An Army of Normal Folks - Steve Wanta: How To Loan Money 100% of The Time (Pt 2)

Episode Date: November 18, 2025

Steve Wanta is the co-founder of JUST, a nonprofit lender to 14,000 black and brown female entrepreneurs in Texas. And because they’ve built an unheard of system based on trust and community, they’re achieving unheard of results such as loaning money to 100% of applicants while also being repaid 99% of the time! Support the show: https://www.normalfolks.us/premiumSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey, everybody. It's Bill Courtney with an army of normal folks, and we continue now with part two of our conversation with Steve Wanta, right after these brief messages from our generous sponsors. I'm Robert Smith, and this is Jacob Goldstein, and we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the, the best ideas and people and businesses in history. And some of the worst people. Horrible ideas and destructive companies in the history of business. Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing. It's like not having it at all.

It's a very simple, elegant lesson. Make something people want. First episode, how Southwest Airlines use cheap seats and free whiskey to fight its way into the airline business. The most Texas story ever. There's a lot of mavericks in that story where you're, We're going to have mavericks on the show. We have plenty of robber barons. So many robber barons.

And you know what? They're not all bad. And we'll talk about some of the classic great moments of famous business geniuses, along with some of the darker moments that often get overlooked. Like Thomas Edison and the Elections Channel. Listen to business history on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What do you get when you mix 1950s Hollywood? A Cuban musician with a dream and one of the most iconic,

it comes of all time. You get Desi Arnaz, a trailblazer, a businessman, a husband, and maybe most importantly, the first Latino to break prime time wide open. I'm Wilmer Valderama, and yes, I grew up watching him, probably just like you and millions of others. But for me, I saw myself in his story. From plening canary cages to this night here in New York, it's a long ways. On the podcast starring Desi Arnaz and Wilmer Valderrama, I'll take you in a journey to Desi's life, the moments it has overlapped with mine, how he redefined American television and what that meant for all of us watching from the sidelines, waiting for a face like hours on screen. This is the story of how one man's spotlight lit the path for so many others and how we carry his legacy today. Listen to starring

Desi Arnaz and Wilmer Valderrama as part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Malcolm Gladwell here. This season on revisionist history, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama, where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control. 35 years. That's how long Elizabeth's and its family waited for justice to occur. 35 long years. I want to figure out why this case went on for as long as it did, why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way, and why, despite our best efforts to resolve suffering, we all too often make suffering worse.

He would say to himself, turn to the right, to the victim's family, and apologize, turn to the left, tell my family I love him. So he would have this little practice, to the right, I'm sorry, to the left, I love you. From Revisionous History, this is The Alabama Murders. Listen to Revisionist History, The Alabama Murders on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, it's Ed Helms, and welcome back to Snafoo, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode.

32 lost nuclear weapons. Wait, stop? What? Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player. Who still wore knee pads? Yes. It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Shear made me feel.

good. I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched. You're here. What was that like for you to soft launch into the show? Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today. I forgot whose podcast we were doing. Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of Snap-Fu with Ed Helms on the I-Hart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome, fellow seekers of the dark. I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me in Nocturno?

Tales from the Shadows. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends and lore of Latin America. Take a trip from ghastly encounters with evil spirits to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural. creatures and experience the horrors to have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows.

Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you. get your podcast. That's exciting. That's kind of cool. That's new and fresh and no dime plants and cubicles. Yeah. And I've got a salary now.

And you're connected to like Whole Foods, which is cool. Totally. And my job description was, don't be in Austin. That was it. That was it. That success. Did you have an American base? Austin, and I came back.

It was like such a gift. I'd come back to hang out in Austin for like three days, and I would get on a plane and go back to Guatemala where I was a Peace Corps volunteer. It was, it was, I did something right in a former life. Yeah. And how many, and how many of these, one in Guatemala and one in Costa Rica initially?

Yeah, one in Guatemala and one in Costa Rica. And then the foundation had grand aspirations. Let's get, to serve as many places as we could in the world. Scale it. It's scale. And so my job then became finding, different similar organizations because we realize there's tons of groups that do

this sort of stuff. We chose the hardest way first. The biggest risk because it's not the first loan. It's actually you build a system that can sustain itself. That is the key to what allowed this work to scale across the... So what do these microloans look like in

Guatemala when you start? Yeah, it was women buying lumps, sums of flour to make tortillas. They make tortillas in their house. They would buy chickens.

So what reality of microcredit is you've got to manage that triple whammy, low-income volatile. So one of the ways you do that is make a loan. And then they pay back frequently weekly

with a little bit of interest and that allows them to manage cash flow so they can, by the end of their six months, they can pay off the loan and without a lot of pain. Hopefully they're making more money.

Is there any financial literacy teaching that goes along with this because if someone's never seen a pizza store only 15 minutes from their village, I would imagine conceptually the idea of interest and boring and paying back when you've never seen a lump sum together at one place in your life, there has to be some education that goes long. Yeah, so a lot of it is around, in the traditional microcredit model, a lot of it is around discipline and showing up, which in and of itself could be really hard, especially if you have a lot of other pressures.

So in so many ways, their focus was on keep showing up, keep showing up. So in Guatemala, when I worked with these Bangladeshis, the things that we did for five days was make sure people could show up and bring 25 cents. And then they learned to move from their thumbprint for their signature to actually signing their name. Wow. So that was the context in Guatemala, and that was the application of that, like, keep showing up. And, you know, for me, I, you know, I traveled the world for 10 years, finding in funding these groups all across Africa.

I lived in Indonesia for six months, all with Whole Foods. And I felt like, man, there's a huge opportunity to see the community as the point and figure out how that can be this beautiful source of support. and transformation. So I thought microcredit did a great job of figuring how to scale the transaction. I wanted to figure out how we scale the transformation. Give us a sense after, I don't know,

pick a time, 12 months, 18 months, two years, whatever, a benchmark that you think is reasonable that in Guatemala and Costa Rica on this first foray into this microcredit world that whole foods took, the transformation that you saw. Yeah, there is so many challenges facing someone in rural poverty

and there's only so much the money can do. That's what I was wondering. That's why I asked. None of this is in Alex's prop. I'm actually, I'm kind of chasing your story now. I'm curious. I mean, what did this, let's be honest, did this do any damn good?

That's what I'm asking. Yeah, and I think this is, So microcredit oftentimes gives a real insular community. And there's a lot of academics that research it. There was really a lot of attention post-Nobo Peace Prize. So Mohammed Yunnan won the Nobel Peace Prize a year after we started working with them. And people were really excited. At the same time, they started to see that microcredit meant a lot of different things,

a lot of different people. Unis started to call the new version of microcredit, just different version of loan sharks. So there's a lot of internal debate. I wondered about that. Yeah. What was the interest right? So I think in Guatemala, it might have been like,

it was really low. Costs compared to like 20%, but the way it's structured, they'd actually only be, because they pay back principal and interest every single week. It'd be in like a cost like 10%. Okay. So, but in other places, it's like 70, 100.

Really? Yeah. So there's a couple success stories from the capital market perspective. One in India, one in Mexico. This group in India, they serving millions. They learned from Germin. And ultimately, there was real concerns around the level of pressure they put on really poor people to pay back.

