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A podcast to disrupt common narratives and constructs to empower diverse communities. We provide inspirational content from entrepreneurs and leaders who are disrupting the status quo.
Surviving mindset, thriving mindset,
winning mindset. Winners are built.
I can look at you,
I we just met, but I can.
I read people fairly well.
We're not human beings
having a spiritual experience.
We're spiritual beings
having a human experience.
Energy matters.
I can look at you and tell you, you had
somebody who told you they loved you.
Like I look at you,
I can look at you and tell you
you have both self esteem and confidence.
Those two things are different.
If you believe
we can change the narrative.
If you believe,
we can change our communities.
If you believe we can change the outcomes
and we can change the world.
I'm Rob Richardson.
Welcome to disruption.
Welcome to the discussion.
Now I'm your host and moderator,
Rob Richardson with me.
I'm honored to have John Hope Bryant,
entrepreneur, philanthropist,
author of many books, advisors
to many presidents, and author,
author of his latest book, financial,
Financial Literacy for all, which I have,
which I'm currently reading. I've.
I've definitely looked up to him.
I'm sorry.
I'm on breakfast Club and many others,
and many other, segments, including CNBC
and many others.
And he is definitely a disruptor.
He's disrupting, struggles, you know,
particularly for, African Americans
and having to accept struggle,
particularly when it comes to finances
and is working to empower all. John.
Pleasure
to have you all disruption, brother.
My honor to be on with you. Rob.
I can't hear him. We need to set the mic.
On to be with you.
It's nothing.
I got a little bit of sound issue here.
All right.
I can't hear my mind.
Brother. Brother.
Boom boom. Testing. One. Two, three.
All right, so let's get that.
Let's, Yeah, we got it.
We doing?
Now, give me a second.
Audio test.
Test. Do the test for test.
The speaker. Is that right?
I can hit test it. Test.
I can't hear that. No.
One. Two. Three.
Trying to. Hear it.
I can hear, I can hear it.
I can hear him now. John. Yo. I'm here.
All right, you're here.
Sorry about that.
So good
to have you on. Pleasure to have you on.
So yeah, I really want to start with,
you know,
kind of going into your journey, I,
I kind of see that you started off with,
that your that your mother was kind of.
From what I could tell,
she was kind of your source of inspiration
when it came to entrepreneurship and,
and, hiring your father started off,
you know, very early on in the segregated
South, actually,
becoming, entrepreneurs pretty early.
and then reverted back, through,
I guess, divorce and other issues.
I wonder, like, what did that
how did that moment, like, really shape
your life in terms of what you do now,
when it comes to financial literacy?
well,
you said a word, as I'd say the community,
when you talk about my mother,
she wasn't the source of my
of my inspiration for entrepreneurship.
Actually, she
she didn't want me to be an entrepreneur.
Oh, really?
Okay.
Wanting to get a job. She.
She was tired of worrying about me,
so she she really wanted me to go to work.
If I if she had her druthers,
she would have had been working at
McDonnell Douglas Aircraft,
where she worked, which became Boeing
aircraft later.
but she was a premier saver,
premier investor.
she was financially literate.
She had a credit score over 800.
It was in the mid 80s back in the day
when they a50 that
that schedule
that's that score doesn't exist anymore.
But there was a time we went up to 850.
She was eight over 850. she.
And when she said she bought a car,
she meant cash.
That was her name was her
name was one of the smith she passed on
last September is been promoted.
so she.
But most importantly, she told me
she loved me every day of my life.
And, there's nothing more powerful in
the child being told that they're loved.
I can tell that somebody told you.
Absolutely. Loved you.
I can tell you
I can look in your eyes and see that
you can always tell
when somebody was well loved.
And if you want to find a good man,
it said, find a man who had a great
relationship with his mother
to find a woman,
find a woman who has a great relationship
or had a great wish with her dad.
Now, you can have relationships
without that.
But it's it's an easy cheat sheet.
If you find somebody
who had a great relationship with their,
really the opposite sex, if you will,
in the relationship of a parents,
it gave them something that they didn't
have naturally, as a male or female,
and it gave them respect and consideration
for that opposite, sex.
Also, my dad was he was a businessman.
He was an entrepreneur.
He ran a traditional business.
It seemed a contracting business,
but he was a hustler, in the family
and my grandfather.
So as Johnny Smith,
my dad, my grandfather, R.B.
Smith, was a sharecropper.
And my second great grandfather,
George Young,
fought in the Civil War
in the Black Lives,
as a result of the Emancipation
Proclamation signed by Lincoln,
he was assigned as one of 7000 officers
in the US
black troops, in, Memphis, Tennessee.
And, so that's where I got my freedom
fighter, social justice bonds.
And then my business bonds, again,
came through.
My grandfather
and my dad and I became an entrepreneur
almost as a new feature
in our family lineage.
As, you know, to be an entrepreneur
a little bit, be a little bit crazy.
and my dad wanted freedom, but he.
I think he wanted it in a box
he could recognize.
And that's nothing wrong
about entrepreneurship.
