November 26, 2024 • 42 mins
John Hope Bryant is an entrepreneur, author, and philanthropist, best known for his work in economic empowerment and financial literacy. He is the founder, chairman, and CEO of Operation HOPE, Inc., a nonprofit organization providing financial literacy and economic education to underserved communities. Bryant has been a vocal advocate for financial inclusion and has worked tirelessly to uplift communities through initiatives aimed at improving credit scores, increasing homeownership, and fostering entrepreneurship.
In this episode of Black Tech Green Money, Bryant talks with AfroTech's Will Lucas about the nature of money, describing it as a "coward" that seeks safety and high returns. He emphasizes the importance of building relationship capital and the value of strategic partnerships. Bryant also discusses the misconceptions around debt, explaining the difference between good and bad debt, and highlights the importance of financial literacy as a new civil rights issue. He encourages listeners to think beyond making money to building wealth through investments in education, relationships, and smart financial strategies. The conversation underscores the need for a comprehensive business plan and the significance of creating scalable businesses to foster long-term economic growth in the Black community.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
I'm Will Lucas in This is Black Tech, Green Money.
John Hope Brian is chairman and CEO at John Hope
Bryant Holdings, Brian Group Ventures, Brian Group Advisors, and executive
chairman of the Promise Homes Company, which is the largest
for profit, minority controlled owner of institutional quality, single family
residential homes in the United States. And he's founded chairman
(00:23):
and CEO at Operation Hope, the nation's largest on the
ground nonprofit provider of financial literacy. He's been an advisor
to presidents the largest corporations in the world, and he's
responsible for financial literacy becoming the official policy of the
United States federal government under President George Bush and Obama.
And it's the only American citizen to ever inspire the
(00:44):
renaming of a building on the White House campus from
the US Treasury Annex Building to the Freeman's Bank Building
in honor of Lincoln's unfinished work to teach free slaves
about money in eighteen sixty five.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
He's that conversation.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
And so I remember, very early in my career, before
I was making any money, a mentor of mine was
giving me advice on how to make it. And he
was like, you know, young will like money is not
your problem. And he was, you know, just saying, you
just trying to say, like, you know, money looks for value,
It looks to places that they can grow and these
(01:19):
sorts of things. And he wasn't saying, I wasn't becoming
that person. He was just trying to get me the
idea that you know how we often hear man, if
I just had X amount of dollars, I can finally
go do the thing. And he was saying, that's a
bad way of thinking. What do you say to.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
That, Oh, I'll go even further. Money is a coward,
Capro is a coward. Money's not courageous. Money tries to
find the safest place it can find for the highest
return over the longest period of time. And if you
look safe and you can provide a good return, then
money's interested. If you like you're a risk, if you
(01:55):
like your if you're like your, you're you're a shooting star.
Then money's gonna be very expensive, and it's gonna and
it's gonna have a lot of extraction or in it
and maybe even look repressive because it wants what you want.
It wants to get in and wants to get out
and wants UH and wants the highest level of protection.
And and what we have to understand is the dynamics
(02:16):
of that relationship. But the larger issue that I think
your mentor was trying to say to you was that
really the the real capital is in you, that you're
the product. It's not about money, uh. That that capital
comes from the Latin root word copy toass knowledge in
the hill, knowledge, knowledge in the head, and that credit
comes from the Latin root word creditoe. Credibility and banking
(02:41):
and finance is a faith business, very spiritual. It requires
a faith and confidence of people to take in it.
It really has very little to do with money. Money
is nothing more than an exchange of value. I mean
I could take it. I could if I wanted to
write a check, I could take the back of your shirt,
write a routing number and write the banking details of
(03:04):
your bank account. Or you could and you could say
to the payment to pay to the order of John
ho'bryant and sign it, and technically I take your shirt
off your back to the bank and the bank would
scratch her head. They would go talk to the attorney.
But within thirty days they'd have to figure out how
(03:25):
to cast your shirt or try to convince me or
convince you to come with a more traditional version of
a transfer of value. We get over obsessed about getting
that bag, getting that money, getting that dollar, getting that
getting paid. All this is, it's called making a living
for a reason. All money is is designed to help
you make a living today versus making your life. You
(03:46):
build wealth in your sleep. Education, relationship, capital, stocks, bonds, businesses. Brand,
You've got a brand. Now we have a relationship. You
didn't meet me on you know, the Yellow Pages, Google search,
You didn't foilut a form we met. I vibed you.
I thought you were a good dude, and I said yes.
(04:07):
Now you know somebody else who calls my speaking agent,
they get quoted, you know, fifty thousand dollars for a
forty five minute speech because I don't know them. It's
a commercial transaction. And I'm even losing money when I
do that, if I have to travel to go do it,
but I might have some strategic reasons to do it.
I'm doing this for free because and all I told
(04:30):
as told today was hey John, you got to a
podcast with Will And I thought, for a minute, Will
oh my god, Yeah, I love that, dude. That's relationship capital.
That's that's what makes the world go around. And if
you hang around nine broke people, you'll be the tenth.
So you gotta watch who you hang around. You got
(04:50):
to watch your mindset and we got to learn. I
was just thinking this morning, will we got to become
bilingual Black people. To become bilingual civil rights is cool,
we also need civil rights. Being able to defend yourself
in the streets is cool, but I want you to
win in the suites. I want you to understand what
grand light red rooms are, which are defending yourself against
(05:11):
racism and bias and police brutality and all that stuff.
But I want you to be in more and more
green rooms where internships and apprenticeships and jobs and actually
the capital an opportunity is because what really happens is
you don't have to ask for money, you build the
product right. Kind of poor reputation, I could not believe it.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
So I used to have again more mentors who would
talk about the bank. Went to them and said, what
else can we do for you? And I could not
believe that that's how the bank worked until it happened
to me and my bankers said, we got d these things,
what else do you need? And I'm like, you're asking me.
I didn't come from that where they asked you what
(05:53):
can they do for you? You always went to the bank,
you know, with your hand in your hand, shame, head down,
all these things, hoping they wouldn't you away.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
A bank will lend you money when you can prove
you don't need it, and it's a bit of a
fake game, like you're by the way, I'm going one
step further. People, a lot of our people will say,
this is why I really want everybody to read this book,
Financial Literacy for All, which is now number one UH
in the world on on economics and and UH and
business UH management, because I'm trying to explain something that
(06:28):
we've taken very emotional, which is money, and or worse,
we've rejected it. You know, all people say, well, we
you know, I hate debt, we should we should not
want to be indebted. What are you talking about. There's
not a billionaire alive who didn't do it on the
back of good debt. There's not a government that's leading
the world, including ours, that didn't do it on the
back of good debt. There's good debt and bad debt
(06:52):
and you what you want. And bad debt is when
you're financing something that depreciates jewelry close you know, uh.
But what good debt is when you financed something that
could appreciate, which a home you know, small business you
me uh. And neutral debt is something that could go
(07:12):
both ways. An automobile, If it's getting you to a job,
if if if it's allow you to keep your family safe,
that's good debt. If you're bought something you can't afford
money you don't have to impress people you don't know
about stuff that don't really matter, well, that's bad debt.
And so coming back to this concept of the bank
uh coming to you this morning and coincidence is God's
(07:35):
way remaining anonymous. This morning, I was talking to a
banker International bank, and they were they had held up
uh at a depositive mind that they held for longer
than they should have on a loan I took out
three years ago. And I had sent them a note saying,
by the way, I want my money that you I've
(07:55):
done everything you asked me to do. I want my
money bag. And on top of that, you know, do
you guys want a line of credit for me in
this country that I'm doing business with, because I may
find some opportunities I'm interested in. If you don't want it, cool,
but if you do out, i'd love to talk about
that business. It was a simple email. Anyway, this lady
calls me. She's my relationship manager, and she's talking to
(08:16):
me like she talked to I think anybody else for
a minute. And so she's telling me, well, you know,
we kept your one hundred thousand for I think it
was two years. I said, no, it's supposed to be
one year. And yes, but maybe we could use it
as a security for this new line of credit. I
think I've already said the number, so I think its
one hundred thousand dollars. And it was a line of
credit for you know what, which five hundred to a million,
(08:40):
which I wasn't going to use, by the way, but
she wanted to use it for this new line of credit.
And she said, well, maybe we need to do an appraisal,
and and I let her finish talking, and I said,
I don't think I'm interested. I said, thank you very much.
I mean, I'm very appreciative, but you guys have wasted
my time for a year. You asked me to do X, Y,
and Z. I did all of that, and then I
(09:00):
waited another year to let you keep my money on tap,
which was a year more than And if I had reverses,
if I didn't give you collateral for a year, you'd
be filing all kind of notice. Is a default to
me and call me all kinds of names. But I'd
let you guys make that mistake, and no one's apologized
to me. No problem. But now you want to transfer
(09:21):
my money to another transaction that I just mentioned, and
then you want me to go through all these hoops
and do appraisals for a property that you just appraised
two years ago. It's done nothing but gone up and
value it's easy to find. Blah blah b liafe actually
doubled it. This probably is doubled in value for a
small transaction. So you know what, I'm good, I said,
You know I just by the way, I just finished
one hundred million dollar reefinands on a portfolio of one
(09:43):
of my companies that was non recourse debt, meaning no
personal guarantee, no nothing, with one of the biggest banks
in the world. And she's like oh oh, oh, you're right.
