Magatte Wade: Africa, Capitalism, Communism, and the Future of Humanity

00:00:00.000 | You have to have the free markets

00:00:03.000 | in order to build prosperity.

00:00:04.840 | And prosperity means economic power.

00:00:09.360 | If you have economic power, no one messes with you.

00:00:14.000 | Or if they're gonna do it,

00:00:14.920 | they're gonna have to think twice.

00:00:15.840 | And when they do, they're gonna have to pay consequences.

00:00:18.640 | - The following is a conversation with Magat Wade,

00:00:23.560 | an entrepreneur who's passionate

00:00:25.880 | about creating positive change in Africa

00:00:28.120 | through economic empowerment.

00:00:31.000 | This is the Alex Friedman Podcast.

00:00:33.000 | To support it, please check out our sponsors

00:00:34.880 | in the description.

00:00:36.120 | And now, dear friends, here's Magat Wade.

00:00:39.660 | You were born in Senegal.

00:00:42.940 | You have lived and traveled across the world.

00:00:45.480 | So let me ask you, what is the soul of Senegal?

00:00:48.360 | Like its people, its culture, its history.

00:00:51.280 | Can you try to sneak up on telling us

00:00:55.880 | what is the spirit of its people?

00:00:58.160 | - Taranga, Taranga.

00:01:00.720 | Taranga, it's a Wolof word.

00:01:02.840 | Wolof is a main indigenous language of Senegal.

00:01:05.680 | And it means hospitality.

00:01:07.840 | That is what us, the people of Senegal, are known for.

00:01:11.560 | And it transpires in everything that we do,

00:01:14.160 | everything that we say.

00:01:16.960 | It's a place where, I guess with hospitality

00:01:19.880 | goes this concept of warmth.

00:01:21.700 | So we are a very warm people.

00:01:25.320 | So in a nutshell, that's us.

00:01:26.480 | That's us, the place where you come.

00:01:28.600 | And everybody will just embrace you,

00:01:31.440 | make you feel very comfortable,

00:01:32.920 | make you feel like you're the only person in the world

00:01:35.320 | and that we've been waiting for you our whole life.

00:01:37.720 | So that's my country.

00:01:39.360 | - So that's for people in Senegal, people in Africa,

00:01:43.160 | or also people across the world,

00:01:45.720 | weird strangers from all walks of life.

00:01:47.720 | So hospitality towards everyone.

00:01:49.360 | - For everyone, for everyone,

00:01:51.320 | especially towards the foreigner.

00:01:54.280 | Because it's very ingrained in us,

00:01:57.920 | this understanding that especially the foreigner,

00:02:00.880 | the foreigner is called foreigner

00:02:01.960 | because the foreigner is coming from somewhere else.

00:02:03.760 | So if someone has taken the time and the energy,

00:02:07.040 | whether in a forced manner or because it's a choice

00:02:11.160 | to travel so far to come to a place that's not theirs

00:02:14.840 | to start with, that's probably foreigners again,

00:02:17.560 | then it is your duty to welcome them,

00:02:20.600 | to be uber welcoming to them.

00:02:23.040 | - So there's not a fear of the foreigner,

00:02:24.960 | there's not a suspicion of the foreigner.

00:02:26.640 | - No, no, no.

00:02:28.360 | And I think this goes with the other way around.

00:02:31.280 | Maybe it has to do with just,

00:02:34.680 | when you feel good about yourself,

00:02:36.040 | when you're very grounded yourself,

00:02:37.720 | it's very easy to open yourself to others.

00:02:39.840 | And I'm wondering if that's not

00:02:41.880 | the other side of the equation in a way.

00:02:45.560 | So no, we don't have a fear towards a foreigner.

00:02:49.560 | That's just not.

00:02:50.400 | - When you have a pride of your culture,

00:02:53.840 | a pride of your own people,

00:02:55.360 | it's easier to sort of embrace.

00:02:56.840 | I mean, it's interesting how these kind of cultures emerge

00:02:59.120 | 'cause the Slavic countries are sometimes colder.

00:03:04.120 | They're slower to trust others.

00:03:07.880 | We're now here in Austin, Texas.

00:03:09.360 | One of the reasons I fell in love with this place

00:03:11.160 | when I showed up is there's that same hospitality

00:03:13.880 | as compared to other cities I've lived in.

00:03:17.240 | Sort of Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco.

00:03:22.040 | There's a hesitation to open up, to be fragile,

00:03:26.560 | to be caring before understanding

00:03:31.320 | what I can gain from you kind of calculation.

00:03:34.920 | It's really interesting.

00:03:35.760 | And I wonder how those kinds of dynamics emerge

00:03:39.200 | 'cause there's certainly parts of the world,

00:03:41.840 | like Austin is one of them,

00:03:43.280 | where you just feel the kindness,

00:03:45.040 | just radiate without knowing kindness from strangers.

00:03:48.280 | - You know, if I were to advance one thing,

00:03:52.720 | and I had the same experience

00:03:54.920 | after having lived in San Francisco first,

00:03:59.520 | then we went to New York, then we came to Austin.

00:04:02.600 | And when we came to Austin, I felt,

00:04:04.320 | it took me a while to put my finger on it,

00:04:06.360 | but what I found in Austin, people just hang.

00:04:10.480 | People, right?

00:04:11.920 | They're real.

00:04:13.000 | They're real.

00:04:13.840 | Unlike what you were saying,

00:04:14.840 | I feel like in these other places,

00:04:16.680 | it's a destination for people who want to come and perform.

00:04:21.320 | I think maybe the early San Francisco people,

00:04:24.440 | it was different for them.

00:04:25.720 | But later, as prosperity starts to come in

00:04:30.520 | and success comes in, then you attract a different breed.

00:04:34.040 | At first, we're the people who made it,

00:04:36.160 | who made this place be what it is.

00:04:38.920 | And then it attracts all the bling followers

00:04:41.960 | and the bling-attracted people.

00:04:43.800 | And when those people show up,

00:04:45.120 | it's time for all of us to get out.

00:04:47.240 | And that's one of my worries about Austin too.

00:04:49.200 | And I guess I count myself in it,

00:04:51.400 | but because we're also new arrivees.

00:04:54.840 | Always been furious now.

00:04:56.200 | But how are we gonna protect this place?

00:04:58.960 | - Yeah.

00:05:00.200 | Yeah, these are the best possible version

00:05:02.840 | of the Austin history.

00:05:04.320 | This is the early days of Silicon Valley in Austin.

00:05:07.120 | And so you get a chance to build on top of this culture

00:05:11.600 | that's already been here, of the weirdos, the artists,

00:05:15.040 | the sort of the characters,

00:05:18.760 | but also the general kindness and love

00:05:21.880 | that just permeates the whole place.

00:05:23.080 | Build on top of that entrepreneurial spirit.

00:05:27.480 | So like tech companies, new startups,

00:05:30.600 | all that kind of stuff.

00:05:31.760 | And then you get a chance to build totally new ideas,

00:05:35.440 | totally revolutionary ideas and make them a reality

00:05:38.160 | and dream big and build it here.

00:05:40.320 | I think Elon represents that with all the people

00:05:44.400 | that kind of try to do the cutting edge stuff

00:05:49.400 | they're doing at Tesla and SpaceX.

00:05:52.480 | But there's a bunch of other companies

00:05:53.600 | that are just like coming up.

00:05:54.960 | I get to talk to a bunch of tech people

00:05:56.480 | and they're just incredible.

00:05:58.120 | Versus San Francisco, there's a cynicism a bit.

00:06:03.120 | And also some of the interaction with strangers,

00:06:06.440 | there's always a bit of a calculation.

00:06:08.200 | Like how good is this going to be for my career?

00:06:11.200 | - Or how can, yeah.

00:06:12.080 | How can hanging out with this person can advance me?

00:06:14.560 | You go to a party, you're seizing, they're seizing up.

00:06:18.320 | It's like, I'm not gonna talk to someone

00:06:19.600 | so because that's not gonna advance me.

00:06:21.200 | Who's gonna advance me next?

00:06:22.520 | And so this is what I would not wanna see here in Austin.

00:06:27.200 | And I think maybe there's one way to try to,

00:06:30.120 | I really would like to see Austin not go the way

00:06:32.640 | San Francisco did and other towns before.

00:06:34.680 | - I like how you pronounce San Francisco

00:06:36.040 | with a French accent.

00:06:36.880 | - San Francisco?

00:06:37.720 | (laughing)

00:06:38.880 | - That's great.

00:06:39.720 | That's the one word you go with a French accent.

00:06:42.160 | - You have to. - Sounds beautiful.

00:06:43.440 | San Francisco.

00:06:44.280 | - San Francisco.

00:06:45.800 | But you know, so now that you find that cute,

00:06:50.360 | you're gonna have to forgive me when I mess up my English

00:06:53.160 | because English is not my first language.

00:06:55.240 | So I always try to make sure people know that.

00:06:58.200 | But you know, Lex, this is why I am very interested

00:07:01.040 | in what some folks here are working on.

00:07:03.800 | And I'm just gonna be very selfish here

00:07:05.480 | because I wanna help her with what she's doing.

00:07:07.960 | It's someone like, you know, Nicole Nocek

00:07:10.680 | and her project, you know, with the housing project

00:07:13.320 | that they have right now,

00:07:14.560 | making sure that Austin remains a town

00:07:16.800 | that's affordable for people of all walks of lives.

00:07:20.480 | If we can accomplish making sure that all walks of lives,

00:07:24.120 | doesn't matter how little or big you're making money-wise,

00:07:28.320 | that you can stay in this town

00:07:29.640 | so the diversity at that level can remain,

00:07:32.080 | then I think Austin stands a chance to really show the world

00:07:35.040 | how to do things differently.

00:07:36.360 | And what I love about her initiative

00:07:38.680 | is just how they're really trying, you know,

00:07:42.880 | to again, work on keeping affordability down

00:07:45.800 | for most people.

00:07:47.000 | I think it's important to,

00:07:48.920 | because it seems like it matters to you,

00:07:50.440 | I know that it matters to me.

00:07:51.920 | I absolutely would not wanna see Austin go away

00:07:55.400 | as San Francisco did.

00:07:56.240 | And I think the key to that is making sure

00:07:58.640 | that true diversity, not like the fluff, fluff, crap

00:08:00.960 | diversity we're hearing over there.

00:08:02.320 | And that's another thing, by the way,

00:08:03.680 | because San Francisco likes to pride itself in,

00:08:05.800 | oh, you know, we are so into diversity.

00:08:09.280 | But I'm like, if diversity for you means gender,

00:08:13.160 | difference of gender, skin color, you know,

00:08:16.640 | maybe the different accents we have,

00:08:18.200 | and you think check, check, check, check, check,

00:08:19.840 | I'm like, it's not enough.

00:08:21.800 | Can we also add diversity of thoughts?

00:08:24.240 | And that's the other problem I have with that place.

00:08:26.120 | You know, and I know some folks

00:08:28.080 | who are scared of saying much around people.

00:08:30.680 | That's also another thing.

00:08:32.040 | So not only they're sizing you up,

00:08:33.760 | but everybody's also, there is this invisible,

00:08:36.800 | this invisible, how should I say this?

00:08:40.600 | There's this invisible agreement

00:08:43.360 | that they all seem to have to stay on script.

00:08:46.080 | - Yeah, there's a feeling like you're following

00:08:48.600 | a certain kind of script that's very kind of shallow.

00:08:51.720 | And there is a bit of a categorization going on.

00:08:54.240 | Which category do you belong to?

00:08:55.800 | And let's put this into a simple math equation

00:08:58.480 | of what comes out, as opposed to just the free, open

00:09:01.560 | embrace of people, the weirdos, the characters,

00:09:05.960 | the interesting, the full, deep sense of diversity.

00:09:09.360 | - Exactly.

00:09:10.200 | - Not just ideas, but backgrounds,

00:09:12.120 | and rich and poor, like-

00:09:16.320 | - Artists, engineers, name it.

00:09:17.480 | - High school dropouts, PhDs, all of this.

00:09:20.600 | - Yes, yes.

00:09:22.040 | That's what makes for a rich society

00:09:24.600 | that's gonna get ahead.

00:09:25.800 | - I'm glad you mentioned Nicole's efforts.

00:09:27.560 | I know she really is passionate about.

00:09:29.460 | I don't know how complicated that work is,

00:09:32.800 | because there's probably a big force

00:09:37.400 | trying to increase how much it costs to live in Austin.

00:09:42.400 | - Yeah.

00:09:43.640 | - I don't know how you resist that.

00:09:45.240 | Whenever I go to New York City,

00:09:47.120 | just the fact that there's a giant park

00:09:49.520 | in the middle of it, I wonder,

00:09:51.800 | how did they pull this off?

00:09:53.320 | This is amazing.

00:09:54.760 | It's like to resist the force of the increasing price

00:09:59.320 | of the land, and still to protect this idea

00:10:02.320 | of having a park.

00:10:05.160 | And then in the same way, protecting the ability

00:10:08.640 | for people from all walks of life

00:10:10.080 | to live in the center of the city,

00:10:11.380 | to live around the city, to chase a dream

00:10:15.400 | when they don't get any money in their pocket.

00:10:17.760 | - Absolutely.

00:10:18.600 | - I don't know how you do that.

00:10:19.440 | It's partly political, probably,

00:10:21.760 | regulation, all that kind of stuff.

00:10:23.400 | But a lot of it has to do with regulations.

00:10:26.080 | And this is where her and I also very much

00:10:29.400 | see eye to eye in terms of the free markets

00:10:34.280 | and also prosperity building,

00:10:35.840 | because it's always the same problems

00:10:38.040 | most of the time, most places.

00:10:40.440 | Here what you have is some people

00:10:42.320 | in the name of, we gotta stand for,

00:10:46.280 | and I don't like to use this word,

00:10:47.720 | but maybe you help me find a better one.

00:10:49.960 | But at least that's a word that people can understand.

00:10:52.120 | We gotta stand for the lesser fortunate among us.

00:10:54.720 | Some people would call them,

00:10:56.040 | maybe oftentimes use the word, maybe the underdogs,

00:10:58.160 | whatever it is, I will just say,

00:10:59.600 | maybe the lesser fortunate among us, right?

00:11:01.760 | In the name of standing up for them,

00:11:04.560 | you're promoting policies that are actually gonna backfire

00:11:07.920 | and where they end up being the first ones

00:11:10.280 | to suffer from it.

00:11:11.360 | So let's take this whole housing issue

00:11:14.280 | that Nicole and her team are working on.

00:11:16.280 | We find that oftentimes the cost,

00:11:19.880 | at the end of the day, it's the good old supply

00:11:23.240 | and demand equation.

00:11:26.360 | If you're gonna make it so hard

00:11:29.480 | that the supply level of housing remains

00:11:33.440 | below a certain threshold,

00:11:35.160 | remains lower than the demand of people who need,

00:11:38.800 | especially affordable housing, housing altogether,

00:11:41.680 | what's gonna happen is, scarcity, prices go up,

00:11:45.840 | and who gets kicked out first?

00:11:47.600 | The lesser fortunate among us.

00:11:49.600 | And so, but I find that oftentimes people

00:11:52.680 | in the name of we care, don't engage their mind.

00:11:55.600 | And a friend of mine said this, and he said it so well,

00:11:58.040 | he said, "Having a heart for the poor, that's easy.

00:12:03.040 | "Having a mind for the poor, that's the challenge."

00:12:06.440 | And oftentimes, we all have a heart for the poor,

00:12:10.120 | but when it comes then to, then what do we do

00:12:13.400 | to have a real impact on making sure

00:12:17.200 | people get a chance at going up,

00:12:20.920 | then that's where everything starts falling apart.

00:12:23.400 | And then you have people who,

00:12:24.840 | then they start pushing for policies, housing policies,

00:12:28.560 | making it super hard for you to even renovate

00:12:30.840 | or add one more story to your home or anything like that.

00:12:33.800 | By doing that, you're messing up with the supply,

00:12:36.200 | with the supply of housing,

00:12:39.200 | and therefore the people who can't afford,

00:12:43.080 | people get priced out of a market.

00:12:45.200 | And so what people like Nicole are doing

00:12:47.160 | are going back to where all of this is taking place,

00:12:49.360 | and they're going back to the regulation side.

00:12:51.280 | And just like, I'm sure we'll talk about it here,

00:12:53.440 | but people wonder today,

00:12:55.080 | why is Africa the poorest region in the world?

00:12:58.000 | We go back to the same culprit, bad laws,

00:13:01.040 | and tons of senseless regulations.

00:13:04.640 | If you make it so hard that in Berkeley,

00:13:07.000 | for someone to build one more story to their home,

00:13:09.400 | which means maybe one more unit

00:13:11.880 | that could be rented out to someone,

00:13:13.440 | and if many more people do that,

00:13:14.640 | and you have a much bigger supply,

00:13:16.600 | which means the prices will go down,

00:13:18.320 | which means more people have access,

00:13:20.200 | and among them, especially the lesser fortunate among us,

00:13:22.960 | then we're starting to see a winning proposal, aren't we?

00:13:25.560 | But instead, if you go the other way around,

00:13:27.440 | then all of a sudden you're pricing them out of a market.

00:13:29.400 | Same thing was done with us.

00:13:30.400 | So oftentimes when I see problems of this nature,

00:13:33.560 | you can betcha that regulations and senseless laws

00:13:37.120 | are the heart of it, and that's what they're tackling.

00:13:39.560 | It's not popular, it's not fun,

00:13:41.720 | and people tend to not even understand

00:13:43.360 | where you're coming from,

00:13:44.520 | but this is a problem we have

00:13:45.560 | with people not understanding economic econ 101.

00:13:48.880 | - Well, so it's the regulation and the laws

00:13:50.480 | and the system that props them up

00:13:51.840 | and increases the span of those laws,

00:13:53.920 | and we'll talk about that,

00:13:55.240 | the fascinating way those kinds of things develop,

00:13:57.960 | when it works, when it doesn't.

00:13:59.760 | Let me sort of step back

00:14:01.560 | and ask you a question about Africa.

00:14:03.240 | In the West, in many places in the world,

00:14:07.000 | Africa is almost talked about like it's one country,

00:14:10.680 | like it's one place.

00:14:12.280 | So in what ways is Africa one community,

00:14:16.720 | and in what ways is it many, many, many communities,

00:14:20.120 | just from your perspective, in Senegal and beyond?

00:14:24.680 | - Right.

00:14:25.960 | So at the most basic of what makes us one

00:14:30.960 | goes back to even what makes you African.

00:14:33.320 | You are African, I'm African.

00:14:34.960 | We're one big family.

00:14:36.520 | Africa is very much at the end of the day,

00:14:40.240 | the foundation and the birth of the human race.

00:14:44.280 | So from that standpoint, at the most basic level,

00:14:47.600 | we're all Africans.

00:14:48.440 | - Where this whole thing started.

00:14:50.040 | - Exactly, exactly.

00:14:51.640 | Where this whole thing started,

00:14:53.160 | and how at some point,

00:14:55.240 | humanity was hanging by its fingernails.

00:14:57.600 | Only 2,000 of us were left on this earth,

00:14:59.880 | and eventually we started, we went for survival,

00:15:02.200 | and that's how we started to spread around,

00:15:04.280 | and some going up north, some going this way, that way,

00:15:07.360 | and as you're traveling to different places,

00:15:09.680 | then features start to change,

00:15:11.200 | to adapt to where you are, right?

00:15:13.600 | So hair gets lighter for some people,

00:15:16.120 | eyes get different shape for others,

00:15:17.880 | to adjust to our new natural habitat.

00:15:21.240 | You know, the genomics program,

00:15:22.680 | I think at the National Geographic did that so well

00:15:26.920 | for people who are interested in going back

00:15:28.120 | to that work with Spencer Wells and such.

00:15:30.280 | But yeah, so at the very basic, most basic level,

00:15:34.000 | that's what unites us all, first of all.

00:15:37.000 | And then I would say that the continent,

00:15:40.800 | especially here, I will group it into Black Africa,

00:15:43.880 | you know, Black Africa.

00:15:45.080 | Unfortunately, our common stories, you know,

00:15:50.560 | of having gone through this terrible, horrible period

00:15:54.200 | of around the same time,

00:15:55.560 | the whole continent being enslaved and colonized,

00:15:58.440 | so that in a way forms,

00:16:00.520 | not that we were ever the first people

00:16:03.120 | or only people ever enslaved in this world.

00:16:06.280 | As a matter of fact, I mean, the word slaves

00:16:08.920 | comes from esclav, slave, slavs, les slavs, right?

00:16:13.600 | From the Eastern Bloc.

00:16:15.000 | So the first slaves were actually people looking more

00:16:17.120 | like you than looking like me, right?

00:16:19.320 | So, but we don't necessarily remember all of that

00:16:22.520 | because in our human psyche,

00:16:25.280 | the closest to us in history of a big mass of people

00:16:30.280 | being enslaved is African people.

00:16:32.600 | We were the last group like that.

00:16:35.720 | - You know, the pain of World War I

00:16:38.360 | and World War II permeates Europe,

00:16:42.000 | but it certainly does for the former Soviet Union,

00:16:45.840 | the countries that made up the former Soviet Union.

00:16:48.160 | Does in the same way,

00:16:50.440 | the pain of slavery

00:16:55.440 | and empires using Africa, does that permeate the culture?

00:17:01.200 | Is there still echoes of that?

00:17:02.920 | - In a way, yes.

00:17:04.520 | Especially the fact that, you know,

00:17:06.400 | in many different places,

00:17:09.080 | whether it's Ghana or my country or Benin,

00:17:12.360 | where you have these places

00:17:15.040 | that we call the door of no return

00:17:16.840 | or the places of no return,

00:17:18.560 | which this was the last place

00:17:22.400 | where the slaves were standing or, you know,

00:17:25.760 | this is in Senegal, we call it the door of no return.

00:17:29.000 | There is this one door, you're there in the slave house.

00:17:31.640 | And once they go, they go.

00:17:33.440 | It's, that's it.

00:17:34.560 | That's going to be the last time they see back home.

00:17:37.160 | So, you know, those, of course, of course,

00:17:43.320 | it creates for a common lived experience,

00:17:48.320 | which becomes a common lived history.

00:17:52.640 | And of course, it's going to tie us up.

00:17:56.760 | - Is there a resentment, because you mentioned hospitality.

00:18:00.080 | - Yeah.

00:18:00.920 | - Is there a kind of resentment of the foreigner

00:18:03.560 | that there's a rich, vibrant land?

00:18:07.080 | There's many resources, there's powerful cultures.

00:18:10.480 | Are they just going to show up and use us?

00:18:13.240 | - Yeah.

00:18:14.080 | - That's a way to see geopolitics in this modern world.

00:18:16.520 | - Yeah, this is, okay.

00:18:17.720 | So where it plays very differently is,

00:18:19.800 | so if you came to Senegal today,

00:18:21.400 | there is not really a problem at that level.

00:18:24.000 | Where people's resentment start to come from

00:18:27.120 | is, of course, when bad behavior shows up,

00:18:31.240 | meaning like you have so many white people who can show up

00:18:33.920 | and just in their attitude,

00:18:35.400 | they have an entitlement attitude, right?

00:18:38.720 | And they think that in a way we're all still servants.

00:18:43.320 | Some people in your face, some people more,

00:18:46.160 | but that can cause some little resentment.

00:18:48.400 | But where really the resentment is.

00:18:50.240 | - And that can, the entitlement can take different forms.

00:18:53.600 | - Different forms.

00:18:54.440 | - Like even pity.

00:18:55.280 | - Yes.

00:18:56.120 | - Don't even get me going on that one.

00:18:57.480 | I was trying to be polite today.

00:18:59.120 | So just don't, Lex, do not.

00:19:02.080 | Sometimes I tell myself, my God,

00:19:03.440 | today you're going to be all composed.

00:19:04.760 | You're going to be, you know, Lex, you're all composed.

00:19:06.680 | So don't go there and make a fool of yourself.

00:19:08.240 | Just behave.

00:19:09.280 | - Yeah, hold it together.

00:19:10.120 | - But if you get me on some grounds,

00:19:12.360 | that's when it's all going to go to hell.

00:19:15.080 | - So yeah, let's move beyond that too.

00:19:17.840 | So resentment, there's a dance between hospitality

00:19:20.960 | and resentment.

00:19:21.800 | - And resentment.

00:19:22.640 | So when you come in, you're you, you live your life.

00:19:25.200 | You're just a normal human being.

00:19:26.800 | And you treat me decently like you would treat a friend,

00:19:29.160 | normal people.

00:19:30.040 | I have no problem with you.

00:19:31.160 | I'm not going to come back and be like,

00:19:32.200 | well, you and your ancestors have enslaved me.

00:19:35.640 | You, you're not going to see that stuff.

00:19:38.200 | Sometimes I'm in this country where I feel like that's,

00:19:40.440 | you know, it might look like that.

00:19:42.480 | But we in Africa don't do that.

00:19:45.480 | Now, if you come, you have this nasty attitude.

00:19:48.560 | You think you're still serving servants around.

00:19:50.160 | Well, you're going to have a problem.

00:19:51.360 | Someone like me, I might even grab you

00:19:53.040 | by the back of your neck and, you know,

00:19:54.720 | take you back to the airport.

00:19:56.000 | That's when you're lucky.

00:19:57.280 | - I'll be you very quickly.

00:19:59.920 | - Exactly.

00:20:00.760 | But where things come up is,

00:20:04.960 | especially nowadays with the African youth,

00:20:07.720 | when we have to be reminded of a World Bank,

00:20:10.520 | when we have to be reminded of even the world,

00:20:13.320 | places like the World Economic Forum,

00:20:14.640 | you know, like all of these places that seem to constitute.

00:20:17.640 | They would, the way they describe them,

00:20:22.120 | when I say they, it's primarily my Pan-African friends.

00:20:26.240 | So here maybe terms are worth describing.

00:20:29.280 | So the Pan-African movement goes way back when.

00:20:35.480 | We're talking about, you know, way back when,

00:20:39.680 | started in the '30s, going on all the way from there.

00:20:44.680 | So what you have there is people

00:20:47.800 | who have started coming together

00:20:50.680 | and dreaming up an emancipated Africa,

00:20:54.240 | away from the colonies, because at that point,

00:20:56.640 | there were still colonies, and dreaming up all of that.

00:20:59.440 | So we're talking about people like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana.

00:21:02.560 | We're talking about Julius Nyerere of Tanzania,

00:21:04.840 | talking about Blaise Tieng of Senegal,

00:21:06.920 | and other people like that, Bandia of Malawi.

00:21:09.520 | So anyway, so, and the African youth of today,

00:21:12.960 | we're still hanging on to some of these ideas

00:21:16.840 | and on some of these dreams of a reunited Africa.

00:21:19.880 | So when you were talking about what seems to unite you,

00:21:22.880 | there is that, you know, also,

00:21:25.200 | meaning like we all feel like we're part of the same family.

00:21:27.960 | Is it only in our heads?

00:21:29.320 | Is it in reality?

00:21:30.160 | For many different reasons,

00:21:31.640 | there is definitely what we call a Pan-African movement.

00:21:34.400 | And I very much myself, consider myself one of them.

00:21:38.360 | I don't agree all the time with where we wanna go

00:21:41.280 | and how we wanna go there, but not where we wanna go.

00:21:45.320 | Where we wanna go is we would love

00:21:46.680 | to see a united Africa, for sure.

00:21:48.640 | But how to get that accomplished,

00:21:50.400 | that's where oftentimes we have issues.

00:21:52.480 | So on something like that,

00:21:54.480 | so this Pan-African, especially the Pan-African youth,

00:21:57.800 | but it's beyond the Pan-African youth,

00:21:59.880 | it's the youth in general in Africa, World Bank, UN,

00:22:03.920 | all of these organizations that they tend to qualify

00:22:06.200 | as imperialist organizations.

00:22:09.640 | And it's not always a correct way to describe them,

00:22:12.360 | but I'm sure you get the sentiment.

00:22:14.480 | And from that place, there is tons of resentment,

00:22:19.480 | because for the longest time, these groups, organizations,

00:22:24.720 | and some that preceded them,

00:22:27.200 | have proceeded to actually decide

00:22:30.640 | what even our new frontiers would be.

00:22:32.640 | You see, when you go to a place like Senegal,

00:22:35.680 | Mali, all of that, different countries,

00:22:37.760 | but we were one people, one group, one kingdom.

00:22:43.560 | And then at some point, they decided,

00:22:45.240 | just when you look at Africa,

00:22:46.240 | have you looked at how straight some of these borders are?

00:22:49.040 | You're like, did a robot just draw these?

00:22:51.440 | Really? - No fancy robot.

00:22:53.040 | - No fancy robot, especially this one, it looks so cute.

00:22:55.480 | But you know what I mean?

00:22:56.640 | So they have continued deciding what it would be

00:23:01.640 | to be us, to live on our land, and how do we even progress?

00:23:09.920 | And it just keeps on going.

00:23:12.000 | They get to decide which type of even economic development

00:23:17.000 | path are we gonna choose or not?

00:23:20.520 | So from that standpoint, yes, there's a lot of resentment,

00:23:24.000 | including even from people like me.

00:23:25.760 | - Yeah, and it's interesting that the invader

00:23:27.600 | and the oppressor and the empires

00:23:29.600 | have actually created a force for unity.

00:23:33.320 | I've seen that in Ukraine, in the invasion of Ukraine,

00:23:37.000 | where it was a pretty divided, not a pretty,

00:23:39.320 | a very divided country with many factions.

00:23:41.760 | But the invasion really forced everyone to think

00:23:45.840 | about the identity of this nation together.

00:23:48.800 | Beyond factions, beyond all of that,

00:23:51.240 | it allowed it to look at its history and its future.

00:23:55.160 | They all say that all great nations

00:23:57.560 | have had to have a war of independence.

00:24:00.600 | And this is our war to find our own identity.

00:24:04.680 | And so in that sense, Africa as one place,

00:24:09.400 | as one continent, had to find multiple times its identity

00:24:14.400 | through the resistance of the oppressor.

00:24:17.240 | - Especially sub-Saharan Africa,

00:24:18.920 | especially sub-Saharan Africa, yes.

00:24:20.720 | - And there's an interesting aspect to this

00:24:22.120 | because the president of Senegal

00:24:23.440 | is also the head of the African Union.

00:24:26.920 | So we'll talk about the fascinating geopolitics

00:24:30.160 | of that whole situation.

00:24:33.560 | But let me ask in general,

00:24:37.560 | you talk about this question, this fascinating question,

00:24:41.200 | what does it take for a country to prosper?

00:24:43.440 | What does it take for a country to prosper?

00:24:47.960 | You see many countries in the world that really struggle

00:24:51.960 | and many that flourish.

00:24:54.480 | And it's not always obvious why,

00:24:56.880 | because some have natural resources, some don't.

00:25:00.360 | Some have wars, some don't.

00:25:04.960 | Some have sort of authoritarian regimes, some don't.

00:25:09.960 | And some have democracies and all that kind of stuff.

00:25:13.480 | So the dynamics aren't exactly obvious.

00:25:16.160 | Is there commonalities?

00:25:18.200 | Is there fundamental ideas

00:25:22.040 | that result in a prosperity of a nation?

00:25:24.800 | - Today, I can confidently say yes,

00:25:27.440 | despite all the differences that you talked about.

00:25:29.880 | And I think then this is where it becomes very important

00:25:33.320 | that we are very clear about the question you asked me.

00:25:37.320 | You said, what does it take to make a country prosperous?

00:25:41.720 | So I'm just gonna stick to prosperity,

00:25:44.240 | because prosperity doesn't necessarily mean,

00:25:46.960 | sometimes it has nothing to do with maybe how

00:25:50.080 | you conduct yourself, otherwise, socially speaking.

00:25:54.920 | So you can be prosperous,

00:25:58.680 | and still when it comes to your family laws,

00:26:02.080 | all the way you approach the other aspects of your life,

00:26:04.560 | maybe you're running a very communist lifestyle,

00:26:07.840 | or you're in a very liberal society.

