Saqr Ereiqat - Why Dubai Has Become The Global Hub For The Crypto Industry

Full transcript: Saqr Ereiqat on London Real

2:32 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose, my guest today is Sakur Erekat, the blockchain pioneer, business leader, and investor. You are the co-founder of Crypto Oasis Ventures, the largest blockchain ecosystem in the world and now a partner at Trade Dog Group, a global conglomerate of crypto ventures. You previously spent more than a decade working at IBM in the Middle East and played a pivotal role in shaping the Dubai government’s blockchain strategy. You are widely recognized as one of the leading voices in the industry and dedicate much of your time to nurturing startups and assisting established companies with shaping their technological strategies. You believe that by fostering innovation across multiple industries, we can speed up the global transition to Web3 in a way that will radically transform and improve our world. Sakur, welcome to London Real in Dubai.

3:32 Saqr Ereiqat: Wonderful. Thank you so much for having me. I couldn’t have written a better introduction myself. Thanks for that.

3:40 Brian Rose: I’m going to use that. You know, I have been fortunate to speak with some of probably the leading voices in blockchain in Dubai over the past two months, and it’s been fascinating. And a question that came up in the last couple of weeks, as I say to my guest, is Dubai, the number one city in crypto. And when I first say that, people think a little bit, but I’ll tell you, Sakur, we’ve almost always come to the conclusion that it is, because A, we can’t think of another city that would beat it. Now, look, it’s probably got a long way to go. You might argue that it has a lot of the builders and maybe not as many of the users, but I think most people would have a hard time trying to point to another city as being bigger than Dubai. And I wanted to get your thoughts on that. And also, I guess you’ve seen this place 10 years ago when it wasn’t that.

4:31 Saqr Ereiqat: Well, what we’ve seen in Dubai is really magical. And I zoom out from just a city in crypto, but Dubai as a city in the world.

4:38 Dubai has essentially catapulted itself to international fame and recognition. People will know Dubai, but will not know the United Arab Emirates. They’ll say, hey, I went to Dubai. I went to Dubai. And they think Dubai is a country, but Dubai is just a city in this beautiful United Arab Emirates that we live in. And a lot of this is back to the leadership that we all live under and serve under. And what they’ve done is really develop Dubai into a spot for the world. And the leadership is quoted in saying Dubai is not a city in the world, but it’s the world in a city. Today, we have more millionaires moving to Dubai than ever before, more companies setting up in Dubai than ever before, with more hedge funds setting up in Dubai than ever before. We have dedicated free zones that welcome crypto, particularly crypto and emerging technology entities. We are the number one destination in the world on TripAdvisor. We are one of the happiest cities in the world.

5:41 We have a clear happiness agenda and a ministry of AI and the future of work today, actually, while we’re sitting here, a couple of meters into the direction towards Dubai. The World Government Summit is taking place. The World Government Summit brings together leadership from all around the world. All of the presidents and leaders of states are in Dubai today. Now, what’s driving this? It’s really three elements, as we say. It’s talent, it’s capital, and it’s infrastructure. The infrastructure can be broken down in two bits, right? You have the physical infrastructure, but also the digital infrastructure, right? So, yes, it’s great roads and great hotels and great restaurants, but also you have the digital infrastructure. And probably the third bit to it is the regulatory infrastructure.

6:28 The UAE as a whole, for example, in here, it’s very important to remember our brothers down the road in Abu Dhabi, right? Abu Dhabi became, ADGM became one of the first entities in the world to provide a regulatory regime for crypto companies as early as 2008, sorry, 2018, right? For crypto exchanges to set up over here. So, that’s on infrastructure, right? Dubai has one of the most vibrant airports in the world, one of the most vibrant seaports in the world, but then also, none of this works without the right capital. The UAE has always been capital rich. We have some of the largest sovereign wealth funds in the world. Now, we have more and more hedge funds setting up over here. Ray Dalio, Brevin Howard, all of them, they’re moving their capital over here. We’ve seen more capital move here than ever before. And with that, what directly follows is the talent, right? You’ve just said it, you’ve spoken to so many people here in Dubai. I can tell you about Dubai 10 years ago where we couldn’t even get, and it’s not yet 10 years, so this was 2015 probably, where we couldn’t get five people in the room to talk about this. Today we have conferences and conferences and conferences with thousands of people coming into the space.

7:48 And talent is probably the most unique element in Dubai, right? The UAE has established itself as a talent-first immigration policy. And this was, again, very conscious, right? Rome wasn’t built in a day. Many people think that this all just happened. It really didn’t. This was by design, by clear execution, with a vision, to actually make it a talent hub for the world. Today, everyone that’s someone wants to be in Dubai. Why? Because of the beautiful infrastructure, because of great capital, because of safety and security, right? And with that, what the UAE did at the time is they set up one of the fourth Industrial Revolution Research Centers with the World Economic Forum and quickly realized that the next, quote-unquote, war is the war for talent, right? And with that, they said, we want all of these talented individuals to come to us. And they came up with schemes like the golden visa scheme, like an investor scheme, how people that are able and that are needed in the economy can land here in no time, right? We’ve seen entities like Binance, for example, set up in Dubai and within 12 months have more than 700 employees. Where else in the world can you do that? And by the way, these are 700 employees by a multitude of nationalities. And again, to drill down on this, it’s as easy to land someone here from Peru as it is to land someone here from Palestine, as it is to land someone here from Australia, right? If you are someone

9:21 Hiring in the UAE, your talent pool isn’t just limited to the 3 billion people that are in a, I think, six-hour flight radius around you, or even less than a three-hour flight radius around you. Don’t beat me to the number. It is the entire world, because it’s as easy to get someone to immigrate over here and get their paperwork done, then anything, right? We operate in Switzerland as well. And over there, it took us, I think, six months to hire a Canadian citizen, right? And the elephant in the room here is like America, you know, where you can’t get talented people to save your life. It’s a three, four, five-year green card process, and it’s just nearly impossible. And this is what the UAE understood, because I’ve been asked the question, so what if other countries start now? It’s like, how are they going to start?

10:06 How are they going to change their immigration policy? How are they going to set up that right infrastructure? How are they going to bring in all of the capital? So I firmly believe that the UAE, as a whole, specifically Dubai, but the UAE as a whole, with initiatives like the ones we’re seeing in Abu Dhabi, with Hub 71 and ADGM, with initiatives like the ones we’re seeing in Rasul Khameh, with the digital asset oasis, with initiatives here in Dubai, like the Dubai AI and Web 3 campus, where essentially the laws of the UAE don’t apply. They’re so welcoming to international entities. They’ll say, you know what? We’ve created a free zone for you where the laws of the UAE don’t apply. So you can come here and practice under the laws and regulations that you understand, and don’t worry about the UAE courts. And this is the IFC and ADGM, right?

10:51 And with that, they have their own system of courts, they have their own system of regulation, and they’re welcoming to international people that more than anything that I’ve seen. And we’ve worked a lot with governments trying to benchmark this. I’m just back from Pakistan, where I was invited by the Minister of Finance, trying to talk to them about government innovation. And when you stack Dubai in the UAE, again, I keep saying Dubai, but really it’s about the UAE. When you stack the UAE across all of the other governments around the world, there’s really only Singapore and Estonia that you can bring to that level. And both of them don’t have the beautiful amalgamation of talent capital infrastructure that we have over here. Sorry for the long one.

11:35 Brian Rose: No, it’s a beautiful answer. Like the immediate thing that everyone’s going to think, and I just showed it up earlier, is how does this compare to the West? And you went to school in London. I’m based in London. America is right there. We’ve got these Western democracies, which quite frankly have a superiority complex. We have our freedoms, we have our democracy, we have our history, we have our universities, we have our capital markets.

11:58 How do those compare to this? And what do you say when people hit you with common misconceptions about the UAE? You don’t have the freedoms we have. You don’t have the this that we have. How do you explain that to a Westerner, and how do you contrast that with a Westerner?

12:12 Saqr Ereiqat: So I’ve recently stopped trying, because if you are in this world and you read the news, and you still can’t see through them, then that’s okay. Then that’s your point of view. But the UAE and the West will win on pretty much any single metric that you want to set out. And let’s make this factual. First and foremost, the UAE is one of the safest countries in the world. When we go to a coffee shop over here, and I’m sure you’ve tried this, we put our phone on the table or our wallet on the table to reserve a seat if it’s a serving. My local Starbucks on the beach in JBR, and people leave the keys to their car.

12:54 They just leave it there, and then they go and get the coffee. And I come out, and there were some cups there, and I’m like, are they still there? But that’s the way you reserve your table. That’s the most normal thing in the world. I mean, so much so that when we travel, a part of the travel routine is reminding yourself, hey, you’re going to a place that’s not that safe anymore. Then for healthcare, because again, I want to talk away from tech, away from crypto, just life in the UAE. Life in the UAE, you have the best healthcare facilities in the world. And if not here in the UAE, in the three-hour flight radius, you have some of the best and affordable healthcare in the world. When you look at the standards of schools, they’re the highest in the world as well. Now, mind you, with that, over the weekend, I found out that LA Metro, actually, when you look at the GDP of LA Metro, is 20% larger than that of Saudi Arabia, which is one of the largest economies in the world.

13:53 So there is, of course, that scale that you don’t have over here. But what you have over here is an ease of doing business that is incomparable to them, and a safety and security for your family when you’re traveling, or something that you don’t even have to worry about, an infrastructure that enables you to grow. And with that, to arrive anywhere else in the world, with us being in Dubai and Abu Dhabi just being down the road, you have some of the two best airlines in the world, between Etihad and Emirates, that will take you anywhere in a direct flight. With that, really, the entire world is your oyster.

