Well, from a networking standpoint, the number one thing you have to remember, because I'm now at a stage in my life where a lot of people want to get to know me. So I see it from the other end. As a younger man, I would introduce myself to people and try to get to know them because they were important. Now I'm on the other side of the equation. The main thing to remember is that if you treat people like you're a fan, then they're going to treat you like you're one of the fans.
That's it. If you treat people like a celebrity, they're going to treat you like a fan. So many years ago, even when I was not famous and not even... relatively successful or before I had any money when I would meet famous people. I met a few famous actors through my kickboxing.
You'd speak to them one-on-one, like a normal person. You'd introduce yourself. You'd ask them their name even, not in an obnoxious way, even if you already know what it is.
And the best way to go about it is when you're working the room and you finally get face-to-face with these people. Do not ask for selfies. Do not ask for pictures. Do not act shocked or surprised or like a fan.
Do not worship them. When I was sitting with that famous rapper the other day, just sat down on the couch, we were shooting the shit man to man for over 45 minutes, an hour. I didn't ask him about his songs. I didn't ask him about his music.
And we just talk like men. So that's the best way to network, I guess, is that when you finally do get the opportunity to speak to people, speak to them like a normal person. Otherwise, they're never going to take you seriously.
In terms of your local town, if you want to become more of a somebody in your local town, which I think is a very important thing to aspire to do, because especially if you're going to stay there for a very long time, and especially if you're not perhaps as worldly as me and you're not going to travel as much as I do. The number one thing that I like to do in my hometown and in a new town is to get known in all of the best spots that there are. So if you walk into the best restaurant and they already have a table reserved for you 24-7, or the best bar, they've got a spot at the bar reserved for you 24-7, you'll be surprised how many high net worth... people who are worth knowing and women will pick up on that.
You'll be surprised that when the waiters and the valet parkers and the hotel receptionists know your name and say, hello, Mr. Tate, and treat you with respect, you'd be surprised how many people pick up on that. So tip very heavily. One, go to the nice places, treat every member of staff with respect.
And before you know it, you'll be better known and more respected in your home city. Spending a lot of money is an investment. in your city. Spending a lot of money on vacation, if I'm somewhere where I'm never going to be again, it perhaps matters a lot less. But even if you do something stupid, very stupid, even if you go into the local casino and you gamble $50,000 and say goodbye to everyone and smile and walk out with a smile on your face, you are now a well-known person.
If you go out to a club and you spend $25,000 on champagne, a crazy spend that they are never used to seeing, you'll be surprised how often you get asked back and invited back. There's a nightclub actually in Belarus. That still messages me to this day when you're coming back to Belarus because they never had anyone walk in there and spend $30,000. So it's a very good way of getting known. And yeah, it is absolutely an investment.
It's an investment in your reputation. It's an investment in your reputation and it's an investment in terms of what people think of you as a man and your status and your standing, I guess, in the hierarchy of your city. I'll be perfectly honest. Geography is one of the most important things to that.
There's about five or six cities in the world where the people hang out. and you have to know the places in those cities where the people hang out. So again, you have to have your dress code right, you have to have your manners right, you have to have at least some money to be able to get into the door of those places.
The world works in a very strange way when it comes to high-level men and especially beautiful women as well. Imagine it in terms of three different rooms, and one room is free to walk inside and that's where all the fat chicks and the brokies hang out. One room costs $2,000 to walk inside just to get in the door.
And there are the average looking girls and the guys with a bit of money. And then one room costs $100,000 to walk into. And that's where all the 10 out of 10s hang out and all the millionaires and billionaires and people you want to network with. That's exactly how the world actually works.
That's not an analogy because all of the places where the people who you want to meet are costs at least some money, or you have to have some type of reputation or some type of standing. or some type of network or good friends to actually get into these places. So if you're in Bucharest, Romania, your odds of running into a high value person who you think is going to be of any use to you is pretty much zero because I probably don't want to talk to you and neither does Andrew and you don't know anyone else in the city. But Los Angeles, certainly, Miami, New York, London, Dubai, Singapore, there are places in the world where the people hang out.
And depending on what you want to do and who you want to know, all depends on where you go. And then you just have to work your way up until you're in the same room as these people. Networking is all about making it. So you can't just network after you've made it. You have to have armed yourself with a skill set that makes you useful to people.
