PODCAST · history
The Left Mic - The Social Podcast
by Zak
Relationships, experiences, places and thoughts. I speak with individuals I have met along the way, talking about personal stories, impressions, life and dreams. Society is the sum of ups and downs, some we share, most we never hear of. Here some voices rise above the rest to tell their unique tales and I thank you all for allowing me to listen and record your stories. Find me on Twitter @TwoandaMic1 Cover Art photo by Nassos. Jingle (from episode 157) by Omish Njash.
Episodes
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Want to see a failed democracy? It's all around us and we are also to blame!
A really large number of people have decided they don’t want a democracy anymore and that is why they are voluntarily choosing to withdraw and let the far-right bring back their latest brand of authoritarianism. This is the level of apathy our society has descended to. When people shout for the...
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Poetry – And So They Set the Stage, the Whole Damn Stage…is a Set Up by TwoandaMic
This poem takes aim at a system that has allowed billionaires to thrive. They influence international politics, bend long established principles and legal systems to their will while allowing billions of people to starve. A system that can do that, celebrate itself, exult in the finesse of its...
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When the Cockroaches of India come together, ministers topple – a sign of democracy in action and the power of Gen Z!
Exam papers leaked, 12 students took their lives as a result, a corrupt government official resigned, millions came out in protest, the cockroaches united. This episode talks about the movement forced into existence by the arrogance and entitlement of privilege, enduring injustice and corruption...
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From helping displaced children in Syria learn to running a techno music festival in Germany – A humbling journey!
This episode has been a long time in the waiting. Time is ever a complication when people are driven to using time as effectively and completely as possible. Iyad is a walking real-life story book. He has any number of tales to tell and he has a passion for living new stories within each of the...
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Racism to the north, xenophobia to the south, yet the dream of Pan-Africanism remains strong!
What is Afrophobia and why has it arisen on the continent of Africa? And in South Africa to be precise. In this podcast Ademola and Adeleke join me to talk about the phenomenon of Afrophobia and how it needs to be overcome for the dream of Pan-Africanism to bear fruit and unite the continent in…
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Poetry - Character of the Happy Warrior by William Wordsworth (including an intro by TwoandaMic)
Wordsworth, with all the meaning and depth that is so common in all of his poems, lays out for us a blueprint for the kind of character we should look for in the provision of political leadership. He may have written this poem as an ode to Lord Nelson, but we can take from it much more....
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The Enemy Within – How Anna approached her fight with Cancer and lived to tell the tale.
Anna is a power to behold on a basketball court. When she first joined the team a few weeks ago, she had never really played much basketball, just a bit of streetball here and there, she had had no structured basketball training and was essentially, as she called herself, a newbie. The huge steps...
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The TwoandaMic Book Club - Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism and other arguments for economic independence by Professor Kristen R. Ghodsee
This is a book that at its heart focuses on the relationship between political systems, gender equality and female liberty in a number of different ways and situations. The book is written by Professor Kristen R. Ghodsee who specialises in Russian and East European Studies at the University of...
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Poetry - ‘til the Peacekeepers Came to Knife Freedom in the Back by TwoandaMic
Political persuasion is sometimes the result of chance. A single event, an opinion of someone we care for and think we respect, a man wearing a suit on TV looking all successful and powerful, can change a pathway of thought at a stroke. And with a system geared towards monopolising those strokes,...
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Greek Genocide Day of Remembrance - Remember and Never Forget...
On the sad day of remembrance of the Greek Genocide, I read an excerpt from a radio address made by Dr Lovejoy in 1923. Dr Lovejoy was an American physician and witnessed the events at Smyrna in September 1922 at first hand. Over a hundred years have passed since these horrific days, a number of...
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Dr Boshart - "People don’t want to challenge structures, and I think that structure is failing." How Healthcare in Canada is failing First Nations communities
Dr Boshart is a doctor educated in what she describes as modern western medicine and in the traditional ways of the First Nations. Her dedication to her patients in unique. She takes her duty of care very seriously and the Hippocratic Oath is not simply a formality but a code by which she lives…
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Merging Businesses and Cultures, Gender Equality Legislation in the EU and AI is a Salad Full of Challenges
Helga joins me from Milan to talk about her extensive experiences as a Talent Acquisitions Head in creating culture and structures where none exists, or merging them where they collide in a business context. So much easier to say than to do. Yet when adding gender equality into the mix and the...
