Aryan Vedhara on financial literacy, what schools don't teach, and building the fix from the inside

0:00Aryan Vedhara:Welcome to Six Degrees of Purpose, a series in which Olly and I explore the trends shaping our relationships with wealth, meaning and money. You can find us on Apple, Spotify, YouTube and some shorts on Instagram or at thisis6.com. We'd love to hear your thoughts and feedback. Today's guest is 16 years old and he's already spotted something that most of us in this industry take years to understand, that being good with numbers and being financially literate are two completely different things. Arian Vidara is a sixth former at King's College School. He co-founded a climate movement before he was old enough to drive and built a podcast with over 200 ,000 streams.

0:40His latest venture is the Aspire Project, a 14-week financial education programme and an app that he built with two friends because they noticed something important. School children can solve equations most adults have forgotten, but nobody's taught them about pensions, tax, mortgages or their first paychecks. He's built a team of over 20 people to help them do this, and to fix the gap. So let's found out why it matters enough for him to build it. Aaron Vidara, welcome to Six Degrees of Purpose. Thank you very much. It's great to be here. What drove you to create this bio project? It starts when I was about 12 and I was sort of exploring what I wanted to do for my GCSEs.

1:21And we had a really great talk at school about careers and about picking what you wanted to do in the future. And they said, work backwards. So start where you want to be in 20, 30 years. What kind of careers could get you there? What kind of A-level university degrees could get you to those careers? What kind of A-levels could get you to those university careers? And what kind of GCSEs could get you to those A-levels? And I think as overwhelming as it was, it was really helpful for someone who had absolutely no idea what they wanted to do. And so I think the first thing I did was I went onto TikTok and I opened up and searched luxury lifestyle at 30 or how to buy a boat at 30.

2:03Uh, and the thing, the big thing at the time, the big rage was software engineering. Everyone was going to San Francisco, not even going to university, you know, getting recruited to go code for Google or Facebook or whatever that might be. And I thought, okay, this is what I want to do. So I thought I'm going to pick everything based on that. And that's what I did. I picked computer science for my GCSEs as well as geography. And I also picked TP because I found it quite interesting. And I was about halfway through when I remember ChantyPT first came out. And as amazing as it was for all my other homework, it could do my computer science homework in half the time and twice as good.

2:45And I think that freaked me out. I think I was very concerned about the fact that if it could already so early do work so much better than me when I spent so much time into it, I was very concerned about what sort of the sustainability of a job like that would look like. And I sort of decided I've got to pivot. I know this might not be where I'm going to be in 20 years at this rate. So I decided, OK, what's the next logical step to buying a boat? I thought consulting at the time was my the next logical step. So I started researching into McKinsey, BCG, Bain. Mind you, I was 13, so I had no idea what a consultant actually did.

3:24So it was just mindless researching. And then I remember listening to a podcast, actually, with Stephen Butler. And he mentioned that the global managing partner for McKinsey had said they were going to cut their graduate intake by 50%. And I think that was another wake-up call, realizing that actually maybe this is not going to be here in 20 years. And then it was investor banking. and then it was private equity and then it was quant trading and I think as everyone happened I started thinking Jesus this might not be here when I'm ready to go into the workplace and that was pretty terrifying and so I sort of started to think well how can I sort of future-proof myself and if I'm feeling this with all the resources that I have I mean parents who've been so successful and going to a school like that, then other people surely must be thinking the same thing.

