What podcast hosts can learn from chairing panel events

Having multiple podcast guests at once can feel like herding cats – everyone wants a chance to say their bit, everyone has an opinion and people can potentially start speaking over each other! But there are a lot of great benefits to this podcast style, if you can pull it off.

Panel-style podcasts are usually:

• Lively and dynamic in style – like listening to a conversation with friends!

• Good at bringing different perspectives together.

• A great way to share expertise and insight.

So, how do you make sure that everyone can be heard and understood, and that everyone contributes their best? In short: you need a great host to act as chairperson, guiding the debate. 

In this article, we break down our advice for using panel chairing experience for hosting a great podcast, including some top tips from serial panel chair and Executive Chair of Message Heard, Louise Beaumont (so many chairs!). 

Serial panel chair and Executive Chair of Message Heard, Louise Beaumont.

Choosing your guests

As is the case for any great podcast or panel, guest selection is really vital to making sure it all comes together. The best guests are those who have a depth of knowledge, are comfortable speaking on the topic and who bounce well off others. 

Being opinionated or passionate is usually a pro, and it can be helpful to select guests based on their ability to add different points of view to the same topic.

Trust-building and coaching

It’s often helpful to spend time with your panellists ahead of the day, and this also applies to a panel podcast. This will enable you to both build trust in the relationship with that individual guest and test out any avenues that might be ripe for further discussion. In the production process, we call this step the pre-interview which you can learn more about here. 

According to Louise, it’s also a chance to suss out how well your individual guest responds to some of your intended topics, so that you can ‘Coach them on how to make the answer more vibrant.’  This doesn’t mean showing them all your questions, but rather introducing in broad strokes the things you’re likely to cover.

It’s also a way to help improve their answering skills by encouraging them to ‘Add a killer fact or stat, tell the memorable anecdote. Keep it short and colourful, rather than lengthy and pedantic.’ All important for getting the most value out of your conversation.

A lot of this links to our more general tips about becoming a better podcast host, which you can read more about here.

Formulating the arc of the discussion

Another opportunity that comes from panel prep is developing the discussion arc. This translates neatly into the arc of the episode in any panel-style podcast. Louise says:

During the prep call, people can see that I’m building the story arc, and giving everyone a role in building it. They can see when and where I’ll bring out oppositional or supporting views.  And they can see I’ll be fair with airtime. Once you have a good story arc you can place each point of view in an order that will make sense to the audience – again, this makes it memorable – which is better for the panellists.

Planning your discussion arc is always a great way to ensure that you get everything you need out of the group and come away with a conversation that is dynamic but also has a flow from start to finish.

Encouraging surprising answers

The best moments in panel discussions often come out of surprising takes on the topic – ones that reveal a more passionate, opinionated or just unique sense of the subject. Prompting these surprises can be tricky, but Louise says it has a lot to do with the courage to ask more daring questions:

I’m on the audience’s side – I know I have to make the conversation sharp, vibrant and relevant for them, and also really to the point so they say ‘God, I wish I had thought of that question’ or ‘I wish I was brave enough to ask that question’ and then I have to get them really sharp, interesting answers – so the tough question pays off with an interesting answer.

It's worth also remembering that the courage to ask has to be accompanied by the right questions, asked at the right moment, and prefaced with the trust of the panellists themselves. Louise adds:

Getting surprising answers is a combination of knowing which questions to ask, and how to ask them (tone, style), but also having the trust of the panelist such that they feel they can tell that anecdote or furnish that fact

This is where the preparation really pays off, building on the trust you’ve already established ahead of time alongside the arc you’ve fleshed out, and keeping your audience in focus throughout the discussion.

Managing multiple speakers

One of the potential pitfalls of a panel discussion is losing the insights each panellist might deliver if they start to speak over each other or interrupt too often – or if one person takes up so much time, nobody else has a chance to weigh in!

It’s important to remember that, unlike a panel, you have editing on your side in a podcast. The main thing is to ensure there is minimal talking over each other by participants in the conversation. In a panel, using a device to help signal to the guests that it is time to come to a natural close could be helpful, as Louise suggests: 

‘My control mechanism is called ‘Waggy Pen’. In the prep call I hold up my bright pink pen and explain to people that when they see Waggy Pen, it’s my way of telling them to end at the next full stop. I do it so that I don’t have to talk over anyone – which is just aurally annoying for the listener, and also so the audience doesn’t realise how the conversation is being managed. Good for them, good for their fellow panellists, good for the audience.’

In a podcast, however, you can have the producer help you out here - they are able to help jump in and restart questions, as well as ensuring the flow of the entire conversation is intact. Editing afterwards can also sharpen the outcome. If you do feel the the need to interrupt, be sure to demonstrate that you are looking for clarification, or are genuinely just interested in digging into something related to that point – for instance, you might say, ‘Sorry to interrupt you, but that has reminded me…’ or ‘Building on what you were saying…’

Use the combination of good preparation, a switched-on producer and gentle conversational techniques to help maintain the overall flow of the discussion, and make the most of your chance to edit the recording after the fact. 

Remote moderation techniques

Adding in the remote recording factor that we are all dealing with these days, can be another layer of hosting complexity. Louise’s advice is to get, ‘Everyone in the [virtual] green room at the same time, so we can re-establish rapport, run through the story arc, remind everyone of the rules (short, sharp, vibrant).’ This may mean a quick reminder of everything ahead of the recording time and being ready with the technology – keeping the setup and recording process as simple as possible will help ensure everyone feels calm and ready for discussion.

 If you’re considering a panel-style podcast, we can help make sure it all goes off without a hitch. Our Convenor package is all about bringing together thinkers in your space and cultivating excellent conversations. Get in touch today if you are looking for the support to ensure your podcast is executed with success!

Want to learn more about making a panel podcast with Message Heard? Check out our Convener package here.

Planning a Podcast Interview? Start Here.

The interview format is one of the most common types of podcast out there. But even though there are a lot of interviews recorded, not all of them succeed! Cultivating a conversation that is insightful and valuable for your audience isn’t always as simple as it sounds.

This guide is here to help you navigate the interview process to make sure yours never falls flat, and that your podcast really stands out from the crowd. After all, you only get one run at a great interview. 

A quick house-keeping note - here at Message Heard, this format falls under our ‘duocast’ package. This is simply a shorthand for all podcasts involving two voices, so we use duocast and interview podcast interchangeably in this post.

So, back to business. Before we get into our step-by-step guide, it’s worth asking the question: Why are interviews (or duocasts) so popular with listeners, and what are the benefits of using this format? 

The benefits of a great interview

A successful interview has the potential to:

1. Communicate and connect with people

What better way to showcase a connection than through a great conversation? Successful interviews live on in people’s memory. This is a chance to connect not only with an interviewee, but also to communicate something intrinsic to the host. Bringing people together is the biggest opportunity of the interview format.

2. Showcase expertise

Your depth of understanding is on show through the questions asked and the answers received. It’s a two-for-one deal, where both the host and the interview subject have a chance to talk deeply on a subject that is of interest or curiosity to them.

3. Raise an individual profile

Raising your brand profile is often easier through an effective conversation than it is by simply stating what you know or have to offer. This is because calling in a great interview subject immediately offers you the chance to grow your network – leveraging their audience, as well as your own – and expanding the reach of a brand or individual.

The interview checklist

Stage 1: Research and planning       

Any good interviewer knows that it’s all about the preparation that goes in ahead of the conversation. Before your guest even sits down with you, it’s time to hit the books: read or listen to the guest’s previous interviews, look up their personal profiles or online presence, and start considering how you might angle your conversation. What have they not been asked before? What do you wish they’d talk more about? Come up with a focus for your interview based on your research, and start planning your initial questions.

With all of your questions written down, start to organise them into a structure that makes sense for the episode. Ask yourself: do these questions move between themes and topics in the most natural way? Consider the arc of an episode and where you’d like to ideally finish the discussion, as well as any key information that you need to get out of the conversation. Make sure this is covered in your line of questioning.

Stage 2: Pre-Interview priming

As well as doing your own preparation, it’s worth it to start priming your interviewee beforehand. Use an initial call, or a pre-interview, to get a shared understanding of:

• Your interview style

• What you’re hoping to achieve in the conversation

• Any technical information required

• And to give the subject a chance to speak their questions or concerns.

This is also where you are filling in the gaps from your desk research, as it is your chance to check any facts directly and clarify intent for the conversation.

Outline what you want to talk to about in the interview, but don’t give the subject the exact questions. This will keep the interviewee from overthinking their answers and will keep your recorded conversation fresh and in the moment.

Furthermore, this is your chance to begin to build rapport with the subject. Good rapport is always part of an effective conversation, and it can be tricky to do all of this in a few moments before recording, if you haven’t met the subject before.

Stage 3: Soundcheck and technical setup

Let’s face it: many of us are now recording remotely! If you aren’t able to record in studio (which is the optimum place to ensure quality) you will have to do a bit of extra work to ensure your podcast is recorded correctly and sounds great. Whether you’re able to use a studio or not, a producer or engineer can perform this soundcheck to make sure the host is focused on conducting the best interview possible on the day.

There are many good ways to record an interview. In general, we don’t recommend using Zoom or Skype to record, as these don’t record at an optimal quality. Consider one of the various recording platforms out there like Cleanfeed, Zencaster, Squadcast or Riverside. Technically, a tape sync is the technical term for a remote interview, and with a producer on board, it can be possible to arrange for a remote engineer in the guest’s location who will be able to set up and record remotely at a much higher quality. If safe to do so, this is worth considering too, to ensure the host and interviewee have the best audio at the end.

Whatever your setup, you need to check your guests sound setup to make sure the recording is the best quality possible. This will also help you hit the ground running on the day of the interview and elevates stress for the interviewee.

Stage Four: Making the most of your recording day

Now is the make or break moment! The day of your recording, do your best to ensure both you and your subject are feeling relaxed and ready to chat. Try to keep the technical setup as pain-free as possible so they too can concentrate on delivering the best answers without getting distracted by other factors. If you’re recording remotely, ensure everyone is somewhere they won’t be disturbed and where there isn’t too much background noise – turn off your phone, email notifications, etc. Again, if you’ve got a producer, they can help make sure all the conditions are as optimal as possible for a great quality recording.

As you start to ask questions, this is the time to be very present in the conversation. Focus is vital here, as is listening. Having done some solid prep, you shouldn’t be afraid if your subject starts to deviate or introduce a tangent – either guide it back on track with a clear question or follow the track further and ask appropriate follow up questions if you’re curious and want to dig deeper. This is all part of active listening.

If you’re not sure you’re getting the information you need, be prepared to ask extra questions that might help tease out a topic. In essence, this is all about flexibility – just as a natural conversation can move around or shift, be aware when this is happening and consider whether to follow or turn things around. And if your subject is nervous or unsure, reassure them that they can always pause, take a moment, and start again.

It’s all about managing a conversation – as well as having one! Pay attention to how the discussion feels as it unfolds. If you’re interested and excited about it, chances are that this will come across to your audience too!

Stage Five: Editing and final touches

Here’s your chance to really tighten up a meandering conversation – you can move things around a little, if really needed, cut out any repetition or mistakes, and consider the pace of the episode as a whole. Dialogue pacing is crucial – you don’t want a subject to not sound like themselves, but you also want to help them out if they were nervous or particularly slow to speak. Sometimes, it can help to manually pace the dialogue here and there to create energy and shift up the tone in a monotonous part of the conversation. Help everyone out as well by cleaning up any uhms and ahhs, for a nice crisp quality to the speech.

There you have it, the 5 steps to nail a podcast interview and create a conversation that is a pleasure to listen to. Implement these tips to ensure your interview really makes an impact and stays with audiences well after an episode is finished.

Want to learn more about duocasts? Find out all the podcast production services we offer here.

Which format suits your podcast?

Whatever your business goals, there is a format that suits your story best. Discover more about the shape your podcast could take to convey your company’s message successfully.

Looking to start a discussion? Or grow your profile? Creating the perfect corporate podcast is made up of many parts, including choosing the right format for your story. We might assume that a podcast is just two people on mic, talking to each other about a particular subject. But actually, a podcast can offer many forms of storytelling. 

In this blog, we want to introduce some other formats that might suit your podcast aims better, aligning with your business or brand goals and helping you stand out from the crowd.

A Monologue/Solocast

A Monologue or Solocast is one person on mic talking through a subject. This can be elevated with sound design and other editing techniques. Examples include Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History Series and The Anthropocene Reviewed with John Green. 

Pros

This format is great for thought-leadership, as well as narrative storytelling or reviews. It doesn’t rely on guests or other parties, as one person carries the show. Your audience really has the chance to know you intimately, which can be very powerful for personal brand building. It can also be easier to edit one voice rather than several, and you can always adjust and record again with an individual, if things don’t sound as you’d hoped. 

Cons 

Your host has to be very capable, as they really own the show - there’s no one to bounce off from! Also, to make sure this format really shines, it’s important to ensure audio is well produced in order to still sound dynamic and hold audience attention. This can also mean privileging shorter episode lengths or use of archive audio, to break up the single speaker. 

The Documentary 

Popularised by NPR, this format is very much about historical recounting of a series of events. This might be achieved with a combination of voices, music, archival audio, and more. An example of this is our podcast with Remembering Srebrenica, Untold Killing.

Pros

This format is very engaging and dynamic, and can definitely have broad appeal, enabling a deep exploration of a particular story. These sort of shows are also proven to have a broad appeal and are regularly seen at the top of the podcasting charts. Beyond this, documentaries often have an evergreen quality meaning people can discover and enjoy your content long after the run is over. 

Cons

This style of podcast requires a long production time, and has complex production needs. It requires lots of forward planning and more time to piece together the episodes. Great research is definitely required.

Non-fiction storytelling or reporting

In this format, you hear reporting on an ongoing story, or a hosted show that is being reported, usually based on real life or true stories. It’s a combination of a discussion and reported information, so multiple voices are heard and help to tell a story - this makes it a great way to teach something new to your audience, and expose listeners to new ideas and concepts. Examples include Breaking Brand, Reply All and Heavyweight. 

Pros

This is a compelling way to tell a story that you own, offering the chance to include other audio to create a dynamic episode. You really can tell any story at all, so this can be a very flexible and inclusive format.  

Cons

Because this format often involves many sources of information, it can mean long and complex production and detailed research are involved.

The Interview

An interview between a host (or multiple hosts) and a subject, who is given the chance to share their unique expertise or insight. The host guides the discussion, asking key questions. Examples include our collaboration with NatWest, or How I Built This and the very popular Tim Ferris podcast. 

Pros

Interviews offer the opportunity to introduce a new perspective. Hosts have less pressure, as the guest should do most of the talking. Listeners also don’t mind the occasional fluffed word - they want to feel there’s a natural conversation happening. New audiences might discover your podcast through your guest, which is great for audience building, and this format can help spark discussions. 

Cons

There are lots of podcasts already in this format, making it hard to stand out. Interviewing is also trickier than it looks - it takes good research and can be challenging if the guest is repetitive, talks for too long, or isn’t able to articulate their views. You’ll also need a new quality guest for each episode. 

Fiction storytelling

A fictionalised play or audio drama, this format is normally performed by voice actors. It’s much more similar to dramatic television or the radio play. Like any good fictional story, these rely on great characters, tension and narrative arcs. It’s a very creative storytelling type, and examples include The Archers and Forest 404. 

Pros

Audiences can be really engaged with this style of podcast, as they become invested in the story. With few examples out there, it can be easier to stand out in this format. The only limit is your imagination! Which also means, research and factual accuracy might be less important.

Cons

This is a less common format because it is generally less relevant to businesses. Your competition comes more from Netflix than other podcasts, so it’s much more about having the creativity to come up with a great original narrative. You do have to have the whole story in place at the start, so you know exactly where your episodes are going and how to hit the right beats to keep listeners engaged.

There you have it, some of the other podcast formats that might be perfect for your brand. Don’t get us wrong, sometimes two people and a mic just having a great chat can really work - after all that’s the format behind Conflicted! But it's important to consider why this is the best format. 

Think carefully about the format that best suits the story you have to tell, so that you can get out there and share it! And if you’re not sure — get in touch, we can help you figure it out. 

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Want to learn more? At Message Heard, we make podcasts that help your brand reach new audiences. Find out how we can help you by getting in touch.

7 questions to guide your podcast strategy

You know you want to make a podcast. But what comes next? Here’s the low down on developing a strategy that sets your podcast up for success.

Creating a corporate podcast is often more than just a matter of having a great idea. Making a podcast worthwhile for your business requires a strategy. A strategy can make the difference between a podcast that’s simply fun and satisfying to create, and a podcast that really works for your larger business or brand goals.

During lockdown, we worked closely with Historic England to deliver a detailed podcast strategy that supported their aims as a business, as well as their wider content strategy. In particular, we utilise a Discovery Workshop process that is the key to defining everything a podcast strategy needs. This involved conducting a series of workshops conducted online, using various visualisation tools to help our teams collaborate and brainstorm around several important questions. 

In this blog, we’re going to break down parts of this process, sharing with you the important overarching questions that you need to answer to develop a podcast strategy that works towards your goals as a brand. 

Our virtual whiteboard used in our Discovery Workshop with Historic England.

1. What are your business/brand values and goals?

All content that you spend time creating as a brand should reflect your values and should be created in alignment with your goals. So, a good place to start is here: what does your brand or business value? Knowing what you stand for can help get the ball rolling. 

In the case of Historic England, they had used podcasts before to support exhibitions and events. Their aim was to inspire people and create advocates for the built environment. These key values helped dictate the way in which we defined a strategy for their future podcasts. Creating content that speaks to an ethos really helps to shape and define the scope of your podcast and will lead towards certain themes and ideas that are important for you to explore. 

Next up: What are your goals for your content? Content that aims to acquire new members, for instance, is likely to be different to content that furthers brand awareness. While your podcast may be intended to achieve many things, it’s important to define exactly what this might be before you get stuck in creating episodes.

2. What content have you created already?

Reviewing or auditing your content to date is a good way to help define what’s missing, and what your podcast might build upon. What worked? What didn’t? Spend time reviewing what content you’ve tried to create, the effect it had, any measurable qualities of success, before defining your podcast.

3.  What are your competitors up to?

Have your key competitors already got a podcast? If so, it’s worth taking a look to see what they are up to. Set your podcast apart from the outset by researching your competitors and the way they present themselves. Take note of what stories they’re telling and use this to help find your niche. If they don’t have a podcast yet, all the better! It’s your opportunity to create something that’s missing in the market.

4. Who is your audience?

Defining your audience is a great way to hone your podcast content. Thinking about who they are, what they are like, what they need, and what information you can uniquely provide them. All of this will help get you one step closer to creating a successful podcast.

5. What themes do you have in mind already?

There might already be some obvious themes that relate to your industry, the experts or guests you have access to, content you already create or content that is missing. Define your themes in a broader sense. Brainstorming here may reveal new areas that your podcast can explore - after all, it’s not a text-based medium, which means that you can define ideas that suit an audio format specifically, and this might bring to mind new areas to explore in your content. 

6. What format will your podcast take?

There are many possible formats a podcast can take. From monologues, to interview, to narrative-style podcasts (like the infamous Serial podcast), round tables, multi-host (like our work with NatWest), and more. Defining what format might suit the stories you want to tell will help define how to execute your content, when it comes to turning ideas into reality. 

7. How do you want to be different?

Here’s your chance to really brainstorm and get creative! Having reviewed what you’ve already created in terms of content, as well as what your competitors are doing, the themes and formats you prefer, what your audience needs, and keeping in mind your values as a brand, it’s now finally time to start fleshing out your niche. What would you most like to try? What story do you uniquely have to tell? Setting your podcast apart is key to creating something extra special with each and every episode. 

With these key questions answered, you can begin to define a successful podcast strategy. At Message Heard, we work with this as a starting point with each and every one of our clients. As we dig into the Discovery Workshop process, we can help you unveil the insights that can help your podcast stand out. By defining a detailed strategy, production also becomes a far smoother and more time and money efficient process. Take your ideas and turn them into a reality that serves your brand.  

Want to learn more? At Message Heard, we make podcasts that help your brand reach new audiences. Find out how we can help you by getting in touch.

How to Become a Better Podcast Host

What does it take to be a great podcast host? Here’s what you need to know to make successful podcasts. 

Podcasting is one of the most popular forms of media right now. The best corporate podcasts have something in common: a great host! While anyone can try their hand in front of the mic, it takes something special to be a capable podcast host. After all, contrary to popular belief, an engaging podcast isn’t just about creating a conversation — it’s  about how you curate that conversation for the listener. So, what can you do to become a stronger podcast host? Here are our tips to get you started.

Start preparing early

Hosting a podcast  can be intimidating - most of us aren’t used to being recorded! This means that having confidence on your subject matter is a great way to start, as well as preparing yourself for what needs to go into the episode you’re making. 

Recently, we worked with NatWest to produce a branded podcast. Our hosts were first-timers to the world of podcast production, and one of the hosts, Burcu Karabork, had this to say about the process:

“There is a tremendous amount of discipline and experience required in knowing where to stop conversations, what questions to ask, where to prod a bit deeper...So the question becomes; can you afford that learning curve? Often we only get one chance to impress listeners, after which they turn away from us and don’t come back. It’s imperative to get it right the first time so we don’t alienate them.”

While a lot of podcasts sound ‘off the cuff’, chances are there was still a lot of preparation behind this. That means: having questions in mind, knowing what subjects or information you need to cover, and having thought through the way you want to articulate this. Even some of the most natural, and famous, podcast hosts are scripted. 

An excerpt of Micheal Barabaro, host of The Daily’s, script.

