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My graduates from my school being false bad drop thanks rop might drop back drop.
So first and foremost, thank you guys for coming. I really appreciate it. If you've watched Ryans Leslie's episode on Earn your Lesia, I'm sure you got a ton of game. And if you watched Till Harper, who was on Market Mondays twice, I'm sure you got a ton of game. So this is just gonna be an extension of that. It's titled Crypto, but we're gonna be talking about a
lot more than just crypto. We're gonna be talking about the business world, investing, the musical side of things, group economics well.
As long as with cryptocurrency as well.
So you know, this is going to be one of these EYL conversations where you get a million a million dollars worth a game from people that have done it at a high level. That's doing it at a high level. So I encourage everybody to listen. It's very rare that you get an opportunity to head it's kind of information, especially from two gentlemen together at the same time.
So let's get into it. Let's get into it, all.
Right, Ryan, I want to talk with I want to I'm gonna ask you the first question. So you spoke about before as far as mentorship right in college, and you had an experience with Sandy Green, PhD. Right, So part of I feel like the community that we have built is mentorship. It's kind of like an online mentorship, and you never know how somebody can change your life, and experiences can change your life.
So can you talk about that for sure?
First of all, this echo is crazy. What I will say, though, is that mentorship is really like having an extended family member, somebody who's going to make an investment in you when you are already hard working, when you already know that you have the talent, you have the tenacity, you have the drive, the desire, the discipline, the dedication, and sometimes
you just need the direction. And so for me, mentorship really was that moment when you know, my parents, they're from the Salvation Army, so they have always been storing up treasures in heaven. So what that means is that they sacrifice treasures on earth in the service of others to have treasures in heaven. That doesn't pay for a Harvard education, you know what I'm saying. And so they were able to actually inspire me to apply to Harvard very early. And I was lucky when I was there
to actually have a mentor. And I truly believe that that made the difference between the trajectory that I already was on and where I've been able to get to now.
So I want to ask you the next follow up question, Ryan, is stock question right in the long Lines where the market one day.
Apple Apple.
You invested in Apple in two thousand and nine, and I believe you have a sixteen thousand percent rate of return on that initial investment. If anybody watches the show, we always Ian always talks about.
Buy and hold, buy and hold, and a.
Lot of people get caught up in day trading and rotations, and he always says, you're gonna rotate your way into poverty by leaving your positions. So can you talk about that the value and what made you invest in Apple early and what made you keep it Because a lot of times people might have had one hundred percent, three hundred percent rate of return on their money and they're taking it out. You left it in and now you're
up sixteen hundred sixteen thousand. You're up sixteen thousand percent on your initial investment.
So talk about that.
Yeah. For sure.
To be a great long term investor, it really just comes down to three elements. The first and the second you can The third is up to the market in the economy. The first is just time. When do you start and how long do you hold? For me, my
holding time horizon is always twenty years. And the reason why my time horizon is twenty years is because when you look at the history, anytime you've held if we talk about the S and P five hundred, or we talk about the total Stock Market Index, anytime you've held for twenty years, you've had a zero percent chance of loss, a zero percent chance of loss. I know a lot of people who are new to investing. I know for sure. My parents are from the Caribbean. They thought being in
the stock market is just gambling. They see people actually do exactly what we were just talking about, that rotation where you just leave too much of that money on the table. You see it do one summersault or two summersaults. You've never seen your money dance like that, and you take it out. But twenty years is the time horizon. Number two is the rate of savings, and number three is the rate of return. When I make an investment, I want to be an owner, and ownership is not
about a short term play. Just think if you actually bought a franchise and you put somebody in that franchise and on day one they were selling let's say, twenty Hamburgers. Then in two years they were selling three hundred Hamburgers. Why would you sell a franchise if it's actually delivering for you. So what I will say is that the
reason I held though had to do with mentorship. I watched my investment go from one hundred thousand to three hundred and fifty thousand, and I remember a conversation I had with my mentor. Said, hey, look, man, I took your advice and man, one hundred thousand to three fifty I'm gonna cash out, get something nice for my mom. And he gave me an ultimatum at that time. He said, Ryan, listen, you can go ahead and cash out, give something nice to your mom, but we'll shake hands and I'll never
teach you anything again. Or you figure out a different way to give something nice to your mom, and hold on to that investment and we'll check in every single year around tax time and we'll see what it grows to. And when we checked in this year, that one hundred thousand I got it on my birthday September twenty fifth, two thousand and nine, that one hundred thousand was just under sixteen million.
And if I hadn't.
Don't let that, don't let that go over your hand. Clap it up for that, ladies and gentlemen.
But that's the difference that mentorship makes because for me, if it was up to me, I look in the mirror, I'm thinking, Man, I'm smart. I made a great investment. It's giving me a great return. And sometimes the lens of expertise and the lens of experience can actually provide you wings that allow you to fly further than you
can fly on your own. And so that's why I think first and foremost when I look at a company, I want to be in a company that when I look around, I use it every day and the people I love they can't live without it. So when I'm looking at Instagram, I want to be an owner in Facebook. When I'm looking at devices that I'm seeing all around, I want to be an owner in that company. When I'm seeing the platform that I'm able to even listen
to podcasts on, I want to be an owner. And you got to give the business time to materialize into the growth that you're looking for, because you want your money to work for you, So give the business the time to grow.
