From Special Ed to Doctorate: Dr. Brian Arnold’s Journey of Resilience

Dr. Brian Arnold’s story is a powerful reminder that where you start does not have to define where you finish.

In this episode of Behind the Story, host Jelani Gonzalez sits down with Dr. Brian Arnold to explore his journey from struggling to read as a child and being placed in special education classes, to becoming an educator, entrepreneur, leadership consultant, podcast host, and doctorate holder.

Dr. Brian opens up about growing up in Colorado as one of the few Black students in his school, the pain of being underestimated, the mentors who helped him see his own potential, and the role faith, family, sports, and education played in shaping his life. He also shares why earning his doctorate meant more than a credential—it was proof that the labels placed on him did not have the final word.

The conversation also explores entrepreneurship, reinvention after the 2008 financial crisis, the meaning of freedom, the mission behind Journey to Freedom, and why highlighting everyday successful Black men matters for the next generation.

This is a conversation about resilience, opportunity, purpose, leadership, education, and the people who help us believe we are enough.

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Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Man, I would just like you know for the folks that are watching today, you are God's greatest gift. He loves you if you allow him to. You were born for greatness. The one thing I love to tell people is they're an answer to somebody else's prayer. Somebody is praying right now that they would be able to listen to Jelani and I talk. They don't know our names at this point, but there's something that either one of us said that is going to spark something in them that is going to help them achieve greatness. And so don't stop looking. Don't stop waiting. Keep searching because God's out there and he's waiting for you to be able to latch on and grow.

SPEAKER_01 0:35

Let's start at the beginning. Let's go back all the way to Cherry Creek High School, 1983. When you look back, what's the inflection point, the pivotal moment that shaped who you became?

SPEAKER_02 0:48

What a great question. And to answer that, I'll go back even a little bit further. I'll go back to Cherry Creek schools, being in elementary school and not being able to read. And kids making fun of me and folks telling me that I wasn't enough. And I had this amazing mom who would tell me that I could do things, but it wasn't what was showing up in the classroom. I don't know if it was just the fact that I'm in an environment that my family had not been used to. My dad grew up very poor. My mom grew up very poor. My dad was a part of a program in the United States that's called the Affirmative Action Program. And he moved us out to the suburb and then didn't really, I'm not saying they didn't understand, but they didn't understand the culture of what the expectations were at the suburban school. There were uh I don't remember how many kids were in my elementary school. Uh I just know that there were two, well, there were three black individuals that were at my elementary school. One of them was my sister, and the other one was a guy named Ernie Pitts. So, you know, whether that mattered or not, it was there were expectations or not expectations that I would do well, but expectations that I couldn't do what everybody else was doing. Because we're talking about 1970, so we're at right at the end of the civil rights movement here in the United States, and all of a sudden I'm in a suburban white school that has expectations that I'm not good enough. I'm not capable of. And so that that moved on. And so it moved on through junior high, it moved on through high school. In fact, there were so many students that were at our high school. Uh, now there's 35 of us out of a high school that has 3,500, and 20 of us are in special ed classes. So there's some kind of mix up there that just didn't gel and didn't make sense. But I did not want to go to college. I did not want to get the same, I guess, ridicule or the same treatment that I felt in college that I was getting in high school. And my mom had this dream for me. My mom said, You got to go to school, you got to get a good education. That's the only way you're gonna get a good job. And I said, Mom, I'm gonna go to stunt school. I want to be a stunt man, I want to go to Hollywood, that's all I want to do. So I literally picked a school because I just happened to be a pretty good athlete, and I got athletic scholarship offers. So now it was even sweeter because my mom's saying, wait a minute, you can go get an education and it's not gonna cost money to do it? You gotta go. And I'm like, no, I'm going to stunt school. So I picked a school that was as close to Hollywood as I could find that was gonna give me a scholarship. Because my plan was to go to class and then go figure out how to be a stunt man. And so that was kind of, you know, what happened in at Cherokee High School is they just told me, you're not enough. I got kicked out of English classes, I got kicked out of other classes, got sent back to a trailer. They made us carry these stupid machines around and you know, that would show that we were not, you know, basically here's this big box you have to carry around that tells everybody else that you're not very smart. And so me and my friends, we just threw them in the trash can. And then they got mad at us. You're wasting our money and our funding. And you think I'm really gonna carry this thing around and show everybody? But then what happened is I got to go to college. And not that I lit up in college, I just enjoyed the experience. I had a mentor, my coach, Coach Terry Franson, who just took me in and I don't know if I want to say held my hand, but you know, preferably he held my hand. We walked around the track on every day. He told me that I was enough. He told me I was good enough. I went to a learning center that told me how to ask for help from teachers. And so every time on a semester came, I would go tell the teacher, hey, this is where I'm at. What do I need to do in order to pass your class? I don't care if I get an A, I don't care if B. Somebody, I think my coach told me nobody's gonna look at your transcript when you graduate to tell how smart you are. That it's gonna show that you had a degree, which was huge for me to be able to think that. Uh, and I had some really good professors and teachers that that helped me along the way. Uh, I was able to excel in athletics, not to the point where I could go do the Olympics or anything. I was a track and fielder and athletics athlete. Uh, but I did get to go to Europe. I got to compete in Europe. I got to live, I guess, kind of the life of a professional athlete. But at the same time, I was still growing. Like there was class, math I'm terrible at. I'm still terrible at. I don't have any desire to be very good at math. I took astronomy because astronomy allowed me to get math credits. So I didn't have to take algebra, geometry, and that kind of stuff. But because I had mentors and I had people, I was able, but it's still, it's still up, reared its ugly head. So now I have my degree, right? I go to the university to have a degree. Uh to physical education. I want to be a teacher now. I want to go teach kids how to run, jump, play, all that kind of stuff. I come back to Colorado where I grew up, and I take a test. They said I have to take a test in order to be a teacher in Colorado. I could hit this thing called spell check and it would fix it. I could hit this grammar checker, it would fix it. Now nobody could tell that this disability that I had was something that was stopping me from becoming. And they said, wait, you're really good at this technology stuff. Will you be a professor at this university? And so by the time I was 26, I was a professor at Cal State San Mardino. I taught at UC Riverside, San Diego State, Azusa Pacific University. And I that that's where it kind of got started in this thing called education. Uh, and then I decided to open up my own business because I couldn't make any money in education, and then I went for it there. So that's kind of the trajectory there.

