John Hope Bryant (2:08)
Welcome to Money and Wealth with John O. Bryant, a production of the Black Effect Podcast Network and iheartradio. Yo yo. This is John Hope Bryant and this is the Money and We podcast series on iHeartRadio on the Black Effect Network. So here we go. Today's episode, AI, artificial intelligence. For all of us navigating the pain and the opportunity of a changing world, AI is sort of like the electricity of our time powering everything, transforming industries and altering how we live and how we work. For communities already on the edge, this change could feel like a tsunami unless we act with intention. Now, that sounded like me, right? That sounded just like I said it and wrote it, right. Actually, that was AI acting like me. I asked Ay to give me an opening line that sounded like John Hope Bryant, and there you go. This world is about to fundamentally change. Let me break this down of how I got into this situation. My friend, my brother Van Jones said this might be the ultimate leveler. By the way, he said 99% of black folks don't know a thing about AI, really. Pause. But 99% of white folks don't know a thing about A.I. either. Pause. That we are all starting for the first time with a technology at the same place. Lost, but convinced that everything is going to change all at once. And they are completely right. By 2030, the world's going to change as you know it. You heard it here. I didn't say 2050, I didn't say 2080. Within six years time, five years time, actually now, 2025, the world as you know it is going to fundamentally shift, and it's shifting underneath your feet right now. And I'm explaining some of that to you. How did I get into this? Because my obsession, as you know, as I've been saying, the financial literacy is a civil rights issue of this generation. I think if Dr. King, God rest his soul, we just celebrated his birthday. If Dr. King was alive today, he'd be passionate about things like financial literacy as a leveler is as important, I believe, as the right to vote. I've been on this mission at Operation Hope with Operation Hope and financial literacy and all that comes from it and through it. I've been on this thing for 32 years. Built the largest financial literacy coaching organization in America. $4.5 billion invested in communities, 4 million plus clients, 1500 offices doing financial coaching, you know, advised three U.S. presidents from both parties, recognized by five known nine, you know, just leaning in on everything from financial coaching on the workplace to financial literacy in schools, children, bank accounts for kids without Mayor Andre Dickens in the city of Atlanta, City Council for every kid in kindergarten, kids accounts in Atlanta. The work we're doing with major employers like Delta Airlines and UPS and the Walmart Co Chairing of Financial Literacy for all the CEO, Doug McMillan. The book Financial Literacy for all our work and disaster. We're going to California. My heart goes out to everybody affected by the fires and particularly the communities in Altadena where a lot of black wealth was lost. I'm passionate about this issue. Hope Inside Disaster. I work with FEMA creating the emergency financial first aid kit. It goes on and on. Freedmen's bank. You've all heard me go on and on and on, but nothing gets me unfocused, nothing gets me off message. And I get a call from a friend named Sam Altman a few years ago, couple three years ago at this point. And when I went to go see him in his office in San Francisco on one of my trips there, because I'm just nosy, I want to see what he was doing. And he opened up his laptop and he showed me a prototype for something that really at that point was not in the marketplace. I don't even think it was released. And it was what we now call ChatGPT. This OpenAI. I didn't really know what I was seeing at that moment. I just knew it was transformational. He asked me my advice. I said, make sure that you introduces technology. First of all, thanks for asking me for my advice. Sam. Most people don't who are geniuses. They just think they know everything. But he knows that the smartest people in the world can be so hyperfocused, you can have a blind spot. And a lot of tech leaders have a blind spot called people. He didn't want to be one of those people who had a blind spot. What should I do? Make sure you're talking to underserved communities when you go on tour to talk this into the country and the world. Go make sure you go into underserved communities. John, will you do it with me? Absolutely. Get a call from his office. Sorry, Sam won't be able to do the underserved tour. He's international right now. I text Sam directly. I'm like, no, brother, you're not doing it for me. You're doing it for yourself. You need to. You may need to make sure you go to these communities. He said, let me eat right. Let me think about it. Weeks pass by, and then I get a call from him out of the blue in the middle of the night. I think it was, I think close to midnight. I remember I made a call for that to the east coast to the president of CLARK Atlanta