The Tim Ferriss Show - #758: Jamie Foxx and Jacqueline Novogratz

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited. The episode features segments from episode #124 "Jamie Foxx on Workout Routines, Success Habits, and Untold Hollywood Stories" and #514 "Jacqueline Novogratz on Building Acumen, How to (Actually) Change the World, Speaking Your Truth, and the Incredible Power of 'Dumb' Questions."Please enjoy!Sponsors:ExpressVPN high-speed, secure, and anonymous VPN service: https://www.expressvpn.com/tim (Get 3 extra months free with a 12-month plan)AG1 all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://DrinkAG1.com/Tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.)The League curated dating app for busy, high-performing people: https://click.theleague.com/qmhm/timferriss; available on iOS and AndroidTimestamps:[00:00] Start[06:50] Notes about this supercombo format.[07:53] Enter Jamie Foxx.[08:19] When Jamie met Kanye West.[10:58] Why Jamie considers his studio magical.[13:32] When Jamie met Ed Sheeran.[15:00] What's on the other side of fear?[16:53] Making impressions.[22:15] How Eric Marlon Bishop became Jamie Foxx.[24:49] Overcoming fear at open mics.[26:12] Could Prince or Michael Jackson find a career break in today’s "Age of Memes?"[27:49] How Jamie learned to read the room.[33:27] Why do some comedians lose the ability to make people laugh?[39:04] Enter Jacqueline Novogratz.[39:37] Jacqueline's background and siblings' accomplishments.[42:06] Jacqueline's journey into social impact investing.[45:15] An early banking career and reputation for asking tough questions.[48:36] A tendency to champion underdogs.[53:18] From banker to disruptor.[1:00:04] Jacqueline's first opportunity in her new path.[1:05:28] Failures, small wins, and perseverance.[1:09:21] Jacqueline's first real win in Rwanda.[1:13:37] The path between Rwanda and founding Acumen.[1:16:06] Jacqueline's reasons for applying to Stanford Business School.[1:18:10] How the Rwanda genocide redefined poverty for Jacqueline.[1:20:42] Lessons Jacqueline learned about human nature from the genocide.[1:26:25] Acumen's three main functions and naming process.[1:29:12] The quantification of impact investment through Lean Data.[1:37:28] Alternative names for Acumen that got left on the cutting room floor.[1:40:43] The concept of moral imagination.[1:44:55] An early win at Acumen.[1:50:43] Advice for young people aspiring to create positive change.[1:53:20] The benefits of committing to something larger than oneself.[1:56:10] Characteristics of a good mentor.[1:59:36] Book recommendations.[2:02:48] Advice for impact investors at various levels.[2:09:20] Next steps for investors to start making a difference.[2:14:00] Jacqueline's authenticity.[2:17:07] A taste of potential topics for a future round two.[2:20:55] Parting thoughts.*For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast.For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsorsSign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissYouTube: youtube.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, Margaret Atwood, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, Dr. Gabor Maté, Anne Lamott, Sarah Silverman, Dr. Andrew Huberman, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Okay, this is going to be part confessional. As some of you know, I am recently single and navigating the world of modern dating. What a joy that is. Sometimes it's fun, but it's mostly a goddamn mess, as many of you probably know. I've tried all the dating apps, and while there are some slick options out there, the most functional that I have found is The League. Why did I end up using The League? First, most dating apps give you almost no information. It's a huge time suck. On The League, you're starting with a baseline of smart people, and you can then easily find the ones you're attracted to. It's much easier. It's like going to a conference where everyone is smart and then just looking for the people you think are cute to

go up and speak with. So more than half of the league users went to top 40 colleges and you can make your filters really selective. So if that's important to you, then go for it. It does work. And that is one of the reasons that I use it. Second, people verify using LinkedIn so you can make sure they have a job and don't bounce around every six months. It's a simple proxy for finding people who have their shit together. It's infinitely easier than trying to figure things out on Instagram or whatever. Third, you can search by interest and in multiple locations. I haven't found any other dating app that allows you to do this. So for instance, I usually search for women who love skiing or snowboarding,

have those as interests as I like to spend, say, two to three months of the year in the mountains. I'm a rivers and mountains guy. The UI is a little clunky, I'll warn you, but it's incredibly helpful for finding good matches and not just pretty faces. So you can search by interest and specify multiple cities. So to summarize a few things that I think make it stand out, features available in the league include multi-city dating, LinkedIn verified profiles, ability to block your profile from coworkers, bosses, family, et cetera. That's very easy to do. You can search by interest, you can get profile stats, and there is a personal concierge in the app. So there's someone you can text with within the app as a personal concierge to get help. So what am I looking for? I am looking

