This is the reason interview with Nick Gillespie and today I'm talking with MacGott Wade who was born in Senegal and is director of the Center for African Prosperity at the Atlas Network. She's the founder and CEO of many companies including Skin is Skin which sells a series of skin products and she's the author of the new book The Heart of the Cheetah how we have been lied to about African poverty and what that means for human flourishing. MacGott thanks for talking to me. Nick thanks for having me it's a pleasure. So what's the elevator pitch for the book? The elevator pitch for the book is what you said you know how we've been lied to about African poverty and what it means for human flourishing. So basically so many people around the world have been appalled by why Africa to this day including many Africans why Africa to this day is still the poorest region in the world despite you know all of its riches starting with very young population I'm sure we'll talk about that but when it comes to that I realize that almost no one you know puts on the table the right diagnosis as to why that is the case. The book is about what is the right diagnosis as well as to why this continent is still the poorest in the world and then so 80 percent of a book spends time on that because we need to make sure that we got the diagnosis right so we can have a good solution and then 20 percent of a book goes on to solutions and then from there from having read the book then we invite people into our cheetah generation movement where we're actually taking all the concrete steps that the solutions parts talks about. Let's talk about that kind of the controlling metaphor of the book really is the cheetah and the cheetah generation you know a cheetah is obviously an African animal it's it's pretty cool where does that term come from and what does it signify for you. Yes so the reason why I am cheetah everything is because of my beloved professor George Aite a Canadian economist who we lost earlier this year. And he taught for many years at American University in DC I know. He taught for many years exactly and was part at some point I think of the Brooklyn Institute if I'm not mistaken. So anyway so professor Aite for me I think for people to understand why why him why cheetah and why all of this you understand that back in 2007 I was back then a young you know Ted fellow we were actually also the African fellows where the first Ted fellows we were the cohort the first cohort and so as that basically they went around and they you know the people of Ted and their ally and the people who work with them picked a hundred young Africans from back home in the diaspora everywhere but they felt really this cohort of young Africans are really onto something and they're doing amazing work most of us were entrepreneurs but you also had artists of various types of creatives it was wonderful. So they take us to Ted was my first time at Ted you know we were in Arusha in Tanzania and you know there were people like Larry Page they're very brain Bill Gates I mean everyone was there you mentioned of course Bono was there right Bono was there everyone was there everybody really in the world back then that was somebody was there because Africa was hot they were like let's see what we you know let's see how we move this thing forward and so you know basically me I was there and you know I was an entrepreneur already working in Silicon Valley and all of that I was I was still very much if you could qualify me that way I was very much still a lefty you know like because I was also a do-gooder so not that the two can be conflated but anyway that was more me and I was barely at this idea that aid is fine but trade is better I was still fine even with aid for an aid so that's where I was you know but definitely starting to be served by reality in terms of you know like what dots connect and don't connect and so here I am that's a mindset I walked in with and then this was the first time but in my life but I heard people being so articulate about the disasters of foreign aid the reason why you know just being so vocal about it and Africans not not non-africans they were like people like Andrew Wanda people like George Ayete but him his talk really gripped me because when he was talking about so what George's title the title of his talk was hippos versus cheetahs and very much he was making this differentiation in mindsets was not so much about age are you African non-african it's about the mindset about about Africa and it's a path forward and he had he had made this differentiation between the hippo mentality these are the people who still believe you know that colonialism sets us back people who believe that slavery even though we're out of it sets us back and when you put them all together it's more or less the victimhood mentality and also our leaders you know our current leaders who are actually the first beneficiaries of that status quo in terms of the mindset right because if you know as long as we stay in victimhood we don't try to fight more we stay poor and the foreign aid keeps on pouring in to fix supposedly that poverty but poverty and so that whole side of the argument he'd identified it as the hippo generation again mindset instead of generation think mindset and then they are facing off with home the cheetah generation and definitely you know George said you know he's like you're definitely one of my everybody on that stage for all of us they are all these African cohort he said you guys are my cheetahs you know and so we were so proud I was just like yeah it's very flattering right you know I mean if you're a cheetah either a cheetah or a hippo it's like I'm going with cheetah yeah I love that now it was so cool you had no idea and that you know Nick what George did for me and all 99 other you know fellows it's it's I think George just ah I felt for me at least he just carried on the work that my grandma did with me in my early days but anyway I go back so George was and he said facing off with the cheetah generation he said the cheetah generation is a generation of Africans with a mindset that really are waiting for no one they're not going to wait for the government they're not going to wait for the foreign aid they're not going to wait for they're going to wait for no one they they believe in themselves they know they have the tools and they're going to just they're just going to get it done and he said the future of our continent lies on the back of the cheetahs and he his whole thing was runs run cheetahs run have the best run of your life and for me I interpret that as as well just like the cheetah runs in leaps and bounds uh but time to catching up for Africa is over the type of leapfrogging is upon us and so even there the the the the the metaphor goes very well so the cheetahs because speed agile being agile but also before a cheetah goes for the when cheetahs are hunting 80 percent of their time is spent on strategizing you'll see them kind of sitting laying around you know looking like they're just you know taking some a break or whatever and then if you don't pay attention you don't know what's going on you think it's all cool but if you start to pay attention you'll see that there is maybe an antelope or gazelle not too far away but when the cheetahs start to run the way you see them spreading first of all and then going one corner you this one corner that one corner and then one among them is in charge of the race and as you know they go from zero to sixty or sixty five in three I mean something wild and so they just go for it and it's just it's just beautiful so it's about strategizing it's about preparing before you go for the fight and when you go you have to be precise you have to you have to go for speed and just get it done so that's what the cheetah generation is and it's a mindset it's not about your age it's not about are you african or non-african it's not about are you an african living on the continent or in the diaspora it's very much do you believe that we have a bright future and do you believe that that bright future will be achieved by the free markets and you know you talk about that Ted conference in particular because Aita was there as well as Andrew Mwenda who you mentioned but Bono I mean what was fascinating about that that was the beginning of a shift in his mindset he had been you know people I think he himself would agree that he has something of a Christ complex of a savior complex and he had been you know to his credit he had been trying to talk up how do we help the developing world how do we help Africa and he came out of that you know essentially within a couple years saying that trade is better than aid so the Aita the Mwenda message the one that you are selling now has had real impact on you know at least some people involved in this space yeah no for sure so yes because what happened there Bono when he was hearing people like Mwenda when he was hearing people like you know Aita and many others kind of pushing back on the aid rhetoric I think for him it was a very first time but people like him we're so we're actually hearing the other side of a story from Africans yeah because up till then they spent most of their time with you know benefactors of the status quo in terms of the consensus around why Africa was poor right and then it all landed them on foreign aid and so our leaders back home were benefiting from that you know basically lining the pocket and the donor aid community was benefiting from that especially government to government aid because it's a it's a way of being able to practice you know neocolonialism in a in a soft way but still so what's not to love for the different governments that benefit from that you know scenario but this one and I think Bono has always been involved with people who actually benefit from that whether it's the IMF the World Bank I mean that whole structure of what some of us would call poverty Inc you know that rhetoric really benefits them so I think Bono has been specifically more speaking to them and maybe some of your direct recipients who which person who is getting access to clean water is going to tell you oh the aid didn't help me or whatever but I but I think what he has never been able to hear until then was people like George Ayette you know very very much how they act together very much you know what they're talking about and yet had a very different viewpoint and I think it was a shock I think the fact that he went to heckle Mwenda is it was because that's what he did he heckled a speaker an African on stage in his continent on his continent saying aid is no good for us and Bono I think which I think it was just one of his electroshocks that one gets and his first knee jerk reaction it was just a knee jerk reaction you know the nerves were just reacting and I think that's what happened but eventually as he went on and that's what I say to people I feel like Bono I'm not surprised Bono came to our side on these issues because I think I know Bono always cared he may not have gone about it the right way but he always cared and the fact that he truly cared and this by the way Nick is a crux of a book as well if you truly care you cannot be blind to the evidence and it sounded like in that in that one of the exchanges that you were counting the book at that moment in Africa Mwenda had asked the crowd you know can you show me a country that's gotten a lot of aid that has done well and Bono was like yeah Ireland I mean it's fascinating because Ireland has along that one of the poorest countries on the planet certainly in in Europe and Mwenda rebutted that by saying no you were given opportunity like when the Celtic tiger took off it was because they essentially opened themselves up through a series of business for foreign tax regulation to engaging and integrating into world markets rather than just getting money dropped from helicopters and things like that exactly you know I want to get