Speaker 1: He speaks of the planet Charlamagne to God here and
Speaker 1: as we come closer to closing out this year, I
Speaker 1: just want to say thank you for tuning it into
Speaker 1: the Black Effect podcast Network. There have been so many
Speaker 1: great moments over the past year. Take a listen to
Speaker 1: some of those captivating moments in this special best of episode.
Speaker 2: This is Money and Wealth and I'm honored to be
Speaker 2: here with a new friend, Alex Rodriguez. Mean he would
Speaker 2: know him s A. Rod. Let me give you the
Speaker 2: part that's easy for all the baseball fans. You may
Speaker 2: or may not know that he came from the Minnican Republic.
Speaker 2: His family were immigrants. Victor Rodriguez's father and Lord is
Speaker 2: Nellie Nevado Melo. I hope I said that right his mother.
Speaker 2: They came from, Well, he came it was born in
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy five in Washington Heights section of Manhattan and
Speaker 2: came to this country with a dream. He was raised
Speaker 2: alongside his siblings Joe and Susie and achieved incredible things
Speaker 2: in his professional career that started, as you know, playing
Speaker 2: twenty two seasons in Major League Baseball. That's the Seattle Mariners,
Speaker 2: the Texas Rangers, the New York Yankees, and of course
Speaker 2: later as chairman CEO of a rod But we're going
Speaker 2: to get into that because it actually wasn't later. It
Speaker 2: was actually almost right away. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Speaker 2: And he has been passionate about business and sports and community,
Speaker 2: and I will say, from my own perspective, I would
Speaker 2: say the maximization and unleashing of untapped human potential at scale.
Speaker 2: We'll talk about a little bit about that about with
Speaker 2: regard to how he treats his employees. Alex and I
Speaker 2: spent some time in the community a few months ago
Speaker 2: here in Atlanta at Clark Atlanta University. He showed up
Speaker 2: very simply for no compensation, because he was asked to.
Speaker 2: And so this is an important conversation about things that
Speaker 2: matter most at a time where everything matters.
Speaker 3: And I'm honored to be with my new friend Alex Rodriguez.
Speaker 4: John great to be here, man. We've been looking forward
Speaker 4: to doing this together.
Speaker 2: We have. We have And the story of your sports
Speaker 2: success is a topic of obvious legend. And I don't
Speaker 2: know if you get tired of talking about it or not,
Speaker 2: but I want to talk about your sports success from
Speaker 2: a different window a different vantage point.
Speaker 3: I want to understand.
Speaker 2: Was this always about you, you aspiring to do more?
Speaker 2: My guess is initially you were passionate, absolutely passionate about baseball.
Speaker 2: That was when you were in the Dominican Republic. That
Speaker 2: was something that you obsessed on.
Speaker 3: Is that right?
Speaker 2: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Look, ever since, you know, I was born in New York.
Speaker 4: I was born in the shadows of Yeshiba University, right
Speaker 4: around one eighty third in nineteen seventy five, very close
Speaker 4: to Yankee Stadium. My father owned a shoe store in
Speaker 4: our apartment. And very much like my father, ever since
Speaker 4: I was ten years old, I've always wanted to be
Speaker 4: a baseball player and a businessman. And I was fairly
Speaker 4: good with numbers. My father was too, and I had
Speaker 4: a passion for it, and ever since I was a
Speaker 4: rookie and I got drafted in nineteen ninety three by
Speaker 4: the Seattle Mariners with the one pick overall in the
Speaker 4: first round, I was thinking about life after baseball because
Speaker 4: I've seen enough examples of players that have gone like me,
Speaker 4: from rags to riches back to rags, and I didn't
Speaker 4: want to be an addition to that, you know, unfortunate
Speaker 4: number or statistic. So that was my passion early on,
Speaker 4: was to have a path, to have a good life
Speaker 4: post baseball.
Speaker 2: You were inspired by that balance initially from your dad.
Speaker 3: Is that right? Yep? Yeah?
Speaker 2: And Mom is where you got the self esteem. She
Speaker 2: poured the love in you and said you can do anything,
Speaker 2: is that right?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: You know my father he passed some years ago, and
Speaker 4: he left us when he was ten, and I never
Speaker 4: saw in those ten years my father raise his voice once.
Speaker 5: Even though he was an alcoholic.
Speaker 4: He would drink twenty twenty four beer cans a day,
Speaker 4: Budweiser I'll never forget, and two packs of cigarettes a day.
