My Chat with Zuby, Rapper, Author, and Motivational Speaker (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_627)
Episode Stats
Words per minute
182.47174
Harmful content
Misogyny
3
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Toxicity
10
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Hate speech
11
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Summary
In this episode of The Sad Truth, I have a guest who has been kind enough to invite me on his show several times, and as we know from his hospitality, it's a grave violation to not reciprocate. He is a very interesting man, and I'm glad to have him on the show today. He's an uncle, a father, a husband, a brother, a son, a daughter, a step-son, a grand-child, a great-uncle, and a great friend. In this episode, we talk about his life, his family, and what it's like to be an uncle.
Transcript
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Today, I have a guest who's been kind enough to invite me several times on his show.
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And as we know from Middle Eastern hospitality, it's a grave violation to not reciprocate.
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I think it's going around everywhere around the world.
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My sister and my nephews were sick a couple of weeks ago.
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I actually went to visit them in hospital because my little baby nephew had to go into hospital
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And then as soon as I came back from Johannesburg, I got sick.
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So I think my body realized that that was when I was allowed to.
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So I took a couple of days out, but I'm back on it now.
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So again, apologies to all the listeners and viewers.
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If I cough in your ear, it's been about three weeks.
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You know, if I hope one day you have children, you realize that from the age of about when
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they first go into kindergarten till they get out of elementary, prepare to be perpetually
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And so once they got older, I actually noticed that I was much healthier because I wasn't catching
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I'm assuming that it is still within your big plan to have children.
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So I'm not a father yet, but I have certainly seen I've seen all four of my siblings go through
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the process and they're all going through the process right now.
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So even though I don't have my own children thus far, I absolutely plan to in the future.
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And I've got a lot of wonderful children in my family.
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Well, yesterday, I'm not sure if you saw it on social media, I announced that my wife
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and I were celebrating our 24th anniversary from 1999.
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And I discussed it in this baby, in The Sad Truth About Happiness, I discussed that one of
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the most important decisions is choosing the right spouse.
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Are you going to break all the women's hearts or what's going on?
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Yeah, I am taken as of about almost seven months ago.
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You mentioned just a few minutes ago, Johannesburg.
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Now, I've always had a desire to visit Cape Town.
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I've never been to South Africa, but Cape Town looks like a mix of Lebanon because of
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its kind of temperate Mediterranean-like temperature.
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Also looks like Southern California, where I lived for a few years.
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So actually, it was my second time in South Africa.
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I have a friend who lives in Joburg, and he got married over there in March.
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And since it was my first time in the country, I decided to stay an additional 12 days.
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So I spent time in both Johannesburg, and I spent 10 days in Cape Town as well.
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I even took the opportunity to climb up Table Mountain.
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I did a meetup there with some of my followers and supporters.
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I connected with some people who I'd done podcasts with over the years, but hadn't met
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And then when I was just in Johannesburg a couple of weeks ago, that one was just a two-day
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So I just went there to speak at an event called Psycho Finance Leaders.
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So it was a financial conference that they had going on, and they invited me to do a couple
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But this time, I actually got to see more of Johannesburg.
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So last time I saw more of Cape Town, this time I got to see a little bit more of Johannesburg.
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Cape Town is definitely more, it's more beautiful and more touristy.
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It's more of a place that people would sort of visit and spend time.
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Johannesburg is more of a big city, hustle and bustle, much more urban.
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It's a very green city, actually, very green, but not as much natural beauty.
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Now, of course, we always hear, oh, how dangerous it is and so on.
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Did you feel that there was an ominous threat looming over every corner?
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But at the same time, I'm very aware that there are particular areas of both of those
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So in Cape Town, for example, there's an area called Cape Flats, which is very notorious.
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It actually has one of the highest crime rates, I think, of any neighborhood, perhaps in the
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And then in Johannesburg, they have still got many of the, what do they call them, the
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And some of those areas are much more dangerous.
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I've heard downtown Johannesburg itself is actually pretty dangerous.
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Particularly if you go there at nighttime, many of the apartment blocks are essentially run
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They kind of just take over entire apartment blocks and then run their operations out of
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But at the same time, you can avoid it just by being wise and not wandering by yourself
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into dodgy looking areas at night, if you see what I mean.
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Just one last point on South Africa, then I want to move to Namibia in a second.
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But anyways, I had gone to see the movie Cry Freedom.
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Oh, I highly recommend it both to you and to all our viewers and listeners.
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It's a movie that recounts the story of the anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko.
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And as I say it, I'm getting goosebumps because, you know, whenever someone asks me, you know,
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what are some folks who, you know, inspired you and so on.
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And so Steve Biko was this, you know, as the term that I use was a real old school honey
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I mean, he's speaking out in an environment where it's going to go badly for you if you
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And then he wrote a book called I Write What I Like, meaning you're not going to constraint
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Of course, eventually he was tortured and killed.
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But what moved me so much when I was a young guy is it resonated with me.
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And so anyway, so if you haven't read it, if you haven't read that book, it's a short
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I write what I like and see the movie Cry Freedom.
