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

Magatte Wade is an entrepreneur with a passion for creating positive change in Africa through economic freedom. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: – Mizzen+Main: https://mizzenandmain.com and use code LEX to get $35 off – Audible: https://audible.com/lex to get 30-day free trial – InsideTracker: https://insidetracker.com/lex to get 20% off – Onnit: https://lexfridman.com/onnit to get up to 10% off EPISODE LINKS: Magatte’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/magattew Magatte’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/magattew Magatte’s Facebook: https://facebook.com/themagattewade Magatte’s Website: https://magattewade.com Websites mentioned: Austin housing project: https://texansforreasonablesolutions.org Center for African Prosperity: https://atlasnetwork.org/partners/center-for-african-prosperity PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: – Check out the sponsors above, it’s the best way to support this podcast – Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman – Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman – Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman – LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman – Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman – Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here’s the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) – Introduction (05:55) – Africa (34:48) – Magatte’s story (1:03:36) – Corruption (1:25:01) – Advice for young people (1:46:02) – Identity (2:06:58) – BLM (2:24:18) – CRT and racism (2:54:32) – African geopolitics (3:03:02) – Overpopulation (3:21:49) – Loss

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Lex Fridman?

  The following is a conversation with Magatte Wade, an entrepreneur who is passionate about creating positive change in Africa through economic empowerment.

• 0:11Lex Fridman?

  And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We've got Miz and Main for style, Audible for audiobooks, Inside Tracker for longevity, and Onnit for supplements. Choose wisely, my friends. And now, onto the full ad reads. As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make this interesting, even though my voice is incredibly monotone, especially in this ad read. It makes no sense whatsoever. I try to be exciting and emotional, but the voice just does not know how to do that. It is a version one of this particular voice speech generation box.

• 0:48Lex Fridman?

  Anyway, if you skip these very monotone, but hopefully interesting ads, please still check out the sponsors in the description. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too. This show was brought to you by Miz and Main, the makers of comfortable, stylish dress shirts and other menswear. I wear their black dress shirt and I love it. I have more of those than I can actually count. I have a ton of them. They're incredibly comfortable. They are, in terms of form, they're just, they're like perfect in terms of the human body.

• 1:25Lex Fridman?

  I guess there's like an athletic fit to it, but without being too constraining, that I feel I can do any kind of stuff in hot weather and cold weather. Allows me to move comfortably while the, sort of the material is still, has, has like a strong form to it, which is nice for a dress shirt. I just like the minimal classiness of a good dress shirt. This is definitely my favorite black dress shirt is the one that Miz and Main makes. Right now, you can get a special discount by going to miz and main.com and use the promo code Lex.

• 2:07Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by Audible, an audiobook service that has given me hundreds, if not thousands, I'm actually pretty sure it's thousands at this point, of hours of education through listening to audiobooks. Many of the audiobooks I mention on this podcast, I once listened to with Audible. I listened to Audible when I run. So those two-hour runs that are like 12, 13, 14, 15 mile runs that I do in the Austin heat, I'm listening to an audiobook. I just can't tell you the power some of these books carry when they're done well in terms of the voice that does the reading. I mean, they really pull you in into that world

• 2:52Lex Fridman?

  in a way that sometimes even reading can't do. A great audiobook, a well-written audiobook, is unlike any other experience. Anyway, there's thousands of titles to choose from and new members can try it free for 30 days at audible.com/lex or text LEX to 500-500. This show is also brought to you by InsideTracker, a service I use to track biological data. They have a bunch of plans, most of which have blood tests that obviously use your blood data and machine learning algorithms to analyze it. Also, they have DNA data, fitness tracker data. All of that is combined together to give you a picture of what's going on inside your body.

• 3:35Lex Fridman?

  It's obvious to me that the measures of the human body, of the specific body that you are in, are essential to making the proper decisions for what you should do with your health, with your life, all that kind of stuff. And I think a lot of medicine relies on population data and very shallow diagnosis of the patient as they come in. I think it's obvious that the future of medicine will be leveraging algorithms with only minimal sort of deep insight from the human doctors, but grounded in the time series data across a long period of time that comes from your own body. And InsideTracker is at the forefront of that kind of idea. So you should definitely support them. You should definitely check them out,

• 4:20Lex Fridman?

  see if it works for you. Get special savings for a limited time when you go to inside tracker.com/lex.

• 4:29Lex Fridman?

  This episode is also brought to you by Onnit, a nutrition supplement and fitness company. They make AlphaBrain and you try to help support memory, mental speed and focus. I remember when I first started listening to Joe Rogan, one of the early legitimate sponsors I remember is for AlphaBrain, for Onnit. It feels surreal and really an honor to be able to say that Onnit supports this podcast. So just like one of the podcasts that really inspired me to get into the long form discussion format. I mean, Joe has been an inspiration for many years and now is a good friend and it's just, all of it is surreal and it's just a gigantic honor.

• 5:13Lex Fridman?

  But yeah, I do take AlphaBrain on occasion when I have a difficult deep work session coming up. So when I really have to think for a long period of time. You can get a special discount on AlphaBrain if you go to lexfridman.com/onnit. This is the Lex Fridman Podcast. To support it, please check out our sponsors in the description. And now, dear friends, here's my god, Wade.

• 5:56Lex Fridman?

  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 its people, its culture, its history? Can you, can you try to sneak up on telling us, what is the spirit of its people?

• 6:13Speaker 01

  Taranga, Taranga. Taranga, it's a Wolof word. Wolof 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, 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. So 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.

• 6:54Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 7:04Speaker 01

  For everyone, for everyone, especially towards the foreigner. Because it's very, it's very ingrained in us, this understanding that especially the foreigner, the foreigner is called foreigner because the foreigner is coming from somewhere else. So if someone has taken the time and the energy, whether 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 why the foreigners again, then it is your duty to welcome them, to be uber welcome, welcoming to them.

• 7:38Lex Fridman?

  So there's not a fear of the foreigner, there's not a suspicion of the foreigner?

• 7:42Speaker 01

  No, no, no. And I think 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 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 towards a foreigner, that's just not.

• 8:05Lex Fridman?

  So when you have a pride 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 Slavic countries are sometimes colder, they're, 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 as compared to other cities I've lived in, sort of Boston, Philadelphia, San Francisco. There's a, there's a hesitation to open up, to be fragile, to, to be caring, be understanding what the sort of, what I can gain from you kind of calculation.

• 8:50Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  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. And 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.

• 9:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  They're real. 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.

• 9:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  At first, we're the 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'm one of, I count myself in it, but you know, because we're also new arrivals, um, always been furious now. But um, how are we going to protect this place?

• 10:14Lex Fridman?

  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, 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, build 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.

• 10:53Lex Fridman?

  And dream big and build it here. I think Elon represents that with the, all the, all the people that kind of tried to um.

• 11:03Lex Fridman?

  Do the cutting edge stuff they're doing at Tesla and SpaceX. But 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 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?

• 11:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, how can hanging out with this person can advance me? You know, you go to a party, you seizing, they seizing up. It's like, I'm not going to talk to someone 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.

• 11:50Lex Fridman?

  I like how you pronounce San Francisco with a French accent.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  San Francisco?

• 11:54Lex Fridman?

  It's great. That's the one word you go with a French accent. Sounds beautiful.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  San Francisco. San Francisco. But you know, so now that you find that cute, you're going to 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. 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, you know, Nicole Nozak and her project, you know, with the housing project 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 lives, doesn't matter how little big you're making money wise,

• 12:43Speaker 01

  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, 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 Austin go away that San 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.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  But I'm like, if diversity for you means 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, 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, there is this invisible, this invisible, how should I say this? There's this invisible agreement that they all seem to have to stay on script.

• 14:01Lex Fridman?

  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, what comes out, as opposed to just the free, open embrace of people, the weirdos, the characters, the interesting, the full, deep sense of diversity.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 14:25Lex Fridman?

  Not just ideas, but backgrounds and rich and poor, like.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  Artists, engineers.

• 14:32Lex Fridman?

  High school dropouts, PhDs.

• 14:35Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:36Lex Fridman?

  All of this.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. That's what makes for a rich society that's going to get ahead.

• 14:41Lex Fridman?

  I'm glad you mentioned Nicole's efforts. I know she really is passionate about. I don't, I don't know how complicated that work is, because there's probably. A big force trying to increase how much it costs to live in Austin. I don't know how you resist that. Whenever I go to New York City, just the fact that there's a giant park in the middle of it. 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, having a park. And then in the same way, protecting the ability for people from all walks of life to live in the center

• 15:26Lex Fridman?

  of the city, to live around the city, to chase a dream when they don't get any money in their pocket.

• 15:33Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 15:33Lex Fridman?

  I don't know how you do that. This partly political, probably, regulation, all that kind of stuff.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  It's, a lot of it has to do with regulations. And this is where her and I also very much see eye to eye in terms of, 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've got to stand for, and I don't like to use this word, but maybe you helped me find a better one. But at least that's a word that people can understand. We've got to stand for the lesser fortunate among us. Some people would like, call them, maybe oftentimes use the word, maybe the underdogs. Whatever it is, I will just say, maybe the lesser fortunate among us, right?

• 16:18Speaker 01

  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.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  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 it so well, he said,

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Having a heart for the poor, that's easy. Having a mind for the poor, that's the challenge. And oftentimes, we all have a heart for the poor. But when it comes then to, then what do we do to have a real impact on making sure the 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 the supply, with the supply, with the supply, the supply of housing.

• 17:54Speaker 01

  And therefore, the people who can't afford, you know, people get priced out of the 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 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 among them, especially the lesser

• 18:37Speaker 01

  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 the market. Same thing was done with us. So oftentimes, when I see a problem, problems of this nature, you can bet you that regulations and senseless 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.

• 19:04Lex Fridman?

  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 you a question about Africa. In the West. In many places in the world, Africa is almost 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, from in Senegal and beyond.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Right. So at the most basic of what makes us one goes back to even what makes you African. You are African. I'm African. We're one big family. It's Africa is very much at the end of the day, the foundation and the birth of, you know, the human race. So in from that standpoint, at the most basic level, we're all Africans.

• 20:03Lex Fridman?

  Where this whole thing started.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. Where this whole thing started and how at some point humanity was hanging by its fingernails. Only 2,000 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, to adjust to our new natural habitat. You know, the genomics program, I think at the National Geographic did that so well. For people who are interested in going back to that work with Spencer Wells and such.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  But 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, Black Africa, unfortunately, are common stories, you know, of having gone through this terrible, horrible period of 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 esclav, you know, esclav, slave, slavs, lislave, right?

• 21:29Speaker 01

  From the Eastern Bloc. So the first slaves were 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, the closest to us in history of a big mass of people being enslaved.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Is African people, we were the last, the last, you know, group like that.

• 21:51Lex Fridman?

  You know, um, the pain of World War One and World War Two 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 that same way, the, the pain of slavery,

• 22:12Lex Fridman?

  and empires using Africa, does that permeate the culture? Is there still echoes of that?

• 22:18Speaker 01

  In a way, yes, especially the fact that, you know, in many different places, whether it's Ghana or my country or Benin, where you have um these places that we call the door of 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. There is this one door, you're there in the slave house, and once they go, they go. It's um, that's, that's it, it's gonna be the last time they see back home.

• 22:54Speaker 01

  So, you know, those, of course, of course, it creates for a common lived experience, which becomes a common lived um history, and of course, it's gonna tie us up.

• 23:12Lex Fridman?

  Is there a resentment, because you mentioned hospitality?

• 23:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:15Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 23:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:29Lex Fridman?

  That's, that's a way to see geopolitics in this modern world.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  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 their attitude, they have an entitlement attitude, right? And they think, but in a way, we're all still servants. Some people, you know, in your face, some people more, but that can cause some little resentment. But where really the resentment is.

• 24:06Lex Fridman?

  And that can, the entitlement can take different forms, like even pity.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 24:10Lex Fridman?

