Listen to the chapter here!
[Salim Amin]
And that is what journalism was always about. It's supposed to be objective, unbiased reporting. Unfortunately, that has changed.
Young people today think what they see on social media is reality. We really do need to mobilize humanity. We are in an age where people want to get everything in 148 characters.
And you can't. Be good to people, be kind to people.
[Neil Pasricha]
Hey everybody, this is Neil Pasricha and welcome. Welcome back to the ninth year of 3 Books. Yes, it is January 3rd, 2026.
We are on the official first full moon of the year. The wolf moon, if you want to call it the wolf moon, that's fine. And it's the ninth year of the show all of a sudden.
I mean, we started in 2018, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26. And I want to invite you back into our third episode, chapter, our third chapter in our traveling to Africa series with Neil. All right.
So you remember chapter 154 with Peter Kimani, the incredible novelist that we hung out with down, down in Nairobi or the outskirts of Nairobi. And then we had chapter 155 upstairs in the bookstore, Nuria bookshop in Nairobi again. And since I only went to one city, well, two cities, if you include Mombasa in Africa, I've got my third chapter for all of you and it is going to be a doozy.
We are going to be hanging out with Salim Amin. But before we get into that, as you know, our show has no ads, no sponsors, no interruptions, no promotions, but we do have a community of three bookers that we think of as a very sacred force. It's one of three clubs that we have at the very end of the show.
We've got the end of the podcast club. We've got the cover to cover club. And of course we have the secret club, which is referenced in today's letter from Dan.
Hi, Neil. Thank you for sending me a reading light. And to all of those in the paper cutters club, I often forget about the club and carry no expectations.
Opening the package created a moment of surprise delight. Before opening it, my wife and I puzzled over the package. Did you order something?
No. Did you? I find it funny that anytime she realizes something has come from you, she says something like, Oh, it's from your Canadian friend.
I also just listened to chapter 153 with Carl Honoré and was thinking about your discussion about when a phone fits well into one's day and life versus when it is an unhelpful distraction. You also brought up AI during the end of the podcast club and commented on its over complimentary programming. I agree, but I've also found that an LLM, I use Clode, can be a wonderful companion to reading complex books.
I first tried it with Middlemarch last year, and I understood so much more by asking Clode questions. I've now done the same for Jane Austen and William Shakespeare book clubs organized by Henry Oliver. He's recommending I check out Henry Oliver.
I appreciate Clode's patience. No question is too dumb. If I misinterpret a passage, the correction is expressed without criticism and it lends itself to back and forth exchanges, exploring things like how the meaning of some words has shifted over time.
My questions would likely bore a human expert, but Clode doesn't express boredom. Well, I think I could do without Clode's sycophancy. I suspect the compliments like brilliant question or great close reading actually nudge me to appreciate the experience more.
I don't want Claude as a companion for everyday life, but kind words combined with deep expertise, enrich my reading of hard material. I get so much more out of books that I would without the help. Now I love Jane Austen's work.
I didn't before, and I want to read everything by Shakespeare. I would now consider Middlemarch a formative book, which I read at age 48 because of how this experience has opened a door to challenging works of art. Maybe Clode is my metaphorical reading light to tie this email into a theme.
So then of course I wrote back to Dan and he wrote back and said, I just got your response while waiting in line at Powell's bookstore in Portland, Oregon. I'm only in Portland for a day and I can't pass up the opportunity to go to Powell's. Your email plus Powell's was great book, loving synergy.
And then he said, I found a great use for my reading light. I've been recommending these reading lights. Now it's been in my book club guys.
You've seen it. And I did mail a reading light up to everybody who's in the paper cut club. What's the paper cut club.
Well, you're going to have to listen for clues. There's a phone number at the end. You got to get the secret word.
I can't say more about it. It is our analog only through the mail fan club for the show. And Dan says, I realize I don't need a reading light for reading in bed.
Since my wife has no trouble sleeping with my bedside reading lamp on, but then when the clocks were set back for an hour this weekend and it's dark and I walk home from work and I love to read while walking and I don't love reading on my phone. So winter usually means podcasts or music, but not anymore. I realized I can now walk and read with the book light.
People might think I'm crazy when they see me, which just brings a mischievous joy to the experience. I love that Dan. So book lights, reading lights, everybody.
You just stick it on the top of your book, walk down the street and you've got a little lamp while reading, by the way, I also really love reading while walking. I think I'm going to write that down as an awesome thing. Reading a book while walking.
I don't know what it is. It's, um, it's like you're in a place and in another place kind of more combined. It's like doubling the places you're in.
Right. And yeah, you have to be careful. And I recommend on the sidewalk, not the road, et cetera, et cetera.
But yeah, reading while walking is great. And I do recommend that by the way, because a good friend of mine, Jay Pinkerton, who was the editor at golden words newspaper at Queens university, he got hit by a car. And when I asked him, Jay, are you okay?
He's like, I'm okay. I broke a bone. I'm fine.
I was like, what were you doing? He's like, I was reading a book while crossing the street. So you have to be careful a little bit.
All right. Let's get back into Nairobi. We are going to hang out in the studio, the office, uh, The Mr. Byrne sized office or really kind of like almost like a museum of Salim. I mean, who is the shepherd or the CEO of camera picks? What is camera picks? Well, that was the company started by his dad, Mohammed.
I mean, or Mo I mean, also known as the man who moved the world. I'm holding up the book by Bob Smith. This is a guy who.
You know, Saved 8 million lives by photographing the, um, Ethiopian famine. His photos were the spark that created, um, you know, the Bob Geldof concert that everybody knows about live aid. And he really kind of helped bring light to the dark continent over, you know, a number of years of far too short life.
He was sadly killed. And, uh, a plane that was hijacked and somewhat apropos cause he was a photo journalist. The hijacking was filmed, including the crash by newlyweds on a beach in South Africa.
When the plane crashed. It's a, it's a, it's a crazy story. We're going to hear more about that.
These are the, his, he had one child and his child is still alive. And we met up with his son in Nairobi. And Salim is a fascinating guy of his own, right?
He is, he is at home taking care of his aging mother. Who's in her nineties, but he himself is a documentary maker, producer, author. He's a talk show host.
He has written two books, including one that I'm holding up right now called Kenya through my father's eyes and incredible photo journalist book with just the photos are just really stunning, you know, like lions and boxers and, you know, um, uh, African dictators being sworn in at elaborate ceremonies. And he also made the film Mo and me, the sound man returned to quorum stand together as one. Those are other films he's made, but Mo and me of course is the one about his dad.
He's been published in time magazine, uh, including when he was a very young child, he has a degree in journalism. He's had his own talk show called the scoop. And, uh, I should mention by the way, also that the documentary Mo and me won 15 awards, including a bunch of awards for best documentary.
If you want to see it. And I did watch it before interviewing him. Uh, it's a really incredible piece.
Um, I kind of like drove out of the hotel in Nairobi. Um, you know, via Uber. And when you get picked up at an Uber in a Nairobi hotel, it's a big deal.
Like they have, every car has to have all the doors open, all the trunks open. They have dogs like searching and smelling the cars. They have these giant concrete barriers that are lifted up that they have to come down.
So like no car can kind of like ram up to the, to the front. There's metal detectors going in and out of the hotel. Let's just like to leave the hotel.
And then, you know, we dropped, we're driving past, like, you know, busy streets, um, slum areas. And we kind of make a left turn and you can sort of see Nairobi gentrifying here. There's a little kind of little luxury condos type thing coming up, but in a little hidden pocket, there is the offices of camera picks.
And so I go up the stairs in the office. I'm, you know, register. I go through and I meet the wonderful kind, magnamious, gregarious Salim, who I have an instant heart connection with.
It feels like we're old friends and we just have a really powerful conversation talking about a ton of things around kind of injustice, humanity. you know, he has a lot of strong statements about, well, they, they really aren't strong, but they sound strong today. I don't want to kind of take too much away from it, but you'll see here.
It's a really fascinating conversation. I'm really excited to kind of welcome him onto three books to share his work, to share the kind of memory and homage and, and kind of legacy that his father created as well through this conversation, our third and final and our series traveling to Africa. I hope one of many traveling around the world series.
I hope you've enjoyed this. Let's jump into the conversation now. Good morning.
How are you? You know, I'm usually the one that says like, ah, I hit report. I like how you are.
You're, you're various persons. I, as soon as I turned, you started it off, which I like, which I like. I feel like I'm in a museum by the way.
[Salim Amin]
I feel, I'm glad you're in liking the space. It is a little bit of a, a sort of a, um, uh, homage, a museum of, uh, you know, interesting objects, artifacts that kind of defined, you know, my past and my father's life.
[Neil Pasricha]
Your past, your father's life. We're in, would you call this, would you refer to this room as a studio? No, it's my office.
[Salim Amin]
I mean, it's my office, but it's, it doubles up as a studio.
[Neil Pasricha]
It's like a Mr. Burns office. It's like, you know, that Simpsons office where it's like, this is, people can't see if you're watching a video. It goes right down.
There's like a huge desk. And, and just so people know what I'm looking at, I see many, many old cameras. Okay.
I see framed things on the walls, which clearly have a manner of, that's why I said museum. There is a bionic arm, which we're going to talk about. There is like, kind of like a gold record, like you kind of see in like a recording studio.
There's all kinds of awards. There is hats, like down, you could probably see this if you're watching on YouTube. There's like a dictator's hat.
Yes. Which, which dictator?
[Salim Amin]
Bengistu Halimaryam of Ethiopia.
[Neil Pasricha]
Ethiopia.
[Salim Amin]
Who ruled the country from, from 90, from the early, early seventies, mid seventies, all the way to 91 when he was overthrown. And somebody grabbed his hat. Well, my dad got his hat because he was in there when they, when they overthrew him.
Oh. He went in with the rebel armies. He did.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah. Oh my gosh. Okay.
We got lots of, there's a map over on the wall that people can't see. And obviously most people on our show, just so you know, I'm starting to videotape. Yeah.
Yeah. I'm starting to put them on YouTube. Yeah.
Good idea. But the vast majority of our audience is still audio only. They're, they're at the gym.
They're on a long walk with the dog. They, you know, and so I try to like visually describe the scene. There's a map of the world upside down and Africa is in the center.
The writing is right side up. So you've got Africa in the center of the world and all 55 African countries labeled.
[Salim Amin]
Yeah. And the idea of that map, it was given to me as a present by my, my production partner in the U S uh, Chip Duncan. So Chip gave it to me and he basically said, you know, who said the world should be the way it is, you know, on a map.
Why isn't it, you know, the other way around? Who decided that?
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah.
[Salim Amin]
So nevermind putting what country.
[Neil Pasricha]
Exactly.
[Salim Amin]
Exactly. You know, he said, this is a, you know, this is a way to, to say that not everything is the right way up. Yes.
You know, the world can sometimes be the other way around.
[Neil Pasricha]
If you're flying in outer space, you know, you see things from a different angle. Yeah. There are little statues or lots of other cameras.
There's a whole kind of shelf behind us with books, lots of old books, which I love. We are sitting on a giant Brown leather couch. I'm padding it now here.
I've got my clipboard, I've got books with me. There's like a, like a little metal car, like a, like a safari car.
[Salim Amin]
So yeah, this was a Land Rover that was, was built by blind artisans in, in Nakuru. So it says that they, they, Nakuru is a little bit down near Pasna. I've actually going up towards the lakes.