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You know, often these movies play, you can catch them.
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It's kind of disappeared, but I'm sure you can find it somewhere.
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Yeah, I plan to visit at least 100 different countries.
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I think I'm on 43 right now, 43 or 44, but I'd like to get to 100 within my lifetime.
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Well, I mean, I guess 100 is just a nice round number, but why 100?
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And I guess I'm approaching the halfway mark of it.
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So I think, yeah, I just think it's a good number.
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I think at that point, I could say I've seen about half the countries in the world.
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I think it's around 203 that are in the United Nations or something around that.
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The reason why Namibia fascinates me is, well, first, from everything that I've seen,
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the topography, the landscape is otherworldly, right?
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You've got these dunes that then break straight into this ominous-looking ocean.
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So it's a very raw, as I said, otherworldly topography.
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But the other reason why I love Namibia is because I'm a huge animal lover.
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And yes, you can love animals and still eat salmon.
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Because, you know, I'll get the tofu brigade who'll come after me and say, you're such a hypocrite, right?
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You keep talking about loving animals, and yet you haven't gone vegan.
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So anyways, there's this very rare hyena called the brown hyena or long-haired hyena that is in the desert of Namibia.
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And it currently has taken over this old, abandoned ghost town, mining town called Elizabeth Bay.
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And these hyenas are known as the ghosts of the desert because they just kind of materialize out of thin air,
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And so it's always been my fantasy to go and actually see these beautiful mythical creatures.
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And so I'm trying to find a way to fit a trip into Namibia within some professional context.
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And so I've reached out to a few universities in Namibia to see if we can make something happen.
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So if I get there before you, I'll report back and let you know how it goes.
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I think one of the biggest blessings that I've had in my life is being able to travel from a very young age.
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And then I think that sort of just put inside of me some type of wanderlust and curiosity about the world.
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Anytime I see a map or I see a globe, I'm just staring at it and looking at places that I've been to,
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places I want to go to, places that spark my curiosity.
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There's many countries I've been to simply because I didn't know a lot of people who had been to them.
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So I just wanted to go there and see what it was like.
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So I've been to the many places that have a lot of tourism, but I've also been to a few countries that are not sort of major tourist destinations just out of curiosity.
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But yeah, I just think in this lifetime, having that opportunity to learn more about people, there's just so much to see.
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There's so much to see that I understand that not everyone has the opportunity to travel.
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But I think that for those who do have the opportunity and have the means, I sometimes struggle to understand how someone can totally be content to just spend their entire life for decades and decades and decades just only seeing a very, very small part of it when there's just so much out there.
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And to be honest, it's never been so easy and frankly, inexpensive to at least, you know, you don't have to go to every single country in the world, but at least to check out a couple others.
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In one of the chapters of my latest book, I talk about the importance of variety seeking and I talk about variety seeking, food variety seeking.
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Now, sexual variety seeking is fraught with some problems because if we're in a monogamous union, we may not want to violate that.
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But we also have a penchant for sexual variety seeking.
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I talk about intellectual variety seeking, which is something that, you know, academics try to pretend that they're for, but then they end up being hyper specialists who focus in a very, very narrow area.
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Whereas I argue that life is too short to not seek, you know, intellectual landscapes, country landscapes.
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So to your point, and so I think that's, you know, that's a fundamental recipe of happiness at the end of your life when you look back and you say, hey, I've been to 100 countries.
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I mean, people think of wealth as, you know, you know, Elon Musk is the most, you know, wealthy man who's ever lived, but let's suppose that he had never traveled.
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Well, then one could argue that Zuby, who's been to 100 countries, might be a wealthier guy in terms of the accumulated adventures and experiences.
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But so coming back to your trajectory, you said you grew up in several places.
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So maybe you could tell us about that and then maybe segue into how you've been able to build this incredible platform when, you know, one could argue it's very difficult to build it, right?
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You're not whatever, you know, you're not Joe Rogan somehow.
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And yet you've been able to be incredibly successful in building a platform that people listen to.
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And when I was a baby, my dad got a job offer to work in Saudi Arabia.
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So all my earliest memories begin in Saudi Arabia.
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He came back home and he told his wife, aka my mother, and his five children, hey, we're moving to Saudi Arabia.
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And so they went on, you know, on faith and on trust.
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And they went out there in the mid to late 80s and ended up staying there for about 20 years.
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My mom was working as a journalist at the time, a real journalist, not the type that we have, the activist type that we have today.
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And so, yeah, I was in Saudi Arabia from a very young age.
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I grew up in a small expat community, place maybe about 1,200.
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I think there were about 1,200 people, 1,200 to 1,400 people from all over the world, all the different Arab countries, European countries, Australia, Canada, USA, UK, just all over the place.
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So I was in a truly diverse environment, people of different backgrounds, nationalities, faiths, beliefs, everything.
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And it was a very safe, cordial, harmonious society.
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When I was 11 years old, I went to boarding school.
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I went to boarding school at the age of 11 in the UK.
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So from the ages of 11 to 20, so for seven years of secondary school and then three years of university, I was back and forth between the two countries.
