The Dispatch Podcast - Finding a Common Goal

Episode Date: November 20, 2020

Charles Koch and Brian Hooks joined Sarah and David to discuss their new book, Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World, which is about social entrepreneurship, the principles of human progress, and empowering people to discover their gifts. On today’s show, Koch and Hooks explain how finding common ground with people across the ideological spectrum has helped reorient their approach to public policy reform as it relates to the criminal justice system, education, and more. Show Notes: -Believe in People: Bottom-Up Solutions for a Top-Down World by Charles G. Koch and Brian Hooks. -Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies by Charles Koch. -After Life: My Journey from Incarceration to Freedom by Alice Marie Johnson with Nancy French. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome back to our special Friday Dispatch podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Isgert, joined this week by David French. We are talking to Charles Koch, the CEO of Coke Industries, and Brian Hooks, the CEO of the Stand Together Foundation. They have just written a book called Believe in People, bottom-up solutions for a top-down world. And we should disclose that one of our staffers comes to us from the Pointer Coke Media and Journalism Fellowship Program. And she is wonderful, by the way. But we're really looking forward to today's conversation about how Charles and Brian are trying to seek common ground in a world of negative partisanship. A topic you all know is near and dear to me and David. And let's dive right in. David, I'm going to hand this over to you. All right, well, welcome. I really appreciate you guys joining us. And we're talking about your book, Believe in People, and it is Believe in People, bottom-up solutions for a top-down world. Now, we're not going to talk politics this whole time, but that's going to be the entry point in the conversation because, in an interesting way, the journey that you talk about in the book, mirrors in some ways my own journey. out of what I would call part, you know, out of partisanship.

And you have a section in your book. We're talking about coming up from partisanship. And this has gotten some attention in the media. And I know that our listeners would be very interested because we have a lot of listeners who are right now in the process and a lot of readers of the dispatch who are right now in the process of despairing of partisanship. And so, Charles, if you could just sort of talk a bit about your

journey about how you think about political change. And then, you know, we'll go from there. Okay. To give a good answer to that, I have to put it in context of why I wrote the book. So this won't take long. I'll be brief. But it was to enable many more people to benefit from the principles of human progress, the principles of bottom-up empowerment, which enables people to contribute and succeed. And the reason that's so important to me and guides everything I do is when I learn these principles and started plying them, they transformed my life and enabled me to accomplish more than I ever dreamed.

And then as I understood these, I saw that they transformed many, many others, so many others and in fact are what transformed societies throughout history. When large numbers of people went through that transformation and took it to the next step to become social entrepreneurs who made their societies better, not perfect, I'm not a utopian. We'll never have perfect societies because humans, starting with me, are imperfect. And what I mean by that is a society based on the principles of equal rights and mutual benefit where people succeed by assisting one another, and everybody has the opportunity to realize their potential.

And this starts, and this gets right to the main theme of the book, well, all of this is central to the themes in the book, starts with recognizing that everybody has a gift. Everyone has someone to, something to contribute if they're empowered. and and and and this is this is critical as I found because when I discovered my particular gift I learned it was very narrow and so the only way I could succeed and I've achieved what I have is by finding common ground with people by building partnerships on all people who were good at all the things I weren't, but we had a common objective. And that's how we wrote the book. I started this book after I finished the book Good Profit in 2015, the same time we last saw

each other. And I'd been working on it four years and had most of it written, but I was about to give up. And so I said, Brian, you got to come in and straighten me out because this book is not going to accomplish what I want. And so Brian got intermittently involved and then brought in all these stories and that I didn't have enough on and the structure and the flow of the book. So I owe the quality of the book to Brian. Right, right. Well, hey, David, let me pick up on how that sort of framework gets applied to the question that you ask. You know, when you look at the core lessons from the book, as Charles says, it's how do we best empower every person to do their part to apply these principles of social progress, these principles of human empowerment. And what we put forward is that the only way it's going to work is if all of the institutions of society are firing in all cylinders. And so if education is doing its job to empower people, people have the benefit of safe and good communities to draw from.

