Transcript
Tristan Tate here, at the end of
a wonderful 2025. I've decided, for the first time ever this year, to sit down and speak face to face
with some students of the real world.
A lot of people talk about the real world or university.com, and there's a massive misunderstanding about exactly what it is.
that we do.
These interviews are not pre-scripted. I've run no questions by him. I've just invited him here to my house in Dubai.
and I'm gonna ask him about his experiences.
What's your name and where are you from? I'm Yanis, I'm 32 years old and I'm from Greece originally.
Nice. Well, good to meet you, Yanis. Nice to meet you, too.
So,
Talk a bit about your
life and your financial situation and your kind of work schedule and your resume before discovering
The real world.
So pretty much I went through the full matrix system. Nice. Yeah. I went to university, I dropped out.
Then I packed my stuff, went to Germany, I started working in the car industry for Volkswagen.
And I was mostly working night shifts because it's more money. It's double tariff. And of course I was scrolling TikTok.
And then I found back then
you were allowed on TikTok. I found you guys talking on TikTok and that's how it started pretty much.
You know what's very interesting?
You probably know this. If you had stayed at your job in Volkswagen, right now you'd be unemployed because they're firing everybody. In fact, they closed.
They closed. They closed this specific...
So if you had stuck to the path set out for you, you'd currently be unemployed in Germany, perhaps? Not perhaps, 99%. Nice. Well, it's amazing that you found us.
So talk a little bit about your journey inside of the real world. When you join,
It is a very complicated program.
what do you first gravitate towards what do you first try who do you first listen to um when i first came in uh back on discord
I started with copywriting as everybody.
So,
I was not a good copywriter to be honest because I was using German on my daily routine, my English was not that good
So it was kind of forgotten.
So I started copywriting, I landed a client,
and the client was paying me 3,000 a month, pretty much what I was making from my job. Wow.
This like that.
Of course, I lost all the money.
because I invested in crypto. - Nice. - Without knowing. I thought, okay, I'm just gonna multiply it. I'm just gonna buy Bitcoin. I'm gonna buy Terraluna.
Daryl Luna, yeah, that's the one that cooked you. Yeah. Yeah. If you just bought Bitcoin, you'd be OK. No, I also bought Bitcoin, but I panic sold.
Because I wasn't disciplined enough. So pretty much it was me making 3k
Let's say on Monday and by Friday I had nothing left. So, no, you didn't have nothing. You had an important lesson.
You paid 3,000 euros for a lesson.
I just realized it's possible.
Of course, it took me a few months to land a client. It's not like I went in and
Yeah, here, Yanis take my money? No.
It was like...
I was other advertising after my night shifts around 300-400 emails a day.
Outreeds in cold, outreeds in cold.
It wasn't like...
nobody waved his wound and I got declined. Because people think they will just join
They will listen to the professors, which are amazing by the way, and they're just going to start making money out of nowhere. No, it's a lot of work behind the scenes. It's a lot of work and a lot of discipline.
because
It doesn't just come like that. Yeah, because we're trying to teach people how to really make money. And how to really make money means you have to work. There's no magic app.
that you're going to download on your phone that's going to fix this problem for you.
have to put the work in i quickly realized that actually doing this thing is much more difficult
than working a physical job.
It's much more difficult having your own business. You know, it's the fear.
What if this client leaves? What I'm going to do
especially in the beginning and eventually
It's much more difficult than working in a physical job.
And I believe people who are working physical jobs are just
comfortable.
Because it's scary. It is scary. I always say when you own a business and I've owned a lot and some have gone well and some have not gone well. When you own a business,
If you do it right, you'll eat the most, but you always eat last.
You know, the people who work for you, you have to pay their salaries. They have to take their money every month.
You know, if there's nothing left at the end of the month, you're hungry.
That's the way it is. The business has to survive. Yeah, it is a lot riskier and it teaches you how to survive.
So let's talk about the last year or so inside of the real world for you. How's 2025 been and what have you been up to?
So it actually started from 2023 when I made my first $100,000 per month. Wow.
then it was again fear if I'm gonna be able to retain it and I just
moved out of the country, I went back to Greece for a while, then back to Germany, and I thought, okay,
now we have to scale somehow, because I didn't want this firework, you know,
type of thing. Okay, I made one day like one month 100k and now that's it.
And I started acting as if I don't have money. In fact, I've locked all my money away because I'm terrible with budgeting. I knew I'm going to spend it all, which I did eventually. So pretty much I made my first 100K. I went and bought a Panamera ZTS that I mentioned in our last interview. So I had zero again. And then.
this actually boosted me because I wanted to keep the car. Because there was just two choices.
