[The Art of Moral Imagination: Lessons from Jamie Foxx and Jacqueline Novogratz]-[#758: Jamie Foxx and Jacqueline Novogratz]

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Laying Tim Ferris show.

Hello boys and girls ladies and germs.

This is Tim Ferris, welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris 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.

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 past 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 to give you these super combo episodes 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.

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 I said why me a song like what you mean he said I got this song he says I want to record that so you happen to be in luck because I got a studio in the back so we're going to back and my studio at that time I called it the Porsche was lot smaller than this it was really like niff it's like a legit compact it was compact the sound was to see I had a engineers from all over the city dialed 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 he says okay the song goes like this he says he wants a Marvin Gaye some Luther Vanger hit it now he said but I know it's a hit we did blame it on the alcohol that night I sang it exactly like the record which goes way in contrast to my R&B roots because it was auto tune and everything like that but we wanted to sing it exactly like the demo so we would lose the essence of it 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 the strip club we went we went we went we did the 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 my man Pekas took us around and I will go into the club and use my comedic you know vernacular to get the song off I said fellas you ever been at the club you meet a girl you been drinking you think she look like Halle Berry you get her back home she looks like Halle scary you know what you got to do blame it on the goose guys feeling loose blame it on the stop the record ladies you ever meet a guy you get back to the house with him and you been drinking too much and you say I usually don't do this but you do it anyway you got to blame it on the 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 long story longer blaming on alcohol was done here slow jam was done here so this studio has that essence to it that you just you don't throw it out of way and just a building itself the Tasha betting feels been here she's cut Kelly Rowlands 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 a young man by the name of Ed sharing slept on this carpet for like six weeks trying to get his music career gone he came from over from London he heard about a lot like I said a lot of history and it has that magic to it is well the mojo yeah how do you think of teaching confidence with your own kids because you're you're clearly very confident guy yeah grandmother was very bold very strong woman how do you try to teach that to your kids well what you do with your kids is like when my daughter is like there's a phrase that when you see on the lease I my daughter my oldest daughter Karin I would always ask them what's on the other side of fear and they'd be like huh I said what's on the other side of it meaning like if I stood in the middle of this floor right now just yell what's on the other side of it or if I stood on the middle of the floor man what's on the other side of meaning like either you do or you don't but there's no penalty there's no reward it's just just be yourself so I taught them what's on the other side of fear nothing people are nervous for no reason because there's nothing no one's gonna come out and slap you or beat you everything you're just nervous so why even have that 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 school teacher or tech guy or whatever or girl whatever it is there's nothing on the other side of it what's on the other side of fear nothing I like it when people say well so nervous what do you nervous about reminds me of this quote that I sort of recite to myself and I'm gonna paraphrase it because I have it written down but it's from Mark Twain and says I'm an old man who's known a great many troubles most of which never happened yeah exactly because all of it is in our head when we talk about fear or lack of being aggressive or 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 so if you start early if they are a shy person they just won't be as shy if you keep instilling those things so the mimicry the impersonation yeah how early that start because I read and 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 behave by letting you tell Joe yeah they will let me tell Joe because I would get in trouble miss Reeves my 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 I lived in a school so I I'd 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 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 was the kid 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 a jai you guys when you when you're hearing this go google these guys a young Jay Leno these are like sort of like you know Richard prior what so I would take those jokes and tell him a school because those kids when he's telling me he's Richard prior on Fridays well he says I'm primed up so what's your prior prime time you couldn't you couldn't he couldn't really say anything on prime to he was clean but like rich little google rich little because rich little was the first person and I saw doing personations this had to be like 76 1976 so like fifth grade for me the joke was uh Jimmy Carter which was the president at the time singing you light up my life and at that time his brother oh was getting caught drunk all the time like Billy so it was a Jimmy Carter going so many nights oh me my brother Billy would sit by the window waiting for somebody to bring some peanuts and beer and so that was my first attempt at an impersonation and then it went on from there to do a Richard Neckstreet in Ireland my broccia so you know who else would I do Reagan but here's it Reagan came later but Reagan came like in the 80s when I was actually like 21 now is the first black guy doing the Reagan impersonation probably the only one so I would be on stage doing my impersonations and going to Ronald Reagan people they're like no I didn't know where well well as a matter of fact I uh well no there you go again and so that being uh come with the fuck here here with the three little pits so you know it's but the key is this and at the same time Kermit the Frog who well sounds like that Sammy Davis Jr.

a little bit and because you know man 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 saying me day's Jr.

