Fashion Expert： What Clothes Tell Us About Culture, Politics and War
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
214.83525
Summary
In this episode of Who's Next, I speak with Dimitri Korsch, CEO of a company that makes suits for Jordan Peterson, Zebedee Zuby, and many other famous people. Dimitri talks about how he got into the business, why he started the company, and why he thinks Jordan Peterson should be his next client.
Transcript
00:00:01.000
Now that I look at the 2020s, what's happening with clothing, it's coming back to the 1950s.
00:00:07.780
It's almost like the clothing today is a re-emergence from a war.
00:00:10.980
Which is interesting, like we didn't actually have a very big physical war in the West,
00:00:19.380
Like, I can't really answer that, so how do I design an image for somebody
00:00:26.320
When you're old and everybody questions your mental capacity
00:00:29.440
and thinks you're about to die, what you don't want to do is you don't want to wear a black suit.
00:00:33.560
Because what does black psychologically trigger in us?
00:00:37.740
To me, he was designed to fail, and I was like, oh, they're going to replace him.
00:00:44.440
You're someone who's made suits and other clothes for a bunch of problematic people
00:00:48.860
like Jordan Peterson, Zuby, me, a bunch of others.
00:00:52.800
And a lot of more famous people than those three, too.
00:01:01.280
Yeah, I was just thinking, have you guys run out of guests?
00:01:11.180
Well, so before any of the celebrity stuff, right?
00:01:12.840
Like, I started a company in 2010, which became a global company by about 2015.
00:01:17.140
We were selling in, like, 15, 16, 20 countries.
00:01:20.900
And the thing about the – so at first, I kind of wanted to see, like, how far I could
00:01:28.980
Like, anything you do, you want to see what your potential can be.
00:01:31.020
Because eventually, like, the financial goals that I had set, I had met and exceeded them.
00:01:35.980
And I thought, well, I'd like to get The Rock in one of our suits, in one of my suits.
00:01:40.900
And so I put The Rock as the background on my computer.
00:01:49.740
And eventually, I got into the movie Skyscraper, which was a big summer blog buster.
00:01:55.660
It was like, you know, The Rock jumping from Skyscraper.
00:02:00.400
And if you guys want a crazy story about how I met The Rock for that movie, it was just
00:02:03.540
But I ended up doing 12 suits for the movie Skyscraper.
00:02:14.440
Because the idea is you want to aspire to grow.
00:02:18.700
And at the time, it was maybe about 2016, I started watching Jordan Peterson videos on
00:02:24.200
And he had some really great Harvard lectures that he had recorded.
00:02:27.500
It was before, kind of, it was maybe right around the Bill C-16 thing that was coming
00:02:30.920
out in Canada, but it was way before he was famous, right?
00:02:33.220
So I had Maps of Meaning, which I completely could not understand at all, because it's like
00:02:37.200
20, 30 IQ points above my level of grasping things.
00:02:42.680
I thought, I want to get Jordan Peterson as a client.
00:02:46.040
Now, his brother, he has a brother, Joel, who is a client who had been getting some suits
00:02:55.020
But getting to Jordan is like really, really hard.
00:02:56.560
And so I kind of thought, okay, maybe it's not going to happen.
00:03:00.880
And then I was watching an interview with an NFL player telling his story about how he
00:03:07.960
And the story was that he was watching the NFL as a young boy with his uncle.
00:03:11.640
And he told his uncle, like, wow, you know, this guy is an amazing football player.
00:03:14.940
He was watching, I don't know, one of the great NFL linebackers.
00:03:19.020
And his uncle goes, you know, that could be you when you grow up.
00:03:33.220
We've got tens of thousands of clients around the world.
00:03:35.720
Lots of people go on camera wearing our suits all the time.
00:03:38.660
Who could possibly be more competent to make suits for Jordan Peterson?
00:03:42.380
That's going to sound selfish and arrogant, but why not me?
00:03:47.540
And on the journey towards that, you know, we were talking about, like,
00:03:52.080
Lanox Lewis started getting suits from us, Alice Cooper,
00:03:57.400
And then by the time I finally got a reply from somebody on Jordan's team,
00:04:01.200
it was like, oh, we saw your work with Alice Cooper and we like it.
00:04:04.180
I guess what I was asking as well is the extent to which there's an ideological dimension to this,
00:04:10.000
because I don't know if you make suits for Bernie Sanders or AOC, right?
00:04:15.500
So I guess what I'm getting at is, is there something about the worldview of some of the people that you work with?
00:04:22.460
Well, so like yourself, I emigrated from the Soviet Union.
00:04:28.320
And so obviously anybody that comes from the Soviet Union or from Cuba does not think very highly of communism or like hardcore socialism whatsoever.
00:04:36.740
Like nobody's like, nobody defected to the Soviet Union that had any sense of sanity, right?
00:04:42.360
So when I heard Jordan Peterson promulgate, you know, his worldview based on, I suppose, competence hierarchies,
00:04:51.320
that spoke very much to me because I started a business.
00:04:54.820
I watch how people operate all the time and how people progress through competency and regress through incompetency.
00:05:00.940
And of course, try to prig their way into higher positions, like try to, you know,
00:05:06.400
sanctimoniously say they deserve something that they don't actually deserve because their results don't show it.
00:05:10.680
So I was like, I like that worldview at the time.
00:05:13.280
Also, you know, this whole leftist thing was becoming pretty apparent and then COVID hit.
00:05:19.500
And all of a sudden, you know, everything I had worked for was immediately taken away for an indefinite amount of time
00:05:25.540
because we're a company that measures people for suits.
00:05:28.240
We're a company that travels to people's offices and touches people to do that.
00:05:32.600
Nobody's going to the office, can't touch anyone.
00:05:34.840
And I thought, well, it feels a lot like a government or governments are really impeding my dreams.
00:05:41.280
Now, notwithstanding, there was some other stuff happening, obviously, on the virus side,
00:05:45.940
which, you know, was pretty apparent early on, at least to me,
00:05:49.260
that it wasn't as risky as we were being told on, you know, mainstream media.
00:05:56.020
Like I started doing a lot of statistical stuff.
00:05:58.080
I, you know, laid out spreadsheets, started doing statistical analyses.
00:06:02.760
I have a lot of friends with like math and physics degrees, you know, from university,
00:06:07.100
And they're like, yeah, this seems pretty accurate.
00:06:09.120
And then here was the guy that was saying, hey, like this is how the world should look like.
00:06:14.480
And I got into Von Mises and PragerU and, you know, Dennis Prager,
00:06:18.580
And yeah, I think whatever frequency I picked up from that absolutely geared me towards that path.
00:06:23.160
And so you asked, well, would I do suits for like Bernie Sanders?
00:06:26.760
I wouldn't decline, you know, a client, let's say, who wants to get suits.
00:06:29.980
But obviously, I'm on a certain universal vibrational frequency that has sort of connected me to people like you, let's say.
