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The Syrian revolution is often remembered as a struggle between dictatorship and freedom, between Assad's totalitarian state and the liberal hopes of the Arab Spring. But the truth is more complicated. Anand Gopal is an award winning journalist and the author of Days of Love and Rage, a remarkable account of the Syrian revolution told through the lives of those who lived it. The book demonstrates that in places like the northern Syrian town of Menbij, the ideals of freedom and rights proved too thin to withstand the demands of real political life. Bread, order, justice, belonging. Especially when pitted against ISIS's brand of populist conservative religious politics. What began as a democratic uprising became, in one city, a test of whether liberalism could survive war, inequality, and social fracture. It could not. And in that failure lies the deeper question, beyond freedom alone, what do people need to build a successful political community? I'm Thomas Small. This is my conflicted conversation with Anand Gopal. Hello, Anand. It's nice to see you. It's nice to meet you. Thank you so much for coming on Conflicted.
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A
Thanks for having me, Anand.
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B
Your publisher was very kind and sent me an advance copy of your new book. When this episode is released, it will literally have just come out. It's entitled Days of Love and Rage. It is a. What is it? It's a history, a kind of narrative history. Very novelesque in some ways. It certainly reads like a novel, and I mean that in a good way. It's dramatic, but more than dramatic, it's moving. The characters pop, and it tells the story of the Syrian revolution, civil war that began in 2011. It's a wonderful book. At times I felt I was reading like an early 21st century Les Miserables or something, because it really does explore the same big issues. It has the same humanity, and the cast of characters is enormous.
- [03:10]
A
Well, thanks. Thanks for those kind words. You know, I was drawn to this subject of the Arab Spring through my reporting. I'd been in Egypt and Libya and Syria, and by the time I got to Syria, which would be 2012, I realized that there were just so many extraordinary stories just waiting to be uncovered. I ended up coming to this one city of Minbej, which is in northern Syria. It's a town about an hour, hour and a half from Aleppo.
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B
It's sort of between Aleppo and the Euphrates on that highway.
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A
Yeah. It's not a place that most people, including myself, had heard of. Not very well known even within Syria, to be honest.
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B
I lived in Syria for a year in 2007, 2008. Never went to Manbij, you know, know of it, heard of it, saw it on the map, never went there. It's about 150,000 people, sort of size, is that right?
- [03:56]
A
That's right, yeah. It's an old city, you know, dating back to the Roman times, but it's been resettled many, many different times. And the most recent iteration of settlement dates to the 19th century. So it's fairly new in that sense.
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B
It's a wonderful place to sort of anchor your story, which, you know, it's about the Syrian Revolution, your book, but it grapples with much bigger questions like modernization, the arrival of capitalism on a pre capitalist world, all these sort of big questions. And Mumbage is a great place to set this because as you say, when it was refounded in the 19th century by the Ottomans, the Ottomans, who were, you know, in the Tanzimat era, trying to reform their empire and make it modern so that it could compete better, so they hoped with European powers, they established this town near Ish, the Euphrates, to benefit from irrigation plans that they had drawn up for the Euphrates. So it's a sort of symbol of new modern Syria. I mean, from the Ottoman period onwards.
- [04:52]
A
Yeah, that's right, that's right. And moving forward to the French Mandate period, that's when the city really begins to grow. You have traders that move from Aleppo and other cities to Membaj and become something like the ruling class of the city. And I mention that because from that point onwards you begin to see these divisions in the city, between countryside and urban, between traders and others, and these divisions end up getting refracted through various political divisions over the next 70, 80 years.
- [05:21]
B
I mean, Membij is, if I'm not mistaken, one of those places in eastern northeastern Syria where the state even, I think the Ba' Athist state, which as we know was inching towards totalitarian in some respects, was certainly a strong and powerful central state. But even in the Ba' Athist period, Mnbij was sort of half governed by the central state and still quite governed by traditional tribal patrimonial relations. The state was really in charge of criminal law and prosecution and obviously taxation. But a lot of the day to day governance of the city and its countryside still fell to the tribal sheikhs, the head men and their families, and all these networks. So it's a kind of, again, it's a place in which old and new and ancient and modern are still colliding when the revolution broke out.
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A
That's exactly right. In fact, you have these, you may even call them different ethoses. So there's two different ethoses in the city. There has been. There is the tribal ethos and this is the networks of tribal sheikhs. And many of them owe their positions to being in these patrimonial networks that go all the way back to Damasc on the one hand. And then you had these traders. And these traders tended to be opposed to the Ba'ath regime for a couple of reasons. One is that the Ba'ath regime, because of their economic policies, they monopolized foreign trade. And so this affected the interests of the Sikh traders who tended to want to have free trade with other Ottoman cities or other cities in the region. So the tribal figures tended to be closer to the Syrian regime, and some of the traders tended to be oppositional. In the 1970s and 80s, you began to have organized opposition to the Ba'ath regime in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood. And so many of these trade supported the Muslim Brotherhood either openly or in secret.
- [07:00]
B
Yeah, you know, that class, the kind of. Sometimes it's described as lower middle class, although often these figures can be quite rich and their wealth can stretch back generations. But the sort of souk class, you know, in fact, even now in Iran, we see what are called the bizaarees there are playing and have always played this very important role in politics. When they're eventually fed up, when they can't take any more of what they consider to be bad governance, they can often force change. And in the Syrian context, to these men who worked in the souk and whose livelihood was based on trade, internal but also external trade, they had a love hate relationship with the Ba' Athist regime, let's say.
- [07:40]
A
That's absolutely right. And you know, it's interesting, if you're traveling in Syria and you end up in Mimb, let's say before 2011, you would have found it to be a pretty out of the way provincial city. Not very. Not a place of great wealth. If you're coming from Damascus, you think it's just a backwater, but within the city itself, you have like anywhere else, you have rich and poor, you have real class divisions. And these divisions go back 100 years. And so that division you mentioned between the Sikh traders And let's say the tribal elements, that was a real division. And the Sikh traders did have this very antagonistic relationship to the government. They saw the Ba'ath regime as primarily an entity that was inhibiting their business interests. And so when the revolution broke out in 2011, you had two different groups that kind of joined in the uprising. One was a lot of these families from the Sikh traders. The second were the children of some of these tribal sheikhs or newer generation who had grown up, up and didn't really get the same benefits as their parents had from Bashar al Assad. And so you had these two different elements kind of joining in the revolution. And both sides just agreed on one thing, which is they hated the regime, they hated the dictatorship. They didn't necessarily agree on what should come after, what should replace the dictatorship.