to your the autobiographical parts of the book which are fascinating everything but as long as we're talking about you know kind of the question of foreign aid and African development it's worth thinking about not long ago I was talking to Johan Norberg a Swedish economist who you know pointed out that in the like in the late 50s and early 60s as decolonization was taking place around the world most smart people were betting on Africa Africa was doing better than Asia as a continent and Africa got a lot of aid Asia got relatively little but Asia has been doing better so this goes to that question of you know trade versus aid but you in the book and in your work you've really kind of you know the critique of the kind of aid mentality or the you know whether we want to call it a you know a great white savior or outsiders from Africa who are going to come in and fix everything you have written a series of critiques and there's a blistering one in the book of Columbia University developmental economist Jeffrey Sachs he was a major force in creating and pushing the United Nations Millennium Development Goals which were kind of like for the 21st century this was the the new way that the you know the wealthy part of the world or the global north was going to help the global south what does what do people like Jeffrey Sachs fundamentally get wrong what is what is wrong with the framework that they are trying to impart on the developing world well I think that the part that someone like Jeffrey Sachs doesn't understand although he you know yeah you can call yourself an economist we all know our issues with stiglitz and people like that but to me it's just not understanding at the end of the day the way the world works and not understanding economics I'm sorry you know and and also in the end it's not really rocket science and maybe that's why for people who are always looking for complexity they fail to see that I think for folks like him it's very something very unsettling about this idea that you know the market can can take care of things right and so the reason why I say he doesn't understand economics he doesn't understand how things work is I'll just give you examples because the thing is people like Jeffrey Sachs and his team came to me and what was the book Anina Munx she has a book an amazing book that I would recommend everybody to read I meant I think I mentioned it in the yes and I've forgotten the name of it yeah I think it's ideally something like that so anyway so for people listening to us and the story with Jeffrey Sachs um Jeffrey Sachs you know celebrity economist back then has said I mean he thought he could fix poverty and so forth but then what he did is basically set up a village what they would call the millenium development millenium development villages and there they just went on to basically do a very down type of approach to economics and so if only people grew this type of crops and did it in this way and all of that then things are going to work except that none of them ever thought about oh we're gonna have to sell this thing to somebody don't we and so they went for the whole capacity building part and this is by the way a lot of what aid does and what of what the World Bank is financing a world a lot of what the IMF is financing because frankly that's all they can finance financing buildings maybe or even training that's fine you can finance that but the activity that comes around you don't just wake up and say you're gonna have to focus on bananas you're gonna have to focus on coffee that's not how it works so in their case they got all of that capacity building going and then they started looking around and being like okay we have now these nice you know warehouses for the hibiscus but the women were growing over bananas we have um all everything is in bags so he's great and then they're like well how exactly are we gonna sell this and that's when they reach out to someone like me uh him and his lieutenants and then basically they were expecting for me to just hand out decades of my work relationship buildings going to buyers finding out who is buying what finding out what customers want finding out all of this stuff and creating a product that matches the the market and all of that so they came to me and said basically hand out all of those relationships hand out all of that know-how and that all of that knowledge because you know we're trying to save Africa literally that's what we're saying and i'm like even then you have no respect for how the market works because if you were talking to another person that you would like to consult with i know you would probably be proposed to pay them i know you would not just expect them to just hand over their relationship the buyer relationships without maybe proposing uh some type of contract maybe five percent of what it's sold or not no the attitude they even had with me i'm like this is an attitude you have on the market no no wonder you go nowhere so eventually what happened is they went nowhere and things started rotting all over the place all of this stuff that we spent they spent millions of dollars on and by the way an enterprise would have probably produced the same better quality cheaper and still be able to sell it but they were had nothing to show for and so that's the mentality of people like that but then it doesn't stop there because what happens is by the time i showed up and i was trying to do i was working on setting up the supply chain at some point we look like we could look like we're like them because the first part of the supply chain is you grow the hibiscus you store it all of that but by the time i arrived a lot of these women were like there's no way we're going to be growing hibiscus again we know your type you come from over there you tell us it's just a matter of producing x y z and then we work hard we spend all of our time doing it and in the end we have nothing to show for look over there we still have production from last year that's rotting in these in these warehouses that this was we built so we don't have time for this lady bye so i even had to redo undo that story and redo it to get them to even be willing producing so you see it doesn't stop at what he did yeah you talk a lot in the book i mean if there is a message it's that what africa you know what africa would benefit from is you know millions of africans creating businesses becoming entrepreneurial and things like that but you you stress how hard it is within africa to start a business can you work a little bit through at one point you talk about you know how what it's like to start a business in senegal your home country versus you know opening a business in say houston texas or something like that no we'll go into that but uh but before i go about um before i go there nick allow me to go back just a little bit to the foreign aid because that one i think it's very important that i try to nail it here with you because uh despite saying what what we say many people still have a hard time because like how come you an african be against foreign aid how how how and even you know then i say you have to think the world is life is made of trade-offs you know that very well but when it comes to foreign aid i think people only look at supposedly the little wins you know in in the trade-offs but i want to make it clear here for people to understand the trade-offs because they're very important so i had this woman she was very upset with me and so that's the reason why i had to go there so for her like surely the roads can be can only be helpful aren't they you know you're not going to tell me that you're for dirt roads and people not having ways to go from point A to point B and i said listen lady i don't but still with even with that in mind this is why i have a beef with foreign aid i said for that road for that road you're seeing a road and that's the reason why for you we need to continue okay let us let let me tell you what that road is really the cost really of that road you see road equals benefit let me talk about the cost cost number one because of this road i have a culture of dependency that gets that keeps on being ingrained in my people that surely cannot be good for the entrepreneurial mindset that i would like to but but we need from them in order to really create wealth and value right a cultural dependency just doesn't go hand in hand how does a road create dependence okay i'll tell you how it does because if we have to rely we we got this road this road came because of foreign aid foreign aid came to us because supposedly we're poor our governments are literally poor they don't have enough money to cater to all the needs of what the government would need money for building roads building schools building hospitals things like that that what people think about most of the time building infrastructure especially now i would like to tell them people why do you think we are in that situation why do you think that we're poor in the first place so much that we need you to you know inject the additional cash so that we can build the roads that normally we should have built for ourselves with the money that we made we are poor because we don't let our entrepreneurs work so if you just come and finance for me what i should have financed for myself and by myself you and you and we keep doing this nothing has changed since the end of so-called colonialism you know nothing has changed so for the past 60 some plus years our people seeing this happen regularly it means that you know you're building a culture of dependency because for 60 years we don't expect to be building our own roads and that's something that i explain i see oftentimes you know like just the other day i give you an example i am about to i just actually hired him at first i was almost like going to back off but then i remembered my okay my god you're trying to build a future generation stay calm so we were discussing you know we were negotiating um something a contract for to be part of my social media team right so this young african all the way from Nigeria and then um i send him a message to to so basically proposes a price to me the price makes absolutely no sense you know if you're in the marketplace it makes no sense it was way too high for what it was he was definitely twice as more expensive as what it should have been at least if not more then um i say okay why don't you go back you think about it and you send me a message and then he went back and he sent me a message and his message was about well um and he he gave me all the reasons why i should pay him that price but none of it had really to do with the value he was bringing to the table so it was very much about i understand you know i i appreciate i'm going to have the opportunity to apprentice with you and all of that stuff he was he could see all the goods he was going to get from best and he also could see that he's not up to speed with where i need him to be but we're integrating him and we're just going to keep going but so none of this argumentary had to do with the value he was going to bring but more this idea of you know my father has been taking care of of helping me even though i'm a young adult now he's 22 years old i'm a young adult now um and i just would like for him to finally have some relief and not have to support me i'm an older i'm the older one in the family so it would be nice but i'm no longer a burden for him and also if i'm uh under good conditions and all of that then it means that i could do a better work it's almost like you make coming and saying i ideally would need the lifestyle of a hundred thousand dollars a year right whatever what i'm just picking a number uh and i know that i really should be getting only five thousand but you know if you pay me a hundred thousand then you know it takes care of this problem that problem this problem that problem then maybe i can do a good job and so when i saw that first my i was like