But because of the courage that my dad, my
mother had, he gave me expanded courage.
and really, courage is, you know,
courage is, your faith
reaching through your fear,
displaying itself as action in your life.
And,
I was just standing on tall shoulders.
Had great reason to be courageous.
because of the the seasons
that came before me.
So, you know, it is a lot of role
modeling that went on before me.
That's really what you're talking about?
Yes. Both in in the form of love
where mother gave me, you know what I did?
At one point, I owned 700 homes.
I sold the company Promised Homes Company
two years ago.
I'm a passive shareholder now,
but I sold the company, but I grew.
It grew from 0 to 700 homes, about $150
million.
And asset value, where my mother owned
seven homes
and my grandmother owned a shotgun shack.
So I'm
so I'm curious, also, like you said, that
it wasn't your obviously your parents,
your background gave you the strength
and the courage to go out here and disrupt
to be an entrepreneur,
which is a crazy thing to do
no matter who you are,
where you come from.
But what inspired you to
to seek out this path and to
and to get on this path
when you you definitely
had examples of courage,
but not necessarily examples
of entrepreneurship?
Yeah.
I became convinced at nine years old,
that freedom had changed in America.
it had always been this way.
But people of color, in particular,
black people, either didn't recognize it
or it wasn't introduced to us,
or it was snatched from us as a pathway
for it was denied
us, of us, as a pathway forward.
So we use the government,
we use the thing that was in front of us.
We use the thing that had worked
as a lever to get freedom
through civil rights,
which made perfect sense, the 1800s and,
through the 1900s, you know, Doctor King,
the prophet of the 20th century,
my mentor, Ambassador Andrew Young,
who built the city,
that I'm sitting in now,
Atlanta is the only international city
in the traditional South.
Did that by leverage,
pulling the levers of government?
I so I understood
why my black brothers and sisters
relied so much on it.
But at a very early age,
I began to understand
also that of the hundreds of ethnic groups
in America,
only blacks, African-Americans,
poor whites
who are now riding at the ballot box,
by the way,
they write to just differently,
poor whites and Native American Indians.
All three of those groups
did not use a free enterprise system.
two of those groups, two of those groups
relied exclusively on the government for,
redress and, access the.
But all three of those groups,
got left behind.
And, the number one
group dying in America today,
high school educated white men,
people don't know that number one group.
Now, the number that the number one group
dying is white men.
Number one, drop it. And dropping dead
today.
It's been this way for a decade.
high school
educated white men dropping dead
like this because it's opioid addiction
and other disease.
Really? It's it's it's it's depression.
It's lost.
Oh, yes.
And, in this same group are angry and
they are riding, riding at the ballot box.
They didn't have a spokesman for,
you know, I don't know, 70 years,
50 years
at least since the Industrial Revolution.
And then my tripped up and decided
that I decided
I tripped up and became their spokesman
for their frustration.
And now they are they are on it.
They are out here saying,
I will not be denied.
And you can't and you can't be angry
at them for being frustrated and angry.
Their anger is not a strategy.
Anger is not a business plan.
It doesn't work for black people
in right in the streets.
It's not going to work for my poor whites
when they write in the,
in the ballot box.
But it feels good in the short term.
And there's somebody always
willing to stand up
and fan the flames of your frustration.
But it is, it will it,
you know, you will find us the North Pole.
You end up south.
It does not last.
So I kept looking for something.
I like math
because it doesn't have an opinion.
That's a melody. Hobson quote.
And,
when I looked at the math of the matter,
the the details,
I kept doing the process of elimination.
I kept, you know, I would look at our
I grew up in South Central in Compton.
Right.
And, I'd see our folks just dying
are getting killed.
They're brilliant. Yeah. Not with us.
I witnessed two murders before
I was nine years old.
And the death of our family.
That worth.
Before I was nine years old,
it was all over money.
I was nine years old. I think this is.
This is where you're getting to.
I believe I was nine years old
and a white baker came into my classroom
and taught
financial literacy in Compton and,
I might as well have met a martian.
I mean, what do you do about the form?
He came in once a week for 45 minutes.
He wore his normal business suit.
Yes, it's business arts in 16 floor.
There was no 16th floor in Compton, right?
I'm the only thing that was above
the sixth floor at all was the courthouse.
It didn't go to 16 floors.
And that was prophecy, folks.
For criminal, supposed criminal acts.
This guy
worked on the 16th floor in some office
building that went beyond the 16th floor.
And he had
he was there in the middle of the day.
My mother couldn't show up
unless I got in trouble.
She had two breaks in lunch every day.
She was an hourly employee.
I raised my hand in class.
What do you do for a living
and how did you get rich legally?
We still he said, I'm a
and I finance entrepreneurs.
Entrepreneurs.
That that was it, man.
Was it that was it
that that that's the demarcation, Mark.
I said, when this white man
came to my classroom and I said,
how did you get rich legally?
And he told me this, and I said,
wait a minute.
And if I get your jobs to little poor
people money, that's your job.
Yeah.
And if I don't pay you back,
I don't get dead.
No. Like, you know, I'm not going to
murder you because you notice a default.
Yes. In your piece of paper.