for a woman who is well-educated and who loves skiing or snowboarding or both. These are, and I've used this word already, proxies for like 20 other things that are important. So just I'll leave it at that for now. Someone who's default upbeat, likes to smile, smiles often, glass half full type of person who would ideally like to have kids in the next few years. Her friends would describe her as feminine and playful, and she would love polarity in a relationship. She's athletic and has some muscle. I like strong women, not necessarily bodybuilders, but you get the idea. It could be a rock climber, dancer, whatever, but has some muscle, loves to read, and loves learning. If this sounds like you, send hashtag date Tim, so hashtag date Tim, in a message to your concierge in the app to get us

paired up. So these are all reasons why I was excited when the League reached out to sponsor the podcast. They even have daily speed dating where you can go on three three-minute dates with people who match your preferences all from the comfort of your couch. So check it out. Download the League today on iOS or Android and find people who challenge you to swing for the fences and who are in it to win it. I found it to be super fascinating. You can really get good matches instead of just looking at pretty faces and kind of rolling the dice over and over again. Much better. So download the league today on iOS or Android and check it out. Message hashtag Tim to your in-app concierge to jump to the front

of the wait list and have your profile reviewed first. So check it out, The League, on iOS or Android. I don't know about you guys, but I've had the experience of traveling overseas and I try to access something, say a show on Amazon or elsewhere, and it says not available in your current location, something like that, or creepier still, if you're at home and this has happened to me, I search for something or I type in a URL incorrectly and then a screen for AT&T pops up and it says, you might be searching for this. How about that? And it suggests an alternative. And I think to myself, wait a second, my internet service provider is tracking my searches and

what I'm typing into the browser? Yeah, I don't love it. And a lot of you know, I take privacy and security very seriously. That is why I've been using today's episode sponsor ExpressVPN for several years now. And I recommend you check it out. When you connect to a secure VPN server, your internet traffic goes through an encrypted tunnel that nobody can see into, including hackers, governments, people in Starbucks, your internet service provider, etc. And no, you are not safe simply using incognito mode in your browser. This was something that I got wrong for a long time. Your activity might still be visible, as in the example I gave to

your internet service provider. Incognito mode also does not hide your IP address. Also, with the example that I gave of you can't access this kind or that content wherever you happen to be, then you just set your server to a country where you can see it. And all of a sudden, voila, you can say log into your normal Amazon account as opposed to being routed to.uk or whatever. And everything works. So ExpressVPN protects you and enables you because it encrypts and reroutes your network traffic through secure servers. So even though your traffic is still passing through your internet provider, now they can't read it. ExpressVPN is so fast also it doesn't bog things down at all. I usually forget that I even have it on. I can stream high quality video with no lag or buffering

even on servers thousands of miles away. It gives me access to servers in 105 countries around the world, which is very helpful as I am constantly traveling and love to do so. It's easy to use. You just choose a server location and tap one button to connect. You do not need to be technologically savvy. You don't need to know anything about how it works. It's just one click and it works on every device, phone, laptop, tablets, even TVs. ExpressVPN has really changed the way I use the internet and I can't recommend it highly enough. Check it out.

Right now, you can go to expressvpn.com slash Tim and get three extra months for free when you sign up. Just go to expressvpn, E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com slash Tim for an extra three free months of ExpressVPN. One more time, expressvpn.com slash tim for an extra three free months of ExpressVPN. One more time, expressv over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show,

where it is my job to sit down with world-class performers from every field imaginable to tease out the habits, routines, favorite books, and so on that you can apply and test in your own lives. This episode is a two-for-one and that's because the podcast recently hit its 10th year anniversary, which is insane to think about, and passed 1 billion downloads. To celebrate, I've curated some of the best of the best, some of my favorites from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited to give you these super combo episodes. And internally, we've been calling these the super combo episodes because my goal is to encourage you to, yes, enjoy the household names, the super famous folks, but to also

introduce you to lesser known people I consider stars. These are people who have transformed my life and I feel like they can do the same for many of you. Perhaps they got lost in a busy news cycle. Perhaps you missed an episode. Just trust me on this one. We went to great pains to put these pairings together. And for the bios of all guests, you can find that and more at Tim.blog slash combo. And now, without further ado, please comedian, and the owner of BSB Ultra Smooth Flavored Whiskey. You can find Jamie on Instagram at IamJamieFox and in his upcoming films, Tin Soldier and Back in Action. So one day, my boy Breon brings in this kid.

