Speaker 1: Hey, what's up everybody? My conversation with entrepreneur and author
Speaker 1: John Hope Bryant was so good I decided to turn
Speaker 1: it into a special bonus episode, So hope you enjoy it,
Speaker 1: and don't forget that A new episode of Politics drops
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Speaker 1: here is more of my conversation with John Hope Bryant.
Speaker 1: So here's a concern that people have as it relates
Speaker 1: to maybe some of the things that you say, and
Speaker 1: I don't disagree with a lot of it, to be honest,
Speaker 1: But here's a concern is that if you attached and
Speaker 1: levered to so much, not just capitalism in America, we're
Speaker 1: talking about hyper capitalism in America, which is a different
Speaker 1: level of capitalism that we have here, ultimately, do you
Speaker 1: then begin to mimic the behaviors of the oppression that
Speaker 1: often comes with capitalism.
Speaker 2: You're so good. I mean, you're so good.
Speaker 3: You've given me two questions I've never been asked before,
Speaker 3: and they're two of the best questions I've ever been asked,
Speaker 3: and I get and I do this all week and
Speaker 3: you know, no, that's the real Again. God, if you
Speaker 3: want to make God laugh, tell them your plan.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm.
Speaker 3: I think that I think that black people are the
Speaker 3: moral compass for this country. I think that black people
Speaker 3: are the moral compass for the world, because no matter
Speaker 3: how successful we become, we're still black. My Latino brothers
Speaker 3: and sisters can can can integrate. And my Asian brothers
Speaker 3: and sisters, I mean, you can go out the lot
Speaker 3: Indians they can at some point they can mainstream, slick
Speaker 3: their hair back or whatever you know, you know, not
Speaker 3: get it to and in the summer changed their last name.
Speaker 2: My Jewish brothers and sisters, all of them.
Speaker 3: Can can can can mainstream integrate.
Speaker 2: We can't. We're still black no.
Speaker 3: Matter how successful we become, and we're and as a
Speaker 3: result of that, we carry this stigma, this burden, this
Speaker 3: this lash, this history that we keep reminding the world
Speaker 3: about like you gotta be you got to treat people decently.
Speaker 3: And we're a bridge to everybody else who's trying to
Speaker 3: come up because we are constantly reminded that we but
Speaker 3: by for the grace of God might be there ourselves.
Speaker 3: And so there's good capitalism and bad capitalism. Bad capitalism
Speaker 3: is where I benefit and everyone else pays a price
Speaker 3: for it. Slavery is an example of bad capitalism. Jim
Speaker 3: Crow Uh, sharecropping our examples of bad capitalism. I think
Speaker 3: private prisons are an example of bad capitalism. I mean
Speaker 3: we can check check cash. The pay of lenders actually
Speaker 3: came out of an honorable place, but they were pimped.
Speaker 3: Check cashing came out of you going to a grocery
Speaker 3: store and you'd be there to counter. Hey, by the way,
Speaker 3: I got my paycheck, could you just cash this for
Speaker 3: me so I can have some cash and they'll pay
Speaker 3: for my groceries. And then the grocery figured out they're
Speaker 3: making more money paying a one percent fee on a
Speaker 3: check with no inventory than getting two percent profit on
Speaker 3: shells where they had to buy inventory, So they became
Speaker 3: check cashers. That's where that came from. Same with payday lenders.
Speaker 3: A lot of this stuff is pumped and perverted, but
Speaker 3: the obnoxious versions of pity lending and all this stuff
Speaker 3: that's bad capitalism. Good capitalism is the person who braided
Speaker 3: your hair. Good capitalism is a person who just did
Speaker 3: gave me my manicure. Good capitalism is where I benefit
Speaker 3: and you benefit more. So we can't do this, this,
Speaker 3: this this podcast without technology which we the government did
Speaker 3: give it to us.
Speaker 2: We paid for it. The phone, we.
Speaker 3: Paid for, the pillar we slept on last night, we
Speaker 3: paid for I mean, we paid for it because there's
Speaker 3: more value than we're paying for, fair exchanges, no robbery.
Speaker 2: So so I think when good people win it am.
Speaker 3: If you're a good person and you become successful, you
Speaker 3: become a great person who's successful, and you tend to
Speaker 3: do great things with that greatness. You tend to be charitable,
Speaker 3: you tend to be philanthropic, you tend to give back.
Speaker 3: I mean you walk around worried all damn day, Jamail.
Speaker 3: I look at you all day, you worried about black people.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's not like it's your full time job.
