Empowering Blacks In Finance & Revolutionizing Wall Street With Michael Milken

John Hope Bryant welcomes Michael Milken in this episode of "The Founders Series." Michael is a transformative figure in modern finance, making the perfect guest for an all-encompassing discussion on innovation, mentorship, and the power of human potential.

Milken shares his journey, starting with how he revolutionized Wall Street with his innovative approaches, creating a clear shift in the financial industry. He recounts his transition from a passion for space exploration to finance after the Watts Riots, driven by the belief that skin color should not determine access to capital.

For 60 years, Milken has worked tirelessly to eliminate racial barriers to capital and opportunity. He highlights key milestones, such as mentoring Reginald Lewis, the first African American to build a billion-dollar company on Wall Street. Milken also discusses the creation of K-12 online schools to provide quality education in underserved areas, emphasizing the power of compounding in wealth creation, as described by Einstein.

Milken shares his investment philosophy, stressing that the best investment is in oneself, with knowledge and health as the foundations of wealth. He advises young professionals to seek experience and mentorship early in their careers rather than chasing the highest-paying jobs. Recognizing global talent, Milken believes that with the right opportunities, individuals worldwide can flourish.

Drawing parallels with athletes like Tom Brady and LeBron James, Milken highlights the importance of maintaining health for long-term success. He encourages using life’s challenges to one’s advantage, as adversity often precedes success. With a record of financing over 3,000 companies, Milken underscores the importance of individual impact in business success.

Join John Hope Bryant and Michael Milken for a compelling conversation that explores finance, education, mentorship, and the relentless pursuit of breaking down barriers to create a more inclusive and prosperous world.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome the Money in Wealth with John O'Bryant, a production
of The Black Effect Podcast Network and iHeartRadio John Hope
Bryant Money in Wealth podcast series. This is where I

(00:21):
unpack capitalism and free enterprise, make it approachable to everybody
inclusive capitalism. This is where we explain how things work.
We inspire you to be better. We make sure you're
not a shame that you don't know better and no
one ever talks to you. It's not your fault. It's
what you don't know. That you don't know this killing you,

(00:41):
but you think you know. There's no need for shame anymore.
We're gonna unpack all of this and repack it with
you in mind. And with that in mind, every now
and then I will bring as you know, I just
normally ramble and talk to you directly. We have a
conversation about going from the streets to the suites. But
every now and then, when I think it's special and important,

(01:02):
I bring a guest on. It's very rare, and I'm
going to call this the Builders Series. And really a
first in this section is an iconic figure, somebody who
is very important to me the world, would nom as
Michael Milkin. Our Hiss friends call him Mike Milkin, a

(01:26):
man who is one of the greatest and most innovative
minds of the twentieth century in capitalism in finance, one
who really reset the system at scale, and he reimagined,
reimagined capitalism in finance and with it free enterprise. And

(01:49):
in some ways, and I don't believe this is over exaggeration,
I think this is literally true what I'm about to say.
In some ways Wall Street can look at itself in
as long as history as sort of pre Mike Milkin
and post Mike Milkin. We'll get into that in a second.
But when you think about what's changed this country, of

(02:10):
course we know of some of you know of Alexander Hamilton,
our first Secretary of the Treasury, who by the way,
came from the Islands and had a single mother's I'm
just gonna say I think he was part black. But
I'm just my own little inference there that's not fascially
corrected or anyway. This is my sense that he comes
from humble, He came from humble and unique beginnings and

(02:33):
came in this country and changed everything as our first
Secretary of the Treasury and was inclusive in his view,
and you go sort of fast forward. You go through
the Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War and Frederick Douglass
who was not only an abolitionist but a businessman, and
then you get to the twentieth century and we're gonna
talk about the guy behind the guy. You know about

(02:55):
Reginald Lewis, but you may not know about the guy
behind the guy. That is this guy Mike Milkin. So
before we get into that, And he hates when I
say this, but he's a billionaire. He hates when I
say it because it's not about money, it's about purpose.
But he is something that we all aspire to understand
and be as it relates to freedom. Mike, why do

(03:17):
you give a damn? I mean, why do you care
so much? You could literally just go chill, Like I've
stayed in your house. You don't even stay in your house.
You're busy working.

Speaker 2 (03:28):
Maybe I'll visit you in my house. John.

Speaker 1 (03:31):
We actually kick Mike out of his own house. We're like,
we gotta change your nine meter a date, goodbye. But Mike,
Mike has could just chill. He could just enjoy his life,
spend his money, focus on his obsess on his own
family and really be inclusive and exclusive at the same time.

(03:53):
But that's not who you are and it's not been
who you are. This is not a new look for you.
This is who you've been your whole life. Why do
you give a damn? Why do you care? We're going
to get into how you operationalize that because these are
good PhDs are better. We're going to get into what
you've done that with specific people like Reginald Lewis and
unpack that. But again, why do you care?

Speaker 2 (04:16):
I think, John, there's points in your life that kind
of change your life. My father, his mother died in childbirth.
His father died in a car accident when he was
eleven and twelve, lived through the Depression. One of the
few things his father ever left him was a watch.

(04:38):
And to give you the relative values, and during the Depression,
when he was at the University of Wisconsin, he gave
up the watch that his father gave him to pay
for an entire year of tuition. Now today, obviously a
time X watch is not going to cover the cost

(04:58):
of tuition. He was very strong on family and next generation.
It was extremely important to him, and his feeling was
that his grandchildren would not have a life, a good life,
a chance at the American dream unless every single person

(05:20):
felt they had a chance at the American dreams. And
so I grew up during the fifties. The show Happy Days,
some of your viewers might have seen Happy Days, and
in many ways these were happy days for communities. I
used to ride my bike to school. Your neighbors knew
who you were, your streets were safe, and it was

(05:45):
a period of time in this country. And I wanted
to run the space program. So the first thing that
ever happened to me was Sputnik went up and everything
was turned upside down in nineteen fifty seven and communism
quote one, this little ball was traveling around Earth. You

(06:07):
could drop nuclear bombs anywhere you wanted if you could
do this. Soviet Union thought it was their finest day,
but it was the end, the beginning and end of
the Soviet Union because it woke up the United States,
and so the US economy was much larger than the
Soviet Union, and DARPUB was formed so the US would

(06:30):
never go fall behind in science.

Speaker 1 (06:34):
Well was dark Boat just very quickly.

Speaker 2 (06:37):
It was part of the Defense Department, right and its
goal was to it's kind of like a venture capital
firm that was created, a government venture capital firm to
push science. It was cool to be a STEM major.

Speaker 1 (06:56):
At the engineering in math. We're gonna make sure we're
not packed these these these phrases for people.

Speaker 2 (07:00):
And so the government put up money and encouraged kids
to go into science and math. And I wrote a
letter to the President in fifty seven that I was
running to run the space program because NASA was being formed.
Now I was a little disappointed. I didn't get a
letter back from the President. Okay, I was eleven years old.

(07:23):
I never had That was my plan. I'd run our
space program until the Watts riots. August eleventh, nineteen sixty five,
and I met a young African American man who was married,
had a child, had no savings, and they had burned
down the building that he worked in. He didn't start it,

(07:47):
but he didn't stop it, so when he woke up
the next morning, he didn't have a job.

