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All right, guys, Welcome back Episode twenty nine. This is an extremely special episode for us because we are going international, right, We're going international vir content. As we said before, a lot of people you know, always access for stuff outside of America, so we thought this would be a good idea and we're gonna touch Mother Africa, the continent.
We got a large fan base out there, yeah for sure.
So before I start, I wanted to shout out all of our international listeners. We are trending on the top charts and a lot of different companies countries Canada, South Africa, Mosambique, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Grenada, Barbados, Barswana, Jamaica, UK, DR the Netherlands and Trinidad. They say Tanzania, I think I said Tanania. So yeah, shout out to you guys man that we really appreciate you. You know, coming from America, coming from New York, who knew that somebody in South
Africa will be interested in our conversation. But once again, that just goes to show you the power of the Internet. And in Great Britain too, Oh yeah great. But well we're gonna do something in London.
Ye, A lot of people from London always asking us when we come in.
Toronto and London are two biggest international markets, so you know that's special. But we know everybody else and it's all a melting pot to a lot most people from our listeners, probably in Toronto and UK, they're immigrants on some level. Their parents, you know, they come from Africa, they come from Jamaica, they come from the island. So it's all a melton pot. It all mixes together. So we have a very familiar guest if you listen to the podcast, because he was the guest on the last podcast.
It's pushing a double hitter. It's qucially the double header for us first, y'all, so welcome back having me.
Yeah, yes, we did a wardrobe story. It was too long. We had to make sure you get two episodes.
Yes, yes, all right, so we're going to talk about Africa. Right. We're gonna talk about a lot of different things in Africa, but first we're going to talk about something that started in America reached over to Africa, which is basketball.
Right.
Basketball is a global sport. If anybody is not familiar, I played basketball in my whole life. That was my original plans going to the NBA.
As most young people in our community.
Yes, right, so now my son has to live up to that.
There's a lot of pressure on them.
So so, but the NBA is strategically spreading its wings across the globe.
Right.
If you know anything about sports, you know soccer is the most dominant sport in the world football football, It's house. Yeah, yes, exactly. American football is what they call our football. That's the most popular sport in almost every country in the world. But basketball is catching up close, probably second in majority of the countries. It's huge in Asia. Think it's like the number one sport in China, and it is the
number two sport in Africa, right behind soccer football. So the NBA decided that they're going to open a branch in Africa.
Yeah.
I actually wrote about this on Instagram. But it's going to be NBA Africa.
I think nine different countries are going to be participating, and it just shows the spread of the game. And I think it goes back to we can we can pinpoint it back to like the original Dream Team in nineteen ninety two.
Hopefully all listeners can remember back that far.
It seems crazy to us, but like, yeah, nineteen ninety two when the Dream Team played at in Goola and they won by like seventy something points, But it was the fact that you had people from a country in Africa competing with Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird and all those greats and then fast forward, right, like a guy like Joel Embiid who's now an NBA superstar, And you know gods like Surge and Vodka and Siakam come from you know, countries in Africa.
You can contribute to that, to that game, of course.
And it's similar to like how like Rashall was saying, like China it's number two sport there, right, or close maybe number one, but like the impact that a guy
like Yao Ming has had of course, right. So like you see now when when NBA players, especially those who have marketing deals, they do the season right and the first stop they that they have on the off season, they do it to China exactly right, right, And then you got companies like Leaning and all these other companies signing guys because they know the global spread of it, right right, Like that's our export. Whereas sports like baseball it's played in China but not played in other countries,
right right. Like and same thing with American football. They tried it in London, botch.
And that's what was the only international American sports exactly the fact.
So you you used to work for NBA League pass right, that's right?
Yeah? And then so.
You you were a part of the African launch of the NBA Pass. Yeah, yeah, can you talk about that?
Sure? Sure, sure, So I pay out every every year.
So EMI League Pass for those who don't knows, like the Netflix for basketball. So obviously you could watch if you live in New York. Well let's say you live in Chicago. You basically if you're your local television station is only going to show you the Bulls, right, and then maybe you could watch maybe a national televised game.
That has some other teams. But let's say you live.
In Chicago and you are a Rockets fan and you want to watch every game, you had to subscribe to the NBA League Pass.
And so that's how it works in the US.
But people that are NBA fans internationally, they're not going to get as many games on their local television or they may not even people can.
Record what national exactly.
So now you can watch all the games on your app, on your app or your Apple TV or your local or your PlayStation.
