Magatte Wade: Africa, Capitalism, Communism, and the Future of Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #311
you have to have the free markets in order to build prosperity and prosperity means economic power if you have economic power no one messes with you or if they're gonna do it they're gonna have to think twice and when they do they're gonna have to pay consequences the following is a conversation with magot wade an entrepreneur who is passionate about creating positive change in africa through economic empowerment this is the lex friedman podcast to support it please check out our sponsors in the description and now dear friends here's my god wait you were born in senegal you have lived and traveled across the world so let me ask you what is the soul of senegal like it's people it's culture it's history can you can you try to sneak up on telling us what is the spirit of its people taranga taranga taranga in it's a wall of word wolf is a main indigenous language of senegal and it means hospitality that is what us the people of senegal are known for and it transpires in everything that we do um everything that we say it's a place where i guess with hospitality goes this concept of warmth so we are very we are a very warm people uh it's on a nutshell that's us that's that's us the place where you come and everybody will just embrace you um make you feel very comfortable make you look like feel like you're the only person in the world and that we've been waiting for you our whole life right so so that's my country so that's for people in senegal people in africa or also people across the world weird strangers from all walks of life so hospitality towards everyone for everyone for everyone especially towards the foreigner because it's very it's very um ingrained in us this understanding that especially the foreigner the foreigner is called foreign because the foreign is coming from somewhere else so if someone has taken the time and the energy whether uh in a forced manner or because it's a choice to travel so far to come to a place that's not theirs to start with that's probably foreigners again um then it is your duty to welcome them to be uber welcome welcoming to them so there's not a fear of the foreigner there's not a suspicion of the foreigner no no no and i think um this goes with the other way around maybe it has to do with um just you know when you feel good about yourself when you're very grounded yourself it's very easy to open yourself to others and um i'm wondering if that's not you know the other side of the equation in a way so no we don't have a fear uh towards a foreigner so when you have a pride uh of your culture pride of your own people like it's easier to sort of embrace i mean it's interesting how these kind of cultures emerge because um you know the the slavic countries are sometimes colder they're slower to trust others uh we're now here in austin texas one of the reasons i fell in love with this place when i showed up is there's that same hospitality right as compared to other cities i've lived in boston philadelphia san francisco there's a there's a hesitation to open up to be fragile to to be caring before understanding what the sort of what i can gain from you kind of calculation it's really interesting and i i wonder what how those kinds of dynamics emerge because there's certainly parts of the world like austin is one of them where you just feel the kindness just radiate without knowing kindness from strangers you know um if i were to advance one thing and i had the same experience um after having lived in san francisco first then we went to new york then we came to austin when we came to austin i felt it took me a while to put my finger on it but what i found in austin people just hang people right they're real yeah they're real yeah unlike what you were saying i feel like in these other places um people are it's a destination for people who want to come and perform i think maybe the early san francisco people it was different for them um but later as prosperity starts to come in and success comes in then you attract a different breed yeah at first wherever people who made it who made this place be what it is and then it attracts all the bling followers and the bling attracted people and when those people show up it's time for all of us to get out and that's one of my worries about austin too and i guess i wanna i count myself in it but you know because we also new arrives um always been furious now but um how are we going to protect this place yeah yeah these are you know in the best possible version of the austin history this is the early days of silicon valley in austin and so you get a chance to build on top of this culture that's already been here of the weirdos the artists uh the sort of the characters but also the the the general kindness and love that just permeates the whole place build on top of that entrepreneurial spirit so like tech companies new startups all that kind of stuff and then you get a chance to build totally new ideas totally revolutionary ideas and make them a reality and dream big and build it here i think elon represents that with the the all the all the people that kind of tried to um do the cutting edge stuff they're doing at tesla and spacex there's a bunch of other companies they're just like coming up i get to talk to a bunch of tech people and they're just incredible versus san francisco there's uh there's a cynicism a bit and also some of the interaction with strangers there's always a bit of a calculation like how good is this going to be for my career yeah how can um hang out with this person can advance me you know you go to a party you seizing the season this isn't up it's like i'm not going to talk to someone so because that's not going to advance me who's going to advance me next and so this is what i would not want to see here in austin and i think maybe there's one way to try to i really would like to see austin not go the way san francisco did and other towns before i like how you pronounce san francisco with a french accent it's great i think that that's the one word you go with the french accent sounds beautiful san francisco but you know um so so now that you find that cute you're gonna have to forgive me when i mess up my english because english is not my first language so i always try to make sure people know that um but you know lex this is why i am very interested in what some folks here are working on and i'm just going to be very selfish here because i want to help her with what she's doing it's someone like um you know nicole noezek and her project you know with the housing projects that they have right now making sure that austin remains a town that's affordable for people of all walks of lives if we can accomplish making sure that all walks of life doesn't matter how little big you're making money wise that you can stay in this town so the diversity at that level can remain then i think austin stands a chance to really show the world how to do things differently and what i love about about you know her initiative is just how they're really trying um you know to again work on keeping affordability down for for most people i think it's important to because it seems like it matters to you i know that it matters to me i absolutely would not want to see um austin go away that's what francisco did and i think the key to that is making sure that true diversity not like the fluff fluff crap diversity we're hearing over there and that's another thing by the way because san francisco likes to pride itself in oh you know we are so into diversity but i'm like if diversity for you means um gender difference of gender skin color you know maybe the different accents we have and you think check check check check check i'm like uh it's not enough can we also add diversity of thoughts and that's the other problem i have with that place you know and i know some folks who are scared of saying much around people that's also another thing so not only they're sizing you up but everybody's also very invisible this invisible um how should i say this there's this invisible agreement that they all seem to have to stay on script there's a feeling like you're following a certain kind of script that's very kind of shallow and there is a bit of a categorization going on which category do you belong to and let's put this into a simple math equation how what comes out as opposed to just the free open uh embrace of people the weirdos the characters the interesting the full deep sense of diversity exactly not just ideas but backgrounds and uh rich and poor like artist engineers high school dropouts phds yes all of this yes yes yeah that's what makes for a rich society that's gonna get ahead i'm glad you mentioned nicole's efforts i know she really is passionate about um i i don't i don't know how complicated that work is because there's probably a big force trying to um increase how much it costs to live in austin yeah i don't know how you resist that i whenever i go to new york city just the fact that there's a giant park in the middle of it uh i wonder like how did they pull this off this is amazing it's like to resist the force of the increasing price of the land and still to protect this idea of having um having a park and then in the same way protecting the ability for people from all walks of life to live in the center of the city to live around the city to uh to chase a dream when they don't get any money in their pocket absolutely i don't know how you do that this partly political probably uh regulation all that kind of stuff it's a lot of it has to do with regulations um and this is where her and i also very much um see eye to eye in terms of um you know the free markets and also prosperity building because it's always the same problems every most of the time most places here what you have is some people in the name of we got to stand for and i don't like to use this word but maybe you help me find a better one um but at least that's a word that people can understand we gotta stand for the less lesser fortunate among us some people would like call them maybe oftentimes use the word maybe underdogs whatever it is i will just say maybe even lesser fortunate among us right um in the name of standing up for them you're promoting policies that are actually going to backfire and where they end up being the first ones to suffer from it so let's take this whole housing issue that nicole and her team are working on um we find that oftentimes the cost at the end of the day it's the good old supply and demand equation if you're going to make it so hard that the supply level of housing remains below a certain threshold remains lower than the demand of people who need especially affordable housing housing altogether what's going to happen is scarcity prices go up and who gets kicked out first the lesser fortunate among us and so but but i find that oftentimes people in the name of we care don't engage their mind and a friend of mine said this and he said so well he said having a heart for the poor that's easy having a mind for poor that's the challenge and oftentimes it's we all have a heart for the poor but when it comes ventu then what do we do to have a real impact on making sure people get a chance at you know going up then that's where everything starts falling apart and then you have people who you know then they start pushing for policies housing policies making it super hard for you to even renovate or add one more story to your home or anything like that by doing that you're messing up with a supply with a supply uh with a supply um the supply of housing and therefore the the people who can't afford you know people get priced out of a market and so what people like nicole are doing are going back to where all of this is taking place and they're going back to the regulation side and just like you know i'm sure we'll talk about it here but people wonder today why is africa the poorest region in the world we go back to the same culprit bad laws and tons of um senseless regulations if you make it so hard that in berkeley for someone to build one more story to their home which means maybe one more unit that could be rented out to someone and if many more people do that then you have a much bigger supply which means the prices will go down which means more people have access and among them especially the lesser fortunate among us then we're starting to see a winning proposal aren't we but instead if you go the other way around then all of a sudden you're pricing them out of a market same thing was done with us so oftentimes when i see a pro problems of this nature you can betcha that regulations and census laws are the heart of it and that's what they're tackling it's not popular it's not fun and people tend to not even understand where you're coming from but this is a problem we have with people not understanding economic econ 101 well so it's the regulation the laws and the system that props them up and increases the span of those laws and we'll talk about that the fascinating way those kinds of things develop when it works when it doesn't let me sort of step back and ask a question about africa in the west in many places in the world africa is almost uh talked about like it's one country like it's one place so in what ways is africa one community and in what ways is it many many many communities just from your perspective uh from in senegal and and beyond right so at the most basic of um what makes us one goes back to even what makes you african you are african i'm african well one big family it's africa is very much at the end of the day the the foundation and the birth of um you know the human race so in from that standpoint at the most basic level uh we're all africans where this whole thing started exactly exactly where this whole thing started and how at some point um humanity was hanging by its fingernails only two thousands of us were left on this earth and eventually we started you know we went for survival and that's how we started to spread around and some going up north some going this way that way and as you're traveling to different places then features start to change to adapt to where you are right so hair gets lighter for some people eyes get different shape for others to to to adjust to a new natural habitat you know the genomics program i think um at the via national geographic did that so well for people who are interested in going back to that work with spencer wells and such but um yeah so at the very basic most basic level that's that's what unites us all first of all and then i would say that the continent especially here i will group it into black africa you know like africa um unfortunately are common stories you know of um having gone through this terrible horrible period of um around the same time the whole continent being you know enslaved and colonized so that in a way forms not that we were ever the first people or only people ever you know enslaved in this world as a matter of fact i mean the world slaves comes from escrow you know esclav slave slavs lislav right from the eastern bloc so the first place where actually people looking more like you than looking like me right so but we don't necessarily remember all of that because in our human psyche um the closest to us in history of um a big mass of people being enslaved is african people we were the last the last you know group like that you know um the pain of world war one and world war ii permeates um europe but it certainly does for the soviet the former soviet union the countries that made up the former soviet union does in the same way the the pain of um slavery uh and empires using africa does that permeate the culture is there still echoes of that in a way yes especially the fact that you know in many different um places uh whether it's ghana or my country or benin where you have um these places that we call the dwarf no return or the places of no return which this was the last um place where the slaves were standing or you know this is in senegal we call it the door of no return uh there's this one door you're there in the slave house and uh once they go they go it's um that's that's it that's gonna be the last time they see back home um so you know those of course of course it creates for a common lived uh experience which becomes a common lived um history and of course he's gonna tie us up is there a resentment because you mentioned hospitality yeah is there a kind of resentment of the foreigner that they there's a rich vibrant land there's many resources there's powerful cultures are they just going to show up and use us yeah that's a way to see geopolitics in this modern world yeah this is okay so where it plays very differently is so if you came to senegal today there is not really a problem at that level where people's resentment start to come from is of course when bad behavior shows up meaning like you have so many white people who can show up and just in the attitude they have uh an entitlement attitude right and they think but in a way we're all still servants some people in your face some people more but that can cause some little resentment but where really the resentment is and that can the entitlement can take different forms like even pity is is don't even get me going on that one i was trying to be polite today so just just don't lex do not you know sometimes i tell myself my god today you're going to be all composed you know next year i'll compose so don't go there and make a fool of yourself just just behave yeah but together you get me on some some grounds that's when it's all gonna go yeah so yeah let's let's let's move beyond that too or so resentment there's there's a dance between hospitality and resentment and resentment so when you come in you're you you live your life you're just a normal human being and you treat me decently like you would treat a friend normal people i have no problem with you i'm not gonna come back and be like well you and uh your ancestors have enslaved me you you're not gonna see that stuff sometimes i'm in this country though i feel like that's you know it might look like that but we we in africa don't do that now if you come you have this nasty attitude you think you're still seeing servants around well you're gonna have a problem someone like me i might even grab you by the back of your neck and you know take you back to the airport that's when you're lucky yeah um how are you very quickly exactly but um where things come up is especially nowadays with the african youth when we have to be reminded of a world bank when we have to be reminded of um even the world places like the world economic forum you know like all of these places that seem to constitute um they would you they the way they describe them when i say they it's primarily my pan-african friends so here maybe terms are worth describing so um the pan-african movement goes way back when um we're talking about you know way back when started in um in the 30s going on all the way from there so what you have there is um people who have started coming together and dreaming up and emancipated africa away from the colonies because at that point they were still colonies and dreaming up all of that so we're talking about people like kwame kuma of ghana we're talking about jewish new railway of tanzania talking about blizzchiang of senegal and other people like that bundy of malawi so anyway so and the african youth of today we're still hanging on onto those onto some of these ideas of uh and on some of these dreams of a reunited africa so when you were talking about what seems to unite you there is that you know also meaning like we all feel like we're part of the same family is it only in our heads it's in reality many for many different reasons there is definitely what we call a pan-african movement and i very much myself um consider myself one of them i don't agree all the time with our where we want to go and how we want to go there but not where we want to go where we want to go is we would love to see a united africa for sure but how to get that accomplished that's where oftentimes we have issues so on something like that um so vis-pan-african especially with pan-african youth but it's beyond the pan-african youth it's for youth in general in africa um world bank u.n all of these organizations that they tend to qualify as imperialist organizations and it's not always the correct way to describe them but i'm sure you get the sentiment and from that place there is tons of resentment because for the longest time these groups organizations and some that preceded them have proceeded to actually decide what even our new frontiers would be you see when you go to a place like senegal mali all of that different countries but we were one people one you know one group one kingdom what what and then at some point they decided just when you look at africa have you looked at how straight some of these borders are you're like did a robot just draw these really fast robots no offense to robot especially this one he looks so cute but you know what i mean so so they they have continued deciding what it would be um to be us to live on our land and how do we even progress and it just keeps on going they get to decide how are we gonna which type of even economic development path are we gonna choose or not so it's very um so from that standpoint yes there's a lot of resentment including even from people like me yeah and it's interesting that the invader and the oppressor and the empires have actually created a force for unity i've seen that in ukraine in the invasion in ukraine where it was a pretty divided not a pretty a very divided country with many factions but the invasion really forced everyone to think about the identity of this nation together yes beyond factions beyond all of that that's right it allowed it to look at its history and its future like they all say that all great nations have had to have a war of independence and this is our war to find our own identity that's right and so in that sense africa as one place as one continent found had to find multiple times its identity through the resistance of the oppressor especially sub-saharan africa especially southern africa yes and there's an interesting aspect to this because the president of senegal is also the um you know the head of the african union so we'll we'll talk about the the fascinating geopolitics of that of that whole situation but let me ask in general you talk about this question this fascinating question what does it take for a country to prosper what does it take for a country to prosper you see many countries in the world that really struggle and many that flourish and it's not always obvious why because some have natural resources some don't some have wars some don't some have sort of authoritarian regimes some don't and some have democracies and all that kind of stuff so you the dynamics aren't exactly obvious is there is there commonalities is there um fundamental ideas that result in a prosperity of a nation today i can confidently say yes despite all the differences that you talked about and i think then this is where it becomes very important that we are very clear about the question you asked me you said what does it take to make a country prosperous so i'm