Episode: 19 — "Value vs. Money" · Full Episode #19
Date: 3 March 2020
Language: Libyan Arabic, English code-switching
Audio: MP3
Dr. Abdalla Kablan (د. عبدالله كبلان) is a Libyan AI and fintech expert. He holds a PhD in computational intelligence and lectures at the University of Malta. He founded Wiser, a fintech company. He arrived in the UK as a young man — Bradford was his first stop, and the culture shock was significant. He later settled in Malta, which he came to see as a strategic platform that Libya had failed to use.
Abdalla drew a distinction between knowledge and wisdom using a simple image: "Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad." He applied this framework throughout the conversation — to technology, to Libya's economic choices, to personal decision-making. Knowing something is not the same as knowing what to do with it.
He argued that Libya had missed a strategic opportunity with Malta. The two countries are geographically close — closer than most Libyans realise. Malta built itself into a hub for fintech, gaming, and digital services. Libya could have used that proximity as a springboard for technology transfer, education pipelines, and regulatory learning. Instead, the relationship was reduced to money. "We saw everything as money," he said, and missed the value.
See: Malta as Springboard
His most direct philosophical statement: "The only currency that is always declining is time." He applied this to career decisions, to Libya's political stagnation, and to people who wait for perfect conditions before acting.
He offered a neurological explanation for deja vu — the brain processing a sensory input through memory circuits before conscious circuits, creating the sensation of having experienced something before. He presented it matter-of-factly, as an example of how the brain's architecture can produce experiences people attribute to the supernatural.
His first experience of the UK was Bradford. The culture shock was not about language or weather — it was about the gap between the imagined West and the reality of a post-industrial northern English city. It recalibrated his expectations.
"Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad." (EP 19)
"The only currency that is always declining is time." (EP 19)
Abdalla returned in Season 7 for a four-episode arc that functions as a sustained masterclass on execution, habits, written communication, and the structural traps that most knowledge-workers walk into. The series ran across four consecutive episodes and closed the season.
Episode: 119 · Full Episode #119
The opening episode is built around a structural reframe of the action-versus-thought ratio. Abdalla's formulation — "One hour of action beats one thousand hours of thought" — is the title and the thesis. He set it against the kind of over-analysed paralysis that he sees repeatedly in capable Libyans, himself included at earlier stages.
The episode's most personal disclosure is the Web Summit story. In 2015, Abdalla competed in the Web Summit start-up finals and lost. He described, candidly, both the disappointment and the long downstream effect of the loss on his self-narrative. Six years later, in 2021, he returned to Web Summit as a judge — selecting the finalists in the competition he had once lost. He used the arc as a working example of his own thesis: the action of submitting in 2015 — including the action of losing — is what created the conditions for the 2021 invitation. The thousand hours of thought about whether to enter would have produced neither outcome.
He also referenced a decision-making algorithm he uses with his wife — a small, structured framework for adjudicating disagreement that he credits with reducing the friction of two-career household decisions. He did not over-explain it.
Episode: 120 · Full Episode #120
The second episode is a tour of the habit architecture Abdalla has built around himself, framed through James Clear's Atomic Habits. He uses the book not as a generic recommendation but as the working document for his own daily structure.
The episode's headline detail: an Apple Watch streak — closing the activity rings every day — that has been unbroken since 1 September 2020. He described the streak less as a fitness achievement and more as a single-axis demonstration that small daily compliance, sustained, is itself a form of compound interest. He has not skipped a single day across multiple years.
He also described the daily scrum-style stand-up he runs with his teams — a fixed, short, calendar-protected meeting in which each person reports what they did yesterday, what they will do today, and what is blocking them. The mechanism is borrowed from agile software development. He has applied it to non-software teams with the same result.
Episode: 121 · Full Episode #121
The third episode is about written communication — specifically, the cost of bad email and the shape of effective email. Tariq and Abdalla opened with the shared experience of having both received, separately, the same bad pitch email — a long, padded, ego-led approach from a stranger that produced the opposite of its intended effect in both of their inboxes. The coincidence is the spine of the episode.
