Alfie Whattam, Founder @ ALFA

Welcome back to another episode of The Graduate Guide. Today, joined by Alfie. Alf, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you for having me, let's do it.

Yeah, so you're the founder of Alpha, but you've had, um, you know, a big career in the world of recruitment and AI and There'll be so many hidden gems within this conversation on how to build a career in, well, the world of AI, or we're going to get into the world of recruitment and maybe what's wrong with that as well. But I think a good place to start is in your education while you're at school, what was your idea of how your career would pan out to be then? What were you thinking about in regards to your career?

I had a really different and weird origin story. I'll explain it quickly because it could go on and on for a while, right? I grew up in York, in England. Small, lovely town, but not a massive amount of things happening there compared to— we're right next to King's Cross filming right now, where I guess it's like the heart of the UK.

Right.

But I grew up with absolutely nothing in York, and I really wanted to do something around business, around technology, around, I guess, what we're doing right now and media and that type of world. I had a very interesting origin story in the respect that when I was a kid, I was a professional magician. I don't know if you know this from my research, but I used to perform at parties and weddings and events and eventually started to get pretty good. I was on Britain's Got Talent. I had my own TV show for a while, traveled all around the world in many, many different countries, performing for billionaires like Warren Buffett, for prime ministers like David Cameron and Boris Johnson, and then for all different types of A-list celebrities at their parties, like Simon Cowell and Anton Deck and Ed Sheeran. Interesting people. A lot of fun. Very interesting, to be honest. I enjoyed the the business side of show business a little bit more than the, the show side. Clearly still got a little bit of the show left in me, we were doing a podcast after all, but I really enjoyed the business side and wanted to double down on that. So I guess by accident, Peter, I, I created a recruitment business for magicians. I'd be getting requests to do gigs in China and Germany and Spain, and I couldn't be in 3 places at the same time, you know, despite it being magic. So I'd hire other magicians to do the shows for me, and I'd take a cut and make some money. So I built up a magic talent agency sort of by accident really, which sounds amazing. To be completely honest, there's not a lot of money in like making 2 hours of margin of somebody every single week working like a Friday or Saturday night at an event. So, um, I pivoted a little bit into more of technology, into more software engineering, which was my other interest. And it's how I built up my career as a magician, by using the internet and using social media before it was really as popular as it is today. So joined a traditional large recruitment agency as a trainee. Spent 5 years working my way up the ranks until I was running a big multimillion pound business for them with over 50 people all across the country and in Ireland and in India and so on. Really enjoyed that part. But I started to understand that the recruitment industry is broken and there's so much fraud and corruption and scams that happen within that world, which led to me leaving to start my own business, which is a— at the moment we're operating as a consulting model, helping scale companies, helping build AI and software engineering and tech teams. And at the same time, as we've been doing that for a couple of years, we've been building our own AI product, which is going to be released by the end of this year. And then that will completely revolutionize the world of hiring and change how people go from, hey, I want to hire, to, hey, this person's now working for my company. That problem has got a very, very weak set of solutions at the moment, from putting up an ad and getting hundreds and hundreds of applications and having to go through them all, or to paying an agency thousands and thousands of pounds and most of the time getting a pretty poor experience. We've got a much better way of doing it, and we're using AI, we're using machine learning, we're using cutting-edge technology to solve that issue.

That is a pretty different answer to what we're used to on this podcast in that you were so ambitious and knew what you wanted to do from a very young age, which I think a lot of people in the education system, you know, they're told, okay, you know, get into a good university, you'll be fine. And then, you know, when you're at university, you'll find out you want to do— and everyone kind of gets this sort of 20-year-old spot, and they haven't actually thought about what makes them happy and what they want to do. Clearly there's a deeper drive than for you. You said coming from, from relatively, uh, not much, and then really having this, uh, desire to build something.

Yeah.

Where do you think— what do you think your makeup is for that?

