The Rich Roll Podcast - Jacqueline Novogratz On Cultivating Moral Imagination, Practicing Courage & Pursuing Work With No End

Episode Date: January 24, 2022

We all want to positively change the world. But where do you start? Today’s guest—a woman who has made an extraordinary impact on improving the lives of millions of people across the developing world—has dedicated the better part of her life to answering this question with actionable, sustainable solutions. Meet Jacqueline Novogratz. A former investment banker, Jacqueline walked away from Wall Street back in 1986 to co-found Rwanda’s first microfinance institution. Today she is the founder and CEO of Acumen,a novel, non-profit financial organization she conceived in 2001 that blends philanthropy with venture capital to invest in people, companies, and ideas solving the toughest issues of poverty. As a pioneer of impact investing, Acumen and its investments have brought critical services like healthcare, education, and clean energy to literally hundreds of millions of low-income people throughout the world. In addition to having four TED Talks under her belt, Jacqueline is also the New York Times bestselling author of The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World and her most recent book, Manifesto for a Moral Revolution, which delves into our pressing need to reimagine and rebuild new systems, and where to begin. Today she shares her powerful story. This is a deeply thoughtful conversation about what is actually required to change the world. It’s about the importance of cultivating moral imagination. Something called patient capital. And the humility and hard-edged hope necessary to tackle gigantic problems. It’s also a conversation about listening, immersion, asking questions, and the importance of transcending dualistic, non-binary thinking—skills critical to eradicating poverty, solving our planet’s biggest problems, and empowering those most in need. To read more, click here. You can also watch it all go down on YouTube. And as always, the podcast streams wild and free on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. As you will soon discover, Jacqueline is wise and deeply soulful. I aspire to this new friend’s level of service—an example for us all. Peace + Plants, Rich

I often say that distance dulls the moral imagination. And so we want to do good, we want to be part of good, and so we give money hoping it does good. But that's not enough. Generosity without accountability can really make a mess of things and it's not the same as justice. Justice is hard. Income and wealth is not the opposite of poverty, that the opposite of poverty truly is dignity. It's that ability to make choice. And so charity has a role, but it too often creates dependency. So what if we took philanthropy and invested it in those entrepreneurs that were hell-bent on solving some of the biggest problems of our day, like sanitation, like education, like energy, like agriculture?

What if we gave them time to really understand the true constraints and the obstacles that get in poor people's way and build solutions so that at the end of the day, they could send their children to schools they wanted to send their children to. We are on this earth together for a very short moment, and I believe that we come in almost as circles, and you and I are in a circle of a generation. It goes in a second. How do we use that time? How do we want to be remembered by those future generations? I certainly don't want them to look back at us and think we didn't care, but that we tried. It's only when we see that we are not just part of each other, we are each other, that I think we'll really solve these problems.

The Rich Roll Podcast. Hey everybody, welcome to the show. I am your host, Rich Roll. This is my podcast. Welcome aboard. You're in for a treat because my guest today is the very inspiring Jacqueline Novogratz, who is this incredible woman who has made this extraordinary impact on improving the lives of millions of people across the developing world. Jacqueline is a former investment banker who, back in 1986, walked away from Wall Street to co-found Rwanda's first microfinance institution.

Today, she is the founder and CEO of this organization called Acumen, which is a really novel nonprofit financial institution that she conceived in 2001 that blends philanthropy with venture capital to invest in people, invest in companies, ideas that are solving the toughest issues of poverty. As a pioneer of impact investing, Jacqueline Ackerman and its investments have brought critical services, things like healthcare, education, and clean energy to literally hundreds of millions of low-income people throughout the world. In addition to four TED Talks under her belt, Jacqueline is also the New York Times bestselling author of The Blue Sweater, Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World, and her most recent book,

Manifesto for a Moral Revolution, which delves into our pressing need to reimagine and rebuild new systems, premised on this idea that we talk about today called moral imagination. Did I say she is inspiring? Yes, I did, but it's worth repeating. I love this one and it's coming right up. But first. We're brought to you today by recovery.com.

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When you or a loved one need help, go to recovery.com and take the first step towards recovery. To find the best treatment option for you or a loved one, again, go to recovery.com. Okay, so I guess in the broadest sense, this is a conversation about what is actually required to change the world. It's about this idea of moral imagination that I referenced.

It's also about something called patient capital that we talk about today. And it's about the humility and the patience and the hard-edged hope necessary for tackling gigantic problems. It's also a conversation about listening, about immersion, about asking questions, and the importance of transcending dualistic binary thinking if we are truly committed to not only eradicating poverty, but solving all of our planet's biggest problems and empowering those most in need along the way.

As you'll soon discover, Jacqueline is a badass. She is very wise, deeply soulful as well. I think we can all learn from her experience and her example. And again, I just love this one. So here we are. Please enjoy me having a conversation with Jacqueline Novogratz. and her example. And again, I just love this one. So here we are. Please enjoy me having a conversation with Jacqueline Novogratz.

So nice to meet you. Thank you for coming out here. It is so wonderful to be here, truly. I'm a little nervous. I'm intimidated by you. No, you are not. I am. You're the ultra marathon guy

that has millions and millions of people watching you. No, you are not. I am. You're the ultra marathon guy that has millions of millions of people watching you. You're so accomplished. And the level of impact that you've had is staggering in such a beautiful way. So I'm really touched and honored to be able to spend time with you today, to learn more about how you do what you do,

how you got there. And really this beautiful struggle that you talk about around committing yourself to something bigger than yourself and what it means to live a purpose-driven life and pursue audacious goals with humility and embracing the long path and the obstacles that get thrown in your way and to fear not work that has no end, right?

I love that. Which is this journey that you're on. Yeah, do you know Scott Harrison? Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He says that a lot and I think about that a lot. I love that actually. Cause that's really,

that's the journey that you're on, right? Like you're tackling such huge problems that have massive scale and you're ch such huge problems that have massive scale and you're chipping away at it. And you're able to maintain this enthusiasm and this positivity and this level of immersion and engagement that we're gonna talk about without losing hope or becoming,

I'm sure there's discouragement, but without kind of like losing that energy that you infect all of these companies and these people with all across the world. Well, thank you. You do the same thing, just in a different way. I just feel like I sit here and talk into a microphone. Sometimes I feel neutered.

Like I, you know, when I read about you and the more that I learn about you, it's that boots on the ground, like you're showing up, you got the notebook, you're immersing yourself in these cultures and really committed to understanding, not just the problems, but the people and what their needs are

and the best way to solve the problem that of course includes capital, but above and beyond that really demands this nuance appreciation for the very particulars of their problems in the very particulars of their problems in the way that they lead their lives. Well, thank you, but do you really feel neutered? Because I feel that so much of leadership

is finding who you really are. And I'm a doer, I have to build. You amplify people, who they are. I can already see what an incredible listener you are. And I've heard so many of your podcasts in this moment where nobody's listening to each other. Right. And so we need those amplifiers.

We need the doers. We need the intellectuals. We need the engineers. And so I always thought if I didn't do this, I could be a war journalist, but realized that I would be jumping into the war to try to fix it like that. Even though I have visual sensibility,

it's just not possible for me not to try and build something. And so do you really feel neutered? Well, sometimes I just feel like I talk a lot, but there's more that I could actually be doing like on that point of being a doer. So I don't know, maybe you can help me out. Maybe you can plug me in somewhere. Well, I totally could plug you in.

Now I'm scared, now I'm really scared. Don't ever offer me anything rich. Oh no. So many things I wanna cover with you, but before we even get into like the whole story, I know that you just returned from COP26. So I'm really curious about what that experience was like and what you were kind of left with, like how you're feeling about what went down,

the work to be done, what might not have been addressed to the extent that maybe we wish it was being dealt with in a meaningful way. So yeah, like how was that? Sure, well, maybe the metaphor, and I'm saying this to one of the great athletes of the universe, but it was grueling to be there,

18 hour days and walking really far and also exhilarating and also frustrating. But the day after I threw my back for the first time in my life, and I thought right there, there's the metaphor. That on the positive, I actually think that the media covered it from the outside, almost only looking through a negative lens,

a more cynical lens. And certainly there is room for cynicism and more importantly, skepticism. On the other side, inside the room, governments were less vocal, but civil society and the private sector were really focused on getting things done. I felt the shift in responsibility that I've never felt

in 20 years of running Acumen. And that was very hopeful. I went with two objectives and two objectives only. One was to ensure that the voice of the poor was in every conversation because we talk about the need to mitigate carbon and clearly we have to reduce it by 59 gigatons every year just to stay at 1.5 degrees.

But when we think about climate justice, we often think about Europe and the United States, people who are losing their jobs and we need to, but so must we look at the bigger picture that you're looking at a continent like Africa where 45% of the population has zero access to electricity, where the median age is 19.7, where if you don't have electricity,

you don't get to participate in this world where most kids now have smartphones. They understand what the opportunities are. They're just locked out of them. And so when we think about how we build a world that is sustainable and inclusive and just, we have to mitigate carbon. And at the same time,

we have to include people who've been fully left out in ways that avert long-term catastrophe. And so it was frustrating that the poor were not included in so many of the conversations, and yet I felt a great sense of efficacy in that that opened so many new conversations. The second piece was to, frankly, find partners and raise money for the work that Acumen does,

because I believe that we are on our way to electrifying the whole world. I don't wanna get too technical here on you, right out of the box, but because of the work we've done for 15 years in trying to create a solar light and electricity for people who've been fully left out, we've been able to get electricity

to about 160 million of the world's truly poor people. That represents one third of all people on the planet who have access to solar light and electricity off grid, who are poor. It's unbelievable. It's been very cool. It's given us a sight line then to what it would actually take to achieve sustainable development goal seven

or universal electricity. There are 800 million people still today, 150 years after Edison invented the light bulb with no access to electricity. We think that the markets that have been built will bring 450 million people into electricity. 100 million people will have to give systems to. And then there are 230 million people.

