Latest / Art of the Question / How to Speak With Confidence - Timotej Bonifer - #1

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How to Speak With Confidence - Timotej Bonifer - #1 · Art of the Question

• Speaker 2: I thought you have such a cool niche and I just really wanted to know a little bit more about that. yeah, first of all, I was just curious to hear like, how did you get started? Speaker 1: Good question. I'd say personally it was with YouTube, likewise. So I used to be a video gamer, made a bunch of content there. And then I sort of had a bit of a brief period in between, I want to say about maybe three, five years, when I was sort of trying to get away from the video game side of the world. I was pretty addicted to, I mean, I still say I'm an ex video game addict. That's my Instagram bio. It attracts the right people, I'll it that way. But moved away from that, I went back into content creation. I want to say three years ago, because in the between time I realized that, you know, human beings fall into different categories. And I think that I am a classic case example of a content creator. If I'm not creating, I'm depressed. Like honestly, I was, I was doing a lot of cycling at the time. I was working in the kitchen. This is kind of fine, but I'm missing something. And that one thing that was missing was just creating content and being able to share this with the world and being able to hopefully improve other people's, not just pronunciation, accent, but confidence in the way that they speak. is something that sort of became, you know, it's out of an accident, feel like. And I think, I feel like nothing in life really happens out of the blue. know, you're not born to be like, ⁓ I'm going to be an English confidence coach. No, that doesn't happen. Speaker 2: No, all right. so was your accent always very good? Were you a natural when you started creating the gaming content as well? Or did you really have to work for it? Because I've seen your videos. You can do American, you can do British, ⁓ and they sound perfect. At least to me they do. So how did you learn this and when did you discover? ⁓ that you were able to, change your accent because you're, you're, you're not a Brit. You're not an American. Speaker 1: Yeah, I've never even been to the UK, which is kind of the wildest part of the story. I usually tell that to people. What? What's going on? No, it sucked at the beginning, but it sucks to me. I mean, there's a video that I have, I'm using a couple of advertisements that I want to say was from 2013, 14, where we had like a class assignment in our English class in high school. We had to record something and I had decent English back then. I do have a proclivity of having good hearing, I used to play lot of instruments, I definitely have a bit of a head start-up on some people. But no, the accident I started off with, the first YouTube video is still up there from 2014. I don't want to say it was the 27th of January from the top of my head. But I spoke a little bit like, hey guys, welcome back to another YouTube video. It sounded horrible. mean, yes. Of course, if you compare this to someone who has really thick, like, Slavic accent, you know, to him, that's still, they're going to say, oh, but you had a good starting point. It's like, sure, but you didn't see the voice before I started uploading. That's why I always also say to people like, get started with content as soon as possible, because you're going to have a metric to look upon. Even clients that I work with, they sometimes a little bit uncomfortable because I'm like, here's the thing, we're not going to just work on your English. I want to work on your content. Because if you upload a video today, and then we work together for three months and then you upload that last video of the three months, there will be a clear comparison of before and after. usually people don't go back and watch the introductory call or the sales call. And so they need to have a reference point. And my only regret looking back now is that I didn't start YouTube sooner, because I could have. And I would have had more of a memory lane to go down, almost like a video journal, which is why also... love doing what I'm doing now, even though sometimes it feels like I upload something that's cringe or I might share an opinion that's a little bit too controversial. I might get into trouble or whatever. But it's like, I don't care. even in just whatever we do here in the podcast, somebody sees the clip that we're like, yeah, this guy's a bit of a of a dick. I don't like him. He's going to forget about it in 20 seconds. It's whatever bad video I might upload or something I'm not satisfied with or have a, cause you mentioned right, American accent. Yeah, but I'm not happy with my American accent. I don't like it. So I have to work on that. I've got to tune into my Scottish accent more. I've got to, I want to learn the Australian accent. It's going to take time. And so if I start today, by the end of the day, I'll have a decent Australian accent because I'm good at it, but it will take years before I'm actually at a point where I say, you know, this is not really good. And I'm happy to go to Australia and try to fool somebody into thinking that I'm actually one of them, because that's my ultimate goal. I never wanted to learn a language for the sake of learning a language. I to learn a language and speak it in such a way that people actually go like, Whoa, something's not adding up here. Is this guy from here? Like that always sort of excited me because being a content creator on Twitch and YouTube at the time, I had a lot of people that were even in my team. had moderators that were from the UK and it took them a really long time to realize that I wasn't from the UK. They were confused by that. They perplexed by it. And I still take part in that because I think that's like the ultimate, ultimate cheat code is like, It can be done, which is also what drives me to help motivate others basically. I've given you very long answer, but... Speaker 2: No, that's good. That's good. mean, we have all the time, so long answers are good for sure. But is the British accent ⁓ one that comes most naturally to you? Speaker 1: is the one that I find the most appealing. Speaker 2: Okay, so you tried to learn that one specifically. Speaker 1: Yeah, because it's first of all, I grew up with mostly British content. So I grew up with, Jeremy Clarkson, Top Gear, Bond movies and so on. I was never a fan of what the States were doing. And even though there's quite a few people in the States that make amazing voices that are great actors, I'm biased towards the Brits. And so when I was picking which accent I want to go for, it's like, well, it's a no brainer. Plus in schools, which is a good thing here in Europe, majority of schools from my knowledge will teach British, they're not teaching British accent, but at least you're writing. in the way the Brits will write. So the colour would have a U in there. So they're sort of priming you to go into that direction, but most people are scared of it because a badly done British accent is a really bad accent. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, but you made the right call. I was doing some preparations for our conversation today and I found a study that ⁓ people perceive the British accent as being the most intelligent one. So ⁓ if you have a British accent, I believe you have like 12%. It's like 12 % more likely that you'll get hired in ⁓ job searching progress. So I think you picked the right one. Speaker 1: that's really, really good because you see, I want to call myself, I like the word extemporaneous. I learned it recently. It means that you do stuff without preparing for it. So for example, I'll always come to a podcast unprepared. But what you've just pointed out there is something that I innately know, but I wouldn't be able to explain it because I didn't look into the studies. I didn't sit down and think, ⁓ is there actually scientific evidence that the British English is perceived better than the American English? But, you know, I got a comment a while back. The guy said, Hey, you speak English and 4k. I speak it in 360 P and I started laughing out loud, but this is kind of what you're describing is, know, if you, if you're an American and this happens to me a lot, cause I speak with people who are from the Balkans, especially like Serbia is a great example of this. lot of Serbians doing business with the States, closers, ⁓ setters, people working in sales. And what happens is that. The average American, unfortunately, with their knowledge of geography being very limited, not to mention linguistics, they perceive any accent that's Slavic as Russian. And of course, what have they been conditioned their whole life? Russian bet. So for them, that's the bad guy. And it's funny because you look at movies, the bad guy always has an accent. I mean, innately, we know this. Like we know that the British accent is the premium one. And it is also the OG one. That said, you can take the British accent too far. You could take it into the realm of sounding a little bit too posh. And it's like, oh, this is... fucking pretentious. I can't listen to that. And I think that we know this, which is why a lot of people in the, in the Balkans were in the Slavic part of the world are actually ashamed of speaking in English because they know deep down, they know it's being perceived as foreign. And this obviously goes for other people as well. It goes for Germans. It goes for Italians. It goes for French. And yeah, I feel that we should talk about this more. I think people should be aware of the numbers more. Cause I, I would have not perceived 12 % you said. Speaker 2: Yeah, it was one study. I pulled it up here. A 2023 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that job candidates with British accents were 12 % more likely to be rated as highly qualified compared to candidates with identical credentials and neutral American accents. Speaker 1: 12 % is a lot. Speaker 2: Yes, it's significant. Speaker 1: Yeah, even 2 % would have been substantial, but 12 % is like the amount of, because again, you look at input and output, the amount of input you put into something, how much do you get out of it? In great relation to what we were just talking about with content, I was thinking about how much time do I put into making a video? It's like, okay, took me an hour to record it. How many hours do people consume watching it? That's when you look at the stats, even a short TikTok video will assume hours and hours of content within the first couple of days. And so, Why do people want to go through the process of learning a new language, but they don't want to put that effort into learning a better accent. That has always been sort of like conflating in my mind. don't fully understand it. What is it harder? I mean, cause it shouldn't be, it should be pretty straightforward. You've learned your language. You might've even learned sub accents of your region. So for example, for me being from Slovenia, I can speak about, I would say five or six