| Episode | 2 |
| Season | 1 |
| Category | People |
| Listen | Full Episode #2 ↗ |
Episode: 2 — "Why and How to Apologise" · Full Episode #2
Date: 22 October 2019
Language: Libyan Arabic (90%+), brief English
Nasr Elhadi is a Libyan entrepreneur based in London. Born and raised in Tripoli. His father died when he was young; his mother carried full responsibility for the family — a fact he describes with deep respect. His full name follows a three-generation tradition: Nasr Elhadi Nasr.
At the time of recording, he had two children: a son named Nasr (continuing the tradition) and a daughter named Joud, aged four.
Nasr and Tariq Elmeri met in a courtyard in Tripoli during the final week of August 2011. The revolution's last days. Both had an obsession with documenting events on camera — no TV or media infrastructure existed. They formed a group with Khairi Sha'ban and others, sleeping in the same house, shooting footage.
Out of that energy they launched a media production company called Intaj, along with Alaa and Marwan. It collapsed: no clear vision (films or advertising?), no formal role division, creative clashes, and no one to bridge between the personalities. Nasr left abruptly for a family emergency without explanation, handover, or goodbye.
Around 2015, Tariq reached out after realising they were both in London. The unresolved ending of Intaj had stayed with him. They met and broke the problem into parts: the communication failure and the financial loss. The conversation cleared the air — what had been a wound became a lesson in how to repair things properly.
Nasr had separately apologised to others over the years. His finding: 100% of people he apologised to received it positively. Not one reacted negatively.
From roughly 2009 to 2015, Nasr ran clothing franchises in Tripoli: New Look, Tommy Hilfiger, Timberland, Burberry accessories — expanding to a new store every six months at peak. The business model depended on the Libyan dinar being pegged to the dollar through the central bank. When war intensified in 2015, the central bank stopped supplying dollars. The black market took over. The dinar collapsed: from 1.3 to 5 to 7 per dollar. Sales dried up, invoices came due, stock sat unsold. They spent a year trying to keep stores open before closing everything.
The lesson Nasr drew: he had never understood money. He treated the bank as infallible. This failure drove his later advocacy for Bitcoin and financial sovereignty.
See: The Dinar Collapse
Nasr joined an NCT-style group in London — roughly 20 families with the same due date and neighbourhood. He read How to Be a Dad and studied every physical and chemical change a mother goes through during pregnancy, so he could respond to mood shifts with understanding rather than frustration. He described the nine months as preparation time for fathers.
See: Fatherhood Across the Season
Episode: 108 · Full Episode #108
Date: 22 February 2022
Nasr returned in Season 8 for a long conversation on the nature of money, building on the financial-literacy thread that the EP 2 conversation about the dinar collapse opened.
Nasr expanded on his Tripoli retail business in detail. At its peak between 2009 and 2015 he ran the Libyan franchises for New Look, Tommy Hilfiger, Timberland and Burberry accessories, with new stores opening roughly every six months. The New Look franchise in particular reached, at one point, the highest per-customer spend of any New Look location globally — a ranking position that did not match Libya's reputation as a market and did match the actual purchasing behaviour of a Tripoli middle class that had been starved of brand retail for decades. In Ramadan, the single largest store recorded daily revenues on the order of fifty thousand Libyan dinars.
The empire was destroyed inside four years. The mechanism was the dinar collapse — the central bank's loss of dollar liquidity, the black-market premium on hard currency, the resulting inability to keep stock priced in line with what customers could pay. Nasr describes the period not as a story of personal failure but as a case study in how a national monetary failure becomes a personal commercial failure for anyone whose business model depends on the currency holding.
See: The New Look Empire
The conceptual frame of the EP 108 conversation is money-as-stored-time. Money, in Nasr's argument, is the receipt for effort already expended — time and labour converted into a portable claim on future goods. A currency that is debased is, in this framing, the theft of time that has already been worked. The dinar collapse, for Nasr, was not primarily a financial event. It was the cancellation of years of accumulated effort by people who had no part in the decisions that produced the cancellation.
The second pillar of the conversation is Bitcoin and stablecoins — particularly USDT — as on-ramps for people in the Global South whose local currencies cannot reliably hold the time they have stored in them. Nasr is careful to separate the speculative dimension (the volatile asset class) from the infrastructural dimension (the ability to hold a dollar-denominated balance without depending on a bank that may or may not have dollars to give you). For Libyans, Egyptians, Lebanese and Sudanese — populations whose local currencies have moved against them in living memory — the on-ramp is not theoretical. It is the practical difference between savings that hold and savings that do not.
"مية في المية، لا يوجد أحد من الناس التي اعترفت لها بالشيء وكانت ردة الفعل سلبية."
"One hundred percent — not one person I apologised to responded negatively." (EP 2)
"لا تتفادى الحاجة الصعبة. الحاجة الصعبة هي التي تسهل لك الأمور التانية."
"Don't avoid the hard thing. The hard thing is what makes everything else easier." (EP 2)