title: Ali Khan - Culture, Law, Cities, Technology, and Institutions in Frontier Markets (Frontier Markets Podcast #11)
author: Frontier Markets Podcast
publication: Frontier Markets Podcast
published: 2023-06-19T08:00:00
source_url: https://podcasts.captivate.fm/media/0d431b7a-a065-4be3-ba0e-a4ee1bf58ef2/Ali-Khan-Podcast-Final-converted.mp3
word_count: 11282
Hello, and thank you for joining me on the Frontier markets podcast. I'm your host, Krishan Kupchand and my guest today is Ali Khan. I got to know Ali through introduction from my previous boss at the Charter City Institute, Karl Peterson, Shout out to Karl. And in our first conversation, we touched upon some of my favorite topics, these related to new city developments, innovative financial structures, alternate asset classes, and lessons from the growth of the Gulf State capital, in particular, Dubai. So Ali spent most of his time applying these ideas as a lawyer, both in crypto, but also when it comes to specifically UAE and Dubai law. Now, with that in mind, I would love to get started. So without further delay, Ali, can you share a bit of a timeline and backstory of your kind of professional history and how you've gotten to where you are today? Sure thing. Krishan, it's a pleasure to be here today. I think my narrative arc for my career, my professional journey, has been, some would say interesting in a good way and some would say interesting in a negative way, depending on how much you like stability. I started off many, many years ago studying Arabic and history as an undergraduate. And I think that's quite important. The reason why I wanted to study Arabic and history was because Arabic, as a language, allowed you to be able to take the patterns that you see in the world and challenge them through thinking about them in a completely different way. Why is that material? Because a lot of my career further on ended up becoming the sort of career that I wanted on the basis that when you're able to apply yourself through different mindsets, that is a fundamentally important part of working in things like, you know, frontier markets, global south work, et cetera, et cetera. It also is useful when it comes to creating structure out of chaos, which is a lot of the work that I do with the law. But also, what I find fundamentally interesting to think about things like the Charter City Institute. So anyway, I studied Arabic and history. I had the pleasure of living in Damascus in Syria before the war, 2009, 2010, where I worked as a journalist helping to set up one of Syria's first English language daily newspapers. And so having the privilege of work at a very, very early part of my career in the thick of the Middle East, in areas which weren't usually trodden by, you know, Western interests, was amazing. I mean, firstly, I had the time of my life in Syria. It was an incredible place to be a young guy in his early 20s. It was, you know, living in the old town in Damascus was as an urban historian and as somebody who was a tour guide throughout all of his studies to afford his fun and games. I was like a kid in a toy store in Damascus. It was incredible. Syria turned to Syria. I started getting interested in politics. And I ended up in sort of the grassroots politics world as things were getting interesting in around 2011, 2012 in London. I was president of Syria Students Union, which is a very political students union. And it gave me a lot of insight into the sort of efforts of trying to make things happen politically from the ground up within the structures of extant institutions. I had my thoughts on it and I had my queries on it. And I felt that the best way to get a compelling understanding of how I can make an impact on the world was not to go into politics, but rather to go and understand structures a little bit more. One of the things I was doing during that time at SOS was building governance structures. And my approach to governance structures is human-centric design, right? So instead of looking at it from a top-down approach, look at the reality of who you're working with and what you're trying to achieve, take a number of the different variables and create a balance around that to find the path of least resistance towards creating structures that work, taking to account, you know, upside, taking into account risk, taking account the whole sort of, you know, 360 degree understanding of what an operation of an organization is about. In helping to do that with SOS Union and for a couple of startups and charities at the time, I got really compelled into this. And so I started training as a lawyer. At the time, being the gobbie guy that I am, I thought, okay, I'm best placed being a barrister. So I went off and trained as a barrister, got called to the bar, but life very quickly through a series of extraordinary circumstances led me through to Dubai, where I worked for DLA Piper, which is a very large law firm, working as the bridge between onshore civil code and offshore common law. The UAE is one of those extraordinary jurisdictions where it had the foresight to say, okay, well, the relationship between the concept of sovereignty and the concept of law, from a Western point of view, is something which we can probably play with a little bit. Instead of having a method of changing our laws to adapt to the trade that we want, which is an intensity political thing to do, why don't we just carve out a square mile and make it common law, common law being much easier to foster international trade through. And so in around the mid-nauties of the 2000s, the DIFC, the Dubai International Financial Centre was born, and this fascinated me completely. It completely blew my mind. Even when I was at school, I was so interested in it. My mother was brought up in Dubai. We've had a long family history in Dubai. Dubai is where I spent a lot of my early years. And so this piece of innovation, I thought, was a totally fascinating way to deal with the challenge that is constantly thought of one's point of time, of how do you develop with quotation marks on either side of that word, emerging markets jurisdictions towards structures which work. And the traditional theory was, it's a top-down thing. You have government that changes laws and that seeps back down into structures and bureaucracies to create dynamic change. That of course is challengeable as a theory. So the DIFC was a fascinating thing. And I worked as a bridge between the DIFC and then the ADGM, the Abu Dhabi global markets, when it was formed, and the onshore civil code jurisdictions of the UAE, code switching between the two, relevant to what I was saying earlier about being able to code switch between Arabic and English thinking different patterns, thinking about different ways in which justice works, from a mental point of view, etc. And it was, it was amazing. It was fascinating. I at that point thought, okay, well, I have a choice here. Either I'm going to sit in a law firm and wait for work to come to me, or I'm going to engage my entrepreneurial side. I went off to engage my entrepreneurial side. I was part of a group of friends that set up one of the region's first alternative Arab Music festivals, Wasala music festival, was that up in Dubai, taking into account the zeitgeist of the time that was happening across the Arab community, both within the Middle East and outside. There's this extraordinary explosion of expression within Arabic culture and with it, Arabic milieu, but as a modern format and therefore taking modern tropes within a quite sophisticated classical form. So in other words, there's a band like, there's a band called Mashwa Leyla from Lebanon who were headlining at our first festival. The sort of music they play is somewhere sometimes between Darth Punk and like Al-Muthanabbi as an old Arabic sort of poet, in terms of its sophistication. And