If I don't pay you back. Yes.
You know, you're crazy. What's credit?
It's he. Explain that to me, right? Yeah.
Okay. Wait a minute.
are there
any other people like you in the country?
Oh, my God, there's
10,000 banks back then.
there's got to be at least
a million bankers in a country.
Whoa, whoa. Slow down.
You mean to tell me there are a million
people running around this country
and your job was a loan?
Poor people. Money.
Well, we're about to be disruptive.
That's so.
So, judge.
Hey, there it is.
Yeah, I'm preneur
and one of my five positions, which was,
you know, me for operation
Hope is disrupting
access to capital, and access to credit.
Access to credibility.
the word credit comes from the Latin word
credito.
Credibility.
The word capital comes from the Latin word
copy to us, knowledge in the head.
In banking is a trust business.
You need credibility.
So you have more capital
so that you can access
and build a relationship with the bank.
So they then open up their vaults
and lend you money
because there's not a billionaire ever
that didn't do it on good debt.
That's right.
Yeah.
There's not a big, GDP country where
the gross domestic product income is ever.
Then they didn't do it on good debt.
All these conversations
about how much debt we have,
you folks need to knock it off.
They they say no.
I mean, people say you shouldn't
buy a home telling poor people
don't buy a home on TV.
Those fools own a home
telling you not to own a home.
It's crazy that they own a home
and they probably own several other
homes they rent to somebody.
Amen.
And I and I will. Yeah, I own the company.
That was the you know, one was a big
it was the biggest owned by minority.
and I would tell
people do not rent from me
right away from me, do it for a short
period of time and get out.
Right. Used to work at McDonald's
your whole life.
You shouldn't work at Walmart
your whole life.
You can if you want to, but if you do,
make sure you get promotions.
Like my CEO, my friend,
the CEO of Walmart, Doug Graham,
who goes way to India right now,
he worked at Walmart, but he's a CEO.
You know.
I wonder though, like, I want
I want to get to I want to read
quote your quote earlier
because I think it's it speaks to
what we're talking about here,
that this should be something
that is the things you're saying is
not it's not rocket science.
Like, like like you like math a card,
from your friend Melody Hobson.
Because it doesn't have an opinion.
I think the the issue is that, though
we are not this is not a logical thing.
It's deeper than that.
you know, money is the problems
with money are deeper than that.
They go psychological, they go emotional.
So where can one start? Yeah.
Where does one start?
What's the root of the issue
when it comes to money
healing?
Tell me more.
Well, I mean, what is the.
Well, there's three ways to live.
And this is from, the, the book,
the memo, and then my book, from nothing
sort of give you this
these, these, demarcation marks.
And then my last book, Financial Literacy
for all, is literally your workbook
for your family and yourself and
and get yourself, your own balance sheet
and income statement, and building wealth
and not just making money.
Those two things are different,
but there's three mindsets.
The surviving mindset is
I put this memo in the memo,
which is the memo
we never got about how the system works.
Surviving mindset, thriving mindset,
winning mindset. Winners are built.
I can look at you,
I we just met, but I can.
I read people fairly well.
We're not human beings
having a spiritual experience.
We're spiritual beings
having a human experience.
Energy matters.
I can look at you and tell you, you had
somebody who told you they loved you.
Like I look at you,
I can look at you and tell you
you have both self esteem and confidence.
Those two things are different.
to might put that into you.
You also have good role models.
You wouldn't select them yourself.
I can look at you and tell.
I can look at you that you wake up
in the morning and you're hunting.
Yes, you're you're hunting.
You're a hunter. And that's a builder.
so you
so I can tell you that a somebody's
mindset, I can tell you that you've
already graduated to a thriving mindset,
which is a which is a middle class,
which is, you know,
that's about access to your jobs and.
Right, they kitchens and how.
How do you move from that survivor?
I've never been in it.
So I don't really and I've been to your
to your point I've been extremely blessed.
Like, yeah.
Like, people have tried
to put limiting mindsets into me.
The story I tell people often
is that I struggled in school early on,
and I, and I, I was diagnosed with ADHD,
which is really not a disability.
It's a learning difference.
but,
you know, the teachers tried to say
that I wasn't going to be a great student.
And I decided one day in my life
that I was going,
I said, look, I'm
going to achieve in school.
And I told this to my eighth grade
teacher, and she essentially told me,
that's not going to be possible,
Robert, like, you're a horrible student.
That's what she told me, right?
And I was close to this teacher.
I went home
and I talked to my mother right.
And she gave me the words.
I say this to everybody.
She said, listen, Rob,
you never have to be
defined by anyone's low or narrow
expectations of you.
You define yourself or yourself
by yourself and let God do the rest.
And hence,
that's been the story of my life.
So but I was blessed to have that so
but like for people
don't necessarily have that.
Where do they start? John.
So Quincy.
So Quincy Jones would say another role.
My mentor, a friend of mine,
not one ounce of my self esteem
and self-respect
depends on your acceptance of me.
we'll say that again.
I say it again.
Doesn't like drop go,
go saying say it one more time.
Not one ounce of my self esteem
or self-respect
depends on your acceptance of me.