SPEAKER_01 6:30

So you've obviously lived a life of reinvention and had to deal with lots of adversity. When did you first realize you weren't going to let where you started define where you ended up?

SPEAKER_02 6:42

You know, I I think it was as I think that's a really good question, because I think it wasn't until I was in college that I realized that I could be more. That I realized that, you know, the adversity that I had when you're when you're, I guess, an athlete and you're able to people like you because of what you do, you define yourself as I have to do. Not that I have to be or not that I'm enough, but I have to perform to be legitimized. You know, I think of like actors or actresses, and people have to validate you by coming to your movie or coming to your, you know, to your show or coming to your play. And every it's the rest of the world that tells you you're good enough. And that's kind of how I was as an athlete. And it wasn't until I was in college that I began to realize that wait a minute, it's not my athletic ability that makes me the person I am. It's my ability to be in relationships, it's my ability to be able to communicate. It's my it's my belief in my God who then tells me that I'm enough, that I can go do all these things. And I'm able to start now doing things that didn't have to do with my performance. They had to do with who I was as a person. And I don't think I reached that while I was in high school.

SPEAKER_01 7:50

Well, being, you know, an athlete and and coach, what did what did sports teach you about yourself?

SPEAKER_02 7:56

Yeah, I think what I would say is the biggest thing they taught me is, like you said, the resilience. That if you work hard enough, it doesn't really mean you have to have some talent. I mean, that's part of it, I think it told me about myself is I did have some talent, but it was that work ethic that allowed me to be able to achieve wealth. And it just happened to be around some pretty talented athletes at the school I went to, like very talented, like Olympics athletes, NFL football player caliber people, but they got there because they worked hard, not just because they were talented. And then you be you can almost separate out the folks that will work so hard that they will achieve medals or they'll achieve this compared to the people who are just talented, and then they kind of fall away. You don't ever see them again. And so I think what what athletics has told me is you need to go for it and you need to work hard and diligent at whatever it is. You have to create, I guess the next thing would be habits. What are the habits and the routines that you create on a daily basis that allow you to succeed? Because you can't do it by just showing up and hoping that you run and or hoping that you skip or hoping that you hop and then you're good enough. Not at the not at not at a world-class level. You know, that might work at high school because everybody's not as good as you and talent prevails. But once you start working with people who are just as talented as you are, and then you outwork them, then you get to win races or you get to win in that game of life. I think that's what athletics taught me more than anything. And then it taught me to coach or to give that back.

