← Money And Wealth With John Hope Bryant
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John Hope Bryant
Welcome to Money and Wealth with John Hope Bryant, a production of the Black Effect podcast network and iHeartradio. So my road to entrepreneurship wasn't some fairy tale, and it certainly wasn't easy. And that's good because then you can relate to it. When I was in Compton and living with my mother, the backstory to meeting this white banker who taught me financial literacy in what was then home economics class was my mother who had bought that home. And so I saw somebody make a choice, right, between renting and owning the dignity and the respect that, that engendered, the sense of somebodyness that we had knowing that the roof over our head was our own home. There's an unconscious thing about owning your own stuff, right? And you could tell whose home was rented because the grass was up to your knees. Our grass was well maintained because, well, nobody washes rental cars, right, but you, when you own it, you take care of it. You tend to take care of it. And so we would cut the grass. I would cut the grass, right, for, for, for mom in, at that 15502 South Fraley address in Compton, California, the corner corner lot that she owned. And when I was growing up there in Compton, I'd already seen, you know, the death of our net worth or the death of our family structure divorce when I was less than 5 years old. Then I saw a murder OC the guy who saved my life when I was, you know, six, seven years old, might have been even five or six murdered right in front of me. That was about over money. He was selling marijuana part time in the wrong neighborhood, trying to make some extra money. The wrong side hustle and they murdered him for it. I witnessed that. I can still see it in my own mind's eye to this day. And I had met, when I moved to Compton, this young man who was older than me by 10 years plus George, he was 18, I was 9 or 10 at this point, at this particular point. So when I met him, you know, he was, you know, maybe 17 or 16, but when he was murdered, he was 18. So George was smart. George had great grades. I had okay grades, by the way. I got a C minus, C plus in math. So the finance, the so called financial literacies are, you know, financial literacy. Big baller for the country who's advised three US presidents from both parties. President Clinton, President Bush, President Obama, who advised the Treasury Department, helped create policy for the executive order through the federal government and financial literacy policy and emergency financial disaster policy through female homeland security and all this stuff that we've done at Operation Hope, etc. I got a C minus. C plus in math. That's right. And I'm in good company because you may not know this, but Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Got a C minus in public speaking from Crozier Seminary. Did you know that? That's right. They said if you don't stop talking like that, you never amount to anything. Well, he turned out more than okay. So doing something different doesn't mean that you can't do it. It just may mean that it's different. So George had a great grades. He was a perfect student, but didn't have great parents. And I don't think I ever remember seeing his father. Now I didn't have a father at home, but I had a father. My mom and dad were divorced, but my dad spent time with me, my mother spent time with me. They did not argue with me. They didn't make me a negotiating point between them in the household. They didn't make their children the argue point. Please don't do that to your kids. They don't. They, your kids not asked to come here. They did not get a vote. Right. You had, you guys got busy, they showed up. And so you have a responsibility to raise them into adulthood and to make them responsible citizens. Give them all the tools they need to compete. Discipline, structure, love, accountability, confidence, belief. All in the tools they need to, to, to roll in this world. So my mother was like a mom and a dad when I was, you know, with her. And then my dad was like extra sauce right when I go, went to go hang out with him oftentimes on weekends. He lived in South Central, we lived in Compton, he lived at 35th and Western. And but, but I never saw George's father. And, and, and his mother was nice enough, but you know, I don't really remember her very much. When I would hang out, he, he would spend most of his time at our house because I think he loved my mother. Anyway, George was a great student and I wanted to be like George because I wanted to be smart. Unfortunately, George didn't know who he wanted to be. So George started hanging out with my next door neighbor, Tweet, the local drug dealer. The whole family next door was just off the chain crazy like they were, they were, they were all involved with the drug train gang and slanging, banging police were always at the house next door. Tweet was, he was a handsome guy. He was, you know, he was super cool. But just use his talent for something that did not have a return on investment. And in my Neighborhood, you had prison, parole, and death. And George started