Before we get into your amazing career journey you've had, I think that's very kind of you to say. First of all, I certainly don't feel like I'm, I'm kind of where I want to be yet. I'm only 28, so I'm still a baby, but relatively speaking. But I, I guess I grew up with, um, I mean, relatively speaking, nothing. I mean, I wasn't, I wasn't, uh, you know, living in a third world country, so I, I, um, I think it would be probably inappropriate for me to describe it as nothing, but I had zero in my bank account, if, if that's what, if that's what I mean. Um, and I, I guess I didn't want to be in that position. I just wanted to have more, be able to do more, be able to share more, be able to give more, and be able to help add value and, and help make other people happy and make their lives better. Because ultimately, that's how you become happy, that's how you become rewarded, that's how you become fulfilled— by adding value and helping others, right? Um, and to put yourself in that kind of position, you need to be able to do something big. You need to be able to do something bold. You can't just sit on the sidelines watching other people in the arena. You have to get in there yourself. At some point you have to leap and go for it. And I guess I took that leap a little bit earlier than most people and failed and failed and failed for many, many years. Eventually getting to the point where you build up a thick enough skin where failure is just like having a cup of coffee. It doesn't affect you anymore. Spurs you on, it motivates you, it inspires you. Um, so I guess the motivation was, was having nothing, like, relatively speaking, and wanting to, to have more. I have a 1.5-year-old kid, I have a wife, and, and when you have a— when you're a dad, when you're a husband, it's less about you, it's more about providing for your family and, and making them happy, making them healthy and safe and, and all of that. So I guess the motivation comes from trying to give them the best life possible, which, um, in many respects, you know, I might not have had myself.

And you're, you're clearly a very entrepreneurially minded person. Um, that first sort of big career leap you took into the world of recruitment in a big organization, you know, you rose through the ranks very quickly within that. And I wonder, when was it you realized that you were an entrepreneur, you had to do something for yourself? Because Yeah, I think a lot of people can coast in big companies, but clearly you had a— you know, even within a big company, you had an entrepreneurial mindset.

Yeah, I guess it was the entire journey, to tell you the truth. I mean, I was an entrepreneur before I was doing that because I was running the Magic Talent Agency, and much smaller scale to what we've got now, but I worked for myself before I worked for anybody else in that respect. But whilst I was working for somebody else, um, I guess if you asked my managers to describe me in one word, it probably would have been disruptive. Now, that might not be a good thing at a big corporate, but, um, it's just in my DNA. I'm always looking at systems and going, that's, that's fucking broken, how do we fix that? You know, this is a really bad way of doing it, how do we make this better? How do we improve this? The challenge with big companies is it takes 10 layers of approval to get anything like that fixed and changed. So, um, that caused a little bit of perhaps chaos at times, good chaos, organized chaos. But fundamentally, I think I would struggle to work for somebody else again. I think I just like to break things, move quickly, and that really goes against what some of the legacy traditional larger dinosaurs are wanting to— they operate in a very different way to that ethos and that mindset.

Right.

Yeah.

And Let's— while we're on the topic of recruitment, um, get a little bit into potentially where it's going wrong. And if I add my two cents as a recent graduate from university, yeah, I think, um, it seems like recruiters, uh, have seen it more of a lucrative industry where you can come in for a quick cash grab for placing one person in a job and, and then just repeating that, repeating it without ever really caring about what they're placing the person into, or who the person is, or where they want to go. And I think that's potentially where a lot of the corruption on the student side of it has been happening. From your side, having been in that world, and clearly, like, you've got very good intentions with wanting to build great things, where do you think it's going wrong?