Speaker 4: So my mind is a ten year old John. I
Speaker 4: thought my father's going to be dead by the age
Speaker 4: of thirty. There's no way that anyone can live with
Speaker 4: this type of lifestyle. But never saw him drunk, even
Speaker 4: though I'm sure he was. But he was an acting
Speaker 4: alcoholic and very functional. And the amount of cigarets he
Speaker 4: was smoking my house was like in toxic.
Speaker 3: But my mother.
Speaker 4: I got my toughness and my grit and my work
Speaker 4: ethic from her. She worked at General Mortars for over
Speaker 4: twenty years and then when dad left, she had to pivot.
Speaker 4: Once we arrived in Miami at the age of nine,
Speaker 4: and I joined the Boys and Girls Club. She was
Speaker 4: a secretary of the morning at surf table at night,
Speaker 4: and I remember her coming home after twelve hours of
Speaker 4: working around midnight, sometimes eleven o'clock at night, and I
Speaker 4: would just be watching finishing, watching the Mets game, watching
Speaker 4: Kinner's corner, and I would give her a big hug,
Speaker 4: and I would take her pouch where she had her
Speaker 4: tip money, and I would start counting that money. And
Speaker 4: you know, on Thursdays and Mondays, Tuesdays it was thirty
Speaker 4: two twenty eight dollars twenty nine thirty. But Friday and
Speaker 4: Saturdays with the big ticket nights, and she would come
Speaker 4: home sometimes with fifty eight fifty nine sixty bucks. It said, boy,
Speaker 4: we're richer than Warren Buffett. We made it big. But
Speaker 4: then John, she did been interesting. She would then take
Speaker 4: that pouch and put that money out and put it
Speaker 4: in an envelope yep. And then she would say, son,
Speaker 4: help me, you know, pick up the mattress. And I remember,
Speaker 4: like an eleven year old boy, like every was yesterday,
Speaker 4: she would take that envelope and put it right under
Speaker 4: that mattress, and I said, Mom, but wait a minute,
Speaker 4: there's banks all around our neighborhoods.
Speaker 3: Why don't you go put the money there?
Speaker 4: And being an immigrant mother and not trusting banks, she goes, Son,
Speaker 4: we don't trust banks, We trust cash, and we trust
Speaker 4: our mattress. So that was the start for me where
Speaker 4: I said, financial literacy is going to unlock my future
Speaker 4: and hopefully get me out of this neighborhood.
Speaker 2: This is my pool for economic empowerment and the uplifting
Speaker 2: of all of us. Whether color is not black or
Speaker 2: white as in race, or red or blue as in politics.
Speaker 2: It's great as in at least in the United States
Speaker 2: of America, US currency. Wherever you're listening to this and
Speaker 2: watching this around the world, we got to message for
Speaker 2: you too. This is about the aspiration generation. This is
Speaker 2: about all of us coming up from nothing. This is
Speaker 2: about all of us aspiring and succeeding. And we have
Speaker 2: a very special episode today. Not only is it with
Speaker 2: my brother and my friend Van Jones, who I.
Speaker 3: Think is a genius.
Speaker 2: I believe is beyond and ahead of his time, which
Speaker 2: is why some people give him drama and problems because
Speaker 2: they don't really understand the frequency that he's on, and
Speaker 2: he does not always take the time to break down
Speaker 2: how he's thinking. He's too busy doing and moving then
Speaker 2: to be overly concerned about how something is being interpreted.
Speaker 2: He rather his results speak for him. But I think
Speaker 2: it's important to be able to understand van So they
Speaker 2: listen to him. So they said that more people trust
Speaker 2: him because he I believe is one of the true
Speaker 2: thought leaders for the twenty first century.
Speaker 3: Now, keep in mind, we killed doctor King. Keep in
Speaker 3: mind that Doc King's friends called him Martin Luther King,
Speaker 3: Martin Luther Kumb Uncle Tom fell out one of them,
Speaker 3: and these were his friends talking. In mind, it wasn't
Speaker 3: the Afrikaans, it was the a n C that actually
Speaker 3: undercover threatened to take out uh Nelson Mandela because he
Speaker 3: was quote negotiating with the enemy d quote. He had
Speaker 3: brought uh the Firmer Well, an africaner, on his cabinet
Speaker 3: as vice president when he became president. That was certainly
Speaker 3: ahead of his time, and nobody agreed with what he
Speaker 3: was doing. But he was a moneymaker. He was a
Speaker 3: guy bringing the cash in. He was a cachet.
Speaker 2: So some people kept it quiet, but real talk it
Speaker 2: was people in his own party who really had great
Speaker 2: animus for him because he was just he was just
Speaker 2: a visionary. And it was Gandhi who wanted to bring
Speaker 2: two countries together into one and he was killed for that.