SPEAKER_01 9:30

What's one lesson that you could think of, or one principle you could think of from sports that would apply directly to business?

SPEAKER_02 9:36

Of the habits and routines. I would say the habits and routines and the alignment that you have inside of athletics. So now at some point you believe in the things that you say you can do, you can really do. Well, the same thing happens in business. You know, and I can learn a business principle now and I can move that forward. Like, what do I do every single morning that I get up? Do I do I look at my PL sheets? Do I look at, you know, the people that I'm working with? Do I look at that? Now can I get better at that because now I know what I'm doing? Because I've created those habits. And I think with especially for entrepreneurs, one of the reasons that entrepreneurs don't succeed is they don't create the same habits that they need that they did when somebody at a job was telling them they had to be. Like at a job, they said you got to be here at 8:30. You got to do these certain things every single day because we need you in order for us to perform at the level we want you. When you're an entrepreneur, you don't have to get up, right? You don't, you don't make any money, but you there's so many entrepreneurs that like, I'll just do a little bit here, then I'll go home for a while, and I'll go play with my kids or I'll go play some games. Or no, it don't work like that. You gotta work twice as hard to get off the state.

SPEAKER_01 10:48

Yeah. Speaking about going back to education for just a moment, when you you're talking about your challenges and being dyslexic and and being in special education, obviously, if you could redesign education for students who learn differently, what would you change first?

SPEAKER_02 11:04

I would change the belief that this is the trajectory that you have to take in order to be successful. Because there's so many, you know, we we say go to school, you get this education, then you go to college, then you get the education in college, and then you can have a job. Well, that necessary college isn't for everybody, or the type of education isn't the same for everybody. You know, there are some people that should be engineers, there's some people who should be medical doctors, and they should go to school and spend a lot of time before they start working on me. Yes, you got to go to school. But then I look at some of it like if if if I have a life where I'm really gifted in communication and I can really take an item and a concept and explain it to somebody in a way maybe that could sell an item or something. Why don't I hone in on that and teach that? Because I want to take the person's strengths, not their weaknesses, and build those strengths. And our education system tries to tell you you're weak in this area, so let's go do another five hours of homework at night on something you're really weak at, so you can just be kind of good at it. Instead of saying, What is your strength? Let's make let's hone in on that and make that purpose in your life just shine. If you're great at music, be a musician. Hello?

SPEAKER_01 12:21

Yeah, that's obvious, isn't it?

SPEAKER_02 12:23

It should be, but it's not Brian.

SPEAKER_01 12:27

You you've spoken about education being undervalued in um parts of the Native American um and African American culture, non-white people. Explain that. Why do you say that?

SPEAKER_02 12:40

And well, I I think it it just stems from systems that have been developed. And I think the systems in our country get exactly out of them, and you may have heard this before, what they are designed to do. And we've created an educational system or systems that don't allow folks, uh folks of color, quite frankly, and it's getting better, to be able to have the opportunities. Because it's truly about opportunities. We're in the midst of, you know, these charter schools and vouchers and you know things of that nature. I believe in a voucher because I look at the opportunities, like I'm saying, because I'm looking at it from the perspective, what's the best education I can get for the gifts of this student? And if that means that the local community school that is right there doesn't have that, that student should be able to go to whatever school is going to give them what's gonna make them shine in life. And so our system doesn't isn't designed for that. I mean, our systems were where we put, if we think of if we jump back 40, 50, 60 years in our country in the 30s and 40s and 50s, where African Americans were segregated and they were shining in schools. They would have schools where they saw teachers that looked like us, they were able to really spend time on the right homework system, and they were out testing their white counterparts. Then we got this great thing in our country that, oh no, we got to put everybody together. We need to segregate or desegregate everybody and integrate all these, but they didn't realize that integration meant that I'm gonna now bust you from your home and your community. I'm gonna put you into another school, and then I'm gonna, that school that really doesn't want me, I'm gonna put you in the back of that room, and then I'm not gonna give you the resources to succeed while you're in the back of that room. Instead of now you had all these resources, let's just take them all away and then bust you so much further away to go. Or like the the Indian schools that were saying, okay, we need to teach you how to, you know, sweep, mop, cook, all these things, whatever it was that didn't have anything to do with being an engineer or being a doctor or being, you know, all these things where you say, that's not for them, that's for us. And we segregated away and not helped them. And so we're catching up. We're so far behind. And if you go into and especially when you separate around economics, now you go to school. So my dissertation was based on why uh it was it was equity or being equal in perception versus you know, why the opportunities aren't available. And that's kind of my whole dissertation was taking black administrators and saying, do we give them the opportunity to be an administrator? Are we expecting them to have all their experiences to be able to do it? Well, if I've never been able to have the experience of being a dean or being an assistant principal or being, and now I want them to be in leadership at the district office as a you know curriculum coordinator or something like that. And then I put out a job description that says, you know, you have to have seven years of experience as an administrator in order to apply for this job. Well, you look at a lot of schools and you say, okay, seven years, how many people in those in that district that are people of color could even apply for that position? One or two, maybe, you know, and so then it's a good old boys never, right? It's who you know. Well, if I don't know who, then I don't get the opportunity. So it's about providing opportunities that leave let people excel. And we're just not there yet. I mean, if you look at the high, you know, higher, especially in education, you know, I I don't I don't think I didn't have any black teachers growing up. I had a couple in college, but not growing up, not one, you know, that said I and I used to say, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter to me, I'll just finish with this, that I see other people who look like me in positions that I need to be in. And then I go before I do my Journey to Freedom podcast, that I went to this event. It was called the Trust Leadership. And inside the trust leadership framework, I go to a convention, it's 500 people there, 30 folks of color in the how do I know there's 30 folks of color in the room? Because I counted. It doesn't matter, but I'm counting, so it must matter because that's how I know. So you know, I say, oh, it doesn't matter, but it truly does for most people.

