Justin Nguyen_mixdown.mp3

Harpreet: [00:00:13] What's up, everybody, welcome to the artists of Data Science today, we've got a conversations episode where we get to hear from people who are doing interesting work, pursuing their dreams and adding value to the world. We're going to get inside their heads, see what makes them tick and walk away with a new perspective that will help us in our journeys. These episodes are much less structured and formal than what you normally hear on the show. Their raw, unedited and, for the most part, unproduced. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I'd love to hear what you think about these episodes. Feel free to email me at the artists of Data Science that gmail.com with your thoughts. Our guest today is

Harpreet: [00:01:01] Taking the boring

Harpreet: [00:01:03] Career advice that 40 something year olds love to tell us and adds a Gen-Z twist to it. He's leading the movement to help students navigate their way through college networking, LinkedIn and the job search process. Ladies and gentlemen, help me welcoming our guest today, host of the Declassified College

Harpreet: [00:01:24] Podcast and the Get Your

Harpreet: [00:01:26] Grind Up podcast.

Harpreet: [00:01:27] Justin Win.

Harpreet: [00:01:29] Justin, thank you so much for taking time out your schedule to be here, man. I really appreciate you coming out of the show.

Justin: [00:01:35] No, thank you for having me on. It's a pleasure. I'm super excited to see. See how this goes.

Harpreet: [00:01:39] Yeah. And so let's start off by learning a little bit more about you. Talk to us about where you grew up and what was it like.

Justin: [00:01:47] Yeah. So I like to say that I grew up in a really unique place. I grew up in Windsor, Connecticut, and for those who don't know, like Connecticut, is a one of the smallest states in the U.S., but also b, we [00:02:00] are typically stereotyped as like rich people. Just because when you think of Connecticut, you think of like South Connecticut right next to New York, and that's where all of the Wall Street bankers live. But where I lived, I lived right outside of Hartford. And what most people don't understand is Hartford is, I believe, like a top 10 poorest capitals in the U.S. So we have this really interesting dynamic in Connecticut where where I went to school, I got to see sort of the poorer side of the world as well as the upper echelons and rich side too. And because I came from this town that didn't have the quote unquote best reputation when it comes to, we're not like this rich town. When I went to go play soccer because I was a big soccer player growing up, I was considered like the hood players to to play on these teams. And it was like super interesting to me because I didn't think I grew up in the hood or went to the hood or anything like that. By no means did. Like, I grew up in a very suburban town, but that was just the stereotype put on the where I grew up. And but that gave me such

Harpreet: [00:03:02] A unique sort of

Justin: [00:03:04] Perspective of especially when I went to college. Like I can communicate to the kids that grew up on welfare and everything like that, as well

Harpreet: [00:03:11] As the kids that have

Justin: [00:03:12] Million-plus dollar houses and go to private schools their whole life. So I think I grew up in a one of a kind place, but it's just been a super unique experience, especially going through college now.

Harpreet: [00:03:24] That's really interesting, man to be able to code switch between both of these different types of groups

Harpreet: [00:03:29] And communicate effectively

Harpreet: [00:03:32] With them both, right? So talking to us about high school, when you were in high school, what did you think your future would look like?

Justin: [00:03:41] So when I was in high school up until my junior year, I generally thought I was going to go play pro soccer. And the reason for that,

Harpreet: [00:03:48] I thought I was

Justin: [00:03:49] Pretty good and people told me that I was pretty good,

Harpreet: [00:03:51] But that was

Justin: [00:03:52] Basically my whole life. I was playing anywhere between 30 to 40 hours a week on like two to three teams sometimes. And when I got to my junior year, [00:04:00] I broke my leg. And what ended up happening is like my whole world

Harpreet: [00:04:03] Got turned upside

Justin: [00:04:05] Down. My college offers kind of got taken away. I had to really figure out what I wanted to do with my life and ultimately moving from high school to college. What I thought was like, OK, I'll combine my parents goal of me wanting to become a doctor with my love for sports, and I'll go into athletic training. Long story short, that didn't last too long.

Harpreet: [00:04:26] I'm like first generation born in California, right? My parents are not from the states at all. Mom's from Fiji. My dad is from India. And so coming over

Harpreet: [00:04:36] Where they're both of Indian

Harpreet: [00:04:37] Heritage, right? They have that mindset of there's only three possible career choices. You can be your doctor, you'll be an engineer, or it could be a failure. Was that the same kind of mentality that you had growing up with your parents?

Justin: [00:04:53] Yeah, definitely. I would say the other one that I did have as an option was a lawyer. That was an option on the table, and that was where I was like, OK, maybe I can combine sports with my parents goal of wanting

Harpreet: [00:05:03] Me, wanting

Justin: [00:05:04] Me to become a doctor again. It just didn't work out just because the classes and everything like that, but just a quick, funny story. The reason that I became a business major my sophomore year was because my roommate, we both played this video game called FIFA. And for those who don't know, FIFA is like the soccer video game on Xbox and PlayStation. And basically, there's this like stock market aspect to it. And I didn't even know what the stock market was at the time, but you could trade players like buy them low and sell them high. And I figured out how to do it, and I traded two a million coins after like watching YouTube

Harpreet: [00:05:36] Videos and stuff in like three months.

Justin: [00:05:38] My roommate is like, Dude,

Harpreet: [00:05:39] You can be really rich if you do this in real life

Justin: [00:05:42] And you put me on to the stock market that got me interested in finance and then I got my finance degree or my finance major. And that's what sort of led me into the world of entrepreneurship because I started to find content like If Gary V and things like that. So that's sort of my whole career journey. I guess, and it's always unique [00:06:00] to to understand other people's journeys, because no one's is exactly the same, but you can always pick little pieces here and there and apply it to yourself and take that into the future. So to say, and I want to swing the question back to you, right? How did you sort of find your way into Data science? Was that something that you were looking to do right out of the bat?

Harpreet: [00:06:24] Not at all, right. So I graduated with my first undergraduate degree that was like two thousand seven, right? And the economy is on the downturn around then, and the only job I could find was as a math teacher. So I taught math for a little while and I taught math to at risk students. So it was essentially, I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of like a continuation school, but

Harpreet: [00:06:50] Like for students in California,

Harpreet: [00:06:52] It's like this, right? If you get kicked out of high school, you go to a continuation school, which is like a school where all the bad kids go. If you get kicked out a continuation school and then you get put in this like academic rehabilitation program type of thing, right? And that's the environment that I was teaching in. But it wasn't just bad students. There's students there that were trying to get ahead as well. And, you know, being a math teacher, they're like, I didn't know

Harpreet: [00:07:20] How much I enjoyed

Harpreet: [00:07:22] Math until I started teaching it. And from there I started pursuing, OK, what could I do with this passion in math? And that led me to walk down the path the actuary for a while and squiggly career line, you know, went from actuary to biostatistician and then got bored of being a biostatistician and went into data science. But I think the common theme among everything was just interested in mathematics. I guess that really drove my career.

Justin: [00:07:49] I mean, it's so funny that you mentioned

Harpreet: [00:07:51] Math, right?

