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John Hope Bryant (0:22)
Holiday.
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John Hope Bryant (1:28)
With millions of books on Amazon, there's a reading feeling for everyone. For example, Juan's as he drifts away to nirvana after only the first chapter is different to Maya's when she discovered the narrator was in fact the evil twin, which is also different to Noah's. Aw anytime the cute cyberpunk is mentioned, even though in reality he'd be totally out of his league. From two to Amazon books, that reading feeling awaits.
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John Hope Bryant (2:23)
Welcome to Money and Wealth with John Hol Bryant, a production of the Black Effect Podcast Network and iheartradio. Yo yo yo John Hope Bryant here. This is Money and Wealth with jhb. So reader ass listener ass supporter asks how can I make $10,000 in two weeks if my life depended on it. I don't want to say who the listener was because I'm about to blow up the question. The answer is you can't. Unless you rob somebody and then you put your own life at risk. I mean, you can't is a big word. My middle name is Hope. I'm not saying you can't. The likelihood of you being able to do this legally to make $10,000 in two weeks, and I assume in this question you're working class, middle class, or you're not. I mean, I can make $10,000 in two weeks, but I don't need it. Right. If you, if you need it right. The very, the very nature of you needing it is, you know, is relevant to you, then the likelihood of you being able to legitimately, honestly make 10,000 in two weeks is very low, which means you're going to have to do something sketchy and which means you're going to put your life at risk. Reminds me of Chris Rock. Said dude next door neighbor robbed him and he knew he robbed him. He's like, hey man, what's going on? I heard you got robbed. He said you didn't hear stuff because you were doing stuff. You robbed me. So, yeah, don't rob anybody and don't do anything illegal. And karma is real. Whatever goes around comes around. And if it looks too good to be true, it normally is. So, yeah, that's a. The short answer to the question is you really can't legitimately make 10,000 in two weeks. Now that's the bad news. Everything else I would tell you is the good news. By the way, love is work. Love is laziness. Anti love is evil. Evil exists, but it's very rare. Most people are just lazy, intellectually lazy, financially lazy, physically lazy, spiritually lazy. They don't want to do the work, they want somebody else to do it for them. Only in the dictionary does the word success come before the word work. Because it's alphabetical, right? So here's the good news. You know, you got to do the work. Everybody has to do the work. And now, you know, if you do the work from the neck up, from the shoulders down, you work smart, not hard. You can get to a point. That is my story. My story, where you can make $10,000 in two weeks, but at that point you're compounding mostly. Like, in other words, you make money during the day, you build wealth in your sleep. So I will get a check for something and I'm like, what's this for? That's what you want to get, but it took. It's taken me 20, 30 years to get there. What's this for? Means it's interest on, you know, a dividend. It's dividend, dividend payment, you know, or interest on stocks and bonds or interest on some real estate investment or rent or something like that. It's some payment off of an asset and the assets not on your ass. Right. This is a real asset. Right. And you're benefiting from it, by the way. It's an old saying, but it's true. And this is that further up the ladder, you get sort of story. Well, it's harder to make 1,000 on 10,000 than it is to make 10,000 on 100,000. But it's harder to make 10,000 on 100 thousand than it is to make 100,000 on 10 million. If you have 10 million, it's actually pretty easy to make $100,000 a year. It's actually, if you have, excuse me, 4 million, $3 million a year starting assets, you can make six figures without lifting a finger. Just passive income. You never touch the principle. If you just make sound, conservative investments in the stock market or there's a range of other things you can do, it stands to reason, if you have a billion dollars in assets, then it's actually easier, you know, well, there's a line of sight to, you know, $100 million a year. If you have a billion dollars in assets, that's 10%, by the way, of return on the billion dollars, where your principal doesn't go away, and you've made 10% of that, which is $100 million. So. So compounding, the more you make, the easier it is to make more on what you made. Now, unless you're just hustling, unless you're just trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents, you're just trying to. You're always trying to make some mula, some money, some cash. You know, again, you get into that whole scamming, messing around world where, you know, somebody's literally trying to get rich quick. So multilevel marketing, you know, there's a lot of people running around. I do. I'm, you know, I'm gonna do a whole separate situation on scam. So I'm not getting into that now. But the short answer to this question is, yes, it is possible. You know, anything's possible, right? So I don't want to diminish your. I don't want to discourage you or diminish your overall enthusiasm for whatever Dream you have, right? Anybody can get lucky. But the rational, reasonable, you know, I'm not going to get shot or killed or arrested. Answer to can somebody who makes $50,000 a year make $10,000 in two weeks if their life