just gonna stick to prosperity because prosperity doesn't necessarily mean sometimes doesn't has nothing to do with maybe how you um conduct yourself otherwise so socially speaking right so you can be prosperous and still when it comes to your family laws all the way you approach the other aspects of your life maybe you're running a very communist lifestyle or you're in a very affordable another a very liberal you know society so for me when we talk about prosperity i just want to make sure that we are clear on that because some people might save it might be somewhere and be like well you you because i know what i'm going to talk to you about next and some people are going to sit and be like well china is not like that or you know uh even um dubai is not like that um no so what i'm talking about is this thing and that's what i love about this if we just stick to the word prosperity to me i see prosperity as this it's like economically speaking what are we going to be to be a prosperous nation meaning we are a middle to high income nation i'm not talking about what are the rights of your women to to vote or can people live like this or um i'm not talking about any economic fundamentally economic yes prosperity because i think it's that distinction is very important because over the years i've seen people push back on all types of things and it occurred to me that that's what the misunderstanding was there so we're going to talk about prosperity making sure that the country can make money so that it can take care of its needs and the needs of its citizens um then what i have come to find is that at the root of that is going to be what we call economic freedom and what i call the toolkit of the entrepreneur in that you can put the rule of law you can put the concept of clear and transferable property rights economic freedom is at all the levels that which will allow entrepreneurs and business people to create value and create value entrepreneurially we're not talking about rent seeking anything like that it's like you found a pie to be this big and you make it this big so that's what we're talking about create value create value yes so when it comes to that we have found that um whether you're looking at two countries that start out the same we're talking the same people east germany west germany south korea north korea very similar people to start with right but yet radical outcomes i know that today germany is united but we're talking about back in the days when you had east and western bloc same people very different outcomes like i said south korea um north korea and so on and so forth and at the same time very different nations dubai compared to singapore or to england very different yet the same outcome so it seems to me like whenever we're looking at prosperity if a nation is prosperous regardless of whatever other shenanigans they might be running whatever other operating software they might be running for anything that's not related to business if on the business side they are proponents of a free markets or at least a base level of free markets we know that such countries will create prosperity so what are the aspects of the operating systems that lead to singapore and and to south korea and all that kind of stuff so can you speak to different elements that enable the toolkit for entrepreneurs sure sure and maybe here let me just maybe illustrate it with my own story and then i can take you back tell us your story who are you it's just because it started with me coming here you shouldn't even rob anything and now it looks like i've known you we know you're sorry for talking and then you're like tell people and then no no but so this is where this question even when you ask me how are some some how do some countries become prosperous that question lex i had it when i was seven or so that's when my family moved me to um from senegal for the first time of my life i left my country i left my continent and i was headed to europe to go join my people my my family my parents who were there as economic migrants my parents had migrated for a better life as so many people have to so many people have to coming from poorer places coming for low-income countries do you saw the difference yes between the two places how else would you call it here you were in senegal minding your own business causing tons of trouble everywhere you know just being a this being a happy free-range kid but i was yeah so you were always a troublemaker not just now okay okay life wouldn't be fun without it and of course i agree so because even you you know like can you like all put together like front i know there's a lot of problem making behind you desperately trying to keep it together i know you are but with me i'm gonna totally bring it out so just yeah so you saw the difference right i still be different i'm walking in here back home and i tell people this story because to me it's a defining story back home to take a shower it's a it takes time grandma has to you know make the charcoal catch on a little uh stove like you use at you know when you go camping and then she puts a pot of water on it it boils she takes it puts it in a bigger bucket mixes it with some colder water then we put a little uh pot in it and a stronger member of the family has to drag it to the shower and then there finally i can proceed to take my shower here i'm in germany in the middle of the winter and my mom's like my god time for your shower i'm like i'm i'm not getting naked where's the bottle wherever it is a bucket of hot water she's like oh you're silly come on just jump in and i jump in the shower turn the buttons the water is coming down temperature while i'm playing are you kidding me it's so amazing i've been cheated out of life my whole life yeah so that's what happened and then i then and then i'm like oh and all of these roads are paved roads unlike back home everything is like sandy and you know my feet are always ash i always have to wash off when i back when i go back home and your shoes get ruined most of the time and it started everything and i had this question and it was just like wow how come they have this and we don't so i was not being like oh you know how come they have all this money oh i i was not that it was just like how come and i think what i was alluding to was how come life is so easy here and it's not an easy not in a negative sense in a beautiful sense sometimes i get uh you know just having traveled through the war zone just to come back traveling through europe back to america it just i'll just get emotional just looking at the efficiency of things like how how easy it is how that we can um first of all in ukraine you currently can't fly right it's a war zone just even the the transportation you said roads yeah the quality of roads in the united states is amazing just not you know many of the places that drive in ukraine you're talking about i mean uh really bad conditions of roads and i'm sure in many parts of africa and many parts of the world the world's even worse right right and outdoor you know having a toy indoor toilet is a is a fascinatingly awesome luxury to have it is it is and don't take me wrong lex do we have some great roads now in many parts of africa yes yes main arteries great roads you're like whoa this is moving it yes we do uh but definitely uh more today than in my time growing up um do we have you know a country like nigeria that just birthed um six unicorns last year alone yes do we have the african youth out there being so amazing and you know living their lives yes we have all of that but it is still unfortunately just like we're scratching the surface yeah and those people still are getting all of that accomplished literally swimming through molasses this is some of the most most gross immoral unfair waste of human capital and so that is the started with you as a seven-year-old asking wait a minute how do amazing people in europe do this and the amazing people in africa don't yeah and that's a key word amazing because that's when i that's what i realized later because and it was not always like that for me amazing and amazing right i knew instinctively that of course we are amazing too but so this and then the so eventually the question became how so i went from how can we have this and we don't to the country as i'm growing up and researching because it stayed with me when i tell you i'm obsessed i'm haunted i am good so you can laugh all you want but it's so the question became the question became how come some countries like um the united states singapore are rich and some others like mine and many others in africa are poor that became the question and along the line like along the the road i continued on living my life wondering about this question and i've heard all types of reasons as to supposedly why that might be the case some people with a very straight face are still peddling the iq fury according to which come on darling it's not your fault you know your skin color goes with a gene sequence that just doesn't allow you to be as smart as white people are and it's not your fault but just accept it bad stuff is still out there it's very real i and i have to hear it and others would say to me oh it's just because you know you guys don't have adequate level of um education and i say you know maybe you got to go say that to most of the street sellers you go see in senegal you go up to any of these to many of these street sellers in senegal they are wading through cars in moving cars under the hot sun fumes thrown at their face trying to sell you anything and any that you think you might be able to use whether we're talking about um an ironing board to an umbrella to q-tips to um you know toothpicks selling you whatever you need for from your car these are street sellers and you ask them dear do you do you have any degree yeah i i have this credit uh degree in math or in in uh literature or whatever some very very educated people yet they're right there this is what they're doing so that's just at scale wasted human potential thank you thank you so that has to do the wasted human potential has to do now with the system with something about the laws which is some yeah something some something about sort of uh the things that limit or enable the entrepreneur yes because at that point i've heard this you know i heard people say yeah your iq is no good yeah you're not you don't have enough degrees or you're not educated no some people would even say it's because you guys are malnourished you're malnourished you need to be fed others oh well maybe i'll give you some shoes and maybe something is going to change whatever and then so i heard all of these nonsense likes but you guess what but guess what none of them made sense you know why didn't make sense because if any of that crap was true why or why is it that my parents or any other people from these places and oh and by the way some people call up those places god forsaken land that's also the type of criteria always have to hear when it's not just flat out s-h-i-t whole countries from you know one person a few years ago president of this country that sentiment is sometimes there it is it is as i go on with my life trying to and trying to find the answer to why are some countries like mine poor while others are rich i'm hearing all of these reasons thrown at me and then they make no sense because then how come then if my parents move as it is usually anyone else who moves from a a poorer nation to a nation that supposedly is rich all the sudden they get to manifest their greatest potential so i'm starting to think this has nothing to do with a person per say because we're talking about the same person same background so maybe the same name features everything yeah now i'm starting to think maybe it doesn't have to do with a person maybe we're talking about something that has to do with a place that they came from or the place that they're going to so this this little thing is starting to be in my mind again remember this is not something that i woke up to overnight i'm like voila i got my ques it took me for a long time and i had to i had to to face off to have many different ideologies face each other i had to really have a reckoning literally in my heart and in my mind and so so then that's what i'm thinking it cannot be it cannot no no no it's the same people it has to be about the place but then what about this place but then even about the place you're thinking again two countries different backgrounds same outcome same background different outcome what is this and then i go on i start a comp i i am in silicon valley in the late um uh 90s early 2000s that come boom all of that and um i'm starting to discover this concept of this thing called entrepreneurship you know i'm in silicon valley and uh just getting to experience what um seems so cliche by now but you know people on the getting together in the back of a napkin talking about an idea you know putting it out and then they go out and they talk to somebody to some interest investors who's gonna invest in it then they have a lawyers who get to you know put all of this stuff together and then they have uh the big four cpa firms this whole ecosystem of what they call of entrepreneurship and then eventually this concept of entrepreneurship being this uh this idea of um you know creating something out of nothing so there i am and at some point i become an entrepreneur myself and the way i became an entrepreneur was not like i woke up and i'm like i want to make money so i'm going to become an entrepreneur you know like no and this is also another problem i have with people who have a problem with entrepreneurs or business people most entrepreneurs do not start a business to become rich most entrepreneurs start a business because they have found identified a problem that bothered them enough that they said enough is enough i'm gonna do something about it what entrepreneurs are are people who criticize by creating do they always get it right no as a matter of fact the failure in entrepreneurship is humongous it's it's it's kamikaze path to take the entrepreneurship path we lose our spouses my first husband passed away as soon as i was about to sign my first term sheet and yet i had to keep going what force can keep you going after you just loved lost the love of your life what force keeps you going the force of oh i just want to be rich really when your whole your whole world is upside down your whole world is upside down and you just want to quit you just want to go meet him and join him in death i stayed why because of the same reason why i started my company i stayed because the women whom i had put back to work by then we're talking about some of the most vulnerable women in my country these are women who grow the hibiscus which we need to make the bisap which is the juice of taranga remember this is our national identity drink and for the longest time women grow this hibiscus but we use for the national drink for this drink and now that coca-cola pepsi and all that had made it through the marketing that it is more cool to drink those beverages now there is no more market for the hibiscus and with that goes the livelihoods of these women and for me that bothered me enough because in that force i saw two things one was a part of my culture we're talking about i mean my part of my cultural identity for christ's sake the juice of taranga you ask me what defines you i said taranga there's a juice for it so my culture is disappearing and at the same time these women are sliding into abject poverty because what they used to make no one needs anymore so that is what got me to start a company and the company was created just because of that i wanted to build a company that would allow me to not only preserve this very important aspect of my cultural identity and at the same time put these women back to work and maybe it's more difficult to put into words but there's a kind of it's a basic human spirit where you see the the place where you came from breaking apart in some kind of way and you have the entrepreneurial fire that dreams of helping yes and that sometimes it's hard to convert that into words you have to tell nice stories and so on but it's the basic human desire to help yes and uh especially when criticized by creating especially when you've been raised especially when and let's face it um do we all are we all a bundle of circumstances some happy some some worse yes we are and um oftentimes i ask myself my god why you why did you why did you get to have the opportunities that you have what makes you different from let's say even your cousin that couldn't that is still home yeah trapped because we call ourselves trapped citizens when you're strapped in these countries that go nowhere we're like a bunch of trapped citizens so so you see lex when my husband passed away and i wanted nothing more to do than to quit and to send investors had already said we understand if you want to stop whatever you decide to do will do that and i wanted to quit and i was actually on my way i was in senegal for a month trying to really get a bearing over myself and um by the end of the month i had decided i'm letting go there's no way if a pain was too great um nothing made sense anymore it was too much so i went to see these women and um i talked to the one who you know we're talking back then there were 400 of them later on we grew to 9 000. and um i told the representative of all of them and i told her this is very lit this very old lady and just looking at her i knew i was going through some pain but this woman has probably gone through 10 times not that pain is calc you know like measurable but you could tell this woman probably lost a child as often times happen in places you know that are lower income countries probably lost a husband also probably who knows so many people lost this part of our lives you could see the pain you can see the pain yet she's so so dignified she's so dignified and that already kind of made me like we got to stop crying but and i told and i told her that i was quitting i could not look her in the eyes and um and she said look at me i could not look in the ass she said look at me child and i looked at her and she said you know i know you're in pain but where your husband is where your beloved is there's absolutely nothing that you can do for him but for us you can change everything and i went back so that's what entrepreneurs are at their best so she helped you find your strength yes and i i i was i was weak still but i said you put that aside there's a job to do here and i went back and lex i fought with everything that i had and this company that i started in my kitchen became this company that had the who's who of a beverage world with at some point roger enrico the chairman of pepsico sitting on my on my board on my board yeah i went back because of that so the reason why i tell this story for me is important because i it the world needs to understand that there are so there is a much more there is a viable way of caring and of um being part of a solution for the lesser fortunate in terms of not keeping them where they are and we're like the savior is coming and you know giving them food and all that no no no no but it's like just like the leg up i got in my life give somebody else a leg up what are the things you're fighting against in africa when you try to build a business like that so then we're building this company and back then this was in 2004 but it wasn't i built my first company we had to have um two sister companies one there one here so the one in the in africa was about the whole supply chain yeah and uh the one in america was you know uh research development sales and marketing all of that good stuff and then at some point i look around i'm like wait a second here back in the days before we had the you know like they would talk but we say oh we have this one-stop shop for business registration but the truth is very quickly you can set up an llc in the us we're talking about less than even then less than you know two days super fast 20 minutes online it's done back then it was you know less than a few hours to get it done um cost you almost nothing we're talking about a few hundred dollars you know free two to 350 depending which state you are so llc starting a basic company takes almost no time no time no time no money almost you don't have to know a guy that knows a guy that slipped some money to the politician and so on no none of that stuff none of that stuff and so at the same time also things like um and visa can take you into today's day okay lex i don't know if you have um employees on payroll or anything like that uh but do you have to go every month or anybody listening to us right now do they have to go every single month to three different type of agencies um um you know like governmental agencies to do one step this one is basically you're gonna go and give them your retirement money like you know like the pension part of the salary that you took out from your employee you have to go to this agency and put that application through so you leave that money behind then you go to another agency this one is for their health you know care whatever you have three of those places where you have to literally go to in person three times three places every single month to drop off these you know these paperwork do you have to do anywhere in the u.s i mean do you do we have that situation anywhere that you know of right now no and do you think that's uh business friendly or do you think it's uh it's cumbersome and business and that's not just cumbersome sort of physically it's cumbersome psychologically but there's uh there's a feeling like the system around you yeah there's a feeling like you're trapped it's a feeling like the system doesn't want you to succeed versus a system that does want you to succeed exactly you're in a country like uh we're in texas if you make less than a million bucks in revenues a year you know all you do five minutes it takes you you're filing you know your state your franchise um tax that's it it's below that number tell them what it is then you have nothing to give them or anything like that you move on us even if i make this much there is a minimum tax that you have to pay which is a thousand dollars in senegal right now for the listener mcgowan was holding up a zero you make no money you still have to pay so so and then oh let me walk you through what happened to me when we had to try to get the electricity uh hooked up on our first office so we go they say oh first you have to apply you know like you normally you have to apply then we apply we pay the money remember again here you have to also go this was like you know you go to the office and you pay and then we wait and we wait and we wait and when i say we wait i'm not talking but we waited 24 hours we did 48 hours a month two months three months four months five months you go this you send your assistant she goes she comes back uh well they say we send it to wait at some point i'm like i gotta go there so i go there and um i asked to speak to the head of a district for you know and um i'm just like going on and on and on and on about how we've been delayed this is gonna be a problem we have to produce everything is delayed and i'm i'm i risk losing