University, Dr. George French. And it was probably 2 in the morning there, so it was 11, maybe close to midnight. I get this call. Hey, man, I have to go to the White House to meet with President Biden on my work, et cetera. Two, three days, I think it was. Can I come to you think I can come to Atlanta after that and have you host a meeting to have this conversation? The only thing I had to say was, yes. With no time and no idea I was going to do it, I hung the phone from him and called Dr. George French at Clark Atlanta, where I'm on the board. Dr. Friend said, Absolutely. And three days later, we had Sam Altman from the White House to our house in Atlanta for this conversation. The King families in the house. My friend, Dr. Bernice King is actually on the board of AI Ethics Council now. I'll get to that in a second. King family's in the house, young families in the house, all the HBCU presidents, Morehouse, Spelman, Dr. Thomas, and then Dr. Helene Gayle, who's president of Spelman at that time, and Dr. Thomas Morehouse and heroes and sheroes everywhere. And I was terrified, absolutely terrified about what I was hearing. And Sam, are there any unintended consequences that can come from this answer? Yes. I know that we'll probably cure cancer within 10 years, but something bad may also happen, and I can't tell you what that is. And I respected it as honesty. And so I knew at that point that I had to change my agenda. It wasn't replacing financial literacy. I had to move it over to include what I now call AI literacy, artificial intelligence. Financial literacy is a civil rights issue of this generation, and AI literacy as the civil rights issue of this generation, moving us from the streets to the suites. And so soon after that, Sam came to the HOPE Global Forum. We announced Artificial AI Ethics Council on stage together. And within a year, we had a plan that we had a board put together. A lot of heroes and sheroes that you respect on that board. I don't want to take up valuable time here going through a resume list, but it's a lot of incredible leaders on that board. And we just announced something powerful with Georgia State University and the mayor here at Andre Dickens called the AI LP3 AI Literacy Project here in Atlanta. Now all this you're saying, okay, John, this is a nice story, but you told me this is going to change everything. I don't. I don't see it yet. Here you go, two lenses. The anticipated pain, job losses and societal disruption. Number two, the opportunity. New industries and jobs emerging in the AI driven economy. That's why, by the way, we've done AI LP3 with Georgia State University, with Morehouse, with Clark Atlanta, Spelman, the mayor's office here. Because we're going to train up a whole new generation of kids from kindergarten, with a bank account in kindergarten, all the way up through high school, middle school, high school, in college in Atlanta as an ecosystem to create a farm club for the future and create our own jobs. And was somebody to disrupt out of a job, destroy it. Let's create our own jobs and anticipate the pain and replace it with promise. Now, let's now get to the pain. And why you have to listen to this, why you tell all your friends to listen to this. You can go right to minute 10 if you like and cut to the chase if that's, if you have limited time. Here are industries that will be absolutely disrupted. Manufacturing, AI driven robotics are going to replace roles on assembly lines, including automobile production. An example of this is factories utilizing robots for welding and quality control. Haven't you seen the Amazon drones? Haven't you seen these delivery bots that have wheels on it that robots that are delivering pizzas and things like that in packages? Haven't you seen, I mean really, drones are really preambles to this, by the way. This stuff is sneaking up on you, by the way, right in front of you. Haven't you seen robots doing welding in factory tours as you looking at your TV set? That used to be people, those used to be manual jobs. Now those jobs are automated, okay? So manufacturing is going to be completely disrupted. By the way, these are industries now where you need a high school education, needed a high school education. That's gone. Now if you have a high school education and no hustle and no intention in getting a better education or skill for the future, you're toast. It's not love or hate anymore. It's radical indifference. Nobody's going to care enough about you that hates you or to care for you. And I don't care whether you're black, white, red, brown or yellow, you're not going to see any more green. So the color is not, again, the color. This is not race based, right? This is going to be talent based and opportunity based and understanding based and hustle based. And in some ways people who are underserved are going to be better positioned because we've been doing so much with so little for so long, we can almost do anything with nothing. And so we got our hustle on ten when we wake up paranoid. So we might be able to pivot here Particularly in the creative spaces. And make something out of nothing in a rainbow out of the storm. Because you cannot have a rainbow without a storm. First, can I get an amen? Yes, I'm preaching. Here's industry number two that will get disrupted. Transportation and logistics, autonomous vehicles and AI optimized logistical systems. Let me give you an example of this. Self driving trucks and automated warehouse management systems. Now you've already seen self driving cars being tested. You've already seen self driving basically taxis in San Francisco. You've seen these things on television. This stuff's real. I was just at CES conference in Las Vegas as a guest of Delta Airlines, my friend Ed Bastian and the stuff that they have right now is mind blowing and mind bending around automation of automobiles and the transportation industry. Truckers and Uber drivers and not picking Uber. You know, all the driving services, the delivery services, the trans, the major transportation services. That's one of the top 10 employment sectors in the country. Poof, gone. Once again. You can do it with a high school education and a minor certification. Now, that job's not going to just completely go away, but it's going to change how that it's not going to. You're not going to be driving the car. You're going to be maybe overseeing a car being driven. Overseeing the technology. Getting ahead of myself again. Write this stuff down. Here's a big one. If you're black and brown, I want you to look to the left and look to the right of you and see somebody who will not have a job because the likelihood that somebody that we know is employed in this sector that I'm about to mention is everything. Retail and customer service. So AI managing inventory, self checkout systems and customer interactions is going to be absolutely complete. The takeover is going to be complete. Think about an Amazon Go store eliminating the need for a cashier. You know what an Amazon Go store is. Okay, I did a video on this. Go on my. Look up. Go on my Instagram page and look at the video I did about five months, six months ago going through airports and there was an Amazon Go shop that I featured. But you don't need to go that, that, that far. I want you to think about when you went to CBS recently or you went to Walgreens recently in the video version of this podcast. I'm going to drop in some photos during the video presentation of me in different places. Most recently in Las Vegas where it used to be one sole checkout, self checkout situation where you scanned yourself. This last place I went to in Las Vegas, three, two weeks ago. 100% of the checkout was. It was 10 checkout stations or self checkouts, with one guy overseeing the 10 to make sure the systems didn't break down and nobody stole anything. That store had a total of, I believe I saw two or three employees. This was the complete store of Walgreens or cvs. Can't remember which one. That store used to have, I don't know, eight people. Okay. On a shift. Gone. Poof. Right. Go to a grocery store and, oh, I was in McDonald's. I walked past McDonald's in. Where was I? I was in Seattle on a layover, and I walked past a McDonald's. I'm not picking a McDonald's. This is everybody. And there literally was 12 again. I'm gonna show a picture of this. 12 checkouts. Self checkouts. And there was a place where you picked up your food, and there were robots on the other side of the customer service person talking to you at the counter, handing you your food. That was happening to. Helping us prepare the food. How many jobs do you think that represented at McDonald's before they automated it? There's a restaurant in, I believe it's San Francisco or Oakland that's 100% robotic, 100% no employees. And I'm told the food's pretty good. They're making. Making hamburgers. American Hamburger Shop. Check that on my Instagram page as well. Grocery store. You used to go to a grocery store, and there were 12 checkout counters, and the nice person was talking to you, and there was a line and all this stuff, and, you know, she bagged it for you, or he bagged it for you. You go to a grocery store. Now, just. Just watch this. Now listen to this and think about this. There's 12 checkout counters. All of them are closed except one, maybe two. And where's the line? Now, in self checkout, they just. It's almost like positive hurting, right? You know, you. You put a frog in. You drop a frog in a pot of hot water, it jumps out. But if you put that frog in some water and slowly just increase the temperature, frog never realizes that it's cooking. I don't want you to cook. I want you to learn how to cook. And that means that before somebody zeros you, nobody. Nobody wants to deal with the. The girl with the attitude right at the counter, what you want? I want my food. What. What can I do for you? I'm busy. I'm on the phone with my boyfriend. What. What to do with me? The attitude Right. Nobody. Robots and AI don't complain. Don't ask for breaks. Don't. Don't ask for time off. Don't ask for raises. Right. They don't get tired. They don't get attitude. Right. It's consistent. And I'm joking, but I'm serious.