Speaker 1 (07:53):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (07:54):
And when I sat with them, he told me that
his father never had access to capital, no matter how
many good ideas he has, because of the color of
his skin, and that he wouldn't have an opportunity to
build his own business, and he'd always be somebody's employee

(08:15):
because of the color of his skin. And that was
August eleventh, nineteen sixty five, and I went back to
Berkeley where I was going to school, changed my major
to finance. Had done all this research and it was
totally irrational to me that the color of anyone's skin
should determine whether they're a good credit, whether their ideas

(08:38):
are good and could be financed. And I made the
decision in nineteen sixty five that I was going to
change the flow of capital as a sophomore at Berkeley
in the future, and that people would not be judged
on the color of their skin, but their ability, their entrepreneurism,

(08:59):
and their talent. And so when you say why do
I do what I do today, I've had this mission.
I have grandchildren today, and I tell them the same
thing my father told me. Unless every kid feels they
have a chance, it's not going to be great for them.

(09:22):
That's equal opportunity, not necessarily equal outcomes. I've been on
a mission and going to start my sixtieth year this
year on this mission, and so as long as I'm
living and breathing, I'm going to make sure that everyone
feels they have this opportunity and a project that you're

(09:44):
working on. I'm going to make sure they understand how
important financial literacy is. When Laurie and I got married,
we got married on August eleventh, nineteen sixty eight. It
was not an accident. I never wanted to forget that.

Speaker 1 (10:02):
Day of the day the riots.

Speaker 2 (10:04):
That's correct, and we're going to celebrate that at our
center on August eleventh, twenty twenty five, the Center for
Advancing the American Dream. And one of those pillars, John,
you know, is financial literacy. And so I knew when
Laura and I got married. We set up a budget

(10:25):
of six hundred dollars a month. That's what we had
to live on transportation rent. Because I knew, even if
I was only getting ten percent rate of return investment
on my money, that I knew every dollar I spent
today would have been worth eight dollars in twenty years.

(10:51):
So when I hit forty, I knew that if I
saved a dollar, it would be worth eight dollars. And
the power of compounding and understand this. Einstein is often
credited with the idea, what is the most powerful force
in the world. It's not as famous formula e equals

(11:13):
mc square. It was coumpounding, and people forget how important
that is. And so the concept of saving, the concept
of making an investment in the future, and one of
those investments you make is in your own education.

Speaker 1 (11:32):
So hold on right there. So you told me something
one day that brains intelligence are equally distributed, but opportunity
is not, which I'm gonna get to in this next question.
I'm going to ask you. But as you were talking
about compounding, and as you talked about what you and
Laurie dian I want to make sure the listeners don't

(11:53):
skip over what he said about August eleventh. What he
said was he got married. Correct me if I'm wrong here, Mike.
You got me on the same day that you had
this epiphany about the mission of your life, which was
the day of the riots. This is the wats riots,
and so rainbows after storms you had you changed your
major to finance. I didn't know you wanted to be

(12:14):
an astronaut. That's a new news to me. That's cool
to know. And then you moved into this mission of
giving access to all people through finance and got married
as a pivot point really acknowledging point a reminder on
August eleventh, and now you're going to open up the
center on August eleventh. But one of the billionaires you
created is a guy who helped me out named Tony Wrestler.

(12:37):
And Tony told me one day you make money during
the day, you built well in your sleep, which is
another way of what you just said, which is you
and Laurie had six hundred dollars and you wanted to
save ten percent of that because you knew in X
number of years that that was really going to have
be the way you build wealth. Most people don't understand that.

(12:57):
They got their obsession with I want to make that
mon want to get this dollar, We'll get this cash,
We'll get that bag. I want to get this mullah.
They all these different acronisms for money. Money is highly overrated.
You build wealth in your sleep, which is compounding. As
you just mentioned, how many billionaires, which you guess you
created through your work over your years, how many people

(13:18):
have come through you and are now enjoying their own status.
Is one of the titans in the world. A dozen,
two dozen.

Speaker 2 (13:29):
I don't know if it's a thousand, but it's hundreds,
but I'd say the most important element, John, is that
tens of millions of jobs were created. One of the
things I saw very goodly. You know, people don't really
think of it this way, but the value of human potential,

(13:53):
often referred to as human capital and social capital. Yeah,
in this country is about fifteen hundred trillion, So it's
fifteen times the assets. So if an individual thought, boy,
if I could get these skills, if I had a
mentor if I could get a job and learn from

(14:15):
someone else, they don't really see it, but their value
is going up, and the value of what they can
do in the future when you're young is far more
valuable than the amount of money you have in the bank,
or your net worth or what assets you hold. And
so the potential of people in this country is fifteen

(14:37):
times the financial assets, and it's fifty times the size
of the economy, and so people don't necessarily think about that.
As a young kid, boy, if I became good in math,
math majors are among some of the highest paid people
in this country. If I learned how to code, if

(14:58):
I built a little robot when I was six years
old and I wanted to make my robot move. So
I learned how to code. And a lot of people
think about their first job is who's going to pay
him the most. That's right, the most important thing on
your first job is who's going to teach you the most.

(15:19):
You're going to be your mentor, because what you're going
to achieve and the rest of your life is going
to dwarf what your starting salary is. And so a
lot of people don't really step back and think, boy,
these are the jobs of the future, These are the
skills of the future. There are plenty of skills that

(15:40):
you know aren't in big demand today because of technology disintermediating,
and so one skill is always knowledge and education.

Speaker 1 (15:51):
So untapped human potential. You and I share a passion
for unleashing untapped human potential at scale. And as you know,
I wore a little crush velvet three piece suit that
my mother bought me to go to church. I wore
that suit to the school in Compton, California, and the
model of the banker who came in my classroom, who

(16:14):
happened to be white, who was teaching us financial literacy
when I was nine years old, and I asked him,
what do you do for a living and how'd you
get rich legally? And I was dead serious, no one.
I'd never met anybody like this before. He said, I'm
a banker and I finance entrepreneurs. That was sort of
my first unofficial mentor in finance, and and it was,
it was, and it changed my whole life. I started

(16:37):
a business right after that, and the rest is history.
There's another guy that you saw potential in at an
early age. Well, you saw his potential after he reached
a mature age, but he saw his potentil at an
early age. He was a lawyer. He was on the
he was on Wall Street, and he was trying to
get a piece of the big ring. He was trying

(16:57):
to grab the big ring. And what was unheard of
in nineteen eighty five, which was to do a billion
dollar deal on Wall Street, wasn't about the money. He
was trying to buy a company. He wanted to be
part of the leverage buyouts of that age, and he
was trying to buy a company. A district of case
was Beach's International. I believe it was nine erny eighty
five million dollar was an acquisition price. Think so anybody

(17:22):
listening to this, watching this, think you know I'm saying
a billion, think twenty billion a day, think thirty billion.
It's nineteen eighty five, and he's got to have to
be black. His name was Reginald Lewis, now Reggie Lewis's Grace.
The covers a Black Enterprise and all these different publications,
and he's held up as the Martin Luther King Junior
of Wall Street, the first black man to do a

(17:42):
billion dollar deal on Wall Street. And he deserves all
that credit. There's a museum with his name on it
in Baltimore and so on and so forth. His family
enjoys generational wealth. He's helped countless people, but when he
went to Wall Street, he was denied access to capital.
It goes back to that quote that you told me, Mike,
that intelligence is equally distributed, but access an opportunity is not.

(18:07):
And tell us the story of Reginald Lewis, And why
did you stick your nose in this, put your reputation
and I think relationship capital at risk to help this guy.
I believe by the way you were picked on later

(18:29):
because of helping people like him and others. I'll give
you that, hopefully before we finish. But again, why you
give a damn And how'd you pick this guy? And
what made him special? And what did you do.

