Angel Rich Explains The History Of The Black Dollar, Financial Literacy, Black Tech + More

[Music] you're watching The Breakfast Club [Music] morning everybody is DJ envy Angela yeesh Alamein to God we are The Breakfast Club we got a special guest in the building this angel rich yes now Forbes magazine asked the question could the next Steve Jobs be a black woman and they're talking about Miss angel rich so tell people why Forbes feels that way angel building the one and only real issues Jesus cry you know well essentially I would say the first reason is we have a game called credit stacker where we reverse engineered the fare as a credit reporting system and we applied game mechanics to it and we created a game where it's similar to candy crush but instead of swapping around candy you're swapping around credit types to be able to pay off your debt and achieve a higher credit score and we're essentially trying to reduce poverty through a game and it's been quite revolutionary that's a brilliant idea because for kids and I've always said this they don't teach things about investing and about finances and about your credit when you're in school and kids do so much on their phone they're being able to actually work through their finances do an app is the in a game is the best way to get to them definitely we also released a version last week at South by we Hearst hosted the first ever black egg miners awards at Facebook and with that we also launched a version of the game that has music integrated into it we partnered with epic solutions a record label and there's a two artist named Ron Javon and Paige and we actually put their music directly into the game so you could go to Google Play and iOS right now in 60 countries 21 languages download the game for free and groove to improve your credit where credit that bad in college actually it was they do every credit card as you and I terribly and not many people actually ask me that I graduated Hampton with $180,000 worth of debt Wow I mean with student loans and everything else I I essentially kind of put myself through school so I had to pay for the car that I had the the rent that I was paying all of those various different things added up at the end of the day and when I graduated I had a hundred and eighty thousand dollars I had about about I got close to a hundred one hundred eight hundred and eighty what kind of car you drive where were you living I had a brand-new until you learning about financial literacy definitely and when I calculated out the payments I would have been 60 years old before I was out of debt yikes and I was like I can't live like this like I gotta figure this out in as a result I just learned various different hacks along the way and I slowly when I started talking with people about them I realized that it was kind of information that I had developed and a lot of other people didn't have it and it needed to be share it with people it seems like they do that to lose to make kids lose you know when you're talking twenty three percent interest and things like that like you can never pay that off in no time you know exactly as well as kind of the point of the game is to teach kids about interests and so I didn't even know was on that car was twenty eight who taught you about money who taught you how to get together well a little bit of I learned business from my parents I grew up in a life insurance sales family I learned how to make money but I didn't necessarily learn about credit as much my mother used to always yell about her credit and how we couldn't get certain things because of credit and she used to pay for everything in cash like I just thought that was the way to do things right and it wasn't I really kind of taught myself room and once I got out of the debt once I was working my way out of the debt through the process of and researching it and going to classes myself I kind of just learned along the way and then I'm a statistician so I was a global market research analyst for financial financial and I conducted a bunch of research studies to also figure out exactly how to be able to reduce that and change behavior psyche can we lower those rates you know because you said 20% can you go back and lower those rates if it's 23 or 22 inch your credit goes up or yes with that you should definitely yeah essentially you know that's called refinancing for everybody and basically you're able to go back and reapply for the loan and be able to get a reduced amount when you have a better credit score and you can even go and put lump sums on whatever your principal amount or your your loan amount that you're paying off or credit card companies to you can also if your if your money goes in if the money that you owe goes in your debt goes into collections right you can also bargain with them oh yes that's my favorite part and I was one of the things I learned that a lot of people didn't know like if you're deep in debt like who pays off the full amount like you can negotiate for a strong 20 to 30 percent mm-hmm you can even negotiate your student loan that you own yes actually would you have to pay do what yep Hampton you heard me right let me not say that too loud well essentially a little trick here is with HBCUs they're technically a private loan not a federal loan so technically it falls off in seven years go ahead and share that information with the rest of the world now you better not because it's gonna be a whole they don't have to pay at all if you have it so when you go to a HBCU you do tend to be able to get that first $10,000 now after that you own your own but they send and give you that first 10,000 right but technically it's not from