14:32 I want to finish on a note that’s a little bit controversial, but I really do believe that. I don’t believe democracies are made to keep up with the technological shift that we’re seeing today. Technology is moving faster than the democratic process. Does that mean I don’t believe in democracy at all? No, no, no, super. I’m born and raised in Germany. I’m a Palestinian. I believe in democracy as the next dude as well. It’s just what we’re seeing over here, and that’s one of the common misperceptions that we hear. Hey, but it’s not a democracy. It’s a dictatorship.

15:04 Sure. We have His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Zayed. We have His Highness Sheikh Mohammed and the rulers of the UAE, and they’re doing such a good job because they have our best interest in mind. And I say that as a non-Emirati, but I identify so much so with this country and with that leadership. They have our best interests in mind. Name another country in the world, and there is a few, but not many, that has a happiness agenda. The first time I heard this, I thought this is wishy-washy, like, oh, happiness agenda. But I was so intrigued by it that I went back to school and I did a degree by UC Berkeley in corporate happiness. Happy people are more productive people. They are more willing to spend. They’re better participants in the global economy, right? So when they say the happiness agenda, obviously they have our safety and happiness at heart, but also they understand that there’s a business metric that you will increase by allowing me to renew my car with a click of a button, right? A business metric that will increase by allowing me because any minute that I’m not dealing with renewing my visa or renewing my ID or you’re renewing my passport is a minute that I’m probably going to spend working, right? And with that, I think the world is really going through a massive change, one that’s unprecedented in human history, right? And I say that very carefully.

16:27 I really believe that we are in the first minute of the first hour, of the first day, of the first week, of the first month, of the first year when it comes to technological adoption in human history, right? Technology has just come around the corner. We’re just figuring out how to use this to our benefit. What’s 15 years in the time of history? And the UAE has positioned itself as this perfect platform to be a frontline runner, if not even a leader in that entire space.

17:01 Brian Rose: Does technology make democracy obsolete?

17:04 Saqr Ereiqat: So the first thing that I used to say when I went on stage at the time talking about blockchain, that in the future we won’t need governments anymore because really governments are made for trust. But I’ve switched from that. Also, I’ve switched from everything needs to be blockchain.

17:25 In the end, governments provide one very important thing. Forget about the fact that they certify who we are and they give us passports and they give us a nationality and rules and regulation. They provide trust. Blockchain in a perfect world should be that trust machine, right? It should remove this friction that is so inherent in everything that we do because we don’t trust each other. Let’s not forget, we come from a world where there were no contract. Just a couple of thousand years, there was a handshake, there was honor, there was respect, there was me sticking by my word. And blockchain is just a technological facilitator for us to turn back into this trust-based society. So I don’t think that governments will be obsolete, but I do believe that governments will shift of what they do. So it’s now, when you look at a good government, and this is what I consider the UAE being, it’s a government that invokes trust.

18:27 We were speaking about COVID just before. When the UAE said, you guys stay at home, you’re not allowed to leave the house. And if you want to leave the house, you need to apply for a permit. Everyone listen. There weren’t any demonstrations in the streets, right? Because everyone’s stuck at home, and the government then took it on itself to really go through the entire UAE and ensure that it’s safe for everyone to participate again. We were then in December, I think, 2020, JITEX was happening again, and the future blockchain was happening again, with tens, if not hundreds of thousands of visitors. So a good government is a government of trust, is one. The new currency of government in the future is trust. If you trust your government, you will listen to what they say. If you listen to what they say, you will be a more positive participant in this. So these technologies, in a simplistic way, you could think of them as making governments obsolete. I think that they will shift our demands from government to us being using government as our provider of trust and us trusting our government.

19:42 Brian Rose: It’s an interesting point when you say about government trust, because if you look at revolutions throughout history, that’s obviously a breakdown of that government trust. And it’s something we don’t think about. I think we oftentimes think of governments as these digital things. It’s either government or it’s not. So my political experience is when I ran for mayor of London in 2021. And I thought that at this time, with all of my social media channels, I could, for the first time, take my message directly to the voters and bypass the two-party system because I had to run as an independent. At the time, I saw the city I love, London being locked down for no particular reason. Because my show, I got to interview professors from Harvard and Stanford that wrote something called the Great Barrington Declaration and showed statistically that what we were doing wasn’t really helping and was actually hurting people, mental health, physical health, the economy, et cetera. So I was a little frustrated with the mayor and I thought, he needs to go. And I thought we take it directly to the voters, take it out of the party’s hands. And maybe you have this system in the future where maybe it’s like a Dow, and you don’t have all this nonsense going on. I did find out I was a little early for that. And I found out that there’s a lot of vested interests in the status quo.

20:49 And that the media, either intentionally or unintentionally, are kind of in cohorts with the two-party system. It’s just one merry-go-round. Probably intentionally. Yeah, maybe intentionally, where I was number two in the betting agencies and I didn’t get invited to a six-party debate, for example. And then the media, I mean, the media in Britain is absolutely brutal. It was a blood sport and they were just coming after me. And so it was interesting. The other thing I learned, soccer, is how broken a city like London is. Londoners care at the time about four things, business, transport, healthcare, crime. You got kids being stabbed in the streets. You’ve got a healthcare system that’s broken. You’ve got housing that’s just not being built. And you’ve got a transport system. Honestly, my tube stop in Old Street looks like it was last cleaned in 1963. And Dubai really puts a mirror on something like that.

21:39 And you realize how broken it is. And when people say, oh, it’s a democracy, and maybe they contrast that with the vision of the rulers here, you say, okay, when I was running the mayor of London, I realized that anything we would accomplish would be taken credit for by the next mayor. Obviously. Because in four years, what the hell are you going to do? And we had these 10, 15-year plans to fix these things. And I remember speaking to my advisors and we’re like, if we do our job, the next mayor is going to take credit.

22:08 And everybody was okay with that. But that’s the way it’s worked. Yeah. And so it’s just broken after broken after broken. And then you see a vision here, a 10-year, 20-year, 50-year, 100-year, maybe longer vision. And then metrics to come up with it. There’s a vision, 2070 right now that wants to put us on marks. But sorry, I broke your…

22:26 Saqr Ereiqat: No, it’s just a very interesting contrast. And again, it’s a great way to compare a democracy with monarchy in this case. And what is freedom? That is a real interesting question. And what is it really? People say, oh, you don’t have freedom to say what you want to say. I’m like, oh,

22:42 Brian Rose: and I do on YouTube. No, and I do in the UK. No, that’s off-com that tells me not to say that.

22:47 Saqr Ereiqat: So when you drill down, if you choose to have that conversation with people, you’ll start to realize that it’s really an illusion of freedom, an illusion of choice, an illusion of safety. And yet these Western governments kind of walk around, I think with a superiority complex that is not backed up by a lot. Yeah. And don’t get me started. I think the worst thing that happened in this and what made it clear to everyone is what happened during the FIFA World Cup in Qatar, which was so beautifully executed, so well done. But suddenly you had everyone wanting to be a human activist and standing up for human rights. Mind you, as a Palestinian, this is something very close to my heart. But then can we pause for a second? Can we remove all of the political agendas for a second and look at the fact that this is working and this isn’t? Regardless of where you stand, pro-democracy, anti-democracy, pro-dictatorship, anti-dictatorship, this country works.

23:45 And it’s working in such a beautiful way that you’re here and the next guy is here and we’ve received more tourists last year than ever before. This works. Will the naysayers be there? I moved here in 2008 and I never forget because at the time I was 21 years old and what did I know about the world at the time. And then on Times Magazine, or it was a, no, not Times Magazine, the New York Times and the Guardian, these big newspapers, they had these pictures of Dubai skyscrapers back in the dunes when the financial crisis hit that Dubai is going to be a ghost city and who’s going to live in these places. And I was really worried, but then I looked out of the window and I saw people getting hired. I saw salaries being increased. Yeah, I saw the Lamborghinis on Dubai airport that people abandoned because they weren’t supposed to buy them to begin with. But at the same time, I started seeing that divide between what you consume, because again, being born and raised in Germany as a Palestinian, I’ve consumed that media.

24:57 I’ve seen it and suddenly I realized there’s such a big divide between what is being reported to reality. Let’s root ourselves in reality. The UAE works. We today are the most thriving ecosystem and probably the fastest growing and the largest in the world. And yet we’ve been claiming this for the last two years. And yet to hear someone says it’s not the case. We have more than 1,800 companies in the blockchain ecosystem over here, out of which two thirds are the majority are crypto native entities that are choosing the UAE as their home.

25:36 They’re in ADGM, they’re in the IFC, they’re on Dubai mainland, they’re in Ras el Khame, they’re in Sharjah. They’re all around because people see that it works over here. Friction in business is low. Does that mean it’s the perfect place in the world? I don’t think anywhere is. But you can do business over here. You’re unable to do business over here. You’re welcome to bring your children here and your family over here. You don’t want to do that.

26:02 You have six flights a day to wherever you want to go, to actually go and leave whenever your business here is done. And with that, I don’t see this changing anytime soon because of these visions. Because this isn’t maybe 30 years ago, this was by chance and I’d argue it wasn’t then already. Because when you look at Jabal Ali port, which is just down the road from here, Jabal Ali port was, I think, finished in mid 70s. And already then was one of the largest ports in the world. And everyone called them crazy at the time. Who is going to come to Jabal Ali port? Why would anyone come to Jabal Ali port? Today Jabal Ali port is one of the most utilized in the world. Emirates airlines started with a plane on loan from Kuwait Airways and from Pakistan Airways. And one of the first destinations that many people don’t know is Lahore, Dubai Lahore. And at the time they’re like, why would anyone need an airline? You’re such a small city, a small fisher village. Why do you need an airline? Today Emirates airlines is one of the most connected, one of the most successful airlines in the world. A couple of kilometers down the road, you have a Dad Airways giving them a run for their money as well.