He has a backpack on. His jaw's a little busted his name is Kanye West and I say yo, who's that? I said, yo, that's a new kid, Kanye West, he coming on I said, really? What'd he do? I said, he rap, I said, well shit, he gotta perform next year

cause everybody that comes to my house, they gotta perform so I said, yo man, they say you the shit and he was really quiet I said, man, let me hear you rap. You need your beats or whatever? He said, I don't need no beat. Chopped everybody's heads. Just amazed.

I said, dude, I don't know where you come from, but you are going to be one of the biggest stars ever. And he said, I actually have a song for you. I said, moi? Me? A song? Like, what you mean? He said, I got this song. He says, I want to record it

I said well you happen to be In luck because I got a studio in the back So we go in the back And my studio at that time I call it the Porsche It was a lot smaller than this It was really like

It was like a Learjet It was compact It was compact The sound was toasty I had engineers From all over the city Dial it in So that when real artists come

They don't think Oh this is just comedian fucking around, some real shit. So we go in, and Kanye, you know, quiet, but at the same time, he knew what he wanted. He says, okay, the song goes like this. She say she wants a Marvin Gaye, some Luther Vandross, a little, I said, I got it. And I started going, she say she wants a Marvin Gaye.

And he said, what the fuck are you doing? I said, well, see, young man, going, she say she want some my big. And he said, what the fuck are you doing? I said, well, see, young man, you don't know nothing about R&B. See, I'm an R&B motherfucker. See, I got to give him the shit. You know, I got to put the shit on it. And he goes really politely. He says, hits the button.

He says, don't do that. I said, but you don't know what you're talking about, brother. That ain't how the song go. You got to sing it this way. So in my mind, I'm thinking, you know what? I'm going to sing this shit. The song is whack.

It's not going to make it because I'm thinking old school R&B. But he was teaching me the simplicity of hip hop, which I didn't know. I was like, what a cool guy, great rapper.

I don't think it's going to happen for him. So I go off and do a bad movie. And when I come back, my voice is, remember that song you said was whack? I said, yes. Number one in the country.

You, Kanye, and Twista. Kanye's first record. And it was actually Twista's record. I said, oh, shit. So I'm at a club. He said, you don't believe me? I said, no, we're in Miami. They played it.

Everybody ran to the dance floor. I grabbed the mic, said, that's me. That's my song. I'm on that. And so the music, that's me. That's my song. I'm on that. And so the music, that's how I got into the music. Now the reason the story is significant is because the same brains that we use, that same

hard drive that we use, I brought it to this studio. So that hard drive is magical because we also did, just to give you a history on the music, Breon found that song, slow jams. It went number one.

And then as we started getting into music, there was a song that Breon brought in. Breon would call me. Like he said, you want to be in the music business? It's like, you know, two or three in the morning.

He called me, says, you want to be in the music business? I said, yeah. He said, and wake your ass up. I said,

what? He said, I got this song. You got to hear. So I drove all the way from my house in the Valley to this little studio. He says, are you ready? Motherfucker.

Are you ready? And Breon always says everything three times. Are you ready? Motherfucker. Are you ready? Are you ready? I said, yeah,

yeah, man, play this shit. So he plays it. And the song was blame it on the goose. God's feeling loose. Blame it on the, I stopped it.

I said, listen, first of all, please tell me that's my song. He said, yeah, it's your song, but you got to record it right now because a lot of people are listening to this song and they don't know if it's a hit or not. He said, but I know it's a hit. We did Blame It On The Alcohol that night.

I sung it exactly like the record, which goes way in contrast to my R&B roots because it was out of tune and everything like that, but we wanted to sing it exactly like the demo so we wouldn't lose the essence of it. I don't want to be like, blame it on the alcohol. You know, some corny shit. So we did that.

And then we went from every, the way we broke that record is that we went from every club. We went to the strip clubs first. Went to the strip clubs? Strip clubs. We did an East Coast run. So we were going to break the record in the East Coast. So we went to the strip.

We went to New York. My man Peck took us around, and I would go into the club and use my comedic, you know, vernacular to get the song off. I said, fellas, you ever been at the club? You meet a girl. You've been drinking. You think she look like Halle Berry. You get her back home.

