How People Actually Make Money in Crypto | The Mal Show (Podcast) with Talal Tabbaa

Cryptocurrency is one of the most talked-about industries in the world today.

Some people see it as the future of finance. Others see it as speculation and hype. But beyond the headlines and price charts, an entire financial infrastructure is being built — exchanges, platforms, and systems that allow millions of people to buy, sell, and store digital assets.

One of the people helping build that infrastructure in our region is today’s guest.

Talal Tabbaa is the CEO of CoinMENA, a cryptocurrency exchange serving users across the Middle East and beyond, providing access to digital assets within a regulated environment.

In this episode of The MAL Show, we explore Talal’s personal journey into the crypto industry and what it takes to build a company in such a fast-moving and often controversial space.

We also break down cryptocurrency itself — why it exists, the problems this technology is trying to solve, and how the crypto market actually works. From trading and exchanges to the risks and realities of the industry, this conversation aims to help viewers better understand the world of digital assets.

Topics discussed in this episode include:

Talal Tabbaa’s journey into crypto
How cryptocurrency works and why it exists
How crypto exchanges operate
How trading works in the crypto market
The risks and opportunities in the industry
Building a regulated crypto company in the Middle East

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To get in touch with Talal Tabbaa
https://www.linkedin.com/in/talaltabbaa/

#themalshow #crypto #bitcoin #cryptocurrency #entrepreneur #podcast

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:02

I believe in Bitcoin mainly because of its fixed supply. Bitcoin is the only asset in the world that has a perfectly inelastic supply. No matter what happens to Bitcoin's price, it goes up to 200,000, goes down to 50,000. There's always going to be 450 Bitcoin released every day at the moment.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

Building that infrastructure in our region is today's guest.

SPEAKER_00 0:31

What percent of global money laundering happens through Bitcoin? It's minuscule because Bitcoin is fully transparent. It's actually one of the worst ways you can launder money.

SPEAKER_01 0:39

How do you trust something? You don't even know who's behind it.

SPEAKER_00 0:41

I think it's very arrogant to assume that you know what you're doing and you need to do something so that you get data and let that data tell you what you need to be doing next.

SPEAKER_01 0:49

Why do we need Bitcoin to deliver what may seem to be the same function that gold or digital gold can deliver?

SPEAKER_00 0:55

Again, I worry about what I can control and don't worry about what I can't control. I'm not gonna know who Satoshi is, but I know Bitcoin works.

SPEAKER_01 1:05

Assalamu alaikum and welcome to the Mal Show. Today we're talking about one of the most talked-about industries in the world, cryptocurrency. Some people see it as the future of finance, others see it as speculation and hype. But behind the headlights and price charts, there is a real financial infrastructure being built. Exchanges, platforms, and systems that allow millions of people to buy, sell and store digital assets. One of the people building that infrastructure in our region is today's guest. Talal Tabah is the CEO of CoinMear, a cryptocurrency exchange serving users across the Middle East and beyond, giving people access to digital assets in a regulated environment. In this episode, we explore Talal's personal journey and how he entered the crypto industry, as well as what it takes to build a company in such a fast-moving and often controversial space. Along the way, we break down cryptocurrency itself, why it exists, and what problems this technology is trying to solve before moving into the market side of things, discussing how crypto trading works, how exchanges operate, and what people should understand before entering this world. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel to get the latest episodes of the match show. Let's begin. Talal, thank you so much for being with us today. Habibi, thank you so much. Uh pleasure is all mine. Honor is all mine. And thank you for being with us while everything that's that's going on, hopefully staying safe, operations are normal.

SPEAKER_00 2:29

Yes, alhamdulillah. I mean, um tough times never last, tough people last. So I think in tough times like this, you gotta be tough and you gotta push through. Um obviously it's a stressful time for everyone, but um I'm trying to worry about what I can control and not worry about what I cannot control. Um, so that's that's the framework that I'm thinking, whether it's at home, whether it's at work, whether it's in life. Uh Falhamdullah, so far so good. Great to hear. Great to hear.

SPEAKER_01 2:56

Uh Talal, I want to start with you with uh how do you start the building journey? Now, the common convention is I'm an employee at a company, I want to start something new, I quit my job, I go all in, I really, I really focus. Now, you've been advocating that that doesn't need to be the case. And you may always have time to build while you're on the on the job. How do you approach that? How do you approach the the ethical side of doing two things at a time? How do you approach the mental capacity and bandwidth to do both, etc.?

SPEAKER_00 3:25

Okay, so the ethical question is a very important one because I think that is a guilt that humans should not have. If you are employed by a company, you have a duty to give everything you have for that company. But does the the the that job does not define you? Meaning, in a in an age like this, you can do many things at the same time. Blacks and I actually think team members that are involved in multiple things, maybe they're involved somewhat in a family business, they have a side hustle, that improves their quality as human beings and subsequently as team members. So I don't think if if if you if you're not doing your job, obviously it becomes a big issue, and then you would have an issue keeping that job to begin with. Um but look, the way that I think of it is building while you still have a job, I think is something that has been completely normalized in the US and will be normalized, and in my opinion, is already normal in the Middle East as well. Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase, used to be an Airbnb engineer and he used to build Coinbase on the weekends. And then once Coinbase became big enough and crypto got better traction, he was able to quit his job at Airbnb and then do Coinbase. So the ethical question, where does it come in? Airbnb and Coinbase have zero competition, they don't compete with one another. So in my opinion, that's where ethics come in. If you're doing a business that has nothing to do with your existing job or existing business and you're not getting clients for from it, and you're not cutting any of the red lines that, in my opinion, uh should never be cut, then then it then it's fine. Um, for example, at uh CoinMina or even the company before it, um I built the company while still working another job. But I guess there's something that I have to also be very transparent about is I didn't start CoinMina. Uh I'm the CEO of CoinMina, but I actually didn't start it. Initially, I just put in some money as a as an investor. Um, my partner Yazen actually, he's he's the one that came up with the name of CoinMina, bought the domain coinmina.com. And the first time I ever heard the word coinmina.com was actually when Yazen uh bought the domain. Um but at CoinMina, there's Talal, Dina, and Yazen. We're three three uh founders, and you don't have um to do everything yourself. Even in a football team as good as Argentina, if everyone was messy, you wouldn't have a goalkeeper in defense. So I guess the the reason why I make that analogy is you need a team that has complementary skill sets. You need someone that comes up with crazy ideas, someone that sense checks them, someone that's good at execution. Um, so I actually don't know. Being a startup CEO or being even a founder or co-founder, you don't need to necessarily come up with the idea. Yeah, and even Travis, the the Uber founder, Elon, Tesla's founder, they didn't come up with Uber's idea or Tesla's idea. They're given a lot of credit for scaling it. Um but then again, what what what CoinMina and Life taught me is ideas are cheap and execution is what matters. Um now we'll see how that changes in the world of AI as execution becomes uh easier. Um I guess I answered your question with a million and one tangents, but yeah, hopefully I partially.

SPEAKER_01 6:36

You definitely did. And let me pick on one of these million and one. How do you reach that level of humility and transparency, of being able to be very comfortably say it wasn't my idea? And how does Yazen reach this level of selfishness to be able to say, okay, I came up with the idea, but maybe in this specific case, Talal is positioned well to come and be a CEO. I'm as Yazen positioned well to do something else, the two other partners also. How did you reach that situation?

SPEAKER_00 7:00

Very direct. There can be only one of us working at the company. Very direct, Yanny. There is only one way to have uncomfortable conversations, and it is to have them. If you avoid them, they fester and they create issues, and eventually they blow up in your face. Just like any relationship, one of the most important things is being able to overcome problems. If you have a relationship that has you've never fought, or that by the way, this applies to every type of relationship. You know, if you've been uh with a partner for five years and you've never fought, probably a red flag, because the first time you fight, it's gonna be unfamiliar territory. You want to be able to fight and resolve and fight and resolve so that you're able to reach your final goal. Um I guess with with CoinMina, it was uh it was Yani. When when we even wanted to go out and raise, yeah, even Beko Capital raised these issues. Like, guys, you have three founders, but only two are active. Yes, Dina and I have a very good working relationship, we have very complementary skill sets. Um, and Yazen and I, we've done several companies before. So that's from that experience, we realized that he's good at things and I'm good at things, and for we need to play to our strength, basically. One of one of the the actually, Yezin has a very good quote. I don't know who said it. Yezen said it on behalf of someone, and I need to figure out who that someone is. Maybe the audience can help us. But it's basically you can achieve amazing things if you don't care who takes the credit. And I probably butchered the quote, but the meaning of it is as a team, you can achieve insane things. And it was maybe Truman, the president, that said it, but I don't know. We'll we'll we we'll see who who fact checks me. But the concept is if you think of credit as a collective effort, you can achieve insane things. But then what's in it for me? For who? Uh if I don't take the credit. If it's the collective credit, okay, so I guess each person has things that can come out of it, right? Some people are doing it for monetary gains, some people are doing it for legacy, some people are people have different reasons for uh for doing it, and what's in it for them has to reflect what their goals are. So if someone has purely economic interests, they don't care to be running the business day to day. They care about an exit, which alhamdulillah in our case happened, they care about dividends, which wouldn't happen if I'm running the business. They would be, yeah. What's in it for me is highly contingent on the goals that that person or investor or even employee came into the business with.

SPEAKER_01 9:25

I'll definitely come to this exit later because that's obviously where I spend a lot of time on. But just on what you said, what do you think of the counter-argument that time heals a lot of things? So you don't necessarily need to have very direct conversations early on because maybe things change, time heals, etc. So why kind of maybe jump too early into something? Let's cross that bridge when we reach it later.