It's, it's in Kenya. In Kenya. Yes.
And these are, you know, somebody, you know, blind artisans made a realistic Land Rover.
[Neil Pasricha]
Just from touch and feel. Yeah. It's like the size of a turtle. Like it's pretty big. Yeah.
And there's, and the bionic arm, just before we hit record, you said NASA made that.
[Salim Amin]
NASA designed that. Designed that. It was built in a, in a lab in Youngstown, Ohio.
Um, but it was designed, it was myoelectrics designed by NASA. Because when he lost his arm, he was at that time, the most famous cameraman in the world.
[Neil Pasricha]
I, I saw, I saw a note saying your dad had his photos published in every single newspaper in the whole world. I mean, that level of virality is not attainable today.
[Salim Amin]
In spite of the technology being available.
[Neil Pasricha]
You've been with it. It's like, but even like a friend of mine is Mel Robbins and she's, you know, yes, she's on Jimmy Fallon now and she's on Stephen Colbert and she's on Seth Meyers and she, her book's been number one forever and she's got the more followers on Instagram ever. But if I went to a newspaper in Jakarta, I don't think I'd see her face.
Do you know what I'm saying? Like that level of everywhere omnipresence is just, it's not attainable because the world is so fragmented.
[Salim Amin]
And given where he came from and his background and his history, you know, he achieved a lot in a very short life. Um, your dad was born what year? He was born in 1943.
And, and, and where? In Nairobi. He was born, but his parents were from where?
His parents were from Jalandhar at that time was, you know, was India, no partition. British ruled India.
[Neil Pasricha]
British ruled India.
[Salim Amin]
And they were born in like the 1910s? I would say probably, no, probably earlier than that, probably late, late 1800s. Um, and my grandfather then came to East Africa to build a railway, like many, like many Asians.
Oh, it's a railway. You know, he was a Mason. Um, he was a Mason and, and so he was brought to build, to build a railway, um, here.
So posted first in Nairobi. Yeah. And then, um, when my father was born here and, and then my grandfather was kind of moved around.
So my dad and his siblings were born in various parts of East Africa.
[Neil Pasricha]
So your grandparents on your dad's side, cause we're going to talk a little bit about your dad. We're going to talk about you. One of your former books, of course, is about your dad.
Um, it's called Mo, M-O, the story of Muhammad Amin, A-M-I-N by Brian Tetley, T-E-T-L-E-Y published in 1988 by Moonstone books, which I believe you read when you were like 15. Maybe it was published in 1985 then. I might have got the wrong pub date.
[Salim Amin]
Maybe, maybe, uh, maybe it was 15 or 16.
[Neil Pasricha]
I want listeners to know like we're leading into your dad because it's a formative book because you read it very young, but also because, um, we're, we're sitting in the offices in Nairobi of CameraPix. Yes. C-A-M-E-R-A-P-I-X, a company founded by your dad.
Yes. In the year. 1963.
1963. But just going back a little bit, because British ruled Kenya and British ruled India were, you know, part of the British empire. And India wasn't India yet.
I mean, it wasn't an independent country. That was not until 1947. And then pretty quickly after they were like, oh shit, we got to give a chunk of this to Pakistan for the Muslims.
Like how much after that was that like a year?
[Salim Amin]
Yeah. That, that, no, no, I mean, 47 was when partition happened, right? So, so I think independence was independence in inverted commas, you know, was, was, was sort of talked about from 44 onwards.
But 47 is when they celebrate independence from. For India. For both India and Pakistan.
[Neil Pasricha]
Oh, so the same year.
[Salim Amin]
Yeah, same year. So then Pakistan.
[Neil Pasricha]
I'm a little rusty. It wasn't like India was a country and then they split Pakistan off. It was like they did them both at the same time.
[Salim Amin]
They did them both. That was when the British kind of overnight disappeared. But I am again, divide and rule was the British is, you know, the, the, the modus operandi globally.
And that's what they did here. You know, splitting up all the countries in East and Central Africa, you know, along borders that were drawn up in Europe by people who had never set foot on the continent. And, and India and Pakistan was purely a divide and rule.
I mean, can you imagine India now what kind of a powerhouse it would be if it had never been partitioned and never happened? You know, so these are, these are some of the things that I think, sadly, we're paying the price for that now. Look at Gaza and, and, and Israel, you know, the British, the British had no right to give any of that land to, to Israel, you know, the right to create.
It wasn't their land to give, you know, it wasn't their land to give at all.
[Neil Pasricha]
You know, and this is, this is the tragedy of, of the time they gave it in 1948, it was called what? The entire. It was Palestine.
Palestine. It was Palestine. And they took a chunk of Palestine or all of Palestine.
[Salim Amin]
I mean, you know, first they came here, they, you know, they were looking at Uganda as a place to settle the Jews after the second world war. And I think they found that it's a little bit too wild for them. Then they tried Kenya and that didn't work.
And again, maybe just too sort of wild for them to, to, to, to settle in. And then, you know, the, the Holy land is, there's a, we seem to be the right thing to do, but who's under whose right was it, you know? And the Palestinians welcomed them with open arms because they felt these were, you know, their brothers and sisters who had suffered a pressure, tremendously, you know, in, in the Holocaust and, and, and, and so they welcomed them and look where we are now.
[Neil Pasricha]
The welcome mat has been lost since pulled away. It's been, yeah. And it's not, it's not, it's, it's, you know, Netanyahu on TV this morning at the hotel gym here in Nairobi, the, the quote on CNN.
And I said to the guy in the gym, I was like, can you turn off the news please? And then they put on like, this dance music. You would know it.
It's like, you know, like a Kenyan DJ with like eight people just dancing behind them the whole time. Bag. Yeah.
B-A-G. Okay. You know, so that was, that changed the vibe in the gym.
But the headline on CNN was Netanyahu declares independent Palestinian state, quote unquote, sheer madness.
[Salim Amin]
Yeah. I mean, it really, it's, you know, I sometimes wake up in the morning and I discussed this with, with my wife, Rizana with, with our daughters. And we all think, well, have we gone mad?
You know, are we just, you know, because it's insanity. What is happening in the world at the moment is absolutely insane.
[Neil Pasricha]
Watching it happen.
[Salim Amin]
You know, whether it's still happening, the Middle East is a disaster that, you know, it's a genocide. It's a slaughter. What's happening in the U S it's just, I mean, you know, Trump wants to go and invade Portland, Oregon, for God's sake.
You know, I mean, basically any blue state, any blue state, you know, that seems to be doing fine. You know, he wants to put his troops in, but it's just the, the, how split the world is and how, how, you know, how polarized we've become. It's, it's, it's shocking.
[Neil Pasricha]
It's shocking. And I just recently read Autocracy Inc by Anne Applebaum. She's a New York, sorry, an Atlantic staff writer who talks about the rise of autocracy.
And she says this line in the near the beginning of the book, which really stuck with me, which is during Arab spring, like the advent of Facebook, kind of creating like fervent movements for democracy that like helped to originally overthrow the then leader of Egypt, whose name I forgot.
[Salim Amin]
it was not Sisi came in off that it was, there was the, it was the Islamic government.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah.
[Salim Amin]
But I can't remember.
[Neil Pasricha]
It's okay. She, she wrote, and I would remember it after the show was recorded. But, but she says, you know, the assumption was that democracy would take over autocracy.
And actually the reverse has happened. That autocracy has taken over democracy because when you have centralized technology and centralized powers, you can actually more easily retain super extreme power and centralized positions. You can weaponize justice.
Like he's just, like he's doing with Trump is doing it. Put James Comey under arrest.
[Salim Amin]
A guy who actually made him president the first time around who basically facilitated it and made it easier for him to become president because the Comey report, because of Hillary Clinton's, uh, you know, uh, email, uh, you, when you look back now, you think you look and see what is happening now. And you look back at, you know, emails being sent from a private email address. You think, my God, was that really what, you know, what was so bad at the time when you see the kind of injustice that is being done now.
And, and it's, it's just crazy.
[Neil Pasricha]
I love your eyes right now. Cause they're glistening and you're fervent and you're a passionate. No, because you have energy, you have energy and you have, your dad is from a Muslim family and pre partition colonial British India, uh, which became part of Pakistan when he came over here in 1960.
[Salim Amin]
There would be sort of late, it would be sort of mid late 40, sorry, early 40s.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, early 40s. Then your dad sort of had a secret wedding. Or at least it was a wedding under secrecy as I understand it.
Marrying your mom because she's from a different religion.
[Salim Amin]
She was Ismaili. Ismaili. Yeah.
And he, and it was not acceptable in that.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah. And Ismaili, for those that don't know, how would you describe it?
[Salim Amin]
Well, I guess followers of the Al-Qa'an. Um, so it's a subsect of, of the Muslims, like the Shias, like the, you know, other, they're part of the Shia sect. Um, uh, but followers of the Al-Qa'an.
So, you know, there's all these kind of split. 10, 15 million around the world.
[Neil Pasricha]
Uh, heavily settled originally in East Africa. Now, obviously diaspora around the world.
[Salim Amin]
Big in Canada. Huge in Canada. And now Portugal as well.
[Neil Pasricha]
My wonderful chiropractor phase. Is, Is, Is, Ismaili. Yeah, Ismaili, wonderful people.
Yeah. Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, by the way, for those that may be listening in Toronto or visiting Toronto, it's, uh, like a breathtaking masterpiece.
[Salim Amin]
Worth seeing for sure.
[Neil Pasricha]
You've been? Yes. Oh, amazing.
[Salim Amin]
it's beautiful.
[Neil Pasricha]
Oh, this is great.
[Salim Amin]
What the Al-Qa'an has done, I mean, we're going off topic here, but what the Al-Qa'an has done, the, the, the previous Al-Qa'an who just passed away, I mean, quite incredible. The kind of work that they've done in, in, um, uh, sort of places in, in Southeast Asia. Hope like behavior.
Bless Africa.
[Neil Pasricha]
We're building hospitals, building schools.
[Salim Amin]
Universities, education, health. Yeah.
[Neil Pasricha]
Novelists, Kenya Bay, and he is a professor at the Al-Qa'an University.
[Salim Amin]
That's right. He teaches in the, in the journalism department of the graduate school of media studies. Um, and, uh, no, it's, it's, it's quite a phenomenal story.
Um, but yeah, so it was back then. Yeah. Being a photographer first was not a profession, not considered a profession.
So my grandfather was, you know, extremely disappointed in my father, the wayward artists. Yes. You know, Because as like most South Asian families, you had to be doctor, accountant, lawyer.
That hasn't changed. That has nothing changed. That has not changed.
But back in those days, it was even worse.
[Neil Pasricha]
I still feel this pressure. I'm 46 years old. My dad still thinks I have a shot at men's middle.
[Salim Amin]
And you do. You're never too old.
[Neil Pasricha]
I could go to gay men's.
[Salim Amin]
Never too old. Never too old to learn. So they started off on the wrong footing.
My grandfather then, as soon as his term with building the railway was over, there was no doubt in his mind that he was going to go back to what was Pakistan at that time. But he was going to go back and insisted that my father follow him and that never was going to happen. Because dad had already started photographing and getting into photography and he was sort of 17, 18 years old at this point and decided that he was never going to go back.