Practice makes perfect

The great thing about podcast production is that you can always re-take a line if you mess it up. So give yourself room to practice! Try out recordings, and listen back to yourself. While this can be awkward at first, it’s essential to know how you are coming across, and whether you need to mix things up. Give it to someone else to listen to: do they know what you’re trying to convey? 

The style of delivery required for a podcast is different from simply talking in everyday life, though it’s not too far removed. The art of hosting is about staying true to your style and tone of voice (as it represents who you are as an individual!). However, learning how to do things like clearly delivering the words in your script; conveying emotion through your intonation and pacing your delivery, are skills that different you from a rookie podcaster and host with command of the mic.

So if you’re new to this… practice, practice practice! Get you phone recorder out and give your read of the script a go (or two).  Listen back to your way of delivering information, try different versions of the same thing as you are recording, and have patience. The process does become easier. 

Work with a producer

A producer can be a huge help for making a successful podcast. In the case of NatWest, our Head of Production, Sandra Ferrari, was there to provide support and advice along the way. In Burcu’s words, “When you know that you’re being looked after and that you have a safety net, you relax. When you relax you say things in the moment that are more genuine and authentic to yourself, which in turn makes you far more engaging for listeners.” 

Sandra was there to guide our hosts through to creating their vision. Burcu adds:

“It’s difficult to know what your artistic vision is if you’ve never worked on that before and Sandra was instrumental in helping us to discover ours. She went above and beyond to introduce variations into the podcasts, allowing us to pick and choose what we liked and discard what we felt didn’t speak to our authentic selves. I really appreciated being allowed to push my own boundaries in that way, expanding my views on what I thought our podcast should sound like, all the while feeling in control enough to let go of what I liked less.”

Producers are there as a trusted minder, to help you stay on track and create the episode you planned to make. 

At Message Heard, we specialise in guiding your project through to completion. Whatever part of the process you’re struggling with, from ideation through to distribution, we can help. 

It takes skill to become a great podcast host. Whether it’s your first time trying it out, or you’re a seasoned professional, the same skills apply. Take a look at our Business of Podcasting section for more great advice on creating amazing podcasts. 

Want to learn more? At Message Heard, we make podcasts that help your brand reach new audiences. Find out how we can help you by getting in touch.

Podcast publishing 101: Where to publish your podcast?

A guide for checking your podcast is published everywhere it needs to be.

Podcast publishing is a bit of a minefield — but getting it right is key to creating a successful podcast, so it's worth investing some time in. We've learned a lot from publishing our own shows, and we're here to share our learnings with you, so you don't fall into the common traps.

We’ll share our tips about podcast publishing, and share our ever growing podcast platform checklist that you can use to make sure your podcast is accessible on whatever app your listeners are using.

Why is podcast publishing important? 

From Apple to Google Podcasts, there are so many places that listeners can discover, listen, rate and review your podcast. 

With our show Conflicted, we can see that listeners use over 26 different podcast platforms and there is still a large chunk of unattributed listens which could come from any number of other podcast platforms. 

The vast majority of listens come from a few big players: 68% Apple Podcasts, 14% Spotify and the remaining 19% split between over 20+ other apps.  

A table showing some of the places people listen to our show, Conflicted.

But no matter the size of listenership on that platform, it’s important your show can be accessed everywhere as it improves the experience of every potential listener you have. Think of those potential super fans who will be very annoyed that they can’t find your awesome show on their chosen app! 

The good news is it’s pretty easy to do, but there are a few factors to consider especially when it comes to timing. 

When should you publish your feed?

It makes sense to focus on making sure your podcast is on the biggest podcast platforms first. 

We discovered the hard way that Apple Podcasts, which along with Spotify, is widely one of the most common places people listen to podcasts, encourage you to allow up to 10 working days for them to approve your feed once it’s submitted. 

So to avoid any last minute panics, we now make sure all our feeds are set up with the trailer uploaded 10 days before we planned to start promotion. 

Once the feed is created via your chosen hosting platform, you will generate an RSS feed link. We then make sure this link is submitted to the top players: 

• Apple Podcasts - Submit your feed here via iTunes Connect. Make an account if you don’t already have one, and you can also see analytics through this portal.

• Spotify - Submit or ‘claim’ your RSS feed through Spotify for Podcasters. You’ll also need to create an account, and similar to iTunes Connect, Spotify offers specific analytic via this portal. 

• Google Podcasts - Google now have a podcast manager portal as well where you can submit your feed directly. You can log in with any google account, and as with the others, you will need your RSS feed link at the ready.

From there, we’ve found your RSS will be automatically picked up by most other podcast platforms. This may take some time, so you can also check and submit your feed via the links in the list below! 

Where else should you make sure your podcast is published? 

As we mentioned, the RSS feed does a lot of the hard work for you and you might find your podcast has found its way on to many of these platforms without you submitting it directly. 

So, we suggest waiting for up to 10 days and once you see your link appear on these platforms you have already submitted to: 

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify  

• Google Podcasts  

Then go through and check your podcast is displayed on these players, if not you can add them via the links or instructions below:  

• RadioPublic

• CastBox

• PodcastAddict

• Pocket Casts

• Overcast - There is no specific way to submit to Overcast, they say you should see your podcast on Overcast 2-3 days after you submit to Apple. 

• Stitcher

• Acast - Scroll down to the green button where it says ‘add your show’ 

• Player FM

• Luminary 

• Downcast - Downcast also don’t have a direct submission and use Apple Podcasts, but if your show is not appearing you can email them: support@downcastapp.com

• Doggcatcher - Doggcatcher also doesn't have a direct submission. If you can’t find your show, you can try using their support forum. 

• BeyondPod 

• Himalaya

• Alexa - Lots of podcast apps already have skills which you can use to access your podcast, but some shows also create your own skill but this requires custom development. 

• Entale - You can add your shows to Entale if you wish to add reference materials like images or links. 

This is a running list we have compiled. Have we missed any? Let us know if your favourite podcast platform isn’t listed and we’ll add it along with the link to submit. 

Want to know more about marketing and distributing your podcast? At Message Heard, we make podcasts that help your brand to reach new audiences. Find out what we can do for you. Call today: 02081036034 or email us at: contact@messageheard.com.

Two Seasons In, Here’s What We've Learned About Podcast Marketing

When it comes to podcast marketing, do you feel like you’ve tried everything, or that you don’t even know where to start? 

Frustrated your podcast isn’t getting the audience it deserves? Confused as to why your downloads plateaued? We know the feeling… we know all the feelings.  

We have been creating and releasing our podcast Conflicted since February 2019. It’s taught us first-hand how hard building a podcast audience is — it’s not enough to make great content (if we say so ourselves) and throw it into an RSS feed.  

But, after two seasons, we’re feeling positive about the progress Conflicted has made:  

• We’ve received coverage in The Guardian, The Telegraph and The Times.  

• 99.6% of listeners say they would recommend it to a friend, family member or colleague. 

• For Season 2, average listenership over the first 7 days has grown 62% compared to Season 1 for the same time period.  

• We’ve grown an engaged listener community — 96.3% of the members of our Facebook Group have actively posted, shared or reacted.   

• And the cherry on top: we were nominated for an ARIAS (the Audio Oscars) for Best Independent Podcast alongside  some of the world’s biggest podcasts. 

We know there is still work to do, but at this juncture we wanted to share a whistle stop tour of what we’ve learned over the past two years of distributing and marketing our flagship podcast.  

Our growth: Season One compared to Season Two.

Plan, Plan, Plan

For every podcast we make — either under our Originals umbrella or for our clients — we preach the gospel of strategy.

Thinking critically about who your podcast is targeted at and how you plan to reach them is vital, as is adapting that plan as you release your podcast and learn more about your audience.

We have tried different tools for planning, including Trello and Monday.com, but for Season 2, it was a good old fashioned word doc which really helped capture our strategy as well as the tactics we’d use.

How we map out our thinking.

We also recommend creating a master copy document to create consistency and make sure you tailor your messaging to each channel, including your podcast’s metadata. This metadata includes your podcast title, podcast description, episode titles, show notes and other data like tags you input when you upload episodes to you podcast hosting platform. Using a master document helped us keep our language consistent but also acted as checklist prompting us to input all the data correctly each episode.

Marketing Needs To Be Baked into Production

Before you even press record, you need to have a production and marketing strategy in place – especially if the people producing and promoting the show are in separate teams.

Why? There are so many marketing considerations which overlap with the way your show sounds and what you capture during recording:

• Audience Development - Who is this podcast targeted at? Who are you actually speaking to when you step behind the mic?

• Audio Branding - Theme tunes, music beds, jingles, archival tape. What audio-materials will you use to create your distinctive sound?

• Visual Branding - How will the look of the show capture the podcast’s tone and attract your target audience? A consistent visual identity across all brand touch points will professionalise your brand and attract new listeners.

• Tone of Voice - Again, your show’s voice needs to be consistent across all touch points. The language of the show and language used in marketing need to complement, not quarrel.

• Call to Actions - How do you plan on engaging your audience? Are these CTA’s scripted? Will they cut through?

• Social Media Assets - Are you capturing the assets you need to promote the show during production ?

• Trailers and Teasers - What are you sharing? And when are you sharing it? Do you need extra voice overs for your trailers? How are you building excitement?

• Guest Engagement - How will you work with the guests on your show to maximise your combined reach?

• Press Assets and Reels - What sizzlers do you need to sell your show to the press?

Cover The Basics

Making sure you are covering the basics is key before you start exploring marketing approaches tailored to your show.

As a company, we are now at a place where we have a best practice approach for all the shows we produce and release.

How to build your own best practice? When something works - write it down. Build a checklist as you learn. And execute that checklist. Every. Single. Time.

Doing core promotional activities for each episode also helps you spell out what actually works, as you can compare and see how things like content, topic and guests affect downloads or engagement. It’s about tracking the individual items AND the combinations of items to create a clear picture of what actually works.

Engage Your Audience

Tailoring your engagement strategy to your audience means finding the right channels for your podcast.

For the launch of Conflicted Season 2, we have focused on building a Facebook Group and running weekly giveaways. We’ve also started to see the benefit of having distinct social channels for each show, especially on Twitter, we’re people can tag, share and recommend the show to others.

An example of listeners engaging with the hosts via our Facebook group.

These were invaluable step for us in creating a dialogue with our listeners — but for your show the best channels and tactics may be different. Think about who your audience is, what engagement you want from them, and how to reward those who interact, share and feedback.

Test, Iterate, Improve

There is no silver bullet. There isn’t one scalable, repeatable thing that will get you a committed audience of millions overnight.

We do believe however, that there is a cocktail of things that will get you there one day. Working out that magic marketing mix involves testing, iterating and improving.

That is why we conduct thorough retrospectives after each season of the show. This entails:

• Reviewing the Data – Dig into your analytics. Examine your growth, listenership trends and demographic data. Don’t just focus on the numbers —make sure to factor in any qualitative insights from Apple podcast reviews, emails and tweets, too.

• Collecting Audience Feedback – We did our first audience survey for the end of Season 2. This has become an incredible resource for data about what our audiences enjoys and what they want to change. You can see our survey here, and Bello Collective also have a great resource on making an audience survey.

• Doing a Team Review - We asked: what we do well, what went wrong, and what we could improve when it comes to marketing, production and monetisation of the show. Out of this process we have an actionable list of improvements to take forward.

Some of the results from our Audience Survey.

What isYour Unique Opportunity?

Every podcast needs to play to its strengths, as well as the resources you have at your disposal. 

In this example, Conflicted is a discussion show so it made sense to focus on platforms that allow listeners to engage more deeply and run giveaways that provide ‘further reading’. It’s also personality-led, so we wanted our content and coverage to profile our hosts and allow their personalities to shine. 

Ask yourself what unique opportunities your podcast has — is it the profile of your guests, your social media reach, your connection with listeners? These are the building blocks you need to grow your show.  

If you want help developing a podcast marketing strategy that plays to the strengths of your brand and speaks directly to your target audiences — get in touch.

Click here to contact us about our services!

Conflicted - Climate Crisis

As the financial crisis moved off the front pages, activists and politicians began to organise around another global emergency: climate change. In the final episode of this season of Conflicted, Aimen and Thomas sweat their way through the swamp of science and politics that surrounds the world’s most flammable issue.

Listen to the podcast wherever you get your podcasts, and find the full transcript below.

Read the transcript here:

Conflicted S2E6

THOMAS: Hi everyone. Thomas Small here. I'm coming to you from deep undercover, literally. I'm sitting on my bed with the covers pulled over my head, trying my best to recreate the conditions of a recording studio. You see, the episode you're about to hear was recorded before lockdown, but before we kick it off, Aimen and I have a favor to ask. As we come to the end of season two, we're doing a survey to find out what you, dear listeners, enjoy about the show. What you want more of and where we can improve. The survey will only take about five to ten minutes to complete, and let's face it, you're at home twiddling your thumbs waiting for this global pandemic to end. So why not just click on the link in the show notes below or go to bit.ly/conflictedq. That's all lowercase bit.ly/conflictedq. And as a Thank You, anyone who completes the survey will be in with a chance of winning a copy of Aimen’s book, ‘Nine Lives: My time as MI6’s top spy inside Al-Qaeda’. Now on with the show.

THOMAS: Welcome to the last episode of this season of Conflicted. I am Thomas Small and of course Aimen Dean is here with me. Hi Aimen.

AIMEN: Hi Thomas.

THOMAS: How are you doing today? Don't say you're still alive. People are getting sick of that joke. [Aimen laughs] I noticed that there's more gray hair in your beard. Is that the toll of being a jihadist or the toll of being a father of two young children?

AIMEN: Um, I can tell you I've been through many wars and I can tell you nothing prepares you to raising children. [Thomas laughs] Raising children is worse than actually going to war. [Aimen Laughs]

THOMAS: All right, so, so far, we have been on a long journey of tracking the rise and demise, potentially the demise, of America's New World Order. In the last episode, we turned our attention to how the collapse of the American economy, or near collapse of the American economy in 2008, rippled around the globe. And today, to conclude the season, how is the history of the environmental movement connected to the history and politics of the New World Order? And what does the global climate crisis mean to the billions of people who don't live in what we call the Western World?

[Theme music plays]

THOMAS: So, we've been talking about the end of the New World Order, the end of liberal democracy, the end of capitalism. But with the climate crisis, are we actually witnessing the end of the world itself? This is potentially, Aimen, not disconnected to the question of the success of global capitalism, which along with its arguable benefits has also, or so the scientists tell us, had a pretty huge negative impact on the environment. Now, before we get into this, I want to say that this is a topic that many people today feel really passionately about. And I'm going to be honest, I don't always know what to think about it, because there's so much conflicting information out there. Not so much about the problem itself, about which the science is pretty settled. But about the best solution. Which is where, of course, science takes a back seat to politics. People are truly conflicted. So, Aimen, we've discussed this issue a hundred times, and some of your views might make people think you're a climate change denier, are you?

AIMEN: No, definitely not. I'm not a climate change denier. I am more or less skeptic about the solutions that some quarters are putting forward. So I am someone basically who believe, while I'm not a scientist, I believe that the total disruption of human economic activity all across the globe is not the answer.

THOMAS: Right. Okay, good. So you're not a climate change denier, and we will discuss later your views about the more radical suggestions that some voices have about how to deal with the crisis. But before we get there, I just think it's good to offer a brief history of the environmental movement. And the first thing to point out is that movement is actually very old. Its roots lie in the 19th century, the romantic movement really, which coincided with the industrial revolution. Poets and philosophers began to grow uneasy about the rising pollution that resulted from industrialization, not to mention the social and spiritual dislocations that followed. Legislation in Britain and elsewhere from the Victorian period onward, primarily over air pollution was passed, plus conservation societies were founded all across the world. In 1962 Rachel Carson's hugely influential book ‘Silent Spring’ kicked off the modern environmental movement, and the first earth day was celebrated in 1970. So the movement has really deep roots. But it was really the establishment of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 1988, followed by the first UN Earth Summit held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 where global action on climate change began. The Rio Summit was actually expressly a post-cold war effort to bring countries together so they can discuss how to cooperate on development issues, which involved what was then called sustainability, sustainable development. The countries wanted to make sure that prosperity rose, but they were concerned that with rising prosperity would be an increasing environmental degradation. This all eventually resulted in the Kyoto protocol of 1997, which has struggled to be ratified by the countries of the world, to put it lightly. Especially the United States has been an outlier. They have not signed the Kyoto protocol. This has all led in recent years to lots of activists being fed up with what they consider to be global inaction on a pressing problem and the growing popularity of green political parties and what's called the Green New Deal and other such policy proposals. So that's the history. And we can see that really the era of the New World Order, which has seen this explosion of capitalism and economic growth everywhere, has been shadowed all along by a growing concern. That it is not sustainable in the long run and that the Earth is suffering as a result of all our prosperity. Now, before we focus on the politics of climate change in the West, I'd like to talk about the Middle East. Ultimately, listeners come to you, Aimen [Aimen laughs] to hear about the Middle East. So how has the climate crisis and the facts around the climate crisis been a factor in everything that Conflicted has been discussing over the last two seasons?

AIMEN: Well, don't forget. We in the Middle East are the source, or the largest source of this pollution. [Aimen laughs]

THOMAS: Because of the oil that you're pumping out.

AIMEN: Oil and gas. So basically, we've been pumping oil now for almost a hundred years to the rest of the world. You know, basically the two thirds of the world energy exports, they are coming from the Middle East, of course. So if you look at Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Iraq, Iran, Libya, the production levels basically are just tremendous. So of course we are the producers, but we are not necessarily the polluters.

THOMAS: Well, you do consume a lot of petroleum yourselves, but of course it is the West and more recently, China.

AIMEN: And India

THOMAS: And India, Yes. So the source is the Middle East, but then from that source of the pollution is created everywhere. AIMEN: Yeah. So when I talk to people, whether it is in Saudi Arabia or Iraq or Iran, or Yemen, wherever, basically they say, look, you know, the World is angry about OPEC being one of the biggest polluters in the world because OPEC, you know, the organization for petroleum producing chemicals--

THOMAS: [Overlapping]The global petroleum cartel really.

AIMEN: Exactly to the point where there were even environmentalist who were shouting that OPEC is a terrorist organization because—

[Aimen and Thomas laugh]

THOMAS: Yet another terrorist organization from the Middle East.

AIMEN: Exactly. [laughs]

THOMAS: Gosh, you guys can't help yourself.

AIMEN: No, we can't. Because you know, it should have been disbanded and assets seized and all of that because unfortunately with the environment, the environmental message from the West that is actually seeping through to the people in the Middle East is extremely negative. And they feel that basically, that the environmentalist are hostile towards the Middle East because of so many, what I call intersectionalities of causes, that are dumping more and more of the world's problems on the Middle East.

THOMAS: Well, if rising carbon dioxide is seen as the major problem, then petroleum is the source of that problem.

AOMEN: Ah ha, but someone from the Middle East would say, well, excuse me. We were living in nomadic lives, or semi urban lives. We were agricultural, or pastoral or having livestock going around. Until you guys came discover the juice [Thomas laughs] beneath our feet and you decided to extract it and give us the money.

THOMAS: Well, let's not talk about the pollution itself. I want to talk about the effects of this pollution, i.e. climate change. And how climate change has influenced the things we've been talking about on Conflicted. I mean, it's absolutely true that in the first decade of the 21st century there was widespread drought in countries like Syria and Yemen. These are countries that became hotspots for the Arab Spring, and of course civil war. Has climate change played a role in that?

AIMEN: Of course. There is no question. That as the climate changes drastically, you start to have areas and pockets where drought follows, and crops fail. Of course not entirely the environment's fault, but also the management of the countries. Basically like Yemen and Syria are poorly managed as countries

THOMAS: Because of the drought, Syria specifically, a huge influx of rural residents moved into the cities. So there was a burgeoning population explosion in the cities. There weren't enough jobs for these people, which created the unrest that to some extent led to the Arab Spring and the civil war there.

AIMEN: Exactly. And actually, by pushing more and more rural people into the urban centers, they--these became the foot soldiers for the rebellion that followed in Syria and also for the civil war that followed in Yemen.

THOMAS: The urban population of Syria increased by 50% in a decade proceeded up to the civil war.

AIMEN: Exactly because of the fact that the crops were failing because of rising temperature as well as, less water and rainfall. The same thing happened in Yemen and Lebanon, for example. Lebanon was affected also. Lebanon now is becoming more and more a narco economy.

THOMAS: Drugs.

AIMEN: Drugs, yes. Do you know why?

THOMAS: No.

AIMEN: Because with water becoming more and more scarce, so what would you rather plant? Because if you spend so much on water, you might as well plant something that's actually have more intrinsic value. You know, like…

THOMAS: [Overlapping] Marijuana.

AIMEN: Marijuana and coke and opium, [Thomas laughs] than tomatoes, potatoes and peaches.

THOMAS: You can maximize your profit.

AIMEN: And the same thing in Yemen, they also turn to drugs instead of coffee.

THOMAS: Especially Khat.

AIMEN: [Overlapping] Yes.

THOMAS: [Overlapping] This very famous Yemeni drug where you see Yemenis with a big sort of bulb, bulge in their cheek. [Aimen laughs] They're constantly stoned.

AIMEN: Exactly. So what happened is it affected the populations. They became more and more lazy drug addicts. They becoming more and more reliant on the fact that this is a new source of income, but it is either criminal or semi-criminal and it's not sustainable. So actually the shortage of water and the rising temperature caused both Yemen and Syria partially to become failed States and caused Lebanon to become a narco economy, to some extent.

THOMAS: The ISIS phenomenon also involved water. It's not often talked about, but one of the things that ISIS managed to get a hold of during their conquest of much of Syria and Iraq were several dams up the Tigris and Euphrates River. Which you know, have seen in the last couple of decades, a precipitous drop in water level. So water was involved in the struggle with ISIS as well.

