I've always been an entrepreneur at heart. I always wanted to start and run businesses and I've always been kind of a rebel in many ways. I started working at the age of eight selling books and magazines, handing out newspapers and flyers, picking strawberries, and whatever else I could do to make some extra pocket money. I always found a way. That’s why studying business was always a natural step for me. In fact, when I was 10 my goal was to become an “international businessman” even though I didn’t really know what it meant, it just sounded cool. I graduated from university in business studies in London at the height of the financial crisis in 2009, and I realized the timing couldn’t have been worse. It was impossible to enter the job market when all big companies were firing their people, so I decided to take up a master's in entrepreneurship. After my studies I got into working for a large corporation (Procter & Gamble), which was invaluable, but I kept feeling unfulfilled. I had already started a business once when I was 17, it was a marketing company which I founded with two friends which was actually making money, but we had to close it down to pursue higher education. So that itch to do run my own business was always there and in 2014 I decided to leave and start a light distribution business in Sweden where I grew up.

Since the financial crisis had such a big impact on the world economies, I started looking into how global markets work and I was interested in understanding how to hedge against inflation, so I started investing into gold. Theoretically on paper it was a rational investment, however it turned out that I had bet on the wrong horse. The financial markets and all asset classes started soaring except gold. It was one of my early lessons into investments to not put all my eggs in one basket. At the same time, I was going down the monetary rabbit whole and I started to become more and more resentful towards how government, banks, and the establishment are operating the financial world and impacting everyday people all over the world.

I discovered crypto quite early on back in 2013. At that time, I wanted to again go all in on Bitcoin but after a discussion with my ex-wife she had convinced me that my investment track-record wasn’t really the best and getting into such a risky asset wouldn’t make sense. Bitcoin at that time was around $300, and that was my second lesson, always trust your gut-feeling. I jumped in later in 2016 when the markets were in a bull run, which still sounds early but to be honest I’m not a great investor because I take way too many risks. I’m great at making money I’m just not very good at keeping it.

Let’s fast forward a few years and I met Anas (@AnanasBRB) at a tequila tasting event in Dubai in early 2021. We both shared a passion for crypto and NFTs so I was like, “Do you wanna start a podcast together?” And that’s how the Crypto Sheikhs Podcast was born which is now called the Arts DAO podcast (@artsdao_podcast). That helped us get connected to a lot of like-minded people and artists and we eventually started doing meetups that kept getting bigger and bigger. (@Arts_Dao).

I really love how blockchain works. You can completely decentralize many different industries, and by decentralizing you’re disrupting them, and by disrupting them, you are revolutionizing them, and this revolution is almost like a renaissance. There's a renaissance happening in banking right now which feel a bit like a battle between the evil and good forces. Crypto can replace traditional finance and offers access to the financial system for millions of people who were previously unbanked. But the traditional banks, which I refer to as the “dark side” will not leave without a fight. And it will be interesting to see how governments will or will not support them.

With NFTs there are probably many more use cases which we still haven't explored. It's still in its infancy especially when we talk about the metaverse, we’re probably 10 years away from sitting in our living room and watching things fly around. However, we can leverage the metaverse to improve our current human interactions and that is super valuable.

The learning curve to all of this is quite steep though. There are tons of good videos on YouTube to learn from and blockchain is quite an important concept to learn and understand. When someone asks me to describe it quickly, I use this analogy. Imagine a hundred people sitting in the room and you're sending money to another person in that room. And everyone in this room has a digital ledger in front of them, like a screen where whenever you send that money, it gets registered simultaneously on everyone's screen. Everyone in that room must confirm to everyone else that the transaction has appeared on their screen. Once everyone confirms, then the transaction is approved and that creates one block that is the first block in the chain. When that process repeats then the next block is created on the chain, however, the end of the code of the first block must match the beginning of the code of the next block. And that's why it's immutable. You cannot change it. And if you change one, you must change the whole chain. So, it’s very difficult to hack a blockchain because all the computers are decentralized. I would argue that its un-hackable unless someone has a majority share of computers (nodes) on the chain and can control them of course.