[Neil Pasricha]
And your dad, for those that don't know, and Mohammed Amin was, as you have said already, the world's most prominent photographer, the world. And he went to Zanzibar. He was young, in his 20s, right?
[Salim Amin]
Yes, early 20s.
[Neil Pasricha]
And he took photographs of something you weren't supposed to take pictures of.
[Salim Amin]
Yeah. He stumbled, but using common sense, stumbled across a Soviet training camp. A Soviet training camp.
Training Zanzibar soldiers and building a missile base on Zanzibar. Now, this is at the height of the Cold War.
[Neil Pasricha]
Year approximately?
[Salim Amin]
The year was, I would say, 60, 67. Okay. 67.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, yeah.
[Salim Amin]
So we're like halfway between. The Cuban Missile Crisis was coming up. And so he stumbled and photographed and filmed the Soviet and East German advisors, trainings of Zanzibar troops.
They got him. No, they got him afterwards. And that footage went around the world.
Viral. It went around the world. It was used by Kennedy to negotiate with Khrushchev over the Cuban Missile Crisis because he had evidence that Khrushchev was denying that the Soviets had any kind of interest in Zanzibar or were building anything there.
So this was a vital piece of evidence that was used to negotiate the Cuban Missile Crisis. And so the KGB then, of course, found out who had shot this footage. And dad didn't know this, it's all happening behind the scenes.
And then he went back to Zanzibar to cover the visit of Anwar Sadat, the Egyptian president at the time, was a state visit. So it was a normal assignment just to go and cover that. And so he went back to Zanzibar for that and the KGB picked him up at the airport and locked him up in Quilombo Migu prison, which at that time was one of the most notorious prisons.
And he was tortured and beaten for a month. Tortured for all sorts of things. I mean, they whipped him and they used sort of electrical, all that kind of ancient torture stuff.
[Neil Pasricha]
Ancient torture in the 1960s at a Soviet prison in Zanzibar where he came out after 28 days, he had lost 28 pounds.
[Salim Amin]
Yeah, a pound a day pretty much. Pound a day. Yeah.
And he's 22 years old at this point.
[Neil Pasricha]
Survived, but also thrived after that.
[Salim Amin]
Well, it was his baptism of fire. I think he could have at that point chucked it all in and said, so would I.
[Neil Pasricha]
I don't think I would have been like, you know what, I'm going to go to Ethiopia and shoot the famine now.
[Salim Amin]
No, it was his baptism of fire and he could have given up. I think his whole family told him to give it up, but it just hardened him. It forged him.
[Neil Pasricha]
Why do you think that happened?
[Salim Amin]
I think he just...
[Neil Pasricha]
You and I both just said, if we were tortured for 28 days...
[Salim Amin]
I would have given it up in a second.
[Neil Pasricha]
I would have gone undercover and gone right away.
[Salim Amin]
But I think he realized that... So he was deported to Kenya, you know, that was one of the conditions of his release. And I think he realized that, you know, this is the power that he has with this camera to tell people's stories that, you know, the voiceless is something that I think motivated and moved him.
And I think he realized that he was able to do this. And he also got a... You know, it wasn't purely, you know, charitable.
This was also, you know, it was also a very lucrative business because... There were not many people operating in this part of the world at that time. You sell the photos to Reuters or something.
And to multiple agencies. You know, you can... It became quite lucrative if you were able to get into places that nobody else was.
And he was very, very good at that. He may not have been the best, technically the best photographer or cameraman or photojournalist, but he could get into places that nobody else could.
[Neil Pasricha]
Like that French coronation. What was that about?
[Salim Amin]
Oh, Bukasa. Emperor Bukasa.
[Neil Pasricha]
Tell us a couple of stories about how he got into places or what places he got into. And then also, I'm curious, like, how do you get into... How is he doing this?
[Salim Amin]
So I mean, you know, again, at the time...
[Neil Pasricha]
For those of you that don't know, he kind of looks like, if you can picture, like... He looks a bit like Salman Rushdie kind of vibe.
[Salim Amin]
Yeah.
[Neil Pasricha]
You know, he's got like glasses, the beard.
[Salim Amin]
The goatee. The goatee.
[Neil Pasricha]
And he's got this...
[Salim Amin]
Yeah, balding.
[Neil Pasricha]
I don't mean to say that, but I'm just trying to give people like an image. We could show an image on screen for those on YouTube. But for those listening, it's like, picture a guy who looks kind of like that.
He's in his 20s and his 30s. Tell us some places he got into. I mean, how did he...
[Salim Amin]
You know, some of the world exclusives that he got, when he came to Kenya, he was obviously starting up. He had to start anew. And it was a new territory, a new country for him.
But a few months after he came, he moved to Kenya. His office was in downtown Nairobi at that time. And a building or so down the street was a chemist pharmacy.
And he was in the office as he was pretty much 24-7. He spent most of his time in the office. This was a Saturday afternoon.
And he hears a gunshot and, you know, just instinctively grabs his cameras and goes down. And there's the assassination of Tom Boyer, who was touted to be Kenya's next president after Jomo Kenyatta. Tom Boyer was a very prominent minister.
One of the architects of the airlift that took Kenyans to the US to study Barack Obama's father was one of the recipients of that airlift that Boyer did with the Kennedys, with Bobby Kennedy in particular and JFK. And so he was a very prominent politician. He was just getting medicines from this pharmacy.
And a gunman assassinated him. From the government. Well, nobody knows.
I mean, it's questionable.
[Neil Pasricha]
Somebody wanted him out of the way.
[Salim Amin]
Because Boyer was a Luo. And Kenyatta, the ruling party at that time, was a majority Kikuyu. So you're talking about tribes names?
Tribal names, yes. So tribalism is one of the serious problems we have on this continent, not just in Kenya, but across the continent.
[Neil Pasricha]
Tribalism is defined as?
[Salim Amin]
You know, people of different tribes that can't really kind of seem to get... They all want power. And, you know, whether it's the Hutus and the Tutsis in Rwanda that led to one of the darkest genocides in our history.
Or it was, you know, the Luo and Kikuyu tribes in Kenya that led to the post-election violence here in 2007. And one of your previous guests.
[Neil Pasricha]
Boniface Malengi, Chapter 104, the person who connected us, who I love, Boniface.
[Salim Amin]
Yes, you know, he made his name as a photojournalist covering the post-election violence. And so this is where that post-election violence stems from, is from these incidences that happened in the 60s, you know, where tribalism was never addressed. The issues were never addressed.
And they keep coming back to bite us in every election cycle.
[Neil Pasricha]
Although I hear that for Boniface's 2027 election campaign, in talking to his people, they're not bringing tribalism into the race.
[Salim Amin]
The young people now, this generation now, the Gen Zs and others don't seem to be paying much attention to tribalism, which is good. Yeah. And hopefully that'll be...
It just takes time to work through these things.
[Neil Pasricha]
It does.
[Salim Amin]
But every conflict in the world has got something to do with tribalism, whether it's religious differences, or it's ethnicity, or it's color. These are all forms of tribalism or of prejudice in some way, shape, or form. So yes, so Tom Boyer, so he was there with his cameras immediately after Mboya was shot.
Got a picture of the dead body. Filmed and photographed the doctors in the pharmacy trying to revive him. The ambulance company went into the ambulance with them.
He just walked in. Well, you know, the ambulance driver was like, you know, panicking. Yeah, it's an emergency.
He told him where to go, which hospital to take him to. Doctors are trying to revive Mboya inside the ambulance. Then at Nairobi Hospital.
He was there photographing and filming every single...
[Neil Pasricha]
And it sounds like he's also helpful on the scene.
[Salim Amin]
He was also helpful. He even went to hide Mboya's body because there was a mass of people that came to the hospital to try and get his body out. Wow.
Again, because they felt that he was such a hero. So they wanted to come and claim the body. And he helped to hide it.
With the doctors, they went and hid it in some other room in the hospital so people couldn't find him. You know, but it was a massive story.
[Neil Pasricha]
Being helpful is one tool for getting into places.
[Salim Amin]
It was a massive, massive story. Of course, of course. And those pictures still resonate today.
And then, you know, you mentioned the coronation of Jean Bidel Bukassa, who was the so-called emperor of the Central African Republic. You know, small little tin pot country.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, small. Give us a little bit of tiny bit of context on this.
[Salim Amin]
So the Central African Republic is in Central Africa. It's a little, little country. And Bukassa wanted to be crowned as emperor.
This is the year...
[Neil Pasricha]
This would be sort of early 70s. Okay, now we're in the early 70s. You're not in his 30s now, maybe?
[Salim Amin]
Now he's in his, yeah, sort of his late 20s, early 30s. And there's this coronation that's going to happen that's being styled around the coronation of Napoleon. Okay.
But this is a country...
[Neil Pasricha]
Is this like a bribery coronation? Is this one of those...
[Salim Amin]
No, no, no. This is a country that basically Bukassa blew a quarter of his country's national budget on this one event.
[Neil Pasricha]
It's kind of like Trump's heading that way.
[Salim Amin]
I would completely agree with you.
[Neil Pasricha]
But when you put posters in every building and you make parades on your birthday, you are spending national money in your honor. Yes, absolutely. Whether that's 0.1% of the budget or then 1% of the budget, this guy...
So we're talking extreme wealth inequality, extreme dictatorship, extreme autocracy. Then at that point, we still have... Just so people watching this can have a rule of thumb, it's 25% of your country's budget you spent on your birthday party on coronation by becoming king, right?
And then do tell, they had an official deal with some photo outlet.
[Salim Amin]
Well, yeah. So it was the French because it was a French colony, a former French colony. The French had obviously got exclusive rights, negotiated exclusive rights to film this.
And dad, sitting in Nairobi, was like, bugger this. I'm not going to... This is my patch.
I'm going to go and see this. So they do... Him and a correspondent make some inquiries and they realize that they're told, yes, you come there, but you have to be properly dressed in a morning suit with the top hat and tails and everything.
Otherwise, they will cut off your ears when you arrive. So they don't have this attire. So they go to the local theater company here and they rent this morning suit and top hat.
As if they're attendees. And so they change on the plane so that when they land, they're doing this. And it's like 40, 45 degrees Celsius, right?
Which is over 100 and something degrees Fahrenheit.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah. Double it by 30.
[Salim Amin]
Yeah.
[Neil Pasricha]
It's 120.
[Salim Amin]
So it's sweltering hot. And they don't have visas or anything. They haven't got any visas.
But the immigration guys are laughing so much because they're sweating and they're laughing so much they just stamp their passports and let them in. So then they come to the church. They don't have anywhere to stay.
Everything's booked out. Small little town. So they go and sleep in the church where the coronation is going to happen.
And obviously, security is not like it was, like it is now. It was not like that then. And so they sleep in the church.
And the next morning, everyone's getting prepared. And because they're so well-dressed, the French media assumed that they were just guests, amateurs taking. It's only when a little bit later on, they realize, shit, this guy's a professional photographer.
[Neil Pasricha]
He has like six cameras hanging from his back.
[Salim Amin]
He was kind of hiding them. And then he kind of took them out when they knew the emperor was on his way or Bokassa was on his way. And there was a fight.
The French media started, you know, starting a fight. Like punching each other. And so he just kicked over their cameras.
They had set up their cameras on tripods. So he just kicked all the cameras over. And so all their cameras, camera equipment shattered on the ground.