AIMEN: Indeed. In fact, if you go back to the Yemen episode in the first season, we talk about the fact that the entire Yemen war from the Saudi perspective, was based mostly on the fact that it is about water security for Saudi Arabia. And that's why, for example, if you look at countries like Oman. Oman is going to run out of oil in just 20 years or less.

THOMAS: And what will they do?

AIMEN: And already, basically they are enlisting the help of Saudi and Kuwaiti companies that specializing in building, and this is the new innovation, in building solar power plants on the sea that also does water desalination.

THOMAS: Water desalination is so important throughout the peninsula. I mean, I think something like 50% of Saudi drinking water comes from desalination.

AIMEN: [Overlapping] 95%.

THOMAS: 95%!

AIMEN: Saudi Arabia alone produce one third of the entire world output of desalinated water and the UAE produced one fifth. So the reality is that the entire peninsula produced almost 60% of the entire global consumption of desalinated water because there is that entire big peninsula, the size of India, not a single river or lake. So the water sources are very scarce. And therefore any drastic change in the environment could have negative effects, as well as some other positive effects that we'll talk about later. But the negative effect is the scarcity of water and rainfall. So here's a problem for Oman which will be the first oil rich Arab country to run out of oil in the near future, 20 years is nothing. We will see it in our own lifetimes, that in less than 20 years, the last oil tanker leaving Oman to export oil, we will see it.

THOMAS: And they’ll be waving it away with tears on their face wondering what does the future hold.

AIMEN: Exactly. So from now, they started using solar power to desalinate water.

THOMAS: Solar power to run desalination plants? But those plants require huge amounts of energy. Can solar power power them? AIMEN: Yes. If you have enough concentration. If you produce roughly between 500 and 600 megawatts of power per day. Then that's it. You have it.

THOMAS: I'm glad you brought up the subject of solar energy because green energy in general, as it increases in its sophistication and as the West especially begins to rely more and more upon it has an economic effect on the Middle East, because as demand for oil and gas decreases in the West, that will affect the economies of a country say like Saudi Arabia. Are they aware of this? What are they doing to prepare for this?

AIMEN: Why do you think Saudi Arabia is frantically trying to diversify their economy as soon as possible by relying on the religious tourism and expanding it from $16 billion per year to $63 billion per year in 2030? Why do you think they are trying to rely more on extraction of other minerals like gold, silver, uranium, phosphate, bauxite and other things? Why do you think they want to build these tourism cities like Amaala on the Red Sea and other places, and using their cultural sites and opening the visa system so anyone can visit Saudi Arabia? Why do you think they're doing it? Because basically they know that there will be a time when ships will sail away with the last bit of oil and that’s it.

THOMAS: [Overlapping] Or oil will become not valuable enough.

AIMEN: Actually, many people are telling me oil will not become valuable enough. And I will say basically that is still far away in the future. Why? Because still there are two modes of transportation that cannot be powered by electricity yet. Maybe by natural gas, but not by electricity. Not yet.

THOMAS: Which are those?

AIMEN: Airplanes, commercial airplanes and commercial ships. So, commercial shipping there is no engine unless if you placed nuclear powered engines on the big ships which is most likely impossible to do that for thousands of tankers and massive container ships. THOMAS: I can imagine your old friends in Al-Qaeda would love to get their hands on a huge tanker with a nuclear bomb on board.

AIMEN: Exactly. It's a security hazard. So you will still have to rely on diesel engines and also kerosene engines for the aircrafts for a generation to come. Because no amount of electrical batteries can actually power a seven, triple seven plane to fly from London, let's say to New York, it’s impossible.

THOMAS: So, oil will remain in demand for the time being.

AIMEN: Yes. But the question is what other parts of the economy that we can, you know, remove the fossil fuel from? So we're talking about power generating so we can use solar, we can use wind.

THOMAS: [Overlapping] Well, and Saudi Arabia has been investing tremendously in green energy itself, actually, especially solar power. I believe they're building right now the largest solar farm in the world.

AIMEN: Yes. Because why? We have an area in Saudi Arabia called the Empty Quarter. The Empty Quarter basically is nothing but the emptiest most desolate and inhospitable desert in the world. THOMAS: But you invoke the empty quarter and it gives me all sorts of romantic ideas of...

AIMEN: [Overlapping] Of Thesiger?

THOMAS: Wilfred Thesiger walking across the Empty Quarter to the mountains of Oman. Oh gosh, those were the days.

AIMEN: Exactly. [Laughs]

THOMAS: For the listener, Wilfred Thesiger, the last of the great British explorers, in whose fantastic book ‘Arabian Sands’, I really recommend this book ‘Arabians Sands’. He describes his journey across the Empty Quarter to Oman, and it's just a magnificent book.

AIMEN: I totally agree. Funnily enough you'd mentioned this, just now as we speak Saudi Arabia and Oman finishing the last touches on the road that actually track the Thesiger journey from the Empty Quarter, basically to Oman. So you can take it and you can basically bask in the beauty of the Empty Quarter.

THOMAS: Oh Aimen, I hope you and I can maybe take that journey together.

AIMEN: We will do, I have a car in Dubai in a park there. So we can go and take it and do it.

THOMAS: I'm going to hold you to that.

[Thomas and Aimen laugh]

AIMEN: So basically, the reality here is that the Empty Quarter have a huge amount of sunshine throughout the year, the rainfall there basically is extremely negligible and cloud cover is almost nonexistent. So, and what they do basically is the new technology with the solar farms, some of them make them 400% more efficient in terms of production. So Saudi Arabia basically could do two things: wind farms for the night because at night the wind pick up in the desert, and in the day the sun is shining. So basically you have two sources that are almost complimenting each other, throughout. And once you add the fact that the battery technology, thanks to the efforts of people like Elon Musk and his teams, the battery technology, if it become more and more efficient, then whatever's produced during the day that has an excess can be stored so it can be utilized during the night from the solar power. Also, Saudi Arabia, controversially, is investing in between 17 to 18 what they call mini nuclear reactors.

THOMAS: Mini nuclear reactors.

AIMEN: Why? Again, it's the water security issue here. Because you said that solar can produce, solar power in intense production can desalinate water. The problem with water desalination is that it requires intense source of power. So while 500 megawatts, or even one gigawatt can produce enough desalinated water for two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand people, so it's good for Oman. It can power a province with it and give enough drinking water for a province. The problem here is in Saudi Arabia, the population in 2030 we'll hit 40 or 45 million. So what you need is intense source of energy that is continuous in order to generate that. Also, the Saudis, and this is not in the public domain, but this idea is being floated by ministers and deputy ministers, and I've heard one from a deputy minister there. They are toying with the idea that the nuclear energy output could actually desalinate so much water that you can basically pump an entire river into the interior of Saudi Arabia to change the climate.

THOMAS: Well, this sounds like fantasy. This sounds like something out of Dune or something like that.

AIMEN: But funny enough, if you look at the numbers and if you look at basically the energy output from a nuclear reactor on the Red Sea and how it could basically pump water in huge quantities into the interior of Saudi Arabia, building oases in the desert, that can actually fundamentally change the environment and fight desertification. Then you see basically that we can fight climate change but in the Arab way, very entrepreneurial and very radical. [Aimen laughs]

THOMAS: Well, maybe the Arabian Peninsula will become heavily forested before I die. Wouldn't that be amazing?

AIMEN: That's what the prophet Mohammed himself said.

THOASM: The prophet Mohammed said that?

AIMEN: He said that the end of days won't come until the land of Arabia become once again lands of meadows and green hills and rivers.

THOMAS: Another prophecy, always prophecies with you Aimen.

AIMEN: What can I say? Look, I grew up in Saudi Arabia and then I joined Al-Qaeda, it's just nothing but prophesies there. But in order to convince the Arab World, which is very climate skeptic, by the way, to convince the Arab World that actually it is in their interest to look for greener sources of energy, even including nuclear, and I know it's controversial, but remember, in the Western World there is abundance of water, in that Arabian Peninsula, which is the size of India—

THOMAS: [Overlapping] There’s none...

AIMEN: There is no water. So nuclear is the safest and the greenest guaranteed source of power they could have in order to make sure they have enough water. Otherwise, if water isn't available in quantities enough for the population to drink, wars and ugly situations will emerge.

THOMAS: [Overlapping] Mass destabilization.

AIMEN: Exactly.

THOMAS: So the Saudis and other Middle Eastern states are pursuing policies in response to climate change. What about more widely? So what to say, the high-level people outside of the middle East, but not in the West, so China, India, et cetera, what sort of things are they telling you about the climate crisis? What is their attitude in general towards climate change?

AIMEN: The problem with India is that they, India and China, they are gripped by this idea of a conspiracy theory that the environmental movement is nothing but a ploy by the West in order to derail their economic progress. That's what I hear in China.

THOMAS: [Overlapping] They’re convinced of this.

AIMEN: And I hear also from other Indian entrepreneurs in Dubai whenever I meet them that, well, the environmental issue, they try and basically to strangle our economies by saying, well, it’s all the environment! You have to reduce your carbon footprint. But the problem here is, and when you talk, especially Indians, they say basically that on a government level, on a central government level, on New Delhi level, the initiatives are just really bureaucratic talk. The real initiatives are taken by small towns, villages and individuals who are installing solar panel on their rooftops. Even sometime in shantytowns they install, you know, not because it is environmentally friendly but it is pocket friendly. [Aimen and Thomas laugh] So it turns out basically that, you know, some of the charities that donate solar panels to these villages and towns are actually doing the right thing. But you know, here's the problem, is that it's really a drop in the ocean. You need to have a massive production of solar panels in India, as well as in China, and other places in order to convince them that, okay, this is economically viable, and the government can do it.

THOMAS: I want to return to what you were saying, how Indians and others, they have this conspiracy theory about the climate crisis and the politics of the climate crisis being exploited by the West to undercut Eastern prosperity and development. Because it's, I'm not saying that it's right, but geopolitically, the politics of climate change have been taking an interesting turn of late. For example, it is Western leaders and Western people in general who care most passionately about climate change. And it might be possible to spy within that concern something like cynical power politics going on. For example, the president of France, Macron, and other leaders of you know what, let's face it, these are relatively speaking, shrinking powers at the moment, France and Britain, and even the United States, relatively speaking, shrinking powers. The president of France threatened to spike a major EU trade deal with Brazil, unless Brazil put an end to rainforest clearance. And some analysts are beginning to wonder, so just as the threat of the Soviet Union used to be invoked to unite the West around ideas of human rights as a means of projecting and shoring up their global power in the 20th century, the question is, is the climate crisis now being invoked by primarily Western powers to do something like the same thing? If the West can rally around climate crisis, can they force the Eastern world to adopt policies that might protect Western power? AIMEN: That's what I hear in places like Beijing, in places like Delhi and Bombay, or Mumbai as they call it now, and in places like Riyadh and Dubai and Abu Dhabi.

THOMAS: And in in your analysis is there's some reason to worry about this?

AIMEN: [Overlapping] That they say that the way they are doing it, which is do it now impose taxes like this. We will impose taxes on carbon, we will impose taxes on plastic, we will do this, this and that, I mean, they believe that this is all designed in order to assert Western hegemony. That is the problem here is that for many of them, and especially when you talk to policymakers in the East, whether from China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, or in the Middle East itself, they will tell you basically that the problem here is that the message that is coming from the West is rather confused and aggressive at the same time. It's like, we're going to die. But we look around and we don't see that the changes are so drastic that we're going to die. That the world will end, but we don't see this around us. We are not seeing anything in the horizon approaching slowly with the word doom written in cloud formation. [Thomas and Aimen Laugh] So we don't see it. So, but nonetheless, they are, you know, doing it in a way to try to push us around to adopt certain economic and regulatory standards. And of course, we'd have to push back because what they say, we already are taking measures to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. Not because of the climate change, but because fossil fuels will run out eventually. So we need to start from now. So it's an economic imperative, that's the first thing. The second thing is a health imperative. In China in particular they are in a hurry actually to replace as many of their coal power stations, which they are building still, but they are trying to replace them, especially around the big cities, with either natural gas, solar, wind and nuclear.

THOMAS: But this is to protect people's health.

AIMEN: Exactly.

THOMAS: [Overlapping] Cause air pollution is a huge problem in that part of the world.

AIMEN: I mean, every time I go to Beijing, and I go to Beijing a lot every year. Not for the past months, just for disclaimer because of the coronavirus. But, every time my poor wife have to deal with the fact that every time I come back from Beijing, I suffer for two or three days from nosebleed.

THOMAS: From the pollution.

AIMEN: From the pollution.

THOMAS: Ugh.

AIMEN: And so, you know, the pollution is stabbing inside my nose. So of course that's why they want to do it. They want to make sure that their skies are clear. This is also what they're trying to do in New Delhi also. So the pollution is a health issue and that's how I think swe should be selling this to the rest of the world. It's an economic issue, as well as it is a health issue.

THOMAS: Well, instead of selling it in that way in the West, at the moment, people who you know, are increasingly concerned about climate change. They have adopted a different rhetoric, a rhetoric which I think--

AIMEN: [Overlapping] Doom and gloom.

THOMAS: A doom and gloom rhetoric, let's call it. And, I think that this rhetoric is at the moment, particularly associated with this movement Extinction Rebellion. You know, the global environmentalist movement. Which, you know, depending on your point of view, is either notorious or inspiring, which started actually here in London. And I actually can remember first encountering Extinction Rebellion when in April 2019 they took over Oxford Circus, a big sort of roundabout in the center of London near where I work, and I would come up from the Oxford Circus tube station and I saw them there. They’d sort of camped out in the middle of this huge intersection. They’d erected tents and they created this sort of platform and there was sort of clownish hijinks going on. It was a very strange, rather phantasmagoric scene of, on the one hand, political activists on the other hand, what-- sort of hipster entertainers. It was weird. And their rhetoric was certainly very, very, I would say extreme, trying to encourage us all to panic. They were saying, the end of the world is nigh. We haven't done anything really to address it. We must start doing so now. Now I'd like to talk about the way Extinction Rebellion is organized. It's very interesting. There was a quote from The Economist that says, ‘Whereas the occupy movement’, which as it happens we discussed in the previous episode, ‘a similar outfit became bogged down in cumbersome people's assemblies, Extinction Rebellion has adopted an approach called Holacracy. Holacracy claims to spread power across employees by ditching traditional management hierarchies in favor of semi-autonomous circles. In Extinction Rebellion's case, this amounts to what are in effect franchises of the main brand which plan and carry out their own protests following a loose set of rules set out by the main group’. Now, when I read that, I thought I must ask Aimen because that sounds a little bit like the way Al-Qaeda is managed. Are Extinction Rebellion, just terrorists Aimen?

AIMEN: I mean, look at the similarities between the two. You know, from a rhetoric point of view, I'm not talking about action. I'm talking about rhetoric. Both are saying that the world's going to end. [Aimen and Thomas laugh] Both have prophecies of doom and gloom. Both believe that their cause is righteous and anyone basically who deny their cause is a monster. So you know, the problem here is, and both of them have a defined enemy. My problem is that they believe somehow that the enemy is the human race. And you know, the use of rhetoric that the world is gonna end, that we will have an environmental catastrophe of biblical proportions in 12 years time and that we will all die, and if we don't do anything right now. I don't believe that even, if the entire world decarbonized tonight, and we all went to the stone age again tonight, that it will slow basically the climate change in 12 years. If there is a catastrophe, that the catastrophe wouldn't happen. So it's kind of irrational.

THOMAS: Yes. Al-Qaida and Extinction Rebellion both think the world is going to end. One difference to be fair to Extinction Rebellion is that they're basing their prophecy, if you like, however perhaps exaggerated it might be, on scientific facts. Unlike Al-Qaeda who are being inspired more by religious texts and the religious prophecies. The thing about Extinction Rebellion and other such groups is that though they are responding to a scientific consensus about climate change, they are themselves actually a political group, a political activist group. Which is why their organization is actually interesting. So if we're going out on a limb here and saying that Extinction Rebellion, at least in its organizational structure, is similar to a group like Al-Qaeda, I want to ask you, what did jihadists think about climate change?

AIMEN: I'm sure the listener will be baffled by the fact that Osama Bin Laden wrote a letter to Barack Obama asking him to take the environmental crisis seriously.

[Aimen and Thomas laugh]

THOMAS: In fact, it's true, Aimen. And in that letter, Osama bin Laden actually calls on the American people to launch a revolution in the name of the environmental crisis.

AIMEN: So no one should actually berate us for comparing Extinction Rebellion with Al-Qaeda. Look, when it comes to Extinction Rebellion, I admire what they do. I understand why they are doing it. And it's a great cause. It's an honest cause, it’s a noble cause. I don't doubt their intentions. But unfortunately, I doubt their methods. And there is a lot of naivety also there.

THOMAS: You know, Extinction Rebellion was founded initially by an organization called Compassionate Revolution, whose webpage states that it was birthed in the occupy movement, and there are, as you say, ideological similarities. Both movements reject capitalism, they both believe that capitalism is incompatible with democracy as they understand it. And the Occupy Movement was also explicitly environmentalist at times. And Extinction Rebellion’s slogan is ‘System change, not climate change. Only revolution will save us now’. So if we're talking about ideologies, as we often do here on Conflicted, this is as a political ideology revolutionary.

AIMEN: And that's why their message has been the most harmful to the environmental cause. No group that ever advocated for combating climate change has done more harm to the cause of combating climate change, like the Extinction Rebellion.

THOMAS: Because of the panic they're trying to foment?

AIMEN: Because of the panic and because of the message and the intersectionality of the message. The problem is the intersectionality here. Where you have vegans, basically uniting with animal rights movements, I think, basically with anti-capitalist movements, with the pro-environmental movement, and then basically have them all together threatening the system that sustains the global economy as it is. And the problem is when you try to sell this to people in India or Africa or the Middle East or China or Southeast Asia or Pakistan, I'm talking about the most, and Bangladesh, the most populous nations of the world, two-thirds of the humanity, when you try to sell these ideas to them, it's not just only coming as, you know, the single issue of the environment it’s a whole package. You need to stop eating fish, you need to stop eating meat, you need to stop eating honey even, you shouldn't wear leather, you shouldn't eat dairy, milk, ice cream, whatever. And so basically someone from Saudi Arabia or someone from the deserts of Africa will look at you and say, okay, it's not green where I am, unless if you actually make a rain 24/7 so I can grow tomatoes and cucumbers, you know, then I'm going to eat the desert animals, like the camels and the goats or whatever, that it feed on scarce desert vegetation which is not suitable for human consumption.

THOMAS: So Extinction Rebellion's rhetoric isn't really landing in the developing world, but in the Western world--

AIMEN: [Overlapping] It’s rejected—it’s not landing, it’s actually viewed as a joke. [Aimen and Thomas laugh]

THOMAS: But in the West it is not viewed as a joke. I mean, anecdotally, I can just say, based on friends of mine who are really passionate about this and Extinction Rebellion's message is really landing with them. They are scared. They are panicked and they are changing their lifestyles in response to this. They really are, the amount of vegans, the amount of people who they no longer buy things from Amazon. They no longer buy new things at all. They go to charity shops more and more. They just, you know, it really is a movement. It's almost like a spiritual movement.

AIMEN: And that's a problem, it’s becoming like a cult. To some extent.

THOMAS: That's a negative way of putting it out, but I actually am, I'm often very impressed by, especially my younger friends, who are able to summon the will from within them to live in a more sustainable way, which after all, is not a bad thing. I find myself not as able to do so.

AIMEN: Yeah. But the problem here is you can't come from an environment like Europe and North America, which is lush, green, abundance of water, abundance of vegetation.

THOMAS: And already post-industrial.

AIMEN: Exactly. And demand that two thirds of humanity who have access to none of these, not abundance of water and not abundance of vegetation, not abundance of, we're talking here about 3 billion people depend on the ocean for their livelihoods in terms of food and protein intake. Because you can't go to the coast of Somalia, Mozambique, Madagascar, the Maldives, Indonesia, Malaysia, all of these places and tell them, stop eating fish.

THOMAS: To be fair to them, they are mainly lobbying their own governments and their own politicians to implement new and more radical policies. But ultimately what they would like is for those politicians to create a global strategy for combating the climate crisis along the lines they wish. And that would entail the Western World ganging up to some extent on, the rest of the world.

AIMEN: Look I have lived a life where I've spent years in four different war zones, and then I spent two years in the banking sector. I spent years in multiple countries from the West to the East. And I've been in different jobs from the spiritual to the economic, to the semi scientific when I was actually building, you know, chemical weapons for Al-Qaeda. In a sense, over 40 years lifetime, you accumulate some, I won’t call it wisdom, but I will call it basically...

THOMAS: Perspective.

AIMEN: Perspective and the perspective here is this: climate change is a crisis, that I accept. What I don't accept is panic. So how do I propose to deal with it?

THOMAS: Exactly. How do you propose?

AIMEN: Two principals that you always apply in business. And you apply in your own personal life and you can apply to every situation, including governance. The first one is crisis management, and the second principle is business continuity.

THOMAS: How can these two principles taken from business help us address the climate crisis?

AIMEN: Okay. Let's say basically that we have a factory that, let's say makes ice cream. And suddenly there was a hurricane that affected the dairy farm that was actually supplying the factory. It affected some of the employees…

THOMAS: [Overlapping] The supply chain has been disrupted.

