How To Export Coffee In A War (Pt 2) (Reheat)

As civil war erupted in Yemen, Mokhtar Alkhanshali found himself imprisoned, with $5,000 stuffed in his underwear and his coffee samples confiscated. To get those samples to the biggest specialty coffee expo in North America, he’d have to survive more than one near-death experience. Would his coffee be worth the risk?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Pashman?

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• 0:44Dan Pashman?

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• 1:01Dan Pashman?

  Dan here with another Sporkful reheat for you, and this one is part two of a two-part story that we started last week in last Friday's reheat. And this was an episode that many of you requested for a reheat, so we're very happy to bring it to you. It's a story of Mokhtar Al-Kanshali, an unlikely coffee entrepreneur. When he left off, he was being held captive in a Yemeni prison as the country was erupting into full-blown civil war. Now, if you haven't heard part one yet, please go back and start there. And remember, if there's an episode of the Sporkful you want us to pull out of the deep freezer and reheat, drop me a line to [email protected]. Thanks so much, and now here's part two of our story.

• 1:38Dan Pashman?

  Previously on the Sporkful.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  I would ask seasoned coffee buyers and roasters, where can I get Yemen coffee? And they would say things like, it's just really hard to get. We don't know where it comes from because we can't go to that country. It's very expensive and it has a lot of defects. But the best cup of coffee that I had was like a Yemen coffee 10 years ago, 20 years ago.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  And I looked at Wulam, he had this kind of Mona Lisa smile.

• 2:07Dan Pashman?

  Like a very subtle smirk.

• 2:08Speaker 01

  He's like, was that a smile? I don't know, maybe he's a good, is it bad? I don't know, it was so different. He said, this is one of the best coffees I've ever tasted. I could feel like the earth shaking. And I went outside and I saw what looked like laser beams being shot in the sky. And those were anti-aircraft machine guns being shot at fighter jets.

• 2:34Dan Pashman?

  This is The Sporkful. It's not for foodies, it's for eaters. I'm Dan Pashman. Each week on our show, we obsess about food to learn more about people. This is the second half of our two-part story about Mokhtar Al-Kanshali. If you haven't listened to part one from last week, please start there. When we left off, Yemen was erupting in a full-blown war. Mokhtar was trying to leave the country from the port of Aden.

• 2:56Speaker 01

  And all I had with me are my coffee samples. And I had $5,000 that I hid in my underwear and a Colt 45 handgun.

• 3:04Dan Pashman?

  Mokhtar needed to get out of Yemen alive and get those coffee samples to the big Specialty Coffee Association Expo in Seattle. This was his chance to show the high-end coffee world that Yemeni coffee was incredible and that he had access to it. He hired a driver and bodyguard, and they left for Aden. When they got there, they were stopped by an armed group of resistance fighters who thought Mokhtar's driver and bodyguard were part of the conflict, fighting for the other side. All three of them were blindfolded and taken to a local jail.

• 3:33Speaker 01

  And it was a very difficult moment that I really can't speak a lot about. But I ended up, you know, it was, I mean, at one point, I was, I had my hands tied up behind my back and was blindfolded. And someone told me they were going to kill me today. And I just kept thinking to myself, my family, like, why did I put myself in this position? And like, my whole life behind me? And eventually going in this disgusting jail cell with a lot of people who are mentally unstable. And but at that point, they had bombed both airports and both seaports. There was no way out the country. But there were small ships leaving from the port of Moka to East Africa.

• 4:09Dan Pashman?

  The port of Moka is where coffee was first brewed by Sufi monks. Coffee spread from there across the Arab world. The story of the port of Moka is how Mokhtar first learned that coffee came from Yemen. It's how he got started on this journey. Now, it might be his only chance.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  And so in my head, I was like, wow, if I ever left this, you know, this prison, I'm going to go to this port. But it was like, it was a faraway fantasy. I'm like, I'm like, you know, tied up right now and, you know, I don't know. I'm barefoot in this place where people are taking shits around me and like talking to themselves and saying, this was a very difficult place to be. They barely could breathe even.

• 4:42Dan Pashman?