Does that sound familiar if anybody watches market, mondays, this is the same thing that we've been saying for a very long time. You gotta buy good companies, hold them for twenty years tech companies. So these things that you keep hearing, as he said, it was mentorship. So you
can get mentorship in a variety of different ways. So when you receive the information online, it's important to take heed to that because that one hundred thousand to three fifty is a great flip, but one hundred thousand to sixteen million is out of this world flip.
It's different. It's a little different.
And I say this like honestly, when you think about it, man, think about the companies that have done extremely well. They've always done well over a twenty to thirty year time horizon. And I want you to think, if you got into Amazon when it first IPO, when you got into Monster Energy when it first IPO, if you would have sold at a thousand percent I'm talking about ten x your money, you would have left tens of thousands of percent on the table. And a beautiful piece about money is when
you put it to work for you. It's one of the greatest employees because it never has a sick day, it never goes on vacation and never asks for time off. It never gets old, it never gets weak. It's always there to keep working for you unless you actually go ahead and cash out. So when you actually earn the money and you put it to work, let it be your greatest employee and don't let it just be one.
If I told you right now that the way that the stock market works is non discriminatory, the twenty percent that you are making a year is the same twenty percent that's afforded to Warren Buffett or any other hedge fund. The difference is how many dollars do you have growing by twenty percent. If you got one hundred dollars, well then that's twenty dollars. If you got one hundred thousand, well that's twenty thousand. If you got a million, well
that's two hundred thousand. You got ten million, where y'all can continue to do the math. So when you actually earn the money, understand it's like a lifetime robot level employee that will always, always, always work for you. So give it the time to manifest into the wealth that you wanted to create.
There you have it, Yes, clap it up for that hill, Harper. Let me ask you this question. The first question is going to be very simple. Why bitcoin why Bitcoin? I know you're you're bitcoin bull. You're extremely bullish on bitcoin. You built the platform. We're going to talk about the Black Wall Street. But why bitcoin?
You know, bitcoin is ostensibly a store of value and a perfect form of money, and money is changing. It's changing very rapidly. We're moving very quickly out of fiat and hard money currency into digital currency and cryptocurrency. The question is where is it headed and how can we be early adopters and get into the space. Ryan is just talking about ownership. The beautiful thing about bitcoin is that, as Ryan just described, it is agnostic to race, it's
agnostic to barriers of entry. It's literally just real estate on a blockchain, real estate on a ledger, and if you purchase a set number of satoshi's, you own a little bit of that real estate and it's a finite amount. What creates value with scarcity. That's why waterfront real estate is extremely valuable. It's more valuable than the real estate that's inland because there's more inland property than waterfront property. Scarcity drives value, and bitcoin is the most scarce crypto
asset out there. Twenty one million be minted, there'll be at least three to five million lost or disappear. So you're really talking about in real way, somewhere around eighteen million bitcoin in any type of circulated supply. There are forty eight million millionaires in the world. There's not enough bitcoin to go for each millionaire to even hold one. You know, we will be talking about setoci's in the future,
not even talking about bitcoin. But bitcoin isn't the only asset class in this space, but it is the one to enter into.
Now.
That's why my goal is to each black person in America hold it LEAs a million Stochi's. Put show hands, who has at least a million Satoshi's in their wallet right now? At least a million?
A million?
Raise, raise your hand if.
You got a million Stochi's in your wallet.
If you if you don't know what a stosi is, Okay, y'all, don't watch Market.
Monday's shame on you. So let's let's let's.
You don't watch market mondays, I see, I.
Think shame on you should be a shame of yourself. All right, let's have this conversation. Then what is what is it? Can you explain to them what is sure?
So so, so check this out y'all. Back in the day, gold was valued in terms of bricks, like how many bricks you got are in terms of weight? Right, And then as bricks got so expensive, they had to have a smaller fractal value of the gold, so they broke it down into pricing gold into ounces. The same thing is true for a setoshi. There are one hundred million satosis in every one bitcoin, just like there are one hundred pennies and a dollar. There are one hundred million
satoshi's that make up one bitcoin. So what does that mean. What it means is a satoshi is one hundred million fractal share of one bitcoin. So as you build your satochi's, you don't need to just go out and buy a bitcoin. I can go into the black wall street wallert right now, check the current price of bitcoin.
It is right.