So I was on the team that was responsible.
For growing the Digital plaf Digital League Pass outside the US and Africa was a major focus for US and it was a growth area from a monetary standpoint. China Australia, Canada, UK, where the where the I guess the places that most of the revenue came from.
But for the what they saw the future growth.
From was was Africa for two reasons, not only from customer consumption standpoint, but from a talent standpoint too.
Yeah. I remember, I'm a huge Bulls fan.
So I remember Lou Dang, right, and he's doing some amazing things in Africa.
But like you know, he's doing stuff with Nipsey's partner.
Yeah, gross David Charlotte, David Gros get him on the podcast. So like, what was the plan do you know, like the NBA's plan to because obviously this is planned out. What was their plan to move into Africa?
So there's I mean there's always been relationships. You mentioned gla game, but there's been NBA players from Africa since the eighties, right. So you had a Keem who changed, You had new Ball, his son just got drafted exactly.
Then you had uh change his name. Yeah, there was no age prior to him coming to America. When he went to Houston, they put the h on it.
I'm not even sure what the best today's yes, right, And then you had the Kirie Matumbo Pools who followed a new pat Bowl and Millon Ball.
We mentioned, Yeah, the KEMPE has some direct ties into getting the league into Africa.
Right, so you know those old players always had philanthropic relationships with the league, right, so like doing doing like you know, nonprofit stuff. But in that what happened was the league would go there and like wow, like you're from this tribe and everybody in this tribe at six
y nine, and like, we can do something here. And obviously you have the visual league being the you know, the blackest league, right, there's some visual connections there, and so they had to realize and then I think they learned a lot from the other leagues, right, for instance, the investment that the MLB mess Major League Baseball doesn't, the Maican Republic doesn't, Venezuela doesn't. In some of these other countries where there's a bunch of talent is on
another level. So they're like, hey, we could do this. We can make this whole content on our farms. They're trying to do that. Now, that's funny you said that.
Major They just had the Yankees and the Red Sox play in London and everybody was like, we don't even care about baseball. It's like it's soccer or it's cricket, right, you know what I'm saying, So like that's true, like they're trying to spend it two and I think maybe
and maybe it's true or not. But because of the population of Africa, like we know that majority of the population is under like twenty five exactly, right, so there's a huge growth curve exactly for potential athletes and business people, right exactly.
So a lot of people asked the question. I wasn't really one hundred percent sure.
The teams.
I don't know if you know or not, but the teams, like the nine teams, who's going to be the owners of those teams? You know, people in Africa?
Or yeah?
So this actually so I left the league prior to this being an announced. I don't know one hundred percent sure the full structure, but what I remember it being is a combination, like a co ownership between the league and local partners.
Yeah okay, because well, how do you feel personally just your personal opinion about that. Do you feel like Africa would have been better to have their only because you're Europe has their own leagues, Like people come go from America all the time, and Africa does have leagues. In Nigeria specifically, it's not it's not the same it's not the same level of Europe. So but like the EuroLeague
is very strong. Do you feel like they could have done better at just forming a league together themselves or do you feel like the NBA is a is a good partnership for them.
The NBA is a good partnership.
Like you said, there are already leagues, they just haven't really taken off to the same level having had. And also there's an issue in Africa, not only between a from a sports perspective, but from a business perspective where there's not too much inter country trade, right, and so I think it would have been difficult for like a league to be cross continental and to have different things and all the ownerships being like inclusive in those specific countries.
I think the NBA being an outside force for bad for worse American Western sports force and tying it together makes it.
A lot better.
People got to visualize that, right, because this isn't like you're going from New York to Florida.
You're going from country to country.
So like when they have a Spanish League that they're all in that country, exactly what Africa's trying to do here.
Like literally you're going to nine different countries and.
Even you know, the the European leagues, just like the soccer leagues, you have the you know, you like in soccer you have Barcelona playing against Byron or Real Madrid I mean, or Manchester United. Like traveling between those countries, like their countries are really compact. Like traveling between these countries are not really a big deal. And they have
the funds to do that. Like you can't take a train from Legos to Acra or Legos to to you know, Johannesburg, like it's it's it's not the same, right, So I think the level of investment that you need in the organization you would need, the NBA could work that out.
Yah, that makes it a good partner.