my business uh we already pre-sold some of these products to our customers i gotta something needs to happen so at some point the gentleman looks at me it's like lady look over there i look over there i see a pile of paper this high we're talking about maybe hundreds of applications each one of them is a single single single sheet each single sheet is an application for getting um the electricity and it says do you see that i said yeah and i said look over there i look over there to the other side i see two meters he's like each of his applications needs one of those how many do you see i said two then i knew i was in trouble and then i said what do i do and he said lady it's not at our level and i agreed with him it was not on his level but eventually you know by now you can tell that i pretty much get what i need because and at that point what i did was not threaten him or anything like that i didn't even pay bribe or anything but you could see why people pay bribes because when you have a pile like that then the only way to advance your file and that by the way happens even at the passport office you come you apply for your passport which is your right they forced us to have passports it's your right is assistance you have a passport and even there if you want your yours to keep going through the process you have to bribe somebody so it can go even the face is supposed to go let alone faster so here i'm thinking i have a problem and at that point i did what i do i talked to him about all the things i was trying to do i explained to him why i'm here why i'm trying to do this and even him said lady someone like you you have no re you you have no reason to even be here you could be back in america living your life loving the loca you don't have to be here so that i think gained a lot of his respect and i said if you don't do if you don't help me with this i understand i shouldn't be of a priority or anything like that but i beg you i beg of you i need i need for this to go on this week and he said okay that's how i got my meter one of those two meters became mine so then he said but we have a problem and i said what he said well the truck we need of a truck to be here to do it because because of where you are from the pole we need long cable lines to get it all done but the truck is i don't know i don't know where the truck was because they had this one truck i don't know how many customers so i go to the mayor of a town with whom i'm quite friends but you see i know people but it shouldn't be this way so i go to the mayor of the town and i said mayor he happens to have the same name as me first last name same but except he's the ugly when i'm the pretty one because you know he's hurt you know right that's so people can tell you apart she's experienced i need your help you need to help me with this he's like now what and i explained to him and he's like okay you can take the truck from the from the from the city hall i'll tell the guys that they can allow you to have it and then they come and then you guys can do this and then we arrive there guess what i thought i was done lex but i was not done because now the electricity company by the way whom we paid everything was there we've been sitting in our money for nine months by now well we need a ladder long enough to you know like one of the super super professional ladders that normally the electricity companies have theirs was in some of a village and they didn't know if it was going to be back for another three days or four days i said are you kidding me he's like no so i called mayor again i'm sick mayor do you have a ladder and i explained and he said and that's how i got my electro my electricity hooked up otherwise i probably would still be waiting so lex you add all of these things together and also the fact that in my country by the way the labor laws are so stringent basically you are married to employees for good for bad and some people say oh no you're not married for good or bad except but it will just cost you a lot of time and money to get rid of any of them it doesn't matter for circumstances do you think i really an entrepreneur really need to hear something like that you know the head of ilo i had an argument with him at the un and i said to him listen and you listen to me very well the reason if you want to protect employees as you claim everything you're doing is to protect employees a you know better for human being than i am in terms of making wanting to make sure that people are treated right and fairly but last time i checked google for example is not offering their employees chef cooked meals super healthy anything they want feeding them from morning till evening having some you know babysitters you know having health care child care on site all of these perks that come on top of really cozy salaries it did not happen because uv ilo told them you have to do this it happened because there are enough jobs created around that now you're in an employee's market and employers have to fall all over themselves to attract the best talent among us that's how it's done and not with your nonsense that you're imposing me right now which the only results you're gonna get like in my country do you know what we have to show for all of these the fact that the senegalese employees the most protected employee on paper in the world well we're one of the 25 poorest countries in the world that's what it got us so let's try to untangle this so there's a system in place there's a momentum with that system like you said ladies not my level which is for somebody who grew up in the soviet union um at least echoes some of the same sounds i heard um from from people i knew there it's kind of this helpless feeling like well this is just part of the system this gigantic bureaucracy and the corruption that happens is just like the only way to get around to get anything done and so the corruption grows maybe could you speak to the corruption is there is to what degree is there corruption in senegal in africa and um how do we fix it so when you said to which degree there is corruption i will respond to you the same i respond to people i say yeah we have corruption and it's almost as bad as in chicago yeah right so um now what i want people to understand when it comes to corruption it's uh because we are misguided with corruption we think corruption is the root cause of problems when corruption is simply a symptom of a deeper root problem in this case um if you make the laws so senseless meaning let me give you an example of senseless laws every time i have to import something in my country i have a business we're making lip balms in this case and others skincare products some ingredients i'm able to find in the country at the standard that i need in order to remain competitive because for example our products are sold whole foods market you can understand it's a pretty sophisticated and really you know they don't just put anybody on the shelves but the thing is it means that on the other end my inputs has to be right so out of those some we have seven ingredients seven items that need to come from abroad to go into the making of this product some packaging and some raw material but guess what likes for five of them i am paying a forty percent tariff and for the other two almost 70 tariff that i call senseless laws this tariffs are senseless yeah corruption is just a symptom they reveal that something is broken about the law exactly and the laws are so taxation um this kind of restricting laws like laws that slow down the entrepreneurial momentum they do they do because in this case when my product comes what do people have to do because every time you if you add 40 percent you're basically on the other end so every time you add um if let's say my product normally cost a dollar and with your 40 by the time i'm done i had to pay i had now it's costing me 140. by the time it arrives in my warehouse in my manufacturing facility it's now at 140 because of a tariff i left behind that 40 percent you added to it do you know how much it's gonna add to my final cost but once the product is finished i have to sell it to the customer i have to sell it for dollars sixty more because of that forty cents uh extra you took from me in order for me at the end of the day to have some type of profits because profits at the end of the day um is uh the blood of a business there are two people are misguided they say oh you dirty greedy business people and it's all about profit profit profit profit you know i belong to this organization called i'm a board member on the conscious capitalism it is the largest organization of purpose driven businesses and entrepreneurs the type of people i told you about we start our businesses because we we see something that needs to be to be taken care of in society whole food market is one of them the container store you know all of these companies that are beloved in the us that you can hear of we believe that the end goal of business is purpose but in order to do purpose you have to have profits to stay in to stay alive and the best way for people to think of profits so that they'd not all twisted about it lex if i asked you what's your goal in the world you're probably going to tell me your dream you're going to talk to me about what you're doing right now and how you want to be uniting you want a more harmonious world you want human flourishing that's what you're working towards that's what you say to me you're not going to say well my biggest goal in the world is to produce as many red blood cells as i can except you need to produce verse otherwise no legs and if no legs no one working yeah you know what i mean yeah so that's how so people need to stop with this whole profit not do we have some psychopaths among us yeah one percent of us in this world are psychopaths in every field anywhere you look and surely you find that in the entrepreneurial entrepreneurs world as well yeah so we have one person of us who are a psychopath for sure but do they define the rest of us absolutely not and thankfully not so let's just be clear on that so here the you know my you charge me 40 tariff which is outrageous then you're forcing me to sell it 4.60 more than my competitor who does not have to go for that nonsense because she's an american woman who is operating in america and she doesn't have that nonsense put on her so now i'm on this market competing against this woman eye to eye so if we're selling the same value product mine cost a dollar sixty more simply because of some stupid rules from back home then guess who is going to stay in business and who does it see they want to talk about equality that's the type of equality i want to see the playing love the level the playing field has to be leveled told you english is language so two people talking between us maybe we'll have this english thing figured out we'll have it figure it out so the the the idea of capital is the idea of conscious capitalism is the the thing that in large part enables this level playing field that's what we want so so what you're trying to say so here so when i talked about sensors loss that's an example so when you make when you make the tariffs so high that and you're going to render me um you know non-competitive then that's where for people who might make sense when the product arrives at port they say hey i give you this what i give you maybe it's ten percent of the price or five percent it's surely not forty percent but you are happy with it you have a government official that's what we call a bribe and me i'm like hey i saved myself money and um also i saved myself time but you see if the laws where you pay five percent or even the ten percent that i just left behind or nothing you come you paid you move on because who has the business of fooling around and staying behind and no you do that when it's actually uh makes sense to do that so i'm not sitting here telling people i engage in unlawful practices in my case because i'm around saying the things i'm saying right now so i'm a target you have to do things cleanly and i believe in doing things that way so what i had to do was go to the ask again mayor we have a problem mayor is whenever he sees me he's like now what sounds like we've got a problem you're best friends now so i say now it's the customs and and it's like what do you want me to do i said do you know anybody at customs i need to hire up at customs because i got to explain to them what's going on here they all know of course but i think they're not always maybe understanding or maybe they understand and in this case he understood so we went and uh he's like yeah i know this is not this is not very damn this and i said what do we do now and i saw him going through binders and binders on in his office because he's gonna try to go and look where in the law can we find something that can help me escape these rules and you know the best he found lex was oh well here see this one if you've been in business for two years then uh we can allow you there is a special term for this which french is technical we can allow you to bring your raw material but you have to tell us exactly how much you're bringing and it has to match your formulation because you know they don't want you to bring in more that we need and maybe sell some of that to the rest of the market and they didn't make their money on it so there it means i have to give them my recipe imagine coca-cola being asked to give their secret sauce to government officials in a country that you can't even know what might happen let alone even in business you don't do that i mean straight secrets or trade secrets but here you're asked to be putting it in front of some people you don't know where it's going to go after that because there they get to see okay her recipe calls for x amount of um of candy little wax x amount of um coconut coconut oil okay and on top of that we have to think about how much foliage might they be or not because again we don't want her to to to buffer it over there so you have to get naked in front of them in terms of your recipe which might end up only god knows where tomorrow maybe competitive competition or maybe even them they start a business and they compete with you because we've seen that so um you have to do that and then each time find out fill out the paperwork get the approval then it can come in so when it can come in you don't have to pay that tax oh and by the way you only have you have one year one year to make this product and get it out and all of it needs to be back out because if it's any of it stays here you're gonna pay the the taxes that we held up so you're basically forced by these uh senseless laws yes to be dishonest all of this was so it's so cumbersome because each it means more paperwork paperwork everywhere maybe having to disclose your thing so me in my case what i did is um you know this person said okay we're gonna see how we can how we can work with you but uh for the first two years we were more or less in the gray area yeah so so what even gray area is good yeah but but let's what does it mean in a situation like that whenever they want to mess with you yeah it means they can come and they will look and they will find something so it means that every day i'm trying to do business i'm running the risk of being harassed and or maybe even put in jail depending on what it is yeah i mean you're an incredible person because it seems like there's two ways to change this uh become president or gain power in the country and to try to change the laws which seems really difficult to do and the other way is fight through the laws and create the business anyway build the business community and through that method create a huge amount of pressure change the laws you're totally getting it by with your last part because this is the other thing and this is where i get so upset sometimes with um my fellow africans because they get so disgusted by what they're seeing right and they think the answer is to go for politics let's go be president let's go be this let's go be that and we're going to change everything i see that in the u.s too people thinking that presidents have all of his power do you know who has released power in government for president i mean people don't get that um your best bet uh if you're gonna if you insist on going into politics stick to the local level that's where all the skeletons are buried and hidden and that's where you can make the most impact local level i know it's not shiny i know it's not exciting but that's where it's at so if you must go into politics but there's another way so in my case what i do is two things i preach and i practice i preach when i'm here talking to you about this i'm preaching i am sharing with people that is which i found and by the way the answer was there i was doing these two businesses realizing the difference in treatment of um the doing business environment of the us compared to the doing business environment of senegal and at first i was like of course us everything is messed up it's because we're poor country but when i started to put two and two together i'm like you're poor because you have no money at least not enough money to take care of your basic needs you have no money because you have no source of income where does a source of income come from for most of us it comes from a job doesn't it and in some people sometimes at my uc berkeley class they say oh no it comes from government too i'm like i would like to think that even if you work for garman you're going to be paid something right and they're like yeah and then even before i can say something we're like yeah because that money we used to pay our public officials comes from taxes you know employers employees we go back to the private sector for most of it from where this whole thing is created so it's clear your poor because have no money no money because no source of income source of income for most of us is a job we're talking about uh so where do jobs come from the private sector primarily small and medium-sized enterprises then don't you think that we should make it easy that we should have a friendly doing business environment and also a lot of the a lot of it comes not just from the small medium sized businesses but i think a lot of the values created from new ones being launched yes right it's not just like me like saving somehow through regulation the ones that are already there no no it's like it's letting the market letting the new better ideas yes flourish yes it's about what what i mean by doing business environment is all the things that you and i talked about earlier even the access of electricity is part of a doing business we're doing business so basically when i've discovered all of that when i put all these dots together then i'm like well i guess business and it makes sense lex if you want to grow tomatoes you're gonna have to have two things one is a good seed right that has good attributes and then you're going to have to have a good environment for it is the soil the right one what's your ph level all of those good nutrients we're going to put in it is it in a place that has tons of sun how much sun exposure or not the climate engine is it gonna be cold not not you can have some beautiful tomatoes in the middle of siberia last time i checked so same thing here you know mohamed yunus the noble um laureate in for peace said poor people are bonsai people they're the same people if you put them in the normal natural a friendly habitat where they can thrive they become the tallest tree in the forest poor people are bonsai people so you see that tiny pot you put around the bonsai tree that's the tiny pot that created by giving me such a hostile business environment that basically were put together by the set of laws that you have put that basically i have to jump through as a business person practicing business in my country if you turn that environment into a friendly environment where i am not married to my employees i have flexibility of uh the labor laws are simple straightforward clean where the tax code is very simple it's not worth truckloads of laws like in my country it's so complicated you have to hire a cpa which costs more money and even them tell them girl we're going to make some mistakes they don't they don't talk to me like that it's new now you know they don't send me golem they shouldn't they better not but they say whatever they say i'm scared you know you know they're like we're gonna but bottom line is we're gonna make mistakes this thing is so complicated we're gonna make mistakes so which means my ass is on the line so anyway so so if the tax code was so simple straightforward like it is maybe in texas where up till a fresh hold you owe me nothing go online five minutes fill out your taxes you're you're compliant keep bringing keep building your business because that's what we need from you if you made it so easy and straightforward then you know what that's when you get all of these people likes what you're talking about saying you know what my name is aminata and i live in the middle of nowhere senegal but you know what i've got this great idea which is for this really hot nice hot sauce but i know the americans are gonna love i'm hearing but hot sauce is a big thing let me bring it to them but everything is there for you to jump into the ring of entrepreneurship you don't have to know someone like my god you don't have to even have the ability to sell yourself maybe like i can sometimes you are someone with a great idea you're willing to work hard for it and pour everything you got into it guess what it's fair you can get into the race you can be a dreamer and you can be a dreamer in a rural little village and then that has ripple effects throughout the entire country young kids growing up you know i want to be the next ex yes whatever and it doesn't have to be you know the next steve jobs that that seems really far far away all levels it's at all levels you you create uh local heroes because because um because representation matters yes right so and we are so badly in need of that and so um so that's what all the things that have been stolen from us as long as things remain the same so lex once i found out that basically at the end of the day the answer is economic freedom and that when it comes to that the indexes economic indexes that measure that whether it's the dream business index ranking of a world bank or the fraser economic freedom index of the heritage foundation when you look at all of those indexes and others what do they have in common one after another they show you that it is harder to do business in almost anywhere in sub-saharan africa than it is per se anywhere in scandinavia so it is telling you that scandinavian nations that socialist americans tend to love so much and take as an example over there too they're showing you that they don't understand what's going on really in scandinavia that uh scandinavia is more capitalist scandinavian nations are more capitalist than almost any sub-saharan african nations ultimately the political systems actually don't even matter nearly as much as the private sector of being able to operate the machinery of capitals there you go there you go there you go and it's almost like um like i said it's almost like its own little widget within