I would say to argue with the full pros.
There are two that life is 10%
what life does to you and 90% are you.
Choose to respond to it.
That success is going from failure
to failure without loss of enthusiasm.
that if I don't like me,
I'm not going to like you.
If I don't feel good about me,
I'm not going to feel good about you.
If I don't respect me,
don't expect me to respect you
if I don't love me,
I don't have a clue how to love you.
And the big one is,
if I don't have a purpose in my life,
I'm going to make your life a living hell.
Whatever goes around, come around,
hurt people, hurt people.
So most of us are surviving mindset
because we are depressed
and we're depressed because of the way
this world has treated us,
because we don't have a daddy at home.
So we didn't have.
So without a daddy at home, a young man
has a natural propensity to go cut up.
There's going to they're going
to be oversexualized and overly violent.
That's not
that's just natural that they just
they need
this is what they need to structure
and they need to to be told no,
without a daddy at home, they're going
to create havoc wherever they go.
So, a woman,
a young girl, needs a father figure.
So if you don't have a daddy at home,
if you don't have a nuclear family,
if there's one thing, if one person
is working two jobs and they're never home
just because they have too much a
at the end of their money,
if you go outside your street
and you try not to get shot
between your house and the bus stop.
Right? Yeah, exactly.
Go on.
And if you see the police as somebody
who is threatening you, not protecting,
you see white people or somebody trying
to put you down versus to lift you up.
then
then you, you know, and you go all around,
and you have three generations of that.
Yeah. Long five generations of that.
it because it's the old southern saying,
no matter how much I love you, my son
or my daughter, if I don't have wisdom,
I can only give you my own ignorance.
Yeah.
So out of love, we pass down bad habits
from generation to generation.
And now you got some people around you
say, no, you can't do that.
Why are you going to that school that.
Why are you talking?
Why go through this, all that stuff?
So what does that mean?
We're talking white. It's crazy.
It's like if you barely speak Japanese,
you're in Mexico.
In Mexico? Spanish.
You know, you're in Germany, speak German.
If you're in America, you speak English.
What's crazy? It's stupid.
It doesn't make any sense.
You gotta be bilingual now.
You gotta go.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Good. Yeah, yeah. Talk streets and sweets.
Yeah, but. But you got to be bilingual.
But if if that is your situation,
then you're an expert now.
And what you're against.
Yeah. That's what you're for. Yeah.
And and so now
you've got a surviving mindset
and your self-esteem,
your assets on your rear end.
I can't say what
I really want to say, but.
And so you
now you you you can
all you want to do is live for the moment.
I want to get this money, get this paper,
get this dollar, get this bag.
You hear this? In our neighborhood
all the time. We'll get this money.
Money is extraordinarily overrated.
You make money during the day,
you build wealth in your sleep.
So if you're depressed.
What do you make money during the day?
You build wealth in your sleep.
Yes, sir.
Hope stocks buy.
Yes. Businesses. Homeownership.
education, things
that compound that build on themselves.
and so 96% of our businesses,
black businesses don't have an employee.
An employee
is as a function of compounding.
So you're going to be in your daily
hustle.
You're
basically a self-employment project,
if you don't have employees,
if you don't have books
and records and infrastructure,
you wake up every day and you're.
Yeah, you say you run a business,
but in reality, you're just earning
an income with a self-employment contract.
But it seems like that
that's why they call it
making a living versus making a loan.
As soon as a contract is over,
you're out of business, out of business,
and you build no wealth.
You build wealth in your sleep. So, so
the basic the there's a the good news
about this conversation, Rob.
There's not a thing
I just said that's complicated.
And I'll answer your specific question
about how is it that we got the lesson,
how do we get out of it? Yeah.
All the precious things I and is I said
this on the Breakfast Club shopping.
You know when you're depression
you you overindex on coping,
shopping, drinking, drugging,
sleeping, texting, sex.
Yeah.
You're going
you know more not doing is the one
I enjoy that matters which is healing.
Yeah.
In order to heal, you got to deal.
You got to deal with your mess.
Which means you have to have self, steam
in order to deal with your mess.
You must esteem yourself.
But if you.
But if you're running from yourself,
if you're if you're if
you're living your life or your Instagram,
profile or your Facebook profile,
that's who you want the world to say.
To know you are the word
personality comes from the Latin
word words persona,
which means literally to perform.
So our personality is a performance
we're putting all over the world
against our am g.
That's a coping mechanism.
It is so literally, literally
everything you're doing, the code,
everything is literally you from
from going from
from surviving to thriving
and to go from thriving to winning.
And winners are builders.
That's what you are, Rob.
You're a builder.
You get up every day and you hunt,
and when you get up, the devil said,
oh shit, he's up.
So, so you've got to change your mindset.
And that's why
when you look in you look at you look,
I had a lot of fun on Instagram.
Yeah.
Just get folks
who think they're arguing with me now.
They hitting their face or my,
they're hitting their face on my face.
I mean, I'm
just a part of a movement of common sense.
I'm sitting here saying what is basic?
Common sense?