We have looked at your records, we looked at your file.
You actually do qualify in every way. We're so sorry.
Don't worry about one hundred thousand dollars. We'll send that
back to you and we'll have a decision. Will you
(10:05):
buy monday on the new requests that? Okay? Sure there
you go right there. A bank will lend you money
when you can prove you don't need it or it's
perceived that you don't need it. I don't need this money.
I mean, it'd be nice to have it. It allows me.
I'd rather use OPM other people's money to facilitate things
I want to do under the right conditions. But it
(10:26):
has to be structured properly. It has to be under
the right terms conditions. Fair change is no robbery. A
great negotiation will is when both people leave the table
slightly annoyed, because that means every that no, that neither
one got everything they wanted, but you also didn't feel
like you got screwed. You leave the table slightly annoyed.
(10:49):
It was probably a good deal. And for your listeners,
I want them to hear this and again, I go
all this over all this in financial literacy for all
in my and also my own podcast, Money and Wealth,
and I talk about this my pullpit of finance. You
have a table, and on the one side of the
table is a capitalist and they have a product and
(11:10):
they want to extract money from you. And on the
other side of the table is you, and you want
that product and you don't want to give them any
money and their job. People listen to this, now, don't
get emotional. Whenever you make an emotional decision, it's a
bad one. The capitalist job is to extract as much
money as they can from you while giving you the
least amount of value. And your job is to extract
(11:35):
the most amount of value while delivering the least amount
of cash. And that dynamic tension is natural negotiation. Now,
somebody says, well, how does that apply to capitalism? Where
you're a little village, you don't think you're a capitalists,
Go to a little village in Africa, go a little
village in Latin America. Think about when you're last in
(11:56):
Jamaica or wherever, and you trying to buy a little
chots or something from and how much is this, Well,
it's two dollars. How about a buck fifty, No, one ninety, Well,
how about a buck sixty. Wow, I'll take it one
seventy five. I think it's given me be worse hip.
That's the negotiation. And and you're you're in the midst
of a capital's transaction. You go to the store, you
(12:16):
go to CBS today where the price has been predetermined
because they've done market research. And you want to buy
a comb, and the comb is nine bucks, and and
they've pretty much, you know, done the research approves that
this comb. You pay nine bucks for it, and you
pick it up, and you go to the register, and
without any complaints at all, you buy it. Why because
(12:39):
you know that solving the naps that aut of your
hair and the kinks in my hair are worth at
least twenty bucks, maybe a hundred bucks. Maybe it's invaluable
to you at that moment you want to sew at
least worth nine bucks. There you go, right there. We
do that all day, every day, and don't think about it.
We're all engaged in this system of free enterprise and capitalism,
(13:03):
but we don't understand it. And it is what we
don't know that we don't know this killing us. But
we think we know some brothers like I don't want
to buy a house. Buy a house. The bank owns
the house. I don't know. If you don't pay, the
bank will own your house. But by the way, if
I give you a loan and you don't pay, I
(13:24):
will own your house. Right, So what you need to
do is pay, and then you get the benefit of
appreciation the value above the debt, and you get the
benefit that's called equity, and you get the benefit of depreciation,
which is a tax strategy, and you get to write
off twenty years of a thirty mortgage payments against your
income on your tax bill, and you got to live
(13:47):
in it. Yeah, just becomes okay, black.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
As I said this quote to me to change my
life a couple of years ago, and I was talking
about how much money I had in the bank, and
she was like, wealth is not in the bank balance.
And it blew my mind because I'd always imagine I
just wanted to get as much money in the bank
as possible. And she was like wealthy people other people
she work with, they have some money in there, but
(14:13):
that's not where their wealth is. Can you can you
speak on that?
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Well, of course, I mean you're again cash versus wealth creation. Right. So, uh,
you want you want to have enough cash to live
and meet your obligations and whatever, but you don't really
want to have a lot of cash sitting around. This
is very much like similar to the analogy that you know,
(14:36):
wealthy people want to save time and poor people want
to save money. Right. Uh, they trying We spend all
this time, you know, messing around, trying to make some
money or save some money, or not pay that rent,
that that light bill even though there's a rent notice
on it, trying to wait to the last minute. You
got to pay the light bill. Whether it's Tuesday or Thursday,
(14:58):
You're gonna to pay the light bill. Right. So, but
you're wasting time on this activity. I'd rather you waste
a little bit of my money, would waste a minute
of my time. I could give you more time. I'll
make more money. So you build wealth in your sleep.
You want to take that money and put it to work,
compounding right, home ownership, We just talked about that, starting
(15:21):
a business, putting money to work, starting a business. The
easiest example the stock market. There are three things that
have never gone down in American history. American GDP, gross
domestic product, the income of this country, the stock market
in real estate values. Now somebody watching this will say, ah,
I got him, he's wrong. Doesn't he even know there
(15:43):
was a real estate recession. There was a recession in
two thousand and eight. Yeah, I know that. I know
that real estate went up, it dipped, it's called a recession,
and then it corrected above the line. And real estate
I bought for eighty eight thousand dollars is now worth
three hundred thousand dollars. The home, the townhouse I bought
(16:04):
for two hundred and twenty thousand dollars in LA with
a little bit of money, of my money and a
lot of bit of the bank's money. Here you go
twenty percent cash down from me, eighty percent finands by
the bank, good debt, a little bit of my money
from the bank account into the transaction compound it. And
then when the real estate recession happened, the value went
down to one something one point eighty. All my friends
(16:25):
at sale, John sale, sales, sale, That's why they broke right.
I'm like, why would I sell? I got I got
to live someplace. No, I think I'll just hold on.
I moved to Atlanta, rented that place out to a
police officer who didn't pay his bill on time, I
might add, and uh, buddy finally paid, and I forgot
about it. Will five years, eight years later, forget twenty sixteen,
(16:50):
I go to check on the property, called my broker
out there, my brother hey man, trying to sell his property.
And then I'm gonna buying something in Atlanta. What can
I get for it? Now? Mind, you bought it for
two something, so last I checked on it was one
hundred and something of value, so I was underwater. He said, well,
I think you can get it. You can get seven
to fifty. I said, you don't mean seven to fifty dollars,
(17:12):
do you? What did the la just fall apart? No,
seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars almost almost passed out
it it hit. It had literally triple in value from
where more than triple to value of what I paid
for it. That's what people with wealthy people do. Wealthy
people use money to make more money or use money
(17:33):
to build wealth. So so real estate has never gone
down the stock market. So go go buy. Listen to this.
I'm not telling you what to buy. Whatever you're wearing,
whatever you use, wherever you go, if that's a publicly
traded company, go buy an index or a stock with
those in it, a basket in it. And you don't
(17:53):
have a lot of money, do do do fractional ships.
But if you're part of the of the of the
of the blue chip stock index, those are the best
performing companies in America, and they are global companies. And
if you lose, a billionaire's losing, by the way, so
it's a good bet. And and buy and don't sell.
(18:15):
Just forget about it and watch it compound over time.
If you have a twenty year window on your investment horizon,
and when you want to retire whatever, you're gonna have
zero losses. It's gonna go up, it's gonna go down.
But over twenty years, it's just gonna do this right
on balance. And if you like a company Walmart, Tarja, Target,
(18:37):
if you like a company, there's a good chance other
people like it too. And by the way, once you
own one stock, I understand now over answering your question,
By the way, will once you own one stock you
get a right to the to the to get all
the financials. Yeah, all the all. You imagine somebody bought
one pencil in your house and now they can go
through every room, in every drawer your house. That's what.
(19:01):
That's what. When you have one stock of Target or
Walmart or or Delta Airlines, whatever, you now can go
through every inch and cranny of that company. You have
a right to all their financials. You are an owner
that powerful. That's sexy.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Yeah, you know. So I have this friend who's she's
an attorney, black girl, and she went to Howard and
she learned, she got her law degree from Howard. And
I remember telling me this story of you know, she
was in you know, the school court they they're not
court room, and she was you know, she learned, you
know how you be fiery in the in the law
room and you said, you slamm your fists on the desk.
(19:36):
And her professor, who was a black man, said, we
can't do that. They can do that. You can't, especially
as a black woman, you cannot do that. In the
course you're seen differently. And my question is this, are
there nuances about money, because we say all money is green.
People want to make money. You know, they don't care
if you're black, white, green. They care about green. So
(19:58):
my question is are there nuances about money that apply
to black people in finding success in it that may
not apply to our counterparts.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
I think there's nuances and money period. I could have
financed my companies with pookying them. I could have got
somebody from my community who has an interesting pedigree on
business that nobody sort of know the details from him.
He doesn't have a website, and he could have and
(20:31):
the audience to figure the rest of this out. And
I could have got some cash from homeboy to start
my business or grow my business. But I couldn't pass
an audit. I couldn't get out of the financials. The
bank's only look at me crazy. And I can't then
position myself for the next level of growth on Wall Street.
I can't go from Main Street to Wall Street because
(20:52):
my partners are funky.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
So, I've always had a philosophy that I want my
partners to be bigger and my financial partners are also
my partners, and want of my partners to be bigger
and more credible than I am. I mentioned I say
anything about money, bigger and more credible than I am.
