Good Life Project - Jacqueline Novogratz | Manifesto for a Moral Revolution

Episode Date: May 7, 2020

Jacqueline Novogratz co-founded Rwanda’s first microfinance institution, Duterimbere, before launching the groundbreaking impact-investment and activist platform, Acumen. Nineteen years in, Acumen has helped build more than 128 social enterprises across Africa, Latin America, South Asia, and the United States, bringing affordable education, health care, clean water, and energy to more than 300 million people. Novogratz sits on the Advisory Councils of the Harvard Business School Social Enterprise Initiative, the Oxford Said Global Leadership Council, the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, and UNICEF. Her best-selling memoir The Blue Sweater chronicles her quest to understand poverty and challenges readers to grant dignity to the poor and to rethink their engagement with the world. Jacqueline's new book, Manifesto for a Moral Revolution (https://amzn.to/3c84n65) offers a revolutionary lens on leadership, activism, social responsibility, investing, and calls us to play a more active role in reshaping the future of the world we live in.You can find Jacqueline Novogratz at: Website: https://acumen.org/ | Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jnovogratz/-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Growing up in a military family, the oldest of seven siblings, Jacqueline Novogratz, developed this fierce sense of duty and responsibility, along with a scrappiness and a drive to make the impossible possible. And that led her into the world of banking, where she was kind of fast-tracked for a huge career before she did something that shocked everyone around her. She quit her job to co-found Rwanda's first microfinance institution and eventually founded

legendary impact investment platform, the Acumen Fund. Now, along the way, she has learned to listen fiercely, to acknowledge the value of every life. She has stumbled many, many, many times and been incredibly open and transparent about that journey and learn how to truly serve a bigger purpose. 19 years later now, after Acumen has sort of embraced the world under her leadership, they have supported the growth of over 128 social enterprises across Africa, Latin America, South Asia, the United States, impacting more than 300 million lives.

She serves on the board of the Aspen Institute, sits on advisory councils of Harvard Business School, Social Enterprise Initiative, the Oxford State Global Leadership Council, NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, UNICEF. And right now, she sees us all kind of in a moment of profound disruption that calls for, in her words, a moral revolution. That, in fact, is the name of a powerful new book of hers, Manifesto for a Moral Revolution, Practices to Build a Better World. It is a veritable field guide to a new kind of leadership and a new vision of the world and the way that it could be fueled, not so much by hope, but by powerful ideas, proven models, stories, examples of what's truly

possible when we step into a place of collective responsibility, action-taking, and elevation, we dive into all the different stops in this journey, into her moving story, many of the powerful stories of the people that she has worked with along the way in today's conversation. So excited to share it with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project. Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required, charge time and actual results

will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die.

Don't shoot him, we need him. Y'all need a pilot? Flight risk. I grew up all over the place. My father was in the military. And so I think we moved something like 19 times before I was 10. But when I was six, I lived in Highland Falls, which is right next to West Point. And my grandmother grew up in Queens.

And so therefore, my mother did too. So the city has always been a part of my life. Yeah. The family was originally Austrian, came to Pennsylvania, is that right? My father's side of the family. My grandfather's farm was on the border between Austria and Hungary. So very much a part of my cultural heritage is this immigrant Austrian culture and mentality. Yeah.

I mean, it sounds like, you know like you're brought up in a household also where you're the oldest of seven kids, which by definition means that you must be scrappy. All seven of us were scrappy, are scrappy, and close. When you grow up in a house of four bedrooms for nine people, and you're all piling on top of one another and you're moving, you really get to consider yourselves a tribe. And that was what we did. And that's what we do. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting also.

I have a number of friends. I've spoken to a lot of people who grew up in a similar circumstance. But actually, a number of them were, there was one kid. So like they were the only. And I was always curious, when you're constantly dropping down into a new world, often every year, how does that impact you? And their answer was, they sort of learned to be hyper-social very quickly. But it's kind of interesting, because when you drop down into a new world, you already have your own self-contained world.

Like you have six other playmates, two parents with you. I'm curious whether that sort of made the family much more sort of insular in that you had everything you needed within the family or sort of like externally focused. That's such a great question. I would say it's a combination of both. When I was 10, there were three of us, and then the next four came. And so we had this big kid, little kid dynamic for a lot of our growing up years, although that's really changed. And now the younger ones are sometimes feel like the older ones. I developed skills as a young person of holding tensions that are still in my work in that I would, I learned how to move into a place very quickly and make friends. But almost as soon as I did, I knew that at some point I would be leaving them.

And so it was this holding of pain and joy that has somehow continued to be a theme. Learning how to leave and not really leave people behind, learning how to say hello. But as you said, I would say that what my family has offered and continues to offer, and I really tribute my parents to this, was a sense of not being alone and an accompaniment where they hold each other. But in a way that we were safe, even though we were raucous, cowboy, all seven of us, we knew that there was a place to fall back on. There was a shelter, a refuge, even though it was loud and chaotic and sometimes frustrating. It was home. And that still exists. And I think that's given us the ability to, all seven of us,

really to be entrepreneurs and venturing out, but having this common home and sense of being a part of each other and being part of something bigger than ourselves. Yeah, it's interesting the way that you framed how you approached building friendships or relationships too because I could imagine you could either say, well, we're not going to be here that long. I'm not going to invest myself and I don't want to get too close

because it's going to hurt too much when we leave. Or you could say, you know what? I have what I have. I know that I'm going to have to learn to sort of be present and just drink in whatever this brings me in the moment and hold it lightly because it's going to move on and maybe certain parts of the relationships will continue. But it sounds like you kind of defaulted to the latter. Yeah. My mother was and is an incredible myth maker. And she would encourage us to be where you are.