  What, what, what happened to your money and gun and coffee at this point?

• 4:46Speaker 01

  Gun is with them, coffee samples are with them. They were in this Samsonite bag.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  And my money was still in my underwear. No one had checked my underwear. And, and so I had $5,000 in cash this whole time.

• 4:59Dan Pashman?

  Over several hours, Mokhtar talked with his captors about who he was, his mission to help Yemeni coffee farmers, and why he was trying to leave Yemen. Mokhtar was not a hostage negotiator. He'd never done anything like this before. But he had learned a lot about how to deal with people, especially from his grandfather.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  He would walk into a room and people would just stop talking and look at him. And there was a way he looked, because he always had something to say that was just different. Typically, when you meet people in a room, you go and you shake each person's hand. What he would do, he would slap people's hand and give high fives, you know, things like that. I think one of the biggest lessons was grit. You're going to be in very difficult positions and, and those times it's easy to compromise on your values or easy to give up even. And so he would say things like, you know, the, the person who's, who's bravest in the last hour wins the war.

• 5:52Dan Pashman?

  Mokhtar tried to channel his grandfather and kept talking to his captors. Finally, he convinced them that he wasn't fighting for either side and he and his crew were released. They had missed the ship out of Aden. They decided to try to leave from the port of Moka, a four-hour drive away. They spent a night at a local hotel, planning to leave in the morning. But that night in the hotel, they had visitors.

• 6:13Speaker 01

  In the middle of the night, they came in, six guys with their faces covered with guns and like all holding AK-47s. And that was scary because when people cover their faces, it's not a good sign. They don't want you to see who they are because they might do something to you.

• 6:26Dan Pashman?

  Mokhtar, his driver and his bodyguard were captives once again. These guys took Mokhtar's gun and coffee samples. But Mokhtar was able to get in touch with Samer Nasser, the Yemeni-American woman who had told him about the ship in Aden. She got a well-connected friend to come to the hotel, explain to the armed men who Mokhtar was, and get him and his crew freed. They were about to leave the hotel when Mokhtar realized he needed something.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  I said, "Okay, can you go get my coffee, my samples?" He's like, "What?" I'm like, "No, no, I have a, I have a bag. It's a Samsonite, it's a black Samsonite bag, and I'm not gonna leave without it." He said, "What are you talking about?" The guys, they're like, "Hey, let's just escape now. Forget about the samples." I'm like, "No, like, we need those samples." And I made them go, and they took an hour. And an hour at that time, and you're hearing like bombing, and you hear like houses or shells coming around you. And it was like, and my friend's like, "What are you, we could have just left." He comes with my Samsonite bag.

• 7:19Dan Pashman?

  So this suitcase of samples held the product of two years of work. And the reason why it was so important was because you wanted to get it to this trade show to show everybody how great Yemeni coffee could be.

• 7:37Speaker 01

  And I had promised these farmers this dream. "You guys work on producing coffee and doing these new techniques and extra work, and I will promise you I can find buyers for this coffee." And so I couldn't let them down. And I was like, you know, and especially in a place like Yemen, hope is a very heavy burden to have. And if you give people hope, you just can't, it's something you have to be very mindful of. And so I really wanted to figure out how I was going to make this promise happen. And so in my head, I'm already thinking about the port of Moka. I'm gonna, I'm gonna go to do this. I get back, my family was like, "Thank God you're alive, you know, forget about coffee." My partners even, the investor, like, "Forget about the coffee project, just like, stay safe."

• 8:17Dan Pashman?

  But Mokhtar did not forget about the coffee, and he did not stay safe. He had a trade show in Seattle to get to. He went to the port of Moka, but the ship he thought he would take was broken down. He heard about a smaller boat headed to East Africa.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  It's like a little 16-foot dinghy with like a little 40-horsepower Yamaha motor on it. And I'm like, "Are you, like, this is, are we gonna be able to cross the ocean on this like little thing?" Like, and I realized...

• 8:44Speaker 01

  You know, for me, like, I'm a very spiritual person and I believe in God. And I, in these kind of situations, you really have to have something to believe in. And I took, I got on that boat. It was a few hours into the ride and we're in the ocean now. We're like in the ocean, like.

