Joel (1:46)

Call 844-844-IHeart welcome to how to Money. I'm Joel, and today I'm talking Capitalism for all. Making the system work, Everyone with John Hope Bryant. Okay, so you might expect someone who experienced homelessness as a kid to grow up angry at the financial system. Well, instead, John Hope Bryant, he set out to understand it and to help more people succeed within it. So he believes in financial literacy. He believes that it's not just helpful, it's actually foundational to economic opportunity and even to human dignity. John Hope Bryant, he's the founder, he's the chairman and CEO of Operation Hope, which is one of the nation's leading organizations focused on financial literacy, credit access and economic empowerment. So today we're talking about credit. We're talking about economic mobility, entrepreneurship, and what it really takes to build a financial system that works for everyone. John Hope Bryant, welcome to how to Money. Thanks for joining me, Joe.

John Hope Bryant (2:56)

Nice to be with you. Honored to be with you. Heard good things about you. And this is a very important conversation on the 250th anniversary of our nation. No one more important time to have a conversation about who we want to be when we grow up than now.

Joel (3:14)

Yeah. Yeah. Still still a young nation in so many ways. And we have a lot of young listeners here, John, who I think can benefit from your wisdom and your experience. First question I got to ask you, because we ask everyone who comes on the show, is what do you like to splurge on? What is the thing you're doing? The smart stuff, you're saving, you're investing for your future, but you got to have like an outlet for. For spending that provides joy in the here and now as well. What is that for you?

John Hope Bryant (3:41)

My racing simulator.

Joel (3:42)

Oh, tell me about auto.

John Hope Bryant (3:43)

Well, I was. I have a full competitive auto racing license which I don't get to use very often because of my schedule, but I do a lot of track days. I have a race cars at Atlanta Motorsports Park. Your Atlanta native. So you know, it's in Dawsonville, so it's like a country club for race cars. No way. And so I'm right. We have a condo right on the. On the straightaway and my cars are underneath. And we have a racing simulator here at my house that we have in. In south Atlanta, North Fayetteville. And so I was on it all day yesterday. And that's if you want to call it a splurge. It's. I have a. I just got a diving certification when I was in Maui and that being underneath in the calm blue ocean was one form of freedom and release. And then being on the road the next week in Dubai where I could arrive and drive there because I have this racing license and do they have Buddhism at 150 miles an hour, which is what I call motorsports, is another form of calm. Those two, if you want to call it are splurges. But really all money is is freedom. That's all it is. And so I have the freedom now to do things like that. But it's really not about the money. It's about what it facilitates.

Joel (5:00)

Yeah, 100%. Well, John, you're an incredible entrepreneur, but it kind of. It wasn't obvious that that was going to be the outcome of your life. When you look at your family tree, what do you think prompted or connected made that a possibility for you?

John Hope Bryant (5:17)

Pain. Pain, suffering, problems, Challenges. My mom and dad had built wealth up. They came from the deep South. My second great grandparents were slaves on both sides of my family family tree. My mother, my mother's mother owned a shotgun shack. Your listeners can look up what that is. We won't waste time on definitions. My second great grandmother, my mother's side, escaped slavery, bought a, built a house and had a border with no mortgage on the house. Border meaning renter. So, so she was a free enterprise person. My, my grandmother, to the extent that she could, was a free enterprise person. My mother owned seven homes and sold them. I own 700. My father, my, my second great grandfather protected Memphis, Tennessee for Abraham Lincoln as part of the Emancipation Proclamation. My. So had, I've had sort of justice in, in my bones from, from, from an early age. Got it, got it. Honest. But he protected folks who weren't protecting them because of course, the Emancipation Proclamation was a call for those behind, quote, enemy lines. Then my grandfather was R.V. smith, was a sharecropper. So working land he didn't own that he would actually never be able to control, but he worked it anyway because he was industrious and wanted to do for himself. My father was a businessman. I'm an entrepreneur. My mom and dad took those, those, those bones, if you will, brought them together. Initially it worked. They built a small conglomerate of small businesses in South Central Los Angeles. Apartment building they bought for $18,000 now worth $8 million. A home, a gas station. Anyway, they lost it all. They. They divorced over money. Joel.

Joel (6:57)

Yeah.

John Hope Bryant (6:58)