And literally within a week of our moving to a new place, our home was back to being home. And she was so extreme about it that even now, if I go, and you know, I travel all the time, I'll go to a place for a week and I will put flowers in my hotel room. I will make it home because I don't know any other way of being. And I would say that that was a big piece of that ability and that way of being. And she was the one that definitely would say, you know, you might not like your brother right now, but your job is always to love each other. And it was those kinds of things that I think she hammered into us that has given all of us that sense of the now, the present, the you are here, so be here. Things might change, then be there. Yeah. It sounds like your mom was quite a fierce, fierce in her devotion to

her family, to her kids. It sounds like also one of the other things that's really, it was a strong part of your upbringing was a sense of, a sense of duty, a sense of responsibility. I mean, your dad is in the military. From what I understand, he, he did three tours in Vietnam. And I'm curious how, especially having served there, which was a very different conflict than the U.S. had found itself in before and after, were you sort of aware of the context around his service there? Or were there conversations in the family? Yeah. I mean, I grew up in an immigrant Catholic military family in the 60s and 70s. So duty was a really big piece of our lives. I'd say as a little girl, I didn't fully understand it.

But certainly by the time I was 10, he was in Vietnam that year. And I remember, so that was like 1971, 72. Sure, I remember the demonstrations, the people being spat upon. And I would defend not the war, but my father's goodness that I knew that there were really good people who were doing their best as patriots. And my father got very involved with an orphanage while he was there. And so he would send home these stories of these kids that he actually wanted to adopt. And so I think my experience of it was also complex, but I definitely remember my parents were extremely young too. So they looked like the hippies in some ways. And I remember my mother getting in a big argument with these young guys and myself coming to that defense of these are our people that are doing their best in a bad war. As a kid, I could kind of see that, not as a little girl, but as a 10, 12-year-old. And I had to hold that paradox that I was deeply proud of my father and his patriotism and his sense of duty.

And I was deeply divided about this war that wasn't good for us. And I think that we have to get better right now as a world at holding those paradoxes. And we've gotten so bad at it. Yeah. I mean, what powerful training and foreshadowing for you, just all the lessons of your family, the lessons of, I mean, exposed to so much as a kid and also a sense of service, a sense of the importance of this world is, even though it's us and we have this unit and a powerful family structure and we are deeply

devoted to each other, there's a world outside of that also that we are all beholden to and responsible to. And there's, you know, in the sense that, you know, we have a lot of amazing things in our lives, and it's part of our job to actually step out into the world and help others. You end up eventually in college at UVA, I guess, studying international relations and econ.

And then was your intention at that point to sort of say, well, this is going to set me up to go into business. And I'm curious, did you go in or as you evolved at UVA, were you like, I'm going to go out and conquer the world? Or was it a service mind at that point? Or was that a later shift? From the time, it sounds funny, but from the time I was six years old,

I definitely wanted to change the world. I had a nun, Sister Mary Theophane, Catholic school, and she hammered in the service side if my father really stood for the duty side. To whom much is given, much is expected. I was obsessed with these kind of badass saints that would go off and, you know, really fight for social justice. It wasn't the religious element of what they did. It was the social justice that they fought for. And frankly, we didn't have a lot of women role

models in our lives who were that tough and that focused on something bigger than themselves. So I would say, it was always in my mind, I actually wanted to be an English major and fancied myself almost a war journalist when I joined UVA. Again, I think my father with the immigrant mentality and was really worried that I would never get a job and starve to death. And so he was the one that really pushed the econ side of it. And so while I was foreign affairs econ, I took a lot of classes in English literature. And I frankly didn't know what I was going to do when I came out. I had to pay for my way through college. And so I hadn't really gone on any of the spring breaks or things that other kids got to do.

In the summer, I was always a bartender or a waitress. And so I wanted to see the world. I wanted to do something crazy for a year. My parents were super thoughtful. They never said no. But my canny mom said, just go through the interview process. And so I reluctantly agreed to do that and put my resume in boxes that took econ and foreign affairs. And sure enough, I got this job to be a banker with Chase Manhattan Bank. And I sat down and the guy asked the only question that I didn't know the answer to, which is, you know, tell me, Ms. Novogratz, why do you want to be a banker?

And I thought, huh? And so I said, well, you know, to be honest, I don't want to be a banker. You know, my parents are making me do this interview. And he said, well, that's just too bad because if you got this job, you would be in 40 countries in the next three years, which of course was really such a part of who I wanted to be. So I was like, could we start this interview over? And luckily he let me, walked out the door, came back in, reintroduced myself. And he said, Mr. Novogratz, tell me, why do you want to be a banker? And I said, ever since I was six years old, all I ever wanted to be was a banker. And I think this is how life works. Took the job, went to 40 countries and my life was forever changed.

