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Episode: #758: Jamie Foxx and Jacqueline Novogratz
Author: Tim Ferriss: Bestselling Author, Human Guinea Pig
Duration: 02:31:15
Episode Shownotes
This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited. The episode
features segments from episode #124 "Jamie Foxx on Workout Routines, Success Habits, and Untold Hollywood Stories" and #514 "Jacqueline Novogratz on Building Acumen, How to (Actually) Change the World, Speaking Your Truth, and the Incredible Power of 'Dumb' Questions."Please enjoy!Sponsors:ExpressVPN high-speed, secure, and anonymous VPN service: https://www.expressvpn.com/tim (Get 3 extra months free with a 12-month plan)AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://DrinkAG1.com/Tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.)The League curated dating app for busy, high-performing people: https://click.theleague.com/qmhm/timferriss; available on iOS and AndroidTimestamps:[00:00] Start[06:50] Notes about this supercombo format.[07:53] Enter Jamie Foxx.[08:19] When Jamie met Kanye West.[10:58] Why Jamie considers his studio magical.[13:32] When Jamie met Ed Sheeran.[15:00] What's on the other side of fear?[16:53] Making impressions.[22:15] How Eric Marlon Bishop became Jamie Foxx.[24:49] Overcoming fear at open mics.[26:12] Could Prince or Michael Jackson find a career break in today’s "Age of Memes?"[27:49] How Jamie learned to read the room.[33:27] Why do some comedians lose the ability to make people laugh?[39:04] Enter Jacqueline Novogratz.[39:37] Jacqueline's background and siblings' accomplishments.[42:06] Jacqueline's journey into social impact investing.[45:15] An early banking career and reputation for asking tough questions.[48:36] A tendency to champion underdogs.[53:18] From banker to disruptor.[1:00:04] Jacqueline's first opportunity in her new path.[1:05:28] Failures, small wins, and perseverance.[1:09:21] Jacqueline's first real win in Rwanda.[1:13:37] The path between Rwanda and founding Acumen.[1:16:06] Jacqueline's reasons for applying to Stanford Business School.[1:18:10] How the Rwanda genocide redefined poverty for Jacqueline.[1:20:42] Lessons Jacqueline learned about human nature from the genocide.[1:26:25] Acumen's three main functions and naming process.[1:29:12] The quantification of impact investment through Lean Data.[1:37:28] Alternative names for Acumen that got left on the cutting room floor.[1:40:43] The concept of moral imagination.[1:44:55] An early win at Acumen.[1:50:43] Advice for young people aspiring to create positive change.[1:53:20] The benefits of committing to something larger than oneself.[1:56:10] Characteristics of a good mentor.[1:59:36] Book recommendations.[2:02:48] Advice for impact investors at various levels.[2:09:20] Next steps for investors to start making a difference.[2:14:00] Jacqueline's authenticity.[2:17:07] A taste of potential topics for a future round two.[2:20:55] Parting thoughts.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Full Transcript
00:00:00 Speaker_09
Okay, this is going to be part confessional. As some of you know, I am recently single and navigating the world of modern dating. What a joy that is. Sometimes it's fun, but it's mostly a goddamn mess, as many of you probably know.
00:00:12 Speaker_09
I've tried all the dating apps, and while there are some slick options out there, the most functional that I have found is The League. Why did I end up using the League? First, most dating apps give you almost no information. It's a huge time suck.
00:00:28 Speaker_09
On the League, you're starting with a baseline of smart people, and you can then easily find the ones you're attracted to. It's much easier.
00:00:35 Speaker_09
It's like going to a conference where everyone is smart and then just looking for the people you think are cute to go up and speak with. So more than half of the league users went to top 40 colleges and you can make your filters really selective.
00:00:48 Speaker_09
So if that's important to you, then go for it. It does work and that is one of the reasons that I use it. Second, people verify using LinkedIn. So you can make sure they have a job and don't bounce around every six months.
00:01:00 Speaker_09
It's a simple proxy for finding people who have their shit together. It's infinitely easier than trying to figure things out on Instagram or whatever. Third, you can search by interest and in multiple locations.
00:01:12 Speaker_09
I haven't found any other dating app that allows you to do this. So, for instance, I usually search for women who love skiing or snowboarding, have those as interests, as I like to spend, say, two to three months of the year in the mountains.
00:01:23 Speaker_09
I'm a rivers and mountains guy. The UI is a little clunky, I'll warn you, but it's incredibly helpful for finding good matches and not just pretty faces. So you can search by interest and specify multiple cities.
00:01:36 Speaker_09
So to summarize a few things that I think make it stand out. Features available in the league include multi-city dating, LinkedIn verified profiles, ability to block your profile from coworkers, bosses, family, etc. That's very easy to do.
00:01:49 Speaker_09
You can search by interest, You can get profile stats and there is a personal concierge in the app. So there's someone you can text with within the app as a personal concierge to get help. So what am I looking for?
00:02:00 Speaker_09
I am looking for a woman who is well-educated and who loves skiing or snowboarding or both. These are, and I've used this word already, proxies for like 20 other things that are important, so I'll leave it at that for now.
00:02:12 Speaker_09
Someone who's default upbeat, likes to smile, smiles often, glass half-full type of person, who would ideally like to have kids in the next few years.
00:02:22 Speaker_09
Her friends would describe her as feminine and playful, and she would love polarity in a relationship. She's athletic and has some muscle. I like strong women, not necessarily bodybuilders, but you get the idea.
00:02:32 Speaker_09
It could be a rock climber, dancer, whatever, but has some muscle. Loves to read and loves learning. If this sounds like you, send hashtag Date Tim, so hashtag Date Tim, in a message to your concierge in the app to get us paired up.
00:02:44 Speaker_09
So these are all reasons why I was excited when The League reached out to sponsor the podcast. They even have daily speed dating where you can go on three three-minute dates with people who match your preferences all from the comfort of your couch.
00:02:57 Speaker_09
So check it out. Download The League today on iOS or Android and find people who challenge you to swing for the fences and who are in it to win it. I found it to be super fascinating.
00:03:07 Speaker_09
You can really get good matches instead of just looking at pretty faces and kind of rolling the dice over and over again. Much better. So download the League today on iOS or Android and check it out.
00:03:17 Speaker_09
Message hashtag Tim to your in-app concierge to jump to the front of the wait list and have your profile reviewed first. So check it out, the League on iOS or Android.
00:03:31 Speaker_09
I don't know about you guys, but I've had the experience of traveling overseas and I try to access something, say a show on Amazon or elsewhere, and it says, not available in your current location, something like that.
00:03:43 Speaker_09
Or, creepier still, if you're at home, and this has happened to me, I search for something or I type in a URL incorrectly, and then a screen for AT&T pops up, and it says, you might be searching for this, how about that?
00:03:57 Speaker_09
And it suggests an alternative, and I think to myself, wait a second, My internet service provider is tracking my searches and what I'm typing into the browser Yeah, I don't love it.
00:04:08 Speaker_09
And a lot of you know, I take privacy and security very seriously that is why I've been using today's episode sponsor ExpressVPN for several years now and I recommend you check it out when you connect to a secure VPN server your internet traffic goes through an encrypted tunnel that nobody can see into including hackers governments and
00:04:26 Speaker_09
people in Starbucks, your internet service provider, etc. And no, you are not safe simply using incognito mode in your browser. This was something that I got wrong for a long time.
00:04:36 Speaker_09
Your activity might still be visible as in the example I gave to your internet service provider. Incognito mode also does not hide your IP address.
00:04:44 Speaker_09
Also with the example that I gave, if you can't access this kind or that content, wherever you happen to be, then you just set your server to a country where you can see it and all of a sudden, voila, you can say log into your normal Amazon account as opposed to being routed to .UK or whatever.
00:04:58 Speaker_09
and everything works. So ExpressVPN protects you and enables you because it encrypts and reroutes your network traffic through secure servers. So even though your traffic is still passing through your internet provider, now they can't read it.
00:05:11 Speaker_09
ExpressVPN is so fast, also it doesn't bog things down at all. I usually forget that I even have it on. I can stream high quality video with no lag or buffering, even on servers thousands of miles away.
00:05:22 Speaker_09
It gives me access to servers in 105 countries around the world, which is very helpful. as I am constantly traveling and love to do so. It's easy to use. You just choose a server location and tap one button to connect.
00:05:34 Speaker_09
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00:05:50 Speaker_09
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00:05:57 Speaker_09
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00:06:09 Speaker_06
Optimal minimum. At this altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?
00:06:17 Speaker_01
Now would've seen an appropriate time.
00:06:20 Speaker_08
What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over a metal endoskeleton.
00:06:25 Speaker_05
Me, Tim, Ferris, Joe.
00:06:34 Speaker_09
Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs, this is Tim Ferriss.
00:06:37 Speaker_09
Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to sit down with world class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives.
00:06:50 Speaker_09
This episode is a two for one, and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads.
00:07:00 Speaker_09
To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes.
00:07:12 Speaker_09
And internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes, because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars.
00:07:25 Speaker_09
These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle, perhaps you missed an episode.
00:07:35 Speaker_09
Just trust me on this one, we went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at tim.blog slash combo. And now without further ado, please enjoy and thank you for listening.
00:07:53 Speaker_07
First up, Jamie Foxx, Oscar, BAFTA, and Golden Globe Award-winning actor, Grammy Award-winning musician, stand-up and improv comedian, and the owner of BSB Ultra Smooth Flavored Whiskey.
00:08:09 Speaker_07
You can find Jamie on Instagram, at IamJamieFoxx, and in his upcoming films, Tin Soldier, and Back in Action.
00:08:19 Speaker_03
So one day, my boy Breon brings in this kid he has a backpack on. His jaw's a little busted. His name is Kanye West. And I say, yo, yo, who's that? They said, yo, that's a new kid, Kanye West. He coming on. I said, really? What'd he do? He said, he rap.
00:08:35 Speaker_03
I said, well, shit, he got to perform that shit, because everybody that comes to this, to my house, they got to perform. So I said, yo, man, they say you the shit. And he was really quiet. I said, man, let me hear you rap.
00:08:45 Speaker_03
You need your beats or whatever? He said, I don't need no beat. Chopped everybody's heads up. Just amazing. I said, dude, I don't know where you come from. but you are going to be one of the biggest stars ever. And he says, I actually have a song for you.
00:08:58 Speaker_03
I said, moi? Me, a song? Like, what you mean? He said, I got this song. He says, I want to record it. I said, well, you happen to be in luck because I got a studio in the back. So we go in the back, and my studio at that time, I called it the Porsche.
00:09:12 Speaker_03
It was a lot smaller than this. It was really like nifty. It was like a Learjet. It was compact. It was compact. The sound was toasty.
00:09:19 Speaker_03
I had engineers from all over the city dial it in so that when real artists come, they don't think that, oh, this is just comedian fucking around. Some real shit. So we go in, and Kanye, you know, quiet, but at the same time, he knew what he wanted.
00:09:34 Speaker_03
He says, okay, the song goes like this. She say she want some Marvin Gaye, some Luther Vandross, a little, I said, I got it. And I started going, she say she want some Marvin Gaye. And he said, what the fuck are you doing?
00:09:47 Speaker_03
I said, well, see, young man, you don't know nothing about R&B. See, I'm an R&B motherfucker. See, I got to give him the shit. You know, I got to put the shit on it. And he goes, really politely, he says, hits the button. He says, don't do that.
00:10:00 Speaker_03
my brother. Uh, that ain't how the song go. You got to sing it this way. So in my mind, I'm thinking, you know what, I'm going to sing this shit. The song is whack. It's not going to make it.
00:10:10 Speaker_03
Cause I'm thinking old school R&B, but he was teaching me the simplicity of hip hop, which I didn't know. I was like, cool guy, great rapper. I don't think it's going to happen for him. So I'll go off and do a bad movie. But when I come back,
00:10:24 Speaker_03
My boy says, remember that song you said was wack? I said, yeah, it's number one in the country. You, Kanye, and Twista, Kanye's first record. And it was actually Twista's record. I said, oh, shit. So I'm at a club. He says, you don't believe me?
00:10:39 Speaker_03
I said, no, we're in Miami. They played it. Everybody ran to the dance floor. I grabbed the mic, said, that's me, that's my song, I'm on that, you know. And so the music, that's how I got into the music.
00:10:48 Speaker_03
Now the reason the story is significant is because the same brains that we use, that same hard drive that we use, I brought it to this studio.
00:10:58 Speaker_03
So that hard drive is magical because we also did, just to give you a history on the music, Breon found that song, Slow Jams, it went number one. And then as we started getting into music, there was a song that Breon brought in.
00:11:13 Speaker_03
Breon would call me, like he said, you want to be in the music business? It's like, you know, two or three in the morning. He called me, says, you want to be in the music business? I said, yeah. He said, then wake your ass up. I said, what?
00:11:22 Speaker_03
He said, I got this song you got to hear. So I drove all the way from my house in the valley to this little studio. He says, are you ready, motherfucker? Are you ready? And Breon always says everything three times. Are you ready, motherfucker?
00:11:32 Speaker_03
Are you ready? Are you ready? I said, yeah, yeah, man, play this shit. So he plays it. And the song was, Blame it on the goose, got you feeling loose, blame it on the a-a-a-a-a. I stopped it. I said, listen, first of all, please tell me that's my song.
00:11:46 Speaker_03
He said, yeah, it's your song, but you gotta record it right now because a lot of people are listening to this song and they don't know if it's a hit or not. He said, but I know it's a hit. We did Blame it on the Alcohol that night.
00:11:56 Speaker_03
I sung it exactly like the record. which goes way in contrast to my R&B roots, because it was out of tune and everything like that, but we wanted to sing it exactly like the demo, so we wouldn't lose the essence of it.
00:12:06 Speaker_03
I don't want to be like, blame it on the alcohol, you know, some corny shit. So we did that, and then we went from every, the way we broke that record is that we went from every club, we went to the strip clubs first. Went to a strip club?
00:12:19 Speaker_03
Strip club, we went on, we did an East Coast run, so we were going to break the record in the East Coast. So we went to the strip, we went to New York,
00:12:27 Speaker_03
My man Peckis took us around and I would go into the club and use my comedic, you know, vernacular to get the song off.
00:12:35 Speaker_03
I said, fellas, you ever been at the club, you meet a girl, you've been drinking, you think she look like Halle Berry, you get her back home, she looks like Halle Scary, you know what you gotta do?
00:12:43 Speaker_03
Blame it on the goose, gots feeling loose, blame it on the a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a
00:12:49 Speaker_03
Ladies, you ever meet a guy, you get back to the house with him and you've been drinking too much and you say, I usually don't do this, but you do it anyway, you gotta blame it on the ah, ah, ah, ah.
00:12:58 Speaker_03
So we took that and we went all the way down from New York all the way down to Miami. This is like 2008. And then the song took off. And so,
00:13:07 Speaker_03
Long story longer, Blame It On The Alcohol was done here, Slow Jams was done here, so this studio has that essence to it that you just, you don't throw that away.
00:13:18 Speaker_03
And just the building itself, Natasha Bedingfield's been here, she's cut, Kelly Rowland's been here, she's cut, The Game has been here, he's cut. Right here on this floor, for you guys listening, I'm pointing to the floor, to the carpet,
00:13:32 Speaker_03
A young man by the name of Ed Shearing slept on this carpet for like six weeks trying to get his music career going. He came from over from London. He heard about a live show that I do in LA.
00:13:45 Speaker_02
He said, I really want to do your live show if it's possible. You know, because I have some music that I love.
00:13:50 Speaker_03
I hear this kid with this red hair. I'm like, man, you do my live show? And it's mostly black, you know what I'm saying? But it's really like music people, like really hardcore music people. They're very finicky.
00:14:00 Speaker_03
You know, people that have played for Stevie Wonder, people will come there. I mean, I had Miranda Lambert one night. I had Stevie Wonder on stage. I had Babyface. I said, so this is the real shit you're talking about. You know, you can come here.
00:14:11 Speaker_03
I don't care about the London and the accent. You got to really come with it. So I think I'll be OK. I was like, all right. So I take it to my live night, 800 people there.
00:14:20 Speaker_03
People's playing, black folks sweating, just getting it, you know what I'm saying? I mean, people singing and, you know, they would tear American Idol up, you know what I'm saying? These people haven't necessarily made it.