27:14 So visions are bold and these leaders that we have a chance to live under the leadership of, they have bold visions and they’re competitive. They want to be the best. Sheikh Mohammed has quoted, why do you do this? He says, it’s in our nature to want to be the best. And you see that then I’ve had the distinct honor and pleasure to serve in these government entities as a consultant and to work with them. And there is, I don’t think there’s any other government in the world that is this active. So much so that they didn’t call, they actually turned their governments into profit centers and they put CEOs at the helm of governments.

27:55 And it’s a really cool YouTube clip that I invite anyone to check out of Sheikh Mohammed at the World Economic Forum. He was asked about what’s going on in Dubai. Dubai was just going through this vibrant growth at the time. And by the way, vibrant growth means that in the last 10 years, the population of Dubai doubled and the 10 years before it doubled again, right? And he was saying, in Dubai, we live with a certain mindset. And he turned to the camera and he said, every day in Africa, a gazelle wakes up in the morning thinking about only one thing, how do I outrun the lion to not die? And the lion at the same time is waking up thinking, how do I outrun the gazelle to make sure that I can feed myself and my pride? And then he turned jokingly to the camera and he said, in Dubai, I don’t care if you’re a lion or a gazelle, in the morning, you better wake up and run. And that’s in everything that we’re doing over here.

28:59 Similarly, when they wanted to be the first electronic government in the region or the first mobile government in the region, he came out with this bold vision of hundreds and hundreds of servers being available within two years, right? And he said that he’s quoted saying that, and this is a convention of all government leaders of Dubai at the time. He said, we’re going to be, we’re going to have X amount of servers. I think it was 500 or 1,000, don’t quote me on the number, but he said, we’re going to have these many services live two years from now. And he said, we’re going to celebrate two years from now that all of these services are live. And you know what we’re also celebrating? We’re going to celebrate the departure of anyone that didn’t make it happen, right? And that’s leadership, right? Even it gives me goosebumps.

29:49 I quote this so many times that it gives me goosebumps because it just shows how they’re thinking.

29:54 Brian Rose: And I’m sure you can feel it when you go out into the street. Where does that come from? Like, why here of all places? I mean, again, you go back 50 years, 100 years, and okay, there was some trade, there was some pearl diving, but you don’t have a river here. You don’t have the resources here.

30:10 I mean, do you ever think back and think, why, how? I mean, it’s this big bold vision, you know, it’s not coming from, you know, a city that’s been around for 2000 years with lots of ideas and trade, you know. Do you ever wonder why here?

30:26 Saqr Ereiqat: I think a lot of it, and really, I’m not just giving lip service to it. And you go back and you start Googling why. And you know, who united the United Arab Emirates? It was this mammoth of a man called Sheikh Zayed, who was a Bedouin, who, you know, was the first one to move into the city, to start developing this.

30:48 And he had a vision for this stuff even then. You know, we same Hamad bin Rashid. Sheikh Rashid, already you can see, we want all the tournaments to be in Dubai. We want all trade to be in Dubai. We want all famous people to be in Dubai. 40, 50 years ago, when this was just mad talk, right? They had this bold vision. His Highness Sheikh Zayed brought all of these guys to the table and said, you know what? United, we are strong.

31:18 We shouldn’t fight each other. Let’s build this United Arab Emirates, right? And let’s make sure that Dubai is this free trade hub for the world. This was, and you know, again, this isn’t, this isn’t me just making sense of something. You can go back and you can find these videos where these guys at the time were saying it, which if you were listening to them, you’d say, this guy’s out of his mind. Why would anyone have a tennis tournament in Dubai?

31:45 Why would anyone have a golf tournament in Dubai? The Emirates Golf Club, I think they just celebrated 27 or 28 years of existence. You go back to the pictures, you’ll find a desert, an absolute desert and a patch of green where you could play golf. Why? Because it made sense to them, they saw that they wanted people to arrive here, to enjoy their lives. And suddenly now we have the biggest tennis tournaments in the world here, the biggest golf tournaments in the world here, and the biggest anything tournament here. And it’s, it is not the least due to obviously an amazing population, each one of us being a stakeholder in this, but it’s the leadership’s vision and how they execute on it. And it’s Sheikh Hamad being, His Highness Sheikh Hamad being quoted saying, we, the second doesn’t exist in our world.

32:37 We want to be the first. And this is in everything that we’re doing, right? And then they come out with these principles because you know, it’s easy, again, I want to go back to this. It’s easy to say, oh, but it’s not a democracy. Well, I can point towards many places in the Western world or in the democratic world, right? Where one of the base principles of Dubai is not applied and the base principle of Dubai. And I’m not sure, have you been to the Emirates towers yet?

33:06 No, we’ll, we’ll go there together. And in stone, you see the principles of Dubai. Oh yeah. I’ve read those. Yeah. They’re amazing. Right. And one of the first one is the laws above everyone. Sounds so simple, but you know, when you think about everything that’s happening, all of the headlines that we’re hearing, is the law above everyone in the US? Is it in the UK?

33:27 Is it in these, you know, in France? Is it in these nations that claim that they are so forward thinking and so progressive and that they need to teach us about human rights? And I don’t know. And this is also one of the base things that in Dubai that works. It was, it was, it was one of my first projects. And, and maybe it’s not right to quote it, but at the time we were doing a data migration between, between systems for one of these government entities that issues fines without going into which government entity that was.

34:04 And there was, I never forget that there was on, on this letterhead, on this royal letterhead, and not one of the world, but you know, from the extended family that was asking for, can we reduce the fines, fines, which, you know, if you, if you go to, to any country in the world, you’ll probably go and see someone make a donation somewhere. And they’re like, okay, your parking tickets are gone. And the answer was no, the law is above all. Remember us migrating a system, there was certain records we didn’t have access to only to realize that these are records that are for the palace, for example, right? Even they have, and again, it’s, it sounds so simplistic and, but it shows that they practice what they preach, right?

34:47 And I think that can be attributed, a lot of the growth that we’re seeing here in the UAE can be attributed to this, this vision that they have.

34:55 Brian Rose: Yeah. Those eight principles are pretty powerful. I, I was posting them on my socials the other day. I recommend everyone read those. Compare that or contrast that to the kind of people you deal with in the crypto ecosystem, because we look at some of the great technology successes over the past hundred years, similar people, big visions that everyone else laughs at at the time, you know, look at what Musk has done, look at what Jobs has done, look at all these things.

35:21 So yeah, is that, is that also aided by the big vision here? Have you seen that carry over into the thousands of companies that you’ve worked with crypto?

35:30 Saqr Ereiqat: Definitely. Because, um, and, and not just from, from a crypto base, but also from the Dubai AI and web three campuses point of view, where we’re an active partner, also from TD five point of view, where we accelerate companies also from the companies that are here, you know, if you are a founder, you want to move things and you generally are used to banging your head against the wall because no one buys into this big vision. You’re at home over here because you’ll come here and you’ll find people resonating with that. Oh, you want to change the world with this application?

36:03 Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. By the way, this guy is doing something in this space and this guy’s doing something. Maybe you guys should be talking and then you’ll go to a senior government executive and he’ll say, yeah, you know what? We have a strategy for this stuff. Maybe you want to be part of this strategy, right? When you, when you arrive over here as a founder and obviously again, I’m, I’m painting the perfect picture. Unfortunately, with any emerging technology, with any emerging economy, there’s a lot of bad actors, right? So, unfortunately, we still hear of many people falling prey to, to those, those bad actors. But, you know, if you land in the right space, if you land, you know, in these right accelerators, incubators, venture studios, in the right government departments, your, your experience will be only, you know what, forget about government per se. If you just go on the road, there’s, there’s this fear, there’s this vibrant fear. So I’m not young enough to still remember the dot-com bubble, right? I was experiencing it from a computer at home, but, you know, it didn’t mean anything to me. And now we’re welcoming all of these experienced guys that lived through this, invested through it, made multi-billion dollar exits with it.

37:15 And they say, this is the kind of vibe that we had in Silicon Valley at the time. And this is where the idea of crypto oasis was born, that we don’t want this to be the Silicon Valley of the region. We want this to be the crypto oasis. This ecosystem should be referred to as something that is native to this ecosystem, right? And then we firmly believe in this space.

37:36 So with TDFI, we then publicly work with government entities to help them accelerate in these markets. With trade dog market managers and market makers, we actually work with these companies to ensure that we support them in that healthy growth and that space. And I firmly believe that it’ll be the UAE that is leading this race. And it is because of these visionary founders finding their home in the UAE.

38:04 Brian Rose: Can you tell me more about crypto oasis, kind of how it got started, what it is today, and then now what you see it going forward, including like what’s your vision of state of the art right now of, you know, Blockchain Web 3, even AI.

38:20 Saqr Ereiqat: Right. So crypto oasis, again, started with our partnership with the DMCC, where we set up one of the first physical spaces for crypto entities to land here and blockchain entities to land over here. We signed a partnership with the DMCC at the World Economic Forum, kicked off in 2021. And I’m talking as someone that’s native to the space, seen it grow. When we started counting, we’re shocked by how many companies are moving over here. So these numbers, 1,800 companies, and that’s the last one we’ve issued just a year ago, roughly. I myself questioned, and I myself went in and I said, okay, where are these companies? What are these colada companies? Because that’s a lot of colada companies. Just by comparison, Crypto Valley, and you know, we work very closely. We represent

39:14 The Crypto Valley Association here in the region, which is in Switzerland, which is in Switzerland, and you know, the wider region around Switzerland. I think today, after being in progress for eight, nine, even 10 years, are counting 1,100 companies. And again, that just shows how vibrant this entire space over here is. So crypto oasis is really the ecosystem that, you know, we’re venture building in the space and we’re investing in the space as well. So we’ve invested into somewhere around 55 early stage entities in the space. When I say in the space, I mean, in the UAE. And with TDFI, what we do is we incubate these companies, right? We make sure that we take them from, you know, from zero to hero, right? And also start venture building in the space. And venture building is a very interesting concept that doesn’t receive too much airtime. It’s us becoming the corporate co-founder, right? It’s me de-risking the entire process. Venture studio entities, so startup that is set up in a venture studio, is twice as likely to reach Series A faster, twice faster than any non-venture studio company. Compared to venture capital venture. Those are two different things. Yeah, I think venture capital slowly but surely we’ll see that fade away to this venture building, venture studio model where we will actively participate. And with venture capital is cut your check. I’ll try to make a few connections. See you

40:46 Later.