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I still lived in Saudi, but during the term time, I was in the UK.
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Was that difficult in that you're not surrounded by your parents?
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Or is it, thank God I'm free, I can be free of the shackles of parental oversight?
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I saw it as an adventure, even from a very young age.
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And perhaps for me, it was a bit normalized because I'm the youngest of five children.
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And all of my older siblings also went to boarding school.
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So I know for some people, boarding school, especially going overseas for it, is a very sort of weird and foreign concept to them.
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But for me and my family and the people I was around, it was very normal.
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Their siblings went to boarding school and so on.
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I got into Oxford University and I went there when I was 18 years old and I studied computer science.
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And when I was in Oxford, that was a pivotal time for me.
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So I started rapping when I was in my first year of university.
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I'd been a hip-hop fan since my early teen years and I was just listening to all of these different artists throughout my teenage years.
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I just wrote down a couple of verses when I was traveling and I kept doing it.
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I came back to when I was in my first year of university.
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One of my friends named Chris had a basic recording studio in his dorm room.
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So I would download beats off of the internet and then I write something down and I would just record some simple tracks.
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And then I'd email them to people, just share them with my friends and family and people in my college.
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And I started to build up a little bit of a buzz, right?
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People started saying, oh, you've got some cool songs going on here.
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After I'd been rapping for about 10 months, I released my first album.
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So this was in my second year of university, 2006.
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I put out my very first album called Commercial Underground.
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I remember this is back in the age of CDs, right?
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So I actually explicitly remembered making 50 copies.
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So I think that was a very important moment because that was the light bulb moment where I realized this is something I can do as more than just a hobby, right?
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When I was making those physical exchanges of I give someone a CD, they give me a five-pound note.
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I actually did a couple of gigs in my hometown in Saudi Arabia.
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And I got invited to do some performances in London and a few other places.
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And by the time I graduated at the age of 20, I had actually sold – I think I'd sold about 2,000 copies of my first album hand-to-hand by the time that I had graduated.
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I released a second album called The Unknown Celebrity.
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So I put out a second album and I started going out on the street and just talking to people and promoting my music, playing them my stuff, and selling my CDs.
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Fast forward over the course of time – okay, actually, let me do this in the proper order.
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After taking a year out, after graduating and doing my music full-time for one year, I already had a job lined up before I had graduated, but I deferred it for one year.
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I worked as a management consultant for three years.
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I was a management consultant working for lots of big, well-known companies in different sectors.
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And then in early 2011, I made a decision that by the end of that year, I wanted to go full-time with my music.
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I remember writing it down that by the end of that year, I was going to quit my job and I was going to be a full-time rapper.
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I set up my company, COM Entertainment Limited.
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I incorporated that with the company's house in the UK and did all the paperwork.
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Yeah, I'm trying to imagine the professional Nigerian parents with the medical doctor father saying,
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next time I see you, I'm going to beat you senseless because you're an Oxford grad in computer science.
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You're going to do this nonsense wrapping stuff.
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That's what you would have expected, but it was the opposite.
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They have been incredibly supportive of me in, honestly, in all of my endeavors.
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I think there's a couple of things that also help with this.
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I think the fact that I didn't drop out of university to pursue a music career, right?
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I already had some years working experience under my belt.
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And perhaps most importantly, by this stage, I'd already put out three independent releases
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and I'd actually sold a few thousand albums already.
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I was already making money from my music, not enough for a full-time income, but I was
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making, you know, maybe at the time when I quit my job, I was making maybe making about
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So I thought, okay, if I give this my all, I'm sure that I can at least double that.
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And if I can double that, then I at least have enough money to keep myself afloat.
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So from that moment onward, honestly, Gad, I went on an adventure that hasn't stopped since.
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So for many, many years, I used to just travel from city to city in the UK and I used to do
00:21:59.760
Eventually I graduated off the street and I started selling my music in shopping centers.
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So if you, if you ever go to a shopping mall, you'll see, you have the big stores on the
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side and then, you know, in the middle, you have these small kiosks where you have independent
00:22:16.520
So myself and my friend, um, Shaudo, who's also an independent musician, we started doing
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So we were the first independent British artists to open our own pop-up shops in shopping centers
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So instead of being outside, getting rained on all day long, we moved it indoors.
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So we'd be there all day long in different cities, talking to people, promoting our, selling
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our CDs, selling our t-shirts, hoodies, caps, just all of our different merchandise.
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And we would normally do that for 10 to 10, 10 days to two weeks per month.
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And that became enough for us to sustain ourselves.
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That was our main bread and butter from about 2015 until 2019.
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So every month we were just doing, you know, we did dozens and dozens of these stores and
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anyone who knew me prior to about 2019, if they knew me, they probably knew me from either
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meeting me out there on the street or bumping into them in a shopping center somewhere, or
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maybe they'd seen a video on music video on YouTube or something like that.
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And then coming into late 2018 is when there was another big transition.
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And this is simply where, okay, so I often say that the Western world started to really
00:23:36.940
I've been listening to, wow, a lot of different people listening to the Joe Rogan podcast.