SPEAKER_01 16:56

When I hear stories like yours from my black American brothers, I it makes me even value my upbringing in the Caribbean even more because it's the exact opposite. All my teachers were black. You know, um, I had one or two that were East Indian, but all of them were black, all my teachers look like me, so I didn't have to worry about that, you know, and and it's not the same here in the US. So I I'm really conscious of that difference and how it could impact on on a child, you know, learning in that environment. But let me ask you this personally. What did earning your bachelor's, master's, and doctorate represent to you personally, beyond the credentials, especially from where you started?

SPEAKER_02 17:42

I can say my bachelor's degree was hey, I went to school, I did what they asked me to do, great, now I should have a LEGO. I don't know if I was excited about that degree as I was, you know, about my doctorate. My master's was I finally found something I'm really good at, and it doesn't matter if I have dyslexia, and now I'm on an equal playing field with everybody else because I have a master's behind my name. That's all that was. My doctorate was they said I couldn't do it. They said I wouldn't even be able to read or write. I mean, there were so many things that they told me I should be, not what I could be. And my doctorate represented, oh no, you all can, you know, take a leap in the lake because I did it, and there's nothing you could do about it. And for the rest of my life, you don't have to call me doctor, but as soon as you look at me, you know that I am. So that was more of I did it, I did it in a way that that I wanted to do it, uh, and nobody could, that's one thing that somebody nobody can ever take away from you is your education. It's impossible to take that away from you once you have it.

SPEAKER_01 18:52

What was growing up like in a home? Like, was it a two-parent home? What did your parents instill in you about education?

SPEAKER_02 18:58

Yeah, I I am so fortunate and so blessed that I had my dad and my mom in our household the whole time. I saw my dad struggle a lot. I saw my dad go into affirmative action programs and then not not get promotions, knowing that he was good enough. You know, I my mom became a nurse, a psychiatric nurse when I was in high school. She started working. So she was a stay-at-home mom all the way through junior high. And then she went and got her doctorate in psychiatric nursing, and then she worked, she taught at the university while I was in college or as soon as I finished college. So so proud of my mom for all the things that she did. But they instilled in me how important not only education was, but being true to yourself and being who you were. You know, my mom picked cotton when she was growing up, and you know, there were instances where the clan was showing up and my grandpa was fighting them off. My dad talks about cuthered bathrooms and you know the things that they had to do in order to survive, and they live by an orphanage and they had to take clothes from the orphanage in order so him and his brothers and sisters would have clothes. And they had a really good life for themselves. My dad is 87 now, and we ran a track meet this last summer. You know, he was in it, I was in it, my son was in it, my grandkids went in it. So we did four generations in one track meet. And this, you know, so proud of both of them. And uh, you know, my mom and dad aren't together anymore, uh, but they were together when I was growing up. And so at least I had that. And they were they were faithful people. They believed in what God would have for our lives and that kind of stuff. And so I think I got a really good foundation around family. I have eight children myself now. I have 16 grandkids, and family is everything. Uh, and they gave me that foundation. I I would I I'm so much more fortunate than so many other folks that I've interviewed or talked to uh to be able to have that in my upbringing.