40:46 Brian Rose: I’m busy with cutting more checks.

40:49 Saqr Ereiqat: Exactly. Whereas venture building is really what we do also with TDFI. We start with this company, you know, they’re today at a $5 million valuation, a $10 million valuation. And we’ll work through our portfolio of companies and that is events, that is market making, that is research, that is go-to market strategy, ensure that you actually become successful as an entity. And the numbers are proving it. So I believe that this is going to be the model of going forward more and more where we believe that through venture building we’ll de-risk the entire process for everyone.

41:26 For the investor, for the founder, for the startup, for the government that they’re working and the numbers are astounding.

41:33 Brian Rose: You said maybe venture capital is dead. I wonder if we could go a little deeper on that. Yeah. Because it’s an interesting question, you know.

41:41 Saqr Ereiqat: I’d pull that back. I’m being way too clean for virtue. Yeah. But yeah, so it’s exactly what you described. Here’s a check. Here’s a couple of intros.

41:51 Brian Rose: I’m busy with writing more checks.

41:53 Saqr Ereiqat: Definitely, that’s going to be the case. And it doesn’t necessarily need to be that all venture capital will end up being with venture studios. But you know, one of our partners, for example, the Blockchain Founders Fund, they’re typical venture capitalists, right? But when they invest, they start holding you by your hands, supporting you, making the right introductions on every single corner. We will look at us with what we do with the trade dock, right? You come in, you join in the TDFI incubator, and it’s really an all-encompassing service, right? Where we take you on every single step of the way. We help you in every single decision that you need to make. And you know, these are maybe, quote unquote, traditional models, not venture building models.

42:47 But they are definitely not the standard venture capital model. When I say venture capital is that I don’t mean the entire industry of venture capital will just fade away. I just feel that the winning venture capitalists, the ones that will actually be able to perform better than the rest, are those that take an active role, an active driving seat. And you don’t need to be operational. You can sit on the board. You can support them. You can be an advisor to them.

43:12 But it’s that kind of expertise that will help companies become more successful. And this is what we believe in as the trade dock group, that we want to take you in as someone that, you know, starting out with a great idea and ensure that you reach that billion dollar status rather quickly.

43:27 Brian Rose: So it’s interesting, because right now, as this bull market starts to warm up a little bit, you’re seeing that a lot of funding rounds are now kind of dominated by these KOL rounds that get kind of these more accelerated vesting schedules and just quite frankly get better terms than VCs, because they have a real value add, because any business, as Peter Drucker would say, is about satisfying a customer. And if people don’t know about your tech, you might have the best tech in the world that won’t go anywhere. And so they’re valuing that with us when we started London Real Ventures a couple of years ago, the only thing I could add value was, was this, what we’re doing here. And so for me, it was, we’ll write you a check, but I’ll put the CEO in the chair and I’ll kind of get them to elicit their vision and get the spark, that kind of energy that makes them a great founder. And then we put that out to the world and get it in front of our five million subscribers and make sure that that asset was something that worked for them for years to come and ended up being a great value add.

44:21 And so now we bring more than capital to the table, because right now, I’m sure you know this, if you’re just competing on capital right now, you’re going to miss the deals. You really are.

44:32 Saqr Ereiqat: I agree with you 100%. And it’s these kind of, you know, because founders also are becoming sorry, before you’d be willing to sell your mother for the right amount as a founder, because you really want to get this done. Now you ask and you wonder, what is that capital done in the past? How have they helped people excel? So when I say venture capital is dead, yeah, it’s a great sound bite and all. I don’t mean that there won’t be a world of venture capital anymore. It’s just that shape or that kind of chick writing mentality. I’ll write you a check and off you go. I think that more and more of that is going to disappear to more and more active, call it venture building, call it incubation, call it sitting on the board, something that you play a more active role in the startup success. And it can be giving them the right exposure because, you know, you have millions of subscribers and there just needs to be one or two people in that subscriber list that this clicks with. And that can be the source of your success.

45:33 Brian Rose: Talk to me about what you’re going to be doing with Trade Dog and Crypto Oasis, because, you know, I sat down with Gaurav who, you know, kind of founded that whole teeny fine Trade Dog. And he talked about how an entrepreneur or a founder already has,

45:48 You know, 12 different jobs. Now you throw them in the blockchain ecosystem and you got another 10 jobs. You got a token you don’t understand. You got to bring it to market faster than any other company ever would in a public markets, you know, with an IPO in the US or anywhere else. You’re probably going to be around for six, eight, 10 years with a blockchain company.

46:06 You might be generating your token within three months sometimes. And you got to deal with all that pressure, all that liquidity. How important is it to have that kind of deep knowledge help? And is it imperative to have it these days if you want to be successful in blockchain?

46:22 Saqr Ereiqat: If you ask me, it is just on, and you’ve summarized it actually beautifully well.

46:26 First thing, when we think of Crypto Oasis, Crypto Oasis is an ecosystem. So you become part of that ecosystem. You understand who the right players are in the ecosystem. We look at Trade Dog and the different companies. If it was the events part of it, if it was TD5, if it was Trade Dog as a research entity, if it was the exchange, or if it is the market maker, our role is to provide you with that expertise. You know, a lot of, let me look at this differently. I’ve recently seen an analysis of successful founders and their age.

47:04 And we have this romantic point of view that the successful founder is the Mark Zuckerberg type or the Jeff Bezos type that is young and vibrant and wants to change the world and will change the world. That’s factually incorrect. The majority of founders are well in their 50s, successful founders. They’re well in their 50s. They would have beaten up 10 times over. Yes, you have these Mark Zuckerbergs of the world, but that’s the reason why everyone knows Mark Zuckerberg.

47:35 Brian Rose: Right. And Brigades is why they both dropped out of Harvard to start their companies. Right. And a great example, I think, was Alibaba’s dude, Jack Ma, who said, you know, I applied to McDonald’s and KFC and was rejected there, and only then did I start Alibaba. And on KFC, you know, if you look at Colonel Sander’s, there’s a reason why he’s this old dude, right? He’s not this young guy that, you know, made it very early.

48:03 Saqr Ereiqat: So there’s this romantic idea of this Superman founder. And yes, there are Superman founders out there. There are guys that I sit down and I say, which planet did you fall off?

48:14 But that’s not generally the case, nor should this generally be what you as a venture capitalist look for or as a studio look for. Should be looking for someone that’s dedicated, that knows what they’re doing, that has an idea about their subject matter. And that’s where our value comes in. Don’t worry about tokenomics. Don’t worry about listing.

48:36 Don’t worry about how we manage your token. Don’t worry about how to go to market. We’ll support you with hundreds of examples, if not even the right founders, that will support you on this process. We have the right expertise. We’ve done this over and over again. It’s small, repeatable processes done over and over again that we know works, right? What’s the difference between a successful chef and a non-successful chef, right? They all use the same ingredients.

49:05 There is no rocket science in this. I’m sorry. I mean, a lot of people try to make this opaque and mysterious. It isn’t opaque. It isn’t mysterious. It’s the basics. Get the basics right. And have a product that fits the market that people want to use. Have a captivated audience. Have something that solves a problem, right? Work hard and suddenly you have your overnight success. These overnight successes take a lot of work. And we believe in this space so much so that we’ll say, you know what? We’ll join you in that journey. And no, don’t pay us. We’ll support you and we’ll take an equity that, if anything, will make sense once you are successful. So I have a vested interest in you becoming successful. And I’ll join you on every single turn of the way. And I’m very proud to say that if it was with Trade Dog or Todd, the Trade Dog, or if it was with the companies that we’ve invested in in crypto oasis, founders come back and tell us, hey, you guys are the different guys, right? You guys are the ones that support us where someone else just would say, hey, we’ll come back to you, right? I see that, that active stake in these companies being the driving success factor.

50:17 And we’re seeing this macroeconomically as well, again, moving out of technology because, you know, we live in our little bubble where we think everything’s technology and everything’s crypto and everything’s blockchain. And it took me, and it’s easy to go down that rabbit hole. I went down that rabbit hole that it was difficult to emerge from that again and realize that blockchain, tech, all of it, it’s a concerted effort of different technologies. That blockchain is one piece of, but if done right, then blockchain is going to do to information, blockchain is going to do to transactions what the internet did to information.

50:55 We were living in a world where information was completely, completely disintegrated. You’d have to go to this library or that library or that library. The internet connected us to all of that information and it’s so much more than anyone could have imagined. Similarly, I believe blockchain will do that to a transaction, which is why I’ve signed my name and blood next to it. And I believe we are in our 1996 moment of the internet. It is 1996 and blockchain is the internet. Now, mind you, I’ll keep myself honest.

51:23 I’ve been saying that for five years, so it’s been frozen in time as 1996 and blockchain is the internet, but we are in this exact moment and then we can correlate the number of users of crypto blockchain to the number of users of the internet. It’s like 4% or something like that. Don’t beat me to the number. It’s like early days.

51:40 Brian Rose: It’s very early days. If you’re listening to this and you’re saying, Hey, you know, Brian’s been in this for years and suck has been in this for years. I’m missing out.

51:49 No, no, you’re not missing out. If you’re joining right now, you’re probably doing a better job than I did to join this a couple of years ago.