And I think the African Union actually did that. They just announced that they're going to eliminate tariffs on into continental trading. We wrote about that on Instagram as well. I think it's like forty countries involved, and yeah, I think that's going to start next year where tarrofts will
be eliminated for the majority of the continent. So they actually hopefully they're going to start doing more because you said, like you know, it's not a lot of that going on right now, but hopefully that's a step in the right direction where they can actually start to trade in between the continent with each other. So all right, so now we got we got the league covered, but we're going to go into some more interesting things on the
continent on the next segment. All right, so we're now we're gonna talk about content, right because continents King, We've covered content on America, but we haven't covered continent internationally. So Iroco yep, can you explain that?
Yeah, so Iroco is Aroco TV is the is a website. It's a startup that was created in twenty and eleven. I work there from twenty twelve through almost twenty fifteen. And so what it is is basically the Netflix of Africa. And the question is why do you need in Netflix of Africa is because the third big the third biggest movie marker in the world is actually out of Nigeria. So number one is Hollywood. Number two is Bollywood. Number three is is Knowllywood. I heard it's a huge there.
It actually one of the years I worked there. It actually grows about eight hundred million USD in that place, and it's a tremendous market. It's it's interesting, at least from my perspective, I might have consumed too much Western content. It's not really my thing. But the movies are being produced for like less than ten thousand dollars and in like two weeks high volume. As you can imagine. Because the market, the movies are not the highest priced and
the biggest budget. You're not really seeing action movies. These are like romantic movies, comedy movies, movies where you don't need special effects. But basically the way it worked is the gentleman I worked for. He's a Nigerian brit So he lives in London, travel to London to Nigeria often to see family or whatever. And at the time, all of the content was in DVDs. So what his mom would do is go from London and Legos, spend maybe Christmas time or whatever their family, come back with a
suitcase full of of DVDs. He was like, well, why can't my mom consumed the content the same way I do on Netflix? And so that's how the ideas started. So move back to Nigeria, took that, took the DVD content digitized. It also built relationships with some of the movie producers. To them, they were like, because Netflix wasn't even a big thing out there at the time, They're like, you want you want to give you want to pay
me for my digital rights? And to them they're like, I don't really know what digital rights means, but like you want to give me some money, it's whatever. So they he got some exclusive pretty pretty uh cheaply and basically took that, took those that piece of content, initially put it on YouTube. It started blowing up, and because people that emigrated outside Africa that lived in the US UK, they were able they were now able to see the latest movies without having a wait for people to send
the DVDs back. And then he eventually actually raised money from a US venture capital, so that firm was actually the probably one of the first two Africa based tech firms to get the US venture capital in twenty eleven, and I joined them and opened up their New York office because their biggest audience, even though they had African content, were Africans in the US and so and then it kind of grew from there.
Wow.
So Netflix itself, right, he said, it's the Netflix of Africa. It doesn't exist on all continents, right, And that's one of the things they said that it probably potentially has some great growth and we documented, you know, some of its setbacks as well.
But what is like the price point on a rucual TV type situation.
The latest price is it depends on the country, but the latest price is it's actually similar to Netflix.
So they have a nine ninety nine plan.
There's one that's around uh around six ninety nine, but it's actually priced in and UH at least in Nigeria and uh Nayra. And it's very volatile. It depends on the US the exchange rate. But the company's expanded. So since I worked there, they've done a lot of production.
So they're actually making movies content. Yeah, and actually they they they as of two weeks ago, they actually ended up selling that production house to a French media conglomerate called kind Out kind Out Plus, so kind c A n A L plus.
How so, how many countries are there.
In so the the rocal content is global. It is everywhere.
So there when I was there and and and even now there's customers in over two hundred countries in the world because the African ds port is everywhere.
And it's just started by African.
African, Yeah, Africa and German so uh so basically too, they went so that the German person and an African person went to school in Manchester.
They met.
The African person came up with the idea and then he co founded it with the German individual and they both moved full time to Legos and built it out. Ended up opening an office in New York and London to help distribute the content.
Something else was was recently started with a German and an African right that went public.
Junior Ji so based the Ali Baba of Africa exactly. So there's this company called Rocket Internet started by German brothers. And what they do is they actually built, they built. They built companies that are successful in the first world, so Amazon back group on all that kind of stuff, and they built it in like emerging markets where those companies are not there yet. And so what they did was they looked at Ali Baba slash Amazon and they decid had to build it in Africa and they called
it Jumia. And so they're in Nigeria there in Kenya, and there's some other countries as well, and so yes, there there, it's interesting there is there is like I guess a few people of German descent that build tech companies in Africa.
