Özcan Akyol struggles with exactly the same fear in his life as billionaire Joop van den Ende. “It was so nice that someone of his stature told me what I experience myself,” said the television maker.
As a child from what he calls the social underclass, Özcan Akyol had to climb a lot to reach his current position. “I am a class migrant,” he says in the talk show by Humberto Tan. “For the people who don’t know what that means: you all have different layers in our society. This was really the social underclass.”
Climbing Ozcan
It couldn’t get much lower than that, says Özcan. “With all due respect, because it is also my greatest asset that I grew up there. I met all the people I wanted to meet. And then you climb a social ladder… I went to MAVO, MBO, HBO, university. But you start at the bottom. You are formed at the bottom.”
According to him, that will never leave your DNA. “Everywhere I go… that is my point of reference. I guess I’ll never really be impressed by anything… because I know what it’s like at the bottom. Then you become reasonable steady.”
Fear of relapse
Host Humberto: “Are you afraid of having to relapse again?”
Ozcan: “Every day.”
Humberto: “Is that a motivation?”
Özcan: “Yes, that is very much a motivation. At first I thought, how pathetic I am. But look, I interview a lot of people. And one interview was very valuable to me. That was Joop van den Ende.”
Same as Joe
Joop is one of the richest people in the world. “I believe that man has 2.5 billion. And that also comes from poverty. He explained to me: ‘In everything I do I am still afraid of falling back into poverty.’ To fall back to the past, how it was then.”
He continues: “I always had that. I had already defined that for myself. It was so nice that someone of his stature also told that. Yes, I am afraid every day of losing everything and going back to that situation. You can interpret that very negatively. But it is actually a fuel. That’s what your engine runs on. That’s why you keep going.”
Pull up
Humberto thinks that Özcan is a Joop for many people. “What I really like, you are very open about the past. I think a lot of people who see you are drawn to that. What you have with Joop van der Ende, you are now too. For a certain part of the population, you are too.”
Özcan: “It is the same blood group. I believe that. (…) It is about understanding very well what it is to grow with hardship. That you are overlooked. We really were second-, third-class citizens. That’s just how it is.”