If you give them access, they will pay. They will want to buy their own systems. But giving them access requires doing business not as usual. And that's what we wanna do. And so really felt a great deal of hope that we were finding partners raising money for that effort to bring electricity to everybody on the planet. Well, it has to be easier now. I mean, Acumen's been around for 20 years at this point. And you have legions of stories around how difficult it was to get

the financial sector to wrap their head around this new business model that you were proposing. But after two decades, there's proof in the pudding and you're seeing so much positive result from these many companies that you have seeded and fostered that the model has established itself. So it's gotta be easier, right? To get people on board and see the vision that you have. Easier, still not easy enough. You have a whole new generation that knows that capitalism isn't broken. And in fact, I would say you hardly meet anybody anymore

that says unbridled capitalism is good for the world. But getting from that statement to actually structuring the right kind of capital at a level of scale that will shift systems still isn't easy. But it is easier because as you said, we can now show that what's required from all of us is to focus on the problems that we're solving first, rather than the kind of capital that we have. I have philanthropy, so I want to give it away. I'm an investor, so I want to maximize my returns.

Well, money is money. And so if we think about investment as a means to solving a problem, it changes everything. And if we focus on building systems that start with, what will it take to bring the poor in? What will it take to make sure that the environment is protected? Well, then we can figure out the right kind of money

and the right kind of investment to get there. There's so many things baked into what you just said that I wanted, there's so many threads I wanna pull on. I mean, the first of which is the kind of underlying theme beneath all of it is transcending this compulsion that we have to think of problems in the world in binary terms, capitalism, socialism, for-profit business, philanthropy,

and instead be, as you said, sort of problem-oriented. Like here's the problem, what's the best way to solve it? Let's like get out of our, you know, sort of calcified thinking around how we've tried to solve these problems in the past unsuccessfully and see if we can't find a new way in that perhaps might be something we never thought of it.

Like that's the only way, right? And then the second thing being this systems approach. Like you can't just show up, here's the problem, solve it, whether it's toilets or electricity or affordable housing, like all of these problems that you've tackled, the solution seems to always lie in this immersion approach where your boots on the ground

and you're really understanding what's happening and creating infrastructure around those entities that you're trying to create so that they can function properly. Like the toilet situation is a great example of that, right? Like you can drop toilets in all of these places, but if there's no one to clean them or some kind of infrastructure to manage the, you know,

the cleanliness of them, then they all fail, right? So it's requiring you to think more broadly and realize that it's not just the problem itself, it's this concentric circle of problems. Yeah, and you've said so much now that I wanna unpack, starting with the word transcend, because I do think that that's such an important word for this moment in time

that we have seen the world in binaries, rich, poor, for-profit, nonprofit, even left, right, maybe one of the most toxic in this country anyway, that that world may have worked when we were fully separate from each other, but in a world that's fully interdependent, it doesn't work. We have to move to non-binary or non-dual thinking, which I appreciate in the way that you think and the way you speak.

And I love the story of the toilets as well because it's a long, hard, grueling story that also bends your mind because we look at these stories in partial ways, right? because we look at these stories in partial ways, right? We say so often when it comes to the poor, we don't wanna give subsidies, but we're not acknowledging as the rich that much of our infrastructure is based on subsidies. So if you look at toilets at the macro level, one in three human beings on the planet still have no access to a toilet,

which is mind boggling in and of itself. The large majority of all subsidies for sanitation for the toilets we flush go to the top one sixth of wealth earners in the world. And that's because governments are willing to pay for infrastructure. If you're looking at a slum, like the slums outside of Nairobi,

where half the city lives, there's no room for infrastructure. You know, imagine all these little shacks kind of tumbling over one another and these higgly-piggly little alleys going through them where there's a lot of human waste and other kinds of waste because there's nowhere else for it to go. And as you said, well-intended charities and government programs would build latrines. As soon as those latrines get filled, they're done. The next progressive step there was government would hire people called frogmen who would climb into the latrines and clean them out. Not a great job, but a paying job for people.

And so there were many people who did that job. What this little company, and I say little at the beginning, Sanergy saw was one, the moral imperative and also the adventure of solving a big hairy goal like sanitation. They went into the Makuro slum in Nairobi, three young entrepreneurs.

And they started by immersing, as you said, this idea, get close to the problem, understand it from the people who live their perspectives. And they saw that not only do people understand their problem, but they wanted to be part of the solution. That area outside of Nairobi or in Nairobi is super entrepreneurial.

And that there were individuals who were already creating toilets that they were asking people to pay for, to use, but they had no resources themselves to empty those toilets and keep them clean. So Sanergy built a system pretty much with the conceit that I shared at the time. This is a good 12, 13 years ago, that where government had failed, the private sector could fix the problem, social entrepreneurs.

And at the beginning, it looked like it might work. They would sell toilets to individuals who would charge for people to use them. They would keep them clean. There would be a mirror and a little vanity station. Every day they would pick up the waste and they would put it into a composting area with the idea that they would convert it into fertilizer and somehow find a market for it. But then you have other constraints. Suddenly you have huge piles of fertilizer and it's really hard to build a market for fertilizer. And you couldn't grow fast enough because there was such demand for it.

That's when they started to recognize that they actually needed to partner with government. They needed different kinds of systems and standards. And so they've since completely evolved as a model. It's a hybrid, there's philanthropic components to it. They've got, now they're serving over 100,000 people in the slums. I use those toilets whenever I'm there. I can vouch for them being clean and safe and a lovely experience.

But Sanergy, it's creativity on creativity on creativity. They realize it's really hard to sell fertilizer, but what that fertilizer offers is compost on which you can breed black soldier flies. Those black soldier flies then can be turned into animal feed, which is a much higher protein than fish food, which is, I mean, than fish, which is ground into food.

It also has much lower suffering associated with it and much lower carbon because you're not moving from lakes, fish to the lakes. And so it's become one of the world's great examples of a circular economy model for how we can solve our problems, starting with people who have the problems in the first place.

It's a model of partnership with government and it's a model of partnership with government. And it's a model of getting serious from a systems perspective of how we can solve some of the great problems of our days that are so complex and yet eminently solvable. Yeah, that's a beautiful end to end solution that I imagine they couldn't have envisioned

when they sought out at the beginning, right? It was only in the doing that all of that stuff gets revealed in the process of trying to make it work. Well, you write about this in your book that you don't start off and be like, I'm gonna run five iron bread and just run it. You start and you start to see what the process reveals to you.

And that shows you where to take another step and another step. And that's a big cornerstone of your book, this idea of when people come to you and say, I wanna save the world or your own experience of being younger and imbuing yourself with that sensibility, it can become paralyzing. And the solution really is in the doing, right?

You have this thing, like, you just have to start, like, what are you latching onto? Like, take that first step. The way it's rigged, you're not allowed to see where it's headed, right? You only get to see the next step when you take that initial one and the path slowly, you know, the brick layer is like just one step ahead of you

laying the bricks down in front of you. Our first COO, an amazing guy named Dan Toole did not come from business as a background. He worked in emergencies for the United Nations. And he said, I feel like we're standing in on the fifth floor of a brick building and we're trying to build a terrace brick by brick with no safety net underneath.

And I was like, sounds about right, Dan. Right. Yeah, the story of your life. It's the story. Right? It's the story. It's the Sufi way. I mean, which goes back also to transcendence

that there's this idea of how do you start a path? You take a step. Yeah. Well, let's take it back and kind of parse your path from the beginning. I mean, you have a very interesting kind of origin story. I mean, you grew up with six siblings, seven of you guys, your dad was an army guy, a veteran,

and of all of your brothers and sisters, they all seem to have like matriculated into the world and they're all doing amazing things. So like what was going on in that house growing up? Cause it's unbelievable between your brothers and sisters. Like everybody's doing something interesting it seems. Well, we're all really lucky for sure. The house was chaotic.

It was a small four bedroom house. I mean, we moved almost every year. In fact, at one point we were in Mount Cummins, Michigan. So during the riots, but I think in part because we moved every year in the early years of my life until I was 10 and there were so many kids and so little space, we had no choice but to get along, find ways to create play together.

My mother was and is one of the most extraordinary myth makers and tribe builders. And so I think she infected us with that sense of both rules and possibilities. And so if we would get mad at each other, she would one, let us know that she might, you know, not like us in that moment, but she would always love us, that it was our job to show up for each other. If we didn't like each other, we had to love each other.

And we definitely had to show up and we still do. You know, my mother is still, will give me the phone call like, what do you mean you're not gonna come to your sister's whatever? And I'm like, I just saw her two days ago. And you guys all live in New York. We all live in New York.

Except do your parents live in New York as well? My parents live in DC. My brother, Michael, who is in hedge funds and then Bitcoin and crypto. Big crypto guy. Big crypto guy, bought my mom and dad a house in Long Island. And so they're there about seven months of the year

and they're threatening to move from DC to New York because they're in New York so much now. But during pandemic, I think that was the big move where we were all together. And in the summer, my parents have a barbecue at their house at three o'clock every Sunday. And it doesn't matter how fancy your other engagement might be, you better be at my parents barbecue. That's kind of how the Novogratz family rolls.

I mean, your mom just seems like a character, like you're a Novogratz and this is the way we do it. And here's what we're doing. Especially since she wasn't the Novogratz, right? Her dad died when she was a baby and she grew up with a single mom in New York City. And yet she built the myths and had high expectations. And I think something you have said, my mom said,

because I was like, you are creating all of these children and we have no balance at this family. And she was like, show me an ordinary, show me a person who's balanced is an ordinary. Talk about a myth. I love that.

Well, it's always, you can look at someone's life through the rear view mirror and it's like, of course you're doing what you're doing. Like it all makes sense. All of these experiences that you've had have added up to you being the person that you are and the way that you kind of navigate the world.

