History has been cruel to African-American inventors.

The world has no idea of the great inventions of many African-Americans because the truth has been buried and whitewashed.

We've been portrayed as slaves, entertainers and athletes.

For the most part, systems of white supremacy have suppressed black achievements and intentionally created a narrative of slots, low education, irresponsibility and frivolous living.

I thought I'd change the narrative up a little bit today in light of Black History Month.

According to the Pew Research Center, blacks make up 11 percent of the U.S. workforce overall, but represent about nine percent of STEM workers.

So in honor again of Black History Month, here are some amazing inventors and innovators who have changed the world with their STEM inventions.

There's Thomas L. Jennings was likely the first black person in America to receive a patent in eighteen twenty one.

He was granted a patent for dry scouring, a method for cleaning clothes that preceded modern day dry cleaning.

There's Granville T Woods.

Most important invention was the multiplex telegraph, also known as the induction telegraph or block system in eighteen eighty seven.

The device allowed men to communicate by voice over telegraph wires.

Ultimately helping to speed up communications and subsequently preventing crucial errors such as train accidents.

He was even sued by Thomas Edison, and he won in court and rejected Edison's request to come work for him.

There's Frederick McKinley Jones.

He was a prolific early 20th century black inventor who helped revolutionize revolutionize both the cinema and refrigeration indices.

He's best known for inventing the first automatic refrigeration system for trucks.

Lewis Latimer He played a critical role in the development of the telephone and invented and patented the carbon filament, a significant improvement in the production of incandescent light bulbs, making it more affordable for households.

Of course, there's George Washington Carver.

He's best known for coming up with about three hundred uses for the peanut.

Some of these included flour paste, paper soap, shaving cream and even medicines in my favorite peanut butter.

Charles Richard Drew Drew pioneered America's first large scale blood bank during World War Two.

He was responsible for saving thousands of lives.

There's Katherine Johnson, who worked for NASA as a human computer where she solved many difficult math problems.

Johnson helped to calculate the path for the Freedom seven, the spacecraft that put the first U.S. astronaut in space.

She was also a huge part of the mission that successfully planned the first moon landing.

Alan M. Toge He's the search engine inventor prior to Google, Marc Dean, responsible for developing the first color PC monitor and the first gigahertz chip, Guan Bluford Jr., the first African-American man to travel into space.

There's Garrett and Morgan, who did what he called the first safety hood after noticing how many firefighters were killed by smoke on the job.

The hood, which went over the head, feature tubes connected to wet sponges that filtered out the smoke and provided fresh oxygen for the firefighters.

Mae Jamison, astronaut and doctor in nineteen ninety two Mae Jamison, boarded the endeavour, making her the first African-American woman in space and was thrust into orbit.

I could go on.

I could talk about the stoplight, the ironing board, the almond and almanack, the streets of D.C. You know, there's so many wonderful inventions that so many people don't know about.

Joining me today is a dynamic creator inventor.

He his name is Frederick Upington and he is the CEO and founder of Zagel Technologies, a black owned designer and manufacturer of autonomous vehicles, including self-driving pods that make it easy to connect consumers with services and products on the go.

Don't go anywhere.

We'll be right back with this phenomenal black CEO and innovator.

Fred, welcome to the show, man, it is so nice to actually get to meet you once I saw what you were doing.

I said, Listen, I got to have this young man on the show, so thank you so much for taking the time out to be with us today.

Thank you very much, sir.

Appreciate it.

Awesome.

Awesome.

Well, you know, you may have heard the intro.

We talked about so many innovators, inventions, creators in in in the history of America that many times we're not taught about in school, right?

They don't talk about many of the wonderful achievements and we're talking, you know, during slavery and then coming out of slavery.

So so in light of this being, you know, we're going to be airing in Black History Month.

What does it mean to you as a CEO, a creator and innovator in the African diaspora to be able to kind of do the work that you're doing?

For me, it's it's about purpose.