hanging out with Tweet, started walking like Tweet, talking like Tweet, acting like Tweet, and got shot and killed with Tweet. So that was the third time I witnessed a death, and the second time, actually, I didn't witness that. It happened. Right. It was witnessed in my life. I saw three deaths, two murders, experienced three deaths. Deaths of something important to me that was transformational. The family structure, our. Our net worth, you know, generational wealth. Then the murder of OC and then the murder which I actually witnessed and the murder of George. And I realized being smart wasn't enough. Like, you know, yeah, it's really important, but it's not enough. Being cool is not enough. Hanging out certainly depends who you hanging out with. Not enough culture matters. Like, culture, to this day is not the most important thing in business. It's the only thing in business. It's the only thing in your life. On your street, your. Your neighborhood has a culture. Your household has a culture. As wife Shaetra has said, most habits are learned, right? Most things are learned. What is the habit in your household, in your life, in your family structure? So you're starting getting a sense of what the habits were in my family structure and the ecosystem in my family that my mother was going to make sure was embedded in our culture before we walked out that front door. And even when she wasn't around, we were guided by her role modeling. Right? You model what you see. A lot of kids want to be rap stars. Nothing wrong with it. But you can't scale a rap star. TI Is my friend. Killer Mike's my friend. I have a lot of friends who are rappers. Actors are my friend. I was with Chris Tucker, the brilliant comedian and actor, just today. Great friend, you know, of a lot of people in the entertainment business. Quincy Jones is a mentor of mine. But the very fact that I can mention these names. I know Oprah Winfrey. I know. I know a lot of. A lot of these people that you are aware of, Quavo. Right. But you can't be. The very fact that I mentioned their name means that they're. They're. They're. They're brands. They're unique into themselves. And you cannot have 40 million black people trying to be, you know, 3,000 rappers and 200 named actors. It just. The numbers don't work. Right. It's not scalable. And. And even their businesses are dependent upon their personality. So they're. They're in all likelihood have 2, 3, 410 employees. But our community needs, if you're gonna go work for them, you need somebody who can create hundreds of employer employees and thousands of employees. I In I. E. I wrote a piece once that America needed, and I love the presidency of Barack Obama and what he represented. But I wrote that America probably needed black. America probably needed a black Bill Gates before it needed a black president. Right? We needed that role model to see and experience what it's like to create a business that create, that created a business of the billionaire that creates 100 millionaires that work for him, that create then, you know, multi millionaires and then create millionaires underneath, underneath, underneath that then create hundred thousandaires, salaried employees. And all these people are giving money back, you know, you know, to their communities and donating to charities, going to, donating, tiding at church and, and hooking up the, the vendors at their house, whether it be, you know, painters or electricians or folks cutting the grass, it all trickles down, right? And it's all habit forming. So that's why I've said black America probably needed a black Bill Gates or several of them before we needed a black president. Because government can't save you, just like drug dealing can't save you, just like rap stars can't save you. So my point was that we end up wanting to be rap stars, athletes and drug dealers. Nothing wrong with the rap star example other than it's not scalable and you shouldn't want to be a drug dealer or gangster. But we end up modeling that because that's what we see. Those are symbols of success that we see and where the rules are published in the playing fields level. Black folks and brown folks succeeded. Think about the arts. You, you sing well, you dance well, people buy your records or whatever, go to your performances, you succeed. Think about sports. You run fast, you hit a, bounce a baseball, you bounce a bat, you bounce a basketball, you, you throw a football, whatever, you're good at it, you get the contract, you succeed. Right? Even though that, by the way, is not necessarily sustainable because 70% of those, 70% of those in professional sports, namely the NFL and the NBA, are bankrupt. Five years give or retirement. That's another podcast I'll do and I'll focus on professional sports and all that. But on this example, I just want you to understand that this is the math of the matter. You cannot have 40 million-plus black people trying to fit into these sub categories of, of artistry that are scalable. So you got all these people trying to do these few jobs which don't last. But that's what we, we're modeling what we see because we see success in it, but you can't scale