Part I

Part 1

| 3 INTRODUCTION God blessed me with exceptional intellectual abilities and a savvy, determined mother. She never let the constant weight and disappointment of poverty defeat us. Because of her love and presence, I went on to graduate from Harvard and Oxford and to make more money than I ever dreamed possible. We Americans love to tell rags-to-riches stories like mine to placate the masses. If he can do it, why can’t you? American culture over-emphasizes tales of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” as a means of convincing us all that if you’re poor, it’s your fault. Whenever I say the words “End Poverty,” I get eye rolls and skepticism. People will say, “There will always be poverty,” if they’re nice, or I’ll hear, “You must be a special kind of stupid,” from the more aggressive types. “I’ll tell you how to end poverty, get a job!” is another favorite quip, even though the vast majority of poor individuals, even the homeless, do indeed have a job—often more than one. Why does the topic of poverty elicit such strong emotional responses from us? “Life isn’t fair, and it never will be,” or “This isn’t a perfect system, but it’s the best there is,” are common refrains. As a nation, we have a collective sense of defeat when it comes to over a tenth of our citizens living in abject poverty. We’ve had poverty and hardship among us for so long, we can’t even imagine a world without it.

4 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. Poverty falls into two types: relative and absolute. Relative poverty is having less than someone else. I may have a place to sleep at night, but it pales in comparison to your mansion, so relative to you, I’m poor. Absolute poverty has nothing to do with comparisons. When you lack the basic necessities for human existence that we all learn about in kindergarten (food, clothing, shelter, and transportation), then you’re suffering from absolute poverty. It doesn’t matter if you’re the only person in the world starving or if everyone on the planet is starving along with you. Starvation is terrible no matter how you slice it. I’m only concerned with absolute poverty in this book. When you reframe the question in this way, asking how we can end poverty simply becomes: How do we make sure that every household has the bare minimum food, clothing, shelter, and transportation they need to survive? Even with this clarification, Americans will usually reject that it’s possible for us to have a capitalist society where everyone is fed, clothed, housed, and able to get to and from work. How on Earth did we get here? To understand how an entire civilization became convinced that someone has to starve for someone else to eat, we have to take a deep dive into our history, cultural narratives, and personal biases. Rest assured, the solution to end poverty is the easy part. I’ll explain in the following pages. The difficult part is that, simply put, we’ve been thoroughly convinced that sharing is a bad thing. We see neither the value nor the obligation to help our neighbors. This begs the question: if we believe sharing and helping one another are bad things, then what’s the point of society? We have gotten so lost in our pursuit of individual wealth that we have forgotten that the fundamental purpose of civilization is to care for one another. People form communities and broader societies because they intuitively know they can be better off together than separate. Our likelihood of survival skyrockets when we work together in collaborative units. Yet somehow, the words ‘cooperation’ and ‘help’ have become triggering for many Americans. We believe so much in individualism that we’re willing to spend trillions of dollars treating the symptoms of poverty each year, rather than directly tackling the root

INTRODUCTION | 5 cause of it. A lack of money. In a modern economy, absolute poverty exists for one simple reason: people don’t have enough money to buy the essentials. In allowing people to live in extreme poverty, we as a society ultimately pay the high price of shelters, jails, foster care, street cleaning, property damage, medical costs, theft, and more. I often hear in response, “I don’t have time to worry about other people’s problems. I’ve got too many of my own.” It’s challenging for many of us to grasp that we don’t live in isolation. When we allow people to go hungry or to live on the streets, their problems quickly become our problems when our streets are covered in filth, crime seems to be everywhere, and taxes continue to rise without any clear benefit to most American families. I hope to show you that making a small, unconditional investment in every American household will pay incredible dividends to us all, not just to the poor. I’ll take you on my own personal journey to show just how much talent and money we allow to waste away. I want you to realize poverty isn’t someone else’s problem, and it’s not unsolvable—so, let’s fix it. A solution is long overdue. When you’re done reading this book, I’m confident you’ll see that we can soon abolish absolute poverty in the United States, and we can make trillions of dollars doing it.

| 7 CHAPTER 1: THIS CAN’T BE LIFE It was always the same story while I was growing up. “Darryl, we’d like you to take a special test for us.” Then would come the questions. “Does your mother read to you at home?” “Did someone help you write this story?” “Can you write another one in front of us?” Teachers always had a hard time believing that, somehow, I might be really smart. I don’t blame them for their surprise at my intelligence. I was a poor black kid. I didn’t fit into their idea of ‘genius’. The thing is, intelligence exists in equal ratios in every community, regardless of income or race. The difference is how that intelligence is nurtured. I grew up around all kinds of smart people, but one by one, they all flickered out. Poverty has a way of smothering even the brightest flames. As the burden of life becomes increasingly heavy, kids stop being curious, stop caring about school, and give up hope for a better future. We start life with resilience, but we all have our breaking points. A person can only take so much disappointment, and growing up poor is a life of constantly being told ‘no.’ I decided at a young age that it wasn’t God watching over my family: it was my mother. And I could see the life being drained out of her as she tried her best to do it all. It wasn’t God who kept me safe, it was those few friends who’d join me in a fight, even when we were outnumbered and

8 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. sure to lose. If there was a God, I reasoned, why did he think it was okay that my mother had to work so hard every day for so little? Why did my family and the families of those around me have to suffer so much? The world was a cruel place, and I didn’t see where a benevolent God could fit. “What do you think happens when we die?” my sister asked one day when we were playing outside. “Nothing,” I replied, drawing with my stick in the dirt. “I think you die and that’s it.” I was five years old, and my sister was seven. We were a Christian family, but looking back, I think my logical young mind simply couldn’t reconcile itself with the concept of heaven when God so clearly played favorites. Being born poor felt like a curse that sucked the soul right out of me. Many in my community doubled down on their faith while I walked away from mine. No one was coming to save me or any of us. My parents got divorced when my mother was five months pregnant with me. At twenty-nine, she went from being a full-time homemaker (at my father’s behest) to becoming a single mom and the sole provider for herself and her four children. My mother was the only person who was always there for us. She worked tirelessly to feed, clothe, shelter, educate, and love us. She cried and struggled like everyone else’s parents, but she kept trying—and she never left. She did this all while never earning more than $30,000 a year, and most years we came nowhere close to that figure. As a child, I never thought we had it all that bad. Everyone around us was poor. On a relative basis, we seemed to be doing well. We missed a few meals here and there, but we never went more than a day without eating. Our clothes were used but clean. My mother did her best to keep her children at a safe distance from the chaos of our world, and when she wasn’t able to, we got through our trauma one way or another. Anyone who grew up poor will understand when I say that I grew up poor, but not dirt poor. Many of my friends, neighbors, and relatives weren’t so lucky. They grew up with nothing. Life was stressful. If any word can summarize poverty, it’s stress. You

CHAPTER 1: THIS CAN’T BE LIFE | 9 stress about rent. You stress about bills. You stress about food. You stress about losing hours. You stress about crime. You stress about the police. You stress about your children. You stress about your parents. You stress about health. You stress about life. You stress about death. Poverty is all-consuming. And it’s that way by design. Socio- economically speaking, if you want to keep the poor under control, you need to saddle them with overwhelming burdens. That way, they never have the time to question why so much is falling on their shoulders while so little falls into their coffers. My mother was no different than every other struggling single mother. She was tired, always tired. We share tales of incredibly strong black women who raise kids all by themselves as if they’re uplifting stories—but they’re not. I watched my mother cry, just like my aunts, my sisters, and all the other women doing the job of a village by themselves. It’s too much. Her life was an endless sacrifice. She never bought herself new clothes. She pretended she wasn’t hungry when there wasn’t enough food to go around. She didn’t sleep enough. She never went to therapy to heal her childhood traumas. She was able to make it through it all, and today is deservingly proud of everything she overcame in life, but she didn’t get the life she deserved because she had to do everything alone. Few things hurt the way seeing your mother in pain as a child hurt. I had a seriousness about my demeanor by the age of five that only poverty and struggle can manufacture. I tried my best to be strong and mature for my mother. I stayed out of trouble and did whatever I could to make life a little easier for her. I wasn’t a perfect kid by any means, but I always kept my mother in mind when I was making decisions, and I tried not to do anything to embarrass her. A lot of the silent trauma that existed in our family made outward affection difficult for us—as it does with many families—but we did our best to be there for one another. Although I can’t say I truly appreciated my mother’s love when I was a child. I’m talking about the kind of love that motivates someone to wake up every single day, catch a bus, go to a job they hate, catch another bus, come into a messy home with arguing

10 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. kids, clean up, cook, solve quarrels, and keep everyone alive. That level of love isn’t easy for a child to comprehend. I complained and was bratty about not getting cuddled and showered with the loving attention I thought families were supposed to give. I always respected my mother, but poverty kept us from having the warm relationship we should’ve had. She couldn’t pick me up and smother me with kisses or go outside and run around with me. She didn’t have time to do science projects with me or sit and talk about how things were going with my friends. A hard life made her incredibly tough and determined to keep her children healthy, out of trouble, and in school. But like most mothers playing the role of a village, she didn’t have much else to give after all of that. It wouldn’t be until adulthood that I understood and appreciated how much love my mother poured into all of us. I’ll never be able to thank her enough for that love. Ultimately, what my mom showed me was that you have to keep fighting, regardless of the circumstances you’re in. You must do whatever you can to get out of that situation. She accepted the burden of poverty but did everything she could to help her children find a way out of it. There isn’t much room for being a child when you’re poor. There’s so much burden saddling down every adult, the children are forced to step into their own almost immediately. Life is about survival; there’s no time for childhood innocence and love. Despite the stress we faced being poor, we didn’t live under a shadow of doom and gloom. I’ve always found poor folk to be a lot more fun than other groups. When you face that much struggle, you learn to smile and let it go. You try to appreciate the good moments and be grateful for what you have. Poor people are also some of the most generous people because they have so little to give; we understand the importance of community and will lend, give, and help out friends and family in whatever ways we can. I played outside with my friends every day from sunup to sundown. I never was enrolled in any camps or shuttled from one activity to the next.

CHAPTER 1: THIS CAN’T BE LIFE | 11 The morning routine was to gather all of my friends and find free ways to entertain ourselves, ideally without getting into too much trouble. We didn’t have family events often, but when we did, they were full of kids laughing, adults dancing, and an uncle with a watchful eye over the grill. All the adults treated us kids like we were their own, for better or worse, fully exercising their rights to both spank you and hug you afterwards. We all struggled, but at least in those early days we struggled together. Poverty is most tolerable when there’s a sense of community. At those rare gatherings, I’d play with the kids some, but it was only a matter of time before I’d start peppering the adults with questions. I wanted to know everything. How does a car work? What’s fire made of? How does Santa have time to get to every single house in one night? Why doesn’t the moon fall out of the sky? At home, my questions drove my mother crazy after a while. She had enough on her plate from the meat grinder of poverty without my endless queries. She did her best to humor me, but I would eventually wear her down and she’d tell me to go find something to do. Then, I’d go and bother my siblings. Being the youngest of four children, I had all the knowledge I could ever want within reach. I’d ask my brother to teach me how to wrestle, then bug my sister to teach me the Spanish alphabet again. I begged them to take me to school with them in the mornings. When they weren’t looking, I’d steal their books and struggle through them. I started off going to kindergarten in the housing projects where we lived. The public housing had a big open courtyard in the middle, surrounded by buildings with barred windows and unkempt lawns. I’m pretty sure whoever planned our projects based them on the architectural designs that were used to build prisons. No effort was made to create a visually appealing aesthetic. It had a negative impact on the area. No one cared about where we lived, and it showed. Residents in our neighborhood were deprived of a sense of pride in their home and community. City planners certainly weren’t concerned with ‘frivolous things’ like beautification initiatives in the housing projects. The neighborhood had a constant sense of tension. Everyone was dealing with too much stress,

12 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. too much trauma, and there was always a feeling that something could explode at any moment. In my neighborhood, everyone struggled. Poverty is a fully immersive experience because when you’re poor, you always deal with it. You don’t have the luxury of focusing on anything beyond survival. You can’t lift your head up long enough to think about personal fulfillment because you’re too busy trying to ensure your basic needs are met. I remember when I was young, if we ordered pizza, we’d have to walk several blocks away from our house to meet the delivery guy. He refused to come into our area because he’d been robbed too many times. When people are very poor, the urge to steal can be compelling. Even a few dollars from the cost of a pizza can make a big difference for people who are hungry. The neighborhood tension spilled into our kindergarten classroom. At school, the teachers spent most of their time trying to get kids to sit still or dealing with emergencies happening in their students’ homes. Kids would come to class hungry, neglected, abused, and dirty. Sometimes there were adults at home, sometimes there weren’t. I was lucky to have my mother and siblings, and they provided enough safety and stability in my life to keep me from falling into despair. Kids in my neighborhood didn’t have a nanny or caregiver constantly watching over them, but my friends and I always felt safe together. That didn’t mean scary things didn’t sometimes happen, though. I remember being about seven years old and was playing outside with my friends when a police cruiser pulled up. My friends and I took off running even though we weren’t doing anything wrong. I didn’t know why I was running, but I was afraid, and I had this sense that the police were bad. The officers rounded us up and made us all sit down for a lecture, cuffing us all for added effect. It was a scary experience, but I didn’t think much about it after the fact because it was just part of life in that neighborhood. It’s only when I got older that I realized how absurd the experience was. It’s not something that would ever happen in a wealthier community.