• 9:02Dan Pashman?

  Can you see land in any direction?

• 9:03Speaker 01

  No, and it's just like the waves are huge. It got dark and it looked like Moby Dick. It was just like, and I'm like, why am I doing this? Like, I could have, at least if I died in the land, I would have been buried. Like, now I'm gonna die in sea. My parents are gonna like, you know, like, they're never gonna find my body. It was very scary and I, and I realized, you know, people who, you hear stories of migrants who take these ocean voyages, you know, off the coast of like North Africa to Italy or to like Greece from Syria. And the stories of bodies I wash up, you know, and children. Like, you wonder like, what makes somebody, what makes somebody do that? Why would they like risk their lives, their family's lives to do that? Or even here in the US, like, why would someone go through coyotes and through like these different smugglers to come from Mexico, from Guatemala up here? This is a poem by Oursun Shire.

• 9:44Speaker 01

  He said, "No one leaves land to go into the ocean unless the whole city is fleeing." And so I really, I resonate with those people who, who take these journeys and risk their lives. But in that journey, you know, I made it, crossed, we made it to, um, to East Africa, to Djibouti.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  I get there and the ocean, like naval authorities come out with their guns and rifles. They think we're smugglers. I pull out my US passport. I tell them, you know, my US citizen, I have like a coffee company or I'm trying to do a coffee thing. And they're like picking up like the, or my Samsung night bag, which is pretty heavy with coffee, coffee samples. They opened it up, I'm like, no, look, it's, it's coffee beans. It's not, they're not drugs. And they, they don't believe me. No, they're like, there is drugs in here.

• 10:31Dan Pashman?

  Coming up, Mokhtar finds himself imprisoned and separated from his coffee samples again. Then later, he attempts to make his first sale in the world of specialty coffee. Stick around.

• 10:49Speaker 02

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• 11:35Dan Pashman?

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• 14:10Dan Pashman?

  Welcome back to another Sporkful reheat. I'm Dan Pashman. Hey, if you want to hear what I'm eating and reading every week, you should sign up for the Sporkful newsletter. I'll give you my weekly recommendations, and so do our producers and the whole rest of our team. We also share announcements about exciting things happening with the show, when there's special discounts on my pastas. And on top of all that, if you subscribe to the newsletter, you're automatically entered into giveaways for cookbooks featured on the show, as long as you live in the US or Canada. There's literally no downside. Sign up right now at sporkful.com/newsletter. I promise we won't spam you. We're only going to send you really good stuff. Again, that's sporkful.com/newsletter. Thanks.

• 14:49Dan Pashman?

  Now, back to the story of Mokhtar Al-Kanshali. He made it across the Red Sea from Yemen to the East African nation of Djibouti, but the navy there assumed he was a drug smuggler and arrested him.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  And I'm in jail, and I have still my $5,000 in my underwear. And so I took $100 out and I gave it to one of the guards, said, "Hey, can you give me a SIM card for my phone?" He gives me a SIM card, and the iPhone SIM cards, there are these smaller mini SIMs. This was a giant SIM card. It didn't fit. And so, like, crap. So I'm there in the cell, I'm bored. I put my SIM card on it from Yemen, and I start to cut up around this giant Djiboutian SIM card.

• 15:30Dan Pashman?

  Mokhtar took his Yemeni SIM card, which fit in his phone but wouldn't get service in Djibouti. He laid it on top of the big SIM card that the guard gave him and cut the big one down to the size of the small one, the one that did fit.

• 15:43Speaker 01

  This was just for fun, just for like, you know, let me just, for, I don't know why. And I did this thing, and I had it for a couple of hours, and I decided to try to stick it into my phone. Why the heck not? And I stuck it in, and it worked. And I totally MacGyver'd this thing. And if you ever get these SIM cards, you just gotta make sure it fits into your phone.

• 16:01Dan Pashman?

  If you're ever stuck in a Djibouti prison, your SIM card doesn't work, this is the trick. If you take one thing from this episode.

• 16:14Dan Pashman?