Justin: [00:07:53] Just like the stereotype that HP vs. was supposed to be naturally good at math, but I find that the reason that [00:08:00] people hate math, especially growing up, is because if you don't understand the core concepts of math of like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, I'm saying like actually understand not just being able to do it. Everything else becomes so hard. And when you when you take that that lesson and you apply it to sort of like your life, the same sort of things happen if you don't understand the core basics of, like what you want to do, what makes you happy, what makes you sad this and that? Then you kind of end up just going through the motions for the rest of your life. And that's how I've kind of just taken things for my whole life is like, I understand what sort of makes me happy. I need to have some free time. I need to be able to play some video games. I need to be able to travel. But at the same time, I need to know that I have to put in the hard work to be able to get the results that I want to, whether it's monetarily or like emotionally. And I don't think

Harpreet: [00:08:54] Many people know that

Justin: [00:08:55] And especially talking to college students, they definitely don't know

Harpreet: [00:08:58] That because when I ask

Justin: [00:09:00] Them and I'll be like, Hey, like, what do you like? What do you want to do after you graduate? And I know that's a loaded question. A lot of time. But sometimes they'll say, like, Oh, I want a job in marketing, and I'm like, OK, let's cool. Like, what do you want to do? And then that's when they go blank. Everyone has that first answer. But when you start asking why and like digging deep, what you realize is the really smart people, the really successful people in the world, they know their answer to a core. And I think that's the ultimate thing, because when you look back at it from like a math perspective, just bringing everything back to math, the best people who understand math who are smart enough and math, they understand that core basics of of addition, subtraction and multiplication, which isn't that hard on service value.

Harpreet: [00:09:43] Yeah, definitely. And like Nivola, everybody talks about this, this concept of specific knowledge and specific knowledge. Essentially, it goes back to what you're saying that that one thing that really peaked your

Harpreet: [00:09:54] Interest way

Harpreet: [00:09:55] Early on in life and just cultivating skills around that until [00:10:00] you develop such a unique skill set that you've become essentially the type of person that nobody can go to school to become. But I mean, I don't know, man, I feel like a lot of successful people will have that squiggly line like they may have

Harpreet: [00:10:14] Known what it was

Harpreet: [00:10:16] That they really enjoy doing, but they were so focused on that one job role that they didn't think of all the different roles that are associated to that one job role. And as they dig deeper and deeper, they might find these like little branches. And you actually get a podcast just released earlier this week around that, and it was called Topic How to Find Your Passion, and it covered something similar. Do you mind sharing what you covered in that podcast with this?

Justin: [00:10:44] Yeah. So this whole topic of like how to find like find your passion, right? That's what everyone always tells you. Find your passion and you'll never have to work a day in your life. And that is true to a point. You need to find something that you you really love to do. But I think the tough part that they don't explain to you is like your passion is one thing, but finding the job to actually work for your passion is something completely different. Right. And I talk about this in an upcoming episode this Friday, which is around the same sort of thing. But let's say like you love

Harpreet: [00:11:18] Cats, right

Justin: [00:11:19] On broad surface, there doesn't really seem like anything that you can really do to make a lot of money or like, make a sustainable living when you love cats other than being like a veterinarian. So what if you aren't good at science? You're you're like, you're out of luck? Apparently, right? But when you break it down and you understand you really

Harpreet: [00:11:38] Love cats

Justin: [00:11:39] And you really love marketing and you really love business, how can you combine it all? You can combine it by creating a drop shipping company, an e-commerce company that sells cats merch. You can create an online

Harpreet: [00:11:51] Community around cats

Justin: [00:11:53] And then sell them products. You can join a company like Chewy or something like that that sells cat products. There's [00:12:00] all these different sort of things that they don't teach you in school, because if you go to your high school council and you're like, Oh, I love animals, they can be like, Oh, maybe you should become a vet, but that's not the only path out there. And I don't think people

Harpreet: [00:12:10] Realize that when it comes to

Justin: [00:12:11] Passion, like passion is great. You need to have your passion that you want to work towards. But then that second layer again is, what's that job where you can utilize that passion to its full capability? And I don't think most people realize that.

Harpreet: [00:12:24] Yeah, it's very, very interesting. Couple of things I want to I want to touch on there. So have you heard of Cal Newport, who wrote this book called So Good They Can't Ignore You?

Justin: [00:12:34] I feel like I've heard the name and I've heard that title before, but I haven't read it.

Harpreet: [00:12:38] Definitely. Check out some of this YouTube YouTube talks around

Harpreet: [00:12:41] That book

Harpreet: [00:12:42] Title. So good they can't ignore you. But essentially, he makes like three arguments in that book. Don't do what you love, but learn to love what you do and be a craftsman. Just collect rare and valuable skills. And essentially, those are the two biggest arguments that stick out to me. So there's that aspect of passion, but another thing that I think is more interesting. I love to get your perspective on this. All of these different branches that you mentioned, they're possible because of the internet, right? Whereas the people who are teaching school right, they if all they're saying is, Oh, you could do a job as a vet.

Harpreet: [00:13:22] I'm guessing that person

Harpreet: [00:13:23] Didn't grow up in the internet era to be able to come with these really

Harpreet: [00:13:27] Interesting ideas that

Harpreet: [00:13:29] You have. What's your thoughts on that?

Justin: [00:13:31] Yeah. And I think I mean, I think that's the biggest problem, right, when it comes to career education. A lot of these people that are in the space, they have their master's degree. They've been a career advisor their whole life or like for the past 10, 15 years, they haven't had to find a job and because they haven't had to find a job recently other than just like promotions and stuff, they they don't know what's actually out there. And also to the the other caveat to that is when it comes to career services, again, I look at it from a college level, [00:14:00] just take UCF, my alma mater, for instance, like I love UCF, but we have seventy thousand

Harpreet: [00:14:07] Plus students on our campus.

Justin: [00:14:09] We have about seven advisors for faculty members if every student went to those advisors. I think it's only like

Harpreet: [00:14:18] 12 seconds or 12

Justin: [00:14:20] Minutes per student for the entire year. But the crazier the crazier thing is that these advisors, they still have free time. So if you're telling me that someone, if everyone went to this place, they would only get 12 minutes every year, but you're still having free time. That doesn't add up to me. There's a disconnect there, and I think the disconnect is a students think that like, Oh, I'm going to walk into a career services office and they're going to give me an internship because that's sort of like the vibe that they give out. But also be career services doesn't understand how to translate

Harpreet: [00:14:55] Their knowledge to Gen Z.

Justin: [00:14:57] And what I mean by is like they're throwing out webinars. Students can will not even pay attention to a Zoom

Harpreet: [00:15:03] University lecture,

Justin: [00:15:05] Let alone you talking to them about how to use LinkedIn and not even mentioning content creation or anything like that. Like, they don't care about that. You have to find a way to make it interesting, and I don't think career advisors go to school to become teachers. And I think that's a big problem because ultimately they're they, I would argue, are they might be one of the most important teachers that you have a relationship with in college, but they aren't taught to be teachers, at least from my knowledge.

Harpreet: [00:15:32] It's a really, really interesting. Do you think part of that has to do with, like some students might not just go and see a career counselor because I can say I've never once gone to a college career counselor? Do you think that's something that students should be doing? It does it. Does it matter what part of their college journey they're at, whether it's freshman, sophomore, junior senior?