CHAPTER 1: THIS CAN’T BE LIFE | 13 As my mother fought and struggled to get a hand onto the economic ladder, we moved a lot. This instability makes it hard for poor communities to stay intact. Rampant increases in housing prices and gentrification eroded the one thing that made life bearable—community. I went to three different kindergartens, and by third grade, I’d attended eight different schools. I became accustomed to the routine of change. Once the teachers at each new school had sufficiently poked and prodded me, they’d call my mother and ask her permission to place me in a gifted and talented classroom, or to skip me up a grade or two. My mother cared about my social development and wanted me to be around others my own age, so she always went with the gifted classes. Those classes were a safe haven in the madness of the Indianapolis public school system. The kids were all bright and relatively well-behaved. The teachers could actually spend their time teaching. I can’t say much about the effect that pulling the fastest learners out of class had on the rest of the students, but it allowed me to learn at a pace that wasn’t as painfully slow. People are more likely to give opportunities to poor kids if they’re smart. At least that was my experience. My teachers all seemed to like me and would give me extra assignments because they knew I liked the challenge. They played their part in making sure my intellectual thirst was quenched. That usually meant giving me separate assignments or asking me to lead group projects. Sometimes I would read to the other students to give my teachers a break. I loved school. It had rules and structure. It was predictable. I thrived in environments where the tasks were concrete and hard work appeared to be rewarded.

| 15 CHAPTER 2: YOU CAN’T WIN, CHILD Caste systems are rigid social structures where a person’s culture, job opportunities, social status, neighborhood, income, and life expectancy are all determined by their birth status. In America’s caste system, to be born poor is to be in the lowest caste, whereas to be born poor and black means you’re an outcast. A ‘broke nigga’ in America is the equivalent of an untouchable in India. We love to talk about the American Dream, the idea that anyone in this country can make it to the top if they work hard enough, but the reality in America has been a lot more nightmarish. Our nation was built on an inescapable social hierarchy, with slavery as its foundation. Quite the opposite of allowing anyone to make it; being born with a drop of color in your skin ensured a life of servitude for more than four hundred years. Of course, things have improved, but not to the level Americans assume. The US falls behind Singapore, Austria, Japan, Ireland, the Czech Republic, South Korea, Lithuania, and a host of other countries in terms of social mobility measured by the World Economic Forum. This means where you start in America is typically where you’ll finish, especially if you’re born poor. And it should come as no surprise that social mobility for black boys born in America is by far the lowest of any demographic. When you’re poor, you’re taught to navigate welfare systems. You know how much money you can earn before you lose your housing

16 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. voucher. You know to make sure there are no adult males at your house if the housing authority visits. The systems are intended to keep poor people subservient and mired in poverty. You exert all your mental energy arguing with government bureaucrats that see you as subhuman rather than trying to see through the wool the system has placed over your eyes. You have many questions, but there are no good answers. You wonder things like, “Why are we supposed to take the lowest-paying jobs?” “How am I ever supposed to get out of poverty while making $10 an hour?” If you’re hoping a higher education will be your salvation, you ask yourself, “How am I supposed to pay $50,000 a year for college?” “How am I supposed to compete academically with kids hiring full-time tutors for every subject?” And as I got older, I asked myself, “How am I supposed to build capital when I have no money?” For most people living in poverty, the fact is, you can’t win. The game is rigged in ways that few poor people can even fathom, especially given the state of our public education system. Because of this, they focus on what they know—they focus on navigating poverty. I was one of the very few that had a realistic opportunity to escape, and that’s because I had my brain, my mother, and my teachers. Academic success came easily to me in those early years. My mother noticed and did everything she could to get us into better schools with more challenging curricula. In third grade, we moved into one of the best school districts in the city. Although we lived in one of the poorest corners of the district, that decision changed my life. Going to school there felt like I was being skipped ahead by two grades. The children at the new school were asked to think and I liked that. I adjusted to the higher expectations and performed exceptionally well, but I was soon back to feeling bored in class and in need of greater academic challenges. I had little patience in those days and always wanted to work at warp speed. I’d finish my work early, get bored, and start fidgeting and chatting with those around me who hadn’t yet completed their assignments (the most trouble I ever got into). Luckily, my teachers didn’t slap me with a attention deficit disorder label and try to medicate me into obedience as

CHAPTER 2: YOU CAN’T WIN, CHILD | 17 is done to many young children across America. The teachers saw that I needed bigger challenges and adjusted where they could, allowing me to take advanced courses and do independent study projects that stretched my limits. I often felt bored with school, but being bored at one of the best schools in the state meant I had a future. In that new school district, I began to realize how much life in my neighborhood was different from that of my classmates. My school peers were solidly middle class at a minimum. They’d never eaten mustard sandwiches. They weren’t at all familiar with the rules and guidelines of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC), the Electronic Benefits Transfer (EBT), or the Housing Choice Voucher Program (commonly known as Section 8). My classmates had never been to a neighborhood like mine. Most never would. They didn’t have incarcerated family members or friends. Cops never harassed them. They never had their electricity or water turned off. It’s an understatement to say the new school was a culture shock for me, but I was able to experience some of the advantages of wealth, namely access to a better education in the new school district, safety, and higher expectations. Yet, I was still an outsider, and many of the perks were still beyond my reach. I loved basketball almost as much as school, but you needed to pay $60 a year to play on organized teams. Since we didn’t have that kind of extra money lying around, and we didn’t have a car to get to practices or games, I was unable to participate. That was about the time when I began to understand that money was intrinsically linked to quality of life. For a kid, having at least a little money meant being able to play organized sports, learning how to play a musical instrument, and getting to go on school trips. While not having any disposable income at all meant sitting on the sidelines, watching wealthier kids enjoy those (and other) opportunities. To have a chance at living life instead of watching others do it, I hustled kids on the basketball court, sold candy, washed cars, mowed

18 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. lawns, fixed houses—anything to keep from being poor and on the bottom of the ladder. I always had some entrepreneurial plan percolating at the back of my mind. I used my earnings from selling newspaper subscriptions to buy packs of gel pens, which I’d then sell individually for a small profit to the kids at school. As I became more business savvy, I started letting other kids sell the pens for me, thereby increasing my sales base. In low-income neighborhoods, high-paying job opportunities don’t exist. You don’t have relatives to call on that can get you interviews. You can’t go work for your father’s construction company or your mother’s medical practice. All that tends to be available are minimum wage jobs, like collecting carts from grocery store parking lots, working a cash register, or selling drugs (usually not making much more than minimum wage with a lot more risk). Or maybe you decide to rob and steal for your dignity rather than languishing away, waiting for the manager of some dead-end job to call you in for an interview. That’s not how things worked for kids in my advanced classes. Their parents were doctors, lawyers, accountants, or worked in some other well-paying profession. Those kids never came to school hungry, never saw an eviction notice on their doors, and never watched all the men in their lives get carted off to jail for trying to feed their families. They began their lives with opportunity, and the world both expected them to succeed and ensured they did. Economic mobility is mostly a myth. In a merit-based world, how much money your parents make would have nothing to do with your future income. Everyone’s talent and drive would determine their lot in society. We can ignore for a moment the absurdity of assuming someone’s IQ or vertical leap should determine whether they have a warm place to sleep at night and food in their belly, as a meritocracy would warrant. We don’t live in a merit-based society in America: we are an aristocracy. In America, your zip code tells you nearly everything you need to know about what will happen in your life. First, your zip-code determines how your neighborhood will be policed, and whether you’ll be born with

CHAPTER 2: YOU CAN’T WIN, CHILD | 19 a parent—most likely your father—incarcerated. Your zip code will tell you what job opportunities your parents have (or don’t), whether they have any formal education they can pass onto you, how high their stress levels are, how clean and safe your streets will be, and whether you’ll go to bed and school hungry. None of this is your choosing or your fault, but it’s your fate nonetheless. Second, our schools are funded based on property taxes. So the quality of our education, the primary way that we think of moving up in American society, is determined by how expensive of a home our parents can afford. Of course, the worst performing schools are almost universally in the poorest neighborhoods, and the neighborhoods with the highest performing public schools cost the most to live in. Nothing is more important for student achievement than teacher quality, and the teachers in low-income communities are asked to teach students facing the greatest difficulties while receiving the lowest pay. It’s no surprise then that the best teachers often wind up at the wealthiest schools. Third, social networks determine financial success. As the old adage goes, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. And when you’re poor, you tend to only know poor people. Having friends in low places doesn’t get you very far in a fiercely competitive business environment. Wealthy children go to wealthy schools from kindergarten onwards, often paying as much as $60,000 a year on tuition for K-12 schooling. I never quite understood this until I bluntly asked a good friend’s dad why he was willing to pay so much money for his kids’ educations when there were free public schools that were academically rigorous in neighborhoods he could easily afford to live in. “Darryl, I’m a businessman,” he began as he grasped my shoulder. “When I go watch the kids play sports, I’m always sitting next to two other parents who can afford to pay $60,000 a year for their kids to finger paint.” The networking alone made the price tag worthwhile. When you’ve been having playdates with the CEO of Apple’s kids since you were toddlers, getting that first job out of college in Cupertino isn’t so hard.

20 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. Fourth, and the most ignored in American society, your zip code determines how much wealth you’ll inherit. Wealth is incredibly unevenly distributed in America and the world. If the human population were one hundred people, two would have half of the wealth. We speak mostly about wealthy people being self-made, but that’s hardly ever the case. The vast majority of wealthy people aren’t famous, don’t want to be on any public ranking lists, and they inherited their wealth. Capitalism is called that because of the absolute importance of owning capital in the system. Your zip code will determine if you inherit $50 million from your parents or debt and funeral costs. Nothing determines your long-term financial outcomes more than inheritance— not even close. It takes money to make money, as they say. And when you’re born rich, the interest on your inheritance will generate more money while you’re still in your diapers than most poor people will earn in their lifetimes. When I explain these unfortunate truths, people often get angry. “So, are you saying there’s no hope for poor kids?” No, there is hope, just not in the ways people assume. Yes, exceptional people will have an opportunity to reach levels of incredible wealth in America. But the vast majority of us aren’t LeBron James, and don’t possess extreme talents that society puts a high value on (being the kindest friend, best mother, best tomato picker, etc. won’t lead to any financial wealth). We shouldn’t be designing society just for the—by definition, few—humans who have rare skills. Instead, we should aim for a society where everyone has the basics, and those that want to invest the energy can have the opportunity to receive exceptional rewards. The answer is not for us to fight for a single seat at the table. We just need more chairs. Our current system is designed for the rich to stay rich and the poor to stay poor. We point to the few instances when someone goes from rags to riches to mask the fact that for the vast majority of us, if you’re born in rags, you’ll die in rags. I began to develop two separate personas as I continued to straddle

CHAPTER 2: YOU CAN’T WIN, CHILD | 21 the different worlds of wealth and poverty at school and at home. I heard people say that money couldn’t buy you happiness, but I knew it could buy fresh food, a car, a bus pass, access to healthcare, books, a graphic calculator, a computer, or an instrument to learn music—all things we typically can’t afford as poor Americans. Given the consequences of being on the bottom of a cruel, hierarchical world, like any rational poor person, I decided to do whatever it took to get my hands on some capital, social or financial.

| 23 CHAPTER 3: THEY MADE US HATE OURSELVES AND LOVE THEIR WEALTH While the economic consequences of America’s caste system are obvious, the social and psychological damages done by it are hidden. Humans make mental associations all the time. A snake, for example, is not intrinsically good or bad. In some cultures, people associate snakes with treachery, while in others, the serpent represents health and vitality. Because of these very different mental associations, people in these two types of cultures will have polar opposite emotional responses when you show them an identical picture of a snake. In America, greed is good. It’s impossible to overstate the importance of wealth and its associated status in a materialistic society. Exorbitant wealth is seen not only as good, but as the ultimate good. And since wealth is good, by association, anyone with wealth is also good. When society values Birkin bags, if you’re rich, you buy one of those and reap the positive associations people have with that bag. If fashion shifts and people now value rare jewels, you can buy those too. Paintings, names on buildings, stolen cultural artifacts, exotic animals, land, whatever is the new thing to love, a wealthy person can buy it, and people will associate that ‘good’ thing with wealthy people. If wealth enables you to buy whatever material item is being idolized at the moment, then being wealthy in and of itself becomes holy.