  While all this was happening in Djibouti, a lot was also happening back in America. Mokhtar's family and friends had been pressuring the US government to get Mokhtar out of Yemen. When he called them from the Djiboutian prison to tell them where he was, they were already mobilized and quickly contacted the US government to get him released. Mokhtar and his suitcase full of coffee samples were sprung from jail again. With his samples in hand, he flew from Djibouti to Kenya, then to Amsterdam, then home to San Francisco. After a couple of days there, he made it to Seattle and arrived at the Specialty Coffee Association Expo right on time. Days earlier, he was in a war zone, being held at gunpoint. Now, he was in the land of lattes. And once again, his coffee needed to be tested and evaluated by experts.

• 16:59Dan Pashman?

  Remember, when his first samples of Yemeni coffee were tested the year before, two of them were world-class, but 19 of them were terrible. If Mokhtar was going to get this business off the ground and start making some sales, he had to prove to the industry that those high scores weren't a fluke.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  And I get to the trade show and the coffee gets submitted and in blind tastes, it does really well.

• 17:20Dan Pashman?

  Mokhtar's samples scored higher than any Yemeni coffee had ever scored at this conference. With those results, he caught the attention of specialty coffee insiders, including the CEO of Blue Bottle, James Freeman. Remember, a few years ago, Mokhtar was pestering baristas at Blue Bottle to help them learn the basics about coffee. Now, he was talking to the big boss. Mokhtar went to Blue Bottle's roasting facility in Oakland, hoping to sell some coffee.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  I get there in the morning and it's my coffees. There were two, but then there was all these other coffees on the table. I'm like, what are these other coffees? He goes, oh, I wanted to taste it alongside other coffees. And he had some of the world's best coffees there. I'm like, crap, like now, like, yeah, our coffees are good, but along these giants are not gonna, you know, are not gonna shine. And so we're going around tasting and it's a blind tasting. And there was one coffee, I remember it was on the left corner. And I looked at everyone who tasted it and their face changed. And so at the end, when they revealed the scores and they revealed which coffees was which, it was, that was my coffee. And so to me, that was, you know, it was amazing, like, it was an amazing moment because, like, I'd never expected to be at that level, that pinnacle of like quality, of like flavor, of sense of that, you know, enjoyment.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  And to hear, you know, my industry hero, James Freeman, talk about this coffee, his quote was, "This is what angels singing tastes like."

• 18:37Dan Pashman?

  "This is what angels singing tastes like." James Freeman said he'd buy the entire lot, 860 pounds. It was all the coffee Mokhtar had. But getting the coffee out of Yemen was another ordeal. Every morning at 4:00 AM, Mokhtar checked in with his team in Yemen. The war there was getting worse. His processing plant had to run and generate it because electricity was unreliable. After months of delays, he got the coffee to the port of Aden and on a ship to Oakland. Now, Blue Bottle just had to sell it.

• 19:05Speaker 01

  A month later, we met ahead of their, their launch team for this coffee. They had their marketing team there, they had the PR team there, they had their, all these people in this meeting. And he mentioned it was going to be $16 for a cup.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  And I just like, I stopped everyone like, wait, excuse me? Like, I got, I was a little mad. I felt like, is he trying to overcharge it? Because the story, like, why is it so expect? Who can afford that? He goes, no, no, Moktar, like, we have a formula. Whatever the green beans cost, we just use this formula. Like, so, they normally pay, you know, I don't know, two, three dollars, like, a pound for coffee. And then for really special coffees, they might spend like, you know, I think eight dollars a pound. This was fifty-eight dollars a pound for this coffee.

• 19:50Dan Pashman?

  That's how much he was paying to you?

• 19:53Speaker 01

  I had no idea about the price economics of coffee. I just was like, I went to Yaman, what are you being paid now, these farmers? Okay, if I told you to do this, this, and this, and you want to live a more dignified life, like, how much more should I pay you? And they said, this much more. And so I just paid them that, what I thought was fair for them to get paid. I didn't think about how that would transcribe into a cup later. I just started that way first. And so, I said, who's gonna buy it at sixteen dollars? Like, you've never sold coffee this price before. And James Freeman had the vision, he said, no, this coffee's that good. You know, and so, we went on the tour for this coffee, and people had this visceral reaction, I remember. Like, why would someone charge sixteen dollars?

