#300 — A Tale of Cancellation

Welcome to the Make and Sense podcast. This is Sam Harris. Well, there's going to a lot of chatter online about Ukraine that is new. Many people are concerned that we could be edging closer to nuclear war with Russia.

Anyway, I reacted to some of that online, but I think I'll do a podcast on Ukraine in the next couple of weeks. Today's episode is a tale of cancellation. For anyone who has any doubts about whether cancellation is a thing, this episode is for you. In particular, it's a tale of a truly ridiculous cancellation.

As you'll hear, the mob picked the wrong target, as it often does. Today I'm speaking with Meg Smaker. Meg is a documentarian with a very interesting and unusual backstory. In the first half hour, Cecilia has censored herself in trepid and resilient the person she is.

There's been some important coverage of her and her story. Michael Powell wrote a good piece of the New York Times. I believe Graham Wood might be doing something for the Atlantic. But what there's been much more of is noise on social media, among the win-gene hysterics and malcontents and grievance entrepreneurs.

Briefly, what happened is that Meg made a film, originally titled, Gee-Hod Rehab, about a program in Saudi Arabia that seeks to rehabilitate former terrorists. And her film was accepted at the best film festivals, like Sundance and South-West West. And then it was hurled from the ramparts of those festivals, which is to say, disinvited. She even had an award rescinded and positive reviews changed after the fact.

All in response to an utterly dishonest campaign of defamation and intimidation. So this is a story of what happens when a creative person has her dream come true, because her documentarian to get her first feature into Sundance is a truly wonderful thing. It more or less guarantees distribution and future work as a filmmaker. But it's also a story of what happens when that dream is maliciously turned into a nightmare by the woke mob.

And you might expect this bothers me for many reasons. First, it hits close to home. This is the kind of thing that has been directed at me. But when it was, I was lucky enough to have already built a platform and an audience that makes me more or less impervious to these kinds of attacks.

Meg wasn't so lucky. But as you hear the injustice of this episode is really compounded because Meg is absolutely the wrong target. I mean, I can understand many people being upset by what I have to say about Islam. Because my view really is condemning of the faith, at least in part.

Obviously, I don't think I or anyone else should be canceled for honestly discussing a link between specific doctrines in Islam and much of the pointless misery we see leaking out of the Muslim world. Jihadism, especially. Although we might currently note what's happening in Iran with social protests bordering on revolution in defiance of the hijab. But it's just to say that in my case, the offense and even outrage isn't totally surprising and illogical, right?

Because my view really is that Islam has to be dragged kicking and screaming if need be into the modern world. But in Meg's case, there is literally nothing in her film for people on the left to honestly find offensive. She doesn't share my view of Islam at all. And there's no criticism of the religion in the film.

As I make clear in our conversation, this is an utterly humanizing portrait of men who we have every reason to believe have been treated terribly in Guantanamo by the US government. So what's happened to Meg in her film is quite perverse. It's just a spectacular own goal for the far left. And it's perfectly emblematic of the moral and political confusion that is screwing up everything now.

And as you'll hear at the end of the podcast, there's also a call to action here. Meg is still struggling to get her film distributed. And she set up a GoFundMe page for that purpose, which is accessible at jihodrehab.com. And I would really love it if our community could help Meg.

So if you find the story compelling and you want to help right the wrong that was done here, I would greatly appreciate it. And I bring you Meg Smaker. I am here with Meg Smaker. Meg, thanks for joining me.

Thank you. So really nervous, but I'll try to do my best. No, well, it's really great to talk to you. I we were thrown together by, I guess, a mutual friend of issues.

A friend of mine, I don't know how well you know her, but Melissa Chen put you on my radar. And I'm glad you did because it's a fascinating situation you're in. I'm sure it's an uncomfortable one, but I want to get into it. And it pulls together so many issues that we're dealing with collectively and culturally.

There's several things to talk about. You've made a film originally titled jihodrehab, which I've seen, and which is really quite wonderful. And the irony of its cancellation will be quite evident to our audience. But so we want to talk about the film and its reception, perhaps above all.

But before we do, you have a very interesting and counterintuitive background. So let's just summarize who you've been before you ever thought you might make documentaries, and then we'll get into the film and the current controversy. I don't know how far back you want to go, but I want to go back to you as far as September 11th. Yeah.

Well, I'm currently a filmmaker, but before I'm talking to a filmmaker journalist, but before I was a filmmaker, I was a firefighter. And if you asked me back then what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, without hesitation, I would have said be a firefighter. And I love that job every day. It was different.

You have to work on a team, and it was just such a really, really great job to have. And the people I work with were like family to me. All that kind of change though on 9-11. And the reason for that is, but like the day before 9-11, I would describe my firehouse as a place of family, of supportive, caring people who were very they are just like family, a place of love and support.

And within 24 hours that place turned from place of love and support into a place that had a lot of vitriol and hatred and bigotry. And none of the things that I was seeing on mainstream media kind of answered those questions that were generated from that day. And my dad always told me that there's only three types of people in the world. Those of you hit them, they hit you right back.

And those of you hit them, they run away. And those of you hit them, they asked, why'd you hit me? And I've always been in that third camp. So after 9-11, my initial response was to try to understand.

So I watched a lot of news, and I read a lot of books about Islam, and I read books about Arabic and history in the least. And what was really interesting to me was the things that I was reading about Islam were directly contradicting what I was seeing on the news. And the only way I can think about that time was to basically go to Afghanistan on my own and try to find those answers for myself. And so it was a little bit after six months, it was around six months after 9-11.

I traveled to Afghanistan on my own. And after arriving there, I was immediately humbled by my own ignorance of the world. I mean, I don't know if you remember what you were like when you were 21, but I was very self-assured of my worldview. And that was came crashing down after my time in Afghanistan.

Okay, but before we get into your experience there, there's a bridge we have to attempt to build. I don't know if it's possible because it could be mysterious even to you, but you have just described your sudden interest in why they hate us, and which was shared by many, many millions of people in our society at that point. And your response to it is so peculiar and extreme compared to what everyone else did, that if there is an explanation for it, it would be great to have it in support as you can provide. I mean, how is it that you, a solitary woman who happens to be a firefighter suddenly decides to go to Afghanistan solo in the more or less immediate aftermath and ongoing chaos of the beginning of our war on terror?

Basically, you're saying, why did you do this crazy thing of going to Afghanistan, right? Yeah, I mean, it is fairly bonkers if you just look at the average. No, I completely admit to that. If you don't know me, it sounds like a fucking crazy person.

