[SPEAKER_04]: What's up, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls around the world.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'd like to welcome you back to the real talk with Zubi Podcast.
[SPEAKER_04]: On today's episode, we've got on another brilliant guest.
[SPEAKER_04]: He is a young entrepreneur.
[SPEAKER_04]: He is the founder and owner of Thriller Emmy.
[SPEAKER_04]: And this is Adnan Jassat.
[SPEAKER_04]: Welcome to the show.
[SPEAKER_04]: Thank you, Zubi.
[SPEAKER_04]: Good to meet you.
[SPEAKER_04]: Great to meet you too, man.
[SPEAKER_04]: No doubt, ma'am.
[SPEAKER_04]: Adnan, I've done a very brief intro there, but for my listeners around the world, please introduce yourself and tell them what you're about.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so my name is Adnan Josaath, I'm the founder or CEO of Trilam, ME.
[SPEAKER_00]: Trilam is the largest marketplace for sneakers, street to accessories in the Middle East.
[SPEAKER_00]: I also founded multiple other companies and startups in the UAE Middle East, South Africa, Canada, etc.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, my current startup at the moment is Trilam, ME, what Trilam, ME, Middle East.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, we we the regions, we started about
[SPEAKER_00]: Three years ago, and today we are the region's number one pioneer marketplace for accessories, street wear sneakers, watches, handbags, anything you can think of that's collectible with a number one marketplace.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've got about fifty five thousand users at the moment.
[SPEAKER_00]: We span across three countries in the Middle East as well as Africa.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we work with some of the biggest celebrity endorsers that you can think of.
[SPEAKER_00]: We work with names such as Jason DiRulo, Post Malone, Swaley, the Meagos group on and on.
[SPEAKER_00]: We work across different talent groups.
[SPEAKER_00]: We work in the music sector.
[SPEAKER_00]: We work in the fitness sector.
[SPEAKER_00]: We work in the beauty sector, etc.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, that's a great description.
[SPEAKER_04]: Awesome.
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, firstly, congratulations.
[SPEAKER_04]: Thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_04]: No doubt, man.
[SPEAKER_04]: Tell me a little bit about your background.
[SPEAKER_04]: Where are you from?
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'm from South Africa.
[SPEAKER_00]: Currently, I'm just in twenty two.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was a twenty one.
[SPEAKER_00]: About three weeks ago, I just in twenty two.
[SPEAKER_00]: Happy belated.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, I grew up in Dubai.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think Dubai is a fantastic place to cultivate and grow as a young man, especially in terms of business.
[SPEAKER_00]: Things are so easy, things are so flexible.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't have to jump through too many hoops to start a business to grow a business.
[SPEAKER_00]: And like I said, like we had a discussion before, I told you I'm in and out of South Africa and Dubai.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they both have the opposing cons, but what I like about Dubai, which is where we shooting this podcast now, is Dubai has made it such a cohesive help for people who want to start, grow businesses, especially online businesses.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's not much legislation, there's not much regulation.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's very easy for someone, even a young guy, someone who's watching this this night in a clinic, to come here and actually start a full-fledged, respectable,
[SPEAKER_00]: online e-commerce business.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even if you're looking to go in the retail sector, Dubai I think is a hub for for business.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think if you're looking to start a business, Dubai is a fantastic place.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's where I am.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I mean, these place pros and cons like every place.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course.
[SPEAKER_04]: What was it like growing up in Dubai actually?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do I as interesting?
[SPEAKER_00]: Growing up, I guess it's strange in the sense that it's so safe, it's sort of like a bubble, that when you go anywhere else, you feel a bit out of place.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because when you come to the bottom to worry about too much, you can drive where you want to, you can eat where you want to.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can go out late at night, especially as a female, is very safe.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you go to other countries, I guess you feel that sense of something could happen, you always on edge, maybe you're a bit paranoid when you go to other places.
[SPEAKER_00]: So Dubai is very nice in that sense growing up.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think as you get older and depending on your set of values, you have to choose what you value, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you value safety, then you are accepting the place for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you value other things, if you value freedom and democracy, then obviously it's not the place for you, then you've got to make your decision.
[SPEAKER_00]: But growing up, I think it's a fantastic place to grow up.
[SPEAKER_00]: But again, like I said, it's a bubble.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you've got to make the decision to actually go out there and explore, because the rest of the world is not like to buy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_04]: And so your family is originally from South Africa.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's right.
[SPEAKER_04]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_04]: So South Africa and in Johannesburg, you said, correct.
[SPEAKER_04]: So Johannesburg and Dubai, those are two very very different cities.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_04]: What was it like growing up?
[SPEAKER_04]: kind of doing that back and forth between the two, especially given what you were just saying about safety and security, because Johannesburg, unfortunately, I've actually been there a couple of times, but it doesn't have the best reputation for safety.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's known to be somewhere with quite a lot of crime, and then Dubai is one of these safer cities in the entire world, so I'm kind of curious.
[SPEAKER_04]: Less so, I mean, I guess you can speak, as a adult, but particularly when you are younger,
[SPEAKER_04]: growing up and kind of going back and forth between those two was that strange where there any particular sort of safeguard you had to take or conversations you had to have with your parents or anything like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's an interesting question, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because it's sort of polar opposites, device so safe, and that's an African, the other end is so dangerous.
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess the main thing is, look, when we leave, you buy the moment, you order to buy a space that sort of paranoid switch turns on your head.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, it's like watch out, you know, as soon as you land on edge, you're looking at every guy that comes next to you, who walks next to you, who might approach you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And as soon as you land, as soon as you get out of the airport, then you've got to get guards, which is so different to you, because when you, yeah, you don't even think about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you land, as soon as you land, you've got to get your car, you get guards, and then you sort of go in a convoy to your house.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like the basic things we take for granted, like driving from the airport to your house, you can't even do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So one say.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you get there, like I said, that switch sort of turns on, I've got to make sure you save, you're going to make sure you get some sort of protection, whether it's your own or external.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then when you get to your house and the security boom is open up and the fences switch off.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you know, it's just so many different mechanisms and things that you've got to jump to make sure that you and your family are safe.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's definitely a, it's a massive switch compared to Dubai because in Dubai you so safe they it's so dangerous that your mindset totally has to shift and if you have the Dubai mindset South Africa you're going to get killed by it, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You just think you can walk at night and go dry whenever you want them.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no such thing as a dangerous area because yeah, I don't think they are dangerous areas.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're, they are definitely like most places in the world dangerous areas that you just don't go, they're off limits.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you gotta have the sort of personality to say, okay, this is where I am and this is what I got to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think if you do that, you'll be fine, like in most countries, but the switch is phenomenal.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there's pros and cons.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't go back all the time because there isn't something great about the countries.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fantastic things about the country.
[SPEAKER_00]: But again, you just gotta be on edge and you gotta be aware and say, okay, I'm in South Africa, let me follow South African rules and protocols and I'm in Dubai, okay, let me follow Dubai protocols.
[SPEAKER_04]: What do you love about South Africa?
[SPEAKER_00]: Many things, number one thing I love is the freedom.
[SPEAKER_00]: It allows you tremendous amounts of freedom.
[SPEAKER_00]: In terms of freedom of speech, movement, expression, religion, I think we have the most number of religions in South Africa than anywhere in the world just because we so vast and accommodating in terms of how people can practice their religion openly and freely.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just the people, the culture, the constitution, the wildlife, the nature, the scenery.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can go on and on.
[SPEAKER_00]: South Africa is a fantastic, beautiful place.
[SPEAKER_00]: I encourage everyone who's watching to go and visit at least once.
[SPEAKER_00]: The only downside that we have is the crime.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the only downside.
[SPEAKER_00]: I say this all the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: If crime didn't exist in South Africa, South Africa would be the number one place in the world.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was at least for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't realize how many freedoms, privileges and rights you are allowed in South Africa until you leave.
[SPEAKER_00]: I guess it's the same with most Western countries.
[SPEAKER_00]: You take a lot of things for granted.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, if you walk in the street and start protesting, you take that for granted.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, if you post something controversial that that's not mainstream or conservative online, you don't get any backlash for what you take that for granted.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's just the freedom aspect, the ability to do whatever you want, when you want, obviously as long as not infringement someone else is right.
[SPEAKER_00]: That thought exists in scarcity nowadays, I'd say.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's interesting.
[SPEAKER_04]: I've been thinking so much, especially over the last couple of years, about the relationship between freedom and safety.
[SPEAKER_04]: because a lot of people, particularly in the West and I'd say particularly Americans, they view safety and freedom almost as if they're opposites and they're on the sliding scale.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I tend to see it very differently.
[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, there's a couple of things that struck me about what you were saying there, which is I think that to have freedom, to have true proper of day-to-day freedom, there's a baseline level of safety that's required.
[SPEAKER_00]: I agree with that.
[SPEAKER_04]: So in some ways, somewhere like Johannesburg on paper is more free than Dubai.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: But if you're just saying, hey, you can't just travel freely.
[SPEAKER_04]: You can't just come out of the airport and get in your car.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm like, is that freedom?
[SPEAKER_04]: Like on paper?
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: On paper it is.
[SPEAKER_04]: But then in the reality, it's like, well, if you have to be so cautious and have such a level of vigilance that you're like, actually, I can't do that or I can't do that.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm like,
[SPEAKER_04]: way that then starts to take away from the freedom.
[SPEAKER_04]: So I'm just kind of thinking out loud here.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's not something I've fully formulated in my head, but I think that freedom and safety work together rather than against each other.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I think there's a difference between like
[SPEAKER_04]: on paper freedom and sort of day-to-day freedom.
[SPEAKER_04]: And then there's also elements of like financial freedom, for example.
[SPEAKER_04]: So someone might be telling me, like, oh, you know, I'm so free to do it.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I'm like, all right, how much do you pay in taxes?
[SPEAKER_04]: And they're like, oh, you know, forty percent or what?
[SPEAKER_04]: Okay, so if you don't do that, what happens?
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't know how you go to prison jail.
[SPEAKER_04]: Okay, so you have to give forty percent of everything, of everything you earn to the government every year, just to stay out of jail, are you free?
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_04]: I just think about these a lot.
[SPEAKER_04]: I like to take in the different perspectives.
[SPEAKER_04]: Maybe one day I'll write a book on the relationship between these things.
[SPEAKER_04]: Let's talk a little bit about your business.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just quickly.
[SPEAKER_00]: Go for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: I agree with your premise in the sense that you need a basic level of safety in order to accommodate your freedoms.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I do agree with that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd say, because I'm from Johannesburg, which is probably the meanest and prettiest part of South Africa.
[SPEAKER_00]: In that part, I agree with you.
[SPEAKER_00]: In that section, where it applies, where it's so unsafe that you can't conduct day-to-day activities without some formal protection.
[SPEAKER_00]: That is very dangerous.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think that your freedoms will apply there because it's just so unsafe.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I do agree with you.
[SPEAKER_00]: However, in the vast majority of South Africa, it is reasonably OK.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like most, I'd say, I'll compare it with maybe some countries
[SPEAKER_00]: in, I compared with the US, actually, in terms of safety, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: The moderates are pretty much the same on par.
[SPEAKER_00]: The current rates are pretty much on par with most states.
[SPEAKER_00]: So most of South Africa is okay and you do have the basic level of safety with the freedom.
[SPEAKER_00]: What I would say though is apart from once you do have, once you've acknowledged that you do need the basic level of safety to conduct those freedoms.
[SPEAKER_00]: What I then say is, okay, once you do have that safety, then
[SPEAKER_00]: You need to worry about not only safety from the people, but safety from the government.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's one thing I do feel that we haven't South Africa.
