The Best Of: Money & Wealth

And I could have complained about that and wine and Mona could say that, you know, I've got high class problems, and God gave me relevancy and a chance to make a difference and just accept that and be thankful. So I went to my first speech and did that and went to my second that was for Van Jones on artificial intelligence here in Atlanta. I went to my AI academy, went to this an operation of hope. Did that help him with the AI Ethics Council, which is coming by

the way, my work with Sam Aulman. Then I went to the second speech. I went to my office work the little bit, when changed clothes, took seed on. Went to the second speech on Saturday night for the Black Coffee Company, which I, you know, talked about earlier and to encourage other investors to double down with them and

encourage them. And so anyway, we went to a late dinner and I'm sitting there waiting for my wife to show to come from the She went to the restroom to wash her hands and whatever, and his brother walks over to me and I can see him by the side of my eye and I sort of know what this is now is you know, he's about to approach me,

which is all good. I don't mind. And he said, look, my guy, he did like a you know in these celebrity things that you know, where the rock star, the celebrity dude sends somebody else over with a message.

your right. But I'm really unimpressed now. So I'm impressed with the dud who came over to me. He's very respectful.

financially lazy. They want somebody else to do the work. He could have got up said to his lady, excuse me, baby, I want to go say a low to him, come over. Shook my hand look me in the ia man. I heard what you said. All good. I should come over myself to begin with my bad you know. Respect you're out of date, so we you know, I just you know whatever, respect, your work, whatever. I hope we can catch up sometimes later I would have said, what's your name?

That would have been that would impress me. I would remember him, and maybe even he had given him my information to connect with me later or one of my you know, senior leaders in my office. But he missed that whole memo. He missed the opportunity because what Ambasator Jung said is so true. Men and women fail for three reasons. Arrogance, pride, in greed mindset. It wasn't about whether he had a successful business or all that stuff. You know, whether he's making money, I can kill. That's

when he's making money. I don't want your money. I got my own, all right. All money is his freedom and I got the freedom and not be interested.

you didn't get my help. We're not going to do business, and I won't remember you. I don't even remember you. I remember the first guy, I will not remember the second, not in a positive way. Nobody owes you anything. Stop walking around entitled. Like the story of the young lady I mentioned earlier in the trending topic who her girlfriends thought that that boy owed her all expense freight. Anyway, I don't want to pee. This frustrates me to even

think about it. Okay, here's a fan question. This was a good podcast, wasn't it. It wasn't boring. Here's a purple Indian woman. Purple Indian woman from Instagram. Purple Indian woman, what are the best options for my two children? My two daughters to start saving and investing now age twenty five and sixteen? First of all, I'm glad you don't think it's too late at twenty five to start investing

in sixteen. Certainly it's not too late. The answer to this question, Purple Indian woman on Instagram, is the best option for your two daughters is now and with you. It's not about whether it's an index fund or this, or stocks or real estate or fractual investing or bitcoin or current cryptocurrency or whatever it is you want to do. Start a business grat and it's important that they do it with you. Get this book and read it with them,

Assign chapters to them. Let's come back and have a family meeting about money, because the lights don't come on

by themselves. Have a discussion about this every week, about money around financial listening for all, I want to see that book dog cared and beat up and the page is ripped and highlighted right, and you want to start a conversation, have dinner together, what a concept once again once a week and have a kitchen conversation about money using the book as a discussion starter, and try to get keep the spaghetti and the ribs.

And yes they're exception to this rule. So don't pick a fight with me saying I know examples where this is not the case.

these rules. But what you and you really want. You know, when I talk to somebody and I'm looking at him there and their eyes are clean and they're they're positive, they're looking at me, I can tell they had it mom and a dad, or I can tell that a strong ulture strong mom or an ultra strong dad that really grounded them and balance out the fact that the other mate wasn't there. You really mom and dad. But you can, you can over index like my mother did.