of the regional sub accents. And when I was doing that exercise practice, I realized that They're certain of these sub-region acts and I don't like, which means there's probably, as you pointed out, certain job opportunities or situations in life where you will just completely neglect a candidate because of the accent that they have. You would also, you know, I'll personally say no to a woman if the voice of her is not attractive to me. Cause that is part of it. Like sure, there's physical attraction, but there is also, well, you got to listen to this person for the rest of your life. ⁓ You know? It was maybe a very selfish decision in the beginning. But if you think about it, the one person you'll spend most of the time listening to, other than the spouse and your kids, be your own voice. So why not work on it? I want to have a voice that when I hear it, I go, oh my God, that does sound good. I want to be able to listen to my voice and say, that's hot. Same way that, I mean, people post photos on Instagram. Do you post the photos that you're proud of or do you post the photos you're not proud of? Why don't we the same thing with our voice? ⁓ Speaker 2: Yeah, it's harder to put a filter on your voice, so might as well put in the effort. ⁓ Yeah, and also that 12 % was compared to neutral American accent. So I would assume ⁓ that if it's compared to maybe a shitty Dutch accent like mine or maybe ⁓ a thick Slavic one or whatever, that the difference would be even bigger. ⁓ I would assume. As you mentioned, I think you briefly pointed out, you haven't looked at the research, but it is funny not all accents are created equal indeed because the very posh accent, ⁓ people do think that you're ⁓ more likely to be highly qualified or smarter, but less trustworthy on average if you sound super posh, which I found was kind of funny. ⁓ And then this one pretty shocking for the people from Birmingham. Their accent is called Brummie and ⁓ consistently ranks at the very bottom of British accent prestige studies. One study found it on par with silence for perceived intelligence. Speaker 1: Yeah. thing is UK has so many accents. It's insane. And I would be the first to say I've got no idea where most of them are. Like I understand the British culture pretty well. I understand a lot of the sub accents. can even replicate a couple of them, but it is so diverse. There's a lot of, how should I say? You know, for the States, we know that the primary ones. You've got the Valley Girl, you've got the General Florida, you've got the classic redneck in Texas, and you've got the Boston Italian accent. That would be kind of be most of it. Well, everything that's in between, yes, it exists, but most of us don't perceive it. This is where, again, Europeans are a little bit uneducated in terms of where stuff is in the States. Contrary to that, British accent, feel, unlike the American, has a very thin line between sounding like, you know, classic BBC English that we grew up with or received pronunciation and then being just God-awfully, you know, chat. It's like, all right, bro, like, well, could you learn to make like, speak like this? Whoa, what just happened there? It is actually a very thin line between that. And what tends to happen is people who live in the UK, I've engaged with quite a few of them. They've got that very, how shall I say, you know, day to day accent where they're just so used to it. They start shortening it, they start slangifying it. And what ends up, you know, it ruins the accent, in my opinion. sure. It's cool for that region, but it's not as nice to listen to. And of course, also the hype, top of the top British English is not as nice to hear. By the way, I wanted to say that, Emilia, when you pointed it out, you said, you know, my thick Dutch accent, you sound the least Dutch out of the Dutch people I've spoken to, next to maybe Max Verstappen. because like, I know what a Dutch accent sounds like. It's real thick. Because to me as an uneducated swine in terms of that region of the world. I've not been to the Netherlands yet. I really want to go. want to see Amsterdam obviously. But the Dutch accent I think is perceived in my opinion almost like you guys are trying to speak English with a little touch of German, but you've got some, you've got a verbal stuck in your throat. know, it sounds, it sounds interesting. Speaker 2: We say we sound a little bit like this. ⁓ Dutch people have this very strong accent and yeah, it's hard to get rid of. mean, there's a lot of sound. Speaker 1: You've the softness of it, you've got the gargliness, there's a lot that goes on. But I think at the same time you have the tendency of speaking very fluid English because I think there's something with the music of the language. The way that the Dutch speak is very similar to the way that the British people speak. You know, maybe I'm wrong, somebody will correct me in the comments as always, but I just find that, you know, an average Dutch person can speak way better English than the average French person, for example. But it also needs to be... how much of a cultural prick are you? Because the French are a great example of this because they are pricks. You learn the French language, they will just keep correcting you. like, ⁓ no, no, no, this is not the way the French is spoken. Meanwhile, with Spanish and Italian, you learn five square words like, ⁓ you're brother of mine, come here. Same with the Malkut. It's like, you want to be happy for people trying to speak your language as opposed to sort of pushing them down. I've done a couple of travels to Japan and every time I go there, I'll learn like secretly learn a word or two and then I'll just drop it out of nowhere and they'll go like, Oh, you speak a good Japanese, bro. I love that because that makes me want to learn more. But if you, if you know, plus like French language is a great example, cause you know how they count. Speaker 2: Well, yeah, I mean, Speaker 1: Yeah, but then you have numbers like 95, which I think is like something times 20 plus something. ⁓ Speaker 2: Yes, yes, every member from high school now. Yeah, terrible. Speaker 1: It's absurd. It's absolutely absurd. And that's funny because you've gone through the effort with your French of learning all of that shit, but then you're saying, ⁓ no, I can't learn the proper British accents. Like, come on, bro. Like you've put all that into your language and now you're gatekeeping it. You don't want to learn another one. So I think that I sort of draw the line, you know. Speaker 2: Yeah, no, but it's strange, right? Because I used to spend my summers in the US. And as a teenager, I would go to California. I used to ride BMX bikes there. And there was this summer camp called Woodward Camp. And every summer I would go out there all by myself and I would be surrounded by just American kids for like two weeks straight. And I was 15, 16 or whatever. I mean, I wish I recorded my voice. I wish I recorded my English back then, but I'm pretty sure it was good. Like, I'm so sure it was like the accent was pretty good back then because I was just like taking it all in and there weren't any Dutch people around me in order for me to like... Yeah, it was pretty easy to get rid of the accent, I feel like. And then... A few years after I went to Miami in my gap year, I spent six months in Miami ⁓ and I got like the Cambridge certificate ⁓ to get like my proficiency English. ⁓ But the thing is I was surrounded by Germans. I was surrounded by French people. I was surrounded by Dutch people. And then you have Miami, which isn't even like the majority of the people. speak Spanish who actually live there. If you turn on the radio, it'll be in Spanish, right? Not every radio station, but... ⁓ So I've noticed while I was there that my accent was getting worse. My pronunciation was actually hurting while I was actively there in Miami to become proficient in English. So I think like surrounding yourself... in the language you want to sound like is a very good tool ⁓ to master the accent. Speaker 1: It's not a good tool, it's a necessary evil. And we don't talk about it enough. We hear the expression, you're the sum of the five people you hang out with the most, and we kind of try to apply that to our friends and people we hang out with, especially if you're like myself, more of an entrepreneurial mindset or whatever. We don't do it for accents. And I always tell people, like, well, how much content are you consuming? What content are you consuming? We should write this stuff down. You should literally write down how many hours a day you were listening to what particular content. We don't know nowadays, could have just swiping brainlessly on social media, being surrounded by a bunch of stuff. I noticed this because if you put me into a group of a bunch of Balkan speakers, my accent starts to go away. When I was traveling to, let's say the States, and when I was in Japan, I was at one point surrounded by nine Americans. It like in an Airbnb, it me and nine Americans. Well, guess what? I started speaking more like an American. I just immediately introduced the R sound. I was like, all right, I'm going to copy what they're doing, which on one hand is a great thing because I get to practice the American accent. On the other, it's bad because now I'm stuck between two accents. sometimes people, even I listening back to my own voice on like a clip or something I'm sending to the editor, or sometimes I don't even see it. I'll send a clip to the editor. He edits it, posts it. I see it on social media as it's posted. I'm like, what accent is that? Somewhere in between American and British, you know? It was a little bit of Balkan. I'm like, ⁓ because I'm not actually spent listening to it. And we forget that speaking is a conscious thing. We, of course we want to speak unconsciously or subconsciously. We want to speak without having to think about it. But unfortunately, when you want to have an accent, you've to put in the effort before that becomes a routine. And as long as I live in Slovenia, as long as I'm surrounded by people who speaking a little bit more like this, that's a problem. Of course, it's not a problem because they all speak Slovenian language. speak. language so you might think, oh, it's not affecting me. Of course it is. The worst thing I've noticed, however, in speaking of podcasts, is that people in Slovenia running podcasts speak horrible Slovenian language. And for a long time it didn't make sense to me. I thought, wait a minute, you guys are really bad at English. You barely speak any other languages. You're running a podcast in your own native language. or you're giving a speech, for example, whatever it might be, you're using your native language, which you've used for 20, 30 years. It sucks. How can that be? And how could it be that I, and this isn't, I really don't want to sound cocky or arrogant here, but I could put my hand into fire. I swear on my grandmother's grave that you could put me into a Slovenian podcast right now and I will speak with cleaner Slovenian with less ums and ahs and filler words and less English words in