The truth about Juneteenth, wealth and Black People

0:00 let wait and and uh and and so uh you know my uh and so so I have to explain to people sometimes you know because I you know when you when you do stuff like this you meet all different kinds of people that might be interested in for different you know for different reasons and and sometimes I meet people that are what I might call like blackity blickety blickety black and they impose certain ideas toward me like okay that means that white people have never ever allowed anywhere near anything that we're doing and I'm like no I don't I don't I'm not threatened by that you know the same way uh you know the same way um uh my daughter was born in Jewish hospital uh they didn't tell me I couldn't be there because I was black uh if I wanted to go to the Notre Dame

0:45 University uh clearly run by the Catholic church or by people that are uh Catholic they don't tell me I can't attend Notre Dame like you know so I said we got white people in the black business school uh why wouldn't you want to learn from intelligent black people I think that we we should be leading the world we are we are the smartest people in the room nine times out of ten uh we are the only people actually that have they can say that we survived the slave dungeons the middle passage 250 years of the most brutal slavery known to man a hundred years of Jim Crow another 40 50 years of mass incarceration the war on drugs and we're also surviving whatever they're doing to us right now Megan we won't know about that until you know for another 50 or 60 years that's

1:31 when all the FBI Files will be released and and we're going to find out what they're doing like if I'm still trying to figure out what happened to hip-hop music how we went from Tribe Called Quest and KRS one to uh to kill that [ __ ] die you know like who did that who was responsible for this right because this was we didn't we were not on that committee this was not something that we decided to do uh but I think that you have to be thoughtful about these what I perceive to be very deliberate efforts to degrade our culture and short-circuit us from becoming who we're truly meant to be now uh first off I want to say thank you uh to JJ and her vanilla milkshake I also got wearing the black excellent shirt I I saw that shirt and I said okay he's a cool dude and uh and thank you so

2:17 much for having me I'm very honored to be at your at your event um I have so much respect for what you're doing and uh and I love the fact that you work together as a couple that's when my wife and I I do and and also I want to mention uh that it's interesting I was watching Asia's brilliant conversation about Quantum wealth Theory I like the first of all I like the title I said wow that's a great title I wonder what this is about because quantum physics and quantum mechanics a lot if you study that stuff it's just mind-boggling you know Albert Einstein he used to call it spooky math I think that's what he called Quantum quantum physics because it didn't make any sense you know quantum entanglement and the double slit experiment that she talked about all that I was y'all so I'm a little bit of a nerd so I was like okay let me see what she's got and then she starts breaking down the brain and

3:03 uh behaviors and everything and I and and I said I wish my wife was here because my wife happens to be a therapist and an expert on the subconscious mind and uh and she is is a smart black woman I'm very proud of her for that uh she reads about 22 books a year and uh and one book she read four times was a book about the subconscious mind and I and I so I I listened to her and I talk to her about things and and and and what the this these conversations fed into me was this this keen understanding that the biggest barrier that we have to Building Wealth one of the biggest barriers it isn't really just access to resources that's important that must be discussed um it isn't access to knowledge and

3:49 information you you literally have an entire uh you have an entire University on your cell phone right so it's access to information that's you can't you can't say well I I couldn't get the get the knowledge like or or they kept it from me no we maybe we could say that 50 years ago you can't say it now if you got an iPhone you can learn anything you want to learn a lot of it is really culture a lot of it is culture and habits in the subconscious mind and how we're programmed as children and into adulthood and all these other things and and I said my gosh this this is really what's going on I America is a beautiful amazing extraordinary country in certain areas there are things that we do better than anybody on Earth uh and uh and and in fact we are very very good at

4:36 industrialization and that's helped us win Wars right and by the way shout out to every veteran in here uh veterans make sacrifices that uh you mentioned that nobody talks about nobody shows respect to that um and I'm going a little tangent I'm gonna Circle back but I gotta go on this tangent here because my grandfather served in World War II and uh and once he was hit in the head with one with a cannon on the Navy ship and they thought he was dead and so they put him in the morgue and zipped his body up and he literally wakes up and starts pushing and saying let me out and he gets let out and he goes on and marries my grandmother stays married to her for 70 years and and uh took care of her until the day she died and then my father went to Vietnam and uh he can't talk about it to this

