Episode: 64 — "My Obsession Is to Make People Happy and Make Money" · Full Episode #64
Date: Season 6
Language: Arabic
Online: @ammar_cant_stop_talking
Ammar is a Libyan cryptocurrency trader and online personality, twenty-five or twenty-six at the time of recording. He is known on Twitter under the handle @ammar_cant_stop_talking. The episode does not disclose his surname. He explicitly refuses to be categorised by Libyan region — east, west, south — and resists the standard biographical openings that interviewers in Libyan media tend to ask first.
Ammar described a depression that lasted approximately four years across his teens. He was not in therapy. He had no clinical support. He did not name a single intervention that ended the episode — only that he found a way out of it on his own, over time, and that the absence of professional help during those years was a fact he reported rather than recommended. The episode treats the period as formative without romanticising it.
The bullying centred on his voice. Ammar's voice is softer in register than Libyan masculine norms expect, and as a teenager he was targeted for it. The bullying was prolonged and contributed to the depression. He spoke about voice as a marker of perceived masculinity in Libyan school environments — the way it operates as a screening filter independent of anything else a person carries. Reaching adulthood with the same voice and a different relationship to it was part of the recovery.
In 2016 Ammar was in a car collision in Benghazi, approximately 500 metres from a front line. The crash was severe enough to function as a near-death event. The proximity to active combat — the line itself was within hearing distance — added a second layer to the experience: he could have died in the crash, and he could have died in the fighting that was happening while the crash was being dealt with. He used the phrase "wake-up call." The phrase is overused in self-help language but here it described an actual event with two simultaneous mortality vectors.
See: The Near-Death Pivot
Libyan public conversation tends to open with the question: where are you from? The answer is read as east, west or south, and a set of assumptions follows automatically. Ammar refuses the question. He does not give the standard tribal-regional opener. The refusal is not posed as a political position so much as a generational one: a younger Libyan who understands the question as a sorting mechanism and declines to be sorted by it.
Ammar's professional work is in cryptocurrency trading, and his online presence is built around an audience he has assembled in Arabic. The episode title — "my obsession is to make people happy and make money" — is his framing. The two halves are not in tension in his account. The audience is the source of the money; the entertainment of the audience is the condition of the work.
"I'm not going to tell you where I'm from." (EP 64)