And they're trying
to rationalize their behavior
because it's tied to a 40 year life.
Because it's irrational.
They're tired, they're
it's not rational.
No, no, it's worse because
the rationalize, kill, rationalize.
Yeah.
This is the this is somebody right
doing this for 30 or 40 years.
Yeah.
I mean these coping mechanisms.
And here's
this guy John Ryan coming and saying now
he had to knock all that stuff out there
like, no, I don't need to knock that all
I need to knock you all.
I think I'm well, I want to
I want to make sure
I get some a couple things,
but I want to talk about diversity.
And you talk.
About here, you can do this topic.
I know we don't have time today,
but this topic here, Charlamagne,
is very, you know, both very passionate
about mental health.
This topic here could be three segments.
Just mental health.
We have got
we have got to deal with this.
It is the key to everything.
And there's too many of us
who are not acknowledging
that we have mental health issues.
If you black in America and don't think
you're crazy, you're a little crazy.
I think everybody
is a little crazy in America too.
But because we go through a lot
and I think it's, you know, the route
of mental health from my definition is,
avoiding reality and avoiding the pain.
And so, like we, as you say, black
America has been through a lot of pain.
So the goal is to
if you are trying to avoid it,
you don't deal with it.
And then you're dealing in things
that aren't reality.
And then that is the roots
of mental illness from my perspective.
That's why you got 1.8, 1.78, $1.8
trillion trillion of black consumer
spending and 91% of it is consumption,
91% is consumption.
We're not building wealth 41% of us
owning a home.
No, we want to rent.
And a place is uptown versus downtown,
a place we can't afford with money.
We don't have to impress people
we don't know.
You're talking about stuff
that don't matter.
People don't want you just.
We're just taking your rear.
Really? Into the hood.
Da hyphen hoodie doesn't look like
the worst house on the best block
by rehab it and living build equity.
When you get enough equity 3 to 5 years,
use the equity line of credit
and buy a second home in the hood.
Near near transportation, near jobs.
Every inner city is near
essentially located real estate
in inner city in France called Paris.
Buy rehab and rent and rehab.
Be conscious.
Rehab it when people who actually live
in your neighborhood plumbers, heaters,
landscaping, techs, roofing, lighting
hire people in your hood,
not your cousin Pookie.
Them who don't have a talent, hire
somebody who has a skill.
It looks like you put them to work,
give them a contract and recycle
those dollars.
And you do that three times
and you'll have $1 million
net worth in five years
with a high school education.
So there you go. Right there.
Because you have low self-esteem,
you're you're going to the mall
when you really need to be going
to the real estate listings, right?
Yeah. Because you got low self esteem.
You go into the club,
you look at that, pay $5 a bottle service,
for some lady who, you know,
you really in the daytime and sober,
you wouldn't
spend a lot of time with our guy.
It is reverse.
And what you really need to be asking
that lady is not what's, you know,
what's her waist size.
You need to ask her
what's her credit score.
But because we. What's your credit score?
What are your values of the money
your family hits?
Your what's your and what's your
and what's and what's your vision.
Yeah.
What's your passion for your life
because you're potentially
picking your life partner at a club.
Yeah. Right.
Yeah. Probably not a good strategy.
And you're drunk.
So it it's you got a lot of weight here.
I think I want to talk about,
since we just,
we kind of did this deep dive,
but I certainly want to get on diversity,
at least towards
the end of the, conversation.
But since we talked about this before,
it's focusing a lot on mental health.
We talk about mental clarity, essentially,
and getting mental
clarity in mental health.
I think one of the challenges you and I
before the broadcast talked about,
I and not only how it's changed
the economy, but,
you know, I I'm sure you know,
this is not new algorithms are not new.
Algorithms are actually being used,
to really, actually further drive people
into more of their madness
from the reality at the ballot box
that you talked about,
to the, to the worst habits
you just talked about with
the black community. I mean,
I'm just see, like, how do you get
how do you how do you start
when you go out, when you have this device
that's been in front of us so long?
That actually is an addictive advice.
device.
Where does one start
to get mental clarity?
If you had to say
one thing that they can do
to make the biggest difference
in their life,
we can talk about self esteem.
And you and I have been blessed
to at least
have some examples and models
poured into us, for maybe those who don't.
Where should they start?
What's the one place they can start
to get the most mental clarity.
In a book?
there you go.
Keep in mind that there was a law,
the most important law passed
by people who were trying to oppress you
for economic purposes
because it was all about money.
Was thou shalt not educate?
it was against the law
to educate a black person
against the law for you to learn.
That should tell you everything
about the power of education.
You know,
God gave you two ears and one mouth,
so you listen twice as much as you talk.
One of my five pillars of success
is as much education
as you can shove down your throat.
Second pillar
understand financial literacy,
the math of the matter,
how education, is applied
to aspiration, market
economies, financial literacy.
My book Financial Literacy
for all as an example.
What operational does number
three family structure and resiliency.
There was no they sold off the children
and they abused the wife
until you stopped fighting
to try to protect her
because you couldn't do anything about it.
They broke the family up.
So there you go.
Family structure,
self-esteem and confidence.