I can't be figured because man you know it's the same voice you know so that's sort of like the mechanical way of getting to the impress 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.

mannerisms are important because like uh like I do it in 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 as GoRoe you know in this GoRoe you know the game of basketball you know we just try to you know you know it's that you know it's right it's right after it's right after playing you know when he comes up to off the court they catch him he still tired 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 quality of the physicality of of someone like LeBron or you know different different personalities bring rap bring about different things what is your birthday Eric Marlin Bishop and how did Eric Marlin Bishop become Jamie Foxx man I was Eric Marlin Bishop graduated high school 86 I get out to California and I started doing I'm in college and in doing the music but I will go up on these open mic nights for comedy so I'll go I do really well did I get get like standing onvation and then I came to LA got a standing onvation and then when I came back every week I wouldn't get called up I was like man what what's going on how does the open mic work what is it is 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 are going up so I went up I had a great set then for the next three four weeks I didn't they never called my name I said yo my name did you see my name yeah yeah you weren't on the list you were on the list but we we got out of the people but I found out that the comedians you're gonna you're the fresh meat I said what's that they were shooting evening at the improv this old old comic show back in the day see 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 fresh meat fresh meat I said cool so I go up in between two of the guys get a standing onvation people like who's the kid is he on the show it's nice fresh means amateurs so then they started yelling my name yo Jamie yo Jamie hey Jamie but I'm not used to so now they think I'm arrogant it's some other fucking things he's the she's not even listening to us so I took that name in a stuck and then I started building everything off of it I'm back in the day people used to wear jackets and put names on the jacket so I had sly as a dot dot dot coming to the fox hole fox hole you know things like that by the time you got to doing the open mics getting up on stage were you nervous were you afraid or are you over it because you because first I looked at it first like I I went to an open mic night and saw the guys I was like man he's terrible 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 just fucking around so if I hit cool if I miss I wouldn't try to be that anyway you know I wanted to do more music but but when I went on stage it was just like it was just natural was a you know I belong here so I think that's the thing too when it comes to entertainment a question that I have to always ask them like yo 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 when it's either executing a song or executing the joke or executing things within entertainment it's cool but then you have to wonder like how do you get it off like how do you like even now when you talk about the Bill Cosby joke back in the day we just tell the joke 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 is just like you know questions does that make sense makes sense no that makes sense the considerations have you bombed on stage before oh yeah two things when you are bombing what is your internal dialogue or response and then I'm trying to dialogue is boy you staying but you bomb it I bomb and it wasn't a lot of I only bomb like twice do you remember your first yeah I did this this show for this guy named laddermore old blue singer I'm 21 what was this name laddermore laddermore sounds like Voldemort yeah ladder more so this guy saw me at this other club saying hey man you know ladder mobs before I'm around the corner man would you come open whatever I say how much you paid he's a pet fifty dollar I say I'm there fifty bucks I need it so this is like 8990 so I get there and I don't know who laddermore is I just know it's a lot of older people like I mean like oh oh oh shit what are people at these other people so I go up and the setting was different it was like the chairs and stuff away in a bit like a banquet setting and it's in the middle of the hood you know crensho 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 and I how you feel and he started doing these old stock jokes kills so I said okay now I know what it is you got to 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 and so what I started doing from that they aren't I would go to like DeMorne Ile Davenport Ile boys the Idaho where it's all white gun and some Colorado all white and I would go do like 40 minutes of all black material to see what they understood what they didn't understand so I go to these all white places and they understood 15 minutes I logged that 15 minutes I can go to any place where it's just all white that you would determine if they understood it by the way by that you know I would ask y'all know who this is as well I would tell the joke if 15 minutes they understood that I can go to any place in the world that's all white and they get it then I will go to my chocolate city Chicago DC Florida and do all of my political high brow stuff and see what the black folks understood man what the fuck you doubt my doubt now they understood 15 minutes now I got 15 to 30 minutes of what it's crazy out here you know they're so finicky right my fuckers are looking at me like what the fuckers you talking about and then I'll tell my you know the square footage of the house man when you get a certain square feet man that's you this crazy maintaining you know mother fuckers like mother fuck if you don't get off the guy damn say I lost it I lost it and I walked off stage and all of a sudden I walk off stage they're giving up for Jamie Foxx and I'm thinking they're going crazy yeah yeah thank you 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 and I opened the door and there was a kid skinny little tank top on barely fit his name was Chris Tucker he was smash 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 where people were laughing so hard like I said he's gonna kill somebody like when he says last night how was your I kill it's gonna be true somebody gonna have a fucking heart attack and I sat down and I said and I went I can't do that I lost that so I left went to another club at night bomb like wasn't just you know so finally I went over the ok now where the troops were I started doing standing over there for the troops to sort of get back with my rocky moment like you know I started running up the steps chasing chickens and shit bap bap bap bap bap bap bap bap bap trying to get back for a stand up comedian that's the one thing you can never let go you can never stop being 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 and then you got acknowledge it ok I stunk yeah yeah cuz they're gonna let you know yo of acumen a global force of entrepreneurs investors philanthropists and social innovators working together to break the cycle of poverty the New York Times best selling 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 you can find Jacqueline on Twitter and Instagram at Jane Novagratz Jacqueline welcome to the show it's great to be here with you Tim thank you I'm going to just go with the layup I'm not gonna 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 just give us a little bit of color there so we know from where you have come I was raised in a four bedroom house with seven siblings seven of us amazing parents that 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 cowboys who are also expected to somehow be good 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 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 I think it was a funny combination of one constraint and the early 1980s that was my first job now how did you end up traveling the world 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 you're going to travel the world meet fascinating people learn various ab and see about 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 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 and they literally would send us around the world a month at a time I think I was in New York three weeks one year and you would just get this note on your desk that you had to be in Kuala Lumpur three days from mass this whiz kid I was the same person nothing had changed and how ephemeral the way the world sees you became to me 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 to speak that truth even through traveling lips yeah wow what a story I mean it's it's something that's so few people especially new hires would actually dare to do 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 that's quite a move it sounds like that wasn't a first though that you'd sort of cultivated this speaking of truth coming up to that point is that accurate 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 a great gift of my latest book of asking I wouldn't say dumb questions asking the questions 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 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 am I missing anything I've actually never thought about it for myself personally but it deeply resonates that I am not comfortable in it's hard sometimes both for people who work with me and for the people who take our courses online at laying out a roadmap because the world is too complex for a step-by-step guide to how to solve poverty 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 that was incredibly hard because we were all raised to quote unquote do the right thing 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 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 I read about Muhammad unis in the Grammy in Bank and in 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 I met with absolute crushing failure made all the worst because I turned on this really big job offer.

