August 27, 2026 • 63 mins
John Hope Bryant explains what it means to be an “operating entrepreneur” as he records from a quiet late-night retreat in Wailea, Maui, to show how silence fuels thinking and wealth creation.
Responding to a viral clip about poor neighborhoods being noisy and wealthy ones quiet, he argues the real divider is economics (“green”), not race, and that poverty removes peace, time, and mental bandwidth. He links stability and quiet to focused attention, strategy, ideas, intellectual property, ownership, assets, wealth, wellness, and longevity, citing Operation HOPE’s Financial Wellness Index showing higher credit-score neighborhoods correlate with longer life expectancy.
He warns smartphones and the attention economy recreate “noise” anywhere, urges protecting attention, prioritizing the important over the urgent, and moving from labor to ownership by creating and owning ideas.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Money and Wealth with John Hope Bryant, a
production of the Black Effect Podcast Network and iHeartRadio. Hey, hey,
it's John Hope Bryant here of Bryant Group Ventures and
Operation Hope. And I'm saying that intentionally in that way
(00:23):
because I want to stress here that I'm an operating entrepreneur.
that something that Charlemagne told me, Charlemagne, the guy of
The Breakfast Club and Black Effect Network, the platform that
I do my podcast on, a good friend of mine,
good brother, brilliant, really. And at some point I'll have
(00:45):
him on this show as well. I'm on his board,
Black Effect Network, because I believe in him. But one
thing he told me when I agreed to do this
podcast and he asked me to do it was, John,
you're different. You're an operating entrepreneur. You're an operating businessman.
You know, you meet a payroll. You've got 400 employees.
(01:06):
You've got operations on the ground around the world. You've
got a success story. You've got a track record. You've
done deals. You've done nine figure deals. You know, you
have a billion dollar fund that you stood up. You've
sold companies for over a hundred million dollars. You know,
you're not out here playing like you're an entrepreneur. You
really are one. And that struck me and made me
(01:27):
want to do this. And I felt a little bad.
from time to time because I don't have the perfect, well,
I could have the professional studio if I wanted to,
like many other podcasters. And I really admire many of
them who have done a really great job at podcasting,
but I'm not a podcaster. I'm an entrepreneur who's doing
a podcast. Okay. And so I just decided I'm going
(01:51):
further in. I'm not going further away from who I am.
I'm going to dive further into taking you with me
on this entrepreneurial journey as a real operating businessman and entrepreneur, creator, grower, developer,
builder of companies from the ground up, which includes, you know,
I think three of my 40 companies I've created are
(02:14):
the biggest of their kind in the category in the country,
in the largest economy in the world, the United States
of America. And we built this thing to the point
where we've gone from one of the poorest zip codes
in America, my story, Compton in South Central LA, to
Forbes 250, number 145 on that list of the greatest
living self-made Americans on the 250th anniversary of America. So
(02:37):
why do I say all that? Because that's really about
distance traveled and inspiring you that you can go from
zero to hero. But why am I saying that sitting
in this casual environment? Because I'm not going to create
these fancy studios. I've got fancy studios. I can go
to iHeart Studios anywhere around the world, actually. and record
my podcast. I've got a beautiful studio at my headquarters
(02:58):
in Atlanta, but I'm often on the road. I'm often
traveling because I'm a real businessman with a real need
to meet with my partners and board members and customers
and clients. And you're constantly in play with me and
I'm giving you, you know, the real world as I
(03:22):
Experience it, which includes podcasts done in hotel rooms, podcasts
or straight-to-life videos done by me literally in cars, in airports. Well,
these podcast series that I do, often myself talking straight
to you, the camera, is from wherever I am in
the world. And so right now I'm in Maui, and
(03:44):
it's the middle of the night. And the ocean's in
the background, by the way, so you might hear a
little bit of that. but it's quiet throughout all of
the city of Maui, certainly in Wailea, the more upscale area.
And as you get closer to the wealth, it gets quieter,
irrespective of race. A straight-to-live video I did has gone viral,
(04:06):
which inspired me to do this longer-form podcast. I did
an interview with a gentleman in Atlanta on his podcast,
and I just mentioned that poor neighborhoods are noisy, and
wealthy neighborhoods tend to be quiet and Because I grew
up in this neighborhood that was black and brown, I
inferred or suggested that a lot of the black and
(04:27):
brown neighborhoods tend to be noisy. And that when you
go to wealthy neighborhoods, they're just quieter. And the presumption was, well,
you mean white neighborhoods. No, there are black neighborhoods that
I lived in in Atlanta, Niskay Lake Falls in particular,
gated neighborhood of 22 homes, was dead quiet all the time.
The color's not black or white or red or blue.
(04:49):
The color is green. as in economics. So let me
break down for you in this episode, why wealth whispers.
So pull out your pen, pull out your device, get
ready to take some notes that will change your life.
I'm going to tell you some scratch notes, some cheat
(05:12):
sheet notes that most folks never communicate to you about
how wealth really gets created and sustained It may shock
you because it's going to be different from what you've
been told and what you see in social media and
on TV. So let's get into this. And I dare
(05:32):
you to prove me wrong because I live this life.
Wealth whispers. Why quiet may be the one and only
most valuable asset you'll ever own. and it costs you nothing.
(05:52):
The central equation here, stability to quiet, to thinking, to
ideas leads to creation, leads to ownership, leads to wealth,
leads to wellness, leads to longevity. Yes, those things are connected.
(06:12):
Wealth whispers. I'm sitting here, like I said, in Wailea
in Maui, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 5,000
miles from the closest landmass. It's the most remote landmass
in the world. Everybody's asleep here. I'm doing this podcast
(06:34):
because I can think right now, I can ponder, I
can reflect. It's peaceful in this place, this space. We
come here, the family comes here twice a year to retreat,
not to vacation, to retreat. to unpack ourselves, to sit
in silence, to reflect, to restore, to rest, to renew,
(06:56):
to commune with nature and God, to listen and observe
the power of the waves. The biggest mass of anything
in the world is water. 70% of the world of
the earth is water. 95% of that unexplored, by the way.
Power and majesty of that, the power and majesty of
(07:19):
what God created there is breathless. And we come here
to honor that and to reconnect with that. By the way,
you can do that in a local park. You can
do this in your local beach. You don't have to
come to Maui for what I'm talking about, but this
is the price I was willing to pay for this.
I've been coming here for 30 years. And when I
(07:41):
started coming here, originally inspired by my brother, Lance Triggs,
who still works with me at Operation Hope today. He's
president of all programs. He's the first person who turned
me on to Maui. When I first started coming here,
I couldn't afford this. I could afford a coach plane
ticket and to rent a room in a fancy house. Actually,
it was a rent a room in a not fancy
house up in Haiku. Anybody knows Maui? That is not
(08:03):
a wealthy area. It's like a hippie zone north of Paea, Haiku. Beautiful. And,
you know, middle-class family was renting a little room. There
was no running water. There was no kitchen. It was
a place to sleep. And then I could go outside
because it's very natural here and, you know, wash myself
(08:25):
off and all that kind of stuff. And then it
was a restroom facility outside. And then it was off
to explore Maui. But I had my piece of paradise,
even when I couldn't afford the villa that we stay
in now. And by the way, it was It started
as renting a room, then renting a little, you know, ohana,
a little house behind someone's house, a little, not even
(08:49):
a house, you know, a little apartment. And then one
thing led to another and led to another, and then
better areas, we moved to better areas, and we end
up where we are now. But all this was the
journey with the one constant being the power of quiet
and silence and Create wealth. It's quiet here. Not empty.
(09:16):
Not lonely. Quiet. You hear the wind. You hear the ocean.
You hear the birds. And most importantly, you hear yourself.
You hear God whispering to you. And that reminds me
of a post that went viral that I want you
(09:38):
to pull up. where it was a big debate around
this simple observation, go into many wealthy neighborhoods and they're
remarkably quiet. Then go into many poor, struggling neighborhoods like
the one I grew up in, ones I grew up in, plural,
South Central Los Angeles before the, oh, sorry, after that, Compton, California,
(10:03):
and they're often noisy. By the way, it's not black
and brown neighborhoods exclusively, poor white neighborhoods, pretty much the
same thing. They're just rural, so you don't get the
concentration of noise like you do in an urban area.
But the noise of frustration, the noise of depression, the
noise of anger, the noise, not just physical noise, it's
(10:26):
emotional noise, it's psychological noise, it's spiritual noise, it's tension noise,
it's unsettled noise, the noise of a being that can't focus.
So let's talk about what that means. It means cars,
it means sirens, it means television blaring, And music, it
(10:48):
means arguments. It means, yes, music and people coming and
going in your house, in your neighborhood, in your place,
in your space. Everybody reacting to something, never responding to something.
It's ready, fire, aim, living a life. Now get this one.
If you haven't got anything else, this one will. If
(11:09):
you live in a poor rural neighborhood, maybe you don't
feel the sirens, all that stuff, but get this. It's
a surviving mindset. It's a surviving mindset in a thriving
and winning world. In order to win, you have to think.
Because winning is about a mindset. But most people are
in a surviving mindset. And surviving mindsets are just what
(11:33):
they sound. It's noisy. It's painful. It's complicated. It's angry.
It's It's argumentative. It's drama, lots of drama, lots of trauma.
It's a lot of INGs, right? Struggling, drinking, texting, sexting, peeing, oversleeping, hollering, screaming,
(12:05):
you know, hanging. A lot of INGs are useless, but
not healing, not dealing. So we're going to get to
that because the real goal of all of this is
to become reasonably comfortable in your own skin so that
there's nothing stopping you from creating the world that you
(12:26):
want at scale. So here I'll say again, wealth whispers.
Not rich. Rich is a contract. Wealth is potentially generational.
Wealth is generational. because riches can come and you lose
your money. You can still regain it because you've got
(12:47):
the right wealth mindset. We're not human beings having a
spiritual experience. We're spiritual beings having a human experience. Energy matters.
So I wasn't criticizing poor people when I did that
viral video clip. I was describing an environment. To me,
(13:07):
it was just common sense, like saying, This is a
table in front of me. It wasn't complicated because poverty
doesn't just take money out of your pocket. Poverty takes
peace out of your environment. Can I get an amen?
It can take time out of your day. It can
take bandwidth out of your brain. If you hang around
(13:28):
nine broke people, as I keep saying, you'll probably be
the 10th. Our Hope Financial Wellness Index at Operation Hope,
which we have gathered with data from Experian and a
range of government sources, it shows that for every 50
point increase in credit scores, you live five more years
on average. So in a 500 credit score neighborhood, you
(13:49):
live to about 61 years of age. So you don't
even get to social security, but in a 700 credit
score neighborhood, get this, with 15 minutes apart in an
urban area on average, you live to 81 years of
age on average. 20 year delta, 20 year difference, 15
minutes apart, mindset, mindset. This even affects your wellness, not
(14:16):
just your access to capital, not just your access to opportunity,
your wellness. And so I'm sitting here in Maui. I
started thinking, what if quiet isn't merely something you get
after you become successful? What if quiet is something, what
if it's one of the ingredients of something that helps
(14:38):
you become successful? successful in the first place. Because quiet
gives you something incredibly valuable, space to think. And thinking
is free. Everything I've said so far is available to you.