And as this ruckus was going on, the bugle sounded and Bokassa entered the church. And I just went right up the red carpet, right in front of Bokassa, wide angle lens, and walking backwards, photographing the emperor coming in, in all his regalia and his crown.
[Neil Pasricha]
He must have had a crown, like a lion's crown or something.
[Salim Amin]
He had jewels and all sorts of, exactly like Napoleon. And he had a throne set up and built with an eagle, you know, beautiful pictures. And he ended up getting the only images of that.
So these are some of the things that, you know, getting into Idi Amin's Uganda, you know, again, Tells this story now.
[Neil Pasricha]
Now what you're, you know, He's here.
[Salim Amin]
This is now early 70s. And there's been a military coup in Uganda. This army general, you know, called Idi Amin has taken over.
But there's, you know, the press corps is all sitting in Nairobi because this was always the base for the foreign correspondents. So he calls, he has a black book of contacts. So he calls up a state house in Kampala and the operator picks it up.
And, you know, he's like, you know, How is the capital of Uganda? Kampala is the capital of Uganda. Uganda's touching Kenya.
It's the bordering East African community, Tanzania and Kenya. And the operator picks it up. And, you know, that just says, can I speak to General Amin?
And the operator is like, well, who are you? And so without thinking, he says, well, my name is Muhammad Amin. And the operator put him directly through to Idi.
[Neil Pasricha]
Oh my God.
[Salim Amin]
Because I think the operator assumed he's a relative.
[Neil Pasricha]
So for those that have seen the movie, The Last King of Scotland starring Forest Whitaker, this is one of the most tyrannical dictators of human history. And you just call him on the phone.
[Salim Amin]
Well, you call state house. And like I said, this operator assumed that he was a family member, must be a brother or a cousin because he had the law. And that didn't put two and two together.
It didn't think that way. When the guy said, who are you?
[Neil Pasricha]
It's a common last name.
[Salim Amin]
It is, I mean, it's not common-ish. I mean, I've heard of it. Muslims, Idi was a Muslim as well.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah. And so Amin is- But this is like, it's not like you'd never heard it before.
[Salim Amin]
No, but the operator in that moment must have thought, bloody hell, this is a new president has come in. As a relative, I must put him straight through to the general. And Idi was very good.
And dad explained, I'm a journalist in Kenya. I'd like to come and film your triumph.
[Speaker 4]
Complimentary.
[Salim Amin]
You know, I'll always have to- So he knew he wanted to get on the right side of Idi. And Idi was, you know, loved the publicity, obviously wanted to recover- But he never let any other people in. And he just said, give me the details of your plane, your flight number, and I will meet you at the airport.
In Entebbe, which is where the airport is in Uganda. And the city where the airport is. And sure enough, he was there on the runway when they came and drove them himself around Kampala to say, you see how happy my people are that I've taken over.
And, you know, this is an example of using your contacts, but then also making the most of the situation that you're in and taking advantage once you get in of, you know, saying and doing the right things. And this is where the experience of being an African in Africa is something that foreign correspondents will have, always had difficulty doing it. The people that came to parachute in for a story and leave, they didn't make those kind of connections and contacts and, you know, didn't know the lay of the land.
[Neil Pasricha]
Relationship and networking. There's ingratiation, which we've heard, like just like, I want to talk about your triumph. Yeah.
There's also like, and I'm just speculating here because you're also a photojournalist and your dad's a photojournalist and our mutual friend Boniface Mwangi is a photojournalist. There's almost like a moral ambivalence that you have to hold because, and to the point of like not expressing a view, what I'm saying is, if you were going to try to capture inside Netanyahu's house right now or inside the Hamas facility, you would need to hold your personal viewpoints deeply in check.
[Salim Amin]
And that is what journalism was always about. It's supposed to be objective, unbiased reporting. Unfortunately, that has changed.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, that's...
[Salim Amin]
That has changed completely over the last...
[Neil Pasricha]
There is no such thing anymore.
[Salim Amin]
Doesn't exist anymore.
[Neil Pasricha]
What we consider, when I grew up, what we considered the CBC, Canadian Broadcast Corporation, similar to the KBC or the BBC. Well, this was considered like the most, they don't have advertisements, it's from the government.
[Salim Amin]
The BBC was the same.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah.
[Salim Amin]
You know, NBC, ABC, CBS.
[Neil Pasricha]
These were considered like objective, straightforward, blunt.
[Salim Amin]
Absolutely.
[Neil Pasricha]
The guy on the 10 o'clock news isn't smiling or frowning. You know.
[Salim Amin]
They just said it as it was. Said it, say it as it is. And then it was up to you as the viewer to decide your opinion on that piece.
Nowadays, unfortunately, I think, unfortunately, journalists have become more important than the story, in many cases. The personalities have become more important than the actual people that they're reporting.
[Neil Pasricha]
You gotta look good. How's your Instagram story? How many followers do you have on your sub stack?
How many readers do you have? And then we get this incredible fragmentation, which is so difficult to follow. My poor dad is eight years old.
I mean, I grew up with him reading the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail, two newspapers a day. I'm begging him to get a newspaper subscription again. I get everything I need on Apple News.
I'm like, Dad, Apple News is an algorithm. It's run by the largest technology company in the world that owns more money than the top 100 companies in Europe. You trust them to tell you what to read?
That's what you think about. So then my dad, my 80-year-old father, who's a brilliant man, he will come up to me and he'll say, oh, did you hear Taylor Swift got engaged?
[Salim Amin]
But that's what his algorithm is giving him, right? Exactly.
[Neil Pasricha]
This is the guy that used to tell me what was going on in the stock market. And I love my dad. It's not my dad's fault.
It's just that as our brains get a little bit more acceptable.
[Salim Amin]
Young people today think what they see on social media is reality. That if you read it on X or you see it on Instagram or on TikTok, Facebook maybe is a different generation. But what you see on social media is fact rather than saying this is somebody's viewpoint.
Go and check with three or four. If I want to know the reality behind a news story or a breaking news story or any event, I will have to watch four or five different channels. That's exhausting.
It's completely exhausting. Read three or four different newspapers.
[Neil Pasricha]
And it's such a level of intellectual discernment that is not taught anymore and it's very difficult to parse.
[Salim Amin]
We are in an age where people want to get everything in 148 characters.
[Neil Pasricha]
I saw on Twitter, and I refuse to call it X, I just think Twitter is a far better name, and a post on X is so inferior to a tweet on Twitter. So it's Twitter to me style. I saw on Twitter last week a shot of Alkaraz, the number one ranked men's tennis player, not the big open, but whatever, the junior tour, falling over, grabbing his leg and screaming in pain.
And the person hovered over their thing and their thing said something legit. It sounded legit. They had a lot of followers.
Oh no, Alkaraz is down with severe pain. Achilles? So I thought, oh my gosh, poor Alkaraz.
He snapped his Achilles. Then later in the day, I'm walking through an airport or something, and I see in the corner of the screen, Alkaraz...
[Salim Amin]
16262, I remember that day.
[Neil Pasricha]
I was like, wait, I finally snapped his Achilles. And I Google it and it's like, there's no mention of this anywhere. It's like he fell down for a second.
[Salim Amin]
But I saw... He kind of twisted his ankle.
[Neil Pasricha]
I thought for sure it was like... Because I saw that on Twitter. And it looked like from a good source.
It had a lot of followers. It had the photo evidence. I knew he was playing that day.
He was wearing the new purple clothes with the blonde hair. I was like, this is a fresh video. It passed through my brain like it was a fact.
[Salim Amin]
But it did happen and it was a fact, but it wasn't Achilles. It was basically he twisted his ankle. But it's that split second when you capture something that then is blown out of proportion.
We seem to do that a lot. We seem to do that a lot with context. Now, there is no context.
And this is what journalism and photojournalism in particular... Now, I keep telling young people when I have a chance to speak to people or lecture at universities, the chances of a photojournalist, a real photojournalist being the first person at a breaking news story with the first pictures is like winning the lottery. Those are the odds.
Because there will always be somebody with a mobile phone that will capture the bomb blast, the car accident, plane crash, whatever it is, train crash, whatever it might be. So our job now has changed from being the bearer of the news to providing context and background and reality and giving people a historical look at why this incident happened, what is the context behind it, and then where are we going to go in the future rather than just that one snapshot.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah, 100%. And how both infuriating that must be for those that have practiced in the craft and skill of true photojournalism and how also worrisome it is for those like me who are slightly paranoid about living in a panopticon, like a surveillance state where nothing can happen without everyone having a film of it. Doesn't that make you think that you're always on tape?
The art hall was on tape. I could walk out of this place. I could go to my hotel.
I'm being film tracks followed the whole time. It's like crazy. That's like people would just accept that this is okay.
[Salim Amin]
Yeah, no, it worries the hell out of me that we have no privacy, whether it's other people filming you or it's the CCTV coverage that seems to be everywhere on most city streets. This is one of the good things about living in Africa is that we don't have that kind of coverage.
[Neil Pasricha]
There's no police looking like...
[Salim Amin]
There's supposed to be, but most of it doesn't work.
[Neil Pasricha]
But they're not tracking your faces and matching up...
[Salim Amin]
No, not yet, not yet. It'll come because, again, we are very tech savvy. Yeah.
Kenya, in particular, is very tech savvy.
[Neil Pasricha]
But privacy is the new luxury. If you can go off to some distant island that you own... Yes.
No one knows where Jeff Bezos is because he has $180 million yacht. It's in the middle of the ocean. So he's hiding.
He's living in hiding.
[Salim Amin]
Somebody still knows.
[Neil Pasricha]
Somebody might know.
[Salim Amin]
Somebody still knows. Satellites, remember. Somebody still knows.
[Neil Pasricha]
Remember Elon Musk? Elon Musk buys Twitter. And one of the first things he does is disable the feed of the guy who was tracking his plane.
Yes, that's right. So he said, the bird is free. You know, we'll take off the handcuffs.
And the first thing I'm gonna do is shut down you, shut down you, shut down you. You're out of here.
[Salim Amin]
Hypocrisy is, you know, it's mind-blowing. But nobody calls these people out on it. Or they do, and that gets...
[Neil Pasricha]
The algorithm has decided to mute that story. Yes, suppress it. Suppress it because someone owns the algorithm.
So just for those that don't know, so your dad is like the world's preeminent photojournalist. But then in 1980, in the early 80s, he covers something that's sort of truly life-changing for him and a lot of people. And then he very sadly has an untimely and early demise.
Would you mind just sharing those two incidents? And this is kind of wrapped around the way, you know, you at age 15 sort of learn about your dad through a blue-covered, hardcover book that's written by Brian Tetley, which, by the way, you can find under 778.59 for art slash photography slash filmmaking slash video production. You know, because we're kind of underneath this umbrella of this book, The Story of Muhammad Amin, which I have right here and I'll show up on the camera.
To talk about... And by the way, the back says, Massacre on the Horn, Bloodbath in Bangladesh, Bokassa and the Congo, Bombs in Beirut, and in big letters, Ethiopian Famine, 1984.
[Salim Amin]
So the famine was... You know, he'd been covering Ethiopia for decades, but the famine was... You know, there was rumblings of a famine.
There was rumors of a famine. You asked about the hat earlier on. Yeah, Mengistu Hailemariam was running the country.