SPEAKER_00 9:44

Well, I guess the reality is uh this is not scientific, meaning human relationships are complex and you can't brush them all in one stroke or with one brush. Um, but I'm of that school because to me, life is too short to rely on time. I want to act on the things I can act on, and then those actions will have results, and that results will have data, and that data will feed and drive my future results. It's different schools of thought. Uh, some people like to uh give it time and and and let it die out, or or I maybe that's in business, I don't think that's necessarily a good idea. Because in business, you want to be able to, you know, I think it's very arrogant to assume that you know what you're doing and you need to do something so that you get data and let that data tell you what you need to be doing next. And this is something that again, Brian uh Armstrong, the Coinbase CEO, says it in a very direct, blunt way. It's like, if you don't know what to do, do something. And that something will give you data, and that data will tell you where you need to be going. So I think that makes it easier to run your business if you acknowledge that you don't necessarily know or can't control everything that's in your environment.

SPEAKER_01 10:56

You're also of the school of thought of always having a backup plan. Uh we've learned through history that maybe some of the most successful commanders were of the view of burn the ships, don't have a backup plan. How do you think of these schools of thought?

SPEAKER_00 11:10

Yeah, so it's ideal if you can achieve both. Meaning when we started CoinMina, there was only one outcome. We will monetize this business. We will either go public on DFM, we will either raise crazy money and acquire the other businesses in the Middle East, or we will sell the business. Those are the only three options. Failure is not an option. So if by that you mean burn all the boats, sure. But by that, does it mean that I spent all my savings to any mathalan? We had to put in a million dollars to start Coin Mina, uh, about a million dollars for paid up capital because we split it between the founders. Um, we could have taken loans to do that, but we didn't. We split it in a way that we don't have to take loans. Famathalan, maybe burning all the bridges means ah, Adi, extend all on your credit. So I guess the word burning all the boats can give uh uh extra push for risk that might not be warranted. So if people around me or people in my life know that I like to take risks. If you like to take risks, you need to make sure that you have a backup plan. Because so, yeah, I guess I'm of the other school of thought where um the reason why I have a backup plan is I want to be able to make another bet and another bet, another bet. So if I put all my uh I'm not gonna use eggs in all basket because from an investment standpoint, I do have that. I don't have a backup plan. Uh Bitcoin is my backup plan, and if Bitcoin fails, I will have to spend my time to make money again. And in half today, I don't if the if Coin Mina or Hadda does not pay me, I bought Bitcoin, and Bitcoin is enough for me to be financially stable. I don't need to change my time for money. Everyone that is working on salaries, they're exchanging their time for money. If you are if you are investing successfully, then you can make your money work for you essentially. Uh yeah, from that standpoint, I don't really have a backup plan. But in business, you should.

SPEAKER_01 13:03

I want to come back to how come you trust uh Bitcoin that uh that uh that uh that much. But um but before I get to uh to that and and the fact that you're putting everything into uh in in into it, uh I want to stay with you on that point of a lot of people like to come on shows and say we started from absolutely nothing, we started from from zero. You're coming here just being much more honest and transparent and saying, look, there was a million dollars initial capital to come in. What do you think of the idea of starting from zero? On one hand, why is it like so dramatic?

SPEAKER_00 13:40

And I will be very honest with you. Anna, I have zero experience about starting from zero. And my my my dad paid the tuition to send me to Purdue University in the US. That was maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars. So in my mind, I cannot compare myself to anyone and everyone because I was given a golden spoon. So I have no option of losing because I was sent to the best school. My dad made sure that he worked very hard so that he's able to afford to send me, my brother, my sister to university. So it is my duty to repay the trust that he put in me. So I guess when people say start from zero, it's insanely impressive for people that have started from zero and made it to absolute success. It's it's a rags to riches story. It is something that in human nature you like to do that. When you see people break social and economic boundaries, it is something that is there's a wow effect with it. Uh but Anna, from my side, I wouldn't be able to relate to that because I was literally given the best opportunities by my parents. And I feel like I have a duty to both do well in the world of business and not only give back to my parents and family, but to give back to the wider community. Because I was given a chance that maybe if someone else was given a chance, they would even do better. Um yeah, I guess, and and that is about a personal level. On CoinMina, Coin Mina is my fifth company. Some of them failed, some of them worked. So in the first company, I wouldn't have been able to put in a million uh dollars to start. But if you take on risks early in your career, in my opinion, you will be rewarded. Because I guess the first real big risk that I took was leaving PWC to go work for a family office in Saudi. And I was on the fast track with PWC, getting promoted to suits and everything, and I quit to a job that didn't have a formal job offer, and that was uh a big risk I took at the age of 23. And what would happen if I again I had a backup, which is my family, and I wouldn't go hungry. And maybe someone else wouldn't be able to say that, you know, and I quit my PWC job, which was nice pay, stable, and I took a leap of faith into a job that I didn't know how it would work out. But in my mind, if that job didn't go well, I would go back to PWC. I'm not gonna go hungry. I guess um there's an interview from Travis, the Uber CEO a few days ago, you know, when they say that pain is actually something that you should aim for in business. And because if you in if you endure pain, that means your results will be more defensible in the future.

SPEAKER_01 16:17

Now, golden spoon is a word that usually is used in a very negative connotation. Now you're wearing it with a badge of honor, actually turning it into a duty and responsibility to deliver even more. How did you go through this thought process?

SPEAKER_00 16:31

Because I worry about what I can control and I don't worry about what I can't control. I can't control that my parents did well and were able to send me to school, or am I gonna feel bad about it and victimize myself? So, what can I control? I can control my emotions, my thinking process, where no Alhamdulillah, uh I was given great opportunities, and now I have no option to fail because it would be yeah, you know, it comes with its own pressure, and you can take that pressure in multiple ways. You can relax and say, you know what, I don't care, I have backup, I'm not gonna go hungry, whatever. Or you can use it as fuel and motivation. And and honestly, that's something that I think about a lot for my son because uh obviously Dubai gives you very pampered and nice living. And uh I look at the toy cars of my son, they're things that I did not see until I was much older. That's something I also think of, you know, how am I gonna motivate him? Because I guess Anna, in in my mind, the way that my dad motivated me was not similar to our conditions, and the conditions were good, so he he can't motivate me by telling me talk you need to go out and make money, or you need to, yeah. Different levers are needed for different types of motivations. Yeah, and I have purely financial motives, would not have done it for me because I didn't have that concern. I didn't have paycheck to paycheck, Alas Abil Missa. So I have different goals in mind, and you need different uh ways to motivate different people. Yeah, I know that that was a bit of a long-ended situation.

SPEAKER_01 18:06

No, no, but it's spot on because I think a lot of people actually like that fear of hunger in the founders because they're like, that's why they're all in, they have no option to fail. If they fail on the street, that's why we back them. But here you are saying not necessarily what you're looking for is a motive, and that motive doesn't always need to be hunger.

SPEAKER_00 18:21

Yeah, it can be people are and you know what? The first time I really felt motivated was when I decided to study engineering and they did like an intervention. I know I was a very bad kid, uh, Allah. My my mom, I I God bless her, Yanni, but I feel bad for her because I was not a very easy, I was a very difficult kid. Uh at school, uh, it was not Yani, and I wasn't necessarily very good at school either, because I would miss classes. When I decided I wanted to study engineering, they came to my house. Family uncle, actually, my uncle was supportive, but family members who should not study engineering. He will not make it. Even my school counselor, my high school counselor, who I love to go back and tell her, see, I told you, like, ah, Talal, go to Purdue? I don't think so. You know, only 20% of people graduate. I'm like, yeah, I will be part of that 20%. So to me, the motivation was my high school counselor was saying, Notalal, Purdue, Purdue, it's very easy to get in, but you will you will never graduate from there. So that became, and how can she say that? Yeah, ish, and and and they referenced other relatives or had I, you know what, that distant uncle, he started engineering, but he ended up moving to economics or business because he couldn't do it. So I really don't think you should do it. That was my motivation. No, Kifi, how could they doubt my ability to do that? And that became the fuel that allowed me to go to uh do well in university and different types of ways to motivate people. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 19:46

Now, I want to go back to your point you made about Bitcoin now. You're saying you're all in, it's where your money is, where effectively the company that you've built is and the exit is. How do you build so much confidence and concentration in Bitcoin and why?