So that's so they're literally watching the world as it's happening and saying, all right, let's go to a part of world where it's not happening.
And let's build it there. Exactly.
But I mean from a kid from Queens Man, like your journey has been out of this world, like a vision like that, your studies, whatever it take you like.
No, definitely not definitely not man, it's just kind of like uh working in you know, went to school. I knew I wanted to do business. They didn't know what that really meant because I didn't really have business people in my my you know, my family or even around me.
Haitian rights, yeah, man, Haitian thing is like hey, mom's a nurse, you're going to be a doctor, or if you don't want to be a doctor, to be a lawyer, if you're gonna be a layer, be engineering, and so this business think it was something different and uh study business got was was was fortunate to be part of
an internship and called in Roads in college. In college that introduced me to Wall Street for lovel wall Street financial crisis happened, fell out of love of Wall Street, went to school and kind of discovered tech and the world and how it was using around the world, and kind of that's kind of how I ended up working at the company.
So we talk about music. I know you I mentioned on the content of musical content, Yeah, which is hot right now. As far as afrobeats, it's a bunch of artists out there with his kid.
Uh he just put out his album. Yeah yeah, yeah.
Somebody else has had a song on the radio they keep playing all the time. Uh that Joanna song. Joanna is like things that.
I forget the name the title. Then God, all I know is that it follows me every time I get in the car.
Is knows he's burning up. Now.
I think you got a song with casting over to but yeah, can you talk about that?
Yeah yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
So we back then we uh, this is twenty twelve to thirteen, and so obviously being in the movie space in Nigeria, there was a cause proximity to the musical space and so the CEO came out with the idea like all right, let's come up with a company called ira King, which we would it's basically Spotify for Africa where we take that content. And so a lot of these people you talk about we did. We were the first ones to digitize that content even back then.
And uh, it was too early. It was too early.
I mean the company was out there and it just the music wasn't as popular yet here. And then obviously probably after they decided to wrap it up and focus only on music, I mean movies one hundred percent.
Like that's when like Whisky was doing songs with Drake and it was just an early thing.
And if they were, if they were to capt that up like that company would have been something different because that you know, afrobeat is the thing.
Right right now for sure. Yeah.
So and it's it's it's it's it's crazy. I mean because of the Internet, you know, music and content and just cultures is so there's no borders.
Afrobeats feels like reggae to me.
It does a vib it's a whole vibe like that. It's a similar type of vib I think.
So, you know, I think we're all in a similar age groups like mid thirties whatever growing up in New York City area, Like you couldn't go to like a party in the late nineties and early two thousands without hearing you know, dance had his time where he was doing songs with everybody then. Like I think it was a big era of like reggaetne reggae, albat is it. So I think everybody there's always like some of this this like African daspora music that's taking over.
Afrobeat is having this thing right now.
All of the music, I mean it has roots in Africa of course, you know, as far as the drums of course, and you know all of that stuff. So you know, it's not surprised that it's popular because it's always been popular, just not it wasn't framed in that way, right right, So like you said, it sounds like reggae, but really probably the reggae comes from that originally.
Like you know what I'm saying, So like jazz and.
What's fluid ben because people out there love reggae, people out there love even Haitian music. White Clefs is huge over there in Africa. Like I go, like, you know, I that's why Cleves young. They might be the young. Yeah, exactly. My you know, my my in laws are from Nairobian. I go over there and like I go and I listen to I'll be at a restaurant and then the
server would have a Jamaican wristband. I'm like, you've been in Jamaica, Like you know, I've been you know, from I mean Haitians, back from Queen So like, I've always been around Jamaican's.
I've been in Jamaica many times.
And so I was like, oh, where you from in Jamaica, Like what are you doing here in Narobi And They're like, no, I've never been in Jamaica.
I just love reggae culture. Culture. The culture is huge, right, and so yeah, it's kind of gone back.
So definitely, I do believe although reggae has African rules, I think the afrobeats learned from reggae too.
Yeah, for sure.
And even I mean it's all cross because even if you go to Jamaica, you see a lot of flags from Ethiopia.
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Shout out to the rosters. Yes, yes, yes, so you know it's it's it's all. It's all connected for sure. So let me ask you this as far as the music scene, because you know the music is blowing up, do they have record labels in Africa or are those artists being signed to like American labels.