What does this do to your self-esteem?
It ruined your self esteem
because you could not protect your family.
What are black men doing now?
Not showing up at home
because they don't feel
they can protect
and take care of their family?
Self esteem and confidence.
What does confidence come from?
Confidence comes from competence
employed in the market economy.
So black people in America
have the highest confidence
because we're in the biggest economy
in the world, like you, we're killing it.
But we have low self esteem.
Africans and Afro-Caribbeans
have high self esteem and low confidence.
They because they've got family structure
itself.
You know,
we see the doctors, lawyers, robbers,
mayors, everybody looks like them.
But they have never succeeded
in a leading market economy.
And then the role models the environment.
You model what you see,
why the kids want to be rap stars
and athletes, God forbid drug dealers
because when they grew up
in that neighborhood,
those were the role models they saw.
So read a book starts with my
I've made it very simple.
I've taken Wall Street
and brought down the main street.
Unpack it.
I want to see the book written,
underline, highlighted, dog eared.
Have a conversation once a week.
Y'all don't have dinner with each other
anymore.
Use the book as an excuse
to have a family meeting.
Buy some dinner,
put it on the kitchen table.
And by the way, don't eat soul food
every day.
On day three, they.
That was a slave diet.
They threw the money out,
but they threw the
the scraps out the back door
as a sign of disrespect.
Now, brilliantly,
we took it and we said, we'll show you.
And we put salt on it so that the food,
the meat wouldn't go bad.
We put salt on it.
And then we made grits, hog mauls,
pig feet, fried chicken.
We did.
We did all that whole cake.
We did all that stuff.
But these are
the worst parts of the animal.
And it wasn't it.
Yeah, great. We made it a soul food,
but it's going to bloat you.
It's going to inflame you.
You're dying of hypertension and diabetes
and low and high blood pressure.
Because we're eating this up
three times a day.
Eat some fruits, vegetables and some fish,
and eat some food
once or twice a month as a treat.
Now back to to the question.
We got to get your life straight.
You gotta get
you back on the right course.
You need the financial literacy course
and you need a computer course.
Now, you
you really need a computer course.
But that's where it starts.
Because that job that people are somebody
some people are watching this, listening
to this, that job
that you have or puking your cousin poking
JoJo's got at the convenience store.
It's gone at the fast food store.
It's gone at the grocery store.
It's almost gone.
And as you said,
it's happening right in front of you.
Go to the grocery store.
Don't mind me.
Don't, don't don't take what I'm saying.
Don't take what I'm saying is gospel.
Go to the grocery store.
It used to be ten aisles of people
checking folks out.
You go there now, and there's three
aisles of folks checking folks out,
and there's 10 to 12 self-checkout
counters and one employee looking at them.
And this has happened
right in front of you.
That is robotics, that is automation,
that is computerization.
That is a step towards a I.
Yeah, It is it is analytics, in motion
in your grocery store.
You go to you
go to a fast food restaurant.
it used to be eight to 10 to 20 people
working in one fast food restaurant.
Now you go
there is 5 to 6 people, you go on,
you hit a screen to put in your order
because people are tired
of being rude to the counter
and they're tired of being rude.
And so you go to the mall,
you go to the mall,
go to the go to the go to the airport.
I mean, it's right.
It's happening. Yeah, right.
You're right about that.
It's not.
But it's
this is the first technology like in
it's also a general purpose technology
in that it's the first technology
that I think is actually going
to affect people in finance too.
It's going to affect actors
and other people.
You can see, you're in Atlanta.
I believe Tyler Perry, was building
the $800 million studio.
And he saw, I said,
I got to shut this down.
And so we figure out where we go next
because this
this makes it
so I don't have to do much of this.
I don't have to do as much as I had to do
even close.
So I do think there has to be something.
and I was playing your book today.
my my adopted son,
who's my cousin, took a while.
I was driving him. I was
we were listening to the book.
I made him listen to sit down.
And he told me, well,
I can like I look stuff up.
I said, well,
you can't look up how to think.
All right.
So we're back to words.
Like, so you got to know this because
yeah, you can do artificial intelligence.
But artificial intelligence is neither
artificial nor intelligent okay.
So it's coming from data.
So to your point, I use AI all the time,
I use OpenAI,
I have my friend Sam Altman, who created,
we're co-chairs of of the
AI Ethics Council together, as you know.
but I know what I'm looking up,
and I, and I, and I have a gut of
what is what is right.
So I know what to ask AI and I'm really
saying, can you confirm, do me a favor.
I can research this.
I, I can research
just for a week or a weekend
and come to the conclusion or what
I'm saying is correct by pulling together
15 pieces of data and then sort of,
you know, micro sizing it.
But I do me a favor.
Reach all over the world
to every database accessible.
And in three seconds I confirm to me
what I believe already is correct.
So I can then write it in this article
and know that I'm factually correct.
So education comes from books
or from data?
Is your, relative? Say it. But wisdom
comes from experience.
And I can sit here and tell you
it's like these all these brothers
walk around
saying they're financial influencers.
And, ladies, we're. And I did this.