So we're we're going to definitely roll up our sleeves and get into the crushing failure but before we do maybe we'll 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 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 tell them know what to do and I'm not asking so much for prescriptive advice yet we might get to that but how did you at that time especially this is pre-internet how did you find this next Lily Pat to jump to and then please tell us about your crushing defeat again we had far less tools then and so I had read one tiny article about Grammy in Bank which was still very obscure I sent a letter to Muhammad Yunus that probably never reached Bangladesh and then I heard from a young woman who also was at Chase that her aunt that 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 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 I knew that if I were waiting for the perfect I wouldn't have done it I also knew I might lose my nerve and it was the only thing that was on offer to really test out my theory that the powers that be 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 said well they're they're gonna poison you and they're also talking about voodoo holy shit Jesus and you know I don't believe in voodoo but I will tell you when you are a single person except for this incredible Nigerian woman who's profented you I would lie in bed and I'd feel like is anybody here coming to get me and and then I got unbelievably sick with food poisoning like deadly sick 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 I couldn't go there I couldn't be full and potent as the real things and so there was particularly those years a lot of gitty you know people believed in and wearing different amulets and medicines in a way you see the guys in Silicon Valley kind of replacing that with new things that we do to give us a sense of strength and so the way I always attributed it to which is why I would never accuse anyone having done it but the threat of it and my own fear and isolation I may have been made manifest in this literal purging that I did 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 two Tim it was 30 years ago and the world operated in very different ways 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 and love all of its different layers and see the reflection in our own societies we just make manifest in different ways at the time though you had just suffered this defeat of sorts it had really met with tremendous opposition what was your first meaningful win after that in your mind could be small or big or the first time when you're like okay this this isn't a fool's errand like I'm actually on to something I'm on the right track here that's such an interesting question I had another crushing failure rate that that she was from Rwanda which was a country I was completely unfamiliar with at the time in fact I thought she said Uganda 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 impaired and until that moment we're unable to open a bank account without their husband's signature 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 institutions specifically for women 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 really did feel the sense that if we could get markets to work for poor women they would have so much more dignity than what I've been seeing that I probably went for a three-week assignment and knew somewhere inside of me that I wasn't leaving to wait bilge hey over that period of time I would say that the whole first year and a half was that slog I would say a combination of this man Tony Triciano when he'd given me this job offer and he was like you're gonna go to Africa it's instead of do this and I was like Mr.