• 20:36Speaker 01

  People would come to try to like, talk crap about this coffee and drink it. But like, wait, this coffee tastes like strawberries. And it was the first time they sold the coffee with a story. So every person who bought it, they got this coffee, but they got this like, little accordion booklet on the story of it, and a little cookie that was based off of my mother's recipe of cardamom cookie. And I always joke and tell people, no, no, the coffee's, the coffee's two dollars, the cookie's fourteen.

• 21:00Dan Pashman?

  Right, right.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  It sold out within a month, by the way.

• 21:04Dan Pashman?

  Blue Bottle's thinking was, people will pay hundreds or thousands for a rare bottle of wine from a specific region with a special backstory. Why shouldn't they pay top dollar for coffee? It's on the same level. The next year, Moktar shipped 50% more coffee to Blue Bottle, and it still sold out in a month. Soon after, The Coffee Review, the trade guide that introduced the industry's grading system, it gave one of Moktar's coffees in 97, the highest score ever for any coffee. By 2018, Moktar was starting to think even bigger.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  I did an auction in 2018, Yemen's first coffee auction. And the way auctions work, it's a way for coffee, when there's a certain type of coffee that's really sought after, for buyers to compete for it. And it creates these crazy, amazing prices. And I used to make decent profit, but the auction gave me like 20x return.

• 21:51Dan Pashman?

  You were just auctioning your own coffee?

• 21:52Speaker 01

  My own private auction, yeah.

• 21:53Dan Pashman?

  Right.

• 21:54Speaker 01

  And then I started to feel uncomfortable, like, okay, I do this, but what about these other farmers, people who can do this also? And I said this idea, why don't we have Yemen's first national coffee auction?

• 22:03Dan Pashman?

  Moktar had been doing private auctions, selling his company's coffee to the highest bidder. But a national auction would mean farmers across the country, even ones who didn't work with Moktar's company, could sell their coffee directly to buyers they normally wouldn't have access to on their own and keep the proceeds. This is the auction you heard about at the start of the first episode, when Moktar shared his feelings the evening before the event.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Our biggest fear is that we don't succeed, meaning that we sell the coffees at a lower price than what farmers can sell in Yemen. And what's a bigger fear than that is people have given us much of their hope. We can't fail, because if we fail for this, it means that people will feel that trying something new isn't going to work.

• 22:49Dan Pashman?

  Moktar told me more about how the auction was set up.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  We had a competition where farmers from around the country could submit their coffees, and the very best make it to the final round. We had 161 submissions, and 28 coffee lots from across 13 regions made it to the final, and then those get auctioned out. And buyers from around the world could compete for those auctions and buy directly from the farmer.

• 23:12Dan Pashman?

  Why not just take all of the great coffees that are winning, that made it to the finals of the national auction, and just export them through your company?

• 23:22Speaker 01

  I mean, first of all, like, there's way more coffee than I can ever buy in Yemen. And that's not, my goal is always to try to help Yemen rebuild its coffee infrastructure and revitalize its ancient arts. And that needs hundreds of people, thousands of people who do what I do, really, to make this actually happen.

• 23:42Dan Pashman?

  So like, you have the 28 farmers who made it to the finals, who got to auction their coffee. For the other farmers who submitted but didn't make it to the final 28, is there any benefit for them to the system?

• 23:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, actually, a lot of side effects happen. So when we think of like, certain types of like wines, like in Bordeaux or like in Napa Valley, it's not one estate that makes it famous. It's a lot of people doing it together and creating a brand. So I'm trying to create this coffee brand for Yemen internationally. I want Yemen Coffee's profile to be elevated. Secondly, in this auction, farmers, these smallholder farmers, thought, you know, what's the point of me trying to pick better cherries or do these things? Now they feel like, oh, there's actually a way for to doing that. And so now what's happened is that the other, the price of coffee in Yemen, the average price is rising now. So the collectors, and it's really helping push the industry forward. Because right now, less than 2% of Yemen's coffee is specialty coffee.

