Raymond: Yeah, that's definitely the hot seat. It's an it's worth having. I mean, God, okay. Let, let me roll back this way. Right. So yes, I did get divorced a couple of years ago. It's been about five years now, four years.
Part of that was married seven years. So we're married seven years and then got divorced fast forward. I've been dating someone. Great. For the last three years. I think my story with love to a certain degree is that it, it's a very interesting thing, right? It's like a gift that you every now and then might be given.
However, it's not yours. You don't get to hang on to it. No matter how hard you try, it's not yours. Right. If you're lucky you get to hold it. Right. You're the, you're essentially, you're a steward for love. You get to hold it long enough till you die or you don't, but it's not yours to keep. Right. So it's a very interesting thing in that.
It's also the lesson of life that things are transient and with everything good. When it goes away, it really sucks. And. For multiple reasons. It could be, it could go away, could not work, but you also, that experience taught me a lot about how I approach life. Life is an experience. The question is always what, what did this experience do to you?
Did it make you a better person? Did it make you a worse person? The fact that the experience happened, you can't control it. There's nothing you can do to control how experiences pan out. But the thing about it is what do you do from that point going forward? Right. There's a lot being be married for seven years was not easy.
It was great. I wouldn't trade that experience for anything else, because I learned a lot about myself. The person I am today was shaped by that experience. There's so much about yourself that you don't know in as much as you're with yourself every day. And you think you do, you don't and there's also something to be said about.
There's certain things about yourself that you will never know until you are in the situation that exposes them. And that is why I. I kind of approach life from an experiential perspective. I want to experience something so that I learn about myself, right? There's no way. Look, you can be an armchair quarterback from now to the end of time, if you've never dated and you've never gotten married and you've never accepted the risk of it fam you don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
I'm sorry you have someone in need, right? Like you cannot not be vulnerable and talk about vulnerability. That's not how life works. It's not possible. Right? If you decide to get married the day, you're accepting that marriage you're accepting the risk of divorce. I don't care what your religion tells you or what you believe, or you accept in a risk along with it.
You decide to be vulnerable with someone and be in a relationship. You're also accepting a risk. If you don't want that risk, you accept the risk of staying alone forever. There's certain things in life. Well, you know how people say you can either pay what money or time there's certain things in life that you can never fucking pay with with money.
The only currency is time and that's what experiences are the only currency that experiences except is your time. If you don't give that time, you wouldn't experience it. However, This is not a thing you earn. Everybody comes in with a fixed bank statement and every day you're making withdrawals, whether you want to shop or you don't, the money is going away, you, you might as well fucking shop.
Imagine you, you we're born with $200 million in the bank and no matter what you do, we're taking money out of that account every day on a rolling basis. You can go spend it, whether you spend or you don't spend it, we're going to take a certain amount every day. What the fuck are you doing? Not spending it.
Ken: And you had told you about our account as an expiration date. Yes. And we won't tell you when the expiration date is.
Raymond: Yeah. And some people are sitting back just not spending their money. So at the end of the day, you have to experience something. You have to live something. Currently my girlfriend lives in a completely different country and.
This is not something that I own. This is something that I get to steward, but the thing I don't know is if I get to steward it forever or not. Yeah. So as long as it's entrusted to me, guess what I'll do. I just take care of it the day it goes, it goes, if God willing, it stays till I die. . The thing we humans try to do is we try to get out of this life alive.
Nah, nobody does that, bro. We're going to play this game of life. You're going to do it. Heartbreak. You're going to deal with not being good enough. You're going to deal with sadness. It's the game you're in life is not a game where you start out on the bleachers and the coaches like, okay, you can come in now.
Now from the jump you're in the game. No matter how you decide to play it. There's no fork in the road you take that doesn't have its own challenges. The thing is just start spending that currency of time. Start having experiences. Some experiences you will learn from some will be painful lessons. Some will not be painful lessons.
And then a lot of it too, is the thing that you want out of life. If you think about it, if you think about relationships, If you think about what made you decide to get out of one, uh, willingly or not willingly, you could have just put up with it. You could have just been fine with it, or the other person could have just put up with you are as well, or just being fine with it.
Right. It's all choices. But if you had, you would have stayed, you would have been happy. You would have stayed, would have stayed married, but it's like, are these two people happy in the marriage? And then you start to decide if the quality of life you want is pegged on a title or on the reality of your existence as a person.
When you think about people who went and did stuff in the world, they still stand alone in a footnote somewhere. It's probably their spouse or their kids or whatever. At the end of the day, you choose whatever fucking life that you want to live. The moment you're dead. People can write about it, sing about it, talk about it, but it doesn't matter.
You chose the fucking life you wanted and guess what you got, what you wanted out of it. But if you're not spending your experience currency, I don't know what the fuck to tell you, man. There's no, that's just not
Ken: well,