Justin: [00:15:54] Yeah. So, so like just from talking to the people in the research that we've. On most students, if they [00:16:00] go to career services, they have a bad reputation with them. So what that means is they might try it out their freshman year or their sophomore year, and then they go once they're expecting to get an internship because that's what they say, come to our office. We'll get you an internship. They go once they don't get an internship, too, like, why am I going to career services there? They're not living up to the value that they're telling me now. That gives a negative feedback loop because they're never going to come back after their freshman and sophomore year. Secondly, career services is one of the least funded departments. The majority of universities around the U.S., so they don't have the marketing material or the marketing dollars that a college of business does or College of Engineering does. So that plays a role in it as well. And I think the stat that I've seen somewhere is that about 50 percent of students don't even will never even step foot in the career services office. And a lot of times that is also like location. If you look at where a lot of these career services departments are at schools, it's like tucked back in the corner on campus. It's never in the student union, which makes no sense because it should be a core piece of the university. Because if you ask any college student like, why are you here? They're probably going to say, Oh, I want to get a job and I need my college degree to get there. Why is career services not the core piece of the college offering then?

Harpreet: [00:17:20] So talk to us about this. A couple of things I to touch it.

Harpreet: [00:17:23] One is related to

Harpreet: [00:17:26] Picking a major to go and get a job right. You did a really interesting post about this might have even been today or yesterday about the college major program and what's wrong with it. Talk to us about that.

Justin: [00:17:42] Yeah, I mean, I'll just ask you, right? What were your initial major in undergrad? What was that

Harpreet: [00:17:49] Mathematical econ,

Justin: [00:17:50] The mathematical econ, right? And then what was your major post-grad

Harpreet: [00:17:55] Math and statistics?

Justin: [00:17:56] So like, you're kind of you're one of the few, [00:18:00] I would say that is actually stayed within your realm, but you're also going into very specialized industry, I would say as well, right? I would put data scientists in sort of the same realm as like a computer scientist and an engineer where you probably need that degree to get that job right. Computer scientists, engineers, doctors, lawyers, you need that certification to really showcase that you can do that job when it comes to majors. I think the majority of majors out there are very interchangeable. And why I say that is because the only reason that you need a major on your degree is so that when you are applying to these jobs and they say, Oh, you're you have a marketing degree or you have a finance degree or whatever it is, you can say that you have that and they can optimize their ATS system

Harpreet: [00:18:45] To boot you out or

Justin: [00:18:47] Keep you in in their sorting pile. When it comes to skills, a lot of these majors aren't even preparing you correctly for the job that you think that you want to get. For instance, marketing majors, I pick on them all the time just because I'm in the field of marketing. I go and speak to a marketing class, juniors and seniors, and I'm like, Hey, guys, you should start thinking of your LinkedIn page as a landing page rather than a resume. Do you know what a landing page is? Most of the time, no one will raise their hand, and I'm like, How are you going to school for three or four years in a marketing degree? And you don't know what a landing page is. It doesn't make sense to me. And the second part of that, too, is just again picking on the marketing on the marketing industry. We went out to create a career fair earlier this year, and it was a marketing specific, career fair, and we were like, OK, we're partnering up with Amma. It should be easy to get some companies to come to this event, especially marketing agencies. So we started reaching out to

Harpreet: [00:19:49] Them like, Hey, we're hosting this event.

Justin: [00:19:51] There's going to be a bunch of marketing majors there. We're partnering up with AMA. Would you like to come? Almost every agency that we hit up said, we [00:20:00] don't actually recruit marketing majors. We recruit more.

Harpreet: [00:20:03] Or do you

Justin: [00:20:04] Know if they're going to be any English or psychology majors coming to this event? And I was like, No, but I'm interested in like, why are you asking for them? And they said marketing students understand marketing theory and they understand sales. That's basically what you're taught in marketing school. What they fail to teach in marketing school is how to write effectively from a persuasive way, which that's what you're taught in English class. And then you're also you don't necessarily learn the psychology behind the buyer's decision, which you learn in psychology. And when I understood that, that's when things were really like my mind started to open up to this idea of like, do majors actually matter? And I would say for the majority of fields

Harpreet: [00:20:50] They don't like in the post

Justin: [00:20:52] That it was today that I put today, like I have a friend of mine, he is a. Biomedical. Biomedical engineering major and electrical engineer major, all of his internships have been at have been in software engineering and computer engineering at like Twitter and Tesla, and like big names like that. And then my other friend. He graduated from a non Typekit school with just a interdisciplinary studies, so he chose his own degree. Basically, he created it himself, which I didn't even know that you can do, but apparently you can do that.

Harpreet: [00:21:24] He got a job in private equity,

Justin: [00:21:27] Which is one of the hardest jobs to even get, especially as a recent grad. And when I started to hear more and more of these stories, I'm like, It really doesn't matter what major you have. It depends on what are you doing in school and how can you actually showcase that you have those skills? And that's when projects really play a role, and that's why you're seeing all these really successful students. Unlike LinkedIn and stuff, they're starting groups, they're starting online communities, they're starting podcasts and everything like that. That's the showcase that they have the skills to pay the bills that their degree doesn't [00:22:00] necessarily show these companies anymore.

Harpreet: [00:22:02] Absolutely agree with you when it comes to podcast, not podcasts, but when it comes to projects, because I don't even think necessarily that to get into data science, you need to have a math background or a computer science

Harpreet: [00:22:14] Background, yet super

Harpreet: [00:22:16] Helpful. But just because you don't have that particular background does not mean that you cannot learn math or you can't not learn programing. And if you went through a university program

Harpreet: [00:22:28] That maybe

Harpreet: [00:22:29] Wasn't quantitatively rigorous, but now you're starting to see that this Data world resonates with

Harpreet: [00:22:34] You, then the best way to

Harpreet: [00:22:36] Bridge that gap is a project and a project that you said shows that you have the skills to pay the bills and whatnot. That's huge. But dude, I don't even think that like, I'm against this whole college major system. I like to see stuff go back to like the apprentice system

Harpreet: [00:22:55] Where you study what you

Harpreet: [00:22:57] Need to study to do the job that it is that you want to do, but also pick up on other core skills, right? Like I think that psychology writing like these type of skills or things that everybody should have. So I think they're teaching us the wrong mix of, I guess we call like required classes for the first two years, right?

Justin: [00:23:18] Like if you think about it from a writing perspective, right? College writing is incredibly boring. No one wants to sit there and write a five paragraph MLA format piece of paper. No one cares about that. And as a matter of fact is you'll never use MLA or APA format once you graduate. I don't understand why that that's really a thing. But like we brought in, we have this internship program for our podcast and we brought in one of my good friends, Jesse Louis. And what he loves to tell people is he gets paid to tweet. And when you understand, like when you understand the psychology of like. You get paid to tweet like and you tell a nineteen twenty twenty one year old [00:24:00] that you can literally get paid to tweet to write that caption on Instagram to create that copy for that YouTube video whatever it is, their eyes light up because they're like, Oh my God, I interact with that stuff every single day. I didn't realize that there's someone behind that writing that stuff. That's what people care about, and that's what schools don't understand

Harpreet: [00:24:20] Is like, the attention

Justin: [00:24:21] Is moving, but your curriculum is so old that you're not teaching the right things. And that then leads to people thinking that these types of careers aren't out there. Like, we're going to be creating an episode later on of like careers that you've never heard of that are really cool. And I think that's just the super unique thing of when you really going back to like our first topic of understanding, like who you are and everything when you understand who you are, what you're really trying to do and what makes you happy and what you're willing to work towards. I think that's when you start to find and fall into these jobs that you didn't even understand. We're there because most colleges don't even know that, that they're they're even there in the first place.