It's no good, you know. becoming the man in your hometown, living in LA, networking, working your way up, knowing that you can get into the best bars, the best restaurants, et cetera. And then when you're there, just being a jackass and not having any skills and not having anything to offer people. If you come up to me and say, hey, Tristan, I'd like to work with you, for you, you better have something good to say.
So it's not just the networking aspect of it. It's what you're doing in your spare time. What are you reading?
What are you learning? What can you possibly offer people? Because people like me, don't really need money, so I don't care about your business idea.
You probably need my marketing skills more than I need you and your business idea. I don't care about hiring you because I have the best people to do all of the jobs I want, the best cameramen, the best security guards. So if you don't have something really unique and special to offer the people who you're trying to meet, you're just going to come across as someone who's pestering them. And being pestered is very annoying when you're famous. That all depends on who you're trying to meet, but I would say the number one would be health and fitness.
People will take you a lot more seriously if your clothes fit well and you're muscularly built and you're strong and you go up and give a firm handshake. If you're a fat sack of shit, people are not going to take you as seriously. That's just the way that the world works. So that's the base that you have to work off of as a young man, because maybe your IQ isn't that high, but maybe you're a nutritionist and personal trainer. Nutritionists and personal trainers to the ultra wealthy and to the celebrities of the world do very, very well.
In fact, I heard of one actually, he was gifted a Ferrari for all of his hard work. but then he was arrested and had his car stolen by the police. That's quite an amusing story. But yeah, if he didn't have his particular skillset, I would never have met him and I never would have associated with him and he never would have worked for me.
He never would have bought that Ferrari. On top of health and fitness, for making a good first impression, your ability to speak, your speaking voice, because that communicates into everything you do, whether it's sales and marketing, website design, fitness training, whatever you think you have to offer people, you have to be able to convey the idea to them. You have to be able to explain the idea to them.
Again, sales skills. I advise anybody, if you're young and you're broke and you don't have a job, take up a sales job. It doesn't matter what it is.
It doesn't matter if you're selling windows or newspaper advertisements over the phone. Take up a sales job because life is sales. My cameraman had to sell me his skills before I hired him. Even meeting beautiful women is sales. You have to convince them to let you waste their time and spend time with them.
So everything is sales. So your sales skills, your speaking voice. your health and fitness, and your general appearance are all the most important things. I would say, yeah, absolutely. Get a commission-only sales job.
Get a sales job that offers you no basic salary because it teaches you lots of things. One, the art of sales and closing the deal and actually bringing money in is very important. But two, it teaches you work ethic and hunger. Because when I worked commission-only sales jobs, it was a matter of, I'm not going to eat unless I sell these windows.
And I'd take a three-hour drive down to whichever house I was going to give the presentation in. I'd sit there, stare in the mirror, splash some water on my face, snap into sales mode and knock on the door and then make my presentation. And I was very, very good.
And yeah, sales is a skill that Andrew and I have even to this day. But you have to understand absolutely everything from the camera that's recording me to the chair I'm sitting on to this wooden paneling. There's always, there's somebody in every single company that makes everything that is somehow in charge of sales and marketing.
So just think about things. Think about the items around you in the room. Think about...
the items you use every day. When you go and buy something, why did you buy it? Why did you buy it and who convinced you to buy it? You could be ordering a coffee from Starbucks.
Why? Why are you ordering the coffee from Starbucks? Who behind the desk of Starbucks HQ all those years ago sat and came up with the strategy that made you know what the brand is about and go there and actually buy their coffee?
Obviously, boycott Starbucks, but that's just an example. But think about it when you buy things. Think about your reason for buying them.
And then your mind will start thinking a lot more like a salesman. Yeah. If you're leaving university or high school, sales is definitely the field you should get into. It's the field you should get into because no matter what you learn and no matter what skill set you actually develop on top of sales, you have to convince people to use your product or service one way or another.
Andrew and I are very good at sales, but anything you learn inside of the real world, even, whether it be AI content creation, that's all well and good and you could be the best in the world. But if you can't convince people. If you can't convince people to use your service and actually pay you money to do the things that you're good at, then it doesn't matter.
It's all for nothing. So you should definitely, definitely get into sales. Elegance in men is a lot more about behavior than the way you dress. It's not a costume you can put on. It's very much your mannerisms and the way that you behave.