So there was a bunch of things that came. out saying, like, I don't know if this is a good thing. In Mexico, there's a group called Compartamos, and they were the darling child because they also scaled. They were serving hundreds of thousands of people, millions, tens of millions of dollars. They went public. This microcredit institution went public in the Mexican market and everybody celebrated. But the next day, they said, well, let's look behind the curtain a little bit. And they were charging like 98% interest. Wow. So one camp would argue our job, access is so important that our job is to serve as many people as possible. The way we do that is be as profitable as we can. But I've believed

that if your focus is transformation, then you're going to ask different questions. What the industry did was talk about financial inclusion, how do we scale access, which isn't the game that I'm interested in playing. But I also appreciate many of the things and the reasons and how they could do that. So I think trying to reimagine things that already exist is, I think, the heart of the innovation. I didn't mean to say this. I wasn't planning on saying it, but what you just said reminded me of an article that I couldn't tell you when, how long ago, or where I read it, but I do remember reading it. And one of them was about a similar business model to try to help people in poverty with loaning money.

And this organization originally wanted to make it easier to pay back the money because transportation, a lot of the people they found were having to take one day off work of productivity to travel to pay back the money. So they said, well, that's easy. We'll allow them to keep that extra productivity, and we'll go to them to collect the money. But within three months, they were started to being viewed as like the Italian Guido coming to break your kneecaps if you didn't pay us. And then instead of, they had 95% of the people they were loaning money to actually showing up, half the people, when they went to get the money, many of whom were the words, would you? show up and pay their money when they say you come and would run out the back door.

Yeah. So it was this weird deal that the good intentions actually screwed up the whole system. And I can't help but wonder, you know, in this microcredit lending world that you were exploring and learning and everything, that even though it really was well-intentioned, I hear you say, but the point is we have to make money to be able to service more people. Does the making money end up being an impediment serving more people? There's a bunch of questions because this poverty is very complex. And what I've come to realize is that there's not a silver bullet.

And my credit is important from a perspective of people need access. And if they don't have money, how do you get money? How do you build stability? How do you build wealth without money? You have no money. So, you know, in the United States, we're really great at assessing people's past so we can say no to their future.

So if you compare microcredit in the context of the United States, it's beautiful. It's very special. And I think what I always saw, the thing that I struggled with was it wasn't enough. I am deeply impatient. And I feel like it's not good enough. And what is the magical part is this relationship

that you build with people. so you have a responsibility to keep pushing, new, more, and better. And I feel like people are happy enough with making a bunch of loans. And I felt like that's not for me. Okay. So how long did you do this for the Whole Foods thing? Ten years. Wow.

I got to travel. I mean, I got to travel the world, but on all over, I think like probably 70 countries. And got to give away money. what's wrong with that? Give me away somebody else's money, too. Totally. That's the greatest thing. You know, and I get a 20% discount on Whole Foods.

I mean, like, what, like, it's all, all win, all up. You have said it now three times in the last 10 minutes. This wasn't really what you were more interested in the transformation, right? I would curious what you think the greatest travesty in the world is. You want to ask. Yeah, I want to ask you that. That's fine. let's reverse rolls.

You want to ask me... What do you think the greatest travesty in the world is? You mean historically to ever happen? No, like a... Currently, like, what's the thing that kind of makes you... That makes me Bristol the most? Yeah. Honestly.

Yeah. I can think of two. Okay. One is that in many areas in the east, both East Asia and the most Asia and the Middle East, that women are not allowed to be educated and that they have to live this subservient lifestyle where they're not talked. Actually, I can think of three. And remember, I do business in 42 countries, so my perspective may be a little different

because I've traveled a lot to. A second is that in many, and it's really in the true in Bombay or New Delhi, but in many cultures, especially in and around India. Rape is a way of life, and it's not even punishable. I think that is a horrific travesty from not only what's happening to the woman, but the children that are born of that are often ostracized. And then the third travesty that I think that, really worries me is social media has gotten us to a place that we now believe lies about one

another. And I think that's tragic. And I think certainly two of, I think all three of those get to what I believe is the greatest travesty is the loss of potential. Loss of potential. And when you think about people not having access to education or their access to money, access technology, the idea that someone isn't given the same opportunity to flourish to me is the hardest thing to get over. And it has a lot of edges to it, but I think that's what's really driven me to leave the foundation

because I believed when I got to 10 years that I would never reach my full potential if I stayed. You would never reach your own? Yeah, I wouldn't reach my own full potential if I stayed. And no, I didn't know what would be next, but I hit the professional lottery twice. Let's pause for just a minute, because it's a good segue into all of the experience

that led to what you're doing now. But as an aside, when you say loss of potential is the biggest travesty in the world in your mind and the amount of time you've spent in the very countries in our hemisphere where there is just an enormous loss of potential

which manifests itself I would believe in multiple thousand person caravans headed toward the southern border of our country you know the people you don't know the actual people, but you know

the metaphorically, you know the people in those caravans. You've worked with them. Well, in the rural village where I was a Peace Corps volunteer, 20% of the community, a few thousand people had emigrated to the United States. Many of them illegally, many of them would borrow money to be able to make that voyage. They're called coyotes and, you know, more than a few funerals passed through our community for kids that had died along that journey.

What to me is so clear is that from a rural Guatemala perspective, those were the hardest working, those are the people that had the greatest entrepreneurial spirit, those people that said, hey, there is nothing here, I've got to provide for my family. The willingness to work hard, their dream is always to come back home and provide for their family. It's this universal truth we have. We all have dreams. We all need to figure out how we can take steps towards those dreams. We're not all given the same set of circumstances. So my understanding is that a lot of these folks would happily migrate to the United States legally if the access to legal migration was available to them.

And did you see that? Was it that bad? I don't think I had a good connection to the understanding of how the immigration system worked. You know, just even to apply it to a visa cost you a couple hundred bucks in Guatemala. You have to take tests. And it's very intense to get just for a tourist visa.

But I have a friend that I worked with that Whole Foods. He left and started a company that was working in farm labor and helping farmers navigate that system because there just isn't the labor necessary to provide for our food system. So, you know, I think I keep coming back to systems and I love your conversation with Darren Babcock and talking about how it's not the people, it's our systems. So I think about that a lot.

And every problem you see, there's probably a systems approach that we can make it better. Well, the reason I ask, and it may seem off topic, but in my mind it's completely on topic, because as we go forward from where your tenure stopped and really the crux of what we're talking about now, which will be the rest of the time we're together, it seems to me you're serving a lot of those very people that you would have served in Guatemala but are now or Costa Rica or pick a country. El Salvador or Mexico or wherever. And you said the biggest tragedy is... Lost potential.

What if access and potential existed in their own countries? I would argue we would not have an immigration issue. Yeah, I think that was actually what a lot of USAID's strategy was, is to help build and foster local economies. You know, I think about, I've worked with a lot of folks across Africa, and it was really clear, one guy in particular, Oluandro Tachala, one of the most amazing people in the world, and he said very clearly, trade, not aid.

So there is... I love that. And he's built an amazing business. The point there is that these systems have to work, and they're multi-dimensional. And there's not simple answers, but there is simple commitment to the work and keep, because it is, it change takes time.

So, yeah, I mean, I think at the end of the day, what I think as a person, as a human, I want to follow people's dreams. I want to be the guide on the side and let them wherever they want to go, wherever they want to get there, if they have resources and some support. We'll be right back.

I'm Robert Smith, and this is Jacob Goldstein, and we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history. And some of the worst people, horrible ideas, and destructive companies in the history of business. Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing. It's like not having it at all. It's a very simple, elegant lesson. make something people want. First episode,

how Southwest Airlines use cheap seats and free whiskey to fight its way into the airline business. The most Texas story ever. There's a lot of mavericks in that story. We're going to have mavericks on the show. We're going to have plenty of robber barons.