Harpreet: [00:25:00] That man, that's super, super interesting, and I think we should replace English High School, High School, English, rather with business writing because I've got like two books right here that I refer to on the regular. There's everybody writes and business writing for dummies. These are skills that you need in the new world, being able to say things in as few words as

Harpreet: [00:25:23] Possible for maximum impact.

Harpreet: [00:25:25] We should be learning.

Justin: [00:25:27] I think that's the funniest concept in the world is like your whole life in school, you try to stretch one concept as long as possible, right in high school. It's like, create this five page paper in college, like create this 15

Harpreet: [00:25:39] Page paper in

Justin: [00:25:40] Master's degrees. It's like create this 50 page paper on this one little tiny subject, and then you get into the real world. And like, bro, can you turn that email into like two sentences, please?

Harpreet: [00:25:52] Yeah, man.

Justin: [00:25:53] Like that skill is probably way more important than you figuring out how to write a 50 page APA formatted piece of paper, [00:26:00] but you would never know that until you leave college. And I think, like, that's so interesting to me. Like, I'll create. I had to do a business project in college and then write an APA formatted paper like, when am I ever going to do that in the real world? My manager is not going to want to see a 50 page paper. He wants to see a two paragraph email saying, This is the result. This is how we got there. That's it. But I would never know to do that.

Harpreet: [00:26:25] Yeah, man, that's an excellent point. So I'm curious now we're talking about

Harpreet: [00:26:32] Career counselors,

Harpreet: [00:26:33] Career centers at colleges, and we're talking about majors, and you mentioned that for marketing roles that people who are trying to fill those roles don't even look for marketing students. Right. So what does this mean for people who are in school now? Like, should they define themselves by that that degree program they're in like, Oh, I'm a marketing major. Oh, I'm at this major. Or if there was like a list of classes that you think every student should take to be successful in this new economy. And if you were to recreate your own first two years of just general education, like what would you toss into the mix?

Justin: [00:27:18] Yeah, if I were to remake university and I've stuck by this concept for the past two years, ever since I've started getting asked, this question is I would get rid of the you need to apply to college with like a major in mind because that sort of leads bad connotations. I think it's like a third of every single person that that chooses a major. They regret their major and then, like a fourth of everyone, ends up changing their major while in college. So all that pressure that we put on people

Harpreet: [00:27:47] To like, pick

Justin: [00:27:48] A major, it doesn't really mean anything. And then secondly, all the pressure that we then put on all the people that are undecided

Harpreet: [00:27:55] Also is meaningless

Justin: [00:27:56] As well, right? If your friend is undecided, you're like, Oh, what are you doing? [00:28:00]

Harpreet: [00:28:00] Why do you not have your life set together?

Justin: [00:28:02] You should pick a major like that's really there's no point for that. So what I would propose is instead of choosing a major, I don't think ninety nine percent of 18 year

Harpreet: [00:28:12] Olds know what they want

Justin: [00:28:14] To do for the rest of their life. They haven't really tried anything. What I would do is for the first four semesters, so the first two years that you're in college, you would pick four different subsets that you would then in turn at for each of those semesters. So let's say you want to become say you're really dedicated and you really want to become a doctor. What you would do is like, you could intern as a cardiologist, intern, as a surgeon, intern, as a pharmacist, and then your last intern is maybe at a marketing firm just because you wanted to try something new. You do your three interns at medical places and you realize this really isn't a job that I want to do, but that marketing one was really fun. Let me explore it some more. Then your junior year, you go and choose your major so you don't have to take those gen ads per say, right? So your gen Ed's are now your internship experience, and you only you're only going to school for two years, your junior and senior year. And that's when your core classes really kick in anyway. That's what I think is the goal. Like the ultimate college plan, from my perspective, because you get actual real life experience to make an educated guess on what you actually wanted to do rather than coming from high school, where for the majority of Americans, you're probably only going off of what your parents are telling you. Maybe what you've seen on YouTube, if that and

Harpreet: [00:29:32] That's maybe

Justin: [00:29:34] Like the test that you have to take in high school where it tells you, like, what careers are good for you? And if I had taken that, if I had gone through with what that has told me, I would be a bookbinder like that was literally my number one job was a bookbinder. No one reads regular books

Harpreet: [00:29:50] Anymore, especially

Justin: [00:29:51] When Gen Z starts getting the buying

Harpreet: [00:29:53] Power. So it's like

Justin: [00:29:55] It's I think the system is broken because we don't give students adequate enough time to [00:30:00] test and try things, and that ends up ruining them for the future because they're like, OK, I'm a business major. I need to stay in business because if I don't, then I fail out and then I have to spend more time in school. And then there's so much pressure and add more money. I add more debt and it's just again a negative feedback over and over again if you ever want to transfer majors.

Harpreet: [00:30:20] Absolutely love that. And I think the valuable shift in mindset there is recognizing that it is not time wasted if you do this type of activity, because what you learn during that period of time is not going to just automatically become irrelevant to your life.

Harpreet: [00:30:39] Right? During that one

Harpreet: [00:30:41] Semester, we did this internship, you would have inevitably picked up some skill, picked up something that you can carry with you throughout the rest of your career and having this diverse skill set this diverse talent stack, it really what separates you from whoever else is out there interviewing for whatever job you're in, right? That's extremely, extremely insightful point of view. And dude, I still read regular books like all the time.

Justin: [00:31:10] So you read, but like most people don't. I would say, like, especially my generation and like one of the schools that does this really well

Harpreet: [00:31:18] Is it's in Canada. What's it

Justin: [00:31:20] Called?

Harpreet: [00:31:21] The University of Waterloo, I believe. And I I think that

Justin: [00:31:27] It might just be the College of Engineering, but it might. The university as a whole. But at least for the College of Engineering, you have to complete for co-ops before you graduate. Four. And it was funny because I saw someone, one of my friends who's in who's trying to disrupt higher ed tweeted this this that out. And then someone commented, Oh, that must be why my Tesla internships are always with University of Waterloo people. That's the beauty of creating an environment of testing things is your top students. They will go to [00:32:00] the Teslas of the world, the Googles of the world, the Facebooks, et cetera. But the middle tier and bottom tier students, at least they're going to be forced to do something and buy them by you. Forcing them to do something gets them out of the comfort zone, gets them from just partying and doing all these things that college students do. But there's nothing wrong with that. But you need to get that experience in some way, shape or form. You get it that you make them and force them to do that early, so that by the time that they're seniors, they're not just like, Oh my God, I need to find a job now. They're starting that process early, and I think you set something up like that. That's when the game really changes and you start to see employment rates for college students actually start to rise rather than being where they're at right now, where it's like, I think it's twenty five to 30 percent of all students graduate with a job using their degree, and that was pre-COVID numbers. So I don't even know what it is right now.