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I think perhaps that's around the time I first, I first heard about you.
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I remember discovering Jordan Peterson in 2016, you and him, you both spoke about, about the
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I started seeing strange things going on and there's actually something that's a specific
00:24:03.160
I don't know if I've told this story before of what the catalyst was that actually caused
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me to start to speak out more publicly and start to share more of my thoughts, which is
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what people funnily enough now know me for rather than simply my music.
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And I remember there was, I won't say his name, but there was somebody I know, somebody I
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know had met personally, who was the student union president at a university in the UK.
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So someone who's got, you know, he's, he's a young guy, but he's in a position of power
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and he's very in modern day terminology, very woke back at the time.
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We probably would have called him a social justice warrior.
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SJW has, it's not as popular now as it used to be.
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And you know, we followed each other on Facebook.
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I'd always see his silly virtue signaling posts and whatever.
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Whatever, you know, everyone's entitled to their ideas.
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But then he posted something one day, which caught my attention.
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And it was in relation to the university's debate society.
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And it basically boiled down to, I support free speech, but that doesn't mean we should
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And I was like, hmm, I was like, what do you, I, and I, I responded.
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I remember I responded to the message and I said, what exactly do you mean by hate speech?
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Keep in mind, this is after him saying he supports free speech.
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And this is in relation to the university's debate society.
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And he said something about people should be allowed to speak openly, but they shouldn't
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be allowed to say things that are hurtful or offensive to other people.
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And anyway, we started having a back and forth on Facebook and we, we both had quite significant
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Several thousand people are able to see this conversation.
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Anyway, after a lot of back and forth, and I've been very reasonable, he says, and, and
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I haven't even put forth any of my particular ideas, by the way, but he ended up saying publicly,
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and I quote, I think I'm pretty much quoting this exactly.
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People like Zuby are dangerous and have ideas that could get people killed.
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I don't think people like him should be allowed on university campuses.
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So this is after I've seen, you know, Ben Shapiro being protested in Berkeley over in California,
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Milo Yiannopoulos, people setting fire to places and causing hundreds of thousands of
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dollars of damage, all the Bill C-16 stuff going on in Canada, the transgender craziness
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slipping into certain, I I'd been observing all of this stuff for a while.
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And when this, when this guy said that, that was when I was like, okay, this is real.
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This isn't just stuff I see on the internet, right?
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To use your terminology, this is a true idea pathogen that has reached our shores, right?
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I'm not some extreme radical, but I thought, oh, wow, a student union president thinks that
00:27:07.320
I, I little old me should be banned from university campuses.
00:27:12.160
I, so I've gone from graduating 10 years ago to being told that I shouldn't even be allowed
00:27:18.760
So I think that triggered something in my brain and it made me say, this is going too
00:27:27.460
And so late 2018, particularly on Twitter, I just started nothing crazy.
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I just started sharing more of my thoughts on what was going on in the world.
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And at the time I probably would have had about 16 or 17,000 followers on Twitter.
00:27:44.160
And I started noticing that some of the things I was saying were really resonating and particularly
00:27:52.300
I was starting to get free retweeted into all these different spheres and people started
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to be like, hey, like this guy is talking sense.
00:28:00.740
I remember as well at the time, one of the first tweets I ever had go viral before the
00:28:12.500
Do you remember when Kanye West came out wearing the mega hat?
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And do you remember how the media responded and treated him?
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So in a sense, actually, I was going to, you preempted one of my questions, which is, are
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you, are you trying to go down the trajectory of, well, here is a black man who's not behaving
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And I was, cause I was going to ask you it and forgive me if this is inappropriate, but
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You know, do you think that part of the push that made you go more viral is precisely because
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you are not the black exemplar of the positions that you should be taking?
00:28:57.060
Um, I think a lot of things sort of factor into my being and my personality and characteristics
00:29:03.960
that have made it sort of resonate with more people.
00:29:07.000
Um, but yeah, I, I was, look, I, I believe that people, obviously people should be allowed
00:29:15.640
If you have a democratic society, regardless of your skin color, gender, whatever, you should
00:29:20.460
be allowed to vote for and support the person you want.
00:29:23.780
So what I saw when Kanye was wearing the mega hat, wasn't even him saying, Hey, everybody,
00:29:28.640
you need to go and vote for Trump or vote Republican.
00:29:35.820
If you can wear, um, you know, if you can wear an Obama t-shirt, why can't I wear a Trump
00:29:45.600
I mean, I remember, do you remember, which would you remember one of the pundits said that
0.97
00:29:48.960
this is what happens when Negroes don't read.
1.00
00:29:53.400
Who was I think on, wow, I don't, I, you know, I don't want to say the wrong name.
00:30:00.900
I think I know who it was, but, um, it was, I think it was on CNN.
00:30:07.620
I can't believe this, this response, just the way that the, you know, it was, it was very
00:30:13.100
So one of the first ever tweets I had that went viral in, in the USA was simply saying,
00:30:18.920
um, I think I actually remember exact, the exact tweet.