it's beautiful. From my point of view, I think it was incredible sort of work. So we set up a festival for that, trying to take some sort of, I'm trying to make some sort of platform for that zeitgeist. Following that came back to London, consulted for a while, wondering what to do next. Things started shifting quite a bit, I think, politically around the world, around 2016-2017. There was a huge amount of focus that was being placed on the role of institutions, the role of structures. I started thinking about these things too. And then COVID happened. And during COVID, I did two things. Firstly, I was part of a group of people that set up an asset management firm called Mandelao. They're looking to build private equity roll-ups. And our first sector of interest was, or is a veterinary medicine. The thesis of which, very strong, and I can go into it, but I don't think that's what we're talking about today. I'd also, to keep my legal hat sort of warm, I started working, as you mentioned, with the Charter Cities Institute. Looking into these structures and these really, really interesting ways in which one develops equitable societies. And I don't think there's ever such a thing as a greenfield site in the world. There's always somebody who has some skin somewhere in the game, but the idea of taking some space and building an equitable sort of environment, urban environment around that, kind of brought in all the different interests I have together. So yeah, since COVID, AS Legal is where I work now. In Dubai, it's a firm that is split between the sort of traditional litigation work. We've always done a lot of corporate work within the Web 3 space as well. I take a lead in the DeFi and the Web 3 practice. And our client base is mostly in the DeFi space with regards to Web 3, as well as a lot of traditional players from the market in Dubai as exists. So we're quite broadly based in terms of our capacity to be able to service a wide range of what we think are sectors of interest with regards to how the emerging markets and their relationships with Dubai and UAE at large will fold out. That was a lecture rather than a dramatic arc, but that's what you asked for and that's what you get. Fantastic idea if you appreciate that. I'm going to go right to the beginning of that, you know, a parent lecture. And I want to tap more into those two years in Syria in particular, because one thing that I find kind of fascinating is the transition of a region from being within conflicts to post-conflict to what are the seeds that are required to create prosperity versus this, you know, a simmering state of otherwise, you know, pain that tends to exist in many other countries that are not able to unlock that, for example, Libya. I'm curious, you know, Syria recently entered the Arab League again after 12 years. What are your thoughts on the last 12 years of what's kind of happened? One, and two, what is kind of the macro story of telling yourself about the region as a whole? Yeah. So firstly, I couldn't talk about Syria without talking about it from a human perspective. Being in a situation where, you know, one year, you're lucky enough to be invited to, you know, expat drinks events at, you know, the U ambassador's residence and people raising glasses, saying here's to, here's to Bashar al-Assad. He's the new diamond of Europe's relationship with the Middle East, the new Odoan, and then literally within a matter of months that turning into a full blown war. It's tragic. It's tragic, but it also makes you think quite a bit about certain things. It, the reality is what Syria taught me was that relying on the status quo in terms of a, you know, a balance of power, a balance of peace in this day and age is a very dangerous thing to do unless you are fully, fully, fully informed about as many things as you can be informed in, which no, no one party can be unless they are, you know, a type of party that, frankly, none of us have access to. And so from, from my perspective, I always caveat whatever I think about with regards to Syria, with the reality that I do have some emotional skin in the game. Notwithstanding that, what happened over the course of the last 12 years was, you know, from an economic perspective, not only devastating, but in terms of the shift that's happened, it's obviously been very difficult to get reports from the ground, but what we've, you know, what we've gleaned is that the old elite communities and the old, basically anyone who could got out, who replaces them, right? In terms of the infrastructure that exists, it's those guys that had to stick around, ended up, you know, sometimes becoming warlords, and therefore taking positions of economic power within certain industries and institutions that then drive the future of the country. And that's not a model unique to Syria that happens quite often across, you know, various parts of the world. And so as Syria now goes through its next phase, its reconciliation, so to speak, there is a lot of interest in, you know, let's say returning Syria back into the fold such that it is part of, you know, the economic opportunity across the Middle East, but it will take a long, long time before the infrastructure is anywhere close to being able to service that properly. Bear in mind, even before the war, it's not as though it's not as though Syria was, you know, like Ukraine, for example, we're not talking about a Western country here. Before the war, Syria was, you know, still in this bizarre post-Soviet, but, you know, pre-liberalization environment. The best way I can show that you know, identify this to somebody going down the street is you'd see, you'd see a KFC, one KFC in Damascus, which was actually like Kuwaiti, Kuwaiti, Fried Chicken, right? Yeah, right. Or you'd see all the hallmarks of a demand and a desire for Western, you know, goods, but without the capacity to allow that to happen. And so there's this sort of halfway house that existed. And it is, you know, it's, it's not, it was an authoritarian government. It still is an authoritarian government. It holds, it was liberalizing. It apparently, it had a plan to, to sort of engage with the wider global economy, but history took a different turn. So going back to your question about what's what's needed, so to speak, there's a lot that's needed. There's a lot of political, frankly, sort of, you know, conversations behind the scenes that are required before there's any real capacity to understand where a safe opportunity lies within Syria. It's also just incredibly fragile right now, right? You know, you've got, you've still, you've still got a lot of different players in the region that have a lot of different interests either side of Syria, which, which are obviously going to affect the entire region. And so everybody just kind of holding on to their pants a little bit at the moment with a little bit of peace. Having said all that, I have a very, very good friend of mine who's on the ground right now in Syria. She's half Syrian, half Libyan. She gets to go to Syria relatively easier than others. And she's sort of sending reports from the ground, obviously whatever she's comfortable sending. And there's nothing like, you know, hearing in the background of her videos, the bird song, the very unique bird song you hear in Damascus, you can almost smell the orange blossom. You can, you know, Damascus has a very, very specific, very, very beautiful vibe about it. And that's always going to remain attractive. So, you know, what's this space, I'd say? It's much easier talking about somewhere like Lebanon, right, which follows a particular model of the disaster. Syria is quite a unique circumstance. Fascinating. Can you actually share, I know you visited Beirut not too long ago. Can you share kind of your macro thesis on Lebanon then as well? Lebanon is, yeah, my heart is Lebanon