You know, I always start with my wife, right?

One of my favorite books by Simon Sinek start with why?

So everything I do is has a purpose behind it and is rooted in community.

So for me, it's about representation.

You know, at one point, as a kid, I didn't have someone like myself to look up to for the work that I am doing currently doing so now I am that person I wanted to look up to, and it's my duty to make sure that purpose is fulfilled and we get to the greatest act of humanity is to inspire.

So I want to inspire more people within our community to answer their calling and do the work.

That's that's what that means to you.

Yeah, that's that's amazing.

I mean, you think about the space of STEM where it says it really only nine percent of folks who are working in science, technology, engineering and mathematics are, you know, from the minority African-American community.

And you've really launched out to do something that is just really groundbreaking.

So I want to talk about Django.

What was the inspiration that drove you to really get started and to begin, you know, building this platform?

So Diego's inspiration actually came from a tragic incident that took place a couple of years ago in twenty eighteen I, I lost a loved one to a car accident and it took the EMT and police a few hours, about four hours to get to him.

And you know, the whole family felt that pain.

I felt that pain was really painful.

And for me as an entrepreneur and I've been a technologist, I've been coding since I was 14, and I've always solve problems using technology and business combined together.

So.

I said to myself, what can I create?

What solution can I create using technology to make sure no one else experiences this pain?

And that was where Jaguar, as a company was born up with the name for the solution and the world wasn't ready for it at that time.

Sure.

And it took a few years to flesh out everything kinks, the product design and where what really accelerated it was during the pandemic.

Covid.

We're all isolated platform business models where you facilitate transactions between multiple parties like platforms like Amazon.

Uber also had a startup business that was also doing the same thing for on demand services, so we're already focused on bringing things to people as a result of the economy, know the post-pandemic society that we're living in.

So that demand grew.

And as you've already seen with COP26 and the demand, the urgency rather to do some missions globally.

There's been an accelerated push for autonomous vehicles and electric vehicles.

So this was when we decided to launch.

We saw the opportunity to, first of all, use autonomous vehicles for commerce.

Right.

So Jega was also inspired by the goddess of commerce at J, and we took the jet from that.

It was very important for me because I'm inspired by women around me, very enterprising women around me, for my mother, to aunt, my wife and everyone around me, all my sisters.

They've been very enterprising women and we wanted to use that as a way to pay respects to the fastest growing group of entrepreneurs.

So that was how Jaguar was born.

It came from a place of pain.

No problem.

And I wanted to solve a solve that problem for not just myself, but society.

And that's how It came about.

That's amazing, right?

You solve the problem and you solve the problem or work towards solving the problem.

I'm sure that you had many hurdles.

So for our for our viewing audience, I already know what it is.

But can you tell our viewing audience what is Jayco and what exactly do you do?

Right.

So we juggle with design and manufacture autonomous pods that are used for commercial activities.

So for example, if you wanted to get an urgent care service being brought to you, you be able to use a Jaguar Party's driverless electric and focus on sustainability.

We have partners and suppliers that work with us from on the software side and the hardware side.

And we're currently looking to pilot in 2022, and we'll also have an energy player as well, which is building the infrastructure because in order to have electric vehicles on the roads, we need to have charging infrastructures and energy infrastructures in place to support that.

So part of our solution is not just the autonomous vehicles that are driverless, but also energy solutions as well.

That's exciting.

So if I am in need of services or products through a process Like business, Yeah, business, I can I can order something to go On the platform as a mobile app.

So you're going there and you'll be able to find the business, see what their services are, select that and have that experience brought to you.

That's the vision.

Our goal is to have this completely automated where it is right now with the U.S. and regulations.

There are some restrictions, but places like Europe, Africa and Asia, it's fully automated where these pods can roam the streets and drive without interruption or human intervention.

That's amazing.

Did you have did you have to go through regulation here in the states to be able to, you know, gain access to the roads and different spaces?