That's bullshit like that. Sorry. Am I allowed to swear? You are.

Yes. Okay. Cool. Cool.

Cool. That makes us a lot easier for me. Yeah, I think I got this. So I remember when I was a firefighter, for me, I love doing it, but there was one call.

There's one type of call that whenever we went on it, I would always be really nervous about it. And that was any calls involving hazardous materials, because every video we saw in training where firefighters died, it was because some kind of chemical or a gas excitation or something like that. And so it always kind of scared me, right? And it was the only calls that I went on that I would hesitate.

And it was the only calls I went on that I would second guess myself. And I don't know how you're wired, but for me, when I don't understand something, like I didn't really understand how chemicals and hazardous materials work, it scared me. And so for me, diving deep into that and understanding it is a way of kind of like a safety blanket. So when I realized that this was one part of me being a firefighter that I just needed to overcome that fear, I went in and I started training as a hazmat specialist.

And it's really like involves a lot of chemistry, a lot of like, you know, on the fire grounds work type drills and stuff like that. And it's a pretty involved process to become a hazmat specialist. But then after I got that, the next call that I went on that was for a hazmat call, I didn't hesitate. I was super comfortable and super deliberate.

And I think for me, it might kind of, my friend thinks it's a little bit obsessive compulsive. But like, if I don't understand a thing, like I have to understand a thing, like I can't let it go. I can't be just like, Oh, that's going to be a mystery. And I'm just going to keep on living my life.

Does that make sense at all? Yeah. Although, I mean, there are, you know, there are many, many things to understand. And on paper, at that point, it must have looked, you know, if not to you, to others fairly crazy to that shit crazy is what my dad said.

Because literally, we have journalists, you know, season journalists getting decapitated at that point. I mean, Daniel Pearl got murdered, I think in February of 2002. Yeah, I was, yeah, I was, I actually had a knock on effect of that is when I went back to Pakistan, it was going to Afghanistan. So I went back to Afghanistan, I'm back to Afghanistan, right from 911.

And then I went to back to Afghanistan in 2004. And when I went back, I actually had the secret police. There weren't so secret, actually, because I knew that would follow me in Pakistan, because they were, they were worried that I was going to get kidnapped. And it was funny because I wasn't there as a journalist who had loads of resources.

So I was saying in the really cheap part of town, which also was a very dodgy part town. And when they found that out, they were really scared that something was going to happen. And they sent this like caravan of like armored cars to literally remove me. And they like put me up in the Marriott, like what is going on guys?

And I think the Marriott was bomb shortly after that. So not the best decision. But yeah, I think that this isn't I, my experience has been that most of the people that I meet are good people. And that goes for every country I've been to, I think through different cultures and different traditions and, you know, religions, it's most of the people I've met have been good.

I think if I had never left the United States and I didn't have that experience, I would feel very fearful of the world, because I know that before I started traveling and before I started really doing a lot of reading ferociously, the world seemed very scary because imagine if you never left your hometown and you just, you know, watch the news all day. That's fucking terrifying. And I think the way that I describe Yemen and Afghanistan to people, because inevitably they always think that it's so dangerous and there's explosions going off all the time. And I'm like, you know, running for my life, but the way I describe it to people is imagine that you knew absolutely nothing about the United States.

You didn't know it was located on a map. You didn't know what the president was. You had never seen any movies from there. The only thing that you knew about the US was what you read in the New York Times and about like the rapes and the robberies and the killings.

And you would think that America was like Mad Max on crack and you'd be like, that place is dangerous. I'm fucking never going there. And I feel like a lot of the times, like living in Yemen, most of my friends and family were like, and initially they were super scared for me. But you know, when you live in a country like that, or you know, even going to Israel or other countries that I've been to that are portrayed on the news in kind of like this chaotic way, I think the majority of the population, the majority of the time does not experience that.

Yes, there are, you know, explosions here and there of like violence, but you also have like school students here. Like I remember when I was in Saudi Arabia, I had a taxi driver, he asked me where I'm from. And I told him America and his first thing was like, oh, it's so sad about your crazies, schools over there, like you must be so worried for your children from the school. And I was like, I don't have kids.

But yeah, I think that's something that people do think about. But it's interesting that that's our view of the states over there. So yeah, sorry, I ramble on a one. Just tell me shut the fuck up.

Fuck go on too long. Sorry. That was great. So Yemen, obviously there's a significant civil war and humanitarian crisis happening there now.

Was any of that going on when you were there? Was that pre chaos? I mean, I really kicked off in there. So Houthis have been were definitely an issue when I was there.

Like there was bombings in the outside of the city. Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was the president of the time, it was it was a definite issue there. And we had lockdowns sometimes when things really kicked off. And and there was riots sometimes for I remember this one time.

It's one of my like, so when you live in Yemen, you have to have clan. And what I mean by that is when I move there as a single person, I would like move into an apartment. And then this happened to me at handful times, I moved to apartment and then I would like repaint it and like, do the redo everything and make it nice. And then inevitably my landlord would come, call him and sound the line and check the place out.

And then he'd like, Oh, it really looks nice in here. I was like, yeah, thank you. And then about a month I decided to move back in and I have to move out. And I I realized after a while that I just had no recourse to any of this.

And then I met, there's a huge diaspora of Iraqis in Yemen, because of what happened with the war in Iraq, a lot of Iraqis moved to Yemen to kind of get away from that and escape that at the time. And I met and befriended this family. And they kind of took me in and adopted me. And one of the women, I consider her like a sister to me.

She actually helped me on the film and did some translations and looked at the dates and story notes. But yeah, she's like, she's like a sister to me. And so when they adopted me, the next time I got messed with like the whole crew came down and we're not talking about like two or three people, we're talking to Anne's uncle's cousins. And then as soon as it was clear that I had clan that I had like people, I was left alone.

And then they found me this place to rent in Hada, which is the newer part of of Santa. And it was this really old Gabili guy, sorry. Gabili is a Bedouin with a lot of money from Selling Qat, which is a drug there. And he was a huge fan of mine because I was always on the run on time, really, really low maintenance.

And when the riots kicked off, this is very Yemen, the riots kicked off, he sent two Hilix trucks with, two Hilix trucks with each of them had a 50 caliber gun in the back and right outside my gate to like protect me. And then he dropped off an AK-47 for me to have, just in case. And I was like, oh, I love Yemen. This is hospitality.