Speaker 2: It was Shimon Perez once again over trying to bring
Speaker 2: something rational peace to the Middle East.
Speaker 3: Solution. I mean, we go on and on and on.
Speaker 2: It was you know, Malcolm X who came back from
Speaker 2: Mecca and said, gee, all white people are the devil.
Speaker 2: I just prayed with white people in Mecca. He was
Speaker 2: damned in two weeks. He's messing with somebody's business plan.
Speaker 2: The President Dull Clinton once said, it's hard to get
Speaker 2: somebody agreed to the truth when the lie is paying
Speaker 2: your paycheck.
Speaker 3: Does this would be that diabolical or that cynical? It
Speaker 3: just could be.
Speaker 2: Look, I'm fighting a short term battle for the survival
Speaker 2: of my people, and I don't know what you're doing
Speaker 2: with you being the person with a vision maybe fighting
Speaker 2: a long term not only a battle, but trying to
Speaker 2: win the war, and those two strategies may look different.
Speaker 2: I'm a partnership guy. The protest guy maybe likes bunk
Speaker 2: John O'Brien. I think they understand now what I'm trying
Speaker 2: to do. But when I first started this work, people
Speaker 2: call me all kinds of names. Man it rolled their eyes,
Speaker 2: like capitalism, financial literacy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, now they get
Speaker 2: it right. But when I first started this, the protest
Speaker 2: people really thought that I was a waste of time.
Speaker 3: But I needed the protest people to set up the
Speaker 3: situation where.
Speaker 2: The companies and governments and entities and communities wanted to
Speaker 2: partner with a guy like me to create an environment.
Speaker 3: Where there was no need for protests anymore. I say
Speaker 3: all this to.
Speaker 2: Say we have a radical movement of common sense.
Speaker 3: Van and I.
Speaker 2: But Van is even more on the forefront of progressive
Speaker 2: innovative thought than I am in many ways. But he
Speaker 2: takes less time to explain his titchy agent. He's always
Speaker 2: to explaining somebody else's situation. That's what he does on
Speaker 2: CNN all the time, explaining somebody else's situation. So I want,
Speaker 2: I believe, and Van does not know. Van does not
Speaker 2: know I'm about to say this. This is all live
Speaker 2: and in the moment we have not talked about this,
Speaker 2: and other than Van saying ask me whatever you like,
Speaker 2: I believe that we are in this moment history. Van's
Speaker 2: heard this part before. I believe we're sitting at a
Speaker 2: moment in history, but history does not. He'll feel historic
Speaker 2: when you're sitting in it, because like another day, I
Speaker 2: believe this is a third reconstruction. Vance heard me say
Speaker 2: this before. Some of the listeners have heard me say
Speaker 2: this before, from the streets to the sweets, from civil
Speaker 2: rights to civil rights. What you have not heard me
Speaker 2: say is, I think we need a radical transformational approach
Speaker 2: to the new capitalism, to the new economy, to the future.
Speaker 2: And that part I want that And I think if
Speaker 2: people can hear you say your vision on that part,
Speaker 2: which we have not discussed, and you did not know
Speaker 2: I was going to say. But if I gave you
Speaker 2: the charge of saying what's bold and audacious?
Speaker 3: If you knew there was a future and you knew
Speaker 3: you could not fail, what would you say? What would
Speaker 3: you do?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 2: What's your vision for all of us, particularly black folks,
Speaker 2: but all of them on a go board basis we look.
Speaker 6: I mean, this is a deep question and let me
Speaker 6: let me go backwards before I go forward.
Speaker 5: You have to ask a deep question about why.
Speaker 6: If you believe in God, if you believe in a
Speaker 6: just university, you believe in any any kind of spirit
Speaker 6: of love or whatever you want to call it. Why
Speaker 6: did black people get stolen from Africa? M brutalized, mistreated,
Speaker 6: rape assaulted, Not for a day, not for a weekend,
Speaker 6: not for a decade, not for a century, but for
Speaker 6: three centuries?
Speaker 5: Why how is.
Speaker 6: That consistent with any high spiritual understanding?
Speaker 5: I mean, why are we here as African Americans.
Speaker 6: We'll never know the answer, but you could choose to
Speaker 6: say that the West Western civilization needed a soul, needed
Speaker 6: a moral compass, needed something within it that could keep
Speaker 6: its worst impulses and check and insist that it reached
Speaker 6: its highest goals and aspirations. And that's really what African Americans,
Speaker 6: in my mind, is what we are.
Speaker 5: If you took.
Speaker 6: African Americans out of this country, even just on a
Speaker 6: political policy voting basis, this country would lurch so far
Speaker 6: into authoritarianism and despotism that you would have a menace
Speaker 6: on the planets such which you'd never seen before.