You don't have to come to Maui for it. You
don't have to go to Beverly Hills or Buckhead or
whatever the wealthy neighborhood, Lincoln Park in Chicago. You don't
(14:59):
need to go to the wealthy neighborhood. You don't need
to go to Manhattan for this. This is free to use.
It is a gift from God, but you got to
reclaim it in your brain first. So this is thinking,
this is the thinking that produces ideas, people, that allows
ideas to produce creation. Creation can become intellectual property. Come
(15:22):
on now. Intellectual property can become ownership. Ownership creates assets.
Asset can create wealth. And financial stability can contribute to
something even more important, wellness. Quincy Jones once told me,
(15:44):
God rest his soul, he was my big brother. He said,
if you think you're in the music business and you
don't own music rights, publishing rights, or licensing rights, some
kind of rights, intellectual property rights, you actually are not
in the music business. You're just a temporary performer. You
rock the mic, but you don't own it. Michael Jackson
was at one point the most famous, most highly regarded
(16:08):
entertainer in the world. And his music was incredibly valuable.
What was more invaluable? That intellectual property that he acquired,
including the Beatles catalog, because when he wasn't performing and
being loud on stage, he was sitting in quiet, thinking
about how to own the stage. Listening, because God gives
(16:29):
you two ears and one mouth, so you listen twice
as much as you talk. Wellness. This is typically... the
topic of my wife, Chaitra Bryant, who I'm, well, she's
health and she's helped me to sustain my life. She's
helped me to extend my life, lower my blood pressure,
increase my wellness and lower my inflammation. Do you know
(16:50):
that 75% of all disease lives on inflammation? So I'll
bring her on. I'll bring her back on because she's
done an episode with me before to talk about the
power of wellness. But I'm going to just speak to
that in part during this podcast. So today I want
to talk about something that sounds like it has nothing
to do with money, but it has everything to do
(17:12):
with wealth, and that's the economic power of quiet. So
let me just say this. Poverty is louder than money.
When we talk about poverty in America, we usually talk
about income. But poverty isn't simply a shortage of money.
Poverty can be a shortage of margin. You don't have
enough room. You don't have enough time. You don't have
(17:36):
enough savings. You don't have enough credit. I've been on
both spectrums. You don't have enough options. So you start
living from a sense of urgency and it's now ready, fire, aim,
a surviving mindset, as I said earlier. And so therefore
(17:58):
everything becomes urgent. I recently told my old team, my
own team, who's been doing this urgency thing for so long,
building companies with me, that they let the urgent crowd
out the important. I told them to drop the urgent.
I demand that you now focus on the important. At
least one day of five days a week. Because that's
where strategic thinking comes from. See, they're thinking. That's where
(18:21):
the magic comes from. Otherwise, you're winning the battle and
losing the war. You're rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
The ship is sinking and we're picking drapes. You need
time to think. You need time to strategize. You need
time to reimagine. You cannot just keep running all the time.
(18:42):
If you go far enough for the North Pole, you'll
end up South. The red is due. The car has
broken down. The hours get cut. Your child needs something.
Somebody gets sick. The refrigerator breaks. The landlord calls. The
(19:02):
credit card company then calls. You're juggling five problems all
at once. Is this sounding familiar? That's noise. I walk
through life. This is my personal ethos, people. I'm giving
you my personal strategies for winning. It's not out of
some book somewhere. It's what I do. I walk through
(19:24):
life consciously oblivious of most things around me because it
just doesn't matter. The noise just doesn't matter. I just
block it all out. It just doesn't matter. And I
take no for vitamins. Yeah, you told me no. I'm
not focusing on the nine no's. I'm focusing on the
one yes. That's what I'm listening to. The rest of
it is noise. And then there is the actual physical environment.
(19:48):
Maybe three people share a bed. Maybe you're living next
to a highway. Maybe you hear the neighbor's television through
the walls. Maybe there are sirens outside. Maybe right now,
this very moment. Maybe there's instability in the neighborhood. If
you grew up in a 500 or live in a 500,
(20:10):
or sub-September credit score neighborhood, I guarantee you there's instability
in the neighborhood. Maybe you're constantly worried about safety. That's
noise too. It's occupying space in your brain. But here's
the part we don't talk enough about. Financial stress creates
(20:30):
noise inside your head. How am I going to pay
these bills? How am I going to pay this or that?
What happens tomorrow? What if I lose my job? What
happens if the car breaks? How do I make it
until Friday? That's mental noise. There's a book called The
Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. Don't listen to it.
It'll drive you crazy. He drones on, but he's genius.
(20:53):
And read the book. It's like, it's crazy. It's long,
but read it. But essentially the cheat sheet notes I'll
give you is yesterday is a memory and doesn't exist.
Tomorrow's the future and hasn't happened yet. But we spend
most of our time, most of us, with one foot anxiety,
our paralysis of analysis, our lack of faith. Everybody wants
(21:16):
to get to heaven. Nobody wants to die to get there.
We want to believe in God. We want him to
prove it first, whatever the it is. That doesn't work
that way. Faith is what you do. We don't have
all the facts. So we have one foot in yesterday,
one foot in tomorrow. Neither one of them are true.
That's why you're not present. That's why they call the
present a gift. So I learned to be present. And
(21:38):
the gift I got was more time. You create time
when you're present and you create peace. And when your
brain spends all day solving or just reacting to emergencies,
there's less bandwidth left for imagining possibilities. That's why when
my friends were going out partying when I was growing up,
(22:00):
I didn't realize what I was doing at the moment. Hey, John,
come out and hang with me. Hey, come on. We're
going to this club. We're going to this party. It
was a lot of noise, a lot of people. I'm
thinking to myself, none of that stuff is making me
any money. None of that stuff is building me wealth.
I'm not getting paid to be at the club, right?
And all you folks, I'll say to myself, all you
guys are broke, or at least not where I'm trying
(22:22):
to go. I'm going to stay here and study. I'm
going to stay here and read a book. I didn't
realize what I was doing, but I was building my
mental and psychological and spiritual war chest to win. I
was doing what the book The Outlier says, which is
10,000 or 20,000 hours above studying anything. I think it's
10,000 hours more than what the average person is spending
(22:45):
in the course of their life and career just working.
You put 10,000 hours in at another 20 hours a week.
maximum thinking about studying anything, and you become the NBA
of that thing, the NBA player, the NFL player. You
become a pro athlete at that thing, and no one
can compete with you. So survival asks, how do I
(23:06):
get through today? Creation asks, what can I build tomorrow?
Both are legitimate questions, but they're very different questions, and
poverty can trap people in the first one. That's why
I say, and this was the founding thesis for Operation Hope,
there's a difference between being broke and being poor. Being
(23:29):
broke is economic, but being poor is a disabling frame
of mind and a depressed condition of your spirit, and
you must vow never, ever, ever to be poor again.
What wealth really buys? Let's go back to those wealthy
neighborhoods for a minute. Why are they so quiet? Part
of the answer is obvious. Bigger lots, better insulation in
(23:54):
the houses. That's why I don't hear what's going on
with neighbors. Even if the neighbors were having a party,
I would really hear it because they can have their
space and I can have mine. And these walls are
like hotel construction quality. It's so thick and made of
concrete in many places. Better insulation, less density. You know,
people not on top of each other. More trees, hello,
(24:18):
which buffers noise. and also creates oxygen. So you're breathing easier,
green spaces, private offices, gated communities, second homes, retreats, like
I'm on now, wealth buys control. Now I'm talking about
(24:39):
first the wealth of spirit, the wealth of mindset, control
of your own self, then financial wealth, okay, economic wealth
buys physical control. control over your environment, control over your schedule.
All money is, is freedom. I do what I want,
when I want, however I want, with whomever I want.
(25:01):
And I don't argue about it. To argue with a fool,
truths there are too. I'm not arguing with you. I'm
just going to say, bye, Felicia. I'm going over here
and you're going wherever you want to go. You don't
have to go, but you got to get the heck
out of here because I own the door job and
I set the rules. So you control your schedule, control
your transportation, Control over where you live. Control over who
(25:24):
gets access to you. Can I get an amen? Control
over your time. I just refuse to hang around toxic people.
Like you ain't gotta go, but you gotta get out
of here. Like I refuse to hang around deadbeats and
negative people and toxic. Oh God, my God, I'm allergic
to toxic people. My God. Control over your environment. Control
(25:48):
over your attention. Think about what wealthy people spend money on.
Think about this. Privacy. First class lounges. It's not meant
to floss. Wealthy people just want simplicity and the control
of their environment. It just looks like they're flossing because
it happens to be doing that in, let's say, a
private plane or a first class cabin. They're really just
(26:10):
buying control of their environment. A first class cabin for
me is just a mobile office. Private clubs. Spas. Resorts.
Renewing yourself. Retreats, homes on acreage. We have 40 acres,
buy some more at our place. I just love, I've
always wanted to have land, right? And I can walk
(26:32):
on it and breathe. And by the way, all that land,
that green space is restoring me and my family with oxygen.
It's calming also. Same rules apply there as here in Maui.
Noise canceling headphones. Why? Because peace has economic value. That's why.
(26:56):
Think about it. Successful people spend enormous amounts of money
buying do not disturb. Think about it. And maybe they're
on to something. Maybe we're on to something. Successful people
spend enormous amounts of money and time just trying to
create their own environment. because your attention is one of
(27:20):
the most valuable assets you possess. Google knows it. Meta
knows it, Facebook. TikTok knows it. YouTube knows it. Advertisers
know it. These companies spend billions of dollars figuring out
how to get a few more minutes of your attention.
(27:41):
We're basically in an attention economy. Now think about that,
your attention. has now been monetized. So here's the question.
If everybody else understands the economic value of your attention,
why don't you? What did Malcolm X say? We've been bamboozled.
We've been tricked. We've been fooled. We've been hoodwinked. We've
been run amok. I don't know about you, but I'm
(28:03):
sick and tired of being sick and tired. So I'm
trying to set you free with financial liberty. That's my
little rap. Civil rights. Quiet is a factory for ideas.
Let's connect directly to wealth creation here with this topic.
Where does wealth come from? So before the company, before
(28:26):
the building, before the factory, by the way, when people,
this is really important point here, when companies buy a company,
are they buying the furniture and the fixtures and the
wall hangings and even the structure? Is that what they're
(28:47):
really buying? Are they buying a management team? See what
I'm saying? You're buying the human capital, the culture, the philosophy,
the net result of folks creating something incredibly unique in
the quiet of creation. So before the factory, before the stock,
(29:09):
before the product, there was usually something else. An idea.
An idea. Think about virtually every great innovation, okay? The automobile,
the airplane, the personal computer, the smartphone, Google, ChatGPT and
artificial intelligence. My friend Sam Altman is an innovator there.