Harpreet: [00:32:50] I think every university should go to that model, a co-op model and 100 percent. So I want to ask you a question to ask you a question on the ATS system. Do you think there are some myths out there associated with the ATS applicant tracking system? And if

Harpreet: [00:33:06] There are. Would you mind

Harpreet: [00:33:08] Debunking them for us?

Justin: [00:33:10] So I think the problem when it comes to ATS system and I'm by no means an expert, it's just the things that I've seen on like the internet and stuff like that that I've read an articles and stuff. The the problem comes is every company's ATS system is different and they're all sorting out different keywords. And I would say for anyone out there who's looking for a job, you need to be cognizant of what an ATS system is, just so that you know, how to play the game. And what I mean by that is right. If you're playing any video game in the world, you probably need

Harpreet: [00:33:42] To read

Justin: [00:33:44] That instruction manual at least a little bit to understand a little bit of how that game is played. If you go and you don't know how to play Smash Bros. Against someone who has been playing Smash Rules for the past 10 years,

Harpreet: [00:33:56] You're going to get destroyed every day of the week.

Justin: [00:33:58] That's how you have to think of finding [00:34:00] your job. There are cheat codes to the game of finding a job. One of those is understanding that that nine times out of 10, there's an ATS system on the other side, especially if you're applying to any large company. The second piece is understanding how the system works of making sure that there are specific keywords on your resume. If your key if your if your resume doesn't have those keywords, then it gets sorted to another pile. And then you might be saying just OK, that sounds really bad. Like why do companies do this? And that's when you have to put on your company hat and understand why. I saw a stat that Google gets two million resumes every single year. If you're looking at that from an HR standpoint, there's no way that a recruiter can look through all of those resumes. And that's why they have these systems in place to try to make it a little bit easier for themselves and efficient for themselves. And whether that's right or wrong, that's not really for you. To decide, for you to decide is that's a part of the game. You need to now figure out how to play it so that you can win when it comes to the application process. So when it comes to like myths and things like that, I don't think those are really important. I think the most important thing is understanding that it's there and there are free resources on the internet to help you beat that game, at least help you understand how it works and then kind of go from there. The one thing that I did that I did see, though, is we we recently had a tick tock that went viral about the apps they had, like 1.6 million views or something like that. One of the top comments, if not the top comment, is like just copy and paste the job description on your resume and turn it into all white. Do not do that. Do do not do that.

Harpreet: [00:35:39] If you have any

Justin: [00:35:40] Good recruiter and if you're applying to any reasonable job that recruiters are just going to put it into plain text and they're going to be able to see all those words, even if it's in white on your white background.

Harpreet: [00:35:51] So just don't do that. Whatever you do, that's

Harpreet: [00:35:56] Such that's hilarious, but that's such a bad practice. [00:36:00] So I think a cheat code to this, just to take your terminology from your show to bypass the ATS applicant tracking system is maybe try to use LinkedIn to connect with recruiters or connect

Harpreet: [00:36:12] With potential

Harpreet: [00:36:13] Hiring managers and network with them. But there's obviously a good way to network in a bad way to network, right? So I'd love to pick your brain on some things that we could do to up our

Harpreet: [00:36:28] Linkedin game up our

Harpreet: [00:36:29] Linkedin etiquette. Make us better at networking. So what is

Harpreet: [00:36:35] The proper way to network with

Harpreet: [00:36:37] Somebody on LinkedIn?

Justin: [00:36:38] Yeah. So I'm starting to change this a little bit just because of I'm part of this group that is, we're writing a book together basically, like we're all writing different books. It's like an author circle, essentially, and it's run by this guy named Eric Custer, who is nicknamed the book professor. So he helps students around the world write right their book. He has been able for this session alone. He's gotten Jason Pfeiffer, the

Harpreet: [00:37:05] The editor

Justin: [00:37:07] Or the chief editor at entrepreneur Tiffany Haddish. Later on, he's got Adam Grant and a bunch of other people to come in and speak to us for an hour. And the way that he's been able to do it is he thinks of it, or he took it from one of Adam Grant Ted talks where Eric didn't know any of these people. He called outreach to them. But there's this concept that Adam Grant talks about where there's a certain percent of us that are takers. Those are people that are just going to take from us, no matter what. There's a certain percent of us that are givers. They're going to give you your time of day if they have that time of day, no matter what. And those people, when you reach out to them, they're just going to say yes, no matter what, you don't have to worry about them. The middle part, which is the biggest section,

Harpreet: [00:37:51] Is what are

Justin: [00:37:53] Sort of called the connector. And those are the people that it's sort of like pretty quick quid pro quo where it's [00:38:00] like, you scratch my back, I scratch your back

Harpreet: [00:38:02] Matches, I think he calls it the

Justin: [00:38:04] Matchers. Yeah, matchers. Sorry, you know it better than mine. So matchers and Eric talks about this concept of the witch again in Adam's talk of the five minute What is it? A five minute, five minutes something. But basically, it's you taking five minutes out of your day to leave that person a review on their podcast leave that person to review on their book

Harpreet: [00:38:28] Tweet at them, whatever it may be,

Justin: [00:38:31] So that you show up

Harpreet: [00:38:32] On their feed and you give

Justin: [00:38:34] Them something that's you giving them value. So that then allows you to take a little bit of value from them. And that value that you're taking from them is networking with that recruiter.

Harpreet: [00:38:44] So what I

Justin: [00:38:45] Would do on LinkedIn is you can reach out to them on LinkedIn. And the message that I always like to say is like, Hey, I'm a student at this university, I'm studying this. I saw that you have an opportunity open for x y z. I love to connect and learn more about it. But what I would say to is when you're reaching out to these individuals, recruiters and HR managers, or sometimes the worst people to reach out to because of the massive amounts of messages that they probably get the best person to reach out to is people that are part of the team or the manager. And that might seem scary, but you will get more information from them than you will from the HR person. And the reason for that is that HR person, they're recruiting for 10, 20, one hundred different roles that team manager or that team player only knows his or her's role, and they can give you specific insights into what questions are going to be asked, what to dress, what the company culture is actually like and all these different sort of things. So if you're on LinkedIn, reach out to people, maybe try to find ways to to give them value, whether it's endorsing them on LinkedIn, finding them on different platforms, finding out that they have a personal blog and commenting on it. Then [00:40:00] when you reach out, you can mention that and then that's when you go in for your ask of like, Hey, would you be open for

Harpreet: [00:40:05] A 15 minute informational

Justin: [00:40:07] Interview, a a 30 minute podcast episode, anything like that? That's how you give them value before you take.

Harpreet: [00:40:15] So I just looked that up as a five minute factor. I'll share a link to that in the show notes as well. So to kind of piggyback off what you're saying, so if we do try to network on LinkedIn, don't make the first message, be something weird, like just hi, or don't make the first message, be begging for a job, try to develop a relationship, add some value to them. And if you do choose to reach out to a

Harpreet: [00:40:44] Recruiter, it's more

Harpreet: [00:40:46] Of making them aware that you've applied for the role that they could expect to see your application in the in the system, but then try to reach out to people who might be potential teammates to understand what their day to day is like. So you can see if that role is something that you would want to be doing that. Yeah, that take away, correct?