24 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. Fancy clothes are good, and I have fancy clothes. Expensive cars are good, and I have expensive cars. Mansions are good, and I have three. If I have all of these ‘good’ things, then by association, I must be good too. And if I have the most things, then I must be the best person. In America, we worship the rich because we worship things, and rich people have all the things. Rich people are good by definition—good in a materialistic society. The opposite is also true. If having expensive things means you’re good, then not having expensive things means you’re, at best, not good. Personality traits are not the social currency, so being emotionally available, dependable, or patient pale in comparison to being rich. You struggle to feel special or unique in any way. When character is valued less than things, then the inherent diversity and uniqueness of us all gets ignored, leaving the vast majority of society members feeling basic, uninteresting, and unloved. You aren’t bad per se, just not good. For poor people, the consequences of living in a materialistic society are damning. While not having expensive things isn’t good, causing someone to have less things is downright bad. Poor people living in absolute poverty (defined as having insufficient means of purchasing food, clothing, shelter, or transportation) have needs, not things. If you befriend a poor person, they’re likely to ask you for help quite often, as they can’t provide their families with the essentials for human life. This means you’ll have less material wealth as you socialize with more poor people. The Bible summarizes the plight of the poor perfectly with the proverb, “The poor are despised even by their neighbors, while the rich have many friends.”1 When you’re poor in a materialistic society, you are bad. The psychological harm caused by having your being defined as bad in society is often insurmountable. Despising humans because of attributes assigned to them by birth is nothing new. However, blatant bigotry based on race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexuality is universally condemned in 1 Proverbs 14:20

CHAPTER 3: THEY MADE US HATE OURSELVES AND LOVE THEIR WEALTH | 25 mainstream American society (at least publicly. Behind closed doors we still have a long way to go). Blasting the poor as filthy, lazy vermin is still very much in vogue. “I’ve got a plan to end poverty,” announced a highly educated, very wealthy man sitting next to me at dinner. Given that I’d just mentioned my efforts to end poverty, I was interested in hearing his pitch. “It’s called the Zamboni plan,” he continued. “I take a Zamboni and run over all the homeless people in America.” He found his joke quite funny, and a few others joined him with a chuckle. The rest simply pretended as if nothing was said and moved on to the next topic. Suggesting at the dinner table that we commit genocide on the poor did not elicit even the slightest reprimand from this group of successful, well-mannered professionals educated in the most elite universities across the country. He never would have been allowed to say that about gay people or Mexicans, but it was perfectly acceptable to say about the poor and homeless. In elementary school, I became painfully aware of my poverty and was afraid it showed. I tried to change how I spoke, dressed, and behaved so I didn’t appear to belong to that class of people that everyone spoke so badly about. You know, those people. We hate poor people in America, so I learned to hate myself and those around me for being born poor. When poverty is despised, then anything associated with poor people is automatically categorized as bad in the collective cultural mind. Imagine feeling like everything about your culture—the way you dress, the food you eat, the way you speak, the home you live in, your hairstyles, your name, your hygiene, your etiquette, your humor—were all bad and something to be ashamed of. Unless you embrace the ‘badness’ of your clan, adopting a counter-culture mentality, your chances of having any genuine self-esteem are nil. The chest-pounding and violent posturing stereotypical of impoverished communities are typically little more than cries of mercy from a young man or woman begging to be valued, to be seen and loved as a human being. As a child, I didn’t understand all of this, so I hated my community

26 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. as much as the next person. I bought into the American narrative that we were all poor because we were somehow not good enough or not working hard enough. I told myself I was going to work my way out. I was going to matter. I saw how people looked at me when I told them where I lived or when they learned that my family didn’t own a car. I was humiliated whenever I slipped and let my poverty show, and it stung when I thought others noticed. I wanted out. I decided to master this rich, noticeably white world and prove my worth. I tried to advance socially in the obvious ways—being exceptional so people assumed someday my existence would matter. I leaned into being smart and worked on becoming more athletic. But any of these positive traits would be negated if I was seen as being poor, so I hid it the best I could. I never let kids from class come over to my apartment to study or hang out. I always pretended to live a few blocks down the street in a nicer neighborhood when being dropped off. At school, I waited until the lunch lines were empty so the other kids didn’t notice my free lunch card. I started to care about brand names, but there was no way I could afford them. “I want the new Penny Hardaway shoes,” I told my mother, completely unaware that these plastic sneakers cost $175. “Sure, if they have them at PayLess,” she replied as we walked to the store to buy my school shoes for the year. That wasn’t a no! Which was rare in those days when I asked for something. You can imagine my devastation when the lady working in the store reached down, rubbed my head, and gently told me, “We don’t carry name-brand shoes here.” We went home with cheap knockoffs. And the teasing started immediately when I got to school, most of it coming from other poor kids. We were taught to hate ourselves and were vicious in enforcing the rule amongst each other. I hid the hurt, as always, and responded with jabs about their tattered clothes or dirty homes as was the custom. We hardened each other with cruel humor and wit. The words that really hurt, we buried those deep in our psyche and

CHAPTER 3: THEY MADE US HATE OURSELVES AND LOVE THEIR WEALTH | 27 hobbled on. I didn’t make the mistake of buying imitation brands again. In the future, I’d go to Value City or T.J. Maxx to find discounted clothing due to some minor manufacturing defect to appear middle class. Still, I treated my shoes with the utmost care, knowing I couldn’t afford a new pair any time soon. At least those didn’t have any holes like my old pair. Of course, everyone knew that I was poor, but at least helped me pretend they didn’t know. Youth is all about building confidence. It’s impossible to do so when you feel your defining characteristic, being poor, is inherently bad. In American society, status is mostly about material wealth. When you have no money, all you can do is create false signals to appear well-off (or at least not as poor as you truly are) to have a shred of self-esteem. School was no longer fun; academic success became my way of achieving dignity and self-worth. Learning no longer had intrinsic value. It was a means to an end, a way to shake off the stench of poverty. I became increasingly self-conscious. I spent more and more time thinking about how others viewed me instead of doing the inner work to understand who I was as a person, what brought me joy, and how to show up for others. I still cared about people and expressed that through friendship, giving, volunteering in the community, and so on. But the purity was gone. I started a decade-long journey of whitewashing the poverty from my skin to metamorphose into a full-fledged human being. I clearly had a gift for learning. I made straight A’s with relative ease and won the respect of my classmates. Unlike in my neighborhood, where few people saw examples of how excellence in the classroom could lead to financial wealth, my schoolmates had the importance of academics pounded into their heads from day one. They weren’t any smarter than my friends at home, but they were better trained. And they knew that if they made it through college, they’d at least end up as well off as their parents were. With them, academic achievement was a badge of respect because of how it predicted future wealth. I learned that regardless of the economic class you were born into, the

28 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. average person is, well, average. If you started off life poor and you were average, you stayed poor. Graduating from high school didn’t guarantee anything and, most of the kids in my neighborhood didn’t know anyone who’d gone to college. We looked around us and saw poverty, that begot poverty, that begot even more poverty. For a poor kid of average abilities there was no hope of escaping it, so why would they waste their time trying? The middle-class kids often had parents with some sort of trade skill. Their parents were plumbers, electricians, teachers, etc. Their families weren’t dealing with the stress of just trying to make ends meet. Those kids had examples of what a relatively burden-free life could be, and how to get there. The average middle-class kids knew they’d stay middle class. They just had to ensure they at least graduated from high school to obtain that lifestyle, which they mostly did. The rich kids were a different breed altogether. They were born on top and knew they would stay on top. Average or below average, it didn’t matter. They would inherit their parents’ wealth and could do as they pleased. They still had a pecking order and competition among themselves, but there was less room for them to move up, so they tended to be a less ambitious bunch. Americans, ironically, have this narrative about poor people being poor because they’re ‘lazy,’ but I always found the rich kids to be the laziest by far. And well, they could be. They had so much help and support, there was no chance they wouldn’t make it to college. Drug habits just meant a stint in rehab. They really had to try hard to end up not rich. For those kids, social status was mostly inherited. If your family had the most money, then you were the most popular. Everyone had some money and some status, so the tension caused by the lack of basic human necessities wasn’t present. In my new school, kids didn’t use violence as a tool to work out their differences. Words and ostracizing were their weapons of choice. They would gossip about each other, stop talking to someone who upset them for a few weeks or spread nasty rumors. No one ever got beaten up or killed for any of that. It was just kids emotionally

CHAPTER 3: THEY MADE US HATE OURSELVES AND LOVE THEIR WEALTH | 29 abusing one another for status. Their problems and in-fighting seemed trivial to me, but that was my new world, and I had to adjust. If I could deal with the problems of poverty at home, then I could play their social games at school. Knowing I’d never be valued by the rich kids caught up in the money game, I gravitated toward the nerds and the athletes. My athletic abilities were nowhere near my intellectual gifts, but I figured I might as well hedge my bets. It also didn’t hurt that my friends at home valued athletics and the potential riches sport could bring, so by doing well at both school and sports, I’d be able to be ‘good’ in both worlds. I didn’t grow up with money, but I had several extreme advantages in my ascent from poverty. I could effortlessly absorb huge amounts of information, and I loved to learn. I had a mother that cared about education, and I went to a great school. I had very bright siblings who were able to teach and protect me. School was clearly my ticket out. I decided to be a doctor. I liked the predictability and structure of science and wanted the wealth and prestige that came with being a physician in the US. Adults all nodded in approval when I said I wanted to be a pediatric cardiologist. I’d help kids and make tons of money doing it. It was a lofty goal, but practical enough. My dream, though, was basketball. Despite my athletic skills being nowhere near my academic abilities, it was hard to resist the allure of someday being a pro athlete. I have a genuine love for basketball that still lives in me to this day, but I’d be lying if I said the wealth and status that came along with being a professional athlete weren’t major motivations for me back then. The media mostly provides kids like me with grossly unrealistic examples of people that started off with nothing and went on to make hundreds of millions of dollars in professional sports. A total of only sixty players worldwide are drafted into the National Basketball Association every year, even though over half a million kids will play high school basketball in the US—nearly every one of those kids believes they’ll go pro.

30 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. I know I did. Kids in poor communities countrywide bet their lives on an outcome with a lower probability than winning the lottery. And the adults encourage it. There are far more adults willing to mentor and nurture excellent athletes than there are who want to develop excellent students. That’s because we value athletics as a society over intelligence. So, despite my obvious advantages, all I really wanted to do was be like Mike. All of this was magnified post-puberty. Suddenly, social status meant even more as we all began jockeying for partners. When I finally got old enough to play for school teams (you don’t usually pay to play at your school), some great coaches took me under their wings. I’d always worked hard in school, but in sports, I had to push myself even further because I wasn’t the most talented, and I had a very late start with high-level, organized sports. From my playground days, I was a better basketball player than most kids my age, but high school basketball in Indiana is a different monster. And my high school was a perennial powerhouse—one of the top basketball teams in the nation. I had to scratch and claw just to make the team. The feedback loop was incredibly positive and being poor didn’t matter all that much anymore. I got way more love and attention for playing basketball than I ever did for my scholastic achievements, and I bathed it in. Girls liked me, teachers wanted to talk to me about our games, even strangers stopped me in the grocery store to ask for an autograph or to share their analysis of last week’s game. Finally, I’d stumbled into a bit of social capital. I started to stand up straight, speak more directly, and felt a sense of pride in who I’d become. I felt I was earning my humanity. I poured everything into being a student-athlete, getting up at 5:00 a.m. to work out before school, and staying up until midnight to finish my homework. I say this not to encourage others to follow in my footsteps, but to point out how absurdly difficult it is to make it out of poverty in America, even when you have huge advantages like a high IQ, great teachers and coaches, and a 6’3” frame.

CHAPTER 3: THEY MADE US HATE OURSELVES AND LOVE THEIR WEALTH | 31 We had outstanding basketball and weight training coaches and athletic trainers. Follow the dollars and you’ll see what a society truly cares about (the highest-paid public employee in a state is usually the head coach of the basketball or football team). Knowing all of this, I gave everything I had to mold myself into a decent player. Luckily, I had help along the way. One coach in particular constantly pushed me to my limits. He was somebody who really cared about his students as individuals and wanted us to show us that the only thing that could stop us was our own self- limiting beliefs. We didn’t believe him, of course; we knew the world wasn’t fair. But it was nice to have someone at least tell us that. With him, I’d train until I vomited, couldn’t walk, couldn’t stand up, and then train some more in a few hours. Despite me not being anywhere near the best player on our team, he invested his time in me because he saw my hunger. Because school up to that point had been relatively easy for me, basketball was the first time I ever had to dig into my inner depths. I became comfortable with pain and exhaustion. I needed to go beyond my mental boundaries just to have a chance to get on the floor. My coaches and trainers showed me what I was capable of and redefined tasks I once saw as impossible into just another good challenge. I improved drastically as a basketball player because of the investments that exceptional coach and others made in me. Years of training hard by myself were less effective than a month with these men teaching me the game. Wealthy children get this level of attention in every activity they do. Whether it’s sports, art, school, camping, or debate, they can afford world-class teachers to teach them and push them from the time they start walking and talking. Because of these incredible advantages, they significantly outperform relative to their skill levels because society invests so much more in them than we do in anyone else. As poor kids, we have to show elite promise before anyone will invest in us. As rich kids, your worth is a given.