Speaker 2 (18:43):
Well? First, I had met Regg number of years earlier.
He was an entrepreneur. And when it came time to
sell this international division of Beatrice, the people who were
selling it told me that Reggie not have any credibility
with them, and I told them.

Speaker 1 (19:05):
Harvard educated attorney just for these those are not completely
aware of Redge Lewis is correct.

Speaker 2 (19:09):
And the largest private equity firm was the seller of
the company. And I had financed the purchase of overall
beaches for them, but I told them they didn't need to.
He didn't have to have credibility with them. He had
credibility with me, and so that was it. And I
would say to you that he was better prepared. He

(19:31):
knew the assets better than anyone else, and he knew
the plan and he had the best plan as to
what he was going to do with these assets. So
he was the best person for this job. And I
had helped them build their firm, and I told them

(19:51):
that I stood by Rege Lewis. And to think about
it was only you know, almost forty years ago. Today
reg has occurred with Reg and John. I got hate letters,
I got death threats. We've come a long way. And
what I saw on Reg Lewis is I saw the

(20:12):
Jackie Robinson. There were many minority entrepreneurs that have built businesses,
but when they got bigger, they already always sold them
to a bigger company. And so I view this as
a statement that if you have ability, and you have
more ability in anyone else, you don't have to sell

(20:33):
that unlimited capital is available to you and you can
grow and you can make your ideas become a reality.
And so my feeling was that no different than Jackie
Robinson's role in baseball, that Reg was going to play
this role in business. And one of the last things

(20:56):
Reg and I ever talked about was maybe he should
buy Paramount Wow, occurring in the early nineties, and who
knows what would have happened to Paramont had he bought it.
But Reg's life was cut short by a glioblastema. He
was a very proud man and really didn't want anyone

(21:18):
to know that he had terminal cancer until he died,
except for his family, and so to me, I traveled
around with him. We went and talked to high schools,
we went to talk to kids. John, you grew up
in Compton, California. So if we ask what is one

(21:39):
of the ten worst places to have grown up in
the nineteen sixties, you list Compton, California as well.

Speaker 1 (21:47):
Yes, yes, And.

Speaker 2 (21:49):
So most of the kids didn't make it out of Compton.
Most of the schools it wasn't even safe going to school.
So we built a company called K twelve in the
late nineties where you could go to school online, and
so if a parent was concerned about the safety of

(22:11):
their child, they could go to school at home. Getting
a computer was free, curriculum was free, teachers were free.
And so many kids have gone on to great colleges
and flourished from Compton who actually went to school online.
And when I think of Compton, besides you, it's hard

(22:32):
to think of Compton today without thinking about Venus and
Serena Williams who came out of Compton. That's right, So
a lot of talent. But the question is what is
the opportunity, And you talked about it, what is the
role model your day of a banker walking into your
classroom and hopefully if people want to see your purple suit,

(22:54):
they'll go to the Center for Advancing the American Dream
and see your purples. But whether it's Compton or East
Saint Louis or East Palo Alto or Harlem or the Bronx,
there are so many talented people. Fifty years ago I
started to interact with an economists called Hernando de Soto

(23:18):
out of Peru, and his view was most gorillas or
terrorists as they were referred to, many of onere entrepreneurs
who didn't have access to capital.

Speaker 1 (23:30):
So the audia he means, the rebels in the in
the the mountains, mountains areas.

Speaker 2 (23:38):
Called South America, and his view was get these people,
give them capital, tell them there's another path besides growing
cocaine or something else that they can make money on.
And so that's why I say, if there's one recommendation
for young people today is don't focus on your first paycheck.

(24:01):
Focus on who's the mentor what are you going to lose.
I've had tens of thousands of people tell me that
they told a person everything they know. I always correct
them and say, you taught them everything you know. Many
of them have gone far past what you taught them,

(24:24):
but you set them on the path of what you
know So the Tony Wrestlers of the world, the hundreds
of those today that are been successful, built great firms,
you've partnered with. What I'm most proud about them is
that they care about the society they live in, and

(24:44):
I've been able to pass on to them over the
past fifty years plus the idea that their children, their grandchildren,
the life they grow up in will be a function
of every kid feeling they had a change. And therefore
you never know where those ideas come from when you

(25:05):
look at it today. Bill Gates didn't finish college. Larry
Alison didn't finish college. Mark Zuckerberg didn't finish college. Now
those are three of the ten most valuable people in
the world measured by dollars. That built Oracle, Facebook, Meta,

(25:28):
and Microsoft. But they went there for a year or two,
but got the entrepreneurial bug in them. They could build something,
They could create something new. So when I visit countries
around the world, I always go into the schools and

(25:49):
try to find that outlier, that kid, okay, who's got
an idea, And I think showing role models to people
that there is another path. There are so many people
from lower income growing up who've risen to the top

(26:11):
because someone gave them a chance, someone gave them a mentor,
and they changed the world. John, They changed the world.
And I'm sure had Reggie Lewis not passed away a
few years later from a brain tumor, you would have
a lot more people knowing about him, or Slivia Edmunds,

(26:32):
or many other African Americans who I loan money to.
So you know, talent is colorblind, no desire and will.
So many people went and excelled in sports because they
thought they could. There are so many people in the

(26:55):
nineteen forties and fifties and sixties that I've interacted with.
They went to work for the post office. Now why
did they go work for the post office? Because there
was no discrimination in that government post office?

Speaker 1 (27:11):
That's right. Many of them profecial sports, entertainment, government service
and level the rules are published and Plainfield was level. Continue.

Speaker 2 (27:22):
So what I found, John, was very simply, if I
financed a person who came from India, he was more
likely to hire a person who came from India. If
I finance an African American, they were more likely to
hire an African American. Now it isn't necessarily the discriminate.

(27:44):
But there's circles they operated, and so if we're going
to get and to give.

Speaker 1 (27:49):
Back to afric American communities, by the way, when they
make some money, they're more likely to do that because
of that same proplics.

Speaker 2 (27:57):
Some are, some aren't. But I would say to you
Bill Tatum at the Amsterdam News, I was always used
to tell me I had two disadvantages. One I was
black and two I look white. Ya I was with

(28:18):
him in Harlem. That's what he used to tell me.

Speaker 1 (28:21):
But so for the audience this as you know, Michael
Milner and I had an argument last night about a
range of stuff that wasn't important, but he basically I said, look, Mike,
I'm not going to tell you about finance. Don't tell
me about basically the black culture. He's basic try to
convince me he's blacker than me. And you know, he's
one of the few people who actually has a little
bit of credentials in this area. He's talking about all

(28:42):
the things he's done in the community, and this was
all true. By the way, he's telling this one story
about Harlem. Now he's a I'm going to make you
an honorary black man. Just just going to just give
you that credential for the moment.

Speaker 2 (28:55):
So that's quite an honor, John, and I appreciate that.
But I would say for everyone on listening, everyone has potential.
You're going to make sure you invest in your own potential.
That's right, and that's knowledge. You know, when I went
to school back in the dark ages, to get a PhD.