There was a rebel movement from the north, which was trying to oust Mengistu. And there had been drought, almost 10 years of drought. And then, you know, the famine started coming into effect because Mengistu was using food as a weapon.
So he was strangling the amount of food...
[Neil Pasricha]
Kind of like what's happening in Palestine.
[Salim Amin]
Absolutely right. What is happening in Sudan, what is happening in northern Ethiopia, again today... Is happening today.
[Neil Pasricha]
So I'm not aware of Sudan.
[Salim Amin]
There's 26 million people on the verge of starvation. It's one of the great untold stories of this world. Right now.
At the moment. Right now, as we speak.
[Neil Pasricha]
We must uncover it. By the way, I'm doing this... Why am I in Nairobi for four days doing three interviews back to back?
I'm trying my best to take a 55 country, 1 billion person populace and bring stories back to our listenership, which is global. But if I look at the top countries that listen, it's Canada, US, England, Australia. You know, there's some China, there's some India, there's some Japan.
But we're not getting these stories, like at all. So Ethiopian famine, there's a rebel coming in. He's using food as a weapon.
He's purposely starving his own populace, which is millions of people.
[Salim Amin]
Yes. Which is about 8 or 9 million people on the verge of starvation.
[Neil Pasricha]
It's a tool of war, as is happening in Palestine and Sudan and northern Ethiopia today. Then there's rumors of it.
[Salim Amin]
There's rumors because those days, there was no mobile phones, there was no satellites, there was no drones, there was none of that. So, and he, through his contacts, through the people that he knows, hears about this, you know, and hears about the situation. It's almost impossible to get permission from the Ethiopian government in order to get to these areas in the north, because there's also a war happening, a civil war that's going on.
So it's very easy for the Ethiopian government to deny permission.
[Neil Pasricha]
You can't just rest on your tails.
[Salim Amin]
Yeah, and you don't have... So, you know, he works, his contacts and everything, and eventually gets the permission only because the people in the Ministry of Information in Ethiopia realize that there is, the roads and flight networks have been blocked and stopped because of the war. So there's no way, even if they give permission, there's no way for them to get there.
So not knowing that he had had conversations with World Vision, which at that time was one of the largest NGOs in the world.
[Neil Pasricha]
Of course, it's the logo right now.
[Salim Amin]
Yes, and World Vision had a plane with food, but no permissions. The government wasn't going to give them permission. So he had done this deal with Peter Searle, who was the head of World Vision at the time, and said, Fried Pete, if I get the permissions, you get us on that plane and we go to Northern Ethiopia.
And that's how they made it there. When the Ethiopian government...
[Neil Pasricha]
I don't get it. So they said...
[Salim Amin]
So the government didn't know that he had any contact with...
[Neil Pasricha]
The government got the permission. His contacts had a plane, World Vision, with food.
[Salim Amin]
With no permission.
[Neil Pasricha]
With no permission, so they put them together.
[Salim Amin]
Exactly, and they got on that.
[Neil Pasricha]
It's kind of like helping the ambulance driver get to the hospital again.
[Salim Amin]
Exactly. And so they got there. Him, BBC correspondent Michael Burke, and BBC radio correspondent Mike Wooldridge, the three of them, and got on this plane, landed in Mekelle in Northern Ethiopia, and basically walked into the single largest natural disaster or human disaster of the 20th century.
[Neil Pasricha]
Just to give people the size of the scope of what was happening, so 10 million people...
[Salim Amin]
10 million people on the verge of starvation. What do you mean on the verge? On the verge, like with nothing.
We're like people who were not lost. There's nothing in the storehouse, there's nothing in the harvest, there's no food coming in. They moved out of their villages and their homes, and come to these, you know, bigger areas.
[Neil Pasricha]
As we all remember through the 80s of the emaciated...
[Salim Amin]
Children.
[Neil Pasricha]
Young, basically bones with flies around.
[Salim Amin]
Absolutely right. And those were... And so they stepped into this famine, and, you know, the footage that came out of that is the footage that it was the single longest news piece ever broadcast in broadcast history.
The single longest news piece? Eight minutes. It was an eight minute piece, which in the history of broadcasting had never been broadcast on primetime television.
So BBC, CBC...
[Neil Pasricha]
Because he got this, he sold it through his company.
[Salim Amin]
Well, no, he was working with the BBC, he was working with an organization called Reuters. He was a bureau chief for an agency called Viz News, which then became Reuters Television in the 90s. And the BBC was one of the owners of Viz.
So it was a BBC team, Michael Burke and Mike Wooldridge, and he was doing the filming. And they went out on the BBC first, and then NBC, who was their affiliate partner...
[Neil Pasricha]
With the government, of course, not knowing about this.
[Salim Amin]
With the Ethiopian government not knowing about this until it was too late. And NBC in the US, with Tom Brokaw, picked up that. Of course.
A CBC crew was a few days... We'll take that story. Yeah, a CBC crew was a few days behind them, and they then also did a big deal...
[Neil Pasricha]
And it became the front page news of the whole world.
[Salim Amin]
And it became the single... Yeah, I mean, over a billion people watched that news piece.
[Neil Pasricha]
And just so people know, the world population at the time was like four to five billion.
[Salim Amin]
So Live Aid, then Band Aid, Do They Know It's Christmas, Bob Geldof watched this piece on BBC.
[Neil Pasricha]
We went through that real quick. So for people that don't know...
[Salim Amin]
Bob Geldof watched this on the news and decided that he needed to do something. Sitting around and being outraged or being disgusted was not good enough. So he was not a very successful singer.
The Boomtown Rats was not a very successful band at the time, but he had contacts in the music industry. So he got people together and created this super group that was called Band Aid, which had people like George Michael and Sting and Bono. You know, it was this...
It was... I don't remember all of the artists.
[Neil Pasricha]
Axl Rose was in there.
[Salim Amin]
Not for Band Aid. I'm not sure for Band Aid. No, that was We Are The World.
Now we're looking at the UK. This was the UK version of...
[Neil Pasricha]
It's pretty much like they take the top singers. Imagine right now...
[Salim Amin]
George Michael.
[Neil Pasricha]
Everybody together.
[Salim Amin]
Boy George. On one stage. Yeah, David Bowie.
All of them were part of the Band Aid initiative.
[Neil Pasricha]
With call in, please and pledge some money.
[Salim Amin]
Well, this was just the recording of the song first. And then so they recorded Do They Know It's Christmas? And it came out on Christmas.
Massive response, I think, became the fastest selling single of all time. So that was a combination of Midyear and Bob Geldof that wrote They wrote that song. Do They Know It's Christmas?
So then Harry Belafonte, who was this amazing singer, as well as activist and campaigner of human rights, UNICEF Goodwill Ambassador back in the day. Harry is inspired by what Bob has done in the UK and decides that we need to do the same thing in the US. So he pulls in Lionel Richie and Michael Jackson and Stevie Wonder and Quincy Jones.
And they record We Are The World with 40 of America's most popular musicians from Springsteen to Dylan, Bob Dylan. Michael Jackson there. Michael Jackson was there.
Michael Jackson and Lionel Richie wrote the song. We Are The World. We Are The World.
They wrote We Are The World. Quincy Jones was the maestro that put everything together. And you had basically Ray Charles and Stevie Wonder.
Everyone who was anyone in the music industry in the US was there. And they recorded this song, which to date is I think the third largest selling single of all time. It became an anthem for the ages.
And then Geldof in the summer of 1985, July 1985, puts together Live Aid. And Live Aid is still the single largest concert in our history. Really?
Still to this day. How big was it? Well, 1.9 billion people watched Live Aid on television. And that was 40% of the world's population.
[Neil Pasricha]
And did this work? Did all this...
[Salim Amin]
Billions and billions of dollars were raised. And? Seven or eight million people's lives were saved in Ethiopia.
[Neil Pasricha]
How many people died?
[Salim Amin]
A million, a million and a half died. 1.5 million died of that from seven to eight million. But you know, we were talking about 10 million earlier.
So you're looking at about, you know, eight and a half million people survived because of those pictures, because of that movement. And 40 years on, what's interesting, Neil, is when the world is in a much worse place than it was in the 1980s, we have so much more technology and resources, but yet we cannot do a movement like that again. And this is a question that fascinated me and drove me and my partnership to make our new documentary called Stand Together As One.
And this came out a couple of months ago in the US doing the circuit of the film festivals at the moment.
[Neil Pasricha]
The famine, the music, the impact.
[Salim Amin]
So we look at the famine and the story of the famine. We look at the music. We look at, you know, Band Aid USA for Africa, which is We Are The World and Live Aid.
And then we look at where the money went over the last 40 years. And it's a great story because USA for Africa in particular was only supposed to be around for two or three years for famine relief efforts. And 40 years on is still going, still giving half a million dollars a year to different organizations around the continent, whether it's a community radio station in Senegal or an LGBT theater group in Uganda or an orphanage in Ethiopia.
They still are giving $5,000, $10,000 grants to like 60 or 70 organizations.
[Neil Pasricha]
From the propulsive force of this 1.9 billion person-watched concert, you still are getting half a million dollars a day.
[Salim Amin]
From the song of We Are The World, not even from the concert.
[Neil Pasricha]
Oh, not even from the concert.
[Salim Amin]
It's from We Are The World itself. The royalties of We Are The World, the downloads now that there's Spotify and all these other platforms. So the downloads are still happening.
Every time there's a crisis, We Are The World is revisited in terms of an anthem that people can use to mobilize humanity. But we really do need to mobilize humanity again. And there's never been another concert like Live Aid.
No. There's never in our history, there never was one before that. And there's never where two continents simultaneously have 16 hours of live music.
You have the biggest musicians, Queens, Freddie Mercury's most famous performance was at Live Aid in Wembley.
[Neil Pasricha]
And this is all happening. You're like 14 years old.
[Salim Amin]
I'm like 15 years old. I'm not realizing that this is all because of my father.
[Neil Pasricha]
And you're the only child of your father.
[Salim Amin]
Yes.
[Neil Pasricha]
You're the only child of your father and your mother.
[Salim Amin]
Yes.
[Neil Pasricha]
And you have this giant thing happening around you.
[Salim Amin]
But I had no idea that this was... I mean, we watched Live Aid and whatever. We love the music because I knew...
He had no idea about music. He had no clue about who these musicians were, what they were. But I didn't realize the importance of the fact that it was his images that created this movement, that started this movement, that changed history and the history of humanitarian aid as well.
1984-85 was pivotal in how NGOs operated globally. It became a business. Sadly, in a bit of a negative way, it became a trillion-dollar business as well.
There were hundreds of NGOs that were formed because of the famine in Ethiopia. And it became a business. Sadly, instead of it being to help people in a lot of ways, it was a business.
[Neil Pasricha]
And it wasn't that many years after that your dad sadly passed away.
[Salim Amin]
So then, yeah. So then we fast forward to 1991, which is the fall of Mengistu, the dictator. The rebel armies now have made it to Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia.
And they're taking over the country. Mengistu flees to Zimbabwe to his friend Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe. But there's a massive explosion in the city that was set off.
It was the largest ammunition dump in Africa, was hidden, buried, hidden under one of the shanty towns in Addis Ababa. And this somehow caught, nobody knows how it caught, went up. Someone either sabotaged it or it went off on its own.