See: The Shared Bad Pitch
The positive model Abdalla offered was a UK law firm he has worked with — a firm that writes emails so terse they read, on first contact, as borderline rude, but whose terseness in fact accomplishes more in three lines than the padded email accomplished in three paragraphs. He held the law-firm style up as the working benchmark for executives in MENA who, in his experience, default toward over-warmth and pre-amble and consequently lose decisions to people whose emails are shorter.
The episode's most concrete deliverable is a list of rules for writing effective email: state the ask in the first line, eliminate every word that does not serve the ask, make the response a single decision rather than a chain of them, and never confuse warmth with effectiveness.
Episode: 122 · Full Episode #122
The Season 7 finale was an audience Q&A, with Tariq routing listener questions to Abdalla across the same set of themes — money, execution, procrastination, and the gap between knowing and doing.
The episode's central reference is Lewis Carroll's Red Queen from Through the Looking-Glass — the queen who tells Alice that, in her country, "it takes all the running you can do to keep in the same place." Abdalla applied the Red Queen as the working metaphor for the fast-money trap: the more you accelerate inside a system designed to extract from you, the more you stay in place. The implication is that the way out is not to run faster but to step off the track that requires the running.
He also offered a sharp reframe of procrastination as stress-relief rather than laziness — the procrastinator is not avoiding work, the procrastinator is regulating an unbearable nervous-system load by selecting a less demanding task. He treated this as both a diagnostic (procrastination tells you what the body cannot yet hold) and a path to a different intervention (regulate the load, do not moralise about the avoidance).
The episode closed Season 7. Across the four episodes, the arc moved from action (EP 119), to the small daily structure that supports action (EP 120), to the written communication that compounds it (EP 121), to the structural trap to be avoided (EP 122).
"One hour of action is worth more than a thousand hours of thought." (EP 119)
"Procrastination is stress relief, not laziness." (EP 122)
Episode: 146 — "There's Something More Important Than Money" · Full Episode #146
Season: 10
Language: Libyan Arabic
Kablan returned to Damiri in the back half of Season 10. The conversation extended several long-running threads — value vs. money, knowledge vs. wisdom — and opened new ones around artificial intelligence, the Gaddafi-era Libyan school in Malta, and the recovery of stolen Libyan assets.
The episode title revives the EP 19 framing and pushes it harder. Kablan's argument is that the Libyan economy, the Libyan family, and the Libyan diaspora all over-index on money as the unit of account and under-index on value as the actual measure of what is being built. Money can be earned without producing value, and value can be created without producing money. The substitution, in his framing, is the source of much of the country's economic confusion.
Building on the knowledge/wisdom distinction from EP 19, Kablan offered a sharper version: the technology industry is building artificial intelligence at speed, but no one is building artificial wisdom. The model can name the tomato as a fruit. The model cannot reliably decline to put it in the fruit salad. The distinction is offered as a concrete limitation on what current AI systems can be safely used for, and a concrete prediction about which categories of work will be displaced and which will not.
Kablan returned, at greater length, to the neurological explanation for déjà vu — the brain processing an input through the memory circuit fractionally before the conscious circuit, producing the sensation of having experienced something before. He treated the example as a recurring case study in his broader thesis: experiences which feel supernatural are usually architectural, and misreading the architecture costs Libyan society repeatedly.
Among the most surprising pieces of regional history in the conversation: a Libyan school operated in Malta during the Gaddafi era, with roughly 7,000 Libyan students at its peak. The curriculum was transported intact from Libya — the Green Book ideology, the rote pedagogy, and the corporal discipline. Flogging was practiced. The school functioned, in effect, as an extension of the Libyan state on Maltese soil. Kablan used the example to make a wider point about how thoroughly the Gaddafi-era apparatus shaped the diaspora it produced, and how little reckoning has happened with what was reproduced abroad.
Kablan described, in working terms, a project he has been involved in to recover Libyan assets stolen during the Gaddafi era and the chaotic years after. The architecture is partly legal, partly investigative, and partly technological — forensic accounting and digital tracing across the jurisdictions through which the funds were laundered. He framed the work as one of the rare areas in which a concrete, large-scale, recoverable Libyan economic claim is actually on the table — and one of the rare areas in which Libyan technical competence in the diaspora can be deployed at scale.
"We are building artificial intelligence. We are not building artificial wisdom." (EP 146, paraphrased)