AI-Powered Real Estate & Impact Investing: Transform Capitalism & End Poverty w/ Sam Sells

0:00 My next question for you actually is critics Mark say that affordable housing and investor returns cannot coexist. How does your AI powered system defy that myth? You know, by increasing profitability and resident success. Yeah. So what one of the things I like to say in in private equity world is concessionary. So are the returns concessionary? Meaning if I do a regular project I'm going to make a 20% annualised return, but if I do an impact project I'm making a 10% annualised return?

0:40 Welcome to the King Dems Podcast, where we share the stories of extraordinary people and dissect hot, relevant topics that shape our world. From visionary leaders to trailblazing creatives, we uncover the mindset, strategy, and grit behind greatness. Whether it's business, culture, or personal growth, we ask the real questions.

0:58 This isn't just conversation, it's transformation. The Kingdom's podcast, Your next breakthrough starts here. Music licencing reimagined. Ladies and gentlemen, we're live you once again welcome to the kingdom's broadcast. And today I've got with me fighting out of Texas, United States of America. Mick.

1:22 Welcome, Samuel, the disruptive capitalist. Sal, how old are you, Sabo? I'm doing well. Thank you so much. Whoa, I guess you were thinking, yeah, now you're a fighter. You know, we spoke briefly about the UFC or started the part. Whoa, how are you doing today? How's Texas, my man? Man, it's weather is good.

1:50 We've had rain this year. Yeah, I hate. Texas is typically warm all year round and there are a lot of my people there in Texas, a lot of Nigerians there in Texas. And they say it reminds them of the weather back home. You know, it's summer all year round in Nigeria. So tell me about the weather in Texas.

2:14 So I mean, it's hot in the summer. We occasionally might get a little bit of snow in the winter, but most of the time we get no snow in the winter unless you're up north in Dallas. Wow. But yeah, Texas is a good place. It's a really good place. I think I would love Texas already. Yeah. Wow. You know you have always described yourself as a disruptive capitalist, someone who believes profit and social impact aren't just compatible but essential partners.

2:47 So can you kick us off with a story that epitomises these philosophy in action? Yeah. So I started a company 7 years ago and you know, our objective from the very, very beginning was to find a way to help investors make money helping people. Because I, I had learned, you know, a decade before that when you align incentives where people make money, helping other people like, it becomes sustainable, it becomes repeatable and. Repetition breeds mastery.

3:20 Right. Repetition breeds mastery, right? And, and look, you know, nonprofits help a lot of people, but nonprofits spend a lot of their time and money seeking more money to fund the nonprofit. So they spend a lot of money going after more money. Looking for money. I've actually worked with a nonprofit before, so I can very much relate. Yeah, it's, it's very expensive.

3:40 They'll, they'll spend millions of dollars a year just trying to get millions of dollars a year and it's not sustainable. It's never a sustainable model. It only works when you have a very, very wealthy benefactor. Who? Can cover it, but so I wanted to do stuff that nonprofits do, but I wanted to do it under a capitalistic paradigm.

3:59 And so to me, that was how do I disrupt the capitalism where it's only about the money and make it about money and purpose or impact making it different? Yeah, that that was what was in my mind. I love that word impact, you know? Yeah, about the money and the impact. That resonates with me. Yeah. And so we set out, Michael, how can I make a lot of money helping a lot of people.

4:23 And I think I was in probably, I was in probably in Jamina, Chad or West Africa. Maybe it was when I was in Afghanistan one of those times, or maybe all those times I just kept looking at people and in these villages and thinking, you know, at the end of the day, it's all about our home. Where we grow up determines our it doesn't determine our destiny, but it determines where we start for sure.

4:45 And it determines a lot of what our, our philosophies, our mindsets are based on the people we grow up around. And, you know, so I started thinking, well, real estate is a place to make a lot of money. What if we start doing real estate where we go after very distressed assets, take them over, rehabilitate, rehabilitate them, turn them into clean, safe places for people to live, and we get a big upside with repositioning the asset and making money off of it.

5:16 So that's what we set out to do. We started a mobile home parks. We did that for a few years. It worked out really well in the beginning. I learned some hard lessons on a few of them and then we got into apartment complexes, buying very distressed apartment communities 20, forty, 50% occupied, rehabilitating those and make it turn those into clean, safe places that were naturally affordable.

5:39 And we did that probably for six of the past seven years. And the and the process we learned that you can absolutely make money helping people, but what we needed was a nonprofit portion that would come in and take care of our residents. So a resident in in the US, somebody loses their job. That's on the lower social economic scale.