51:57 Saqr Ereiqat: Right. And then by now, close to a decade ago, because we’re still in this early stage moment that the real adoption hasn’t started yet, which is why also I look at these heavily populated countries in the region and in the world for being drivers of adoption. But then you need quote unquote safe havens like the UAE to facilitate all of this.

52:18 Brian Rose: Okay. If you zoom in really quick, founder that you would find top three mistakes that they make. Say, for example, you weren’t able to build with them, incubate, accelerate them, and they were going to go out on their own.

52:31 Just in the web through blockchain space, one or two or three things that you see regularly.

52:36 Saqr Ereiqat: There is no overnight success. Does that mean we haven’t made quote unquote overnight successes and some of the investments that we made? Yeah, maybe. Maybe. But generally speaking, if you’re a founder, if you’re in the space and you think that you’re just going to publish something into the market and suddenly the entire world is going to jump on it, you can have the best solution in the world. And I, I can quote 10s just from the top of my head. You have the best solution in the world. If you don’t know how to bring it to the market, if you’re too early or you’re too late, then there’s nothing there. So, so first things first, it’s, it’s understanding that this is a lot of hard work. And it was the Nvidia CEO that was quoted recently as like, would you do this again? You know, because Nvidia has one of the most successful companies. When we look at it on the stock market right now, he said, no way. Isn’t that crazy? Yeah. I’m not that crazy. Right.

53:29 And, and, and it is that, I mean, you, you really need to, to, to believe in this space deeply and be willing to face the pain and be beaten down. And, and mind you, you know, this isn’t war or anything, you know, it’s, but it’s, it’s difficult. And also having been in corporate and now being an entrepreneur. Again, there’s this romantic vision that one is good and one is bad. And you know, if you’re an entrepreneur, you’re free, but if you’re in a corporation, you’re tied in. And in many ways that could be right. But I realized that it’s a lockdown to the character. So the first things first, it’s hard work.

54:08 It’s not easy. It’s not a fast reward, right? It can be, but generally it isn’t the case. Second thing is founders that think too much about tech. Blockchain is a technology. If you’re not, you know, I, I, I won’t say I despise people. It’s, it’s too extreme. I don’t like people that are in this space and say, Hey, no, but I’m not the tech guy. If you’re not the tech guy, why are you in the space? If you don’t, they take time to understand the technology.

54:39 Why are you in a technology dominates its field? Go be in any other field. There’s, there’s a lot of benefit to be made in many different industries in the world. And mind you, no one needs to be the tech guy, but you should at least respect the space enough to understand that this is a technology driven space. There’s a technology at the heart of it, which is promising to revolutionize the world as we know it. Now, the flip side of this is these guys that know nothing but tech, right? That think because they’ve solved the tech challenge, suddenly the entire world will, will, will be in standing ovations to them, right? And it, and unfortunately isn’t that right? There’s a reason why Facebook became successful and MySpace went down, right? And, and, and if we think about it, it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a lot about the, the, the adoption of customers rather than the technology that you solve. So while it is a tech dominated space and, and I think everyone should respect themselves enough if you’re in this space to not walk away with the notion of, Oh, I’m not the tech guy, right? Because the education is as freely and readily available as it just a bit never before in history, right? You can go to Princeton or Harvard, or, or, you know, we have a partnership with, with, I think it was at Barron university, Basel, it was the university of Basel, where you can get all of that education for free. So, but also you have to think of

56:05 User centricity of, of human connection first, before you think that you’re going to, to, to share the world. And last but not least, and it’s tied into that it’s, it’s an unwillingness to educate yourself, right? Education, education, education is, is at the heart of everything that we’re knowing, which is why I don’t like to be introduced as a government, as a, as a blockchain expert or a government expert or health. I don’t believe that anyone in blockchain is an expert. I, I, and I say that with, with respect to all of these amazing people that I know, right? There’s two or three that I could point to that I’d say, okay, these are expert guys because they understand the business, they understand the people, they understand the, the technology behind it. But this is such an emerging space, right? And one of the largest and most used crypto platforms, blockchain platforms is Ethereum. And what happened to Ethereum last year? They changed it fundamentally, right? So, so you need to come into the space to be willing to, to be educated. So in, in, in summary, it is, you know, educating yourself and the willingness to educate, understanding that it is about the human and user centricity and, and not about technology. And last but not least, it’s this willingness to, to fight against all odds.

57:25 Brian Rose: Interesting things there. I guess if you solve a problem, that’s like, what are you going to Nobel prize for? If you discover something, but a business,

57:34 Again, back to Drucker, I mean, a business solves a problem for a customer. And if you don’t think that way, then you’re not going to have a business and then you won’t be able to change the world. So that’s important, right? And just sticking X on the blockchain is not a business. Again, you have to actually have a use case. And that was a lot of criticism of some early blockchain companies and maybe fair. So the, the education is really interesting. So in 21, I started my crypto and defy Academy and I’ve been personally taught over a thousand students, you know, basic stuff from wallets to defy to all sorts of things. And it’s really interesting because I get to talk to my students and see how they work. And a lot of them, they learn a little bit and then they see how much they could learn and they get a little frustrated and they think, Oh, I’m not very good in this. And I always quote, one of my guests was on the show name is Lynn Alden. She’s an on-chain analyst, really, really, really smart, really OG in Bitcoin. And I always quote her when she said to me in an interview, she said, Brian, I’ll never fully understand Bitcoin. Yeah. And I always quote that back to my students. And I say, if Lynn Alden said that she will never fully understand Bitcoin, that means probably you won’t. And also maybe you shouldn’t try to fully understand it, but you should understand and constantly learn, but also use what you can and then build with

58:47 That.

58:47 Saqr Ereiqat: To that point. Yes. People listening right now are listening to us over the internet. And now I want everyone to think for a second. Do you understand the internet?

59:00 I studied business and IT and I’d have a hard time actually putting together how the internet works in its entirety. And I had a university course on it and I’ve read about it, but you know, I’d be able to, but you know what, there’ll be elements of it that I don’t understand. Similarly, you don’t need to understand blockchain to that level. You need to understand how you can use it. And if we can use the internet and everything that we are doing without understanding it technologically, well, let’s apply that same kind of thinking to blockchain, to Bitcoin, to Ethereum, to all of these different crypto platforms. And with that, I’ve been saying it for too long and you know, it’s still not proven right, but I really don’t think that blockchain is about cryptocurrencies. I think cryptocurrencies is an early use case. That’s amazing. That captures everyone’s attention and this ability to turn profit quickly in an open and decentralized way. And sometimes a centralized way, right? Think Binance, right? They’re centralized, but they’re such an important part of this entire equation.

1:00:08 Right. And we need to really think about the fact that the value that blockchain can drive is much more than just a cryptocurrency of sorts, but it’s early days, right? As we said, first day, first hour, first minute, first month, first year of this entire tech adoption. And if we’re talking about blockchain, we probably are still in the first minute, let alone the first day of the big bang.

1:00:36 Brian Rose: We both spent four or five days at the Satoshi round table. It was the 10th event, my first, an amazing event, I guess probably 450 kind of OG and also up and coming people, I guess, in the blockchain web three space.

1:00:51 There were a lot of conversations happening that weekend and I’m sure you were privy to many of them, but what do you think is coming next? You know, while I’ve been in the studio, I’ve talked about social fi and the rebirth of DeFi and the ordinal system and what’s being built on the Bitcoin chain. And there’s just so much happening. I’m curious what you see as interesting to you as what comes next.

1:01:13 Saqr Ereiqat: There’s a lot of interesting stuff, but I’ve been in this space for long enough. And I always quote that I used to stand on stage in 2015, or fortunately it’s documented and say within two years, everything’s going to be blockchain.

1:01:26 Has that happened? No. So I’ve been in this space for long enough now to make any predictions. But I can tell you what we’re seeing the world move towards right now. First, it’s gaming. Gaming, I believe, is going to be the frozen horse of blockchain adoption.

1:01:43 Or I hope, let’s put it this way, right? Because we’ve been waiting for the killer use case and we’ve seen it so many times in the promise of it. Gaming is capturing the attention of users. Gaming is capturing the attention of the capital that’s in the space. Gaming is capturing the attention of all the smart individuals in the space. So I think gaming will be huge.

1:02:04 What I can tell you, and I’m glad you mentioned the Satoshi Roundtable because the first time I was there, it was a year or two years ago, it was one of my proud moments in my blockchain journey because I’ve always wanted to be allowed to be invited to be at the Satoshi Roundtable and this year and the time before I’ve also been lucky enough and privileged enough to be able to host a session over there. So at the Satoshi Roundtable, a lot of the momentum was around layer two on Bitcoin. I’m not sure where I stand with this just yet. There’s a lot of movement on it and we should be watching the space. Decentralized infrastructure with the need for high performance computing, artificial intelligence and transaction as they are panning out in the world is capturing, again, a lot of attention. And something that I haven’t heard at the Satoshi Roundtable, but I believe is in a similar early stage as we were in 2014-15 with blockchain, is quantum computing. And again, I’ve tried to understand it to a level that I got to a point where I said, and actually, no, it was one of the scientists in the space, one of the renowned scientists in the space that said, it’s like at some point you just need to accept there’s a little bit of quantum computing magic happening over there. Similarly to what I call the blockchain Bitcoin magic that just happens. We don’t need to understand this. It’s for smarter, more educated, more specialized people to understand this and solve these problems for us as long as

1:03:46 We understand it principally. And principally, what quantum computing has a promise of is to change computing as we know it. Computing as we know it is zeros and ones. You’re seeing me right now on the internet because of zeros and ones. Sounds simplistic, but that’s the base of computing right now. Quantum computing removes that base. With that, then people call for the death of Bitcoin because of quantum computing rubbish. Because just how people will start wanting to attack the Bitcoin network with quantum computing, the Bitcoin network will protect itself. The quantum will break the crypto, the cryptography. Sure. And you know where that fails? It’s if one is developing and the other one isn’t. And already there’s a proposal in the Bitcoin community to start adopting for cryptography that is quantum proof. Because yeah, it’s true. If we would take Bitcoin as the Bitcoin network as we know it today, and you throw quantum computing 10 years from now to it, yeah, probably you’ll break it. But what people always tend to forget is that as the attacker becomes more sophisticated, the offender becomes more sophisticated regardless of who you want to label the attacker or the defender. And both will use the same technology. And quantum is coming soon. Quantum is slowly but surely becoming widely available. You can go on IBM’s cloud today and start using quantum computing in a cloud environment. No, I don’t think it’s

1:05:20 Coming soon as I slowly but surely also don’t think that crypto or blockchain is coming soon. It’s such an early space. And that’s why I don’t want to make predictions because honestly speaking, every time we did make predictions, this went a different way in one way or the other. There’s a couple of basic principles. I believe this technology has the ability to change the world. With this technology, and I refer to blockchain right now, with this technology being having the possibility to change the world, people will slowly but surely wake up to the benefit of it because there’s too much benefit to be drawn from it for it not to be used.