- [08:47]
B
And a religious divide and in some cases an ethnic divide also informed these divisions. We can talk about that later because we're getting ahead of ourselves a bit. I actually wanted to start this conversation talking about you. So you are currently in New York City, and from what I've discovered on the Internet, you have long been a resident of New York City. I don't know if you're originally from New York City, but I have read that you were there on 9 11, which, you know, happened almost 25 years ago. We're in the 25th anniversary year of that momentous event. I'm 40, almost 47. I think we're about the same age. Right. Those of us of our generation, that that is a pivotal day, 9 11. And given your career, as we'll discover In a second, 911 looms large over your life. So could you kind of share with us your memories of that day, how it struck you, and how a young Anand Gopal was interpreting that event?
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I was in College on 9 11. I was studying physics. I had always been a science person and was near the towers. I remember that morning hearing a very loud noise. And, you know, if you've ever been to New York, you hear things like that all the the time. You don't pay attention to it. Eventually I went out probably to get a bagel or something, and I saw that one of the towers was on fire again. In New York, you see that sort of thing all the time. Didn't pay much attention to it. But then I did notice a second plane flying very low right in front of me. I watched it hit the tower right in front of me.
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B
You actually watched it in real time?
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Yes.
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B
Oh, my Lord.
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What did you do at that point? Me and several other pedestrians ran towards the towers because people needed help. But pretty quickly, it became pretty chaotic. The smoke was overwhelming. I ended up underneath a parked car where there was a subway grating so that I could actually breathe because the air was too thick. And around that time, the tower fell. So I was right in the vicinity when the tower fell. For anybody, not just being there in the moment, but anybody around our country at that time, it was a moment where everyone stopped whatever they were thinking about and started paying attention to foreign affairs and for me, certainly for the first time. So I began to follow what became known as the War on Terror pretty obsessively, reading the Afghanistan and then in Iraq. And so several years go by while I'm kind of doing this for afar, and I really couldn't wrap my head around all the kind of complexities of this. I mean, to start with Afghanistan, I really couldn't understand, like, this group, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, what were they about? What would really compel anybody to get involved with entities like this? And so eventually I was doing my PhD at the time, and I left to just spend a little time in Afghanistan. And the idea was to maybe teach English and try to understand more. And I got there and ended up spending three years there, living in the countryside side, in different parts of the countryside, ended up spending a lot of time right in the thick of the war where the battles were being fought, spent time with US Troops, spent a lot of time with the Taliban. Through that, I began to get a kind of a different understanding of what these conflicts were like.
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B
So there you are in Afghanistan. You eventually segue away from teaching English towards journalism. And when I read that you had embedded with the Taliban during the American occupation of Afghanistan, I thought, you know, wow, we. How did that happen?
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So when I was starting to report, I realized that the big kind of lacuna in my understanding and everybody's understanding was that we just didn't know what the other side was about. The Taliban were these ghostly figures, the insurgency. And we would every day get reports, you know, a car bomb here, assassination there. But I had no idea what they were about. It was very hard to access them. The kidnapping threat was pretty severe. So I tried to figure out a way to reach them that would be safe. And eventually I realized that the safest way to do so was to meet members of the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda who were in prison. So I started visiting the prison outside of Kabul. And over months, basically, I was able to build the trust of some big Taliban commanders and Eventually I said, listen, I would like to meet your compadres in the field. So they connected me.
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B
Were they initially hesitant at all or did they immediately say, okay, that's fine?
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A
Well, by the time I popped the question as a war, I had already won their trust. So it took months. In the beginning, I was just going and hanging out. And what I learned pretty early on in dealing with these sorts of people is that, you know, you go in asking very politicized questions and you get really boilerplate answers. Instead, I tried to find out more just about their lives. I mean, I say, tell me about the village you come from, you know, describe it, you know, try to connect with them on a more human level. And it did help to build rapport. So yeah, eventually they connected me to some of their fellow fighters out in the countryside. I ended up going and spending months with some of these units and it was really kind of a eye opening experience because the most striking thing of was realizing the extent to which entire villages were implicated in this insurgency. I mean, I think I had an idea before that you had the American backed forces on the one side, the Taliban on the other, and then you had this vast mass of civilians in between. And it was much more complicated than that where you spend time with the Taliban unit and everybody in the village is related to every member of that unit. So everybody has a brother or a son or a father who's in what they saw as a resistance force. So of the village was kind of intertwined with the insurgency. When I saw that, I began to realize that the efforts that the United States and its allies were making to try to quote, unquote, win hearts and minds. I knew pretty early on that it
- [14:18]
B
was not going to succeed, really could not succeed. It just was based on the wrong premises. If you'd been in the military and had had a very long career, you might have thought to yourself, it's like we're back in North Vietnam and we can't distinguish between quote, unquote Charlie and ordinary Vietnamese because they were so intertwined. It becomes very difficult.
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A
I think the Vietnam comparison is very apt. That's exactly right. In all my conversations with US military figures over the years, I think this is the one basic point that most people didn't get. I shouldn't say that actually, people who are on the ground, in a combat outpost, actually they did get that often. But as you went higher up in the ranks, as the war became more about abstractions and not about the reality of things, a lot of the brass as well as A lot of policymakers simply did not, and I would say still do not understand that.
- [15:05]
B
Maybe the problem from the beginning was the idea of a war on terrorism, because you start the war really to fight Al Qaeda, which was a transnational clandestine terrorist organization, more or less organized around a shared ideology. It was more like an old school anarchist, Bolshevist, whatever you want to call it, type of organization, but that overlapped in Afghanistan with fighting the Taliban. And maybe it was hard to disaggregate those two kinds of being because the Taliban was never like Al Qaeda.
- [15:38]
A
That's exactly right. In fact, I remember early on when I was with the Taliban, one of the things I would ask them is their thoughts on 9 11. And what struck me is how few of them even had any thoughts on it. I mean, it was completely. I mean, some of them hadn't even heard of it, to be honest. So you know, what many of them were understanding this conflict to be about was a reiteration of the Soviet occupation that they were were wanting to farm their land in their little valley. And these foreign occupiers came to impose an alien way of life. Most of the Taliban fighters were concerned with their valley. They're concerned with their narrow little slice of territory. They didn't even think about other parts of the country. So it was a very parochial outlook that does sit very uncomfortably with this sort of global jihad view of Al Qaeda. And most Taliban fighters that I talked to had no thoughts about that whatsoever. This was not what they were fighting for.