Yeah. But I don't want to skip over something really subtle that you just shared. Because a big part of that story is the fact that when he said that, so many people would have, like their internal dialogue would have been, I just completely blew this. I messed up. Like, this is done. They would have walked out. That's it. I would guess 90 to 95% of the people, that's the way that their mind would work. There's something in your mind that said, oh no, if I step up and say, I want to redo, I'm going to get a redo, or at least why would I not ask? Which is unusual. That's actually, that's really interesting. People have said that at other times in my life.

I think when there's something that I know might sound impossible, but I know that should be possible and I really want it, I don't even think about it. You know, I was a military kid. This was a time before people traveled. I started dreaming about the world when my dad was in Vietnam when I was six. But I had never left the United States. I also was a minor in French and I studied Spanish. You know, I cared about the world.

And I think that when he said, you'll be in 40 countries, I thought, whoa, wait, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, stop, stop. And yeah, make the impossible possible. And what could I lose? And I didn't say it in an arrogant way. I just like, please, could we do this again? And he said, yes. And there's a real lesson in that. Yeah, there definitely is. I'm fascinated by those micro moments that reveal undercurrents or parts of ourselves that very often are such powerful drivers for our behavior and for our outcomes, but that we often don't identify or sort of reflect on or contemplate. And I'm always curious where

those things came from too. And again, you use the word scrappy. I think that we so often think of freedom in this big, limitless way, but freedom doesn't exist without constraint. And in a funny way, the more constraints that you have, the more opportunities you have to find your own freedom. And I think that that was another theme of childhood that has meant that in some ways, it's when we're constrained. And I think about this moment, we have a chance to really find new ways of being free. Yeah, it's interesting. When you share that, there's a side of me that's an artist, and my mind immediately goes to the artistic version of that,

which is constraint breeds creativity in a whole different way. If you tell me I have to do something with a limited budget, then I'm going to completely change the way I do it. Or if I can't use this color or this canvas or this tool, you don't say, oh, well, okay, I guess I'm not going to do it then. You're like, okay, so how is, this is a new challenge. This is not necessarily what I want to walk into, but it is what it is. And maybe it actually is going to breathe something new into existence that wouldn't

have happened before. Same North Star, a thousand paths to it. Yeah, there you go. So you're hanging out in Chase a couple of years there, traveling around the world. At one point, you find yourself in the favelas in Rio, I guess, acutely aware of a lot of this certain sense of awakening to the way the world really is. Tell me a bit about that window. It's funny.

I just was reading journals from that time. And so it feels very fresh to me. Again, at that point in my life, even in New York City, I was inviting homeless people into my home to share a meal, not out of any sense of do-gooder-ism, but just, I think it was the first time I'd ever confronted homelessness. It made no sense to me. And now this was on steroids. And it got even more complex for me in Brazil and in Chile, because these beautiful street kids were all around me with, and you could see their innovation. You could see, talk about freedom coming from constraint

and their mothers were selling roasted corn and mangoes on the street. And yet at the bank during a financial crisis, we were writing off hundreds of millions of dollars of loans. And the juxtaposition of these two forces existing within blocks of each other just took the bottom out of my sense of order in the world and just started asking the question, first, why? Why is it like this? And then the why not question, why does it have to be like this? And I went within the box of Chase to my bank to say, why don't we set up a lending program for these people? Because frankly, we might get a better chance of being repaid than so many of the elites that were borrowing huge sums of money and moving it

offshore immediately rather than doing what they said they were going to do with it. And that was a real moment of awakening as well, because he literally gave me a book called The Innocent Anthropologist. And I don't think I understood it at the time, but I think that was the moment I started on the path of creating my own path and trying to build the world that I wanted to see, and I guess you become exposed to the work of Muhammad Yunus and the emergence of this sort of like a whole new concept of microfinance, which it sounds like for you really lit a spark. Yeah, that there could be a barefoot banker to the poor and that the poorest women on the planet had a 99% repayment rate was so thrilling to me and seemed to just offer this huge opportunity to be part of something new. No one had heard of it then. And it also reinforced my sense of hard work, duty,

dignity of work, so many things that I had seen, I had lived in my own life, and I wanted to be part of. Yeah. So this all builds to a head. And I guess what, about three-ish years or so into your work at Chase, you basically decide, you know, this whole world is not entirely right for me. And the only logical next step is to not just leave Chase, but leave the country and profoundly change your life and head over to somewhere you had never been before. Tell me what's going on in your head as you're making this decision to basically walk away from this track where a lot of people, I'm sure, were looking at you and saying, ooh, I would love to be on this path. She's a big company, doing amazing work, getting

well-paid, on a path to being at the top levels of this world of finance. What happens that makes you say, I'm done, or at least I'm done with the way that this looks? A conversation with my boss who essentially told me that I had been ranked number one in my big group for productivity that particular month, but that he also needed to deliver the critique that I dress like Linda Ronstadt and laugh too loudly, that I needed to change. And suddenly I thought, wait a minute, this path is going to really change who I am, or I could venture off and try a different path that could help me find out who I really want to be as I also do this other work. And again, I had this wanderlust as well.