  Is, is.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  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 gonna be all composed, you're gonna be, because you know Lex is all composed, so don't go there and make a fool of yourself, just, just behave.

• 24:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 24:25Speaker 01

  But if you, if you get me on some, some grounds, that's when it's all gonna go to hell.

• 24:30Lex Fridman?

  So yeah, let's, let's, let's move beyond that to, so resentment, there's, there's a dance between hospitality and resentment.

• 24:36Speaker 01

  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 your ancestors have enslaved me, you, you're not gonna see that stuff. Sometimes I'm in this country, vo, 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 serving 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.

• 25:14Lex Fridman?

  Help you very quickly.

• 25:15Speaker 01

  Exactly. But where things come up is, especially nowadays with the African youth, when we have to be reminded of the World Bank, when we have to be reminded of even the world, places like the World Economic Forum, you know, like all of these places that seem to constitute,

• 25:35Speaker 01

  they would, you, they, the way they describe them, and I say they, it's primarily my Pan-African friends. So here maybe terms are worth describing. So, um, the Pan-African movement way, goes way back when, um, we're talking about, you know, way back when, started in, um, in the thirties, going on all the way from there. So what you have there is, um, people who have started coming together and dreaming up an emancipated Africa.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Away from the colonies, because at that point, there were still colonies, and dreaming up all of that. So we're talking about people like Kwame Kuma of Ghana, we're talking about Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, talking about Blais Tiani of Senegal, and other people like that, Bandia of Malawi. So anyway, so, and the African youth of today, we're still hanging on onto those, onto some of these ideas of, 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.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  And I very much myself, 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, so this Pan-African, especially the Pan-African youth, but it's beyond the Pan-African youth, it's the youth in general in Africa, World Bank, UN, 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.

• 27:35Speaker 01

  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? No offense to robots. No offense to robots, especially this one, he looks so cute. But, you know what I mean?

• 28:12Speaker 01

  So, so they, they have continued deciding what it would be 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.

• 28:40Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 29:04Lex Fridman?

  Beyond factions, beyond all of that.

• 29:06Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 29:07Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 29:19Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 29:20Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 29:32Speaker 01

  Especially Sub-Saharan Africa, especially Sub-Saharan Africa, yes.

• 29:36Lex Fridman?

  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 fascinating geopolitics of that, um, 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.

• 30:20Lex Fridman?

  Some have, uh, 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?

• 30:39Speaker 01

  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 has nothing to do with maybe how you conduct yourself, otherwise 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.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Or you're in 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 be somewhere and be like, well, because I know what I'm gonna talk to you about next. And some people are gonna sit there and be like, well, China is not like that, or, you know, even Dubai is not like that. 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 gonna 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 vote, or can people live

• 32:09Speaker 01

  like this, or, I'm not talking about any of that.

• 32:12Lex Fridman?

  Economic, fundamentally economic prosperity.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  Yes, because I think 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 if we're gonna 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, then what I have come to find is that at the root of that is gonna 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.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  To create value and create value entrepreneurially. We're not talking about rent seeking or 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.

• 33:12Lex Fridman?

  Create value.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  Create value, yes. So when it comes to that, we have found that 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, North Korea and so on and so forth. And at the same time, very different nations.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  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 shenanigan 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.

• 34:36Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 34:47Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. And maybe here, let me just maybe illustrate it with my own story and then I can take you back to.

• 34:57Lex Fridman?

  Makah, tell us your story.

• 34:59Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 34:59Lex Fridman?

  Who are you?

• 35:00Speaker 01

  It's just because it started with me coming here. You showed me the robot and everything. And now it looks like I'm no need for, we're no need for. And then you're like, tell people. No, no, no. But so this is where this question, even when you asked me, how are 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, 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,

• 35:45Speaker 01

  coming from low income countries.

• 35:46Lex Fridman?

  So you saw the difference?

• 35:48Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 35:48Lex Fridman?

  Between the two places?

• 35:51Speaker 01

  How else would you call it? Here you are in Senegal, minding your own business, causing tons of trouble everywhere. You know, just being a, just being a happy, free ranch kid. But I was.

• 36:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So you were always a troublemaker, not just now? Okay.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  Life wouldn't be fun without it.

• 36:05Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, and of course, I agree.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  So because even you, you know, like, and you're like all put together, like front, I know there's a lot of trouble making behind you.

• 36:13Lex Fridman?

  Desperately trying to keep it together.

• 36:15Speaker 01

  I know you are, but with me, I'm gonna totally bring it out. So just, yeah, so.

• 36:20Lex Fridman?

  So you saw the difference?

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Right, I saw the difference. 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 shark hole catch on a little 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 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, I got time for your shower. I'm like, I'm not getting naked. Where's the bottle of water?

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Where's the bucket of hot water? She's like, oh, you silly. Come on, just jump in. And I jump in the shower, turn the buttons, the water is coming down temperature. I want to play with. It's like, are you kidding me?

• 37:15Lex Fridman?

  So amazing.

• 37:16Speaker 01

  I've been cheated out of life my whole life.

• 37:18Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 37:18Speaker 01

  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 go back home. And your shoes get ruined most of the time. And it started 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 of this money? 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 back it's not.

• 37:54Lex Fridman?

  And easy, not in a negative sense.

• 37:57Speaker 01

  No.

• 37:57Lex Fridman?

  In a beautiful sense, sometimes I get, 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 easy it is, how we can. First of all, in Ukraine, you currently can't fly, right? It's a war zone. Just even 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, really bad conditions of roads. And I'm sure in many parts of Africa and many parts of the world, the roads are even worse.

• 38:39Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 38:40Lex Fridman?

  And outdoor, you know, having an indoor toilet is a fascinatingly awesome luxury to have.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  It is, it is. And don't take me wrong, Lex. Do we have some great roads now in many parts of Africa?

• 38:56Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  Main arteries, great roads, you're like, whoa, this is moving. Yes, we do, but definitely more today than in my time growing up. 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.

• 39:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 39:33Speaker 01

  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.

• 39:51Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's a key word, amazing, because 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 so eventually the question became, how? So I went from how come they 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 haunted. So you can laugh all you want, but it's.

• 40:35Speaker 01

  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.

• 41:18Speaker 01

  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. That stuff is still out there. It's very real. 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 education. And I say, you know, maybe you gotta 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 waiting through cars, in moving cars, under the hot sun, fumes thrown at their

• 42:01Speaker 01

  face, trying to sell you anything and any, that you think you might be able to use. Whether we're talking about an ironing board, to an umbrella, to Q-tips, to, you know, toothpicks, selling you whatever you need from your car. These are street sellers. And you ask them, dear, do you have any degree? Yeah. I have this credit degree in math or in literature, whatever. Some very, very educated people. Yet they're right there. This is what they're doing.

• 42:37Lex Fridman?

  So that's just at scale wasted human potential.

• 42:42Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 42:44Lex Fridman?

  So that has to do, the wasted human potential has to do now with the system, with something about the laws.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Which is, yeah.

• 42:54Lex Fridman?

  Something about sort of the things that limit or enable the entrepreneur.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Yes. Because at that point, I've heard this, you know, I heard people say, yeah, your IQ is no good. Yeah, you don't have enough degrees, or you're not educated. Yeah, 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 gonna change, whatever. And then, so I heard all of this nonsense, Lex, but you guess what? But guess what? None of it made sense. You know why it didn't make sense? Because if any of that crap was true, why, oh, why is it that? My parents or any other people from these places. And oh, and by the way, some people call those places God forsaken land.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  That's also the type of credit you 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.

• 43:55Lex Fridman?

  That sentiment is sometimes there.

• 43:57Speaker 01

  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 poorer nation to a nation that supposedly is rich, all of a sudden, they get to manifest the greatest potential. So I'm starting to think this has nothing to do with a person per se, because we're talking about the same person, same background, same everything, same name, features, everything. Now I'm starting to think, maybe it doesn't have to do with a person.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  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, well, I got my quiet, uh-uh. 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,

• 45:23Speaker 01

  same background, different outcome. Hmm, what is this? And then I go on. I start, I am in Silicon Valley in the late nineties, early two thousands. That come boom, all of that. And I'm starting to discover this concept of this thing called entrepreneurship. You know, I'm in Silicon Valley and just getting to experience what 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, bring it out and then they go out and they talk to some investors who's going to invest in it. Then they have lawyers who get to, you know, put all of this stuff together. And then they have the big four CPA firms, this whole ecosystem of what they call of entrepreneurship.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  And then eventually this concept of entrepreneurship being this, this idea of, 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 going to do something about it. What entrepreneurs are, are people who criticize by creating. Do they always get it right? No.

• 46:52Speaker 01

  As a matter of fact, the failure in entrepreneurship is humongous. 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.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  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 that 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.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  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 asked 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

• 48:52Speaker 01

  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.

• 49:03Lex Fridman?

  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 place where you came from. Breaking apart in some kind of way, and you have the entrepreneurial fire that dreams of helping.

• 49:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:24Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:33Lex Fridman?

  And criticized by creating.

• 49:36Speaker 01

  Especially when you've been, especially when, and let's face it, do we all, are we all a bundle of circumstances, some happy, some worse? Yes, we are. And 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, trapped? Because we call ourselves trapped citizens. When you're trapped in these countries that go nowhere, you're, 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,

• 50:21Speaker 01

  and to send, investors had already said, we understand if you want to stop. Whatever you decide to do, we'll 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 of myself. And by the end of the month, I had decided, I'm letting go. There's no way, the pain was too great. Nothing made sense anymore, it was too much. So I went to see this woman, and 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 I told the representative of all of them, and I told her, this is very, this very old lady,

• 51:06Speaker 01

  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, you know, like measurable, but you could tell this woman probably lost a child, as oftentimes happen in places, you know, that are lower income countries. Probably lost a husband also, probably, who knows? So many people, loss is part of our lives.

• 51:29Lex Fridman?

  You could see the pain.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  You can see the pain, yet she's so, so dignified. She's so dignified. And that already kind of made me like, my God, 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 her in the eyes. I said, look at me, child.

• 51:53Speaker 01

  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.

• 52:16Lex Fridman?

  So she helped you find your strength?

• 52:18Speaker 01

  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 let's 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 the beverage world. With at some point Roger Enrico, the chairman of PepsiCo, sitting on my on my board, on my board.

• 52:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, I went back because of that. So the reason why I tell this story for me is important. Because I've it, the world needs to understand

• 52:58Speaker 01

  that there are so that 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 saviors coming and, you know, giving them food and all that. No, no, no, no, no. But it's like, just like the leg up I got in my life, give somebody else a leg up.

• 53:26Lex Fridman?

  What are the things you're fighting against in Africa when you try to build a business like that?

• 53:32Speaker 01

  So then we're building this company. And back then, this was in two thousand and four, that was when I built my first company.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  We had to have two sister companies, one there, one here. So the one in Africa was about the whole supply chain. And the one in America was, you know, research and development, sales and marketing, all of that good stuff.

• 54:01Speaker 01

  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, they would 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, today, it's super fast, 20 minutes, online, done. Back then, it was, you know, less than a few hours to get it done. Cost you almost nothing, we're talking about a few hundred dollars, you know, three, two to three hundred fifty, depending which state you are.

• 54:34Lex Fridman?

  So LLC, starting a basic company takes almost no time?

• 54:39Speaker 01

  No time, no time, no money, almost.

• 54:41Lex Fridman?

  You don't have to know a guy that knows the guy that slipped some money to the politician and so on?

• 54:48Speaker 01

  No, none of that stuff, none of that stuff. And so, at the same time, also, things like, and Visa can take you even to today's day. Okay, Lex, I don't know if you have employees on payroll or anything like that, 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?

• 55:17Speaker 01

  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, this paperwork.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  Do you have to do that anywhere in the US? I mean, do you, do we have that situation anywhere that you know of right now?

• 56:02Lex Fridman?

  No.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  And do you think that's business friendly? Or do you think it's cumbersome in business?