5:59 They lose their hourly job, they can't pay rent. And so by law in the US, you have the Fair Housing Act, which says that you have to give the same thing to everybody, meaning you can't get free rent to somebody if they lose your job. You have to, you have to kick them out. That's the law. And so people get mad at landlords, but it's the US it's the law.

6:21 Like I have to be by by the law. So rather than kick people out, what we started doing was reaching out to nonprofits, local nonprofits, charities, churches and say, Hey, can you help this lady? She lost her job or this young man that these guys lost their job. They need help getting a new job. They need help covering their rent.

6:40 And so we started working a lot with nonprofits to help support our residents. And in exchange, that actually made our deals more profitable because now their rents were getting covered, we were having less evictions, people get less mad, don't tear up the units. And so that was really, really helpful. But we also discovered that small towns don't have access to nonprofits, just cities do.

7:03 And we just, we just kept learning all these these lessons in the process. And eventually it LED us to where we are today and our current strategy. You know, your journey has been quite adventurous. It would, I say, as an understatement. Yeah, adventurous is an understatement for the tweets and turns that your journey is actually gone through, you know, firefighting, military strategy, global health and now real estate innovation. So how do these seemingly disconnected brawls connect? You know, under your mission to create launch pads of human potential?

7:42 Yeah, all those roles are all about service. I've, I've been like this since I've been a young man. We absolutely, we, absolutely we me. I've been focused on serving others since I've been a young man. And so firefighting, I enlisted in the Air Force as a firefighter. That's just a service role, right?

8:04 Helping people in need. I became a healthcare executive and got into global health that global health for over a decade focused on working focus on working with foreign militaries, foreign governments, helping them create sustainable healthcare systems primarily focus around patient movement era medical patient movement did I worked at USAID.

8:25 You could did a fellowship with them for a year. Ebola response. Just a lot of the all that stuff all ties back to, you know, how do you serve your fellow man? And, and just that passion that I've, you know, I grew up in Oklahoma, rural Oklahoma down the dirt Rd from a Indian Reservation or Native American reservation.

8:45 And just, you know, I, I've had a relationship with poverty, American poverty, and then spending time in Afghanistan, which was the poorest country on the planet, and a lot of the other ones in sub-Saharan Africa, West Africa and Asia. I just grew a passion for helping people get out of poverty. Like how do we do that?

9:04 You know, you talk about USEIDI. Do remember that the not not-for-profit that I did work with, they did get grants from USAID. They're usually involved in quite interesting, what I say projects. Yeah, especially when it comes to healthcare. Another thing that yourself and myself have in common is the fact that you were a Scout, a Boy Scout and of course, you know, Eagle Scout and now a veteran.

9:33 There is something they always say, you know, always be prepared. And that has always followed me, even now in my life. You know, I think it's a lifelong thing. So how has that philosophy of always be prepared And, you know, the military strategies, military leadership, you know, has that shaped your approach to tackling systemic poverty? Yeah, So a great question.

9:58 You know, I, I was an Eagle Scout. It's really hard to find Eagle Scouts these days. And Boy Scouts of America used to mean something. Yeah. They lost a lot of that meaning when they got ransacked by public opinion. We, we all budget an honour, you know, Like I'm always proud that I was a Boy Scout, you know? Yeah, yeah, somehow they got villainized, attacked and like. Destroyed culture.

10:23 Castle Culture. Cancel culture, right? Yeah, how, how dare we teach little boys to be grown men so and good fathers and husbands and all those things. But yeah, how dare we do that? Yeah. Yeah, I, I question reality sometimes like what's happening right now. So anyhow, so, so that in the military again, it's and then where it came from, you know, the military is a great experiment in poverty, right?

10:52 The most, the majority of people who join the, the US military are coming out of the lower socioeconomic rungs of society. So we, we based a lot of what we do now off of that model. So in the military model, you come in, you get housing, you get healthcare, you get food, but you also get somebody that's going to kick you in the butt and keep hold you accountable to do the work you need to do, the education, the job, skill training and etcetera, so that you can become a a functioning member of society and not on welfare all your life.

11:25 And you look at people who grow up in welfare and projects in poverty and what do they not have? Well, they don't have the housing they have is terrible. Public housing in the US is terrible, like it is most places, and then they're surrounded by a whole bunch of poor people and then they don't have access.

11:43 So in the military you get access to job training. If you grow up in, let's say, Gary, IN, or in New York City, in the slums, you don't have access to job training. And the Housing and Urban Development, Department of Housing and Urban Development, they have some programmes for job training, but it's really up to the cities, the states to deploy those programmes. And they're very haphazard.

