Speaking and Communicating Podcast

So, I'd ask parents, raise children who are intellectually ambitious, not just children who care about grades and test scores.

I want to know if your children know how to think critically.

Secondly, I want you to raise children who are globally and culturally competent, so that you can understand the connectivity between humans all over the place.

And then thirdly, we ask people to be humanitarian driven.

And so, those are the elements that I talk to parents about all the time.

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host, Roberta Angela.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning in to.

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development.

And by the end of this episode, please log on to Apple and Spotify and leave us a rating and a review.

Now let's get communicating.

Nathaniel A.

Turner, who is a Humanity Propulsion Engineer.

We're going to learn more about that.

He's a Renaissance man, an author, lawyer, and accountant.

Wow.

Who is also a TEDx speaker.

There's so much that Nathaniel is an expert on, but today we want to know how he can help us live life to the fullest.

To the fullest and to our fullest potential.

And before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show.

Hey Nathaniel.

Hey, how are you?

And you can call me Nate, because if you call me Nathaniel, I'm going to think I'm in trouble.

That's just my full government name.

Only time people call me Nathaniel is when I'm in trouble.

I remind you of your parents, right?

That's right.

No, no, no, no trouble today.

No trouble whatsoever.

Nice to meet you, Nate.

Welcome.

My pleasure.

Thanks for having me.

My pleasure indeed.

You remind me of us.

So my late dad, I have a nickname back home in South Africa.

Even when he's angry, in his anger voice, when I'm in trouble, he'll still call me by my nickname.

It was the craziest thing.

Because my mom would turn into my government name, like I said.

She'll call me all the terms of endearment when things are good.

When I'm in trouble, if it's my government name, oh yeah, she's not happy, right?

Now, it's me.

Exactly.

So you know what I'm saying.

Exactly.

Thanks, Nate.

So please introduce yourself to our listeners.

I mean, you did an adequate job of it.

I typically tell people that I'm just a guy.

So oftentimes I show up in events when a lot of people are walking around with all of their letters behind their name and doctor in front of their name.

And I usually put JAG, which is just a guy.

I'm just a guy trying to figure it out, like most people, and who actually wants to lead a planet better than it was when I arrived.

That's really the essence of how I approach life each day.

That's interesting.

You say that especially in the networking events and gala dinners.

When you say you're just a guy, would then people be curious about you or would they think, I don't think he's got anything else to offer.

Let me move on to the guy with the business card.

Yeah, usually people do stop to ask because it's such a great departure.

So if you're in an event, people like to stand on what they've done.

And for me, education is past tense.

You're right, I have a law degree and I earn a degree in accounting and I have a master's in history and theology and all that stuff.

But all those things are past tense.

Those are things I did previously.

It has nothing to do with what I'm doing currently.

And usually when we walk in a room, we walk in a room with a lot of people who've done something, but they're not necessarily doing anything.

So I just want to say to all the people that we're all just people.

I don't care what you did yesterday.

What matters is what you're doing right now, what plans you have for helping people moving forward in the future.

So when I walk in a room, I would like for all of us to understand that we're all just people trying to figure it out.

As they say, we are human beings, not human do's or do's.

That's right.

Spiritual beings, I've heard, having a human experience.

Right.

So when you talk about all the things we've done, then how do we transition to this idea of what am I doing right now?

Because the things we've done is what some of us even embraces our very identity.

You know, I'm an accountant, Tila.

I graduated with an accounting degree.

All I am is an accountant.

I'm going to help you with your books and your taxes.

Right.

How do you make that transition then to say, now here's the next step?

I've lived by this idea called the who mindset.

And there's two parts of it.

So the first part is this.

Most people don't understand who they are.

And I say that the way I understand who I am is to use this three-part question.

One, you might say, hey, Nate, you're a father.

A lot of people know you as a dad.

What kind of father are you?

I'd say, I'm the greatest father in the whole world.

And then you might say, well, who does your son think you are?