Oprah Winfrey gave me an award, the Usual Life Award,
and when her investigators came around after she says he
(21:16):
wanted to give me the award. Investigators came around and said,
we're gonna makeep being lit uncomfortable. We're apologize in advance.
We've gone through. We've already gone through all your childhood.
That's why we're having lunch with you. But Oprah has
a rule, it's called the Oprah rule. She doesn't put
her arm around anybody who doesn't have us much to
lose reputationally as she does. Yeah, that's good man, that's
(21:37):
my rule. So all my partners are bigger than me,
more credible than me, and I build my companies. I
build my operations with an institutional pedigree. So I make
sure that I don't just have accountant. I have an accountant,
audit firm who is one of the Big six or
Big ten or Big twenty firms with a nice reputation
(21:57):
and a pedigree. My clients, my partners, also my kind
of companies I'm trying to do business with. Use that
company or company like that. It's somebody you recognize. I
make sure that my bank is somebody who has a
recognized pedigree. It doesn't mean I don't put money in
a black bank, doesn't whish I do doesn't mean that
I don't help the least these God's children. But my
lead institution is going to be somebody who says something
(22:21):
about me, not me saying something about them. Right, and
my investors are going to have something more than money
going on for them, reputation and text. When somebody says
who's your partners, it means something. So yes, you've got
to realize that you cannot curse out people in that
board room. If you're white, they'll just say you're upset.
(22:44):
If you're white, they say if you're black, they say
you're crazy. I was walking through the lobby of a
hotel with my wife and this weekend, last weekend, and
there was a white kid laying on the couch in
the lobby of the hotel, had his shoes on, feed
up hope on the couch with his head on his mama,
and and he's chilling. Nobody said a word to him.
(23:07):
I said, baby, if that was a black kid, somebody
would have come along and say, the young man, you
need to take your feet off that couch. You gotta
be twice as smart, twice as intelligence, twice as well dressed,
get up twice as early, say twice as late, be
twice as clean. But it's made me better. Haters have
made me better. I don't get mad at stuff like this.
(23:28):
I use it as fuel. Right. I take no for vitamins. Right.
A success is going from failure to failure without loss
of enthusiasm, over to rounded through it. I'm going to
get to it. So as a result of that, I'm
built to last. I'm as a result of me making
sure that I'm overclocked, over prepared, over overtight, and never emotional.
(23:48):
I can walk in any room and clean their clocks.
Because they're lazy. They taken the easy route. They've had
to be had the test that I've had. Talk without
being offensive, Listen without being defensive, and always lead even
your adversary with their dignity, because if you don't, that's
been the rest of their life, trying to make you miserable.
It becomes personal, and they don't want you in the
(24:09):
room half the time anyway, so they're trying to find
some excuse to neutralize you and get you off the stage.
You can say you don't like John Bryant, You're not
gonna say he doesn't qualify.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
That's good, that's good. I want to talk about we
why so many of our businesses have so few employees?
And I want to position it this way is you know,
I think about how do we get more of us
to consider scale, Like there's no as far as I know,
no black box ricks like we are. You know, I
think there was a study done by the SBA. It's
(24:39):
back in twenty twelve. I believe it was the last
time they did it, and they said eighty percent of
our businesses are in the bottom twenty percent of categories
for sales revenue. So we over index on barber shops,
long care companies, dry cleaners, et cetera. And so I wonder, like,
what does it take to get that black barber to say,
you know, instead of starting to shop on the corner,
(25:00):
I want to start thirty of these shops and do
it across the country. Like what does it take to
get us to think that way?
Speaker 2 (25:05):
The Bible says the Bible says, where there's no vision,
that people perish, all right, So we needed again, we
need to go from civil rights in the streets to
sil rights in the business suites. Look, this makes perfect sense.
Why we are where we are? Will, why do kids
want to be rap stars? Athletes and drug dealers from
(25:27):
our neighborhood.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
That's what they see.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
They're not dumb and they're not stupid. They're brilliant. They're
modeling what they see see. Yeah, they don't. No one's
talk to them about why education matters to them. K
through twelve, they're like, why do I go do ath
of all this when I can just go sell some drugs? Well,
selling drugs is prison, probation, parole, and death, but that's
(25:48):
a different conversation. They're seeing a media gratification. They're seeing
a connection to their aspirations. But no one's taking taking
education and plugging it into a socket called aspiration and saying,
if you do this, you can be I'm an engineer.
If you do this, you can go into AI. If
you do this, you can become a gamer. If you
do this, you become a coder. If you do this,
you can become a real estate mate, a real estate magnet.
(26:11):
We have a farm club for professional sports. There used
to be a farm club for the arts, used to
be art class, a lot of stuff. But they're still
an informal farm club for that, but certainly professional sports
from middle school. But there's no farm club for business
and the things that's driving the economy. And so you
look at the role models of jay Z or whoever
(26:31):
people admire, they have a staff of thirty people. The
biggest celebrities that you want to admire, they have a
staff of five people, four people, ten people, maybe thirty
people that's running their brand. You can't scale the brand.
This is only one jay Z. Maybe I'm not picking
on jay Z. There's only one Ti or Killer Mike
(26:54):
who I know, and you can't and there's only so
many employees that are able to sit in their balance
sheet given that is one The product is an individual. Right.
So the things that we've tried to get forty million
people into to an economic model designed for three thousand people. Right,
(27:14):
And even those jobs last three to five years on average.
Celebrity three to five years, a ball player three to
five years, drug dealer probably less than that. Right. So,
and look at Jews, just the opposite, seven and a
half million Jews, but they're pursuing forty million occupations and
they've understand you need to write the check, not just
(27:36):
cash it. Be the owner. But when you discriminate against me,
you just discriminate against the guy who owns the building
that you're actually talking crap in. So what we need
is a long answer your question. What we need is
a business plan. What we need is a business plan,
and we need role models who start with what you
(27:57):
just said. Why am I just why don't I have
too much month of to end in my money? Why? No,
matter how hard I work, I'm broke because you've got
one operation and you're trying to make money and not
trying to build wealth. You need to you build wealth
in your sleep. Compounding. Compounding can mean different additional locations.
So maybe I need to model success. Maybe I need
(28:19):
twenty locations, maybe I need ten. I can't. And by
the way, what's the strategy. It's going to blow your
your viewer's mind when I say, listeners, listeners mind when
I say this, why do I want to have three locations, ten,
twenty to sell it?
Speaker 1 (28:32):
That's right, that's absolutely correct to sell it.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Oh but John, then it's not a black business. No,
it's a successful It's called an exit strategy, right, right,
So percent of black businesses don't have an employee because
we're emotional about it, because we're there're self employment projects.
Because we have to understand that this is about growing
something you can sell, that you can merge that you
(28:57):
can that you know, it's not a black business, it's
a green You don't see Jewish people and white people
have said white owned business. You know, you don't see
Juli Latino people, Latino owned business, big sign in the
one the in the wall. Let's you know, you know
Asian owned business. Right, it's only black people, black owned business.
I know it's black. I see you, right, you you
(29:18):
want every person who with a dollar bill, a legit
one to be your customer, right, And so we got
to take the emotion out of it. We need different
kind of role models. Look, why am I doing what
I'm doing to create plumbing? There is no there is
no one of the video has got four million, five
million views that I did. Somebody just put up this
(29:39):
little clip I did. But to speaking the Milking conference
where I said I want to be the Federal Reserve
of the Hood. Yeah, and to me it was common sense.
I wasn't I wasn't trying to get attention. I was.
I just thought it was common sense. I want to
become the Federal Reserve of the Hood. I want to
create an economic infrastructure, a financial access point, nationwide where
(30:00):
we can come in operationalize our untapped human potential at scale.
Get our credit score up thirty to fifty to one
hundred points, get our debt. You know, black people have
the largest, sorry, the lowest credit score on average in
the nation. The average credit score for black people is
less than six twenty. Not poor people, all of us.
(30:21):
And so when we get up in the morning, will
and we think that the bank is discriminating against us,
and they might be. It might be a racist person
at the bank who don't like you, who discriminated against you.
That might be the case. But if your credit score
is five fifty, they don't want to work very hard
at it. The answer is just no, right, you're just
a bad credit risk. Now you don't pay your bills.
(30:42):
So we get the credits grow up fifty to one
hundred points, so you're in the high sixes. God forbid,
you get the seven. That's the Nirvana seven hundred. Get
your debt down thirty eight hundred dollars for somebody making
forty eight thousand dollars. These store our Hope and side
models at open site locations and Operation Hope three hundred
dollars across the country. We get your savings up two
thousand dollars on average. And when we do that, we
(31:03):
make you bank qualified. Yeah, so the bank just wants
to say yes. And if you want to test my theory,
go to the computer at midnight when the bank's not
even open and you have a seven to twenty credit
score and type in an application for a credit card
or a mortgage or cardinals and watch that approval.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
We'll get it quick, quick, quick.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Change the game, change the business plan, change your minds,
change our model, become bilingual, learn financial literacy for all.
It's the new civil rights issue of this generation. We
have got to be as obsessed with this as we
were the right to vote.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
Last question for you, going to let you go. And
you know a lot of folks in our community. I've
heard lament capitalism and for a variety of reasons. And
I want you to make a case on this and
why capitalism has been largely what created wealth in this country.