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NGOs are the fundamental societal adhesive that channels our hope on our behalf. We simply cannot risk losing them...
The world around us is being changed by human enterprise and direct human influence, yet our activities often ignore significant collateral damage. Much of that damage is unacceptable yet only NGOs line up every day to address the rights of those communities to try to bring comfort and assistance...
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Young Sherlock on Amazon Prime - A TV Show Review
Sherlock Holmes is a character we all know, much like James Bond, or Miss Marple. We all know how the detective behaves; how observant and intelligent he is and how quirkily he goes about his task. Yet Young Sherlock puts a lot of emphasis on the ‘Young’ bit as this is a character we are not so...
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Urban mobility and how cities function and why people move around as they do
Talking with specialists in their fields of expertise about topics which touch on everyday life is one of the fundamental priorities for the channel. Alongside the need for entertainment, knowledge, open-mindedness and creating a safe space for diverse voices, being aware of why our realities are...
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Poetry - A Plagued Journey by Maya Angelou
Maya Angelou was born Marguerite Ann Johnson on this day April 4th in 1928. Her life was trying from the very start. She had to fight for everything, and she lost a number of those fights along the way, and still she rose. She was an inspiration for so many people, for the beauty of who she was…
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Corruption is a devil we know, and patriotism is an awkward bedfellow - A TwoandaMic Monologue
Why do we continue to allow watered down versions of political leadership to rule over us, even when we can see their faults? We have allowed certain ideas to hold sway in our minds when in truth they should always be questioned. We regard ourselves as not being so important to society, that we…
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Short Stories – The Private History of a Campaign that Failed by Mark Twain
This story about war by Mark Twain says as much between the lines as it does on them. There are messages upon messages and there are questions, probing questions, that are asked of the reader or listener. This is a story about war. It is a story about youth and how the young one day come across...
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Celebrating International Women’s Day – a letter written by Constance Lytton
March 8th is International Women’s Day. March is Women’s History Month. In a patriarchal world, where rules are established by men, where institutions and practices are dictated by men, where morality and behaviour are judged by men, it is notable just how poor a state the world finds itself it....
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The war on Iran is a civil war of human conscience, and the aggressors will lose no matter what the outcome because the people they fail to represent demand better at home.
A social democrat will never defend a brutal regime that kills its own people and threatens innocents. So for those who do not hear enough criticism here of the Iranian regime, please listen to other episodes that focus purely on Iran. This episode is about the hypocrisy of politicians, from...
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Do people have to be aware that they have moved to the right for it to count as a move to the right?
Information comes at us from every angle and we are bombarded by it. Just this morning the bombs were flying again and war has come to Iran. In recent weeks we have seen and heard the fake pleas to the people of Iran from you know who and they care so much about the people of Iran that they have...
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Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. From '1984' by George Orwell
We are now watching as governments around the world, especially in democratic countries, attempt to rewrite history at a greater rate of change than at any known point in history. We are watching evidence redacted to save the elites and governing classes. We are watching them invade nations just…
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Iran’s brutal response to protests and the wider political divisions for Iranians in Iran and elsewhere
Since the times of the Shah, the religious revolution in Iran has been talking about oppression, the corruption of the west, and the hope for the Iranian people in following the leadership of the revolutionaries. Since 1979 the current government has been everything but revolutionary. The...
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The Epstein Case – how did this sordid network grow so big under the noses of the biggest security agencies in the world?
The Epstein case is all of the worst characteristics of humanity rolled into a single horrific and long-running episode. We are nowhere near understanding the full depth of it. There is no guarantee we ever will. Already nations gearing up for investigations into the fall-out of the Epstein Files...
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Mask wearing thugs with impunity will never enforce the law – the truth about Trump and his ICE and the lessons for the rest of us!
We have by now seen the murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti. We have seen the way communities have been torn apart. We have seen how 'law enforcement' in the USA has so often been a blanket term to explain away systemic racism and prejudice. The ICE has now brought all of those facts out into…
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The assassinations that sabotage peace
Talking of assassinations is the necessity of sustainable politics. It is a form of politics that democratic election cycles thought they had dealt with by the emergence of the party system. Unfortunately, the party system has become a colosseum of dirty tricks and blood sport. Leaders around the...
