Sina Saadat is the founding partner of luxury listings. The leading real estate platform on social media with over 50 million monthly viewers and a whopping 258 million of luxury properties sold directly through Instagram. With over a decade of development experience, Ciena has brought a unique perspective to the booming influencer scene.
Being able to celebritize international trophy listings to effectively market and sell them in innovative ways has differentiated luxury listings from the crowd and conventional marketing. I’m excited to talk about all things, luxury listing, marketing, and the life of an influencer with my homie Sina.
Welcome to the run GPG podcast. Thank you for having me. David just everybody knows. This is my first ever podcast. I held out for a long time, but you know, I can’t say no to David GPG. When I saw the lineup, when I saw who I would be next to, I was so humbled and honored. I don’t even know if I told you this, but I pulled out all the stops for the first time ever.
I started getting coaching, like public speaking, coaching, speech coaching, how to basically communicate my life story because a lot of the time, all you see on Instagram is the glitz, the glamour, the success. But I wanted to choose this as an opportunity to show the rest of the world where I came from the humble beginning, and I wanted it to have a story where I can motivate and inspire the next generation.
So thank you so much for having me here, David. That’s awesome. Thanks for those kind words. And, yeah, you’ll have the opportunity to do that. Happy we can provide that. Now. I was really looking forward to this podcast because you were someone I actually, met through social media, which is a powerful medium for growing a brand in itself and networking.
But the fact that we were able to meet and then collaborate. Because it shows how valuable it can be when you use it strategically and intentionally. Right. So I do want to talk to you about that in a little bit more detail, but first I want our listeners to hear in your words, like you said, the Siena Sabbat story.
Now someone’s introduced to you for the first time today. Let’s give them some background because you have a very interesting backstory and history for being so young. So the first question is who has seen us, where you’re from, where you grew up? Great question. So this is something that most people don’t really know.
Like I said, on Instagram, you only see the success. You see the snapshots of all the amazing things, the cars, the houses, the life, the traveling. And it really humbles me to think about where I came from having nothing. So I was born in Tehran, Iran in 1993. If you know anything about the history of Iran during that time in the middle east, in general, it was very politically charged.
It was essentially a war zone with what was happening between Iraq and Iran. Not a lot of families could get out. It was very stuck. We were in a situation where you only had very little choices, but there was an entire revolution that happened, right when my parents were very young, they were, they had children, very young and my brother and any family that wanted to leave Iran had a few options.
So basically, the dollar dropped. We had nothing and we had to scrape everything. Had sell everything that we had to try to get out of the country to start a new life. A lot of families tried to do this, or they were unsuccessful, but it was either you immigrated somewhere else or you tried to get refugee status.
So I remember at the time we could either go to Los Angeles, New York, Belgium, Germany, and then there was a little city that nobody knew it was called Vancouver, Canada. My parents ended up picking Vancouver, Canada. We didn’t know a single person, zero connections, no jobs. Just the hope that if we got out of here, we could start a new life.
Okay. So I was, as a, as a kid, I didn’t really know what was happening. I was five, six years old when we actually left Iran. And that’s where my whole childhood kind of initiated growing up in Vancouver, Canada in the early nineties, it was a completely different city than what it is now. I still believe it’s an emerging city, but it really had a small town vibe.
I didn’t know a lick of English. I was ESL all the way up until grade five. So I basically was learning English from the TV. A lot of the time. Things failed us. The education system failed us. Our parents were always told that, you know, we were not going to amount to much. We’re either going to be in jail, ended up in trouble, or dead.
One of those options. Right? So my whole life growing up, I never, ever really thought I was going to amount to much, but what I could physically see in front of me growing up in Canada, when I would leave, where we were originally growing up and go into the city, into the downtown core and to where I currently live.
Now you have such a big divide between these lavish mansions and these Lamborghini’s and Ferrari’s and all these really expensive cars driving on the street. And all I can remember as a kid, I could barely even speak English was I visualize that. And I had a dream that at one point I would do something to be able to take my family and.
Change our, our direction. I didn’t know how, I didn’t know when, but I knew for a fact that I had that underlying vision to not have this for the rest of my life. That’s fantastic. That’s you know where things got started for you? What an interesting story about how you got to Canada and actually how you, you got, you know, started in social media.
Now you did something that a lot of young, aspiring influencers dream of and that’s build and monetize a luxury brand on social media, right? So you are a true influencer, you know, you run in some pretty elite circles. I see who you roll with, dude. I see that. But before we talk about, superstar scene, I do want our audience to get the real picture and understand how you got, first of all, started on social media and secondly, where did luxury listings and all the other things you’re doing, where did that come from?
Where did that, you know, what was the evolution? For sure. So that’s actually a really cool story as well. Luxury listings was one of the first ever pages to post luxury real estate on social media on Instagram, in general, back then it was considered a little bit more of a hobby. I remember a lot of my friends at the time who had legitimate jobs.
We’re in real estate and we’re selling property. They never, ever really thought of Instagram as a tool to be able to market themselves or market their luxury properties in general. So what we were doing is pretty groundbreaking back then. Not only were we posting this stuff back then a lot of the times people would just be posting inspirational things, but they never thought to take the due diligence to actually go and research.
Who’s marketing the property, where it is, how much it is and include that into the caption. So when you think about influencers genuinely, it was a lot of those players in the space that took time out of their day to essentially fake the contract before they actually signed it. So what we were doing was offering free promo.
We would market all of these luxury realtors until we got onto their. And a lot of people don’t know that originally what it is is we’d be scouring 20 different websites, all the different brokerages around the world researching and trying to figure out what the luxury property is. And who’s marketing it.
A lot of the time, the realtors weren’t putting themselves in front of the property, it was more about selling the property and making the commission branding a little bit different. Back then it was conventional marketing. You’d either be on a bus ad in a newspaper, or you would rent TV space or you’d get on some sort of conventional form of marketing.
So we had to beg people to try to get a meeting with them, to try to show them the importance of social media. This was 5, 6, 7 years ago. You can’t believe how many calls and emails that had to do to a lot of these agents who are now my long-term clients. They’re my good friends. They’ve given us incredible testimonials about how social media is completely not only revamped, but changed the entire business and skyrocketed.
So the inflexion point only really happened two, three years ago, but five, six years ago, we were hustling. It was a two man job: my best friend, my business partner, and my brother Calm Bees and Marty who founded the entire platform, luxury listings. I was the first person to come on and I worked for free.
I busted myself for at least two years not making a dime, but I showed to him the vision that I thought that I had to be able to take this from just an Instagram page to a real legitimate business. So I quit my job. I, like I said, I, I went and I had my entire life savings. I boiled that down to nothing. And I scraped by for a really long time until we started to get our real pink clients until we started to sell luxury property through that.