shapes. I absolutely adore Lebanon and have a very deep, I have a very deep sort of, I have the privilege of not having to rely on the space. So, I only have to love it. But if I had to rely on the space, it would be love haze, 100%. When I was on the ground there, and this was, you know, probably about six or seven months ago, there were four different currencies that were being used at the same time. There was the Lyra, the Dollar, the Beirut, and the Lawler, right? And you've got a circumstance where in the complete collapse of the state institutions, and we're talking about total collapse here. We're talking about there not being a government. We're talking about the economy going completely kaput. A series of events, including the Blast during COVID in the Beirut port, as well as a number of other economic factors that have affected Lebanon at large. It just meant that it's in total disaster. And it meant that, you know, the price of a coffee, a book value price for coffee, for example, can be like $42 if you paid with your credit card, right? But in terms of lollers, or in terms of Beirut, in terms of what the gray sort of market of currency, which everyone uses, that's where, you know, you get a much more reasonable price. And the way to do it, honestly, if you're lucky enough to have a foreign card, is you go to an ATM, you take out dollars, you then go down the road to the telephone shop, and you swap that at a gray, sort of gray market currency exchange for the actual market rate, the gray market rate of the paper Lyra, and you never use your card again during the day, you only spend in cash on sort of gray market prices. It's extraordinary. It's extraordinary. You have to be a forex trader to buy a pint of milk. But having said that, you know what's interesting, Chris? Having said that, having known Lebanon for quite a while, having seen it in its different phases, this was the first time. And I've tested, Andre, he's my business partner at AS Legal, I have a lot of friends from Lebanon, etc. He's from Lebanon as well, and I share this with them, they agree. When I was there, it's the first time I spoke to taxi drivers and such, and he said, I said, how's life? It looks really difficult, electricity goes off and on like every day, and basic infrastructure is working. And I don't forget, one of them said, this is the happiest I've been in 40 years, the happiest I've been. And he went on this deep rant as we were waiting for somebody else to come to the taxi, about how for years it was Sunni and Shia and Christian and Druze and these sort of factional sort of splits and this assumption that no one's ever going to get along. Now having this one common god, one common enemy called the economy, is a really useful thing, and actually it does help. And to be honest, on the ground, fascinating things are happening. I've always advocated that if any country was going to be the first country that actually properly experimented with blockchain technology for decentralized services and governance and actually the development of goods and the tokenization of communities, it's going to be Lebanon. I still hold that bet very, very strongly, and I keep a very close eye on Lebanon as a result. It kind of works perfectly as a present infrastructure to make that happen for a variety of reasons. And so much so that I have found out in the last week and I haven't gotten touched them yet, but I know that there is a small town, I think, in the Shuf Valley that is building a tokenized community. And they are looking to essentially play with this idea that all of us have dreamt about in the blockchain world of what happens when you create a community tokenizer and are able to allow it to be able to benefit directly from the value of its existence, let alone its activity and produce in a wider market. And I think it's super, super exciting. It works because Lebanon and the Lebanese experiment, and this is relevant to wider emerging market theory, or frontier market theory, whatever you want to call it. But bear in mind, these infrastructures, these state infrastructures have more often than not been placed on top of communities that have not identified as states throughout their history. Instead, they've identified as communities, they've identified as wider regional cultures, they've identified in a number of ways. And economically, more often than not, they've identified as urban areas. The whole concept of the nation state, from the perspective of, from an economic perspective, does hold credence from points of view of agrarian cultures. The Europe having borders from one farm to the next makes sense because people fight over the land for a particular reason. In a lot of economies, Lebanon's slightly different, but a lot of economies across emerging markets, you're talking about big urban areas that were created leveraged mostly through trade and trade routes. And so the idea of identifying with the wider state is a relatively new concept when actually people's family histories identify their place in Damascus, their place in Aleppo, their place in Timbuktu, etc etc. Of course, that's not a universal generalism, but that is a truth to some extent. Therefore, one looks at the concept of building urban environments or developing urban environments. One has to bear that in mind when addressing the frontier market issue, that it's different to building a city in the middle of next to Milton Keynes. We're talking about an actual form of identity that has a lot of political relevance and therefore can build some sort of governance structure whether decentralized or not, I would say, should be decentralized in order to actually leverage the most value out of it in a way that works. In other words, imagine a situation where each city or each urban environment, if people identify with that, had its own capacity to have its own economic identity that works in tandem rather than in competition with other economic identities within the same framework in order to create macro value. That's not a million miles away from being able to happen and that's something that I'm deeply interested in. And on a professional level, we look at this from a not just a legal basis in terms of how that would interact with underlying jurisdictions, but also from a governance basis. Let's take the DIFC and the ADGM in the UAE as an example. These are common law urban areas that have been built. A lot of work has been done to find the interoperability between the laws of common law and where they might conflict with the surrounding civil code jurisdiction. So in other words, you have a style of law that is for a community in theory, sitting in the middle of a wider pool of law that is created for a wider reason, and they don't have to conflict. They can be interoperable. They can be inter, you know, intermesh to a certain extent. Conflicts of law might exist when it comes to, for example, under common law, there is no assumption of good faith. When you're entering into a contract, you have to write it in if you want it there. Under common law, there is no forced measure that's automatically there. You have to write it in. Whereas in civil code, usually, that's the case. Now, you know, if you know that's an issue, you address it in the legislation, covering the entire framework of how these two jurisdictions operate. But then why does still, when you look at sort of governance structures, how governance works in one jurisdiction, the civil code jurisdiction, how governance would work in a common law jurisdiction might conflict. So you build governance structures that look holistically at how you can build something which stands the test of time in terms of its capacity to dynamically work between them. And these are the sort of things that are super important because we are getting into an era where it's super easy