Raymond: To me, that's just not. Okay.
Ken: Yeah. But, but where do you feel? Everything you take? The money is hot.
Raymond: Shit. The money's always hard, bro. You it's. So, I mean, going back to your earlier question of like, how do you open your heart again to love? I wouldn't say I opened my heart to love. Aye. Fuck man. I took an engineering approach there that I am. Um, you, you iterate slowly, right? So, um, it's interesting, right?
Because for me, I legit, after I got divorced was like, yep. Not getting married again, not dating again. I'm I think I'm good with that. Like, I, I, I'm pretty sure I can live out my life comfortably without having to worry about that. And it came. I think along with that realization, the moment I realized I had the power to choose that I could just be alone forever.
The moment had dawned on me. Finally, I got to the realization of, okay, nobody he's forcing you to do this because there's this weird feeling of like, Oh, these are all the boxes you have to check in life. But the greatest feelings when you realize. You put those boxes there, you're going to fucking check them yourself.
Cause I'm not, those are not my boxes. I will put the boxes that I will check and I will check them. All of a sudden you realize that it's completely up to you now to make a decision or not as to what you're going to do. And then I wasn't really like, even when we met, I wasn't looking to date, that was just not, and I told her that I was like, look, I'm just here because.
My friends think you're cool and they're planning a trip and I would love to go on the trip with you guys. So cool. So, so we're texting back and forth about the trip and you know, this, and that was like, Oh man, this is really cool person. And the interesting thing about it was at some point we were texting and she kind of like just dropped off and I was like, yeah.
Okay, cool. Moving on. We'll you know, we'll, uh, a couple of hours, no response or whatever. And then she texted back. She was like, cool. I apologize. My phone died and I didn't have a charger. I'm sorry. I dropped off on you. That for me was actually the moment I was like, Okay, well, hold on. Maybe I think I'm interested, right?
Like just like someone who did not, did not owe me an explanation as to why she dropped off, but thought it polite enough to say, Oh, you know, this is what happened. I was like, Oh, okay. All right. All right. Our ride. So it was good, you know, like, you know, and, and the interesting thing too was even when I asked her out on a date, I just kept having conversation because I really loved talking to her.
Even when I asked her out on a date, I was very direct. I was like, look, I want to ask you out to dinner. It's a date. If you don't want to go on a date with me, please tell me no, right? Like we can still go out and eat. Right? Like, that's not a problem, but I want you to know that there's an intention behind this.
This is me now trying to find out about you and tell you about myself. Okay. Um, start talking and spend time in the whole nine yards.
Ken: She was shocked
Raymond: because I think she was used to people kind of doing the roundabout of like, Oh, do you want to go hang out and have coffee? And then this and that. As, like not, there's an intention behind this, you know, but if the intention is okay with you, then when we go into a date, but if you don't want to go, I see you don't want to go.
But for me, realizing that this is not some con here, all of the options, because the reality is those options are probably playing out in your head. But I want us to both agree that these are the options on the table. You can add options if you want. Do you understand what I mean? Right. But. I think that was also what made her kind of like, okay, I see you because I wasn't trying to be deceptive about it.
I wasn't trying to con you into whatever. And even our entire relationship, hasn't been this pressure to be one of the things that a lot of my good friends told me after I got divorced was like, yeah, for seven years, you weren't yourself. And the day I realized I wasn't myself. I think I was, I was packing up stuff to move out of the apartment we lived in and I found a drawing that I had done precisely eight years to the day.
Wow. That was backing that up. I hadn't really done any significant art or music for eight years. So I wasn't myself,
Ken: dude, listen, I, you know, I have such a parallel story to that writing, even this form of podcast.
Raymond: Yeah.
Ken: There's a slowly few years in my life where it's just nothing with it. Yeah. And I thought it was life coming out of me, but no,
Raymond: honestly, it's not to say that she was the cause.
Right. I started to become who I wasn't. I was trying to become a husband and check all these boxes and do all these things, but that wasn't where I needed to be in life. And I think one of the greatest things that I think she gave me as a gift was, was us getting divorced and makeup because she also realized that I wasn't at my full potential.
We're both now in a space where we're trying to check all these boxes that other people had created for us. So we had to come to a decision as to. You know what, continuing in this doesn't make sense in order to be the best people we can be for ourselves and for the world, we need to end this. It's not to say that she was the reason for it.
You as a person, as an African man, there's a lot of stuff that is drilled into your subconscious. You're not even aware of. And after getting divorced, I went to therapy for about two years. Right on a consistent basis, mostly because I want it to just find out about myself. I wanted to understand who this person was.
And a lot of that is actually what helped me want to, or be able to pursue something new because I now understand the person I'm with now, man, if she ain't seen me play music for like two or three days, she'd be like fam, I'm going to the mall. I'm looking at the city as here and play music because now you're able to, you can expect someone to love you.
If you don't tell them what loving you means, like. Come with someone, they should be able to know. I need some time for my insanity of art and music. It's not a, it's not a judgment call on you. It's not that I don't want to spend time on you, but this is what makes me who I am. So every now and then I need to zone out.
And go do that thing if that's not fine with you. That's great. You will find a great guy somewhere, but is not this guy