4:17And so that's when I started my podcast, Building Resilient Futures. And that was all about sort of helping other young people to future-proof themselves for the future. And so we interviewed lots of great guests and that was all about having conversations about leaders in fields all across the spectrum about what actually does it take to have a successful and long-lasting career. And resilience was a theme that was sort of continuous um and as i continued that podcast i sort of realized that actually as much as i'm enjoying this i don't feel like i'm having i want to build something i want to do something that actually sort of has that direct impact on people's lives um and i had some experience of sort of building things before um sort of my first time building an app or something like that was called greener world i did it with a sort of best friend of mine at the time i think we were about 11 we built first prototype and then we sort of launched it and then we sort of started getting a lot of publicity so I'd had some experience of sort of building stuff before and so I realized that that's what I wanted to do again but sort of for this problem and then I think sort of the game-changing moment was when I went to South Africa on a rugby tour and that was sort of the most special week of my life I think and we spent a day at a township we played rugby there we had lunch there uh and to see how happy they all were in such difficult circumstances was sort of it was really warming i'm not someone who hasn't been around any of that i mean every time we go to india we go sort of go to the orphanages we go help out my mom didn't come from very much neither did my dad so i mean i had been around that but to see how happy they were and sort of how much they they didn't care about their circumstances was like really warming and I realized that actually I want to do something about sort of more on a global scale and I came back to the UK and I grabbed a couple of my best friends all the time and said okay what can we start to do and the first thing we started with was we decided that actually we're 16 we're not going to be able to you know wipe out global poverty but we can start in the UK and what's the biggest lever you can pull and it's education in our opinion.

6:29So we started developing the Aspire project to provide practical skills and practical education for young people across the country, regardless of their level of privilege. And then that sort of developed, we started building tools for those courses, and then we sort of ended up piecing them together. And then now we are here now, sort of with our consumer app, just a few more months from launch. It's amazing.

6:53Aryan Vedhara:I'm going to come back to the financial literacy piece but I want to take you right back to one of the first things you said Arian about you looked up on the internet what a luxury lifestyle would look like at age 30 and getting a boat what drove you to think that that was the lifestyle you wanted age 30 and therefore you were going to take yourself all the way through the journey to get to that I think I think I was always someone who was quite driven by the idea of being successful like not necessarily like in any specific specific sort of vertical just the idea of sort of being like successful in itself and so I think when you're 12 you don't see many different ways of being successful other than sort of from a financial standpoint um and I think even then I was always quite impact driven and so I always dream dreamt of sort of being like you know having a massive boat and a massive house and doing charity events all the time and sort of that was like who I was and so I think I think social media had such a profound impact in the sense that it gives you such exposure to the kind of things you can do at such a young age I mean I didn't think it would be possible to own a boat at 30 I mean how many how many people in the world probably own a boat at 30 it's probably not many more than a couple of thousand so I think the fact that social media gives you the opportunity to dream so high I think that's definitely good of got to be part of it in some way and is that still the dream given now you've had this profound impact of going to South Africa and seeing the township and wanting to create that financial literacy and wiping it out across the globe I want to build something that leaves a legacy I think uh there's a really great uh talk I listened to and I actually forgot who's by but they said that actually the most important thing is as an entrepreneur or as a founder is to build something that leaves a legacy whether that's an app or a piece of code or you know a physical object is build something that's going to have an impact on people far after the business ends or far after you've solved the problem if there's a problem to solve and so I think that's probably what drives me is you know I mean I dream of revolutionizing the entire sort of like financial infrastructure I mean I think Like if I was to say, what does like 100 % success like for Aspire?

9:15I mean, it's that you don't need to open your bank account ever again. You don't need your banking app. You only use that for transactions. I mean, from the age of 16, you might have a dream of retiring at 50 or owning a house by the time you're 35. And instead of being given random bits of advice by, you know, all sorts of sort of random groups, it's all centralized within one app. And then as you sort of grow and that takes you through a journey of being able to build, not just from a financial standpoint, but from a career standpoint and working towards your goals, I think that then is something that motivates me.

9:50I think the idea of leaving sort of an app or leaving a legacy that people can continue to use long after sort of, you know, aspire finishes per se. Now, it doesn't escape our attention that you've attracted a lot of interest from not just the media, but also from serious business leaders, people at the top of major global banks who are in the very center of what we call the UK financial establishment. What do you think it is about what you've built that's attracted such interest and attention? I think the first thing is when we started developing the curriculum of what we wanted, aspired to be, we were very deliberate in saying that actually what specific things are going to have the biggest impact on young people's life.

10:39and I think you've got to go from right at the beginning and work work backwards and you've got to go absolutely granular um and so what we discovered is actually that it's not just young people you know don't have some financial literacy is the actual basics of what they're given in the education system is lacking I mean our education system across the world actually is broken and it doesn't work for the future. I mean, you have subjects like history in English where, you know, Claude can write a better essay than most teachers can. I think that's extraordinary to even think about. But people don't know how to use Claude to do that, or people don't know how to use Chachupty to do that.