SPEAKER_01 20:47

That's lovely. Let's let's switch to business for a bit. Okay. You you owned a uh owned a financial services business, um, and then you pivoted towards a leadership consulting business in 2010. What what triggered that shift?

SPEAKER_02 21:03

Eight. A whole lot of shifts. Oh my gosh. So so I left education because I wasn't able to afford it back in 2000. I had these eight children that all needed somebody to bring some money in so that we could eat well. And I I excelled at it. I was good. I did I had a mortgage company, we did financial services, we were trajectory was going super well. There was folks I was working, part of his multi-level part, like you know, people are watching online. I was in an office with a gentleman named Ed Milette for seven years, and so got to spin with him. He's a big guy that's on YouTube now. Another guy named Patrick Bit David, who was doing a whole bunch of political stuff in Florida now. And so I got to train got to be trained from the best. But and I was I thought the world would never stop. We were buying houses and cars. You know, I was driving a Hummer in Mercedes and all those really cool things. And then 2008 happened, I had 80 some loans in the pipeline. We're gonna fund them all, I'm gonna make another hundred grand next month. And then for the next six months, there was not a penny to be made anywhere, anyhow, at all. And then so from that, you know, I said, wait a minute, what am I doing? Is this the life that I truly want? My wife at the time was we're losing a house, we're losing cars, you know, she's mad every single day. Uh, and I said, let me go do some other stuff. And I was fortunate enough to be a technologist, so I went back into, you know, being a professor again, helping people with, like you said, doing some consulting work and consulting about the internet and that kind of stuff. And so, you know, use of email, and that was going really good. And then I decided to go into homeless services. And so they asked me if I could run, excuse me, a couple facilities with folks experiencing homelessness. And I had always loved doing nonprofit stuff. And so I kind of ran through my thing in homeless services, and I think I made a big difference and been chairman on many boards. And I said, well, now I got to get back, and I got my grandkids to take care of now. So let me go back and make some money again. Went back into mortgage. But this time I really went into how do I do and help people become the person that God actually intended them to be. Now that I'm, you know, I'm not 60 years old now, and I'm going, okay, at 60 years old or 55 years old, legacy becomes a little bit more important than it was where you're just trying to make money and do stuff. Now it's okay, how do I make a difference? How do I make an impact? How can I truly do the things? And so I've been able to put together some programs and get some with some really incredible people that were working on doing some of this stuff. I was able to do a podcast and talk to all kinds of people about what it is that makes people successful. And hopefully that's making an impact. I, you know, you never know how much an impact. But in a world where now I look at our teenagers and our youth where they're trying to deal with so many things like social media and who am I? And am I enough? And now we have AI, right? I just wrote a book called A Relationship versus AI. And what's the difference here? Because now we're like, wait a minute, now we have these bots that are telling us, you know, who we are in these relationships that we're trying to make with with a computer. AI, I love it, is great. I'm a technologist, right? However, I do it so that I can get more time with my family, not so I can spend more time working.

SPEAKER_01 24:20

It's a tool. It's a tool.

SPEAKER_02 24:21

It's a tool. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 24:22

Yeah. Dr. B, let me ask you this. What was the hardest part about all of that, about about reinventing yourself when people already know you as something else?

SPEAKER_02 24:32

I would say time. The hardest part is we we we cultivate relationships. I think all of us do. The amount of relationships that we cultivate, I think, changes so much. Somebody gave me a statistic the other day, and they said 90% of the people that you interact with often in your life right now, you will not be interacting with in five years. And that's a hard statistic to take because we think that I have you as my friend and you're my friend for life. And I think God moves us along. I mean, our family, obviously, we're gonna be with. But 95, and I go through my phone, I don't know, five, six thousand people that are in my phone, and I look through them like I haven't talked to this guy in 10 years, I haven't talked to this guy. So when you say what is the hardest part is not realizing that in five years, the folks that know me as that whoever I was before, I won't even be talking to, anyways. I'm gonna have a whole new set of friends and people, but it's that it's almost the grieving of this is who I was, and this is who you think I am, and you don't believe me. I'm telling you, this is what where I've grown to, how I'm evolving, how I'm working on me and the personal development that I'm doing. But all you see me as the high school kid, I guess, that was, you know, dyslexic, that didn't know how to do stuff. I often talk to my college friends, and I love my college friends because that was one of the best times in my life. But all they want to do is talk about what happened in 1988 or 1987, and I'm like, there's so much happens since 1987. I don't mind talking to you about that. That's fun, and we get to remember. But what about what are you doing now? How can I help you there? And so when you grow at a different pace than some of your friends do, and all they want to do is reminisce every time you see them, it's like, yeah, I can't, you're you're not in the same room if it's me anymore.