She looks like Halle Scary. You know what you got to do? Blame it on the goose. God's feeling loose. Blame it on the ah, ah, ah, ah. Stop the record. Ladies, you ever meet a guy, you get back to the house with him, and you've been drinking too much, and you say, I usually don't do this, but you do it anyway, you got to blame it on the ah, ah, ah, ah. So we took that, and we went all the way down from New York, all the way down to Miami. This is like 2008. And then the song took off. And so,

long story longer, Blame It On Alcohol was done here. Slow Jams was done here. So this studio has that essence to it that you just, you don't throw that away. And just the building itself, Natasha Bedingfield's been here. She's cut.

Kelly Rowland's been here. She's cut. The Game has been here. He's cut. But right here on been here. She's cut. The Game has been here. He's cut. Right here on this floor, for you guys listening, I'm pointing to the floor, to the carpet. A young man by the name of Ed Shearing slept on this carpet for like six weeks

trying to get his music career going. He came from over from London. He heard about a live show that I do in LA. He said, I really want to do your live show if it's possible. You know, because I have some music

that I love. I hear this kid with this red hair. I'm like, man, you do my live show? And it's all, it's mostly black, you know what I'm saying?

But it's really like music people, like really hardcore music people. They're very finicky. You know, people that have played for Stevie Wonder. People will come there to, I mean,

I had Miranda Lambert one night. I had Stevie Wonder on stage. I had Babyface. I said, so this is the real shit you're talking about. You know, you can come here. I don't care about the London and the accent. You got to really come with it. I said, I think I'll be okay.

I said, all right. So I take her to my live night. 800 people there. People's playing. Black folks sweating. Just getting it. You know what I'm saying? People singing. And, you know Black folks sweating. Just getting it. You know what I'm saying? People singing and

they would tear American Idol up. And these people haven't necessarily made it. So all of a sudden Ed Sheeran gets up with a ukulele. Walks onto the stage and the brother that was next to me was like yo Fox man who the fuck is this dude right here man with the red hair and shit and the fucking ukulele.

I said man his name is Ed Sheeran let's see what he does. Within 12 minutes, he got a standing ovation. Wow. From that crowd. And I said, bro, you're on your way. So this studio has, like I said, a lot of history, and it has that magic to it as well.

The mojo. Yeah. How do you think of teaching confidence with your own kids? Because you're clearly a very confident guy yeah uh grandmother was very bold very strong woman how do you try to teach that to your kids well what you do with your kids is like when my daughter is i there's the phrase that when you see annalise my daughter my oldest daughter corinne i would always ask them what's on the other side of fear and they'd be like huh i said what's on the other side of fear? And they'd be like, huh? I said, what's on the other side of it?

Meaning like if I stood in the middle of this floor right there and just yelled, ah, what's on the other side of that? Or if I stood in the middle of the floor and went, ah, what's on the other side of it? Meaning like either you do or you don't, but there's no penalty. There's no reward. It's just, you just be yourself. So I taught them what's on the other side of fear nothing people are nervous for no reason because there's nothing no one's going to come out and

slap you or beat you up and then you're just nervous so why even have that and so that's a building block that they can use not just about the entertainment business because that's the other thing you don't have to be an entertainer, but whatever you go into, whether you be a lawyer or a school teacher or a tech guy or whatever, or a girl, whatever it is, there's nothing on the other side of it. What's on the other side of fear?

Nothing. I like it. When people say, well, I'm so nervous, what are you nervous about? Reminds me of this quote that I sort of recite to myself, and I'm going to paraphrase it because I have it written down, but it's from Mark Twain. It says, I'm an old man who's known a great many troubles,

most of which never happened. Yeah, exactly. Because all of it is in our head. When we talk about fear or lack of being aggressive or whatever, it's in your head. So not everybody's going to be super aggressive, but the one thing that you can deal with is a person's fears. So if you start early, if they are a shy person, they just won't be as shy if you keep instilling those things. The mimicry, the impersonation, how early did that start? Tell me if this is off or not because you never know with the Internet. That your second grade teacher used to reward the class if they behaved by letting you tell jokes. Yeah, they would let me tell jokes because I would get in trouble. Miss Reeves, I think it was my third grade teacher, Miss Reeves. Because I would like talk, but I was very smart.

My grandmother had a school. I lived in a school. So I already knew that from first to eighth grade, I already knew all of the lesson plans. So a kid like me sitting there with nothing to do, I'm going to get in trouble. So she would let me do stand-up comedy on Fridays for the kids. And all I would do is my grandmother would watch Johnny Carson, and the only room that had the television was my room.