So I didn't fear going away. I really feared failing. I really feared letting down my parents and my friends. I really feared destroying my career. And in a completely ironic way, that was made easier because the number two person at the bank had spotted me and offered me this real opportunity, quote unquote, to be a star. And then I knew that, okay, I'm 25 years old. If I take that opportunity, I'm on the path. And this is probably going to be the only real chance I have to try the other one. And if I fail on the other one, I can come back to this path. Maybe not in the same way,

but I know I can be on that path. And then I just cut the rope. Hmm. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results

will vary. At that point, what did you believe you were stepping into or creating? Well, the ostensible job I got with a wonderful nonprofit was to be an ambassador to women working on building this microfinance movement across Africa. The reality was I moved into an office that no one had been in to do a job no one understood nor even anticipated me doing. And so I arrived to a blank slate with no support system and really did fail over and over and over until I was lucky to meet a woman who, finally an African woman, who asked me to come and help her build a credit institution of some sort in Rwanda, which was a country I couldn't have located on a map. And I think because of that great sense of failure against the promise of success in conventional terms,

I went and that was another sliding door moment that changed my life. Yeah. I mean, also leading up to this and during this, you know, there's the larger context of here's a white woman who's young, who, you know, like comes from a certain perception of privilege, dropping into Africa, saying, and the question always becomes, and I know you have been grappled with this and had this conversation, I'm sure countless times, like, who are you to sort of like think that you can drop into this place and somehow figure things out? And even if you can, why you and not somebody here? And they were right. That's the question to ask.

And I think the humility I had to learn very quickly was that going to save the world has within it both great hopefulness and huge levels of arrogance if you let it. I had to learn a new humility and I had to learn that I was not important. I was there to accompany people on a journey so that they could build because they were the ones that were going to stay. And in a funny way, I think Jonathan failing as I did by coming in like a big lapdog full of energy to bring amazing solutions and hitting wall after wall helped me understand that it was my job to listen first. To come in as a guest and know that I was a guest.

And it was only then that I started to be treated more as a local. Yeah, I think so often we can come into a situation with what we consider to be good intentions. And we consider, we identify ourselves as good people. And yet, when we arrive in a situation where we don't really truly understand what's going on or understand the context or understand how we'll be perceived. There is a learning curve. And like you said, the word that you use, humility, I think it's like if we don't drop into it pretty quickly, it's just you get battered and bruised until you do. And to a certain extent, rightfully so. Well, and another turning point was because I did build this bank with five Rwandan women. We did become the largest microfinance lender in the country. And then four years after I left, seven years after I arrived, the genocide came and destroyed everything. And those five women played every role of the genocide,

including being perpetrators. And thinking about what you just said in terms of we think of ourselves as a good person, we never think of ourselves as a bad person. What I had to confront in sitting shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee with someone I'd built an institution of social justice with in a prison in isolation was that suddenly my I saw monsters and angels right there and in all of us. And I started to understand that the monsters really are our broken parts, our insecurities. And again, bringing it to our current moment, it's in those times when we feel afraid and insecure, that it gets really easy for demagogues to prey on those pieces of ourselves and divide us and make us do terrible things. And those are the moments where we need a different kind of leadership. We need different kinds of systems and institutions that pull out the best of ourselves and help us suppress those monsters.

Yeah. A friend of mine actually produces and hosts another great podcast called The One You Feed. And it's based on the parable of the two wolves where there's the bad wolf that eats you up, there's the good wolf, and they end up in a battle. And the question is, well, which one wins? The answer, of course, being the one you feed. But the bigger implication is that they both exist in all of us. They exist in all of us. Yeah. The genocide you were talking about, so it was 94, 95, right? Yeah, the Rwandan genocide,

which I think a lot of people in this country may be vaguely familiar with, but they don't really understand. I mean, this was the Tutsis and the Hutus, something like 800,000, 100,000 million people killed in a matter of days. 100 days. Which is breathtaking in its brutality. And as you said, you head out of the country for a bit. You ended back in Stanford in 89. But these women that you were working with, shoulder to shoulder, to build an institution where, in your mind, we are all doing good work.

And then to come back later after the genocide and to learn of the fate of these different women and how some of them were no longer here. And that some were the perpetrators. They were the reasons that the others were no longer there. And to then, like for you to grapple with this and still at a relatively young age, sort of like trying to figure out like, where's my place in the world? And what am I, like grappling with the fact that all of these things exist within humanity. That's big. It was big. I think that it was the biggest turning point for me in that by that point, I had worked in private sector. I had built a nonprofit finance institution. I was working in philanthropy at Rockefeller Foundation. And I'd seen that there are really important things that each of those systems do.

But at the end of the day, our systems are just what we make of them. That what we need is leadership. And we frankly need to reimagine all of our systems. And that was really, for me, the beginning of the next chapter of my life, which would become Acumen, the organization that I founded in 2001, which I wouldn't have been able to use the language of reimagining capitalism then. But I did understand a few really important things. One, that we get it all wrong when we talk about poverty in terms of $1, $2 a day. Sure, money is part of it, but the opposite of poverty isn't wealth. It's dignity. And dignity is about money so that you can eat. But it's about choice and freedom.