it. And, and so we, we end up wanting to do these things that don't have what I call economic legs on them. There are no retired drug dealers, right? Prison, probation, parole, death, right? It does not have a retirement plan. There's no pension plan. But one thing I did understand in my neighborhood, and I do give credit to the folks in my neighborhood and think about people now. In your neighborhood, if you can rel, is where you grew up, where you may live right now. There are no dumb drug dealers who are successful. It may be immoral, it may be unethical, it may not be a good business plan because you're selling death to your community. In many cases, you're, you're infecting people with something that doesn't, doesn't prosper their lives. It's what I call bad capitalism. Good capitalism is where I benefit and other people benefit more. Bad capitalism is where I benefit. Everybody else pays a price for it. So drug dealing is by its own very nature bad capitalism. But we're not necessarily talking about bad people, right? So if you're a drug dealer, you're an illegal and ethical entrepreneur, you understand? Import, export, finance, marketing, wholesale retail, customer service, security, territory, logistics, and on and on and on. You've got payroll, right? I mean, these are business people, they're entrepreneurs, they're hustlers, and they just need a good business plan. By the way, I'm not picking on black and brown people. Poor. There are more poor whites in America than poor anybody else. Hello. And where do you think NASCAR came from? Moonshine running from the Appalachian Mountains. That's right. These are guys who, running from the police, selling moonshine, running from police, became really good at it, realized that the moonshine running part was not going to last. Running from the police was not a sustainable career. You'll get prison, probation, parole, death. Right, right. And so it was, it was, they had to stop that part. But they look, you know, we're good at driving. And so they started driving on those country roads and driving on the beach and then driving in circles on dirt tracks. And then that turned into a fifth generation five generations later. If you go back five generations of a lot of these NASCAR families, you'll find moonshine runners. But they're multi, multi, multi millionaires today. And it's a multi, multi billion dollar industry today. And the president of NASCAR is on my board of directors. Great Guy, Steve Phelps. So how do we take where's the Rainbow after the storm? How do you take a negative and turn into a positive? These drug dealers are natural business people. Maybe they can't go work for IBM because a lot of them have a public, but they can go create the new IBM, right? They can. If you can't get a job, create a job. You can't cash a check, write one. And if you're a gang member, you're a frustrated union organizer. Hello. Right. So that's organizing skills, right? These are talented people. Unfortunately, they didn't get the memo in my neighborhood. So George got murdered with Tweet. My friend Andre got hooked up at jail. I'm thinking. I'm thinking about now in the. I was on the corner, look left, there's tweet and there's George murdered. Look in front of me, there's Andre. And all my boys hung out there. Jail, prison, parole, some cases, murder. These are friends of mine, but extremely talented. Never got of the hood. To my right was this one family, our role model, Hispanic family. And one of my dear friends lived down the street, Sanchez family. And they all lived in the same property. Now, part of that was because it's a Hispanic neighborhood now, Compton, where I grew up. But it was a black neighborhood there with few Hispanic families. They didn't feel necessarily welcome in the neighborhood. So they had a fence around their property, and that actually forced them to work together as a unit. And they lived in the same house. It was a house in front and the house the back. They lived together, worked together, slept together, were family together, create a business together, built wealth together. To this day, the whole generation, multi generations of them, I guess three generations now, immensely successful. I'm still in touch with the family. I watched that, right? I watched that. And I say in my book up from Nothing, and I'll get into details of that, the five pillars of success. But the third pillar is family structure and resiliency, right? So becoming an entrepreneur and a businessman is not just about having a great business idea. It's having the right culture, the right role models, right environment, because you. You model what you see. And so I said, when the rules are published in the playing field is leveled, black people succeed. I mentioned the arts, I mentioned professional sports politics. That's, hey, you. You give a good speech, you have a good platform, they vote for you. The rules are published in the playing field is level. But in entrepreneurship and business, there is no rule book, right? And you confuse making money with building wealth, right? You think Hustle's enough. It's not. And so we have to get our hustle right, get our life