Hussein Hallak | How To Create A Legacy

Hussein Hallak

Hussein Hallak: The publishing for profit podcast is brought to you by ghost writers and co   , earn more money by publishing better content and learn how do we increase your thought leadership so you can build your brand head over to ghost writers and code.com for more information. That’s ghostwritersandco.com and now your host, Joel Mark Harris.

Joel Harris: Hello and welcome to the publishing for profit podcast. This is Joel, Mark Harris, your host. Today we talked to who is saying how lack a serial entrepreneur who grew up in Syria, moved to Dubai, where he started several companies. he ran an ad agency that had several multimillion dollar clients. He moved to Vancouver, which is where I met him, and now he primarily.

Works with startups to help improve their performance. we have a great conversation. It’s always fun to talk to his sane about a lot of things, including growing up in Syria. Some have some of his excesses, a little bit of his failures, what he’s learned along the way. So hopefully you enjoyed. Hello and welcome to the publishing for profit podcast.

Today, I have a very exciting guest who say in hillock, who is a serial entrepreneur speaker, and I’m an author now. so welcome to the podcast to SIM.

Hussein Hallak: Thank you for having me. Yeah.

Joel Harris: Cool. so I want to start, so Hussain is from Syria, and it’s a place that we just know by the news reports, but can you tell us a little bit about what it was like growing up in Syria and what your childhood, in particular was like,

Hussein Hallak: I would say. I can’t compare it to any other child that I can say it’s a normal childhood or non normal childhood because it’s, it’s different. That’s what I can say is, I, I think there are three phases in my childhood. One that is the happy, nice childhood where everything was nice. Syria is a, Generally a very liberal place. and, compared to the rest of that part of the world, especially in the 70s, when I went to, when I was growing up, very seventies, early eighties. so I grew up, we had, my parents. we’re employees of, like different things. My mom was a teacher and my dad was an employee of the government, and, everyone works for the government in Syria, in one formal way because it’s, almost it owns everything in the country.

So, Yeah, we, they w which was good money. we, they had parties all the time. we have good fun. What else can I say? and then came the other part of my, I wouldn’t say, well, it’s early child, late childhood, kind of early teens, where we, we had sanctions in Syria and, we used to stand in line to kind of get rice, sugar and tea, and, There was no, like the necessities of, everyday, kind of, you know, life. It’s, it’s scarce. So, and then I would say, can’t, you can consider it a childhood. That’s, I mean, that’s the childhood. It was been between being, at a time where everything’s available. It’s a lot of fun. Growing up, my dad’s, my dad and mom having a lot of parties, kind of everybody joyful and having good time in a sense.

And then came the other part where, I didn’t know what was sanctions. I didn’t know what the hell was going on. I just knew that. We had the scarcity of money and a standing in line and, kind of fighting for food. If he said, we, we, I used to, I remember the vividly the lines of kind of standing in line to get bread even, and they being pushed around and pushing around just to get, our, our daily bread needs kind of thing. So yeah, I love that. That’s, that’s a little bit about that kind of, that part of childhood. I used to love a kind of play. I love toys, love Lego. my uncle lived abroad, so he would send me those toys. I don’t think we could buy them from Syria at the time, getting, don’t remember buying a lot of toys.

We were, we’re not that rich, so yeah. How does that give you an idea?

Joel Harris: Yeah.

Hussein Hallak: Yeah. Well, I didn’t expect the question though. It

Joel Harris: seems like a, a typical childhood, right? And just growing up and, you know, playing with toys and wanting the new thing, right. So, Yeah. It’s interesting. have you always been interested in entrepreneurship cause you’re, you’ve heavily involved into, in the startup community especially, I know that you, you speak a lot of about entrepreneurship.

Your new book that we’ll talk about later is about entrepreneurship. is it always been a passionate

Hussein Hallak: subject for you? No, I was, well growing up, my biggest passion was towards medicine and science. I was fascinated with science. I was fascinated with medicine. Everything that I read about was about these kinds of things.

I think even my interest in, like the medical field was also about the science, I would say about the medical field. So, I would say. entrepreneurship. I didn’t know what the word meant until, until I think I was, it was 2003 or something. So, that would have been, I would say my thirties, cause the word doesn’t exist in, in our vocabulary in the sense that we have a word that the Trump presents what entrepreneurship is, but it’s not part of our lexicon and the Arabic language.

Your, Most of the people, especially in Syria where I grew up, we are a community of, I would say farmers and land owners. So our, my, my grandfather was a border Waze, if you wish, like he was a land owner. and, in his mind, he’s a farmer, but he was a land owner. He owns a lot of land. And, so we had the, we have a farming community and then you work for the government.

You are an employee of the government. You, let’s say, work for school or work for, for, let’s say any of these solutions of the government, like the ministries. And, very few people were, business owners. So you have small business owners who own shops and kind of, you know, sell some clothes and stuff like that.

So. Very small. And you have the large business owners who mostly worked in trade Syria as part of the silk road. And I grew up in Damascus, born and raised Damascus. So it’s, it’s a lot of that trade. So trading probably is the closest to what entrepreneurship was. And it was more like owning a business and being a trader.

So it doesn’t, it’s not in our psyche that you go out to say, I want to. Take an idea and execute it. Mostly what you, what ends up happening is people go into trading, like they start trading stuff and that’s their path for entrepreneurship. But it’s not entrepreneurship as it’s known in the West where somebody has an idea and goes and builds a widget.

For example, these are called inventors in, in our, in our, in our lexicon. So I didn’t have, I had no idea what that is. It’s kind, kinda like fish in the sea. You don’t recognize what. What is around you. You don’t recognize what’s missing or what’s there as what it is. Until I was, until it was I think 2003 and I was reading when I moved to Dubai in 2003 and the distinction there is that I had access, big, wider access to the internet, faster access.

I remember vividly installing the two mega bits. A connection into my office. And in Syria we had a modem, a 57 K a modem, and you didn’t even didn’t even operate at that speed. So it took me, let’s say, six hours to get a website that is three megabytes size. So you didn’t have access to that kind of information.

So when I, when I, in Dubai, I read voraciously online, because of what I found is like. Oh, so this is what it’s called, what I’m doing. So me starting at agencies, me kind of coming up with an idea and following the I, the reason I moved to Dubai as a company kind of co hired, my, my, one of my startups at the time, which was a online gaming style startup, we used to.

Build websites as a game. And the first client that we got was the Disney of the middle East of Huish, and they acquired our company and gave me a position in Dubai, and that’s how I ended up in Dubai. So I learned about this. I was like, Oh, this is called entrepreneurship. So this is what I have. So that was kind of a weird thing because obviously compared probably compared to your child and you’d know, you would know what an entrepreneur is, you have.

People you look up to. I didn’t know what an entrepreneur is, just like, Hey, this is a, this is who I am. And so I guess I am an entrepreneur then. So that’s how, that’s how my relationship kind of with entrepreneurship, I always wanted to do stuff and I pursue them and do them. Basically. That’s how I built my companies.

And, then I got to found that I have to find out that this is called entrepreneurship. And then I started reading. Cause, I grew up studying, engineering and, there was no, there’s not nothing you can take to kind of, we don’t have business administration. We don’t have, we have the, what is it?