So I had to watch Johnny Carson 2 as a kid. So nine years old, seven, eight, nine years old, I would just take the jokes that were being told by David Brenner and Steve Allen and a young David Letterman. Who else would be on there? Franklin the Jai. You guys, when you're hearing this, go Google these guys. A young Jay Leno. These are sort of like Richard Pryor. So I would take those jokes and tell them at school because those kids wouldn't watch it. Please tell me you used Richard Pryor on Fridays. Well, I guess it was on primetime, so it wasn't Richard Pryor. Richard Pryor on primetime.

He couldn't really say anything on primetime. He was clean. But like Rich Little. Google Rich Little because Rich Little was the first person that I saw do impersonations this had to be like 76 1976 so like fifth grade for me the joke was uh jimmy carter which was the president at the time singing you light up my life and at that time his brother was getting caught drunk all the time, like Billy. So it was Jimmy Carter going, so many nights,

me and my brother Billy would sit by the window waiting for somebody to bring some peanuts and beer. And so that was my first attempt at an impersonation. And then it went on from there to do a retrodiction. I am not a crook. So, you know, who else would I do? Reagan. But here's that Reagan came later.

But Reagan came like in the 80s when I was actually like 21. And I was the first black guy doing the Reagan impersonation, probably the only one. So I would be on stage doing my impersonations and going to Ronald Reagan. People are like, no, it ain't no way. Well, well, as a matter of fact, I, well, oh, no, there you go again. And so that being young and that teacher, Ms. Reeves and Ms. Douthit and all those teachers allowing, Ms. Cole allowing me to be myself, you know, helped me hone in on what I was going to be doing

for the rest of my life. Like, literally, my friends from Tarot go like, how the fuck did you do that? This is the shit you used to do? You turned your third grade back. In the cafeteria. It was literally the same shit. I'd be like, wow.

Millions of people are watching this shit, and it's the same. And now Doc Rivers from the Clippers. Hey, you know, we're going to try. You know, it's not Blake's fault. You know know next year we gotta we gotta do better you know

so I'm working on like the new impersonations now and the way you do an impersonation is usually about it's musical like um

say Kermit the Frog right so Kermit the Frog is eh so it's sort of like the way you do your eh eh

you know what I'm saying it's finding eh eh eh finding right so so the actual voice tone is in the key of G for Kermit the Frog

so that's and then once you get the voice tone it's how you manipulate your mouth to get the sound. Because you notice, so it's sort of constricting. And then it's asking the character to come sit with you. So, you know, but the key is this. And at the same time, Kermit the Frog, who else sounds like that? Sammy Davis Jr. a little pigs. So, you know, but the key is this. And at the same time, Kermit the Frog, who else sounds like that? Sammy Davis Jr. a little bit.

Because, you know, man. So now Kermit the Frog is one way, but if you just twist your voice or twist your mouth to the right and grab some swag, now you're Sammy Davis Jr. Kermit the Frog, because, man, you know, it's the same voice. You know, so that's sort of like the mechanical way of getting to the impression. So you would start with not the visual, because obviously those people who are listening can't see this, but the mannerisms are also very much on point. Mannerisms are important because, like, I do a LeBron James impersonation,

which is really not a voice. It's more of his mannerism. It's the jaw. Youism. It's the jaw. You know, it's the look. Let's go, bro. You know, let's go, bro. You know, the game of basketball, you know, we just try to,

you know, you know, it's that. You know, it's right after playing. You know, when it comes off the court, they catch me still, Ty. You know, the game of basketball, we just try to do the best. You know, so it's the mannerism. So people will appreciate the mannerisms first.

The physicality. The physicality of someone like LeBron or, you know, different personalities bring about different things. What is your birth name? Eric Marlon Bishop. And how did Eric Marlon Bishop become Jamie Foxx? Man, I was Eric Marlon Bishop. Graduated high school, 86. I get out to California and I start doing,

I'm in college and doing the music. But I would go up on these open mic nights for comedy. So I go, I do really well. I get like standing ovations. And then I came to LA, got a standing ovation. And then when I came back every week, I wouldn't get called up. I was like,

man, what's going on? How does the open mic work? Well, here's what it is. What you do is you put your name on a list, put your name on a list, and they pick from the list,

and they say, okay, these are people that are going up. So I went up, and I had a great set. Then for the next three, four weeks, I didn't,

they never called my name. I said, yo, money, did you see my name? Yeah, yeah, you weren't on the list. You on the list but we got other people