00:30:21.640
I think I just said, LOL at all these people calling Kanye West lost.
00:30:34.540
This, this was, this was like my first time really getting attacked, really getting attacked
00:30:42.660
Um, and of course, February 26, 2019, I have my famous deadlift tweet where I identify as
00:30:52.180
I post a nine second clip of me lifting 230 kilos and saying that, um, I've broken the
00:30:58.720
I remember very specifically when I posted that I had 19,000 followers.
00:31:04.940
When I posted that I was actually at my pop-up shop.
00:31:07.440
So I was still selling my CDs and promoting my music out there, wondering what my next
00:31:14.780
And I had just seen multiple stories of males identifying as women and breaking women's
0.85
00:31:21.000
records and things, you know, I was just seeing crazy things happening mostly in the USA and
00:31:25.740
So I just posted that tweet thinking that it's going to get a few laughs.
00:31:30.380
Um, a lot of people ask me if I, if I marketed it or if I had some plan, I didn't have any
00:31:42.100
Lo and behold, this is the thing that just of all the things that I put out of all the
00:31:48.020
things I've put out into the world over the past decade.
00:31:50.040
Plus that was the thing that just captured the public imagination.
00:31:53.520
That's how everyone from Joe Rogan to Tucker Carlson, to Piers Morgan, to Ben Shapiro, Candace
00:32:02.360
So within a few months, I find myself on the Joe Rogan experience.
00:32:06.360
I find myself sitting down with Tucker Carlson.
00:32:08.560
I find myself touring the USA and doing all these interviews and podcasts with different
00:32:14.080
And I guess from that moment onward, it introduced my personality and my ideas and my story and
00:32:22.440
So now that we're almost five years past that now, I've been able to maintain that trajectory
00:32:31.580
I managed to turn something that honestly could have just been a little flash in the pan, a
00:32:39.060
And I managed to use that to draw attention to all the things that I really do and the
00:32:45.900
things that I really care about and the message that I'm really trying to put out there.
00:32:55.000
Now, so whatever point you're at now, are you still, given that it probably isn't incorrect,
00:33:05.300
You're now much more known for your thoughts than for your music.
00:33:10.220
Is that something that upsets you because you'd love to be as known for your music as
00:33:16.640
In a dream world, you would be, you know, the world famous rapper and who cares about
00:33:26.760
And while you may still be interested in music, this is no longer your main interest, whereas
00:33:37.480
Firstly, I'd say that I've always been a man of ideas.
00:33:41.320
I just thought that the only way that I should put them out there was through my music.
00:33:46.680
So I think really what happened is that I unshackled myself, if that makes sense.
00:33:55.000
I put out several releases since this has happened.
00:33:58.400
And I was initially frustrated that I was getting all of this attention for a silly tweet, whereas
00:34:08.740
I have all these other things that I've really put my time, my energy, my creativity into,
00:34:13.420
which got some attention, but not the same level.
00:34:18.940
I thought, okay, music is, let's say I have a house.
00:34:22.940
I have a house and I want people to come through the front door and the front door is my music.
00:34:28.040
And then I changed my mind to, look, I don't care if people come through the front door,
00:34:34.580
Whatever it's a buffet, I'll put out different things and people can come and pick what they
00:34:48.860
They just like my tweets or they like my Instagram reels or my YouTube videos, whatever it is.
00:34:53.980
If I can offer some type of inspiration and motivation and ability to nudge people in a
00:35:00.900
positive direction, I don't care whether it's a book, it's this conversation, it's seeing me
00:35:26.800
As long as people like what I'm doing and it's resonating with them,
00:35:30.040
then as far as I'm concerned, it's still aligned with my original music mission.
00:35:34.380
It just means that I'm doing it in some additional ways now.
00:35:38.320
I would use another C word instead of communicator.
00:35:42.320
And the reason why I'm saying that is because in my happiness book, you actually touch on
00:35:48.940
Your career trajectory, in a sense, proves that you don't necessarily need to be reading
00:35:55.740
my book because you're already implementing many of the things that I prescribe to people.
00:36:02.200
Number one, I argue that all other things equal when you're trying to pick the best possible
00:36:09.360
profession for you, immerse yourself within your creative impulse.
00:36:14.520
And I think we might have discussed this the last time I appeared on your show,
00:36:25.780
These are very, very different mediums and very, very different domains.
00:36:28.860
But what all of these folks share in common is they create something from nothing.
00:36:33.600
The new dish, the new bridge, the new stand-up routine, and so on.
00:36:44.440
You're creating new music that didn't exist until you came along.
00:36:48.660
You're creating new ideas, new tweets, new humorous moments, whatever it is.
00:36:54.340
And I think there is no more direct way to instantiate your sense of purpose and meaning
00:37:00.800
The second thing I would say, which I always found from when I first started following you,
00:37:05.360
is you're very comfortable in engaging in marketing of yourself.
00:37:09.880
Now, oftentimes people view that as, you know, it's gauche.