no but then i got back to him and i said you know i really like xxx but an entrepreneur sort of succeeds because they everything is based on value so while i have a lot of sympathy for all the things you share this is not the value doesn't match up with what you're gonna bring but you see you would not see i i talk to many people in the u.s and in some parts of a developing world where you know people don't expect you know handouts so much and they don't talk about things the same way you know what i mean so but the fact that so many of us this is how we justify want you know how we justify what we want to earn that's wrong and it goes back to that cultural dependency i was talking about we're perfectly happy saying i need this and give it to me and also when they deal with me thinking oh this wealthy person that you can just get whatever from so the dependency goes all the way down to me today trying to do a contract with this person and having in there to say no we're not going to rely on people's good wealth so that's one number one dependency number two so for that road i get a generation of young people behaving this way which cannot operate in the market i go back for that road i also got um more violence and more violence as well as leaders who never want to leave and usually through that the violence let me explain myself foreign aid represents trillions of dollars that have been spent on this continent since the end of so-called colonialism so since the beginning of the independence is literally the sixties that's what's been going on and look around you you have people who have been around for more than 20 years some of them almost 40 years i think i think togo is the guy who has the longest standing out there but anyway so what happens here is what do you know what they're fighting for do you really think that they're fighting for the little peanuts that are that we are you know paying them in in in the ways of taxes because when you have so few employers and so few um you know employees official ones so what they're fighting for really at end of the day is control control for access to um the natural resources they control they're fighting for control to access to this foreign aid especially that foreign aid they're fighting for that so the more foreign aid you provide the less these people have an incentive to actually let their wealth creators work and most importantly the more you're incentivizing them to not even want to leave and that not wanting to leave will also lead to violence that to me that correlation is very direct and you would have to be blocked to not see it so for that road i'm getting a president's going to stay there forever despite not doing job and i'm also going to get violence erupting because everybody's fighting each other in order to control that that pile of pile of pile of money so that's number two that violence and um last but not least you are standing on us actually never getting there just you're causing what we're going through right now these uh there is no incentive in getting the business environment right so that our business our wealth creators can create because if they can create if our entrepreneurs are actually free to enterprise which is the environment that the only thing we ask from government is an enabling environment their incentives to put it in place they put it in place it means the poverty is gone it means the foreign aid dries out so need to ask you if for in exchange of for road on top of that's going to be a crappy road and if it's a bridge maybe 10 years from now the bridge is going to collapse some of us are going to be dead on it but who is going to go after the ccp funded company but got the business that got the contract to do in the first place no we're dead nobody cares the road we paid for ended up costing us five times more than what he was supposed to cost because of all types of you know um corruption as we know and so for that crappy road of yours i get a cultural dependency that's going to follow my youth um you know generation after generation so we're talking long term for that crappy road of yours i'm going to get violence and also people who do not want to leave even bobernet doing a good job for that crappy work road of yours i'm going to get another generation of entrepreneurs who are denied their right to enterprise which will lift the country poverty so all of a sudden does that throw it does that foreign aid you know is is it does it all of a sudden looks still yeah you you know you uh talk about how you're obviously no fan of colonialism and imperialism you know as it existed in the 19th and the first half of the 20th century but then you talk about a kind of neo colonialism that is coming through foreign aid that empowers governments that are not in the business of you know of promoting their people but rather in taking as much money as they can from the west and things like that one of the things that you point out and there's a really deep and horrible irony here is that one of the most successful exports to Africa from the west is essentially socialism or a kind of top-down structure where the government is you know pick not it's beyond picking winners and losers it's really controlling access to all sorts of things can you talk about the persistence of if not pure socialism then a kind of socialist mentality where a few people kind of call all the shots you know where does that come from and how do you confront that in 21st century Africa yes so when I started to connect the dots as I'm trying to as I explained in the book as to how prosperity actually is built because you know also another thing is I think many people forget that poverty is the natural state of man man as in humanity but in any case when you ask yourself how is prosperity built and eventually start to connect the dots me in my case being an entrepreneur doing business on both sides of the world is really what opened my eyes to this whole issue around the around the really rotten business environments that many African nations offer their citizens and entrepreneurs so there when I discovered that I was I was blown away I was just really blown away when I when I made the connective dots between the fact that wait if you make it hard for you entrepreneurs to enterprise of course they're not going to build the wealth and the prosperity that goes with it and of course they're not going to have a sovereignty that goes with being a prosperous nation conversely if you make it easy for your entrepreneurs to enterprise you build wealth you know prosperity and then people your country is is prosperous meaning it matters in the grand scheme of thing and this board called the world and when I understood that I was like wait so then why why do we have such a rotten environment I mean did we just wake up and it was this way what happened to us are we just are we just as crazy as some people claim we are or as stupid as some people claim we are that we would not you know know what it what it takes and do it and then that's when I started to stumble upon the work of someone like Georgia Yute because Georgia Yute had a missing piece for me and Nick when I started reading from George that's when I made a realization even myself I realized back then that as an African who on who profoundly cared about Africa even I for me the story of Africa started with slavery from there moved on to colonialism and then to present day but it never occurred to me to even first of all think about Africa pre-slavery time let alone think about what type of you know economic systems were being ran in different parts of the continent all of that it's when I read from George that how was I'm like wait wait wait these people have been around for a long time before that time that the world the rest of the world seems to have established as the starting point for African history and I realized to this day many people black non-black African non-African for many people unconsciously the story of Africa and black people starts with slavery and George George was amazing in the sense that he looked in a different direction and so not only he looked there he was curious about that but then what he had uncovered and what the research is uncovering more and more he said man before the white man ever set foot on the continent very free free free enterprise you know very people were free and then people are like oh what are you talking about tribes no no no go back and research all of us and then even research the work of people like Jomo Kenyatta the first leader of Kenya so what all of this is showing you is even there when people thought that Africans don't have the same you know relationship to private property to property rights Kenyatta is showing in his books why that was just like a makeup of the west of a western person who doesn't understand what really goes on because he would tell you in his book facing Mount Kenya every single piece of land you ask the African you say whose land is it they say ours but what they mean by ours and what you think because and he says every single plot of land could be traced directly to the person it belongs to the family it belongs to or the clan it belongs to every time we're talking about private ownership of the land and you see and but something like that was misconstrued and it was the ways for western today aha we told you Africans are socialists and the Africans learned more on that with their Ubuntu concept I am because we are and so that's what someone like Nyerere of Tanzania for example leaned on to say yes this is we are socialist as well and the African social is Ubuntu so we conflated things that had nothing to do with each other the way Africans live as a social fabric we're very yeah we're socialists in our social fabric but in terms of how we used to make our money we were as capitalist as anybody else right but capital is you just I mean you're essentially just talking about kind of voluntary market transactions yeah exactly free market entrepreneurialism so so what happened there is so now you go back because my question was why why are we doing this today what happened to us and then what happened is what George put his finger on that critical pivotal moment in our life in our history as Africans as to why we are still where we are today economically speaking so basically what happened was during the end of the 50s early 60s you know with Nick you were at the height of the ideological battle as represented at one end by the by the west fighting for freedom and practicing capitalism as its economic system free market and then facing up with the east various forms of statism it is during that time we were just are some some of the people who would be the liberators of Africa meaning the the people who would go on to also be the first presidents of these nations they during that battle of ideologies that was going on both sides looking for influence usually looking south to the people south we you can very easily understand what happened and it is what happened basically the marxist socialist of the time but first of all it was the fury of old you would have to have been crazy to believe that marxist socialism did not work because we were still in the middle of the lies coming from the you know soviet union about you know their crap still working so our side said our africans basically their side look the west is who enslaved us then colonialism surely whatever they're promoting we're going to be against and on top of that you marxist are the ones who traditionally have been fighting for racial justice which is very true which is very true you know for all my criticism of these guys minus marx himself who was a racist but marxist many there were many well-meaning marxist people who actually believed in racial justice and so between those two combinations and the forces of the time and just where most intellectuals were back in the back in the times many of these people embraced