5:23 day uh he talks about uh being pushed out of the airplane when uh he didn't he didn't want to jump out they pushed him out of the plane he talks about sleeping in the ditch and hearing the mortar fire and the bombs going off that night and uh and and what was interesting is that on one hand uh the unhealthy coping mechanisms occurred things like heroin addiction which affected so many of our men in women that went over to Vietnam but also what was interesting was there was this really tough dogged determinism that he developed as well where he said when I was in that ditch I decided I'm going to do whatever I got to do to get home I'm going to survive this no matter what it takes so he comes home and he uh and I said well how did you get off of heroin I said I heard heroin's a hell of

6:08 a drug and he said and you know it literally he said I just stopped doing it I just realized that that was not the life I wanted I didn't want to be a junkie and and I watched him throughout his entire life had that same attitude when it came to accomplishing the goal right figuring out what the mission was okay my family needs me to find a way to make money I'm going to figure that out right and and that and to some extent and I think we discount that right we discount uh just our personal power when we're committed to doing something we discount the importance of understanding at some point you got to put your excuses to the side and figure out what the assignment is and this creates a real interesting contradiction or a challenge I have because I have part of

6:54 my audience I attract a lot of a lot of military folks a lot of veterans follow me and I remember I asked the soldier I said I said you know I respect soldiers I respect veterans immensely but but I why why do so many veterans follow me and then and what he said was he said because you give an assignment you tell us what the mission is and and that's what we understand you know and I said okay that's it that's it yeah you know you have a problem you solve it right but then I've got people that I have to that I have to challenge a little bit who unfortunately were hit by this other culture of almost like a a a really heavy victim mentality you know not to the point that we haven't gone through things we know what we've gone through and we can lay that out on the list and we should acknowledge all of that but it's like that's not supposed to be a crutch right we can't we can't let

7:41 that be a crutch you know and and so so that that becomes um that's my story and that's why you know I'll never disrespect a soldier I think the soldiers are not appreciated when my father told me about how he came home from Vietnam and people were calling him baby killing all this stuff I got mad I said I want to go back in time and kick those people in the face you know and now that he's uh he's got blood cancer and he's sick and he is dying from agent orange and things he experienced in the military uh we're talking about these things and these things are that is literally what is on my heart right now as I speak to you so thank you for your service if you have served and uh and and I wish our country appreciated you as much as they should I just have to say that now now circling back to what we were talking about earlier

8:26 um uh yo here's the deal when you're talking about wealth and economics you cannot understate the importance of culture uh culture is more important than how many degrees you got it's more important than uh how how much wealth you have access to per se those things matter but that's not you don't have to go take a bunch of classes in order to understand Building Wealth and let me give an example my wife and I went to China and we were in China for about three weeks and we traveled to different regions of China and I'm gonna tell you one thing that was really interesting I don't want to stereotype here but man they know how to sell a product anybody ever been in a space where maybe it was Chinatown or China itself and just seeing how assertive they can be like they will they will hunt you down and chase you down and follow up and upsell you

9:13 downsell you negotiate and barter whatever they got to do to make that sale and and and all throughout the country when I went to different regions I would see this you know similar products uh which told me about which made me think about the Distribution Systems I I saw similar sales techniques I I saw similar business models and I bet you that a very small percentage of all these thousands of entrepreneurs I ran into a very small percentage of them went to college and studied business and so so this idea that you have to go and get all this knowledge and information to build wealth run businesses or whatever the case may be I I think that that's over emphasized a little bit I think that's important it's beneficial but it's not necessary culture is everything so if we talk

10:00 about culture and let's talk about that a little bit um I I was I was speaking last night with a great man that everybody should know about the name of Professor James small and Professor small is an expert on black history and culture uh he talks a lot about Africa and and all the things we should know about Africa and he tells those stories that you'll never learn in school because I I don't believe that we're ever going to really learn who we truly are from a public school system I don't think that the public school system is designed to empower anybody even people who are not black in fact in Chicago we have 55 Public Schools where not one single child can read or do math at grade level in 55 schools think about how many think about so if there's 2 000 kids in every school that's over 100 000 kids that that cannot not one child so so so this