Ken: have to
Raymond: stick it out, like exactly. Right. So it also helps people know it's almost like a buyer beware and it's not a buyer beware in that, you know, like you're like damaged goods or whatever.
It's just, I have figured out myself enough to no, that these are the things that make me who I am. I sometimes that can be a bit crazy. And the needs to experience life or like, I want to go out and do, you know, sometimes she'd look at me and be like, Hey Jesus. Okay. But interestingly enough, more than anything, I want her to be the greatest person that she can be.
I think you get the best out of people when they realize they're in a space where they can be themselves, they don't need to change. Um, it's like, you've seen us a lot of times at Columbia. Right. I was never a social dancer and be like, let's go. I'm like, I just go by for a walk. No one she's like, put your shoes on.
Let's go. Right. And then in that experience, I've learned something new because she realizes that I'm an experiential person. I need to go out and do things and see things. And she has also come to. Okay,
shit. The aspect of me, I want to be quiet and listen to jazz, or I want to cook something or just the things that don't seem very, that seemed boring and mundane. Because one of the things I'm always telling her is like, she always jokes about it. She's like, man, the best kind of guys are like the ones that are divorced because see, you know, you guys, if somebody else has gone through the headache of, you know, um, figuring out, you know, you figuring out the whole nine yards.
Um, but it's interesting because one of the things I always tell her is like, we might come to a point in our lives where we're extremely busy things like let's sit down and make a sandwich will become a luxury. Things like let's sit here and just have some random conversation for two hours. It might become a luxury.
Let's do it right now. Relationships in my opinion are like, uh, again, banking system, you know, on the days when things are good, that's when you're making deposits, enjoy the fuck out of that shit. Like hype it up as much as possible.
one day. Unfortunately, you're gonna have to make Woodrow us. Today's where you fight the days where you don't agree when things don't match up, that's you making withdrawals, but bro, if you make more withdrawals than you deposited, you run into overdraft to close the accounts and most relationships. And when they're an overdraft, there's nothing else to draw from.
So a lot of times we make the mistake of like, Oh, we've gotten a relationship. We checked the box. And I even sometimes I'm guilty of that because I, you know, life gets busy and the whole nine yards, but. When I think of it as that, I try to make the deposits men because the withdrawals they will come.
Ken: So in that, in that spirit, I want to ask you a difficult question to answer and very personal on one
Raymond: pass.
Now, now
Ken: I am ready for you though. I can't prepare no, no, no. Before meals though. Okay. What about yourself? In that previous life,
Raymond: did
Ken: you learn that you had to change and that you're working on not trying to carry into this new thing,
Raymond: right?
Ken: Because there's this aspect. I believe of relationships not working out that are.
Regardless of the environmental factors. There's also a lot of inward activity and some of the inward activity is sometimes based on things that we, we thought wrong, right. Or not even thought wrong, we learned wrong. Right. Um, is there something that sticks back at you? That's like, wow. I th there is this aspect of me in the past that.
I needed to change, or that is mostly the revolution. Now, in order to meet, I hate to say this because it sounds businessy, but in order to meet the demands of the future,
Raymond: no, no, it's, it's true. Right? Um, there are a couple of things and a lot of that was just kind of going through therapy and getting to know myself better.
I was a very angry person and angry in that I was angry at life. I was angry at the things that life didn't give me and the things that life didn't give my parents and my family and those around me that I cared about. So I was constantly obsessed with trying to write that wrong. How do I take care of it?
People around me? How do I take care of my mom, my dad, my wife, my brother, you know, and I didn't make enough time for myself. If anything I learned that you can not take care of other people, unless you take care of yourself. If you're not kind to yourself, you can be kind to other people in that regard. I was, I kind of carried around this feeling of I'm starting from behind the lion man.
I need to hurry the fuck up. If you look at African systems, authoritarianism did a number on a lot of us, right? If you lived through dictatorships and you lived in environments where. The use of force was, was always the way to get things done. A lot of us struggle with PTSD from that, that we're not aware of what that manifests itself in is in multiple things.
It could be, you know, just lashing out on controllable uncontrollably, having this like standoffish attitude to things or people. When it's almost like the moment something gives me a glimpse of not being in agreement. This thing is not going to favor me. I just put up a giant wall because I don't even want to deal with, like, you don't want to become that thing that you see, right.
You don't want to be in a position where you. You having to yell at someone or you're having to like exercise your frustrations. So you go the other route, you put up walls that is not healthy. When you're in relationships, man, you got to you, however you do, you got to put down the wall. And so what those walls showed up as was just, I just checked out when you check out.
You're signaling to the other person, not live. You're just not in the game anymore. It's like the game is happening around you and just sitting down. There's no incentive for the other person to continue in the game that they're supposed to be playing with you. And the thing also that another way it manifests itself and it's just not, not letting go of stuff you check out, but you still hanging not to stuff.
There's something about sadness and like unhappiness that is very addicted where you just, you sit there. And you remind yourself what got you there. Yeah. You, you let it marinate for, for prolonged periods. Right? So I had to learn to not do that. I had to learn that the best, but you have a finite amount of energy.