12:07 They're not standardised. Reporting is not required for all the programmes. And so it's just not very well executed. And then, but in the military, you, you got this training programme and then you got this mechanism to hold people accountable. And then you have a mechanism to cover people's rents and, and everything else. And so we, we've taken that and we've applied it to regular housing and we found that a lot of that stuff still works. It just needs to be done in a little bit different way, more streamlined, more efficient.

12:40 So now we're trying to work with public housing authorities in the United States and the government housing and saying like, let's bring the same system that we use in the military to help millions of people climb the social economic ladder and get job skills, get training, go out and be functioning members of society without being on welfare.

13:00 And that our system works. It's been proven. We're just are working now to scale it because my, you know, my goal is to help millions of people get out of poverty. That's what I want to do. But it has to be in a way that makes investors money so that they do it over and over and over again. And so that's what we're done.

13:18 So you actually talk about something that sounds like the title of my 100th episode. I think you should go watch my milestone episode. You argue that government systems are broken and private sector efficiency is key. So can you break down how your model with impact worth capital this especially when working with entities like public housing authorities? Yeah, when you so there's 3300 housing authorities across the country, all right.

13:56 And then when you take on private owners, there's thousands of and if we're just talking about housing, so apartment complexes, mobile home parks maybe built to rent communities as well. So the, the question is, is, you know, how does, how is our model better than the broken model? The current broken model is here's these HUD programmes, housing authorities, 3300 of you guys pick which ones you want to use. These are the models.

14:25 Good luck. All those models, they are all focused on allocation of capital. All right, we have $70 billion of HUD funding to go out to 3300 people and they need to fight for it. All right, what if instead of focusing on how much money we have to give out to everybody, what if we focused on how many people are we helping get out of poverty?

14:55 Right? So it's not just the, it's not the money, it's the focus. What are we focused on? And, and the focus is on, you know, taking care of people who are in poverty, which is great. The government should do that. But the government needs to work on getting people out of the system, right? You have 40 million able adults who have access to Medicaid in the US, and they complain all the time that Medicaid is spending trillions of dollars.

15:23 They need to reduce how much we're spending on Medicaid. And so then they go and negotiate prices with pharmaceutical companies, which they should. Pharmaceutical companies are raping and pillaging America, so the which is great, but that's not going to solve Medicaid. You want to solve Medicaid, create a system which our system does, that takes every single human in that system and provides them a, a, a personalised road map to get from where they are to making 60 grand a year in U.S. dollars.

15:59 If they're making 60 grand a year, they're no longer on Medicaid and you just solve Medicaid. You want it, you want to reduce, you want to save $1.2 trillion a year, deploy our system across 40 million people. And even if we're at like a 15% efficacy rate, in two years, you're going to start saving trillions because the system, it has to have a system, it's got to be a system, and the system has to be a system that works. We already know what the military system works, so we just streamlined that system and added an AI powered element that gives people a personalised road map. And then they can, they can move, they can go. But you want to save Medicaid, you want to save tax dollars, you want to boost the economy,

16:46 Focus on getting people out of poverty. That's it. And the only way you get out of poverty is making money. You're actually, it feels like you saw my next question for you. My next question for you actually is critics Mark say that affordable housing and investor returns cannot coexist. How does your AI powered system defy that myth?

17:12 You know, by increasing profitability and resident success. Yeah. So what one of the things I like to say in in private equity world is concessionary. So are the returns concessionary? Meaning if I do a regular project, I'm going to make a 20% annualised return, but if I do an impact project, I'm making a 10% annualised return.

17:37 And so that problem is real. When we first started, we did way better than a regular project we do, and then we got to focus on impact and then they became concessionary returns. And so we learned that lesson hard that you have to structure the deal so that the returns are fantastic. Now when we partner with public housing authorities, we get government backed capital stacks, meaning that we can get bonds and grants that are at low interest, they're low risk.

18:09 There's guarantees on the rents. They'll rent 60% of the units or 50% of the units will go to public housing. Guaranteed they'll be on a 99 year land lease because we want the public Housing Authority to always own the land and always have a right because if not Blackstone or one of these other big groups they're they'll take those properties out of the housing and rent right into market rate to maximise their profits. You can have a very healthy profit, non concessionary profit by building a capital stack that's 80 percent, 90% funded by the government, 70% funded by the government, and then come in and you have guarantees from the government on rents and everything else.

18:54 It becomes a very good, very healthy return for investors. I'm looking at your educational background right now. You do have a Bachelor of Science in visa strategy and of course you do have a master's degree in healthcare administration and policy, you know, global health emphasis. With this background, I I think you would very much relate to what I am thinking right now due to my background in economics.

19:26 My first degrees in economics and capitalism and socialism are very separate philosophies. But you have done an excellent job my friend in achieving a hybrid of these two concepts. And not just a hybrid, an optimal hybrid of these two concepts. One of the past guests on this podcast gave me a title that is on my LinkedIn.

