 Market Mondays is huge huge yeah it's one of those things like we always joke about it people walk up to us and they're like earn your leisure man I watch out every Monday and it's funny like we put out episodes every Tuesday but they're really talking about Market Mondays because we put that yeah and so again it was the timing was perfect people's knowledge uh for this information was there and people were home they had nowhere to go and people were losing their jobs and it was like well this is opportunity for you to stay home and make money. I feel like uh there's so many people who hear the words financial literacy or money management management or whatever it may be and they start to get a headache the anxiety starts to creep in you know it takes it takes some time to get into it really understanding and appreciate and understand what it can do for you and what you guys are doing and teaching out everybody is a blessing and the avenues and the areas that you're trying to reach out and help people with an understanding we're going to get into how earn your leisure is blown up but let's get back to the origin for both of you um Rashad where did your relationship and the understanding of financial literacy where did that spark? I started in my household honestly my father was always an entrepreneur and he was he he was like the first one to really teach me about um investing and from there I just always fell in love with investing in stock market I always like since I was a little kid I was always fascinated with stock market investing stuff like that so the information um once again going back to home you know I was fortunate to have that early on in a lot of my peers wasn't but um for me that's where it started and then I just you know ever since then just have been on a journey to learn as much as I possibly can about investing about business out you know something that I always thought was really interesting as far as business and um you know learning the inner workings of of how business actually works so that's where it started for me. Yeah so for me it's kind of a I learned through my peers um and so a lot of my friends are entrepreneurs I was a teacher you know going to school from 730 to 330 every day um and so you know I got to watch them be entrepreneurs and understand business through them but also just took time and dedicated myself to understanding it on my own um so I was super encouraged um because I was like wait I'm grasping these concepts they're not that difficult I just got to keep adding time to it um so my parents worked uh but they never knew about investing my parents are from Jamaica um so they never taught me anything about finance but like save your money save your money save your money uh and so the one thing that I watched them do was work hard and so I figured like that would be the way like my parents in middle class if I work hard enough this could be a lifestyle that I could have until I started investing I realized wait this is the this is not something that was being taught to me but I think this could be a route for future success and especially generational wealth which is something that wasn't talked about at the dinner table um but it definitely is a part of the conversation now how did you guys meet and what generated the idea to earn your leisure um yeah we met we grew up together um the same town so uh we met at an actual um it was a group of kids from our community that went to film um it was extras in a movie called Eddie without a remember that movie Goldberg yeah classic classic I see like you know to me any basketball when we're coming up now was that was that was big time big time now we're going to go for coach the next yeah so we went to Madison Square Garden and we filmed a um a scene so um and I'm a little younger than him so um I was in sixth grade he was in eighth grade so it was different schools and he had just moved to the neighborhood so I knew a lot of the other kids but I didn't I didn't know him um but you know he came up to me and you know you act like he knew me his whole life so ever since then we just been rocking and rolling so yeah you know we just pretty much grew up grew up together our whole lives um played sports together hung out same mutual friends so when we was um after you know our our college was over and you know he went to become a teacher and I went to become a financial advisor so as I was building my financial advising career I understood the power of social media um and I really wanted to you know become a rock star financial literacy rock star social media while at the same time he was developing um you know programs and curriculum for children so he had a program that he did every summer for six weeks and um you know it was it was a lot as far as like give kids internships and college tours what one of the one of the things in the program was financial literacy so he asked me to come in and teach the financial literacy class so that was like you know the first time that we actually combined it um my expertise with finance his expertise with education and really had financial literacy and you know we taped a lot of those sessions put it on instagram um and yeah that was like the beginning of us actually working together in the financial literacy world and um as I said my aspirations of you know building my social media was growing and you know it reached a point where everybody asked if I had a podcast already so I didn't have a podcast at that time so you know I thought it would be a good idea to start one so you know once again we had the relationship already of you know doing the class work work and you know we just speak every day anyway so you know I asked him if you want to be my partner in it and um yeah the rest is history how crazy is it the way I'm you mentioned Shadji your social media problem was already rising but to see the podcast Troy take off the way that it did you know what I mean still still young is you know put it together for years ago how how crazy it to see the way it's blown up it's humbling it's humbling um but it tells you there's an appetite for it yeah every every day that when we go outside somebody's telling us about the information that they heard that sparks something in them or help change their family's life and so like I tell people all the time like that's the fuel so we all we we never went into this this process saying like hey we're going to be wealthy and we're going to make money off this we was like we kind of talk about these things um naturally every day let's let the people in our conversations we thought they were like conversations that everyone had and it wasn't really commonplace so we're like look let's just add value to people's lives let's get some information hopefully they'll execute on some information it'll make a change and um so once we started it was like