And I'll let you. I don't want to want to
speak on you. I'll let you speak on it.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
Man. We get to do an hour just on this. Yeah,
this is a ridiculous conversation. The converences they're happy.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Yeah, now, yeah, I'm with you.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
It's ridiculous. Slavery was about capitalism. Nobody went halfway around
the world, bring your ass over here because they didn't
like you. Why did they go to Africa? Because we
were agricultural geniuses, that's why. Because we could take dead land,
(32:28):
dead soil and bring it back to life. Because we
did that in Africa, and we could work from cancer
in the morning to cancy at night, and it didn't
bother us under the sun. We're agricultural geniuses of the land.
What was the economy in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds,
agricultural economy? What were the crops? Cotton, tobacco, et cetera,
(32:51):
et cetera. Was needed the soil that was situated in
the Caribbean, but more so in the southern US States.
First indentured servants brought over here to work that land
were white and black. They got along with each other.
And when in sixty the early sixteen hundreds they got
(33:12):
along with each other didn't like what the overseer was
doing on what wasn't called a plantation. Then these were
trading companies back then. When they didn't like they ran
away with each other. Black and white. And when they
were caught the overseers, henchman said, a, Boss, we got
a problem. They're getting along and we can have a
class I'm sorry. We can have a race riot, but
(33:35):
we cannot have a class riot because we're the class.
So we got to work this out. And Boss said, well,
tell the white guys they're white like us, and then
put them in charge of the black people and tell
them that they work really hard, they can buy one
of them. And the poor whites didn't do any critical
(33:57):
thinking to go, uhh, oh, I'm white like you. They
should have said, well, next question, do I have land
like you do, have titles like you? Do? I own
businesses like you do? I own No, they didn't ask.
They just said, oh, I'm white like you, okay, Boss,
And that lie has survived four hundred years where poor
(34:19):
whites and poor blacks are at each other's throats while
the wealthy people just sort of fade in the background
and going about their business. Now, that was bad capitalism
at scale, horrible, disgusting capitalis we can I can do
a whole hour on slavery, and as a mechanism and
as a business model, it was repressive and disgusting and horrible.
(34:40):
And I think bad capitalism is where I benefit and
you benefit more. I'm sorry. Good capitalism is where I
benefit and you benefit more. Bad capitalism is where I
benefit and you pay a price for it. And this
was the worst example of bad capitalism, slavery, but it
built this country. Black slaves were worth more than anybody
else in at forty the wealthiest city in the world.
(35:02):
Will in eighteen forty was not just Mississippi. Okay, I'm
gonna get off that. I can stay on that forby.
By the way, the word white, word white was a
made up word, racial word white. I'm about to stet
pick a fight with all these folks who think they're historians,
but they're wrong the racial word white. The world is
five billion years old, four billion years of organism life,
two hundred million years of human life, but those were Neanderthals.
(35:26):
One hundred million, one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand years
of modern America, modern life with the people that we
would recognize and look and feel and stuff. And then
you know, of course recorded history. We know three thousand
years before Christ and all that kind of stuff. You
hear all those stories, and of course you know Christ
and he you know, God blew conscious in us and
all that kinds of recent history. But the word white
(35:46):
came into sixteen hundreds. You had black royalty, you had
black people who were in power hundreds of years ago.
But it was, it was, it was convenient in sixteen
hundreds in America to this word for the reasons that
I just mentioned to you. Now, let's go to your
question and answer it directly. Why this is a ridiculous situation.
(36:08):
I've already talked about the comb and the brush and
all that stuff. People watching this or listen to this
are engaging in capitalism. The government didn't buy your phone,
the government't buy your car radio. Yeah, all right, So
I did a podcast on this, the six levels of
a capitalist. The first level you got you are a
(36:30):
human and you are using your human capital exchange that
for compensation so you can live. Yeah, that's a gig worker.
That is the unstructured worker at the bottom of the pyramid.
They pay you by the hours or buy the gig.
And you want a bunch of freedoms, or you don't
want anybody tell you what to do, so you broke
his heck. But you get to come and go as
you please. Then you've got the next level, which is
(36:52):
a worker and you work from nine to five or
whatever your shift is. The ais a to upset your life.
By the way, artificial intelligence, that's another thing. I'm co
chairing the AI Ethics councilor with Sam Aulman. That's a
whole other thing that's gonna change everything by twenty thirty.
But you're working at a nine to five and a
job that will go away, and you're being paid, you know,
(37:12):
a decent wage whatever the law allows, and you get
to go, you get to leave it five o'clock. It's
not your problem. Okay. Now the next level is you're
a salaried worker and you get more compensation because the
boss can call you, call you at eight o'clock at
night every now and then, and they can't say you
can't say it's overtime because you're on a salary. Now,
(37:33):
they can't abuse you. But you know, basically, whatever the
job needs you is when you show up and they
pay you, let's say, low six figures for that salary job.
So it's more risk, less freedom, more reward. Now you're
a c suite executive, you're a chief financial officer, executive
vice president. You're a baller in some corporation. Now you're
getting six figures, mid six figures, maybe high six figures,
(37:56):
maybe seven figures. But that boss can call you any
day on time he or she likes twenty four to seven.
And it's not your business and it's not your problem.
But you have to be responsive because you are all in.
You got a lot less freedom, a lot more compensation,
but you still don't have the risk of an owner.
The next level is a business owner. Now you have
(38:19):
this is your deal. Now you own it. If it
goes down is your deal. But if it wins, it's
your deal. Well, you get more compensation, much more risk,
and you basically work whenever you have to. Now, the
great thing about a business is different from an entrepreneur.
There's an established plan as a barbershop or a nail
salon or a you want to be a technician or
(38:41):
whatever it is. There's a business that came before that
you can model it. The craziest part form her capitalist
is me. I'm an entrepreneur creating something out of whole
cloth didn't exist before. If you win, you win big,
But if you lose, you lose everything. And an repreneur
works eighteen hours day to keep them getting a job.
(39:03):
Now I just explain I just explained capitalism to everybody
listening to this, because everybody is in one of those categories.
Then somebody's going to say, well, I just want to
work for the government. Where do you think the government
get their money from. I mean, we can go to
this all day, all night. Eighty eight percent of all
jobs or private sector jobs. The government is only twelve
percent of all jobs. And they get their money from
(39:24):
you and me paying taxes and businesses. And then said, oh,
I want to be a socialist. What are you talking
about all that? This is a taxing structure. You go
to Norway or Sweden or whatever, they're capitalists. They just
are taxed at sixty or seventy percent of every dollar
they may. So you don't have anybody who's broke. There's
a safety net. But you don't see anybody who look
(39:46):
like you and me also running these companies. Wow, so's
so there's a there's a safety net. Fine, but you
cannot aim at the highest ring. And those are small economies.
And then you say, well, what about you China? China's capitalists?
What about Russia? Russians. They say they're communists, they're capitalists.
So communism doesn't work. Socialism doesn't work, and capitalism is
(40:09):
a horrible system except for every other system. Knock it off.
We are we are living in a free enterprise democracy.
Get with it. What we really need and this is
gonna really anger your viewers. What we really need is
a black Jewish business plan. I'm gonna drop the mic
on that one.
Speaker 1 (40:25):
I love it work through the book. It's Amazon, everywhere, Barnes.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
It's everywhere Walmart, Amazon, Barnes, and Noble black bookstores. And
we made to make sure that there are black bookstores.
That it's number one in several categories economics, business, and
I don't know, there's been not many many times that
a black man was number one in economics and business.
And this has been since April one through today. It's
still number one on Amazon and best I can tell,
(40:53):
we are buying it, which is really quite inspiring. We
want to know how stuff works, like we want to
figure this stuff out. This is the SIVI Rights movement
and this is the third reconstruction and it started with
George Floyd's murder and it'll go to twenty thirty and
we have a shot that will not come back. This this,
in my opinion, this is it. This is after this.
(41:14):
Folks have done with us. They're done with that, They're
done with trying to accommodate. I'm not saying they that
they shouldn't be done with us. They shouldn't. But folks
are gonna move on to something else, and we have
got the we we've got to get out of this
victim mentality. We've got to stop thinking that somebody owes
us something they do but it doesn't matter. We've got
(41:34):
to stop stop asking for perfection. You know, whether it's
reparations or whatever that stuff is, it ain't happening. Note,
if you see who's running for president against the current president,
you really think that's conversation Like, we have got to
become a homeowner. So the number one way you build
wealth as homeownership. Forty one forty four percent of us
own a home. The rest of us are renting, trying
(41:55):
to impress people. We don't know what money we don't have,
but places don't want us with a doorman and don't
give a damn about you. We can't afford and in
conversations that don't matter, not at all.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
Child, Hold Brien, It's such a pleasure, such a pleasure.
Thank you so much. Black Tech Green Money is a
production of Blavity Afro Tech on the Black Effect podcast
network in Nightheart Media and it's produced by Morgan, Debaonne
and me Well Lucas, with ad Digital production support by
Kate McDonald, Sarah Ergan and Jaden McGee. Special thank you
(42:32):
to Michael Davis and Love Beach. Learn more about my
guessing other tech. This up is an innovators at afrotech
dot com. The video version of this episode will drop
to Black Tech Green Money on YouTube, So tap in,
enjoy your Black Tech Green Money, share to somebody go
get your money. Peace and love,
I'm Will Lucas in This is Black Tech, Green Money.
