What kind of uh did you just take the show?

I'm refilling myself, You want some more?

Sure, I love it, I love the man, you got it dude, that's crazy amount of sugar rum Soudani, this is what we do, I think as we got into this season and we kind of tweaked what Rami was really trying to pursue right for the first time.

Just he's like, you know what, maybe I don't want to be good, I just want to be good at something, can you pursue that kind of financial goal or that kind of uh that idea of even like that pursuit of the american dream and still hold on to your moral compass, like if that becomes number one and I feel like that's really what's what's on the spotlight this season, any objective in life other than if someone is just gonna live in the mash it and pray and fast and thicker and whatnot that they're going to have to engage in something something of the world and the prophet himself, the model, obviously for our religion, he wasn't monastic in that way, he's engaging so the constant balancing act between the inner world and the outer world, the unseen world and the seen world is just the balance of you know, a walking person going from the right to the left and the right to the left, right, but I feel like that gets lost really, that gets lost really quickly and like you know that and again like I think like when you are leaving your home country and you're kind of in a place where you're kind of trying to figure out yeah how do you make that living for yourself and again make it worth it, can you hold on to who you are, where I grew up, it felt as though like like poverty was a property of being muslim almost, you know, and that the moment you begin to transcend um that poverty, it's like you're actually moving away from Islam, you know, I think tussling with that is um is a thing that I think we all have to do, you know, and I think you know, as now we get into the third season, this core thing underneath what we've been exploring I think has been this this financial anxiety that is really present, like Grace, like how has that anxiety been part of your family even like growing up, like how did that affect you?

Yeah, absolutely, so my parents were immigrants from Taiwan and they came here for the american dream and I was really blessed to be raised in a lot of you know with upper middle class home, so money was not a worry for me, but that actually led to me to search for meaning and actually led me to find islam because it's like okay is this the point of life is just to make as much money as you can, and you're done, and you can you can take your toys with you, you can't do that.

So there has to be more, well, it's so funny to growing up, like, with money, but without faith, and you find it's really funny though when you grow up with faith and not money, because then you're like, where's the money you're like, and then you almost kind of like, forget about the, you know, because you're kind of like, we believe, but it didn't come in and it almost it's like money becomes the fixation, but then money has become your religion.

Well, yeah, yeah, and I think that's kind of almost like what we see happen with this family, you know, I mean, how is it, like for you growing up, I think, well, growing up in the hood, it was, you know, you're speaking about how you had, like, the stability to explore faith and I think because of the instability, a lot of people drew towards Islam, and it made a lot of sense because, you know, there had to be something more than what our situation was, you know, there had to be something more than the violence and like, you know, and the instability in the mental illness and, and you know, that's all I think results of poverty of course, and so, you know, seeing the way Romney's family struggles in this episode is a thing I understand profoundly and him going to to any end, you know what I mean?

To make things happen for his family is a difficult thing to critique or question when you don't kind of share that kind of same struggle as as him and his family.

So I think I watched a lot of people do do a lot of things of course, to to just free themselves from the situation of being in in in in the community like mine, what was it like for, you know, for you know, just how your family thinks about this stuff and processes my people's situation was obviously different.

We didn't immigrate here but were brought here as slaves, so which was about money.

Yeah, which was about money just we weren't doing making it.

So it was like the experience of one not having a home.

So it's like I'm it's almost as if to say it was like, this is like an extended business trip for some communities, like we have a home, but we're here away from home to do a job, that business trip idea and you know, of did your family send money back home?

You know, like you're like, you're always sending money back home, you're always like, you're trying to like, at least growing up we would be saving money for people in Egypt and then we'd also be trying to like save money just to talk to them, right?

Like we had the phone card game.

I remember one time my dad bought a stack of phone cards from this dude and it turns out like all the codes have been used.

This rocked our family.

I mean we were like this is like and now we're going back through patterson, we're trying to find the guy.

I don't I mean like when I was a kid it felt like we lost a million dollars 30 minutes and then $5 for an hour.

And so it's like you're saving money to send back home.

You're saving money to even communicate with home to communicate with everything you've known.

Like everything has a price tag and then it's at a certain point you're like, oh I think I'm thinking more about the price tag than the reason why even the thing, you know, and I feel like that's so baked into the anxiety of like but that's the key when you start asking what is money and so on and obviously the dollar doesn't have an intrinsic value.

And then we even think about gold and it's like more real, it would be so much better if you could smell $100 bill and like run faster.

Like at least like that would be like if it was just like and then just like we were able to do something it would be so okay.

I get why why this is That, that was $100 sprint like, like that was a premium dollar right there.

But yeah, but so what we're seeking, like we're talking about people get so involved with the means.

They like, I'm doing this for my family, but they never see their family because they're chasing the means by which to be with their family, never even know their families.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a very dangerous and easy way to stray off of even the path that we've made for ourselves.

But also, even even with how I think we're framing this through through Romney's perspective, is it possible in the setup right now to keep your morals and and do that and like what does it look like to go gray tell you a story.

I remember I was a young father And we had no money and we didn't have diapers.

So I remember I had this like little check, I can't remember some sort of like rebate check for like it was like $7 or something, I didn't even have a bank account, I was broke, broke, broke, broke and I'll go to the grocery store and see if I can like cash is $7 check so I can get some diapers and uh and I couldn't because I didn't have whatever, I couldn't, so I'm standing outside on the corner and um there's this this is a profound moment for me.

There was this man and he had this cart like overflowing with cans, right?

And I was like, I want to take his cans, right?

I've thought to myself, I just had a thought about robbing an old man.

It's funny, yeah.

For empty soda cans, you know what I'm saying?

But in that moment I was like, oh I I see how you could get to that place and how quickly um the moral framework just dissolves, like like a sugar cube and and water it just and it's not for nothing, you know, it's not just um out of just weakness, it's it's often times, I would say most times a consequence of love, you know?