Speaker 3: You wouldn't do that. Maybe, I don't think if you're
Speaker 3: a female, blonde hair, blue eyed from an uppercross white family,
Speaker 3: no matter how nice you are, you would not be
Speaker 3: doing It's not your lived experience. So the more so
Speaker 3: you bringing the people with you as you rise, you
Speaker 3: lift and rise, you lift, in rides, and I see
Speaker 3: that amongst all the people I know who are successul
Speaker 3: House with Killer Mike and t I. Yesterday they bought
Speaker 3: They could have put a restaurant in Buckhead, but they
Speaker 3: put it in. They put it. They put it, you know, Uh,
Speaker 3: in a in an underserved neighborhood. They could have gone
Speaker 3: to a wealthy area, but they put that restaurant where
Speaker 3: we could reach it. And everybody showed up by the
Speaker 3: way to support them in the community. But it's not
Speaker 3: a charity. You got to pay your bill at that restaurant,
Speaker 3: otherwise they can't pay their workers. So I'm philanthropic. Half
Speaker 3: of the contracts in my businesses go to minorities and women.
Speaker 3: Uh that's intentional. So I think that as you become
Speaker 3: more successful, if you have a consciousness, you bring the
Speaker 3: consciousness with you. Where did Ford Foundation come from? Where
Speaker 3: the Rockefeller Foundation come from? It came from capitalists. Harvard's
Speaker 3: named after a business person. I mean, uh, I mean
Speaker 3: people who founded these we think about these things. We're
Speaker 3: not thinking about the people who founded these things. Walmart
Speaker 3: was a business person. It was a farmer named Sam Walton.
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 3: Ups was was Jim Carrey who was a bicycle messenger.
Speaker 3: If we created these big companies, do you think we'd
Speaker 3: hire more black people and women?
Speaker 2: Probably?
Speaker 3: And as we had hundreds and thousands employees where we
Speaker 3: make them millionaires. Probably, What do those black millionaires do
Speaker 3: get back to their community? Fund their churches, fund fund
Speaker 3: their schools and their own create charter schools and their
Speaker 3: own community support the teachers and their public schools. They
Speaker 3: start in lifting up those left behind. So once again
Speaker 3: I come back to a broken record that I just
Speaker 3: said earlier. We just never tried this as a business plan.
Speaker 3: So yes, I do believe Stride Masaye was the six
Speaker 3: richest man in Africa's a dear friend of mine, brother
Speaker 3: the Bill Gates of Africa. Every time I talk to him,
Speaker 3: he's talking about how do I lift up my people.
Speaker 3: He's not talking about how much money has stacking his Benjamin's.
Speaker 3: He's not talking about He's trying to use his infrastructure
Speaker 3: as a force for good. I want to get to why,
Speaker 3: at some point, Jamie, I want to get to why
Speaker 3: I believe God has a sense of humor and why
Speaker 3: people listening to this should not be dismayed.
Speaker 2: They should be glad they're.
Speaker 3: Living at this point in history, because we are living
Speaker 3: through history is going to change the world because demographics
Speaker 3: are destiny. So at some point we'll get to that.
Speaker 3: I'm over talked. I've over answered that question, but it
Speaker 3: was a brilliant question. Yes, you can have good capitalists.
Speaker 3: You can do well and do good. I have four
Speaker 3: hundred employees, I have one hundred million dollar cash flow
Speaker 3: every year, four point eight billion dollars in total investment
Speaker 3: in underserved neighborhoods, five divisions of my organization. People just
Speaker 3: know about Operation Hope. I go to bed every night
Speaker 3: feeling good about how I run my business. I'm not perfect,
Speaker 3: but I know I've created millionaires. I know I'm paying
Speaker 3: people six figures. I know I gave my employees. When
Speaker 3: I saw my company, I gave my employees cars and
Speaker 3: gave them an investment account. I couldn't do that about it. Broke,
Speaker 3: I'm the one who comes up. Now, you know this
Speaker 3: is you. I'm not speaking to you. When somebody in
Speaker 3: our family gets gets gets in trouble, who do they call?
Speaker 1: Oh, yeah, they definitely call him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 3: You can't do nothing, Broke. You can't do nothing. Poor,
Speaker 3: you cannot right, So you know we got a circular.
Speaker 3: If you hang around nine broke people, you're gonna be
Speaker 3: the tenth. I saw t I yesterday. He said, Oh,
Speaker 3: I spoke at UH at Afro Tech last week and
Speaker 3: I mentioned your name. I said, I said, well, I
Speaker 3: don't owe you any money. Why you mentioned it? My
Speaker 3: my name, my name? He said, well, I told him
Speaker 3: you were my mentor, UH, which was very nice and killer.
Speaker 3: Mike describes me as a mentor to him. And you
Speaker 3: know a lot of these a lot of these pro athletes,
Speaker 3: most pro athletes, and I just met Michelle Williams the
Speaker 3: other day of a destiny child and she wanted to
Speaker 3: talk about it.
Speaker 2: They don't want to be business people.
Speaker 3: Everybody wants to be them, and they want to be
Speaker 3: business people because they once they get into it, they
Speaker 3: realized what the will get right, and so they want
Speaker 3: to go from cashing the check to writing it right.