So I don’t know if you know, but we’re actually one of the only pages that has physical proof of doing transactions directly through our Instagram, not as a licensed realtor, but as a marketing referral fee. So we really paved the way for a lot of these other quote, unquote marketing luxury marketing platforms that you see on social.
And, we know a lot of them and we have a lot of, kind of long-term relationships with them to be able to show and inspire a lot of these other younger social media platform, kids and influencers that look up to us every time I make a post on our page, it gets about 20 to 30 reshared cause people know the source to come to get that original luxury, high quality content.
You know, it’s crazy to think that was only like seven, eight years ago. You know, it was only seven, eight years ago. Like it wasn’t that long ago where you were trying to convince, you know, well the real estate industry as a whole, that social media was a way to go. You know, it feels like it’s been here forever, but it hasn’t, you know, it’s, it’s pretty new.
So, you mentioned it, you know, what was it like when luxury agents and brands started to reach out to you to collaborate? What was that like? It was, it was, it took a long time. It was a lot of us reaching out originally. So you got to understand what the minimum commission is for a realtor that is selling luxury property.
Like you have the percentages, let’s say a few hundred thousand dollars for, you know, we’re selling 10, 20, $30 million properties plus, right. So for them to not even want to put a little bit of budget towards social media at the beginning, cause it was, it was a joke. A lot of people thought of it. Like why do I need to brand myself on social media?
I’ve already established my business. I have a website, I got business cards. I got clients, social media at the time. They thought it would kind of bring them down. The inflexion point hit only a few years ago when we solidified our media kit and we started to work with the best of the best. It took a few of the agents to come on.
Like Jordan Cohen. Malcolm has been, the, the hot shots that you see on our page. Now, a lot of whom we’ve been working with from day one, Dina, golden tire, these people, it took them to believe in us for the rest of the world to believe in us. Obviously we had to establish like millions of followers and the proof was in the pudding right there, but it took quite a bit of time for us to actually make real transactions.
As soon as we started to sell the property, like in Dubai and Miami and LA, we printed it into a media kit and I distributed that media kit to every single realtor within the span of one year, we physically flew around the world. I did a world tour and I was one of the first people to ever actually do a virtual walkthrough shot on my iPhone using a stabilizer.
We went, we were in LA for a couple of months. We were in Miami for a couple of months. We went to London, met with Daniel daggers. I was one by one going around, shooting all of the realtors, putting their face in front of the camera and uploading it on Instagram stories. And that’s when I think it really took off because the swipe up feature was added.
We were able to direct people to their websites, to their listings. And that’s when the sales started to come in. That’s when the leads started to come in and that’s when the business kind of shut off. That’s awesome. So you answered my question on how you actually sold properties through Instagram, but that makes sense.
And I hope everybody’s paying attention to what Sienna did. I mean, it’s genius. You know, he actually did something about it, right. He put the work in, and as we say all the time, you know, success leaves clues. So we see your content and sometimes the vision for your content and the way it looks to an outsider, sometimes it can be different.
How would you describe the content you actually produce or the listings you post? Because it’s about more than just luxury listings, right? Like you could have endless luxury listing. So have you thought about that? Like how would you personally describe the content? So at the beginning, it all came down to the curated eye, but what we had to do was AB tests based on the analytics and the.
That’s what really took us from just a regular platform to the next level. We started to actually monitor and track what made certain pieces of content go more viral. So these things we decided to AB test and double down on what was working and that’s where you see the vision of the page. So originally it all came down to what our curated I was because we had nothing else to kind of compare to.
But I’d say in the last three to four years, we really broke it down into the analytics. As soon as Instagram started to update their analytics, we jumped on it early and we actually proved and interacted and AB tested our. And it took a lot of experimentation. So originally, I don’t know, for example, we used to shoot with red cameras and it would be a full production.
We’d spent so much money in and it would be a lot of time and energy and effort put into it. And one day on the job site, the red cameras, battery died and I was like, screw it. We’re doing it. Live, shoot it on the iPhone. And when I, when we posted it and took a look at it the next day, the engagement, it was actually a lot higher than what we normally get with the screen movie production level, with all this, you know, money and investment put into each one of these properties, you can imagine we’re shooting 20, 30 properties at a time.
It was costing us a lot. When I posted it with the iPhone, you know, you normally think backwards and be like, okay, these are luxury properties as trophy listings. Why would the iPhone get more engagement? So it actually comes down to psychology. First of all, there’s two things. When you’re shooting widescreen, people are scrolling down your phone, right?
And, and your phone is actually horizontal. So when they’re scrolling quickly, the short attention span that they have, you have like half a second to catch their attention. And for them to double click, that’s the second thing. So if you’re shooting a horizontal video, you just have more real estate on that person’s phone.
If they’re scrolling quickly and they have a very short attention span, the more real estate you take up on their phone, the more chance that you’re going to be able to engage with them and have them come show some love, leave a like, or a comment, or even better save and share that content. So that, that was one of the key things.
The other key thing is as an Instagram page, we definitely were the first to put ourselves out there. Instagram pages were run by 16, 17 year olds and nobody actually traveled and met the client. Nobody actually traveled and shook hands and filmed there. So we took it to the next level. I remember I had like $2,000 left in my bank account and I was sitting there.
I’m like either I’m going to eat or we’re gonna risk everything that we have and fly and actually meet these people during like a world recession almost. So we took that time to not rest, but we took the biggest risk and it actually paid off because that world tour that we did, it associated us with those clients face to face and the word of mouth and the engagement that we got.
I think we went from 1.5 million to two point million right after that world tour. So that really, really changed the entire course of luxury. Yeah, it sounds like that really moved the needle. And I’ve, I’ve said this before, you can’t be overly polished on social media anymore because you know, people will call out the authenticity sometimes, sometimes, you know, not to mention like the iPhone, camera’s pretty bad-ass right.
Like attention. It’s a pretty good video, but I like what you said there about taking up a realist real estate space, visually, that makes so much sense. Have you thought about the issues, needs or desires that you solve for your partners? For sure. So there’s a lot of really good examples of that. I would love to use Jordan Cohen, Jordan.
Cohen’s one of our favorite clients ever when we started with him back in the day. if you go check out his page now he’s got hundreds of thousands of followers. He’s the number one Remax realtor in North America. And when we started with them, He was the first client that really believed in us and understood social media before a lot of the other luxury realtors.
It was hard to move the needle. David, when I’m telling you, these are people that not necessarily they’re egotistic, but they’ve done it. They’ve made their business. They’ve proven that they are who they are. And a lot of the times they were in the older demographics. So why would they listen to a young 20 year old kid who is trying to say, Hey, if you don’t take this opportunity, you might lose out on business.
So Jordan Cohen really actually championed and pioneered as he was one of the first agents who trusted us and paid us very handsomely. He paid us to make sure that we had enough posts like clockwork, always, always promoting Jordan coin. And literally, if you look at what has, what has pages turned into?
