He speaks of the planet Charlamagne to God here and as we come closer to closing out this year, I just want to say thank you for tuning it into the Black Effect podcast Network. There have been so many great moments over the past year. Take a listen to some of those captivating moments in this special best of episode.
This is Money and Wealth and I'm honored to be here with a new friend, Alex Rodriguez. Mean he would know him s A. Rod. Let me give you the part that's easy for all the baseball fans. You may or may not know that he came from the Minnican Republic. His family were immigrants. Victor Rodriguez's father and Lord is Nellie Nevado Melo. I hope I said that right his mother. They came from, Well, he came it was born in nineteen seventy five in Washington Heights section of Manhattan and
came to this country with a dream. He was raised alongside his siblings Joe and Susie and achieved incredible things in his professional career that started, as you know, playing twenty two seasons in Major League Baseball. That's the Seattle Mariners, the Texas Rangers, the New York Yankees, and of course later as chairman CEO of a rod But we're going to get into that because it actually wasn't later. It was actually almost right away. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
And he has been passionate about business and sports and community, and I will say, from my own perspective, I would say the maximization and unleashing of untapped human potential at scale. We'll talk about a little bit about that about with regard to how he treats his employees. Alex and I spent some time in the community a few months ago here in Atlanta at Clark Atlanta University. He showed up very simply for no compensation, because he was asked to.
And so this is an important conversation about things that matter most at a time where everything matters.
And I'm honored to be with my new friend Alex Rodriguez.
John great to be here, man. We've been looking forward to doing this together.
We have. We have And the story of your sports success is a topic of obvious legend. And I don't know if you get tired of talking about it or not, but I want to talk about your sports success from a different window a different vantage point.
I want to understand.
Was this always about you, you aspiring to do more? My guess is initially you were passionate, absolutely passionate about baseball. That was when you were in the Dominican Republic. That was something that you obsessed on.
Is that right?
Yeah?
Look, ever since, you know, I was born in New York.
I was born in the shadows of Yeshiba University, right around one eighty third in nineteen seventy five, very close to Yankee Stadium. My father owned a shoe store in our apartment. And very much like my father, ever since I was ten years old, I've always wanted to be a baseball player and a businessman. And I was fairly
good with numbers. My father was too, and I had a passion for it, and ever since I was a rookie and I got drafted in nineteen ninety three by the Seattle Mariners with the one pick overall in the first round, I was thinking about life after baseball because I've seen enough examples of players that have gone like me, from rags to riches back to rags, and I didn't want to be an addition to that, you know, unfortunate
number or statistic. So that was my passion early on, was to have a path, to have a good life post baseball.
You were inspired by that balance initially from your dad.
Is that right? Yep? Yeah?
And Mom is where you got the self esteem. She poured the love in you and said you can do anything, is that right?
Yeah?
You know my father he passed some years ago, and he left us when he was ten, and I never saw in those ten years my father raise his voice once.
Even though he was an alcoholic.
He would drink twenty twenty four beer cans a day, Budweiser I'll never forget, and two packs of cigarettes a day. So my mind is a ten year old John. I thought my father's going to be dead by the age of thirty. There's no way that anyone can live with this type of lifestyle. But never saw him drunk, even though I'm sure he was. But he was an acting alcoholic and very functional. And the amount of cigarets he was smoking my house was like in toxic.
But my mother.