So they have record labels, but most of the people that you see successful here are they have affiliations with US record labels. And that's that's what's helped quite a bit bad. At the time, it wasn't like that. But you know, actually the individual that ran that division at the company I was at here, he left and went to Sony Music. So like the that at that time, they realized that it was heating up and they started putting people on the ground to kind of pull that
talent in and be that that in between. So yeah, so for the most the people that you see now and having success. They're backed by US powerhouses.
So even then, even at that venture in Iroco, your job was to do the analytics, right, yeah, so what.
Type of things are you looking for? Like sure, sure, so yeah, So it was a lot of things.
So the analytics were mainly analytics that you would see on any digital platform. So I was responsible with looking at the website, seeing where people were coming from and use that information to figure out what the best marketing campaigns were. Like you would see if people came from Google, people came from an email, people came from Facebook. I would look at also what people do on a website to see whether we should do things to the website
that would make the navigation a lot easier. And then from a content perspective, the cool thing about digital content you could put numbers behind actually the amount of people that were playing a certain piece of content, and then I could go to the content team and they're like, all right, drama movies are on average played twenty five percent more on our web site. Therefore drama movies are
more viable. So they would use that information to go to the negotiation table to decide what content to renew, what to buy and et cetera.
The numbers guy.
All right, So in the next seven we're going to talk about a few other things. And the question that everybody asks anytime that we post anything about Africa is it's China behind it, Chinese influence. So we're gonna talk about Chinese influence in Africa a little bit. We're gonn talk about some other things as well, So be right
back with that, all right. So one of the things that everybody always comments, so anytime we post anything about Africa is like the Chinese behind it, was Chinese involved with So anybody's not familiar China. And it's not just Africa, it's all over the world, right, Jamaica heavy and heavy influence. China has a heavy influence in Jamaica and they also have a heavy influence in Africa.
A lot of countries in Africa, the continent.
They really have a China has been involved in Jamaica for a long time. Jamaican billionaire. Yeah, Chinese. Yeah, it bugged me out the first time. I really I ain't really I saw somebody that was Chinese, but they was talking in Jamaican accents.
Why, but it's a lot of people in Jamaica. It's a very diverse country.
Yeah, I mean my grandparents Jewish, you know what I mean.
So like when I heard both of your grandparents, my grandfather. So when I when you see them on TV, talk like my mom, my mom's last made The name is Twari, which is a Jewish diamond company in Jamaica. So like when I sold on TV, it's like bugs me out. I'm like, wait, they don't look like us. They sound just like us though it.
Is we It's crazy.
So all right, can we talk about that Chinese influence in Africa?
China obviously, you know, since they kind of you know, they're still communists kind of, but over the last whatever three or four decades, they've embraced capitalism and it's been with the aggression. The level of wealth that's being created there is immense, level trade is immense, and with that they want to be a world player, right, and to be a world player you have to, you know, put
stakes in other places. And they see Africa as a place that's been ignored by the Europeans, the US, et cetera. And there's a lot of opportunity and the way they're doing it is by using.
Financial capital as well as human capital. Right.
So what they there's a lot there's a lack of infrastructure across the continent. So what they're doing, they're going to countries and they're saying, hey, we'll build a new highway for you, we'll build a new bridge for you, we'll build a new factory for you. But you know, after we build it, you know, maybe we have to
have exclusive rights to it. Maybe you know, we need to do X, y and z, and so in doing that, they're just building everything, you know, they're you know, they're having the opportunity to kind of uh state their claim and so they're going into it at least from the onset of as if they're helping, which there is a level of it.
But the way they're doing it, a lot of people don't agree with.
It, right, because what they do is they you're not hiring local people, right, they bring their own people to build everything from China.
Yeah, cheaper labor, cheaper labor.
There's even people, I mean, I don't know if this is true or not, but the people saying that they're taking prisoners from China and using them as like labor in Africa.
That's that's that's I don't I don't know the truth there, that's there's a whole there's a whole story on it on HBO UH Sports. They covered it. It was like pretty in detail.
It was that was one of the rumors that they covered so right, and you know, and you.
Know, I think, I don't want to I don't want to like feed into like the whole Africa and nepotism and and and corruption story.
But there's a lot of out there.
And so what they're doing is they're like sometimes they're Greece in the pockets certain politicians and then politicians are signing things.
Off and and that's it. So then you have a.