And I'd say, my son, of course, he thinks I'm the greatest father in the whole wide world.

And then you might ask my son, who is your dad?

And he said, he's a jerk.

Then who am I?

I am who my son says I am, because I define myself as his father.

And so from my lens, what I have to do in this who mindset is to recognize that I am not who I believe I am.

I'm not who I believe others think I am.

I am only who those I'm in relationship with know me as being.

And at the end of my life, those people are probably going to be the people who write my bituary, who tell my story.

And if I'm not who I hope to be with them now, then I'm not going to be that way when my life comes to an end.

And so I focus on that.

I focus on who I want to be when my time is up, when my bituary is written, when my eulogy is spoken, when the last words are scribed on my tombstone, on my urn, they're not going to write, here lives an accountant, here lives an attorney.

I've never seen a tombstone like that.

I've never seen an obituary written like that.

I've never heard people come to a eulogy and eulogize someone as an accountant, as a lawyer.

But what we do is we talk about the character of a human being.

And so I want to focus on that now so that I can be that when I'm no more.

Yeah.

It's interesting you bring this up because we always talk about communication and how you may think you are a great communicator, but the most important thing is how do others experience you?

Absolutely.

So it's about them.

Like you said, it's your son saying, my dad is a jerk.

Oh, that's how he experiences me.

I thought I was a great father.

Right.

And then the other second part to that, which is what you just said, the who is, I asked myself, who did I help other than myself?

Who did I serve other than those I love and adore?

And who knew that life mattered other than people who I think can help improve my life.

So that's the way I would approach the second part of that who.

Do you wake up every day with those questions, with that mission?

Yeah.

Every day, interestingly enough, I wake up and in the first 20 minutes of each day, I write my life as I'd like it to be, not as it is.

So I'm always self-reflecting, self-analyzing who I am from the lens of who I want to be when I'm no more.

Is that what you call backward designing?

Yes, part of backward designing, but I call it journaling forward.

So each day, some people journal at the end of the day.

We write down what we didn't like about the day, or who we were mad at, or et cetera.

I don't waste my time with that.

I journal the life that I want.

So each day, because I understand we have 60, 70,000 thoughts per day, but 90 percent of those thoughts are thoughts about something that happened previously.

And if we had a bad day, what we end up doing is waking up, reflecting on what went wrong yesterday.

And thus, we bring yesterday's worries or troubles into today.

And I choose not to do that.

Even if I had a great day, I can't relive yesterday.

I can only do the most of what I have, which is the current moment called now.

But that's the way I write my life.

I write my life each day to remind myself to be present, and that whatever I'm doing is to help me manifest the life I want to have, should I be gifted a tomorrow.

But that's why we keep having the life we have, because we keep going back with the 70,000 similar thoughts, and the results are going to be the same.

Nope, nope.

I won't do that.

And also realize that even if you have a good day, you can't revel in that past day.

That day is gone.

If I had a great day yesterday, today I'm having a great conversation with you.

And when this conversation is over with, while I can enjoy the fact that we had a great conversation, you and I both must go on to do something else.

We can't sit around, oh wow, had a really great time today with Roberta.

Yeah, you did, but now what?

Now you have to move on to do something else.

Similarly, we do that when we have something bad happen.

We spend all our time focusing on the bad, and we bring the bad into today, and we take the bad into tomorrow, and so that just snowballs.

I just prefer to think about who I want to be when I'm no more.

And then that becomes my focus.

That makes me wonder.

So I lived in South Korea for almost a decade.

I went to some Buddhist temples.

I tried to learn as much as I could.

And one of the things I was taught was, speaking of living in the now, you can't just always be emotionally attached to everything.

Be it like you said, whether the past was great or it wasn't so great, because you just keep hearing that forward, whereas you just enjoy the now.

That's what meditation is, being in the present.

Just experience the now, be grateful, but don't be emotionally attached to the past like that.

I agree completely.

