 A wonderful human being, as brilliant in person as she is on stage. Let's give a hearty welcome to none other than Megette Wade. Good afternoon. Thank you. Um, so I want to share a story with you guys. My life is all about sharing my stories. I never talk about anything that I don't live. And maybe that's where my passion comes from. Because when I talk, I talk from what I've gone through. So, um, you know, from the moment I was six years old, a question has popped into my head that has never left me since, which is actually the reason why I'm standing here. And that question was, why are some countries rich, while other countries are poor? And it happened at six years old, why? Because that's the time when my family moved me from Senegal, West Coast of Africa, where I was born, to Germany. And later the family would move to France. And then from there, I would carry on on to the U.S. But really, I arrived in Germany right around age six. And I saw all of this prosperity around me. And I could not help but compare that to where I came from. And so that question, very simple question from a six-year-old is, how come here in this country I have this, this European country, and where I came from, we had that? And it never left me. Along the way, many people tried to give me many theories as to why that was the case. And I've heard it all. Some people claim, oh, you know the IQ thing. Africans, black people, are not as smart as other people. Oh, I'm still hearing it to this day. A few months ago, I was at a conference where a panel, an entire panel of four or five people, basically making the case as to why black and brown people around the world, especially in poor countries, will never amount to much more than that because we are intellectually inferior. I've heard people say that it's because we lack education. We don't have access to enough education. I've heard people say that it's because we are malnourished. We have issues with malnutrition. I've heard people say it's because all of these wars are supposedly going on. And I even have people saying it's because simply I don't happen to have shoes. So I've heard all the nonsense. A lot of it made no sense to me. And I will tell you why it made no sense to me. Because most of what I heard was making it seem like it was about this individual. But then it makes no sense. Because if it is about that individual, if it is about the fact that people cannot, these people can't amount to much more, then you explain to me, why is it that my parents, as soon as they leave my country of Senegal, they can all of a sudden make something of themselves that they could not make of themselves back home? Is everything I'm here making sense then? You see all of a sudden why I'm like none of that makes sense. Something else must be at play. So I kept searching. And eventually along the way, a very simple connection started, dots started to connect in my head. People are poor. You're poor because you have no money. You have no money because you have no source of income. Where does a source of income come from for most of us? A job, right? Where do jobs come from? Where do jobs come from, guys? I'm hearing it all. It's good. Entrepreneurs, businesses, yes. It comes from businesses, especially small and medium-sized enterprises. Then if you think that those SMEs, those businesses, are the key to the global poverty that we're talking about, then don't you think that we should look into the business climate of countries? Don't you think we should look at how easy or hard it is to run a business anywhere in the world, in any of these countries? I think we should. If you want to grow a beautiful potato or tomato plant, you go to your nursery and you try to pick the best seeds for your environment. So you try to get the environment matters a great deal. It doesn't matter how good your seed is. If you put it in a place and you don't water it, that thing is never going to make anything of itself. So it happens to be that there are at least two indicators that I love. One is the doing business index ranking of a World Bank. And the other one is the Frasier Institute Economic Freedom Index. And both of them show what, in a way, I have been seeing on my journey of building businesses, both in the US and back home in Africa. And what do they show? It is harder to start and run a business almost anywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa than it is in any Scandinavian countries. What did I learn? Basically that most Sub-Saharan African countries are less capitalist than Scandinavian than any Scandinavian countries. I would let that sink in for a minute. That's what I discovered. And you know, when I discovered that, that made sense. That made sense. That could explain why people in developing nations were poor, and why developing nations are poor countries. And countries who happen to have greater economic freedom happen to be doing better. When I discovered that, I went through some emotions. My first emotion was I felt this sense of relief, and excitement that one can feel when for decades of your life, your entire life, you've been walking around with an illness in your body or in your mind. And no one, no one could find a reason why you were in such pain. No one could. But all of a sudden, you stumble upon this doctor or this