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Good morning.
In 1998 I was working at Bellevue Hospital in New York City
in the Survivors of Political Torture Program.
I’m a Kuwaiti but I’m a New York licensed clinical psychologist.
Worked??? too many people who grew up idolizing their leadership
only to end up being tortured by them.
And one -- and as being the father of five boys, two at that time,
one of the things that are going through my mind is,
you know, Islam needs to be rethought, redesigned, and rebuilt,
words that I just saw off the board, but that’s what I was thinking.
My son Rian here taught me a lesson this summer.
He basically left his *** Doo toy in his bay house
and came into the house and said, "Baba, I want you to come with me
"to my house to get my *** Doo toy."
And I said, "Rian, go away, I’m working."
And then he lowered himself to my level and he said,
"Baba, I want you to come with me to my office in my house.
"I have work to do."
So he rethought how to approach me.
Now, two years later I left Bellevue but 9/11 happened.
Everyone talked about how 9/11 was the U.S. emergency call,
but the design there, nine times eleven is 99,
which is a very important number in Islam.
But if you read the numbers as a word from right to left,
you have the word Lila, or Allah.
So whoever it was that did this, and I’ve heard a million theories,
in the end was taking down the way I thought of Islam
and I didn’t want that to be the picture for my kids.
So that was the question I had to answer.
I raised money, raised 7 million dollars in a few months when I came out with 99.
A million came from my classmates in business school,
but I think the most important contribution, you know, the most --
one thing, I’m proudest of is, I think I’m the only Kuwaiti that went to Beirut
and actually came out with money. [Laughter]
So when things this terrible happen,
people say sounds like a job for Superman.
Well, there was no Superman, and so I had to create them.
And I went to people who actually were active working with Spiderman
and Batman and put up to your talent together which was very difficult
to convincing these guys only to create heroes
based on Islam in the post 9/11 world.
But it happened and we basically launched the comic book series,
and the concept was this.
Basically, there are 99 heroes from 99 different countries,
so American heroes and Indonesian heroes and Saudi heroes
working together to make the world a better place.
They’re almost evenly split between boys and girls
and there’s something in there for everybody.
In fact, the writers have the direction that it’s only when kids
of all religions and non-religions can identify with these characters
that I’ve achieved what I’m trying to do.
There’s no real discontent.
Now, the characters from all over the world,
here’s our comedian character here.
You see a clip from the upcoming animation series by Endemol,
so Indian character there, Wasa - the characters are, you know,
designed by people who are involved in designing X-Men.
Batina there I based on my wife.
I came home, I said "I created a character after you."
She said, "That’s not me."
I said, "It’s the eyes, look at the eyes."
Basically, The New York Times interviewed me early December ’05.
They sat on the article for six weeks as it wasn’t timely, Islam and cartoon,
and then, thankfully, the Danes put out those death cartoon controversy.
Next thing you knew New York Times put out a full page article
because it became timely and anybody Googling 'Islam' and 'cartoon' or
'Islam' and 'comic', it’s what they got. They got me.
And that let over - thousands of newspaper articles
and led to a Chinese edition which we’re launching actually this quarter.
Turkish edition we just found out sold 20,000 copies in month one in October.
Arabic-English editions in India, Indonesia,
so we would create the first ever intellectual property
that’s been able to go global out of the Islamic world by basing it on values
that we share with the rest of humanity as juxtaposed against people
who want to believe that we come out of caves on Mars.
We launched the theme park in Kuwait a year ago.
The second one should be opening in another GCC country within a year.
Again, the same things that other people have, you know,
created lots of hateful messages from, we went back into and pulled out
very positive messages.
That’s (inaudible) character on the rollercoaster.
We launched doing Kuwait’s Independence Day last February
and actually finally launch the Kuwaiti members of the 99
which I hadn’t done for five years.
We’ve done two merchandising deals and you can see here part of the conflict
between keeping the philosophy and doing the deals.
I’ve turned down many deals recently but these are two -- these I did,
one in Spain, one in Turkey for back to school products.
So, we're actually getting paid licenses to do this which is very heartening
and we've been able to create what we think is a global product.
One of the things that’s exciting which is (inaudible)(03:51)
we did a joint venture with Endemol.
Endemol, the largest TV producers in the world behind Star Academy,
Deal or No Deal, Big Brother.
Twenty six episodes have been written in Hollywood by the writers behind
Ben 10 and Spiderman and Superman.
We have offers from U.S. broadcasters,
U.K. broadcasters, French, and German, and the idea was to launch in the west
because that’s where it can make money and then if we have to give it up for
(inaudible)(04:10)
Islamic world to compete with the hateful messages out there.
So basically - power point just crushed.
Basically -- you know, my approach to this has been creating this concept.
I’ve raised over 23 million dollars and I’m closing another 15 to 20 next month
so part of my conundrum, part of the thing that I -
and I’m still in control of the company.
The next three years will really tell us if this is the next Spiderman
or whether it was a social experiment of ten years.
And that’s -- and, you know, but the --
one of my fears right now is --
with this next one, for example, you know, I had one potential person
who wants to buy the whole thing and part of me is like, well, if he does that,
you know, to quote Uncle Ben from Spiderman,
“With great power comes great responsibility.”
We built something here, right? They’re cultural icons.
And what you haven’t -- the slide that you didn’t see here, that got crushed
is basically a slide that announced that last summer,
to commemorate President Obama reaching out to the Muslim world,
we did a deal with Time Warner that this year -- here we go -
the 99 are gonna be joining forces with the Justice League, Batman,
Superman, and Wonder Woman, to have that conversation that has never
been had between democratically elected or selected cultural icons,
in this case it’s selected, not elected, right.
So it’s gonna start with distrust and move to trust.
So what I’m -
an eerie shot here you have of the World Trade Center, you know,
this doesn’t mean - that’s feeding more conspiracy theories,
but if you see this, I mean, even in the shape of the building,
it’s kind of happened in the word Allah.
So the design in there is, you know, cannot be denied.
I just did not want my children growing up in a world
where Islam is associated with this kind of stuff.
And my question to you is, you know, how do we -- you know,
we’ve broken through a lot of, you know -- when I got accused of, you know,
Bin Laden joining the 99, I went it and did a deal at Time Warner and you know,
we’re hanging those Batman and Superman.
Obviously, there’s nothing bad that’s gonna happen
You know, we got told that this is an Islamic -- my second one to finance,
I did through an Islamic investment bank.
So I’ve been able to kind of -- each problem kind of focused
on finding a solution that was practical.
But now it’s about how do we turn this into a real global product?
It’s gonna be on TV by year end, but how do we -
how are we able to kind of bridge that gap and bring in revenues earlier
and gain the trust of multinationals through licenses before I have to
(inaudible) in financing and lose control of the company?
Thank you.