depended on it? The answer to that is probably not, unless your life does depend on it. Boy, here's a truth that is as old as Jesus and the world, its itself, the modern world itself, somebody is always trying to separate you from your money, you from your wallet. This is John O'Brien. This is Money and wealth. So, yeah, how to identify scams is, you know, there's three triggers. Really. It's more than three triggers, but here's some easy ones. There's an emotional trigger. These are the triggers that people were trying to pull on you to get you to separate you from your wallet. There's an emotional trigger. There's a formal trigger. In other words, trying to look like they're part of the system. Emotional is like inspiring you, convincing you and trying to make you feel like you're part of a movement or doing good or whatever. And then there's greed. And the biggest of these three, without question, is greed. So let me get into this. In no particular order. There's a couple out of. Well, again, no particular order. That pick on Madoff. Madoff, Madoff with I think it was $50 billion with a B. And he says, you know, Bernie Madoff says, how are you to get away with this? He was, you know, embraced by the establishment, part of the formal economy, dealt with sophisticated investors. I'm gonna deal with crimes really for working class folks, middle class folks and poor folks here in really primarily. But he was dealing with high net worth investors. How do you get away with it? He says himself, because people were greedy. They wanted to believe that he could give them some crazy returns on their money. So they turn their heads to common sense. Common sense is not so common. If you look for the truth, you'll find it right. But the rational lies is to tell rational lies. And you tend to believe what you want to believe. So whether it's Bernie Madoff who made off with 50 billion or whether it's this dude who out of Malaysia, the one. I don't want to get this wrong because I've got a 1 MBB initiative and I never like confusing anybody. Confusing it too one mbb and this is one BB or something like that. Anyway, it was a dude out of Malaysia who scammed the country out of billions. Billions, I mean, just out of the sovereign fund of Malaysia. By the way, see, when I pull the guy's name up, we're talking and you know, again, the Prime Minister was involved and all these people. How could you get the Prime Minister involved with a scam in Malaysia? Easy greed. Because the. It appears the Prime Minister was also in on the scam. Right? And this guy went and hid in China and he's still in China. I read this book. I don't often read 700 page books, but this book I did read and it's fascinating and I'll come back to that because I'm trying to look up, I want to make sure that I pull up this guy's name and you can do some research on him yourself. This is like, you know, and he's a young guy, he was in his twenties, but once again, and he did, you know, he financed Hollywood movies and he had all kind of legitimate one. MDB is the name of the scam, by the way. And Joe Lowe is the guy's name, right? $4 billion stolen from that one MDB fund. Joe Lowe is this guy's name. The Department of Justice tried to prosecute him. They prosecuted Absentia because he's on the run. They were able to trace down $100 million. But I mean, this guy scammed just everybody. It's fascinating. There's documentaries out on it. Check it out. The Prime Minister again, big names Wall street investment firms and you know, got taken for a ride in this thing. A lot of people got hurt, right? Then you step down a few levels and there's this couple in Texas, black couple. I don't want to mention their name. They're still being, you know, going through the criminal justice system. And while there has been a verdict raised, it's not over. And I want to ruin their reputation by mentioning their name, making a bad situation worse. But, you know, you'll probably know what I'm talking about. They use spirituality in the church to try to get folks to time into their. I'll say blessed. That's all I'm gonna say. And again, they promised you something that you shouldn't have believed. They, you know, they were talking about doubling or tripling your money or some crazy thing. I forget the numbers, but it was like crazy or it was even worse than that. I mean, bigger than that. There's no way you can give these kinds of returns. Again, greed, right? They use emotionalism and they use, I guess, the formality of the church and they use greed. They use all the tricks of the trade. Do I think they were bad people? Do I think they woke up in the morning and said, ooh, let me scam out my own people. No, I don't think that's the case. I don't know them, but I don't think that's the case. I just think that again, the rational lies is to tell rational lies. You convince yourself that what you're doing is the right thing when it is the wrong thing. And the dude I know, guy I know, pastor out of Houston, really nice guy, ran a mega church in Houston. Reverend Kirby John Caldwell, he's serving time right now. Do I think he did something malicious? No, I don't. But he convinced himself, and I wish he would have called me out or told him to stay away from it with a 90 foot pole, but he convinced himself that when somebody came to him with Chinese bearer bonds or some kind of crazy thing, that he convinced himself that it was legit. He had a stack of documents, again, formality, a stack of documents that supposedly proved that this was legit. I would have told him it wasn't. And he, you know, use his influence or other people used his influence as a prominent pastor