Road, you have a bridge, you have a something like that, just a railroad built by Chinese hospital hospital. And then you know then after that they have ownership or they could have ownership. What they might do is they may do something where they they offered, they built it, they offered the financing, and they do it at like maybe a user's interest rate to the point where the country can't pay it and then they're stuck with it. So you know, there's a story in Kenya that I could
go into if you want. Yeah, yeah, so Kenya recently, you know there's a port that is in their uh their Mambasa which is a huge port city. And in Kenya where it was a port that was rebuilt shipping port that was rebuilt by the Chinese and and and part as part of the deal. Somehow they built it, but they lent Kenyon's money to pay them for building it, and then Kenyans cannot keep up with the interest rates
and they took the port over. But the what was said is that it's it's temporary, but you know, you know things are not always not.
But they did in Jamaica to this, so they built the airplane. They bailed the airport out, like the second largest airport in Jamaica, and it's like on a twenty year lead, like they own it for twenty years, but then they can buy it back at the twenty year mark. But probably something tough me toughing them to buy it back. So they probably just own the airport now, right.
But in their defense, I mean, Africa has been the victim of like usurus financial transactions for a long time because you know, most of Africa got independent in like the sixties into the seventies. There have been multiple dictatorships and all types of stuff and when they had when they got independent, these European powers that were involved just
pulled out, didn't care. They left the countries in bad shape and the World Bank IMF came in and a lot of those loans were with caviast that were not great for the countries. And so China's doing this kind of just kind of just stepping into that role bit and to the country, they're like, at least these people are building us stuff. So like there's positive and negatives to it.
Like all things in life.
So and then also, like you said, I mean, it's the politicians are the ones that actually have to sign off on it. They're not putting a gun at anybody's head and taking the land over. So ultimately, if they are taking over Africa, it's the politician's fault, right you can't. I mean, you know, they're going to do what's best for their country, right like any country would do. America has done that for generations. Every country would do that.
But it's up to the country to say no, all money is not good money.
Right right, right, you got that country has to think long term and the leaders have think long term, and that's not always the case. And another reason why they love Africa is because they've been building so much in in China. They need materials for that, and there's materials in Africa, every material so you know, you can't do They realize you can't do what they did in the eighteen hundreds nineteen hundred, come with guns and whatever, like let's.
Let's let me do a deal with you.
I'm gonna go and build this school for this hospital, give you buses, do whatever. And by the way, like that mining over there, like yo, like I see can we get see I.
See Belgians doing some stuff there.
I see some British Like, why don't you just like let us hold that ourselves because we are We're really your friend.
So yeah, that's that.
You know, they're they're they're definitely being strategic about it.
It's a gold continent for a reason, you know what I mean. So in terms of like Americans of African descent, what do you think long term as far as investments in the continent.
Yeah, I think it's very very important for us to be involved. I think there's a lot of opportunity. Like we said on the side earlier, I think over fifty percent of the population in Africa is.
Is under the age of twenty five.
I think that's I believe that's a stat that Africa is one of the Africa in Asia all the only two continents where the POB is growing, like the US, Europe, Japan, Like these are places where people are having less or less children, so there's less and less people, whereas in Africa is growing. So therefore obviously you have more talent and also more consumption. Obviously this is a place where people of African set, whoever whoever they are, is it's more of as.
Looked upon an asset.
Like it's it's not as easy for us to just drop in Belgium or drop in Malaysia and just open up a business. But like I'm not gonna say, I'm not saying it's easy in Nigeria or but Tswana, but it's easier, right, And I think it's just important, Like you know, we've we we we come from that country, that continent originally, everybody has a different story about how they ended up here, right, and it would be I think it's very important for us to like take take part in it its resurgence.
Now for sure, I've seen Akon he said that he encouraged all Americans, Black Americans specifically, to go back to Africa and taking talent, like whatever talent you have, whether it be real estate, whether it be manufacturing, construction, music, whatever, and established business there because he was like, you know, it's still a learning curve where it's still learning and we might have the expertise to help out. And like you said, even if you've never been, it's still a
connection on a certain level. It's got to be a connection for sure. So there was there was.
I was speaking to a gentleman in Atlanta stop and he does work in Africa, and he was telling me something this might be true or not if you can prove like through like your ancestry dot Com or something like that, if there's any ties to country in Africa.
Like you can get a dual citizenship within like six months. Is that true or not?
I think I think Ghana was offering African Americans. I think they still are citizenship. It was like part of a campaign come home campaign that they were running. I'm pretty sure Gana was doing that. I'm not familiar with any other country, but I know Gana specifically was offering that, and I think they still are offering that. So shout out to Ghana.