00:14:30 Speaker_03
So all of a sudden Ed Sheeran gets up with a ukulele, walks onto the stage, and the brother that was next to me was like, yo, Fox, man, who the fuck is this dude right here, man, with the red hair and shit and the fucking ukulele?
00:14:42 Speaker_03
I said, man, his name is Ed Sheeran, let's see what he does. Within 12 minutes, he got a standing ovation. Wow. From that crowd. And I said, bro, you're on your way. So this studio has, like I said, a lot of history, and it has that magic to it as well.
00:14:59 Speaker_03
The mojo. Yeah.
00:15:00 Speaker_09
How do you think of teaching confidence with your own kids? Because you're clearly a very confident guy. Yeah. Grandmother was very bold, very strong woman. How do you try to teach that to your kids?
00:15:12 Speaker_03
Well, what you do with your kids is, like when my daughter, there's the phrase that when you see Annalise, my daughter, my oldest daughter, Corrine, I would always ask them, what's on the other side of fear? And they'd be like, huh?
00:15:24 Speaker_03
I said, what's on the other side of it? Meaning like if I stood in the middle of this floor right there and just yelled, what's on the other side of that? Or if I stood in the middle of the floor and went, huh, what's on the other side of it?
00:15:35 Speaker_03
Meaning like, either you do or you don't, but there's no penalty, there's no reward, it's just, you just be yourself. So I taught them, what's on the other side of fear? Nothing.
00:15:47 Speaker_03
People are nervous for no reason, because there's nothing, no one's gonna come out and slap you or beat you up or anything, you're just nervous. So why even have that?
00:15:56 Speaker_03
And so that's a building block that they can use, not just about the entertainment business, because that's the other thing, you don't have to be an entertainer, but whatever you go into, whether you be a lawyer or a school teacher or tech guy or whatever, or girl, whatever it is, there's nothing on the other side of it.
00:16:15 Speaker_09
What's on the other side of fear?
00:16:16 Speaker_03
Nothing.
00:16:17 Speaker_09
I like it.
00:16:17 Speaker_03
When people say, well, I'm so nervous, what are you nervous about?
00:16:19 Speaker_09
Reminds me of this quote that I sort of recite to myself, and I'm going to paraphrase it because I have it written down, but it's from Mark Twain. It says, I'm an old man who's known a great many troubles, most of which never happened.
00:16:30 Speaker_03
Yeah. Exactly, because all of it is in our head. When we talk about fear or lack of being aggressive or whatever, it's in your head. So not everybody's gonna be super aggressive, but the one thing that you can deal with is a person's fears.
00:16:45 Speaker_03
So if you start early, if they are a shy person, they just won't be as shy if you keep instilling those things.
00:16:53 Speaker_09
The mimicry, the impersonation. How early did that start?
00:16:57 Speaker_09
Because I read, and maybe you can tell me if this is off or not because you never know with the internet, that your second grade teacher used to reward the class if they behaved by letting you tell jokes.
00:17:11 Speaker_03
Yeah, they would let me tell jokes because I would get in trouble. Miss Reeves, I think it was my third grade teacher, Miss Reeves, because I would like talk, but I was very smart. My grandmother had a school.
00:17:20 Speaker_03
I lived in a school, so I already knew that from like first to eighth grade, I already knew all of the lesson plan. So, you know, a kid like me sitting there with nothing to do, I'm gonna get in trouble.
00:17:31 Speaker_03
So she would let me do stand-up comedy on Fridays for the kids, and all I would do is my grandmother would watch Johnny Carson, and the only room that had the television was my room. So I had to watch Johnny Carson too as a kid.
00:17:45 Speaker_03
So nine years old, seven, eight, nine years old, I would just take the jokes that were being told by David Brenner and Steve Allen and a young David Letterman. Who else would be on there? Franklin and Jai.
00:17:59 Speaker_03
You guys, when you're hearing this, go Google these guys. A young Jay Leno. These were like sort of like, you know, Richard Pryor. So I would take those jokes and tell him at school, because those kids wouldn't watch it.
00:18:11 Speaker_09
Please tell me you used Richard Pryor on Fridays.
00:18:14 Speaker_03
Well, I guess it was on primetime, so it wasn't Richard Pryor. Well, you did Richard Pryor on primetime. He couldn't really say anything on primetime. He was clean. But, like, Rich Little.
00:18:22 Speaker_03
Google Rich Little, because Rich Little was the first person that I saw do impersonations. This had to be, like, 76, 1976. This was, like, fifth grade for me.
00:18:34 Speaker_03
The joke was Jimmy Carter, which was the president at the time, singing, You Light Up My Life. And at that time, his brother was getting caught drunk all the time, like Billy.
00:18:48 Speaker_02
So it was Jimmy Carter going, so many nights, me and my brother Billy would sit by the window waiting for somebody to bring some peanuts and beer.
00:18:56 Speaker_03
And so that was my first attempt at an impersonation. And then it went on from there to do a Richard Nixon, I am not a crook. So, you know, who else would I do? Reagan.
00:19:06 Speaker_03
But here's the thing, Reagan came later, but Reagan came like in the 80s when I was actually like 21. And I was the first black guy doing the Reagan impersonation, probably the only one.
00:19:17 Speaker_03
So I would be on stage doing my impersonations and going to Ronald Reagan. People are like, no, it ain't no way.
00:19:22 Speaker_01
Well, Well, as a matter of fact, I, uh, well, oh no, there you go again.
00:19:28 Speaker_03
And so that being, being young and, and, and that teacher, Ms. Reeves and Ms., Ms. Douthit and all those teachers allowed, Ms. Cole allowed me to be myself, you know, helped me hone in on what I was going to be doing. for the rest of my life.
00:19:43 Speaker_03
Like, literally, my friends from Tarot go like, how the fuck did you do that? This is the shit you used to do in the cafeteria. It was literally the same shit. I'd be like, wow, millions of people are watching this shit and it's the same.
00:19:57 Speaker_03
And now Doc Rivers from the Clippers. Hey, you know, we're gonna try. You know, it's not Blake's fault. You know, next year we're gonna So I'm working on, like, the new impersonations now.
00:20:10 Speaker_03
And the way you do an impersonation is usually about, it's musical. Like, say Kermit the Frog, right? So Kermit the Frog is... So it's sort of like the way you do your... You know what I'm saying?
00:20:23 Speaker_04
It's finding... Right?
00:20:26 Speaker_03
So... So the actual voice tone is in the key of G for Kermit the Frog. Uh, uh, Kermit the, Kermit the Frog here, here with the Sesame Street. So that's, and then once you get the voice tone, it's how you manipulate your mouth to get the sound.
00:20:49 Speaker_03
Cause you know, it's, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh. So it's, it's sort of constricting. And then, and then, and then it's, and then it's asking the character to come sit with you. Uh, Kermit the Frog here, here with the three little pigs.
00:21:00 Speaker_03
So, you know, it's, but the key is this. And at the same time, Kermit the Frog, who else sounds like that? Sammy Davis Jr. A little bit. Because, you know, man.
00:21:09 Speaker_03
So now Kermit the Frog is one way, but if you just twist your voice or twist your mouth to the right and grab some swag, now you're Sammy Davis Jr. Because, man, you know, it's the same. voice, you know?
00:21:24 Speaker_03
So that's sort of like the mechanical way of getting to the impression.
00:21:28 Speaker_09
So you would start with not the visual, because obviously those people who are listening can't see this, but the mannerisms are also very much on point.
00:21:36 Speaker_03
Mannerisms are important because like I do in a LeBron James impersonation, which is really not a voice, it's more of his mannerism, it's the jaw, you know, it's the look. Let's go, Ro. You know, let's go, Ro.
00:21:50 Speaker_03
You know, the game of basketball, you know, we just try to, you know, you know, it's that, you know. You know, it's right, it's right after, it's right after playing. You know, when it comes up to, up to the court, they catch him, he's still tied.
00:21:59 Speaker_03
You know, uh, you know, the game of basketball, we just try to, you know, do the best, you know, so it's the, the mannerism. So people will appreciate the mannerisms first. The physicality.
00:22:06 Speaker_03
The physicality of, of someone like LeBron or, you know, different, different personalities bring, bring about different things. What is your birth name?
00:22:16 Speaker_09
Eric Marlon Bishop. And how did Eric Marlon Bishop become Jamie Foxx?
00:22:22 Speaker_03
Man, I was Eric Marlon Bishop. graduated high school, 86, I get out to California and I start doing, I'm in college and doing the music, but I would go up on these open mic nights for comedy.
00:22:39 Speaker_03
So I go, I do really well, I get like standing ovations, and then I came to LA, got a standing ovation, and then when I came back every week, I wouldn't get called up. I was like, man, what's going on?
00:22:51 Speaker_09
How does the open mic work?
00:22:52 Speaker_03
What you do is you put your name on a list, put your name on a list and they pick from the list and they say, okay, these are people that are going up.
00:22:59 Speaker_03
So I went over, had a great set, then for the next three, four weeks, I didn't, they never called my name. I said, yo, Money, did you see my name? Yeah, yeah, you weren't on the list. You were on the list, but we got other people.
00:23:08 Speaker_03
But I found out that the comedians were actually running the list. So the comedians that had been here for a while was like, we don't want him on here, because he's showing us up. So I was like, fuck.
00:23:17 Speaker_03
So I ended up going to this evening at the Improv, the Improv like in Santa Monica. And so I had never been there, so I would notice that a hundred guys would show up, five girls would show up.
00:23:32 Speaker_03
The five girls would always get on the show because they needed to break up the monotony. So I said, hmm, I got some. So I wrote down on the list all of these unisex names. Stacey Green, Tracy Brown, Jamie Foxx. And now the guy chooses from the list.
00:23:50 Speaker_03
He says, is Jamie Foxx, is she here? She'll be first. I was like, no money, that's me. Ah, okay, all right, well, you're the fresh meat. I said, what was that? They were shooting Evening at the Improv, this old comedy show back in the day.
00:24:05 Speaker_03
Said, you'll be the guy that will just throw up to see if you get a laugh or two. You know, it's gonna be a tough crowd.
00:24:11 Speaker_09
Fresh meat.
00:24:12 Speaker_03
Fresh meat. I said, cool. So I go up in between two of the guys, get a standing ovation. People like, who's the kid? Is he on the show? I said, no, he's fresh meat. He's an amateur. So then they started yelling my name. Yo, Jamie. Yo, Jamie.
00:24:27 Speaker_03
Hey Jamie, but I'm not used to the name. So now they think I'm arrogant. This motherfucker thinks he's the she, he's not even listening to us. So I took that name and it stuck. And then I started building everything off of it.
00:24:40 Speaker_03
Back in the day, people used to wear jackets and put names on the jackets. So I had Sly as a dot, dot, dot, coming to the foxhole, foxhole, you know, things like that.
00:24:49 Speaker_09
By the time you got to doing the open mics, getting up on stage, were you nervous, were you afraid, or were you over it?
00:24:58 Speaker_03
Because first I looked at it first, like I went to an open mic night and saw the guys, I was like, man, these dudes are terrible.
00:25:05 Speaker_03
So when you go on stage and your whole life is not, I want to be a comedian, I went on stage like, yo, I'm gonna just fuck around. So if I hit, cool, if I miss, I wasn't trying to be that anyway.
00:25:19 Speaker_03
I wanted to do more music, but when I went on stage, it was just natural.
00:25:25 Speaker_03
I belong here, so I think that's the thing, too, when it comes to entertainment, there's a certain like, oh, I belong here, this is what I'm supposed to do, how successful I will be or won't be, that's something out of my hands, but I do know that this is where I belong.
00:25:41 Speaker_03
And that's with anything and anybody. When you can sort of listen to that, voice in your head or what's in your heart and you get a chance to do something that you really feel like you're supposed to do, that alleviates a lot of the fear.
00:25:55 Speaker_03
Now if it was a surgeon or a lawyer or something, you know, if it's something that I'm not or something like that, then maybe there will be more fear. But with this, I don't have those types of fears.
00:26:07 Speaker_03
As I've gotten older in the business, I've sort of simplified things. Like now, I just execute. I have to ask people like Ricardo, Justin, Justin, what should I execute? So the fear of a celebrity or an artist now is how do I get my art off
00:26:27 Speaker_03
in a world where it's the social media driven ridicule and criticism.
00:26:33 Speaker_03
Like I always say like this, like a person like Prince or a person like Michael Jackson could have never survived in today's world because in the day of the internet and where everybody has a voice, most of the voices are hateful voices or not understanding.
00:26:49 Speaker_03
Like if you saw Prince with
00:26:51 Speaker_03
a guitar and a bandana and the way he dressed you know people would meme the shit out of it you know so now it's not a fear but it's just a a question that i have to always ask them like yo is this is this the cool shit to do or not the cool shit to do and so what i learned is when it's just executing something
00:27:11 Speaker_03
when it's either executing a song or executing a joke or executing things within entertainment, it's cool. But then you have to wonder like, how do you get it off?
00:27:21 Speaker_03
Like how do you, like even now when you talk about the Bill Cosby joke, back in the day we just tell the joke.
00:27:27 Speaker_03
Now you gotta be like, okay, I gotta tell the joke in a way that is still funny, it still keeps the bite on it, but you know, so those are the, different, like, for me as a entertainer, where there's not fear, it's just like, you know, questions.
00:27:45 Speaker_03
Does that make sense?
00:27:46 Speaker_09
Make sense. No, it does make sense. The considerations. Have you bombed on stage before? Oh, yeah. Two things. When you are bombing, what is your internal dialogue or response?
00:27:56 Speaker_03
And then second... Internal dialogue is, boy, you stink. Boy, you bombing. I bomb, and it wasn't a lot. I only bomb, like, twice.
00:28:06 Speaker_09
Do you remember your first?
00:28:07 Speaker_03
Yeah, yeah. I did this show for this guy named Lattimore. Old blues singer. I'm 21.
00:28:13 Speaker_09
What was his name? Lattimore. Lattimore. Sounds like Voldemort.
00:28:17 Speaker_03
Yeah, Lattimore. Lattimore. So this guy saw me at this other club and said, hey man, you know, Lattimore's performing around the corner, man. Why don't you come and open? I said, whatever. I said, how much you pay? He said, pay $50. I said, I'm there.
00:28:28 Speaker_03
50 bucks, I need it. So this is like $89.90. So, I get there, and I don't know who Lattimore is, I just know it's a lot of older people. Like, I mean, like, oh, oh, I'm like, oh shit, where the people at? And these are the people.
00:28:44 Speaker_03
So I go up, and the setting was different, it was like the chairs and stuff were way in the back, it was like a banquet setting. And it's in the middle of the hood, you know, Crenshaw.
00:28:54 Speaker_03
And, like, the tables are, like, from here to where, like, 20 feet away, 30 feet away from me. So I don't have that. Oh, you didn't have that proximity. And I hadn't been doing stand-up comedy that long. I'd only been doing it for, like, a year.
00:29:06 Speaker_03
So I had, if I'm funny, I got an hour. If I'm not funny, it's about 10 minutes worth of shit, because I would just take a joke and just keep spinning it and spinning it. So my first joke they didn't get, second joke they didn't get.
00:29:18 Speaker_03
I said, shit, I'm damn near all the jokes. So I said, well, let me do this before I do anything. Let me just talk about people in the audience. So I looked, and I saw this guy with this sort of suit on with a butterfly collar.
00:29:29 Speaker_03
They're like, oh shit, I'm gonna talk about him with the butterfly collar. But before I could say that, I looked around, everybody has a butterfly collar. This is what they really wanna look like.
00:29:41 Speaker_03
And so, I just said, hey man, I don't know what else y'all want. And pretty soon, Latimore's gonna come up. You guys ready for Latimore? And I just started doing that, so I'm gonna take a break.
00:29:54 Speaker_03
So I get off stage, and the dude that was washing the dishes, Takes his apron off and goes, man, I got it. That's a mic. How y'all feel? And he started doing these old stock jokes. Kills. And so I said, okay, now I know what it is.
00:30:10 Speaker_03
You gotta have jokes that are appropriate for your audience. So I learned on how to tell jokes for everybody. Because at first, my jokes was geared towards women, it was singing.
00:30:21 Speaker_03
So what I started doing from that day on, I would go to like, Des Moines, Iowa. Davenport, Iowa. Boise, Idaho. where it's all white, Gunnison, Colorado, all white.
00:30:34 Speaker_03
And I would go do like 40 minutes of all black material to see what they understood, what they didn't understand. So, if I go to these all white places, if they understood 15 minutes, I logged that 15 minutes.