(29:16):
You had to speak two foreign languages. No longer, it's
much more important that you can program, or you have
math skills or accounting skills, you know, taking an accounting
course and understanding a balance sheet and understanding how you
build a business and understanding how it works. You never
know later in life how that's going to pay off

(29:38):
for you. That's right now. When I went to Wall Street,
very few people were math majors or had strength in math,
and it kind of amazed me. And so you go,
you bump into a person and I and he'd say, okay,
let's see I made one hundred percent on my money
this year. It went from one thousand dollars to two thousand,

(30:00):
and then next year I lost fifty percent of my money. Well,
if you do the math, you're back where you started.
It went from one thousand to two thousand. Now you'd
ask people on Wall Street, let me see if I
make one hundred percent one year and then I lose fifty.
They take one hundred minus fifty is fifty and divided

(30:21):
by two and tell me you were making twenty five
percent on your money, okay. And that is why often
if I hired the number one graduate from a leading
a business school, I always teem them up with a
kid or a person that grew up in the school
of hard knocks that understand what the real world was,

(30:44):
and it's you know, it's interesting. I have a good friend,
Neil Ferguson, who was a professor at Stanford and maybe
the leading business historian alive today, and he used to
tell me when he walked into that class, he would
try to figure out how long which kids got there

(31:04):
on their ability and which kids got there because of
their pedigree. And then once he determined that, he tried
to think about how long was it going to be
for the guy that got there and his family to
come to work for the guy that got there on
his ability? And so people don't really think about this.

(31:26):
Let's think about an industry that most of the viewers
are familiar with the entertainment industry and industry where I
financed a lot of the companies MGM, Fox, Universal Columbia,
every single one, Warner Brothers, every single one of the

(31:50):
founders of those companies grew up two hundred miles from Warsaw.
Everyone was an outsider built an entire industry. Now, let's
talk about the people that have built the new industries.

Speaker 1 (32:08):
By the ways, But the viewers, he's talking about people
who grew up outside of Warsaw, the concentration camps. So
we're talking about you know, polanark in Poland, in Poland. Yes,
the analysis is, you know, my my grandfather was a sharecropper,
My second great grandfather was a slave who fought in
the Union Army, so up from nothing, and so his

(32:30):
analogy that these people built these great businesses. We were,
you know, they were one step removed from absolute human devastation,
which I can relate to. Had compassion for By the way, well.

Speaker 2 (32:44):
You could think about it, right she had capital been
available and they had a different system, the center of
the entertainment industry would have been Warsaw, Poland. Okay, but
they all came here for a better life and a
better opportunity and built something new. You look at those
companies today that are the most valuable in the world. Navidia,

(33:10):
it's the third or the second most valuable company in
the world today. He came from Taiwan. The CEO of
Microsoft and the stock's gone up four fold since he
became the CEO. Born in India, the CEO of Google
and the most watched streaming network YouTube, born in India,

(33:36):
the founder of Apple, Steve Jobs, Jordanian, Jeff Bezos. Everyone
was an outsider, and so to me, you know, when
I went to Istanbul and you go to the bazaars,
They've got six to twelve year old kids that could

(33:57):
have been on my trading desk. They've seen every they've
seen everyone that came. They just needed to get a
bigger platform to operate on than in front of their stall.
In that bizarre And so whether you visit a part
of the country that looks totally run down, those individuals

(34:17):
there are diamonds in the rough there. They need to
be polished and they need to be disciplined. You know,
what I see is a lot of people want to
be entrepreneurs, a lot of people want access to capitol region.
But they're not willing to put the time and effort
to get themselves prepared.

Speaker 1 (34:37):
Did you just give me a compliment? Did you just
actually call me Ridge?

Speaker 2 (34:40):
By the way I do, you're my new Redge. But John,
what I'm saying to you is you've prepared your whole
life for the role you're in today. Okay, to be
a new Rege Lewis. But let's talk about the Olympics.
It's going to happen in Paris, and that one hundred

(35:01):
meter dash is going to take less than ten seconds.
Whoever wins it, whoever wins it is going to run
in less than ten seconds. So you can see, well,
how long do they prepare? How long did they prepare
for that race? They might have prepared for fifteen years
for that less than ten seconds. The runners are bigger,

(35:24):
they're stronger today, their legs are more powerful because getting
out of those slotting starting blocks, John is more important.
And so my point is you see it in athletes.
A guy tells you he took three thousand three pointers.
Stephen Carey just didn't walk out of the basketball court. Yeah, okay,

(35:48):
they've been practicing in the gym. When you see those
their knees iced at the end of the game. Okay,
they're preparing to perform at the highest level. You want
to run a company, you want to build a new industry. Today,
never before are their greater opportunities today in that when

(36:12):
I went to Wall Street, you maybe had ten maybe
eight people, either they liked you or they didn't like you.
Today there's ten thousand. You don't need to win a
popularity conference contests with everyone. Just one is enough. But
you got to get yourself prepared. No different than that athlete,

(36:35):
no different than that singer, no different than that actor.
And a lot of people don't understand how important going
to school is, learning programming, learning accounting, understanding finance. These
are just no different than an athlete or an entertainer.
You're getting yourself prepared, okay, And so getting yourself and

(37:01):
in the best investment you can make is in your self.

Speaker 1 (37:05):
That's right. So look, Look, was obvious to me, Mike
is that we're gonna have to do a part two
and a part three before we get through it this episode.
We're gonna uh and I want the viewers and listeners
to send me a note to say whether you want
to hear more from Mike as you can hear. Uh,
we got more than we can unpack in an hour.
But before we finished with this, we're gonna cover some

(37:26):
more ground. But I want to go back. There's some
many things I want to talk to you about. We're
gonna talk about mcad before we finish briefly, but I
want to go back because you're talking about outliers and
I'm thinking about you know, Tony Restler and Michael Arraghetty
from Ares who are in private equity, and I do
a podcast that explains what private equity is and I

(37:47):
unpack it. Uh and and Michael and Michael Arraghetty CEO,
Tony Restler's executive chairman. Tony came from your shop, as
we talked about earlier, and now he's doing well and
doing good at scale. But before private equity, there was
junk bonds, and that's the junk bonds is what financed
Reginald Lewis. There's a lot of private equity being finance
for entrepreneurs to day, but it was back in your day.

(38:09):
You pioneered this thing called junk bonds, which required an
out of the box, outlier, disruptive mindset. You talk about
other innovators. I'm talking about this innovator you. And let's
go back now to high school, because it started way
back when you were you were a cheerleader. I mean,

(38:31):
come on, an arm flier, is that right?

Speaker 2 (38:34):
Aren't you a cheerleader? John Well? In my high school,
that's the cheerleader was an elected, very important role, okay,
because you had a fire up the school. We had
to raise money for lights for the football field and
for the grass and everything. And so yes, I've been

(38:54):
a cheerleader my whole life. Now, I did have good
insight in that my wife, who was in my high
school class and I met in seventh grade, was voted
most likely to succeed. So I decided I'd stay as
close to her as possible. But I know they weren't

(39:14):
call John bonds.

Speaker 1 (39:15):
They were still fine, by the way, Laurie is still fine.

Speaker 2 (39:18):
Yes, And so they were called high yield bonds, high
return bonds. But when you think about the club, there's
millions of companies, millions, only five hundred are rated investment grade.

Speaker 1 (39:36):
By the way, I don't know if you guys got that.
He corrected me. He didn't like the phrase junk bonds.

Speaker 2 (39:40):
That's a phrase you could call him whatever he hid.

Speaker 1 (39:44):
High yield bonds. No, this is proper exactly, but he.