So many robber barons. And you know what? They're not all bad. And we'll talk about some of the classic great moments of famous business geniuses along with some of the darker moments that often get overlooked. Like Thomas Edison and the Elections Chair.

Listen to business history on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What do you get when you mix 1950s Hollywood, a Cuban musician with a dream, and one of the most iconic sitcoms of all time? You get Desi Arness, a trailblazer, a businessman, a husband, and maybe most importantly, the first Latino to break prime time wide open. I'm Wilmer Valderrama, and yes, I grew up watching him, probably just like you and millions of others. But for me, I saw myself in his story. From plening canary cages to this night here in New York, it's a long ways. On the podcast starring Desi Arnaz and Wilmer Valderama,

I'll take you in a journey to Desi's life, the moments it has overlapped with mine, how he redefined American television, and what that meant for all of us watching from the sidelines, waiting for a face like hours on screen. This is the story of how one-man's spotlight lit the path for so many others and how we carry his legacy today.

Listen to starring Desi Arnaz and Wilmer Valdera That's part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Malcolm Gladwell here. This season on Revisionous History, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama, where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control. 35 years. That's how long Elizabeth's and its family waited for justice to occur. 35 long years. I want to figure out why this case went on for as long as it did,

why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way, and why, despite our best efforts to resolve suffering, we all too often make suffering worse. He would say to himself, turn to the right, to the victim's family, and apologize, turn to the left, tell my family I love him. So he would have this little practice, to the right, I'm sorry, to the left, I love you. From Revisionous History, this is The Alabama Murders. Listen to Revisionist History, The Alabama Murders on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Hey, it's Ed Helms and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons. Wait, stop? What? Yeah. Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid. solid 70s basketball player.

Who still wore knee pads? Yes. It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of guests. The great Paul Shear made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched. You're here. What was that like for you to soft launch into the show?

Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today. I forgot whose podcast we were doing. Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough. to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of Snap-Fu with Ed Helms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Lama is a spirit. It's not just a city. I didn't really have an interest of being on air. I kind of was up there to just try and infiltrate the building. It's where Cronk was born in a club in the West End. Four World Star, it was 5'5.9. Where a tiny bar birthed a generation of rap stars. Where preachers go viral, and students at the HBCU turned heartbreaking into resurrection.

How do you get people to believe in something that's dead? Where Dreamers brought Hollywood to the South, and hustlers bring their visions to create black wealth. Nobody's rushing into relationships with you. Where are you from? They want to look in the eye. Where the future is nostalgia. I'm talking to chat, GPT. She's like, you really the first lady to have a gayful girl's tape in Atlanta, Georgia.

Like, that's what separates you from a lot of people. And I'm like, oh what, you're right. Atlanta doesn't wait for permission. It builds its own spotlight. I'm Big Rube. Let us guide you through the stories behind Atlanta's most iconic moments. Listen to Atlanta is on the I-Hard Radio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast.

You played football in high school. You better believe it. Yeah. You said you played offensive line? Center. Oh, good. Better. Noose tackle in center.

How old are you? 48. Okay. Can you remember your two best running place? What they were called? One. Dive right. A gap, yeah. Say it again? Dive right, A gap, I think. Yeah. So a lot of people might have said 44 lead or 33 counter or whatever, because back when you and I grew up playing football, you had a play and three or four. or odd or even indicated whether you're running, running right or left or a gap or whatever indicated the hole you were going to run to, right? Yeah. That was the system.

That was how football was called. You were going to run right or left, and you're going to run this hole or that hole based on the play call. And you, as an offensive lineman, had to have certain responsibilities to make that hole open up. And that's where we were going, and that was the system. And then defenses evolved that started taking that away. So the system of offensive football no longer worked. So the answer was for offensive coaches,

how do we now attack these defenses that are taking away what has worked as a football system on offense for four or five decades, which was the wishbone, the veer, the off-war? all right and so the evolution of football was we're going to spread these defensive out defenses out which is if you'll think about 20 years ago when defense stopped using fullbacks and tight ends as much and started spreading out and instead of calling a play to a specific spot against the defense we're going to teach a concept and the concept is we're going to go right but we're going to attack whatever hole there is on the defense.

And instead of teaching kids, you're going to open up the B gap. We're going to teach kids the concept of what we're trying to attack, and we're going to let you work it out on the field. So that conceptually, we're definitely going to run right, but where that hole is is going to be based on the defense, and you have this set of rules to create that hole. It's called conceptual football. Cool.

that is what you see on Saturdays and Fridays, on the Sundays and Saturdays on TV, but it's what has morphed in the high school game, too, the last 10 years. Okay. The systems quit because things changed. The system's no longer worked. And so while the answers are complex, let's, instead of going from a hard, fast system, that no longer works, let's create a concept and teach people how to work inside that construct to attack this new problem.

That's football. I love it. It is my belief that many of our systems don't work, and what you just said was the whole reason I just went into the Stott Tribe is because what you just said was, the answers are complex and very hard to figure out. I completely agree. The concepts, however, are very simple to me. We need access.

We need to meet people where they are. The greatest tragedy of our time is... Boss potential? So we need to maximize this potential. So if we maximize potential, we give people access and we meet people where they are, those concepts are not difficult.

I totally agree. Now, how to attack that issue simply requires having people understand the concepts and creating a different construct to those concepts because the current system doesn't work. It's just like football. Yeah, and I'll give you, to respond to your diatribe, there's really systems theory that talks about simple, complicated, and complex. want to bake a cake you've never baked before you could figure out the you could read the recipe you can make a make a cake complicated is many pieces that have to do the exact same thing every time your car the engine on your car you've got to push the gas you've got to go forward complex is our humans raising a kid traffic is also complex so in order to address complexity you must address it with simple simplicity. And there is a role for complicated, and I think deeply about building trust. This is how we've evolved our work is to bring a technology, piece of technology that allows us to do the exact same thing every single time, because we believe that's paramount to building trust

that must offer a complexity of humans with simple tools. Okay. So we've just gone all over the place to basically say you spent, well, more than 10 years, but you spent 10 years plus kind of learning this thing. And you wanted to look at it from a different way and in a different place, I think. Yeah. And so you're living in Austin. So what do you do? Well, I think it's important to give a brief nod to how just the organization started and it speaks to how important loose connections and strong ties are. So I worked with a guy, I worked with another foundation in East Timor, which is next to Indonesia, to invest in microcredit that the foundation that we worked with, that executive director became a mentor to mine. One of the most brilliant people, highest integrity they could hope to meet,

he was business partners with venture capitalists in Austin. And I was coming to the tail end of my time. I was talking to my mentor saying like, hey, I'm struggling. I'm trying to think what's next. And that venture capitalist came to me and said, hey, Steve, I want to do philanthropy differently. I've been back in entrepreneurs for 30 years. You know, we've just had some shared background.

And, you know, I want to back you. You can do whatever you want as long as it starts in Austin. Okay. Pretty cool. Amazing. And it was this thing. I did not come to him with a pitch. I did not say, hey, this is my business plan.

This is what we're going to do. This student came to you with. I got money. I want to do something good. And I'll back you as long as it's here. And we said, we'll meet every week. We'll figure this out together. So at the time, I'd fallen out of love with microcredit

because I wanted something that was about transforming lives, community. I saw microcredit is just a piece, not the full solution. So with that context, with this opportunity, I said, okay, great, let's figure something out. And flash forward, I've fallen back in love with microcredit because I see it for what it is. And I believe we know what enough could be.