We started with him when he had like, let’s say less than 10,000 and now he’s got a hundred, few hundred thousand followers. He’s very recognized he’s winning a war. And he’s he’s made it he’s, he’s, he’s super happy. The testimonials that he gives for us, we were, we were with him when he received his award last year at Inman and what he was able to say about luxury listings in front of everybody.
That’s when I was like, wow, because a lot of these professionals, I look up to, I idolized being in property development. When I, when I got to meet Paul McLean, my jaw dropped because never in my life that I think that I would be in the same room, being able to do business and learn and be inspired from the world’s best architects, interior designers, developers, and agents that really, really took it to the next level.
Well, that’s, that’s an interesting thought, you know, when you see somebody doing so well, and then you look at what they’re doing, that’s unit, you know, you just need like that third party testimonials sometimes, you know, just to push you over the edge. So super interesting. Okay. Our listeners and subscribers are gonna shoot me.
If I don’t ask you, what’s the secret to growing a large social media following. Now, I know you niche down, you worked hard, you did something very tactical, but in your mind, is there a broad stroke you can kind of like point to, for the listeners that would help them grow their social media following a hundred percent?
I think I’m going to take up a page out of Ryan, sir, hands book. It’s actually very fascinating in social media, both accounts growing at the, at the same time, it was inspiration on both sides, but I remember there was an interview that he did and I always kept my ear to the streets. I was very early with Gary V.
I was very early with a lot of these guys, like people that you’ve interviewed as well. Andy Frisella, all of these people. I studied inside and out. And one thing that really resonated with me with what Ryan said, and I think it really changed our page as well, is about being consistent. When you look at TV advertisements with commercials, you can’t just shoot
something once and expect that that product service or commercial to trigger somebody’s brain.
That’s very, very rare. You need to be consistent. You can’t just post a few times, let it go week. What we’ve doubled down on is that we actually found softwares and programs for us to be able to actually make sure that it’s consistent before anybody was doing that. We were trying to figure out HootSweet actually is a Vancouver company.
Ryan homes ended up becoming one of my buddies, massive, really, really, really big in the social media management space. And that’s when we took it from just a page that was sharing real estate to a social media management company, marketing the top 1% of. And the way we did that is by being consistent. I think a lot of people underplay that consistency, consistency is the number one thing.
You have to always make sure you’re putting out quality content, but if you’re not being consistent about it, your competition is going to beat you and your page, most likely won’t grow as much as you want it to. Yeah. Thanks for that. Thanks for that breakdown. Consistency is key. I agree with you there.
Now you have millions of followers and of course, you’re, you know, you’re getting a lot of views and engagement. What’s the key to going viral with a luxury listing. There’s a couple of things that mix into that factor. If you actually, if you look at which ones of our reels and which ones are our video and picture content have the most amount of vitality to it.
It’s the ones where we included the lifestyle. Whether we had an influencer, an actor actress, or we put a really expensive car in the driveway, or we made it more about how somebody might live inside that house rather than the property. It was just something that people wanted to share nowadays, you know, engagements then completely flipped.
It’s about what people save in bookmarks to watch later, or what people share to their family or friends around the world. If they’re going out of their way to share that piece of content, Instagram ranks it way different than if somebody were just leaving. Back in the day, how many likes did you have?
How many likes did I get? That was a very good measure. And nowadays, like is a very vain way to measure your engagement or track anything. It’s all based on whether somebody wants to save that piece of content as an inspirational educational or entertainment for later, or if they want to share that content to somebody that they love, or somebody that they want to view the same piece of content.
So how did we do that? We AB tested what was, what made it viral. For some reason, every time we shot something Twilight, meaning it was a little bit dark out. The lights popped and people just saved that content. More people shared that content more. Anytime we did a super cool video where there were actors, actresses in it, we had a really expensive car in the driveway.
People shared and saved that content a lot more. So if you are looking in that range, try to find where you can lean on these types of things and collapse. You don’t have to blow all your budget on this. Try to find ways that you can actually leverage what you do have to include this type of lifestyle in your shot.
And then sit back and AB test everybody’s following and engagement and demographics are different. So what works for us might be working a little bit different for somebody else, but for luxury listings, that’s really what took the page to the next level. And we started to notice all the other pages following.
Yeah, that’s good advice. I agree. I think aesthetics are super important. But yeah, that was a very good breakdown. So I appreciate that. Okay. Here’s a question. I like asking this question, when people have brands, cause it makes you really kind of drill down in your opinion. What’s the difference between branding and selling in your opinion? What’s the difference between branding and selling? I love this question. So branding is long-term and it’s indirect. Okay. So your brand takes a long time to build and your brand is what sells you when you’re not in the room. Selling is indirect and it’s short. So I think branding is above all, because if you can build a solid brand, people will sell you when you’re not even there.
That’s what happens to me all the time. Like when we met you through the clubhouse, I still don’t even understand, like to me, I still think of myself as. Young immigrant kid with no money. You know what I mean? But for some reason, everybody else thinks of me as this luxury listings, media may have been extraordinary.
That is an ingenious brand. But to me, I don’t know anything about branding. I didn’t go to school for marketing. I didn’t, I didn’t do business. I’d never had mentors or opportunities or networking. I just had a vision and a dream and I was persistent with it and I never gave up. That’s what really luxury listings were birthed out of when you meet us face to face or when, when we do end up connecting and going for coffee, you’ll realize I’m just a regular Joe Schmo kid.
I’m very casual, laid back. I like to shoot. I like to play sports. I like to just be a regular person, but in reality, when it comes to Brandon. That’s something that anybody can start as long as they have a foam and they have time and they have commitment at home. This has all happened from the comfort of our apartments and our houses before we had these mansions and these cribs and these very nice lavish office and accommodations and the Supercars that you see, it was literally just two young kids posting every single day, multiple times a day.
DM-ing hundreds of people every single day and establishing that brand. So for me, don’t focus on selling, try to build something because it’s absolutely free. Anybody can do it. That’s the whole point of why I wanted to come on this podcast is to show people. You don’t need to have a rich dad. You don’t need to have a bunch of connections and networking and opportunities in front of you.
You can build your own opportunity. It might not be Instagram by the time you start, it might be another social media platform, but guess what? It’s all free. It’s the sweat off your back. That really matters. So that’s where I come from. That’s probably the best answer we’ve had to that question in a, I dunno how many episodes that’s fantastic.
Thank you for breaking that down. Branding something we’re passionate about as well. We believe in it. It’s a long play. it’s not, I mean, there’s no real KPIs for branding, but long-term, you can see the, the benefits and the results, and I believe it’s critically important. Okay. Here’s the last question in this kind of a in this box, what advice would you give an aspiring influencer who wants to monetize a brand on social media?