Speaker 2 (39:48):
John. When Japan started manufacturing things, everyone said everything from
Japan is junk. And then often we discovered, gosh, their
cars are of higher quality. And so what I was saying,
if you're in the group, you're going to think of

(40:09):
a lot of names. Though that's junk. Why you want
to buy a Japanese car, that's junk? Okay. But my
point was, if you were one of the five hundred
companies in the world there was investment grade, you liked it.
If no one else had access to Campan all right,
So when cable came around, you could have a great

(40:32):
idea of building the cable industry. But it took a
lot of money to build the cable industry. It didn't exist,
so nothing was investment grade. So the John Malones and
other pioneers and Chuck Dowens, you know, I had a
chance to finance all of them because no one else believed.
And it's hard to believe John today, if you say

(40:54):
to me, of all the industries I ever financed, what
was the hardest. It was mobile phones? This little device here, wow, Okay,
no one believed in it. Why did you need a
mobile phone? You had a wireline phone. What did you
need another phone for? And it wasn't until I teamed

(41:16):
up with John Coogey or Craig McCall and others and
gave him capital that this industry took off. That's a
longer story. I don't know if we have time to
get into it. But John, they wrote in the financial
magazines about how bad John's accounting was, and the stock
went went down. So he decided he'd put him on

(41:39):
a misery and he'd buy all the stock himself. He
only needed three and a half billion to do that.
So it was a good teaming up. And three years
later John was the wealthiest person in America.

Speaker 1 (41:54):
And you financed him.

Speaker 2 (41:55):
I asked you that.

Speaker 1 (42:07):
How many companies the entrepreneur's deals have you financed? You
have any sense of that number?

Speaker 2 (42:12):
Over three thousand. But I want to make a different
story to you. Let's think about a person watching this podcast.
You believe in mobile telephones. You believe in this idea
that your communication device should be where you are now.
I felt that way because I was a Star Trek

(42:33):
fan and wherever Captain Kirk was he hit this little
thing and his phone was with him. Okay, So AT
and T invented the technology. They went to McKenzie who
analyzed it, and McKenzie told them in the year two thousand,

(42:53):
this is in the late nineteen seventies, there'll be one
million users on the planet and they'll be paying one
thousand dollars a year, and the entire market in the
year two thousand will be one billion dollars. And AT
and T decided with their advice that it's too small,

(43:14):
and so they invented it and decided not to go
in the industry. Now, if you were working for it,
and you were just you know, an engineer down below,
and you said, you know, I believe in this thing.
Do you know what it costs to ask for the
sell your franchise for New York City? How much did
you have to put up ten thousand dollars? No way,

(43:38):
that's it.

Speaker 1 (43:39):
For the franchise for all of New York City.

Speaker 2 (43:42):
That's correct, That is correct. Okay, So you, an individual
could have felt this way, and now you have what
was one of the largest companies in the world who
didn't feel that way. And so a young kid out
of Seattle, Craig McCall took it up, and twenty four

(44:05):
years later after this technology was invented, and fifteen years
later after they turned it down, they spent twenty to
thirty billion buying a call seller to get into the
business they decided not to go into. So for the
people on this phone, you can see something that others

(44:27):
don't see. And if you believe strongly on that business,
that industry, that needs and just ask yourself, what are
the needs of the people today? With the demographics changing
and people getting older in the United States, the needs
of people over sixty are going to be so significant,

(44:50):
and what are the services they need? They're not the
same as they were sixty years ago. So my point
was every day there's an opportunity out there. Every day
some stock makes a new all time high, and every
day some stock makes an a new low. So it's

(45:11):
a market of stocks, it's a market of ideas. But
when I look at a company, and I made the
decision to finance companies, the first thing I looked at
and the most important asset was who's running the company,
what are their visions, what are their ideas? And except
for professional sports, no company put their people on the

(45:35):
balance sheet. So there's this company about to go bankrupt
in nineteen ninety seven called Apple, and Steve jobs. They
allow him to go back to the company he founded
in nineteen ninety seven. It's on the verge of bankruptcy

(45:56):
and it took it would have taken twenty Apples to
make one. Some today it takes twenty Sonys to make one.
Happen four hundred to one change in one generation by
a person. I'm not a Boston Celtic fan. I don't

(46:16):
know how many of your viewers are Boston Celtic fans.
But I went to graduate school in Philadelphia, and the
seventy six ers had a better team, but they always
lost to the Celtics. And the Lakers had a better team,
but they always lost. And so I grew up not
liking the Boston Celtics. And things were good because the

(46:41):
Boston Celtics fell on very hard times for a number
of years. Then something happened. They drafted one kid named
Larry Bird out of Indiana State, and for the next
ten to fifteen years they were or problem again. And

(47:02):
the same thing in Chicago, one of the worst professional
teams ever drafted this skinny kid named Michael Jordan out
of North Carolina. And so in sports you can say, boy,
that one person made a difference, But it's the same
in business. Business, And so a person who's a great

(47:25):
investor says, you know who's running this company, whose ideas?
What is their vision? Who's the next Reg Lewis? Okay,
what is their idea? And I can back them And
it's not the balance sheet.

Speaker 1 (47:41):
That's right.

Speaker 2 (47:42):
In the last thirty years of the twentieth century, once
capital was available, large companies created investment grade companies minus
four million jobs in thirty years minus four million jobs.
And quote junk companies or non investment grade companies created

(48:04):
sixty two million jobs. So once you leveled.

Speaker 1 (48:08):
The small bus as a non investment grade company like
a small business, are growing companies not yet made it
to institutional quality.

Speaker 2 (48:15):
Well you people would be surprised today how many household
names are non investment grade credits. It's the majority. And
so my point was, you want job creation, you want
the companies of the future. When I met Sam Walton

(48:37):
in nineteen seventy four, Steers was one thousand times the
size of Walmart. Now, if you were a bigger yeah,
if you were a young guy looking for a career,
you'd have been you'd be a very wealthy person today
had you made the decision to go to Walmart instead

(48:58):
of Steers which went bankrupt, or Kmart that went bank
So this is my best advice to people on the
job is who's the CEO? What is their vision? Do
you believe in it? Do you believe in the products
and the services? And if you can join them early,

(49:18):
you could become quite wealthy. If you joined Microsoft or
any of these companies early in their day, wealth was
a byproduct, but you had you believed in something. You
believed in whatever it was that this company was doing.
And if you don't believe in what the company is doing,

(49:39):
then don't go to work for that company. And if
you don't believe in the management, they're not going to
take you in the right direction. And So when I
met a guy like Steve Wynn, he had a little
hotel in downtown Vegas called the Golden Nugget. But when
I saw him and his vision of what he thought

(50:02):
things could be, to me, he was Walt Disney for adults.
He was going to be the Walt Disney for adults. Wow,
And I mentioned it because I was in Las Vegas
yesterday and all these buildings that exist in almost all
these companies, I were like my little kids growing up.

(50:25):
But each one had an entrepreneur, whether he was Kirk
Kryan or whether it was Steve Wynn and had ability.
And as you go to industry, industry, Federal Express, whoever
thought that would work? You have the US Mail? What
do you need another person delivering packages and mail for ubs?

(50:48):
Yeah or DHL. And so I challenged people every day,
where's the future going? What are their ideas, what do
they have passion for? And if they have passion for it.
Out of all the companies I've financed over all the

(51:08):
years that I've interacted with now for almost sixty years,
I only had one person tell me he was in
it for the money. Now, some of them might have been,
but if they told me, I wouldn't have loaned the money.
But most people that have created significant success or wealth,
it was a by product of their passion and meeting

(51:33):
the needs of society. That's right, it's a by product.
You're building on a nonprofit basis, Operation Hope. What is
the challenge in our country? The challenge is most people
are financially illiterate. They're making decisions every day that aren't
in their best interests. They're not investing in themselves through education, training, mentorship,

(52:00):
and so often when we gave equity to people over
the years, they didn't recognize the value it hand and
didn't hold on to it. So today, when you talk
about private equity, private equity today employees about nineteen million
people in America, and somewhere between twelve and fourteen million

(52:22):
of those have been given stock in their company. And
as you know, sometimes they think it's valuable. Sometimes they
think it's not valuable. And if you don't do a
good job giving them these tools of financial literacy, they're
not going to achieve what you want to achieve.