person, and all of a sudden, it makes sense. And you're like, oh my god, I was not crazy. We know where this comes from. And most importantly, we know what to do about it. It is amazing. That's what happened for me. Around the same time, I met my husband Michael Strong. And then with him, we both shared and were aligned around entrepreneurship and the solutions to poverty. And when he was telling me more about economic freedom, it all was making even more sense. And then something happened. As I discovered all of this, and it became clear and real for me in my belly, I started to go take that to the rest of the world. And the rest of my world back then was a very progressive world. You see, I came from the left of the left. I come from the left of the left. You might not guess it today. But I was not too far from, I was right in there. Let's just say that. So once I, Michael and I started talking about all of this and I became really, this is it now. I'm going to take it back to the world and to my friends. You know, I have this one very good friend of mine. I told her that I was dating Michael. She went to Google him. It never occurred to me to Google him. She Googled him and she called me and she said, you can't date him. And I'm like, who are you talking about? She's like, that man, that man, blue shirt. And I'm like, who are you talking about? She said, that man, Michael Strong. I said, what did he do? Did you see him? How he was in Bloomberg defending Walmart, allowing, you know, greater buying power to the poor? I said, and she had a problem with that. I said, are you hearing what you're saying? So anyway, I could not date Michael Strong because she figured the man must be out of his mind. How can you defend Walmart? Although she said Walmart was giving greater buying power to the poor. That part didn't seem to matter. And likewise, I lost 90% of my friends. 90% of my friends I lost almost overnight because of my newfound ideas. It was very painful. I was in a great state of despair and anger. I was depressed. Later on though, because I started a company called Skinny Skin, which is all about how do we end bias. In doing Skinny Skin, I come to learn about the science of bias. And then it explained everything about how my friend felt. That's when I discovered that in a way, anti-capitalism is a bias. It's an implicit bias for a lot of people. So now we know that racial bias is bad for black people. But there's another bias that's really bad for black people, and it's the bias against capitalism. Because the bias against capitalism, you might as well say it's a bias against global poverty and most people who live in the global poor, mostly a lot of them are blacks and browns, aren't we? So that was really interesting. This is when I started to discover that, yes, there is this bias against capitalism. And then what happened for me is I started completely changing my mind around the way I looked at people who had this bias against capitalism. So what does the science on bias teach us? It teaches us that we all have biases. And to me, I find that unifying. If you've got a brain, you've got biases. That's what evolutionary biologists will tell you. And it also, the science on bias at Skinny Skin, what we teach people is do not focus on the David Dukes of anti-capitalism. In this case, I'm thinking of people like Naomi Klein and her likes. I can't bother with people like her. Because for whatever reason, they have decided to stick with their lack of intellectual integrity. And for people like that, I can't do much. But the people for whom we can do something are the people who are well-intentioned, listening to her, hearing her ideas. Those people care about a better world for the global poor. And the science of bias tell us focus on those people. Because they're already where you need them to be. All they need, though, you need at this point to try and do what we call decoding. See, if you're 25 years old on this earth, changes are you have gone through 25 years of coding and programming to be an anti-capitalist. Think about it. All the movies you watch on Hollywood, mainstream media, most of it is anti-capitalist and the academia, I won't even go there, right? So what the science of bias tells us and what to do about that is you have been to, and the reason why we don't focus on the neomy climes of a world because they're ideologues is because people like that can't feel love. I will say it flat out. I'm not sure that an ideologue is capable of love, empathy, or curiosity. That's why they're ideologues. But the science of bias tells you you need those. Love, curiosity, and empathy are active ingredients that the brain needs in order to rewrite itself. That's what your neurons need to rewrite themselves. So from there, what do you do? You become what Michael was for me. This one-on-one relationship with the other person where you help them practice what we call practice no more stereotype. And how does that work? Five exercises. One is you help people understand, you help them with bias awareness. It is important for people to see how the biases are everywhere. When Michael and I started on this journey, I was amazed to see that pretty much everywhere you look, there's a bias against anti-capitalism. It's everywhere and you don't realize that. So that's step