• 56:07Lex Fridman?

  And that's not just cumbersome, sort of physically, it's cumbersome psychologically. That there is, 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.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  Exactly. You're in a country like 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, your filing, you know, your state, your franchise tax.

• 56:41Speaker 01

  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.

• 56:58Lex Fridman?

  For the listener, my guy was holding up a zero.

• 57:02Speaker 01

  You make no money.

• 57:04Lex Fridman?

  You still have to pay.

• 57:05Speaker 01

  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 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 about we waited 24 hours, waited 48 hours, a month, two months, three months, four months, five months, you go, you send your assistant, she goes, she comes back. Well, they say we send it to wait. At some point, I'm like, I gotta go there.

• 57:47Speaker 01

  So I go there and I asked to speak to the head of the district for, you know, and I'm just like going on and on and on and on about how we've been delayed. This is going to be a problem. We have to produce, everything is delayed and I'm, I risk losing my business. 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, he'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 the electricity. And he says, do you see that?

• 58:32Speaker 01

  I said, yeah. And he said, look over there. I look over there to the other side. I see two meters. He's like, each of these 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 a 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 force us to have passports.

• 59:17Speaker 01

  It's your right as a citizen to have a passport. And even there, if you want yours to keep going through the process, you have to bribe somebody so it can go even the pace it's 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, you have no reason to even be here. You could be back in America, living your life, la vida 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.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  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 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 for 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 one, I'm the pretty one, because you know.

• 1:00:42Lex Fridman?

  Of course.

• 1:00:43Speaker 01

  You know.

• 1:00:46Lex Fridman?

  That's so people can tell you apart, she's the pretty one, right?

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  Exactly, I'm the pretty one and he's the whatever. So, so I go to the mayor and I'm like, Mayor, 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. They've been sitting on 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. The, theirs was in some other village and they didn't know if it was going to be back for another three days or four days.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  I said, are you kidding me? He's like, no. So I call Mayor again, I'm like, Mayor, do you have a ladder? And I explained and he said, and that's how I got 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 or for bad. And some people say, oh no, you're not married for good or for bad, except that it will just cost you a lot of time and money to get rid of any of them. Doesn't matter the circumstances. Do you think I really, an entrepreneur really needs to hear something like that? You know, the head of the ILO, I had an argument with him at the UN. And I said to him, listen, and you listen to me very well.

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  The reason, if you want to protect employees, as you claim, everything you're doing is to protect employees. A, you know better for a human being than I am in terms of 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 babysitters, having childcare on site, all of these perks that come on top of really cozy salaries. It did not happen because you, the ILO, told them, "You have to do this."

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  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 result 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.

• 1:03:38Lex Fridman?

  So, let's try to untangle this. So, there's a system in place, there's a momentum with that system. Like you said, "Lady, it's not my level," which is, for somebody who grew up in the Soviet Union, at least echoes some of the same sounds I heard 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...

• 1:04:20Lex Fridman?

  Is to what degree is there corruption in Senegal and Africa? And how do we fix it?

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  So when you said to which degree is there 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. Right? So now, what I want people to understand when it comes to corruption? It's because we are misguided with corruption. We think corruption is the root cause of problems when corruption is simply a symptom of the deeper root problem. In this case, if you make the laws so senseless, meaning, let me give you an example of senseless laws.

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  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 at 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.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  Some packaging and some raw material. But guess what? Lex, for five of them, I am paying a 40% tariff. And for the other two, almost 70% tariff. That I call senseless laws. These tariffs are senseless.

• 1:06:13Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, corruption is just a symptom. They reveal that something is broken about the laws. And the laws are so taxation.

• 1:06:22Lex Fridman?

  This kind of restricting laws, like laws that slow down the entrepreneurial momentum.

• 1:06:30Speaker 01

  They do, they do, because in this case, when my product comes, what do people have to do? Because every time, if you, if you add forty percent, you're basically on the other end. So every time you add, if let's say my product normally costs a dollar and with a forty percent, by the time I'm done, I had to pay, I had, now it's costing me one forty. By the time it arrives in my warehouse, in my manufacturing facility, it's now at one forty because of a tariff I left behind. That forty percent you added to it, do you know how much it's gonna add to my final cost that once the product is finished, I have to sell it to the customer? I have to sell it for a dollar sixty more because of that forty cents extra you took

• 1:07:13Speaker 01

  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 is the blood of a business. There are two people who are misguided. They say, oh, you dirty, greedy business people, and it's all about profit, profit, profit, profit.

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  You know, I belong to this organization called I'm a Board Member Under 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're not all twisted about it,

• 1:08:19Speaker 01

  Lex, if I asked you, what's your goal in the world? You're probably gonna tell me your dream. You're gonna 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 gonna 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.

• 1:08:48Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:49Speaker 01

  You know what I mean?

• 1:08:50Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:50Speaker 01

  So that's how, so people need to stop with this whole profit non. 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, in the entrepreneurial's world as well. Yeah, so we have one percent of us who are 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 forty percent tariff, which is outrageous. Then you're forcing me to sell it for a dollar sixty more than my competitor, who does not have to go through 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.

• 1:09:35Speaker 01

  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 a fourth language, so.

• 1:09:56Lex Fridman?

  Well, it's two, two people talking. Between us, maybe we'll have this English thing figured out.

• 1:10:02Speaker 01

  We'll have it figured out.

• 1:10:03Lex Fridman?

  So the, the, the idea of capitalism, the idea of conscious capitalism is the, the thing that in large part enables this level playing field.

• 1:10:12Speaker 01

  That's what we want. So, so what you're trying to say, so here, so when I talked about census laws, that's an example. So when you make, when you make the tariff so high that you're going to render me, you know, non-competitive, then that's where for people it 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've a government official, that's what we call a bribe. And me, I'm like, hey, I saved myself money and also I saved myself time.

• 1:10:53Speaker 01

  But you see, if the laws were you pay five percent or even the ten percent that I just left behind or nothing, you come, you pay it, 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? So I'm like, we've got a problem. You're best friends now. So I say now it's the customs. And and he's like, what do you want me to do? I said, do you know anybody at customs?

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  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 he's like, yeah, I know this is not, this is not very, yeah, 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 going to 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

• 1:12:21Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:12:47Speaker 01

  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, trade secrets are trade secrets. But here, you're asked to be putting it in front of some people. You don't know where it's gonna go after that. Because there they get to see, okay, her recipe calls for X amount of uh of uh candy lila wax, X amount of um coconut um coconut oil. Okay, and on top of that, we have to think about how much foliage might there be or not, because again, we don't want her to to to to buffer the other 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.

• 1:13:29Speaker 01

  So um you have to do that. And then each time file out, fill out a 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.

• 1:13:48Lex Fridman?

  So you're basically forced by these uh senseless laws to be dishonest.

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  But where corruption, all of this was so, it's so cumbersome, because each, it means more paperwork, paperwork everywhere. Maybe having to disclose your things. 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 for the first two years, we were more or less in the gray area.

• 1:14:16Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, so even gray area is good.

• 1:14:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, but but but let's, what does it mean in a situation like that? Whenever they wanna mess with you, 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.

• 1:14:36Lex Fridman?

  I mean. You're an incredible person because it seems like there's two ways to change this.

• 1:14:45Lex Fridman?

  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 to change the laws.

• 1:15:06Speaker 01

  You're totally getting it by with your last part. Because see, this is the other thing. And this is where I get so upset sometimes with 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 US too. People thinking that presidents have all this power. Do you know who has the least power in government? The president. I mean, people don't get that. Your best bet, if you're going to, 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.

• 1:15:50Speaker 01

  So if you must go into politics, but there, 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 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 a 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.

• 1:16:33Speaker 01

  Where does a source of income come from for most of us? It comes from a job, doesn't it? And then 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 government, you're going to be paid something, right? And they're like, yeah. And then even before I can say something, they're like, oh, yeah. Because that money we use 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.

• 1:17:06Speaker 01

  You're poor because you have no money. No money because no source of income. Source of income for most of us is a job. We're talking about, 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?

• 1:17:28Lex Fridman?

  And also, a lot of the, a lot of it comes not just in the small and medium sized businesses, but I think a lot of the value is created from new ones being launched.

• 1:17:40Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:17:41Lex Fridman?

  Right, it's not just like me, like saving somehow through regulation, the ones that are already there.

• 1:17:46Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 1:17:47Lex Fridman?

  It's like letting the market, letting the new better ideas flourish.

• 1:17:53Speaker 01

  Yes, it's about, 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. But doing business, so basically, when I've discovered all of that, when I put all of those dots together, then I'm like, well, I guess the 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 gonna have to have a good environment for it. Is the soil the right one? What's your pH level? All of those good nutrients that you're gonna put in it? Is it in a place that has tons of sun, how much sun exposure or not? The climate in January, is it gonna be cold, not not?

• 1:18:37Speaker 01

  You can't have some beautiful tomatoes in the middle of Siberia, last time I checked. So same thing here. You know, Mohamed Yunus, the Nobel Laureate 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.

• 1:19:02Speaker 01

  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. But 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 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.

• 1:19:47Speaker 01

  It's so complicated. You have to hire a CPA, which costs more money. And even them tell them, girl, we're gonna make some mistakes. They don't talk, they don't talk to me like that. It's you know, you know, they don't say, girl, they shouldn't, they, they, 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 threshold, you owe me nothing. Go online, five minutes, fill out your taxes, you're, you're compliant. Keep bring, keep building your business, because that's what we need from you.

• 1:20:30Speaker 01

  If you made it so easy and straightforward, then you know what? That's when you get all of these people like what you're talking about saying, you know what? My name is Amin Nata 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 that 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.

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  You're willing to work hard for it and pour everything you got into it. Guess what?

• 1:21:18Speaker 01

  It's there. You can get into the race.

• 1:21:20Lex Fridman?

  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 X.

• 1:21:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:21:31Lex Fridman?

  Whatever. And it doesn't have to be, you know, the next Steve Jobs. That that seems really far, far away.

• 1:21:37Speaker 01

  It's at all levels. It's at all levels. You you create local heroes because because because representation matters.

• 1:21:44Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:21:45Speaker 01

  Right? So and we are so badly in need of that. And so 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 Doing Business Index ranking of the 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,

• 1:22:29Speaker 01

  that socialist Americans tend to love so much and take as an example, although there too, they're showing you that they don't understand what's going on really in Scandinavia, that Scandinavia is more capitalist. Scandinavian nations are more capitalist than almost any Sub-Saharan African nations.

• 1:22:47Lex Fridman?

  Ultimately, the political systems actually don't even matter nearly as much as the private sector being able to operate the machinery of capitalism.

• 1:22:59Speaker 01

  There you go. There you go. There you go. And it's almost like, 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, 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?

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  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 specialists, 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. There this, there that. And it's going on for years after year after year. And finally, you meet this one person. And boom, it's there.

• 1:24:16Speaker 01

  Not only the liberation,

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  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'm gonna have a lot of work to do. But there's hope.

• 1:24:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:35Speaker 01

  Right?

• 1:24:36Lex Fridman?

  And you're 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 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,

• 1:24:58Lex Fridman?

  to escape the feeling of being trapped. Is there a device you can give?

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:05Lex Fridman?

  To people that, to young girls and boys dreaming somewhere in Africa of how to change the world?

• 1:25:14Speaker 01

  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. And one of my goals is to open the same doors that were opened for me, because together, our voice.

• 1:25:34Speaker 01

  There's such amazing stories out there. And 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 the 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 they say, when I listen to you, I feel like I'm I'm talking to a priest. And I'm like, because the gospel. I receive the gospel. So anyway, but the thing is, Lex, who tells you these things?

• 1:26:18Speaker 01

  To this day, when they talk about the poverty of Africa, what do they talk about? They sit in there telling you, oh, yeah, it's because of colonialism. 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 culp, you know, like guilty to some level of where we are today? One of maybe part of the 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 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.