What should they be doing? I think it all comes down to being true to yourself, your voice and the reputation that you want to build. It’s about being genuine. I couldn’t say that more. So a very, very good example of this is not only luxury listings, but because of luxury listings, I met the girl of my dreams and I do what I want now when I want, and that’s the ultimate luxury and the freedom, but what I would suggest.
When you’re starting off, be very, very true to yourself and genuine about it. But when you want to monetize the brand, you have to put yourself in that perspective. And sometimes it’s not fake till you make it. But when you got to understand when social media was originally starting off with us, I’m just going to give you the pure raw examples.
It’ll be completely different from a younger entrepreneur now. But they should understand this perspective. And let me is going to kill me for saying this, but I think, I think it’s, it’s, it’s one of the best stories and it actually inspired me cause she’s a lot younger than me. But when I learned from her she had a very similar story to what I had coming up from nothing, hustling to make it and barely making it off of a tiny opportunity, but being able to capitalize on it.
So what she did was she was actually recognized as being one of the first ever influencers as well in the fashion fitness sector on Instagram. Because as you remember, you only had a few kinds of buckets to be an influencer back then our first bucket, when we started real estate, we were the first everyone kind of laughed.
They were like, there’s no way that’s going to happen. You’re not going to be able to sell real estate there. You can sell some yoga pants, but you’re not going to be able to do this. And we said, why not? Let’s just do it. And let’s see what happens. I’d rather lose money for a couple of years and then be the person that was right about it in a day.
So what Lemmy did was not having many. Opportunities as well with her and having no money. She just woke up one night, started posting her content and went viral similar to what happened with us, but she wasn’t making money. She didn’t have real contracts with the clients. She did exactly what we did with luxury listings.
She used the only little money that she had to go and buy clothes that she aspired to be wearing one day and being paid by those brands one day spent all the money she had and then took photographs, wearing that content and posted it as it, as if it was an actual paid contract. This is before brands would even send you contracts.
They would just DM you saying you’ll, I’ll send you a few hundred bucks. I’ll send you some products posted and tagged. She did that before any of that was actually established. And, after a month or two of doing that. The other brands started hitting her up thinking, oh, you’re already working with these other big names and which I won’t name, but like they were big names.
So it automatically developed that brand. And she started to get these contracts and she started to get real gigs as a result of that. The same thing happened with luxury listings. We had to post for free and nobody knew it was for free, but for years before we can actually have a realtor reach out to us and say, Hey, what’s your PayPal.
I’m going to send you a bunch of money. I have this new trophy listing. How does it work? How much do you guys charge? And we used to literally have like a pay to play list of what, the services that we were offered. Now it’s turned into a website and a media kit and a sales call and its discovery.
And originally it was. Hey, do you want us to post your stuff? This is how much we charge. It was the wild, wild west, like on the telegram days, if you remember back in the day, there weren’t groups and all these things. So nobody really knew that it wasn’t a business yet. We all had to do things under the table.
So if you were to do it now, learn from what we did, but you don’t necessarily have to do it the same way. Nowadays, you have a plethora of social media platforms that you can choose to start from. It’s not just Instagram, it’s not just Twitter. I would recommend if you’re starting off now find something that has fresh grass.
A lot of the times I say this, and when I say fresh grass, it’s very important. When we started with luxury listings and Instagram, back in the day, there weren’t that many accounts. So whatever we did post. In the span of a few weeks gain a hundred thousand followers, plus that’s impossible nowadays because it’s so saturated go to a platform where there is a little bit more fresh grass, meaning you’re going to get more push naturally organically from the platform because the platform wants to get content out there, pick one that’s new and commit to it.
And you’d be so surprised at what fresh grass can do for your initiative. That’s awesome. Yeah, you, you, you touched on authenticity and not faking the funk, right? It just gotta be authentic. That’s great advice. And speaking of fresh grass, I do want to talk about the new social platform that you’re quickly becoming an influencer on.
And that’s the clubhouse , that’s the clubhouse just for a minute. I mean, I pop into a room and I see you speaking with like meek mill, the Kardashians, I don’t know, but I do see you using the platform strategically. Which I want to ask you about next, but first. What are your thoughts on the clubhouse so far? I’m a huge supporter.
I don’t want to say I got on really early, but like, for example, that’s how you and I met. I really cherish the relationship that we’ve been able to foster from the clubhouse. I’m a huge supporter of the clubhouse and this is why. So, like I said, Hey, there’s fresh grass and B, there is nothing but organic opportunity right there.
I don’t want people to think, okay, there’s free business there, but if you are true and you’re genuine, you really are who you say you are. You don’t need to go there to sell yourself. You’ll naturally your brand will result in business. That’s what’s happened for us. I was on in a few weeks and we got three, four new pain clients.
And I didn’t have to do anything except just to be seen by a lot of people that don’t know what a clubhouse is. The best way to explain it is that it’s an open forum podcast, which at any point you can raise your hand. And be involved in the podcast, ask a question or direct the way the podcast is going.
And to me, that’s absolutely fascinating right now we’re having a one-on-one live podcast together, but people are going to have to listen to this from a third perspective. Whereas this was in the clubhouse, which you and I do every single day. That’s why this conversation is so natural to me, it’s actually unnatural because I’m so used to the clubhouse.
Being on camera right now is probably why I’m tripping up a little bit. If I am tripping up at all. But the amazing thing about the clubhouse, like I said, there’s fresh grass. You’re in early, meaning it’s still beta tested. It hasn’t even been opened up to Android yet. So like I said, there is that vertical opportunity that might not be on Instagram.
It might not be on Twitter or the other various established social media platforms. So when there is that sort of, what is it, what is about to be that’s when you can come in and claim yourself. Establish your digital real estate and put what you think clubhouse should be. I honestly feel like every time we do a room, we’re actually influencing what a clubhouse could be or where the app and the company eventually will go.
Why not? Why wouldn’t we think that they want their users to be though? It’s all users. If it wasn’t for us hosting these rooms and bringing these real estate professionals together, the clubhouse would not be doing it themselves. That’s another beauty aspect of it as well. It’s so international because of luxury listings.
We have real estate professionals, interior designers, architects from all around the world and we can line it up so that the timeframes I have my viewers from the UK, London tuning in, I have my view professionals coming in from Dubai. We have all over north America and it’s just, it blows my mind how we could all be sitting in a room with whatever is happening in COVID exchanging information.
And my perfect way of explaining it is that we’re sharpening each other’s blades. I don’t run rooms that are just about gossip and talking and wasting time. The rooms that I run are about actually making everybody in the room better, whether that’s we’re sharing information about our best real estate practices or we’re talking about social media, or we’re just updating on the most relevant news and facts that to me, Is the true embodiment of globalization because no other social media platform can information passed back quickly by voice.