the government mmm so what happens in today that stuff gets erased after seven exactly and that's another thing like people be going around just paying off stuff like what but he's actually right I'm the real-life Rich Dad Poor Dad my birth father is a man named lunchbox yogi my stepfather that raised me was one of the like first black top entrepreneurs in DC and in Miami oh wow he actually yeah what you majoring yeah marketing okay so if you can actually afford to have bad credit for a few years you could wait seven years exactly not about to buy it so here's my theory right like say you graduate with $180,000 worth of debt and you just come out making like $50,000 you don't you can't pay off everything at one time so you need to be able to divide it into items that are large and things that are gonna permanently stay there like the student loans go ahead and get into a rehabilitation program because those are never falling off so you might as well start trying to figure out a way to pay them off now you should wait a year because you can extend it for a year before you actually start paying it off then things that are like $10,000 or more that has been on your credit for less than four years I would say pay those off first because your credit to debt ratio is the most important thing that's affecting your credit score but if it's $10,000 and it's been on your credit for more than four years and you don't really have the money and you have a ton about the last three years I'm just saying wow you got a book history at a black dot okay why do you think black people historically haven't been able to make the dollar work for them well the main part of it is group economics like when I was younger I'm from Cayman Park the first black neighborhood in the country and my great grandmother always made a shop in DC as well as with black people like she was adamant about it we would have to drive around four miles just to find this specific person sometimes and I never understood it until I wrote the book and so a part of my research it would take us over 250 years to be able to catch up with our counterparts if we do not exercise group economics and so is essential that's the only way that we're gonna be able to close this wealth guy we have to be able to put our money where our mouth is and actually collectively share with each other mm-hmm you know why do you think it's so hard for our community to do that like you look at other communities whether it's the Jewish community the Russian community Italian community they're able to put their money together and build blocks build communities seems like what our community we're scared to we just don't want to and all that a roblox person so be straight to the point about it I would say the problem would be Willie Lynch obviously and then the solution would be in other cultures they start financially educating their children at a young age on the economics when the Jewish kids are going to school in the evening they're actually going to finance an economic school there they're learning about financial what I even get out of elementary school hmm and so we're not doing that at all and that was the reason I created the games to be able to start a new generation for the world and I see it I had I did exactly that Google recently that's on fire tell me his eight-year-old knows more about credit than most of his friends because he's been playing my game for two months you know it's crazy cuz I do that with my son I taught him early and he's making money he knows he knows about credit he knows about bank accounts he knows about transferring money I didn't know none of this until I was probably about 28 Wow but in fact that he's 10 11 years old he has his own bank account he answers on PayPal he has his own money it's like I absolutely positively agree with you if you have kids start them early yes definitely and I watch on I don't know if you're familiar with amis and Abi's Mikayla yes I've met this young woman and she's just amazing and I her parents just instilled an entrepreneurship spirit in her they didn't shut her down when she wanted to start her lemonade company they pushed her out there with her little brother and they didn't tell her hey don't use honey use sugar you know they didn't limit her and I think that that's one of the most important things that you need to be able to do for your children you need to allow them to feel like they have limitless possibilities and if you teach them that as a young age integrate it with economics how you can make money for yourself be a millionaire at 9 years old yes that's like the the balancing out right balancing a key letting your kids know the realities of America but then also telling them they can do and be whatever they want to be definitely my mother was very much like that it could she never limited us with anything my sister owns a nail salon shout out the snob nails so we always felt like we got to put the address out they just can't shout out ways it's Nam now so she's at a verse in mall in DC okay yes her grand opening is on April 7 she owns one in Laurel but she's transitioning to DC to a much larger no-bail a shop so yes I'm very excited about my sister's shop and she started as a nurse and just hustled her butt off and now she's like a kind of like a celebrity announcer she's followed by a facade she and different things like that and so my mother never never limited us but she always let us know that it was a tough world out there I had to read business books every single week I had to do book reports on them she would always tell me that life is not fair I got this essay that I didn't feel great it starts life