1:05:58 The earliest invention of it was Bitcoin. And until today, as many people have tried, no one’s been able to recreate Bitcoin. It’s the most decentralized, the most adopted, and no one’s been able to come close to it. So yeah, I believe in Bitcoin as well, as much as I believe in blockchain as a technology. These are two basic principles that I can share that I’m willing to put my life against.

1:06:26 If gaming’s going to work or not, I hope it will. If decentralized infrastructure is going to work or not, I hope it will. If quantum computing will come along or not, again, I hope it will. But the one thing that we can say is Bitcoin is here to stay and it’s a limited amount of coins out there that have more and more demand, especially with institutional adoption right now. And blockchain is too good of a technology for it just to be just another technology.

1:06:54 And with that, it’s so early that I invite everyone to educate themselves.

1:06:58 Brian Rose: You mentioned institutions. So we’re a month in, I think, Bitcoin ETF. What are your thoughts on that kind of post adoption? What do you think we go from here? Apparently there’s, I mean, there’s massive amounts of Bitcoin going into these ETFs.

1:07:12 Saqr Ereiqat: I really, I don’t know anymore where I stand with this. I started being super excited and waiting for the day this would happen. But really the entire purpose of Bitcoin as a technology is to take us away from financial services as we know it. And now with the ETF, it’s financial services as we know it. Bitcoin is promising to make you a wealthy individual because you own your own coins, you own your own keys, you own your own wallet, you are at the center of it. If a bank dies, if a government dies, if a leader comes, if a leader falls, if you are in control. Now, I don’t want to hate on ETFs because they will do great for institutional adoption. And we can see them already doing that, but it beats every single metric of this philosophy that Satoshi put out there in the white paper.

1:08:16 Is it a step on the way for adoption? Yeah. Is it, in German we say this, is it really the yellow of the egg? Is it the silver bullets? I don’t know.

1:08:32 Because I don’t think that giving anyone your tokens is the right model. I have a problem with us not being educated to own our own wealth. And this is one of the things that fascinated me so much when I first was introduced to, in the early days it was Bitcoin and Ethereum, that you can actually own it and you’re not dependent on anyone. With the ETFs, what’s the positive side of it? The positive side of it is there’s more and more Bitcoin that will buy. I’m a Bitcoin holder, so I’m happy. I say, hey, the price of Bitcoin will rise. That’s positive, obviously. The negative is, again, this learned helplessness. Yeah. Why? Why buy off of an ETF? Go buy it yourself.

1:09:18 But then also the flip side of it is probably the majority of people will then buy it and leave it on their exchange, which is even worse. Right? So God knows.

1:09:27 Brian Rose: It’s an interesting point. I mean, financial education is one of the beautiful things about crypto. And I’m a good friend of Robert Kiyosaki, author of Rich Dad Poor Dad, and he always says, schools teach you to be poor.

1:09:39 And I don’t think it’s a coincidence that we’re not taught about money in school and then later have to rely on bankers to run our money. And we’re told subconsciously that we’re too stupid to understand our money. And we never have a relationship with the money because like you said, we don’t have custody of it. I always say to my students, do you have money in the bank? And they raise your hand. And I’m like, no, you don’t. The bank has custody of your money. And when you don’t have digital asset ownership, you don’t have freedom. And we can talk about that. So in one sense, it separates it. In the other sense, it blesses Bitcoin. It’s now got a stamp of approval and you might get more users. And your dad or your grandpa or grandma might actually have Bitcoin exposure, which might help them learn. So I see what you mean. In some ways, maybe it’s like digital colonialism. Maybe they’re taking back that thing that could have taught us about ourselves.

1:10:34 Saqr Ereiqat: Unfortunately, the examples you put out in the regions are closer than ever. Speak to an Egyptian, speak to a Lebanese person and ask them about what happened to their deposits. People that have been saving their entire life and many of the expatriates that we see over here are exactly that. They’ve been saving their entire life to now realize that, oh, they can’t do what their money has to please. So for me, I’m just wondering why would you? And yes, I see the answer to it, but I’d love to see more and more education.

1:11:04 I really believe education is at the heart of it. I’m all self-taught on this space. Everything that I know in this space I’ve done through some kind of course online. And I’ve not taken a single one of the really expensive courses out there. I went out there, I’ve mostly consumed free resources, and I educated myself in this space. I wish that we could live in a world where we would teach people about this being the largest transition of wealth and probably the most positive transition of wealth, the most promising opportunity in financial services that is available to the public. I think we’re witnessing the largest migration or creation of wealth of any time before. That’s unprecedented. And I wish that we could start educating children about this. And I have three children myself, and I make it a point. So my children, it’d be unfair to say that they understand blockchain. But they know blockchain. They know it’s the same blockchain. It starts there. I try and teach them as much as I can, the four-year-old right now, how to interact with money and what money is and what money isn’t.

1:12:19 And I think the ETF just is more towards this learned helplessness that we unfortunately accept as the status quo. That blockchain and crypto was there, or Bitcoin specifically, because a lot of cryptos are not necessarily part of this. That Bitcoin and blockchain created a solution for.

1:12:40 Brian Rose: Yeah. My boys are six and seven. They arrived tomorrow from London, so I’m excited to have them back here.

1:12:48 Saqr Ereiqat: I’m excited for you.

1:12:49 Brian Rose: Yeah, they’ve already spent a week here before, and they really loved it.

1:12:53 Saqr Ereiqat: I’ll give you a list of things to do.

1:12:54 Brian Rose: Good. I’ll get those. They both have Bitcoin wallets, actually, and we talk about money, and I’m trying to educate them.

1:13:00 As most young boys are fascinated by, they love pirates. I used to meet them stories at night when they were a couple years younger. At one point, my oldest son, Caden, he said, Daddy, Daddy, why do pirates have treasure maps? And I was in the middle of my Crypto and DeFi Academy and teaching people, and I paused for a second and I looked at them and said, because they didn’t have Bitcoin. And it was actually a really interesting thing if you go deep on it, because it’s like, what is a treasure map for a pirate? I mean, it’s kind of like private key. And it’s because they couldn’t put their money in a bank because nobody would maybe allow the pirate to take it out. There was no centralized place, so they made this really imperfect private key where, you know, you couldn’t find out where you buried it, but that’s what it was originally. And it was just interesting to just see this whole parallel.

1:13:44 Saqr Ereiqat: I love that analogy. I’ll use it in the future as well.

1:13:47 Brian Rose: It’s kind of interesting that you see what breaks down and what doesn’t. So, yeah, the education is really important. And that’s what frustrates some people in this space. I’ve had long conversations with Yahtzee of Animoco Brands, and he says, look, I get the fact we’re using Web 2.5 to onboard people. But he says, ultimately, as hard it is for people to have a metamask wallet and see their coins, he said that is ultimately how we financially educate them. So he wants to get them there at some point.

1:14:13 Saqr Ereiqat: And I’m with him 100%. I’m glad you mentioned him. He’s one of the few that I will give expertise to the space, right? He’s someone that’s dedicated his life to this pretty much, and has been in this space since before it was called this space, right? And worked on digital technology, digital ownership, digital access rights, right? And with that, I think that once we arrive at that education point of view, right? And if there’s one thing I always want people to take away from any time that they see me speak is educate yourself.

1:14:41 I’m no different than you, right? If you’re listening to this and you’re thinking, oh, my God, no, go do it yourself. At the time, everyone around me told me not to. And I spent time and effort into it. And I was fascinated by it. And it paid out in the right way. So I really believe that we’re all supposed to at least have created a wallet, all supposed to own a little bit of Bitcoin, even if it’s $100, own Bitcoin, understand what this means. And don’t own it just so it can increase in price. Own it to understand this generational opportunity that we seem to be living right now.

1:15:22 Brian Rose: Yeah. I always used to say, it takes a village, which is me kind of quoting an old saying, and that’s why I like to have, I’ve had like over a hundred of the top people in blockchain, because not everybody can learn from a Michael Saylor. Not everybody can learn from an Avax founder like M. N. Gonsir or Circle CEO. But if you string enough of those together, you’ll find someone you resonate with, and then you’ll find a few, and then you can learn in your own way.

1:15:46 Saqr Ereiqat: And there’s so many people that want to educate you out there. There’s so much information and people need to go down that journey. And if you have 5 million listeners and followers, if I can get through to one, I’ve achieved everything I wanted to today. Because someone told me about this sometime, and I was fascinated by it. So I hope that people will enjoy their fascination with this space.