(29:35):
New medicines, new manufacturing techniques, Somebody first imagined something that
didn't exist. And this is why I find patents so fascinating.
A patent is essentially a protected, potentially monetizable idea. the
(29:59):
product of creation, of mental creation. Thinking. Somebody begins inside
their own brain with something called imagination. It weighs nothing.
You can't touch it. Nobody else even knows it exists.
(30:20):
Then somebody develops it, tests it, protects it, commercializes it.
Attorneys wrap legal protections around it and suddenly a thought
becomes an asset. Am I going too fast for you?
You can always rewind this and replay it. This is
one of the most important episodes I've ever done. That
(30:44):
asset can be licensed, people. It can attract investment. It
can become a company. This is the power. And if
you can take the power of your thinking and connect
it with artificial intelligence, by the way, oh my God,
what's possible. That's why me and my co-creator partners in
(31:07):
artificial intelligence, my AI agent, we sit in quiet all
the time. My family's gone a bit, just throwing ideas
back and forth, creating things quietly that will make a
very loud thump when they hit the market. a young
lady told me, former executive of Coca-Cola, very, very powerful
(31:32):
black woman in Atlanta, retired from a prominent position in
finance there, Vicki Palmer, her and her husband, John Palmer,
we were at dinner with Ambassador Andrew Young one night.
She says, you know, you're very quiet. I'm like, huh?
She says, you do things very quietly. And I'm like,
(31:55):
I don't think most people would agree with you. I
think most people would say I'm pretty loud. I mean,
I can't go down the street without somebody stopping me
and talking about the video that they saw or this
or that, which is a blessing, by the way, and
how it changed their life. She says, no, that's not
what I'm talking about. You do things, but you've been
(32:17):
thinking about those things for a very long time quietly,
and then people hear you did them. You don't talk
about them. You just go, do the work quietly. You
make the moves, you create the partnerships quietly. And then boom,
one day, it's a reality that other people hear about.
And then you amplify the lessons of that through your podcast,
(32:39):
your straight talk, all videos, your books, et cetera. And
I was like, oh, you have really gotten me figured out.
I'm a really private person living a very public life.
So here we go, this idea becomes a company and
it creates jobs, it can create an industry, it can
(33:02):
create enormous wealth, right? So that's the story of many
of the companies I created from an idea to, in
one case, a company I sold for nine figures and,
you know, there's a company that took me five years,
there's another company I created after that, that doubled the
asset size of the company, it took five years to do,
(33:22):
we did that in five months. What took me five
months with this Nugent partnership with CIM Group, $ 30 billion
company out of LA, the CIM BGG Impact Ventures and
the fund that we're creating, a billion dollar fund raised
$ 350 million, $ 315 million so far, but we raised $ 250
million in five months. But it took me five years
(33:45):
to create the last company to get it to $ 150
million of assets, sell that company for $ 120 million, most
of my interest in that company. transition job at that
company now. But that's the power of compounding lessons learned
and honing my intellectual property development process in my head,
(34:09):
going from good to great. So human imagination becomes economic output.
That's extraordinary when you think about it. And where does
imagination often do its best work when you're not constantly
being interrupted. Quincy Jones again told me that he puts
(34:30):
together the greatest musicians and the greatest music in the
studio and everybody's talking and then at some point everybody
goes quiet and he sits at the piano and he
cracks the door, leans his head to one, tilts his
head to one side and leaves the door cracked. I said, why?
He said, I'm listening. For what? I'm waiting for God
(34:53):
to walk in. The magic of the music ultimately is
created in the quiet of God's voice whispering in his ear,
even if we did all of that other stuff with
all those brilliant people in the room. So when you're walking, reading, writing, thinking, reflecting, sitting.
(35:23):
Quiet is not inactivity. Quiet can be a factory for
your ideas when you're doing these things, normal things. You
don't need to sit like a Buddhist monk. You can
go on about your life like listening to this podcast.
(35:45):
You can't listen to this podcast and have 15 other
things going on whispering in your ear at the same time.
That's why you have your headphones on or why you're
listening in your car or while you're cooking or while
you're gardening or while you're jogging or working out. You
need a focused environment so you can listen and learn.
(36:07):
Let's talk about nations for a minute. Let's look at
the many countries generating enormous amounts of intellectual property and
patent activity. The United States of America. legitimate patents, China,
not really patents, they're really knocking off our stuff, but
I'll give them props for a lot of creativity. Japan,
(36:30):
South Korea, Germany. Then look at the greatest, the great
industrial and economic powers of the world. You see the
same country. So that's the countries, you know, doing all
this patent work, right? Now let's see, if we can
be precise. I'm not saying patents automatically create GDP, gross
(36:53):
domestic product. They don't. And correlation is not causation. Strong
economies also require education, right? Infrastructure, capital, research universities, rule
of law, markets, entrepreneurship, talent, manufacturing, self-determination, the ability to
(37:16):
benefit from your Creations capitalism responsible capitalism good capitalism is
what I'm talking about my book capitalism for all number
one bestseller By the way, thank you very much five
months going But here's what the relationship tells me great
economies create They don't just consume which is why America
is gonna have to get a reboot on our business
(37:38):
plan in quick They don't sit in conflict all the time. Hello.
Everybody wants to be an American but Americans and They invent,
they experiment, they improve, they commercialize, yes, and most importantly,
they own. This is why I believe one of the
(38:00):
greatest natural resources America possesses isn't underneath the ground, it's
between our ears, it's us. It is unlike oil, it
never runs out. Gold is finite, land is finite, human
(38:20):
imagination is renewable, and because of God, it is unlimited.
Every child born in America represents potential intellectual property, human capital, literally,
potential innovation, potential entrepreneurship, potential GDP, gross domestic product, which
(38:42):
means when we leave millions of children trapped in environments
where they cannot develop their potential. We're not simply failing
those children. America is leaving GDP on the table and
failing itself. That's why I wrote the book, Capitalism for All.
It's not just a story. I know this podcast is
listened to all around the world. Thank you for making
it top 70 for entrepreneurship in every continent, top 250
(39:08):
for business on every continent. This is not just an
American story. but I live here, I'm an American product,
and we're still the light on the hill for the world,
but this is gonna be replicated everywhere in the world.
I believe there's nothing wrong with work. Labor makes a living,
ownership builds wealth. There's nothing wrong with work. Everybody needs
(39:33):
to work. Only in the dictionary does the word success
come before the word work because it's alphabetical. So I
believe in work. An entrepreneur works 18 hours a day
to keep from getting a job. I believe in work. Hmm.
Work creates dignity. Work creates discipline. Work puts food on
(39:55):
the table. But eventually you've got to understand the difference
between labor and capital. Labor gets paid when labor works.
Capital can continue working when you stop and gets paid
when you sleep. I've said this another way. Money makes
(40:20):
more money on money than labor can ever make money
on sweat. I'll say it again. Money makes more money
on money than labor can ever make money on sweat.
That doesn't mean stop working. No, no, no, no. Never that.
And don't start playing games either because there are no
shortcuts to success. If somebody gives you a free lunch,
(40:42):
it's probably stale. It means don't stop the work and
don't stop at work. get the job, develop the skills,
increase your income, improve your credit, okay? I want you
to create some savings, acquire assets, start investing, build something,
create an intellectual property or two or three, own equity,
(41:06):
build up the ladder, and move up the ladder from
cashing a check to writing it, just like me. Worker, creator, owner, investor, capitalist.
I'll say it again. Worker, creator, owner, investor, capitalist. From
(41:31):
cashing the check, starting on endorsing it, to writing it,
front of the check versus the back. That's the journey.
Too many underserved communities have been taught only the first instruction.
Get the job, cash the check. Absolutely do that. But
then what? The job should become a platform, not a ceiling.
(41:57):
Use labor to acquire capital. Use capital to acquire assets.
Then let assets begin working alongside you. That's why I
use intellectual AI as my co-creator alongside me. Because when
you own the business, the business can potentially understand earn
(42:19):
while you're sleeping. You make money during the day, Tony
Ressler advice, you build wealth in your sleep. Real estate
doesn't punch a clock. Equity doesn't need a lunch break.
Intellectual property doesn't need a vacation. That's ownership. Your phone
(42:40):
can turn a mansion into a poor neighborhood. Now here's
the modern problem. You can escape physical noise and still
have a noisy mind. You can live in a $ 10
million house and carry a poor neighborhood around in your pocket.
Or worse, in your brain. Yes, I said it. It's
(43:05):
your phone. It can be a smartphone or it can
make you really dumb. It can be a dumb phone.
A lot of people use the smartphone in really dumb ways. Ding, ding, ding, email, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook,
text message, breaking news, notifications. Somebody's angry. Somebody got divorced.
(43:26):
Somebody got a Lamborghini. Somebody said something stupid. Said something
about some politician. Some politician said something about somebody else.
Some celebrity did something. And now you've got invited to
other people's business. You've invited the entire planet into your
nervous system. And no one's paying you a dollar for it.
(43:50):
In fact, in an attention economy, they just monetized you
and you get nothing for it. I am ruthless about
my time. I don't let anybody consciously waste my time.
You can waste my money. You can't waste my time.
Only I can do that. Now that's gangster. Your phone
can turn a mansion into a noisy neighborhood. It's the
(44:14):
mansion of your mind. That's why This isn't ultimately about geography.
It's about attention and intention. If you spend all day
consuming everybody else's ideas, when do you create your own?
When do you have time for your own? If you
(44:36):
spend all day watching somebody else's life, when do you
build yours? I've often said, go to a poor neighborhood.
Everybody's talking about somebody else. Go to a wealthy neighborhood.
People are talking about their ideas. It doesn't matter the race, mindset.
If you spend every waking moment reacting, when do you reflect?
(44:58):
If you're reacting, you can't respond because those are two
different emotions. If you're making an emotional decision, it's probably
a bad one. Noise doesn't merely consume time. Noise consumes imagination.
And there is a war being fought for your attention.
Protect it. the 500 credit score versus 700 credit score neighborhood.
(45:23):
But this isn't just about money. It's about, as I
said earlier, wellness. At Operation Hope, and we have a
wellness advisor at Operation Hope. It's my wife, Chaitra Bryant.
She donates her time. She's not paid. She's an unpaid
advisor at Operation Hope on health wellness. She's certified in it.
She's a registered dietician, has all these certifications and degrees,
(45:44):
and is brilliant at it. We spent years looking at
the financial health of communities. And now we think there's
correlation between wealth and health. And one of the most
powerful indicators we've focused on is a credit score, of course.
Not because the credit score is perfect, it's not, but
because it tells you a lot about the economic ecosystem
(46:05):
surrounding a household and a community. It's a trending indicator
of hope, well-being, belief, confidence, joy, faith, et cetera. Think
about two communities, right? Community A, 500 to sub 600
credit score neighborhood, what might you find? Higher financial stress,
higher interest rates, more subprime loans, more check cashers, more
(46:28):
payday loan lenders, more rent to own stores, more renters
versus owners of property, less access to affordable capital, greater instability,
more financial emergencies, more people using the emergency room as
their healthcare, more frequently More noise. Now drive to a
(46:49):
700 credit score neighborhood. It's a short distance, typically maybe
15 minutes. Go to my Hope Financial Wellness Index. Just
look up a zip code. You tell me your zip code,
I'll tell you how you live it, right? You'll be stunned.