So that's a great observation, and it's absolutely true. I think the recruitment industry is broken, and it comes right from the very, very top. Okay, so you have some of the biggest recruitment companies in the world and I've seen firsthand they are committing fraud, they are lying to people, they are scamming to people, and it's happening on scale globally. Okay. And I've seen this in a, in a variety of different ways. It's not as if it's just one or two bad apples. Um, there are definitely a lot of good people in the industry and I don't want to paint everybody with the same brush, but it's not a case of it being a few apples. It's a case of the entire industry being broken. And it starts with the way that recruiters are compensated. Um, like it or not, they're very, very commission-driven, very, very low, small salaries, and to make most of their money in commission, which means that, let's just be honest, there's a bias when it comes to recommending a candidate. That recruiter wants that candidate to get the job. They want them to stay in that job even if they're not particularly the right fit. So we see recruiters every single day spamming irrelevant CVs, and anybody who's listening to this who's gone through this will understand exactly what I'm talking about. This isn't some brand new concept. I'm not reinventing the wheel here. Right? This is, this is pretty self-evident, right? Everybody's got really, really bad matches, which hurts the candidates as well because it's their reputation on, on the line. So commission-driven recruiters just spamming bad matches to try and get quick wins and those quick fees that you're talking about. Um, but also it's really, really expensive. You know, it costs a lot of money to pay people in commission. It costs a lot of money to have these big fancy offices that you see around London and these outrageous bonuses which some of the recruitment directors get. Um, so it's really expensive for a company to even use a recruiter. And then when they do use them, they get a really bad experience. Like 90% of the time it's slow, it's all manual, it's old school. They're not leveraging AI, they're not leveraging technology. They're doing it with like a written book and like taking down notes. It's just a traditional broken industry. But going a little bit deeper, I guess some of the things that I've seen would make your head spin, like, Peter Wood, honestly. Like I've seen recruiters for publicly listed companies pretending to be a candidate going on a job interview so that candidate has a better chance of getting the job, you know, on like a phone interview where they can't see their face. And essentially they're lying, they're pretending to be that person so they can get that candidate in with the company. I've seen situations where recruiters have made fake CVs pretending to be the perfect fit for the role to try and get in there with the company. And then, you know, whether they'll say, look, is that person available? No, they've just been snapped up by one of your competitors, but here's some more people. And then they show their real profiles, which, look, they're not as good as the fake profile, but it gets them in, in the door. Um, and a whole host of other very, very unethical things. So I think that industry is broken. I think it deserves to get the rep that it does. And, and that's why I'm really proud with what we're building at Alpha, because we're solving that problem. We're offering a much better and ethical way to that situation. Um, the consulting practice doesn't use any of those ridiculous techniques. We do everything based on relationships. We win our business based on podcasts in the same way that you are doing here, by adding value and by recommendations and referrals. Um, and then with the AI platform that we're building, it will replace 90% of the elements that are currently, uh, the manual steps that are happening within the recruitment world, and it just makes it a better, a faster, and a more streamlined experience.

I think it's interesting, uh, from a student perspective, if you told someone, oh, I'm going in to do recruitment, everyone will kind of go, oh yeah, yeah, wasted potential, all this kind of thing. But I think like the actual concept of helping people get into their dream job and build a living for themselves, like, that is an admirable way to spend your life course. And, and I, and I wonder if it's broken, which I believe it to be How does it change? How do we move forward? Because, you know, not just on an actual recruitment as a company, but like, what's the future for someone who's resonating with everything you're saying? They're sitting there and they're going, I want to apply my ambition, I want to build a great career. Why should it be in the world of recruitment? And how— what telltale signs should they be looking for in terms of the companies they should go to work for in recruitment?

Yeah, I guess, um, you're right, it is an admirable thing uh, from a theoretical and, and top-down perspective, right? So, um, if you can get the right person the right job, that can change their life. You can give them purpose, meaning, fulfillment. You can give them a, a nice salary increase, and that can provide for their family. From a company perspective, if you find the right person for that business, that can transform what they're building. They can release amazing products, revolutionize their services, get out there to their customers and make their lives better. And then that improves the economy and ultimately it makes the world a better place. So the magic of recruitment, you know, it really is there. But the way— the why is not broken, but the how and the what, they're broken. And I guess what we need to do is we need to use AI to replace the commission-driven elements which causes these bad matches. We need to use technology to make it faster. You know, it shouldn't be a case of you getting hundreds of applications and you manually having to go through each one. We can use tech to spot the right ones using machine learning and give you exactly what you need rather than just overwhelming you with, with average profiles. And ultimately, that brings the cost down because when you're doing it at scale, recruitment shouldn't be reserved for big, big companies that can afford to do this. Everybody should have the same access and right to talent. You know, talent's everywhere, but the opportunity to get it is not. And we need to use these systems, use this AI, and use this new way of working to really fix that broken model.