00:37:12.720
It's, you know, I get a lot of my colleagues who apologize 34, you know, lines before they
00:37:26.340
I mean, there's certainly, I mean, it could be obnoxious if you're promoting yourself in
00:37:32.280
But, you know, I'm housed in a business school.
00:37:38.780
What product is there that's more important than yourself?
00:37:42.580
So marketing yourself is a fundamental feature of, you know, the most important product that
00:37:51.320
Is this something that you think you were born with?
00:37:53.640
I mean, you just have that innate talent to hustle, to be persistent, to be resilient,
00:38:01.720
Is it something you read a couple of books that says, here are the three steps for marketing
00:38:11.100
Well, this is why I think it's important to tell my whole story, because I have sold over
00:38:21.900
Do you know how many people you have to talk to face to face to sell 30,000 albums?
00:38:31.180
That was my full time job, just going out there and talking to thousands of people a week
00:38:36.780
So over the course of that time, wow, you learn a lot of things.
00:38:44.020
You learn a lot about marketing, communication.
00:38:45.760
You learn a lot about resilience, grit, handling, rejection.
00:38:52.360
Forgive me, because I was going to come to a rejection.
00:38:56.680
So it seems for me, when I see salespeople, now you could argue I'm a salesman of ideas,
00:39:05.460
I'm proposing my ideas to the world, and hopefully people, quote, buy them.
00:39:14.200
Intercepting people in the street where the rate of rejection is going to be astounding.
00:39:21.240
And based on the personality that I know you have, you're probably someone who took it
00:39:30.060
Because very few people can handle a rejection rate of 95%, if not higher, and keep slugging
00:39:40.020
Well, I'm glad you asked about this, because it's actually a very fundamental part of my
00:39:43.620
story, which I think a lot of people are not aware of.
00:39:47.040
I think because so many people now discover me online, they sort of missed that whole period
00:39:52.140
from 2006 to 2019, where I was just grinding, like really grinding.
00:39:57.860
And when I say that, I don't mean sending emails.
00:40:12.080
I still am a road warrior, but I now do it on a bit of a different level.
00:40:18.020
So actually, I can probably give you some numbers.
00:40:20.600
I can say that when I was selling on the street, I'd probably say that about maybe about 30%
00:40:36.720
On a very good day, it might go as high as 50% of people might stop.
00:40:40.060
And then I'd say of all the people I stopped, if I stopped someone, there was probably about
00:40:55.180
I would have thought that it would be well below 5%.
00:41:01.820
So if I wanted to sell 30 CDs in a day, I could pretty much wager that if I spoke to 300-ish
00:41:09.380
people, I attempted to speak to 300 people, I'd get 30 CDs sold.
00:41:16.220
And a lot of this, by the way, is a lot of it is personality-driven.
00:41:23.240
There's very different ways that you can approach people.
00:41:25.540
There's ways you can approach people where, yeah, you're going to get a 95% rejection rate.
00:41:32.300
I know how to communicate and put my body language in a way to put people at ease.
00:41:38.800
I would never approach someone aggressively or directly asking for a sale.
00:41:44.700
Or it would just be, you know, a very, very friendly, amiable thing.
00:41:50.460
Find out if they have time even to begin with, right?
00:41:57.380
Or, you know, actually, what kind of music do you listen to?
00:42:05.240
And then I can introduce them, tell them who I am, tell them what I'm doing.
00:42:12.800
I would never try to sell my music without allowing them to listen to it.
00:42:16.400
I say, if you've got a minute, I can play you a little bit of the music.
00:42:19.320
If you like what you hear and you'd like to support, here's how much it costs.
00:42:34.220
And if they liked it and they had a little bit of money on them, at that point, you've
00:42:39.240
got a pretty high chance that the person is going to buy it.
00:42:42.560
And you learn to interact with different people, young, old, men, women, groups versus
00:42:49.640
Man, I had some funny moments out there on the street.
00:42:51.800
I had some times where, and by the way, this is also why I got my French and Spanish up
00:42:59.100
to conversational level because I was selling my CDs in the UK and there were so many tourists
00:43:05.260
coming from different countries in certain cities.
00:43:11.200
I try to stop people and they look at me weird.
00:43:13.680
And I'm like, oh, OK, I think I think they're French.
00:43:16.940
And so I'm like, all right, I need to brush up on my French.
00:43:20.320
And so next thing, you know, you know, excuse me, guys, what kind of music do you listen
00:43:27.480
Excusez-moi, quel type de musique vous écoutez-vous?
00:43:37.200
Je suis ici aujourd'hui pour promouvoir ma musique.
00:43:45.860
And, you know, at that point, you know, imagine a group of French teenagers and they've just
0.60
00:43:53.960
And they're like, this is the coolest guy in the world.
00:44:01.640
Like, so that's how I had some real adventures out there.
00:44:05.240
There are days actually, in some ways I don't miss it.
00:44:07.940
But in other ways, I actually sort of miss just going out there every day,
00:44:11.460
being an adventure, connecting with all these different people face-to-face.