Speaker 1 (52:43):
Yeah, I think it's a bonus. Without financial literacy, they
think stock is maybe either worthless or when they want
to cash it out because they just think it's a
financial bonus at the end of the year, and then
they end up winning a battle and losing the war,
or worse, taking the money and putting a down payment
on a mobile home or something or a car, and
then end up with a bunch of debt that they
can't pay off and end up going bankrupt or something.

(53:06):
So this wonderful thing becomes a noose around their neck
because they didn't understand this was an opportunity for them
to build wealth again, for them to compound in their sleep.
So when you don't know better, you can't do better.
There's an old Southern saying, Mike, no matter how much
I love you, my son or my daughter, if I
don't have wisdom, all I can give you is my
own ignorance. So out of love, we passed down bad

(53:29):
habits from generation the generation. And so I am, as
you know, coaching all the Delta employees, one hundred thousand
of them with a bashing as the CEO. There's another
great leader example. You know Walmart's doing this with their employees,
Doug Millan. I'm doing it with a Venetian hotel. Just
starting that in Las Vegas through Apollo, which is a

(53:52):
private equity player, and doing a division of KKR, A
couple companies of KKR owns doing financial coaching and counseling.
I want to do financial literacy, which you did with
High Yo bonds. You pioneered an entire industry, an entire space.
You're an outlier, and I want to be that. We
will be that for financial literacy. We believe that financial

(54:13):
literacy is a civil rights issue of this generation. And
the colors not black or white, or red or blue.
It's green, as in the color of US currency for
those who are in the US watching this. And so
we think this is a way for inclusive capitalism, Mike,
the way to set things right, to allow the playing
field to be level so that people can have freedom,

(54:36):
freedom through self determination, the same thing that you have
enjoyed and now you're trying to give to others through.
By the way, the African Scholars Program, which we did
not have a chance to really get in the details here.
You gotta promise me to come back with the African
Scholars Program. You talk a little bit about that. You've
done that yet identifying as talent from the kindent of

(54:56):
Africa to come here and learn the best about financi
maybe to go back to their home country. You've got
the Mcat and Milk con Center for the Advancement of
the American Dream right next to the Freedman's Bank. By
the way, what the Amber answer, Andrew Young would say,
coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous. What are the
chances that Michael Milkin would buy six very former bank

(55:17):
buildings that bank Lincoln and all these people across from
the White House. He'd buy these buildings, and what's the
chances that his assembled property, no planning here are next
to the building that I called to be renamed was
the Treasury Annex Building now the Freedman's Bank Building, in
honor of Abraham Lincoln's vision to teach free slaves about

(55:39):
money after the Civil War, to give them a sense
of free enterprise, understanding a little seacorn, little knowledge, a
little capital, a little access. And of course Lincoln was assassinated,
the story was lost. What's the chances that these things
are joined at the hip. We've got to work together.
This is ordained that we move people from the streets
to the suites. Then to continue your legacy, which will

(56:02):
last one hundred years.

Speaker 2 (56:04):
Know that building is going to last a lot longer,
we hope than one hundred years, because as long as
the country exists, that's central. But you touched on something, John,
I just want to briefly mention, and it's really two things. One,
how do you increase your human capital? One is education, mentorship,

(56:26):
getting skills, etc. Getting financial literacy. But the second one
is your health. Yeah, you take care of yourself, Okay,
And what we know now in science, in public health
and medical research has been the number one driver of

(56:49):
the world's economy. So you might have a lot of potential,
a lot of potential, but if you're not taking care
of yourself, and that these when you talk about bad habits,
no eating all the fried food and passing down from

(57:10):
generation to generation. Today we know what happens with your microbiome,
and so they're getting yourself. You can increase your human
capital by you being healthy. Every single great athlete is
taking care of themselves today. In Babe Ruth's day, they didn't.

(57:31):
He had an outsized talent, and he might be out
at night drinking and whatever he was doing at night,
but that doesn't play anymore with an athlete. And how
did Tom Brady win a Super Bowl as a quarterback
in his forties if he wasn't taking care of his body?
And how is Lebron James at thirty nine years old

(57:54):
still starring for the Lakers if he wasn't taking care
of his body. Of the things every person can do
is not only invest in their knowledge and skills and
financial literacy, but their health that's right. Health and wealth
that is correct. And that comes back to Roman and

(58:15):
Greek times when they used to say the health of
a nation is the wealth of a nation from that standpoint,
and we saw that during COVID when it was costing
the country one trillion dollars a month with the actions
we were taking. So the first thing I just wanted

(58:37):
to comment on your addressing is many people have parents,
and prostate cancer is a disease that's heavily heredity based,
and the most likely person to get it is an
African American. And I saw Alonzo Mourning announced in the
last couple of days that he just was treated for

(58:59):
prostate cancer. But understanding how you can reduce your risk
of getting a life threatening disease is available to everyone today.

Speaker 1 (59:09):
Everybody listening to this. Now we're wrapping this thing up,
but I'm the host, so I can go a little
for a little longer if I want to. We're gonna
go a few more minutes here because this is a
really important note for you to know. Michael's not just
talking about this in some theoretical sense. I want you
to stop now. You got a lot of good stuff.
For this last hour, I reagally need you to stop

(59:29):
and listen very carefully to what this man just said.
Rainbows only follow storms. You cannot have a rainbow without
a storm. First, A lady who created months drunk driving.
She lost her daughter to a drunk driver. She was devastated,
she was angry, she was upset, she was depressed, and
then she found her purpose and she's to her work
saved lives of tens of millions. Michael Milkin had prostate cancer.

(59:52):
Michael McGan was given a death sentence. He was told
he was gonna live I think he said eighteen months
with some crazy thing. And Michael was like, I don't
think so. And Michael went out and and and educated
himself and learned everything that he could learn about this,
to all the knowledge around the world about this. And
not only did did he did he solve his own

(01:00:12):
He was own his own dang on doctor. He solved
his own prostate cancer uh and cured himself. Uh. And
and it's lived a long, beautiful life. He's the largest
funder for prostate cancer today in the world. So when
he tells you about this, he's not lecturing you. He's
not talking down at you. He's not talking over, he's

(01:00:32):
not talking theoretical. He's talking about somebody who had to
literally stop his life to save his own life. And
now once again he's trying to pay it forward. And
I went and got a colonoscope. I used to get
a more rudinentary test once a year, which I won't
talk about. But was you know, a little uncomfortable. Uh hello, uh,

(01:00:54):
but but you know, I call it a good cleanse.
When I got a colonoscope. And everybody watching this should
want to go get test it. You will know. He's
gonna give you some stats. But the short version is,
if you're black and you're male, you need to go
get tested seven. If you're over forty, you're twice as
likely or some crazy thing to die than your white counterpart.