You can either use it to sit in brood or you can use, you know, use it to get into the next step. Right. Um, and so learning that made me realize, okay, if you're going to date again, you're going to have to meet people. But don't look at every one, one as like, Oh, we're going to get married and have 50 kids and life is going to be all great because then you set yourself up for failure one day at a time.
Just take the experience in front of you, give everybody a chance, but be also very careful and deliberate about the things that will work for you or the things that will not. Cause a lot of times we, when we don't know what works for us, Other people would dictate the terms. They see you, they see the things that are grading you that they, like.
I haven't necessarily seen everything. They don't necessarily know you. And they're like, I think you're great. Let's stay you too. You're like, ah, sure. This might get likes me. You wonderful. That's right. But it's a disservice to them because when you decide to be with someone, he should be able to say, yeah, I see all these high, you know, dispensing cons to grow hair.
The other good job. You see all these great things, but see down. No, let me tell you, this person is pruned you too, of insanity that involved music or art, or this is how I am. When I get sad or I have this tendency to put up walls. If you see them happening, you got to break them down right away. I'm giving you the cheat code.
I have to know myself too, to tell you what you're about to, it's interesting, man, this conversation, I probably have it with people, like at least once a month about you'll spec, the thing you like and all of this and all of that. But when people talk about those specs, the closest they'll go to anything that's deep as emotional intelligence.
What the fuck is emotional?
Ken: Like emotional
Raymond: intelligence means like it's not a general concept. It's being able to apply something in situations. And the only way you get to do that is you spend enough time with someone there's a need for you to explore enough, again, experiences and enough experiences and situations for you to determine.
Is there a general pattern of how this person responds or how this person deals with life or, you know, is there not. What do you do when people pass away? What do you do when you don't get the job you want? What do you do when it's downtime for a bit? Right? What do you do when you're sick? All of these things.
For example, when I'm sick, man, the moment I start feeling sick, that's the day I want to run five miles. I'm like, ah, the Africa might seek, go for B no way I run today, lace up my shoes. I'll go outside around that five miles. I'll come back and I would damn near died. Then what ends up happening is you need to be able to call out these things.
So the days that were in your shoes, I agree. You say what to run five miles. They will look down and data suggest insight.
Ken: Right? Cause they do.
Raymond: Yeah. And as African men. There's this funny thing, my mom always says in a way, she says, is there ever anyone who gets detained me of fire? It's a way of seeing, is there ever someone who can talk you off a cliff or tell you something and you like, because this person has said it, I would just listen.
I'll just let it go. The person you choose to be in a relationship should have that power. And I mean, I'm kind of stingy where I'm like, eh, I'll give the power, but every stage you get more far, but, um,
Ken: no, but you know, you did something that's very important, which is the. You know, you handed over the cheat code, but I feel like before you get to that point, it's a deliberate decision.
It is.
Raymond: It is
Ken: you, you, you happen to have been in a position where you're like, okay, well this is going somewhere. I'm interested. Um, you know, You have no run away despite all of the disclaimers that have thrown at you yet. You know, and, and this question, I freaking love it. I was having a conversation with a friend of mine and we always hit this point.
It's like, you know, especially when we're just talking about dating website and just dating in general and it's like, these questions is very hard to. To also fully like it sense everyone I ask this question, sends them into a trust, like I'll, I'll ask the person the question, I'll go back and come back.
And they still, they get about it, which is okay. Can you explain to me how to love you? What are the things that make you feel loved? And then people are always, always pensive about that, but you, you hit that like from the get-go because you know, you beat through it, somebody, so somebody make you meet you a shady, shady scars,
Raymond: ladies and gentlemen buy used cars.
Ken: Somebody really, really shiny labor that's, you know,
so
Raymond: it's, it's uh, it's, uh, More than anything though. It's not like my experience is novel or that, you know, um, you know, that it's remarkable. There are still days when it's hard. There's still, uh, instances where I haven't fully made the breakthrough of like, okay, I'm going to take this next step where I'm going to be this vulnerable.
So it's, it's not like, it's like, Oh, this person has figured out everything. Um, one of the things though that I tend to tell people is your experiences. Honestly, your experiences are not about you. I hate to say it, man, but your, your experiences damn fucking about you, man. The shit that you go through, Mark my words, give it enough time.
There's somebody else who will be going through that shit. And if you're not there for them, they will fall apart. That experience was for that person. Not for you. That experience was only there so that you know what to tell how to hold that person when they're going through theirs, because you're the only one they can look at and be like, fuck.
If he, if he did it, fuck, I could probably track. I can get through it. I can't tell you how many friends have gotten divorced since then. And the first person they call is me because yeah, we can shoot the shit, but nigga, I will tell you to go to therapy. I will call you out on your shit. And I will tell you, look, it's like the red pill and the blue pill.
There's one thing my therapist told me, which was kind of funny, but scary. Right? And the guy said, you know, you can draw the feelings right now. You can go, you meet plenty of women do give you the interest that you want. You can either deal with the hard parts right now and get through it, or you can deal with it when you're 45 and you have kids in another family.