10:48 is this is an issue and it's not just an issue that affects black people uh there are lots of uh uh documented uh stories and information about why the public school system was designed what it was supposed to teach you to do it was designed to manufacture workers it's one of the reasons that the Rockefellers uh poured so much money into the public school system because they say we don't want people thinking independently we don't want a bunch of people that want to start businesses we want people that are going to become cogs in a wheel that are going to understand their part in the this mass production process so so School kind of rewards you for sitting down and shutting up more than it rewards you for being creative and intelligent and taking risks and all these other things that you have to do in order to build wealth well uh Professor small was talking about Juneteenth and we're running up on the

11:35 Juneteenth holiday and uh and and also my birthday's in a couple of days it's going to be the 27th anniversary of my 25th birthday so uh that's you know and um and and it's funny I was I was born actually on Father's Day and and my unfortunately my father was not there to receive me as a gift I I think I think I'm a pretty nice guy he should have been there you know it was a nice party uh but anyway um the uh so one thing he said about Juneteenth that was interesting was he's said that we live under this myth that Juneteenth was this day where the soldiers came down and told the slaves in Galveston that uh that they'd been freed and that they could all go and everybody's good you know just going out you know head on out the door you know life is better now he said actually this is according to Professor small I just

12:21 learned this last night so I still have to go verify everything but he's a smart guy who knows a lot of stuff he said actually that wasn't true he said that in Juneteenth when they came down and and and and talked to the slaves they said uh you're not free you but you have a different situation you are still going to work for the same Master you are required to still stay on the plantation and work for the master the difference is that he has to compensate you so you won't be slaves anymore uh you'll be employees but or better yet you might say they went from being unpaid slaves to being paid slaves and the amount you will be paid will be determined by the master so your boss your master is going to get to decide how much he wants to pay if he

13:07 wants to pay you a penny a day then then that's what your pay is going to be and then they created things like vagrant laws where if you have a job and you were black you were going to be incarcerated and when you get incarcerated they're going to lease you back to the plantation owners so you could work for them what does that sound like anybody anybody know about a system that does that sound familiar to y'all at all is it is there is there any system where we incarcerate people and then sell them to corporations for small amounts of money I don't know I can't remember it starts with a P I can't not OPP so okay so so I so and then he said there was a third group of slaves who said

13:54 to hell with that he said he said that this is and again this is not documented in history he said there was a third group of slaves that said well you just gonna do what you got to do I'm not going back to that situation at all we out of here so if you got to shoot us you gotta catch us try to kill us whatever Catch Me If You Can but we out of here and these were the individuals that went and set up a lot of the very prosperous black towns all across the United States the like the Black Wall Street remember Tulsa Black Wall Street was just one of hundreds of towns that were set up and one of hundreds that were burned down and destroyed so so the story it was a systematic kind of issue and I heard what Professor small said and I said that is so fascinating how that links directly to the world that we

14:41 live in today I said because if you think about it we kind of have at least three broad categories of people uh in in our community we have those of us that went to college went deep in debt got our student loans and then went to become slaves in the corporate Plantation we get stuck because we're so deep in debt like a sharecropper that you can't ever quit the job and we're never given any other sort of transferable skills that would allow you to build wealth or something create enough um of an asset base that you could walk away from that job that's a lot of us that's just educate educated people right with the mbas Bas bs's JD's phds MDS whatever the letters behind our name that make us feel like we're better than other people right then you got like the street dudes right the you know some of us got people like that in our family I got a bunch of them

15:27 that didn't do all of that but they so they are hustle and doing whatever well eventually we know how that ends right because you know the music glorifies the drug dealer but they don't show you what happens when they get locked up and get 50-year prison sentences and then they become part of the the labor lease program which is again just uh it follows from uh what they did back at Juneteenth right uh and then you had that third category you have the third category of people they said I'm Gonna Be Free by any means necessary and these are the people that I relate to the most these are the people that I love talking to these are the people that uh have the courage and the vision to understand the assignment who understand what Freedom actually looks like who understand what it really means to be uh quote unquote successful who are

16:13 determined to get there who are preparing their children for freedom of success and those are those people that are fighting to get away from the corporate Plantation uh it doesn't mean again I told my daughter I said uh I said it's okay to work for somebody I said but there's a difference between working for somebody because you want to versus working for somebody because you have to and I said my job as your father is to make sure you always know the difference and that you always have a choice I want you to have options I want you to be happy happiness is directly linked to options they find that for example when they did a study on rats and they put rats in the cage and they would hit them with electric shocks and they had one group of rats that had no options they had no ability to stop the shocks they would just go through pain uh just randomly and they didn't know where it was coming from or how to how to change