It’s called the university of trading. Just to tell you how trading is actually a big deal. We don’t have university, we don’t have a business administration. In our university. The Damascus university is one of the most prestigious universities in that part of the world, and we didn’t have something called business.

So there is no, what would you do if you get, if you graduate from there and there’s no such thing, there’s trading because trading is such a big part of how we do. and that’s basically where you study things that have to do with business, like accounting, like business administration and stuff like that.

So, that’s, that’s kind of a weird way of how, how, how our relationship with entrepreneurship and that’s why you don’t see a lot of entrepreneurship. Coming out of there. and in the same, let’s say, scale as you see, for example, in Vancouver, Canada, because it’s not part of the psyche, it’s not part of what you do.

You don’t go up and say, Oh, I can be an entrepreneur. I can be just, I can, it can be a doctor, a lawyer, a trader, and accountants, stuff like that. And

Joel Harris: then, so was it a big shock, moving to Dubai? I had imagined that the, Entrepreneur community. The startup community is quite robust there, you know, with everything that’s going on.

So was it a big change for you coming from Syria.

Hussein Hallak: not as entrepreneurship. I think that grew up, that grew later on when, after the.com, and obviously when I moved there, there, there is a community that was growing, but not as much. Dubai is known as the kind of the headquarter. It’s not set up to, at the time in the two thousands, it’s not set up to, And nurture entrepreneurship in the, in the two tens and on, like in 2010 and beyond. They started kind of paying attention to that and nurturing it even more. there are initiatives, but it was way behind, let’s say what the Western world is, but the biggest chalk there is. Number one, being paid a shit ton of money compared to what I, what I was being paid in Syria, which was not good for somebody who didn’t handle money.

R and a and, grew up in a place where money was not the, I mean, we always wanted money, but it’s not for the sake of money. It’s place you grew up in saying, what do you want to do for the world and what kind of impact do you want to have? And since money was. I, I grew up around a family that had fights around money all the time.

My grandfather was very rich and everybody wanted a piece of Atlanta. So my father left all of that to say, I don’t want any piece of that. It’s kind of like, how do you say, dynasty, you know, kind of a series kind of approach. So he didn’t want that. So that’s what I grew up around. I said, okay, I want to do stuff, not for the money.

And then when I moved there, I got paid. Not a lot of money, but compared to what? As in Syria itself, shits on the money. And, and I don’t. I’m not a consumerism kind of things like the things that I bring joy to, to me is going to attend the movie. So that’s what I did. There’s a ton of movies there, so I spent all my time.

Sometimes I would attend two or three movies in one night. I didn’t have a lot of friends. so yeah, that’s, that’s the thing. The thing that shocked me more is also, I, I, I grew up around, I didn’t have banking’s area, so I’d never, no, never had a bank account. Never had a credit card. so imagine in your thirties being introduced to that.

And a lot of money and being at the kind of the last Vegas of, of the Arab world. So, I made a shit ton of mistakes, if you wish. It’s a lot, a lot of wasted, a ton of money, made a lot of mistakes. So it was, it was a grand experiment, I would say. So it was a lot of fun. Yeah.

Joel Harris: And so is there any lesson that you learned from.

basically being very conservative with money and then having almost too much and then, and being overwhelmed by the entire experience.

Hussein Hallak: Yeah. Well, it led to what I’m probably, my biggest failures is launching, Cause money was not the primary thing and I didn’t have the proper business education, which led to my interest in studying entrepreneurship and kind of mentoring others is.

In 2006 I launched the, the. Leading, number one, basically a marketplace for Arabic art in the world. And, but I did it all wrong. So, the way I did it is I first went and, and kind of built up the marketplace, got the artists. put them on a, I spent a ton of money building the Mark. Remember that’s 2006, 2005, 2006, WordPress was just coming out in the sense that making it available for people to build websites.

Unlike now, now you can build a website for, what is it like $100. You can have the grandest website with all the bells and whistles. At the time. It took me just to give you an idea. Let’s say actually $100 is a bit expensive, $30 it can get to WordPress for free. Even web hosting for free for six months and stuff like that, and a $30 for four theme.

Let’s say it costs me $30,000. Wow. Just get started. Okay. So that’s to give you kind of the, the kind of the scale between what we have right now and at that time. So, at the time we didn’t have, we have, which are called portals and there’s a lot of ton of access and work on it. so it spent a lot of money to get it up and running and put it out there.

And one of the biggest challenges is obviously you build something that doesn’t mean it has a market. So, because I wasn’t worried about how we make money. I was worried about. I want to get my idea out there. and that’s always, always the wrong thing to do. I put my idea out there and, and surprise, surprise collectors didn’t want to buy art off the internet.

it was a new thing even though, I mean, there are websites, but not necessarily to buy art and not necessarily to buy art that is as, as exotic as Arabic art because in all of the Arab world. We’re 300 million people at the time. And, we, I could find, let’s say a thousand, 200 artists. That’s a massive amount of artists that’s to, to, to put them there.

But that’s, that’s 1,200 artists that people couldn’t have access to. So. You have one day you don’t have access to these artists. And the other day you have access to those artists. Usually you would go to exotic, you know, galleries and the galleries are the gateway to do that. And there’s this whole experience of, you found this artist and you’ve paid for, for access, and you paid for their painting and you collected it.

Now you’re just buying it offline online if you, if you wish, or you have access to them collectors, we’re not, we’re not excited about this. They wanted the experience of going to Christie’s and bidding over a painting and paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for a painting. They could get, let’s say four 30 or or whatever.

So they wanted that experience. That’s the whole thing. They didn’t want to save money. They didn’t want that kind of access. They wanted the district to have access. So I didn’t have any idea about that all. I had an idea of. I wanted to have art Arabic Carthy available for the whole world. So my approach to this was not, A business approach was, I believe in this. I believe Arvik art is an important expression of the Arbor quarreled and I know all these artists and I want to help them. So I built this, so I ended up losing a million dollars in the process. that’s to answer your question about. My introduction to have a lot of money and having a lot of access and, without the frameworks, without the training, money, access, the right environment doesn’t help you really need, I mean, they help a little bit, but if you have the training and the proper frameworks and the understanding of how, how we should go about it as far better and far more important.

So is that

Joel Harris: where your passion for helping startups come from?

Hussein Hallak: To a large extent. Yes. I think in one way I’m trying to, to prevent this from happening to other entrepreneurs. I think of myself and what kind of, what I could have done if I didn’t go through this because I know myself. I’m resilient.

I was lucky to have, the family that I have. I was lucky to have the friends that I have and the people around me that helped me through this. A lot of people don’t have that. and don’t have access to that. So something like this and something even smaller, like even if you lose $20,000, 10,000, that may wreck somebody’s life for awhile.

And I’m, I grew up in a certain environment where it’s, I’m very resilient in the sense that, I bounce back really quickly. So in three years I was, up and running and building startups again. I mean. Actually, in six months, I was already building another company and kind of recovered and paid, paid back a lot of the deaths that I have and and kind of recovered completely and recovered my trust in the market.

Not a lot of people can do that. So, and not a lot of people have the access and not because I’m special. It’s just sometimes you’re lucky in how you’re positioned and the market situation and the people I’m surrounded with. So, So I wanted to save people from, from going through this. And also, I believe that a lot of people have great ideas that they want to, if they get it out there and they put it in practice, they can build a great company, hire great people, serve the community.

