Culture and adaptation

Episode 18, with Dr Tala Abdallah. Talking to AI about your mental health can be appealing. It seems cheaper and faster, it is there at 2am, and it can feel like talking to a friend without worrying about being a burden or being judged.

Episode 17, with Samar Hawa. Beirut does not have to wait for change. Samar Hawa shares the story behind Rebirth Beirut, how a simple idea of bringing light back to the city grew into an initiative built around safety, dignity, partnerships and hope, lighting more than 160 streets.

Episode 15, with Nadine Mhanna. Most people place the harp in Greece or Europe. Its story runs back thousands of years, with some of the earliest depictions found in ancient Egypt and the Middle East.

Episode 13, with Maya Nassar. Sometimes the people who look the strongest are fighting the hardest battles in silence. Maya Nassar was seen as successful, confident and in control, while privately she felt isolated and afraid that asking for help would change how people saw her.

Episode 11, with Lisa Sofian. Lisa started with one idea and a coastline worth protecting. This conversation is about how the SWIM Initiative came to exist, and about the far less cinematic work of keeping it alive, the logistics, the persuasion, the years where progress is measured in small stubborn increments rather than headlines. We talk about what it takes to move from caring about something to being responsible for it, and about the difference between a cause and an organisation. Lisa is honest about the parts that are not inspiring: the fatigue, the bureaucratic resistance, the moments when the sea looks exactly as it did before you started. What holds it together is a specific kind of purpose, durable rather than dramatic, closer to habit than to passion. The conversation also looks at the person behind the mission, because movements are usually one person's ordinary persistence made public. It is an episode about scale starting small, and staying small for longer than anyone expects.

Episode 7, with Mike Harb. Mike calls it a painkiller society, and the phrase lands because it describes something most people recognise before they can name it. We reach for the thing that dulls the signal, the scroll, the drink, the extra work, the noise, and we do it so habitually that we stop noticing there was a signal at all. This conversation is about exhaustion as a default setting rather than an emergency, and about the survival mindset that hides comfortably inside ambition. We talk about the difference between coping and choosing: how numbing buys you the day but spends the year, and how distraction has become the most socially acceptable form of avoidance available. Mike is not offering a detox plan. What he describes is slower and harder, staying with discomfort long enough to learn what it is pointing at. The conversation keeps returning to the same uncomfortable question: if you removed everything you use to take the edge off, what would you actually have to feel?

Episode 6, with Youmna Baladi. It started as a mother's private worry. Youmna wanted her son to encounter something the school system was not going to give him, a place to test himself outside grades, to meet ideas and adults and versions of a future he had not been shown. What began as that specific concern became a platform now shaping teenagers across Lebanon. This conversation traces that path without smoothing it out: the gaps in traditional education that prompted it, the practical work of building an environment where young people can be curious in public, and the responsibility that comes with influencing how a generation understands its own potential. We talk about what adolescents actually need, not more instruction, but permission and exposure, and about the difference between preparing teenagers for exams and preparing them for themselves. Youmna is clear that purpose here was not a plan. It was a response to something missing, followed persistently enough that other people's children now benefit from one mother's refusal to accept the default.

Episode 4, with Nadim. Nadim makes films, which means he spends most of his time trying to convince reality to match something that so far exists only in his head. This conversation is about that gap, the years of unglamorous persistence between having a vision and having anything to show for it. We talk about creative obsession honestly: what it takes from relationships, from money, from rest, and from the version of yourself that could have chosen something steadier. Nadim describes the particular loneliness of ambition that nobody else can see yet, when there is no evidence to point to and belief has to be manufactured daily from nothing. There is also the question of what happens when the work finally arrives and does not resolve the doubt. The conversation avoids the tidy story of the artist who suffered and was vindicated. It stays with the messier truth: that persistence is mostly boring, that doubt does not go away with success, and that choosing a vision means choosing to keep paying for it.