00:06:40.560
So when I was reading about yourself, Dimitri, and about tailoring,
00:06:47.760
I find fashion very interesting because fashion reflects the culture.
00:06:52.400
How does your fashion reflect the people that you design for and your belief and your politics?
00:07:05.040
And the whole bespoke movement in England basically kicked off after the London fire.
00:07:11.660
I think it was what, 1666 was the Great London Fire, right?
00:07:14.080
And then Mayfair started to rebrand itself as a sort of a place where luxury merchants would go
00:07:20.200
and the aristocrats would visit those merchants there, starting with, I don't know, Prince George IV, probably,
00:07:27.000
So what happened was as the luxury consumption started to start to elevate in England,
00:07:36.100
So what you saw is with cultural change is that clothing always predicated a shift towards liberalism in society.
00:07:45.140
Like Edward VII, again, in the early 1900s, you saw society moving more liberally.
00:07:49.880
And so a lot of the clothing brands that were actually built over those years
00:07:53.480
were built on a vision towards a more liberal society.
00:07:55.840
Tom Ford being an example of that, like Tom Ford's entire mantra is like libertine living.
00:08:04.000
Well, the logic is that you're spoiling yourself.
00:08:06.860
You're living sort of a sybaritic life where you're enjoying and lusting yourself into luxury and, wow, you deserve it.
00:08:17.860
And so in the 60s and 70s, you saw the cultural shift as well with like the Vietnam War,
00:08:22.460
where that's actually when the bespoke tailoring thing kind of fell apart and Savile Row was struggling
00:08:26.420
because everybody moved away from their father's uniform.
00:08:35.260
But what's really interesting to me, and this was completely serendipitous, not intentional,
00:08:48.720
Today's counterculture is seeking rules, you know, and hierarchies, again, based on competence.
00:08:53.760
And I think, again, Jordan Peterson has sort of risen as the Internet's father as a central figure for that, right?
00:08:58.900
So it wasn't that I purposely set out to design anything that would, you know, invoke society into some kind of a, I don't know, conservative movement.
00:09:08.400
I just happened to work in suits, and it just so happened to align with the fact that today's society is, again, seeking the return of the gods, let's say.
00:09:17.600
And the central figures of today's social movements, like Jordan Peterson, for example, and on some level, you guys as well, of course, those figures tend to be, you know, looking for restoration to a greater society, looking for something better.
00:09:31.260
And do you think it's the structure of the suit reflects, how can I put it, the fact that the people who you dress are seeking a more structured way of life,
00:09:42.560
as opposed to the chaotic elements that extreme liberalism brings?
00:09:49.160
I actually had a couple of emails with Jordan Peterson about this topic specifically.
00:09:52.300
He was meeting with a prime minister who may be controversial on the world stage, and he had, you know, sort of primed us that he had this dinner, and he put some pictures up.
00:10:00.780
And I emailed him, which was, again, kind of selfish of me, because I don't want to take up too much of his time.
00:10:05.460
He's got a lot of things to do, and, like, I'm a dumb tailor over here.
00:10:07.820
But I said, hey, Jordan, this outfit you wore with this prime minister is the wrong outfit, and here's why.
00:10:14.100
The prime minister has a military background, and you're wearing an unstructured jacket, which is, like, you know, the Italians and the British have very different views on tailoring.
00:10:27.020
Even peacoats and reefer jackets are based on the Navy, whereas the Italians, as the Italian tailors would say,
00:10:32.560
they like a looser-fitting, unstructured suit so they can reach over and kiss a lady's hand, okay?
00:10:37.820
You know, the British aristocrats do that stuff all the time, too.
00:10:40.580
They're just not quite so open about it, right?
00:10:43.960
So I emailed, you know, I said, you know, JP, like, this is what I think is a better option next time you meet this particular prime minister.
00:10:54.500
I said, I want to do a structured rope shoulder, a lot more constructed, a lot more militaristic looking, and a darker tone,
00:10:59.740
so that you would pay homage and respect to the person with whom you're sitting, who has a military background,
00:11:04.440
who is an Ivy League graduate, etc., etc., etc., right?
00:11:07.440
So part of what I do for clients and what our company does for clients, of course, you have to take into consideration,
00:11:16.240
A, what they do on a daily basis, and B, what they're aspiring to project.
00:11:20.220
Well, on that very point, it's actually a fascinating conversation because we've obviously just had the election in the United States.
00:11:28.820
And I guess the fact that the Democrat person was a woman sort of changes the dimensions of this slightly.
00:11:34.440
But I'm curious to get your analysis on, you know, what people in those two movements,
00:11:41.140
because they're really philosophical and intellectual movements more than politics.
00:11:48.880
And what does Trump, the way Trump dresses, say about what he's trying to project and vice versa with the Democrats?
00:11:54.080
I recorded like a very boring one hour sort of dialogue with one of my co-workers when Trump was still running against Biden,
00:12:03.180
And it was about the difference in what the Biden-Trump debate and what the two potential presidential candidates were wearing to the debate, right?
00:12:11.240
And what I proposed from that video is that Biden will be immediately replaced after this debate.
00:12:19.580
And it was pre-planned before the debate just based on what Biden was wearing at the debate, okay?
00:12:30.940
You know, we all see the world through the lens of whatever it is that we do, right?
00:12:33.680
Like a doctor might be looking for signs of dementia in Biden, you know?
00:12:39.420
You know, but I'm looking as a clothier, as a haberdasher.
00:12:42.200
I see Biden's outfit and I go, oh, they're going to replace him.
00:12:46.980
So remember when Trump ran the first time against Hillary, Trump had a sort of ominous message because he himself had an ominous image, right?
00:12:54.940
He wore very dark suits that were completely oversized.
00:12:57.960
He kind of came in as he looked like a classic American industrialist, kind of like a Henry Ford figure.
00:13:07.520
And all of his messaging was negative, negative, negative.
00:13:11.920
He's wearing a Kennedy blue suit, a light blue suit.
00:13:16.620
He's wearing a light blue suit, which shows a message of hope, which shows a message of perseverance, which shows a message of, you know, illuminating the future, which was not Trump's image in the first.
00:13:26.440
And I did a very careful and a very, very, you know, granular analysis of what Trump wore in the 2016 versus 24 election.
00:13:33.760
OK, and then Biden walks out and I said, this is wrong.
00:13:36.800
Number one, Biden went a shade darker on his suits.
00:13:40.280
There's no way somebody dressing Biden would miss that.
00:13:42.700
But when you're old, when you're old and everybody questions your mental capacity and thinks you're about to die, what you don't want to do is you don't want to wear a black suit.
00:13:51.980
Because what is black psychologically triggering us?
00:13:59.400
I go, that is not the color you put an 80 year old guy in who might have dementia.
00:14:04.040
Number two, he was wearing an overhand tie knot, which shows haptic incapability.