20:00 She calls me a modern day business philosopher think you you are somebody who could also pass for, you know, a confirmation of that title as well. You know, as as as modern day business philosophers. Let's let's try to break this down. What are your thoughts on pure capitalism and what are your thoughts on socialism? And why do you think even a hybrid, an optimal hybrid, is the answer to society's problem today? I guess it depends on how we define pure capitalism. In my mind, the simple root of capitalism is we act in our own best interest to maximise profits. You know when you add in their power disparities, when you add in their the realities of life, when you add in their fraud, deceit, capitalism can get

20:56 pretty rough, right? Dog eat dog. So the there's a reason there's a government, right? Once you get over, there's a, a theory of 500 people. Once you get over 500 people, you need a government because then people start attacking each other, clans, tribes, etcetera. Anarchy. Anarchy, right? Yeah, like in what we see it right The when a government is focused on taking care of the people, the most vulnerable of society, that's what our government is for.

21:24 Take care of the most vulnerable society. Also provide the infrastructure so that every single person who wants to achieve and grow can right. There will always be problems. Humans are not perfect, right? And they aren't. The government is obviously not perfect. And we live in a crazy world right now where news agencies have turned into click bait and they've learned that the more crazy, salacious, ridiculous the story is, truth does not matter anymore.

21:52 Like, there's just you can turn on the news and I'm like, I have no idea what's true. Whatever that is, it sounds crazy and I don't even know if it's real. It's so. Sad. It's so sad. I don't even want to do any longer. Right. Yeah. Like CNNNBC, Fox, they've all turned into like TikTok. It's like TikTok.

22:11 We all feel like rumour mongers right now. Rumour mongers, right? Yeah. It's sad to see. It's sad. Like I've been, I've been, you know, in Afghanistan watching things, been part of things that happened and then watch it get posted on the news and it was completely different than what the reality was. I was like, I'm there.

22:31 I'm a part of this. Exactly. I haven't. You know, like growing up in Africa, I grew up in Nigeria, 1st 30 years of my life, you know, and going out and seeing what the Western media paints of my country and I'm like, excuse me, I come from there man. Like whatever whatever you said is absolutely BS.

22:55 It's absolutely BS and then everybody eats it and drinks it and I'm like, Oh my goodness, you know? Hook, line and sinker. Yeah, Trump just announced himself. He's king of America, right? And then on the other side like. Please invite him on the King Dave's podcast, The King of America on the King Days podcast. Yeah, it's good of a fun.

23:18 It's crazy, right? Like like, like him anyhow. So somebody's got to focus on how do we help the poorest of the poor? How do we help people get out of poverty? Because nobody cares, right? If the government cared about getting people out of poverty, they would do stuff for that. And instead right now we just live in a world where everyone's just trying to get re elected so they can make more money. And so they will say whatever they need to say to their constituents to get votes.

23:44 And what gets votes is radicalising your constituents. That's what that's the path when we are on right now in the US is radicalising constituents to get them to get out of their butts, get their butts out of the chairs and go do a vote. So right now we're, we're trying to work with public housing authorities. We are trying to implement a system that we have created and have been implementing and working. But we're just trying to do it at scale because we know we help people get out of poverty.

24:12 We want to do this at a massive scale because that's what I care about. If I could help millions of people get out of poverty, may not die super heavy man. You know, let's geek out on tech for for for a minute. How do do you know who you're speaking to? Do you know that I have AI? Yeah, let's do it.

24:32 Let's talk to AI. OK so so my name is Ademolar and my middle name is Isima. So my initials are AI. I don't know why my parents set me up this way. And I am a very, very big AI enthusiast, AI evangelist. You know, I have literally used AI to scale up my business, accelerate, you know, everything that I do in my life.

24:57 And some people call me AI because that's literally my initials. How does AI specifically help our residents transition out of poverty faster? So the system that we've almost ready to launch essentially gives people a personalised road map to success and then access to the, the resources necessary. And then we have the nonprofit team that coaches and mentors people because you still need a human interaction. And so right now we're calling it Percy that your personal success companion.

25:31 And I'll, I'll keep a lot of that under wraps, but it should, we're launching a pilot with it and testing it on people in public housing, not testing it on them, but testing it with the people in public housing who already struggle. So we're doing the most difficult challenges to make sure that we work out all the iterations, the kinks, all the, all the possibilities are already there.