Now, real time, forty eight thousand, seven hundred and thirty and seventy five cent right. And and so if I want to buy right now live, I'm gonna buy ten dollars. I'm gonna preview my buy, I go in, I confirm, and then now I just bought point two eight two bitcoin, right, I just did that, right, And so a Satoshi is a fractal share of a bitcoin. So I just bought Sato. I bought a fractal share of a bitcoin right here
on stage. And so my goal is to have every black person in America hold at least one million Toto. She's with basically forty million of us in this country. If we held a million Satohi's each, we would literally control the bitcoin market worldwide. People would have to come through us, and it'd be the first time in history that black Americans have controlled an asset class. And when you start controlling asset classes, you're able to do what
set price. And if we're able to set price of a valuable, ascending value asset class, we have the other thing that's very important, leverage. Leverage is the critical piece. And so what I love what Ryan's talking about. He's talking about ownership. I'm talking about ownership. And if you think about ownership, we need to strategically own a sending value asset classes like high value blue chip stocks and hold them for long term, like a sending goal acid
class like bitcoin, hold it long term. This is not a trading mentality. This is not Robin Hood. Robinhood is Robin the hood y'all. It's trying to get people to trade, because how do they make their money. They make their money off exchange. The more you trade, the more money they make. They want you jumping in and out of positions. That is not the way to build wealth. I never want you to sell the bitcoin you buy. What are you gonna do with it? You say, here, well, I
still need liquidity, Sure, you still need liquidity. What you're gonna do. You're gonna buy it, You're gonna hold it, and then on the platform you're going to take out a loan against the equity or the upside of that asset. You're never gonna sell it, and the you're gonna pass that bitcoin onto your children, and they'll pass it on to their children's children. You can just think of bitcoin like wealthy people used to think of houses, Right, You
get these real high value mansions. They're not flipping in and out of the house to extract the liquidity. They're holding the house and then just taking the equity out and reinvesting that equity into other assets and or liquidity challenges that they may have. Think about the same way. You're gonna be able to do that with bitcoin. On the black Wall Street Platform.
Speaking of that, Yes, clap it up for that, ladies and gentlemen, speaking of that. Speaking of bitcoin, So, Ryan, going back to you, you had sixteen thousand percent rate of return on Apple, but I believe you have a thirty two thousand percent rate of return.
On bitcoin, right, is that correct?
That's right?
All right?
So you was obviously earlier invested in bitcoin as well. So when did you first invest in bitcoin?
Yeah, anytime I have an interview or anytime I actually run into any one, they always say, Ryan, man, I heard about your laptop. Well, that laptop was a whole story in and of itself, and I was working on some music and I lost the files. So when you work on music, it's not enough to just have the finished record. You need the files. So my laptop went missing. I put up a million dollars as a reward for the return of the intellectual property, because who wants to
pay a million dollars for a laptop? You could just go to Apple get one for two thousand dollars. Well, the laptop turned up, long story short, and the gentleman who found the laptop actually sued me to actually retrieve that reward one million dollars, and he actually won in New York court. And the next day I was on the cover of the New York Post. I sent it to my mom. She said, at least you look nice. I remember that.
Yeah.
I had a nice suit on, right, But the headline was rap weasel.
First of all, rap weasel? Does that look like me?
Rap weasel must pay one million? And then the next day I went to just go ahead and get a breakfast sandwich, and uh, it's the same place I go every day, and today this guy who is behind the county you want to take a picture with me. I said, well, I come here every day. Why do you want to take a picture with me? He said, well, because you want to cover the New York Post. You the rap weasel? Okay, all right, you want to take a picture.
Okay.
But the reason why that story is so important is because when you lose a judgment, well, then the federal government or the state government can just come in and freeze your assets. And so upon losing that one million dollar lawsuit, they froze two point three million dollars in my account. And I was in November twenty twelve, and that was a moment at which I started to think, Man, you know, do I really want a centralized currency to
actually be controlled? And I'm talking about they just took double I only lost a million, while you take two point three, right, So I said, look, we got to find a different way. And luckily at that time, you know, I'm in a stute student.
Of the game.
And if you look back, all of this is verified.
Look back.
In June twenty thirteen, I put out a tweet I said, from now on, pay me in bitcoin, twenty thirteen.
And what happened was I.
Had a Shopify store twenty thirteen. So I'm early in Shopify, and bitcoin became the means by which I wanted to be paid. And I still do that to this day. But to give you a case in point, I sold an album five dollars the day, It's worth like seven hundred. I sold a hoodie forty seven dollars today is worth like six thousand. I sold a couple of meet and greets total price two thousand today is worth like one hundred and twenty two thousand. And that's just the differentiation
of being able to get in early. And I know some of y'all might be thinking, like, man, I can't turn the time back to twenty thirteen. But I'll tell you right now, even if you buy some subtocis today, you're still early. But you don't want to be amongst the folks that say, you know what today it was either just a footnote in the history of my life.
Or it was a game changer, a life changer.
And when we talk about assets and when we talk about ownership and we talk about being able to buy fractionally and being an asset class where there is scarcity, that's what that opportunity in cryptocurrency provides.
And so, yeah, thirty two thousand percent return.
Yeah, when I got into bitcoin, it was trading at about one hundred and twenty two dollars per coin. We just looked at the prices forty eight thousand. Y'all could do the math.
How much?
How much money did you put it in?
What should we ain't gotta take that?
Hey?
You really?