32 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. Few people from my neighborhood had my experience of jumping from the bottom to the top tier of our local caste system. Everything went right for me in my school years. And it had to. People liked to use me as an example of the “American dream,” and I would always laugh it off. I was not naïve enough to buy into that fairy tale. I knew I was always one wrong step away from a life of poverty, and so were all my friends at home. When you’re poor, you get no second chances. If you’re caught with drugs, you get charged with intent to sell, and you’re tried in court as an adult. No questions asked. If you act out in class, no one asks what’s going on at home. You’re labeled a troublemaker and placed in remedial classes. If one of your parents gets sick, it was time to quit school and help at home. The older I got, the wider the gap between home and school grew. In the neighborhood where I lived, fighting evolved into shooting. People dropped out of school, started having kids as teenagers, and one by one lost their battles against poverty. None of my friends from class were living that life. Their biggest pressures were about upcoming tests or sporting events. And I no longer bought into the myth that hard work was the only thing that mattered. I saw proof every day that in America, the key to success in anything was being born with money. I knew if I wanted a better life, I had to be more talented and work twice as hard as my classmates who were born on second and third base. I was up for the challenge. When I learned to combine the intense work ethic I developed through sports with my natural academic gifts, there was no limit to what I could achieve in the classroom. With the help and support of so many people around me, I somehow avoided every potential landmine and pitfall I faced. Academically, I was qualified to gain entrance into every school in the country. Athletically, I was recruited by mid-level Division I programs. By that point, I knew I wasn’t on track to make it to the NBA. I just didn’t have the skills or raw athletic ability. In any endeavor, talent becomes increasingly important as you move into elite levels of competition (since

CHAPTER 3: THEY MADE US HATE OURSELVES AND LOVE THEIR WEALTH | 33 everyone is trying to be the best, hard work only gets you so far). I’d done everything in my power to position myself to receive a full scholarship, without which I never could’ve dreamed of attending college. Then, one day, out of the blue, I got a call from a Massachusetts phone number. “Hi, Darryl? This is the men’s basketball coach from Harvard.” My days at the bottom were done.

| 35 CHAPTER 4: FAR FROM A HARVARD STUDENT By the time I graduated from high school, I was finally starting to feel comfortable in my own skin. I’d somehow managed to become a decent basketball player on one of the top teams in the country. I worked several jobs to buy a car, go to prom, dress a little better, and eat out from time to time. I graduated with highest honors and accepted the offer to attend Harvard University on a full scholarship. I had solid footing on the ladder to success, whatever that was. Before starting my first semester at Harvard, I remember walking into Foot Locker with pride and stocking up on the oversized ‘tall t-shirts’ everyone from my neighborhood wore back then. I bought a pair of Air Jordan basketball shoes—something I’d never considered splurging on before—and a pair of Timberland boots. I had to make sure I didn’t step in any of that Boston snow and ruin my new footwear. It was one of the most expensive shopping days of my life, but I was on my way to Harvard, and I wanted to look the part. I didn’t have the money to ship any of my things to Boston, so I stuffed everything I owned into two suitcases I’d won at a carnival. One of my suitcases began to burst before I even reached the airport, but I figured it would still make the trip. At the airport, I placed that suitcase on the scale with dread and it weighed fifty-three pounds. I wasn’t about to pay an extra $25 for an overweight bag, so I took out my coat and a hoodie to get it under the fifty-pound limit. It was hot, but I decided

36 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. to wear them both since I didn’t have much money to spare and didn’t intend to leave them behind. I finally landed at Boston Logan airport and knew it was the beginning of a special chapter in my life. There, I thought, I would just be a student from Indianapolis; I would no longer be defined by where I grew up. I naively figured that from there onwards, all that would determine my fate was merit and my performance in school. In which case, why would it matter where I started? After collecting my bags, I dragged them over to the Silver Line bus, and eventually got onto the “T,” Boston’s subway system. I was drenched in sweat at that point, thanks to the coat and hoodie, but I stood up the whole ride to campus, too excited to take a seat. “Harvard station,” I heard called over the intercom. It was finally my stop. I struggled past the other passengers with all my luggage and exited the subway, then made my way up the stairs. It still felt surreal. Just a few months ago I’d taken my first flight ever, when I took a short trip to St. Louis to visit Washington University. That was the first time in my life I’d been recruited. I felt wanted. My performance in academics and basketball paid for that ticket. At the time, I couldn’t imagine feeling prouder or having better prospects. There I was, about to begin my post- secondary studies at arguably the most prestigious college in the world. The moment I emerged from the subway station and turned into Harvard’s yard, my heart stopped. I saw parents everywhere, each driving the most expensive cars I’d ever seen. It never crossed my mind that this would be a family event. Kids were bringing in complete furniture sets, wardrobes, and shoe collections. I’d never seen cardigans or topsiders before, but there, they were everywhere. “Where’s your stuff?” asked one student. “Oh, it’s coming later,” I lied. Everyone on campus seemed to already know one another from boarding school. It took a little time before I realized that their asking, “Where did you go to high school?” was a subtle way of assessing my

CHAPTER 4: FAR FROM A HARVARD STUDENT | 37 worth and rank. “North Central. Do you know Indianapolis?” I would answer. “No,” came the inevitable response. To many students, not going to the ‘right’ high school meant there was no reason to waste any further time speaking to me. I wasn’t elite. Fortunately, not everyone was snobbish. A few students kindly asked me to join their families for dinner once they realized I was alone. I politely declined. I appreciated the offers but wasn’t about to start being looked at as a charity case on day one. I unpacked my bags and sat there in my 250-year-old dorm room. Somehow, I’d just gotten a hundred times poorer. It seemed I was further from the top than I’d ever been. I felt bad for myself for half a second, then remembered what I’d done to get there and decided I was just as good as anyone else. I stood up, grabbed my basketball, and went to the gym. I began my meditative rituals on the court and those insecurities melted away. I wasn’t starting from scratch. I’d put in work that few humans can imagine to get there, and no one was going to tell me that I didn’t belong. I may be poor, I told myself, but I’ll be damned if I’m not elite. The first few months of college were brutal. Long before graduating from high school, I’d decided the best way I could help others would be to become a doctor. One of the biggest obstacles for poor people in the US is affordable access to healthcare. I figured as a doctor, I’d be able to practice medicine in poor communities and could serve those who needed help the most, while still earning a great salary. I also liked the idea that, as a medical professional, I might one day have a voice in shaping healthcare policy across the country. So, I’d chosen to do my premedical studies in the field of neurobiology. In the first two days of biology class, we went over everything I’d learned in my advanced placement high school courses. I couldn’t believe how fast we were going, but the other students all seemed fine with it. I asked around and soon discovered there were schools where kids are taught by college-level professors starting in the sixth grade. My

38 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. classmates had been groomed for this, while—for the first time in my life—I struggled to keep up in school. I got a C- on my first test and started questioning if Harvard had made a mistake in letting me in. On top of that, I got hit with the realities of Division I basketball. I considered myself good at the sport, but it was a whole different level of talent, and I was out of my depth. I was now playing against some of the best college players in the country—some of whom would go on to play in the NBA. Basketball at this level was a full-time job, and there I was, trying to do that and take one of the most difficult course loads available at Harvard. I foolishly started working a part-time job and signed up for a few extra-curricular activities. I didn’t have much of a choice since I needed the money and had to start building out my resume for medical school (yes, Harvard students start thinking about graduate school from day one of Freshman year). I was overwhelmed with the number of things on my plate and wasn’t performing to my expectations in anything. I needed to dig deeper. I decided I didn’t care about social life or sleep. I worked constantly. I started reading several chapters ahead in my textbooks so the material wasn’t so new to me during lectures. I worked alone in my room because there was too much socializing in the libraries. I went to office hours, saved some money to get a writing tutor, and mapped out every fifteen-minute block of time of every day so I could juggle it all. The lack of socializing didn’t bother me that first semester. I quickly realized that I didn’t fit in at all. I wore a durag, spoke with a funny accent, had extra baggy clothes, and didn’t know anything about prep schools or secret societies. Dating was also tough when the other guys all had multi-million dollar trust funds. One of the hardest things for me to adjust to was how different friendships worked at Harvard. Growing up poor, your friends were everything. They were the people you relied on to help you when things inevitably hit their worst. If you were going to get jumped in a fight,

CHAPTER 4: FAR FROM A HARVARD STUDENT | 39 they’d have your back. Same went for if you really needed a place to stay when things were too crazy at home. Our problems were real, so we needed real friends to help us through them. Being poor, you couldn’t survive on your own. Friendships for rich people, I learned, aren’t like that. They have money and can buy whatever services they want, so they don’t feel like they really need people. They treat each like business associates. If someone gets into trouble, rather than coming to help, they’ll distance themselves from that person. If they get an opportunity to swap out one friend for a wealthier one, they do it in a heartbeat. They didn’t care about you, they cared about your money, access, and status. It’s a dreadfully cold and lonely world. I become guarded and defensive. I made a few friends with people who had backgrounds like my own, but I mostly kept people at a distance and stayed focused on my reason for coming to Harvard in the first place. I was there to escape poverty and to help people like me get access to a better life. That would make the nightmare of a place worthwhile. The more I got to understand it socially, the more I hated Harvard. I came close to leaving several times that first semester—at one point, I had the transfer papers filled out. But eventually, things started to click. Once we got to the point where the material was new even for the prep school kids, keeping up became a lot easier. And then before I knew it, I was helping other students grasp concepts. That first semester was without question the hardest of my life, but I stuck it out, and I had all A’s on my first college transcript at the end of the term. School never became easy, but as I learned how to master the classroom, my stress levels dropped, and I had space to work on the other aspects of my life. Academically I belonged. Socially, I was doing okay. Being an athlete helped, and I mostly stuck with the other minority students, especially those who grew up with household incomes below $1 million a year.

40 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. That gave me a start, but I knew in order to thrive there, I was going to have to figure out how to speak with a broader set of students than that. So, I started to venture out and befriend a wider variety. When I first got to Harvard, the income differentials were overwhelming. I’ll never forget the first day I agreed to go along for a group dinner. We had unlimited swipes at our dining halls, so I saw no reason to go off campus and pay for food. But dinners were a big part of socializing at school, so I decided it would be good for me to go. I figured I would only have an appetizer, so it wouldn’t cost too much. To my great surprise, when the bill came, everyone started whizzing out their credit cards to pay for the check without even giving it a glance. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. My heart leapt into my throat. These kids had ordered everything under the sun and not eaten half of it, and there I was, hungry as hell, pretending to be full to save money. And now I was expected to pay for it all? I just couldn’t. I buried the shame when the waiter came to the table and asked, “Are we splitting the bill evenly?” “No, I only had an appetizer. Put ten dollars on my card, please.” I said this, then sunk into my chair, vowing to never leave the dining hall again. But things got better. Harvard pays kids a ton of money to work campus jobs. I remember calling my mom not long after I started working there. “They’re paying me $15 to move refrigerators. And they pay time and a half for overtime!” To this day, I don’t know how I did it all, but I worked at the grill and the library, I cleaned bathrooms, I had a research job, I worked at the cleaners, and I tutored other students. I made enough money to at least get myself a few pairs of loafers and some form-fitting t-shirts, and I saved enough to go on the occasional trip to New York. I even went to Puerto Rico with some friends from school. One of the best things about Harvard is that everyone there is a nerd. I gained a lot of social clout for being one of the smarter kids, despite coming from a public school. Growing up, I was just cool enough to be able to have a girlfriend and get invited to the occasional party, but in the

CHAPTER 4: FAR FROM A HARVARD STUDENT | 41 land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Harvard kids were awful dancers, super awkward, and most had never even been to a party. So, I thrived. As a black man on a predominantly white campus, I was often fetishized and stereotyped when it came to dating, and although I knew that was the reason for some of the “romantic” attention I received, I ignored it. I was finally getting my self-esteem back, and I wasn’t going to let my conscience get in the way. I got invited to join social clubs and started to venture beyond the jocks and minorities. There was a lot of growth that happened during my time at Harvard, but also a lot of shrinking. I was proud of myself for going out of my comfort zone and meeting people from different countries, ethnicities, and social classes. But more and more, I became aware that no one was curious about my culture, aside from their interest in hip-hop and dance moves. We weren’t meeting one another in the middle. In my heart, I knew what was really happening. I was learning how to be white and how to be rich. My culture wasn’t worth learning about in the eyes of my classmates. I came from poverty, and that was something to be escaped, not celebrated. My previous life was summarized in that one word: poverty. And it was expected that I would shed that past and learn more ‘civilized’ ways of being. It’s nearly impossible to become the best version of yourself when you’re trying to fit into a group that, by default, will never accept you. I fought it, but slowly and surely, I began leaving my past self behind. I lost my accent. I threw away my durags. I told myself I liked super- skinny girls. Over time, I stopped wanting to simply escape poverty; I started wanting to be rich. I’d gotten a taste of what it felt like to have status and I liked it. I began a decade-long transformation that would ultimately leave me lost and wondering who the hell I’d become. I was constantly analyzing the fascinating new world I found myself in. Over time, I noticed something surprising: once you got over how