• 24:35Speaker 01

  And we're trying to push it to go to like, you know, much higher than that.

• 24:39Dan Pashman?

  Moctar spent years working on this national auction. He created a nonprofit, the Mocha Institute, to manage it. He took time away from his coffee business, traveling back and forth to Yemen, getting government officials and academics and farmers and exporters all involved. The big day was set for August 31st, 2022, just this past summer. And right before, Moctar decided to do something unexpected and out of character. I almost couldn't believe it myself.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  And I was like, okay, I'm gonna take a couple of days to go, you know, I'm gonna force myself to go on a little, like, small mini-vacation. So I promised myself I would not look on my phone or laptop. I'm just gonna go have this vacation.

• 25:14Dan Pashman?

  The vacation was during the auction?

• 25:17Speaker 01

  It was, it was the day of the auction. Yeah, I was like, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna just disconnect, because it's been, you know, at this point, two years of my life, and I haven't taken any breaks. And, and I was in London, I'm like, let me just go to the south of France, to Nice, I've always wanted to go there. Let me just go and, and just chill there for a couple of days. And I couldn't even enjoy anything. I was just terrified that what would happen.

• 25:36Dan Pashman?

  The promise Mokhtar made to himself about how he was gonna disconnect, he broke it almost immediately. He was in his hotel room in the south of France glued to his laptop, waiting for the auction to start. The buyers would be all over the world. They had bought samples of the coffees being auctioned, so they knew which ones they wanted ahead of time.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  The auction goes live at 10 a.m. London time. And so most of the buyers are from, a lot of them are from Asia, so like in that part of the world. But also, there are people up at 1, 2 a.m. in the U.S., like Goodman Roasters in Chattanooga, Tennessee. And so it started out very slow. You know, and a lot of the, like, half of the lots, no one bid on them in the first hour, I think. It was like, it was like 15 that were still not, it was, it was a very bad sign. And so I remember like, I'm like, where are the, where are the Asian buyers? Like, why aren't they waking up? And then the first Korean buyer woke up, Marstella from South Korea. He gets up and he starts to bid in. Okay, great, Koreans are in there.

• 26:32Speaker 01

  I did this thing where as a different country would get in, I would put a song on and send it to different website groups. So when that happened, Gangnam Style.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  When Goodman Roasters from Tennessee came on, I put on the Chattanooga Choo Choo.

• 26:54Speaker 01

  When Kuwait, I think it was the Jarrah from Richard's Coffee, Kuwait came on, I put on an Arabic Kuwaiti song.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  That was my way of kind of trying to ease attention from my, our team members, because they were very stressed out. I'm like, hey, guys, it's all, it's great, you know? And then there were still not a lot of buyers from Asia. They're like, why aren't they, why aren't they coming on? And so, guys, these are like professionals, they're gonna come in the last second. You know that scene in The Big Short when Brad Pitt goes on that, in that pub and puts on his headset?

• 27:21Speaker 05

  90 million. 85.

• 27:25Speaker 05

  Eighty-four.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  And I sent that scene to them. And Jerry was like, "Oh, I love that scene." And they did.

• 27:33Dan Pashman?

  How much time was left in the auction at that point?

• 27:35Speaker 01

  We didn't know how long it would last because it can go from an hour to like five hours.

• 27:39Dan Pashman?

  How do you determine when it ends?

• 27:40Speaker 01

  The way it works is that after the first hour, a timer goes off, a three-minute timer. And if it gets to zero and no one bids, the auction ends. And every time someone bids, it starts again.

• 27:52Dan Pashman?

  Right, it was a three-minute timer.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  It would get to like 20 seconds and then come back again, you know, and that kept happening. And so at that time, we didn't know would be the last like 45 minutes or that's half hour almost. The last lot got bid on. Like, okay, thank God, everybody has their coffee. Now I can like, now I can breathe now. Let's just see how far I can go. These farmers, they've never sold coffee, most of them, more than eight dollars a pound. So the prices went off like $25 a pound, $26. There was one that was like $40. Then there was one that went like $50. And then there's another one that went to $78 a pound. And so for $78 a pound, that's life-changing for some of these farmers.