(01:01:14):
And he talked about fried chicken. We're gonna have to
do this whole thing. We're gonna do a three part series.
He wasn't down in fried chicken. I like fried chicken,
but understand, this is a slave diet. He can't say it.
I'll say it. Fried chicken, hog moss, pig feet, grits
of ribs. All these were things the slave owner threw
out the back of his house as a sign of disrespect,

(01:01:37):
and we turned that our mothers and fathers and grandmothers
and grandparents and great grandparents turned that into a delicacy.
We said, we'll show you, and we turned that into
a delicacy called soul food. And that's beautiful, but don't
eat it every day. Eat it once a month and
enjoy the legacy. But you gotta speed yourself with healthy things.
As my wife would say, staying in good shape. Eighty

(01:01:59):
percent of it is what you eat, not working out.
So now, Michael, now that people know the backstory, was
it the stats on black men and prostate cancer and
what can they do to extend their life?

Speaker 2 (01:02:12):
Well, we launched a program about eight years ago with
the VA, and we created a special program for all
African American men that served this country and we reduced
the death rate by fifty percent and it's now no different,
five zero fifty percent. Correct. So it shows that if

(01:02:33):
you care, you can do something about it. And so
the best two ways to increase your your value long
term earnings, power, our knowledge mentorship is one and the
other is taking care of your health. And it isn't
just you now we talk about the individual they got

(01:02:57):
a life threatening disease, but it affects it's the whole family.
And there are great companies. Time Warner, its builder, its
visionary died in January of nineteen ninety three from cancer.
Had he not died, the company would have been a

(01:03:20):
totally different company today. Had Abraham Lincoln not been assassinated,
the past for this country would have been substantially different.
So there are things you can do to make sure
your path. If you're in good health, your children and

(01:03:40):
grandchildren will have a different life than if you're not
in good health. And so as you said, John, you
got tested today, and so many diseases like colon cancer,
you catch it early today, ninety five percent chance of
total emission, you catch it late. Complicated.

Speaker 1 (01:04:00):
They told me to come back in ten years. They said,
I got my colorhoscomy. They said, you're good for ten years.
I was so happy to hear that. I don't want
to tube anywhere near me on that in that regard
any sooner than I have to, but I was happy
to do it.

Speaker 2 (01:04:13):
There'll be new blood tests that are like an early
warning system. There's a Grail test fifty different cancers the
same as checking your cholesterol. Wow. Now these things aren't
totally perfected, but today what's going on in medical research
and science and what we've pushed over the last fifty years,

(01:04:34):
there are low cost options to have things checked. And
so I just wanted there's a lot of investments you
can make in yourself. One of them is your health,
and the other ones your financial literacy and your education,
and saying to yourself, you know who'd be a good
mentor that's the person I want to go work for

(01:04:56):
for the summer, Get an internship. You never know where
I might lead.

Speaker 1 (01:05:12):
As we wrap up, Mike, I'm gonna I'm gonna tell
you two quick things. One on AT and T as
you you pioneered this whole space and financed it, and
again AT and T thought it was not a really
important thing that went back in the business. Later on,
I put a landline at where we live. We have
you know, we're a rural area and we have forty

(01:05:35):
acres and at forty acres in a sprinter VANU E
forty acres and a mule and uh, they had to
run a line to the house at and T and
went through a lot of energy to do this and
that was about four years ago. I get a note,
and I wanted a land line because you know Russia,
somebody cuts the thing on cables on the ocean. I
want to have a backup to a mobile phone and

(01:05:57):
for an emergency anyway. I get a notice. My my
cheet said Rachel tells me that AT and T now
wants to charge me not a couple hundred dollars a month,
they won't charge me two thousand dollars a month to
keep that land line. And they're trying to discourage me capitalism.
They're trying to discourage me from having a landline. They
want to go to digital, and they want to go

(01:06:18):
for a mobile. So to two points one, here's a
company that was built on landlines that didn't want or
rejected or discount AT Mobile, who's now over emphasizing mobile
to the point they're trying to discourage their best customers
from having a landline. And by the way, they succeeded.
I'm not paying two thousand dollars a month for a

(01:06:40):
landline that I'm not using. I'll come up with another plan,
a SAT phone or something. But look at what you
did that full circle arch and by the way for
twenty percent of that two thousand dollars. That's twenty percent
of when I could have bought the entire rights for
mobile phone service from Manhattan for ten grant can Hall.
They have the whole platform. Manhattan builds them real wealth.

(01:07:01):
So that's the first thought that hit me. The second
one on mentors. Guy you don't know, I don't think.
His name was Harvey Baskin got riscue his soul. He
was in finance in Washington, d C. He was one
of my early mentors. I went to work for me
were Ion Jeffrey's restaurant in Malibu. He built it for
his then lover Jeffrey. At the end, anyway, I was
a waiter convincing to let me be his assistant. I

(01:07:21):
just wanted a mentor. I was peppering this guy with
questions all the time. I mean, you know, you know,
I'm nosy. I was asking questions. And I took him
to dinner one day at my request, and he wanted
to go some fancy restaurant in Venice, California, And I'm
peppering him with questions, and it was like driving his Daisy.
I was driving my little Audi and he was he
broken his legs, so he sitting in the back of

(01:07:42):
the seat, was pushed up, hit his foot up. I
didn't care what it looked like. I'm trying to give
me some knowledge. And so we go to dinner and
the bill comes Mike and it's one hundred bucks. I
was twenty years old. It might as would have been
one thousand dollars. And he only paid me twenty thousand
dollars years. This was a lot of money. The bill
coms one hundred bucks. He slides it to me. I

(01:08:03):
slide it to him. He slides it back to me.
I slide it back to him. He slides it back
to me. I go to slide it back to me,
said John, stop, stop, stop, stop. You got a decision
to make here. You got to figure out whether you
want to pick my brain or pick my pocket. One

(01:08:24):
last longer, and I took a breath that I really
was I was got frea consulting. I've been asking this
guy for a million questions. It's invaluable the knowledge you
gave me, Just like this podcast today for those listening.
I took the bill back, paid the bill with the
last hundred bucks I had, and twenty bucks I gave
the waiter as a tip. It wasn't his fault that
I was broke and drove back with the last gas

(01:08:45):
I had. You know, that guy put his hands around
me as a mentorer friend. He pointed to me to
the icons at that time and said, this is my guy.
He introduced me, walked me into places, he vouched me.
That wasn't early. He was testing me, like, are you
trying to make some money a short term gain? Are
you trying to build some wealth? Are you trying to
have a transaction or do you want to have a relationship?

(01:09:06):
Are you about what you get or what you have
to give? And that's really what I hear you saying
is be a giver, build a relationship, work the long term.
Don't just take that short term piece as we got
to y start it. Don't just get that paycheck for
the highest pay and sometimes that unpaid internship is the
best deal you can get because you're around power, you're

(01:09:27):
around you're around knowledge. Just be ear hustle, ear hustle. Everybody, listen,
be nosy, Quincy Jones, I'd get so smart. I'm just
nosy as hell. Be nosy, and uh be the whatever
I don't play golf for the caddy at the best
country club, because now you're building that relationship capital and
I just hope that people got that message. And I've

(01:09:48):
I've learned so much from you. I've learned from this
podcast that I'm doing. And I thought, I know you
pretty well. And thanks for being a true innovator and
pioneer and disruptor and I think industry creator, sector creator
for the twenty really twentieth century and innovator. One of

(01:10:09):
the most those innovative minds of twentieth century capitalism the
world has seen.

Speaker 2 (01:10:15):
We're going to continue to do that in the twenty
first century. John, I look forward to visiting you again.
And you've made a very interesting insight here for people.
When you look at people that rise up from the
lowest socio economic to the highest, it's generally those that
interact with people of different social economic groups. And yes,

(01:10:36):
whether they were a caddy at a country club, whether
they're a waiter at a high end restaurant, whatever it
might have been, you never know where those relationships are
coming when you get yourself involved in Yes, the best
internships might be the unpaid internships.