So. And I’m great at teaching. So what’s better than someone who’s studies all the time? Because I love reading and greater teaching and have been through the experience then to teach other entrepreneurs. So, and I ha I have the belief that if you can, you must. So, that is, that is, I think where it comes from and, where I’m, I’m super excited and always, you know, thrilled about having the opportunity to help entrepreneurs.

So that’s where it comes from. The other thing that it comes from is I’ve seen a ton of people that, that have ideas that never material. My, my dad, for example, was a writer. He wrote poetry. He wrote, he wrote, you know, scripts for movies. And he never pursued his passion for several reasons.

Number one, he was prevented from writing Syria. Because we are a free country, you know? Exactly. so, he was prevented from writing because he was, he wrote something in his private to memoirs, about on private journals, about the president, kind of a joke. So his, one of his friends. That’s something that happens in Syria a lot, unfortunately, is one of his friends go, went and told the, the secret service or the , we call them the Syria about him.

So he was dragged about to thrown in jail, to be thrown in jail for 16 years. We don’t see him. He was saved from that by connections that my uncle had. But the, the gift was, you’re never going to write any, like in your life. You’re, you’re, you can’t publish here. Something like that. So he felt he couldn’t pursue his, his dream and his passion.

And I saw how that broke a person. Cause, I saw him, he’s always someone who’s very talented, very creative, but he was never able to share that creativity. I read his poetry. I got to read some of his work when I go into his stuff and inspired me. But I saw how much that could, that, that’s part of the people.

So that’s one of the things that also, I saw what it does to a person’s spirit when they’re not unable to pursue their ideas, to pursue their dreams, to kind of go ahead and experiment with something, whether they fail or not, doesn’t matter, but just go after that. yeah. So that’s, that’s the other thing, and I hate.

Having a job. I hate it with a passion. I hate other people to have any job. Now there’s a job and there’s a job in the sense that I do believe that we need to move to a place where jobs are, are different quality of jobs where people are able to pursue their creativity within their job and to give more of themselves and to experience themselves.

To be. Maximum of, ability. So in order to do that, if you need to be trained to be an intrepreneur, basically someone who inside is a mover and shaker. so at least you have those skills. So if you want to, you can. So that’s, these are some of the motivators of why I pursue this.

Joel Harris: I think those skills are super important, especially now with the covert 19, you know, people are forced to be creative.

They’re forced to look outside the box and see, okay, how can I make money in other ways that, I haven’t traditionally done. So. but I want to go back so. So your father was a writer, how did that inspire you to write and did you get your passion? Cause you’re obviously very creative and you know, great writer.

I’ve read lots of your stuff.

Hussein Hallak: my chest a little bit. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So

Joel Harris: is that where you get your writing chops from?

Hussein Hallak: It definitely helped knowing that my dad is a writer. But I think one of the biggest things that, that inspired me when I was studying is I was, I was probably a creative PR. I believe everybody’s creative, but to a certain extent, I, I, I had an affinity for creative things.

And I look where the spotlight is. So, so, growing up, I w I L I crave the spotlight. I crave to be in spotlights or whatever it is. I sang, I’d be on stage, I’ll, I’m always, I’m always volunteering to anything. So I’m, my wife always tells me, you’re like, you raise your hand before you hear the end of the question.

Who will do I know I handle on go up? So, So I had that. And I think one of the biggest thing that you can, the people that are in the spotlight in Syria, in our part of the world, which I think is a, is a very distinct difference than, than let’s say, the Western world. So if you look at, in particular North America, who are the people in the spotlight?

The people in the spotlight are athletes and actors, celebrities. You know, what is it? Reality show host or stuff like that, you know, TV hosts, these are the least respected people in our community. So that is, I think, a distinct difference. The highest respected people in our community, our writers.

Authors who, people who write books, philosophers, thinkers like Noam Chomsky, for example, that would be like, he will be idolized in the world. And I don’t mean by the media, I mean by everybody on the streets. So people would, so it kind of a, a bit of a history. It comes from, from the, the Arabic culture before, regardless of Islam.

Mecca was the w like, that’s why they call them Mecca of something. Mecca was before Islam was a place where people went to trade, where people worshiped like other idols, you know, these wooden statues and stuff like that. But it’s also where. Poets from each tribe will come and compete and instead of fighting, they would compete of who beats the other with poetry.

Because the biggest thing, our language, the Arabic language was not a written language. So it was a your, you show your chops by how much you remember and how many of the complex words would you know basically how big your lexicon is and how many. Like, how, how capable are you to communicate? So imagine that’s the history.

A lot of people probably don’t think of, of us like that. They think, Oh, Islam or whatever. so, so that’s, that’s where it comes from. And that’s why language is very important. And everybody who has a command of language in our culture is highly, highly respected. So poets are the highest respected people.

So compared. Let’s say the most famous poets in, in, in the Arab world are, I mean, it’s not the same in the, since the two thousands and moving forward because media, you have people, you have singers or whatever, this like that. But, before that, while I was growing up, my generation, if you hear of a poet.

A poet is as, let’s say, famous as, I dunno, the rolling stones for example, like all the Beatles. Those are poets at the time, nobody would go to, you know, to a concert to attend. You know, somebody’s singing, who, who’s the idiot is going to do that. They would go attend, you would find stadiums. I mean, as far or auditoriums that are filled to listen to a poet.

So that’s my fascination with language and why I love language and why it’s so because I want it to be in spotlight and to be in the spotlight. In that part, you had to have commanded language. And also I grew up around a large library in our home. we were filled with libraries and we had books, English and Arabic.

So, and my fascination with English came from my love for music. So I listened to music when I was young, from Michael Jackson to rock music, to blues to, and I wanted to sing. And, that’s how I got my accent. And I love sitcoms. So combine all of those. I think when you get the comedy of a language, you get the language.

So I started. Listening to those and reading and on how the fascination with movies, and that’s how I got now where I got my, my language in English because I write, actually I am more expressive right now in English than Arabic. In Arabic. I used to write a lot of poetry. I used to write more poetry because that’s how I got to my wife to fall in love with me.

but, the English one came from my fascination with business once I started reading in business and fascination of the mechanics of how you build thick an idea to execution. All of my reading, there’s no writing. Arabic writing’s always either poetry or politics. Literature and the analysis, stuff like that.

There’s no writing in business at the time when I was growing up. It’s of course, right now we have all these translation. There are people who are talking about business and stuff, but when I was growing up, there wasn’t, so there’s a L there’s a lack in that. So I started reading English and that’s how one of the reasons why I go, I strengthen my language and I became very skillful in writing because that’s my fascination.

So. That gives you an idea of where it comes from. That’s cool.

Joel Harris: we, you mentioned a while back about, you know, making sure that for startups that when you started your art gallery business that, you need to make sure that the market is there. What other common issues, problems do you see startups having?

When they obviously, when they’re starting out.

Hussein Hallak: The biggest problem that I see is definitely not having a market. You can build the greatest idea, the greatest execution, have the greatest team, the most money. If there is no market, nobody to buy, it’s worthless. So I think that’s always the case. Is there a market now how to find out that there’s a market that’s the key?

Because if it’s just a matter of checking, Hey, there’s a market, let’s build it. Then great. The problem is not falling into the trap of thinking there’s a market. So you have to find out there’s a market, there’s steps to do to do that. So number one, the idea doesn’t matter. So I can take an idea that somebody else has had.