00:14:08.480
An overhand tie knot is the first knot your father teaches you to tie.
00:14:10.820
It's kind of the small little knot you tie it very quickly.
00:14:12.960
I guarantee you, Biden doesn't tie his own ties.
00:14:15.500
But the fact that they put him in an overhand knot, I was like, oh, they're showing that he's haptically incapable.
00:14:19.960
So immediately I went right to his cufflinks and he's not wearing cufflinks.
00:14:24.080
And I'm going, OK, if I'm dressing an 80 year old guy and people are asking, hey, is this guy potentially incapable of leading a country?
00:14:30.160
I'm giving him, you know, a beautiful full Windsor tie.
00:14:32.780
I'm giving him cufflinks to show that he's able to eloquently place cuffs into us.
00:14:43.040
I you never wear a point collar with an oblong face because it shows like a mismatch.
00:14:47.340
And it was like to me, he was designed to fail.
00:14:49.920
And I was like, oh, they're going to replace him.
00:14:53.860
So from those little tells, you could you could see the fact that he was already yesterday's news compared with Trump, who was actually showing a message of hope, a beacon of positivity.
00:15:06.580
Now, what did you think of the way Kamala was styled?
00:15:09.220
Because obviously she's a woman, so that's different.
00:15:13.520
So obviously all the female candidates in the U.S. that I see, well, Hillary and Kamala and even AOC when she's on camera, they're wearing they're wearing pantsuits.
00:15:20.640
And I'm just I'm not sure how much you can really deviate from that as a female leader.
00:15:24.380
And I don't want to, you know, come off as like saying, oh, that's a sexist thing.
00:15:26.940
I don't really know how to signal competency better than with a suit.
00:15:31.020
So I didn't really see Kamala wearing anything that would.
00:15:33.600
Well, first of all, what the heck is her branding anyways?
00:15:36.900
That that might be the more that might be the more, you know, the more the more base question.
00:15:45.900
So how do I design an image for somebody who I don't even know what their ethos is?
00:15:52.320
I guess an interesting question there might be.
00:15:57.420
Because for a woman, you are either trying to project strength, in which case you might
00:16:08.100
It's a weird thing for a woman to wear in like Hillary Clinton doesn't look normal.
00:16:12.560
Especially when she's got that Stalin-esque weird, you know the name.
00:16:17.700
But on the other hand, you can't like wear a mini skirt and have your boobs out either.
00:16:23.340
It's kind of probably a very hard thing to balance for a woman who's attempting to go
00:16:27.660
Well, I don't want to overstep my boundaries of my own, you know, domain of expertise.
00:16:30.960
But like is leadership has for most of human existence been a male-dominated domain.
00:16:37.540
And that domain tends to, you know, compete on things like, well, intelligence, number
00:16:41.120
And obviously women are just as intelligent as men.
00:16:43.580
But also physical prowess and power is an element towards leadership because there are times
00:16:50.400
Right now we're seeing conflict being resolved in the domain of violence, which is a male
00:16:54.280
Like I don't know how women can, you know, compete in that domain whatsoever.
00:16:58.940
You know, what we've seen from women in terms of how they project leadership, at least
00:17:03.620
what I see from an international scale, you know, I don't want to step outside my domain
00:17:06.560
of knowledge, but I see them leading with this message of empathetic leadership.
00:17:09.920
But I haven't really been able to understand what exactly that means.
00:17:13.860
And I had a conversation with Chad GPT the other day.
00:17:17.720
And I asked Chad GPT, I said, can you tell me what you think of Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand
00:17:22.860
And it said, well, you know, she exemplified beautiful, empathetic leadership.
00:17:26.100
And I said, can you describe what exactly empathetic leadership means?
00:17:29.240
And Chad GPT was like, oh, she led, you know, with her heart first and caring for people.
00:17:32.680
And I said, OK, well, she said that during the COVID pandemic in New Zealand, we would like
00:17:38.840
And Chad GPT replied and it said, well, yes, but that was a way to reward people for
00:17:44.000
And I said, how is it rewarding people to have individual freedom of, you know, movement,
00:17:50.060
individual freedom of autonomy over their habitus?
00:17:52.240
Isn't that something that's implied with our social contract with society that we are
00:17:56.800
And the opposite of that is not promoting freedom, but actually taking away freedom, which
00:18:02.300
And Chad GPT was like, I must reconsider my answer and determine better what empathetic
00:18:07.180
So if Chad GPT can't answer it, like, how can I answer it?
00:18:10.480
But, you know, it's a good point because I was thinking about someone when you were talking
00:18:16.600
And we tend to always look to the modern when it comes to female leadership.
00:18:20.720
And of course we should, because we live, that's where the time that we live in.
00:18:24.340
But let's look back at one of the most iconic leaders that has ever existed.
00:18:29.560
And one of the most iconic monarchs that has ever existed, Elizabeth I.
00:18:35.580
So let's look at her because she's somebody, everybody knows Elizabeth I.
00:18:40.040
She was somebody who dominated the world stage, who was respected as a leader, even though
00:18:46.080
her own father, Henry VIII, would have preferred her to be a boy.
00:18:51.320
So I guess I would ask, was she like a CEO or like a chairman?
00:19:01.980
But so, but also Thatcher was to me a fractal of a Golda Mare.
00:19:05.520
You know, like if you want to talk about the ultimate quintessential, you know, female
00:19:09.340
leader that dominated in a male hierarchy, that's Golda Mare.
00:19:14.460
Well, I mean, how would you, how would you imagine?
00:19:18.920
Because there's going to be people who don't know.
00:19:20.120
Well, she was one of, she was the first basically leader of a, first female leader of a democratic
00:19:26.920
And not only the prime minister of Israel, but the prime minister of Israel during like,
00:19:30.360
you know, some of the biggest war the country has ever fought for its own survival.
00:19:35.720
You're talking about, I mean, which is, again, that's the male domain.
00:19:38.180
And she dominated in that domain because she became the prime minister and was fairly popular.
00:19:43.020
And Margaret Thatcher, again, when you think of Margaret Thatcher, you don't think short
00:19:47.500
But here's the thing though, Iron Lady, nobody who met her, and I know people who used to
00:19:54.340
work for her and know her, they all said that she was incredibly feminine and powerful with
00:20:01.960
So Wes, this is what I meant about Hillary Clinton.
00:20:04.580
There's a kind of, it feels like this person has tried to make themselves not be a woman.
00:20:10.760
That femininity is just gone, which I'm sure was there or even is there at certain points,
00:20:18.480
Whereas with Thatcher, from what I know, she wasn't afraid of people knowing that she's
00:20:24.260
a woman and actually using that to sort of flirt with Gorbachev or whatever in a very
00:20:32.840
But tell us about Golda Meir a little bit more.
00:20:35.900
And by the way, you know, whether dress and her and Thatcher, whether that was a part of
00:20:40.700
Well, I, again, this is going into maybe a domain I'm not super deeply familiar with.