00:26:13.960 | So for me, when we talk about prosperity,

00:26:16.560 | I just want to make sure that we are clear on that,

00:26:18.480 | because some people might be somewhere and be like,

00:26:21.320 | "Well, because I know what I'm gonna talk to you about next."

00:26:25.000 | And some people are gonna sit there and be like,

00:26:26.000 | "Well, China is not like that."

00:26:27.640 | Or, "Even Dubai is not like that."

00:26:32.600 | No, so what I'm talking about is this thing,

00:26:34.600 | and that's what I love about this.

00:26:35.640 | If we just stick to the word prosperity,

00:26:37.680 | to me, I see prosperity as this.

00:26:38.960 | It's like, economically speaking,

00:26:40.480 | what are we gonna be to be a prosperous nation?

00:26:43.080 | Meaning we are a middle to high income nation.

00:26:46.760 | I'm not talking about what are the rights of your women

00:26:50.200 | to vote, or can people live like this,

00:26:54.240 | or I'm not talking about any of that.

00:26:56.680 | - Economic, fundamentally economic prosperity.

00:26:59.440 | - Yes, because I think that distinction

00:27:01.360 | is very important because over the years,

00:27:03.080 | I've seen people push back on all types of things,

00:27:05.280 | and it occurred to me that that's what,

00:27:07.360 | the misunderstanding was there.

00:27:08.800 | So if we're gonna talk about prosperity,

00:27:11.200 | making sure that the country can make money,

00:27:13.240 | so that it can take care of its needs,

00:27:15.080 | and the needs of its citizens,

00:27:17.400 | then what I have come to find is that at the root of that

00:27:22.400 | is gonna be what we call economic freedom,

00:27:25.480 | and what I call the toolkit of the entrepreneur.

00:27:28.360 | In that, you can put the rule of law,

00:27:30.440 | you can put the concept of clear

00:27:32.200 | and transferable property rights.

00:27:35.040 | Economic freedom is at all the levels,

00:27:37.920 | that which will allow entrepreneurs and business people

00:27:42.920 | to create value, and create value entrepreneurially.

00:27:48.960 | We're not talking about rent-seeking or anything like that.

00:27:51.160 | It's like you found a pie to be this big,

00:27:53.520 | and you make it this big.

00:27:55.800 | So that's what we're talking about.

00:27:56.760 | - Create value.

00:27:57.640 | - Create value, yes.

00:28:00.640 | So when it comes to that, we have found that,

00:28:03.960 | whether you're looking at two countries

00:28:07.440 | that started the same, we're talking the same people,

00:28:10.320 | East Germany, West Germany, South Korea, North Korea,

00:28:15.080 | very similar people to start with, right?

00:28:19.040 | But yet, radical outcomes.

00:28:22.960 | I know that today, Germany is united,

00:28:26.120 | but we're talking about back in the days

00:28:27.520 | when you had East and West and block.

00:28:29.400 | Same people, very different outcomes.

00:28:32.800 | Like I said, South Korea, North Korea,

00:28:35.800 | and so on and so forth.

00:28:36.840 | And at the same time, very different nations.

00:28:39.880 | Dubai, compared to Singapore, or to England,

00:28:45.800 | very different yet, the same outcome.

00:28:50.440 | So it seems to me like whenever we're looking at prosperity,

00:28:53.560 | if a nation is prosperous,

00:28:55.480 | regardless of whatever other shenanigan

00:28:58.800 | they might be running, whatever other operating software

00:29:03.040 | they might be running for anything

00:29:04.800 | that's not related to business,

00:29:07.240 | if on the business side,

00:29:08.840 | they are proponents of a free markets

00:29:12.800 | or at least base level of free markets,

00:29:17.800 | we know that such countries will create prosperity.

00:29:21.440 | - So what are the aspects of the operating systems

00:29:23.360 | that lead to Singapore and to South Korea

00:29:26.840 | and all that kind of stuff?

00:29:27.760 | So can you speak to different elements

00:29:30.080 | that enable the toolkit for entrepreneurs?

00:29:32.000 | - Sure, sure.

00:29:33.560 | And maybe here, let me just maybe illustrate it

00:29:37.440 | with my own story and then I can take you back to-

00:29:40.240 | (laughing)

00:29:42.400 | - Magat, tell us your story.

00:29:43.920 | - No, no. - Who are you?

00:29:45.240 | - It's just because it started with me coming here.

00:29:46.920 | You showed me the robot and everything,

00:29:47.920 | and now it looks like we know you for 12 years.

00:29:50.480 | And then you're like, "Tell people."

00:29:52.440 | No, no, no.

00:29:53.720 | So this is where this question, even when you ask me,

00:29:57.040 | how do some countries become prosperous?

00:30:00.600 | That question, Lex, I had it when I was seven or so.

00:30:06.360 | That's when my family moved me from Senegal.

00:30:11.080 | For the first time of my life, I left my country,

00:30:13.160 | I left my continent, and I was headed to Europe

00:30:16.120 | to go join my people, my family, my parents,

00:30:19.400 | who were there as economic migrants.

00:30:21.760 | My parents had migrated for a better life,

00:30:24.560 | as so many people have to.

00:30:27.040 | So many people have to, coming from poorer places,

00:30:29.840 | coming from low-income countries.

00:30:31.320 | - So you saw the difference?

00:30:32.600 | - Yes.

00:30:33.440 | - Between the two places.

00:30:34.600 | - How else would you call it?

00:30:37.200 | Here you were in Senegal, minding your own business,

00:30:40.080 | causing tons of trouble everywhere,

00:30:41.720 | you know, just being a happy, free-range kid that I was.

00:30:45.400 | - Yeah, so you were always a troublemaker, not just now.

00:30:47.880 | - Always. - Okay, great.

00:30:49.280 | - Life wouldn't be fun without it.

00:30:50.120 | - Yeah, of course, I agree.

00:30:51.640 | - Right?

00:30:52.480 | So, because even you, you know,

00:30:53.320 | like, and you're all put together, like, front.

00:30:55.680 | I know there's a lot of troublemaking behind you.

00:30:57.880 | - I'm desperately trying to keep it together.

00:30:59.800 | - I know you are, but with me,

00:31:01.200 | I'm going to totally bring it out.

00:31:02.560 | So just, yeah.

00:31:03.880 | So...

00:31:04.720 | - So you saw the difference.

00:31:05.640 | - Right, I saw the difference.

00:31:06.560 | I'm walking in here, back home,

00:31:09.280 | and I tell people this story,

00:31:10.320 | because to me, it's a defining story.

00:31:13.360 | Back home, to take a shower, it takes time.

00:31:18.200 | Grandma has to, you know, make the charcoal catch

00:31:21.720 | on a little stove like you use at,

00:31:23.960 | you know, when you go camping.

00:31:25.600 | And then she puts a pot of water on it, it boils.

00:31:28.560 | She takes it, puts it in a bigger bucket,

00:31:30.600 | mixes it with some colder water.

00:31:32.320 | Then we put a little pot in it,

00:31:34.320 | and a stronger member of the family

00:31:36.000 | has to drag it to the shower.

00:31:37.640 | And then there, finally, I can proceed to take my shower.

00:31:40.680 | Here, I'm in Germany in the middle of the winter,

00:31:43.720 | and my mom's like, "My God, time for your shower."

00:31:45.640 | I'm like, "I'm not getting naked.

00:31:47.280 | "Where's the bottle?"

00:31:48.120 | I'm like, "It's cold."

00:31:48.960 | "Where's the bucket of hot water?"

00:31:50.840 | She's like, "Oh, you silly, come on, just jump in."

00:31:53.440 | And I jump in the shower, turn the button,

00:31:55.520 | the water's coming down, temperature,

00:31:56.800 | I'm playing with.

00:31:58.080 | It's like, are you kidding me?

00:32:00.040 | - So amazing.

00:32:00.880 | - I've been cheated out of life, my whole life.

00:32:03.280 | So that's what happened.

00:32:04.840 | And then I'm like, "Oh, and all of these roads,

00:32:08.280 | "they're paved roads."

00:32:09.120 | I'm like, "Back home, everything is sandy,

00:32:11.680 | "and, you know, my feet are always ashy.

00:32:13.440 | "I always have to wash off when I go back home,

00:32:15.920 | "and your shoes get ruined most of the time."

00:32:18.640 | And it started, and I had this question,

00:32:22.280 | and it was just like, "Wow, how come they have this,

00:32:25.120 | "and we don't?"

00:32:26.800 | So I was not being like, "Oh, you know,

00:32:28.800 | "how come they have all of this money?"

00:32:30.480 | I was not that.

00:32:31.320 | It was just like, "How come?"

00:32:32.640 | And I think what I was alluding to was,

00:32:34.760 | "How come life is so easy here, and back home it's not?"

00:32:39.320 | - And easy, not in a negative sense.

00:32:42.200 | In a beautiful sense.

00:32:43.280 | Sometimes I get, you know, just having traveled

00:32:46.240 | through the war zone, just to come back,

00:32:48.200 | traveling through Europe, back to America,

00:32:50.720 | it just, I'll just get emotional just looking

00:32:53.120 | at the efficiency of things.

00:32:54.520 | Like, how easy it is, how we can,

00:32:58.200 | first of all, in Ukraine, you currently can't fly, right?

00:33:02.360 | It's a war zone.

00:33:03.240 | Just even the transportation, you said roads.

00:33:06.440 | Yeah, the quality of roads in the United States is amazing.

00:33:09.520 | Just not, you know, many of the places

00:33:11.720 | that drive in Ukraine, you're talking about,

00:33:14.920 | I mean, really bad conditions of roads.

00:33:19.280 | And I'm sure in many parts of Africa,

00:33:21.280 | in many parts of the world, the roads are even worse.

00:33:23.720 | - Right, right.

00:33:24.720 | - And outdoor, you know, having an indoor toilet

00:33:28.360 | is a fascinatingly awesome luxury to have.

00:33:32.440 | - It is, it is.

00:33:33.640 | And don't take me wrong, Lex.

00:33:35.440 | Do we have some great roads now in many parts of Africa?

00:33:41.400 | Yes, main arteries, great roads,

00:33:44.160 | you're like, "Whoa, this is moving."

00:33:45.960 | Yes, we do.

00:33:48.720 | But definitely more today than in my time growing up.

00:33:52.720 | Do we have, you know, a country like Nigeria

00:33:58.200 | that just birthed six unicorns last year alone?

00:34:02.440 | Yes.

00:34:03.440 | Do we have the African youth out there being so amazing

00:34:07.960 | and, you know, living their lives?

00:34:10.320 | Yes, we have all of that.

00:34:12.640 | But it is still unfortunately just,

00:34:16.320 | like we're scratching the surface.

00:34:18.520 | And those people still are getting all of that accomplished,

00:34:21.560 | literally swimming through molasses.

00:34:23.520 | This is some of the most gross,

00:34:27.320 | immoral, unfair waste of human capital.

00:34:35.920 | - And so that is the, started with you,

00:34:39.960 | as a seven-year-old, asking, "Wait a minute,

00:34:43.360 | how do amazing people in Europe do this

00:34:48.360 | and the amazing people in Africa don't?"

00:34:50.640 | - Yeah, and that's a key word, amazing,

00:34:52.280 | because that's what I realized later,

00:34:55.200 | because it was not always like that for me,

00:34:57.560 | amazing and amazing, right?

00:34:59.200 | I knew instinctively that, of course we are amazing too.

00:35:02.760 | But so this, and then, so eventually the question became,

00:35:06.320 | how, so I went from, how come they have this and we don't,

00:35:09.440 | to the country as I'm growing up and researching,

00:35:11.840 | because it stayed with me.

00:35:12.960 | When I tell you I'm obsessed, I'm haunted.

00:35:14.880 | I am haunted.

00:35:16.000 | So you can laugh all you want, but it's,

00:35:18.520 | so the question became, the question became,

00:35:23.080 | how come some countries like the United States,

00:35:27.800 | Singapore are rich and some others like mine

00:35:32.600 | and many others in Africa are poor?

00:35:35.080 | That became the question.

00:35:37.040 | And along the line, like along the road,

00:35:41.320 | I continued on living my life,

00:35:43.360 | wondering about this question.

00:35:44.880 | And I've heard all types of reasons

00:35:50.400 | as to supposedly why that might be the case.

00:35:53.840 | Some people with a very straight face

00:35:56.120 | are still peddling the IQ fury, according to which,

00:36:00.320 | come on, darling, it's not your fault.

00:36:02.960 | You know, your skin color goes with a gene sequence

00:36:05.520 | that just doesn't allow you to be as smart

00:36:07.800 | as white people are.

00:36:09.840 | And it's not your fault, but just accept it.

00:36:12.880 | That stuff is still out there.

00:36:14.280 | It's very real.

00:36:15.120 | And I have to hear it.

00:36:17.760 | And others would say to me,

00:36:20.560 | it's just because, you know,

00:36:21.680 | you guys don't have adequate level of education.

00:36:25.440 | And I say, you know, maybe you gotta go say that

00:36:29.360 | to most of the street sellers you go see in Senegal.

00:36:33.120 | You go up to any of these,

00:36:34.480 | to many of these street sellers in Senegal,

00:36:37.640 | they are wading through cars,

00:36:39.640 | in moving cars under the hot sun,

00:36:43.680 | fumes thrown at their face,

00:36:46.840 | trying to sell you anything

00:36:49.640 | and any that you think you might be able to use.

00:36:53.360 | Whether we're talking about an ironing board,

00:36:56.880 | to an umbrella, to Q-tips,

00:36:59.760 | to, you know, toothpicks,

00:37:02.840 | selling you whatever you need from your car.

00:37:04.800 | These are street sellers.

00:37:06.360 | And you ask them, dear,

00:37:07.760 | do you have any degree?

00:37:10.760 | Yeah.

00:37:12.320 | I have this great degree in math

00:37:14.480 | or in literature or whatever.

00:37:17.480 | Some very, very educated people.

00:37:20.240 | Yet they're right there.

00:37:21.080 | This is what they're doing.

00:37:22.480 | - So that's just at scale, wasted human potential.

00:37:27.480 | - Thank you.

00:37:29.400 | - So that has to do,

00:37:30.840 | the wasted human potential has to do now with the system,

00:37:35.000 | with something about the laws.

00:37:37.080 | - Yeah.

00:37:39.200 | - Something about sort of the things that limit

00:37:43.600 | or enable the entrepreneur.

00:37:45.720 | - Yes.

00:37:47.040 | Because at that point I've heard this,

00:37:48.920 | you know, I heard people say,

00:37:50.400 | yeah, your IQ is no good.

00:37:52.560 | Yeah, you don't have enough degrees

00:37:54.480 | or you're not educated.

00:37:56.080 | Yeah, some people would even say,

00:37:57.320 | it's because you guys are malnourished.

00:37:58.720 | You're malnourished.

00:38:00.160 | You need to be fed.

00:38:01.440 | Others, oh, well, maybe I give you some shoes

00:38:03.840 | and maybe something's gonna change, whatever.

00:38:06.040 | And then, so I heard all of this nonsense, Lex.

00:38:08.880 | But guess what?

00:38:09.720 | But guess what?

00:38:10.560 | None of them made sense.

00:38:11.400 | You know why it didn't make sense?

00:38:12.240 | Because if any of that crap was true,

00:38:14.640 | why, oh why, is it that my parents

00:38:19.080 | or any other people from these places?

00:38:22.760 | And oh, and by the way,

00:38:24.000 | some people call those places God-forsaken land.

00:38:28.120 | That's also the type of critic you always have to hear

00:38:31.520 | when it's not just flat out S-H-I-T,

00:38:34.480 | whole countries from, you know, one person a few years ago,

00:38:38.440 | president of his country.

00:38:40.280 | - That sentiment is sometimes there.

00:38:42.600 | - It is, it is.

00:38:44.280 | As I go on with my life,

00:38:45.640 | trying to find the answer to

00:38:47.720 | why are some countries like mine poor

00:38:49.200 | while others are rich?

00:38:50.200 | I'm hearing all of these reasons thrown at me.

00:38:53.040 | And then they make no sense.

00:38:55.480 | Because then how come then, if my parents move,

00:39:00.280 | as it is usually anyone else who moves from a poorer nation

00:39:04.960 | to a nation that supposedly is rich,

00:39:07.080 | all of a sudden,

00:39:09.040 | they get to manifest the greatest potential.

00:39:11.720 | So I'm starting to think this has nothing to do

00:39:14.320 | with a person per se,

00:39:16.120 | because we're talking about the same person.

00:39:17.680 | Same background, same everything,

00:39:18.680 | same name, features, everything.

00:39:21.040 | Now I'm starting to think,

00:39:22.120 | maybe it doesn't have to do with a person.

00:39:24.240 | Maybe we're talking about something that has to do

00:39:26.800 | with a place that they came from

00:39:28.480 | or the place that they're going to.

00:39:30.240 | So this little thing is starting to be in my mind.

00:39:34.400 | Again, remember, this is not something

00:39:35.760 | that I woke up to overnight.

00:39:37.160 | I'm like, "Well, ha, I got my quest."

00:39:39.200 | It took me for a long time.

00:39:40.400 | And I had to face off,

00:39:43.200 | to have many different ideologies face each other.

00:39:45.840 | I had to really have a reckoning,

00:39:47.280 | literally in my heart and in my mind.

00:39:49.640 | And so then that's what I'm thinking.

00:39:54.360 | It cannot be, no, no, no, it's the same people.

00:39:58.400 | It has to be about the place,

00:39:59.320 | but then what about this place?

00:40:01.080 | But then even about the place,

00:40:03.600 | you're thinking, again, two countries,

00:40:06.400 | different backgrounds, same outcome,

00:40:08.040 | same background, different outcome.

00:40:09.800 | What is this?

00:40:12.080 | And then I go on.

00:40:15.080 | I am in Silicon Valley in the late '90s,

00:40:20.080 | early 2000s, that come boom, all of that.

00:40:23.800 | And I'm starting to discover this concept

00:40:26.720 | of this thing called entrepreneurship.

00:40:29.000 | I'm in Silicon Valley

00:40:30.280 | and just getting to experience

00:40:32.360 | what seems so cliche by now,

00:40:34.800 | but people getting together in the back of a napkin,

00:40:38.360 | just talking about an idea, bringing it out.

00:40:40.360 | And then they go out and they talk to some investors

00:40:43.120 | who's going to invest in it.

00:40:44.160 | Then they have lawyers who get to put

00:40:46.080 | all of this stuff together.

00:40:47.360 | And then they have the big four CPA firms,

00:40:49.840 | this whole ecosystem of what they call of entrepreneurship.

00:40:53.040 | And then eventually this concept of entrepreneurship

00:40:55.000 | being this idea of creating something out of nothing.

00:40:59.400 | So there I am.

00:41:00.840 | And at some point I become an entrepreneur myself.

00:41:03.120 | And the way I became an entrepreneur was not like,

00:41:04.760 | I woke up and I'm like,

00:41:06.520 | I want to make money,

00:41:07.360 | so I'm going to become an entrepreneur.

00:41:09.280 | No, and this is also another problem I have

00:41:11.320 | with people who have a problem with entrepreneurs

00:41:13.640 | or business people.

00:41:15.240 | Most entrepreneurs do not start a business to become rich.

00:41:19.960 | Most entrepreneurs start a business

00:41:22.760 | because they have found, identified a problem

00:41:25.160 | that bothered them enough that they said,

00:41:27.760 | enough is enough.

00:41:29.040 | I'm going to do something about it.

00:41:30.600 | What entrepreneurs are,

00:41:32.040 | are people who criticize by creating.

00:41:34.720 | Do they always get it right?

00:41:35.960 | No.

00:41:36.800 | As a matter of fact,

00:41:37.640 | the failure in entrepreneurship is humongous.

00:41:40.520 | It's kamikaze path to take the entrepreneurship path.

00:41:45.520 | We lose our spouses.

00:41:47.000 | My first husband passed away

00:41:48.840 | as soon as I was about to sign my first term sheet.

00:41:52.040 | And yet I had to keep going.

00:41:54.680 | What force can keep you going

00:41:57.440 | after you just loved,

00:41:58.600 | lost the love of your life?

00:41:59.960 | What force keeps you going?

00:42:01.720 | The force of, oh, I just want to be rich.

00:42:03.120 | Really?

00:42:04.680 | When your whole,

00:42:05.640 | your whole world is upside down,

00:42:07.240 | your whole world is upside down

00:42:10.440 | and you just want to quit.

00:42:12.320 | You just want to go meet him and join him in death.

00:42:15.400 | I stayed, why?

00:42:17.440 | Because of the same reason why I started my company.

00:42:20.800 | I stayed because the women

00:42:22.960 | whom I had put back to work by then,

00:42:25.840 | we're talking about some of the most vulnerable women

00:42:27.720 | in my country.

00:42:29.000 | These are women who grow the hibiscus,

00:42:31.240 | which we need to make the bisap,

00:42:33.160 | which is the juice of Taronga, remember?

00:42:35.240 | This is our national identity drink.

00:42:37.880 | And for the longest time,

00:42:39.000 | women grow this hibiscus,

00:42:40.240 | but we use for the national drink,

00:42:41.640 | for this drink.

00:42:43.200 | And now that Coca-Cola, Pepsi,

00:42:45.040 | and all that had made it through the marketing,

00:42:46.920 | but it is more cool to drink those beverages.

00:42:49.600 | Now there is no more market for the hibiscus.

00:42:52.280 | And with that goes the livelihoods of these women.

00:42:54.800 | And for me, that bothered me enough

00:42:58.520 | because in that force, I saw two things.

00:43:00.960 | One was a part of my culture.

00:43:03.720 | We're talking about, I mean,

00:43:06.120 | part of my cultural identity, for Christ's sake.

00:43:10.160 | The juice of Taronga.

00:43:11.280 | You asked me, "What defines you?"

00:43:12.560 | I said, "Taronga, there's a juice for it."

00:43:14.880 | So my culture is disappearing.

00:43:16.760 | And at the same time,

00:43:17.920 | these women are sliding into abject poverty

00:43:22.880 | because what they used to make, no one needs anymore.

00:43:25.880 | So that is what got me to start a company.

00:43:30.880 | And the company was created just because of that.

00:43:34.000 | I wanted to build a company

00:43:37.360 | that would allow me to not only preserve

00:43:40.720 | this very important aspect of my cultural identity,

00:43:44.160 | and at the same time, put these women back to work.

00:43:48.440 | - And maybe it's more difficult to put into words,

00:43:51.440 | but there's a kind of,

00:43:53.280 | it's a basic human spirit where you see

00:43:56.920 | the place where you came from

00:43:58.800 | breaking apart in some kind of way,

00:44:03.080 | and you have the entrepreneurial fire

00:44:06.440 | that dreams of helping.

00:44:08.600 | - Yes.

00:44:09.440 | - And sometimes it's hard to convert that into words.

00:44:13.440 | You have to tell nice stories and so on,

00:44:15.080 | but it's the basic human desire to help.

00:44:17.320 | - Yes.

00:44:18.160 | - And get criticized by creating.

00:44:21.280 | - Especially when you've been,

00:44:22.880 | especially when, and let's face it,

00:44:25.160 | are we all a bundle of circumstances,

00:44:29.720 | some happy, some worse?

00:44:31.440 | Yes, we are.

00:44:32.560 | And oftentimes I ask myself,

00:44:35.200 | my God, why you?

00:44:37.040 | Why did you get to have the opportunities that you have?

00:44:42.040 | What makes you different from, let's say, even your cousin

00:44:46.320 | that couldn't, that is still home, trapped?

00:44:50.000 | Because we call ourselves trapped citizens.

00:44:52.480 | When you're trapped in these countries that go nowhere,

00:44:55.520 | we're like a bunch of trapped citizens.

00:44:58.080 | So you see, Lex, when my husband passed away

00:45:03.280 | and I wanted nothing more to do than to quit

00:45:05.760 | and to send, investors had already said,

00:45:08.240 | we understand if you want to stop.

00:45:10.040 | Whatever you decide to do, we'll do that.

00:45:12.680 | And I wanted to quit.

00:45:13.920 | And I was actually on my way,

00:45:15.360 | I was in Senegal for a month,

00:45:17.880 | trying to really get a bearing over myself.

00:45:20.520 | And by the end of the month, I had decided I'm letting go.

00:45:25.520 | There's no way, the pain was too great.

00:45:27.680 | Nothing made sense anymore.

00:45:30.200 | It was too much.

00:45:31.760 | So I went to see this woman

00:45:33.920 | and I talked to the one who, we're talking back then,

00:45:38.920 | there were 400 of them.

00:45:41.000 | Later on, we grew to 9,000.

00:45:43.520 | And I told the representative of all of them,

00:45:47.800 | and I told her, this is very old lady.

00:45:51.160 | And just looking at her, I knew I was going through some pain

00:45:54.920 | but this woman has probably gone through 10 times,

00:45:57.600 | not that pain is measurable,

00:46:00.320 | but you could tell this woman probably lost a child

00:46:02.840 | as oftentimes happen in places

00:46:05.240 | that are lower income countries.

00:46:07.880 | Probably lost a husband also,

00:46:10.280 | probably who knows, so many people.

00:46:12.320 | Loss is part of our lives.

00:46:13.600 | - You could see the pain.

00:46:14.440 | - You can see the pain, yet she's so, so dignified.

00:46:18.080 | She's so dignified.

00:46:19.840 | And that already kind of made me like, my God, stop crying.

00:46:23.480 | But, and I told her that I was quitting,

00:46:27.080 | I could not look her in the eyes.

00:46:29.560 | And she said, "Look at me."

00:46:33.720 | I could not look her in the eyes.

00:46:34.880 | She said, "Look at me, child."

00:46:36.400 | And I looked at her and she said,

00:46:40.480 | "You know, I know you're in pain,

00:46:44.760 | "but where your husband is, where your beloved is,

00:46:48.120 | "there's absolutely nothing that you can do for him.

00:46:51.080 | "But for us, you can change everything."

00:46:54.080 | And I went back.

00:46:55.760 | So that's what entrepreneurs are.

00:46:59.720 | At their best.

00:47:01.320 | - She helped you find your strength?

00:47:03.200 | - Yes.

00:47:04.200 | And I was weak still, but I said,

00:47:09.080 | "You put that aside, there's a job to do here."

00:47:13.240 | And I went back and I fought with everything that I had.

00:47:16.880 | And this company that I started in my kitchen

00:47:19.120 | became this company that had the who's who

00:47:22.520 | of a beverage world.

00:47:23.720 | With at some point, Roger Enrico, the chairman of PepsiCo,

00:47:27.680 | sitting on my board,

00:47:30.440 | yeah, I went back because of that.

00:47:34.480 | So the reason why I tell this story for me is important,

00:47:37.760 | because the world needs to understand

00:47:40.440 | that there is a viable way of caring

00:47:48.200 | and of being part of a solution

00:47:54.640 | for the lesser fortunate,

00:47:57.480 | in terms of not keeping them where they are,

00:48:00.560 | and we're like the saviors coming

00:48:02.280 | and giving them food and all that.

00:48:03.960 | No, no, no, no, no.

00:48:05.080 | But it's like, just like the leg up I got in my life,

00:48:07.840 | give somebody else a leg up.

00:48:09.240 | - What are the things you're fighting against in Africa

00:48:14.040 | when you try to build a business like that?

00:48:17.400 | - So then we're building this company.

00:48:20.280 | And back then, this was in 2004,

00:48:24.840 | that was when I built my first company.

00:48:26.800 | We had to have two sister companies,

00:48:31.120 | one there, one here.

00:48:32.360 | So the one in Africa was about the whole supply chain.

00:48:35.920 | And the one in America was research and development,

00:48:42.000 | sales and marketing, all of that good stuff.

00:48:44.600 | And then at some point I look around,

00:48:48.520 | I'm like, wait a second,

00:48:50.200 | here, back in the days before we had the,

00:48:52.720 | they would talk, they would say,

00:48:53.760 | oh, we have this one-stop shop for business registration.

00:48:56.480 | But the truth is,

00:48:57.560 | very quickly you can set up an LLC in the US.

00:49:01.800 | We're talking about less than, even then,

00:49:04.040 | less than, today it's super fast, 20 minutes online, done.

00:49:07.880 | Back then it was less than a few hours to get it done.

00:49:12.760 | Cost you almost nothing,

00:49:14.720 | we're talking about a few hundred dollars,

00:49:16.600 | three, two to 350, depending which state you are.

00:49:19.360 | - So LLC, starting a basic company takes almost no time.

00:49:23.880 | - No time, no time, no money, almost.

00:49:25.760 | - You don't have to know a guy that knows a guy

00:49:29.200 | that slips some money to the politician and so on.

00:49:33.280 | - No, none of that stuff, none of that stuff.

00:49:35.640 | And so at the same time, also things like,

00:49:40.040 | and this I can take you into today's day.

00:49:42.680 | Okay, Lex, I don't know if you have employees on payroll

00:49:45.200 | or anything like that.

00:49:46.680 | But do you have to go every month,

00:49:50.640 | or anybody listening to us right now,

00:49:52.800 | do they have to go every single month

00:49:56.040 | to three different type of agencies,

00:49:59.060 | you know, like governmental agencies, to do one step?

00:50:06.880 | This one is basically you're gonna go

00:50:10.240 | and give them your retirement money,

00:50:14.040 | like, you know, like the pension part of the salary

00:50:16.320 | that you took out from your employee.

00:50:18.440 | You have to go to this agency

00:50:20.160 | and put that application through.

00:50:22.080 | So you leave that money behind.

00:50:23.880 | Then you go to another agency.

00:50:25.400 | This one is for their health, you know, care, whatever.

00:50:28.440 | You have three of those places

00:50:30.060 | where you have to literally go to in person.

00:50:33.640 | Three times, three places every single month

00:50:36.840 | to drop off these, you know, this paperwork.

00:50:40.120 | Do you have to do that anywhere in the US?

00:50:42.640 | I mean, do we have that situation anywhere

00:50:45.520 | that you know of right now?

00:50:47.160 | - No, no.

00:50:48.200 | - And do you think that's business friendly,

00:50:50.120 | or do you think it's cumbersome in business?

00:50:52.160 | - And that's not just cumbersome sort of physically,

00:50:55.200 | it's cumbersome psychologically.

00:50:57.360 | But there's a feeling like the system around you,

00:51:01.880 | yeah, there's a feeling like you're trapped.

00:51:03.780 | It's a feeling like the system doesn't want you to succeed

00:51:07.240 | versus a system that does want you to succeed.

00:51:09.560 | - Exactly.

00:51:10.880 | You're in a country like, we're in Texas.

00:51:13.920 | If you make less than a million bucks in revenues a year,

00:51:17.640 | you know, all you do, five minutes it takes you,

00:51:19.840 | you're filing, you know, your state, your franchise tax.

00:51:24.440 | That's it.

00:51:27.120 | It's below that number, tell them what it is.

00:51:29.320 | Then you have nothing to give them

00:51:30.760 | or anything like that, you move on.

00:51:33.200 | Us, even if I make this much,

00:51:36.920 | there is a minimum tax that you have to pay,

00:51:40.160 | which is $1,000 in Senegal right now.

00:51:42.600 | - For the listener, my guy was holding up a zero.

00:51:46.500 | - You make no money.

00:51:49.080 | - You still have to pay.

00:51:49.920 | - You still have to pay.

00:51:52.760 | And then, oh, let me walk you through what happened to me

00:51:55.600 | when we had to try to get the electricity hooked up

00:51:59.160 | on our first office.

00:52:00.840 | So we go, they say, "Oh, first you have to apply."

00:52:03.360 | You know, like you normally, you have to apply.

00:52:05.840 | Then we apply, we pay the money.

00:52:08.320 | Remember again, here you have to also go,

00:52:10.080 | this was like, you know, you go to the office and you pay.

00:52:13.360 | And then we wait and we wait and we wait.

00:52:16.560 | And when I say we wait, I'm not talking about

00:52:17.880 | we waited 24 hours, we waited 48 hours.

00:52:20.440 | A month, two months, three months, four months, five months,

00:52:25.040 | you go, you send your assistant, she goes, she comes back.

00:52:28.800 | Well, they say we send it to wait.

00:52:30.200 | At some point I'm like, I gotta go there.