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B
Yeah, the Taliban were never a global jihadist movement at all. They were a jihadist movement in a more traditional way, really. And their sights were on Afghanistan or on the Pashtun dominated areas around the Afpak area and into the valleys. It's an interesting movement because it combines a fierce defense of Pashtun Wallah and a sense of Sharia. And they're mixed up, but it's far less ideologically coherent, really, let's say, or systematic than something like Al Qaeda. So you ended up writing your first no Good Men among the Living. It made a huge splash, you won tons of awards. You end up going to Columbia University for, if I'm not mistaken, a second PhD, this one in sociology. And I have read that you bring a sociological approach to your journalism and to your writing. And as I said at the outset of this conversation, Days of Love and Rage. Your new book reads like a novel in the sense that it is grounded in human, individual, their desires, their frustrations, their dreams, et cetera. It's not at all top down. In fact, a guy like me who's always immersed in top down analysis of both history and present politics and geopolitics. At first I started reading it thinking, but this is just sort of, I don't know, romantic fluff, you know, where's the meat? But then I realized as I read more, there's a lot of meat there. So would you describe the sociological approach? If that's even the right way of describing what you do?
- [18:04]
A
Yeah. I've always been drawn to trying to understand the macro phenomenon through the micro phenomenon, partly because I'm uncomfortable making broad claims about broad swaths of lands or territories or people or phenomenon, because there's always counter exceptions, but going from a very narrow specific. So this book, Days of Love and Rage, really just focuses on one city and it tries to tell the story of the Arab Spring through the point of view of just one city. Of course, the shortfalls of that is that it's just one city and that different cities will have slightly different, different experiences. But I think that the strength of that approach is you can begin to get sort of the texture of everyday life, which does inform decisions that from the distance may look like purely ideological or political. And it's one of the things I've always noticed about these conflicts is that as you zoom in, oftentimes people's interpersonal relations or their own insecurities, their own foibles, their own personal drives get repackaged into a political language and looks ideological from a distance.
- [19:03]
B
Here on Conflicted, when the Assad regime fell, we did a series where we interviewed eight Syrians from across Syria who had experienced the Arab Spring there, had participated in it, had to some extent been involved in the revolution and then the civil war. And hearing those firsthand accounts from a Syrian in Raqqa, a Syrian in Afrin, a Syrian from Sueda. As you say, a kind of patchwork view, but it builds up a real picture of the complexity of the whole event which transcends simple ideological divides. You yourself don't enter the story of your new book until the beginning of part five. It's a vast book, about 500 pages before footnotes and bibliography comes in. So in part five, there you are, it's 2017 and you end up in the story you're telling, which is a sign that everything we've been reading up to that point is sort of backstory or research. So when you arrived in Syria in 2017, how did you get to Membij? Why did you go there and Then if you could kind of like excavate the process you went through constructing this vast narrative.
- [20:13]
A
Actually, I first arrived in Syria as a reporter in 2012. So I had been reporting on the uprising in different parts of the country. In the course of doing so, it's when I heard about the story of these people in Minbiz and how they had tried to construct a revolutionary government, really tried to construct a democracy in the midst of a civil war. And so that captivated me. I'd never thought you can actually. It's almost like looking at a microscope at people who are trying to build democracy in real time. What might we learn from that process? What could be instructive for other democracies? That's what I was interested in. And so I spent several years beginning in 2017, tracking down everybody from the city that I could. Pretty quickly I realized that that's a nearly impossible task for several reasons, one of which is that by 2017 that Democrats had been defeated. People had dispersed around the country and around the world, many as refugees in Turkey or in Europe. So literally just finding people was a challenge. And then secondly, people, by the time I got to people, they were embittered, they had lost, right? They had risen up against the dictator and had at that point failed. Failed pretty spectacularly. Because the result of it, as the book describes, was not a democracy. The result of it was replacing the tyranny of Assad with the tyranny of isis.
- [21:29]
B
At the time you arrived, I guess the city had fallen under the control the sdf, the US backed Kurdish based kind of paramilitary organization that was recently more or less ended by the central government in Syria. So when you arrived, MEMBIJ was under the sdf, but even then that wasn't experienced by the locals as a return to anything like that democratic experiment.
- [21:49]
A
That's right. So MEMBIJ from 2011 until 2024 had four different governments. It had the Assad regime, And then in 2012, protesters overthrew the regime and for 18 months had this democratic experiment. And then in 2014, ISIS took over. And then in 2016, the American backed Syrian Democratic Forces took over. And those are the Kurdish majority forces that ran the city for eight years. They also ran it with an iron fist. And so from the point of view of locals, they went from ISIS to a different type of authoritarianism. And so people were pretty embittered. Several times people said, why do you want to dig up this old story? I'd just rather forget it. I don't want to think about this and then, of course, the third challenge was anytime you're operating in an environment like Syria, which has experienced 40 years of dictatorship, and so that meant 40 years in which people were spying on each other, in which there were informants everywhere, I had to convince people that I wasn't a spy, I wasn't a CIA spy or something like that. These were all challenges. And one of the ways I was able to address these challenges is I realized that I can't do it alone. And I began to recruit people from the city of Mimbish who had taken part in the events, who had been part of the democratic experiment, to assist me as researchers. And at one point, I think we had almost a dozen. We together collectively sort of fanned out around the globe to track these people down. And in moments where people may have been wary of speaking to me, they were not so wary of speaking to their old buddy who they marched in protests alongside 10 years earlier. And so this allowed people to open up. And I was able to get more of the texture of everyday life, get some intimate stories through this approach.
- [23:27]
B
And also mine. Newspaper clippings, newspaper articles, local newspapers, including revolutionary newspapers, Facebook posts, all sorts of media. It seems like your team really went overkill to try to document those years as best as they could. And then you're given basically reams of their research. You look through it, and then you have to recreate the inner subjective worlds of a huge cast of characters. What is that challenge? Because on the one hand, you're a historian or a journalist, right? You want this to be truthful, accurate, factual. But, you know, you're a great writer, Anand, basically. And you also want to touch the reader in that way, like a novel can. So how do you wade through that thorny question of recreating the inner life of a real person?