I'm not a Buddhist, I would say yet, but I would agree with that completely.

I say that jokingly because I always tell my family that I want to go spend time studying with Buddhists.

So I would love to go to the Himalayas, but I have a family, I'm not sure that they're okay with me just departing for a month on here.

But I was like, I would really like to go.

And going on your Eat, Pray, Love mission.

Right, right, exactly.

Yes, but like you said, the point is to live in the now.

Live in the now.

I can think about the future, but I still have to do the work in the present.

And I can't be so overwhelmed by thoughts of tomorrow or thoughts of yesterday that I'm not present right now.

Which a lot of us, especially now with so much going on, we're guilty of.

Back to journaling forward.

Yes.

Even before you mentioned the word manifesting, it came to me that, huh, you say you write your journal the way you want your life to be going forward, which is what they say when you want to manifest.

So if every night I write, Roberta wins the lottery, Roberta wins the lottery.

Let me know how that works out.

However, if you write that you want to win the lottery because there's a greater good that you want to serve, then winning the lottery becomes less the issue and serving something bigger than you becomes the greater issue, which is much more important.

You are less important and don't make you the big thing, make the service of something greater than you, the bigger thing.

I know some people, hey, I want a great car and I want a great house.

That's not what I'm thinking about.

I'm thinking about how do I have the best health I can have?

What's my role in that?

If I have wealth and I call it abundant wealth, it just simply means for me not owning anybody and not owning anyone.

I understand the connection between my freedom and the freedom of others.

So often when we want to be free financially, we are actually incarcerating people proverbially in our freedom.

They're not free.

So the things we do, like with electronics as an example, I use AI, you might use AI, but we don't think about the cost of AI.

We don't think about all the energy is being used.

We don't think about all the pollution that's being created by the energy is being used because we're doing something, or we're ordering something from Amazon.

We're not thinking about the trees that are being killed in Amazon for boxes, and the transportation and our addition to climate change.

So that's what I'm saying.

I think about that.

And then the last part I ask is for timeless wisdom.

But that's all I'm seeking to manifest each day.

I'm not thinking about material items, or as my grandmother would say, things that rust and that moss do destroy.

Things that rust, for sure.

You said you're a dad.

When it comes to parenting, do you teach your children these principles?

When do you start, or when do you feel like, maybe they're too young?

Let's just talk about Disney.

So I first taught my son to visualize at, I think, age four.

The story is, we enrolled him in soccer or football, depending on where you are in the world, and he did not want to play at first.

And then about week six, we could start, it was eight weeks, the first season.

About week six, we could tell he was starting to enjoy himself.

And so week seven, we were driving to the game, and I said to him, hey, why don't you try to visualize what you want to happen?

He says, you know, like any child, what is visualizing that?

And I said, well, just close your eyes for a moment, and just think about how you want the game to go.

And then just tell me what it is that you see.

And he says, I steal a ball, and I run down the right side of the field, and I fake out a guy, and I kick the ball in, and I score a goal.

And sure enough, that is exactly what he did.

That is exactly what he did.

So he was so excited.

Went home, and he was like, okay.

And then he couldn't wait.

When do we play again?

Okay, so you got the next game, and we're in the car, and we do the same thing.

And he tells me he's going to score two goals.

And sure enough, he scored two goals.

And so the rest of his life has been like that.

When he ran track, and he ran by himself, I would give him this thing I called the brain.

I'd say, write down what you want to happen today.

What's going to happen at the meet?

At his best finish in the United States, in the USA Junior Olympics, was second in the nation.

He also finished fourth in the nation.

He ran in an event in Phoenix, Arizona, which is called the Phoenix Invitational.

It's one of the largest youth track meets, and kids run from all over the world.

He finished fifth there.

So he was practicing these habits.

His father, unfortunately, was not.

Even though you taught him?

I taught him to do it, and it was until he was getting ready to start his PhD.

I was speaking at an event that he attended, and the students were asking me, hey, Dr.