What I love about your journey into doing your own thing within the recruitment world is that of course you, you earn your badges in, in the world, and, and I think you saw from the very inside what was going wrong. And I think when you realize that, you can go one of two ways. You can sweep under the carpet and go along with everyone else and, you know, maybe Russian doll it and make your own recruitment company, and it just kept— keeps repeating. And I think I think partly due to like COVID and the economic downturn that's happening, and also like even students sort of starting to call bullshit on traditional forms of education, I think this is the time for change in recruitment. And I think, was there a part of you— what was, do you think, the balance between, okay, I can't stand this anymore, I want to go do something about it, versus it's the right time now, I've got to do it?

Yeah. Well, look, I think what we're building on the AI side couldn't have existed a year ago. So I guess the why now is like the tech wouldn't have been possible to work. We have a conversational chatbot which speaks to people and finds out what their situation is and what their expectations are and does that better than a human can do. That tech just wouldn't have existed a year ago. So I guess part of like, I've been thinking about this idea for so long and building it and step by step and step, but the missing magic, the missing ingredient, it's so new and so exciting and so revolutionary that it just wasn't there a few months back. So, um, yeah, I don't know if that's the right answer to your question, but it's something that I've always thought about. It's something that I've always wanted to improve upon and always wanted to make better. But thanks to AI, we can now finally make that happen.

Yeah. And you're also a podcast host, like myself. And, um, and I think even in the world of podcasting, I feel like at this point it just sounds like we're roasting our own industries in a way. However, I think there's a lot of people that go into it with the wrong intentions, right? Like, they see the viewership, they see people living as digital nomads and, you know, just talking for a living. And I think there's so much more that goes into it. Like, it's a lot harder than it looks. Um, the actual buy-in from anyone, rather than just vanity metrics, requires like just time and time again and actually doing it for a good cause. And I think when you thought, okay, I want to start a podcast, what was, you know, the real motivation behind it? And what was it you're really trying to achieve with it other than, yeah, driving business for yourself?

Well, firstly, let me say like, well done on what you've built with The Graduate Guide, because I see a lot of podcasts and 99% of them are complete shit. But you've built something really, really good. And you've got one thing that I like about podcast hosts are the ones that are persistent because 90% of people that release a podcast never release a second episode. Yeah. And of the people that release a second episode, 90% of them never get to 10 episodes. You've done 150 or something now. Yeah, we're on 170. And just, just by doing that, we've already got to the top 0, 0.1% or something. So like, nailed it, right? Yeah.

Well, I think just quickly on that, I think knowing your why— like, if I give mine and sort of contextualize yours, it's, you know, I was a student yeah, that was doing history and had no idea what I wanted to do with it. Back against the wall, I thought, you know, I could spend all my time applying for the same spring weeks or summer internships everyone else, or I could really try and build this very authentic natural network. Um, and, and I, I did it for so many more reasons than just a bit of brand growth or viewership. Like, it's— it really has become my life, the thing that gives me passion and happiness. And I think That's where the value comes when you realize your wife has started something.