- [24:15]
A
So I'll give an example. The book focuses primarily on six individuals, one of whom. His name's Abdelhadi. He started off as a pro democracy protester, secular. He comes from a. We mentioned earlier about the rural urban divide. He comes from a traditionally rural family that moves to the city. They're pretty poor. They don't have a huge social network inside the city. So he's kind of grown up, always with a bit of a chip on his shoulder. He throws himself into the protests, he gets arrested, he gets tortured pretty severely.
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B
Your descriptions of the torture of prisons in Assad, Syria, and then later, isis. Goodness gracious. It really made my blood run cold.
- [24:54]
A
I mean, yeah, it's not for the faint of heart, but you know, I thought it was important to portray the
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B
reality of this absolutely.
- [25:00]
A
Just to convey, you know, why people decided to take the risks they did take. So he ends up as a leading protester in the city. Eventually the dictatorship is overthrown and he takes part in this democratic experiment. And what he finds over time is the inequalities that began to appear between rich and poor really weigh on him. And he becomes a sort of populist rabble rouser and at the same time gets increasingly consumed by slights either real or perceived, and falls into the sway of ISIS and undergoes a fairly remarkable transformation from this goofy secular kid into a member of isis. I was really interested in that transformation and trying to understand his internal process. How does he think about this to himself? How does he experience the world? And one of the ways we tried to do that is in addition to interviewing him dozens and dozens and dozens of times. But for every incident that is described in the book, we were able to track down other people. And so just for his story, there was probably 25 or 30 other people who are very important sources. And we can kind of go back and forth between the sources in a way. So he would say one thing, we would ask some sources about it, and then we'd come back and say, well, your cousin said this, or your neighbor said that. And then this kind of back and forth helped us, helped me iron out inaccuracies. And of course, it's not just inaccuracies or facts that are misremembered, but people are going to want to portray themselves in a certain way, right? So you need to, as a journalist, do your best to try to check what they're saying with others. So it's through this process that you get a sense of what the real story is. But always when it comes to people's internal experiences, the starting point is what they say. What they say. They say, I felt such and such way. I won't always take it for granted, but that's the starting point. And I'll look to ways to check it.
- [26:42]
B
Abdelhadi is just one character who undergoes really remarkable transformations across the whole arc of your story, which, you know, lasts like 15 years, it covers a lot of ground. But those vital eight years, really, that's the heart of the story. You start out in part one, telling the stories of three men. A young man from the countryside called Ibrahim, a man from the town, an intellectual kind of character called Hassan Nefi, another man from the town, a kind of striver, upwardly mobile striver called Abu Oss, or at least that's his moniker. He's a karate expert. Really? The karate expert of Munbij. But you know these three men. One a man of desire, if you like, One a man of intellect and imagination, one a man of will. You lay them out there in the beginning of your story. This is before the revolution breaks out. It helps set the scene a bit. Which of those three men Anand is you? My suspicion is it's that man of intellect and imagination, Hassan Nephi, whose journey is for maybe someone like you and me. Maybe an educator, Western kind of guy. The most relatable. He's the one who experiences tremendous torture in Assad's prison. Like unbelievable, that section. And goes through many, many, many transformations as the revolution and civil war unfold. But is Hassan Nefi you? Is he a real person or is he just you? I couldn't tell.
- [28:15]
A
He's definitely a real person. And also he is very much me. That is right. He's a poet and an intellectual. And when he was imprisoned, he was imprisoned for posting flyers, anti government flyers. In 1986 he was a leftist and thrown in prison and spent 15 years in some of the worst prisons on earth. What I found really compelling about his story, though, because I had interviewed many people who had similar trajectories, but I was trying to understand what gives one strength when you're seeing truly the worst of humanity and living in those conditions for 15 years. And his answer to me was Hegel, which was surprising.
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B
Yeah, yeah. Well, not so surprising. Maybe, you know, a young man, poet, romantic, leftist, who then suffers enormously, a huge disillusionment. Sure. Maybe Hegel would speak to such a man.
- [29:08]
A
Sure, yeah. You know, ex post facto. Yes. Now, I think that it's not so surprising in the moment. I wasn't expecting that that's the answer he would give. And he believed, or came to believe through reading Hegel, which I think was smuggled into the book, that history has teleology. There's an end towards which it's moving,
- [29:29]
B
a purpose, a meaning. Yeah. An animating spirit directing it towards some predetermined end.
- [29:34]
A
Exactly. And so that his suffering was not for nothing, that it was part of some grander design. And I'm not a Hegelian, but I can definitely identify with using, either rightly or wrongly, using intellectual frameworks to try to make sense of my own life.
- [29:51]
B
And you're not a Hegelian. You studied sociology at Columb University. We're all Hegelians a little bit from that point of view.
- [29:58]
A
That's very true.
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B
And Hassan, Hassan goes from leftist romantic poet to this kind of Hegelian. And by the end of the story, I'm not sure if it's right to say he's rejected that Hegelianism, but it's been modified through his experience of the civil war into some kind of more or less straightforward existentialist sort of commitment, which, you know, we'll get to it at the end of this conversation, as you get to it at the end of your remarkable book. But I thought, this is the author talking to me. That's what I felt, at least.
- [30:30]
A
I'm glad you picked that up, actually. I don't know how many readers would pick that up. But he does become a sort of. He is channeling Kierkegaard, I think, at the end, when he's embracing the idea of faith. And I think that is his transformation. And by the way, he did pass away recently. Oh, I'm sorry to hear that, unfortunately. But I did talk to him shortly before. He was most interested in talking about two things, which was one was the transformations in Syria, fall of the Assad regime, and Kierkegaard.
- [31:00]
B
Oh, I see. So now you mentioned faith in your prologue. You say, quote, revolution, and you mean revolution in its almost like Platonic ideal form. Revolution reflects, if anything, a profound crisis of faith. What do you mean by that? I think it's safe to say to the listeners you don't mean religious faith, but what do you mean by revol. Revolution reflects a profound crisis of faith.
- [31:27]
A
I think when we go through our lives every day living in a society in which we just expect certain things to happen. I mean, you get in a plane and you expect that the pilot knows what he or she is doing. You expect that you get in a car, the traffic lights are going to work. I mean, you are engaging in many acts of faith every day, just assuming that society is going to work the way that people say it should work. Even beyond that, maybe you read the news, the New York Times, listen to a podcast, and you just have faith that the people who are saying, who are talking are actually saying something that's real or true. And there are moments, I think, where people begin to question a lot of basic things, fundamental things. And revolutions are one of those moments where everything that was previously taken for granted is now up for grabs. This is like reminder of the old Marx quote. I mean, he's talking about capitalism, but all that solid melts into air. I think you can also. He's talking about capitalism as a revolutionary.