It's great. Well, I'm seeing the hospitality, although the safety is looking questionable at this point. Well, it's, you know what? Like I said, it's, if I was by myself at that time, I didn't have a clan, I didn't have a very well-known and influential powerful Gabili as a landlord, I would be like, yeah, it's very dangerous.

Oh, here's okay. Here's how I describe it, right? Like, I don't know about you, but I like puzzles, not puzzles as in like I put together puzzle pieces. That shit drives me nuts, but actual like human culture, cultural and political puzzles.

And so, for example, it was 2004. And so growing up, my dad was a firefighter, but he had this knack of like, he loved to read, he read a lot of textbooks in his spare time. That was one of the things I picked up from him. And so I was reading about lazy fair economies.

And it was this theory, and they'd really never been in practice at that time because it collapsed the small estate. I was like, this would be a really cool thing to go find out about because technically this is a lazy fair economy. There's no government, there's no rule of law. So I was in northern Somalia, it's my land, and I was trying to figure out how I could go to Mogadishu because Mogadishu at that time was absolutely chaotic.

And if you can picture Mogadishu as a pizza, each slice of pizza is a different clan or a different like faction rules. And you can't cross over that without permission. If you do, you'll be shot and killed. So I was trying to figure out because I wanted to basically be able to go all over Mogadishu freely.

And I was trying to figure out how to do that. And I realized that in Mogadishu, they had marble cigarettes and Coca-Cola and other kind of products. And it occurred to me that they have to get that from somewhere because there's no factories that make that kind of stuff at that time anyway in Smolger and Mogadishu. So even though the Somali State collapsed in 1991, that means, as did the post office, that means someone has picked up some kind of and made a private postal business.

And my theory was that if I can befriend that guy, that would be the person who would be able to get me free access. Because even if you're a warlord, or if you're running a piracy ring, or you need to have your supplies, you need to have for your men, for your family, you don't want to get cut off and that's the one guy. No one wants to piss off. It's the guy who brings you that stuff.

So I found out who ran the private postal service in Somalia and met with him. I befriended him. And then I went to Mogadishu with him. And when we walked around, everyone saw me with him and just figured that I was his friend or that we were doing a business deal with him.

And then once he left, I was able to go all around Mogadishu. And no one messed with me. And it was pretty night and day. And it was just figuring out the puzzle of this place and how you're able to navigate it.

So I guess the answer to your question is yes, going to Mogadishu is a six foot tall, albino gazilla on the surface is not smart nor is it safe. But it's all how you do it. And by doing it that way, it actually was quite safe. Does that make sense?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think you just further confirmed that I want to be with you in a crisis. If I have to be in a crisis.

I want a lot of people's top list for if the zombie apocalypse actually comes. I was really disappointed because I honestly thought that when this all started, I was expecting like Mad Max Fury Road. I'm like, man, I'm gonna be playing on a rock in this new world. I got this great skill set and then I wind up being like the big Lebowski apocalypse or all home in our robes.

So I didn't get to use my skill set, unfortunately. Yeah. And I went through it crazy, actually. So how long were you in Yemen?

A little bit under four, five years. So like a little bit over four and a half years. Yeah. And was Somalia to stay punctuated that time or did you go to Somalia after Yemen?

So Somalia, I went in twice once when I was in Yemen. And then again, when I went back to school, I wrote a paper based on my time in Somalia called The Evantages of Anarchy. And I turned it into one of my professors and the paper basically said that Somalia was in this unique position because Somalia land had declared itself independent, but was and had its own currency, it has elections in president, but it was not recognized by the international community. And because it wasn't recognized, it wasn't able to get money from the IMF and things like that, which on the outside people thought was a bad thing.

But what actually happened was because they didn't have international recognition, they also didn't have international influence. And so the government didn't go abroad for money, had to go to the local populace and the local business leaders. And so it created a very healthy relationship between the local business and the politicians, where it was more organic. And they were responsible to local populace, where a lot of countries in Africa receive a lot of their budgets and funding from the IMF.

And so they're okay pissing off the locals because people that they don't want to piss off are these foreigners, these foreign countries. So it actually created a very healthy economy and a very healthy political system in the North and Somalia land. And so the paper that I wrote was kind of like about the advantages of the anarchy that happened in Somalia. I turned it into my professor and she called me into her office.

And I thought I was in trouble because I mean, you don't know about me, but I've learned disability and my spelling is a fucking atrocious, like really bad. So I thought I was going to get in trouble. And so she called me in and she said, I read your paper. And I was wondering if you would be interested in writing an academic article about it.

And I, you know, we could co-author it. And I didn't know what it took to wrote an academic article. I thought it was going to be a couple of weeks of my time. So I was like, sure, it took two years.

So I then applied for some grants to go back to Somalia and actually do real field research. And so then I went back in 2010 and went all over Somalia kind of doing field research on state building and piracy and using piracy as a way to measure stability and state building. Sorry. I can't just tell me you shut the fuck up.

I do want to get to the present concern. So I guess one more step along the way. So you have created this still by my lights, fairly insane cultural exchange program for yourself. And it's all working out.

You've gone to you've spent years in Yemen. You've had adventures in Somalia. At what point do you decide to become a documentarian? That actually happened while I was living in Yemen.

So when I was in Yemen, I was teaching fire, I was a head instructor at a firefighting academy. So I taught Yemeni men how to fight fire. And which that's a whole different story, how I got that job. I don't know if you know this, but women aren't firefighters in Yemen.

So I remember my first day, I walked into the classroom and I didn't know I spoke Arabic. I worked in the classroom. I'm here with a secretary for the instructor. And I started right on the board and they're like, wait a minute, this is our instructor?

And they completely ignored me completely. And that's- You must have been in many situations where people assume you could not understand Arabic and they're talking about you in front of you and then you disown them. I love that. I love it.

I love it because I mean, I don't look like I would speak Arabic. You don't look like you speak Arabic. But that for you. So the first day I literally went home, I was almost crying because I thought, oh my God, I'm getting fired from this job.

And then the second day the same thing happened. And so, you know, firefighting, we have the same like improvised adoption overcome. And it's something that we just kind of go to all the time. And when you become a firefighter, your fire academy is about 20 weeks long.

It's probably more than that in some cases. And you do all this classroom work when you study fire science and safety equipment and, you know, you know, standard protocol and you know, chain of command, all that stuff before you ever do live field drills. And what I mean by that is we have something called the burn building when you're training. And it's a house that basically you can set on fire multiple times to kind of do live fire drills.

But you wait until the very end to do that. So what I decided to do was to take them, because I figured that they looked at me and didn't see me as a firefighter and that they just thought I was this woman to teach them stuff. And I knew that I had to change that perception. So on day three, I took them out to the fire ground and we did a live fire drill.