But this huge explosion, four o'clock in the morning, he goes out to cover the explosion. There's a secondary explosion which blows off his left arm, his left arm gets taken out by an RPG from this ammunition dump. His sound engineer, John Bethai, dies next to him, is killed immediately by the force of the blast next to him.
So he loses his left arm. He's evacuated back to Nairobi. They amputate the arm.
Within three months, he scours the world for a bionic arm that will allow him to shoot again, to film and photograph again. Finds it through NASA technology at a clinic in Ohio in the U.S. And they fix him with this bionic arm that's designed to operate a camera lens.
[Neil Pasricha]
So he flies home from Ethiopia with no arm.
[Salim Amin]
Yeah, airlifted by an ambulance, air ambulance. With just his arms gone. Yeah, I mean, his hand was intact up to the elbow, but between the hand, the wrist and the elbow, there was nothing left.
They thought that they might be able to use, you know, they had neuro...
[Neil Pasricha]
They put a tourniquet or something. Yeah, they put a tourniquet. Imagine the sheer amount of shock that would cause.
[Salim Amin]
And he was lucky he was carrying his stills camera around on his shoulder. So the RPG went into the stills cameras and that saved it. RPG stands for?
Rocket propelled grenade. That was part of the stuff that was the explosion. And his right arm...
[Neil Pasricha]
And the baptism by fire many years ago in the KGB-run Zanzibar prison also steeled his resolve to handle this, what is almost like a psychologically insurmountable crisis.
[Salim Amin]
Yeah, I mean, there was no one-armed cameraman in the world.
[Neil Pasricha]
It almost seems, and I don't mean to sound... This might sound odd, but it's almost like... So he dies in an Ethiopian hijacked plane, your dad.
[Salim Amin]
A few years, five years later, yes.
[Neil Pasricha]
I mean, this life, this story...
[Salim Amin]
It's a hell of a story.
[Neil Pasricha]
It's like a crazy freaking story, man.
[Salim Amin]
You can't write this stuff, put it that way. I mean, people will not believe...
[Neil Pasricha]
You're the only child of him.
[Salim Amin]
Yeah, people will not believe. And we're hoping, there's a feature film in the works as well, a biopic on his life. Who's playing him?
We don't know yet. We're talking to a couple of people, but there's some interesting people. There is the wonderful Gurinder Chadha of Bended Like Beckham fame, who will be the producer, who's the executive producer.
She's written the script with this wonderful writer in South Africa.
[Neil Pasricha]
What also pressure for you, though?
[Salim Amin]
No, no pressure for me, Neil, at all. You don't feel like you got...
[Neil Pasricha]
Look, I know they'll never be...
[Salim Amin]
He was a unique individual. And there's not... These kinds of people come around once in a generation that can do those things.
He was only 52 years old when he died, which is very young. I'm older than him. You've lived longer than he has.
So I've lived longer than he has. But in his lifetime, he accumulated this archive of 8.5 million images, 25,000 hours of video. I was basically a steward.
I've done two books in my 55 years. He published over 100 coffee table books and stuff in that time, as well as making over 100 documentaries and covering every major news. You know, no, too late now, unfortunately.
I wish I should have. I should have done that a long time ago. I always had this bug from when I was eight or nine years old.
I started shooting when I was eight or nine years old. I was first published when I was 10 in Time magazine. And I don't think they knew it was a 10-year-old that was whose photo it was.
But I used to go and cover the East African Safari Rally with him. And that was where I learned my photography and my passion. And he never wanted me to do this.
His father before him, he was like, you know, get a real job. Don't do this. But that's all I ever wanted to do.
So I went to university. Do not as I do, do as I say. He said, it's a tough life.
It's not a great life. You know, it's difficult with family and everything. And because I never did see much of him.
I mean, I went away to university and did a degree in journalism. But I, you know, he came to visit my university. He came for my graduation for one day.
That was the only time he ever came to visit me in university. I would come back here over holidays.
[Neil Pasricha]
But he was an assistant. He was an absent.
[Salim Amin]
Well, he was absent because he was busy all the time.
[Neil Pasricha]
I'm not, I'm not, I'm not like saying he wasn't busy. And obviously his career certainly speaks for itself. I mean, I'm, you know, I get it and in times and eras.
But like, if I were to ask you like lessons as a father that you gleaned.
[Salim Amin]
Well, yeah, not to be like, I figured that if my children ever have to make a film about me, then I've seriously failed them. You know, I made, I made a documentary on his life called Moe and Me.
[Neil Pasricha]
I don't mean that way, I'm saying it the other way.
[Salim Amin]
But I, you know, I, I mean, I, I, no, look, he was.
[Neil Pasricha]
Like you're a present dad.
[Salim Amin]
Yes, I've spent a lot of time. I have a very close relationship with my daughter. This is the opposite of what your dad does.
Yes, yes. I think, I know that he loved me. I know that he adored me.
I think that he felt he had more time. Um, I don't think he anticipated living only 52 years. And, uh, I think he anticipated that we would have more time together to be able to, but he still was trying to finish things.
[Neil Pasricha]
When I'm in my sixties and he's in his thirties, we will have his life together. Exactly. Though he was constantly putting himself in a clearly dangerous situation.
[Salim Amin]
Yeah, but I mean, the hijacked Ethiopian Airlines plane that he died on was no, you know, it wasn't a situation he put himself in. No. It was a bunch of amateurs hijacking a flight that, uh, that ran out of fuel and crashed.
[Neil Pasricha]
And someone else captured that.
[Salim Amin]
And yes, uh, the honeymoon couple from South Africa on the beach of the Camorras, uh, islands, uh, you know, just filming each other on their honeymoon and, uh, turned around and saw this plane coming 737 coming out and crashing into the ocean. That was 1996. That he was the arm.
Was the arm. November 96.
[Neil Pasricha]
He came to your graduation.
[Salim Amin]
Yes, in Vancouver, in Vancouver. So yeah, so I went to university in Vancouver. No, no, actually I went to Langara, which was a college at the time because when I was there, Langara was the only, um, institute on the West coast that taught journalism.
UBC or SFU, um, never taught journalism or communications. Now they're big, big deals on that. But the Vancouver community college, uh, uh, system had, uh, um, BCCI, Langara and, and VCC or something Vancouver community college.
And they taught journalism and, uh, and the only, I was, you know, I had the option of going to McGill or, um, or, or Ryerson on in Toronto, which was also big on journalism, but I couldn't handle the weather on that side. So, uh, you know, and I had family, my mom's family was in Vancouver.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah.
[Salim Amin]
You don't feel pressure. Because I, I made it very clear to people that I will never achieve what he achieved. I will do my own thing.
[Neil Pasricha]
You say that right up.
[Salim Amin]
I will do my own thing.
[Neil Pasricha]
I will, I will. I'm not in this game. No.
[Salim Amin]
I'm not playing. I'm not playing. I'm happy to be.
[Neil Pasricha]
He got a Royal flush on this career. I'm happy to just get a couple pairs.
[Salim Amin]
I still get introduced as his son and that makes me proud. Aw. You know, I still get introduced as his son, especially from a certain generation of people.
They will say, Oh, do you remember this person? This is his son. So, um, you know, it's, and I put the pressure on myself because I chose the same career.
Yeah. As him. Yeah.
If I'd been something completely different, like a doctor or an accountant or whatever, I wouldn't have that type of pressure. But then I think that I would have lost out on what I love doing, which is, which is telling stories, um, which is doing interviews, which is, I had my own talk show for, um, for five years. I told people here, I was interviewing you.
[Neil Pasricha]
They're all like, Oh, is he still on the TV?
[Salim Amin]
Yeah. So I did the scoop for five years and, and, and, you know, 150 amazing interviews with people from around the continent. Um, I, I, I, you know, we've been working on building, um, uh, Kenya's largest museum for the last five, six years with the government.
Well, it's called, it's called Uhuru Gardens National Museum. It's in Nairobi by Wilson airport. Um, it's this magnificent, absolutely magnificent museum.
It's not open yet, sadly. I can't go. So you can't go because it's, um, it's not open yet.
And you know, it's just, again, this, this things have slowed down.
[Neil Pasricha]
But when you work on the projects that you work on, these things take forever. Like that's just the way they are.
[Salim Amin]
That's just the way they are. But what it did give me an opportunity to do was to interview people that are, have been instrumental in this country's history, which I love people in their nineties, hundreds, eighties, nineties, hundreds, who have never spoken about their lives and played a huge role in getting Kenya's independence and, and stewarding the country, uh, through, through the, the, the, the, the post-independence era.
And I absolutely love it. And then I find that we have all of their content in our archive because dad photographed them, filmed them, was at the same events that they were presiding over. And so we have all this amazing content.
So it was like, I mean, it's insane. And we look at countries, people, you know, Mozambique to Nigeria, to the Middle East. It wasn't, he was the first person to ever be allowed to photograph the Hajj in 1972.
And he ended up, which was where the Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca, the first person to ever be allowed to do it. So he went for four years and photographed it. And his first coffee table book was pilgrimage to Mecca.
It was the first book on the Hajj. They let him do it, why? Well, the Saudi royal family agreed for him to come and gave him all the facilities.
And he did that in 1972. He had a great black book. You know, yeah.
And he, so he had these contacts. He, you know, he was made commander in chief of the Pakistan armed forces.
[Neil Pasricha]
I see the book right behind you.
[Salim Amin]
Yeah. So he was made commander in chief of the Pakistan armed forces for nine months by Zia ul Haq. Because Zia wanted a book on the armed forces.
So it ended up Defenders of Pakistan was what it was called. It was a book and a documentary. So he went to, and he's got stuff that nobody in the world will ever get.
Of course. You know, you can't get access to armed forces now.
[Speaker 4]
Yeah.
[Salim Amin]
You know, he did 19 hours in F-16s photographing, you know, air to air combats. And then you got all the air force in front of the K2 and the Himalayas and, you know, incredible content.
[Neil Pasricha]
Yeah.
[Salim Amin]
You'd never get the Hajj in the seventies. Very different place.
[Neil Pasricha]
So you were just like exploding with stories and like, I'm trying to take, I mean, we're just touching, like skimming the surface of so much here. And unlike your dad, you're very present with your kids. Yes.
Which I'm going to say, like, that's a very different, but equally, if not greater form of legacy in the world.
[Salim Amin]
I hope so. I hope so. I mean, I think we, I mean, their mom is.
[Neil Pasricha]
I'm a continent away from my kids right now.
[Salim Amin]
Their mom is instrumental, is instrumental in how well they were brought up. Yeah. I mean, she, because I also traveled an enormous amount in the early years, in the first sort of 25 years of their lives, I traveled an enormous amount, but their mom was the, there was the sort of a very, very influential figure in bringing them up to the young ladies that they are.
And, you know, one is in, one is in Toronto, one is in Zurich, Canada, there's an underwriter, one is a lawyer in London. So they've done okay, you know, and I think we've, we've, you know, we've, we've brought them up to be good girls.
[Neil Pasricha]
And neither of them is a photojournalist.
[Salim Amin]
They are excellent photographers, both of them.
[Neil Pasricha]
I can imagine.
[Salim Amin]
But they, this is not their profession.
[Neil Pasricha]
By the way, Boniface Mwangi, our mutual friend and guest in chapter 104, I asked him for a question for you. I like to do this. And he said, do you think in an era of AI, there's still a career of photojournalism?