AIMEN: Yeah, the supply chain has been disrupted. So what do you do? Already there is a plan. There is a contingency that should the supply chain be disrupted. Okay. Do we have enough in reserves for a day or two or three to keep the factory running? If there are shortage of employees, do we have any people basically who can come and fill the capacity? What about the road network, can we take alternative roads? Because you need to stay in business even if you know, okay. If we have to reduce capacity because we are really affected by the catastrophic climate disaster, how do we do it? So basically, we reduce the capacity by 10%, 20%, 30%, even 50% but let us actually keep working at 50% capacity in order to recover later. So this is called crisis management and business continuity.

THOMAS: So basically, the world needs to come together and say climate change is real, but in order to establish as much continuity in prosperity that we can, we need to manage this crisis. Not freak out about it and adopt radical revolutionary solutions. AIMEN: Yeah, because imagine two scenarios here. Okay. Let's say we are in a concert. And some terrorists basically pulled out a knife and start stabbing others there in the corner of that concert.

THOMAS: I can imagine that happening.

AIMEN: It's happened, unfortunately. So, what happens is if the ushers and the security manager of the venue is clever, he will announce quickly on the megaphone that ‘ladies and gentlemen, please proceed to the gates, there is an emergency. It's only an accident. There is nothing to worry about, but just proceed to all the emergency exits in an orderly fashion.’ It's a calming, calm, measured thing and you don't basically disclose the entire information because people will panic. You don't shout attack, attack, flee for your lives. What's going to happen to stampede will kill 10 times more people than the stabbing incident itself would have killed. See, these are the two differences here. Panic kills. THOMAS: But people who are advocating, well, let's say the people who are panicking say, look, there is no solution. We just need to stop with all of our consumptions. Stop with all of our industry. Stop with all of our resource extraction. We need to stop.

AIMEN: Okay.

THOMAS: If not, what do you suggest? What do you put your faith in to save us from what you acknowledge is a climate crisis?

AIMEN: Technology, we should put our faith in technology, in innovation going forward. Because just as I was talking to you minutes ago when I said that in Saudi Arabia they are actually experimenting with new solar power technology that is 400% more efficient, and if we are seeing that roads can be built from plastic waste, and even install solar panels on these roads so actually a static infrastructure become more useful, if we are looking at carbon capture technology, which one plant, one plant alone would replace the need for 40 million trees to suck the carbon out of thin air and sequester it or use it as when you mix it as hydrogen become a carbon neutral fuel. These are technologies now and in the last episode I told you basically that the technology in the past 10 years is greater than the technology of the previous hundred years.

THOMAS: [Overlapping] And the previous hundred years greater than the previous 10,000.

AIMEN: Exactly, so what's going to happen in the next 10 years? In the next 10 years, as you know, when humans feel the need, and they say that the need is the mother of all invention, when humans feel the need to come up with solutions, they will come up with solutions. Bill Gates is one of the great investors in this new technology of carbon capture. And carbon capture technology is proving to be more and more efficient than just only planting trees. I actually, I'm all for planting trees. But one plant over three or four acres of land could actually suck more carbon than 600,000 acres of forested area.

THOMAS: That's a lot of carbon sucking.

AIMEN: Exactly. Which we can sequester it in the ground safely, especially in empty oil fields. In empty previous extracted oil fields. Or we can basically mix it with hydrogen and basically it become a carbon neutral to some extent, carbon neutral fuel.

THOMAS: So you put your faith in technology, but Aimen, you're a Muslim. You're supposed to put your faith in God, and here you are sounding like some Silicon Valley techno futurist bro.

AIMEN: Oh, well, you know, in my own personal belief, I believe it's God who guided us towards this technology. God is merciful. Yes, he saw that how we are destroying his beautiful creation, but at the same time, he is whispering into our minds the solutions for it. So, I'm not saying Silicon Valley is receiving direct a star link from God. But I'm saying here is that there is a solution and the solution is technology and human innovation. Those who say stop everything right now. Unfortunately, they are actually dooming us even further, not actually providing any solution. You can shout in the streets all you want. You can shout until your lungs explode, but shouting will not get us anywhere. Panicking will not get us anywhere. Blockading airports and roads and bridges and subway trains and underground trains will not get us anywhere.

THOMAS: Well, I agree with you. I think that panic isn't the solution. But as for your faith in technology, mm, you might be an optimistic Muslim, but I think I'm more of a pessimistic Christian and I'm not sure that I put my faith in Silicon Valley and men like Elon Musk. I just can't bring myself to do it. I sort of think we probably are going to be soon facing a much more catastrophic change in political economies, change in our levels of consumption. I mean if you ask me, I tend to sympathize with those voices from the 19th century romantic movement that sees as a consequence of this industry and the consequence of our rising prosperity, see something like an essential spiritual problem at work there. That is now manifesting itself outside of ourselves. And, and for me, a spiritual problem really has a spiritual solution. I don't know what that solution is and it probably just muddies the water even further to bring it up. But the part of the Extinction Rebellion movement that, beyond the panic, is encouraging people really to spiritually transform, they might not think of it in that way, but consume less, buy less, save, live in greater harmony with the environment. That strikes me as at least part of the solution.

AIMEN: I agree. But still, I have to say that this message does not transcend the borders of the Western World. It's still a Western mindset, a Western white man savior mentality. I'm sorry to say.

THOMAS: Oh no!

AIMEN: It's still, I'm just saying from the point of view of people I talk to in the Middle East and China, in India and Africa. People just basically are not buying it.

THOMAS: The climate crisis is the new white man's burden. And we're going to bring the light of revolutionary environmentalist change to you, brown and black people who don't know any better.

AIMEN: Exactly.

THOMAS: Oh god, that's so depressing.

AIMEN: I know but that's the reality. Like when you talk to an Arab, they are very optimistic. They will say, oh look, we are using, yes, we are getting the carbon, hydrocarbons out of the ground. We are extracting, we're making money, but what we are doing with it, we are saving. We are investing. We are basically buying more technology to replace our petrol power the electricity generators with solar, wind and nuclear. So we may survive, and we have water. So basically whenever you told them, yeah, but the West is saying though, they will immediately wave their hands specifically and say, let the West shut up. They have all the water, we have none. So they should shut up. Because we have far more pressing problems than theirs and we know how to deal with ours. Let them deal with theirs. That’s the message I'm hearing.

THOMAS: So Aimen, Extinction Rebellion's rhetoric isn't appealing to the non-Western world, as you say. So how could Western environmentalists change their message to appeal to the East? You mentioned earlier they could perhaps position their message along the lines of health, of human health.

AIMEN: What they need to do is to focus on the environment and the environment only, first of all. There is no need for the intersectionality of causes, like veganism and socialism and all of these things, just drop it. It's not going to sell in the rest of the world. That's the first thing. Second thing is to tell the people it is for their own health. And the second thing is for their own survival. So for example, if I'm going to convince the government of Bangladesh for example, that it is in their own interest of the government of Bangladesh to implement environmentally friendly policies because they are one of the first countries that will suffer if the sea levels rises because they are a very low country, the possibility of flooding that could displace tens of millions. THOMAS: This is the strategy that has largely been pursued by the UN and other global bodies.

AIMEN: Exactly. Because it's a calm measured way of approaching this. THOMAS: So on balance then you're actually rather, you're not antipathetic to the environmentalist movement more generally. You know, the moderate bureaucratic, almost way that it has been pursued over the last few decades. It's these more radical voices that have sprung up in recent years that you don't really think are on the right track

AIMEN: Because you can’t go to people in developing countries and tell them that sorry, you will never reach the prosperity that we ever achieved because you know what? The world is about to end. Sorry you missed your spot; sorry you missed your time. But that’s it, we're going to switch off the tap of prosperity. You know, and you have to live in the stone age. This is a message that has coming in into the rest of the world, and the rest of the world is giving the middle finger back.

THOMAS: So, Aimen, what do we do?

AIMEN: Just don't panic. My fear, Thomas here, is that I've been in an organization that is classified as terrorists, which is Al-Qaeda. And what I'm afraid is that as movements like Extinction Rebellion and others are framing the human race as the enemy and with the rhetoric going about how humans are going to doom the world and end the world, there would be some young minds who are genius and clever, but nonetheless isolated and you know, full of conspiracy theories in their heads. They might just decide together to develop a virus and just release it into the population in order to reduce the human population or even end it. And they see this as a favor. Already there is a university professor here in London, she came up with a book just recently where she argues that we should stop all having babies and let the human race die so the planet may survive. Ideas like this are becoming normative.

THOMAS: It's true. I mean, I think you do encounter such ideas more and more regularly. And I can imagine that certain impressionable people, maybe the same sword who might initially get involved in a mosque study circle to increase their own piety. And then they hear more and more of this sort of conspiratorial apocalyptic rhetoric from the Islamist right, or Islamist left or whatever you want to call it. And it might, you know, they might find themselves on a road that leads to evermore extremism that sometimes does result in, in violence.

AIMEN: In fact, whenever I talk to my clients either in the private or public sector when it come to counter terrorism issues, they actually express the fact that they are seeing the embryonic stages of environmental terrorism because that rhetoric is so vicious. Right now from minority of environmental activist.

THOMAS: A huge minority of them-- But just like Muslims--

AIMEN: [Overlapping] Exactly.

THOMAS: [Overlapping] A huge minority of Muslims get involved in Islamist violence, but it causes a big problem.

AIMEN: A small minority, not a huge minority.

THOMAS: That's an interesting question semantically. A very small minority of Muslims are seduced by Islamist violence, but it causes a big problem.

AIMEN: Exactly the same thing with the environmentalist movement. We will have a small minority who would actually most likely end up resorting to violence and terrorism in the future, possibly the near future. Because if we have this deadline of 12 years unfortunately being propagated by politicians who should know better, you end up pushing agitated people towards violence and we need to, this is why I'm saying we shouldn't panic. People just please calm down your rhetoric. We're not gonna die. We will survive and don't worry. We will survive.

THOMAS: So if it is true that it is the climate change political rhetoric that might unite a diminishing West and allow them to claw back some of the power they've been losing of late, it might be that weirdly enough, environmentalism becomes the ideological underpinning of the New World Order. We are certainly living in a world very different Aimen from the one that we grew up in. George H. W Bush’s New World Order didn't turn out as he planned, but nobody can doubt, compared to the cold war when the globe was split between the two superpowers of America and the Soviet Union, or even to the 90’s when for a brief moment, America was totally dominant, today following everything we've touched on over the course of two seasons now, 9/11, the War on Terror, the rise of China, the return of Russia, the clash between Iran and Saudi Arabia in the oil rich Gulf and the twin crises of global capitalism and climate change, we're in a much more multipolar world than we were. A world that remains conflicted.

[Outro Music Plays]

THOMAS: Dear listener, thank you so much for sticking with us throughout this season of Conflicted. We hope you've enjoyed it and will keep listening when we come back for our third season. And don't worry, you won't have to wait very long this time. To hear the details as soon as we announce them, subscribe to the show in your podcast app and follow us on social media. You can find us on Facebook and Twitter at MHconflicted. And of course, once again, you can win a book connected to this episode. It's called ‘Wilding’ by Isabella Tree. And it is a beautifully written description of a pioneering rewilding project, a reminder of the power of nature to heal itself if human beings step back and let it happen. To have a chance to win it, join our discussion group on Facebook before the 29th of April. You can find it by searching ‘Conflicted Podcast Discussion Group’. Conflicted is a Message Heard production. It's produced by Sandra Ferrari and Jake Otajovic. Edited by Sandra Ferrari. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley. Thank you again. My name is Thomas Small and Aimen and I will be back soon. Stay tuned.

AIMEN: Goodbye.

Conflicted - Wall Street

From a bomb maker to double agent to… banker?

In this episode, Aimen draws on his experience as a helping banks combat financial terrosism as our hosts explore the 2008 Financial Crisis and its impact on the world order.

You can listen to the episode wherever you get your podcasts, and you can also find the transcript below.

Read the transcript here:

Conflicted S2E5

THOMAS: Hello and welcome back. You are listening to Conflicted. My name is Thomas Small and with me, of course, is my co-host, Aimen Dean. How are you doing today, Aimen?

AIMEN: I'm still alive.

THOMAS: Still alive. Thank God. But where would we be without you, Aimen?

AIMEN: The land of the living perhaps? [laughs]

THOMAS: Oh, I think I'm there, but I'm not, I can't ever be quite sure. So, in season two of conflicted so far, we have been focusing on how America has been faring over the last few decades in its attempt to establish their New World Order. We've examined all three of their main objectives to achieve this. Essentially, those were: first sorting out the Middle East, bringing neo-liberalism to Russia, and establishing a new relationship with them after the Cold War, and as we learned in the last episode, bringing China in from the cold and integrating it into the global economic system. We learned about China's New Silk Road, which is their initiative to basically take control of continental Eurasian trade, which if successful could create a Chinese new world order to rival America's. In this episode, America is more clearly in our sights. We'll go back to 2008, the last time everyone thought the world was about to end, the financial world at least. Yes, I mean the credit crisis of 2008 and the impact it had on the West's hopes of a global neo-liberal order.

[Theme Plays]

THOMAS: So Aimen, we're talking about banking today. What makes you an expert on banking? I understand that after you left your job as a double agent for the security services working inside Al-Qaeda, you became a banker. [Aimen laughs] How did that happen?

AIMEN: Well, it's basically exchanging one form of terrorism to another.

THOMAS: That old chestnut. You love that joke.

AIMEN: I love that joke, because it's almost true. Actually, most funny jokes are the true jokes. But in reality, when I went into the banking sector, after I left the service of MI6 and MI5, I actually was there fulfilling three functions. So the first function is the global strategic security function. The bank that I went to work for, which was one of the biggest global banks, was attacked before in terms of terrorism and they lost many staff and they lost their entire headquarters, in one of their middle Eastern countries.

THOMAS: I mean, they were, they were actually the victim of a terrorist bombing.

AIMEN: Indeed. So that's the first function I fulfilled. The second function is terrorism finance. So, no I wasn’t--

THOMAS: [Overlapping] You financed terrorism? Wow!

AIMEN: No, no, no. Okay, okay, okay, I rephrase here. I rephrase. It's CTF or counter terrorism finance.

THOMAS: [Overlapping] Oh that’s less interesting. Oh that’s too bad.

AIMEN: Making sure, basically that high-net worth individuals or charities that are operating within the Middle East and beyond are not exactly dabbling in financing terrorists.

THOMAS: And the third thing you were doing?

AIMEN: And the third thing basically is investigating companies, high net worth individuals, and sometime even banks that are operating within the Middle East for signs of either corruption, money laundering, and understanding basically how they are operating to make sure basically that there is no corruption or money laundering going on.

THOMAS: Corruption amongst high net worth individuals in the Middle East. That must've kept you busy. Now, [Aimen laughs] now when you joined the banking system, what were your first impressions of it? How was it different from the worlds you had been inhabiting in Al-Qaeda and in MI6?

AIMEN: I felt basically there is no difference between them and Al-Qaida except they’re wearing suits.

[laughter]

AIMEN: But you know, I felt, of course it's full of nerds, geeks, it's full of also lawyers.

THOMAS: Well you must have felt right at home.

AIMEN: [laughs] Yes, and one of the things is that I felt that basically that my job was quite interesting because, you know, I was moving between these three functions seamlessly. Between the security function into the counter terrorism finance function into the investigative, financial investigative function. And of course, basically I had to learn a lot. You know, I had to be mentored by other people who will teach me about finance, how banking works. How financial services work, how insurance work in order to understand how financial fraud and insurance fraud work. So it was a learning curve—

THOMAS: A steep learning curve, but presumably during your times as a terrorist and as a double agent, you were aware of how terrorist financing happens from that side. I mean, were you ever involved?

AIMEN: I was involved in it, actually. [Laughs]

THOMAS: How did that involvement work?

AIMEN: Well, we used to infiltrate charities that were operating basically in places like Afghanistan or Azerbaijan and Georgia on behalf of the Chechens or in the Philippines or in Kenya on behalf of the Somali terrorists. So basically in order to divert charitable funds and resources and donations…

THOMAS: [Overlapping] These are donations given with goodwill from people. They didn't necessarily know that you were there pocketing the money and spending it on building bombs.

AIMEN: Ah, yeah, of course. It was all done, you know, without the full knowledge of the poor donors who were thinking basically it's going to buy, you know, tents and medicine for flood victims in Afghanistan or in Somalia.

THOMAS: So you knew about terrorist financing from the terrorism side, and it was a steep learning curve to come up to speed with how the banking system works. But tell us more. How did you use the resources of banks to help governments fight terrorist financing globally?

AIMEN: Well, because basically I came with the knowledge of how terrorists move money. And then I came into a bank where they told me basically about, you know, the basics of banking. And then, I combined the two together and I started to come up with ideas of how to spot what we call hotspots of terrorism activity in terms of finance. And so we can shut them down, we can track them down. And this is when you start to see an evolution. Where the banks started to become in some countries different from others, of course, but in some countries, the banks became the eyes and ears of governments to track down the movements of individuals, not only involved in terrorism, but sometime even involved in drugs and involved in child sex trafficking because there are certain hotspots around the world where these people congregate.

THOMAS: Yes, so tell, you say you came up with ideas. What was your big idea? What ultimately, what tool did you create that allowed you to combat terrorist financing from within the bank?

AIMEN: Okay, so banks utilise something called data mining software. They are expensive. I can tell you that they cost millions of pounds or dollars or whatever. So, but the problem is, data mining is like looking into 30 needles in a billion haystacks.

THOMAS: Wow, that sounds like a big job.

AIMEN: Yeah. Therefore you still need human intelligence to direct or zoom in on certain specific spots around the world in order for the data mining software to actually yield the tangible results.

THOMAS: You need to find the right haystack so you can focus on the right needles.

AIMEN: So let's take an example of ISIS. Since ISIS now is almost destroyed, almost, like physically destroyed. In hibernation, I would say.

THOMAS: [overlapping] Yeah for now…

AIMEN: So let's take an example. A certain bank here in the UK with a very expensive data mining software operation. They were thinking logically, rather than thinking as a terrorist. [Thomas laughs] So basically, they decided that, okay, let's look at the cities on the Turkish Syrian border. If any of our debit or credit cards are used there in ATMS or in shops or at hotels or whatever, then we flag it up.

THOMAS: And these aren't major cities actually along the border.

AIMEN: Yeah cities like Urfa, cities like Gaziantep, like Kilis ,like Reyhanli …

THOMAS: Provincial cities, Turkish provincial cities.

AIMEN: So, but they all close to the Turkish-Syrian border. So it started to give them results, but the vast majority were useless results because why? It turns out basically that these cards belong to British citizens or British residents who are of Kurdish origins. And they are going there to visit their families.

THOMAS: So not terrorists.

AIMEN: They're not terrorists at all.

THOMAS: Tourists, really.

AIMEN: Tourists, not tourists only, but actually visitors, expatriates in the UK who are visiting their families for the summer or whatever. So, you know, the results were so disappointing. So, and I walk in, and I say, basically, you are looking at the wrong place. You know, there is, you have to look at Istanbul. So I remember, you know, the banker who I was dealing with, he was saying, come on Aimen. Istanbul at any given day, including residents, tourists, and visitors and day workers there will be 30 million people there. So, you know, it's impossible. I said, no, no, no, no. So I took him up, and I'm not going to mention the name of the place so they don't avoid it anymore.

THOMAS: Fair enough, fair enough, the terrorists don’t avoid it.

AIMEN: So yeah. But I draw a 16-block radius to him on the map of Istanbul. And I said, this is where you will get results.

THOMAS: And you know this, I mean this reminds me of what you were saying in episode one of this season when you were talking about being a private spy today when you would go to cities and you would talk to taxi drivers and other such people to find out where the terrorists in that city are congregating. So this is how you can use this knowledge for practical purposes with the bank. You say they're here. Look here.

AIMEN: Exactly. So when I draw that square over 16 blocks radius. They said, okay, that's, that's manageable. It's not an entire mega city like Istanbul, which is, you know, if you include Istanbul in Europe, it would be the largest city in Europe. So basically, he said, you know, that's fine. So they looked at the 16-block radius. They asked me the question, of course, how do you know? So I said, because I've been there myself. I went there, I infiltrated the place. It is an elevated place; you don't end up there by mistake. Tourists don't go there. You only go there because you want to go there. And because you have business there. It's a place basically where jihadist congregate, where immigrants from Muslim countries and…

THOMAS: [Overlapping] Because there are radical mosques there? Because…

AIMEN: Radical mosques, you know…

THOMAS: Safe houses…

AIMEN: Safe houses, you know, associations that support them. So as soon as they implemented that they started to get tangible results that ended up basically with even sometime families, UK based families, being intercepted by the Turks before they reach ISIS and then deported back to the UK.

THOMAS: To face justice here.

AIMEN: Well, not necessarily because they haven't committed a crime yet. But the idea is to bring them back, confiscate their passports, make sure they don't travel to join ISIS. So in other words, basically it really saves lives. Because these families could have been killed by the coalition bombs there when ISIS were bombed.

THOMAS: Not to mention the people they might've killed themselves.

AIMEN: Yes, exactly. So there is…so when you talk about bank saving lives… [laughs]

THOMAS: People usually don't talk about that Aimen.

[laughter]

Aimen: Indeed, but this is basically part of their CSR, their Corporate Social Responsibility. That they make sure that none of their customers is dabbling in terrorism. And this applies also to areas of concentration where drug dealings takes place. So they take the profile of the individual, let's say, basically, they wouldn't necessarily take an individual who have a Turkish surname and say, Oh, he's there, let's investigate. But if there is someone basically with an English surname, a French surname, a Pakistani surname, an Algerian surname, but end up in that area in Turkey, then…

THOMAS: It's a red flag.

AIMEN: It’s a red flag. So profiling works. It saved lives.

THOMAS: So that's Istanbul. What other cities were you able to sort of target…?