[SPEAKER_00]: We've got a government that respects people's rights.
[SPEAKER_00]: Or at least it's fighting too.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a difference.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I'd rather have a government that is probably at the moment not respecting my rights, but he's trying to.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then a government that says, no, we're just not going to respect your rights.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then you're trying to do something opposing to that.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, yes, I do agree with you.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've got to have a basic level of safety.
[SPEAKER_00]: But again, you've got to do that in a place that allows you your freedoms not only from the people, but from, let's say, a tyrannical government or government that's coming after you.
[SPEAKER_04]: freeest place in the world would probably be like a rural region of red state where you have the on paper, freedoms that come with the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
[SPEAKER_04]: but you're not in like an inner city area where while some of those rights are curtailed anyway, such as the Second Amendment, but also you then have the safety, you know, you don't have the level of safety that necessarily grants you the freedom to kind of go about your business in the way that you might.
[SPEAKER_04]: So yeah, it's an interesting conversation like when people
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, we all use language differently.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: And so when people say certain words, it means it means very different things.
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, so if I can tell someone, like, oh, you know, I live in Dubai, like, you get such a range of reactions.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's true.
[SPEAKER_00]: You get same right.
[SPEAKER_04]: You have some people, oh my gosh, you must have like no rights and no freedom of notice.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I'm kind of like,
[SPEAKER_04]: There is nothing that I want to do that I can't do here.
[SPEAKER_04]: There's nothing that I normal.
[SPEAKER_04]: There's nothing I do when I'm in the UK or I do when I'm in the US or whatever that like all of a sudden like I come to Dubai and like I can't that might not be true for everyone.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, depending on your lifestyle, depending on like what it is you do or whatever you know sure like there are some things where they're like actually you know what
[SPEAKER_04]: No, there's we're going to restrict this.
[SPEAKER_04]: We're going to restrict that and it changes place to place it even changes throughout history.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'd say the way Dubai is is actually very similar to how many western cities were just a couple of decades ago in terms of the
[SPEAKER_04]: laws and the way the sort of boundaries are.
[SPEAKER_04]: So yeah, it's a fascinating one.
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't want to get to, I don't want to get too, too, too down that rabbit hole.
[SPEAKER_04]: But I think it's an interesting, you know, my summary of it is I'm a big fan of just like, you know, go where you treated best, right?
[SPEAKER_01]: Like everyone's different.
[SPEAKER_01]: That's true.
[SPEAKER_04]: So I always tell people like, people know I travel a lot of been to lots of different countries, lots of different cities, and you always get the question of, oh, you know, where's the best place?
[SPEAKER_04]: like there's no best playman it depends on who you are everything from the climate to the type of food you like to the type of nature you like to be around deeper for urban or rural big cities small cities where's your family what's important to you what kind of business do you do of you an entrepreneur or you a digital known type or you a nine to five or you know there's no one single there's no one-size-fits-all there isn't
[SPEAKER_00]: No, and I'd say, like you said, if you move to like maybe somewhere in Texas or Utah where you can get that basic level of freedom with safety, with the freedoms that you are required to have, I think that's probably the best bet that you can have, but like you said, it depends on what you value, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you are a single guy and you're an entrepreneur, someone like me,
[SPEAKER_00]: and you're moving around and you quick and you just need to conduct business, I think device plays for you, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think if you value, if you like a two-way advocate or someone who loves their freedoms and protection, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Then I think the US and South Africa is a place for you, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Where you can keep in bear arms to protect your freedoms and freedom's the most valuable thing that you have.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's a place for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Again, if you married and you have children, that's a different question, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you want your kids to be indoctrinated with?
[SPEAKER_00]: mainstream conservative ideas are not, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Then US probably not the place for you.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah, you said it's a mix.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's given take at all places, but you just got to decide what's best for you.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's all trade-offs.
[SPEAKER_04]: So you've been an entrepreneur your entire life?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd say, look, I started quite young, so I can see how it sounds like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I'd say from about sixteen, seventeen, I started getting this interested with school and focusing more on, you know, not only business, but what can I do to provide value?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I was sort of, I was sort of that guy in school where, okay, we learning stuff, but what am I doing?
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just consuming knowledge that is pretty much outdated, books read in the nineteen nineties, early two thousandths.
[SPEAKER_00]: with knowledge that I'm never going to use.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm learning business from teachers that have never started a business.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm learning economics from someone who's never been in economics for the first time.
[SPEAKER_00]: Learning history from someone who's never been in a historian.
[SPEAKER_00]: It just didn't make sense to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I said, OK, look, it's a difference between educating yourself with knowledge because that's very important.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm always for education and being a constant learner.
[SPEAKER_00]: And there's a difference between consuming knowledge for the sake of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's what most school is now.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's just consuming knowledge for the sake of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's to write the test and pass and then that's it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So from about that age, I started realizing that this is probably not the best path.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I stayed in school and I started doing other things on the side and I was making money and at the end of the day I was like, okay, let me actually learn about business.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I put that to the test and I said, okay, let me learn about business from someone who started a business.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you know spoke with family members and people who involved in business and we put together an idea a long story short and I started the first company that that we had and We scaled it up to eight million dollars and sold it by the time I was twenty years old work company was that this was also in the sneaking industry, okay, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a subsidiary of thriller me so the only before it was a marketplace It wasn't it just an e-commerce store, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So we still are keeping stock we were keeping stock right and we were we were growing we were going the the inventory we were growing the user base and
[SPEAKER_00]: We are asked about thirty five thousand users.
[SPEAKER_00]: We got a valuation based on the marketplace MVP that we had the one that's running now.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at that age, I pretty much said okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is working, and this is something that I'm doing that's providing value.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me focus on harness my talents on this rather than continuing higher education, which I feel is not the right move for nine and a nine percent of people.
[SPEAKER_00]: Obviously if you want to be a doctor engineer then that's the path for you, but I'd say for nine and a nine percent of people it's not.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I decided to pursue that path and luckily turned out and I started getting involved in the startup world and business world and
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that was the right path for me at the time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, time will tell, but I think that's a right path.
[SPEAKER_04]: And am I right in saying your parents are entrepreneurs?
[SPEAKER_00]: So my family is involved in business in South Africa.
[SPEAKER_00]: My father is definitely, you know, a key role model of the person I went to to ask for business advice and still helps me day to day when I need help.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, we got a family business in South Africa and we always had sort of a business mindset, you know, entrepreneurship is the way to go.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that really propelled me from a young age to also say, okay, I had a support.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had a support structure to encourage me to pursue business.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think a lot of people don't have that.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's very important.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think most guys, if they tell their parents, okay, we're going to start a business.
[SPEAKER_00]: They'll think that something can happen with them.
[SPEAKER_00]: They'll say, no, just stick with school.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a safe option.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's the way to go.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what I didn't realize until I started building businesses and building companies is you don't realize how much external validation you used to get for the conservative choices that you made in the past.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you think about it, when you graduated school, it was like you found a solution to global warming.
[SPEAKER_00]: Guys were like fantastic, you know?
[SPEAKER_00]: You'd have a party and you'd have a big cake and tell someone you started a business to model, see what happens.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, congratulations.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, yes, it's important to have that structure to sort of encourage you that look what you're doing is the right move.
[SPEAKER_00]: But again, you've got to be true to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've got to cut out all that noise that says, no, you're not making the right decision.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, this is going to fail.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, you're not going to succeed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then sort of say, okay, I know what I want to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is the end goal.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to give it a time frame, and I'm going to put in the work, and then we're going to see what happens.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's interesting.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think a lot of guys now at the moment, they're struggling with which universities do pick, or which degree to take.
[SPEAKER_00]: And everyone's encouraging them.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's fantastic.
[SPEAKER_00]: I agree to a point.
[SPEAKER_04]: You've raised so many interesting points here.
[SPEAKER_04]: And my own view, I'm an Oxford University graduate.
[SPEAKER_04]: I graduated eighteen years ago.
[SPEAKER_04]: I've got a degree in computer science.
[SPEAKER_04]: And what's fascinating is in the past eighteen years, my view of university in a higher education in general has changed quite a lot, but also the universities themselves have also changed a lot.
[SPEAKER_04]: In terms of the value proposition, so I mean the tuition fees in the UK, I don't even know about the US, but
[SPEAKER_04]: the cost to go to university has tripled since I graduated.
[SPEAKER_04]: So when my oldest brother say who's ten years older than me, when he went to university, you didn't even have to pay the tuition fees because it was taxpayer funded.
[SPEAKER_04]: So at the point of service, you did not pay anything.
[SPEAKER_04]: And then they got introduced and then just in less than twenty years, it's tripled.
[SPEAKER_04]: At the same time, the value of the degree itself, I would argue has decreased.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, partly because so many people are getting them, but also the education
[SPEAKER_04]: When I say education, I don't mean formal education, but the ability for people to educate themselves has changed.
[SPEAKER_04]: We now have this thing called the Internet.
[SPEAKER_04]: And sure, twenty years ago, if you wanted to learn how to be a programmer or you wanted to learn about this subject to that subject, you couldn't really do it.
[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, at best, you could go to a library.
[SPEAKER_04]: check out a whole bunch of books and try but it was very difficult.
[SPEAKER_04]: You didn't have all these courses, you didn't have YouTube videos, you didn't have online tutors, and so it's just, the landscape has changed so much that I've probably reached a conclusion which is quite similar to yours.
[SPEAKER_04]: What I say is that, you know, when people ask me like, you know, especially younger people, I should go to university, what do my thoughts?
[SPEAKER_04]: I think there's three, maybe four categories of people who I think should go to university.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think number one is you already touched on it.
[SPEAKER_04]: You want to go into a field and a vocation where you absolutely need a degree.
[SPEAKER_00]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_04]: You want to be an engineer, you want to be, you want to work in medicine, you want to be a doctor, you want to be a lawyer with still apply, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: There's certain jobs where it's like, okay, like you've got to, you've got to get the degree.
[SPEAKER_04]: So I'd say that's one category.
[SPEAKER_04]: Number two is if you can go
[SPEAKER_04]: without incurring any cost.
[SPEAKER_04]: So if you can get a full ride scholarship or your blessed to have parents who are going to pay your way, if you can go through it and you're not going to have any debt, then I think there's a value in education itself.
[SPEAKER_04]: If you're eighteen years old and you're not a hundred percent sure of what you want to do yet,
[SPEAKER_04]: There's no harm spending three years getting a degree meeting people doing all that.
[SPEAKER_04]: If it's not going to cause you, you're not going to come out a hundred grand in debt, then you know, why not do it?
[SPEAKER_04]: And then I'd also say the third would maybe be, and this sort of ties into the others, but like, if you're just like someone who's very, very academically capable and you want to do like a genuine useful degree, even if it's not something maybe you're going to apply in the exact field you go into, like I think there's a bunch of nonsense degrees.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: There's a lot of degrees where it's just like there's no there doesn't need to exist.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: There's no point.
[SPEAKER_04]: But if you're going to study a real subject and you're just like academically, you're an academically good person, then especially if number two also applies, then I'd say, okay, but outside of that, and most people, I don't think meet.
[SPEAKER_04]: No.
[SPEAKER_04]: All one, let alone multiple of those.
[SPEAKER_04]: Outside of that, I'd be like, I don't think it's worth it.
[SPEAKER_04]: If you ask me twenty years ago, I would say, I think most people should go to university.
[SPEAKER_04]: No, I'm like, yeah, I don't think most people should go.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think everybody should educate themselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's different.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't think education and university are the same thing there.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, that's a big differentiation.