right, our role models right, and then we'll get. We'll get our business plan right, and then we'll get our story right. So I became an entrepreneur in my mind before I ever became one in real life. I became a businessman in my spirit, before I ever became one who cashed a check or brought in revenue. It was a mindset. Mindset matters. And. And I looked around my neighborhood and saw what I liked. So what I didn't like, decided I didn't want that. And there's a lot of love in the word no. And so I'd start my legal hustle, and I start selling mail order because I didn't have any inventory, didn't have any money. So what can I do? I've got good hustle. You know, you don't have any compounded capital. You need to compound and hustle and hustle and hustle can create more hustle and. And that in. In, you know, fear. Fear is a lazy bastard, and the devil's a lazy bastard. They. They don't work hard. They wait. They. They wait for you to give up. So I figured if I got up early and stayed up later, worked harder, like my T shirt says nobody cares, works work harder, that. That would be my advantage. And so I hustled and I had gift for gab and I sold mail order anything. I would share my dream with my teachers at school or whatever. And all that led to then my lesson in financial literacy that I, you know, had this banker come in my classroom and click, click, click, click, click, click, click. That plus what my mother taught me, what I saw, my father, what I saw, my neighborhood, what I didn't want, what I did want. Rainbows after storms. Boom. That's the business plan for my life. And, you know, this story can go on forever. I can do two, three different segments on just this aspect of becoming an entrepreneur and a business owner. But it all started with that childhood framework. And there's nothing I just said that's magical, right? And none of it required a lot of money capital. None of it required fancy stuff or, you know, flossing. None of this. It was all pretty basic. And it's in. Every one of these tools are available to you. And so when that banker said, I'm a banker, not financial entrepreneurs, well, that became the. The business plan for my life. I'm g. Become an entrepreneur. And then when I ask that banker, well, how many bankers are There in, you know, there more than you. Right. Like, let me make sure I understand this properly. I can borrow money from you, and I don't get dead if I don't pay you back. What are you talking about? Well, in my neighborhood, if you borrow money from Pookie, them and you don't pay him back, you're not coming back. You, you, you know, they'll take you out or they enslave you for the rest of your life. You don't never. You never get out of debt. It's like, no, no, you, you know, you take out a loan, you qualify. You know, you take the loan out, you pay it back, you're fine, and you don't pay it back. You know, we have a notice of default. We foreclose on you, you live to fight another day. I'm like, okay, well, I just figured out what I'm going to do, and all I got to do is convince you my business plan's right and have decent credit. Yep. Okay, so how many people are like you? Well, there's a couple hundred thousand bankers at bank of America, he said, so it's got to be millions of bankers in America. Whoa, whoa, whoa. And how many banks are there in America? Had to be 10,000 back then. There's 4,500 banks today. FDIC Insurance bank, whose mission is to lend you capital if you can prove you that, that you qualify as it. So my. My people don't have to go out and get money from Pookie, Nim and Jojo and Bang Bang and the mafia and all this stuff. Payday lenders and rent to own stores and check cashes. And look what's going on in our neighborhoods. You know, 500 credit score neighborhoods. Check cash or payday on lender rent, on store title, lender, liquor store, pawn shop. They're just preying on people with low financial literacy and high aspirations and dreams who are the HUs who have a surviving mindset. They're preying on you. It's Target marketing. And I don't know about you, but I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. As Malcolm M. Said, I've been. We've been bamboozled. We've been tricked. We've been fooled. And I don't know about you, but I'm sick and tired of being sick and tired. So when he told me that, that I didn't realize it, but that was a business plan for Operation Hope, which I had found. Which I would found back then. So I was nine going on 10 years old. I would have found it. 26, 16 years later, I would have found Operation Hope. And there's a whole nother story of some organization. I found it for Tom Bradley, which is still a city government agency. I found it out when I was 19 years old and a volunteer for the City of LA under Tom Bradley. But I was too young to run it. They told me it was a city lending agency. But I'll try to put that in the, in the. In the comments for the podcast. I've got to remember the name of the city agency, but you can look it up today. I inspired it when I was 19 years old. That became the preamble for what Oakland would become after the Rodney King riots. Operation Hope. But Operation Hope's business plan