16:59 it and then they had another group of rats that learned that they created learned behavior where they gave them an option where I you feel the shock and then if you hit a button you can make the pain stop you can make the pain go away you can stop the shocks and they found that when they measured serotonin in the brains of these rats meaning how depressed they were they found that the rats that were in the cage that were stuck were more depressed than the rats who had options so if you want to know why so many of our people struggle with anxiety and depression at Epic levels and we die young because of it as Miss Asia brought up earlier today in her brilliant way it says we don't have options we feel stuck

17:45 it sucks to be stuck so so when I talk to my 12 year old and we're talking about all the things she wants to do she wants to she wants to she's a singer dancer actress she's just got this love and she she gets up and gives Emmy Award speeches during the Emmys that nobody asked her to create but she'll come down to her and her award dress and it will literally give us an acceptance speech and it was like nobody gave anybody gave me nothing girl what you doing but but that's what she does that's in her soul that's who she is she makes up dance routines and everything else every single day she does this and so I said okay you want to be a dancer and actress and all these other things I think that's great let's go talk let's go study some models where you can create that life and still have options let's let's study Tyler Perry how did Tyler Perry build his own

18:30 economic Empire and eventually buy bet and I said because Tyler Perry he doesn't have to audition to be the star of any movie that he ever makes no he doesn't have to audition he gets to pick who the Stars if if Madea's gonna be the star then Madea's gonna be the star I said let's study that business model let's talk about how the economics will play a part in you having what I think is very important for you which is options which is connected to something that I know is important to you which is happiness so when we talk about what she wants to do when she grows up I don't even talk about things like professions or you want to be a dentist or a lawyer or a doctor I said no I just want you to be happy that's I know we can agree on that we may not agree on whether or not you should be an attorney or a you know or a physician but we can agree that you want to be happy so let's talk about how the economics

19:16 connects to your freedom which connects to your happiness which also comes with things like knowledge of self some people don't even know what makes them happy they watch TV and they think that material stuff makes them happy that'll make you happy that that gives you a temporary high a big injection of dopamine that makes you feel like you're happy for a while I mean when I got my my first job when I finished College I was so I was literally the black sheep of my family I was I was a complete embarrassment because I was in school till I was 31 years old and if you know about anything about black families you know that that guy who's in who's still in school at 28 29 years old and you're gonna get made fun of them so I I'll go to family reunions and they wouldn't have anything to say to me all the time

20:01 they just kind of say so you still in school huh so I got my first job when I was 31 years old and uh and and as JJ mentioned she was accurate I was the only black person on the planet male to female to get a PhD in finance that year it was really really hard to do the most difficult thing I ever did in my life right and I love it though because it was it was difficult and there was some trauma there was some abuse that with me and my wife we Bond around the trauma we experienced going through our PHD programs the most Petty crazy ridiculous space ever but but there's the bright side of that that these tough experiences make you a tough person right so uh ultimately through my therapy Journey which I think uh JJ was so on point about therapy therapy does wonders for you I love my therapist I was supposed to talk to her today but I

20:47 I'm here so I can't talk to her you know but uh I I I learned how uh you can actually take these tough experiences and and sort of dispose of some of the negative pieces and really use the positives to make you strong because if you think about it every superhero in any Marvel movie he always has a terrible origin story he or she there's always like something horrible they had to go through to gain their superpower and so when I look at my father who has a horrible origin story being pushed out of the airplane in Vietnam the heroin addiction getting shot at he's had to kill people in his life he's several times um I also see the superhero I see the man who can't be stopped when my father decides something's going to happen it would usually happen when it came time to provide and protect his family I didn't hear he see some sniveling man at

21:34 the dinner table complaining about how the white man won't help won't let him take care of his kids I I saw none of that I saw a man who showed up in the way he needed to show up for the people that needed him to show up in an appropriate way I I saw that and I modeled that and I love that right so so so I went through my little version of it I didn't go through anything like what but I did go through my own version of sort of this academic mistreatment and everything else so I got out and I got my first job and I was making a lot of money uh relative to what I was making before I went from making about 12 000 a year as a grad student to making 115 000 a year as a faculty members so the amount of money I made in a year became the amount of money I made in a month so when I got that first paycheck check you can tell me nothing I I