• 1:27:01Speaker 01

  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, war is building over here. Oh, we're having Ebola is coming, all of that stuff. Even when they were talking about the monkeypox, which at first, you know, in this wave, it started with white people in Europe. Well, even in the many newspapers you pull out, it's black people with monkeypox on their on their skin. I'm like, wait a second, this time around, we did not start with us. So why are we, are you always showing us when it's right now happening to white people? You know? So so all of that is happening. So for me, the thing is. We, the world, simply right now,

• 1:27:45Speaker 01

  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. Seventy-five percent of the population in my country is below the age of twenty-five years old. So when we're talking, I know we're talking about, you know, repopulation, you know, is important. We're gonna have to go for that. Maybe you'll get me going about comment, I don't know. But anyway, so here, my point is, A, we need to have the right diagnosis as to why this continent is the poorest continent in the world, despite its riches, starting with its young people, all the natural resources, diversity in land, people, cultures, languages,

• 1:28:26Speaker 01

  everything that make for great ingredient 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 overregulated region in the world. At the end of the day, what Africa, and I dare to say Africa here, and treat it as one, we are fifty-four countries, fifty-five 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.

• 1:29:10Lex Fridman?

  And economic freedom is the thing that unlocks that human potential of the young people, just...

• 1:29:14Speaker 01

  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 this thing that gets you to get up and go and do something. Criticized by creating, young people are naturally wired to wanna 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. And in this situation, what they do, you know, let's talk about pre-colonial Africa, of four favers, before slavery ever happened. There were black people 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...

• 1:29:59Speaker 01

  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? What economic 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 free 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 region in the world, lacks economic freedom. Number two, what do we do about that?

• 1:30:38Speaker 01

  We've got to become serious about reforms, economic reforms, so that we can become beacons of 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. Lee Kwang Woo, you know, when, you know, he's just like, we've got to do something. And he looked around and he realized at some point, we've 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, the stock market crash and the Great Depression and everything,

• 1:31:23Speaker 01

  the world's, and with all the lies that were told to the world coming from the Soviet Union Stalin, while they were starving and dying over there, but oh no, you know, I mean, Durant was telling the world that, oh no, no, everything is going well, nobody's dying when we know now. And getting political prices based on this stuff. But then the world went on believing that, oh no, capitalism failed. This is, this, this, you know, crash that you had in the, in the, in the stock market is proof. This is what late-stage capitalism produces. You guys always have your big ups and downs. But 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 the Soviet Union, but supposedly the communism was doing just fine. And you're at the point where...

• 1:32:09Speaker 01

  The free market concept almost died. And it's the, 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 re- a new commitment to the free markets on this continent if we wanna go anywhere, if we wanna go anywhere.

• 1:32:31Lex Fridman?

  And the timing is perfect because the young people, there's a, there is a kind of freedom for that revolutionary free markets in this whole space.

• 1:32:41Speaker 01

  Exactly. And by the, you said something, oh, say that again, because I wanna tell you what I'm hearing in that, because something's really cool. Say it again, come on Lex.

• 1:32:48Lex Fridman?

  I don't know which part. English is my second language too.

• 1:32:51Speaker 01

  No, you said, you said there's something revolutionary.

• 1:32:54Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:55Speaker 01

  In, in, in that, because you know how young people are attached to the revolution and how, you know.

• 1:32:59Lex Fridman?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:32:59Speaker 01

  I understand, look, look Lex, I understand and I am willing to give the benefits of the doubt to some of these socialists who ca- who came to it because they had to witness some of the horrors of, you know, of their times, you know.

• 1:33:18Lex Fridman?

  There's a revolutionary spirit behind that. It's ultimately.

• 1:33:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:22Lex Fridman?

  Uh, criticized by creating.

• 1:33:24Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. But violent revolution is never the answer. But that's what they went for in seventeen eighty-nine in France, you know, the French Revolution. Um, and then late, and you know, Marx and Engels, you know, they're promoting these ideas that usually for them justifies violent revolution, then in all of these people, the, 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.

• 1:33:52Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:52Speaker 01

  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 and 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. A revolution 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. Criticize by creating. By what? You're gonna go shoot people? Or be like, what's his name? The Che Guevara?

• 1:34:36Speaker 01

  Who tells you, I love, it's in writing, I love nothing more than to fry the, the, the, the, the brain of a man with his gun? Really?

• 1:34:46Lex Fridman?

  Well, in terms of sexy, 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, is 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.

• 1:35:31Lex Fridman?

  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. 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 roadblocks as possible.

• 1:36:16Speaker 01

  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 worst region in the world is because it happens to be the most overregulated 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 laissez faire. 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

• 1:36:58Speaker 01

  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 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 you at that point anymore. So.

• 1:37:17Lex Fridman?

  So it's just to clarify, you know, there's a perception in some reality that Scandinavian countries have elements of socialism in their politics, in their society, in their, even in their economics. So at the very least, Africa should have, in terms of economic indices, should be as free as the Scandinavian countries. You're just giving that example.

• 1:37:41Speaker 01

  Economically free, yes. Because see, the Scandinavian, they do have a subsidized, you know, like a welfare system, that's what, a more socialized welfare system. But the way they make their money is very, very much the way of the free markets. So there is how you make your money, and then there's how you maybe decide as a country to redistribute it, right? And so even there, even in Scandinavia, again, yes, they have more economic freedom. So then from there, Lex, where we go is, my job and my goal is for every single African, young and old,

• 1:38:23Speaker 01

  to know what I have come to learn. We are not doomed.

• 1:38:32Speaker 01

  It's not over for us. We will never catch up. The time for catch up 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 not when you go to universities. I will ask you, MIT, the MIT Econ Department, or even some, most of the professors, are they free market oriented?

• 1:39:13Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:39:25Lex Fridman?

  Nobody cares about the economists, anyway.

• 1:39:28Speaker 01

  So we move forward.

• 1:39:29Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:39:43Speaker 01

  No, I get that, but then we cannot be stifling their efforts.

• 1:39:47Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 1:39:47Speaker 01

  By putting these artificially made regulations and laws that stand in the way and clip their wings. So, so that's why, when you were saying, what, 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 of the 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, I was, I had front row seat of the differences.

• 1:40:32Speaker 01

  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 a country allows its citizens the economic freedom to enterprise, then they become rich. So 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.

• 1:40:57Speaker 01

  In this case, I like to use that word. Facts will empower you and they will even furthermore, they will power you. Empower and power you. Cause empower 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 markets? We're starting a way there. People don't necessarily be left behind or anything like that. We we're in twenty twenty two for Christ's sake. We don't have to do entrepreneurship the same way maybe was done fifty 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.

• 1:41:41Speaker 01

  But update is definitely not uh build back uh build back uh, what do they call it? Build back new or whatever they're calling it at the W F, you know, like whatever, whatever nonsense and, you know, stuff they're smoking over there. It's not that. 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 learned from from our times and from life. So that's what I want them to know. Learn your 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.

• 1:42:24Speaker 01

  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 gonna use Bitcoin because it's white man's stuff. Bitcoin is math, you idiot. Math is universal, so it belongs to all of us.

• 1:42:49Lex Fridman?

  There's no color.

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:42:51Lex Fridman?

  In in the in the space of economics.

• 1:42:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:53Lex Fridman?

  In the space of ideas.

• 1:42:55Speaker 01

  Ideas.

• 1:42:56Lex Fridman?

  And there's a chance to leapfrog too.

• 1:42:58Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:42:58Lex Fridman?

  Which is really, really powerful.

• 1:43:00Speaker 01

  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, 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 emergent 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.

• 1:43:37Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:43:46Lex Fridman?

  I think the cynicism, the idea that people are dumb is at the core of a lot of things that prevent the flourishing of society. You know, this kind of anecdotally, people are like, ah, 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 a freedom to find that thing, and people interact, they get excited about shit together, and then they, they build.

• 1:44:27Lex Fridman?

  It's, if you look at authoritarian, at, 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 the entire populace is much lesser than the, the wise sages sitting at the top. Then you add violence on top of that, and that leads to corruption, and to corrupting of just the human mind of the leaders. And the whole thing is, becomes a giant mess. The antidote to that is...

• 1:45:08Lex Fridman?

  Economic freedom.

• 1:45:09Speaker 01

  For people to have a freedom to enterprise. And look, Lex, when we allow for that to happen, have you looked around lately and look at the level of 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 the like it's it's all about guitar strings. And others, it's all about this best cupcakes. And others, it's all about this this new crypto thing over here. And others like hair, best, you know, weight. It's when you allow us, because seven billion geniuses, each one of us, I believe, came to this world with something,

• 1:45:53Speaker 01

  something that only he or her possesses. And that is the genius, and it is their contribution to the human problem.

• 1:46:02Lex Fridman?

  When you think about your identity today, so it all started in Africa, just like it did for the entirety of the human species. There's a bit of European flavor in there, a little little French, Silicon Valley. You're now in part a Texan. There's you're 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?

• 1:46:39Speaker 01

  That's a very interesting question, because it's been a long time I haven't asked myself. I have before.

• 1:46:58Speaker 01

  What I have found is.

• 1:47:03Speaker 01

  I think who I am today has been for sure shaped by, I call it Dakar, Paris, San Francisco. Dakar is Senegal, Paris, France, and San Francisco primarily. And now, yeah, I think I might want to ask, there's a little bit of Texan in there.

• 1:47:20Lex Fridman?

  How do you say Texas in French?

• 1:47:22Speaker 01

  Texas.

• 1:47:23Lex Fridman?

  Texas.

• 1:47:24Speaker 01

  Texas.

• 1:47:24Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:47:25Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:47:25Lex Fridman?

  Austin, Texas.

• 1:47:26Speaker 01

  Austin, Texas.

• 1:47:27Lex Fridman?

  Austin.

• 1:47:28Speaker 01

  Austin, Texas.

• 1:47:30Lex Fridman?

  Not quite as good.

• 1:47:31Speaker 01

  Austin, Texas.

• 1:47:33Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:47:34Speaker 01

  Us, Texas.

• 1:47:35Lex Fridman?

  Us.

• 1:47:35Speaker 01

  Us, Texas, yeah. So, um, you, I was formed by those three. 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. I don't think you could ever hear me tell an older person, especially not my parents or my grandma or anybody like that.

• 1:48:19Speaker 01

  For us to be able to tell an older person, that's not true, or you're lying, 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's a way to disagree. There's a way to push back. That doesn't have to rob this person, who happens to be older than you especially, from their dignity, from the dignity that older age normally provides.

• 1:48:47Lex Fridman?

  And there's wisdom to their words that you yourself may not.

• 1:48:50Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:48:51Lex Fridman?

  See, so the reverence is for the idea of wisdom, of tradition.

• 1:48:55Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:49:17Lex Fridman?

  The fineness?

• 1:49:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, the fineness, foods.

• 1:49:21Lex Fridman?

  I mean, you mean like the intricacies that, like the very.

• 1:49:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's some sophistication in there. I mean, French lingerie, for example. I mean, la dentelle, you know, the, the laces, all of that, super, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's exquisite. So the.

• 1:49:39Lex Fridman?

  Fashion, the food.

• 1:49:40Speaker 01

  Fashion, the food. I mean, there's something to be said about all of that and it's, 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.

• 1:49:51Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:51Speaker 01

  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, with Senegalese culture is eating is a moment of communion. It's a moment of friendship, family. It's, it's, it's a, 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's a prep time, all of that stuff. It doesn't matter how busy I am, but we're doing it.

• 1:50:29Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:50:59Speaker 01

  Depends what you're talking about.

• 1:51:00Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 1:51:16Lex Fridman?

  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 if you don't, there, there's a bit of a barrier.

• 1:51:31Speaker 01

  I must admit on that and that it is true. You would feel less that if, if you were with a group of Senegalese people per se.

• 1:51:39Lex Fridman?

  Sure.