I could literally hop like I’m in rooms all the time, but I’m able to absorb information a lot faster than if I were to go read it. Like I said, English is not my first language. I learned English from watching TV. So I’m a lot better phonetically in being able to speak in conversations, I absorb information way faster, that way than any other form.
So if you’re that type of analytical thinker and that’s how you learn, I would highly suggest hopping on clubhouse and you don’t even need to speak, just be a fly on the wall, pick the right people that you aspire to be like one day and just listen to them. Speak a lot of the times you learn just from hearing other people’s questions being answered.
That’s the beauty of it. A lot of people think, well, I’m scared. I don’t want to speak. I don’t think I should be in there. These are people that I shouldn’t be in conversations with, but a few months ago, I probably thought that self as well until I started to actually intermingle and we put into these conversations and I realized I can hold my own with a lot of these people that I used to look up to as idols.
And now it’s an everyday recurring thing for myself. So I’m a very, very big supporter of the clubhouse. To be honest, it’s completely changed my life and my business. Yeah, reputation. My branding. That is really why I’m even on this podcast. It is my first podcast ever. And I couldn’t be thankful. I couldn’t be more thankful for this opportunity.
Yeah. You, you, you described, some, some of the reasons why I like clubhouse, you know, I heard somebody talking about the serendipity there, you know, and it was so true. Like, you know, the other night I was, I was on stage with black China. Like I was speaking on stage with black China. I just started laughing.
I’m like never in a million years, would I think I’d be speaking on a stage with blackjack. It was just kind of ridiculous, but cool at the same time, you know, because it’s just not the same circle, not the same industry, nothing like that. But I was speaking on stage with blockchain. I just use that as an example because of the serendipity that just happened at the same time, you know?
Now where do you hope to go with the clubhouse? Like, yeah. Cut because of how fresh and new it is, you will, if you’re on it right now, chances are, you might find yourself on stage. With somebody that you might’ve never been able to have that chance to be in a conversation with, that to me is invaluable. If you’re persistent, you’re consistent enough, you go into the right rooms where there are those.
I don’t want to say celebrities, but let’s say it’s anybody that you look up to, it could be in business. It could be in, whatever that type of person is. Like you just said, black China. There’s a lot of people I don’t want to name, drop that I’ve had. I’ve been blessed enough to be sitting right beside, like I say, sitting, we’re in different rooms around the world, but they’re called clubhouse rooms to be in the same room with a lot of these people right now.
It’s actually super invaluable and it’s not fully monetized yet. So if I were, if I would, as a young entrepreneur or anybody listening to this conversation, I would take this chance just to download the app and see what it’s like and take a chance. That’s what I recommend. Now. What’s your endgame with the clubhouse?
Where do you hope to go? That’s something I can’t fully answer because I don’t know. I’m very open-minded about it. I give full feedback. I listened to the constructive criticism. So the club that we’ve created, the luxury listening’s club, it’s for the people by the people I know I’m moderating. I direct it, but mainly what I’m trying to do is provide the most value back.
I’ve been in a lot of the other real estate rooms. I’ve been in a lot of rooms. I know you and I, you and I have had this conversation privately, but I just want it to be different. I want it to be real and genuine. I’m not one of those people that is suppressing people’s voice or pushing people down. I make it very open and inclusive and a safe space, but at the same time, knowledgeable and experiential.
I bring the best of the best. I was able to rely and lean heavily on the network that we built with luxury listings. And I personally got a lot of these people signed up for their first time. I had to call them and convince them because now it’s not, it’s not as hard when I first had to convince them about Instagram.
Now when they pick up my call and I say, Hey, there, there’s another huge opportunity here. I think it would be good for you to become a thought leader you’re already so experienced and you already have so much wisdom and not. Why not come join the room, drop some knowledge for young up-and-comers? That’s the way that I pitch it.
It’s all about giving back to the next generation. And that’s why people come and enjoy and be in my rooms. Nobody’s getting paid. It’s just about building this community and giving back to the community that built up a lot of these top professionals. The best way to do that is to just sit there and drop gems.
We call it dropping gems. And the way that they do that is I allow anybody to be able to raise their hand, whether they’re a real estate enthusiast or somebody that wants to become an architect. And they’re about to go to school for interior design and they see a lot of these names and these faces to me, they’re just my friends and they’re my clients and these people that I’ve been working with for the past decade.
But to them, it’s like, whoa. And I, I, I still, I hear that. And I feel that about people saying that to me and it blows my mind because to me, I still I’m a nobody I’m up and coming and I’m planning on doing stuff. The rest of it. But when I bring these professionals and we’re all sitting here and we’re giving back, we do masterminds.
So it’s like every single week, instead of having a massive event, they take time out of their day. And sometimes the first room I ran was an hour. The second room I ran was two hours. Naturally. I wasn’t pushing it. The third room, I ran, went up to four hours and now I’m averaging a minimum 5, 6, 7, 8 hours.
And these real estate professionals are busy people. It’s not just like we’re getting hooked. It’s literally you feel your soul grow every single time. Somebody says, wow, I can’t believe I’m even speaking to you. Thank you so much for this opportunity. I just learned so much by just listening to y’all up.
That makes my soul grow every single time. And that’s why I’m like, okay, I’m not going to give up on this until I physically do have to give up. And it’s been nothing, but going up and up and up and again, getting nothing but positive feedback. I started with just a Friday room where we brought all the real estate professionals together, just to see how it would work.
Now we have a weekly room running every Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, and then Saturday. So all I have left is Thursday and Sunday too, and I’m pretty sure those are going to get grabbed up when my social life is out the window. I’m literally just stuck in this house all day, doing the clubhouse and that’s the truth.
It’s not like I can lie about that because if you follow my account, you will physically see at any point, if you want to figure out what I’m doing, you just hop on the clubhouse and you’ll either see me speaking in a room or in a room. So that’s one thing that literally is the truth. And if anybody wants to shadow me or figure out where I am, that’s the beauty about clubhouse.
You can hop on and figure it out. This is exactly where he is. This is exactly what he’s talking about. If he’s, if I’m not picking up my phone, you’ll know what I’m doing. Yeah. And you do such a good job with it. Like people look for your rooms, you know, and it’s such a safe space. People just love them. They want to be a part of it.
You’re providing such tremendous value in those rooms. So, you know, hats off to you. You do such a great job with the clubhouse. What projects are you working on now? Or what future projects are you working on? There’s a lot of really cool stuff in the pipeline. So with luxury listings, we just brought on a really big investor, some strategic partners we’d opened up and grown our office and just hired a ton of new people to come in and help on the social media side and the strategy side of it.
But I’m really choosing this time of my life to give back. It’s not about money for me anymore. And we’re doing a lot of charitable things on the side, just out of the goodness of our heart. A lot of it’s not advertised because we don’t want to do it like that. I see you. I know what you’re doing. And like, it’s, you know, It’s really, impressive dude, cause that, that, you know, besides like what you said, you know, besides the flashiness of what you see on social media, I know what you’re doing.