What is it? There is? there’s somebody who looked at Craigslist, and what they did is they took, elements of Craiglist and shown that how brilliant companies were built by copying an element of, you know, Craiglist’s. So for example, let’s say finding drivers. Matching drivers with people who want to go places.

That’s Uber, kind of hookups or people, you know, meeting each other. That’s Tinder. So it’s things like that. The idea doesn’t have to be novel or new. If it is, great, but that’s what not what it matters. So I see a lot of people kind of get stuck on, is this a new idea? Is this a great idea? Bad idea with great execution for a market that’s always, that’s always growing, that you’re continually trumping from.

That’s great. That’s even better. I mean, who, who in the hell would have thought that, Hey, I’m going to build a company where everybody can become a taxi driver? Who would think, you know, think, Oh, that’s a great idea. And it even didn’t start like that. Most of the great companies that we have right now, then it start.

The way that it is right now. Uber didn’t start as, Hey, everybody can be a driver of Uber started as a company where, people can find drivers, when they’re, outside, and it’s more about exclusive and high end and kind of a replacement for limos. That’s when it starts, that’s where it started.

And now it’s like ubiquitous. So it doesn’t matter what the idea is, it doesn’t matter where it starts. It doesn’t matter how you execute it and are you executing it for the right market. So, not getting stuck on the idea testing immediately and putting it in front of customers. So what do entrepreneurs do?

They try to come up with the most novel idea. So they get stuck in the idea stage. They don’t share it with anyone. They, they’re very protective so that nobody can steal my idea. You’ve heard a lot. Nobody steals anybody’s idea, like an idea is worthless. because an idea, if you look at the idea and you look at how much execution you have to do, who’s who in the, who in their right mind will take your idea and execute on it for the next three to five years, maybe they’ll succeed, you know?

Now, was there ever a time where people stole ideas? Yeah, there is. I mean, what is it? Snapchat is a stolen idea. Because, yeah, because the two founders that, created snapshots, and there’s, there’s a lawsuit, and the other founder won the lawsuit and got their shares and their names. So what is it?

Steven Spiegel, I think is the, is now the CEO of, I don’t know if I’m saying his last name. He basically the, the. According allegedly that he took the idea from, they were two people at the dorm and that came with him because he has the business mindset and said, here’s the idea, and he ended up executing it on without them or like kind of cutting it off.

I can’t remember the actual story, but cut him off halfway through or basically. Continued without him. The same thing. I mean, what is Mark Zuckerberg? We know the stories. Like he said, he supposedly allegedly took the two, the idea from, from the, what is it, the so-and-so twins, and they even Ray did a lawsuit and they got money from him because of that.

Now, whether or not, how do you consider stealing? But the key thing here is for. Stealing the idea doesn’t guarantee that’s going to be executed and you’re going to raise money from it. For every company that succeeds, there are hundreds, even thousands that’s fail. So success has nothing to do with the idea has everything to do with the execution.

Yes. If you have a, an idea that it’s time has come. It’s the right market and you execute well. That’s great. So I think they get stuck on the idea. They don’t execute as fast as possible. They don’t put it in front of the customers. They are very protective. They don’t share. and they take too much time.

that’s, that’s I think the, the problem, some of the problems that entrepreneurs fall into.

Joel Harris: Cool.  so for one of the things that I think that,

Hussein Hallak: have.

Joel Harris: Problems with is the marketing. How would you recommend, or how do you recommend startups market themselves? Especially with little or no budget?

Hussein Hallak: They need to do content marketing a lot.

So one of the things that they need to do is to write excessively about the stages that they do. So, so write about the idea. Write about, for example, lean startup, which is. And the book that kind of changed how, changed everything and how startups do things. What started as a blog post Unbounced started as a blog for a year before they became a company about how to build dining pages and all of that.

Why is that? Because that’s how you build an audience. So, we, me and you had done a lot of writing, you know, started ideas and tested and see if people are interested right now, writing my book, unleash the startup of you. And the first thing I did is the first piece of writing the introduction. I wrote it and I put it on online and I linked it to landing page.

I haven’t, the book is still in the making. But I’ve put it, put something out there. And I said to people, I’m writing this book now somebody can definitely take, Hey, that’s a good idea. And they can write a book good for them. But the, the key here is that they’re not going to write the same book cause I’m writing my own book.

They’re not going to know everything that I’m doing. Paulo Coelho, one of, one of his books that he wrote, I can’t remember the name of the book. He actually, to the opposing his publishing company released parts of the book. As they continued. I don’t know if you’re, I can’t remember the name of the book that he did that, but you heard the story, right?

He released the released parts of the book, and it’s like why you’re doing, people will not buy the book. People bought the book. So it’s the key thing here is if you don’t have budget, you can always write. You can always take an hour or two hours on, right? And you don’t have to be an amazing writer. You don’t have to write like the New York times example.

You’re writing for your audience. You’re writing for a certain audience that will appreciate that you’re communicating with them authentically. And there’s a ton of resources about writing that you can benefit from. And can we get you started? if you, if you’re not clear on one, one of those, a few messages, me and you, and you can, you can, you can even hire, I mean, like a, like a writer to help you with kind of doing an interview with you and write about your story like you’re doing with me right now.

So I think. The key thing is that money. That’s, that’s one of the problems that entrepreneurs have is I don’t have the money. I don’t have the resources. Well, what can you do with what you have? You can still write if you have time, like everyone else you can write, you can communicate, you can share on social media.

A lot of the time. The tools are free. Now I just share an article on medium and you can find it on Wellington’s called the gigantic list of amazing startup resources. There’s a ton. There’s 844 tools, resources, and articles that will help you get started no matter what your idea is. So there is that, that you can do and there’s a ton of those online.

So start with something. Start communicating with your audience. Any idea that to get you started and communicating with your audience to get you started in testing and build from there. So a marketing starts with content. Identify what we call the, Fire hoses of information. Communities like product hunt.

If you’re building something that is techie, a hacker, news communities where people are, there are Slack channels where people congregate and have the same interest as you, and you can start communicating with them a core, for example, answering questions in your area of expertise. Anything that helps you stand out and build your personal brand because you can attach that personal brand to the startup that you’re doing.

And that’s what I think is very powerful that you can get you started.

Joel Harris: Okay, so you mentioned your book. I think now’s a good time to talk about it. What’s, what’s it about and who is it meant to help.

Hussein Hallak: Cool. So my book is about three things about mastering your time, building a personal brand, and becoming the leader of your always meant to be.

Now it’s, it’s based on the assumption that, That I believe that everybody uses meant for greatness. Now, this is not an, you know, like a new age belief, something like that. It’s more the, it comes from, a belief that I built based on dealing with a lot of people. Every single one I dealt with have the capability for more.

So they can do more, they can help more, they can add value more. But most of the time they’re held back. They’re held back by, number one, not having the time. A lot of us have to put food on the table, pay the bills, all of that. So that takes time. And mostly we are using that time, you know, building.

working in a job, you know, fulfilling whatever roles that we need to do. And what I found is that 90% of people have no idea of how to master their time. They have no idea how to be more productive, how to kind of manage that. So the first thing I did is I reached out to my network and instead of, you know, having opinions, like my opinions about the hugs, what to do with your time, Kind of a, a, an I obsess on how to build a great, how to build up your productivity and be an amazing, productive person. So throughout the time I’ve, I’ve read tons of books about that, but I didn’t want this to be a summary of my learnings. One of the things I wanted is I wanted to, to be, to make it more real.

