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Impact in the 21st CenturyAuthor: Simbi Foundation & The Goood Life
Welcome to Impact in the 21st Century. This is a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, founders, and authors, and the positive impact they create. Each episode, Host Aaron Friedland sits down with these inspiring guests to unpack how they found their purpose, the work they're doing to make a positive difference, and what it takes to lead a more impactful life in the 21st century. Impact in the 21st Century is brought to you by Simbi Foundation & The Goood Life. Each episode is recorded from https://waterfall.farm/ Learn more at www.simbifoundation.org/podcast Language: en Genres: Business, Non-Profit, Society & Culture Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it Trailer: |
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EP #38: Mukesh Kapila - Is Our Empathy Finite? The Attention Economy of Human Suffering | The Darfur Whistleblower on the Patterns of Genocide, Past and Future
Episode 38
Wednesday, 28 October, 2026
Professor Mukesh Kapila CBE is a medical doctor, humanitarian, author, and Professor Emeritus of Global Health and Humanitarian Affairs at the University of Manchester. He has spent his life on the front lines of humanity’s worst moments, from Rwanda in 1994 to Srebrenica, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Sierra Leone. In 2003 and 2004, he was the United Nations’ most senior official in Sudan when the killing in Darfur began. When the institution he served chose silence, Mukesh went on the BBC and told the world. He was fired, and he was right. In this rare and deeply honest conversation, Mukesh takes us inside the mechanics of global conscience and institutional failure, exploring: Why the world’s attention is so unevenly distributed across conflicts, from Palestine to Sudan, Tigray, Yemen, the DRC, and Afghanistan, and what cultural proximity, agency, and the existence of a “positive agenda” have to do with who gets heard The case for a one-state ideal over partition, drawn from his own family’s survival of the 1947 Partition of India and the Red Cross man who stood between a mob and a train carrying his pregnant grandmother How his aerial reconnaissance over Darfur revealed the pattern of racialised targeting, and the moment a woman named Ayesha walked into his office in Khartoum and flipped the switch that sent him to the BBC Why “genocide” is a legal threshold, not a rhetorical one, and the dangerous unintended consequences of using the word too loosely in the current moment The anatomy of institutional indifference inside the UN, why institutions reward loyalty over courage, and why the only honest unit of analysis is the individual The second half of his life’s work, captured in No Stranger to Kindness, and why true kindness is not the easy kind but the kind that costs the giver something real The story of a four-year-old Tutsi girl who picked up an abandoned baby on the road to the DRC border, and the young man she raised, whom Mukesh met years later This is a conversation about moral courage, the loneliness of being right, and the quieter counterweight to cruelty that keeps showing up when it matters most. It is also one of the most important conversations we have had on the show. Pick up his memoir Against the Tide of Evil and its companion No Stranger to Kindness wherever you get your books. Learn more about his ongoing work at mukeshkapila.org, and listen to his Fading Causes Podcast. 🎙️ What is Impact in the 21st Century? Impact in the 21st Century is a podcast that celebrates the impactful work being done around the globe and shares the stories of the inspiring individuals behind it. 👤 Who hosts the podcast? Aaron Friedland is a National Geographic Explorer, PhD Candidate in Econometrics at UBC, and Founder of the Simbi Foundation. 🦻 Who makes it sound good? Tom Foster is an Award-Winning Recording Engineer and Cinematographer, Up-and-Coming Composer, Film Scoring Student at Berklee College of Music, and Head of Audio & Music for the Sea Change Project. This podcast is brought to you by Simbi Foundation & The Goood Life.