within it you can have whatever type of society you want to practice you want to exercise at whatever level you want to but if you're serious about becoming a low amid a middle to high income nation there is no other pathway that we know of at this point and you know what made me super excited about that beyond having finally found my answer i have to tell you when i found that answer i literally fell to my knees it was a type of feeling that you know if something is not well with you whether it's physical or mental something is not well you're not well and you go around and you go to the so-called specialist some of them you know but you're going around for years going around trying to get help for your ailment and here they don't know here they tell you things that you can't tell why but you just know it's not true they're this they're bad and it's it's going on for years after year after year and finally you meet this one person and boom it's there not only the liberation but also this whole new world that comes with it you know i'm still i'm still ill but guess what there's a path forward we know that i am i'm gonna have a lot of work to do but there's hope yeah right and you're the uh the beacon of hope actually for a lot of people in that part of the world and that's those beacons are actually really necessary so not only is there hope but you can uh become i mean the beacon for your people your your your home this this power that you see that you feel all around to become uh to escape the feeling of being trapped is there a device you can give to people that to uh young girls and boys dreaming somewhere in africa how to change the world that's right and by the way i want to say there are bigger beacons there are better beacons than me i just happen to be someone who has the chance of talking to you right now uh and one of my goals is to open the same doors that were open for me because together our voice there's such amazing stories out there and um so bigger beacons better beacons out there one thing here for me the reason why i do what i'm doing right now and it's almost to a point of self-destructing my own health i feel invested with such the mission of i have been afforded the truth so it is my moral duty to try to take it around i know i sound people sometimes say when i listen to i feel like i'm i'm talking to a to a priest and i'm like because of the gospel like reciprocals so anyway but the thing is lex who tells you these things to this day when they talk about the poverty of africa what do they talk about they're sitting there telling you oh yeah it's because of chronism it's because of racism it's because of imperialism it's because they're stealing you know raw material blah blah blah is is any of those cult you know like uh guilty to some level of where we are today uh one of maybe part of a reason where we are today maybe maybe is that the only reason or the overwhelming reasons no is that unsurmountable absolutely not so for me don't stay in that place of um that steals and robs you of your agency so so i think it's important for people to a get the right diagnosis as to why we are where we are because what you and i just talked about the mainstream does not talk about this when they even talk about africa in terms that you know are not the usual suspect of oh famine is building over there wars building over here oh we're having ebola is coming all of that stuff even when they were talking about the monkey pox which at first you know um in this wave it started with white people in europe well even in the many newspapers you pull out it's black people with monkey pucks on their on their skin i'm like wait a second this time around we it did not start with us so why are you always showing us when it's right now happening to white people you know um so so all of that is happening so for me the thing is we the world simply right now does not have the right diagnosis as to why this continent right now despite all of its riches because lord knows it's got riches starting with its young population 75 of a population in my country is below the age of 25 years old so when we're talking i know we're talking about you know repopulation you know it's an important we're going to have to go for that maybe you'll get me going about commenting i don't know but anyway um so here my point is a we need the right diagnosis as to why this continent is the poorest continent in the world despite its riches starting with its young people over natural resources diversity in land people cultures languages everything that make that make for great ingredient for for awesomeness despite all of that we are the poorest region in the world people need to know that the reason why that is it's because we also happen to be the most overrated other regulated region in the world at the end of the day with africa as and i dare to say africa here and treat it as one we are 54 countries 55 depending on how you count yet we almost for a tiny minority of these countries we almost all lack one of the most crucial freedoms that they are if you are serious about prosperity building we lack economic freedom and economic freedom is the thing that unlocks that human potential the young people just yes for them to run to run with their ideas to start businesses or to start initiative it doesn't have to be for-profit all the time right but it is it is it is this is this thing that gets you to get up and go and do something criticized by creating young people are naturally wired to want to criticize by creating they're not sitting around waiting or complaining usually unless you put them in a tiny box and they have no other way to go yeah and in this situation what they do you know let's talk about pre-colonial africa of four favors before slavery ever happened there were black people in the con on the continent you see when we talk about the story of black people and africans africans you know black people in africa for most of us even me i noticed that unconsciously it starts with slavery but you're like no we were there before before white men ever set foot who were we what were we doing in our diversity um what um academic systems were we running on and then you realize that for most of them they were free marketeers and they were very much on the free trade on the fria enterprise side so even that is a reinforcement this is the place where we do not understand our history so proper diagnosis africa is the poorest region in the world because it happens to be the most over regulated uh region in the world lacks economic freedom number two what do we do about that we gotta become serious about reforms economic reforms so that um we can become beacons of uh free markets just like the asian tigers that's what the asian tigers did they had to become serious singapore taiwan you know south korea those guys had to become serious about the free markets you know when uh you know he's just like we gotta do something and he looked around and he realized at some point we got to make these reforms and he went on to that journey of reforms making his country one of the most free market you know countries in the world and voila the magic happened back in the you know in the 30s of a stock market crash and the great depression and everything the world's and with all the lies that were told uh to to the world coming from the soviet union stalin while they were starving and dying over theirs but oh no you know i mean durante was telling the world that uh oh no no everything is going well nobody's dying when we know now and getting police surprises based on this stuff but then the world went on believing that oh no capitalism failed this is this this you know um crash that you had in the in the in the stock market is proof this is what lisage capitalism produces you guys always have your big ups and down and by that time it was so hard on people that they're like we're done with this and at the same time we're told the lies coming out of soviet union but supposedly that communism was doing just fine and you're at the point where the free market concept almost died and it's um you know the the the asian tigers who kind of helped you know bring that idea back to life right uh their success having used the free markets and so for me we gotta have we gotta make a rick a new commitment to the free markets on this continent if we wanna go anywhere if we wanna go anywhere and the timing is perfect because the young people there's a there is a kind of freedom for the revolutionary free markets in this whole space exactly and bible you said something oh say that again because i want to tell you what i'm hearing in that because something's really cool say it again come on lex i don't know which part you said english is my second language too no you said you said there's something revolutionary yeah in in that because you know how young people are a touch of a revolution and how you know i understand look look like i understand and i am willing to give the benefits of a doubt to some of these socialists who cut who came to it because they had to witness some of the horrors of you know of their times you know there's a revolution behind that it's ultimately yeah uh uh criticized by creation exactly exactly but violent revolution is never the answer but that's what they went for in 1789 in france in over french revolution um and then and you know marx and engels you know they're promoting these ideas that usually for them justifies violent revolution lending all of these people the i am with them when they say that they want um to see equal rights for people of course i don't agree with their therefore we need to push for equal outcomes yeah equal rights is right but equal outcomes is not right so but i am with them for all the way to equal rights but this is where the two paths go this way and also they're they're they're none the fact that they have no issue with violent revolution people get killed uh you know people get put in gulags and people get that's not right so what you just said here just give me goosebumps because there is revolution in the free markets but that's the type of revolution we want the revelation that comes from people creating criticizing by creating it's one of the best forms of revolution if you ask me that's the most sexy way of revolution criticized by creating yeah by what you're gonna go shoot people or be like uh what's his name um che guevara who tells you i love it's in writing i love nothing more than to fry this brain of a man with his gun really well in terms of sexy uh there is power in that message of the oppressor the abuser the enemy that has abused their power they need to be destroyed and there's power in that in the message of that violence unfortunately the lessons of history show that the violence one doesn't work but it does it does the following there is something about human nature as the old cliche goes that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely it's the people who are in charge of committing that violence it does something to their head the first person you kill the second person you kill for some reason you lose your ability the compassion for other humans even if you began as a revolutionary as the soviets did fighting for the worker for the for the rights and the the basic humanity of the people that really do the work uh you lose you lose the plot somehow because of the violence so in that way it seems like the lesson at least of this part of the human history until the robots take over is that the economic freedom free markets and protecting those and allowing the anyone from your country to dream and to make that dream a reality by creating it with as few sort of uh roadblocks as possible exactly so so that's why for me the message is very clear is what we talked about today the reason why africa is the first region in the world is because it happens to be the most overregulated um region in the world and for some people who might be you know put off by it because they're like oh she's talking about let's say fair no let me put it maybe in a way that you can understand do you think that it should be as easy for any person in africa for any entrepreneur in africa to enterprise than it is for any person in scandinavia to enterprise if your answer is yes which i would hope it is then you have a moral obligation to work with me to make my country and as a whole my continent more free markets it's that simple at that point there's no like yes but on the other hand uh-uh no and it's for me on that question and i yet have to find somebody who claims to say no if you say no then we have a whole nother problem i'm not even talking to at that point anymore so yeah so just to clarify uh you know there's a perception and in some reality that scandinavian countries have elements of socialism in their politics and their society in their even in their economics so at the very least uh africa should have in terms of economic indices should be as free as the scandinavian countries you're just giving that example free yeah because even scandinavian they do have uh um a subsidized you know like uh welfare system that's what a more socialized welfare system but the way they make their money is very very much the way of free markets so there is how you make your money and then there's how you maybe decide as as a as a as a country to redistribute it right and so even there even in the in the in scandinavia again yes they have more academic freedom so when from their legs where we go is my job and my goal is for every single african young and old to know what i have come to learn we are not doomed um it's not over for us we will never catch up the time for catch-up is is gone but guess what we've got a strong strong possibility and chance to leapfrog and leapfrog we will it is still time but for that to happen like i said we need to know what we just talked about today because that is not what the mainstream keeps us abreast with when you go to the world bank they don't necessarily work along these lines they're still it's it's not when you go to universities um i will ask you mit the mit econ department or even some of most of our professors are very free market oriented we find that oftentimes in academia there there is a strong anti-capitalist bias there is a strong anti-free market bias so this is a problem this is a problem nobody cares about the economist anyway uh in mit the spirit of the entrepreneur burns bright not in the economics department because they just write op-ed articles but in the dreamers the young undergrads that actually build something no i get that but then we cannot be stifling their efforts yes by putting these artificially made regulations and laws that stand in there and clip their wings so so that's why when you were saying what advice do you give to them the advice i give to them is each one of them they have to pay attention to this to this discourse we just had i don't ask anybody to agree with me on face value go back do like i had to do i come very much from the left over left if you can believe that but i had to have my own intellectual journey and in this case my intellectual journey was very much complemented by my own life having to build these companies on two separate continents and having to obs i was i had front row seat of the differences at first i thought it was this way just because we're poor and therefore we messed up and therefore it's like this but eventually i learned that no we're poor because we lack economic freedom and if the country allows its citizens the economic freedom to enterprise then they become rich so yeah i had it upside down you see and so it's important for people to know that so number one know your facts because your facts will empower you in this case i like to use that word facts will empire and they will even further more they will power you empower and power you because then power is like inside and power is like i push you forward and up so that's what it does to know the facts and then go on and look around you where are the best practices of this who is at the cutting edge of a free market we're starting a way where people don't necessarily be left behind or anything like that we we're in 2022 for quite sick we don't have to do entrepreneurship the same way maybe was done 50 years ago a hundred years ago when as a community as a people we were maybe less enlightened because of our times right we can we can update this thing and move forward but update is definitely not uh buildback uh buildback what do they call it buildback new or whatever they're calling it the wf you know like whatever whatever nonsense and you know stuff you're smoking over there it's not that where there are some principles that are universal and that stand the test of time those we have to keep and on top add the new new things we learn from from our times and from life so that's what i want them to know learn new facts be empowered empowered and then look around think about the and look to see where the best practices are around the world because the world is yours you might be african but the world is yours so stop this nonsense of oh well it's done by white people so we're not gonna do it get the best that exists in humanity for what you're trying to solve and on top of that put your own twist right bitcoin is all of ours to take bitcoin is not the white man's thing so therefore oh come on you know because you know we have a misguided pride we're not going to use bitcoin because it's white man stuff bitcoin is mafia idiot math is universal so it belongs to all of us there's no color exactly in in the space of economics yeah in the space of ideas ideas and there's a chance to leapfrog too exactly which is really really powerful exactly because here we will leapfrog and let's i'm not crazy this is this is gonna happen you mark my words but it's gonna happen if as many people hear what we're talking about today because at some point the solution is not gonna come it's not me it's not this it's gonna come from the wisdom of a crowd this is why i love the crowd there's no better wisdom than the crowd and that's also why i believe in the free markets this concept of emergence order there's no way there's no central planning that is smart enough that has the level of intel that street level people have trying to create something it's just we just have to be humble there's just something at the bottom of a pyramid that just bubbles up and happens they're the best i think the cynicism the idea that people are dumb is at the core of uh a lot of things that uh prevent the flourishing of society you know this kind of anecdotally people are like everyone is stupid and people say that jokingly but the reality is people are incredible they have the capacity for kindness for love for innovation for brilliance in all kinds of dimensions you might be you might suck at math but you might be amazing at carpentry you have to find that thing and there's something about when there's freedom to find that thing and people interact they get excited about shit together and then they they build it's if you look at authoritarian at places that limit that freedom at the core i think is the idea that people are dumb let us take care of everything we'll come up with the rules and the regulations because people are too dumb to manage things themselves and that and then that idea builds builds on top of itself where you think that there the entire populace is much lesser than the wise sages sitting at the top then you add violence on top of that and that leads to corruption and uh to corrupting of just the human mind of the leaders and the whole thing is uh becomes a giant mess the antidote to that is economic freedom but people have a freedom to enterprise and um look um lex when we allow for that to happen have you looked around lately and look at the level of um niche that has happened in this country i mean you have clubs where you you have places where people are into guitar strings you know like some of them like it's it's all about guitar strings and others it's all about these best cupcakes and others it's all about this this new crypto thing over here and over it's like hair best you know wait it's when you allow us because seven billion geniuses each one of us i believe came to this world with something something that only he or her possesses and that is the genius and it is their contribution to the human problem when you think about your identity today so it's all started in africa just like it did for the entirety of the human species um there's a bit of european flavor in there a little french silicon valley you're now in part and a texan there's here you really are an american so but you're also an african who are you when you look in the mirror when you think about yourself when you listen when everything gets quiet and you listen to your heart who are you is can you figure out that puzzle that's a very interesting question because it's been a long time i haven't asked myself i have before um what i have found is i think who i am today has been for sure shaped by i call it dakar paris san francisco dakaris senegal senegal paris france and san francisco primarily and now yeah i think i might want to ask if there's a little bit of texan in there how do you say texas in french success success yeah so austin texas austin texas yeah so um you i was formed by those free i have to say that what i enjoy from my senegalese roots are our commitment to peace love and tolerance very much um and taranga obviously and i like that it's a culture that's very much about reverence it's we're big on reverence um i don't think you could ever hear me tell an older person especially not my parents or my grandma or anybody like that for us to be able to tell an older person that's not true or you're lying it would never cross my mind because that's the most disrespectful thing you can think of the most irreverent thing you can think of it doesn't mean that you have to agree with everything that's said but there is a way to disagree there is a way to push back that doesn't have to rob this person who happens to be older than you especially from their dignity for the dignity that older age normally provides and there's wisdom to their words that you yourself may not absolutely see so the reverence is for the idea of wisdom of tradition exactly exactly and again so that is something that i really enjoy especially and something i'm very attached to to this day uh and then from france what i had to what i really came to enjoy of course is all the fineness that one can find within french culture the fineness you have a fineness foods i mean you mean like the intricacies like that like the very yeah there's some sophistication in there i mean french lingerie for example i mean like don't tell you know the laces all of that super it's it's it's it's it's uh exquisite so the fashion the food the fashion the food i mean there's something to be said about all of that and it's it's very beautiful and i love also um even when i talk about fineness it's like a meal is not about like this big thing they put in front of you but you know smaller portions enjoy what you're eating and spend time at the table like the eating time is not necessarily just this function of feeding yourself which