Then it all comes back and you have to deal with it then, and then guess who the consequences are for multiple other people. So the best thing you can do for yourself, this is typically how it happens. There's a grief map. This is how people grieve and people grieve when people die, people grieve when relationships end.
Stage one. This is what you go through. You go through the denial stage. You go through this stage, this stage, this stage, when you're here, don't think the world is falling apart. There was a stage before that day, you just passed and there's a stage that you're going into. That's fine. It's like a filter.
You'll still come out on the other end. But the sooner you deal with this shit, the better because you can't escape it death. That's part of the experience. There's no life and death. There's just life. Death is a mile marker in life because we don't see it. There's birth there's life and death. No, we just say there's life and death.
Right. But literally there's only life and it's a cycle you're born. You have experiences and then you die. That's it.
Ken: Man you see, this is, this is why I went in to interview me, man. I knew you would come here, you know, and you dig deep. I didn't know. You'd be that open about the marriage stuff. Wayne,
Raymond: if you had asked me this, uh, God, maybe two, three years ago, I probably would've just been like, ah, I don't want to talk about it or whatever.
Um, but I think again, I'm, I'm a huge advocate of talking about things and document in it. Um, I joke with people about this. And I a, I mean, it's a horrible joke, but like I've been divorced before. What can happen? The worst thing that happened is somebody tells me on two, two, let me bring the food out for the last one.
The, but interestingly enough, right? I think again, it's always, it's always for other people. Yeah. Society also looks at divorce as like a, you know, it's a shameful thing and life is horrible. And the whole nine yards, my ex wife was doing great. She's in the career that she wants. She's in a loving relationship, a hundred percent happy for her even doing like the riots and the black lives matter.
Everything we're constantly talking about social justice. What are you doing in your field? What are you doing in this area? Because in as much as we're divorced, it's almost like there's a certain standard. We still hold each other to, which is. You need to be the best in this fucking life that you can be, because that's why we did this thing.
If this ended, you're not doing that thing you were supposed to do when you fucked
Ken: up. Yeah. You just switched it for not
Raymond: exactly. We'll make it seem like there's this terrible thing that Cannes during, and you can't talk about it. Yeah. It's sad. Yeah. It's unfortunate. The whole nine yards. This is the game you're in.
And if you don't. Live through these experiences and you don't come out on the other side, they still have power over you. The experiences still have power over you. They shouldn't define it's just another mile Mark. It's like saying, ah, I don't want to debt to me who the fuck feels shame after death. Do you understand what I mean?
You'd bet it happens. It's like, ah, I didn't want to be born. I didn't get what they going to give it to me. I was naked. How embarrassing not everybody gets that experience being right. Like, yeah. These are just experiences, whether you like it or not, they're happening, they're happening around you. I have this feeling that life will fuck with everyone at some point.
There's another aspect of this cool experience that I think was one of the most remarkable for me. There's a certain level of humility and respect I have for relationships. I don't judge people who have broken up or divorced. There's no situation where relationship ends and you will find me pick insides or same person exited AR because if there's one aspect of human existence, that's complex, I think the most complex is interprets personal relationships.
The fucking tried. Yeah, the list up and they got in the game. Yeah. Maybe they didn't have the skills for it, or they got filed out, but they fucking tried. There are people who are trying to sit in the bleachers and dictate what happens in the game, lace up and get in. That level of humility about what life can throw at people helps you not look at like, you can adopt this stance of, I know.
And let me tell you what you should do. Yeah. I don't know to me. And I tell you maybe to walk maybe to work don't come tomorrow and tell me, you said I should do. Figure out your own salvation by yourself. Right? Do the best I can give you is tips. You know what I'm saying? Like you could ask me, what's good to eat at this restaurant.
I'll tell you. What's good for me. You might try it and as good for you, you might try it on. It's not good for me.
Try more things so that you can decide if that's the thing that was good for you or not good for you. Right. And, and I, I think the humility aspect of it really helped me a lot because man, people are going through shit. Nobody gets to say I okay. And I told you so, or I knew, or this and that. Not where we're becoming, uh, like I was telling my good friends earlier this year.
I'm like, nigga, where the adults now, that's it. We are the adults now. And if we think we're going to be adults and still afford to act like kids, or just assume that, that. The risk of just the only risk we have is homework. Nah, we're dealing with complex relationships. We're dealing with pandemics. We're dealing with the result of elections.
We're dealing with taxes and real life. We're adults. Now we don't get to opt out.
Ken: No,
Raymond: no.
Ken: Uh, Why are you so good at this man? He's so good at this. This is, this is amazing. Like you put me in an editing nightmare. It's two hours of blast conversation.
Raymond: Let's make it two episodes.
Ken: That's exactly what I'm going to do.
And then it's my birthday
Raymond: on the 21st. So drop it on the 21st. .
Ken: Vibes. I would drop the relationships one on the 21st. I would drop the African one on, you know,
Raymond: Erickson. Yeah. That's you man. Go for it.
Ken: Yo fives. Okay.
Raymond: Now music. Oh man.
do we want to do, let's see. Let's let's make you let's make you something for your, uh, for your podcasts.

