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- [00:00]
Host 1
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Host 2
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Host 1
Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts Radio news.
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Host 2
You're listening to Bloomberg Businessweek with Carol
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John Hope Bryant
Massar and Tim Stanovec on Bloomberg Radio.
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Host 3
JP Morgan announced a new program today. It's a venture aimed at expanding economic opportunity in local communities across the country.
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Host 2
It's called the American Dream Initiative.
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Host 3
It'll span six focus areas. It includes small businesses where the effort will focus initially on well housing and financial health.
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Host 1
Yeah, and we really wanted to talk more about the American Dream and how capitalism and the economy can be more inclusive. It is the subject of a new book. It is by John Hope Bryant. He is the founder, chairman and CEO of Operation Hope. It's the nation's largest on the ground financial literacy and economic empowerment nonprofit. He's also the founder of Bryant Group Ventures and Bryant Group Advisors, previously led the Promise Homes company. He's also advised the administrative of both George W. Bush and Barack Obama in financial literacy and author of many books, including his latest, Capitalism for All Inclusive Economics and the Future Proofing of America really gets to the heart of, I think really what is a problem here in America when we think about where we are today. John is here with us in Studio. So nice to have you here. I was telling these, these guys, I'm a fan too, of how many conversations we had around the pandemic and coming off of what happened to the murder of George Floyd. We've just talked so much about diversity inclusive. Tell us a little bit about this book because you've talked about this subject a lot. Tell us about what your mission was with this book and what you were looking to get at.
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John Hope Bryant
It's not the morals message, it's the math message. My goal here, I'm going on tour starting tomorrow, and I'm going to go to black and brown, urban. I'm going to go to poor, white, rural. I'm going to go from Main street to Wall Street. I'm going to go from the penthouse to no house. And I want people, I'm literally looking for people to start like this, to
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Host 3
be skeptical in the beginning.
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John Hope Bryant
And then my goal for myself is within 15 minutes they're doing this and their heads a little cocked in there. This is interesting. It's, it's. I don't, I'd rather you respect me and learn to like me than like me and never respect me. The math is the message. And if I can combine the math with a narrative and then, then layer in a little bit of emotionalism about all of us, give people an excuse to come back to the middle. I mean, most Americans and most people around the world are somewhere in the middle. They're not in these extremes. And I found the only universal color is the economic green. It's not about black or white or red or blue. It's not about some partisan view of the world. Once you start understanding that, really the lesson, and my book makes this very clear capitalism for all. The lesson of KKR that just got announced where they built a company, bought a company and sold it, and then provided profit sharing to the employees. Watch the story, read the story, listen to the story. Look at the faces of the employees and they explode with, I'm part of this. And you say that's America. That goes back to the early 1900s of the Henry Fords and the Rockefellers and that's America. Look at what, what Walmart did and said, I'm not going to lay off any employees. We're going to train them in AI and upskill them. They're the largest employer in the world. Look at what Apollo is doing with some of its subsidiaries around employee stakeholder ownership. Look at what Delta Airlines, one of the forwards in the book is Ed Bashn, the CEO of Delta is doing with their own hundred thousand employees in financial coaching. I was on a Delta flight last night and on the way to the flight, the Delta person talking my ear off about her new credit card and now she's just got a limit increase and she's managing her finances. I didn't say a word to her. That's interesting for 20 minutes. Yeah, she's wearing me out about her credit score and people coming on the plane, the flight attendants talking about that thousand dollar emergency savings account they got because they got financial literacy and how that changed their life. Now she they're all in on Delta. They feel like they're owners and they're profit sharing. Delta does a couple billion a year every year. That weds them to capitalism and free enterprise. The last thing I'll say is in the book I knew there'd be skeptics and critics and people making assumptions. I put right up front a 50 year impact study that's already done on why inclusion works. It's a 50 year study about women in 1972. And just to make this really clear, it was white women. Just to be really blunt, 1972, a woman, a white woman. Your mother, Your mother and by extension my mother. Not black, not white all couldn't get a bank account. Not 1872. And there was a whole debate in this country about women's roles and should they have. And women couldn't get a loan unless her husband co signed it. So when we're outside the economy because of black's pursuit of affirmative action justice, which is Kennedy, Johnson or Johnson? Kennedy, Johnson and then Honoree President Dr. King, they open that door and then Nixon comes in as a reaction to Johnson and Kennedy and King and he codifies affirmative action for women. By the way, he doesn't get credit because of all the other stuff he did. He did a lot of good stuff anyway. It gets codified. Make a long story short. Come now to present moment. Women are a third of the US economy. Eight to ten trillion a year. I got to remind myself it's a T not a B because it's such a big number. Eight to $10 trillion of GDP are women's participation in the economy. If we had not gotten that experiment right.