I covered the Charlemagne show.
These people are making hundreds
of thousand dollars a year, sometimes
millions, telling you how to get rich
by doing seminars about getting rich.
Now, I'm not hating on this,
but this is like somebody
saying they're going to do surgery on you
and to cancer surgery.
And they and they got certified on YouTube
like, this is crazy.
You got it's something
there are certain careers
you have to know what you're doing
and money and making money and doing well.
That's one of those things
you cannot floss and fake.
You cannot get it from us.
You cannot get it completely from
books on tape.
You've got to get the deal with somebody
who's actually done it.
We don't have time for this,
but there's so many transactions
and so many things I've done,
including one last week.
And I want to continue the conversation.
We'll talk afterwards
because I've definitely got more to say.
But go ahead.
Yeah, we I've learned something that
I thought I knew I didn't know it,
but I learned through this transaction,
through the grinding of free enterprise
and capitalism,
because capitalism is a gladiator sport,
and in it you're in the arena
and in the room.
You don't know what the heck you're doing,
you don't know what's going on.
You know what's going on
when you get there, and you don't know
how to behave until you're sitting across
that negotiating table
and how you're going to react
or respond to that defines everything.
And so you want to call somebody
who's been to the negotiating table.
I signed 100.
I'm sorry,
I signed a $200 million credit facility.
Me, I'm one of the few African-Americans
alive today
who signed a $200 million credit facility.
And it was non-recourse.
Was Rob,
as you knows, means I don't guarantee it.
I was I'm part of a $100
million credit facility
just this past January, company
that I created, you know,
when I first started, if you had a 50,000,
our loans personally guaranteed.
Right?
But now I'm doing non-recourse debt.
You know, you can, you can somebody can't
give you a book and teach seminar
who hasn't
built a my payroll
is a million half dollars every two weeks.
border employees.
How am I going to tell you how to run
a balance sheet or income statement?
And by the way, I applaud that,
because there's a lot of people that
that make a lot of money at that level,
but have 10 or 20 people working for them.
That's usually what it is.
They don't really fast the opportunity.
So that's definitely be applauded.
I have 400 employees. I ain't no joke.
No it's not.
So you're definitely
be applauded for that.
And we're definitely going to have
another conversation later.
Let me also just say I want to get
to this point before we conclude.
And then we'll we'll talk all actually
off the air.
you talk about diversity, inclusion.
And I heard you say this line
about diversity, inclusion.
You say
black people are too emotional about it.
And some white people are too narrow
minded about it.
You talk about it as being it
is critical in terms of, in terms of
just being competitive as a nation.
Tell me what you meant by that statement
and how diversity and inclusion
is so important for America.
Yeah, I know,
let me give you a word on that.
Go ahead.
Is a Van Jones quote.
I'm getting quite proud
because a good friend of mine,
we're working on this together.
He says that 99% of black folks
don't know a thing about I,
and 99% of white folks
don't know a thing about AI.
That's correct. We all live here.
So it's a starting point,
the first starting point
where we all start
basically at the same place.
And whether you're in the hood
or working at a convenience store
or a fast food restaurant,
your job is at risk.
Or whether you're an accountant,
as you said earlier,
or you're a lawyer
or you're in the creative spaces.
Like I hear that Tyler
Perry story is real.
It's real.
you're you're you're,
you know, your job may go away.
And so you may have to reinvent yourself
and create
a new employment situation for yourself.
because we're going to go from the horse
and buggy to the automobile
once for everything. For everything.
Not just the horse and buggy.
That was one that was transportation.
This is everything.
yeah, but but you know, fairness when you
if you had a horse and buggy in 1850,
it felt like everything.
But by 1910,
the most valuable thing you could use for
a horse was to make it into glue.
It had gone from everything.
Purpose, machinery, transportation.
True.
Fair enough
to literally not worth anything.
So you're going to have some human beings
who the society may say
aren't worth anything.
I know this is hard for people to hear,
but the with analytics
may say you don't have any value
and you're going to have to create
some value by being educated,
skilled that you that you understand how
the system works and you can lean into it.
in this new world we're, we're living in.
Otherwise it's not gonna be love or hate.
It's going to be radical indifference.
Folks won't hurt or hate you.
I feel enough about you to hate you.
They'll just be indifferent towards you.
which is worse?
Another way.
Which is indifference is worse.
Is worse.
So d and I, I, I went and debated
Bill Ackman who is a billionaire
who is the leader
and the poster child for anti D.
And I work he has built
an entire reputation around it.
He's going public with his company
in my opinion because of his profile
of it, of him standing in front of it
in attracting conservative
interest to his platform
and possibly his investors in his company.
It's just my theory.
I don't know that part.
What I do know is
I debated him about two months ago
at the Milken Global Conference.
It was a private session,
so I can't say what was said.
I can tell you that after 40 minutes,
he really was looking for the exit door.
that's how you say he works with somebody
that can debate
with the with some clarity and truth
and not emotional receipts.
He had no data, on his side.
I was stunned by this.
I came with nothing but data.
I was not emotional.
the other side was very emotional.