25:54 AI already does all this stuff. We've already designed and implemented probably 2/3 of the of the system. But now we're just finalising wrapping it up and setting out to deploy the whole objective. Here is when you're let me back up. Let's say your name's Maria. You're 28 years old, you're fleeing a domestic violence situation and you have a three-year old at home and a five year old at home. All right, you come into public housing, you have $0.00 of income, you have two little kids at home. How are you going to go get a job? So the current system says you need to go get a job. And Maria's thinking I've got a a three-year old and A and a four year old at home or five year old at home. How am I supposed to go get a

26:36 job? I need child care. I have $0.00. I can't afford child care right. Period. Stop. She's done right. And so the welfare system is going to provide her a house, food, utilities, phone exportation, they're going to spend and healthcare. They're going to spend between 40 to 60,000 a year on Maria.

26:58 So what we do is with our public housing, with support services on site, she now can log in to Percy. Percy's going to figure out who she is, talk to her, understand her situation and and it's going to say, Maria, it sounds like you really like to help people. How would you like to do healthcare and become an LPN? Maria has no idea what an LPN is. Most people down there don't.

27:23 So LPN licenced practical nurse, There's programmes out there that will pay for her training, $0.00 out of her pocket. But she doesn't have a GED. She didn't graduate high school, so it needs to take stock of that, understand. OK, You didn't graduate high school. First we need to get you into a GED programme.

27:39 And 1st we're going to put you with your counsellor here at the Halo of Hope site that we're at. So she can go meet with her counsellor and she'll they'll set her up with child care, get her transportation, help her finish the programme to help her finish her GED, apply for the LPN position for the training programme that's about a year long, a year later here, a year and a half later, she graduates that programme and she's gets a job offer today for about 5055 grand a year.

28:09 She has child care. She just went through the programme in a year and a half and now she's making 55 grand a year on her own. And the programme is going to help her continue to elevate. Maybe she wants to be a doctor, maybe she wants to be a full nurse, whatever it is. And so that's the system. Like that's how you get people out of poverty. Maybe it's Tommy.

28:32 Tommy wants to make money. Well, let's help you get into a internship or, you know, go apprentice as an electrician or a welder or something else. Two years, three years later, Tommy's making 6070 grand a year working on his journeyman licence. So that's, I mean, that's the system. And healthcare workers are like in super high demand. Always.

29:03 Electricians, welders, you know, dirt guys, all those people, they're in super high demand. Construction workers, like we can't find them. And yet we have millions of Americans sitting in poverty doing nothing and they don't know how to get jobs. Those kind of jobs, they don't have access. And you may say, well, they should just walk down to the the place and ask for a job.

29:29 I'm like, they're going to walk down there looking like a homeless person, ask the the foreman for a job and then foreman's going to say no, right? They need a system that helps them prepare and then go ask or get connected to the right people that can then ask. And some cities do have some things that work.

29:50 It's just so fractionalized across the states that, you know, it's like, OK, this system in Indiana, Indianapolis works pretty good, but you drive to Gary, IN, they got nothing. You got to go to Chicago. And, you know, if you can get into the unions, you're good. But if you can't get into the unions, you're screwed. And then they're going to look at your background check and you had a felony because you were 18 years old trying to provide for your family and you sold some drugs. So you're not going to get hired. So you might as well just die in poverty. I mean, that's kind of like how the system is set up, super CD. And so we're disrupting it.

30:32 Poverty is not a good thing. I can. I can very, very much, you know, relate to it, especially if you grew up in Africa, you, you would see poverty face to face, you know, and poverty is not a not, it's not pleasant. It's not beautiful. It's the opposite of that. And I know it's something that you can very much relate to.

30:56 You worked in war zones, you know, in the slums, the trenches, you know. What was the most unexpected lesson about human resilience you know and human existence that you picked up and still these with you till today? I've met a lot of happy people in poverty. Happiness is free. I met a lot of miserable people who Dr Lambos so the the thing that people and I met very angry people in poverty too. Well, that's kind of inspiring anger, trust me. Yeah, yeah, it can inspire anger, right? Especially young men.

31:35 Especially in young men. With a lot of tests to run. A lot of tests mosterone who feel entitled to have something better, right? And so then they want to take it because they they don't have a path. They don't have a path. They don't know what to do and it bothers them. So as a man, I know this like if I don't know how to provide for my family, you want to wreck a man So you know, you end up turning to crime because that's what you have access to. Messes with you mentally.

32:14 It messes with you mentally and, and everyone you around you, you know, like look like you join a gang because you you need some kind of camaraderie, you need some kind of coaching, you need some type of type of mentorship and you're not getting it anywhere else. And you need some kind of path to make money and and that's it. So that's the path.