22:20 thought I won the lottery I I wanted to do cartwheels down the hallway you talk about money literally making you uh it did that day money was my happiness and and I felt that way for about six months until the dopamine kind of wore off and then at that point you get you get what I wouldn't almost call like almost like an addiction where you're used to the money now now you need the money but getting the check you just check to make sure it's the right amount you put in your account you don't think about it anymore and then you got the rest of your life to deal with so so the thing about material things making people happy is interesting to me because I think we're falsely led to believe that that's what matters but what we don't understand is that eventually all that sort of Jubilation levels off and then you find yourself dealing with the realities of life and

23:06 you start wondering things like you know why do children of billionaires commit suicide or why when Deion Sanders was the best player in the NFL was making more money than anybody else had all the cars all it was going to all the parties owned a couple Mansions had all access to all the ladies and yet he was so suicidal that he was going to drive himself off a bridge how's that happen well it's because happiness is much deeper than just the amount of resources you have in your bank account see a lot of times many of us because we grew up without access to the things we want I mean I I you know I can tell all these stories about the projects my mother was 17 when she gave birth to me with in that I asked my mother I said who was in the hospital with you when I was born

23:51 and she said me and the nurse that was it I said nobody else was there and I knew my father was out running the streets doing whatever he eventually went to prison for drugs I didn't know him that well I don't even know him well enough to dislike him I don't even dislike them and then the man I just never knew him um but nobody else was there you know so I visualized this scared 16 year old girl being pregnant she gave birth to me when she was 17. and I I visualize um first of all I said well thank you for not for letting me live because I'm sure it would have been easier to just terminate right that's no no judgment but that's what society says if you're poor then your child shouldn't be born um obviously I have to disagree with that as one of the kids that got a chance to be born uh and also I remember

24:37 that we we did live in the projects so so there's really no poverty story a person could tell me that I couldn't relate to on some level I I remember seeing roaches in the house and it wasn't a big deal to have roaches and like roaches you just flick them off your sandwich and keep on eating you're not gonna throw away a good sandwich just because just because this guy's a roach took a little bite again some of y'all may think that's gross that'd be y'all ain't never been through nothing no I'm playing I'm playing you ain't never you ain't never really been hungry if you don't know what I'm talking about but but seriously so so what happens is that when we grow up in those conditions and we grow up struggling and and without the things we want we we just tend to full of fixate our mind on this idea of this false idea that if I get the right job with the right house and

25:23 the right car and the right amount of money then life is just going to be good and that's just not true you know I I what I compare it to is um imagine when you how you feel when you really have to go to the bathroom right imagine in fact imagine if I'm an okay speaker I do my thing but imagine if I was given the best speech ever like let's say I was a great speaker like Malcolm X or something I'm giving the most riveting speech on Earth and giving you the knowledge that's going to change your life but at the same time you really really gotta pee like you got like you you just gonna explode if you don't get to a bathroom um are you really gonna be able to pay attention in that speech I mean remember it's the best speech ever I'm telling you how to make a billion dollars and and be a black and Powerful way you you

26:09 don't but you get you gotta pee right so at that moment nothing else matters you got to get to a bathroom right so you just say gosh I want to see this speech but I gotta get it recorded for me and then you go you hop onto the bathroom and then finally get to the bathroom you finally get in there you're like oh thank you Jesus oh God right you're happy to finally let it out right okay so let me ask you so after you're done and you go wash your hands and everything hopefully everybody washes their hands if you don't you're nasty what do you do after that do you just do you just hang out in the bathroom in case you gotta pee again maybe spend the day in the bathroom for a while just because Penny was so enjoyable before why not just do it all day right no what do you do you you walk out of the bathroom and then you get back to

26:56 doing things that are more important right and it's not that going to the bathroom wasn't important it was important based on where you were in your life you needed a bathroom so bathrooms were really important now you don't need a bathroom anymore so now other things are more important than that and so life is kind of the same way they they have something they call Maslow's hierarchy of needs you should if you don't nobody should look it up and they talk about that they talk about how your level where you are vibrationally where you are in terms of what level of life you're on that determines what really matters to you right so for example when I talk to my daughters I our daughters they're they're um I get to be the bonus dad of a of a son he's he's six foot eight so if I if I told you he was my biological child you would not believe me but I I love being his bonus dad he's very smart and uh and two beautiful daughters their