Justin: [00:41:07] Yeah. And the second part of that is imagine this right? Though the HR person that you're going to talk to, they're just there for the initial screening, right? They're probably just going to ask you the generic questions and like the behavior ones that everyone can find on the internet, the people on the inside, the people that will be giving you your second or your third interview. Those are the ones that you want to meet, because imagine I'm going for a data scientist role, right? And I saw that your company is is hiring for that. I reach out to you, say, Hey, we'd love to jump on a 30 minute podcast, episode four for my show

Harpreet: [00:41:41] And talk about diet data scientists,

Justin: [00:41:43] We start to build a little bit of relationship, talk back and forth. I understand how your company works, yada yada yada. I apply and I say, Hey, hey, Harp, I applied to you to this new data scientist role. Do you have any like? Is there any way that you can help me out or give me a referral? You'll probably say yes [00:42:00] because we've had a great conversation on our own podcast. And then secondly, imagine if you're the hiring manager. When I walk in for that interview, we've already built a relationship. I just have to prove to you that I have the skills to actually do the job. You're probably going to hire me because you already have that relationship with me. That's the golden ticket that people don't realize people is like, Oh, what are the chances of that? You'd be very

Harpreet: [00:42:22] Surprised, especially if you're

Justin: [00:42:24] Very strategic in how you're networking. Don't do a general splash of just like trying to connect with random people, be very specific in terms of the companies that you want to reach out to. And then the specific sort of sectors that you want to work in as well. That's how you you optimize your, your job search and you'll get a lot less rejections that way.

Harpreet: [00:42:46] Absolutely agree, as a hiring manager myself, you could tell when a message is well thought out and they put in some effort and put in the work as opposed to just a shotgun email to just copy paste everyone. So love to get some tips on how to make a good LinkedIn headline. Do you have any tips you can share with us for that?

Justin: [00:43:13] Definitely. So your headline for those who don't know, that's sort of the the body of text that's under your name. What you want to do with this is you're going to want to first figure out what job that you want to optimize for. So once you figure that out, you're going to look at the job description and try to find those keywords again, those words that pop up a lot. And what that might look like for let's say you're going for a marketing role that might be email marketing. That might be something that pops up a few times on on your headline. So what else do you from again? I'll take it from the student perspective a lot, a lot of the times, and this kind of goes for for adults as well. They will typically put like, I'm a student at this university or I'm a barista at Starbucks or anything like that. The [00:44:00] problem with that is if you're looking at it from a recruiter standpoint, when they're looking up something on the LinkedIn search bar, they're not going to be looking up barista at Starbucks. They're not going to be looking up at student at this university. They're going to be looking up skills that you have and that's what you can use your headline for. For instance, let's say you want to get into marketing. Maybe you build out a side project that you just started an email newsletter and you grew your email newsletter by thirty five percent last month where you can change your headline to is aspiring email or aspiring marketer, and then put the Dash the straight line dash and then put increasing companies email marketing open rates by thirty five percent.

Justin: [00:44:47] Now, when that recruiter lands and sees your headline, they know exactly what you're looking for and what you can do, as well as if that that recruiter looks up. Email marketing You have a better chance of showing up from an SEO perspective, and for those who don't know what SEO is, SEO is just search engine optimization. And these are things that you need to understand when it comes to the job search. Because if your profile is SEO, optimize that rank you higher when when these recruiters are looking for specific specific roles and another hack here, as well as when you're putting in your location, put the location of where you want to work, not necessarily where you live now. That can be a little deceiving, but that helps you from a local SEO rank standpoint. So if you're living in Wisconsin but you really want to work in New York, I would suggest that you put New York as your location because that's ultimately where you want to be anyway.

Harpreet: [00:45:45] Yeah, and if anybody asks you questions about it, you can just like, yeah, I plan on moving to New York, I'm going to be there anyway, whether or not I get this job.

Harpreet: [00:45:53] I have plans to be

Harpreet: [00:45:54] New York, so that's why I just

Harpreet: [00:45:55] Changed my location

Harpreet: [00:45:56] In New York. One thing I did with my LinkedIn headline [00:46:00] and this was a few years ago,

Harpreet: [00:46:01] I was changed since then,

Harpreet: [00:46:03] But I use keywords and I tried to make it a bit spicy. I guess so to speak. So I had in there. I had

Harpreet: [00:46:12] So three Big Tech

Harpreet: [00:46:13] Stacks like Python, SQL, Tableau, right in data science. So I

Harpreet: [00:46:17] Had Python, Padawan,

Harpreet: [00:46:19] Sql Sorcerer, Tableau tactician, right? It's a little bit of that alliteration and a little bit hinting towards my level of mastery with that particular tool. So the more interesting and insightful you can get it, the better, right?

Justin: [00:46:35] Yeah, I think if you can add your personality to it, definitely do. The only thing too is like, you just have to make sure that you're watching out from the CEO perspective, making sure that you have those initial keywords in there are great. The other thing that you you want to pay attention to, too, is where you can use your headline strategically. To do is when someone is scrolling down their LinkedIn newsfeed. The things that they see from a profile perspective is your

Harpreet: [00:47:00] Name, your profile picture

Justin: [00:47:02] And your headline. If you use your headline strategically and you're commenting on posts,

Harpreet: [00:47:09] They can see the

Justin: [00:47:10] Headline and it brings their attention to it and they might click on your profile. So something that I've seen someone do with with her headline was, she said, I believe if you're reading this, then I'm marketed it right. And she wanted to get into marketing. So like, it's like, Oh, interesting, like, I read it. So maybe she wants to mark it. Like, What is she trying to market to me? And that might make me click on her profile more. And that increases your profile views. So that's that's another way that you can look at your headline as

Harpreet: [00:47:38] Well if you're if you're looking

Justin: [00:47:40] To create content or engage with content on LinkedIn.

Harpreet: [00:47:43] So it's almost like you want to set up your headline as a way to entice somebody to click on your picture to drill down a little bit deeper and go

Harpreet: [00:47:53] Into your profile. And once they are in

Harpreet: [00:47:56] The profile, once you've done a good job hooking them in with [00:48:00] that headline, they're going to come to your profile. They're going to read your about me section. What cheat code can you share with us with respect to the About Me section?

Justin: [00:48:10] Yeah. So with the about me again, you're going to want to try to put as many keywords in there as possible. I would I wouldn't suggest using the keyword bank that some people have. I would just try to find different ways that you can incorporate keywords into your own story, saying that the main part of

Harpreet: [00:48:27] Your profile

Justin: [00:48:29] Or of your about me section should be your story. And the reason I say that is if that recruiter or whoever lands on your page continues to scroll down to your experience section, that's where you put all your resume stuff, all your accomplishments and everything like that. You're about me should be where the recruiter or again, whoever falls on your page, where they fall in love with you, because at the end of the day, I'm sure you can speak to this as well. When you're working a job 90, there's a bunch of people that could do that job the same way that you do it. What separates you is your story. Are you likable or are you someone that I can see myself working with? And that's where your You're About Me section can really play a role. How can you brag? But in a way that doesn't seem braggy and gets people to fall in love with you? So what I say, what I what I like to tell people with that is if you're like an immigrant or first-generation student, find ways to incorporate that into your profile because you never know. That recruiter might be someone that is a first generation or immigrant student as well, and they can connect with you on that piece.