If you were to put me in sneakers and sweatpants, I would still fit in a top-end restaurant more so than a I would have done at 19 wearing a full suit. It's the way you open doors for people, the way that you greet the waiters, the way that you greet the staff, the way that you treat your guests. If you're driving a lady particularly and you're not in the West where they will become radical feminists, by all means, get out the car first, walk around the side, open the door.
It's something that you can't wear. It's something that you have to be. So read up tips on basic etiquette.
how to hold your knife and fork, how to hold a glass of wine by the stem and not by the bowl of it at the top, and you'll fit in a lot more at the better places and seem a lot more elegant, irregardless of what you're wearing. There's nothing wrong with being a gentleman. The only thing... that there's a problem with today is simping.
People on the internet who are pretty much incels who subscribe to a very toxic idea of what red pill masculinity is will see me with this beautiful girl having purchased these flowers and think simp. For all the young men out there who get very confused by the terms used on the internet, I would say simping is one thing and one thing only. Simping is an unfair exchange of value.
That's what simping is. If a girl doesn't know I exist, and I've found her address, I'm sending flowers to her house just to make her happy, that very much is simping. If I am waiting by the door to my office going into work and trying to open the door for every single woman in the hope that they'll recognize me, that is simping. Buying flowers for a work colleague who isn't interested in you is simping.
However, if you are trying to get a woman to take you seriously in terms of starting a relationship with her, then very few things you can do. can be considered simping because as i said that's an unfair exchange of value if the value you get at the end is a girlfriend or maybe even a wife or family then there's absolutely nothing wrong with you know buying them flowers opening the door opening their car door even if you pull up at her house jump out run around open it up let her in close the door run right back around and get in the driver's seat these are all very standard gentlemanly moves that you can make it's when you're making them for women who will never have a serious interest in you That's when it becomes simping. It depends on the setting that you're talking about.
If you're setting yourself amongst high value men and you want to see more gentlemanly, then certainly cutting out foul language in the way you speak is the way. The one trick, I say trick, I guess the one trait and the one behavior I like is if somebody is getting up or leaving a table to stand up yourself. And also when anyone wants to greet you or to shake your hand, whether it be male or female, never do it sitting down. If a man comes over to me, and is about to walk over and sit at my table, I'll never shake his hand sitting down.
I'll never say hi to a woman and give her a half hug sitting down. You always stand up, look the man in the eyes and shake his hand. Or you stand up, look at the woman in the eyes, give her a kiss on both cheeks.
Sometimes it's three, sometimes it's one, depending on what country you're from. But never ever greet people from your seat. That is a number one red flag. And also it's one of the most important because it's usually people's first impression of you. The first step to giving a proper handshake is not being a weakling.
Because if you're weak and skinny and scrawny and you try to give this really hard handshake, it may be a firm handshake, but I also know you're trying too hard. Whereas if you've got big forearms and big hands and big shoulders and you've been training and you look like a strong guy, I expect your handshake to be firm. The number one thing when people say firm handshake is people who don't know how to meet and greet men. They think that you have to squeeze the hand. You don't have to squeeze the hand at all.
Less than... half a centimeter of actual movement, but your hand should be rigid and unmovable. You can't have a malleable hand in someone's hand where, you know, if they squeeze it slightly, your fingers are going to bend.
So nice firm hand, you grab and you squeeze just half a centimeter. That's it. No crushing, no trying to show you're stronger than anyone else.
It's just the fact that your hand moves and doesn't give anything back. That makes a firm handshake. If you start squeezing people's hands, they're going to think you're a dick.
Yeah. I mean, I've seen a lot of variations and To be fair, if you're a worldly person, there are a bunch of variations to this. I think in Southeast Asia, I've been in India, Thailand, Vietnam, that's when people will give you the double handshake.
They'll grab your hand, but that's very much a sign of being a subordinate. You know, a guy who you tip heavily at a hotel will grab your hand. Thank you, sir.
Thank you, sir. You know, there are different etiquettes and ways to bow to certain people in Japan. I know you always have to bow lower than the person you're bowing to if he's in a position of seniority. But Japan's not a place I hang out a lot at. But before you go to anywhere new, I would certainly look up the little traits within the culture and try to play along as best as you can, because it's usually appreciated.