00:52:31.840 | So I go there and I asked to speak

00:52:34.560 | to the head of the district for, you know,

00:52:38.260 | and I'm just like going on and on and on and on

00:52:41.960 | about how we've been delayed.

00:52:43.280 | This is gonna be a problem.

00:52:44.320 | We have to produce, everything is delayed.

00:52:46.600 | And I risk losing my business.

00:52:49.120 | We already pre-sold some of these products to our customers.

00:52:53.040 | I gotta, something needs to happen.

00:52:54.840 | So at some point, the gentleman looks at me,

00:52:58.040 | he's like, "Lady, look over there."

00:52:59.520 | I look over there, I see a pile of paper this high.

00:53:03.920 | We're talking about maybe hundreds of applications.

00:53:07.280 | Each one of them is a single, single, single sheet.

00:53:10.260 | Each single sheet is an application

00:53:12.320 | for getting the electricity.

00:53:14.780 | And he says, "Do you see that?"

00:53:16.960 | I said, "Yeah."

00:53:17.800 | And he said, "Look over there."

00:53:18.740 | I look over there to the other side.

00:53:20.740 | I see two meters.

00:53:22.440 | He's like, "Each of these applications needs one of those.

00:53:26.260 | "How many do you see?"

00:53:27.100 | I said, "Two."

00:53:28.200 | Then I knew I was in trouble.

00:53:29.660 | And then I said, "What do I do?"

00:53:33.700 | And he said, "Lady, it's not at our level."

00:53:37.500 | And I agreed with him, it was not on his level.

00:53:40.060 | But eventually, by now you can tell

00:53:41.940 | that I pretty much get what I need because,

00:53:44.060 | and at that point what I did was not threaten him

00:53:46.020 | or anything like that.

00:53:46.860 | I didn't even pay a bribe or anything,

00:53:47.900 | but you could see why people pay bribes.

00:53:50.180 | Because when you have a pile like that,

00:53:52.140 | then the only way to advance your file,

00:53:54.020 | and that, by the way, happens even at the passport office.

00:53:56.980 | You come, you apply for your passport,

00:53:58.540 | which is your right.

00:54:00.260 | They forced us to have passports.

00:54:02.060 | It's your right as a citizen to have a passport.

00:54:03.940 | And even there, if you want yours

00:54:06.340 | to keep going through the process,

00:54:07.540 | you have to bribe somebody so it can go

00:54:09.180 | even the pace it's supposed to go, let alone faster.

00:54:11.940 | So here, I'm thinking I have a problem.

00:54:15.220 | And at that point, I did what I do.

00:54:17.420 | I talked to him about all the things I was trying to do.

00:54:19.820 | I explained to him why I'm here, why I'm trying to do this.

00:54:23.020 | And even him said, "Lady, someone like you,

00:54:25.340 | "you have no reason to even be here.

00:54:28.360 | "You could be back in America, living your life,

00:54:30.940 | "la vida loca, you don't have to be here."

00:54:32.700 | So that, I think, gained a lot of his respect.

00:54:35.300 | And I said, "If you don't help me with this,

00:54:38.300 | "I understand I shouldn't be of a priority

00:54:40.900 | "or anything like that, but I beg you, I beg of you.

00:54:43.600 | "I need for this to go on this week."

00:54:46.500 | And he said, "Okay."

00:54:47.680 | That's how I got my meter.

00:54:48.740 | One of those two meters became mine.

00:54:50.700 | So then he said, "But we have a problem."

00:54:52.580 | And I said, "What?"

00:54:54.020 | He said, "Well, the truck, we need the truck

00:54:57.240 | "to be here to do it because,

00:54:58.820 | "because of where you are from the pole,

00:55:00.840 | "we need long cable lines to get it all done.

00:55:05.340 | "But the truck is, I don't know where the truck was

00:55:07.760 | "because they had this one truck for,

00:55:08.740 | "I don't know how many customers.

00:55:10.600 | "So I go to the mayor of a town with whom I'm quite friends

00:55:13.140 | "because I know people, but it shouldn't be this way.

00:55:17.340 | "So I go to the mayor of a town."

00:55:20.420 | And I said, "Mayor, he happens to have the same name as me.

00:55:22.740 | "First, last name, same, but except he's the ugly one,

00:55:25.500 | "I'm the pretty one because, you know."

00:55:27.020 | - Of course. (laughs)

00:55:29.780 | That's so people can tell you apart.

00:55:32.300 | She's the pretty one, right? - Exactly.

00:55:33.140 | I'm the pretty one and he's the, whatever.

00:55:35.900 | So I go to the mayor and I'm like,

00:55:36.880 | "Mayor, I need your help.

00:55:37.980 | "You need to help me with this."

00:55:39.140 | He's like, "Now what?"

00:55:40.500 | And I explained to him and he's like,

00:55:41.900 | "Okay, you can take the truck from the city hall.

00:55:45.420 | "I'll tell the guys that they can allow you to have it.

00:55:47.740 | "And then they come and then you guys can do this."

00:55:50.420 | And then we arrived there.

00:55:51.740 | Guess what?

00:55:52.580 | I thought I was done, Lex, but I was not done

00:55:54.900 | because now the electricity company, by the way,

00:55:56.900 | whom we paid, everything was there.

00:55:59.260 | They've been sitting on our money for nine months by now.

00:56:02.620 | Well, we need a ladder long enough to,

00:56:06.420 | you know, like one of the super, super professional ladders

00:56:08.420 | that normally the electricity companies have.

00:56:11.180 | Theirs was in some other village

00:56:14.540 | and they didn't know if it was gonna be back

00:56:16.200 | for another three days or four days.

00:56:18.000 | I said, "Are you kidding me?"

00:56:20.780 | He's like, "No."

00:56:22.020 | So I call mayor again.

00:56:23.340 | I'm like, "Mayor, do you have a ladder?"

00:56:25.500 | And I explained and he said,

00:56:26.820 | "And that's how I got my electricity hooked up.

00:56:30.820 | "Otherwise I probably would still be waiting."

00:56:33.460 | So, Lex, you add all of these things together.

00:56:36.480 | And also the fact that in my country, by the way,

00:56:38.580 | the labor laws are so stringent.

00:56:41.420 | Basically, you are married to employees for good or for bad.

00:56:44.500 | And some people say,

00:56:45.720 | "Oh no, you're not married for good or for bad,

00:56:47.680 | "except that it will just cost you a lot of time and money

00:56:50.640 | "to get rid of any of them.

00:56:52.640 | "It doesn't matter the circumstances."

00:56:54.300 | Do you think an entrepreneur

00:56:55.980 | really needs to hear something like that?

00:56:57.980 | The head of the ILO, I had an argument with him at the UN.

00:57:01.420 | And I said to him, "Listen, and you listen to me very well.

00:57:04.820 | "The reason if you want to protect employees,

00:57:09.820 | "as you claim, everything you're doing

00:57:12.120 | "is to protect employees.

00:57:13.920 | "A, you know better of a human being than I am

00:57:17.340 | "in terms of wanting to make sure

00:57:18.840 | "that people are treated right and fairly.

00:57:21.260 | "But last time I checked, Google, for example,

00:57:24.980 | "is not offering their employees chef-cooked meals,

00:57:28.420 | "super healthy, anything they want,

00:57:31.560 | "feeding them from morning till evening,

00:57:34.340 | "having some babysitters, or having childcare on site,

00:57:39.340 | "all of these perks that come on top

00:57:41.720 | "of really cozy salaries."

00:57:44.580 | It did not happen because you, the ILO,

00:57:46.220 | told them you have to do this.

00:57:48.100 | It happened because there are enough jobs created around

00:57:51.860 | that now you're in an employee's market

00:57:55.180 | and employers have to fall all over themselves

00:57:57.980 | to attract the best talent among us.

00:58:00.900 | That's how it's done.

00:58:02.020 | And not with your nonsense

00:58:03.620 | that you're imposing me right now,

00:58:05.540 | which the only results you're gonna get,

00:58:07.480 | like in my country,

00:58:08.820 | do you know what we have to show for all of these,

00:58:10.740 | the fact that the Senegalese employees,

00:58:12.660 | the most protected employee on paper in the world?

00:58:15.780 | Well, we're one of the 25 poorest countries in the world.

00:58:19.380 | That's what it got us.

00:58:20.760 | - So let's try to untangle this.

00:58:26.720 | So there's a system in place.

00:58:28.580 | There's a momentum with that system.

00:58:30.940 | Like you said, "Lady, it's not my level,"

00:58:33.740 | which is, for somebody who grew up in the Soviet Union,

00:58:37.240 | at least echoes some of the same sounds I heard

00:58:43.420 | from people I knew there.

00:58:45.740 | It's kind of this helpless feeling like,

00:58:48.060 | well, this is just part of the system,

00:58:50.220 | this gigantic bureaucracy.

00:58:52.540 | And the corruption that happens

00:58:55.320 | is just like the only way to get around

00:58:57.540 | to get anything done.

00:58:58.940 | And so the corruption grows.

00:59:01.260 | Maybe could you speak to the corruption?

00:59:03.300 | To what degree is there corruption in Senegal and Africa?

00:59:08.820 | And how do we fix it?

00:59:13.100 | - So when you said to which degrees there is corruption,

00:59:16.100 | I will respond to you the same I respond to people.

00:59:18.340 | I say, yeah, we have corruption,

00:59:19.960 | and it's almost as bad as in Chicago.

00:59:22.140 | So now, what I want people to understand

00:59:27.080 | when it comes to corruption,

00:59:28.880 | it's because we are misguided with corruption.

00:59:33.300 | We think corruption is the root cause of problems,

00:59:35.700 | when corruption is simply a symptom

00:59:38.460 | of the deeper root problem.

00:59:42.260 | In this case,

00:59:43.300 | if you make the laws so senseless,

00:59:50.860 | meaning, let me give you an example of senseless laws.

00:59:56.020 | Every time I have to import something in my country,

00:59:59.140 | I have a business, we're making lip balms in this case,

01:00:02.340 | and others, skincare products.

01:00:04.100 | Some ingredients I'm able to find in the country

01:00:09.160 | at the standard that I need in order to remain competitive.

01:00:13.120 | Because for example, our products are sold

01:00:15.040 | Whole Foods Market, you can understand,

01:00:17.000 | it's a pretty sophisticated and really,

01:00:19.600 | you know, they don't just put anybody on the shelves.

01:00:22.620 | But the thing is, it means that on the other end,

01:00:26.040 | my inputs has to be right.

01:00:28.160 | So out of those, some, we have seven ingredients,

01:00:33.040 | seven items that need to come from abroad

01:00:35.440 | to go into the making of this product.

01:00:38.680 | Some packaging and some raw material.

01:00:42.000 | But guess what, Lex, for five of them,

01:00:46.080 | I am paying a 40% tariff,

01:00:48.920 | and for the other two, almost 70% tariff.

01:00:51.560 | That I call senseless laws.

01:00:54.920 | These tariffs are senseless.

01:00:58.040 | - Yeah, corruption is just a symptom.

01:01:00.040 | They reveal that something is broken about the laws.

01:01:02.440 | - Exactly.

01:01:03.280 | - And the laws are, so taxation,

01:01:08.120 | this kind of restricting laws,

01:01:11.120 | laws that slow down the entrepreneurial momentum.

01:01:14.560 | - They do, they do.

01:01:16.000 | Because in this case, when my product comes,

01:01:19.280 | what do people have to do?

01:01:21.640 | Because every time, if you add 40%,

01:01:25.400 | you're basically on the other end.

01:01:26.720 | So every time you add,

01:01:28.400 | if let's say my product normally cost a dollar,

01:01:31.640 | and we feel 40%, by the time I'm done,

01:01:33.880 | I had to pay, now it's costing me 140.

01:01:36.640 | By the time it arrives in my warehouse,

01:01:39.000 | in my manufacturing facility,

01:01:41.000 | it's now at 140 because of a tariff I left behind.

01:01:44.800 | That 40% you added to it,

01:01:47.240 | do you know how much it's gonna add to my final cost

01:01:49.960 | that once the product is finished,

01:01:51.200 | I have to sell it to the customer?

01:01:53.160 | I have to sell it for $1.60 more

01:01:55.400 | because of that 40 cents extra you took from me.

01:01:58.920 | In order for me at the end of the day

01:02:00.880 | to have some type of profits,

01:02:02.520 | because profits at the end of the day

01:02:05.920 | is the blood of a business,

01:02:08.320 | there are two people are misguided.

01:02:10.000 | They say, "Oh, you dirty, greedy business people,

01:02:13.760 | "and it's all about profit, profit, profit, profit."

01:02:16.360 | You know, I belong to this organization called,

01:02:20.600 | I'm a board member on the Conscious Capitalism.

01:02:23.120 | It is the largest organization

01:02:25.280 | of purpose-driven businesses and entrepreneurs.

01:02:29.800 | The type of people I told you about,

01:02:31.120 | we start our businesses because we see something

01:02:34.200 | that needs to be taken care of in society.

01:02:36.600 | Whole Foods Market is one of them,

01:02:38.640 | The Container Store, you know,

01:02:40.640 | all of these companies that are beloved in the US

01:02:43.120 | that you can hear of.

01:02:44.840 | We believe that the end goal of business is purpose.

01:02:49.840 | But in order to do purpose,

01:02:53.600 | you have to have profits to stay alive.

01:02:58.600 | And the best way for people to think of profits

01:03:01.160 | so that they're not all twisted about it,

01:03:04.080 | Lex, if I asked you, what's your goal in the world?

01:03:08.440 | You're probably gonna tell me your dream.

01:03:10.960 | You're gonna talk to me about what you're doing right now

01:03:13.320 | and how you want to be uniting,

01:03:15.240 | you want a more harmonious world.

01:03:16.640 | You want human flourishing.

01:03:18.320 | That's what you're working towards.

01:03:19.920 | That's what you say to me.

01:03:21.360 | You're not gonna say, "Well, my biggest goal in the world

01:03:24.120 | "is to produce as many red blood cells as I can."

01:03:27.320 | Except you need to produce those, otherwise, no Lex.

01:03:30.120 | And if no Lex, no one working.

01:03:33.160 | - Yeah.

01:03:34.000 | - You know what I mean?

01:03:34.840 | - Yeah.

01:03:35.680 | - So that's all.

01:03:36.520 | So people need to stop with this whole profit, non-profit.

01:03:39.040 | Do we have some psychopaths among us?

01:03:41.520 | Yeah, 1% of us in this world are psychopaths.

01:03:43.840 | In every field, anywhere you look.

01:03:46.360 | And surely you find that

01:03:47.440 | in the entrepreneur's world as well.

01:03:50.120 | Yeah, so we have 1% of us who are psychopaths for sure.

01:03:53.880 | But do they define the rest of us?

01:03:55.280 | Absolutely not, and thankfully not.

01:03:57.400 | So let's just be clear on that.

01:04:00.000 | So here, you charge me 40% tariff, which is outrageous.

01:04:05.000 | Then you're forcing me to sell it for $1.60 more

01:04:09.160 | than my competitor who does not have to go

01:04:10.880 | for that nonsense because she's an American woman

01:04:13.000 | who is operating in America

01:04:14.160 | and she doesn't have that nonsense put on her.

01:04:16.280 | So now I'm on this market competing against this woman,

01:04:18.800 | eye to eye.

01:04:20.400 | So if we're selling the same value product,

01:04:23.720 | mine costs $1.60 more simply because of some stupid rules

01:04:27.080 | from back home, then guess who is gonna stay in business

01:04:29.760 | and who does it?

01:04:30.600 | See, they wanna talk about equality.

01:04:33.760 | That's the type of equality I wanna see.

01:04:35.760 | The playing field has to be leveled.

01:04:39.200 | Told you English is my fourth language.

01:04:41.320 | - Well, it's two people talking.

01:04:42.960 | (laughing)

01:04:44.040 | Between us, maybe we'll have this English thing figured out.

01:04:46.560 | - We'll have it figured out.

01:04:48.440 | - So the idea of capital,

01:04:50.760 | the idea of conscious capitalism is the thing

01:04:53.600 | that in large part enables this level playing field.

01:04:57.920 | - That's what we want.

01:04:59.520 | - So what you're trying to say,

01:05:00.360 | so here, so when I talked about census laws,

01:05:02.440 | that's an example.

01:05:03.360 | So when you make the tariffs so high

01:05:06.080 | that you're gonna render me non-competitive,

01:05:11.080 | then that's where, for people who might make sense,

01:05:15.280 | when the product arrives at port,

01:05:18.160 | they say, "Hey, I give you this.

01:05:21.200 | "What I give you, maybe it's 10% of the price or 5%.

01:05:24.400 | "It's surely not 40%, but you are happy with it.

01:05:28.080 | "You're the government official."

01:05:29.600 | That's what we call a bribe.

01:05:31.200 | And me, I'm like, "Hey, I saved myself money.

01:05:33.920 | "And also I saved myself time."

01:05:36.560 | But you see, if the laws where you pay 5%

01:05:40.800 | or even the 10% that I just left behind or nothing,

01:05:43.960 | you come, you pay it, you move on.

01:05:45.720 | Because who has the business of fooling around

01:05:47.480 | and staying behind?

01:05:48.680 | No, you do that when it actually makes sense to do that.

01:05:51.840 | So I'm not sitting here telling people

01:05:53.520 | I engage in unlawful practices.

01:05:55.440 | In my case, because I'm around saying the things

01:05:58.280 | I'm saying right now, so I'm a target.

01:06:00.840 | You have to do things cleanly.

01:06:02.080 | And I believe in doing things that way.

01:06:03.680 | So what I had to do was go to the, ask again, mayor.

01:06:08.080 | We have a problem.

01:06:09.200 | Mayor, whenever he sees me, he's like, "Now what?"

01:06:11.360 | (laughing)

01:06:13.040 | So I'm like, "We've got a problem."

01:06:14.360 | - Your best friends now.

01:06:15.440 | - Yes.

01:06:16.520 | So I say, "Now it's the customs."

01:06:19.000 | And he's like, "What do you want me to do?"

01:06:21.040 | I said, "Do you know anybody at customs?

01:06:22.360 | "I need to hire up at customs

01:06:23.640 | "because I got to explain to them what's going on here."

01:06:26.560 | They all know, of course,

01:06:27.880 | but I think they're not always maybe understanding,

01:06:30.520 | or maybe they understand.

01:06:31.440 | And in this case, he understood.

01:06:33.800 | So we went and he's like, "Yeah, I know.

01:06:36.600 | "This is not, this is not very, yeah, this."

01:06:39.920 | And I said, "What do we do now?"

01:06:41.440 | And I saw him going through binders and binders

01:06:44.280 | in his office because he's going to try to go

01:06:46.840 | and look where in the law can we find something

01:06:51.520 | that can help me escape these rules.

01:06:55.520 | And you know the best he found, Lex, was,

01:06:58.160 | "Oh, well, here, see, this one.

01:07:00.760 | "If you've been in business for two years,

01:07:03.000 | "then we can allow you,"

01:07:05.600 | there is a special term for it, it's French, it's technical.

01:07:08.280 | "We can allow you to bring your raw material,

01:07:10.840 | "but you have to tell us exactly how much you're bringing.

01:07:15.120 | "And it has to match your formulation,"

01:07:16.800 | because they don't want you to bring in more

01:07:18.760 | that we need and maybe sell some of that

01:07:20.880 | to the rest of the market

01:07:21.920 | and they didn't make their money on it.

01:07:24.120 | So there, it means I have to give them my recipe.

01:07:27.040 | Imagine Coca-Cola being asked to give their secret sauce

01:07:30.800 | to government officials in a country

01:07:33.960 | that you can't even know what might happen,

01:07:36.280 | let alone, even in business, you don't do that.

01:07:37.920 | I mean, trade secrets are trade secrets.

01:07:39.960 | But here, you're asked to be putting it in front

01:07:42.440 | of some people you don't know where it's going to go

01:07:43.680 | after that, because there, they get to see,

01:07:45.680 | "Okay, her recipe calls for X amount

01:07:48.640 | "of candelilla wax, X amount of coconut oil, okay."

01:07:53.640 | And on top of that, we have to think about

01:07:58.680 | how much spoilage might there be or not,

01:08:00.400 | because again, we don't want her to buffer over there.

01:08:03.520 | So you have to get naked in front of them

01:08:05.480 | in terms of your recipe, which might end up

01:08:07.280 | only God knows where tomorrow,

01:08:08.760 | maybe a competition or maybe even them,

01:08:11.040 | they start a business and they compete with you,

01:08:12.560 | 'cause we've seen that.

01:08:13.640 | So you have to do that.

01:08:15.200 | And then each time, fill out a paperwork,

01:08:18.000 | get the approval, then it can come in.

01:08:19.440 | So when it can come in, you don't have to pay that tax.

01:08:21.800 | Oh, and by the way, you have one year,

01:08:24.000 | one year to make this product and get it out.

01:08:26.880 | And all of it needs to be back out,

01:08:28.720 | because if any of it stays here,

01:08:30.520 | you're going to pay the taxes that we held up.

01:08:33.160 | - So you're basically forced by these senseless laws

01:08:38.160 | to be dishonest.

01:08:40.680 | - Backward corruption, all of this is so cumbersome

01:08:43.720 | because it means more paperwork, paperwork everywhere,

01:08:47.360 | maybe having to disclose your things.

01:08:49.040 | So me, in my case, what I did is, you know,

01:08:53.000 | this person said, "Okay, we're going to see

01:08:54.760 | how we can work with you."

01:08:56.960 | But for the first two years,

01:08:58.600 | we were more or less in the gray area.

01:09:00.680 | - Yeah, so even gray area is good.

01:09:04.240 | - Yeah, but what does it mean?

01:09:05.840 | In a situation like that,

01:09:07.200 | whenever they want to mess with you,

01:09:09.280 | it means they can come and they will look

01:09:11.560 | and they will find something.

01:09:13.280 | So it means that every day I'm trying to do business,

01:09:15.680 | I'm running the risk of being harassed

01:09:17.920 | and/or maybe even put in jail, depending on what it is.

01:09:21.360 | - I mean, you're an incredible person

01:09:24.840 | because it seems like there's two ways to change this,

01:09:28.680 | become president or gain power in the country

01:09:34.360 | and to try to change the laws,

01:09:37.120 | which seems really difficult to do.

01:09:39.760 | And the other way is fight through the laws

01:09:43.160 | and create the business anyway,

01:09:45.040 | build the business community

01:09:46.560 | and through that method, create a huge amount of pressure

01:09:50.040 | to change the laws.

01:09:50.880 | - You're totally getting it with your last part

01:09:53.880 | because this is the other thing.

01:09:55.400 | And this is where I get so upset sometimes

01:09:58.480 | with my fellow Africans

01:10:00.440 | because they get so disgusted by what they're seeing.

01:10:03.440 | And they think the answer is to go for politics.

01:10:08.160 | Let's go be president.

01:10:09.320 | Let's go be this, let's go be that.

01:10:10.760 | And we're going to change everything.

01:10:12.000 | I see that in the US too.

01:10:13.480 | People thinking that presidents have all of this power.

01:10:15.960 | Do you know who has the least power in government?

01:10:17.560 | The president.

01:10:18.600 | I mean, people don't get that.

01:10:20.560 | Your best bet, if you insist on going into politics,

01:10:23.560 | stick to the local level.

01:10:25.360 | That's where all the skeletons are buried and hidden.

01:10:28.320 | And that's where you can make the most impact, local level.

01:10:31.200 | I know it's not shiny.

01:10:32.120 | I know it's not exciting, but that's where it's at.

01:10:34.600 | So if you must go into politics, but there's another way.

01:10:37.880 | So in my case, what I do is two things.

01:10:40.120 | I preach and I practice.

01:10:41.880 | I preach, when I'm here talking to you about this,

01:10:44.240 | I'm preaching.

01:10:45.360 | I am sharing with people that is which I found.

01:10:48.120 | And by the way, the answer was there.

01:10:51.280 | I was doing these two businesses,

01:10:52.880 | realizing the difference in treatment

01:10:54.880 | of the doing business environment of the US

01:10:59.200 | compared to the doing business environment of Senegal.

01:11:02.200 | And at first I was like, of course,

01:11:04.040 | us, everything is messed up.

01:11:05.680 | It's because we're a poor country.

01:11:07.480 | But when I started to put two and two together,

01:11:09.680 | I'm like, you're poor because you have no money,

01:11:12.040 | at least not enough money to take care of your basic needs.

01:11:14.720 | You have no money because you have no source of income.

01:11:17.720 | Where does a source of income come from for most of us?

01:11:21.120 | It comes from a job, doesn't it?

01:11:23.520 | And then some people sometimes at my UC Berkeley class,

01:11:26.200 | they say, "Oh no, it comes from government too."

01:11:29.080 | I'm like, I would like to think that even if you work

01:11:31.000 | for government, you're going to be paid something, right?

01:11:32.480 | And they're like, yeah.

01:11:33.320 | And then even before I can say something, they're like,

01:11:34.800 | "Oh yeah, because that money we used to pay

01:11:37.760 | our public officials comes from taxes,

01:11:42.240 | employers, employees, we go back to the private sector

01:11:45.280 | for most of it, from where this whole thing is created."

01:11:47.920 | So it's clear, you're poor because you have no money,

01:11:52.040 | no money because no source of income,

01:11:53.520 | source of income for most of us is a job.

01:11:55.280 | We're talking about, so where do jobs come from?

01:11:57.920 | The private sector, primarily small

01:12:00.000 | and medium-sized enterprises.

01:12:01.520 | Then don't you think that we should make it easy,

01:12:06.480 | that we should have friendly doing business environment?

01:12:11.480 | - And also a lot of it comes not just

01:12:16.200 | from the small and medium-sized businesses,

01:12:20.360 | but I think a lot of the value is created

01:12:23.240 | from new ones being launched.

01:12:25.320 | - Yes.

01:12:26.160 | - Right, it's not just like saving somehow

01:12:29.200 | through regulation, the ones that are already there.

01:12:31.120 | - No, no.

01:12:32.480 | - It's like letting the market,

01:12:35.120 | letting the new, better ideas flourish.

01:12:38.400 | - Yes, it's about what I mean by doing business environment

01:12:42.000 | is all the things that you and I talked about earlier.

01:12:45.320 | Even the access of electricity is part of doing business.

01:12:48.560 | But doing business, so basically when I've discovered

01:12:51.600 | all of that, when I put all of those dots together,

01:12:54.080 | then I'm like, "Well, I guess the business,"

01:12:56.440 | and it makes sense, Lex.

01:12:57.960 | If you want to grow tomatoes,

01:12:59.680 | you're going to have to have two things.

01:13:01.400 | One is a good seed, right, that has good attributes,

01:13:05.960 | and then you're going to have to have

01:13:07.720 | a good environment for it.

01:13:10.560 | Is the soil the right one?

01:13:12.440 | What's your pH level?

01:13:14.200 | All of those good nutrients that you're going to put in it.

01:13:16.120 | Is it in a place that has tons of sun?

01:13:18.200 | How much sun exposure or not?

01:13:19.960 | The climate in general, is it going to be cold?

01:13:21.520 | Not, not.

01:13:22.440 | You can't have some beautiful tomatoes

01:13:25.120 | in the middle of Siberia, last time I checked.

01:13:27.360 | So same thing here.

01:13:28.480 | You know, Mohammed Yunus, the Nobel Laureate for Peace,

01:13:33.040 | said, "Poor people are bonsai people.

01:13:36.600 | "They're the same people.

01:13:40.320 | "If you put them in the normal, natural,

01:13:42.640 | "friendly habitat where they can thrive,

01:13:46.600 | "they become the tallest tree in the forest.

01:13:49.560 | "Poor people are bonsai people."

01:13:51.400 | So you see that tiny pot you put around the bonsai tree?

01:13:55.440 | That's the tiny pot that's created

01:13:57.920 | by giving me such a hostile business environment

01:14:02.000 | that basically were put together by the set of laws

01:14:05.400 | that you have put, that basically I have to jump through

01:14:08.960 | as a business person, practicing business in my country.

01:14:12.800 | If you turn that environment into a friendly environment

01:14:17.800 | where I am not married to my employees,

01:14:20.640 | I have flexibility of the labor laws

01:14:24.160 | are simple, straightforward, clean,

01:14:26.880 | where the tax code is very simple.

01:14:29.600 | It's not worth truckloads of laws,

01:14:31.440 | like in my country, it's so complicated.

01:14:33.600 | You have to hire a CPA, which costs more money.

01:14:36.080 | And even them tell them,

01:14:37.280 | "Girl, we're gonna make some mistakes."

01:14:38.640 | They don't talk to me like that.

01:14:39.880 | It's in our country, you know, they don't say,

01:14:41.200 | "Girl, they shouldn't, they better not."

01:14:43.520 | But they say, whatever they say.

01:14:45.440 | - I'm scared, I'm scared.

01:14:47.760 | - You know?

01:14:48.600 | (laughing)

01:14:49.880 | You know, they're like, "We're gonna,

01:14:51.360 | "but bottom line is, we're gonna make mistakes.

01:14:53.640 | "This thing is so complicated, we're gonna make mistakes.

01:14:55.360 | "So which means, my ass is on the line."

01:14:57.960 | So anyway, so if the tax code was so simple,

01:15:02.000 | straightforward, like it is maybe in Texas,

01:15:04.520 | where up till a threshold, you owe me nothing,

01:15:07.360 | go online, five minutes, fill out your taxes,

01:15:10.360 | you're compliant, keep building your business,

01:15:13.720 | 'cause that's what we need from you.

01:15:15.080 | If you made it so easy and straightforward,

01:15:19.840 | then you know what?

01:15:20.800 | That's when you get all of these people,

01:15:22.720 | like what you're talking about, saying,

01:15:23.800 | "You know what?

01:15:24.640 | "My name is Aminata,

01:15:28.240 | "and I live in the middle of nowhere, Senegal,

01:15:30.480 | "but you know what?

01:15:31.320 | "I've got this great idea for this really hot,

01:15:33.400 | "nice hot sauce that I know the Americans are gonna love.

01:15:35.720 | "I'm hearing that hot sauce is a big thing.

01:15:38.320 | "Let me bring it to them."

01:15:39.840 | But everything is there for you to jump

01:15:41.560 | into the ring of entrepreneurship.

01:15:44.000 | You don't have to know someone like my God.

01:15:47.160 | You don't have to even have the ability to sell yourself,

01:15:51.160 | maybe like I can sometimes.

01:15:53.200 | You are someone with a great idea.

01:15:57.120 | You're willing to work hard for it

01:15:59.320 | and pour everything you got into it.

01:16:00.840 | Guess what?

01:16:01.680 | It's there.

01:16:04.040 | You can get into the race.

01:16:05.360 | - You can be a dreamer,

01:16:06.960 | and you can be a dreamer in a rural little village,

01:16:09.720 | and then that has ripple effects

01:16:11.520 | throughout the entire country.

01:16:12.640 | Young kids growing up,

01:16:14.120 | I wanna be the next X, whatever.

01:16:16.760 | And it doesn't have to be the next Steve Jobs.

01:16:19.800 | That seems really far, far away.

01:16:21.920 | - It's at all levels.

01:16:23.600 | You create local heroes because representation matters.

01:16:28.600 | And we are so badly in need of that.

01:16:33.840 | And so that's what all the things

01:16:36.120 | that have been stolen from us

01:16:37.320 | as long as things remain the same.

01:16:39.280 | So Lex, once I found out that basically at the end of the day

01:16:42.800 | the answer is economic freedom,

01:16:45.040 | and that when it comes to that,

01:16:46.440 | the economic indexes that measure that,

01:16:48.960 | whether it's the Dream Business Index ranking

01:16:50.600 | of the World Bank,

01:16:51.560 | or the Fraser Economic Freedom Index

01:16:54.360 | of the Heritage Foundation,

01:16:56.040 | when you look at all of those indexes and others,

01:16:58.720 | what do they have in common?

01:17:00.520 | One after another, they show you

01:17:02.120 | that it is harder to do business

01:17:05.160 | in almost anywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa

01:17:07.080 | than it is per se anywhere in Scandinavia.

