Mario Harik

We lived in Egypt for a while.

We lived here in Canada for a while.

So it's good to be back in Ottawa.

I haven't been back in almost 35 years to Ottawa, but I spent a portion of my childhood here as well.

But all of these experiences, at least what they gave me, is a different perspective.

When you interact with different cultures and different people,

It really teaches you how to look at things from different perspectives.

Everybody's going to have a different lens, how to look at a certain solution, at a certain problem, at a certain, you know, whatever it is that you're dealing with.

And I find a lot of entrenchment in that.

I seek other points of view.

And part of it was because I grew up in this environment and I got to see multiple cultures along the way as we live in different countries during the wartime in Lebanon as well.

Now keep in mind, I was very young at the time.

So when you're very young, you're still, your brain is developing and forming, but it's really when you get to your teens is when you start thinking differently about different levers and risk.

I think overall, I would probably put myself in the more risk-averse category, but I think that's more of my engineering-type education, where as an engineer, you're always assessing risk or you're trying to quantify everything that you are dealing with.

So when you look at risk...

You're looking at all the information, all the data behind that risk, and you're assigning a probability of what's the probability of that risk materializing.

Now, if you're only looking at the downside, it's very easy to say, I'm not going to go there because that's too risky.

However, if you look at the upside and you probability adjust the upside of whatever area you're looking at and the risk that is involved with it,

it changes your perspective of how of how to deal with risk but i'd say i have a very analytical view of risk but i lean towards being more risk averse than risk taking and i do think part of the upbringing but more importantly my engineering education is what kind of governs some of that approach on the notion of risk taking how did you navigate the yellow bankruptcy somebody reached out to me a mutual friend of ours and told me it was pure genius can you tell us that story

Yeah, so one of our large competitors went bankrupt in 2023.