Exactly. Mine was very similar, to be honest, Peter Wood. I, um, it was during COVID so 3 years ago or something now. I was sitting at home in lockdown and I just wanted to build my network. I wanted to learn from people. I wanted to speak to people. There were so many interesting people out there, super successful people, and I was stuck in my bedroom not able to leave the house. And I wanted to learn from them. I wanted to get their insights and apply them to my own life. So I started just messaging people cold on LinkedIn, on email, finding people that I'd like to be in a couple of years. And then people said yes, and then it started to snowball and snowball. And then we moved into our own podcast studio, and now we do an episode a week. And, um, across all social media, you know, we've had hundreds of thousands of people have listened to our show. And, and it's insane to, to kind of, uh, you know, get that, uh, that following and that growth and being able to speak to some amazing people. Um, and now it's at the point where I'm speaking to people like Harry Stebbings from 20VC, or, or DHH, created Ruby on Rails, a really popular programming language in my world, um, you know, billionaires, best-selling authors, and everything in between. So, um, it's really cool. But I guess the why was I just wanted to learn, man. I wanted to, I wanted to get insights from these people. And if I messaged them asking for a coffee, they would have ignored the email because they get that 100 times a day. So if I'm adding value first and then receiving something back afterwards, that's the way to do it. And I never used it as a way of making money, Thankfully, it has become quite lucrative from that perspective. It's led to a lot of business. We've been able to launch businesses off the back of the, of the podcast, um, which is really cool. But I'd still keep doing it today even if I was losing money every single day on it, because the value that you get in the network that you build is worth so much more. I mean, like, your network really does become your net worth, and the best way to do that is by starting a podcast.

Yeah, and I think conscious of the dangers of promoting that every student should start a podcast. I think maybe not all of them. Yeah, yeah. The learnings from what you're saying there, right, is you need to find a way in networking to add value. Like, you can't just expect like pure like philanthropic, um, nature of people to just, oh, that's a student that wants some of my time for coffee, I'm going to go meet them. And I found the same thing, like, for the longest time, you know, I had this delusional optimism that, you know, I'd got, I think, the managing director of Google in one of my first episodes, and I was like, oh, now I can get anyone. And it's just never that good next week. Yeah, yeah. And it's like, and I think there is a real thing there, and students should know this, in that building their whole network and knowing how important that is you need to find a way to position yourself in a room with somebody that you admire and want to learn from and actually be able to offer anything when you don't even have anything, you know, in terms of traditional qualifications or degrees or whatever. You need to just really embrace your curiosity, right? And I think that's why podcasting is a great lens to do it. It's the best way to build rapport, like person to person. You have a conversation, uh, You know, I know you didn't go to university, but is there some advice you'd give back to, to students on how to actually refine your process of both outreach and, you know, building that rapport within the conversation, knowing how important it is?

I guess so. I went to uni briefly and then I dropped out, which is funny because my wife has a PhD, so we're like polar extremes on that end. So I'll say something now that will probably piss off a lot of your viewers, but I'll say it anyway, and that university, the traditional university route I believe is a scam for 90% of people. Now, if you're going to be a doctor, if you're going to be a lawyer, if you're going to do something that involves a degree, then absolutely you need to do it. But if you're— for most things, like I did business for a while, right? I'm pretty sure I could have learned more about business watching YouTube videos than paying tens of thousands of pounds to learn from somebody that's never run a business before. Now, people might disagree. I think there's definitely a lot that you can get from uni, like a good network and a few other things. But in terms of pure knowledge, I think you could probably learn more from YouTube in 2024 than most of these professors that don't really know what they're talking about. Okay. But on the topic of outreach, that was your question, right? How to network and how to meet people. I think you're absolutely right. Just asking for something from them. Without giving is, is like the worst way of doing it. A very practical exercise would be just pull up an Excel document, get a list of all the people that you'd love to meet, start with 100 or something so it's manageable, and then put— get their email address. You can find it online, it doesn't take long. You can find their email, you can probably find their phone number as well using like Apollo and different lead scraping magnets. And then get their LinkedIn, get their Twitter. I'd probably stay away from like Facebook and Instagram, it's a little bit too creepy. I feel like you're like liking their old pictures or something, right? Um, I have that sometimes on mine. I'm like, who is this guy? Yeah, what's he doing? Um, but professional social networks, start liking this stuff, start commenting on it, start to build little soft touch points, start to get, you know, your jab, jab, jabbing. So when you go for the right hook, when you go for the email, you've already worn them down a little bit. They know who you are, they like you, they trust you, they know your face. And then when you're asking for something, you're not asking for something for you, you're giving. Hey, I love your story. I love what you posted the other day about this, and I'd love to interview you for my blog, of my newsletter, or on my podcast. Or I'd love just to get a few minutes to have a chat with you, and then I could turn it into, um, some top tips for people looking to do what you do, or something like that. Give value. And then, and then as you keep doing that over time, they'll start introducing you to people. And when you want something from them and you can ask them, you've already built up so much goodwill with them they'll feel almost guilty if they don't give you what you're asking for. It's not going to work for everybody. That's why you have got to play the numbers game and, and contact a lot of people. But if you're a graduate out there right now trying to contact people about a job or trying to get 5 minutes of somebody's time, just, just stop what you're doing. You are wasting your time, you're wasting their time, and it's not an intelligent way to go about the process. You know, map out the market, do strategic value-add cold outreach, and then you'll be amazed with how many of those conversations start turning into like warm, real friendships over time.