i understand it but for this is something that they share with uh with senegalese culture is eating is a moment of um communion it's a moment of friendship family it's it's it's a pers it's a precious moment to this day and my husband is american we eat our meals together all the time there's i would not have it any other way and there is a prep time all of that stuff it doesn't matter how busy i am but we're doing it actually to push back a little bit it's interesting because yeah the camaraderie over a meal is a beautiful thing i i got i mean i was in a pretty dark place because on the way to ukraine i traveled to paris and i stayed in paris and i wasn't able to enjoy the fineness because it was almost a distraction from the humanity for some reason to me because there's such a focus on the art of it all that you lose the basic connection to humanity now that said depends what you're talking about i think some of the lack of connection over humanity was the fact that while i did know how to speak french for a long time i forgot most of the language um and so part of it there is a barrier you said hospitality there is a bit of a barrier in french culture to where in order to be welcomed in you have to you have to hear the music and be able to play the music of the people and uh if you don't there there's a bit of a barrier i must admit on that and that it is true um you would feel less that if if you were the group of senegalese people per se or i would even say if a group with um of spanish people um and i think this has to this is maybe this the other side of uh it for the french people they can be a little bit you know uppity up there and i think maybe that's what you're sensing there um if you don't have the codes which is what you call the if you don't sing the music then um it's hard for you to be part of it but i was speaking here from the standpoint of you're in yeah um yeah yeah yeah also come on come on coming from texas and i'll see ukraine ukraine i should say some of the best steak and meat i've ever had cheap uh texas some of the greatest and for the me the size of the meals in in france it's like what are we doing here i mean i i it was i get it i get its art i like to look at my art on the wall no okay and then eat my damn steak did you go so maybe okay no no no no okay now here i have to defend them although sometimes i'm the worst no you did you go to some michele star restaurant maybe that's why a little bit because next time you go to france i'll take you to the countryside or any whole french home they will serve you multiple times i mean you're by the time you're done even if it's you know the portions are smaller if it's smaller if you want to but because that way you get a chance to really you know feel what you're eating and then have more and then all of that stuff but let's be like oh like this and then you know but no you'll eat plenty but it's because you went to the michelle's places where they're like i'm sure the warmth and the people is there it's almost makes me sad that sometimes i think to properly be in a place he's i really should spend a long time there yeah and also be emotionally ready again i was emotionally unavailable i was just like well i would imagine on your way to the ukraine i'm like who can think about food but in your identity a bit of texas a bit of san francisco and um i guess from america the defining the defining thing for me for america is it's um the freedom and the entrepreneurial mindset see very quickly when i moved from france to the united states and i started becoming successful in the united states i found myself me and my husband he was french and my first husband who passed away we found ourselves at some point we stopped talking to our friends in france who stayed in france because we were talking to them about things that were so outside of their their their comprehension what do you mean you're in your 20s and um you know you just raised um i don't know a million dollars or two million dollars especially from back in those days today you know it's easy here and there so even in france that entrepreneurial spirit didn't burn quite as bright i mean i mean don't take me wrong do you have some entrepreneurial people in france yeah but to the level that you have it in the u.s absolutely not it's just uh i mean in france it's still very much you know you're born in this area you go to school in that area your parents live around eventually you'll marry and be where your parents are maybe go to where your spouse's experiences are and you buy your house and you buy it once and you're not gonna do like the americans two years later i sell my house or go somewhere else you don't have any of anyone what do you mean you know like just stopping from nowhere you're gonna do a bit you're gonna do what start a business and you have nothing to back you up or whatever oh and even this idea of um you know going and fundraising this venture cap especially back in the days venture cap all of that is it's very american we take it for granted but it's very american who would have met made a bet on me in france the same person i would not have found the same people i would never in france have been able to um raise it you know somebody was 32 million for my first business never would have have been able to do that in france and it doesn't mean that french people are bad people or anything like that it's just um something that's just not so in the culture right just like um this whole concept of philanthropy it's not that french people don't do philanthropy but philanthropy in america is very different from the level and also the magnitude of maybe what the french people do and also they have this um always like oh let's do it behind the scene money is suspicious you know success is suspicious so at some point my husband and i just felt like our friends actually were maybe thinking that we're maybe some drug dealers or something so we should stop because it just was not flowing anymore and so um so yes in america i found i found this um this um entrepreneurial spirit but then i was able to link it with something that i'm very familiar with in my country see back home in senegal i'm part of this um you know you have what we call the murid so what it is is uh one of the four brotherhoods in senegal muridism is the most influential of them and the biggest one and um us it's all about entrepreneurship as well i mean of course there's a whole religious part and but our mantra is pray as if you will die tomorrow and work as if you will never die and the way we say the way somebody will say that somebody passed away we say somebody has retired somebody has retired from their work right beautiful right so so so i think um it's funny because in in that community we're very much entrepreneurial um you know left to our own devices we're entrepreneurial but then what happens is the minute people start going to they're being educated through the education system you know like the french especially education system but tend to breed more like you know the french bureaucrat mindset then you can see all the entrepreneurial mindset kind of starting to to dwindle down so it's kind of very interesting so in a way america helped me reunite with that side of my of my roots where america tells me reinforces that side of my roots and also gives me more tools to practice that side of my roots if that makes any sense uh through all of that that's what brings out the heart of a cheetah which i think is a beautiful beautiful thing that encap encapsulate that whole trajectory which i think is the best possible answer anyone could give it makes me want to really think about who i am because you really have brought together so many cultures within yourself like just talking to you makes you feel like we are just all one people because at the end we are at the end we are um and you know when you come from uh at the end we are and also i think for me if people can take anything from my story it's at the end of the day i am very clear about it and uh i'm all for harmony among people and among um among us peoples um if we can accept that we're all i know this sounds so cliche but some for me it's so true that we're all humans you know when i left senegal when i was about to leave senegal for the first time and to go to europe to be reunited with my parents because now they had emigrated and things were going to be fine and i was going be things were stable for them now they're like it's time to be reunited with her they brought me over but before i left senegal my grandma sat me down she actually she lowered herself down to my level and she said say my god you're about to go to this place where most people will not look like you and most people speak the language that's gonna be different from yours and you're gonna realize that all the kids are going to school and you never been to school because you know i was like i said a free-range kid and i was just living my life and she said but i don't want for any of that and she said her words said i don't want for any of that to intimidate you she said you can be impressed by some of it if you want but no intimidation and she said because the fact that they might be different from you yeah they're going to have a different skin color from you but it is still human skin you're human they're human and said this language you're going to speak it's a different language from yours but it is still a language that humans speak you're human they're human therefore you can speak it and lastly they have gone to school going to school is what little humans do you're a little human so you'll be just fine and i went and grandma was right right that was right and that helped me um and i think when you internalize that so early on um it just makes you belong to the human family that you're part of i am part of a human family and i would have no problem going to russia for example let's take and be totally open maybe don't go right now but no not now maybe not now you're right but please don't bring weed if you go go on the plane no no no no no no no no no yeah right that girl i don't know what she was thinking but yeah um no so but what i'm trying to say lex is i feel like i can go anywhere in the world including some of the most um unfriendly places in the world to someone like me because there are places like that yeah and yet i know i know that somehow somewhere someone will take care of me someone will help me when i first came to this country i i i came as a tourist and but you know you had this amazing family who had um business a family business in indiana columbus indiana the wences carol and eldon wentz i owe them everything that i have in this country that i am in this country they are americans in mid-america from a place that most other americans would maybe you know look down on because you know and some people would be like oh you're going to this place where they have more churches and cows than people you know that type of behavior uh because you know the elite coastal elites but it is in midwest in the midwest that i found that i black young women coming out of nowhere found support they all rallied around me i didn't even come from the same faith as they are from yet their whole church rallied around me to find me an apartment my host family found me got me a job and it was not a pity job they were like we need we are in serious needs of getting our accounting under control and our marketing and all of that and i had to catch up years of accounting like two percent and uh come up with marketing all of that and i did it way faster than they thought i would ever be able to do that at some point they look at me and they're like look you there is a future for you and we are too small for that future and now we could be we could be selfish and keep you here with us and we wouldn't we would want nothing more than that because really they're like my parents to this day i just came back from seeing them and they said but there's so much more for you and we don't have it so we want you to go and find out what it is and that's eventually when i you know because something was brewing up in san francisco when i say i left my heart in san francisco because you know my uh my man would become my husband um we went to the same business school in france but then he was older than me so he had come to san francisco and started a business fair and i just looked like there was something there and scar hollow was like you got to go to some forces go and find out with emmanuel what's going on so i went and i left my heart in the sky i came back i'm like okay i'm leaving here's the keys to my i'm apartment of here so no but carroll so this is it this is what i'm saying especially in these times when this country loves to dwell on you know um you're bad because you have your skin color here are people with a completely different skin color than mine completely different faith than mine yet embraced me um protected me um paid for my visa you know for my for my lawyer to for my h1b everything and also uh played emotional support for me and no one no one asked them to do that they didn't have to do it they didn't so what i'm saying is and this has been the story of my life everywhere i go regardless of the hostility around me you bet you have that there's always always going to be somebody who shows up for you and somebody who's at the at the extremes of at the antipods of where you and who you are and that tells me something in the end we are good people most people are good people and there's so much power to that the internalizing of this idea that we're all just human and there's human kindness all around us i've seen it a lot where people internalize that and they're able to walk lightly amidst hate yeah and walk past it yes and it it doesn't it doesn't uh stick to them in a way that they build resentment and it paralyzes them if they internalize the world just human they can be in the just like you said in the in the worst places in the world for them and someone somewhere that human magic and touch is there yeah you'll find it will find them it will find yeah yeah and you know the other thing too lex is um especially in these times we're walking in it is to um remind yourself i i think um this is where we all are called to practice more more courage i call it courage it's the courage to show up with curiosity with empathy and with love to me verse three are the antidote to pretty much anything yeah curiosity in love in the face of fear can you can you show up with curiosity in the in the face of hate can you say i'm gonna i'm gonna engage with love even if i'm scared to death and even if i'm pissed off to death by this ah but can you do that and um in the face of uh just like you know judgment or whatever can you show up with empathy and um i had just found that when you try to do that you you engage very different parts of your brain that's that's proven by the way by a brain scientist but you also can feel it in your body that you engage in very different parts of your soul and so um i try myself i'm not always good at it but it's a practice but i try to honor which is curiosity empathy and love as i told you offline those i agree with you 100 percent on that but there is you know when you go to ukraine and and you can say you can speak about the power of love but when you lose your family when you lose your home all you have in your heart is hate even if you know it you're not supposed to have it you still all you have is hate so sometimes it's it's a very human thing to have resentment to have hate but it is but it is about trying not to stay there yes and it's okay if it takes you years but it is about trying and i'm and i mean the word trying it is about trying not to stay there let me ask you about some of the things you see in this country from your from your perspective of everywhere you've been in the world what do you think about the black lives matter movement here in america that does struggle with the role of skin color today and throughout the history of this country and maybe even throughout the history of the world well black lives matter has been a very hard one for me because do black lives matter those three words together in that order what they mean they mean everything because black lives do matter as any other lives do matter but i know in this case why they say black lives matter because some of the contexts we have had now while i agree with the principles that black lives matter i have a big problem with the organization and what it stands for when i have an organization that pretends to want to stand for black lives to matter yet you are self-proclaimed marxist socialist i pause why i pause and then i'm like have we learned nothing have we learned nothing and the reason why i say that lex is because 60 some years ago it started before even 60 some years ago black people in this case um i'm talking about the african people i'm talking about the black africans who would go on to really um cement this concept of african emancipation and african liberation and here i'm taking us back to 1945 it's they were they had four of them before that but in 1945 in manchester uk happened something that would become major for for africa and its future especially sub-saharan africa in manchester uk people like blessing of my country nearby tanzania kwame nkrumah ghana and others and others from different parts of the continent got together with marcus garvey and w.e.b dubois and i said dubois because that's how he stated in french he has a french name uh french name at least and americans would say so for americans listening i know you said dubois oh but no because just in case they're like who is talking about that's what i'm talking about um so all of those people got together in the uk yes and with uh w.e.b dubois and marcus garvey big top african-american intellectuals of their times um www had so many things happened to him you know starting from the north being more more or less a liberal type guy you know um came to the south just to see um at this time you know people black people being lynched and some of the body parts been shown in store windows i mean just for a second we put ourselves in his shoes i put myself in his shoes and that's when he started to become radicalized right because at first it was like oh reforms we say that and i was like god darn it enemies people we don't talk to them we force you know and eventually little by little things going through um yeah you you have these people they're very much on the marxist socialist train so do you think the la the sort of it's the political movements that are just using yeah because what happened back in those days it is true that to their credit communist socialists were fighting for equal rights they were fighting for the rights of black people to have equal rights so of course i could see why one could say especially in those times you've been lynched bodies burnt body parts showcase that windows stores meanwhile in africa under colonization in your own country in your own land and you have this group that's saying we your fight is part of what we fight of course you're going to say a side with you especially if this is all happening at a time where you know so 1945 these guys who would be the liberators of various african nations for meeting with garvey with w.e.b dubois and um that's where prem this music is very important it's the fifth pan-african congress meeting it's very important it could be their last one but it's the most important one because that's when they formed their plans and um and really the rallied around this concept of african administration emancipation and um african liberation we're going to liberate our countries then later so that's how all of this movement started to happen and um from there gandhi was already making some progress with india you know getting them out of british rule and all of that so all of this was happening and really like this whole thing was bubbling bubbling bubbling you know like there's like a new force going on and then we arrive in the late 50s and um you know kuma with um the you know them with the british as well they might manage to become to become um the their colonization is is over they're the first one to go in 57 then from there it's what we call the independences that's what when afr most of sub-saharan african nations are getting independences different dates mine april 4th 1960 so all over so this is happening and now think about it you're talking 57 you're talking 60. we're like at the we're like at this time now with the middle of a cold war because we have to put things in context if you want to understand what's going on because people today ask me why do you think um because even now when they understand oh you're right um it makes sense if you have no economic freedom you're going to be poor but why why why did they go for this why did they go for this and then they don't understand so that's what happened so beginning of day of times pre-colonial africans with free marketeers free enterprise it's pretty well recorded by someone like george adity that's where i got the cheetah thing from and getting an economist and then slavery happened colonism happened and then the independences um late 50s early 60s for most countries for most african most sub-saharan african countries so there what you have is um but then what happened there so i told you in 45 fifth african congress in the uk with um the liberators of africa um under the um under the leadership because he was the the wise you know eldest man um dubois was he was in his 70s back in the day so he's older than them you know and he's coming with all of his ideas and everything so we're like so there we are now we're in the late 50s early 60s we're starting to make progress with the independences you know india has gone there before so all of that is starting to happen and at that time remember they they already were being introduced to the concept of socialism marxism all of that way before by some of these you know um black of african-american intellectuals of their time who are very socialist marxists by that time so now they're becoming independent because i do i do independent like this because i i reckon that there's still neo-colonism going on so now this is happening to becoming free but then you look around what do you see that now most of these liberators of their nations become the president of the nations but remember what i told you most of them have the drunken the social socialist marxist socialism kool-aid so as these african nations become independent with the first independent governments and you know presidents most of them most of them are socialists various forms of statist type of government and this is because at that point we had made a fatal mistake of going of um saying um we are marxist socialists because you guys fight for equal rights uh so in this case there should be no colonism or anything like that so not only you have that going on and the people so right now you had this battle of ideology going on because on one end represented by freedom and the economic what you call it the economic system they were using is capitalism and these are represented by the western nations facing off with eastern bloc practicing