It literally, changing your environment will change your life. So
now you've driven to a 700 credit score neighborhood and
(47:09):
what changes? More homeowners, more banking relationships, Lower borrowing costs.
More access to mainstream capital. More businesses. More stability. More options.
More financial margin. And often, more quiet. Just like this.
(47:34):
Where I'm at now. And here's where this becomes much
bigger than money. Okay, now we've seen extraordinary life expectancy
gaps between distressed communities and financially thriving ones. In some comparisons,
it's literally 15 to 20 year or more difference, 15
(47:55):
minutes apart. Now think about that, okay? So Quiet has
a health premium, 20 years. Now your credit score isn't,
magically determining how long you're going to live. That's not
what I'm saying. The credit score is a trending indicator
(48:15):
of the ecosystem. It reflects things happening all around you. Income, debt, housing, education, employment, safety, stress.
What's the number one cause for death in America? Heart attacks.
(48:36):
What's the number one cause for heart attacks? Stress. What's
the number one cause for stress? Money. Right? Number one
cause for divorce? Money. Number one cause for domestic abuse? Money.
Access to healthcare, right? Food choices, access to capital, opportunity. Again,
end stress. Don't underestimate stress. Let's talk about disease now
(49:03):
and dis-ease. A lot of disease is dis-ease. Your body's 70% water.
What happens when you get all worked up and angry?
You're heating up that water. You're burning yourself up. You're
frying your organs. Get another topic another day with shapes. Troy.
Come back into this. Think about chronic financial stress. You're
(49:24):
worried about rent, worried about food, worried about your children,
worried about the car, worried about your job, worried about crime,
worried about tomorrow. You go to sleep worried. You wake
up worried. You look old because you're worrying all the time. Look,
if you're going to pray, why worry? If you're going
(49:44):
to worry, why pray? I mean, look, just give it
to God and do the best and let God do
the rest. Just give it to him. Don't, I mean,
don't make yourself look old and tired and worn out
and you haven't given God a shot or faith a shot.
People say, why should I try God? Because he cannot
(50:05):
possibly mismanage and screw up your life worse than you have.
Give him a shot. Your body doesn't know whether the
threat is a tiger chasing you or a Visa bill
chasing you or MasterCard bill chasing you. It just knows
that your nervous system is shot. It knows that something's
a threat. And when the stress becomes chronic, that's not
(50:26):
simply an economic problem. That's a wellness problem. And this
is why health and wealth should never have been separated
in the first place. Financial stability creates options, right? Better housing,
better food, fruits and vegetables, you know, quality food. We've
been eating fabulous, fresh food right out of the ocean.
(50:52):
You feel different. I don't even want to eat fast
food anymore, right? I do it when I have to,
but when I have no choice late at night, you know,
driver's taking me someplace, I'll put it into a fast
food restaurant. I have a couple of favorites when I
do that, but they don't balance their quality. But I
try to eat real food these days. And that was
not always me. This is a new reality based on
(51:16):
more education and more knowledge, which I got from reading
when I had quiet and time. So we're talking about
preventive health, not just reactive, stressful health scares. Exercise, sleep, vacations, retreats,
green space, walking. On the beach, putting your fingers and
(51:40):
your toes in the soil. Time with your children. Time
with your mate. And something we rarely put on the list,
time with yourself. Peace, quiet, margin for error. I mean,
what's the whole point of this? To become reasonably comfortable
(52:02):
in your own skin is my goal. Nobody's perfect. But
to become reasonably comfortable in your own skin is a
powerful thing. Because if I don't like me, I'm not
gonna like you. If I don't feel good about me,
I'm not gonna feel good about you. If I don't
love me, I don't have a clue how to love you.
And if I don't respect me, I'm not gonna respect you.
Somebody's listening to this and says, John, that's easy for
you to say, you're sitting in paradise. Fair enough, but
(52:25):
you don't need Maui. I did it without Maui until
I got here, until I was able to afford to
get here in the first place. You need intentional quiet. Fine,
30 minutes. Start there. Start with 15. Maybe before your
family wakes up in the morning, crack a book. Maybe
(52:48):
the Bible. Maybe my book, Capitalism for All. Who knows? Whatever.
Find a book. Read it. Or just meditate or just
sit in silence. Maybe in your car if you can't
find times before the family wakes up. Maybe walking to work.
Maybe at the library. Maybe on a break. maybe in
(53:09):
a park, maybe at a church, turn off your phone.
Turn off the television. No social media, no news, no gossip.
Take out a notebook and ask yourself some questions. What
problems do I understand that other people don't? What frustrates
(53:33):
me that could be done better? There's a point to this.
Stay with me. What skill do I have that somebody
would pay for? What could I create once and sell repeatedly?
What could I own instead of consume? What could become
(53:53):
intellectual property and owned by me? What idea have I
been ignoring and my favorite? What is my future trying
to tell me that my present is too loud for
me to hear? Drop the mic. What are you passionate about?
What's your purpose? What are you here for? You're not
(54:14):
here just to pay bills. You're not here just to struggle.
The Bible suggests that you can't grow without legitimate suffering.
So don't walk away from your pain or run away
from it. Run right through it. But your pain has
a purpose. It's not meant to just be painful. It's
meant to teach you something. That's the whole point of
all this is to learn. So just sit there in
(54:39):
that moment and ask yourself that question again. What is
my future trying to tell me that my present is
too loud for me to hear? And don't rush the answer. Think.
Let it come to you. Sit in silence for a minute. Oh,
I love the silence, the power and majesty of silence.
(55:03):
Because that 30 minutes might ultimately be more economically valuable
than 30 hours of activity. and busyness. Let me close
this up. We've been talking for too long. I've been
talking for too long. You know, you never want to
meet an old guy in the club. So before you
all get me out of this, I'm going to leave.
You take life seriously, by the way. Never take yourself
(55:23):
too seriously. Learn to laugh at yourself all the time.
It's very therapeutic. So sitting here in Maui reminded me
of something else. I grew up around noise. Today I've
learned to treasure quiet, But this episode was never really
about noise. It's about your human potential. And I'm all
(55:45):
about untapping, untapped human, about unleashing, sorry, untapped human potential
at scale. That's what my website, Brian McVendrew says, is
my value proposition. That is the overriding theme of all
my businesses tied to good capitalism. Because somewhere right now,
there's a child sitting in a 500 credit score neighborhood
(56:06):
with a billion dollar idea in their head. They need
a partner. They need a mentor. They need a sponsor.
They need a friend. They need somebody to listen to them.
They need somebody to help them create quiet in their
brain so they can create magic for us all. There's
somebody driving a bus with an idea right now. There's
(56:28):
somebody working at Walmart with an idea, a powerful one
right now. Somebody waiting a table with an idea Right now,
somebody sitting in a community college classroom with a powerful
idea right now. Somebody listening to this podcast right now
(56:49):
with an idea. And that idea might become a business,
a book, a patent, an app, a new product, a solution,
a movement. a mind shift of AI, an asset, but
(57:11):
first you've got to hear it. That's why God gave
you two out, two ears and one mouth, so you
listen twice as much as you talk. And that requires
something really rare, right? But achievable and cost-free. Quiet. So
here's the whole journey. Stability creates margin. Margin creates quiet.
(57:35):
Quiet creates space to think. Thinking produces ideas. Ideas produce creation.
Creation can produce intellectual property. Intellectual property creates ownership. Ownership
creates assets. Assets can create wealth. Wealth creates greater choice
(57:57):
and stability. Stability can support wellness. Wellness can contribute to longevity.
And now you have more control over your whole life.
By the way, you can take that through a financial
lens or a wellness lens. In other words, this doesn't
have to have anything to do with money. And that
(58:18):
cycle still works. And then the cycle begins again. That's
the virtuous circle. And the opposite can become a vicious circle. Instability, noise, stress, reaction,
poor decisions, less ownership, financial insecurity, more stress, death prematurely.
(58:43):
Our job is to break that cycle, people. That's what
financial literacy is really about. That's why I call it
the civil rights issue of this generation. That's why I
want you to learn what capitalism for all is, the book,
the philosophy. It's not a book. Somebody told me it's
not a read book. It's a work book. It's a
think book. It's a mark it up book. It's a
read it again book. Let's start a movement. civil rights
(59:03):
to silver rights from the streets to the suites. The
Third Reconstruction. The Ownership generation. That's what inclusive economics is
really about that I created. Not making poor people comfortable
in poverty, creating more owners, more inventors, more entrepreneurs, more investors,
(59:29):
more healthy families, more peaceful communities, less depression, and more
people with enough economic security to dream again. What did
Dorothy Height tell me, the late Dr. Dorothy Height? John,
I like you because you're a dreamer with a shovel
in your hand. Because the greatest asset you own may
(59:49):
not be your house, although I want you to own
a house. It may not be a stock portfolio, although
I want you to have a stock portfolio. It may
not be your bank account, you better have one of those.
and an FDIC insured bank. It may be your imagination,
so protect it. Give it space, give it time, give
it quiet and give it grace. And when the idea comes,
(01:00:13):
build it, protect it, patent it if appropriate, finance it,
sell it, scale it, and most importantly, own it. Because
poverty can keep you busy. Labor can make you a living.
Creation can make you an owner. Ownership can create wealth.
(01:00:38):
Wealth can create choices, and those choices can help you
create a healthier, more peaceful life. It might just bring
you to Maui, and you might be the neighbor next
door in the villa they've yet to build. Wealth whispers
(01:00:59):
and asks you, are you dreaming yet? Make sure your
life gets quiet enough that you can hear that dream.
I'm John Hope Bryant. This is Money and Wealth on
the Black Effect Network on iHeartRadio. This is season three.
Thanks for listening to me and coming along on this
journey with me every week and pass this on to
(01:01:20):
a friend. This may be one of the most important
episodes I've ever done, at least from my perspective. And
I'm going to take you proudly with me all around
the world this year and next. And I'm not going
to again try to create this beautiful, perfect set that
I so admire that other people have. It may be
a little raggedy sometimes. It may be, you know, not
(01:01:43):
as a beautiful setting as this is. It may be
noisier than you like. I'm sorry if I can't perfect
every moment and place and space. But I'm going to
give you the benefit of the quiet of my focused
attention on you Every single time. I'm out. Get the
(01:02:04):
podcast to others as a referral. Get the book for yourself,
Capitalism for All, my seventh. Get one of the AI,
the AI agent that Hope AI created. Van Jones and
I have co-chair Hope AI. Wait for powerful stuff coming
from Sam Altman and I and the AI Ethics Council.
(01:02:27):
Stand by for that. Think about the Hope Global Forum
coming up. Go to Operation Hope. Sign up for the work.