Oh, so yes, so you have to go through regulations in order to be on public roads, but for private roads, you don't need necessarily need that because that's your testing and that's the phase that you go through with the technology.

You go through the testing phase, your pilot phase and then before you get to commercialization As well, that's a production phase.

Yeah, that's amazing.

So when you think about how this will also help businesses, what what will be the benefit to businesses?

Well, the benefits, first of all, they'll will be able to reach customers on the go, which is on tap market.

And there are more people, especially post-pandemic, who would rather have services given condition.

It takes you.

It takes twenty one days to form a habit for well over twenty one days as a result of the lockdown and shutdown.

You know, everyone orders from Amazon, everyone orders from Uber Eats, Grubhub, DoorDash.

All these businesses have normalized having products brought to you in a shorter time frame and not having to go there.

We have Uber.

The vehicles come to us.

We have all these things coming to us, so we're primed for that convenience.

So for us that we're really focused on saving you time, whether it's having the pods brought to you or you using one of our electric vehicle chargers while you're charging a vehicle, you can have experiences that brought to you as well.

You've developed some really exciting partnerships, as I was reading through.

Can you talk a little bit about the partners and the folks that you have been able to build relationship with to help move Jake all along?

Yes, I could shed light on some of those people.

We have very interesting team members from private entities and government entities.

And we've even had some from Big Tech companies that have reached out to support the the vision based on just the solution, right?

So we have our team members and from the government and this our CFO is from the CFO from Miami-Dade County.

We have people from Caterpillar.

Our engineers are from Caterpillar.

We also have people from Tesla that also worked with us as well.

Well, not the company itself, but the engineers who came from Tesla for working with us and other electric vehicle companies, automation and also autonomous driving software companies as well.

And we have our fleet management company as well that we're working with and also have other local businesses like urgent care facilities that we'll be working with with us as well to provide mobile urgent care solutions to their customers.

That's our first entry into the market.

That's amazing.

Can you talk about that urgent care, it sounds like.

Well, I don't want, I don't want to get ahead of myself.

But can you talk about that urgent care and what that partnership looks like?

Yeah, because that's.

Sure.

So it's it's it's not the entire services that they will be providing its quick services like IV therapy, COVID testing, that's those are the services that they'll be starting with.

We'll figure out where we're using that to smooth out the processes and the systems before we well, those companies, because we're focused on the software and hardware, we make it easier for businesses.

We provide them that space on wheels, things like an automated space on wheels with access to data about their customers and the business to automate and improve their processes.

Mm hmm.

Mm hmm.

And that's amazing when you think about resolving or helping to solve that problem.

Will this will this help businesses also with overhead and minimizing costs in that type of thing?

I'll talk about that.

Yeah, that is the goal.

So we also have we also have a park where we partner with.

They have a smart vending machine and that was a company founded by my wife as well, OK?

And basically, it's you're able to access products in these vending machines using facial recognition, and it's able to detect your mood and all that.

So it's automated.

We'll have that on the pods.

So there will be businesses or e-commerce businesses that want to have presence without having a brick and mortar space and having that dedicated fixed costs, you know, that comes from rent.

So by using the pods, you're able to have rent this space on the man when you need it, as opposed to being locked into a contract.

And as we saw during the pandemic, you have you had a lot of businesses and retail that had to that went out of business because they couldn't pay their rent.

Hmm.

So, so true.

That's.

Exactly, so, you know, only that because they ain't able to have your customers come to it.

So with juggle, we're helping these businesses go to their customers, right?

Right.

And no matter like it's a basically a pandemic proof business in the sense that if there was ever a lockdown, you could use the parts to if there was ever another lockdown again, you could use the cards to automate your business.

And even if there wasn't, you can reach new customers getting to new demographics that you otherwise won't be able to reach.

We have advertising on the digital screens outside the pods that allow businesses to advertise their services, businesses or even on the local businesses that can advertise and national businesses that can advertise as well.

I love it.

I love it.