And that comes with knowing that you're safe, that you have access to health care and education, that you're part of something bigger. Dignity is that you feel like you're seen and you're not hurt or marginalized just because of how you were born or who you were born or where you were born. tools that I have and not bow down to the altar of one tool or another, but simply use them as means to the end of helping to enable human dignity and human flourishing. And as crazy and as abstract and conceptual as that idea sounds, it ended up becoming a focus on what we called patient capital, which then evolved into impact investing and now is starting to expand beyond that again. Yeah. I mean, which is really just a radically different approach to the huge problems in the world, like at the center of it being poverty. Because the old approach, which had existed literally for generations, without intending it,

really it diminished dignity. It was about let's provide money or let's provide food or let's provide this. But when you look at the effect of, okay, so now I have food for a day, but on the effect of, okay, so now I have food for a day, but on the effect of the individual sense of agency or empowerment or capability, dignity, it effectively strips it and keeps it stripped for life. But to reimagine, to say to yourself, well, this is the way it's

been done for generations. This is the way that entire quote industry exists, but it's broken and I'm going to do the exact opposite. Effectively means recreating the entire world. It means like you're building a new theory of how to lift people out of poverty from the ground up against the backdrop of a massive invested paradigm of people in institutions that kind of don't want things to change. Yeah. I mean, that's why in my new book, I write about the moral imagination, which is the audacity to imagine the way the world as it could be, but the humility to see the world that is. I didn't fully understand that we were going to have to reimagine every part of the system. Although as you being so much wiser than I am, you got that right away. I didn't understand that when we started.

But the second was just start. Start where you are. Start with what you have. And at that point, I had been part of the microfinance sector from the time that was just making itself up. It didn't really know how to do it. And suddenly I was seeing millions and millions of people across the world getting access to credit for the first time in history, not from money lenders, where they were paying 600% a year, but from local banks that in the best cases, the women were part of owning. And so why couldn't you do that for safe drinking water and healthcare and housing and energy, where all these systems were so broken for half the world. And so we just started with this idea that we could raise philanthropy and invest in

entrepreneurs who were building companies that would teach us where markets work and importantly, where they failed. And I had no idea how hard it would be. I had no idea that we were having to reimagine philanthropy and capitalism, that we were going against the status quo in all of these sectors. But, man, the last 20 years, this journey has been the most extraordinary journey of learning and being connected to something bigger and to seeing that you truly

can make the impossible possible. So powerful. I mean, the idea of philanthropy and capitalism existing in the same sentence was kind of heresy for a long time. So when you come in and say, no, we're going to raise money the way that you would normally do it for a private equity fund, but with the intention of now turning around and funding, not food or things like that, but funding individuals who you perceive to really have character and grit and vision

in some of the toughest parts of the world to build a for-profit endeavor, but not just for the purpose of making money, but for the purpose of creating true social change and justice and affecting a culture and a society. I mean, it's groundbreaking in every way. There are certain ideas or ideals that you share in your you share uh in your beautiful new book one of them you brought up which is really imagining and cultivating moral imagination and you spoke to a little bit there there's some stories that you share sort of in the context of that one of the ones i love is the story of carlos and mayumi in no small part because i am a lifelong chocolate

fan of the highest order, but also just the bigger pictures. Can you share a bit about who those people are and what that story was about? Yeah. The company that they created is Cacao de Colombia, and Mayumi was a cacao whisperer, if you will, in the chocolate industry in Tokyo. And Carlos was representing the coffee industry from Colombia, which is where he is from. And as they were speaking, she had just come back from this four-year journey to find the world's best cacao. And his moral imagination got lit up.

His country was just coming out of 50 years of civil war. Many of the post-conflict areas in Colombia had been completely isolated. So that's where you saw the most desperate levels of poverty and no trust. And he decided, well, coffee was actually not indigenous to Colombia, but chocolate was. And chocolate's a very broken industry. It's a hundred billion dollar industry that essentially exists from the labor of about five million smallholder families, 90% plus of whom make under two dollars a day. So how do you change that system? And they decided to find the best cacao in Colombia. It existed in the post-conflict areas, and they just started.

We, Acumen, supported them with Patient Capital, and they work in five different post-conflict areas, including up in the mountains in the north with the Aruaco Indians, a beautiful indigenous group that has a cosmology that puts the earth at the center and sees in many ways themselves as the elder brother and the greedy west as the younger brother. And they brought moral imagination because they saw an opportunity to create a new kind of partnership, starting with humility, starting with listening, starting with respect for the Arawakos,

in a way made easier because Mayumi's identity included a layer of Shintoism. And Shintoism and the Arawakan cosmology have many, many different gods and deities that are associated with different parts of nature. And that was their starting point, almost a spiritual starting point on which they could build more than a contract, a covenant, if you will, of how they would operate, recognizing they needed to become a viable, disciplined company to compete in the global marketplace, but that they would do so from this place of sharing, respect, collaboration. And from the Oduwako perspective, this was an opportunity for them to actually export not only some of the world's best chocolates, which they have now won awards for, but also their philosophy of a world that must be sustainable.