various forms of statism socialism communism various forms of statism and these two are fighting for influence so and we also have it's also not so two things there one is we're at a time where remember the free market concept was almost dead almost dead so almost every intellectual at that time was social marxist or marx socialist i put the name that's what you wear so you're in a world where it was the normal thing it was just mainstream acceptance so not only you have that force but at the same time if these two forces are fighting one another it turns out that the one representing capitalism and freedom well sorry but isn't it you who enslaved us and colonized us and you're fighting with with the people who represent you know um supposedly people who are saying that uh who had been fighting for equal rights for us with us for the longest time these are our friends and that's when we made a fatal mistake because while yes there were maybe good things um to agree on with uh marxist socialists of at times i especially you know um equal rights for for all people and all of that that's the only thing we should have among the only things we should have agreed upon their violent revolution tendencies no way uh when it comes to um the economic nonsense no way we should not have thrown the baby out with the bathwater but that's what we did and that's when we made a fatal mistake so then we became free all of these nations and most of them started with socialist or communist leaders my country socialist leopold he was a socialist and they stayed in power for 40 years the first 40 years of our freedom years and all over the continent more or less that's what you had and on top of that something else that the french don't know the people don't know is france with its colonies said you cannot not do um you have to um you have to keep um the french french civil law so we're talking about the napoleonic civil code are you kidding me so that's what happened so the reason why i go back to blm is while i have all the respect in the world and all the compassion in the world for people like kruma for people like near railway for people all of us people of those times the liberators of africa while i have so much love compassion for them i am also able to say because i got the benefit of 60 some years time and you know where you get to to do a debrief and see what it worked what didn't work what happened we have had the 60 years to look back and to reflect so yes i can understand why they did what they did i cannot even i can understand why they sided with these people who on the surface or at least some part of a fight with the same fight as them when it came to equal rights i can excuse them but i will not excuse the blm founders because that mistake was tolerable 60 some years ago today no the blacks of today cannot be serious about black lives mattering and saying in the same sentence and we're going to be socially smart mark's a socialist if this doesn't work so the blm movement is too deeply integrated with with the ideas ideologically marxism yeah anti-free market anti-capitalist and we do know that you have to have free markets in order to build prosperity and prosperity means economic power if you have economic power no one messes with you or if they're gonna do it they're gonna have to think twice and when they do they're gonna have to pay consequences so if you if you want for blacks to be respected anywhere in the world you're gonna have to be serious about black prosperity all mass not just a few people oprah over here and somebody have a vet no we as a group have to be a critical mass of prosperity across the board and because we're talking critical mass of prosperity across the board it means black people everywhere in the world but guess what we in africa happen to represent 90 percent of a representative of a black race so you're gonna be serious about black black lives mattering without being serious for africa the one billion people in africa that are black and for them to have access to the free markets and yes fossil fuels so that they can rocket you know up prosperity-wise and the resources of the young people the young minds so that all of these young people young minds can finally manifest their greatness that i know they have and that they're showing us every day despite despite the obstacles that's what we need senegal becomes rich and synagogue can become and will be richer than france the culinary singapore did it we can do it manly rich nigeria rich functioning as well mali uh malawi rich tanzania rich ugandan rich zimbabwe rich niger rich everywhere rich prosperous as prosperous if not more prosperous than than than switzerland or singapore or the us don't know all of alician chinese or luxembourg places that have no um you know resource resource natural resources we become rich and you watch the world having a very different uh relationship with us that's the only time we will commend any type of respect that's when people even the our common psyche will change even about black people all of the stereotypes that they have of us is gonna melt away and you may still not like us but you will still respect us because we are a force to be to be dealt with and only economic power does that it would be nice of course for us to respect people because they're people it would be nice but let us not kid ourselves this is this is earth and someone said you know nice people will make it to heaven but not to harvard necessarily it's true it's interesting that pity does not ever turn into respect it would be nice if it did it would be nice but it doesn't prosperity prosperity is the only thing and the way we do that there is no just like all of us humans have to inject have to inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide that's a human way of breathing you bring me on but you want to be foolish and be like oh well sorry that's how white people breathe so as black people we're gonna have to do something different well good luck with that right yeah so this is here why i'm saying i have no patience for black lives matter we're making a mistake that was made 60 some plus years ago even more than that maybe even 100 you know when we were siding with a marxist socialist because they're the ones who've been fighting for equal rights let me ask you though about racism do you as you travel through this world as you travel through america feel the burn of hatred um you've spoken about the revolutions that have been fought throughout the 20th century against racism but today as people talk about educating reminding the world with the even with more philosophical ideas of critical race theory for example do you think this is still a battle that that needs to be fought at the forefront of culture in the united states um does racism exist yes it does but all forms of isms exist some people it's about various forms of ableism others it's about size um and racism yes is one of them does it exist yes it does but is it what's going to stop anyone from manifesting their greatest potential i say no i say no many people in this country have showed it whether they're african americans or african african immigrant i'm an african immigrant you have african-americans like oprah and others and other people even before her who despite the nastiness around them were able to make it so we do know especially as black people but i think it's humanity as a whole and that's what i love about the human spirit it's resiliency but resiliency only can happen if you don't allow yourself to be beaten down and to lose your self of agency it's of course easier say than than done and some among us need a little bit more help to not succumb for it than others do and i've seen it it might be harder for you if you're somewhere in uh you know um in a city um you know you know city black america maybe the environment might be a little bit tougher um for you to try and get your act together and all of that stuff and it's okay but even in that situation we need to um i think it's important that we still do not rob you of your agency and this is where i am mad as heck against those who supposedly um care and their idea of how to make sure that i don't become or stay a victim of racism is through all the things we talked about the crt the anti-racism crap of um you know uh abram x candy and what's her name robin d'angelo i mean her i'm shocked the woman is making all of this money supposedly fighting a war on our behalf i'm like lady i hear you lie loud and clear that you are true racist i know but you told me you are and for you to think that you're into racism makes you less racist and it's that happens too she's she comes from a racist background fine she's saying it it's true but this idea that every walking person on earth belongs to one category of the other depending on what you know which skin color you came with it's it's problematic at its root so my point is does racism exist yes do you think it's gonna stop me from doing anything i have to do no might it make it harder longer prob maybe but it will not stop me but for it not to stop me i can't engage in victimhood mentality i can't lose myself a self i i got i got to use all the agency that i have to fight back and fight beyond see it's just soon just better fight back you fight back and you fight beyond because at some point yeah and it's this concept of yes and so um this is why i have loved the job so when i have somebody who is like oh anti-racism is the way are we gonna go and tell all the black all the white kids that you know because they happen to be white that they're really oppressors and blah blah blah and they're black kids because they're black you know you're not changing anything when you're doing that nothing except that you're causing you're putting problems where there were no problems to start with all we had to do was maybe go for a different rat from there kids are kids kids are born kids and this i'm not sure if you want to get me going on to the whole science of um bias because that's something i spent years of my life on and my journey on the science of bias started with um the days of philando castile eric garner that whole summer of 2016 when we had this horrendous horrendous uh situation of black people um being killed by the police where they shot before asking and the people left to die in the most inhumane way for the rest of us to watch from the social media that's me that's when my george floyd moment happened not late or four years ago in the whole world is like you know um so that sent me on a journey of understanding what discrimination is and bias is um and in a way that's the reason why i started this company that i even called skinny skin that's where it came from again criticized by creating i i needed to understand what discrimination was how does it work is it true what candy is saying is it true what d'angelo is saying is it true that but i it could it could be that your bad your race is just because of the skin color you happen to be born in is it true is it true i i needed to know because i was at a time of my life where at some point you know when when those killings were happening it was so hard for me um being a black person in this country and wondering i mean what is this and and what do we do with this um yeah is it true how much discrimination am i operating under in the system all of that you need to understand the full characteristics of if you're if you're dreaming of making a big change by building companies you have to kind of intuit how much what am i up against what am i up against right and so this is why you know spend all of his time on some of the work and then eventually i understood that um discrimination if you wanted to understand it beyond um it's um you know beyond the the big lines of uh especially the the clickbait lines would make it very black and white then i had to really take a moment and i spent time you know with a world of brain scientists with uh behavioral psychologists uh with evolutionary biologists to have all of this ecosystem but together form what we one might call the science of bias and especially i came across the work of this team of scientists at the university of uh i think it's wisconsin and there were only ones who made sense in this sea of nonsense back then and this article wasn't political and it was saying something that i could relate with and eventually what i learned was and this part comes from the evolutionary biologists people they in a way tell you that right around age three can happen sooner or later because you know we're all different but you go from this person who has to rely on these other people usually your parents to stay alive to be fed to be housed to even your diaper change all of that stuff right to now something is kicking in where you have to in order for you to survive and this is all wired in so you don't even understand it consciously as i'm saying it now where in order for you to survive for in order for you to go from this state of dependency to another to the next step to the next stage and more and more and more you're going to have to develop this ability to make sense of the world and what's making sense of a world at its most basic level means is can you determine if a situation or a person is good or bad for you failure and you need to be able to do so do so ever so quickly because failure to do to be able to do that might means that you might not be alive for next second see it's so wired in so this process starting to kick in and at that point your brain is going to be your best ally for that and what the brain is going to do is it's going to help you and the way the brain works is through it it works with um for if it's all wired for efficiency and the way it um it goes for efficiency is through automation meaning that every time it has computed and you probably know these things way better than me every time it has computed one algorithm it doesn't quite it doesn't want to do it again it's almost like this okay got it stored stored right and then it adds maybe some little levels of complexity to it but it has to be something new meaning the new level of complexity for it to even be willing to reconsider otherwise you have so then all of a sudden what you have is these neurons in the back of your head and they have created pathways right so and every time um neurons have created pathway among themselves because basically they attached and here is a pathway well this pathway in the world of um in the world of um science of bias it's a habit in general it's a habit when they form two pathways when they form a pathway it's a habit so if we're willing to talk about unconscious bias because of course it's very different from somebody who tells me to my face there's no world in which you or i could ever be equal because you're black and white you're a woman i'm a man this peace and that that people like that again 100 one percent of psychopaths in our world they're out there unfortunately by the time they do nasty things it's pretty horrible and that's what all we hear about but i'm talking mostly about the rest of us remember when i told you that most of us are good people bumbling along making it up as we're going that's why i have compassion for human nature so but really in the morning when i wake up do you really think that i'm waking up and thinking how am i gonna go kill how am i gonna go kill lex that next guy needs to go down he's a man he's a don't take me where i'm sure about some women who feel like that but i'm not one of them and i do think a majority of us are not whatever but you know in the morning i'm waking up i'm just like gee can i get my tea oh my dog is not looking okay today you know we've got right it's a lot going on and you're using these kind of just like you said brilliantly the brain is has a bunch of simplifications it's built up yeah and he uses those simplifications to get through the day for the day exactly so so then here you are needing to make sense of a world and then the brain is your best ally in that the way it's going to do it is for efficiency efficiency done through automation so every time it thinks it's figured something out it's never going to think about it again so that's how you build all of these habits of unconscious bias because everything so it's somewhere along the line you come up with um the with the information that black men walking around with a hoodie equals danger so later what do you see whether it's lex oh my god i'm walking in the dark alley i see a black man with a hoodie maybe i'm gonna run away because i've been given that information so the best way to think about it is the brain is a hardware and uh and the software it runs on is um what do you call it is a cultural imprint all of this information that we're getting from the disney movies that you're reading telling you that themselves are to be saved by the prince and all that stuff and girls wear pink and or whatever um you know you watch the movies and all the movies whenever you watch them it's about africa they're talking about the blood diamond so we're talking to you about slavery over talking to about this and then north wonder you walk away thinking that all the ills of africa are caused because of uh resource extraction for diamonds or they're always fighting each other look at uh i mean in the movie you know or you know uh slavery all the time you walk away and this is it and we're all programmed along the same line see that's the beauty of it all of us are because even some black people who are going to claim but they didn't business when they registered really so the truth so then when i learned all of this i'm like wow this concept of if you've got a brain you've got biases it comes with a territory that makes sense now it doesn't mean we can't we can't transcend that function of a brain and that we should transcend it right but i think it's very important because once you understand that a little bit more peace is created among us because this is not about a black and white or a yellow and green issue it's about we are human issue and these are part of the things we developed to you know to to to to keep to to stay around um just like we no longer have to rely on um you know this fear of flight um you know like um ability of a brain because bears over there start running and running fast right today wherever bears show me where they are but we have kept this tendency to go for fear uh fear or flight i don't know how they say it and so we have this you know courtesan done by the stress you know stress triggers but back in the days we have a stress trigger we run and it's all you know expelled out but today we get triggers and we don't know what to do with it because where would we run to what do we do bear is not even here so same thing here with that and so when you realize this whole thing that is now we what you understand is that this problem is not about anti-racism bs but it is about can each one of us do the work with a work is needed which is we look inside can we go for this work of deprogrammation this concept of a mindful practice of undoing the habit of bias and that doesn't necessarily have to do with the simple categorization of black and white it's all kinds of biases everything it's about everything and you know when i started on that journey and then my friend back then built you know this practice of undoing your habit of unconscious bias we had all types of people come and say wow i discovered that my bias against larger people and i'm like what do you mean well um i think i it seems to me like i felt that larger people maybe are are dumb no we heard things and you know and you don't judge yeah you don't judge and so and you see it's at every level you know like um i don't know like there's even this one friend she was like you know when i looked into the whole dating thing i absolutely didn't want to have um you know asian men because she went her mind was into some stereotypes about the size of whatever and she was like no but you see you once you start because there's this whole thing of um it's the five step thing bias awareness this uh underst basically at this level what you're doing is you're learning to spot the biases in our culture because that's where the cultural imprint comes from you're watching this movie and you're realizing just like i said wow gee i realize once again the black person is portrayed like uh like the fuck of a movie um or you know um the latina lady this is how she's been portrayed and you see it everywhere even the npr npr is happening like you're listening to something like npr it cannot be more liberal than that and this gentleman is asking these two candidates one of them is a woman political candidate if everyone is a man i'm hearing as i'm asking the lady a question but i know he's not going to ask the man he didn't ask her he said how do you um how do you balance uh you know your race with a family yeah does a man not have a family right there you see it's very subtle yeah but you see but because now my mind is kind of trained to see things i'm like interesting or like when the media just says froze um climate change issue on something without even the choice of words so it's pretty much everywhere you open the book everywhere the interesting thing though uh i mean even that man uh woman example is i think it's really um powerful to bring that bias to the surface but not let that lead to kind of fear and paralysis that's right you should almost i mean that's what humor is make fun of it bring it to the surface like acknowledge the fact that those things are part of the conversation and a lot of them are it is you know it's a cultural imprint because it's part of culture and that might be there could be you know i grew up in the soviet union where the gender roles were stronger than in other places that's right and that's part of the culture we have to acknowledge exactly that that this is how this is affecting how i think you might exactly we might like how that works we might not but we have to acknowledge it and and not get you know make it part of humor make fun of yourself you know all that kind of stuff that's the thing and so lex that's why this first step is bias um bias awareness so you get you train yourself oh yeah okay that was one or it's where you know and it's about it's in you it's we're talking about you we're not and then from there you like um um replace the bias like bias replacement then it is um where you practice the empathy you're like gee wow i wonder how i would feel every day i walk into a store and the guy thinks he should be following me because maybe i can i might steal something because i'm black right because when once you try that to put yourself into a person's shoes all of a sudden something else starts to click and then from there you go on to making connection when you're making a connection and then things start to change because now you um no you're making um then you make cultural immersion so this is where we had some people like this one woman she was very um uh quite uh very feminist oriented and um she had an issue with women wearing their hijab and because for her it was like how come you how come how come you you you just slow you know like how come you're accepting this uh demeaning of yourself not