Episode: 41 — "What Do You Do with 26,000 Days?" · Full Episode #41
Date: Season 5
Language: Arabic
Ammar Al-Sabban (عمار الصبان) and Rami Taiba (رامي طيبة) are the co-founders of Mustadfir (مستدفر), the first podcast network in Saudi Arabia. Ammar is from Jeddah and trained as an architect before moving into content creation. He is also a voice actor — his credits include the Arabic-language dubbing of Sesame Street. Rami is a web developer and UX designer.
The name Mustadfir does not translate neatly. The network grew out of a shared conviction that audio could fill a gap in Arabic-language media that text and video had not addressed.
The episode's central concept: the average human life spans roughly 26,000 days. Ammar and Rami used this number as a framing device for how they approach time, work, and creative output. The figure is not their invention — it circulates in productivity and mortality-awareness circles — but they built an entire philosophy of urgency around it. The question is not metaphorical. It is arithmetic: if you have 26,000 days and you have used 10,000, what are you doing with the remaining 16,000?
Ammar described podcasting as putting "friends in your pocket" — the idea that a listener develops a parasocial relationship with podcast hosts that mimics genuine friendship. The hosts are present during commutes, before sleep, during meals. For audiences in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf, where public social spaces for unstructured conversation were historically limited, this dynamic carried particular weight. Mustadfir positioned itself not as media but as companionship.
One listener told Ammar and Rami that she had been listening to the show so consistently that she felt she had "manifested" their appearance on Damiri — as though the act of sustained listening had willed the crossover into existence. The story is minor in scale but illustrative of the intimacy that audio creates between strangers.
Ammar referenced an episode of their own podcast that dealt with grief. It became one of their most-listened-to episodes. He attributed this to the fact that grief is under-discussed in Gulf Arabic public discourse — there is social infrastructure for mourning (condolence gatherings, religious frameworks) but little space for processing grief as an ongoing psychological experience.
Before Mustadfir, Ammar worked as a voice actor. His most notable credit is the Arabic dubbing of Sesame Street. He described voice acting and podcasting as expressions of the same instinct — using the voice as a primary creative instrument — but distinguished between the two: voice acting requires disappearing into a character, while podcasting requires being recognisably yourself.
"You have 26,000 days. How many have you used? What are you doing with what's left?" (EP 41)