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B
Absolutely. A Revolutionary dynamic that dissolves was past and create something chaotic that is present.
- [32:30]
A
Exactly. And I think that is a feature of revolutions. I mean, if you think about the 40 year dictatorship in Syria, at the end of the day, yes, there was a really repressive apparatus and people were terrified most of the time. But it did require in a way the complicity, even the consent in some way of everybody, in the sense that people just had to accept that they had to behave in certain ways. And maybe it's because they did not believe that any other way of being as possible. And all of a sudden a revolution's a moment where even that kind of faith or understanding of the system you're in falls apart and you think that there's now new ways of being that are possible. So in that sense, I think revolutions represent a crisis of faith.
- [33:12]
B
I see. Absolutely. Another thing that that first part has in spades, but which the whole book has in spades is a huge amount of romance. This is basically. It's like Dr. Zhivago in some respects. It is an extremely roman. Many men throughout the book are falling in love with beautiful, almost pure ideal women. You know, there is something very romantic in the story you're telling that a man's desire for a woman and a woman's almost like restraining counter desire for a family is somehow fundamental to human flourishing. But that this is undermined by injustice, which leads especially the men to experience rage. And there's your title, Days of Love and Rage. They experience rage because their love and their woman's wish to have a family is thwarted by injustice. A desire for vengeance, a revolutionary spirit thereby kindled, then a militant spirit. You can see this growing as the story unfolds. But all of this ironically destroys the context where that romantic love and family making can. So it's a. On one hand, it's a very. Not cynical, but it's a very depressing portrayal of the dynamic that sort of motivates human beings.
- [34:39]
A
That's interesting. Yeah, I think, I mean, one of the characters, his name is Ibrahim, as you mentioned, and you know, the book opens with essentially with a love story. He's a 16 or 17 year old kid living in the countryside. He sees the girl next door and falls head over heels for her. They have secret series of trysts because, you know, in the conservative culture of the village, people aren't allowed to date openly. Eventually his father doesn't allow them to be together. And so he starts experiencing rage and injustice. But he doesn't know at that point what it's directed towards. I think he just feels a generalized rage and angst. And then he becomes a rebel fighter eventually and goes through the revolution. But you know, interestingly, in his case, he does get a family, not the woman that he was in love with. He ends marrying somebody else.
- [35:29]
B
And that's true.
- [35:30]
A
I don't want to give too much away. But just to say that he does face a choice later in the book about whether he should return to his former love or not.
- [35:36]
B
It's very romantic. It's very Dr. Zhivago. And I really, it's a very romantic moment. My heart was breaking for both parties. But returning to the question of you, the author, are you telling us something? Is there a kind of a romantic in you that just believes that this is the motivating force? You know, it's funny reading, reading this book, Anant, because it's vast and it's kind of like reportage. It's telling me this happened. But throughout it, there's a mind, yours at work, crafting it, molding it, telling a story. At one point in the book, you actually mention Alasdair MacIntyre, the famous philosopher's argument that humans are, as you put it, essentially storytelling animals using stories to make sense of the world, to make sense of the actions of others and to make sense of ourselves. And then you go on to describe that more. And I thought again, wait a second. This is what Anand is doing right now. He's telling this story to tell me something about the way he makes sense of the world. So how do you make sense of the world? What are your own personal, let's say, conclusions, your politics, your philosophy? As a result of all of this stuff that you've experienced and then researched,
- [36:55]
A
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B
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B
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- [37:19]
A
Shop in stores@nordstrom.com or download the Nordstrom app. Going into this research, I think I had what I now view as a maybe a simplistic understanding of freedom and maybe even a simplistic understanding of the point of life, in the sense that if you would have asked me 10 years ago, what are we all striving for? What's the point of being here? I would say to have personal Autonomy and freedom to be as free as possible. And this is baked into the Western liberal understanding. I think engaging with an illiberal society, meaning a more conservative society as Syria, but also engaging with this kind of. Of mass uprising and collective project of the revolution, made me confront some of those ideas and make me wonder if that was perhaps too pat or too simplistic of an answer. And I did become, I would say, much more of an Aristotelian, somebody influenced by Alasdair MacIntyre through the course of researching this book. And I think one of the things that the people I met taught me is that anointing one of these values, like personal autonomy and freedom as the supreme value around which you organize your life tends not to go well when you do, and that you have to human flourishing, which is a term you used earlier, I think it requires a whole host of things. Having rich friendships, family, community. That's, I think, the biggest takeaway for me, something that I feel that maybe in our more atomized Western lives, we tend to forget.
- [38:59]
B
And the revolutionary project that Menbidj underwent during those crucial years, 2012, 2013, 2014, really, before ISIS came and smashed it all all up. Although, you know, even that's very simplistic, because, as you say, and this is why Menbage is such a wonderful arena for you to explore all these big questions. You know, after its initial quote, unquote, liberation from the regime, very quickly different factions emerge inside the town, and they're all debating the meaning of freedom. And you're helping us and, you know, debate it for ourselves as we witness them debate the meaning of that word. And then as things develop, inequalities, class inequalities emerge. Do they emerge? Are they revealed? Basically, you have liberal elites increasingly squaring off against conservative and then religious and then fanatically religious populists. So, again, it's something that we can kind of recognize in our own world today more widely, to stick to manbage in a way to make it more specific for a second. Where did that revolutionary council go wrong? Because in the end, they lost control. And the city wasn't just conquered by isis, exactly. Or at least not only from without. It was also conquered by ISIS from within. So where did the revolutionary council led by these liberal elites, maybe men and women, that you would have felt more like simpatico with 10 years ago? Where did they go wrong?
- [40:28]
A
So the revolutionary council was the body that essentially took over the city when the dictatorship was overthrown, and it comprised protesters, many of whom risked a lot during the protest phase and in the beginning, their program is essentially freedom. Freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom of markets. Everyone was behind this. After 40 years of dictatorship, people were savoring this freedom. And you had an explosion of new periodicals, independent media, and this is a context where you never had anything but state run media for so long. You had new political clubs and other formations appearing for the first time. So it was really a vibrant democratic moment of which the Revolutionary Council was ahead of. But as I said, because the organizing principle for them was freedom of all types, speech, assembly, markets. What happened is over time, prices started to rise. There began to be an affordability crisis, especially around the question of bread, which is the main staple in Syria, around
- [41:28]
B
the Arab world, which the Assad regime had more or less always subsidized.