Speaker 1 (01:10:59):
So we wrap this up this podcast. I have two questions. One,
will you come back?

Speaker 2 (01:11:05):
Of course, because I learned when we talk also John,
it isn't just a one way street.

Speaker 1 (01:11:10):
You learn we argue maybe too, it's always a one
to We're never bored when we're talking to each other. Never.

Speaker 2 (01:11:20):
I hope your listeners understand that there's opportunity just around
the corner if they think about it. And you mentioned
why are we so focused on young leaders in Africa?
Because forty percent of all the young people in the
world are going to be living in some Sahara Africa,

(01:11:40):
and it will not make any difference what you do
if you don't create opportunities there. And as we see today,
there are more people in the United States today that
were born in sub Sahara Africa than in Europe. Amazing thing.
And as you know, many of these are very high

(01:12:01):
performing people that have made enormous contributions to the United
States that have come from Kenya, Nigeria and other countries.
And so by US training and giving these skills to
the future leaders of their countries, they'll create more jobs,
they'll create more opportunities for their people.

Speaker 1 (01:12:20):
Now, this has got to be the longest, the longest
podcast I've ever done, and I'm so I'm so happy
with it. It's going to be it's brilliant. Not because because
you're in it now you you must be going into
hives or something, Mike, because in an hour and whatever,
you haven't used but two stats and you are stat
of seconds. So I want you to I want you
to end this, to drop the mic moment. We got

(01:12:40):
so much to talk about in future podcasts. But the
power of the diversity of this country, of immigrant experiences,
of all the different voices here, why don't you give
the audience I wrote something all the Business Plan for America.
People can go watch it. They should listen them out.
Read my book Financial Literacy for All. Read The Business
Plan from America. I talk about the power of our diversity.

(01:13:04):
But from where you said you are a statistical genius,
Please leave the audience with the status of the power
of this country.

Speaker 2 (01:13:12):
Well, there are many countries in the world, but there's
only one country that people want to come to, and
that's the United States. Forty percent of everyone worth a
million dollars today in China wants to come to the US,
not just bring their wealth, but their creativity. And you

(01:13:33):
see it every day IVM in order to compete with
other companies. Just hired a new CEO a little while ago.
Born in India. Okay, So each the head of the
World Bank today born in India. And so if we
went back sixty plus years, seventy five percent of everyone

(01:13:57):
not born here was born in Europe. Today it's nine.
And so this country is changing. In the area you
grew up in, john more than seventy percent of all
the children in the second largest school district in America,
Los Angeles, are of Latin American ancestry, and more than

(01:14:19):
fifty percent now of everyone living in California under twenty
five is of Latin American ancestry. So the fates of
the country is changing, and the vast majority of people
in the country someday will be of African, Latin American
and Asian ancestry. And so it's important that they all

(01:14:43):
feel they had a chance. Not that they grab that
ring and turned out to be a Bill Gates or
Steve Jobs, but they least had a chance to do it.
And so this is essential. The country's getting older, there
would be no increase in our population in the last

(01:15:05):
fifty years if it wasn't for immigration, and today the
leading immigrants in this country in this century twenty first
century have first come from Mexico, second India, third China,
fourth the Philippines, and then the Dominican Republic. And all

(01:15:25):
those people that have come here from the Dominican Republic
are not baseball players. However, you'd have quite a baseball
team with just players from the Dominican Republic. So when
you're thinking about what business you're going to go into,
what fields, let's think about where's the future and opportunities.

(01:15:45):
So if you're a financier, your opportunities are identifying those
who were born in Africa or of African American ancestry,
or born in Latin America or of Latin American ancestry
or Asian ancestry, because they're going to be the majority
in this country. And you need role models. And there's

(01:16:06):
plenty of people with ability if you go find them
and give them opportunities.

Speaker 1 (01:16:12):
And what are we trying to do here today? We're
trying to make smart sexy again. It takes twenty years
to change a culture. In the last twenty years, i'd
argue many of my communities I love and care about
underserved communities have made dumb sexy. We've dumbed down and
celebrated it. And and now we need to make smart
sexy again. It's not and by the way, not just
all our black and brown neighborhood poor white neighborhoods have

(01:16:32):
been making dumb sexy. I mean, it's just we got
We gotta get rid of the ignorance and get rid
of the drama, get rid of the emotionalism, and get
to the and create a business plan for our lives.
And the business plan for our lives is what Mike said.
We are better together. And and you've never had a
superpower that wasn't an economic power at the same time,
and we've got a new generation of people coming up.

(01:16:54):
We got to make them. Black capitalists matter. We got
to make them. We got it. We gotta get them
in economy. Give them a shot. Doesn't mean anybody has
a right to succeed. There's no equity. Doesn't mean you
have a right to succeed. It means you get a
place at the table and an opportunity to show that
you can do it. It's giving people a fish and
teaching them how to fish at scale. That's financial literacy

(01:17:16):
for all and I want to thank you, Mike for
extending your legacy into the twenty first century. As you said,
the mcat's going to be a great place for people
to learn how to take the reins of opportunity for themselves.
And in future podcasts we will go in the deep
dives on several As you were going through this, I thought, Geek,
this topic could be an hour, that topic could be

(01:17:39):
thirty minutes. And I think we have to unpack this
so people no better, so they.

Speaker 2 (01:17:45):
Can happy to do that. John, and I want you
to say your closing speech today is one of Martin
Luther King's most famous speeches. People know I have a dream,
but if you get a chance, go online and google
what is the blueprint of your life? By Martin Luther King?

(01:18:09):
What is your blueprint? What is your plan? Fantastic speech
he gave, And periodically I go back, maybe once a
quarter or once a month and listen to that speech,
reminding you if what is your blueprint? Where do you
want to head? What is your plan? Great speech by

(01:18:30):
a very very talented man, reg Luther Martin, John Brian, Okay,
giving you all those.

Speaker 1 (01:18:44):
I love you, man, and I'm gonna let you I'm
gonna cautch you with some slack and make you more
black than me for about thirty seconds because I did
not know the doctor King gave it. Did he really
do a speech called the.

Speaker 2 (01:18:55):
Blueprint the Blueprint of your life?

Speaker 1 (01:18:58):
I had no idea, and I thought I was.

Speaker 2 (01:19:01):
So you can work on your blueprint.

Speaker 1 (01:19:04):
I appreciate that, ladies and gentlemen. This has been Michael Milkin,
the living legend, the innovator of hio bonds, yes for
the twentieth century, the innovator of finance that changed everything.
Maybe in another podcast I'll talk about why he got
into so much trouble trying to help poor people and
open doors some folks. Some people didn't want at the table,
but that's okay. Everything worked out just fine for him

(01:19:27):
and the world. The world's better because Michael was here.
Read his book, go check out his cancer research, check
out what he's doing with Milking Institute, the Milk and
Global Conference, the Milkin Center for the Advancement of the
American Dream. And come back, I guess to this podcast.
We will continue this conversation. This is John Hope Bryant
and Money and Wealth, and this is my conversation with

(01:19:49):
the Great, the amazing Michael.

Speaker 2 (01:19:51):
Milkin, Thank You, John, John Hope Bryant, Thank You.

Speaker 1 (01:19:56):
Aka Rich, Money and Wealth with John O'Brien is a
production of the Black Effect Podcast Network. For more podcasts

(01:20:18):
from the Black Effect Podcast Network, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.