[Salim Amin]
I think it's even more important now. I think the, the fact that people are not sure about, so one of the things that we, we want to do, and I'll discuss this with Boniface as well, one, we know that our archive is hugely valuable for AI companies because they don't have this. Now, when you type in AI or you search AI for things, you come back with a very white Western male dominated answer.
Of course, because they scoop the internet.
[Neil Pasricha]
And that's what the internet was when they scooped it.
[Salim Amin]
This kind of content that we have about countries in Africa and Southeast Asia, in the Middle East, about fashion and art and, and, you know, hairstyles and, and, and glasses and culture and all of this stuff is not available because our archive is not digital. So it's never been online. We're still struggling with digitizing this archive.
But it's never been online. So nobody has been able to scrub it.
[Neil Pasricha]
Because we never put it anywhere where they could see it.
[Salim Amin]
But should we, we want to make it available, especially for educational purposes, for people to be able to make sure that we get our own, when AI makes things about Africans, that they have the right reference points for it. So we want to make it available and to do that. But one of the things, this is when I say we, it's me.
And again, my partner in the US, because he has an equally large archive of content from different parts of the world, from South America, from the US sides, from even parts of Africa, and he's still photographing. So it adds current content to our archive. But one of the things we want to put together is an institute of truth.
So where the original, where the original content can sit and people can come and visit, physically see original negatives.
[Neil Pasricha]
You know, it's before 2023, when ChachiPT started.
[Salim Amin]
And see the original picture. Because even when dad was shooting images, they cropped them. When they were in the darkroom, they would crop them based on what was important at the time.
Now, in the context of history, that cropping also could change the perspective of that image. So to be able to see the original negative, or the original image, when in an age where we don't know what we're seeing, whether it's fake or real, I think is hugely important. And a university like the University of Toronto, or Cambridge University, or Oxford, to house this archive, physical archives, and actually allow people to come in and watch the original video of Black Hawk Down, or the Rwanda genocide, or the Ethiopian famine, before AI has got its hands on it and changed it, I think would be hugely invaluable for education.
[Neil Pasricha]
The only problem is, how do you create a new trusted institute in an era of such high distrust? I mean, to what extent could something even as stable, secure, and seemingly impervious to distrust, as like the University of Toronto? But then we see what's happened to Harvard.
[Salim Amin]
Yes. That's the problem.
[Neil Pasricha]
They've smudged shit over the Harvard Veritas logo by saying, you can't do this, we're going to take all your money, you can't let in people from four, and then they have to fight the government, and there's lawsuits. Then Columbia folds, so that looks like the other ones are going to fold as well. And then it's just like, then you just ostracize the school.
And now the school has its own like, well, Harvard's like a 500-year-old institute of truth that has held standards for a long time. But even if you put the archive there, then you go down with the ship.
[Salim Amin]
Exactly. So again, maybe it's an independent institute.
[Neil Pasricha]
Speaking as an alumni, whose degree now looks a little shoddier.
[Salim Amin]
You know, it could be an independent institute that's set up. I mean, there's one thing, Neil, there's no shortage of money in the world. There's no shortage of people with money in the world who want, I hope, who want to do something good, that will want to have something that is there.
It's not only our archive that would be in this. It would be open to every, there's people in their 70s and 80s and 90s, photographers who have captured some of the most iconic moments in our history. Whether it's news or politics or sports or entertainment.
And they are sitting on their original content. They don't have the ability to digitize all of this. It's sitting in cabinets and boxes.
And they're just, they're going to die. And their children and grandchildren have no interest in this at all. And we'll probably chuck it out or burn it or do something.
And if we can get our hands on that stuff, because we know between us, we know other photographers. And we can help them digitize, get hold of their original content, give them legacy, pay them some money. That I think to me would be a real fulfillment of my father's, because I don't think my father would have wanted his archive to sit at rotten in shelves, in boxes and cabinets.
He would have wanted it to be used to educate future generations of people. And I think this is where we would like to go.
[Neil Pasricha]
Capture of human history and not just human history. Some of the photos that if you're watching on YouTube, you'll see is like a lion kind of curling in to drink water. I mean, it's everything.
I've done a terrible job as an interviewer. I don't say this very often on my own podcast, but so excitedly thirsty have I been for these like human altering stories that I have failed to even mention your other two formative books. I wonder if to close us off, you might tell us a little bit about how they shaped you and we can try together to loop those into this larger, epic, epic fabled conversation similar to the ones that inspired you, including at a young age when you read the Iliad by Homer.
I-L-I-A-D written controversially either in the seventh or eighth century by Homer who lived and died in eighth century Greece. There's very few details about his life and death. He also wrote famously the Odyssey.
There's a million covers, so why even describe one? But you know, obviously it's an epic poem set during the final weeks of the Trojan war focusing on the Greek hero Achilles and his anger towards Agamemnon, the commander of the Greek forces. You can follow this one to 883.01 for literature slash classical modern Greek literature slash classical Greek epic poetry. It's interesting to mention that because of course, the book you read in your twenties, which also introduced symbolism and fables to you or amplified it, was The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. That came out in 2003 from Doubleday. People will know this because Dan Brown is alive today.
He was born in 1964 in New Hampshire. And this is, I mean, I read it when it came out. Everybody read it when it came out.
Robert Langdon, of course, is in Paris on business. He's a symbologist at Harvard and he gets an urgent late night phone call. The elderly curator of the Louvre has been murdered inside the museum.
Near the body, police have found a baffling cipher. While working to solve the enigmatic riddle, Langdon is stunned to discover it leads to a trail of clues hidden in the works of Da Vinci, visible for all to see, yet disguised by the painter. Follow that one under 813.54 for 1945 to 1999 American literature. So how did these two books kind of fold into this larger story we're talking about here?
[Salim Amin]
Look, I think these were more sort of personal. The Iliad, I just found the story of the Trojan War fascinating. You know, how it began, you know, all these characters.
I don't know if they were real or not. I mean, Homer, you know, was a poet and I'm sure had a lot of creative license even back then. But, you know, the stories of Achilles and Agamemnon and Melillaus and Paris and Troy and taking Helen, the most beautiful woman, you know, away, stealing her away and causing the downfall of this great empire.
It was just, it just to me was just fascinating. Yeah. And how the gods kind of got involved as well.
[Speaker 4]
Yeah.
[Salim Amin]
Some on this side, some on that side and how they, you know, they manipulated. And I just thought this is such an interesting way to describe history.
[Speaker 4]
Yeah.
[Salim Amin]
And it's, and I've followed then the Odyssey and all these other sort of the Iliad, all these different Greek books who have, as you said, had, there've been so many covers since then. There've been feature films, Brad Pitt, it was Achilles and Troy. Very sexy.
In that, yes. And then you've got Eric Bana playing Hector and, you know, there's tragedy, there is hope, there is joy, there's love, there's all the things that I think is part of our life. But it's, it's a fantastic story.
[Neil Pasricha]
And you read that in school.
[Salim Amin]
I read, well, we were, we were taught, you know, Latin and divinity and stuff in, in primary school and in high school. In Nairobi. These were British schools, right?
These were part of the British curriculum.
[Neil Pasricha]
I was going to ask, because sorry to say this, I've tried to crack the Iliad or the Odyssey a couple of times and I'm a slow mind, Salim. I'm like, this is hard. This is too hard for me to read and understand.
Did you have like a, you know, like a, like an edition or a translator? Do you remember, like, how do you?
[Salim Amin]
You know, there are sort of simpler books that don't have the complicated language of Homer. Okay.
[Neil Pasricha]
So we gotta go there.
[Salim Amin]
So you can just, if you Google them, there's plenty of different versions that some have been turned into novels and actual stories.
[Neil Pasricha]
Or do the thing I do, which is read the Wikipedia plot summary and try to read the book at the same time.
[Salim Amin]
But, but, you know, it's such interesting.
[Neil Pasricha]
How cool that you got assigned that at school, though.
[Salim Amin]
Yeah. Yeah. I thought it was really...
[Neil Pasricha]
We kind of skipped over that stuff.
[Salim Amin]
I thought Greek mythology was fascinating for me. And then, and then it kind of also kind of dovetails a little bit into comic books. Because again, these, those ancient Greek heroes are, you know, the modern versions of Superman and Batman and others are, I think, derived a little bit from, from those heroes.
You know, their powers, their, the way, I think the, the, the Schuster, Jerry Schuster and the people that wrote comic books, Stan Lee and others, I think got their inspiration for many of their comic book heroes from, from the, the Greek mythology.
[Speaker 4]
Yeah.
[Salim Amin]
And so I, again, going into comic books was something really natural. There was a little store in downtown Nairobi that used to sell comic books. And I'd go with my mom.
She used to go and buy her Indian film magazines, Filmfare and, you know, Stardust and all these things about Bollywood magazines. And I would go and get a comic book every week with her. That's why you have a shop.
And then I'd have an entire cupboard of comic books. Now I buy the, the, the graphic novels, which they're rather than the weekly comic books.
[Neil Pasricha]
But it's almost like Williad was like, it wasn't drawn, but...
[Salim Amin]
It was a precursor of this. Yeah, exactly. It was a precursor of these.
[Neil Pasricha]
Epic tales of, you know, yeah, it's, it's, and then it kind of, kind of sort of feeds into Dan Brown.
[Salim Amin]
Absolutely. I mean, again, this idea of, of, of, you know, I was always fascinated about how religion has played such an important role in every major war I think we've had in, in our history. Yeah, there is religion.
[Neil Pasricha]
What you believe versus what I believe.
[Salim Amin]
The religion is always, is always the underlying principle and, and, you know, understanding Catholicism and Islam. I mean, I said, I went to a very Christian school, you know, we would sing the songs Oh, your dad was Muslim and your mom was Ismaili, you went to Christian education. Christian education, we sing the songs of praise every morning in assembly.
You know, we'd, we'd learn divinity in the Bible as part of our classes. My, our daughters went to a very Christian high school here and I wanted them to do that because of the discipline that was there as well as understanding and learning about other religions, because I think it's very important. You know, and they, they obviously they did madrasas and went and learned about their own religion as well, but were able to, to, to get a good overview of other things.
And I think in a world of increasing intolerance, this is very important to educate people on this. I remember somebody saying to, to my daughters in, in, in, in their high school, one of the daughters said, Oh, but, um, you know, what do you know about Jesus? You get Muslim, you know, what do you know about Jesus and stuff?
And you guys don't even teach that. And she said, well, hang on a minute. Jesus is named more in the Quran than Muhammad is.
No way. Jesus is named come because he is one of our primary prophets. In Islam, Jesus is considered to be above Muhammad even in terms of prophets.
The only difference is we don't consider him to be the son of God, but he is the, on the day of judgment, Jesus is going to come, not Muhammad. So, you know, this is the, the teachers were like, are you serious? I said, yes.
In the Quran, Jesus is mentioned more than Muhammad as prophet Isa. And so, you know, this is, but people don't do this to assume that we are here and not understanding that every religion, major religion in the world has come from the same place.
[Speaker 4]
Well, yeah.
[Salim Amin]
You know, and it's, it's, we all believe the same things that we call them by different names and we believe about the same people.
[Neil Pasricha]
And we change too. Like there's, uh, for those that have read Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, like, ah, it was animals for quite a long time. It wasn't even people.
[Salim Amin]
It wasn't people. It was nymphs, you know, you do the tree, you know, tree nymphs, ocean nymphs.