to download templates that are unfit for purpose. The whole idea of creative law making and creative structuring is never more important than now. And it does take folks who are interested in laws, not just for, you know, the yields they can have for their time, but also are interested from the perspective of what they can provide as a service towards new structures in a brand new world we're working in. Fantastic. One thing I want to highlight there is an anecdote regarding Lebanon's currency situation. Firstly, you mentioned the lira dollar, beer and Laura, right? Is that correct? Lola. Lola. It sounds like a high coup on high inflation. Yes. And I think the importance of what the vision of cryptocurrency could be for regions like this cannot be understated. And the reason why I say this is because one previous guess that we had was this guy Zach marks the founder of GF Finance. GF Finance is this crypto protocol that's lending to small to medium sized businesses in emerging markets like Kenya, Philippines, India. He was talking about the five trillion dollar credit gap. And in particular in tackling that, the thing they're trying to kind of create a more flexible structure for is essentially community finance. Ideally, you have these bottoms-up communities, be it, you know, coming from Gibraltar, my family comes from like a Cindy family, right? And you have like the Cindy community, which has certain social structures in terms of sharing knowledge, but also certain communal structures in terms of one of them does better. Oh cool, now I have money can put in the pot and lend elsewhere. It's a win-win and you have this high trust context for that. The thing that GF Finance wanted to try and do is essentially can't put the crypto-native way to do that because right now, one, if you have these communities, sometimes fraud may happen et cetera, but two more importantly, their capital limits them. So the ideas can you unlock global capital for these types of structures that are highly communal in their lending and trust based kind of methods, right? So that's one thing. But the second thing I want to point to here in terms of not taking for granted the current way in which things are done is Lebanon's head of the central bank, the governor of the central bank, initially last month, there was like an interpool warrant set out for him. The reason being he's quite literally stealing from, at least this is what the accusation says, he's stealing from the central bank, right? And with the crypto currency, that becomes very difficult, right? No one can steal centrally from the Bitcoin reserves. And I think we've still very far from the infrastructure that enables that, but not losing sight of that possibility despite sometimes seeing stuff which may compel one in a different direction when it comes to thinking about what crypto kind of truly is. I think it's very important, so I appreciate you sharing that. Yeah, 100% Chris. It's worth really bearing in mind that anyone who has a view on crypto, go and sit in Lebanon when you as a doctor or as a lawyer or as, you know, as anyone who's had any savings in your local banks suddenly watch all those savings plummet and you will do anything to get them out of the jurisdiction and somewhere safe, right? What crypto managed to do during the great crash, you know, was it saved a lot of families, right? And it is there for a reason. Now, I don't really care what anyone has to say about the technology that for better or for worse, try and argue against that like genuinely try and argue against that and I will I will give you a very, very verbose and goby argument back. The reality is very, very clear. If you look at crypto from parts of the world where the use of digital assets requires a remedial cost from the institutions we have, good for you. Think about the role of digital assets from the perspective of parts of the world where crypto can be the remedy to a lot of the damage that has happened to those parts of the world. That's what I'll say about that for now. I encourage pertinent. In one of the other previous podcasts that we had, we were talking about Erdogan's election and the hyperinflation that was being experienced in, well, the inflation, the significant inflation being experienced in Turkey. And as I was reading one of these pieces, it was talking about spend first account later policies in particular with reference to one of the grand palaces that were being built for the president. And you know, you imagine me a citizen there and seeing the value of your kind of savings just depreciate on a daily basis. And then you see that kind of transaction done by government that's not before you. I don't want to get too much into politics. It's just, you know, I totally see the value to this. It would certainly have an effect. Wouldn't it, Chris? It would certainly have a effect. Most definitely. By the way, if anyone who's listening, if they are interested in this, you know, these are markets that are incredibly important, but hard to kind of get access to and hard to kind of start wrapping your head around and highly recommend getting in touch with Ali or myself to put you in touch with Ali to dig deeper because I think there are still the people who are at the forefront of crypto. It seems to be the case. I'm not at the forefront or not fully kind of immersed in these markets as well. And I think like bridging that is incredibly important. 100%. 100%. We can talk a little bit about the crypto community, actually, which is, which is associated with, we've now sort of segwayed from, you know, the concept of this role emerging markets. But let's, you know, in a world where every market is emerging, which is the crypto world, it is important to note that there's a difference between decentralization and isolation, right? To really help, and this is something that I talk about quite a bit, decentralization's role in the concept of decentralized finance is its relationship vis-a-vis the institutions that currently exist and the channels of value that currently exist, right? What decentralizes not is a gold rush of individuals running and trying to grab whatever they can. And unfortunately, you know, naturally, I think the space has created that sort of environment, but it is 100% guaranteed that the winners of this decentralized world will use the technology appropriately to work in collaboration rather than in competition and a decentralized arena. And that is happening as as as crypto is coming more and more institutionalized, there is the capacity for a lot of collaboration to exist between communities. Now, the question is, how do you build a community? And that's the fundamentally important thing that we look at, right? From a behavioral perspective, from a cultural perspective, from an intangible perspective as well as from the structural perspective of governance and structures that actually allow and reflect how a community should think. There was, there's this beautiful idea of how do you build a DAO, right? A decentralized autonomous organization. The problem with DAO's is that they don't necessarily reflect what many people who crave DAO's really want, which is, you know, this sort of community in which to be able to create governance structures for voting, DAO's were mostly created in order to be able to portion value on a micro level to people doing development projects, right? It's a different thing between that and if you want to get a group of artists together to try and collaborate, but time will come where that is available. It's more a case of human beings creating that first and seeing if the technology can fulfill that purpose rather than relying on this cool sexy technology and molding themselves to it, which is very very interesting to do. So yeah, communities are so, so important to this narrative and this