SPEAKER_00 20:01

Okay, so uh I will give you a very clear and direct answer. This is because I bought earlier, meaning if I was gonna start from today, I would not put all of my wealth in Bitcoin. The risk and return is very different from when Bitcoin is three, four hundred dollars versus now. And then when I first when I first bought Bitcoin, I used to live in a studio with zero responsibilities in life. There was zero dependence on Talal Tabbah. Now I have a wife, I have a son, I have other obligations, I have team members. Each period, investors need to invest based on the risk return, and your risk appetite is much easier when you're young. When I was uh younger, I used to like to invest in Bitcoin, and the reason why I used to like invest in Bitcoin is probably the same reason why I still like it today. As part of my job as PWC, we did a lot of work for uh banks, central banks, and financial institutions. And I realized that financial institutions are not going to be early adopters of technology and that they're kind of faced with the innovators' dilemma. And the innovators' dilemma means if you basically have a profitable, high-margin business and there's an innovation that is going to disrupt that, you're not gonna want to take it on. For that reason, the New York Cab company did not come up with Uber. That's why the New York Times didn't come up with Instagram, that's why Marriott Group didn't come up with Airbnb. And similarly, banks aren't gonna come up with Bitcoin because it cannibalizes the inefficiency that they use to make margins. So I guess, long story short, I got into Bitcoin because I realized that the financial industry is extremely behind and they're not going to adopt it from within. It has to be an independent system. Um, and then I guess I had seen the friction with sending money in and out of countries. I have seen the well, I guess Anna to from a Personal standpoint, this is not investing uh advice or or anything of that sort. But I don't think money should be public. In the same way that, yeah, so I guess gold was money for very long time in human history. And you could trust gold because in order to get more gold, you need to spend time, you need to send miners, people to dig it and mine it from the under from under the ground. Um as a kid, I used to like to save in gold because I did not the the game of monopoly is the best example of why it's hard to trust the US Federal Reserve. Because anytime they go bankrupt, they can print more of it. I guess going back to why I believe in Bitcoin, I believe in Bitcoin mainly because of its fixed supply. You are able to know. Yeah, I mean, okay, in economics, they taught us that no asset in the world has a perfectly inelastic supply. Let's stay, let's go back a little bit in economics classes. Inelastic supply means an asset that its supply does not change no matter what happens to the price. Let's take the example for uh wood. If wood's price was to shoot up 20x, what are we gonna do? We're gonna go to the woods, cut, chop off some more wood so that we can sell more and capitalize on this crazy price appreciation. If we start a company and the share price goes 10x, we will issue more shares and sell it to the public so that we are able to capitalize on that increase in uh in price. Bitcoin is the only asset in the world that has a perfectly inelastic supply. No matter what happens to Bitcoin's price, it goes up to 200,000, goes down to 50,000. There's always going to be 450 Bitcoin released every day at the moment. And the monetary policy of Bitcoin cuts the amount of Bitcoin going into supply by half every four years. So I guess the deterministic nature of the monetary supply showed me that this asset is going to have limited supply and increasing demand over the coming years. And I want to make money without putting too much effort. So this is the lazy way of making, or that's that that was my thinking process. So I think that was validated by by Bitcoin's price. We'll see how it progresses in in uh in the coming years. And yeah, I guess my belief in in Bitcoin is built on a deep understanding of the technology and some of the socioeconomic problems that we have in the world today.

SPEAKER_01 24:33

Okay, but as you said, you grew up investing in gold. Uh gold has a finite amount of supply, it has an increasing demand, especially with everything happening around the world now. We see central banks increasing their reserves in gold. Uh, gold has become very digital, very fractionalized, a lot of platforms. So, why do we need Bitcoin to deliver what may seem to be the same function that gold or digital gold can deliver?

SPEAKER_00 24:57

All right, so uh doomsday scenario. Um, in a country where, let's give an example in Latin America, where um the central bank in a specific country has completely failed, and you have two tons of gold or two thousand Bitcoin and you need to move them out. How are you gonna move your gold in a country where everything is chaotic? You're not gonna be able to do it. Bitcoin, you can even remember the keys in your head and you can memorize the or you can put it on a drive. There's multiple ways of transferring it. So the argument between Bitcoin and gold is uh realistically speaking, if you're older and I don't know what that threshold is, you most likely need to invest in gold. Yeah, my grandfather, I finally convinced him to buy Bitcoin, and then when I pushed him to invest more, he's like, Talish, why? What's in it for me? And I'm uh 89, well, 90, he just turned 90. Alhamdulillah. So basically, uh I bought a bit of Bitcoin, I've seen it. Why do you want me to buy more? And I have gold and I'm 90. My investing goals are different than your investing gold, golds. Gold is an$18 trillion dollar asset, Bitcoin is a trillion dollar asset. So if if you tell me why is gold not why is gold more valuable than Bitcoin, is because way more people trust in gold. But why do people trust in gold? Because it's been there 5,000 years. There is no way for Bitcoin to become more trustworthy than gold in its first 20 years of existence. As there's something in economics called the Lindy effect. And the Lindy effect says that the longer money is in circulation, or the longer money an asset is used as money, the more likely it is trusted going future.

SPEAKER_01 26:38

Okay, so Bitcoin came in and solved the problem that gold still has an element of physicality in it, even if you don't see it buying digital gold, there is a physical risk there. Now, why do we need then the other currencies? You also said, I think, on the board of one of the Ethereum associations, et cetera, if kind of Bitcoin came in and said we're 100% digital, why do we need yet another one?

SPEAKER_00 26:58

So there is no other Bitcoins. There's only one Bitcoin, in my opinion, and the rest are yanny. And the way I see my investing is I save using Bitcoin. I actually save using my bitcoins, and the other is speculation. It's like investing in stocks trying to buy low, sell high, you end up doing the opposite. Yani. The others are more speculative in nature, and I don't see them as savings per se. Uh Famathelan, I do hold some Ethereum. I like this new token called Hype. These are a few tokens that I invest in, but I invest in from a speculative investment standpoint, and I don't let them increase more than 1-2% of my uh invested portfolio.

SPEAKER_01 27:37

Now, you divide investment into saving, which is clear, and speculation. Now, someone may say, is speculation really investing, or is it more of gambling effectively?

SPEAKER_00 27:47

Um I guess this I think the stock market has become gambling since 2008. And the best way to prove that is look at a company called Beyond Meat. They have had very logical increase in revenue and Ibiddah, but the stock price has been like this. Basically, and and and if you're asking me speculation gambling, in my opinion, the stock market has become closer to a casino than it is investing since 2008, because the denominator we are using, which is the US dollar, has such a high fluctuating supply that it's impossible to use it as the frame of reference. Yani. If we wanted to know what's this distance, and I give you a ruler that the unit of centimeter keeps changing, then how can you figure out the distance? So if we're calculating the price of the SP using this US dollar, which has supply that is literally circulating in the trillions or fluctuating in the trillions, yeah, then I guess GME, uh, you have many examples where uh if you look at the ratios for uh price to earnings you had, yeah. So the stock market is closer to gambling, and so is my speculative investments. Yes, that is correct.

SPEAKER_01 29:03

So now I grew up, a person has grown up thinking building companies, investing in companies is great, is ethical, creates jobs, creates employment. Going to casinos is maybe bad, right? Is gambling is speculative. And based on that, I've been avoiding going to casinos and I've been investing in the stock market. Now currently I face this reality. What do I do? Where where do I go from there? Like it's it's kind of not my mistake because I haven't decided that the stock market has become a casino, but it has become a casino. So where does this leave me?

SPEAKER_00 29:36

Yeah, I mean, look, um, just to be clear and yeah, not to sensationalize things over overly, not all of this market, all not all of stock investing is casino, just so that we're not painting an extra uh uh yeah, extra what's the word? Uh dramatic means. Dramatic, me even me. Exactly, um, especially when you have tech stocks that have price to earnings ratios that really fluctuate uh heavily. But yeah, I mean the US stock market is become such a passive investment that you know, if you think of the SP and how many people around the world use it as a savings instrument, I think it's become closer to an inflation index than anything else. Because if it's getting all of these passive flows, yeah, I still haven't made up my mind on that, to be honest. And uh, I will be there are ideas that are still in progress in my mind, and that's one of them. So I I think that as I was younger, I used to spit out answers on the go, even if I'm not 100% sure. Actually, I'm never 100% sure, but even if I was not sure at all. Uh now I'm teaching myself that if I'm if my answer or my thought process on something is not 100% clear, I'll be direct about it. But this is one of the things that I'm still thinking about.

SPEAKER_01 30:58

For a follow-up episode. So you said on banks and financial institutions, uh, you don't think they're gonna come up with uh Bitcoin. It's not in their best interest, not in their best incentives. However, Bitcoin, we don't even know who came up with it. So by definition, we don't even know what's their best interest, what's their agenda, what are they trying to drive. How do you trust something? You don't even know who's behind it.

SPEAKER_00 31:16

Uh great, great, great. Okay. So, and I I guess when when I answered you about people and agendas, I started thinking of those to a point where I forgot the actual answer. But the way you trust in Bitcoin is um incentives. Today, there is a trillion dollar incentive to crack the Bitcoin code. Because what's Bitcoin market cap is about a trillion dollars. So if you're able to hack it, or if you're able to compromise it, or if you're able to take it down, you make you can make crazy amounts of money. And that means if even if you are a government, if you are an individual, if you're a company, break Bitcoin and make an insane amount of money. So that incentive, it's like a price tag hanging over Bitcoin's head. Uh so there's a trillion dollar price tag that has not been cracked. Um and then the other thing is that, in my opinion, if Satoshi's identity was known, they'd be jailed, killed, prosecuted. Yeah, of course. 100%. If you went, yeah, let's let's also not be idealistic. If you think Uber went to the Department of Transport, said, Hey, knock the door, can I please come up with a technology that's gonna cannibalize your taxi uh revenues? They would tell them, go, we're not gonna allow you. If you went to the central bank and told them, hey, I want to create this form of private money that is better than yours and will compete with you, then yeah. So Satoshi's identity not being known is something that is very important because otherwise Bitcoin would have died. They would have been able to find Satoshi, take his or hers first million Bitcoin. Uh, and and this is a question that I struggle a lot with with explaining to bigger customers or bigger investors in who is Satoshi? Uh and I don't know, no one knows, and you can speculate, you can try to draw your own conclusions, but the reality is Bitcoin works without Satoshi, as we've seen over the past uh Did you watch the series trying to uncover who is it?