So when it first started, though, I was really struggling because, I didn't know what to do. And all the thing I really knew how to do was lend folks money and get it back. So I started to explore the things. Like I went to AA, I went to Weight Watchers. I went to other community movements,

other things that use communities as a central part of their approach. And I tried to explore as many diverse models as I could to be inspired by what my career credit could be. Wow, that's kind of cool. Yeah. that you went to AA and Weight Watchers. So Weight Watchers is funny because I wrestled also growing up.

And to me, the stepping on the scale was torture. So in Weight Watchers, for those that don't know, there's an app and you point system and they track your food. And then it's like $9.99 a month. But if you want to go weigh in, it's like $15 a month. Even though I have to do more, I have to drive to these meetings, they know that the community is so much value, they charge for it. And for me, it was this eye-opening moment around the use of the markets, use of capitalism, to really quantify things of value.

So my traditional micro. That's really interesting. So interesting. That's very cool, actually. Once again, it's a concept. Such a concept. It is a concept. And I ended up, so I saw microcredit, really is in many ways, a tax on the poor because they got to go to these group meetings, it was making sure people repaid.

So I thought, wow, could you reimagine? So the whole point is that they want to show up. They want to help their friends. They're inspired by their friends. So Weight Watchers gave that aha moment for me. And that's what we've been trying to do since. So Just was formed in 2016. And I think this is probably website content,

but it served low-income black and brown, female entrepreneurs and Austin with microfinance. I mean, that's a pretty specific goal. You want to serve black and brown, female entrepreneurs, and Austin with microfinance. I'm curious how you landed on, what is that? That's not a creed. That's not a, that's a purpose, I guess. How you landed with that purpose and why and how you started.

How you started doing that. Yeah. So the first, taking back to my friends at Whole Foods Market, I knew we needed a higher purpose from day one. We didn't know what we're going to do, but I said, whatever it is, it's going to lead to less stress and more joy. That's why I can put the rest of my life behind. And in that, we started lending,

and we started lending with Spanish-speaking women, because simply I spoke Spanish. I knew there was lack of opportunities, and I ended up being able to hire someone from the community because essential to all of it in this model is trust on some level because we don't track credit, you don't have to have a bank account, like all of those things are really important to giving people money and getting it back.

So when we first started, it was really this deep commitment to say, let's figure out who we're going to be. So we set a goal. Goals are really important, helping you have targets and directions. So Yvonne, the first woman, I had the fortune to hire, we said, let's go find 100 women in Austin. We'll see what we learned from that. So she ran around knocking on doors.

is we ended up having 14 different small groups. Our only thing that we promised to them was we'd give you some money. We would meet every week together and we would something valuable. We'd get some valuable experience. We had no experience. We had to build it every Friday. We'd get together what are we going to do next week? And we went through it.

I went to 14 meetings Monday through Thursday across Austin. And that was going to have to happen forever for us to scale this work or this grow this work. So what was very clear was that that was more stress and less joy. As beautiful as those relationships where it was very stressful driving across town. And then what we more importantly, we learned two other things that they had the ability to lead. They didn't need me to show up. And we talk about dreams.

And they would say their dream is to help their community. From there is what emerged our innovation on traditional microcrans. from around the world for Texas. It is the just entrepreneur trust agent, the Jeddah. The Jedi. So I often say she's not a Star Wars Jedi, but she is magical. I got to play on merge for sure. It's pretty cool.

So she now in 2017, we started with that approach where we said, hey, you guys totally have the ability to lead, do you have total agency, you get to decide who joins your small support group like EO or YPO for the business community, and we'll trust you. You are extension of trust. So we will lend 100% of the time. We don't check credit. Don't have to a bank count.

I don't understand that you don't check credit for it. So credit scores in the United States, our system, like I think credit... Our system. Our system in the United States that is very, that concept is very rigid.

Did we just use the word system and concept? Of course. Yeah. It's interesting. So that the... If you start paying attention to how many times we use that word when talking about stuff, it will blow your mind. I've started paying attention to it.

But it is. The concept of that... The concept is very rigid. And it's designed to protect the money. Which is understandable. Totally understandable. Don't get mad at the reality. Let's just, let's work with it.

So, you know, FICO came in, I think it was like 1996. To be fair. And it makes total sense. Let's be fair. The trick here is the way to be fair is to assess someone's past. So if you lead up to that moment, you've never had access, then how of a sudden is that system fair? So for us, the credit score is, or any data, how much money they have in their bank account, any of that are things that will not allow you to trust their potential. So we also actually very much need to get repaid.

So I say this to bankers to make them uncomfortable. They want to understand just. I say, imagine 100% of the people that walk through your branch, you must say yes, 100% of the time. And get repaid nearly 100% of the time. And so much of it is actually rooted in how those back to that triple whammy effect and why credit is so important. And why the design of how you get repaid is so important.

important. So there's all these little nuances I had the fortune of learning and studying deeply for 10 years. We'll be right back. I'm Robert Smith, and this is Jacob Goldstein, and we used to host a show. called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history. And some of the worst people, horrible ideas and destructive companies in the history of business. Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing. It's like not having it at all. It's a very simple, elegant lesson. Make something

people want. First episode, How Southwest Airlines Use Cheap Seats and free whiskey to fight its way into the airline business. The most Texas story ever. There's a lot of mavericks in that story. We're going to have mavericks on the show. We're going to have plenty of robber barons. So many robber barons. And you know what?

They're not all bad. And we'll talk about some of the classic great moments of famous business geniuses, along with some of the darker moments that often get overlooked. Like Thomas Edison and the electric chair. Listen to business history on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. What do you get when you mix 1950s Hollywood, a Cuban musician with a dream, and one of the most iconic sitcoms of all time? You get Desi Arness, a trailblazer, a businessman, a husband,

and maybe, most importantly, the first Latino to break prime time wide open. I'm Wilmer Valderrama, and yes, I grew up watching him, probably just like you and millions of others. But for me, I saw myself in his story. From planning canary cages to this night here in New York, it's a long ways. On the podcast starring Desi Arnaz and Wilmer Valderama, I'll take you in a journey to Desi's life. The moments it has overlapped with mine, how he redefined American television,

and what that meant for all of us watching from the sidelines, waiting for a face like hours on screen. This is the story of how one man's spotlight lit the path for so many others and how we carry his legacy today. Listen to starring Desi Arnaz and Wilmer Valderrama as part of the MyCultura podcast network available on the IHard Radio app,

Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcast. Malcolm Gladwell here. This season on Revisionous History, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control. 35 years.

That's how long Elizabeth's and its family waited for justice to occur. 35 long years. I want to figure out why this case went on for as long as it did. why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way, and why, despite our best efforts to resolve suffering, we all too often make suffering worse.

He would say to himself, turn to the right, to the victim's family, and apologize, turn to the left, tell my family I love him. So he would have this little practice, to the right, I'm sorry, to the left, I love you. From Revisionous History, this is The Alabama Murders. Listen to Revision's History, The Alabama Murders on the IHeart Radio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, it's Ed Helms, and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons. Wait, stop? What? Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player. Who still wore knee pads? Yes.

It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole whole whole lot of guests. The great Paul Shear made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched. You're here. What was that like for you to soft launch into the show? Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today. I forgot whose podcast we were doing. Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of Snap-Foo with Ed Helms on the I-Hart Radio. app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm I Belongoria.