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Host 1
Right.
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John Hope Bryant
We'd be also ran country in the world today. And there's so many more examples of the math in 200 pages of this book. But I make it so that it is really there's no other door to go through.
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Host 3
You bring up a lot of examples of companies that are profit sharing with employees or Doing, doing good, good capitalism. And I think a lot of the folks who work for those companies are already a step ahead of a lot of other Americans who don't have the opportunity to work for those companies who are worried about the cost of education, who are drowning in student loan debt.
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Host 2
How do they cost of living, how
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Host 3
do they get included the ones who don't yet work at these companies.
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John Hope Bryant
So this is the reason for the book and why I think there's a fierce urgency of now. If we were just talking about poor people and with the question you just raised, I wouldn't be sitting here. Not because you don't care, it just wouldn't be relevant to your audience. But half of 70% of the US economy is consumer spending.
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Host 1
Right?
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John Hope Bryant
70% of all Americans are living from paycheck to paycheck. If you're making $100,000 a year, 50% of those are living from paycheck to paycheck. Okay, let me get closer to your viewer. Now. If you're making a quarter million dollars a year, a third of those are living from paycheck to paycheck. And that's before cost of living has gone increased with the oil prices popping and all the rest of this stuff. So now you have a fierce urgency of now it's going to affect politics, it's going to affect lifestyle, it's going to affect choices you make. And now we get to decide what kind of country we want to live in. Is this okay? When the reality is that the third, the bottom third have always come from the bottom up to the middle class. The middle class is always pushed. That's what's driving the US Economy. We have a K shaped economy now with the top in when and really the market gains giving people, I think a false sense of safety. That group is now almost half of the consumer spending. Not good because. Not good because when they turn off the faucet, what's left? Yeah. So we, we are at a, in the 250th anniversary of America, to answer your question. We have to figure out do we reward work? Are we giving up on the worker and saying AI has the end of jobs? That's a false, I think that's a complete false narrative and I can prove it. So it's going to be tough because everybody's being thrown into brutal capitalism and free enterprise with no or, and no trainings, no training wheels. But this is the time to teach financial literacy and have the, and have a fierce urgency of now. This is a time for this legislation like the right to vote, where we say, we demand. We the people Demand K through 12, that this is taught and embedded in our school system. This is a time where we get tax codes for that, incentivize internships and apprenticeships. So you give tax breaks for that. This is a time, I think everything gets reimagined in the fierce urgency of now so that you support those with too much month at the end of their money.
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Host 1
We have a million questions. We're talking. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
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Host 3
We got extra time. We love.
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Host 1
We love. We just want to. We just kind of blew our break because we want to talk more with you, John Hope Bryan, founder, chairman and CEO of Operation Hope. So many other things, but we're talking about his newest book, Capitalism for All Inclusive Economics and the Future Proofing of America. John, I remember one of these conversations during COVID and we talked about an individual, and it was with regards to George Floyd and about. We talk about having seats at the table, and not everybody has seats at the table. And I feel financial literacy. I've been doing this for a long time. And we've been talking about this a long time, too. How do we really finally get there so that not just income generation, but wealth generation? Right. We finally changed the conversation. Hallelujah. But how do we then really move the needle on that? Because buying a home. We've talked about this. Right. Is also so important to creating wealth and generational wealth. How do we finally get there?
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John Hope Bryant
So, as you know, since I've seen you last, we've had a reversal of our approach in this country. Is no longer safe, just to be really blunt. Is no longer safe to. To bluntly support what people call, I don't know, minority activities or black. To me, it's just green, just emerging market customers. But it's more complicated now. Okay, fine.
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Host 3
DEI is a bad word now.
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John Hope Bryant
Yeah. And I don't care about dei. Just to be really clear, black people were fourth on the list anyway, right? Women, by the way, were first, and veterans, et cetera. But I could care less about a. What I care about is when you look at the CEOs who call me Fortune 500 CEOs, they're like, Shh, John, we're still in, right? We can't say it publicly. We don't want to get our heads knocked off politically or in the public. But we. This is good business, right? It's not just about. It makes us feel good.