the marxist socialism ideologies of their time and that's how africa as most of the continent was going to become free and starting their independences it started with basically leaders who have been infected with the disease that marxist socialism ideology is and that's how we got to where we are today because by the way that heritage has never been questioned again ever and what the book is trying to do is for us to question that legacy that needs question we need to question the legacy of tamasankara we need to to to look at the legacy of people like jules nerere all of them we have to look at the legacy and be able to say yes i completely understand where you came from i completely understand where you came from i can even understand the the the emotional state in which you were and i can even forgive you for having gone that path but 60 some plus years later with everything that we know we have a fall of the berlin wall and everything that the world has given us the latest in in them being china being able to rise to prosperity thanks to the free markets for the scz we have no more excuse for not you know challenging the legacy of of that time let's talk about the present reality i mean one of the most you know stunning parts of the book is when you cut you discuss the the difficulties of starting a business in your home country can you explain to people you know it's like it it's never easy to start a business in the first place because you have no idea if it's going to work you got to get you know capital or partners and things like that but what makes it so hard what are the steps that make it really tough in senegal to you know start working yeah so basically um like you said yeah hard start running starting and running a business anywhere is hard enough but just for nature of business it's hard that's why there's only a few part of a population that are business entrepreneurs but there's a reason why most of us are just happy doing our own thing having a job and you know we don't want to think about how to make a good role so not so we have those added we have those normal difficulties of doing business because i'm not i'm not crying about it it's it's my choice we all know it's hard to get my choice so i'm not going to cry for that and i actually welcome the challenges that it makes life more fun but the problem you have in africa in many african nations is that you have these added um non-necessary hurdles that are completely man-made i wish i should say in this way government made so let me try to explain to people what this means because when i have sometimes arguments with friends of mine who are fellow bernie sanders you know supporters and they're like ah you know like uh what do you call it the Scandinavian nations are a model and i said to them then okay great then do you believe that it should be as easy for any entrepreneur in scandinavia to do business as it is for any entrepreneur in africa do you believe it should be yes i do okay so then we've got a problem because Scandinavia is more capitalist than model african nations okay so then it's like wait what what do you mean okay this is what i mean what i mean is nick when the u.s uh and i told you i have a sister company here and a sister company in senegal so all my businesses have that in common so i'm very much front seat to look at the discrepancy between the ease of doing business on both sides and then to realize the one in senegal is not just an anecdote it's not just senegal that's like that it's pretty much the whole continent and this is why by the way you always hear me saying africa and then my friends are like i'm like yeah you know better than i do but anyway keep on schooling at the end of the day we however even though we're 54 nations when it comes to our business environment we very much start to look like a village so yes i'm going to keep saying africa okay so when it comes to um to that what does it mean uh the business in the u.s nick and megat need to get into an employment contract nick is going to be a great lab technician and it's all great we negotiate the price that works for you but works for me as you know then we go to we go to work we assign you a contract you sign it i sign it put it in my in my uh i put in my drawer you put it in your drawer and you're in your cloud whatever now we move on to work every uh every two weeks i can you know your your pay comes directly into your bank account we have set up everything now and all of this by the way happens quickly right i you send me the contract send me your bank information everything is good to go now we're in senegal nick and megat want to get into the same contract well we're going to have to print it print it physical copies in three you sign i sign all of them then i or my cpa and i better hire cpa because if you try to do it by yourself you're going to make mistakes because the labor laws are so complicated that you should hire an expert in order to not make a mistake because if you make a mistake it means you might be harassed your employee might come after you for various things as well as the state so you don't want to make mistakes on that so you have to hire somebody which means extra cost so i hire my cpa cpa is in the capital city because that's usually where a lot of the good people are because everybody's concentrated in capital city because all the government offices are concentrated there as well that's how you have one capital city where you have one quarter of a population living in and living like sardines and all the all the you know anyway so three three one so i have now next my next step is i'm going to have to go physically you'll be like 2023 why do you have to go because our government our government officials do not look at emails if you're going to email them something you might as well imagine it was lost in the mail so you get yourself in a car in our case we are in the middle of nowhere we're in a little village and i did that on purpose because my whole thing is i'm not going to do like everybody else and go into crowded capital city where 25 of a population is we need to give people a chance to stay in their communities and build you know a life but the way that's going to happen you have to anchor it with two things but the first thing is a job and then we also anchor it with the second thing a school because we have a school for the children of the workers so but i did this it was my goal my goal was i wanted it reversed so people get a chance to stay home in their communities and build and not do what my parents did but at the national level my parents left me behind to migrate to abroad in this case many parents leave their kids behind to migrate to a big city so as a little girl you still have the same problem where's mom where's daddy that's not that's not fun so i so and i think nick that story has been what's followed me my whole life my whole life i did not want for other kids to have to be separated from their parents or their grandma because later i had to leave my grandma just because of economic reasons no child should have to go through that if we can if us the adults can afford it can avoid it and so i really did what i believe that and so i went to these communities and built there and so what it means is okay but the problem is i have to go uh once we sign these documents we have to go to what we call inspection du travail so labor inspection office it's a government office um we're lucky because we don't have to go to the capital city in this case which is a good two three hours away um in this case it looks like there is a regional antenna but still an hour away an hour and a half to know how bad the roads are that day and it's usually between hour hour and how so i have to drive there so we leave first thing in the morning to be there we arrive so basically what it is is once you arrive there some government official who does not even know where you where you guys are operating from he does he has never built a business in his life in his life he knows nothing about our industry he knows nothing nothing nothing about anything but this person nick will get to decide if you and i indeed can work together after we have said we want to work together and we sign the documents so and so this person show up at the office uh you're there for eight o'clock even before eight because it opens at eight so you're there before so you know your first one and go back because you've got you've got a business to run nine nobody ten no one eleven no one noon where is he running errands personal errands and there's absolutely nothing that i can do about it even though the guy is there to serve me remember government official and everybody shuts up because if you start to show that you're upset or even frustrated or guess what it's going to take you longer because they know how to make you pay for your you know your your attitude because that's how they call it so the guy shows up and in this case he said well where is um nick's health certificate like what and here i had hired a cpa to handle all of this he's the one who handled the contracts everything and told me every single step that i need to go through so it's on right and i arrived and the guy tells me about a piece of paper that's in the law but i've but my my cpa didn't send me and i call the cp i'm like he's saying i need an extra document and i'm like what are you talking about and so he talks to him and the guy said well it's in there that we have to have a health certificate to make sure that nick is physically up to do this job and so we didn't know about that so now he's like well um but you know that's what they like but you that there's a law and there's so many of them of course there are some you're not going to know and then you don't know about it and now i could see in his eyes his eyes were sparkling because you know what he was now waiting for bribe because think about it i'm this entrepreneur i've got so much to do i left my company early in the morning cut on my sleep got in early in the morning waited until noon finally he's there but he's telling me that my file is missing something and it means i'm gonna have to start over all over again well guess what most people do exactly what's what's what's what is coming next you give a little something and then all of a sudden okay fine i don't need the fine you can go so in my case i said i am not going to do that because i don't give bribes because especially if i stand where i stand it plus for me it's good because i get to see all the problems so i go back i go back i send you to the doctor who doesn't even look at you this is a rent seeking swing as well it's in the laws everybody and so he writes you the thing never looked at you didn't measure nothing when you come back with the paper i go back now he's allowing me for 60 percent of the files that i brought to be to go through but then there is a few don't go through because he said this guy he's gonna have to be a night a night guard in your in your company and sorry but the convention says nothing of that for that type of company that type of industry like wait what so because the thing is in San Diego every single job is in a convention is part of a corpse you know a peace corp whatever work with the government this is very civil law style right and this is also why it's common law so in this case that's that's what it is and so nick after months of going back and forth i was able to finally hire some of these employees if i wanted to do it the legal way and so just level that's what it is then the people i hired how do i pay them normally should be a bank account but guess what another woman majority of people are unbanked why are they unbanked because some of my employees you know they don't even have um IDs proper IDs if you don't have a proper ID you can imagine you can't even open a bank account and even if you open an account when you have certain salaries if your salary is