11:20People don't know what's going to make that impact for themselves in 20 years. And so we were really deliberate in saying that actually, what makes the biggest impact in our life? And what do we have that not everybody else has? If you look at the most successful people in the world what do they have what skills have they learned and picked up along the way that young people just aren't given and so when we settled upon our three core themes of financial literacy technological literacy and ai skills and then career readiness and awareness i think we had done a lot of research into that and it wasn't just sort of three things we'd picked out of a bag and then i think the reason we were able to sort of get so much attention not just from the media but also from sort of the big figures in sort of banking i mean john flint former ceo of hsbc and the former ceo of national wealth fund i spoke to him for sort of 45 minutes on a video call and he was like well this sounds unbelievable um and so i think being young and understanding the very problem that sort of you're trying to solve makes a really big impact and sort of getting people's attention um i also think you've got to be really brave i think you've got to sort of be willing to put yourself out there um so you come up with an idea you do all the work for it you do all the research and i think people are starting to recognize now what a big problem it is that young people just aren't being given sort of tools they need to sort of take them where they want to be i mean everyone wants to be able to live a life where they're not sort of stressed about money everyone wants to live a life they feel like they're doing something and so if we're not giving our young people the tools to feel like they can do that i think people who've been through that system are going to feel motivated by that and they're going to feel sort of a passion and excitement about someone that's trying to fix that so I think that's probably where we've been very lucky I also think it's just been so brilliant being able to have some people just advocate for us I mean a heart of energy has been like a mentor for me I mean I first had on my podcast as my first guest and then now she's a member of our advisory board And it's having someone who can just say, you know, just reach out to people, just do it.

13:25I mean, there's nothing you lose from someone not responding. And so I think that's such a huge thing as well.

13:31Aryan Vedhara:What I find fascinating is the link between the financial literacy and the workplace literacy. I think I agree with you, technology literacy, it's sort of, I think, perceived to be a given, but needs to grow. But the financial literacy, I think there's an assumption that children learn about finances at school. But what they learn is very different to what they need to know. They learn about the cost of things. They learn about potentially slightly inflation, but not about, for example, a pension, which is something that is fundamental when you go into a workplace. the first thing you're asked is, do you want to contribute to your pension?

14:19Aryan Vedhara:And most people probably don't even know what it is. So the combination of the two, I find really interesting in how you are bringing this to life for those that need to learn and everybody actually now, how do you do that in Aspire? How do you bring that to life for people? So I think the most important thing sort of that we focus on and that I think people need to focus on is that no aspect of your life is sort of singular it's all very important to be linked together um your career will affect where you are financially your finances will affect your ability to choose a career i mean you can't you can't become a contractor or do something that has very spotty income sources without knowing that you're gonna have to save more you just can't do that you need to understand where they link together and i think a big fundamental gap in what we've had as a country and I think as a society is that we haven't had the input from the people who've done it into building those systems and so I think as someone who's sort of like tried to sort of navigate what I want to do in the future and how that would affect me from a financial standpoint but also from a standpoint about what I'm actually doing in my day-to-day I think I've sort of had a sort of very unique perspective in the sense that I've then done a bit of entrepreneurship i mean i've done a couple of internships and sort of the financial services space i've done sort of work with some other startups uh so i've had some sort of idea of what all these different spaces look like and i think the effects that they have on each other is something that i think people don't recognize until it's too late um and so i think the most important thing for when you're sort of building sort of something that links to things that are so fundamentally interlinked but seems so different is by realizing how what points they link together and i think that's where you have to start so for example the first thing you often do when you get your first job is you'll go through like your onboarding or your introduction or whatever that might be and they'll sort of teach you a bit about what the company is like and they'll give you you know the it rundown and all these things which actually in the grand scheme of things mean little to nothing in one your ability to be successful in that job and two your ability to make the most of that job and so I think to see immediately that that is where it's starting in the wrong place already I think is really interesting um and so what it should be almost is that when you get into your first job these are things they tell you you know we will contribute up to five percent in your defined contribution benefit pension if you donate to these charities we will match your contributions to these charities you know you get this much annual leave um but you can actually work these many days from home as well if you want and so i think people need to be given like in the literal sense everything they might need to know i think assuming that people know stuff and know things that are sort of they're never taught is just a fundamental gap in i think our thinking as well i think people think that sort of you know I know this now because I've been through the process.