Number one calls of divorce in America's money make a long story short. I saw, saw murder when I was 6 or 7 years old with the guy who saved my life. That was over money. My next door neighbor was a drug dealer. At the house my mother bought with, you know, she saved money and bought a house after the divorce in Compton, California. I tried to make a friend. That friend was very smart, but didn't have good parents like I did. Even though they were divorced, they didn't make me a point of contention. They love me irrespective. My dad gave me says yes I can. My mother sense of yes I am. She told me she loved me every day of my life. This is important to your question. So this best friend of mine didn't have good role models anyway. He started hanging around with the next door neighbor who was a drug Dealer that got killed together. So by the time I was nine years old, I saw the death of our family net worth. We lost that apartment building, lost all those assets I mentioned to you because my dad was financially illiterate. Couldn't make it, but couldn't keep it. Wouldn't ask my mother for help. In a relationship, two plus two should equal six, eight or ten. Either you're better together or what are you doing? So he didn't get that memo. So I got all these lessons the hard way. Joe, most people go to business school. They go to, you know, life was my business school was my master's class. And I got these lessons and I only had to teach me once. And then when I was nine years old, a banker came in my classroom and taught me financial literacy. And he happened to be Caucasian. And I. And that's important because most experiences of folks like me growing up with a person of Caucasian was negative. A police officer throwing you against a patrol car or something. This was a positive experience. And this banker came and taught me financial literacy from bank of America. And my teachers would buy the mail order products that I bought. And so that I was had in my little briefcase with just my dreams in it, I sell mail order. My teachers, who are also Caucasian, would buy them from me. So I had these positive experiences around what you might call race relations. I didn't know that's what it was. But I asked this banker who came in once a week for six weeks, what do you do for a living? And how'd you get rich legally? And I was dead serious, right? I mean, I never met this. I mean, this guy's like a Martian. Come into my classroom. My mother could. My mother had a lunch break, Joel. And two 15 minute breaks. And she only came to school if I got in trouble. This guy was there in the middle of the day chilling. He said, he called that. He said, I'm on a salary. What's that? Where do you work? Bank of America. Where? In a skyscraper? Here's my business card. 16th floor. There's no 16th floor in Compton. There's six floors in Compton and that's a courthouse. Like, boom. Who is this guy? And he says, I'm a banker and I finance entrepreneurs. And I said, I don't know what an entrepreneur is, but it was legal. And you're financing it. I'm going to be one. And so later on I created a for profit and a nonprofit, now the largest of their kind in the country. We've invested $5 billion into mostly underserved economies untapping, untapping human potential at scale. But the nonprofit is teaching people how to get bank qualified at prime rates. Well, that's essentially Joel, what that banker told me. I said, so your job is to lend poor people money and all I got to do is prove I can pay it back? Yes. Okay, I'm in. So I became an entrepreneur and put the liquor out of the candy business when I was 10 years old so that my confidence went through the roof from that. I was homeless when I was 18 years old for about six to eight months of my life. So you can't fall from the floor. So by the time I was 20 years old, man, I had all kinds of experiences that a 60 year old would have.

Joel (10:28)

Yeah.

John Hope Bryant (10:28)

In fact most year olds don't have those level experiences. And so I, I really had a sense that this system could work for everybody. But it's what people don't know that they don't know, but they think they know. Right. People can focus. I won't get that money. We'll get that bag, we'll get that cash with that dollar. You say you have a young listeners, they're focusing on this. I want that dollar, I want that money. No, wrong. It's, it's, it's, it's an illusion. All money is an exchange of value. You want to build wealth and you build wealth in your sleep. And one of those areas is entrepreneurship, business. Right, of course, homeownership, asset ownership. So it just dawned on me, that's my last book, Financial Literacy for All. This is my seventh book coming out now, Capitalism for All. I've been giving people these sort of software upgrades along the way. The book Love Leadership was a philosophy on doing well and doing good and how the poor can save Capitalism. It's sort of self described title, but people thought I was crazy when I wrote that. But basically my rich friends eat, my poor friends do better, if only to stay rich because the market is 70%. The biggest economy in the world is 70% consumer spending. 70. There's a lesson we need to learn and think about right now. The book, the memo. Get the memo. That's the, what we were talking about, about what folks don't know, they don't know up from nothing. My personal story, Financial Literacy for All gave people the bones of what they need. And now the most audacious, bold, disruptive idea I think that has been injected in American DNA in a while is that this thing that people are intimidated by or resent, but often don't understand, even Those who are participating in it don't understand. They think it's about making money and it's about all themselves. This capitalism for all ethos is the only thing that can save us. And it saved me. So I came from this unlikely place and most of people who thought I was wasting my time in the neighborhood I grew up with want to work for me now. I have 400 employees, by the way.

Joel (12:32)

And what made you. It sounds like when I'm hearing, I hear two things that came out in your story. There's curiosity and there was some boldness. And those are you were asking questions about how the system worked that you didn't understand. You were getting nosy, right? You were getting up in this guy's business to try to figure out how did you thrive in this environment that I don't really understand. It seems like in our culture right now there's a lot of burn it down because I don't understand it. Instead of curiosity, let me enter into this. How can I succeed in this environment? It's like I don't, I don't like the game. How would you respond to someone who's thinking that way?

John Hope Bryant (13:09)

Well, it's wrong, first of all. And it's our, and it's our parents fault. My parents had a responsibility to raise me. My mother told me she loved me every day of my life so that I don't have a self esteem problem. And I thank her for that every day. I thank my dad for a lot of things. But my dad also missed matriculation exam on relationships. He missed the matriculation exam on how to treat a woman. He missed the exam on how to really build a business, build wealth, generational wealth to protect it. On being nosy. So you're being nice and saying I'm curious. No, I'm actually nosy. God give you two ears and one mouth. You listen twice as much as you talk. I'm actually very nosy. I got my nose in everything. And you got to stay young, you have to stay nosy. And you have to understand your parents are just your parents. They're trying the best that they can and do what they do. But if they're not successful financially, if they're not succeeding in the way that they would have liked or you would think that they have the potential for, you have to consider the source. There's an old saying, no matter how much I love you, my son or my daughter, if I don't have wisdom, all I can give you is my own ignorance. And so out of love we pass down bad habits generation to generation. And again, it's what we don't know, that we don't know, we think we know. So here's a misnomer. People say, I hate rich people. No, you don't. You hate rich people until you become rich. What you hate is a game system. What you hate is a system that no matter how hard you work, you can't seem to get ahead. So let's ungame the system. That's what I'm doing with the book, is what we're doing with the. Working with Operation Hope is what I'm doing in my work as a capitalist at Brian Group Ventures. Second point. Let's say that somebody listening to this and saying, I don't. I'm just not buying what this guy's saying. It's a nice, cool story. But, you know, I'm. I'm going to college and I'm going to become a socialist. Okay, here's my question to you. Two questions. Even if you distribute money like a. Want to distribute money like a socialist, don't you have to first collect it like a capitalist? Second question. How'd you get to college? Right. Did the government send you? Did the community block club send you and pay your tuition?