And I taught them what an SCBA is. It's self-contained breathe apparatus that firefighters use. And I taught them about how to don it. And my goal that day was to teach them skip breathing.

Skip breathing is a very advanced technique that firefighters use that when your air runs out, this alarm bell goes off and it basically tells you you have like a couple minutes left of air. And you, if you're an experienced firefighter, you change your method of breathing that you make that last longer, but you have to remain calm. And you have this huge alarm going off in your air. It's really, really hot all around you.

There's fire, there's smoke. And unless you have a lot of experience and a lot of training, you tend to freak out when that alarm bell goes off and you suck your air down even faster. And I knew that. So there's all these cadets.

And I took them in two by two to the burn building. And I would shut off my air and shut off their air. And then the alarm would sound. And to the person, they all freaked out.

This one guy tried to pull off his mask and I had to slam his body against the wall like one is masking, yell at him Arabic. I'm like, if you take this off, you will breathe in superheated air and you will die. So don't do that. And this one guy, he like almost passed out and I'd basically drag him out of the building.

And then we did that. And it was about like, I think I had about 40 cadets and I went into it at the very end of it. I came out and they were like, oh, no, ground like breathing really heavily. And this one guy looks at me and goes, teacher, you are man.

And then after that, that was it. It was fine. And we got along great. And they just looked at me as like a man dresses a woman teaching and firefighting.

And that was fine. That was the end of it. And so yeah, it's definitely not the first time that that has happened. But I do think that like being able to understand kind of where people are coming from, like these men, I think most of them had around a third grade education because firefighting is very different and Yemen is not seen as a desirable job.

So, you know, people who have really well educated aren't going after that. And so a lot of them were from the rural areas. And this was a huge thing for them. And so it's like realizing that, you know, there's people who are maliciously sexist and there's people who just have not been exposed to women in different positions like that.

And so once you're able to show them like, hey, like, I can do this, I'm actually pretty good at it. It shifts their paradigm. And then we were able to work no problem. One more firefighting question that just occurred to me because 9-11 was it was a an atrocity when viewed from one angle, a certainly a tragedy when viewed from another.

And it was especially so I can imagine from the point of view of a firefighter, what happened to the firefighters in New York that day and the heroism on display and the doomed nature of it was so acute. I have to imagine that these events hit the firefighting community generally in an especially hard way. I think you alluded to some of that when you talked about how driven your firehouse was with hatred of Islam perhaps or at least jihadism at a minimum. Is there more that you can say about that?

I mean, how did this land for firefighters? So in California, we have a fire season and back in the day, it used to be actual season not year round. And we have these things called strike teams where during fire season, when there's huge fires, there are five engines that are sent out by different departments and to resource allocations. And so I was on a strike team, so I was on a different unit.

And that morning, we were at a station that had another engine on it. So there are sometimes stations that have two or three engines on that are stationed there. And that engine had been out the whole entire night running calls. And my guys, I was a senior firefighter at the time, and my guys got up early and started to get ready.

And there was making a lot of commotion in the TV room. And I was in the bathroom and I came out to actually yell at them because I was like, hey, the other crew is still sleeping, like keep it down. So I walked in the TV room and I kind of gave it to one of the firefighters and he pointed the TV and I saw one of the trade towers on fire. And I turned to him and was like, I don't fucking care what movie you're watching.

I literally thought it was a movie because I didn't, I just I just thought they were watching a movie or something. And he's like, no, this is the news. And I looked at it. And the one thing that I remember most of that day was the shift.

And when the first plane hit at the firehouse, it was more like, oh shit, that's going to be a crazy call because normally you have either a plane crash that you go on or like a high-rise fire that you go on. But I was like, too, so we all as firefighters, we were all talking about how what kind of call that would kind of be on how crazy it would go to do something like that. And what you have to understand is before 9-11, all the training that we got was that steel reinforced buildings don't collapse. So when you went to a high-rise fire, you set your incident command system at the bottom floor, right?

So we knew there's loads of resources and loads of firefighters and chiefs always were going to be at the bottom floor. And so we knew that. And so when the first plane hit, the shift that I'm talking about is like, it was more like thoughts and prayers and concerns and talks about how to blunt how cool of a call that would be to go on, right? Like how cool would we do a plane crash into a high-rise?

And like we were all talking about kind of being jealous of that going on call like that. And then there was a palpable shift when the second plane hit, because it was very clear that when the first plane hit, we thought it was some kind of accident. And when the second plane hit, it was the shift was so palpable, it went from concern and thought-temprayers to rage and vengeance. And it was interesting to me because the facts were the same.

Plane hit the building, people had died, and it was tragic. Those facts were the same, but because the perceived intent had shifted from accident to this is an attack, this is on purpose, that shifted the whole paradigm at the firehouse. And so that to me is one of the things that I remember so vividly from that day. And also that, and then when the towers came down, everyone in the firehouse was silent because we all knew where all the firefighters were, because the incidents command system had to be on the bottom floor.

And so we knew that probably before the rest of the nation did that hundreds of firefighters had died. And so the reaction was, so firefighting is not like normal jobs. It's not like you go to an office, and you just do a nine-to-five with someone. It really is like an extended family.

And so I trained with guys in my department. I trained with guys from FDNY. I trained with guys from Louisiana, because I was a lot of search and recipe training and you start training, which is like when the Oklahoma City building exploded, they'll send a user team. And it's basically, I think it's 72 firefighters who are trained in different things, Hazmats, low-angle rescue, confined space, different specialties, and we'll send a team to that site to manage it.

And so you get to train with other departments. And I think it's also like a, like even when I was traveling in Pakistan, I brought some shirts from my firehouse with me and I actually stayed at a firehouse in Pakistan and I gave them some firefighting shirts. And it was, yeah, they just welcomed me in. They were very curious about women firefighting in America, but it is an extended family that actually goes beyond the borders of the US.

And it's just a different kind of profession because the way I describe it is it's a very unique job when you're exposed constantly to other people's like the most traumatic moments. And it attracts a certain person and it kind of develops a certain personality to where when you meet another firefighter, there's this kind of look of like, yeah, you know, you've been to the show. Does that make sense? Yeah.

Yeah. So there really was no expectation on your part when you saw the fires burning out of control in both towers that the buildings themselves were going to start to pancake and come down. Oh, absolutely. That's a thing, because that's not what we were taught.