32:34 So what you have to do is you have to disrupt that whole machine by creating a different path, a different Ave. And so that's what we're advocating for is like, there's a different way we have it. You know, it's not rocket scientists a rocket science. It is complicated. Yeah, you know, you can't just go to slums and get people free stuff. So now they're super poor and have 75 shirts. That's.

33:00 Nice. Give them out of fish. You fed them for a day. Teach them how to fish. You fed them for a lifetime. That's it, right? That's it. And So what we're doing is providing them a path and we're using real estate to make money doing it so that our investors can make a lot of money tearing down and rebuilding these nasty old slums into launch pads, brand new communities that are launch pads with a child care on site, an education centre on site and a business centre on site. And it's like, hey, you're in, you're in poverty, you're here with us, we're going to help you get out as fast as possible. And my goal is 2 years.

33:37 Like we can get people out in two years from zero to 50 KA year in two years and then have a path made for them that they can continue to follow forever. It's up to them. You know, you can't force people to do stuff. And we've learned that we've had people, we still evict people from our apartment complexes because some of them refuse to accept help from a nonprofit, refuse it.

34:01 And some of them, just like they can't let go of being criminals. So right, you have to be safe If if the kids here can't can't be safe then. Oh, give me for laughing. You sounded like a comedian. For a minute. I felt like I had Juro get on my show. That's. That's the world, right? I'm quite curious. So, so what's the logistic was the range band, you know between that time where in the the structure is being torn down and the review process.

34:37 So where do these people, where are these people located to in the meantime? Yeah, great question. So we'd like to have swing facilities. So we build a facility or take over a facility that we can fill, fill it with those folks. Otherwise they go on to project based vouchers or tenant based vouchers and, and they get relocated and the HUD authorities have that the local authorities know where to do. Where do people go?

35:03 And then we redevelop in phases. Normally we'll leave one side of the complex intact. We'll tear down one side, build up a new side, move people into there, then tear down the next side and do it in two or three phases. And sometimes four or five phases is larger 600 unit complex or something like that. We want mixed income.

35:21 You don't want a brand new facility full of poor people because then you just have a new facility full of poor people. And we want poor people to be around other people that are not poor. So we like mixed income market rate people who already have jobs, make it 50607080 grand a year that can casually interact with folks who are poor and they can see in the nice cars, they can see the dinners, the clothes and they, you know, they, they want to level up so that they can do the same thing. And then we have on site services where they can go in and be like, all right, somebody's wearing Lululemon. I really want Lululemon.

35:55 Great, you make $0.00, you better not be buying a Lululemon right now. You need to get a job. And the way you get a job is you need to go through this training programme. And I'm not talking about a 15 bucks an hour job or a $20.00 an hour job. 30 grand a year, 40 grand a year. No, we need 5060 grand a year.

36:11 Something self sustainable for real. Not Taco Bell or Pizza Hut, no fast food jobs. We got to get people to where they can really live. That's, that's it. That's where you know. No slander against Pizza Hut is is allowed now that's like you can talk about Domino's. Yeah, like that's those jobs are for kids in high school, you know, They're not for grown adults. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

36:45 Yeah, unless you're like a manager, I guess there. I don't know what they make now, but ground adults need to provide for their for families. And we can do better as a nation, but we're not going to do better as a nation if we just keep doing the same thing or we only count how much we're giving to the housing authorities. It's not about that.

37:06 It's about the humans, people in the buildings and the communities. Like how many of those people are we helping? So that's one of our big things with AI, with our tracking mechanism is OK, you start at 0 and in two years you have $80,000 a year in salary because you did whatever like that needs to get tracked.

37:25 And in that system that creates, that gets rewarded. Go on any government website and tell me where it says that they produced an outcome for a human that mattered. They don't. They only calculate their spending. That's dumb. Think Elon Musk is going to have a word with you regarding this expert Elon Musk in your inbox very soon?

37:55 Do you have a Twitter account? Sorry Ellen, you have an X account. I do not I need to start talking about this crap on on. XK OK, you better not get an X because you might just get axed on X. But on a more serious note, I did have a guest, Alan Lazarus, you know, from your neck of the weeds. He's going to have a second appearance on the on the podcast, I think later on this week.

38:24 If so. And then, you know, he says something. He says America is suffering from an entitlement, our epidemic entitlement mentality epidemic. Like do you want to speak about that? Because you actually touched, you know, on that when you talked about, you know, people refusing help and people not, you know, wanting to take that conscious effort, that active effort to level up even when they're given a helping hand. You know, there's a proverb react come from in Nigeria, they say it's it's a child that, you know, opens their arms that the that the parents can lift up.

39:05 You know, if you don't open your arms right, you cannot be lifted up. So how do you cope with that entitlement, you know, mentality pandemic that is ongoing and what efforts do you guys do to achieve a change of orientation? Yeah, great. Great question. So I think it and the US is taught in high school.