John Hope Brian is chairman and CEO at John Hope
Bryant Holdings, Brian Group Ventures, Brian Group Advisors, and executive
chairman of the Promise Homes Company, which is the largest
for profit, minority controlled owner of institutional quality, single family
residential homes in the United States. And he's founded chairman
(00:23):
and CEO at Operation Hope, the nation's largest on the
ground nonprofit provider of financial literacy. He's been an advisor
to presidents the largest corporations in the world, and he's
responsible for financial literacy becoming the official policy of the
United States federal government under President George Bush and Obama.
And it's the only American citizen to ever inspire the
(00:44):
renaming of a building on the White House campus from
the US Treasury Annex Building to the Freeman's Bank Building
in honor of Lincoln's unfinished work to teach free slaves
about money in eighteen sixty five.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
He's that conversation.
Speaker 1 (00:58):
And so I remember, very early in my career, before
I was making any money, a mentor of mine was
giving me advice on how to make it. And he
was like, you know, young will like money is not
your problem. And he was, you know, just saying, you
just trying to say, like, you know, money looks for value,
It looks to places that they can grow and these
(01:19):
sorts of things. And he wasn't saying, I wasn't becoming
that person. He was just trying to get me the
idea that you know how we often hear man, if
I just had X amount of dollars, I can finally
go do the thing. And he was saying, that's a
bad way of thinking. What do you say to.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
That, Oh, I'll go even further. Money is a coward,
Capro is a coward. Money's not courageous. Money tries to
find the safest place it can find for the highest
return over the longest period of time. And if you
look safe and you can provide a good return, then
money's interested. If you like you're a risk, if you
(01:55):
like your if you're like your, you're you're a shooting star.
Then money's gonna be very expensive, and it's gonna and
it's gonna have a lot of extraction or in it
and maybe even look repressive because it wants what you want.
It wants to get in and wants to get out
and wants UH and wants the highest level of protection.
And and what we have to understand is the dynamics
(02:16):
of that relationship. But the larger issue that I think
your mentor was trying to say to you was that
really the the real capital is in you, that you're
the product. It's not about money, uh. That that capital
comes from the Latin root word copy toass knowledge in
the hill, knowledge, knowledge in the head, and that credit
comes from the Latin root word creditoe. Credibility and banking
(02:41):
and finance is a faith business, very spiritual. It requires
a faith and confidence of people to take in it.
It really has very little to do with money. Money
is nothing more than an exchange of value. I mean
I could take it. I could if I wanted to
write a check, I could take the back of your shirt,
write a routing number and write the banking details of
(03:04):
your bank account. Or you could and you could say
to the payment to pay to the order of John
ho'bryant and sign it, and technically I take your shirt
off your back to the bank and the bank would
scratch her head. They would go talk to the attorney.
But within thirty days they'd have to figure out how
(03:25):
to cast your shirt or try to convince me or
convince you to come with a more traditional version of
a transfer of value. We get over obsessed about getting
that bag, getting that money, getting that dollar, getting that
getting paid. All this is, it's called making a living
for a reason. All money is is designed to help
you make a living today versus making your life. You
(03:46):
build wealth in your sleep. Education, relationship, capital, stocks, bonds, businesses. Brand,
You've got a brand. Now we have a relationship. You
didn't meet me on you know, the Yellow Pages, Google search,
You didn't foilut a form we met. I vibed you.
I thought you were a good dude, and I said yes.
(04:07):
Now you know somebody else who calls my speaking agent,
they get quoted, you know, fifty thousand dollars for a
forty five minute speech because I don't know them. It's
a commercial transaction. And I'm even losing money when I
do that, if I have to travel to go do it,
but I might have some strategic reasons to do it.
I'm doing this for free because and all I told
(04:30):
as told today was hey John, you got to a
podcast with Will And I thought, for a minute, Will
oh my god, Yeah, I love that, dude. That's relationship capital.
That's that's what makes the world go around. And if
you hang around nine broke people, you'll be the tenth.
So you gotta watch who you hang around. You got
(04:50):
to watch your mindset and we got to learn. I
was just thinking this morning, will we got to become
bilingual Black people. To become bilingual civil rights is cool,
we also need civil rights. Being able to defend yourself
in the streets is cool, but I want you to
win in the suites. I want you to understand what
grand light red rooms are, which are defending yourself against
(05:11):
racism and bias and police brutality and all that stuff.
But I want you to be in more and more
green rooms where internships and apprenticeships and jobs and actually
the capital an opportunity is because what really happens is
you don't have to ask for money, you build the
product right. Kind of poor reputation, I could not believe it.
Speaker 1 (05:32):
So I used to have again more mentors who would
talk about the bank. Went to them and said, what
else can we do for you? And I could not
believe that that's how the bank worked until it happened
to me and my bankers said, we got d these things,
what else do you need? And I'm like, you're asking me.
I didn't come from that where they asked you what
(05:53):
can they do for you? You always went to the bank,
you know, with your hand in your hand, shame, head down,
all these things, hoping they wouldn't you away.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
A bank will lend you money when you can prove
you don't need it, and it's a bit of a
fake game, like you're by the way, I'm going one
step further. People, a lot of our people will say,
this is why I really want everybody to read this book,
Financial Literacy for All, which is now number one UH
in the world on on economics and and UH and
business UH management, because I'm trying to explain something that
(06:28):
we've taken very emotional, which is money, and or worse,
we've rejected it. You know, all people say, well, we
you know, I hate debt, we should we should not
want to be indebted. What are you talking about. There's
not a billionaire alive who didn't do it on the
back of good debt. There's not a government that's leading
the world, including ours, that didn't do it on the
back of good debt. There's good debt and bad debt
(06:52):
and you what you want. And bad debt is when
you're financing something that depreciates jewelry close you know, uh.
But what good debt is when you financed something that
could appreciate, which a home you know, small business you
me uh. And neutral debt is something that could go
(07:12):
both ways. An automobile, If it's getting you to a job,
if if if it's allow you to keep your family safe,
that's good debt. If you're bought something you can't afford
money you don't have to impress people you don't know
about stuff that don't really matter, well, that's bad debt.
And so coming back to this concept of the bank
uh coming to you this morning and coincidence is God's
(07:35):
way remaining anonymous. This morning, I was talking to a
banker International bank, and they were they had held up
uh at a depositive mind that they held for longer
than they should have on a loan I took out
three years ago. And I had sent them a note saying,
by the way, I want my money that you I've
(07:55):
done everything you asked me to do. I want my
money bag. And on top of that, you know, do
you guys want a line of credit for me in
this country that I'm doing business with, because I may
find some opportunities I'm interested in. If you don't want it, cool,
but if you do out, i'd love to talk about
that business. It was a simple email. Anyway, this lady
calls me. She's my relationship manager, and she's talking to
(08:16):
me like she talked to I think anybody else for
a minute. And so she's telling me, well, you know,
we kept your one hundred thousand for I think it
was two years. I said, no, it's supposed to be
one year. And yes, but maybe we could use it
as a security for this new line of credit. I
think I've already said the number, so I think its
one hundred thousand dollars. And it was a line of
credit for you know what, which five hundred to a million,
(08:40):
which I wasn't going to use, by the way, but
she wanted to use it for this new line of credit.
And she said, well, maybe we need to do an appraisal,
and and I let her finish talking, and I said,
I don't think I'm interested. I said, thank you very much.
I mean, I'm very appreciative, but you guys have wasted
my time for a year. You asked me to do X, Y,
and Z. I did all of that, and then I
(09:00):
waited another year to let you keep my money on tap,
which was a year more than And if I had reverses,
if I didn't give you collateral for a year, you'd
be filing all kind of notice. Is a default to
me and call me all kinds of names. But I'd
let you guys make that mistake, and no one's apologized
to me. No problem. But now you want to transfer
(09:21):
my money to another transaction that I just mentioned, and
then you want me to go through all these hoops
and do appraisals for a property that you just appraised
two years ago. It's done nothing but gone up and
value it's easy to find. Blah blah b liafe actually
doubled it. This probably is doubled in value for a
small transaction. So you know what, I'm good, I said,
You know I just by the way, I just finished
one hundred million dollar reefinands on a portfolio of one
(09:43):
of my companies that was non recourse debt, meaning no
personal guarantee, no nothing, with one of the biggest banks
in the world. And she's like oh oh, oh, you're right.
We have looked at your records, we looked at your file.
You actually do qualify in every way. We're so sorry.
Don't worry about one hundred thousand dollars. We'll send that
back to you and we'll have a decision. Will you
(10:05):
buy monday on the new requests that? Okay? Sure there
you go right there. A bank will lend you money
when you can prove you don't need it or it's
perceived that you don't need it. I don't need this money.
I mean, it'd be nice to have it. It allows me.
I'd rather use OPM other people's money to facilitate things
I want to do under the right conditions. But it
(10:26):
has to be structured properly. It has to be under
the right terms conditions. Fair change is no robbery. A
great negotiation will is when both people leave the table
slightly annoyed, because that means every that no, that neither
one got everything they wanted, but you also didn't feel
like you got screwed. You leave the table slightly annoyed.