of really unleashing untapped human potential at scale and making people bankable at scale and getting your credit score up and your debt down, your savings up and making you bankable. Turning you from black and white or red or blue to green. Right? Right. Bankable. That get making the private banker to the working class, the underserved. Folks with too much month at the end of their money. Folks who are moving from a struggling mentality, a surviving mentality, to a thriving mentality to a winning mentality. You know, again, the private banker for the working class, the working poor, the working, you know, working middle class. Operation Hope, which is the largest in the country today, $54 million budget, $5 billion invested almost in underserved neighborhoods, raising credit scores 54 to 120 points in between. 6 months to 24 months. All that started with this kid and this dream. It's all the same business plan. I became the entrepreneur and now operation is your banker. So you can become dream makers in your life. Rainbows only follow storms, right? You cannot have a rainbow without a storm first, cannot grow without legitimate suffering. Don't run away from your problems, run through them. I love you. I'm out. Let's go do this thing. They bought the eight unit apartment building. First lived in one unit, rented two out that covered the mortgage payment. That was subbed. 300amonth. Yes, they built. They bought it for $18,000. For anybody you think real estate is not magical. That apartment building is worth several million dollars today. Almost. I think it's six. Last time I checked, it was $6 million. That's that. That apartment building is worth. We bought it for $18,000. And the rest of the unit rents. It was eight units. So she. We lived in one unit ren to cover the mortgage payment. The rest of the units, the five units that were left were profit. And they use that profit, save that extra money to then put a down payment on their home, the home I'm talking about on Santa Barbara Boulevard. And by the way, we lost the apartment building. I'll get to that in a minute. And I say we lost because that's generational wealth for our family. It wasn't just my mom and my dad. It wasn't just my dad. They, they, my dad didn't realize that they had to be better together. My dad was a great hustler, by the way. A great hustler. But there's a difference between making money and building wealth. I'll get into that in a separate podcast. We're really focused on that. But a lot of, like a lot of black strivers, we think that making that money, getting that dollar, getting that cash, getting that buck, getting that bag is everything. It's actually not, right. You can, you can make, you can win the battle and lose the war. And that's exactly what my father did and wouldn't listen to my mother. So. But here's the positive part. They were smart enough to buy that apartment building for $18,000 and they did nothing else but buy that and just hold it. The whole family would be set today. More set than ultimately, we ended up being with my mother by at least six times. More set. My mother ended up being technically a millionaire when she passed on, but that one apartment building again will be worth $6 million today. We only only owed $18,000 when we purchased it, when they purchased it. And when you buy a piece of real estate, you get the benefit of the depreciation, a tax benefit, you get the benefit of the appreciation, the equity, and you write off most of the mortgage payments against your income. So it was really win, win, win. Anyway, so we moved from the apartment building, owned it, then got a house. Great, good job. Then we bought a gas station at, I believe it's at Normandy and Vernon, south east corner. For those who know Los Angeles geography, you know that that gas station is still there today. Just last time I was in la, it was still there and functioning. We own that gas station. We own a cement contracting business, we owned a little nursery business, taking care of little knucklehead kids like me before and after school. For working parents, we. My mother had a side hustle making arts and crafts. Anyway, mom and dad really argued over money because my dad could make it but couldn't keep, as I mentioned earlier. And he was a great hustler, but he was not financially literate. And Pastor Young says the men and women fail for three reasons. Arrogance, pride, and greed. My dad was not greedy, but he was full of pride and slightly arrogant. And he wouldn't ask my mother for advice. And only in a relationship do I think that the mask should not work. Like I love math. To quote my friend Melody Hobson, I love math because it doesn't have an opinion. Right. But only in a relationship should the math not work. Two plus two. If it doesn't equal 6, 8, or 10, meaning more than 4, what are you doing? Right? You can do better all by yourself. If you're not better together, what are you doing? Right? So dad and mom had the building blocks, right? But they didn't have the strategy. Right. They didn't have the mindset. Right. They still had a surviving mindset. They didn't together move to a thriving mindset. Again, my