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7 Days of Mayhem that started 2026
The title 7 Days of Mayhem clearly refers to the first 7 days of 2026 but it also is a tribute to a movie entitled '7 Days in May' and one I would recommend people watch, even though it is in black and white and was made so long ago. The problems we are facing today we have faced many times over...
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The Sudanese Armenian Heritage Project
Vahe is a young man with a passion for people, history and stories. His work with Sudanahye (Sudanese Armenian) pursues real stories, true stories, untold, quaint family stories that brought together tell a tale of a country, a region, tragically torn apart today by the corrupt influences of both...
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Poetry - The Defeat of Youth by Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley was a philosopher, a visionary and a writer of such immensity that his reputation remains powerful and influential. A pacifist, a thoughtful and thought-provoking writer, he urged his readers to step back from the world and see it for what it was becoming. In Brave New World the…
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TV Shows of 2025 - The Battle for Streaming?
TV Shows have become a medium for enjoying storytelling that combines the thrill of the audiovisual experience with the longevity of a book. Is it for this reason that we have become so enamoured with them? Is this why moviemakers and cinema chains are afraid for their industry? Yet TV shows, to…
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The TwoandaMic Book Club - The Armour of Light by Ken Follett
This is a review of Ken Follett’s The Armour of Light. It is the latest in his Kingsbridge series and is set in the times of the Napoleonic Wars, the industrial revolution, mass poverty and times of significant social and religious change. I cannot overstate the relevance of the many topics...
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It’s very important that Nigerian people maintain revolutionary vigilance!
While this spat between Lago and Washington appears to be about Boko Haram and their religious conflict, to only see this viewpoint is to accept the word of a liar, even a presidential one, at his word. In this episode Ademola talks about many of the issues that plague Nigerian politics and he is...
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The International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women
In a just world gender equality would no longer be a demand but a reality. People will point towards progress being made yet misogyny and violent abuse against women continues. How can we in good conscience claim to live in a democracy when half of the population has a genuine reason to be…
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A Nigerian Activist in Berlin
Ademola contacted me some months ago to say that he might be visiting Berlin for a conference as a guest of the German foreign ministry. A few weeks ago Ademola and a group of African activists from different African nations came to Berlin and then Hamburg to meet with politicians, civil…
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A TwoandaMic Monologue: The Honourable Politicians
Making ______ Better Again, wherever that may be, has always been an extremely discomforting concept. Whether it is spoken in English, German, Italian or any other language, the idea that some unknown point in history is for some reason the enviable destination of modern society is worrisome.…
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The curse of democracy is the hypocrisy it nurses.
What drives us to celebrate insignificances when pain is banging on the windows crying out for a helping hand? Why do we believe that some have the right to the glitz and at the same time care not that so many will never know any of the freedoms we take for granted? This reflective, critical, and...
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Short Stories – The Selfish Giant by Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde remains one of the greatest writers in the modern era. A genius with the pen he was born in Dublin, Ireland on October 16 1854 an died on November 30th 1900 in Paris, France. He took his artistic talents from his mother Jane Francesca Elgee, a poet and a journalist. He published his...
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Short Stories – The Street that got Mislaid by Patrick Waddington
This is a treasure of a story because it speaks to the hearts of many who would today happily be forgotten about by the authorities. Not through criminality or to avoid financial duties, but just because people are so fed up of all the oversight, control and continuous badgering. If only a few…
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Dept Q on Netflix - A Review
I had my eye on Dept Q for quite some time before taking that plunge into the delights of Edinburgh’s latest crime series (that I am aware of at least). The opening scene sets a tone which continues throughout, not in the violence necessarily but in the mood and characterisation. Aggressive…
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Book Club – Crooked Cross by Sally Carson
Rarely does a book make such a splash 90 years after it was first published. Yet this is the case of Sally Carson’s masterpiece Crooked Cross. Reissued after it was rediscovered by Persephone Books this is a story of love, hate, tragedy and politics. It is told as subtly as such destruction can…
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Lynchings in the USA yet the ‘President’ targets non-existent ANTIFA ‘organisation’?