42 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. well-spoken they were, the wealthiest kids at Harvard weren’t really all that smart. This is all relative of course, but I never would have imaged the least qualified students would be the ones with the most resources. It clicked when I started learning more about their primary and secondary school experiences. Apparently, there were schools all over the country that charged $50,000 a year for kindergarten! Because private schools aren’t reliant on public funds, their curriculum isn’t limited by state-legislated mandates. Which means the standards and curriculums at those schools reach far beyond state regulations. At those schools, the teachers all have doctorate degrees. Children are free to explore at their own pace, they often don’t have grades, and they get unlimited one-on- one attention. The schools are small, so almost everyone makes the varsity sports teams. They have almost unlimited budgets for after-school programs, so every kid gets a chance to be president or founder of whatever club or group they wish to join. But it’s not just about a better academic experience. The guidance counselors have all the Ivy League schools on speed dial, and they receive a guaranteed number of spots for their students every year. Preparation for the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) starts for these kids in sixth grade and continues through high school. Kids at boarding schools have regular dinners and outings with their teachers, and those teachers provide their students with even more connections—in addition to excellent letters of recommendation. At those elite schools, students are given the answers to all the tests in life. It’s nearly impossible for them to fail. I’m fully supportive of this kind of academic environment. It’s wonderful that students get this kind of nurturing and guidance. What didn’t sit well with me was knowing that those students were getting spots in what was supposed to be one of the toughest academic institutions on the planet. They hadn’t earned their spot by being the best or the smartest. They’d simply grown up with an exceptional economic advantage. Maybe it was my athlete mentality, but I found it difficult to accept this reality

CHAPTER 4: FAR FROM A HARVARD STUDENT | 43 without judgement. When you play basketball in Indiana, you quickly learn what real talent looks like. I would put my work ethic on the basketball court up against anyone else’s. But my talent? Not so much. I greatly outperformed my abilities and had no qualms admitting it. Academically, I benefited from my talent advantages, so I understood both sides of the coin. When it comes to elite levels of competition, talent takes over. Some kids are blessed with exceptional talents, and when that’s combined with a solid work ethic, those kids become stars. Everyone wants to be great, and everyone tries hard, but that’s not always enough. No matter what effort I put into basketball, I knew I’d never be as good as LeBron James. Then again, no matter how much effort LeBron James put into school, he’d never be as good as me in the classroom. There’s nothing fair about the distribution of talent. For some reason, people have a difficult time acknowledging the importance of talent when it comes to elite-level success, but it’s just a fact. For the rich kids, they didn’t need much talent. They were taught how to appear smart and were given a seat at the table. And if the $50,000 a year’s worth of training wasn’t enough, their parents would simply donate a few million dollars to their school of choice and get them in that way. I share this insight not to ridicule my wealthy classmates. A few of them were indeed brilliant—most were not. But I say this because growing up poor, I always assumed rich people were exceptionally smart. I thought people became wealthy because they outworked and outsmarted the rest of us lowly peons. As it turns out, the key to being rich is being born rich. We use academic institutions to pretend that the world is a meritocracy—meaning success is based on demonstrated ability and merit—but it isn’t. Meritocracy is a myth used to convince the poor to work themselves to death. Consider the American College Test (ACT) and SAT scores, for example. Since talent is randomly distributed regardless of economic class, why do children from wealthier households consistently perform better on these tests? Well, if your parents have a lot of money, you start

44 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. studying for the ACT and SAT in sixth grade. If you take the same test over and over, with someone telling you how to master the test, you’ll do well. Kids from lower-income families often never study for these tests given the high costs of SAT Prep courses and tutors—add that to the growing number of ways poor kids are competing with one hand tied behind their backs. It took a fascinating course in philosophy to help me resolve my frustration with this inequity. In that course, the professor walked us through a mental exercise where everyone starts off life equally, but through merit, those with talent gain all the wealth and power. Was that fair? I’d never questioned meritocracy. I assumed the people that were the best at school or sports should get the best things because…well, I didn’t know why. That’s just the way things were. But suddenly, I was forced to grapple with the idea that I never did anything to deserve my talents. So why was I any more deserving of this opportunity for a better life than anyone else? My being born with an innate ability to learn was no more of a fair reason for me to have riches than someone born into it. I didn’t think the legacy kids deserved to have such extreme advantages over everyone else, but I never questioned my own privileges. Why should someone have to live outside just because they weren’t born with abnormal talents? Who deserves nothing? I genuinely love learning. Once I finally got away from a school environment where I was forced to read hundreds of pages a day, I even learned to love slowly gliding through a good book. School, however, was always a means to an end. I found a lot of the tasks we were assigned at every level of school unnecessary and oftentimes even counterproductive. The US education system is structured more like a weeding-out system than a way to provide useful skills and knowledge to the general population. Look no further than the lack of basic financial education, vocational training, emotion

CHAPTER 4: FAR FROM A HARVARD STUDENT | 45 management, civics, or even cooking skills to see school isn’t where you learn the most important skills for adult life. Instead, we force kids in the prime of their lives to spend ungodly amounts of time studying often useless topics, all so they can compete for a limited number of good jobs. Practical application of a subject, to say nothing of aptitude and personal interest, has no bearing on curriculum requirements. I always found it pointless trying to guess what a poet writing in Old English five hundred years ago meant or why they wrote something. I also found absurdly biased history lessons a colossal waste of time. We’re expected to learn in school what the system wants us to learn with no questions asked. Even a class like economics exists mostly to promote classist propaganda. I started to question more and more accepted ‘truths’ about society. I began to read books outside of what was on the syllabus. Once I satisfied all my academic requirements, I spent what remaining time I had in the real world. If life wasn’t a meritocracy, I had to find out what it really was. Instead of using my brain for my own advancement, I dedicated more and more of my free time to helping those that didn’t win the genetic lottery. My initial academic worries aside, I was confident I wouldn’t end up living in poverty again, given my performance in school. People who graduated from Harvard didn’t end up poor, and there was no way I would not graduate with the grades I was getting. Knowing this, I spent my mental energy trying to figure out how to help all the people still living in poverty. “Why are we spending so much time talking about career planning?” I asked at yet another job networking event during freshman year. “Let’s be real, we’re all going to get jobs. Why don’t we discuss bringing up the rest of our community?” I got blank stares back. “We’re not all going to get good jobs. Don’t be naïve.” I was a little surprised to hear that. “Really? I think everyone who graduates from here can make $100,000 a year if they want to,” I persisted. This time, the looks I received told me they thought I’d just said the dumbest thing they’d ever heard. “That’s not a good job.”

46 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. To me, $100,000 a year was more money than I’d ever need. It was more than triple what my mother earned and raised four kids on. I wish I could say I changed their minds and convinced everyone that it was more than enough money to live on and that perhaps the brightest kids in the world should be thinking about the hardest problems our society faces rather than asking how they’d be able to afford a $10 million second home. But I didn’t have that kind of courage yet. Still, I was unjaded and determined to make a difference, so I stayed focused on helping others. I ran social programs for children in Boston’s poorest neighborhoods, engaging mostly with kids who were growing up in environments similar to those I was raised in as a child. As my worldview expanded, I started asking how I could help the poorest people in the world, not just the poorest people in the richest country. I co-founded a non-profit organization that focused on economic development mostly in Western Africa and the Caribbean. We used our newfound proximity to knowledge and wealth to deliver basic goods to the world’s poorest people. One of the great things about being at Harvard was having access to some of the best minds in the world in our professors, and we weren’t shy about seeking guidance and advice when needed. Not to mention, with all the money and connections on campus, raising $50,000 in donations was suddenly realistic. I experienced what I thought was poverty while I was growing up in Indiana. Though as I started doing international aid work, I realized I had no idea what real poverty was. Growing up poor, we might’ve had the water cut off occasionally, but I didn’t know anyone who didn’t have permanent access to clean water—and everyone had a toilet. When I traveled to the world’s poorest countries, I visited areas where miles and miles of people lived in complete destitution, with no running water and barely enough food to eat. The people in these countries still died of diseases long-since eradicated in the developed world. People wasted away without enough energy to even swat away the flies that landed on their faces. Those in the midst of humanitarian crises didn’t smile or even look at you; there was no hope in their eyes.

CHAPTER 4: FAR FROM A HARVARD STUDENT | 47 Mothers watched as their babies lay despondent beside them, knowing they couldn’t feed them. Hungry children would approach us and pull on our clothes, begging us for money. We gave what we could, but the need was overwhelming. It was difficult to witness this kind of suffering. I remember seeing a line of thirsty, severely malnourished children, several with distended abdomens. They stood under a nearly bone-dry waterfall, waiting with their mouths open, hoping to catch a few drops. We saw the consequences of extreme poverty everywhere we went. I’ll never forget the smell of rancid latrines in the summer. My heart still aches when I think about the first time I saw a starving human chained to a tree. The man was suffering from a mental illness, and the people in his village believed it to be a demon possession. I wish I could say it was the only time I witnessed such a horror. I still cringe when I remember a mother drinking visibly fecal-contaminated water. When you see poverty like that, you can’t unsee it. Those memories and so many others will haunt me for the rest of my life. Our non-profit organization drilled boreholes to access water, built irrigation systems for dry-season farming, and revamped social enterprises whose profits funded orphanages. After suffering a career-ending knee injury while playing basketball, I threw all the energy I’d previously dedicated to basketball into fighting poverty worldwide. I had the time to sit in on lectures at the School of Public Health and in the economics department. I read every international development book I could get my hands on. I went to office hours of Nobel Laureates to get advice on my projects and ask about their development theories. I was obsessed, and I loved my work. I stuck it out as a neurobiology major and finished all my pre-med curriculum requirements. But my heart was already set on economic development. The idea that there was a way to systematically lift not only poor communities but poor nations out of poverty was incredible to me. Maybe there didn’t have to be poor people. Perhaps we could design a world where everyone had enough, and some had even more.

48 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. Around that time, a teacher, mentor, and close friend of mine pulled me aside and asked what I wanted to do with my career. I thought about it and realized I was already doing what I wanted with my life. “This,” I told him. “I just need the tools to get better.” He asked, “Have you ever thought about applying for a Rhodes Scholarship?” I hadn’t. I honestly didn’t even know what the scholarship was for. I knew Bill Clinton was a Rhodes Scholar, but I couldn’t tell you what it signified. I started digging into it and wasn’t all that impressed with the history. Cecil Rhodes is the Babe Ruth of colonization. He “made” (a euphemism for stole) a fortune plundering Africa, then decided to put it all in a trust before he died. He wanted men from all the British colonies to have a chance to come and study at Oxford so they too could become “refined gentlemen.” I didn’t buy into all that, but I did see it as an opportunity to study international development and public health with some of the brightest minds in the world before I went on to medical school. As luck would have it, I applied for and won a Rhodes scholarship and was off to England to study at Oxford University a few months after I graduated from Harvard College. If you think Harvard is old money, try Oxford. Harvard was founded in 1636, about 400 years after curious minds began to gather on the lawns of Oxford, England to discuss and debate the mysteries of the physical and spiritual worlds. The majestic Annenberg dining hall at Harvard that tourists flock to each year was modeled after its older Oxford counterpart. In Europe, class is something you’re born into. No matter how much money you make in England, you’ll always be lower class if you’re born lower class. In a strange way, that made it a lot easier for me to forget about being poor. There was no need to worry about something I couldn’t change. Plus, it was a foreign country, and I didn’t feel the need to try to change things there. I simply wanted to experience the new world it provided. Unlike my early days at Harvard, I dove right into social life at

CHAPTER 4: FAR FROM A HARVARD STUDENT | 49 Oxford. The unbelievably extravagant (and frequent) black-tie events at Harvard were nothing compared to the white-tie affairs at Oxford, complete with long tailcoats and top hats. I’d been around extreme wealth for four years, though, so it didn’t faze me much. I enjoyed the extravagance to an extent and didn’t take it all that seriously. There was classism for sure, but I gave it little thought. I went out of my way to meet students and professors from various countries, social classes, and academic departments. Academically, I no longer felt the need to prove myself. If someone didn’t believe in my intelligence, then they never would. I decided that was their problem with racism and classism, not mine. Instead, I focused on learning. I went to Harvard to escape poverty; I went to Oxford to learn how to help others do the same.

| 51 CHAPTER 5: DON’T GIVE ME THAT DO-GOODY GOOD BULLSHIT My spirits were higher than ever. Rhodes Scholars all receive monthly stipends (i.e., seed money), so I didn’t have to stress about finances while studying. I took that, along with the extra money I made tutoring and coaching basketball to pay for my travels across Europe. I didn’t have a lot of money, but I had enough for once. In graduate school, that small stipend meant I could focus on studying, implementing development projects, and getting to know some of the smartest people on the planet instead of cooking curly fries and working at the cleaners. I continued to run my non-profit organization and spent a significant amount of time working in Western Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America. My non-profit worked with partners to drill boreholes, build irrigation systems for dry season farming, build social enterprises, assess poverty alleviation programs, and more. I began doing rigorous academic research to add to my poverty-fighting toolkit. I read Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Amartya Sen, Jared Diamond, Milton Friedman, and others to gain a deeper understanding of global economics. I was twenty-two years old and living the dream. I was doing purposeful work I loved, I was seeing the world, I had brilliant friends to learn from, and I finally didn’t have to worry about money. Life felt as close to perfect as I’d ever hoped it would be.