Check out what my businesses are doing at Brian Group Ventures.
You can sign up, and I won't overwhelm you with noise.
I'm out. John O'Brien. This is Money and Wealth. Money
and Wealth with John O'Brien is a production of the
(01:02:47):
Black Effect Podcast Network. For more podcasts from the Black
Effect Podcast Network, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Money and Wealth with John Hope Bryant, a
production of the Black Effect Podcast Network and iHeartRadio. Hey, hey,
it's John Hope Bryant here of Bryant Group Ventures and
Operation Hope. And I'm saying that intentionally in that way
(00:23):
because I want to stress here that I'm an operating entrepreneur.
that something that Charlemagne told me, Charlemagne, the guy of
The Breakfast Club and Black Effect Network, the platform that
I do my podcast on, a good friend of mine,
good brother, brilliant, really. And at some point I'll have
(00:45):
him on this show as well. I'm on his board,
Black Effect Network, because I believe in him. But one
thing he told me when I agreed to do this
podcast and he asked me to do it was, John,
you're different. You're an operating entrepreneur. You're an operating businessman.
You know, you meet a payroll. You've got 400 employees.
(01:06):
You've got operations on the ground around the world. You've
got a success story. You've got a track record. You've
done deals. You've done nine figure deals. You know, you
have a billion dollar fund that you stood up. You've
sold companies for over a hundred million dollars. You know,
you're not out here playing like you're an entrepreneur. You
really are one. And that struck me and made me
(01:27):
want to do this. And I felt a little bad.
from time to time because I don't have the perfect, well,
I could have the professional studio if I wanted to,
like many other podcasters. And I really admire many of
them who have done a really great job at podcasting,
but I'm not a podcaster. I'm an entrepreneur who's doing
a podcast. Okay. And so I just decided I'm going
(01:51):
further in. I'm not going further away from who I am.
I'm going to dive further into taking you with me
on this entrepreneurial journey as a real operating businessman and entrepreneur, creator, grower, developer,
builder of companies from the ground up, which includes, you know,
I think three of my 40 companies I've created are
(02:14):
the biggest of their kind in the category in the country,
in the largest economy in the world, the United States
of America. And we built this thing to the point
where we've gone from one of the poorest zip codes
in America, my story, Compton in South Central LA, to
Forbes 250, number 145 on that list of the greatest
living self-made Americans on the 250th anniversary of America. So
(02:37):
why do I say all that? Because that's really about
distance traveled and inspiring you that you can go from
zero to hero. But why am I saying that sitting
in this casual environment? Because I'm not going to create
these fancy studios. I've got fancy studios. I can go
to iHeart Studios anywhere around the world, actually. and record
my podcast. I've got a beautiful studio at my headquarters
(02:58):
in Atlanta, but I'm often on the road. I'm often
traveling because I'm a real businessman with a real need
to meet with my partners and board members and customers
and clients. And you're constantly in play with me and
I'm giving you, you know, the real world as I
(03:22):
Experience it, which includes podcasts done in hotel rooms, podcasts
or straight-to-life videos done by me literally in cars, in airports. Well,
these podcast series that I do, often myself talking straight
to you, the camera, is from wherever I am in
the world. And so right now I'm in Maui, and
(03:44):
it's the middle of the night. And the ocean's in
the background, by the way, so you might hear a
little bit of that. but it's quiet throughout all of
the city of Maui, certainly in Wailea, the more upscale area.
And as you get closer to the wealth, it gets quieter,
irrespective of race. A straight-to-live video I did has gone viral,
(04:06):
which inspired me to do this longer-form podcast. I did
an interview with a gentleman in Atlanta on his podcast,
and I just mentioned that poor neighborhoods are noisy, and
wealthy neighborhoods tend to be quiet and Because I grew
up in this neighborhood that was black and brown, I
inferred or suggested that a lot of the black and
(04:27):
brown neighborhoods tend to be noisy. And that when you
go to wealthy neighborhoods, they're just quieter. And the presumption was, well,
you mean white neighborhoods. No, there are black neighborhoods that
I lived in in Atlanta, Niskay Lake Falls in particular,
gated neighborhood of 22 homes, was dead quiet all the time.
The color's not black or white or red or blue.
(04:49):
The color is green. as in economics. So let me
break down for you in this episode, why wealth whispers.
So pull out your pen, pull out your device, get
ready to take some notes that will change your life.
I'm going to tell you some scratch notes, some cheat
(05:12):
sheet notes that most folks never communicate to you about
how wealth really gets created and sustained It may shock
you because it's going to be different from what you've
been told and what you see in social media and
on TV. So let's get into this. And I dare
(05:32):
you to prove me wrong because I live this life.
Wealth whispers. Why quiet may be the one and only
most valuable asset you'll ever own. and it costs you nothing.
(05:52):
The central equation here, stability to quiet, to thinking, to
ideas leads to creation, leads to ownership, leads to wealth,
leads to wellness, leads to longevity. Yes, those things are connected.
(06:12):
Wealth whispers. I'm sitting here, like I said, in Wailea
in Maui, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, 5,000
miles from the closest landmass. It's the most remote landmass
in the world. Everybody's asleep here. I'm doing this podcast
(06:34):
because I can think right now, I can ponder, I
can reflect. It's peaceful in this place, this space. We
come here, the family comes here twice a year to retreat,
not to vacation, to retreat. to unpack ourselves, to sit
in silence, to reflect, to restore, to rest, to renew,
(06:56):
to commune with nature and God, to listen and observe
the power of the waves. The biggest mass of anything
in the world is water. 70% of the world of
the earth is water. 95% of that unexplored, by the way.
Power and majesty of that, the power and majesty of
(07:19):
what God created there is breathless. And we come here
to honor that and to reconnect with that. By the way,
you can do that in a local park. You can
do this in your local beach. You don't have to
come to Maui for what I'm talking about, but this
is the price I was willing to pay for this.
I've been coming here for 30 years. And when I
(07:41):
started coming here, originally inspired by my brother, Lance Triggs,
who still works with me at Operation Hope today. He's
president of all programs. He's the first person who turned
me on to Maui. When I first started coming here,
I couldn't afford this. I could afford a coach plane
ticket and to rent a room in a fancy house. Actually,
it was a rent a room in a not fancy
house up in Haiku. Anybody knows Maui? That is not
(08:03):
a wealthy area. It's like a hippie zone north of Paea, Haiku. Beautiful. And,
you know, middle-class family was renting a little room. There
was no running water. There was no kitchen. It was
a place to sleep. And then I could go outside
because it's very natural here and, you know, wash myself
(08:25):
off and all that kind of stuff. And then it
was a restroom facility outside. And then it was off
to explore Maui. But I had my piece of paradise,
even when I couldn't afford the villa that we stay
in now. And by the way, it was It started
as renting a room, then renting a little, you know, ohana,
a little house behind someone's house, a little, not even
(08:49):
a house, you know, a little apartment. And then one
thing led to another and led to another, and then
better areas, we moved to better areas, and we end
up where we are now. But all this was the
journey with the one constant being the power of quiet
and silence and Create wealth. It's quiet here. Not empty.
(09:16):
Not lonely. Quiet. You hear the wind. You hear the ocean.
You hear the birds. And most importantly, you hear yourself.
You hear God whispering to you. And that reminds me
of a post that went viral that I want you
(09:38):
to pull up. where it was a big debate around
this simple observation, go into many wealthy neighborhoods and they're
remarkably quiet. Then go into many poor, struggling neighborhoods like
the one I grew up in, ones I grew up in, plural,
South Central Los Angeles before the, oh, sorry, after that, Compton, California,
(10:03):
and they're often noisy. By the way, it's not black
and brown neighborhoods exclusively, poor white neighborhoods, pretty much the
same thing. They're just rural, so you don't get the
concentration of noise like you do in an urban area.
But the noise of frustration, the noise of depression, the
noise of anger, the noise, not just physical noise, it's
(10:26):
emotional noise, it's psychological noise, it's spiritual noise, it's tension noise,
it's unsettled noise, the noise of a being that can't focus.
So let's talk about what that means. It means cars,
it means sirens, it means television blaring, And music, it
(10:48):
means arguments. It means, yes, music and people coming and
going in your house, in your neighborhood, in your place,
in your space. Everybody reacting to something, never responding to something.
It's ready, fire, aim, living a life. Now get this one.
If you haven't got anything else, this one will. If
(11:09):
you live in a poor rural neighborhood, maybe you don't
feel the sirens, all that stuff, but get this. It's
a surviving mindset. It's a surviving mindset in a thriving
and winning world. In order to win, you have to think.
Because winning is about a mindset. But most people are
in a surviving mindset. And surviving mindsets are just what
(11:33):
they sound. It's noisy. It's painful. It's complicated. It's angry.
It's It's argumentative. It's drama, lots of drama, lots of trauma.
It's a lot of INGs, right? Struggling, drinking, texting, sexting, peeing, oversleeping, hollering, screaming,
(12:05):
you know, hanging. A lot of INGs are useless, but
not healing, not dealing. So we're going to get to
that because the real goal of all of this is
to become reasonably comfortable in your own skin so that
there's nothing stopping you from creating the world that you
(12:26):
want at scale. So here I'll say again, wealth whispers.
Not rich. Rich is a contract. Wealth is potentially generational.
Wealth is generational. because riches can come and you lose
your money. You can still regain it because you've got
(12:47):
the right wealth mindset. We're not human beings having a
spiritual experience. We're spiritual beings having a human experience. Energy matters.
So I wasn't criticizing poor people when I did that
viral video clip. I was describing an environment. To me,
(13:07):
it was just common sense, like saying, This is a
table in front of me. It wasn't complicated because poverty
doesn't just take money out of your pocket. Poverty takes
peace out of your environment. Can I get an amen?
It can take time out of your day. It can
take bandwidth out of your brain. If you hang around
(13:28):
nine broke people, as I keep saying, you'll probably be
the 10th. Our Hope Financial Wellness Index at Operation Hope,
which we have gathered with data from Experian and a
range of government sources, it shows that for every 50
point increase in credit scores, you live five more years
on average. So in a 500 credit score neighborhood, you
(13:49):
live to about 61 years of age. So you don't
even get to social security, but in a 700 credit
score neighborhood, get this, with 15 minutes apart in an
urban area on average, you live to 81 years of
age on average. 20 year delta, 20 year difference, 15
minutes apart, mindset, mindset. This even affects your wellness, not
(14:16):
just your access to capital, not just your access to opportunity,
your wellness. And so I'm sitting here in Maui. I
started thinking, what if quiet isn't merely something you get
after you become successful? What if quiet is something, what
if it's one of the ingredients of something that helps
(14:38):
you become successful? successful in the first place. Because quiet
gives you something incredibly valuable, space to think. And thinking
is free. Everything I've said so far is available to you.
You don't have to come to Maui for it. You
don't have to go to Beverly Hills or Buckhead or
whatever the wealthy neighborhood, Lincoln Park in Chicago. You don't
(14:59):
need to go to the wealthy neighborhood. You don't need
to go to Manhattan for this. This is free to use.
