Black Wealth Lessons from a Finance PhD - Dr Boyce Watkins

Hey everybody, how you doing? I hope everybody's doing well. I hope you guys can uh see me and hear me. Okay. Uh welcome to Power Nomics training. This is something we do every week. Uh and we get together and we uh behave extra black and extra smart and we do our absolute best to be our best. Uh I hope everybody's doing good today. I hope you're having a good Wednesday. Um I'm having a great Wednesday and uh I'm feeling good. I'm feeling proud. I'm feeling uh energized. Um, I I went to the store today and I bought some supplements to uh to heighten my energy level. I got some B12. So, look out if if I'm taking vitamin B12, you better watch out, man, cuz I I'm I'm coming to get you. So, anyway, um, health is wealth, right?

So, remember, uh, everything that you put time and energy into is an investment. And, uh, most of your best ROI is not money. Return on investment is not just financial. So, don't ever think that money is the biggest thing that you get from an investment. uh you get so many other things besides money uh from an investment and I I just want you to really make sure that you learn that because if you understand it from a universal standpoint then you'll understand investing better and then you will get the money the money believe me the money's coming but uh you'll get so many things that money cannot buy there's so many things that uh you wouldn't trade for money for example you wouldn't trade your um your health your physical health for money you wouldn't trade your relationship with your mama for money uh you wouldn't trade your um your time with your children for money. You wouldn't trade your mental health for money.

I hope uh even though a lot of people do actually, believe it or not, there are a lot uh the mental health of Americans is not very high. And uh and part of that is driven by uh as I spoke to Dr. George C. Frasier today, uh I was explaining to him that I think that in America, we kind of have a commitment to unhealthy capitalism. And uh the unhealthy commitment to unhealthy capitalism is one where uh you have people that want to do what what I would almost call Trump style capitalism. Uh where it's sort of very uh brutal and very cutthroat and uh and it's winner take all. It's about sort of making as much money as you can. Uh it's it's about it's and it causes these uncomfortable trade-offs like you're trading human life for money, the health of children for money, right? Or you let people get away with anything because of money. and uh and and it's practice on the Democrat and the Republican side. I I don't believe in letting the Democrats off the hook because I've seen really weird things with uh Democrats as well. So, it's uh it's just one of these things where it's um you know, something worth thinking about. So, conscientious capitalism is what we aim for. So, put the word conscious in the in the in the comments. Put the word conscious or conscience. Uh type it in there. Let me know if you get what I'm saying.

Now, by the way, uh somebody says they like my background. You like that? Okay. Thank you. I I thought about, you know, the biggest goats I know and and these two goats are are I I figured I'd be I It's almost like I I get um what's the word? Like get protective energy over, you know, over me from the goatiest goats, right? So the goats are behind me. So I can't go wrong. I can't make a mistake. I can't mess up. And if I do mess up, it's God's plan because I got the goats behind me. And all we're doing and and we ain't nothing new. Ain't nothing special about me or it's we're all continuing a legacy. We're continuing a tradition. Uh we're supposed to be excellent. That's what black people are. That's what we do. That's how great we are. And so, uh, so these guys just set the tone. So, God bless them both. Dr. Claude Anderson and the one and only Marcus Garvey. Uh, we read Marcus Garvey's book in our previous trainings, uh, in our Power Nomics class. So, if you if you guys actually want to go get the recordings, um, I'm trying to think, the recordings are in the Black Business School. I think, you know, I got to go find them. I got to go find them. But, as you know, we've been doing poweromics training for years. and um and uh u let me think here and Chanel who's on our team, she puts all the recordings of every single training into the Black Business School. I just got to go find out where it's at. I can't remember. Um I know if you go to black keystogreatness.com, there is an uh a free sort of a life class there that you can also take there. And uh I'm really I'm really curious now to see where we put put all these powernomics trainings are. Here we go. Let me see if I can find this here. Uh you know what? I'll we'll go look at it later. Sorry everybody. I I'm just trying to look and see where it might be. I'll find it next time.

But anyway, uh make sure that you um and also if you want to join the Zoom or get an invitation to the Zoom, uh text the word uh text uh text morning to the number 87948. Text morning to 87948 and then I'll give you the link to uh the Zoom where you can come into the private Zoom. Some of you are watching from outside the Zoom or you're watching the recording. And so if you text morning to 87948, you'll get invited to money in the morning and to our powernomics training. All right, so let's hop in.

All right, so you guys know that that we've been reading the book called um An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. And uh and I like this book uh not because I have anything against the Jewish community, even though um I I will admit I'm a little bit concerned about some of the things I've seen in Gaza and in the Middle East. I I think that there is some something there for sure. But I'm not here to uh to judge all that and to indict all that. I'm here to talk about best practices when it comes to building wealth. Um, and uh, and I'm not even endorsing the the style of wealth building from other communities. I'm not putting them on a pedestal. I'm not telling you that everything they do is wonderful and sacred and perfect. What I am here to say is that you can learn from the winners, right? You can learn from the winners. So, if you watch a football game and the other team beats you 175 to four, uh, you should be studying their offensive and def defensive schemes for at least a couple reasons. One, so you can learn how to stop them when they're trying to score. two, you can learn how to score some points of your own. And then three, maybe you can go win you a championship. You just don't have to play the same way they play, right? So, so the truth of the matter is that uh no matter what you think about that community, we know that that community is very good at making money and building wealth.

So, we've been reading this book, An Empire of Their Own, How the Jews Invented Hollywood. Um I don't have the name of the author in front of me. I have it on Kindle here and I don't want to lose my page, but this book, it describes, in case you're new, this book describes how the biggest Hollywood studios were created by a group of people from the same community. They were all from the same part of the world. They were all from Eastern They were all from Eastern European countries. And it's really, really fascinating to see like, holy crap, how did this group of people, you know, from a very small part of the world create one of the most phenomenal cultural empires on the entire planet? like what did they do? How did they do it? So, this is what we're reading and uh the book is long. We're literally 3% of the way through the book. So, um but let's uh let's keep going.

All right. So, here um let me see here. Uh so, here we're talking about Low uh who created Lowe's Theaters. Um and it says, and I'm just going to literally start reading from where we were last time. Uh Low wasn't entirely truthful about his commitment to the movies. He was never the advocate that Zucker would become. Zucker created another uh film company. I think it might have been Universal Pictures. I'm not sure. But he did recognize opportunity. After his experience in Coington, he installed a 110 seat theater above the Hippo Drone and attracted 5,000 patrons on the on his first Sunday. Soon after, he began converting his New York arcades into movie houses. Within 6 months, the arcades and Nickelodeons have returned all the partners the initial $100,000 investment. So, you see how they're investing as a community. They're putting their money together, forming these businesses, and next thing you know, they're making $100,000, you know, individually back in, you know, 1902, right? Or 1895, whatever they that's a lot of money back then. Within a year, they had a they had a score of storefront theaters scattered throughout New York City. So, they were looking to scale the business. Low, who created Lowe's theaters, may have been right that success was more a function of chance than industry. But this time, this time, Chance had smiled upon him. Marcus Low had arrived. Marcus Low who created Lowe's Theaters. Adolf Zucker. Adolf Zucker I think he created Universal Studios. I'm not sure. He remembered an evening in 1897 just before his wedding when he took his intended to [snorts] Chicago's Hopkins theater and saw a brief film of May Irwin kissing John C. Rice in a scene from the Broadway hit The Widow Jones. Quote, "The next night he went back to the shop for dinner or after dinner," wrote his biographer, intending to spend the evening over a design, but toward 9:00 he closed up and went again uh to the theater, drawn irresistibly by the fascinating Marvel. That was how Zucker claimed he first got interested in the movies. It ran maybe a minute, but it made but it made an indelible impression on my mind.