SPEAKER_01 26:19

You know what I learned? It's not just about growth, it's about good times versus I don't want to say bad times, but I'll just say good times versus different times. See, what what they tend to do is reminis on the good times they had. Whereas now they probably since then they probably have not had good times that they want to talk about or that they can share with you. So they the way of connecting is to go back to the good times you experienced together. Even though you're not there anymore, they're probably not there either. But that's the way that I've learned that they connect with you because that was the good times that you shared. And speaking about that, let me ask you for from your perspective, because you talked about family, you talked about how important that is to you, and you just talked about using AI to get more time and family. What does what does freedom mean to you today?

SPEAKER_02 27:10

That's so cool. Because I think of even in the podcast, it's called The Journey to Freedom. And and I take a group of men every year down to Alabama and we do a civil rights tour, and we're we're going through what happened before because history tells us so much about who we are today. And freedom to me is the ability to take advantage of opportunities that are out there. And there are so many people that are stuck, even in their current situations, where when an opportunity arises, whatever their situation stops them from doing something that they know they should be able to do. Freedom to me is being able to live in purpose and live boldly where God has said, this is what I called you to do, and now I can actually do it. And I'm not worried about do I have enough money to do it? I'm not worried about do I have you know the right relationships with people to do it? I'm able to go out and cultivate those things which will allow me to get to where I want to be. You know, somebody stopping me from doing it, and to me that's okay too. That's part of the process, but is there an opportunity or a way to get around that barrier in order to succeed and be good? That's what freedom is. Is a barrier is put in front of me. Do I have an opportunity to move away? I think of you know, like, you know, the horrendousness of you know, something that happens to kids or trafficking or something like that, and they're stuck and they're bound where there is no opportunity to leave. They are they are enslaved, whatever it is that they're doing, or they don't have the ability to maneuver, to get an education, to find other ways, to introduce themselves to people, to have great relationships with others, that's not available to them, and that's not freedom. Freedom is, oh, there's an opportunity. Now let me figure out or give me some help to figure out what it is I need to do.

SPEAKER_01 29:00

Does that make sense? It makes perfect sense. And and speaking of that, you founded Journey to Freedom to help black men achieve success. What's the mission? What problem were you trying to solve that nobody else was addressing?