there. than the average Slovenian would, even though I spend 90 % of my day in English, because I feel like I have to put in the effort for everybody else is just like, it's just speaking. I just go out there, I just speak. They never listen to themselves. Sometimes I feel like some influencers don't even watch their own content because they did, they would realize just how obnoxious their sound, how squeezy, which a lot of time right now is spent in my online community. We're talking about how to lower the voice. This is one of the things that everybody's been very interested in. because you're not naturally born with a low voice. And I noticed that a lot of people, they speak from here. You can almost hear them like they're squeezing the bottom of their face. It's like, oh my God, I cannot listen to that. It just does not sound attractive. Not in a woman, not in a man, not in a public speaker, not at a restaurant owner. It doesn't matter who you are, where you are. You should work on trying to make your voice sound a little bit more attractive, not to others, but to yourself in the first place. And I feel like Again, I've used the example of looks before. I mean, could you imagine not looking at the mirror ever? And you just go around the world, not knowing what you're wearing, what your hair looks like. I mean, it would be a really weird way to live life. So we have headphones, everybody's got equipment. We have a phone, can chuck it down, record a quick video, listen to yourself and be like, Hmm, yeah, I don't like this thing about my voice. Should I change it? Nah, I was born with this voice. We get nose jobs, get boob jobs, get guys are getting their legs extended so there can be a couple of years. You know, we paint our hair, we cut our hair, we get piercings and earrings and makeup and all that stuff. For some reason, changing our accent a little bit, working on our voice, lowering our voice, which by the way also has been proven to increase the chance of getting the job. Another thing that you can do, which doesn't cost you anything, literally it's free and it can increase the opportunities in your career. Nah, not going to do it. I don't understand it. You you put on a suit and tie and you make sure that you get the most expensive dress and that you look like a million bucks and then you open your mouth. All goes out the window in opinion. So if you're talking about extremes, I'd rather be a hobo with a nice radio voice, which I think there's a story out there on the internet. Some dude in America, you know which one, right? Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've seen the homeless dude at the traffic lights. He sounded amazing. Yeah. Speaker 1: Exactly. I'll take his life. I'll take his life over some rich influencer who's got, ⁓ my god, he voice, voice speaks like this. Welcome to another face. Like the Mickey Mouse escaped from jail. Like what's going on? ⁓ Speaker 2: Yeah, how did you, how did you, because when did you realize that it was important to have a proper accent? ⁓ When did you start working on it and how? I'm very curious to hear like, okay, you recognize that it's important to sound good. ⁓ You start to actively listen to your own voice. You start recording it, but like, how do you actually train it to sound better? Speaker 1: I'll start off with the first part of question, was how do I realize that? I knew it. Everybody inherently hates their voice. But to me that was like, hmm, seems to be something going on here. And I guess everybody else is okay with hating their voice. So I should be okay with hating my voice. That was my mentality back in the day. I was very, very socially conditioned. The process of changing the voice was really just an internal one. It was an internal struggle for, shit, I got to upload a YouTube video. First I got to record the YouTube video and then comes the most painstaking process. which is editing the YouTube video where you're stuck listening to your own voice for several hours potentially. And I was like, if I keep doing this, I'm going to have to do something about my voice because it's annoying me. Like I hate listening to my voice. And so the question was why? Why is that something? And you know, again, I'm going to go back to the looks thing because it becomes apparent to me now looking at the last probably two decades. We have been part of my fragile. We've been fucked. by what's happening with the image of people. Self-confidence is tanking. know, we've got people's depression rates are up and rising, anxiety rates, nobody likes the way they look, nobody's happy with themselves. And it almost feels like, as society we've said, that's okay. It's okay to not like certain things about yourself. And it's like, why? I've always been sort of... rubs to be the black sheep of the group. mean, the reason I went with the name Flip English is because I wanted to flip the thing upside down and do things a bit differently. And so I asked myself, well, what would happen? And this coincides with my process of changing the accent. And I'll explain this to you through the process of alter ego. Cause when I played the first YouTube video, I wasn't uploading as me as Tim. I was uploading as this online persona called the orange doom. Cause you have a video game name, so you can design that person around whomever you want. Again, great question for the gamers out there. or even for women who are playing Sims. Women love playing Sims because they can simulate families and all that stuff and drama. Speaker 2: Affairs and drowning people in the pool. Speaker 1: Yeah, whatever floats your boat. But do you design those people in an ideal shape? Right? Because you probably do. There's only two things that we do as people on Video Game Wars. We design the best possible scenario, the best possible character, the strongest, the fastest, the best. And okay, we have a couple of those where we like deliberately want to make it the worst that we possibly can. And that's great because that's exactly how humans are made to evolve and learn. Is we try both sides of it. Even for accent development, I'll say to people, Try to speak like you're the most extreme Balkan and then try to speak like you're the most British person. then eventually you'll see where is your pendulum on you leaning more towards the Balkans, the Islamic or leaning more towards the British and just adjust word by word. But I digress. I was playing the video game. I developed the persona. I started uploading content. I'm thinking to myself, hmm, I'm shy. I'm introverted. I'm a bit awkward at times. I'm not a great speaker. All these things. What if the character that I made in the video game, was the exact opposite. was arrogant, over the top, cocky, confident. What happens? And so I started developing that character. And over time I realized that it's a lot more fun. Life's a lot more fun when you're a little bit confident in cocking yourself. If you can be self-entertaining, you know, could lock me into a room for a couple of days with no contact with the outside world. I'd be like, yeah, it's fine. I got myself, me, myself and I, right? I can hang out. And I think the process of then changing the accent, lowering the voice primarily was all in an effort to fit that character. Now, how do we define that? could say, in current days and day and age, a great system for that is to be, I always say, pretend to be the person that you want to become. Visualize, right? I don't know what they call these things nowadays, manifesting. On to believe what you have. If I start doing the gym, I can look at myself and be like, yeah, I don't quite have a six-pack, but I can see myself having the six-pack. And that gets me to the six back a whole lot faster. It makes me feel like I'm already where I want to be building the business, getting the girl, sorting this, sorting that. mean, all of it is tied into our ability to be confident in what we've got. So confidence in our voice is a real slippery slope. Cause just saying I'm confident in my voice. That's not fixing your voice, but I'm confident that I can get the voice that I want to have. That is actually inspiring you to get better. The Sad truth is, it's never good enough. Everything and anything I've ever done and ever will do will never be good enough. I'll always fall a little bit short, but I'll keep on trying. The worst thing I can do is just say, it's okay the way it is right now. And that's where it stops. And I've got a lot of people that I know that stopped. And it started with video games. I didn't realize that at first. We were playing, we used to play the game called RuneScape. And in RuneScape, you have... skills going from level one to level 99. And to get to level 99, it takes a lot of time. In fact, it takes the same amount from one to 92, then from 92 to 99. When we were playing, no one even thought that you could get to 99. Right now, if you tell me, hey Tim, do you want to go and get a billion dollars? You want to get a small loan on a billion dollars? I don't think I can get there because I can't visualize it. But if I convince myself enough, nothing is impossible. The truth is I don't need a billion dollars, I don't care for it. But let's make it a million. Let's make it ten. Let's make it a house in the mountains in Switzerland. That's something that I fancy. In the video game world, I said that to my friends and we all were like, it's impossible to get a level 99. Of course it is. You've got a bunch of, you know, 10 year old, 12 year old kids that have just started playing the game. Maybe the highest skill they've got is level 50. They're nowhere close to that magical 99. And so it's like, it's impossible. And then I went out there, I had the audacity. said, well guys, I'm going to get 99 in cooking, which was one of the skills, which is no different than saying I'm going to get 99 in fitness. I'm going to get 99 in business. I'm going to get 99 in English accent. I'm going to get 99 in playing football. You could pick any of the skills available in life today. I chose the video game world of cooking, which was one of the most boring skills ever, but kind of fun. You go to the bank, you get some logs. You get raw lobster or shark or whatever it was. You light the fire, you click on the fire and then you start slowly cooking up those lobsters. Every couple of lobsters you burn because you don't have a high enough cooking level. I kept doing that for about six months. Six months later, I get level 99. Now, what happened to me, revelation for the rest of my life. All the friends that were playing at the time, they come to my 99 party. So we walk throughout the world of think it's Gielinor it's called in RuneScape. I'm showing off this skill cap which shows that hey, I've got 99 in a skill. After that week, more than half of my friends quit playing. that stayed then actually got 99s of the round. And that taught me a valuable lesson at a very early time in my life is that people will be Like when they see something great happen, instead of being driven by it, they're disappointed by it. Because I think initially they were not driven by enough. They