is not fair I definitely had reality for you writing this book history of the black dollar what are some things that you learned while writing this book that surprised even you that you didn't know beforehand I like that question some things that I learned I didn't know the black that it was a black person that started the first Oyster House I don't know a lot of black first I thought I thought that was pretty cool I also I kind of knew but not as in death and this is a kind of a big point of the book that during at the end of the Revolutionary War slavery was starting to die down because slavery wasn't profitable they had to take care of the slaves they were getting sick and it wasn't profitable for them to maintain them then good ol li Whitney created the cotton hat and the South yes and so as a result it allowed cotton to become the cheapest and highest quality across the world and therefore America became the number one country in the war because we had the cheapest and highest quality of cotton literally off of free labor that is then the money that we were able to use for the Industrial Revolution and I'm shocked when I go around the country and speak at places like Harvard and different things like that that the country does not know this this information like at all like they have no clue and at a place at like Harvard where the most educated people in the country if they don't know how the country started I believe that that is also why we are not on the same page in terms of group economics within ourselves as well as with other races because we are unclear about our history there was a study that came out recently with MSN saying that I don't know the exact percentage but it was a large majority didn't know that the civil war was based off of slavery mm-hmm and so there's just so many things that you speak about now you speak all those people at Harvard they're being taught their history and the problem with us is we're also being taught their history you know I mean nobody's teaching them our history and we don't know our history and coming from growing up in what used to be chocolate city it was 99% black when I grew up there and so we actually learned black history in DC and apparently the rest of the country really does it to the level that we did right like when we read books we were reading black history books in the morning we sang the black national anthem like it was like a black school you know and so when I go out and I went to Hampton and I met this girl from Roanoke and she didn't know who Frederick Douglass was and there was a picture of Africa on the wall and she walked in and asked us what that was from so many different places you know I mean because at one time Hampton was considered quote/unquote the bougie school yes it was it was I seen that a lot as well yeah I definitely see that a lot as well but even in Queens we learned all that like it was a black school in Queens mostly West Indian so we would we did the same thing we learned our history my kids now they the only way they learn the history is from me and mom other than that they don't learn it and that's excellent I find that a lot of families don't teach their kids history state of Virginia right now it's considering this book as required reading across all the and it's my goal to have it required reading across all schools before I die because I really feel as though having those conversations with your children as a family and as a school and together is really important the way you plug the nail salon real quick this real quick in the middle normally history of the black dollar getting on amazon.com and goes from slavery to present-day and provides us with an economic perspective on black culture to get us all on the same page and what's great about it is I think for kids sometimes we have to just like when you watch a movie like Black Panther take pride in things that we have accomplished because like you said there's a lot of things that I learned when I was reading this book that I didn't know we created as well and for kids that's a source of pride to say okay we had a large part in I mean we were the people that built this country definitely and different things like Freeman's Bank like a big thing that that I that I came to the conclusion of I wasn't necessarily a big fan of reparations before I wrote the book and I was just like I wanted to go out with like some pickets and like start protesting for reparations because there was actually six different times throughout black history that we were robbed and most times people talk about black wall Sheree okay I'm gonna talk about Freedman's Bank mmm-hmm you know free miss Bank was the bank that was created as as we as slavery was dying out in a lot of slaves were becoming free and was literally for the freedmen and so Lincoln felt as though we needed a place to have our bank they initially started going down because people or Ava Caucasians started taking our money and so so I was like okay Caucasians just kept taking our money they didn't blow up Frederick Douglass's that's why we have a house Frederick Douglass has a house in DC he put ten thousand dollars of his own money into the bank they still kept stealing our money so when the bank ended it was millions of dollars of our money that they just took from us it never gave back so my perspective as an economist says it's one thing to say that the labor that we did during slavery is the equivalent of six trillion dollars but let's say for whatever reason y'all just felt like we should have missed slaves okay how about the money that we actually put into the bank just Oh you just though that happens six different