I used to preach that video games were a waste of time. And 10 to 15 years ago, when I used to say this, they largely were a waste of time. Now, they still are a waste of time.
However, time you enjoy wasting isn't necessarily time wasted. So I, for example, like to read books. I read books, I listen to audiobooks. I don't benefit necessarily monetarily from them. They're just entertainment.
Instead of watching TV, I read books. Some people play video games. What I would say is, whereas books can make you more interesting as a person, video games, you have to find a way of at least offsetting the damage done by the time you sink into them by, at the very least, trying to be productive. I don't know, streaming your video gameplay on Rumble, trying to play competitively with other people over the internet, and making... videos and document your games and try and get some eyes on you so you're not just isolated by yourself messing around in your room with your face in a computer screen.
I mean most bad habits and most hobbies and most things that don't necessarily seem that productive can be turned into. content creation. And that's something that we teach inside of the real world, regardless what it is. I mean, if you like shining shoes, if you do it to a professional level, you can create content and get eyes on you and get advertisers and make money and start a channel based on that. So I think video games are a waste of time still.
Yeah, they're still a waste of time and the gamers are going to get mad at me. But there are extremely famous streamers who make a lot of money playing video games. And people say like, oh, well, they play video games.
I should do the same thing. They're not just video game players, though. They're entertainers.
They're charismatic. They're hosting a show. They're funny. You know, their character looks good.
I don't know. But these people who host the video game streams are more than just players themselves because it's not the video games people are interested in. It's their personality.
Elegance in a woman, to me, is somebody who's never going to embarrass or humiliate you and somebody you'd be very proud to show off. So I don't know if women see it that same way in men, but... If you come across as an elegant man, that's the kind of man that she wants to show to her friends, to her parents.
Lots of women I date are very keen to show me to their friends or their parents or their families for whatever reason, in the same way that, you know, I'd want to show off a beautiful woman to my friends. But when there's any rough edges, that's the kind of thing that will put you off wanting to show somebody off. So if a woman swears a lot, talks in a very bad manner, maybe has a really horrible accent, You know, dress is a bit too revealing. That's the kind of thing that will make you think, okay, this woman's all right, I like her, I'll keep her at home, but I'm not going to introduce her to my friends. So elegance is certainly something that women should strive for, and men as well.
If you look at life like a video game, anything that increases one of your stats is a worthwhile hobby. I think that playing chess... will make you more intelligent, helps your critical thinking, reading books makes you more interesting and more knowledgeable.
Any type of sport or physical training makes you stronger, fitter, better looking, it's going to make you live longer. So whatever hobby you want to pursue and whatever you want to do, just make sure it's something that makes you better as a person. I mean, I know young men who make jewelry, who make knives, you know, that's a very productive hobby because it's a business that they're training themselves up to do.
Just try to avoid things like Video games. Because video games actually increase nothing. They help you in no way at all. I would argue that they probably make you less healthy, more lazy. Not knowing how to conduct yourself.
Drinking too much to a point of inebriation is a big red flag. You know, if you ever start stumbling or slurring your speech, you know, there's a time and a place for that. But usually that's a big red flag for women, especially if you're out on dates.
For me, I will judge men harshly on bad driving. If a man doesn't check his mirrors and he's not moving his car properly, I judge people on bad driving. Again, bad language, using too much slang when you're supposed to be in a professional setting.
Knowing the difference between a casual and a professional setting is very important. It's not just the language somebody uses because the language I'll use with my friends is very different to the language I'll use on a Zoom call with a multi-billionaire businessman. So it's knowing the time and the place for certain types of behavior because as men, we can all be childish and we can all be juvenile.
But you have to be able to distinguish one from the other. And there's people who I've met who certainly don't know how to present themselves to somebody, even somebody like myself, who's wealthy and they're trying to pitch me this business idea. They show up and they're acting as though we're two friends down the pub, even though I don't know them.
That's a huge red flag. You know, they should at least make the effort to try to come across as refined as possible. And if they're incapable of doing it or incapable of spotting a situation where they should be doing it in, then it's probably not the kind of person that I'd want to do business with, network with, be friends with.
There's no correct answer for which accent is acceptable and which one isn't. However, some accents are better than others, which is a shame because you can't really control your accent. However, regardless of what your accent is like and what your speaking voice is like, you can always tell the intelligence behind somebody's accent.