SPEAKER_01 33:09

Was it any good? Was there any real insights there?

SPEAKER_00 33:11

Was it just I think there's been many, many different uh, many different series on it. I think the one you're mentioning ends up saying it's Paul Lerou, which is a criminal that's currently in jail. I think it's more than one person, to be honest. That's it's very difficult for one person to come up with something like this. It I think it's but the also the counter-argument if it's a team, it would have been leaked of who uh of who did it. Anyway, it's harder to keep a secret when it's multiple people. But again, I worry about what I can control and don't worry about what I can't control. I'm not gonna know who Satoshi is, but I know Bitcoin works.

SPEAKER_01 33:50

And the gentleman who you mentioned is in jail, is it something related to Bitcoin or is it something else? Something else.

SPEAKER_00 33:57

He's a uh class A criminal. But I guess geniuses can go two ways. You can have people that go the extreme route of helping the world, and then you have people that take the other route. This guy is super smart, but he took the criminal route.

SPEAKER_01 34:12

Well, I guess also they can be intertwined, right? Because one of the also the criticisms of Bitcoin is while it does a lot of great things that you mentioned, it's also a conduit for human trafficking, for money laundering, for lots of different things because of the same characteristics it offers.

SPEAKER_00 34:26

Yeah, I mean, I would argue that analogy has the same legs as us drinking in plastic straws right now. Because because drinking in plastic straws means nothing if you have rockets flying over who you have yani. The the it really became evident that the ESG movement or a lot of the renewable stuff is only on us mere mortals. It does not apply to governments and armies and you know, so what effort uh yeah, I guess the same analogy kind of uh, in my opinion, fits uh fits on that. You know, today what percent of global money laundry happens through Bitcoin? It's minuscule because Bitcoin is fully transparent, it's actually one of the worst ways you can launder money. Bitcoin is really bad for money laundry because everything is public, accessible to all. If you want to launder money, you use physical cash because it has no public record, it has it's not uh trackable uh forever in history. I actually think that Bitcoin is one of the worst ways to launder money because of its characteristics. If you go towards other things, uh privacy coins, sure, those have characteristics that that do allow that. But yeah, in my opinion, um having run a centralized crypto exchange, I feel like um controls in things digital are much easier than in physical. And it's uh maybe an analogy that I was able to understand this better earlier on. If I send you a PowerPoint, and I guess the the the argument is it's easier to control digital than it is to control physical. If I send you a PDF file of our send you a PowerPoint, even though it's digital but it's older than Google Docs or presentations, you have the file, I have zero control over it. Uh actually, I did this once in uh in a presentation on stage. Scan a QR code and you get a Google Doc. But then I can control that Google Doc. So I guess with digital things, you can control them in a better way than physical, and the same with Bitcoin. Um, and if you want to look at examples of Bitcoin, uh so the biggest hacks in Bitcoin history, there was one$3.5 billion from Bitfinex. They caught the hackers six years after because they used some of the stolen Bitcoin to buy a PlayStation gift card from Walmart. They tracked it and they caught them. Uh with Bitcoin, it is fully traceable and it's actually not a very good, it's one of the worst ways to launder money. But but to also not position to position it in in a when there are new technologies, they are used by the best and worst in people. So some people use Bitcoin and stable coins and other had for illicit purposes. Uh, but that does not define them, and that is not a very good idea because it's easily trackable. Uh, even now you have things like there's tokens that are centrally issued, like USDT and USDC, that can fully comply with the AML regulations where they have even the right to seize and the right to freeze.

SPEAKER_01 37:24

Now, you mentioned CoinMina as a centralized crypto exchange, and you mentioned now centrally issued coins. Now, people, some people would say these descriptions are inherent and ironic in their own sense because that was the whole point. Decentralization, none kind of central issuances. Are we back to square one?

SPEAKER_00 37:45

Um, not necessarily. So, first of all, um decentralization was not the goal. The it was the goal of Bitcoin, but it was not the goal of other coins. And even Satoshi, in there's there's uh many things that Satoshi wrote about colored coins or website coins, where he believes that even domains will become in the form of tokens. Um and those would be centrally issued. Okay, Bitcoin needs to be decentralized because it is being used as money. There are other things, and and with money you should not trust. Yanni. Why why with money I should not trust? I should rely. Because I'm exchanging my time for money. I spend eight hours, I get paid$10 per hour, I've made this$80, and that means I'm exchanging my money, which is limited and finite. Sorry, I'm exchanging my time, which is limited and finite, with money. Whereas if someone has the ability to mint and create new money, like the US Federal Reserve, they're basically diluting my effort by printing more money. And this has been the reason for the failure of every monetary system throughout human history. The Roman Empire fell when they started to slash a lot of the gold. They had gold coins, and to basically steal money from their population, they started cutting some of the gold off and they would skim, skim part of it until people realized, hey, this is completely unfair and uh completely flipped.

SPEAKER_01 39:13

Very interesting. Uh, we're getting a bit into political economy here. So we're staying away from politics, but actually away from political economy at least. Uh I want to go back to so on this wasn't centralization. Now, when you start running such a central exchange, and effectively this is money of retail investors, this is everyday person listening to us now who's put with you a$10 and$100, obviously the responsibility here becomes quite huge, right? And on a on a in a few months when someone who bought uh Bitcoin at$120 and then came down to 70, a guy who had$100 now has$50. How do you deal with that responsibility?

SPEAKER_00 39:48

Okay, so there is my first, by the way, it is not my first responsibility. Just so that I'm very clear. My first responsibility is ensuring that the assets are safe. The value of the assets is a secondary thing we will come to. Yanni. If Yusuf buys one Bitcoin and Bitcoin goes from a 2020 to 70, this is as expected. But if the Bitcoin was to get hacked, that is not expected. For my first job is to ensure that the company is solvent, that the custody is world class, and that the cybersecurity infrastructure is uh is there and is in place and is compliant to VARA and Central Bank of Bahrain. As for the drop in Bitcoin value, we address this in a different way, where we place weekly buy and sell limits based on the net worth of the user, so that we don't allow them to invest more than the government technically allows. Um, and we don't offer leverage or margin. In my opinion, anyone that talks about responsible investing and then gives their user access to leverage or margin, they're not being honest. If your platform is doing leverage or CFDs or perpetual, then you are a profit-oriented business. And there's nothing wrong with that. But you can say that you take care of your users. Because if you take care of your users, you would only offer spot. Um, that's my personal opinion. Because again, going back to the casino and gambling, uh, leverage trading platforms have a closer business to casinos than they do to exchanges like the NASDAQ and other centralized exchanges. So how do you deal with the I again? I worry about what I can control and not worry about what I can't control. So, for example, when we listed some tokens that uh, because we're a profit-oriented business at the end of the day, which means that I have a fiduciary responsibility to my shareholders to grow and run the business. But at the same time, I can't sell my customers uh anything under the sun. When there are coins that are low liquidity, low volume, we put a big disclaimer in this can go to zero, cause, cause of you do your part in terms of how you make your users and investors more aware.

SPEAKER_01 41:57

On leverage, what draws the line between whoever is offering leverage is being honest or not? For example, if it's real estate, I think we would all accept that offering a mortgage is kind of fair enough. Is it the volatility, is it the liquidity? What drives whether leverage is an honest practice or not?

SPEAKER_00 42:15

Very interesting. So, and if you take a mortgage mortgage, your probability of getting liquidated is not that high. Whereas if you are actually I'm I'm curious to understand what the commercials are behind it, but unless real estate completely collapses, your risk of getting liquidated is reason reasonably accepted. Whereas if you bought Trump token at 10x or 5x leverage, you are almost guaranteed to get uh wiped out. So I don't think there is a scientific one for it, but leverage does involve interest and um leverage does allow people to invest more than they can or more than they should. Um I mean, platforms that offer 5x leverage, I have no issues with. If you're offering 101x leverage on fartcoin, then yes, obviously I have an ethical issue with it. But at the end of the day, I don't think of myself as the referee. Meaning I don't judge others and to each their own. But I have my own moral compass, and that's how I manage what I'm able to do and what I'm not able to do. Because funnily enough, that you mentioned real estate, real estate was the ultimate way of making money 50 years ago because you could lever up for 30 years with crazy leverage on an asset that had low vol low, sorry, low supply and very increasingly uh increasingly demand, but they had kind of uh liquidation uh protection because houses don't get house mortgages don't get liquidated as often. Yeah, very interesting.

SPEAKER_01 43:49

Now uh I want to go back to said your first responsibility is to protect people's assets. Yes. And that you have everything from the central bank of Bahrain. Authorization to Avara in the UE, and that's your top priority. Now that's what FTX said, right? They said it's our top priority, we have all of this, etc. And then FTX collapsed. If FTX at such a level can collapse, how can people trust anyone else?

SPEAKER_00 44:14

Harami, FTX FTX, Fa stole customer funds. Um, I guess with debt seniority or with seniority of cash, the first one is customer assets. And then you go back to equity. So with SBF, they invested customer funds, which should all be backed up one-to-one. But in my opinion, FTX was a great example of human failure and not crypto failure. Because if it was a decentralized exchange, that would not have been possible because everything would be out in the open. What SBF did is a classic scam that has existed since the human start of human time, where he has a liability, which is in dollars, which is very clear what his liability is in, and he created some asset called FTT or his tokens. And those are assets where he propped up the value of to match the liabilities. And they had some Mickey Mouse type auditors, and I I, with all due respect to Mickey Mouse, Yanny, but it's they had some in uh Ayakalam auditors who had passed where they showed this heavily inflated asset on the asset side, which was FTT, and liabilities in dollars. Uh, another example that is more relatable in the real estate world. Let's say me and you want to start a project, and I come up with I tell you I'm gonna come in with my piece of land. And instead of valuing my piece of land at a million, I value it at a billion. So I'm come in with bad intentions. In FTX, they did have bad intentions and they intended and they did actually invest customer money. The thing that shocks me the most about FTX is they invested$500 million in Anthropic, the company that produces Claude, way back when. When in 2021 or 2022. Uh so technically, if SBF or if FTX did not have that bank run, they would have way more than their customer assets. They would be fully solvent. But that shows you the importance of time. Yanny. Some many people don't give enough importance to the time value of money and and and how risks change changed.