[SPEAKER_00]: And people complete the tour long, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: They say, if you don't go to university, then you're not educating yourself.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, that's it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a big fallacy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Look, the main thing I agree with everything you said, I think the main thing that people don't realize is, when you go to university, if you go for one of those three reasons that you mentioned, I agree with you, I probably also get a thousand in the position.
[SPEAKER_00]: The main benefit or the main takeaway, I'd see people getting from university, is not so much the degree in the piece of paper at the end.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a network, but what I'd also say is, it's the ability to learn how to learn, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because most people don't know how to learn, because if you think about it,
[SPEAKER_00]: So when I started my first startup, I was reading a lot of books from startups, people who started startups, people who started businesses who founded big companies, public companies, and what I learned from them is they were all expert learners.
[SPEAKER_00]: They knew how to absorb information very quickly and how to apply it and went to apply it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they say the main degree that helped them, they ran a study and they said the main degree that helped people learn how to learn was, or become good at learning, was a physics degree.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, what?
[SPEAKER_00]: And then if you look, most of the guys that manage hedge funds and VCs and any of what most guys in finance, the top guys, they have a physics degree.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I was like, okay, that makes sense to a point.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I started developing deeper and I started extrapolating what they meant and what they meant is they didn't go to university to get a physics degree because they want to be a physicist.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were because physics gives you the best wireframe on how to think.
[SPEAKER_00]: How do you look at computer science exactly, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: On how to look at things from a different perspective and how to extrapolate it and critically think about things.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think if you go to university and the skill you get out of it is you learning how to learn.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a big benefit.
[SPEAKER_00]: And three years of your life is nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyone can give away three years, especially when you're nineteen, twenty years old, it's nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's the first thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: The second thing is you have to have a degree that's going to provide some value.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was speaking to a friend of mine, we were in business together and we worked together for a while and he said that his brother was going to university.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's fantastic.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, yeah, he's going to university and we had a big party.
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, amazing.
[SPEAKER_00]: What is he studying?
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, he's in the US.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, he was the West African lesbian poetry.
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, say it again.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, he's going, he got a scholarship.
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, he said, what?
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, West African lesbian poetry.
[SPEAKER_00]: As a major.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: I stop listening to him after that, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, I stopped the conversation.
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, OK, now I know that the university is this game, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And you look at the rates.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, the dropout rates in the US are like, forty one percent or something like that, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's ridiculous.
[SPEAKER_00]: And at the end of that, people who get degrees, they expect just to, they have the sense of entitlements.
[SPEAKER_00]: They've got a degree now.
[SPEAKER_00]: I expect we put in the workforce.
[SPEAKER_00]: They have no value.
[SPEAKER_00]: Most of them have no value unless you in a very critical field.
[SPEAKER_04]: They're a degrees that give you negative values.
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'd rather, if I were going to, if I were going to hire someone and two candidates and one of them has no degree and one of them has a degree in lesbian underwater basket.
[SPEAKER_04]: I will hire the person without the degree because I'm like, you weren't stupid enough to waste three.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's ridiculous.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's something like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And going into ridiculous.
[SPEAKER_00]: Presenting this done.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, and it's scary.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not only the fact that people are studying this, but the fact that it's taxpayer funded.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the scary part.
[SPEAKER_00]: My taxpayer, my taxpayer, my taxpayer dollars are going into these degrees.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you think this is a one-stop degree.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not a one-stop degree.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You got like, from psychology, you got about a hundred different offsets of what you can study.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's from social sciences.
[SPEAKER_00]: You got about a thousand different offsets of what you can study.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's absolutely ridiculous.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think that if you're going to university just for the sake of going to university, you wasting your time, you wasting money.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, no, most people think it's not day money.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're still wasting taxpayer money.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're still wasting time, money, energy, effort, resources.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think you're expanding these resources for no good reason.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think if you do have a valid reason to go there, you should.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another thing that I tell a lot of people is, if you're not going to go to university, but you don't know what to do, because it's a question I get asked a lot, especially young men, they say, you didn't go to university, I said, okay, I didn't go to university, but it's not a one-size-fits-all thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: So they say, what do you think I should do?
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, honestly, what I think you should do is go and find a job or a degree that you absolutely hate and go do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: And for a second, they think about it and they say, okay, that doesn't make sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, okay, give me a minute.
[SPEAKER_00]: Go and do something that you absolutely hate.
[SPEAKER_00]: And while you're doing that, you'll be doing it for a week, a month, three months, you'll be in probably the worst route of your life.
[SPEAKER_00]: You think, I hate what I'm doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that when you hate what you're doing, you'll find what you love.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what I did.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was in school and I hated school.
[SPEAKER_00]: What?
[SPEAKER_00]: Fully to your hate school.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because like I said, I was learning, I was consuming knowledge for the sake of consuming knowledge.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was consuming knowledge for test.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wasn't consuming knowledge for the pursuit of higher education and learning.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the stuff that I was learning, like I mentioned, I was being taught business by someone who was never in business.
[SPEAKER_00]: They make sense to me, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I was being taught history by someone who was never a historian.
[SPEAKER_00]: It didn't make sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: And all they did was they went through a similar teaching degree that would probably the books were written in the nineteen seventies, eighties hasn't been updated, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: We're starting the Cold War and everything that irrelevant to now they modern times and how it's like this doesn't make sense to me, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm all for education.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm all for learning.
[SPEAKER_00]: But when it's learning for the sake of learning, I think that's that's fruitless and pointless.
[SPEAKER_00]: So
[SPEAKER_00]: I was absolutely hated and I said, okay, I hate this.
[SPEAKER_00]: What would I rather be doing?
[SPEAKER_00]: And then I figured it out.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd rather be providing value in this industry, or doing this, or building this business, or joining this company for an internship.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd rather be doing all that stuff.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's amazing.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you're doing something that you hate, it's amazing how quickly you find the thing that you want to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think about it and a lot of them do it and a lot of them find what they're looking for by doing something that they hate.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's just my suggestion for people who don't know what to do because a lot of people they don't know what to do and they're just going to university because like I said, it's a conservative choice.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, going to university nothing's wrong with that parents are going to be happy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone's going to be happy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just do your thing, get your four years and get out.
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think it's a big mistake and I think people encouraging it is detrimental to anyone who's thinking of going to university.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's a strong statement, but I totally get where you're coming from.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's one of those...
[SPEAKER_04]: issues where I feel like the societal and generational software update has not taken place.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yes, because most parents like any any decent parents obviously they want their kids to do well.
[SPEAKER_04]: They want them to be successful.
[SPEAKER_04]: And their template for that is what worked when they were.
[SPEAKER_04]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_04]: So if your parents are I don't know in their fifties or sixties or seventies or even eighties,
[SPEAKER_04]: then in that time, I mean, if you rewind the clock, then going to university, whether you're in the UK, the US South Africa, like it was almost a ticket to at least a certain level of success.
[SPEAKER_04]: It was almost guaranteed if you go to university and you do at least decently well, it's gonna open up all of these opportunities and you can go into all these fields.
[SPEAKER_04]: That was true up until pretty recently.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's only recently,
[SPEAKER_04]: that that's changed and suddenly you have all of these graduates and they're working as baristas and Starbucks, they're working in, you know, they're selling shoes and foot lockers or whatever, they're all they have degrees.
[SPEAKER_04]: And so there's that delay where, you know, people are raised with a certain set of values and expectations.
[SPEAKER_04]: And now I think people who are around my age maybe
[SPEAKER_04]: Let's say my age give or take ten years.
[SPEAKER_04]: They are going to raise their children.
[SPEAKER_04]: Sure, you'll still have some people who are like, look, the pattern is just to go to the university on someone.
[SPEAKER_04]: But there's going to be a lot more flexibility and a lot more thinking of like, okay, the game has changed.
[SPEAKER_04]: The cost has gone way up.
[SPEAKER_04]: The value has gone down.
[SPEAKER_04]: The opportunities for education and learning and work.
[SPEAKER_04]: are so much bigger now than they were before.
[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, gosh, who knows?
[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, by the time my son is eighteen, nineteen.
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't even know what is going to look like.
[SPEAKER_04]: All right.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's going to be different again.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like there's going to be new jobs that don't even, I mean, okay.
[SPEAKER_04]: If I think back to, I was born in nineteen eighty six.
[SPEAKER_04]: In nineteen eighty six, if someone were to explain to my parents how their son in the future was going to make a living.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, you couldn't even explain.
[SPEAKER_04]: There's there's almost no aspect of what I do that was even explainable because it's just like, oh yeah, he's gonna.
[SPEAKER_00]: So far fetched.
[SPEAKER_04]: What even are these things?
[SPEAKER_04]: The words don't even make sense.
[SPEAKER_04]: What the heck is that?
[SPEAKER_04]: What is this?
[SPEAKER_04]: What's social media?
[SPEAKER_04]: What does change drastically?
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, and so that's going to happen again.
[SPEAKER_04]: And twenty years there's going to be like all new technologies and avenues.
[SPEAKER_04]: There's going to be things that used to work, which it's like, okay, that's just
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's just dead now.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: That doesn't even exist anymore.
[SPEAKER_04]: And then there's going to be like something brand new way.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Hold me away.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And is that a scary thing?
[SPEAKER_00]: Does that make people uncomfortable not going to university?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: It does.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a scary, uncomfortable feeling.
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, you're leaving your child out there to sort of fan for himself.
[SPEAKER_00]: But is it necessary?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's the pill that you've got to swallow as a parent and as a student or as a young man.
[SPEAKER_00]: To say, that's a pill you've got to swallow to secure whatever goals you want to achieve.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because it's easy to say, I'm going to go to university and get a four-year degree and after that get placement and I'm going to work for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's an easy thing to say.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's actually difficult to say, no, what I'm going to do is I have a set goal in mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not a conservative.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not a mainstream goal.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a radical goal because this is a radical belief to not go to university nowadays.
[SPEAKER_00]: And to say that regardless of what everyone is saying, I got ten people telling me, no, when the only person telling me, yes, it's myself.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's an uncomfortable feeling.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think it's necessary for most young men nowadays to say, is what I want to do, or does what I want to do require degree.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if the answer is yes, then go for it.
[SPEAKER_00]: If the answer is no, then you go to swallow the pill and say, OK, I got to do what I got to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm going to rough it out.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm going to learn from the best.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to learn from people that have experience.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not something I don't get about people.
[SPEAKER_00]: What most people don't realize, and this is not a shortcut, because I don't like shortcuts, but if someone wants to achieve something, a lot of young guys come to me and say, I want to achieve something.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to buy a specific car, I want to get a specific house in an area, or I want to build this business, so I want to grow my Instagram or whatever they tell me.
[SPEAKER_00]: First thing I say is, okay, there's someone out there in the world who's done what you wanted to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, you know, you say yes.
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, okay, then go speak to them or find out what they did, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: If someone wants to buy, let's say a range of, don't go talk to someone who has a deal because he's talking to tell you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Go ask a guy out of buy a range of and say, okay, what I did was I set aside money every month and I put it in an index fund and after three years I was able to buy the car.
[SPEAKER_00]: He'll give you a route to follow.
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone wants to build a successful business.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, it's true.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm a percent.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I'm saying if you want to achieve a specific goal, go find someone who's done it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because whatever you want to do, someone else is done it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So instead of going to someone who hasn't started a business, I'll send them a business advice, which doesn't make sense, which happens more than you think.