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Host 1
Some of that off air when we talk to people, too.
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John Hope Bryant
Oh, absolutely.
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Host 1
Go ahead.
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John Hope Bryant
And it's the same. I'm sure we could trade names. These are the biggest names in the most conservatively run institutions because these are emerging markets, not just a feel good look. I've already said a third of all customers, third of the economy is women. Okay? 40% of this economy is black and brown. 40% of the country is black and brown. It's going to be a majority of minorities. Here's a shocker for you. 10,000 baby boomers are walking out of the economy every day. Let that sink in for your audience. 10, not a year, not a month. 10,000 a day are retiring. Bye. Going to play golf. Everybody's going to play golf at the same time, who's going to replace them? And even if you don't care about them, I mean the them my rich friends need my poor friends to do better, if only to stay rich. Because it's a circular firing squad, you know, you're shooting your replacement. We have got to understand, unless we want to speak Mandarin in 20 years Chinese and have them pick it the biggest economy in the world, we are all we got. Here's another shocker for you. It's all this is in the book and I have asked really smart people these questions like what do you think the banking, the traditional banking sector is? What percentage do you think are non, non immigrant foreign born people? What percentage of the, of the banking new account activity? Oh, 5%, 54%, 68% and people just shocked. What do you mean? Because 95% of America is banked. 95% of traditional America already has an account. So the new activity is coming to all the big banks. And I've seen the data from foreign born new to country. That's where the boost is. Well that's what happened in the early 20th century when the Irish and the Polish and the Jewish and whoever came to America. This is not a news story. It's just these folks look a little different. Right? So I love the math, to quote Melody Hobson, because it doesn't have an opinion. I think we had to push back and now you're gonna have to. Now that America I think is going to push forward and the business plan, the business, the balance sheets are going to push forward. Why you can't grow an economy by shrinking it. I'm going to say that again.
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Host 1
Right.
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John Hope Bryant
You can grow. Can I grow GDP by making the economy smaller? And we have made. This is not a political statement, it's just the facts. We have made the economy smaller because there's less people participating in it. The Unemployment rate for African Americans has doubled the last year. 300 black women lost their jobs in the first two quarters of 2025. These are not good signals for the economy. And these aren't lazy people. These are folks who want to work. So I think Citigroup report in this, in this book, discrimination against black alone for tween the year 2000 and the year 2020. 2020 cost the US economy $16 trillion trillion. And if you just knock it off, it returns a trillion dollars a month. You add the trillion dollars a month to the gdp. These are meaningful, big numbers.
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Host 3
You are speaking our language.
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John Hope Bryant
Oh, good.
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Host 3
When you're talking about these numbers, you're talking about gdp. You've advised a couple presidents on financial literacy. Would you run for president?
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John Hope Bryant
I've been asked a couple of times. Never on air.
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Host 3
Well, the reason I ask is because when you said you were going on tour for this book, it sounded like the way you were approaching it was almost like a politician approaches. And I don't mean that in a pejorative sense because a lot of people think that's a pejorative thing to say, but it sounds like the way somebody who's running for something approaches reaching everybody to get their vote or to communicate to them.
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John Hope Bryant
So my model. I'm glad you actually said this because it's out of the way. My model is Dr. King, not John JFK or President Barack Obama or President Clinton, who I absolutely love. I think that guy is amazing, what he did in reducing the deficit and increasing the economy for all people at the bottom. But I know I have no interest in running for political office. And this is not what that is about. I am, though, moving a get it done party, not a party, but I am moving. I am moving like this. I just told my team this morning, think of this as if it's a presidential national effort. I'm going on tour. I want to talk to everybody because we need to have a third way. We got to break this cycle of the far right and the far left going in their camps and just talking to their echo chambers when the biggest group in America are independents and they don't have a voice at all. And I just want, I want there to be a moment where the middle forces the edges back to the middle from both parties because both parties, in my opinion, are out of sync with America. And if I can do that by not running, by not being political, by not being partisan. In fact, I said this morning, I'd rather, I hope that the mayor of New York and the mayor and the President, United States and the administration steal every idea in this book. Don't you give me credit for it. Rip it off and use it. Because if they win, we win. If they lose, we lose. So I have no agenda personally other than continuing Dr. King's unfinished work, Poor people's campaign when he was assassinated, and Andrew Young, my mentor, Frederick Douglass's work 100 years before that. I think this is the third reconstruction is what I'm telling you. First reconstruction was after slavery, after the Civil War.