It is a gift from God, but you got to
reclaim it in your brain first. So this is thinking,
this is the thinking that produces ideas, people, that allows
ideas to produce creation. Creation can become intellectual property. Come
(15:22):
on now. Intellectual property can become ownership. Ownership creates assets.
Asset can create wealth. And financial stability can contribute to
something even more important, wellness. Quincy Jones once told me,
(15:44):
God rest his soul, he was my big brother. He said,
if you think you're in the music business and you
don't own music rights, publishing rights, or licensing rights, some
kind of rights, intellectual property rights, you actually are not
in the music business. You're just a temporary performer. You
rock the mic, but you don't own it. Michael Jackson
was at one point the most famous, most highly regarded
(16:08):
entertainer in the world. And his music was incredibly valuable.
What was more invaluable? That intellectual property that he acquired,
including the Beatles catalog, because when he wasn't performing and
being loud on stage, he was sitting in quiet, thinking
about how to own the stage. Listening, because God gives
(16:29):
you two ears and one mouth, so you listen twice
as much as you talk. Wellness. This is typically... the
topic of my wife, Chaitra Bryant, who I'm, well, she's
health and she's helped me to sustain my life. She's
helped me to extend my life, lower my blood pressure,
increase my wellness and lower my inflammation. Do you know
(16:50):
that 75% of all disease lives on inflammation? So I'll
bring her on. I'll bring her back on because she's
done an episode with me before to talk about the
power of wellness. But I'm going to just speak to
that in part during this podcast. So today I want
to talk about something that sounds like it has nothing
to do with money, but it has everything to do
(17:12):
with wealth, and that's the economic power of quiet. So
let me just say this. Poverty is louder than money.
When we talk about poverty in America, we usually talk
about income. But poverty isn't simply a shortage of money.
Poverty can be a shortage of margin. You don't have
enough room. You don't have enough time. You don't have
(17:36):
enough savings. You don't have enough credit. I've been on
both spectrums. You don't have enough options. So you start
living from a sense of urgency and it's now ready, fire, aim,
a surviving mindset, as I said earlier. And so therefore
(17:58):
everything becomes urgent. I recently told my old team, my
own team, who's been doing this urgency thing for so long,
building companies with me, that they let the urgent crowd
out the important. I told them to drop the urgent.
I demand that you now focus on the important. At
least one day of five days a week. Because that's
where strategic thinking comes from. See, they're thinking. That's where
(18:21):
the magic comes from. Otherwise, you're winning the battle and
losing the war. You're rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.
The ship is sinking and we're picking drapes. You need
time to think. You need time to strategize. You need
time to reimagine. You cannot just keep running all the time.
(18:42):
If you go far enough for the North Pole, you'll
end up South. The red is due. The car has
broken down. The hours get cut. Your child needs something.
Somebody gets sick. The refrigerator breaks. The landlord calls. The
(19:02):
credit card company then calls. You're juggling five problems all
at once. Is this sounding familiar? That's noise. I walk
through life. This is my personal ethos, people. I'm giving
you my personal strategies for winning. It's not out of
some book somewhere. It's what I do. I walk through
(19:24):
life consciously oblivious of most things around me because it
just doesn't matter. The noise just doesn't matter. I just
block it all out. It just doesn't matter. And I
take no for vitamins. Yeah, you told me no. I'm
not focusing on the nine no's. I'm focusing on the
one yes. That's what I'm listening to. The rest of
it is noise. And then there is the actual physical environment.
(19:48):
Maybe three people share a bed. Maybe you're living next
to a highway. Maybe you hear the neighbor's television through
the walls. Maybe there are sirens outside. Maybe right now,
this very moment. Maybe there's instability in the neighborhood. If
you grew up in a 500 or live in a 500,
(20:10):
or sub-September credit score neighborhood, I guarantee you there's instability
in the neighborhood. Maybe you're constantly worried about safety. That's
noise too. It's occupying space in your brain. But here's
the part we don't talk enough about. Financial stress creates
(20:30):
noise inside your head. How am I going to pay
these bills? How am I going to pay this or that?
What happens tomorrow? What if I lose my job? What
happens if the car breaks? How do I make it
until Friday? That's mental noise. There's a book called The
Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle. Don't listen to it.
It'll drive you crazy. He drones on, but he's genius.
(20:53):
And read the book. It's like, it's crazy. It's long,
but read it. But essentially the cheat sheet notes I'll
give you is yesterday is a memory and doesn't exist.
Tomorrow's the future and hasn't happened yet. But we spend
most of our time, most of us, with one foot anxiety,
our paralysis of analysis, our lack of faith. Everybody wants
(21:16):
to get to heaven. Nobody wants to die to get there.
We want to believe in God. We want him to
prove it first, whatever the it is. That doesn't work
that way. Faith is what you do. We don't have
all the facts. So we have one foot in yesterday,
one foot in tomorrow. Neither one of them are true.
That's why you're not present. That's why they call the
present a gift. So I learned to be present. And
(21:38):
the gift I got was more time. You create time
when you're present and you create peace. And when your
brain spends all day solving or just reacting to emergencies,
there's less bandwidth left for imagining possibilities. That's why when
my friends were going out partying when I was growing up,
(22:00):
I didn't realize what I was doing at the moment. Hey, John,
come out and hang with me. Hey, come on. We're
going to this club. We're going to this party. It
was a lot of noise, a lot of people. I'm
thinking to myself, none of that stuff is making me
any money. None of that stuff is building me wealth.
I'm not getting paid to be at the club, right?
And all you folks, I'll say to myself, all you
guys are broke, or at least not where I'm trying
(22:22):
to go. I'm going to stay here and study. I'm
going to stay here and read a book. I didn't
realize what I was doing, but I was building my
mental and psychological and spiritual war chest to win. I
was doing what the book The Outlier says, which is
10,000 or 20,000 hours above studying anything. I think it's
10,000 hours more than what the average person is spending
(22:45):
in the course of their life and career just working.
You put 10,000 hours in at another 20 hours a week.
maximum thinking about studying anything, and you become the NBA
of that thing, the NBA player, the NFL player. You
become a pro athlete at that thing, and no one
can compete with you. So survival asks, how do I
(23:06):
get through today? Creation asks, what can I build tomorrow?
Both are legitimate questions, but they're very different questions, and
poverty can trap people in the first one. That's why
I say, and this was the founding thesis for Operation Hope,
there's a difference between being broke and being poor. Being
(23:29):
broke is economic, but being poor is a disabling frame
of mind and a depressed condition of your spirit, and
you must vow never, ever, ever to be poor again.
What wealth really buys? Let's go back to those wealthy
neighborhoods for a minute. Why are they so quiet? Part
of the answer is obvious. Bigger lots, better insulation in
(23:54):
the houses. That's why I don't hear what's going on
with neighbors. Even if the neighbors were having a party,
I would really hear it because they can have their
space and I can have mine. And these walls are
like hotel construction quality. It's so thick and made of
concrete in many places. Better insulation, less density. You know,
people not on top of each other. More trees, hello,
(24:18):
which buffers noise. and also creates oxygen. So you're breathing easier,
green spaces, private offices, gated communities, second homes, retreats, like
I'm on now, wealth buys control. Now I'm talking about
(24:39):
first the wealth of spirit, the wealth of mindset, control
of your own self, then financial wealth, okay, economic wealth
buys physical control. control over your environment, control over your schedule.
All money is, is freedom. I do what I want,
when I want, however I want, with whomever I want.
(25:01):
And I don't argue about it. To argue with a fool,
truths there are too. I'm not arguing with you. I'm
just going to say, bye, Felicia. I'm going over here
and you're going wherever you want to go. You don't
have to go, but you got to get the heck
out of here because I own the door job and
I set the rules. So you control your schedule, control
your transportation, Control over where you live. Control over who
(25:24):
gets access to you. Can I get an amen? Control
over your time. I just refuse to hang around toxic people.
Like you ain't gotta go, but you gotta get out
of here. Like I refuse to hang around deadbeats and
negative people and toxic. Oh God, my God, I'm allergic
to toxic people. My God. Control over your environment. Control
(25:48):
over your attention. Think about what wealthy people spend money on.
Think about this. Privacy. First class lounges. It's not meant
to floss. Wealthy people just want simplicity and the control
of their environment. It just looks like they're flossing because
it happens to be doing that in, let's say, a
private plane or a first class cabin. They're really just
(26:10):
buying control of their environment. A first class cabin for
me is just a mobile office. Private clubs. Spas. Resorts.
Renewing yourself. Retreats, homes on acreage. We have 40 acres,
buy some more at our place. I just love, I've
always wanted to have land, right? And I can walk
(26:32):
on it and breathe. And by the way, all that land,
that green space is restoring me and my family with oxygen.
It's calming also. Same rules apply there as here in Maui.
Noise canceling headphones. Why? Because peace has economic value. That's why.
(26:56):
Think about it. Successful people spend enormous amounts of money
buying do not disturb. Think about it. And maybe they're
on to something. Maybe we're on to something. Successful people
spend enormous amounts of money and time just trying to
create their own environment. because your attention is one of
(27:20):
the most valuable assets you possess. Google knows it. Meta
knows it, Facebook. TikTok knows it. YouTube knows it. Advertisers
know it. These companies spend billions of dollars figuring out
how to get a few more minutes of your attention.
(27:41):
We're basically in an attention economy. Now think about that,
your attention. has now been monetized. So here's the question.
If everybody else understands the economic value of your attention,
why don't you? What did Malcolm X say? We've been bamboozled.
We've been tricked. We've been fooled. We've been hoodwinked. We've
been run amok. I don't know about you, but I'm
(28:03):
sick and tired of being sick and tired. So I'm
trying to set you free with financial liberty. That's my
little rap. Civil rights. Quiet is a factory for ideas.
Let's connect directly to wealth creation here with this topic.
Where does wealth come from? So before the company, before
(28:26):
the building, before the factory, by the way, when people,
this is really important point here, when companies buy a company,
are they buying the furniture and the fixtures and the
wall hangings and even the structure? Is that what they're
(28:47):
really buying? Are they buying a management team? See what
I'm saying? You're buying the human capital, the culture, the philosophy,
the net result of folks creating something incredibly unique in
the quiet of creation. So before the factory, before the stock,
(29:09):
before the product, there was usually something else. An idea.
An idea. Think about virtually every great innovation, okay? The automobile,
the airplane, the personal computer, the smartphone, Google, ChatGPT and
artificial intelligence. My friend Sam Altman is an innovator there.
(29:35):
New medicines, new manufacturing techniques, Somebody first imagined something that
didn't exist. And this is why I find patents so fascinating.
A patent is essentially a protected, potentially monetizable idea. the
(29:59):
product of creation, of mental creation. Thinking. Somebody begins inside
their own brain with something called imagination. It weighs nothing.
You can't touch it. Nobody else even knows it exists.