didn't have hunger of their own. But also because there's envy and jealousy involved. They wanted it. They just weren't able to put the effort into it. And I see it in myself now sometimes. Now I've been building Flipping Lift for three years. I feel like the last couple of months have been very, very turbulent. On one hand really good. On the other hand, it's been kind of a struggle. There's a lot of expenses adjacent to it. There's a lot of... Something always breaks. Every day something breaks. Probably chances are that when we finish with this podcast, I'll have like five DMs to get to about stuff that broke. And even though all of that's going on, sometimes, yeah, I feel jealous. I feel jealous because I look at somebody's life, you know, who's playing on easy mode. Some American who can have a monetized TikTok account and that itself just brings them, I don't know, a couple of hundred bucks per week just because they upload content. And I don't have that privilege because I'm not. a citizen of the United States or a handful of countries where TikTok can be monetized. These little things. And so you could say, oh, you're being whiny, which is true. You could say, oh, it's an unfair game, which is just how life is. And so you just got to keep on trucking. And the worst thing is that you can help me by saying, yeah, you go on and tell me I believe in your business. The truth is I couldn't care less. No offense. I've learned to not take that opinion from others, even if it's positive, because it doesn't do much because then I'm teaching myself to always be conditioned on the approval of others. On the other hand, it's very easy for you to bet against me, which is where that lesson was learned in RuneScape because when I said, guys, I'm going to get 9th and 19th cooking, they laughed. The reaction was like, yeah, sure thing you will. know, when pigs fly, it just won't happen because it's impossible. And the truth is that when I achieved that, when that I'm happening is that their reality was crushed because their perceived reality was this is impossible. If he did it, That proves that he is beyond me. He's beyond my ego capacity and that's a huge issue. I think men out there who are listening to this need to start really cleaning out the ego from their head. And I say this as someone whose online nickname when playing that Orange Doom character was Ego Boy. People called me Ego Boy, right? So I know what, and now I think about ego. I still have quite a lot of it packaged underneath my skin and I like that, but I'm also innately aware of it. because it's a real poison. It's a real poison because instead feeling happy for others, you feel jealous. Speaker 2: Yeah. And, and okay. So, so you, you, you had this realization, but how do you practically start to work on your voice? How do you, no, that's, that's fine. We're, that's what we're doing. That's what we're doing. We're rambling, but I'm, I'm just going to, to keep asking. I'm very curious. How do you go about this process before you started teaching it? Right. Because first you have to figure something out all on your own and then we can go. Speaker 1: Yeah, I just- Speaker 2: and talk about how you teach others now, but first I'm just curious in your own personal journey, what does look like on a day to day basis. Speaker 1: truth is I don't know. I say that because when the first video was uploaded in 2014, I then had, started doing the YouTube channel. I later transitioned also onto Twitch. There was a period of time where unfortunately a lot of the video got deleted. So there's like a gap of about three years where no content exists. And it's very difficult for me to analyze what was going on in between from my memory. But I think I'm going to use a cop out here. I'm going to use Hormozia as my help, as my free call or out of line, whatever. forget what it's called in the millionaire. ⁓ Call a friend basically. Yeah. I'm going to say that it was volume that I simply did so much volume of speaking, consequently also analyzing my voice, rewatching that content when it was out online, that that on its own was enough to improve. Cause honestly that's, ⁓ let's, let's think of it in terms of fitness. All right. You want to go and have the perfect form in fitness. You go to the gym, you get a personal trainer. Speaker 2: a friend. Speaker 1: Coach, he'll tell you do it like this. Cool. Easy mode. What if you're on a deserted island? There's no one there, but you do have a mirror or a camera you can record yourself. Well, you'll just do the best you can, which is do the exercise, record it, analyze it, and change the practice. And if you keep doing that over and over and over again, I don't think, unless you're a complete moron, that you won't be able to figure out which version of the exercise, which type of repetition is the best. Based on how sore you will feel afterwards, based on how stronger you will become, based on the potential injuries you might incur during that process. We should just observe and react to it. And Homozi had one sentence, it was a quote he posted a long time ago, he said, most people if they just followed their own advice would be successful. And it's one of those tweets that hits you right in the ego and you're looking at it like you're foaming at the mouth because it's true and you know it's true and you disagree with it, but you realize you can't do anything about it. You can't disagree with yourself in that regard because somebody has just shown you the mirror. And I think of that every day. How much better I would be a business? How much better I would be at relationships? How much better I would be at this and that if I just actually took my own advice? Because I know what I should be doing, but I ain't doing it. And the only reason I'm giving you this elaborate of answers because people come to me nowadays. I'm trying to work on their accent. A lot of times they're like, well, Tim, what is the next step? And I'm like, honey, there is no next step. This isn't like step one, step two, step three, boom, your accent is magically gone. This is a listen to your voice for thousands of hours and slowly fix it. For some it's faster, for some it's slower. I'll be there to help you. I'll give you all the exercises I can possibly think of. But at end of the day, it's your voice and you're the one who has to work on it. There's no magical five step system that's going to fix that. And usually that sucks because it's a reality that innately they're aware. They know it's the truth. Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, it kind of reminds me of when people go to the gym and just expect to get in better shape just by going to the gym. ⁓ I see people like, I don't know what happened, man. I've been going to the gym like four or five times a week and it's, I see nothing. And then when you see them train, they'll be on their phones and they're like chatting and walking around and whatever. Not a single drop of sweat. So, I mean, if you want to see some results, you're the one that has to put in the work. ⁓ So I would assume that is the same for perfecting, ⁓ enhancing your accent. And what is it that people can do if they want to improve their accent? Like, what does the process look like? Without giving away all the sauce, of course, but... I'm just curious how people... Speaker 1: It's just blood, sweat and tears. You've struck a nerve there in a positive way with what you just said about the fitness industry. Because I had a period in between before, ⁓ going transitioning from video game addiction to ⁓ what I am now, which I almost said I come addicted to building a business, come married to it. There was a period of time where I was addicted to cycling and you know, COVID was there the time we were kind of lockdown. There's nothing better to do than just go out on the bike and ride. And that was also a time where was sort of dealing with certain bouts of depression and I realized that when you push your body to the absolute limits, two things happen. Any kind of physical exertion will completely overwhelm the mental capacity of pain. That's why always joke around, you tell me you've got depression, I'll kick you in the nuts. For about 10 minutes, you'll be fixed on depression, right? Because physical pain will be unbearable. Of course, that isn't the best way to cure stuff. I know there's people out there that require professional help, but... point being was that for me was a really meditative thing going out there pushing my body to the limit and realizing that I'm a lot stronger than I think I am that can do a lot more than I've actually convinced myself of doing. If you apply that to your accent to your voice how many people do you know actually this is a question to yourself as well how many times has happened to you that you've used your voice so much that you actually lost it. Speaker 2: ⁓ I mean, I have for sure, but that's a long time ago. I think it might be when I was still in university during fraternity introduction weeks with like five days of talking to people, but not very often anymore. Speaker 1: You know, how often do you feel sore from it? How often did you actually push your voice to its limits? I'm not suggesting that's the way to go about it. But if it is just hours that we're looking at, I have so many hours. This is funny for me because I never went, I did go to university to study English. I flocked out of it after about a semester. Looking back at it in the time that I wasn't at the university and all of my peers, classmates, whatever, were there drilling the theory, learning the international phonetic alphabet, you know, becoming better speakers of English. I was actually physically out speaking them because I just had, I have so many hours of yapping under my belt that no matter what they do now, they won't be able to catch up to me unless they work 24 hours on the radio, it won't happen. It's a numbers game the other day. And so even right now as we're in a podcast, this is kind of bad for me to say it, but the more that I yap, the better I'm going to become. It would actually be in your interest if this was a coaching session that I hopefully you would be speaking more and I'll be listening, that roles are reversed, right? But I feel like what we should be doing is spending more time pushing our bodies. This is why I made that reference. I said, it was great. We pointed out when I was doing cycling, I realized, okay, this is actually what training is like. Like I had days where I would come back from the bike and I'd be lying like half naked in the bathroom on the floor with a with a can of coke in my hand, slowly sipping on it because I needed to come back alive. I was like borderline dead. When you push your heart rate to 200 beats per minute, your vision becomes, it's darkness. You just see nothing. All the pain of your, there's no worries in there. There's no, ⁓ no, my girlfriend left me. No, there's nothing because it's just pain. When your legs are actually lactating, but people have not, I think it's lactating, like lactating pain. Or it's lactating what women have when they make