00:20:48.800
And you guys have a lot of historians on the show.
00:20:50.260
There's some books back there that I've read, right?
00:20:55.840
But can you imagine a leader in a cocktail dress?
00:21:02.460
I don't know how to, I don't, I'm like, I'm not a psychologist.
00:21:04.600
Do you think a woman can imagine a woman in a cocktail dress as a leader?
00:21:08.060
Do you think it's because we're chauvinistic male kids?
00:21:10.560
No, because, because, um, this is really good, interesting conversation.
00:21:16.080
And again, I, again, there's going to be somebody that's more educated in this field than me.
00:21:18.880
That's going to come along and give a different hypothesis here.
00:21:20.780
But like women would feel very threatened by women who are, you know, coquettish, let's
00:21:29.240
Like women get competitive with other women, right?
00:21:34.780
So, so, and you know what, what else is interesting?
00:21:38.560
You know, you talk about empathetic leadership and you're like, well, we, there's an interesting
00:21:42.740
Like I do a lot of fundraiser events with our company because it helps us garner new clients.
00:21:46.260
And there's some studies, a lot of studies that actually have consistently shown that
00:21:50.260
when you have beautiful women at a fundraiser event, men give way more money.
00:21:54.920
Like when you have a beautiful female sales representative, we just see the package size, the basket size
00:21:59.180
she sells is like way higher than a dude, which, which is like, again, nobody's talking
00:22:04.800
And so I do wonder like what kind of empathy that would evoke for men if they were to see
00:22:11.600
But I don't know what that, would that incite men to, to rise up and fight for their country
00:22:18.600
But I suppose the question would be, given that we live in a world that is attempting to
00:22:24.560
balance this out and whether you think it's possible or not is a different question.
00:22:27.980
But we do see a lot of female leaders coming through in different countries.
00:22:32.300
In this country, the leader of the Conservative Party, the new leader is Kami Badenoch.
00:22:36.460
If you were advising somebody who was a female leader aspiring really to, who had good policies
00:22:42.800
and the right ideas even, what would your advice be?
00:22:46.300
How, how would you help them to, to kind of get the look right?
00:22:53.860
If you haven't been cancelled, it's inevitable.
00:22:55.500
Well, you can only get yourself cancelled if your opinion is like, oh, Kami's a woman,
00:23:12.980
What would you advise be to women seeking leadership positions if they are going to do that, despite
00:23:19.100
Let me tell you my experience in the suit selling business and how it correlates to this.
00:23:22.160
So when I was in my early 20s, I started this company.
00:23:24.260
I'm like, I'm going to go and I'm going to sell suits to women.
00:23:28.140
And I had a lot of male clients, but I'm like, oh, let's meet some hot lady lawyers, right?
00:23:33.740
Like we were manufacturing and leads in England at the time.
00:23:35.920
So I thought, you know, I'm going to call some female partners at law firms.
00:23:38.860
And when I met these ladies, it was not what I was expecting, you know, because I hadn't
00:23:42.600
seen a preponderance of women like that concentrated in one place in the past.
00:23:46.900
These women competed and won on male criteria, male dominated criteria.
00:23:51.280
So these women were disagreeable, highly conscientious, incredibly hardworking.
00:23:56.920
Like these were women putting in 100 hours a week at their law firm.
00:23:59.920
They were basically just dudes, like in terms of temper mentality, right?
00:24:03.040
Like I said, I hadn't met a lot of women like that in my life.
00:24:07.280
My mother is like a very conscientious, disagreeable, you know, systems analyst, data architect type
00:24:12.600
of person who's just all career, career, career.
00:24:14.480
But to meet them in a group and you kind of go, okay, that's interesting.
00:24:17.860
These women didn't win by, you know, by being coquettish.
00:24:22.560
They won actually by being competent, disagreeable and hardworking, all those other factors.
00:24:26.720
So if I were to advise a woman how to dress to win in that arena, I don't know how I could
00:24:32.180
Like I think I would just say, hey, you're probably going to have to wear
00:24:35.500
a suit because there's a level of, and maybe we as a society don't know how to resolve
00:24:39.780
Like how long have women been in the workforce?
00:24:43.240
But it's also, they need to embrace their femininity.
00:24:46.260
Like I saw the comedian Bill Burr on SNL and having this conversation, he made a joke
00:24:52.360
where it goes, ladies, the pantsuit isn't working.
00:24:56.720
We need to, and what he's actually saying is something quite profound, which is you can't
00:25:03.840
You need as a woman to combine the masculine with the feminine.
00:25:08.260
But this is where I, I questioned this because, and I think we had this conversation with somebody
00:25:12.540
else in an episode that hasn't maybe been released yet, which is once you start showing
00:25:17.760
flesh, then you instantly get switched into object of attraction mode, which is more difficult
00:25:30.740
I would argue as a, just as a man watching outside, because it's like, if you are, if
00:25:36.820
you are like, just like, well, she's hot, that's, you're not thinking about, I want to
00:25:44.080
But there is such a thing as when someone comes in, a woman using her attractiveness
00:25:49.100
that is powerful and it's, it's a power in the room.
00:25:54.780
Let me tell you guys my sort of theory on this.
00:25:57.140
And again, I'm going to be stepping into some, into some, we're all going to get canceled.
00:26:01.820
Basically three men discussing what female politicians should wear for our appeal.
00:26:06.380
Here's what me personally, here's, here's what frightens me.
00:26:10.540
Here's what frightens me about having a female leader in a time of war.
00:26:13.960
It's a good, it's a good starting, specifically, men inherently, and I'm talking like at our DNA
00:26:21.260
level, we understand that war is death because men have to fight and die in wars.
00:26:27.340
Like women, you know, even in Ukraine now, all the Ukrainian women have boyfriends in
00:26:33.680
Because I travel all the time and I meet Ukrainian women in coffee shops all over the world these
00:26:40.020
Dmitry, just that, we should say there actually are quite a lot of women fighting in the armed
00:26:48.000
We should, this isn't me saying, doing that stupid thing that journalists do.
00:26:52.520
I just want to make sure that we're respectful to those women who are actually bravely fighting.
00:26:56.980
And I have friends that have fought in some pretty crazy battles, like female friends.
00:27:00.560
And I've got actually some guests I should introduce you to that have just gone.
00:27:03.200
But generally speaking, you're probably, of course.
00:27:05.800
So women, like, like as a man, I know that if like a war comes and I can't leave the country,
00:27:15.020
But I'm not sure that women necessarily have that same instinct, because if your village
00:27:20.880
is raided and you lose the war, all the men get killed and all the women get taken basically
00:27:25.500
as concubines, the women's DNA still continues.
00:27:28.040
Like the women still get to reproduce and live their lives with technically, let's say, stronger
00:27:33.940
So even though it's not an optimal outcome per se, it's nonetheless not death and end of
00:27:39.800
So, so I know that as a man, my bloodline ends if we lose in a war.