(10:49):
It was probably a good deal. And for your listeners,
I want them to hear this and again, I go
all this over all this in financial literacy for all
in my and also my own podcast, Money and Wealth,
and I talk about this my pullpit of finance. You
have a table, and on the one side of the
table is a capitalist and they have a product and
(11:10):
they want to extract money from you. And on the
other side of the table is you, and you want
that product and you don't want to give them any
money and their job. People listen to this, now, don't
get emotional. Whenever you make an emotional decision, it's a
bad one. The capitalist job is to extract as much
money as they can from you while giving you the
least amount of value. And your job is to extract
(11:35):
the most amount of value while delivering the least amount
of cash. And that dynamic tension is natural negotiation. Now,
somebody says, well, how does that apply to capitalism? Where
you're a little village, you don't think you're a capitalists,
Go to a little village in Africa, go a little
village in Latin America. Think about when you're last in
(11:56):
Jamaica or wherever, and you trying to buy a little
chots or something from and how much is this, Well,
it's two dollars. How about a buck fifty, No, one ninety, Well,
how about a buck sixty. Wow, I'll take it one
seventy five. I think it's given me be worse hip.
That's the negotiation. And and you're you're in the midst
of a capital's transaction. You go to the store, you
(12:16):
go to CBS today where the price has been predetermined
because they've done market research. And you want to buy
a comb, and the comb is nine bucks, and and
they've pretty much, you know, done the research approves that
this comb. You pay nine bucks for it, and you
pick it up, and you go to the register, and
without any complaints at all, you buy it. Why because
(12:39):
you know that solving the naps that aut of your
hair and the kinks in my hair are worth at
least twenty bucks, maybe a hundred bucks. Maybe it's invaluable
to you at that moment you want to sew at
least worth nine bucks. There you go, right there. We
do that all day, every day, and don't think about it.
We're all engaged in this system of free enterprise and capitalism,
(13:03):
but we don't understand it. And it is what we
don't know that we don't know this killing us. But
we think we know some brothers like I don't want
to buy a house. Buy a house. The bank owns
the house. I don't know. If you don't pay, the
bank will own your house. But by the way, if
I give you a loan and you don't pay, I
(13:24):
will own your house. Right, So what you need to
do is pay, and then you get the benefit of
appreciation the value above the debt, and you get the
benefit that's called equity, and you get the benefit of depreciation,
which is a tax strategy, and you get to write
off twenty years of a thirty mortgage payments against your
income on your tax bill, and you got to live
(13:47):
in it. Yeah, just becomes okay, black.
Speaker 1 (13:52):
As I said this quote to me to change my
life a couple of years ago, and I was talking
about how much money I had in the bank, and
she was like, wealth is not in the bank balance.
And it blew my mind because I'd always imagine I
just wanted to get as much money in the bank
as possible. And she was like wealthy people other people
she work with, they have some money in there, but
(14:13):
that's not where their wealth is. Can you can you
speak on that?
Speaker 2 (14:16):
Well, of course, I mean you're again cash versus wealth creation. Right. So, uh,
you want you want to have enough cash to live
and meet your obligations and whatever, but you don't really
want to have a lot of cash sitting around. This
is very much like similar to the analogy that you know,
(14:36):
wealthy people want to save time and poor people want
to save money. Right. Uh, they trying We spend all
this time, you know, messing around, trying to make some
money or save some money, or not pay that rent,
that that light bill even though there's a rent notice
on it, trying to wait to the last minute. You
got to pay the light bill. Whether it's Tuesday or Thursday,
(14:58):
You're gonna to pay the light bill. Right. So, but
you're wasting time on this activity. I'd rather you waste
a little bit of my money, would waste a minute
of my time. I could give you more time. I'll
make more money. So you build wealth in your sleep.
You want to take that money and put it to work,
compounding right, home ownership, We just talked about that, starting
(15:21):
a business, putting money to work, starting a business. The
easiest example the stock market. There are three things that
have never gone down in American history. American GDP, gross
domestic product, the income of this country, the stock market
in real estate values. Now somebody watching this will say, ah,
I got him, he's wrong. Doesn't he even know there
(15:43):
was a real estate recession. There was a recession in
two thousand and eight. Yeah, I know that. I know
that real estate went up, it dipped, it's called a recession,
and then it corrected above the line. And real estate
I bought for eighty eight thousand dollars is now worth
three hundred thousand dollars. The home, the townhouse I bought
(16:04):
for two hundred and twenty thousand dollars in LA with
a little bit of money, of my money and a
lot of bit of the bank's money. Here you go
twenty percent cash down from me, eighty percent finands by
the bank, good debt, a little bit of my money
from the bank account into the transaction compound it. And
then when the real estate recession happened, the value went
down to one something one point eighty. All my friends
(16:25):
at sale, John sale, sales, sale, That's why they broke right.
I'm like, why would I sell? I got I got
to live someplace. No, I think I'll just hold on.
I moved to Atlanta, rented that place out to a
police officer who didn't pay his bill on time, I
might add, and uh, buddy finally paid, and I forgot
about it. Will five years, eight years later, forget twenty sixteen,
(16:50):
I go to check on the property, called my broker
out there, my brother hey man, trying to sell his property.
And then I'm gonna buying something in Atlanta. What can
I get for it? Now? Mind, you bought it for
two something, so last I checked on it was one
hundred and something of value, so I was underwater. He said, well,
I think you can get it. You can get seven
to fifty. I said, you don't mean seven to fifty dollars,
(17:12):
do you? What did the la just fall apart? No,
seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars almost almost passed out
it it hit. It had literally triple in value from
where more than triple to value of what I paid
for it. That's what people with wealthy people do. Wealthy
people use money to make more money or use money
(17:33):
to build wealth. So so real estate has never gone
down the stock market. So go go buy. Listen to this.
I'm not telling you what to buy. Whatever you're wearing,
whatever you use, wherever you go, if that's a publicly
traded company, go buy an index or a stock with
those in it, a basket in it. And you don't
(17:53):
have a lot of money, do do do fractional ships.
But if you're part of the of the of the
of the blue chip stock index, those are the best
performing companies in America, and they are global companies. And
if you lose, a billionaire's losing, by the way, so
it's a good bet. And and buy and don't sell.
(18:15):
Just forget about it and watch it compound over time.
If you have a twenty year window on your investment horizon,
and when you want to retire whatever, you're gonna have
zero losses. It's gonna go up, it's gonna go down.
But over twenty years, it's just gonna do this right
on balance. And if you like a company Walmart, Tarja, Target,
(18:37):
if you like a company, there's a good chance other
people like it too. And by the way, once you
own one stock, I understand now over answering your question,
By the way, will once you own one stock you
get a right to the to the to get all
the financials. Yeah, all the all. You imagine somebody bought
one pencil in your house and now they can go
through every room, in every drawer your house. That's what.
(19:01):
That's what. When you have one stock of Target or
Walmart or or Delta Airlines, whatever, you now can go
through every inch and cranny of that company. You have
a right to all their financials. You are an owner
that powerful. That's sexy.
Speaker 1 (19:15):
Yeah, you know. So I have this friend who's she's
an attorney, black girl, and she went to Howard and
she learned, she got her law degree from Howard. And
I remember telling me this story of you know, she
was in you know, the school court they they're not
court room, and she was you know, she learned, you
know how you be fiery in the in the law
room and you said, you slamm your fists on the desk.
(19:36):
And her professor, who was a black man, said, we
can't do that. They can do that. You can't, especially
as a black woman, you cannot do that. In the
course you're seen differently. And my question is this, are
there nuances about money, because we say all money is green.
People want to make money. You know, they don't care
if you're black, white, green. They care about green. So
(19:58):
my question is are there nuances about money that apply
to black people in finding success in it that may
not apply to our counterparts.
Speaker 2 (20:09):
I think there's nuances and money period. I could have
financed my companies with pookying them. I could have got
somebody from my community who has an interesting pedigree on
business that nobody sort of know the details from him.
He doesn't have a website, and he could have and
(20:31):
the audience to figure the rest of this out. And
I could have got some cash from homeboy to start
my business or grow my business. But I couldn't pass
an audit. I couldn't get out of the financials. The
bank's only look at me crazy. And I can't then
position myself for the next level of growth on Wall Street.
I can't go from Main Street to Wall Street because
(20:52):
my partners are funky.
Speaker 1 (20:54):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (20:55):
So, I've always had a philosophy that I want my
partners to be bigger and my financial partners are also
my partners, and want of my partners to be bigger
and more credible than I am. I mentioned I say
anything about money, bigger and more credible than I am.
Oprah Winfrey gave me an award, the Usual Life Award,
and when her investigators came around after she says he
(21:16):
wanted to give me the award. Investigators came around and said,
we're gonna makeep being lit uncomfortable. We're apologize in advance.
We've gone through. We've already gone through all your childhood.