understanding everything else that comes with it but through as she understood that she even had that bias then she went on through all the different processes and then eventually when comes the next step cultural immersion she started going uh to the mosque during ramadan when the muslims are doing you know their uh it's the holy month of um you know fasting and then we break at night and she started understanding very different things and eventually happens the last step that happens naturally making a true real genuine connection and this is where friendships happen this is where that's it you guys can go home now because it has been challenged with reality and understanding and so for me that is what i was after and then but then the world was just like we don't want to be told we're part of a problem so but i still reckon that it is the type of mindfulness type of practice that's going to happen and it's one that's very internal to to to you it is it is not and it happens everybody at their own pace so all of this i take it back to um to racism the question you were asking me does racism exist yes it does is it going to stop me from doing anything i want to do no it's going to make it harder but this is where for anybody who is serious about making sure uh about fighting racism i think the only job you have to do is to make sure that people keep their sense of self-agency and b can you help provide people with the tools to stand up so this is why i have so much respect for van jones people like van jones over at this grooving on so many things but people like um miss alice uh johnson she was pardoned uh by president trump through the work of people like van jones and kim kardashian and others they all joined forces this is a case where people of and and those folks then went on to combine forces furthermore no no no regard given to their political belongings they said if the issue is criminal um criminal justice reform then anybody who stands for it has to come together and so what they did in the situation with um uh with um what we're doing criminal justice reform in my mind is a valid uh action to fight um racism in my mind because what are you doing there you're trying to get people out of jail who really have no business being there and also when you have people like bishop omar and the people uh he passed away unfortunately but today we have anton luck and lucky who was in jail for having killed his um cousin you know he um had started i think he started the the the gang in south uh dallas so we're talking really tough guy who was reading the wrong side of uh of the equation and then in in jail literally he found plato the cave and all that so today these people we i'm like why don't we hear more about them the urban specialists because these people it's not about the anti-racism crap of candio di ninja where i say it again until the cows come home but it is about we go where help is needed we go in we go in um in urban you know um inner city inner city uh black inner city neighborhoods and block by block we change the culture and they say it like that it's their words these are african-american people who have as many rights as anybody else to talk about their own culture and they will tell you we have to change the culture i have some some videos like that on my youtube with bishop omar what these people are doing is what we need to do bishop will explain in size sometimes people are their their feets and feet deep down in the mud and what we have to do is to try to pull them up and you cannot say you didn't pull them up because we're not seeing the head out yet but how much how much progress have they made from the bottom to where they are now and keep going so what i see these people doing you see i have so much i i love and respect glenn larry and company you know and ian rove and all those guys i i love them i i love a lot of things that they say um you know this whole concept of personal responsibility don't know that but i'm just like at some point it also needs to be matched up with real actions yeah and that's what the people like anton lucky urban specialists um alice johnson are doing they're going where it's hard alice johnson is getting people out of jail every single day literally and then people like anton lucky and his team are giving them the tools to live the gang life to to be better people to go for a life of redemption this is happening right now but what i find is they're not getting the bulk of the attention yeah but this is anybody who's serious about this is why how i would love to see people do anti-racism is help lift people up for real action support support um uh school choice support school choice black mamas are they know what's going on and when they tell you we want school choice they know what to talk about they're not idiots yeah especially at the local level yes they're helping them at the local level yes so help them make sure that they can take their kids out of these public schools that are doing horrendous things to them you know miss virginia watch that movie how could you not support black moms in this country to take the kids to safety when it comes to education how come not that's what i want to see happen and not like some yeah let's go to some classrooms and everybody's white you go over here everybody's the next state you go over here and kids let us tell you about this no no no no as a black person i don't want you to do any of that crap let me grow my wings yeah if you want help put some fuel behind them and let me take my flight that's all i'm asking for but the only way for you to do um a for that's the only way for you to be part of a racism battle if that's what you think is the most important battles of our life that's it that's what i have to say about that and so for me i'm keeping my head very straight it's about what uh enables black people to thrive i don't need for you to be an activist on my behalf no because when you're doing that you're doing exactly what you've been doing to us black people in africa our whole life i don't need your white savior complex because that's what anti-racism is white savior complex that stuff doesn't work it only works to make you feel better about how superior you are to me but it does nothing absolutely nothing to change my everyday life if it is not if it is at least in the african side to actually even change my um you know turn me into somebody who's waiting for handouts so if peop i would encourage people to really those people who are really serious about wanting to be part of a solution and i know there are many out there for the love of god and everything that's out there and we care about stop it it's it's about think about what's gonna um um enable people maybe the word is wrongly chosen but you know what i'm talking about yeah give them to spread their wings yes give a person um yeah learn to teach a person how to fish and don't give them a fish when you're putting your stupid signs on a lawn uh with black lives matter and all that crap you're not helping and when you're buying one more anti-racism book or or as a company you know financing one more dei you know um if it done along those lines i think we've got a problem yeah so you do think that the the efforts of uh diversity equity and inclusion are often not effective not only are we not effective but they also backfire and there are reports on all of us and at the end of the day it makes sense it makes sense so for me i am very very glad that people um have developed an enlightenment about this very happy about that very but let us not keep going for the easy perceived solution to problems again they've done this to us the poor people of africa they thought the solution was to give it does not work and then they say oh we're gonna do a uh social uh social um social entrepreneurship on you tom's shoes buy one pair of shoes and we give one pair of shoes to some people in uh in poor countries then guess what happened to us you know in the town where we operate in senegal where i have my little manufacturing two we have 2 000 little mom and pop businesses and guess what they happen to be in lex shoemakers right so you have issue makers each one of them hires at least five fifteen people do the math family businesses guess what happens to them the day the tongue shoes truck shows up with bunch of free shoes yeah you can who can who can compete against free now all of these people little by little are gonna have to close their shops because who can compete against free because tom shoes dumping all of his shoes on them and then they go out of business and now instead of helping anybody you actually sent all the kids who depended on these adults working in these places now they have to join the rank of kids who need to be given shoes because you took their parents ability to make money through their wages buy them shoes you see so first they said we just have to give so that was a primarily um you know the charity business and um you still have foreign aid business going on so we just need to give and then the social entrepreneurs came in place but i'm like the only person for this is business is good is for blake mikasi you know the founder of tom shoes but other than that i'm not sure really seeing who else is winning from this and then they and so today my whole thing is we got a challenge to have a mind for the poor or to have a mind for the lesser fortunate maybe in this country it is easy and lesser fortunate because you know for anybody that you see you you feel like is being trampled upon because of something maybe it's because of economic circumstances or maybe it's race in this case or whatever to have a heart for the lesser fortunate among us for whatever reason at that's easy but to have a mind for them that's a challenge let me ask you a difficult question yeah as if we were not already asking difficult questions uh the president of senegal uh maggie saw is also now the chair of the african union he met with the president vladimir putin on june 3rd i think primarily was to discuss food security security africa seems to be split halfway on their perspective in the war in ukraine so broadly speaking what do you think about this first of all the geopolitics of africa and uh the geopolitical relationship of africa with the rest of the world and its current conflict with the war in ukraine what are your thoughts there well you've seen that many countries when it was time to vote some of up abstained you know which in a way says something i think for the africans today especially as represented by the african union because not all countries fall in this along the same lines i feel like again we're back to way back for the longest time the west tries to tell us what to do they decide for us and here they are there's trouble meaning there's definitely a rift major one between most of the western world as represented by you know europe and america primarily now australian and all that um and then them they're saying you know um i think this is more or less an attempt to to stand on their own as well it's like you're not don't tell us what to do as usual um you always work us in with when it makes sense for you to try to rope us in and then we're left hanging on our own so there's a this goes back to the sentiment you were talking about earlier it's been challenging for me to watch this because remember i have one foot also you know like because there's what i get to see and hear from being in the western world but there is also what i get to see and hear from when i'm in the back home so i wear all hats and um i think this is a situation where the african um union and african nations in general are saying we don't it's this case we're almost like you guys are fighting you guys are fighting maybe for once we have to watch it for ourselves yeah there's a sense in which um this is the embodiment sort of you know abstaining from a vote on the war in ukraine is a political embodiment of uh resistance to the influence of the west right it's not about the war between whatever you guys are fighting yes it's saying uh we're not going to let this particular empire that seems to be at the top right now which is the united states empire in europe to dominate our political uh discourse our geopolitical considerations it's almost like no we're not touching this yeah especially that given usually so when they need us again for influence which means more power oh you guys vote the same way we do and when the it's all over and they go back to they go back to uh spreading um you know they go back to um how do you say that they go back to um exchanging and sharing between themselves the goodies of uh you know their halloween collection we no longer we're not there when the goodies are being shared so i think it's it's definitely one of those situations but for me it still is hard because i watch everything that's going on and um i it's going to be complicated for ramifications of all of us i would like to to see our african leaders also what they're doing is is clear but this is a place where i almost i'm also tempted to say yes and um yes to the reasons you're advancing right now you know of we don't want to be always citing because we're tired we're tired of always being dragged around and taken for granted and you wrote our way you know um come on guys uh when when you need us we're we're great and everything is good and then when it's time to go and um share the goodies we don't exist anymore and you actually go for um policies that go against us but in this situation though i would like to still see us do the right thing in my case i was not very happy to see um us going and more or less begging for you know what do you call it um cereals you know oh please let the cereals um make it so at least we get them and we don't starve i can understand why a president would say something like that or try to negotiate something like that but when it comes to an african president having to do that with a non-african president i'm sorry but for me it's too close to begging listen it's hard to be a leader it's such a difficult dance because in some sense sort of the the flip side of that is you're creating a market a geopolitical market of saying we're willing to sit down at the table with america with european leaders with uh russian leaders with china and we're gonna let you guys convince us who we should collaborate with and that's what sort of great um nations and groups of nations do do now there's a cynical of course a dark perspective of that because what's in in that game played by leaders the people that hurt people ukraine hurt people of africa can hurt people of russia people of russia can hurt people of china people united states but it is the way of the world and to to earn res you have to you have to earn respect and sometimes earning respect leads to the suffering of many well but except in this case yes to all of that and the reason why i'm actually upset with with going and being like oh can you let at least the boats uh that are supposed to come to africa full of cereals come over the wheat and all that it's just like look africa has the highest land that you can do agriculture on yes you know we have a larger surface such surface in the world why is this not a time for us to try to wean ourselves off of cereals that we don't necessarily have on the ground but no let us go and plead don't beg create instead great instead exactly this should have been you know just like how the rest of the world when uh kobe happened and china had to close off for different reasons and since then has not you know completely reopened and people have started to realize wow we've got um we've got too much we're too dependent on china for a lot of what we need so we're going to have to bring back some production to the us the europeans are doing the same all of that this should have been enough a time for african leaders to be like we we need to be serious now uh about um you know food security and maybe the stuff that maybe don't grow under our climates necessarily can we work on coming up with different things now i understand that it can take time but um if i knew that that was happening at the same time that was saying oh well let the cereals come in maybe i would be a little bit easier with it but right now i'm just like is it gonna be the same business as usual and in this case i'm just like are we gonna go are we gonna keep going from one masa to another masa i mean really the interesting aspect of all this is if we look at all of human history it's possible that the 21st century is defined by africa it will be and the young people the the huge number of young people it's like the trajectory could be there's so much possibility to define the future of human civilization in africa and i don't mean sort of in the next 10 years i mean in the next 50 years what uh so some people are concerned about overpopulation some people are concerned about us dying out as a human species uh both of those people live in austin and talk to me often about i know i know i know i i know who they are but yeah uh what's your in africa is as at the center of this because there is uh a vibrant huge number probably over a billion uh uh yeah we're 1.3 billion people and of those one billion um blacks i mean that where do you land on that there is a reason likes why i say i'm haunted but i'm obsessed that i'm monumental when it comes to the free markets and that i have such a strong sense of urgency to the point that literally it is affecting me and it has to do with the fact that yes you have the youngest region on earth in terms of the age of its population and the growth and the rate at it at which it's growing demographic wise i am not willing to stay there and say it's a curse for humanity but it will be a curse for humanity if we don't make sure that these people our youth gets to partake and what it takes to partake is not much so if the rest of the world thinks that get to partake means you have to send more foreign aid you have to have more um charity businesses i mean charity um organizations sending stuff away um of course you're almost thinking parasites i'm sorry to say this way if this is what you're thinking you're seeing us as no more than parasites and if that's what it's gonna be i could see why some people might be worried about that although humans should never be seen as parasites no matter no matter no matter but some people will go there now people are here what are we going to do dispose of them that's not an option so the only option we have left is to make sure that people partake and what partaking means is that the people get included in them and are part of the systems that allow for human flourishing and it doesn't it's not much in this case it's about can we be serious about the reforms so we have free market zones areas where people where the flourishing can start can start to take place the wealth that people will need to flourish they don't need you to give it to them but it's all about can i let you fly and you will make it happen for you and also for me every young african i see today i realize how stupid the rest of the world is if they're not supporting what i'm trying to talk about because even if you don't want to do it because that's the right thing to do which i think it is the right thing to do yourself in it maybe engage your selfishness cause this person right there remember i told you seven billion geniuses everybody is came to this world with a piece of solution to the human problem this person and that person and that person hold something for me because i'm part of humanity this person might have a cure to a cancer that might take my wife out the wife i haven't met yet but this kid right here has it inside and if i help this if i make sure that this kid gets a chance to flourish and to manifest his genius or her genius that trickle down many years later comes straight back to serve me and the love of my life if we can't see it any other way maybe let's try to think about it that way because it becomes a very good proposition at that point so in this case by 2050 lagos nigeria will be the largest city in the world the future is african whether we want it or not but is it going to be an african future where you have a youth being a ticking bomb because they have not you know there's no hope they stay in poverty because they belong to nations that don't even understand sometimes the importance of common law versus civil law because they're trapped in countries that don't understand that you know you need to pro you need to um make the legal framework to provide for better economic freedom so you can unleash the the genuineness the awesomeness the ingenuity the industrious the industry side of your young people especially of your women so that they build all the wealth that your nation is going to need you to build and with it the respect that comes from that see we have a choice to make and this is why i feel so so so restless about this at this point of my life we just lost george sayed george aj is one of the few africans that i knew who who put this out that's who i learned from he's he's gone and i feel a strong sense of urgency to not only bring back to the table that which he has been working on but to also make sure that it gets steamed that's why being here talking with you today it's it's you have no idea it's people ask what if someone like you could say what can i do you did or you did more than you could ever ever imagine by just allowing me to take this message to one more person and because if we do this the change is going to happen somewhere down the line so verbal effects of all of that on the unlocking the human potential it's unbelievable all those people and efforts building cool stuff amazing things yes yes yes so some are going to be built stuff offers are going to work on the reforms so we're working on reforms by the way i'm i'm the head of the um africa center for prosperity of the atlas network the largest organization in the world uh working on taking down barriers of entry for entrepreneurs around the world in their respective countries so we're doing great work there are i am i basically um you know all the i obviously overthink tanks we have in in africa right now um free market think tanks and we want to promote more of them to come up and these are local solutions by local people for their local problems always that's where we draw the line and so um there so we're working on reforms primarily and making people understand the free markets and the importance of it um but it is piecemeal legislation it takes time it is hard by the time you accomplish something here more crap has happened over here more laws have been pounded out because you know how they fix a bad law most of the time whether it's in u.s somewhere else put other laws to kind of undo the law from before but it keeps stacking up and before you know it where you should have one thing and it's clear you have a hundred and they go against each other and then it's all it's worse so we have piecemeal illustration but happening you know our teams are doing really amazing fantastic work especially the team in ima you know imani in ghana we have a group now in burundi the great and the great lakes i mean people are doing amazing work amazing work