01:17:11.040 | So it is telling you that Scandinavian nations,

01:17:14.440 | that socialist Americans tend to love so much

01:17:17.000 | and take as an example,

01:17:18.040 | although there too they're showing you

01:17:19.200 | that they don't understand

01:17:20.040 | what's going on really in Scandinavia,

01:17:22.600 | that Scandinavia is more capitalist.

01:17:25.840 | Scandinavian nations are more capitalist

01:17:27.840 | than almost any Sub-Saharan African nations.

01:17:30.880 | - Ultimately, the political systems

01:17:34.680 | actually don't even matter nearly as much

01:17:37.840 | as the private sector being able

01:17:41.520 | to operate the machinery of capitalism.

01:17:44.080 | - There you go.

01:17:44.960 | There you go.

01:17:46.000 | There you go.

01:17:47.000 | And it's almost like, like I said,

01:17:48.920 | it's almost like its own little widget within it.

01:17:51.600 | You can have whatever type of society

01:17:53.240 | you wanna exercise at whatever level you want to.

01:17:57.320 | But if you're serious about becoming

01:18:00.120 | a middle to high income nation,

01:18:03.440 | there is no other pathway that we know of at this point.

01:18:07.560 | And you know what made me super excited about that

01:18:11.120 | beyond having finally found my answer?

01:18:16.520 | I have to tell you, when I found that answer,

01:18:18.520 | I literally fell to my knees.

01:18:21.000 | It was the type of feeling that,

01:18:23.120 | you know, if something is not well with you,

01:18:28.160 | whether it's physical or mental,

01:18:30.280 | something is not well, you're not well.

01:18:32.640 | And you go around and you go to the so-called specialists,

01:18:35.400 | some of them, you know,

01:18:37.120 | but you're going around for years,

01:18:39.040 | going around trying to get help for your ailment.

01:18:42.720 | And here they don't know.

01:18:45.560 | Here they tell you things that you can't tell why,

01:18:48.360 | but you just know it's not true.

01:18:50.200 | There this, there that,

01:18:51.800 | and it's going on for years after year after year.

01:18:54.200 | And finally you meet this one person and boom, it's there.

01:18:59.200 | Not only the liberation,

01:19:02.720 | but also this whole new world that comes with it.

01:19:07.680 | You know, I'm still ill, but guess what?

01:19:12.680 | There's a path forward.

01:19:14.480 | We know that.

01:19:16.120 | I'm going to have a lot of work to do, but there's hope.

01:19:19.880 | - Yeah.

01:19:20.720 | - Right?

01:19:21.560 | - And you're the beacon of hope actually

01:19:23.800 | for a lot of people in that part of the world.

01:19:25.720 | And those beacons are actually really necessary.

01:19:28.240 | So not only is there hope, but you can become,

01:19:32.520 | I mean, the beacon for your people, your home,

01:19:37.520 | this power that you see, that you feel all around

01:19:40.840 | to escape the feeling of being trapped.

01:19:45.840 | Is there a device you can give to people that,

01:19:51.240 | to young girls and boys dreaming somewhere in Africa

01:19:56.240 | of how to change the world?

01:19:58.920 | - That's right.

01:19:59.800 | And by the way, I want to say there are bigger beacons,

01:20:03.040 | there are better beacons than me.

01:20:05.160 | I just happen to be someone who has the chance

01:20:08.920 | of talking to you right now.

01:20:10.400 | And one of my goals is to open the same doors

01:20:14.520 | that were open for me, because together, our voice,

01:20:17.520 | there's such amazing stories out there.

01:20:21.280 | And so bigger beacons, better beacons out there.

01:20:26.280 | One thing here for me, the reason why

01:20:31.400 | I do what I'm doing right now,

01:20:34.280 | and it's almost to a point of self-destructing my own health,

01:20:38.600 | I feel invested with such the mission of,

01:20:42.000 | I have been afforded the truth,

01:20:44.440 | so it is my moral duty to try to take it around.

01:20:46.880 | I know I sound, people sometimes say,

01:20:49.040 | when I listen to you, I feel like I'm talking to a priest.

01:20:52.720 | And I'm like, because the gospel, I receive the gospel.

01:20:57.560 | So anyway, but the thing is, Lex,

01:21:00.360 | who tells you these things to this day?

01:21:03.880 | When they talk about the poverty of Africa,

01:21:05.720 | what do they talk about?

01:21:06.920 | They sit in front telling you,

01:21:07.920 | oh yeah, it's because of colonialism,

01:21:09.320 | it's because of racism, it's because of imperialism,

01:21:12.040 | it's because they're stealing raw material, blah, blah, blah.

01:21:15.360 | Is any of those guilty to some level of where we are today?

01:21:20.360 | Maybe part of a reason where we are today?

01:21:24.360 | Maybe, maybe.

01:21:26.280 | Is that the only reason or the overwhelming reasons?

01:21:29.920 | No.

01:21:30.920 | Is that insurmountable?

01:21:32.440 | Absolutely not.

01:21:33.840 | So for me, don't stay in that place

01:21:36.400 | of that steals and robs you of your agency.

01:21:40.600 | So I think it's important for people

01:21:43.240 | to A, get the right diagnosis as to why we are where we are.

01:21:46.160 | Because what you and I just talked about,

01:21:48.360 | the mainstream does not talk about this

01:21:51.000 | when they even talk about Africa

01:21:52.920 | in terms that are not the usual suspect of,

01:21:55.960 | oh, famine is building over there,

01:21:57.920 | war is building over here,

01:21:59.000 | oh, we're having Ebola is coming, all of that stuff.

01:22:01.160 | Even when they were talking about the monkeypox,

01:22:03.160 | which at first, in this wave,

01:22:05.920 | it started with white people in Europe.

01:22:08.000 | Well, even in the many newspapers you pull out,

01:22:10.200 | it's black people with monkeypox on their skin.

01:22:14.080 | I'm like, wait a second, this time around,

01:22:15.840 | we, it did not start with us.

01:22:17.440 | So why are you always showing us

01:22:19.240 | when it's right now happening to white people?

01:22:22.160 | So all of that is happening.

01:22:24.480 | So for me, the thing is,

01:22:26.760 | we, the world simply right now,

01:22:29.760 | does not have the right diagnosis

01:22:32.480 | as to why this continent right now,

01:22:34.640 | despite all of its riches,

01:22:36.600 | because Lord knows it's got riches,

01:22:38.320 | starting with its young population.

01:22:40.560 | 75% of the population in my country

01:22:42.440 | is below the age of 25 years old.

01:22:44.680 | So when we're talking, I know we're talking about,

01:22:47.120 | you know, repopulation, you know, is important.

01:22:50.960 | We're gonna have to go for that.

01:22:52.560 | Maybe you'll get me going about climate change,

01:22:55.040 | I don't know, but anyway.

01:22:57.440 | So here, my point is,

01:22:58.760 | A, we need the right diagnosis

01:23:00.200 | as to why this continent

01:23:01.560 | is the poorest continent in the world,

01:23:03.280 | despite its riches, starting with its young people,

01:23:06.080 | all the natural resources, diversity in land,

01:23:08.920 | people, cultures, languages,

01:23:10.880 | everything that make for great ingredient for awesomeness.

01:23:15.720 | Despite all of that,

01:23:16.920 | we are the poorest region in the world.

01:23:18.680 | People need to know that the reason why that is,

01:23:21.880 | it's because we also happen to be

01:23:24.000 | the most over-regulated region in the world.

01:23:27.800 | At the end of the day, what Africa,

01:23:30.120 | and I dare to say Africa here,

01:23:32.400 | and treated as one,

01:23:34.360 | we are 54 countries, 55 depending on how you count,

01:23:37.560 | yet we almost, for a tiny minority of these countries,

01:23:42.560 | we almost all lack one of the most crucial freedoms

01:23:48.440 | that there are.

01:23:49.640 | If you're serious about prosperity building,

01:23:52.040 | we lack economic freedom.

01:23:54.680 | - And economic freedom is the thing

01:23:56.160 | that unlocks that human potential,

01:23:58.000 | the young people just-- - Yes.

01:23:59.920 | - For them to run, to run with their ideas,

01:24:03.520 | to start businesses, or to start initiative.

01:24:06.680 | It doesn't have to be for profit all the time, right?

01:24:09.240 | But it is this thing that gets you to get up

01:24:13.000 | and go and do something, criticize by creating.

01:24:16.320 | Young people are naturally wired

01:24:17.960 | to want to criticize by creating.

01:24:19.640 | They're not sitting around waiting or complaining usually,

01:24:22.240 | unless you put them in a tiny box

01:24:23.600 | and they have no other way to go.

01:24:25.080 | And in this situation, what they do,

01:24:27.320 | let's talk about pre-colonial Africa,

01:24:29.560 | of four fathers before slavery ever happened,

01:24:33.440 | there were black people on the continent.

01:24:35.680 | You see, when we talk about the story of black people

01:24:38.040 | and Africans, black people in Africa,

01:24:41.360 | for most of us, even me,

01:24:43.080 | I noticed that unconsciously, it starts with slavery.

01:24:47.360 | But you're like, no, we were there before,

01:24:49.520 | before white men ever set foot.

01:24:50.800 | Who were we?

01:24:51.760 | What were we doing in our diversity?

01:24:54.840 | What economic systems were we running on?

01:24:58.880 | And then you realize that for most of them,

01:25:00.800 | they were free marketeers

01:25:02.480 | and they were very much on the free trade,

01:25:04.040 | on the free enterprise side.

01:25:05.760 | So even that is a reinforcement.

01:25:07.720 | This is a place where we do not understand our history.

01:25:12.240 | So proper diagnosis,

01:25:13.640 | Africa is the poorest region in the world

01:25:15.320 | because it happens to be the most over-regulated region

01:25:18.720 | in the world, lacks economic freedom.

01:25:21.240 | Number two, what do we do about that?

01:25:22.960 | We got to become serious about reforms,

01:25:25.480 | economic reforms,

01:25:26.320 | so that we can become beacons of free markets.

01:25:31.280 | Just like the Asian tigers,

01:25:32.760 | that's what the Asian tigers did.

01:25:34.320 | They had to become serious.

01:25:35.640 | Singapore, Taiwan, South Korea,

01:25:39.120 | those guys had to become serious about the free markets.

01:25:43.480 | Lee Kuan Yew, when he's just like,

01:25:47.680 | "We got to do something."

01:25:49.080 | And he looked around and he realized at some point,

01:25:52.240 | "We got to make these reforms."

01:25:53.640 | And he went on to that journey of reforms,

01:25:56.600 | making his country one of the most free market countries

01:25:59.440 | in the world.

01:26:00.280 | And voila, the magic happened.

01:26:02.520 | Back in the '30s, the stock market crash

01:26:06.280 | and the Great Depression and everything,

01:26:08.520 | the world, and with all the lies that were told

01:26:11.720 | to the world coming from the Soviet Union, Stalin,

01:26:15.440 | while they were starving and dying over there,

01:26:17.800 | but oh no, I mean, Durante was telling the world that,

01:26:21.000 | "Oh no, no, everything is going well.

01:26:22.560 | Nobody's dying when we know now."

01:26:24.520 | And getting political prices based on this stuff.

01:26:26.840 | But then the world went on believing that,

01:26:29.400 | "Oh no, capitalism failed.

01:26:31.960 | This crash that you had in the stock market is proof.

01:26:36.960 | This is what late stage capitalism produces.

01:26:41.200 | You guys always have your big ups and downs."

01:26:43.240 | And by that time, it was so hard on people

01:26:45.080 | that they're like, "We're done with this."

01:26:46.680 | And at the same time, we're told the lies

01:26:48.560 | coming out of the Soviet Union

01:26:49.400 | that supposedly the communism was doing just fine.

01:26:52.200 | And you're at the point where the free market concept

01:26:54.560 | almost died and it's the Asian tigers

01:26:59.560 | who kind of helped bring that idea back to life, right?

01:27:04.520 | Their success having used the free markets.

01:27:06.920 | And so for me, we gotta make a new commitment

01:27:11.640 | to the free markets on this continent

01:27:13.040 | if we wanna go anywhere, if we wanna go anywhere.

01:27:15.680 | - And the timing is perfect because the young people,

01:27:18.720 | there is a kind of freedom for the revolutionary

01:27:23.720 | free markets in this whole space.

01:27:25.800 | - Exactly, and you said something,

01:27:27.560 | oh, say that again, because I wanna tell you

01:27:29.760 | what I'm hearing in that,

01:27:30.840 | 'cause something's really cool.

01:27:31.760 | Say it again, come on, Lex.

01:27:33.000 | - I don't know which part.

01:27:34.080 | English is my second language too.

01:27:36.520 | - No, you said there's something revolutionary in that.

01:27:40.680 | 'Cause you know how young people

01:27:41.520 | are attached to the revolution and how,

01:27:44.280 | I understand, look, Lex, I understand

01:27:48.760 | and I am willing to give the benefits of a doubt

01:27:52.000 | to some of these socialists who came to it

01:27:55.800 | because they had to witness some of the horrors

01:27:59.760 | of their times.

01:28:02.080 | - There's a revolutionary spirit behind that.

01:28:05.280 | It's ultimately criticized by creating.

01:28:08.840 | - Exactly, exactly, but violent revolution

01:28:11.400 | is never the answer.

01:28:12.760 | But that's what they went for in 1789 in France,

01:28:15.240 | you know, the French revolution.

01:28:16.800 | And then Marx and Engels, they're promoting these ideas

01:28:20.920 | that usually for them justifies violent revolution.

01:28:24.120 | Then in all of these people,

01:28:25.560 | I am with them when they say that they want

01:28:30.080 | to see equal rights for people.

01:28:32.080 | Of course, I don't agree with their,

01:28:33.480 | therefore we need to push for equal outcomes.

01:28:37.040 | Equal rights is right, but equal outcomes is not, right?

01:28:39.800 | But I am with them for all the way to equal rights,

01:28:43.120 | but this is where the two paths go this way.

01:28:45.840 | And also, the fact that they have no issue

01:28:50.280 | with violent revolution, that people get killed,

01:28:53.200 | you know, people get put in gulags and people get,

01:28:56.280 | that's not right.

01:28:57.600 | So what you just said here just gives me goosebumps

01:28:59.880 | because there is revolution in the free markets,

01:29:02.960 | but that's the type of revolution we want.

01:29:04.800 | The revolution that comes from people creating,

01:29:07.280 | criticizing by creating, it's one of the best forms

01:29:09.720 | of revolution.

01:29:10.560 | If you ask me, that's the most sexy way of revolution.

01:29:14.880 | Criticize by creating.

01:29:16.040 | But what, you're gonna go shoot people

01:29:17.640 | or be like, what's his name?

01:29:19.520 | The Che Guevara who tells you, I love,

01:29:23.320 | it's in writing, I love nothing more than to fry

01:29:26.520 | the brain of a man with his gun?

01:29:30.080 | Really?

01:29:30.920 | - Well, in terms of sexy, there is power in that message

01:29:35.680 | of the oppressor, the abuser, the enemy that has abused

01:29:40.680 | their power, they need to be destroyed.

01:29:44.320 | And there's power in the message of that violence.

01:29:47.720 | Unfortunately, the lessons of history show

01:29:49.520 | that the violence, one, doesn't work,

01:29:53.200 | but it does the following.

01:29:56.000 | There is something about human nature,

01:29:57.520 | as the old cliche goes, that power corrupts

01:29:59.640 | and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

01:30:01.720 | It's the people who are in charge of committing

01:30:04.600 | that violence, it does something to their head.

01:30:07.800 | The first person you kill, the second person you kill,

01:30:10.960 | for some reason, you lose your ability,

01:30:13.960 | the compassion for other humans.

01:30:16.120 | Even if you began as a revolutionary,

01:30:18.560 | as the Soviets did, fighting for the worker,

01:30:21.360 | for the rights and the basic humanity

01:30:25.520 | of the people that really do the work,

01:30:27.520 | you lose the plot somehow because of the violence.

01:30:33.640 | So in that way, it seems like the lesson,

01:30:36.600 | at least of this part of the human history,

01:30:38.800 | until the robots take over, is that the economic freedom,

01:30:42.800 | free markets, and protecting those,

01:30:46.880 | and allowing anyone from your country to dream

01:30:51.880 | and to make that dream a reality by creating it

01:30:56.320 | with as few roadblocks as possible.

01:31:01.520 | - Exactly, so that's why for me,

01:31:04.640 | the message is very clear, is what we talked about today.

01:31:07.680 | The reason why Africa is the poorest region in the world

01:31:09.680 | is because it happens to be the most overregulated region

01:31:13.240 | in the world, and for some people who might be put off by it

01:31:18.160 | because they're like, "Oh, she's talking about laissez-faire!"

01:31:20.680 | No, let me put it maybe in a way that you can understand.

01:31:24.920 | Do you think that it should be as easy

01:31:28.280 | for any person in Africa, for any entrepreneur in Africa

01:31:31.040 | to enterprise than it is for any person

01:31:34.000 | in Scandinavia to enterprise?

01:31:36.360 | If your answer is yes, which I would hope it is,

01:31:39.200 | then you have a moral obligation to work with me

01:31:43.120 | to make my country and as a whole,

01:31:46.320 | my continent more free markets.

01:31:48.520 | It's that simple.

01:31:49.440 | At that point, there's no like,

01:31:51.000 | "Yes, but on the other hand, uh-uh, no."

01:31:53.800 | As for me, on that question,

01:31:54.840 | and I've yet to find somebody who claims to say no.

01:31:57.280 | If you say no, then we have a whole nother problem.

01:31:59.480 | I'm not even talking to you at that point anymore.

01:32:01.240 | So, yeah.

01:32:02.080 | - So, just to clarify, there's a perception

01:32:05.560 | and some reality that the Scandinavian countries

01:32:08.360 | have elements of socialism in their politics

01:32:10.960 | and their society, even in their economics.

01:32:14.360 | So, at the very least, Africa should have,

01:32:18.600 | in terms of economic indices,

01:32:21.240 | should be as free as the Scandinavian countries.

01:32:24.720 | You're just giving that example.

01:32:25.560 | - As economically free, yes.

01:32:27.120 | Because the Scandinavian, they do have

01:32:29.760 | a subsidized welfare system,

01:32:34.520 | that's a more socialized welfare system,

01:32:37.600 | but the way they make their money

01:32:39.200 | is very much the way of the free markets.

01:32:41.440 | So, there is how you make your money,

01:32:43.200 | and then there's how you maybe decide

01:32:44.680 | as a country to redistribute it, right?

01:32:49.040 | And so, even there, even in Scandinavia,

01:32:54.040 | again, yes, they have more economic freedom.

01:32:56.560 | So, then from there, Lex, where we go is,

01:32:58.600 | my job and my goal is for every single African,

01:33:04.960 | young and old,

01:33:06.480 | to know what I have come to learn.

01:33:12.160 | We are not doomed.

01:33:14.320 | It's not over for us.

01:33:18.640 | We will never catch up.

01:33:21.240 | The time for catch up is gone, but guess what?

01:33:24.760 | We've got a strong, strong possibility

01:33:27.600 | and chance to leapfrog.

01:33:29.000 | And leapfrog we will.

01:33:32.200 | It is still time, but for that to happen,

01:33:35.680 | like I said, we need to know

01:33:36.960 | what we just talked about today,

01:33:38.120 | because that is not what the mainstream

01:33:40.440 | keeps us abreast with.

01:33:41.880 | When you go to the World Bank,

01:33:43.800 | they don't necessarily work along these lines.

01:33:46.440 | They're still, it's not, when you go to universities,

01:33:51.280 | I will ask you, MIT, the MIT Econ Department,

01:33:54.560 | or even some, most of the professors,

01:33:57.000 | are they free market oriented?

01:33:58.240 | We find that oftentimes in academia,

01:34:01.080 | there is a strong anti-capitalist bias.

01:34:03.840 | There is a strong anti-free market bias.

01:34:06.920 | So, this is a problem.

01:34:08.840 | This is a problem.

01:34:09.800 | - Nobody cares about the economists anyway.

01:34:11.840 | (Lexi laughs)

01:34:12.760 | - So, we move forward.

01:34:14.360 | - In MIT, the spirit of the entrepreneur burns bright.

01:34:18.880 | Not in the economics department,

01:34:21.000 | because they just write op-ed articles,

01:34:23.920 | but in the dreamers, the young undergrads

01:34:26.360 | that actually build something.

01:34:27.960 | - No, I get that, but then we cannot be stifling

01:34:30.840 | their efforts by putting these artificially made

01:34:35.840 | regulations and laws that stand in the way

01:34:38.000 | and clip their wings.

01:34:39.160 | So, that's why, when you were saying,

01:34:41.040 | what advice do you give to them?

01:34:43.160 | The advice I give to them is, each one of them,

01:34:47.120 | they have to pay attention to this discourse we just had.

01:34:51.520 | I don't ask anybody to agree with me

01:34:53.560 | on face value.

01:34:55.400 | Go back, do like I had to do.

01:34:57.120 | I come very much from the left of the left,

01:34:58.600 | if you can believe that.

01:34:59.880 | But I had to have my own intellectual journey.

01:35:02.360 | And in this case, my intellectual journey

01:35:04.240 | was very much complemented by my own life,

01:35:08.080 | having to build these companies on two separate continents

01:35:12.600 | and having to, I had front row seat of the differences.

01:35:17.160 | At first, I thought it was this way just because we're poor

01:35:20.080 | and therefore we messed up and therefore it's like this.

01:35:22.680 | But eventually I learned that, no, we're poor

01:35:24.960 | because we lack economic freedom.

01:35:26.280 | And if a country allows its citizens

01:35:28.080 | the economic freedom to enterprise,

01:35:29.840 | then they become rich.

01:35:31.480 | So, I had it upside down, you see.

01:35:33.520 | And so, it's important for people to know that.

01:35:35.400 | So, number one, know your facts.

01:35:38.280 | Because your facts will empower you.

01:35:41.720 | In this case, I like to use that word.

01:35:43.560 | Facts will empower you and they will even furthermore,

01:35:46.120 | they will power you.

01:35:47.640 | Empower and power you.

01:35:49.280 | 'Cause empower is like inside

01:35:50.760 | and power is like I push you.

01:35:52.480 | Forward and up.

01:35:53.760 | So, that's what it does to know the facts.

01:35:56.840 | And then, go on and look around you.

01:36:00.400 | Where are the best practices of this?

01:36:02.560 | Who is at the cutting edge of a free market?

01:36:05.760 | We're starting a way there.

01:36:07.160 | People don't necessarily be left behind

01:36:10.440 | or anything like that.

01:36:11.520 | We're in 2022 for Christ's sake.

01:36:13.720 | We don't have to do entrepreneurship the same way

01:36:16.240 | maybe it was done 50 years ago, 100 years ago

01:36:18.720 | when as a community, as a people,

01:36:20.360 | we were maybe less enlightened because of our times.

01:36:23.240 | We can update this thing and move forward

01:36:26.400 | but update is definitely not build back,

01:36:29.560 | what do they call it?

01:36:30.400 | Build back new or whatever they're calling it,

01:36:32.160 | the WF, whatever nonsense and stuff

01:36:35.560 | they're smoking over there.

01:36:36.640 | It's not that.

01:36:37.480 | There are some principles that are universal

01:36:39.720 | and that stand the test of time.

01:36:41.880 | Those, we have to keep.

01:36:43.440 | And on top, add the new things we learned

01:36:47.360 | from our times and from life.

01:36:49.440 | So that's what I want them to know.

01:36:51.560 | Learn new facts, be empowered and powered

01:36:54.880 | and then look around, think about

01:36:57.160 | and look to see where the best practices are

01:37:00.520 | around the world because the world is yours.

01:37:02.560 | You might be African but the world is yours.

01:37:04.720 | So stop this nonsense of,

01:37:06.200 | oh well, it's done by white people

01:37:07.800 | so we're not going to do it.

01:37:09.120 | Get the best that exists in humanity

01:37:12.960 | for what you're trying to solve.

01:37:15.120 | And on top of that, put your own twist.

01:37:19.200 | Bitcoin is all of ours to take.

01:37:22.520 | Bitcoin is not the white man's thing.

01:37:24.200 | So therefore, oh, come on,

01:37:25.520 | because we have a misguided pride.

01:37:27.240 | We're not going to use Bitcoin

01:37:28.080 | because it's white man's stuff.

01:37:29.400 | Bitcoin is math, you idiot.

01:37:31.000 | Math is universal so it belongs to all of us.

01:37:34.280 | - There's no color.

01:37:35.240 | - Exactly.

01:37:36.080 | - In the space of economics, in the space of ideas.

01:37:39.680 | - Ideas.

01:37:40.720 | - And there's a chance to leapfrog too.

01:37:42.720 | - Exactly.

01:37:43.560 | - Which is really, really powerful.

01:37:44.880 | - Exactly.

01:37:45.720 | Because here we will leapfrog.

01:37:47.680 | And Lex, I'm not crazy.

01:37:49.400 | This is going to happen.

01:37:50.840 | You mark my words.

01:37:52.640 | But it's going to happen if as many people

01:37:55.040 | hear what we're talking about today.

01:37:56.840 | Because at some point, the solution is not going to come.

01:38:00.280 | It's not me.

01:38:01.400 | It's not, it's going to come from the wisdom of a crowd.

01:38:04.800 | This is why I love the crowd.

01:38:07.040 | There's no better wisdom than the crowd

01:38:08.640 | and that's also why I believe in the free markets.

01:38:10.680 | This concept of emergent order.

01:38:12.560 | There's no way, there's no central planning

01:38:15.480 | that is smart enough,

01:38:16.640 | that has the level of intel that street level people have.

01:38:20.560 | Trying to create something.

01:38:22.960 | It's just, we just have to be humble.

01:38:24.760 | There's just something at the bottom of a pyramid

01:38:27.560 | that just bubbles up and happens.

01:38:29.800 | They're the best.

01:38:31.440 | - I think the cynicism, the idea that people are dumb

01:38:34.680 | is at the core of a lot of things

01:38:37.960 | that prevent the flourishing of society.

01:38:41.160 | You know, this kind of anecdotally people are like,

01:38:42.920 | yeah, everyone's stupid and people say that jokingly.

01:38:46.080 | But the reality is people are incredible.

01:38:49.680 | They have the capacity for kindness, for love,

01:38:53.280 | for innovation, for brilliance in all kinds of dimensions.

01:38:57.640 | You might suck at math,

01:38:59.760 | but you might be amazing at carpentry.

01:39:02.200 | You have to find that thing.

01:39:03.640 | And there's something about

01:39:05.520 | when there's freedom to find that thing

01:39:07.440 | and people interact, they get excited about shit together

01:39:10.160 | and then they build.

01:39:12.120 | It's, if you look at authoritarian,

01:39:14.720 | at places that limit that freedom,

01:39:18.520 | at the core, I think, is the idea that people are dumb.

01:39:22.360 | Let us take care of everything.

01:39:24.120 | We'll come up with the rules and the regulations

01:39:26.240 | 'cause people are too dumb to manage things themselves.

01:39:28.960 | And then that idea builds on top of itself

01:39:33.000 | where you think that the entire populace

01:39:35.800 | is much lesser than the wise sages sitting at the top.

01:39:39.600 | Then you add violence on top of that

01:39:41.200 | and that leads to corruption,

01:39:43.640 | to corrupting of just the human mind of the leaders.

01:39:46.360 | And the whole thing becomes a giant mess.

01:39:49.840 | The antidote to that is economic freedom.

01:39:54.560 | - For people to have a freedom to enterprise.

01:39:56.480 | And look, Lex, when we allow for that to happen,

01:40:01.480 | have you looked around lately

01:40:02.840 | and look at the level of niche

01:40:06.080 | that has happened in this country?

01:40:08.080 | I mean, you have clubs where,

01:40:10.400 | you have places where people are into guitar strings,

01:40:13.160 | you know, like some of the,

01:40:14.200 | like it's all about guitar strings.

01:40:16.840 | And others, it's all about these best cupcakes.

01:40:19.840 | And others, it's all about this new crypto thing over here.

01:40:23.560 | And others, like hair, best, you know, weight.

01:40:27.560 | When you allow us, because seven billion geniuses,

01:40:33.560 | each one of us, I believe, came to this world

01:40:36.800 | with something, something that only he or her possesses.

01:40:41.600 | And that is the genius,

01:40:43.080 | and it is their contribution to the human problem.

01:40:47.360 | - When you think about your identity today,

01:40:49.440 | so it all started in Africa,

01:40:52.040 | just like it did for the entirety of the human species.

01:40:55.280 | There's a bit of European flavor in there,

01:40:57.080 | a little French, Silicon Valley,

01:41:00.880 | you're now in part a Texan.

01:41:05.120 | There's, you really are an American,

01:41:08.480 | but you're also an African.

01:41:11.280 | Who are you when you look in the mirror,

01:41:13.720 | when you think about yourself, when you listen,

01:41:16.480 | when everything gets quiet and you listen to your heart,

01:41:19.080 | who are you?

01:41:20.440 | Can you figure out that puzzle?

01:41:23.000 | - That's a very interesting question

01:41:25.160 | because it's been a long time I haven't asked myself.

01:41:30.160 | I have before.

01:41:32.360 | (silence)

01:41:34.520 | What I have found is,

01:41:44.680 | I think who I am today has been for sure shaped by,

01:41:52.800 | I call it Dakar, Paris, San Francisco.

01:41:55.320 | Dakar is Senegal, Paris, France,

01:41:59.400 | and San Francisco primarily.

01:42:01.040 | And now, yeah, I think I might wanna ask,

01:42:02.720 | there's a little bit of Texan in there.

01:42:04.680 | - How do you say Texas in French?

01:42:06.280 | (laughs)

01:42:07.120 | - Texas.

01:42:07.960 | - Texas.

01:42:08.800 | - Texas.

01:42:10.040 | - So--

01:42:10.880 | - Austin, Texas.

01:42:11.720 | - Austin, Texas.

01:42:12.560 | - Austin.

01:42:13.380 | - Austin, Texas.

01:42:14.220 | (laughs)

01:42:15.240 | It's easy.

01:42:16.080 | - Not quite as good.

01:42:16.900 | - Austin, Texas.

01:42:17.740 | - Yeah.

01:42:18.580 | - Yeah.

01:42:19.400 | - Us, Texas.

01:42:20.240 | - Us.

01:42:21.080 | - Us, Texas, yeah.

01:42:22.120 | So,

01:42:22.960 | I was formed by those three.

01:42:30.280 | I have to say that what I enjoy from my Senegalese roots

01:42:35.280 | are our commitment to peace, love, and tolerance,

01:42:40.480 | very much,

01:42:41.720 | and Taranga, obviously.

01:42:46.300 | And I like that it's a culture

01:42:50.480 | that's very much about reverence.

01:42:53.280 | It's, we're big on reverence.

01:42:54.740 | I don't think you could ever hear me

01:42:58.720 | tell an older person, especially not my parents

01:43:02.080 | or my grandma or anybody like that,

01:43:04.240 | for us to be able to tell an older person,

01:43:07.120 | that's not true or you're lying,

01:43:09.920 | it would never cross my mind

01:43:11.480 | because that's the most disrespectful thing you can think of,

01:43:13.480 | the most irreverent thing you can think of.

01:43:15.760 | It doesn't mean that you have to agree

01:43:17.080 | with everything that's said,

01:43:19.240 | but there's a way to disagree.

01:43:21.880 | There's a way to push back

01:43:23.440 | that doesn't have to rob this person

01:43:25.720 | who happens to be older than you,

01:43:26.920 | especially from the dignity

01:43:29.680 | that older age normally provides.

01:43:32.000 | - And there's wisdom to their words

01:43:33.720 | that you yourself may not see.

01:43:36.320 | So the reverence is for the idea of wisdom, of tradition.

01:43:40.320 | - Exactly, exactly.

01:43:42.600 | And again, so that is something that I really enjoy,

01:43:47.000 | especially and something I'm very attached to, to this day.

01:43:50.060 | And then from France, what I had to,

01:43:54.200 | what I really came to enjoy, of course,

01:43:56.600 | is all the fineness that one can find

01:44:00.320 | within French culture.

01:44:02.120 | - The fineness?

01:44:03.360 | - Yeah, the fineness.