17:28So they'll have to work it out themselves. And I think that's a mistake in thinking. I think, you know, if we want as a society to sort of boost growth as an economy, if we want people to be able to sort of live on their own and not be reliant on government or not be reliant on other people, if we want to sort of bring everyone up in society, we have to give them the tools to do so. And so I think that starts with letting people take control of their finances and giving them the tools to do that and understanding how it links to what they're going to spend 80 ,000 hours of their life doing. I love what you're saying, by the way, the divergence between wellness, mental health, physical health, preemptive medicine, and think of like Dr.

18:12Rangan Chatterjee and his thoughts, and that convergence with financial health. I think that is something we're seeing happen. And I'm really encouraged to hear that that's part of the longer term plan because I think it's a natural conclusion. I'm interested in the journey, right? So if I'm, or someone is a user of the app, for example, that's coming out soon, or has been on the 14-week program that you originally designed, what does that actually look like? Yeah. So I'll start with the program because it's a little bit simpler. It is 14 weeks. There is sort of seven modules to it. the first module is something that was actually inspired by a sort of a former prime minister Rishi Sunak and Akshita Murthy their work with the Richmond project is actually something that we've sort of taken as like a building building block of what we want to do is that actually numeracy is fundamental to what we're going to teach later in this course so let's just start with it let's make sure everyone has that sort of building block so that's what it starts with it's a course and sort of how you can apply numeracy beyond just the classroom so how can you use numeracy to you know work out compound interest how can you use it to work out inflation how can you use it sort of in in a spreadsheet for example to work out your budgets and costs percentages are like fundamental to sort of your entire financial life and so seeing those practical applications of numeracy and maths is really important and then second sort of module and lesson is what about writing and being able to write not just formally but also informally both in the workplace and in your life as you get older you will have to write sort of very formal emails and letters sort of either complaining about something or apologizing for something or asking for something or you'll write a cold email asking for a coffee chat or whatever that might be you will have to do a lot of writing and being able to use ai tools in your writing effectively but also write yourself and make an impact from what you're writing is really really important and so i think that's something that we focus on a lot in our session too and then our first core sorry and then our next one is revision skills i mean it sounds a little you know dull and it sounds like something you'd learn in school but actually it's something that we think that a lot of schools don't teach and it's something that's fundamental not just to your school performance but actually as you continue throughout your life is the ability to learn, learning how to learn.

20:42So whether you go to university or not, whether you first start a job, there will be a learning curve in whatever you're doing. And so being able to learn those things effectively is really important for that. So that's something that we touch on. And then we go into one of our core modules and probably our biggest core module is all about financial literacy. And it starts right at the beginning. So what are the most fundamental basics that you need to know to sort of take control of your finances so i get an income what happens to my income now i'm supposed to be earning 40 000 pounds a year why am i taking home 28 000 pounds a year so there's tax how does tax work you know you have your personal allowance and then you have the different types of taxes you know when you spend you also pay a tax when you buy a home you pay a tax and so learning how to understand where your money is going before you get it is the first and most fundamental part of taking control of your finances the second is being able to control how you spend that money and so being able to budget effectively is something that actually is sort of underrated and actually really links to sort of being able to then invest and save is that actually if you don't have the money to how can you sort of how can you do that and so learning how to use a spreadsheet for it and we develop some really helpful tools you know you just plug your income in and you estimate where you live and all of this stuff and it pops out how much you should be spending or whatever that might be um it looks at your finances and sees sort of this is where you're spending a bit too much and sort of understanding how you can optimize and use deals i think deals are something the younger generation does really really well i mean i think the one that i see all the time is uni days it's so good i mean there's deals for everything on it and the amount of loyalty programs that all these companies have i mean you should be on all of them you could save hundreds of pounds a month every single month by just every time thinking, I'm going to get a coffee.