but i found out that the comedians were actually running the list so the comedians that had been here for a while i was like we don't want him on here because he's showing us up so i was like fuck so i ended up going to this evening at the improv the improv like in santa monica and so i had never been there so i wouldn't notice that a hundred guys would show up five girls would show up the five girls would always get on the on the show because they needed to break up the monotony so i said hmm i got some so i wrote down on the list all of these unisex names stacy green tracy brown jamie fox and now the guy chooses from the list he says is uh jamie fox is she here she'll be first i was like no money that's that's me ah okay all right well you're gonna you're the fresh meat i said

what's that they were shooting evening at therov, this old comedy show back in the day. I said, you'll be the guy that will just throw up to see if you get a laugh or two. It's going to be a tough crowd. Fresh Meat. Fresh Meat. I said, cool. So I go up in between two of the guys, get a standing ovation. People are like, who's the kid? Is he on the show? I said, no,

he's Fresh Meat's amateur. So then they started yelling my name. Yo, Jamie. Yo, Jamie. Hey, Jamie. But I'm not used to names. he's freshman he's an amateur so then they started yelling my name yo Jamie yo Jamie hey Jamie but I'm not used to names so now they think I'm arrogant this motherfucker

thinks he's the she's not even listening to us so I took that name and it stuck and then I started building everything off of it

back in the day people used to wear jackets and put names on the jackets so I had Sly as a dot dot dot coming to, coming to the foxhole, foxhole, you know, things like that. By the time you got to doing the open mics, getting up on stage, were you nervous? Were you afraid or were you over it?

Because first I looked at it first. I went to an open mic night and saw the guys. I was like, man, these dudes are terrible. So when you go on stage and your whole life is not, I want to be a comedian, I went on stage like, yo, I'm going to just fuck around. So if I hit, cool. If I miss, I wasn't trying to be that anyway.

I wanted to do more music. But when I went on stage, it was just natural. I belong here. So I think that's that's the thing too when it comes to entertainment there's a certain like oh i belong here this is what i'm supposed to do how successful i will be or won't be that's something out of my hands but i do know that this is where i belong and that's with anything and anybody like when you can sort of listen to that voice in your head or what's in your heart and you get a chance to do something

that you really feel like you're supposed to do, that alleviates a lot of the fear. Now, if it was a surgeon or a lawyer or something, you know, if it's something that I'm not versed in or something like that, then maybe there will be more fear. But with this, I don't have those types of fears. As I've gotten older in the business, I've sort of simplified things.

Like now I just execute. I have to ask people like Ricardo, Justin, what should I execute? So the fear of a celebrity or an artist now is, how do I get my art off in a world where it's the social media-driven ridicule and criticism? I always say this, a person like Prince or a person like Michael Jackson could have never survived in today's world because in the day of the internet and where everybody has a voice, most of the voices are hateful voices or not understanding. Like if you saw Prince with a guitar and a bandana and the way he dressed, you know, people would meme the shit out of it, you know. So now it's not a fear, but it's just a question that I have to always ask them. Like, yo, is this the cool shit to do or not the cool shit to do?

And so what I learned is when it's just executing something, when it's either executing a song or executing a joke or executing things within entertainment, it's cool. But then you have to wonder, like, how do you get it off? Like, how do you, like, even now when you talk about the bill cosby joke back in the day we just tell the joke now you gotta be like okay i gotta tell the joke in a way that is still funny it still keeps the bite on it but you know so those are the different like for me as a entertainer where there's not fear it's just like you know questions does that make sense?

Makes sense. No, that makes sense. The considerations. Have you bombed on stage before? Oh, yeah. Two things. When you are bombing, what is your internal dialogue or response? And then secondly... Internal dialogue is, boy, you stink. Boy, you bombing. I bomb

and it wasn't a lot. I only bomb like twice. Do you remember your first? Yeah, yeah. I bombed, and it wasn't a lot. I only bombed like twice. Do you remember your first? Yeah, yeah. I did this show for this guy named Lattimore, old blues singer. I'm 21. What was his name? Lattimore.

Lattimore. Sounds like Voldemort. Yeah, Lattimore. Lattimore. So this guy saw me at this other club and said, hey, man, you know, Lattimore's performing around the corner. Man, why don't you come and open up? I said, whatever.

I said, how much you pay? He said, pay $50. I said, I'm there. 50 bucks, I need it. So this is like 89, 90. So I get there, and I don't know who Lattimore is. I just know it's a lot of older people. Like, I mean, like, oh, oh.

I'm like, oh, shit. Where the people at? These other people. So I go up, and the setting was different. It was like the chairs and stuff were way in the back. It was like a banquet setting. And it's in the middle of the hood, you know, Crenshaw. And, like, the tables were, like, from here to where, like, 20 feet away, 30 feet away from me.