And I remember speaking to one of the spiritual leaders, the Mamos, who said to me, we are so proud to be partnering with Carlos and Cacao de Colombia and Acumen because of the respect that you show us. But the minute this partnership moves our community out of equilibrium, we'll end that contract. And I learned a lot that day about the confidence of coming into a contract as more than contract, where you shift the power dynamic, which so often exists, and you enter it as equals and the huge possibilities that that enables. Yeah. Well, I mean, such an important pillar of your whole philosophy really is underneath

everything else is seeing every human being as having equal value and that nobody is above or below other people, which again, you have to be willing to sort of let go of the benevolent organization or individual coming in and saving those because you have more than them or you're smarter than them or you're more capable than them, which very often, again, it's rooted in the opposite of dignity for all human beings and recognizing the value of every single person. Well, and so often we bifurcate our minds, right? So it's you're a hardcore discipline financially oriented if you're a capitalist, and you're a woolly-headed, people-loving do-gooder if you're operating in a nonprofit. And we have to have the courage to hold love and power and move with both.

Because sometimes when people hear me talking about the skills of moral leadership that are the skills of the 21st century, and I speak about the moral imagination or listening or partnering with humility and audacity or using identity as a tool for connection, they think, oh, those are so soft, so lovely. It's like, no, in an interdependent world, those are the hard skills. And the exciting thing, Jonathan, now after 20 years is that we have the proof points. And so Cacao de Colombia is still in its early years, although it's already succeeding. But we've been supporting and investing in a company called D-Light now for 12 years.

That company, which started as two graduates from business school with a $30 solar light and this big dream that they would bring light to a billion and a half people and eradicate kerosene is now a company that has brought light and increasingly full electricity to 100 million of the world's poorest. They've shown that you can change this problem, but not with business as usual, with these skills of the moral imagination and listening and seeing the poorest customers and bringing them into the process with partnership. This has got to be the way that we build the future. Yeah, I mean, it is really a calling for what you'd rightly label a moral revolution. It's interesting because I think the term moral revolution, moral is such a trigger word for

so many people, because it's like, well, who's morality? Like who gets to choose what is moral and what is not moral? What I think is fascinating about, it's almost like you, you, you're labeling it that because you're inviting the conversation around that exact question. I so adore, you are just, thank you for saying that. My poor publisher was like, well, you cannot put the word moral on the title of your book. Ed, you know, manifesto for a moral revolution. And it's exactly what you're saying, because actually one of the biggest moral questions of our times is who decides? Who decides? Right now we're in the midst of this enormous crisis. Who decides who gets health care? Who decides who gets access to testing? Who decides whether your state is open or closed? Again, we've got to be willing to hold these tensions. These are moral questions. And so for me, the moral revolution is not according power to some higher authority, nor is it every person for herself with a relative morality, but it's rather a framework that insists on our individual and collective human dignity, a willingness to hold the hardest questions of our time

for what it means to be in an interdependent world, and to move away from a system that has been driven by profit at its center to one that starts by putting humanity and the earth at the center. That's the modern revolution. And I think it starts from a baseline of, and we will all be better because of that, which I think is where a lot of people struggle because as long as you move through the world within us and that mentality, and you assume that we exist in a universe where resources are scarce, you'll never get there. And yes,

as much as I'd love to be metaphysical and think there's abundance all around us, and there's certainly way more than we thought, there is scarcity. And at the same time, I'm a realist, but I'm also a possibilitist, if that's even a word. As soon as you can recognize the humanity of others and say, we're all in this together. And if anything, this moment in time has shown how fiercely interdependent the entirety of others and say, we're all in this together. And if anything, this moment in time has shown how fiercely interdependent the entirety of the planet is on each other. There's no delinking. You can pretend there is, you can create the artifice of it, but the truth of it is entirely different. If any moment has shown us the need for moral revolution and the reimagining of our systems, it is right now.

This virus, one, doesn't really care about race, ethnicity, culture or where you live. Two, the only way we solve it is if we solve it for everyone. And we have to start with the vulnerable and the people who've been marginalized. Three, the only way we solve it is by collaborating, not only by competing. And our leaders are not showing that kind of moral leadership right now. This is the moment for us to reset, to reimagine, and to build back better. And we can. That's what's so exciting to me, because for 20 years, I have kind of ridden shotgun with some of the great change makers who are standing as role models and they're creating business models for this interdependent world. And to me, that's where the opportunity lies.

Yeah. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in

just 15 minutes the apple watch series 10 available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum compared to previous generations iphone 10s or later required charge time and actual results will vary mayday mayday we've been compromised the pilot's a hitman i know you're gonna be fun on january 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him.

Y'all need a pilot. Flight Risk. So a lot of people ask me, what podcast do you listen to? One of my go-to shows, The Jordan Harbinger Show, is hosted by an old friend, Jordan. And besides being one of Apple's best of podcasts in 2018, I tune in because I love how Jordan invites guests with really powerful stories, always focuses on practical information like how to read body language, nonverbal communication and negotiation. And he also shares his own extraordinary expertise in social dynamics on his solo episodes every

week. Recent shows have featured an FBI hostage negotiator who teaches us how to get people to like and trust you, to neuroscientists and Navy SEALs who teach you how to develop resilience and mental toughness, not to mention amazing stories from people who have lived them. Recent episodes I've really enjoyed include Layla Ali, who's a former pro boxer and the daughter of Muhammad Ali. And Darren Brown was a great one also.