SPEAKER_02 29:13

Yeah. I kind of alluded to it earlier. I went to this event, his trust leadership, a guy named David Horseger. He's since been on one of my podcasts. Uh, and I go to this event, I don't I don't think malice was part of it. I don't even think he intended to have 500 people at his event with only 30 folks of color at his event. He's just doing his event because that's what he's learning grown. I'm sitting in the audience, I'm going, why is the folks from my culture not getting this information? If trust is such an important part of our lives and learning how to trust people and learning how to start with trust and initiate yourself in a trust relationship so that you can go to that next level. If that's so important, why are we not talking about it? Because the people that I know that don't trust the most are part of my culture. And maybe because I'm around my culture most, but we don't trust each other. We don't trust ourselves, we don't trust each other, we don't trust our women, we just don't trust, period. Everything is proof to me why before anything happens, why I should even think about trusting. And so I come back home, I come back to Denver and I say, okay, I got to get this into the hearts and the minds of all the people. You know how you get excited when you go somewhere and you just learn something. And then I start talking to people, and there's not a I haven't figured out a space for that to happen yet. Because I can remember the barbershop, and we go to the barbershop, and I think that's a great cultural place to go to. Uh, however, we all talk about, not saying everybody, but most of the time in the barbershop isn't talking about life's lessons. We're talking about an athlete or a movie star or musician that we love or honor. I mean, we're wearing Mahomes' name on the back of our shirts, but Mahomes doesn't know nothing about me. Mahom doesn't, if I were to even ask Mahomes, he might give me an autograph, he might not. I don't know. You know, but I know more about him than I know about what my kids' stats are in their games or what they're doing. And I said, okay, how do I get so I started doing some coaching, I started doing some mentoring with some of the youth. I said, wait a minute, who are your who are your heroes? And they started telling me about all these heroes, but none of them were local. None of them were the people in their community, none of them were you the the everyday people that are spilling their heart, guts, and souls and minds to help you become this this great kid. I said, I need to start interviewing people. And at first I said, you know, I prayed about it and said, God, you know who? I I want to I want to talk to folks of color so I can find out what's going on. He says, No, I need you to talk to black men. He said, black women are, they got stuff going on and they got a lot of stuff more going than you got going, and there's a trust issue between black men and women. I said, okay, so I'll do black men, and I started this journey of what does it mean to be a successful black man in America? And what are our examples? Since I wasn't seeing them, a lot of folks I know weren't seeing them, other than our famous entertainers. And, you know, for some, so some of them they're great examples, and for some of them, they're not so great examples. But who are the everyday people? And I said, so in 2024, I was going to interview 100 black men just to see what was happening around our country. And ended up doing 110 just that first year, and we're up to 200 over 250 now. And I get to be in the homes, I get to talk to men that have overcome so much more than me. I talked about my upbringing being so great. The people I interview, holy moly, I am uh I'm so incredibly blessed. You know, whether they were single, single uh mom homes that they had to, the amount of folks that I've had that have been incarcerated and had to come out of incarceration and get to to where they're at, the amount of people that just didn't have any nourishment or or or folks that loved them, and then the ones who did, the ones in the community raised them and they would run down the street and everybody in the neighborhood would whoop them if they were doing what they weren't supposed to do. The amount of folks that have been on drugs, the amount of person people, you know, I have an attorney in North Carolina who tried to kill himself and then went and robbed a bank. You know, it's just there's just so many stories. And you can tell the regions of our country, like when I'm talking to somebody from the south, what that's like, or I'm talking with somebody from the Caribbean, what that's like, some somebody that's New York, somebody that's on the West. Uh, and it's been so fun, doctors, lawyers, you know, famous people to, hey, I just I just coach a football team at the at the local park, and I'm helping these kids, and seven of my kids have now become NFL players. It's just it's just so amazing. Now there's nowhere I can't look where I go, if you watch my podcast, you will know you can do anything, you know, which is just and that was kind of the goal is how do I highlight and continue to highlight black men in this case? And I started living boldly with purpose, which is all the other folks that aren't black men, that um, you know, what does it take to live boldly with purpose? And gotten some really good interviews there.

SPEAKER_01 34:01

You know, I'm often struck by what you just said because I hear it a lot in the US where young black men, black boys, they lack you call it heroes, they lack proper models. And I always push back on that. Um, and and the reason I I do is because a lot of the successful black men are quiet. See, and what I mean by quiet, I mean they're not out there throwing it in your face. This is how much money I've got, this is the house I live in, this is the car I drive. They go under the radar. So they're there, they're just not in your face, even in the social media world. The the ones that you see, those are not the really successful ones, I can tell you. The the real successful ones go under the radar.