Triciano 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 would I go back to him as a complete failure I have to like show him that we can do something but also Tim I saw the vibrancy I saw the beauty and this world that I had never imagined existed with people who were so amonately capable but who weren't really given a chance to be everything that they could be 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 I had something to offer so coming back to the book mark of Rwanda and you finally start to in close collaboration with these co-founders these these local women create something meaningful you start to chalk up some marks in the wind category how do we go from there to acumen what is the timeline or the series of events that leads 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's makes for at least for me a fascinating study because people get to see sort of how you got to the point where you could self perpetuate and kind of build success on success so Rwanda to acumen so Rwanda to acumen saw both the power of using markets with the with the microfinance I learned markets is important without the capabilities of actually using those that access we're only halfway there I think because I was beginning to understand that I wanted to build companies not just make small loans that I wanted new skills 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 sushana kido go which means little girl 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 doesn't matter why Stanford besides the pretty trees on palm drive 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 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 and and seeing my co-founders play at every role at the genocide from being murdered to watching their families be murdered to being bystanders I think that was probably one of the most important 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 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 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 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 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 we're seeing that today not to mention not consider the environment if government decides everything or top down a process 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 with anything but power and so the question I started asking myself is what if we looked at capitalist capital understand it exists on a spectrum take the power of business and capital perpetrators of sure you had interacted on some level even just going to the market or otherwise with people who are on all sides of this could you speak to that 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 like to hear any of that first thought is absolutely that I didn't just know people in the market our first executive director was jald is being one of the highest ranking or the highest ranking planner at the genocide 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 put to power or the the genocide regime she switched and so early on I saw those who seek power and those who seek purpose and that power can be very tempting 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 pray on insecurity and sometimes make us do terrible things and that's where monsters and angels came in I was literally sitting in a in a prison with Agnes the woman who was the major perpetrator need any asking her how this could have happened and there she was Tim in a pink dress that the prisoners uniform her head shaped bald with a freckled face you know she looked like a young woman she didn't look like a monster and we had founded this institution together we're taught that there are bad people in good be rather than could we focus on the values here 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 problem everything you just said I think is so it's always been important 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 and just to comment a bit further on that I would encourage everyone out there to to look at the the work of Darren Brown so Darren Brown is a mentalist performer also an incredible artist from the UK and he has a number of of specials including one called the push he has another I can't recall the name of but the the objective putting ethical considerations aside the objective is to show how you can mold people who are otherwise upstanding moral people to do terrible things like push someone off a building or to shoot someone and the sad reality is that it is very much possible and that it's easy to 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 a member of the Nazi part for people who make two or three dollars a day where there's no infrastructure there's no trust there are very few skills ed talent there's a lot of corruption and complacency 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 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 once you had cell phone technology and you could text customers 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 I don't really think you want to hear it anyway but in this case the more anonymity they had the clearer people would give so imagine a solar light company allowed acumen to partner with just incredible market makers like the guys who founded Delight which has brought clean solar light and electricity to over a hundred 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 I think that's the next frontier in so many ways.