Depending on the language they use, the vocabulary they use, the vernacular they use, the way they pause, the way that they take their time when putting thoughts together, the way they intonate their words. So I know very smart people who are Chinese, Nigerian, Indian, who do speak with their heavy accent. However, you know that there's a brain behind that accent.
So if you're lucky enough to be born with a British or maybe an American accent, and you're not using your voice to your full potential, it's one of those instances where you'll always get... outpaced by somebody who's more obsessed than if you're born with natural talent. So if you're born with a BBC British accent, which I don't quite have, but I guess that would be the top rank of accents in the world, in my opinion, you know, there's an Indian guy who can sell more than you and do more business than you and close more deals than you, despite the fact that his accent is a disadvantage.
That's just because he works harder than you. So make sure that you do work on your vocabulary. Download stupid apps, word of the day.
Read 20 new words a day and read what they mean, learn their definitions, try to include them into your everyday vocabulary. Yeah, you're really doing yourself a huge diss service if you don't try to maximize your speaking voice. The best way to cultivate your voice besides expanding your vocabulary to me would be reading out loud.
Take a book that you like or a book that isn't something very simple, no children's books obviously, and read them out loud. It's an exercise that everyone used to have us doing in school. We probably don't understand why our teachers used to make us do this.
However, the way that stories are written and the way that people speak in books and the way that sentences are put together, you can tell how it's supposed to be read. You can tell you're not supposed to just zoom through all the words like you do in your head when you're mentally reading it. So literally read it out loud. You can imagine how these characters are speaking to each other.
You can imagine how they're trying to convey themselves, whether it be a sad moment of the book, an action-packed part of the book, somber, happy. It doesn't matter. You know what the characters are feeling at the time. So read out loud. And then when you find yourself speaking with your friends, you find yourself talking really fast and you're umming and ahhing and you can't get your words together like this, then slow the fuck down.
Slow down. Think of what you want to say before you say it. and try to convey it in a very articulate, compendious way. There is a trick that I can tell young men that will help them close business deals, help them get girlfriends, help them make friends, help them get into the circles that they want to get into.
And it's a stat, I guess, of yourself that you can expand throughout your entire life and you should never stop expanding it. And that would be general knowledge. General knowledge is super important because I remember I was sitting with one of the sheikhs in Dubai. And he had, there was no alcohol at this house, of course, it was a dinner event, and they start passing around this wood that you burn and you smell the scent coming off the wood. And I knew exactly how it was made and how it was cultivated.
If you don't find it in the wild, which is very hard nowadays because it's all extinct, you have to drill certain holes into these trees and infect the trees with a certain type of mold and wait for the wood to go petrified. And I was explaining this process to him, which he already knew, but he was super impressed that I understood. this part of Arabic culture and what this product was exactly. And general knowledge will always impress people.
I can sit down with most people and have a conversation about most topics. Irregardless of what it is, there's something that I will know about it. And as a young man, there's no reason to just, if you like sales and internet marketing, only read about that. Spend your spare time learning about things that you don't think are particularly useful. Maybe spend your spare time learning about things that you...
right now have no business knowing. Yachts, the different brands and makes of private jet, learn all of this. Because when you start to sit with important people, you can at least have an idea what they're talking about and interject in the conversation, perhaps with something they don't know.
And that has made me more friends and more connections with men, women, businessmen, anyone who I was trying to get connected to than maybe anything else, general knowledge. You have to work on it. See, I like audiobooks. And even right now, you say you don't see me learning things.
I am four hours into a 17-hour audiobook course lectures on the Vikings and Norse mythology and Norse history. Why? So the last two hours when I was in my room, I was listening to it.
So you don't see me learning this stuff, but I just find so many things interesting that I will make sure that instead of listening to music or doing other things, I'm filling my brain with information. So every day I'm learning something new. I don't think a day goes by when I don't learn something new from somewhere.
But yeah, going down rabbit holes is always very interesting on the internet. If you find an interesting fact out about something, then read up more. I mean, Wikipedia is a tremendous resource. Everyone's forgotten about it. It's because it's kind of fallen out of fashion, I think.