If their businesses, you know, their experience in work is contributing to helping them kind of discover and apply their gifts, as well as public policy, right, government has an important role to play in that equation. And so when you look at how we get engaged in public policy and politics, right, the only reason to get engaged in politics is because, public policy matters to people's lives. And there's the typical way to do it, which is the partisan approach, and that's how, you know, most everybody who gets engaged does it. What we found is that partisan politics does not work nearly as well as bringing diverse coalitions together around public policy issues to pass good policy that can empower people. And so what we're trying to accomplish with this book is to say, look, for people who are interested in making a greater difference. It's easy to focus on, you know, sort of politics or what have you, but there's

actually a much more meaningful way for folks to get engaged. And it's going to depend on what they're passionate about, you know, what kind of abilities that they've got to contribute. And it's, you know, what we try to do in the book is provide a guide for anybody who says, hey, I'm not satisfied with how things are going. I'd like to get more involved, but I need a little bit of help in seeing the path forward. And when we try to provide that path, I want to push you guys a little bit on this idea of bipartisanship, post-partisanship. And you acknowledge in the book that, you know, from about 2010 to recently, you were a pretty partisan guy. And you played for a team, as you put it. And then you said, Sarah, just a modification of that. We were really

fully ended of that for three election cycles. And then we started. to transition out, as we saw, it was undermining the other things, our whole body of work. As we found that, I mean, this is how we build our business. We have a framework, five dimensions, and eight guiding principles. And when they work is when they're all mutually reinforcing. And so this partisanship kind of undermined the effectiveness of the other things we were doing. So when I recognized, I said, this isn't working, Brian, come on, let's come up with a better way. And you have this line in the book that has become somewhat famous about the book where you say, oh, boy, what a mess.

That's what I meant by that, by what a mess, is that my whole life was to apply the basic principles of human progress, all the different ones, but do it in a mutually reinforcing way. And this one was not mutually reinforcing. It was making us more difficult to work with all the people we needed to work with to apply Frederick Douglass's philosophy, unite with anyone to do right, which is the way you get things done. Anyone you can get agree on any issue, you don't worry about the others. And so that's what I want to ask about, which is, you know, you write about it very eloquently

in the book, but it seems to me that there's two parts to not being partisan. One is finding areas of mutual agreement. And I think that's what struck me most about the book is you really do a wonderful job highlighting those areas that are either outside the partisan world or that everyone agrees on, you know, those 80% issues that just aren't getting done. But there's a another part to postpartisan bipartisanship, which is finding areas of compromise. And I'm curious since those three election cycles where you were, you know, quote unquote playing for a team, what are the things that you now are willing to compromise on that you weren't then? Well, I think this language, bipartisanship, postpartisanship, I actually think it's not very

helpful. And it leads people down the wrong path. Because, you know, the way that we've looked at it is what are the most effective ways that we can apply these principles that we talk about in the book of human empowerment, the principles that have been responsible for the prosperity of people over time. And so we look at how can we apply that in education, how can we apply that in helping to organize business? And similarly, how can you apply that in public policy? So I don't think you compromise on principles, right? And so, and the push towards postpartisanship or bipartisanship, it sort of implies that you need to compromise on principles. I think where you do compromise is on the tactics or the path that allows you to get to those

principles. So a good example of that, I think, is what we talk about in the book, is the First Step Act, the Federal Criminal Justice Reform from 2018. And what really made this effective is that nobody involved, even though there was a very diverse coalition. I mean, well over, you know, three, four dozen pretty significant organizations, right? Across the whole ideological spectrum. From the ACLU to the American Conservative Union, the Heritage Foundation, the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement, you name it. With Van Jones, working with Van Jones. But the key there was nobody was asked to compromise on the principle of

justice as they saw it, right? Rather, the coalition that came, that diverse coalition actually strengthened people's resolve to achieve the principle that they cared about. And that's what I think allowed it to push through sort of the morass of D.C. at the time. So I think it's important to look at that, right? Nobody's going to really kind of get out of bed and put their, you know, their capital, their careers sort of on the line to accomplish something that's wishy-washy, right? Or it's sort of a mushy middle. But people will say, hey, you know what, I may not agree with you on nine out of ten issues, but I'm going to stand shoulder to shoulder with you because your efforts are going to help me to accomplish something that I believe in,

a principle that I believe in. So you think about the principles that were at stake in criminal justice, right? For us, it was a matter of right and wrong. It was a matter of what is it, what is a just society, how is it structured? Right. For other people, it was about limited government, right? I mean, the criminal justice system is a failed big government program. for other people, it was a matter of fiscal discipline, right? But everybody got to hold their

principle sacred. And then in terms of compromise, it was, well, how much prison reform are we going to be able to get? Or how far can we go on sentencing reform? Those tactical compromises make sense. But if you ask people to compromise their principle, I don't think anybody's going to really get up for it. And that's certainly not what we're advocating. So, you know, I was really interested in the prison reform aspect of the book. And I particularly when I, as I was turning the pages and then I got to, you had a whole section on Alice Johnson, who I was telling, I told Brian earlier that Alice is a great friend of ours. My wife worked with Alice on her book. And she actually lived with us for a while as she was finishing the book. So let's sort of dive into that issue.