So you give an example just one example of many of just the scale the large scale impact that acumen and these these various spin-offs and for-profit funds have been able to have in the world but if we go back to 2001 circa 2001 acumen you know I always like to ask aside from acumen did you have any other names that were on the short list for consideration that you remember do you remember any other rough choice or was it of course I do in fact we had a you know 2001 just to put us back again it was the dot com craziness well 2000 2001 by 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 and so I had this night at the Rockfeller Foundation where I was working in and we came up with really really great names including eight-year grandma's philanthropy there is something to that there are moments when you feel like you're drowning but then you come out to clarity but so we decided 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 I think now in fact our housing company in Pakistan javat aslam he actually named one of his funds the immersion fund once you really think about it's a beautiful word all of us right now need to immerse more in each other's lives 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 yeah I was just going to ask if you could just explore for a moment then we're going to come back to acumen and I'm going to ask you about the earliest wins and if you could speak to those doubts at some levels so sorry for these people that didn't get to have a Christmas 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 hung over we drove into this place that I'd never been to a place like that before and it was literally when we got to the house it's like a shanty a shack and suddenly I just felt shame to him 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 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 I threw it on the porch I ran back to the car I 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 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 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 I think there's a real role for moving from that place of empathy and from that place of unbridled love in a moment our job right now when 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 that's what my obsession is thank you we're explaining that and telling that story also which I think drives it home acumen so wing in a prayer good idea if you tested the name here we go buckle up do you recall any of the first wins where you're like okay I think this might actually do something oh yeah I might recall like it was yesterday we had helped put together this collaboration this deal to bring long-lasting malaria bednets into Tanzania it started with sumitoma who I 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 Asia where the long-lasting bed nets were created 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 was going to look like and of course I'd 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 I love operations factory operations a few months later I went back in the before two months later I went back in the were eight and there was that moment 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 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 and not so little anymore company in Arusha Tanzania I was like bingo this is what we're about boom proof of concept boom let's look at this example because I'd 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 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 candidate oh critical to where the nation is now when it comes to the poor or low income people the you know you mentioned Sumitomo which is Japanese and developing an ecosystem around a company is in some ways very Japanese concept or something it's been very well explored and developed in the k-dits of these I suppose conglomerates would be a lazy way to translate that in Japan but that as is a very long-term approach yeah absolutely I mean let's look at some of these companies they've lasted 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 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 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 you actually were boots on the ground getting firsthand experience in an immersive way of what entrepreneurship looked like in your chosen environment you got your 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 don't start by asking you know 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 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 there is something so powerful and I think this is what you're getting at to Tim in apprenticing I would say I apprenticed for 15 years and also to your point that bakery in some ways probably look like a Girl Scout project to a lot of people 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 I also saw that we could succeed and I had to let go of a lot of my assumptions yeah again and so I do think you're right 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 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 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 I have to think Jim call it said that to me when I was like enough to be his student and I have paraphrased Jim I say that a lot where it's like well you know Jack on age keep my options open I'm like seriously just commit to something this we don't tell young people or even old people in unburdening of me centric living that comes from dedicating yourself to something larger is is really profound and I mean it's not entirely altruistic it's so relieving I just it's hard to overstate that and I'm glad you mentioned it well and none of this is entirely altruistic if we're seeking purpose if we all buy into you know throws that so many men live lives of quiet desperation and we don't want to be those people then there is no clear path then 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 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 what does not drive them is is just profit though they recognize they need the profit for long-term financial sustainability and scale it's the prioritization you mentioned following a leader earlier and also practicing and there are many different types of leaders out there many people who might seem to be good mentors but make terrible mentors could you speak to an example in your life that I think we're all yearning for in our leaders today John could have done anything but when I think about what legacy is I think about him and I look at the now you know we've had over a million sign-ups on our on-accommodic academy when I see these hundreds and hundreds of acumen fellows and the entrepreneurs I sometimes hear John's words in them and I think 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 so Jacqueline I've good news bad news depending it's actually the same news I just don't know how you're gonna take it which is I think we're gonna have to do or I would like to do around two at some point because there's no way we're gonna cover even a fraction of what I have in front of you but but yeah oh definitely not to do are you kidding me you've been you've been 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 the shorter question is gonna be about books and the longer questions are going to be about advice to different types of listeners those people who have more time.