Like literally it was when they started to collapse, it was shock because, you know, I was not stationed in place with high rises, but I knew firefighters who were and part of the train that you do is setting up on that ground floor for your incident command system. And so like, and again, they would part of firefighting is you have to learn about building construction. You have to learn how to have materials. You have to learn about medical stuff.

Like it's a pretty great job if you're a person who gets bored easily because there's always new stuff to learn about. But yeah, we all the building construction training that we had, it was like, steel reinforced buildings don't collapse. And then that was the golden rule. And then then they did.

And then the whole world kind of shifted. Yeah. Well, in defense of our erroneous assumptions, no one had ever flown a fully fueled passenger jet into a high rise. This is true.

Jet fuel burns really hot and hot enough to melt those kind of fuel real and force beams that no matter how thick they were. So yeah, it was something that was hadn't been tested before. Yeah. Well, you'll get a few emails from 911 truthers after this.

Okay, I'm gonna go on a tangent. Can I just tell you this? In the Middle East, there's a lot of conspiracy theories. That's just that's just part of the there's a lot of conspiracy theories also around 911 and almost to a person, people I talked to in Saudi Arabia, all thought 911 was an inside job either done by the Israelis or done by United States as an excuse to go to war.

Right. And I remember there was there was a guy that I'd met there, really nice guy of doula who would, I would classify super conservative, very, very religious, but salt to the earth, fucking good human just a great human being. And he would he was adamant. He was adamant that it was like an inside job in America did it and XYZ.

And I remember I like he acted as my driver sometimes and I went to go interview, call it, you know, the guy who opens the film, the bomb maker. So call it was his interview was 10 hours long. He was just such a fascinating person and he was with Osama bin Laden on 911. And so we talked a lot about that in his experience.

And Abdullah was in the room for part of the interview. And that part it was about, call it talking about, you know, 911 and the attacks and being with some in law, and then the plan and all other stuff. And I remember leaving that interview and I got in the car with Abdullah and this is from the horse's mouth, the guy that was next to Osama bin Laden on 911 telling him how it is. Yeah, the credit for it.

Yeah. I was like, Abdullah, like after hearing that 10 hour interview, like, have you changed your mind about this being an inside job? And he's like, you know, like, yeah, I think maybe, maybe you're right. And I was like, yeah, it only took like 10 hours.

Like it's something that's best read and tell you this. So I was like, okay, wait, that was pretty fun. He just had to do that a few million more times. Yeah.

And he changed opinion. Right. Yeah, I think, you know, call it my hope someday is to take his interview and do like a podcast of it because his interview was just amazing. Like, for example, there's so much that couldn't go in the film, but I was talking to Colin about just small talk and asked him, you know, do you, do you, I'm a documentary filmmaker?

Do you ever watch documentaries? He's like, yeah, I watched a lot. I was like, Oh, what's your favorite one? And he said, Oh, it's the one that we that was on the syllabus at Al-Furuk.

I'm like, wait a minute, you guys had a syllabus at the Al-Qaeda training camp that had documentaries that were assigned watching material? He's like, yeah, I was like, well, what's your, what's your favorite documentary? And I was kind of racking my brain. What would, what would Al-Qaeda assign for homework for these, these guys in training?

And he said, yo, my favorite one was the one about the man. He's always looking in the camera and he's talking about the war in Vietnam. And I was like, wait, fog of war by Errol Morris? And he was like, yeah, he's like, we watch that film and we know all we need to know about America.

I was like, this is crazy. Someday I want to tell Errol Morris that his movie was on a syllabus, I was great. I would bet they've got a few Michael Moore films. Yeah.

Okay, so let's jump in. It's going all over the back. I apologize. I see the through line.

It's working. But so you are, you are steeped in the culture at this point and you have decided to make a film which sends you to Saudi Arabia. You know, perhaps you, you want to say how you got pointed in that direction and heard about this, the phenomenon of jihad rehab. But perhaps you can just briefly summarize the film.

I want to talk about the film, but I really want to talk about what has happened since the release or attempted release of the film. Yeah. Because they're, they're in some powerful ironies await us. So what is jihad rehab, the place, the phenomenon and give me the elevator summary of the film you made?

Yeah. So I'll take those in reverse. So jihad rehab, now retitled, the Unredacted, is about a group of men who after spending 15 years in Guantanamo are sent to the world's first rehabilitation center for terrorists, which were located in Saudi Arabia. I first heard about the center way before I was a filmmaker.

I was living in Yemen and I was teaching firefighting and I kind of overheard a conversation from some of my cadets and they were talking about a terrorist attack that had taken place in Saudi Arabia. I think it was around 2007 and they said that the perpetrators had been caught and that half the perpetrators were Saudi and half the perpetrators and the other half was Yemeni and that the Yemenis had been tortured and killed, but the Saudis have been sent to something that they referred to as jihad rehab. And at the time, this was really interesting to me because Saudi Arabia was and also is not known for a human rights record or for being very progressive. And so it always kind of perplexed me why this very conservative country was running some kind of progressive rehab program for terrorists and it always kind of stuck with me.

And then my last film I made in Cuba and my Spanish is not great. And when it came time to do my next project, I wanted to do something where it was going to be easier because I spoke the language. It was way not it was so hard to make this film. Yeah, and so I originally wanted to do this and I didn't know the kind of access I could get.

I was pretty sure I could get enough access to do a short documentary. That was definitely within my I think powers, but I wasn't sure if I was going to have enough access or the kind of access that I wanted to do a feature length doc. And but it took me like a year to get access at least the kind of access that I have to make this film. It's like full transparency.

There are reporters that visit the center before me, but they're given like a two hour, you know, PowerPoint presentation and then they're shown around. And then they're really, really kind of escorted everywhere and very curated. And they might be able to talk to maybe one or two people there, but the kind of access that I was asking for, they had just never given ever. Right.

I think I can't remember. Is it the same place that Graham Wood, the Atlanta writer went to when he yeah, yeah, so he full disclosure, I listened to his podcast with you and actually is the only reason why I really wanted to hear that full interview. So I paid for your subscription for that month just to listen to that. And I had to like, I had actually like, stop my subscription that same month because I'm when you get canceled, like I did, you're really poor.

So even I love your podcast. So with Graham was like, I can't afford it. I got some connections over here. Let me hook you up.

Yeah. Can you talk to the person in charge? You know, I listen to that. It was really, it was really great.