Joel (15:21)

Yeah.

John Hope Bryant (15:22)

Who's paying your car note? Who's paying your rent? Who's paying. Somebody give you a food stipend? Right. Is somebody paying your cell phone bill that I'm unaware of. Is the government doing that? The government give you sheets that you're sleeping with? The government pay your utility bills for the apartment or the public. The public housing? The student housing? No. No. Your parents did that?

Joel (15:43)

Yeah.

John Hope Bryant (15:43)

Okay. Where'd your parents get the money? Right. So we are playing games with ourselves. Those who say, I don't like capitalism. Look, all socialism is really the biggest, really simple. It's a taxing system. You know, you look at the Nordic countries and I've been to 100 countries, including the Nordic countries, and I know, I've been there several times. I'm not talking about, like traveling as a tourist. I know them very well. I mean, they're engaged in capitalism. Sweden and Finland have their. Have their capitalist platform like Sweden is. Timber is one of their big businesses.

Joel (16:13)

I remember more so than the United States in some ways.

John Hope Bryant (16:16)

100% Nokia came out of. I think it was Finland. And Norway is oil. Right. But what they did was they decided to tax the wealthy at a higher rate so there wouldn't be poverty underneath it and that social services were funded. And that's great. But there's less people there, much less. Like we got more people in the city in America than they've got in their country. Number two. While you don't see anybody at the bottom, Joel, that system, you don't see people who look like me at the top. So I want to have full fluency. I want to be able to go from the bottom as I have. I'm at 0.01%. I want to go to. I want to go as far as I have the capacity. That's not possible in a socialist system. No one washes rental cars. You take that, you drive it for two or three weeks. It gets dirty. You can paint your face. Your face on the windshield is so dirty, and you take it back to the person who owns it, which is Hertz or Budget or whoever you rented the car from. You don't you. You take care of it because you own it. So we anger. Emotions in business are inappropriate placements in a serious environment. Anger is not a strategy. And emotions should never be made. You'd be part of a serious decision making. Whenever you make an emotional decision, it's the wrong one. Cryptocurrency. I'm going to light up a lot of folks on fire now. Cryptocurrency was created emotionally as a result of the 2008 economic crisis. Don't trust me, Go do your own research. It wasn't somebody sitting around going, how do I create a better economic system? It was, I'm angry at this system. Let's burn it down and let's create this other system. And I find it interesting. And by the way, my wife owns bitcoins, to be very clear that, you know, I'm not. I, and I love blockchain technology, but 90% of the crypto is either bankrupt, out of business or on ice, not working. You have some that are very. Doing very well, about a dozen of them, right. But even a half dozen of those dozen redeem and they're backed by fiat currency, backed by cash. And what are people trying to do with cryptocurrency? Cash it out for cash. By the way, what's the point of a dating app talking about technology? To go meet somebody in person. So you can't get around the fact that the fundamentals of this system are. It's like capitalism, democracy, Joel, are horrible systems. Except for every other system. It's really what I'm saying. So don't burn it down, improve it. When you're being run out of town, get in front of the crowd, made like a parade. Why spend all this energy trying to create something different when you're the biggest economy on the planet? America is the biggest economy in the world. $30 trillion, the US currency, we're not treating it very well at the moment. The US Currency is the flight to quality. US Stocks, US Real estate. We're the flight to quality in the world. Why would we want to burn that down? Why would you want to build on top of that? Your iPhone comes with software upgrades every six weeks because iPhone realizes their phone wasn't perfect when they realized it, when they produced it. Let's also have software upgrades now in capitalism.

Joel (19:26)

Well, isn't in some ways too. It's just wasted energy. We live in the system that we live in, and we can spend hours of our week railing against it, or we can say, all right, this is the reality I live in. Let me do my best inside of that reality. And one of the quotes you use frequently is from ambassador Andrew Young, who said, we live in a system of free enterprise, and to not understand the rules of free enterprise must be the definition of slavery. Which when I heard that just kind of like knocked me off my feet. I was like, that's incredible. It's almost like for a lot of people to rail against it means it's like a form of self sabotage.

John Hope Bryant (20:04)

Yep. You're very good, man. Most people don't. Don't unearth a quote like that. That's. That says a lot about you. And let's go deeper on that quote. Who is ambassador Andrew Young? The only aide of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. By the way, the last living lieutenant of Dr. King. 93 years young and will be 94 next month. The only aide to Dr. King to go to run a city, the city of Atlanta, where we're at, the only one to take the philosophy of doing well and doing good, of public purpose, capitalism, and place it into a city environment. What's the result? Because I love results. The biggest economy in the traditional south, Atlanta. An economy bigger than Singapore. Joel.

Joel (20:51)

Wow.