understanding of this. Firstly, because you need to understand the human approach and the reason why it's a demand for decentralization. And secondly, because without communities, decentralization is isolation and isolation in any economic format is not a good thing. Totally can, one final thing I'll say on this before asking you a question that transitions us to some different topics here is before this interview, I was reading about this company called Money Points in Africa. It's a Fintech company founded by a gentleman called Tossin, Ennio Lorrunda. And in the interview, one of the things that was asked was what is particularly different about Money Points in terms of its kind of recently fairly explosive or sustaining growth in contrast to other Fintech players in their submarkets. And one thing they mentioned is they recognized very early on the efficacy of a hybrid distribution model in Africa, which is basically having these offline nodes for distributing their products, even though it's an online, you know, on the phone type thing. And I think that kind of points to the importance of this bottoms up community driven on the ground driven type of approach, which can yield tremendous results, but it requires the investment and the faith in being able to bridge that gap that makes sense. 100% and local knowledge frankly, you know, you try and do that. Let's try building that idea sitting somewhere in Westminster and then fly all the way out into Rural's hamburger and make that happen, you know, it's not a work. You need to have local stakeholders, which is why this is a good thing, like respecting local stakeholders and having a mutual relationship is a fundamentally fun part of this and it works. There are a number of really interesting sort of funds out there, really interesting, you know, opportunities out there of established stakeholders to work with are on various different levels. It does take a lot of work to unlearn and relearn a lot of the misconceptions that we think we've grown out of that we certainly haven't when it comes to working with emerging markets in order to really leverage that properly. But then there's a separate matter as well, which I think before we move on to the next point is worth raising. It's not all, you know, fun and games. There are, you know, increasingly added complications as the world changes and as power structure changes towards doing, you know, towards engaging in transactions with parties from frontier markets. Fattaf, OFAC, etc. from the US, the compliance requirements from KYC and AML point of view, etc., just making sure that everything is above board is a fundamentally important requirement for anyone who is looking to create a sustainable relationship with parts of emerging markets. And that unfortunately does create tension points and conflict points and it does require not just local knowledge, but also local expertise to be able to sometimes bridge those gaps in order for there to be a mutual understanding of the value of what the requirements are on both sides of the coin. Totally. One local fact that I will share, which is not local to me, but local, locally shared by somebody else the other day, is regarding Libya, which is, as mentioned, similar in terms of being a very cash-based economy, despite its GDP being about 49 billion dollars, it's very cash-riching contrast to its peers and other potentially very interesting markets to look at as a wedge for testing out these distribution models for a new kind of currency model, if any, you know, aspiring folks looking at that. Yeah, I am so interested in Libya and for so many reasons, but it's a jurisdiction you don't want to screw with, right? You know, you've really got to know what you're doing with Libya and with Syria and with a lot of these jurisdictions. It's just not as easy and plain sailing as, oh, this looks great on paper. Let's let's go out and do it. Surely everyone wants this, you know, it takes a lot of very deep work and a lot of conversations to understand what people truly want and what can truly happen. And of course, what the risks are of which there are multiple. So, yes, it definitely, definitely retain an interest, but harbour that interest in a healthy manner. Fantastic. Moving on, what is your view on charter cities as a prospective asset class? Love them. But what do I actually think? I mean, I want to run down on the idea. Yeah, okay. So, I love charter cities because I love Lego. It's simple as that. That on a realistic level. The reason why I love charter cities is because this concept, this idea of being able to build a community and add some weight to it, some physical weights to it, some monetary to weight to it is what a city is, right? Also, if you look at the history of how cities have been built, historically, economically, you know, they've been based on frankly, you know, traditional models of society where you have an elite class and you have labor class and you have the industrial era has defined a lot of the way the modern city works. I think in order to help perpetuate our evolution from that industrial era into the modern, you know, era, one has to look at how we live with each other and how our built environment works, the visual aesthetics of that and the public space relevance of that, etc. from a whole new point of view. Charter cities allow for that to happen without that sort of remedial cost, right? But, you know, the next question to be, okay, well, Milton Keynes was a city that was built, that was supposed to reflect the zeitgeist at the time, politically, etc. What is that a charter city? But the point is that the very interesting part of this is the charter element, right? The charter is, in my view, the asset. That charter, in my view, is such a strong asset it should sit in the goodwill bracket of any sort of book that tries to reflect the asset value of a charter city, because that intangible asset, that piece of whether you've class as IP or not, whatever, you know, whatever you want to go down to an interesting legal route to classifier, is essentially the way in which somebody has some understanding of how this city will operate, right? How it is going to build, how the governance framework for it operates, how it as a city, as a community, or as a market reflects its capacity to be able to be a very, very efficient place, fit for the interests of its stakeholders. To look at it from the out perspective, saying, okay, well, you know, this city we've built is now coming up with this amount of, you know, GDP, etc. Great, whatever. But like that, that, that, those aren't metrics that are, in my opinion, necessarily completely reliable in sort of understanding what the, you know, what's actually going on under the ground. Charter, the charter part of it is fundamentally important. And you know, charter city has been around for ages, Philadelphia, it's one of the first charter cities, right? Cities that were designed under a particular premise, with a particular framework. And, and they are, from, from my perspective, I think that they are a fascinating thing. Now, as an asset class to fit in the wider world of, of finance, it does take, interesting and interested people to understand where the opportunity lies with this. The reality is that during COVID, some great ideas were, were developed and honed, whilst we were sitting there ideating, whilst we couldn't talk to each other. And seeing the conversation around charter cities, developing that time, I thought was, was wonderful. I think since then, the economic reality is that, whilst there is definitely a space for charter cities, it's going to be a challenge. It's going to be a challenge to try and see how to finance building these sort of cities, the relationship between the equity element, the debt element. In the merging markets, or frontier markets, all the