So I reached out to my network and I had hundreds of people respond to me and say, what are the tools? And. There are things that they do to be more productive or that helps them manage their time better. And I took those and those are going to be the first part of the book. How do you master your time kind of stream together through my writing and And with the help of my authors. And, also I’m working with you to help me with that. So, to help kind of string them together to give people some great advice, some varied advice. Because what I’ve learned from, managing your productivity and managing your time is that everybody’s personality is different.

I read a ton of the re, the reason I read a ton of them is because whenever I read one. And I tried to apply it. A lot of things broke apart and, you know, fell apart, broke down, didn’t work for me. Some things worked for me, so I would take one thing from here, one thing from there, and I noticed that’s the biggest challenge is that people think it’s either the whole thing or nothing at all.

So since I had no, no problem in kind of breaking apart things and kind of doing what I want, having that confidence, I noticed that some people do not have that confidence. So this is a way to help them. Here’s what other people are using. Feel free to kind of use them as Lego and play around and see what works for you.

So that’s the first part, which if you now master your time, you can have enough time to build your personal brand. Why do you need that? Because. You, you already have a personal brand. Your people already think of you. Certain things talk about you in a certain way. associate you with certain things, and as long as you don’t control your brand, other people’s do.

But what you can do is you can shift the conversation. You can influence how people think about you. And if you can do that more in a more aware and a more predetermined way, and, you know, kind of having a with, Keeping it top of mind and it’s, it’s something that you do on a regular basis. You, you, people get to know you for a certain way and they start associating you with this, let’s say being the expert in certain thing or be in someone dependable or reliable or someone that always, you know, delivers on their word, whatever it is that you think.

You’re a representative of the brand and now they will work with you more. They will reach out to your mom. And that’s, I think is very important because that’s where jobs come from. That’s where work comes from. That’s what you associate with anything you touch. So if you write and people trust your worth, for example, they’ll take your writing in a certain way as opposed to somebody they don’t trust.

For example. So these are, that’s why building your personal brand is very important. And the third thing is leadership. Why? Because our world needs leadership. We suck right now at the leadership. Because if you look around at the global scene and you look at the leaders of the world, I mean, it’s, it’s pathetic.

we don’t have leaders at all. I, I, a few years ago, 10 years ago, we had Mendela, you know, we had, mother Teresa. We had, who else. Like we had, we had people that you can point to and say, you know what? I want to follow. I want to, I want to hear, but we are having less and less. Who can you point to in the world right now?

You can say, you know what? I’ll follow their footsteps. We don’t have to. Now it’s good and bad. The good about it is that we kind of went past the, the age where there’s one leader that will save us all. Cause that was never true. But we were in a, in a, an a, an a part of the world where a lot of people, or a time in our evolution where a lot of people didn’t have access.

Now you have more access then those people have. So if you think the platform that Mandela had and the platform you have, you have now access with social media tools and all the tools that are out there and what you can write and your student access. More than this a Mandela, because you can, you don’t, it doesn’t matter that if the times pick up, picks up, let’s say an article that you wrote, you can write on medium and you can, we can have articles that have more reach than some of the New York times articles.

You can have a YouTube channel and you can be one of the biggest YouTubers in the world. There’s nothing stopping you. So with that comes the responsibility of where do you want to lead people? So it’s more not, it’s, it’s less of telling people that you have to lead and you have to be more, it’s not a moral approach, but it’s like causing people to question what is the impact you want to leave in the world?

And are you being, you know, conscious of that and moving towards it in a, in a, you know, you know, In a way that you chose rather than it was chosen for you or you know, haphazardly happened. A lot of things will happen in your life by coincidence, but the things that you have a choice at, are you choosing it?

So that is the, that is the arc of the, of the book. And the reason I do that is these are the key things that I, that I noticed that are, you know, me, I’d like to keep things simple. Three things, not, you know, a hundred things. And these are the things that I saw whenever I worked with people that make the biggest impact in their lives and caused them to make the biggest impact in the people around them.

now that’s, that’s basically my book and why I’m writing it. And, what are the certain aspects of it. I think

Joel Harris: one of the things people don’t think about is personal branding. And I, I’m super passionate about it. I believe it’s one of the most important things that you can do. It is, but people just go to work and then he’d come home and they watch TV and they, that’s all they do.

What are some things that will help build somebody’s personal brand.

Hussein Hallak: yeah, I agree with you. A lot of people don’t think of personal brand name because they think of branding as something that, comes with business. For example, the word brand, let’s say you don’t think of yourself as a brand. They have a lack of understanding of branding.

They think branding is something you create. So it requires money. If you don’t think of brand as something that already exists. so it’s the lack of understanding is the wall on spell brand is what people think, whether it’s a company, a brand, a company’s brand is what people think of that company or whether you’re a person.

It’s what people think of you can put simply is what people say about you when you’re not there. That’s your breath. Now, whether you like it or not, your brand. So people think about you, things whether you, you want them to or whether you don’t want them to, so they have an opinion of you. And they have, They associate you with certain things, certain words or, so maybe you are the fun person. Maybe you’re the reliable person. Maybe you’re always there. Maybe, you’re someone who’s, maybe it’s negative. There’s a lot of negative stuff. Oh, I can’t depend on them. Or, you know, they are, they’re strict or whatever it is.

So they associate you with that. Now, a lot of times, a lot of these things are not articulated in the sense that if you ask somebody, what do you think of me is like, ah, I think you’re nice. They don’t think about that. They just have that going in, in their heads, in the background of their heads. So, the key element here is there is a brand, you don’t influence it and it’s there.

So do you want it to serve you? Here’s a question, or do you want it to work against you because it’s either or. There’s no in between. And you need it, of course, to serve you. So in order to serve, you need to understand what it is and to influence it. Now there’s two approaches for this. One approach is in the view, inauthentic, authentic approach in the sense that you want to be seen as someone who’s who we are not.

And that will never work if will fall apart. So we see it all the time. You see it with famous people, for example, you want to find out like, Hey, the projected image, and then people like find out. I was like, Oh, they’re not that. They were tricking us and people have a sense, we have our bullshit barometer.

It’s been developed over thousands and thousands of years. We’re very good at representing that. And usually it’s when something’s being presented as perfect, we immediately call bullshit on it. Immediately. so there’s like the perfect phone call. So whenever something is presented is perfect, we call bullshit on it.

So, I mean, to put it simply, but more sophisticated in that, is that what do you want yourself to be seen? So authentic way is. What are you really great at and what, or what do you really want to go after in the world? So there are several things. There’s what do you, what do you are as a person? So what you stand for, the things you believe in, the things you value most, things like that.

And what do you want to leave behind you? So a lot of what we call your legacy. So these are things that influence, and once you’re clear on that, so the way to do that is to get clear first on who you are to yourself. Kind of like the self image and what, what do you want to project in the world? What do you want to leave a legacy?