And let me say something. This is so this is so important what he's saying. And I gotta I gotta reinforce this, y'all. This isn't just about individuals making money, okay, this is this is about life or death, and this is real talk. In eighteen sixty three, when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, black people in America held a little less than one percent of American wealth. That's after four hundred years of free chattel slavery, and the greatest well
transfer in the history of this world happened. If you were despicable enough to want to hold property to literally extract value from people who had melanated skin. They killed us, they us, they raped us, they separated families to build wealth. Now fast forward one hundred and fifty eight years later to right now, August twenty twenty one, people say, oh, hell man, let's just talk about making money. Don't get too heavy. No no, no, no no. We have to
speak true to this. This country is built off the back of our labor and is built off of building wealth off of us, and we right now still hold only one percent of American wealth. We have to collectively work together, jump into asset classes and start building leverage
that is decentralized. Exactly what he was talking about, the idea of operating our own microeconomies outside of centralized institutions and the banking system which has literally stolen trillions of dollars out of the black community through all sorts of onerous, racist and institutionally systemic and racist policies, procedures, redlining. We can go through all that history. We don't need to,
but we know where we're at now. What he's talking about, what we're talking about right now is literally about life or death. Is not just about Hey man, can I come up sixteen thousand percent? Can I come up thirty two thousand percent?
No?
No, no, How can we work together to actually start to control real wealth? Because why is real wealth important? I believe you cannot have social justice without economic justice. So all this stuff we've been talking about, we talk about mass incarceration, police brutality, health care disparities, education gaps. If you trace it back to the money, what are the communities that are hit the hardest economically fragile and poor communities. We change the wealth factor in our community, we change
all that other stuff. We get it wrong. We start trying to work on all these things from the top. We got to start the route, which is the money in the economics. Let's go, y'all, let's go.
Yes, yes, Hill.
Let me let me ask you a question, because I want to kind of get people a framework. A lot of times they look at investing and they're like, Okay, I'm investing something and I can't.
Take it out. Cryptocurrency.
The word currency is a little misleading because it's like, who's gonna want to pay for pizza with bitcoin when it's gonna.
Go up in value?
Right, So it's like, I'm investing in cryptocurrency, but I can't spend it. It's like, but you bring up a good point about lending, right, Lending against your bitcoin something that I learned about in twenty seventeen when I first got into space and a friend of mine that was
educating me on it. He was like, you know, the whole point is not to really liquidate your bitcoin, but you might need sometimes where you need capital, and you can actually lends your bitcoin out and you get an interest rate on that, but you still keep ownership of it. That's something that is very interesting to me, and I think that that's going to be even more prevalent as time goes on. So I think it's important for people
to have at least the baseline education on that. Can you talk about that as far as lending bitcoin?
Sure, so when we talk about holding an asset, hopefully you're using money that you don't need.
Right away.
Right and when we talk about crypto specifically, remember I'm not saying get out of Apple to put all your money into bitcoin. This is about having an overall strategic approach. All the things you're already doing you should continue to do, but then figure out how do I actually start to build a position in a different asset class in this crypto space. Now watch this. There're two hundred different cryptos and new ones are coming along every day. Ninety nine
percent of them are like penny stocks or pink sheet stocks. There, they're scams, right, The vast majority are scams. And that's why you have to be very careful when you're talking about a lot of these meme coins and pump and dump coins and things like that, because there's really no downside protection. Because part of your investment strategy has to be risk management, meaning you have to look at what's protecting your downside. Is there a liquidity pool to buy
the asset as it goes down? And so the beautiful thing about bitcoin is that it provides you the opportunity. There are enough holders. So there's about two trillion dollars in crypto. One trillion of that or half of it is in bitcoin, so there's a lot more liquidity in that space, and it's also an opportunity to lend it out. So on our platform, the Black Wall Street, we have not allowed this feature yet because it's part of a timeline.
You know, you know you when you actually and Ryan can talk about this when you actually develop a tech company, you don't release everything at once. If you look at Coinbase when a first launch, you look at Coinbase now, it looks completely different. And so we're going to be releasing features as we go and make it better and better and better. But you can go to you know, Block five, there's a number of others you can do your research and loan out you or bitcoin or you're holding.
If you're in a situation where you need liquidity, you don't need to sell it to get that liquidity. The other piece that I think is a very critical piece that we want to add on our platform is the peer to peer piece, because if we can start recirculating the black digital dollar peer to peer, we don't have to be writing interest minimums to check cashing spots. Payday lenders. The payday lending industry is a three hundred billion dollar
industry that's extracting that money out of our community. Specifically, we actually can change that on a digital platform where we create the liquidity that's needed within our own ecosystem. So Vanessa gets that ten or fifteen percent return, not you know, Steve. I'll just say, Steve, you understand. So the money stays in the community. Why is this important?
It's important because a dollar leads the Black community within six to seven hours, where a dollar stays in the Asian community eighteen to twenty days, in the white community in America twenty to thirty days. You hear what I'm saying, six to seven hours. That leads our community multiple days with other communities. The way we build wealth is the recirculation of our dollar. You know, these brothers, look at the AV team putting on this event. You hire a
black AV team. What does that create? All those brothers and sisters right there have jobs right here, my man, right here right We recirculate the dollars, We create jobs, an opportunity. And that's why holding an asset, taking the liquidity out, using that to either reinvest in your own business or to hire folks to actually put do things in commerce is critical. And you can do that with bitcoin very important.