babies. Again, sometimes I mix up words as well, which is one of my attributes. But the is that lactic acid in your muscles, when that gets, it burns. And so for me, it's hilarious because the average person I speak with, they have no idea where the limit of their body is. They have no idea what it means to actually train. know, what is popular nowadays is paddle. It's like, okay, so you've taken tennis, which is a physically pretty demanding sport. I'm not going to lie. I'm not a big fan of it. I think it's a boring sport, but it's still a pretty demanding sport. And then you've replaced it with, you know, this, this joke of a sport, my opinion, it might be a joke because you can't really train it. I've never seen anybody like really training. Paddle. But again, I digress because cycling is, you know, it's for crazy. It's really, you have to be wacko. have to be, something has to be missing in your head to go into cycling as a sport. But it taught me, oh, this is what training is actually like pushing your body to its absolute limit. If it was, if this was an engine, this is you pushing it to the maximum revs, full speed down the highway, risking life limb. You know, and that I think is the point where you realize if you were doing that with your voice, your voice would sound a lot better because you've actually pushed it to its limits. I have people call, join one of the workshops, for example, and I'll be there talking for about three, four hours in one go. They're like, ⁓ my God, how can you talk for so long? Like because I've trained my mouth and all the muscles and the vocal cords and whatever else needs to work to work. But you expect that your body will just get better from Like I said, know, 15 minutes of going to the gym. like, yeah, it works. 15 minutes of the gym. If you actually do the 15 minutes, if you do progressive overload, if you do time and attention, if you actually push your body to the point where it's like, is now sore, which is what I get frustrated because I see people and I'm willing to make a relation here. I'm willing to see people that do sports, but don't actually train. I can tell they've never done a proper full out training to the point where you're not going to walk the next day. Leg Day is a great meme in the fitness industry, but how many people have actually ever gone to the point where Leg Day was so bad that having to go down two sets of stairs felt like you were going to die? Those people that have not experienced that probably also don't have a good voice. That's just my opinion. Honestly, because I feel like there's no way that you're proficient in your voice if you're not also proficient in training your body. Speaker 2: Yeah, so in practice that would mean either recording yourself for the entire day preferably, or just start speaking for as long as you possibly can, record it, listen back and see which kind of words you're still struggling with, which kind of sounds are difficult. Because when I try to speak English, there are certain words that... are pretty easy to pronounce and then there's certain words that are just like they always come out like shit like I have a issue like the pronunciation of the word ruled like ruled like ruled white. Yeah. I mean, I just can't do it. I don't know why, but it's very difficult for me to pronounce it right. So I would like write down certain words and then I just like I to improve it and then sometimes I get it but ⁓ if I don't do it for a week I lose it again. Speaker 1: Well, the very first thing you need to start doing, if we touch upon what you've been doing so far, you've got to open your mouth a whole lot more. This is thing, like honestly, 90 % of the people that come to me, where I observe, I'm like, opening your mouth enough, which is equivalent of you doing, you know, a bicep curl, but you're like moving your hand by like two inches. It's not going to help. You got to do the full muscle rotation, right? You have to actually put in the full effort, but we conditioned because again, we learn our native language. I'm 29 years old. I've been speaking Slovenian for... I don't know when you learn it, but let's say he was 28, right? One year old, he starts to say mama or whatever. That's a lot of freaking conditioning. And so what happens with your language? It gets better, better, better. By the time you're like, you know, in your teens, you've gone through school and they've taught you all the theory stuff. Then you're like, okay, I get it now. I can speak my language comfortably wherever we go. And that just deteriorates. It gets worse and worse. You look at the average politician in any country, would you say that they speak great English, would you say that they're really eloquent and have a great voice, a low voice, or is it just complete utter bullshit that they're spewing out there? And it hurts me because it's like, this is your native language. I know people who, I've got an Italian friend. He was born and raised in Italy. He'd been working as a chef in Slovenia for like the last probably 10 years. And he's now going to Belgrade, to Serbia. This guy speaks better Slovenian than the average Slovenian does. And he's fricking Italian. He speaks three languages, four languages fluently. I'm always blown away by that because I honestly do find it insulting when you have a native language. This goes double obviously for people that speak English because they usually speak one language and they're not even in command of that one language. I find that like a joke. I find it like in the sense that, you know, could you imagine a, it's going to be a horrible, horrible comparison, but I'm thinking out loud, you know, you have an abled body person. who's being outperformed by a dude in a wheelchair. That means kudos to the guy in the wheelchair, but like, what are we doing? And it is actually ironic because this exact comparison often makes me realize just how lazy and how privileged I am because I am able-bodied. I've got four limbs, I can go around, can do whatever I want. And there's people that don't have that privilege. And some of the time when we're whining about stuff and complaining about stuff, we're complaining about stuff that we have a privilege over. like the whole Western society is the same thing. It's like, Oh no, I'm not sure if my flight to Dubai is going to depart because of the situation in Iran. Kids being blown up and it's a legitimate problem. I'm not even joking because I'm supposed to be good by in like three, four days time. And I'm concerned because I don't know if my flight's going to go, but I don't like the fuck. You're so privileged. I digress. get it. You see, I go through a Speaker 2: No, I completely understand what you mean. And you mentioning the ⁓ Italian friend reminded me of something that I wanted to discuss, which is when I hear an Italian guy speak English and he has an Italian accent, I think like, that makes sense. It's Italian guy. kind of cool in a sense. ⁓ Same like for German. sounds less cool maybe, but I think like, that makes sense. He's a German guy. So when he speaks English, well, yeah, he's going to sound a little German. However, when I hear people with a Dutch accent, which is my own, that's when I cringe. And that's when I was like, ⁓ God, do you hear like the terrible Dutch accent? So I'm just curious whether like Italians have that same feeling or Spanish people, whatever. when they speak English ⁓ or they hear other people from their country speak English and then when they hear, I don't know, Dutch person and they go, yeah, it's normal. He's a Dutch guy. I don't know. It's always, it seems weird to me. I don't know if you've had people, if you've heard that before. Speaker 1: ⁓ you cringe at the Dutch accent because you cringed at your accent. Yes. If you loved your accent, you would, I mean, you might still cringe at them to be completely fair, but truth is I would never cringe at the British accent because I love the British accent and I love my accent. I still cringe at people using Slovenian English. Whenever I hear somebody from Slovenia trying to do an interview in English or any politician, I cringe because I still hate it. I hate the way they speak. So Of course to you, the Italian accent sounds amazing to me, to me as well. I opened up Instagram and there's a guy, ⁓ today we're going to make a nice a carbonara. I'm like, ⁓ yeah, what's that? Right. But if I'm Italian, I'll be like, ⁓ mama mia, I don't like it. It doesn't sound good. And so they do come to me and try to fix, fix that accent. It's always just about the perception. And, know, I'm going to get flack for this because I feel on one hand, yeah, we should all be just proud of our heritage and there's something nice about accent. They don't always work. I was just saying the Italian accent works amazingly for food. Spanish accent works amazingly for food. But would you, you know, with the exception of maybe Ferrari and Lamborghini, but if I'm buying a car, I want the person to have a German accent because I'm going to trust them more. Cause whatever reason I'm associated in the German accent with their engineering perfections, like, this is a new Mercedes or the BMW. It's the biggest engines, the V12, takes, guzzles all the gasoline five minutes around the Nurburgring. Here's my money. it. I trust you the same way that you perceive the British accent as the premium one. I feel like different accent perform for different tasks. And so you can actually alternate them depending on what you're trying to do. When I travel, I will actually go for the American accent. I don't like the American accent, but if you're on a plane and they're asking you what do want to drink and you've got the option between water, water, Water and water. If I just say I want water, they're going to understand me. This is the clearest pronunciation of it. Before you mentioned the word world. Now I personally went for the British one because world is easier for me because I don't have to say the R. But if you go for the American pronunciation, you've got to have to go world, world. ⁓ my God. That's so much happening in the mouth. Your tongue has to twist and turning in all different spaces. And that's the mental gymnastics. That's no different than me saying, Hey, drop and give me 50 pushups. You'll be like, bro, I can barely do five. Well, yeah. So you have to practice. And if you keep practicing it by the end of next week, probably be able to do 50 in 10 sets of five. Right now it's going to suck. So we work with clients and they've got the problem with the, the world is a classic one and girl is another one. ⁓ it's just drill, drill, drill the R sound. And it's pretty simple for American accent because every R that you find any letter R is going to be the same hard R. ⁓ it's hard year, girl, world, words. Right. And so you just practice and routine and rinse and repeat. For the British, the length of the vowel. It's a word. It's a world. It's hard. You just lay it, stretch it out like an accordion and problem solves. But that takes a lot of effort because one more thing I've realized with people that they find very, very difficult to