4min chapter

Ask NT Wright Anything cover image

#172 Is the World doomed? (replay)

Ask NT Wright Anything

CHAPTER

Introduction

Ask Nty Right Anything is Peter Byram's weekly podcast. Today we look at questions around global justice and the climate crisis. We also hear from listeners on poverty and economic justice, and what climate change activism means for the theology of new creation.

00:00
Speaker 2
Why would you do that? Why aren't you just, you know, on the beach somewhere? I don't like beach. Like,
Speaker 1
it's like so boring, life at the beach, you know i don't know why everyone's talking about it like when i go to like vacation or something like um i like it to be like more active or sitting on a beach the whole concert or like a yacht life is not like uh or maybe when i getting all the change i'm the happiest when I'm at the edge of failure. When I'm doing something that is so hard that I'm in an extreme amount of stress that things are going to fail very soon. So I normally push myself to that edge. And that's where I perform the best. I learn a lot. And I have an enormous amount of energy solving through uncertainties so basically it's just like um that's where like i you know how you hear like some people are good times to you some people are bad times yeah they're wartire time yeah that's right like i thrive in war but did you feel like apply war is getting easier or something at that no that's why it has like a so many different reasons that you're like about that was more answer like why i'm not at the beach yeah there's no war in the beach it's like relaxation in the peaceful so basically like the companies i started both of them i'm lucky that is like kind of extension of my personal life um so for those of you that don't know like uh i'm a lucky human being probably the luckiest in this room or maybe this country or maybe the whole world i'm from iran i i grew up um like um in like a lower middle class family and my parents were both educators and they knew the value of education and they um they done everything for us to like provide for our education and it started like inventing when i was 14 years old and uh i loved coding and circuit design and inventing new things how'd you get into coding at 14 my uncle uh i started a a computer shop at 13 and burning cds for other people and burning like a news like a you know copying you know yeah sure like uh not everyone have money for or i was gonna
Speaker 2
say is that normal in ron i mean it was normal here maybe that years
Speaker 1
ago but yeah so i was like fixing my friend's windows then you know remember windows was like and it was all cracked windows so they were going back and getting virus windows is not good at that point yeah the crack version and then my came from canada to iran and he said let me show you something and he showed me basic language and said this is what computer is for not like just burning games and stuff and by then i was already doing circuit design because my dad was an electrical engineer and he taught me everything and then i got to introduce a computer as well so now I was like coding for macro control. How old? I was 14. Okay. Yeah. So it's a little later in my life. And basically since 14, then I'm old basically. You're old. Yeah. So basically it's funny because like I technically have 22 years of experience. That's right. Yeah. So I just like, it's like, I can do that non-stop and I don't get tired. I like, like these days I go home between 10 to 11 o'clock at night. When I walk home, I don't feel tired. I feel like, ah, I wish like we had another five hours in the day. So, okay, you know, this is like night. I have to sleep and then wake up in the morning again. It's just... Was
Speaker 2
it always like that? Like when you started coding when you were young, 14, 15, you were kind of all in from the beginning?
Speaker 1
Oh, yeah. To the extent that because of one of my eyes not doing very well, my dad a couple of times had to do the break, the whole electricity of the home so I go to bed. And I'm not kidding, seriously. It was like I had the time, how much time I can spend on the computer. Because my eye was getting a higher number for my glasses. Till when it got fixed, then they were like, okay, now you can do whatever you want. But it was a time during high school that it was keep getting worse. So they were very worried about it. So any minute I could be in front of a computer. That's why I didn't grow up, like become a gamer or something. It's just like, that was the best thing I could do with a computer. Coding and also circuit design. I love, I love electronics as well. And then University of Waterloo changed my life by giving this Iranian kid with no money a full scholarship to come to Canada for my master's degree in engineering. And you have no idea how lucky I am that I got that because this education changed my life. And I was able to come out of, I broke the cycle of like, with the standard of World War, the cycle of poverty. I was able to like help my family to come out. I was able to... Come here alone? I came alone. And then I brought my brothers. Then the rest of the family joined. And then we started helping other people to also come to Canada. And then accidentally we made a Playboard company to help us. We accidentally made