52 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. I’d made it. Then, as often happens in life when you think you have everything figured out, my worldview started to crack. I had long since moved on from believing poor people deserved to be poor. Now, I thought poverty was a lack of basic infrastructure and education. If we could spread western technical know-how to the poorest communities in the world, then we’d be able to end poverty once and for all. But as I gained a deeper understanding of financial systems and economics, I began to question that logic and doubted the general impact of my work. I’d decided potable water and improved sanitation were foundational infrastructures needed to lift people out of poverty because of the importance of healthcare to a person’s well-being. I’d read UN development reports that confirmed my beliefs. Not having access to clean water is one of the largest causes of death worldwide, especially for children. You see high infant mortality rates in areas where people have to drink dirty water. Kids pick up parasites that live in the water they drink, which causes diarrhea and dehydration—and ultimately death. Once a community had access to clean water, was it off to the races from there? Not quite. If the community couldn’t afford to solve its water problems on its own, it was unlikely to be able to solve its remaining hardships without further financial assistance. Even the water and sanitation solutions didn’t typically last because the communities couldn’t afford the upkeep. I started to notice broken water pumps and solar panels in village after village. The development world is obsessed with giving people things, with no means of maintaining these expensive pieces of equipment. I started to think perhaps I wasn’t digging deep enough. While implementing one of our clean water, hygiene, and sanitation projects in rural Ghana, I asked people what they thought their community needed most. “We need money.” “We want jobs!”

CHAPTER 5: DON’T GIVE ME THAT DO-GOODY GOOD BULLSHIT | 53 “If I had money, I could buy sachet water.” Sachet water is water that has been sealed in polyethylene plastic bags. It is popular in Ghana because it is convenient, easily accessible, and cheap. “If I had money, I could double my crop yields.” “If I had money, I could send my kids to primary school.” The answers were varied but always like this. Those households were so poor, everyone was making major trade-offs, and they knew it. If you decided to stop paying your child’s school fees so you could afford to eat, that didn’t mean you doubted the importance of a good education. It meant that poverty made you make an unimaginably difficult choice. Therefore, everyone knew how they’d spend extra money in highly impactful ways because there were so many gut-wrenching sacrifices they’d been forced to make for survival. I felt pretty stupid. I was well indoctrinated in the global aid and development world, but these people’s responses had stripped things down to one simple truth: they knew how to fix their poverty, they just didn’t have the resources to do it. Technical assistance and equipment are without a doubt helpful, but what those communities needed most was access to money and resources to implement those improvements. Although I’d grown up poor myself, I’d forgotten that poor people are more than capable of identifying and solving the major issues in their lives. They want cash to enable them to effectively solve those problems just like everyone else, though they’ll take boreholes if that’s all that’s up for grabs. With money, villages could drill and maintain their own boreholes if that’s what they wanted most, but it would be their choice. As I went around the village, everyone had different ideas about what they’d do with their money, including buying hand soap and clean water storage tanks for their homes. Unlike me, everyone I spoke with knew a lack of access to resources was the root cause of poverty, nothing more. Yes, clean water was important. But it’s not like there was no clean water in Ghana. The poor just couldn’t afford it. That hasn’t always been true, but in today’s world, you can get most essential goods if you have the money to pay for them.

54 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. The simple answer to eradicating poverty worldwide was staring me right in the face, but my ego wouldn’t let me see it. “No, I’m doing the right thing.” If what people needed most were resources, then all we needed to do was share more and the world would be fine. Redistributing resources is simple. There’s no room for me or anyone else to be a savior. But the cognitive dissonance was too much at the time, so I rejected that and pressed on with my efforts to teach people how to stop being poor. I was stubborn, but the seeds of doubt had been firmly planted in my mind. My plan had been to finish up my studies at Oxford, then head to medical school back in the US. But I’d begun to accept that a lack of healthcare, clean water, and education were symptoms of poverty, not the cause. If I wanted to help poor people, I needed to help them get paid. I contacted the University of Pennsylvania, where I’d been accepted to attend medical school, and asked for another year of deferral, which they graciously granted me. I decided to spend that year learning more about business and money. I set my sights on management consulting, which is known as the brains of capitalism in the business world. I put in the work, got a little lucky, and leveraged my newfound privilege and networks to land a job at the top management consulting firm in the world. It was time to start learning the truth about economics from the inside. I felt secure in my path and grounded in my identity. I spent most of my time in the poorest parts of the world, sleeping on dirt floors and living on a tight budget. I practically never thought about money because I had plenty to eat, always had a place to sleep, and was living a life in service to others. I never questioned why I was doing what I was doing or spent much time wondering why I was working for free because I had my basics covered. I hesitate to say that I was ‘happy,’ because a life of purpose and fulfillment is naturally one with all kinds of emotions, but I cared deeply about my work and the people it affected. In a given week, I would feel joy, sadness, disgust, love, disappointment,

CHAPTER 5: DON’T GIVE ME THAT DO-GOODY GOOD BULLSHIT | 55 determination, and pain. I was growing as a human being and using my full talents to attempt to create a better world. I was complete. Then I moved to New York City. Shifting my focus from solving technical economic and public health problems to thinking about money re-opened old, deep wounds. If the key to being able to help others was solving the hardest puzzles, then I felt great about my chances of adding value to the world. I could problem-solve with the best of them. If the key to changing the world for the better was access to money and power, what hope did I have of accomplishing anything? Years of rubbing elbows with the wealthiest kids in the world didn’t suddenly make me rich. I was broke and powerless, grappling with the fact that, to achieve my one real goal in life, helping those who have the least, I’d have to face all of my insecurities around money head-on. In addition, while doing development work, I mostly surrounded myself with people that genuinely cared about other people. Not everyone in the development space is that way, especially in larger institutions that pay well, but you can easily find people pouring their souls into their work for no reason other than wanting to see a better world. Many of those people came from family wealthy (one of the reasons they could work for so little pay without stress), but rarely did people doing on the ground work ever flaunt or base their egos solely around their money. We got our sense of self-worth from the impact of our work (this comes with its own set of problems, the most prominent being the messiah complex many of us develop), not our money or things. But working in a high- paying job in New York, social life was all about money again. I thought I was grounded enough to handle it this time. I wasn’t. I worked and learned plenty, but my priorities shifted away from helping others towards proving my own self-worth again. I was now twenty-four, living in Manhattan, and making more money than most doctors. Everyone around me had money and were dead set on making much, much more. I wish I could say it didn’t affect me, but it did. A lot. Since college, I’d done everything in my power to ensure I didn’t attach my sense of identity to money. It was the only way I could feel good about

56 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. myself being completely broke while constantly surrounded by students whose parents were regulars on the Forbes list. But suddenly, there I was, earning a top ten percent income at the ripe old age of twenty-four. The partners at the firm where I worked made more money than most professional athletes. Instead of being a source of embarrassment, my financial status overnight became yet another source of exceptionalism to further inflate my ego. I’d never felt the power of money. I’d been an athlete, a scholar, a do-gooder, but the status associated with those were drops in a bucket compared to the tidal wave force of money. I could afford expensive clothes and shoes that signaled I was somebody. Wearing the right things and being in the right rooms, everyone assumes you have money and treats you accordingly well. I quickly became enamored with those shortcuts to what felt like love and acceptance. I learned there were shoes that cost four times as much as Air Jordan’s, and I bought myself a pair, telling myself I needed them to fit in at work. But it wasn’t just about work. My social life had changed too. With the extra income, I started going to clubs and parties every weekend. Jay-Z has a line, “If you grew up with holes in your zapatos, you’d celebrate the minute you was having dough.”2 I was becoming someone I never thought I’d be, and I was having a blast doing it. It was fun for a while to do the things that I had always dreamed of being able to do. Ironically, that’s when my happiness started to slide. The first few times I partied with celebrities and girls that never would’ve spoken to me a few years before, I was ecstatic. At a few hundred thousand dollars a year, I wasn’t wealthy by any means, but I was on the right path to riches and well entrenched in the scene. I saw my favorite rappers in the clubs, spent weeks in the Hamptons, partied on yachts, and regularly ate at the best restaurants in the world. Before moving to New York, I drank liquor socially—like most college kids—but I’d only smoked weed three or four times at most. When you’re poor, being caught with even a small amount of weed on 2 “99 Problems”, 2003

CHAPTER 5: DON’T GIVE ME THAT DO-GOODY GOOD BULLSHIT | 57 you can mean a sentence of years in prison. I wanted nothing to do with that, so I’d always stayed far away from drugs. Most people I knew growing up did, too. A little-known fact is that drug use steadily increases with income. Most people associate drug use with the poor, but the reality is, drugs are like any other desired product: the more money you have, the more you can buy. Pablo Escobar didn’t get rich selling cocaine to poor people. It’s the rich who buy and love drugs. I was seeing drugs everywhere. No one was the least bit concerned about going to jail. Most people in my new social circle had been doing drugs since high school—some since middle school. They didn’t think anything of it. In fact, it seemed normal to them. They failed to see the hypocrisy when I tried to explain how those very same drugs were used to explain why poor people were poor and deserved to be incarcerated. It was different there because those people were functional. I saw plenty of people develop habits, but their lives usually didn’t completely fall apart because they had money, support, and most importantly, they weren’t criminalized when their problem was discovered. Apparently, drugs are only a problem when you can’t afford them or when you can’t afford rehab. Everywhere I went, there was what seemed like endless supplies of wealth, drugs, beautiful people, sex, jet skis, fashion, DJs, celebrities, and socialites. I never got deep into drugs, but I tried a little bit of everything. I knew enough about them and alcohol to know moderation is key. Of all the temptations, I was most intrigued by the girls. I went from being a relatively shy kid to arrogant and empty seemingly overnight. Being in the scenes, I knew I didn’t really belong. That wasn’t who I was at my core but the positive feedback was too difficult to resist. There’s nothing like the transition from being treated like you’re poor to being treated like you’re rich. Like anything else, once the newness wears off, it got old. In those wealth-driven environments, there was little pretending what people were after. Everyone gravitated towards the biggest spender.

58 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. Conversations didn’t matter, how you treated people don’t matter. Vibe, energy, connection, loyalty—none of those things were important. The currencies were, in order of importance: wealth, fame, connections, and beauty. People weren’t trying to express themselves as much as fit an image and move closer to the top. Instead of being fun for its own sake, partying became mainly about status. In an environment based on that kind of competition, practically no one was really having any fun. It was all posturing and pretending, especially once Instagram became a thing. Chasing wealth is no different than chasing after a drug high. The rush of those first few events and purchases wears off, and over time, you need bigger parties and bigger spending to feel that same thrill. While I was making plenty of money, I started noticing that relative to my classmates and colleagues, I was still poor. As a kid, I remember searching online to learn how much money physicians made. I saw some specialists were making over $500,000 a year, and my mind was blown. I figured it would be almost impossible to spend that much money. I share the absurdities above so you can see that once you cross a certain threshold, spending money has very little to do with practicality and everything thing to do with status. Our desire for things is limited, but our desire for status doesn’t stop. Companies targeting wealthy people know this, and prey upon their insecurities. It’s hard for most poor people to imagine what being rich is like because they envision having lots of money yet liking and valuing what currently matters to them. Of all the concepts I learned about in neuroscience, adaptation is the most important to understand when it comes to wealth and greed. You make money so you can go to fancy places and feel good about yourself. When you get to those fancy places, you see everyone there has money too—some of them have much more money than you—so you feel less good about yourself. You work to make even more money, and once you’re finally one of the wealthiest people in the room, you start feeling good again. Then you get bored with being in that room because, of

CHAPTER 5: DON’T GIVE ME THAT DO-GOODY GOOD BULLSHIT | 59 course, you’re always the wealthiest person there so you don’t even think about it. Since you’re not getting joy from the status anymore, you start looking up and realize there are even fancier, more expensive places, so you excitedly head there (if you can get the invite). Then you are sad once again because you see that everyone here is an even greater level of rich. Having $10 million doesn’t feel all that great when everyone else in the room is worth at least nine figures. I’ve always been fortunate in my ability to learn from watching others. I carefully watched my siblings growing up to learn what to do and what to avoid. And in that new environment of wealth, I carefully dissected the lives of everyone around me. I focused on the people who were seemingly on top: the trust fund heirs, managing partners, star athletes, pop stars, etc. I got a front-row seat to a look into the future we all were dreamily chasing after and saw nothing but smoke and mirrors. Once the novelty wears off, wealth and fame are toxic. Money is extremely isolating. If you have lots of money and are surrounded by people that don’t, they’ll ask you for your money. The only way to build wealth is to not give away your money. To adjust to this problem, wealthy people become calloused and tell themselves that sharing is a bad thing. If you’re generous with your wealth, you won’t have it for long (many people see giving away wealth as a bad thing. I don’t). So almost universally, wealth results in fearful hoarding and greed. You only spend money in ways that will generate more money. Gifts become a form of manipulation since everything and everyone becomes something for sale. When you have money, those without it will do whatever you tell them to do. That isn’t a relationship; it’s control. So the more wealth you have, the more you have to push people away out of fear that they’re coming for your money. And, for the select few allowed in your circle, you’re training them to pretend to be exactly what you want them to be—meaning that no one is themselves or genuine. They want what you have to give so badly, there’s no hope that any meaningful number of people around you will tell you the hard truths. You’ll be surrounded by people, yet utterly alone.