great I remember the first week we put out an episode I was like wow thousands of people listening like this is crazy like this is crazy and in every week since the numbers are just keep going up and going up and I was like oh we got something special here like people are ready for this type of knowledge this type of education and they're ready for it from people that look like us I mean we take we take great pride in that we're not in suits and ties we're in rugby's and hoodies and Jordan boomers and we're talking about on high level topics but in a way that people can understand and so just being in education and I got I can say to show shy is an education now we know we have to explain things at a level that people can understand or they'll be scared to run away from it and this is not a topic or a subject that people should ever want to want to run away from because at some point that you're going to have to make money to survive in this world so we wanted to make it digestible I think we've done a pretty good job with that no no question no question did you guys know off jump this is we're wearing what we we're being ourselves you know authenticity being so important uh was that just something you knew what you were going to do off the jump yeah yeah something that you know we did um from the beginning was uh you know just kind of true to ourselves and that's something that we've been pretty much a whole lot of just true to ourselves but the way we look at parents how we talk the music that we listen to everything has really shaped our um mold as far as who we are as people so it was one of the things that actually separated us at that time and financial literacy now it's pretty common but there wasn't a lot of people that was actually talking about financial literacy and especially the way we were which was actually like really doing deep dives and you know talking about very complex topics um dressed in just a t-shirt or hoodie and you know so it was an interesting dynamic that people what wasn't used to seeing at that point in time so you know it kind of brought people by surprise and then we used you know case studies of different business models from celebrities and sports figures entertainment and that caught people's attention even more because you know there wasn't anybody doing that at that time so you know that was all part of our packaging all part of our marketing and um it's worked out give me a mistake that people commonly make when they with their relationship with money and how they view money I think they they operate out of a scarcity mindset instead of abundance mindset meaning like they hoard they hoard their dollars they're scared to um invest money they um you know they're trying to work as much as possible for money and that's not really uh an abundant mindset that's going to lead to more money down the line as opposed to figuring out how to make more money as opposed to figuring out how to invest money you know as opposed to figuring out how to work less and have your money work for you so you know that's that's the difference between I think you know poor middle class um environment as opposed to more wealthy environment they understand that it's not really about working for money it's about having the money work for you where a lot of times you know in our environment we was actually taught the other way around the opposite and um that's just kind of like you know a heaps doing the heaps of well just running around doing the same thing over and over again yeah it's that it's like a paper soldier we like to call it that right it's a paper soldier and so we've worked so hard to get the paper soldiers we can't just let them sit right we have to have them going out there working and one of the other things I'll add to what Sha said is people understanding what savings actually is right it's good to have savings six to twelve months obviously for emergency expenses but we should also have money that's investment and so we're talking about having it work for you that means putting in sound investments so that it can come back in abundance and not just keeping it short term um and so we we stress that having long-term investment and understanding that having a positive relationship with money and knowing that it can appreciate over time which is a goal where is that where does that fear come from uh you mentioned that you know it's kind of we've been taught the opposite but where does that fear that misunderstanding about how to be smart about money and letting it work for me where does that come from I think it comes from lack of education and financial ignorance um that's just been passed down from generation to generation it's like you can't teach what you don't know so if your parents wasn't financially savvy and your parents wasn't financially educated and they were taught that you know in order to succeed in life you just have to work as many hours as you possibly can and save as much money and you know just keep money under the mattress you know they're not necessarily doing it on purpose to try to hurt you but that's all that they know so I think that most of it just comes from lack of exposure and lack of education and um it's the same thing with diet if you really think about it it's like some might have a bad diet eat you know fried chicken every day and you know um for the bad food and it's like what is that not times I attended comes from your environment your family right so you know we're we're really creatures of habit and creatures of our environment so when you know better you do better so now we're in the age of information so even if you and this is why I said like breaking generational curses breaking generational you know curses is not just a thing of you know mental situations it's financial as well because a lot of times we've cursed ourselves financially and it's also spending habits as well right like you know as part of just a lot of cultural influences and things of that nature where we were taught to view money more as a voucher and then as a seed meaning like as soon as you get it it's meant to be spent as opposed for it to be a seed to actually grow more money that wasn't something that was always cool so I think it's a combination of things from you know our environment parents cultural influences all of those things kind of um have led to a lot of people having bad money habits yeah I'll add to that um historically we just haven't had a positive relationship with money if you take back to the early 1900s and as far as railroads and banks and how we manipulated into savings and our savings were put into investments that didn't turn out to be great ones it actually hurt us and then banks had insurance and they got money but we got left with the short end of the stick and so historically you know we we haven't had the best relationship but that goes