Speaker 3: And what So what is t I investing in? Does
Speaker 3: he investing in? Does he have a bunch of cryptocurrency? No,
Speaker 3: my man, Yeah, he owns. Real est all might have
Speaker 3: with him is he doesn't use He doesn't use good debt.
Speaker 3: He buys it all cash, which is fine, it's not
Speaker 3: I mean, I think it's smarter ways of doing it.
Speaker 3: But I love that he's in a secure piece of
Speaker 3: assets that's going to go up when he's sleep. Jamail Hill,
Speaker 3: you're a brilliant lady. You've been to France. What's it
Speaker 3: inner city in France? Paris?
Speaker 1: I was like a Paris right, like I know certain
Speaker 1: certain parts.
Speaker 3: They figured it out prop in Paris and live in
Speaker 3: the suburbs in France, centrally located in real estate.
Speaker 2: That's where rich people live. What's the what's the inner
Speaker 2: city in the UK? London?
Speaker 3: What's the inner city in Turkey is Timbul, But here
Speaker 3: in America we're sitting in centrally located real estate. You
Speaker 3: mentioned Harlem earlier. Harlem was black, now it's now it's green.
Speaker 3: Anacostia that was black, now it's green. You can go
Speaker 3: on and on off. It's la You live in l
Speaker 3: a h. When you and I were growing up, south
Speaker 3: Central started at Crenshaw, stopped at Crenshaw.
Speaker 1: Oh it's different. Now you now already know I live here,
Speaker 1: so I can tell you like, oh it's different.
Speaker 3: Yeah yeah, so so so you know, look, you know,
Speaker 3: I'm just I'm just saying that that that and black
Speaker 3: black folks have actually moved out of South Central, moved
Speaker 3: to rialto and all these other places.
Speaker 2: But but that's now centrally located.
Speaker 3: Real estate is there, Transportation is there is their jobs
Speaker 3: is near freeways and near fifteen minutes from the beach.
Speaker 2: It's central.
Speaker 3: We're giving it away, and there are places that I'm
Speaker 3: here in Atlanta from the from midtown Atlanta.
Speaker 2: To the airport is the gold mine. But you can
Speaker 2: still buy it.
Speaker 3: You can still buy a house for one hundred that
Speaker 3: little jacked up house, one hundred two thousand dollars. Buy it,
Speaker 3: buy rehabit and live in it. Buy rehabit and rent
Speaker 3: it out, and never sell. So I can control that narrative.
Speaker 3: I can control those variables. I just told you. Get
Speaker 3: my credit score up, you know, get my dead down,
Speaker 3: and get my savings up, access capital, you know, get
Speaker 3: my earn income tax credit to twenty thousand dollars check,
Speaker 3: making it thirty eight thousand dollars a year. Put that
Speaker 3: as a down payment for my one hundred thousand dollars house.
Speaker 3: Get some minority vendors to rehab the house, rent the
Speaker 3: house out, you know, keep it for five years it'll
Speaker 3: be worth three times what you paid for it. You
Speaker 3: do that three times, you're a millionaire. I mean, I
Speaker 3: just did that in three minutes. Stock market. Same thing. Like,
Speaker 3: I'm gonna tell you something that I did. I did
Speaker 3: dumb me two years ago. Two years ago, twenty twenty two.
Speaker 3: I put three and a half million dollars into a
Speaker 3: stock account with a with my family office manager. That
Speaker 3: money I just wanted to do. All I want to
Speaker 3: do is just sit there. I didn't need to do it,
Speaker 3: just sit there like an insurance policy. Like everything everything's
Speaker 3: going crazy. I know, I got that cash that I
Speaker 3: go grab and they invested it in the stock market
Speaker 3: and interest rates went up, and I wasn't paying attention,
Speaker 3: and I look up and I'd lost a half million
Speaker 3: dollars and I did what I told your audience not
Speaker 3: to do. I got emotional. I told him take all
Speaker 3: my money. That's left three million converted to cash, not
Speaker 3: cash but treasury bills like cash accessible, right, Dumbest thing
Speaker 3: I could have done. So I asked the guys, my
Speaker 3: guys two months ago, just curious what would have happened
Speaker 3: if I kept the money in the account, just did nothing. Well,
Speaker 3: we did that analysis for you, John, you would have
Speaker 3: lost another two hundred thousand dollars two fifty actually, so
Speaker 3: five hundred two fifty. I lost seven hundred and fifty
Speaker 3: thousand dollars, and then.
Speaker 2: The market career, and within the last year.
Speaker 3: I would have made seven to fifty back and another
Speaker 3: seven hundred thousand on top of it if I had
Speaker 3: just done nothing, just nothing. Now, let me tell you
Speaker 3: something that's gangster