00:44:17.400
And I think that a lot of what I'm now able to bring into the online world and the podcasting
00:44:22.380
world and the public speaking and all that, honestly, the seeds for all of that was planted
00:44:26.740
in those days when I was just out there talking to people nonstop, promoting myself, selling
00:44:34.680
And I also have a different view on, it's funny because my whole career, the thing I got
00:44:41.580
the most criticism for was self-promoting too much.
00:44:46.420
I remember there'd be people who, to this day, there's people who complain that I wear
00:44:49.820
my own hats or I wear my own t-shirts with my logo on it or whatever.
00:44:54.360
And the way I always viewed it was, number one, I'm an independent musician.
00:44:59.980
I don't have big PR budgets and all this stuff.
00:45:02.540
If I don't promote myself, nobody is going to do it for me.
00:45:10.100
No one is going to hear about my stuff, let alone buy it.
00:45:12.320
And then I also flip, I also flip sales on its head a little bit.
00:45:17.060
And I have a belief that if you have, if you have a product or a service that can genuinely
00:45:24.600
help people and make their lives better, and you believe in that, I don't just think that
00:45:35.220
I think if you have a book about happiness, if you've spent time researching and writing
00:45:40.520
a book about happiness that can genuinely make, potentially make millions or even billions
00:45:45.840
of people's lives better, I think you have an ethical duty to promote and to sell it,
00:45:52.740
If you hide it away, if you're a fantastic musician and you make all of this music and
00:45:58.320
you record it, and then you just hide it, you just hide it away in your cabinet, I think
00:46:03.860
you're doing something that's unethical, right?
00:46:05.960
I think you should go out there and you should share your gifts with the world.
00:46:08.680
If Lionel Messi, I know you're a big fan of him, if he was content to just be the best
00:46:14.880
football player in his little league or school, yeah, in his neighborhood and he never aspired
00:46:21.320
to any more and he never wanted to share his gift with the world, then I think actually
00:46:26.660
you're now withholding something that other people could benefit from.
00:46:31.440
So when I think of sales, I mean, if someone is trying to push something that's harmful,
00:46:35.640
like genuinely bad for people, that's different.
00:46:39.560
But I think if you have something that's good and that it helps people, it brings joy into
00:46:43.860
their life, it helps them reframe their mind in a better way, it helps them get in better
00:46:52.140
So I don't think that there's anything dirty about sales or marketing or promotion or anything
00:47:00.800
I think that we are actually all salespeople, whether you consider yourself one or not.
00:47:07.980
So I think it's best to do it with some intention and do it consciously.
00:47:13.220
And yeah, I totally reject the idea that there's something wrong with selling.
00:47:19.440
I think that selling is a very good thing as long as what you're selling, like I said,
00:47:26.360
So I wrote an article, I can't remember how many years ago, maybe five, six, seven years
00:47:30.920
At the time, I had a very active Psychology Today column.
00:47:35.460
I think I published over 300 articles on that site from 2008 to about two years ago.
00:47:42.980
And so I was very, very productive within that medium.
00:47:45.980
And one of the articles that I had written, which I was thinking about eventually turning
00:47:49.020
into a book, I think the title of the article is Marketing is Life and Life is Marketing,
00:47:54.800
where basically I was arguing and what, I mean, the whole point of the book would be to demonstrate
00:47:59.800
the importance of marketing across a bewilderment, because we typically think of marketing of,
00:48:07.000
you know, marketing of Gillette and marketing of Starbucks.
00:48:11.480
But, you know, you engage in marketing in the mating market.
00:48:17.940
You engage in marketing when you're pitching your ideas.
00:48:20.560
So, you know, animals engage in marketing when they engage in sexual signaling, as per
00:48:30.900
So oftentimes I get some troll on, you know, on social media saying, you know, you teach
00:48:40.300
First of all, you know, marketing, I mean, as I use it, as you know, you know, I apply biology
00:48:45.220
and psychology to study consumer and economic decision making.
00:48:48.560
You know, it's hardly a lot, I mean, the entire world operates on capitalism.
00:48:53.280
All of the apps that we now have are based on an understanding of marketing and the most
00:49:00.680
So it always bewilders me when people, because marketing is a term that can be either used
00:49:09.800
I'm printing flyers for my local block party, and I'm going to market it.
00:49:17.920
And then they think that when marketing as a scientific discipline, well, it must be the
00:49:22.220
same kind of, whereas, you know, if you just look at the salaries of professors, the ones
00:49:27.720
who are in the business schools get paid the highest bucks precisely because they have
00:49:35.740
So if you're a economist who studies, you know, you know, something in marketing, or
00:49:42.960
you're an anthropologist who applies their craft in marketing, or you're, in my case, a
00:49:47.300
psychologist who studies consumer behavior, it's hardly something to laugh at.
00:49:51.340
So I love the fact that, you know, without you having had the training in business school,
00:49:57.060
you're a natural born marketer, you understand the dynamics, and you even said it, right?
00:50:02.340
I mean, hey, I learned French, because now I could reach this particular segment.