AIMEN: [Overlapping] Well Karachi, Manila, you know, in Nairobi in Kenya. So basically there are many places around the world, even places that you would think it is kind of benign, but nonetheless, there is a concentration of certain individuals there or certain activities there. Even in Bangkok for example. I mean, there are places that are famous like you know for people who unfortunately go and have, you know, inappropriate sexual relationship with young girls. So, you know…

THOMAS: To put it lightly.

AIMEN: Yeah, to put it lightly. So this is where, you know, you can really you know…

THOMAS: Infiltrate and well, what's the word you can really…

AIMEN: Detect.

THOMAS: Yeah, detect.

AIMEN: This is how you can detect terrorism intention. So, and therefore, basically you can alert the authorities.

THOMAS: So there you are now working for a bank, in fact, it was quite soon after you started in the banking system. And in 2008, the famous credit crunch, the credit crisis, the global economic crisis begins to play out really starting in April 2008 and then really hitting the fan in September of 2008. What was the environment like inside the banks as the bankers realized, Holy smokes something really bad is happening?

AIMEN: Nervousness. Oh my God, I never seen many of my colleagues nervous. And you know where I was working, it was in Canary Wharf which is the financial hub of London where the banking industry have their skyscrapers there. And I remember there is a place called the Reuters Plaza where Thomson Reuters headquarters is there and in front of the underground station, which is the equivalent of the subway in America. So I saw many people from Lehman brothers, which is just on the Plaza itself from their building coming hundreds of them with their boxes. That's it, because it collapsed, and that's it. They ceased working and their faces told me everything that I need to know.

THOMAS: Yes, Lehman Brothers, which was allowed to go bankrupt in September 2008 and Lehman Brothers, which was an enormous global investment bank, was allowed by the federal reserve bank in the United States and the treasury department of the United States to collapse. They didn't bail it out. This is usually identified as the thing that…

AIMEN: [Overlapping] Catalyst.

THOMAS: Yeah, the catalyst, the thing that really started the whole house of cards collapsing. So, lots of bankers are losing their jobs. But you didn't lose your job. Why not?

AIMEN: Because my function became more important because many companies started to default on their loans to the banks, especially in places like the Middle East. Immediately after the crisis, two large families from my own hometown owed the global banks more than $22 billion after they collapsed due to the strain of the financial crisis. So it was my job, among others, to investigate whatever assets left of those two families in order to recover as much of the bank's losses as possible.

THOMAS: So for you, the credit crunch was a job opportunity?

AIMEN: Oh, yes. Actually, I got multiple pay rises after that. [Thomas laughs] You know, because of the fact that I started working, you know, seven days a week.

THOMAS: I swear Aimen. I wish I had signed up for jihad at the age of 15 [Aimen laughs] because clearly it means that from then on you're born under a lucky star. So just to sort of provide some historical context here, the credit crisis had many phases. On the 17th of March 2008 in New York, the federal reserve bank bails out a huge bank called Bear Stearns. It bailed out Bear Stearns, which was on the verge of collapse. And this, analysts pretty much agree, increased what was already a very morally hazardous situation because all the other investment banks, which were also facing huge pressures on their, on the system at the time thought, well, we'll be bailed out too and that seems to be proved. When on the 7th of September that year, in 2008, two huge government backed mortgage security broker institutions called Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were taken over by the government and bailed out. And then a week later on the 15th of September, the Lehman Brothers bank was not bailed out, it was allowed to fail. Even though the following day on the 16th of September, the government did bail out the huge insurance company, AIG. So there was one bail out after another one, one rescue after another, with the exception of Lehman. But the whole world realized, oh my God, something big is happening. We're all gonna go to hell in a handcart. I can't impress upon the younger listeners that at the time, everyone was glued to their TV sets. We thought, this is it. The world is coming to an end. I can remember President George W. Bush is coming out standing in front of the cameras to give this speech about how the government was going to rescue the financial system because unless the government rescue the financial system, the whole world would end. And he was white as a sheet. He just looked like, Oh my God. He actually looked more scared during that press conference then he had a seven years earlier after 9/11.

AIMEN: Indeed, because it looked like as if the entire house of cards was collapsing and there was no one to put this back together again.

THOMAS: So Aimen, why did the credit crunch happen? I mean, we've heard about these things, I remember, and people probably remember hearing about things like credit default swaps and all these acronyms and all this financial verbiage used to be flying around. What, underlies the credit crisis?

AIMEN: It all comes down, after 14 years of being a financial investigator and still to this day, I came to the conclusion that it was the result of abandoning that concept of risk. It's abandoning risk aversion when it comes to lending.

THOMAS: So you mean banks used to lend with the full knowledge that if they lent unwisely, they would lose, they wouldn't get paid back.

AIMEN: Exactly. Banks take risk when lending, because remember, banks don't just lend what they have, banks lend where they don't have. So if you think basically that a bank is, the money that they lend you when you take a mortgage or a credit card or a loan, that this is money that is already existing there in the bank and by other depositors, then you're mistaken. The banks basically lend you between nine to ten times more than what they already have in deposits. So if a bank have $1 million of deposits, they can lend up to $10 million to customers on the knowledge that not every depositor will come and take their money at the same time.

THOMAS: This system is known as fractional reserve banking.

AIMEN: Indeed.

THOMAS: So banks are empowered to lend more than the amount of money they have in the vault.

AIMEN: Yes.

THOMAS: That obviously is an extremely risky thing to do because if you lend 10 times the amount of money you have in the vault and you don't get paid back then all the money's gone. Nobody has any money.

AIMEN: Exactly, but why we have this system? Some listeners would be screaming, why, why? And we have two answers for this. The first is to make sure that more people have access to credit. Otherwise, economic prosperity will be nothing like we have seen today since the 1950s. And the second is to increase the money supply in order for more people basically to have access to actual money in the system. The reality is that 95% of the money that we have in circulation are actually digits in--

THOMAS: [Overlapping] Computers.

AIMEN: In computers in these banks. You know, really only 5% of it is really tangible cash that we can hold. And the reason for this, some people basically saying this sounds like a Ponzi scheme, sounds like, you know, as we all it a house of cards. But this is exactly why we have such a huge amount of prosperity. Because the reality is there is no physical, tangible, currency like gold or silver or platinum that can actually correspond to the amount of wealth that is in the world right now. Whether it's natural resources, land, space, data, technology. We don't have enough--

THOMAS: [Overlapping] Anything of value.

AIMEN: Anything of value to catch up with it. I think the entire global gold and silver and platinum supply doesn't exceed $10 trillion, but the wealth, every year we generate is 250 trillion. So you see there is a 24-fold shortage of anything tangible we can use as money. And so we created a system based on trust that we have money based on confidence that it has a value. We agreed that it has a value. So when people basically say that this is unsustainable, we say, no. It is sustainable because it actually has the global wealth as a cushion to stand on it. So confidence is not a bad idea but it's a little bit fragile.

THOMAS: Yeah, it certainly is fragile as was proved in 2008. So I return to the question, in this case what caused the credit crisis to happen? Why did the house of cards collapse then?

AIMEN: The house of cards collapsed because there were too many houses in the system being bought by people who cannot afford them.

THOMAS: So the banks in America and elsewhere, primarily America, were compelled to give mortgages to people who actually in the past they wouldn't have given mortgages to because they couldn't pay back the mortgage.

AIMEN: Three letters, that’s all it takes to understand what happened, three letters, CRA.

THOMAS: The community Reinvestment Act.

AIMEN: Yes.

THOMAS: Now, this was passed in 1977 it was an act that the American government passed in order to encourage banks, if you like, or force them, to give loans to people who previously had not been able to get loans in order to buy houses. And in America because of the, you know, systemic racial injustice of America there was a sort of racialist tinge to this act because traditionally African Americans and Latino Americans hadn't had access to mortgages to the extent that white Americans had.

AIMEN: Exactly, but you do this gradually. I've learned throughout my life that if you're given adrenaline shot to any economic problem, it’s going to cause another problem in another organ somewhere else. Here's the problem is that if you have done this gradually, over years so basically you start to reduce the risk criteria by let's say 5%, 5% incrementally over time, then this crisis wouldn't have happened. What happened is that basically the risk aversion criteria has been thrown out the window altogether. In order to rectify a clearly social injustice that was always there, which is the fact that African Americans and Latino Americans couldn't have access in large to mortgages in order to buy homes. But when you suddenly remove the barriers without making them gradual, just do it now in the early 2000s, what happened is that many of them now are able to buy homes. So we're talking about millions of families are rushing into the market where there aren't already millions of homes built already to cope up with the demand. So what happened is that it created a bubble where the price of these homes…

THOMAS: Skyrocketed.

AIMEN: Yeah Because--

THOMAS: More demand than there was supplies and the price went up which caused all sorts of malinvestments to occur in the economy. Huge amounts of money was pumped into house building in order to catch up with the demand, the supply expanded, the price is expanding, and then credit is being extended in greater and greater quantities to people who can't pay back the loans. And then of course, this becomes very complicated. These bad loans are then packaged by hedge funds and sold around the world where very unscrupulous hedge fund managers are convincing global banks that, no, no, no, everything's fine. These are great. We have created very sophisticated mathematical algorithms that's going to protect you, [Aimen laughs] even though these are bad loans. They're not really bad loans because look I'm waving my magic wand. They're not bad loans, but they were bad loans, and then [explosion sound] eventually, when the time came, no one could pay them back.

AIMEN: Exactly, because what's happened is, the government, you know, in its haste to rectify certain injustices and win votes and all of that, they actually created a bubble.

THOMAS: But that's interesting because you're, you see, you know, most of the time people say that the bankers caused credit crunch, but you seem to be laying the blame more at the feet of the politicians.

AIMEN: Yes.

THOMAS: For example, there's a very famous act which regulated the banks called the Glass-Steagall Act in America, which was founded during the great depression, which separated off commercial banking, ordinary everyday checking accounts…

AIMEN: [Overlapping] Retail banking

THOMAS: [Overlapping] Retail banking from securities banking.

AIMEN: [Overlapping] Investment banking, it’s called investment banking

THOMAS: Investment banking and Commercial banking were split off from each other until 1999 when the act was repealed, which allowed the previously two kinds of banking to be carried out by the same institution. A lot of people say the repeal of Glass-Steagall is what caused the credit crunch about nine years later.

AIMEN: Not necessarily. I mean, not necessarily. Many of the banks that are actually both retail, commercial and investment banks did not suffer the same fate. Lehman Brothers was actually more of an investment bank and did not have that much of a retail banking--

THOMAS: [Overlapping] That’s true and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were certainly not banks in any traditional sense at all.

AIMEN: Exactly

THOMAS: AIG was an insurance company.

AIMEN: Yeah, so basically this is a bit of a simplistic way of looking at it. And this is why I'm saying that the reason it happened is because the government, without, you know, unintentionally, and as you know the road to hell is paved with good intentions, created a bubble. Because, okay, you have, let's say a hundred people that you want to bring into the housing market in a village. And you wanted to lower the mortgage criteria, the mortgage lending criteria in terms of risk. So you don't remove the barrier to all hundred at the same time. Otherwise, the price will skyrocket. Speculators who are greedy will come and start speculating and driving the prices even more, you know? And as a result, you end up basically with a massive bubble. And bubbles is always synonymous with modern capitalism and even as far back as the Tulip bubble in the Netherlands in the 1600s. So what you do instead of removing the barrier for the hundred people in the village, you remove the barriers first for five. Once they settle into their homes, the next five, once they settle, the next five, and then you stop to see what is the housing stock is like. I mean, are there enough supply basically to cope up with an extra five or 10 demands? That's how you do it.

THOMAS: But this sort of gradual, long-term thinking isn't exactly what our democratically elected politicians are famous for.

AIMEN: Unfortunately.

[Laughter]

THOMAS: Well, we can talk on and on about the, the details of the credit crisis from a financial point of view. But frankly, we'd put everyone to sleep. I'd like to shift now to talk about the response to the credit crisis on the ground. Because very quickly we saw in America, and spreading from America outwards, tremendous populist movements opposed really to finance capitalism as it was being practiced. Most famously, the Occupy movement, it started on Wall Street, the Occupy Wall Street movement, and then it spread to other major cities. I certainly remember here in London when the Occupy movement came here, and they, they ended up camping out in front of St. Paul's Cathedral for weeks and weeks. And it was quite funny because, you know, I remember TV interviews with the Dean and the priest of St. Paul's cathedral, you know, who are very well intentioned, nice Anglican vicars and things, were really wringing their hands. What do they do? Do they forcibly remove these protesters who are, after all animated by an antipathy to greed, which I think Jesus Christ also felt in his heart. So they didn't know what to do. Eventually, the protesters were moved on and some of the priests resigned. You know, it was, it was really an extremely sort of heady time where you had, on the one hand, the big evil forces of the banks versus, you know, plucky protesters on the ground saying, we need a new system. The system is rotten to the core.

AIMEN: I remember one of my friends at the time asked me a question, he said, Aimen, you work in the banks in it. Don't you think these banks are evil? And my answer was, this. They are too incompetent to be evil.

[Thomas laughs]

THOMAS: Well, I mean, I don't know people have told me that Al-Qaeda is incompetent, yet they are pretty evil.

[Aimen laughs]

AIMEN: Well, the problem is with the banks and I met many of their chief executives and the chief operating officers and the chief risk officers and all of these people basically to think that they are evil. It's just basically they are normal human beings like you or me who were lucky enough basically to be in the positions where they are. But you know, do they have greed? Every human have greed. And the idea that somehow the bankers are a class of their own in terms of greed is rather… You know, I've seen more royal oligarchs, and land-owning gentry who are the personification of greed. But bankers on the other hand, well, they see themselves as the conduit for human prosperity and the servants of free market forces. That's how they see themselves.

THOMAS: Hmm. I'm not sure the Occupy protesters saw them that way.

AIMEN: Yeah

THOMAS: I mean, Aimen, let's be serious, now. You've described the system, you're, you know, in general, a very objective observer of this system. But isn't injustice to some extent, at least built into this system? Doesn't it favour some people over other people and caused this growing inequality that we see today?

AIMEN: Of course.

THOMAS: [Overlapping] Are we just supposed to accept that?

AIMEN: Yes. The entire economic system of the world as it is right now will always have inherent injustices built into it. Why? Because life is unjust. Life is unfair. You cannot escape the unfairness of this world in any sector of it, no matter what. And this is the problem. And when people basically say that we want to build a completely fair, equitable, society, and I say, while it is noble, unfortunately, when you try to go against nature, nature, fight back. You know, and this is, you know, the problem basically with the financial world. Okay, I’ll give you an example now. Let’s say that, we are in the UK here, so let's basically take the entire UK population, 65 million people, let's say that we take all the wealth that everyone owns, and let's give everyone £10,000 to start with a new life, leveling everyone at the same level. And let's start. I guarantee you Thomas, that everyone have £10,000 today, within a week, within one week, we will have millionaires emerging. Within a month, we will have multi-millionaires emerging, and within a year we will have billionaires emerging/

THOMAS: Because it's just the natural order of things…?

AIMEN: The natural order that's it.

THOMAS: This is very depressing.

AIMEN: No, it's not depressing. It's the problem that not every human is as responsible with money as others.

THOMAS: Yes and not every human is as immoral as others. I mean, some people will steal that money. Some people will trick other people out of their money.

AIMEN: Exactly, but some people basically will come up entrepreneurial ideas, you know with products, that other people want to buy and they will start accumulating this money because they are making products.

THOMAS: I suppose your point is that before long, the world would just return to more or less what we have today. [Laughs]

AIMEN: Exactly I mean, so what I'm saying to people is that, do not be financially illiterate. You need to understand what wealth is and what money is.

THOMAS: Let's get back to that in a second. I know this is one of your great bug bears. We'll get to that in a second. I want to move away now from the Western world because we've talked about how in the higher echelons of Wall Street panic broke out and the banks were bailed out and government got involved. And down on the ground level in Wall Street, the Occupy movement rose to fight against the evil bankers. Now, as all of this is playing out in the West over the next 18 months, In the Middle East, something occurs which we discussed in season one of Conflicted. The Arab Spring breaks out first in Tunis, it spreads. It spreads to Cairo, it spreads to Damascus, it spreads to Yemen. It spreads everywhere, Bahrain. The Arabs are rising up against their rulers and they're saying, we want justice, we want democracy, we want freedom, or whatever they're saying. Is there a link between these two things? On the one hand, a kind of ground swell of anti-capitalist movement in the West and the Arab Spring in the East?

AIMEN: What people don't understand is that the world is a village. And you know, in one corner you have finance, in the other corner you have industry, in the other corner you have commerce, in the other corner you have agriculture, and in the center you have water. So the water, I mean by that, basically the energy of the world in oil and gas and natural resources, like in the Arab world and the Muslim world, you know. And the finance is America. The industry is Europe and China, and the agricultural is India and Russia and other places basically. And so you see, basically the world is interdependent. So if America sneeze, the rest of the world catch a cold.

THOMAS: Well America sneezed in 2008 and by January of 2011 the Arabs were on the street.

AIMEN: Exactly, why? Because everything because of, two words, really. The supply chain. The supply chain, we come back to the supply chain. Now when there is a credit crunch here, in North America, in Europe, people stop buying products. Now these products, let's say clothing, you will see lots of clothes basically, made in Morocco, made in, from Egyptian cotton, you know, made in Bangladesh or China or whatever. I mean, basically these are made from materials obtained from different other countries. You might wear a sweater, but this sweater basically, could have been handled in four countries by the time it comes to you.

THOMAS: So a access to credit in the West contracts, demand in the West goes down, and therefore the people who've been supplying that demand, they no longer have any orders. They're not being asked to make shirts anymore.

AIMEN: Exactly. Not just only shirts, but parts or even extraction.

THOMAS: So how does that lead to the Arab spring?

AIMEN: Because what's happened here is you end up with a situation where you have more unemployed. You'll have more unemployed. The whole Arab world caught fire because one single individual who was a university graduate and unemployed, Bouazizi

THOMAS: [Overlapping] Set himself on fire.

AIMEN: Set himself on fire and the rest of the world with him on fire, actually.

THOMAS: In protest against kind of

AIMEN: [Overlapping] Unemployment.

THOMAS: Well he had a little stall. He had a little market stall--

AIMEN: [Overlapping] Because of the unemployment.

THOMAS: I see, He was forced to resort to simply selling vegetables on the street.

AIMEN: Exactly.

THOMAS: And then some unscrupulous bureaucrat was oppressing him, and he decided the whole system was rotten. So he set himself on fire. And from there it spread.

AIMEN: Exactly. So that is why, you know, the idea that somehow what affects one part of the world doesn't affect the rest, and these ideas of protectionism and we need to be putting tariffs and putting walls and putting — no. We are in the 21st century and whatever happens in one corner of the world affects the rest of it.

THOMAS: That's one way of putting it but another way of, since we're talking about the New World Order, is that, you know, if America has erected this globalized order, globalization after all. Where, as you said, agriculture is in one part of the world, manufacturing is another part of the world and it's all being financed from the huge banks in London and in New York. Doesn't it mean that the New World Order is inherently fragile? Do we want a world order where if a bank sneezes in New York, unemployment throughout the Middle East grows to such an extent that civil wars breakout?

AIMEN: Let's put it this way. When I said to you, the world is now a global village, then what we see here is that, yes, it's a fragile village, but it's a prosperous one. Because look at the levels of abject poverty in the world in 2020 and look at the abject poverty in the world in the 1900s, just a 120 years ago. In the year 1900 I think the abject poverty basically reached heights of 80 and 90%. Now abject poverty around the world basically is around 9%. So to tell me basically that globalization did not shrink poverty is rather disingenuous in anyone's argument. So that's why I'm saying that yes, it’s fragile, but because it relies on peace and order as a conduit for this prosperity. But if peace and order start to crumble and nations started fighting each other, then the entire system collapse.

THOMAS: Well, it's true. I mean, it certainly is true that that abject poverty has decreased. It's hard to tell that to, say a poor Egyptian who has no job, has no money, bread subsidies are being lifted up because neoliberal ideology is taking hold there. He can't even feed his family. So he goes into Tahrir square and just starts demanding... Well, this is the interesting thing. What is he demanding? You know, during the Arab spring, the demands were more political than economic, it was all about democracy. We want democracy. But would you say that in fact, the Arab Spring protesters were barking up the wrong tree? It wasn't really about politics, it was more about the economic systems of the Arab world that needed reform? That just changing the politicians wouldn't do that, wouldn't do the trick or extending the vote isn't really going to achieve anything? Is that what you're saying? Or is it all sort of mixed up together?

AIMEN: Look, they understand—

THOMAS: They, you mean the Arab Spring protesters.

AIMEN: The Arab Spring protesters understood from the beginning that it's the oligarchy that is ruling them, which basically monopolize the money. If you look at every country, which you know, the system entirely collapsed. If you look at Ben Ali…

THOMAS: This is in Tunisia.

AIMEN: Yeah. He, his daughter, his son in law, controlled lots of businesses basically in Tunisia. And look what happened.

THOMAS: Egypt?

AIMEN: Egypt, the president, his two sons, Gamal and Alaa Mubarak

THOMAS: [Overlapping] The whole army.

AIMEN: The whole army as well as the party apparatus, Hosni Mubarak’s party, the national democratic party apparatus. All of these people who controlled, monopolized many aspects of the economy.

THOMAS: Libya?

AIMEN: Libya, of course. Basically you have…

THOMAS: [Overlapping] Colonel Gaddafi

AIMEN: Colonel Gaddafi and his sons.

THOMAS: Saif al-Islam!