global, markets in the global south, you do have a very traditional model, the sort of, you know, the direct foreign investment model, where you've got essentially a top down approach towards money coming in and being disseminated down to be able to build these cities. How one can use that, and where one can use that in terms of a capital based to raise leverage from in order to be able to build this infrastructure. Frankly, the priority has been trying to make that work for infrastructure in general in sub-Saharan Africa, right? And there's so many reasons why there's been a lot of problems in trying to help manifest that. So it's a really complex and complicated thing to actually make it manifest. However, I would say that the reality is it's not impossible. We've seen charter cities operate. We've seen models of charter cities work. We've seen Shenzhen in China. Look how it changed, you know, the way China operates. We've seen the DIFC in Dubai. Look at the way it's completely changed. Dubai's outlooks. If you told me as a kid, sort of running around the streets of data with a cricket bat and ball, that this is going to be one of the capitals of the world, you know, I wouldn't have a clue what you're talking about. Just as an aside, I remember, you know, going to like primary school in the UK, you know, you come back from every holiday, and you have to write, what did you do over the holiday? And I had exactly the same thing I did every holiday, you know, I'd went to the bay. I had like, you know, Gamma Barata from this shop, and then I had, and then I went to that KFC Hardies that was between Charge and Dubai, and then I went to Zira Park and Charge, and then I went to the beach, and then I did the same thing. Then I did it time and time again, because that was all there was, and it was wonderful. Loved it, absolutely loved it. Teachers said, you can't keep copying everything you can't keep writing the same thing again and again. But, you know, seeing that world and seeing how it's changed, and you're looking at why? You know, you're talking about an oil-dependent economy that had the foresight, very, very early on, to say, yeah, no, no, this isn't sustainable. Let's go build something bigger than this. And whilst, you know, Paris was built on the resources of the river Sen, and London was built on the resources of the river Thames, Dubai was built on the resources of, you know, PR and financial leverage, you know. It's the modern resource. It's the way it works for better or for worse, and it knew it, and it built it. And it knows how to do it, and it's doable, and it's replicable. It requires the right stakeholders, it requires the stars to align, but it's very much doable. When charter cities and that model work, it works really, really well, but it won't always work. And that's the important thing, and we won't really be able to have data as to what doesn't, what doesn't until we see more opportunities to this. However, what I would say is the crypto world and the virtual asset world, and it's mindset, it's libertarian mindset, more often than not, has done a lot of very interesting good in propelling how charter cities can operate, which is ultimately a good thing, but then it has to bring people along with it, you know. One thing that libertarians need to understand is no man is an island, you know, and, and, and, and, you know, if you're going to build these things from the basis of a mindset that people should understand and have a buy-in too, it does require stakeholder engagement. How would you describe the energy in Dubai right now as it's essentially coming into its own as a jurisdiction? Those that have been on the ground for years call this the Bifase 6, right? So you had like the Bifase 1, you know, many years ago, called it like, you know, early 70s through, you have the Bifase 2, when you suddenly had, you know, Emirates, the Emirates era, and when, you know, that suddenly there was this big influx of tourism in, and that was when it started changing its capacity from all, let's say, you know, 80s, early 90s, then Dubai Phase 3, when it started really developing, from a real estate perspective, law started changing, you can buy property there. The, the, the Burjil Arab, sort of, you know, era where suddenly there's a massive sale hotel in the middle of the sea, and it was like, whoa, they can make these incredible infrastructure products. This is really cool. Then you had the Bifase 4, where you had, you know, the Burj Khalifa, and, you know, this real sort of, you know, development, which I would say probably happened after the, uh, 2005, sorry, 2008, 2009 crash out there. Then you had the Bifase 5, which was around the sort of, I think the head of it would call it sort of 2015, 2016, 2017, where it started really culturally developing, and really sort of attracting a lot of younger professionals there who are no longer there just for the 10-year bargain, going back home, they were starting to settle in Dubai and starting to build it as, as a community on their home, and this is the Bifase 6, where it's not just, you know, majority, uh, Indians, Pakistanis, folks from across the Arab world, you know, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, et cetera, but wider stakeholders as well. You know, a lot of Russian, uh, people there, a lot of Chinese people there, a lot of folks, and frankly, all around the world there, and it's an anthropological phenomenon, you know, it is not a civil society, and yet it gives the hallmarks of the trimmings of a civil society, whilst being, there must be a better word for this, but whilst being completely uncivil, right? Whilst being, you know, a, a, a legal structure that has a stakeholder engagement in a, a very different way to the way that we're used to from sort of traditional state-based jurisdictions. Um, so the question is to, what's the vibe like? Um, it's mixed. It's mixed between, you know, those who've been there for a long time saying, wow, this is wild, but this is, you know, beyond recognition. There's those who have, you know, that've been there and are capitalizing from the change, we're saying, this is the most exciting thing, this is, this is awesome. There are those in the cultural scene who are really grateful for the fact that there's a huge, um, you know, appreciation now of Dubai's role internationally, from a cultural point of view. Um, but then there are also those, uh, in Dubai who are every wave brings folks to Dubai who think that they are the, you know, going to be the new king of Dubai, right? Everywhere. There is something about that city, but when you land, you think, you know what? I'm going to, I'm going to conquer this place. I'm going to be the king of the way and it's amazing. I think it's absolutely fascinating just how many people seem to know some shaker or another, right? Oh, yeah, that guy, yeah, he's a friend, we know him, we know him, right? I mean, it's physically impossible to have so many people know that many people, but it does, it's the sort of place that does engender this sense of like, I feel like I must be, you know, part of the, the power of this place, the dynamic of this place, it can do strange things to Urego, it really, really can simultaneously, very ironically, can do wonderful things in terms of your, your spiritual health as well. There are some looks and crannies in Dubai where, you know, the spiritual practice there is incredibly healthy. And actually, you know, for an environment like Dubai, to be able to have that there whilst all of that temptation for the Ugo is there as well can be a very, very empowering process. But, you know, it's the Manhattan of the emerging markets, the Manhattan, the global south, you're going to get some of the most complex and the most differing types of people, the most differing types of vibes. But the vibe