I'm glad you said that. Shout out to the whole production team. This is a high level production and we're in Atlanta. We're in Atlanta, Georgia, so it's no surprise that everybody you see and the production team is black. It's a black owned production ATV and this is a high level and we only use the best people, and these are the best people. So a lot of times we think we have to compromise if we go black, but we don't have to compromise. We can still get
the best service by supporting ourselves as well. Ryan, I want to talk about technology. I want to talk about technology. We spoke about that when you was on the podcast, and I know your early seed investor in a lot of different fintech companies, one being tightened. So I'm ask you a more broad range question because there might be some artists in here. So you start off as a musician, songwriter, extremely talented, but like you said, I mean you made earners.
What's up?
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Sixteen million dollars just off of an Apple stock right off of one hundred thousand. You really think about it, like even though they might say, I don't have one hundred, but you might have ten thousand, you might have five thousand. But then you do the bitcoin, then you do your phone. You're always doing something else, right, So what got you in the mindset of developing? Okay, I need multiple streams of income. I need multi I mean to diversify my portfolio.
And how did you get into investing in tech company? How did you get into tech?
Period?
Man, I would say any success that I've ever been able to realize in my life can be directly correlated to just having the right conversation. Conversation is a currency in and of itself, and success happens at the speed of communication. So we want to be successful in whatever we set our minds to. It's a matter of conveying the right message to the right person with the right resources at the right time.
That's very important.
That's my crew over there, Okay, thank y'all. I appreciate it all right. So when I decided I wanted to start a tech company, it wasn't really a decision. It was more of just following the curiosity. Because out of necessity is born innovation. Why did I invest in bitcoin? Well, it was a necessity. My account was frozen two point three million, so I had to innovate figure out a different way that I could have a currency and have
a store of value that was decentralized. When I decided I want to get my phone number out to five hundred and fifty thousand Twitter followers, I needed to actually use technology to scale my ability to respond to everyone. I'm gonna be real about this and he'll and I see what y'all are doing as well in terms of keeping the ownership and equity and the dollar within our community.
We saw this with Rock and Roll.
A lot more people in America know Elvis Presley than Chuck Berry. And when we look at our ability to innovate in this space, I know a lot of artists that looked like me that I actually picked up the phone and told them, hey, I got a technology companies called Superphone, and you can have a text relationship with all your community.
And when I first.
Started, they say, oh man, that's crazy, man, bro like you not a star if you can text everybody. I started Superphone in twenty thirteen. Five years later, I'm looking around, I'm seeing all those same people with phone numbers, but they're using a white company called Community, saying, well, why is that.
Well, it's because.
The investors in Community.
They looked like the founders in Community.
So Community took a concept that I started and they built an alternative competitor and went to our people and said, you know what, we we just raised one hundred million from Salesforce, so we'll give y'all a platform for free. And that's a favorite word in our community. Free, you know what I'm saying. But the end of the day, when you look at the contribute that you make, whether it's through my technology or whether it's through another technology,
the conversation really is about ownership. And so whether you use my Superphone platform, or you use Black Wall Street, or you use Coinbase, or you use any competitor, We're not here to tell you only invest in or use our platform. We're just telling you that the future is now, and if you want to be able to predict the future.
You just write the history yourself. An the ability that we have now in technology allows us to actually have information and access that previously previously was limited to those who had much higher thresholds in terms of investment minimums. So if you wanted to hadge fund strategy, you had to have a quarter million or two million, a two point five million. And the reason why I invested in Titan is because they took that concentrated hadge fund strategy
and you can start with five hundred dollars. And what's the difference between a concentrated hedge fund strategy and a long term diversified index fund strategy.
Well, it's pretty simple.
The concentration is what provides the outsize returns. The concentration is what provides the alpha. The wealthiest people in the world if you look at the headlines most recently, there's been months that's been written about the Jeff Bezos, the Elon Musk, the Mark Zuckerberg's of the world, and what you'll realize when you look at their stories, their wealth is really tied up in a concentrated vehicle because the stock of their own company is what drives the growth
of their wealth year over year. So I would say two takeaways from that number. One, if you have the tolerance, it's okay to be concentrated in your investments.
Diversify across many.
Different asset classes, real estate, cryptocurrency stocks. If you want to get a little bit of a acceleration, yeah, maybe you do some derivatives, some longer term options or shorter
term options. Look at alternative investing. Get into companies early before their public invest in the companies that you see your friends and family building people be so quick to go spend their dollars at Louis Vuital and won't spend their dollars with the new makeup or hair care or beauty business that they're brothers or sisters or aunts or uncles are create. We have that opportunity to be early shareholders, early investors.
And yet when we look.
At the number of black owned or black founded companies in the stock market, we don't really have a lot of options. And so that means we got to invest before we're public. But that early equity, that early ownership, is going to be how we actually changed the narrative and change the trajectory of the wealth that we want to build. So for me, following technology is really because, as Hill said, we built the railroads, but we didn't own them. We built the hospitality business and worked in it,
but we didn't own it. And now it's the only time in history where without brick, mortar, lumber, or steal, we can build value through technology and it can be scalable and we can serve and deliver value the hundreds of thousands, millions and maybe even billions of people. But we got to actually invest in one another, use the products that we create for us by us, and embrace technology as a pathway and a means so that when the next transfer of wealth is being written about in history,
we're not on the sidelines just watching. We're participants and owners.