But looking back, it appears that this wanderlust and this sensitivity around poverty and being a caretaker for those who have less has always been part and parcel of who you are. Yeah, I think, talk about lucky. I think there are some people who don't figure out who they are or what they want to do at their most core part of who they are

until very late in life. And I knew as a little girl that I was going to do something both to serve and also, as you said, to allow for a life of adventure. And that's really carried itself through. And from the time I was six, but when I was probably 44 or 45, I got a random email from a boy I dated when I was 16. And he said, I was in the dentist and I saw this magazine article. And I just want to tell you, Jacqueline, you're doing exactly today what you said you would do, be doing when you were 16 years old. And it really took my breath away because I don't remember being that clear as a 16 year old.

I remember as a six year old wanting to save the world, I was a normal teenager, but I think I had that sense that I wanted to make change. Right. And certainly there's inflection points that end up pointing you in that direction, but I can't help but think short of those stories that I want you to tell that somehow

you would have found your way to be doing exactly what you're doing anyway, right? Like by hook or crook. By hook or crook. Yeah, yeah. So you end up going to UVA, you study like international relations and economics, right? But the idea was you wanted to be a writer.

I mean, was the kind of war journalist thing part of that idea at that time? Funny, I've never thought about that. In a way, I think at Virginia, my middle-class army military dad, immigrant dad, was the one when he found out that I wanted to be an English major in his very quiet but powerful way said

that he thought that was a very bad idea. How would I ever support myself? And being a pleaser, certainly for him at that time, I took on economics, but I took every English course that I could get my hands on. And I think it was then, and I don't even know why, where I would read Sartre and Camus and even Joseph Conrad and find myself deeply drawn to this idea of good and evil and how are there good people and bad people or do good and evil lurk within the spirits of every person,

which is what I deeply believe now. And so maybe that was the connection then from early on, a pull toward conflict and broken places. That started probably through my father being in Vietnam, but then through literature. So this desire to better understand the dynamics that would create that kind of conflict. Like, are these people truly evil?

Who's good and who's the bad guy? Or is there such a thing? I think it was, is there such a thing? Is there such a thing? That early on trying to understand the contras and the sandinistas, which was part of my generation's moral conundrum. The deeper I would look into what was happening,

the less sure I was of who was all good and who was all bad. And it was essentially recognizing that I didn't have such a black and white ability to come down with certainty that I thought I probably wouldn't be a very good journalist. And, but I wanted to know those places. I wanted to be in those places. I wanted to understand those places.

And then layered on top of that, was this sensitivity around poverty that comes in part from stories your dad would tell about being overseas, being deployed and the poverty that he bore witness to. For sure. He's a quiet guy, but I would ask him questions all the time. And I was curious about the children mostly.

And my dad worked with an orphanage on one of his tours in Vietnam. And it didn't make sense to me that they were so poor and we were not. I would say it was also very much the Catholic school upbringing and this social justice element of my family. this social justice element of my family. But honestly, Richard was also, sometimes I think you're born with parts, some of the seeds that become who you are.

That as a little kid, I was always drawn to the runt of the puppy litter. You know, my mother tells the story of, you know, finally having enough money that they could buy this perfect English sheepdog. I was probably nine. And we went to the farm to get the perfect English sheepdog that she'd been studying. And then I saw the runt of the litter

and it was clearly had a problem, was probably blind and mentally disabled. And I was like, how could you be such a horrible person that you're gonna make us get this perfect dog that everybody will want to need to take care of the little one. My mother was like, oh. You're just wired that way.

I think, I mean, I would ask you, do you think you're like, who you are is probably how you came out. A lot of it, I believe in change as well, but I think constitutionally, yeah, we come out the way we are. And as a parent of four kids, I can tell you. Which one?

Yeah, like they come out pretty quickly. You can tell this is who this person is and they stay that way fundamentally throughout their lives. So yeah, I think we come in with a certain wiring and inclinations and dispositions. And yet, despite this, you end up, you know, in this interview for Goldman Sachs or not Goldman Sachs, despite this, you end up, you know, in this interview for Goldman Sachs or not Goldman Sachs, Chase Manhattan,

which is just like, you know, confusing. But I remember just to say, like, I'm a couple of years younger than you, but I remember in college, the career centers and the career paths were not what they are today. Like you would go there and they'd be like, well, it's Boston Consulting and it's Bain and it's this investment bank and that

investment bank. And like, that was kind of it. And that was even more advanced than when I went. You know, in our generation, in my generation, there weren't a lot of options. I didn't know what the nonprofit sector was. I knew that these charities, but I didn't think there was an interesting career there. And- I thought that if you work for them, you didn't get paid. Like you just, the only way to do it would be to volunteer.

And you were sort of saintly. Yeah, me too. And I had paid for college. So I really wasn't that interested in going straight into work after I had been working nonstop for my whole life. I wanted to go ski in Colorado for a year and experience what all my friends had had in their lives

that I'd never really been able to do, fun. In that way, I always had fun. And so our career office just had these little boxes where you could put your resume into the different boxes that took your, your, your majors. And so I put my name in the boxes and Chase Manhattan called. And I really said to my, my roommates, I was living with these two women. I was like, this is ridiculous. I don't want to do this interview.

And they like, just do it. I promised my mom and dad that I would do the interviews. And I had one suit that I owned. And so I walk into this interview with my foreign affairs and economics degree. And this really cute guy is sitting at a table in this little room. And he says, so Ms. Novogratz, why do you want to be a banker? And it was truly the one question I was fully unprepared to answer. Not being a liar, I just didn't hesitate. And I said, I don't want to be a banker. My mom and dad are making me do this interview.

And you could just see his face. It's just like, huh, well, that's really unfortunate. Because if you got this job, you would be in 40 countries in the next three years learning all about the political and economic structures and situations in those countries, which of course was a big part of really what I wanted to do with my life was to go.

I had never been outside the United States, barely on a plane at that point. And so then it was just like, man. So I said, do you think we could start this interview over? And he smiled and said, sure. So got up, walked out of the room, knocked on the door, extended my hand, said, hi, I'm Jacqueline Novogratz. And he said, so tell me, Ms. Novogratz, why do you want to be a banker? And I said, ever since I was five years old, all I ever wanted to be was a banker.

And he laughed, I laughed, and he's like, so let's see how good you are, that he would throw out these questions. And he'd be like, so you're foreign affairs and your real focus is Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia. So tell me about the Middle East. And I'd say, I don't know anything about the Middle East. He's like, I know, tell me about it anyway.

I was like, okay. You're like, this is going very well. I just assumed there is no way on earth that this guy is gonna move me to the next level. And I was a bartender. I went to the bar, worked till three in the morning. My little suit was crumpled into a ball in the back of my backpack that I rode on my bike home.

Get home and pre-cell phones on the little table by the door is a piece of paper that says, Chase called you back at 7 a.m. interview. And I'm thinking, okay, how are we gonna pull this one off? You're gonna have to iron that suit. Got the iron, got the blow dryer. I mean, Jacqueline, it's so crazy. And I know you've been asked this before,

but there's a couple interesting things about this. I mean, not the least of which is the audacity or the gumption to tell the guy you don't want the job right out of the gate. That's very unusual. Most people would be a shrinking flower in the wake of such a question and try to scramble to answer it

in an appeasing way, I suppose. And then the second piece of asking for a do-over. So there's this kind of truth telling compulsion that you have, and also this fearlessness to kind of ask the question that most of us would be too afraid to ask. And on the point of you being asked this question before, I still don't know that I've gotten a satisfactory answer.

Yeah, yeah. And where that comes from. I do think inside of me and maybe everybody is this, both the cocky and the unsure, the audacious and the humble, the worthy and the not sure how worthy you actually are. And so, and I do know that I am a truth teller so much so that I'm really, I can't read speeches. You know, I have to connect and just speak.

And it drives my communications team insane. And that's related to it somehow. That if I know what I'm talking about, I can talk about it, but I can't make something up unless everyone knows I'm making it up and then I can talk about it, but I can't make something up unless everyone knows I'm making it up and then I can have fun. So I think the first part was, it was the truth. And I wasn't looking for a job and I was only doing it

because my mom and dad made me do it. Not made me do it, but you know. And if you didn't want it, there wasn't much to lose. The stakes weren't high. It felt so ridiculous to me that I was in there in this little gray suit that I got hit or miss trying to maybe get this job or maybe not. I didn't even know.

And so, and then the idea for me at that point of traveling to 40 countries was like not a possibility at some level. And again, I'm sure in my mind, there was like, I will travel the world like Gertrude Bell on a camel, right? You know, go off and be the lone wanderer, not someone saying on a plate,

I'm gonna hand this to you, want it? And there was no way I was gonna say no. Yeah. Yeah, it's exactly what you were hoping to manifest in your life and you would then be getting paid to travel to all of these places and immerse yourself in the economies of all of these foreign countries and garner this unbelievable education

about how the world works. And in truth, I had no idea what banking even was anyway. All I saw was 40 countries where I cared about politics. I cared about the economies. I cared about people. I didn't really know what it meant to be a banker. And in fact, it was funny when I first came back to the bar I worked at in the summertime

and everybody was so proud of me for being a bank teller, which was the sort of what everyone thought a banker was. And truth was I made more money at the bar than I did at the bank anyway. So it was a funny moment. The idea of investment banking and consulting, that was, I was still a few years away, I think. So you get the job, you moved to New York

and suddenly you're on a plane and you're flying around and like, what are you actually doing when you're going to these places? So it was called credit audit and we would be essentially handed this big stack of loans that Hong Kong or Kuala Lumpur or Buenos Aires offices had made. And we would go on these big yellow sheets of paper.

We would look at the financials. We'd look at the purpose of the loan. We'd look at how it was structured. Was it variable interest or long-term interest? And we would assess the credit worthiness of the bank's loan portfolio. The early 80s was a really powerful time to do that because you had wild inflation and wild financial crisis.