SPEAKER_02 34:46

That's so true. One of the things that I love that you said this, because we don't see everybody, and that's kind of why Journey of Freedom is even around, to highlight. But America is so unique in the fact that we have, like I talked about a little bit about trust issues. But for a young black man in our country, and I hope this is changing because there are more families that are together, the stereotype says that the dads don't take care of their kids. The stereotype says that you're going to end up in prison. The stereotypes say all you can do is play basketball. I mean, there's all these stereotypes, but one of the things that I think hurts the most is the relationship or the development of family in America. Because family, black families in America have been destroyed for so many years, whether it's in slaves where the dads were pulled from the kids, or whether it was in the you know the 30s and 40s when, you know, they they decided that we weren't going to allow families to be together. You think of the 70s where we said, hey, if the mom's on welfare, the dad can't live there. And it's all been on the destruction of the family unit. And now we have, I have another podcast that we do every now and then called Why Love Waits. And you think of the black women who have been taught not to trust black men. They've been taught you have to have your own bank account. They've been taught you have to watch out for them. They've been taught that they're doing no good. And then these women as single moms are the ones that are raising our sons, and they hear this over and over again of how not good they are. And then we say, Well, how come you, where's this quiet guy that I need you to stop being so quiet? Because you got to be that role model. You have to step in because what they're hearing and seeing, and now we have our social media that portrays, you know, whether it's rappers or whoever else, is you got to do everything you can, doesn't matter what the law says, in order to get yours, because everything is yours, instead of that family unit that brings people up. And so it's just so important that we continue to highlight, highlight, highlight the guys who are doing it and show our kids, hey, whether it's the boys' club or it's church or I don't care where it's at, even if it's at the barbershop, let's talk at the barbershop about finances and money. Let's talk about relationships and what it means to be a husband. Let's talk about what it means to be a dad and a parent. I I don't care about what Patrick. I don't I love football. I coach football, I love athletics, but I I'm not gonna meet Patrick Mahomes, right? But but I am gonna meet the guy next door who is who's working with my kids on a daily basis, or my grandkids, and he's feeding into them because we all have a coach or mentor that we can point to on our on our trajectory of success in our lives. How do we get those people into other folks our kids' lives? We've just we haven't done a good job in this country of of making that as known as it should be and as important. And I as I've been interviewing dads, and I can't wait to interview you when we when we get to chance for you online podcast. But I asked the dads, what does it mean? You know, we all know that it how important it is for child, we just talked about it, and children to have a mom and a dad. But what does it mean to you to be a dad? You know, and I get to hear that answer from these men who have gone through like incredible obstacles just to see their kids, just to be able like be around and be like, oh my God, you literally had to drive that far every time. Well, yeah, she moved or she did this, or she wouldn't let me see him, or you know, my gosh, and some of the obstacles that you go, no, your your kid needs that. And if you're willing, if you're the guy who's willing to do it, and so many of us, I guess, just give up at some point because it becomes so insurmountable. And I I don't I don't meet too many black men or white men or any men that say, I don't want nothing to do with my kids. I mean, when you talk to a gentleman who was in prison for 19 years because of a system before he was exonerated, and he tells you the day that the murder happened that I was put in jail for, I was in jail when it happened. So there's no way I could spend 19 years in jail, but the system wouldn't allow because the police were saying, well, no, he really couldn't have been in jail. He had to go commit the murder, or we let him out for an hour, whatever they did. 19 years when he had an alibi, that the whole I mean, I mean you see the guy who tried to kill himself, or you see guys who are starting stuff, and I would say I guess the theme is is the resilience of people who want to make their lives better and what they're willing to do in order to do it. And you don't see that on television. You don't see that when you're hearing stories or hearing it in music or you're in your your clubs, and you know, just the dedication of men that say, I wish I didn't have to do this alone, that we they feel so lonely because they feel they're the only one out there. You know, some of them have friends, but they they don't share the intimate stuff with their friends. The stuff that keeps them up at night, the stuff that keeps them from, you know, where where do you go when you're having an issue with your wife and you're thinking about getting a divorce and you don't know because your example growing up wasn't with a dad that tried to stay with his mom, right? Your example was your mom saying all these bad things about your dad. And now you're having marital issues and you're going, I don't know what to do. I don't had to go find somebody or I didn't know who to talk to. When you find those themes in there and you go, we could have avoided so many mistakes. You know, when we think about finances and money and and you know, just the thought process that goes around because we didn't grow up in households that had all this money that was, you know, figuring out, well, this is where you invest, and this is how you do the investment, and this is how you go buy businesses. And you know, it was, hey, I hope we have some food today. You know, I'm gonna make sure you guys eat, or your dad's working 60-70, mom's work, or if you're single mom, right? She's probably working two, three jobs, and you got kids that are home all day with each other trying to raise themselves. And then you realize, oh my gosh, you were able to get out. How did you get out of this? And then what did you do? Oh, I need to take that lesson. And then so many people have their relationships with God that are just so airtight and so, you know, you you want to see that and you say, Okay, now I know why you're successful. I know why you're doing the things you do. And it makes so much sense. And I'm sorry you had to struggle when you were a kid, but that struggle has made you who you are. And I needed to hear that. I needed to know that if I'm going through that, there's a light at the end of the tunnel. That that's what you get through that. Man, I just like you know, for the folks that are watching today, but you are God's greatest gift. He loves you if you allow him to. You were born for greatness. The one thing I love to tell people is they're an answer to somebody else's prayer. Well, somebody is praying right now that they would be able to listen to Jelani and I talk. They don't know our names at this point, but there's something that either one of us said that is going to spark something in them that is going to help them achieve greatness. And so don't stop looking. Don't stop waiting. Keep searching because God's out there and he's waiting for you to be able to latch on and grow. I can't wait to do a podcast with you. I can't wait to, I feel like I talk the whole time and I know that's what you do as a guest, but I get so much pleasure in asking the questions. So I can't wait to do it and ask you the questions and find out about you and the relationship that we're gonna create. And even if we just know each other for five years, it's gonna be an amazing five years, and you and I are gonna spend some time together just changing the world, and you can too. Come along with us. Thank you for having me. I sure appreciate it so much.