And I'm Maite Gomes Rejoin. And on our podcast, Hungry for History, we mix two of our favorite things, food and history. Ancient Athenians used to scratch names onto oyster shells, and they called these OsterCon, to vote politicians into exile. So our word ostracize is related to the word oyster. No way. Bring back the Ostercon. Khan. And because we've got a very My Casa is Su Casa kind of

vibe on our show, friends always stop by. Pretty much every entry into this side of the planet was through the Gulf of Mexico. No, the America. No, the Gulf of Mexico, continue forever and ever.

It blows me away how progressive Mexico was in this moment. They had land reform. They had labor rights. They had education rights. Mustard seeds were so valuable. to the ancient Egyptians that they used to place them in their tombs for the afterlife. Listen to Hungry for History as part of the My Cultura Podcast Network, available on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

So what is a typical loan sauce? So it's very prescriptive. our first loan is a maximum of $750. They pay us back weekly. The total cost... With interest or none? The total cost for that loan is $15. So they pay us back in 13 weeks.

They pay us back $765. Average weekly payment is about $60. And it's nothing. It's nothing. So there's no fees. The reality is I'd like to say in business terms, that's known as a really bad business. Why do you charge that $15?

It's actually interest. It's an APR of 15%. Okay. So because first loans are test loans for both of us. Subsequently, loans extend to six months, and they'll go all up to $7,500, and it's on average it's like 4% of principal is the interest expense to them. After 7,500, we say, hey, if you want more money, that's great. There's probably a couple things that would be helpful that everybody can do.

You can do your taxes. You can register your business. That is just a simple signal to us that you're committed. So we'll extend a loan all the way up to $15,000, paid back now over a year, and same sort of weekly payments. So it's... These first groups, these first groups of 14... Yep, 106, 106 pioneering entrepreneurs.

106 pioneer. What did they want the money for? Give me just examples. Yeah, so this is, you know, got to put the money at work immediately. You're going to start paying us back. So one woman that went on to be easily the most successful just entrepreneur, have bought and sold jewelry. And she had a clear distribution strategy. So she'd beautiful story. And then other folks did cleaning, a lot of cosmetology, hair and nails, buying and selling stuff. So there's a range

of folks from the side hustler trying to make ends meet to someone that has a clear vision for business of her dreams. And would you, would these groups sit and talk about challenges openly and bounce ideas off each other? Is that what the community groups were for that you were driving to? That was the hope with that they would see this as a source of safety, of support, encouragement. So we started a simple goal. setting concept, and together we learned a ton. I learned a tremendous amount of what it meant to

be a single mom trying to make ends meet with a business. So that was what we've been trying to anchor the group experience around how we create mental slack for planning for our future selves, because what we already know is if you're operating from a place of scarcity, you make more myopic decisions. You'll pick what's right. in front of you to be able to focus on that and those are oftentimes decisions that may not be a best for our future self so the whole thing that we try to do is manufacture that mental slack and that community is a big part of of making that possible i like that mental slack the the ability to just exhale and think about something beyond friday yeah so actually that's one of the things we try

all these little tiny things we try to do um that base based on our theory of change and one of them is we pause at the beginning every meeting and we breathe together three times and then we share one word with you know how we feel what's going on our life that's very cool all right so that's how it started yeah and then you said in 2017 you said the jetta we launched the jetta approach right so we had 100 women and we said yo this is over or if you guys want to continue with us you're going to become a jetta or wait for a jetta to invite you into her group that's what we're doing with I'm not doing this anymore. Yeah.

Because the alternative is like, well, we'll go do like micro-private equity. Well, plus, if it's required for you to go, there's no way to scale that. There's only so much of you that can go around. You can scale it, but it becomes a very linear type of scale. Yeah. They're very labor-intensive, very intense, and that would not be the way to deliver something with less stress and more joy. And more importantly, I think there's a massive upside from how. people having autonomy and the ability to be creative and our traditional microcredit system was very

rigid. So this has introduced a whole bunch of creativity that has since brought us into a very different version of what we're trying to build across Texas. All right. So the Jetta? The Jetta. So she's the first couple of times we're given, you know, I'm writing checks at this point. I'm driving to these meetings to inaugurate these groups. And we would talk about what it meant to set goals, accomplish them not, and people would say, I feel terrible when that happens. And the Jetta would say, oh, no, it's this great opportunity to learn. So there's all these little things that we would say to each other. There's three of us at Just at the time, and we're like, this might actually work.

Because what you started to see was people planning differently because they could trust the money. But you also saw what they loved about the organization was compassion and caring. because we knew we could always figure out a plan to get repaid if there's deep trust. So we hit the pandemic and everybody thought it was just going to be a week-long experience,

two weeks, right? So if you remember, it's March, and a March that the shelter-in-order was happening across the country in Austin, the same thing. We had about 800 clients at the time. We spent three years building those relationships. with them. And we were really concerned about the 1st of April. Bills come. So we said, hey,

what can we do? We thought we could give a personal loan and do it a little bit differently, but there was a real clear problem. We didn't have the money. So the organization did not have the money. We did not have $800,000 to just go lend out with. We had no proof that we get back. Because we were no longer going to invest in their business. We were going to say, here's a here's a band-aid for this moment that we think is going to be pretty hard. Wow, that's interesting. So as a team, this is back to, I think, when you talk about values and organization values, how do you use them to make decisions?

So we as a team, there's probably like seven of us at the time, we said, what do we do? There's two options. We've got some money. We can go and find people that want that money and then work to get more money and then we get bringing us a few more people. Or we tell everybody, tell all 800 of our clients, that this is what we want to do.

It's what we'll try to do, but we don't know if or when they'll ever be open. So we debate it as a team, and we landed on the second option where we would tell everybody because we thought that was a way to build most trust.

Transparently, tell them what our challenges were, and then work our tail off to fulfill that promise. So 472 women said, yeah, I want your money. And we... Out of 800. Out of 800.

60%. So we got that. We did $472,000 in loans in a week. We got the money. We made the loans. That had to put you pretty thin on your own balance sheet. For sure. At the time, that was represented 50% of our portfolio.

Wow. And we repaid 99% of that money. 99% of that emergency loan, personal loan capital, we got repaid 99% of the time. Wow. And that was, unfortunately, that experience made us, for a moment, forget how important building the community was. We saw that the money was part of the answer, and we thought we could do more of that sort of work, lead with money. When in reality, we've come back and we've learned a number of lessons over the years that we have to deeply root in community. Those jettos are the best.

It was probably the love of the community that got you 99% of the money. Yeah, absolutely. And so now we're actually in Houston, we're in Dallas, we've got work in El Paso, we've got a couple hundred entrepreneurs in El Paso with 50 Jettas and no staff. Really? Yeah. One woman from Lubbock heard about us through a friend in El Paso and drove five hours twice to become a Jetta in El Paso in Lubbock. So you're starting to see trust spread in these really interesting sort of ways. Because that Jeddah is magical.

So tell me, now almost 10 years later, tell me what just looks like today, and tell me, you said, I'm going to screw it up, so I'm going to let you repeat it to me. You said one of the reasons you left the Whole Foods thing is because you wanted to see there was a word you used. New more better. Well, no, it was you wanted to see transformation. Transformation at scale. So tell me on the transformation. Well, first, tell me what just looks like now from this beginning

and getting through COVID and give us some transformational stories. Yeah, right on. So we're, we've done, since inception, we've done $41 million in loans. 41 million? Yeah. From what was the first nest egg? So the initial co-founder, Bill Wood, he committed like $7,000 or $50,000 to start. He reinvested again.