John Hope Bryant (20:51)

I'm going to slow that down. The city of Atlanta, multicultural, multiracial, to a city too busy to hate. Birth of civil rights. The city that saved America because it was where the Civil War ended when. When it. When General Sherman came here and burned the city of Atlanta to the ground to stop the Confederate march and destroy their infrastructure. And that's how Lincoln got reelected. So first reconstruction, second reconstruction played a part in history. I think this is the third reconstruction, which is about ownership and opportunity from the streets of the suites. But here you Here comes Andrew Young, brings the Olympics into Atlanta, makes it the only international city in the south. Make, you know, serves on the board of Delta, sends them to not just Europe, but to Africa. And that's one of their most profitable routes now gets all these international companies from Asia, in other words, in Europe to invest in America. When he was into Atlanta when he was mayor, $70 billion, which at that time was a, still a lot of money, it was a, it was a unimaginable amount of money for a southern city when he was mayor. The net result is this city that's unique in the world with a $580 billion annual GDP. Joel, you can take the surrounding states, put them together inside of the city of Atlanta economy and still have Rome. That shows to me that is the prima facie evidence of what I'm saying in my book, capitalism for all. You can do well and do good. You can do well by doing good. You do not have to make a false choice between white and black ra red or blue politics. You can just pick the green as in the color of US Currency.

Joel (22:30)

One of the things that highlights that you talk about is how it makes you, how you feel about the fact that you employ a lot of folks, you've employed thousands of people, and that changes lives. The fact that running a business and running it so effectively that you can essentially provide for and allow people the dignity of having work that pays them well and jobs that they enjoy like that, that is I think, an under appreciated reality of what entrepreneurs can provide as they expand and grow.

John Hope Bryant (23:04)

So now that we know each other, I'm going to answer your question that you asked me earlier a bit more intimately. You asked me, what's the thing I splurge on the most? Or something like that. What is the thing that I don't ever ask me that question, by the way, because they normally see me through my nonprofit lens. They don't see me as a capitalist entrepreneur, which of course is where that nonprofit came from, is the fact that I could help to seed it. But you asked me this great question. I gave you an answer that a successful person gives, which is not untrue. Here's the deeper answer. The number one thing I'm proud of and pleased with and think about all the time that I splurged on was when I sold one of my companies, the Promise homes company, in 2021, Christmas Eve, sold it for $121 million. The first thing I did was take a million dollars of that and go buy automobiles for all of my senior leaders at Operation Hope because they don't get bonuses, they don't have stock options, they can't go in and splurge. They can't go to the racetrack and buy a race car. They're working their tails off. And I thought that they should be able to benefit from this free enterprise system. And because they're doing the work at Operation Hope as my senior leaders, it frees me to be able to go do work in my broader portfolio. So they were helping me indirectly. Even though it's a firewall up between my nonprofit and my for profit and they're paying aside, getting a salary and all that kind of stuff, I wanted to lean into them some more. I also gave them a million dollars worth of stock so they could, you know, have some of the upside of the economy. That is my proudest thing. And I got that inspiration from my friend Oprah Winfrey that it wasn't about what I had to get is what I had to give.

Joel (24:41)

Yeah.

John Hope Bryant (24:42)

And by the way, do you think they worked harder for me, guaranteed, as a result of that and worked harder for the mission?

Joel (24:46)

Of course. All right, John, I got more I want to get to with you, including I want to discuss what you outline as kind of a third way, something that's not 100% capitalism, not 100% socialism. We'll talk about that in just a second. You love what you do. You also love the idea of not doing it one day. But it's getting harder to know the best way to move into the future towards retirement. Right. We hear about inflation, rate hikes, the changing market, got to get kids through college, build an emergency fund, and then there's retirement.

John Hope Bryant (25:19)

Yeah.

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Joel (28:01)

I'm talking with John O'. Brien. And John, one of the things you're talking about here in your book as well, your new book that's, that's about to come out about capitalism for all. Talk about the third way approach. Like we talk about these terms capitalist socialism. And they're so polarizing because I mean truly, when you look one, we live in a society or in an economic system that isn't all one or the other. Like think about our. Our health care sector. That is, that is not Capitalism, that's not socialism. It is this muddled, weird, it's a complete, it's. And it's completely dysfunctional. Right. So what is the third way, I guess that you are advocating that that's more powerful than one or the other.

John Hope Bryant (28:40)

So this is going to be part of this radical conversation as I go on tour around this country. The tour will start here in Atlanta at Clark Atlanta University and will extend hopefully to my friend, Delta, CEO of Delta. So Andrew Young did the Ford, did one of the Fords. Ed Bashen, CEO of Delta, did one of the Fords. He's one of our partners and my board members and friends. And then Michael Milken, who is the king of Wall street and created alternative credit vehicles, finance vehicles, he did one of the Fords. These three guys who couldn't be more different in some ways found a unifying theme in this book. So there's a number of third ways. And again, this is going to be a really radical, but I think common sense conversation. Let's talk politics because somebody's going to say, well, John, how does this speak politically? It doesn't. I'm not for it, I'm not against it. It's irrelevant that the free enterprise system is for the people. And if I do something, if we do something that advances the people, which is by the way, somebody gonna say, well, wait a minute, isn't this guy talking about capitalism? He's talking about the people. Isn't that social, some kind of social statement? No, no, no. 70% of the US economy, Joel, GDP is consumer spending. 70. So 70% of the $30 trillion, give or take, is you and me paying car notes, going to restaurants, going on vacations, going to buy concert tickets. It's simple stuff.

Joel (30:11)

Yeah.