Speaker 5: And so we have a responsibility in.
Speaker 2: The backup, you've already gone deep. Explain to people what
Speaker 2: you just said like that was deep in and of itself.
Speaker 5: Yeah, if you got to understand where I'm coming from.
Speaker 6: I'm coming from a position that black people have a
Speaker 6: special calling on our culture, on our lives, and on
Speaker 6: our people, that we're special people. We represent through pain
Speaker 6: and suffering, we represent hope, we have soul, we have
Speaker 6: a moral direction. We've produced world class leaders that people
Speaker 6: around the world talk about, from Doctor King to Malcolm X,
Speaker 6: people saying we shall overcome in Eastern Europe when we're
Speaker 6: doing it's time to struggle something. And the thing about
Speaker 6: that we're only ten percent of a country, it's only
Speaker 6: five percent.
Speaker 5: Of the world.
Speaker 6: So this is a tiny, tiny little group of people.
Speaker 6: Somehow world culture revolves around us. From hip hop beyoncely
Speaker 6: just took over country music. I mean, the tiny little
Speaker 6: group of people has produced world class culture, has produced
Speaker 6: world class literature, has produced world class political leadership. We
Speaker 6: have had one black president already, might have a second.
Speaker 5: Hard to know what is going on with this group.
Speaker 2: This is the first podcast episode hosts US Presidential Election
Speaker 2: twenty twenty four. I'm with my brother Don Peoples, who
Speaker 2: is a legend in real estate and in business.
Speaker 3: You're going to get to.
Speaker 2: Know him and his story and what he has to
Speaker 2: tell you, but this we had to reschedule this for
Speaker 2: a number of reasons tied to our mutual schedule. But
Speaker 2: in many ways this is now perfect timing and it
Speaker 2: ties into this moment. So let me see I can
Speaker 2: set this up properly. When doctor King was assassinated in
Speaker 2: nineteen sixty eight, before that happened, he said I'm here
Speaker 2: to redeem the soul of America from the triple evils
Speaker 2: of war, racism, and poverty. He didn't say I'm here
Speaker 2: to say black people. Even though his work helped a
Speaker 2: lot of black people. He was there for everybody. And
Speaker 2: that last movement of the Poor People's Campaign had pivoted
Speaker 2: also to include poor whites, which were then and now
Speaker 2: the largest population of poverty in America. And he was
Speaker 2: assassinated on the eve of the launch of that movement,
Speaker 2: but he had pivoted to economics. Ambassador Andrew Young, my
Speaker 2: mentor my role model in many ways, the guy who
Speaker 2: sort of helped to raise me in my adote life
Speaker 2: are global spokesman in Operation Hope, who was on the
Speaker 2: balcony who helped to turn Atlanta by the way to
Speaker 2: the only international city in the South, and the tenth
Speaker 2: biggest economy in the US, almost five hundred billion dollars
Speaker 2: in GDP. He was there when Doctor King was assassinated
Speaker 2: and he was the only member of his team to
Speaker 2: take that mandate from Doctor King and pivoted into political
Speaker 2: realm to structure power versus their protests for it, and
Speaker 2: then to turn that into an economy, which was the
Speaker 2: city of Atlanta, as I just mentioned, almost a five
Speaker 2: hundred billion dollar economy. And don pivoting to you what M.
Speaker 2: Bassil Young told me a couple next, wasn't a couple
Speaker 2: of years ago, I'd say, actually it was about eight
Speaker 2: years ago, twenty sixteen, as we had gotten the Freedman's
Speaker 2: Bank renamed on the White House campus from the Treasury
Speaker 2: Inex Building, and on our former slaves who been at
Speaker 2: charted the bank to teach rese slaves about money financial
Speaker 2: literacy eighteen seventy five, Abraham Lincoln Frederick Douglass. He said, John,
Speaker 2: you need to say focus on your work. I never
Speaker 2: said this publicly now to today. You need to say
Speaker 2: focus on your work because if ever we lose political power,
Speaker 2: if ever we lose the rights that we hold dear,
Speaker 2: And he said, I can't imagine this happening. But if
Speaker 2: the only real power potentially is economic power. If ever
Speaker 2: we lose political power, social power, even religious power, we'll
Speaker 2: only have economic power the lever.
Speaker 3: Of economics to pull back on.
Speaker 2: You have got to not diminish your work or gett
Speaker 2: distry from it, because we need an economic infrastructure for
Speaker 2: the underserved of this country.
Speaker 3: And it dawns on me that this is where we are.