Turner, do you do the same stuff you tell your son to do?

And like all great hypocrites, I said, no.

No, I do not do them, but I probably should.

And so the last six years, I've been doing the same things that I asked my son to do.

And they've worked for me the same way that they worked for myself.

I have heard this so many times, the Usain Bolt of this world, the Serena Williams is that they do visualize the win.

They literally see themselves in the finish line.

They really do visualize the moment.

They visualize how it feels to hold the trophy, to hold the gold medal.

And also the opposite is true.

I remember the story about Andrew Agus.

I watched him a lot because he had won quite a few Grand Slams and titles.

But there was a time when he was beaten by somebody who was ranked way lower than he was.

I think he was world number one at the time.

So Tony Robbins asked him and said, what happened today?

He said, when I was walking to the court, I remembered the last time this guy beat me.

He lost the match before he started touching the ball in his right hand.

So what you visualize literally, that feeling when you fully embrace that, either way, both extremes, it will happen.

Yeah.

And he was living in the past.

So see, he went back to a time that he had no control over, and they let the past beat him twice.

Yeah.

I think it was a first round match of the tournament as well.

In his mind, that past of, oh, I remember how he beat me, became this big boogeyman monster who was going to beat him again, and he did.

Yes, he did.

Yeah.

So what else do you teach your son?

Because this is a great, great tool for parents as well, especially, you know, so many parents with all that's going on, all the demands on them.

I think the times we used to have when we sit at the dinner table at 6 PM, and you and your mom, your dad, and your siblings, and everybody say, how was your day at school?

Sometimes they don't have that opportunity anymore.

What can they do in order to raise children and empower them with these tools?

Yeah.

I tell parents all the time, you just described sort of modern parenting, which is this thought that we're all so busy doing all these very different things.

I just remind people that when your time is up, what do you want to happen?

Because we make time for whatever is important.

It's interesting to me when folks say, I don't have time.

Like, well, any president of any country has 24 hours.

They have the same amount of time as you.

And somehow, they manage to do a whole lot more stuff than any of us could ever imagine and more stuff than they could have imagined doing before they took that office.

Which means that we have all the time that we need because we have all the time that we're going to get.

It's just a matter of priorities.

I choose when my son was small that he was my priority.

Work mattered because I knew I had to make a living, absolutely.

But there were opportunities that came to me that I could have taken and made lots more money.

But making lots more money wasn't nearly as important as doing the things you just described, sitting down and having dinner with my son each night or being present in his life.

So some of this is a matter of priority.

And he is the most important priority for me.

He's the guest that I invited to my home.

And you don't invite guests to your home to then tell your guests, I'm too busy to have dinner with you.

Oh my.

But Nathaniel, I hear you and I agree, but is that realistic for like some parents, it's not just that there's an opportunity with more money.

It's just basic survival.

Yeah, I do get that.

I do.

I do.

There are some limitations to that.

I just would say that I would like us to not make that our fallback all the time.

It's not the case for everyone.

And still, it is the case most of the time.

In America, I think, I don't want to misquote the statistics, but it may be like an hour and a half is what parents actually spend having conversations interacting with their children each week.

Each week or each day?

No, each week.

Like getting in a car and driving with your child is not spending time with them.

You and I are actually spending time with each other.

This is probably more time than most parents spend with their children having a dialogue.

When we say we don't have time, I just think it's also the way we value time.

Because when we have no more time, the only thing we want to do is have conversations with the people that we didn't have time for.

Yes.

You also help with college preparations and readiness.

And I know in America, the system is designed such that there's just so much of essay writing.

And you must say I volunteered for this and I did this and all this.

You must be the whole package to be admitted, at least to a good school.

So how do you help the young generation with that?

So I usually ask parents to start as early as possible.

And I borrowed this idea from both Harriet Tubman and James Dyson, the inventor of the Dyson vacuum cleaner.

And I called it Mission 5126.

And I asked parents to first have a mission and have a North Star.