times are you wanting to buy the book definitely yeah now Forbes says you won't be the next Steve Jobs if you keep getting funded crumbs how important is funding for what you do funding is extremely important especially when you're trying to build technology which is why venture capital and investment exists it's it's always been a thought process that when you're creating something new or inventing something that you get funding for it sadly in the world right now only 1% of funding goes to black people and only 0.02 percent of funding goes to black women we're actually rounding up with and so only 16 black women in the world have raised over a million dollars in the past six years when Stacy Tisdale was just here she was saying that black women get about 36,000 an investment to the 1.2 million that a white man will get we actually have a little bit of updated data that over the past year since or rather like two years because it's 2018 over the past two years businesses started by black women have increased about two hundred three hundred percent and so as a result the pool of money is now stretched even thinner where we were getting it from so now on average black women are getting about twenty five thousand compared to the three two and that's of a successful company I said that's a successful black woman compared to three to five million of an unsuccessful Caucasian male that's we need to really start putting our money together so we can as a community say okay here's a million dollars we're behind you we can help each other when I met angel in Toronto I'm talking to her another got out the influence Orbitz catch you brother I'm like yo what some good African investing she was like me we're raising a million dollars right now we just closed one hundred thousand we got another fifty thousand coming in so that leaves us with 850 our minimum investment is fifty thousand you can email our team at angel at get wealthy like calm the team and get it and we are seriously looking for investments we just increased in our last round our investors money by sixty percent in seven months that's great it's seven months yes and what's on the s-e-c everything you could go look it up it's on the SEC this is public information and so when's the last time somebody has done an investment that they're ten percent in three years right and so we've been we've been very strategic about who we're taking money from I'm very big and making my investors money I also know what I'm doing I'm not necessarily just raising money and guessing at it like a lot of other entrepreneurs and so we have strategically raised our money and now we're at the point where with the game that we just launched with the music integrated into it we're now raising this next round and we're looking to just scale it even further because we have a what is essentially called I'm not gonna say a guarantee algorithm but close to what is a guaranteed algorithm where we reverse engineer Google Facebook and Instagram add platforms we were able to scale historically to two hundred thousand downloads in ten days Google then called us told us they were impressed and amazed named just one of the top ten apps in the world in 2017 and was like we've never seen anything like this in the world especially giving you don't have no money has the money wants to think about helping and supporting and investing what's the email again it's angel and get wealthy life calm and you worry about you right back getting those investments from or getting funding from like getting a loan from a bank or investor like certain types of investors yes so the problem with that and that's why I read black tech matters so hard and we go around and film everything shut out the camera floor Perez my VP of communications and so you know feel me move I know I told him not to oh we tell them not to they know that your yeah we'll give you this footage about you think about the banks and how that can be getting a little thing can actually hurt you right and so as as well as if you do have student loans on your credit like I'm good friends with most black banks in the country and so but if you have student loans on your credit it makes it kind of difficult on for you to be able to get those type of loans and so there's a lot of poly and as a result there's a lot of policy work that I do in DC working with the bipartisan policy center and all type of people um well shout out to the center for global policy solution it's dr. Maya rocky more um so yes so I do a lot for governor of Merlin and she's married to Elijah Cummings and I love her dearly do you make like okay I think the big black actually is my um chief business business development officer okay he works for us now works with us with a guy named named black know he owns Bank like I think the biggest I being black as well but I think the biggest problem is that they're hard access like you always see a Wells Fargo you always see a chaser yeah you don't really see a one United just also do better with customer service innovative products online banking different things like that that's one of the missions that we have i was recently named a global icon by the united nations where the most influential people in the world in different apps like the black by Donovan Bridgeport we're looking to connect people together with the African Diaspora with the black banks with the black businesses and different things like that so that we we are able to be able to come together and it's not we have plenty of things out there there's no need to be able to recreate the wheel you know shout out to jay-z and Diddy what they doing and trying to create that admin we got