22:34I have a Starbucks card, which will save me 10 % or I have a press subscription that will get me five free coffees. Or I could just go to the one that's slightly closer. Now I'm going to walk five minutes further and save myself five pounds. You do that every day. I mean, that's a huge amount of money. And so all these little things that you're doing are really important. And that's what we sort of try and focus on. And then next is understanding what you do once you have a bit of money. And I think this is sort of something that people don't learn about because they think they'll never be in a situation where they have a bit of extra money and so it's really important to think of it in sort of two ways thinking about yourself now thinking about yourself in a few years the short term and then thinking about yourself in the future so what do you want to do for yourself with your sort of extra money that

23:21Aryan Vedhara:you have what strikes me about this is that humans are different no one person is the same and we all have very different views very different feelings very often different ways of articulating ourselves at the start of this it sounds like actually being super aware of who you are and why you want to do whatever it is you want to do is fundamental not only to the learning journey so how do I write how do I come across as my most authentic self for someone to want to reply to me but also who do I want to be in the future and why do I want to have that amount of money and how does that inform my decisions on what I want to do with it do you have a I guess a module that is around understanding myself before I go on this journey I think that's sort of where the app comes in okay and I think I sort of hadn't touched on that yet but the app is all about sort of where do you want to be in 30 years i mean that's the first the first thing you do when you open it i ask you do you want to have a voice chat with aspire or do you want to text with it try and keep it as informal as possible you know you press on voice chat and it says hi thank you for telling me your name and your date of birth because you've done that and you're sort of when you signed up can you just tell me a bit about what you dream of i think that's the first thing is what do you dream of do you dream of being someone who retires at i know 45 on a big beach in Hawaii you know sipping pina coladas all day is that what you want to do or are you someone who wants to keep working the whole time and is always encroached in that sort of fast life and why why is such a fundamental question in there as well because what's driven you to do that who's been involved in that conversation and I think that's such an important part of sort of having sort of a really good environment around you as well as not being sort of forced into a path I mean the next thing aspire asks is who do you live with and it might seem really like sort of silly and trivial in comparison to what you've just asked of what are your dreams in life but actually it makes such a big impact because if you were fortunate to grow up in a house with two parents and a sibling your sort of outlook on life is going to be a lot safer and you're likely to take less risks versus someone who's might have grown up in a sort of a group home where you're actually there's so much difficulty going on around you that actually you're so much more likely to take a risk to try and get where you might be and then sort of what you've done is you're asked about where you are now so what are you doing now I mean what is going well for you in your life what are you struggling with what is stopping you from getting where you want to be and you don't have to know the answers it's just about sort of saying everything that you know and like sort of brain dumping like you would in revision this is to a large language model type yes so it's Yes, so it's using sort of a clawed API, an anthropic API.

26:21But actually what it does is our system prompts are actually proprietary. So we've developed prompts that actually engage the actual artificial intelligence in a way that no other sort of app has been able to do yet. And so sometimes people call it jailbreaking and manipulating the LLM to do exactly what you want to do. And that's the way we use our system prompts, is to make sure it gives a response that we want it to give. and that it's not just encouraging, but it's also honest and truthful and it understands the full picture. And as you go through, it then asks you about your career, what you want to do in your career.

26:54Do you know what you want to do in your career? Are you doing your GCSEs now? If yes, what do you think you're going to get? What are you aiming to get? If you're doing your A-levels, same sort of questions. If you're at university, sort of similar sort of questions. And it's all about just getting, it tries to get as big of a picture about you as it possibly can. and then after you've done that sort of opens up your app and you know you get your lovely little dashboard and all the little things and it starts by it sort of analyzes all that information and it sort of works out right okay let's say you said your goal was at 35 i want to own an own own my own house in the uk i want to own a property i want to have a family and be able to send two kids to independent school let's say that's your goal you mean you've decided that because you know your parents didn't get to do that for you maybe or your parents did get to do that for you and that's what you want to do and it will work backwards and staying there so it'll know for example you're doing computer science for your gcse's i'm using my example again and you're doing maths and you're doing further maths let's say it knows your quantitative it knows that's sort of the brain you have so it works out careers that would match not just where you want to be but where you're capable of being and that's really important or for one of my friends who sort of has been one of our main sort of feedback givers early on um he hates maths first opportunity drop maths i mean he's doing history theology and philosophy um i think english and geography i think as his four a levels i mean all great subjects but sort of not mathsy in the slightest um and for him law might be the path that he might want to go down we might want to go into project management it doesn't matter it sort of has the second largest database of careers in the uk of any platform in the UK.