So you talked about the first step act, which I think is, you know, one of these things, one of these few actual bipartisan achievements that people at the federal level that we can look back on in recent years, what are some of the next steps? I mean, we still have a mass incarceration issue that I think people across the political spectrum are waking up to a large degree

and that also deeply implicates racial justice in this country and our history and our legacy of struggling with racism. We have a first step act. What do you guys envision as a next step? Oh, there's so many that are needed. I mean, I mean, across the whole spectrum from police through recidivism. And one of the social entrepreneurs we work with, Sean Pika, who has started this

organization called Hudson Link. And he learned this when he was a prisoner, that he started educating them. And so they get a degree from his course. and the recidivism rate from its normal 60% or whatever, out of his program, it's low single digits. Get that, low single digits. So these are the kind of reforms that really excite us. This isn't just a minor, okay, we got slightly better. We transformed the whole prison experience.

So they go in and they learn their gift. and they develop it into a valued skill, and they come out realizing that the way to succeed isn't to take, it's to contribute, and that's transformative. So, David, you've written a lot on this, and I think we probably see eye to eye on some of the reforms that are necessary. The way that our team's been looking at this recently is we do a lot of work in reforming the prison experience in sentencing reform, as Charles just went through and making sure that when

people are leaving incarceration, the odds that they come back are dramatically lower, and that's essential work. I think where we haven't seen as much focus and what we're encouraging people to look at is what can we do to prevent people from coming into contact with the criminal justice system in the first place? Because that seems like the most leveraged opportunity. If you never have to confront, you know, prison or jail, then, you know, you solve all sorts of problems for the individual and society. And so, you know, policing reform, I think, is a really important component of that. We've got a pretty robust agenda on that. Again, a broad coalition across the ideological spectrum that's supporting some core principles in policing reform. One of the

key areas of that is just, we've got way too many laws, you know, that are, that, that that are criminal. And so what that means is there's a ton of discretion in the system. And so, as you would expect, when the law is being applied through the discretion of the individuals applying it, it's applied very disproportionately. And, I mean, you know you've written on this as well as anyone has. The consequences of that are not just, you know, tragic for the individuals, but they create all sorts of problems in terms of, you know, violating our principles of equal rights in our,

in our society. Let's talk education briefly. What's happening in this pandemic is fascinating to me in terms of what I think the long-term effects on public education could be. You have a lot of families who, if they have the ability, are pulling their children out of public schools that are closed and putting them into whatever private schools have availability. And at least in my area, that is an increasingly shrinking number that the private schools are now all at max capacity because they're the ones that are open and the public schools are the ones that are staying closed. New York, of course, is reclosing their public schools to much negative fanfare, I would say. You have long been an advocate of education reform.

I'm wondering if there's any new approach that you plan to take now, if you see this as an opportunity post-COVID to make headway, where is that common ground and what has changed in Charles Koch's world of education reform in the stand-together era? Well, no, great question. I mean, I know the philosophy and everything. Brian is the one doing the work on this, and it's terrific. It is a real opportunity now to open it up. So everybody has the opportunity to get a good education. And just to define what I mean by that, I look at most education today as top-down, one-size-fits-all, teach to test. And I don't call that education, I call that schooling.

And so what we've advocated and practiced, and my, and one example of that is, organization my wife and I founded here in Wichita 30 years ago called youth entrepreneurs and it's not just classroom it's hands on and it's three-dimensional in this sense you have it's tailored to each individual it doesn't one size fit all it's not designed for the average because there is no person average so you miss everybody when you do that and so this is tailored for each individual help each individual find their gift, help then turn it into valued skills, and learn how to succeed by contributing. So we help them start a small business, write a business plan.