SPEAKER_01 46:30

Very interesting. Because there was one documentary on Wirecard, the German stuff, and that it was, I think, inches away from buying one of the big German banks. And had the acquisition been completed, everything else would have almost been a detailed afford that happened because it would have taken over. So I guess a lot of this is in is in is in hindsight as well. But you lived through that moment of FTX collapse. And I think in one of your your posts, you had mentioned you also had a relatively short runway at that point in time. So it was kind of quite a stressful situation. How did you navigate that?

SPEAKER_00 46:57

It's really stressful, yeah. It was very stressful. We had uh lost more money than maybe half of what we raised total, we lost in a year in 2022. We spent crazy amounts of marketing in 2022. Now, when I look back at our financials and what the hell were you doing? But we live and we learn, and companies that are good are ones that are able to learn from those experiences and mistakes and and keep pushing. Um yeah, the FTX disaster was, and this is where you know what differentiates good investors and amazing investors. Beko Capital invested$3 million in CoinMina maybe a few weeks after FTX collapsed. And if it was not for them, I would be bankrupt or CoinMina would be bankrupt. One of one or the other. Because basically I had to put in a short-term loan to make salaries of keza, and then we wanted to uh fundraise, and uh Bekko actually came through for uh I have to give them credit where it's due. And I'm very happy that they put that trust in us and we were able to repay it because we had a good business. Don't get me wrong, Beko did not invest just because we had a good pitch. No, we had a very good business. We had uh the best licensing stack in the Middle East, and we had very good reason to believe that 2023 we'd turn profitable, and we actually turned profitable. So um, how did you manage that period? First is make sure that your other parts in life know that you are stressed as hell. I told all my no one give me any type of trouble because Anna, I'm till here. So I communicated to everyone around me, and no, because because if you don't do that, they assume everything is normal and everything is not normal. When when you're running a company and you have 60 plus employees who their families who and you don't know if you can make payroll, it is very stressful. Alhamdulillah, we're not uh we were able to overcome that with the support of amazing investors like Bekko. Um, and to have a backup plan. And I would not have invested that much if I didn't know that we have a backup plan. And and before we raised, before we raised that emergency round, we had only done a small a seed round. So we had so much equity to use to to to back it up, and that was the backup plan.

SPEAKER_01 49:13

Uh a few things I want to follow up on here. One is I think when you're describing the situation being stressful, you immediately kind of quoted payroll. So that's the kind of the first thing on your mind, the first thing you recollect is the impact on human life. Of course.

SPEAKER_00 49:28

Because Yanni. Okay, so one of the things that is very important to uh it is, Yanni, as a CEO or as someone senior in a company, you're not only in charge of your employees, but your employees have families. And if you don't pay them, it is your job to pay them. Yanni, if I don't make payroll on time, it is the biggest failure of any CEO. You need to make sure that you pay your team. And I I hear of companies, no Allah, this month, uh delay in payroll. It is you are a failure of a CEO if your payroll is delayed. Figure out a way to get your team paid on time. This for me is something that uh in our family business I saw as a kid, you know, even when there was times of uh economic difficulty, dad, grandfather, payrolls go through. Adi. You gotta, you know, and that's why when you're profitable, you invest in rainy day funds, you put backups, because not when the first sign of instability are you get your team out. How do you expect them to be with you when things are tough? And I actually maybe I'll use that to give you an example of how we dealt with it. So, part of our pitch to Bekko is we told them, listen, we're losing money, but I need to raise capital now. And uh this is my plan. I will take a 50% cut on my salary, and I'm the highest paid in CoinMina, I'll take a 50% cut. The lowest person in CoinMena will take a 5% cut. But everyone in the company will take a hit from 50% down to five, and we will do Q1. If January, February, and March are all profitable, and I don't care, even if it's profitable by$1, I will bring back the payroll to normal. And we were profitable all three months and we brought back payroll to normal. So the the the commercial impact was not very big, but the team saw that I would rather take a cut myself and Dina and all of the team to take a collective hit. Don't get me wrong, if we had inefficiencies, we would fire. Because CEOs that don't act on inefficient payroll, it's also they're messing up because everything in life is a balance. And I have a balance between being fair to the team and fair to my shareholders and investors. If I give the team 10-month bonuses, then I'm being very good to the team or overly good to the team, very bad to the investors. So that's the balance you have to strike.

SPEAKER_01 51:46

The other point you mentioned is putting personal money as a loan into the company. Now, there's been situations in the past where founders have done that, and then investors haven't necessarily followed through, and then the company started going under, and then the founder scrambled to get some of that money back out because there was no point anyway, and then just became a complete kind of governance mishap.

SPEAKER_00 52:07

Yes, there is only one way to have difficult conversations, is you have them. So we had a signed agreement with all involved parties saying that this is this loan uh basically will convert to a convertible note. So Anna, I'm on CoinMean as cap table. Hello, when we had the exit, I was also paid out as a noteholder. It was technically not even a loan, it was a convertible note. I came in just like any of the other note holders.

SPEAKER_01 52:32

The other point you mentioned is dilution, which I think you've also posted about before, that this is the founder's most valued currency and asset, and preserve it because you're gonna use it in times like these. But equally, as I said, you want to be generous with your team, you want to give them part of the upside. How do you balance this kind of being generous with your investors, with your team, but also preserving what your most valuable currency is for a rainy day like this?

SPEAKER_00 52:57

Yeah, it's a difficult one as the easiest answer is run a profitable business. Because if you run a profitable business, these problems solve itself. Your equity becomes valuable. Let's say I put in 80% ASOP, but it's a losing business. Yeah, I'm you know, I wouldn't care about the ASOP itself. So, um, okay, so in my opinion, the best way to do Aesop is to allocate a big percent of it in the beginning and leave a way for you to give bonuses in in ASOP. And I saw there's some companies now, I think Nimcard, if I'm not mistaken, they did ASOP buyback or Coin DCX. Well, I'm not sure. I don't want to misquote it, so forget the company name. But there's some startups that they're not gonna sell now, but they're profitable, so they're doing ASOP buybacks, and uh yeah, I think that's something that's very powerful, and it's most importantly, it changes the culture of the company. Um one thing that I also look at is you know what's the standard CEO versus average pay gap in the world in now versus like the 70s? How much in average employee versus CEO in the 70s it was 20x. Okay, now it's 400x. Wow. It is but that's obviously US, and you have your public market so that if I and Ko and Mina were at 20x, and I want to keep it at that. You know, I think that companies today they can pay their team more, and they yeah. That that's also another topic that I think is is going to be super important as we progress with AI is your amazing team members, you will want to pay a lot, and your okay team members you will end up letting go. But it's it's we're we're that's a topic that I still don't have haven't made up my thoughts fully about. But yeah, AI is gonna do some crazy things to the job market.

SPEAKER_01 54:48

But where would this leave the world? Because one of the techniques, the promises of of AI was should be more prosperity. But what you're saying is it's also more inequality and in equal distribution of that prosperity. So where would that leave the world?

SPEAKER_00 55:01

In a pretty difficult spot, which is why I haven't fully made up my thoughts, because I am life is too short to be anything except optimistic. So if I have maybe if I have a negative thought now about this, I will keep thinking about it until I find a positive way to spin it with this negative thing in the background. I guess I haven't fully made up my my mind on that. Uh, but the world will be in a difficult place when it comes to that. And part of it is because historically we have had disruptions, but they've never affected the high-paying people. Yani. You know that in 100 years ago, maybe 70% of the world used to work in agriculture. Today that percent is less than uh 20%. But if 50% of the world's jobs got displaced, you'd imagine it's a big problem. But it's not because we were able to find things that are better. But if AI is going to deem my lawyer, my junior developer, my high-paying jobs, which to get that job, you had to go through university and training and incur debt and whatnot. So we're in a very interesting spot in human history and technological advancements, and uh it'll be harder to get a job, but it'll be easier to start a business. So that's that's the trade-off. And no, in life, everything is a trade-off, Matalan. One of the biggest thought innovations was the photocopy machine because of how many people it was gonna deem jobless. But then you figure out other ways to do it. So I guess I'm yeah, more on the Frederick Hayek school of thought with that. And no, humans will always find a way. It you will have short-term disruption, you will have issues, but humans will eventually find a way. So you're uh neoliberal. Um, I actually don't fully understand the definition of that, if I'm completely honest. Before I tell you, yes, I am.

SPEAKER_01 56:49

But you're uh but you're a Hayek supporter. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 56:52

Okay. And I don't know if Hayek or neoliberal always go hand in hand, but that's why I was. I I agree with a lot of Frederick Hayek says, but my thoughts are talal. I I don't subscribe to Yani. I'm sure I will disagree with many things of Hayek, but from an economic thought process, I agree with many things he has.