John Hope Bryant (30:11)

And if that doesn't regenerate, if that doesn't grow, the whole party's over. You won the battle on Wall Street. That's why they called them out. A K straight, a K shaped economy. Right now that guys like me and ladies are doing well with equities. I'm not sure how long this is going to last, by the way. Unless, unless we solve this. But the bottom side of part of the K, which is the middle class and below are really taking it in the shorts and aren't feeling really good about the economy. Bankruptcies are up, by the way, year over year, foreclosures are up. I don't know if anybody's following this, but year over year you're talking about, I mean it's eye popping number 30%, more defaults and foreclosure, 13%, more bankruptcies. These are not small numbers. This is not 2008. Not suggesting anything like that. But this is not like 2% or 5%. And if so, if this bottom part of the K of the economy is not bolstered up again, my rich friends eat. My poor friends do better if only stay rich. I hope politicians local, state and federal steal ideas from my book, steal them and go use them to drive their political success. We need them to be successful. We need the president, the Senate, the House, the governors, the mayors. We need them all to be successful because their success is ours. Likewise, their failure is ours. So let's, so let's check that box. No, you didn't ask it, but let's deal with that address that this is the get it done party, not the Republican or Democratic party. It's about the people. Number two, it's a third way because it's a, it's a way that no one's talking about. For instance, artificial intelligence, which I cover in this book. I'm co chair of the AI Ethics Council with Sam Altman. We've launched Hope AI at Operation Hope, et cetera. I use AI 50 times, 100 times a day. I love it. But what I now know, using AI, AI hallucinates. AI gets things wrong because it's in a microcosm. In other words, it's right in a narrow. If you dumb in, dumb out, you ask a dumb question, it's going to give you a really smart dumb answer. Or it'll give you a really answer that looks really smart and looks right, but it's in a narrow bandwidth. So it's actually wrong. Yeah. And, and, and so you, you actually need a smart thought process to go into that, to broaden the question, to broaden the vision, the broaden the intuition to have a leadership approach to the question so that AI can then give you a smart answer that addresses the real question. And I oftentimes they always say, oh yeah, I'm sorry, I made a mistake, you're right. Let me recast that. And gives me a completely different. It just told me I was right over here. Right. So it's a people pleaser, it hallucination.

Joel (32:55)

It also likes to please you. Yes.

John Hope Bryant (32:56)

So here's what's my point of that AI is going to change everything. Be clear about that. By 2030, they'll change everything. But I needs people. So your job's not going to be replaced by AI in the short version is going to be a lot of job loss. But Your job is not going to be replaced by AI. Your jobs are going to be replaced by somebody who can use AI as number one. Number two, there's going to, what did I say about the economy is 70% consumer spending. So if all my tech bros, they said, oh, we don't need people anymore. You're a genius with a blind spot called people. Who's going to subscribe to your apps?

Joel (33:28)

Right.

John Hope Bryant (33:30)

Who's going to drive the revenue for the companies that are laying off the people that need the people to buy the stuff from the companies.

Joel (33:38)

You need the tech, tech tech founders to have more of a Henry Ford sort of mindset. Right? I need the people who are making the cars to be able to afford the cars we're producing.

John Hope Bryant (33:46)

That's right. So when I said to, I can't say who the CEO is because you'd figured out, I can't say, sorry, I can't give you any hints, but I'll just say It's a Fortune 500 CEO of a consumer facing company. And after hearing this AI presentation about eight months ago, he was like, oh, you know, we're going to, we're going to see trillionaires and we're going to have all this wealth and we don't need all these employees and is, you know, good riddance basically. He didn't say that, but that was an inference. I said, you do know the economy is 70% consumer spending, don't you? And he looked at me, Joel, he said, that can't be true. I said, no, it absolutely is true. And he said, no, no, but what about business to business? I said, yeah, that's 8 to 10%. And he was so frazzled by that, Joel, that he changed the subject like he just couldn't handle the conversation. So financial illiteracy is not just poor people and struggling working class people and middle class people. It's the wealthy, it's the ultra wealthy, it's policymakers. I mean, do you know that 90% of all GDP comes from cities? This is a round number. It's really between 90, 83 and 90%. But you know, it's closer to 90. 90% of all GDP, gross domestic product income for the country comes from cities. So let me recast this. 70% of the biggest economy in the world is you and me and whoever's listening to this, right? And 90% of the 70% comes from cities. So if you aren't supporting people, giving them, you know, AI upscaling skills, everybody who has it comes or goes to a college, right? Now gets you higher education. You need to get, you know, an accounting degree in an AI certification. Right. A law degree and an AI certification. Right? Everything's being redone now. So whatever you're doing, get an AI certification. And by the way, that AI certification will only be good for about a year or 18 months. You're gonna get recertified because AI can't figure out no one. These business leaders don't even know where AI is going yet. All they know is it reduces costs. They don't automate. They don't yet know how it makes money. They just know that it reduces costs. But you cannot sit and wait for the future to be perfect, because there is no perfect. You can't sit and wring your arms and your hands and just complain about how horrible the world is. You can't be a chief criticism officer. The world's going to leave you. You got to do that Henry Ford thing, as you mentioned. And by the way, Henry Ford III is on my board of my philanthropy. You got to pay your workers enough to buy the automobiles they were making and get them bought in to this new technology. Back then it was the assembly line. Nobody wanted to work on the assembly line. I think prediction, I never said this to anybody. I'm gonna say it on your show. There's gonna be job loss. Middle class first, then service economy and people with a high school education second. And then on the other side of this, about three years into this, there's gonna be a job surge growth. Because now you got new technology and new industries and people need to work on the robotics, the AI, the systems, and going to have to fix them, repair them, grow them. I want your listeners to hear me on this and you say, what about that gap, John, of three years? Yeah, that is a question, right? But one thing I want you to think about is what can you create? What can you start? Because everything is changing. I'll give you one example. Websites. Joe, I don't know how old you are, but I think you're maybe within 10 years of my age. Okay. You certainly know that all of our friends who had businesses 10 years ago paid 10 grand, 20 grand for a website.