60 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. For people like me who grew up poor, wealth was even more isolating. One path was to cut everyone from your past out of your life. When you come from poverty, typically all your friends and family remain impoverished. They’ll have very real needs and always come to you for help. None of them can afford to socialize with you, so you’ll need to pay their way every time. They don’t have power, money, or status to offer in return, and since this is what you value now more than anything, you’ll no longer see those people as valuable. Because they always want something from you, and seemingly have nothing to give, you’ll walk away from your friends and family, surrounding yourself instead with people who also have wealth and status. It isn’t until you’ve made this transition that you’ll realize that without thinking, you’ve lost your culture and can never go back. The other path is to stay close to your old crew. You’ll have to put everyone on payroll so they can afford to stay with you. You’ll have pieces of your past culture to bring along with you into the new world of wealth. However, the nature of these relationships changes drastically. The power dynamic is lopsided, and you’ll have little tolerance for anyone not doing as you say (given how much you feel you’re doing for everyone). Your friends and family become more of an entourage, and you’ll drift into loneliness. The rat race is all-consuming and universally plays out as described. There’s no way around it. When you get your sense of self-worth from money, you’ll be fearful that everyone wants something from you— because they do. All your relationships will be pecuniary in nature, removing any semblance of genuine love and affection from your life. Your sense of happiness will fluctuate with the ticker prices for your assets. And, of course, you’ll have lots of people worship you, feel powerful and accomplished, and experience everything money can buy. You’ll see the world as one big game, a relentless competition where it’s kill or be killed, everyone out for themselves. You’ll joylessly climb a mountain for the rest of your life and never reach the peak. It’s a trap.

CHAPTER 5: DON’T GIVE ME THAT DO-GOODY GOOD BULLSHIT | 61 Being extremely wealthy is toxic to your mental health, as is being extremely poor. Love and a sense of belonging to a community are, without question, the most essential components to a fulfilling human life. Extreme wealth, even more so perhaps than extreme poverty, makes being open and loving almost impossible. After a few years of seeing all of this, I had enough data to know being wealthy was incredibly overrated. I don’t expect everyone to understand that and absolutely don’t seek any sympathy. I’m not sure if in our materialistic society full of non-stop marketing there’s even anything I could say to explain why seeking wealth is a fool’s errand. I had to go through those experiences myself to learn that far more important than having wealth is knowing when you have enough. I pushed aside a life of fulfillment and purpose for one of superficiality and vacuous consumption. It took that journey to learn chasing money is a losing game no matter who you are.

| 63 CHAPTER 6: IT’S A RICH MAN’S GAME, NO MATTER WHAT THEY CALL IT When you’re poor, few things are more infuriating than rich people telling you that having money is overrated. I ask for forgiveness. While I still don’t recommend it, I’ll share exactly how building generational wealth works for anyone that wants to go down that path. During college, I comforted myself by thinking that although I was poor, my peers and I were all in the same place and therefore equal. After we graduated, everyone in my class gravitated to similar jobs. Everyone wanted to work for big investment banks, consulting firms, law firms, and hospitals. We all went for the money, in one way or another. But something strange happened. After about six to twelve months, all the wealthiest kids from my graduating class quit their jobs. “I got what I came here for,” they’d say. “I’m not slaving away for these guys for so little money.” Next thing I’d hear was that they’d suddenly started their own business or had gotten top jobs at one of their parents’ companies. There was no chance I could do something like that. At twenty-four, it required more than a little seed money and some powerful connections to raise the $5 million needed to start a new company on the scale my former classmates did. Raising money is nothing for wealthy kids who are family friends with all the investment gatekeepers. It no longer mattered who had the

64 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. best grades; what mattered was who had access to capital. The game, it turns out, is completely rigged for the rich to stay rich. As they say, it takes money to make money. From the ages of five to twenty-four, I mastered being a student. I wrote papers, took tests, and got good grades. The tasks were concrete, there were rules, and it was usually clear how to move on to the next step. Basically, school is the opposite of work. School teaches you that you can learn everything there is to know about one topic. If I get an A in biology class, that told me I must know all there is to know about biology. Wrong! We take a very tiny slice of whatever knowledge exists about a topic, turn it into a syllabus, and test students on that tiny slice. In the real world, there’s more to know about any given topic than any one person can ever come close to learning. Yet, despite the practically infinite amount of information that exists, the business world is full of arrogant people who think they know everything about everything. The reality is, most of them know very little about the subject matter they speak so confidently about. In an environment like this, people rely heavily on trust. But how do you know you can trust someone you’ve never met? People assume that because a person holds a degree from an elite school or they’ve worked at a top company, they must know what they’re talking about. It’s not true, but alas, people believe it. Consulting companies take advantage of this belief by routinely hiring fresh graduates with impressive resumes, knowing it’ll convince clients to believe whatever the consulting firm recommends. That’s the reason why I was paid an ungodly amount of money to make PowerPoint slides. I told myself that doing that kind of work was okay. “Just put your head down for ten years and you’ll climb the ladder,” I’d say to myself in the bathroom mirror each morning. “You’ll be able to do some good for the world once you have a ton of money to really make things happen!” But I found myself getting sadder and sadder. The partying lost its luster as I saw it for what it was, and my work wasn’t meaningful. How was I

CHAPTER 6: IT’S A RICH MAN’S GAME, NO MATTER WHAT THEY CALL IT | 65 going to do that for an entire decade? It wasn’t as if work-life got much better with each progressing year. When I looked at the people in the top positions at my company sacrificing everything to advance, they typically had no life whatsoever outside of work to demonstrate how ‘all-in’ they were for the company. If anything, they appeared even more lost than I felt. For those that can postpone their lives for ten to twenty years, it’s a comparatively low-risk way to build a net worth in the low eight figures. In an attempt to make it bearable, I scratched and clawed my way into the teams that were working on meaningful problems around poverty, especially in the healthcare space. I was happy to discover that although there’s a lot of bullshit in the consulting world, there are still people who do excellent work and care deeply about driving impact. Those people are rare, but they exist. The company I worked for provided strategy advice to the biggest healthcare organizations in the world. It was interesting to have a seat at the table and talk strategy with some of the most powerful people in wellness. I wanted to try and understand how I could help fix our healthcare system. What I came to realize is that the American healthcare system isn’t broken because we don’t know how to provide good healthcare—we provide phenomenal healthcare to people who are rich. The problem is that we don’t choose to make it accessible to everybody, and we choose to make it extremely expensive so that people in the business of healthcare can generate profit. Everyone was making money off this system: the pharmaceutical companies, the hospitals, the doctors, the insurance companies, etc. And I could see that the system incentivized these individuals and companies to keep things that way. It was a disheartening realization, to say the least. The first key to generating wealth is not being too concerned with the consequences of accumulating it. The leaders of top companies were excellent at that. Although I’d been able to steer my career towards a more interesting path, I still wasn’t willing to wait in line for a decade or two before being

66 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. able to advance to a position where I’d be one of the drivers of change. I’d grown up believing that in the real world, success was based on merit, but I saw first-hand how absolutely untrue that was. No one ever promotes their subordinates above them. The jobs themselves aren’t all that hard, so at big companies, most of your energy goes into playing politics as you compete for the top spots. Again, it’s not what you know, it’s who you know. The aspiring billionaire should not fall for the trap of focusing too much on content knowledge or domain expertise. After a few years, I decided to leave the consulting firm and go work for a start-up company. At the time, that seemed like a faster way to the top. I packed my bags and moved to Washington, D.C., only to learn the grass isn’t always greener on the other side. Turns out, no one makes money at start-ups when companies have their initial public offering (meaning when they initially sell a portion of their company to the public on the stock exchange), unless they have meaningful ownership stakes. Typically, the CEO and investors are the only ones who have a large equity stake. Those people putting in 100-hour work weeks to secure the company’s success mostly earn a below-market rate salary and a small number of common shares, while investors who did little more than write checks would make millions off their preferred equity, billions when things really went well. People who own common shares don’t make a dime until everyone with preferred shares get paid out, so oftentimes even with a successful exit, most employees will make little or nothing from their stock grants. So much for hard work! In capitalism, it’s better to invest your capital than it is to invest your labor. What separates capitalism from other economic systems is the privatization of capital. Prior to capitalism, resources were largely controlled by the state. If you wanted to start a business, you had to get a charter (permission) from the government. However, during those time periods, there was also an abundance of commons (shared land and resources). The thinking was that although the king owned everything, people

CHAPTER 6: IT’S A RICH MAN’S GAME, NO MATTER WHAT THEY CALL IT | 67 needed access to resources to survive, so a large portion of the king’s land was available for everyone to utilize for hunting, timber, water, grazing animals, etc. When capitalism emerged, however, those commons were all claimed by individuals. For the first time, everyday citizens were now truly poor. That, of course, had been true of slaves throughout the world for thousands of years, but the concept of citizens having no rights to any natural resources was both new and devastating. We talk about capitalism and the competition it encourages as if it’s this great equalizer, without asking, “How did you get all that capital in the first place?” The majority of wealth in the world comes from land and natural resources. If someone makes a claim on commonly owned land, then uses that stolen wealth to start a successful business, are they really self-made? The key to capitalism is capital. If you don’t have it already, it’s incredibly difficult to obtain. If you do have it, it’s easy to make more of it. All you need to do is go online and see how much more money you can make in interest or market returns by lending to various types of projects. It’s money you’ll make for doing absolutely nothing but handing over money. While I may have thought graduating from Harvard and Oxford had evened things out between myself and my wealthy classmates, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Many of my peers had $50 million trust funds—some much larger than that. At a modest five percent annual return, which requires zero labor, an individual with a trust fund of that size would receive $2.5 million in interest alone, every single year. That’s capitalism. It’s the ability to make money without working—because you already have money. Once you have capital, your job becomes searching for people like me who’re willing to work a hundred hours each week so that your $100 million magically turns into $120 million next year. And that’s exactly what my classmates did. They knew working for their money was a sucker’s game. Since I had no capital, I was the sucker. Or at least, that’s how I felt.

68 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. I kept working on healthcare projects and other projects that seemed to help people, but I’d strayed far from a service mentality. I almost never went home to Indianapolis anymore, and I rarely saw my family. I volunteered in low-income communities, but my focus was my career. All my energy went toward getting to the top. I’d long since given up my position in medical school and was fully entrenched in the business world. If ignorance is bliss, knowledge can be painful. I now understood how the sausage was made, and let me tell you, it wasn’t pretty. Once it finally became clear to me how the whole system worked, I became incredibly disillusioned. There is no competition. As D’Angelo Clarksdale so aptly put it, “The king stay the king.”3 There was no sophisticated analysis needed to explain why one country was poor and another was rich. A country is rich because they assert that they own assets, and other countries are forced to agree. If you go back far enough in time, you’ll learn that those assets were almost always taken by force. In the modern world, we don’t see it that way. We don’t question the origins of wealth. Instead, we’re enamored with the occasional rags to riches story. Those stories are used to convince the poor that they too could become rich someday. But the truth is, to build wealth, you need wealth. If you don’t have wealth, you better do whatever wealthy people want you to do. And usually, what they want you to do is to make them wealthier. Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Donald Trump, and virtually every other ultra-rich individual you can think of made their money because a wealthy friend or relative loaned them the money to get started. Wealth begets wealth. It’s cyclical. Armed with this knowledge, I was left to wonder what the hell I was supposed to do. Poverty exists because the people with money choose not to share it. That’s it in a nutshell. If wealth generates more wealth, and everyone had just a little bit of wealth, then no one would be poor. But 3 The Wire, 2002 television series