And once you’re clear on those, then you need to actively work towards them. It cannot happen. Just because you believe something. Just because you believe in being nice, that doesn’t mean that you are being nice all the time and being nice all the time. It doesn’t mean that you, you know, just help your neighbors carry their groceries.

It’s not just about that. It’s coven. So. Avoid that. so it’s really about how do you want to do it. So once you clear on the what, what you stand for and what your morals are and why, what drives you to that? It’s the how, how the distinguishing from somebody else, how you’re being nice is different than how I’m being nice.

And just the realization that when you do an act in an authentic way, you will have the following reactions. There will be people who love you. There will be people who hate you and there will be people who don’t give a shit, okay? Now your role is to make the people who love you, love you for the right reasons.

So knowing you and not just for loving you because they like you and make the people who don’t care, air care. So more of the people that don’t care, you know, care about you. So we end up to your side and the people who hate you, maybe you recognize them so that they know what they hate you for and they stay away.

So you’re not going to win everyone you, you by trying to win everyone you’ll be going to be, you’re going to become bland. You’re going to become, you know, like the hated person by the people who truly care about you. Kind of like the difference between. What is a good example? Maybe you’re going to politics a little bit.

The difference between Obama and Bernie Sanders, for example. So Obama says the right things. No, he’s a great politician. If you listen to him, he’s like, you got to like it. But then if you look a little bit deeper, it’s like, what did he really say? Like for example, we have to progress. We have to do more. I was like, that sounds good.

I’m going to sign up to that, but this isn’t really me. As opposed to, for example, when he says, when he says. Everybody has to have healthcare. everybody needs to, everybody, you know, I believe that everybody having healthcare is a right, or it’s a crime not to have everybody, you know, having access to, let’s say higher education.

Let’s say, and I’m going to fight for doing that, whether I’m president or not, or for something like that. Now what do you like that or not? What do you believe in that or not? You know, that person stands for something. You know where to stand. You know why you’re hitting him. You know why you love him.

Whereas if you ask people who love and hate Obama, why you love and hate Obama, and you look at it as like, but like you’re both right, but. Like there’s no substance. And that is, I think the biggest thing is the difference between sane and standing. No, I’m not saying that Obama is all bad or you know, but, he, a lot of what he says can be applied to everything.

It’s kinda like a Nike, you know, model, which is just do it. You know, you can, you can apply it to anything. It’s a great. Saying, and it can say, Nike, just do it. You know, Coca-Cola, just do it, you know? well, what is a good brand of beer? or Corona? Just going to say Corona. You know, you can, you can apply it to all of that.

That’s the problem with, you know, bland, you know, statements that doesn’t stand for anything. So in the same way you have to learn. It’s, it’s branding. That’s why I think people avoid it, is that they think it’s about, I don’t want to lie to people. I don’t want to trick people because that’s what we associate.

We associated with advertising, with saying the message, but not delivering. Whereas true personal branding is about what do you stand for really, and what do you execute into every day’s world and what do you, what are you not going to let go until the day you die? So that is, just to be dramatic. All

Joel Harris: right.

Let’s, so I’ve mentioned you’re a serial entrepreneur. One of the things that you are, one of the spaces that you’re working in is blockchain. Can you tell us a little bit what you’re doing, your company and why you’re, why you’ve stepped into this

Hussein Hallak: space? So blockchain is, for me at least, is one of the most fascinating technologies that I’ve, Okay. So I told you I’m fascinated with science, fascinated with technology since I was a young, for me, science and technology was the same obviously when growing up I realized that a little bit different, obviously. So more now you’re into technology is still love science, read science. A lot of times. I get fascinated kind of going down rabbit hole things.

But technology, is fascinating for me. I keep on reading and that’s how I got into blockchain. I heard about it at the time. I heard about Bitcoin and I heard about the financial aspect of things. And since my history, you know, a little bit now, and my history with money is like, nah, this is not for me.

And then I got to know, that I got to know what a blockchain. actually, Does for people and well, how did technology works through a workshop? So I attended a workshop because I was in launch Academy and I was fascinated. It’s like this is a Mac, a great technology. So I started reading and the more I read, the more dull my film because it’s such a complex technology that, it was hard.

It took me like. Several months to understand a few things. And because of the content explosion, there was a lot of fluff content out there about the technology, but it doesn’t deliver. We have substance. So, started reading, started learning and, got fascinated and I decided to build a company that, we don’t.

Take technically do blockchain technology, but what we do is we teach about blockchain technology and then grew to teach about, emerging technologies. And that’s next, the Centrum, and built several courses for blockchain. One of them is on Udemy right now. That’s a small, of course, just to help people kind of get in, into the world of blockchain.

And I made it, I tried to make it simple, make it simple, visual, simple. And it wasn’t an easy task. It’s a very difficult thing. And now working on building larger courses to help people learn a technology, mostly because of my fascination with it, but also because I think it opens up the doors for a lot of people to, to participate in the upcoming wave blockchain technology.

Just like the internet in the sense that it’s a massive wave. but it’s not. Like, let’s say AI, where even though it’s been developed and growing for a long time right now, but it’s, it’s right now everybody’s AI, you know, and, it’s a complex technology, but if you learn it, it doesn’t open up a lot of things for you in the sense that you can execute, build something in AI, but it doesn’t expand your understanding of anything.

So let’s say you build, you build artificial intelligence or something, that makes that thing do. The task list, they foster a better, cheaper, more complex, let’s say. but you forget about, whereas in blockchain is really a way of thinking. So it’s a framework of thinking, not the speed of thinking.

AI is more likely. Think about that, the speed of thinking. So once you achieved the speed of thinking, you’re not thinking about it, but a way of thinking changes. The whole world changes how you see the world. So a way of thinking of a blockchain is a way of thinking. In particular, decentralized way of thinking, where instead of, you know, collecting all your data in one place, you now can decentralize it and give it to other people.

Well then what, what does that do with security? What does that do to access? How do you do governance, for example? Like if you think about it, how do you guarantee that a government, like the U S government or Canadian government has real representation. How do you guarantee that certain contracts that were promised and signed gets executed regardless of the limit, the ability of people of getting out of the contract or kind of weaseling their way out of it, a guarantee that people get paid.

all of these things. Are very, very hard problems because there’s include the human element and includes the element of trust. Can you try, can you execute that and turn it into code with a very, very, you know, clear cut execution, elements. Can you do that? And that’s a very, very hard problem to solve.

And blockchain sector, which is decentralized, you know, technology plays in that area, plays in the area of moving trust from a human thing that is enabled by technology to something that is completely technology driven. A good example of that, kind of to explain to jargon that I just threw at you, is if you think of money right now, money to give money to someone, you have to, let’s say you’ve done a job for me that’s a, I hire you to do, let’s say my marketing, you know, a ton of let’s say articles and we agree on a payment. I have to receive those articles, verify, and then let’s say I pay you and I know I’m paying you because let’s say in person, it’s a cash payment. I know I’m paying you. I can recognize you. You are the person who delivered the so trust.

Realize in my understanding of that trust, and in your understanding that, yeah, this is what we agreed more. How do you try, if you put that online, if I want to send you to payment, I have to know what your bank account is and I have to do it through my bank. You can’t do it. You won’t accept it.

Through, let’s say Hussein coin, like what is Hussein coin? I don’t want to accept the same coin. Who uses the same coin? You want dollars, for example. You want to use the technology that exists. You don’t. You want to accept Hussein pay won’t send me payment or accept payment on the same day. You won’t give me your details on Hussein platform because it’s not a trusted platform.