to raise money from unsuspecting investors. And it all blew up and he, he's in jail right now and is, you know, I mean, this guy's counseled presidents. Again, a nice guy. I like him. To this day I like him. And do I again, do I think he was malicious? No, I do not. He's even paid restitution. He actually paid back, I believe the principal sum of the money that was invested through these bonds out of his own funds. But, you know, I don't know what else, I don't know the details and whether other people lost additional money. But if you just looked at this, anybody who understands finance and understand how the world works looked at this and said, how did this get down? Again, no disrespect to the pastor, it was a pastor of a very prominent big church. But how did this sophisticated financial instrument with so called governments in the big finance world get down to the local level of a pastor of a local church? And how did he end up with this in his hands to be able to take advantage of. It's just the world doesn't work that way. Greed in and of itself would have caught that opportunity way before it got to him. In other words, if people on Wall street knew that there were a legitimate way to double your money using government bonds, that deal wouldn't have made it out of the first office it showed up to on Wall Street. You would Never got down to the big office of the local office, to the, to the, to the smaller office, to the, to the regional office, to the, to the church in Houston. Right. So I see this stuff coming. People come at me all the time. Hey man, I'll get. I had a photographer come at me at a formal event a couple weeks ago. Hey man, I got these bonds from some country and I want to talk. Nope, I'm just telling you right now. Is it into the story? Can we please start there? I'm telling you it's no good that I'll tell you that dog don't hunt. And the guy wanted to believe. Just, hey, let's just have a meeting. I don't need that. We're having a meeting right now. Always fascinates me when somebody says, hey, John, I just want to meet with you. Well, you're talking to me right now. We're having a meeting, right? What are we going to talk to behind closed doors, on four walls, right Behind a desk in a chair that you can't tell me right now? Right. Anyway, that's just a funny aside. This stuff is just too. If it looks too good to be true, it normally is. So there's your first tale. If it looks too good to be true, it normally is. I've told you a couple about a couple scams. Let me tell you what Experian says about some of the latest scams that you should, you know, they're AI, artificial intelligence powered scams. You can go to the website for, you know, details in each one of these, there's loan forgiveness scams where folks are masquerading like they're the federal government. Like, you know, yeah, like they're going to give you loan forgiveness. And what they really want is your information. And they're going to. They're just trying to reel you in. They get you pay some application fee. A lot of these folks do this, oh, we're going to give you a million dollars. Just pay this $10,000 application fee. Anybody who comes as you at that with any of that. Any of that stuff. Wrong Scam. Right of application fee scam. One of the easiest scams on the planet. They feed on your greed and your emotionalism and your lack of financial literacy. They offer you some big number and just tell you all it takes is for you to give us this small number in relation to the big number and we're going to pay you for the rest of your life. Does that really sound like it's rational? Okay. It doesn't sound like A pipe dream. Hello, it is. And they will often say, like, student loan government dot com. Did you see that? I'm just making this up. Like student loan government forgiveness. I'm making this up. Dot com. There is no dot com. This government. It's going to be.gov gov or dot or worse than be dot org but I wouldn't even believe that, right? If somebody's masquerading as a government is going to be.gov or have something to do with the government. I can't tell you how many times I've received letters in the mail. And I have to look at it five times because it really looks like it's from the government. I've had people tell me, like, I'm in default on my property taxes and I had to, like, look at it five times because it looked like it was from a taxing authority. But when you look at it really closely. No, it's just some business. Some, some. Some. I can't call them entrepreneur because it's not legit. Some. Some business charlatan masquerading as if they're the government. Right? And phone scams. People calling you, impersonating, trying to, you know, get you all wrapped up in some story. And they call you a whole bunch of times over a period of time and get you. And get comfortable with you asking about your family. They don't care about your family. They care about separating you from your wallet. Text scams. I've had those people send me a text. It was. Here's a funny one. They sent me a text as if it was me sending the text to me. They had messed up John Bryant. You know, this is John. Brian. I want you to wire me, you know, I need. I'm in. I'm. I'm in. I'm. I'm in. Stuck in an airport in, in Russia. And, and they've taken my credit cards and you know who I am, I'm legit. Just send me, you know, real quickly, $1000 or 1200 bucks or something. I'll get it right back to you. Scam. Right? And I've had people in my company who got text messages saying they were from me. It clearly wasn't my phone number, wasn't my email address. It was by it. They sent emails to. If you just look closely, it