28:38I mean, Unifrog has the largest. I mean, that's been going for like 30 years or something. So we have the second largest database of careers and industries. And so it works out what does it match to? What does your skills match to? But also, will these careers take you where you want to be? Are you someone who wants to work at a desk nine to five in London? Are you someone who wants to work from home? Are you someone who wants to travel on work? Do you want to work outside? Do you want a job that's physical? Do you want to work with kids? So it looks at all of these various factors and it matches you with something that takes you where you want to be.

29:08Aryan Vedhara:And has it got the foresight to think about the jobs that don't exist yet and what might therefore be something that you could do based on where the world might be in the future? I think that's a really interesting question. I think it's hard for anyone to predict what it's going to be in the future. I mean, I talk to my friends in sort of the school and I sort of start doing career counselling and all of that stuff and actually nobody knows what jobs are going to exist in the future so i think what we're really sort of focused on is making sure you have the skills that sort of give you an opportunity to do all those jobs so let's say i don't know it matches you to a vertical in property you're really interested in property you know real estate property manager whatever that might be and so it's really important that you have skills that match that industry because that industry is going to exist you know those specific jobs might not exist but having skills within that industry is really important and having general skills.

30:06So a big feature that we've spent a lot of time working on is Aspire Academy. And so it's an interactive sort of module which pulls courses depending on what your trajectory is. So let's say property is something you're really interested in and you've done those A-levels we just mentioned and you're going to university and you're studying, I'm trying to think of something that someone might study, really random. You might study journalism, nothing to do with property, but you know you want to do that in the future. And so you're going to have gaps in your knowledge of certain bits because you're studying journalism.

30:38You're not studying something directly related to what you want to go in. And that's fine. You know, encourage that. Widen your sort of broad base. But then how can you build those skills? Well, you might need skills to evaluate how much a property is worth. You might need skills to sort of write a contract, to understand a contract, sort of understand negotiation. you know whatever those might be and aspire academy creates artificial intelligence generated modules so it gives you a video a bit of text to read some flash cards all around that sort of knowledge base and then you do a little quiz you have a little chat about anything you didn't get wrong you got wrong or you didn't understand you do another quiz and then sort of helps you sort of match towards your skills match your actual career and where you want to be and so what we've that's sort of done and sort of the whole thesis of what we're doing is trying to build something that not just links every aspect of your life but optimizes every single aspect and so if i touch briefly on sort of the finance part of the app and the money part of the app i think it's something that i'm really passionate about is making sure people have the tools and the sort of knowledge to sort of be successful with their own finances and the first step is like we said is optimizing what's going out.

31:54And so what it does is it'll look at all your expenditure. You connect your bank accounts, you know, duplicate expenses. You know, let's say you're spending Netflix twice. Well, let's say you have Amazon Prime and you're also paying for Deliveroo Plus, right? But you actually get Deliveroo Plus as part of Amazon Prime. It knows that. So it says, actually, you cut these two subscriptions, you'll save 17 pounds a month. The best place for you to redirect that because you want to buy a house one day is a lifetime ISA. well for now it's a lifetime nicer um or whatever that might be and then what it also does is it compares your spending against its database of deals not something i mentioned earlier deals are great i mean use deals so we have a massive database of deals which are constantly we're constantly scraping and updating and says let's say you're spending i don't know 15 pounds a month on a starbucks membership i don't know i don't know how much starbucks membership is to be honest um let's say there's a student discount that gets you 30 off that and so now you're saving i know four pounds on your starbucks membership every month and you do that for let's say three or four things that's another 12 16 20 24 pounds every month that you can save and you keep doing that and you keep redirecting that into the most sort of optimized place for yourself and it gives you the most like it gives you the biggest jump in sort of where you would have been to where you are now.