1:16:07 Brian Rose: I’m sure we have. Digital asset ownership is something that Yat talks a lot about. Digital property rights, he hammers this home because he believes that’s the fundamental of actually having your own freedoms. I agree. And he goes into capitalism, and the reason it works is because you have property ownership. Now he can go very deep on that. Once you actually own property, then you can modify it. You actually create economies around it. But he calls it digital colonialism, what Web2 was in Facebook. Whereas basically, you’re giving them your data and they’re selling it back to you because you’re not wise enough to charge for it. Kind of like I guess the Brits did back in the 19th century with rational resources of companies. Can you just talk about your thoughts of digital asset ownership? I’ve been on the wrong side of censorship because I didn’t own my digital assets on a platform like a YouTube. Some people think they have money, but actually, it’s in custody of the bank. Some people went to a Canadian trucker strike a few years ago

1:17:04 And found out that their assets were frozen on the back of it. And you got governments all around the world, maybe trying to restrict ownership of crypto assets. Whereas if you want your freedom, you probably want to own those things and also have them in your wallet, not on an ETF. What are your thoughts on that and how do you feel about freedom?

1:17:25 Saqr Ereiqat: So we’ve already referenced the guy, so let’s reference him properly. Yatsui has this TED Talk that everyone that’s listening here should spend a minute or two listening to. And he goes into it better than I’ve seen anyone else go into it. When we think about the world, the digital world as we know it, it is digital kingdoms. It is the house of YouTube, the house of Google, and the house of Meta, and the house of Microsoft, and the house of Apple.

1:17:53 And generally, you’re locked in in each one of them. And also, and again, moving away from tech, we live in this world where we’ve been taught that we have no right to own some of these companies that we participate in, right? And I’m seeing a shift towards stakeholder capitalism. Maybe capitalism will still remain as it is, but it’s more and more enabling the stakeholder, right? And then allowing me as a stakeholder to participate in it.

1:18:25 With that, I believe that blockchain, crypto, the Metaverse, Web3 gaming, decentralized infrastructure is probably one of the biggest enablers of freedom. Regardless, I really don’t want this to sound political, right? Regardless of where you stand, regardless of what you believe in, we all want something better for ourselves in one way or the other. With these technologies, you are at the center of it. If you drive value, you are the owner of that value. If you drive benefit, you are capable to capitalize on that benefit. Is that ready for the whole world adoption just yet? No, probably not. There’s so many basic issues that we have still in this space, which is why, again, I say it’s so early still. But you have an opportunity in front of you and no, this isn’t financial advice, right? I want just to be very clear, but every single one of us should be aware of what’s happening. Where you stand with it, that’s your business, but you should be aware of it because what we’re seeing right now, and by the way, it’s a stark contrast of what we’re seeing with artificial intelligence right now, is that you are enabled to own by yourself, right? If you don’t want to be part of a technology, you can even print a paper wallet, right? And you can own these keys yourself.

1:20:04 And if that doesn’t entice you, when you pause for a second and look at the world, you think, what do I really own? I’m Palestinian. I’m supposed to have inherited the hectares of land from my grandfather’s hard earnings. And someone said you don’t own that anymore. So to me, this is at the heart and center of everything that I believe in.

1:20:35 I believe that these digital technologies will enable us to own what we have and not be dependent on anyone. And again, then you say, oh, but golden diamonds, yeah. And have you tried to move across borders with golden diamonds, right? Moving my Bitcoin from anywhere to anywhere is a click of a button in whatever amount I wish to do that. And I can move billions for a couple of dollars, right? So if you don’t see how this is a huge shift in everything that we’re doing, then you know what? Don’t talk about this. Don’t think about this. Switch to the next episode.

1:21:23 I believe that this is a generational opportunity for wealth, for freedom, for ownership. And also, as anyone can see, I actually put my money where my mouth is. And I left my cushion of a corporate job where I was the leader of public sector and working with governments. And I really had a good time. This is one thing. A lot of people think back to their corporate years and say, oh my God, how did I know I had a great time doing that? But I have an even greater time doing this because it’s at the heart of what I believe in philosophically, that each one of us should be enticed. I don’t want to be the product. I want to be the owner of the value, which is why I don’t have an Instagram. I don’t have TikTok. I mean, the only thing I use is LinkedIn, where I live professionally. And my Twitter, slowly but surely, I’m getting more and more into it. And what got me on Twitter is the entire blockchain space.

1:22:27 Brian Rose: You mentioned artificial intelligence. What are your thoughts on the future of that and even how it relates to blockchain?

1:22:34 Saqr Ereiqat: You’re asking me all of those heavy questions.

1:22:37 Brian Rose: It’s the last heavy one, I promise.

1:22:39 Saqr Ereiqat: But no, I’m glad you point towards it because I’ve recently signed an open letter and I invite everyone to at least read it for the stop of the advancement of artificial intelligence as it stands today. Does that mean I’m anti-artificial intelligence? No.

1:22:54 I’ve been part of the first artificial intelligence implementation in the government of the UAE, right, or Dubai specifically. I believe artificial intelligence has the ability to make us all more productive, to make us all happier, to make us all work less, but not the way it stands today. The way it stands today, artificial intelligence is simply broken. And you know how you can, you know, this is obviously everything is a point of view, but you know how you can prove this as fact is when artificial intelligence starts hallucinating.

1:23:26 There’s now something called artificial intelligence hallucinations. If that doesn’t bother you, similarly to the previous statement, then, you know, move on to the next one. Artificial intelligence, as we’re doing it today, is completely broken, right? And you don’t need to be an educated person to appreciate that. Go on Netflix, go on the documentaries, watch how your data is being used against you, watch how artificial intelligence right now will prioritize a white person rather than a black person.

1:23:57 Look at how they’ll prioritize a man versus a woman. You know, this is bigger than, oh, I’m Palestinian and you’re American and he’s British. No, no, no, no. This is, this is on the base of humanity, prioritizing men over women, prioritizing one color over another. No one, unless you’re on the far right, will sign up for this.

1:24:20 And even if you’re on the far right, don’t you want to understand how it arrived there? Our artificial intelligence, as we know it today, works with a black box. How can I entrust any decision in the world to a black box? And to me, this is, you know, I wish I could shout it off the mountain tops and I tried and, you know, it wasn’t heard, so I stuck with blockchain. Guys, artificial intelligence today is a black box.

1:24:49 It was a, one of the leading companies in the world connected an artificial intelligence to another artificial intelligence. And a couple of minutes later, they had their own language, which the guys that coded the artificial intelligence couldn’t trace anymore. I recently spoken to one of the senior researchers of one of the larger artificial intelligence without referring to them. And he told me that the artificial intelligence suddenly was able to speak Farsi, although none of the training data was in Farsi or just an insignificant amount of percentage, right? And that’s scary.

1:25:28 And this will lead us to a terminator moment. So, you know, we’re at this point right now where each one of us needs to stand up and go to your, hey, we started speaking about democracy, go to your senator, go to your representative, go to your mayor, and talk to them about how artificial intelligence as it stands today has broken. And the solution, again, here in the UAE, we’re seeing it. Go Google the ethical considerations for artificial intelligence, the ministry of AI published. Artificial intelligence needs blockchain more than anything, because we need to start monitoring the decision matrix of these artificial intelligence. We need to understand why they arrive at an answer. And we need to understand how to not make them hallucinate, because in the future, we’re going to have artificial intelligence making major decisions, right? Unfortunately, today, we live in a world where I can point towards the genocide in Palestine and say more than the majority of decision making for targets was made by artificial intelligence. How did that turn out, right? And how did that artificial intelligence decide that?

1:26:39 And what’s to say that when this artificial intelligence has led to Rome itself, we’ll not decide that we are the enemies, because we’re not doing good stuff to the planet. We’re not taking care of this world as much as we should. And maybe the artificial intelligence will decide that we are the virus. One of my favorite movies of all time is The Matrix, where the Matrix is really a dystopian world where the machines, quote unquote, have decided to enslave the human population for energy. Are we there yet? No, of course not.

1:27:14 But it’s right now that we need to make decisions to ensure that we are not going down that route. And right now we are going down that route. What’s the solution? First of all, check the training data. Ensure that the data actually includes a wide array of people. If it’s you and me, we’re not representative of the population, right? If it’s not 50-50 female male, it’s not representative of the population. If it doesn’t represent all the races and religions and all of the other of the above, then it’s not representative of the people. And now why do I say blockchain?

1:27:51 Because blockchain can actually hold, quote unquote, artificial intelligence accountable. We can code it in a way that every decision in the artificial intelligence needs to be recorded on blockchain in a decentralized manner so that forever at least we can understand how it arrived there so that in the post-op we can analyze how to fix it and then we can fix it again. But artificial intelligence, as it stands today, is not only because I watch too many science fiction movies, but because I can’t shake these two artificial intelligence that created their own language that no one can understand as an example to scare me.

1:28:32 So yeah, go out there, go check out the open leds here against the advancement of artificial intelligence that we know. It’s been signed by Elon Musk. It’s been signed by leading researchers in Google and leading researchers in the majority of tech companies. And I hope that we are going to live in a world where first of all, we have control mechanisms for artificial intelligence. Second of all, we’re tracking how this decision-making process is done. Third of all, we actually have data that represents the human population for artificial intelligence.