And then since then we've been able to access foundation capital, some government money, some bank money. 41 million, that doesn't, that feels not like, that's a whole lot of microloans. So we'll do $15 million of microloans this year. Average loan side about $1,500. $15 million? And still no credit check? No, no. I definitely don't know how to check credit.

And what's your payback percentage? 99 point. That's probably better than a traditional bank in it. Yeah, I mean, it's like apples and oranges in the sense that, you know, we have no collateral. We don't, there's no way for us. There's no recourse for us. The only recourse we have is someone won't get a new loan. There is people, if you don't repay and I co-signed for you,

I can't get another loan. So there's real teeth, but it is social capital. And our point's been repayment of a loan is the floor. We need to be driving to people saving money. Because if they can save, they can own. And they don't need you anymore. Exactly. But if we do a great job, you never have to leave your community.

you never why would you want to graduate from your best friends so for us it's a really important paradox of wanting people to be independent and wanting to have something that they feel deeply connected to so for us it's it is so deeply um designed around transformation how we show up for the community how they show up for themselves and we're committed to figuring it out and i think it comes back to concepts because microcredit is great, building relationships for people that's hard to reach. It can help make income, increase income a little bit, but transformation happens with ownership, all forms of ownership, owning your home, but also owning your contribution to the community. And ownership increases access. Exactly. It's a very much a snowball. Yep.

That's so interesting. All right. So today, you have two other secondary programs that I think it really interesting. We have, say more. What do you have two others? Well, you've got the financial health program and the asset ownership program. Tell us about how those have evolved.

So the ground game, so to speak, we're in Houston, Dallas, El Paso. So we've got 20 staff now. 20. Unbelievable. And a part of it is to make sure that we are being good stewards of our resources, our job in the next three years is to cover all of our costs

through earned revenues, through our interests, through other things that we do outside of philanthropy. Because we believe philanthropy is finite, and this problem has an infinite breach. So for us, central to this is building new programs that also drive financial self-sufficiency. Because if you're going to deal in wealth and helping people create wealth, it is a capital game. It's a capitalism, and we believe in the power of capitalism that has to be re, the concept has to be shifted so that that system works for the realities of our community.

So financial health, the whole idea is around creating a growth mindset or a journey mindset where people are setting goals, helping each other through that process, and where it culminates is we do a organization, organization-wide savings challenge where they start to save in groups. There's a little bit of a competition, and that is starting to instill a new mindset for how they can take control of their money.

So I think all of those pieces speak to how we leverage community and trust for them to have their own experience, change to build new habits. And oftentimes, that's still not enough. So for us, we're what's known as a CDFI. We've got great relationships with banks and the funders. We believe we can build a bridge for asset ownership that our clients can cross over on their own terms, $10 a month. So our job is to build that new system. That's unbelievable.

And are people able to take advantage of that shot? Yeah. So there's a couple of things that have happened. And one, I think about systems all the time. And, you know, the central to how microcredit works is you have to do collections, you have to stay on top. You have to call people. Hopefully you can do that with love and compassion. And if we didn't have to do that, work, that would be pretty awesome because it's managed or saving money.

So what we did is created a incentive that says, if you can do this hard thing, Jedda, then you get access to our wealth club. So there's a bunch of benefits that we layer on. now it becomes a home, a container for us just dumping a bunch of benefits in there. There's been many benefits we can get that are sustainable, that maybe even drive or sustainability, the better. So the one that we launched with was following our client's dream of buying a house. So if they persist in the wealth club and they can qualify for a mortgage, which is really hard in central Texas, we will invest up to 20% to that purchase their house.

Really? Yeah. How does that work with the traditional lender? because usually they, are you a gift? No. So are you sub debt then? We are, we know as a community second. It's a home appreciation product.

So we get paid, they don't pay us not debt. They pay us back on resale or refinancing. And we get a share of the appreciation. That's interesting. So you don't become a monthly burden to the homeowner, but they're just beholden to you for whatever percentage of appreciation, refa, or whatever. How's that been working?

It's great for one person. We invested in purchase one of our Jetta's houses. And what we've done through this learning journey is we've seen that income is this massive bear. So no matter how much money we had, being able to qualify for a mortgage, you have to verify your income, you have to have enough income.

So that is the biggest hurdle right now. And that's why we're working on other things that can be a stair step to building more, more income, more wealth. We'll be right back. I'm Robert Smith. This is Jacob Goldstein. And we used to host a show called Planet Money. And now we're back making this new podcast. podcast called Business History about the best ideas and people and businesses in history.

And some of the worst people, horrible ideas, and destructive companies in the history of business. Having a genius idea without a need for it is nothing. It's like not having it at all. It's a very simple, elegant lesson. Make something people want. First episode, how Southwest Airlines use cheap seats and free whiskey to fight its way into the airline business. The most Texas story ever. There's a lot of mavericks in that story. We're going to have mavericks on the show. We're going to have plenty of robber barons.

So many robber barons. And you know what? They're not all bad. And we'll talk about some of the classic great moments of famous business geniuses, along with some of the darker moments that often get overlooked. Like Thomas Edison and the Electionship. Listen to business history on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

What do you get when you makes 1950s Hollywood? a Cuban musician with a dream and one of the most iconic sitcoms of all time. You get Desi Arness, a trailblazer, a businessman, a husband, and maybe most importantly, the first Latino to break prime time wide open. I'm Wilmer Valderrama, and yes, I grew up watching him, probably just like you and millions of others. But for me, I saw myself in his story. From plening canary cages to this night here in New York, it's a long ways.

On the podcast starring Desi Arnaz and Wilmer Valderrama, I'll take you in a journey to Desi's life. The moments it has overlapped with mine, how he redefined American television, and what that man for all of us watching from the sidelines, waiting for a face like hours on screen. This is the story of how one man's spotlight lit the path for so many others

and how we carry his legacy today. Listen to starring Desi Arnaz and Wilmer Valderrama as part of the MyCultura podcast network available on the IHard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Gladwell here. This season on Revisionous History, we're going back to the spring of 1988, to a town in northwest Alabama, where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control. 35 years. That's how long Elizabeth's and its family waited for justice to occur.

35 long years. I want to figure out why this case went on for as long as it did, why it took so many bizarre and unsettling turns along the way and why, despite our best efforts to resolve suffering, we all too often make suffering worse. He would say to himself, turn to the right, to the victim's family, and apologize, turn to the left, tell my family I love him. So he would have this little practice, to the right, I'm sorry, to the left, I love you. From Revisionous History, this is The Alabama Murders.

Listen to Revision's History, The Alabama Murders on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ed Helms, and welcome back to Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons. Wait, stop? What? Ernie Shackleton sounds like a solid 70s basketball player. Who still wore knee pads?