CHAPTER 6: IT’S A RICH MAN’S GAME, NO MATTER WHAT THEY CALL IT | 69 what we’ve done is allow wealth to become concentrated in the hands of a very small number of people. Which means the financial rewards of capitalism all flow into the hands of the global elite. We all work hard so they don’t have to. As someone without wealth, I still had bills to pay. I wondered what I could do, career-wise, to effect change in an impactful way. Would I try to explain the way the system worked to poor people? I doubted that would make a difference. Most people, educated or otherwise, don’t understand finance and economics, and poor people are no different. And even if I were able to explain it to them, what were they going to do about it? They’re powerless, I thought. I lost faith in my economic development work the more I learned about capitalism. I stepped down from my non-profit organization. It felt like I was just taking crumbs to the masses to placate them in a system designed to impoverish people. Whenever I tried to come up with a new project to help the poor, my analytical mind would reveal it as a facade. I kept thinking a person could hand out food or clean water all they wanted, but until the poor had ownership and equity, they’d always be poor. How could I possibly help the poor gain wealth? I didn’t even have wealth myself. Sure, I was making a good income, but income from labor isn’t the key. It’s income from your capital that matters most in capitalism. I remember sitting in the park in front of the White House feeling completely lost. I’d always made sure I made enough money to feel good about myself, but I’d never fully embraced wealth. I’d told myself I was just having a little fun, but that I’d always stay focused on helping the less fortunate. Now, I saw that I needed power to create change. Money is a form of power, but I had no desire whatsoever to live a life surrounded by people solely focused on making more money. I wanted to walk away from everything. If that was the type of world people wanted, then let them have it. I didn’t want to play anymore. I knew there was no nice way to get to the top. Everyone wants power, and if I wanted it, I’d have to sharpen my elbows and get ready for a fight. The

70 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. thing is, at that point, I wondered who I was fighting for? I wasn’t poor anymore, and I hadn’t lived in poverty for a decade. I’d been spending more time thinking about setting up my potential future children for success than thinking about helping the poor. Once you escape poverty, you start to put it out of your mind. Well, at least I did. The system is what it is. Either I had to play along or get tossed aside, right? I stared down the various paths I could choose for my future, and nothing looked interesting. I knew too much to be excited about childish dreams of a better world. I was too far removed from home to ever go back there. It felt less like a crossroads and more like an impasse. And yet, if I considered Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I should’ve been right up at the top, feeling fulfilled and satisfied with what I’d achieved. My basic needs were met, and I had no concerns about my safety or financial security (though I thought about money now more than ever before). I was accomplished and successful, as were my friends. On paper, and to the casual observer, it appeared I had it all. But there was a gaping hole in my chest. The world wasn’t all that complex. There were boots, and there were asses. We could easily treat each other better, I thought, but enough of us had bought into the idea that people must suffer for others to shine, the concept had become intractable from modern society. Given my position in the world, I had practically no chance of changing that. If life were a test, I wanted to quit. Where was the off switch? How can I stop playing this pointless game? I remember asking myself rationally. I didn’t feel any suicidal urges, just the weight of reality. I felt like Buzz Lightyear from the movie Toy Story when he finally realized he was just a toy. By ignoring the realities of capitalism and wealth generation, I’d fooled myself into believing I could somehow change a system without having any real power and authority within it. America does an incredible job of convincing its citizens that we all have an equal say in how things work, and that the best ideas bubble

CHAPTER 6: IT’S A RICH MAN’S GAME, NO MATTER WHAT THEY CALL IT | 71 up to the surface. But I saw, without a doubt, that wealthy individuals and corporations ran the country—and the world. If everyone is out to generate more money, then who wins? Whoever has the most power to bend the system in their favor. And of course, those who already have wealth have an inordinate ability to shape and reshape the system in their favor. Of course, a very small number of people will rise through the ranks, but the chances of that are practically nil. No one was going to listen to anything I had to say until I had some power. I’d deluded myself into believing my voice mattered before it did. And once I was on the climb, it was clear I couldn’t reach the levels of power necessary for change without going all in on an unrealistic goal. I made up my mind, and thought, well, if you’re going to keep living, why not try to do the impossible? I wondered what the best thing would be for me to do with my life. I didn’t care how good the chances of success were; if there was some chance, I was going to try. The best thing I could do with my life, I decided, was to help everyone get a little wealth, so we could get rid of poverty once and for all. I had no idea how I’d accomplish this, but I figured I was going to need money to do it. I got up from the park bench, went home, and started ordering books on investing and finance. I was done with the development work. If I wanted to help the poor, I needed wealth. The odds of success were low, but I knew the best ways to gain extreme wealth, even if starting off with none, and felt my chances of cracking the code were as good as anyone else’s. Since I didn’t have a significant amount of money of my own to invest, I decided to become an investment advisor. The key to winning in capitalism is to make money using other people’s money. Even as an entrepreneur, your real wealth generation comes from raising venture capital to invest in your business, as opposed to relying on your own money. Capitalists are, in theory, rewarded for taking risks. In reality, the best capitalists don’t risk anything themselves; they finance everything. Don’t spend your highest energy years slaving away for someone else

72 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. just to save a few hundred thousand dollars. That’s a complete waste of time. Even if you’re stashing away $25,000 a year, it’ll take you four hundred years to have that initial $10 million to invest. And you’ll still need to multiply that $10 million a hundred times before you tap a billion. Whereas if you’re able to have someone give you $200 million to invest, with a promise to share twenty percent of the profits with you, you can turn that $200 million into $400 million dollars and pocket $40 million for yourself, with your investor taking home $360 million. Both go home happy, and you’re able to skip the multiple lifetimes it would take to luck out and have that $200 million to start off with. Asset management was the elevator I needed. It didn’t matter that my educational background was not in finance or investing. I knew I could learn everything I needed to know if I applied myself. The next thing I did was sell all my things. I was done trying to fit in. I wanted to master finance, and that was it. I wasn’t going to spend my money on buying status. I was going to use it to make a difference. Finance became my life. I worked my day job from 8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. every day, took a two-hour break for food and recovery, and then studied finance from 9:00 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. Monday through Friday. On the weekends, I studied from 8:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m., took a lunch break, then kept going from 2:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. I have always had the ability to maintain focus when I set a goal for myself. The hardest part about learning finance is all the jargon. Jargon isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Once you understand it, it allows for faster communication between two knowledgeable people on a given subject, but in finance, a fair amount of jargon is intended to be confusing. Once I could ‘speak finance,’ however, my learning accelerated rapidly. I’d taken multivariable calculus in college, and compared to that, none of the math in finance was all that difficult. I also found the concepts were significantly easier to grasp than the precepts of physics or neurobiology. After a few months, I was comfortable enough with finance to keep up with a junior investment banker. I was making progress, but that wasn’t my goal. I wanted to master finance and investing. The problem

CHAPTER 6: IT’S A RICH MAN’S GAME, NO MATTER WHAT THEY CALL IT | 73 I had was finance isn’t a science. The quality of a good scientific theory is based on its ability to predict future outcomes. Finance is miserable at this. One of the first things you’ll learn about asset management is that past performance isn’t a predictor of future performance. So, what does that mean? To understand investing, you must understand a little about probability, which is the likelihood of something happening. If I ask a thousand people to guess a number that I have in my head, ranging from one to ten, about one hundred people will usually get that answer right just by guessing. If I take only the winners from the first round and ask them to do it again, about ten people will guess correctly. If I take those ten winners and ask them to guess one last time, one of them is likely to get it correct. That winner has now guessed the correct number in my head three times in a row! Is that person a mind reader? Absolutely not. They’re just guessing. And when enough people are guessing, someone will get it right. To make an informed investment decision, you need insight into things like a company’s products and services, vision statement, market share, target market, governance, and management structure. Without these things, you might as well be throwing darts at a wall. Because of the substantial financial rewards, there are a lot of people guessing about financial outcomes in stock markets, bond markets, real estate, cryptocurrencies, and any other market. Prices in these markets fluctuate because of each decision that everyday consumers make. Many people will claim to be able to predict where these markets will go, but over time, no one truly can. Still, a broken clock will be right twice a day. While predicting the market is impossible, you can change the probability of success by knowing more about the potential investment opportunity. That’ll help you identify significantly over-priced or under- priced stocks in the market. Let’s say you go to a garage sale and are digging through someone’s collection of old baseball cards. You see an autographed Willie Mays rookie card and several other gems. The owner walks up to you and says,

74 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. “These were my dad’s dusty old baseball cards. I never understood why he kept these things! I’ll sell them all to you for five dollars.” That’s what investors call information asymmetry. The individual selling the items has no idea what they’re worth in the open market. You wisely make the purchase and can immediately sell the cards online for a profit. These opportunities exist, but usually not for long, and typically they’re rare. Warren Buffett’s mentor, Benjamin Graham, became rich finding opportunities like that in the stock market after the Great Depression. Back then, there were no supercomputers searching for this kind of mispricing, so you could find a fair amount of them. Today, there are few opportunities like this in the world, but those who find them can make a lot of money for themselves and their clients. Now, if you find one of these opportunities, you’d be an absolute fool to write a book about it. As soon as other people learn about your quick trick for making easy money, they’ll start doing it too. Eventually, the sellers get wise, adjust their asking price, and the opportunity goes away. So, as an investor, it’s in your best interest to keep quiet. Why then, do you see so many books and online courses promising to help you get rich quick? It’s because one of the best ways to get rich is by taking other people’s money. Whether your advice is sound or not, if a million people pay you $15 to hear it, you’ve made $15 million. The truth is, most asset managers are selling snake oil. Over time, I became very good at seeing through the veil of most investment pitches. The problem is that most pitches are nonsense. You need to kiss thousands of frogs before you find your prince. I was eventually able to transition into investing full-time. I helped build a small venture capital fund in the healthcare space, where I had the most experience, before moving on to co-found a hedge fund. For those who are unfamiliar with investment terminology, a hedge fund is a partnership of investors who manage a fund (a collection of stocks) with the sole purpose of turning a pile of money into more money. We looked at investments across all industries, so I had the opportunity to learn

CHAPTER 6: IT’S A RICH MAN’S GAME, NO MATTER WHAT THEY CALL IT | 75 about every type of business under the sun. We were constantly on the lookout for mispriced stocks. I kissed a lot of frogs, but I also found a prince or two. This time, I stayed away from materialism and status. I’d still go out from time to time to release stress, but I was focused on mastering finance to be able to make a difference in the world. I kept my cost of living very low and saved most of my earnings. I invested nearly everything I made, and before I knew it, I’d become a millionaire. I didn’t let this accomplishment distract me. I just kept working and saving. I had everything I needed in life, and I had been careful not to attach my sense of self-worth to my income, so the money didn’t excite me. I saw it as the means to an end, and that was it. I was moving toward my goal, but I found no joy in my work life, and it was taking a toll on me. Finding the occasional mispricing was fine, but my heart wasn’t in it. Most of my peers were in the job because they loved money and the status that it brought. All they ever wanted to talk about was money. I knew I didn’t want to fall into that trap again, so I kept to myself and worked. As the years passed, it became harder and harder to get out of bed in the mornings. I told myself I was working to earn enough wealth to be able to change the world, but the reality was I was working to make rich people richer. For every dollar that I earned, some ultra-high net-worth person was earning $10. I volunteered on the side when I could, but it didn’t feel like enough. I knew I wasn’t making any kind of real difference in the world, and that knowledge grated on me. At the back of my mind, I had a plan to use the money I’d been saving to help people in poor communities. But how much money would I need before I could make a real, positive change? Would $100 million be enough? Would $1 billion? I started to wonder what I was waiting for. By that point, I knew enough about finance to know luck was a lot more important than skill. Given my academic pedigree and abilities, making a few hundred million dollars over a thirty- or forty-year career was within reach. If I wanted to make billions of dollars, I’d need a lot of

76 | END POVERTY. MAKE TRILLIONS. luck, but in my mind, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility. Regardless of whatever lofty financial milestone I set for myself, however, it meant I’d spend my entire life doing something I didn’t care about. I started to doubt what sort of impact I could make on the world, regardless of how much money I amassed. How would I be able to help the poor gain wealth? At best, I figured I’d be able to spread my wealth across my family, but that would be about it. It was becoming increasingly clear that my plan was flawed. Then COVID-19 hit, and I watched in awe as world leaders one-by- one announced that their countries would be shutting their economies down. Everyone was locked in their own homes for the foreseeable future. Suddenly, I had no outside distractions. I could see my life for exactly what it was. I sat in front of a computer screen all day looking for mispriced assets. I was wasting my brain on a task that felt utterly pointless to me. There had to be a shortcut to accomplishing what I yearned to do. I decided to turn the problem on its head. Instead of thinking about mispriced assets, what would happen if I started focusing on mispriced ideas? Maybe there was a way to solve this poverty problem that would be obvious to me, but not to everyone else. Instead of spending my whole life trying to get wealthy so I could have the power to make some limited amount of change, what if I could find a mispriced idea that was just lying around? I could bring that idea to the wealthy investors I already knew and get them to fund it. I didn’t care about the money, and I didn’t care about getting credit, so there was no reason it couldn’t work since I at least knew a lot of billionaires and wealthy families. I began to do what I do best: think. I put aside time after work every day again, but I also spent that time thinking about poverty. I knew I’d never be able to change the world with a moral argument. It had to make financial sense. How could I make getting rid of poverty a good investment?

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