So, at this time, all the movies are very short. Uh film making and making movies is is a new craft. It's kind of this new technology similar to what AI is right now. So, what we're dealing with right now with AI being the hot new thing, um, you know, AI agents being the hot new thing for them. Films were the hot new thing. Okay. These moving pictures, this idea that you can put uh sound and video and lighting onto a screen and you could just see it anywhere. Like that was freaking people out. All right. So with the movies coming becoming a thing, Zucker who had learned a good deal about public taste. So he paid attention to what people wanted from his years in the fur business decided to convert the top floor of the automatic vaudeville automatic I guess moving pictures automatic technology right vaudeville into a small theater as Lo had done. We had we had this empty floor over the arcade he remembered. Um and uh it says here uh about 40 ft by 250 ft. We put in 200 seats and then began to worry because it seemed like an awful lot, especially as most of our customers didn't know what moving pictures were. So, they didn't know what movies were and were used to paying 1 cent, not 5 cents. So, we put in a wonderful glass staircase. Under the glass was a metal trough of running water like a waterfall with red, green, and blue lights shining through shining through. We called it Crystal Hall and people paid 5 cents mainly and and mainly in on account of the staircase, not the movies. It was a big success.

So, what they did uh and and we're on page 340 of this book. Well, I don't it says location 340. I don't know what page that is because I'm watch I'm reading on a Kindle. I don't know what location 340 means. I wish I could tell you. Can't tell you what page it is. Sorry. Uh yeah, I wish I could help. Let me see if I can figure this out. Oh, page 29. Page 29 of 672. 29. All right. So basically what he's saying there is that Zucker when he was trying to get people to come see these this new technology these moving pictures he basically realized that people came for the experience. It wasn't just the product. So this is and every time I see a business lesson I'll just spit it out so you can kind of consider this. A lot of times people don't really care as much about your product as much as they care about your style, your taste, what kind of experience you give. And uh in fact, speaking of experiences, uh if you want a great experience, want to make money in the experience, there are three ways to make money this year at the All Black National Convention. That's our version. You know, the same way the Jewish community was doing their whole thing with the moving pictures. We're doing our thing now, except it's now AI and it's business and it's building black wealth. We now have over two trillion in our community to spend. So that means that that's two trillion that we can invest. So the All Black National Convention is the largest gathering of intelligent black people committed to the idea of investing. We have a partnership with the um black doctoral network, the largest organization of black PhDs in the country. So we got the scholars, thinkers, mothers, fathers, leaders, community activists. We educate the children from age two all the way up to age 92. And uh and so some different ways you can make money at the convention. One, if you have a business and you want to market your business, every business needs marketing. If you have a great product, nobody will know about it if you don't tell them. So we have uh hundreds of thousands of people in our network that we can expose your business to. So you could be a sponsor. So if you go to all blacknationalconvention.com, you can uh click and apply to be a sponsor. We can't sponsor everything because it certain if something isn't if something's faulty or problematic, I can't we can't be associated with that. We've had that issue uh before. Um, you know, I I just sort of casually was supporting the Tulsa Real Estate Fund and it didn't work out so well. A lot of people thought that was our fund and I was like, I didn't get any of that money. I didn't I was just saying, "Hey, go brother, go." Apparently there were some issues. So, I learned from that experience and now I we can't just endorse everything. So, it was a lesson learned for sure. But with that said though, um if you have a solid business and you got something good going on, you can apply to be a sponsor. Uh you can sponsor the Wi-Fi, you can sponsor, you know, I don't know, we we can put signage up. You can sponsor the main ball or whatever it is that your company wants to do. So, all blacknationalconvention.com, you can go there. That's the first way you can make money. Second way you can make money is you can be a vendor. you can set up your table and have your products available and I'll bring everybody to the vendor tables and they can see what you have going on that way. Uh that's also at allconvention.com. The third way you can make money is by being an attendee. You go there, you meet people, bring your business cards, network, set up business meetings, follow up with people. Dr. George C. Frasier, who is the leading network guru in on earth, literally the greatest networker on the entire planet. He's known for this. uh he's going to be there and he's been for years coming and showing people how to how to connect, how to form those relationships, how to how to sort of build the strength that comes through connectivity similar to what this community is doing. So Jewish people ain't the only ones who can work together. Intelligent black people work together better than anybody including the Jewish community. Uh so it's a matter of just sort of us executing and getting best skills with that. teach that to your kids, too. We're uh for the kids, we will be teaching them the same skills we want the adults to have so that in 20 years, they're going to step in and want to be leadership of of everything that we're doing right now. All right. So, anyway, it's all blacknationalconvention.com. So, feel free to go there and uh and take a look.

All right. Now, let's keep going here. All right. So, when Zucker visited he let's see. With the success of Crystal Hall sometime in 1906, Zucker took a trip to Pittsburgh to see Harry Davis's Nickelodeon. The Nickelodeon, which was converted, a converted billiard hall dedicated exclusively to showing movies, had been packing in patrons ever since it opened, and it had become something of a national shrine for arcade owners like Zucker. When Zucker visited, he was already feeling uncertain about the long-term prospects of the Penny Arcade. And he was doing his usual groundwork to determine whether the the future shows or Nickelodeons would be financially viable. He returned convinced that they would they sorry they would he he was sorry he returned convinced that they would and he rented the vacant store next to the automatic vaudeville for his first movie theater. So they're expanding. They're looking for ways to build uh opportunities for each other. Um the connector's name is Dr. George C. Fraser. He wrote a book called Success Runs in Our Race. It's required reading at a bunch of H.B.CU. Uh Zucker's activities over the next year, however, indicated that he was more interested in getting involved with movies than he was in determining just what that involvement would be. He [snorts] had no sooner rented the store than a former prize fight promoter and vaudeville entrepreneur named William Bradley convinced him to form a partnership and operate the new storefront theater together. Brady and life was the stuff inferior val Victorian melodramas were made of. As a child, Brady, a Rudy, a rut, [snorts] sorry, ruddy ruddy Irish Catholic from San Francisco, had been spirited away from his mother by his deranged derelic father and then abandoned in New York. After years of odd jobs, he finally became an actor and then a fight promoter. And though he was hardly in the first rank of entertainment figures, he was solidly in the second, having produced a number of successful vaudeville shows. One thing Brady knew from years inviting was the scent of money. In 1906 when he first met Zucker, that send had brought him to the movies and he had secured the New York's uh the New York franchise of Hails Tours, a theater rigged up to look like a train car and showing short filmed travel logs to give the impression of movement. H So they were showing something on the screen that made people feel like they were moving on the train. This is a big thing and this is going to be much bigger than opening and putting chairs in a building, he insisted. Zucker agreed with him and for a while business was so good that the partners expanded to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Boston, New York, and Coney Island. In each city, Hail's tours did smashingly for roughly 6 weeks. Then the novelty wore off and the number of patrons plummeted, grabbing for an expedient, they kept the theaters afloat for 6 months by obtaining the great train robbery. This 8-minute drama with its self-explanatory title was among the very first fictional narratives on screen when it was made in 1903. It was also among the most accomplished and it energized the movies the way the Nickelodeon would later energize movie theaters. But the train cars had a cost between $6,000 and $8,000 a piece to outfit. And in less than a year, even the great train robbery, Zucker's company had gone $160,000 in debt.

That's another thing. That's something that you've seen actually with some of these companies. Uh I think like with the [ __ ] vegan and stuff like that is uh sometimes you expand too fast and you end up with a lot of debt. And when you get a lot of debt, debt needs to be serviced. That's not just happening at the business level for a lot of companies. It's happening at the national level. Uh the US government is going to eventually end up spending so much on its debt that it's going to have to start cutting social security stuff like that. And then also um Chicago, the city of Chicago like a lot of other major cities is so busy servicing its debt that uh that these cities are going to start declaring bankruptcy probably in the next 10 or 15 years. Just mark my words that's going to happen. So, this company, even though it was growing, even though it was making money, was was drowned in debt, possibly by overexpansion. So, keep that in mind when you build a business. If you expand too fast, then your business can die from the fact that you're going to you end up suffocating with too much debt.

Uh, quote, "I can hardly remember an occasion when the four of us, my father and mother and sister, and I didn't sit down for dinner together," says Zucker's son, Eugene. My father would discuss all the events of the day, good and bad, and if disaster was ahead, we would know it and be prepared for it. And if he had made a a mistaken judgment, we would know it. We were always moving from an apartment with an elevator in service to an apartment over a candy store from Riverside Drive to Broadway. Zucker's wife was a stalwart. She would say, "Well, so we move again. I'll find a place now. How much can we afford?" So P said, "As little as possible and still be near a good school. This is the way our life appeared to be to be a hop, skip, and jump up and down and back and forth."