You’re, you’re one of the realest dudes I know, like in terms of giving back, you do provide value to people, very generous. And you’re very humble and saying like, you know, if people knew, I guess is what I’m saying. If people knew what you were doing, they, you know, they’d be impressed. No for sure.
And I know it sounds very cliche and a lot of, for example, quote, unquote, gurus or whatever, as you make it more successful in your life, it’s the same recurring narrative. And I thought, why do I need to wait until I’m 30, 40 to find this out? Why don’t I just take that risk by now? I’m not as established as I want to be, but I know for a fact, this is very cliche, but the more you give, the more you get, and I don’t want people to give in order to get, but that’s just the truth.
It’s honestly the truth. It might not happen overnight, but if you start to figure out what can I do for people? How can I give value back? What am I doing to benefit the community that made me who I am selflessly? And you just use that as the base naturally, everything you want. I know this sounds crazy and cliche, but it eventually will start to materialize in front of you as long as you’re persistent and consistent with it.
So. One of the things that I’m doing, like you said, with clubhouse, I didn’t do that so that we could get a ton of clients, but being very transparent that has really revolutionized our business. We’ve gotten a ton of clientele from it because before I wasn’t there, there wasn’t a way of selling what we’re doing.
But now that I’m on there, I don’t need to sell what I do. The proof is in the pudding, you see the credibility, you see the clientele that we have. It’s like a, every day, regular testimonial, and I’m not paying for these testimonials. It’s just realtors and professionals coming up and I’m like, whoa, I know luxury listings.
I sold the property through luxury since I can’t believe you guys are doing this room, I’m in this room right now. And then they see all the other clients that we regularly have, and they’re all just praising it. So it’s not something that we did on purpose. It’s just the way clubhouse works right now.
It’s very positive. Reaffirmation. So that’s one thing, another thing in the long run that we’re trying to set up, which is very, very important as I’ve always been very innovative. I’m a tech guy at heart. So I always viewed real estate as being very prehistoric. It’s the way things move. And that’s why you and I very much resonated when I figured out what you’re doing and how you’re doing and automatically clicked because I’m a very forward-thinking person I’m always trying to feel.
And I’m always trying to move in a way where I can be a shaker of the industry. I won’t feel accomplished or happy just knowing that I did what everybody else did, whether I fail or not. I want to be known as somebody that tried and actually did something so far out of the norm that we can be remembered as a part of a legacy to be able to change things.
Be innovative before we’re thinking. So. The partners that we’ve brought on. Absolutely amazing people. Jesse Pang, Matthew and David. She ‘s brought a very, very young, innovative, forward thinking approach, which has completely revolutionized the end point of where we see luxury listings going.
We’re building it into a tech platform. We’re no longer a social media marketing platform. That is what we are, but we want to differentiate ourselves from every other Instagram page that you can see. It’s a dime a dozen. Now they’re all the exact same. Like I said, every time we post something 20 to 30 pages, we post the same content.
That’s why a lot of times I get exclusive content. I work with these properties or the agents, and I asked, can I post the first, I want to make sure our page posts at first, we write it into a lot of the deliverable contracts. It’s something that I can’t get too much into because we’re just finalizing a lot of it.
But one thing that you will see in the very immediate future is that we are getting big into the VR game. We want to be able to provide experiential VR and AR not like what you would naturally see on Matterport. It’s like when Instagram first started and you sought this all of our amazing luxury listings content on Instagram.
I want to be able to do that in the virtual space before anybody else does and better than anybody else. Because naturally you, we have these trophy listings, a lot of the people, if they’ve made it in their segment or in their area, they’re diversifying their portfolio and they’re buying luxury property all around the world.
Let’s move on to, so that’s fantastic. Thank you for that summary. I mean, it’s always exciting what you’re doing, you know, we’ve, you know, we’ve side-barred about this stuff. You’re always looking at the next big thing. Just like we are always trying to get ahead of the curve. I too believe that, you know, the real estate industry has been archaic for, you know, decades, you know, not a lot of people kind of pushing a new agenda, that new way to do things right.
Tech, you know, branding all these different types of things. But, yeah, it’s, it’s badly in need of a shakeup. We’ve been saying that for awhile. Okay. Let’s move to some personal development. Now we always like to ask these, these fun questions of successful entrepreneurs and influencers. What does your daily routine look like?
Do you have one? Yeah, I’m very big on daily routines. I was a kid that had a lot of pent up aggression and testosterone, and like I said, growing up, I was always, you know, in the, in the bad crowd, quote unquote. So what you see now, this is a polished scene, growing up, I didn’t hit my eye. I was short in my whole life.
I didn’t get tall until recently. So imagine like a short fat kid with a big Afro that could barely speak English. I had to work on my personality. I had to work on it. Resilient. So that’s, that was built very early on in my life. I confided in sports and very aggressive sports. So I was a team captain for my wrestling team, ended up becoming a preventional wrestler, and I played almost every single position in rugby.
And I was a team captain for my rugby team as well, which ended up becoming provincial. But my, my daily habits have to all revolve around my physical body. So I wake up really, really early. I’m usually up around 7 38. If it wasn’t for the clubhouse, my normal daily routine is I like to get a really early workout in.
And then I start my day. I’m a workaholic. I’m in the office pretty much from morning, all the way until 5, 6, 7 PM, usually. And then I go home. I hit the gym for a second time. I create a meal prep and I work on my dinner. I spend time with my girl. There’s nothing. I like spending time with my girl.
That’s my ultimate luxury. One thing that I really want to mention in my daily habit that I only recently brought into my life because of a close friend of mine, actually, his name is director X, Julian. He really put me on to meditation and mindfulness early on before, as a male in the sector that I’m in and the crew of friends that I have, mindfulness and meditation was on the back burner.
It was always like, you know what? I know I need to do it. I hear about it a lot. I think it’s something that has benefited my life, but there was never like a cool male role model that was like, you know what? This is manly. This is something that could, you know, change the way, your, your perspective on life.
And when I started to physically take just five minutes out of my day to put everything down, the emotional, the mental baggage, my phone, the relationship. My home life, all these things, they make your mind go a mile a minute. And especially with the way my mind works. I overthink a lot of things. I’m very, I think probably from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to bed and even while I’m sleeping, I’m over analyzing everything.
And it’s a good and a bad thing because if you are that type of person, burnout happens a lot faster because you got to understand your brain is a muscle as well. And it consumes a lot of energy, a lot of juice. So I actually mentioned this a lot while I’m on clubhouse. If you’re not cognizant of that, and you’re not giving yourself a little bit of rest and actually blocking out time for rest mentally, that’s what meditation is.