00:27:44.700
I'm not sure if women, and again, I'm going to get a lot of hate comments in this, but
00:27:47.940
still, I'm not sure that women implicitly understand that, like, that's the end of the
00:27:54.440
And I especially worry about women leaders that don't have male offspring, because, you
00:27:58.780
know, when women have kids, they start voting more conservative.
00:28:02.240
And I understand why when women have kids, they start voting more conservative, because if they
00:28:05.520
don't have kids, it's like, well, I have all this female empathy.
00:28:10.220
I'm either going to become the proverbial cat lady or get some pugs.
00:28:13.660
And, you know, now we see the spending on pets is like insane because women have less,
00:28:19.060
But now it's like that empathy starts turning towards society as a whole.
00:28:22.140
So women without kids, they tend to vote very left because, hey, let's let the migrants
00:28:26.920
Let's show love and empathy for everybody, everybody.
00:28:28.820
And the men are going, hey, these migrants, these people might not want us here.
00:28:36.620
Women have kids and all of a sudden they're voting more conservative.
00:28:39.500
Oh, because they now understand that their own bloodline is in danger going forward.
00:28:44.380
I wonder what the implications of that are, because it has been a point that I've heard
00:28:50.840
people make to absolutely, like, just crazy levels of consternation.
00:28:59.820
You can't say that a female leader of a country that doesn't have kids, that there's something
00:29:04.660
about that that's going to change the way she might see the world.
00:29:08.720
But as a parent, I can tell you as a man, it's changed my worldview becoming a parent.
00:29:14.480
And so, I think, I don't, I actually genuinely don't know why this is such a controversial
00:29:20.860
I think it's just because people without kids want to get really offended by it.
00:29:24.640
Well, here, like, anytime you want to test any theory, you just push it to its logical
00:29:28.720
Have you ever seen ISIS execute female prisoners on camera?
00:29:36.440
Like, you know there's executions they publicize all the time and it's always guys getting
00:29:44.980
There is a certain, like, you can't see to the other side of death, you know?
00:29:49.880
And it's like, for me, for me, would I be led into battle by somebody that potentially
00:29:58.040
By the way, this is why I'll never fly in an airplane when an airplane, if airplanes are
00:30:01.240
flown by, like, robotic pilots or drones or whatever, no, I will refuse to fly in an airplane
00:30:09.280
Because I don't like any system where the person responsible for my safety is not in
00:30:17.120
Like, I don't like politicians spending my money when they haven't built anything substantive
00:30:21.000
themselves in order to understand how money really works.
00:30:23.740
Like, if you're not facing the consequences of your own actions, why should I face the
00:30:30.080
That's such a good point because I think that really opens up the entire debate we've
00:30:34.660
been having for the last eight or nine years, which is what you're talking about is where
00:30:40.100
Populism is the revolt of people who feel that the people who govern them do not have skin
00:30:45.380
in the game and, in fact, can pursue policies that harm everybody else because they feel
00:30:50.960
virtuous or they feel compassionate or they feel empathetic, but do not pay the price when
00:30:57.020
their policies actually cause terrible consequences for everybody else, i.e. shipping jobs overseas,
00:31:03.900
i.e. mass immigration that affects people who are not protected by gated communities, who are
00:31:09.120
not protected by the comfort that they can afford.
00:31:11.580
That is a really fascinating observation, I think, and that's where really this whole
00:31:18.660
It's a feeling that the people who rule us do not have skin in the game.
00:31:23.060
If you run a company, which I do, and I've had hundreds of employees, my biggest, maybe
00:31:28.180
a couple of hundred with all the front-facing salespeople, support, staff production, etc.,
00:31:34.400
you actually see very quickly how people act differently when they're not personally responsible
00:31:43.360
There was one year where I lost about a million and a half dollars on my business because
00:31:46.440
I decided that I'm going to try to do this fair, it was the stupidest experiment I've
00:31:50.880
ever done, but that's the great thing about running a business is you always, the market
00:31:55.420
It tells you exactly what works, what doesn't, right?
00:31:57.220
I moved my salespeople from commission-based to salary-based roles.
00:32:01.920
No, but it was really interesting because, no, and I'll tell you, and it's funny and it's
00:32:06.280
But what I realized is that a salesperson productivity in the company is actually very highly correlated
00:32:10.580
to how long they've been in the business because they build a client base, and the longer they
00:32:14.420
stay, the more the clients trust them, the more the clients spend.
00:32:16.600
So I thought, well, if I can just take that pressure off my experienced salespeople, and
00:32:20.620
some of them are like, yeah, this sounds great, then maybe things will be good because they
00:32:23.940
won't leave and clients will continue buying, and it completely tanked our sales.
00:32:29.800
Well, so we have something called sales training, right?
00:32:31.620
Sales training is like you teach somebody what to do, and it's not always intuitive on what
00:32:35.540
Like running a business or running an economy, it's not intuitive because the ideas that
00:32:40.020
you have in your head of how things work is not how things actually work.
00:32:45.800
If I buy her flowers and tell her she's pretty, she'll like me.
00:32:48.360
And it's like, nope, there are things that you want to work, and then there are things
00:32:52.420
that actually work, what people respond to, right?
00:32:54.660
So what ended up happening is our sales training a lot of times asks people to do things which
00:32:59.340
are uncomfortable for those people to do, like asking for a sale, asking for a bigger
00:33:02.800
sale, presenting a more expensive, a luxurious item.
00:33:05.280
These are all things that are ultimately good because you want to aspire to get the best
00:33:10.000
Well, what I noticed with the people that were not on commission is that they still went to
00:33:13.140
work every day, but they refused to do anything that made them uncomfortable.
00:33:15.680
And the lesson it taught me is that like a lot of productivity happens at the edge of
00:33:22.900
Same with dating, but like a lot of, this is like the whole porn argument, like a lot
00:33:26.200
of, you know, a lot of lack of like mating with people is the fact that men are just
00:33:30.800
And I've been observing that, like I'm in my 40s now.
00:33:32.880
And so I look back and I have a lot of 25-year-old guys in my company and how they act.
00:33:36.660
I'm like, oh, a lot of your success just comes from desperation.
00:33:39.700
And when you remove personal responsibility, you remove an element of desperation.
00:33:44.160
And when you remove that, you know, what do you get now?
00:33:46.960
Society is like here, and sorry for saying it, but like my train today was canceled in
00:33:53.740
I don't really see a lot of very happy faces outside.
00:33:56.560
And what are people paying half their money for taxes here for?
00:33:58.940
You have to embrace discomfort in order to improve.
00:34:03.640
It doesn't matter what sector that you work in, whether you're a comedian, you can, and
00:34:08.180
you've got a comedy club and you're in a comedy club, you can do your safe set that
00:34:12.180
you know will do very well, or you can do your new jokes that might not go across well.