Lynchings are a thing of the past – how I wish that statement were fact-based. Considering the nature of politics and the degradation of social justice in the USA I cannot say with any confidence that it is. Terms such as “No foul play” suddenly take on a different meaning. When a loved one is…
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Ravenswood High School in East Palo Alto - a star of desegregation or a victim to flawed planning?
What does it mean to have a school in your locality? Why do people move to areas in cities that provide basic services like healthcare, education, employment, transportation, alimentation and entertainment? When these services are taken away, society dies, communities die. When Ravenswood High...
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The Senate Charade and the Fakeness of Farage – House Judiciary Committee Hearing on Free Speech
This entire hearing was performative politics with a heavy dose on the “performance”. There was no substance to it. Nobody truly gave a damn. They were playing to the cameras and pretending the entire time. People appeared, said what they said, made out they were angry, crossed a faded line or…
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Poetry - For the Fallen by Laurence Binyon
The only guarantees in life are death and taxes so the saying goes. We should add to that injustice as well for it has accompanied human civilisation since the dawn of our time. We see it today, in our technological, advanced and moral societies, where our supposed level of understanding has…
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Severance on Apple TV+ - A review
Severance as a TV show on Apple TV+ probably introduces itself. There is a link below to the original season’s trailer and I’d highly recommend you take that in as well if you are yet to watch the show. If you have already seen Severance, I’d love to hear from you about what you liked most or…
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Performance politics aimed at fuelling disharmony – surely people deserve better than Reform!
A year on from the Farage Riots and what have we learned? The basic truth is that rioting does nothing. It doesn’t exhibit patriotism. It doesn’t convince people that a movement based on hate will do anything other than eventually dissipate. It has shown that a vast number of the people on the...
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Palantir isn’t the problem. The system which believes that Palantir is the solution is the problem.
There has been a lot already written and said about Palantir but I wanted to get a few of my own thoughts in order on the subject. Below I have links to mainstream and independent reports on Palantir and its dangers as a company and its software Gotham in particular. We cannot allow our passive...
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What happens when debating guru Mehdi Hasan meets 20 angry right wingers?
On July 25th Jubilee released a show called Surrounded with Mehdi Hasan confronting 20 far right voices in the USA. You can see that episode on YouTube here: 1 Progressive vs 20 Far-Right Conservatives (ft. Mehdi Hasan) In this podcast Esheru joins me to give his thoughts on the Surrounded show…
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Short Stories - Man from the South by Roald Dahl
Roald Dahl wrote some of the most amazing children’s stories I’ve even read. My personal favourite of his is The Fantastic Mr Fox, but other classics such as James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The BFG and The Twits, not forgetting George’s Marvellous Medicine...
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Short Stories - A Slander by Anton Chekhov
Here is my narration of Checkov's short story called A Slander. How does the story’s protagonist interpret a joke, how much importance does he give it and how does he perceive the character that tells it? What webs the human mind spins when all is needed is calm, a sense of humour and little less...
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Relationships, experiences, places and thoughts. I speak with individuals I have met along the way, talking about personal stories, impressions, life and dreams. Society is the sum of ups and downs, some we share, most we never hear of. Here some voices rise above the rest to tell their unique tales and I thank you all for allowing me to listen and record your stories. Find me on Twitter @TwoandaMic1
Cover Art photo by Nassos.
Jingle (from episode 157) by Omish Njash.
HOSTED BY
Zak
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Frequently Asked Questions
How many episodes does The Left Mic - The Social Podcast have?
The Left Mic - The Social Podcast currently has 297 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is The Left Mic - The Social Podcast about?
Relationships, experiences, places and thoughts. I speak with individuals I have met along the way, talking about personal stories, impressions, life and dreams. Society is the sum of ups and downs, some we share, most we never hear of. Here some voices rise above the rest to tell their unique...
How often does The Left Mic - The Social Podcast release new episodes?
The Left Mic - The Social Podcast publishes regularly with 297 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
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You can listen to The Left Mic - The Social Podcast on PodParley by clicking any episode. We provide an embedded audio player for direct listening, and you can also subscribe via your preferred podcast app using the RSS feed.
Who hosts The Left Mic - The Social Podcast?
The Left Mic - The Social Podcast is created and hosted by Zak.
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