So this is Adolf Zucker who created I think it was Universal Studios. uh pay attention now that he was an entrepreneur. He was that means you had booms and busts. You have ups and downs. So if you are an entrepreneur and you're not yet married and you marry somebody, you better make sure that they're mar they're ready to be married to somebody who follows an entrepreneurial lifestyle. An entrepreneur is not a person who does a standard 9to-5. They don't get a consistent paycheck. They don't have a predictable life. They're not things are not always sort of the same. There's a lot of excitement. There's a lot of novelty, but there's also a lot of up and down. Sometimes the money's good, sometimes it's not. Uh, sometimes the hours are long. You don't really When I became an entrepreneur, I didn't really think about weekends and vacations anymore. It didn't mean I didn't take them. I just didn't I didn't need them, but I didn't have the ability to take them. I can't just I couldn't just abandon everything and just go away, you know. But at the same time though, I began to get to the point where I would take a vacation every day. Every day in the middle of the day, I'd take an afternoon nap. My friends that went to work could not do that. So really sort of knowing that life of an entrepreneur is really important. And also knowing yourself is really important. And if you have a partner that also wants to be with you, make sure they understand it. Uh some some lifestyles are different like the lifestyle of a cop. If you marry a cop, you better just know what it's like to be married a cop to a cop. You you date a PhD student. A lot of my friends in our PhD program got divorced because they didn't understand how you could study 10 hours a day, seven days a week and still be worried about failing your test, right? Or and still not be done, right? So So really, it's a it's a lifestyle thing.

All right. So anyway, Zucker's nerve and confidence were remarkable with each crash that occurred. So remember, there's crashes. Everything crashes. Never let anybody tell you you shouldn't invest because the market's going to crash. If anybody comes up, anybody, give me a guess if you go through this where you have somebody in your family that's like, well, you know, the stock market is going to crash. The dollar is going to crash. Everything's going to crash and then it's going to all go to hell. It's going to crash crash crash. Right? They you have people like that, right? Next time you hear that, next time somebody warns you, like they're telling you something new, like as if you don't talk to a finance professor every other day, um, and they warn you that the stock market is going to crash, don't fight with them. Don't argue with them. In fact, it's it's hard to win an argument with an intelligent person. It's impossible to win an argument with an idiot. Okay? So, idiots are hard to win arguments with. Just politely say, "Yep, you're right. It is going to crash because it crashes." That's what capitalism does. Capitalism artificially creates crashes because capitalism is where you're driving the car really fast down the street and if you crash it is going to be messy and there's an explosion. But uh but the thing is if you are protected and you stay relatively safe and you don't get crazy then the crashes are few and far between and when they do happen it's a fender bender and you could just you you get a new car and you get on the road and you're 10,000 miles ahead of the the person who sat on the side of the road because they were scared of crashing. So the stock market crashes. It will crash. Um, I think it's I predict I believe right now since we're talking on what is this, April 8th, 2026, I believe it's going to crash in the next few days. I believe that this uh ceasefire in Iran, I do not believe it. I do not believe it's going to hold. I said this from the jump. I don't know why the stock market has not crashed yet. I'm sitting here waiting like, okay, when you going to just get back all that money? Like, I'm just looking at it like, come on now. Like, really? Really? You really think? Like, you really think this is a ceasefire? You really think that the uh that the US, the Israelis, and the Iranians are all going to stop fighting all of them at the same time? You really think that's going? Hell no. It ain't going to happen. The Israelis don't even want a truce. They're going to jump out there and just drop a bomb on somebody and mess everything up. The Iranians are shooting bombs at everybody. They They don't care. They just like they just done lo they they didn't they ain't got nothing to lose at this point. And then you got Trump. And Trump's supposed to be the grown-up in the room. Really? Really? Trump is your grown-up in the room. He's the one that's supposed to keep everything. Man, you better get out of here with that nonsense. So, I'm looking I keep refreshing my page on CNBC because I'm waiting for I've already seen evidence that this the ceasefire has been violated. I'm waiting for the futures market to crash because they're going to say, "Oh, well, they they didn't stop fighting after all. The straight of Hermos is not open like they said it was." I think they're lying. I think I think that the whole I'm going just say like this. I think that this whole rally of the market today is one of those like I call it like you'll hide your wife, hide your kids rallies because because that's just artificial money. That that was an artificial rally. That that's not real. That's an illusion. So if you have stock, I would encourage you get some puts. Protect it while you can because puts are cheaper when the price goes up. Just just wait. Put your seatelt on. I bet you anything there's going to be a crash this week. But maybe I'm wrong. I could be wrong. I got to be I got to hedge my bets on that, too, because if I'm wrong, I don't want to look too stupid. even though I'm probably I probably do a pretty good job on my own. All right, but anyway, we'll see. All right, so let's keep going here.

All right, so Zucker's nerve and confidence were remarkable with each crash that occurred. Remember this guy was very successful. He had crashes. Uh he said his son, he always sat with a cigar in his mouth as though nothing had happened. So he was able to This is why the black financial therapy department that we created is so important. He was able to process the the crash. It wasn't the end of the world. It wasn't something that told him he should give up. He would just sit there with a cigar in his mouth as if nothing had happened. After the Haley's tour debacle, remember this is one of the most successful entrepreneurs of all time. He created, I think, Universal Studios. After the the Haley's Tour debacle, Brady suggested they declare bankruptcy. Quote, "It was as though I touched him with a live wire. He bounced up from his chair and came at me with his hands out. I never dreamed he has such a temper." And he yelled, "I won't go into bankruptcy. I won't." For Zucker, who had the sternest and least forgiving of moral codes, bankruptcy was not m as much an admission of defeat as the breaking of an obligation. I remember reading this. To break an obligation was tantamount to lying, one of Zucker's cardinal sins. Instead, Zucker sent Brady back to Broadway and took complete charge of the theaters. This time, following the policy he had set at Crystal Hall, he ripped out the train cars, reinstalled the seats, and kept the theaters open from 9 until midnight each evening. At the end of two years, he had retired the debt and was even shown a profit.

So, here's here's what I'm I want you to pay attention to right here. Pay attention to this. What he's talking about is something I've talked about this extensively in my book, The Ten Commandments of Black Economic Power. That in order for a community to build wealth and power, you have to have codes of conduct. You have to have standards. You have to shame has to be part of the process to some extent. You got to have something where you can't just let everything slide. You can't be forgiven and forgetting and acting like every type of behavior is acceptable. What he's saying is I pay my debts. That's what he's saying. He's saying I'm not going to steal from you. If I my word is my bond. If I tell you I'mma pay you back, I'mma pay you back. And I want you to contrast that. And this is where I want you to understand because this will help you understand why wealth can't get built in the black community. Let's think of it like this. How many of you have heard people and how many of you feel maybe that you've heard people say like this is why I don't loan money to relatives. I don't I don't I don't give my money to my relatives, right? The my no don't don't don't hire none of your relatives. It ain't going to work. Right? Why would you say that? Why would you feel that way? I'm not telling that you're wrong. I understand. I got relatives I don't want to loan money to or invest in. Why? Well, because you got you got bad culture. You have shady negroes that will borrow your money, not pay you back, and then look you in the eye at the damn family picnic. What the hell's wrong with you? You at grandma's house, and we sitting over here eating dinner, and I'm eating my food and chewing extra harsh, staring at you cuz I know that you use my money to buy those Jordans. I I saw you on Instagram on a Carnival cruise and you up here looking flyer than me. You dress better than me and owe me money. Not acceptable. Not acceptable. So what he's saying here, Zucker is saying he has a code of conduct. He's saying, "No, I will not declare bankruptcy because bankruptcy makes my creditors not get paid." And I don't want nobody running around here saying, "I loan money to that guy and he never paid me back." So I want you to understand how that is connected to a strong economic ecosystem because risk when risk is high, wealth is low. When risk goes high, asset prices decline. When risk is high, the stock market crashes. When risk is high, the economy slows down. When risk is high, you don't have trust. But if you lower risk, like if I if you're solid and I'm solid and I know you solid, you know I'm solid and I know that you know that I'm solid and you know that I know that you know that I'm solid, then we can be solid with each other and build something solid together. Do you understand what I'm saying? So, what Zucker is saying here needs to be written. Now, this is a this is business school, people. This is something I'm just reading. I'm like, whoa, this is business. This is business school. Teach this to your kids. All your kids. You got four kids. Hey, son. Look, when you borrow money from your sister, you pay her back. When you when you go work with your brother, when your brother needs you, you show up for him. When But but but don't you dare go out here and do something crazy that's going to put everybody in jeopardy. The family makes the decisions together. We work together, right? That kind of thing. You create that code of conduct that will carry over into adulthood and next thing you know you'll be seeing your grandkids building a multi-million dollar business together because they know they can depend on each other. What I got is what you got. You need you need $5,000. Well, I got $5,000 in my bank account and I'm going to give it to you because I know you're going to give it back. That's a beautiful situation. It's beautiful.