33:14Let's say your goal was at 35, I want to buy a house. You were on track to buy it at 38 because of where you were going now and that's fine. But now actually you're on track to buy it two years early just because you've continuously made lots of small savings. And it's about giving every single person the sort of opportunity to do that. And I think that's something that sort of journeys. It's absolutely fascinating. It's something that it feels like you've designed something that you would have really appreciated when you're 11 and mapping out your life. um how do you measure success success for a spy is sort of in two fronts i think we designed it originally as sort of a cic community interest company delivering those courses for free and having a real positive impact and not making any money from that that just being absolutely social impact and then building the limited company in the app which is absolutely a for-profit business i mean businesses need to make money they can't sustain themselves but actually it's still doing good while doing that and so having that dual entity is makes it really easy for us to define two sort of goals and i think the first goal has i think we're already part of the way there something that we've been campaigning for is financial literacy to be in the curriculum they've added it in 2028 and that is a massive step forward and i think everyone would recognize that but actually we're not satisfied because it's not enough it's a very basic curriculum it was designed by academics not by people in the industry it doesn't include investing it only includes budgeting inflation includes the most basic things that actually aren't going to make the biggest impact on you in the future and so if that curriculum isn't going to change as fast as we want to change then you've got to be on the outside looking in you've got to push into it And so that's how sort of what we aim to do with the school sort of program is that actually our program does encapsulate the 2028 curriculum.

35:07So if schools don't have the sort of resources to teach it themselves, they can outsource it for free. And Aspire will come in and deliver that 2028 curriculum. But you're not just going to get that 2028 curriculum. You're going to get the entire 14 week journey, including numeracy, writing, revision skills, financial literacy. You're going to get AI skills and technology. You're going to get career readiness. you're going to get their entire suite and actually you're going to get it at no cost so i think sort of our goal would be i mean it sounds crazy but have it in every school across the country whether it's delivered by us or deliver it by partners that we sort of work with so let's say i know you go to a state school you deliver the school delivered the program by another independent school and now you've been through the program you might then lead sort of the next the next iteration of it you might then go out and teach another school as you get older and so it's continuing and having that spread very organically throughout the country would be sort of a goal or a dream you could say and I think the other thing would be sort of get the app in as many people's hands as possible I think it gives people such profound sort of positive advantage actually to be able to sort of map out where you want to be and to optimize every single aspect of your life to get there is something that very few people have right now as sort of limited to the people with the most privilege and actually if our app is sort of designed to be free it will be free for everyone there will be a pro feature because it has to make money but actually all the key features that everyone will need are in that free module and everyone will get 12 months for free i mean we've made that absolutely clear if you've used if you've been through the aspire program which we hope that everyone will have been you'll get 50 lifetime off so you know if your entire life you'll be able to get 50 off as well as 12 months for free and so i think as many people as we can get it in the hands of as possible there's a bigger impact we can get um and we've been really fortunate for the times to have picked it up uh and that really helps sort of boost both the message i mean their campaign was smarter with money i think it was was obviously excellent i mean that's something that needs to happen more of the ft does one i mean claire barrett from the ft is obviously a huge voice on financial literacy um louise hill founder of go henry is a big outspoken voice on financial literacy and there's lots of great people doing it um and that's really important but what we've always sort of believed is there isn't enough collaboration within it and everyone wants to be the one who's the one doing it and that's something that we sort of fundamentally disagree with but actually the most important thing is actually there's one system which encapsulates all of this um and we've written to sort of all the major party leaders in Westminster and the relevant people.

37:45So we've written to the Chief Secretary of the Treasury and the Secretary of State for Education. We've written to the Shadow Secretary of State for Education and the Shadow Chancellor and the Shadow Economics Secretary to the Treasury. We've written to sort of the leader of the Liberal Democrats. We've written to the Education Spokesman for Reform and the Treasury Spokesman for Reform. So we've written to a really wide majority of parties saying, what would you commit to if you were in government? Or now you're in government. What would you commit to sort of furthering financial literacy opportunity for young people?