00:30:47 Speaker_03
I can go to any place where it's just all white.
00:30:50 Speaker_09
You would determine if they understood it by the line?
00:30:52 Speaker_03
By the line. I would ask, y'all know who this is? And so I would tell the joke, if 15 minutes, they understood it, I can go to any place in the world that's all white and they get it.
00:31:01 Speaker_03
Then I would go to my chocolate city, Chicago, D.C., Florida, and do all of my political highbrow stuff and see what the black folks understood. Man, what the fuck you talking about? Now they understood 15 minutes.
00:31:13 Speaker_03
Now I got 15 to 30 minutes to 45 minutes that wherever I go, no matter what age, they'll understand no matter what gender, no matter what race, they'll understand this 45 minutes. So I had to learn how to use the formula in order for you to be funny.
00:31:32 Speaker_03
And then once you got your comedy license, once you've been seen by enough people in the highest way, like if you look at an arc of a Kevin Hart, like Kevin Hart takes that arc, takes the same formula.
00:31:43 Speaker_03
I'm not for sure how he put it in his mind, but he's doing the same thing to where he's going to all of these places
00:31:51 Speaker_03
all over the world implementing his comedy and if they get it he's gathering all that so that now when people see Kevin Hart no matter where in the world they're gonna laugh.
00:32:02 Speaker_03
Becoming a great comedian is also having that formula going on in your head because if you
00:32:08 Speaker_03
paint yourself into a corner like you're only the black comedian or you're only the hispanic comedian or whatever that is then it's hard for you to become universal i mean eddie was eddie murphy was great he had an opportunity through saturday night live to get it to everybody but uh it's definitely a formula to not bomb it
00:32:24 Speaker_09
So that was the first bomb. You mentioned two. What was the second? If it's hard to recall, the follow-up question is going to be, what is the post-game analysis when you step off the stage after bombing, say, the second time?
00:32:37 Speaker_03
When I bombed the second time was way later in my career when I'm working out jokes. But I don't like to work out jokes and tell people I'm working out. I like to actually do a show, come and do the show. So when, I think it was Irvine.
00:32:51 Speaker_09
So you don't tell people you're working out?
00:32:52 Speaker_03
No, no, no. I think that's cheating and I think you get bad habits. So I do a show in Irvine, California. First show I kill. It was just ready for him. I'm like, oh man, everything works. Second show, bombed.
00:33:08 Speaker_03
Because I didn't take time to dig out the jokes and that. So, but when you bomb, you go like, okay, all right, let's go. Let's check it out. So I got a team of my guys. I said, let's go. Okay, that didn't work. No, you got to put this in front of that.
00:33:21 Speaker_03
You're going to put that behind this because that's going to kick this off. People didn't know what that was. So maybe we don't say that. So, you know, you have to, when you take the bomb, when we take the L, it's not like you're not funny.
00:33:31 Speaker_03
What's the L? Like, you take the loss. Oh, okay. When you take the loss, it's not like you're not funny. It's just like, okay, you just didn't put the shit together. So that's the other thing, too.
00:33:39 Speaker_03
When you do become funny, it's gonna be harder now to make people laugh because you set the bar. So watch this. The hardest part for Chris Rock was after he had done something great in stand-up. Because now, you gotta top that.
00:34:00 Speaker_03
The hardest part for Eddie Murphy, because Eddie wants to come out and do stand-up, is how do I top that in your head? The hardest part is coming for Kevin Hart in the fact that you smashed him.
00:34:15 Speaker_03
Now, you know what I'm saying, you gotta know how to refresh. Because when you do something like, I would look at my stuff and go like, I gotta quit doing that.
00:34:26 Speaker_03
because that shtick that I'm doing, people are catching on, and they're like, okay, motherfucker, we done already seen that shit.
00:34:32 Speaker_03
So that's the other thing, you gotta have great material, and you gotta know how to move, because right now is the perfect time for Eddie Murphy to come out and do stand-up, because it's been so long, it's nostalgic, it was 30 years ago, so now you can catch a new young, you can still excite the older, you know what I'm saying?
00:34:49 Speaker_03
So being a stand-up comedian is tough, and you've seen a lot of funny guys Not be funny anymore. Why? Because you can't top what you did. You look at a Jim Carrey, you go like, okay, man, where you at? Where you at? You know what I'm saying?
00:35:01 Speaker_03
You know, don't give up the funny. Or you look at Chris, I always look at Chris Tucker and be like, motherfucker, where you at? Don't leave us. Because being a stand-up comedian is an interesting thing. Most stand-up comedians want to look good.
00:35:15 Speaker_03
In what way? They just want to look good. Think about this, when Eddie Murphy started doing stand-up, he was funny,
00:35:21 Speaker_03
But then he started doing, you know, to wear the leather suits, and it was the fly shit, and the rings, and they didn't want to look good. Joe Piscopo started working out. with the muscles, you know what I'm saying?
00:35:32 Speaker_03
So, as a stand-up comedian, we gotta be careful not to look too good, because people start going, what the fuck are you doing? You ain't cute, nigga, we just wanna laugh, you know what I'm saying?
00:35:43 Speaker_03
But when we start getting into our shit, that's when we look, because I did that. Like, I got to, my thing was, after In Living Color, the show called In Living Color that I did, I felt like I had made it.
00:35:56 Speaker_03
So I wasn't necessarily on the good-looking shit, but I was on the, I've made it jokes. I went on stage and was doing rich jokes. Just got that Range Rover. Anybody else? It's crazy out here. You know, they're so finicky, right?
00:36:09 Speaker_03
Motherfuckers are looking at me like, what the fuck is you talking about? And then I was talking about, you know, the square footage of the house, man. When they get a certain square feet, man, that shit is crazy and maintaining, you know?
00:36:19 Speaker_03
Motherfuckers like motherfuckers, you don't get off the goddamn say I'd lost it. I lost it and I walked off stage and all of a sudden I Walk off stage. Give it up for Jamie Foxx and I'm thinking they're going crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you.
00:36:30 Speaker_03
Thank you so much And I'm standing outside the club and I hear the crowd going crazy. I'm like, what the fuck they doing? I just went on stage. What the fuck are they laughing at?
00:36:38 Speaker_03
And I opened the door and there was a kid, skinny, little tank top on, barely fit. His name was Chris Tucker. He was smashing, he was... No one has been that funny within 15 minutes. I've never seen, and I watch them all, I've never seen a stand-up.
00:36:58 Speaker_03
where people were laughing so hard, like, I said, he's gonna kill somebody. Like, when he says, last night, how was it? Oh, I killed. It's gonna be true. Somebody gonna have a fucking heart attack. And I sat down and I went, I can't do that. I lost that.
00:37:11 Speaker_03
So I left, went to another club that night, bombed. Like, it wasn't just, you know. So finally, I went over to Okinawa where the troops were. I started doing stand-up over there for the troops to sort of get back. It was my Rocky moment.
00:37:23 Speaker_03
Like, you know, I started running up the steps chasing chickens and shit. Trying to get back. For a stand-up comedian, that's the one thing you can never let go. You can never stop being...
00:37:35 Speaker_03
Excuse me a certain goofiness to you and so and like when you talk about fear when you talk about bombing It's different when you've done it for a long time, you know And when you do bomb you just got to get right back up in it and you got to acknowledge it.
00:37:46 Speaker_03
Okay, I stunk Because they're gonna let you know Like today's world. Hey, you can't do nothing in today's world without somebody letting you know. I own a you fuck that up like
00:38:00 Speaker_09
Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1?
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00:38:56 Speaker_09
Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out.
00:39:04 Speaker_07
And now, Jacqueline Novogratz, the founder and CEO of Acumen, a global force of entrepreneurs, investors, philanthropists, and social innovators working together to break the cycle of poverty, the New York Times bestselling author of The Blue Sweater and Manifesto for a Moral Revolution, and one of the world's 100 greatest living business minds, according to Forbes magazine.
00:39:32 Speaker_07
You can find Jacqueline on Twitter and Instagram, at JNovaGrads.
00:39:37 Speaker_09
Jacqueline, welcome to the show.
00:39:40 Speaker_00
It's great to be here with you, Tim. Thank you.
00:39:42 Speaker_09
I'm going to just go with the layup. I'm not going to say lazy question. It's really more of a setting of the backdrop for people who don't know you. Could you please describe your childhood, your parents?
00:39:55 Speaker_09
Just give us a little bit of color there so we know from where you have come.
00:40:00 Speaker_00
I was raised in a four-bedroom house with seven siblings, the seven of us, amazing parents. Dad was in the military. My mother was a force to be reckoned with. I would say it was a noisy, chaotic, loving house full of
00:40:16 Speaker_00
cowboys who are also expected to somehow be good.
00:40:20 Speaker_09
Number of your siblings have also gone on to do great things very much on a national and global scale. To what do you attribute that? Is it just inheriting good software? Is it environmental? Are there any particular inputs or
00:40:40 Speaker_09
habits that your parents have, anything that comes to mind, I'm sure you've been asked this before, but what was in the drinking water, so to speak?
00:40:47 Speaker_00
I think it was a funny combination of, one, constraint, that when you have so many kids on a military income, you gotta get entrepreneurial young, fast, and that was probably a very important piece.
00:41:01 Speaker_00
Number two, my mother is one of the great myth-makers of all times.
00:41:05 Speaker_09
Myth-makers?
00:41:06 Speaker_00
Myth-makers. I remember when we were little, Bob, Mike, and I, all we really wanted was Levi's jeans. There weren't a lot of things to differentiate us.
00:41:14 Speaker_00
So my mother made a deal with us and said, look, I'll buy you the dungarees, which is what they used to call jeans, from the post exchange unless you can earn the difference for those Levi's.
00:41:26 Speaker_00
But I have to tell you, I'm really disappointed in you guys. Why would you need brands? You're Novogratzes. And we laugh now. We're like, what the hell was a Novogratz? But she had the sense that this was who we were.
00:41:40 Speaker_00
So two, kind of a driven myth-making mother. And three, this big extended immigrant Catholic family. And so this idea that to whom much is given, much is expected was also reinforced. And so I guess in a funny way, Tim, we grew up
00:41:57 Speaker_00
in a tribe, but also allowed to be wild individualists who had to be entrepreneurial. And here we are.
00:42:06 Speaker_09
So you're known for impact investing, social impact, and all the things that we, or I should say I, mentioned in the bio that I just read. But that's not where things began from square one.
00:42:20 Speaker_09
You weren't just hatched out of the egg as this imminent world changer. Maybe you were on some level. I mean, your brother, Mike Novogratz, who's been on the podcast, talked about
00:42:29 Speaker_09
how you have had this very clear North Star for seemingly much of your life, but that wasn't the first step. In other words, you didn't just graduate from high school and start acumen. Could you just walk us through your first professional decisions?
00:42:46 Speaker_09
Where did you go after school and why did you go there?
00:42:50 Speaker_00
I think I did always want to change the world from the time I was six, and I guess that was part of both the positive and the pressure. And so there was always that idea that I had.
00:43:01 Speaker_00
But to go through college, certainly as the first, we had to pay for school. And so I worked two, three jobs the entire time I was at the University of Virginia.
00:43:12 Speaker_08
What were your jobs? What types of jobs?
00:43:14 Speaker_00
Well, mostly I was a bartender. And in the summer, I work 100 hours a week as a bartender, which was actually quite something.
00:43:21 Speaker_00
When I graduated, I told my parents that I'd really never had a proper vacation and that I was going to take a year to just explore the world, never really gone outside the United States or anything like that. And my parents, being very wise, said,
00:43:36 Speaker_00
We think that's fine, but at least go through the interview process. And so I agreed quite reluctantly, and I threw my resume, without thinking, into the boxes for foreign affairs econ majors, which were my majors.
00:43:50 Speaker_00
And Chase Manhattan Bank called and said, we'll take you in as an interview. And so I go into the interview, and there's this cute guy sitting across the table from me. And he says, tell me, Jacqueline, why do you want to be a banker?
00:44:01 Speaker_00
Which was, of course, the only question I wasn't ready for. And so I was like, Actually, my mom and dad are making me do this. I don't want to be a banker." That's what you said? Yeah.
00:44:15 Speaker_09
I mean, I don't lie. It's probably the only answer he wasn't prepared for.
00:44:19 Speaker_00
He was like, well, something in him was prepared because he was like, well, if you got this job, you would be in 40 countries in the next three years and you would be understanding the economic and political situation in each of those countries.
00:44:32 Speaker_00
Of course, as this kid that always dreamed of knowing the world, loving the world, I was like, oh, God. I said, could we start this interview over? He let me
00:44:43 Speaker_00
literally leave the room i knocked on the door i introduce myself i sat down is like tell me jack why do you want to be a banker and i said ever since i was six years old all i ever wanted to do is be a banker.
00:44:56 Speaker_00
Of course there are interviews after that to make sure i had a brain but i got the job. And sure enough, for the next three years, I was in 40 countries at a really extraordinary time when the financial systems were also in peril in the early 1980s.
00:45:14 Speaker_00
That was my first job.
00:45:15 Speaker_09
Now how did you end up traveling the world?
00:45:19 Speaker_09
I suppose thinking back to my own undergrad experience and the recruiting on campus by investment banks and so on, although this may not have been in the investment banking category, but when I think the promises of various recruiters, I associate the you're going to travel the world, meet fascinating people, learn various A, B, and C about
00:45:39 Speaker_09
X, Y, and Z industries. I associate that with the management consulting pitch. So what was the job that you ended up getting that allowed you to travel like that in banking?
00:45:48 Speaker_00
It was an extraordinary job. It was called Credit Audit, where the bank hired primarily liberal arts majors, I think, young people who were critical thinkers who asked the dumb questions.
00:46:02 Speaker_00
They literally would send us around the world a month at a time. I think I was in New York three weeks one year.
00:46:09 Speaker_00
And you would just get this note on your desk that you had to be in Kuala Lumpur three days from then, and a package of traveler's checks, which was the way that we would get money, and a reservation at a hotel, and we would go.
00:46:23 Speaker_00
And so it's one way the world has really changed. Because I remember talking to my boss, because I had a reputation for unwittingly getting people fired by asking the really dumb questions, and then uncovering
00:46:35 Speaker_09
I can't let that go without asking for an example. How does that happen? What would a hypothetical or real type of question or actual question be that might get someone fired?
00:46:45 Speaker_00
The biggest one for me was in Switzerland when I was pretty much a solo act to look at this whole suite of Swiss banks, which everybody just assumed were safe because of Swiss banking.
00:47:00 Speaker_00
And Tim, I kept looking at the numbers and the spreadsheets for this one bank and nothing added up to me.
00:47:07 Speaker_00
And so I went to the head of the division, the office, and I was incredibly nervous because I wasn't that confident that I was that great at all these spreadsheets. And I pointed out what I saw as real flaws and real vulnerabilities.
00:47:23 Speaker_00
And he essentially told me I was too young, too naive, didn't I understand. Swiss banking and that the bank was completely protected. And I scratched my head. I went back. The number still didn't work. I called my boss. He yelled at me.
00:47:38 Speaker_00
And I just knew that I might be wrong. I might be all those things he said, but I could only tell my truth. I literally had to hold on to the chair because I was so afraid, and I turned it in.
00:47:53 Speaker_00
I gave it, in those days, a seven, which put it on a big warning list, which meant it went all the way to the top of the bank. It turned out that I was right. The bank failed. I learned really young, Tim.
00:48:05 Speaker_00
I went from being seen as kind of scared and not that serious overnight to then being seen as this whiz kid. I was the same person. Nothing had changed. the way the world sees you became to me.
00:48:24 Speaker_00
Because I know that I was exactly the same woman the morning after that I was the morning before. So I guess learning really young, sometimes just speak that truth even through trembling lips.
00:48:36 Speaker_09
Yeah, wow, what a story. I mean, it's something that so few people, especially new hires, would actually dare to do.
00:48:46 Speaker_09
It just strikes me as unusual that you would have the conviction to potentially, and I don't know the politicking or the power dynamics inside of that bank, obviously, but to piss off your boss by giving it a seven, which then flies straight up the flagpole after getting reprimanded.
00:49:06 Speaker_09
That's quite a move. It sounds like that wasn't a first, though, that you sort of cultivated this speaking of truth coming up to that point. Is that accurate?
00:49:16 Speaker_00
Yeah, I think it probably was. And in fact, God, you're already making me get emotional. But I think I saw myself as less courageous of voice than other people experienced me as.