AIMEN: Saif al-Islam, Hannibal, Moatassem

THOMAS: [laughs] Hannibal! Can you imagine naming your son Hannibal, really? [Aimen laughs]

AIMEN: Well, you know, he believes that… He hated the Italians so much because basically of Italy’s history in Libya and you think basically, okay, our neighbors the Tunisians have Carthage, and we were a part of the Phoenician-Carthaginian heritage. So I should name my son, Hannibal, the scourge of Rome.

[Laughter]

THOMAS: The man who conquered Rome, well almost conquered Rome…

AIMEN: Almost conquered Rome, to spite the Italians so…

THOMAS: Anyway, So Gaddafi controls a lot of the economy. The Tunisian leadership controls the Tunisian economy, the Egyptian leadership—

AIMEN: [Overlapping] Same with Syria, Syria for example, you know Bashar al-Assad’s mother, Anisa Makhlouf, her brothers and her nephews, Rami Makhlouf and others, they control 60% of the Syrian economy. Just let this sink in 60%.

THOMAS: Yemen?

AIMEN: In Yemen, it was far more different, but it was a failure of this nation state to provide any sort of services whatsoever.

THOMAS: So you think that the Arab Spring protestors really did know that when they're protesting against their government in the name of democracy, what they're actually wanting is the dismantlement of this oligarchic, corrupt oligarchic economic system and increase there of economic opportunities for everyone, basically liberalism. Basically the thing that the American New World Order is supposed to be giving them.

AIMEN: The ruler of Dubai, Mohammed bin Rashid in 2011, he gave a speech, it was a rare speech where he was so candid. He was so candid. He was saying to the audience in a conference in Arabic, he was saying that, I always have told my colleagues and my friends remember, he is also the prime minister of the UAE as well as being the ruler of Dubai. He said, I've been saying to my colleagues in the Arab world, feed your people, give them jobs, give them opportunities. Do not allow certain people to monopolize everything. Because what's going to happen is that these people will end up rising against you, because hungry people have nothing to lose. Hungry people got nothing to lose. So, and this is why in the UAE, as well as other resource rich countries in the Arab world, you know, the royals are very rich, filthy rich. But at the same time, they do not really squeeze the people out of their savings and out of their pockets. They still allow people to have loans to build houses. They give them free parcels of land. Land is free. Give them parcels of land, give them long term loans from the government…

THOMAS: [overlapping] Encourage entrepreneurship.

AIMEN: Yeah. You know, encourage entrepreneurship, give them loans to start businesses, send them to America and to Europe to gain degrees. I remember during the election campaign here in the UK, whenever you hear, you know, people who are leaning towards, you know, socialism like Jeremy Corbyn, the former leader of the labor party, whenever basically he talks about economic models, I always look at him and say the country that you most hate in the world, which is Saudi Arabia, he’s written so much against it, it's the economic model that you want to implement, you idiot. You know it's the one you wanted because basically, he wants free education. Well, Saudi have got a free education, and actually they send their students basically to Western countries to pay their tuition fees, their tickets…

THOMAS: Hundreds and thousands of students.

AIMEN: Hundreds of thousands, I think by far now is 400,000 students who have benefited from this. They've got salaries and accommodation and their tuition fee paid and tickets back and forth to their education destinations. So, you know, free healthcare, or insurance covered by the government or by the employer.

THOMAS: A very generous housing program for citizens.

AIMEN: Exactly. So the question is, you know, what is it that you hate about them then? Apart from being pro-American. Is there anything else? Their economy is a mix of state enterprise, profitable state enterprise, and private sector enterprise.

THOMAS: Well, sure, but Saudi Arabia also has that little magic bullet of huge amounts of oil to sell.

AIMEN: I tell you something, every time someone brought up this issue and says, Oh, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Oman, whatever, they have oil man. They have oil so of course they would be economic successful, and I will say yes, this is partly true, but if it is purely just natural resources, then Venezuela, and the DRC, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, will be far richer than Saudi Arabia. Because the DRC sits on $25 trillion worth of—

THOMAS: [Overlapping] Natural resources.

AIMEN: Natural resources and Venezuela have more oil than Saudi Arabia. And yet, look at both of them right now. It's not about, purely just natural resources. It’s about—

THOMAS: [Overlapping] How you empower the economy to take advantage of them.

AIMEN: Exactly. Exactly. That's why when people tell me the Arab world, they rose against oligarchy. And I say yes, but they say, well, Royal families are oligarchs too. And I will say yes, but the difference here between one set of oligarchs and the other is that if one oligarch or a government. Let's put it this way, if a government runs its country as a business and take stock of the potential of this country to generate profit, then you have prosperity comes in. So if you look at the model that is followed in China, in Turkey, you know, to some extent, especially between 2003 and 2014 in Turkey, and in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, in UAE, in Singapore, in Hong Kong, in the city-states. If you see that they are running their countries as businesses, any country will look at its capabilities. It will look at geographical position, whether advantages or not, population size, big or small, natural resources, you know, many or none.

THOMAS: Geographical location.

AIMEN: Cultural sites for tourism, natural beauty, there are many ways in which our country can look at all the negatives and positives, advantages, disadvantages, and basically makes it work. And then start with the idea. First of all, everything you've learned about economics in terms of Marxism, Capitalism, whatever…

THOMAS: All the great 19th century ideological buzzwords.

AIMEN: Exactly, throw it in the rubbish right now dear listener, please throw it in the rubbish.

[Thomas laughs]

THOMAS: Aimenomics, everyone. Here we go. Aimenomics.

AIMEN: Why? Because we live in the 21st century where the last 10 years technological advances were more than the past hundred years put together and the past hundred years were more than the past 10,000 years put together. Which means we need new kinds of economics. And with the world becoming a global village where we are so interdependent because of technology, because of the communication revolution, and the information revolution, we need to have new kind of economics.

THOMAS: Not some one size fits all, global paradigm of neoliberal American domination but...

AIMEN: Or socialism.

THOMAS: Or socialism.

AIMEN: No, we don't need Marxism. We don't need capitalism.

THOMAS: So when you said that countries should be run like companies, you're not just parroting some super right-wing capitalist perspective.

AIMEN: No, I tell you something. The right-wing people basically say the state should just regulate and should not run any business whatsoever. I disagree. And the left-wing will say that the government should own the means of production and run them for no profit motive, for the benefit of the people. That also I disagree with. What I agree with is a country where there is a state enterprise run efficiently for profit and also private sector that actually supports the public sector to achieve profit and to maximize the prosperity for the people.

THOMAS: And this is the model being pursued in these countries like Turkey and China and elsewhere that you mentioned.

AIMEN: Exactly. So when someone says to me, Aimen, have you seen any, for God's sake, any state-run company that generate profit? Because this is the skeptics always. And I tell them, yes, the largest company in the whole world.

THOMAS: Saudi Aramco.

AIMEN: Saudi Aramco. Because my father worked there, my uncles, all of them without exception work there, half of my cousins and their kids work there. So I know all about Aramco and I can't tell you basically that the largest state-run enterprise in the world is the most profitable company in the world. In 2018 they made $111 billion more than the other five largest oil companies that come behind them combined.

THOMAS: Well, of course. I want to counter by saying, well, you can sell oil, so pump oil out of the ground, you sell it. I mean, is that so difficult?

AIMEN: Look at the national oil company of Venezuela, they are making losses all the time. And basically the other five private companies just behind Aramco globally combined together, actually, they have larger production value together than Aramco. Yet their profits were less than Aramco, even though they are privately run, and Aramco is a state run--

THOMAS: It's also very important to point out that Saudi Aramco doesn't just sell oil. It actually is the linchpin of an incredibly sophisticated petrochemical industry that the Saudi state has allowed to grow in Saudi Arabia where they don't just sell the oil, they refine the oil. They oversee manufacturer of oil products. So it's a whole industry, which leads to economic prosperity there.

AIMEN: Exactly. So, you know, and Saudi Arabia and other companies basically like this. Maaden which is their minerals company.

THOMAS: [Overlapping] Mineral company.

AIMEN: They do that. So they do that. So actually, Norway does that. You know, it's not just only—

THOMAS: Yeah, the Norwegian oil company is state owned and profitable.

AIMEN: Equinor. Equinor is profitable, and this is state owned. The idea that somehow, we are afraid that the state will be inefficient, well look, if you have the will, you can create state owned companies that generate profits and compete like capitalist companies, like free market companies in that market, like each other.

THOMAS: This sounds remarkably moderate and balanced for you, Aimen. You're basically arguing for an intelligently designed and run mixed economy. Some state ownership, some private ownership, as long as everyone is animated by the profit motive in order to spread prosperity more generally.

AIMEN: Exactly. So first of all, leftist should drop this notion that profit is immoral.

THOMAS: [Overlapping] Evil.

AIMEN: And the right-wing, you know, ultra-capitalists should drop the notion that there will be no efficient and profitable state-run enterprises.

THOMAS: But Aimen, what about, dare I ask it… democracy? Human rights? Liberal societies? I mean, you've mentioned China, Turkey, Saudi Arabia. They don't really score very highly when it comes to that side of political economy.

AIMEN: Of course they don't score highly on that side.

THOMAS: Is that not something we should care about?

AIMEN: Of course we should care about the human rights of every single human being on this planet. Their right of free speech, the right to assemble, the right basically to express themselves. The freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of not having a religion to begin with.

THOMAS: How does that square with what you're advocating?

AIMEN: Okay. Because politics and economics are two separate things. And anyone who tried basically to argue otherwise. Look at China. Look at Hong Kong. Look at Singapore. Look at Saudi Arabia. Look at Norway. All of them have very different politics from each other. Yet they all achieved some sort of, you know, successful mixed economy of efficient, profitable state enterprise and a thriving private sector.

THOMAS: And perhaps the idea is: with prosperity down the line will come an increase in the protection of human rights and democracy, or not necessarily? This is of course, what animated George H. W. Bush’s New World Order. The idea that with prosperity would come, democracy, would come liberal democracy. It doesn't seem to be happening that way.

AIMEN: It doesn't seem to be happening because the more prosperous I see people become… For example, I have friends of mine in Saudi Arabia who were extremely critical of the government, the vision 2030. And the fact basically that there will be liberalization of the economy—

THOMAS: [Overlapping] This is an enormous program of reform, particularly economic, but also social and cultural reform that has been going on in Saudi Arabia since the coming to power of King Salman and the rise to power of now Crown Prince Mohammad Bin Salman in Saudi Arabia. It's called Saudi Arabia Vision 2030.

AIMEN: But with this liberalization and economic reforms comes greater repression, greater control over people's thought. I mean, basically there is less freedom of thought in Saudi Arabia in 2020 than that was in 2014.

THOMAS: Isn’t that bad?

AIMENL: Oh, of course it's bad. No question about it. But the friends who I had who were critical suddenly changed their minds when they started having good jobs. Oh I love it. Now I have a job, they were telling me about the new joint ventures between big international companies and Saudi companies. They got jobs finally after they graduated long time ago from universities in the U.S. and what about the oppression? You were talking to me about, Oh, it's such a stifling situation in Saudi Arabia. We can't speak our minds. Oh yeah. I was just basically angry about being unemployed, but now I'm employed. [Thomas laughs] You know, I have a parcel of land now from the government and they are going to give me a loan to build a house on it and finally, I can get married. Suddenly all the talk about, you know, freedom, democracy and human rights evaporated as soon as you know, Mohammed bin Salman stuffed in a, a wad of cash in their mouth.

Thomas: Aimen I know last time I said that you were depressing me. I don't want to say this time that you have depressed me, although you do have this remarkable capacity of spinning an optimistic narrative that leaves me thinking, things aren't really that good. [Aimen laughs] But as ever your perspective is informed and thought provoking. It does make me wonder if the New World Order that America set out to create in the 90s, which we discovered last time when talking about China has countered a serious rival in the Chinese’s own version of that order, that the New World Order, the idea that through globalization, prosperity will increase, that through globalization the globe will become a village and we'll all be interconnected and that ultimately in some way fitfully we will all benefit from this, maybe it's not that it is failing, but that it is succeeding--

AIMEN: Economically.

THOMAS: Just not in the way that America expected and perhaps not ultimately to America's own benefit.

AIMEN: I tell you something. Do you know who really won the globalization game so far? Really? Google, Apple, Twitter, Facebook…

THOMAS: Silicon Valley

AIMEN: Silicon Valley. They were the ultimate beneficiaries of globalization.

THOMAS: Well, we are going to talk about Silicon Valley, among other things next time on our final episode of this season of Conflicted. As we've been discussing today, after the credit crunch, the Occupy movement rose to try to fight back against what they considered to be the injustices of global capitalism. The Occupy movement in the end fizzled out or did it? In the next episode, we'll describe the way the anti-capitalism movement following the credit crunch morphed into Extinction Rebellion and other environmental activist movements. And how with the end or at least mutation of the New World Order the new game changer for global politics may be the end of the world. That's right. We'll be talking about the climate crisis in the last episode of this series. I'm sure it will be a doozy.

[Outro music plays]

THOMAS: If you would still like to find out more about the effects of the 2008 credit crunch, enter our competition to win a copy of a wonderful book called ‘Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed’ the World by Adam Tooze. This is presently the definitive narrative history of the 2008 financial crisis. Tooze is an excellent writer and though his left-leaning views would probably irritate Aimen, the book is well worth reading. To be in the running to win, just make sure to become a member of our Facebook group before the 15th of April. Find it by searching ‘Conflicted Podcast Discussion Group’ on Facebook. In the group, you will find articles and further reading and it's also a place for you to enter into discussions with all the other Conflicted listeners. You can also find Conflicted on Twitter. We are at MHConflicted. And if you enjoy listening to the show, please do us a favor and rate us, review us, or maybe even tell other real human beings in your life about Conflicted. Join Aimen and me in two weeks’ time for the next episode of Conflicted. In which we conclude our journey across the unraveling of America's New World Order.

Conflicted is a Message Heard production. It's produced by Sandra Ferrari and Jake Otajovic. Edited by Sandra Ferrari. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley.

Conflicted - China 3.0

From the protests in Hong Kong, to the persecution of the Uighurs and the building of the New Silk Road, this episode explores the role China played in the New World Order.

Listen now where ever you get your podcasts, and find the whole transcript below.

Read the transcript

Conflicted S2E4 Final Transcript

THOMAS: Hello there. Welcome back to Conflicted. I'm Thomas Small and my friend and cohost Aimen Dean is here with me as well. Hello Aimen.

AIMEN: Hello Thomas.

THOMAS: How are you? Have you contracted Coronavirus yet?

AIMEN: Not yet.

THOMAS: I believe we're all going to die of it soon. [Laughs]

AIMEN: [Laughs] No.

THOMAS: Well, inshallah, as you say. So far in season two, we have been dissecting America's ambition following the end of the Cold War to establish a New World Order of global capitalism, liberal democracy, all protected by America's military might. Last time we talked about Russia and about America's ambition to establish a new profitable partnership with their old enemy, and about how thanks to Vladimir Putin that didn't quite work out. So, we've done the Middle East and we've done Russia, and today we're focusing on the third object of America's attention as it strove to build a New World Order. And of course, I'm talking about China. For the New World Order to succeed, China would have to be fully integrated into the global economy, which would result, or so America believed, in China's leadership enthusiastically embracing, liberal democracy. Let's discuss how successful that plan was.

[THEME MUSIC]

THOMAS: So Aimen, in your life now as a contractor let's say, around the world [Aimen laughs] working with all sorts of governments, you have grown into something of an authority on really the entire, what used to be called the Developing World, but let's face it, they're pretty developed now. So, you have authority to speak on China, would you say?

AIMEN: From a political and security point of view, yes, to an extent. Because in my first trip into China, and it was the first of hundreds of other trips like it afterwards, was in 2010 when I was invited by one of the largest oil and natural gas companies, state owned, to lecture on issues regarding security. After the lecture, I ended up basically being signed on as their security advisor in the Middle East, and I started basically frequenting China sometimes six, seven times a year or more than that.

THOMAS: What was your first impression of China when you arrived?

AIMEN: Um…

THOMAS: And we're talking Beijing here?

AIMEN: Yeah, but, Beijing, I went to Hong Kong, of course. Basically, and other places across China. From the Northeast, all the way to the Northwest and beyond. So, I really was fascinated by this society, by this place. I remember my first trip was in the middle of winter, so it was so cold, [laughs] but in time my relationships started to extend beyond just, you know, oil and telecommunication companies, started even to grow, even with the government departments there. You know, in order to basically talk with them, think tanks. Actually, you know, advise the leadership of the Communist Party. So, I started basically to have, a greater integration with them in terms of understanding, first of all, their fears and also their aspirations. Their fears of dealing with the Muslim world, but at the same time, their aspirations into really economically conquering the Muslim world as they have done in the 1420s, 1430s and 1440s during the voyage of the Muslim admiral from China, Zheng He. So, they wanted to have this extended trade network with the Muslim world, because that's where the energy is, and that's where the potential for China's economic expansionism is.

THOMAS: We're going to get there in the end. So, let's focus our attention on Hong Kong and see what the tensions between it and China can tell us about the wider question of an American-led New World Order. Aimen, as you know, Napoleon famously said, “China is a sleeping lion, let her sleep for when she wakes she will shake the world.”

AIMEN: I would have corrected him by saying, China is a sleeping dragon.

THOMAS: Ooh. When she wakes, she will burn the world!

AIMEN: Well in this case, I'm not saying burning the world, but I would say basically more or less embracing the world. [Laughs] But how tightly this embrace and how suffocating, well, that's what we are going to discuss today.

THOMAS: So, the theory has been for the last 40 years or so, that if China is integrated into the global order of world trade and the American-led Atlanticist order that that they built up following the second world war and ramped up following the end of the Cold War, if China could be integrated into that, then, not only would economic growth occur there, but liberal democracy would flourish there. Why do you suppose Western leaders first assumed this to be the case that that with economic growth comes liberal democracy?

AIMEN: I think because they always equated capitalism or free market system with liberal values and democracy which is not the case. If you look at many prosperous nations around the world, not all of them basically follow the same liberal democracy and human rights as others. I mean, you know, there are many prosperous nations that are really autocracies.

THOMAS: So from the Western, I mean, when we're talking about the West, this is just an ideological fixation. Liberal democracy and capitalism go together. They just think that, but there's no reason to think that.

AIMEN: There is no reason. I mean, just look at, for example, a country like the United Arab Emirates, or Kuwait, or Saudi Arabia. And if you look at a country like, even Singapore because it is very strict. You can't chew gum there. You can't throw anything on the street. You know, it's very, very regimented.

THOMAS: Not known for its liberal regime.

AIMEN: Exactly. So, if you look at a country like the United Arab Emirates, I mean, people there do not have the aspirations to become a liberal democracy because for them they believe that well, look, we're already a free market, free enterprise society. We are doing really well. Why do we have to rock the boat?

THOMAS: I want to stop you so that we don't get off track because we’re talking about China. And so, we've said now that the West was looking at China and thought, we've got to make them liberal democrats. We'll make them liberal democrats by incorporating them into our global economic system and with prosperity will come liberal democracy. Fine. Let's move away from America's point of view and try to imagine ourselves into China's point of view, particularly the point of view of the Chinese leadership. And as this series is talking about the New World Order, the post-Cold War world, it's good if we start back in 1989. The Berlin Wall is falling and precisely around that time in China, the Communists are crushing protesters in Tiananmen Square. This is a very famous event, the protests by students in Tiananmen square in Beijing. I remember, 10 years old, I guess, maybe 11, I remember watching it on TV and that famous image of the lone student standing in front of the Chinese tank. Daring the tank to crush him, daring the Chinese regime to crush his aspirations for a more liberal, more democratic China. Do you remember that episode from where you were at the time in Eastern Saudi Arabia?

AIMEN: Vividly. I was a child in Saudi Arabia, but it was a picture that was posted in most of the Arab newspapers at the time.

THOMAS: So, the Chinese are, the Chinese leadership I should say, in Beijing are watching the Soviet Union slowly collapse while struggling but succeeding in crushing any liberal dissent internally. But as they're watching the Soviet Union collapse, they're pretty concerned that the same thing might happen to them. They were born out of the same sort of ideology as the Soviet Union. You know, Maoism, Communist China, they had been allies of the Soviet Union before famously they broke away for geopolitical reasons that we don't want to go into. But they shared so much in common with the Soviet Union ideologically that they are… obviously the collapse of that empire would have threatened them, would have frightened them. So, they're determined not to have the same thing happen to them. Do you think it was ever likely around that time that the same thing could happen to them?

AIMEN: Well, what was going on through their mind and, remember basically that the Chinese leadership have greater collective wisdom at least than the collective wisdom of the Soviet Union leadership at that time, so for them they realize that Tiananmen was a wake-up call. And some within the party, within the Communist Party, decided that the direction is to go into more oppression and more state control. Dong Shao Ping, he basically envisioned that, no, we can survive. We can basically survive as a quasi-communist government. If we liberalize the markets. He basically saw that there is a way forward for China.

THOMAS: I think the, the important point here is about is to really ignore ideas about Communism. It gets in the way. The Chinese leadership were primarily interested less in maintaining Communism as an ideology.

AIMEN: [Overlapping] It is to maintain power

THOMAS: [Overlapping] Instead maintaining their one-party totalitarian rule.

AIMEN: Yup

THOMAS: They want one party rule in China focused entirely on Beijing, and their totalitarian system had already over the proceeding 40 years been through a lot. I mean, during the period of Chairman Mao, there were two great waves of extraordinary, really extraordinary, violence and social disruption let us call it. First, the so-called great leap forward, which caused a famine that killed about 30 million people. And then only 10 years or so later, the so-called Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution, which killed at least 20 million. So, China has been through the ringer. Now in the 70s, things began to change. Nixon famously went to China in 1972 and brought China in from the cold, and from that point onward, the American leadership worked closely with China. At the time, of course, thinking well, since China and the Soviet Union have fallen out, we can maybe take advantage of that by making the enemy of our enemy our friends. And then following Mao's death when this Dong Shao Ping becomes the premier, he starts this shift away from Maoism and towards allowing aspects of a free market, or at least a private property dominated economy in the country. So, China has already, by the time of Tiananmen Square started to make these moves. But you're saying that Tiananmen Square was a wake-up call, but it wasn't a wake-up call like maybe the West wished it to be. They didn't think we need to have liberalism. They just said, what.