Joel (37:20)

That's right.

John Hope Bryant (37:21)

All right. They haven't updated that website since then. Right. You're my son or nephew or anybody listening to this could pick Columbus, Georgia, just, you know, not Atlanta, Conyers or Marietta or Alpharetta or whatever. Find out how many businesses are in that the ecosystem. Solicit all of them and say you have a website. You spent 5 10, $20,000 on it, 5, 10, 15 years ago. I'm going to upgrade your website with AI and I'm gonna charge you 500 bucks. Think about how many businesses would say yes to that. I think it's 25%.

Joel (37:58)

Yeah.

John Hope Bryant (37:58)

You're gonna go from five grand to 25 grand to 500. And you're gonna put AI and automation on the back end of it and e commerce. Sign me up so that if you do 2,000 of those contracts, you've done a million dollars of business at $500 each. And that's not even doing gradation of. Some people are going to be 200 contract with $5 contracts. Some of these will be thousand dollar contracts, but that's just one example of upgrading software. But right now you want to start a business two years ago, that's a hundred thousand to a million dollar enterprise. You need accountant, you need lawyers, you need, you need, you need all, you need systems, you need computers, you need all this stuff. Right. You need 10 people and 100,000 to a million bucks. Now for 50 bucks you can start a business, A million dollar business. AI is your accountant, AI is your lawyer. AI is your marketing agent. AI is your systems infrastructure. AI is your coding. I mean I can go on and on and on.

Joel (38:54)

It's really easy to, to cry about and to lament and be worried about what AI can bring about. But I think what you're, what you're saying is take advantage of it, like utilize it to make you a better business owner. I have a friend who literally just vibe coded a website for another friend who's starting a small bakery business. He did it in like five days. And that is that those are the kind of tools available at our disposal. And I get like future of AI is uncertain. That three year period you talk about sounds like it could be, it could be dark. But for the people out there who say no, I'm going to figure this thing out. Instead of being scared.

John Hope Bryant (39:30)

Yes. When you're being run out of town, get in front of the crowd and make like a, make like a parade.

Joel (39:35)

Yeah, yeah.

John Hope Bryant (39:37)

You know, figure out where your. Is an old saying in leadership. Let's see where our people are going. Let's go get in front of them and lead them. Right?

Joel (39:45)

Yeah.

John Hope Bryant (39:45)

Let's, let's see where the market is going, let's see where things are happening and let's, let's go and become a solution to that. That's what capitalism is by the way. So look everybody, listen to this. You can complain about Life. Or you can go do something about it. You don't like capitalism, but you're listening to this on a, on a device you bought through capitalism. If you have an iPhone, you have a smartphone, you have an Android. That's capitalism. You have these earbuds. That's capitalism. The, the, the airwaves. You're listening to this on radio. That's capital. You're on I heart. You're on whatever, Spotify, whatever. That's capitalism. You're listening in a car. That's capitalism. You stopped at a gas station. The gas station owner is a capitalist. You go get your nails done. The nail tech is a capitalist. She's an independent contractor inside of the nail salon, which is a capitalist. It's owned by somebody who wants to make more tomorrow. They made yesterday. And they want to be able to sell their business at some point and take some capital gains and go and live a good life. Your dentist is a capitalist. Yes, I said it. Your dentist. Right. They're not doing it for free. Your lawyer certainly is a capitalist. Your architect is a capitalist. Right. Your health care system we talked about is really a messy form of it. But you think about why should some of this stuff cost us 2,000, 5,000, $10,000? Crazy. But how can the surgeon afford the Ferrari or the, the Porsche? Yeah, I'm not hating on anything. I'm just saying this is the way. This is the system we're living in. And I've been to a hundred countries, Joel. I don't know of another system that works better than this in the world.

Joel (41:31)

That's good. Yeah. We got, got more I want to get to with you, John. Including. I want to talk about. I want to talk more about ladders and what it looks like to bring everyone in. Right. And create more economic success under this capitalism for all system. Talk about that and more right after this. You love what you do. You also love the idea of not doing it one day. But it's getting harder to know the best way to move into the future towards retirement. Right. We hear about inflation, rate hikes, the changing market, got to get kids through college, build an emergency fund, and then there's retirement.

John Hope Bryant (42:07)

Yeah.

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John Hope Bryant (43:29)

How's this?

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John Hope Bryant (43:33)

No.

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Joel (44:35)

All right, we're back. Still talking with John Hope Bryant talking about making the system work for everyone. Capitalism for all. Love this philosophy. Talk to me about ladders because that's one of the things you talk about in the book as well, that the people who are locked out of the wealth building system, they need ladders, right? To be erected to ensure that they can participate in the Free enterprise economy. And I do think when we're talking about there is a segment of America that does, it feels like not a caste system India style, right? But it does feel like it's harder for me to move up and be economically mobile in society than maybe what it felt like in my parents generation 50 or 60 years ago. First, do you think that's true? And then two, what does it look like to bring ladders down for those people to help them move up?