I got my toughness and my grit and my work ethic from her. She worked at General Mortars for over twenty years and then when dad left, she had to pivot. Once we arrived in Miami at the age of nine,
and I joined the Boys and Girls Club. She was a secretary of the morning at surf table at night, and I remember her coming home after twelve hours of working around midnight, sometimes eleven o'clock at night, and I would just be watching finishing, watching the Mets game, watching Kinner's corner, and I would give her a big hug, and I would take her pouch where she had her tip money, and I would start counting that money. And you know, on Thursdays and Mondays, Tuesdays it was thirty
two twenty eight dollars twenty nine thirty. But Friday and Saturdays with the big ticket nights, and she would come home sometimes with fifty eight fifty nine sixty bucks. It said, boy, we're richer than Warren Buffett. We made it big. But then John, she did been interesting. She would then take that pouch and put that money out and put it in an envelope yep. And then she would say, son,
help me, you know, pick up the mattress. And I remember, like an eleven year old boy, like every was yesterday, she would take that envelope and put it right under that mattress, and I said, Mom, but wait a minute, there's banks all around our neighborhoods.
Why don't you go put the money there?
And being an immigrant mother and not trusting banks, she goes, Son, we don't trust banks, We trust cash, and we trust our mattress. So that was the start for me where I said, financial literacy is going to unlock my future and hopefully get me out of this neighborhood.
This is my pool for economic empowerment and the uplifting of all of us. Whether color is not black or white as in race, or red or blue as in politics. It's great as in at least in the United States of America, US currency. Wherever you're listening to this and watching this around the world, we got to message for you too. This is about the aspiration generation. This is about all of us coming up from nothing. This is about all of us aspiring and succeeding. And we have
a very special episode today. Not only is it with my brother and my friend Van Jones, who I.
Think is a genius.
I believe is beyond and ahead of his time, which is why some people give him drama and problems because they don't really understand the frequency that he's on, and he does not always take the time to break down how he's thinking. He's too busy doing and moving then to be overly concerned about how something is being interpreted. He rather his results speak for him. But I think it's important to be able to understand van So they
listen to him. So they said that more people trust him because he I believe is one of the true thought leaders for the twenty first century.
Now, keep in mind, we killed doctor King. Keep in mind that Doc King's friends called him Martin Luther King, Martin Luther Kumb Uncle Tom fell out one of them, and these were his friends talking. In mind, it wasn't the Afrikaans, it was the a n C that actually undercover threatened to take out uh Nelson Mandela because he was quote negotiating with the enemy d quote. He had brought uh the Firmer Well, an africaner, on his cabinet
as vice president when he became president. That was certainly ahead of his time, and nobody agreed with what he was doing. But he was a moneymaker. He was a guy bringing the cash in. He was a cachet.
So some people kept it quiet, but real talk it was people in his own party who really had great animus for him because he was just he was just a visionary. And it was Gandhi who wanted to bring two countries together into one and he was killed for that. It was Shimon Perez once again over trying to bring something rational peace to the Middle East.
Solution. I mean, we go on and on and on.
It was you know, Malcolm X who came back from Mecca and said, gee, all white people are the devil. I just prayed with white people in Mecca. He was damned in two weeks. He's messing with somebody's business plan. The President Dull Clinton once said, it's hard to get somebody agreed to the truth when the lie is paying your paycheck.
Does this would be that diabolical or that cynical? It just could be.
Look, I'm fighting a short term battle for the survival of my people, and I don't know what you're doing with you being the person with a vision maybe fighting a long term not only a battle, but trying to win the war, and those two strategies may look different. I'm a partnership guy. The protest guy maybe likes bunk John O'Brien. I think they understand now what I'm trying to do. But when I first started this work, people call me all kinds of names. Man it rolled their eyes,
like capitalism, financial literacy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, now they get it right. But when I first started this, the protest people really thought that I was a waste of time.
But I needed the protest people to set up the situation where.
The companies and governments and entities and communities wanted to partner with a guy like me to create an environment.
Where there was no need for protests anymore. I say all this to.
Say we have a radical movement of common sense.
Van and I.