Harpreet: [00:49:33] So try to find different like, really

Justin: [00:49:35] Niche things to put into there

Harpreet: [00:49:37] Because you never know how someone can connect with you.

Harpreet: [00:49:40] And this is an excellent place for you to showcase your communication skills, right? Because About Me is a bit more of a long form, and it's going to be an opportunity for you to, first of all, showcase your ability to clearly communicate, as well as use proper esthetics for [00:50:00] business writing so whitespace

Harpreet: [00:50:01] And breaking up your paragraphs

Harpreet: [00:50:03] And stuff like that, right? I would even say use some inventive or innovative word choice. Write like, don't put. I'm passionate about helping e-commerce companies understand churn rate for better customer retention.

Harpreet: [00:50:18] I don't fucking know anybody that's

Harpreet: [00:50:20] Passionate about doing that right. You might be passionate about helping your stakeholders make better decisions with Data. Like, OK, that sounds like more of something you'd be passionate about, right?

Justin: [00:50:32] Yeah, exactly. I mean, this is where copywriting kind of plays a role, right? You want to be able to tell a story and a unique way, but also at the same time showcase that you know the lingo you know and understand how things. Work in that specific industry. So it's like it's tough because especially for those who aren't marketers who aren't writers, it can be really hard to figure out what to put in there. But that's why you need to understand how to write. And that comes with just researching online on on YouTube and Google and everything like that. But a good place for you to understand good copywriting is if you go to marketing examples. It's run by this really young kid, but he is an absolute genius when it comes to being able to curate great content and great stories in

Harpreet: [00:51:16] The marketing world.

Justin: [00:51:17] So check that out if you're if you want to learn a little bit more about copywriting.

Harpreet: [00:51:21] Definitely, because that's one skill that I want to pick up, right? Like, even though I am a data scientist like, I try to diversify my skill set as much as possible because when it comes to success and data science, you should learn to build and you should learn to sell. The ultimate is when one person can do both. That's when you get those true superpowers, and communication means selling or selling means communication. So I've heard you mentioned copywriting a couple of times. I've actually just recently in the last year or two have came across that job. Do you mind quickly just describing what it is that a copywriter does?

Justin: [00:51:57] Yeah, copywriters are just writers. That's [00:52:00] that's it. It's funny because you grow up right and everyone always loves to rag on the English major. They're like, Oh, you can't make any money if you're an English major. But if you're an English major and you position it correctly, you can get a job as a copywriter. And if you're a really good copywriter, you can make a ton of money. Whether it's writing articles for people, writing blog posts for people, writing tweets, all these different sorts of things. Anyone who writes something online in a marketing sense, those are copywriters in and of itself.

Harpreet: [00:52:29] Justin, last question before we jump into a quick random round here, first of all, thank you so much

Harpreet: [00:52:34] For sharing such wonderful insights. I found

Harpreet: [00:52:37] It really, really interesting,

Harpreet: [00:52:39] Insightful and I think

Harpreet: [00:52:40] You've got some great perspectives wise beyond your years, my friend. So here's the question before you jump into the random round, it's one hundred years in the future. What do you want to be remembered for?

Justin: [00:52:53] I want to be remembered for the person,

Harpreet: [00:52:57] For the person

Justin: [00:52:58] That started to make career education cool, and what I mean by that is if you look at five, 10 years

Harpreet: [00:53:04] Ago, personal

Justin: [00:53:05] Finances was something that no one talked about, but nowadays you have personal finance influencers. So I want to take the the conversation around career education and change that into the same way that the conversation around personal finances are right now. So if I can become that person, that's that's what I would love my my 100 year legacy. So to say to be

Harpreet: [00:53:27] Man, I definitely definitely see that happening. You're putting out some great content and some great advice through your LinkedIn post as well as your podcast.

Harpreet: [00:53:34] I highly recommend everybody

Harpreet: [00:53:36] Checking out the College Declassified Podcast. I gained so much value from it, and you know, here I am in my late thirties and I still learn something. I absolutely enjoyed it. So jumping into the random round here, what are you

Harpreet: [00:53:51] Currently most

Harpreet: [00:53:52] Excited about or what are you currently exploring?

Justin: [00:53:56] E-commerce. So like just from the influencer standpoint, right from [00:54:00] merch and all that, but also a friend of mine is in the e-commerce space and where actually a call later tonight where we're talking about like how we can start to set up our own company and everything like that from an e-commerce perspective. So that's something that we're working on and we'll see what happens. Hopefully it's enough to to fund this little dog back back here. So we'll see.

Harpreet: [00:54:20] Yeah, e-commerce is going to blow up incredibly in the future, just given our global situation and I see some interesting things happening for e-commerce in local economies. So, yeah, what are you most inspired by right now?

Justin: [00:54:41] Most inspired by it. That's I've never had that question before. I would say. Right now, I'm most inspired by when students reach back out to me and they say, like, Oh, thank you so much for producing this episode. It's like helping me out my last interview and help me get my internship. Or when someone takes a listen to my to the podcast and I'm like, Oh my God. Like, I never listen to podcast, but I've listened to three of yours and I can't wait to listen to more. That's what inspires me to keep going because I know that I'm on the right track. I just need to figure out how can I get this into more people's ears? So that's that's what inspires me the most to just keep on grinding.

Harpreet: [00:55:21] Well, I'm hoping that the thousand or so people listen out there puts your content into their ears because I know they're going to gain a tremendous amount of value from it. What do you believe that other people think is crazy?

Justin: [00:55:36] I believe that you genuinely can do anything that you put your mind to. And I know that's like what we're told as kids, but I don't think many people actually believe it when it comes to like what they say.

Harpreet: [00:55:45] What I mean by that is, I believe you can

Justin: [00:55:47] Be anything that you want in your life. But the caveat to that is you're going to probably have to work really, really hard if you want that thing to do. And that's the part that a lot of people leave out when they're telling kids, like, Oh, you can be whatever you [00:56:00] want to be in life and you're like, you grow up and like, Oh, wait, this is really hard to get there. And I think that's that's the part that we fail to to tell kids when they're growing up.

Harpreet: [00:56:09] Are you familiar with Carol Dweck and her work growth mindset versus fixed mindset? Mm hmm. Definitely. Look into that. I think you'd really enjoy it. This concept of these two, the, you know, the antagonist of the fixed mindset and the protagonist, the growth mindset. Definitely check that out. So if you could have a billboard put up anywhere, what would you put on it?

Justin: [00:56:34] Only because I've seen it work on TikTok. I would create a billboard focused towards David Dobrik on creating a scholarship for DACA students

Harpreet: [00:56:48] Because he's a DACA student.