01:44:04.400 | Foods, the line.

01:44:06.000 | - You mean like the intricacies,

01:44:07.520 | like the very--

01:44:08.760 | - Yeah, the sophistication in there.

01:44:11.640 | I mean, French lingerie, for example.

01:44:14.120 | I mean, la dentelle, the laces, all of that, super,

01:44:19.120 | it's exquisite.

01:44:22.560 | So the--

01:44:23.560 | - Fashion, the food.

01:44:24.640 | - Fashion, the food.

01:44:26.040 | I mean, there's something to be said about all of that,

01:44:27.520 | and it's very beautiful.

01:44:29.480 | And I love also, even when I talk about fineness,

01:44:32.680 | it's like a meal is not about like this big thing

01:44:34.760 | they put in front of you,

01:44:36.040 | but smaller portions, enjoy what you're eating

01:44:39.200 | and spend time at the table.

01:44:40.240 | Like the eating time is not necessarily

01:44:42.400 | just this function of feeding yourself,

01:44:44.280 | which I understand it,

01:44:46.480 | but for, this is something that they share

01:44:49.560 | with Senegalese culture,

01:44:51.560 | is eating is a moment of communion.

01:44:55.200 | It's a moment of friendship, family.

01:44:57.960 | It's a precious moment.

01:45:00.560 | To this day, and my husband is American,

01:45:03.800 | we eat our meals together all the time.

01:45:06.600 | There's, I would not have it any other way.

01:45:09.120 | And there's a prep time, all of that stuff.

01:45:11.120 | It doesn't matter how busy I am, but we're doing it.

01:45:13.840 | - Actually, to push back a little bit, it's interesting,

01:45:16.040 | 'cause yeah, the camaraderie over a meal

01:45:18.280 | is a beautiful thing.

01:45:20.160 | I got, I mean, I was in a pretty dark place

01:45:22.960 | 'cause on the way to Ukraine, I traveled to Paris.

01:45:25.440 | I stayed in Paris and I wasn't able to enjoy the fineness

01:45:30.440 | because it was almost a distraction from the humanity

01:45:35.040 | for some reason to me,

01:45:36.360 | because there's such a focus on the art of it all

01:45:39.160 | that you lose the basic connection to humanity.

01:45:42.560 | Now, that said--

01:45:44.240 | - Depends what you're talking about.

01:45:45.240 | - I think some of the lack of connection over humanity

01:45:48.720 | was the fact that while I did know how to speak French

01:45:51.720 | for a long time, I forgot most of the language.

01:45:54.400 | And so part of it, there is a barrier.

01:45:58.120 | You said hospitality.

01:45:59.600 | There is a bit of a barrier in French culture

01:46:03.360 | to where in order to be welcomed in,

01:46:05.960 | you have to hear the music

01:46:09.400 | and be able to play the music of the people.

01:46:12.200 | And if you don't, there's a bit of a barrier.

01:46:16.440 | - I must admit on that and that it is true.

01:46:19.840 | You would feel less that if you were

01:46:22.040 | with a group of Senegalese people per se,

01:46:24.120 | or I would even say if a group of Spanish people.

01:46:27.520 | And I think this is maybe the other side of it

01:46:31.720 | for the French people.

01:46:32.640 | They can be a little bit uppity up there.

01:46:35.200 | And I think maybe that's what you're sensing there.

01:46:38.360 | If you don't have the codes,

01:46:40.320 | which is what you call the, you don't sing the music,

01:46:42.920 | then it's hard for you to be part of it.

01:46:45.440 | But I was speaking here from the standpoint of you're in.

01:46:48.640 | - Yeah, from the inside.

01:46:51.080 | Also, come on, come on.

01:46:52.800 | Coming from Texas and also Ukraine,

01:46:54.960 | Ukraine, I should say some of the best steak and meat

01:46:58.560 | I've ever had, cheap.

01:47:00.640 | Texas, some of the greatest.

01:47:03.120 | The size of the meals in France,

01:47:07.000 | it's like, what are we doing here?

01:47:08.720 | I get it's art.

01:47:11.880 | I like to look at my art on the wall

01:47:14.600 | and then eat my damn steak.

01:47:16.720 | - Did you go?

01:47:17.560 | So maybe, okay, no, no, no, no.

01:47:19.000 | Okay, now here I have to defend them

01:47:20.320 | although sometimes I'm the worst.

01:47:22.080 | No, did you go to some Michelin star restaurant?

01:47:25.440 | Maybe that's why.

01:47:26.280 | - Yeah, a little bit.

01:47:27.120 | - That's why.

01:47:27.960 | - A little bit.

01:47:28.800 | - Because next time you go to France,

01:47:29.640 | I'll take you to the countryside or any French home.

01:47:34.640 | They will serve you multiple times.

01:47:38.040 | I mean, by the time you're done,

01:47:41.240 | even if it's, the portions are smaller.

01:47:43.200 | They're smaller if you want to,

01:47:44.040 | but because that way you get a chance to really

01:47:47.000 | feel what you're eating and then have more

01:47:48.640 | and then all of that stuff,

01:47:49.480 | but not be like, ah, like this.

01:47:50.640 | And then, but no, you'll eat plenty,

01:47:52.920 | but it's because you went to the Michelin places

01:47:55.000 | where they're like.

01:47:55.840 | - I'm sure the warmth of the people is there.

01:47:57.800 | It almost makes me sad that sometimes,

01:48:00.600 | I think to properly be in a place,

01:48:03.000 | you really should spend a long time there.

01:48:04.800 | - Yeah, a long time.

01:48:05.640 | - And also be emotionally ready.

01:48:06.640 | Again, I was emotionally unavailable.

01:48:09.360 | I was just like.

01:48:10.200 | - Well, I would imagine on your way to the Ukraine,

01:48:11.440 | I'm like, who can think about food?

01:48:13.200 | - But in your identity, a bit of Texas,

01:48:16.240 | a bit of San Francisco.

01:48:17.880 | - Yeah, San Francisco.

01:48:20.560 | And I guess from America,

01:48:23.680 | the defining thing for me for America is,

01:48:28.040 | it's the freedom and the entrepreneurial mindset.

01:48:33.040 | See, very quickly, when I moved from France

01:48:35.880 | to the United States and I started becoming successful

01:48:39.040 | in the United States, I found myself,

01:48:41.520 | me and my husband, he was French

01:48:43.280 | and my first husband, who passed away.

01:48:45.880 | We found ourselves at some point,

01:48:47.200 | we stopped talking to our friends in France

01:48:50.520 | who stayed in France,

01:48:52.280 | because we were talking to them about things

01:48:55.840 | that were so outside of their comprehension.

01:49:00.360 | What do you mean you're in your 20s

01:49:04.280 | and you just raised, I don't know,

01:49:09.280 | a million dollars or $2 million,

01:49:10.680 | especially from back in those days.

01:49:11.840 | Today, it's easy here and there.

01:49:13.520 | - So even in France, that entrepreneurial spirit

01:49:15.560 | didn't burn quite as bright.

01:49:16.800 | - I mean, don't take me wrong.

01:49:19.560 | Do you have some entrepreneurial people in France?

01:49:21.520 | Yeah, but to the level that you have it in the US?

01:49:23.880 | Absolutely not.

01:49:25.000 | It's just, I mean, in France, it's still very much,

01:49:28.120 | you're born in this area, you go to school in that area,

01:49:31.040 | your parents live around, eventually you'll marry

01:49:33.840 | and be where your parents are,

01:49:35.080 | or maybe go to where your spouse's parents are,

01:49:38.280 | and you buy your house and you buy it once

01:49:40.720 | and you're not going to do like the Americans,

01:49:42.640 | two years later, I sell my house, I go somewhere else.

01:49:44.760 | You don't have any of, what do you mean,

01:49:46.800 | like just stopping from nowhere,

01:49:48.960 | you're going to do what, start a business

01:49:51.000 | and you have nothing to back you up or whatever?

01:49:53.400 | Oh, and even this idea of going and fundraising,

01:49:57.760 | this venture cap, especially back in the days,

01:49:59.720 | venture cap, all of that, it's very American.

01:50:02.040 | We take it for granted, but it's very American.

01:50:03.560 | Who would have made a bet on me in France?

01:50:06.440 | The same person.

01:50:07.640 | I would not have found the same people.

01:50:09.480 | I would never in France have been able to raise,

01:50:13.400 | at some point it was $32 million for my first business,

01:50:16.040 | never would have been able to do that in France.

01:50:18.400 | And it doesn't mean that French people are bad people

01:50:19.920 | or anything like that.

01:50:20.760 | It's just something that's just not so in the culture.

01:50:24.560 | Just like this whole concept of philanthropy,

01:50:27.120 | it's not that the French people don't do philanthropy,

01:50:29.200 | but philanthropy in America is very different

01:50:31.680 | from the level and also the magnitude

01:50:34.280 | of maybe what the French people do.

01:50:35.920 | And also they have this, always like,

01:50:37.960 | oh, let's do it behind the scene.

01:50:39.640 | Money is suspicious, success is suspicious.

01:50:42.440 | So at some point my husband and I just felt like

01:50:44.480 | our friends actually were maybe thinking

01:50:46.000 | that we're maybe some drug dealers or something.

01:50:47.840 | So we just stopped because it just was not flowing anymore.

01:50:51.000 | And so, yes, in America, I found this entrepreneurial spirit,

01:50:56.000 | but then I was able to link it with something

01:51:01.680 | that I'm very familiar with in my country.

01:51:03.840 | See, back home in Senegal, I'm part of this,

01:51:06.920 | you have what we call the Mouride, I'm a Mouride.

01:51:09.680 | So what it is, is one of the four brotherhoods in Senegal,

01:51:13.800 | Mouridism is the most influential of them

01:51:16.040 | and the biggest one.

01:51:17.320 | And us, it's all about entrepreneurship as well.

01:51:20.560 | I mean, of course there's a whole religious part,

01:51:23.800 | but our mantra is pray as if you will die tomorrow

01:51:28.240 | and work as if you will never die.

01:51:30.480 | And the way we say, the way somebody will say

01:51:33.360 | that somebody passed away, we say, somebody has retired.

01:51:37.280 | Somebody has retired from their work, right?

01:51:39.640 | - Beautiful. - Right?

01:51:40.760 | So I think it's funny because in that community,

01:51:45.760 | we're very much entrepreneurial,

01:51:48.880 | left to our own devices, we're entrepreneurial.

01:51:52.440 | But then what happens is the minute people start going to,

01:51:55.480 | they're being educated through the education system,

01:51:58.000 | like the French, especially the system,

01:51:59.880 | but tend to breed more like over French bureaucrat mindset,

01:52:03.360 | then you can see all the entrepreneurial mindset

01:52:05.560 | kind of starting to dwindle down.

01:52:07.920 | So it's kind of very interesting.

01:52:09.440 | So in a way, America helped me reunite

01:52:13.040 | with that side of my roots,

01:52:15.240 | where America tells me, reinforces that side of my roots

01:52:20.240 | and also gives me more tools to practice

01:52:22.920 | that side of my roots, if that makes any sense.

01:52:25.800 | - Through all of that,

01:52:27.240 | that's what brings out the heart of a cheetah,

01:52:30.160 | which I think is a beautiful, beautiful thing

01:52:32.320 | that encapsulate that whole trajectory,

01:52:36.560 | which I think is the best possible answer

01:52:38.800 | anyone could give.

01:52:39.760 | It makes me want to really think about who I am,

01:52:44.160 | because you really have brought together

01:52:47.080 | so many cultures within yourself.

01:52:49.240 | Like just talking to you makes you feel like

01:52:52.160 | we are just all one people.

01:52:54.240 | - Because at the end, we are, at the end we are.

01:52:56.600 | And when you come from, at the end we are,

01:53:01.320 | and also I think for me,

01:53:03.400 | if people can take anything from my story,

01:53:05.480 | it's at the end of the day, I am very clear about it.

01:53:07.640 | And I'm all for harmony among people

01:53:11.240 | and among us peoples.

01:53:13.800 | If we can accept that we're all,

01:53:20.000 | I know this sounds so cliche, but for me, it's so true,

01:53:23.280 | that we're all humans.

01:53:24.800 | You know, when I left Senegal,

01:53:27.600 | when I was about to leave Senegal for the first time

01:53:30.040 | and to go to Europe to be reunited with my parents,

01:53:33.360 | because now they had emigrated

01:53:35.480 | and things were going to be fine

01:53:37.480 | and I was going to be, things were stable for them.

01:53:40.880 | Now they're like, it's time to be reunited with her.

01:53:43.760 | They brought me over, but before I left Senegal,

01:53:46.280 | my grandma sat me down.

01:53:47.760 | She, actually, she lowered herself down to my level

01:53:50.160 | and she said, "Magat, you're about to go to this place

01:53:54.000 | where most people will not look like you."

01:53:57.960 | And most people speak a language

01:53:59.920 | that's going to be different from yours.

01:54:02.200 | And you're going to realize that all the kids

01:54:03.600 | are going to school and you've never been to school

01:54:05.720 | because, you know, I was, like I said, a free-range kid

01:54:07.640 | and I was just living my life.

01:54:09.680 | And she said, "But I don't want for any of that,"

01:54:13.720 | and she showed her words, she said,

01:54:14.800 | "I don't want for any of that to intimidate you."

01:54:18.480 | She said, "You can be impressed by some of it if you want,

01:54:21.360 | but no intimidation."

01:54:23.320 | And she said, "Because the fact that they might be different

01:54:25.760 | from you, yeah, they're going to have a different skin color

01:54:27.560 | from you, but it is still human skin.

01:54:30.960 | You're human, they're human."

01:54:32.880 | And she said, "This language you're going to speak,

01:54:35.320 | it's a different language from yours,

01:54:37.440 | but it is still a language that humans speak.

01:54:41.080 | You're human, they're human, therefore you can speak it."

01:54:44.720 | And lastly, they have gone to school.

01:54:47.560 | Going to school is what little humans do.

01:54:49.680 | You're a little human, so you'll be just fine.

01:54:52.800 | And I went and grandma was right, right?

01:54:55.160 | It was right!

01:54:56.600 | And that helped me.

01:54:58.580 | And I think when you internalize that so early on,

01:55:03.280 | it just makes you belong to the human family

01:55:07.280 | that you're part of.

01:55:08.280 | I am part of a human family.

01:55:10.280 | And I would have no problem going to Russia, for example.

01:55:12.920 | Let's take...

01:55:14.240 | And be totally open.

01:55:16.340 | - Maybe don't go right now, but.

01:55:17.660 | - No, not now.

01:55:18.500 | Maybe not now, you're right.

01:55:19.340 | - Or at least don't bring weed if you go.

01:55:21.860 | Go on the plane when you go.

01:55:23.380 | - No, no, no, no, no, no, no.

01:55:25.600 | Right, that girl, I don't know what she was thinking.

01:55:27.080 | But no, so, but what I'm trying to say, Lex,

01:55:30.960 | is I feel like I can go anywhere in the world,

01:55:34.320 | including some of the most unfriendly places in the world

01:55:38.440 | to someone like me, because there are places like that.

01:55:41.500 | And yet I know, I know that somehow, somewhere,

01:55:46.500 | someone will take care of me.

01:55:48.880 | Someone will help me.

01:55:50.480 | When I first came to this country,

01:55:55.040 | I came as a tourist.

01:55:56.380 | But you had this amazing family who had a business,

01:56:02.360 | a family business in Indiana, Columbus, Indiana.

01:56:05.000 | The Wentzes, Carol and Eldon Wentz,

01:56:08.720 | I owe them everything that I have in this country,

01:56:10.720 | that I am in this country.

01:56:12.420 | They are Americans in mid-America

01:56:17.420 | from a place that most other Americans

01:56:19.360 | would maybe look down on, because, you know.

01:56:22.040 | And some people would be like,

01:56:22.880 | "Oh, you're going to this place

01:56:23.720 | where they have more churches and cows than people."

01:56:26.280 | You know, that type of behavior,

01:56:28.040 | because, you know, the coastal elites.

01:56:30.880 | But it is in Midwest, in the Midwest,

01:56:33.240 | that I found that I, a black, young woman,

01:56:39.120 | coming out of nowhere, found support.

01:56:43.160 | They all rallied around me.

01:56:44.600 | I didn't even come from the same faith as they are from.

01:56:47.480 | Yet their whole church rallied around me

01:56:49.920 | to find me an apartment.

01:56:52.640 | My host family found me, got me a job,

01:56:55.600 | and it was not a petty job.

01:56:57.600 | They were like, "We need, we are in serious needs

01:57:00.080 | of getting our accounting under control,

01:57:02.320 | and our marketing and all of that."

01:57:03.520 | And I had to catch up years of accounting,

01:57:05.800 | like 2%, and come up with marketing, all of that.

01:57:10.000 | And I did it way faster than they thought

01:57:11.720 | I would ever be able to do that.

01:57:13.160 | At some point, they look at me and they're like,

01:57:14.440 | "Look, there is a future for you.

01:57:17.360 | And we are too small for that future.

01:57:19.840 | And now we could be selfish

01:57:22.360 | and keep you here with us.

01:57:23.280 | And we would want nothing more than that."

01:57:25.600 | Because really, they're like my parents to this day.

01:57:27.600 | I just came back from seeing them.

01:57:29.240 | And they said, "But there's so much more for you.

01:57:32.360 | And we don't have it.

01:57:33.720 | So we want you to go and find out what it is."

01:57:36.240 | And that's eventually when I, you know,

01:57:38.040 | because something was brewing up in San Francisco

01:57:41.280 | when I say I left my heart in San Francisco.

01:57:43.580 | Because, you know, the man who would become my husband,

01:57:47.440 | we went to the same business school in France,

01:57:48.880 | but then he was older than me.

01:57:50.240 | So he had come to San Francisco

01:57:51.960 | and started a business there.

01:57:53.440 | And it just looked like there was something there.

01:57:55.160 | And Scarol was like, "You got to go to San Francisco

01:57:57.280 | and find out with Emmanuel what's going on."

01:57:59.200 | So I went and I left my heart in San Francisco.

01:58:00.560 | I came back and I'm like, "Okay, I'm leaving.

01:58:02.480 | Here's the keys to my apartment."

01:58:03.720 | Well, I don't know, I'm just kidding.

01:58:04.880 | But I'm like, "I'm out of here."

01:58:06.640 | So no, but, Scarol, so this is it.

01:58:08.920 | This is what I'm saying, especially in these times

01:58:11.160 | when this country loves to dwell on, you know,

01:58:14.800 | you're bad because you have this skin color.

01:58:16.600 | Here are people with a completely different skin color

01:58:18.520 | than mine, completely different faith than mine,

01:58:20.800 | yet embraced me, protected me, paid for my visa,

01:58:25.800 | you know, for my lawyer, for my H-1B, everything,

01:58:30.360 | and also played emotional support for me.

01:58:34.160 | And no one, no one asked them to do that.

01:58:37.080 | They didn't have to do it.

01:58:38.480 | They didn't.

01:58:39.320 | So what I'm saying is,

01:58:40.200 | and this has been the story of my life.

01:58:42.240 | Everywhere I go, regardless of the hostility around me,

01:58:45.560 | you betcha that there's always, always going to be somebody

01:58:50.080 | who shows up for you, and somebody who is at the extremes,

01:58:54.040 | at the antipodes of where you are and who you are.

01:58:56.800 | And that tells me something.

01:58:58.200 | In the end, we are good people.

01:59:01.000 | Most people are good people.

01:59:02.640 | - And there's so much power to that,

01:59:04.560 | the internalizing of this idea that we're all just human,

01:59:10.480 | and there's human kindness all around us.

01:59:13.080 | I've seen it a lot where people internalize that,

01:59:17.800 | and they're able to walk lightly amidst hate.

01:59:22.040 | - Yeah.

01:59:22.880 | - And walk past it.

01:59:24.360 | - Yes.

01:59:25.200 | - And it doesn't stick to them in a way

01:59:29.560 | that they build resentment, and it paralyzes them.

01:59:33.080 | If they internalize the world as human,

01:59:35.960 | they can be in the, just like you said,

01:59:37.880 | in the worst places in the world for them.

01:59:40.640 | - And someone, somewhere,

01:59:42.520 | that human magic and touch is there.

01:59:44.440 | - Yeah, it will find them.

01:59:46.840 | It will find, yeah, yeah.

01:59:48.480 | And you know, the other thing too, Lex,

01:59:49.920 | is especially in these times we're walking in,

01:59:53.080 | it is to remind yourself.

01:59:55.640 | I think this is where we all are called

01:59:58.320 | to practice more courage.

02:00:01.280 | I call it courage.

02:00:03.280 | It's the courage to show up with curiosity,

02:00:07.120 | with empathy, and with love.

02:00:09.320 | To me, those three are the antidote

02:00:11.720 | to pretty much anything.

02:00:13.480 | Curiosity and being in love.

02:00:14.760 | In the face of fear, can you show up with curiosity?

02:00:19.680 | In the face of hate, can you say,

02:00:22.920 | I'm gonna engage with love, even if I'm scared to death,

02:00:26.600 | and even if I'm pissed off to death by this?

02:00:29.360 | But can you do that?

02:00:30.680 | In the face of just like, you know, judgment or whatever,

02:00:35.040 | can you show up with empathy?

02:00:36.800 | And I had just found that when you try to do that,

02:00:40.920 | you engage very different parts of your brain.

02:00:44.080 | That's proven, by the way, by a brain scientist.

02:00:46.560 | But you also can feel it in your body

02:00:48.840 | that you're engaging very different parts of your soul.

02:00:51.400 | And so I try myself, I'm not always good at it,

02:00:54.960 | but it's a practice that I try to honor,

02:00:57.680 | which is curiosity, empathy, and love.

02:00:59.680 | - As I told you offline,

02:01:02.120 | I agree with you 100% on that.

02:01:04.600 | But there is, you know, when you go to Ukraine,

02:01:07.880 | and you can speak about the power of love,

02:01:12.480 | but when you lose your family, when you lose your home,

02:01:16.240 | all you have in your heart is hate.

02:01:18.040 | Even if you know it, you're not supposed to have it.

02:01:21.480 | You still, all you have is hate.

02:01:22.880 | So sometimes it's a very human thing

02:01:27.880 | to have resentment, to have hate.

02:01:30.440 | - But it is about trying not to stay there.

02:01:33.760 | And it's okay if it takes you years.

02:01:36.400 | But it is about trying, and I mean the word trying.

02:01:40.280 | It is about trying not to stay there.

02:01:42.760 | - Let me ask you about some of the things

02:01:45.720 | you see in this country from your perspective

02:01:48.680 | of everywhere you've been in the world.

02:01:50.600 | What do you think about the Black Lives Matter movement

02:01:53.800 | here in America that does struggle

02:01:57.240 | with the role of skin color today,

02:02:03.560 | and throughout the history of this country,

02:02:07.760 | and maybe even throughout the history of the world?

02:02:10.360 | - Well, Black Lives Matter has been a very hard one for me.

02:02:16.360 | Because do Black Lives Matter,

02:02:18.360 | those three words together in that order,

02:02:20.200 | what they mean, they mean everything.

02:02:23.280 | Because Black Lives do matter,

02:02:25.520 | as any other lives do matter.

02:02:27.640 | But I know in this case why they say Black Lives Matter,

02:02:29.960 | because some of the context we have had.

02:02:32.720 | Now, while I agree with the principles

02:02:36.280 | that Black Lives Matter, I have a big problem

02:02:39.440 | with the organization and what it stands for.

02:02:43.120 | When I have an organization that pretends

02:02:47.680 | to want to stand for Black Lives to matter,

02:02:51.320 | yet you are self-proclaimed Marxist socialists,

02:02:56.320 | I pause.

02:02:59.680 | Why?

02:03:01.720 | I pause and then I'm like, have we learned nothing?

02:03:05.680 | Have we learned nothing?

02:03:07.960 | And the reason why I say that, Lex,

02:03:10.080 | is because 60 some years ago,

02:03:13.600 | it started before even 60 some years ago,

02:03:18.440 | Black people in this case,

02:03:24.920 | I'm talking about the African people,

02:03:27.240 | I'm talking about the Black Africans

02:03:32.840 | who would go on to really cement this concept

02:03:37.840 | of African emancipation and African liberation.

02:03:43.320 | And here I'm taking us back to 1945.

02:03:46.080 | They had four of them before that.

02:03:49.280 | But in 1945, in Manchester, UK,

02:03:53.400 | happened something that would become major

02:03:56.480 | for Africa and its future, especially sub-Saharan Africa.

02:04:02.480 | In Manchester, UK, people like Blaise Diagne of my country,

02:04:07.480 | Nyerere, Tanzania, Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana,

02:04:14.280 | and others and others from different parts of the continent

02:04:19.520 | got together with Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Dubois.

02:04:24.520 | And I say Dubois because that's how we say it in French.

02:04:28.280 | He has a French name.

02:04:30.120 | French name at least.

02:04:31.280 | And Americans would say, so for Americans listening,

02:04:34.080 | I know you say Dubois.

02:04:35.760 | - Oh boy. - But Dubois.

02:04:37.120 | No, because just in case,

02:04:37.960 | they're like, "Who is he talking about?"

02:04:39.320 | That's who I'm talking about.

02:04:40.720 | So all of those people got together in the UK

02:04:44.600 | and with W.E.B. Dubois and Marcus Garvey,

02:04:50.360 | big top African-American intellectuals of their times.

02:04:53.960 | W.E.B. Dubois had so many things happen to him,

02:04:58.760 | starting from the North,

02:05:00.360 | being more or less a liberal type guy,

02:05:02.440 | came to the South just to see at this time,

02:05:08.280 | black people being lynched

02:05:09.680 | and some of their body parts being shown in store windows.

02:05:13.840 | I mean, just for a second, we put ourselves in his shoes.

02:05:18.000 | I put myself in his shoes.

02:05:20.400 | And that's when he started to become radicalized.

02:05:23.080 | Because at first it was like, "Oh, reforms."

02:05:24.800 | And I was like, "God darn it, these people,

02:05:26.960 | "we don't talk to them, we force."

02:05:28.640 | And eventually, little by little, things going through.

02:05:33.200 | Yeah, you have these people,

02:05:36.560 | they're very much on the Marxist-Socialist train.

02:05:39.960 | - So do you think the sort of,

02:05:43.000 | it's the political movements that are just using-

02:05:46.320 | - Yeah, because what happened back in those days,

02:05:49.320 | it is true that to their credit,

02:05:53.800 | the communist-socialists were fighting for equal rights.

02:05:57.360 | They were fighting for the rights of black people

02:05:59.360 | to have equal rights.

02:06:01.200 | So of course, I could see why one could say,

02:06:05.600 | especially in those times,

02:06:07.440 | you're being lynched, body's burnt,

02:06:12.200 | body parts showcased at window stores.

02:06:21.560 | Meanwhile, in Africa, under colonization,

02:06:26.120 | in your own country, in your own land.

02:06:31.120 | And you have this group that's saying,

02:06:38.280 | your fight is part of what we fight.

02:06:44.520 | Of course, you're gonna say, "I side with you."

02:06:50.200 | Especially if this is all happening at a time

02:06:53.320 | where, so 1945, these guys who would be

02:07:00.240 | the liberators of various African nations,

02:07:03.440 | they're meeting with Garvey, with W.E.B. Dubois.

02:07:07.800 | And that's where, this meeting is very important.

02:07:11.880 | It's the fifth Pan-African Congress meeting.

02:07:14.000 | It's very important.

02:07:15.160 | It could be their last one,

02:07:16.080 | but it's the most important one

02:07:17.800 | because that's when they formed their plans

02:07:19.560 | and really rallied around this concept

02:07:22.400 | of African emancipation and African liberation.

02:07:26.520 | We're gonna liberate our countries.

02:07:28.320 | Then later, so that's how all of these movements

02:07:31.880 | started to happen.

02:07:33.160 | And from there, Gandhi was already making some progress

02:07:36.120 | with India, getting them out of British rule and all of that.

02:07:40.000 | So all of this was happening

02:07:41.080 | and really this whole thing was bubbling,

02:07:42.800 | bubbling, bubbling.

02:07:44.120 | There's a new force going on.

02:07:46.560 | And then we arrived in the late '50s

02:07:49.000 | and Krumah with them, with the British as well,

02:07:53.640 | they might manage to become,

02:07:56.160 | their colonization is over.

02:08:00.040 | They were the first one to go in, '57.

02:08:02.400 | Then from there, it's what we call the independences.

02:08:05.040 | That's what most sub-Saharan African nations

02:08:07.120 | are getting their independences.

02:08:08.040 | Different dates, mine, April 4th, 1960.

02:08:11.360 | So all over, so this is happening.

02:08:13.560 | And now think about it.

02:08:14.400 | You're talking '57, you're talking '60.

02:08:17.000 | We're like at this time now with the middle of a Cold War.

02:08:21.720 | 'Cause we have to put things in context

02:08:23.080 | if we wanna understand what's going on.

02:08:24.680 | Because people today ask me, "Why do you think?"

02:08:27.040 | Because even now when they understand,

02:08:28.360 | "Oh, you're right, it makes sense.

02:08:30.480 | "If you have no economic freedom, you're gonna be poor."

02:08:32.920 | But why?

02:08:33.760 | Why did they go for this?

02:08:34.880 | Why did they go for this?

02:08:35.720 | And then they don't understand.

02:08:36.920 | So that's what happened.

02:08:37.800 | So beginning of times, pre-colonial Africans

02:08:41.880 | were free marketeers, free enterprise.

02:08:44.240 | It's pretty well recorded by someone like George Aite.

02:08:47.120 | That's where I got the Chile thing from.

02:08:49.240 | And Ghanaian economist.

02:08:50.640 | And then slavery happened, colonialism happened,

02:08:52.880 | and then the independences.

02:08:54.720 | Late '50s, early '60s for most sub-Saharan African countries.

02:08:58.840 | So there, what you have is, but then what happened there?

02:09:02.680 | So I told you in '45, fifth Pan-African Congress in the UK

02:09:06.200 | with the liberators of Africa.

02:09:09.880 | Under the leadership, because he was the wise,

02:09:14.720 | eldest man, Dubois was.

02:09:17.120 | He was in his 70s back in the day.

02:09:18.480 | So he's older than them,

02:09:19.880 | and he's coming with all of his ideas and everything.

02:09:22.120 | So we're like, "Ooh."

02:09:23.200 | So there they are.

02:09:24.440 | Now we're in the late '50s, early '60s.

02:09:26.160 | We're starting to make progress with the independences.

02:09:28.880 | India has gone there before.

02:09:30.320 | So all of that is starting to happen.

02:09:32.160 | And at that time, remember,

02:09:35.800 | they already were being introduced

02:09:38.240 | to the concept of socialism, Marxism,

02:09:40.880 | all of that way before by some of these

02:09:44.040 | Black African-American intellectuals of their time

02:09:48.600 | who were very socialist Marxist by that time.

02:09:51.760 | So now they're becoming independent

02:09:54.640 | because I do independent like this

02:09:57.160 | because I reckon that there's still neo-colonism going on.

02:10:01.200 | So now this is happening, we're becoming free.

02:10:04.560 | But then you look around, what do you see?

02:10:07.800 | That now most of these liberators of their nations

02:10:11.040 | become the president of their nations.

02:10:12.920 | But remember what I told you?

02:10:14.280 | Most of them have drunken

02:10:17.720 | the Marxist socialism Kool-Aid.

02:10:22.280 | So as these African nations become independent

02:10:25.960 | with their first independent governments and presidents,

02:10:30.960 | most of them are socialists,

02:10:35.080 | various forms of statist type of government.

02:10:37.760 | And this is because at that point,

02:10:40.680 | we had made a fatal mistake of saying,

02:10:45.280 | we are Marxist socialist

02:10:48.720 | because you guys fight for equal rights.

02:10:52.160 | So in this case,

02:10:53.000 | there should be no colonialism or anything like that.

02:10:55.680 | So not only you have that going on,

02:10:57.920 | and the people, so right now,

02:10:59.560 | you had this battle of ideology going on

02:11:01.960 | because on one end represented by freedom

02:11:04.760 | and the economic, what do you call it?

02:11:06.000 | The economic system they were using is capitalism.