But it is a tremendous resource. And when it comes to history and battles and world leaders and things like that, there are literally clickable links from each page to the next page to the next page. And you could sit and read and learn entire eras of history or entire 20-year periods in an hour or two if you are determined enough. And this information is maybe not useful for making money and maybe not useful in the long run. But if you impress someone like me who you're trying to do business with, with your knowledge on something that I find interesting, then I'm going to like you more and I'm more likely to sign the contract.
Fighting is a worthwhile hobby and it was something I did and I consumed. God knows how many hours of my youth punching punch bags and punching other people. It's very useful because it's something that you carry around with you everywhere you go.
Everywhere I go, I know how to fight. If I get in a problem or an argument or a confrontation, I know how to fight and something that I never lose. So yeah, fighting is a very good hobby.
It makes you harder to kill. It's probably, I think, one of the highest return on investment hobbies that young men can possibly do. Get yourself down to a local boxing gym and learn how to fight. Absolutely.
I think that it doesn't teach you any massive lessons. I think that you're a lot more aware. of how tough you aren't. I think that men overestimate their physical capabilities and their ability to do well in a fight probably by a thousand times. Like everyone thinks they'll be fine in a fight.
Everyone thinks they'll just, they have this fantasy that they can just beat people up. But fighting is actually incredibly, incredibly difficult. And when you really know how to fight, it makes you more paranoid because you understand how unrealistic these scenes where, you know, scenes in movies where a guy's beating up five different people, unless you're Steven Seagal, this is unrealistic stuff. So.
It makes you a lot more paranoid because I'm aware that if someone sucker punches me from behind and his friend starts stomping on my head, it doesn't matter how much kickboxing I know. So when you know how to be violent and you know how easy it is to hurt people and to knock them out, you understand also how fragile you are as a person. And you stop overestimating yourself in terms of what you can do in a fight like most men do. A lot of people end up working fast food jobs after university because they believe that doors are going to open because the degree is given to them. They get this message from their parents.
They get this message from the Matrix, the media. They're sold this dream that you're going to come out of university with a degree. and everybody's going to want to hire you, and you're going to be a high-value member of society that's going to just jump into this $75,000 a year, $100,000 a year job. But you won't, and that's not what's going to happen.
Take one university. You went to university, didn't you? How many students passed in your year?
Do you know? At graduation? Guess.
I don't know the size of your university. 30,000. 30,000 students in a year passed at your university alone.
maybe 10,000. Let's say 10,000. How long ago since you graduated? 10 years? Eight years?
No, no, no. Four or five. Four or five years. That's 50,000 people have walked out of the door of the same building you went to in Texas with these pieces of paper saying, hire me. I'm worth millions of dollars per year.
I'm worth hundreds of thousands per year. I'm worth at least six figures. 50,000 people from that one building you went to. How many universities are in the USA?
I challenge somebody to do this math. How many students graduate? with a university degree every single year in all of the top universities. Okay, fine.
How many universities are there in the United States? How many new degrees, how many new pieces of paper are printed every single year for everybody to walk out of these buildings and wave around at employers saying, I'm worth all this money? Take that number and divide it by the number of jobs in the United States that even pay six figures.
The number of jobs in the United States that even pay you $100,000 a year, which by the way, is still broke. and you'll see the glaringly obvious scam that traditional education is. Universities used to be prestigious.
You used to have to be smart to go to university. Now, any idiot can go to university. You can buy a degree, even if you're unintelligent.
Universities used to be for the intelligent, the smart, the industrious, and they would go there and get their degree, and they'd be rare in society. The man walking around, yeah, I have a university education. People used to brag about having somebody like that in their family, and universities used to actually mean something.
However, Once it became clear that there was a big business here, a big racket here, that the banks were happy to fund all the students going there and pay you all your money, universities sprung up everywhere. You could do universities online from your house. And all these people are printing these degrees every year, which are utterly meaningless.
If you don't know what the next step is, I can't give you a specific answer because the next step is different for different people. What did I do? I worked on my sports career. I thought it might make me some money.
It didn't. But I thought if I could become the world champion at kickboxing, I'll have some fame and some money and a good life. And I can use that money to invest in things and set myself up.
And I pursued a sports career. Now, if you're not built like me, and you're not designed like me, and you're not big like me, maybe a kickboxing career isn't right for you. But certainly, the world of professional sports is good for anybody with an athletic background. I'm terrible at soccer.