So you actually had hyperinflation. In one day, Brazil's currency could change by 800%, always in the wrong way for Brazil. So suddenly, company after company and nation after nation was defaulting on their debt. At the same time, the Saudi gold, I mean, oil was becoming like gold. And so the banks were really liquid

or had been really liquid. And so they were making stupider and stupider loans because they had this money to push out the door. And so from a macro perspective, I found it just fascinating because for the first time in my life, I saw the world as all connected. That was happening in oil, had a direct influence on who was getting money in another completely different part of the world. I also saw how the rich were treated so differently from the poor and that a hundred million dollar loans would be made to elites in, I keep picking on Brazil,

but that was the country that had such an impact on me. And it was clear if you, once I learned to see story and narrative in financials, it was clear that the person who borrowed had no intention to ever repay. Sometimes they would move the money right off shore to protect it so that they had the money. Sometimes they would use part of it,

but there was a lot of fraud and the bankers often didn't follow up. Everything was based on a handshake and relationship based on being in the same club. Right. And so I found that both fascinating and terrifying. And at the same time, because we all read about the developing world as these really poor places, and yet there I was in this incredibly alive, beautiful, colorful, joyous place. I would be drawn into communities that were poor.

I didn't think of them as poor. I just saw them as the most colorful, vibrant, joyful communities. And then I realized those people were fully excluded. They would never have a chance to get even a $10 loan and maybe they would be better at repaying it because they would have such a sense of obligation in ways that the too many, not obviously not everyone,

but too many of the elites weren't taking seriously. So walk me through the process of how you take those experiences, the more that you kind of understand the tectonic plates of macroeconomics and how it's sort of marginalizing and depriving these poor people of access to capital and getting to understand kind of

what that dynamic looks like, how you step into this idea of possibly tackling it as a vocation. You're a banker, I mean, you could have stayed there and had this successful career. You were moving up the ladder, but at some point you jump off the chain. You were talking about stakes in that first interview.

High stakes, low stakes. I think it plays a big role in a human being's lives and those decision points. Are you in a high stakes moment? Are you in a low stakes moment? And sometimes when it's a high stakes moment, there's greater clarity to what the decision actually means. So I would say two, if not three things were happening simultaneously. One, I'd had this epiphany that the poor had no access. And yet we were writing off

hundreds of millions of dollars of loans. I didn't think I needed to leave the bank because I actually loved so much about it. And some of my very best friends I met in that period. And I thought that my boss might be interested in the idea of me building a unit inside of the bank where we actually lent to low-income people because I was sure we were gonna get better repayment rates

than the bank was getting at a macro level. The second thing that happened, I guess there were three things. At the time, I stumbled across this article about a little known man at the time named Muhammad Yunus, who ended up being the founder of the Grammy Bank and got the Nobel Peace Prize for the work he did on just this idea.

He was the pioneer of microfinance. He was one of the pioneer, but he was the greatest storyteller. And I would say there were three or four, but it was 1976, talk about patience, when he first made 30 small loans to 30 desperately poor Bangladeshi women and saw that they all paid back in a nation

where the average repayment rates at the banks were something like 15%, 85% write-offs, right? So I read that, I was seeing it with my own eyes and went to the bank. And then the third thing that happened was this incredible man, Tony Triciano, who was the number two person at Chase had offered me the chance to essentially sit at his right side and build a fast track career. And he was an extraordinary man. I think he saw in me the scrappy person that he was and is.

And so he kept raising the stakes. I wasn't finding anything that was perfect. I couldn't find anything in Brazil. I knew I had stumbled upon this and I wanted to do it. Somehow test whether you could lend to low-income people. And so while I was stumbling or fumbling toward finding an opportunity, Mr. Triciano kept offering,

well, you want to work in Spain? Where do you want to work? Pick a place. The Texas banks were hurting. Go fix that. Go help me fix that problem. And I think that was the clarifying moment for me that here's a fast track, here's no track. I don't know if you'll ever get on that fast track. And my father definitely

thought that I had thrown away that once in a lifetime opportunity. And I might've, but I knew that if I went with him, I would have stayed on that track. That's a really hard track to get off of. And there was no opportunity for you to say to him, let's start a microfinance branch in Brazil and see how it goes and let me run it and prove to you that we can make it work? Or was that something that was just too far afield

and not interesting to- That's such a great question. I might've lacked the courage or the imagination because I asked my boss who I didn't respect as much, but maybe because this was like, remember that show, get smart with the doors that open and shut? This is the big dude.

To get to the 60th floor, you're in the executive washroom. You took this big all the way to the Smart with the doors that open and shut? This is the big dude. To get to the 60th floor, you're in the executive washroom. All the way to the top and the doors would open and he would be sitting behind this desk and I was there with my, you know. And you're 25, right? And I'm 25 years old. And yeah, I think I may have lacked the courage

to do a deal with him. It was either the deals on the table or go off into this unknown territory. So you split. So I split. Yeah, how are mom and dad with that? Not great. And again, context and time,

I was going to a place they'd never been able to imagine. Very few of us could. No cell phones, no real way of connecting. I didn't have health insurance. I couldn't explain to anybody exactly what I was doing. And man, was it easy for them to tell people that their daughter, and there weren't that many young women who worked on Wall Street at the time,

had this fancy job where she was traveling all around the world telling bankers how to do their business better. That's a good story. Telling them that they were living in, I was living in places that they couldn't find on a map, doing something that they didn't understand or weren't able to articulate.

Didn't feel quite the same. And then there was the fear factor. I think particularly for my mother, my father had been in Vietnam. For my mother, I was never gonna get married. That was a big piece for her. And something bad was surely going to happen to me. And would I ever come back?

I think we under appreciate the extent to which those social pressures keep us in situations we don't wanna be in. It takes a lot of courage when you're the oldest, right? Of all your siblings, I'm sure your parents were very invested in your path and all of that. And it's hard. Well, and also maybe invested in me continuing to be a role model and a helper in the six

that were coming up. So yeah, and you're a parent, you wanna keep your children safe. Sure, of course. So how do you figure out what the next move is? There was a woman at, well, I wrote to the big names, Muhammad Yunus, Abed, Ilabat in India.

Those were the days where it took 10 days to get a letter across the world. Nobody wrote me back. But a woman I worked with had an aunt named Michaela Walsh who worked with Women's World Banking and she was in New York City. And so I went to her and I said, I wanted to go to Brazil and I would help build Women's World Banking in Brazil.

And she said, that was great, but they had no opportunities there. And there was however, a job in West Africa in the Cote d'Ivoire, not exactly on my game plan, but I said, yes, didn't ask for any details, missed the health insurance piece. And literally probably a month later sold everything. My mother still reminds me, you know,

she had given me some good antiques that were just left on the corner for someone to pick up. Cote d'Ivoire. There is, Cote d'Ivoire. So I feel like this is another, you know, this experience is another inflection point in your education of appreciating the complexity and nuance of the problems that you were, you know,

audacious enough to even tackle. On so many levels, Rich. Audaciousness, but also arrogance. It never dawned on me to ask whether I would be properly introduced. I was really happy with the way my job was described, that I would be an ambassador to African women and I would help them set up

these little microfinance entities across the continent, starting in the Ivory Coast, the Cote d'Ivoire. I had an office at the African Development Bank and it all just sounded amazing to me, this amazing entrepreneurial opportunity. Of course I get there and I'm fully and wholly rejected by the West African women, wondering why a 25 year old who spoke terrible French

and had no understanding of their culture should be the ambassador to African women. Right. Good point. The white savior here to save the world. High rolls ensue. And no one wants saving, thank you very much. And certainly not by people who haven't even spent any time truly even understanding who you are, why you are.

And second, this was a very prestigious office. And so there was also the other side that, why should I get it, not them, right? Right. And so ensued probably six months of failure after failure, really, really difficult situations that were many of them from my own blind spots and some from very ambitious women who saw me in the way of their ambition.

That was a very toxic combination. So how long were you there? I was only there for about six months, but it was definitely a defining moment. One that almost broke me. You know, they say, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger. Sometimes it just doesn't kill you.

And I definitely remember walking down the street one day where these dogs were growling at me and just being like, go ahead. You know, everyone else hates me too. I was very low. But it does make you stronger though, because it's a formative experience in which you realize like you've been disabused of everything

that you kind of thought about how to approach these things. So you depart with your tail between your legs, but you've had a valuable experience. I mean, you're very frank about these failures that you've had along your path, but each one of them kind of informs the next step. And all is part of this journey towards really understanding how to be the best steward

and servant to these solutions. Sure, it does make you stronger. There's no doubt. It definitely, in a crazy way, reinforced my commitment. I was not leaving. And my parents lived in Germany. My dad was still in the army then. And I went to Heidelberg for Christmas time. I was jaundiced. I couldn't have been skinnier. I was just this like tiny, tiny thing. I was probably running 16 miles a day

just to probably run away. I don't know. Yeah. And then my mother and I had the big blowout. Tell me about this. Whether I had been deliberately poisoned or I had mistakenly gotten the worst food poisoning a person could get, I lie in a bathroom floor for eight days,

really fully dehydrated and really in trouble. I mean, just to be clear, when you left, it was under threat. You know, there was- There was threat. Yeah, there was threats and you had been forewarned that you could possibly be poisoned. And you ultimately do get sick and it's unclear

whether you were actually poisoned or suffered some kind of food poisoning or something. It was definitely a crescendoing by the minute. Yeah, but that's terrifying. It was terrifying. I mean, I left the country, but I finally got well enough. I bought a ticket that day.

I did go to the women in a way that does not sound like a broken person. And I really, I remember looking at them. They were so beautiful. And I was so conscious of being such a little bedraggled, skinny white thing. And they were like these gorgeous women and these turbids and jewelry and flowing robes of yellow and purple.

I mean, yellow and orange and pale blue. I'm like there in the room with them. And somehow I had the courage then to say, I know I made a lot of mistakes, but I wouldn't treat any creature the way you treated me. And I'm totally alone. And we need to do better if we're going to heal this world. That somehow those words came out. And I wasn't hectoring.