00:49:26 Speaker_00
A great gift of my latest book, where I talked about the need to learn how to use voice, was that one of my colleagues at the time, who I haven't hadn't seen in more than 30 years. It was like, you were always the one that was standing.
00:49:42 Speaker_00
And I think I always stood for the underdog, but I also just couldn't tell a lie. And they hired me for a particular purpose. And I felt like that was my duty. That was just my job. As a kid, I was the one that would fight for the underdog.
00:49:59 Speaker_00
In fact, I got thrown out of trigonometry for standing up for what was right.
00:50:05 Speaker_09
What were you standing up for? Was it the answer to something or was it a person?
00:50:08 Speaker_00
No, the teacher, he was a great pop quiz guy and he had promised us that we wouldn't get a pop quiz that week. And one of my friends had been sick and she was very, very insecure when it came to trigonometry.
00:50:21 Speaker_00
I said, you don't have to worry about it because this teacher told us that we weren't going to have a pop quiz and promised us.
00:50:28 Speaker_00
And then of course he gave us the pop quiz and I just felt such a need to protect my friend, that I stood up, I made a big deal about it and that was the end. That was my last day of trigonometry for that year.
00:50:39 Speaker_00
And the worst of it is I had to do home economics for the last six weeks of the year.
00:50:46 Speaker_09
I'm just imagining how happy you were about that, but I think it's worth really underscoring that you develop this and reinforce this truth speaking.
00:50:58 Speaker_09
You take some lumps, of course you're gonna take lumps along the way, but ultimately, not to attribute all of your successes to that, but I think it's no small thing.
00:51:09 Speaker_09
One of the aspects of your story that has stuck out to me as I'm doing homework is the power of asking, I wouldn't say dumb questions, asking the questions, right?
00:51:23 Speaker_09
Asking questions and speaking truth, and it's just how, you talk about patient capital, we might talk later about how it's differentiated from just long-term capital and long-term investing and how you differentiate the two, but if you're making a long-term sort of patient investment in yourself, like over the short term you might get reprimanded for truth and asking,
00:51:44 Speaker_09
questions or seemingly naive questions, but they seem to be really good long-term bets. And I suppose there's not a question so much in that, but does that resonate with you as being true? How does that land for you when I say that?
00:51:58 Speaker_09
Am I missing anything?
00:51:59 Speaker_00
I've actually never thought about it for myself personally, but it deeply resonates that I am not comfortable and it's hard sometimes both for people who work with me and for the people who take our courses online
00:52:11 Speaker_00
at laying out a roadmap because the world is too complex for a step-by-step guide to how to solve poverty.
00:52:18 Speaker_00
But what we do have is a compass, a moral compass, and that speaking of truth and standing for truth not only builds a sense of courage, but it deepens, I think, one's and certainly my own understanding of where lines are.
00:52:34 Speaker_00
So yeah, so thank you for that.
00:52:37 Speaker_09
Yeah, also, and I'm getting on a caffeinated soapbox here for a second, but we're going to cover a lot of ground, so we have space for my caffeinated soapbox.
00:52:45 Speaker_09
And that is to say, these things don't manifest out of the ether when you need them most necessarily, right? You were practicing and conditioning yourself to tell the truth. And you had a choice
00:53:00 Speaker_09
to stuff or to speak in that moment, you made the decision to speak, rated a seven, and that gave you the positive reinforcement I have to imagine and more confidence to continue doing the same.
00:53:12 Speaker_09
But it's a skill, and it seems like a practice that you need to reinforce. Let's come back to this banking. In your retake, ever since the age of six, I've always known I wanted to be a banker. Clearly, you're no longer a banker. So what happened?
00:53:26 Speaker_09
What happened? You're doing these audits, Where does the next chapter enter the picture?
00:53:32 Speaker_00
It started, again, having always dreamed of traveling around the world and loving the world, in fact. Now I'm in Brazil, and Chile, and Ecuador, and truly Colombia falling in love with the vibrancy, the color.
00:53:49 Speaker_00
These stories that as a young American kid, we didn't ever get about the developing world. And it struck me in this era again, Tim, when the banks were falling apart.
00:54:02 Speaker_00
They had been making all these bets based on relationship and long-term debt, and suddenly the markets were in crisis, and they wanted to call all their loans, and they lost hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars at that time.
00:54:16 Speaker_00
So I would sit inside the bank looking at loans that should never have been made, often money that was actually never even put into what it said it would be put into.
00:54:26 Speaker_00
Meanwhile, on the weekends, I would just be drawn to the favelas and into the slums and into these parts of the cities that were so full of life and vibrancy and work.
00:54:37 Speaker_00
and diligent people, and I would talk to people about their businesses and realize that this was a group of people that could not even walk in through the doors of the bank. They had no confidence with the banking system.
00:54:50 Speaker_00
And so I, again, asking dumb questions, which may be a theme of my life, went to my boss with all good faith and said that maybe we would do better for the country, do better for the people, and actually get our money back.
00:55:06 Speaker_00
do better for the bank if we actually made smaller loans to local people doing what they were doing. And he literally gave me a book called The Innocent Anthropologist. And it became very clear to me that the bank wasn't ready to pivot in that way.
00:55:23 Speaker_00
And so I had to go outside, which is where I've stayed, trying to disrupt systems from the outside, not the inside, which I think I'm better at.
00:55:31 Speaker_09
So the Innocent Anthropologist, I assume, was a very formalized way of giving you a book that basically says, listen kid, that's adorable, but also very naive. I mean, is that the thrust of that gift?
00:55:44 Speaker_00
Yeah, he gave me two gifts actually. That was the first gift.
00:55:48 Speaker_00
Then when we were talking a little bit later and he was trying to convince me to stay at the bank, he's like, look, you're one of our top producers and performers, but culturally, you don't really fit.
00:56:00 Speaker_00
You dress like Linda Ronstadt and you laugh too much, which now I think may have been code for you're not actually acting enough like an elite one of us.
00:56:09 Speaker_00
And I realized in that moment that not only did I want to see how we could actually use the tools of banking to solve poverty, but that if I stayed, that he was essentially asking me to be a completely different person.
00:56:23 Speaker_00
And that helped make the decision.
00:56:26 Speaker_09
What was your next move? You know, some people will get the checkmate in one move, but it's often an evolution. Where did you go from there?
00:56:33 Speaker_00
Well, the next move was telling my parents that I had made the decision. Oh, yeah.
00:56:39 Speaker_08
Tell us about that.
00:56:41 Speaker_00
I was giving up on, you know, this middle-class immigrant family saw as the job of lifetime and to make it worse, the COO of Chase, Tony Triciano, who just such an amazing man. was giving me an opportunity then.
00:56:56 Speaker_00
I think he liked that I was this scrappy bartender girl and not the more refined version that my immediate boss wanted. He really gave me an opportunity that would have changed the trajectory of my life. My dad thought I was giving up that opportunity.
00:57:13 Speaker_00
My mother thought I would never marry. Both had truth in what they were saying. I think that was incredibly hard because we were all raised to quote unquote, do the right thing.
00:57:25 Speaker_00
I was looking for an opportunity to get to Brazil, but I found one that would bring me to West Africa, which was absolutely not on my playbook.
00:57:33 Speaker_00
But I realized that this was a chance to pursue a different kind of dream that was looking at taking the tools of banking and reaching low-income people.
00:57:42 Speaker_00
I read about Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank and other heroes of mine, and I wanted to try it myself. And so I went. And as you said, it was sort of a next move.
00:57:54 Speaker_00
I met with absolute crushing failure, made all the worst, because I had turned down this really big job offer.
00:58:02 Speaker_09
So we're going to definitely roll up our sleeves and get into the crushing failure. But before we do, maybe we'll get into another failure, I have no idea, because I don't know the details of this, but how did the conversation with your parents go?
00:58:14 Speaker_09
Did you deliver it in a way that they were able to hear? If so, what was that way? Did you try it and they were just like, terrible idea, time will tell, watch us. That was the end of the conversation.
00:58:26 Speaker_09
I mean, how did it turn out and how did you approach it? Or maybe the other way around.
00:58:29 Speaker_00
Well, I just told them what I was going to do.
00:58:32 Speaker_09
So you didn't say, I'm thinking of X. You were just like, this is what I'm doing. I'm giving you guys a heads up.
00:58:37 Speaker_00
Heads up. This is really, you know, it's not such a request. It's a, this is what I'm going to do next. And my mother was like, you are out of your mind. She could be very forceful then.
00:58:47 Speaker_00
And what she will say now is that she kind of understood by then that I had a very strong will. when I decided something, I don't think I quite understood until much later how afraid they were.
00:59:01 Speaker_00
This is pre-internet, pre-cell phone, pre-real understanding of what this big continent was about. The only images they had of Africa was almost as a single country rather than 54, all looking like Ethiopia during the famine of 1983.
00:59:21 Speaker_00
Probably the worst thing that she said to me was, you know, I could understand if you were a nun. And I was like, what are you doing? I think there was a lot of fear. I think there was a lot of fear.
00:59:35 Speaker_00
What's been so thrilling is to watch them along the journey not only feel deeply proud, but get more and more excited. And that happened fairly quickly, as long as we had a few rules.
00:59:45 Speaker_00
If I went to a war zone, I didn't tell them until after I got back because communication was too hard. It was not fair to them. I think those are things that parents don't have to deal with today because they can be in more constant contact.
00:59:59 Speaker_09
So before we get to the crushing defeat, which I definitely want to spend a little time on, how did you find the next opportunity?
01:00:06 Speaker_09
Because I think many people listening will have, they will have some experience, maybe it's a current experience, of doing something that generates income but that is not deeply rewarding to them on some level.
01:00:19 Speaker_09
And they want to have a greater impact, they don't know what to do. And I'm not asking so much for prescriptive advice yet, we might get to that.
01:00:27 Speaker_09
But how did you at that time, especially this is pre-internet, how did you find this next lily pad to jump to? And then please tell us about your crushing defeat.
01:00:37 Speaker_00
Again, we had far less tools then. And so I had read one tiny article about Grameen Bank, which was still very obscure. I sent a letter to Muhammad Yunus that probably never reached Bangladesh.
01:00:54 Speaker_00
And then I heard from a young woman who also was at Chase that her aunt had started an organization called Women's World Banking and that there might be an opportunity. So I just went there and offered myself to go to Brazil.
01:01:09 Speaker_00
And as I said, she said, we don't have any opportunity there. We do, though, in West Africa. And I just took it. It was super risky. It didn't come with health insurance. It just was an opportunity.
01:01:22 Speaker_00
I knew that if I were waiting for the perfect, I wouldn't have done it. I also knew I might lose my nerve.
01:01:28 Speaker_00
And it was the only thing that was on offer to really test out my theory that the tools of business and banking could actually serve people who had been fully left out.
01:01:38 Speaker_00
And I don't think it was until I was actually on the plane listening to Joni Mitchell's blue album over and over and weeping that it really hit me that I was on my own.
01:01:50 Speaker_09
Why were you weeping? Was it fear? Was it something else?
01:01:53 Speaker_00
I think it was loss. Everything I'd left behind. No understanding of where I was going. Fear. a lot of loss in transition.
01:02:04 Speaker_00
And then the minute I landed, both excitement for being there and yet almost immediate confrontation with the first big true failure of my life, which was that I had been told that I had this opportunity to be an ambassador to African women.
01:02:22 Speaker_00
I was going to help build all these microfinance organizations across the region. And I would say the arrogance underneath was that I was going to save the world. at least this part of it.
01:02:34 Speaker_00
And what the confrontation helped me understand pretty quickly was that most people don't want to be saved, and certainly not by a 25-year-old white American girl whose French was not very good and who had very little understanding whatsoever of the local culture.
01:02:54 Speaker_00
And so I hung in there for a number of months. It was very hairy.
01:02:59 Speaker_09
Hairy in what way?
01:03:01 Speaker_00
Everything from just kind of a daily rejection where I would go to my little office in the African Development Bank and the door would be locked, or I was supposed to do this big conference and I would ask people for help and they'd be like, that's not my job.
01:03:16 Speaker_00
Okay, I didn't really know where to go. And then this one Nigerian extraordinary woman befriended me and she's like, you know, they really want you out, the powers that be.
01:03:25 Speaker_00
And so don't eat anything in front of the women who didn't want me in the country." And I said, what do you mean don't eat anything? She's like, well, they're going to poison you. And they're also talking about voodoo. Holy shit. Jesus. That's intense.
01:03:40 Speaker_00
And you know, I don't believe in voodoo, but I will tell you, when you are stripped down to nothing, and you're afraid to eat anything in front of people, and you're being locked out of your office, and you don't really have much of a safety net, nor do you know a single person except for this incredible Nigerian woman who's befriended you, I would lie in bed and be like, is anybody here coming to get me?
01:04:04 Speaker_00
And then I got unbelievably sick with food poisoning. like deathly sick.
01:04:11 Speaker_09
Did you think it was poisoning or did you think it was food poisoning? I mean, after hearing that story, my God, I mean, I would imagine.
01:04:18 Speaker_00
I couldn't go there. I couldn't go there. She thought it might be poisoning, but I didn't remember eating anything in front of anybody. And I was a little thing to start off with.
01:04:30 Speaker_00
And so after about eight days of just lying on the bathroom floor, I decided it was enough. and told the women, trying to be respectful but also clear, that I got what they were saying.
01:04:46 Speaker_00
I really heard that they had not asked for anybody like me and that we shouldn't be just parachuting in to go and build things. without doing it in real partnership, and that that was a mistake on every level, including mine.
01:05:04 Speaker_00
And nobody should be treated the way that they treated me, and that both were true. That said, I left everything that I owned in the boxes that I had in the Abidjan Hilton. Goodness knows whatever happened to them.
01:05:18 Speaker_00
And I moved to East Africa, where I kind of started again, hopefully with a lot more humility and maybe a different kind of courage.
01:05:25 Speaker_09
Was it with the same organization?
01:05:28 Speaker_09
I have to ask because I'm sure, I'm wondering, and I'm sure people listening are wondering, I've heard stories of resistance and conflict when people parachute into different places, whether it's with an NGO or with other organizations.
01:05:42 Speaker_09
I have never heard of possible poisoning. I mean, that is a next level. How do you explain that? I mean, would the intent be to make you sick, to kill you? I mean, that's, I don't know how to make sense of that degree of kind of counterattack.
01:06:00 Speaker_00
Again, I think it's really dangerous to assume, but I think that what I've learned. I used to read novels about the mystical and the magical, that in cultures, including the United States, that were very orally based, storytelling, myth-making,
01:06:23 Speaker_00
can be as powerful and potent as the real things. And so there was, particularly in those years, a lot of giddy-giddy, people relieved in wearing different amulets and medicines.
01:06:38 Speaker_00
In a way, you see the guys at Silicon Valley kind of replacing that with new things that we do to give us a sense of strength.
01:06:45 Speaker_00
And so the way I always attributed it to, which is why I would never accuse anyone of having done it, but the threat of it and my own fear and isolation may have been made manifest in this literal purging that I did.
01:07:04 Speaker_00
The threats were not that unusual. Again, and I see it in places where there's often insecurity and deeply oral based society. And you got to remember too, Tim, it was 30 years ago and the world operated in very different ways.
01:07:23 Speaker_00
then, and I just was caught up in this world that I had no understanding of, and of course is now a place that I'm deeply in love with and love all of its different layers and see the reflection in our own societies we just make manifest in different ways.
01:07:42 Speaker_09
At the time, though, you had just suffered this defeat of sorts, had really met with tremendous opposition. What was your first meaningful win after that, in your mind? Could be small or big.
01:07:58 Speaker_09
Or the first time when you were like, okay, this isn't a fool's errand, I'm actually on to something, I'm on the right track here.
01:08:04 Speaker_00
That's such an interesting question. I had another crushing failure right after where I analyzed a bank portfolio, a microfinance organization, and saw that I was excited by seeing all of the problems in the portfolio.
01:08:16 Speaker_00
And the CEO, rather than sharing my excitement that now we could actually fix the problems, burned my work and didn't want to work with me after that. And so I had to learn a whole new approach, clearly.
01:08:28 Speaker_09
That was in East Africa?
01:08:29 Speaker_00
That was in Kenya. So I had a second big failure. The little wins were that in my everyday life, the relationships that I was building, including with the person who served tea, with drivers, were quite real.