Yes. It's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole whole whole lot of guests. The great Paul Shear made me feel good. I'm like, oh, wow. Angela and Jenna, I am so psyched. You're here. What was that like for you to soft launch into the show? Sorry, Jenna, I'll be asking the questions today. I forgot whose podcast we were doing. Nick Kroll. I hope this story is good enough to get you to toss that sandwich. So let's see how it goes. Listen to season four of Snap-Fu with Ed Helms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Lama is a spirit. It's not just a city. I didn't really have an interest of being on air. I kind of was up there to just try and infiltrate the building. It's where Crunk was born in a club in the West End. Four World Star, it was 559. Where a tiny bar birthed a generation of rap stars,

where preachers go viral, and students at the HBCU turned heartbreaking. the resurrection. How do you get people to believe in something that's dead? Where Dream was brought Hollywood to the South, and hustlers bring their visions to create black wealth. Nobody's rushing into relationships with you. Where are you from? They want to look in the eye. Where the future is nostalgia. Talk to the chat, GPZ. She's like, you really the first lady to have a gayfew girl's tape in Atlanta, Georgia. Like, that's what separates you from a lot of people. And I'm like, oh what? You're right. Atlanta doesn't wait

for permission. It builds its own spotlight. I'm big rude. Let us guide. you through the stories behind Atlanta's most iconic moments. Listen to Atlanta is on the I-Hard Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm just going to read these, although this producer guy over here hates when I read stats off your website because he wants you to say him, but I don't know how to get you to remember these, but I'm just going to say this. overview stats 14,000 visionary female entrepreneurs have received loans 14,000. It's actually like 18,000 now.

18 now. Amazing. 33 million in Invested Dreams. 41 million, yeah. Our site is pretty up to the out of date. You know, every week it's doing like today I'll do like $200,000 of loans. It could be he looked up something. Yeah.

But it's still getting up. So how many visionary female entrepreneurs have received loans now? No, not 18,000. Like 18,000. We have like 3,000 active female entrepreneurs and some men, too. Over 40 million invested. Yep. Still got a 99% or better repayment rate.

And 63% of just women have a savings fund now. Yeah. And I would have guessed that's up from almost none. Yeah, there's a real relationship to money that I think is profound, especially if you, you don't have mental slack to plan for your future. I've heard more than a few times people say, I just can't save.

And when you start looking at others that have and the tactics they use to save, you start to believe it's possible, this social proof. And I share this with Alex. You know, I've had the gift of travel in the world and, you know, seeing oftentimes someone's first interaction with microcredit. And they, more than a few times I see people cry

because the first time they get that access, what is beautiful about that story is that they do not cry the second time. It shifts how they see themselves, their ability to provide for their families. There is a pride that comes with this relationship that's rooted in mutual respect, a handshake, not a hand up, right?

There is something really powerful about the concept that microcredit offers. And I think this is, this is, you know, simple proof that alternative ways are possible. You know, there's a worn-out old thing that we really accept that we all say to each other, which is there's just no difference on us, right? I mean, we're all human beings.

We all want the same thing. Maslow's hierarchy of needs. We're all the same. And if the zip code at the time of our, birth happens to be that we're born into poverty, well, we're probably going to be poverty sticking at the zip cut of the time of our birth is wealth or affluence, you know, but ultimately the essence of our beings are very, very, very similar. And everybody goes, yeah, when you say that, everybody shakes their head up and down. It's rare that anybody says, no, I just disagree

at that because they're poor. They're just worse people. I mean, that's ridiculous. ridiculous to say, right? We're all basically the same and want the same things. And access has a lot to do with it. I'm just trying to make the point that I think everybody can agree. Yes, human beings are essentially basically the same. And then when we go loan and money, people from that affluence of go, oh, they're good folks. They're going to pay the money back. And the people, before the poor oh well they they're just not going to pay the money back how is it that we're essentially the same but we're not going to act essentially the same with money and i think it's interesting that the natural notion would be that the poor people are not going to pay back the money and the people from affluence do even though we say people are basically the same and i think what just has proven is that the people from the poor place will will pay back the money just like the people for the influence because they are the same.

They want the pride of standing on their own. They want to pay things back. They want to do things the right way. And if you just give them an opportunity, they will succeed. And I think this is the nuanced response because just bringing it back to football and concepts versus systems, the concept has to be right for the person's context. that's a really good way of put it and I

what I unfortunately I don't think we do enough of in our country is try and figure out new concepts that work for folks it's because that's where the gray is that's what the heart is

so awesome you're doing these these conversations with people like Darren Babcock and Adrian Lewis people that I hold in high regard because they're sharing these different approaches And, you know, that's what we need more of.

We just need, we're not the answer. We're a part of the solution, but we need many more. And I would hope there would be a bunch more folks, Army of Normal folks, getting out there trying to figure out what could be their contribution. Share with us the story of Letty. Is it Letty, L-A-T-I, a house cleaner? Yeah, she's, she actually was one of our first JETA's,

she ends up cleaning my house. She'll to this day, she now has a team of people that are still cleaning my house. And one of the greatest gifts that I get to give our family is having a clean house. And this woman, you know,

I think the thing that I saw, she came hard worker and she felt like I'm stuck. I don't know, I don't know how to save. And then she started to chip away at these things. She started setting goals.

She started connecting with other folks within Just. And she bought a better vacuum cleaner. And she bought four more vacuum cleaner. Which is what the loan was for. Right. At one point, she said she bought like four Roombas because she was going to be more efficient. Yeah.

I'm like, God, it's genius. But I stayed in touch with her more closely because she cleaned. She was, you know, I was in relationship with her from her services cleaning our house. So at one point, we were trying to figure out, you know, what could be more. And we sat her down. We said, hey, maybe we could help you register your business. And in that conversation, I said, well, what's your dream for the next five years? And she got very, we all got very emotional because she had chid cancer.

And she had cancer. And she didn't know where to look. This was like early stage of her journey. And, you know, at that point, I felt really like, that's not the place I should be. Like, I shouldn't be this person that is. trying to counsel her. I'm not equipped to do that. So what happens over time

is she finds the right people, but one of the most important things that I love from her sharing was that those women in her group became her sisters. They extended support in different ways beyond her business. They helped her when she couldn't clean.

And then from that process, she figured out she could manage a business of other people cleaning houses and she could be quality control. And it became such a symbol for me that there's tremendous potential and it needs a way to get out. And once it does, it's going to do things that we never anticipated.

So she's one of my favorite and she's one of thousands. That's phenomenal. And probably, well, not probably. none of that happens, if not for Just, because she doesn't even have that group of girls to be with. Yeah, I think the thing, if we just compare Just the microcredit that I saw over the world, there is a different relationship that's made

because of the Jeddah. The Jeddah has agency over who's in her group. Those groups are meant to be small so that when problems happen, they want to help each other. So this is where compassion and caring emerges. So I think that is the really unique thing of just.

It's this trust-based loans. It's the Jetta. The community. The community that she creates. And then it's this wealth club. It's this path. Like, we are going to be in on your dreams. Everybody starts just by drawing their dream.

So what's next? Next is to prove unequivocally that we can do this work in any context across Texas. And that means growth. Why just Texas? Well, because I don't have billion dollars, Bill. That's a good reason. I think if we can get to like $100 million. Do you really?