And some of these kids come from tough areas, and they're flunking everything, and they get in it and they're making straight A's. And they get a scholarship to college or your trade school or whatever fits their aptitudes. It's transformative. I'd tell you that it's when you see the transformation in these kids, it's fascinating. So that's one aspect. Brian, how do you bring teachers unions, though, to the table on something like that? Because otherwise, this feels like still a pretty right of center discussion. No, we're getting the teachers who get into that love it because they see it really helps the kids. And that's, I think that's the key is, is, you know,

a good education system, however you define that system, needs to be beneficial for everyone that's involved starting with the students, but also including the teachers. And if you talk to a lot of teachers today, they're going to tell you something similar to what a lot of students or parents would tell you. They're not satisfied with kind of the pre-COVID educational system, but they hadn't really been turned on to a better way. And so while COVID has been tragic, right? I mean, I've got a seven-year-old, and we're more fortunate than most in terms of the options that she's got. But it's been a very disruptive experience for 60 million kids, right?

But it's also an opportunity for a whole bunch of people who haven't really considered what is a better way in education to ask that question. Right? Because, I mean, pre-COVID, I mean, the statistics are awful, right? We've got less than 30 percent of kids graduating high school that are college. ready. If you drill down into those numbers, it's like 6% of African American kids graduate high school college ready. It's a tragedy. It's absolutely unjust in the society. You think about we've spent as a society something like three times more per student today than we did 30 years ago, and we've seen

zero increase in performance, zero increase in performance for three times the investment. So it's a huge problem. But, Sarah, to your point, now people are looking up and saying, well, I want to do something different, but the supply is really limited, right? Because we've had this system that's atrophied. So what stand together, what we're doing with our partners is we have increased our investment in alternative options about five-fold just in the past year. And the idea here is let's really empower the social entrepreneurs in education. And many of those are teachers, right? Teachers who have personal knowledge about what good education looks like. Let me just interrupt me. So this doesn't just transform the students.

When they see this, it transforms them. They come from a boring, terrible job where they're not having any success or just marginal success to ones where, wow, I have a meaningful job. But is that outside of the teachers' unions? I mean, without a space for the unions, and so the teacher's union gets to still be part of that organizational structure? I think there's two ways to think about reform, and I think both of them are important, right?

One is reform within the system, and that's kind of what you're talking about. And it's tough, because just like in any system, the entrenched interests are going to be really hard to move. The other way to reform is to just bypass the system altogether and show a better way. And that's what the opportunity is right now. If we can help to empower teachers

to offer better options for students, That's a win-win for everyone. So give you an example. We formed a fund with the Walton Family Foundation called the Vela Fund. And the whole idea there is we're going to fund something like six or seven hundred entrepreneurial ventures in education. And almost all of these are going to be teachers. Existing teachers, many of them will be teachers' union members. But they know something that there's a better way.

They want to experiment with a different way to serve kids. We figure the failure rate there is probably going to be. about 60% right because we want to we want to take some bets but imagine what does that mean that means maybe two 300 new options that could scale into something you know maybe at the scale of a con academy right which serves a hundred million students worldwide right now so once you show people a better way and the kids start learning in those systems just try to take it away from the parents I think my frustration has been that you know what 20 years ago or so we had the really big at least on the political level, explosion on school choice and charter schools. And that was such

a big shift in how so many people thought about education. But of course, the system, the entrenched interest, as you put it, I think pretty correctly, pushed back. And so you have states like Massachusetts that so severely limit the number of those schools that can even be up and running. I guess I'm trying to figure out how this will fit into that paradigm, what pushback you're expecting back. And to me, it seems like if you don't bring those entrenched interest to the table and show them why they still get to be part of this moving forward, you're talking about a level of disruption that would be wonderful. But I feel a little like Lucy in the football where I thought we had found the silver bullet 20 years ago. And now the football is

like really stuck in the mud and I can't get it out anymore to beat that metaphor to death. I think we, and look, we've been great supporters and very enthusiastic about the kind of programs that you're talking about. But I think that we've had the, as Charles would say, we've had the emphasis on the wrong solallible, right? We, a lot of those options, as good as they are, charters and a lot of private schools, they don't do what Charles just said. They're still offering a one-size-fits-all solution. It's just in a different building. And so we want to focus not on private or public. It's marginally better.