27:42 mother's gorgeous and and their father is a great guy and we partner together to really make sure these kids are protected and loved and and uh and and and so with these pretty girls the best thing I can tell them is not just things about happiness and how money fits into that but I also say you know one of the goals in me your mother and your father are going to have for you is to make sure that your financial needs are met well enough again not just because we're giving you things but because you also understand how to make money how to preserve money you we want your financial needs to be met well enough so you don't end up in a situation where you've got to date a creepy terrible man just because you can't pay the rent in fact when we were talking we was talking earlier about narcissistic abuse

28:29 the system mentioned Financial abuse as one method of control that people have over others and I've seen this a lot uh in 2006 I wrote a book called Financial love making and I interviewed lots of people and I was really fascinated by how many people make relationship choices based on economic need so uh what I say to them is I say I want to help you operate at a vibrational frequency High Enough where you're not picking a man that's just going to fulfill a financial void it's okay to be attracted to men who are successful and wealthy and all that I believe that that some of that's biologically wired just like men like women that look a certain way or whatever it is that midnight women have things that they tend to be attracted to so I think that's okay maybe the wealth

29:15 is a symbol of something and innate about that man that's appealing to you and that's perfectly fine but I don't want you to feel that you have to go and pick a partner just because daddy didn't help you daddy didn't teach you how to pay the bills Mama nobody's there for you so many of our people get abused in relationships because we don't have anybody to turn to some of us many of us in this life myself included have gone through abuse not just relationship abuse but just societal abuse because we didn't have anything to lean on we had no inheritance we had no uh nobody we could turn to for money uh and and it might show up as uh as some kid who goes out slinging dope in the in the street because he needs to

30:01 make an extra two or three hundred dollars because he just had a baby and he does it he wants to get what the baby needs so so effectively when you really think about what how important money is in terms of just that that ability to have a safe successful and content existence I don't understand why we don't train our children on money from the day that they are born I seriously I see so many I see so many of our boys like our children being trained to be great football players and 99.9 of them ain't never gonna make a nickel playing football but their parents will spend a thousand dollars sending that child to football camp I'm like what that is not an investment that that is fine I like football I'm a big football fan but can't we sort of really think about what

30:48 should be the priority here so so effectively when you talk about you sub money as a source of power or abuse or whatever the case may be and and whether money's good or bad and I loved how Asian put the the different beliefs we have about money money is the root of all evil debt is bad and I that's what I realized she was she was brilliant and I said so she brought up Dave Ramsey because I bought that up before that ain't always bad debt is not always good debt is just powerful money isn't always bad money isn't always good money is just powerful it's like a gun is a gun bad or good what depends on what you need the gun for if you're protecting somebody if you're protecting your family then it's a very good thing if you're using it to commit a robbery then it's abandoned fire is

31:33 fire good or bad well if fire can cook your food and keep you warm or it can burn you and your family alive so fire can be all these things so money is very powerful and here's the thing here's the problem here's what here's what we gotta we gotta hack into this and understand this this issue is that that Financial abuse that the sister was talking about in terms of relationships it doesn't just happen in romantic relationships it also happens in the relationship that black people have had with this country see when we talk about things like this is where I I this is where I scare or confuse people because I'll talk about integration and I'll sit here and I'll say gosh you know I I don't I don't mind the fact that my neighbors are white and I don't mind the fact that that uh that

32:18 I can go to shop in any store I want to I I've never had any issue with white people unless you're trying to bully me or control me you know when my when my daughter married a a a guy from Denmark he's a really nice guy you know I said well does he treat you well do you love him yeah okay fine so so I don't I never had that issue with anybody who wasn't black but what I do think about is I ask ourselves I say what did integration actually really do for us that I can really point to in terms of saying okay we are clearly better off after integration right okay let me see um do we have more wealth than we had before integration no okay because we own more land we owned a hundred times more landing and 100 years ago than we do or 20 times more land or 50 times some some number I

33:05 gotta look it up but we own a lot more land before integration than we do now uh do we have more businesses uh now than we did before integration no we don't we don't we traded our businesses in for student loans and corporate jobs that's what that's what we did um in fact we used to own a sports League we had something called The Negro Leagues we had the golden Glory sweepstakes which is basically a black NASCAR uh we we had a lot of stuff your ancestors weren't just sitting around waiting for people to save them they were actually building things and creating things out of necessity okay um our our families stronger now than they were before integration do we have stronger families or have we kind of fall off the rail a little bit no no 76 of all black kids don't even have a daddy in the house and and we don't even think daddies even are important anymore we think fathers are just this stupid