(30:20):
Then somebody develops it, tests it, protects it, commercializes it.
Attorneys wrap legal protections around it and suddenly a thought
becomes an asset. Am I going too fast for you?
You can always rewind this and replay it. This is
one of the most important episodes I've ever done. That
(30:44):
asset can be licensed, people. It can attract investment. It
can become a company. This is the power. And if
you can take the power of your thinking and connect
it with artificial intelligence, by the way, oh my God,
what's possible. That's why me and my co-creator partners in
(31:07):
artificial intelligence, my AI agent, we sit in quiet all
the time. My family's gone a bit, just throwing ideas
back and forth, creating things quietly that will make a
very loud thump when they hit the market. a young
lady told me, former executive of Coca-Cola, very, very powerful
(31:32):
black woman in Atlanta, retired from a prominent position in
finance there, Vicki Palmer, her and her husband, John Palmer,
we were at dinner with Ambassador Andrew Young one night.
She says, you know, you're very quiet. I'm like, huh?
She says, you do things very quietly. And I'm like,
(31:55):
I don't think most people would agree with you. I
think most people would say I'm pretty loud. I mean,
I can't go down the street without somebody stopping me
and talking about the video that they saw or this
or that, which is a blessing, by the way, and
how it changed their life. She says, no, that's not
what I'm talking about. You do things, but you've been
(32:17):
thinking about those things for a very long time quietly,
and then people hear you did them. You don't talk
about them. You just go, do the work quietly. You
make the moves, you create the partnerships quietly. And then boom,
one day, it's a reality that other people hear about.
And then you amplify the lessons of that through your podcast,
(32:39):
your straight talk, all videos, your books, et cetera. And
I was like, oh, you have really gotten me figured out.
I'm a really private person living a very public life.
So here we go, this idea becomes a company and
it creates jobs, it can create an industry, it can
(33:02):
create enormous wealth, right? So that's the story of many
of the companies I created from an idea to, in
one case, a company I sold for nine figures and,
you know, there's a company that took me five years,
there's another company I created after that, that doubled the
asset size of the company, it took five years to do,
(33:22):
we did that in five months. What took me five
months with this Nugent partnership with CIM Group, $ 30 billion
company out of LA, the CIM BGG Impact Ventures and
the fund that we're creating, a billion dollar fund raised
$ 350 million, $ 315 million so far, but we raised $ 250
million in five months. But it took me five years
(33:45):
to create the last company to get it to $ 150
million of assets, sell that company for $ 120 million, most
of my interest in that company. transition job at that
company now. But that's the power of compounding lessons learned
and honing my intellectual property development process in my head,
(34:09):
going from good to great. So human imagination becomes economic output.
That's extraordinary when you think about it. And where does
imagination often do its best work when you're not constantly
being interrupted. Quincy Jones again told me that he puts
(34:30):
together the greatest musicians and the greatest music in the
studio and everybody's talking and then at some point everybody
goes quiet and he sits at the piano and he
cracks the door, leans his head to one, tilts his
head to one side and leaves the door cracked. I said, why?
He said, I'm listening. For what? I'm waiting for God
(34:53):
to walk in. The magic of the music ultimately is
created in the quiet of God's voice whispering in his ear,
even if we did all of that other stuff with
all those brilliant people in the room. So when you're walking, reading, writing, thinking, reflecting, sitting.
(35:23):
Quiet is not inactivity. Quiet can be a factory for
your ideas when you're doing these things, normal things. You
don't need to sit like a Buddhist monk. You can
go on about your life like listening to this podcast.
(35:45):
You can't listen to this podcast and have 15 other
things going on whispering in your ear at the same time.
That's why you have your headphones on or why you're
listening in your car or while you're cooking or while
you're gardening or while you're jogging or working out. You
need a focused environment so you can listen and learn.
(36:07):
Let's talk about nations for a minute. Let's look at
the many countries generating enormous amounts of intellectual property and
patent activity. The United States of America. legitimate patents, China,
not really patents, they're really knocking off our stuff, but
I'll give them props for a lot of creativity. Japan,
(36:30):
South Korea, Germany. Then look at the greatest, the great
industrial and economic powers of the world. You see the
same country. So that's the countries, you know, doing all
this patent work, right? Now let's see, if we can
be precise. I'm not saying patents automatically create GDP, gross
(36:53):
domestic product. They don't. And correlation is not causation. Strong
economies also require education, right? Infrastructure, capital, research universities, rule
of law, markets, entrepreneurship, talent, manufacturing, self-determination, the ability to
(37:16):
benefit from your Creations capitalism responsible capitalism good capitalism is
what I'm talking about my book capitalism for all number
one bestseller By the way, thank you very much five
months going But here's what the relationship tells me great
economies create They don't just consume which is why America
is gonna have to get a reboot on our business
(37:38):
plan in quick They don't sit in conflict all the time. Hello.
Everybody wants to be an American but Americans and They invent,
they experiment, they improve, they commercialize, yes, and most importantly,
they own. This is why I believe one of the
(38:00):
greatest natural resources America possesses isn't underneath the ground, it's
between our ears, it's us. It is unlike oil, it
never runs out. Gold is finite, land is finite, human
(38:20):
imagination is renewable, and because of God, it is unlimited.
Every child born in America represents potential intellectual property, human capital, literally,
potential innovation, potential entrepreneurship, potential GDP, gross domestic product, which
(38:42):
means when we leave millions of children trapped in environments
where they cannot develop their potential. We're not simply failing
those children. America is leaving GDP on the table and
failing itself. That's why I wrote the book, Capitalism for All.
It's not just a story. I know this podcast is
listened to all around the world. Thank you for making
it top 70 for entrepreneurship in every continent, top 250
(39:08):
for business on every continent. This is not just an
American story. but I live here, I'm an American product,
and we're still the light on the hill for the world,
but this is gonna be replicated everywhere in the world.
I believe there's nothing wrong with work. Labor makes a living,
ownership builds wealth. There's nothing wrong with work. Everybody needs
(39:33):
to work. Only in the dictionary does the word success
come before the word work because it's alphabetical. So I
believe in work. An entrepreneur works 18 hours a day
to keep from getting a job. I believe in work. Hmm.
Work creates dignity. Work creates discipline. Work puts food on
(39:55):
the table. But eventually you've got to understand the difference
between labor and capital. Labor gets paid when labor works.
Capital can continue working when you stop and gets paid
when you sleep. I've said this another way. Money makes
(40:20):
more money on money than labor can ever make money
on sweat. I'll say it again. Money makes more money
on money than labor can ever make money on sweat.
That doesn't mean stop working. No, no, no, no. Never that.
And don't start playing games either because there are no
shortcuts to success. If somebody gives you a free lunch,
(40:42):
it's probably stale. It means don't stop the work and
don't stop at work. get the job, develop the skills,
increase your income, improve your credit, okay? I want you
to create some savings, acquire assets, start investing, build something,
create an intellectual property or two or three, own equity,
(41:06):
build up the ladder, and move up the ladder from
cashing a check to writing it, just like me. Worker, creator, owner, investor, capitalist.
I'll say it again. Worker, creator, owner, investor, capitalist. From
(41:31):
cashing the check, starting on endorsing it, to writing it,
front of the check versus the back. That's the journey.
Too many underserved communities have been taught only the first instruction.
Get the job, cash the check. Absolutely do that. But
then what? The job should become a platform, not a ceiling.
(41:57):
Use labor to acquire capital. Use capital to acquire assets.
Then let assets begin working alongside you. That's why I
use intellectual AI as my co-creator alongside me. Because when
you own the business, the business can potentially understand earn
(42:19):
while you're sleeping. You make money during the day, Tony
Ressler advice, you build wealth in your sleep. Real estate
doesn't punch a clock. Equity doesn't need a lunch break.
Intellectual property doesn't need a vacation. That's ownership. Your phone
(42:40):
can turn a mansion into a poor neighborhood. Now here's
the modern problem. You can escape physical noise and still
have a noisy mind. You can live in a $ 10
million house and carry a poor neighborhood around in your pocket.
Or worse, in your brain. Yes, I said it. It's
(43:05):
your phone. It can be a smartphone or it can
make you really dumb. It can be a dumb phone.
A lot of people use the smartphone in really dumb ways. Ding, ding, ding, email, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook,
text message, breaking news, notifications. Somebody's angry. Somebody got divorced.
(43:26):
Somebody got a Lamborghini. Somebody said something stupid. Said something
about some politician. Some politician said something about somebody else.
Some celebrity did something. And now you've got invited to
other people's business. You've invited the entire planet into your
nervous system. And no one's paying you a dollar for it.
(43:50):
In fact, in an attention economy, they just monetized you
and you get nothing for it. I am ruthless about
my time. I don't let anybody consciously waste my time.
You can waste my money. You can't waste my time.
Only I can do that. Now that's gangster. Your phone
can turn a mansion into a noisy neighborhood. It's the
(44:14):
mansion of your mind. That's why This isn't ultimately about geography.
It's about attention and intention. If you spend all day
consuming everybody else's ideas, when do you create your own?
When do you have time for your own? If you
(44:36):
spend all day watching somebody else's life, when do you
build yours? I've often said, go to a poor neighborhood.
Everybody's talking about somebody else. Go to a wealthy neighborhood.
People are talking about their ideas. It doesn't matter the race, mindset.
If you spend every waking moment reacting, when do you reflect?
(44:58):
If you're reacting, you can't respond because those are two
different emotions. If you're making an emotional decision, it's probably
a bad one. Noise doesn't merely consume time. Noise consumes imagination.
And there is a war being fought for your attention.
Protect it. the 500 credit score versus 700 credit score neighborhood.
(45:23):
But this isn't just about money. It's about, as I
said earlier, wellness. At Operation Hope, and we have a
wellness advisor at Operation Hope. It's my wife, Chaitra Bryant.
She donates her time. She's not paid. She's an unpaid
advisor at Operation Hope on health wellness. She's certified in it.
She's a registered dietician, has all these certifications and degrees,
(45:44):
and is brilliant at it. We spent years looking at
the financial health of communities. And now we think there's
correlation between wealth and health. And one of the most
powerful indicators we've focused on is a credit score, of course.
Not because the credit score is perfect, it's not, but
because it tells you a lot about the economic ecosystem
(46:05):
surrounding a household and a community. It's a trending indicator
of hope, well-being, belief, confidence, joy, faith, et cetera. Think
about two communities, right? Community A, 500 to sub 600
credit score neighborhood, what might you find? Higher financial stress,
higher interest rates, more subprime loans, more check cashers, more
(46:28):
payday loan lenders, more rent to own stores, more renters
versus owners of property, less access to affordable capital, greater instability,
more financial emergencies, more people using the emergency room as
their healthcare, more frequently More noise. Now drive to a
(46:49):
700 credit score neighborhood. It's a short distance, typically maybe
15 minutes. Go to my Hope Financial Wellness Index. Just
look up a zip code. You tell me your zip code,
I'll tell you how you live it, right? You'll be stunned.