Everything he's saying just sounds so familiar because we talk about when you say a concentration to tech to index, anybody that sound familiar to tech two index. And when we interview Mark Cuban, I asked him what his portfolio was and he said it was I know Netflix for sure, Russell two thousand, and I believe it was Microsoft. He had another technology coming, that's it. He just had three positions in his portfolio. And like you said, that's something
that's a major key. A lot of times we get distracted. We're trying to have thirty seven stocks in our portfolio, and it dilutes your holdings and you're not really gonna be able to, you know, figure out what's going on. You're gonna be doing research on all of these different areas. And it's like you think that by having that many you're actually helping it, but you're actually hurting your portfolio most of the time. And like you said, the hedge funds,
most hedge funds is more of a concentrated thing. So that's why when we suggest two tech, it's not to just you know, keep it basic, but it's actually a more sophisticated way of investing than having thirty seven companies that you just know for sure.
Warren Buffett said, diversification is actually insurance against ignorance. So listen, I'm not saying that just because you were at invest Best now you're an expert investor. If you don't know what to buy, you still alright, just go ahead and buy the whole stock market. You could buy a whole stock market for two hundred and twenty five dollars a share.
The history shows that even if you don't know what you're doing at all, and you buy a whole stock market and you hold for twenty years, your money's gonna double every seven years anyway.
But you got to be able to hold.
You got to have the patience to allow those companies to do what they're supposed to do for you. So I totally agree with you on that that concentration is really for those who actually know what they're doing. And the reason why I think concentration actually is a byproduct of founders is because founders know their business better than anybody else.
So if I believe it's.
Or I believe if I'm Mark Zuckerberg, I believe in Facebook, well, I don't want to be distracted by any other companies. I want to be able to build the value within the equity and the shares of my own company. And if I see something I like, I'm gonna just go out and buy it right bring up.
That's like I said, man, it's just reassurance that you know everything that we talk about, you just saying it. So we definitely got to get you on market. Mondays, by the way, we'll talk about that. So hell, let me ask you this people might not be familiar that crypto. A lot of cryptos they have different utilities and different usages. A lot of time they just think like all cryptos are the same, you just use it, So can you just talk about that?
Like there's some crypt Like.
I was an early investor in Tron, which I'm still not really one hundred percent confident in. But the thing that really drove me to Tron was when I heard that they were a crypto that was designed for video games. And my son is a gamer. Shout out to nas, he's in the build the Yeah. So when I understood the culture of video games, like it's a whole it's a whole subculture of video games. So I'm like, all right, think the cryptocurrency for that, then that's brilliant. And then
there's a bunch of cryptocurrency for different things. So can you talk about.
That church so so so just like you need you know, Ryan was just talking about, you got to do research and understand the company, understand what you're investing in. The same thing holds true for different crypto assets, right there are different use cases and different value propositions that each one has. For instance, if you believe in the NFT space. Then you may be attracted to ethereum and you want
to sort of go that way. You may do some research and find that cardonal and ada is something that you're interested in, and so you literally have to pull back the onion do your own research. There's so much free, free, free information out there on the Black Wall Street app and and just in general across the ecosystem that allows you to understand the different use cases for different crypto assets. The thing to be careful of is when you see
people trying to pump one now. And that's why I believe Elon Musk and Mark Cuban have been so irresponsible around those coin and we could we can get into deeper of what that's about, and and and and why
that is. But they're if people don't understand. If someone comes up to me and says hill crypto is a crypto, those coins the same thing as Bitcoin, then you know that they actually haven't done their homework and done their research to understand there's a different there's a there's a fundamental difference in the use case and so so rather than there's so many of them and there's so many
that are actually providing real use and value. And if you believe in the value or the use that they're providing, and you think that there is a longevity to that, then lean into that space and lean in. I don't mind for just give you an example. Personally, I do not mind bitcoin, but I mind ethereum.
Okay.
Now, see, so I have, I have a mining set up, a mining you know, a situation, right, and I could choose to mind any of the cryptos out there, but I do not mind bitcoin, and people always talking about bitcoin mining, bitcoin mining. I think that there's better value for me using my mining rigs to mine ethereum. Now that may change, right, Why is that? Well, it may change because ethereum's changed.
Why why do you prefer to mine ethereum as opposed to bitcoin?
Okay? So, so you have to look at basically what you're receiving for that time and energy spent. It's very energy intensive to mine, and what happens is you end up spending a lot of money in energy fees and costs. It also depends where you do it, if you live in a certain place. I do not recommend mining, okay, because certain in certain places energy fees are very high. My whole mining setup is not where I live, because it would be too expensive to mind where I live.
So I have my whole mind set up somewhere else where the energy cost is significantly lower, and so I'm able to mine a great deal for a much, much much lower cost. And so you have to actually look at that, and then you look at what you're getting from mining right now, the way ethereum is set up and the level of fees that are associated with ethereum.