just you know good enough for you to take care of your family and everything and the bank wants to function a good amount from it every single month that makes no sense so i am working with my employees to find out first of all how can we have you be able to receive money in a different form than just cash because also i can't just give them cash because otherwise i can't get my accounting records straight which means they're going to come after what are you uh you know what type of money laundering are you doing or who knows what else so i have to show things that are official they are not official you can't really you know you shouldn't really try to get to force them into having this bank account but even if they have it's going to cost them a lot because the banking systems are the most regulated in africa which means also among the most costly so we eventually there we had to rely on crypto in order just to have a money move because sometimes you would try so at first how is paying people some one person who has nothing to do with our company has a bank account i would wire money from the u.s to that person and then that person just versus it by making everybody sign so we have a record that the money went from to z to z one day this person i'm trying to send him money and after two weeks wire after two weeks we don't know where the money is and eventually after four weeks the money gets returned like that gets returned and then i try to do it through western union after a few you know for a few time it worked but all of a sudden i get a call from the compliance office from western union after the money left to say there is a problem we need to know who you're sending this money to you know the whole KYC thing know your personal stuff and so i had to answer who are these people how do i know them how long have i know them what am i doing with them do i have proof of what we're doing all of this stuff and then finally they're like okay after being literally feeling like what's like an interrogation like you're a type of criminal finally they say okay we'll call you back only two hours later to say well you did not we were not satisfied with what you said so your money will be returned you'll get it back in eight days oh thanks a lot my money now is with you you're gonna give it for eight days and then send it back to me meanwhile i have to think about what else to do that's what in a way me got me into crypto so when people talk about and saying oh it's a scam scheme no you because in the west you look at crypto as an asset class to an speculative you know asset class us it's more simple than that crypto for us especially bitcoin simply represents basically the function of currency you know that so we see that in crypto so anyway so so this is all the things nick right well can i layer another thing that you talk about in the book is then in places like Senegal when you are importing goods that you might need you know if you if you need a computer if you need a car if you need whatever the tariffs are tremendous right as well as when you're sending goods out of the country yes yes yeah so for example you need a car to come in um you know cars are basically the cars going to cost you double by the time you're done with tariffs literally and um then you have then you're gonna have this company you know the the investment office apics in this case the promotion of foreign investors so apics they literally they stand for helping you know like assisting in with fdi like making it easy for you to supposedly set up a shop but all of this really is on the equipment that you're going to need for your business they're going to withhold the taxes that you should have paid the tariffs that you should have paid on it for at least three years because like yeah it takes at least three years to complete to get up but it's not like they're excusing you that they're just withholding it so once you get there you're gonna have to pay this thing so exactly how did you help me it's still gonna still gonna be the same cost of doing business you just delayed it so that's number one is is that kind of set up similar throughout africa regardless of what countries might have uh you know what european countries might have uh been the colonial powers yeah it is it is because nick think about it what all of these countries have in common because if you if you never bothered to think about liberating your wealth creators aka entrepreneurs if you never bothered to liberate them and you stayed in this madness that you inherited from the colonial times right of socialist policies most african nations are run with five even for the ones that are not but say oh no we're not socialists or we like nigeria for example even them running five-year plan alla soviet style right so for the most part we're still in the same camp um so if you don't make it easy or possible for your wealth creators to create and create a mass then what happens you stay poor and so what you're gonna have to rely on your only source of budget income as a nation is going to be the money you get from foreign aid to supplement the little that you get from whatever you get from taxing your people so basically your whole game is domestically you tax your people to death on everything that you can put your hands on and given that you don't produce much on the ground you know you're primarily relying on natural resource extraction yet these are people who live there people who are going to need shampoos people are going to need soap people are going to need cars people are going to need tv's refrigerators when they can afford it they're going to need all of that and you don't produce any of this crap because you didn't allow for the market forces to get you there so you basically you're waiting them you're waiting them exactly where you know they're going to show up at they're going to show up at the customs office because the stuff is enough to come from outside and so basically your your strategy for filling up the government's coffers is going to be domestically tariff tariff tariff tariff and also taxes taxes taxes and internationally it's going to be foreign aid that's basically your your revenue plan are you a fan then of a couple years ago the un helped push through the african continental free trade area which sought to minimize tariffs among different african countries as well as coming in is that conceptually a step in the right direction or is that more kind of interference yeah so if they really follow through it can only be a good thing i am a big fan always everywhere all the time of free movements of people good services and ideas especially ideas i'm a big fan and in so far as the afc ta you know supposedly that's the goal then of course i rejoice but that's where my but then i'm cautiously optimistic because as we know um these things take forever but most importantly and most scaringly i wasn't gonna uh not not this December but last December and i went to the offices to the headquarters of the afc ta in akra and i was allowed to sit on some meetings i don't know why they allowed me but i was able to sit on meetings where you had different countries represented around the table and actually they were continuing some of their conversations and nick there what did i discover i discovered that pretty much you know like how sometimes you get oh buy one get the second one free but then you look at all the little lines and technically it's going to be almost near impossible to get the second one free well that's what this afc ta is shaping out to be uh basically every single country that's part of it for now is actually working on all the exemptions that they would like to put to it and then um basically yes but not this not this part of the economy yes but not this so this very the time they're done the increment we expect it was designed supposedly to provide is going to be almost no because everybody is busy right now getting the little clauses to still keep it closed and so i am not holding my breath i am simply not holding my breath and the other thing about that too is they can open that all they want but if you still don't understand the free markets if you still don't understand what an enabling business environment is that's just the top of um that's just uh i think yeah what they're proposing the the ground base of this cake has not been caked yet and so and i give you an example let's say afc ta worked let's say they had it and it's really working um i can move my goods or and myself from one continent one country to another within the continent but nothing else changed the labor laws i talked to you about didn't change the the permit uh obtained how to obtain permits and how long and how much it cost did not change the tax code did not change become more simple to understand and easy to pay taxes did not change let's say none of those things what we call economic freedom but causes is a big part of economic freedom doesn't get changed then magat is just saying okay okay um you know uh moritania fine now when i buy when i buy maybe my shea butter from you i don't have to pay taxes on it but i still have to pay taxes on a lot of things that most africans don't manufacture today which still need to go into my product so but the minute that product comes in anywhere from africa it's going to be taxed from that entry point and then you know then from there start to travel really how much easier have you made it have you made it for me to do business and is it going to be really still enough for me when i have a chance to build my business somewhere in africa or outside of africa to till choose africa that's the other thing people think it's just you touch here you touch things get better that's why you should not try to control the market ever because it's not about touching one thing here touching one thing there somehow the market the way it works is enough it's a it's a critical mass of things that have to happen for something halfway across to make sense and that what it is no one can really guess that so people free to do it so how let's talk a little bit about how you affect change you know within africa and other parts of the country because other parts of the world um you know you mentioned bitcoin is a way of routing around certain you know uh kind of bottlenecks in the economy and things like that you uh talk about startup cities um yes yeah how how would startup cities explain what those are and how that would help in an african context yes so in so far as africa is the most is a poorest region in the world region in the world because it happens to be the most over-regulated region in the world it's the region in the world where entrepreneurs lack what entrepreneurs need the most which is an enabling business environment now most of these countries you can imagine there are people already benefiting from the status quo right and you can therefore and you also can appreciate nick and i'm sure your audience as much as the next person how cumbersome and complicated and hard and long it takes to do piecemeal legislation and also reforms we can all appreciate how complicated that is costly timely everything meanwhile i'm sitting there and thinking while all of that is good in the absence of nothing else we got to accelerate this we got to accelerate and most importantly we have to be a little bit more radical because like we said you and i tweaking something here tweaking something there is just not going to get us there we have to it's the house in such a bad shape but we have to do tabula rasa and just start over but now are you really going to be telling a whole country we're gonna we're gonna go from one day to another do that i'm not going to do that so the idea instead is how about we try to clean up clean up once one place at a time so the all the startup cities are is these are next generation special economic zones with their own law their own governance especially when it comes to