So when folks say they want their children to go to college, I asked them to be very specific.

The North Star is a specific star.

It's not just any star, it's a specific star.

So I asked parents, what specific institution would you like your child to be able to attend?

Because then we can design your child's life around that institution.

And what do I mean by that?

So my son, before he was born, and my wife told me she was ready to be a parent, and I had to acquiesce to her decision, we wrote Harvard and got an application from Harvard.

We chose Harvard because Harvard in the US is considered the top or one of the top institutions in the world.

We figured if we could prepare a child to meet the academic qualifications for Harvard, then that meant that child could be prepared for just about any school in the world.

So that was the goal.

The first part of that is simple.

You got to do well academically.

You got to have good grades, you have to have a good test scores.

But embedded in Harvard application were two other things.

The second thing was that Harvard was looking for students who were world citizens, and Harvard was looking for students who care for something greater than themselves.

And so now we had a template.

There's three parts.

Today we call it, the first part is intellectual ambition.

So I'd ask parents, raise children who are intellectually ambitious, not just students, children who care about grades and test scores.

I want to know if your children know how to think critically, if they're thinking about any broad, large issues.

Are they thinking about ways to make the planet better, or are they just thinking about how the planet can help make their life better?

Secondly, I want you to raise children who are globally and culturally competent.

It's not enough to speak one language.

I'd like for you to be able to speak a few languages.

But moreover, I want you to understand the cultures of other places and other people in the world so that you can understand the connectivity between humans all over the place.

And then thirdly, we ask people to be humanitarian driven, which is that you have a goal or objective to do something that when your time is up, the planet is better because you were here.

And so those are the elements that I talk to parents about all the time.

Make your child the child that schools can't wait to admit, rather than you being the child who is begging for somebody to let you in.

Because the latter is usually the case.

Let's go back to your first point.

Yes.

Since I came to this country, I have found that this has always been the question on our minds, especially because we're talking about test scores as well.

It seems as though critical thinking is still a challenge.

Is it the school system?

Is it the way they're being tested?

What is going on?

Again, I think most things start at home.

So Aristotle famously said, bring me a child at seven, I'll show you the man.

And in America, most kids don't go to school until they're five or six.

Some states don't require children to go to school until they're seven or eight.

So I always ask, for those first five to six years, who are the teachers of those children and their parents?

So to me, that's where it begins.

I think school should be an extension of what parents want with their children's lives.

Not the other way around.

I don't think we should treat schools as if they're the place we just outsource parenting and all our responsibility.

I'm the host.

I invited a guest.

It's my job to make sure that the guest can think critically and the guest is prepared, not the other way around.

So that's where we can take care of the critical thinking aspect.

Now let's talk about the second one, global cultural awareness.

So I lived in South Africa, I worked there, lived in South Korea, I worked there, and now I'm in the US.

Here's one thing we know, especially being in South Korea, so you had teachers from different countries, US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, UK, Ireland, Scotland.

When we as teachers gather together, sometimes we would have one of our US colleagues have this idea that the US is, not only the best on the super power, we know it's a super power, but that outside of it, you can't get better.

Where do things go wrong to have that type of mindset?

Or is it even true?

Are we being jealous because we're not US citizens?

I mean, we used to compliment the South Korean transportation.

It's the best.

It really is.

It's top notch.

Like, vice presidents of Samsung take the train.

That's how top notch it is.

Okay.

And if you come from New York and you've used the New York subway and you say it's the best, but you can see that literally where I am, this is way better.

Right.

How do these mindsets begin to say, no matter what I see in front of me, I still believe I'm the best because I come from the US?

Well, does that term, confirmational bias?

I think Americans suffer from that, but we suffer from that a great deal.

We have biases and we look around and try to confirm them every opportunity we can, which is to the point of not having a global perspective.

If we understand that there are other places that achieve, there are other people who achieve, that there are other people who do things extremely well.

We're not the only ones who do things well.