the black app already yeah apps already I'm building one called black Angeles comm there's literally like Angeles but the black version right and so me and Jason actually invest in what y'all already know we understand we got to put the weed in a bag we understand that but at a certain point we got pounds over here you know we're starting to write you know saying I didn't need to know you did it you need you know angel we want you to do this angel to Diddy thank you daddy yes all right now what's the biggest misconception when it comes to the black dollar in America that we're ignorant hmm and so I would say that when I was doing I'm also the author to African American financial experience study the reason that it's currently blacks in life insurance commercial shoes the first thing that I did and I learned during that study which is what led me to writing this book is that so often people thought that we were just ignorant black people with no money and I just proved two things in that study blacks are more life insurance at an equal or higher value within any other race and secondly though the Caucasians just don't know how to necessarily relate to us they don't necessarily know our history they don't know about the cotton they don't know about the Civil War they don't know about freedmen Spain they don't know about all those various different things black coats that was another time right okay but anyway and so so they don't know all these various different things they don't know I had to literally sit down with one of the VP's of Prudential and I was like I was raised by my great-grandmother and he was like and I was like my great-grandmother was raised by a slave her great-grandmother and she he was oh my gosh you have a direct connection to slavery oh my gosh oh my gosh this is mind-blowing and I was like yes sir and that's most black people across the country and after that conversation a few days later they finally let me do the african-american study Wow and it what and it was like literally a light ball to them and so I'd realized at that moment wow you know sometimes they are just being crackers but a lot of them just don't know they so we make it ease Mia mm-hmm yeah it's a racial wealth gap yeah it may it's on me and some other educational so how do we close the racial wealth gap between blacks and whites and is it really a huge racial wealth gap oh yeah imagine the generational wealth of people passing down inheritances to their family members that we haven't had the time to really catch up on that yes I think that there needs to be more of a community effort I think that there needs to be more names coming together like the partnership that you have I think there needs to be more displays of that where people are not scared to work together and to bring communities together because as a result of bringing those communities they're like I got an office in Rome now like as a result going back next week and so but as a result of being able to bring communities together you're able to share resources that you wouldn't have on the other side knowledge - it's a lot is it snowing like you look at Brooklyn and how we lost Brooklyn I mean yes Brooklyn was ours you know we looked at it as you know not that expensive hood ghetto and they took that and flipped it around same thing with Harlem you know that was ours they were selling brownstones for a dollar now those brown stones - for five million dollars yeah shout out to my publicist Nicki mcclain I'm a coin this term financial agriculture I'm making this up as I speak mm-hmm it's like financial agriculture right I used to study agriculture when you plant a crop you can't keep planning the same crop in the same soil any farm has to have three crops that rotate because you have to be able to continue to fertilize the soil because if you keep planting the same crop in it it'll dry those nutrients up it takes to use that crop so culture and communities are like that you can't keep feeding off of the same culture in the same community you have to be able to financially rotate those different experiences in order to produce different financial crops your last night really rich right yes God playing all day well the book history of the black dollar you could pick it up right now can they get it anywhere you buy books Amazon okay yes and and then okay all right then I'm also yesterday I just want to shout out to people who's the taxi dispatcher Nick at Newark Airport and from just us cuts who bit my eyebrows with clippers yesterday okay this brother is fire if he could do this with my eyebrows he could definitely get your fade together all right no no one gives a place we need to start investing more in I would definitely agree with that follow me on angel rich 27 an Instagram I'm as wellis at wealthy life first and black tech matters download credit stacker on Google Play on iOS 60 countries 31 languages and by history of the black dollar or amazon.com as well and you will hear more from angel on the brothers context matters black pigment shake - okay go get your nails done it's not news [Music]

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Keywords: the breakfast club, power1051, celebrity news, radio, video, interview, angela yee, charlamagne tha god, dj envy, angel rich

Id: 5tKX-64TXcQ

Length: 30min 20sec (1820 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 04 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

This may be super nitpicky, but I really hate when people do the "he/she's the next ____" thing. I find it so limiting and like it's putting people into unnecessary boxes. She's not the next Steve Jobs. She's the first Angel Rich.