Speaker 2
a $4 billion company. It
Speaker 1
became the largest technology the largest immigration company on planet earth that's crazy yeah uh to give you a sense like 0.5 percent of population of canada we brought to canada wow not population of immigrants population of canada like all the students that we brought are producing more than 0.6 percent gdp of this country and this is at the start like if you give them five years they become about more like 0.7 percent of gdp of this country. Exactly. So it feels so good. And
Speaker 2
one of the problems that I had... Well, I was going to ask, like, because I think, you know, we're going to talk about product market fit, like, and I think finding big problems is the first step. And I think that's the thing that stops so many people is finding... How did you get into a plywood in the first place? Like,
Speaker 1
that story? So basically, I was an inventor. So I helped the students while I was at school to pay for fees. And my brothers didn't have a scholarship. So life was hard. We were helping the students with their applications. And they were paying us a little bit. And then after that, we all went our life. And I was an engineer in the US. And I wanted to get back to inventing, but I didn't have money. So I said, why don't we make a website to help international students, maybe one of the students a month to make $1,000, so it's enough time to invent the next thing. And that became the invention. And then it started going well. Then I was like, maybe we should just spend time on it and then my brothers joined and then the rest is history and then to be honest at the start of it it was just to do something and be fun and just be busy two three years in the company when the first group of students started come to canada and then now we are talking to them as a customers and they were like they didn't say what a great website you have. They didn't say, oh, I really like that feature. All my word was just thinking engineering. They were like, man, you've changed our life. Like apply or change our life. Like as much as you, Waterloo changed my life. It was like this coming abroad and getting educated. And now, and then I, it kind of, my heart, I start feeling like for the mission of the company. And it was like, yeah, it's cool. Like we are an engineer and we have this feature and our load of time is only like 100 milliseconds for a thousand universities. But also we are helping life. And then that helping people became a bigger and bigger to the level that I became like more than 50 percent to that side and less than 50 percent to just building the company and stuff and that was a time i just like said there's nothing in life i can do more impactful to help people get educated because we believe education is a right not a privilege like people regardless of their gender race nationality religion or wealth of their parents they should not be buried to go to university or college. Everyone should have access to good quality education. In fact, actually, poor people really need education to get out of the cycle of poverty. And I was always thinking, okay, if you want to break the cycle, you really have to help the people who also don't have money. Because all the people we are helping, I don say like rich people, but they were the families that could. This
Speaker 2
is late apply, but like this is what leads into passage.
Speaker 1
Yeah. Right. And I started like thinking of like, oh, why don't I sell some of my shares and just give a scholarship out the way that Waterloo gave us a scholarship? And then we were like, OK, but one time you give the scholarship and the money goes away, then it has to be sustainable. And then I did more research and I realized the amount of philanthropy money in the world is very small. But the amount of money that is willing to get a return, but they also want to be social cause, is a lot. So we thought, why don't we make it like a low interest rate loans? Anyway, so... This is within a plyboard. These are tots. Okay. They're all tots. I started a passage last year and we said there's two groups we want to help. One, very, very smart people who want to come to Canada and want to study things that are nursing, different healthcare degrees, trades, and STEM that we need here. need here. And also, I want to do something with the refugees. And the way that foreign countries work with the refugees is extremely inefficient. It should be a better way. Nor are refugees happy, nor the people are happy that so much of taxpayers' goals and is not wisely spent. It should be a better way. And so for that, we started like passage and we started like helping students. And we also started something that like is the most meaningful work I ever done in my life. We started bringing girls from Afghanistan who just because of their gender they got the well done just because of their gender they get kicked out of the school i can't believe that just because you're like a woman you get kicked out of the school and they were like medical students and ai students and computer science students we started providing financial access to them and they went to pakistan and they get visa and now the first group are in Canada. And I