do. is actually lengthening words without making them sound awkward and having pauses. People don't like pauses nowadays. I've probably used a couple of filler words throughout this conversation. I've probably used a couple of non words as well as ums and ahs, significantly less than the average person uses. The truth though is that you're not innately aware of it. I may be confidently saying this, but until I see the actual recording, I'm like, ⁓ God, what are we, what are you saying? You you used so many of them. I do try to be innately aware. I do try to be in charge of my voice and not get too caught up by thinking, which is another great attribute that I think we could probably expand onto. A lot of people think when they speak. lot of people need to have, you know, a speech prepared, know, the bullet points and, no, what if I don't remember what I wanted to say? And I mean, there's different ways to say what you want to say. There's no need for it to be scripted and prepared. Which is what I notice sometimes, even with podcasts and sometimes yes, podcasts need to be prepared a little bit. People's attention span is low. Can we just have a conversation that's raw? I like that. I miss that. It's one of my favorite things to do nowadays. I'm going to try to do it more. I've even got the, ⁓ the meta glasses and I hope I can take advantage of it on some travels, but having wild random conversations with strangers. There's, there's no repercussion. To be honest, look, we've been chatting for an hour. I don't. actually know you. I know nothing of you and yet we can have a lovely conversation. And if I find you even more interesting, I'll start asking some questions and return towards the of the conversation. The truth though is there doesn't need to be anything between us for the conversation to be interesting. This is what I find interesting. This is why I immediately said, yes, I want to be on the podcast with a complete stranger I've never seen. Sure, I know you're journalist and know that you're Dutch. That's basically all I know, right? I love that because that opens up a realm of interesting questions, interesting conversations, interesting points of view. It does have to be scripted, prepared and, ⁓ yeah, this is the person you'll be talking to. I like a little bit of that. Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah, no, mean, I agree. mean, that's why I decided to go back to the basics and have these sorts of random discussions ⁓ because, yeah, just topics I find interesting. And this is definitely one of them. You mentioned filler words ⁓ earlier. There ⁓ we go. That was one. I remember when I worked for the Dutch News. when I was going on the radio for the first time. And when I got feedback from one of the people that worked there, was like, hey, try to use less filler words next time. So what I did was I just started recording myself yapping for five minutes at first, then 10, then 20. And then eventually I would do like 30 to 40 minute just rambles. And every time I was tempted to use a filler word, just let, just pause. And I remember doing that for a while and it like improved significantly. But then also I thought I was good to go, stopped doing it for a couple weeks and then the filler words came back. So it's like continuous improvement and continuous work that you have to do in order to... Yeah, keep mastering your voice. And this was in my own language, mind you. This was in Dutch. So, Speaker 1: It could also be that the language, I'll go back to the French one, because French have a huge problem with non-words, the ums and ahs. So filler words would be like, know, like, you know, like filler words are actual words, non-words are just sounds that we make. The French is a big problem for this. again, it might be related to the Dutch, where it's part of the way they speak. French love to do this, like, ah, these weird like glottal sounds they make, whatever, throat sounds. I think that makes its way into the language as well when they speak other languages. I would also wager that the choice is a conscious one. It's an identity one. You can just identify. I'm not going to use filler words because the biggest problem is it's like choice. Choice is like me saying, I'm not going to smoke cigarettes today until we go out and we get drunk and then I'd really fancy a cigarette. Somebody's offered me a cigarette. Let me have a quick couple of puffs. Right. Boom. Next. I know I'm smoking again. It's way easier for to be a actual like deliberate identity shift of character by saying, I'm an individual who identifies as someone who doesn't smoke. Way easier to do. Way easier. And you can help yourself out with religion if you want to. You help yourself out with your version of faith. can... A million different ways, but this idea, oh, new year, new me, I'll go to the gym now. New year, new me, I'll have a new accent now. It's not enough. I have to identify with the accent. And this is also something I've noticed. people reverting because they make the changes, you go through the process, you start speaking a bit more like let's just say yourself, you were in America, so you would be surrounded by Americans, you start speaking a little bit more like an American, you move back home, boom, the Dutch accent takes over because it's not enough to just choose it, it has to be a full identity shift that goes on. And I'm noticing that the same thing is applicable now to business. I have to actually start changing and I had to change my personality a lot to fit. the idea and the collective mindset of a businessman. Because there's certain choices you have to make that are not your choices. They're a bit wild, a little bit out there, they're risky. You're spending a lot of money on advertising. You're launching products that you don't know if they're going to work. You're testing and trialing and employing people and it's way easier if it's not a choice, if it's just how it is. And I say this because for example, I don't drink alcohol practically ever. I used to drink... Like a normal person, was never an alcoholic, but I find it way easier to just say, just identify somebody who doesn't drink. That doesn't mean that I never drink, but it's way less likely that I'm to go on a, you know, seven day fender bender or to help to educate yourself. know, those stats that you mentioned at the beginning. For some people like myself, I think you're probably the same. Those stats need to be put into a visualized state. When you say, ⁓ If I have a British accent, I'm 12 % more likely to get this. Hmm. That makes a lot of s***. That is convincing enough. When I was reading the book, Why We Sleep, by Dr. Matthew Walker, he said, well, how long does it take for alcohol to clear out of your blood? My mind was like, probably 24, 48 hours. It's like two weeks. Like s***. Which means that if you drink alcohol today, your sleep will be impaired, potentially up to for the next two weeks. And when I read that, It just justified that decision to change the character and what I do even more. And that's to say that I'm far from optimized human being. do so many things I have to change when it comes to your voice. It needs to be a choice, but a character shift. Which is why I also say, say goodbye to the culture that you have. Say goodbye to the language you have. One big convolution I don't understand is you will not forget your native language. If you were, if you were any, I don't know, if you're above the age of 25, you were born and raised in that country for those 25 years and you used to communicate primarily with that language, you could move to the other side of the world for five years and come back home and probably nothing will change. You'll, you'll pick the language up as if you haven't spoken it for a couple of hours. It's like riding a bike, but for some reason people are scared of it. It's like, all into the new language. I find it funny when you have someone, especially for all the people that might understand it, but your device, it's your phone, your computer. I was working with one client once. We had to help them set up the Google calendar or something. And so I asked them to share my screen. lo and behold, their computer is in Hungarian. I'm like, change it right now. You don't need your native language on the computer. It's, know, because even like that you learn. Again, I go back to RuneScape. RuneScape is a classic case of a game where if you don't use or speak English, you're screwed. I don't know if they've changed it now, if you can change the translation, but back then that's it. It works in English. So you're forced to use it. You need to figure out that there's a quest at the start of the game, which is called Cook's Assistant. It was the first quest you do. You enter a castle, there's a cook there and he's like, he's like, man. The Duke of this region has his birthday and I burnt the cake. Please help me get a new cake. So like, okay, what do I need? He's like, you need an egg, you need some flour, and you need to milk a cow. So that is your first quest. And you have to go around the world and guess what? You need a bucket to get milk from the cow. And so you got to find the bucket. And they're like, you see the logo and you're like, ⁓ this is the picture of the, ⁓ that's what a bucket is. You start connecting visually and it's a great way for kids to learn. Like I would personally make. RuneScape is a mandatory game for everybody to learn English. It is also a very autistic game, know, it does require a little bit of, you have to be a little bit autistic. I'm definitely somewhere on the spectrum, which is why I like the game. It's very repetitive, but it teaches you. You get to see what the process is like. And just that process, I think, would help people a lot. By going out there and immersing themselves in the language. I know this is hard to do. You know, I'm not going to do that for Japanese. Because guess what? The symbols are different. So it's not going to work. But for most of the other cases, a lot easier. I'll be in Barcelona tomorrow after our conversation. I don't speak Spanish, I know a couple of words. But I'm willing to bet if I just moved to Barcelona for a year and I'm forced to start communicating with the bakeries and restaurant people in the language, not just will I learn the actual language a lot faster, but I will master the accent because I'm copying the most authentic people possibly there. Sure, it might be mixed with Catalan because that's the sub-regional accent, but still. The only downside is I won't know how to read and write, which is kind of a big irony because we were brought up this idea that there's people out there that are illiterate. We're still like, Oh, what a, what an idiot. mean, this was, are you a peasant? Were you like a slave? Like what was the reason that you were, you're an uneducated person. You don't know how to read and write. What did that person speaks better than you do? What are they more eloquent? know, people that look at me and say, Oh, Tim, you your grammar sucks. Because my grammar sucked. I suck at grammar. I suck at spelling. You