If we recognize that the only way to improve is to acknowledge your own faults, then we'd be better.

But America does, we have our shortcomings, and that certainly would be one of those, which we think that we're always the best in everything, even though the data says something otherwise.

PISA is an example, which is the Program for International Scholastic Assessment, says that America ranks in the 30s in math and science.

I believe the last time the PISA scores were out, America was neck and neck with Chile and Rwanda.

So it is not true that America has the best educational system or the best air quality or the best water or the best of a lot of things.

But it's just that's the attitude the Americans have always had, but it's an uninformed perspective.

Listen, I'm not knocking America.

No, I know you're not.

But also with that is, so when just in general, when you think I have everything or I'm the best everything, it then kills the curiosity you could have in learning on new things and learning about others and having the global perspective, or even the critical thinking you mentioned earlier.

Yeah.

Even if you were the best in everything, you would still need to get better.

Again, best is past tense.

If you and I run a race and you beat me, you're the winner of that race.

Now, unless you're never going to run another race, you're not always the champion.

You have to run again and you have to win again, otherwise, you're no longer the best.

I think America has a tendency to live on past efforts, as opposed to what we're currently doing.

Which is what you were saying at the beginning of this conversation.

We live on past victories, instead of waking up in the morning and journaling forward and looking for ways to serve, instead of think.

I hear people all the time say, hey, I've got 20 years of experience.

And I say, well, I don't know, do you have one year that you've just repeated 20 times?

Did you learn anything new?

Are you measurably better?

Are you quantifiably better?

Are you qualitatively better?

How are you measuring experience?

If you're just doing the same thing you've always done, and I could learn that thing in one year, you're not better than me.

We're the same.

You're actually worse than me, because you haven't figured out to be better after 20 years.

You're still doing the same thing the same way.

That's not progress.

There's nothing that we would consider a progress in the world if it was still the same after 20 years.

Cars are not the same.

Houses are not the same.

Our energy, our electricity grid is the same, so that's deplorable.

But most things, we don't keep a cell phone a year, because someone says the new iPhone is out, and we've got some updates, right?

The new one.

Right.

We don't keep laptops or televisions or shoes or clothes.

Why?

Because we somehow believe things are improved.

And yet human beings could do something once and tell you they've done it for 30 or 40 years, and never improve, and we think that's okay.

So Nate, please give us three things that we can do, hopefully on a daily basis, on how to then shift this entire paradigm and look to serve, look to improve daily, and more than anything, not live on past victories or violence.

Okay.

The first thing is to figure out who you want to be when you're no more.

And so it's a challenge, I would say, maybe appear a little bit more, but write your obituary and or write your Wikipedia page as just you're writing your last entry.

So if you had to write your life in your Wikipedia page, and you imagine how you want your life to read, write that now.

That would be the first thing.

The second thing I would say is to take what it is that you put in that Wikipedia page that you want to happen in your life, and create a vision board, and place that vision board everywhere you possibly can, so that you remind yourself of what your vision is for your life.

Because too often, we create things that we never look at again.

But like that North Star, it's unavoidable.

Every night that North Star is going to appear, you need only look up in the sky and you'll see the star.

Your vision boards have to be that way too.

It has to be on your phone, on your laptop, on your walls, in your home, wherever, on your refrigerator, wherever it is, you need to remind yourself of that.

And then the third thing I would say is to check who it is you spend your time with.

Birds of a feather do flock together.

There's a certain thing we call the starting five, and we believe that people should have five people in their lives that are similar to a basketball team, a point guard, a shooting guard, a small four, a powerful four, and a center.

Do you have five people in your life who would help you, one, point you in the right direction, guard all your hopes and dreams, two, show you that you can shoot for the moon, and if you miss, you'll land upon the stars.

Do you have someone who's a small four kind of person who makes sure you do all the small things, you account for all the small details, you got all the I's, cross all the T's in your life.

Is there someone who will power you forward when you want to quit?

Is there someone like that?