00:34:16.900
And the chances are they won't, but you've got to do it in order to improve.
00:34:21.280
And the problem is if you continually embrace comfort, it may feel good in the moment, but what
00:34:29.420
And not only growth, it's also self-respect at the end of it.
00:34:38.340
Howard Schultz, I saw Howard Schultz speak when I was in university.
00:34:40.700
It was one of the greatest things I've ever seen.
00:34:43.160
And it was so fortunate that he came to speak at my school and he said neutral is negative.
00:34:49.320
Like everything I've seen that becomes neutral, it regresses to negativity.
00:34:53.060
You can't stand still in life because even if you manage to stand still,
00:34:56.680
everyone else is still moving forward and you get left behind just as a result of that.
00:35:02.400
I mean, one of the things within that is just knowing you personally, you're someone who
00:35:06.820
has thought very carefully and has a lot of real world experience when it comes to sales.
00:35:12.560
What can you tell us about what makes a good salesperson?
00:35:18.660
Well, one of the misnumbers about the profession of salespeople think that you have to be a good
00:35:22.780
talker, you have to be charismatic, you have to be gregarious.
00:35:25.660
You know, that's the movie character salesperson.
00:35:30.200
I realized like pretty early in my career that personality and results aren't very highly
00:35:36.800
And I think Jordan Peterson spoke about that, too.
00:35:38.880
There's not a lot of connection between personality and productivity, right?
00:35:41.820
Like we all think of an accountant as like a really boring, you know, sort of consistent
00:35:47.280
But I've known a lot of accountants that are super wild and just crazy guys, you know,
00:35:53.380
So the top salespeople, you would expect them to be like, again, because we're watching a
00:35:59.660
We'd expect them to be slimy and sort of, you know, honest Iago types.
00:36:03.560
But no, a lot of times they're just very similarly temper, they're similarly temperamental to what
00:36:10.000
you would expect from a high performing person in any profession.
00:36:13.780
They're very intelligent and they have a degree of disagree, they have a degree of disagreeability
00:36:17.860
whereby they're able to challenge and ask questions in a constructive way.
00:36:23.080
So they learn why they're doing what they're doing, right?
00:36:25.720
But I think that's true across all professions, right?
00:36:28.560
But there must be something that predisposes someone to sales versus accountants.
00:36:33.420
Propensity for risk and probably a level of testosterone.
00:36:37.860
You know, like I was studying, like, I have a problem with, I had a problem in school in
00:36:42.260
the sense that, like, I liked school, I did well at school, but it always bothered me that
00:36:45.520
the teachers would set these rules that I don't think they understood why they set the rules.
00:36:50.280
I think you probably had a little bit of a difference as well.
00:36:52.820
I was like, well, and the other thing is I never respected authority unless it was gained.
00:36:57.920
So you didn't get my respect by being the teacher.
00:37:03.900
And that's a function of being raised by Russian parents.
00:37:05.680
Because your dad would say, your mother said this, but why?
00:37:16.380
It's like, I don't understand positional authority.
00:37:18.040
And that's actually very interesting because positional authority is management and competence authority
00:37:25.880
So, you know, when I observe my teachers in school, I was like, why do they have all
00:37:35.160
And then I started reading into it as I got older.
00:37:37.420
And I understood that teachers actually, the profession of teaching attracts the lowest
00:37:42.800
But it makes sense because teaching is safe, right?
00:37:46.940
Like you grow up, you're put into an institution and then you're like, well, I'm going to study
00:37:51.680
Then I'll go right back into that institution to uphold the institution.
00:37:54.200
There's nothing venturing outside the institution, right?
00:37:56.780
And so I started looking at the highest testosterone by profession and it was entrepreneurs, people
00:38:02.400
And it makes sense because testosterone is going to lead you to take risks because risk taking
00:38:06.860
is a demarcative behavior towards, you know, reproduction.
00:38:13.320
So to me, if you ask, you know, what is really driving guys or gals into sales?
00:38:17.020
Probably at some level, it's a higher level of testosterone.
00:38:26.880
It's safer being a tailor than in some of the schools.
00:38:30.860
Well, so there are some dissonance you were feeling when you were in the school.
00:38:33.200
Probably that your life was too damn predictable.
00:38:38.120
And the fact that I had to leave is because, and also the fact was, is that I took a lot
00:38:42.680
of pride in my work and, you know, obviously I made mistakes and whatever else, but I drove
00:38:47.560
myself to be an outstanding teacher, officially graded outstanding in both primary and secondary.
00:38:54.520
And I felt that like there were people who were putting in a quarter of the effort.
00:39:00.200
And is that not a marker of testosterone competition?
00:39:04.440
So, so it's not like you went there and you stay there.
00:39:06.440
But again, I think this is all, I'm looking at like studies on this and you asked me a
00:39:11.920
I've asked myself that same foundational question.
00:39:13.640
Like what drives people into something that has no predictable outcomes?
00:39:17.160
Because then when you're an entrepreneur, like you said, we were talking before the show,
00:39:19.960
like, yes, you can do the right things, but it doesn't guarantee success.
00:39:23.260
It only improves the opportunity to, to experience it, but there's no promises.
00:39:26.940
One of the things, I actually really love fashion.
00:39:29.860
I find fashion very interesting, particularly when it's, when it's connected to musical movements
00:39:35.300
and particularly with British musical movements, things like punk, ska, you know, things that
00:39:49.140
What can you see coming down the pipeline connected to your role and your job, et cetera?
00:39:55.800
Well, um, I have a book coming out with Michael Franzese.
00:40:00.520
Part of the book is we actually talk about the evolution of suits, uh, through the decades,
00:40:04.360
like the thirties, forties, fifties, sixties, et cetera.
00:40:06.180
So what's interesting to me is the movement of, of suits specifically fashion in general,
00:40:11.920
but suits specifically today is kind of moving towards what suits looked like back in the
00:40:16.060
1950s, which is, which is a, a fuller cut suit, which is a more traditionally conservative
00:40:23.180
suit, not a lot of exuberant details, just very straightforward, fuller cut suits.
00:40:27.680
And the 1950s were an interesting era for that because we were coming out of the forties
00:40:33.600
And so, and then we, before that had the thirties where we had opulence, like the thirties
00:40:37.800
were the golden age, you know, that was Clark Gable and, and, you know, Gary Cooper.
00:40:42.000
These were like, these were like the, the golden age of bespoke tailoring kind of thing.
00:40:46.320
And then, and so the fifties were not a reemergence of the opulent thirties, but they were a break
00:40:53.900
So you want things that are conservative looking, but still fuller cut and more fabric.
00:40:58.880
You know, you can enjoy that now because fabric is no longer being rationed.
00:41:01.720
And now that I look at the 2020s, what's happening with clothing, it's coming back to the 1950s.