02:11:08.320 | And these are represented by the Western nations

02:11:12.080 | facing off with Eastern bloc,

02:11:14.240 | practicing various forms of statism,

02:11:16.200 | socialism, communism, various forms of statism.

02:11:19.000 | And these two are fighting for influence.

02:11:21.400 | So, and we also have, it's also not, so two things there.

02:11:26.160 | One is we're at a time where,

02:11:28.280 | remember the free market concept was almost dead.

02:11:30.840 | Almost dead.

02:11:34.040 | So almost every intellectual at that time was social Marxist

02:11:38.240 | or Marxist socialist, I put the name.

02:11:42.280 | That's what you were.

02:11:43.240 | So you're in a world where it was a normal thing.

02:11:46.040 | It was just mainstream acceptance.

02:11:48.840 | So not only you have that force,

02:11:50.640 | but at the same time,

02:11:52.360 | if these two forces are fighting one another,

02:11:54.200 | it turns out that the one representing capitalism

02:11:57.800 | and freedom, well, sorry,

02:12:00.000 | but isn't it you who enslaved us and colonized us?

02:12:03.800 | And you're fighting with the people who represent,

02:12:07.320 | supposedly people who are saying that,

02:12:10.360 | who had been fighting for equal rights for us,

02:12:12.200 | with us for the longest time.

02:12:13.920 | These are our friends.

02:12:15.760 | And that's when we made a fatal mistake.

02:12:17.800 | Because while yes, there were maybe good things

02:12:20.840 | to agree on with Marxist socialist of the times,

02:12:24.440 | especially equal rights for all people and all of that,

02:12:28.680 | that's the only thing we should have,

02:12:29.960 | among the only things we should have agreed upon.

02:12:32.080 | There are violent revolution tendencies, no way.

02:12:35.640 | When it comes to the economic nonsense, no way.

02:12:39.480 | We should not have thrown the baby out with the bathwater,

02:12:41.880 | but that's what we did.

02:12:43.040 | And that's when we made a fatal mistake.

02:12:44.360 | So then we became free, all of these nations,

02:12:47.440 | and most of them started with socialist

02:12:50.360 | or communist leaders.

02:12:52.640 | My country, socialist.

02:12:54.800 | Leopold Sedar Senghor, he was a socialist.

02:12:58.920 | And they stayed in power for 40 years.

02:13:01.720 | The first 40 years of our freedom years.

02:13:05.080 | And all over the continent, more or less,

02:13:08.240 | that's what you had.

02:13:09.880 | And on top of that, something else that the French don't know

02:13:13.320 | that people don't know is France with its colonies said,

02:13:16.560 | "You cannot not do, you have to keep the French civil law."

02:13:21.560 | So we're talking about the Napoleonic civil code.

02:13:30.080 | Are you kidding me?

02:13:31.600 | So that's what happened.

02:13:32.800 | So the reason why I go back to BLM is while I have

02:13:37.800 | all the respect in the world

02:13:40.680 | and all the compassion in the world

02:13:43.640 | for people like Ruma, for people like Nyerere,

02:13:45.960 | for people, all of those people of those times,

02:13:48.880 | the liberators of Africa,

02:13:50.600 | while I have so much love, compassion for them,

02:13:54.040 | I am also able to say,

02:13:57.560 | because I got the benefit of 60 some years time

02:14:02.000 | and where you get to do a debrief

02:14:06.080 | and see what worked, what didn't work, what happened.

02:14:08.880 | We have had the 60 years to look back and to reflect.

02:14:12.680 | So yes, I can understand why they did what they did.

02:14:18.040 | I can even, I can understand why they sided

02:14:21.120 | with these people who on the surface,

02:14:23.440 | or at least some part of a fight was the same fight as them

02:14:26.200 | when it came to equal rights.

02:14:27.680 | I can excuse them,

02:14:31.360 | but I will not excuse the BLM founders

02:14:37.960 | because that mistake was tolerable 60 some years ago.

02:14:43.680 | Today, no.

02:14:45.960 | The blacks of today cannot be serious

02:14:50.960 | about black lives mattering and saying in the same sentence

02:14:55.880 | and we're gonna be socialist Marx, Marxist socialist.

02:14:58.480 | It just doesn't work.

02:14:59.840 | - So the BLM movement is too deeply integrated

02:15:03.520 | with the ideas of Marxism. - With those ideologies.

02:15:06.280 | Yeah, they're anti-free market, anti-capitalist.

02:15:10.920 | And we do know that you have to have free markets

02:15:15.520 | in order to build prosperity.

02:15:17.360 | And prosperity means economic power.

02:15:21.880 | If you have economic power, no one messes with you.

02:15:26.520 | Or if they're gonna do it,

02:15:27.440 | they're gonna have to think twice.

02:15:28.360 | And when they do, they're gonna have to pay consequences.

02:15:31.200 | So if you want for blacks to be respected

02:15:35.360 | anywhere in the world,

02:15:37.200 | you're gonna have to be serious about black prosperity.

02:15:39.960 | En masse, not just a few people,

02:15:42.200 | Oprah over here and somebody over there, no.

02:15:44.880 | We as a group have to be a critical mass of prosperity

02:15:50.800 | across the board.

02:15:52.560 | And because we're talking critical mass of prosperity

02:15:55.360 | across the board,

02:15:56.600 | it means black people everywhere in the world.

02:15:59.800 | But guess what?

02:16:00.880 | We in Africa happen to represent 90%

02:16:03.840 | of our representatives of a black race.

02:16:06.120 | So you're gonna be serious about black lives mattering

02:16:08.960 | without being serious for Africa,

02:16:11.400 | the 1 billion people in Africa that are black

02:16:14.040 | and for them to have access to the free markets

02:16:16.320 | and yes, fossil fuels,

02:16:18.200 | so that they can rocket up prosperity wise.

02:16:23.200 | - And the resources of the young people, the young minds.

02:16:27.680 | - So that all of these young people,

02:16:29.040 | young minds can finally manifest their greatness

02:16:32.400 | that I know they have.

02:16:33.720 | And that they're showing you us every day

02:16:35.280 | despite the obstacles.

02:16:37.760 | That's what we need.

02:16:40.120 | Senegal becomes rich and Senegal can become

02:16:42.680 | and will be richer than France.

02:16:44.200 | The colonizer, Singapore did it, we can do it.

02:16:47.800 | Mali rich, Nigeria rich, functioning as well.

02:16:51.800 | Malawi rich, Tanzania rich, Uganda rich, Zimbabwe rich,

02:16:57.680 | Niger rich, everywhere rich, prosperous.

02:17:02.120 | As prosperous if not more prosperous than Switzerland

02:17:06.120 | or Singapore or the US or the Lichtenstein or Luxembourg,

02:17:10.360 | places that have no natural resources.

02:17:16.000 | We become rich and you watch the world

02:17:19.120 | having a very different relationship with us.

02:17:22.480 | That's the only time we will command any type of respect.

02:17:27.240 | That's when people, even the,

02:17:29.920 | our common psyche will change even about black people.

02:17:34.680 | All of the stereotypes that they have of us

02:17:37.320 | is gonna melt away.

02:17:40.080 | And you may still not like us,

02:17:43.080 | but you will still respect us

02:17:44.640 | because we are a force to be dealt with.

02:17:47.800 | And only economic power does that.

02:17:50.160 | It would be nice, of course,

02:17:52.760 | for us to respect people because they're people.

02:17:55.400 | It would be nice, but let us not kid ourselves.

02:17:58.600 | This is earth.

02:18:00.800 | And someone said, "Nice people will make it to heaven,

02:18:04.080 | "but not to Harvard necessarily."

02:18:05.920 | It's true.

02:18:06.760 | - It's interesting that pity does not ever turn into respect.

02:18:13.160 | It would be nice if it did.

02:18:14.680 | - It would be nice, but it doesn't.

02:18:17.040 | - Prosperity is the only thing.

02:18:18.240 | - Prosperity is the only thing.

02:18:19.520 | And the way we do that, there is no,

02:18:21.880 | just like all of us humans have to inhale oxygen

02:18:26.880 | and exhale carbon dioxide.

02:18:31.040 | That's a human way of breathing.

02:18:33.240 | You bring me on, but you wanna be foolish

02:18:35.600 | and be like, "Oh, well, sorry.

02:18:37.360 | "That's how white people breathe.

02:18:38.560 | "So as black people, we're gonna have

02:18:40.040 | "to do something different."

02:18:40.880 | Well, good luck with that.

02:18:42.480 | Right? - Yeah.

02:18:43.320 | - So this is here why I'm saying,

02:18:44.880 | I have no patience for Black Lives Matter.

02:18:47.080 | They're making a mistake that was made

02:18:49.800 | 60 some plus years ago, even more than that,

02:18:53.960 | maybe even a hundred years,

02:18:55.320 | when we were siding with the Marxist-Socialists

02:18:58.320 | because they're the ones who've been fighting

02:19:00.360 | for equal rights.

02:19:01.440 | - Let me ask you though about racism.

02:19:07.480 | Do you, as you travel through this world,

02:19:11.000 | as you travel through America, feel the burn of hatred?

02:19:16.000 | You've spoken about the revolutions that have been fought

02:19:21.160 | throughout the 20th century against racism.

02:19:25.760 | But today, as people talk about educating,

02:19:29.280 | reminding the world with the,

02:19:31.480 | even with more philosophical ideas

02:19:33.320 | of critical race theory, for example,

02:19:35.760 | do you think this is still a battle

02:19:38.480 | that needs to be fought at the forefront of culture

02:19:42.320 | in the United States?

02:19:43.640 | - Does racism exist?

02:19:49.800 | Yes, it does.

02:19:50.720 | But all forms of isms exist.

02:19:55.280 | Some people, it's about various forms of ableism.

02:19:59.040 | Others, it's about size.

02:20:02.720 | And racism, yes, is one of them.

02:20:06.560 | Does it exist? Yes, it does.

02:20:08.240 | But is it what's gonna stop anyone

02:20:12.400 | from manifesting their greatest potential?

02:20:14.520 | I say no.

02:20:17.200 | I say no.

02:20:18.440 | Many people in this country have showed it.

02:20:21.480 | Whether they're African-Americans or African-immigrant,

02:20:26.120 | I'm an African-immigrant.

02:20:27.360 | You have African-Americans like Oprah and others,

02:20:30.920 | and other people even before her,

02:20:33.800 | who, despite the nastiness around them,

02:20:37.440 | were able to make it.

02:20:38.680 | So we do know, especially us Black people,

02:20:43.640 | but I think it's humanity as a whole.

02:20:46.160 | And that's what I love about the human spirit.

02:20:48.480 | It's resiliency.

02:20:50.640 | But resiliency only can happen

02:20:52.240 | if you don't allow yourself to be beaten down

02:20:55.080 | and to lose yourself of agency.

02:20:58.680 | It's, of course, easier said than done.

02:21:03.840 | And some among us need a little bit more help

02:21:07.680 | to not succumb for it than others do.

02:21:10.440 | And I've seen it.

02:21:13.000 | It might be harder for you if you're somewhere

02:21:15.320 | in a city, you know, in a city, Black America.

02:21:20.320 | Maybe the environment might be a little bit tougher

02:21:24.720 | for you to try and get your act together

02:21:26.160 | and all of that stuff.

02:21:27.720 | And it's okay.

02:21:29.600 | But even in that situation,

02:21:33.200 | we need to, I think it's important

02:21:36.120 | that we still do not rob you of your agency.

02:21:39.280 | And this is where I am mad as heck

02:21:44.240 | against those who supposedly care

02:21:48.480 | and their idea of how to make sure

02:21:52.160 | that I don't become or stay a victim of racism

02:21:55.240 | is through all the things we talked about,

02:21:57.200 | the CRT, the anti-racism crap of, you know,

02:22:01.920 | Abraham X. Kendi and what's her name?

02:22:06.320 | Robin DiAngelo.

02:22:07.520 | I mean, her, I'm shocked.

02:22:09.520 | The woman is making all of this money,

02:22:12.160 | supposedly fighting a war on our behalf.

02:22:15.600 | I'm like, "Lady, I hear you loud and clear

02:22:18.080 | "that you are a true racist.

02:22:19.440 | "I know, but you told me you are."

02:22:21.720 | And for you to think that your anti-racism

02:22:23.320 | makes you less racist, and that happens too.

02:22:26.600 | She comes from a racist background.

02:22:28.760 | Fine, she's saying it, it's true.

02:22:30.960 | But this idea that every walking person on earth

02:22:35.840 | belongs to one category or the other,

02:22:37.280 | depending on which skin color you came with,

02:22:39.800 | it's problematic at its root.

02:22:43.920 | So my point is, does racism exist?

02:22:47.520 | Yes.

02:22:48.360 | Do you think it's gonna stop me

02:22:50.440 | from doing anything I have to do?

02:22:52.120 | No.

02:22:53.240 | Might it make it harder, longer?

02:22:55.920 | Maybe, but it will not stop me.

02:23:00.320 | But for it not to stop me,

02:23:02.120 | I can't engage in victimhood mentality.

02:23:04.560 | I can't lose myself.

02:23:06.120 | I gotta use all the agency that I have

02:23:09.720 | to fight back and fight beyond, see?

02:23:13.040 | It's just a bit of fight back.

02:23:14.600 | You fight back and you fight beyond.

02:23:15.920 | 'Cause at some point, yeah, and.

02:23:18.600 | It's this concept of yes, and.

02:23:20.120 | So this is why I have loved the job.

02:23:24.360 | So when I have somebody who is like,

02:23:26.400 | "Oh, anti-racism is the way.

02:23:28.640 | "Are we gonna go and tell all the white kids

02:23:31.280 | "that because they happen to be white

02:23:32.960 | "that they're really the oppressors and blah, blah, blah,

02:23:35.600 | "and the black kids because they're black?"

02:23:37.800 | You're not changing anything when you're doing that.

02:23:41.560 | Nothing except that you're putting problems

02:23:44.040 | where there were no problems to start with.

02:23:46.400 | All we had to do was maybe

02:23:48.240 | go for a different route from there.

02:23:50.120 | Kids are kids.

02:23:51.320 | Kids are born kids.

02:23:52.560 | And this, I'm not sure if you wanna get me

02:23:54.320 | going on to the whole science of bias,

02:23:57.680 | because that's something I spent years of my life on.

02:24:00.040 | And my journey on the science of bias

02:24:03.960 | started with the days of Philando Castile, Eric Garner,

02:24:08.960 | that whole summer of 2016,

02:24:12.400 | when we had this horrendous, horrendous situation

02:24:17.400 | of black people being killed by the police

02:24:20.440 | where they shot before asking,

02:24:22.520 | and people left to die in the most inhumane way

02:24:25.000 | for the rest of us to watch from the social media.

02:24:28.160 | That's me.

02:24:29.960 | That's when my George Floyd moment happened,

02:24:31.480 | not three or four years ago,

02:24:32.320 | and the whole world is like, you know.

02:24:34.200 | So that sent me on a journey

02:24:38.720 | of understanding what discrimination is and bias is.

02:24:42.160 | And in a way, that's the reason why I started this company

02:24:45.560 | that I even called Skinny Skin.

02:24:47.160 | That's where it came from.

02:24:49.280 | Again, criticized by creating.

02:24:51.240 | I needed to understand what discrimination was,

02:24:54.000 | how does it work?

02:24:55.240 | Is it true what Kendi is saying?

02:24:57.080 | Is it true what D'Angelo is saying?

02:24:58.800 | Is it true that it could be that you're racist

02:25:03.800 | just because of the skin color you happen to be born in?

02:25:06.680 | Is it true?

02:25:07.520 | Is it true?

02:25:09.440 | I needed to know,

02:25:10.920 | because I was at a time of my life where,

02:25:13.840 | at some point, when those killings were happening,

02:25:16.960 | it was so hard for me,

02:25:19.080 | being a black person in this country,

02:25:21.240 | and wondering,

02:25:22.920 | I mean, what is this?

02:25:29.720 | And what do we do with this?

02:25:32.000 | - Yeah, is it true?

02:25:35.160 | How much discrimination am I operating under in the system?

02:25:38.920 | - All of that.

02:25:39.760 | - You need to understand the full characteristics of,

02:25:42.800 | if you're dreaming of making a big change

02:25:45.560 | by building companies,

02:25:47.160 | you have to kind of intuit,

02:25:49.520 | how much, what am I up against?

02:25:51.160 | And so this is why,

02:25:52.680 | spend all of this time on some of the work,

02:25:54.960 | and then eventually, I understood that discrimination,

02:25:57.960 | if you wanted to understand it beyond,

02:25:59.880 | beyond the big lines of,

02:26:03.720 | especially the clickbait lines,

02:26:05.640 | would make it very black and white.

02:26:07.960 | Then I had to really take a moment,

02:26:09.440 | and I spent time with a world of brain scientists,

02:26:12.800 | with behavioral psychologists,

02:26:15.840 | with evolutionary biologists,

02:26:17.640 | to have all of this ecosystem,

02:26:19.440 | but together, form what one might call,

02:26:22.600 | the science of bias.

02:26:24.560 | And especially, I came across the work

02:26:27.920 | of this team of scientists at the University of,

02:26:30.960 | I think it's Wisconsin,

02:26:32.640 | and they're the only ones who made sense,

02:26:35.160 | in this sea of nonsense back then.

02:26:38.280 | And this article was in Politico,

02:26:41.840 | and it was saying something that I could relate to it.

02:26:46.240 | And eventually, what I learned was,

02:26:48.960 | and this part comes from the evolutionary biologists people,

02:26:51.960 | they, in a way, tell you that right around age three,

02:26:56.640 | it can happen sooner or later,

02:26:58.120 | because we're all different,

02:26:59.920 | but you go from this person

02:27:01.840 | who has to rely on these other people,

02:27:03.960 | usually your parents, to stay alive,

02:27:06.360 | to be fed, to be housed,

02:27:07.920 | to even your diaper change,

02:27:09.560 | all of that stuff, right?

02:27:11.440 | To now, something is kicking in,

02:27:15.320 | where you have to, in order for you to survive,

02:27:20.320 | and this is all wired in,

02:27:23.280 | so you don't even understand it consciously,

02:27:25.600 | as I'm saying it now,

02:27:26.720 | where in order for you to survive,

02:27:29.640 | in order for you to go from this state of dependency

02:27:31.840 | to the next stage, and more, and more, and more,

02:27:35.600 | you're gonna have to develop this ability

02:27:37.520 | to make sense of the world.

02:27:39.280 | And what's making sense of the world

02:27:40.720 | at its most basic level means is,

02:27:43.320 | can you determine if a situation

02:27:46.400 | or a person is good or bad for you?

02:27:48.800 | Failure, and you need to be able to do so ever so quickly,

02:27:54.200 | because failure to be able to do that

02:27:56.640 | means that you might not be alive the next second.

02:27:59.320 | See, it's so wired in.

02:28:02.800 | So this process is starting to kick in,

02:28:04.760 | and at that point,

02:28:07.560 | your brain is gonna be your best ally for that.

02:28:09.880 | And the brain is gonna be your best ally

02:28:13.240 | and what the brain is gonna do is it's gonna help you,

02:28:16.160 | and the way the brain works is through,

02:28:18.400 | it works with, it's all wired for efficiency.

02:28:22.560 | And the way it goes for efficiency is through automation,

02:28:27.560 | meaning that every time it has computed,

02:28:29.280 | and you probably know these things way better than me,

02:28:30.840 | every time it has computed one algorithm,

02:28:34.400 | it doesn't want to do it again.

02:28:36.760 | It's almost like this, okay, got it, stored, stored, right?

02:28:40.280 | And then it adds maybe some little levels of complexity

02:28:42.680 | to it, but it has to be something new,

02:28:44.520 | meaning the new level of complexity

02:28:46.400 | for it to even be willing to reconsider.

02:28:49.000 | Otherwise you have, so then all of a sudden,

02:28:50.520 | what you have is these neurons in the back of your head

02:28:54.040 | and they have created pathways, right?

02:28:56.640 | So, and every time neurons have created pathway

02:28:59.880 | among themselves, because basically they're attached,

02:29:03.480 | and here's a pathway, well, this pathway

02:29:05.760 | in the world of bias, science of bias, it's a habit.

02:29:10.760 | In general, it's a habit when they form two pathways,

02:29:13.960 | when they form a pathway, it's a habit.

02:29:15.680 | So if we're willing to talk about unconscious bias,

02:29:19.560 | because of course it's very different

02:29:21.960 | from somebody who tells me to my face,

02:29:24.280 | there's no world in which you or I could ever be equal

02:29:29.520 | because you're black and I'm white,

02:29:31.000 | you're a woman, I'm a man, this, this, and that,

02:29:33.800 | that people like that, again, 1% of psychopaths

02:29:37.960 | in our world, they're out there.

02:29:39.920 | Unfortunately, by the time they do nasty things,

02:29:41.920 | it's pretty horrible and that's what all we hear about.

02:29:44.440 | But I'm talking mostly about the rest of us.

02:29:46.280 | Remember when I told you that most of us are good people,

02:29:48.680 | bumbling along, making it up as we're going.

02:29:51.360 | That's why I have compassion for human nature.

02:29:54.120 | So, but really, in the morning when I wake up,

02:29:57.280 | do you really think that I'm waking up and thinking,

02:29:59.200 | how am I going to go kill?

02:30:00.200 | How am I going to go kill Lex?

02:30:01.480 | That Lex guy needs to go down.

02:30:02.880 | He's a man, he's a, don't take me wrong.

02:30:04.800 | I'm sure there are some women who feel like that,

02:30:06.240 | but I'm not one of them and I do think a majority of us

02:30:08.600 | are not, whatever.

02:30:10.120 | But in the morning I'm waking up, I'm just like,

02:30:12.920 | gee, can I get my tea?

02:30:15.400 | Oh, my dog is not looking okay today.

02:30:18.160 | You know, we've got, right?

02:30:22.680 | - It's a lot going on and so you're using these kind of,

02:30:25.680 | just like you said, brilliantly,

02:30:27.000 | the brain has a bunch of simplifications it's built up

02:30:30.280 | and it uses those simplifications to get through the day.

02:30:32.840 | - It's through the day, exactly.

02:30:34.560 | So then here you are needing to make sense of a world

02:30:37.960 | and then the brain is your best ally in that.

02:30:39.960 | The way it's going to do it is for efficiency,

02:30:41.480 | efficiency done through automation.

02:30:43.400 | So every time it thinks it's figured something out,

02:30:46.520 | it's never going to think about it again.

02:30:47.840 | So that's how you build all of these habits

02:30:49.840 | of unconscious bias, because everything,

02:30:52.360 | so it's somewhere along the line,

02:30:54.720 | you come up with the information that black man

02:30:59.440 | walking around with a hoodie equals danger.

02:31:01.720 | So later, what do you see?

02:31:03.240 | Whether it's like, oh my God, I'm walking in the dark alley,

02:31:07.880 | I see a black man with a hoodie,

02:31:09.200 | maybe I'm going to run away

02:31:10.120 | because I've been given that information.

02:31:13.000 | So the best way to think about it is the brain is a hardware

02:31:16.640 | and the software it runs on is, what do you call it?

02:31:21.640 | Is a cultural imprint.

02:31:23.600 | All of this information that we're getting

02:31:26.120 | from the Disney movies that you're reading,

02:31:28.320 | telling you that damsels are to be saved by the prince

02:31:30.920 | and all of that stuff and girls wear pink and whatever.

02:31:33.680 | You watch the movies and all the movies,

02:31:36.360 | whenever you watch them, it's about Africa,

02:31:38.120 | they're talking to you about the blood diamonds

02:31:39.520 | or they're talking to you about slavery

02:31:40.760 | or they're talking to you about this.

02:31:41.640 | And then of wonder you walk away thinking

02:31:43.200 | that all the ills of Africa are caused

02:31:44.920 | because of resource extraction, the diamonds,

02:31:47.520 | or they're always fighting each other.

02:31:49.400 | Look at the movie, or slavery all the time.

02:31:54.400 | You walk away and this is it.

02:31:56.680 | And we all programmed along the same line.

02:31:58.160 | See, that's the beauty of it.

02:31:59.840 | All of us are, because even some black people

02:32:02.400 | who are gonna claim, but this is not what they registered.

02:32:05.520 | Really?

02:32:06.680 | So the truth, so then when I learned all of this,

02:32:08.600 | I'm like, wow, this concept of if you've got a brain,

02:32:11.360 | you've got biases, it comes with a territory.

02:32:14.680 | That makes sense.

02:32:15.720 | Now, it doesn't mean we can't transcend

02:32:19.880 | that function of a brain and that we should transcend it.

02:32:22.840 | Right?

02:32:25.120 | But I think it's very important

02:32:25.960 | because once you understand that,

02:32:27.760 | a little bit more peace is created among us

02:32:30.400 | because this is not about a black and white

02:32:32.120 | or a yellow and green issue.

02:32:34.120 | It's about, we are human issue.

02:32:36.960 | And these are part of the things we develop

02:32:38.960 | to stay around.

02:32:42.080 | Just like we no longer have to rely on,

02:32:45.400 | this fear of flight, ability of a brain

02:32:50.960 | because bears over there start running and running fast.

02:32:54.640 | Right?

02:32:55.480 | Today, where are the bears?

02:32:56.320 | Show me where they are.

02:32:57.160 | We have kept this tendency to go for fear of flight.

02:33:02.160 | I don't know how they say it.

02:33:03.440 | And so we have this, you know,

02:33:05.600 | courtesan done by the stress, you know, stress triggers.

02:33:08.440 | But back in the days, we have a stress trigger, we run

02:33:11.520 | and it's all, you know, expelled out.

02:33:14.120 | But today we get triggers

02:33:15.920 | and we don't know what to do with it

02:33:17.120 | because where would we run to?

02:33:18.840 | What do we do?

02:33:19.680 | The bear is not even here.

02:33:21.600 | So same thing here with that.

02:33:23.360 | And so then you realize there's this whole thing

02:33:25.840 | that is now what you understand is that this problem

02:33:29.120 | is not about anti-racism BS, but it is about,

02:33:32.760 | can each one of us do the work where the work is needed,

02:33:36.400 | which is we look inside.

02:33:38.520 | Can we go for this work of deprogrammation,

02:33:41.640 | this concept of a mindful practice

02:33:45.320 | of undoing the habit of bias?

02:33:49.560 | - And that doesn't necessarily have to do

02:33:52.240 | with a simple categorization of black and white.

02:33:55.480 | It's all kinds of biases.

02:33:56.320 | - It's about everything.

02:33:57.440 | It's about everything.

02:33:58.920 | And you know, when I started on that journey

02:34:01.000 | and me and my friend back then built, you know,

02:34:03.160 | this practice of undoing your habit of unconscious bias,

02:34:06.600 | we had all types of people come and say,

02:34:11.400 | "Wow, I discovered that my bias is against larger people."

02:34:16.080 | And I'm like, "What do you mean?"

02:34:17.960 | "Well, I think I, it seems to me like I felt

02:34:21.920 | that larger people maybe are dumb."

02:34:24.480 | No, we heard things and you know, and you don't judge.

02:34:28.120 | - Yeah.

02:34:28.960 | - You don't judge.

02:34:29.800 | And so, and you see, it's at every level, you know,

02:34:32.800 | like, I don't know, like there's even this one friend,

02:34:35.800 | she was like, "You know, when I looked into

02:34:36.960 | the whole dating thing, I absolutely didn't want to have,

02:34:39.520 | you know, date Asian men."

02:34:40.480 | Because she went, her mind was into some stereotypes

02:34:43.560 | about the size of whatever.

02:34:45.520 | And she was like, "No."

02:34:47.360 | But you see, once you start,

02:34:50.080 | because there's this whole thing of,

02:34:51.480 | it's the five-step thing, bias awareness,

02:34:54.240 | this, basically, at this level, what you're doing is,

02:34:58.800 | you're learning to spot the biases in our culture,

02:35:02.080 | because that's where the cultural imprint comes from.

02:35:04.440 | You're watching this movie and you're realizing,

02:35:05.960 | just like I said, "Wow, gee, I realized, once again,

02:35:08.360 | the black person is portrayed like the thug of a movie."

02:35:11.360 | Or, you know, the Latina lady,

02:35:15.360 | this is how she's been portrayed.

02:35:16.720 | And you're seeing it everywhere, even the NPR.

02:35:18.800 | NPR is happening, like you're listening to something

02:35:20.960 | like NPR, you've got to be more liberal than that.

02:35:23.640 | And this gentleman is asking these two candidates,

02:35:26.200 | one of them is a woman, political candidates,

02:35:27.920 | the other one is a man.

02:35:29.080 | I'm hearing him asking the lady a question

02:35:31.080 | that I know he's not going to ask the man,

02:35:32.600 | and he didn't ask her.

02:35:33.720 | He said, "How do you balance your race with family?

02:35:38.720 | Does the man not have a family?"

02:35:41.960 | Right there, you see, it's very subtle.

02:35:46.120 | But you see, but because now my mind is kind of trained

02:35:49.000 | to see things, I'm like, "Hmm, interesting."

02:35:51.240 | Or like when the media just says,

02:35:53.200 | "Froze climate change issue on something,"

02:35:57.640 | without even the choice of words.

02:35:59.920 | So it's pretty much everywhere.

02:36:01.640 | You open a book everywhere.

02:36:03.160 | - The interesting thing though,

02:36:05.040 | you mean even that man-woman example,

02:36:08.280 | is I think it's really powerful

02:36:11.920 | to bring that bias to the surface,

02:36:14.000 | but not let that lead to kind of fear and paralysis.

02:36:18.520 | You should almost, I mean, that's where humor is,

02:36:20.960 | make fun of it, bring it to the surface.

02:36:23.320 | Like acknowledge the fact that those things

02:36:25.760 | are a part of the conversation.

02:36:27.160 | And a lot of them are, it is, you know,

02:36:30.880 | it's a cultural imprint because it's part of culture.

02:36:33.240 | And that might be, there could be, you know,

02:36:34.760 | I grew up in the Soviet Union

02:36:36.640 | where the gender roles were stronger than in other places.

02:36:39.800 | - That's right.

02:36:40.640 | - And that's part of the culture.

02:36:41.480 | We have to acknowledge that this is how,

02:36:44.400 | this is affecting how I think.

02:36:45.800 | You might, we might like how that works,

02:36:48.320 | or we might not, but we have to acknowledge it.

02:36:50.360 | And not get, you know, make it part of humor,

02:36:53.040 | make fun of yourself, you know, all that kind of stuff.

02:36:55.520 | - That's the thing.

02:36:56.360 | And so Lex, that's why this first step is bias awareness.

02:37:00.160 | So you get, you train yourself,

02:37:01.680 | oh yeah, okay, that was one.

02:37:03.080 | Or it's, you know, and it's about, it's in you.

02:37:05.960 | We're talking about you, we're not.

02:37:07.200 | And then from there, you're like,

02:37:08.840 | replace the bias, like bias replacement.

02:37:12.720 | Then it is where you practice the empathy.

02:37:17.400 | You're like, gee, wow, I wonder how I would feel

02:37:19.720 | every day I walk into a store,

02:37:21.280 | and the guy thinks he should be following me

02:37:22.760 | because maybe I can, I might steal something

02:37:24.320 | because I'm black, right?

02:37:25.760 | Because once you try that,

02:37:27.240 | to put yourself in the other person's shoes,

02:37:28.680 | all of a sudden, something else starts to click.

02:37:31.240 | And then from there, you go on to making connection.

02:37:35.240 | Then you're making a connection,

02:37:37.840 | and then things start to change.

02:37:39.760 | Because now you, no, you're making,

02:37:43.120 | then you make cultural immersion.

02:37:45.160 | So this is where we had some people,

02:37:46.440 | like this one woman, she was very,

02:37:48.040 | quite, very feminist-oriented.

02:37:51.520 | And she had an issue with women wearing the hijab.

02:37:56.000 | And because for her, it was like,

02:37:57.320 | how come you, how come, how come you,

02:37:59.920 | you just lower, you know, like,

02:38:03.160 | how come you're accepting this demeaning of yourself,

02:38:06.280 | not understanding everything else that comes with it?