is there, that Manhattan vibe definitely is there. Business is booming. Incredible. I think it's on my bucket list to visit in the next 12 months at least. What I would say, Christ, I mean, what I would say, Christ, just be careful. When you're going to visit Dubai, make sure you do your due diligence, right? Find out what it is you want to know about Dubai. If it's the sort, if you go there and say, all right, Dubai, show me what you got. More often than not, it'll show you what it wants to show you, right? If you really want to know Dubai, know people, right? And ask people, are you genuinely as a place? One of the best things I love about it is that behind the facade of the people shilling with each other and selling and everyone's a broker and no one's a builder, behind all that, people really genuinely do operate as a community, right? People do know each other, want to introduce each other to each other. It's great. I love that about Dubai. And you know, you want to have the sort of experience where, yes, one day you are having dinner at, you know, wherever, nobu. And then the next day, you're having dinner at Booker Terror and Old Fisherman's Hut in Jamera. And the next day, you're having dinner in data and having some of the most incredible crab curry you've ever had in the world where Jamera master chefs go to to learn the recipe. And then the next day, you're having drinks at some incredible beach house, you know, having the full diverse Dubai experience is the only way you'll fully get to understand how that place works and what it means. And it's super important to be able to understand that when you want to understand its role as the Manhattan of the Global South. One thing I'm trying to plant seeds for is figuring out what does a better, I hate to use with playbook here, but a playbook for, you know, high quality travel that induces these types of experiences look like, right? I think I'm more familiar with the, I guess, the bottoms-up approach of serendipity and adventure. I've recently I was in SOTini with a friend who's been a FinTech company there. And that was my first time experiencing what it's like to really get plugged into the system by somebody who's in the know. And that was something that was very special in terms of getting a totally different and very high fidelity view of really what's moving. Yeah, a reach absolutely. Well, look, I mean, in terms of playbook for travel and a playbook for absorption, right? I've always felt for me that if I'm going to go and say, all right, SOTini, show me what you got. I'll do so having read a lot about it. I think that going prepared with certain half narratives really helps to a structure some idea of expectation and be completely prepared for that expectation to change. But it gives you some framework in terms of what to look for and what to understand, right? If you're going to fly to Cypress, you know, read a few books about Cypress's history, read read read also, you know, Elif Shaffack has written a great book about, you know, what it was like, Love Across, you know, typical Elif Shaffack sort of story book of Love Across Borders and that sort of stuff. Like that, that, that, that kind of stuff is what I do in order to get a view of, of a place. I also, I'm also that guy who reads like the underlying laws of a place, right? The constitution, understand how like its governance frameworks work, whether it applies them or not, it's a really, really interesting thing to understand, okay, well, that's how power works in this place. Super interesting, right? Those sort of, I mean, when I was traveling a lot, and I still do this, but I don't have as much time anymore, I would, I would listen to music from a place, so like Georgia, for example, right? I'd listen to a, like, Georgian chorale music, which is some of the most fascinatingly beautiful music in the world. I try to read, you know, basic books about tablesee and urban environments in Georgia, and I would read a bit about Georgia's political history, so it's law, right? It's constitution, how it works, et cetera. Through that, from my perspective, I start to get a framework where I know how to resonate with a place, and when you resonate with somewhere, that's when things start to feed back towards you. The dangerous thing is turning up somewhere, expecting to resonate, having no framework of resonance whatsoever, no, no way of interacting. That could be quite dangerous, and it'll also make you feel as though you've come to conclusions that are probably quite inaccurate because you've just made them up. I seriously appreciate that. I think, you know, something that Zach mentioned in the previous podcast was, part of the motivation isn't just, you know, impact and returns, and a lot of, you know, other stories you can tell ourselves about, you know, wanting to participate in France, you're in emerging markets, it's also about adventure and street food and culture. And it kind of bottoms up, you know, approach of relating with people from different parts of the world and having these special experiences. And I'm really glad you shared that because hopefully for listeners, I know definitely for myself, that is something which I will aim to embody throughout these explorations. Well, bear in mind, street food is, you know, the universal connector as well, I mean, if you really want a way to be able to get a bottom-up approach of the opportunity that lies between like Gibraltar and Tangier, right, go and have street food in Gibraltar, go and have street food in Tangier, and then from there start building your ideas of where can bridges be built, right? If you do it from a government top-down perspective, you're going to probably waste a lot of money. So that's where we go to. Look, go for, I always go for the fact that actually some some truths thankfully still hold universal, right? Find where the universal truths are and see how each and every place channels those truths in their own narrative and their own fashion. The reason why I work with emerging markets in general, and I wouldn't even say I work with emerging markets, I just work and emerging markets just tend to be a part of my life because I'm not, you know, I'm a citizen of the world, right? But the reason why I enjoy it so much is because the counter position to that is what? That you you sit in one city, you do the same thing again and again, you look at the world from the lens of your fishbowl and you have the audacity to have a view on it. No, I really take my views seriously enough to have them tested by experience. You can't do that unless you are working with what we traditionally call emerging markets, right? Otherwise known as the world. The world, the global growth market. Okay, final few questions here, rapid fire. One, who inspires you? Oh, depends on what, right? So yeah, I'm one of those guys who went to the law because I was inspired by people like Gandhi, Mandela, et cetera, the younger years. So people who are able to transcend the real temptation of material and look at the core value of a thesis and follow that through to its nth degree, whether they are a startup, whether they are a political revolutionary, whether they're, you know, whether your siblings like following through on an argument, people who do that inspire me because, you know, the more in life you get through, the more complicated it gets, the more you realize just how difficult it is to stick to your guns. Those who can do that, it's hugely inspiring. And that by the way, and by the way, just that that that applies across the board, I get inspired by like, you know, somebody sticking to their guns in a pub who's, you know, had somebody piss them off, right? Yeah, yeah, that's right. You stick to your guns. You go for it because it's, we live in a world where people have gone out of fight in the right