38:19And we've been disappointed not to get the response we would have hoped for. And I think this is something that everyone agrees with. Equality of opportunity is something that everyone from across the spectrum believes in, no matter what you believe. I think that's sort of something that everyone's settled on now. But I think not everyone, I think nobody actually has sort of understood what that means. is that's not sort of equalization in every sense that's not sort of you know taking from one person that's not that's none of that it's actually just giving everyone the education and the tools they need and i think that's where sort of aspire sort of aims and dreams to be is actually be the leveler for society is you know from a financial standpoint you'll feel so much better if you do it yourself i mean i refuse to take my parents help as much to their dismay i want to do it myself and it feels so much more rewarding when you do that and I think if we give everyone the tools to be able to do it themselves I think that would be such a great goal that we could strive towards

39:16Aryan Vedhara:and of course I mean we focus a lot on sort of the younger generation but there's still that gap actually even we meet entrepreneurs today that would still have that lack of knowledge or understanding and so there's something around bridging the even you know the university upwards to sort of 30 even 40 even 50 and their understanding because we see now companies that are creating well-being around payroll around HR and we see individuals of course selling businesses but not knowing what to do with the proceeds after that how do we bridge that gap how do we enhance financial literacy and also we and we haven't touched on it as much but the technological literacy for actually everybody that is missing that i think it's a really interesting point and i think it's something that we've sort of talked about a lot that actually there is a huge gap of people at university currently and much older than that I mean yeah I think my granddad I was speaking to another day on the phone I mean he's 94 um he's very much not from sort of the younger generation yeah um he struggles with his phone he struggles with sort of understanding sort of like he his sort of work came to the UK when he was 16 he's worked really hard came in with like two pounds in his pocket and now has sort of a couple of rental properties in Newcastle and he just cannot manage it anymore and so I think actually you're right it is everyone across the spectrum but i think it starts at the beginning because i think if everyone is taught it when they're 16 that actually then everyone will have it when they're 50 and 60 and 70 or whenever um and i understand that there might be a gap then in in sort of in the gap in the sort of in between when sort of while you're giving it to everyone when they're 16 what about the people who are 50 right now i think that's a sort of very very prevalent point and I think that's where Aspire the app comes in more so I think it really works for anyone at any age I was testing that with my parents yesterday um and sort of my mom and my dad are both much older um and sort of they use it and they're they're sort of learning stuff while using it they're using the Aspire Academy and learning bits about you know what is an LLM what actually is it how does it work um you know where might AI go in the future how to apply AI in your life and they're learning about that as well So I think from an education standpoint, you have to start at the beginning, because delivering a program to everyone in the country would be impossible from a practical point.

41:55But delivering it to every young person in the country, it would be difficult, but it is possible. And to me, it seems sort of, it still feels like something to aspire towards. The conversation spanned quite a broad spectrum, and it's fascinating for us to hear what you're working on, because this is something very close to our hearts. We talk very much about the taboo of wealth in the UK. And we think that's born out of a lack of financial literacy at younger ages. And that's not the case in other countries, for example. So you're solving something that's deeply, I think, important. And we often close by asking people what advice they would give to their younger selves.

42:35But I'm going to flip it around and say, for the Aryan at 30 years old, what do you know now? that you really hope he holds on to? I think, that's a great question. I think being open to sort of pivoting, I think it's sort of something that I've learned and I've sort of been able to bring on. I think, I'm not sure if I mentioned it, but I think we've had, since I founded Greener World the very first time, I've built three other apps since then, not including Aspire. one died before even its alpha test the next one i did its alpha test then it died then i did a beta test for one and then it died and so i think being willing to fail and sort of do these like sort of experiment with it doesn't work fine you pivot it into something else is really important because i think that's how you build something that works that's how you build something that not just has product market fit but actually has an impact and is affecting people's life because actually people have used it have gone yeah I like this little bit but it's not really working or oh I love this this is working for me I think being able to find that and being able to find that impact through being open to pivot I think is really really important and I think that's something that I would hope that I can hold sort of hold close the next sort of 20 years.

43:57Aryan Vedhara:Arian thank you for such an amazing conversation I think there's a lot that people can learn from what you're doing and hopefully from using Aspire. Thank you very much it's been great to talk to you both. Thanks for joining us. Thank you.