For sure. We gotta go back. We said that we gotta gom sorry to go.
Yeah, we gotta go. We gotta do something out there. It's a new way I saw on I g New Year's like a lot of celebrities, a lot of people are going to a crowd to something New Years.
So, yeah, hear me talking about that all the time.
He spends like the last two weeks of the year in South Africa, right, Yeah, South Africa is beautiful.
Yeah, I want to go out to Africa period. You know, there's so many different places in Africa. So yeah, we definitely got touched. Can we talk about the.
Yeah, yeah, So am pessa is M stands for mobile for mobile passa is money in Swahili and basically it's mobile money. And so you know, obviously people use mobile money all over the globe. In the US, we used v we use cash app, but not to an extent they use it out there. Like the first real successful implementation of mobile money was in It was in Kenya,
and it's something that everybody uses. It's something that is it's actually that's from like two thousand and eight, like way back then, people were using money to sex message to each other and it's it's still considered the most successful implementation of mobile money. Like you, these are people. These are you know, we've always had financial instruction infrastructure in the US. You had bank accounts, you have credit cards,
et cetera. These are individuals that didn't even have that, but they were able to transact digitally using their phones.
Yeah, I'm sorry, cut you up, but yeah, I saw it in sixteen minutes. It was crazy because they were saying that like how successful it was, and they were saying, like, you know, especially in a lot of the rural parts, they can't get to a bank. Even if there is a bank, they can't get to it physically, So like I forgot how much. But a large population, large part of the population is unbanked and have bank acounts, never
had bank accounts, so not a mobile thing. But everybody has to cell phone, even if it's like a cheap cell phone, but they still have a cell phone. So it made life tremendously easier when they developed that program because not everybody uses that, so easy you don't have to use the band. I think the guy is like a billionaire who developed that.
Yeah, yeah, he was part of that, but also it came together with a marriage between basically Seth Fari Khan, which is like their Verizon, like their major cell phone provider, and Equity Bank, which is a major bank. So it was as if, you know, if I was to use a parallel in the US, It's as if Verizon and JP Morgan Chase came together and got along and they just they created this huge digital digital thing in a way because it's a it was emerging market and had
less infrastructure. You have fewer players, you had a few fewer regulatory hurdles, and it just came together seamlessly and took over.
That's powerful, man. So what's your overall outlook.
On the content?
I know you've been there a lot and your family half your wife is from Kenyon as well, and you worked in the NBA and stuff like that on on Africa.
What's your You're optimistic. I'm optimistic. I think similar to like crypto, like you know, tread carefully. Like for instance, if the people like from when I initially landed worked in Africa to now, a lot of those currencies are down like fifty percent, right, so they've they've you know, there was a time and I would say the you know, early twenty ten, so like to on ten to twenty fourteen, where all those currencies were booming, there was so much
investment happening. But there's a there's been a lot of like political unrest. The economies have not taken off to the level that they that people thought, and so there's been a lot of uh, there's been a bit of a pullback. That being said, that's good opportunity to put money in. I just want to put all my money in.
And also I would make sure that I think it's very important for you to understand the local market, right, So like, for instance, like you build an app out here in the US, I'm building iPhone first be gets over there, Android is king, right, you got to know what people are going through. You have to know that you know, one trouble we had, it's like all right, well people, we want people to streaming movies or watch schemes on their cell phone. In the US, my team
mobile data plan is unlimited. Over there, people are prepaid and the infrastructure is not even that strong. So like streaming those megabytes and to even watch a game like you could kill somebody's whole monthly allotment of Watch one game, all right, so.
They're more likely to wait until they could get to Wi.
Fi to download something, whereas we here don't care, right, so you have to make sure if you would have built a product for them, you have to take those things to account.
That's dope.
That's yeah, man, thank you for that information.
Man.
We appreciate it, and we're gonna try This is actually something that we want to try to do, uh, for every every continent, so we all have like this was an Africa addition, We'll have a Europe edition, We'll have a South America.
Different countries, Caribbean edition. Yeah, yeah, different countries.
Because I feel like it's important a to acknowledge that the people all over the world, and it's also important once again for Americans investment. Majority of our listeners are Americans. But you got to expand your mind. You got to see the world for what it is. You got to
see bigger than just your neighborhood and your city. It's tough a lot of times we get so bogged down in our day to day life that we don't see past our ten mile radius or even two mile radius, Like we just worry about where we're at but the world moves quick and you know, business is done all over the world and just people. You know, it's good to experience different cultures and know what's going on outside
of it's just your neighborhood. So we could be that window of the world and bring people that are knowledgeable about, you know, different areas in the world and actually travel to those places as well. That's one thing we're going to do. We're on toll right now hitting different cities in America, but we're gonna eventually we're gonna go overseas as well. We're going to go to these places and actually talk to people in those actual countries as well.