You do it through your bank. You do it through PayPal, but you forget that bank and PayPal actually get hacked. Quite a bit. And even though you trust them, but a bank can literally wipe out all the money that you have with them right now without recourse. So let’s say right now in covert times where you can go to the bank and all of it is online, let’s say your bank right now, let’s choose a small bank.

It doesn’t give me thank you for saying, let’s say it chooses to, you know, close your, close your account and you’re, now you’re stuck calling them and they’re not answering a call. What recourse do you have? You had $100,000 in their bank account and your bank out there and he’s gone. So you have no recourse.

So these are, this is a challenge of centralized systems that had too much control for a few people, whereas decentralized systems would happen. Number one, you have a large group of people who believe in or hold back that money. Right now, if your government, let’s say the U S government or the Canadian government has, has had leadership and they make different choices and the value of money goes down like the Venezuela.

And suddenly you had all this money and suddenly that money is worthless. You can’t protect against that. Whereas if you look at Bitcoin, for example, it’s, there’s a ton of people that are using it, and the money value is separated from, let’s say, the ability of a few people to manipulate it or change it.

Nobody can change. Now, Bitcoin, nobody controls Bitcoin. Okay. Even if the community of developers right now that are responsible, combined together, they can’t change the system. Even as such, ocean Nakamoto, we find out who he is, who’s the inventor of Bitcoin, who we don’t know who he is. It’s a pseudonym for someone, or a group of people came out right now and say, I want to change Bitcoin to this.

Nobody would listen to him because the power is not with him. His power is with the people who run the code on their machines. So that decentralized power is very powerful. So it gives power to the, to the currency. And once the transaction happens to give me your Bitcoin address, I have my Bitcoin address and I send it to you.

It’s sent done. There’s no recourse. I can’t, if I send you money through my bank, and I called my bank and say, Hey, I actually sent money to, to, Joel and it turned out that he’s, he’s defrauded me. He didn’t send me the stuff. The bank will take the money back. So I mean, this is just a simple example, but there are so many complex layers that you build on it with code.

So turning contractual agreements into code is a very powerful idea. We call them smart contracts. Basically. Taking any agreement that we have as human agreement and trying to turn it into code that executes when certain conditions are met. So you do one X one, one, two, three X, Y, Z get executed. So that’s a very powerful idea.

And moving into a community where we don’t have to, let’s say there’s this covert 19. A disaster. And let’s say we agree that is by law, that if a certain problem happens of this scale and people, let’s say you have, let’s say, personal insurance, for a pie, they call it, or something like that, personal insurance, and you’re owed.

You don’t have to wait until the government convenes. You know, like it’s automatic. You get fired from a job and that’s logged in by your company automatically. The money comes from the government and the say goes to your bank. For example, you have to apply for anything. All of the go through that process.

It’s just written in code and just executed once certain conditions are met. So that’s, this is the kind of thing, for example, the distribution to the supply chain that we have right now and the challenges we have with that. If we had blockchain of flights supply chain, we know exactly how many rolls of toilet paper are on the way, who is buying them, how it’s being sold, all of that.

And we would have no worries about this, their supply chain, we wouldn’t have, somebody had to stand on a podium ensured that they spoke to the heads of, you know, the, the supermarkets and there is enough, a supply chain will be transparent. You can look at supply chain and say, Oh, we have enough supply chain for the next eight months.

And it’s just coming and it’s going to arrive at this day, this day, this day. So it

Joel Harris: sounds like a lot of the problems that we’re facing now with, yes. Shortages of, of items like, you know, like toilet paper that you’re mentioning, both, accessing government

Hussein Hallak: funds

Joel Harris: that can all that stuff be solved if blockchain is put in place.

Hussein Hallak: I would say blockchain allows the infrastructure for it to be solved. The solutions are there is just that because it relies a lot on human, factors and on old way, even on the software. And the infrastructure that exists right now is supervised by humans. If you think about it, humans are controlled by emotions.

Fear for you, for your job. Fear for, you know, like for example, we might delay telling your boss about a bad news, which delays them. Making a decision which delays and rack up from that software doesn’t care. Something happens. And if it’s in the software that is going to execute based on these, let’s say metrics, it executes.

There’s no delay. There’s so, it’s just turning things into software and what blockchain is, excuse me. What blockchain gives you, it gives you the infrastructure where you can trust these things will execute because the manipulation. Is harder because of the decentralized ability. So a centralized system is, is that doesn’t mean the decentralized system cannot be compromised, but it’s less likely to be compromised if you can definitely build that software within a centralized system, but it’s less, more likely to be compromised and penetrated and having people, you know, stop it.

So I think that’s, that’s the key, the difference. And that’s what blockchain enables. It’s not that blockchain will solve that. And that’s, I think one of the biggest challenges is a lot of people that didn’t understand the technology from starts out, Oh, this is going to solve all them. Just like they think right now, AI will solve anything.

No, nothing’s, the technology is just a way to accelerate, confirm power, empower, enable certain elements. You as a human being or a group of human beings need to take those decisions. I need to build and use that technology in a way that will make that happen. And that’s why the reason why I want to teach people about that, because with blockchain, you are more capable of, if you understand that you can apply it.

Watchings is a hard technology to implement, but it’s not a hard technology to use. It’s not hard to use Bitcoin. It requires, definitely, it’s sort of understanding different than how we used to understand the world. But we’re not asking you to design a blockchain system. Okay. But do you need to know enough to actually use it and not be afraid of it?

Joel Harris: so in the blockchain companies, how are you seeing content marketing being used.

Hussein Hallak: For for a long time. it was one of the key elements because, when a new technology or emerging technology arrives to the scene, the biggest thing is education. How do you educate people? So content is, is a key. I don’t think, I don’t think I’ve seen any blockchain company succeed without relying on content marketing as a key envy, of course, because of the, A lot of the challenges that came with a new technology and lack of understanding. A lot of the scams that came with it, just like the.com let’s say bubble, where we had a lot of scans as well. A lot of bad ideas. The same thing happened with blockchain. the challenges, we, it came at a time where there is more awareness and you can reach out to more people.

So, They found a need to educate people. They have to educate people about what they do, how they do it. So content is the, definitely the decor a vehicle to, to kind of inform people about that and educate people. So contact took center stage and, when the scams, a lot of platforms, Then advertising for anything that has to do with blockchain or crypto currency or crypto, let’s say.

Anything that has to do with crypto, the crypto space. Sometimes blockchain crypto is kind of, interchangeable. It’s not, but

Joel Harris: each other with each other, right? Yeah.

Hussein Hallak: Yeah. But a lot of people use them interchangeably. So a lot of the challenges. How do you, how do you beat that if you can’t advertise and you can’t reach people in certain ways?

The remainder is, let’s say, communities, education, content, content, in many different forums, video, you know, written, infographics. And content delivered to presentations and events. So content took center stage. When it comes to, let’s say blockchain and any emerging technologies, mainly because also it’s expensive to advertise, and especially for an emerging technology.

It’s not guaranteed that everybody will jump in. so you, you be wasting your advertising dollars.