How intentional do you have to be in who you're reaching out to in the beginning? Because I feel like there is a bit of a chicken and egg thing, and when you don't really know what your value-add is or what your offer is versus like sometimes you meet people and they help you define that for you.

Sure.

Um, and, and I think, you know, you're, you're a bit further ahead in your career journey than me, um, and you've built this network and And I'm curious, you know, I do sit on a good network now, but how to like properly utilize it and the best way to actually, you know, create, build things with them, create value with them. Like, how do you then take that network and harness it, whether it's also just to land a job, you know? Yeah, yeah. How'd you do it?

I think there are certain people who, if you meet, regardless of what you're doing, there's probably stuff that you can learn from them, or people in their network that you can benefit from. So people running like CEOs or CXOs, like C-suite of exciting fast growth companies, investors that put in large amounts of money into companies that you're interested in, advisors, people that sit on boards and can offer opinions and expertise. If you are going to be more strategic about it and you know what you want to do, then you can do more of the Excel method that I talked about and be a lot more Strategic, like, hey, I want to build an AI company. Who are the top people running AI companies near me? Okay, well, let's reach out to those people and have it. You can find it on a Google search, you can find it on ChatGPT. If you can't do that step, then you probably shouldn't start because you'll just fail in general. Like, that, like, that is pretty basic, right? Um, but yeah, I, I'd say, like, I'm very, very mindful of how I spend my time personally, right? Whenever I've got a task that comes to me I think, number one, can I automate this? Can I use software to do it so a human doesn't need to do it? So it's running in the background while I sleep? Or if I can't automate it, can I delegate it? Can I get one of my staff to do this task for me at a high enough level of quality where I'm happy with it, then I can go off and do more higher value types of activities? If I can't, then I do it myself, or I eliminate it. I think, this is— this worth my time? Should I really be doing this? And then I cut it. So I'm very specific about how I spend my time. And to be honest, regardless of where you're at in life, I would view it the same way. Like, everybody has 24 hours in a day, right? It doesn't matter who you are. The only difference between you and somebody massively successful is that they spend their 24 hours differently. They do the same things that you, but they do them better. Yeah.

And you've spent some time in some rooms that I've seen pictures of with some of the most exceptional people and most productive people, you know, names like Ali Abdaal come to mind, and, and, you know, some actual alumni of this podcast. And, and, you know, you talked about being in that room and just how much, like, just being a fly on the wall can, can do for your motivations and what your sense of what you can achieve. But what do you actually think, um, from those types of people you're really extracting from them? If you could, like, boil it down to 3 things, you're just like okay, this is what I've learned from spending my time with these amazingly exceptional people.