Yeah. So I spent some time at El Hayar, which I think Graham talked about his podcast. And I spent obvious a lot of time at the center. So just to give you some context here, I interviewed or talked with, I would say around probably over 150 of these guys of that 150 around 30 were interested in doing the project of that 30, only 12 were interested in doing the project without their face being blurred or disguised in some way.

And for me, it was really imperative for the audience to be able to see these guys look in the eye because I think that's how you kind of are able to like see someone's humanity. But yeah. So and they were, were they all Yemeni in the end or were three of the four Yemeni? What would?

So in the film, you have Collin and he's Saudi and then Abagon, Ali Muhammad and not at all Yemeni. Right. Right. Yeah.

Okay. So you make this film, which I've seen and which few other people have seen given what happened upon its premiere. I mean, maybe I'll just say this at the outset, just to set people up for to understand what you saw the film like when you before you saw it, you heard about it. What did you think you were going to what your expectations before you watch the film was?

Well, I was because Melissa got in touch with me. I was set up to understand it appropriately. You know, I just I sort of knew what I was getting into. But nevertheless, I was surprised upon watching it, how insane its reception was, you know, that what you've produced in this film, apart from it being just a very professional and well done documentary.

And this is the kind of thing you'd expect to see on frontline or Netflix or anyplace that would. Intense distributors. Yes. But it's just a remarkably compassionate and humanizing document.

Right. I mean, so to give people a heads up here, I want you to run through everything that happened once it premiered at Sundance. But one would think this is precisely the kind of film that people who have criticized me for Islamophobia would want people like me to see. Right.

I mean, it's literally impossible to watch this film and not have serious misgivings about how we've conducted our side of the war on terror and, you know, serious misgivings about Guantanamo, for instance. And I mean, you totally humanize these guys. And if anything, I could imagine the concern for criticism, you know, going into this would have been that you'd be worried you were perceived as being soft on terrorism, right, or just taken in by the humanity of these guys and not really getting, you know, the nature of the evil we had to deal with and still have to deal with out in the world. Right.

So like, you'd imagine if anything, you could imagine some criticism from the right, or from even someone like me. I mean, I'm not a creature of the right at all, but I'm someone who, you know, like you, 9-11 had an instantaneous impact on me. But the direction I took it is a real focus on the problem of jihadism. And you know, that focus is often misunderstood.

It's not an all-in-animous against Muslims, generally, as people. And it's certainly not any symptom of xenophobia on my part. And you know, I'm not at all surprised at the humanizing story you're able to tell in this film. I mean, but my problem with jihadism is that, and just with bad contagious ideas, generally, is that, you know, bad ideas get good people to do bad and otherwise unthinkable things.

It's like the bad idea problem that I'm most worried about and jihadism is one species of, you know, very bad ideas that has religious roots. But it's not the whole story. And again, watching your film, what comes through very clearly is the rest of the story, right? Like, so you see these guys as truly ordinary men who are faced with various life challenges, like, you know, earning a living and getting married or, you know, how to get married, right?

How do you even get a woman's attention? And you see this quite standard set of social problems. And you see the way in which, you know, jihadism can capture that and leverage that and, you know, ideology and religious belief aside, you see other variables there. And that really is your focus in the film.

So the irony, and we're going to talk about what happened once you made this film, the irony is, this is, you know, from my view, this is like, it's almost the perfect rejoinder or what should be, I mean, again, it's not a true rejoinder because, you know, I don't reject anything in your film, but it should be perceived as the perfect rejoinder to everything I've said about Islam and jihadism, right? It's like, it is the thing you should want me to see if you hate what I've said in honestly, I thought you wouldn't like the film. I mean, I don't, again, I don't listen to your podcast religiously because I'm poor, but I don't see the clips online and stuff. I was like, oh, I'm sure intellectually, I think that you would have, like, been fascinated by it.

I was prepared for you to be like, I watched your film, Megan, I didn't like it and hear all the same. I think you did. I should be the person who should be criticizing you for this film. And certainly anyone to the right of me, that's where you would think it would come from.

But honestly, we, I always say we, I should say me more often. But I thought and believed that this film was going to be atrociously attacked by the alt-right. And because of that, I took a lot of steps, both pre-bearing and post-production to butt-triss up against those. What I mean by that is I knew that if, like, so typically when you make a film and it's in most of the film to English, but there are places where it's Arabic, you hire like a translator, student, and she wants to hire one translator to go in at the very end and make sure and spot check and make sure everything's on the up and up.

Because I knew that this film was going to be just ripped apart, we didn't hire one or two, we hired three different translators to go through the entire film before we picture locked to make sure that every single word that was in there was correctly translated. Because I thought that if something was off or wrong, that they would use that one thing to say, see, this isn't right, and they're for the whole film. And so I went through the film with a fine-toothed comb and as they are lawyers, and we have this law firm called Donaldson Calliff and they're, you've never heard of them, but they are the top lawyers for documentary films. They've represented all the Oscar award winners going back 10, 15 years and they're really well respected.

And they went through the film and they kind of was like, yeah, you kind of went way and way on what you really needed to do to create this film. I'm like, yeah, because we're going to rip the part once this thing gets out there. And I'm also an ex-competitive boxer and it's all used that metaphor. And I was expecting the right hook and I wasn't prepared for the left cross.

So they're in lies of the problem. Yeah. Okay. So what happened and what did the left cross actually look like?

Well, I mean, before we get back up, because you mentioned something about these guys and their motivations. And I will say, I wanted just to add to that because, you know, like I said, I interviewed over 150 of these guys and some of the interviews lasted 10 minutes, some of them lasted like, call it up to 10 hours. And after a while, I began to see this pattern of that they would fall into one of four categories, not all of them. There was exceptions, but like one of four categories in terms of how they got into this lifestyle or this world.

And I think what was really interesting to me was that of the four, there was only one that actually had to do with religion and the other three had nothing to do with religion. So when you were talking about this like that idea thing, I actually, that wasn't a universality from the people that I talked to. And again, I only, I only talked to like, you know, I didn't talk to thousands of them, but it was, you know, a little bit less than 200. And so also, I should just know, you have performed a kind of psychological experiment in making this film.

And what you got is a, the very definition of a self selecting group of people who are willing to talk to you. Oh, yeah. Well, I will say that the people that were willing to talk to me, so I should let's back up. So how I got access originally, and the reason why I was able to talk to so many of them was, so when you when you when you operate in a regime, dictatorship, Yemen, with Ali Abdullah Saleh, or, you know, anytime that there's an authoritative regime, going through official channels is always, in my opinion, kind of the worst thing to do.