AIMEN: What they said is we should embrace pragmatism. In other words, that if the people have enough, if the people have financial aspirations, then their political aspirations can be kept in check.

THOMAS: So this is in fact the opposite of the Western point of view. So, the Chinese are saying with prosperity will come political quiescence. Now that's, that's interesting because in the last months we have seen in Hong Kong, the opposite of political quiescence. The Hong Kong people are rising up. Hong Kong, which is a very important bastion of the Western economic system, right there beside China. Sort of quasi a part of China since 1997 which beginning in April, 2019 has seen lots of protests which became increasingly violent, increasingly inflammatory over all sorts of questions. Questions that really get to the heart of the Western economic system, what's called neoliberalism, because in Hong Kong they're facing growing property prices, the young generation feel disenfranchised, economic growth is stagnating. The system actually, though it seems to have a veneer of democracy, is being revealed more and more to just be a kind of economic capitalist, crony capitalist oligarchy. So, first of all, before we start analyzing it, what can you tell me about these Hong Kong protests? Why did they start? When did they start? What do the people who are protesting in Hong Kong want?

AIMEN: Okay. In Hong Kong, the protesters are protesting mostly because of the extradition treaty between China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Which talks about basically the extradition of criminals or people basically who have been deemed a criminal in the Chinese justice system, and Hong Kong Justice System and in Taiwan Justice system. So basically, the idea is that it's an extradition treaty. So someone would say, is that really? And I will answer no, basically –

THOMAS: Well it’s true…

AIMEN: It's a culmination of so many things and the feeling that this is just an excuse by China to extend this hegemony into Hong Kong.

THOMAS: Now Aimen, it must be said that the Chinese crackdown against these protesters has been, at least from our lights, severe. President Xi Jinping, China's strong man at the moment. He threatened the protesters openly. He said that ‘any attempt to endanger China's national sovereignty and security, or to challenge the power of the central government crossed a red line and would be dealt with harshly’. He did say that. Which is in general, a very clear articulation of the Chinese political perspective, which is: you will not stop us. China is going to win.

AIMEN: But you know, basically there hasn't been any direct Chinese crackdown in Hong Kong.

THOMAS: But he said they would.

AIMEN: They would, but they didn't.

THOMAS: I know, but they will.

[AIMEN LAUGHS]

THOMAS: I mean but they will. The Hong Kong police have cracked down very harshly and everyone knows, you know, to whom the Hong Kong police actually answer. [Laughs]

AIMEN: Yeah, but whose fault is that? You know, Britain did not defend its position in Hong Kong.

THOMAS: [Overlapping] It is not Britain's fault that Hong Kong police are cracking down on-- Britain doesn't have the power to--

AIMEN: [Overlapping] What I mean, basically is that they left in 1997. So, 22 years later, who do you think basically the Hong Kong police would answer to? If it's not to China, then to who? Because—

THOMAS: Maybe to the people of Hong Kong. That'd be nice.

AIMEN: Yeah, but in 20 years it will go back to China. [Laughs]

THOMAS: It's true. Well, in 20 years they can deal with that. It must be pointed out that for almost 200 years, Hong Kong was part of the British Empire. It was sort of leased to the British in the early 19th century on a long lease, and that lease came up in 1997 at which point Hong Kong was handed back to the Chinese. Now, a very complicated set of negotiations led up to that handover. And one of the many things that, one of the many concessions that the Chinese agreed to, was for example, not to extradite criminals from one justice system to the other because the Hong Kong residents were, for justifiable reasons, afraid that the legal system of Hong Kong based on British common law and respect for human rights and things might clash with the system in China. So, the extradition treaty may seem like a small thing, but it symbolizes something. Which is that the agreement that the Chinese had made might be coming apart and that the Hong Kong will be integrated more completely into the Chinese system, which Hong Kong people fear. Is that fair?

AIMEN: Well, one of my bosses when I was working in that particular global bank I used to work for after I left the UK intelligence services, he said to me that up to 1997 the people of Hong Kong were feeling so nervous that between 1992 and 1997 many, many people basically migrated to Canada, the U.S., U.K. and other places, you know, because they were afraid that the handover will make them proper Chinese. And remember, 1997 China wasn't as advanced as now.

THOMAS: And the shadow of Tiananmen Square hangs over this whole conversation.

AIMEN: Exactly.

THOMAS: Throughout the 90s China was still kind of a baddie. It hadn't been, you know, it hadn't been brought in entirely from the cold.

AIMEN: Exactly, but you know, when I started going to Hong Kong, I started to see basically that people there were relaxed about it because why? Because up until then, up until, even up until the celebrations of the 20th anniversary of the handover in 2017.

THOMAS: [Overlapping] In 2017 yeah

AIMEN: Because I was there in Hong Kong also, and I was seeing all these, you know, billboards and advertisement and celebration of ‘better together’ and all of that. So, you know, you ask people there and they say, well, so far China did not interfere too much, but also people are saying we are now almost halfway to become fully integrated into China. It is 2047, that's a date when the special status, most likely, the special status of Hong Kong as an SAR, a Special Administrative Region of China, will come to an end.

THOMASL This was also part of the negotiations with the British at the handover that the-

AIMEN: [Overlapping] Exactly

THOMAS: The settlement that they agreed on would last only 50 years, at which point China would do with Hong Kong what it wished, and everyone assumes that will be to incorporate it as a proper, a proper part of, of the country.

AIMEN: Exactly. But since then, if you see basically the Pearl River Delta

THOMAS: [Overlapping] The Pearl river Delta.

AIMEN: Yeah. And we're talking here about, you know, Macau, Hong Kong, but also Shenzhen and Guangzhou. So basically, all of these cities, you know, there are over 95 million people basically live in that Delta. And China now has basically built a sea bridge over that Delta in order to connect all the four cities together.

THOMAS: So they're coming, the infrastructure is being laid down already.

AIMEN: Exactly. So, for them, for the people of Hong Kong, they started to feel that, Oh my God, we're being incorporated. But at the same time, the living standards, you know, in the cities around Hong Kong, especially Shenzhen just to the North of it, started to improve considerably. And this is the mainland China, and this is something that started to affect the people of Hong Kong where they started to have this kind of double loyalty. They fear China, but at the same time, they admire the fact that China builds while Hong Kong doesn't. There is a monopoly of land in Hong Kong, and that basically has caused many young people to feel despair over the fact that they will never be able to own a property because it is the most expensive real estate in the whole world

THOMAS: This is extremely interesting to hear because in a way, Hong Kong is like a little Western satellite just beyond China. And the West as well is kind of going through waves of a similar realizations. That its relative prosperity is less than it used to be vis-a-vis the rest of the world, especially China, as a result of which it doesn't command the same sort of power. It looks across at China and is a little bit concerned or half concern, half admiring. Property values throughout the Western world are skyrocketing, especially in the cities. The young generation can't afford to buy houses, including, you know, even the generation like myself. And so, the Hong Kong people are kind of going through the same thing,

AIMEN: But 10 times worse. Ask any person from Hong Kong, can you afford to buy a house? Which is in reality, a shoe box in a high rise. That's what it is. And they will tell you, basically it's, you know, not until they are in their forties they can, you know, they would be able to afford. Um, and that is the problem here. Is the fact—

THOMAS: [overlapping] It’s true, Hong Kong is the world's most expensive real estate market, by far. The average house $1.2 million in, in Hong Kong. This is well above Singapore, which is the second most expensive in the world. So that's a big problem. Hong Kong's real estate prices are extremely high.

AIMEN: Not for shortage of land.

THOMA: Not for shortage of land? It's an Island!

AIMEN: Yeah, no, but still, they have a good, decent part of the mainland, basically that belongs to them. So basically, it's not a shortage of land. It is the monopolization of land by the land department of the government of Hong Kong. They rarely basically put out small parcels of land for development or for auction. And of course, it would be the highest bidder. And as a result, you know, the prices just keep going higher and higher and higher. They control it because basically of the fact that there is, when people say Hong Kong is you know, a democracy I really start to laugh. It's an oligarchy of real estate barons.

THOMAS: It's true. Hong Kong is headed up by someone called a “Chief Executive,” which is quite funny cause that's an expression we usually associate with the world of corporations. So the Hong Kong Chief Executive oversees a committee, which is dominated by property oligarchs really, but then who also have their fingers in all the pies of Hong Kong.

AIMEN: Exactly, so what happened here is that now the protests are about anti-China. That's what's happening. But the question is what triggers it? What triggered all of this? Yes. The fear that China is going to erupt them off their human rights of their freedom of expression, freedom of assembly, and that's right. If I tell you what the Chinese official told me over dinner, and he is someone I also met in Hong Kong, you know, several times as well as in mainland China. And he said that the problem is I feel that the Hong Kong young are protesting against China. But they are protesting at the wrong enemy here. The real enemy are the ones who are robbing them of their aspirations. Because if he compared a young entrepreneur from China, from Shenzhen, just north of the border, and the young entrepreneur, you know, from Hong Kong. And he will say basically that the young entrepreneur in Hong Kong won’t have enough savings or money to invest in his business or invention because he's already spending so much of his income on rent, because he can't buy and if he tried to get an office around, incorporate basically, it is even more expensive. But a young man from Shenzhen can save more, even though the income is less, can save more of his income because the rents are less. And you know, if he wants to incorporate and start a business, the cost of business is less. So, you know, the reality is that Shenzhen is now becoming more successful than Hong Kong as a tech capital of China, while Hong Kong, remaining reliant on the financial sector as well as the trade sector. But, if only the real estate prices start to go down, only then we start to see basically that the people of Hong Kong, will start to feel more secure about their future…

THOMAS: It’s difficult though because the entire Hong Kong political economy is propped up by high house prices.

AIMEN: Unsustainable.

THOMAS: It may be unsustainable. But it's true. I mean, because Hong Kong has famously low taxes.

AIMEN: Yeah.

THOMAS: Which is, it is claimed, which lies behind its rise to economic domination over the 20th century. Fine. But the state which still needs to provide public services is funded largely by its ownership and its selling and renting of these, of property. So they have to keep the price very high in order to sustain the system as it is.

AIMEN: But then the system will lock out the next generation. The next generation will remain locked out of the property market because it's just too high. It's just unrealistically high.

THOMAS: So what does the China, what does the Chinese official say is the solution? What would the Chinese Communist Party do to solve this problem?

AIMEN: Well, for them, they are saying, well, we are going to wait until 2047. We are biding our time. 2047 is around the corner from a historical point of view. And only then basically when the whole, the two regions, both Macau and Hong Kong, become fully integrated into China then the real estate market basically, you know, in Hong Kong will collapse automatically because then there will be no border between Shenzhen, you know, Guangzhou, and the mainland China and Hong Kong people can commute. It will be linked up by trains. There will be no visas or passports or border anymore. There will be commuter belt created for Hong Kong by then. People can just live in Shenzhen or its suburbs and can basically commute to Hong Kong on a daily basis.

THOMAS: So, the Chinese are not threatened by these protests. I mean, we hear all the time in the news here that the protests in Hong Kong are a harbinger of big problems for China, that it might be the first domino in a set of dominoes that come that brings the whole system toppling down. The Chinese, they're pretty sanguine. They, they're not afraid?

AIMEN: This is the problem. I mean, the West always get excited about protests and freedom and all of that, but you need to understand that it's far more complex than that. The Chinese media machine is very formidable. They really know how to steer the public opinion of their people without the people knowing that they are being steered into that direction. The argument I made now, that the protesters in Hong Kong have been... Yes, they have been triggered by the treaty, but in reality, basically they are also protecting the-

THOMAS: [overlapping] The extradition treaty.

AIMEN: Yes, the extradition treaty. They've been riled up about it but also they are riled up because they feel that they don't have a future in Hong Kong because of the fact that they will always remain renters, you know, rather than property owning individuals and professionals. And so that is, so the Chinese media really made it into, Oh, these poor people, they are misled. They are protesting against the wrong enemy here. Their enemy is the oligarchs, those capitalist oligarchs who have monopolized the land, look at them. You know, unlike us, we are building entire cities in months, in order to accommodate you, our people. So you have cheap, you know, affordable, high quality homes.

THOMAS: So this is the Chinese counter narrative. Is it, is it landing? Is there any indication that you, that you know of that the Hong Kong people are listening and thinking, Oh, that's interesting.

AIMEN: Well, now it's not directed at the Hong Kong people, it is directed at the Chinese people. Because when the Chinese people see the protest, the Chinese government want to make sure—

THOMAS: [overlapping] That the protests don’t spread…

AIMEN: Exactly. So what they're saying, Look, look at Hong Kong model. People can't afford the shoebox. You guys however, basically we are building like there is no tomorrow. [Laughs] So you know, so in a sense they have actually cleverly turned the narrative upside down and that the protesters are just misled people who thinks their enemy is China, while in fact basically they are angry about their living conditions.

THOMAS: So the Hong Kong protests aren't going to derail the Chinese juggernaut anytime soon. Let's switch now. Let's move to the other side of China and return in fact to a topic that we discussed in Season One of Conflicted. And this is the other thing that you often hear about these days that's going on in China, on the West side of the country amongst the population of Uighurs, the Uighurs of the Xinjiang province in the West. Um, briefly now, because we did cover this in season one, who are the Uighurs? They're not actually Chinese.

AIMEN: Well, remember that China have 56 ethnic minorities. So, they are one of the ethnic minorities of China.

THOMAS: They're not Han Chinese.

AIMEN: Oh, no, the Han actually make up the vast majority of Chinese people. But then remember there are, you know, Mongolians, Kazaks, there are Tibetans.

THOMAS: [ Overlapping] Tibetans

AIMEN: There are the Cantonese, the Hui Muslims who are actually Han Chinese by ethnicity, but Muslims. Um, and don't forget the religious minorities who are always prosecuted, like many people basically talk about Muslims being prosecuted, not necessarily. Hui Muslims don't have the same trouble that the Uighur Muslims have. And that's because of the separatism that the Uighurs have.

THOMAS: Now Aimen I want to push you on this. You say that Hui Muslims haven't faced persecution by the Chinese state. I think that's not strictly speaking accurate. Now, it's true, they're certainly not experiencing what some of the Uighurs are experiencing, but in April 2018 the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work department took control of the State Bureau of Religious Affairs, and so they are now directly overseeing religious affairs, no longer the government itself. And this United Front has emerged as a very aggressive proponent of making sure that religious groups throughout China are not expressing anything that they consider to be anti-Chinese. It's part of a larger process of signification of religion in China. So for example, amongst the Hui Muslims, they've been knocking down domes and minarets, anything that smacks actually of Arab aesthetic. Arab Islamic aesthetic. Now I think it's important to point out that this actually, in fact, this actually backs up your larger argument, I would say. Which is that the Chinese state is involved in state building and creating a viable nation state, which can then project its power outwards. And Muslims within China are considered to be potentially antagonistic to that effort. Ironically, as they are often considered to be elsewhere in the world, even in the West. You know, it is Muslims that often create this sense that they're not really one of us. They're not really signed up to our national identity.

AIMEN: Well, historically speaking, the Hui Muslims filled up many, many posts in the government that are related to commerce, diplomacy, and even the Navy. So in a sense, yes, the emergence of that committee from the Communist Party to take over the religious, affairs of China was worrying and worrying for so many people, including the Hui. But for the Hui, when they were saying yes, only very few mosques of ours basically have minarets and domes because the vast majority of Hui mosques, and I've been to some of them, look exactly like Chinese temples.

THOMAS: They must be beautiful.

AIMEN: And they've been like this for centuries. The Hui Muslims from the beginning, from a thousand years ago, they built their mosques not distinguished at all from the rest of the Chinese architecture. So, when you see, you can't tell a mosque from outside, and this is not because of the communist party or anything, it's been happening from a thousand years ago.

THOMAS: It's true. But more recently, in fact, the Hui Muslims have received some money from the Gulf, especially Saudi Arabia. And Salafi missionary movements have been appealing to some Huis and the Chinese state is trying to stop this.

AIMEN: Exactly. I mean, and ironically, some members of the diplomatic mission of China in Saudi Arabia are Hui Muslims themselves, and they were talking to religious scholars in Saudi Arabia telling them, please, you know, just leave us alone when it comes to our religious identity. We are Muslims, Muslims enough. Thank you so much. Just stay out of it.

THOMAS: [Overlapping] Okay. You’re racing ahead now, who are the Uighurs?

AIMEN: So the Uighurs are a Turkic ethnic group. So, they are more similar to people in Kazakhstan, Kurdistan, and Uzbekistan. So they are Turkic in their, in fact, it's the birthplace of Turkic based languages, especially in places like Kashi, which called in Arabic Kashgar and in the local language, Kushgar. So, which is basically sitting in the Southern Part of the Xinjiang province in Northwest China.

THOMAS: So, let me just tell you what I know about the Uighur situation in China. The Chinese are evil and they're erecting enormous concentration camps, shoving millions of Uighurs in them and brainwashing them into not being Muslims because they hate God.

AIMEN: No, it's not like that. [Laughs]

THOMAS: Really? I mean, that's what I've been told.

AIMEN: Okay.

THOMAS: First, before you just destroy the perceived wisdom of it. To what extent is that narrative true?

AIMEN: Okay. So, you know, a disclaimer to the listener here as I have, you know, a lot of commercial interests in China, myself. So basically, I'm not defending China because of that. And I'm not actually defending it, I'm explaining the situation as it is.

Thomas: Great.

AIMEN: But also, I have to basically state that I relied a lot on the official Chinese narrative here. In fact, when I was invited to come to Xinjiang myself, I've been there and I visited, even one of the camps that’s been talked about, so I was still being minded. I was still basically like, in a way, you know…

THOMAS: [Overlapping] The Chinese government minder…

AIMEN: Exactly.

THOMAS: But you have visited one of these camps that are holding Uighurs?

AIMEN: Indeed. So, for them they believe that the separatism, you know that the Uighurs basically harbor…

THOMAS: Like Tibetans say. So the Uighurs think, we're a people. We shouldn't be dominated by Beijing. We want to be separate.

AIMEN: Yeah. So, the separatism which is cloaked in Islamic ideology also with it…

THOMAS: Because Uighurs are Muslim.

AIMEN: Exactly.

THOMAS: Sunni Muslim, like Saudis, like Egyptians, like Algerians…

AIMEN: Yeah, Sunni Muslims. But you know, there is a division there between those who are Sufis and those who are more influenced by other schools of thought. Not just only Deobandi--

THOMAS: Which is kind of hardline Salafi kind of…

AIMEN: [Overlapping] No no--

THOMAS: [Overlapping] From South India, South Asia…

AIMEN: Yeah, it’s not Salafi, it's a hard line, Hanafi—

THOMAS: [Overlapping] Sorry.

AIMEN: Yeah, it’s a hard-line Hanafi

THOMAS: These different labels [laughs] get all confused.

AIMEN I know, I know, trust me. I struggle always basically to explain this to others. But, you know, there are so many schools of thought that have influenced the Uighurs basically in terms of religious affiliation. Remember, Xinjiang province as a whole have about 26 million people. Um, and despite being so big as a province and roughly about 12 million to 13 million are Uighurs. So basically…

THOMAS: So roughly half.

AIMEN: Roughly half, below half. So, but they are concentrated mostly in the Southern half of the province and the Northern half have less Uighurs and more Han and Hui and Kazaks and other ethnicities.

THOMAS: So, the Uighur population, which lives more in the South part of the province. They're broadly speaking Sunni Muslim. So what are the Chinese government trying to do to them?

AIMEN: Okay. The Chinese didn't have that much problems with them in the 1970s and 80s, because mostly it was Sufi Islam that was dominant. I remember I was talking to an Iman there in Kashi and he said to me something interesting. He said, look, you know, you've noticed that on the way here there were villages that are looking like a post apocalypse, like basically no one is there. You know, a mosque is destroyed, bulldozed completely, and the streets are empty. No one is there. And then you pass into another village or another town where the mosques are open with lights and celebrations and the streets are bustling. He said, this is when you see a Sufi village that is, or a town, that is cooperating with the authorities. And you will see another place where there is more spirit of separatism. That's a place that is deserted and this is a place that is rewarded. So—

THOMAS: So the Chinese aren't really, it's not really about Islam. It's about a form of Islam that some Uighurs have embraced over the last few decades that is more political in its orientation, let's call it Islamism, more Islamist in its orientation and which feels that being within or being under the Chinese State is against Islam or something. They're political separatists.

AIMEN: Yeah. So, so what's happened here is that the problem is there were a group of people from Xinjiang who when they were studying in Pakistan in the Islamic university of Islamabad in the 1980s. Their teachers included, people like Kamal Helbawy, who was one of the most senior leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood in the world. And Abdullah Hassan…

THOMAS: Oh wow.

AIMEN: Oh yes who was the—

THOMAS: [overlapping] The great ideologue who basically started the jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviets.

AIMEN” Oh, yes. So, they influenced a new generation of—

THOMAS: Uighur students in Pakistan.

AIMEN: Indeed. And they started to return and preach the gospel of jihadism.

THOMAS: [Overlapping] Ah.

