Episode: 41 · Guest: Ammar Al-Sabban & Rami Taiba · Full Episode #41
The average human life spans approximately 26,000 days. Ammar Al-Sabban and Rami Taiba, co-founders of Saudi Arabia's first podcast network, used this figure as the organising principle of their episode. The number is not original to them — it circulates in productivity and mortality-awareness communities — but the way they deployed it was specific: not as motivation but as arithmetic.
The calculation is simple. If you are thirty years old, you have used roughly 11,000 days. You have approximately 15,000 remaining. The question then becomes concrete rather than philosophical: what are you doing with the remainder? The framing strips away abstraction. It converts the vague awareness that life is finite into a number that can be subtracted from, divided, and allocated.
Ammar and Rami applied this thinking to their own decision to leave stable careers — Ammar in architecture and voice acting, Rami in web development and UX design — to build Mustadfir. The network was a bet that audio content in Arabic was underserved and that the remaining days of their lives were better spent building something new than maintaining something safe.
The concept resonated with Damiri's audience in part because Gulf Arab culture, at the time of recording, was undergoing a visible generational shift. Young Saudis were leaving government jobs, starting businesses, creating content, and making career decisions that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. The 26,000 days framework gave that shift a numerical urgency.