but we need to run faster so while we keep we help ram running faster we also have to unlock other things and right now i'm working on one of my most craziest projects something bold radical crazy for some people but i know we're not crazy because before singapore has done it you know uh hong kong has done it latest the most recent china with the sdzs the smell um special economic zones um some of the most radical free market zones in the world they've done it and often times within a generation meaningful change start to happen right so um here what i'm working on is this concept of some call it um charter cities paul romer others call it um the um free cities and i like to call it startup cities what these are is for us to think about okay if piecemeal legislation takes forever at the same while we have this demographic that's growing faster and faster in africa there is a discrepancy here between the the process of the progress we're making to set the right environment for business to prop up and how many more people are coming to life literally every day on the continent there's a discrepancy here and so the ticking bomb is going faster than the process we the progress we can make this is a problem so what some of us are working on is this concept of a startup cities and to say peace management takes piecemeal legislation takes too long how about we continue doing that work which is essential and critical but at the same time can we think of zones and i like to call them also common law zones where we basically try to have within a country an area where for business i'm not talking about family law or any of that stuff no one is touching your culture or anything like that but we're just saying business-wise an enclave where you have the best practices from around the world including yours in terms of what constitute a great business environment and allow people in like it's a it's you know you get in freely or nobody's forcing you to go nobody's forcing you to whatever so in visa so basically you're you're to think about this um rather unoccupied plot of land within a country think dubai on 110 acres of land dubai is thinking that uh in their case they're like uh maybe they decided maybe to realize that the best for business in their case and they said uh they looked around and were like wow but common law especially british common law seems like a very good one so at that point they decided for business only not family or anything like that which is going to stand there you know sharia or whatever and so they said we are gonna bring in um you know uh so they hired a retired british common law judges to educate the law and train the people under there and i'm oversimplifying but at the end of the day in uh within a generation dubai became one of the top international financial centers in the world it is what it is today um so in the case of the african nations that that zone can then spread yes it can not only spread but maybe let's say senegal if senegal was to go for this here you have this one and then over there you have another zone and then what they start to do is they're not all modeled the same way because maybe this one is saying hey we want to attract more i don't know maybe we want to attract more um um medical research right this one's going to be saying maybe we want to attract more um crypto or maybe it's going to be more like us we want to be more about religious this or whatever you know what i mean so it we wanted to fit more vis-a-vis and just uh kind of give the basics the grounds and then watch the magic happen on it right and so this is what we're working on and the hope fair because sometimes people are like you know i know some people are like you guys are crazy but hey i'm like no it it's just it's more or less the story of um you know um the asian tigers and um most recently most of uh china's progress economically speaking because some people might say well you don't want the china way of developing you see even then i say and it's okay we you can always do better but we cannot deny the what the magic that they have accomplished what they have accomplished is nothing short of a miracle 800 million people getting out of poverty so it's not include yeah for the the quality of life and the majority of the child yes population yes does something like that happen without problems of course not and so the next person to do something just actually gets to learn from lessons from lessons that's all and leapfrog leapfrog and leapfrog exactly so for me this is a promise and people are like oh but you guys are crazy but i'm like just like with everything do you know how many attempts it took before the first flight you know the wright brothers took off do you know how many and that's important you you try you crash you try you crash but each time you're going higher up higher and you once you get up for once then you stay up longer and before you know it you're doing all types of things so here's the same thing i tell people listen all i need is one success story and then the sea change people don't even wait for us yeah everybody but this is hard because it's the first time so but the good news is there are many groups working on the continent there are some some um groups in zambia there's a zone there folks are doing something like this in nigeria where we're part of a project fair in nigeria um the one that i'm most excited about i cannot disclose the name of the country yet but my god i'm i'm so excited by it and i just know i just know lex it's gonna happen in our lifetime i hope so it's a really powerful vision and uh you know it's not being dramatic to say that the future of humanity uh depends on this that your success that success in africa it's such an important continent it is a century it's the continent where everything started and i think it's the continent where we have that continent has to finally finally finally thrive we cannot all of us call ourselves um an enlightened society as a whole when you have such when you have this it's a humongous continent have you seen the size of it you know yeah it's it's it's hard to fathom actually yeah i forget exactly and it has such ingenious people you know sometimes i look at my people i have to tell you i'm so proud of them and the young people especially and you know you would look at them and you know somebody said sometimes one day and it was so true they said you know we've seen poverty other places but here it is just maybe somebody doesn't have money but they have dignity and it's true yeah so everything else we can handle and we will handle you have to mark my word for this this is gonna happen and um our youth is amazing you should see them so full of creativity and it doesn't matter you know you were telling me what makes you different many things makes us all different you know rwandans are very different from um the west africans that we are um rwandans for example never dance with their hips they dance more like you know with this part of a body um west africans hips us it's hips all over the place all the time and it's you know more jumping stuff like that in one day you feel it's more like you know i mean they remind me more of you know the ballet thing um rondon's harvest times where you know they don't eat in uh you know so much in public it's not very well it's something you do um us we have west africans we like to be loud we're almost like the italians of the continent and then the ones are more like you know the swiss of active country even looks like a switzerland i mean we're so different from one group to another when you go to with a congo and you see these guys they're so crazy we have a dress i mean le saper so we are a very different bunch um but you know what i love about us what i love about my people we are we we are we we are a manifestation of what resiliency means and um so everything we need is there everything we need is there i will say that there's nothing wrong with the seed everything that's wrong with us is that pot that we put around us so we're tired of being bonsai people we need to be the tallest trees in the forest that we were designed to be and so and that can be fixed and that can be fixed and that's the beauty of it and that's why i am so i'm almost dizzy with i get dizzy with uh with hope i know my history i know my economics my fellow humans and all of that and we know that there's an unfailing recipe and when it comes to that recipe we have the hardest part of it one missing ingredient which is a free markets as we go around and talk and people start to understand and each country tries to figure out okay where do we go there from here i i know that i will die with my continent having taken the right shift for a turn i don't have to see where it ends because i cannot in my wildest dream imagine where it's gonna end but i know it's gonna be yeah so all my only job is to get this message out and then let my people do with it what they want to do that's a scale of impact it's just boundless it's kind of cool i mean you know sometimes we think about individual problems and how do we solve them we look up to certain individuals like the i don't know steve jobs and elon musk but it's so much more powerful to just without knowing what they will do give the freedom uh to millions to hundreds of millions of people to do whatever the hell they're gonna do can you imagine can you just imagine it's truly truly exciting so with the in that sense the work you're doing it's unimaginable the kind of impact it would have now going back to that hard moment this dark place you went in in your mind in your personal life story you lost your husband um what gave you strength during that time uh what were the what were the places you went to your mind in terms of personal struggle in terms of maybe even depression or or these kinds of struggles i think for me when my person passed away i went to maybe my friends could see what was going on maybe they couldn't i don't know but on the surface i looked like i was fine but what happened is the only thing i think that kept me around aft as i thought about it uh was um the job to be done these women relied on me and i was no longer free i did not own myself and they said it in those words you don't own yourself anymore and it was true but it helped me because i was able to um you know sometimes whatever it takes to keep you around whatever it takes and that's what i would tell people who feel like they can't just push one more push and they think they need to end it at that point whatever it takes just stick around for one more second because the next second you know so i stuck around because of duty i felt a very strong sense of duty my duty was in this case i think stronger than my than my pain i don't know if it's possible i don't know how that was possible but it was and um and i just pushed my grief under the rug for years for years i worked like a mad lady i travel i would travel i would do three states in three days landing at twin the morning around five or six gonna ride along with our distributors because it was beverage and just keep going and have all of this energy and look like everything is fine but what happened was just like i was focused on the job to be done and sometimes it is okay to do that at least for me it was my safety my you know like when you're in the water and you're about to sink and they throw you that um that round thing i don't know how you call it um you know but uh you know that keeps you afloat yes yes yeah whatever yeah between the two of us we're back we're still we're terrible i know exactly what you mean exactly right so you understand me so they sent you that thing and you just i was just hanging on to it my life depended on this thing so these women they carried me yeah they carried me and with time things are moving forward and at some point i went into a really really deep depression and um i went into a very dark place even darker than the one i think i came from because by that time i had worked for years on this company and now some other things was happening and around that time it's also when i was discovering a lot of what i'm we talked about today about what makes the country rich and for me to understand that um my network i was very much into um left oriented network and um to to just start to to see all of this i tried to address it to realize that many of these people would prefer go running for the hills then except for a moment that maybe capitalism might be part of a solution when many of them were involved in capitalism so um that was a hard time at some point i was um yeah so many things were happening around that time that basically shook up everything for me one it's hard to talk about because it's very personal and the person that i that was but i but i was having a problem with passed away last year and i'm one to always say leave the dead alone so because of that i won't speak about it but there too having a major fallout with somebody who was like a favorite figure for me somebody that i completely trusted and so at some point you just tell ask yourself was my whole life built on a lie right and um and then you're confused and then you become confused and and then at some point you lose 90 of your friends because of ideologically speaking it doesn't work anymore um then you just wonder have i have i been asleep this whole time and then you start to wonder remember when you ask me who am i at some point lex i literally was like a candle in the wind i felt like i was a candle in the wind and it was very hard to come back from that and um people have a heart the few people i talk to about this they have a hardest time understanding or even believing it because they're like you i'm like yes me i used to be a candle in the wind what got you out what made you overcome that my current husband my current husband love love see when i tell you love is the answer but him he came with love but he also came with um really helping me figure out the world so with michael because that's him who we're talking about michael strong um that must be special he's so special he's so special so you have no idea how special it is but you know um michael the reason why i have such love respect and admiration for my husband i'll never say it enough is because um actually it's one of those relationships that got built based on intellect first you see at some point i was in the position where i could start a foundation after having built my first business and all i wanted was an ability to um power as many especially women african women entrepreneurs like me a few years ago before then to do something like i was able to do bring back to the world some really cool aspects of our culture built into a really cool brand 21st century type that's what i wanted to do because the more i could promote women like that and put steam behind them and the more my dream envisioned for and respected africa prosperous africa would happen back then that's what i wanted and around me this was also part of a whole crisis of um ideologies i had back then everybody was like well we we should be just doing grants and i knew that i'd my people didn't need grants they didn't need like a handout they don't want your charity i didn't want charity i wanted someone who could work with me on my accounting i wanted somebody who um could help me brainstorm marketing wise i wanted somebody or i needed to raise money to pay my um my research and development guy to help me you know take the juices from my grandma's recipe to something that can be shelf-stable i i uh if you're gonna i needed coaching these are all the things that i needed to make my dream happen i didn't want you to give me some crap for free that's not what i want i just want um to be able to build my business with all the things that business building needs and so and so that's what i wanted to do and it's what it was needed and so michael somebody found out about what i was doing because back in the days in foster school they would write a lot about me and everything and so michael along with john mackey the founder of whole foods market they had a non-profit called flow and it's all about human flourishing they want for people everybody to get this choice this ability to be able to get to a point in their life where they're in complete flow it's uh mikhail just make high michael is the only one who can say that last name but you know the whole concept of flow when you're in a state of flow you're basically doing what you need what you're supposed to do the way you're supposed to do it with the people was this whole concept of flow yeah it's amazing unfortunately i decided so you know so i meet with this man okay so i so we we he finds me his people find me and then there was a program where it was all about accelerating accelerating women entrepreneurs so it's during these times when i'm starting now to see things that's when actually all of this stuff that i noticed how come here it takes me all of his time to start my business over this 20 minutes here it's free however thousands of dollars all of this nonsense that i just took oh maybe it's just because we're messed up we're poor that's why everything is so messed up whoa these people are introducing me to concepts i'm like first of all i'm like oh really um what did you call um the uh doing business in the right what is that um you know all of this stuff yeah and i'm starting to discover this whole of the body of work what but the free markets like this thing that i was sensing this environment that i was sensing that it was different around me and that they called it the free markets over here and i was very bad and then i started to but had those ideas with the ideas that i was fed with before that and the evidence won and further more than the evidence the evidence combined with my lived experience it was so powerful so i basically unders started understanding these ideas from the most visceral part of my my body you know of my being and it makes sense so michael michael helped me find the solution the answer to my lifelong little girl's question of why do they have this and we don't and how do some countries like mine be poor while others are rich and with the we've learned with understanding all of that the greatest biggest sense of liberation came upon me like i i have no other word to describe that true liberation the liberation that comes from a peer to finally understand and be vindicated in your own you know understand in your own um deep knowing or feeling that they're not what they're saying is not true you're not the problem it's not you there's something else and when i discovered that my whole life changed so and since then i have be i've been very serious about going deeper and deeper and deeper into my understanding of all of this understanding the subtlety at some point i was very angry about the liberators of africa because i was like yes you helped liberate us but just to keep us in this mannerism i was angry for the longest time and then eventually you have to engage empathy and love to put yourself in their shoes and try to understand the time at which they were living and that got me onto a journey of trying to understand history more that's how i understood i was able to go beyond just these liberators and try to understand and rebuild the world around them at the mark at the micro and under also them at the other macro level just really you have to try to walk in their shoes and from there finally separate the baby with a bath water but they were not able to do back then that's why today i'm sorry but i have no patience for the blm organizers founders especially founders i don't know what organizers think but the founders told us what they stand for and i say guys don't make that same mistake again if you're serious about this you cannot make this a mistake the liberals of africa they have an excuse we didn't know better it was it was so easy back then to conflate everything but today you me anybody alive cannot with a straight face embrace marxist socialist ideas especially especially when they're claiming that they want people to thrive no you can't i'm sorry and i will hold you i will hold your feet up to the fire on that one i will i will and that's what i'm doing they will give me a lot of grief for this but guess what i could care less do you know why i could care less because we have an entire population to help rise out of poverty into prosperity where they become you know co-creators global co-creators of innovation and those ideas give you hope for the place you love for senegal for africa they do they do i live the world i live in the new centers of culture and fashion are in dakar the new um the new the new centers of uh tech and and um you know crypto even is somewhere maybe nigeria so you see that future you see that future clearly i do i do i do it's a beautiful thing and uh it's also beautiful to see that the space of these uh really powerful ideas is where you also fall in love right so at the intersection i did a section michael would spend mike and i would spend hours talking about all of his ideas and i would be like but what about this no it doesn't make any sense no no no oh no and then hours every single day for months lex yeah and then from there our love was born because i tell people for us love is not about location in the eyes like you know we all think but it's about we look in one direction and in this case it's this vision what we know to be possible and true if only you liberate people we what we know to be true impossible we all of us are miracles walking around every time i get on a plane it's a miracle of engineering um all the things we're able to do you know now when they do operation on your teeth how they're able to put the pain down away all of this is us you're working on this robot this this this inside here yeah humans are amazing i know so that's why i went and when it works in great tandem with this guy yeah yeah these two working together yeah watch out nothing we can't accomplish nothing nothing well guy you're one of the most incredible people i've ever talked to i've ever thank you so much this is truly an honor thank you for everything you're doing thank you for the fire that burns within you and and there's just the passion you have for a place that's going to i think define the future of humanity so thank you for everything you're doing thank you for talking thank you thank you to you and sometimes i hope this fire doesn't consume me that's how much it is but um i am grateful to you for this um and um yeah thank you for i know you don't do a lot of this you know i am it's uh this type of interviews maybe i don't know but um i'm so so happy you mean fun inspiring powerful interviews yes i need to do more you're amazing i don't know because at first i was like lex friedman really yeah really how's this gonna go i'm gonna talk to lex and go all crazy i think you need to work on your uh unconscious bias thank you thank you thank you so much thanks for listening to this conversation with magot wade to support this podcast please check out our sponsors in the description and now let me leave you with some words from nelson mandela money won't create success the freedom to make it will thank you for listening and hope to see you next time