• 28:30Dan Pashman?

  These final results topped all of Mokhtar's expectations. Two years of work paid off.

• 28:36Speaker 01

  I remember after that, I fell asleep. Like I have, I sleep like five, six hours sometimes, or four. And I, in my adult life, have never slept that much. I went to sleep at 1 a.m. and I woke up at 11 a.m. Like, straight, sleeping.

• 28:51Dan Pashman?

  You talked about the idea of sort of like the blind spots that we all have. I feel like you thinking that you would be able to relax in Nice.

• 29:00Dan Pashman?

  On the day of this auction, that's a blind spot, Mokhtar. Like, that does not seem realistic.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  I was like, if there's anywhere in the world I'm gonna be able to relax and force myself to do this, it's gonna be the French Riviera. It's good to enjoy what you do, and that's really amazing, but you do, you do have to make sure that you take these, these breaks, you know, just like-

• 29:17Dan Pashman?

  Yeah, for sure, but not on the day of the biggest event that you've been working after, working towards for two years. That, you take the vacation after that, Mokhtar.

• 29:25Speaker 01

  I mean, hearing you say it right now, it's so-

• 29:33Dan Pashman?

  Is your grandfather still with us?

• 29:35Speaker 01

  My grandfather passed away like two years ago.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  And from cancer. And he was able to see a lot of like, you know, my coffee, the first launch and the things that happened. And, you know, when she was around to see the auction and I also see our coffee estates. But everything I do, I try to showcase the best he taught me and what I learned from him in my life. I think that our grandparents teach us how to live by their passing. When he passed away, it was just, I really felt this mortality in a different way. And like, wow, we have a few breaths in this. What are we going to do here? What are we going to leave behind? And so he would always ask me, what is your fingerprint on this earth? Basma in Arabic.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  What are you going to leave behind here? And so he left behind an amazing legacy and I hope to continue that through my work.

• 30:48Dan Pashman?

  That is Mokhtar Al-Kanshali. If you want to learn more about him, Dave Eggers wrote a book that goes into his journey in even greater detail. It's called The Monk of Mokka. You can get it wherever books are sold. And if you want to buy some of Mokhtar's coffee, you can do that at portofmoka.com. That's M-O-K-H-A dot com. And please connect with our show wherever you listen, whatever your podcasting app is, just go there right now. Go to our show page and click plus or heart or favorite or subscribe or follow, whatever it is in your app. There's a thing to do. Please do it. You can do it right now while you're listening. Thank you.

• 31:21Dan Pashman?

  This show is produced by me along with senior producer. Emma Morgenstern. And producer.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  Andres O'Hara.

• 31:26Dan Pashman?

  Our editor is. Tracy Samuelson. Additional editing by. Devin DeComo. Our engineer is. Jared O'Connell. Music help from Black Label Music. The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher. Our executive producers are Eric Eddings and Colin Anderson. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.

• 31:40Speaker 04

  And I'm Caroline from Bloomington, Indiana, reminding you to eat more, eat better, and eat more better.

• 31:59Dan Pashman?

  This reheat was produced by

• 32:00Speaker 06

  Gianna Palmer.

• 32:01Dan Pashman?

  The team that produces The Sporkful today includes me along with managing producer

• 32:05Speaker 06

  Emma Morgenstern.

• 32:06Dan Pashman?

  And senior producer

• 32:07Speaker 03

  Andres O'Hara.

• 32:08Dan Pashman?

  Our engineer is Jared O'Connell. The Sporkful is a production of Stitcher Studios. Our executive producer is Camille Stanley. And hey, did you know you can listen to The Sporkful on the SiriusXM app? Yes, the SiriusXM app, it has all your favorite podcasts, plus over 200 ad-free music channels curated by genre and era. Plus, live sports coverage. Does your podcasting app have that? And there's interviews with A-list stars and so much more. It's everything you want in a podcast app and music app all rolled into one. And right now, Sporkful listeners can get three months free of the SiriusXM app by going to siriusxm.com/sporkful. Until next time, I'm Dan Pashman.

• 32:46Speaker 07

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