commercial law right and we're usually based on commercial law on um on a common law so in any case that's really for me what the solution is going to be because what you're doing all of a sudden you're saying to these african entrepreneurs who are trapped into the dysfunctional you know systems they're in right now you're giving them a chance you're basically giving them a chance to have straight from home zones that are among the best business that have among the best business environments in the world a la singapore a la danmark or better right and you mentioned china took advantage of special economic zones you talk about this in the book where you know in the midst of a you know openly communist country they were like okay we're gonna create a sandbox here where entrepreneurs or business interests are able to act much more freely than they would anywhere else in the country exactly exactly so china did that scz by scz me i would call each of us scz is a startup city right and before china places like singapore have done it but more at a nation state level because they're small enough that they can do it for the whole country but if you're big as china is you can do it zone by zone or startup city by startup city and it still works so that's pretty much you know looking at that um but you know what is in it what is in it say in senegal what would be in it for the government of senegal to say like okay we're gonna we're gonna let you have this zone of freedom which is probably gonna very quickly kind of outperform the the rest of the country etc like how do you how do you get the the incumbents the people who benefit from the status quo to allow that kind of experiment to yeah so first of all um it's a very good question so i've been i've been on this path for the past um more than a year ago i started more than a year ago being on this path of selling these ideas to african governments when i started we only had one african government that really seems to have understood and be on board everybody else was like whatever you know they're doing their their zones like ad style zone you know special academic zones and everybody wondering why it's not working but i'm like hello you're running an ad software uh when there is a premiums when this this needs a premium software but anyway continue on so what i think people need to understand on this um nick and why i'm so bullish on the future of africa is because we don't need all 54 nations to go for this all at once all i need is one nation where you have a leader who is thinking a little bit more different than the others and also has different goals than the others because not all of them are as corrupt as we think they are and even if they do things that are corrupt not all of them given a chance want to stay in this state of of misery and despair and so here what you do you need to find a leader like that first of all so when you're saying how do you get somebody to what's in it for them for a leader what's what is in it for them doing a startup city is is for a leader who deep down knows that i want to leave a better legacy behind and i i know that we need to create jobs we need to do all of that so you start with a leader like that that's what's going to be in there for them then what you do is you make it easy for this leader that's why startup cities matter that's why we don't want to do it you don't want to do it at a country level because that leader even if he or she wants to see this something like this thrive she or he is going to be limited because your many many entrenched interests already exist and you might be a coup might happen on you or i mean depending on which sense it is or all of your oligarchs or people who benefit from the current system might become your enemies from one day to another make sure you don't get elected the next time or who knows your party who knows so there's all of these realities to deal with and frankly also many people the peoples of a country might not be on board not because they don't want to be more prosperous but because you know people are concerned what is that how does that work you mean now i have to do this you know change people don't like change even if it's sometimes for you know how everybody has with back in the facebook days every time facebook changes something we all hate it right they were all done but then we're like we love it so much like please never but left to our own devices we never would have voted for if we voted for it we would have said no so this reality is very true as well so this is why the startup city is what i like about it it's a way for these leaders to actually get their cake and eat it too so continue doing whatever it is that you're doing over here but over here let's do an experiment that doesn't affect anybody because it's a it's an area that's rather unoccupied so we're not exploiting people or anything like that and there let's say okay what would happen if the commercial rules because that's the other thing here right i want to insist on that because i know there are many stories out there and things that really delay the adoption of this which is like oh it's a country even a country no it's just like if china is able to do something like this you it should give you everything you need to understand that there is no sovereignty being been attacked your your your family laws remain the same your immigration law remain the same criminal law all of that stuff remain the same you're just saying when it comes to prosperity building entrepreneurs need an enabling environment so we're going to look at the commercial laws especially and make sure we give them the best environment for them to create that's really it so so in an area like that you're basically making it an opt-in type of situation and that's the other thing you don't exclude the other people in the country to come in it's not about that it's just like there's an extra option for anybody who wants to be able to run better businesses and it's really all it is and so what we have found is now we're talking to four countries and i'm very confident but very few in a very few months we'll be able to announce the first one we picked because now they're competing a little bit with each other but so what's in it for someone for a leader who really has their heart and their mind in the right place because not everybody is as bad as they look it's going to be legacy it's going to be try before you buy because we're just trying over here if it works it's great if it doesn't work we try it there's nothing more you can do so that's what's in it for a leader like that but if it works probably his whole country is going to ask to switch over and then the change would have happened in a rather quick manner it would have happened in a rather uh undisruptive manner and it would have happened in a way that the people actually are the ones at some point saying yes we want this to be everywhere and when we get to that then you see the change effect starting to happen to other countries because other countries are not going to sit there of the citizens certainly are not going to sit there and say why we're not doing the same and then that's it that's it then I can die happy and go let's talk about skin is skin this is a company that you started a few years ago and it and it makes skin and lip balms or treatments how what is skin is skin is and how does it exemplify what you're hoping to you know kickstart all throughout African entrepreneurship and you know in global enterprise yeah so what skin is skin is is basically um it's manufacturing it's African products made in Africa by Africans uh very much you know for the longest time especially um you know there is this movie poverty ink that was documented that was very very very effective I think it helped a lot of people understand the the traverses of aid and even NGOs trying to help but yet not helping as much as they as they fit as they were thinking that we're helping so with skin is skin really at the end of the day um Nick you're getting a great uh great skin treatments and the lip balms from us but me pretty much I'm in it for the jobs created my goal is 2.5 billion prosperous Africans by 2050 that's my goal and the way that's going to happen is as many jobs being created as possible which means as many entrepreneurs being allowed to enterprise as possible and I offer myself as exhibit a or you know um put your food where your mouth is um don't just preach to people but also practice what you preach I'm a very big fan of them big on that and I'm the concept of criticized by creating so but do and so what we're doing is we're pushing this whole concept of cheetah made so cheetah made the best way to think about it is when um you know Japan managed to have made in Japan um France made in France um made in Italy when you hear that it means a lot of things it means per craftsmanship means quality means premium and it and so you're buying from these people not because you feel sorry for them but you're buying from the people because of what they bring to you so in this case this was um companies like um like skin is skin and making it in Africa and the cheat um you know movement where where the cheetah made uh label we're pushing all of that was my way of criticizing by creating towards um initiative like tom shoes tom shoes believed that the way you help poor people is by leaving giving them shoes because they could not afford to buy shoes and then that whole thing of buy one give one model worked so well you know you buy one give one pair to a child in need because probably lives in poverty uh it works so well that everybody and their mothers about any company around started doing the same thing socks so everything but people missed to understand is when you shipping this uh your free stuff to these countries we live in communities we live in a village we live in those and who can compete against free right and like I think the village where we make our skincare products it's one of the villages in Senegal with the most uh shoemakers in the country we have a few hundred shoemakers each one of them hiring at least 15 something people in average that's a lot of people now when the the day the shoe the shoe uh the tom shoes truck shows up what do you think happens to all of these people what do you think happens to them kids are like I'm not buying I mean people who are buying like I'm not buying them over here we have three shoes right so you destroyed these jobs so to me it was just like how can people not see this I understand the first instinct of thinking you're helping but this is not helping but it was it's one thing to tell people it's not working and why it's not working but maybe give them a chance to participate because when somebody's buying a tom yeah oh no I I get that and so I guess you know a question you in in the book you discuss a bit uh John Mackie the co-founder of Whole Foods who is uh or the you know emeritus uh chairman co-founder of Whole Foods who's talked about conscious capitalism where he believes that capitalism has moved beyond or should move beyond kind of the arguments of Milton Friedman explicitly was making in the early seventies that um you know that the only only responsibility of a company is to the bottom line of its shareholders to increase investor value and he says you know that that's not quite right you participate in that and so with something like skin is skin um how much is it you create a product which can stand alone you know that is a really good product that is sold at a price that it can command and then how do you factor in like there is a mission there and people you know and I think John is absolutely correct about this lots of people are willing to you know part of what goes into the price they're willing to pay is the larger sensibility or mission of a company um you know with skin is skin products how much of it is like okay this product if you didn't know you know