It's not radically better. Something I thought you put really well was that there are of the public and private schools. There's good public schools and there's bad public schools and there's good private schools and there's bad public schools. And pushing through to disrupt that system. And will you explain just a little bit about Khan Academy for those, by the way, listening who didn't know what you were referring to? to there? Sure. Sal Khan is a great story of a social entrepreneur, right? And I think this actually provides a nice pathway for, you know, your listeners who are thinking about how can I contribute. Not that they're going to start Khan Academy, but what what Sal Khan did was he said, you know,

look, I'm a great engineer. I can help to teach my cousins math. And so we did a few kind of very simple, you know, videos and post them for his cousins. And all of a sudden his cousins were sharing with others and other people were learning. And he said, wow, this is really gratifying. I'm acting on my gift as an engineer, and I am now sharing it in a way that empowers others to improve themselves. And through that kind of organic expansion, he's put together what is arguably the best curriculum in STEM education online. And it's now global. It's free of charge for the user, and it allows students to kind of tailor their education. He's starting a new project that we're helping to stake, which is going to be an on-ramp for people who have skills to

offer, whether they're teachers or not, and beyond just the STEM education, where he can connect somebody who's mastered a skill, whether or not they have a credential in it, with student cohorts who would benefit from learning that skill. And it's basically a marketplace to connect the teachers with the students now in a more intentional way. And so it's sort of of innovation begets innovation. And it's at a scale beyond, you know, what most people imagine is possible. See, and that, that, that, he, he's a great example of what we mean by bottom up innovation. I mean, it was spontaneous. He saw what worked and, and took it to scale. Well, my, my oldest daughter has, uh, I mean, I guess the definition of a, of a nerd in high

school is becoming addicted to Khan Academy math videos. So that was my oldest daughter. Well, this is a segue because your book is not all about politics by any stretch. One of the things that I thought was really interesting about the book is just the sheer number of different you use the term social entrepreneurship. The sheer number of different projects around the country that are doing good things that are part of the stand-together efforts. And one of the things that always ends up happening when I talk to folks about dealing with deep-seated social problems such as education like Sarah just dove into, poverty, racial injustice,

mass incarceration is everyone defaults to government because they say only government is big enough to deal with the problems at ALS and that these individual stories are nice and all and we support them in everything. But at the end of the day, doesn't it all come back to public policy? But in reading your book,

your book just seems to say, no. How do you deal with the answer the question that says, well, these are great stories, but if you're going to deal with those society as big as ours with problems that are, you know, national and scope, that all of these, this emphasis on private, on the private sector is just flat out inadequate. Well, well, public policy and politics starts with culture.

So if you don't change the culture, if people aren't, don't feel they're going to be allowed to contribute and succeed, you have one kind of. of culture. As more and more people contribute and succeed, you have another kind of culture. And let me give you an example of that, which I've lived through over the last nearly 60 years or more than, yeah, 60 years, almost exactly. And that is how we became so successful in business. And it was by creating what I call virtuous cycles of mutual benefit. And what I mean by that is our approach was to first, what capabilities do we have

that will create value for our key constituencies? And that starts with our customers, but also our employees, our suppliers, our communities, and society as a whole. And then we think, okay, we're going to focus on that, and then we're going to continually transform ourselves by improving and adding to our capabilities. And that opens new opportunities, and those new opportunities call for additional capabilities we need to add

and more opportunities. So that's what I mean by a virtuous cycle, all based on succeeding by, creating value for others. And, okay, where the culture comes in, besides, you build all these mutually beneficial relationships throughout society by doing that. But it's by empowering our employees. Like the number one job of every supervisor at every level in our company is to enable

employees to self-actualize. What Maslow said, what you can be. you must be. So what a supervisor does with their employees, okay, each one, what gifts do you have? What do you have a passion for? What would you love to do here that will create value for our constituents? And then we will design a role around that as best we can. So it fits your abilities to give you the best chance to succeed. And then we will give you the tool. and put you in contact with those so you can have a knowledge system, what we call Create a Republic of Science, so that you're constantly learning and improving.

And by the way, well, what's really helped us is we've invested nearly $30 billion in technology within the last decade. And we use that to empower our people and enable us to create value for the other, for our customers rather than to control them. And every meeting I go to now, I tell me about innovations from people on the line, show us where we have waste, where we have bureaucracy. Okay, here's what the customer's value.