[SPEAKER_00]: which is like it's the same thing with university and a busy degree.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why would you go learn from the professor who's forty years old never started a business, reading documents and books from nineteen ninety about how business works.
[SPEAKER_00]: When you can go speak to someone now who's running a business and take up an hour of their time and listen to them.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's never been easier to do that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's never been easier.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can literally go on YouTube and learn from everyone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anyone you want, they're probably made a YouTube video and you can go learn about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the thing most people don't realize.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's so easy to absorb this information from people who have done what you want to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's just a matter of going out there and doing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a radical idea.
[SPEAKER_04]: It is.
[SPEAKER_04]: You're touching on something else that I've been thinking a lot about recently.
[SPEAKER_04]: And this is the concept of agency.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I think that everything you and I are both high agency individuals.
[SPEAKER_04]: If there's a bell curve of agency, and you have the lowest in the high, anyone, anyone who's an entrepreneur is going to be an high agency person, which means that you are a lot more comfortable with feeling like you are in the driver seat of your life, and you can make these decisions, and you can go against the grain, and you can question the majority or the conservative opinion, and so on.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm increasingly coming to the conclusion that most people are not like that.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's true.
[SPEAKER_04]: And you've got the extreme other end where people feel like they're just completely, you know, the kind of people who don't even... There are people out there who pretty much think like everything is just like.
[SPEAKER_04]: Right.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like their their world view is just like everything's luck, you know, rich get rich or a pull get poorer.
[SPEAKER_04]: You can't go up.
[SPEAKER_04]: You can't go to like it's just you're just kind of worried things at face.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, there's there's there's that very low agency top thinking most people are kind of somewhere in the middle.
[SPEAKER_04]: Which is why you know for most people it's you they want to have like a very clear established path that millions or billions of people have taken and test it and it's tried and tested and
[SPEAKER_04]: I just think with the way the world is changing and the way technology is changing, the way business is changing is it's increasingly tilting towards high agency.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I don't know, I could be wrong.
[SPEAKER_04]: I would like to think you can sort of take anyone and make them higher agency.
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't know if you can in the same way that like
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, you can make someone more entrepreneurial, but if someone's just, you know, you can't kind of just, I don't know if you're going to take the average person and turn them into like a great entrepreneurial kind of like it's in you, same like art, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Can you make someone more creative?
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, but some people are just like creative.
[SPEAKER_04]: They're just creative people.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I think the agency is kind of like that on that same, on that same bell curve.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I don't know what the
[SPEAKER_04]: There's a change in what the sort of societal defaults is in this regard with higher education and then work, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Just, you know, it's always been, you know, go to school, you get a degree, you know, get a job work.
[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, people used to work one job from twenty until
[SPEAKER_04]: until they retire that used to be the norm now it's like I don't know how long the average job lasts but probably a few years most people are going to move around a little sideways up down yeah that's kind of how it is and I just think you know again ten years from now twenty years from now it's going to be even it's going to be even more different so yeah I don't know I'm just I'm thinking out loud here I wonder what the
[SPEAKER_04]: I wonder what that solution is going to be for a large chunk of people who are not as comfortable with.
[SPEAKER_04]: You see this and everything.
[SPEAKER_04]: You see it, you see it like an investing for example.
[SPEAKER_04]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_04]: So like most people,
[SPEAKER_04]: Most people do not invest at all.
[SPEAKER_04]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_04]: That kind of blows my mind.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's that's insane.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's kind of crazy.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm like, sure.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like most people have no investments.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's true.
[SPEAKER_04]: No no stocks, no Bitcoin, no real estate.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like most people don't invest.
[SPEAKER_04]: Most people are so conserved.
[SPEAKER_04]: Even if they have money, a lot of people like they just put it, just play and save.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Which, of course, inflation is going to eat it away anyway.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm going to kill its purchasing power.
[SPEAKER_04]: But like
[SPEAKER_04]: It's fascinating.
[SPEAKER_04]: I mean, I don't know if you're into, I don't know if you're like a Bitcoin guy.
[SPEAKER_04]: But even with like, I'm very staunch Bitcoin advocate.
[SPEAKER_04]: But it's kind of fascinating to me the way people respond.
[SPEAKER_04]: So Bitcoin's now been around for over fifteen years.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: And obviously it's gone from being worth less than one cent to as we speak over a hundred thousand dollars per unit.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: And it's going to, I believe, it's going to go to a million, ten million.
[SPEAKER_04]: But anyway, but it's kind of fascinating.
[SPEAKER_04]: And there's never been something that's like,
[SPEAKER_04]: easier to invest in.
[SPEAKER_04]: You don't need like a brokerage account.
[SPEAKER_04]: You don't need to be a high net where you can start with a dollar, you know, ninety seven percent of the world owns zero Satosh like nothing, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: So after fifteen years and two trillion dollar market cap, only three to four percent of the global population is currently is currently participating.
[SPEAKER_04]: and the amount of people, and I'm talking like, even like smart people, I know who I'm like, you try to like explain it often there just like, I can't take that risk or I can't.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm like, I'm not saying take your life savings, I put, I'm just like, don't you think you'd have some?
[SPEAKER_04]: Take a bit, yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: And it's so hard to convince.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm just like, man, it's very, very difficult to change.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yes, when someone has like their worldview, this is how we do things, just to even get them to like steps.
[SPEAKER_04]: slightly outside would be like, you know what, maybe I'll just take zero point one percent and yeah, yeah, you know, kind of put it in there.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's a tunnel vision most people have.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's balancing the paradigm between society, expectation and choices.
[SPEAKER_00]: What choices you're going to make.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's interesting point.
[SPEAKER_00]: You put it up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you take the average man and turn him into, let's say, a one percent man.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's an interesting question.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it depends on a few factors.
[SPEAKER_00]: The most important factor is how much does he value society expectation?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because if an average man, because I think an average man value or a place of society expectation of very high pedestal, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: In the sense, if I make this decision, what would other people think?
[SPEAKER_00]: If I start this business, what are other people think of me?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's their own.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, that's a normal thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's to probably be the hardest or the biggest hurdle that you'll have to overcome if you want to proceed that route and you want to turn an average man into a successful one percent guy.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's changing how they perceive other people and how they interpret what other people think of them.
[SPEAKER_00]: If they can completely eradicate societies' expectations for them, then I think you can pretty much turn the average guy to the one percent guy.
[SPEAKER_04]: But then he's not.
[SPEAKER_00]: The question is, can you?
[SPEAKER_00]: But then he's not average.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then he's not average.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then you've done it, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Then you've turned him into the one thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think that's what I mean when I'm talking about agency because it's essentially, when I say, use the term agency, it's essentially how much do you believe that you are in the driver's seat?
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: How much do you believe that you versus society, culture, the economy, all these other external factors, you know, over the course of a lifetime, look, none of us choose where we're born, when we're born, like there's a lot of randomness.
[SPEAKER_04]: But I always say like, the older you are, the more responsible you are for the state of your life.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_04]: So if you're, no one's going to look at a five year old and be like, oh, hey, like you're responsible for you.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like at five, you, you've had no chance to make any decision.
[SPEAKER_04]: You're just born here, whatever, your life, you're not controlling the wheel.
[SPEAKER_04]: At twenty, there are also aren't a lot of expectations, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: For most people, like no one expects a twenty year old to like have it all figured out and you've already, by the time you get to thirty, forty, fifty.
[SPEAKER_04]: So like by the time you're seventy, if you're still saying, oh, you know, like, if you still don't figure it out, it's less, it's kind of like, especially if you're in a country that has opportunities, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: If you're just stuck in some terrible place, that's different.
[SPEAKER_04]: But if you're in the USA, or you're in the UK, or you're in Dubai, it's like,
[SPEAKER_04]: OK, man, you've had like, fifty-two years of adult life.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: To like, what have you done?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a kind of figures like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: But there are people who are just like, oh, well, you know, it's not me.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's everything about that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's everything about them, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not taking self accountability.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll tell you interesting story about society, expectations, actually.
[SPEAKER_00]: So we recently done an investment round, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: For the start-up within investment round, we raised twelve million dollars.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this went public.
[SPEAKER_00]: It went a couple of business websites.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I got about fifty calls within the hour, OK, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Just people that know me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the first question they said was congratulations.
[SPEAKER_00]: I said thank you and they said you just got twelve million dollars.
[SPEAKER_00]: I said no.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't get twelve million dollars, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: The business got twelve million dollars.
[SPEAKER_00]: They said okay, but how much did you get?
[SPEAKER_00]: I said zero.
[SPEAKER_00]: They said wait, why?
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, zero, they said, what do you mean?
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, I don't need the money.
[SPEAKER_00]: The business needs the money, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: The money was for the evaluation of the business.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was for certain things.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the business needs more than I do.
[SPEAKER_00]: The business is going to grow exponentially because of these funds.
[SPEAKER_00]: They said, what about you?
[SPEAKER_00]: You're putting in the work and you working eighteen hours and don't you don't you need an amount from that?
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, I do, but I won't take it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone was flabbergasted, it was like, that doesn't make sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's probably the day that I stopped Colterky listening to scientists, because they didn't understand, they didn't understand my top process was, I don't care.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm okay eating five dollar meals a day, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm okay driving in some beat-up car or being driven around.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't need all that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't need a fancy house.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't need a big watch.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't need any of that, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't need a big name, nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that doesn't make sense.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's when I realize society's expectation means nothing.
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's when you totally disregard what people think about you.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's when you're learning begins.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think most young men need this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Not only do they need to disregard what society thinks about them.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think what's more important is they need to be in a position of stress.
[SPEAKER_00]: They need to be under that feeling of, okay, I've got to achieve certain things because when you've got investors and people you've got to make happy and stockholders and people that expect certain things from you, it's a different level of pressure.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think most young men need that pressure because that's where you find yourself.
[SPEAKER_00]: Most young men, I see out there, like you said, aside, it doesn't have much expectation for a twin-year-old.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that you should have an expectation for yourself as a twin-year-old.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think as a twin-year-old, you shouldn't be out there partying every weekend and spending money and working at Starbucks.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think you should be doing that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think you should be enjoying as much stress as possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because that's where you find yourself.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need purpose and you only find purpose through adversity.
[SPEAKER_00]: You only find purpose when things are difficult and tough when you're in the grid.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's where you find yourself.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's where you find your purpose.
[SPEAKER_00]: And like I told you in the beginning, I was reading a lot of starter books in the early age.
[SPEAKER_00]: And one quote that stuck with me was, I think it was Peter Thiel.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, they asked him, what do you think the purpose of life is?
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said, well, I think the purpose of life is to find your purpose.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then spend every waking minute pursuing their purpose.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's quite simple and then I've sort of counterfactually changed that and I said okay This is what I tell young people because young people approach me every day and they say what do I do?
[SPEAKER_00]: Or what do you think the past should be and I think what's important is I love the keeps saying young people because you are young
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I am... It's true, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's true.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have to say young people.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have to say it, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because to be fair, I do say young people, but I got a lot of older people.
[SPEAKER_00]: I want to say older people, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: But older people messaging me, because they also in a predicament where they don't know what their purpose is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that in life you've got to find your purpose.
[SPEAKER_04]: There's something so interesting there, and this is something I've learned.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm obviously like...
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Sixteen years older than you, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: And even just from my own journey and my career and having spent gosh two decades at this point, even just on social media.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Something I've really learned is age.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think is less relevant than it used to be.
[SPEAKER_04]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_04]: I used to think when I was so say when when I was your age,
[SPEAKER_04]: I thought that I could only, I thought that to inspire someone, you had to be ahead of them in multiple regards.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I've now realized that inspiration runs in all sorts of directions.