02:38:09.600 | But through, as she understood that she even had that bias,

02:38:13.560 | then she went on through all the different processes,

02:38:15.960 | and then eventually, when comes the next step,

02:38:18.200 | cultural immersion, she started going to the mosque

02:38:21.720 | during Ramadan, when the Muslims are doing,

02:38:24.000 | you know, it's the holy month of fasting,

02:38:27.000 | and then we break at night.

02:38:28.920 | And she started understanding very different things.

02:38:32.360 | And eventually happens the last step

02:38:34.040 | that happens naturally,

02:38:35.760 | making a true, real, genuine connection.

02:38:38.840 | And this is where friendships happen.

02:38:40.760 | This is where, that's it, your bias can go home now,

02:38:43.240 | because it has been challenged with reality

02:38:46.240 | and understanding.

02:38:47.360 | And so for me, that is what I was after.

02:38:51.360 | And then, but then the world was just like,

02:38:53.720 | we don't want to be told we're part of a problem.

02:38:55.800 | So, but I still reckon that it is the type of mindfulness,

02:38:59.200 | type of practice that's going to need to happen.

02:39:00.640 | And it's one that's very internal to you.

02:39:04.160 | It is not, and it happens, everybody at their own pace.

02:39:08.560 | So all of this, I take it back

02:39:11.440 | to the racism, the question you were asking me.

02:39:15.480 | Does racism exist?

02:39:17.480 | Yes, it does.

02:39:18.520 | Is it going to stop me from doing anything I want to do?

02:39:20.320 | No.

02:39:21.160 | Is it going to make it harder?

02:39:22.000 | No.

02:39:22.960 | But this is where, for anybody who is serious

02:39:27.480 | about making sure, about fighting racism,

02:39:32.040 | I think the only job you have to do

02:39:36.240 | is to make sure that people

02:39:40.360 | keep their sense of self-agency.

02:39:42.040 | And B, can you help provide people

02:39:45.400 | with the tools to stand up?

02:39:49.040 | So this is why I have so much respect for Van Jones.

02:39:52.600 | People like Van Jones,

02:39:54.160 | although I disagree with him on so many things,

02:39:56.280 | but people like Ms. Alice Johnson,

02:40:00.440 | she was pardoned by President Trump

02:40:03.080 | through the work of people like Van Jones

02:40:05.480 | and Kim Kardashian and others.

02:40:08.120 | They all joined forces.

02:40:09.760 | This is a case where people of,

02:40:11.640 | and those folks then went on to combine forces.

02:40:15.520 | Furthermore, no regard given to their political belongings.

02:40:20.520 | They said, if the issue is criminal justice reform,

02:40:25.800 | then anybody who stands for it has to come together.

02:40:29.520 | And so what they did in this situation with,

02:40:32.160 | what they're doing, criminal justice reform, in my mind,

02:40:37.120 | is a valid action to fight racism in my mind.

02:40:42.120 | Because what are you doing there?

02:40:45.080 | You're trying to get people out of jail

02:40:47.120 | who really have no business being there.

02:40:49.520 | And also when you have people like Bishop Omar

02:40:52.720 | and the people, he passed away, unfortunately,

02:40:55.280 | but today we have Anton Luckey,

02:40:57.920 | who was in jail for having killed his cousin.

02:41:04.360 | I think he started the gang in South Dallas.

02:41:08.960 | So we're talking really tough guy

02:41:10.400 | who was really on the wrong side of the equation.

02:41:13.400 | And then in jail, literally he found Plato,

02:41:16.640 | the cave and all of that.

02:41:17.920 | So today these people,

02:41:19.840 | I'm like, why don't we hear more about them,

02:41:22.400 | the urban specialists?

02:41:23.960 | Because these people,

02:41:25.280 | it's not about the anti-racism crap of Kandil D'Angelo,

02:41:28.360 | I'll say it again until the cows come home,

02:41:30.680 | but it is about we go where help is needed.

02:41:33.240 | We go in urban, inner city,

02:41:38.240 | black inner city neighborhoods,

02:41:40.240 | and block by block, we change the culture.

02:41:43.320 | And they say it like that, it's their words.

02:41:45.560 | These are African-American people

02:41:47.080 | who have as many rights as anybody else

02:41:48.720 | to talk about their own culture.

02:41:50.160 | And they will tell you, we have to change the culture.

02:41:53.760 | I have some videos like that on my YouTube

02:41:55.880 | with Bishop Omar.

02:41:57.600 | What these people are doing is what we need to do.

02:41:59.960 | Bishop will explain, he says,

02:42:01.240 | sometimes people are their feet

02:42:04.600 | and feet deep down in the mud.

02:42:06.440 | And what we have to do is to try to pull them up.

02:42:11.240 | And you cannot say you didn't pull them up

02:42:13.520 | because we're not seeing their head out yet,

02:42:15.320 | but how much progress have they made from the bottom

02:42:18.600 | to where they are now and keep going.

02:42:22.200 | So what I see these people doing,

02:42:24.520 | you see, I have so much,

02:42:26.360 | I love and respect Glenlarion Company,

02:42:29.360 | and Ian Rove and all of those guys.

02:42:30.680 | I love them.

02:42:31.640 | I love a lot of the things that they say.

02:42:34.240 | This whole concept of personal responsibility,

02:42:37.720 | we don't know that.

02:42:38.920 | But I'm just like, at some point,

02:42:40.320 | it also needs to be matched up with real actions.

02:42:43.760 | And that's what the people like Anton Luckey,

02:42:46.720 | urban specialist, Alice Johnson are doing.

02:42:50.120 | They're going where it's hard.

02:42:51.200 | Alice Johnson is getting people out of jail

02:42:52.840 | every single day, literally.

02:42:54.840 | And then people like Anton Luckey and his team

02:42:57.400 | are giving them the tools to live the gang life,

02:43:01.120 | to be better people, to go for a life of redemption.

02:43:05.280 | This is happening right now.

02:43:07.120 | But what I find is they're not getting

02:43:08.600 | the bulk of the attention.

02:43:10.280 | But this is, anybody who's serious about,

02:43:13.640 | this is why, how I would love to see people do anti-racism

02:43:17.360 | is help lift people up for real.

02:43:21.520 | - Action. - Support, support

02:43:23.640 | a school choice.

02:43:27.000 | Support school choice.

02:43:28.160 | Black mamas, they know what's going on.

02:43:30.840 | And when they tell you we want school choice,

02:43:32.880 | they know what they're talking about.

02:43:34.000 | They're not idiots.

02:43:35.400 | - Especially at the local level.

02:43:36.960 | - Yes.

02:43:37.800 | - Helping them at the local level.

02:43:38.840 | - Yes, so help them make sure that they can take their kids

02:43:42.840 | out of these public schools

02:43:44.720 | that are doing horrendous things to them.

02:43:48.240 | Miss Virginia, watch that movie.

02:43:50.440 | How could you not support black moms in this country

02:43:55.160 | to take their kids to safety when it comes to education?

02:43:57.600 | How come not?

02:43:59.120 | That's what I wanna see happen.

02:44:00.840 | And not like some, yeah, let's go to some classrooms

02:44:04.560 | and everybody's white, you go over here.

02:44:06.720 | Everybody's a neck stain, you go over here

02:44:08.960 | and kids, let us tell you about this.

02:44:10.640 | No, no, no, no.

02:44:13.280 | As a black person, I don't want you to do any of that crap.

02:44:15.920 | Let me grow my wings.

02:44:19.680 | If you want, help put some fuel behind them

02:44:22.240 | and let me take my flight.

02:44:23.560 | That's all I'm asking for.

02:44:24.800 | That's the only way for you to do,

02:44:26.480 | that's the only way for you to be part of a racism battle

02:44:30.440 | if that's what you think is the most important battle

02:44:32.200 | of our life.

02:44:33.440 | That's it.

02:44:34.280 | That's what I have to say about that.

02:44:35.400 | And so for me, I'm keeping my head very straight.

02:44:37.640 | It's about what enables black people to thrive.

02:44:42.640 | I don't need for you to be an activist on my behalf.

02:44:49.000 | No, because when you're doing that,

02:44:50.400 | you're doing exactly what you've been doing to us

02:44:52.800 | black people in Africa our whole life.

02:44:55.160 | I don't need your white savior complex

02:44:56.920 | because that's what anti-racism is, white savior complex.

02:44:59.360 | That stuff doesn't work.

02:45:00.680 | It only works to make you feel better

02:45:02.640 | about how superior you are to me.

02:45:04.360 | But it does nothing, absolutely nothing

02:45:07.040 | to change my everyday life.

02:45:08.400 | If it is not, if it is, at least in the African side

02:45:11.280 | to actually even change my, you know,

02:45:14.760 | turn me into somebody who's waiting for handouts.

02:45:17.560 | So if people, I would encourage people to really,

02:45:20.800 | those people who are really serious

02:45:23.000 | about wanting to be part of a solution.

02:45:24.560 | And I know there are many out there,

02:45:26.440 | for the love of God and everything that's out there

02:45:28.480 | and we care about, stop.

02:45:31.480 | It's about, think about what's gonna enable people.

02:45:35.960 | Maybe the word is wrongly chosen,

02:45:40.640 | but know what I'm talking about.

02:45:42.240 | - Yeah, give them the freedom to spread their wings.

02:45:45.000 | - Yes, give a person, yeah,

02:45:47.040 | learn to teach a person how to fish

02:45:49.040 | and don't give them a fish.

02:45:50.680 | When you're putting your stupid signs on the lawn

02:45:53.040 | with Black Lives Matter and all that crap,

02:45:55.040 | you're not helping.

02:45:55.960 | And when you're buying one more anti-racism book

02:45:58.440 | or as a company, you know, financing one more DEI,

02:46:02.920 | you know, if it's done along those lines,

02:46:05.480 | I think we've got a problem.

02:46:06.920 | - Yeah, so you do think that the efforts of diversity,

02:46:11.920 | equity and inclusion are often not effective?

02:46:16.200 | - Not only are they not effective,

02:46:17.280 | but they also backfire.

02:46:18.760 | And there are reports on all of this.

02:46:20.600 | And at the end of the day, it makes sense.

02:46:25.440 | It makes sense.

02:46:26.760 | So for me, I am very, very glad

02:46:29.680 | that people have developed an enlightenment about this.

02:46:34.160 | Very happy about that, very.

02:46:37.560 | But let us not keep going for the easy perceived solution

02:46:42.560 | to problems.

02:46:44.120 | Again, they've done this to us, the poor people of Africa.

02:46:47.880 | They thought the solution was to give.

02:46:51.880 | It does not work.

02:46:53.880 | And then they say, "Oh, we're gonna do

02:46:55.760 | a social entrepreneurship on you, Tom's Shoes.

02:46:59.960 | Buy one pair of shoes and we give one pair of shoes

02:47:01.960 | to some people in poor countries."

02:47:04.520 | Then guess what happened to us?

02:47:06.080 | You know, in the town where we operate in Senegal,

02:47:09.280 | where I have my little manufacturing,

02:47:11.160 | we have 2000 little mom and pop businesses.

02:47:15.920 | And guess what they happen to be in, Lex?

02:47:18.640 | Shoemakers, right?

02:47:21.320 | So every shoemakers, each one of them

02:47:23.720 | hires at least five, 15 people.

02:47:26.160 | Do the math.

02:47:27.000 | Family businesses.

02:47:29.320 | Guess what happens to them the day

02:47:33.160 | the Tom's Shoes truck shows up with bunch of free shoes?

02:47:36.560 | - Yeah.

02:47:39.960 | - Who can compete against free?

02:47:42.240 | Now, all of these people, little by little,

02:47:44.160 | gonna have to close their shops

02:47:45.240 | because who can compete against free?

02:47:46.720 | 'Cause Tom's Shoes dumping all of his shoes on them.

02:47:49.600 | And then they go out of business.

02:47:50.520 | And now, instead of helping anybody,

02:47:53.200 | you actually sent all the kids

02:47:54.960 | who depended on these adults working in these places,

02:47:59.000 | now they have to join the rank of kids

02:48:00.440 | who need to be given shoes

02:48:01.800 | because you took their parents' ability

02:48:05.760 | to make money through their wages, buy them shoes.

02:48:10.400 | You see?

02:48:12.280 | So first they said, "We just have to give."

02:48:14.120 | So that was primarily the charity business.

02:48:19.080 | And you still have foreign aid business going on.

02:48:22.640 | So we just need to give.

02:48:24.400 | And then the social entrepreneurs came in place.

02:48:27.440 | But I'm like, "The only person for this is business is good

02:48:29.720 | "is for Blake McCarthy, the founder of Tom's Shoes.

02:48:32.600 | "But other than that, I'm not sure really seeing

02:48:34.720 | "who else is winning from this."

02:48:36.560 | And so today, my whole thing is,

02:48:41.080 | we got a challenge to have a mind for the poor

02:48:46.000 | or to have a mind for the lesser fortunate,

02:48:49.080 | maybe in this country.

02:48:50.560 | It is easy.

02:48:52.280 | And lesser fortunate,

02:48:53.120 | because for anybody that you feel like

02:48:56.200 | is being trampled upon because of something,

02:48:58.160 | maybe it's because of economic circumstances

02:49:00.680 | or maybe it's race in this case, whatever.

02:49:02.800 | To have a heart for the lesser fortunate among us,

02:49:08.120 | for whatever reason, that's easy.

02:49:12.600 | But to have a mind for them, that's the challenge.

02:49:15.480 | - Let me ask you a difficult question.

02:49:18.560 | - Yeah.

02:49:19.520 | - As if we were not already asking difficult questions.

02:49:22.720 | The president of Senegal, Maggie Sall,

02:49:26.640 | is also now the chair of the African Union.

02:49:30.000 | He met with the president of Vladimir Putin on June 3rd.

02:49:35.200 | I think primarily was to discuss food security.

02:49:39.280 | - Security.

02:49:40.320 | - Africa seems to be split halfway

02:49:44.480 | on their perspective in the war in Ukraine.

02:49:46.840 | So broadly speaking, what do you think about this?

02:49:50.640 | First of all, the geopolitics of Africa

02:49:53.720 | and the geopolitical relationship of Africa

02:49:58.280 | with the rest of the world and its current conflict

02:50:01.800 | with the war in Ukraine.

02:50:05.480 | What are your thoughts there?

02:50:07.040 | - Well, you've seen that many countries,

02:50:09.560 | when it was time to vote, some of them abstained,

02:50:13.040 | which in a way says something.

02:50:15.640 | I think for the Africans today,

02:50:17.880 | especially as represented by the African Union,

02:50:20.200 | because not all countries fall in this along the same lines,

02:50:23.200 | I feel like again, we're back to way back.

02:50:27.160 | For the longest time, the West tries to tell us what to do.

02:50:30.920 | They decide for us.

02:50:32.840 | And here, there's trouble,

02:50:37.520 | meaning there's definitely a rift, major one,

02:50:42.400 | between most of the Western world

02:50:44.400 | as represented by Europe and America primarily,

02:50:48.120 | and you have Australia and all that.

02:50:49.920 | And then they're saying,

02:50:53.240 | I think this is more or less an attempt

02:50:57.000 | to stand on their own as a country

02:51:02.160 | on their own as well.

02:51:03.240 | It's like, don't tell us what to do, as usual.

02:51:07.240 | You always rope us in with, when it makes sense for you,

02:51:09.680 | you try to rope us in,

02:51:10.800 | and then we're left hanging on our own.

02:51:13.000 | So this goes back to the sentiment

02:51:15.000 | you were talking about earlier.

02:51:16.800 | It's been challenging for me to watch this,

02:51:21.800 | because remember, I have one foot also,

02:51:26.480 | because there's what I get to see and hear

02:51:28.680 | from being in the Western world,

02:51:31.840 | but there's also what I get to see and hear

02:51:34.240 | from when I'm back home.

02:51:37.040 | So I wear all hats.

02:51:38.720 | And I think this is a situation where the African Union

02:51:44.640 | and African nations in general are saying,

02:51:48.440 | we don't, this is a case where one was like,

02:51:52.720 | you guys are fighting.

02:51:53.840 | You guys are fighting.

02:51:56.560 | Maybe for once, we have to watch out for ourselves.

02:51:59.480 | - Yeah, there's a sense in which this is the embodiment

02:52:04.480 | sort of abstaining from a vote on the war in Ukraine

02:52:08.360 | is a political embodiment of a resistance

02:52:12.960 | to the influence of the West.

02:52:14.880 | It's not about the war between,

02:52:16.840 | whatever you guys are fighting.

02:52:18.440 | It's saying, we're not going to let this particular empire

02:52:23.440 | that seems to be at the top right now,

02:52:27.000 | which is the United States empire in Europe,

02:52:30.360 | to dominate our political discourse,

02:52:33.840 | our geopolitical considerations.

02:52:36.640 | It's almost like, no, we're not touching this.

02:52:38.960 | - Yeah, especially if it's given usually.

02:52:40.880 | So when they need us, again, for influence,

02:52:43.920 | which means more power,

02:52:45.320 | oh, you guys vote the same way we do.

02:52:47.800 | And when it's all over and they go back to spreading,

02:52:52.800 | they go back to, how do you say that?

02:52:54.480 | They go back to exchanging and sharing between themselves

02:52:59.240 | the goodies of their Halloween collection.

02:53:03.120 | We're not there when the goodies are being shared.

02:53:07.640 | So I think it's definitely one of those situations.

02:53:11.600 | But for me, it still is hard

02:53:14.600 | because I watch everything that's going on

02:53:17.080 | and it's going to be complicated,

02:53:23.320 | the ramifications of all of this.

02:53:25.320 | I would like to see our African leaders also,

02:53:28.720 | what they're doing is clear,

02:53:30.520 | but this is a place where I'm also tempted to say,

02:53:34.000 | yes and.

02:53:36.720 | Yes to the reasons you're advancing right now.

02:53:42.440 | We don't want to be always siding because we're tired.

02:53:47.240 | We're tired of always being dragged around

02:53:49.520 | and taken for granted and you vote our way.

02:53:53.080 | Come on guys, when you need us,

02:53:55.600 | we're great and everything is good.

02:53:57.280 | And then when it's time to go and share the goodies,

02:53:59.640 | we don't exist anymore.

02:54:01.160 | And you actually go for policies that go against us.

02:54:04.560 | But in this situation though,

02:54:06.400 | I would like to still see us do the right thing.

02:54:09.800 | In my case, I was not very happy to see us going

02:54:14.800 | and more or less begging for,

02:54:17.360 | what do you call it?

02:54:21.280 | Cereals, you know, oh, please let the cereals make it.

02:54:26.160 | So at least we get them and we don't starve.

02:54:28.360 | I can understand why a president

02:54:31.440 | would say something like that

02:54:33.200 | or try to negotiate something like that.

02:54:35.480 | But when it comes to an African president

02:54:39.320 | having to do that with a non-African president,

02:54:44.320 | I'm sorry, but for me, it's too close to begging.

02:54:47.840 | - Listen, it's hard to be a leader.

02:54:49.200 | It's such a difficult dance

02:54:50.560 | because in some sense, sort of the flip side of that

02:54:55.560 | is you're creating a market,

02:54:59.600 | a geopolitical market of saying,

02:55:01.720 | we're willing to sit down at the table with America,

02:55:05.400 | with European leaders, with Russian leaders, with China.

02:55:10.400 | And we're gonna let you guys convince us

02:55:13.880 | who we should collaborate with.

02:55:17.080 | And that's what sort of great nations

02:55:21.720 | and groups of nations do.

02:55:23.560 | Now, there's a cynical, of course,

02:55:25.560 | a dark perspective of that

02:55:27.000 | because what's in that game played by leaders,

02:55:31.160 | the people that hurt, people of Ukraine hurt,

02:55:34.360 | people of Africa can hurt.

02:55:36.400 | - People of Russia.

02:55:37.280 | - People of Russia can hurt, people of China,

02:55:40.120 | people of the United States.

02:55:41.280 | But it is the way of the world.

02:55:44.920 | And you have to earn respect.

02:55:49.000 | And sometimes earning respect

02:55:51.160 | leads to the suffering of many.

02:55:52.920 | - Well, but except in this case, yes to all of that.

02:55:56.160 | And the reason why I'm actually upset

02:55:59.840 | with going and being like,

02:56:01.920 | oh, can you let at least the boats

02:56:03.920 | that are supposed to come to Africa full of cereals

02:56:06.000 | come over, the wheat and all that,

02:56:08.160 | it's just like, look, Africa has the highest land

02:56:11.560 | that you can do agriculture on.

02:56:13.240 | - Yes.

02:56:14.920 | - We have a larger surface, such surface in the world.

02:56:18.200 | Why is this not a time for us to try

02:56:21.480 | to wean ourselves off of cereals

02:56:23.520 | that we don't necessarily have on the ground?

02:56:26.440 | But no, let us go and plead.

02:56:29.320 | - Don't beg, create instead.

02:56:31.920 | - Create instead, exactly.

02:56:33.320 | This should have been,

02:56:34.520 | you know, just like how the rest of the world,

02:56:36.480 | when COVID happened and China had to close off

02:56:39.480 | for different reasons.

02:56:40.320 | And since then has not completely reopened

02:56:42.640 | and people have started to realize,

02:56:44.400 | wow, we've got too much,

02:56:47.000 | we're too dependent on China for a lot of what we need.

02:56:50.600 | So we're gonna have to bring back some production

02:56:53.040 | to the US, the Europeans are doing the same, all of that.

02:56:56.240 | This should have been a time for African leaders

02:56:59.280 | to be like, we need to be serious now

02:57:02.080 | about food security.

02:57:05.880 | And maybe the stuff that maybe don't grow

02:57:08.400 | under our climates necessarily,

02:57:10.160 | can we work on coming up with different things?

02:57:12.480 | Now I understand that it can take time,

02:57:14.520 | but if I knew that that was happening at the same time

02:57:17.520 | that we're saying, oh, well, let the cereals come in,

02:57:20.240 | maybe I would be a little bit easier with it.

02:57:22.240 | But right now I'm just like,

02:57:23.720 | is it gonna be the same business as usual?

02:57:25.560 | And in this case, I'm just like,

02:57:26.920 | are we gonna keep going from one masa to another masa?

02:57:30.920 | I mean, really?

02:57:31.760 | - The interesting aspect of all of this

02:57:35.080 | is if we look at all of human history,

02:57:37.000 | it's possible that the 21st century is defined by Africa.

02:57:40.360 | - It will be.

02:57:41.800 | - And the young people, the huge number of young people,

02:57:45.640 | it's like the trajectory could be,

02:57:47.320 | there's so much possibility to define

02:57:49.640 | the future of human civilization in Africa.

02:57:52.560 | And I don't mean sort of in the next 10 years,

02:57:55.440 | I mean in the next 50 years.

02:57:57.400 | So some people are concerned about overpopulation,

02:58:03.280 | some people are concerned about

02:58:05.600 | us dying out as a human species.

02:58:09.680 | - Both of those people live in Austin.

02:58:12.320 | Talk to me often about-

02:58:13.480 | - I know, I know.

02:58:14.320 | I know, I know who they are.

02:58:18.200 | - What's your, in Africa, is it the center of this?

02:58:22.720 | Because there is a vibrant, huge number,

02:58:26.440 | probably over a billion people.

02:58:28.840 | - Yeah, we're 1.3 billion people

02:58:30.560 | and of those, one billion blacks.

02:58:33.480 | - I mean, where do you land on that?

02:58:36.760 | - There is a reason, Lex, why I say I'm haunted,

02:58:41.040 | that I'm obsessed, that I'm monomaniacal

02:58:45.520 | when it comes to the free markets

02:58:47.360 | and that I have such a strong sense of urgency

02:58:50.280 | to the point that literally it is affecting me.

02:58:53.680 | And it has to do with the fact that, yes,

02:58:56.080 | you have the youngest region on earth

02:58:58.520 | in terms of the age of its population

02:59:01.360 | and the rate at which it's growing demographic-wise

02:59:06.720 | I am not willing to stay there and say,

02:59:09.880 | it's a curse for humanity,

02:59:12.120 | but it will be a curse for humanity

02:59:14.800 | if we don't make sure that these people,

02:59:19.080 | our youth, gets to partake.

02:59:24.520 | And what it takes to partake is not much.

02:59:28.800 | So if the rest of the world thinks that

02:59:31.360 | get to partake means you have to send more foreign aid,

02:59:34.840 | you have to have more charity businesses,

02:59:38.520 | I mean, charity organizations sending stuff our way,

02:59:42.280 | of course, you're almost thinking parasites.

02:59:46.440 | I'm sorry to say it this way.

02:59:47.960 | If this is what you're thinking,

02:59:49.760 | you're seeing us as no more than parasites.

02:59:52.760 | And if that's what it's gonna be,

02:59:55.360 | I could see why some people might be worried about that.

02:59:58.160 | Although, humans should never be seen as parasites,

03:00:04.000 | no matter, no matter, no matter.

03:00:05.760 | But some people will go there.

03:00:08.760 | Now, people are here.

03:00:12.520 | What are we gonna do, dispose of them?

03:00:16.320 | That's not an option.

03:00:17.800 | So the only option we have left

03:00:20.120 | is to make sure that people partake.

03:00:21.800 | And what partaking means is that people get included

03:00:24.960 | and are part of the systems that allow for human flourishing.

03:00:31.520 | And it's not much.

03:00:33.560 | In this case, it's about,

03:00:35.720 | can we be serious about the reforms?

03:00:38.600 | So we have free market zones, areas,

03:00:42.600 | where people, where the flourishing can start to take place.

03:00:46.960 | The wealth that people will need to flourish,

03:00:52.440 | they don't need you to give it to them.

03:00:55.040 | But it's all about, can I let you fly?

03:00:58.360 | And you will make it happen for you and also for me.

03:01:02.280 | Every young African I see today,

03:01:04.880 | I realize how stupid the rest of the world is,

03:01:07.600 | if they're not supporting what I'm trying to talk about.

03:01:11.320 | 'Cause even if you don't wanna do it

03:01:12.920 | because that's the right thing to do,

03:01:13.840 | which I think it is the right thing to do,

03:01:15.960 | you're selfish, maybe engage your selfishness.

03:01:20.400 | 'Cause this person right there,

03:01:21.720 | remember I told you, seven billion geniuses,

03:01:24.520 | everybody came to this world

03:01:26.120 | with a piece of solution to the human problem.

03:01:30.280 | This person and that person and that person

03:01:32.920 | hold something for me, because I'm part of humanity.

03:01:37.080 | This person might have the cure to a cancer

03:01:40.840 | that might take my wife out, the wife I haven't met yet.

03:01:44.080 | But this kid right here has it inside.

03:01:47.280 | And if I help this, if I make sure

03:01:50.720 | that this kid gets a chance to flourish

03:01:52.680 | and to manifest his genius or her genius,

03:01:56.200 | that trickle down many years later,

03:01:59.000 | comes straight back to serve me and the love of my life.

03:02:02.800 | If we can't see it any other way,

03:02:04.440 | maybe let's try to think about it that way.

03:02:06.760 | 'Cause it becomes a very good proposition at that point.

03:02:10.000 | So in this case, by 2050, Lagos, Nigeria

03:02:14.000 | will be the largest city in the world.

03:02:16.560 | The future is African, whether we want it or not.

03:02:20.480 | But is it gonna be an African future

03:02:23.080 | where you have a youth being a ticking bomb?

03:02:27.880 | Because they have not, there's no hope.

03:02:31.360 | They stay in poverty because they belong to nations

03:02:34.920 | that don't even understand sometimes

03:02:36.240 | the importance of common law versus civil law.

03:02:40.120 | Because they're trapped in countries that don't understand

03:02:43.840 | that you need to make the legal framework

03:02:47.560 | to provide for better economic freedom.

03:02:49.960 | So you can unleash the genuineness, the awesomeness,

03:02:53.960 | the ingenuity, the industrious side of your young people,

03:02:58.000 | especially of your women,

03:03:00.240 | so that they build all the wealth

03:03:01.800 | that your nation is gonna need you to build.

03:03:04.080 | And with it, the respect that comes from that.

03:03:06.360 | See, we have a choice to make.

03:03:08.920 | And this is why I feel so, so, so restless about this

03:03:12.680 | at this point of my life.

03:03:14.840 | We just lost George Hayete.

03:03:16.480 | George Hayete is one of the few Africans that I knew

03:03:19.840 | who put this out.

03:03:23.360 | That's who I learned from.

03:03:24.680 | He's gone.

03:03:26.440 | And I feel a strong sense of urgency

03:03:30.120 | to not only bring back to the table

03:03:32.880 | that which he has been working on,

03:03:34.920 | but to also make sure that it gets seen.

03:03:38.440 | That's why being here talking with you today,

03:03:40.640 | you have no idea.

03:03:44.160 | People ask, if someone like you could say, what can I do?

03:03:49.320 | You did more than you could ever imagine.

03:03:52.880 | By just allowing me to take this message to one more person.

03:03:56.280 | And because if we do this,

03:03:59.600 | the change is gonna happen somewhere down the line.

03:04:03.200 | - Yeah, the ripple effects of all of that

03:04:05.000 | on the unlocking the human potential

03:04:07.240 | of all those people in Africa building cool stuff,

03:04:12.240 | amazing things.

03:04:13.160 | - Yes, yes, yes.

03:04:14.360 | So some are gonna be built stuff.

03:04:15.920 | Others are gonna work on the reforms.

03:04:17.640 | So we're working on reforms, by the way.

03:04:19.160 | I'm the head of the Africa Center for Prosperity

03:04:22.960 | of the Atlas Network,

03:04:23.960 | the largest organization in the world,

03:04:26.080 | working on taking down barriers of entry for entrepreneurs

03:04:28.920 | around the world in their respective countries.

03:04:31.040 | So we're doing great work there.

03:04:32.640 | I basically, obviously all the think tanks we have

03:04:37.280 | in Africa right now, free market think tanks.

03:04:41.160 | And we wanna promote more of them to come up.

03:04:43.880 | And these are local solutions by local people

03:04:46.640 | for their local problems, always.

03:04:48.760 | That's where we draw the line.

03:04:50.200 | And so there, so we're working on reforms primarily

03:04:55.200 | and making people understand the free markets

03:04:57.160 | and the importance of it.

03:04:58.440 | But it is piecemeal legislation.

03:05:03.200 | It takes time.

03:05:04.680 | It is hard.

03:05:05.840 | By the time you accomplish something here,

03:05:07.960 | more crap has happened over here.

03:05:09.640 | More laws have been pounded out

03:05:10.920 | because you know how they fix a bad law most of the time.

03:05:13.480 | Whether it's in the US or somewhere else,

03:05:14.720 | put other laws to kind of undo the law from before,

03:05:17.640 | but it keeps stacking up.

03:05:18.920 | And before you know it,

03:05:20.360 | where you should have one thing and it's clear,

03:05:22.520 | you have a hundred and they go against each other

03:05:24.400 | and then it's all, it's worse.

03:05:26.240 | So we have piecemeal legislation, but happening,

03:05:28.960 | our teams are doing really amazing, fantastic work,

03:05:31.320 | especially the team in Imani in Ghana.

03:05:34.040 | We have a group in Burundi, the Great Lakes.

03:05:37.160 | I mean, people are doing amazing work, amazing work,

03:05:40.480 | but we need to run faster.

03:05:42.160 | So while we help them running faster,

03:05:45.320 | we also have to unlock other things.

03:05:48.120 | And right now I'm working on one of my most craziest projects,

03:05:53.040 | something bold, radical, crazy for some people,

03:05:57.200 | but I know we're not crazy

03:05:58.360 | because before us, Singapore has done it.

03:06:00.400 | Hong Kong has done it.

03:06:03.400 | Latest, the most recent China with the SCZs,

03:06:06.000 | the special economic zones,

03:06:09.600 | some of the most radical free market zones in the world,

03:06:12.760 | they've done it.

03:06:13.800 | And oftentimes within a generation,

03:06:16.440 | meaningful change start to happen, right?

03:06:19.080 | So here, what I'm working on is this concept of,

03:06:23.720 | some call it charter cities, Paul Romer,

03:06:27.280 | others call it the free cities,

03:06:32.280 | and I like to call it startup cities.