01:08:45 Speaker_00
I kept going back to this human potential that I was seeing all around me and starting to understand the crushingly complex systems
01:08:55 Speaker_00
that were in their way that nobody really wanted to confront, including the supposed good guys, the NGOs, the nonprofits, the leaders who were also arbiters of who got resources and who didn't.
01:09:08 Speaker_00
And it actually reinforced for me why I believed in the power of business, of entrepreneurship, because I was in this other world where who got control of the resources meant everything.
01:09:21 Speaker_00
The first real win for me was when a woman walked into my office in Nairobi and said that she was from Rwanda, which was a country I was completely unfamiliar with at the time. In fact, I thought she said Uganda.
01:09:35 Speaker_00
And they had just, 1986, they had just passed a new law that abolished Napoleonic Code. Under Napoleonic Code, women were put in the same category as children and the mentally
01:09:49 Speaker_00
impaired, and until that moment were unable to open a bank account without their husband's signature.
01:09:56 Speaker_00
And she asked me if I would go to the country to do a study, if you will, for whether it might be possible to create some kind of financial institution specifically for women.
01:10:08 Speaker_00
It was the first time an African woman had asked me to help solve a problem. I think I was so beat up by then, and yet
01:10:18 Speaker_00
really did feel this sense that if we could get markets to work for poor women, they would have so much more dignity than what I'd been seeing, that I probably went for a three-week assignment and knew somewhere inside of me that I wasn't leaving till we built a bank.
01:10:35 Speaker_09
So presumably, that's what happened. What happened?
01:10:40 Speaker_00
So that's what happened. I mean, a couple of things happened. Again, I had learned from my own lack of humility
01:10:47 Speaker_00
that it would have been really easy to go in there and be like, I, I, I, I, but that if we were going to build an enduring institution, and I deeply believe in enduring institutions, that I had to be a minor role, even if I was doing a lot of the legwork.
01:11:04 Speaker_00
And so I was really lucky to find a small group of Rwandan powerhouse women who are my co-founders, and we did everything together, it reinforced the African adage that if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
01:11:22 Speaker_00
And it became one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life because I saw that you really could change a little corner of history with the right people, the right kind of capital, the right value system, and certainly a lot of hard work.
01:11:37 Speaker_09
I want to just put a bookmark in that for a second and ask, from that initial plane flight, crying, listening to Joni Mitchell, to that Rwandan woman walking into your office, how much time had elapsed, roughly?
01:11:57 Speaker_00
Roughly, probably seven months.
01:12:00 Speaker_09
Okay, so over that seven month period, What were the ingredients that kept you going? Was it that you'd said to yourself, come hell or high water, I'm sticking around for a year? Had you made that kind of commitment?
01:12:15 Speaker_09
Was it, I cannot go back to the US with my tail between my legs and let all these naysayers prove themselves right? Was it something else? I'm just wondering what kept you kind of slogging away over that period of time?
01:12:30 Speaker_00
I would say that the whole first year and a half was that slog. I would say a combination of this man, Tony Turisiano. when he had given me this job offer. And he was like, you're going to go to Africa instead of do this?
01:12:47 Speaker_00
And I was like, Mr. Tresiano, don't you understand? If I don't go, I might never do it. That moment kept coming back to me. And it's like, how do I go back to him as a complete failure? I have to show him that we can do something.
01:13:02 Speaker_00
But also, Tim, I saw the vibrancy. I saw the beauty in this world that I had never imagined existed with people who were so eminently capable, but who weren't really given a chance to be everything that they could be.
01:13:19 Speaker_00
And it didn't seem like rocket science to me to build different kinds of systems that actually allowed their capability to flourish. And so I think it was a mix of hubris and a desire to be used in ways that I felt that I had something to offer.
01:13:38 Speaker_09
So coming back to the bookmark of Rwanda, and you finally start to, in close collaboration with these co-founders, these local women, create something meaningful. You start to chalk up some marks in the win category.
01:13:56 Speaker_09
How do we go from there to Acumen? What is the timeline or the series of events that leads?
01:14:04 Speaker_09
And I know we're covering earlier chapters, but I like really looking at these things closely because it shows the development before you reach escape velocity. And I think that makes for, at least for me, a fascinating study because people get to see
01:14:22 Speaker_09
how you got to the point where you could self perpetuate and kind of build success on success. So Rwanda to Acumen.
01:14:30 Speaker_00
So Rwanda to Acumen saw both the power of using markets with the microfinance I learned that it wasn't enough that giving women just small loans was amazing that you could give them access to credit at say 12% a year rather than 400% a year which is what they paid the money lenders.
01:14:51 Speaker_00
that you could build community. My assumption that if you gave women small bits of credit that it would be enough for them to create jobs was wrong. Most people aren't entrepreneurs. And that's probably a really good thing.
01:15:03 Speaker_00
I could say it as an entrepreneur married to an entrepreneur. We need. We need the builders. We need all these other personalities around us.
01:15:14 Speaker_00
So I also started a little bakery with 20 women to really understand what it would take to build entities that gave people good jobs.
01:15:23 Speaker_00
And that was a whole other learning point in the apprenticeship, if you will, before Acumen, that access to markets is important without the capabilities of actually using that access. We're only halfway there.
01:15:39 Speaker_00
I think because I was beginning to understand that I wanted to build companies, not just make small loans, that I wanted new skills.
01:15:50 Speaker_00
Also, in the context of East Africa at the time, degrees and other markers of success, particularly for women, seemed really important. I was often called in Shoshana Kidogo, which means little girl.
01:16:02 Speaker_00
even though we actually created a very successful lending operation. So I applied to Stanford Business School. It was the only school I applied to, but I thought, well, if I get in good, if I don't, it doesn't matter.
01:16:13 Speaker_09
Why Stanford? Besides the pretty trees on Palm Drive?
01:16:16 Speaker_00
It was really, really hard to get an application anywhere. We only had word processors. We didn't have computers. It took 10 days to get a letter to Stanford or wherever
01:16:30 Speaker_00
And then another 10 days after they sent the application to you, and then you had to write on that little airplane paper, send it back. It was a nightmare.
01:16:39 Speaker_00
And that particular year, Harvard on its annual report had a picture of all of the graduates with dollar signs on the back of their hats. And I thought, well, I think I might be a misfit, given that I really want to solve poverty.
01:16:59 Speaker_09
That is so bad. That is so bad. And I have close friends who have gone to Harvard, but oh, God, that's terrible.
01:17:07 Speaker_00
But put yourself back there, right? 1987, that was the height. That was Mike Milliken. That was like the height of market belief. In fact, market fundamentalism. Gordon Gekko.
01:17:17 Speaker_09
Gordon Gekko, exactly.
01:17:19 Speaker_00
And so Stanford had a public management program that I thought fit more. with what I wanted to do with my life. It was very clear that I didn't want to go back to just make money.
01:17:30 Speaker_00
I wanted to go back to build the tools to build companies that could employ and serve poor people. And so at Stanford, I met an extraordinary mentor named John Gardner.
01:17:40 Speaker_00
And I think he shaped my life as well in terms of getting me focused on the United States as the rest of the world, and talked to me about the importance of leadership, which I hadn't really thought about as much, Tim.
01:17:51 Speaker_00
Then I went to the Rockefeller Foundation, where I really saw the power of philanthropy. So by the time I was nearing 40, I had worked in the private sector with banking, I had built
01:18:02 Speaker_00
several institutions, but most notably Dutertembre, the microfinance organization, and this bakery and a couple of others. And then probably the other critical thing that happened was the Rwandan genocide.
01:18:15 Speaker_00
So suddenly, having worked on a social justice institution by then that had been in existence for seven years, and seeing a country explode into a bloodbath,
01:18:29 Speaker_00
losing many of the people that I loved and that I worked with and seeing my co-founders play out every role of the genocide from being murdered to watching their families be murdered to being bystanders.
01:18:43 Speaker_00
I think that was probably one of the most important
01:18:48 Speaker_00
not experiences because God forbid I'd watched it from afar, but both an understanding of patient capital, that the work of change is so often a couple steps forward and sometimes the whole thing blows up, that societies are highly complex, and again, that at the heart of my work
01:19:08 Speaker_00
had to be a redefinition of what poverty was, that we so often look at poverty and we think the answer is income, the answer is jobs.
01:19:16 Speaker_00
What I had seen by now, both in banking and in development and certainly with the genocide, is that the opposite of poverty is dignity. It is
01:19:27 Speaker_00
having a choice, having opportunity, having agency over who you are in your life and what you're capable of doing. And we miss that. And that was really the beginning of Acumen, that we have all these tools.
01:19:43 Speaker_00
We have the superpower in capitalism, but when we raise it to the rank of religion and everything goes around one end, profit, We can do amazing things, but we exclude a huge chunk of the world and we create great inequality.
01:20:01 Speaker_00
We're seeing that today, not to mention not consider the environment. If government decides everything or top-down approaches to aid, it's just too easy to give to the people that are close to you or for reasons that have nothing to do.
01:20:16 Speaker_00
with anything but power.
01:20:18 Speaker_00
And so the question I started asking myself is, what if we looked at capital as capital, understand it exists on a spectrum, take the power of business and capital, but rather than let it control us, control it in service of creating a world where we can actually solve our problems.
01:20:38 Speaker_00
Acumen was born in 2001 with that idea in mind.
01:20:42 Speaker_09
We're gonna spend a fair amount of time on Acumen, no big surprise there, but I wanna spend just a few more moments on the Rwandan genocide because I think it may be helpful in exploring the tendency that we all have to oversimplify things.
01:21:03 Speaker_09
And the example that comes to mind, and this is based on reading and prepping for this conversation that I'd love to hear you speak to, is the tendency to separate the world into monsters and angels, and how unhelpful that can be.
01:21:21 Speaker_09
And I think you alluded to it with your description of coworkers and people you knew, or certainly people you had exposure to, being on all sides of this genocide.
01:21:32 Speaker_09
Victims, bystanders, perpetrators, I'm sure you had interacted on some level, even just going to the market or otherwise with people who were on all sides of this. Could you speak to that?
01:21:43 Speaker_09
Because I wrote it down because it seemed important, not just within the context of a genocide, obviously, but just within the context of life in general. I'd love to hear any and all thoughts.
01:21:56 Speaker_00
First thought is absolutely that I didn't just know people in the market. Our first executive director was jailed as being one of the highest ranking or the highest ranking planner at the genocide.
01:22:08 Speaker_00
Before the genocide, she was co-creating a liberal party based on multi-tribal democracy with another one of our co-founders. But when it was clear that power looked like it was going to Hutu power or the genocide regime, she switched.
01:22:25 Speaker_00
And so early on, I saw those who seek power and those who seek purpose, and that power can be very tempting.
01:22:37 Speaker_00
And I also saw how in a time of real insecurity, and we're in one again, it can be very easy for demagogic leaders at all levels of society to prey on insecurity. and sometimes make us do terrible things. And that's where monsters and angels came in.
01:22:57 Speaker_00
I was literally sitting in a prison with Agnes, the woman who was the major perpetrator, knee-to-knee, asking her how this could have happened.
01:23:09 Speaker_00
And there she was, Tim, in a pink dress, the prisoner's uniform, her head shaved bald, with a freckled face. She looked like a young woman. She didn't look like a monster. And we had founded this institution together.
01:23:27 Speaker_00
We're taught that there are bad people and good people, monsters and angels. And yet the truth of the matter is that monsters and angels live in every single one of us. Monsters are our broken parts.
01:23:39 Speaker_00
They are our petty fears, our insecurities, the grievances that grow. And it's just too damn easy to pull into those parts When we, as a society, feel insecure, we blame other people. We other them. And that was very much at the heart of the genocide.
01:23:59 Speaker_00
And that has very much informed the way I see the world and the way at Acumen, even the way that we talk about and inscribe our values. It's always intention. It's always recognizing the light and the dark.
01:24:15 Speaker_00
in almost any choice that we make, so that we're much more cognizant that there is no system that's all good, nor is there any human being that is all good or all bad.
01:24:25 Speaker_00
I worry sometimes when I hear conversations in the social media moment that we are in, that it's capitalism's fault, it's socialism's fault, it's stakeholders, it's shareholders rather than, can we focus on the values here?
01:24:38 Speaker_00
What are we trying to solve? And then can we pull back and find ways to use the best of the tools that we have at our disposal and actually solve that.
01:24:49 Speaker_09
Everything you just said, I think it's always been important.
01:24:53 Speaker_09
I think it's exceptionally important when you have technologies that are, in a sense, designed to polarize, because the incentives are such that that becomes sort of a driving design and engineering imperative, in a sense.
01:25:07 Speaker_09
And just to comment a bit further on that, I would encourage everyone out there to to look at the work of Darren Brown.
01:25:18 Speaker_09
So Darren Brown is a mentalist performer, also an incredible artist from the UK, and he has a number of specials, including one called The Push.
01:25:28 Speaker_09
He has another, I can't recall the name of, but the objective, putting ethical considerations aside, the objective is to show how you can mold people
01:25:40 Speaker_09
who are otherwise upstanding moral people to do terrible things like push someone off a building or to shoot someone.
01:25:47 Speaker_09
And the sad reality is that it is very much possible and that it's easy to sit on a moral high horse and levy judgment against others and to say, I would never have participated in a Rwandan genocide or I never would have been
01:26:05 Speaker_09
a member of the Nazi party, and so on and so forth, but it's not quite that simple, right? And I think to simplify it down to the black and white people being all one or all other is not in service of solutions.
01:26:21 Speaker_09
I really appreciate you expanding on that. Let's jump to Ackerman. Ackerman, how did you choose the name, or how is the name decided?
01:26:30 Speaker_00
Acumen stands for perspective, insight. When we started Acumen, I was focused on revolutionizing philanthropy. And too often, the way we think about philanthropy is soft. This was saying, again, the hard and the soft.
01:26:44 Speaker_00
You've got to bring an edge, start with business, start with insight, build from there, and bring the same level of accountability that you would expect from a financial investment into the world of social change. Therefore, Acumen.
01:26:58 Speaker_09
So could you just recap for people? I know we mentioned it in the bio, but a lot has been discussed so far. What does Acumen do?
01:27:07 Speaker_00
Acumen does three things. First, we invest long-term patient capital. This is 10 to 15 year investment backed by philanthropy. So equity and debt into entrepreneurs that are going where markets have failed. Healthcare, education, energy, agriculture.
01:27:25 Speaker_00
We will invest not only for 10 to 15 years, but we accompany those entrepreneurs with our social capital, our access to networks, to supply chains, to knowledge, sometimes to talent. Any money that comes back gets reinvested.
01:27:42 Speaker_00
As you said, Tim, to grow these companies in scale is at the heart of everything that we do. We then need to tap into more traditional forms of capital in the impact investing space.
01:27:53 Speaker_00
So we also have a management company that runs several for-profit impact funds. The second thing we do is build a community of builders through the World School for Social Change Acumen Academy. And that is not only trying to identify, link,
01:28:11 Speaker_00
inspire the talent that exists, I believe, in every corner of the world, but also to offer rules, tools, blueprints, so that anyone, anywhere, who want to be on the path of social change, using this combination of head and heart, hard skills, and the, what I think are the even harder skills, can be part of it.
01:28:32 Speaker_00
The third is to measure what matters. If you're going to say that you invest for impact, you better be able to measure what that impact is.
01:28:42 Speaker_00
A couple of years ago, we spun off a company called 60 Decibels that uses an approach to measuring change that we created called Lean Data, which we can talk about. It essentially upholds one of our main values, which is listening.
01:29:00 Speaker_00
And it measures impact not from the perspective of the giver or the investor, but from the recipients, from the customers themselves, so that we can actually serve the poor in ways that we hope to.
01:29:12 Speaker_09
Does the lean data, and I may ask some follow-up questions just to ensure I'm clear on how it works, does that apply to the for-profit investing as well, the for-profit impact funds?
01:29:27 Speaker_00
Yeah. And in fact, the reason we spun it out is a number of other nonprofit and for-profit funds asked us if We would essentially provide them with lean data consulting.
01:29:40 Speaker_00
And we thought that again, going back to our mission, we want to change the way the world tackles poverty. We would serve that mission better if we spun it out, let it grow. And that 60 decibels, which has been really exciting to watch take off.
01:29:52 Speaker_00
I'd love to see BlackRock using it, frankly.
01:29:54 Speaker_09
All right, BlackRock, I'm sure there's somebody listening who is involved with BlackRock. Let's just assume they are listening. And also for my benefit and for listeners, could you just reiterate what lean data are?