did a calculation. If the entire of the, like, if we scale this, and like, you have to like, listen to them. They speak better English than me. So like the whole concept of like, you think about refugees, like make it 10 times like amazing people. And if we do that, we can save Canadian taxpayer by 0.15% of GDP while being extremely humanitarian. And we solve our nursing issues. We solve our trade issues. We bring people to, like, degrees that Canadians don't want to do it. And the people who have money and immigrate to Canada, they don't want to go to those. And what's the model? They're, like, loans that you make? Extremely low interest rate loans. And the reason is loan because you have to make a system sustainable because there's not enough money in the world that just want to like donate, especially for calls like this. If you want to solve this at Global Matter, we put publicly, if you go to passage.com, there's a timer
Speaker 2
that is 60. I saw that, yeah. And it's a big mission. Like the mission statement, you tell me what it is, but it's funny.
Speaker 1
So when we started PassIt, we were like, we have to feel accountable. Not to build another unicorn. Like, life was so good to us. We have responsibility to the world. And we were like, what if by 2030, we go after making a world that no human on planet earth that they're smartest the top one percent smart people don't get banned for studying in canada or us or uk or australia just because they don't have money we want to solve that so if you're the top one percent if you have the grit if you have the drive just because your parents don't have money, you should not be banned. It should be a way for you to come. And that means we have to give over $50 billion loan per year, a low interest rate loan. And we were like, first we were thinking about, oh, it's going to take two decades. I was like, guys, this should not take me to 50. 50s, I have a K-12. I want to solve K-12. We have to do higher education before i'm 50s so we thought like why don't we put it by 2030 and we were like let's put it publicly with a timer on seconds so we publicly fail if we don't achieve so everyone like knows that we failed and when we started i thought we have 1% chance of success to achieve this goal by 2030. It's only about 15 months past from that time. And I think we have a solid 10% chance of success. That's 10x, man. 10x? That's big. Can you believe it for one second? Let me ask you this. they just imagine a world that even the poorest person in this planet earth if they really try if they're the best if they just have the drive there's no barrier for them and they can be a software developer in canada or become a nurse and make over hundred thousand dollars in two years that's the word just just just think about how how beautiful the world gonna be for our children you know where the topest people in the world don't have like a money problem for their education to be able to like serve the community, serve the society. Because the world that we live in, like if you are the smartest girl in Afghanistan. Yeah, there's not much you can do. You can't even go to work. I
Speaker 2
don't want my children to see that world. I love that thesis. I guess my question to you is like, how important has it been? I mean, one of the things that is clear to everybody, I think, is just the amount of passion. And that amount of passion after going after a really big, hard to solve problem, right? How important has that been in your kind of entrepreneurial journey? Like, what does that do for you on the day to day?
Speaker 1
Yeah, like building a plyboard was hard and but it also like um like some of the things set us for success for life so i'm not going to be homeless um like hopefully like but like i don't think so the success of my company is not going to make me homeless sure so then my my base is covered and the the wealth for me is uh is if my kid can have a piano class because i always wanted to have a music class when i grew up so i was like one day i become so wealthy that my kid can have a piano class right uh so i think my kid's gonna have a piano class regardless of like how big or how much i feel so then my base covered. So then I have to go for the highest of the highest of the highest, the hardest problem to solve. Like the passage problem is it requires someone who understands technology, immigration and financial and have the category to be able to like borrow money and people can trust. There are not that many, like if I don't do it, there are not that many human beings can do it just because it's so hard. So if I don't do it, what else I can do in my life? You know, I'm not going to go to the beach. We know that. We know that. But like also like what? Like building another unicorn. I already done that. So let's just like do something that is like so hard. Either I fail and everyone know what what worked and what didn't work. So the next entrepreneur can take it from where I left. Or I succeed and then the whole world change. And no poor person ever going to be say, oh, I can't go to U of T or Waterloo or George Brown and become a nurse or software developer just because my parents don't have money. Let me ask you this.

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