And then lastly, do you have a center of influence?

Are there people in your life who can help you when you are sort of lost and you need to meet people, make connections to help change your life?

Those are three things just off the top of my head, I would suggest.

That is so powerful, especially the one with who you surround yourself with, because before social media, it used to be just you literally look at what kind of friends you hang out with, what influence they have on you.

But now, just what do you spend time following on social media and watching and scrolling?

That's the surround yourself.

Yes.

That's highly important.

Absolutely.

You got to be critical of what it is we give our time and our energy to.

Absolutely.

Any last words of wisdom?

Anything I haven't asked you, we're hoping to share with our listeners today.

I would end by telling you that I'm grateful that you took time to talk to this guy in Indiana, all the way from Chicago.

Which is right next door.

It is.

I grew up outside of Chicago.

I grew up in Gary, Indiana.

So Michael Jackson was born.

Yes.

Yes.

Where Nate and Michael were born.

When Nate and Michael were born, correction.

Thank you so much, Nate.

His government name is Nathaniel Turner.

The Renaissance man who helps us live each moment and live in the now.

Humanity propulsion engineer who helps parents to raise future leaders.

Thank you very much for being here.

I've enjoyed this conversation so much.

Thank you so much.

Have a great day.

You too.

And before you go, would you like our listeners to reach you online?

And would you like to share those details?

Sure.

You can have a website like everyone else.

It's Nathaniel, nathanielaturner.com.

That's the simplest way.

And of course, like everybody else, I have social media presence.

But if you go to the website, you can find all.

Nathaniel A.

turner.com.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

My absolute pleasure.

So Nate, the work that you do, do you feel that it has had a tremendous impact on your son?

Yeah, it's been unbelievable.

Today, I will brag a little bit about my son.

I usually don't like to do that.

But my son today, he speaks four languages.

He's fluent in Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan, English.

He's going to be mad at me because I said Catalan, but he did learn to speak that version of Spanish.

He did pick up some French and some German.

He was admitted to, accepted by 27 of America's best universities.

He received probably more than $5 million or more in financial aid for his undergrad experience.

He attended a school in California called Santa Clara University.

It's the top 50 school.

He received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering with a minor, I believe, in computer science and computer engineering.

He won that university's humanitarian award at the end of his time there.

He had seven PhD fellowship offers right after undergrad.

Schools like Georgia Tech, Carnegie Mellon, he attended Carnegie Mellon where he received his PhD in electrical and computer engineering, with a focus on renewable energy, sustainable energy, wind, solar, etc.

A lot of work around how to improve the grid, maybe how to create different grids.

He then decided that he was going to start his own corporation.

I should say he decided that while he was a 16-year-old in Brazil playing soccer, because he left America at the end of his junior year of high school because he said he wanted to chase his dream of playing professional soccer.

And he had done everything his parents had asked him to do.

He had already earned 33 college credits by the end of his junior year.

He had already tested in the top 1%.

He started high school as a seventh grader, so he was more than ready academically to go.

So he left the country.

But while he was in Brazil, before he got his concussion, he said he realized what he wanted to do with his life.

When his playing career was over, he was going to go to school and find a way to use technology to enhance the lives of people who have been historically and geographically underserved and underrepresented.

Because when he was in Brazil, the electric grid was terrible, and they had problems with Internet.

And he didn't think that it was fair.

This is a voice of a 16, 17-year-old.

It wasn't fair that people at various parts of the world didn't have access to the same things people in America took for granted.

So he wanted to fix that and also make it so that people in America who didn't have those utilities had access to those as well.

Today, he is now a second-year student working on his MBA, NYU's Thermal School of Business.

And I would tell you, all of his education has been free.

So all of those places that I named, without us spending much money to make that a reality.

All because you taught him to visualize from age four.

All because we decided before he was born that like the Lion King, that he would one day be king and that he needed to be prepared to be able to take care of the village.

Absolutely.

Thank you, Nate.

My pleasure.

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