01:30:09 Speaker_09
I'm going to be a pompous Princetonian. What exactly is or are lean data? Because the question of measuring impact is one that, at least in my circles, comes up a lot. How do you actually do this?
01:30:22 Speaker_09
How do you try to invest not just for ROI but for good, for impact? But how do you do that without just waving your hands around and claiming that you've done a lot of good? I'd love to hear you expand on that.
01:30:35 Speaker_00
We invest in entrepreneurs that are trying to build markets where they haven't existed for people who make $2 or $3 a day, where there's no infrastructure, there's no trust, there are very few skills and talent, there's a lot of corruption and complacency.
01:30:48 Speaker_00
And so it would be really easy for us to essentially say that anything we do in a difficult environment is impact. And so we decided that we had to hold ourselves. accountable to a higher standard.
01:31:02 Speaker_00
That at the end of the day, what really matters when it comes to dignity is to record and understand the voices of those you are there to serve the poor. For many years, Tim, our impact measuring was fairly mediocre because we didn't have the tools.
01:31:18 Speaker_00
Once you had cell phone technology and you could text customers
01:31:24 Speaker_00
Suddenly you had a one-on-one communication where you weren't in the room, where people aren't always as likely to tell you the truth because they don't really think you want to hear it anyway.
01:31:35 Speaker_00
But in this case, the more anonymity they had, the clearer people would give. So imagine a solar light company. We're the largest off-grid solar investor for the poor in the world. So we have a lot of them. We could go to a company like D.Light.
01:31:52 Speaker_00
and text 5,000, 6,000 customers simultaneously. Ask those customers a series of questions from which we can deduce what matters to them. How many more hours of light do they have when they buy a solar home system that gives them?
01:32:09 Speaker_00
three lights, a radio, a television. What is the quality of that light? We can measure carbon offset. That's easy. Has their health changed because they're no longer using dangerous, noxious kerosene?
01:32:21 Speaker_00
Are their children doing better in education, which was an assumption we had when we first went into it. Then we collate all of that. And suddenly we can help our entrepreneurs understand whether they're serving people.
01:32:35 Speaker_00
which is sometimes shocking when they find that they actually are not in the way that they thought they were. But equally, we can start to look across a sector like solar.
01:32:44 Speaker_00
electricity and we can see which companies may have the best product, but it's reaching people with the highest income.
01:32:52 Speaker_00
And so you've got a trade-off, which companies are doing the most to displace carbon, but they may have another trade-off and which companies have the happiest customers.
01:33:03 Speaker_00
Then we can decide more effectively where we want to allocate our dollars for impact, not only for Financial returns it not only has held us more accountable tim it's allowed the entrepreneurs.
01:33:16 Speaker_00
Much deeper understanding of who their customers are it allows us to see are we actually reaching the poor which is our mandate and it's shown us where we were wrong. What it came to off great energy we assumed.
01:33:29 Speaker_00
As I said that kids would do better in school, they don't necessarily do better in school. If you want kids to do better in school in really, really hot areas, get them a solar system that includes a fan.
01:33:41 Speaker_00
Because with a fan, the air moves at night, bugs are kept away, the kids sleep, they do better. It's a lean approach because you're not doing a three-year randomized control trial.
01:33:52 Speaker_00
And it is a deep approach because you're hearing from the perspective of those who actually most matter.
01:33:58 Speaker_09
Yeah, the three-year randomized controlled approach has its place, but honestly, I mean, and this is speaking as someone who is very involved with financing scientific studies, it's not the right tool for all jobs.
01:34:11 Speaker_09
And particularly when you are outside of a laboratory with lots of Uncontrolled variables it's just trying to hammer screws a lot of the time i think there's a real place for this lean data approach and i have a question about.
01:34:29 Speaker_09
How this is used so here's a hypothetical maybe it's not hypothetical i would imagine you run into this if you are. Acting as a non profit and you're investing in various enterprises.
01:34:42 Speaker_09
You can apply this data or offer this type of tool across the board, I would imagine, with the underlying belief that a rising tide raises all ships. Once you are a consultancy and you are providing
01:34:59 Speaker_09
Lean data to for profit companies would you not say in a given sector run into someone who wants you to avoid conflicts by providing them this data which could help their businesses.
01:35:14 Speaker_09
or business, and they might say, hey, I know that you have this valuable data. We would like to be the only one to receive it in the X, Y, and Z category. Otherwise, it doesn't really give us a competitive advantage, so why would we pay for it?
01:35:26 Speaker_09
Do you ever run into anything like that, much like a law firm would have a conflict check?
01:35:32 Speaker_00
No, I mean, when there's conflict, then you know you're onto something. And I'm looking forward to that day when we do have that conflict.
01:35:38 Speaker_00
I would say the more internal conversation that we have as a board is how transparent to make it so that we start actually taking seriously the level of impact that different investors around the world actually are getting.
01:35:53 Speaker_09
You mean transparency in terms of what you learn, how much to make publicly available?
01:35:58 Speaker_00
Yeah. It goes to the ethos at the beginning of Acumen even, and I guess it goes to that girl we were talking about. I just wanted to know the truth ourselves. Even if the world didn't care, we would always have a forced ranking of our investments.
01:36:11 Speaker_00
If you just sat there trying to defend your investment, as an investor, that was a way you could get fired.
01:36:19 Speaker_00
If you were the one who talked about everything that was wrong with it and what made you worried, that was a way you could become more of a hero. And now we've grown quite large and I think we have a different set of questions that we ask.
01:36:34 Speaker_00
But I think it was that ethos, Tim, of holding ourselves to account for the kind of impact that we are trying to create in the world, not protect.
01:36:43 Speaker_00
that allowed Acumen to partner with just incredible market makers, like the guys who founded D.Light, which has brought clean solar light and electricity to over 100 million people and really launched an energy revolution and taught me that the kind of investing we need to think about right now at scale doesn't only reward the building of a single company, but those companies who ultimately create entire markets.
01:37:10 Speaker_00
I think that's the next frontier in so many ways.
01:37:12 Speaker_09
So you gave an example, just one example of many, of just the scale, the large-scale impact that Acumen and these various spinoffs and for-profit funds have been able to have in the world. But if we go back to 2001, circa 2001, Acumen.
01:37:33 Speaker_09
I always like to ask, aside from Acumen, did you have any other names that were on the shortlist for consideration that you remember? Do you remember any other rough drafts?
01:37:43 Speaker_00
Of course I do. In fact, 2001, just to put us back again, it was the dot-com craziness. Well, 2000, 2001. By the time I picked Acumen and we started, there was a bust. But you could not get a URL. And no names were working.
01:38:01 Speaker_00
And so I had this night at the Rockefeller Foundation where I was working in, and we came up with really, really great names including Ain't Your Grandma's Philanthropy.
01:38:11 Speaker_09
That's great.
01:38:14 Speaker_00
I think that was my brother Mike's, but I can't remember. There was a lot of why involved in the naming of Acumen. Then I really loved the word immersion. I still do. It's one of the principles of moral imagination.
01:38:27 Speaker_00
There's a great line from Tilly Olsen where she says, may you live a life of immersion. I'm paraphrasing, but what price will you pay? To truly understand the complexity of the issues that we are trying to solve, you have to get close.
01:38:42 Speaker_00
Bryan Stevenson, the civil rights activist, says you have to get proximous. I say you have to immerse. It's the same. But when we did trials, particularly across gender, women were attracted to the word immersion, men hated it, hated it.
01:38:56 Speaker_00
And so acumen seemed a little less offensive to one of the two groups.
01:39:05 Speaker_09
How did you test it? Were you sending out a poll to a group of friends? How did you do the split testing?
01:39:14 Speaker_00
Well, a friend of mine, Antonia Bowering, was working for a now-no-longer.com called, I think it was called March 1st. They did this big ideation project with us. So they actually did some true consumer testing.
01:39:27 Speaker_00
But I also, having so many people in my life and being an extrovert, just kept asking, asking, asking. I couldn't find a single man who was with me on immersion.
01:39:38 Speaker_00
And in fact, I can remember one person was like, I just hear that word, Jaclyn, and I feel like you're making me drown in a sea. He's like, well, there is something to that.
01:39:49 Speaker_00
There are moments where you feel like you're drowning, but then you come out to clarity. But we decided.
01:39:55 Speaker_09
I never would have guessed in a million years that you would have such a gender split on immersion. Maybe I'm just a language geek, so I find it attractive as a concept.
01:40:05 Speaker_00
I think now, in fact, our housing company in Pakistan, Javad Aslam, he actually named one of his funds the Immersion Fund. Once you really think about it, it's a beautiful word. All of us right now need to immerse more in each other's lives.
01:40:21 Speaker_00
All of us need to design with the imagination, not just through our own lens, but with the imagination that is morally based. You don't get that if we don't have immersion. I think it's changed.
01:40:34 Speaker_09
Yeah, I was just gonna ask if you could just explore for a moment, and then we're gonna come back to Acumen, and I'm gonna ask you about the earliest wins, and if you could speak to those, but I don't wanna gloss over moral imagination.
01:40:47 Speaker_09
Could you just take a moment, and I think you're kind of walking into that territory, but just to frame it, what is moral imagination?
01:40:56 Speaker_00
Moral imagination is essentially putting yourself in another's shoes and building from their perspective, as I said. we often design through the lens just of our own imagination.
01:41:07 Speaker_00
That doesn't work when we're designing for people whose lives are completely unlike our own. So moral imagination starts with empathy, but I've learned time and time again that empathy by itself reinforces the status quo, or at least risks doing so.
01:41:24 Speaker_00
And so the idea of moral imagination is understanding
01:41:29 Speaker_00
by immersing a particular problem, and then thinking systemically about those issues that get in people's way, and then frankly being honest enough to recognize where people get in their own way, and then moving from there.
01:41:44 Speaker_09
When you say empathy, in some cases, enforces the status quo, could you elaborate on that? Do you mean that it's just an us versus, not versus, but like an us and them, kind of the savior of the fill in the blank? Is it that dichotomy that's created?
01:42:01 Speaker_09
Not that that is what empathy does, of course, but what do you mean by enforcing the status quo?
01:42:07 Speaker_00
I think it's even deeper. I mean, I think when I first learned about the moral imagination was in college when I was at Charlottesville, ironically, given everything that happened in Charlottesville a few years ago.
01:42:20 Speaker_00
I signed up to bring a turkey dinner and all the trappings of a Christmas to this community that was 30 minutes away from the university where low-income people lived. was also kind of a wild co-ed, and so we had this big party.
01:42:38 Speaker_00
We asked everyone to bring food and toys to make a perfect Christmas for these kids. I was really excited because I felt, at some level, so sorry for these people that didn't get to have a Christmas.
01:42:52 Speaker_00
The next morning, my girlfriend and I got up, and we got in her car. We loaded it with all the stuff. We were both completely hungover. We drove into this place that I'd never been to a place like that before.
01:43:07 Speaker_00
And it was literally when we got to the house, it's like a shanty, a shack. And suddenly I just felt shame, Tim. I was like, oh my God, like, I don't know who these kids are. I don't know what kind of things they like.
01:43:21 Speaker_00
I don't know if the parents want the kids to know that somebody else is bringing them Christmas. And this is all wrong. And literally I said to Suzanne, my friend, I was like, just keep the car running and grab the stuff. I ran it.
01:43:38 Speaker_00
I threw it on the porch. I ran back to the car. It was like, just go. And I think in a way it was the beginning of my moral imagination that that act was an act of empathy. It was well-intended. And I hope that they had a really lovely Christmas.
01:43:54 Speaker_00
But the moral imagination would have said, look, am I willing to do the work of actually understanding who these people are at the very least and building from there? If I'm not, find an organization that does.
01:44:09 Speaker_00
Even better, ask the questions around what got them there in the first place. And where can I be spending my time and my energy and my capital to solve that problem? And I'm not saying we shouldn't give charity.
01:44:22 Speaker_00
I think there's a real role for moving from that place of empathy and from that place of unbridled love in a moment.
01:44:33 Speaker_00
Our job right now, when the pandemic and everything that's happened in the world has broken our systems open, is to think bigger than that and to hold ourselves to account at a systemic level. And that's what my obsession is.
01:44:49 Speaker_09
Thank you for explaining that and telling that story also, which I think drives it home. Acumen. So, winging a prayer. Good idea. You've tested the name. Here we go. Buckle up.
01:45:06 Speaker_09
Do you recall any of the first wins where you're like, okay, I think this might actually do something?
01:45:15 Speaker_00
Oh yeah. I mean, I recall it like it was yesterday. We had helped put together this collaboration, this deal, to bring long-lasting malaria bed nets into Tanzania.
01:45:27 Speaker_00
It started with Sumitomo, who had developed this bed net, and also recognized that 95% of malaria is in Africa, and yet there was no manufacturing capability for this particular kind of bed net. And so it was a real experiment. Could we build
01:45:43 Speaker_00
manufacturing capability with similar throughput rates to the kind that you might get in Asia, where the long lasting bed nets were created.
01:45:52 Speaker_00
We went through all these different entrepreneurs, we identified this incredible guy named Anusha in Arusha, Tanzania, and worked with Global Fund to buy these nets and didn't really know what it was going to look like.
01:46:06 Speaker_00
And of course, I had seen a lot of things fail. This was a complex collaboration. And then I went to go visit just as the factory was getting going. And there was one line of bed net making machines. And I was like, this is cool.
01:46:21 Speaker_00
I love operations, factory operations. A few months later, I went back and there were four. A few months later, I went back and there were eight. And there was that moment
01:46:32 Speaker_00
when suddenly I was seeing hundreds of women operating these machines that I thought, oh my goodness, we're doing this. And then they ended up creating jobs for 10,000 people, manufacturing 30 million nets a year.
01:46:45 Speaker_00
They ended up being 15% of global production. And when you think about that, that's like a half a billion people who have gotten access to malaria bed nets because of this little company in, not so little anymore, company in Arusha, Tanzania.
01:47:01 Speaker_00
I was like, bingo, this is what we're about.
01:47:04 Speaker_09
Boom. Proof of concept.
01:47:06 Speaker_00
Boom.
01:47:08 Speaker_09
Let's look at this example because I'd like to explore the thought process or the process a bit in so much as I think many people who are considering impact investing or even perhaps starting a firm or a fund or a company that has that as its intended purpose, particularly a fund, they might
01:47:34 Speaker_09
Solicit proposals or business proposals and then choose from that menu of options but it seems like you started with. Selecting a problem and then you canvassed to find candidates is that how you approach it in the beginning we selected sectors.
01:47:51 Speaker_00
We were mostly focused at the very beginning on health technologies. And then the idea was we would find entrepreneurs. I was and am such a believer in entrepreneurs. And in fact, people would say, oh, are you trying to solve malaria?
01:48:04 Speaker_00
And I'd be like, no. We are trying to find those health technologies that could fundamentally change people's lives and bring them dignity. Now, again, we're in a very different place where we have all local teams on the ground.
01:48:18 Speaker_00
Depending on the region, there's much more focus on the sectors. And Tim, what we find then is if you think about Acumen as a laboratory, when we see a company really move up like a daylight, then we can start to build
01:48:34 Speaker_00
other companies around it to really help create that ecosystem. So we're a bit different.
01:48:39 Speaker_00
In the U.S., for instance, it wouldn't make sense for us to be looking at off-grid energy or investing in the social determinants of health care, financial inclusion and workforce development, which we feel are so critical to where the nation is now when it comes to the poor or low-income people.
01:48:56 Speaker_09
You mentioned Sumitomo, which is Japanese, and developing an ecosystem around a company is in some ways a very Japanese concept, or it's something that's been very well explored and developed in the Keiretsu.
01:49:09 Speaker_09
I suppose conglomerates would be a lazy way to translate that in Japan.
01:49:13 Speaker_00
As is a very long-term approach.
01:49:17 Speaker_09
Absolutely. I mean, look at some of these companies. They've lasted us a very long time. They're not five or ten year companies. I look at your story, I look at your chronology, and one thing that stands out to me
01:49:33 Speaker_09
and please feel free to disabuse me of any misconceptions, but you cut your teeth in banking. You got to understand that machine from the inside.
01:49:45 Speaker_09
You then, well, simultaneously, in some respects and then after, looked at microfinance, access to capital. You started a bakery. I don't think that's a small thing. You actually were boots on the ground, getting first-hand experience
01:50:01 Speaker_09
in an immersive way of what entrepreneurship looked like in your chosen environment. You got your ass kicked in West Africa. But, put another way, you really got an extended education.