[SPEAKER_04]: So age is one of those things, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: So you can be a twenty-two-year-old, and there can be someone out there who's forty-two, and they see what you're doing, and they hear what you're saying, and they take massive inspiration from it.
[SPEAKER_04]: Before I always use a lot like it kind of flow, older to younger, it flowed from this to this.
[SPEAKER_04]: And then also because life is so multidimensional, and there's so many different games,
[SPEAKER_04]: in life, that someone can be incredibly successful in one of them, but life, but so poorly, completely poorly.
[SPEAKER_04]: So you could have someone who's quite literally like a multibillionaire, but when it comes to health and fitness, they're clueless.
[SPEAKER_04]: So they go to a gym and like they're at the bottom, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: So in the game of business and wealth and whatever they're like at the top, but then in this other one they're clueless or when it comes to like relationships or community like they're they're surprisingly bad at knowing how to and so you can actually just kind of like
[SPEAKER_04]: especially now with the internet and podcasts and all this there's not this thing of just like oh there's just this hierarchy and it flows in one way you kind of find like it's in in all directions you got young people inspiring older people older people inspiring younger people this person it just and I think that's beautiful and I think that's I think that's um I think that's quite a big change that's happening I don't think it was always like that it always used to be like you know
[SPEAKER_00]: It's always high up here, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: The top applies the bottom now, it's just kind of.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the way it is.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you probably have a beautiful point because it's so perplexed and life is so multifaceted that you can excel in one thing and not in the other.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's why I think I wouldn't say higher education, which is higher education means university.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I'd say the pursuit of learning and excellence should apply no matter what age you are.
[SPEAKER_00]: So like I mentioned, I got people who are Twiny messaging me and asking me questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: I got people who are forty messaging me and asking me questions.
[SPEAKER_00]: People who are fifty.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's okay because I do the same thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't completely excel in all fields and what fields I don't excel in, I go ask people, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's a beautiful dichotomy in the sense that you can excel in one thing and someone else can excel in another thing and you can work together and both excel at the same things, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's definitely an interesting thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another thing is, with the young man, it's difficult when you see someone who's achieved whatever you want to achieve and become overwhelmed, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because you see someone who's okay, they got the money, they got the fitness, they got the relationship, they got the health, they've got on face value, everything.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I use starting from zero when it looks quite scary, it's overwhelming.
[SPEAKER_00]: But I think that's one thing most young people need to understand is, after you remove societal expectations, realize that at the end of the day,
[SPEAKER_00]: Everyone is human.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one excels at every single thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's something most young people don't understand because me and you understand perfectly because we've seen it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Most young people don't understand and they get overwhelmed and because they get overwhelmed, they don't even attempt one thing and they just quit.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's sad.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think the society encourages us with higher education in university and schools, you know, because they say it's so difficult to become the one percent guy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Just take the concept of choice at ninety-eight ninety-nine percent of other people too, and you will be fine.
[SPEAKER_00]: At least you won't be alone, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You'll be losing, but you won't be alone.
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead of winning and being alone, they'd rather have them lose and be with other people.
[SPEAKER_00]: So a lot of a lot of advice that I tell young people is you've got to set aside what society thinks of you.
[SPEAKER_00]: But importantly, you've got to figure out what you think of yourself.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've got to believe that you can actually achieve.
[SPEAKER_00]: And to a sense, you've got to be a bit delusional.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You've got to be a bit delusional to say, I'm going to go against the grain and I'm going to go against the curve and whatever they telling me is wrong or whatever I'm saying is right.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, well, you have to see it before others do.
[SPEAKER_04]: You have to see your own success before other people do.
[SPEAKER_04]: If you're going to do anything especially in the fields of
[SPEAKER_04]: creativity and entrepreneurship.
[SPEAKER_04]: There has to be a level of delusion because where you want to be and where you see yourself being is by definition vastly different from where you currently are.
[SPEAKER_04]: People are always going to people know
[SPEAKER_04]: you as you are.
[SPEAKER_04]: You're eighteen years old.
[SPEAKER_04]: You're twenty years old.
[SPEAKER_04]: You're forty years old.
[SPEAKER_04]: People around you, whether it's friends, it's family.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's a quite like people are used to just this is the way this person looks.
[SPEAKER_04]: This is the way they dress.
[SPEAKER_04]: This is how they are.
[SPEAKER_04]: And so if one day and as you alluded to many times, most people are sort of naturally conservative, meaning that they are averse to change.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: And so if all of a sudden this person who you've like always seen in this certain, even if they just like change their look, they change their hair, they change their hairstyle all of the say someone who's like, before, you know, they're overweight, they're a bit sloppy, whatever.
[SPEAKER_04]: They don't really take care of themselves.
[SPEAKER_04]: And then they just like, wow, they get, they get in shape and like, they're just like,
[SPEAKER_04]: Whoa, like, and there are people who don't really like that.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's true.
[SPEAKER_04]: I love that.
[SPEAKER_04]: I love seeing them.
[SPEAKER_04]: But there are some people who are like, oh, no, I don't really, like, I wanted you to stay, maybe they don't even consciously think it.
[SPEAKER_04]: But they're like, oh, no, I had this view of you and now I need to change.
[SPEAKER_04]: Now I need to kind of change it.
[SPEAKER_04]: And, you know, we hear a lot about crabs in a bucket and oftentimes, you know, there are haters, haters exist.
[SPEAKER_04]: But I think there are also a lot of people who just, they're not haters.
[SPEAKER_04]: but they quietly and inadvertently discourage people.
[SPEAKER_04]: A lot.
[SPEAKER_04]: You see this in many ways.
[SPEAKER_04]: Say you have someone who's overweight or they're obese and they do, they want to lose weight.
[SPEAKER_04]: And the hardest people, the people who make it hardest for them are often there.
[SPEAKER_04]: They're friends, they're families, they're boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, husband, who's like, oh, you know, come on, live a little bit or what about this?
[SPEAKER_04]: Oh, you're on a dough, you want to do this?
[SPEAKER_04]: They make these little comments, or they just instead of like supporting them and their diet, offering them stuff that they know they should be eating.
[SPEAKER_04]: And it's um, I don't know man human beings are human beings are funny like I love people but also there's some strange things in in psychology on the individual level and especially on the collective level where people kind of sabotage themselves.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yes, and they sabotage each other.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, sometimes it's intentional.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think most of the time it's it's not.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, they're actually trying to just
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't know, stay in their comfort zone and keep other people in their comfort zone.
[SPEAKER_04]: And, you know, they just don't want those things to change.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, it's a very interesting diagnosis.
[SPEAKER_00]: You brought up because it happens.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: It happens.
[SPEAKER_00]: And people at this cottage a lot because of what other people think of them and because of what other people say.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so you're in a circle and you support structures so important.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why I mentioned if you have, I think the most fortunate scenario you could be is if you are raised in a household that has good parents with good values and just a little bit of money.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it's probably the most fortunate scenario any of you in being can wish to be because you in that stage where you've got a good environment and you've got good values and you also understand the importance of working hard.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's probably the best propellant for success as a young guy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another thing is, look, I'm very in the sense hard on people who ask me what the thing they should do, because my viewpoint is nothing should stop you from achieving your goal.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, all these other things I look at as excuses.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, in the sense that people are discouraging me or people are telling me no, it's all excuses.
[SPEAKER_00]: At the end of the day, you've got to take self-contability.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you didn't get what you wanted to get, it's your fault and yours alone.
[SPEAKER_00]: No one else can dictate how your life's gonna go.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you try to lose weight, you're trying to gain muscle, you're trying to start a business, you're trying to buy a specific house.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever it is, if you have a set planning mind and you've got to be very gold-audentated, that's important.
[SPEAKER_00]: Most guys don't know what they want.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're just working.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you are gold-audentated, you should have no excuses and you should have no one delaying your process of getting what you want.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's an important skill.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a skill that needs to be developed.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it develops through time.
[SPEAKER_00]: It develops through failure.
[SPEAKER_00]: It develops through pressure.
[SPEAKER_00]: Once you're in pressure and you start losing, that's another reason I don't like high education because high education encourages or discourages failure.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the real world, think about it, if you go to university and you fail, that's a big thing, it's like horrible.
[SPEAKER_00]: The real world failure is not horrible, failure is fantastic, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'd love to fail as many times as possible because the more time that I fail, the closer I am to success, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone told me this early on when I was studying, because I was at a point where so many things were going wrong, and I was on the verge of stopping and quitting and probably pursuing something more conservative.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he said to me, how many times have you gone out and asked for investment?
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, probably about fifteen times.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, okay, what if I told you, you were ten times away from, yes, that on the ten times, the investors would say, yes, would you go do it?
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, yeah, of course.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, what if you were twenty times away from saying, yes, I said, yes, of course.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said, so could do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: And whenever you hit that number, increase it again.
[SPEAKER_00]: And again, and again, and that just shifted a mindset there.
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, okay, the end goal is not to actually achieve investment.
[SPEAKER_00]: The end goal is the relentless pursuit of excellence.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what it was.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was for me, and that's what he told me on face value.
[SPEAKER_00]: He said,
[SPEAKER_00]: Life is not about an end goal or retirement age and any of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Life is about the relentless pursuit of excellence and knowledge.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that never stops.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's why it's so motivating.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because there's no end goal.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you are a set figure in mind, I want to make a million dollars.
[SPEAKER_00]: After a million dollars, you're going to take your foot off the glass.
[SPEAKER_00]: And then that's it.
[SPEAKER_00]: You've lost purpose.
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, you'll probably realize there's not as much as you thought it was and realizing.
[SPEAKER_04]: If you have the motivation to make it to that level, then you'll be like, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_04]: You'll be good.
[SPEAKER_04]: I gotta keep moving.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, it's it's an interesting thought and that's why all that's why I'm very you mentioned a time at early.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm very much against it a time.
[SPEAKER_00]: What is your mention?
[SPEAKER_00]: Not retired.
[SPEAKER_04]: Huh?
[SPEAKER_04]: I mentioned not.
[SPEAKER_04]: No, there's no so much time.
[SPEAKER_04]: The only time I've ever been like.
[SPEAKER_04]: The time I most worried about my father.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Was when he he tried to retire.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_04]: He himself.
[SPEAKER_04]: It didn't it lasted like two to three months.
[SPEAKER_04]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_04]: But like when he was like retiring, I was actually like.
[SPEAKER_04]: a little concerned.
[SPEAKER_04]: I was like, I mean, he's like in his late seventies.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_04]: We, he's at the edge where you know, he probably like, you know, should, we thought he should go to that tire, but to society, but I was like, actually, like, I don't, I don't think that's a good idea.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like, I think that, I think that as a man, speaking broadly here, I think as a man, once you retire, the death clock starts ticking down.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's true.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think it does.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think it makes sense to take your foot off the pedal a little.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: And if you were working five days a week, cut it down to two or three, spend a, but like you can't, the whole idea, I'm going to just retire and I'm just going to play golf or sit on a bench or whatever.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think that, you know, it's easier to lose it.
[SPEAKER_04]: Just like if you stop going to the gym, it doesn't matter how long you've been training, if you stop training, your muscles are going to atrophy.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's true if your brain is well, your brain creativity, all that.
[SPEAKER_04]: even if you don't need the money, just you have to stay at least mentally engaged.
[SPEAKER_04]: If you're going to retire from work, you will at least need to take on something that's going to keep, especially if people get older.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, if people get into their sixties, seventies, eighties, like, you know, your brain, your brain deteriorates.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: And you have to stay engaged and stay doing things.