Again, I can't get into details,
but let's just say that we had to have
a change, a conversation 40 minutes
in from the substance
to other things about this around
why we believe he's been manipulated,
or on this topic,
and he needs to save himself, from,
I think, reputation damage
because he's on the wrong path.
All these folks that are pushing
RTD and I are on the wrong path path.
But by the way, black
folks are on the wrong path.
Also, we came at this emotionally
do the right thing.
This is the hand of God.
This is, you know, be moral.
Okay, that's all cool.
But that's not
that's not where our business is going.
And society's going to change.
I mean, we have a chance and Adam
and Eve to put our, our,
our economy inside of our culture.
Now, this is God talking.
And we decided to put our culture
inside of our economy back
to Adam and Eve.
What do you think we're going to do now?
And so these folks are leading
with their economic interests,
in their personal interests first,
and they're afraid they're fearful.
It's going back to the poor white.
This is where
poor whites and wealthy whites intersect.
They are afraid of the future.
There's too many of us in it
for their taste.
But they they've forgotten
that God has a sense of humor.
There are not enough.
This is not a racial comment
I'm about to make.
It's just math.
There are not enough college
educated, successful white men
to drive GDP gross domestic product
for the next 30 years.
Our generation will see
the first generation of baby boomers
over 65 years of age.
That's a majority in this country.
Those are wealthy, white
and trying to retire.
They made their money.
They built their wealth.
They're exiting the stage.
You have those coming on the stage
who look like you and me.
And we're not financially literate,
as we've been saying,
this entire broadcast, we got hustled down
pat, but we've been and we got surviving
and it's some some driving down pat,
but we don't have building wealth.
We don't have that. No one taught us this.
So what I say is that that
when some black succeed in this new world,
even the racist wins because the economy
grows, GDP grows, everybody wins.
You're going to have a majority
of minorities in ten years.
Right now you have 40% of this
country is black and brown.
In 1950, the country was 90% white,
1950, not 1850.
And so I can give you more data, but.
You go right now very quickly.
It's just so people know I like this one
point in data you always bring up the most
diverse cities are the most prosperous
to economically prosperous.
I'm not talking about something.
I don't want people to listen to this
and start parsing my words.
Economically prosperous,
successful, profitable.
The most valuable cities in America
are the most diverse.
Look at it.
Atlanta, where I'm at right now, it's the
biggest economy in the traditional South.
It's nothing to do between
Atlanta and Memphis
and all these other cities
other than we made a different business
playing a different bet
versus arguing over who's gonna go
to a water fountain, white and black.
We start to argue over
who's gonna get the contract.
The green.
Right.
And, and, and so it's
the only international, the city.
Thank you. In the South.
Thank you, Andrew Young.
And it is the 10th largest
economy in the US.
And you can put three states around
and land
together inside of Atlanta
economically and still have room
for the two biggest states
in America California in New York, two
most ethnically diverse,
two most prosperous financially.
And you can go on or on the biggest,
most profitable companies in America
by 40% over their peers
are the most diverse and inclusive.
The data is unimpeachable and undeniable
that not only does
diversity work as a business plan,
but demographics say you have no choice
than than to promote Dei as R&D.
You have no choice than to promote D
and D as GDP for the future.
So it's all here.
The research and development.
This is the farm club
and the bench strength
for the playoff games
of the rest of our lives.
This is like Doctor King saying America.
He didn't say I'm here to say
black people.
He said I'm here to redeem the soul
of America
from the triple evils of war,
racism and poverty.
I'm not here.
I'm advocating for black folks
and brown folks
giving some moral statement about D you I,
I'm saying that my rich friends in my poor
friends do better.
If only they stay rich.
I'm saying you cannot
have the largest economy in the world
in 20 years, as we are right now,
in the sole superpower in the world
as it is right now.
Unless you embrace people
who are black, brown and different
and teach them how the economy works
and give them a ladder into success,
whether you like them or not,
this is not even debatable.
We will be speaking Mandarin in 20 years
unless we get this right,
because you never had an economic power
that wasn't the the, the superpower.
Sorry. You never had a superpower.
It wasn't the economic power.
At the same time
in the history of the entire world.
That's
why I say that God has a sense of humor.
Because with all this crazy politics
going on right now, that's basically
divide.
Divide the division,
you know, hate this person, I think.
Look, none of that works.
No, it's a it's a way
it's a way to destroy the nation.
And I think that's part of part
of our biggest challenges is an emotional
one is is a mental health one.
And we have to get that and disrupt
that struggle.
John O'Bryant, it's been a pleasure.
I definitely want to have you on again.
Definitely
want to talk more about particularly,
I because we're doing a lot in that area
here in the Midwest and some of the South.
So definitely after the stream.
Let's definitely talk a little bit
before you leave,
for all those listening to disruption
now, keep disrupting
and we hope to see you at Midwest
Con 2024, September 4th through the sixth.
We talk about policy, innovation
and technology for social impact.
Stuff that I think you would
definitely connect with.
John,
thank you so much for coming on the show.
Hold on.
you know, right after this,
after we end the stream.
Thanks so much.
Everybody. Keep disrupting.