33:50 little accessory that you tack on it for convenience when uh we would never we would never assume that it's okay for 76 of our children to not have a mother in the house but why do we think it's so normal for 76 of our kids to not have a father in the house maybe we need to process that a little bit so so you can go down the list um educationally were we better educated before integration or after I don't know well we got 55 public schools in Chicago that receive probably billions of dollars in funding that don't have one single child that can read or write or do math a grade level nah and nope so so about integration and here's what I see I visualize and JJ let me know when my time is is low because I don't want to talk over talk do I about 10 more

34:36 minutes is that okay okay I'm gonna do 10 more minutes um what I visualize with integration is is a marriage and it's an abusive marriage and it was a scenario where uh where where you formed a partnership where perhaps we were misled into believing that we would be Equitable Partners in this relationship we thought we were gonna sort of split the power split the wealth split the possibility and and that wasn't really the plan that wasn't the plan the plan was not to integrate you so you could be equal Partners the plan was to integrate you so that you can become subordinates the plan was to commodify you uh to some extent black people are we're like the KFC chicken that was invited to somebody's house for

35:22 dinner so the chicken arrives at the house thinking he's about to eat good and he don't understand that no you are the dinner you we know we're gonna put you in the middle of the plate and you're like ooh they put both we're gonna put you in the middle of the table I'm gonna be in the middle of the table I'm getting all the attention right and you don't understand they're gonna carve a piece of your butt off and cook you because because you are the commodity so to some extent what what happened with integration is not again this is important to understand integration was not a bad concept just like marriage is marriage bad or good well it depends on who you're married to yeah it depends on the nature of that relationship so integration in itself was not a bad or a good concept but in America where you're dealing with this this concept where unfortunately

36:09 many whites were led to believe that they were Superior to black people and then also simultaneously it takes to the tango now you have a lot of black people even to this day who sort of have an inherent inferiority belief we believe that we're supposed to serve somebody else right so it's a perfect combination like like the pimp in the hole right Pips can't pimp everybody the pimp would not be able to recruit my daughters because they have high self-esteem they have fathers strong fathers that support them they have access to resources so they wouldn't be good targets for a Pimp they're both beautiful girls but if you have that little girl out there who doesn't like herself very much who doesn't have uh food to eat who

36:54 doesn't have anybody that has her back who maybe doesn't have a lot of knowledge and education well then she's going to be a a ready Target and Pips can smell this Predators can smell this so to some extent in America remember capitalism is another one of those things that's very powerful I don't see it as good or bad but in America unfortunately we are kind of committed to the idea of predatory capitalism we have a lot of predatory capitalism I'm not anti-capitalist now I I think capitalism can do wonderful things but there's some problem with a society that believes that uh that it's okay that workers wages have been going down while CEO pay has been just skyrocketing through the roof there's something wrong with a society where uh the top one two three percent of the

37:41 country is allowed to own half the wealth right like there's something wrong with the society where your government is 31 trillion dollars in debt and it's largely because there are people who believe wealthy people shouldn't have to pay more in taxes I look at that I saw exactly when the U.S debt started skyrocketing around 2000 President Bush pushed forward tax cuts and he did that because at the time things looked good and there were there was a government surplus and right after that happened not 11 occurred which led to the Iraq Iraq and Afghanistan Wars which cost several trillion dollars the big financial crisis of 2007 through what's further in debt because remember the first thing Obama had to do when he got into office was write a big check for about seven to eight hundred billion

38:27 dollars uh to bail out the banks not not to bail out the American people but we bailed out the banks we bailed out Wall Street right and then a few years later you had the pandemic now the debt to GDP ratio which is almost like a debt to income ratio so think about a debt to income ratio if you're trying to buy a house so the debt to GDP ratio went from maybe about 50 in the 1960s to being 165 percent today so so effectively if you think about it think about it like this the US government has 31 trillion dollars in debt annual tax revenue is about 4.5 to 5 trillion dollars that's like a person making forty five thousand dollars a year being three hundred thousand dollars in debt so if you had a friend that was three hundred thousand dollars in debt but they were making forty five