[SPEAKER_04]: And yeah, I think, I can't really speak for women, but I think certainly for men.
[SPEAKER_04]: I don't, yeah, I don't believe in like,
[SPEAKER_04]: full retirement.
[SPEAKER_04]: I believe in like a partial, you know, or I'm going to not just be on the grind, like I was before, but retiring overall.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like I see people who are like, you know, they've had some success early and you know, they're in like, they're thirty five or they're even forty five.
[SPEAKER_04]: And they're like, oh, I want to retire.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm like, bro, you want to retire at thirty five.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like,
[SPEAKER_04]: What are you going to do for the next?
[SPEAKER_04]: Sixty.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: What do you what do you what do you what do you plan and oftentimes that I'm just going to like do unlike bro you come back in six months.
[SPEAKER_04]: You're going to be bored.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I personally view retirement as a sial if you think about it.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, because if you think about it, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's say I think that a time and age let's say sixty five.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: By the time you're forty eight five by the time we're exactly but but for most people right by the time you forty you're already thinking okay my retirement's coming up by the time you fifty you can start easing off yeah but the time you fifty five sixty your foot can be off the gas and you're just counting down the days so that whole mindset shift so different to to someone like me someone like you
[SPEAKER_00]: As entrepreneurs, there's no end goal.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no finish line.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no such thing as once I get this or once I achieve this, I'm going to stop.
[SPEAKER_00]: It just doesn't exist.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a mindset shift you've got to head from a young age.
[SPEAKER_00]: From a young age, you've got to go after it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Even though you've made it or you've got what you wanted to get and achieve what you want to achieve, there's no taking your foot off the gas.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's no stopping it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Anything you've got to double down and go harder.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think that's something most guys don't realize.
[SPEAKER_04]: Do you know why I think as well, though, is I think a lot of people when they, they're thinking is, is way too far too selfish.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: So even I'm sure like a lot, you know, I'm not, I'm not begrudging any teenage guy or whatever because I've been a teenage guy, I get it, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: But like when you're, when you're in your teens or oftentimes in your early twenties, particularly if you're thinking about like success and wealth and career,
[SPEAKER_04]: You tend to think of it from a very selfish perspective, it tends to be like, I want that car, I want this type of house, I want that thing, I want to be, you tend to think that way.
[SPEAKER_04]: And when you do, well, number one actually, it actually, funnily enough, makes it harder to, hard to earn money.
[SPEAKER_04]: But actually, if you have a purpose and a service that's outside of yourself, you are thinking of like, okay, I've got a mission and I want to,
[SPEAKER_04]: I want to serve people.
[SPEAKER_04]: I want to this product or this service or this talent I have.
[SPEAKER_04]: I want to get it out to people and I want to improve their lives and stuff like shape or confidence value.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, once you are thinking in that mindset, then the idea of like, oh, I'm going to hit some number and stop.
[SPEAKER_04]: It doesn't it doesn't even make sense because it's like, okay, yeah, you're okay.
[SPEAKER_04]: Say you achieve some success by forty or by fifty or whatever.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's like, man, there's still all these people who could benefit from
[SPEAKER_04]: what I have to offer them.
[SPEAKER_04]: So why would I stop?
[SPEAKER_04]: No, I'm going to keep on going.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like my dad's a medical doctor.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I think with him, his mindset is kind of like, you know, he's been a doctor for like fifty years.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: And he has so much knowledge and he's directly helping people.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: So, and so it's like, I think his mindset is just like, well, as long as I can
[SPEAKER_04]: do this.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, make it impeccable.
[SPEAKER_04]: Why would I stop?
[SPEAKER_04]: It's not about like, oh, I need money, money, money.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's just like, hey, like, I'm helping people.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I'm helping make it impeccable.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, in a tangible way.
[SPEAKER_04]: So I think the reason why maybe some people have that idea of like, oh, I just want to kind of hit this number and then do this.
[SPEAKER_04]: And then normally I find by the time they've gone through the mindset shifts that actually allow them to even get to that point, they would have realized that, oh, no, the game's like way
[SPEAKER_04]: It's way bigger than this and it's not just about me and obviously people get older and they have, once they have like a family and so on then that also changes the thinking to a more generational one.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's not just maybe you have enough for yourself if you've been fortunate and you've done well but then it's like okay but what about what about my son?
[SPEAKER_04]: What do I thought about this?
[SPEAKER_04]: What about you know, then you start thinking of like I need to make sure that
[SPEAKER_04]: My great grandchild.
[SPEAKER_04]: Make sure that they're going to be your share.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, you start thinking that way.
[SPEAKER_04]: And when you look at people who have like huge levels of success, you can make time to think like, not in years, not in decades, like generations.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: They're just thinking of like, okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: Very long term.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, very very long term.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: Look, I'd say you one thing I'd say from what you said is you are way more merciful to young guys than me, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I'm a young guy.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know I know what young guys could be doing instead of what I'm doing, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't I still blame them.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't understand why you dedicate yourself as a young military age.
[SPEAKER_00]: Prime guy right you in the prime of your life you've got the most energy you ever gonna have you you can stay up for days without sleeping right you got no responsibilities no you don't have a wife you don't have a kids you don't have anything right all you got to do is putting the work for a couple years and you could and I don't understand what guys would rather be out partying and wasting their money yet
[SPEAKER_00]: and buying cars and going to clubs and it just doesn't make sense to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And so when you guys messaging message me and say, I want to be successful.
[SPEAKER_00]: I say, okay, what are you doing on the weekend?
[SPEAKER_00]: No, I'm going to clubs.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's programming.
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, oftentimes, you know, people think that you think it's program.
[SPEAKER_04]: I do.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, because especially if you're talking about the more sort of like materialistic, like a lot of times people want the
[SPEAKER_04]: people want the perks and the image of success and money more than actually want the true value.
[SPEAKER_04]: Or even like they don't want to go through the process.
[SPEAKER_04]: You want the results.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's like someone who wants to, I'll give you a good analogy, okay?
[SPEAKER_04]: It's like building a fantastic physique, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Whether you're a guy or a girl, you know, building a strong muscular, lean physique, like everyone.
[SPEAKER_04]: Everyone in the world, if you ask them, hey, would you like to look more like this?
[SPEAKER_04]: Everyone will say yes.
[SPEAKER_04]: But if it's like, okay, but it's a bunch.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's a big butt for years.
[SPEAKER_04]: You have to, this way, you have to train this off.
[SPEAKER_04]: And it's not even, it's not even a hypothetical.
[SPEAKER_04]: We know that most people don't want to go through the process due to it because the vast majority of people do not do it.
[SPEAKER_04]: If they really wanted to, they would.
[SPEAKER_04]: And they don't.
[SPEAKER_04]: So oftentimes when I'm talking to, when I'm talking to people, old young, whatever, and I think to me, everything we're saying here, what we're saying,
[SPEAKER_04]: This is for the people who are who complain or who say they want certain things.
[SPEAKER_04]: I often say it think like when I'm giving advice in general on social media or on a podcast or whatever, I'm like, this is for the people who are discontent.
[SPEAKER_04]: If you're just someone who's like, you know what?
[SPEAKER_04]: I just want to have like a totally average life.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's not my, I'm more ambitious than that personally, you're more ambitious than that.
[SPEAKER_04]: But you know what, people who are like that, it doesn't really bother me.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm kind of like, okay, that's not the way I'm worried, but like,
[SPEAKER_04]: Cool, I kind of, like, God bless you.
[SPEAKER_03]: And why do you?
[SPEAKER_04]: In a way, that's kind of a blessing because your expectations are not so, so, so, so sky high.
[SPEAKER_04]: If it's just that somebody blows like, you know what, like, I just want to earn like, you know, a decent salary and be able to pay my bills and, you know, hopefully like get married, have a couple kids and just kind of live a pretty normal life.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's totally fine.
[SPEAKER_04]: I think the people who you probably get frustrated by
[SPEAKER_04]: are the people who are like the complainers.
[SPEAKER_04]: The people who are like doing everything that's just like average or below, but they're saying they want this and this and like, okay, well in that case, yeah, you've got to cut out the excuse.
[SPEAKER_04]: You've got to change your habits.
[SPEAKER_04]: You've got to go hard.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like if you're saying that's what you actually want, then do it.
[SPEAKER_04]: If someone comes to me and is like, oh, Zubi, like, oh, I see, you know, you've been training a lot, whatever.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like, you know, I want to teach me about nutrition and diet and training and whatever.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm not annoyed by the person who's like, yeah, you know, I just don't like going to the gym and I can't be bothered.
[SPEAKER_00]: At least it's honest, yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm like, cool.
[SPEAKER_04]: I get annoyed by the person who's like, hey, I wanted this and then you give them the information and you tell them or whatever and then they don't.
[SPEAKER_04]: And then they don't do it or they're just making excuses or I woke up late or like, now you know you're annoying me.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, if you want to, if you want it, here's the path.
[SPEAKER_04]: If you're just honest and you're like, you know, yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: I can see what it takes to do all that and you know what, I just don't want to walk that hard at all.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm like, you know what, I'm not even going to, I'm not, I'm not bad at it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, more power to you.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the thing, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: What makes successful value, but is that it's hard to attain?
[SPEAKER_00]: Like anything, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: If everyone has it, you wouldn't want it.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that's what makes it valuable.
[SPEAKER_00]: My problem is when I, when I have young guys, yes, they also, their words are contrary to their actions.
[SPEAKER_00]: They say, I want to be successful now and do this, but then they're messaging me from a cloud boat at two AM and partying it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That, that just is logically incoherent to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: It just doesn't make sense, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So for those people, I got no time for, but I do have time for people.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll give you an example.
[SPEAKER_00]: I had a message yesterday.
[SPEAKER_00]: Two guys message me about ten minutes apart.
[SPEAKER_00]: One guy message me and he said, hey, I just finished school and, you know, I'm in Dubai, I'm with my girlfriend and I want to get, I want to be successful.
[SPEAKER_00]: Can you help me?
[SPEAKER_00]: Nah, I don't open messages like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then I got another guy, ten minutes later, probably he looked very similar to the first guy, probably very similar to the build.
[SPEAKER_00]: Pretty much the same guy, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Auto school doesn't know what to do and he message me.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he's message red, hey, he said, hey, I just finished school.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I was given by my parents two years to figure out what I want to do.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I really like what you're doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: And my offer to you is I want to come and work for free.
[SPEAKER_00]: I work ten hours a day, six days a week.
[SPEAKER_00]: I only want major holidays like Christmas and that off.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we'll do this for three months.
[SPEAKER_00]: And after three months, if you're not happy, we'll part ways, no hard feeling.
[SPEAKER_00]: And if you're all happy, then I'd like to discuss a full time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have message in Instagram.
[SPEAKER_00]: I said, this guy got the mindset, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: The other guy, I'm not even having time for him.
[SPEAKER_00]: He's not going to get anyway with that mindset.
[SPEAKER_00]: This guy at least is willing to put in the work and he's going to get far and I had a similar opportunity about six months to go.
[SPEAKER_00]: Someone has message me like that looking for internship where they could just learn and absorb knowledge and figure out how businesses work and
[SPEAKER_00]: how our industry works.
[SPEAKER_00]: And now I set him up, he got his own company.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a subsidiary of one of all other companies, also in the fashion space.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he's a millionaire.
[SPEAKER_00]: And this was six years ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm a six months ago, six months ago.
[SPEAKER_00]: And he also approached, and six months ago he was doing internships and now he's managing millions.
[SPEAKER_00]: Good.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's just a mindset chef.