number one, help people to see it for themselves. From there, you do stereotype replacement. Anytime I would catch a bias like that, I would switch it around and say, wherever you show me that capitalism is bad for poverty, I would say capitalism is good for prosperity, creates prosperity. From there, the next one is swapping places. And swapping places is very important. You have to have the ability to put yourself in somebody else's shoes. And this is where we, people in this room, libertarians in general lack, we lack a library and resources for that. When Fee last year did Made in Meke, basically followed me in Senegal and we showed people our operation, what we're doing and how it's all happening, what happened there is people were able to walk in the shoes and put themselves in the bodies of people who are in countries like that and are suffering from the lack of capitalism. That really helps you have greater empathy, which is actually when things start to also happen. And from there, cultural immersion. Maybe that's when you invite your friends to come to Fee. You invite them to come into your world to see what you're seeing. And when we are helping people with fighting their bias on racism or any isms that they have, for example, we invite people to go to parties where there's maybe gonna be, it's something that's put together by African-Americans or whoever it is. But then you have to go and put yourself in somebody else's world where you all of a sudden become more like an observant and you get to start to understand things in a completely different way from if I was just arguing back at you. And then last, but the best, make a connection, make new friends. I tell you, once first people show up here, that's the magic of what's gonna start to happen. So, you see, I think the time for fight to end the fight has come. I am quite frankly sick and tired of the fight. I hear us oftentimes be, well, we need to win this and we need to win that. Win what? I want the win-win situation. Win what? It's about time we start looking at the other people as not the enemies. I have been brainwashed for decades by the time I discovered any of this. And if he had connected with me on the terms that I see most people on our side connecting with other people, I would have told them goodbye, you're crazy. But I didn't because he brought me in and he worked with me with feelings of love, empathy and curiosity. Everything happened because he was able to unlock in me my sense of curiosity, my sense of love and my sense of empathy. So that's what I'm trying to call up in everybody in this room from now on. That's where the real power is. Let's not be the social justice warriors of anti-capitalism. It's not gonna work. You know how it works on the other end, what's been going on. So let's not be those people. And the reason why that matters so much is because if we can succeed at letting go of this bias against capitalism that exists out there, not only would we have created greater prosperity for everybody around, but also we have created dignity. And I will tell you why that dignity part is so important. And I don't know if this is gonna work. My first slide please. No, the other one please. You see, this was a year ago, since then we've had a bigger team in Senegal. For my skincare company, the lip balm that's supposed to be your cricket in the pocket. In this case, cricket in the bra. So that's a lip balm that basically we have out there to be your cricket. You know cricket is Pinocchio's little conscience? That's what this is supposed to be. When you're trying to remind people to switch their minds on, otherwise the mind is on autopilot where all the biases live, including the anti-capitalist bias. So this is a good trend. But so we make this in Senegal and we sell our products in the US. It's available at Whole Foods, for example. You see that lady over there, the one who is siding like this. You see her. She looks very happy here, doesn't she? She looks very confident here, doesn't she? Well, what if I told you? Her name is Yahara. She's 26 years old. Before us, she never had a job. And her best outlook on life was to find a husband. That said, nothing else. And cook and serve at home. With us, she discovered a whole new life. Well, Yahara, after I explained to her what I explained to you guys on my search of why are some countries poor and others rich, she said to me, and I explained to her everything I discovered, what I just shared with you. She started crying. I said, why are you crying? She said, I have to confess. But up till now, because every time I open a magazine, every time I watch a movie, every time I see me, the African girl, the black skin represented, I am being represented as a pathetic human being who needs somebody else's help. They bring us food. They bring us shoes, everything. And she said, and I have come to accept but maybe us Africans must be inferior. How many are walking around this earth like her feeling less than for reasons that have nothing to do with her but she thinks it's her? That made my heart go ballistic. And then she said, oh, but that's not why I'm crying. I said, then why are you crying? She said, because now I know, but it is not true. That, my friends, is what is at stake. Prosperity and dignity. So what do you wanna do? Thank you.