It literally, changing your environment will change your life. So
now you've driven to a 700 credit score neighborhood and
(47:09):
what changes? More homeowners, more banking relationships, Lower borrowing costs.
More access to mainstream capital. More businesses. More stability. More options.
More financial margin. And often, more quiet. Just like this.
(47:34):
Where I'm at now. And here's where this becomes much
bigger than money. Okay, now we've seen extraordinary life expectancy
gaps between distressed communities and financially thriving ones. In some comparisons,
it's literally 15 to 20 year or more difference, 15
(47:55):
minutes apart. Now think about that, okay? So Quiet has
a health premium, 20 years. Now your credit score isn't,
magically determining how long you're going to live. That's not
what I'm saying. The credit score is a trending indicator
(48:15):
of the ecosystem. It reflects things happening all around you. Income, debt, housing, education, employment, safety, stress.
What's the number one cause for death in America? Heart attacks.
(48:36):
What's the number one cause for heart attacks? Stress. What's
the number one cause for stress? Money. Right? Number one
cause for divorce? Money. Number one cause for domestic abuse? Money.
Access to healthcare, right? Food choices, access to capital, opportunity. Again,
end stress. Don't underestimate stress. Let's talk about disease now
(49:03):
and dis-ease. A lot of disease is dis-ease. Your body's 70% water.
What happens when you get all worked up and angry?
You're heating up that water. You're burning yourself up. You're
frying your organs. Get another topic another day with shapes. Troy.
Come back into this. Think about chronic financial stress. You're
(49:24):
worried about rent, worried about food, worried about your children,
worried about the car, worried about your job, worried about crime,
worried about tomorrow. You go to sleep worried. You wake
up worried. You look old because you're worrying all the time. Look,
if you're going to pray, why worry? If you're going
(49:44):
to worry, why pray? I mean, look, just give it
to God and do the best and let God do
the rest. Just give it to him. Don't, I mean,
don't make yourself look old and tired and worn out
and you haven't given God a shot or faith a shot.
People say, why should I try God? Because he cannot
(50:05):
possibly mismanage and screw up your life worse than you have.
Give him a shot. Your body doesn't know whether the
threat is a tiger chasing you or a Visa bill
chasing you or MasterCard bill chasing you. It just knows
that your nervous system is shot. It knows that something's
a threat. And when the stress becomes chronic, that's not
(50:26):
simply an economic problem. That's a wellness problem. And this
is why health and wealth should never have been separated
in the first place. Financial stability creates options, right? Better housing,
better food, fruits and vegetables, you know, quality food. We've
been eating fabulous, fresh food right out of the ocean.
(50:52):
You feel different. I don't even want to eat fast
food anymore, right? I do it when I have to,
but when I have no choice late at night, you know,
driver's taking me someplace, I'll put it into a fast
food restaurant. I have a couple of favorites when I
do that, but they don't balance their quality. But I
try to eat real food these days. And that was
not always me. This is a new reality based on
(51:16):
more education and more knowledge, which I got from reading
when I had quiet and time. So we're talking about
preventive health, not just reactive, stressful health scares. Exercise, sleep, vacations, retreats,
green space, walking. On the beach, putting your fingers and
(51:40):
your toes in the soil. Time with your children. Time
with your mate. And something we rarely put on the list,
time with yourself. Peace, quiet, margin for error. I mean,
what's the whole point of this? To become reasonably comfortable
(52:02):
in your own skin is my goal. Nobody's perfect. But
to become reasonably comfortable in your own skin is a
powerful thing. Because if I don't like me, I'm not
gonna like you. If I don't feel good about me,
I'm not gonna feel good about you. If I don't
love me, I don't have a clue how to love you.
And if I don't respect me, I'm not gonna respect you.
Somebody's listening to this and says, John, that's easy for
you to say, you're sitting in paradise. Fair enough, but
(52:25):
you don't need Maui. I did it without Maui until
I got here, until I was able to afford to
get here in the first place. You need intentional quiet. Fine,
30 minutes. Start there. Start with 15. Maybe before your
family wakes up in the morning, crack a book. Maybe
(52:48):
the Bible. Maybe my book, Capitalism for All. Who knows? Whatever.
Find a book. Read it. Or just meditate or just
sit in silence. Maybe in your car if you can't
find times before the family wakes up. Maybe walking to work.
Maybe at the library. Maybe on a break. maybe in
(53:09):
a park, maybe at a church, turn off your phone.
Turn off the television. No social media, no news, no gossip.
Take out a notebook and ask yourself some questions. What
problems do I understand that other people don't? What frustrates
(53:33):
me that could be done better? There's a point to this.
Stay with me. What skill do I have that somebody
would pay for? What could I create once and sell repeatedly?
What could I own instead of consume? What could become
(53:53):
intellectual property and owned by me? What idea have I
been ignoring and my favorite? What is my future trying
to tell me that my present is too loud for
me to hear? Drop the mic. What are you passionate about?
What's your purpose? What are you here for? You're not
(54:14):
here just to pay bills. You're not here just to struggle.
The Bible suggests that you can't grow without legitimate suffering.
So don't walk away from your pain or run away
from it. Run right through it. But your pain has
a purpose. It's not meant to just be painful. It's
meant to teach you something. That's the whole point of
all this is to learn. So just sit there in
(54:39):
that moment and ask yourself that question again. What is
my future trying to tell me that my present is
too loud for me to hear? And don't rush the answer. Think.
Let it come to you. Sit in silence for a minute. Oh,
I love the silence, the power and majesty of silence.
(55:03):
Because that 30 minutes might ultimately be more economically valuable
than 30 hours of activity. and busyness. Let me close
this up. We've been talking for too long. I've been
talking for too long. You know, you never want to
meet an old guy in the club. So before you
all get me out of this, I'm going to leave.
You take life seriously, by the way. Never take yourself
(55:23):
too seriously. Learn to laugh at yourself all the time.
It's very therapeutic. So sitting here in Maui reminded me
of something else. I grew up around noise. Today I've
learned to treasure quiet, But this episode was never really
about noise. It's about your human potential. And I'm all
(55:45):
about untapping, untapped human, about unleashing, sorry, untapped human potential
at scale. That's what my website, Brian McVendrew says, is
my value proposition. That is the overriding theme of all
my businesses tied to good capitalism. Because somewhere right now,
there's a child sitting in a 500 credit score neighborhood
(56:06):
with a billion dollar idea in their head. They need
a partner. They need a mentor. They need a sponsor.
They need a friend. They need somebody to listen to them.
They need somebody to help them create quiet in their
brain so they can create magic for us all. There's
somebody driving a bus with an idea right now. There's
(56:28):
somebody working at Walmart with an idea, a powerful one
right now. Somebody waiting a table with an idea Right now,
somebody sitting in a community college classroom with a powerful
idea right now. Somebody listening to this podcast right now
(56:49):
with an idea. And that idea might become a business,
a book, a patent, an app, a new product, a solution,
a movement. a mind shift of AI, an asset, but
(57:11):
first you've got to hear it. That's why God gave
you two out, two ears and one mouth, so you
listen twice as much as you talk. And that requires
something really rare, right? But achievable and cost-free. Quiet. So
here's the whole journey. Stability creates margin. Margin creates quiet.
(57:35):
Quiet creates space to think. Thinking produces ideas. Ideas produce creation.
Creation can produce intellectual property. Intellectual property creates ownership. Ownership
creates assets. Assets can create wealth. Wealth creates greater choice
(57:57):
and stability. Stability can support wellness. Wellness can contribute to longevity.
And now you have more control over your whole life.
By the way, you can take that through a financial
lens or a wellness lens. In other words, this doesn't
have to have anything to do with money. And that
(58:18):
cycle still works. And then the cycle begins again. That's
the virtuous circle. And the opposite can become a vicious circle. Instability, noise, stress, reaction,
poor decisions, less ownership, financial insecurity, more stress, death prematurely.
(58:43):
Our job is to break that cycle, people. That's what
financial literacy is really about. That's why I call it
the civil rights issue of this generation. That's why I
want you to learn what capitalism for all is, the book,
the philosophy. It's not a book. Somebody told me it's
not a read book. It's a work book. It's a
think book. It's a mark it up book. It's a
read it again book. Let's start a movement. civil rights
(59:03):
to silver rights from the streets to the suites. The
Third Reconstruction. The Ownership generation. That's what inclusive economics is
really about that I created. Not making poor people comfortable
in poverty, creating more owners, more inventors, more entrepreneurs, more investors,
(59:29):
more healthy families, more peaceful communities, less depression, and more
people with enough economic security to dream again. What did
Dorothy Height tell me, the late Dr. Dorothy Height? John,
I like you because you're a dreamer with a shovel
in your hand. Because the greatest asset you own may
(59:49):
not be your house, although I want you to own
a house. It may not be a stock portfolio, although
I want you to have a stock portfolio. It may
not be your bank account, you better have one of those.
and an FDIC insured bank. It may be your imagination,
so protect it. Give it space, give it time, give
it quiet and give it grace. And when the idea comes,
(01:00:13):
build it, protect it, patent it if appropriate, finance it,
sell it, scale it, and most importantly, own it. Because
poverty can keep you busy. Labor can make you a living.
Creation can make you an owner. Ownership can create wealth.
(01:00:38):
Wealth can create choices, and those choices can help you
create a healthier, more peaceful life. It might just bring
you to Maui, and you might be the neighbor next
door in the villa they've yet to build. Wealth whispers
(01:00:59):
and asks you, are you dreaming yet? Make sure your
life gets quiet enough that you can hear that dream.
I'm John Hope Bryant. This is Money and Wealth on
the Black Effect Network on iHeartRadio. This is season three.
Thanks for listening to me and coming along on this
journey with me every week and pass this on to
(01:01:20):
a friend. This may be one of the most important
episodes I've ever done, at least from my perspective. And
I'm going to take you proudly with me all around
the world this year and next. And I'm not going
to again try to create this beautiful, perfect set that
I so admire that other people have. It may be
a little raggedy sometimes. It may be, you know, not
(01:01:43):
as a beautiful setting as this is. It may be
noisier than you like. I'm sorry if I can't perfect
every moment and place and space. But I'm going to
give you the benefit of the quiet of my focused
attention on you Every single time. I'm out. Get the
(01:02:04):
podcast to others as a referral. Get the book for yourself,
Capitalism for All, my seventh. Get one of the AI,
the AI agent that Hope AI created. Van Jones and
I have co-chair Hope AI. Wait for powerful stuff coming
from Sam Altman and I and the AI Ethics Council.
(01:02:27):
Stand by for that. Think about the Hope Global Forum
coming up. Go to Operation Hope. Sign up for the work.
Check out what my businesses are doing at Brian Group Ventures.
You can sign up, and I won't overwhelm you with noise.
I'm out. John O'Brien. This is Money and Wealth. Money
and Wealth with John O'Brien is a production of the
(01:02:47):
Black Effect Podcast Network. For more podcasts from the Black
Effect Podcast Network, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Host
John Hope Bryant
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