1:29:03 Brian Rose: There’s quite a heated discussion at the Stoshi roundtable about this, I think on the first day. Yeah. I think you were there. Yeah. And it was really talking about how to track the data on blockchain and really try to see the ingredients that go into the finished piece. And there was some really important, passionate discussion about that. Vaxi had Professor Max Tegmark on the show to talk about the future of life Institute and the letter he signed alongside Elon Musk. And he’s MIT just like me. And so he went deep on his concerns. Then I had Mo Gaudet who wrote a book called Scary Smart, who used to work at Google X and pretty much he’s amazing. Love Mo. I had a mom when he had his sulfur happiness book back London rail back in 2017 or 18. He basically left Google X because he was freaked out by the artificial intelligence. And Mo’s book is amazing. It goes a little dark. So a year ago, I went pretty deep on the AI and I got to a dark place and I got two young boys. And I basically said, they’re never going to have teenage years like any human ever had on this planet. And they can potentially be dominated by this artificial intelligence. I then spoke with Peter Diamandis and then people like Dr. Ben Goetzel, Professor Hugo de Garis, who was OG in AI who wrote a book called the Artalec war where he actually game scenario this out into the future. And he protects these two groups of humans emerging one or pro AI, one or pro human that ended up getting into a war

1:30:24 And a billion people die. So I’ve gone all the way down these rabbit holes and it can get a little dark and really start to think about it. I think most of the world is completely oblivious to this and completely oblivious to the geometric growth that’s going on. And we’ve also, we’ve been disconnected now from the chat GPT moment, which is a year ago, and that’s all been building, but it’s, it’s something that needs more attention paid to it, because I plug in the most advanced large language model in the world. And I say, give me the top three guests on London Real. And it will say, you know, you know, two guests.

1:30:59 And then Tony Robbins, I love Tony. He taught me how to break a board when I was 10, but he’s never been a guest on my show. And my son, my seven year old son, Caden could have checked that on Google and yet it gets spit out of a large language model. And if that thing is making decisions where humans are involved, it’s very scary. Very.

1:31:20 And also one final thing is that we’ve got these, these massive web to, you know, oligarchies that are controlling all the tech. And so again, back to those companies don’t aren’t right now making very good decisions for us humans. And do you really want the Googles and open AI eyes and those companies controlling this really dangerous technology? Probably not. So it adds up to some real question marks. I do like the fact that there are some blockchain companies trying to do this. We’re trying to invest in some of them to where it’s open source and decentralized. That is, I think the only solution we have here.

1:31:58 Saqr Ereiqat: Yeah, I would agree with that. And again, it’s not unfair to identify this as a dark place. As soon as you do a lot of a little bit of reading in the space, you’ll have enough examples of how this can go bad very quickly. And again, this doesn’t need to be theoretical. We look at how the world is now after Facebook, after Instagram, after YouTube, how this has impacted teenage suicide rates, how this has impacted physical mental wellbeing for, for these most vulnerable of our people. And we realized that, you know, we’ve not done a good job. I mean, I think it’s fair to say we’ve not done a good job with as a whole, let alone with these emerging technologies. So now is the time.

1:32:41 Now is the time to actually go out there and say, stop. We need these right boundaries around it because AI is not bad. The problem isn’t in artificial intelligence as it is. It’s in us coding it in an irresponsible manner, just for the sake of getting the next product out there, doing it better, doing it faster, giving the better answer. Yeah, sure. Tony Robbins sounds right. And you know, if, if, if Caden would check, he would arrive there, but you know, how many people will check after they get that answer? Not many, not many. And again, going back to education, education, education, you know, I’m, uh, I believe in, in my, my religion is Islam and what another, when we get a very bad press and in the world and one of the first things, or the first word that we believe God has spoken to us was read. And I think we’d all be living in a better word where we would just do a little bit of more reading, try and understand these technologies that we’re dealing with. And then when you decide then to be on the other side of it, that’s fine. At least you would have educated yourself and, and information and knowledge is, is more freely available than it ever was before in human history. And that’s the positive side of, of your sons growing up and my children growing up, that they can educate themselves in ways that you and me could have just dreamed of.

1:34:06 Right. So let’s, uh, let’s hope that we will live in a better world, not one that’s dominated by machines.

1:34:12 Brian Rose: Yeah. And they might have these, these personalized tutors and all these amazing things that can happen. But, um, in the short term, we have to be really careful with what this AI does. Um, Yuval Hari, the guy that wrote Sapiens is talking about what happens when AI now creates the narrative and creates the stories. And as humans, we, you know, that’s what we consume and imagine when that happens, it starts to get really wild and scary and throw in some deep fakes and you know, you’re going to have nightmares. So let’s pay attention to this now, for sure. What are you doing 10 years from now? That’s what I want to know.

1:34:46 It’s 2034. What, what do you think you’ve built? What do you think? What do you want to be? What do you want to be?

1:34:54 Saqr Ereiqat: You know, I’ve, um, I’m, I’m the kid that had a plan, right? I’m, I’m the guy at 12 years old. I had all figured out, you know, to that exaggerate maybe 13 years old. And I learned, um, the hard way that you can plan for as many things as you want. Um, what’s going to happen is going to happen. Yes. You maybe have an influence into it. You know, what would have happened if I wasn’t in that room researching blockchain 10 years ago?

1:35:24 What would have happened? And if I didn’t mean my wife in Saudi Arabia, what would have happened if I didn’t move to Dubai? And these, all of these decisions were, were pretty much not in front of me. So I don’t know as, as, as the easy answer. And I stopped worrying about it. I like to think about what I can do today, what benefit I can drive today.

1:35:48 And, you know, you said something on your WhatsApp states that resonated really well with me. It’s like, how can I earn every day? Who am I to ask for 10 years from now? I need to earn today and I need to earn tomorrow. And the day after that, I need to best, you need the best brother, the best father, the best son, the best husband, the best professional, right?

1:36:12 That’s, that’s what I want to be. I want to be 10 years from now. I want to be the best version of myself, even better than today, but to not make this too philosophical. I believe that with trade dog, we have a multi-billion dollar opportunity that we’re going to, to make real for everyone to join in us, right? I believe with crypto oasis, we’ve already proven in many ways that this opportunity is real here in the UAE. But who knows that if, if, if quantum computing comes around and actually does break this and my prediction doesn’t hold true, or my analysis doesn’t hold true, maybe this entire space will disappear. I firmly don’t believe in it, right? I firmly believe that 10 years from now, we’re going to be celebrating the successes that we started today, right? So trade doc group, hopefully as, as a multi-billion dollar entity in the space, crypto oasis as, as the largest and most significant in the space. And select it as an individual, as the best version of himself as the, as he was.

1:37:10 Brian Rose: They say man plans and God laughs. There you go. Right. So have a vision and a philosophy and then earn it every day. And then most likely you’ll get there or you get to where you’re supposed to be.

1:37:22 Saqr Ereiqat: In Arabic, we say, I want and you want, but God does what he wants.

1:37:26 Brian Rose: That’s nice too. I’m going to learn some Arabic. You should. Sure. I really will. I’m slowly picking up little bits. It’s amazing. Here’s a question I want to finish with that I haven’t asked very often, but I used to ask it all the time on London Real. You know, to that 20 year old kid out there could be anywhere right now.

1:37:48 Could be in the States, could be in China, could be in Palestine, could be in Africa, could be in Israel. Advice to that 20 year old kid. They’re staring down the barrel of very different worlds than maybe we did. Maybe they want to do something. Maybe they want to educate themselves. What kind of advice would you give to them as far as, you know, things to think about things to make themselves aware of things to learn things to do.

1:38:12 What would you tell them?

1:38:14 Saqr Ereiqat: The best skill to learn the ultimate skill is to get things done, learn how to get things done. And I don’t care if it’s fixing a wheel or if it’s learning how to code on blockchain or if it’s using artificial intelligence and a lot of it. And then also will be in accepting that education is at the heart of it. But ultimately the difference between success and failure is you being able to, and obviously again, I don’t want to take away the wider ecosystem of things in God and luck and call it what you made a cosmos. But your ability to get things done is what’s going to differentiate you from someone else. Your ability to understand that you’re made to listen is going to differentiate you from someone else.

1:39:08 Your ability to be able to educate yourself constantly is going to differentiate you from someone else. And yes, at 20 years old, all of this sounds so weird and challenging. Just get it done. Whatever is in front of you. If you’re a waiter, get your waiting done. If you’re an engineer, get your engineering done. If you create cars and, you know, create better cars and hold yourself accountable to yourself, not to anyone else.

1:39:38 We live in a world where social media wants to influence everything that we’re doing and, you know, try and paint a picture how, you know, everyone’s more successful than you. Don’t worry. The only standard is you. If you’re better today than you were yesterday, that’s a good day. And if you’re able to get things done, whatever that thing is, I don’t believe that anyone is limited in doing anything. If you put your mind to something, you’ll be able to do it. So learn to get things done if there’s one piece of advice.

1:40:15 Brian Rose: I love that. Execute. And back to another phrase, God helps those who help themselves. 100%. Right. So important because you can educate yourself all you want, but if you actually don’t get it done, then it’s not going to amount to much and you’re not going to contribute really back to humanity. Saikra, thank you so much for the conversation.

1:40:33 Saqr Ereiqat: Thank you. It just went very different than I thought it would.

1:40:36 Brian Rose: Yeah, me too. I just, honestly, you’re one of the best, you’re an incredible asset for the United Bear Remembrance. You’re one of the greatest spokesman that I’ve spoken to in the country who just zooms out and tries to let people know. I always joke that everyone in this country must secretly work for the Ministry of Tourism because they’re always trying to tell you, how great this place is. There must be some tokens going out there for somebody.

1:41:01 Because I’m looking for my hair drop. But I mean, everybody wants to tell you how great this place is. Everyone wants to tell you to move here and you’re just going to have a great top down view.

1:41:10 Saqr Ereiqat: And now you’re making me into one of those people. It’s wonderful.

1:41:13 Brian Rose: I’m glad.

1:41:13 Because I am really… And if you’re listening to the stone move here, I don’t need more traffic. But that’s what just happens when you talk about this. But no, it’s fantastic. Congrats on the new role. And Trey Dogg, it’s going to be fantastic. Congratulations for everything you’ve done with crypto-oasis. And let’s pick this up in a couple of years, find out what happened next.

1:41:31 Saqr Ereiqat: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Thanks so much. Appreciate it.

1:41:34 Brian Rose: And I just want to thank Web3 TV for having us. We’ll see you next time on London Real.