Well that really taught me to not see through anybody ever but the book I give right now in this time of so much despair is Victor Frankl's man search for meaning where he really looks at people in the Holocaust 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 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 and I have seen myself personally so often that in the darkest times we can find our best selves and that's our opportunity right now and so I think for this moment Tim man search for meaning is should be required reading for all of us I could not endorse that strongly enough for it get healthy affordable food 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 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 so he's created a university and he's now raised probably three of 13 million dollars you know seven-year debt at two percent 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 thousand dollar 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 and for their communities 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 example you know it took me a long time to build the relationships and the deal flow in the for-profit sector where the past fail marks are very clearly defined to get to the point where I could invest in really good companies and for 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 it can be very intimidating the idea of starting from scratch to try to figure out what makes a good impact investment could you speak to that for the person who has you 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 is a simple answer like hey if you don't want to figure this out invest in one of our four profit impact funds 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 neck and each other and giving back more than we take I think becomes a mantra every day having a my brother Michael at Galaxy and going to such different roots as young people and yet all along the way asking these questions of how do you change the world 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 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 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 you invoked the name of mutual friend who texted me prior to this conversation also Seth Goden 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 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 if in doubt don't hit snooze for three years go to acumen.org just commit to spending 68 minutes educating yourself you will learn something or getting manifesto for a moral revolution your book commit to getting that on Kindle maybe you try it for just 20 pages you give it a taste test see what to think there are simple things that you can do first and 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 absolving oneself of responsibility and I'm as guilty of that as an expert 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 dig around commit to 30 60 minutes there's very limited downside and I want to lose muscles of courage that we don't always flex 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 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 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 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 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 and I hear that in different conversations that you've been having with people and I'd love to go there too finally I would just love to say you're really one of a kind to embarrassed 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 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 thank you so much and talking about unflexed muscles I'm not very I haven't flexed the muscle of letting things land very much so I'm gonna I'm gonna tuck that away and think about it for the rest of today 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 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 shops you have the toughness and the honesty to speak truth and I wrote 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 and that in fact there are someites an imperative or there are imperatives to be able to combine those things and to not view them as separate and I'm just so extremely happy that I have the chance to have this conversation and I hope it is just the first of many so thank you again for taking the time thank you Tim and I I'm just so honored truly and feel so so privileged and thank you too for making manifest the heart and the soft it's what we need to do in our world together and so looking forward to many conversations as well and I wish you good luck on this to be content and it says not available in your current location something like that or creepy or still if you're at home and this is happening 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 and it suggests an alternative and I think to myself the weight of second my internet service provider is tracking my searches and when 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 that is why I've been using today's episode sponsor express VPN for several years now and I recommend you check it out when you connect to secure VPN server your internet traffic goes through an encrypted tunnel that nobody can see into including hackers governments people and Starbucks your internet service provider etc and no you're 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 smart people and you can then easily find the ones you're attracted to it's much easier it's like going to a conference where everyone is smart and then just looking for the people you think are cute to go and speak with so more than half of the league users want to top-form colleges and you can make your filters really selective 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 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 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 I'm a rivers and mountains guy the UIs 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 so to summarize a few things that I think make it stand out features available on the league include multi-city dating linked in verified profiles ability to block your profile from co-workers bosses family etc that's very easy to do you can search by interest you can get profile stats and there is a personal