Yeah, well, let me shout out a few of them. Um, I certainly feel like I am the underdog in those rooms, and I'm very grateful to, to be, uh, invited to those types of things, right? So the Ali Abdaal— we had dinner at his house a couple of weeks ago. You know, Ali is a massively influential YouTuber, bestselling author, um, you know, multi-millionaire. He's coming on the podcast soon, so that'll be a really, really exciting episode. Um, I guess what I learned from him, um, a couple of things, I guess, specifically around YouTube. I guess the idea of just going all in and not treating it as a little side project, but like you're competing against people that this is their like mission. They've got a full team and they're doing— their quality is here, your quality is here, right? And you might not think you're competing with them because you're doing different types of content, but in reality You are, because you're competing with people's time, you're competing with people's attention. And if people have got limited time and they're— they've got the phone, who can they watch? Can they watch Ali Abdaal or can they watch you? And if your content is not on the same level, um, not just in terms of editing and production because that's secondary to the actual content itself, what you're talking about— if your content is, is down here and there's this up here, even if it's not the right space and industry, you're still competing with them. It's still on a phone, it's still content. Like, your competition is not the, the other AI business around the corner. Your competition is Joe Rogan. Your competition is Lex, because they could be watching that instead. Your competition is the BBC, right? Like, that's how it works. So from Ali, I learned about, um, you know, and I don't, don't know Ali, Ali well, so, um, we've only had brief conversations, but from the conversations that we've had, they've been very, very inspiring just to up my level of commitment to quality. And in that same room, there were a few other really interesting people. There was Simon Squibb, Simon gets 50 million views on a TikTok post. I guess what I learned from him was the power of hooks, the power of starting a social media piece of content, and in the first couple of seconds, you've got their attention, you've got them interested, you've got them engaged, you've got them listening. Whereas most people, they start, so in this video, we're going to talk about, like, what the fuck? Like, you need to get somebody interested right away. So Simon is a genius when it comes to that. Probably the best in the world, and he's a master in that area. Just one or two other people, uh, Timothy Amu was in that room. He's been on the podcast, sold his business at, I think it was 27, for tens of millions. Um, you know, genius when it comes to scaling stuff from, from zero to one. He said something on my podcast which always resonated with me. He said, having an audience is like bringing a gun to a knife fight. And it's so true. If you're trying to get investment for your business, if you're trying to get clients, if you're trying to become friends with influential people if you've got an audience, if you've got a podcast, if you've got a newsletter, if you've got a social following, then that's like having a gun when everybody else has got a knife. That will instantly allow you to win. And then last, definitely, uh, not least in that room— and there were so many amazing people, but just, just picking a couple so it's not a 2-hour episode— uh, Dan-Marie Serta, um, who I'm, uh, a friend of mine. He, um, gets millions of views on, on Twitter, on, on LinkedIn. He runs a huge uh, Business Heights, brain supplement company. You take a pill, turns you into a healthier, happier, smarter person. An incredible product. Um, I've learned so much from, from Dan, but I guess if I had to pick one thing, it would be just the idea of thinking a lot bigger. Like, stop limiting your beliefs, stop making excuses, stop saying why you can't do something, you know, fuck that, throw it out the window. How could this work? What, what do we need to do? What, what needs to happen for this to become reality? And when you surround yourself with exceptional people like those, um, everything changes, right? Um, that's quite a long-winded answer, but that's great.

And I think on The Graduate Guide, we like to platform as many different types of people and as many different stories as possible, as authentically as possible as well. And I think, you know, you have this crazy desire to be, to be great and achieve greatness. And I think for those people that really want to do that, and I so miss that, but are finding it hard to apply that ambition somewhere, um, and they're listening to this, you know, I imagine for all the success you've had, you've had to push through some pretty difficult, like, harsh realities of maybe this industry you're working in, some constraints at the time. And yeah, talk me through a time where you might have been feeling a little bit less motivated and, and how you actually overcame that.