Justin: [00:56:50] But also I saw a viral TikTok of this guy. He's trying to trade sand, a bag of sand all the way to a Tesla. And David Dobrik is known for giving away Teslas. So David Dobrik saw the sign and he hit him up on TikTok,

Harpreet: [00:57:05] And he didn't

Justin: [00:57:07] Give him the Tesla because he want. The guy wants to get the Tesla directly from Elon Musk, but he gave him a la tour bus. So I know that

Harpreet: [00:57:17] It works,

Justin: [00:57:18] But that's probably what I would put on. Like, we can create a cool scholarship. That'd be awesome.

Harpreet: [00:57:23] I like that. Are you currently reading anything right now? So what?

Harpreet: [00:57:26] What do you got?

Justin: [00:57:27] I'm currently rereading the one hundred dollars start up right now, so I don't read a lot, but I listen to audiobooks, and that's one of the most interesting books that I've seen. Just because it's like, How can you build something that's not an Uber? That's not an Airbnb. Like, not everything has to be those. And I think we really discount the companies that aren't those. There's different ways to generate a solid amount of income, like some of the people in the book, are making seven figures off of like starting off with one hundred dollars. So it's like pretty insane.

Harpreet: [00:57:55] You might enjoy zero to one by Peter Thiel.

Justin: [00:57:58] Yeah, that's on my list. Yeah, it's on my [00:58:00] list.

Harpreet: [00:58:00] What song do you currently have on repeat?

Justin: [00:58:03] What song? I recently recently heard from this dude. His name is like three l a u. He's like a DJ. And I was listening to a stuff on Spotify earlier today. I just came across his music and it's pretty dope.

Harpreet: [00:58:17] So I would I would say, I

Justin: [00:58:19] Don't know the name of the song, but just him in general. I've been listening to a lot of his stuff today.

Harpreet: [00:58:24] Check that out. We're going to open up the random question generator for the next few questions, and I'll even answer some of these along with you. The first question

Harpreet: [00:58:32] Is which

Harpreet: [00:58:33] Fictional place would you most like to go to?

Justin: [00:58:37] Which fictional place? I don't know why it just pops into my head, but like Narnia, I think would be really dope.

Harpreet: [00:58:45] That shoe is on my mind, too. I was about to say Narnia.

Harpreet: [00:58:48] All right. I don't know

Justin: [00:58:49] Why, but it popped up in my head.

Harpreet: [00:58:51] But it would have to be Narnia in the summer right now with that eternal winter bullshit.

Harpreet: [00:58:57] I don't know.

Justin: [00:58:57] I missed the winter, so I'm originally from Connecticut and I live in Florida now. So like any chance that I love that I can go back during fall, spring or winter, I always take a chance just because it's a breath of fresh air as long as I don't have to live there.

Harpreet: [00:59:09] Yeah, yeah, dude. Like, I'm born and raised in Sacramento, California, and I lived there until I was way into my twenties. But I've been in Canada for, like the last six years. I love the frickin winter, I love the winter, I love the cold, I love the fog, but I don't put up with that with eternity. What is your theme song?

Justin: [00:59:31] My theme song, the first song that came to my head, was Do Not Disturb by Drake. I think that's the name of the song.

Harpreet: [00:59:37] Nice that they're in at the moment. It would be akin to the dawn taking souls. So care the don.

Harpreet: [00:59:45] He's he he's friggin awesome.

Harpreet: [00:59:46] And he made an entire album with Gary V. I think I'll only you that really what's called the Gary V show. But what he does is he takes people's speeches and he cuts it up, puts it to a beat and takes the spoken word, [01:00:00] whether it's from a podcast interview or a keynote speech or whatever, and puts it over a beat and just makes it the most amazing thing ever. So he did that with David Goggins.

Harpreet: [01:00:09] And so, oh wow.

Justin: [01:00:10] That's awesome.

Harpreet: [01:00:11] Yeah. So taking solos as scared of John David Goggins, do you got any nicknames?

Justin: [01:00:17] A funny one that I go by is my my friends call me that. Sometimes it's a Kwang, and the origin story behind that is my friends in high school. They hacked my my Xbox profile somehow, and then they just looked up like

Harpreet: [01:00:32] Top ten Chinese

Justin: [01:00:33] Names, even though I'm not Chinese, which is like a

Harpreet: [01:00:35] Joke.

Justin: [01:00:36] And Kwang was one of them, so they changed my name to Hwang, and I was just too

Harpreet: [01:00:39] Lazy to change it back. So like my

Justin: [01:00:41] Senior year now, my junior year of high school, I was called Kwang and then like my senior year of high school, I was like, I changed it like my Twitter name. Everything was like, I'm not quitting.

Harpreet: [01:00:50] So like, they still call me

Justin: [01:00:51] That to this day, though.

Harpreet: [01:00:52] That's hilarious, man. I guess my nickname is Harp or Fox, depending on who's calling me.

Harpreet: [01:00:59] All right.

Harpreet: [01:00:59] So this is one I haven't come across yet. Who is one of your best friends and what do you love about them

Justin: [01:01:07] Other than my girlfriend? I would say chateaus and Michelle. I would say MC Fang is probably my my best friend out there. And I think what I love about him most is just, he's just someone

Harpreet: [01:01:20] That even though we don't

Justin: [01:01:22] Talk like that often every time I go back up and see him in Connecticut or like, we just hop on Xbox and play with each other or something like that, like, it's just instant connection. Like it's hard to hard to put it into

Harpreet: [01:01:35] Words where it's just

Justin: [01:01:36] Literally like we could not talk for for six months a year or however long. But the instant that we're together, it's like we like nothing ever changed. Like that was the kid that we grew up together. We played soccer together, we dribbled a soccer ball and our neighborhood together and everything like that. And that connection has never left. Ever since then, that's awesome.

Harpreet: [01:01:56] That's a beautiful thing. I mean, I've got like something similar with with [01:02:00] three of my friends that, you know, had since way back in the days. So I'm going to cover my bases here and say, barring my wife, barring my five month old son, who's also my best friend, I'd say that I got this tight

Harpreet: [01:02:15] Knit group, the woof chat.

Harpreet: [01:02:16] So that's DJ, LoopPay and Raj,

Harpreet: [01:02:18] And we text

Harpreet: [01:02:20] Almost daily in this little

Harpreet: [01:02:21] Group chat. I love them

Harpreet: [01:02:22] Because

Harpreet: [01:02:24] They've been through everything. We've been through everything together.

Harpreet: [01:02:26] So this history, they're matched a lot of history and somebody who people, a group of people who know me from like back then who see me take all these different twists and turns in life and are able to to truly understand the story. Definitely 100 percent. So how could people connect with you? Where could they find you online?

Justin: [01:02:49] Yeah. So if you if you want to check me out, definitely check out the Declassified College podcast that's on every single podcasting platform. And then from there, the best place to see my content is on LinkedIn. So just LinkedIn forward slash and forward slash. Justin jcg you so either or just hit me up and just let me know that that this podcast send you, Justin.

Harpreet: [01:03:10] Thank you so much for taking time out of your schedule to come on to the show today. I really appreciate you sharing such wonderful codes with us today, man. Thank you.

Justin: [01:03:19] Oh, thank you. I appreciate it.