My dad did it when I was with him and when I move for my mother to be with him. So give him credit. But my mother really was a grounding sense situation. And she was a single mother, just like seventy percent of all black households, and she told me she loved me every day of my life and I believed it. So look, you can survive, you can chill and still succeed. But why would you want to right? Why you don't want to just survive? You want to thrive and you want to win. And stop saying these

kids that you're a baby daddy and your baby mama. Right, you're messing up these kids head, messing with their self esteem. Say you're a mommy. You're the mother or their father, and you're proud of them. When they screw up, you say, I'm mad at you. I'm upset with you. You future lawyer, you, future entrepreneur, you, future business owner, you future engineer. I'm upset with you, and I'm going to hold you accountable. Now let's go to dinner. I'm gonna hold you accountable.

And here's your penalty for screwing up. Kids need love and accountability, love and responsibility. You can't just you can't just let kids walk away from their accountability. You end up with punks, you know, with a mess on your hands. They need to learn the word. No. You're not their best friend, you're their parent. Oh, don't let me get me started. It's a whole other podcast. People make the mistake of thinking that being smart enough is enough.

outcome to experiment that was not successful. It doesn't define who you are. It just says, this is what I went through. It's it's it's on the path to where you're going again. Rainbows only follow storms. Success, as I said earlier, is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm, over to rounded through what you're going to have to get to it. Success, as I keep saying, is going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

It doesn't define you. Life is ten percent what life does to you in ninety percent how you choose to respond to it. What's your response is going to be? You don't react to what you respond You come right at it. You go. You come right at it, not over to round it. You know, don't avoid it. You're coming right to face it. Because what is a killion makes you stronger, It makes you, It builds resiliency. Why am I telling you this? Why is this important podcast

on money and wealth? Because every poverty, every form of poverty two reasons. By the way, every form of poverty three reasons. Beyond sustenance poverty, which is a roof over your head, food on the table, and reasonable healthcare. Sustenance poverty poverty just to sustain yourself. So everybody should have sustenance. Everybody should have a roof over your head, reasonable health care, food on the table. That should not be something that

we beg for in society. It's something that society provides. It's biblical, by the way. But beyond that, every form of poverty is mindset. Whether you believe you can, whether you believe you can't, you're absolutely right. And so my concern is this generation that we have today, who's grown up seeing a black president, you know, who's grown up seeing and experiencing a run up on the stock marketrket, seeing real estate pride prices that have been on the rise.

They might have missed, probably did miss the two thousand and eight real estate crisis. And even if they did, it's in the rear view mirror. Who's who saw a

social justice reconing on black America, black and brown. If you're African American, are African or people of African descent, you've seen this, You've seen that you saw a positive reaction to the deafestating murder of George Floyd, and you saw somewhere between sixty billion and three hundred billion, depending on how you calculated, invested in you.

entitled to success. No, you aren't, and you won't be because you aren't prepared to fail.

in the world. Frankly, if you're listening to this or Washington this, you've got some kind of a digital device that's cutting edge, then you consider yourself lucky. Certainly, if you're in the United States of America and you have a job, you've got a source of income, you have you know, you have shelter, you have food, you have opportunity. When you get up in the morning, you've you've been blessed, you have at least one parent. And so there are

people in this world. There's a lady right now trying to get from her hut on the east coast or west coast of Africa, trying to get from her hut to the well to get some water without being abused.

first tell you I've been to where you are. That's why I found an operation Hope, because I've had that experience with it at nine years old, when the classroom, when that baker came to my classroom and taught me financial literacy, and everybody else was throwing paper planes and playing around and joking. But again I had by that time, I had these experiences where I saw a murder of

my guy who saved my life. I know experienced. I didn't see it firsthand, but of course experience my best friend being murdered with my next for neighbor over drugs. And I saw my bomb and dad divorce and family tore apart, my mother hustle to go buy our house, our first house in come to California as a single mother, and I had taken life seriously by the time I

was nine years old. And this banker came in my classroom in tall financial literacy home economics class which doesn't exist anymore, And I asked that banker, what do you do for a living and how did you get rich?