That's why we're having lunch with you. But Oprah has
a rule, it's called the Oprah rule. She doesn't put
her arm around anybody who doesn't have us much to
lose reputationally as she does. Yeah, that's good man, that's
(21:37):
my rule. So all my partners are bigger than me,
more credible than me, and I build my companies. I
build my operations with an institutional pedigree. So I make
sure that I don't just have accountant. I have an accountant,
audit firm who is one of the Big six or
Big ten or Big twenty firms with a nice reputation
(21:57):
and a pedigree. My clients, my partners, also my kind
of companies I'm trying to do business with. Use that
company or company like that. It's somebody you recognize. I
make sure that my bank is somebody who has a
recognized pedigree. It doesn't mean I don't put money in
a black bank, doesn't whish I do doesn't mean that
I don't help the least these God's children. But my
lead institution is going to be somebody who says something
(22:21):
about me, not me saying something about them. Right, and
my investors are going to have something more than money
going on for them, reputation and text. When somebody says
who's your partners, it means something. So yes, you've got
to realize that you cannot curse out people in that
board room. If you're white, they'll just say you're upset.
(22:44):
If you're white, they say if you're black, they say
you're crazy. I was walking through the lobby of a
hotel with my wife and this weekend, last weekend, and
there was a white kid laying on the couch in
the lobby of the hotel, had his shoes on, feed
up hope on the couch with his head on his mama,
and and he's chilling. Nobody said a word to him.
(23:07):
I said, baby, if that was a black kid, somebody
would have come along and say, the young man, you
need to take your feet off that couch. You gotta
be twice as smart, twice as intelligence, twice as well dressed,
get up twice as early, say twice as late, be
twice as clean. But it's made me better. Haters have
made me better. I don't get mad at stuff like this.
(23:28):
I use it as fuel. Right. I take no for vitamins. Right.
A success is going from failure to failure without loss
of enthusiasm, over to rounded through it. I'm going to
get to it. So as a result of that, I'm
built to last. I'm as a result of me making
sure that I'm overclocked, over prepared, over overtight, and never emotional.
(23:48):
I can walk in any room and clean their clocks.
Because they're lazy. They taken the easy route. They've had
to be had the test that I've had. Talk without
being offensive, Listen without being defensive, and always lead even
your adversary with their dignity, because if you don't, that's
been the rest of their life, trying to make you miserable.
It becomes personal, and they don't want you in the
(24:09):
room half the time anyway, so they're trying to find
some excuse to neutralize you and get you off the stage.
You can say you don't like John Bryant, You're not
gonna say he doesn't qualify.
Speaker 1 (24:18):
That's good, that's good. I want to talk about we
why so many of our businesses have so few employees?
And I want to position it this way is you know,
I think about how do we get more of us
to consider scale, Like there's no as far as I know,
no black box ricks like we are. You know, I
think there was a study done by the SBA. It's
(24:39):
back in twenty twelve. I believe it was the last
time they did it, and they said eighty percent of
our businesses are in the bottom twenty percent of categories
for sales revenue. So we over index on barber shops,
long care companies, dry cleaners, et cetera. And so I wonder, like,
what does it take to get that black barber to say,
you know, instead of starting to shop on the corner,
(25:00):
I want to start thirty of these shops and do
it across the country. Like what does it take to
get us to think that way?
Speaker 2 (25:05):
The Bible says the Bible says, where there's no vision,
that people perish, all right, So we needed again, we
need to go from civil rights in the streets to
sil rights in the business suites. Look, this makes perfect sense.
Why we are where we are? Will, why do kids
want to be rap stars? Athletes and drug dealers from
(25:27):
our neighborhood.
Speaker 1 (25:27):
That's what they see.
Speaker 2 (25:28):
They're not dumb and they're not stupid. They're brilliant. They're
modeling what they see see. Yeah, they don't. No one's
talk to them about why education matters to them. K
through twelve, they're like, why do I go do ath
of all this when I can just go sell some drugs? Well,
selling drugs is prison, probation, parole, and death, but that's
(25:48):
a different conversation. They're seeing a media gratification. They're seeing
a connection to their aspirations. But no one's taking taking
education and plugging it into a socket called aspiration and saying,
if you do this, you can be I'm an engineer.
If you do this, you can go into AI. If
you do this, you can become a gamer. If you
do this, you become a coder. If you do this,
you can become a real estate mate, a real estate magnet.
(26:11):
We have a farm club for professional sports. There used
to be a farm club for the arts, used to
be art class, a lot of stuff. But they're still
an informal farm club for that, but certainly professional sports
from middle school. But there's no farm club for business
and the things that's driving the economy. And so you
look at the role models of jay Z or whoever
(26:31):
people admire, they have a staff of thirty people. The
biggest celebrities that you want to admire, they have a
staff of five people, four people, ten people, maybe thirty
people that's running their brand. You can't scale the brand.
This is only one jay Z. Maybe I'm not picking
on jay Z. There's only one Ti or Killer Mike
(26:54):
who I know, and you can't and there's only so
many employees that are able to sit in their balance
sheet given that is one The product is an individual. Right.
So the things that we've tried to get forty million
people into to an economic model designed for three thousand people. Right,
(27:14):
And even those jobs last three to five years on average.
Celebrity three to five years, a ball player three to
five years, drug dealer probably less than that. Right. So,
and look at Jews, just the opposite, seven and a
half million Jews, but they're pursuing forty million occupations and
they've understand you need to write the check, not just
(27:36):
cash it. Be the owner. But when you discriminate against me,
you just discriminate against the guy who owns the building
that you're actually talking crap in. So what we need
is a long answer your question. What we need is
a business plan. What we need is a business plan,
and we need role models who start with what you
(27:57):
just said. Why am I just why don't I have
too much month of to end in my money? Why? No,
matter how hard I work, I'm broke because you've got
one operation and you're trying to make money and not
trying to build wealth. You need to you build wealth
in your sleep. Compounding. Compounding can mean different additional locations.
So maybe I need to model success. Maybe I need
(28:19):
twenty locations, maybe I need ten. I can't. And by
the way, what's the strategy. It's going to blow your
your viewer's mind when I say, listeners, listeners mind when
I say this, why do I want to have three locations, ten,
twenty to sell it?
Speaker 1 (28:32):
That's right, that's absolutely correct to sell it.
Speaker 2 (28:35):
Oh but John, then it's not a black business. No,
it's a successful It's called an exit strategy, right, right,
So percent of black businesses don't have an employee because
we're emotional about it, because we're there're self employment projects.
Because we have to understand that this is about growing
something you can sell, that you can merge that you
(28:57):
can that you know, it's not a black business, it's
a green You don't see Jewish people and white people
have said white owned business. You know, you don't see
Juli Latino people, Latino owned business, big sign in the
one the in the wall. Let's you know, you know
Asian owned business. Right, it's only black people, black owned business.
I know it's black. I see you, right, you you
(29:18):
want every person who with a dollar bill, a legit
one to be your customer, right, And so we got
to take the emotion out of it. We need different
kind of role models. Look, why am I doing what
I'm doing to create plumbing? There is no there is
no one of the video has got four million, five
million views that I did. Somebody just put up this
(29:39):
little clip I did. But to speaking the Milking conference
where I said I want to be the Federal Reserve
of the Hood. Yeah, and to me it was common sense.
I wasn't I wasn't trying to get attention. I was.
I just thought it was common sense. I want to
become the Federal Reserve of the Hood. I want to
create an economic infrastructure, a financial access point, nationwide where
(30:00):
we can come in operationalize our untapped human potential at scale.
Get our credit score up thirty to fifty to one
hundred points, get our debt. You know, black people have
the largest, sorry, the lowest credit score on average in
the nation. The average credit score for black people is
less than six twenty. Not poor people, all of us.
(30:21):
And so when we get up in the morning, will
and we think that the bank is discriminating against us,
and they might be. It might be a racist person
at the bank who don't like you, who discriminated against you.
That might be the case. But if your credit score
is five fifty, they don't want to work very hard
at it. The answer is just no, right, you're just
a bad credit risk. Now you don't pay your bills.
(30:42):
So we get the credits grow up fifty to one
hundred points, so you're in the high sixes. God forbid,
you get the seven. That's the Nirvana seven hundred. Get
your debt down thirty eight hundred dollars for somebody making
forty eight thousand dollars. These store our Hope and side
models at open site locations and Operation Hope three hundred
dollars across the country. We get your savings up two
thousand dollars on average. And when we do that, we
(31:03):
make you bank qualified. Yeah, so the bank just wants
to say yes. And if you want to test my theory,
go to the computer at midnight when the bank's not
even open and you have a seven to twenty credit
score and type in an application for a credit card
or a mortgage or cardinals and watch that approval.
Speaker 1 (31:19):
We'll get it quick, quick, quick.
Speaker 2 (31:22):
Change the game, change the business plan, change your minds,
change our model, become bilingual, learn financial literacy for all.
It's the new civil rights issue of this generation. We
have got to be as obsessed with this as we
were the right to vote.
Speaker 1 (31:36):
Last question for you, going to let you go. And
you know a lot of folks in our community. I've
heard lament capitalism and for a variety of reasons. And
I want you to make a case on this and
why capitalism has been largely what created wealth in this country.
And I'll let you. I don't want to want to
speak on you. I'll let you speak on it.
Speaker 2 (31:57):
Man. We get to do an hour just on this. Yeah,
this is a ridiculous conversation. The converences they're happy.
Speaker 1 (32:03):
Yeah, now, yeah, I'm with you.