• 1:51:39Speaker 01

  Or I would even say if a group with, of Spanish people. And I think this has, this is maybe the, the other side of it for the French people. They, they can be a little bit, you know, uppity up there. And I think maybe that's what you're sensing there. If you don't have the codes, which is what you call the, the, you don't sing the music, then it's hard for you to be part of it. But I was speaking here from the standpoint of you're in.

• 1:52:04Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. From the inside.

• 1:52:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:52:06Lex Fridman?

  Also, come on, come on, coming from Texas and also Ukraine. Ukraine, I should say, some of the best steak and meat I've ever had, cheap. Texas, some of the greatest, in the, the meal, the size of the meals in, in France. It's like, what are we doing here? I mean, I, I, it was, I get, I get it's art. I, I like to look at my art on the wall.

• 1:52:29Speaker 01

  No, okay.

• 1:52:30Lex Fridman?

  And then eat my damn steak.

• 1:52:32Speaker 01

  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 Michelin star restaurant? Maybe that's why. That's why. Because next time you go to France, I'll take you to the countryside or any home, um, French home. They will serve you multiple times. I mean, you're, by the time you're, you're done, even if it's, you know, the portions are smaller. They're 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 that stuff, but not be like, oh, like this. And then, you know, but no, you'll eat plenty, but it's because you went to the Michelin places where they're like.

• 1:53:11Lex Fridman?

  I'm sure the warmth and the people is there. It's, it's almost makes me sad that sometimes, I think to properly be in a place, you really should spend a long time there.

• 1:53:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:20Lex Fridman?

  And also be emotionally ready. Again, I was emotionally unavailable. I was just like.

• 1:53:25Speaker 01

  Well, I would imagine on your way to the Ukraine, I'm like, who can think about food?

• 1:53:28Lex Fridman?

  But in your identity, a bit of Texas, a bit of San Francisco.

• 1:53:33Speaker 01

  And yeah, San Francisco. Mm hmm. And I guess from America.

• 1:53:39Speaker 01

  The defining thing for me for America is it's 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 comprehension. What do you mean, you're in your twenties and, you know, you just raised,

• 1:54:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:54:28Lex Fridman?

  So even in France, that entrepreneurial spirit didn't burn quite as bright?

• 1:54:32Speaker 01

  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 US, absolutely not. It's just, 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, or maybe go to where your spouse's parents 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, I go somewhere else. You don't have any of, and what do you mean, you know, like, just stopping from nowhere? You're gonna do, you're gonna do what? Start a business and you have nothing to back you up or whatever? Oh, and even this idea of, you know, going and fundraising this venture cap, especially back in the days, venture cap, all of that, it's very American, we take

• 1:55:17Speaker 01

  it for granted, but it's very American. Who would have 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 raise, you know, at some point, it was thirty-two million dollars for my first business, never would 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 something that's just not so in the culture, right? Just like this whole concept of philanthropy, it's not that the 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.

• 1:55:59Speaker 01

  Our friends actually were maybe thinking that we're maybe some drug dealers or something. So we just stopped 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, um I'm part of this, um you know, you have what we call the Mourid, I'm a Mourid. So what it is, is uh one of the four brotherhoods in Senegal, Mouridism 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 the whole religious part.

• 1:56:38Speaker 01

  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?

• 1:56:55Lex Fridman?

  Beautiful.

• 1:56:55Speaker 01

  Right? So so so I think um it's funny because in in that community, we're very much entrepreneurial. Um 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, uh especially education system. But tend to breathe 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.

• 1:57:40Lex Fridman?

  Uh through all of that, that's what uh brings out the heart of a cheetah, which I think is a beautiful, beautiful thing that encaps- 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.

• 1:58:09Speaker 01

  Because at the end, we are. At the end, we are.

• 1:58:13Speaker 01

  And, you know, when you come from, 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 I'm all for harmony among people and among, among us peoples.

• 1:58:32Speaker 01

  If we can accept that we're all, I know this sounds so cliché, but 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 immigrated and things were gonna be fine. And I was gonna 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, said, "Magat, you're about to go to this place where most people will not look like you.

• 1:59:13Speaker 01

  And most people speak a language that's gonna be different from yours. And you're gonna realize that all the kids are going to school and you've 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, she 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 gonna have a different skin color from you, but it is still human skin. You're human, they're human." And she said, "This language you're gonna speak, it's a different language from yours, but it is still a language that humans speak.

• 1:59:56Speaker 01

  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, you'll be just fine." And I went and grandma was right, right, it was right! And that helped me. And I think when you internalize...

• 2:00:17Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:00:31Lex Fridman?

  Maybe don't go right now, but.

• 2:00:33Speaker 01

  No, not now, maybe not now, you're right, but.

• 2:00:35Lex Fridman?

  Or at least don't bring weed if you go, go on the plane.

• 2:00:38Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, yeah, right, that girl, I don't know what she was thinking, but.

• 2:00:42Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:43Speaker 01

  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 unfriendly places in the world to someone like me, because there are places like that.

• 2:00:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:56Speaker 01

  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 a business, a family business in Indiana, Columbus, Indiana. The Wentzes, 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,

• 2:01:41Speaker 01

  you know, that type of behavior, uh, because, you know, the elite, the coastal elites. But it is in Midwest, in the Midwest, that I found, that I, a black, young woman, 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, uh, got me a job, and it was not a pity job. They were like, we need, we are in serious need of getting our accounting in, under control, and our marketing and all of that, and I had to catch up years of accounting, like, to the scent,

• 2:02:22Speaker 01

  and 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. There is a future for you and we are too small for that future. And now we could be selfish and keep you here with us and we wouldn't 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, the man would become my husband. We went to the same business school in France, but then he was older than me.

• 2:03:05Speaker 01

  So he had come to San Francisco and started a business there. And it just looked like there was something there. And Carol was like, you gotta go to San Francisco and find out with Emmanuel what's going on. So I went and I left my heart in San Francisco. I came back and I'm like, okay, I'm leaving. Here's the keys to my apartment. But I'm out of here. So, no, but Carol. So this is it. This is what I'm saying, especially in these times when this country loves to dwell on, you know, you're bad because you have this skin color. Here are people with a completely different skin color than mine, completely different faith than mine, yet embraced me, protected me, paid for my visa, you know, for my lawyer, for my H1B, everything, and also played emotional support for me.

• 2:03:49Speaker 01

  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,

• 2:04:02Speaker 01

  you bet you have that there's always, always going to be somebody who shows up for you and somebody who is at the extremes, at the antipodes of where you are and who you are. And that tells me something. In the end, we are good people. Most people are good people.

• 2:04:18Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:04:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:38Lex Fridman?

  And walk past it.

• 2:04:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:04:40Lex Fridman?

  And 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 as human, they can be in the, just like you said, in the, in the worst places in the world for them.

• 2:04:56Speaker 01

  And someone, somewhere that human magic and touch is there.

• 2:04:59Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, you'll find, you'll find them.

• 2:05:02Speaker 01

  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, those three are the antidote to pretty much anything.

• 2:05:28Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:28Speaker 01

  Curiosity, empathy and 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, uh but can you do that? In the, 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 the brain scientists, but you also can feel it in your body that you're engaging very different parts of your soul.

• 2:06:06Speaker 01

  And so um I try myself, I'm not always good at it, but it's a practice that I try to honor, which is curiosity, empathy and love.

• 2:06:15Lex Fridman?

  As I told you offline, those, I agree with you hundred 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 um 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.

• 2:06:45Speaker 01

  But it is, but it is about trying not to stay there.

• 2:06:48Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:06:49Speaker 01

  And it's okay if it takes you years, but it is about trying, and I, and I mean the word, trying. It is about trying not to stay there.

• 2:06:59Lex Fridman?

  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, maybe even throughout the history of the world?

• 2:07:27Speaker 01

  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 contacts 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.

• 2:08:06Speaker 01

  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, I'm talking about the African people.

• 2:08:43Speaker 01

  I'm talking about the Black Africans who would go on to really 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 Southern Africa. In Manchester, UK, people like Blais Dian of my country, Nyerere, Tanzania.

• 2:09:28Speaker 01

  Kwame Kuma, Ghana,

• 2:09:31Speaker 01

  and others and others from different parts of a continent, got together with Marcus Garvey and W E B Du Bois. And I say Du Bois because that's how we say it in French. He has a French name. A French sounding name at least. And Americans would say, so for Americans listening, I know you say Dubois.

• 2:09:51Lex Fridman?

  Oh, boy.

• 2:09:52Speaker 01

  But Du Bois, no, because just in case they're like, who are you talking about? That's who I'm talking about. Um, so all of those people got together in the UK.

• 2:10:00Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 2:10:01Speaker 01

  And with W E B Du Bois and Marcus Garvey, big top African American intellectuals of their times.

• 2:10:11Speaker 01

  Um, W E B Du Bois had so many things happen 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 being 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, this and that. And I was like, god darn it, enemy people. We don't talk to them, we force, you know? And eventually, little by little, go, things going through. Um, yeah, you, you have these people, they're very much on the Marxist socialist train.

• 2:10:55Lex Fridman?

  So you think the lot, the sort of, it's a political movements that are just using?

• 2:11:01Speaker 01

  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

• 2:11:31Speaker 01

  showcased at window stores.

• 2:11:36Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, in Africa,

• 2:11:40Speaker 01

  under colonization,

• 2:11:43Speaker 01

  in your own country, in your own land.

• 2:11:51Speaker 01

  And you have this group that's saying,

• 2:11:55Speaker 01

  "Your fight is part of what we fight."

• 2:12:02Speaker 01

  Of course, you're gonna say I side with you, especially if this is all happening at a time

• 2:12:10Speaker 01

  where, you know, so 1945, these guys who would be the liberators of various African nations, they're meeting with Garvey, with W. E. B. Du Bois. And that's where, this meeting 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 really rallied around this concept of African emancipation and African liberation. "We're gonna liberate our countries." Then later, so that's how all of these movements started to happen. And from there, Gandhi was already making some progress with India, you know, getting them out of British rule and all of that.

• 2:12:55Speaker 01

  So all of this was happening and really like this whole thing was bubbling, bubbling, bubbling. You know, like it's like a new force going on. And then we arrive in the late 50s and, you know, Krumah with, you know, them with the British as well, they might manage to become, to become, their colonization is over. They're the first one to go in, 57. Then from there, it's what we call the independences. But when most Sub-Saharan African nations are getting their independences, different dates, mine, April 4th, 1960. So all over, so this is happening. But now, think about it, you're talking 57, you're talking 60. We're like at this time now with the middle of a Cold War. Because we have to put things in context if we wanna understand what's going on.

• 2:13:40Speaker 01

  Because people today ask me, "Why do you think?" Because even now, when they understand, "Oh, you're right. It makes sense. If you have no economic freedom, you're gonna 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 the times, pre-colonial Africans were free marketeers, free enterprise. It's pretty well recorded by someone like George Ayite. That's where I got the Chita thing from. And Ghanaian economist. And then slavery happened, colonialism happened, and then the independences. Late 50s, early 60s for most African, most subsaharan African countries. So there, what you have is, but then what happened there? So I told you in 45, 5th African Congress in the UK with the liberators of Africa.

• 2:14:24Speaker 01

  Under the, under the leadership, because he was the, the wise, you know, eldest man. 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, woo. So there they 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, black African American intellectuals of their time, who were very socialist Marxist by that time.

• 2:15:07Speaker 01

  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, we're becoming free. But then you look around, what do you see? That now, most of these liberators of their nations become the president of their nations. But remember what I told you? Most of them have drunken the socialist Marxist socialism Kool-Aid. So as these African nations become independent with their first independent governments and, you know, presidents, most of them, most of them are socialist, various forms of statist type of government.

• 2:15:54Speaker 01

  And this is because at that point, we had made a fatal mistake of going of saying, we are Marxist socialist because you guys fight for equal rights. So in this case, there should be no colonialism or anything like that. And 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 do 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.