Let's keep going. Aside from vindicating himself once again, Zucker had learned a lesson from his Haley's tour experience that that was to determine the course of his life. He came to realize that the movies only seemed like novelties because they've been treated like novelties. He sensed that their potential was much greater. How he arrived at this conclusion, he never really said. Like most things in Zucker's life, it was probably less the result of inspiration than of rumination. But by 1908, he perceived that quote, "These short films, one realers or less, didn't give me the feeling that this was something that was going to be permanent. Permanence would only come by attracting the middle class as well as the workingclass audience. And one could attract the middle class audience by exhibiting longer and better films by in a sense imitating the middle class forms of the novel and legitimate theater. That was what that was precisely what Zucker was now recommending. However obvious it might have seemed in hindsight at the time what Zucker was proposing was a radical change in the basic conception of motion pictures which is not to say that he was the only one who proposed it. only one uh one of the first and most behemoth. Zucker never acted impulsively, but when he did set his mind on something, he was a zealot. And now he became almost messianic on the subject of longer, better films. So, he really became committed to making longer, better movies. Quote, you couldn't head him, recalled William Brady. Presently, he was in my office bubbling with grandiose ideas about the future of the movie racket. some six sense had convinced him that the day of mere shorts was drawing to a close and fulllength features like the great train robbery only far longer and far better could be coming. So remember this is the time where they didn't have long movies. They didn't have movies that were two hours long and all that. They had one minute Instagram reels except they were ugly and raggedy and right. So it's funny that we went back to like short reels again, right? But that's what they had back then. And what [snorts] he's saying what he's seeing is is a vision of the future. That's another aspect of being a good investor. Good investors live in the future. They don't live in the present. They don't sit and dwell on the past forever. They they they move toward the future. All right.

So, let's keep going here. All right. So, let's see here. Y'all really like this. This is like the a 10th time I've seen you all comment on the back. So, y'all like this? Y'all digging this? This is This is working, huh? Okay. All right. All right. Well, then I better sit up in my chair a little more since I'm I got Claude Anderson and Marcus Garvey behind me. This is Is that look like presidential or something? I'm playing. All right, cool. But yeah, these these these guys are the goats. I love them. And I got to get one I got to get Dr. George Frasier up there, too. So, let me keep going here.

All right, so let's see here. Uh Zucker was about the only living human who could guess what would happen. Okay, so let's see here. All right, so Brady wasn't alone. Zucker le le le le le le le le le le le le le le le le le le le le le le le le le le le le le le le le le le le le le le le lectured the regulars at Shane Shameley's Grill uh Low Brady and Schubert brothers who owned several legitimate theaters and Nick and Joe Shake associates of Low on the untold possibilities of the feature film even Jesse Laskkey who shared Zucker's conviction about quality films received his impassion plea for features since his comedy theater on 14th Street was still doing standing room business the motive for Zucker's sudden obsession seemed far less mercenary than psychological He must have known for at least or at least since that the ideal quality feature films comported perfectly with his ongoing recreation of himself. Quote, "Every Hungarian is either a peasant or an artist, sometimes both," he once said. But the regal guarded Zucker of America clearly aspired to art, changing the tone and the stat status of of movies was a more direct route to the higher echelons of legitimate gental America, which Zucker had always regarded as his rightful place. and the means he would later use to affect this change indicated that raising his station and gaining acceptance from artists already accepted in literature and theater was an important consideration for him. Finally, while other movie Jews were exploiting the quote democratic possibilities of the movies, Zucker had always been vaguely uncomfortable with these possibilities and distrustful of anything even remotely demagoguic. He claimed he became a Republican after hearing William Jennings Brian's rabbling rabble rousing cross of gold speech at the Democratic convention in Chicago calling it a bunk. The others could seek could secure the movies with the working class and the immigrant audiences. Zucker whose ties to these groups were purposely tenuous would bring them to better class. Okay, that's that's his class view. Okay. Whether or not there was specifically a specifically Jewish component in Zucker's sudden preoccupation, it was true that many, if not most of the producers who would take up the banner of feature films were Jewish, and the idea was certainly compatible with the deepest strains in Jewish life, where culture had always been held in in in special esteem. In America, where ambitious Jews could conceivably ride culture into higher social strata, this esteem carried an even greater force. It was the Jews like Zucker who were most sensitive to the movie's low esteem and the Jews who had who had the most to gain by raising it. Acting on this idea in 1910, Zucker took his family to see an hour and a half film of the Passion Play. Photographed on location in Ober I can't pronounce Oberu I Germany where the pageant had been performed once each decade since 1634 and then properly brought the right to exhibit the film in New York and New Jersey. The cost was $40,000. So he went over to Germany, got the rights to present a certain film, and he ended up bringing that film into uh into Jersey or into Yeah. into New York and New Jersey. He paid $40,000, which was an astronomical sum of money at that time. Quote, "Everybody thought I was crazy," he remember, and and told my wife I'd lose all my money. Made all kinds of predictions why I I'll go to the wall. Nobody believed that people would sit through a picture for hours as they would a play. They were all there were all sorts of reasons why the thing would not succeed. That was why Marcus Low Low's theaters shied away from the movies. Zucker obviously disagreed, but he proceeded cautiously nonetheless, fearing that the Catholic Church might organize opposition to a film depicting Christ. According to one version, he booked the film into Newark first to test reaction. And then when a priest and when a priest strenuously objected that Zucker was usurping the role of the church, Zucker begged for mercy, claiming that he would be he would be broke if the film failed. The ploy, if if it was a ploy, worked. When the film opened in New York, it did very well justifying Zucker's faith that audiences would sit through movies just as they sat through stage plays.

Zucker so so this is the first time that somebody that they actually had a movie that was more than a couple of minutes. Do do you understand the historical significance here? He's experimenting because at that time they didn't believe people would go to the movies, right? So he comes out with this movie uh that's, you know, a couple hours long and just they don't know if people are going to sit through and watch it and they find out. So they're market testing, right? They're they're try, but it's expensive, but that's what they're doing. They're market testing to see if people actually have a demand for it. Nowadays, you don't have to spend that much money to test the market. They have something called MVP, which is minimum viable product. MVP is where you put the least amount of money in to test out a product and you see if people want it. If the first hundred people love it, then chances are the next 100,000 people will love it. And that's how you find out what's going to work. You don't do all the guessing and then put all your money into what you guessed at. you you guess you guess a little and then test a little. Guess a little test a little and then you keep on putting more money into it once you get confirmation and validation that it's going to work. So whenever people come to me and they say, "Hey, Dr. Boyce, I want you to invest in my business." I'm like, "Okay." I'm like, "Well, my first question in my head is, "Well, does the damn thing work? Do people want it? Is there evidence that this is working? Are you already making money? Or is this just an idea?" If it's just an idea, man, ideas don't mean nothing. That's like the That's the difference between making a baby and being a parent. Anybody can make a baby in 10 minutes, but being a parent takes 157,680 hours of continuous labor to raise that baby to the age of 18. That's a whole different animal. That's a whole So, just cuz you made a baby don't mean you're a parent. So, just cuz you came up with an idea don't make you an entrepreneur, right? So, so you got to put in the work. That's the That's the point.