way. Those who can use their voice and those who do fight, those who can do so, regardless of the outcome are inspiring as hell this time. We live in fantastic. I self-restriction is a word that comes to mind as well. And in terms of you know, sticking to one's kind of core values, always challenging but important. I appreciate that. Okay, second question, not necessarily a rapid fire here, but in terms of your process for thinking about due diligence when it comes to entering a new market, buying an asset in a new market, trying to grow a company in a new market geographically, what does that process pragmatically look like? An operation look like for yourself or what does it look like in a tier A sense for other firms? Yeah, local stakeholders start off with, right? Really identifying and do good due diligence on the local stakeholders, really understanding who it is that in their sort of, you know, blind environment, you feel that you get some light from. That's fundamentally important, and that's that's rather cost effective way of starting off as well, right? Because then as you get down the line and you start to look under the hood at various opportunities, you start to you start to be able to triangulate various different viewpoints towards a truth that is palatable to you, right? These are jurisdictions where, you know, the balance sheet might say X, but if you look at what that balance sheet actually represents, how assets, how accounts are actually managed, et cetera, you're in, you sometimes might be in for a rough surprise, right? So if you are, you know, if you're looking for, I mean, I'm looking at this from an M&A perspective or an investment perspective, you do have to really blend the quantum DDDD that you do with the qualitative DD, and that qualitative DD has to come through understanding what various different market participants and ecosystem feel and have to say about it. The second thing I would say as well is that risk works in a different way in these parts of the world. Don't come with your impressions of risk intact. Do what it takes to feel as though you get almost the equivalent of a legal opinion on when it comes to risk in the region. There are things that none of us will know about, that certain parties will, about political risk, about the actual real concentration risk, about a number of other risks that might exist towards a particular opportunity that will give you a far more realistic approach towards the opportunity rather than this sort of, you know, fettering, you know, this fancy into the emerging markets without any real understanding. Also, you know, you do annoy people. You annoy a hell of a lot of people if you go in and you don't do that kind of due diligence, they might be happy to get rid of their assets, tell it to you, but you leave with a bad taste in the mouth and that's, you know, that's a lot of sustainable way of operating, right? So due diligence is also a form of respect, which is important. Fantastic. And final question, what is some product stress about right now? Honestly, the Lebanon project, I think, is really cool. I'm really looking forward to trying to find a way to explore that more. There are, from a crypto point of view, there are a number of projects that I think are very, very cool in the, in the sort of data center environment and look from a tech perspective, this is now sort of goes beyond me, but I can instinctively understand the relationship between energy markets, crypto mining in sort of a proof of work circumstances and the capacity to then find a sort of closed loop economic model to be able to make that happen. Take the right time, right place, but I know parties who are doing this, I'm really excited by them. I'd give them by name, but in fact, I can give one by name called chainergy, which I have looked into. They're not, they're not a client, but they are, that I've got to know the sort of leadership there as well, and as an idea, it's really cool. I think it's a really cool idea. There are other firms that I won't mention, but I, you know, are easy for you to go and find who are looking at the use of virtual assets from a supply chain perspective when it comes to food, right? And in particular, there's, there's one that is building a regulated closed loop environment between the governance token and its capacity, therefore for various stakeholders down the food chain, say, you know, somebody farming wheat in Pakistan all the way through to the markets where that commodity is being traded, all, all basically on the ledger, so to speak. And those are the initial use cases that interested me in blockchain in the first place. I don't really have a personal interest in a lot of the fanciful stuff that's happening in and around Web 3 other than that. I come from a sort of a real world perspective seen deeply where the real problem, real world problems are and seen where blockchain can help. And so that's where my personal focus is on. And I think there's some super interesting projects there. We haven't even started seeing its capacity yet as we've all kind of, you know, been following various different coins up and down. Fantastic. Actually, you know, I'm going to ask one more question. That's okay. Any final calls to action or recommending resources for our listeners? Oh, um, calls to action. Yeah, I think I, I think it's really important that we recognize that this is probably the first summer since COVID where we feel like we can have a proper summer holiday. Have a summer holiday. Like, genuinely, it's as weird as it sounds. Like what, 2020 was 2020. 2021 was like, okay, we're in this weird limbo land. 2022 was a rush to recovery. Generally speaking, I think 23 were in now is like, okay, all right, you know, we've kind of forgotten that this was literally, you know, it's something that happened around the corner. Take a break. I genuinely, as odd as it sounds, take a break and open your mind up to seeing what the world looks like. Rather than doing what I think all of us are doing since COVID, which is, oh, this looks like an opportunity. Let's jump. Let's go. I dedicate myself to this fully, fully, fully. Go, go, go. Oh, wow. This is interesting now. Let's go to that. Let's go, go, go, go. You know, take a breath. It's been wild. Another, another thing I would say is in terms of resources, honestly, from my perspective, we need more resources on looking at emerging markets from the point of view that you, for example, Krish are trying to expel us, right? Looking at them, I really don't like the term emerging markets. I don't like even the term frontier markets, right? They, they, whatever they are as communities that have economic value, looking at that from that perspective in multifaceted approaches. Unfortunately, a lot of these, a lot of the resources are there are decentralized by nature, right? So, so going to find out, who's going to find out about this particular newsletter or that particular thing or that particular thing? And so I guess it's part of a call to the action, a call to action as well is, you know, network. It's a, it's a, it's absolutely incredible. The power of word of mouth still, even with social media, even with, you know, all things on the internet, like asking and receiving is still so powerful in terms of getting through to the sort of information that you want. So yeah, just, just, meaning curious, it's, it's so fundamentally important and I will reemphasize this. Don't forget that because we sit behind our screens every single day, expect any information that we're receiving to be completely validated without any sort of resonance whatsoever with the human beings the other side of the screen. So remember the human interactions. Noted and wonderful. Thank you very much, Ali Khan. Krish, thanks a lot for your great work, man, and thanks a lot for inviting me on.