mother finally got to thriving mindset. We're not there yet. And unfortunately, they thought they were builders, but they had. They still had a surviving, hustling mindset and approach. And so end up winning the battle and losing the war. Crossing bridges ahead of time, picking up a. Stepping over a dollar to pick up a dime. What do I mean by that? They argued over money. Dad wouldn't listen to mother. He would bid jobs as a cement contractor. He wanted to win the bid. I respect the hustle, but again, not financially literate. So the job was, if the last contract to bid with a client for a thousand dollars, my dad would go in and bid at 900. Well, the materials might be 950. My dad didn't think about that. He thought the cash flow was profit. Wrong. So the more money he made, the broker we got, he made a dollar and spent A$50. And we lost everything. We lost the gas station. We lost the apartment building. We lost our home. And on the verge of losing our home, my mother again, she. She was a master at savings. Remember this going back to the grandma story. And she would put little seed corns to the side. And ladies and gentlemen, if you're married, I want you to trust each other. I want you to be in each other's lives. I want you to all that. But understand that you're meeting a business partner here and not just a mate. And when you go to the club and you see the dude. Oh, he's. He's handsome. Ladies, guys. You see the lady? Oh, she's fine. Don't just ask their name, ask their credit score, right? And I'm. I'm Joking. But I'm serious, right? Because this is a business partner for the rest of your life. So you want to have a joint account, right? And you want to have a separate account to make sure that, you know, if you find out this person is actually not financially literate, that they tear their own rear and they're not tearing yours, the collective yours. At the same time, you need to have be the backup plan for your family. So my mother had a separate little account that she had set up, and she wasn't hiding from my father. My father knew it was there, and she had saved $4,000, which was a lot of money back then. This is 1968. No, this was 1970. I was four. Four or five years old. Between three and five years old, if I get the math right. So sometime between 60. I was born in 66, 68, 69, 70, 71. That time period. Anyway, $4,000, a lot of money. My. My mother had saved this $4,000 to send my brother to a college of his choice because she wanted him to move from a surviving mindset to a thriving mindset. Right, and thriving mindset. So surviving mindset's freedom. First reconstruction, out of slavery, you're free. Second Reconstruction, civil rights movement, getting access to jobs, access to careers, access to education, access to the polling booth, access to public facilities, restrooms of your choice, all that stuff. Being able to have access, of course, Third reconstruction, which is we're in today, that Operation Hope is helping the lead is a movement from the streets to the suites, from civil rights to silver rights. Right, the third reconstruction, the color is not black or white, it's green. It's not red or blue, it's green. It's economics is opportunity for all. It's about. It's about writing checks, not just cashing them. So we're in the second reconstruction now we're in the 60s and the 70s. And my mother knew that for my brother to do better, he needed a higher education. And you know better, you do better. And so my brother was set to go to a college of his choice to be whoever he wanted. My father got to the bank first and took that $4,000. Unfortunately, my mother had him as a signer on the account. So you might want to have. Until you guys embed. Until you embed yourself, until, you know, going from we're about me to about we. It may take a minute for you guys to come together as one. And you trust each other, not just romantically, but about money and business decisions. And you're on the same Accord you might want to have an account, just your own name on it and then he has an account or she has an account with their name on it. Then you have a joint account until things evolve. He got the money and wasted it on some hair brain idea. He had to get a bag, my dad did and of course he lost it. And my brother could not go to a college of his choice. And it broke my mother's heart. And that's how my brother ended up going to, to the Navy. And he went to the Navy because he could get a four year education if he signed up for military service. He thought he signed up for four years. Of course it's like they know the psychology in the military. Once you're there, you probably stay there. Be a good experience. So he signed up for four years. Re signed up re signed up and had of the Navy became a non commissioned officer. A great career in intelligence there and end up retiring to Hawaii, marrying somebody who lives in Hawaii. He works for. Retired from the Navy, works for the Navy as a private contractor with his, with his family. And it's a beautiful story but it wasn't his choice. His. His whole story is defined by that $4,000 moment where he did not have self determination. Right. But what would