All right. So, let's keep going. So, Zuck uh let's see here. Um okay, so Zucker did next did an extraordinary thing. While he had been evangelizing for feature films, Marcus Loa had gradually been accumulating theaters. Lowe's theaters, I keep saying that. Los theaters uh had been accumulating theaters and had become a power in popular entertainment. Now, Zucker proposed that to pull their holdings in a new company called Lowe's Consolidated Enterprises. Lowe's Theaters. How many of you have been to a Lowe's theater? Anybody? LS. Give me a yes if you know about Lowe's theaters. We're reading the book, An Empire of Their Own. How the Jews invented Hollywood. Anybody ever Anybody been to a Lowe's theater? This This is the creation of Lowe's Theater. This is two guys, Adolf Zucker and Marcus Low. Zucker created Universal Pictures. Anybody seen a movie with Universal Studios? Anybody know about Universal Studios? So, these these are two people. This is maybe the white people's version of Biggie and Pac or something, right? They're sitting on not a billion dollar empire, probably a hundred a $100 billion dollar set of ideas. If you add all these companies up, it's probably 20 30 40 50 hundred billion dollars. Okay? And uh and this is this is going to be like the wealth for the great grandkids for sure, right? And and and and this is just formulated. I want you to look at the conditions under which this was created. So, it

was created under kind of this cloud of desperation in the sense that Zucker is like he's failing, he's trying, he's failing, he's trying, he's getting some success, he's nudging down the road, he's standing on conviction, he's standing on resilience. Those are the two things that matter most in business. You don't learn that in business school. Business school does not teach you nothing about how to stick to it, right? How to pivot, how to keep never give up. You got to learn that from from God or from your mama or from your own experiences, right?

And uh and and and he's he's struggling along. He tries something, it works. And then Marcus Low gets together with him. They're friends. This means they had a relationship. They had a good relationship. If one of them had been an [ __ ] this wouldn't have happened. They wouldn't have formed this partnership. So, I always tell people one of the keys to success in life is don't be an [ __ ]. Be nice to people. Be helpful to others. And then others will want to partner with you. That's where great partnerships come from. Narcissists don't do very well in partnerships.

All right. So, anyway, let's keep going. Let's keep going. Let's keep going. All right. So, uh, Zucker then, so they they then, uh, Zucker proposed to pull their holdings into a new company. That's another thing, too. Expansive thinking, like they're always looking for the next business idea. That's another thing. Gosh, so many things are thoughts coming to mind. Culture. The the culture of the entrepreneur. The culture of the entrepreneur is one where you're always looking for the next big thing. You're always looking for the next product. You're looking for the next market. You're looking for the next great idea. And unfortunately, capitalism is p that and the fact that black people are mass marketed employee culture doesn't allow you that expansive experience. It is very fulfilling to be able to sit around with your with someone you care about and just constantly come up with great ideas that are going to expand your reality. You it opens the key to the world that that you lose when you are raised in just pure jobseeking culture where all your limitations are placed on you before you even begin the game.

So, we I believe I would argue um and and I may end up doing a year at an H.B.CU next year. I can announce it when when it happens. But if I'm there, I'm going to really encourage the students to be incredibly expansive. I want you to go for it. I want you to believe in what you have and and see the value in what you have. We we have so much wealth in the black community that we do not see. We see our two trillion that we spend every year, but that's probably 2% of what we have. We have probably another 30 40 billion in in human capital from our elders. We don't listen to our elders. Dr. George Fraser brought this up today and I said, "Man, that's a great point." He was talking about how many how we don't pay attention to our elders like we should. Uh we have great trillions of human capital when it comes to our children. Our children are incredibly valuable, right? We we have the be, you know, our kids become the best basketball players and entertainers in the world, the best scientists, the best of everything, right? So So there's so much capital there.

Let's keep going. So, so here Zucker proposed to pour pull their holdings into Lowe's Enterprises, but Zucker had a provisio. Quote, "I made a condition that I would put my interest in, but that I would not take any act any active part in the business." So, this is where he's showing that you just because you own a business don't mean you got to run the damn thing. So, stop thinking that being an entrepreneur or owning a business means you got to run a business. Ain't nobody said you got to do no work. If you're not sure how to do that, I did a training called How to Make Money Without Working. go uh text the word uh money to 87948 and you can watch it for free and a lot of people like it and because I I think somehow we are trained to believe that when you do something new you've got to be doing all this work your time is limited you don't want to think that way so he says here he he said [clears throat] later because it was not my thing it I had in mind he didn't want to spend his time at a movie doing this movie thing he wanted to do other movie things but not that my mind was made up on these pictures low agreed and in 1910 Zucker released from all of his obligations, left the entertainment industry to conduct what he said would be a three-year study of the movies, a personal investigation into their prospects.

So, that's fascinating. That's interesting cuz So, what it sounds like he's doing is he's saying to to Marcus Low, "Hey yo, look, you go do the dayto-day. You do the mundane. You go sit in all the meetings and do all the stuff. I'll give you some money, but then I need to be free so I can look at the bigger picture because I want to elevate my consciousness." What I'm picking up from Zucker is that he was a very financially conscious person. I'm picking it up from this because one, they're saying that he wanted to go do this three-year study to see this the expansion of the industry, what it could become. That's the beginning of Universal Pictures. In my mind, that's when it's born. He's looking at he's saying, "I don't I don't want to build the million-dollar company. I want the billion-dollar company." Right? So, a lot of times, you'd be amazed how thinking big is the number one variable in determining where you end up. I know a lot of people when I was in academia and I was working on my doctorate, I knew some of the smartest people on earth who who would think so small that their impact would be almost non-existent. But then I I know some people who aren't that smart who think big and their impact is massive. So he was thinking big. He was trying to big build something massive. And also the other thing that tells me Zucker had high financial consciousness is the way he handled uh crashes and and and and distress. He didn't see it as the end of the world. He would just sit there, keep his cool. He always saw the bigger picture. That's what we talk about every morning in Money in the Morning is getting your financial consciousness where you want it to be so that when you run into a situation, an opportunity or whatever, you're able to see how it fits into the bigger picture. What is the bigger picture? The And I can tell you what, the big picture is not whether or not you going to get paid on Tuesday. They want you focused on that small sort of a survivalist, low vibrational like, am I going to get enough money so I can go to the club on Friday night kind of energy. And that's not CEO energy. That's not millionaire energy. That's not entrepreneur energy.

So anyway, let me keep going here. So he says um so that so he went to go study the the entertainment industry. And among those who remain unconvinced about the prospects was low himself. So Lowe's theaters. He didn't believe in what Zucker was saying. So Zucker attributed his partner skepticism to the 1907 national depression. So there was a depression in 1907 when several of Lowe's theaters slumped along with the rest of the economy. So Lowe's kind of got caught in the moment. He saw the depression. He said, "I don't think this is going to work." Uh and uh and and then Zucker was still able to say, "Well, this too shall pass." Again, consciousness, right? That's another thing, too. Sometimes you'll have people around you who will see you fail or they'll see hard times and they think times are going to be hard forever, which which leads them to abort and and destroy long-term potential opportunities, right? So, you you're you're doing something different in 2028 because of something that happened in 2022, right? because you gave up in 2022 and you therefore killed all possibility of anything new happening in 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 there's a lot more in the game left to play. So you cannot allow one moment or one day or one year or one situation cause you to to to limit your your vision for what you're trying to do.

So he says here also let's see um he says um let's see okay Zucker has suffered too. So Zucker also went through a lot during the depression. Economic conditions change and sometimes entrepreneurs can think it's because they're not doing a good job or they're not qualified when really it could just be a bad economy. That's why also you want to have conservative uh investing habits where you're very careful with money because you must be prepared for things to go wrong. So uh whatever the source his confidence had been shaken many years later he enjoyed telling the story of opening night at one of the movie theaters where only one single patron had come. So this guy again who created Lowe's theaters had a day where only one person showed up. So don't give up on your raggedy little business. Uh thinking quickly, he had the usher tell the fellow that this was a really dry run and he had been sold the ticket by mistake. But the man was undeterred and insisted on seeing the show. Lo wandered glumbly back to Shanley's seeking commiseration from his friends. So he was so this guy who became a multi who built a billion multi-billion dollar empire was so depressed that nobody showed up for his business that he went to go get consolation from his friends. So this is also further evidence that uh that that everybody goes through it. Stop acting like you going through it means somehow your thing was meant to fail. You might be on your way to being a billionaire or creating billionaire children or grandchildren and and you cannot internalize what appears to be failure. That really is a learning opportunity for the most part. But let's keep going here.