SPEAKER_01 57:10

Do you do you do you believe one should have an ideology that's consistent uh or you pick and choose? Because you seem to be leaning towards I don't need to bind myself to an ideology. I can I can pick I can pick and choose. But some people argue that in order to really build a full methodology, it also has to follow an ideology that's inherently consistent and that can reach a place. So, how do you balance these?

SPEAKER_00 57:35

Who has created the consistent ideology? Is it the people before me or is it me? Because if it's the people before me, in my opinion, it's expired because I love my parents, but work advice they give me is irrelevant. It is based on their experience, which is why I'm very careful that I don't give any advice. I share my data point. Because if you're starting a business now, it's very different than when I started the business in the middle of COVID, when just the fact that you were online and looking to work was a plus. And I was filling in applications on AML policy of CoinMina or custody or AM, you know. So if you are able to get yourself to do hard things in hard times, you will be you will be rewarded. But I don't know what it is gonna be in this cycle. Uh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 58:20

I want to go back to you said one of the mistakes was maybe some of the spend that could have been optimized. What are the other biggest mistakes you've done?

SPEAKER_00 58:29

Hmm. I don't think of them as mistakes. They are mistakes, but they're more of things I can learn from you. And no, you don't dwell on your old mistakes. Biggest one was liquid pref. And I should have liquid uh raising on convertible notes is easy, lazy, but inefficient because you should people told me, ah, you should probably raise around to clear out your convertible notes and convert them and clean up your cap table. Clean up your tablet. I want to run a profitable business and then inshallah we'll see what happens. So hello, we ended up with a positive outcome, but the pay upside would have been much higher if we were to do it slightly differently without the high liquid pref. So uh paying attention to liquid preference would be something that I would say every founder should do and uh get a lawyer early on. Don't get a and in the beginning, uh my thought process why why do I need to pay for a lawyer now? I just want to start the business to raise some money, you had okay on Shallah here. Yeah, I guess uh that was probably also another uh another mistake.

SPEAKER_01 59:34

Um the other hand, before this episode, I was asking people what type of questions we ask, and one of the good friends of the program, Daria Mohammedi, she asked the other way around what unconventional things you've done that led you to you think actually the success and where you are today.

SPEAKER_00 59:55

Very interesting. I think at Coin Mina, the thing that we did the best was hiring the right team members and not doing it based on historic credentials, but doing it based on who's able to prove that they can actually lead the department. We didn't really have department heads in the beginning. We had an engineer, an operations associate, and then whoever stepped up became the department leader. So we don't really have an org structural anyway from that standpoint at Coin Mina, it's a little bit all over the place, but that's one of the things that's unconventional that that uh worked out. Remote is not very unconventional, but we were doing it before COVID, which I guess anyway, we we started the company before just before COVID and was fully remote. Um yeah, unconventional stuff. Um I guess with uh we didn't really hire a lot from uh you know big companies or from uh ex competitors or had we we used referral mostly for everything growth and hiring. You know, yeah, actually CoinMina's marketing is also we we didn't spend anything on uh paid ads for the first couple of years. It was all referrals. Um interesting. We have one salesperson in CoinMina. So CoinMina has done I don't know, like 10 plus billion in flows. Wow, we have one salesperson, um, but that's because he's able to coordinate with many sales agents that are not on our full-time payroll. So uh we have a very unique sales structure, and yeah, I guess we also kept a pretty lean team. Um, and that was due to my philosophy of so I don't want to go to office. Anna Katal, when I told start when we started Coin Mina, I told Dina and Yazan, Anna, my only condition is Anna, I don't want to go to office. If it's the office, Anna, I'll quit. I don't need to work for money, and alhamdulillah, I invested in crypto, and I don't need to work in order to live. I so I don't want to go to office. That was the first thing that, and I started to think, okay, if that's something that's mandatory for me, what are the things that I need to do to make sure I don't get screwed? And the first realization was you need to be severely understaffed. Like you can't have any sort of overlap. You need to be not only understaffed, but severely understaffed. For Coin Mina, some of the investors would look at our payroll or org structures like this is it, where's the rest of the team? And that's what because we kept it very, very lean. And if you do it as a very lean setup, remote work can actually be efficient. Because if design doesn't happen, we only have Sumaya. Where is the design? Where's Femet? You know, there is yes, but there's it also creates business risk because you have huge reliance, but that's where you have like redundancy planning from within the team as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:56

You mentioned 10 billion plus flows, which is a massive number. Take us behind the scenes. How do these actually flows work? How do they go through the blockchain? What actually happens, and how do you make money? You mentioned, for example, you don't do leverage, you don't do margin. So how do you actually make money on these flows?

SPEAKER_00 1:03:10

Yeah, so I'll give you an example that is very easy to uh track. I take out my phone, I live in Dubai, I download CoinMina, I submit the KYC passport, bank statement, proof of address, what have you. I send dirhams to the CoinMina bank account, and then I can buy Bitcoin, I can buy USDT, I can buy Ethereum or any other crypto asset. Um, and I I guess I'll tell you first how we make money. We make money from two main uh flows. One is the trading fee. So we charge 0.75% on every trade. So no matter what the amount is, we're taking 0.75%, and then you have spread. Where uh let's say you're buying Bitcoin using Dirham, we make the FX spread. If you check the price of Bitcoin dollar on any global exchange and you check our Dirham Bitcoin, you will see that we make also some money on the spread. Uh so that's how we make money. Um and yeah, basically the types of users we have are split, I would say, into three categories. You have your retail investor that's speculatively trading, trying to buy low and sell high. You have your corporates that are using USDT and USDC as means of transactions, uh payroll, uh transfers, cross-border transfers. Um and then you have long-term Bitcoin holders who buy Bitcoin and hold on a recurring monthly, quarterly uh basis. So those I would see are the three main types of customers. And now we have the newest one, which are the institutional customers. These are uh CBUE regulated financial institutions and others that are also getting into digital assets.

SPEAKER_01 1:04:45

So if I'm the first type looking to uh buy low and sell high, what signals should I look for in the market to be able to make these predictions? Or should I follow some Bitcoin influencers? How do I know I'm buying low and selling high?

SPEAKER_00 1:04:59

Oh, so I actually would not be the right person to comment on this because I don't do this. I buy Bitcoin every Thursday, regardless of the price. So why Thursday? Because when I started in 2016, the weekend used to start on Thursday. And if the weekend starts and I have money, I will not have I won't have enough money to buy Bitcoin. As I told you, I was not a very easy kid. So in my early 20s, if I have some money, I'm gonna go out and I'm gonna travel. And I'm so if I'm forcing myself to buy Bitcoin every Thursday, then I will have fun with whatever is left of the money, not have fun and then with the rest buy Bitcoin. So I used to buy Bitcoin every Thursday so that I don't spend it all on the weekend, and now the weekend's Friday, but I still buy every Thursdays to keep that habit.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:45

What are some of the biggest mistakes you see new users making once they they recall on the platform?

SPEAKER_00 1:05:51

Yeah, I mean diversification. I actually am against diversification. Okay. And general. And this is not investment advice. But I think diversification is a very bad way of it's the best way to stay mediocre. And it's the best way to stay with everyone else. And I don't want to make as much money as everyone else because I want to make more money than others. So I'm able to afford more stuff. So if I'm following what every finance professor says, ah, buy 60% in bods and 40% in the SP. How many, how many? I didn't start with a billion dollars. So how am I gonna make the jump that I want to jump? So um yeah, I think that yeah, I need to be careful in how to word that because I don't want to incentivize people to take extra risk. And I looked at it as okay, what are my mandatory things that I have to do? I need to uh pay my rent, I need to make sure that I have enough money for my wife, my son, etc. Okay, fine. I put some of that money aside. Okay, now I can actually uh invest the rest in in the way that I think. And the way that I think of it is Bitcoin is the best investment opportunity of our generation, and I won't be able to forgive myself knowing that I have this much conviction and not putting everything that I can in it over the years. Uh it comes from that uh standpoint, or that's that's the thinking process behind it.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:21

And that's partially as you said, because of the time you started. Now, if you're starting today, how would you do it?