Speaker 2 (32:06):
It's ridiculous. Slavery was about capitalism. Nobody went halfway around
the world, bring your ass over here because they didn't
like you. Why did they go to Africa? Because we
were agricultural geniuses, that's why. Because we could take dead land,
(32:28):
dead soil and bring it back to life. Because we
did that in Africa, and we could work from cancer
in the morning to cancy at night, and it didn't
bother us under the sun. We're agricultural geniuses of the land.
What was the economy in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds,
agricultural economy? What were the crops? Cotton, tobacco, et cetera,
(32:51):
et cetera. Was needed the soil that was situated in
the Caribbean, but more so in the southern US States.
First indentured servants brought over here to work that land
were white and black. They got along with each other.
And when in sixty the early sixteen hundreds they got
(33:12):
along with each other didn't like what the overseer was
doing on what wasn't called a plantation. Then these were
trading companies back then. When they didn't like they ran
away with each other. Black and white. And when they
were caught the overseers, henchman said, a, Boss, we got
a problem. They're getting along and we can have a
class I'm sorry. We can have a race riot, but
(33:35):
we cannot have a class riot because we're the class.
So we got to work this out. And Boss said, well,
tell the white guys they're white like us, and then
put them in charge of the black people and tell
them that they work really hard, they can buy one
of them. And the poor whites didn't do any critical
(33:57):
thinking to go, uhh, oh, I'm white like you. They
should have said, well, next question, do I have land
like you do, have titles like you? Do? I own
businesses like you do? I own No, they didn't ask.
They just said, oh, I'm white like you, okay, Boss,
And that lie has survived four hundred years where poor
(34:19):
whites and poor blacks are at each other's throats while
the wealthy people just sort of fade in the background
and going about their business. Now, that was bad capitalism
at scale, horrible, disgusting capitalis we can I can do
a whole hour on slavery, and as a mechanism and
as a business model, it was repressive and disgusting and horrible.
(34:40):
And I think bad capitalism is where I benefit and
you benefit more. I'm sorry. Good capitalism is where I
benefit and you benefit more. Bad capitalism is where I
benefit and you pay a price for it. And this
was the worst example of bad capitalism, slavery, but it
built this country. Black slaves were worth more than anybody
else in at forty the wealthiest city in the world.
(35:02):
Will in eighteen forty was not just Mississippi. Okay, I'm
gonna get off that. I can stay on that forby.
By the way, the word white, word white was a
made up word, racial word white. I'm about to stet
pick a fight with all these folks who think they're historians,
but they're wrong the racial word white. The world is
five billion years old, four billion years of organism life,
two hundred million years of human life, but those were Neanderthals.
(35:26):
One hundred million, one hundred thousand, two hundred thousand years
of modern America, modern life with the people that we
would recognize and look and feel and stuff. And then
you know, of course recorded history. We know three thousand
years before Christ and all that kind of stuff. You
hear all those stories, and of course you know Christ
and he you know, God blew conscious in us and
all that kinds of recent history. But the word white
(35:46):
came into sixteen hundreds. You had black royalty, you had
black people who were in power hundreds of years ago.
But it was, it was, it was convenient in sixteen
hundreds in America to this word for the reasons that
I just mentioned to you. Now, let's go to your
question and answer it directly. Why this is a ridiculous situation.
(36:08):
I've already talked about the comb and the brush and
all that stuff. People watching this or listen to this
are engaging in capitalism. The government didn't buy your phone,
the government't buy your car radio. Yeah, all right, So
I did a podcast on this, the six levels of
a capitalist. The first level you got you are a
(36:30):
human and you are using your human capital exchange that
for compensation so you can live. Yeah, that's a gig worker.
That is the unstructured worker at the bottom of the pyramid.
They pay you by the hours or buy the gig.
And you want a bunch of freedoms, or you don't
want anybody tell you what to do, so you broke
his heck. But you get to come and go as
you please. Then you've got the next level, which is
(36:52):
a worker and you work from nine to five or
whatever your shift is. The ais a to upset your life.
By the way, artificial intelligence, that's another thing. I'm co
chairing the AI Ethics councilor with Sam Aulman. That's a
whole other thing that's gonna change everything by twenty thirty.
But you're working at a nine to five and a
job that will go away, and you're being paid, you know,
(37:12):
a decent wage whatever the law allows, and you get
to go, you get to leave it five o'clock. It's
not your problem. Okay. Now the next level is you're
a salaried worker and you get more compensation because the
boss can call you, call you at eight o'clock at
night every now and then, and they can't say you
can't say it's overtime because you're on a salary. Now,
(37:33):
they can't abuse you. But you know, basically, whatever the
job needs you is when you show up and they
pay you, let's say, low six figures for that salary job.
So it's more risk, less freedom, more reward. Now you're
a c suite executive, you're a chief financial officer, executive
vice president. You're a baller in some corporation. Now you're
getting six figures, mid six figures, maybe high six figures,
(37:56):
maybe seven figures. But that boss can call you any
day on time he or she likes twenty four to seven.
And it's not your business and it's not your problem.
But you have to be responsive because you are all in.
You got a lot less freedom, a lot more compensation,
but you still don't have the risk of an owner.
The next level is a business owner. Now you have
(38:19):
this is your deal. Now you own it. If it
goes down is your deal. But if it wins, it's
your deal. Well, you get more compensation, much more risk,
and you basically work whenever you have to. Now, the
great thing about a business is different from an entrepreneur.
There's an established plan as a barbershop or a nail
salon or a you want to be a technician or
(38:41):
whatever it is. There's a business that came before that
you can model it. The craziest part form her capitalist
is me. I'm an entrepreneur creating something out of whole
cloth didn't exist before. If you win, you win big,
But if you lose, you lose everything. And an repreneur
works eighteen hours day to keep them getting a job.
(39:03):
Now I just explain I just explained capitalism to everybody
listening to this, because everybody is in one of those categories.
Then somebody's going to say, well, I just want to
work for the government. Where do you think the government
get their money from. I mean, we can go to
this all day, all night. Eighty eight percent of all
jobs or private sector jobs. The government is only twelve
percent of all jobs. And they get their money from
(39:24):
you and me paying taxes and businesses. And then said, oh,
I want to be a socialist. What are you talking
about all that? This is a taxing structure. You go
to Norway or Sweden or whatever, they're capitalists. They just
are taxed at sixty or seventy percent of every dollar
they may. So you don't have anybody who's broke. There's
a safety net. But you don't see anybody who look
(39:46):
like you and me also running these companies. Wow, so's
so there's a there's a safety net. Fine, but you
cannot aim at the highest ring. And those are small economies.
And then you say, well, what about you China? China's capitalists?
What about Russia? Russians. They say they're communists, they're capitalists.
So communism doesn't work. Socialism doesn't work, and capitalism is
(40:09):
a horrible system except for every other system. Knock it off.
We are we are living in a free enterprise democracy.
Get with it. What we really need and this is
gonna really anger your viewers. What we really need is
a black Jewish business plan. I'm gonna drop the mic
on that one.
Speaker 1 (40:25):
I love it work through the book. It's Amazon, everywhere, Barnes.
Speaker 2 (40:31):
It's everywhere Walmart, Amazon, Barnes, and Noble black bookstores. And
we made to make sure that there are black bookstores.
That it's number one in several categories economics, business, and
I don't know, there's been not many many times that
a black man was number one in economics and business.
And this has been since April one through today. It's
still number one on Amazon and best I can tell,
(40:53):
we are buying it, which is really quite inspiring. We
want to know how stuff works, like we want to
figure this stuff out. This is the SIVI Rights movement
and this is the third reconstruction and it started with
George Floyd's murder and it'll go to twenty thirty and
we have a shot that will not come back. This this,
in my opinion, this is it. This is after this.
(41:14):
Folks have done with us. They're done with that, They're
done with trying to accommodate. I'm not saying they that
they shouldn't be done with us. They shouldn't. But folks
are gonna move on to something else, and we have
got the we we've got to get out of this
victim mentality. We've got to stop thinking that somebody owes
us something they do but it doesn't matter. We've got
(41:34):
to stop stop asking for perfection. You know, whether it's
reparations or whatever that stuff is, it ain't happening. Note,
if you see who's running for president against the current president,
you really think that's conversation Like, we have got to
become a homeowner. So the number one way you build
wealth as homeownership. Forty one forty four percent of us
own a home. The rest of us are renting, trying
(41:55):
to impress people. We don't know what money we don't have,
but places don't want us with a doorman and don't
give a damn about you. We can't afford and in
conversations that don't matter, not at all.
Speaker 1 (42:11):
Child, Hold Brien, It's such a pleasure, such a pleasure.
Thank you so much. Black Tech Green Money is a
production of Blavity Afro Tech on the Black Effect podcast
network in Nightheart Media and it's produced by Morgan, Debaonne
and me Well Lucas, with ad Digital production support by
Kate McDonald, Sarah Ergan and Jaden McGee. Special thank you
(42:32):
to Michael Davis and Love Beach. Learn more about my
guessing other tech. This up is an innovators at afrotech
dot com. The video version of this episode will drop
to Black Tech Green Money on YouTube, So tap in,
enjoy your Black Tech Green Money, share to somebody go
get your money. Peace and love,
Host
Will Lucas
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