• 2:16:38Speaker 01

  So and we also have, it's also not, so two things there. One is we are the time where, remember, the free market concept was almost dead. Almost dead. So almost every intellectual at that time was social Marxist. Or Marxist socialist, I put the name, that's what you were. So you in a world where it was a 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?

• 2:17:19Speaker 01

  And you're fighting with with the people who represent, you know, supposedly people who are saying that 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 to agree on with Marxist socialist of a times, I especially, you know, 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. There are violent revolution tendencies, no way. When it comes to 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.

• 2:17:59Speaker 01

  So then we became free, all of these nations, and most of them started with socialist or communist leaders. My country socialist. Leopold Seda Sengar, he was a socialist. And they stayed in power for 40 years, the first 40 years of our freedom years.

• 2:18:21Speaker 01

  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, uh, 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 Niyarewe, for people, all of those people of those times, the liberators of Africa,

• 2:19:06Speaker 01

  while I have so much love, compassion for them, I am also able to say, because I got the benefit of sixty-some years' time, and, you know, where you get to, to do a debrief, and see what worked, what didn't work, what happened. We have had the sixty years to look back and to reflect. So, yes, I can understand why they did what they did. I can even, I can understand why they sided with these people who, on the surface, or at least some part of a fight, was the same fight as them when it came to equal rights.

• 2:19:45Speaker 01

  I can excuse them.

• 2:19:48Speaker 01

  But I will not excuse the BLM founders. Because that mistake was tolerable sixty-some years ago. Today, no. The blacks of today cannot be serious about Black Lives Matter-ing, and saying in the same sentence, "And we're gonna be socialist Marx, Marxist socialist." It just doesn't work.

• 2:20:15Lex Fridman?

  So the BLM movement is too deeply integrated with, with the ideas of Marxism.

• 2:20:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. They are anti-free market, anti-capitalist, and we do know that 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.

• 2:20:48Speaker 01

  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 over there, uh uh uh, 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% of representatives of a black race. So you're gonna be serious about black black lives mattering without being serious for Africa, the 1 billion people in Africa that are black and for them to have access to the free markets.

• 2:21:31Speaker 01

  And yes, fossil fuels so that they can

• 2:21:37Speaker 01

  rocket, you know, up prosperity wise.

• 2:21:40Lex Fridman?

  And the resources of the young people, the young minds.

• 2:21:43Speaker 01

  So that all of these young people, young minds can finally manifest their greatness that I know they have. And that they're showing you us every day despite despite the obstacles. That's what we need. Senegal becomes rich and Senegal can become and will be richer than France. The Singapore did it, we can do it. Mali rich, Nigeria rich, functioning as well. Mali, Malawi rich, Tanzania rich, Uganda rich, Zimbabwe rich,

• 2:22:14Speaker 01

  Niger rich, everywhere rich, prosperous. As prosperous, if not more prosperous than than than Switzerland or Singapore or the US, I don't know, or the Liechtenstein or Luxembourg, places that have no, you know, resource, resource, natural resources. We become rich and you watch the world having a very different relationship with us. That's the only time we will command any type of respect. That's when people, even the

• 2:22:46Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 2:23:22Lex Fridman?

  It's interesting that pity does not ever turn into respect. It would be nice if it did.

• 2:23:30Speaker 01

  It would be nice, but it doesn't.

• 2:23:32Lex Fridman?

  Prosperity is the only thing.

• 2:23:33Speaker 01

  Prosperity is the only thing. And the way we do that, there is no, just like all of us humans have to inhale oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide. That's a human way of breathing. You bring me on, but you wanna 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? So this is here why I'm saying I have no patience for Black Lives Matter. They're making a mistake that was made sixty some plus years ago. Even more than that, maybe even a hundred years. You know, when we were siding with the Marxist socialists, because they're the ones who've been fighting for equal rights.

• 2:24:19Lex Fridman?

  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? 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, even with more philosophical ideas of critical race theory, for example, do you think this is still a battle that needs to be fought at the forefront of culture in the United States?

• 2:25:03Speaker 01

  Does racism exist? Yes, it does.

• 2:25:08Speaker 01

  But all forms of isms exist. Some people, it's about various forms of ableism.

• 2:25:16Speaker 01

  Others, it's about size. And racism, yes, is one of them. Does it exist? Yes, it does.

• 2:25:25Speaker 01

  But is it what's going to stop anyone from manifesting their greatest potential?

• 2:25:31Speaker 01

  I say no. I say no. Many people in this country have showed it.

• 2:25:38Speaker 01

  Whether they're African Americans or 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 yourself of agency.

• 2:26:15Speaker 01

  It's, of course, easier said than done. And some among us need a little bit more help to not succumb for it than others do.

• 2:26:27Speaker 01

  And I've seen it. It might be harder for you if you're somewhere in, you know, in a city, you know, in a city, black America. Maybe the environment might be a little bit tougher 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, I think it's important that we still do not rob you of your agency.

• 2:26:56Speaker 01

  And this is where I am mad as heck against those who supposedly 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, you know, Ibram X. Kendi 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 loud and clear that you are a true racist. I know, but you told me you are. And for you to think that your anti-racism makes you less racist.

• 2:27:40Speaker 01

  And that happens too. She's she 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 or the other, depending on what you, 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 going to stop me from doing anything I have to do? No. Might it make it harder, longer? Maybe. But it will not stop me.

• 2:28:15Speaker 01

  But for it not to stop me, I can't engage in victimhood mentality. I can't lose myself as self. I I got I got to use all the agency that I have to fight back and fight beyond. See, it's just you 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 this is why I have loved the job. So when I have somebody who is like, oh, anti-racism is the way. We're going to go and tell all the black, all the white kids that, you know, because they will happen to be white, that they're really the oppressors and blah, blah, blah. And the black kids, because they're black, you know.

• 2:28:54Speaker 01

  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 route 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 bias, because that's something I spent years of my life on. And my journey on the science of bias started with the days of Philando Castile, Eric Garner, that whole summer of two thousand and sixteen, when we had this horrendous, horrendous situation of black people killing, being killed by the police where they shut before asking.

• 2:29:37Speaker 01

  And 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 later four years ago, and the whole world is like, you know. So that sent me on a journey of understanding what discrimination is and bias is.

• 2:29:59Speaker 01

  And in a way, that's the reason why I started this company, that I even called it skinny skin. That's where it came from, again criticized by creating. I, I, I needed to understand what discrimination was, how does it work? Is it true what Kendi is saying? Is it true what D'Angelo is saying? Is it true that, that I, it could, it could be that you're bad, you're, you're racist 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, being a black person in this country and wondering.

• 2:30:43Speaker 01

  I mean, what is this? And, and what do we do with this?

• 2:30:49Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, is it true? How much discrimination am I operating under in the system?

• 2:30:54Speaker 01

  All of that.

• 2:30:55Lex Fridman?

  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?

• 2:31:06Speaker 01

  What am I up against, right? And so this is why, you know, spent all of this time on some of the work and then eventually I understood that discrimination, if you wanted to understand it beyond, it's, you know, beyond the, the big lines of 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 behavioral psychologists, 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

• 2:31:46Speaker 01

  of, I think it's Wisconsin, you know, and they're the only ones who made sense in this sea of nonsense back then. And this article was in Politico and it was saying something that I could relate with. And eventually, what I learned was, and this part comes from the evolutionary biologist people. They, in a way, tell you that right around age three, it 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.

• 2:32:32Speaker 01

  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, in order for you to go from this state of dependency to another, to the next state, to the next stage, and more and more and more. You're gonna have to develop this ability to make sense of the world. And what's making sense of the world at its most basic level means is,

• 2:33:01Speaker 01

  can you determine if a situation or a person is good or bad for you? Failure, and you need to be able to do that, do so ever so quickly. Because failure to do, to be able to do that might, means that you might not be alive the next second. See, it's so wired in. So this process starting to kick in. And at that point, your brain is gonna be your best ally for that. And what the brain is gonna do is it's gonna help you, and the way the brain works is through, it, it, it, it works with, for, it's all wired for efficiency. And the way it, it goes for efficiency is through automation.

• 2:33:43Speaker 01

  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 try, it, 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 of, 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 neurons have created pathway among themselves, because basically they're attached, and here is a pathway. Well, this pathway, in the world of, the, in the world of bias, science of bias.

• 2:34:26Speaker 01

  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 I'm white. You're a woman, I'm a man, this, this and that. That, people like that, again, 1% 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?

• 2:35:06Speaker 01

  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 Lex guy needs to go down. He's a man, he's a... Don't take me wrong, I'm sure there are 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...

• 2:35:36Speaker 01

  Right?

• 2:35:38Lex Fridman?

  It's a lot going on and you're using these kind of, just like you said brilliantly, the brain has a bunch of simplifications that's built up and he uses those simplifications to get through the day.

• 2:35:48Speaker 01

  To get through 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 gonna do it is for efficiency. Efficiency done through automation. So every time it thinks it's figured something out, it's never gonna 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 the, with the information that black man walking around with a hoodie equals danger. So later, what do you see?

• 2:36:20Speaker 01

  Whether it's like, 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 the software it runs on is, 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 damsels are to be saved by the prince and all of that stuff. And girls wear pink and all whatever. You know, you watch the movies and all the movies, whenever you watch movies about Africa, they're talking to you about the blood diamonds, or they're talking to you about slavery, or they're talking to you about this. And then no wonder you walk away thinking that all the ills of Africa are caused because of resource extraction, the diamonds, or they're always fighting each other.

• 2:37:04Speaker 01

  Look at Idi Amin on the movie, you know? Or, you know, slavery all the time. You walk away and this is it. And we're all programmed along the same lines. See, that's the beauty of it. All of us are. Because even some black people who are gonna claim that they didn't, this is not what 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 the brain, you've got biases, it comes with a territory. That makes sense. Now, it doesn't mean 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 or green issue.

• 2:37:49Speaker 01

  It's about, we are human issue. And these are part of the things we developed to, you know, to keep, to stay around. Just like we no longer have to rely on, you know, this fear of flight, you know, like ability of a brain, because bears over there start running and running fast. Right? Today, where are the bears? Show me where they are. But we have kept this tendency to go for fear of flight. I don't know how they said. And so we have this. You know, criticism 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?

• 2:38:34Speaker 01

  What do we do? The bear is not even here. So same thing here with that. And so then you realize this whole thing. That is now, 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 where their work is needed? Which is we look inside. Can we go for this work of de-programmation? This concept of a mindful practice of undoing the habit of bias.

• 2:39:04Lex Fridman?

  And that doesn't necessarily have to do with the simple categorization of black and white. It's all kinds of biases.

• 2:39:12Speaker 01

  It's about everything. It's about everything. And you know, when I started on that journey and 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 is against larger people. And I'm like, what do you mean? Well, I think I, it seems to me like I felt that larger people maybe are dumb. No, we heard things and you know, and you don't judge.

• 2:39:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:43Speaker 01

  You don't judge. And so, and you see, it's at every level. You know, like, I don't know, like there's even this one friend. She was like, no, when I looked into the whole dating thing, I absolutely didn't want to have, you know, date the 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, it's a five step thing. Bias awareness. This, 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 the fuck of a movie.

• 2:40:27Speaker 01

  Or, you know, 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's gonna be more liberal than that. And this gentleman is asking these two candidates, one of them is a woman, political candidates, if everyone is a man. I'm hearing him asking the lady a question that I know he's not gonna ask the man, and he didn't ask her. He said, "How do you, um, how do you balance, uh, you know, your race with a family?"

• 2:40:55Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:55Speaker 01

  Does a man not have a family? Right there, you see, it's very subtle.

• 2:41:00Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:01Speaker 01

  But you see, but because now my mind is kind of trained to see things, I'm like, "Hmm, 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 a book, everywhere.

• 2:41:18Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:41:33Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:41:33Lex Fridman?