Raymond: We've been trying to get together for over a year now, I'm glad we're finally able to make it happen. It's been an interesting year, the last couple of months have been equally as interesting and challenging. I decided I was going to take off and head to the continent for about a month, see family, see friends, eat some good food, stay in an environment where people know you and you feel grounded.

So that happened, that was great, spent some time in Rwanda, did some traveling with my girlfriend and then went to see my parents in Nigeria. Through the course of that process the end SARS protest started, I would wager it's been the largest protest in modern Nigerian history, at least that I can recall.

For those of us who were in the States this year, I mean, hell, those of us in Seattle, the black lives matter protests were significant. We all went out. We knew important that was to our existence as people of color in the States and it was interesting to be home and you realize the same thing is happening.

The fact that the special anti-robbery squad in Nigeria very much harasses young people is like a known fact. When I'm leaving the house, my parents are always like, go put on a hat so they don't see your hair, all these things you have to do just to make sure that you don't flag yourself or draw attention to them. Things like hiding your phone if you've got a new iPhone and it stems from a bunch of things.

When I look at Nigerians and I look at Africans as a whole, I don't see Africans as bad people. This is actually like an experiment I tend to carry out on myself. For example, most times when I go home, I'll pay someone more than the amount of money I'm supposed to pay for something and a hundred percent of the time that person turns around and says, hey, you gave me more than I was entitled to. When you treat people with respect, they treat you with respect, for the most part.

Africans are victims of circumstance and when you look at the people who constitute the special anti-robbery squad, underfunded, underpaid, you're in a country that is struggling, you're being put at risk. You're not paid enough and the trajectory of your life is not anywhere near middle-class and not to talk of all the other pressures that come from the leadership going down. So for these people, they're victims of their circumstance. It might not necessarily be where you started out, but majority of them have adapted to become the monsters that were suddenly now trying to protest against and the beauty of the protest was that it wasn't just saying disband this special anti-robbery squad, it was also saying, hey, reform the police, pay them more, give them the appropriate training and give them what is due to them so that you don't create an environment that fosters this behavior where people's kids are getting shot because of someone's ego or jealousy that young person is more successful than you are.

It's a consequence of so many things, globalization, you're working overseas. Here, when you buy an iPhone from a phone company, most of the time, you're not paying cash for it and then when you go home where people are used to being cashed for something, someone's looking at you and it's like six months’ worth of salary that you're carrying in your hand but you don't get a chance to explain, well, I'm making monthly payments or I'm not actually as rich as it seems.

One thing leads to another, it becomes a volatile situation. However, I think the frustration of COVID, the frustration of what was going on in the country, combined with a general feeling across the world, there's enough of this injustice. That's what inspired people, people got out on the streets and for the first time I saw what I would consider a glimpse of what a new Nigeria slash new Africa can be. People across economic backgrounds came out to protest, people across ethnic backgrounds came out to protest, people across religious backgrounds came out to protest.

Ken: The monster that was created, started to touch too many people across the board and therefore the response has to be that every functioning member of society feels like they have a stake in this and they have a stake in things changing, but something that's shocked me is how much repression happened afterward because I thought maybe the police would join in actually.

A couple of days ago, Faz showed the new video that I didn't see before, the video that circulated before was showing people running and saying that they were shooting at Leki bridge and you could clearly see soldiers shooting on the population. To me that comes to the meat of also the second part of our main discussion, which is we understand we've had systems, we had colonization that started, diplomatic influences that are stifling contracts away, there are different ways you could think about the problems of Africa.

But the one that I have a hard time understanding is exactly what happened in Nigeria as a response, which is soldiers stepping out in the street and doing that, these are your sons and daughters too.

Raymond: It's actually not uncommon in Nigerian history for the government to use the military as a tool to quell any kind of protests in as much as the military is the state's legal way of using force state-sanctioned violence. If you look at Nigeria's history, yes, they also have a massacre, there's a laundry list of instances where the government has used a military force to stop anything they deemed threatening. If you also look at why, when you ask questions, like why the police didn't join in or the military didn't join in, I mean, let's fast forward to today.

CNN has released a report, it's evident that people were shot, people died and the government lied about it, but guess what has happened? Nothing. No one is been held accountable that you can draw a straight line through Nigeria's history and you will see this repeated multiple times. When you as a soldier or as a police officer, unless you have a strong moral conviction, even at the cost of your own life, you're willing to risk such a thing, you know nothing's going to happen. If you step out of line, they're just going to put you in the ground, like every other person.

So it makes it difficult for people to actually participate. Even some of the people who participated in the protest they didn't cause any trouble, Arams was released I think yesterday or today, and there are multiple of them who got arrested after the fact. Think about it, you're a regular person, you get thrown in jail for upwards of a month. Chances are you're going to lose your job and lose your source of income, so it's not necessarily that maybe we won't kill you. Maybe you're not going to stay in jail forever, but we're going to disrupt the course of your life.