You might be good at soccer. There's nothing wrong, instead of going to university, applying yourself towards some type of... professional sport, whether it be long jumping, weightlifting, boxing, whatever you're good at, because these people, let's be honest, are some of the most successful people in the world.
When you talk about who are the richest, most successful, most famous people in the world, you don't say the guy who went to this university, the guy who went to that university. You're talking NBA. You're talking NFL.
You're talking soccer. You're talking baseball. You're talking boxing.
You're talking golf. So professional sports is a very, very good outlet to drive yourself into because even if you don't make the big money, like I do, didn't because I didn't. You learn a lot of hard lessons along the way. You're in great physical shape. You've learned how to deal with ups and downs and wins and losses and injuries and setbacks.
You're far more prepared for the world, I believe, after a four-year career in boxing, which ends abruptly before you made any money, than you would be if you spent four years studying something generic like business. I've never purposefully... been a clown and that's what a lot of these people even if some of these streamers do grow up to be i guess mature adults when they're in their late 30s and 40s when they're closer to my age if they do i think they'll look back at their content and be deeply ashamed of themselves because i think that they are purposefully being clowns they're purposefully acting stupid and saying and doing very stupid things although i don't agree with everything i used to say and although i don't smile at my old content pridefully a lot of the time i never purposefully acted like a clown.
I never made a joke out of myself or a joke out of my life. I always said what I believed was true at the time and I always did what I thought was right or smart at the time. So as many things as I got wrong when I was younger, I was still a young man doing my very best, you know, to make it, you know, out there in this cold world and I became rich as f**k eventually so it must have worked. Yeah, don't make a clown of yourself.
If I know that, you know, I was sitting there in front of a camera at 25 talking about how I run all these webcam models. It's come back to haunt me, obviously, because, you know, the Romanian justice system is trying to, you know, butcher my life because of that. But there's me at 25 talking about running webcam models or any of the stupid shit I was doing.
Yeah, I still didn't make a joke out of myself. I never wore stupid costumes. I never painted my face stupid colors.
I never screamed and jumped around and acted like an animal or a monkey, like a lot of these people on the internet. You know, I was doing the best I could at the time. And I wasn't right about everything, but I have nothing to be ashamed of.
That's my favorite fight story. And the haters on the internet find this fight. It lasts about two minutes into the first round and I tap out.
It was my first ever MMA fight. But I think that's one of my proudest moments in fighting and one of my coolest stories. I just injured my shoulder, right? I was in a car crash. I hadn't done any physical training for...
months. I was in a lot of pain and the head, the champion of the federation, his opponent pulled out. So the head of this fight show calls me and says, look, Tristan, I need a fighter last minute.
Andrew was in the big brother house at the time. So I didn't have Andrew. My fight coach was in another country. I didn't have him.
I didn't have anybody. So I just said, you know what? Yeah, fuck it.
I'll do it. I'll take the fight on one day's notice and I'll get in there and try to win. I didn't win, but I think that's one of my proudest stories in fighting, and it's a pretty cool story, if you know the background to it. The fight, at the very beginning, we were talking with the rules, and they said, look, because you've come in last minute, would you like to alter the rules? Maybe the first round, no wrestling.
So it's just going to be stand-up, which is your arena. And I said, no, I don't want to alter the rules at all. I would like the rules to be full MMA rules.
And I want the rules that way because if I do knock him out, then I've won. And I'm not going to have him making any excuses. So I spoke very rudimentary. basic Romanian at the time, but I heard his corner just telling him to grab me and wrestle me.
So I threw 11 head high kicks in those two minutes, I believe, 11, because my arm was injured. My shoulder was injured. I couldn't jab properly, so I couldn't line up my right hand.
And I knew if I could catch him with a head kick, I could actually knock him out. It didn't work. One of the kicks I missed and I span around. That's how he grabbed me from the... back and got me onto the ground for the first time and I essentially tapped because I got off the ground the first time just by brute forcing my way up and then when I tried that the second time my shoulder was slipping out of place as I was pushing him so I was like okay well now I can't get up my shoulder's falling out of place and I'm trying to push this guy off me so I just tapped and ended the fight but pretty cool story um I earned a lot of respect all the fighters in Romania all the fighters from the uh show they work as doorman and stuff in Bucharest I earned a lot of credit in my city and in the Romanian community for doing that