00:41:07.060
So I think we're coming out of a re, it's almost like the clothing today is a reemergence
00:41:12.620
Like we didn't actually have a very big physical war in the West, but we surely had a cultural
00:41:17.880
And I, and I think there's the same sort of an ethos that the same spirit is running
00:41:27.240
Like I have a friend who's in the hat business and business is booming.
00:41:30.460
And it's like, when was the last time you saw a guy wear a hat like 10 years ago?
00:41:34.000
So I see a reemergence of what some would consider more conservative fashion.
00:41:39.420
And, but that's, but that's a great point because one thing that I've noticed particularly,
00:41:44.780
and maybe it's me getting more conservative as I get older, is I see people of our generation
00:41:49.540
refusing to embrace a more adult look and still remaining in their twenties fashion.
00:41:58.700
I think, you know what I think is driving that?
00:42:00.340
I think it's IT being a major employment sector and remote work being a by-product of
00:42:06.180
Because, because, you know, you know, Jordan Peterson says it like this too, clothing
00:42:12.280
And so as we are acclimated to working from home, it's like, why would I put on a suit or
00:42:16.420
And I think, or I don't know, like as, as, as we sort of become a little bit, again,
00:42:22.040
we're becoming cognitively dissonant towards remote work.
00:42:24.500
We're seeing that reemergence again of coming back and meeting people in person.
00:42:28.040
That's something that's going to drive clothing as well, because like, I'm going to get dressed
00:42:31.240
up for you guys in a way that I might not get dressed up for myself if I'm, you know,
00:42:36.780
Do you think there's also something there about youth, the preservation of youth, because
00:42:41.740
in a society that highly values people being young, which wasn't always the case,
00:42:46.280
you know, there were periods in human history when you would have looked at someone young
00:42:50.600
as totally useless and, and, and you would have said, well, you're not really a person
00:42:56.160
Whereas now, you know, the American presidential election was a bit of an exception, but generally
00:43:01.520
speaking, we tend to think of youth as being a good thing.
00:43:04.940
I think you're on the right track, but I don't think you're exactly on point.
00:43:10.160
I think it's a revoking of personal responsibility, which is exactly what's been happening in the
00:43:15.460
culture because everything the left has been doing is about abdicating personal responsibility.
00:43:19.680
So it's not about, I want to look youthful because I miss being 15 or 18 years old.
00:43:23.920
It's because I don't want to take the responsibility of, of determining my own destiny, which is part
00:43:31.180
So you're there, you're almost there, but I think it's a cultural thing.
00:43:37.580
So as the show has got bigger, we get invited to more, you know, prestigious occasions and
00:43:43.520
constantly went to me, mate, you've, you've got to, you've got to get a suit.
00:43:46.540
And then when you go and buy a nice suit, it changes the way you hold yourself.
00:43:51.920
It changes the way you move through the world and it changes the way you speak.
00:43:58.160
You're evoking a spirit of people that are greater than you that build great things.
00:44:01.920
Truly, you know, I had this conversation, um, recently where it's like, it was, it was
00:44:08.240
He said, you know, you're wearing a suit for others to show respect.
00:44:10.520
And I said, I think there's a deeper sense there because look at, you know, in mathematics,
00:44:13.860
if you want to have a proof, right, you can prove something is true, but you can also prove
00:44:16.860
the opposite is not true, which proves that something might be true.
00:44:20.140
And so when you look at people that want to destroy society, I mean, I'm really talking about
00:44:24.680
these radical leftist types, imagine what they look like.
00:44:28.540
Like a, uh, rotund blob with blue hair and piercings, just everything about destructing
00:44:35.800
Well, from a female perspective, what they're saying is the, if the male, you know, if the
00:44:40.640
agency you have as a male is finding me sexually attractive, I'm going to make myself super
00:44:45.880
So you have absolutely no agency over me whatsoever.
00:44:48.060
It's like, they're destroying their own sexual market value intentionally to show you
00:44:53.180
And so what's the opposite of destroying your personal image is uplifting a personal image.
00:44:57.480
So the opposite of that leftist movement is conservatism, right?
00:45:00.060
Like paying conservatism, conserve the institutions, paying homage to the institutions built before
00:45:04.400
So to me, the suit is not only, um, a respect factor.
00:45:10.000
Like I'm showing respect to people that came before me that built things that I'm completely
00:45:15.340
These things that operate around this in society, they're amazing.
00:45:21.320
And, um, very, very quickly, France, you know, like for me, I went to a private school in
00:45:28.240
Vancouver, um, for elementary school, but I didn't belong there.
00:45:35.080
And so you had all the local, you know, like the kids that grew up in the city and their
00:45:41.360
And I was from Ukraine and my friends were from Latvia and, you know, in Sarajevo, like
00:45:45.280
from all over sort of the Slavic countries that came to Canada.
00:45:47.500
And my dad, you know, he's, he's an RV technician, like a mechanic at the time, you know, he
00:45:52.740
would take me to school in his 1989 Corolla or Camry, which was, you know, he was getting
00:45:58.180
ready for his overalls, but there was a private school.
00:46:01.040
So all the other kids are being dropped off, you know, when their dad's driving a black
00:46:08.260
I don't know why, but it made me feel like those men were important.
00:46:15.100
It is because when I was a kid, I loved wearing suits.
00:46:19.620
It's because you know that what you wear communicates something about you.
00:46:24.340
And if you want to project a sense of power or authority or status, there is nothing that
00:46:30.160
does that better for a man than a well-cut suit.
00:46:33.880
And a status of respect for the institutions around you because they're freaking unbelievable.
00:46:38.600
Like, you know, you guys were saying earlier, like, oh, our camera battery is not working.
00:46:44.540
Like, that's such an important thing for me, right?
00:46:50.100
Like, somebody had to build that together with many brilliant minds.
00:46:52.820
These are all institutions around us that we get to enjoy.
00:46:55.500
It's that irony, you know, of that kid typing about how he's an anarchist but doing it on
00:47:02.320
Like, on the greatest thing that's ever been invented that you can hold in your hand,
00:47:14.000
I took my son with me on a business trip to Hong Kong earlier this year.
00:47:18.100
And we were, I was doing a lecture at university there about, you know, luxury fashion.
00:47:25.020
You know, an eight-year-old kid puts on a suit and, oh, my God, he lights up.
00:47:29.180
He looks at himself and he sees maybe something about his dad and himself.
00:47:34.640
Maybe not when you're an adult, but as a kid, that is an incredible feeling.
00:47:39.140
And we always talk about how, and people always say, you know, this is the 1930s.
00:47:47.780
If we look globally, what's happening, the world becoming more unstable.
00:47:52.840
Do you see that reflected in fashion or not at all?
00:47:59.420
You know, the pandemic actually catalyzed that quite a bit because things were moving towards more casual during the pandemic.
00:48:05.940
Because keep in mind, heading into 2020, we were still on this weird timeline, you know, after Harambe died and everybody went nuts.