We're not delivering. We need to deliver that. We need this capability we're missing and so on. And what this does, which is amazing, I can't tell you the number of former employees, They're not depending on me. They're not telling this to just blow smoke at me. They say this whole approach of building capabilities to create value for others

transform my life. And I don't mean just in business, but in every aspect with my family. I'm raising my children better. I'm better in my community and with my philanthropic work. And many have said, and it's helped me, help my religious organization, whatever it is, help their parishioners more by applying these principles, and these are the principles of empowerment and human progress. So I think if you apply that thinking, David, the questions you're asking of scale,

it's a great illustration of what it would mean to solve problems outside. of the public sector, but to do it in a way that actually doesn't just solve the problem that's in front of us, say poverty or, say, addiction, or some of these challenges that we talk about in the book. But it helps people to build the capability to solve whatever problem might come in the future. We cite, we quote a guy named Dick Cornell in the book, and Dick was one of these great guys coming up in the 60s and 70s in the classical liberal movement, who I had a chance to meet before he passed away, just a really broad thinker.

But the way he would answer your question, right, this notion that the only way that you can do big things is through government programs is to say, well, that's just absolutely backwards, right? It completely misunderstands how society works. Because by definition, the only resources that government has is a fraction of what's produced in the private sector.

And so if you want to solve big problems and you think you need to go to where the resources are, The resource is not just financial capital, but really what's essential is social capital. We've got orders of magnitude more of those in business, in communities, you know, in families. And so if you want to talk about scale, you've got to be helping to turn people on in the voluntary sector. And then it's just a question of mechanics, right? And that's a big, there's challenges there, but, you know, we can figure that out. Well, see, and this thing that, okay, the government or the business, they can identify the really smart people and get them to work on this problem.

They'll come up with a big idea. You look out through history, and that's largely not the way it happened. I mean, look at Einstein. He wasn't accepted in a university. He was just a lowly patent clerk. You look at the Wright brothers. The government was sponsoring projects. to create an airplane, and the bicycle mechanics came up with it.

This is true throughout history. Bottom up, empowerment and innovation is what creates human progress and lifted humanity out of dire poverty for nearly everybody except those on top. Not long ago, I saw someone go through a sudden loss, and it was a stark reminder of how quickly life can change and why protecting the people you love is so important. Knowing you can take steps to help protect your loved ones and give them that extra layer of security brings real peace of mind. The truth is, the consequences of not having life insurance can be serious.

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Protect your family with life insurance from Ethos. Get your free quote at ethos.com slash dispatch. That's eth-h-o-s dot com slash dispatch. Application times may vary. Rates may vary. to to head back into the world by the way i just sorry i'm fumbling because i love that grant story the right brother story so much because the story of the grant money that the government was giving to the other guy it's filled with fraud it's filled with waste it's like it feels so modern

actually they're like oh we have a problem um and the government's efforts to solve it were just such a spectacular failure. And so I just, I read a book recently about that whole saga as the Wright brothers are continuing and no one even knows about that. And the guy with the government grant who says that he's done it, who isn't, is getting all the media attention. I mean, it's, again, it just is such a modern feeling story. And so capsulate some of our problems, which leads me to my question for you. David and I spend a lot of time on our podcast advisory opinions, talking about sort of how Congress has maybe failed as an experiment at this point. That the incentives are so poorly aligned for them to do anything.

Matt Gates, I thought, had a very honest interview, whatever that was last month, where he said, like, yeah, no, I, you know, my job is basically to go on TV and throw bombs. There's no real point in legislating. That's not going to happen. And, you know, we all sort of made fun of that interview of like, how dare you, sir, say what we all know to be true. You know, and you have been involved in politics. You gave a lot of money over the years to various candidates.

And now I think we find ourselves with a situation where the people who are in Congress basically all believe that either they can go be governor someday maybe and be an executive. Maybe they can get stuff done at the state level. That sounds fun. or they can run for president because then they wield the power of the executive branch and all the agencies that actually do things. But their time in Congress is sort of like a gap year, if you will. They're not expected to do anything. They're not going to do anything. They're there to be partisan and to sort of make the best case for partisanship. And we see this

more and more as those purply districts disappear. And as purply senators and congressmen disappear, and the partisanship has only increased. You know, you've just watched this for a long time. You've invested in it personally, professionally, and everything. Do you see a way out of this morass coming anytime soon? Well, just let me correct one assumption. I mean, these are the media reports, all the money we put in. I feel a little like Mark Twain did when he said that the rumor of my demise has been greatly exaggerated. The rumor of how much we've invested in politics has been greatly exaggerated because they take almost everything we spend on everything with social entrepreneurs and lump that into politics. And that's how they get this.