Take five to 10 to 15 minutes out of your day and try to focus on not thinking about anything for me at the beginning, it was close to impossible. It was torture, trying to sit down and stop thinking about the million things that I got going on in my life. Like I said, I’m not as established as I want to be.
I’m still in work mode. I’m still in hustle mode. The goals and accomplishments that I want to achieve in my life are a lot larger than life currently. So I know that I still do have to hustle 24 7. I just turned 28. I want to be in a completely different league and the next five to 10 years and the immediate short-term goals and long-term goals that I’ve set up for myself.
I don’t have the luxury and the time to sit and waste, even when. So a lot of the times when you do see me in the clubhouse every day, Saturdays and Sundays, it’s because I’ve made those my short-term and my long-term goals. And I know I have a lot of people counting on me and more importantly, I have myself to not let down and that’s just the type of person I am.
So I wake up in the morning and I strategize everything else the night before. I like to make sure I get a workout in. I make sure that I eat very, very healthy, growing up, like I said, I was basically in poverty my whole life. So now I know intermittent fasting is very cool, but just growing up, I never had breakfast.
So it’s, it’s normal to me. I don’t have breakfast in the morning. I have one espresso and I’m good probably till 12, 1 2, where I’m like, whoa, I actually need to eat something to continue going. I know that doesn’t sound very healthy, but I’d rather be true and honest. I’m a big believer in fasting. I do it, you know, it keeps you sharper too.
Oh, for sure. For sure. A lot of people like my friends and my family, or that are close to me, have no idea how I function. It’s very, very strange my mind and my mouth go a mile a minute. For some reason, my brain is able to absorb a lot of information and no matter who I’m in front of, I can have a conversation with them.
I’ll be able to recall things. And if I do have an espresso in the morning, then I’ll, I’ll have a very good conversation with you and I’ll be able to become, I’ll be able to actually build a relationship with you because I don’t only know about real estate. I know about a plethora of different topics and deep enough where I can actually listen to that person, have a meaningful conversation with them.
So that’s actually one of the reasons why I’m in the clubhouse. A lot of the time, I want to be able to actually resonate with anyone and anyone and everyone and anyone. Yeah. Well, that’s the thing about the clubhouse using it strategically, depending on your business, it can be very beneficial, you know? So yeah, but the grass is, it’s fresh grass, like you said, so we’ll see where it goes.
Okay. Here’s one, that’ll make you think. Sienna, if you could have dinner with any three people in history past or present, who would they be and why? Very good question, actually. So I’ve had this burning desire for a very long time. The very first time I ever heard about Nikola Tesla, I just was so fascinated about life back then.
So I do the three people that I’m going to say are going to be very historic because. Chances are, if there’s somebody alive right now in my lifetime, I’m just that type of person I’ll call it right now. Let’s say, I want to meet Elon Musk. I promise you in my lifetime, I will meet him. And I will get to the stature and level where he’ll want to go to dinner with me.
And I’ve called every single thing in my life. I’m just going to call that right now. Who’ll be my third person at one point in my life. You and I together will be with Elon Musk, whether we’re doing something on Mars or whatever, that’s how confident I am when I call things out. The very first one that I was going to say was Albert Einstein.
Only because if you look at pictures of my dad, it’s, it’s like the Twilight zone. It literally looks like Albert Einstein as a kid growing up, like not as a kid, just like what, you know, the natural picture that you think of what you want. Albert Einstein looks like when I would look at my dad and like the videos of him and, and I growing up and pickup.
It’s exactly like a carbon copy of Albert Einstein. So I wouldn’t even want to meet with him to figure out his genius and how his brain works. I would just want to go for coffee with them and be like, you know how, like the six degrees of separation, I feel like with humans, the way somebody’s face looks like and their caricature in their brain, and they’re just existence.
I’ve always been fascinated by that because everyone has always said that my dad looks like Albert Einstein, and I would just love to shoot the shit with Albert and say, you know, I would just try to figure out the type of guy that he is, you know, Nikola Tesla, of course, because I’m a huge, huge supporter of a guy like Elon.
And if you look at the similarities and, and how he’s been able to build his companies with what he’s been able to do, I love Nikola Tesla. I feel like the world would be a way different place if it was Tesla instead of Edison, but. I could open a huge can of worms when it comes to the history behind that.
I think not enough people know about Nikola Tesla. So I would like to meet him face to face and in-person to try to really psychoanalyze the guy and the third, like I said, I’m going to make a prediction at one point in my life. I’m going to be buddies with Yuan. I like that. And we’ll, I like the way you’re thinking, it’s the confidence, right?
You, you matter, you know, you think about it and you manifest it and it’ll happen one day. Yeah. I’ve always been super fascinated about outer space. And if it wasn’t for guys like that and making it the norm for the longest time, people would have thought of it as being impossible. And I’m a true believer that anything is possible.
As long as you put your mind to it. Yeah, and we need more people that are thinking so far out of the norm, that it eventually does become the norm. And for people to say that he’s crazy for trying to colonize Mars. I think that’s the coolest thing ever and might not necessarily be in the exact same way, but just making that a statement and making that a reality is the most admirable thing to me.
I want to be able to get to a certain level in my life so that when I’m his age, I’m pushing the boundaries on what people think is the norm. At that point, I want to be able to be futuristic in my life. That’s awesome. Yeah, we just had a, we just had Steve Sims on the show and he’s, he’s worked with Elon Musk and Richard Branson.
He was telling us he was, he was, he was telling us about his experience. It, so watch for that. It’s going to be an interesting lesson. You’ve talked about his experiences with Elon Musk, but he’s basically concierge for billionaires. You know, if you want to get married at the Vatican by the Pope, he’ll make it happen, you know, or whatever you want to go to or space X we’ll make it happen.
So he’s a good guy to know. So maybe there’s something that will happen there where you and I are having drinks with Steve. And we ended up at space X with Elon Musk. I don’t know, Sienna is just saying, it’s funny. It’s a small world. When you get, you know, you start going that way. Okay. Here’s one.
This, this one’s tough for a lot of our guests. You’re opening a bottle of champagne a year from now celebrating something you’ve accomplished. What would that be? That’s a really good question. First of all, it depends on the bottle of champagne. I’ll let you come up with that one. But a year from now is my most important short-term goal.
And it’s something that I’ve been very committed to day in and day out. You’ll see me there. I’m a very strong supporter of the clubhouse. And my goal is that one year from now, I don’t want to have the largest group. If that ends up happening, I’m happy with it. It’s not about numbers to me. It’s never been about followers.
It’s about providing the most amount of value, inspiring the most amount of kids. Because to me, I was once a kid, I never had nothing and just saw the images and the pictures and the videos and changed my entire life. Luxury to me, I know it says luxury listings. Luxury to me is to be able to do what I want when I want and not have to answer to anybody.