put me on a spelling bee contest, I'll be the first one out. But no idea. Without Grammarly extension in Google, I'm screwed. Having to write stuff on a piece of paper, I'm screwed. They're using my voice. Speaker 2: ⁓ Matters less, I feel like in the digital age at least, depending on... Well, you obviously help a lot of people improve their accents. I believe you do British and American accents that you help people with, correct? Correct. ⁓ What kind of clients do you have? Why do people come to you? What is their main reason to improve their English? Speaker 1: I want say the main reason they come to me is because they see the advertisement and they're like, did I just watch seven minutes of an advertisement? Because I try to make the stuff fun. I try to make it entertaining. I try to make it somewhat educational and triggering that inner fear and knowledge that they don't like their voice without being too offensive. It doesn't always work. I get a lot of hate comments from people ⁓ calling me an idiot and what else because, God forbid I try to change somebody's voice. Speaker 2: Welcome to the internet. Speaker 1: Yeah, they're not wrong mostly, but they're just thinking at it from the wrong perspective. And I think the reason they come to me is because they see someone who's actually done the journey, whereas English has always been predominantly taught by native speakers. And so the problem is like, yeah, the native speaker knows the source the best, but they don't know how to get there. It's a bit of a problem. You wouldn't ask the eagle how to fly to the top of the mountain, right? Cause you're not going to fly. got to climb over there. Wrong animal to ask. You might want to ask a goat because a goat will know how to get there. And so I feel like we're asking the wrong source. We're trying to go to the wrong individuals. They don't see that. And I feel like we've cracked something with Flip English where people are finally starting to see why it's important, how it can be applicable to them, what kind of percentage of return it can bring. if that's an investment you're looking to make. And most importantly, it's actually from someone who understands the problem. And my only thing that I really want to do right now, because I'm hungry, because I'm a little bit crazy, because if I got 99 in RuneScape, I want to do it in real life as well, which is business related, is to crack the system and be the best that a possibly can be. And that means going beyond just a tiny country. Slovenia has got like 2. something million people. is nothing. The whole balcony region, sure, it's got more people, but why not go even bigger? And I realizing that this issue exists worldwide. Not to mention countries like India, which is for me, it's an uncrackable place because I don't understand the language enough. I'm doing my best to try to see it and what are the sounds they're producing. And into that, I realized it's a very, very simple thing we're doing. When I started, I thought this is some complex prob- program, you know, we need to develop step by step system. Honestly, it's just find the words that make you sound more X language, reduce them, find the words that we can use to make you sound more British, more American, increase those. And just rinse and repeat. It's literally word by word. And for me, the journey started with the word word. The way that I say word in British English is in my opinion, perfect to my ears, to me it's perfect. So I'll just find Other words like the word, word, like hard, that I can attach to it. And then suddenly that one word of perfection starts to infect all the others. So it's like a positive little virus that gets spread across the English language. And in the beginning, of course, it's scary because to people it seems like, ⁓ my God, there's 70,000 English words. How can I possibly learn them all word by word? Because of compounding effect. Same with it, you're not going to become a millionaire from investing overnight, but if you just do a little bit every single day, you go to the gym for 20 minutes a day, right? You read 10 pages of a book a day, suddenly that shit culminates into something greater. By the time that happens, everybody who's been observing you will be shocked because they're not observing you throughout the process. They're just observing your moments of the process. It's easy now looking at Warren Buffett and being like, ⁓ my God, this guy's got billions. Yeah. Well, he started when he was like age seven or something crazy like that. That's the thing you don't see. You got to build in the shadows and your accent unfortunately can't really be built in the shadows unless you do one thing. I forgot to mention this, but it's in the top of my head. What's the most effective way you can do for your voice? Good quality headphones, a microphone that's plugged into some type of digital audio converter and listening to your voice in real time, which is what I'm doing right now as we're speaking. You're using AirPods so you can hear my voice, but you probably can't hear your Speaker 2: voice. No, no. Speaker 1: Exactly. So you're now forced to wait until the end of the conversation, which could be an hour long, could be two hours long, could be five hours long. Then you got to look at that conversation, analyze it, and then apply it for the next conversation you'll be doing. Meanwhile, I'm actually self-correcting my voice as we go along. I'm literally adding real-time listening as we're also speaking. So if we go back to the concept of a thousand hours, which makes you an expert, 10,000 hours that makes you a master, The thought process for me was the following. It's not just speaking that helps. If I spent today 10 hours listening to YouTube videos, I will be adding to my English. It just won't be 10 hours for 10 hours. It will be reduced. Like we can say maybe 20 % of that will actually be applicable. If I'm just speaking, that's one to one. One hour of speaking is one hour of speaking. But right now I'm speaking and listening at the same time. I'd be willing to wait. That's like. a double multiplier. It's like I'm in a video game and it's a double experience weekend in RuneScape as they used to do it. Because every act that do will give me double the experience. And if I imagine I'm doing this pretty much six hours a day, every day, I go on coaching calls with the headphones, I record content with the headphones, record ads sometimes with the headphones. Now you take a regular human being and you try to get them to catch up to my hours. Again, volume. Like Kormozi said that so well. do so much volume that it would be unreasonable for you not to be successful. And so that's the way I approached English. It brute forcing it essentially. What we're trying to do with Flareup English now is find what has worked for me in the past to shorten that timeframe. And I plan to do what I plan to do in the future is to learn other accents, maybe even learn another language if we can, but see like, I speed run it? Cause I find, I find that to be an interesting concept. Like how fast can you get there? Cause A coaching package or a coaching program is usually at least three months. I think less than three months is very difficult to get proper progress, but I'm crazy enough to believe that it can be done. If the person is coachable, if the person is ready to commit to surround themselves in language, create content, listen to it, observe, analyze, I think you can do it in a month. ⁓ Speaker 2: There must have been some examples of famous actors who are like preparing for a role or something and that's sometimes that I'm like really amazed that you hear a certain actor speak their native tongue for the first time and is like, ⁓ this guy's Australian or wait, this guy's British because you've only seen him or her play in American movies. Speaker 1: But it works for them not because they're talented or because they're good at accents. It works for them because they're preparing for a role. That's what we're making. Well, not that they're putting in the work, but they're in the mental capacity of, know, again, could I learn to speak Italian like an Italian? I can. How long will it take? Probably two years. But if you give me a role in a movie, you pay me Speaker 2: work. Speaker 1: millions of euros to do that. And you give me a definitive character. You say you will now be playing Enzo Ferrari. It's like, ooh, that's a different kind of approach. Now, it's tangible. I'll be spending most of my time trying to get into the mind of Enzo Ferrari. That's the challenging part. The language, the accent is now come naturally because if you can imitate that performance, you'll also create the accent. I often joke around that when I try to do accents, Speaker 2: Because Speaker 1: It's not like I'm just doing an accent. Oh, you'd like me to start speaking like a Scotsman? I just switched to different accent. No, no, no. I'm switching to different personality. Because you speak different languages. You look like a different person. You're trained to... Everything changes. If you actually observed, if you took that clip and you're like, some person observed that, it'd be like, okay, hands move differently, eyes move differently, head moves differently. You can't do the Indian accent without doing the head. It's part of it. Can you do the Italian accent without using the head? Mamma Mia. It's not just intonation. It's not just the sounds that we use. It's how the whole body perceives it. And it's amazing to see when you've got, there's a couple of women that love doing these videos and they perform very well for reasons because on women, character is even so much more exaggerated and easy to observe when it changes depending on the accent. And I saw, you know, there was a girl that spoke, I think it was like the video was in Spanish, Italian, French. Slavic language and English and so in the same video she speaks all the five languages when she goes from English to Slavic It's like a completely different person. She looks different It's even been proven that obviously different languages at an early Point of your life when it's still developing changes the shape of your skull Your skull changes your jaw changes because different muscles are being used I think of that all the time So it's not enough think I'm going to speak in a different accent. No, you got to speak in a different culture. That's the, that's the difficulty behind it. Like if I want to do a redneck accent, like a real, you know, someone from downtown Alabama, like I really want to, well, guess what? In my mind, I got to be a little bit racist. I got to be a little bit, you know, you want to be a real redneck? Got to go, got to go deep in this arse, you know? And that's the problem because it's difficult for people to do. To me, there's, there's nothing more amazing than seeing a movie like, and thinking of Rednecks and the infamous word that we can't use on the internet, Django Unchained, one the most incredible movies ever. Where, yeah, there's a lot of use of that word, but brilliant acting all around. I think of Matthew McConaughey's