his life be? How would it be different, right. If, if. If he had gone to a college of his choice and become a dentist or a doctor or a banker or a business person or an engineer or whatever. Right. You know it doesn't matter what it was, but it could have been his choice. And he, and he just didn't do that. And as a result of that. Well, I just told you the story, right. He's a great, great life. But it wasn't his choice. And that was enough. My mother had had enough. And my mother said I'm out. And. And that became the fight of all fights. And my dad, they had domestic abuse, came to blows and they're calling the police to get my mother, my dad off my. My. Off my mother beating her up. And she put off a pump, a 3 inch pump popped him on the head. Hair didn't grow on the top of his head until his last dying days when that pop. So he learned how to do that with my mother again. But she, she was out, you know that she left. We left with the shirt on her back and her kids and we went to go to say with somebody she said was my uncle OC was really her girlfriend and his. Her boyfriend whose name was O.C. but in order to make me feel comfortable make the kids feel comfortable. She said it was that. That was my uncle. And I was playing on the. And she was staying there with her girlfriend and her boyfriend to save money for her to buy her first house on her own Again, again, here's that same lesson again, the basics, learning, you know, spending less than you make, putting a little aside for the future. So she's working as a seamstress now and McDonald Douglas aircraft, which later became Boeing, and making, you know, equivalent of today of 15, 18 an hour. And she worked, work, work, save, save, save. And while she was doing that, I built a relationship with the guy OC who again thought was my uncle. And I was. I was playing on the porch one day and I fell and I was swallowing my tongue. I was choking. And he cleared. He cleared my throat, you know, he cleared my. My throat passage and saved my life. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for him. So I adored this guy, right? And he got murdered in front of me. Well, in order to take care of his family and all and, and ours staying with him. He didn't have a conversation with us saying, hey, I can't afford to have you guys stay with me. Let's talk about this again. Basset Young's quote. Men and women fail with three reasons, arrogance, pride, and greed. You could have just had a conversation with us. My mother would have contributed some money. But he decided he was going to go to work, his legit job. Then he was going to go out again and he was going to sell drugs part time. And it was marijuana, was in the wrong neighborhood. And those guys took it very seriously. They followed him home. They said, you're in the wrong territory. And they drove, they dragged him, they hit him with a truck and dragged him. He's on a bicycle. And that was right in front of me, in front of the house. And I think they did it because I could see him, sent a message and they killed him right in front of me. And I still have that image in my, in my head. So I saw my first death and that was about money. So the, the first death was the death of my. Of our parents net worth or family structure, generational wealth. Second first murder was Oats OC Getting murdered in front of me. All this is about money. And my best friend George got murdered over money selling drugs with the next door neighbor, Tweet, who we moved into. My mother bought her first home, 15502 South Fraley in Compton, California. And she bought that house and I became friends with George, who was real smarter than me, by the way. So intellect alone is not enough. And. But George had the wrong role model, wrong mindset, and got murdered hanging out with tweet. So watch who you hang around again, you hang around nine broke people, you'll be the tenth. Whoever, whoever you hang around, whatever you see is who you will be. And so I could go on and on and on about my mother, but the, the story here is that she, she bought that house. We lived in it. It was the beginning of her generational wealth. She built equity and then she sold that house, bought another house, sold that house, use the equity to buy another house. She did that seven times and she ended up with a net worth of a million dollars. And I know that because she gave some money to my sister, my brother, to buy a home a couple times. And of course I'm the manager of her estate trustee. Versatile because she had a will. I want everybody to have a will when she passed on the glory. So hopefully she's an inspiration to you. She lives on today. She has a fund in her name and her legacy lives. And hopefully now you know that even if you're a single parent, you can still make it. You can work an hourly job and build a net worth of a million dollars and live a life of dignity and self reliance. You can be free. It is possible. The only freedom is financial freedom, because every other freedom can be taken away from you. Money and wealth with John O'Brien is a production of the Black Effect Podcast Network. 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