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Host 1
Does all the change happen in the private sector? And I'm just curious, you're really smart,
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John Hope Bryant
by the way, to answer me that question.
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Host 1
Have you talked to Mayor Mamdani?
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John Hope Bryant
Have you? I have been asked the White House. I have been asked if I would not debate, but I would have a conversation with the mayor. And I said yes, be happy to a public conversation. I have met last year with Secretary Bessant, who I've considered a friend. I like him. I don't think the environment was right for him to talk to me and for this to have a bipartisan. I called it a Lincoln Douglas conversation. Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to bring the country together through financial literacy. I don't think the environment was right a year ago. It's not still quite right, but I think it's warming up. That the country is going to force, not me, but it's going to force this conversation. Because affordability is not affordable. Because folks got too much month at the end of their money. Because we've broken the promise that if I work hard, play by the rules, do the right thing, keep my nose clean, pay my taxes, I'll get a reasonable shot of success or failure on my own merit. And I'll say something about the administration. I don't care how smart you are, I don't care how well meaning you are. And I think most people are well meaning. But if you're a billionaire, for whom we all should aspire to be okay, you can't do anything broke. If you're a billionaire or sent a millionaire and you've got private planes and private security before you got Secret Service if you haven't been to a grocery store in 20 years? I mean, I don't care how nice you are. How can you possibly understand the pains of somebody who's got a red notice or cutoff notice? And I'm not being pejorative or in any way political, it's just common sense.
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Host 1
It's similar. We had a conversation with Peter Atwater, who is an economist or teaches Economics at William and Mary. But this whole idea that people, in terms of the K, you know, the upper rung, need to spend some time with the lower rung to really understand.
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John Hope Bryant
Get on a Delta flight in coach for a week, right? Go, go, go through the airport, through the terminal, stand in line.
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Host 2
And those are still wealthier people.
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Host 3
Those are the ones who can afford to fly.
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John Hope Bryant
Go to a grocery store. Yes. By the way, those are still middle class people. If you're at a, if you're at a decent grocery store, you're still middle class. I think we, everybody just needs a dose of reality. I go to what I call the hood. I go to the community once a month. Just drive through it if I can. If I'm on the highway and I can get there and have some time. I get off the highway, I go through a working class neighborhood and I'm nosy. I'm just looking around and it's amazing what you see. Check casher, payday, loan lender.
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Host 1
Yeah.
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John Hope Bryant
Rental owned store, title lender, as in car, title, liquor store, forget your problems. Pawn shop, one block church down the street. Trying to make you feel, feel a little bit better once a week. That's your neighborhood therapist. Right. In that neighborhood of 500 to 620, you live at 61 years of age. We, by the way, I've mapped every zip code in America by credit score with the data from Experian. Thank you very much. And from the U.S. the U.S. the, the U.S. census. And we found that you lived at 61 years of age. For every 50 point increase in your credit score, you live five more years. So 15 minutes away from every 500 credit score neighborhood where you live 61 years of age, you live to 81 years of age and your credit score is 700 plus. And the economy has taken off.
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Host 1
John, just 40 seconds. If you could change one thing beyond reading your book and sharing the book and the message, what would you change just quickly?
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John Hope Bryant
The anger. The Bible says the house divided cannot stand. It's also just good common sense. We have to all row the boat in the same direction. We have got to get out of our own way. Our problem's us. Everybody wants to be an American, but Americans, we've got to knock it off. We have to knock it off. Russia wants our way of life. North Korea wants our way of life. China wants our way of life. They can't win in a fair fight. They got it. They need us to destroy us. And that we are helping them with. And so I'm hoping to shake up the debate in the discussion. So it. So an outsider maybe forces people to come to the inside of the hearts and minds of the average person watching this and their head is nodding, saying, my God, finally, common sense.
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Host 1
Thank you so much. We know you're starting a tour with the book. When you circle around again, come back.
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John Hope Bryant
I'd be honored anytime. We haven't talked about AI and I know, but you've given me a lot of time to unpack. And one question I was never asked on air. I appreciate that.
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Host 1
About running for president.
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John Hope Bryant
Oh, God. I didn't mean to repeat it.
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Host 3
I have no interest what we try to do here.
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Host 1
John o', Brien, so great to have you here. The new book is Capitalism for All Inclusive Economics and the Future Proofing of America. John, thank you.
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