But Van is even more on the forefront of progressive innovative thought than I am in many ways. But he takes less time to explain his titchy agent. He's always to explaining somebody else's situation. That's what he does on CNN all the time, explaining somebody else's situation. So I want, I believe, and Van does not know. Van does not know I'm about to say this. This is all live and in the moment we have not talked about this, and other than Van saying ask me whatever you like,
I believe that we are in this moment history. Van's heard this part before. I believe we're sitting at a moment in history, but history does not. He'll feel historic when you're sitting in it, because like another day, I believe this is a third reconstruction. Vance heard me say this before. Some of the listeners have heard me say this before, from the streets to the sweets, from civil
rights to civil rights. What you have not heard me say is, I think we need a radical transformational approach to the new capitalism, to the new economy, to the future. And that part I want that And I think if people can hear you say your vision on that part, which we have not discussed, and you did not know I was going to say. But if I gave you the charge of saying what's bold and audacious?
If you knew there was a future and you knew you could not fail, what would you say? What would you do?
Yeah?
What's your vision for all of us, particularly black folks, but all of them on a go board basis we look.
I mean, this is a deep question and let me let me go backwards before I go forward.
You have to ask a deep question about why.
If you believe in God, if you believe in a just university, you believe in any any kind of spirit of love or whatever you want to call it. Why did black people get stolen from Africa? M brutalized, mistreated, rape assaulted, Not for a day, not for a weekend, not for a decade, not for a century, but for three centuries?
Why how is.
That consistent with any high spiritual understanding?
I mean, why are we here as African Americans.
We'll never know the answer, but you could choose to say that the West Western civilization needed a soul, needed a moral compass, needed something within it that could keep its worst impulses and check and insist that it reached its highest goals and aspirations. And that's really what African Americans, in my mind, is what we are.
If you took.
African Americans out of this country, even just on a political policy voting basis, this country would lurch so far into authoritarianism and despotism that you would have a menace on the planets such which you'd never seen before.
And so we have a responsibility in.
The backup, you've already gone deep. Explain to people what you just said like that was deep in and of itself.
Yeah, if you got to understand where I'm coming from.
I'm coming from a position that black people have a special calling on our culture, on our lives, and on our people, that we're special people. We represent through pain and suffering, we represent hope, we have soul, we have a moral direction. We've produced world class leaders that people around the world talk about, from Doctor King to Malcolm X, people saying we shall overcome in Eastern Europe when we're
doing it's time to struggle something. And the thing about that we're only ten percent of a country, it's only five percent.
Of the world.
So this is a tiny, tiny little group of people. Somehow world culture revolves around us. From hip hop beyoncely just took over country music. I mean, the tiny little group of people has produced world class culture, has produced world class literature, has produced world class political leadership. We have had one black president already, might have a second.
Hard to know what is going on with this group.
This is the first podcast episode hosts US Presidential Election twenty twenty four. I'm with my brother Don Peoples, who is a legend in real estate and in business.
You're going to get to.
Know him and his story and what he has to tell you, but this we had to reschedule this for a number of reasons tied to our mutual schedule. But in many ways this is now perfect timing and it ties into this moment. So let me see I can set this up properly. When doctor King was assassinated in nineteen sixty eight, before that happened, he said I'm here to redeem the soul of America from the triple evils of war, racism, and poverty. He didn't say I'm here
to say black people. Even though his work helped a lot of black people. He was there for everybody. And that last movement of the Poor People's Campaign had pivoted also to include poor whites, which were then and now the largest population of poverty in America. And he was assassinated on the eve of the launch of that movement,
but he had pivoted to economics. Ambassador Andrew Young, my mentor my role model in many ways, the guy who sort of helped to raise me in my adote life are global spokesman in Operation Hope, who was on the balcony who helped to turn Atlanta by the way to the only international city in the South, and the tenth biggest economy in the US, almost five hundred billion dollars
in GDP. He was there when Doctor King was assassinated and he was the only member of his team to take that mandate from Doctor King and pivoted into political realm to structure power versus their protests for it, and then to turn that into an economy, which was the city of Atlanta, as I just mentioned, almost a five
hundred billion dollar economy. And don pivoting to you what M. Bassil Young told me a couple next, wasn't a couple of years ago, I'd say, actually it was about eight years ago, twenty sixteen, as we had gotten the Freedman's Bank renamed on the White House campus from the Treasury Inex Building, and on our former slaves who been at charted the bank to teach rese slaves about money financial literacy eighteen seventy five, Abraham Lincoln Frederick Douglass. He said, John,
you need to say focus on your work. I never said this publicly now to today. You need to say focus on your work because if ever we lose political power, if ever we lose the rights that we hold dear, And he said, I can't imagine this happening. But if the only real power potentially is economic power. If ever we lose political power, social power, even religious power, we'll only have economic power the lever.