I will either keep the car
Or I will have to sell the car to survive.
Then I just kept doing what I was doing. I raised 300k a month.
I did the same thing over and over again. It's not a financial advice. Don't do it.
I don't recommend this, so I bought a second Supercal.
And then I went again to zero. I went to eating dinner nuggets from Lidl. And then slowly I reached half a million a month. And now we are at a point we are making around two and a half to three millions a month profit.
Wow, so I, you know what, I...
have the same financial outlook as you.
And people don't understand this about me, because I say it all the time. They say, "When did you start investing in buying stocks and buying this?" And I said, "Well, I started investing mainly
"when I ran out of things to buy, "because I kept spending all of my money
And I only started building, I guess, what you'd call generational wealth.
once I was making much more than I could possibly spend.
Then I was making the smarter investments because I run out of stuff to buy. So although it's not
it's not financial advice.
But certainly if you have a lot of self-belief,
There's nothing wrong with it.
If you have $100,000 only and you really want a watch that costs $99,000,
Fucking go and buy it. If you believe in yourself enough, if you have the faith that you're going to pull it off,
then you should absolutely go and do it.
So, um...
You're making a lot more money now than you ever used to make.
How has that changed your life?
So, pretty much at this point, everything is, let's say, for free.
Yeah. Food is for free. Cars are free.
Not really.
But yeah, like, okay, I hope it's gonna become, let's say, for free. Yeah, but everything feels free, yes. Yeah, so I pretty much moved to Dubai, I bought my own penthouse here in Dubai. I didn't rent, I just came in and bought.
Yeah. All cars.
So now I'm leaving here,
Of course business is doing amazing. The reason I chose to buy is because
There is a lot of competition here. Yeah. Like back in Germany, I was...
you know, the man.
in terms of
in terms of financial terms, but here I'm
let's say a little bit upper middle class, let's say. Yeah, there's a lot of people above. So there is a lot of pressure and
It was pretty much what I did with the real world.
I just came here and started spending.
Yeah. And magically
I'm just making more and more.
I'm following the same principle. So life I went from working night shift to just
booking flights, a private desk for my parents, to bring them to Dubai for Christmas, for my sister. So it's pretty much everything has changed. Sometimes, honestly, I just...
When I go to bed at night, I...
don't want to sleep because life is so amazing. Yeah. At this point, sleep feels like a waste of time. Yeah. To be very honest with you. I know how you feel. I know how you feel. I've had that. And all this was just
keep going because I wasn't good in crypto training, I wasn't good in copywriting, I wasn't good in marketing at first.
I wasn't good
a talking in first
But you kept saying, if you show up every day at some point,
It's gonna work out. So I was never at Holland. I was never at Holland.
I can say this, I was never a talent.
English is not my native language, so I just
kept going, I just kept slowing up every day,
Until it happened.
I always say that. I say that the talented man...
who doesn't want to do the work, is always going to be outperformed
by the non-talented man who puts in the work.
That's something I always say. So you talked about flying your parents on private jets.
I assume you don't come from a rich family. No, I'm coming from the middle class. My dad was an engineer.
He's still an engineer, of course he's not working anymore.
So I grew up pretty much in a ghetto in Greece. We didn't even have a football, like an actual ball to play. We were just taking empty water bottles and we were just kicking it around.
So now,
At this point
It just feels unrealistic everything. Yes. So this is a question that was asked to me on a podcast that's coming out in January.
How does it feel to be the first person in your family?
to have made it.
Talk about that because a lot of people they make money but their uncles have made money. They have rich aunts, maybe a rich father.
You're the first, just like me and Andrew, you are the first guy
to make the big money in your family.
What does that do for you? How does it make you feel?
And what does it do for your family?
First of all
In the beginning I had a false belief about money. I thought: "I'm gonna make money to have the Lambos, to have the Ferraris, to have everything." And I quickly realized that
Eventually,
Love is the biggest motive. Agreed.
Like...
Now I just see my parents, you know, I see my dad like
in a private Zed, my mom in a private Zed.
And I'm like...
That's
more valuable than any Lamborghinis, than any Ferraris, than any penthouses. Agreed. Well, thank you for coming down. I appreciate hearing your story and it makes me and I know my brother who will see this very proud that we have guys like you inside the school and keep winning, Merle.
Thank you very much. Thank you.