You know, when you think about the pandemic, we were talking earlier just, you know, we got Delta, we got Omicron.

We said, Next one's going to be Decepticon.

Like, Who knows what the next thing is Going to be?

Another one is go like another new one.

Yeah, yeah.

And so your business model fits right in case these lockdowns do come.

But even if they do not, this business model really seems to work and has a great opportunity to make a significant impact.

How were you able to secure capital for this ambitious vision and who can who can invest in Jayco?

Definitely.

So we, we our first investors and that will continue being our investor relationship, for the most part, are our angel investors and venture partners.

So we're raising from angel investors and we're raising from venture capitalists as well.

Our seed right now, we're raising one point five one four five million and we're also where approached by Start Engine, a platform that allows the public to invest so you can invest the public and invest that start engine.

Jager.

Ok. And that's basically they get to invest alongside its institutional investors.

Again, going back to our community when starting June approached us, I found this was in alignment with my purpose because I'm all about I'm all about economic empowerment, creating jobs, creating solutions.

That's all I've done in the last 15 years is create jobs, create opportunities for people.

I love doing that and is a platform that allows us to expand explanation exponential level.

So we're not only using Jega to create opportunities for businesses, but through start engine.

The public can invest alongside institutional investors, get in to get involved with the journey from early on, which typically with our community, were left out of those kind of investment opportunities.

How many people in our community could say they invested in companies like Tesla?

Investing comes like Lucid or Apple in the early stages, so this makes me happy because, you know, for example, the minimum investment amount I started in about two point forty six so that any college kid or anyone, any adult that has that has that amount saved, I want to invest.

They can do that.

So that opportunity from starting to was very interesting to us, but we've been able to secure capital from angel investors and venture partners, and we're going to continue to again, as you mentioned, as an ambitious vision.

A lot of infrastructure that we have to set up to build back better bill.

And with Joe Biden's from Joe Biden, where they have to, that's $7 billion has been allocated for setting up infrastructure or supporting rather businesses like ours that are in the EV electric vehicle and autonomous vehicle space and about $5 billion of that's going towards charging infrastructure.

So I, you know, here we're making an announcement about Juggalos product new addition, which is the Chargers, the electric vehicle chargers that are not just exclusive to juggle parts, but be open to other electric vehicle car owners as well.

So part one of the facts that we know in this space is that in order to drive the adoption of electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles, that we have to set up the infrastructure first as well.

So for us, we're laying out the infrastructure spend of this charging.

This chargers charging stations with local businesses and their parking lots around the country and other countries internationally.

So by doing that, it drives the adoption.

So LEGO is playing a very pivotal role in the EV and AV space, helping drive the adoption of electric vehicles and also by using autonomous vehicles for commerce or helping drive the adoption of autonomous vehicles as well.

Because the transportation side of autonomous vehicles has a longer way to go before it's fully automated, whereas with commerce, it's easier on the lower hanging fruit because it's not driving the entire time.

It's making stops at key locations in cities that we're in.

And so will it just operate in in large cities?

Are we going into the rural spaces?

You know, I can see the great opportunity to be able to reach people that may be unreachable.

So can you talk a little bit about that and what your vision is for that?

Certainly, certainly.

So typically, people would think that this will work in only large cities, right?

However, we've done a lot of interest for rural areas.

A lot of.

Private real estate companies, real estate development companies and smart city organizations, I want to partner with us.

So in rural areas like you said, where you don't have access to certain things like health, whether it's pharmaceutical or pharmacy, the pods can be used for that.

Same thing with transportation packages being delivered in rural areas, we've had those interests and it can work is actually almost pretty much easier to work in rural areas than because it's less risky than in cities because it's lower traffic.

But that's how that's how it would work in rural areas, for the most part.

That's that's amazing, Fred, you know, so I want to maybe get to a moment of inspiration.

So there may be a young African-American male who is who is watching or a young black lady and young Hispanic lady, right?