John Hope Bryant (45:24)

So we're coming full circle in the interview, which is beautiful. We're ending where we began and that shows that you're really smart and good at what you do. People resent this system because deep down in their gut there's an aching feeling that it doesn't work for them anymore. And this is not a racial thing, it's not a political thing, it's a human thing. Women have great intuition, better than men typically because they're the only women can create life. So they're a terminal to a higher power. And there's an intuition that something's not quite right. That's why I call it sentiment. If you're looking at American sentiment, it's down. Even though the economy supposedly is up, people know that something's not quite right. And when you have everybody in a policy making environment who are billionaires or center millionaires, 100 million or more, how does that person make good policy? Joel, they can be the nicest person in the world. Be very kind. But how do you relate to somebody going to a grocery store? How do you relate to somebody who's getting a turn off notice for their cable bill? How do you relate to somebody who's going through a public airport, they're flying private and they've been doing it for 10 or 20 years. How do you relate to somebody who's on a, on a freeway, stuck in traffic, they're right there again, they're flying private. How do you relate to somebody who is in a crowded, noisy environment? They live behind a gated community. I know these people. I'm not hating on them. I'm saying it's impossible for you to create policy without input from the masses because you just represent the classes. And so folks at the bottom understand this country was always about the poor people at the bottom going to the top. I mean, Walmart was Sam Walton with a pickup truck, a high school education in a storefront, the biggest retailer in the world today. And they're one of my partners and I love, I love Walmart, ups, Jim Carrey Bicycle He Met Henry Ford, they got together and voila. Ups. I forget the guy's name. Fred Smith. I think it was FedEx. There's two guys who created Goldman Sachs. Literally, guy named Goldman and a guy named Sachs. They couldn't get a job on Wall street, so they decided to go door to door and sell their own products. And they built what we now call this institution is called Goldman Sachs bank of America. One guy, after the fires in San Francisco, started lending the small business. This is the history of capitalism. This is the history of America. Bottom to the top, not top on top of the top. And systems don't crater from the bottom from the top down, Joel. They create it from the bottom in. So we are at this inflection point on the 250th anniversary of America, what I call the third reconstruction, where everything seems to have reached a near breaking point. The environment is a little funky. Politics are funky. Race relations are funky. The mobility is funky. The ladder's not only broken, it's missing. Somebody stole a ladder. Now you're stuck at the bottom and you resent it. And now when your outflow exceeds your inflow, then your overhead becomes your downfall. And this system requires cooperation. It requires trust, requires faith, requires belief. Now, the spirituality now requires confidence. It requires love. It requires me caring about my neighbor. This system. There's not enough police. If you're in the city of LA, and I grew up there, there's not enough police. Six million, seven million people, Joe. 10,000 police officers with a. With a side, with a sidearm and one pair of handcuffs is not safety. 10,000 police officers against 6 million people. If the city, the city comes unwound, and it did with the Rodney king riots in 1992, by the way. And Police Chief Darrell Gates then told the LAPD to exit the city. He was afraid for his officers. And when you had what happened in New Orleans, you had four times more police officers per capita than la. But it's twice as less safe because all rule of law had decoupled. There's not enough police, law enforcement, military. There's not enough directives to protect us from each other. If we don't believe, we believe, the bet's off. And the bet is this. If I work hard, play by the rules, do the right thing, keep my nose clean, pay my taxes respectful to my elders, honor my citizenship, I'm gonna get a reasonable shot of success or failure on my own merit. I hope you follow that. I've never said that publicly, but that's what I believe. That that's the bet that we have with each other. And it's so this country's not a country. She's an idea, Joel. She's an idea. And we have to keep remaking it every day. So this is a fight for our democracy. I don't mean fight fight. I mean this is a struggle, a recommitment to our democracy, our sense of fair play, a software upgrade on capitalism. And I think that it's right on time. Rainbows only follow storms. You cannot have a rainbow without a storm first. If we do this right, and I believe we will, my middle name is Hope. We put the ladder back down into the soil. We start doing internships. Internships again. And giving corporations tax credits. This is in the book. For internships, for apprenticeships, training people in AI, Training existing workers like Walmart's doing. They're not firing their workers. They're training existing workers in artificial intelligence. Upskilling them for. And I believe that's a smart bet. By the way, you're going to need employees. You're going to need customers who can buy your goods. I said that earlier.

Joel (50:51)

Good for the business, good for the employee, good for the future. Future.

John Hope Bryant (50:53)

Bottom line, right? So we need corporations to get tax credits for sponsoring a school, sponsoring an entrepreneurship club. Corporations to sponsor. To invest in a small business, we have to use a taxing system. Has been so successful on home ownership as an example and so successful on philanthropy as example. Let's use it as a way to get the top, to incentivize them to invest in the bottom. They're not going to do it because it's the right thing to do. Or goodwill, if you want to call it that. They're not what, you know, what did Warren Buffett say? When people are greedy, be afraid. When people are afraid, be greedy.

Joel (51:27)

Yeah.