It's only about 10% of our efforts over time have had anything to do with politics. The rest are in these other institutions in society, education, communities, and so forth. And right now, it's less than that, this election cycle. So, sir, let me try two quick answers to your challenge, because look, everybody, you're right, Matt, Matt Gates is speaking what everybody is thinking. One, I think, is a sentence that almost nobody has ever said, ever, but that Matt Gates is speaking what everyone's thinking. Yeah, remember George Washington warned us about this.

Hashtag 20-20, right? Yes, he did. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So there is a better way for members of Congress to behave and be successful. And we've seen examples of that even under the most divisive times. Most recently, and we talk about this in the book, the criminal justice reform that was achieved at the federal level, but also throughout the states, there's quite a bit happening where, again, I don't think about it as a bipartisan reforms, but they're nonpartisan reforms.

Diverse coalitions come together to get the backs of. of Democrats and Republicans so they can do the right thing. We think that's the future of public policy making, if public policy making will have a future. But I think the better answer is, we need to stop asking politicians to do things that they're just not equipped to do. And that's the case that the book makes, is we're looking for these folks to do things that government is not well-suited to do. Public policy has a role, but by design in our society, it's limited.

And so let's really put the emphasis where it should be, which is on these other areas. areas of society. And by the way, each and every one of us, all of your listeners, are equipped to contribute in those areas much better than we are in public policy. And so as a society, and I think as leaders and as social entrepreneurs, if we can set that example and sort of put the politics in its place, you know, our book has 12 chapters. Only one of them is dedicated to politics, and we think that's probably about the right emphasis. So real quick, before you leave, I just want to plan a germ of an idea that answers Sarah's question and, you know, I will take no credit for this idea. I'll let you all take all

the credit, even though I'm talking about it on a podcast. Yeah, that's, David is actually just lying. He will absolutely take so much credit for whatever this is. I've got, here's the germ of the idea. So Sarah, you said, how do you reform schools by working with teachers unions and how do you resource that? I just think stand together needs to team up with LeBron James because, I mean, this is genius. Because David wants to meet LeBron James. Well, I mean that, but he started the I Promise School in Akron, which was not a charter school. It was part of the Akron public school system. And in the sheer power of the LeBron James celebrity overcame all of those, all of those, you know, Lucy with the football barriers, Sarah. And so there you go. You just pair resources with

the greatest basketball player of all time. And there you have education reform. I'll just step aside and let the magic happen. David, we're going to give you credit for this idea, but I can't resist to tell you that about five weeks ago, stand together partnered with the LeBron James Family Foundation in Akron to make exactly this case. So you are, you are right there with us. A man, a man behind his times. But a little bit closely behind. Way behind.

It's a great idea. Well, with that dose of humility for me, should we sign off? Last question. Of course, this is our last pod before Thanksgiving. And thank you guys both for making the time to do this. But I do think there's a question on all of our listeners' minds, which is, to each of you, what is the Thanksgiving side dish that just makes your heart flutter as you think about going into next week?

And particularly to Charles, I'm curious whether you cook that side dish yourself. no what makes me happy that keeps me going and and as as bob dylan says busy being born rather than busy dying that's what i'm grateful for and and what is that is being able to contribute every day and what enables that are these principles of individual empowerment these principles of human progress and seeing what they do, individually, people I know, seeing their lives transform because they find their skill and they use it to contribute to help others. And it transforms in and it transforms others.

And like when I'm in meetings now in bed, that's what I'm asking, okay, what are people doing? What are they coming up with? wow and this all these things are happening that and people are pumped up and they say okay your eighth principle is is self actualization these are people on the on the front line saying now i know what you mean this is fun now i can be an entrepreneur here in the company and and people listen to me and i've got ideas i'm turned on this is how charles coke is charles coke and i'm hosting a podcast is because all I think about all month in November is what I'm going to eat on Thanksgiving Day. I was going to say all of that is made easier when you've got a little bit of the 1950s

Campbell soup, broccoli casserole in your stomach. Oh, intriguing. Intriging. Well, on that intriguing note, thank you guys. Charles Brian, we really appreciate the conversation. And to listeners, we are, as Sarah said, we're taking a dispatch podcast Thanksgiving week break, so we will come back after Thanksgiving, which may be possibly the presidential election might be over by then, Sarah. I don't know. What do you think? That's still up in the air, but my weight gain is not. That will be guaranteed. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot trackside. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex.

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