There was nothing beyond the I believe the six floors of I think he was six floors, might have been eight, eight floors or something. But it wasn't a skyscraper in Compton. That was a courthouse. Everything else was just a couple stories or single story in Compton. It was in the sixteenth floor. Man, where you work, how do you hear in the middle of the day. My mom was an

hourly worker. McDonald donlon's aircraft became Bowling aircraft. She had a two fifteen minute breaks in lunch other than that, she was an hourly worker. She only showed up to school if I got in trouble, and that wasn't a good thing when I saw her show up at school. So how are you showing up anytime you want during the day. I'm on a salary. What's a salary? It's like I was a medium Martian man. And again he

told me, I'm a banker and on finance entrepreneurs. I said, sir, I don't know what an entrepreneur is, but if you're financing it and it's legal, I'm gonna be one. Rainbows after storms. I became one. So I bought a piece of property in Los Angeles for a couple hundred thousand dollars. It was a townhouse. When I bought it, I was very proud of it. I lived in it. It went down in value while I lived in it. I was encouraged by my broke friends to sell it. Now they

broke again. Watch what you pay attention to for advice, right, my broke friends didn't even own a townhouse. They were written talking about, Yo, you need to sell that. Just look, leave your bad advice in your bad in your well intentioned bad mouth, like in your head. Keep just say hello to me. That's that's all I want to hear. Is you know it's an old Southern saying. No matter how much I love you, my son or my daughter, if I don't have wisdom, I can only give you

my own ignorance. So out of love, we passed down bad habits and bad advice from generation to generation. Is what we don't know that we don't know. This killing is what we think we know. We never got the memo. That's my third or fourth book. The think is my third book, that we never got the memos what we don't know that we don't know. So stop listening to people who have give you bad advice on no experience.

I just forgot about it. And because I just figured, you know, can't be you know, over time it will at least be worth what.

think I can get for it? He said, well, because I had a couple of properties selling this one, you can probably get seven undred fifty thousand dollars for I said, what did you say? What did you say? Seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I bought it for two hundred thousand change had gone down one hundred thousand change. My so called friends told me to sell it. Hello, five years, six years later, it's worth seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

It's worth even more now I sold it. You have a year to do a tax free exchange, which means you pay no taxes. And I found the property that I wanted to buy, and I purchased a property that I wanted to buy with the proceeds of the property I just sold, and I paid no taxes. So there you go. And you want to check with your tax man and all this stuff. You know, don't listen to me and say John Bryant told me to do this.

I'm just giving you, you know, examples of what you can do, but you need to check with your tax pro and or my hope, financial coaches for exactly what you should do or how to do it. It's go by the way, It's called a ten thirty one tax free exchange change in the revenue the Internal Revenue Code. But again, techer, check with your tax pro see how it relates to you. Okay, let's get to the fan question. I just made you a millionaire. Well you did, because

you're going to work hard at it. But you know now, there's no reason why you're not going to be better off after you do this when you than before. I mean, it's like somebody said, why should I try God? Well, because God cannot possibly screw up and mismanage your life worse than you have. So give them a try. Let's see how that works out, and given it says Universe.

In my opinion, you'll probably be Okay. I can't guarantee you that being positive is going to make you a success, but I absolutely guarantee you that being negative will ultimately make you fail. I want you to be positive. I want you to employ common sense. Literally, every group of people in this country, two hundred plus ethnic groups have succeeded using free enterprise capitalism and a market economy and

the things that I've told you. The only three groups that have been left behind African Americans, not all Africans Americans. I'm gonna deal with Africans versus Africans or blacks versus blacks. Is that a thing? And that's not a negative situation. I mean, blacks are blacks? Is that a thing. I'm gonna deal with that in a second part a separate podcast, because it is a thing. But African Americans, not African

Africans or African Caribbeans. African Americans who had a special treatment negative in this country, and who's really our self seening. Our brains were messed with, Our minds and mindsets were messed with, all right, and Native American Indians, Okay, they didn't have a good run and poor whites. Yes, poor whites are those three groups that did not use free enterprise, capitalism and market economy to succeed. Two of those groups actually use a government and you and government will help

you cover your downside. And we need good government. We need civil rights, but you also need civil rights. We need not just red rooms stopping bad things like just police discrimination and bias and all the negative stuff. We need some green rooms, access to capital, access to internships, extra apprenticeship, access to apprenticeships, access to to credit, access to financing, access to opportunity and aspiration. Can I get

an amen? This is a church of what's happening now and what have you done for me lately?