[SPEAKER_00]: People just got to understand that it's not about what you say, about what you do.
[SPEAKER_00]: The idea is easy, it's the execution that's difficult.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you're right, most people don't want to work so hard and have everything and that's okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's fine.
[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, go do your thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: But what I don't understand because I'm a young teenager.
[SPEAKER_00]: I can speak to a nonteenager, but I understand young teenagers in young men.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know what all the faces are.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can go to clubs and you can
[SPEAKER_00]: You know, go rent cars and you can go go with girls and you can do all that my question is why because I'm a young man.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't do any of that.
[SPEAKER_00]: I much prefer working and meetings and meeting with people and providing value and growing businesses and helping my family and helping other families.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the fact that I know that my team is large enough where we feed in ten, twenty, thirty families because they're working for us.
[SPEAKER_00]: That brings me more joy than going out, clubbing at two a.m.
[SPEAKER_00]: of all.
[SPEAKER_00]: You're an anomaly man.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's the thing, I don't understand it because... I'm not that special.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm not that special.
[SPEAKER_00]: I just put in the work.
[SPEAKER_04]: But you say that, but statistically you are.
[SPEAKER_04]: This is what I say.
[SPEAKER_04]: Statistics will prove you right.
[SPEAKER_04]: Often times, I know tons of successful people.
[SPEAKER_04]: Many, many, many brilliant people.
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, oftentimes extraordinary people are, you know, people who are like seemingly normal, who just do extraordinary things and who have a level of discipline and habits and a vision, which you just execute, they in the out for a long and a period of time, and it yields remarkable results.
[SPEAKER_04]: And for any young man who is listening to this, I would take that as motivation because what you're essentially saying is like, hey, the competition's pretty weak, man.
[SPEAKER_04]: like your competition is out there wasting time and wasting money and doing this and doing that and whatever.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like if you're a eighteen nineteen twenty-year-old guy and you like just lock in oftentimes when young people ask me like what's the first thing to do?
[SPEAKER_04]: My first thing you would usually I say is
[SPEAKER_04]: get an awesome shape.
[SPEAKER_04]: Because if you can do that, if you can build the discipline to go to the gym and lift weights multiple times a week and eat right multiple times a day and you can do that for a few.
[SPEAKER_04]: If you apply that same
[SPEAKER_04]: Those same principles, same thing in business.
[SPEAKER_04]: Anything else?
[SPEAKER_04]: Same thing.
[SPEAKER_04]: Then you'll be okay.
[SPEAKER_04]: In fact, you'll find it's easier because like our psychology and our bodies like there's so many temptations and finding this and finding it like if you can get that part.
[SPEAKER_04]: worked out, then almost, like, everything else becomes.
[SPEAKER_00]: I agree with you.
[SPEAKER_00]: That comes relatively easy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Fitness is a big testament to discipline, diligently.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can't fake it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's, of course, there's like steroids.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, whatever.
[SPEAKER_00]: But you're right.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's one thing you can't really buy.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you can't buy a good physique.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in some extent, you've got to put in the work.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: When I hire people, when my team assesses people, we do look at the physical attributes, plays a part.
[SPEAKER_00]: Right?
[SPEAKER_00]: If there's a fat guy and a guy that's in good shape, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm going to look, and if the resumes are pretty much the same, I'm going to pick the first example, because I know that he's disciplined.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know that he goes to the gym.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know that he doesn't miss a day.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know that he eats well.
[SPEAKER_00]: I know that he got some form of structure in his life.
[SPEAKER_00]: This fact guy just gives into his needs to his desires.
[SPEAKER_00]: If he wants to eat, if he wants to sleep, at least this guy got some form of structure.
[SPEAKER_00]: But going back to the young man, like you said, if the young man, let's just podcast, what I don't understand is
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a dopamine chasing culture.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a culture that only chases fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: What can I do today?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: What can I do tomorrow?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hey, let's do something this weekend.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're always chasing fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: I never understood that.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why would you?
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't need fun as a young man.
[SPEAKER_00]: You don't need fun.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need purpose, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: You need discipline.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need intelligence.
[SPEAKER_00]: You need to find what you're good at and spend the rest of your life doing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's what you need.
[SPEAKER_00]: As a young man, if a young man comes and says, what's fun to do?
[SPEAKER_00]: Doesn't make sense.
[SPEAKER_04]: You know what I have I have a little perspective on this as someone who's uh, yeah, please you know a decade and a half older than you and I think what a lot of those young guys don't realize Is that that it sounds so obvious but I strangely enough I don't think people realize this they don't think this way is that
[SPEAKER_04]: what you do in your late teens and twenties will determine the quality of your thirties and yeah so if you because in your twenties whether man or woman twenties people can get away with a lot of stuff physically like they can be out you know drinking and this and it's like
[SPEAKER_04]: Your body is balances back quickly enough that you can actually treat your body pretty badly.
[SPEAKER_04]: And in your twenties, you're not going to see so much damage.
[SPEAKER_04]: In the thirties, and then especially in force, it becomes like very obvious.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's why I'm thirty eight years old.
[SPEAKER_04]: There are people in my age who, if I told you, if I tell someone I'm twenty eight, they'll believe me.
[SPEAKER_04]: Okay, but there are people in my age who look fifty.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: And there are people in my age who look.
[SPEAKER_00]: Twenty eight.
[SPEAKER_04]: So that's when it really starts to split.
[SPEAKER_04]: Right.
[SPEAKER_04]: So I've been going to the gym now for since I was sixteen.
[SPEAKER_04]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_04]: Twenty two years.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: I've spent twenty two years regularly.
[SPEAKER_04]: You try to live wash them.
[SPEAKER_04]: And you know, I'm I'm barring any horrible accident or illness.
[SPEAKER_04]: I can guarantee ten years from now when I'm forty eight.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm not going to be looking like I'm approaching fifty.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm still going to be in great shape.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'll still be strong.
[SPEAKER_04]: Whatever.
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, and so
[SPEAKER_04]: I think a lot of guys in their twenties, they don't think, basically, if you do your twenties well, your thirties will be way better than your twenties.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: That's a good way of looking at your thirties.
[SPEAKER_04]: I can tell you, my thirties.
[SPEAKER_04]: I enjoyed my twenties.
[SPEAKER_04]: But my thirties, because of what I did in my twenties, my thirties have been a lot, have been even better.
[SPEAKER_04]: And I'd imagine this goes through for each year.
[SPEAKER_04]: If you just mess around in your twenties and you don't learn any skills and you don't save or invest any money and you're just doing this and this and this, then your thirties are gonna be like tougher because you haven't built anything yet.
[SPEAKER_04]: You've just spent the past decade, the last twelve years.
[SPEAKER_04]: Not building anything.
[SPEAKER_04]: You didn't build that work.
[SPEAKER_04]: You didn't build relationships.
[SPEAKER_04]: You didn't build wealth.
[SPEAKER_04]: You didn't build skills.
[SPEAKER_04]: And then you can, you know, you get guys who are in their forties and they're now
[SPEAKER_04]: They're in their forties and they're like, they're like, behind where you are because, and it's harder than because maybe now there are even additional responsibilities.
[SPEAKER_04]: Maybe they do have a couple of kids.
[SPEAKER_04]: Maybe they have got people, and it's like, and it gets harder.
[SPEAKER_04]: It gets harder.
[SPEAKER_04]: You're more tired.
[SPEAKER_04]: You need more sleep.
[SPEAKER_04]: You're brain, your body.
[SPEAKER_04]: All of these things are not as, like, there's not as on fires.
[SPEAKER_04]: It was when you were twenty-one.
[SPEAKER_04]: And it gets harder.
[SPEAKER_04]: So I think if people can kind of like extend their view out a little bit more, then it causes them to make better decisions.
[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: If you can think, okay, you're twenty two years old.
[SPEAKER_04]: What decisions can I make that the thirty two year old version of myself is going to say thank you.
[SPEAKER_04]: The forty two year old version of myself is going to say thank you.
[SPEAKER_04]: Right.
[SPEAKER_04]: What are the things I should not do and what are the things I should do because they're
[SPEAKER_04]: Man, it's fascinating.
[SPEAKER_04]: I've seen so many situations so many people around the world and like there are people who buy the time they're thirty like they've made their life so They've made it so difficult to now succeed.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, they've set up so many berries.
[SPEAKER_04]: They've got there's guys who are thirty and they have
[SPEAKER_04]: Three children from three different women.
[SPEAKER_04]: They don't even like any of them.
[SPEAKER_04]: They've got a criminal record.
[SPEAKER_04]: They've got some type of addiction.
[SPEAKER_04]: They're addicted to gambling or alcohol or drugs.
[SPEAKER_04]: And it's like, man, you, it doesn't mean you can't.
[SPEAKER_04]: If you're in that situation, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Like, yeah, you could still turn that amount out of the.
[SPEAKER_04]: But gosh, man, like you've made it so difficult and so complicated permanently.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Now for the rest of you, like you've got to deal with all of this stuff, like you don't even have the mental capacity.
[SPEAKER_04]: You don't even have the time to like do some of the things that we're saying.
[SPEAKER_04]: You're just like,
[SPEAKER_04]: Trying to stay afloat, you know, our child support payments?
[SPEAKER_00]: No, in that case you spun the web a bit too long, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, no, it's an important point.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's an important point.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's a one distinction to make, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: But going back to what you said about making choices that your future self will thank you for, and it's a good point.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think most young men need to adopt the idea of longevity thinking.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I said, it's a very short dopamine chasing culture.
[SPEAKER_00]: Today, tomorrow and next week, what can I do that will make me the most happy?
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's a detrimental culture.
[SPEAKER_00]: So yes, you need that sort of longevity approach.
[SPEAKER_00]: It says, okay, I'm nineteen now, in two years, I'm between in one, in four years, I'm in twenty five.
[SPEAKER_00]: What's the goal?
[SPEAKER_00]: What do I want to set myself?
[SPEAKER_00]: And that goes back to what I was saying, you've got to be goal-oriented.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're not goal-orientated, you're just going through life without a purpose.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's like, okay, something could happen tomorrow, okay, something's gonna happen next week, okay, good, okay, bad, okay, you go to sort of adopt a mindset that look, I know it sounds but stringent, the idea always seems easier than the execution, but just speaking from an idealistic standpoint purely.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you adopt that work work culture, you can do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like you mentioned, your twin is an amazing time because you can pretty much do whatever you want with your body and your recover.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can eat like shit.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can stay up late hours of the night, probably three days consistently, no sleep, very little sleep.
[SPEAKER_00]: You'll be fine in the next day.
[SPEAKER_00]: So it's up to you how you choose to use it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, you can use it, partying and going out late night or you could use it to work work work.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, like for example, when I worked, I sort of adopt the mindset.
[SPEAKER_00]: Actually, me a couple of guys that I know, we all adopted this mindset.
[SPEAKER_00]: This entrepreneur mindset, that's it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, we're going to work.
[SPEAKER_00]: Regardless of what happens.
[SPEAKER_00]: Business is going well.
[SPEAKER_00]: Work.
[SPEAKER_00]: Business doing shit.
[SPEAKER_00]: Work.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sign a new deal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Work related to dollars.
[SPEAKER_00]: Work.
[SPEAKER_00]: Business partners grew me over work.
[SPEAKER_00]: No matter what was happening, we adopted this work work mindset.
[SPEAKER_00]: And it's amazing, like you said, that mindset applies across all facets of life.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in the gym, you know that you're going to be consistent.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can't do five days one week and the next week take off.