He's one of the most mesmerizing mentalists and experts on human behavior and hidden influence on the planet, probably. So search for The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to podcasts, or go to jordanharbinger.com slash subscribe. And be sure to stick around till the end today, where I'm going to have Jordan actually share a little bit about one of his favorite episodes. Tell me what you're seeing happening right now. Like what's really, I mean, as hard and brutal and challenging as this moment is, what are you seeing and what are the stories that are coming to you and where is the hope and the possibility that you're seeing? Oh, Jonathan, it's been

amazing to me to see so many young entrepreneurs with this moral imagination playing itself out in the middle of this coronavirus crisis, whereby they're running companies and they have to pivot and deal with stemming the blood, if you will, while they're starting to build for the future because they can, like the rest of us, can see it. So there's Erica Mackey, who is an entrepreneur in Montana who runs a daycare center with 120 different small business women who each take care of 6 to 12 kids. Each of those businesses rely on income at this moment, more than 50% of the kids that they sit for during the day have parents doing essential work. And so when the crisis happened and we went on stay at home, all of those 120 businesses could have gone under, but Erica immediately shifted, helped raise money so that we could provide support to each of those businesses. And she's beginning to think about how do we build daycare for all people in a way that's affordable into the future? Every table in Compton, LA now has eight different restaurants

serving healthy, affordable, fast food. Well, on a stay-at-home order, you got to find a way to get food to low-income people, people at old people's homes in super disadvantaged neighborhoods. So the CEO, Sam, just put out a statement saying, if you need food, just let us know and we'll get it to you. You can pay, pay. If you can't, let us know. If you want to pay it forward, you have an opportunity to do so. And overnight, people across Los Angeles were contributing so that every table could bring food not only to residents, but to people in the elderly homes, et cetera. And it's not just in the United States.

In Pakistan, one of the acumen fellows, Abdan Mufti, is in the Ministry of Education. Imagine overnight, all the schools are shut down and you've got 12 million kids with no internet, very little smartphones, and yet you have to find a way to get them some form of education. There's another six to seven million that aren't in schools at all. So we pulled together a collaboration of cable companies and private sector and the nonprofit sector, other acumen fellows to get content for ed tech. And within 10 days, they created a cable television channel where they're pumping education. They have a radio station going. If you can't get the television, there are

online courses that are being taught. There's apps that have been built. And now you're seeing not only the 12 million kids get access, but some of the six to seven million kids that are fully outside that system. We are not going back to the world that we had. But what is exciting me right now is to be part of the journey of these entrepreneurs that know no left nor right. They are not bogged down by ideology. They are focused on solving a problem in front of them, not just to reduce immediate human suffering, but to begin to pivot toward a future that needs all of us. I love that. How cool is that? It's amazing.

It's amazing. It's amazing. And that's the hard-edged hope in practice as well. And that is what we have to hold on to right now. That in our midst is a new kind of hero. Our health workers, our garbage workers, and those individuals who are beginning to dream the possibility and are having the courage to just start. Those are the people we need to pay attention to, and those are the people we need to become. One other thing that I wanted to

explore with you, and it's one of the tenets that you offer up, is the idea of embracing the quote, beautiful struggle. When I was actually having a conversation with my wife about you and your work um the other day and as when you zoom the lens out you know it's stunning what's been accomplished you know 300 million plus lives impacted by the various businesses that you funded and so many people who are building businesses and directly affected within the context of those things. And yet over the context of really 30 years for you, when you look at something like this, so many people will raise their hand and say, oh yeah, so powerful, so incredible.

I want to do something like that. But it's also, I think, really, really important to acknowledge the fact that there is a lot of brutality. There's a lot of struggle as you move through something like this. But also this phrase that you use, beautiful struggle, I'm fascinated and curious about. So I actually took this phrase from Dr. Martin Luther King, who gave an incredible speech in 1968 on the steps of Riverside Church, New York City, where he talked about the long and beautiful struggle, which is something we

all have to participate in if we want to create change. And so I've been thinking about that term for so many years. And now that I've been in it for 35 years, I do understand it in that way because something that we don't talk enough about the struggle of doing this work. If you are going up against the status quo, that means the world is as it is because it works for people and people don't want to change. And so creating that change is not going to be easy. And you're fooling yourself if you think that it will be. That said, that what sustains, what enables you to move. And I always laugh when people say, how can you be so old and still so full of joy and possibility? What surprised me on this journey is how much beauty is in it.