So when I was 19 years old, um, I believe I was 18 at the time, 18 or 19, I met my, uh, my girlfriend, now my wife in like a bar and a nightclub in York. She was doing her master's degree. I was working as a professional magician doing card tricks and traveling the world doing that. And she had an offer to do her PhD in New Zealand, which is literally as far away as you could get from the UK. So literally the other side of the world. And she went there to do her PhD. We did long-distance relationship for a while. It's really fucking hard to do that. And it gets quite expensive when you're traveling there to visit and that sort of thing. So at like 19 years old, 19 or 20, something like that, um, I, I went, fuck it, let's, let's do it. So I sold everything that I had, which wasn't much to be honest as a teenager, and I moved to New Zealand. I didn't know a single person there apart from my girlfriend. I had no money. I had like basically nothing in my bank account, enough for like a month or two of rent. I had no job, didn't know a single person in the country. And I had a very limited amount of time on my visa. So I had to find a way to make it work. I was a few weeks away from being homeless at this point. I literally burned the boats and I was feeling awful, feeling terrible, feeling like, what have I done? You know, this is a terrible decision. But by going all in and by cutting off the exit, you find a way to make it work because there is no plan B. Like everybody that's got a plan B listening to this, like, fuck your plan B, like get rid of the plan B. There's no reason to have a plan B. Because it distracts from Plan A. One of my favourite stories is the general that wanted to seize and take the island. So he took all of his men and soldiers on boats and he went to the island. And then he, the first thing he did before he attacked the island was he burnt the boats. He set them all on fire and he stood in front of the soldiers and said, "There is no going back. We take this island or we die. And this is what we have to do." I have I've been interviewing recently people to work for me, and one of the best interview questions that I can ask is— and this sounds like crazy sociopath-level stuff, but it's a really great way to determine who is fully motivated or not, right? I say, look, if I said to you, you've got 24 hours to make £1,000, keep it simple, right? And if not, there's a gun pointed to your head, right? And this gun's going to go off in 24 hours unless you've made the money. Do you think you could do it? And 99% of people will say yes, that they can do it, and then they'll start figuring out a plan and how to do it. Now remove the gum. Could they do it then? Most of them say no. So they can do it, they can figure it out, it's not impossible, they can make it work, but the motivation isn't there. They're not driven enough to make it happen. So get that drive, inject it into your life, forget plan B, succeed or fail, you have to make it work, and then you'll be amazed at what you can accomplish. But everybody fails because everybody goes, "Alright, if this doesn't work, we'll do this," if this doesn't work, we'll do this, and have Plan B and Plan C and Plan B. Like, you're setting yourself up for failure. Just go all in and it will work, or at least it has for me anyway.

Yeah, and you've been an amazing guest and, and shared so many amazing insights for students or anyone trying to pursue really building something different, disruptive, and, and innovative in itself. Um, and my final question to you, which I ask every single one of my guests, is that when you were doing your magic touring, when you made that move to New Zealand, you would have a certain idea of what success would look like in a career to you then. Fast forward with everything you've learned and everything you've seen possible, what does a successful career look like to you?

I guess for me personally, I get my most satisfaction and joy when I help other people, whether that's helping somebody get a job, helping a company grow and scale, investing in a business and seeing it take off. Any flavor of those types of components makes me most rewarded. So for me, success is about helping as many people as possible at the greatest levels that you can do so. Because if you can do that, then it will come back and rub off on you. I don't know if it's some religious component or if it's just karma or if it's goodwill. I don't have those answers. I wish I did. But whatever it is, whatever— if it's, if it's God, it's— if it's the universe, if it's, if it's something else, if we're living in a simulation, who knows— there is something about helping other people and it comes back to you. And, and to me, the most successful people in the world are the people that can help the most people. And like, if you just chase money, if you just chase fame or whatever, like, those are the people that have no money and have no influence because, um, people can see right through it. But if you make it your life mission to help other people everybody will want to suddenly start helping you. It's like crazy how it works, but it's so true. So if you want to— my version of success, and if you want to be successful, start helping people, and, and you'll be amazed at what happens to you.

Alfie, thanks for coming on, mate. It's a pleasure.