[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't work like that.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's consistent daily targets that you set and over time that compounds and then that builds into something great.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that approach, like I said, is easy in an idea stage, but it's the execution that's difficult.
[SPEAKER_00]: And what most young men need to do is they need to switch their culture over from what's going to make me happy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I think as a man, your life's not supposed to be happy, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Maybe some men will disagree with me.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think you're supposed to be happy as a man.
[SPEAKER_00]: Am I happy?
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_00]: Do you know what the software is?
[SPEAKER_00]: You disagree with me.
[SPEAKER_04]: No, I don't disagree.
[SPEAKER_04]: I just think a lot of the type of people you're thinking you're talking about and you're addressing too.
[SPEAKER_04]: They have a very shallow view of what happiness means.
[SPEAKER_04]: They see happiness as a little, you know, dopamine.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm going to see subjective end of the short term dopamine spike.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: I do think that if you do, if you have good habits and you live with purpose and meaning and you are an asset and value to your family, to your community, to people, like you will be long-term, joyous.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like I am almost always happy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: That doesn't mean that in a short term basis, I'm always having like a dopamine spike by doing something.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: But if I look at my life,
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm like of course I'm happy like I should be but it's like I've built I've built and I've created that and if you have certain things foundation the thing with happiness as well is it's not
[SPEAKER_04]: The pillars that build long-term happiness have kind of been the same for millions of years, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It tends to be faith.
[SPEAKER_04]: Faith, family, the same meaning and purpose and health.
[SPEAKER_04]: These are really the core pillars.
[SPEAKER_04]: This is why whether someone is rich or poor or here or there, if they have those pillars, you could go to some poor village in Africa, or some part of Asia, or whatever South America, and if they have
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, good relationship with God, good relationship with their family, good relationship in their community.
[SPEAKER_04]: They're doing so much community.
[SPEAKER_04]: They'll generally be happy.
[SPEAKER_04]: They will have a higher rate of happiness than most people in the West.
[SPEAKER_04]: But it's not the happiness of like, oh, like I went to a party or whatever.
[SPEAKER_04]: Or I saw a cool TikTok video.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's like a long term.
[SPEAKER_04]: Maybe it's better.
[SPEAKER_04]: I prefer to call it joy.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: All right.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like these are joyful.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Joyful people.
[SPEAKER_04]: And so yeah, I totally agree on the short term.
[SPEAKER_04]: If you're just chasing the short-term happiness, then you will miss out on the long-term drive because you won't set up those pillars to achieve it.
[SPEAKER_04]: And oftentimes when people are doing that, it's a scapeysome.
[SPEAKER_04]: Especially when it comes to things like drugs and alcohol.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's escapism.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's like you don't like the base state of your life.
[SPEAKER_04]: So you need to literally take something that filters your brain chemistry so that you can temporarily enjoy this, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: Or you're just playing a video game all the time because the video game is more fun than your real life.
[SPEAKER_04]: Real life should be more fun than the video game.
[SPEAKER_04]: Like I'm not here.
[SPEAKER_04]: Someone who's, you know, I think sometimes people take things to the extremes or you get people I never play video games.
[SPEAKER_04]: I like you don't need to
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, if you're playing for twelve hours a day and you're not a professional gamer, that's the problem.
[SPEAKER_04]: If you're dropping in for thirty minutes here an hour there, it's not going to cause some type of harm, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: But yeah, I just think, yeah, the happiness one is the happiness one is very interesting because if I look at the people who are long term happy, they tend to just have those four or five basic pillars in place.
[SPEAKER_04]: And then no matter what happens, even if there's a day where they're sad because something bad has happened,
[SPEAKER_04]: They still look at, they have a perspective and a gratitude with a lot of things like this sucks, but in the grand scheme of things, I'm still overall happy because I still have all of these other things in place.
[SPEAKER_04]: Someone could like, you know, the worst thing can even happen.
[SPEAKER_04]: You know, someone gets six, somebody dies.
[SPEAKER_04]: And this is some terrible accident.
[SPEAKER_04]: And yeah, temporarily temporarily, you're sad in your meant to be.
[SPEAKER_04]: But you're not like depressed.
[SPEAKER_04]: No, you're not like because it's like, no, no, like this is the grander scheme and that's part of where, you know, things like having faith and having meaning like play such a big role because you frame it in a certain way.
[SPEAKER_04]: You don't believe that, okay, this short term materialistic, well, this is the be all and end all of everything.
[SPEAKER_04]: Everything here's just, you know, short term hedonism, pleasure seeking, whatever.
[SPEAKER_04]: And the thing is you can see it as well because you can see
[SPEAKER_04]: Now more than ever, you can literally see and watch people who live that life.
[SPEAKER_04]: Man or woman, you can see the people who take that to the extreme.
[SPEAKER_04]: They just take the heat into them and you can see over the years and you're like, they're all end of this depressed.
[SPEAKER_04]: But end goal is always the same.
[SPEAKER_04]: Always, it's always the same.
[SPEAKER_04]: Sometimes suicide, like these are not happy.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, no.
[SPEAKER_04]: They're not happy.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're perceived happy, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's perceptive of happiness to them.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's not true happiness.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yeah, you made a very good point.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think
[SPEAKER_00]: For me, I personally think happiness changes over time, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So I think what makes you happy?
[SPEAKER_00]: A twinny will probably make you happy at something different, make you happy at forty and on and on.
[SPEAKER_00]: But yeah, like you said, when you build something of great value, not only to yourself but to other people.
[SPEAKER_00]: then that can be derived as a source of happiness.
[SPEAKER_00]: So when I go and I look at my company and I look at the office and I look at my employees and I know that my employees' families are getting fed because the business we built and I know that there's houses of people's heads and I know that we're providing other people value in different countries and I look at all of them and I say, okay, I built that.
[SPEAKER_00]: We created this.
[SPEAKER_00]: We funded this.
[SPEAKER_00]: We did this.
[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if happiness is to collect work but that's purposeful fault.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I think that's where you derive happiness, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: But what I don't perceive happiness is this, like you said, dopamine, chasing culture, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Wait, just whatever advice is going to make me happy, whatever activity is going to make me happy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let me do this.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I'll be honest with you, ninety nine percent of young men have this, have adopted this mentality, right?
[SPEAKER_04]: When I speak to guys, I wonder if, um,
[SPEAKER_04]: I wonder if that's like a generational shift because I don't think that in my high generation, I don't think it's a good question.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think it may be bad, because I don't think that was the case.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think social media is probably a fact.
[SPEAKER_00]: Social media is a big thing, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Because the whole TikTok scrolling thing, it's built on a dopamine culture, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: It's okay.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why you big on social.
[SPEAKER_00]: You'll know that the first, you know, two thirds of a second of the video or the person has already made up their mind of whether they're going to screw.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's how quickly the attention span has dropped.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's how much has dropped.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yes, I think there's a generational shift.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think two years ago, you know, if you were two years old and working a full-time job, that was perceived normal.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now you're two years old and if you're not going to university or you're not partying or clubbing out of a night, that's perceived as abnormal, just right?
[SPEAKER_00]: So this dopamine culture needs to change and it only changes through pressure, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: I think you need to put yourself in a form or in a state of voluntary pressure.
[SPEAKER_00]: So you need to go in and say, okay, this internship or this job is going to be hard, like the guy you message me.
[SPEAKER_00]: He wants to work ten hours a day.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not an easy task to work ten hours a day, six days a week.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a difficult thing to do, but he's voluntarily going into it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Another option is people join the military.
[SPEAKER_00]: Why did they join the military?
[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, they love the air country, but also they need the discipline, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: They want structure in their life.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's difficult, it's tough, and most of the times you'll see the people that come out the military are not the same people that went in there.
[SPEAKER_00]: They've got a different structure in life, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: And that will sort of pave the way for how they can live the rest of their life in terms of their marriages, their relationships, their fitness, their health, their business relationships.
[SPEAKER_00]: That all paves the way, but that all starts from when you build your base.
[SPEAKER_00]: And I encourage you guys to build their bases early as possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: So if you're seventeen, eighteen, and you're in school, and you've got a couple hours, and you can put yourself in a state of voluntary pressure.
[SPEAKER_00]: I recommend you do it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because I think your success is directly linked to the amount of pressure that you can handle.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you can only handle so much pressure, you're only going to be so successful.
[SPEAKER_00]: But if your capacity to handle pressure is immeasurable and it can keep going up and it's exponential, I think your success will dictate that as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it's the biggest point.
[SPEAKER_04]: You've made so many good points here and one thing I'll say to the cap it off is that I do think that I do think you should enjoy the process and I think that will happen if you are pursuing something that you are genuinely
[SPEAKER_04]: interested in and that you find some purpose in meaning even when it sucks even when you're having the crap days even when you're not making money or you're losing money or like yeah things are bad they're you'll still find an enjoyment yeah I've had so
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I've had so many times where like things like on a day to day based on my madness like sucks like this is crap, but it's okay because you have that belief in head you know why you're doing it
[SPEAKER_04]: So you know, okay, this is, uh, you know, I'm here and I'm trying to get up here.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: And this is like a dip.
[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: But I know I'm still going to get there.
[SPEAKER_04]: So sure.
[SPEAKER_04]: This is a minor setback, but you know what, I can sort of laugh at this and smile through it.
[SPEAKER_04]: Maybe even see the humor in it.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: And it allows you to just keep on going.
[SPEAKER_00]: Especially if you have good people around.
[SPEAKER_04]: It's just on that point.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's all about the journey.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's why I said the retirement is a side of things because that caps the genie.
[SPEAKER_00]: That caps the genie.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's an endpoint.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you don't have that endpoint and you're constantly working, like I said, the pursuit of excellence never stops.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you constantly adopt that mindset, that's the part that you enjoy.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because there's no end goal, the whole thing is a genie.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that's a difficult mindset to adopt.
[SPEAKER_00]: Like I said, the idea is easy.
[SPEAKER_00]: The execution is difficult.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the idea, like you said, is very important.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the idea and the mindset shift you need to have to say that it's not the angle, the money, whatever your angle is.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not the important point.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's what am I going to do or who's the person I'm going to become in order to achieve all that?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's the main thing.
[SPEAKER_04]: So, what is the long term goal in vision for Adnan?
[SPEAKER_04]: It's a good question.
[SPEAKER_04]: Fifty-two-year-old version of thirty years from now.
[SPEAKER_00]: Well, one thing I tell you is, I won't stop working.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll tell you that.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, but my main thesis or the way that I sort of live life is, I've got to be number one delivering value, number two pursuing excellence in the pursuit of learning.
[SPEAKER_00]: And number three, I just gotta make sure that I'm spending every minute, I have every waking minute working towards facilitating my life around that purpose.
[SPEAKER_00]: So in terms of business, you'll definitely see a few more businesses, a few more startups, maybe next time we'll have a conversation about a totally different business, maybe in a new industry, maybe a AI, right?
[SPEAKER_00]: Things are changing, things are changing rapidly, so am I, sorry with my team.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, we've got a lot of big things planned, but for now, like I said, I'm just trying to constantly work and build and provide as much failures possible.
[SPEAKER_00]: And hopefully, as a side effect of that, other people I inspire to also do what I'm trying to do.
[SPEAKER_04]: I love a man.
[SPEAKER_04]: Well, I support you in your mission.
[SPEAKER_04]: You're wise beyond your years, man.
[SPEAKER_04]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_04]: So, I'm excited to see where the future takes you.
[SPEAKER_04]: Thanks, okay.
[SPEAKER_04]: I'm glad to talk.
[SPEAKER_00]: Pleasure.