00:50:07.100
Well, you just got an A on the marketing 101 exam, where we talk about segmenting and
00:50:15.020
You segmented the market, and then you thought, well, what is the optimal persuasion strategy
00:50:22.600
And in this case, simply saying a few words in their language increases your, well, you
00:50:33.340
And, you know, and the thing is, as well, I think something that's been really core for
00:50:37.500
me, and of course, this is related to your book, which I have read, by the way, I know
00:50:42.620
you said I don't, I don't, I don't need to, but I did anyway, you know, you're very kind
00:50:49.700
You know, I think the thing that sometimes people forget, and I think this is also the
00:50:56.540
reason why many people give up is to both trust and enjoy the process, right?
00:51:04.040
I remember when I was in my twenties and I'd been struggling with my music for a while,
00:51:08.580
trying to make it as an independent artist and keep myself afloat and all that.
00:51:11.820
Um, and one of the things that kept me going, wasn't just belief and knowing that, all right,
00:51:21.080
I'm going to, I'm going to break through on this thing somehow.
00:51:23.480
It was also just genuinely enjoying the process.
00:51:26.080
You know, we all have times where we want to, you, you kind of wish you could fast forward.
00:51:33.040
You wish you could, uh, you know, fast forward.
00:51:37.460
You wish you could fast forward the gym sessions and fast forward the cardio and just press,
00:51:41.360
press some button and you've just done it, right?
00:51:44.420
You're trying to learn a language or learn an instrument, any new skill.
00:51:47.920
And you wish you could just download it to your brain.
00:51:51.660
And I don't think that people should really wish for that.
00:51:54.460
I think people should really enjoy, enjoy the process and honestly have fun with it.
00:52:03.900
Um, I very much live my life, like almost like it's a video game and I'm a character in it.
00:52:09.540
And I'm just sort of going to different locations and meeting different people and
00:52:13.900
taking on different quests and new challenges and solving new problems and puzzles.
00:52:19.940
And I think that if you, if you take life on that way and you recognize, yeah, it's going
0.93
00:52:25.100
to have, there's going to be moments where it, where it sucks.
00:52:30.760
You're going to have your downs, but in the grand scheme of things, it's also very fun.
00:52:38.180
And I think if someone perhaps is not enjoying their life, then man, I think they just need
00:52:45.660
to sort of reframe, reframe their thinking and find that sort of childish joy in the
00:52:53.660
Again, I think that as adults, especially once you have a routine, you can, you, you can just
00:52:59.520
feel like you're just repeating things and you don't even know why you're doing it.
00:53:04.660
And in every day, no matter what city or whatever country I'm in, I, you know, I'll, I'll have
00:53:13.260
I'll have exchange pleasantries with the person at the checkout.
00:53:16.840
I'll, you know, I'll be in the gym and I'll just, I don't know, just engage with someone
00:53:20.780
or just do little things to, to just enjoy, enjoy things that could otherwise be very mundane.
00:53:27.180
When I was out there on the street or in shopping mall, standing around all day long, right.
00:53:30.760
I'd be standing there for hours and hours and hours and, um, I'd give myself little
00:53:35.060
You were, you were talking before about rejection here.
00:53:38.640
Here's something I would actually do when I was having a day where, um, I was either just
00:53:47.540
Do you know what I would do is I would say, I'm going to go get 10 rejections in a row.
00:53:57.080
I'd normally end up staying out for another two hours.
00:53:59.840
I talked to seven people, seven rejections, and then, ah, that next person stops and they
00:54:04.940
And that gives me that little bit of motivation to go again.
00:54:07.400
So I'm actually going to people and I'm going in the mindset of, okay, I'm ready for the
00:54:18.580
I, if I were out selling with one of my friends, we'd, um, we'd sometimes see who could
00:54:22.680
get, who could get the craziest sale of the day.
00:54:25.640
So maybe this might mean approaching someone who's like 75 years old and selling them a
0.86
00:54:31.460
Or maybe this means like, um, I remember once, you know, just someone was stopped at a red
00:54:38.600
And I went and I, you know, I got, I, he was listening to hip hop.
00:54:43.040
I heard he was listening to hip hop in his car.
00:54:44.560
And I went to him while he was at the light and I did a quick pitch and he bought my CD
00:54:51.580
I was like, yeah, you know, and so, you know, you, you gamify it, right.
00:54:57.140
And, um, I'd like to think, I'd, I'd like to hope that I can maintain that throughout
00:55:02.580
Um, as I go into, you know, new phases over the next decades, getting married, Lord willing,
00:55:10.720
I'd like to never lose that, lose that sense of play.
00:55:14.820
And that sense of life is life is fun and it's to be enjoyed.
00:55:19.680
Well, you, you, you've clearly read my book because of course I've got a whole chapter
00:55:24.040
on life as a playground and boy, do you exude that spirit.
00:55:34.180
I think that's probably of all the many reasons why people resonate with your message.
00:55:38.820
I think it's that it's, it's you, you know, you're amiable, you're affable, you're just
00:55:46.040
Thank you so much for coming on the show, Zuby.
00:55:50.080
Stay on the line so we can say goodbye offline.