Since almost every every everywhere else the movies were prospering, it is hard to tell how much of this was apocryphal and revisionist. uh Lo's way of justifying his lack of vision and how much was truth uh sorry Lo's way of justifying his lack of vision and how much was truth uh but if Lo was less sanguine about the movies than Zucker he did he did share one thing with him the aspiration to graduate from working-class to middle class audiences and together the two men came to represent the two basic strategies of the movie Jews Zucker concentrated on improving the movies themselves so Zucker wanted to make better movies low chose to concentrate on improving the theaters So Zucker wanted to make better movies. Lo wanted to make better theaters. So it's like a better product and a better experience.

So let's see here. Um, let's see. And Low also uh was soon refurbishing old burlesque houses and reopening them as popularly priced combination movie and vaudeville houses. His first in 1908 was called the royal, formerly the cozy corner. And if one needed any evidence of low's ambition, the royal premiered with an Italian tragedian tragedy. It's like the word tragedy but tragedian. Tragedian named Antonio Morrow appearing live in scenes from Shakespeare. Lo's scheme was class by association, mixing live acts with films and doing so at reasonable prices so that he would be adding the middle class without leaving the working class behind. I don't offer widely advertised top liners, he said, explaining his commercial policy. I do need Mrs. Thaw, a famous beauty whose jealous husband murdered a rival, or Jim Corbett, a former boxing champion, or performers of that class whom an audience may want to see for curiosity's sake, but through whose act they are likely to yawn just the same. I find girls who can dance with the best, and the writers of jokes turned out as good stuff for my artist as for anybody else. The proof was in the profits. In 1909, low rented two large theaters from the Schuberts. The year after that, he consolidated with Zucker. And the next year, 1911, he purchased the vaudeville circuit from one of the largest entrepreneurs, William Morris. William, Anybody heard of William Morris? How many heard? Anybody know anything about Hollywood? Anybody know about the William Morris Agency? There's another name drop. Does anybody know how powerful the William Morris Agency is a 100red years later? Talk about legacy. Who knows about the William Morris Agency? Yeah. Um, okay. So, the William Morris Agency is so powerful that if any of your favorite actors and celebrities was to ever piss off the William Morris Agency, you would never see them again in a movie ever again. That's how powerful the William Morris Agency is. So, they just drop a name, William Morris. So, this is just a raggedy crew of dudes hustling, finding the next big idea. One is Andrew Low, or not Andrew, I'm sorry, uh Marcus Low, who created Los Theaters. The other one is Adolf Zucker, who I believe created Universal Studios. The other one's William Morris, who created the William Morris Agency. Let me give you some names. Not only do they control their community, they control yours. Most great, many, not most, many of your top black actors and actresses are managed and controlled by the William Morris Agency. They make more money off your f off your black celebrities than you do. That's insanity. That's crazy, right? Let me give you some names just so you know. Anybody heard of Denzel Washington, Viola Davis, Michael B. Jordan, Idris Elba, Zenaia, Regina King, John Boyyga, Daniel Kuya, Leith Stanfield, Tessa Thompson, Brian Tyrie Henry, uh Jonathan Majors, Kiki Palmer, Donald Glover, Lupita Nyongo, Marshala Ali, Anthony Mackey, Janelle Monae, Marseilles Martin, Nissi Nash. I keep going. There's a lot of names here. There's a lot. I haven't named even. I mean, that's like a drop in the bucket. Yeah. So, this is the William Morris agency. This is them putting wealth in their community. And then this is what the Negro Leagues should have had if we weren't so busy trying to to integrate and work for white people. Is what happens is that when you have one successful business, economics is contagious. My dissertation chair, Andrew Corolli, who's at Cornell University, wrote entire research papers about financial contagion. Good financial conditions are very contagious. Bad financial conditions are very contagious. So, when you have one or two businesses in your family and you have a couple of people that go off and have some success and they have the right mindset, they should be able to come and just sprout million-dollar businesses everywhere because now you suddenly got a family bank and you've got resources and connections and possibilities that didn't exist before. And every person that's ambitious, that has a good idea, can also get guidance and counsel. And it's almost like fertility. you create an incubator of just these businesses. Uh, anybody heard of Y Combinator out in California? Y Combinator. Y Combinator is this uh incubator. Um, they don't have a lot of black people in in this um in this thing. Um, but if you were to look at the the billion-dollar companies that came from Y Combinator, I'm looking them up. It would blow your mind. It would blow absolutely blow your mind. Here's what Y Combinator does. They admit people with the best ideas. They give them training and preparation. They give them some capital. They give them some guidance and connections. They pull their resources. They pull their resources. And next thing you know, you've got um let's let me name some companies that came out of Y Combinator. Anybody heard of Airbnb? What about Stripe? You might know about Stripe. Multi-billion dollar company. Coinbase. Never mind know about Coinbase. Door Dash, Instacart, Reddit, Open AI. one of the most powerful tech you some of y'all were on chat GPT today. Uh Dropbox. Um I can keep going. There's a lot here. There's a lot. Zappier. Uh Twitch. Uh yeah. Yeah. So there's there's a lot of powerful companies that come out of these incubators. So you know, if I if I'm able to do what I would love to do, you know, I I don't have we don't have all the resources we want to do, but we're doing what we can. um is I if I had a vision and we had a billion dollars to really execute or hundred million or something, then that's what I'd do. Uh if you want to know what I was on the phone talking to Kanye West about and trying to convince him to buy into, I would I said, you know, let's put some money together and let's build an incubator and get the smartest black people we possibly can and bring in the best ideas and create a network of people that can help each other be successful. And I think it could work. Uh the all black national convention is kind of an incubator. We've had a lot of successful businesses come out of that. So, ultimately, this is what you do. This is what you do. You you you you just It's like a It's like um a like a like a family reunion or eating at grandma's house. It where everybody brings a plate. And if everybody brings a plate and everybody knows how to cook something, then you're going to have a delicious meal and everybody's going to be healthy and full, right?

So, let's keep going. All right. So, we're reading uh this book, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. One on page 36. I'm going to read a little bit more and then we keep going. All right. So, uh, let's see here. So, we're talking about low. Um, so in the year 1911, he purchased the vaudeville circuit from one of the largest entrepreneurs, William Morris, and moved his office to Morris's old flagship, the swanky American Music Hall on 42nd Street. When his company recognized later that same year under the banner of Lowe's Theatrical Enterprises, it was capitalized at $5 million. for low. He was now more of more he was now more a vaudeville promoter than a movie exhibitor. That was vindication enough. Meanwhile, Zucker well taken care of by by his low dividends. So Lowe's building the business. He's sending money to Zucker. Zucker is doing good. He continued his firstirhand examination of the movies. Quote, "I traveled all through Europe and this country, watched the audiences, and was interested in any picture that had a subject that I felt would appeal to the public." Zucker wasn't only observing, he was also stumping. In 1910, he had even gone to Wise Benaden where Carl Lamel, uhoh, that's another big name. I'm not going to tell you about Lamel yet, but Lamel, that's they they just they dropping names up in here. Carl Lamel, a major producer and distributor, was vacationing to convince Lamel to make features. Lamel declined. But roughly a year later, back in New York, Lamel introduced Zucker to Edwin Porter, the projectionist turned director who had made The Great Train Robbery. Porter, subjected to Zucker's sermon on feature films, mentioned that Joseph Engel of the Rex film company had just secured the American rights to a French film of Sarah Burnernhard starring in Queen Elizabeth. Zucker promptly contacted Engel and without even dickering agreed to buy the rights for $35,000. Zucker didn't care about negotiations. He realized Queen Elizabeth was the fulfillment of a dream. on the subway not long before Zucker had hit upon a formula for the advancement of movies to the middle class. Famous players and famous plays. He scrolled on the back of an envelope. So famous people in famous plays, I guess. Um his intention was that the movies could become kind of canned theater and that the diversions of the middle up and upper class could be popularized, attracting a new audience while elevating the old one. With Queen Elizabeth, Zucker now had a test case handed to him. one of the world's greatest stage actresses in a bonafide theatrical hit and he immediately set up an office in the times in the Times building overlooking the theater district using his own slogan for the title of his new enterprise he incorporated as the famous players company. Zucker was fully conscious that he was now engaged in prestige building for the movies and for himself. His plan was to capitalize on the material's theatrical antecedance by mounting Queen Elizabeth as if it were a stage production. He would make it a pres a presentation. He'll make his presentation an event as he had once on a much smaller scale made the presentation of one reelers an event at Crystal Hall. For the opening he rented Lysium Theater, a legitimate stage house and he invited leading lights from the theater and gentile culture using Burnhard as the draw. By almost any standard, the film itself was crude and none of the visual dexterity that innovated the innovative directors would soon be bringing to the screen. So, it wasn't even that great of a film. But Zucker realized that Queen Elizabeth was a cultural event, not an aesthetic one. When it premiered July 12th, 1912, the response was enthusiastic, and the occasion, in retrospect, at least was historic. It proved to Zucker's satisfaction at any rate that feature films were economically viable as long as they were the right films. No one complained of boredom and restlessness watching The Great Burnhart. But far more significant, Zucker felt that it had gone a long way toward breaking down the prejudice of theatrical people toward the screen culturally. So theat the people from the theater thought that movies were trashy basically kind of like the way uh for a long time people thought that the internet was like this sort of trashy place to do business and then co happened and suddenly everybody's rushing to the internet. It's kind of the same way. I remember telling people that the internet was a good place to be and they would be like no no no I want to go do this and do that and then they realize the internet's actually even better in a lot of ways.

