Guest: Vanessa Ascencao, Health and Wellness expert

Guest: Neil Roets | CEO at Debt Rescue

Guest: Brent Lindeque, Creator of award winning ‘Good Things Guy’, Speaker, MC, entrepreneur and brand ambassador

Guest: Dr. Yashaar Rampath and Dr. Hala Qarqout: Dr. Vegan

Guest: Douglas Kruger, award winning business consultant, author and professional speaker

Guest: Wendy Knowler

Guest: Leonard Carr, Clinical Psychologist

Guest: Ahmed Kajee, EWN Reporter

POPS MOHAMED & FRIENDS

Pops has his own personal band simply called ‘Pops Mohamed & Friends’. This band has been together for 10 years. They have travelled in and out of South Africa making a name for themselves wherever they performed. This project is very close to Mr Mohamed’s heart since he carefully chose the band members himself. Pops’s vision with this band was to concentrate on a future South African sound which no-one has ever heard before, while also protecting and preserving African indigenous musical instruments for the 21st century.

Pops Mohamed & Friends were highly praised by former deputy president, Kgalema Motlanthe. Pops Mohamed & Friends are a five piece outfit featuring:

Pops Mohamed on African indigenous instruments, vocals and keyboards.

Femi Koya on all saxophones and flute.

Maxwell Baloyi on keyboards and acoustic piano.

Gally Ngoveni on bass and vocals

Bernice Boikanyo on drums 

Full bio: Born in Benoni east of Johannesburg in South Africa, Pops Mohamed is said by many to be South Africa’s ‘unofficial minister of music’. In the 90s he began recording the music of the San from the Kalahari in Namibia and integrating it into various projects ranging from jazz and funk to drum ‘n’ bass and trance. Pops Mohamed works as a producer / performer and lives in Johannesburg.

He loves experimenting with the newest technology, always in the service of music! Pops owes his artistic openness to his childhood to the Indian in Benoni. His nickname Pops dates back to his childhood enthusiasm for the comic seaman Popeye. At the age of 14 he founded his own first band The Les Valiants, with whom he played kwela, soul, pop and Latin music.

Richard Stengel, Former TIME editor and Under Secretary for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs on his new book, Information Wars: the first and only insider account exploring how the U.S. tried — and failed — to combat the global rise of disinformation that eventually spilled into the 2016 election. 

Richard is in South Africa for his book tour which ended 20 December. 

About Richard: 

From 1992 to 1994, he collaborated with Nelson Mandela on the South African leader’s autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. 

Stengel later wrote Mandela’s Way, a New York Times best-seller, on his experience working with Mandela. 

He is the author of several other books, including January Sun, about life in a small South African town, as well as You’re Too Kind: A Brief History of Flattery. 

He is an NBC/MSNBC analyst and lives in New York City. 

About the Book 

Disinformation is as old as humanity. When Satan told Eve nothing would happen if she bit the apple, that was disinformation. But the rise of social media has made disinformation even more pervasive and pernicious in our current era. In a disturbing turn of events, governments are increasingly using disinformation to create their own false narratives, and democracies are proving not to be very good at fighting it. 

During the final three years of the Obama administration, Richard Stengel, the former editor of Time and an Under Secretary of State, was on the front lines of this new global information war. At the time, he was the single person in government tasked with unpacking, disproving, and combating both ISIS’s messaging and Russian disinformation. Then, in 2016, as the presidential election unfolded, Stengel watched as Donald Trump used disinformation himself, weaponizing the grievances of Americans who felt left out by modernism. In fact, Stengel quickly came to see how all three players had used the same playbook: ISIS sought to make Islam great again; Putin tried to make Russia great again; and we all know about Trump. 

In a narrative that is by turns dramatic and eye-opening, Information Wars walks readers through of this often frustrating battle. Stengel moves through Russia and Ukraine, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, and introduces characters from Putin to Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and Mohamed bin Salman to show how disinformation is impacting our global society.