Speaker 2: That the only true freedom is I believe, and Chris
Speaker 2: Gorman or Keeback is the one who gave me this quote,
Speaker 2: is potentially financial and economic freedom because once you have it,
Speaker 2: unless you screw it up, no one can take it
Speaker 2: from you. And it is and we live in an
Speaker 2: economic democracy. This country is I keep saying, a center
Speaker 2: slightly right, center slightly right.
Speaker 3: It's an economic democracy. It's a inclusive.
Speaker 2: I like to believe this inclusive capitalism because you and
Speaker 2: I came from nothing and made ourselves into significant some
Speaker 2: things in America. I don't know another country in the
Speaker 2: world where our stories would have proliferated at the level
Speaker 2: that they have. We might have worked for somebody, but
Speaker 2: you and I work for ourselves. So I'm now turning
Speaker 2: to you because before we got on camera, we got
Speaker 2: we had a very powerful and important conversation, uh, some
Speaker 2: of which I want you to recount here.
Speaker 3: But what do you say to.
Speaker 2: Doctor King's vision that he was pivoting toward the economic agenda?
Speaker 2: And what do you say to Ambassador Andrew Young's criminition
Speaker 2: that at the end of the day, one of the
Speaker 2: few things you can rely on that you have some
Speaker 2: control over, it's economic empowerment. And where are we with
Speaker 2: regard to that agenda? And then I want to get,
Speaker 2: of course, into your story and how you have built
Speaker 2: what you have built, by the way, but those of
Speaker 2: you don't know. Don Peebles runs People's uh I call
Speaker 2: the People's Corporation, but it's several entities within his company
Speaker 2: that's a billion dollars plus in real estate development. Don
Speaker 2: peoples great. So I know it's for those listening to
Speaker 2: this mention that Don Peokles his brother he's black. He's
Speaker 2: not black for a living. He's a great developer who
Speaker 2: happens to be black. He's a great leader who happens
Speaker 2: to be black. But he's probably out of his heritage,
Speaker 2: and so am I. He's African America.
Speaker 7: Okay, down, people absolutely and in fact, I grew up
Speaker 7: during the civil rights movement. I was born in nineteen
Speaker 7: sixty in Washington, d C. Seat of our government, where
Speaker 7: many of the major protests and demonstrations and the fight
Speaker 7: in the halls of our government took place. I remember
Speaker 7: when doctor King was assassinated. I was watching television about
Speaker 7: the assassination. But and then the riots that followed were
Speaker 7: in my community. My mother had to drive me through
Speaker 7: a commercial quarriter near our home and have me duck
Speaker 7: down so that I wouldn't be hit as a little boy.
Speaker 7: But and then, you know, I remember Robert Kennedy's assassination
Speaker 7: as well. I remember how you know, and and Malcolm
Speaker 7: X's focus. But I remember that, you know, there was
Speaker 7: a time of struggle in the country for us to
Speaker 7: have equal access to just basic civil rights, and how
Speaker 7: we had to fight for those. And now our fight
Speaker 7: continues to be for economic opportunity.
Speaker 3: And doctor King understood it.
Speaker 7: I remember his quote. It was what good does it
Speaker 7: serve for the negro to have a seat at a
Speaker 7: lunch counter when they can't afford to buy a hamburger?
Speaker 7: And so that was all the relevance here about economic
Speaker 7: empowerment and so he started to Poor People's March and
Speaker 7: and and ultimately that's poor People's Initiative and so forth
Speaker 7: to reset the table economically in the country, because our
Speaker 7: democracy is a capitalism capitalistic democracy was that economic opportunity
Speaker 7: must lead the way. He set the pathway for Andrew
Speaker 7: Young and then Mayor Jackson before him, and what happened
Speaker 7: right well, yes, and initially through Hartsville now Hartsville Jackson
Speaker 7: Airport where is mayor. He had a vision for Atlanta
Speaker 7: to be a global city and having an international airport
Speaker 7: and got a lot of support throughout the state for that,
Speaker 7: but then people didn't realize what he had. Part of
Speaker 7: his plan was to make it an economic engine, and
Speaker 7: he had to fight to make it. To protect the
Speaker 7: opportunity for minority business contracting, he required thirty five percent
Speaker 7: to be for minority contracting for black contractors, and ultimately
Speaker 7: he fought won that and that started the passway of
Speaker 7: creating significant black wealth in Atlanta, and it made Atlanta
Speaker 7: the mecca for black economic empowerment.
Speaker 1: Once again, thank you for tuning into the Black Podcast Network.
Speaker 1: See you in twenty twenty five for more great moments
Speaker 1: from your favorite podcast