I’m changing the world, doing it the way that I want to change the world. Not the way that I thought somebody else wanted me to change. And that’s what I want to do one year from now using the clubhouse, using my voice for free, inspiring, and giving back to the community that made me who I am today. Man, I have no doubt in my mind that that’s going to happen.
No doubt.
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We’re going to play a bonus here. This is a bonus. This is called shut it down. Okay. We played this with James Harris. We played this with major influencers. Okay. It’s called shut it down. So it works like this. I’m going to give you two options. Usually similar two options. You got to shut one down, essentially picking the other.
Does that make sense? Yeah, this is called, shut it down. It could be. Food could be fashionable. Could be music either way. It’s going to keep you on your toes. This is the luxury edition. Okay. So if I said pizza or Calzone, you would shut down Keller zone. Yeah. Pick pizza, right? Yeah. Who picks the Cal zone? It’s ridiculous.
Okay. Ready from the top of your tongue and stuff? You know? Exactly. Okay. Here we go. Gucci or Prada? Shutdown, Gucci. Okay. I like it. If that’s my choice to a Louis Vuitton or her mace shut down airmen. I’m an LV or you? Yeah. Okay. Here’s one. I want you to shut down. Lambeau. I’m a Ferrari.
I’m a Ferrari. Nice. Okay. Rolex or tech, shut down to protect. Where else can you go? Where you’re stuck and you can trade something on your arm at the bank. You can’t do that anywhere else. If you have ALEKS, that’s going to save your life. Yeah. I’ve heard those stories. I’ve heard those stories. Okay.
Kanye or Drake shut down. Drake. I know it’s tough to do as Canadians, right? It is tough to do well. I’m a Kanye guy. I’m sorry, dog or cat. That is such a tough one. That is like a very tough one. Shut down. Cats. Dogs are man’s best friend. I forget cats. Netflix. Shut down Netflix. I learnt everything through YouTube.
YouTube, I think is the number one thing. If you’re willing to be a practitioner, you can learn anything from YouTube. Yeah. A hundred percent. I agree. Okay. Here’s a tough one. Clubhouse or IgG. Are you going to do me like that? That’s the point it’s got to keep you on your toes, man. It was tough because my whole business is on social media.
Built off Instagram, taking off in the clubhouse, but if I had to choose, I would shut down. IgE. I feel like there is, there’s just a little bit of a shelf life on all social medias and I’m that kind of guy, that weather is. There’s an opportunity there or not. I’ll be the ex I’ll be the Guinea pig. So I’ll go to the clubhouse right now.
Okay. Vodka. Gin all day, I’ll take gin, shutdown, vodka shaken, or stirred shaken. So you shut down Vegas or Miami shut down. Vegas 11 is like my second home. Third. I love Miami. Yeah. My late uncle lived in Florida and Miami is always going to have a piece of my heart. For sure. I love Miami, MJ or LeBron shutting down.
LeBron M J dude. I, you know, I was worried about this one because you’re that younger generation who never saw MJ play, but like, I, you know, MJ is, you know, he’s a great goat. Right. And LeBron is great, but he was no MJ anyways, that’s my opinion. But, okay. Flames are connected. Shut down the flames, man.
I gotta, I gotta re-up the Canucks. I lived in Calgary for four years. I’ve got a lot of buddies that made it to the NHL. I’ve had players. I’ve had friends that were players on the Flames and players on the Canucks, but I’m from Vancouver. I gotta rep the Canucks. I should’ve, I should’ve like pre-check this.
Okay, here we go. work hard or play hard both. You have to have balance. Okay. Last one. Let me reverse that one. Play hard because if you find a way where your work is just as much play. You’ll never end. You’ll just never stop because that’s kind of whatever position my life is in. It looks very glamorous.
And honestly, when I said that’s what my luxury is to be able to do what I want when I want, I have the grill in my dreams. I get to travel the world and get paid to do so. That to me was breaking out of the rat race early on. Everyone was like, yo, you’re doing Instagram. You’re doing social media. What is that?
You should probably get a real job. Nowadays. All those people that were laughing at me are now probably wishing they had my life. So I say, play hard, play hard. And your work will naturally come. Yeah, it was as Steve Sims was talking about, Elon Musk and in his, one of his clients has given Ilan a hard time asking him about the, you know, the, the shady was getting from NASA because he was a private space company.
And he said, he called him a , you know, asking Ilan about this. And Ilan said the words that came out of his mouth, he said, I never forgot. Ilan said they laugh at you seconds before they applaud you. You know, they laugh at you seconds before they applaud you. And the last one, this is the last, shut it down there.
This is the last one GPG or Joe Rogan shut down. Joe Rogan stayed loyal. Yeah, I love Joe Rogan, but we’ll, we’ll get them on the show. One of these days, you know, he was actually going to be one of the three people that I would want to have dinner with, but I know for a fact naturally with the way my life’s progressing, it’s no longer six degrees of separation.
We will eventually run into Joe. We will eventually kick it with him. Might do business. You never know. I’m like, whoa, but my brother, that was incredible. So good to get to know you better to hear your story. I know our listeners and subscribers will agree that it gave some fantastic insight and value. Thanks for that.
And I also want our, our listeners to know and understand that behind the luxury brand, and what they see on social media is one of the realest dudes. I know I said that, you know, I know what you do besides your work life and on social media, you do give back, and it’s about providing value to others.
You are super giving and humble, and that comes through in everything you do. So, thanks again. I really appreciate your time. Sienna. I really do. Thank you so much for having me on this. Like I told you from day one, I’m going to get emotional about it. But if you really look at the run GBG Bodcast I never, in a million years thought that I would eventually be one of the podcast interviews.
I really like still to this day, while we’re having this interview, I’m pinching myself underneath the camera thinking there’s no way you’re on the same platform as some of these guys that like Andy Frisella Ryan, sir. You name it, the amount of people that you’ve been able to interview just goes to show it’s a testimony about who you are first and foremost.
And like I said, I’m completely honored to be having this opportunity to be sitting here and have you interviewed me? It blows my mind, and I really wanted to do this because I’m that type of person that tracks and looks back on life. And it just makes me so fulfilled. So a lot of the things that we talked about in this, I would love to rewatch this a year or two years from now and be able to say, wow, I want kids to come up and say, you know what?
I was so inspired by your interview on run GPG. I saw you in the clubhouse. I saw what you did on social media. And it changed my life. It allowed me to think outside the box and to change the direction of where my life and my family’s life was going. So if there’s anything that I can do is to use. Life that I’ve had the circumstances that I’ve had to be able to communicate that, show that to the world and give real life examples that you can come from nothing.
And if you stick to your dream into your vision and you never give up and you persevere through the ups and downs, eventually you can manifest anything you want in this world. Nothing is impossible.