I was just, it wasn't hectoring. I was just, it makes me cry. You know, I was just saying truth and they couldn't really take it in. You know, it was just that then pregnant quiet. And then I left, I left my two boxes of my prize poetry and whatever random few possessions that I owned. And then I left, I left my two boxes of my prize poetry and whatever random few possessions that I owned in the hotel, never to go back and get it. And so you can imagine my mother seeing

this transformed young woman show up and announce, well, now I'm going back to East Africa. I still don't really have a job, but don't worry, mom, young woman show up and announce, well, now I'm going back to East Africa. I still don't really have a job, but don't worry, mom, it's gonna be fine. You quickly recharge your battery and said, I'm gonna go to Kenya, because Kenya was next, right? Kenya. Yeah, I don't even think I experienced my battery

as not charged at some level. It was just, I'm going to go. I'm going to be home. I am definitely going to eat a lot. My boyfriend met me in Germany. And everyone just was just like, you can't go back. And I felt like there was a form almost of that their fear couldn't hold me back. And that if I didn't go, it was going to affirm too many people's expectations of what this place was, this continent was. That I knew that even though these particular individuals and I had had a hard experience, I already had seen how extraordinary people were

and what was possible. I knew I was in love with it. And so again, going from duality to the complexity of what it means to be human, I wasn't blind to that. In fact, I was so drawn to life there and to the people there and to the culture there. But just as I could not go in any longer as a savior, nor could I any longer see Africa, in inverted quotes, as a perfect place where a community flourished and everyone was kind to each other. I went back after those two weeks as a much more nuanced person going to invest, if you will, with a clear understanding that this was about the human journey that I was a part of. I was neither in control of it, nor would I be controlled by it,

but that I wanted to engage in relationship. And so to your point, what doesn't kill you make you stronger, was a rapid rinse and forget the dry cycle, just throw you right back. Right. But as a completely different person. Right, with kind of this hope,

but a more harder edged hope and an appreciation for the ferocity that is gonna be demanded of you in order to just survive and make your way, let alone produce change or catalyze change. And the beginning maybe of a superpower that I think that you have too, is being able to sit in a room

and just really pay attention to the room and to the people in the room, not in a naive, idealistic, nor cynical way, but start to figure out who's who in the room, what dynamics are happening in the room. I think that the experience in Cote d'Ivoire really jumpstarted it and then accelerated that skill set. So that I could get really tangible things done without losing that sense of idealism and hope.

And how long were you in Kenya? that sense of idealism and hope. And how long were you in Kenya? Well, it's complicated because I was only in Kenya a few months where I had another flaming fail. That when these Rwandan women walked into my office there and said, we are from Rwanda. I thought they said Uganda. That's how I was at the time. And we've just passed our first law, 1986,

so that women didn't no longer, so that men no longer had to pay bride price when they married women. No, sorry about that. It wasn't that. They just passed a new law changing the Napoleonic code 1986 so that women no longer had to get their husband's permission when they opened a bank account. And they wanted to see whether it might be possible to have some kind of financial institution

for women. And it was the first time that African women had ever asked me to do anything. And so I said, I said, yes. Yeah, you're being invited, which is a big difference, right? Come in. It was Felicula, is that her name?

Or was she later? This was a woman named Londrada who I changed her name in the blue sweater. But, and Rayvocata who I changed her name in the blue sweater. And Revo Kata, who I changed both of their names because I was worried when I wrote that book. And I went sort of similar. I went with one suitcase. And then for the next two years, I pretty much went back and forth between Rwanda and Kenya.

I would have stayed in Rwanda. But early on, a woman named Imakule, who was one of our co-founders and one of the first three parliamentarians, I got malaria. And she gave me a big gift and said, we love working with you. This is great. We're building this bank, but it is, you are maniacal. You know, you're just going so fast and our lives don't work that way. And so if we're truly going to build this

as a Rwandan institution, which I was committed to do, we've got to do it in a way that doesn't fully depend on you. And I was both crushed and exhilarated because I did want this to be a Rwandan institution. I didn't want to stay there for the rest of my life. And so we came up with this plan that I would work there for two months and then I would go that I would work there for two months and then I would go to Kenya and work there for two months.

And there was another woman who was a dear and is a dear mentor from the Philippines, Mary Rosales. She ran UNICEF regionally. And she saw that we were building a bank for women. And Mary, who was the one I would really go to cry with when things got really hard, she said, we have a lot of work to do with women and enterprise and income generation.

And so don't worry about it. We have a job for you when you're in Kenya. And so I would flip back and forth between the two countries for the next two years. And this bank ends up taking root and becoming successful. And what's interesting is that, I mean, first, I wanna spend some time focusing on the fact

that so much of the work that you do and truly the solutions that you're committed to are oriented around women. And in particular with microfinance, it's all about the women, right? The women being the kind of financial bookkeepers and the decision makers about how funds are allocated and the empowerment of these women to create some level of financial independence and how that really creates a foundation for a more functional society. So talk a little bit about like the women being

like the key component in all of this. So I never say this, but when I first went to work with women in banking and women in Africa, it felt a little funny to be honest, because I was raised again, a different generation with four alpha male brothers in a big patriarchal extended family. And so I spent a lot of my youth proving

that I was as tough as the boys were. And so this idea that now I'm going to do women's things was not comfortable at the beginning. And then I moved to Africa and saw that 80% of the food was grown by the women. That especially in West Africa, you actually divided who earned income and what was paid for by whom because you had these polygamous families.

And my whole world shifted when I saw firsthand because you had these polygamous families. And my whole world shifted when I saw firsthand how women were excluded, how women, yet women were the backbone. They were the backbone of family. They were the backbone of who paid for school, who made sure the kids got educated. They were the backbone for culture. And they did so much of the work

and yet were seen as chattel, as possessions, had no rights, were not schooled. And that fundamentally changed me. And in some ways it is often the ones that are, the doubting but curious that I think become maybe the best ambassadors. Because I never used the language when I would see women, because I couldn't stand the language of women in development. Women are more honest, women are more this.

And I would think, people are people. However, what I did see was how women were systematically, fundamentally excluded from opportunities that would actually enable the economy to flourish and that we will never build a world when we systematically oppress and in some cases erase 50% of the population. So that changed again, a new layer of nuance that if there would be one man in the room at the time, women wouldn't tell the population. So that changed again, a new layer of nuance

that if there would be one man in the room at the time, women wouldn't tell the truth. And so I had to make rules. If we were talking about Duterte Embedé, which was the name of our bank, the men weren't allowed. Women needed to have that place where they had the confidence and the freedom to tell the truth. There was this idea,

in the early days of microfinance that it would just be throwing money away, that these people would not repay their loans. And in fact, it's quite the opposite. Like the repayment percentage is way higher than it is for loans doled out to, you know, higher socioeconomic echelons. Yeah.

But that was also a lesson that you learned, right? Because initially there were some issues around that until you built in the accountability piece that has the added bonus effect of also kind of sowing the seeds of dignity, which is like a huge part of this whole mission. Yeah. Rwanda was a big aid recipient.

And so the way people interacted with, particularly anything foreign, was to accept grants. You'd walk down the street and kids would say, Don Juan, give me 10 francs. And I would say, no, no, no, no, no. I'd be like, Don Juan, 10 francs. You give it to me. And they would look at me like, but you're rich, madam.

And I'd say, let's talk. Let's have a conversation. It's so offended me that we had this, so many people who were interacting in a way that was tantamount to begging and not enabling themselves to be who they could be. So when we first started, particularly this bakery that I started, the women ripped us off blindly.

It didn't take much. Because it was government run, right? It was like this charitable organization. So nobody was invested. It was run by the good sisters. It was a charitable organization, not government, but they probably wisely took what they could take. When it was clear and they finally believed me

that this wasn't mine, this was theirs. And so we had a choice. We build it in a way that is financially sustainable that allows them to grow and prosper. Or it becomes like too many of the other stupid projects that we had seen where it works for a few years and then it's gone. How does that happen?

There are so many well-intentioned people in philanthropy and yet there's just too many stories of funds just ending up, there's all kinds of issues around corruption and just organizations being poorly run and the money seems to disappear and nobody ends up benefiting and it's all like just a big clusterfuck.

Yeah. Like how does that happen with people who I'm sure are trying to do the right thing and help? I often say that distance dulls the moral imagination. And so we wanna do good, we wanna be part of good. And so we give money hoping it does good, but that's not enough. We've actually got to build in systems

that have to your word of accountability. Generosity without accountability can really make a mess of things. And it's not the same as justice. Justice is hard. Generosity can be hard, but it's a lot easier than justice. And so when there's no accountability in systems,

and if you think about an aid system where people are coming and going, they're not vested, it becomes even easier for many of the different players to take different pieces of whatever is available. So it's gotten a lot better, but I did this study of 200 of these women's groups in Kenya in one of the two months that I was there. And what I saw was a pretty terrifying cycle where the philanthropist or the aid organization would give money to

a women's group. They immediately would give a 10% kickback to the local district officer because the money had to go through him. Then they had no skills to cooperatively run their chicken farm or whatever they were given the money for, usually decided by some government official or a foreigner. The whole thing would fail. But whenever the dignitaries would come to see how the project was doing, the women would parade out some little chicks. They'd put a show on.

They would go by fantas. Sometimes they would, and biscuits. Sometimes they would, and Biscuits. Sometimes they would kill a goat. And after looking at these 200 groups, I could only conclude that the majority of them were spending money to keep this whole farce alive. And I remember staying up all night, one night, writing the report.

And the first line was, good intentions lead the path to hell. Another famous saying of my mother. And I just felt such rage that there was a machine that ultimately was a big lie that if we really cared about enabling people to solve problems, this is not the machine we would be building.

And on top of that, you know, as generous as the spirit is that's donating all of these things, it doesn't respect the dignity piece because nobody wants to be just a charity case, right? Like this is another kind of facet of the things that you talk about in the book, which is finding a way to inspire that dignity.

And that comes with this model and this approach where these people aren't on the receiving end of charity, they become stakeholders and invested. So you're aligning the incentives, right? A lot of these problems you're talking about, there's a misalignment of incentives that butts up against a lack of accountability that creates like all of these problems.

And Acumen is really a re-imagination of the model that is this hybrid between philanthropy and, you know, proper investment banking or venture capital to get those incentives in parallel with the best interest of solving the problem and getting people really engaged themselves, the people who are on the receiving end of it. Is that, I feel like I just like, I don't know.