- [41:33]
A
That's right, that's right. The regime had subsidized not only bread, but, you know, fuel and other basic things. And the subsidies are now all gone. Prices were spiraling and now people started to say, well, freedom of speech and assembly is great, but freedom of markets. I don't know if it's making it harder for me to eat or to feed my children, then I'm not sure about that. And so there's this divide that began to grow for the first six months. Different factions, secular factions, arguing about this question and therefore arguing about what does freedom mean? Is it just freedom from all these things or does it mean something else? In that environment, a small group of Islamists, I think actually six, entered the city and they saw the divides between the rich and poor. They saw the growing anger with the Revolutionary Council on the question of the economy and also on the question of safety. There was a lot of crime. And they systematically waged a very deft political campaign, essentially to paint the Revolutionary Council as these out of touch liberal elites who spoke all fancy words about freedom and dignity, but didn't actually do anything to put food in people's bellies or to keep people safe.
- [42:42]
B
That's not at all recognizable, right?
- [42:46]
A
Exactly. And slowly people began to gravitate towards their message. And their message was a very simple one, which is that the reason why this is happening is these elite states are liberals. And in fact, there's another system we have already that can handle all these problems, which is a system of Islam. If you have an Islamic state, that state is going to provide for everybody, rich and poor, it's going to provide security for everybody. And so people began to gravitate towards that message because there was no other alternative. Also, by the Way, it would be interesting if there had been another group there who had offered a different scenario. Who knows what would have happened? But that was the alternative. And people began to gravitate towards it. By the end of the 18 months, these six Islamists had grown in numbers to hundreds and they had become isis. They were able to, yeah, essentially take over the city largely from within.
- [43:33]
B
You mean they had allied with isis? They didn't create isis.
- [43:36]
A
They did not create. That's right.
- [43:37]
B
They revealed that they were isis.
- [43:39]
A
Yeah, exactly. So when the six individuals came to the city, within a few weeks, they allied with isis, which had just emerged as an independent entity around the region. And in those early days, people didn't know what ISIS meant in the city. I mean, some people did, but other people just said, hey, these guys are promising food on the table and streets that are going to be secure. You can leave your doors open at night. And so ISIS began to grow and a lot of the people that joined them were the very people that had previously marched for freedom and democracy. So it wasn't the case that you had these people sitting and watching YouTube videos and getting radicalized. It was just ordinary people who never thought anything about these questions before and had been mobilized initially just on the questions of wanted more freedom and more democracy. But because of the shortcomings of what they saw as the liberal elite, they began to gravitate towards isis.
- [44:30]
B
What I loved about your book is how you really show, you narrate in a very detailed way that ISIS's rise over its territories was not strictly a military phenomenon. It is often imagined as such, but it was a political phenomenon. You see these ISIS aligned Islamist actors in Mandarin, creating a political office, engaging in debate, engaging in, you know, propaganda or whatever, trying to win their own hearts and minds, win more and more over to their cause, and the liberal cause loses its support more and more. You really see, and you bring it out very well, how this happened in real time and how many of the characters we meet who were liberal are themselves convinced by their experience of the revolution to join with the more authoritarian populist religious side.
- [45:20]
A
Yeah, and one of the things I found most interesting is the way in which this ISIS authoritarian populist group was able to use liberal norms against the liberals. So for example, there was a few times where the Revolutionary Council wanted to outlaw the teaching of ISIS related theology in mosques, or they wanted to outlaw the ISIS black flag. And the argument that ISIS made is that that's against freedom of speech. You can't do that.
- [45:44]
B
Classic, classic move. But it's almost like liberalism on its own isn't enough. Liberalism on its own can't even defend itself. So what kind of an all embracing governance proposition can it be?
- [45:57]
A
Exactly. And I think there is. That's another lesson I took from this experience because I began to see it elsewhere too. The way in which liberalism is too thin of an ideology to sustain a real polity and other ideologies necessarily always fill in the gap.
- [46:10]
B
So would you say then, you know, and this is something I couldn't entirely suss out from the reading of the book, that as you've grown, grown maybe mugged by reality a bit in that way you've inclined in a more conservative direction? I don't mean necessarily crazy religious, populist, or you've inclined in a more purist leftist direction. Where have you gone as a result of all these experiences?
- [46:32]
A
Well, I would say if we think about liberalism in the broader sense, I know here in the United States we tend to use it in a very narrow sense to mean the Democratic Party, but in the broader European sense of the word liberalism, I would say I've moved pretty far away from that. As I said earlier, I probably would, as somebody influenced a lot by aristotle, by Alasdair MacIntyre, where that puts me politically, it's hard to say.
- [46:55]
B
Yeah, well, even his philosophical kind of legacy is contested from left and right.
- [47:00]
A
Exactly.
- [47:00]
B
So you like to be right in the middle. You're welcome. Unconflicted. So here's the thing. I want you to explain something for me. I feel maybe basically there's something in the book that I don't entirely understand. I think I was a bit confused by it. I want you to help me understand it. So at one point you're talking, you know, in a way you're talking about why it is that populism, authoritarian populism arises and you say the Islamic State's tyranny draws on the cultural resources of the Middle East Islam, while Assad's tyranny drew upon a different but also uniquely Middle Eastern heritage, Arab nationalism. Absolutely clear. Really? I was like, oh, that's right. But you go on. Yet the tyrannical impulse of authoritarian populists is the same every everywhere. If tyranny is where democracies go to die, inequality is the cause of death. And what confused me about this is the beginning of the book. You actually characterize Ba' athism as being fairly egalitarian in its ethos, especially during the reign of Hafez al Assad. So you show how they broke the large land estates, they nationalized the best agricultural land, they parceled it out to small freeholders who had at least, I don't know if they owned it, but at least they had the right, the state sponsored right to farm it. You know, they subsidized bread, they created free health care, they did all of those things. And yet it was extremely tyrannical. You're also showing them torturing people to a degree that I couldn't even imagine, certainly hardly stomach. So I'm a bit confused. If the lack of equality, if inequality leads to tyranny, then how does that make sense of what happened with those radically egalitarian revolutionary movements of the 20th century? Century, almost. Which to a man resulted in tyranny?