if it didn't have a wrapper on it or something like that would people still be buying it how much of it is joining a movement through your consumption patterns and things like that and could you talk a little bit about you know how that plays into the mission that you're pursuing here right okay so nick i think the best way to and maybe i'm just gonna for people listening because i do know that maybe some of your audience might be biased against the conscious capitalism i because i see it all the time i just came back from a conference in london when people on stage were completely bashing conscious capitalism not understanding what i think i think not understanding what it is so let me maybe just make that differentiation of people listening to us because i think it's important um you know the problem with the concept of conscious capitalism is that um you can say the same words depending on where you're where where you're taking your cues from it might mean something very different so conscious capitalism a lot of people i know on the libertarian side really kind of make fun of it and um you know some people on the conservative side also make fun of it um they make fun of the conscious part of conscious capitalism when we say conscious capitalism and also some of them flat out have an adverse reaction to it and i think for them they're having an adverse reaction to it because they're understanding conscious capitalism the way the philosophers would think of it and the way the philosophers would think of conscious capitalism is very different from us you know people like john or me we call ourselves bleeding heart libertarians we are people who came from the left uh we don't reject um the desires of a left to see a more fair you know society a society where you know our weakest are still you know taken into account where our minorities are not left to suffer we still believe in those in those in those principles of life and that's self part of philosophy so so but the problem is when so people like us we still are cap we are capitalists still we still believe in the markets in order to solve our problems any problem but the what the philosophers understand for them you know conscious capitalism is this concept where yes we're going to use business supposedly to tackle problems including social problems but the way they understand it is the state has a say in it has a say in how the business is actually going to use its practices to actually push for you know a better a better world and the best way to think of maybe those people's theory is esg esg very much you know it's it's a manifestation of that viewpoint which i can understand i'm a big big um against esg's as they stand but what esg is trying to the end goal that esg is trying to solve i am still on board i still believe that it's a good it's a good thing to protect mother earth whenever possible as a matter of fact she's one of stakeholders of unconscious capitalism so i still believe in all of that but where we defer is how it works the conscious capitalists who think who are more your your philosopher type they think the state should have a role in that so the state should a come up with the issue of the day and also come up with how it's going to be taken care of how how your business is going to take care of that so maybe impose more terrorists maybe impose more more licensing maybe impose all types of things supposedly to end on the good um on the good result of having help solve the problem where the conscious capitalist a la john mackey a la michael strong a la me by the way they co-founded uh conscious capture michael and john yes and michael is your husband michael is my husband for disclosure so the way we all look at this is it is we believe that business is the greatest force for good beyond just hiring people and all that's the greatest force for good and we believe that um uh as a business uh and as an entrepreneur as somebody who's going to start a business we believe that um if you basically that we but but it is not anybody's to decide on the issue of the day you my god the entrepreneur you nick the entrepreneur you decide what is your issue of the day if um and also as the customer right yes that's where it's going to come in the customer so but you you start you wake up and you're like i'm i'm fed up with um the fact that and this is a great company for example televerte it's a conscious capitalist business televerte out of arizona i believe they basically are very upset with the fact that um after you have been incarcerated you have paid your duties used to society you went to jail you spent your time you did your thing especially here they focus on women and because they've been previously incarcerated they come out and most of these companies when you go in there's a box you have to check have you been previously incarcerated and then the truth is when and you have to answer the truth because you know you're under oath and the truth is most people when they see that i'm sorry but consciously or not it's vertical selection they pass on you that's not fair that's not fair i believe in redemption people deserve a second and a third chance if they show up for it but in many cases it's it's denied to them denied to them so here you have a founder televerte televerte who says this is wrong so this person could continue and maybe doing some policy reform work at the state level all they want that's fine maybe they're doing it but they said we believe with business we can get there faster let us show that there is nothing wrong with previously incarcerated people by hiring them having a thriving business from it and all of that and people who actually support those values and that's the other word value see they talk about profit but for us it's about value maximization and of course if you maximize value it's the profit will just follow eventually it's the timeline that you're looking at that might be different so in this case they came this company said we are the our way of ban the box is we're not going to ask but we're going to ban the box at our own level and we're not going to wait for anybody to do this and then they did that and guess what we presented this at Conscious Capsule and they were talking about what they do because that's what we do during the summit people talk about what they've been doing what's their issue of the day and how they're using their business to really push the agenda forward and not wait for anyone we're not going to wait for the state to ban the box we're going to do it ourselves right now in business and guess what now many companies are buying into by ban the box so that's that's a cheetah a cheetah mentality right where you don't wait let me um as um we wrap up i wanted to ask a question we did we didn't really get to it but you know the life story that you tell is fascinating you were born in senegal your parents moved to europe for economic opportunities at a certain point you were brought to Germany then paris uh and france and then you came to the united states um can you talk a bit um about what it is like to be part of a diaspora um because that is you know many many people are part of different diasporas there's an african diaspora there's an irish diaspora which is massive there are far more people of irish descent living outside of ireland than there were and you know in the country in 1841 and things like that um talk a little bit about the benefits and the the costs of being part of a diaspora if you would well i like to say that diaspora people we're in a way we're mutants we're mutants because and uh we bring good things so we bring things that are not maybe so good so basically the best way to think about diaspora is um think about you know um we are the ones who actually got to go and see something else but as as what as when it is whenever it is the case it means that uh you're going to mute some some uh mutation is going to start to happen right and somehow you're going to come up with this interesting mix where you decide what you keep from your original traditions roots and all of that and you also surely pick up along the way from the other from your host nation your host culture and cross pollination starts to happen and it makes for a very um different person i'm not going to say it's a better person it's a it's a worse person it's just a different person it mutated sometimes before better sometimes it can be for worse it depends but um that's what we are because and for me i explained it in the book i think um it's people who have been in the diaspora more like uh me we need to remember that and remember that we belong we're basically um a mutant species in a way if i can say that um because we cannot claim to be in my case i cannot claim to be 100% Senegalese most i mean yeah i'm 100% Senegalese my two parents are from Senegal they actually even had the same name before even being married and it's not the same not because we have the same tribe or anything but it is what it is so you can say i'm a 100% what you know yeah so in our case um i tried to tell people you you have to remember that and have the the the humility of what that means and humility doesn't mean that it's a bad thing but it's just being humble to recognize that you're not 100% Senegalese you're not 100% French in my case you're not 100% American because i also hold both cities and ships i am just something different and but most importantly my role is to try because i'm different because i'm a mutation between both i now my role and my my duty becomes to be a bridge a bridge between two societies but might not otherwise understand each other better and my role is to us whenever i go back and forth to either sides to bring to the other side the very best of the side i left behind that they don't know of especially so that's the role of a diaspora that's what being a diaspora means that's uh fascinating thank you for that um what is the atlas network and uh what do you do for them to promote or how are they promoting prosperity in Africa yeah so the atlas network is the largest organization of free market pink tanks in the world um so everywhere around the world you see a free market pink tank they're there and what what i love about atlas networks so in the in the in the freedom movement my my love for them has to do with the fact that they're the ones who very much focus on international issues and international and not to say that you know being focused on the u.s or in europe is not a good thing um being focused on the u.s not a good thing that's not what i'm saying but but um it gets plenty of support where them they really made it that international is a big big big part of what they do um so that's my first um my first uh you know vote of appreciation for atlas network the other thing i love about atlas network is um that unlike so many places they going back they don't decide the issue of the day for them it's about where you know about depending the principles of freedom understanding that you know it's all to serve human flourishing and that's another thing too i feel like with them i really hear this concept of human flourishing they're the ones i'm telling you the left has abandoned us the left has abandoned the poor and places like you know um uh atlas network has not abandoned us they're there and more importantly they're working with us on our own terms when atlas you know invest in a partner that's what we call the think tanks that you know we work with when they invest in them it's not atlas imposing the agenda on them like it is the case with so many nonprofits out there or the united nations the imf the world bank organizations especially those guys so atlas says atlas basically somebody from let's say africa because the center for african prosperity focuses on africa that's where i'm at so somebody from africa decides to start a think tank or has a think tank that they would like to grow or they have a project that they would