John Hope Bryant (51:27)

And so. So folks are just going to go bunker up at the top, but give them a tax. Speak to their greed, speak to their self interest. I didn't mean greed. Speak to their self interest and give them, Give them incentives to invest in the least of these God's children and you'll see a resurgence explosion of innovation, of creation, of entrepreneurship, of new businesses, things we've never even thought about. Which, by the way, those new businesses going to hire people as they grow. There you go, Joe. More new jobs, right, that no one thought about. And boom, now the economy goes from. I think that we have a shot in a decade to go from 30 trillion to 60 trillion. You heard it here. First America. Now we get this wrong and we keep obsessing about wanting to go back to the, to supposedly the great old days. I'm not quite sure when this was a great old. What days were the great old days in America? Somebody can please tell me. But anyway, what I'm about to say is not political, it's not racial, it's just blunt. There are not enough successful college educated white men to drive GDP, gross domestic product for the next 20 years. I like math that doesn't have an opinion. That's a Melody Hobson quote. Now I want every white man I know to be successful. I need him to be successful because his success is my success, as I said earlier. But there's just not enough of them. And that has not statistically been true at any time in American history until now. We need. Women are a third of the economy, Joel. In 1972, a woman, a white woman couldn't get, couldn't have a Bank account in 1972. Joe. Her. Her. Our mothers couldn't get a loan unless the husbands co signed it. Not 1872, 1972. Wow. So luckily we made the right bet and gave women rights and opportunities. And now they're a third of the economy. Eight to ten trillion dollars. We need to empower the bottom of the pyramid. Poor whites. There's more poor whites than poor anybody else. Native American, Indians, African Americans, Asians, Indians, middle class, whites, middle class, everybody. We need to put that ladder back down and raise it back up with everybody in mind and watch GDP grow. Otherwise we're gonna be speaking Mandarin in 20 years. And yes, I said it and I meant it. If we don't get this right, our enemy's not our next door neighbor. Enemy's not some black dude or white dude or Republican or Democrat. Knock it off. Russia, China and North Korea want your way of life. And they can't win in a fair fight. They can only win if we shoot ourselves in the foot. We're doing a pretty good job of it. Everybody in the world wants to be an American, but Americans. So that's, that's my capitalist call saying I gotta go.

Joel (54:09)

I love it. I love it, man.

John Hope Bryant (54:10)

I hope this has been.

Joel (54:11)

It's John, this has been a pleasure, an absolute pleasure. Thank you for joining me. Where can how to money listeners find out about your new book by the way?

John Hope Bryant (54:17)

Just, just type in John o' Brien and Capitalism for All. You can find it at Barnes and Noble, at Walmart, at Amazon. It's already on pre, pre order number one on Amazon category. You can go, you can go to Wiley Publishing, go to Brian Croup Ventures, go to Operation Hoping you buy from Operation Hope you get a charitable contribution.

Joel (54:33)

All right, well, we'll link to it in the show notes as well. John, thank you so much for joining me today.

John Hope Bryant (54:36)

Joel, God bless you, man. Appreciate you. You got somebody to me nobody else has.

Joel (54:41)

Can my big takeaway from this conversation be that I'm inspired? Because I think it is. And in some ways, John speaks like a politician, but in so many ways he doesn't because he says what he actually thinks, but he speaks in a way I wish, I guess, more politicians would speak. And especially in an age where we're so segmented as well. I'm part of this group or this tribe over here. And John lays out what is a compelling vision, I would say, for our country to embrace the idea of free markets and entrepreneurship and building something that can be a benefit to other people. So just there's a ton more questions. By the way, I had for John. I wish we could have gotten to. Maybe I'll have to bring him back on the podcast at some point in the future. But I think, yeah, big takeaway. First big takeaway is ultimately that I think this is aspirational and inspirational and we need that sometimes, right, to, to remember that we're fortunate to live in a place where we can go start something. I, I talked to friends, talked to a friend who's from another country and he said, oh my gosh, to start a business, to start a little grocery store. Do you know how much oversight, how much we would have had to prove to the government essentially, in order to even get a tiny grocery store started? He was like, it was, it was impossible here in this country. You can start a small grocery store in your neighborhood. And by the way, those are back. Small grocery stores are back. They're making a dent. They're serving their local communities. They're serving high quality items that cost more than they do at a traditional grocery store most of the time. But people are like, you know what? These are locally sourced items. And so I'm more than happy to pay. It's fascinating to see this uptick. And in small grocery stores, well, guess what? In the United States, you right there, you, whoever you are listening to one, if you had the, the druthers, the idea, a little bit of capital to get started, you, you could go do this yourself. And so what John is pointing to is, I think quite true still in this country. We still live in a time where it is possible. It is incredible, is very possible, maybe more possible than ever to start your own business and to succeed and to not depend on someone else creating a job for you. And I'm not saying it's easy, but it is quite possible. This actually, in some ways this conversation brought me back to our conversation we had with John Mackey, the founder of Whole Foods, talking about grocery stores, who is an advocate for something called conscious capitalism, and John Hope Bryant, very much in that same space. I think one of the other things that John said that I wrote down when he said it was you can do well and do good. And I think that is such a great message and I think it is incredibly true that you can build something that is not only good for you, good for your family, good for wealth building, but it's good for the community. It's good for the people that you employ. And this is where, and this is where I think the term capitalism has really gotten commandeered. And free markets might be just a better term to use that is actually more on the nose and then also is just has less baggage associated with it. But capitalism for all that's something I can get behind. And the more we can, each of us do our own part to build good things where we live and to ensure that other people who might not have as much access to the ladders that they need, if we can help, be that ladder. Just like John is with his nonprofit Operation Hope, and he's trying to help people with financial literacy with budget management. Right? That nonprofit serves a ton of people a la Money Management International. Right? The companies that we talk about, the nonprofits who are doing good work out there. Operation Hope is another one. So John isn't just right, doing the good stuff and making money so that he can splurge and live his life. He is also, he is a part of that process of putting the ladder down for other people which we so desperately need right now. So thank you as always for listening. We'll put links in the show notes to some of the resources that were mentioned, including John's new book. Hope you check it out. And of course, thank you for being a part of this show and the how to money community. I really appreciate it. Until next time, best friend out.

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