  You should almost, I mean, that's where humor is, make fun of it, bring it to the surface, like, acknowledge the fact that those things are a 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.

• 2:41:55Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:41:55Lex Fridman?

  And that's part of the culture. We have to acknowledge.

• 2:41:57Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:41:58Lex Fridman?

  That, that, this is how, this is affecting how I think. You might.

• 2:42:01Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:42:02Lex Fridman?

  We might like how that works, or we might not, but we have to acknowledge it and not get, you know, make it part of humor, make fun of yourself, you know, all that kind of stuff.

• 2:42:10Speaker 01

  That, that's the thing. And so, Lex, that's why, the first step is bias, um, bias awareness. So you get, you train yourself, "Oh yeah, okay, that was one." Or it's, 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."

• 2:42:36Lex Fridman?

  Exactly.

• 2:42:36Speaker 01

  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 in the other person's shoes, all of a sudden, something else starts to click. And then from there, you go on to making connection. Then 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, you just lower, you know, like,

• 2:43:18Speaker 01

  how come you're accepting this 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, uh, at night. And she started understanding very different things. And eventually happens the last step that happened naturally. Making a true, real, genuine connection. And this is where friendships happen. This is where, that's it, your bias can go home now because it has been challenged with reality and understanding.

• 2:44:02Speaker 01

  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 need 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.

• 2:44:32Speaker 01

  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? Hmm. But this is where, for anybody who is serious about making sure, uh, about fighting racism.

• 2:44:49Speaker 01

  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, although I disagree with him on so many things, but people like Ms. Alice Johnson. She was pardoned 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 those folks then went on to combine forces.

• 2:45:30Speaker 01

  Furthermore, no regard given to their political belongings. They said, if the issue is criminal justice reform, then anybody who stands for it has to come together. And so what they did in this situation with, what they're doing, criminal justice reform in my mind, is a valid action to fight 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, he passed away unfortunately.

• 2:46:10Speaker 01

  But today we have Anton Lucky, who was in jail for having killed his cousin. You know, he had started, I think he started the gang in South Dallas. So we're talking really tough guy who was really in the wrong side of the equation. And then in jail, literally, he found Plato, the cave and all of that. So today, these people, 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 Candy or DiAngelo. I'll say it again until the cows come home. But it is about, we go where help is needed. We go in urban, you know, inner city, inner city, black inner city neighborhoods.

• 2:46:55Speaker 01

  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 videos like that on my YouTube with Bishop Omar. What these people are doing is what we need to do. Bishop will explain, he says, sometimes people are, their feet sent 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 their head out yet. But how much, how much progress have they made from the bottom to where they are now? And keep going.

• 2:47:37Speaker 01

  So what I see these people doing, you see, I have so much, I, I, I love and respect Glenn Lowry and company, you know, and Ian Rove and all of those guys. I, I love them. I, I love a lot of the things that they say.

• 2:47:51Speaker 01

  You know, this whole concept of personal responsibility, all of that. But I'm just like, at some point, it also needs to be matched up with real actions. And that's what the people like Anton Lucky, Urban Specialist, 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. 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.

• 2:48:36Lex Fridman?

  Action.

• 2:48:37Speaker 01

  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 they're talking about. They're not idiots.

• 2:48:50Lex Fridman?

  Especially at the local level.

• 2:48:52Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:48:53Lex Fridman?

  Helping them at the local level.

• 2:48:54Speaker 01

  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 their 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 an extant, 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.

• 2:49:32Speaker 01

  Let me grow my wings.

• 2:49:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:35Speaker 01

  If you want, help put some fuel behind them and let me take my flight. That's all I'm asking for. That's 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.

• 2:50:19Speaker 01

  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 people, 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 would care about. Stop. It 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.

• 2:50:57Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, give them the freedom to spread their wings.

• 2:51:00Speaker 01

  Yes, give a person um, yeah, to learn to teach a person how to fish and don't give them a fish. When you're putting your stupid signs on the 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 or as a company, you know, financing one more D E I, you know. Um if it done along those lines, I think we've got a problem.

• 2:51:22Lex Fridman?

  Yeah. So you do think that the the efforts of diversity, equity and inclusion are often not effective?

• 2:51:31Speaker 01

  Not only are they not effective, but they also backfire and there are reports on all of us.

• 2:51:38Speaker 01

  And at the end of the day, it makes sense. It makes sense. So for me, I am very, very glad that people 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 social entrepreneurship on you. Tom Shoes, buy one pair of shoes and we give one pair of shoes to some people in poor countries. Then guess what happened to us?

• 2:52:22Speaker 01

  You know, in the town where we operate in Senegal, where I have my little manufacturing, we have 2,000 little mom and pop businesses. And guess what they happen to be in, Lex?

• 2:52:34Speaker 01

  Shoemakers. Right? So, you have these shoemakers, each one of them hires at least five, 15 people. Do the math. Family businesses.

• 2:52:46Speaker 01

  Guess what happens to them the day the Tom Shoes truck shows up with a bunch of free shoes?

• 2:52:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. 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 and buy them shoes. You see? So first they said, we just have to give. So that was primarily, you know, the charity business. And you still have foreign aid business going on. So we just need to give.

• 2:53:39Speaker 01

  And then the social entrepreneurs came in place. But I'm like, the only person for this business is good is for Blake McCarty, 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, and so today, my whole thing is...

• 2:53:56Speaker 01

  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 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, that's easy, but to have a mind for them, that's a challenge.

• 2:54:32Lex Fridman?

  Let me ask you a difficult question.

• 2:54:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:54:34Lex Fridman?

  As if we were not already asking difficult questions. The president of Senegal, Manki So, is also now the chair of the African Union. He met with President Vladimir Putin on June 3rd. I think primarily was to discuss food security.

• 2:54:54Speaker 01

  Security.

• 2:54:55Lex Fridman?

  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 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?

• 2:55:22Speaker 01

  Well, you've seen that many countries, when it was time to vote, some of them 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 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, and you have Australia and all that.

• 2:56:06Speaker 01

  And then them, they're saying, you know, I think this is more or less an attempt to.

• 2:56:16Speaker 01

  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 rope us in with, when it makes sense for you, you try to rope us in and then we're left hanging on our own. So there's, um, 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

• 2:57:00Speaker 01

  and African nations in general are saying, we don't, it's, this is a case where almost like, you guys are fighting. You guys are fighting. Maybe for once, we have to watch it for ourselves.

• 2:57:14Lex Fridman?

  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.

• 2:57:25Lex Fridman?

  Is it, is a political embodiment of a resistance to the influence of the West?

• 2:57:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:57:30Lex Fridman?

  It's not about the war between whatever you guys are fighting.

• 2:57:33Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:57:33Lex Fridman?

  It's saying, uh, we're not going to, uh, 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.

• 2:57:54Speaker 01

  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, uh, exchanging and sharing between themselves, the goodies of, uh, you know, their Halloween collection. We're 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's still, it's hard because I watch everything that's going on.

• 2:58:33Speaker 01

  And I it's it's gonna be complicated, the ramifications of all of this. 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,

• 2:58:51Speaker 01

  yes, and.

• 2:58:54Speaker 01

  Yes, to the reasons you're advancing right now. You know of, we don't wanna be always siding because we're tired. We're tired of always been dragged around and taken for granted and you vote away, you know. Come on, guys, when when you need us, we're we're great and everything is good. And then when it's time to go and share the goodies, we don't exist anymore. And you actually go for 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 us going and more or less begging for, you know.

• 2:59:35Speaker 01

  What do you call it? Cereals, you know. Oh, please let the cereals 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.

• 3:00:03Lex Fridman?

  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 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

• 3:00:36Lex Fridman?

  nations and groups of nations do.

• 3:00:38Speaker 01

  Do.

• 3:00:39Lex Fridman?

  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 of Ukraine hurt, people of Africa can hurt.

• 3:00:51Speaker 01

  People of Russia.

• 3:00:52Lex Fridman?

  People of Russia can hurt, people of China, people of the United States, but. It is the way of the world and to to earn you have to you have to earn respect. And sometimes earning respect leads to the suffering of many.

• 3:01:08Speaker 01

  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 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.

• 3:01:28Lex Fridman?

  Yes.

• 3:01:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:01:45Lex Fridman?

  Don't beg, create instead.

• 3:01:47Speaker 01

  Create instead, exactly. This should have been, you know, just like how the rest of the world, when COVID 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 a time for African leaders to be like, we we need to be serious now 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?

• 3:02:27Speaker 01

  Now, I understand that it can take time, but if I knew that that was happening at the same time that we're 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 going to be the same business as usual? And in this case, I'm just like, are we going to go, are we going to keep going from one massa to another massa? I mean, really?

• 3:02:48Lex Fridman?

  The interesting aspect of all of this is if we look at all of human history, it's possible that the 21st century is defined by Africa.

• 3:02:55Speaker 01

  It will be.

• 3:02:57Lex Fridman?

  And the young people, 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, so some people concerned about overpopulation. Some people concerned about us dying out as a human species. Both of those people live in Austin. Talk to me often.

• 3:03:28Speaker 01

  I know, I know. I know. I know who they are.

• 3:03:34Lex Fridman?

  What's your, in Africa is at the center of this. Because there is a vibrant, huge number, probably over a billion.

• 3:03:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're 1.3 billion people and of those, 1 billion blacks.

• 3:03:48Lex Fridman?

  I mean, that, where do you land on that?

• 3:03:52Speaker 01

  There is a reason, Lex, why I say I'm haunted, that I'm obsessed, that I'm monomaniacal 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 grow, and the rate 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,

• 3:04:35Speaker 01

  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 charity businesses, I mean, charity organizations sending stuff away, of course, you're almost thinking parasites. I'm sorry to say it 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.

• 3:05:19Speaker 01

  No matter, no matter, no matter. But some people will go there. Now, people are here.

• 3:05:29Speaker 01

  What are we gonna do? Dispose of them?

• 3:05:32Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:06:04Speaker 01

  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, you're selfish, maybe engage your selfishness. Because 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.

• 3:06:45Speaker 01

  This person and that person and that person holds 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.

• 3:07:04Speaker 01

  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 gonna be an African future where you have a youth being a ticking bomb?

• 3:07:43Speaker 01

  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 make the legal framework to provide for better economic freedom. So you can unleash the genuineness, the awesomeness, the ingenuity, the industrious 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.

• 3:08:24Speaker 01

  And this is why I feel so, so, so restless about this at this point of my life. We just lost George Hayute. George Hayute is one of the few Africans that I knew who put this out. That's who I learned from. 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 seen. That's why being here talking with you today, it's, you have no idea. It's, if people ask, if someone like you could say, what can I do?

• 3:09:04Speaker 01

  You did more than you could 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.

• 3:09:18Lex Fridman?

  The ripple effects of all of that on the unlocking the human potential.

• 3:09:22Speaker 01

  It's unbelievable.

• 3:09:23Lex Fridman?

  Of all those people in Africa, building cool stuff, amazing things.

• 3:09:28Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, yes. So some are going to be built stuff, others are going to work on the reforms. So we're working on reforms, by the way. I'm the head of the Africa Center for Prosperity of the Atlas Network, the largest organization in the world, 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 um I basically um you know all the I obviously all the think tanks we have in uh in in Africa right now um free market think tanks and we wanna 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.

• 3:10:15Speaker 01

  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 up because you know how they fix a bad law most of the time, wherever in the US 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 legislation that's 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.

• 3:10:57Speaker 01

  So while we keep we help them 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 us, Singapore has done it. You know, uh Hong Kong has done it. Latest, the most recent China with the S S Zs, the smell, the um special economic zones. Some of the most radical free market zones in the world. They've done it. And oftentimes, 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.

• 3:11:42Speaker 01

  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, the progress we're making to set the right environment for business to prop up and how many more people are coming to life.