like or an initiative they would like to run within their think tank then they come to us and they say this is this is this is our views on this this is our views on prosperity on freedom in um in my country and um we believe that there is a something we can do about it like i'll take for example um uh the great lake we have this uh the name is escaping me right now but it's an organization the ones we invite we invest in in um in burundi and so they came up this one time and they said look um you know women's property rights are not being respected the best way for it to be to happen is to have it be part of a constitution so eventually they had a they had an initiative to make that happen and we financed them it was not it was not us saying you know like you had to work on these issues they came with an issue and they came with a plan and we financed them and then of course you know that we put back and how it worked but i think that nick might be overlooked by many but it's not lost on me because when you're african meaning you belong to you belong to the economically dominated uh part of the world uh it's not lost on us because when you're economically weak uh the rest of the world uses it to actually have you be a pawn for their own agenda maybe and and you can say maybe it's not wrong because everybody they say states and nations have no friends they only have interest so if because i'm weak they get to move their interest further the conscious captains and me might say it's not smart for you to do it this way have it win win win and it will be better but not everybody's gonna behave that way so this is where we are and so we are we are being told all the time what to do we're being told all the time what to believe uh when you look at the energy situation it's the same thing the west some some all of a sudden decides fossil fuels no more good we have to go cold turkey overnight almost in the in the you know in the grand scheme of things and um they're out there trying to promote trying to push that agenda down our throat if it was just promoting it even then you could say fine but it's like pushing it literally down our throat and if we don't even buy into it they will have the means to enforce it because thousands of miles away through the world bank through the IMF through all of these organizations they decide to actually act on this agenda by not financing the the the development of fossil fuels based infrastructure and they will use ESG as their you know principled and philosophy to support all of this stuff and so we have absolutely nothing to say compared to China and India who because they're doing much better than us get to tell them f off get out of our way we can't and even if we tell them get out of our way two things are going to happen to us one is that leader is probably going to be in trouble because they'll find a way to get him in trouble and two they're still going to do what they want to do so my whole thing here is um that's that's what so Atlas really gives a chance to the partners that we invest in give them a chance to set the agenda and most importantly execute on that agenda and I appreciate that very much and um this makes me remember something that I am really big on these days Nick something is going on but I don't think we're paying attention enough to and I think I know why we're not paying attention to this but let me tell you what's going on and I really would like for the libertarians to wake up because I am appalled at how quiet they have been about this in a tiny country in Latin America great disaster is about to happen so as you know many countries have signed the new york you know the new york treaty arbitration which is all about we are going to respect international arbitrations meaning we don't expropriate people meaning you know when something is signed we respect it now um as you can imagine many after many um latin american nations are part of it you know central american kafta are part of kafta you know the kafta trade yeah so anyway so a country like Honduras has signed that so they're supposed to respect that a country like Honduras and you could imagine this to be almost any country in Africa and that's a reason why I talk about it because to me it's going to be very interesting to see how america decides to settle on this so you have an organization that has done a startup city is there prosper right okay so since the new government took over it seems like their big plan is to renegade on you know having signed such a treaty because of some issues they might have with prosper but again regardless for me it's like you signed a deal you said you're going to be part of a new york treaty that is going to support this now when you have crazy governments trying to do whatever they're trying to do me i'm sitting there and once again saying governments do what they do but the people stand to suffer the people of Honduras deserve better i think i hear it from all of them saying they want prosperity because last time i checked no one wants to live continue in prosperity so when you have a startup city for all the reasons i explained earlier what the role and goal of a startup city is is to bring you know the enabling environment but businesses aka wealth creators need in order to create wealth they show up and they're going to do their work and then all of a sudden because of ideological reasons you're going to say we don't want to support this we're going to add in in in doing that we're actually going to do something that is going to renegade on our commitment to the concept of rule of law right this is a problem and it would if it was just that side doing it um the government's there you know there's a reason why our government our government there is there is a reason why our countries are where they are you all know why so startup cities actually offer these countries a chance to still attract international investors because they're saying okay on your own we don't really trust what's going on because you're not offering the best business environment reason why i don't want to come but you managed to carve out an area where we can we can do this so we're coming it would be one thing that you have governments who have other priorities do this to themselves but it's another thing to me nick when you have someone like senator warren and i'm using her name senator warren people like kori bush and people like bernie sanders siding with um a government in this case the government of honduras helped by a government like venezuela helped by a government like kuba about basically senator warren said it is okay to expropriate us investors in this case that's a letter that she championed the u.s government right now is telling the honduran government it is okay for you to renegade on rule of law it is okay for you to renegade on the treaty of new york that you signed and also on the kafta you know terms that you signed on this is a terrible precedent if something like this goes it's not just prosper that suffers this time and by the way we'll go and do something else somewhere else this this this idea these ideas are ideas for our time it will be done somewhere it's just a matter of time and we're working on it i'm definitely taking this to africa but my point is we all don't have to be super smart people to imagine what something like this will do to the government of honduras even if and when prosper is gone no one no one is going to want to invest in in honduras anymore meanwhile we have the same senator warren opening her big mouth screaming all over the earth her and the you know being saying when it comes to the immigration issue i say senator warren do you not know what solves immigration do you not because by doing what you're doing get ready to be to for all hondurans to keep coming you think you thought you had caravans before soon it's going to be you know more than caravans no because if people are not able to accomplish prosperity on their land people are going to know what people should do i don't blame immigrants for trying to leave where they are to go to a better place it's not ideal it's not recommended but my parents had to do it and many more after them did it and will continue doing it this is what humans do your ancestors did that nick when they came to this country many ancestors okay so if senator warren i think she needs to hear it from us we don't want her sanctuary cities thank you very much we don't want the sanctuary you want the charter cities yes we want the startup cities we want the startup where we can thrive where we can build life at home where we can check out our babies in the backyard you know get to return around we see them where grandmas and and and and and and grandchild get to live together and be raised together that's what we want given a chance most of us would not want and would not need to be at your shores at the border we would not we never would so senator warren are you in for a real deal or not and i am calling her out specifically this is i don't even know what to it i'm just so i'm so sad nick when i'm not upset i'm very sad because this is what they have done and you remember when you were telling me about the aid earlier while they're doing this the world bank getting ready nicely to sign a nine hundred dollar million nine hundred million eight package for Honduras and then people wonder they're like then you know they say my god you write this book and you say we need enabling business environment but it's gonna be up to these governments to do it and if they don't want to do it what can we do because we're america whatever what do you want us to do to intervene i'm like no no that's not what i'm asking for but when but when it's happening and you the government have nothing better to do than to support these fuggish behavior we have a problem and when also on top of that you're using your arms like the world bank the imf in places like that to reward almost bad behavior we've got a problem what do you think is going to happen what do you think your nine hundred million dollar eight package going to do but it hasn't done over these past few years what what what do you think that kicking out people who have attracted hundreds of businesses in this area building all of these jobs what do you think is going to happen once you kick them out and on top of that you send the signal to everybody but you're not safe to invest in the wealth creators are going to leave or they're not going to come and the poverty is going to stay and people are going to try to escape the poverty it means they're going to come to your to your border but maybe that's what you wanted senator Warren maybe that's what you need from us maybe the only thing you need from us is to be a political pawn because maybe if there was not an immigration crisis maybe a lot of your election your voters would simply not even listen to you maybe that's all you care about us but if that's the case we're going to have to put it on the table and be real about this i'm sick and tired of this neck this needs to change i'm sick and tired of the lip service we're being paid because on one end they say oh we don't want to intervene yeah i don't want you to intervene but you're intervening and in the most pervasive way so what are we doing what are the libertarians doing what is everybody doing what is anybody who believes in the rule of law doing that's the question for you nick all right what are we doing well i know that reason foundation is going to be having a conference at prospara next year among other things so we're you know supporting startup cities and uh and exploring what works and what doesn't uh we are going to end it there uh megawade thanks so much for talking to reason the new book is the heart of a cheetah how have we been how we have been lied to about african poverty and what that means for human flourishing megawade thanks so much for talking thank you so much nick it was a pleasure