 Last night we talked. What's been up? Don't tell him yet. Hey man, welcome back. I'm not that black. Except for the people. We ain't for sale. Hey man, welcome back. Good to see you, man. Hey man, 85 South Shore presents The Black Market and today we got my man, Mr. Justin Dawkins in here. Give us a big rundown of what it is that you actually do. Cause I got my notes and I'm gonna make sure you save us on this paper. Notes. I wonder where you got those notes from? I know people. You know people? So I do a few things. My full time, what I spend most of my time on is fundamentally helping black businesses. That's my job. That's it, right there. I've been classed for that. I'm going for everybody black and the blackest. That's it. So the majority of my time I spend a program called Collab Capital that I founded with. Two of my really good friends, Jewel Burke Solomon and Barry Gibbons. You didn't bring them? I didn't bring them. Jewel just had a baby, literally a week old, so had his birthday to the baby. And my partner Barry, he's dealing with some business things that keep him pretty occupied right now. But we'll be back, we'll be back. Yeah, we celebrated last year. We raised just over 50 million dollars. Oh my goodness. To invest in black innovators exclusively. Like 85 South Shore? Maybe. I'm talking to your people. You know people that gave you the paper, I'm talking to them. Yeah. Give you the notes. We don't need to hold 50. We'll take a few of them. That's what we talking about. It's cool. We're going to flip ours though. We're going to pay y'all back right up front. That's what I heard. Just let me hold. Let me hold them. Yeah, so no one really knows, but we think we're one of the largest to ever raise a fund specifically for black innovators, black entrepreneurs, and so. Even if you want, I'm still going to play. Appreciate that. You here talking to me. They didn't come. So right there, you are already my favorite. I appreciate that. Keep doing that though, man. That's dope as hell. Yeah, so we raised fund one and the goal is to build an amazing portfolio of entrepreneurs and innovators building amazing things and then we'll go raise another fund. That'll be bigger and better. 500 million. Why? Why is that a secret? We need people to know it early. Okay. I like that target. I like that goal. That one sounds good to me. Hell yeah. 10X everything. 500 million. Let's do it. We'll start a black tech company and then we can get a couple. You have a black tech company. Look at all this technology around you. What you mean? I like your perspective. Yeah. How did you get involved in the tech world? Oh, so you want to take me. You're going to age me right now, but I taught myself out of college in high school. I was bored and I was intrigued by like, I wanted to know how do computers work? And so I ended up just teaching myself, you know. And then when in college, I started being broke, you know, like most folks, emotionally young people in college, you want to have a little pocket money to go around with your refund check. So I started building websites and other things online for organizations on campus and around school. I went to Georgia State, so right around the corner from here. And I, from there, I just, I love helping people. I love helping businesses, especially small businesses that didn't have big budgets because back then websites, you couldn't just go to Squarespace. You couldn't just go to these different sites and just press buttons. Go did it. Yeah, you couldn't just press buttons to build websites. You had to know how to code. And so I love working with small businesses and organizations that didn't have hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a website. What you can do now for $10 a month, $20 a month, you couldn't do before. So to have that, have that be an option for them was something that I enjoyed. So I built my first business doing that. And that's how I got into it. You did a great job telling this story cause we still don't know how old you are. And you said that was gonna age you. You good at this. Well, at least, I least gave a little bit because I said you have to know how to code to build a website and now you don't. So, so at least. It's coding that dying art? No, it's just becoming more accessible. And there's, there's a lot of like tools. What's the trick to that shit? The trick to what? Coding. Like any habit routine, like discipline, just being committed. It's like any other language, right? It's why they call it programming languages, coding languages. Just like any language you gotta practice. You just gotta immerse yourself in it. So a lot of people try to like read a book, you know, or take a course online. I always say try to start with imagining something you wanna build. It can be something as simple as I wanna build a calculator. I wanna know how to write code to build my own calculator, something simple or, you know, I wanna build an application to save up to buy tickets to the 85,000, whatever it is. Just so actually have a real problem that will immerse you in the technology and kind of encourage you along the way. Keep you motivated so that you build up that muscle that makes you wanna go and learn how to, you know, chip away at it. And it's just a practice thing. Practice makes perfect. So it just takes time. That's the trick. Ain't no real tricks to it. What are some of the, you know, upstart businesses that you have worked with? Oh man. So we have a growing portfolio. Well, another thing that I do is I'm a Grow With Google digital coach. So over the last... Hold up, you said that fast. Say it slow it down. Slow it down. You a what now? Grow With Google. So it's... Grow With Google. Digital coach. Okay, that's a long title. So Grow With Google is an organization that sits within Google. So, you know, Google does a lot of things. They own YouTube. They have the search engine. They have Google ads. A lot of different products and services. Google docs, stuff like that. So I help small businesses learn how to use those tools to help them build and scale their businesses. And so that's how I work with smaller companies. And I've done that work for about five years now and thousands of businesses here in Atlanta and Georgia. And so that's, I've enjoyed that work. And then as far as like larger, like tech companies, tech oriented innovation companies, I'm really, really excited about our very first investment which is coming called Hebrilla. I don't know if you know about Hebrilla. Hebrilla, you sound familiar. Tracy Pickett founded that company a few years ago. It was a rain cap. She reinvented the rain hat for women. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that story went crazy. Yeah, yeah. So she, I'm always excited about that business. That was our first investment out of the firm. We just invested in another company called Veruna. And Veruna does smart water systems. So you know your water at the tap. That water travels a long way before it gets to our homes. And it's not a very intelligent system. So what happened in Flint is you have all these different waterways and pathways, water travels from treatment to your home. Well, those things, those systems were built over years, different materials. They wear down different ways. And so what happens is the water gets contaminated along the way. But there's no real way to know that until somebody gets sick or they periodically test. So what Veruna does is they have these boxes. They're about by the size of this stand right here. And they feed water into it. It has all these sensors on the inside. And all that data that's being generated as water flows through it, it goes to a software application so that people can see in real time where the water gets bad. So their whole vision is to make sure that Flint never happens again. So they want to make all our water systems smart. And so all that data goes into the cloud. And then people can respond accordingly. Oh, there's certain metals showing up for certain things happening in the water. So somebody can intervene, stop it, before somebody gets sick. So Shay and his partner built that business out of passion and just wanted to have people have clean water. So I love that business and it's exciting stuff. That's dope as hell, bro. I can't believe you raised all that money. And then to see the type, just to hear where y'all at with it and what y'all investing in, it's really dope. Especially to see black people getting involved in all of these different avenues and shit like that. We have to. The technology is advancing. And we're at a really interesting time in history, where technology is involved in everything now. You can't really navigate this world and not have something tech-enabled, some access point to the internet. The internet unlocks a whole bunch of opportunity. Just being able to go and click and download. And they said a lot of stuff wasn't gonna be, you weren't gonna be able to do things on the internet. Nobody ever buy anything on the internet. Now you buy everything on the internet. Everything. What you think of the metaverse and where it's going? I think Web 3, which includes the metaverse, the decentralized web, which is, it's an interesting space. I think it's here to stay. But just like anything this early, we're still trying to figure it out. Like how people are gonna use it. How do we get it out of the early adopter phase, where you have a group of people who are really into it early? How do we get it into the mainstream? How will people interact with it and use it? The everyday person. Because the one thing that people don't talk about is in order to participate in the metaverse, you gotta have access to the internet. But there's still so many millions of people, particularly black people, who live in neighborhoods and communities that still don't have access to broadband internet. So how can a young boy or girl in certain parts of Michigan, outside of Detroit, who still don't have access to broadband internet, how are they gonna participate in the metaverse, right? If they don't have access to internet. So we have a lot of problems to solve. But racism affects everything, man. It does. It does. And so we have to, the reason that we raised our fund is we wanna bridge the wealth gap. And because what we believe is when we invest in amazing entrepreneurs and creatives and empower them, when they have money, they're gonna go back to their neighborhoods. They're gonna go back to invest in those communities. They're gonna start schools. They're gonna use their capital and their access to influence policy for their people. This country, whether you love it or hate it, was built on capitalism. It's hard to get anything done, but our access to the right relationships and access to money is just how it goes. Right. So you won't hit spin game, G. That's what I'm here to do. That's why I'm here. Give me your outlook on the cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency. I think crypto is fascinating, honest. Really, really interesting. I think that there are still some things to learn. It's still early. But I like the idea of decentralizing some of this stuff. Like this aggregation, having money being managed by single entities and not really having other tools and vehicles for people to do commerce, right? Right. I like the idea of crypto in a sense, but it's also technology, so it can be smarter and I don't think we've really maximized the potential of crypto, right? I think we've done it. We kind of used the simplest basic version of crypto so far, but when you start looking at things like Ethereum and smart contracts, right? Like being able to like buy property and being able to have smart transactions. So one day we all gonna pass on, we're gonna transition. Wouldn't it be great to be able to have technology that when that event happens and it's verified, your assets and your resources and all those things were distributed without intervention. You don't need a lawyer. You don't need a bunch of courtroom systems. What if it happened automatically? Hell yeah, that'll be hard. Right. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. Plug my daddy's hard drive up. I got him right here. Exactly. Right here. He left me everything. He left me here. He left the cars, the video. He left the cars, the land, all that. So I think there's, I think we're headed in that direction, you know, especially when I think about the speed in which things are happening now too. Before we used to take, like if you wanted to buy a house, you know this, like you want to buy a house, even if it's cash, it takes time, right? You want to, you often have a property, you know, let's call it, keep the number simple, $100,000. Even if I wanted to buy a cash, you got to surprise it. You still got to go through the same process like you got alone. Right, so what crypto and the blockchain what allows it to do is we can have these transactions much faster, whereas this piece of property is tokenized, right? Put on the blockchain, and then there's this shared ledger, because that's what the blockchain is, the shared record, and we all agree that when I give you this $100,000 in Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever the token that, you know, like whatever it is, it now belongs to me, right? We don't need lawyers, we don't need, we don't need the government in some ways to do these things. We still need them for other resources and access to other services, but being able to conduct business, I think, I think there's a big promise there that we have yet to see. I'm looking forward to it. Have you got involved with the NFTs at all? I bought a few. Again, I'm a technologist, so I'm curious. I'm just curious just like everybody else. You didn't want any returns? I haven't flipped one yet. I'm holding right now. I'm just, I bought a few, holding on to them. Just want to understand, I did it purely out of curiosity just to see like if I could flip it, right? Like if someone would come along and offer me more money forward what the price would be. So I haven't flipped one yet. I keep posting, but I think it's interesting. And what's really cool about NFTs is right now is what I'm calling, I call it JPEG money, right? It's like, it's in the most basic form, again, like crypto. It's like, this is like phase one where we're just kind of spending money to buy images, but it doesn't have to be images. It could be rights to music. It could be, or if it is an image, like for instance, you got images back here, you know, your ghetto legends, you know, gear. What if I could own a piece of that and rebranding every time it prints a t-shirt and I sell that t-shirt, two pennies goes to a college fund, right? This is what I mean by smart money. So NFTs is the idea of it and it's basic level makes sense, but I think there's again, there's more potential than power. We just haven't unlocked it yet, but I'm excited about that. And I think, you know, I think our people are the ones that are gonna come up with creative ideas on how to actually use this that in a way that'll benefit our community and obviously benefit our pockets. Hey man, when the black people nerds hear this and they're gonna wanna get in touch with you, how can they do it? As you know, I'm connected with the nerd gang too. Hey, I love them all. I ain't calling you one. I'm just saying the type of information that you have, they're gonna be interested in getting some more with it. And look, did you even know that we could, I know, trust me, I do this all the time. Shout out to my black nerds after a worldwide, my scientists and people working there saying shit like that. The Blurreds. That's what they call black nerds. You've been calling them black nerds. That works too. So my personal is J. Dawkins ATL on Instagram and Twitter. I'm not really anywhere else. So I'm not really on Facebook. You probably know some other shit though. What you on that? I'm really not Fort Chan or some shit. I wish I had, that's hilarious. I wish I had the time to get into some of this. I just don't have time. So I don't. What are you doing all this, without this time, bro? Man, I was, while I was waiting, I was literally sending emails and closing deals. We closed on another investment earlier than that. Why you were here? Wait, don't clap. Don't clap. He ain't cut me in. Don't cancel that shit. Don't be doing that shit on my premises, bro. We're still gangsters over here. The cops are doing business. That's funny. I want seven percent. You doing business in my establishment. I had it, I had it. Bro, the Godfather will cut you in the fucking black ass ears off, man. They gonna kill you. You try me that time. That's funny. You try me. You just trying to see if I still got my own wife on credit, man. I had my own hot spot going. You had your own wife at. My own hot spot. It's my land. Aw, man, you right. I'm sorry. Send me an invoice. Man, you say it shouts. I don't give a damn if it's a boomerclot nickel bag. $300, man. $300. What did you say, Kat? What are? If you sell it to someone and they sell it, every time it gets sold, do you get money? Yeah, so NFTs, for those that don't know, is non-fungible tokens in FT. And basically what it does is it allows you to tokenize things. And so I mentioned this a little bit earlier. Right now, we're seeing this moving in art. So it's like, whether it's a graphic, maybe a sound, music even can be an NFT. And what is built into it is called a smart contract. And that's where it makes it different than paper money. The thing about paper money, it does not leave a paper trail. If I hand loads of dollar right now, that dollar is gone for all intents and purposes. But with an NFT, what it allows, what it does is it creates almost like a string. And that string is, you can instruct it to do certain things. So with an NFT, I can say, hey, Nas has even talked about real estate.