I don't feel like I articulated that very well at all. It was beautiful. You articulated it beautifully because, yeah, what I learned more than anything else, and certainly after the Rwandan genocide, but in story after story like this, is that many well-intended people see a chance to give a grant and get people a little bit more income

for their income generating process, project. But that income and wealth is not the opposite of poverty. That the opposite of poverty truly is dignity. It's that ability to make choice. And so when I started Acumen, the whole focus was on what systems would you build to enable human dignity rather than just make sure people get some income.

And it felt very clear to me then, particularly after all of these experiences, that markets have a real role to play because there's a distribution and a scaling that's natural. You have self-organizing mechanisms through the good part of capitalism. And it's limited. It too often leaves out the poor

and in the worst of cases, it exploits the poor. Charity has a role, but it too often creates dependency. So what if we took philanthropy and invested it in those entrepreneurs that were hell-bent on solving some of the biggest problems of our day, like sanitation, like education, like energy, like agriculture? What if we gave them time to really understand the true constraints and the obstacles that get in poor people's way and build solutions so that at the end of the day, they could send their children to schools

they wanted to send their children to. They could get access to good healthcare. They could get electricity. Although I wasn't thinking about electricity 20 years ago. And because what I'd seen over and over was that the poor actually pay more in these broken markets than the middle-class pay anyway. It's not like the poor are sitting around waiting for somebody to get them water. It just happens to be dirty. And the water they get access to is often supplied by what's called mafias, extortionary providers.

And so it seemed to me that we could start with recognizing that every human being wants to solve their own problems. We wanna be part of contributing in one way or another and build those systems that at the end of the day, not only allow that kind of flourishing, but solve all of our problems. Well, first of all, I think you should run

your own marketing department at your company because that was beautifully put. But, and secondly, this begs the question of two things. First, this idea of patient capital, because these, you know, if you're gonna change systems and, you know, address infrastructure and create these proper incentives and all of this, like this is a lot of work

and this is gonna take a lot of time, complex, right? And then second to that, but very important of course, is redefining how you think about success, not in terms of profit and loss or investor return, but more broadly in terms of, I feel like the word impact gets thrown around a lot, but like you tell me like what the metrics are that you came up with in order to gauge whether, you know,

an infusion of capital or, you know, lifting up entrepreneurs who are gonna go into these areas and solve a particular problem, like how you're gauging their progress and, you know, whether they're successful or not. There are a lot of questions. I know, I'm sorry. No, that's good, it's good, it's good. I think I know exactly, I think I know where lot of questions. I know that was sorry. No, that's good.

That was more like a rant. I think I know exactly. I think I know where you're going. I'm not very good at asking questions. I just throw stuff out there. You're awesome at asking questions. And like I said, the honor of being listened to is just, you're amazing.

Thank you. The entrepreneurs that are building markets that have never existed don't know how to price. They don't know, they don't have a distribution center system. You know, you think about it, let's look at electricity, which is one I've told before, but in 2006, 1.5 billion people on the planet had no access to electricity. Two young guys, Sam Goldman, Ned Tozin, come forth with a solar lamp, which makes sense to people like us. We've seen solar before. What they didn't fully get was that their customers would make two, $ dollars a day. They would exist in places that had very little infrastructure, no distribution channels. Low-income people had no way to finance these solar lanterns. And equally, if not more importantly, they had very little trust of this

newfangled technology that may or may not work. $30 was the first price point. And that's a lot of money for people who make two, $3 a day. And so our idea was we would take this philanthropy, we would invest, I thought eight years would be long, we're still in 14 years later. And that we would accompany this, the company as well. By that, I mean, we would use our social capital, our networks, our access to corporations. We would

help them raise grant money so that they could build marketing systems, so that they could experiment, so that they could fail. And any money that came back to Acumen would be reinvested in other innovation serving low income people. That single company, D-Lite, has now brought affordable light and electricity to over 100 million people. We then continued to learn with them and realized that we had to build a market. to learn with them and realize that we had to build a market. And so we then started investing in other companies like D-Lite as well as financing companies and in mini grids and what was called nano grids, like just a few houses hooked together. And you asked, how did we know if we're making a difference?

How do you measure impact? Well, we knew we could tell you how many people were getting access to light. We didn't know if it was changing their lives. We knew how much carbon we were displacing because prior to the solar, they were using kerosene, which is dirty and dangerous and terrible for your health. But we developed something called Lean Data,

which is a way of texting 5,000, 10,000 customers simultaneously, asking them a series of questions from which we could deduce how many more hours were you staying up at night? What do you do with that time? Do your children do better or worse at school? What do you like about this? Would you recommend it to your neighbors, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? So today we're the largest off-grid energy investor in the world. One third of people on the planet who have access to off-grid solar and light and electricity are customers of the companies in which we've invested,

we have a very good idea of which companies are most effective at reaching the poor people, at reaching low-income people. Which companies have the most effective light lumens, luminosity, so the bright light, which are best for displacing carbon. Which companies provide the greatest customer satisfaction. And so we can now make decisions

for how we allocate our capital based not just on financial performance, but from all these other indicators. Yeah, it's beautiful. I mean, those are things that are never gonna show up on a spreadsheet, like how many young people stayed up an extra hour to study and how do you gauge the long-term impact

of something like that purely because somebody has a light that they didn't have before. And Rich, you talk about dignity. If you wanna see dignity manifest, go into someone's house who has forever, for every generation, just seen darkness descend at six o'clock if you live near the equator

and watch them flick a switch and light up their home. We so take that for granted. We so don't think about what it would feel like in an isolated or very congested slum area. The fear at night, the sound of the bugs of human beings, all that changes. And what shocked me when we first started to see these units being sold was that often the first light

that the woman would, a place, would actually go outside the door and be their security light. And so how do you measure that? Right. I feel safe. I mean, that would be something you probably wouldn't have thought of, right?

Never thought of it. Yeah. Uh-uh. Yeah. I wanna better understand this idea. You said a minute ago, we knew that if we wanted to address this problem of just electrifying homes and getting lights in them,

that we had to create a market, right? So tell me what that means. Like the way I think about that and tell me if this is wrong, of course there's that adage, like don't give a fish, teach somebody how to fish. But this is like, we're gonna create a whole fishing infrastructure.

We're gonna make the poles and we're gonna, you know, dam the river. And we're gonna, you know, you have to like create all of these other things in order for that one thing that you're focused on to even take root and function properly. Absolutely. I don't think I understood at the beginning

that we were helping to build a market. And obviously we were one player of many, but I used to say when people would say, Oh, so what Acumen does is teach a man to fish. And I would say with all respect, if we're working in a coastal community, they know how to fish. Right there, yeah.

They tell you how fishing works, right? They don't need us to teach know how to fish. Right there, yeah. They tell you how fishing works, right? They don't need us to teach them how to fish. They need a cold chain. They need to know that when they fish in climate crisis and it is so hot and they're bringing back their lower stocks of fish because our oceans have been depleted and they can't keep them cool,

they're gonna lose all their fish. And so unless we find them ways to get them a cold chain, it doesn't matter if they know how to fish. We need to find them people who will buy the fish at prices they could afford with some level of transparency, and I would just go off. So what I was essentially saying,

without understanding what I was saying, we gotta build a market. That is what's needed. And after 20 years of investing patient capital and we've invested about 140 million in about 135 companies on the patient capital side. And then we have about 200 million that we manage in for-profit funds.

But on the patient capital side, building new markets is one of the most important things that patient capital is used for, because you're essentially going to places where functioning markets have never existed. People depended on kerosene, or diesel in Nigeria. Everyone knows how that market works, and it's highly extortionary, very subsidized by government. You get votes if you get people kerosene. So now we're going to create a new market that gives more ownership and power to individuals

by disrupting the one that already existed. That is really hard to do. In the United States, you would get billions of dollars, or millions at least, from government. Look at Tesla. But when it comes to poor people, that money doesn't exist. And so patient capital is, in a way, a form of that early stage R and D marketing, finding the entrepreneurs, supporting them to build different parts of what I would call the ecosystem

so that you are enabling different companies then to service a whole industry that had never existed. And then the piece that we don't talk enough about is that if you do that well and you solve a fundamental problem, like the lack of electricity, so do you create jobs. And so we are, we may be the biggest investor, but there are many investors now

in the off-grid solar industry. That industry has gotten 400 million people total access to electricity and created 400,000 really good jobs, like careers. And that's how we need to think as a world, including in the United States. If we solve our fundamental problems in ways that transcend left thinking, right thinking, it's the government, it's the private sector, but actually use the tools at our disposal, we could build a better country, include people who've been for too long left out,

get rid of some of the left right conversation that only reinforces inaction and most importantly solve some of our biggest problems. Right, this idea of moral imagination. Moral imagination. Yeah. It requires you to step outside of that rubric altogether and just see all of this and appreciate it in a broader context.

So yeah, talk a little bit more about like what that means. Yeah, and I would say, even since I wrote manifesto for Moral Revolution, my understanding has deepened because I think it also starts with seeing the moral force in other human beings and all other human beings. And it's this idea that we can solve our toughest problems.

We start with a sense of empathy. I see you first and foremost. I understand that you have a problem, but if you just stop at empathy, you've reinforced the status quo. Oh my goodness, I feel so sorry for you. This is a terrible situation, period. So what? The next piece is immersion. We talked about it with Sanergy, the sanitation company. Get close to the problem, understand it. Understand it not from your perspective, but from the person who is actually dealing with the problem. And the third is then to analyze it systemically.

What are the forces that get in that person's way? And can you be honest about where that person might get in her own way? And then finally it goes to action. Short term is willingness to see the world as it is. And that takes a lot of humility and truth, yet always holding to the audacity of the world that you're building. Those D-Lite guys from the very beginning,

they were in their twenties, were going to light the world. They were going to eradicate kerosene. It was crazy, an impossible idea. And yet they had to deal with the junk around them of status quo, including the diesel mafias that didn't want them to succeed, the poor who didn't

trust them, the lack of financing, inertia, complacency, bureaucracy. They had to fight all of that and not turn away from it with just silly idealism, not just buy the stuff and hand it out. We call it spray and pray. They had to build a system. They had to build a company. They had to build a market. And now- That's the hard work. Like making the light is the easy part, is the easiest part in the whole thing.