of Midwestern accent. I think of all the James Bond movies that we've seen that have got amazing accents as well. All of it is doable because they're fully immersing themselves into the character. Which means for the time being they have to be a little bit cuckoo. One of the best maybe roles ever played in the history of humanity, in my opinion, was Heath Ledger's Joker in In the Dark Night. Like that dude fully immersed himself in the character. He was putting on his own makeup, he was wearing it off set, he was really getting... He was the character. There's no other way to put it. And we should be striving to do the same thing if you want to work on your voice. Now, of course, if for people this sounds like it's too extreme, then let's just use it for your native language. But what would that mean to me? For me, it would mean that if you speak Dutch or if I speak Slovenian and we don't speak it on a good enough level, even though we've been speaking it our whole lives, that maybe our character has not been properly developed. And the average person, again, we go back to the mirror, they look themselves in the mirror. Do you like the way you look? Do you like the way your muscles are shaped? Do you like the way you speak? If any of those things were answered no, turns out it's a character problem. Also the accent won't fix it, which is a huge deal that I suffer from. I get clients, we hop on a call, we're chatting and they're they're convinced they've got to change their accent. And I have to convince them that they don't, which sounds counterintuitive because I should be out there selling them. I should be like, yeah, of course you need the accent work here, give me your credit card. I want to take care of your money. It's like, no, cause I see they have a deeper problem. There's always a deeper rooted problem that goes on and it sucks. It's because I've spoken to some, I've heard some really, really bad stories. mean, some, some points where I was like, this is turning into a therapy session and not a coaching call or a sales call. I would feel guilty about selling something to someone that when they don't need it. If there's a deeper rooted problem, you've got confidence that that's rotting from within. We can't fix that by just changing your voice. won't do anything. The same way that if somebody has a deep rooted problem, a disease or something, you've got a wound, you can't just slap a bandaid on top of it if it's infected. We've got to clean out the wound, we've got to get to the root of the problem. We've got to take the bullet out, we've got to fix it. And unfortunately, humans have been conditioned to just slap on a bandaid and boom, Bob's your uncle. We'll fix it some other day. And so they come to me, a lot of people come to me. And my operations manager's always... annoyed with me. like, why didn't you sell them? I'm like, because they didn't need it. They didn't need it. I feel bad about selling somebody something that they don't need. Cause I see it. Cause I talked to them and I do a bit of a psychological breakdown. I just realized this isn't the source of their problem. And then that self analysis has to be used on myself as well. In my shittiest darkest time of my life, I was about to get fully employed as a chef in a kitchen. was still under I hadn't finished my graduation. had no idea what I want to do in life. I was lost. got through a breakup and looking back at it, what sort of kept me afloat was realizing what is the core of the problem? Okay. It's that you're not creating is that you're not working on your dreams. In fact, your health will tell you there's a period of time two years ago. I think it was the end of 2024. I want to say where I had just flown him back from Japan. That was my second time there. Loved it. It was a great trip. I go back to work. I start getting these insane migraine attacks. Such strong migraine attacks that if you gave me a shotgun in those moments I would have blown my head clean off. I wouldn't care. It was just so bad. Speaker 2: Holy shit. Speaker 1: Deep within me, I felt this is because you're not working on Flip English. Because for that time, I was just so occupied with the job that I had. I was so preoccupied with dreaming about the things that have to be done. But I had turned off my advertisements. I wasn't developing my product. I wasn't solving my funnel issues. I just sort of put the project on hold. Because New Year was around the corner. I New Year's going to fix everything. I'll be a different person then. I started getting these migrant attacks. Like deep down, I felt. This is because you're not working on what you should be working on and you know what you should be working on. As soon as I started to work on that, problem with Speaker 2: So good. And what's next for Flip English and you and your business? Speaker 1: Yeah, first and foremost, it's an evacuation out of Europe, which is difficult to do again. Speaker 2: Bermanly or just traveling? Speaker 1: No, for people listening to this, obviously right now Dubai's airspace is closed due to the situation. Everybody's trying to escape Dubai. I'm trying to get into Dubai. I've already paid for the company to be opened. I'm migrating everything there, but I need to enter the country to finish the visa process, the Emirates ID, the... Well, there goes a non-word. There's something else needs to be done. Yeah, bank account needs to be open, right? Phone number needs to be obtained. And you need to do that in person. When everybody's trying to evacuate from that region, I'm trying to desperately get into it. I'm that meme, you know, let me in, let me in. These are not willing to literally drive there with a car or a tank. But the reason I want to get out of Europe is quite simple. It's not so much tax optimization. ⁓ is logistics. Unfortunately, EU is very strict with their regulations. Slovenia is very complicated in terms of invoices. As the company is growing, as I'm... starting to hire more coaches to work with me as the ad spend starts to reach, you know, proper five digit numbers per month. A lot of the money feels like it's hemorrhaged. Uh, I'm not the kind of person to say, I don't want to pay taxes. love the concept of paying taxes. I love the concept of paying and that actually gets put to good use, but unfortunately it's not being put to good use. And I feel like flipping this as a brand right now, I've worked on it blood, and tears for three years. It's finally started to make some, some proper money. And I feel like. If I stay here, I'll be just voluntarily giving it all away. And like it or not, everything I've built, everything that my voice has developed into, was done by myself. And so I feel like I don't owe anyone anything. I don't sell, I don't need trucks to drive on these roads that my taxes pay, don't need... Nothing was given to me from the government, from the country, from the school system. I owe it to... RuneScape and War Thunder and YouTube and video games and my own audacity to work on it. because of that, I'm in search of a better life, of a bigger capacity. I love to travel. I want to meet other cultures, which means I also want to live in a place for the time being that has good connections. Slovenia does not have good connections, which means I can't easily fly. You know, if I want to go from Slovenia to Japan, I got to drive literally like... two hours to an airport in Italy from Trieste and then fly to Rome and do a connecting flight and then fly 12 and a half hours to Japan. If I lived in a place like Dubai, it's literally a nine hour flight straight from there. Not to mention that as we've been growing for the last couple of months, I've realized that there's a lot of people that require help in Dubai. It is filled with Indians, Pakistanis. It's filled with Russians, Ukrainians. It's filled with a lot of Europeans. And again, a quote from Hormozi. solve rich people's problems, they pay better. I'm not doing this for the money. My biggest, biggest dream is to help everybody speak better. But in my mind, if I can one-on-one solve some richer people's problems, it gives me the funds to be able to also help the average day person. if I stick trying to solve the average day person, especially here in Europe, especially in the Balkan region, where the buying power is relatively low, where people are still not trustworthy, where they don't even think they've got a problem. ⁓ yeah. I would be working a lot, earning very little, and keeping probably nothing. And I'm still young-ish, right? And I'd love to take a chance. I'd love to build something bigger, and I want to make Flip English a brand that can be spoken about on a bigger stage. ⁓ Speaker 2: That's awesome. My brother lives in Dubai. So if you make it out there, say hi to him for me. But yeah, no, I completely agree. I think if you really want to help more people, a lot of people have the order backwards. It's like, no, I want to stay small because I like helping people. Imagine how much people you can help if you actually made decent money. So I think it's a solid approach and ⁓ apart from the missiles and the struck down drones that have been crashing in Dubai, it is also a very safe and nice and warm place. So I think it's a good decision. Thank you so much ⁓ for today. This was really awesome. Where should people go if they want to? improve their English or just follow you on your social media, see what you're up to. Speaker 1: Of course, so Instagram is where I'm the most active. It's where I post the most. ⁓ That's Timotei Boniface. So hard to say in English, unfortunately. But you can always get the most up-to-date information at flip-english.com. We've got, currently on the homepage, a beautiful quiz, which means you fill out the quiz. It'll tell you exactly what product is best fit for you, what kind of solutions can be put into place. And I'm constantly... trying to evolve, to add new materials. We're working on two different school communities. We've got the English Accelerator, which is sort of more of an accent focused one. And then we also have English for entrepreneurs, where my desire is to collect people who are hustlers from all around the world. I actually have chats. Because at end of the day, language is boring. This is the brutal truth. Language, language learning is one of the most boring things on the planet. I was never at one point excited about learning a new language, but I'm excited about using it. So think languages shouldn't be learned, they should be used. And what better way to use language than by talking about things you're actually passionate about. And that's what the world needs more of. That's why I even started this. That's my ultimate desire is to get more people out of their comfort zone to speak the language in a nicer way, which makes it nicer to listen to. And my dream is that there'll be more voices like my own so that my ears, when I hear them, makes me shut up. I would love to hear more people that make me shut up and just want to listen. And so... Yeah. Again, a very selfish reason, but at end of the day, think a little sprinkle of narcissism goes a long way.