So I don't have that. Oh, you didn't have that proximity. And I hadn't been doing stand-up comedy that long. I'd only been doing it for, like, a year. So I had, and I hadn't been doing stand-up comedy that long. I'd only been doing it for like a year. So I had, if I'm funny, I got an hour. If I'm not funny, it's about 10 minutes worth of shit because I would just take a joke and just keep spinning it and spinning it. So my first joke they didn't get, second joke they didn't get.

I said, shit, I'm damn near out of jokes. So I said, well, let me do this before I do anything. Let me just talk about people in the audience. So I looked, and I saw this guy with this sort of suit on with a butterfly collar like oh shit i'm gonna talk about him with the butterfly collar but before i could say that i looked around everybody has a butterfly collar this is what they really want to look like and so uh i just said hey man i you know i don't know what else y'all want and pretty soon latimore is going to come up you guys ready for latimore and i just started doing

i said i'm going to take a break so i get off stage and the dude that was washing the dishes takes his apron off and goes man i got it as a How y'all feel? And he started doing these old stock jokes. Kills. And so I said, okay, now I know what it is. You got to have jokes that are appropriate for your audience. So I learned on how to tell jokes for everybody. Because at first, my jokes

was geared towards women. It was singing. So what I started doing from that day on, I would go to like Des Moines Isle Davenport Isle Boise Idaho where it's all white Gunnison Colorado all white and I would go do like 40 minutes of all black material to see what they understood what they didn't understand so if I go to these all white places if they understood 15 minutes I logged that 15 So if I go to these all white places and if they understood 15 minutes, I log that 15 minutes.

I can go to any place where it's just all white. You would determine if they understood it by the last. I would ask, y'all know who this is? And so I would tell the joke, if 15 minutes they understood it, I can go to any place in the world that's all white and they get it. Then I would go to my chocolate city,

Chicago, D.C., Florida, and do all of my political highbrow stuff and see what the black folks understood. Man, what the fuck you doubt my doubt? Now they understood 15 minutes. Now I got 15 to 30 minutes to 45 minutes that wherever I go, no matter what age, they'll understand. No matter what gender, no matter what race, they'll understand this 45 minutes. So I had to learn how to use the formula in order for you to be funny. And then

once you got your comedy license, once you've been seen by enough people in the highest way, like if you look at the arc of a Kevin Hart, like Kevin Hart takes that arc, takes the same formula. I'm not for sure how he put it in his mind but he's doing the same thing to where he's going to all of these places all over the world implementing his comedy and if they get it he's gathering all that so that now when people see kevin hart no matter where in the world they're gonna laugh becoming a great comedian is also having that formula going on in your head because if you

paint yourself into a corner like you're only the black comedian or you're only the Hispanic comedian or whatever that is, then it's hard for you to become universal. I mean, Eddie Murphy was great. He had an opportunity through Saturday Night Live to get it to everybody, but it's definitely a formula to not

bomb it. So that was the first bomb. You mentioned two. Yeah. What was the second? If it's hard to recall, the follow-up question is going to be, what is the post-game analysis when you step off the stage after bombing,

say, the second time? Well, you got to, when I bombed the second time was way later in my career when I'm working out jokes. But I don't like to work out jokes and tell people I'm working out. I like to actually do a show,

come and do the show. So when, I think it was Irvine. So you don't tell people you're working out? No, no, no. I think that's cheating. And I think you get bad habits. So I do a show in Irvine, California. First show, I kill. It was just ready for me.

I'm like, oh man, everything works. Second show, bombed because i didn't take time to dig out the jokes and then so but when you bomb you go like okay all right let's go let's check it out so i got a team of my guys i said let's go okay that didn't work no you got to put this in front of that you're gonna put that behind this because that's gonna kick this off people didn't know what that was, so maybe we don't say that. So, you know, when you take the L, it's not like you're not funny. What's the L?

Like you take the loss. Oh, okay. When you take the loss, it's not like you're not funny. It's just like, okay, you just didn't put the shit together. So that's the other thing, too. When you do become funny, it's going to be harder now to make people laugh because you set the bar. So watch this.

The hardest part for Chris Rock was after he had done something great in stand-up. Because now you got to top that. The hardest part for Eddie Murphy, because Eddie wants to come out and do stand-up, is how do I top that in your head? The hardest part is coming for Kevin Hart in the fact that you smashed him. Now, you know what I'm saying, you got to know how to refresh. Because when you do something like, I would look at my stuff and go like, I got to quit doing that. Because that shtick that I'm doing, people are catching on.