SPEAKER_00 1:07:26

Yeah, so I actually was faced with that uh because uh alhamdulillah, we just had an exit, right? So I've I've never had that type of uh problem in my life. Usually I have a salary, I pay food, transport, whatever during the month. I have some left, I buy Bitcoin, and but now I've had a situation where uh I have a bit more money to to uh to invest, and um I'm actually working with a with a asset manager to get a bit of an understanding of how that will be split. Um and they will it will be more conservative. So there will be stocks, there will be uh no no bonds. I don't like bonds, there will be commodities. Why no bonds? Um I guess I why bond, why no bonds? What are bonds paying me today? Four, five, six percent? Anna, in my opinion, the CPI number is false. It is manipulated and it is not one to be taken into consideration because it is designed to keep people calm. Inflation is not two percent and it is not three percent. This is what US statisticians manipulate to keep us accepting of this figure. I guess this is maybe a little bit controversial, but anyone that tracks his spending knows that it's not 2% per year. It's 2%, yeah. You know, it's it's much higher than that. So if a bond is paying me 5 or 6% and my annual cost to inflation is is 10%, then I'm just giving away money for free. I'm literally losing my purchasing power over time. Um, and I guess bonds are you know from a sharia standpoint, bonds are the clearest example of usury. Um yeah, I don't like bonds from an investment standpoint because actually, if you think of the different economic schools of thought, equity is one of the only things that every school of thought agrees, whether you go to Sharia, whether you go to uh Keynesian, whether you go to any school of thought, equity is the preferred method of carrying value. Whereas debt is debt doesn't align incentives. If I'm lending you money as a bank, I make more money if you go bankrupt because I reschedule and I charge you late fees and I charge you hard. So I don't like the dynamics of it. And I'm a very big believer in incentives. If you understand the incentives, you will know how people act. So with bonds, the incentives are messed up. The lender and the borrower, they don't have the same incentive. But if me and you are Sharake, or if me and you have equity in the same company or partners, we make money, we distribute dividends, everyone's happy. We lose money, then we have to collectively think of how we fix the business. But if I'm lending you money and you don't pay me this time, I will charge you late fees. And I will so we don't have the same incentive. And I want to have the same incentives with my business partners. So that's why if I'm doing a deal with vendors or marketing agencies or HADA, I almost never align it. My wife tells me I'm a little bit crazy, but I guess sometimes you have to be crazy. On this or in general. In general, in general. And I tell you an example of how we wanted to do swimming classes for my son, and I told her, no, of course, he does not gonna pay per class. What do you mean paper class? If you pay per class, the son's never gonna, he's never gonna learn to swim. I told the guy, and no, at the end of 10 classes, if the kid can float, I'll pay you 30% extra on whatever had uh. If not, I'm not gonna renew. Because if I don't put the incentive, then how am I gonna get a good outcome? And uh, I want my son to swim now so that he doesn't drown. I don't need him to be Michael Phelps. I need him to start floating. I told Lustaz and uh the teacher, and uh I need him to be able to float by the end of this. Can you achieve that? He said yes, okay. I'm like, if you achieve it, there's 30% extra on the 10 classes that we had agreed on. So I guess I like to set incentives in everything in life to get the outcome that I want. And reality is if the 10 classes ended and he can swim, I'm more than happy to pay that extra 30%. Are you too capitalistic, though? Sorry? Are you too capitalistic? Too capitalistic? Maybe. But I guess too depends on who you ask. If you ask my yogi friends, they will tell you me, me. If you ask my friends in DIFC, they'll tell you to always hippie. But it depends on who you ask.

SPEAKER_01 1:11:41

Taking you back to Sharia, what about Sharia and Bitcoin?

SPEAKER_00 1:11:44

Oof. Nashan Hebsilion. But the reality is, I don't think that you can build a sharia compliant system on the dollar. Because the dollar is built on government debt. Literally, it is the dollar is built on government debt. And government debt by nature is by definition, by the book, usually. It cannot be sharia compliant. Um, and that question got me into some difficult situations with sharia auditors. And uh tell me, is it halal or haram? They can't give you the answer because the answer is a difficult one because it's not sharia compliant. Most financial products today are not sharia compliant. And the reason is if you are using LIBOR as your benchmark, then I guess. Yeah. Uh you asked me about Sharia compliance and Bitcoin, and I started answering with Sharia compliance and dollars. It's because I also haven't made up my mind fully on Sharia and Bitcoin. But I know for sure that Sharia and dollars don't go hand in hand. Um, gold has proven to be the best way to have sharia compliant money, but in my opinion, Bitcoin can also be sharia compliant money for many characteristics. And if we go back to the principles, um with interest, the incentives are not aligned. And that, in my opinion, is a big reason why interest was not allowed in in um in Islamic finance in in Sharia. Um, and letting your money work for you is also gets people lazier. Because if I'm putting my money in when I buy a bond at 5%, what is it doing? It's making me work less, making me not want to come up with new ideas that can improve the world. And so yeah, I guess there's multiple reasons why uh why dollars are not sharia compliant. With Bitcoin, I would not so I've taken uh Sukuk certification before, but I don't qualify to uh I wanted to understand Sukuk a lot more, and I took took a few courses on that, but I'm definitely not qualified on giving a statement on whether Bitcoin is sharia compliant or not. Um, this is a subject that is very personal. I speak to my cousins about it a lot because we we also have no similar thinking, and I still don't have my mind clear clear on that, Saraha.

SPEAKER_01 1:14:09

How do you internally, because I think that's where a lot of people are, right? Your your kind of your career, your investments, your money, your success is in that. But at the end of the day, you also have a personal value side. And these two, it's not necessarily that they go with or against each other, they're just they're they're interlinking, but they're not necessarily perfectly in tandem. It's an evolving thought process. So, how do you stay, say, okay, I'm gonna stay motivated, work 100%, put my money into this, but I'm also gonna stay very self-conscious, very clear myself that this may or may not be the right thing, and I'll keep learning and developing. How do you keep this kind of recalibration?

SPEAKER_00 1:14:45

Yeah, so I guess um being always, you know, things in business happen in short periods of time. Yeah, I guess you need to be, you know, when people say overnight successful or whatever, you need to be willing to endure pain at business and actually enjoy it. Yeah, and I remember when we were first doing CoinMina, it was difficult, it was very difficult. We would stay up till 2-3 a.m. sometimes on uh I would go into a slack huddle with my tech team, and I you can see how long the huddle has been going, and say seven hours. No one took a break, no one and it was painful to spend that much time building and working a huddle, but the team was enjoying it. I guess at work, it's not going to be as if you're going to uh Disneyland, you're going to uh dinner, something, but it has to be mentally stimulating in a way that allows you to have that team push, and that spot is difficult to reach. But we were able to reach that in CoinMina where you have team members, everyone is incurring pain because it's not an easy thing. Uh, but you know that the outcome is gonna be great on the uh on the other side. On a human standpoint, I would be lying to you if I told you it's stable. I have fluctuated CoinMina's growth has been great, but me as a human, I've gone through so many ups and downs, and I had the worst years of my life, and I had the best year of my life all during CoinMina. I had some personal issues in 2022, and I did not care about anything else. I felt like the world was ending. I was in a very bad place personally. Alhamdulillah, I was able to turn that around, and uh my son was born in 2024, and that was the best moment of my life with no nothing, nothing can come close. I guess as a person, you will go through ups and downs. And what I learned is that, and your partners will go through ups and downs as well. You need to work with people that are able to, from a work standpoint, you need to be able to deliver your work no matter what state you are in. And that might come off as uh deaf will and not consider it to Hada, but yes, that is how it needs to be. If you want to be successful at work, you need to be able to keep your issues and come. And I guess if I was personally able to use work as a way to get my mind busy and to move on and improve my life, yeah, I guess it's a it's an interesting question that you ask because um Bitcoin's volatility is probably the least volatile thing in my life, yeah. And I have, or alhamdulillah, now I have uh very stable setup. But when you start Coin Mina and when you start a company that's gonna take so much of your time, it it's a compromise, you will be giving up on other things in your life as well.

SPEAKER_01 1:17:39

Um Do you feel it contributed to these personal challenges the fact that you were all in on CoinMeat?

SPEAKER_00 1:17:45

Akeed, Akeed, of course, of course. Because you're very stressed. So when you're very stressed, you're not able to you could have an okay situation to you, it might sound like it's a disaster because you're so stressed, you're not sleeping well, your head. But I always like to remind myself that these are how how do I say this in English? Um very soft problems. What problems? Problems is you can't uh find food for your family, or you're unable to uh put shelter on your head, or you don't have electricity at home, or these are not problems. These are uh yeah, I mean we are very fortunate to be able to call these as problems, or they're challenges, they're not problems. I guess we'll be nobella dalaya toughen up, and these are not the uh we're we're in a very, very lucky place to be able to even call these problems because they're not problems, they're challenges.

SPEAKER_01 1:18:39

You've also been very fortunate to be one of the few in the region who has actually exited, right? We have a lot of people building incredible, incredible things, but liquidity, real exits have been really, really scarce to come by in the in the region. What do you think that you've done differently and someone listening to us today can do to make the company really ready for more like a real exit where you can have real liquidity?

SPEAKER_00 1:19:00

I mean, first and foremost, run a profitable business. Yeah, you you turn around and you go back to the most important thing is if you're running a business, you you okay. I guess running a profitable business is not the only way to get sold. But in our case, it made it much easier for our acquirers to buy a profitable business because they don't need to worry about runway at what have you. So I guess getting acquired, in my opinion, and this is not advice, it's only my data point, is directly correlated with how much pain you have had to endure in order to get that stage and whether your acquirer will have to endure the same pain. Yeah, anyway. There's many companies that came to the Middle East. I can name many examples. They tried to get a VARA license, ADGM license, uh, DMCC setup, what have you. And they end up leaving after three, four years after spending a few million dollars in setting up, and they never get the ball rolling. So I guess the reason why we were able to get acquired is we were a very attractive business from a licensing and commercial standpoint, but also from a fundraising standpoint, our highest ever fundraising round was at like$70 million. We've never done a crazy some of our competitors raised at$500 million, and we had more revenue and profit than them. So it meant that I can get a good deal for the team, which includes me, the investors, which is mainly Bekko, and the buyers, which is Peribu. So if you're able to get a win-win-win, which was our case, uh that's Yani. I guess in a in a deal, uh, this is uh one of their advisors was telling me that at the end of each deal, you kind of feel like you need to get punched in the in the stomach. This is how you should feel at the end of negotiations, because you would have felt that you've compromised quite a bit. Um what else on the fundraising, on the on the MA side? Um make it so that you are appealing for inbound offers. Outbound offers are not necessarily we polished ourselves, we made uh we were highly profitable, no issues on our licenses, etc., which meant that we were getting inbound offers. Figure out how to put yourself in a position to receive inbound offers.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:22

Now, even if you look at the scarce exits, they've been mostly been to US companies, so to Uber, to Amazon, etc. What's been even more scarce is true as what you've done, which is selling to a non-US company, which I guess where you came up with your famous statement, the world is bigger than Silicon Valley.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:21:38

Tell us about that.