Beauty in the form of attention, beauty in the way that people who've been accompanied, who have succeeded, can find themselves. Beauty in the way that you end up finding more of who you are and what makes us common together, where we find our shared humanity. That is the joy of this work that gives the resilience and the grit that's critical so that you can keep doing that work. And again, to bring it to this moment, we all have a chance to reimagine the systems that we've been a part of and we know are broken. We know they need fixing. We might not know how to fix them. And in fact, if someone says that they do,

we should probably run the other direction. But we certainly know how to start. We we should probably run the other direction. But we certainly know how to start. We know what has worked in other places, and we should have the humility to pay attention to that and build. We know it's going to be hard, and we know we need each other. But even in these moments, we can find real reasons for joy, possibility. Look at the human solidarity that we're seeing, the acts of kindness. There's an awakening that's happening, I think, all across the world right now. And we've got to tap into that, Jonathan, and take it to the next level. Yeah. So agree. You write, I'm going to read some of your words back to you right now. In

your book, you write, and I'm quoting you, to you, which is always a little awkward. That's awkward. feel like being anything but kind. Beauty lives in the narratives of those who are striving to overcome profound obstacles just to survive. It thrives in the bonds of human connection and the quiet moments of contemplative reflection. Let beauty be a powerful touchstone, not only to reinforce your own resolve, but to rejuvenate those you serve. Yeah, I think that what has driven my life and certainly my life's work does start with a moral framework, almost a spiritual framework of how I want to be on this earth and how I want others to have the opportunity to participate. And in those moments where I feel almost broken, ironically, I go back to that same frame to remind me of why I'm here and what the work is that I came to do. And so that frame that starts with standing with the poor can help me create the systems that I want to live in. I have to make the capital work. I have to make the technology work. I have to do all these things that require tangible competencies. But it's the frame that comes from the moral. And then it's the touchstone which gives me the resilience to keep on pushing against the hard.

And suddenly you get to break through. And you look out and, like you said, you have helped move a billion dollars and impact the lives of 300 million. But more than that, you start to see individuals stand on the shoulders of those who came before and do it even better. And to me, that's the hard-edged hope that we have to hold right now, that I'm exhausted by people throwing out false optimism and it's all going to be better.

We are the system as human beings. We get to choose what the system is is and we forget that all the time the beautiful struggle is making a decision here and now that this world needs to be different and we all need to be part of making it different and um it's not the easiest life, but it is a life that leads to the deepest level of meaning, and I believe that that's where the most profound type of joy resides. Which feels like a perfect place for us to come full circle as well. So sitting with you in this container of the Good Life Project, if I offer out the phrase to live a good life, what comes up? To live a good life is to live a successful life

defined not by money, fame, or power, but by the amount of human energy that you can release in the world. A good life, when multiplied, leads to a good society. And those are societies that define their success, not based on just how the wealthy are treated, but on how the poor and the vulnerable and the earth fare. And something that I write about in the book that I've been thinking about a lot lately is we all need the golden rule of do unto heathers as you would have them do unto you. But we also need to expand on that. And if we move from a place where each of us gave back to the world more than we took. Just imagine the kind of world we could build.

Thank you. Thank you. Hey, so I am always on the hunt for a great podcast to listen to. The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of my go-tos. And Jordan happens to be an old friend. And I asked him to come on for just a few seconds to chat. Hey, Jordan. Hey, thanks for having me on, man. Yeah, my pleasure. You recently did an episode with Laila Ali, which I thought was fascinating on a bunch in a way, she is a world-class boxer herself, an entrepreneur. And she and I started talking about a variety of topics. One, she owned a bunch of nail salons, and then she decided, you know what,

maybe I am going to box. She wasn't supposed to be the boxer child. She just decided to get into it. Turned out she was great at it, but she always wanted to stay away from it. She grew up around fame and that really affected her childhood. And we even had some pretty interesting tangents on the show, such as why are boxers always trash talking? I thought it was kind of, well, tacky, honestly. But she told me there's reasons behind that. It's not just part of the performance. It's sort of ingrained into the sport itself, and it's completely impersonal, which for guys like you and I, if somebody went on TV and said a bunch of nasty things about me, I don't think we'd be friends after our match. But that's how boxing works. It was a fascinating conversation. She's really, really honest and really, really

insightful. Yeah, I love that. It's so interesting. So you can hear that entire conversation on the podcast. Just go to jordanharbinger.com or find The Jordan Harbinger Show on your favorite podcast app. Thanks, Jordan. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. And thanks also to our fantastic sponsors who help make this show possible. You can check them out in the links we have included in today's show notes. And while you're at it, if you've ever asked yourself, what should I do with my life? We have created a really cool online assessment that will help you discover the source code for the work that you're here to do. You can find it at sparkotype.com. That's S-P-A-R-K-E-T-Y-P-E.com.

Or just click the link in the show notes. And of course, if you haven't already done so, be sure to click on the subscribe button in your listening app so you never miss an episode. And then share, share the love. If there's something that you've heard in this episode that you would love to turn into a conversation,

share it with people and have that conversation. Because when ideas become conversations that lead to action that's when real change takes hold see you next time if you're at a point in life when you're ready to lead with purpose, we can get you there. The University of Victoria's MBA in Sustainable Innovation is not like other MBA programs. It's for true changemakers who want to think differently and solve the world's most pressing challenges. From healthcare and the environment to energy, government, and technology, It's your path to meaningful leadership in all sectors. For details, visit uvic.ca slash future MBA.

That's uvic.ca slash future MBA. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg.

You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him. We need him. Y'all need a pilot. Flight risk. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever.

It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X, available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary.