John Hope Bryant On Financial Literacy, Race, & Economic Power | NXT Chapter with T.D. Jakes

Is that glass half full of the half empty? The pencil is looking at the glass. If you're around a bunch of people and they say this glass is half empty, run for all your life. Run. If you hang around nine, broke people, you'll be the 10th. I don't mean broke financially. I mean broke in. Hello everybody, I'm excited to have this opportunity to invite you to listen in at a provocative, interesting, and hopefully educational conversation with a very important friend of mine that I want to introduce to you officially. If you haven't met already, he is everywhere doing everything for everybody. And I asked him to do one more thing for me, which is for you. So listen in at Next Chapter Podcast as we have this conversation. He is one of the nation's leading voices on financial inclusion and economic dignity. He's the founder and chairman and CEO of Operation O, America's largest financial literary organization. Over 30 years Operation O has served more than four million people and directed over 4.2 billion into underserved communities, a trusted advisor to major corporations and three U.S. presidents, including Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. He's authored numerous books and is a sought-after communicator on financial empowerment, John Hope Bryant. We want to talk about 6,000 years of us. And I want you to think about that real close and real deep and in great detail because what is being threatened is to us in the United States, in the world, in the country, in the marriage, in the home, and even in our own minds, we're being separated, divided, splintered, fractured, fragmented, and unable to bring ourselves together into a cohesive unit whereby we can make the progress that's necessary for us to move forward. What we share, what we forgot, and why it matters more now than it ever has before. Chapter number one, America divided. Let's start right there and begin to talk about the fact that there have been forces. This is not new. It's culminating at this moment, but there has been forces for years that have undermined us for years. We had, as African-Americans, we had more people married in slavery than we do now. The us is fading away. And though that starts as a small issue, it affects community, it affects the country, it affects the world. And we're seeing that spirit of division perpetuate itself over and over again around the world as we find any reason possible, light skinned, dark skinned, all short baby boomers, millennials, any reason possible to divide our strength which requires us recognizing the unity of our humanity and our shared humanity across race, ethnicity, and all the things that we have in common. There is more to unite us than there is to divide us, but the forces that are around to divide us are frighteningly apparent, and we need help with understanding that more now than we've ever needed it before. What do you say? I think that you're very nice in how you describe that, and makes perfect sense. You are the Pope, in my opinion, for the underserved. You are a spiritual healer for, certainly for us in the world. I think what you said is completely accurate. I would, you know, not as smart as you. I would just simply say that we've been bamboozled, we've been tricked, we've been fooled, we've been hoodwinked. This is Malcolm X quote, we've been run amok. Look, race is not a biological thing, it's an economic thing. It was an economic creation. I'm happy to break that down, but I think that comes as a shock to most people. Most people are so locked into a racial conversation. They can't see straight. Whether you're black and defending it, or you're white and promoting it, or whatever. And by the way, it's not just white and black, it's Asian, it's Indian, it's glad, and it's global. It's global. I mean, light, complex people in Japan, run Japan, the darker Japanese, yes, they exist, are in the prefectures. They're out in the rural areas. If you go through airports in Asia, there are skin lightning, billboards that are full, and they're not shy about it. It's accepted there. If you go to Latin America, places that have leadership that are obvious, that the ruling class of Spanish, looking European, Spanish, and the Mastizo, which is the Aztec Indian, that mixed race, by the way, the Aztec came over the Bering Strait from Asia, that's why they look a little Asian because they are, but so Indians came from Asia, hello. But the darker Latinos, or darker Mexicans, running over the border, trying to get economic opportunity in America, and the Spanish, the European Latinos are running things. It is a global phenomenon. We can go to every continent and pre-play the same, you have a caste system in India, but the concept of race, the world's five billion years old, as you will know Bishop, organism life, four billion years old, in the Andrathal's a few hundred million years. Hopefully we can come back to that because I think it's important. Homo sapiens, let's just jump to Homo sapiens, it's a couple hundred thousand years, it's a modern mankind, which is a woman, by the way, from a woman that appeared in Africa, the came out of Africa, and that's also why I believe why there's been great discrimination against women for centuries untold because they are threat, that's where all only women can give life. Women are life, they are a terminal to a higher power. The source DNA comes through, scientifically through the woman, not through the man, that's our through line. I think women are intimidating to insecure men. That's a whole another story. Well, we feminize phrases like mother earth. Yeah. We think of earth as a gender. We think of so many things as a gender that I think really, really affects us and stops us from really embracing each other in the form of an us. Yes. And we become competitive of people that we ought to be collaborating with, we become competitive against them. And I think that spirit perpetuates itself. And it starts early, I just wanted to add this one little concept, they did some tests, a group of scientists got together and did some tests with babies that were four months and five months old and showed them a dark doll and a light doll and asked them which one they'd rather have. And in almost every case, they picked the light one over the dark one. I'm going to have this conversation with you even though you're lighter than me. I don't know, I don't know about that brother using that cream. You're lighting cream from Asia, got some from the airport, and drank one. Yeah. Look, by the way, you're closer to the source actually of everything because the only color that includes every other color is black. So you actually have a slightly darker cream than me if you will. You're closer to the original definition of all the colors. I think that's also why people are uncomfortable with people of color, black people, for the similar analogy of women, is that we're the only color that includes all the colors. And everybody's essentially African. I was saying that 600,000 years ago, about 200, 300,000 years ago, we emerged from Africa. But the racial word white was created 400 years ago in Virginia. Now, let's think about that because you had blacks in Europe, you had blacks in the Middle East, you had blacks. But it was about ethnicities, most. It was really about cultures and classes. You might have been Dutch, you might have been Irish, you might have been English, and the bloodline would give you a position within the hierarchy. But nobody called you black or white until 1620-ish. And I believe it was James Down, Virginia. Can I tell the story? Yeah. So you had 20 indentured servants that in this example showed up in Virginia, 16 were black and four were white, four whites from England. And they worked together at Bishop and they got along together. They became friends, which became a problem. They ran away together. They didn't like how they were treated. Think about a union job. You didn't like the way your bosses were treated. So they ran away together. And the overseer sent the henchmen to go find them and they found them and they reported back and said, boss, we found them, but there's a problem. They're getting along. They're friends. And so the bosses were like, well, why is that a problem? This is, well, we can have a race riot, I guess. But we can't have a class riot. We're the class. Now they didn't use the word race back then because it was an invention. But they essentially said, look, you guys are white like us. They told the poor whites you're white like us. And so we're on the same team. So I'm gonna give you two more years for running away. Can't do this again. The blacks, they're gonna get this for life. That was the beginning of slavery and a class system. So now you're in charge of the blacks. You're like us. Now the whites did not have the poor whites did not have the education, the exposure, the experience, to understand the next question. If I'm white like you, do I own property like you? Do I have titles like you from England? Do I have land like you? Do I have ownership like you? That would have reset the conversation. But the conversation pretty much ended there. I'm white like me. Oh, okay, boss. So now you're in charge of them. And by the way, you weren't hard enough. We'll let your own some. So now the friendship breaks. So we've been having necessarily conversation. That's one long time. For 400 years in America alone. This whole country is, it almost has a currency in racial frequency, in racial friction, not frequency. And of course, civil war is about that. I mean, you can go, Jim Crow and civil rights movement. It's been, really the color's not black or white or red or blue. It's green. Green. Slavery was about money. And I'll be happy to dig in that, unpack it. So we can stop with the silliness. But at some point, I want to go back to a conversation you and I had about Texas that you remember more than I do. But you think it was, you thought it was so important that I thought it was important about really why race is so stupid. But I'll go in any direction that you like. Go ahead. Keep going. I just want to interject that before we were fighting about race, we were fighting about religion, I want to interject that and help to frame and contextualize and better understand the fact that all the crusade wars were not about race. They were about religion. And so you had killings coming from Christians and other groups of people who had segmented themselves over ideology. That eventually transferred over to a separation about skin tone. But it is rooted in bad theology. Bad theology separates us. And it starts all the way from Genesis on down. It's separated Adam's family, the very first family in the Scriptures. It continues to separate all races all over the world, anywhere you want to go. Middle East, we've been fighting about everything we could fight in the world. The one thing that we cannot divorce ourselves from, you can, in some cases, be Jewish and pass for white in our country. But I cannot hide my blackness. So we're now fighting a battle that cannot be hidden. No, I want to hide it. And it cannot be hidden. You brought up caste systems, which are prevalent, not only here, but even in Africa. And I was writing this book. I have to tell you this. I was writing this book about this. I called it the Shades of Grey. 50th book. You know most. Bad-selling author. And I called it Shades of Grey. You got me blushing. I called it Shades of Grey. And I was writing about race. And I got to Africa. No, let me stop for a minute. Best-selling author, New York Times, Grammy Award, all kind of Emmy nominations. I mean, TV producer, movie producer, best-selling author. Yes, pastor, but builder of the potter's house. From nothing to a global enterprise, media company. I mean, businessman, real estate developer. An employer of hundreds, meter of payroll, husband, father, friend. To do one of these things right would be extraordinary. To do all these competently is unbelievable. You don't walk on water, but you know what the stones are. Even you have a consciousness, even when you're not trying. You could have done this podcast anywhere. I assumed you would have done it at I Heart Radio. That's where you've partnered with for your new imprint. But when I was talking to the driver by when he was coming, he said, no, he's coming to the retreat, which is owned by the gathering spot. Well, that's a black owned enterprise in Atlanta of young black men, Ryan Wilson and others who are trying to build something from nothing, chronic creative community. Even in where you place your podcast and where you're putting your dollars to support the housing of your productions is full of consciousness. And I wanted to give you credit for that. I think it's extraordinary. I think it's important. You don't do this to the exclusion of anybody. You do the inclusion of everybody else. Right. And I just wanted to say, I think you're absolutely amazing. I did it. Thank you, though, I don't deserve it. Thank you because there are not as many non-black people that would rent this place. And so we have to be careful not because we're prejudice, but because we're conscious. And we are awake to the fact that if we don't support these places, they do not continue to exist. And everybody else does the same thing. Of course they do. They support their own Jewish family support. By the way, we're Jews and black cousins, I'll get to that. But they support their own white support, their own Asian support, their own nothing exclusion of anybody else is natural. Right. It should be natural. The problem, though, with the caste system, which actually preceded the racial system throughout the country, is that it was based on class, the haves and the haves months, which also brought about a need for appearance. So I needed to appear to fit into a certain class of people in order to be invited to certain events in order to have certain privileges and certain opportunities. And that started out with the chariot I wrote in, or the horse I came in, or the dress for the suit, I wore. And it finally broke down to something that was beyond, something that button or zip to got down to skin. And that skin tone, that transference of skin. For one, that gets me hope because it lets me know, if there was a day that preceded racism, then it's possible that there could be a day that it ended. In the meantime, I want you to unlock and unfold the foolishness and the quality that exists behind our lack of unity, our lack of togetherness and what we need to forget in order to move forward. I'd be happy to, and again, I can't say how much I'm honored to be on your podcast and be your friend. It says something about me, not about you. That I've risen to a level that I can get the attention of somebody of your caliber. And I just admire you so much. Brilliant. We've already said that race was not a biological construct. It's an economic one. So let's check that box. And that's 400 years. You have $5 billion. Now let's deal with this folly of race itself and skin tone. Chartered number two, stupidity of racism. So 99.9% of all human DNA is precisely the same. We argue over the point zero, one percent. That's different. OK, let's talk about that. Why are black people dark? Because Africa is hot. The sun is direct in sub-Saharan Africa. That God's amazing. God is unbelievable because he made us to adapt. So in sub-Saharan Africa, black looks like this. Black is almost purple. Well, black in the true sense don't get skin cancer. That skin is designed to absorb those heat rays. Body is protecting. His body is protecting. The solves part of your body is over your brain. Your brain cooks your dog. God gave you kinky hair in Africa to absorb those heat rays in dispensate before it cooks your brain. God gave us a wide nose in Africa to cool the air, like a natural air conditioner before it goes into your lungs. Because your lungs cook, you're done. God gave us big lips. Why? I don't know, but everybody wants them. You go from sub-Saharan Africa, North Africa. By the way, you can take Europe and America and put it inside of the African continent. They also change someone, change the maps to make Africa look smaller. But that's a whole different conversation. There's one manipulation in the psychology of success in who is stronger and who is weaker. But it's important to point out that if we measure out Africa, by square feet of square mile, square yards, or whatever you choose, you would find it to be much larger and span than even the United States. But when you look at it on the globe, it looks so much smaller. Because we always need to be bigger to diminish. To diminish other countries and other nations. Self-esteem. How I esteem myself is critically important. Because if I don't like me, I'm not going to like you. If I don't feel good about me, I'm not going to feel good about you. If I don't respect me, how do I possibly respect you? If I don't love me, I don't have a clue how to love you. And here's the big one. If I don't have a purpose in my life, I'm going to make your life a living hell. Whatever goes around comes around. If you can infect the people with their own sense of low self-esteem, you don't need to conquer them. They kill each themselves. They punish themselves. That's a... I'm going to put that aside. I'm going to come back to that. Because I think that's a problem in America today with African Americans who are genius and brilliant in almost every other way. But we suffer from a low self-esteem while we have high confidence. Come back to that. So now we're in Sub-Saharan Africa. We're going north on the African continent. As you go further north, the sun's less direct. You get to Morocco. Still Africa? The Middle East, which is Africa, Jason. People are all of skin. The curls of their hair are so curly, but they're loose. Well, that's the nap, we call it. That's unfurled. Then you have this piece of water there called the Mediterranean. By the way, mankind named all these places. God didn't. We did this. We put borders around it. Mediterranean, you jump over that. You have southern France. Southern Italy. Southern Spain. The Mediterranean. It looked remarkably like Moroccans. Lighter. It's going to be in, but still olive. The curls are looser, but it's still wavy. Very wavy in their hair. I would joke and say Italians are black. I'm like, get it. They're on an Italian man. I'm sure some Italian men were my wife. That's a brother. Then you go into the middle of Europe where it's colder. And they look white. We would say white. But I'm going to get to that in a minute. And they have stringier hair. Now the curls have dropped out. Now the hair is sort of falling flat. And you go into now, I'm going to jump now into the Nordic countries. Northern Europe. Norway. Where my friend, the crown prince, is going to be the king one day. Sweden, Finland, etc. Where the people in Norway, their whiteness makes European whiteness looks dark. But Bishop, they've got long stringier hair. So if your ears get cold, you're done. There are narrow nose that heats the air like a natural heater before it goes to your lungs. If your lungs freeze, you're done. The natural experimentation of their skin absorbs cold weather. I went to Norway to visit my friend, the crown prince. And I got to the airport and all these beautiful Norwegian people in the security blues. Why are you in Norway? I'm here to see the crown prince. One more time. Why are you in Norway? I'm here to see the crown prince. Where are you staying? I'm staying at the crown prince's residence. Okay. You go on the door over here. We don't like your answers. So they put me in the security room. And the crown prince is security coming in. I'm so sorry. I used to this experience of you coming here and saying, black people. You were right. You were right. So they give me out. The ladies, it has midnight is two in the morning. Sorry, midnight is December 2. It was cold in Norway. The lady. The lady, the blonde hair, blue eye, six to Norwegian security guard says, we're so sorry that you went through this. You seem like a very nice person. We want to give you school building with us tomorrow. No! Absolutely not. She thought she was giving me a compliment. I got on a parka, a sweater, three scars, the air mobs. I mean, I'm freezing. She's got on short pants and a t-shirt. It is December 2. But she's adapted to this cold weather. This is the lunacy of race. It's about where the sun was for millions and hundreds of thousands of years in context to human development. You jump over this body of land and you look at a map, North America, Latin America, South America. Europe, Africa. Take out the water. Click. There was a time where you could walk across areas that are waterfield today. There were been earthquakes we'd call it, movements of tautonic plates that separated continents. Again, we're the ones who say it's something it's Italy or something's America or Texas. By the way, Texas was a part of Mexico. And the second president of Mexico in 1820s was Milado, was African. He was the president of slavery. He, the second president, freed Mexico from slavery, from Spain, pushed the Spanish out. He was so popular, he made him president. And the president that created freedom in North America before Lincoln was this man, Guerrero. President Guerrero in Mexico, a black man, president of Mexico, voted in by the populace. And he outlawed slavery before America. And the one place making so much money on slavery, so how to say this is about your home state. They make so much money on slavery. It was a little section that decided it was too much for them. And they left Mexico for this reason, enjoying the United States and that's Texas. Very little known fact. The reason Texas exists today is because it joined voluntarily a place where slavery was still supported. That's why Texas has the only state that has the ability to rescind from the United States by its own constitution. By the way, great state, love them, love that you're there and you're integrating the whole place. But I've just tried to give it more and more indisputable examples. A Y racism is fashionally, scientifically, beyond morally and ethically, but just stupid. It's not even good economics. Like slavery didn't last. It was not a business model that worked. Even people who worked black came in from Ellis Island. Or what we call Ellis Island came into America. The Jews who were, no, Jews came later. I mean, the Italians and the Polish, by the way, the Italians were called the N word. They came in and looked south, saw blacks catching the heck, looked north and saw integration and industrial revolution in the Netherlands. I'm not black, but why test my luck and went north. So the North and economies were growing and building and had diversity. It was expanding. The South was stuck in an old economic model, slavery, free labor, and Jim Crow. And the South and economies began to fail. Basically, the Civil War was the South resisted resisting the Northern economic domination. So that business model was short term in nature. It was short termism. It was based on a bad business model. Slavery is the longest running example of bad capitalism. And I think good capitalism is where I benefit and you benefit more. And bad capitalism is where I benefit and you pay a price for it. And all I've been saying is that slavery was an example of bad capitalism, racism, and this stuff does not work Atlanta, where we are now, is the 10th largest economy in the entire United States of America, 800 and sorry, $580 billion GDP, bigger than Singapore. You can pick Mississippi and Alabama and West Virginia together and take Atlanta out of Georgia and take Georgia. Put all those together, put them inside of the city of Atlanta and still have room economically. Because some folks pursue the business model that made no sense and or stuck on that and never integrated, never embraced, and some of the poorest economies were once the richest. I'm about to shut up. The richest city in the world in 1840 was not just Mississippi. In the world, slavery, cotton, seaport, but they didn't change their business plan. They didn't upgrade their software. They didn't get out of their own way. And now it's one of the poorest places in the world. So I just think that if we can discuss this, I think this took 20, 25 minutes and we unpacked pretty simple terms, why this doesn't make sense and is mathematically and scientifically, historically confirming. In other words, anybody can watch this and with AI, you've got no excuse not to know facts and say, is what John Bryant saying or Bishop James is saying true. If you can confirm that, then what are we talking about? Right. Chapter number three. We're all the same. I think something else, something quite simple that we have to consider. Our body does not reject human body parts based on race. Wow. If you need a heart transplant, you can take a heart transplant from a black man and put it in a white man's body, and the body will accept the heart from the black man. It's not like the heart will say, oh, that's a black heart, I won't take it. It's not any different. The molecular structure of the organ and its ability to knit itself back together with any kind of medication, regardless who they are, you're going to have to take some sort of medication. Makes it possible for the body to integrate. If you need a blood transplant, and I have the same blood type as you do, we don't have to ask what race the person is or what color they are, should be a better term. Before we were able to ingest that blood transfusion and sustain our lives. Because blood plasma was created by a black man, Charles Drew, by the way. Really? Yeah, and I'm always inspired by the Instagram post I see of the white man walking up to the black family who gave his daughter a heart or a lung because there was an accident and the donor was black. That all the racial friction just falls away to your point. And that's something I think we need to think about that we are the same species. You can't take the heart of a dog and put it in a goat. There you go. You can't take the heart of a goat and put it in a cow. Yeah, we are the same species. And my concern is, I'm concerned about the species as a whole, surviving because this is not just an American problem. It's not just a black and white and brown problem. It is happening in the Middle East, it's happening all over the world. As Syria is in a rubble, Congo people are being killed. They're calling Congo a red carpet because there's so much blood being shed in Congo currently right now. I stopped writing shades of gray because I came to Africa with an American ideal about race. And when I got over there where everybody over there just about was black. I found out it didn't have it. It wasn't about what Americans say it's about. They divided over tribes. And they were fighting and killing over tribes. They were doing genocide over tribes even though they looked just alive. So we have found reasons to hate each other. Africans were involved in the slave trade. They didn't know it. They didn't know it. But they were fighting with each other, taking each other prisoner, selling each other for trade, economics. And then they would trade somebody to the coast because the whites couldn't go to the center of Africa. They'd somebody to trade you out to the coast. And they didn't realize there were trains about in the slavery. But everybody, Arabs were involved in the slave trade. Blacks, yes, Europeans. There was a horrible Indians. It was a horrible business model that was accepted back then. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Yeah. Slave trade has never stopped. There we go. The slave trade is going on right now. Yes, sir. There are people that are paying money to get out of Ghana, to get out of Nigeria, to think that they're going to freedom, that are going to be sold and to slavery all over the world. Yes. The slavery is going on for money. There are whites being sold. Bodies, young bodies, young girls, young boys. So slavery still exists today as much as ever. It's just underground. But it's still there. And in Dindra's servitude, you go in parts of the Middle East. And they take your passport at when you come in and use the U.O. them, X dollars. You got to work it off. And if you work it off, you get your passport back. But not a moment until. Right. And you live in their housing. Right. And you do their job. Right. And you know, you're invisible. And I don't want to get, I mean, the point is, yes, things are messy and complicated. Let's now connect this ship this to 6,000 years ago. No, let's go back 150 or let's make this real complicated. Let's go back 400,000, 300, 200,000 years ago where Neanderthals ran into Homo sapiens. Okay. And we're all cousins. So no different than you say these tribes are battling. You have Neanderthals who were better copers for code weather. They were better hunters and so on and so forth. They're hoping of sapiens. They came together. There was some inner breeding and there was some, you know, they got busy. You think that the Neanderthals would have survived because they were just brute force. I would say that the Homo sapiens were spiritually in doubt. They were more thoughtful. And ultimately, they're the ones who actually survived in this chain reaction of human development. And most of us have a little Neanderthal in our DNA by the way. So we're doing zero if you're in Africa up to 5%. I'm sure I have some, I know I have some in my system. I'm 27% European, 71% African, the rest is Asian, Indian and others. So who do I hate by the way? I hate Europeans, I hate myself, but go back to the story. So that battle for how we evolve is a constant struggle. And I think the spiritual, I think God in doubt, I'm getting out of my lane now, you're going to correct me. God in doubt, the top of the food chain of humans with the spiritual dimensions so that we have a higher responsibility than every other animal. I think that God's breath in us made us unique amongst animals. I think it's not only just a higher responsibility, I think it's a higher ability because the Creator created us in his likeness and in his image. Therefore we are created tab. We have no other species that has made an automobile yet. We have no other species that's created an airplane yet. We have no other species that's built a house with an elevator yet. We have no other species that has progressed as much as man has. And most of it in the last 300 years. Yes. Okay. Up until then we were kind of coasting along like this. But the elevation of the man's brain as the man's brain developed, his creativity was a reflection of the growth of his brain and how he perceived himself and how he was able to add on to his environment and was expressing his likeness of God in being creative. And that creativity has an economic impact that helps the middle class to survive because you become producers, not just consumers. You produce things and when you produce things, you're able to have a cost to them which creates job markets that creates GDP that causes growth to happen in the world. And we have to understand that we didn't have a GDP to start with. We didn't have a gross economy to start with. This is all something that we enhance the earth as we evolved into more intelligent intellectual species. And we don't roar like the lion. We don't run like the cheetah. We don't leak like the hyena. We don't fly like the eagle because that's not our strength. Our strength was not in our arms, not in our wings, not in our legs, not even in our ears, but in our head. Our greatest strength is our ability to think. And we have stopped thinking. We are letting machines think for us. We are letting other people think for us. We are letting entertainment think for us. And the more they think for us, the less creative we become. And the less creative we become, the less inventive we become. And the more less like our creator we evolve into. And we lose the middle class when we stop making things and start consuming things because all animals consume. But not all animals create. Man, you just got transported back to the potter's house. No, no, no, no. But think about it for a minute. It is a creativity of man that makes him superior. It is a creativity of man that made ships and made aircraft and made planes and made astronauts. It's a creativity of man. You don't see anybody else making astronauts. You don't see eagles making astronauts. It is a creativity of man which is part of our fallen but still available. God likeness that we are creative. Whether it's art, whether it's painting, whether it's music. We are the only species that can do like Beethoven and create a symphony and be deaf when we create it and still be able to do it. That level of creativity is an exploration of the God likeness of our brain. Yes. And that's something that we have to appreciate and it does not limit itself to any particular culture. Or we wouldn't have hip-hop. That's it. Or we wouldn't have that. Yes. Or we wouldn't have soul music. That's it. Or we wouldn't have all of the things. That's it. Chopin and Beethoven and Bach and all of these different types of music that we have enjoyed over the years or the Africans wouldn't have taken. We came from blacklings. By the way, taking from mines and beat them and made music out of them. And the zylophones were created. We were taken sticks and turned them into furniture. We have taken trees and turned them into tables. We are creative. You know what the species can say that but us. That's right. And our concern now becomes as we develop an artifact that imitates our creativity. We call artificial, artificial intelligence. My concern is it's the more that we rely on it. Rather than use it as a tool, the more we rely on it, the more our brain shrink. And the less competent we become. Because it is easy to become enslaved by whoever thinks with the most superiority. Can I, by the way, brilliate? Can I say two provocative things? Let's do it. I'm going to suggest that AI is another opportunity for humanity to leap, to touch something closer to God's evolution. More power, rings more responsibility, more accountability, the need for more morality to use it properly as you're saying. To use it so it's not using us. So our brains get bigger and not smaller. But it AI, I think, was already there. We're just leaping to discover it. And now we got to figure out how we're going to, how are you using it? Whether we pass the test. We've passed every test up to now not to implode ourselves, to destroy ourselves, to be useful to God, not to be useless to God. I'm going to go back now because the thing that's mentioned more in the Bible than anything else, 2000 plus instances, is money. The only time Jesus got upset was when he turned over the table of the money changers in the temple. I'm going to say something. I want you to disagree with me on tape if you disagree with this. We never had this conversation. I think there was battling amongst tribes in the time of Jesus. And I think that simply put, Jesus was too much truth. He had to go. I think there were people who've served as Hota prophets and help mates of Jesus over time. I think that I'm going to jump forward. I think that Gandhi was too much truth when he tried to make two nations and made them one. Somebody said he had to go. Shimon Perez in Israel was too much truth when he tried to create peace. And somebody said you've got to go. Martin Luther King, Jr. was too much truth. You got to go. What do you mean black and white? We should work together with God's children. Malcolm Max coming back from Mecca saying, you know, all white people are in the devil. I just prayed with some. We should be together. He was a threat to somebody. They wanted him dead so bad. There was two shot guns and broad daylight. The front of his family, kids and a wife, dead. They wanted him dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. Two weeks after he got back, I think from Mecca. Too much truth. I think that... Hold on, let me interject some. Hold that thought if you can. I think the unique thing about Jesus is number one. He is the composite in his historical component of all types of races. Yes. So he came not only with truth, he came as a representative of all people. He had the canonites in him, the jubisites, the hittytes. He had the Jews, he had the Gentiles. And we're all in one body. And whereas religion had separated one from the other, Jesus embodied them together and made them one. And his only prayer that we have a chance to answer is that he prayed that we might be one. Even as he and the father were also one. That was the only thing that Jesus ever asked for. The only thing that we can do is that we come back together as we live together in the womb of his body, in the womb of his flesh, in the womb of his self. And so while these other teachers bring truth, what separates Jesus from bringing truth is that he is truth. He is truth. And the more that we begin to understand that the truth is the fact that there is one species which is in body Christ, so that he died for all mankind. See, he didn't just die for the Jew or the wife of the man, and died for the black man. He died for all mankind because a little bit of everything was down inside of him. And likewise, there's a little bit of almost all in all of us, a little bit of everything down inside of us. As we begin to come back to an us understanding of redemption, of development, of building, of growing, of going forward, if we can get back to that, I think a lot of powerful things can begin to happen to us. 100%. 100%. By the way, yes. Is there anything I've said by the way before I say anything else? Where I've stubbed my toes, my toes. No, you've not stubbed your toes. It's just that the reason Jesus cleared the temple was because Herod the government had taken over the church. So the government was using the money that they raised in Herod's temple and taking advantage of their face to subsidize the government. So it ceased to be a spiritual ceremony or offering. It became another way to tax the people and to use their faith to take advantage of them and to pollute the sanctity and the purity of the gospel. And Jesus came over and kicked over to the table because He never intended for the government to get in God's business. And even today, even in the way we marry, according to the state of Georgia, I now pronounce, what does the state of Georgia have to do with this? This is not a state institution, but we keep trying to fuse together that which is spiritual, with that which is carnal. And whenever God sees that, He always throws it over because we were never meant to be one, one final thing. The woman with the alabaster box that comes in and an ointzes feet for burial, she has the boxes made out of alabaster, the oil is made out of spignared. She represented a year's wages. The spignared never changed the components of the box and the box never changed the component of the spignared. Which was alabaster and that which was spignared was spignared. Understanding the uniqueness of the two things can walk together but they can never imitate the other thing. They walk together but they are not together, they are still separate. So when we start talking about coming together, you have to start together in order to come together. You have to be Adam and Eve and come back together. You can't reconcile what was never won before. And so the understanding of oneness is built upon behollow, is really the Lord that God is one. And as soon as you get that in your head, you can't be like him and be too. Okay, talk to them. When God gets ready to create everything else, He creates it with His mouth. But when He gets ready to create man, He reaches in one man and pulls a woman out of him. He doesn't have to reach back into the dirt because the woman is not a separate species. And the problem with men is we keep trying to make the woman a different species, a lower level species. When in fact, she is a part of him, wool man. And so Jesus, back to my point, Jesus clears the temple because Herod has gotten into the business of religion so that he can profit. Bad capitalism. There you go. Dead on the head. The other thing that we have to think about is the absence of middle class is the absence of industrial growth. Yes. Because when we stop being creators, we are left only to be consumers and it leads to the detriment of the wealthy as well as support. I'm going to go where it's at. What's that further? Most wealth came from poor people. Most legitimate wealth came from poor people who found the ladder, scared up, you went from the poor to working middle class to working middle class to the ladder. Everything you're saying, 1000. Absolutely. Now, how do I see, we've all this together because you just gave us a theology lesson that was absolutely brilliant. Checking them five. Projects to owners. I'm going to say this in sort of very simple layman's terms. Way back when 3000 or so years ago, we had a choice to make. We could have put our economy inside of our culture, our culture inside of our economy. In my view, we made the wrong mistake. We made the wrong choice. We decided to take our culture and put it inside of our economy. Now everything's for sale. President Bill Clinton once told me, it's hard to get somebody to agree to the truth when the lie is paying their paycheck. And so now everything's for sale. And to rationalize is to tell rationalize. And history is his story. So I'm going to ban on your books. I'm going to destroy your history. I'm going to shut off the lights of your background. I'm going to say this story didn't happen. So I'm going to sanitize this in a way because I've got the power that contorts and distorts your worldview. I did this video. They went viral. This showed about black Africans, black Caribbean and African Americans. We're the same, but we're different. It's cultural. Black Africans had mom and dad at home. Children at home. They were in slaves. They were allowed to stay married. The kids were staying at the house. It was less traumatic. The version of slavery was less brutal, economically brutal and otherwise, culturally brutal. And it lasted a shorter time in the brutal way of being a slave versus just being an indentured servant. America took this model and grew it. They didn't descend. It grew. It became more, as I said, not just Mississippi, was the wealthiest city in the world. Cotton tobacco, plus the cotton gin and all this machinery, the AI of that time, the technology of that time, grew. Wall Street came, Wall Street was Montgomery, Alabama. Don't trust me. All these Wall Street firms started in Montgomery, Alabama. That was Wall Street because they were financing the biggest business in the world at that time. So we've just gone in less than an hour around the world. And I think we've broken a lot of eggs. We've destroyed a lot of presumptions. And if we had time, we could go back 6000 years and show talk about how black people in Jews were cousins in the Middle East. They were all one family. And they took different focuses. Blacks became the experts in creativity, culture and cool. And we master that around the world today. We say it's cool and it's cool and Tibet. And then others became experts in capitalism and commerce and markets. And now we rock the stage, but they own it. So now all I'm saying is, where are the rules of publish in the playing field is level? We kill it. The arts. Professional sports. Not just traditional sports. Tennis. Right. F1 racing soccer. Right? We kill it. They. Politics from the slavery to the President of the United States of America, Mr. President Barack Obama. We can do anything. So if we were positioned around good capitalism, and we say not just black lives matter, but black capitalism. And we go from civil rights to civil rights. Right. And we began to become owners of our stages. It is hard to teach a product to be an owner. To give you a low self, to give you a low self esteem. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. You don't hear the profundity of what I said. Okay. We came here a product. Oh, no, we were for sale. No, I got what you said. So the idea that the product is now an owner. I got what you said. There's a role reversal that our mentality doesn't always embrace even with an education. Because education is often indoctrination. What we need is to have it modeled in front of us. What it looks like to see somebody who looks like us, who owns and is not being owned. Okay. The world I present to you. This ship, Chairman. No, no. I don't have enough money to be in that role. Ambassador Andrew Young would say coincidence is God's way of remaining anonymous. Oprah Winfrey. Tyler Perry. Robert Smith. Charlotte Maynay God. Right. I mean, all these heroes and she-ros. Jenna's Brian Howeroy. All the people who are byron Allen. All the people, Steve Harvey. Not just the political talent, not just the entertainment talent. What's your gentleman has the 11 billion dollar company in the Midwest? You know the household name. Dave Stewart. Dave Stewart. Everybody should go to research. Dave Stewart. I mean, making smart, sexy again. Before we take the first dollar or coin or whatever it is, I think down people's too. Before we take any of it in, if we don't change our mind, we'll never be able to change our money. It's all about mindset. It's all about mindset because if you think you are a product when you get money, you will only draw more products. So what's been did? So what's been did? So let's think about the Caribbean and Africa. They have higher self-esteem and lower confidence because they did not succeed in a market economy. Big one. But they have higher self-esteem because they had family structure and everybody looked like them. So self-esteem was not their issue. We had higher confidence because the biggest market economy in the world, but lower self-esteem was beaten out of us. That's why somebody from Caribbean can come here three years later. They would stay at four people in a house and then they own a house. And they go from being a dormant to being a taxi driver. Taxi driver to Uber driver. Uber driver to owning the black car. Black car to owning five black cars. All of a sudden there are all the values. This is the park high at DC plus all the taxis and all the Uber drivers. That's the immigrant story. But they don't have self-esteem problems. They just needed to have a business plan. Right. When we were assets to your point because we were, we had low self-esteem. Our families would destroy mother and father with that way. Family with that way. We did not love ourselves. We did not like ourselves. I think to this day we're mostly depressed. I go back, I end where I started. Look at our inner city neighborhoods now. If I don't like me, I'm not going to like you. Right. If I don't feel good about me, I'm not going to feel good about you. If I have a surviving mindset, I'm an expert in what I'm against and what I'm for. I see a check cash next to a payday loan lender, next to a rent the own store, next to a title lender, next to a liquor store, next to a pawn shop. And we think it's normal. It's not normal. No. You know. Someone's praying on you. They are targeting you. And we don't even notice it. The odd thing about it is this. There are no walls around the ghetto. Nope. And yet we are imprisoned by invisible walls. Let us send under credit score and set you free. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We are imprisoned by invisible walls. You can be poor in West Virginia. You don't have to be poor in Chicago. That's right. You can be poor in Mississippi. You can be poor in Georgia. It's your mindset that makes you unable to escape. When somebody comes along and shows you, when you talk about how you started, when somebody comes along and shows you a better way. Yes. They've given you something better than money. Yes. They have given you vision. Yes. By the way, I didn't want to make it uncomfortable. Now you now know why you were attacked. It's true. Too much truth. Too much wisdom. The light was shining so high, so loud, so bright, that versus applauding you, egos don't fly in packs. But egos are respect to other egos. Buzzards hate packs. Buzzards love packs. But buzzards can't get to that level of that ascendancy of height. And so they shoot at egos. Buzzards shoot at egos. And they try to bring you down if they can't come up. And it is human nature unfortunately. Inhurt people hurt people. You hurt people hurt people. And so you got to get the toxicity out of your life. Starting with you. Your first relationship is with yourself. So you mentioned mindset. All's poverty other than sustenance poverty. Roof over your head, food on the table, and reasonable healthcare. Is mindset. Whether I believe I can or whether I believe I can't, I'm right. Is a glass half fuller than half empty. Depends on looking at the glass. If you're around a bunch of people and they say this glass is half empty, run for all your life. Run. If you hang around nine, broke people, you'll be the tenth. I don't mean broke financially. I mean broke in. So you have a surviving mindset, a thriving mindset, and a building winning mindset. You need to surround yourself with builders and winners. The book that Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell, University of Illinois study, proved that it's 5% of positive role models, every community is stabilized. By the way, he's black. He doesn't look it. Malcolm Gladwell, he's Caribbean. Yes. It's stabilized. Dr. King only had 20% of the black community support. Right. At his height. Right. Right. 20% of the white community support. At his height. And half of them would Jewish. And still he changed the world. Which means everybody doesn't have to agree with you or like you or support you. You can't take everybody with you. You cannot take everybody with you. I've never met a hater that was doing better than me. Hello. I like what I'm doing. What's better with you not doing? Yeah. I can do better all by myself. I don't need help. Yeah. I've never, you don't see people throwing rocks down. Woo. They're always throwing rocks up. We try to get something to fall. So you have to understand proximity. It's based on the perception of the fact that you're in the big house and I'm in the field. Yeah. That you have a car and I've got a donkey. Anytime somebody hates you, it is because they admire something about you but they think it's too far out of their reach. Rather than being inspired, that's why they would rather attack you. That's right. Chapter number six. Blue friend. I want you to intellectually show us the footprints that you stepped in from homelessness to become who you are. You have been there. You have done that. I want somebody to be able to catch the breadcrumbs or the footprints that changes your life. If you were homeless right now, what would be the first step? You know, I was homeless. I know it. Like quite literally. That's why I said it was to hear an airport. Yeah. And I was in a car that was being repossessed and the company was calling me every day. And I saw two murders before I was nine years old. I'm just for the audience who think that this guy can't relate to me. My mom and dad divorced over money. They fought domestic abuse right in front of me. I had to call the police when I was four or five years old. So I murdered when I was seven years old. My best friend murdered when I was nine years old. The National Literacy Course when I was ten years old started my first business nine years old. I started my first business ten years old. Homeless when I was eighteen, nineteen, twenty years old. So, rainbows only follow storms. You cannot have a rainbow without a storm first. You can't grow through except the legitimate suffering. I believe that's biblical. True. I'm going to say the same thing. We've been saying this whole podcast. Ignore the noise. My number one advice is Eagles don't fly in packs. Ignore the noise. Why do we spend all of our time trying to impress somebody that we don't want to be like? Trying to impress the six square block celebrity. That's got all the girls or all the guys or all the whatever. They got the money but no wealth. They got smart but no sense. And we step it over a dollar to pick up a dime. Like knock it off. I walk through life consciously oblivious of most things around me because it just doesn't matter. And I work really hard to keep toxicity and toxic people away from it. It's a job. It's a job. And they will resist. If you have toxic people around you and they know they're playing a game and they know the best chance they have in success is a leech on to you. And you try to get them away from you. They will fight violently to stay attached to you. People who have hurt me, Bishop. People who tried to hurt me have not been strangers. All of them are people that I know. And they thought they rationalize their behavior. I'm sure they convinced themselves that they were right. And if you have a low self esteem you can be drawn into this cesspool of irrationality where you're eating and abetting somebody who's destroying you. So I just say look I can do bad all by myself. I don't need help. If I'm in a relationship with somebody you got to add to me. Whether if I'm in a relationship with myself I need to add to me. I'm just reasonably comfortable in my own skin and every day I screw up and I try to take ownership of it. But if I'm going to know you or no CJ or know somebody else or no Michael Phillips then I need two plus two as equals six eight or ten or what am I we're doing. If we're not better together what are we doing? I don't need somebody else in my life to bring me down. As you say throwing rocks down first just throwing rocks up. No, no, no. I want you to be better because you know me and I want to be better because I know you that's a great marriage by the way. Marriage of a partnership or friendship but it starts with your relationship with yourself. I'm just reasonably comfortable in my own skin. That's what I love about Oprah. She's just cool with her. I mean that is a high frequency one of my wife, Shadra, a high frequency woman, your wife, your daughter, high frequency people. So that's my advice on financials. That's my advice on success in life. Get yourself right. Become, find a way to make peace with yourself. God is your business plan. You're the agent, your legs, your head, you got to do the work but he's your business plan. Or she, you can get that right. To quote billionaire Tony Ressler who we both know now, who's 150th richest man in the world. If you don't quit you can't fail. Just, it's about, you make money doing the day you build wealth in your sleep. So let's buy a home, let it compound. Let's buy some stocks, let it compound. Let's get an insurance plan and a will and let it do its job. Let's start a business. Let's make your nine to five financial five to nine. This is what everybody's done for the, in six thousand years. It's not, my thing is we just haven't done it. Financial literacy is a civil rights issue of this generation. When you know better, you do better. Old Southern 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. Wow. Wow. Only thing I would add to it and I'm not the expert on that kind of stuff. Find your product and you found your answer. Yes. Whatever the product is, if it's a bag of seeds, if it's an ability to make cupcakes, if you find your product and figure out how to take the product and turn it back into the business and continue to grow it, to you grow yourself out of it so that you can invest in stocks. Because if you're really homeless and you're really broke, you may not have anything to invest. You're still trying to find something to eat. Oh, and get your credit score up. Yeah. Get your credit score up. But you got to find a product to do that. You got to find a product. On this point, I'm going to suggest their first product is them. Because as I look around your studio, is I look around your house? Is I look around your office? Is I look around virtually, spiritually right now in my office? All of my special forces team, all of your special forces team, everybody here. There's a twinkle in their eye. There's something special. We're not human beings having a spiritual experience. We're spiritual beings having a human experience. Energy matters. I'm suggesting humbly. He's correct. Find your product. Find what you have to sell. But be the thing that is sales itself first. Because you're the vessel. You are God's vessel here. So get comfortable with you. Build you up so that when someone meets you, even in a crowd, the world stops. They're like, whoa, who's that? That twinkle in your eye. You can't find your product if you don't have the thought. What you're talking about is the thought. To think a certain kind of way. That's the ignition switch that makes you find. But everybody is you're going to find it. When we were in Africa, by the way, my wife only wanted me one person. This is years and years ago, we were in Africa with Ambassador Andrew Young. She heard that Bishop TD Jakes was in the next hotel. And she didn't care about giraffes or safaris or African history anymore. She didn't want to hear no preaching speech in the prime minister. She said, John, I just want to meet Bishop TD Jakes. Wow. And I got what now I call it a husband point. What a disappointment. No, I'm still benefiting from that. We could do this all night. I hope you can. We could do this all night. I hope you heard something that inspired you from the wealth of this tremendous library of knowledge that's been made available to you through John Hope Bryant. I hope you took something, took some notes down. You don't have to agree with all of it. Maybe you got a half of it. You don't even have to understand all of it. Maybe you got three senses. Three of the right senses could change your whole life. Vision, provision, understand it, the more you can see it, the more you can be it. Thank you for joining us on the next chapter. I'm TD Jakes. And this is John Hope Bryant. I love you, man. I love you, buddy. Hey, everybody. I want to take this time to thank you for watching the next chapter podcast. If this conversation inspired you, helped you. Reflect on an idea or spark something new inside of you. Make sure to like, comment, and subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. Remember, life isn't about how you begin. It's about how you finish strong to start your next chapter with us right here every week.