Oh my goodness. And this gets played out. I mean, you have a million examples of this in all of these companies that you've worked with. I mean, the intraocular lens company and the mosquito nets and the coffee company. And like, that's a whole fascinating thing about kind of dealing with the commodities market

and affordable housing. And the list goes on and on and on. Yeah, so many engineers over the 20 years have come to us and said, "'Jacqueline, this is the best water technology that the world has ever seen. It will solve all the problems of poverty. And I'll say, well, go try it.

And they'll say, no, no, I built the technology. You go build the market. It's like, technology is the easy part, my love. Have you spent time with people to actually understand how they make decisions, what they value, how much money they have? Are they willing to pay? Because I promise you this, you want to get people water, you got to deal with the fact that many of them think water comes from God.

God will decide whether they get sick or not. It doesn't matter if you think it's so clean. We had this company that did reverse osmosis. I know they did desalination to get all the impurities out of the water. They made the water too pure and people didn't like the taste. So you've got to have the moral-

It's all about taste. To care. Is this something people will value? Can I get it to them in a way that they can afford? Because if I can't, you're gonna fail. Right. And that whole message is like a fly in the ointment of Sand Hill Road, right? Like, cause it's all about the doodad.

Like if you just make the best doodad, we can change the world. And there is an arrogance built into that and a lack of appreciation. Right, right, right. And what we're seeing in the world is move fast and break things can sometimes really break a lot of things.

And so when you're dealing with very vulnerable societies, communities that have seen cheats and charities come and go, they have good reason not to trust. You can't move fast and break things. You have to make a commitment to show up and show up and show up and take the problems on with the people that you are there to serve. And that's what separates.

Right. A bit, you talk about this in your book. It's that persistence thing. You don't have to be the fastest, but you have to, what do you say? The prize goes to the person who slows down the least. You gotta just keep the slog. Yeah, it's not very romantic.

It's not very sexy. Cause that's the heavy lifting that you do behind the scenes when no one's looking. It's not very sexy. But when you go into a village and everyone has light and electricity because of the companies that you have. It has to be unbelievable.

It is unbelievable. It is unbelievable. I was sitting with a Rajasthani woman, a group of them, and we were talking about their delights and I was complimenting them on the courage to move from kerosene to solar and asking them for the different reasons they did it. And I was hearing all the same reasons

that people talk about. You know, they could go to the bathroom at night and see snakes with their light. And so security again, but the children studying, et cetera, et cetera. And then one woman said, I don't feel stressed anymore. And I said, what do you mean you don't feel stressed? And she said, well, when I had a kerosene lantern, I was always worried that it might fall over and hurt the children or even kill them. And I said, well, that's very interesting,

because one of the founders, Sam, started this company because he was living in Benin, West Africa. And his neighbor's kerosene lantern fell over and burned down the house and nearly killed his eldest child. So he started delighting. And now I'm sitting across from you. And she looked at me and tears came down her face. And she said, please, madam, would you thank that young man for me? And I thought, what is success? Making all this money or being Sam Goldman

and having a woman on the other side of the world, illiterate, I don't know how she make my dollar, $2 a day, thanking you for changing her life. Yeah, it's so cool. What an amazing life you've lived. I mean, the legacy of that and the impact and hundreds of millions of people impacted by the work that you're doing

and being kind of like an iconoclast in your earlier days and now sort of a mentor to so many young people and to kind of bring it back around to COP26. You know, my only takeaway from that is what I read in the press. So I don't, that's why I asked you, like, what was it like being there and what did you take away from that?

But my sense is that with our generation, there's a calcification around, just we'll do just enough, we'll do just enough, we'll say the right things, we'll make some slight adjustments, but there is a lack of appreciation for just how dire things are and the radical shifts that need to be made

in order to truly address this in a meaningful way. And then we have a whole younger generation of people coming up who are incredibly passionate about this, who mean business, who can look to you as this lighthouse who has guided their path in certain ways. And the level of enthusiasm like this, the things that you care about seem to be,

the point I'm trying to get at in elegantly is that your sensibility seems to be part and parcel, like built into the DNA of the generation that is coming up right now, which gives me hope. And so I suspect that you have quite a few opportunities where you're talking to young people and gauging their interest level and trying to guide them into, you know,

the right pathways for them to express their talents in the most meaningful way. Well, thank you for saying that. I feel that I sometimes am clunkier than I would like. I loved your podcast with Adam Grant, where you said that you were neither a politician nor a preacher, but lighthouse. And when you said it, I was thinking,

I think that's the category I would be in as well. So I also just, it's interesting that you put it that way. We were creating our own category, Adam Grant. He's gonna have to write another book. He has to write another book. He has to figure out a P. He forgot about the lighthouse. He forgot the lighthouse.

Adam, paging Adam Grant. Well, the lighthouse though is sometimes complex with this next gen in that, because I agree with you, the next generation understands we need a new capitalism and the next generation, well, what is the next generation is complex, right? I think that generations are almost new every five years.

The youngest one that's coming up, I think really is focused on building. And building is less pure than the ones that just tell you everything that's wrong with the system. And I think there's an important differentiation there. One young woman read my book, Manifesto for Moral Revolution. And I think there's an important differentiation there. One young woman read my book, manifesto for moral revolution. It said, I thought I was gonna read Angela Davis and here's a woman who's talking to me about markets. I hate it.

And I was like, good point there. It's a very bold title. I mean, if you're gonna write a book and you're gonna, first of all, the first word is manifesto. It's like, how dare you? And then a moral revolution. I could have, I might've jutted a little bit differently. Jacqueline being the arbiter of all, the first word is manifesto. It's like, how dare you? Oh, no, I know, I know. And then a moral revolution. I could have, I might've jutted a little bit differently. Jacqueline being the arbiter of all things moral.

Oh, I just got this great, one of our Dutch entrepreneurs, you can count on a Dutchman for just telling you like it is. He said, I didn't wanna read it because I thought you were gonna do all this moralizing. And then I read it and all I saw was myself, that it's really all about all of your struggles.

And I so related to that part of it. But what we were talking about was really this next gen and what they relate to is a world that is inclusive, that is just, that is sustainable, that we have to build a new set of tools. There's a big debate around, are you tweaking the edges by continuing to even use capitalism or the tools of capitalism,

or should we destroy the whole thing? And- It's back to the nuance thing and the non-binary. And that's where I will always make that plea for nuance and try quickly to go to those examples where we have a radical generation of entrepreneurs that are coming up. And what gives me energy rich is not my ideas,

but really learning from their ideas. In some ways they are mentoring me and allowing me to be an iconoclast again, which is so exciting. Because I would say the last few years have been so hard, but now the paths are revealing themselves again in really exciting ways. And so I'm seeing much more radical

financial facilities being built with a clear headed rationale for what's needed. So an example in your town, Los Angeles is every table, the restaurant. Right. So a guy named Sam Polk, he's a Wall Streeter, getting burned out on Wall Street and learns about this phenomenon of food deserts.

You go into an urban center and same as I was talking about with water in the port, food is exorbitantly expensive. You can't get nutritious food. It's just a lot easier and faster for people actually to get fast food because nothing else exists. And so his first move is a classic first move. I'll start a nonprofit.

And that nonprofit is very effective in helping people understand, but it doesn't solve the problem. So he ultimately decides to create a restaurant that is fast, nutritious, and affordable called Every Table. And he starts in Compton. That restaurant is so appreciated by the local residents that he quickly scales to eight restaurants. We're early investors, so we're all happy. When the pandemic hits, and I saw this across our portfolio, how darkness can reveal the best of us, Sam decides, I'm not letting this slow me down.

On day one of lockdown, he sends a tweet that says, if you need food, we'll deliver it to you. If you can't afford it, our mission is fast, affordable, nutritious food, we'll deliver it anyway. And if you're willing to pay it forward, here's a link. And within weeks, they were delivering tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of meals. Then government partnered with them so that they could reach homeless shelters

and the people who had no access. As of today, they've delivered something on the order of 8 million meals. That's incredible. They've significantly grown their company. And along the way, Sam had always wanted to build franchises that were run by employees. And he started to learn that when you look at the McDonald's franchises and other franchises, the percentage of black and

brown owned franchises is incredibly low. And so he, again, started to look at what are the constraints that keep people from being wealth owners, franchise owners, and can we focus specifically on the systemic racist constraints? And so he built, well, his team, built Every Table Academy, where they would allow high-performing employees who wanted to run their own franchise to get trained.

He understood they had no capital to put up front to build their franchise. So went out and is raising a $10 million loan facility where people will get a very, very low income, I mean, interest rate over the next 10 years. But that facility will then be on-lent to the franchisee prospects. He will give them three years where they will be guaranteed $45,000 income so that they can still pay for their family to survive. And over the next seven to 10 years, when they pay off their loan to Every Table Academy,

they will be full-fledged franchise owners, employers, wealth holders. And he's on track, Every Table is on track to open 65 franchises by the end of 2022. So watch this space. Yeah, that's incredible. And they're moving to New York City, my city. Yeah, they gotta be in New York. They gotta be in New York. They should be all over New York. I mean, come on, they should be all over this space. Yeah, that's incredible. And they're moving to New York City, my city. Yeah, they gotta be in New York.

They gotta be in New York. They should be all over New York. I mean, come on. They should be all over this country. That's an example, right? Is that, it's saying we can control the market. We don't have to be controlled by the markets. Economics is not physics.