Joel Harris: Awesome. All right, so I asked this question to all my guests. What is an I? I think I know the answer, but you might surprise me. What is one book? I mean, you’ve, yeah, you’ve said that you’ve read so many books, hundreds of books on all sorts of subjects.

What is the book that has influenced you the most in your life?

Hussein Hallak: The book that influenced me the most in my life is, I’ll say conversation. Is it conversation? Conversations with God?

Joel Harris: Hmm. Okay. I thought you’re going to say lean startup for

Hussein Hallak: sure. it didn’t, in the sense that it’s, that’s, that’s a part of definitely is one of the top books I would recommend. but conversations with God is the book that influenced me the most because the time that it came with and it changes my relationship to the part I grew up in, in the Arab world, in Syria, Syria is not a very religious.

A country, but it’s still, there’s a lot of religious people around that and Islam. I think. For all the people who are committed Christians, they might relate to that. Religion is a major part of life. And I think the difference with Islam is that Islam also has a legislative and everyday life part of it.

So it’s not just your relationship with God as your, a lot of people kind of legislate or like to legislators, at least based on Islam. And, And use it to govern your morals, your, how you treat others, and all of that. So that kind of, you grew up around that. And, I was lucky because my parents are not very religious and, I didn’t know what religion I was until I was, I think 15.

grade and my, my religion school, we can, we have the religion teacher in schools asked me, what religion are you? And I like, I don’t know what that means. I was in a private school, it was an Armenian school I used to go to church with, or Armenians, I think it was Roman Catholic. I don’t know. Or I don’t know what, what.

Like they, there’s a lot of sex. And so Syria has 15% Christians. So it’s part of everyday life. we have Christian neighborhoods, like basically majority Christians living there, and a lot of our friends. So it was not like that segregation in a sense. Like, Oh, you know what? You’re different. So. I used to go to church and I didn’t know, like, I didn’t know what, what, what’s that about in the sense that I wasn’t, that religion was not part of my life has grown up.

So that gave me a little bit of perspective in a sense that I wasn’t that attached and didn’t grew up in a very religious family. But when I was teenagers in my teenage years, I was looking for the truth. So I started reading, all of the, we were, we’re smiley. So we’re a sect of the Islamic, we’re not Sudanese or so.

It’s my, these are not strict as well in Islam. And Islam doesn’t like kind of govern every part of your life, but, and we believe there’s a man that represents God here. So it’s very close to, to how Christians think. and so I started researching, I started learning about, you know, religion and trying to find the truth and trying to find salvation if you wish.

I think that’s the time where people look for that. So I started with red, you know, the Bible or one of the Bibles that I had to hand. We had a Bible at home and we had also the toric. Yeah. So the, I read, I read those kind of searching for, and I read the Sunni’s, you know, books. And I do, I read everything by the 20s, by the early twenties, I had kind of, I w I reached a point where.

I, I didn’t want to read anymore and I didn’t want to give time for that cause I like reach, like I couldn’t find the, the truth, the ultimate truth because that’s what I was looking for. I was looking, where’s the ultimate truth? I want to be the LSV part of those people who are saved and who are, who know the way and that kind of thing.

And, when I moved to, I moved to Dubai in 2003, 2004, I was introduced to that book. And what it did. It, it’s a V, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a very well written book. First it’s like, it’s fabulous from, from, from how the language kind of, how the language we even through each other. So it’s a brilliantly written book.

And it, it kind of gives, a human perspective on the relationship with an entity called God. It’s, it is. It has, the person who was there is religious. He’s not pushing his ideas on you. So it’s kind of freed me from my past because I kind of left that there and I never touched it in a sense that I’m not going to deal with that because it’s not the time.

It’s not helping me in any way. So I left it, but that kind of was the resolution and I kind of wasn’t home a tome of my relationship with God, which is, I don’t want the relationship with God kind of thing. So it was my path, even though a lot of people would probably take a different path with it, which is kind of get closer to God for me, I became more secular after that, but it’s a, it was brilliantly written book.

Fabulous time. It’s, it has three parts, great relationship. and it’s not about God in particular. It’s about how human beings thinks about, think about all of the elements that they pass in their lives, like their relationship, our relationship with war, with each other, how we think about money, how we think.

That’s why I think the brilliance of that book. So it’s a brilliant, brilliant book or highly recommended to read it. but yeah, that’s my complex relationship and why it’s the most influential book because it’s time when it came, kind of gave me that permission to go do whatever I want and kind of be at peace with whatever my search was.

and that’s why I’m kind of a weird person when it comes to talking about religion and, cause I defend people’s right to kind of, Well, even in religion, but I also a stand against the stupidity in anything, whether it’s religion or anything against any religion, doing that so people can’t, don’t know where to put me.

and that’s because of my upbringing and the kind of reading that I had in many different ways. And who’s the

Joel Harris: author?

Hussein Hallak: the author is Neale Donald Walsch. Okay. Awesome.

Joel Harris: Well, thank you Hussein for being on this show. I appreciate your time.

Hussein Hallak: Where can people

Joel Harris: find you?

Hussein Hallak: You can find me. Search for st HELOC on Google.

You’ll find a ton of stuff about me. I’m awesome. Famous. No, I’m just joking. You’ll find probably, I used to have a website. I was saying I liked.com, but I think right now, I haven’t paid attention to it, so it’s, it’s off or something. find me on LinkedIn, Twitter, HH unleashed. If you search  unreached, I think it’s the best place to find me medium, obviously.

so if you go to medium and find me there, that’s probably a where you find, you can read. I have articles on LinkedIn medium. And, go to learn, progress, which is learn doc next decentral.com which was where I curated a lot of the work, around startups and emerging technologies and about coven right now.

So just cause I’m tired of people spreading stuff that are, that are, you know, worthless. I like to curate things that people can find helpful. And the on my belief support for science and scientific stuff. So yeah, you can find me anywhere like that.

Joel Harris: Awesome. And remind us what your book is called and where people will be able to find

Hussein Hallak: the, it’s called unleashed to start up a view and, Oh my God, where, where did I put the, the link for one second.

Unleash, unleash the book. What is it. You don’t want to, I’ll get it. We’ll put it,

Joel Harris: we’ll put it in the show notes and

Hussein Hallak: it will be,

Joel Harris: it will be available on Amazon. I’m assuming.

Hussein Hallak: Once I launched it, I have no idea. So this is the part of me right now. I’m validating the idea. Actually, if you go to my, did I publish the LinkedIn?

I think I’m probably still on medium. There is the search for Eldorado on medium and there I have the link to my book, which is what I should look for right now. But there I have the link to my book and probably is going to be there. You can sign up for early release in the sense that you’re interested in hearing about it and I’ll share with you the chapters of the book as they’re being written.

So, yeah, feel free to do that.

Joel Harris: Awesome. Thank you so much.

Hussein Hallak: My pleasure. Thanks for having me. I really, really enjoyed this and, yeah, how they kind of great, fun, great questions. That’s always amazing. It’s, I, the things I spoke about here, I haven’t spoken to most of them. I would say 80% of them haven’t spoken about before.

So that’s a, that’s, that’s an accomplishment for, for having a conversation with me. Thanks a lot. And a good fun. Bye for now.

Joel Harris: Bye.

Hussein Hallak: Bye. Thank you for listening to publishing for profit.

Joel Harris: Please like and

Hussein Hallak: subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.