Of economics to pull back on.
You have got to not diminish your work or gett distry from it, because we need an economic infrastructure for the underserved of this country.
And it dawns on me that this is where we are.
That the only true freedom is I believe, and Chris Gorman or Keeback is the one who gave me this quote, is potentially financial and economic freedom because once you have it, unless you screw it up, no one can take it from you. And it is and we live in an economic democracy. This country is I keep saying, a center slightly right, center slightly right.
It's an economic democracy. It's a inclusive.
I like to believe this inclusive capitalism because you and I came from nothing and made ourselves into significant some things in America. I don't know another country in the world where our stories would have proliferated at the level that they have. We might have worked for somebody, but you and I work for ourselves. So I'm now turning to you because before we got on camera, we got we had a very powerful and important conversation, uh, some of which I want you to recount here.
But what do you say to.
Doctor King's vision that he was pivoting toward the economic agenda? And what do you say to Ambassador Andrew Young's criminition that at the end of the day, one of the few things you can rely on that you have some control over, it's economic empowerment. And where are we with regard to that agenda? And then I want to get, of course, into your story and how you have built what you have built, by the way, but those of
you don't know. Don Peebles runs People's uh I call the People's Corporation, but it's several entities within his company that's a billion dollars plus in real estate development. Don peoples great. So I know it's for those listening to this mention that Don Peokles his brother he's black. He's not black for a living. He's a great developer who happens to be black. He's a great leader who happens to be black. But he's probably out of his heritage, and so am I. He's African America.
Okay, down, people absolutely and in fact, I grew up during the civil rights movement. I was born in nineteen sixty in Washington, d C. Seat of our government, where many of the major protests and demonstrations and the fight in the halls of our government took place. I remember when doctor King was assassinated. I was watching television about the assassination. But and then the riots that followed were
in my community. My mother had to drive me through a commercial quarriter near our home and have me duck down so that I wouldn't be hit as a little boy. But and then, you know, I remember Robert Kennedy's assassination as well. I remember how you know, and and Malcolm X's focus. But I remember that, you know, there was a time of struggle in the country for us to have equal access to just basic civil rights, and how
we had to fight for those. And now our fight continues to be for economic opportunity.
And doctor King understood it.
I remember his quote. It was what good does it serve for the negro to have a seat at a lunch counter when they can't afford to buy a hamburger? And so that was all the relevance here about economic empowerment and so he started to Poor People's March and and and ultimately that's poor People's Initiative and so forth to reset the table economically in the country, because our democracy is a capitalism capitalistic democracy was that economic opportunity
must lead the way. He set the pathway for Andrew Young and then Mayor Jackson before him, and what happened right well, yes, and initially through Hartsville now Hartsville Jackson Airport where is mayor. He had a vision for Atlanta to be a global city and having an international airport and got a lot of support throughout the state for that, but then people didn't realize what he had. Part of his plan was to make it an economic engine, and
he had to fight to make it. To protect the opportunity for minority business contracting, he required thirty five percent to be for minority contracting for black contractors, and ultimately he fought won that and that started the passway of creating significant black wealth in Atlanta, and it made Atlanta the mecca for black economic empowerment.
Once again, thank you for tuning into the Black Podcast Network. See you in twenty twenty five for more great moments from your favorite podcast