• 3:12:15Speaker 01

  Literally every day on the continent. There's a discrepancy here. And so the ticking bomb is going faster than the process, 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, 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 the 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

• 3:13:00Speaker 01

  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 these, so basically you're, you're to think about this rather unoccupied plot of land within a country. Think Dubai on 110 acres of land. Dubai is thinking that in their case, they're like, maybe they decided maybe Sharia law is not the best for business in their case. And they said, they looked around and were like, wow, but common law, especially British common law, seems like a very good one.

• 3:13:42Speaker 01

  So at that point, they decided for business only, not family or anything like that, which is going to stand to, you know, Sharia or whatever. And so they said, we are going to bring in, um, you know, uh, so they hired 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 a, within a generation. Dubai became one of the top international financial centers of the world. It is what it is today. So.

• 3:14:14Lex Fridman?

  And in the case of the African nations, that that zone can then spread.

• 3:14:18Speaker 01

  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 is 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 will need to fit more of this or that. And just 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.

• 3:14:58Speaker 01

  And the hope there, because some people are like, you know, I know some people are like, you guys are crazy. But I'm like, no, it it's more or less the story of, you know, um the Asian tigers. And most recently, most of China's progress, economically speaking, because some people might say, well, you don't want China where developing, you see. Even then, I say, and it's okay. 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. Eight hundred million people getting out of poverty.

• 3:15:36Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, exactly. So it's not, yeah, for the the quality of life and the majority of the Chinese population.

• 3:15:43Speaker 01

  Yes, that's 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.

• 3:15:52Lex Fridman?

  And leapfrog.

• 3:15:53Speaker 01

  And 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 want to 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.

• 3:16:25Speaker 01

  Listen, all I need is one success story.

• 3:16:30Speaker 01

  And then the sea change.

• 3:16:33Speaker 01

  People don't even wait for us.

• 3:16:34Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:16:34Speaker 01

  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 groups in Zambia, there's a zone there. Folks are doing something like this in Nigeria. We're we're part of a project there in Nigeria. 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.

• 3:17:03Lex Fridman?

  I hope so. It's a really powerful vision. And you know, it's not being dramatic to say that the future of humanity depends on this that your success, that success in Africa. It's such an important continent.

• 3:17:17Speaker 01

  It is.

• 3:17:18Lex Fridman?

  This century.

• 3:17:18Speaker 01

  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

• 3:17:30Speaker 01

  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?

• 3:17:40Speaker 01

  You know?

• 3:17:40Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, it's it's it's hard to fathom, actually.

• 3:17:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:17:44Lex Fridman?

  Forget.

• 3:17:45Speaker 01

  Exactly. And it has such ingenious people. You know, sometimes I look at my people.

• 3:17:51Speaker 01

  I have to tell you.

• 3:17:54Speaker 01

  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.

• 3:18:15Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:18:16Speaker 01

  So everything else we can handle and we will handle. You have to mark my word for this. This is gonna happen. And 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, the Rwandans are very different from the West Africans that we are. Rwandans, for example, never dance with their hips, they dance more like, you know, with this part of their body.

• 3:18:43Lex Fridman?

  West Africans hips?

• 3:18:45Speaker 01

  Us, it's hips all over place, all the time, and it's, you know, more jumping, stuff like that. In Rwanda, you feel it's more like, you know, I mean, they remind me more of ballet, you know, the ballet thing. Rwandans have a sense where, you know, they don't eat in, you know, so much in public, it's not very well, it's something you do. Us, we are the West Africans, we like to be loud, we're almost like the Italians of the continent.

• 3:19:09Speaker 01

  And then the Rwandans are more like, you know, the Swiss of, actually, the country even looks like Switzerland. I mean, we're so different from one group to another. Then you go to the Congo and you see these guys, they're so crazy, the way they dress, I mean, les saperres. So, we are a very different bunch. But, you know, what I love about us, what I love about my people?

• 3:19:30Speaker 01

  We are the, we are, we are the manifestation of what resilience means. And so, everything we need is there. Everything we need is there. I will say that there is 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.

• 3:19:58Speaker 01

  We need to be the tallest trees in the forest that we were designed to be. And so...

• 3:20:03Lex Fridman?

  And that can be fixed.

• 3:20:04Speaker 01

  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, 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.

• 3:20:24Speaker 01

  And when it comes to that recipe, we have the hardest part of it. One missing ingredient, which is the free markets.

• 3:20:33Speaker 01

  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, the right 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 wanna do.

• 3:21:11Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, the scale of impact is just boundless. It's kinda cool. I mean, you know, sometimes we think about individual problems and how do we solve them? We look up at 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 to millions, to hundreds of millions of people to do whatever the hell they're gonna do.

• 3:21:39Speaker 01

  Can you imagine? Can you just imagine?

• 3:21:41Lex Fridman?

  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. What gave you strength during that time? 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?

• 3:22:13Speaker 01

  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 as I thought about it was the job to be done.

• 3:22:42Speaker 01

  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 to 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.

• 3:23:25Speaker 01

  I don't know if it's possible, I don't know how that was possible, but it was.

• 3:23:30Speaker 01

  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 two in the morning, around five or six, going to 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.

• 3:24:10Lex Fridman?

  The thing that keeps you afloat, you mean?

• 3:24:11Speaker 01

  Yes, yes, the floater.

• 3:24:12Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, whatever.

• 3:24:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:24:14Lex Fridman?

  Between the two of us, we're still terrible.

• 3:24:17Speaker 01

  We're bad.

• 3:24:20Lex Fridman?

  I know exactly what you mean.

• 3:24:21Speaker 01

  Exactly right, so you understand me. So they send you that thing and you're just, I was just hanging on to it. My life depended on this thing. So these women, they carried me. They carried me. And with time.

• 3:24:37Speaker 01

  Things are moving forward. And at some point, I went into a really, really deep depression. And 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 we talked about today, about what makes a country rich. And for me to understand that my network, I was very much into a left oriented network. And to just start to see all of this, I tried to address it to realize that many of these people

• 3:25:22Speaker 01

  would prefer go running for the hills than accept for a moment that maybe capitalism might be part of a solution, when many of them were involved in capitalism. So that was a hard time. At some point, I was, 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 was having a problem with passed away last year. And I'm one to always say, leave a dead alone. So because of that, I won't speak about it.

• 3:26:04Speaker 01

  But there too, having a major fallout with somebody who was like a fab 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 then you're confused. And then you become confused. And then at some point, you lose 90% of your friends because of, ideologically speaking, it doesn't work anymore. Then you just wonder, have I been asleep this whole time? And then you start to wonder, remember when you asked me, who am I? At some point, Lex, I literally was like a candle in the wind.

• 3:26:49Speaker 01

  I felt like I was a candle in the wind.

• 3:26:52Speaker 01

  And it was very hard to come back from that. And people have a hard to, the few people I talked 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

• 3:27:23Speaker 01

  really helping me figure out the world. So with Michael, because that's him, who we're talking about, Michael Strong.

• 3:27:30Speaker 01

  This guy must be special. He's so special. He's so, so special. So you have no idea how special he is. But you know, Michael, the reason why I have such love, respect and admiration for my husband, I'll never say it enough, is because 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 power

• 3:28:09Speaker 01

  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 a respected Africa, prosperous Africa would happen. Back then, that's what I wanted. And around me, this was also part of the whole crisis of ideologies I had back then. Everybody was like, well, we, we should be just doing grants.

• 3:28:52Speaker 01

  And I knew that I, my people didn't need grants. They didn't need like a handout.

• 3:28:59Speaker 01

  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 could help me brainstorm marketing wise. I wanted somebody, or I needed to raise money to pay my, 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, 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 to be able to build my business with all the things that business building needs.

• 3:29:42Speaker 01

  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 San Francisco, 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 nonprofit 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, Michael, just, hi. 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 who's supposed, this whole concept of flow. Yeah. It's amazing, it's human flourishing at its highest.

• 3:30:28Speaker 01

  So, you know, so I met with this man, you, next, you're so, 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 that 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 this time to start my business, over there it's twenty minutes, here it's free, over there it's 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? What, what did you call that, the doing business in the, what is that? You know, all of this stuff.

• 3:31:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I'm starting to discover this whole other body of work. What that 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 over there that. And then I started to butt head 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 under started understanding these ideas from the most visceral part of my my body, you know, of my my being. And and it makes sense.

• 3:31:56Speaker 01

  So Michael, Michael, helped me find the solution, the 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 with learn with understanding all of that, the greatest, biggest sense of liberation came upon me. Like, I I I have no other word to describe that. True liberation, the liberation that comes from a peer, to finally

• 3:32:35Speaker 01

  understand and be vindicated in your own, you know, understand in your own 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 been 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 merrism? I was angry for a longer time.

• 3:33:18Speaker 01

  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 macro, at the micro and at the also the at the at the macro level. Just really, you have to try to walk in their shoes. And from there, finally separate the baby with a bathwater, 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 the organizers think,

• 3:34:01Speaker 01

  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 that same mistake.

• 3:34:11Speaker 01

  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, 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,

• 3:34:55Speaker 01

  where they become, you know, co-creators, global co-creators of innovation.

• 3:35:04Lex Fridman?

  And those ideas give you hope for the place you love, for Senegal, for Africa.

• 3:35:09Speaker 01

  They do, they do. I live, the world I live in,

• 3:35:14Speaker 01

  the new centers of culture and fashion are in Dakar. The new, the new, the new centers of tech and, and, you know, crypto even is somewhere maybe Nigeria.

• 3:35:28Lex Fridman?

  So you see that future, you see that future clearly.

• 3:35:31Speaker 01

  I do, I do, I do.

• 3:35:34Lex Fridman?

  It's a beautiful thing. And it's also beautiful to see that the space of these really powerful ideas is where you also fall in love.

• 3:35:42Speaker 01

  Right?

• 3:35:42Lex Fridman?

  So at the intersection.

• 3:35:44Speaker 01

  At the intersection. Michael would spend, Michael 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.

• 3:35:56Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:35:57Speaker 01

  And then from there, our love was born. Because I tell people, for us, love is not about looking each other in the eyes, like, you know, they 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.

• 3:36:14Speaker 01

  What we know to be true and possible. We, all of us are miracles walking around. Every time I get on a plane, it's the miracle of engineering. 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 these robots. This, this, this inside here.

• 3:36:37Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, humans are amazing.

• 3:36:39Speaker 01

  I know. So that's why, and when it works in great tandem with this guy.

• 3:36:43Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:36:44Speaker 01

  These two working together.

• 3:36:45Lex Fridman?

  Yeah.

• 3:36:46Speaker 01

  Ooh.

• 3:36:47Lex Fridman?

  There's nothing we can't accomplish.

• 3:36:48Speaker 01

  Nothing, nothing.

• 3:36:50Lex Fridman?

  McGot, you're one of the most incredible people I've ever talked to.

• 3:36:53Speaker 01

  Oh, you say that. You've met everybody.

• 3:36:56Lex Fridman?

  Thank you so much. This was 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 today.

• 3:37:09Speaker 01

  Thank you. Thank you to you. And sometimes I hope this fire doesn't consume me. That's how much it is. But I am grateful to you for this. And yeah, thank you for, I know you don't do a lot of this, you know, I am. It's this type of interviews, maybe I don't know, but I'm so, so happy to be here.

• 3:37:27Lex Fridman?

  You mean fun, inspiring, powerful interviews? Yes, I need to do more. You're amazing.

• 3:37:32Speaker 01

  I don't know, because at first I was like Lex Fridman, really?

• 3:37:35Lex Fridman?

  Yeah, really? How's this gonna go?

• 3:37:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm gonna talk to Lex and go all crazy, crazy stuff.

• 3:37:39Lex Fridman?

  I think you need to work on your unconscious bias.

• 3:37:43Speaker 01

  Right?

• 3:37:45Lex Fridman?

  All right, thank you, McGot. You're the best.

• 3:37:47Speaker 01

  Thank you, thank you, thank you so much.

• 3:37:50Lex Fridman?

  Thanks for listening to this conversation with McGot 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.