God help you if you don't have enough funds to go through the legal process and meandering of getting yourself out, you're going to rot to in jail. That's one of the problems that people were protesting against as well.

Ken: I think it was the mayor of Lagos who used to be an activist himself. I don't remember all of the political names, a lot of people who are coming out on social media and calling him out by name and saying, you should know better, we stood side by side when where we were fighting military regimes back in the day.

Raymond: It goes back to the thing I had said earlier about how, when you have organisms that live in a certain environment, that environment has quite a strong influence. Eventually the organisms adapt to live there, especially if there are no other options of where they can get out and go.

Every now and then you might come across one or two that are anomalies but a majority of those organisms will adapt to start living in that environment. So that is what tends to happen in Nigeria and in Africa at large, no matter how great a person is, we put them in that pool, the same thing is going to happen.

Ken: The way I look at that opportunity is looking at governments and entities, just for one standing up and wanting to do the right thing for people.

Raymond: I personally am bullish on Africa, I believe in that continent, I believe in its people and I believe that there will be change. However, I think we need to be more objective when we think about change.

Change is not a place, change is not a destination, change is a journey.

Our idea of change should not be the thing we stop at. We should think of it as a stop on the journey and to that regard Africa in itself can still change. There are great Africans. There are a lot of opportunities for us to do a lot of things. Yes, leadership is extremely important. We need the right leadership in order to be able to fully get to where we can as a continent. If we realize we need good leadership, then we should get in leadership. There is a need for us to now think of how we can collectively go into leadership.

We sometimes focus so much on what the government won't let us do or what they're not doing. What are the ones they will let us do? Let's go do those ones and we educate people to understand, to hold their leaders accountable, including yourself.

When you look at what happened with End SARS, one of the greatest things that came out of End SARS was transparency. People were donating money and at the end of every day, there was a report. We spent this much on bailing people out of jail. We spent this much on providing food and help and medical supplies, this is the balance. This is what we're going to put it to.

It was an amazing thing because it showed to people that corruption doesn't have to be, there's accountability and people were not worried about sending money or what is my money going to be used for because every day someone deemed it fits to just show what happened with the money, goes a long way to tell you that it's possible that things can

Ken: I see it very hard for the populations to just kick start themselves. It's not even a savior complex thing, I know people back home are very resourceful. A great example of that is just how music, art, how different forms of creativity come from Africa and just blow the world away and they come from absolutely nothing. But at the same time, there's this thing that needs to be funded some way or the other and who was going to do it? This is why I always look at the governments because that's where most of the money's stifling through. Are we looking towards the Dangotes of this world, and most families, I mean, they're dealing with their own problems. If you are here, you have four or five family members who are definitely needing you in some way, shape or form, and that's your immediate philanthropy.

So it never puts you in this specific situation where you're fluid and being able to be like, okay, now I can maybe donate to this cause or donate to this cause because it's something that benefits the coordinator as a whole. So now has come to question, where do we find these means?

Raymond: When I think about Africans, I think about Africans who live in Africa and Africans who don't live in Africa and then Africans who sort of, kind of navigate both worlds. People like us who we're home today, we're back here tomorrow. So we can't say that we are very well versed in the things going on in the country, but we know a little bit, I think there's a role for every one of us to play; for the people who are there on the daily grind, sometimes I think we expect too much of them. When you go live in Africa, just live in Africa for one month, within a month, you will start to accumulate the stresses that come with living back home.

The way you prioritize, what is important in your life, starts to shift. You start to distill back to let me just get home and rest. We cannot burden them with a lot. There's a lot we have to learn from them about how the system works, about what the frustrations are.

There is something to be said about experiences. I mean, if we subtract these past four years here in the US one of the greatest experiences I would say we've had is we're in a place where things seemingly work. At the back of your mind, there's something that tells you that X is possible. For a lot of our people, especially people who are in rural areas, X is not possible.

The only analogy I can make here is when you think about something like police brutality, you think about families that have seen their grandfathers, their fathers deal with police brutality on multiple levels till they died. It's very hard to convince that person that is going to change, but they keep trying to change it.

I think for us, as Africans in the diaspora, we need to not expect that the people at home, nobody sees the entire view. Even people in the international space station only see a certain part of the earth at any given point. We can't expect them to always see things the way we see it.

There's also another role which we have to play. For example, I think it's 2018 or so in terms of remittances, I think in Nigeria was about $23 billion. It was more money than we got in foreign aid. We also need to step away from this mentality of philanthropy.

We want to take care of our families, we want to send stuff back home, I understand. We need to start being strategic, we need to deploy that capital to good use and now the question arises, how are we going to make sure things go right?

They're starting to grow a set of people who are in that space, who are able to manage things effectively that way. I hate to make a plug but one of the people that I'm very fond of and I follow is Feature Africa fund. The fund is primarily geared toward who's running a business and start-ups in Africa that we think make sense, let Africans give them money. Let's keep the money in the family of quote unquote.