back to being educated once we start to have mistrust then we hoard and we're very tight and we don't have that growth mindset and so once we know the history of our relationship with money we add that to the education that we're providing a lot of people in our space are providing now you'll start to see that change happening and it's happening right now with young people you know you can be any age and there's a lot of folks who just kind of ignored financial literacy for a long time so you can be in your 50s and jumping on board you can be in your early 20s um how how early should you know parents be really communicating with their kids and giving them lessons on watching their money how what's a good age to start there as early as you possibly can um definitely I would say you know one child turns eight nine um that's probably a good age and you're going to introduce that you know some some level of financial education and um definitely preteen 11 12 um and by the time they're teenagers definitely so I you know I'll put it in different stages but I feel like um the younger the better even if it's just new stuff like you know just taking them with you um you know to the bank open up a bank account just show them um you know what that process is or how to write a check for you know what a stock is it doesn't have to be something that you know is ingrained in them every single day but you know just sprinkle it in there everything just like with your own personal tasks whatever you're doing financially just show them and you'd be surprised you know how they'll remember that and then um by the time they're in high school they should have you know a firm grasp because what you don't want to happen is that you know a lot of children get to college and they have no idea about financial literacy and they run credit card stuff and they make all kinds of financial mistakes that it's hard for them to get out of there you know it takes years a lifetime sometimes to get out of a some mistake that you made when you was 19 20 years old so you know if they have more education then they'll be um well prepared yeah get them as early as possible and meet them right where they're at and so most parents with both parents um I think it was easy for me it was like all right my kids watch Disney it's a great entertainment tool but it's also a company that you can own so like there's an explanation in that my kids love playing Roblox all right well instead of paying $9.99 every week which I'm sure you have a child who has Roblox that's what you're doing this is now a publicly traded company well let's explain what a publicly traded company is there's always little timbers that you can throw like you said you don't want to overwhelm them but you can just add these little pieces um because as I said education doesn't stop in the schools it expands way beyond that and most importantly it should be in the home and so any piece of like you said that you can add whether it's taking them to the bank to pay the mortgage or even showing them how to pay a phone bill right everything at long term you guys have a lot of amazing stuff going on tell me about um assets over liabilities yeah so assets liabilities that's kind of been our slogan since we started the show and um right now it's it's our new show on the vote uh where we take a dive into the lives of entrepreneurs and celebrities and kind of have like an MTV cribs meets uh a show that you probably see like a profit on on CNBC or something like that right where we're actually talking about the assets how they turn them from liabilities into assets and seeing their future aspirations with some of the money they're making uh because a lot of times people make a lot of money but they have no education and when you don't have that education you do what you know right it was like I got money let me spend it I'm going to spend it I'm going to spend it and so we get to take a deep dive into to the world of people that you know are have somewhat of a status in the celebrity world um and take a deep dive into what their world and see their vision because a lot of times they don't have a platform to speak about what they do in business right they just get to show you that they're entertainers or they just get to you know that they they're athletes but they have a lot of things going on they just didn't have a platform to express it and so we we hope we will become that for a lot of people in the near future man and talk about blowing up where you guys going to be on the 26th of November funny you mentioned we got a live show uh at the Apollo at the Apollo man that's big time thank you I appreciate that so that's that's almost sold out so we definitely going to sell that out god willing so that's going to be an amazing experience you know to you know grow up you always hear about the Apollo watch the Apollo I used to watch the Apollo um so you know it's one of these these iconic venues probably one of probably the most iconic venues especially for black culture um in america so you know all of the great musicians and performers and entertainers and comics that have you know come through the Apollo so now you can add Market Mondays on your leisure today it's amazing the thing about that that three years ago I was a gym teacher man the performing at the Apollo like that's a power of education like I always say that like people I don't want anyone to discount that like education can take me anywhere it opens doors that nothing else can like three years ago I was with kindergarten students three years later we're going to be on stage at the Apollo and it's crazy because I say he's an educator I still say I'm an educator the difference now is that there's no ceiling on how far we can go with the education I used to think like man if I could just impact my class man if I could just impact my school maybe if I can impact my district great but now it's like there is no ceiling right I couldn't impact the city in New Jersey I couldn't impact the city in Connecticut being where I was and now with this platform that we created we can educate the entire world and we're seeing it that we just came back from Africa and we're seeing the impact and we're hearing the stories there right we're in Cairo uh Egypt and we're hearing the stories it's like this message is really growing and it's hitting our people which is desperately needed because you guys are teaching I want people to uh continue to check out the podcast those who are just getting introduced to it check out what you guys are doing and can't thank you enough and I'm gonna try to check you guys out on the 26 for sure man thank you guys so much we don't see you on the 26 we don't see you at that bar place that that's a fact hey yes yes yes let me know let me know we'll come through let me know I appreciate you guys thank you brother I appreciate you