- [48:45]
A
That's a great question. I think the frame here is to think about democracy first and what undermines democracy. And then we can talk about tyranny and what sustains tyranny. Right. So democracy, the claim here is that democracy is often undermined by real material inequalities. And that lays the groundwork for tyrannical movements and tyrannies to emerge. And what can sustain a tyranny is precisely that how can people put up with the fact that they have no political rights and they're subject to, is to give a modicum of material equality to people. And that was the story of the Ba'ath regime, which is that. So the Ba' Athists took power in this coup in 1963 and then series of coups and finally the final coup in 1970. And in that period you saw a mass redistribution of wealth from feudal lords and other big merchants and souk traders to peasants. You saw millions of people rising to a new middle class. People who had previously been peasants now working in offices. And there was basically a bargain, not an explicit one, but implicit bargain, that underpinned the Hafez Al Assad regime, which is that you, the subject of Syria, the citizen will surrender any claim to political rights in exchange will give you some economic opportunities. And that actually worked. Whether that was morally a good society, you know, that's a separate question. I think it's not clearly, but in terms of stability, in terms of it actually working as a political system, it worked because the regime lasted for so long.
- [50:11]
B
For a while it worked. Yeah, yeah.
- [50:12]
A
And when it started to not work, it was because Bashar Al Assad came to power in 2000 and began to undo some of those economic protections. So for 10, 11 years, there was a lot of reforms around free market
- [50:24]
B
reforms and the so called Damascus Spring the neoliberalization of some of the Syrian economy. Usually the elite part of that economy.
- [50:32]
A
Exactly. Well, but also a lot of subsidies. I mean, the fuel subsidy is a big one that was cut. So there was important. The one subsidy he didn't touch was bread, but everything else was cut. And so the kind of bargain, the implicit bargain of the tyranny was surrender political rights and we'll give you some economic. Economic security was gone. The economic security was gone. And that led to the instability and ultimate overthrow of the regime.
- [50:52]
B
No, I think that's true. I mean, I guess I would slightly complicate that a bit to say that Ba' Athist economics in the end led to the regime no longer able to afford its subsidies, relying more and more on basically bailouts by Gulf monarchies. And then in the Bashar Al Assad and revolution, revolutionary period, the Iranian regime. So I think that for me it's not so much that everything was hunky dory. And then Bashar introduced neoliberalism, which made everything bad. I think Ba' athism was selling a lie that this was a sustainable proposition. They were losing their ability to maintain it and then adopted a range of IMF influenced solutions to their problem that involved no political reform whatsoever. So those solutions, which is basically let's liberalize everything in a highly hierarchical and very corrupt state, just infused corruption into the whole thing. I mean, do you see what I mean by this? Maybe a little bit more complicated.
- [51:52]
A
No, I think that's absolutely right. So the regime, the Hafez Al Assad regime faced a fundamental problem, which is that it was a redistributive regime, meaning it was building a welfare state, but it lacked the ability to generate enough capital to redistribute. Right. This was the fundamental issue was that it didn't have a strong internal market. Because normally if, if your society wants, like Sweden or whoever, or Norway, that's redistributing wealth and creating a welfare state, you need some source of that wealth, whether it's oil revenue or whether it's some kind of industry that is able to produce that wealth. And then you redistribute. So Syria did not have that. And it wasn't just Syria. All these Arab regimes didn't have that. And so you're absolutely right. They're living on borrowed time. They were able to redistribute wealth for decades, but they were very quickly coming up against the fact that they needed to do something to jumpstart the, the economy. Otherwise you're just going to run out of money, essentially. And every Arab regime faced this. Egypt faced it beginning in the 1970s. The Syrian regime faced it beginning in the early 1990s. And so it was a real debate within the regime, what should we do? For a while, they tried to borrow money from the Soviet Union that came up dry.
- [52:54]
B
That well came up dry.
- [52:56]
A
Exactly. Speaking of wells coming up dry, they tried to ship to oil and gas. That didn't work. So when Bashar came to power and he made the reforms, it wasn't that he was. And you're absolutely right in this. He wasn't that he was just making a silly policy blunder. He was actually reacting to real structural weaknesses of the Hapez regime.
- [53:16]
B
This is where maybe the sociological approach and your commitment to kind of backgrounding geopolitics and foregrounding ordinary life is where someone of my bent I start thinking, well, we have to talk about the geopolitics because Hafez al Assad made his geopolitical bed, which cut him off from capital markets, so there was no investment because the Soviet Union was the kind of state it was in, and then it fell and blah, blah, blah. But it doesn't detract from the fact that, you know, so much in your book is revelatory. I mean, one thing I loved about it is that you basically translate all Arabic terms into English at the first instance and then use the English version from then on. Often I read novels or books about the Middle east and though, you know, I know Arabic, so I can kind of understand what they're talking about when they have all of these italicized Arabic words and terms in the book. But it has this Orientalizing or alienating effect. And your book feels much more real to me as an English speaker, which I like very much. How does that sort of consideration enter your head when you're thinking of a book like this? And how can one avoid like. In a way, you want to tell a story that's grounded in a specific place. In another way, you want to draw out the universal implications in terms of human spirit and human experience that that small story reveals. But then does a universal perspective overlap uncomfortably with a Western perspective when it's not really true? For example, Islam is very light on the page in your book. You don't talk about it very much. You know, you wouldn't necessarily know, with the exception of the ISIS bit. But even then, it's. You want to talk more about structural, political, economic, and sort of interpersonal factors. And Islam is kind of not present. Christians, Druze, Those things aren't really present in your narrative. So what were you thinking about when you took those decisions?
- [55:11]
A
Yeah, it's a good question. I think first with the translations of the words. I'm conscious of the fact that it's a long book and there's lots of names and lots of. I think maybe for people who are not acquainted or initiated with the Middle east, new interesting concepts, strange concepts. And I don't want to create more barriers to that for people than are necessary. And, yeah, I think a book that's littered with lots of foreign words could unintentionally create that kind of barrier on the side. Other. Other hand, you know, there's like moments where one has to weigh how much to include about some of the background. Because in some ways these stories are universal. In some ways they're very particular. So I mentioned Ibrahim, who fell in love with the girl next door in his village. And, you know, I think for most of us, if you're a 16 year old and you have a girlfriend, it's not a life or death situation, you know, but in this village, because the culture is very conservative, that's something that he has to face very quickly. Or another person who's covered in the body is Meena, the one woman who's a character in the book. And, you know, she has to face, I think, what you might call an honor culture. You know, she has to face the prerogatives that are put on women in this society. Mimbaj is a pretty conservative place.
- [56:24]
B
You know, it's a very religious place in the sense that it was a center of Sufism. It remained a vital center of that old Ottoman Naksha Bandi Sufi tradition. Exactly. Which I think would have struck foreigners arriving there on the surface as being kind of more liberal. They would have thought, you know, it wasn't like Wahhabism. You know, the women wouldn't have had their faces covered and stuff. But there was still honor culture. Definitely. Patriarchy. Definitely. And Minna's story is fantastic because she, in the end, she kind of embraces more Western feminist kind of ideas, which brings her into conflict with the men that are around her.
- [57:00]
A
You know, it's interesting. I have always, and this is just my personal impression in traveling in Mimbish, I've always seen the conservatism more an expression of the tribal ethos of the city than of the Naqshbandi Sufism, maybe, because I was always seeing the Sufism as against the Wahhabi ISIS influence. And so I was always reading in that lens. And I couldn't maybe be overemphasizing that, but I found that I interviewed many people who would flee to the embrace, as it were, of Sufism as a protection against the tribal mores that they were facing.
- [57:33]
B
Oh, that's interesting.
- [57:34]
A
Interestingly so, like, alcohol is a good example of this. The people who tended to go to the one bar that was there who drank tended to be tribal folks. Right. So on that sense, you would think, okay, they're more liberal.
- [57:46]
B
Oh, I see.
- [57:46]
A
But on the other hand, when it came to gender issues, the tribal folks were extremely conservative. And that was reversed when it came. When you looked at the Sufis, the Naqsha Banis, who tended to be more of the city dwellers, the Sikh traders, et cetera.
- [57:58]
B
Yeah. And tended to have to hold themselves with greater dignity. I would expect refinement. Let's say drinking in the bar is like a trashy thing to do where the Sufis were more middle class, more bourgeois.
- [58:11]
A
Exactly. That's exactly right. And you can see in terms of people, whether they covered or not, you know, women, whether they covered or not, what age they got married. So for instance, in the tribal communities, the women tended to get married at a much younger age, often were covered and less so in the cities. So I think the conservatism to me has always been more a reflection of the rural, tribal nature of the city.
- [58:34]
B
I loved the episode in the book where the Sufi leader there in the town, Sheikh Dibo, is entering into increasingly open confrontation with isis. And you write there, you know, it's like four pages. But it's really dramatic because for those of, you know, us who know about the history of Islam over the last 250 years, you get, you know, a real concentrated recapitulation of that Salafi versus old school, Sufi, civilized, urbane, Ottoman kind of Islam. And they're just openly at war by the end, and they kind of hold each other in contempt. And right there before my eyes was like, oh, that's the whole story in a way. Or at least that's a very important part of the story. And there it is. Now, Listen, I'm taking up too much of your time. I just want to gesture at least towards the present, because Syria in the last year or so has experienced this remarkable, sudden, almost miraculous transformation. The Assad regime fell here on conflicted. We have covered this immensely from many, many angles. And I was that in your book, it's very lightly discussed. You describe the men who topple the regime simply as the rebels. You don't you know, in fact, in the whole book, you hardly talk about Al Qaeda. You do not once mention Jeb Hatan Nusra or the Nusra Front or Hizb'tahrir Hashem as it became. You never talk about Abu Mohammed al Julani or Ahmed Ashara. It's again, it's like a kind of ghost, vaguely haunting the edges. If you knew about it, you'd knew it was there. If you knew nothing about. About Syria, reading your book, you wouldn't even know that Al Qaeda was there. So, again, why did you take this decision? Especially since you were once immersed in Al Qaeda and Taliban and these questions. It's surprising how light that dimension of the civil war is in your book.
- [60:23]
A
Yeah, you know, I spent a lot of time in other parts of Syria, such as Idlib Province, and got to know hts, which is a group that is out controlling the country. I got to know them, and I think they're a fascinating and interesting story. What I was concerned about with the book is it's already, you know, you've gone through a whole journey of different factions and councils and whatnot. And Jabhat al Nusra, which is the precursor to hts, was never a major player in Membij. They were barely present. And in fact, when the six Islamists who entered the city came in, they were not Jahmot al Nusra. They were from a different faction. So Nusra never played a major role. And so I was worried about introducing a new phenomenon or actor at that stage and then having to go and explain everything to people. And more importantly, I think from the point of view of the protagonist of the book, what they were more keyed on at the moment was that Assad had fallen. There is a host of new problems that Syria faces and will continue to face like any other place. Right. But to me, that felt like that would be another book, that'd be a different story to tell. And so I decided to lightly gloss on the details of it.
- [61:28]
B
I wondered if part of your artistic technique there, because you are, you know, a great writer, Anand, I mean, was to kind of recreate for the reader the inner world and worldview of those protagonists and maybe, frankly, those details, Jebet al Nusra and things were not really in their minds or in their worldview so much. Maybe ISIS struck them in precisely the way you narrate it. They don't themselves know of its provenance amongst the killing fields of Iraq and before that, Al Qaeda and all of this. They just. You're trying to get me, you know, Thomas Small to think like your protagonist. I assume that's what you were doing. Even if Thomas Small was like, but what about this? You haven't mentioned this, but again, it's a 500 page book. What are you going to do?
- [62:14]
A
No, that's exactly right. And most readers aren't going to be as knowledgeable as Thomas Small. So it's also keeping in mind.
- [62:23]
B
Well, Anand Gopal, I thank you so much for coming on Conflicted. It's been a real pleasure to have this conversation. And I love the book. People read the book. It's a beautifully written book. As I say, Hollywood should come a knockin' cause it is the dark Zhivago of our of our time.
- [62:37]
A
Thanks so much. It's been really great being here.
- [62:43]
B
That was Anand Gopal talking about his excellent new book, Days of Love and Rage. It is available at All Good Booksellers remember for deeper dives into the ideas we explore on this show, including extended conversations and Q&As with my CO host. And check the show notes for details on how to join the conflicted community. I'm Thomas Small. Conflicted is a message Heard Production. Our executive producers are Jake Warren and Max Warren. This episode was produced by Thomas Small and edited by Lizzie Andrews.
- [63:40]
A
Quick break. One useful thing to share. I thought TikTok was just dances.
- [63:45]
B
Turns out it's where I learned how to save money, fix stuff and get real tips. Short videos, real people. Download TikTok now.