The way to get access in those kind of places is by building relationships and back channels and whatnot. So like I said before, to me, you're to access. And part of that was building relationships with people who were influential and who could who had friends and powerful places. And the one thing you have to understand about Saudi Arabia and other dictatorships is I'll never tell you no, but what they will do is they'll throw hurdle after hurdle after hurdle after hurdle in front of you until you kind of just give up.

And there are a lot of things that I'm not good at. I'm a horrible speller. Very, very bad when it comes to like directions, but I got tenacity for days. So it was, I was up for that challenge.

So we've been going back and forth for about a year. I remember at one point, they said, you know, what we went to the prison and we went to the rehab center and none of them want to talk to you. So that's the end of it. And I said, well, why don't you let me just let me talk, let me just go to the rehab center and to the prison and talk to these guys.

And they were really reluctant to do that. And so we were going back and forth for a long time. And so finally, I was able to put enough pressure on the right people to where they acquiesced. And they said, okay, we will let you physically enter the prison and the rehab center with one caveat.

And here's where the hurdle comes in. They said, you're not allowed to film one frame of video unless these guys agree from the jump to be part of your project. Meaning I couldn't spend months trying to get to know them and make them comfortable with me. They had to like agree from day one, which they knew was never going to happen because a lot of these guys were either fresh off the plane from when Tonimo, where my country had just tortured them for a long period of time, or they were like fresh for back from Syria and fighting with and fighting in ISIS.

And so, and they were right when I first, they let me in the center and let me in the L-Hare and I sat down with the first batch of people. There was the older all kind of guys. And I started talking in Arabic and they wouldn't even acknowledge my presence. They wouldn't even like answering my questions.

Some of them would even look me in the eye. And then I went to the next group, which was like the younger ISIS guys. And same thing there. But what had serendipitously happened was that was also the same time that Saudi Arabia took its first batch of non-sawty nationals through the program.

And they just happened to be from Yemen. And I learned Arabic and Yemen. So I had a very sick Yemeni accent when I want to. And so I went in and there was nine of them and I sat down and I started speaking.

And their heads popped up. And they're like, why the fuck do you speak? Our mother tongue. They didn't say fuck, but I'm going to add that for dramatic flair.

And I told them I used to live in Yemen and they want to know how long and where I lived. And so I live in the old city near the Styla. And they want to know like, like, you know, that is a very famous saucer restaurant down there. And I was like, yeah, best saucer on all of the old city.

And we just had this immediate rapport because they hadn't been back to their home country in over 15 years. And so we just started talking. And we talked for hours. And then at the end of it, I said, I would really love to talk to you guys more individually about your stories and learn about who you are and as people and would anyone here be willing to speak with me individually.

And a couple of hands went up. And then I met with those guys individually and then kind of words spread throughout the rehab center that like Meg wasn't a journalist. Because I didn't really ask him where the bodies were buried in the beginning. It was more like, you know, tell me about your childhood.

And like, tell me about like your favorite sports teams. It was very benign stuff initially, because I knew I was there for the long haul, which is great. One of the things I love being a documentary filmmaker is you're given like the time and the space and the grace to explore a story where I feel like I was a journalist on assignment. I'd have to ask those hard questions from the jump because I'd only be there for a week or two.

So yeah, we're spread around the rehab center and throughout like the staff that, you know, Meg was like basically a white Yemeni. And so I was able to talk to a lot of the guys that initially wouldn't talk to me. And even though a lot of those guys didn't want to be part of the project with the exception of a handful of people, Elhair, who just would not meet with me at all. The it was pretty it was self selecting for the project, but I think I spoke to most people.

I don't know. I mean, I would say I probably spoke to maybe there was like, I'd say 10 to 15 people that I met that absolutely wanted nothing to do with me. But other than that, I was able to talk to quite a few people, but getting back to the original thing after talking all those people and yeah, it is self selecting in a way. I started to notice a pattern.

And so it came down to like four different motivations. And that's why there's four different characters in the film. So the first one, I think this is the one that most Americans are familiar with, is the cause, right? Like I see Muslims being persecuted or being oppressed, and I want to go and defend them and it's my religious duty, right?

And so that's like Abu Ghonam where he talks about going to Bosnia when he first got into this to go defend Muslims in Bosnia. So that's the one that most Americans are familiar with. But the other three have nothing to do with religion. So the next one is economic necessity, right?

Like you have someone like Nader who was, he says in the movie. Just to be clear, I would put a 0.1 cause ahead of that first cause because I mean, they're there are many jihadists. They may pay some lip service to defending their fellow Muslims, but in many cases, that's not even the rationale. It is much more about paradise.

I mean, literally we've got people who dropped out of medical school in London to go fight for ISIS, and they're finding other Muslims for ISIS. It's got nothing to do with saving the Bosnians who were left. Yeah, I mean, that's an interpretation of the cause, right? So I spoke to a lot of men who do subscribe to a certain ideology, right?

And so it's like, unless you're this specific type of Muslim, this Salafi type of Muslim who describes these certain roles and ways of living, then you're not a real Muslim, right? And in their mind, if you're not a real Muslim, then you're like an infant on your target. And so I think that's definitely an ideology part of it for sure. But it's still them thinking they're doing the just and right thing that's a cause.

So it's just a different version of where it's one where I've gone and went to Bosnia because that's what he thought his religious duty was, where I'm sure the guy you're talking about in London thought his religious duty was to go and join ISIS and do that stuff there. Does that make sense? I put those in the same category. Yeah, I didn't mean to derail you.

So the second one was that I found a lot of men talk about was economic necessity, right? So in the film, you have Nader saying that his life was hard before, and that he needed money. And I think the exact quote is, you know, you want money, you need money, you go to the jihad. And in his mind, it became a way to make an income and it became a career for him because he did this for a really long time.

He started out, I think when he was 16. And I think he was doing it till he was in his late 20s, early 30s. And so that's motivation number two. Motivation number three would be pure pressure, right?

So your families into it, your friends are into it. That's Ali, right? His brother was really high up in al Qaeda. And in the Middle East, your older siblings or your fathers are very influential in terms of your life trajectory and your path and your decisions.

And so Ali went to Afghanistan to Al Qaeda training camp because his brother was an instructor there and told him that he should go there. And Ali didn't really want to, but he was just like, you know, he's my older brother. I got to do what he says, because that's a respectful thing too. And then the last one, the fourth motivation I found was more age-dependent, more of the younger guys.

And that was sense of adventure, right? So that's Muhammad. He said, you know, I was, I didn't want to go to school. I thought it was boring.