There's a group, there's a there's a healthy return for mining etherorum where the same level of return I believe does not exist given the energy required for Bitcoin, and and and and watch this. I can mind some other cryptos where the return today is even much more than a theorem. But the problem with that is I still go back to my original thesis. I see the value proposition in ethereum right now over a longer period of time, and therefore me mining. You know, sheibu enu, you know
whatever I mean. Come on, don't get me started. Point is, you know I'm saying you got you got to actually do your own homework and understand that. But I want to pivot real quick, go back to something that that Ryan said that I thought, I don't want folks to miss this. When he was just talking about ownership, and he mentioned Zuckerberg, he mentioned Elon Musk, he mentioned Bezos and their wealth was built off of these tech platforms
and tech companies. And we for far too long, and he mentioned this talking about music, for far too long, our culture has been monetized by tech and tech platforms to build wealth for people other than us, because we don't own the platforms. That's why it's so critical for us to begin to own our own ip, own our own platforms. When I went to launch the Black Wall Street people are like, hell, you're gonna lunch with a wallet? You should white label a wallet. Just do that, man,
you know it'll be much cheaper and much better. It'll be much more functional. But then all of a sudden, I'm like the Rush card, which is a big lie. Right, I can go out into the black community and market something and says, hey, you know, bank black use the Rush card. But if my charter company is a white bank and you actually peel back the onion, you realize it's Green Dot Bank. And if you would have gone
straight to Green Dot, you'd be paying less fees. And so all you're paying are marketing fees layered on top of someone else's technology. That is not black ownership. That's black marketing. It's fundamentally different. That's why we have to own our own our own charters. We have to do this and then we have to support each other in doing it. And so one way to think about it, and this is a mindset shift in terms of purchasing.
And you can talk about Louis Vuitton or whatever. The way I try to think about that piece is, for instance, these you know, Nike shoes or whatever. I never buy a luxury item. I make the company buy it for me. Well, I mean, I'll never buy Nikes unless I've made enough dividend off a Nike stock to buy the shoe. So
you can think about the same way. Use that rule for Louis Vuitton, and nothing wrong with happened louisviittan perse if you own LVMA stock and you allow the stock to buy the purse, right, So you can always think about everything you do and being and all this goes
back to this one simple idea. Let's be intentional with how we use every hard money dollar, fiat dollar and digital dollar and crypto dollar, if we actually import intentionality and strategy around our usage, whether it's a spend or an investment, or who we support and how we support platforms, then all of a sudden, it supercharges that wealth creation for you as well as as the founders and the tech platforms and folks all around, and that recirculation starts to work. Makes sense?
Yes, yes, Ryan Women in wealth Initiative? What's what's that about? Why? You know, I'm I'm very happy to.
See a lot of the ladies here, but I still, yes, I'm still not all the way happy with the percentage that we have. I think it's like sixty women listen to Ernie Alesia, and I would love to have it to be fifty to fifty.
So we're making strides.
We got a bunch of powerful women that's going to be up here this entire weekend. But what's what's that initiative about? And why was it important for you to start that?
Yeah? So I have limited time, right, and.
My mother has always been the matriarch in a meaningful way for my family. She's the one that always encouraged us to save, She's the one that always encouraged us to be frugal, He's the one that encouraged us to also be as resourceful as possible and be of service. And my dad was, you know, he was always, hey, God will provide. You know, he's spending money and God will provide, you know. And my grandfather was the same way, He's spend the money on God will provide. And guess what,
God actually always did provide. So you know, I ascribe
to that a little bit as well. But what I will say is that over the last year, I have a one on one mentorship program and it's it's really to pay it forward in the same way that Sandy gave to me, because I know, being at a conference like this, there's so much information that you had the process and you go home and I know I took some notes, but once the Satoshi and I think he was talking about those in Mark Cuban and concentration and Robin Hood is robbing the hood and how do I
remember everything?
You know what I'm saying.
And so sometimes it takes just having somebody who actually would just lock in with you for a year and break it down for you, just week by week, week by week, week by week. You just you show up every week you do the research, you do the homework. And so I created a program whereby you know, just a few a handful of people per week, I mean per year, I actually provide this kind of mentorship and service. And it's not because people can't find it on their own.
Like Hill said, there's so much freeation. But sometimes if you don't even know what you're looking for, and you don't even know what you don't know, you could just get lost in that matrix. So that mentorship program really began to illustrate for me the difference between a male perspective on investing, which in many cases is kind of more like gambling, and a female perspective on investing, which I found to be in many cases more rational, more disciplined, more reasonable, more measured.
Yeah, come on, get.
Y'allselves around the applause, Go ahead, ladies.
Yeah.
So when I found that there was that kind of differentiation, I found that potentially the impact that I could make in terms of what I was teaching, in terms of the coaching, in terms of the mentorship, the investment, Like Hill was talking about, you want the greatest return on your investment. So I found that when I invested the time with women, they also weren't just doing it for themselves. They always said, Look, I'm not Ryan. This ain't just
for me. It's for my son, it's for my mom, It's for my aunt, my uncle, my niece, my nephew. And what we found on Wall Street all the time. Man, Listen, I know some folks in here. If you actually watch movies, you've seen a Wolf of Wall Street. You see how women are objectified in the Wall Street communities. It's all
suits and ties and misogyny. But actually, very recently that has emerged almost a I guess sometimes they call her like the modern day female Warren Buffett, Kathy Wood of Arc and Best Right.
We talked about her, right.
And what a lot of folks don't know is that one of the other non public greatest female investment managers is actually of color.
Her name is Melanie Hobson. She ha us be married to George Lucas.