01:50:19 Speaker_09
on someone else's charter with someone else's organization and support. You, through that entire period of time, are developing grit, learning what doesn't work, certain approaches to parachuting in. You're learning, conversely, what does work.
01:50:34 Speaker_09
And then, suddenly, you're Jacqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO of Acumen. But I think it's tempting for people to jump straight to the Acumen.
01:50:43 Speaker_09
And I'd love to hear you answer the question, what advice you would give to young people who say they want to change the world? Because it strikes me that if you had tried to jump straight to Acumen,
01:50:58 Speaker_09
Correct me if I'm wrong, but you wouldn't have been viewed as backable. You wouldn't have had the operational experience. It just wouldn't have worked.
01:51:04 Speaker_09
I sometimes worry that these young or older people, quite frankly, who could really make a positive dent in the world are putting the cart before the horse in terms of skill development. They don't have the chops, but they want to change the world.
01:51:22 Speaker_09
You've spoken to students. I know you've given commencement speeches, for those people listening who are like, I just want to change the world, what advice would you give to them?
01:51:31 Speaker_00
Well, the first would be this idea of just follow your passion. I don't even really even understand what that means. Even though my whole life, I have been very clear about the way I wanted to create change and for whom. It wasn't this
01:51:49 Speaker_00
As you said, out of the box, really understanding that we were going to use different forms of capital and support it with the right kind of talent to work a system to create real change. I would say just start.
01:52:01 Speaker_00
Don't start by asking, what is my purpose? What is my passion? Start by asking, what are the problems that need to be solved? Which ones attract me? And take a step toward that.
01:52:14 Speaker_00
Take one step, and the work will teach you where you need to take the next step. Build tools in your toolbox. If you still don't know what your passion or your purpose is as you take those steps, follow a leader and learn from that leader.
01:52:28 Speaker_00
There is something so powerful, and I think this is what you're getting at too, Tim, in apprenticing. I would say I apprenticed for 15 years.
01:52:39 Speaker_00
And also to your point, that bakery in some ways probably looked like a Girl Scout project to a lot of people.
01:52:47 Speaker_00
When I think about some of the most important things I've ever done in my life, that one sits at the top for all the reasons that you implied. I had to learn the gritty realities, talk about learning humility.
01:53:00 Speaker_00
I also saw that we could succeed, and I had to let go of a lot of my assumptions yet again. And so I do think you're right.
01:53:09 Speaker_00
Skipping steps, particularly because life is both shorter than we think it is and it's longer than we think it is, it doesn't serve the world and it doesn't serve you.
01:53:19 Speaker_09
Here, here, you've also, I don't know if you've said this or written it, but I vaguely remember, and maybe you can provide some context here for when it was said or written, but something along the lines of if you try to keep all of your options open, you may just end up with a bunch of options.
01:53:38 Speaker_00
I actually think Jim Collins said that to me when I was lucky enough to be his student, and I paraphrase Jim. I say that a lot where it's like, well, Jacqueline, I need to keep my options open." I'm like, seriously? Just commit to something.
01:53:53 Speaker_00
This, we don't tell young people or even old people. We don't expect that enough. But I think the cult of the individual is also the cult of optionality.
01:54:06 Speaker_00
The secret is that when you commit to something, particularly something bigger than yourself, it will set you free. and suddenly you will find a freedom and layering of life that you never really understood you had.
01:54:21 Speaker_09
That is something that I don't think I would have fully been able to wrap my head around until just in the last few years, really becoming dedicated to scientific research around psychedelic compounds.
01:54:34 Speaker_09
And I don't want to take us down that rabbit hole necessarily, certainly. Your brother Mike has a fair amount to say.
01:54:41 Speaker_00
I'm the wrong demographics sibling for that one.
01:54:42 Speaker_09
Yeah, yeah. Your brother Mike has a fair amount to say about that. Mr. This Ain't Your Grandma's Philanthropy or whatever the name was.
01:54:50 Speaker_09
But the great relief and unburdening of me-centric living that comes from dedicating yourself to something larger is really profound. And I mean, it's not entirely altruistic. It's so relieving.
01:55:14 Speaker_09
It's hard to overstate that, and I'm glad you mentioned it.
01:55:17 Speaker_00
Well, and none of this is entirely altruistic. If we're seeking purpose, if we all buy into Thoreau's that so many men live lives of quiet desperation and we don't want to be those people.
01:55:30 Speaker_00
then there is no clearer path than making a commitment to problems that might be so big you won't solve them in your lifetime. Because then you are constantly just starting. You're constantly learning and unlearning and renewing.
01:55:44 Speaker_00
And I think that's been also the story of this work of trying to solve these big problems. With entrepreneurs that are as relentless in their seeking, it's just that What drives them is to solve a problem.
01:56:00 Speaker_00
What does not drive them is just profit, though they recognize they need the profit for long-term financial sustainability and scale. It's the prioritization.
01:56:10 Speaker_09
You mentioned following. a leader earlier, and also apprenticing. And there are many different types of leaders out there. Many people who might seem to be good mentors but make terrible mentors.
01:56:26 Speaker_09
Could you speak to an example in your life of a mentor or a leader
01:56:33 Speaker_09
Doesn't have to be john gardner i wrote that down just because you mentioned it and i mentioned john and passing from i believe that was your gsb days right the the stanford days to what makes a good mentor or a good leader the type.
01:56:48 Speaker_00
You might want to follow or learn from for me there's really no one like john gardner in my life. to him. He was this very patrician man who almost spoke in Koans by the time I met him. We were 50 years apart in age, so he gave a lot of wisdom.
01:57:04 Speaker_00
Where he stood apart, and again, we need him so much right now. He was the only Republican on Lyndon Johnson's Democratic cabinet and was the head of health, education, and welfare, so he was at the table.
01:57:17 Speaker_00
I negotiated some of the great civil rights legislation. Talk about courage. He would say things to me like, you know, focus on being interested, Jacqueline, not interesting.
01:57:28 Speaker_00
When I would get some fancy job offer and he would think that it's, that was a vanity project rather than a character building project. John left the cabinet. and resigned his position in protest of the Vietnam War.
01:57:44 Speaker_00
And in response, he created a grassroots citizens organization at age 54 called Common Cause. And it was that level of integrity and of doing the right thing, not the easy thing, that I think we're all yearning for in our leaders today.
01:58:02 Speaker_00
could have done anything. But when I think about what legacy is, I think about him, and I look at the now. We've had over a million signups on Acumen Academy.
01:58:14 Speaker_00
When I see these hundreds and hundreds of Acumen fellows and the entrepreneurs, I sometimes hear John's words in them.
01:58:24 Speaker_00
This man who's been dead for almost 20 years is fully alive with the kind of legacy that matters because he focused on investing in the world around him and not just in himself.
01:58:36 Speaker_09
So Jacqueline, good news, bad news, depending. It's actually the same news.
01:58:40 Speaker_09
I just don't know how you're going to take it, which is I think we're going to have to do, or I would like to do round two at some point, because there's no way we're going to cover even a fraction of what I have in front of me.
01:58:52 Speaker_09
We could do a do-over. Oh, definitely not a do-over. Are you kidding me? You've been nothing but net for an hour and 40 minutes. I'm not letting this one go. I would like to ask about, actually, First a short question, then a longer question.
01:59:09 Speaker_09
The shorter question is going to be about books, and the longer question is going to be about advice to different types of listeners, those people who have more time than money.
01:59:18 Speaker_09
Maybe they're earlier in their careers, maybe they're just in a transition. Then you have the investor types. I would consider myself an investor type also, who are looking to have more impact, make more impact.
01:59:29 Speaker_09
And then to institutional, those people who might be in positions within institutions. Before we get to that, so you were kind enough to contribute to Tribe of Mentors, my last book. Thank you very much for that.
01:59:42 Speaker_09
And you answered quite a number of questions. One of those questions is what is the book or books you've given the most as a gift and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life? Now you mentioned a few.
01:59:57 Speaker_09
You can also revise these. One was Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Another, Things Fall Apart, by, can you pronounce this author's name for me?
02:00:06 Speaker_00
Chinua Achebe.
02:00:07 Speaker_09
Thank you. There's so many words and names that I know how to read. I recognize, but I have no idea how to pronounce. And then A Fine Balance by, oh, here's another one, Roentgen Mystery. Roentgen Mystery. There we go. If you had to pick one of these
02:00:24 Speaker_09
or another book, it doesn't have to be one of these three, but a book that you've given as a gift or that has had a strong impact on you for people to start with, which might you recommend and why?
02:00:36 Speaker_09
Of course, I recommend people also read your books, The Blue Sweater and also Manifesto for Moral Revolution. So not to exclude those, but for the sake of conversation now, if they weren't those books, what comes to mind?
02:00:47 Speaker_00
I have reasons for each of those books and certainly The Invisible Man in this moment of the Black Lives Matters. protests and the continuing racial reckoning, Invisible Man really taught me to not see through anybody ever.
02:01:02 Speaker_00
But the book I give right now in this time of so much despair is Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, where he really looks at people in the Holocaust
02:01:16 Speaker_00
and asks himself, why did some just sort of crumple up and die and others stayed resilient and strong? And that at the end of the day, no one can take our dignity away from us.
02:01:27 Speaker_00
And so I think that we have to be reminded right now that between stimulus and response, there is a choice. And we're in that moment. And I have seen myself personally so often that in the darkest times, we can find our best selves.
02:01:44 Speaker_00
And that's our opportunity right now. And so I think for this moment, Tim, Man's Search for Meaning should be required reading for all of us.
02:01:52 Speaker_09
I could not endorse that strongly enough for anyone who's listening to this. Also, across 500 plus episodes of this podcast, the single book that has come up most often is Man's Search for Meaning.
02:02:06 Speaker_09
So if you have not read this book, do yourself a favor, do everyone around you a favor, and pick it up. It is just a tremendous, tremendous book.
02:02:17 Speaker_09
And also a great example of someone, in this case, Viktor Frankl, embracing something larger than himself, the completion of Man's Search for Meaning, the concept of writing this and compiling it as a book that helped him to get through so much suffering also.
02:02:31 Speaker_00
Yeah, and moral imagination that he had in seeing not just the ugliness of the world that is and the humility that that takes, but he truly had the audacity to imagine what could be and to see the infinite potential in every human being.
02:02:48 Speaker_09
Let's use that as a segue to help others to embrace the audacity to imagine what they might do.
02:02:55 Speaker_09
You can take these in any order, and there might be other archetypes we want to touch upon, but for those people listening, and I'll just grab three, we have
02:03:04 Speaker_09
The person with right now for any number of reasons more time than financial resources what they might do and you don't have to tackle them in this order the individual investor so that someone who.
02:03:18 Speaker_09
Is a custom to perhaps investing in public equities or in my case and many others startups cryptocurrency whatever might be. Who would like to begin to experiment with investing for greater.
02:03:33 Speaker_09
social impact or impact, and then the players in the institutional space, those people who may be at asset management firms or otherwise, who also would like to, either in a management or leadership position, begin to steer the ship, at least carving off a portion of activities to focus on impact, maybe lean data,
02:03:59 Speaker_09
Or who just as intrapreneurs within these companies want to want to try something what would you say to any of those groups.
02:04:07 Speaker_00
To the person with not a lot of money but time, I would say focus on both immersion and understanding the problems around us, and also another practice from the book, which is accompaniment.
02:04:20 Speaker_00
By accompaniment, what I mean to walk with someone, to try and understand their problem, not take it on and solve it for them, but to help them build the muscle so that they can solve it themselves.
02:04:31 Speaker_09
By book, in this case, you mean manifesto for a moral revolution.
02:04:33 Speaker_00
Manifesto for a moral revolution. And the whole idea of moral revolution is give more to the world than you take. It's not there are some who have the moral responsibility and some who do not. It's like all of us.
02:04:43 Speaker_00
So I really appreciate that you would ask for all three categories. When you look at the brokenness of our criminal justice system, at the opioid epidemic, poverty, the arts community that's out of work, there is such an opportunity to be of use.
02:05:00 Speaker_00
to pay visits, to just talk to people who are lonely right now, to be more conscious about the way that we spend our money, even for small things, and buy sustainably.
02:05:10 Speaker_00
And so it's building into your everyday a much greater consciousness and awareness of the fact that our action and our inaction impacts people everywhere. For the individual investor,
02:05:25 Speaker_00
I would say that one of the broken parts of our current system of capitalism, which bifurcates how we make money and how we give it away, is that we often disregard how people are treated inside and outside our companies. as well as the environment.
02:05:46 Speaker_00
And then we try to make amends for the fact that we are the status quo with our philanthropy on the outside. And that model is deeply broken.
02:05:54 Speaker_00
As investors, how do we think more holistically about the impact that we're making, positive and negative, with all parts of our money across that spectrum?
02:06:06 Speaker_00
There has never been such opportunity as there is right now to invest in extraordinary entrepreneurs that are reimagining how to use the tools of capitalism to solve big problems. As I said, Tim, they exist in every country.
02:06:21 Speaker_00
And we have to think with more openness to how we would look at our overall portfolio. Again, thinking of it going from philanthropy to more market-driven returns.
02:06:35 Speaker_00
We have a company in the United States called Every Table, and it is a fast food, healthy, nutritious, affordable restaurant chain now in Los Angeles. It's about eight different restaurants, and with the pandemic, it just has.
02:06:49 Speaker_00
exploded in the best ways of delivering food and partnering with governments and individual philanthropists that are willing to pay meals forward so that people in low-income parts of Los Angeles can get healthy, affordable food.
02:07:03 Speaker_00
With Black Lives Matter protests, what Sam Polk, the entrepreneur, understood is that he had within him, within his operation, individual employees who had the capability to become franchisees.
02:07:16 Speaker_00
But in the United States, the franchise model usually expects that you will have your own capital to put into the system from the beginning.
02:07:23 Speaker_00
So he's created a university and he's now raised probably three of $13 million, you know, seven year debt at 2%.
02:07:32 Speaker_00
That will allow him to identify the entrepreneurs amongst his employees, give them the opportunity to start their own franchise, enable them to have $40,000 a year salaries for the next three years, and hopefully we're going to see a whole group of Black and Latinx entrepreneurs that are running every table franchises in, of, and for their communities.
02:07:54 Speaker_00
That's the kind of creativity that exists right now in the United States and everywhere else in the world that we work from Pakistan to Colombia.
02:08:02 Speaker_00
If I were, and I am, an investor that really cares about impact, I would urge myself and urge everyone else to think more expansively about themselves as investors using all the tools at our disposal. And for the big institutions,
02:08:20 Speaker_00
I would say one thing, that as long as we have an investment model that is still based on extraction, rather than
02:08:31 Speaker_00
actually investing for good, we are going to continue to build more and more inequality in ways that are fully unsustainable for this world.
02:08:41 Speaker_00
It has been really exciting to me to see not only a $700 billion impact investing sector emerge over the last 20 years, but also to see big companies like BlackRock and others say, enough. But we've got to move from a place where we do no harm
02:09:00 Speaker_00
to one where real investing is not only accounted for by what a few shareholders earn come what may, but that real investing is truly measured by the amount of the jobs, the beauty, the human capability, the opportunities that are enabled in the world.
02:09:20 Speaker_09
So I would love to ask you for some simple next steps for also each of those three categories, like what people could do tomorrow.
02:09:31 Speaker_09
And the reason I ask that is that I think it's very easy for people to take next steps towards impact investing, whether the form of investment is time or money or energy and to push it into the someday category. I think it's very easy to do.
02:09:49 Speaker_09
And I don't wrong them. I don't wrong anyone for that because it can seem like kind of stumbling through a fog if they don't have a direction in so much as if we take just an individual investor. I'll use myself as an example. It took me
02:10:06 Speaker_09
A long time to build the relationships in the deal flow in the for profit sector where the pass fail marks are very clearly defined to get to the point where.
02:10:17 Speaker_09
I could invest in really good companies and people who have developed those relationships and put in the time to get an understanding of let's just call it the. The more black and white capitalist model.
02:10:33 Speaker_09
It can be very intimidating, the idea of starting from scratch to try to figure out what makes a good impact investment.
02:10:41 Speaker_09
Could you speak to that for the person who has, we could tackle the investment side first, but the kind of individual, the institutional, and then a person with more time, like what could they do tomorrow or next week, for instance, is a simple answer like, hey, if you don't want to figure this out, invest in one of our for-profit impact funds.