So let's keep going here. So he says, "Culturally, this meant that movies had edged away from novelty and toward art and had opened exhibitors eyes to the possibility of a higher class of trade with feature pictures. Personally, it meant Zucker might now be admitted to their ar uh he might be regarded as a man of refinement and culture, which for the Jewish and orphan Zucker would be apt compensation for all he'd been denied. The extent to which this personal elevation might have animated him was evident in his ardent pursuit of a theater connection during and shortly after the Queen Elizabeth affair. In order to give himself validity, end quote, Eugene Zucker said, quote, "He needed someone of stature to put a stamp on it and say, 'This man is on the right track. He's going to use the screen for a purpose beyond anyone's conception. He's going to take the library shelves and open them up to the world visually.'" Brady had already refused, though Zucker had offered him extremely favorable terms. 25% of the stock in famous players and a guarantee of $25,000 a year for the use of his name. Quote, "You're out of your head." He told Zucker, "These pictures are just a fad." So, they thought movies were just a fad. Uh, through Marcus Low, Lowe's low theaters, Zucker had met Ellig, an an aristocrat goatee attorney who represented many of the major theatrical producers. Sympathetic to Zucker's mission, Ludvik offered to sound out Daniel Froman, one of the leading showman on Broadway. Froman agreed to meet with Zucker, but like almost every other theatrical figure, he was still apprehensive, and Zucker remembered the meeting as more interrogation than interview. So, him trying to convince a theater actor to be in a movie was, I guess, like trying to convince a mainstream Hollywood actor to do your TV show or your internet show. That's what I'm guessing here.

All right. So he says um he was still apprehensive and Zucker remembered the meeting as more of an interrogation than an interview. Would the enterprise be high-minded? Would the actors be well compensated? Though Zucker was never especially articulate, he talks the English he learned from the furbench, wrote one observer. He could be quite impassioned when it came to the movies and he finally he did finally convince Froman to give famous players his impremature though not without also giving him a large share of the proceeds. This and Froman's feeling that he might be gaining some advantage over his more famous brother Charles probably tipped the scales. Zucker was not at war with the establishment. On the contrary, he wanted it sanctioned, which professionally meant the approval of a motion picture trust formed by Thomas Edison. This is a big deal. Thomas Edison, I believe, was the inventor of the moving picture. So, they had a lot of back and forth over um copyrights and and and trademarks, you know, over the use of the technology. That was kind of that was where Hollywood kind of became a thing was they kept moving out west to get away from Thomas Edison's goons who would chase him down and and beat him up every time they tried to make a movie using their equipment. All right. So anyway, now with with this theatrical connection in place, he asked Froman to approach Edison for a license to produce films. Edison gladly consented to a meeting with the prestigious Broadway producer, but he insisted that his interest in the motion picture patents company were limited and that he would likely be outvoted. Froman infected by Zucker's fervor stressed that famous players quote would improve the character of the entire industry and his activities would not be confined alone to famous players. Others would follow in our footsteps in bringing great plays and great stage stars to the screen. Edison softened more by some uh reminis reminiscences with Froman than by the possibilities of the movies wrote two letters to the chief operator officers of the patents company instructing them to give Zucker a license. Zucker was so elated that he had the letters photographed and framed. So back then you needed to get permission to make a movie. That's what they're saying basically because it was new technology. They had a patent and they were blocking people from using it. The joy however proved premature. JJ Kennedy, the former engineer and loan collector who now headed the Edison Trust kept him waiting for three hours. And when Zucker finally got in to see him, Kennedy sat behind his imposing desk and said, "The time is not right for feature pictures if it will if it ever will be." It was the same resistance that many of the renegade movie Jews were meeting from the intrigent bullheaded trust. Quote, "What they were making belonged entirely to technicians," Zucker said sometime later in a concise analysis of what distinguished the older movie Gentiles from the Jews. "What I was talking about that that was show that was show business."

"Determined to make movies anyway, with or without the trust authorization, Zucker liquidated all his holdings in Lowe's theatrical enterprises and funneled the money into famous players. Lo was dismayed for Zucker's sake and for his own since Zucker was a considerable stockholder. He even enlisted Zucker's wife to express his concern, but Zucker was adamant. He had invested enormous psychological capital in being the one man who would elevate the movies. And within the months, he had begun preparation for the film of the swashbuckling melodrama, The Prisoner of Zinda, which Froman had produced on stage. For the director, he hired the droopy luprias lup I can't sorry. Lubrias Edwin Porter for a set for a set he rented an old armory and stationed his brother-in-law outside to scout for trust goons. So basically Edison's people had these goons that would look around and try to find anybody who was making a movie. And they did most of this in the on the east. That's why they had to go west to make movies because they were trying to get away from Thomas Edison's scary people that he would send to kick your ass if you were out making a movie. That's that's what that's about. All right. So let's see here. So, um, he it says here, uh, determined to make the movie anyway with with or without the trust authorization. Uh, Zucker liquidated his holdings. Okay, I mentioned that he even enlisted Zucker's wife. Okay, we already said that. For the director, he hired the droopy lubrius Evan Porter for a set. He rented an old armory, stationed his brother-in-law outside to scout for trust goons, enforcing Edison's patents. For a star, he was hoping to snare James K. Hackett who after years of appearing in the stage version of Zinda had practically become synonymous with the role. But Zucker knew that quote if I talked to an actor about pictures he'd think well I'm out of my mind. They wouldn't know where I came from whether I was a shoemaker or what. That's where Froman came in. All Dan Froman had to do was say to one actor Mr. Zucker would like to see you. I've set an appointment zoom. They'd come over and and and over there on their own. So basically this Froman guy was he had clout apparently. All right. So uh but it was then up to Zucker to convince them and the appeal he usually used was the one he had used on himself art. When Hackit came to visit Zucker he was he was the very picture of the faded matinea idol. He wore a fur a fur collared coat with frayed sleeves and carried a gold-headed cane. He he had come only as a favorite of Froman and his attitude was calculatedly disdainful until he caught sight of a poster of Burnhard and Queen Elizabeth. His resistance began to melt. Quote, "My father had a great way of romanticizing the vehicle." Prisoner of Zinda. "The story and the possibilities of it and what it meant means to posterity," recalled Eugene Zucker. As Zucker himself later recounted, Hackett realized that this was an art that was going to amount to something and thought he might as well have the honor of being the first American star. Within weeks, Hackett was making his claims on posterity in the movies. Of course, Zucker was also not unmindful of his own claims. He had even hired the critic of the New York Evening Journal to act as his evangelist. So he's marketing. That's what he's doing. He's bringing people in. He's marketing. He's moving, moving, moving. Right? So when you're raising your kids to be entrepreneurs, you know, they they want to learn these skills. Networking, connecting, talking to people, sharing ideas, selling, selling is a valuable skill for anybody that wants to make money. If you if you master sales, you'll never be broke. So to me, if I have a child, they say, "Well, what are three things you could teach the child?" Number the top of the list would be sales. I teach my if you know how to sell stuff son you'll never be broke. So selling uh maybe networking might be another one and then maybe uh investing or something. I don't know but or or maybe learning the things that you need to learn. So so here's another thing too about education. Zucker to build his movie empire. He was studying he became a student of the industry what people need and what's working right. um in education unfortunately uh if you fall for the BS system that they have in place, that system pretty much tells you to just study whatever the hell they put in front of you and uh and so next thing you know, you know, your child might they might know nothing about business, nothing about making money, nothing nothing about how to survive financially, but they can tell you that, you know, a female queen bee can have 18 babies in 20 minutes. I don't know. Like just stuff that ain't g ain't gonna have nothing to do with the price of tea in China. And I I'm not to say there's anything wrong with knowing that, but I know a lot of kids who know a lot of stuff that ain't helping them at all when really there they should have been studying the things they're actually going to need in order to be successful and to survive.