I didn't want to work. This guy offered me a free ticket to go shoot rockets in Afghanistan. Like, heck, yeah, that's, I mean, you're 19 years old. You want to blow some shit up?

Cool, travel. Awesome. And I think that like, what was really interesting to me is when I realized that, I also realized that like, I had a lot of friends in the military and I'd heard similar motivations from them, right? Like a lot of friends who joined up for the military after 9-11.

That's the cause, right? They're like, like, we want to join up, we don't defend our country. So that's cause number one. I have a lot of friends who, you know, sometimes the best job in the state is with the military, you know, economic necessity.

That's job number two. A lot of friends who come from military families. And, you know, that's just what their family does. That's motivation number three.

And then a lot of my friends who joined up who don't come from money but wanted to see the world and travel and have those adventures join the military. And that's, you know, number four. And a lot of people joined the military to go to school, as well. So it's kind of a monitoring incentive.

And what I realized after a while, I'm talking to guys, it wasn't ever really about good and evil. It was more about time and circumstance. And even though, like, I will say, at university, almost university, a lot of these men were younger and they were searching for purpose and they were searching for belonging. And I also played a big role as well.

But I think those four motivations are the reason why we have four different characters in the film because they all represent the nuance and complexity of this thing. And so I think when people talk about terrorism and they equate it to Islam, I think that, and just strictly religion, I think that's a misrepresentation of the actual, at least my experience in interviewing these guys. Does that make sense? Yeah.

Yeah. I think there's probably more to say on that subject, but it's not important here. And but the most important thing to emphasize is that, you know, anyone who has attacked me or anyone like me for Islamophobia should want me to contemplate a document of the sort you have produced, right? I mean, you have produced a nothing like an echo of any of my diatribes about Islam and jihadism and my specific criticisms of belief and paradise and what work that does for suicide bombers and terrorists and in certain contexts.

And so it's just, it's none of that, right? And yet you have been attacked explicitly as an Islamophobe upon the release of this film. So that's, and I think there's probably, you know, perhaps you know more about this than I do, but I think it's a fairly organized campaign of, you know, counter PR against your film and it's it has worked. Oh, yeah, it goes way beyond that.

Like, there's things that you see in public, but there's private stuff. So there's been lawyers that were hired to send threatening letters. They're like, like, just the we got initially got loads universally positive reviews from all the major trades, like a Hollywood reporter in IndieWire. And then right after that, this group sent letters to all the places that gave us positive reviews and threatening lawsuits.

And then subsequently, a lot of those publications changed the wording of their reviews. I thought it was quite shocking. But yeah, so it was a very coordinated, you know, like, I just want to be clear on something here. I think that whenever you make a piece of work via the book or movie and you put it out into the public space, being criticized is part of that process.

And I think that is a good thing. I think criticism is something that is helpful for dialogue and also sometimes can make you a better writer or a better filmmaker. However, I differentiate between criticizing a piece of work and orchestrating an actual attack to take it down. And there's difference between tweeting, I don't like this film and then hiring lawyers to try to scare people off the project or scare buyers off and or harassing people online.

Like, so for example, Sundance announced a line up of the documentaries on December 9th, and the film would have its world premiere on January 22nd. So this is 2021 into 2022? Yes, correct. So the announcements were on the 9th, but the attacks started on the 10th.

So the attacks started way before anyone had actually seen the film. And initially, if we're being completely honest here, initially, the amount of like rage and anger that was directed at a film that no one had seen and a filmmaker that no one really knew, I think a lot of people their initial response would have been to either attack back or been like, you know, you haven't even seen my films was grew you, but that was not my initial response. I actually, in the beginning, but this is before I found out some information later, but at the beginning, I actually understood it. And here's why.

When I was a firefighter, I went on a call once where this kid had been seriously injured and would probably lose his hand. And when we showed up on scene, you know, the mom was crying and the kid was bleeding out. And the father, the father, he was fucking pissed. Like we showed up and he was just like, what the fuck have you been?

You're so incompetent. Like what's taking so long? And he was just had this anger and rage that was directed at us to the extent that I was looked at my captain, like, are we safe? Like, is this guy gonna come after us physically?

So we got the kid bandaged up and packed him up in the ambulance and right after the family was out of earshot. One of the other firefighters said, that guy's lucky. I didn't fucking deck him. And my captain, because he's older and wiser, turned around with this is a this is about to be a teachable moment on his face.

He said, listen, what you have to understand is that in this job, you are interacting with people at the most traumatic moment of your lives. And trauma is a very tricky thing. People respond very, very differently. He said, and it's very unpredictable.

Some people cry, some people laugh, and some people get angry. And that guy, even though he was angry at you, it is not about you. That guy doesn't know you. He's never met you before, but he has just seen his kid seriously injured and probably maimed.

And the way that he's dealing with that traumatic moment is through rage. And even though he's yelling at you, even though he seems like he's just has this rage towards you, you have to understand that has nothing to do with you. And so when the film, we started getting the attacks before anyone had ever seen the film, initially I thought like, Oh, this makes sense to me because number one, what you have to understand is like every other film before this film that kind of talks about terrorism is very sensationalistic, is very kind of fear-mongering. And so if I was a documentary film maker and a Muslim and I saw that Sundance had programmed a film about terrorism done by this white lady who's not a Muslim, I would think too that like, Oh, like not another one of these these films, right?

And so also because like my sister who I told you about that kind of Dr. Mignam and she now lives in the States and in Texas and we talked quite a bit and she's told me over the years about her experience in this country being a Muslim woman who wears a hijab. And so for example, she landed in America from Yemen when she moved here after. So she was living in Iraq and then we talked about Iraq and she moved to Yemen and then Yemen to she moved here she was born in the States but she grew up in Iraq.

And so she came here and she said that she went through customs immigration and she took three steps out of the airport and she was three steps into America and someone walked up to her and spit in her face and told her to go back to where she fucking came from. And that was her introduction to this country. And so over the years, I've talked with her about her experience and I have a lot of friends from her Muslim. I'm really close with my executive producer, Muhammad, he's Yemeni Muslim and we've talked about his experiences as well.

Although they're not as harsh I think as as rockets because she was a job and a lot of people mistake Muhammad he said for being Mexican. So he's like I can pass this Mexican sometimes it's better. But I think that like knowing the amount of just I don't want to say tacit bigotry that they have to kind of experience on a pretty regular basis like post 9-11 Muslims were treated very differently in this country. And I think unless you're in that culture or you have really close friends who are in that culture you're unaware of the toll that takes.