SPEAKER_00 1:21:39

Uh Anna, I hated, Yanni. I still hate how the US does not give enough credit to the Middle East. And I don't, yeah. I guess the positioning or the American dream is not shouldn't, Yanni. Fine. If you're moving to America, you can have the American dream. But if I'm living in Dubai, why the hell would I have the American dream, man? I'm living in Dubai. I should be aspiring to succeed on a global stage, it doesn't have to be the US. Um I personally have huge ad admiration for Turkey as a country. Um, and Yassin and Peribuhat with they've been able to build is so impressive. They have seven plus million users, they've been doing it since 2017 with not a single external investor. This is this thing that's shocking. You know, they are completely self-funded. They've never done a round. And they were able to acquire us with cash. When I uh understood what they had, I'm like, I want to be part of this guy's growing ship. And we had multiple offers. Yeah, Alhamdulillah, Alhamdulillah. At Coin Mina before we accepted the Peribu offer, we had multiple offers, and some of them were maybe even financially uh more appealing. But I would not necessarily want to work for the persons that for the companies that we're we're gonna acquire. Yeah, I guess selling to a non-US company was something that to us was was was great because they understand the region better as well. Someone that lives and operates in Turkey is gonna understand Middle East struggles, opportunities, etc, etc., slightly better. Um, but that's not to say I'm against US companies, by the way. I if in the future I was to open a startup and sell it to a US company, I'd be open to that. But it can't be the only option.

SPEAKER_01 1:23:26

Uh on your point about maybe rejecting other offers that maybe had a higher uh valuation or money, some people would say money is all green, it's all dollars, just take the highest. How do you balance cash on the table with maybe some of the more subjective elements about who do you want to work with, etc.?

SPEAKER_00 1:23:46

Oof, well, it's um it's very interesting that you see these things, you can discuss them, but you won't see until the deal actually comes through and you have those options on the table. That's when you start to see how people, in math, there were some shares that are publicly listed that were like investors, what do you mean publicly listed shares? Only cash. Today you have illiquid shares in coin. I want to give you publicly listed shares in excuse. Only cash. If it was a publicly traded token, I would understand because token liquidity is bad, but with shares, it's different. But anyway, we didn't get the offer from the public listed company. And it's important to have uh very clear alignment between the signatories. Yani. Dina and I are running the business. So we agreed with Yazen that whatever we decide, we're gonna go with. Weazen said, okay, no problem, you guys are running the business. So me and Dina, we had very clear guidelines of where's your limit, where is my limit. So when we entered negotiations, we were super clear on where we stand. And we stress tested each other a lot. Yani, if we get this offer, will we take it? And we wanted to go ahead with the sales. We felt that we can do crazy things with Peri Bunshalla, we will do that. Um, but yeah, and again, if you if you and deals take so much mental power, you have no idea. Yanni, if you are fundraising, it takes a good amount of time as a CEO. If you're trying to sell, it takes even way more than that, Yani. And I've been able to multitask when fundraising. But multitasking when selling is even harder. Uh, because the last thing you want is for your team members to be saying, Oh, how much eesop do I have? So that equates to and then you have complete wipeout of productivity. And Saraha in 2022, we were this close to selling the company, like this close. It fell through at the last minute to it was uh such a depressing experience because that was pre-FTX crash. Um yeah, that was a very but that experience allowed us to sell in the future because we went through such deep due diligence that we knew what investors are looking for on the dot. And by the way, uh fundraising due diligence and MA due diligence have nothing to do with one another. Yeah, I need it's very interesting how different they are.

SPEAKER_01 1:26:12

Sometimes it's very difficult for people to come back from experiences where money was very close inside. They were already checking pictures of cars, checking pictures of boats, of houses, they were making plans, and then the money doesn't come in. How did you recover from this 2022 experience and how do you keep your kind of mental uh state?

SPEAKER_00 1:26:30

Oof. This is something that um I guess parents will tell you is if you have something good that's gonna happen, just shut up. Literally, that's how we did it. We uh me and Dina agreed that uh we will only inform who needs to be informed. And the discussion was never MA. We have investor due diligence, investor due diligence, to banhallah, compliance, finance, these guys knew because the type of due diligence is in what Palal Islam have for dinner yesterday, and it's very specific. Uh, but anyway, uh the only way to deal with that is to keep your mouth closed. If you talk about it too much, it is a disaster because it's very stressful. And man, and uh, the thing that shocked me and and showed me that I'm still such an amateur in this is when we announced our deal, people congratulated me. It's like, oh, so when are you gonna close? Like, what do you mean? What are you gonna close? What do you mean when you're gonna close? So when are gonna when do you sign the documents and when are you gonna pay them? Like, what do you think we announced? Like, no, people usually announce a deal and then there is still conditions, president, and then they wire approvers, yeah, yeah. I'm like, what do you mean? I told them from the beginning no announcement until everything is done. And uh, the last thing I want is and we're in crypto. Maybe you announce and then something happens. I don't know what happens. But I will only announce was everything is done. Uh money in the bank. Yeah, money in the bank. The bank, and that's what we uh that's what we did. Uh alhamdulillah. That was a very because I can't imagine how stressful it would be. Actually, USDT in the wallet, but same, same.

SPEAKER_01 1:28:11

Yeah. Uh Talal, uh, one last advice you would give to someone listening to us. You talked a lot about financial freedom, about not being always in a position where you have to constantly exchange your time for money. Obviously, one way of dancing this is through Bitcoin investments. Generally, someone today who wants to build that financial freedom, how would they go about it?

SPEAKER_00 1:28:30

Keep your costs very low. Yeah, and I remember um yeah, when I used to live in Switzerland at some point. Um, I had literally a shoebox apartment. I had just gotten married in 2018 who told my wife, no, why don't we go to Switzerland to have? I was like, oh, you have an apartment there. Obviously, in her mind, no talal has an apartment in Switzerland. The idea you get is by the Alp, you open by the Alps, you open the balcony. I will send you the picture later. It's literally a shoebox. And there's a there's not even a blow-up mattress, there's a mattress on the floor that's in who I used to live there. My goal was to achieve financial freedom, which meant that I had some crazy targets. I wanted to save 60% of my salary, uh, which is not realistic. But I used to put that goal and I would live below my means. And early on in my career, I used to live way below my means. If I could live here, I would be living here. So that I have enough to save, then I'm able to invest, so that I don't have to work later. I guess keeping your costs low so that whatever income you're getting, you're able to invest most of it. Because I guess I realized early on is if you are exchanging your money, if you if you're exchanging your time for money, it is very difficult to become financially free. You need to make sure that you are having excess income, that you're able to invest. So that investment is actually what's making you financially free. Because as long as you are on the hamster wheel, you're not going to be financially free. Financially free, in my opinion, is you don't have to work to make ends meet. You don't have paycheck to paycheck type stuff. And then again, and I uh will go back to that, you know, and I'm speaking from my own experience, from the situations that I was in, from the opportunities that I was given. Not everyone can have the same, and you need to adjust based on uh based on that. And I would say advice is overrated. People can give you their own experience, but yeah, advice means that I understand your context as well. Um, and then find older people that want to help. And I owe so much, so, so, so much to, and I he will not appreciate that I called him old experience. Sorry, Abbas, just so that I'm clear. He's he's my dad's age, so he's not old, and by spirit, he's younger than I am. But one of CoinMina's founding board members, his name is Abbas Zater. Um, and when I wanted to first, when I quit my job 2016 and I wanted to start my own thing, I realized I needed mentors. And uh I went to Abbas, who's a super accomplished uh Jordanian-Palestinian uh banker and investor. Um, and I had met him through family and friends, and I went to him and basically tried to pitch him the idea of Bitcoin. He ended up buying, um, and I gave him an option. Bitcoin was$3,300, and I told him if you buy Bitcoin, I'll buy it back from you, downside protection at$3,000. And I think I gave him something like up to 50 bitcoins. Did you charge him for the option? That's the thing. Wait, same as way. And he told me, so what do you want in exchange? I I need you to be my mentor, and what does that mean? I need a we monthly call with you, one hour. One hour a month where I just ask you random questions. Um and he said, okay. And Bitcoin dropped below the 3K, and he's like, ah, so I need to exercise my option. And we did it. And uh yeah, I Abbas has been a huge mentor, and uh he's been on the board of Coin Mina from from uh the day it was founded till last year. And Abbas is not old, Eddie, but he's from the generation old, he's one generation above. Uh, and he's he's super helpful and he did not need, I guess. And I asked him, what's in it for you? Like, I'm what's in it for you? And he's like, You keep me young, you keep me connected with the new world. I will do that for sure. I will try to help people that are in their early 20s so that I can feel young, but I also will that's one advice that can be implemented across the same. You know, find people that are willing to help and you have a nice working relationship with them. And one final thing is life is massive, meaning if you don't have a good relationship with someone, you can find someone else. Yeah, and you know, uh, yeah, don't knock many doors and then go through the one that you prefer.

SPEAKER_01 1:33:01

I'm very grateful I knocked your door for this uh for this episode because it's been absolutely incredible.

SPEAKER_00 1:33:06

I'm very happy. I hope it was uh it was good. Uh it's an honor being with you, really. Um, and thanks so much for having me, Anjad. Thank you, Ramadan Karim. Allah said, thank you.