[Neil Pasricha]
My mom's Hindu, you know, she also went to, uh, like, uh, Kenya high as he was learning, like Lord's parents. But like, you know, growing up, like in the little kind of altar that my mom had, it's like, I'm saying like, you know, blue elephants with many arms, like, you know, and, um, do you start this? Like we started just chatting and, you know, you were talking Israel, Palestine, you're talking about, you know, uh, the work that your dad's done opening up and exposing the to not just Kenya where he was born and raised, uh, from, from, you know, people that have come from kind of colonial England, but also what he did in Ethiopia and central African Republic and going all over this continent, the dark continent, the continent that we
[Speaker 4]
didn't know what was going on.
[Neil Pasricha]
And, and the added light and color and stories and meanings. And the more we see that, the more we realize that we are the same, we are connected. We all bleed the same color.
[Salim Amin]
Absolutely. We bleed the same color. We shit the same poop, you know, we, we, you know, everything is the same.
There is nothing that is different about us. We may have, you know, you're, you're a product of your upbringing, you're a product of your environment, you know, and at the end of the day, that is pure luck. Whether you were born in a palace in, in Europe, or you were born in a slum in, in Kibera in East Africa, that is you, you don't feel privileged because you had nothing to do with that.
It is pure and utter luck. And so, you need to just humble yourself to understanding this is where I was born. Let me make the best of what my situation and circumstances are.
Not be envious or jealous of other people and not look down at other people because of, of what you feel is your privilege in life. We are all born the same. It's just where we were born, that, and then you had, you as a person had nothing to do with that.
You know, you had no influence on that. So, you know, be good to people, be kind to people. I know watching my father and how he operated, he was comfortable with, he would treat princes and kings and presidents the same as he would treat a waiter or a driver or, or a fixer or, or, or a woman selling fruit on the side of the road.
He saw no difference in these people and that's why people were open to talking to him because he treated everybody exactly the same way.
[Neil Pasricha]
You fill your father's shadow and legacy. You amplify it. You illuminate it.
You enlarge it. You lengthen it. And the work he's done, your family has done, and your family continues to do is making a tremendous difference in the world.
[Salim Amin]
Thank you, Neil. I'm not sure it is, but I appreciate you saying that.
[Neil Pasricha]
I believe it is. I appreciate it. We'll continue to do so in this era of disbelief.
I think that's really important. And I think your answer to Bonnie's question is quite profound. Salim Amin, thank you so much for coming on.
[Salim Amin]
Thank you very much, man. Appreciate it. Thank you for your time.
Thank you for doing this. I really appreciate it. It was fun.
Real fun talking to you. Thank you. Yeah.
Thank you.
[Neil Pasricha]
Hey, everybody. It's me. It's just Neil hanging out in my basement, listening back to the powerful, kind, open hearted, big brain, Salim Amin regaling us with stories.
I mean, we could have gone on and on and on. So many quotes jump out to me. Like right now, when you search AI for things, you come back with a very white Western male dominated answer and kind of looping that back into the letter from Dan at the beginning.
Like we're all together grappling and connecting with what AI is, what it means, how we use it, how we don't, what, where we want in our lives, where we don't, where we can see it in our lives, where we can't. And so I think it's refreshing to just kind of hear that perspective and remember that, you know, like I went to the doctor and I have low vitamin D. I've had low vitamin D forever.
I'm like plowing vitamin D. I'm like taking a thousand a day, then 2000 a day, then 5,000 a day. And I always get my blood checked and it's always low.
Eventually my doctor says to me, he's like, you know, it might just be that the data from the study is a bunch of white men from North America. And you, I know you were born here, but he's like, you know, your, your heritage and ancestry comes from a different part of the world. So maybe the numbers on your vitamin D score just are different.
And it's nice to hear that because yeah, you can't always know what dataset you're comparing yourself to. So it's nice for somebody from Africa to point out that, hey, this is pretty biased. It's nice to kind of try to recognize and see the bias where we can.
How about this quote? Our job, and he's talking about journalists. Our job has changed from being the bearer of news to providing context and background and reality and giving people a historical look at why this incident happened, what the context is behind it.
And then where are we going in the future rather than just a snapshot? It's true. I agree with that completely.
Trust, truth, explanation. These things are more and more important than just kind of like there was a fire or here's a photo of a crazy scene. And I kind of, I like the little sort of 60 second kind of first person camera snippets that like the New York Times is doing from their journalists.
And I feel like in the current media complex, it just constantly and quickly evolves to something being new, everything following that, and then that thing not being new anymore. And then that thing being kind of littered with other ways that we can't see the truth anymore. So first person camera to the journalist is great.
And then when you have first person camera to everybody, it's confusing. It's confusing, right? So I guess we have to just kind of keep thinking.
I mean, for this show, Three Books, it's like long form journalism, long form interviews. And I do think in some sense, when you have conversations like we're having, you know, an hour, two hours, sometimes three hours, the truth doubles up. Like honesty comes through.
You hear tone and intonation, the complexity of language and the kind of river-like flow of a conversation. And through that, you get reality. And so that's kind of a place that I'm clinging to.
I still enjoy listening to podcasts that are longer. I like a good, long Rich Roll podcast episode or Tim Ferriss episode. You know, I don't always listen to the whole thing, but I like that that is kind of where my brain wants to go.
Books are like that, obviously. Short-form video. More and more research keeps coming out saying it's bad for our brains.
Okay. We knew that, but now we know that even more. Another quote.
Let me make the best of my situation and circumstances. Not be envious or jealous of other people and not look down at other people because of what you feel is privilege in your own life. A great and healthy and helpful mental reminder for us all.
Thank you so much to Saleem Amin for giving us three more books to add to our top 1000, including number 548, Moe, the story of Muhammad Amin by Brian Tetley. Number 547, The Iliad by Homer. Man, we didn't have that on the list yet, people.
That was good to get out there. And number 546, The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown. I still remember reading that book and feeling that sort of, don't you love books that have two-page chapters?
Books with two-page chapters is an awesome thing. I'm going to write that down. Books with short chapters.
We've got to add that to the list. By the way, if you don't get my Daily Awesome Thing, you can just go to Neil.blog and click newsletters. One of the newsletters I send out every single day at midnight is a Daily Awesome Thing.
I've been doing that since 2008, and I now made them all on one page at Neil.blog slash awesome things. So if you want to read thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of awesome things, you can go there. It's still a daily practice for me and something I have committed to for now too long to stop.
And when I do stop it, I notice it. So I got to keep going. Thank you so much, Celine, for coming on the show.
This concludes our three-part chapter series where we flew to Africa. We did some different kinds of conversations. I'm very excited about the conversations that we have coming.
We've got Paul Hawken coming. We've got Morgan Housel coming. We've got Eve Harlow coming.
We've got some great, great guests coming. As always, thank you so much for being here, and thank you so much for listening. All right.
Did you make it past the three-second pause? So I want to welcome you back to the end of the podcast club, one of three clubs we have for Three Books members. As always, if you're listening to this, call me.
Please call me. I love to hear from you. 1-833-READALOT, R-E-A-D-A-L-O-T.
Give me a call. Tell me a formative book. Give me a slice of your life.
Let's hear feedback on a show. I love feedback on a show, good or bad. With that, let's start off by going to the phones.
[Caller]
RF Kuang is a woman. Poor assumption, Neil. Any time you see an author with initials instead of a name, you should automatically think that's a woman trying to get away from misconceptions that women can't write.
Just so you know.
[Neil Pasricha]
RF Kuang is indeed Rebecca F. Kuang, 29 years old, born in China, raised in the States, went to Yale and Cambridge and Oxford, and has written books like Babble and Yellowface. Sorry that I had assumed that that was a guy.
I don't remember doing that, but obviously I can hear the passionate, fiery vitriol in your voice, and I appreciate you calling in to give me feedback. Apologies. Huge mistake.
I did not realize. Yeah, and it's a good point you're saying. Like, if you hear, like, J.K. Rowling, obviously that's Joanne, but it's a woman trying to get away from the biases against female writers is what you're saying. I hadn't necessarily figured that. I mean, I guess I'm struggling to think of a guy writer who uses initials. So anyway, apologies, and thanks for the call.
I wish I could say your name and send you a book, but I don't know your name, but I appreciate the call. Negative feedback, by the way. Always feel free.
It's always good. 1-833-READ-A-LOT. Appreciate it.
All right. Now, we already did a letter from day at the beginning. We could do a letter now.
I've been posting stuff on YouTube like this, so, you know, you end up getting a lot of comments that way, but I think we'll skip the letter because we did a letter at the beginning. And if you want to send me a letter, though, please do. Obviously, you could do it as a review on Apple or Spotify or YouTube, and you can also email me, neil at globalhappiness.org, and then I get your letter that way. And I will, if I read it on the show, I'll send you a book. All right. Now, let's go to the word of the chapter, and for this chapter's word, we go back to Selim.
Are you no small little tin pot country? Yes, indeed, it is tin pot. Tin pot? Tin pot. Tin pot. Selim referred to a tiny tin pot country and made me think tin pot. What's a tin pot country?
Because, you know, you've heard that phrase before, like a tin pot dictator, and I looked up the etymology, and of course, as you probably realize, but I did not realize, pots used to be made of kind of fancy metals, right? You know, gold, silver, that kind of thing. And so in the 1700s, when they started making some pots out of tin, they were, of course, much cheaper, but of much lower quality.
Inferior quality, shoddy, insignificant, or minor. You can use it especially in regards to a dictator, the cheapness and poor quality of pots that were made from tin. So a tin pot dictator, of course, is a cheap or inferior dictator.
It ain't no Hitler or Pol Pot. That's like somebody who's like, you know, doesn't know what they're doing. It's a tin pot dictator.
That's the term. That's the phrase. But also, you can use it in regards to anything else.
They say you can use it for a tin pot university or tin pot country. Kind of small, petty, or insignificant. Tin, of course, is a metal element primarily extracted from the mineral castor, right?
Used primarily as an alloy, right? You mix it with copper, and you get bronze. You mix it with something else, you get pewter.
So tin is an alloy. It's used to make things lighter, cheaper. And, of course, it also is a protective metal that can be used on tin cans.
So a tin pot anything is a shoddy or inferior version of it. We've been using that in our culture for 300 years since the creation of tin pots to replace, you know, heavier metal pots made with silver and iron and things like that. Interesting etymology, a tin pot anything.
Try to use that word in a phrase today. It's a fun one. I like the sound of it.
It just goes rolls off the tongue. We are aiming for this, of course, not to be a tin pot podcast. It's a 22-year pilgrimage, and you are joining us now in our ninth year of the show.
So, you know, we're not at the halfway point yet. Still a couple more years to go, but it is a journey. We are kind of climaxing the show on every single full moon.
We're going to alternate the new moons with classic chapters, which I'm going to strip out the kind of openings and closings and just have that be the conversation through this year. I really love this community. Three Bookers, if you hear this, give me a call.
1-833-READALOT. Drop me a line, and let's continue to hang out together. Let's continue to talk about books amidst the sea of rabble, amidst the short-form videos that we are pummeled with every single day.
Let's think of this show as a tool, as a doorway, as a path that leads into the longer and deeper pleasures of life. Thank you so much for being here. And until next time, remember that you are what you eat, and you are what you read.
Keep turning that page, everybody. I'll talk to you soon. Take care.