Economics is a social construct that we actually have a say in. And so, yes, use the tools of capitalism so that we can have this generation and this ideation and this distribution. And see where there have been long-term systemic injustices. Fix them. Give people a chance. And watch the magic that happens. have been long-term systemic injustices, fix them, give people a chance and watch the magic that happens. That's what so many of these companies are doing. That's beautiful. I mean, I know that the gravamen of your focus is,

and has been in Africa, but this being in the United States and addressing, this is like a problem and an issue that comes up on the podcast all the time. The fact that we have these food deserts and the people who need access to healthy nutrition the most are deprived of it. And it's a very simple and elegant solution

that leverages the best of capitalist market forces and creative kind of business planning to remove those barriers and allow these people to become stakeholders and invested in the success of the affair, you know, each franchise, of course, but the whole affair altogether. It's really powerful, like it's cool. It's so cool.

And we've got 30 some odd companies across the United States, many of which are bringing in ideas from the rest of the world and using them. A company called Isuzu run by a Nigerian immigrant, Abby Wamimo and Samir Goel, his partner. And Isuzu is an African, in Kenya, we call it the merry-go-rounds.

It's 10 women would get together. We'd each put a dollar in the pot. At the end of the week, one of us would get the $10. And then the next week we would put our dollar in the pot and somebody else would get it. And so depending on where you are in the cycle, you're a borrower or you're a lender. And so Isuzu is using that same idea, but to get,

help people build credit records, which are so hard to do in the United States by virtue of whether and how consistently they pay their rent during the pandemic, very similar and success breeds success. So they went out, Acumen helped them start a grant facility for rent relief to say, we are in this together. This is a pandemic. And if you can't pay your rent, let us know. We'll get you through it so that you can keep your credit record. And when you can pay us back, pay us back. And I'm seeing these models and frankly,

these entrepreneurs becoming the kinds of role models that we need because they don't care about, again, the left-right politics, what they care about is solving problems in ways that put the poor and the earth at the center, not just profit. Right. And that's the moral revolution, right?

It is moving away from a frame that sees everything as the individual and everything as profit. And those who are successful are only those who are getting money, power, or fame to a world that insists on putting our shared humanity and the sustainability of the earth at the center. How can you help impress upon people

that interconnectedness? Like I feel like if there is a kind of virus that's infecting us as a culture outside of the COVID virus, it's this idea of individualism and I'm here to get mine. And it's all about like me accumulating, irrespective of anyone else's concerns.

So disabusing people of that like manner of thinking and getting them into a broader, more compassionate, inclusive mindset of contributing rather than extracting. Because fundamentally, this is all about that. Like, and you say it outright in the book, it's like, can we live our lives where, you know, when it's all said and done, we've contributed more than we've taken, right?

And if we could create like a capitalist metric around that and, you know, sort of judge people's success based upon how much you're contributing rather than how much you're extracting, we would all be in a better place. I think it's about a change in consciousness. One that's actually happening. And you see it in the plant-based worlds

that when you think about how we treat our animals is how we treat ourselves, how we treat our animals is how we treat ourselves, how we treat our bodies is how we treat ourselves. I think there is a growing consciousness and we've got to expand that in the stories that we tell in the way that we model leadership. I was just with the poet Marie Howe, who was the poet laureate of New York. And she talks about, if only we could remember when we were ocean.

We are all the earth. We're all made of stars. We are all part of each other. And in your life and in my life, story after story is nothing but the interdependence. The story of getting the 45% of the African continent that doesn't have electricity, electricity maybe used to be their problem. Now it's all of our problem because Africa as a continent is set to double in population over the next 25 to 30 years, going from 1.2 to 2.4 billion. Suddenly anybody who has a 19 or 20 year old knows what a kid is like. That's the median age on that continent. If we in Europe and the United States

weren't worried about refugees and immigration, it's time now to see that correlation, that what happens there impacts us. There was a 15-year-old that got rich from India. And she said, I am an Indian girl. I am a girl from India and I am a girl from earth. And I thought, God bless you. God bless your generation that it isn't binary.

We can't just be nationalist or globalist. We have to be both. And it's not just our connection and our connectedness to each other, it's to all living things. Teilhard de Chardin, who's a Jesuit philosopher who I love and read a lot of said, we are not human beings

having a spiritual existence experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience. And so I use the word moral almost as proxy for that transcendent, for that spiritual, for that belief that we are on this earth together for a very short moment. And I believe that we come in almost as circles and you and I are in a circle of a generation. It goes in a second. How do we use that time?

How do we wanna be remembered by those future generations? I certainly don't want them to look back at us and think we didn't care, but that we tried. those future generations. I certainly don't want them to look back at us and think we didn't care, but that we tried. And it's only when we see that we are not just part of each other, we are each other, that I think we'll really solve these problems. That's so beautifully put. I have a million other things

that I'd like to talk to you about, but I think you just stuck the landing and I don't even wanna say anything else. You can still say. But I do, I guess, before we round this out, I do wanna leave people with a few thoughts. You know, I think a lot, I think most people are struggling with trying to figure out

how to build more purpose into their lives or find a way to be more fulfilled, or how can I be more service oriented in the free time that I have? So how do you think about like helping to catalyze people on this journey of trying to figure that out for themselves and contribute along the way? Well, I have two answers to that.

And one, I hope doesn't sound self-promotional, but the first answer is if a young person comes to me, it's really asking them, what do they love doing? What are they good at doing? What does the world need from them? Again, the Jesuits would say, go to where your deepest journey meets the world great need. And too often we start with the I. What's my purpose? What's my passion? Rather than if you see a problem that interests you,

go toward it, be curious about it. I have story after story of people who just start that way and end up making this their life's work. If you still have no clue as to what you do next, find a leader that you admire and get close to that person, learn from them. You never know what direction that person will bring you. But because so many people were coming to us and coming to me over the years,

we started first a fellows program at Acumen where we brought people in for a year and would put them in our companies around the world. And then we started fellows programs within country after country. And now we have about a thousand fellows across the world who are doing just amazing things across race, class,

ethnicity, religion. And then we thought we should start sharing this. And so we built Acumen Academy as the world school for social change. So it's an online, this is the self promotional part. It's an online platform where anyone anywhere can take a series of courses that start with, who am I? What can I build? Because this is a moment that needs all of us. It needs us to be conscious

about how we spend our money. Who do we give it to, what do we do, how do we spend our time, with whom do we walk. My grandmother always said, show me who you walk with and I'll show you who you are. And so the purpose-driven life isn't necessarily under this rubric of, you know, of someone that's deserving of a medal or what have you. It's a life that's intentional. It's a life that's conscious of our action and our inaction. It's a life that's full of curiosity. It's a life that does a regular accounting of whether you're giving more than you're taking.

And that asks regularly, not, am I getting richer, thinner, more beautiful, but what am I doing to give other people a sense of self, a sense of their beauty, a sense of their possibility, a sense of their dignity. I think that's what it's all about. Yeah, thank you for that. I think that's the final word.

You just want me to shut up. No, I don't. We've been going for two hours. I could go for another two hours. I wanna leave people wanting more though. What a beautiful soul you are. Thank you so much. I really appreciate you sharing today.

And I just feel good in your presence. You know, you have a really great energy about you and I have so much respect for the work that you do and I appreciate you sharing it today. The book is Manifesto for a Moral Revolution. Have you read the Book of Hope, the book that came out about Jane Goodall? I have it.

I haven't read it yet. Jane Goodall is who I wanna be when I grow up. There's a lot of parallels between your book and that book in the sensibility, like this sense, I felt like a sensibility that you share with Jane and in this like audacity of hope, like, like throughout her life and all of the amazing things that she's done,

like holding onto hope and having this optimistic but fierce, you know, disposition and commitment to continuing to solve these big problems and this like reverence and excitement that she has about the younger generations and all of, there's a lot of shared, like thematic sensibility in your book with her book. Well, that is the biggest honor you could pay me. I've had the privilege of meeting her a few times

and talk about being in someone's presence. She is extraordinary. And she's a lighthouse. Where I think you also share, this is a moment where so many people move from places of disrespect, from shaming and throwing aspersions. Jane focuses on the possible, on seeing goodness,

on building from that goodness. And I've never heard her shame in ways that demean. Yeah, never, right? She ever, ever. Yeah. Ever. And we need more of that demean. Yeah, never, right? Ever. Yeah. Ever. And we need more of that. Yeah.

And it can be complicated because sometimes it seems to a younger person or maybe just any people, sometimes it seems that, well, you're not truth telling, you're not really standing on what's right rather than, oh yes, you are. And you try to cross her, you won't get very far. Right.

And I feel the same. But really understanding the psychology of change, right? Like shaming people isn't gonna move the needle. It might make you momentarily feel, you know, bigger than the other person, but that's a fleeting thing. I've never seen it push people to act. No, of course not, right? So you have to consensus build.

You have to work within systems and outside of systems. And we need all manner of revolutionaries. We need the people on the edges as well, holding everyone else accountable. Like all voices are needed. But I think you sit in this place where you have this facility for creating change, like taking the, like the mechanisms of banking

and you know, all these things that most people don't understand at all and getting them to work in unison with a purpose and a goal that I think we can all get behind. Well, let's be really clear. I hire people who are a lot smarter than me. That's smart too. Other pieces.

But yeah, I do think that that is what it's about. We've got the tools, we've got the skills. We certainly have the capital as a world. And that is where that piece of moral imagination, that consciousness that we are in this together and that we rise and we fall together is the piece that we've got to hold together, whether we're the storytellers and the amplifiers or the builders, whether we're the entrepreneurs

or the financiers, we're all needed. Amen, sister. Amen. All right. or the financiers, we're all needed. Amen, sister. Amen. All right. Manifesto for a Moral Revolution, pick it up, wherever you buy books. And Jacqueline, you're easy to find on the internet. Where's the place you want to direct people, to Acumen?

Yeah, acumen.org on the website. All right, and come back and talk to me again sometime. I would love it. Delightful. I really appreciate it. Thank you the website. All right. And come back and talk to me again sometime. I would love it. It's delightful. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Peace.

Bye. Give peace a chance. Always. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guest, including links and resources

related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, as well as podcast merch, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change in the Plant Power Way, as well as the Plant Power Meal Planner at meals.richroll.com. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or comment. Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated, Supporting the sponsors who support the show is also important and appreciated. And sharing the show or your favorite episode

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