39:14 thousand dollars a year with that person be financially secure would you say that that person's in a good financial situation no you would not so that's what your government looks like so effectively to some extent America is a country that has this interesting history where not only do we have the racism but it sort of bleeds into the capitalism and the predatory capitalism just kind of says we're going to pray on anybody who's weak not just because you're black we don't hate you just because you're black we just we might hate because you're poor or because you're not you're not one of the wealthy and Powerful in this country so what is the solution what's the best way to kind of look at this what does this mean well um I do his book feel free to take a look at it it's called The Ten Commandments of black economic power now I wrote this book

40:00 mainly because it is my firm belief that in order for us to improve our economic condition we must address the economic culture that exists in our families we have to stop raising our kids to make them believe that the highest height they can Ascend to is to get a nice job with a nice office and then go run off and live in a white neighborhood that that can't do now that's okay if that's what people do I'm not judging that what I'm saying though is that you have a lot of people a lot of children that are so smart that they could become the billionaires that fund and create thousands of jobs they they could become the captains of industry but instead the little kid is 16 years old and he's good with computers and somebody what do they say

40:45 oh you're gonna get you a good job hey that's what they used to say to me and and so here's the thing you got to understand is that if you look at Elon Musk one of the richest men on the planet Elon Musk is pretty much just an engineer who also learned how to be an entrepreneur who took some risks and took his engineering skill and scaled that up into something where he's been able to create over half a million jobs mostly for his community if you look at the history of Jeff Bezos another man who's worth over 100 billion dollars who created Amazon if you look at his history I've studied these guys because I'd like to I like to reverse engineer if you're doing something that's working I'm gonna study that well Jeff Bezos was just a techie kid like a lot of our kids in our community who then decided to take a chance to become an entrepreneur he

41:32 walked away from a very good high-paying job people told him he was stupid for doing this and he went he sat in a training class a free class on how to be how to become a librarian how to run a bookstore so he's sitting next to these Librarians taking notes on how to run a bookstore I kid you not and that is literally the origin of Amazon so so my point is to say this and this is what what we'll end with is I think we can do so much better I believe deeply in the idea that we are just sitting on the secret sauce that we got the juice we are everything that we need we are the trillion dollar commodity that we've been looking for I believe the gold is buried right in your backyard and you ain't got to go down the street around the block you

42:18 ain't got to sell your kids in the corporate slavery you ain't got to go to places where you're not wanted to find opportunity I believe that you have the ability to manifest realities that are so extraordinary that even you don't understand how amazing they're going to be but all we need is the confidence and the discipline and the commitment to developing a culture that allows us to fully manifest and create those realities take those kids that might want to be great basketball and football players and create an army of black entrepreneurs buy stock for your children from the time they're born and then if you do that and they they will have so much money by the time they're 25 or 30. if you consistently buy them stock from the

43:05 time they're born by the time they're 30 they'll have so much money they'll never have to work for anybody if you don't believe me go to my website voicewarkins.com I have something there called a five dollar a day investing plan I've had to create this because I had so many people that were giving me pushback because they've been led to the false belief that black people can't build any wealth that black people don't have enough money to invest so I said okay well can black people afford chicken they say yeah I say absolutely if I put a Popeye's Chicken in the poorest neighborhood in America in one day there'll be a line out the door around the corner down the block full of people that shouldn't be eating chicken you know what I'm talking about so so so let's pick five dollars a day which you can't even buy a Popeye's Chicken value meal for five dollars

43:50 so if a person invests five dollars a day consistently in any S P 500 Index Fund Victor Oscar Oscar v-o-o is one that you can pick if you want one if you want to start that for your child or spy that's another one if you do five dollars a day in any S P 500 fund as a gift to that newborn baby by the time the child is 10 they have approximately twenty one thousand dollars by the time the child is 20 they have approximately a hundred and two thousand dollars by the time the child is 30 they have approximately a quarter million dollars by the time they're 40 they have approximately three quarters of a million dollars at that point you're not poor anymore in fact after the first decade you're not poor anymore there's nobody that's liquid that has 20 30 40 50 000 in the

44:35 bank they could call themselves poor what does that do that changes the game that means they don't have to spend their lives in slavery that means they don't have to spend their lives doing work they don't want to do they don't spend their lives in places that they're not wanted they can actually go be free and manifest and live the life they're supposed to live so let's do that for our kids and let's make our people great because that's what we deserve and I believe it to the core of my heart thank you all very much for listening I appreciate it