All right, so let's read a little bit more and then we can finish up. Uh let's see. So um so he hired this guy from the New York Evening Journal to act as his evangelist. So he's marketing by getting people on his side. Uh he was being regarded precisely the way he wanted to be as the man who brought distinction to motion pictures. Quote, "The most notable figure in the moving moving picture field today," rapsidized the Evening Journal in December 1912, "is is Adolf Zucker, a young man of medium-sized, slender bill, clean cutacy eyes of Hungarian birth who speaks the English language with a market accent, but whose mind works with all the swiftness and certainty of the mind of a Napoleon." Adolf Zucker uh president of the famous players is one of the seven wonders of the motion picture business said the New York Clipper the very first to recognize the possibilities of producing famous plays and introducing famous players cinematog cinematographically. Mr. Zucker added a tone of in and a dignity to the film game that it had not possessed before his interests. Another article simply called the formation of famous players perhaps the greatest single phase of the entire advancement of the art of the silent drama. But Zucker, now remember they were making silent pictures at this time too. They had no sound. So that's another point too. Zucker was always one to press an advantage. In 1913 he had Froman approach a brilliant young director who was already gaining notice as the most innovative and exciting filmmaker in America and offered him a $50,000 contract. I dropped into my seat amazed. Froman wrote for we as a young and growing company were not achieving at that time any very large income. Although we were making we were making money. Nevertheless, he dined with DW Griffith and tendered Zucker's offer. Griffith refused, saying coolly, "I think I can earn more." Zucker had more success with Froman's older brother, Charles, also a prestigious Broadway producer. Zucker wanted badly to gain the film rights to Charles's plays. But despite his brother's participation, or possibly because of it, the producer looked upon this new play for for adapting plays to the motion picture screen as a ridiculous chaotic dream. Daniel happened to be in Charles's office one day when he heard that his brother urgently needed $25,000 for a new production. The next day, Daniel returned with a $25,000 check from Zucker for the rights to Froman's plays and half the movie profits. Skeptical about the ultimate value of the deal, but needing the money, Charles quickly agreed and famous players gained a windfall.

So, this is another here's another point I want you to pay attention to. Noticed how he's I I mentioned this earlier that um typically in uh business and and especially in film economic success of the business comes down to three pieces. Production, distribution, monetization. Production means making the product, making something great, right? But if you make something great, that doesn't mean people are going to see it. That doesn't mean people will come. The internet is full of millions of people who do amazing content that nobody sees. They're just hoping to get scooped up by the algorithm or something like that. But really, you notice what he's doing is he's writing checks. He's signing the front of checks. His employees are signing the backs of checks. He's signing the front. He, you know, money must be like a boomerang. You going to have to put some out there to bring more back in. And the hard part about it is that sometimes you put it out there and it don't come back the way you wanted it to. But you notice he's writing checks and he's putting his money where his mouth is. And that's allowing him to get the attention of people that might not normally pay him no mind. If you if you're doing business, I'm gonna tell you the easiest way to get somebody's attention is to write a check. You write a good check and you say, "Hey, I'm I'm I'm here to show you that I'm serious about this. So So here's money for your time, whatever, people will respect you more. People will do business with you. People will take that meeting with you. If you just show up with a good idea and it's somebody that that's already busy, already making money or whatever, they're going to be like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah. I see good ideas all the time." That don't mean nothing. But if you write a check, they'll be like, "Oh, oh, okay, Mr. Smith. Uh, well, how can I help you?" Right? Because what you've done is you communicated your seriousness. There's a whole theory in finance called the lemon theory. And I brought this up before, but I'm going to bring it up again. The lemon theory basically says I if you show up and you ask me to invest in something, then your best way of getting persuading me is to show is to show me what you've invested. Because if you show up and you say, "I got a great idea, but I ain't done nothing yet. I haven't put any money into it. very little time. Uh I haven't tried it. I haven't I've had the idea for 10 minutes, but I want you to put a million dollars into it. That that would be a sucker's move. Nobody's going to do that because because the question an intelligent person, people that do real business. See, there's people that do pretend business, imaginary business, and there's people that do real business. There's people that make real money. People that make real money ain't got time to live in the fantasy world. They got to live in the real world because that's where the money's at. People that live in the fantasy world, they're everywhere because they because anything is possible and they're they're imagining now. I'm not here to judge that. We all start there. But there's a point where things got to be real. So what they're going to say if you say, "Hey, I have this great idea and I haven't put anything into it, but I want you to invest in it and risk your money on my idea and then we'll split the the profits." The first thing they're going to say is, "Well, why would you want me to invest in something that you won't even invest in?" Why would you expect somebody to invest in you when you won't even invest in yourself? So, if you ever want to persuade somebody, if you meet somebody, maybe it's me, maybe one day you're talking to me and you say, "Hey, Dr. Boyce, I have this idea." I'm tell you the truth, like, if you show me that that you're that you're already, oh, yeah, I've been working on it for 5 years. I put in, you know, my life savings and I've done, you know, and it's already working. It's already making then it's like, oh, oh, so you're s So, you have a grown-up idea, not you're you're this is a sign of economic maturity. Economic immaturity is where you say, oh, I had an idea. I was sleeping and Jesus sent me a dream and and I just want to share my dream. Ain't nobody got time for dreams all the time. You know, we live in the real world and uh and and I think that's a really important distinction to make in the economic world. You got to understand there's a whole lot of people that benefit by feeding dreams to black people and getting you all pumped up and giving you great speeches and giving the Holy Ghost and then nothing changes. But when you have something that's real and tangible and there and done and moving, that that means everything. That's so much more valuable than an idea.

So let me let me read a little more. All right. So by the summer of 1913, Zucker had completed five feature films including The Count of Monte Krisco, Test of Dilbertvilles and The Prisoner of Zinda and had decided to invade the European markets. Quote, "I must say I am getting getting on nicely here." He wrote his wife from London. "It seems everybody heard of us and I don't have to introduce myself. Wherever I send my card, they receive me very cordially." With this kind of recognition in America and now in Europe, Zucker was very close to being the man he wanted to become. But he would never settle for anything less than full satisfaction. There was still one more sphere to conquer.

So what we'll do is we'll stop here at uh so remind me we're on page uh hold the button. We are on page uh 43. Okay. And the book is called An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood. And we're going to read this book all the way through uh because it's it has valuable lessons on business and uh and I want us to know how you construct empires. They didn't construct an empire. They constructed an entire ecosystem that controls a big chunk of the world. That's what I want us to understand how to do. And I want our babies to know that, too. So they can go out here and kick ass and take names and win. No more feeling sorry for ourselves. We don't do that here. All right. So anyway, I'm going to go um by the way. So yeah, so if you want to if you want to market your business, be a vendor or attend uh the allblack national convention, you can go to allblacknconvention.com. We're going to convene in Jersey City uh the weekend of October 16th. Uh the Thursday before we're doing a bus tour of Harlem. Uh it's very limited seats. I think they only have 50 seats or something. So if you want to do that, look for the link that says tour of Harlem at allconvention.com and uh and you can get a pass there. But that's going to fill up pretty quickly because there's only limited seats. So, uh, if you want to join us there, you can as well. All right. So, have a good day everybody. God bless you and, uh, I will see you all very, very soon. Take care now. Bye-bye. [snorts]