People didn't know that George Lucas created Star Wars. He found himself a strong black woman, right, and she's one of the best money managers in the world. So that's why we decided that, Look, if you really want to make a true difference and have a true impact, on a family and generational level. Then it's important to educate, mentor inspire and motivate the women.
The women very important.
Make some noise for that very very important.
Hell, before we go, I want you just to talk about Black Walter, but I also want you to tie it on if you can't with the what you said as far as this cross generational wealth transfer, recirculation and dollar and all of that group back of nomics, can you tie that in and how that was a motivational factor in your platform.
Absolutely, But we don't have much time, so I want.
It's early your Liegia's event. We got as much time as we're good.
Okay, Well, since we're talking about strong, incredible women, I want to recognize Naja Roberts, my co founder, who's right here. She is sitting up there. Naja, come on, just just just come on, wave turn around a way to the people. That's Naja Roberts. She's one of the only two breaking mortar over the counter crypto currency exchanges in the country called Crypto Blockshain Plug in Inglewood, California. I went to her on bend and knee and said, I'm launching the
Black Wall Street. I need you please join me in this journey nausea. I need your expertise. She's one of the foremost experts in crypto in the world, and she joined me. Her husband said it was okay for me to be on bended knee in front of her. It was not a problem, and he was cool with that. And so she is incredible. So I wanted to mention her because we talk about everybody talk about crypto and they think it's male driven and tech is male driven.
But they are incredible women doing so many incredible things in the tech space and the crypto space, like NASA. So why is recirculating the dollar so critical? If we look back to the original Black Wall Street and the inspiration for the name of the Digital platform, the Black Wall Street was the original Black Street. From nineteen oh five to nineteen twenty one, ow Gurley founded thirty five blocks in Talls, Oklahoma, the Greenwood District, and what happened
was a dollar recirculated. I believe there were three distinct pillars that built wealth in that ecosystem, and these are the pillars that we tried to replicate with our digital platform. Pillar number one institutional ownership. We've talked about that most of this conversation. We owned the businesses, owned the intellectual property, own the land. So ownership is critical. Pillar number two institutional trust. We haven't talked about this much. They trusted
each other to transact with each other. Imagine that black folks loaning each other money, black folks actually working together, black folks spending money with each other. Institutional trust. And then pillar number three of these three wealth building pillars to me, and perhaps the most important, was the movement of money or capital within the ecosystem. Where during that time a dollar chain saying sixty to one hundred times
back then that was a year to three years. As I said earlier, a dollar lea's a blackmunley within sixty seven hours. We have one point two trillion dollars of spending power in the black community. Yet it comes in because we work hard. Everybody. We all know people are in two three jobs with other side hustles. But the problem is the money leaves. We don't have the ability to recirculate. Just think about this. I'm gonna drop this on you. A thirty billion dollar industry black female hair care.
We don't control the industry, nor do we control even the supply of it when you talk about how much money goes into the Korean community and other communities that own over three to four thousand hair care shops throughout the country, payday Lender. We can go on and on and on. The point is the money leaves. We have to recirculate those dollars, and now digital platforms allow us to do it. Now, why people say, hell man, I love my cash shaff Why is cash shaff a problem?
The reason why we launched the digital wallet first is that if we don't start owning our digital wallets, as the money starts moving into a digital currency, then the dollar's gonna start leaving within six to seven seconds, let alone six to seven hours. We have to own our own wallets. So if you use Apple pay Apple Wallet, if you use zeale Venmo, PayPal, cash app, who owns those? Do they look like anybody in this room. That's why we we started our MVP with a wallet, and we
can digitally recirculate those dollars on platform. Right, I want to I want to bring superphone onto platform and then you could pay for superphone through the Black Wall Street wallet. You understand how this starts to work. You understand how it starts to recirculate and create jobs and opportunity. That's how it works. And and and I'll just say this in the in that spirit, please y'all take out your phones.
Please go to the app store or your or or Google, Google, uh is, Android iOS and download the Black Just type in the Black Wall Street download it. You can still use your cash AFT that's okay, but use a black platform too, That's all I'm saying. Just add it on. Don't make cash APT or PayPal your only wallet. You can actually add black owned wallets to it. And that to me is the secret sauce. No one's saying, yo,
don't do anything you're doing is bad. It's just saying, add on a black alternative, just like you saying, you know, I gotta approach my people, set up, set me up with community. But I'm gonna get rid of community now and go to superphone.
Amen.
That's it. That's it.
Dare you have it?
Ladies and gentlemen, roundup applause for Ryan Leslie and Hill Harper.
One time, and y'all listen. I wouldn't I wouldn't. I wouldn't be I wouldn't be.
Keeping it a stack if I didn't say that I actually respond to everyone that actually is looking for that mentor that's looking for that coach, that's looking to reach that peak performance in the in the prime of their life. So in the same way he said, take out your phone and download the Black Wall Street app. Text Ryan dot com. Try it out. Text Ryan dot com. You
can leave your number there. I respond to everyone. I do the phone calls, thirty phone calls a day till I till I get through the touch touch base with everybody. But it's a pleasure honored to be up here with these brothers. Let's give it up one more time.
Yes, give it up leisure y'all.
My graduates from my school being forced backdrop b drop, Mike drop, back drop drop.
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