03:06:35.200 | What these are is for us to think about,

03:06:37.560 | okay, if piecemeal legislation takes forever,

03:06:41.080 | while we have this demographic

03:06:43.960 | that's growing faster and faster in Africa,

03:06:46.920 | there is a discrepancy here

03:06:48.120 | between the progress we're making

03:06:51.160 | to set the right environment for business to prop up

03:06:55.240 | and how many more people are coming to life

03:06:58.720 | literally every day on the continent.

03:07:02.400 | There's a discrepancy here.

03:07:03.840 | And so the ticking bomb is going faster

03:07:06.520 | than the progress we can make.

03:07:09.320 | This is a problem.

03:07:10.720 | So what some of us are working on

03:07:12.320 | is this concept of a startup cities and to say,

03:07:14.760 | piecemeal legislation takes too long.

03:07:18.440 | How about we continue doing that work,

03:07:20.080 | which is essential and critical,

03:07:21.920 | but at the same time, can we think of zones,

03:07:24.760 | and I like to call them also common law zones,

03:07:27.800 | where we basically try to have within the country

03:07:32.760 | an area where for business,

03:07:35.160 | I'm not talking about family law or any of that stuff,

03:07:37.240 | no one is touching your culture or anything like that,

03:07:39.280 | but we're just saying business-wise,

03:07:42.040 | an enclave where you have the best practices

03:07:45.120 | from around the world, including yours,

03:07:47.400 | in terms of what constitutes a great business environment

03:07:51.600 | and allow people in.

03:07:54.640 | Like it's, you know, you get in freely

03:07:57.680 | or nobody's forcing you to go,

03:07:58.920 | nobody's forcing you to whatever.

03:08:00.680 | So basically you're to think about this

03:08:04.640 | rather unoccupied plot of land within a country

03:08:09.160 | think Dubai on 110 acres of land,

03:08:12.720 | Dubai is thinking that in their case,

03:08:16.040 | they're like, maybe they decided maybe Sharia law

03:08:18.520 | is not the best for business in their case.

03:08:20.680 | And they said, they looked around and were like,

03:08:22.360 | wow, but common law, especially British common law

03:08:24.920 | seems like a very good one.

03:08:26.640 | So at that point, they decided for business only,

03:08:29.800 | not family or anything like that,

03:08:31.200 | which is gonna stand to Sharia or whatever.

03:08:33.480 | And so they said, we are gonna bring in,

03:08:38.480 | so they hired a retired British common law judges

03:08:40.760 | to educate the law and train the people under there.

03:08:44.160 | And I'm oversimplifying, but at the end of the day,

03:08:47.200 | in a within a generation,

03:08:49.760 | Dubai became one of the top

03:08:53.080 | international financial centers of the world.

03:08:55.400 | It is what it is today.

03:08:56.760 | So-

03:08:58.920 | - And in the case of the African nations,

03:09:00.840 | that zone can then spread.

03:09:02.640 | - Yes, it can not only spread,

03:09:04.760 | but maybe let's say Senegal,

03:09:06.400 | if Senegal was to go for this,

03:09:07.640 | here you have this one,

03:09:09.200 | and then over there you have another zone.

03:09:11.160 | And then what they start to do

03:09:12.600 | is they're not all modeled the same way,

03:09:14.560 | because maybe this one is saying,

03:09:16.000 | hey, we wanna attract more, I don't know,

03:09:18.200 | maybe we wanna attract more medical research, right?

03:09:22.360 | This one's gonna be saying,

03:09:23.400 | maybe we wanna attract more crypto,

03:09:26.120 | or maybe it's gonna be more like us,

03:09:27.680 | we wanna be more about religious this or whatever.

03:09:30.000 | You know what I mean?

03:09:30.840 | So we wanted to fit more of this or that.

03:09:32.760 | And just kind of give the basics, the grounds,

03:09:36.760 | and then watch the magic happen on it, right?

03:09:40.520 | And so this is what we're working on.

03:09:43.520 | And the hope there, because some people are like,

03:09:46.080 | you know, I know some people are like,

03:09:47.680 | you guys are crazy, but I'm like, no,

03:09:50.280 | it's more or less the story of the Asian tigers.

03:09:55.280 | And most recently, most of China's progress,

03:09:59.680 | economically speaking, because some people might say,

03:10:01.440 | well, you don't want China, we're developing, you see.

03:10:05.400 | Even then I say, and it's okay, you can always do better.

03:10:10.400 | But we cannot deny the magic that they have accomplished.

03:10:15.680 | What they have accomplished is nothing short of a miracle.

03:10:18.440 | 800 million people getting out of poverty

03:10:20.680 | in such a short amount of time.

03:10:21.520 | - Yeah, exactly, so it's not, yeah,

03:10:23.560 | for the quality of life

03:10:25.600 | and the majority of the Chinese population.

03:10:27.600 | - Yes, does something like that happen without problems?

03:10:30.200 | Of course not.

03:10:31.720 | And so the next person to do something

03:10:33.800 | just actually gets to learn from lessons, from lessons.

03:10:36.720 | That's all.

03:10:37.560 | - And leapfrog.

03:10:38.400 | - And leapfrog, and leapfrog, exactly.

03:10:40.360 | So for me, this is a promise.

03:10:41.880 | And people are like, oh, but you guys are crazy.

03:10:44.240 | But I'm like, just like with everything,

03:10:46.120 | do you know how many attempts it took

03:10:47.400 | before the first flight, you know,

03:10:49.400 | the Wright brothers took off?

03:10:50.880 | Do you know how many?

03:10:52.640 | And that's important.

03:10:54.240 | You try, you crash, you try, you crash,

03:10:56.640 | but each time you're going higher, up higher,

03:10:59.360 | and you want to get up for once,

03:11:02.600 | then you stay up longer.

03:11:04.040 | And before you know it, you're doing all types of things.

03:11:06.680 | So here's the same thing.

03:11:07.560 | I tell people, listen, all I need is one success story.

03:11:12.560 | And then the sea change.

03:11:16.400 | People don't even wait for us.

03:11:19.440 | Everybody.

03:11:20.520 | But this is hard because it's the first time.

03:11:24.040 | So, but the good news is there are many groups

03:11:26.720 | working on the continent.

03:11:28.440 | There are some groups in Zambia, there's a zone there,

03:11:32.440 | folks are doing something like this in Nigeria.

03:11:34.640 | We're part of a project there in Nigeria.

03:11:36.840 | The one that I'm most excited about,

03:11:39.480 | I cannot disclose the name of the country yet,

03:11:41.480 | but my God, I'm so excited by it.

03:11:44.080 | And I just know, I just know, Lex,

03:11:46.240 | it's going to happen in our lifetime.

03:11:47.880 | - I hope so.

03:11:48.720 | It's a really powerful vision.

03:11:50.040 | And you know, it's not being dramatic to say

03:11:52.840 | that the future of humanity depends on that,

03:11:56.560 | your success, that success in Africa.

03:11:59.400 | It's such an important continent.

03:12:02.120 | - It is. - In this century.

03:12:03.240 | - It's the continent where everything started.

03:12:05.640 | And I think it's the continent where we have,

03:12:08.520 | that continent has to finally, finally, finally thrive.

03:12:11.240 | We cannot, all of us call ourself

03:12:13.480 | an enlightened society as a whole.

03:12:18.440 | When you have such, when you have this,

03:12:21.040 | it's a humongous continent.

03:12:22.280 | Have you seen the size of it?

03:12:23.720 | You know?

03:12:25.720 | - Yeah.

03:12:26.560 | It's hard to fathom, actually.

03:12:28.600 | - Yeah. - To forget.

03:12:29.640 | - Exactly.

03:12:30.520 | - And it has such ingenious people.

03:12:32.680 | You know, sometimes I look at my people.

03:12:34.680 | I have to tell you.

03:12:36.720 | I'm so proud of them and the young people especially.

03:12:42.800 | And you know, you would look at them

03:12:45.000 | and you know, somebody said sometimes,

03:12:46.640 | one day, and it was so true.

03:12:48.080 | They said, "You know, we've seen poverty other places,

03:12:51.280 | "but here, it is just, maybe somebody doesn't have money,

03:12:56.920 | "but they have dignity."

03:12:58.720 | And it's true.

03:13:00.080 | - Yeah.

03:13:00.920 | - So everything else we can handle and we will handle.

03:13:03.360 | You have to mark my word for this.

03:13:05.120 | This is gonna happen.

03:13:06.600 | And our youth is amazing.

03:13:09.640 | You should see them.

03:13:11.200 | So full of creativity and it doesn't matter.

03:13:13.520 | You know, you were telling me what makes you different?

03:13:15.160 | Many things makes us all different.

03:13:16.680 | You know, the Rwandans are very different

03:13:18.640 | from the West Africans that we are.

03:13:21.720 | Rwandans, for example, never dance with their hips.

03:13:24.560 | They dance more like, you know, with this part of a body.

03:13:27.440 | - West Africans' hips?

03:13:30.000 | - Us, it's hips all over the place all the time.

03:13:32.240 | And it's, you know, more jumping, stuff like that.

03:13:34.640 | In Rwanda, you feel it's more like, you know,

03:13:36.360 | I mean, they remind me more of, you know, the ballet thing.

03:13:39.320 | Rwandans have a sense where, you know,

03:13:42.440 | they don't eat so much in public.

03:13:45.240 | It's not very well, it's something you do.

03:13:47.920 | Us, we are the West Africans, we like to be loud.

03:13:50.120 | We're almost like the Italians of the continent.

03:13:52.520 | (laughing)

03:13:53.760 | And then the Rwandans are more like, you know,

03:13:55.160 | the Swiss of activist country,

03:13:56.880 | even looks like a Switzerland.

03:13:58.440 | I mean, we're so different from one group to another.

03:14:00.800 | Then you go to the Congo and you see these guys,

03:14:02.880 | they're so crazy, the way they dress, I mean,

03:14:04.480 | les sapeurs, so we are a very different bunch.

03:14:08.520 | But you know what I love about us,

03:14:11.000 | what I love about my people?

03:14:12.400 | We are the, we are the manifestation

03:14:19.720 | of what resiliency means.

03:14:21.800 | And so everything we need is there.

03:14:26.800 | I will say that there's nothing wrong with the seed.

03:14:29.400 | Everything that's wrong with us is that pot

03:14:34.400 | that we put around us.

03:14:36.720 | So we're tired of being bonsai people.

03:14:38.600 | We need to be the tallest trees in the forest

03:14:43.120 | that we were designed to be.

03:14:44.520 | And so--

03:14:45.360 | - And that can be fixed.

03:14:46.680 | - And that can be fixed, and that's the beauty of it.

03:14:48.160 | And that's why I am so, I'm almost dizzy with,

03:14:51.720 | I get dizzy with hope.

03:14:54.440 | I know my history, I know my economics,

03:14:57.480 | my fellow humans and all of that.

03:15:00.680 | And we know that there's an unfailing recipe.

03:15:03.400 | - Yeah.

03:15:06.240 | - And when it comes to that recipe,

03:15:07.360 | we have the hardest part of it.

03:15:09.080 | One missing ingredient, which is a free markets.

03:15:13.560 | As we go around and talk and people start to understand

03:15:20.640 | and each country tries to figure out,

03:15:22.960 | okay, where do we go there from here?

03:15:25.520 | I know that I will die with my continent

03:15:32.280 | having taken the right shift for a turn.

03:15:36.640 | I don't have to see where it ends

03:15:37.880 | because I cannot in my wildest dream

03:15:40.000 | imagine where it's gonna end.

03:15:41.760 | But I know it's gonna be, yeah.

03:15:45.200 | So all my only job is to make sure

03:15:49.800 | that the right thing is done, is to get this message out.

03:15:54.800 | And then let my people do with it what they wanna do.

03:15:58.400 | - Yeah, the scale of impact is just boundless.

03:16:01.400 | It's kinda cool, I mean, you know,

03:16:02.880 | sometimes we think about individual problems,

03:16:04.760 | and how do we solve them?

03:16:05.680 | We look up to certain individuals like the, I don't know,

03:16:09.000 | Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, but it's so much more powerful

03:16:13.400 | to just, without knowing what they will do,

03:16:17.160 | to millions, to hundreds of millions of people

03:16:22.160 | to do whatever the hell they're gonna do.

03:16:23.840 | - Can you imagine?

03:16:25.200 | Can you just imagine?

03:16:26.480 | - It's truly, truly exciting.

03:16:27.720 | So in that sense, the work you're doing,

03:16:30.160 | it's unimaginable the kind of impact it would have.

03:16:33.560 | Now, going back to that hard moment,

03:16:36.160 | this dark place you went in, in your mind,

03:16:38.920 | in your personal life story, you lost your husband.

03:16:41.880 | What gave you strength during that time?

03:16:45.360 | What were the places you went to your mind

03:16:49.080 | in terms of personal struggle,

03:16:52.800 | in terms of maybe even depression,

03:16:54.720 | or these kinds of struggles?

03:16:57.960 | - I think for me, when my husband passed away,

03:17:01.280 | I went to,

03:17:06.240 | maybe my friends could see what was going on,

03:17:10.040 | maybe they couldn't, I don't know.

03:17:11.840 | But on the surface, I looked like I was fine.

03:17:14.480 | But what happened is, the only thing I think

03:17:16.280 | that kept me around as I thought about it,

03:17:18.720 | was the job to be done.

03:17:24.280 | These women relied on me.

03:17:28.160 | And I was no longer free.

03:17:31.320 | I did not own myself.

03:17:32.440 | And they said it in those words,

03:17:33.480 | you don't own yourself anymore.

03:17:35.040 | And it was true.

03:17:38.040 | But it helped me because I was able to,

03:17:43.520 | you know, sometimes whatever it takes to keep you around,

03:17:45.880 | whatever it takes.

03:17:47.120 | And that's what I would tell people

03:17:48.280 | who feel like they can't just push one more push,

03:17:51.840 | and they think they need to end it.

03:17:54.120 | At that point, whatever it takes,

03:17:55.800 | just stick around for one more second

03:17:58.000 | because the next second, you know.

03:18:00.520 | So I stuck around because of duty.

03:18:04.200 | I felt a very strong sense of duty.

03:18:06.320 | My duty was in this case, I think, stronger than my pain.

03:18:10.400 | I don't know if it's possible,

03:18:11.400 | I don't know how that was possible, but it was.

03:18:13.760 | And I just pushed my grief under the rug for years.

03:18:20.200 | For years, I worked like a mad lady.

03:18:22.800 | I would travel, I would do three states in three days,

03:18:28.080 | landing at two in the morning,

03:18:29.840 | around five or six, going to ride along

03:18:31.880 | with our distributors, 'cause it was beverage,

03:18:34.400 | and just keep going and have all of this energy

03:18:36.560 | and look like everything is fine.

03:18:38.440 | But what happened was just like,

03:18:39.760 | I was focused on the job to be done.

03:18:41.440 | And sometimes it is okay to do that.

03:18:43.760 | At least for me, it was my safety.

03:18:46.840 | You know, like when you're in the water

03:18:47.920 | and you're about to sink and they throw you that round thing,

03:18:51.360 | I don't know how you call it.

03:18:52.800 | - The thing that keeps you afloat, you mean?

03:18:56.200 | - Yes, yes, the floater.

03:18:57.280 | It's the floater. - Yeah, whatever.

03:18:59.040 | Between the two of us, we're still terrible.

03:19:02.040 | - We're bad.

03:19:02.880 | So listen, you, you, you.

03:19:05.040 | - I know exactly what you mean.

03:19:06.320 | - Exactly, right?

03:19:07.160 | So you understand me.

03:19:08.200 | So they send you that thing and you just,

03:19:10.600 | I was just hanging on to it.

03:19:12.600 | My life depended on this thing.

03:19:14.480 | So these women, they carried me.

03:19:17.520 | They carried me.

03:19:19.280 | And with time, things are moving forward.

03:19:23.560 | And at some point I went into really, really deep depression

03:19:26.880 | and I went into a very dark place,

03:19:29.640 | even darker than the one I think I came from.

03:19:31.840 | Because by that time, I had worked for years

03:19:35.200 | on this company and now some other things was happening.

03:19:37.960 | And around that time, it's also when I was discovering

03:19:42.160 | a lot of what we talked about today,

03:19:45.160 | about what makes a country rich.

03:19:48.000 | And for me to understand that my network,

03:19:52.840 | I was very much into left-oriented network.

03:19:56.280 | And to just start to see all of this,

03:20:02.320 | I tried to address it to realize that many of these people

03:20:06.720 | would prefer go running for the hills

03:20:09.080 | than accept for a moment that maybe capitalism

03:20:12.960 | might be part of a solution,

03:20:14.760 | when many of them were involved in capitalism.

03:20:17.280 | So that was a hard time.

03:20:21.320 | At some point I was, yeah, so many things were happening

03:20:26.560 | around that time that basically shook up everything for me.

03:20:31.560 | One is hard to talk about because it's very personal

03:20:35.640 | and the person that I was having a problem with

03:20:39.560 | passed away last year.

03:20:41.760 | And I'm one to always say, leave the dead alone.

03:20:45.840 | So because of that, I won't speak about it.

03:20:48.760 | But there too, having a major fallout

03:20:51.080 | with somebody who was like a father figure for me,

03:20:53.560 | somebody that I completely trusted.

03:20:55.800 | And so at some point you just ask yourself,

03:20:59.320 | was my whole life built on a lie?

03:21:01.120 | Right?

03:21:04.920 | And then you're confused and then you become confused.

03:21:08.920 | And then at some point you lose 90% of your friends

03:21:13.160 | because of ideologically speaking, it doesn't work anymore.

03:21:16.160 | Then you just wonder, have I been asleep this whole time?

03:21:24.200 | And then you start to wonder,

03:21:26.320 | remember when you asked me, who am I?

03:21:28.080 | At some point Lex,

03:21:29.880 | I literally was like a candle in the wind.

03:21:33.720 | I felt like I was a candle in the wind.

03:21:35.680 | And it was very hard to come back from that.

03:21:38.960 | And people have a hard time,

03:21:42.080 | the few people I talk to about this,

03:21:43.920 | they have a hardest time understanding

03:21:45.560 | or even believing it because they're like, you?

03:21:48.160 | I'm like, yes, me.

03:21:50.040 | I used to be a candle in the wind.

03:21:52.320 | - What got you out?

03:21:53.720 | What made you overcome that?

03:21:55.480 | - My current husband, my current husband.

03:21:58.480 | - Love?

03:21:59.320 | - Love.

03:22:00.160 | See, when I tell you love is the answer.

03:22:02.040 | But him, he came with love,

03:22:04.360 | but he also came with really helping me

03:22:08.840 | figure out the world.

03:22:10.240 | So with Michael, because that's him,

03:22:11.920 | who we're talking about, Michael Strong.

03:22:13.920 | - That must be special.

03:22:16.480 | - He's so special.

03:22:17.720 | He's so special.

03:22:18.960 | So you have no idea how special he is.

03:22:21.480 | But you know, Michael, the reason why I have such love,

03:22:25.040 | respect and admiration for my husband,

03:22:26.920 | I'll never say it enough,

03:22:28.600 | is because actually it's one of those relationships

03:22:32.360 | that got built based on intellect first.

03:22:37.360 | You see, at some point I was in the position

03:22:41.360 | where I could start a foundation

03:22:43.560 | after having built my first business.

03:22:46.880 | And all I wanted was an ability to power

03:22:54.320 | as many, especially women, African women entrepreneurs,

03:22:59.040 | like me a few years ago, before then,

03:23:01.760 | to do something like I was able to do.

03:23:04.560 | Bring back to the world some really cool aspects

03:23:07.400 | of our culture built into a really cool brand,

03:23:10.160 | 21st century type.

03:23:11.760 | That's what I wanted to do.

03:23:12.840 | Because the more I could promote women like that

03:23:15.640 | and put steam behind them,

03:23:17.480 | and the more my dream and vision for a respected Africa,

03:23:21.080 | prosperous Africa would happen.

03:23:22.560 | Back then, that's what I wanted.

03:23:24.680 | And around me, this was also part of the whole crisis

03:23:29.000 | of ideologies I had back then.

03:23:32.000 | Everybody was like, "Well, we should be just doing grants."

03:23:36.480 | And I knew that my people didn't need grants.

03:23:40.680 | They didn't need like a handout.

03:23:42.280 | They don't want your charity.

03:23:46.080 | I didn't want charity.

03:23:47.680 | I wanted someone who could work with me on my accounting.

03:23:51.040 | I wanted somebody who could help me brainstorm

03:23:54.560 | marketing-wise.

03:23:55.840 | I wanted somebody, or I needed to raise money

03:23:59.400 | to pay my research and development guy

03:24:03.320 | to help me take the juices from my grandma's recipe

03:24:08.000 | to something that can be shelf-stable.

03:24:10.640 | I needed coaching.

03:24:15.240 | These are all the things that I needed

03:24:17.440 | to make my dream happen.

03:24:18.840 | I didn't want you to give me some crap for free,

03:24:20.960 | that's not what I want.

03:24:21.920 | I just want to be able to build my business

03:24:24.840 | with all the things that business building needs.

03:24:27.280 | And so that's what I wanted to do,

03:24:30.440 | and it's what was needed.

03:24:32.120 | And so Michael, somebody found out about what I was doing,

03:24:36.400 | because back in the days of the school,

03:24:37.760 | they would write a lot about me and everything.

03:24:39.480 | And so Michael, along with John Mackey,

03:24:43.640 | the founder of Whole Foods Market,

03:24:44.920 | they had a nonprofit called Flow,

03:24:48.040 | and it's all about human flourishing.

03:24:49.880 | They want for people, everybody to get this choice,

03:24:52.640 | this ability to be able to get to a point in their life

03:24:55.080 | where they're in complete flow.

03:24:56.880 | It's, Michael, just make hi,

03:24:59.040 | Michael is the only one who can say that last name,

03:25:00.880 | but the whole concept of flow,

03:25:02.400 | when you're in a state of flow,

03:25:03.480 | you're basically doing what you're supposed to do,

03:25:06.400 | the way you're supposed to do it,

03:25:07.400 | with the people you're supposed to,

03:25:08.360 | this whole concept of flow, it's amazing,

03:25:10.840 | it's human flourishing at its highest.

03:25:12.840 | So I met with this man, Max, you're so,

03:25:16.880 | okay, so we, he finds me, his people find me.

03:25:21.520 | And then there was a program

03:25:23.200 | where it was all about accelerating women entrepreneurs.

03:25:26.360 | So it's during this times

03:25:28.120 | that I'm starting now to see things.

03:25:30.400 | That's when actually all of this stuff that I noticed,

03:25:33.520 | how come here it takes me all of this time

03:25:35.760 | to start my business, over there's 20 minutes,

03:25:37.440 | here it's free, over there's thousands of dollars,

03:25:39.480 | all of this nonsense that I just took,

03:25:41.080 | oh, maybe it's just because we're messed up,

03:25:42.400 | we're poor, that's why everything is so messed up.

03:25:45.360 | Whoa, these people are introducing me to concepts,

03:25:48.000 | I'm like, first of all, I'm like, oh, really?

03:25:50.800 | What did you call the doing business?

03:25:55.200 | What is that?

03:25:56.040 | All of this stuff.

03:25:58.880 | And I'm starting to discover this whole other body of work,

03:26:02.000 | what the free market's like, this thing that I was sensing,

03:26:06.920 | this environment that I was sensing

03:26:08.280 | that it was different around me,

03:26:11.000 | and that they called it the free markets over here,

03:26:13.880 | and over there that.

03:26:15.680 | And then I started to butthead those ideas

03:26:18.480 | with the ideas that I was fed with before that.

03:26:21.800 | And the evidence won.

03:26:23.840 | And further, more than the evidence,

03:26:25.680 | the evidence combined with my lived experience,

03:26:29.360 | it was so powerful.

03:26:30.720 | So I basically started understanding these ideas

03:26:34.080 | from the most visceral part of my body, of my being.

03:26:37.880 | And it made sense.

03:26:41.080 | So Michael, Michael helped me find the solution,

03:26:45.440 | the answer to my lifelong little girl's question

03:26:49.920 | of why do we have this and we don't?

03:26:52.280 | And how do some countries like mine be poor

03:26:55.600 | while others are rich?

03:26:57.560 | And with understanding all of that,

03:27:01.560 | the greatest, biggest sense of liberation came upon me.

03:27:09.280 | Like, I have no other word to describe that.

03:27:12.440 | True liberation, the liberation that comes from a peer,

03:27:16.880 | to finally understand and be vindicated

03:27:21.880 | in your own, you know,

03:27:25.320 | understand, in your own deep knowing or feeling that

03:27:30.320 | they're not, what they're saying is not true.

03:27:33.680 | You're not the problem.

03:27:35.160 | It's not you.

03:27:36.680 | There's something else.

03:27:38.640 | And when I discovered that, my whole life changed.

03:27:41.320 | So, and since then, I have been very serious

03:27:44.800 | about going deeper and deeper and deeper

03:27:46.680 | into my understanding of all of this,

03:27:49.840 | understanding the subtlety.

03:27:52.040 | At some point I was very angry

03:27:53.920 | about the liberators of Africa,

03:27:55.720 | 'cause I was like, yes, you helped liberate us,

03:27:58.400 | but just to keep us in this marism,

03:28:00.280 | I was angry for the longest time.

03:28:03.360 | And then eventually you have to engage empathy and love.

03:28:08.720 | To put yourself in their shoes

03:28:10.160 | and try to understand the time at which they were living.

03:28:13.280 | And that got me onto a journey

03:28:14.560 | of trying to understand history more.

03:28:17.120 | That's how I understood I was able to go beyond

03:28:19.360 | just these liberators and try to understand

03:28:22.000 | and rebuild the world around them,

03:28:23.600 | at the micro and also at the macro level.

03:28:28.600 | Just really, you have to try to walk in their shoes.

03:28:31.760 | And from there, finally separate the baby with a bathwater

03:28:36.800 | that they were not able to do back then.

03:28:38.680 | That's why today, I'm sorry,

03:28:40.680 | but I have no patience for the BLM organizers, founders,

03:28:44.760 | especially the founders.

03:28:45.600 | I don't know what the organizers think,

03:28:46.440 | but the founders told us what they stand for.

03:28:48.800 | And I say, guys, don't make that same mistake again.

03:28:51.840 | If you're serious about this,

03:28:53.080 | you cannot make the same mistake.

03:28:54.720 | The liberators of Africa, they have an excuse.

03:29:00.280 | We didn't know better.

03:29:01.120 | It was so easy back then to conflate everything.

03:29:04.960 | But today, you, me, anybody alive,

03:29:08.360 | cannot with a straight face embrace Marxist socialist ideas,

03:29:12.520 | especially, especially when they're claiming

03:29:16.440 | that they want people to thrive.

03:29:20.360 | No, you can't, I'm sorry.

03:29:22.480 | And I will hold your feet up to the fire on that one.

03:29:26.080 | I will, I will.

03:29:27.040 | And that's what I'm doing.

03:29:28.080 | They will give me a lot of grief for this,

03:29:29.200 | but guess what?

03:29:30.040 | I could care less.

03:29:30.880 | Do you know why I could care less?

03:29:32.480 | Because we have an entire population to help rise

03:29:36.800 | out of poverty into prosperity,

03:29:40.360 | where they become co-creators,

03:29:44.520 | global co-creators of innovation.

03:29:47.320 | - And those ideas give you hope for the place you love,

03:29:52.440 | for Senegal, for Africa.

03:29:54.320 | - They do, they do.

03:29:55.600 | I live, the world I live in,

03:29:57.240 | the new centers of culture and fashion are in Dakar.

03:30:02.440 | (Lex laughing)

03:30:03.280 | The new centers of tech and crypto even

03:30:08.280 | is somewhere, maybe Nigeria.

03:30:13.600 | - So you see that future, you see that future clearly.

03:30:16.440 | - I do, I do, I do.

03:30:18.960 | - It's a beautiful thing.

03:30:20.080 | And it's also beautiful to see that the space

03:30:22.560 | of these really powerful ideas

03:30:24.920 | is where you also found love.

03:30:26.720 | - Right?

03:30:27.560 | - So at the intersection.

03:30:28.800 | - At the intersection, Michael and I would spend hours

03:30:31.880 | talking about all of these ideas.

03:30:33.160 | And I would be like, "But what about this?

03:30:34.680 | "No, it doesn't make any sense.

03:30:36.000 | "No, no, no, oh no."

03:30:37.240 | And then hours, every single day for months, Lex.

03:30:41.600 | - Yeah.

03:30:42.480 | - And then from there, our love was born.

03:30:45.040 | 'Cause I tell people, for us,

03:30:47.320 | love is not about looking each other in the eyes,

03:30:49.120 | like we all think, but it's about,

03:30:51.400 | we look in one direction, and in this case,

03:30:53.120 | it's this vision, what we know to be possible and true.

03:30:55.920 | If only you liberate people,

03:30:59.600 | what we know to be true and possible.

03:31:01.480 | All of us are miracles walking around.

03:31:04.880 | Every time I get on a plane, it's a miracle of engineering.

03:31:08.600 | All the things we're able to do now

03:31:11.560 | when they do operation on your teeth,

03:31:13.360 | how they're able to put the pain down away.

03:31:16.680 | All of this is us.

03:31:18.000 | You're working on these robots.

03:31:19.560 | This, this, this inside here.

03:31:22.520 | - Yeah, humans are amazing.

03:31:23.840 | - I know.

03:31:24.760 | So that's why, and when it works in great tandem

03:31:27.200 | with this guy, these two working together.

03:31:30.360 | - Yeah.

03:31:31.200 | - Ooh, watch out.

03:31:32.040 | - There's nothing we can't accomplish.

03:31:33.280 | - Nothing, nothing.

03:31:35.160 | - Well, Guy, you're one of the most incredible people

03:31:37.720 | I've ever talked to, I've ever met.

03:31:38.560 | - Oh, you say that.

03:31:39.760 | You've met everybody.

03:31:41.200 | - Thank you so much.

03:31:42.040 | This is truly an honor.

03:31:43.520 | Thank you for everything you're doing.

03:31:44.600 | Thank you for the fire that burns within you.

03:31:46.840 | And it's just the passion you have for a place

03:31:49.080 | that's going to, I think, define the future of humanity.

03:31:52.000 | So thank you for everything you're doing.

03:31:53.320 | Thank you for talking today.

03:31:54.160 | - Thank you, thank you to you.

03:31:55.320 | And sometimes I hope this fire doesn't consume me.

03:31:57.720 | That's how much it is.

03:31:59.240 | But I am grateful to you for this.

03:32:02.320 | And yeah, thank you for,

03:32:04.640 | I know you don't do a lot of these, you know,

03:32:06.600 | I am, it's, this type of interviews, maybe, I don't know.

03:32:09.560 | But I'm so, so happy to be here.

03:32:11.640 | - You mean fun, inspiring, powerful interviews?

03:32:14.960 | Yes, I need to do more.

03:32:16.400 | You're amazing.

03:32:17.240 | - I don't know, because at first I was like,

03:32:18.600 | Lex Friedman, really?

03:32:20.040 | - Yeah, really?

03:32:20.880 | How's this going to go?

03:32:21.920 | - I'm like, yeah, I'm going to talk to Lex

03:32:23.680 | and go all crazy.

03:32:24.520 | - I think you need to work on your unconscious bias.

03:32:27.680 | - Right! (laughs)

03:32:29.840 | Okay, fine. - All right, thank you,

03:32:30.680 | Magat, you're the best.

03:32:31.520 | - Thank you, thank you, thank you so much.

03:32:33.520 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

03:32:36.200 | with Magat Wade.

03:32:37.520 | To support this podcast,

03:32:38.760 | please check out our sponsors in the description.

03:32:41.360 | And now, let me leave you with some words

03:32:43.560 | from Nelson Mandela.

03:32:44.900 | Money won't create success.

03:32:48.460 | The freedom to make it will.

03:32:52.160 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

03:32:55.240 | (upbeat music)

03:32:57.820 | (upbeat music)

03:33:00.400 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Magatte Wade: Africa, Capitalism, Communism, and the Future of Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #311

Chapters