Yeah. So we've got a strategic plan. I think we look like a good business from operating procedures and policies and team that is deeply rooted in. Yeah, so you're a balance sheet's healthy now. Yeah. We've got like $8 million in assets and we need $50 million by the next three in the next three years. So we've got an aggressive plan because it's back to the $8 million. to being eternally impatient because if you have those relationships rooted in trust,

I believe you have a responsibility to new more and better. So for us, it's 10,000 clients across the state of Texas the next few years. They're on a durable path to wealth that they have a plan for, that they're excited by, that provides them with new resources, new opportunities, and that we as an organization approach being financially solvent, self-sufficient on our own. two feet. You may or may not have these metrics, but as I'm sitting here listening to you, this is another squirrel up a tree that there's no prep here. You know, you're not supposed to ask a question that you don't already know the answer to, so you don't end up surprised. I'm the

king of not doing it right. So, but, you know, I'm a football coach, a lover guy with a microphone or mother me, so who cares if I screw it up, right? If you don't like it, don't listen. I would love to know, and you may not have them, and you probably, Probably don't, but I think it would be interesting. The metrics on what just has created for communities where just exists that have nothing to do adjust from a standpoint of tax base, crime, education levels. Because we all know that as you, as you minimize poverty, you start maximizing upward mobility, and therefore you maximize your

communities because there's more people paying into the tax base. There's less crime. There's better education schools. There's more people involved in the booster clubs. There's more people involved in the BTA, which put more kids out into the public who they are now contributing to tax base or going to college or the trade school and making more money. And that's the economy of communal growth. That is the economy of communal growth. So as I sit here and listen to you, and I think about the woman you're just a letty or whoever, and the people she hired to then clean and the taxes and the blah, blah, blah, the metrics of what these women are organically doing for the communities they live in when the vast majority of the people, communities don't even

know about them because you were truly fixing it from the bottom up. So what I would say, I would love that. Yeah, totally. We have explored working with economists to figure out some of those more complex questions. Concepts. Of impacts, economic impact. Economic impact. And one of the things that I think we see, because there's a very clear loans out, loans back, and then incomes, there's a very one

step remove and those numbers are interesting. Where I do think it gets really exciting is thinking about something like Bontan Farms and Darren Babcock, I believe the combination of our model plus their deep rooted place with assets is the address the two really important problems. How do you build relationships rooted in trust with people you don't know? Especially if they're rightfully so, distrusting of systems. So that's what microcredit does really well. And then if you had that deeply rooted in community ownership for awesome assets that the community is proud of,

like those two things together making the invisible visible in trust. And that's how it manifests in this beautiful building, this beautiful space we have that's helping people increase income, appreciating assets. Like that, to me, combination of those two things becomes a radical transformation for a community. That's what I'm saying. It does become radical.

And in the United States, there's not enough people, in my opinion, that are thinking creatively about how you reach the most isolated. And then use that to unlock resources. Because you're now no longer disconnected, you have new opportunity. And it erases disenfranchisement.

it erases so much of what is killing us this is the kind of stuff and it's very much bottom up it's very much going where the need is but allowing what uh there was a uh Alex will remember but it's a story of these people that went to a mountain village to help these people that were falling off the edge of the edge of the mountain and they said well We need to have a clinic for the people that fall off the edge of the mountain. And they opened this very expensive clinic, and nobody would come because they couldn't get to it. So then they said, well, we need an ambulance because all these people that fall off the edge of the mountain need an ambulance to go to the clinic. So they buy an ambulance.

And then five years later, the clinic shut down and there's two ambulances that sit in the weed overgrown. And one of the others says, well, why don't we just build a fence on the edge of the mountain? And they invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in a five thousand. $1,000-dollar fence, kept people from falling off the mountain. And the point is, why not just ask the people on the mountain what they need, rather than go in and tell them what they need, and give them agency and let them handle it themselves? And then you fix the community.

And to me, that's part of the beauty of this, is that these communal groups are supporting one another with the help that you give them, and then you change the entire community. because you're going from the bottom up with people supporting one another. It's phenomenal. And that's not really,

it's morphed to that it feels like. There is definitely a different element because that JETA is materially different because normally I have higher staff and we're going to organize everybody and we'll give them a little bit of agency. They'll get to pick what they're going to invest their business and that's actually really beautiful,

especially in the U.S. context. But to now say, hey, you have a potential to lead your community. You have the potential to help them realize their dreams. That is a shift that is at its core emotional. And that agency leads to a greater belief that they deserve it. And we believe they deserve it from day one. That's pretty crazy. Just everybody, Steve Wanah, C, co-founder and CEO,

of Just, it's changing lives. Alex, you got anything on any of this? I think it would be cool for other listeners across the country to consider this model in their community if they want to start it or existing organizations. Yeah, I'm sure you've got a website or something people can go to, check this out. Yep, yep. Hellojust.com.

What is it? Hello, just. Hello, just. Well, hello. Hello, just. Hello, just. Hello, just.com. And if there's somebody out there saying,

hey, I'd like to do this in Birmingham or, I don't know, God forbid, Green Bay or something. How do they find you? Just email you at hellojus.com? Yeah, Steve at hellojoss.com. And I think the point as much as we talk about

the entrepreneurs, changing mindsets, we actually need people that want to do this work to also change mindsets, their own mindset, to truly believe in people and you can say yes. So I think there's an element of really challenging ourselves and what are we do we really believe

and how are we showing up with those resources or not. And while it's simple, it's not so easy because you've got to go along for the ride for years. And there's some hard elements of this. So it's not for the feign of heart. And it's really beautiful if you can commit to it. Well, you know, nothing of any value is ever going to come easy.

And it's always about being steadfast and present. It's just the way it is. But it's a hell lot better than dying in a cubicle along with a plant you were given by your chiropractor. Yes, signor. Yes, signor. My friend, Steve, thanks for joining us. Thanks for the incredible work. Thanks for spending time telling a story.

Everybody look up just and think about it in your community because this is truly, a bottom-up, life-changing, community-altering idea that's been modeled out and works. And I guess you're just going to keep on going. Yeah, together we get better. That's it. Thanks for being here. Thanks, Bill. Appreciate it.

And thank you for joining us this week. If Steve Wanta has inspired you in general or better, yet to take action by donating to them, exploring their model for your community, or something else entirely, please let me know. I really do want to hear about it. You can write me any time at bill at normalfolks.us. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with friends and on social, subscribe to the podcast, rate it and review it. Join the army at normalfokes.us, any and all of these things that can help us grow, an army of normal folks. folks. I'm Bill Courtney. Until next time, do it you can.

Malcolm Gladwell here. This season on Revisionous History, we're going back to the spring of 1988 to a town in northwest Alabama, where a man committed a crime that would spiral out of control. And he said, I've been in prison 24, 25 years. That's probably not long enough. And I didn't kill them. From Revisionous History, this is the Alabama murders. Listen to Revisionous History, the Alabama murders on the Iheart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, it's Ed Helms host of Snafu, my podcast about history's greatest screw-ups. On our new season, we're bringing you a new snafu every single episode. 32 lost nuclear weapons.

You're like, wait, stop, what? Yeah, it's going to be a whole lot of history, a whole lot of funny, and a whole lot of fabulous guests. Paul Shearer, Angela and Jenna, Nick Kroll, Jordan, Clepper. Listen to Season 4 of Snafu with Ed Helms on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Talking about guns with others might not always feel comfortable, but it could save a life. Here's a way to start a conversation. Your family is going over to your neighbor's home for dinner for the first. time. How would you ask if there are any

unlocked guns in the home? Hey! Hey, we're so excited for tonight. Before we come over, though, may I ask if there are any unlocked guns in your home? Our guns are stored securely, locked in a safe that the kids can't access. Awesome. Learn how to have the conversation at

Agree2agree.org. Brought to you by the Ad Council. Join me, Danny Trejo, in Nocturno, Tales from the Shadow. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal, Tales from the Shadows. On the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

I'm Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, host of the Psychology Podcast. Here's a clip from an upcoming conversation. about how to be a better you. When you think about emotion regulation, we're not going to choose an adaptive strategy which is more effortful to use unless you think there's a good outcome. Avoidance is easier.

Ignoring is easier. Denials easier. Complex problem solving. It takes effort. Listen to the psychology podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is an IHeart podcast.