wasn't me. It wasn't our email address, it wasn't our domain name. It wasn't my phone number. It wasn't anything. But they just, oh, John O'Brien, this is texting me. And he Needs me to wire $10,000. One of my former employees actually did this. It wasn't $10,000, but it was over a thousand. We reimbursed her for that and actually tried to get her to do a video to like share her story. She was so embarrassed. She didn't want to share her story, which upset me because I'm like, well, we paid you back for a scam. We didn't have to. Nothing to do with us. At least you could do is educate other people. Anyway, she's not with us anymore. But, you know, this stuff happens like all the time. Zelle scams, cryptocurrency scams, romance scams. This is a big one. Online purchase scams, employment scams, check fraud scams. I got one of those. How to avoid. Okay, so here's a check fraud scam, right? This is mine. So I'm in Nigeria, and this is emotionalism. They got me on emotionalism. I'm in Nigeria with ambassador Andrew Young 20 years ago. I remember Dick Gregory, the famous comedian, said, I love going to Africa. This is 20 years ago. I love going to Africa because there, even my old canceled credit cards still work. Not the case anymore. Now everybody has digital and, you know, connected to the Internet, whatever. But so I was. I was in Nigeria. We were guests of the President. The united. Of the President of Nigeria, the then President there with Ambassador Andrew Young and the African. African American Summit, Reverend Leon Sullivan. All that was legit. We're at a African art bazaar outside the hotel. Again, government officials around, security around. And I'm trying. I'm all caught up in the emotion of the moment. You know, we're all African, we're all from Africa. Everybody's from Africa. I'm trying to show my support, right, for my brothers and my sisters in Africa. And I'm not mad. I'm about to give you. To tell you this story, but I'm not mad at this person. They actually. This was so smooth and so smart. I wanted them to have the money, right? This was my. I get to tell this story for the rest of my life. So it was worth the money I lost. So I go to buy a piece of art and I wrote a check. He let me write a check. And I. I don't remember the exact amount, but let's just say I wrote the check for $1,000, right? So I wrote him a check for $1,000 for the art. He allowed me. Now this is smooth. Now he allowed me to take the art with me. So I give him $1,000 check. I take the art with me. I get on the plane, I go home. The art's in my office. Two weeks have passed. This is so smooth. These Nigerians, these scams. Not everybody in Nigeria, but Nigerian scams. I mean, Nigerians are probably the smartest Africans on the planet. Sorry, I'm not offending anybody else, but as far as entrepreneurship and business, some of the smartest on the planet. They ever get legal, they'll run the planet. They run the world. My God, this guy is so smooth. This guy was so smooth. Waited two weeks. A confidence scam. Waited two weeks. Build up my confidence in him. Emailed me. Now, what would happen if I. If he got in the wrong email address or something for me, right? Emails me. What if I didn't respond to the email? But he knew how I respond. Emotionalism. Hey, Mr. Bryant told me. I mean, Mr. Bryant, I'm so sorry to bother you. You gave me a check. I went to the. To the bank. The bank wouldn't cash the check because I don't have the proper id, the proper credentials, and. Hope you enjoyed the art. Was so honored to meet you. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Speaking to my ego. I'm so, you know, so proud of the work you're doing. Yeah, right. You about to work me over and, well, I'm like, well, what can I do to help you? Of course. I got the Superman complex, right? What can I do to help you? This is. This is unfair. I mean, what do you mean the bank's not giving you the money? I can't. This is my ch. Do. Tell them to cash my check in your name. I'm sorry, Mr. Bryant. They won't cash the check. What do I do? I need the money for my rent and my payments. Oh, Superman to the rescue. Not to worry. I tell you what. I'm going to wire the money to you. It was Western Union. I'm sending you the thousand dollars by Western Union. I checked the bank, by the way. Check had not cleared. I know somebody sitting there saying, john, don't do it. Check the bank. I checked the bank. The check had not cleared. Okay, we're on the same page. I am the financial literacy guy, right? So I'm like, okay, I checked back. I thought I was smart. I wire him $1,000 to Western Union. Hold on. Now he texts back. Not text, sorry. Emailed back. Back in those days, 20 years ago. I'm sorry, Mr. Bryant. The Western Union won't allow me to pick up the money. They say I have an ID problem. The other one, the first one was a credentials problem, this one was a ID problem. What do you mean they won't give you the money? Yes. Mr. Bryant, I'm so sorry. They won, won't accept my ID. They're going to send your money back. I don't know whether I told him not to do that. I think I did. And I think the money did come back to me. And then I. They told me we'll send it to his sister, I believe so. I resent the money this time. Now he's got me off my game right now. I'm completely committed. I'm, I'm completely distracted. I wire another thousand dollars now to his sister, so called sister, right? And I'm waiting for confirmation. I don't hear anything. Finally, I get my people to check Western Union. Yes, the money's been received. Fantastic. Secretary comes to my office. John, you might want to check the bank. Call the bank. Check's been cash.