39:29 We have an educational system that is pretty broken. We teach people. The idea is to teach people how to learn, but we spend, I don't know, six months on trapezoids, which is cool. Like I like trapezoids just as much as you like trapezoids, right? So I don't like. Trapezoids. Like how does that help me provide for my family?

39:52 Well, what was the last time? I was walking down the street and I say, hey, trapezoid, what's up man? What's up? Yeah. How do you monetize that thing? Right. And so they're just taught, like you learn all this stuff and then you just go out and you're going to get, you know, the cars you want and the house you want, and you're going to get a great job. You know, we don't work.

40:15 We don't discipline and you know. Hard times make great, you know, great men and women who went through those hard times, right? You know the saying? And we live in a time where our parents work themselves to death to overcome poverty and create something. And some of us are still in there, the work in that.

40:35 And then the new generation is just like, I get all this stuff and I deserve it. And then they go to high school and middle school and they're taught that you deserve all this stuff and you shouldn't be working and chores are bad and how life is nothing. Yeah. How dare your parent discipline. Yeah.

40:57 I hate to bring a spoiler alert. You know, life owes you nothing. And you know, I, I really love what my father used to tell myself and my brothers growing up. He told us something I said, education is the best legacy. That is what that's the only thing I owe you. The only thing I owe you is a good education.

41:13 I'm going to give you a good education. Make do with you. Whatever you can't do with it, you know, But do not expect to get anything off me, you know? And he used to tell us that Chinese proverb, teach a man, give a manifest, you fed him for a day and teach a man to fish, you fed him for a lifetime. And that pretty much made us appreciate education and critical thinking.

41:36 Apply your mind. Your greatest asset is your mind. You can lose all your physical assets about as long as you do not lose your mind, you've not lost anything in life. It's so sad to see this pandemic that is going on. You know, it's a mindset disease that is spreading like wildfire. And there are two major types of mindsets you have the fixed mindset and the growth mindset.

42:01 And what I set out to to to to promote by way of this podcast is the growth mindset. So how can modern day business philosophers like yourself and myself, you know, spread the word and would I say push out this if evangelism of work that we're doing, you know, you know, that's your chief greater impact. Yeah, so the only way anyone ever hears your voice is if you share your voice.

42:32 And so I can complain all I want, but until I share that voice with the world of like, hey, maybe we're focused on the wrong things. Maybe we should focus on humans and outcomes and then measure those. You know, nobody's going to listen to me because they have to hear. You have to hear somebody's voice to listen to them and. And so.

42:50 Exactly. LinkedIn, all the social media places. We live in a world now where where somebody who grows up in rural Oklahoma or in Nigeria can get their voice heard. Shout out to Nigeria. Yeah. Shout out to Nigeria. I'm currently #28 on the education podcast rankings, Apple podcasts in Nigeria. I'm grateful to my people.

43:13 Yeah, wow. It's good to see that Nigerian Nigerians appreciate education. We we live in an incredible time. So if you have something you're passionate about, like raise your voice and and make it heard been known. And no, I'm tired. I'm tired of the media just spending everything crazy. Like why can't we just if it's hard?

43:39 You know what? Speaking of media, right, you talked about the foxes, the CNNS of this world. Do you know the interesting thing? They are no longer the traditional media. I think traditional media right now is podcasting. But yeah, it's very much worn that way because people are finally waking up. The CNN and Fox News and CNBC or MSNBC, they're all political tick tocks, that's what they are. Political.

44:08 Tick tocks like click bait. They're just political. Click. Good, that's gracious. Yeah, yeah. That's it. You know, I know you have 8 minutes left on this show and I would like to maximise that. So real quick, you know, you're actually rebuilding the 19, the 1950s era public housing into mixed income hubs, right? And of course, what's 1 policy change that you would love to see that would help supercharge the work that you're doing across the United States?

44:45 Yeah, I would love to see what we're asking for right now is to let us take the software system across all of public housing and then mandate that those folks in there have to use it to create a personalised pathway. It's free. It's free to them. It cost them nothing, cost the US government nothing. It's free to them, but it'll help people get out of poverty. Like that's the whole objective.

45:11 So help them get out of poverty. Look, I'm a capitalism, I will make money off that deal. So a lot of other people, but it'll be free to users, free to the government, and it will save them trillions of dollars. So that's a policy change is to one, start focusing on the stinking, not the stinking, the humans that are involved, like the the thing that really matters, which is humans and start reporting on it.