We're not represented in the stem field.

What was it for you, brother, that that you said you've been coding since you were 14, which is probably I'm not even going to guess how many years ago that was, but right?

What was what was it for you that that caused you to get into the field of STEM?

Because I'll say this, our church has a program where we're teaching kids to code right and in partnership with my brother's keeper of the Lehigh Valley.

So we're teaching kids to write code.

They built their own computers last year, last summer and they kept those computers, but engaging kids minds in that space.

What was it for you, Fred, that really gave you the the desire, the passion and the drive to go into this space and really succeed?

I've always loved engineering like taking computers apart and together I'm I'm a self-taught driver.

Learn how to drive myself, obviously went to driving test and got my license.

The reason why I'm saying, as I've always been, I've always had that engineer's mind and my father was an architect and property developer, so he's always been in STEM.

So that was my first inspiration.

We had a manufacturing factory putting together Frenchies gates, building stuff from scratch.

That was my source of inspiration first.

And he later on as a teenager, I started playing basketball and doing all the things that I wanted to pursue career wise and came in the street early on my teens, and he didn't like that.

So he enrolled me into the market.

So it academy, OK?

And that's how I officially started coding and I became certified.

Had Bill Gates signature on my certificate at 16.

Yeah, so that was how I got in there, and over time, I saw the opportunity to solve problems for businesses using software.

So I started my own software business early on about 20, and I just provided solutions for businesses in the New York area, actually even Philadelphia area.

You mentioned Lehigh Valley.

I was actually invited to speak.

I've spoken to a couple of schools in Philadelphia regarding STEM.

Ok?

I've always because I started early and I've made it my mission to pull off as many young black women and black men off that ladder as well.

Because tech, I always say tech saved my life and tech gave me an opportunity to make not only change my life and change others by giving them opportunities to earn.

So it's my I would love to speak at your program one day.

Yes, I love speaking to kids and showing them the opportunities.

It's not just the engineering and coding side.

There's product management side, it's the UI design side.

There's a lot of sides that one can get involved with technology and it's innate with us.

We understand science, we just program different.

So, you know, you consider that, you know, some of the greatest inventions in the history of the world in Babylon and Mesopotamia, Egypt, right?

Commit, that all emanates from the African continent, and we don't talk about that enough.

But, you know, the Greeks really didn't devise it.

They stole it.

But, you know, considering Fred, that that you as an inventor, as a creator, as an engineer, as a CEO, set such a wonderful example for other young people who may desire to break into this space.

And we got about two minutes left.

What what would you say to someone who wants to kind of pursue a passion or maybe wants to break in to the stem field and really become a CEO like yourself?

The first thing I would say is to take the first step.

That's that's always very important.

Take that first step when you select the areas because you might not, you might find that one area where it's coding might not be your area of choice.

So select like two areas that you want to go into.

Yes, go to a program, have friends and mentors around you that will support that career path.

Very important because if you don't have friends and mentors around you, I had that and that allowed me to continue my journey marathon when it was taught.

Yeah.

Whenever there are challenges, I had those peers around me that encouraged me.

I'm the sum or total of my community influence from my community, right?

Everyone around me who influenced me.

So having that community support you is very important.

But most importantly, don't be.

Don't talk yourself out of it believes and in what it is that you're setting out to do, let your imagination run wild.

Use whenever every problem is an opportunity to create a solution that benefits society where you can make a revenue or living out of, and that impacts other people's lives as well.

With every problem in society, there's always a solution that can positively impact our community economically.

That's amazing, Fred.

I'll tell you, I knew our time was going to go way too fast, but let me just thank you for being on the show today, sharing your vision, sharing your heart.

We're going to be looking forward to the amazing things that Diego is going to do and that you're going to do as a leader in our community.

So on behalf of everyone here at PBS, I like to thank you the viewing audience for tuning in.

May God bless you and keep you.

Keep being courageous, and we'll see you next week right here on courageous conversations.