02:11:00 Speaker_09
understanding that this podcast is not giving investment advice. I'm not a registered investment advisor, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I would love to hear what some simple next steps might be.
02:11:11 Speaker_09
If they agree with you, they want to begin to get some skin in the game, to get on the playing field.
02:11:20 Speaker_00
I mean, I appreciate the self-promotional invitation there, Tim.
02:11:25 Speaker_00
If I get to go down that path, I would say that the symbolist next step would be to get onto Acumen Academy on our website and check out the courses, including the Path of Moral Leadership that Seth Godin, who's so extraordinary in every way, has helped us build, which takes the different practices of the book and really looks at the examples
02:11:50 Speaker_00
of companies that go from chocolate and coffee in Columbia to bed nets to chickens in Ethiopia and really show some of the fundamental business models that have enabled extraordinary levels of change as well as identified role models.
02:12:09 Speaker_00
So I would get onto the Acumen Academy. The second would be both for institutional and individual. There are increasingly trade associations, for lack of a better word, that can direct you to really strong impact investors.
02:12:23 Speaker_00
The Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs is probably the best. Andie. Andie.org, I think. And so get smart. Learn.
02:12:33 Speaker_00
On the Acumen website are also all of our companies and the stories of many of them that give a real sense, again, not only of the possible, but of ways that people can get involved. As I said, Tim, all of our actions increasingly matter.
02:12:50 Speaker_00
And so pay more attention to where and how we buy and giving ourselves license within our communities to be a little radical in the way that we might make sure that we're investing in each other.
02:13:06 Speaker_00
and giving back more than we take, I think becomes a mantra every day. Having my brother Michael at Galaxy and going to such different routes as young people, and yet all along the way asking these questions of how do you change the world?
02:13:21 Speaker_00
How do you change the world? How do you change the world? I actually think it's about getting started where you can with what you have and who you are. But it's also about asking yourself the question, not, am I making more money?
02:13:34 Speaker_00
Am I richer, famous, more famous, more beautiful today? But rather, what am I doing in the way that I run my business, in the way that I invest my dollars, in the way that I interact with everyone from the waiter to the president of
02:13:50 Speaker_00
some fancy bank, what am I doing to insist on, elevate, and enable human dignity? I would start there, and then I'd get smart.
02:14:00 Speaker_09
You invoked the name of a mutual friend who texted me prior to this conversation also, Seth Godin.
02:14:09 Speaker_09
And I bring him back up because I think Seth would agree that it's easy to hide with big aspirations in the sense that if you say, well, I just want to change the world, It's easy to hide. You can make the argument that you're not ready.
02:14:27 Speaker_09
You can make the argument that you have to make a little bit more money. You can use all sorts of socially acceptable excuses not to take action, and that there are, in fact, easy things, simple things, and you can do the easy thing first.
02:14:43 Speaker_09
If in doubt, don't hit snooze for three years. Go to acumen.org. Just commit to spending 60 minutes educating yourself. You will learn something, or getting Manifesto for a Moral Revolution, your book.
02:14:57 Speaker_09
Commit to getting that on kindle maybe you try it for just twenty pages you give it a taste test see what you think there are simple things you can do first it's easy to hide behind the big ambitious world changing thing that may or may not come that's a way of hitting snooze and i think absorbing oneself of responsibility.
02:15:16 Speaker_09
And I'm as guilty of that as the next person, so I'm not casting stones. But there are some very simple options here, as you mentioned, including just going to acumen.org or acumen.org forward slash moral revolution.
02:15:28 Speaker_09
Dig around, commit to 30, 60 minutes. There's very limited downside. And I wanna ask you maybe two more questions. And one, I didn't wanna ask you earlier because I didn't wanna make you self-conscious.
02:15:43 Speaker_09
but you are really good, exceptional, at nailing the Goldilocks amount of using people's names. In this case, Tim, you use it very well. You don't overuse someone's name.
02:15:59 Speaker_09
It's a very effective way of, I would hope that I'm already engaged, but keeping me even more engaged. Is that something that you've always done, or is that something that you've developed somehow?
02:16:11 Speaker_00
Tim, you're making me laugh. You're reminding me of the first book thing I did with Blue Sweater. And I got off the stage and a famous actor came up to me and said, oh my god, you do real so well. And I was like, excuse me?
02:16:27 Speaker_09
Not to imply that this is some artificial thing. I feel like it's, of course, genuine, but it's something that not a lot of people do.
02:16:36 Speaker_09
Or they try to play real so deliberately that they end up saying your name every other sentence, and you're like, I feel like you're trying to sell me a used car or something. But you are very natural.
02:16:47 Speaker_00
I actually think it goes to immersion, which is probably why I didn't get to talk about many of the things I really wanted to talk about because I just get so focused on who you are and what you're talking about that, no, it's not conscious.
02:17:01 Speaker_00
It's not conscious. So I wish I had a better answer.
02:17:04 Speaker_09
Oh, what a gift. I quite appreciated it. Well, let's, let's give, I'm going to cheat.
02:17:09 Speaker_09
I'm going to ask you more than two questions, but my last question is going to be recommendations, closing comments, things you'd like to say before we wrap up for this round one.
02:17:19 Speaker_09
But would you like to give a teaser for other things that you would have liked to have talked about that we didn't get around to? Is there anything you'd like to mention lest it be left out of this, this first edition?
02:17:33 Speaker_00
I really appreciate that you are even asking me that opportunity, giving me that opportunity.
02:17:37 Speaker_00
And I think another reason that I probably know when to say your name or not, or don't even know, but without meaning to flatter, you truly are a deeply engaging conversationalist and interviewer. And I really appreciate that. Yeah, you really are.
02:17:52 Speaker_00
There are many things that I'd like to talk about in terms of what it actually means to bet on character.
02:18:00 Speaker_00
That I think that one of the mistakes I made at the beginning of Acumen was to be so excited by a particular technology or business idea and over time understanding character and that
02:18:14 Speaker_00
You used a lot of the words, the grit, the resiliency, the vision, the ability to take feedback. A whole other conversation I'd love to have with you is on courage. I shared with you at the beginning of this.
02:18:29 Speaker_00
that you do remind me of my brothers, plural, in that you've got just an extraordinary level of what looks like fearlessness. And I'm betting that you've learned to flex those fearlessness muscles early in your life, and you practice them all along.
02:18:47 Speaker_00
But because of the vulnerability and the real courage that you've shown in your podcast with Debbie Millman, there was a whole set of muscles that went untended.
02:18:58 Speaker_00
And that the key to us becoming not just good at what we do or famous or what have you, but becoming wise is to learn how to flex those muscles of courage that we don't always flex.
02:19:13 Speaker_00
And I think this is another moment in history that really demands that of us. And third, I'd love to go deeper into the holding of tensions. That we are at a moment in history where we have to learn
02:19:26 Speaker_00
how to find each other across what might seem like impossible divides to cross. And yet we're all we have, each other, and we're on this earth for a short time.
02:19:39 Speaker_00
And it's up to us to be a generation that actually gets stuff done rather than being seen as being blind and disconnected from one another. And so Acumen has worked for 20 years in communities where people are raised to hate each other.
02:19:54 Speaker_00
And when I think about who our global community is, it also has been raised with many, many different people who were taught to hate each other. And yet,
02:20:03 Speaker_00
It is possible to build out of diversity, a sense of wholeness, but not, not if we just focus on what we're getting from an organization or a nation or community, but the responsibility that we have for each other.
02:20:18 Speaker_00
And I hear that in different conversations that you've been having with people, and I'd love to go there too.
02:20:24 Speaker_00
Finally, I would just love to say you're really one of a kind, Tim Ferriss, and the prep and the curiosity that you bring, and frankly, the love that you bring to every conversation and to the work that you're doing is really unparalleled.
02:20:40 Speaker_00
When I think of true moral imagination, it's based in a deep curiosity and people who are willing to follow that thread. of curiosity to wherever it might lead. And so thank you for modeling that for all of us.
02:20:55 Speaker_09
Thank you so much. Talking about unflexed muscles, I'm not very, I haven't flexed the muscle of letting things land very much. So I'm going to tuck that away and think about it for the rest of today.
02:21:07 Speaker_09
So thank you very much for saying that and for providing such a wonderful conversation to me and to everyone listening. My God, you are so good. You're so good at this.
02:21:21 Speaker_09
And you're such an inspiration and I just love the fact that you have traveled so many paths that many would assume diverge and yet you have found a way to make them converge, if that makes sense. You have the operational chops.
02:21:44 Speaker_09
You have the toughness and the honesty to speak truth. And I recall the process of doing homework for this, finding someone, I can't recall who it was.
02:21:55 Speaker_09
saying something along the lines maybe an investor in one of your funds i don't know saying something along the lines of jaclyn you always talk about love but then we get you around the negotiating table and you're so hardcore and you are living proof that those do not need to be mutually exclusive furthermore, that they can be mutually reinforcing you can combine the hard and the soft in a way that is tremendously effective in the world.
02:22:23 Speaker_09
and that in fact there are some might say an imperative or there are imperatives to be able to combine those things and to not view them as separate.
02:22:34 Speaker_09
And I'm just so extremely happy that I had the chance to have this conversation and I hope it is just the first of many. So thank you again for taking the time.
02:22:45 Speaker_00
Thank you, Tim, and I'm just so honored, truly, and feel so, so privileged. And thank you, too, for making Manifest the hard and the soft. It's what we need to do in our world together, and so looking forward to many conversations as well.
02:23:01 Speaker_00
And I wish you good luck on this.
02:23:04 Speaker_09
To be continued, I love saying that, I always mean it, and I mean it very, very sincerely right now. Everyone, check out acumen.org. There's a lot there that is worth digging into.
02:23:18 Speaker_09
We will have show notes for everything we've discussed, links galore, resources galore at tim.blog forward slash podcast. That will be easy to find. And until next time, Ask dumb questions. They're often the smartest questions you could ask. Be honest.
02:23:38 Speaker_09
Bet on character. Use courage. It is the mother attribute for all other attributes. I'm stealing someone else's quote, but all other attributes at their testing point require courage. And thanks for tuning in. Hey guys, this is Tim again.
02:23:56 Speaker_09
Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend?
02:24:06 Speaker_09
Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel.
02:24:15 Speaker_09
It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered. or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things.
02:24:25 Speaker_09
It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests.
02:24:38 Speaker_09
And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So, if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about.
02:24:52 Speaker_09
If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening.
02:25:04 Speaker_09
I don't know about you guys, but I've had the experience of traveling overseas, and I try to access something, say a show on Amazon or elsewhere, and it says, not available in your current location, something like that.
02:25:16 Speaker_09
Or, creepier still, if you're at home, and this has happened to me, I search for something, or I type in a URL incorrectly, and then a screen for AT&T pops up, and it says, you might be searching for this, how about that?
02:25:30 Speaker_09
And it suggests an alternative, and I think to myself, wait a second, My internet service provider is tracking my searches and what I'm typing into the browser. Yeah, I don't love it. And a lot of you know, I take privacy and security very seriously.
02:25:44 Speaker_09
That is why I've been using today's episode sponsor ExpressVPN for several years now, and I recommend you check it out.
02:25:51 Speaker_09
When you connect to a secure VPN server, your internet traffic goes through an encrypted tunnel that nobody can see into, including hackers, governments, people in Starbucks, your internet service provider, etc.
02:26:02 Speaker_09
And no, you are not safe simply using incognito mode in your browser. This was something that I got wrong for a long time. Your activity might still be visible, as in the example I gave to your internet service provider.
02:26:13 Speaker_09
Incognito mode also does not hide your IP address. Also, with the example that I gave of you can't access this content or that content, wherever you happen to be, then you just set your server to a country where you can see it.
02:26:23 Speaker_09
And all of a sudden, voila, you can say log into your normal Amazon account as opposed to being routed to .UK or whatever, and everything works.
02:26:32 Speaker_09
So ExpressVPN protects you and enables you because it encrypts and reroutes your network traffic through secure servers. So even though your traffic is still passing through your internet provider, now they can't read it.
02:26:43 Speaker_09
ExpressVPN is so fast also it doesn't bog things down at all. I usually forget that I even have it on. I can stream high quality video with no lag or buffering even on servers thousands of miles away.
02:26:55 Speaker_09
It gives me access to servers in 105 countries around the world which is very helpful as I am constantly traveling and love to do so. It's easy to use. You just choose a server location and tap one button to connect. You do not need to be
02:27:09 Speaker_09
technologically savvy, you don't need to know anything about how it works. It's just one click, and it works on every device, phone, laptop, tablets, even TVs.
02:27:19 Speaker_09
ExpressVPN has really changed the way I use the internet, and I can't recommend it highly enough, so check it out. Right now, you can go to expressvpn.com slash tim and get three extra months for free when you sign up. Just go to
02:27:31 Speaker_09
ExpressVPN, E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash Tim for an extra three free months of ExpressVPN. One more time, ExpressVPN dot com slash Tim. Okay, this is going to be part confessional, as some of you know.
02:27:47 Speaker_09
I am recently single and navigating the world of modern dating. What a joy that is. Sometimes it's fun, but it's mostly a goddamn mess, as many of you probably know.
02:27:56 Speaker_09
I've tried all the dating apps, and while there are some slick options out there, the most functional that I have found is The League. Why did I end up using the League? First, most dating apps give you almost no information. It's a huge time suck.
02:28:11 Speaker_09
On the League, you're starting with a baseline of smart people, and you can then easily find the ones you're attracted to. It's much easier.
02:28:18 Speaker_09
It's like going to a conference where everyone is smart and then just looking for the people you think are cute to go up and speak with. So, more than half of the league users went to top 40 colleges, and you can make your filters really selective.
02:28:32 Speaker_09
So if that's important to you, then go for it. It does work, and that is one of the reasons that I use it. Second, people verify using LinkedIn, so you can make sure they have a job and don't bounce around every six months.
02:28:44 Speaker_09
It's a simple proxy for finding people who have their shit together. It's infinitely easier than trying to figure things out on Instagram or whatever. Third, you can search by interest and in multiple locations.
02:28:56 Speaker_09
I haven't found any other dating app that allows you to do this. For instance, I usually search for women who love skiing or snowboarding, have those as interests as I like to spend, say, two to three months of the year in the mountains.
02:29:07 Speaker_09
I'm a rivers and mountains guy. The UI is a little clunky, I'll warn you, but it's incredibly helpful for finding good matches and not just pretty faces. So you can search by interest and specify multiple cities.
02:29:19 Speaker_09
So to summarize a few things that I think make it stand out. Features available on the league include multi-city dating, LinkedIn verified profiles, ability to block your profile from co-workers, bosses, family, et cetera. That's very easy to do.
02:29:32 Speaker_09
You can search by interest, you can get profile stats, and there is a personal concierge in the app. So there's someone you can text with within the app as a personal concierge to get help. So what am I looking for?
02:29:44 Speaker_09
I am looking for a woman who is well-educated, who loves skiing or snowboarding, or both. These are, and I've used this word already, proxies for like 20 other things that are important, so I'll leave it at that for now.
02:29:56 Speaker_09
Someone who's default upbeat, likes to smile, smiles often, glass half full type of person, who would ideally like to have kids in the next few years.
02:30:06 Speaker_09
Her friends would describe her as feminine and playful, and she would love polarity in a relationship. She's athletic and has some muscle, I like strong women. not necessarily bodybuilders, but you get the idea.
02:30:15 Speaker_09
It could be a rock climber, dancer, whatever, but has some muscle, loves to read and loves learning. If this sounds like you, send hashtag date Tim. So hashtag date Tim in a message to your concierge in the app to get us paired up.
02:30:28 Speaker_09
So these are all reasons why I was excited when the league reached out to sponsor the podcast. They even have daily speed dating where you can go on three, three minute dates with people who match your preferences all from the comfort of your couch. So
02:30:40 Speaker_09
So check it out, download The League today on iOS or Android and find people who challenge you to swing for the fences and who are in it to win it. I found it to be super fascinating.
02:30:51 Speaker_09
You can really get good matches instead of just looking at pretty faces and kind of rolling the dice over and over again. Much better. So download The League today on iOS or Android and check it out.
02:31:01 Speaker_09
Message hashtag Tim to your in-app concierge to jump to the front of the wait list and have your profile reviewed first. So check it out, The League. on iOS or Android.