45:32 And our system does it focus on human and reports on them. OK. So that leads me to my final question before the quick fly around. What's that optimal or would I say North Star metric for you? Is it return on investment? Is it life's changed? Is it impact achieved or what exactly is that optimal metric for you? Yeah.

45:56 So I have three different verticals that we track metrics in. So the first one is our real estate and that's return on investment or return on invested capital. And we really try and target 20% plus IR, Rs internal rates of return. We really trying to hit 8% cash on cash or better equity multiples, trying to hit 2, two and a quarter X in five years.

46:23 That's our targets with government subsidies that can get much better than that, but that's where we're at. Foundation is lives impacted, hours of education, so forth. And then the software system, there's seven pillars that we have. And some of that is like how much money is in savings from zero, how much monetary change in their savings accounts from $0.00 to, you know, we want six months of reserves in their savings account.

46:53 I know it's crazy. Americans live on death. But like we can teach something better. Credit score rating changes, you know, education milestones, educational hours, job skill training, a job skill training hours and then change in base pace. Or are they making $0.00 and now they make a 50 grand a year.

47:11 Like that's those are things that we track. And how much time they have in housing. So how much time have they been on welfare or subsidies? And comparing that to the outcomes of others who aren't in the system, who are spending on average 10 years in the system. And our goal is to keep people, on average about two years before they exit poverty and are on their own.

47:32 What a long shot, what a tall goal, but then impossible is nothing. That is my philosophy. We have 4 minutes left. It takes 4 minutes to save a life. And let us see if life's here on the podcast, I'm going to give you 5 quick fire Brown questions. Just tell me the first thing that comes to your mind. Number one, what's your best stress relief tactic from your firefighting days?

47:56 Morning, morning time and scriptures and prayer, and then spending an hour or so with my son in the morning every morning. That's a great stress reliever. That I love me a man of faith that just shall leave my faith at #2 Eagle Scout badge, a skill that you still used to today. Being prepared like that still resonated.

48:22 Yeah, it still resonates with me till today. And I'm always very grateful to be very honest. You know, back home in Nigeria, they say if you if you fail to plan, you plan to fail. And yeah, it's it's very true. Until the end of time, one book every disruptor should read. Last one I just read that was really really good was Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell. OK, I'm going to seal that off your bookshelf. If you do not see tomorrow, know that it is in London, England. OK.

48:52 OK, so the next one is AIS next big leap in social impact. Ours Percy personal success campaign. That's the next one. OK, fantastic, fantastic. And of course, finish the sentence. The future of poverty alleviation is. What the future of? Poverty alleviation is. The future of poverty alleviation is Percy personal success. Mercy through Percy, I love that from me to you, it's a very, very, very big thank you.

49:24 I always say this on the podcast, an attitude of gratitude is good attitude. And anytime a person shares their time with you, they share their life with you because the SI unit for measuring life is time. I do not take your time for granted. From me to you it's love and respect from the other side of the pond. God bless you and of course, I wish you the very, very best in all of your endeavours.

49:47 And of course, you know, I'm always an e-mail away and another book when I say Parker session away as well. You know, I'm happy to collaborate with you on on your projects and see how we can bring our expertise, you know, from our company to to ensure that you guys achieve your goals. And do you want to leave a shout out to anybody before you leave? And of course, please help me, help me beg the audience to do the needful.

50:13 You know, they need to show us more love. Thank you very much for the love you guys have been sharing. You know, we've been on the top 200 chats in five different countries in the last one week. You know, it's, it's, it's a lot of love. Thank you very much. But of course, we can do better. My Nigerian brothers, we are going for #1 sports. We are #28 today.

50:33 But come on #1 or nothing. Yeah, Samuel sells. What do you want to sell before we leave? Yeah. Hey, you know, if hopefully you felt a little bit of inspiration from this, reach out to me on on LinkedIn, Samuel Sells. I love connecting with people. I think we can roll this thing out across the entire planet and help people all over the world find ways to create income on their own using the incredible power of artificial intelligence that is coming. So we're, we're excited about that. I'm excited about making a difference. And then with public housing, same thing. Like if you're if you want to make a real difference and invest in a way that improves people's lives, that we're always looking for values,

51:16 mission aligned investors and we really appreciate all the ones that we have so far. Interested. Guess what? I just, I just formed a new tongue twister. Sam Sells seashells at the seashore. If you could do that five times without fail, you're gonna get, you're gonna get $20 from me and Sam Sells. Yeah, absolutely.

51:41 That's a social media. Of course I'll meet you guys. I want to get is love or respect till I come your way again, please, you know, keep showing love, support and of course, keep winning in life. For me, it says goodbye guys. And of course, you know, salute to the to the Soulja Boy. Yeah. Thank you, ma'am.

52:01 Appreciate it.