00:48:15.360
Like, all of a sudden, inverted ideas started becoming proliferated as a sense.
00:48:22.620
And, you know, everybody had to be a doctor because of the color of your skin because you can actually, you know, help heal a person.
00:48:27.980
All of a sudden, crazy stuff started happening, right?
00:48:30.100
And as the institutions deteriorated, started our fashion.
00:48:33.100
And then it kind of culminated in the pandemic where everybody was just wearing t-shirts and shorts all the time.
00:48:37.640
So, yes, you had this sort of a war that was emerging on a sort of cultural scale.
00:48:44.320
And as I'm seeing our clients and, you know, we thought, hey, after the pandemic, we'll never sell a suit again.
00:48:51.640
Do you think if you see military iconography styles come into fashion, do you see that as a warning sign for society?
00:49:03.340
I would ask, what is the cause and what is the effect?
00:49:06.820
You know, it's like, okay, well, let's say we're seeing some militaristic styles.
00:49:10.840
Like, is that coming from designers or is that coming from where?
00:49:25.340
One of the interesting things I've always found about talking with you is that you have access to lots and lots of people.
00:49:31.420
Now, they're not representative of the population, even remotely.
00:49:35.960
But what you do have, most of your clients are not going to be, you know, public commentators or Jordan Peterson or Constantin Kish or whatever.
00:49:43.980
They're going to be lawyers, bankers, business owners, et cetera.
00:49:47.840
So when you see those people and you see thousands of them every year, I imagine, what are you hearing?
00:49:54.780
What's the word on the street or the word in the boardroom, so to speak?
00:49:58.600
What are people saying about, you know, the cultural situation, the political situation, the global situation?
00:50:04.000
Is there some kind of thing that you're picking up?
00:50:07.220
I've been in some really crazy rooms with, you know, lawyers, bankers, politicians.
00:50:10.500
One thing I'm noticing is there's a profound fear amongst the white collar professional class when it comes to stating their true opinion.
00:50:16.760
Like, it's been, I've had judges, you know, that have been very famous and well-known judges that I've sat down with, you know, and they would, like, kind of say, hey, man, you know, all this stuff that's on my email, the gender pronouns on my email, it's all crap, it's bullshit, but I can't do anything about it.
00:50:32.360
I used to hear that all the time from my clients.
00:50:33.880
Like, how much they disagreed with what was happening, but for whatever reason, they were so afraid to stick out their neck, so to say, because they were afraid it was going to undermine their, so they built their entire profession on, you know, being part of an institution, and so they would rise up to the institution, and they would just get, like, these golden handcuffs where they couldn't express themselves, and that's something that's made me so thankful about being, you know, let's say, an entrepreneur, and it's also made me understand why governments hate entrepreneurs so much, because they can't control us, you know?
00:51:01.260
So that's probably been the main theme, is that a lot of them really, it's like, you know, the silent Trump thing, like, Trump just crushed this election, everybody's like, oh my god, how did it happen, you know?
00:51:09.640
All these people, you know, in large institutions, like, oh, I'm a lawyer, I can't believe he won, it's like, no, man, like, they all voted for him, but publicly they're saying something else.
00:51:17.780
And is that changing now that the elections happened? Are you having conversations with people where you feel like they're more willing to express themselves?
00:51:25.480
Yeah, people can breathe easier, for sure. As they say, the air feels cheaper to breathe, you know? Yeah, for sure, there's a sigh of relief, because, you know, there's this pressure that's been building up, you know?
00:51:38.380
And, you know, it so annoyed me, like, I would have, like, a guy on my LinkedIn who's like, Bill, who weighs 320 pounds and has a big surly beard, he, him.
00:51:46.000
And I'd be like, thanks, Bill. Like, I was having a hard time. He goes, dude, I don't know, like, they make us do this, blah, blah, blah.
00:51:52.540
And now, all of a sudden, you know, the people that had, whatever, whoever those people were that had the control to, like, to create that or to enforce that, they seem to have lost their power.
00:52:02.580
I don't know how that looks on a, you know, on an individual scale, but I mean, in general. So, I do see people breathing a little bit easier.
00:52:08.500
But, you know, what's interesting is, I used to have an office in Ukraine. We had, like, 50-plus guys working for us and gals working for us in Ukraine.
00:52:14.540
And so, I would go to offices with people that had money in Ukraine, which usually, they weren't, like, the kind of people that have money in the Western world.
00:52:22.340
Like, they just, you never quite know what you're really dealing with. And they would tell you things.
00:52:26.420
And those things they would tell you would completely be the opposite of what you're hearing in the media.
00:52:31.300
Like, a complete inversion, but they're the people that are actually in the media.
00:52:35.660
And you would go, wow, like, so much of our world is built on a facade of a certain, like, sanctimonious promulgation, some preaching of some values.
00:52:44.360
But the people that are behind the scenes on those, they don't necessarily believe those values at all.
00:52:48.360
It really shifted my world being around these people because I learned that I, I mean, this is going to sound crazy.
00:52:52.740
I learned from my job that I can't trust the news.
00:52:56.840
And what it also tells you is that if you are an entrepreneur, the main reason people think it's about building wealth or whatever.
00:53:04.300
And look, of course, it's about being financially independent, but it's not.
00:53:09.020
You know, because for all of us sitting here, the reality is, for one reason or another, we didn't fit into the normal workplace.
00:53:16.960
And part of the problem is, well, I'm speaking for myself, I'm certainly including everyone else here as well, is an inability to button my mouth.
00:53:24.580
Creative, disagreeable people tend to not do very well at the bottom of hierarchies.
00:53:29.180
And it's a very interesting juxtaposition, right?
00:53:31.440
Because you're creative and disagreeable, which is actually creative means you're basically smart.
00:53:35.340
You know, and disagreeable means, well, you're able to challenge in quotas and all those status quotes.
00:53:42.120
Because if you're a yes man, you know, you're going to get stuck in middle management.
00:53:48.240
But you're also not really competent because you're at the bottom of the hierarchy within your profession.
00:53:51.660
So any idea you have, as great as it might be, the moment it is a slight outlier from what is known to work, you become like, you become an incompetent thug.
00:54:00.220
And it's like, well, why are you telling me what to do?
00:54:03.120
And it's, you know, and most people that think the system is wrong are going to fail with their own system anyway.
00:54:11.280
So if you're going to be that person, and you guys are certainly those kind of people too, then you better damn succeed at the thing you do.
00:54:18.540
Because otherwise you're just a disagreeable thug.
00:54:24.480
As you know, the last question we'll always ask is, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we should be?
00:54:33.480
There's so many unkosher things I can think of.
00:54:45.580
Something that we're not talking about that we should be talking about?
00:54:49.740
How we should not let people work in positions in government where they can exercise any authority unless they've built some kind of an institution that's been proven by the free market.