AIMEN: I know it's a contradiction of terms, but anyway—

[Aimen and Thomas Laugh]

AIMEN: So, they started to preach jihadism, Muslim Brotherhood ideals, and even some of them returned from places like Uzbekistan and other places with the new ideas that coming from the Middle East which is the ideals of Hizb ut-Tahrir.

THOMAS: Which is a radical Sunni Islamist group.

AIMEN: Exactly. Which calls for the return of the Caliphate.

THOMAS: Like all the other bozos who we’ve been talking about. [Laughs]

AIMEN: Exactly. To the point where it's estimated that the number of Hizb ut-Tahrir members, underground members basically in Xinjiang, according to Hizb ut-Tahrir sources themselves exceed six or 7,000 members.

THOMAS: That doesn't sound like so many people. And I mean the country has 1.3 billion.

AIMEN: Ah, yeah. I'm talking about the Uighur population is 12 million. So basically having six or 7,000 members Hizb ut-Tahrir, and that’s only Hizb ut-Tahrirm, we're not talking about the Muslim brotherhood. And not to mention the jihadists.

THOMAS: Cause there have been Uighurs in Syria as we discussed in season one.

AIMEN: And Afghanistan, you know, fighting alongside the Taliban.

THOMAS: So the Chinese are afraid of the separatism that is being incubated amongst this kind of Islamist ideology amongst the Uighurs. But what are they doing to the Uighurs?

AIMEN: So if you are looking at them, they are, you know, they basically believe that, look, as we have pacified Tibet, they believe they have pacified Tibet. So the person, the individual who actually was responsible for the pacification of Tibet is now in Xinjiang. And he's been there for a few years. He is now basically leading the effort to pacify Xinjiang.

THOMAS: Aimen, I'm afraid you're not selling this to me. Because my whole life I've only heard that the Tibetans have been utterly crushed by the Chinese behemoth. And, you know, Richard Gere has told me many times at the Oscars that the Tibetans are suffering.

AIMEN: Well, okay, suffering politically maybe. But economically speaking, things are starting to change a lot.

THOMAS: We’re back again to that Chinese way. We will make you rich.

AIMEN: Yes.

THOMAS: And you just give us your freedom in exchange.

AIMEN: Well, yeah. You know, this is the money. Obey. That is the Chinese methodology and this is why when I talk to people about it, they keep saying, but they are not supposed to do that. I remind them that this is China. This is not Europe, this is not North America, this is not Australia, this is China. The Chinese have their own way of dealing with things and therefore we have to understand their mentality, their mindset. I must stress Thomas that I made my position very clear in my lectures on counter terrorism to Chinese officials that repression doesn't work. Repression will breed only further acts of terrorism and further acts of violence. And what's happening is beyond what could be endured by the population who are very proud people.

THOMAS: The Uighurs.

AIMEN: Yeah. And, you know, and I made my position very clear.

THOMAS: I'm glad you're saying this because I, you know, I want the listener to understand that Aimen is not justifying the Chinese state repression. He's simply explaining it.

AIMEN: I'm explaining it. I tell you that there is a possibility of a negotiated settlement for this entire sorry crisis. There are many people in China who are good-hearted people, decent people, whether in academia or in the think tanks that advise the Chinese government. If the demands for separatism is dropped, then the negotiation over religious freedoms can kickstart really. And this is why I'm saying, as long as there is a possibility of talks, of secretive talks basically taking place… take this chance. It's about the survival of the Uighur Muslim religious and ethnic identity.

THOMAS: Aimen, this is all very interesting. I mean I must say it freaks me out what you're describing about the Chinese and their apparatus of repression in Xinjiang against the Uighurs.

AIMEN: We have to understand, you know, basically we don't excuse by the way we just say understand, why they want to maintain the integrity of their borders and the integrity of China as a unified country.

THOMAS: And their way of doing things includes setting up camps, putting recalcitrant Uighurs into them and brainwashing them into being obedient to the Chinese state. Is that basically what's going on?

AIMEN: Yes.

THOMAS: And are they being murdered in droves if they refuse?

AIMEN: Uh, well, I mean, basically the question here is that, and I ask the question all the time, are there any people basically who has been executed? And the answer is there are people who have been executed since 2009 until now on charges of terrorism. And the fact that many of them were returnees from Afghanistan, or you know, in later years, basically have returnees from Syria who were trying to carry out acts of terrorism. There have been dozens of acts of terrorism by the Uighurs who are jihadists in China, you know. The Kunming Massacre is one of them--

THOMAS: I’ve never heard of the Kunming massacre.

AIMEN: Well, it is in the province of Hunan, I think, it was in 2014 where in a train station--

THOMAS: Oh it was a knife attack—

AIMEN: It was a knife attack

THOMAS: Someone went berserk and killed all sorts of people.

AIMEN: Exactly. Like dozens of people were killed. Hundreds were wounded. I mean, and there were many other acts of terrorism, you know, car bombs against police stations in Xinjiang and basically the Chinese, you know, released a video, basically containing five minutes, containing all of these acts of terrorism happening, caught on CCTV and all of that. So now—

THOMAS: [Overlapping] So jihadists have been executed in China,

AIMEN: [Overlapping] Yeah yeah.

THOMAS: But what about just garden variety Uighurs who would frankly rather be Muslims and not Chinese?

AIMEN: Okay, so this is basically when you ask and they say, no, we don't execute people because they think differently. We will put them in prison until they recant. But we do not execute people in this way. That's what they say. And I haven't seen any evidence of people being executed for thought crimes.

THOMAS: Frankly, even if that's the case, it doesn't make me really want to move to Xinjiang. The real question is why does China care that much? I mean, it’s Xinjiang, who cares about Xinjiang? Why can't these people just, why don't we just allow a new central Asian Republic, call it Xinjiang, to be established and it breaks away from Beijing.

AIMEN: Ah ok.

THOMAS: I mean Western China. It's nothing. It's just desert and crap.

AIMEN: Yeah, I know. I, you know, I've been there, but actually, you know, if you tour the place, it's really beautiful. I mean, really, I'm not kidding. It's really beautiful.

THOMAS: Sure. There are lots of beautiful places. The Chinese don't need to own them.

AIMEN: Yeah. But, [laughs] but historically speaking, first of all, the Chinese border always fluctuated. Against the Russian empire, against the Turkic empires in a back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, that's always the case. And since the Qing Dynasty and beyond, and before even that, the Uighurs lived, you know, for periods of time under a Chinese influence, under Russian influence, under Turkic influence. So there were always these movements. There wasn't a single country, you know, basically called Turkistan or East Turkistan, as they call it, you know or Xinjiang, except for brief periods of time in the last millennia.

THOMAS: [Overlapping]This part of the world has always been frontier zone between empires and always has been.

AIMEN: [Overlapping] Exactly. It always has been. So now for when I will not say this as my opinion. I will just tell you what that Iman from Kashi who was telling me about why the Chinese are putting hundreds of thousands of people in the camps and talking about them and saying, while it is regrettable, he believed it was necessary. Because you know, the ideologies that are coming out of other Muslim countries has infected them with the rebellious nature which doesn't bode well for the future of the Uighurs in the region. He said that, look, we are 12 million people in this province. This province was always the backdoor of China, you know. You know, there was no reason for the Chinese to hold onto it because basically it is not exactly rich in natural resources. It is not basically very strategic. But something changed in the recent years. Now, instead of being the back door of China, now Xinjiang is the front door of China, the new front door of China. And it's important for a strategic survival.

THOMAS: And why is that? What's changed?

AIMEN: Okay. What changed is the Belt and Road Initiative.

THOMAS: The Belt and Road Initiative. And I think just because it's easier to say and to remember, let's call this the new Silk Road. It has a very orientalist flavor about it.

AIMEN: [laughs] Exactly.

THOMAS: So the Belt and Road Initiative, the new Silk Road, is essentially a continental high-speed rail network which connects China to Europe via Central Asia and the Middle East and Russia, meaning that goods can get to Europe faster than by ship. And this is amazing because it undercuts American Naval shipping routes. It basically is shifting back to the continental system from the Atlanticist naval dominated system. And it includes all sorts of things, ports, new maritime routes... The Chinese are basically throwing down the gauntlet to the way the world has been run for the last 500 years and saying, We are back. We are going to dominate global trade.

AIMEN: Look, the Belt and Road Initiative is a gigantic, gigantic project. It will cost a trillion dollars and that's only phase one. What would happen is that there will be in Xinjiang, whether it is Ürümqi, the capital or Kashi the second city basically in the South of Xinjiang, they will become the junctions of this new Silk Road. Freight trains will leave Beijing with the containers and they will arrive in Berlin in 16 days. Now, these days, it will take by ship between 42 to 48 days to do it.

THOMAS: That's astonishing. That is really undercutting the time.

AIMEN: [Overlapping] Yes and not just only that, to cut the time… But also it would reduce insurance premiums because it’s rail, it’s safe; while the shipping routes basically are, of course, you know, threatened by hurricanes and weather—

THOMAS: Pirates.

AIMEN: Pirates in the Malacca Strait which is a chokehold. And also the Somali Pirates, there are many chokeholds. The Strait of Malacca, the Suez Canal and you have to pay money there and all of that. So what happened is, if the railroad will go from Beijing to Ürümqi, from Ürümqi then it goes to Almaty in Kazakhstan, from there and to Moscow and St. Petersburg, and from there into Poland and Germany and France and UK and Spain. And also, there will be another one from Kashi going all the way to Gwadar which is a port in Pakistan--

THOMAS: [Overlapping] On the Indian Ocean

AIMEN: No, on the Arabian Sea, just at north of the Gulf—

THOMAS: Well the Arabian Sea is part of the Indian Ocean--

AIMEN: [Overlapping] Yeah the Arabian Sea is part of the Indian Ocean [Laughs] but you know to be very geographically accurate. Sorry, I'm a nerd. And so, so basically 3000 kilometer of railroad and a truck road basically going from Kashi all the way to Gwadar. And that port basically will be selling goods to Saudi Arabia, to the UAE, to the Gulf countries, and even to Iran and to Pakistan itself, and maybe even to India. So the idea is that Xinjiang no longer basically a backwood province. It is now going to be the center of China's new Silk Road. It’s the junction, and this is what the Iman told me in Kashi. He said, if China didn't let us go basically when our province mattered little, they will never ever let us go. They will not let 12 million Uighurs stand in the way of progress of 1.4 billion Chinese. So, what he said for the survival of our religion, for the survival of our race, we need to cooperate with China. He said basically just like, and he mentioned this name, he said, just like Ramzan Kadyrov in Chechnya, realized—

THOMAS: Oh from the last episode, Kadyrov who is Putin’s little lapdog.

AIMEN: Yeah. So as Ramzan Kadyrov in Chechnya realized in the middle of the war against Russia that we're not going to win, the Russian bear will crush us completely. So for the survival of the Chechen race, and for the survival of us, our Chechen religious identity—

THOMAS: [Overlapping] Just like Kadyrov, the Uighurs need to, need to bend the knee really and just get with the program—

AIMEN: Exactly.

THOMAS: The program’s not changing and the West is not going to change it.

AIMEN: So no one is coming to our rescue. No one is coming to our rescue, not the Muslim world, you know, not the Western world. We are the only ones who can save ourselves by accepting like our ancestors accepted before, Qing dynasty hegemony over the Uighurs, we can basically accept the current hegemony. But we have to negotiate in order to regain our religious freedoms.

THOMAS: So Aimen, preventing Islamism from spreading amongst the Uighurs of Xinjiang, preventing separatism, political separatism amongst the Uighurs of Xinjiang. Is this really just an excuse that Beijing is giving in order to… do whatever they want in Xinjiang, including say, ethnic cleansing, just killing all the Uighurs? Often that is what you hear in the media that in the end, the Uighurs are done for, they're just going to be wiped out.

AIMEN: No, of course not. I mean, otherwise we would be hearing about, you know, hundreds of thousands of people dying, but that's not the reality. And know why spend billions of dollars basically trying to reeducate the whole population only to kill them later.

THOMAS: Right. So I can understand that perspective, but that's like, zoom out a bit from the Uighurs and talk about the new Silk Road and of a Chinese dominated economic transport system that completely changes the way everything is working. Now, officials in the Western world have actually known for quite a long time that this was coming. As I quoted at the beginning of the episode: China is lion. When it wakes, it will roar.

AIMEN: Dragon. [Laughs]

THOMAS: So, I was personally first introduced to this new reality of a growing China by a friend of mine. His name was Alexandros Petersen. A brilliant young American man who lived in central Asia, lived in China and was studying… He was actually one of the world's experts on the new Silk Road and what it meant for the world. Sadly, the Taliban assassinated, or he was a victim of a Taliban bombing in Kabul where he was teaching at a university and he died.

AIMEN: What a waste.

THOMAS: It's a terrible waste. He, but he wrote a book called ‘The World Island’ in which he reintroduced to people an older geopolitical theory. It's the World Island theory. It was first formulated in 1904 by a Victorian geographer called Halford Mackinder. The World Island theory is basically this: that if you take the whole globe, the African Eurasian part of the world is the vast majority of the world's land. It's the world island, and that in the middle of this world island is what's called the Heartland, which is basically central Asia. The Eurasian plateau that stretches from the West of Russia into China, The Heartland. The theory is if you control the Heartland, you control the world island, and if you control the world island, you control the world. Now, in fact, if you think about it, the whole history of the 20th century is the history of attempts to control the world island on the part of big land empires and the Western world, especially the British-American world, trying to prevent that from happening. Most famously during the Cold War with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union controlled the Heartland and the American Imperium, if you like, was absolutely animated about preventing it from maximizing the power that the Heartland gave it. And it succeeded. The Cold War ended with the Soviet Union failing to take power that it got from controlling the Heartland and dominating the world. Now we have China. China is dominating the Heartland today and is laying down the foundations for a new wave of economic domination that by taking the power of the Heartland, by linking the entire World Island via land-based trade routes like in the old days, like the Silk Road before the Portuguese and the Dutch and the British created the new maritime shipping system that has dominated the world for centuries. Now China's doing it and they're going to succeed. So Aimen, given the fact that the Chinese new Silk Road and its own new world order really threatens America's, is America trying to stop this or undermine it? Is this what lies behind the frankly bellicose language of President Trump in the last few years and the trade war between China and America? Is America trying to stop the new Silk Road?

AIMEN: Well. Yes, but halfheartedly because there is a problem here. Okay. And the problem is this: Trump has been engaging in a trade war not only with China, but also with Europe. And also basically insisting on America’s energy independence which means they don't buy oil anymore from the Middle East or beyond. So, who's buying the Middle East oil right now? It's China. So at the end of the day, it's like, okay, America. You don't want us to trade with China. You don't want 5G to come. You know, you're not buying our oil. But at the same time, basically, you are saying that we shouldn't even do it with China. So, either you provide the alternative or shut up.

THOMAS: So by isolating itself, America's forcing the rest of the world into China's arms.

AIMEN: Precisely. So if you are going to pick up fights with Russia over the Ukraine and Crimea, impose sanctions, who will Russia trade with? It will be China. You know, if China is going to buy Russia’s oil and gas, if China is going to buy the Middle East oil and gas, if China's going to export machinery to both Russia and the Middle East and America basically is saying uh well, we are going to defend human rights and we are going to stand for freedom and all of that okay, you want to stand for freedom, then become a viable economic partner or just do not try to sabotage another economic partnership that is emerging.

THOMAS: If the United States was being led by someone more internationalist in outlook than president Trump, is it possible that he might be able to create a genuine global alliance or coalition against the rising China? Do you think that would be possible?

AIMEN: No. Because you know, Obama also failed and he's an internationalist. America doesn't need a protectionist or internationalist. What it needs is a pragmatist.

THOMAS: America just needs to face up to the fact the Chinese train has left the station. You'd better get onboard.

AIMEN: Yes.

THOMAS: And so really, dear listener, everything is going to change. The Western world is sort of over as we understand it. And the new century is China's. Now this whole season is about the New World Order that George H.W. Bush wanted to create. America, it's not necessarily that America has failed. It's that China has succeeded. The Chinese New World Order is being born today. What do you think? Am I right about this or am I exaggerating?

AIMEN: You are right but there are some caveats here. You know, we have to always remember something. China is not a nation of innovation. China is a nation of imitation. And it will remain so for a little while. When will I see China rise to heights of greatness that was never seen before, is when they are transformed from a nation of imitation to a nation of innovation.

THOMAS: Because?

AIMEN: Because then if they become innovative, nothing can stop them. Because at the moment, why the American economy is so dominant--

THOMAS: With the tech boom and the internet. I mean, we dominate all of them. We, I mean, I'm an American, you know, I personally don’t dominate the world economy. America dominates, you know, all of the innovative technological advances that are creating economic growth at the time, especially from Silicon Valley.

AIMEN: Why? Because basically America is the innovation economy. Yeah, China manufacturer the iPhone. But really who designed it and made it and created it? America.

THOMAS: Ok, but what about Huawei, and all of these big Chinese firms and East Asian firms more generally, which fall within the Chinese orbit?

AIMEN: Exactly, that's what I'm saying, that at the moment they are imitating. But when they start innovating and they are beginning to, we can see the transformation now from the imitation nation to the innovation nation, this is basically when we start to see a greater Chinese dominance. Why? Because then they will be a true alternative. And the most important example of this now is the 5G row all over the world. The question is—

THOMAS: Huawei’s 5G network right here in the United Kingdom, you know… Absolutely. It's tearing political parties apart. Do we allow a Chinese firm, you know, basically linked to the Chinese security service, to install for us our telecommunications network?

AIMEN: But here's the problem is that the Americans could not yet come with a viable alternative.

THOMAS: So I didn't exaggerate. So the New World Order is Chinese.

AIMEN: Exactly. This is why I said… And I remember I was at a dinner at the largest oil company in China. I was their guest of honor at the time, and that was in 2010. So it was a really long time ago, almost 10 years ago. So I remember I said these exact words because they were asking me, when do you think China will become the top economy of the world? And I was asking, you’re Chinese you know, why do you ask me? And he said, because we love to listen to the opinions of others. So, I said, okay, once you stop imitating and you start innovating, then the world is yours.

THOMAS: Well, it's happened.

AIMEN: Yes, it's beginning. It's beginning to happen.

THOMAS: It's beginning to happen. And it seems to me that the Western world is beginning to wake up to this fact and this is directly connected to this New World Order, America's New World Order that it wants to create, because actually China hasn't played along. China all along has had its own plan to create its own new world order and it is succeeding. And so we see it with Trump and the trade war against China. We see it with even European leaders usually so deferent to China are beginning to speak out against the Chinese, against the power, the growing power that they have. Even George Soros, famous for supporting all sorts of internationalists liberal causes, in February of 2020 in a speech said that China is a rising threat and the Western world really needs to begin countering it. This represents a big change, and it could result in perhaps even a military clash between these two new world orders, these two visions for the 21st century.

AIMEN: Well, we hope it doesn't happen.

THOMAS: Of Course.

AIMEN: China is nuclear armed and it has an important ace which we didn't talk about. China has basically what I call the secret weapon.

THOMAS: Oh God.

AIMEN: Putin.

THOMAS: Oh, I didn't expect you to say that.

AIMEN: Yeah, and I tell you why. Vladimir Putin is looking at China as an important, not just only an important ally, but an important backer of the Russian economy. I mean, after all, basically, China buys a lot of oil and gas from Russia. Um, it's an important client but also at the same time, the new Silk Road is going to pass through Russia and through Russia and Satellite States, like, if we can call Kazakhstan a satellite state, but it's allied to the Russians. So basically the Silk Road will pass through Russia to Moscow and St. Petersburg, and then from there into Europe. This will empower Russia even more. Because basically, so many goods and services coming from China and so many European imports, don't forget, it's a two-way street. European exports from the UK and Spain and Italy and Germany—

THOMAS: [Overlapping] And Germany particularly.

AIMEN: The cars and the machinery will also travel from Europe to China through that. So, Russia will become the middleman between China and Europe and the rest of the world. And so for Putin, he's looking at this and rubbing his hands, [laughs] licking his lips, and thinking brilliant.

THOMAS: Well, there you have it. America's New World Order is being rather successfully countered by the Chinese alternative, a real competitor with the new Silk Road initiative from China. And you know, you never know what the future is going to hold but the Chinese economy is still chugging along pretty well. Economic growth in the West is not so hot in comparison. Neoliberalism, this is the economic faith of the West in the New World Order era. It was meant to spread. It was meant to promise endless economic growth for Western countries. It's not really happening. And it certainly became spectacularly unstuck during the credit crisis of 2008. And in the next episode of Conflicted, we will be talking about just that. What exactly happened in 2008? And what did it mean for America's grand vision?

AIMEN: I have to come wearing my banking hat next episode. [Laughs]

[Extro music]

THOMAS: This season we've set up a Facebook discussion group where we post recommended reading. And if you want to go into even more depth about the topics we cover on the show, as with every episode we are giving away a recommended book this week. This week's book is ‘Belt and Road: A Chinese World Order’ by Bruno Maçães. a book which successfully captures the exuberance as well as the apprehension that this huge project generates. Once again, all you have to do to have a shot at winning this book is join the Facebook group. Thanks to everyone who has. Your messages, comments and feedback mean so much to us really, and are actually very helpful in shaping the future of Conflicted. Find the group on Facebook by searching Conflicted Podcast Discussion Group. You can also find the show on Twitter at MHconflicted. And if you like the show, please rate and review us in your podcast app. It would also mean the world to us if you spread the word about Conflicted to your friends or even to your enemies, whether on social media or in person. Thanks again for listening. Aimen and I will be back in two weeks.

Conflicted is a Message Heard production. It's produced by Sandra Ferrari, Jake Warren and Jake Otajovic. Edited by Sandra Ferrari. Our theme music is by Matt Huxley.