Hopefully we can bring some alumni with us. Yeah, now your alumni.
Now show up for sure. So once again, if you got any opportunities speaking and gagings and feel free to hit us up. Email us is the best, but email dm us. We open it to traveling domestically and internationally. We're going to be on a college tourist for We're gonna hit a couple of colleges. We've been announcing that pretty soon. So yeah, we're going to try to spread the word of financial literacy and education all over the world,
every language, every population. As I said, it's not something that's just limited to one communities, but every every community world man con that's that's the kind of vision that we're looking at all over the world. So once again, thank you. Can you tell the people your information how to how to reach you?
Yeah, no, thank you for having me. This was fun. I uh, you find me on Twitter as well as I G It's Fritz Chain so f R d z c h A I N. My name Fitz Charles. On LinkedIn you can add me and that's it.
Yeah.
I'm always you know, my dam is open. I'm always willing to chat with people, learn from people.
And what's your podcast too, It's.
Called coin Gamma. Yeah, we talked about crypto blockchain forty eight episodes then yeah, yeah, exactly, thank you. So, yeah, we talk about crypto blockchain. We needed some of the biggest leaders in the space. Just talking about the different trends. It's always something new going on. Right now it's about Facebook, so next week about it will be about something different.
You're talking about Libra yeah, Libra.
Yeah, so yeah, check me out and definitely appreciate your time for support that.
Thank you for coming Troy. Yeah, pet you on community. Yeah, I'll patreon community. It always grows. So thank you to everybody that's supporting. You know.
That's our proud to pay program again, rest in peace to it. I want to give a big shout out to Brenda. She's one of our patrons from California. She's trying to link the dots so we can come out to Oakland. So shout out to Brenda and everybody that's joined. Like I said, you can join at any tier. There's about this five of them. But the more you support that, the more we're gonna be able to do things like travel internationally and domestically.
So continue to support that. We got some new merch.
If you was on Instagram, you saw the eyl Versity that's coming soon, so be on the look out for that and some more some more other things that we got.
We're gonna put on that on the website as well. The website. We about the redesign.
Yeah about the redesign the website Digital brands with a Z shout out to them, Yeah, for sure. And the merch, Yes, don't forget the merch. The merger is another way to support the podcast. So we have merch up right now or your Legia dot com and putting new merch up, and we make we make statements with our clothes, and we complain a lot about designers that you know are openly racist, and you know, we still.
Wear the clothes.
So it's like you why not wear something that you know is a it says something like all of our clothes say something that you know is financially related and also you know it's from the culture. So that's a way to support. And then we're on tour. As I mentioned previously, we we hit La was the first stop we're doing like these network meeting greets. La was the first stop, was crazy, and then we did Brooklyn. Brooklyn was really crazy, and then Atlanta and Atlanta was even more.
So we're just going to keep the momentum going. I think the next stop that we're going to do is Houston. Shout out to Ashtown, so Acetown man, we need your hoy to show your love. We announce that soon.
We try and make it to the ranch y'all, so like y'all got to help us get there.
Jane Prince, what's up man? A little keykey, what's up, don key? That's my guy. We got a lot of good people that we connected with in Houston. So I've never been to Texas, so I'm looking forward to going to Houston for sure, and then we're probably through DMV Philly too. But if you want us to come to your city, I know Chicago. We're kind of on the cusp with that. A lot of people have been hitting us about Chicago, but let us know, let us know
where we need to go. And the purpose of these networking events is just to bring people together and to meet new people and meet us, meet some of the EYO alumni, but more importantly, meet people in your city, exchange information, discuss business ideas. You never know who your next business partner might be, never know who you can make money with by homework, through different things of that nature. So relationships are very important. A lot of times we
don't fully understand that. So that's the whole point of these network meeting Greece that we're doing. And my book tip of the Week is Howard French is the author and the name of the book is China's Second Continent. It's about Africa, China's influence in Africa. Fitting since we've talked about that, so that's a good book, highly suggested, recommend it. So yes, thank you guys for rocking with us, and we will see you next week.
Peace. Peace, Peace.
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