The conversations that have started to happen, I can tell that people are interested in how do we create a fund for infrastructure where we know that if I'm buying shares, I'm buying shares in an infrastructure fund in Africa, we go get thing X done. Because let's be honest with ourselves, if you work out the numbers, sometimes we expect too much from our governments.

Our governments literally cannot afford to fund a lot of the things we asked them to fund no matter where they get the money from, there's also a part of it, which is being realistic with expectations. When you hear that African governments are corrupt, people in government are stealing money. Yes, there should be a reform of how the money is budgeted and allocated. Nigerian senators shouldn't be getting 300% for insurance allowance and whatnot.

But if we actually took all that money out and put it in a government purse and you try to divvy up things like paying the police a reasonable wage, giving them good housing, pension, life insurance, you do the same thing for education. You do the same thing for health, to be honest, we don't have enough money.

Look at the US, the US still struggles with budget every year. So there's a need for us to realize that there has to be a partnership. I wouldn't even call it a partnership at this point, but we need to start stepping into a certain degree to change things. If we want to see a certain group of candidates, let's create a pool similar to what what's called the super pack and let's go get those people in office to start driving the changes that we want. Some of those things are springing up.

I think that we should have a little bit more conversation around who's doing what so that people know where to put their money and people know where to invest. But I feel like a lot of that is springing up, we should encourage it.

Ken: Oh man, I love that. Absolutely love that. We're going to put the African feature fund thing that you're talking about in the description of the show. I always like to do in every show when there's a conversation like this, where there are resources that can be brought. If you're in Africa and you're doing something legit that has to do with funding a project that touches one of the areas that we're talking about, please reach out.

I'll make sure the plugs go around and that the information is distilled so that other people can keep having these conversations. This is why we sit around and talk about these things, it's so that we inspire the people to keep talking about it. But from the flip side, I also want to talk about some nice and inspiring stuff I've been seeing lately.

The first one is just call it by name, Mpesa, it freaking blew my mind. Let me explain it a little bit, there's this technology developed in Kenya that allows mobile payments without using internet. It uses a protocol, what you use for authenticating your phone with a SIM card or different things. As long as you have a cell phone tower, you have a way to exchange cash. The technologist in me squeaked at the prospect of a project like that. Well, what other projects like that excites you today?

Raymond: It's also something that I'm loving about Africa today, God, Kenya alone, there's Brick, there's Oshahidi, there's Well-told Story. I mean, Well-Told story is an organization that when you think about our cultures, there's certain things you don't talk about that are taboo because I believe they created a network of people who could quote unquote, be allies. When you're a girl and you're on your first period and there's no one to talk to you, send a text and ask a question which sends it out to a group of people and someone can reach out to you and give you the steps that you need. You want to talk about contraceptives, you want to talk about birth control, but in an anonymous way where you don't get in trouble.

So when you think about what the future of technology is in Africa, we can't just build stuff for the Western world and go put it out there. At Microsoft a few years ago, myself and a few friends started this initiative as part of the hackathon called a hack for Africa and it's been on for probably about two or three years now and the fundamental premise was because of the constraints in Africa, if you can build stuff that works in those environments, there's a decent probability that it will scale to the rest of the world because they don't experience the same constraint.

So MPesa is a great example. You have the acquisition of a paystack recently. There's a github page, actually that lists all the open source projects or other technologies that I believe it's Nigerian developers are working on. It's like an entire glossary of stuff that people have written or are contributing to, you've got zip line, it's almost like this is something that just grew wings and took off. Here's actually a funny one, when junior CEO, I think early last year, 2019 or so was on I think MSNBC or some news network and he had made a statement about how Africa doesn't have talent, there are no engineers in Africa, we can't seem to find engineers, blah, blah, blah.

Literally is like less than a month later, we opened our engineering office in Lagos, African development center for Microsoft, the engineers there are awesome. The talent is there, I can't remember who said this today, I had seen this on Twitter. He said that the problem isn't that there are no skills in Africa, it's that there are no opportunities. When you create opportunities Africans will scale up to meet the opportunity.

It's a very interesting paradigm because when I think of what I can go do in Africa, I just want to get out of people's way. I want to look at someone with an idea and say, what do you need? Is it Azure credits for one year? I got you, go do the thing, let me give you that covering versus let me go show you how to do; nah, we get out of the way, we unblock them, we remove the obstacles in their way and let them go do things.

Ken: It's fascinating that you say that, I actually had the same experience going back to, I actually went back to Togo and Ghana. I went to Ashessi University in Ghana produce a lot of badass engineers and every project they came up with, it gave me a pause because the ideas that they're producing over there are touching daily lives of people in ways that I cannot think of them.

I literally, in order to be able to co-sign their projects, or even be the one to generate such an idea, I need to live in those environments and I do not know this. There was a kid whose idea was to do a relay system by using the ingenuity of ladies in the market, as they are placing themselves as strategic points in the market, that's a relay system for transfer of whatever, you just call it and he was talking about how this was like a pla