And they're like, okay, motherfucker, we done already seen that shit. So that's the other thing. You got to have great material. And you got to know how to move. Because like right now, it's the perfect time for Eddie Murphy to come out and do stand-up.

Because it's been so long. It's nostalgic. It was 30 years ago. So now you can catch a new young you can still excite the older you know so being a stand-up comedian is tough and you've seen a lot of funny guys not be funny anymore why because you can't top what you did you look at a jim carrey go like okay man where you at where you at you know i'm saying you know don't give up the funny or or you look at chris i always look at chris tug and be like motherfucker where you at You know what I'm saying You know Don't give up the funny Or you look at Chris I always look at Chris Tuck

And be like Motherfucker where you at Don't leave us Because Being a stand up comedian Is an interesting thing Most stand up comedians Want to look good

In what way They just want to look good Think about this When Eddie Murphy Started doing stand up He was funny But then he started doing You know the way

The leather suits And the fly shit and the rings. They didn't want to look good. Joe Piscopo started working out with the muscles. You know what I'm saying? So as a stand-up comedian, we got to be careful not to look too good because people start going, what the fuck are you doing? You ain't cute, nigga. We just want to laugh.

You know what I'm saying? But when we start getting into our shit, that's when we lose because I did that. Like, I got to, my thing was after In Living Color, the show called

In Living Color that I did, I felt like I had made it. So I wasn't necessarily on the good looking shit, but I was on the, I've made it jokes. I went on stage and was doing rich jokes.

Just got that Range Rover. Anybody else? It's crazy out here. You know, they're so finicky, right? Motherfuckers are looking at me like, what the fuck is you talking about? And then, uh, you know, the square footage of the house, man, when they get a certain square feet, man, that shit is crazy and maintaining, you know? Motherfuckers are like,

motherfucker, if you don't get off the goddamn stage, I'd lost it. I lost it. And I walked off stage and all of a sudden, I walk off stage. They give it up for Jamie Foxx. And I'm thinking, they're going crazy. Yeah, yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much.

And I'm standing outside the club and I hear the crowd going crazy. I'm like, what the fuck they doing? I just went off stage. What the fuck are they laughing at? And I opened the door and there was a kid, skinny, little tank top on, barely fit. His name was Chris Tucker he was smashing he was

no one has been that funny within 15 minutes I've never seen and I watch them all I've never seen a stand up where people were laughing so hard like I said

he's gonna kill somebody like when he says last night how was yo I killed it's gonna be true somebody gonna have a fucking heart attack. And I sat down and I went, I can't do that. I lost that.

So I left, went to another club that night, bombed. Like it wasn't just, you know. So finally I went over to Okinawa where the troops were. I started doing stand up over there for the troops to sort of get back. It was my Rocky moment. Like, you know, I started running up the steps, chasing chickens and shit. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. Trying to get back.

For a stand-up comedian, that's the one thing you can never let go. You can never stop being, excuse me, a certain goofiness to you. And so, and like when you talk about fear or when you talk about bombing, it's different when you've done it for a long time, you know. And when you do bomb, you just got to get right back up in it. And you got to acknowledge it. Okay, I stunk, nigga. Because they're going to let you know.

Like today's world, you can't do nothing in today's world without somebody letting you know, oh nigga, you fucked that up. Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take

one supplement. And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D

and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. And now, Jacqueline Novogratz, the founder and CEO of Acumen, a global force of entrepreneurs, investors, philanthropists, and social innovators working together to break the cycle of poverty, the New York Times bestselling author of The Blue Sweater and Manifesto for a Moral Revolution, and one of the world's 100 greatest living business minds, according to Forbes magazine. You can find Jacqueline on Twitter and Instagram at jnovagrats. Jacqueline, welcome to the show.

It's great to be here with you, Tim. Thank you. I'm going to just go with the layup. I'm not going to say lazy question. It's really more of a setting of the backdrop for people who don't know you. Could you please describe your childhood, your parents? Just give us a little bit of color there so we know from where you have come. I was raised in a four-bedroom house with seven siblings, the seven of us. Amazing parents. Dad was in the military.

My mother was a force to be reckoned with. I would say it was a noisy, chaotic, loving house full of cowboys who were also expected to somehow be good. A number of your siblings have also gone on to do great things, very much on a national and global scale. To what do you attribute that? Is it just inheriting good software? Is it environmental? Are there any particular inputs or habits that your parents have? Anything that comes to mind? I'm sure you've been asked this before, but what was in the drinking water, so to speak? I think it was a funny combination of one, constraint, that when you have so many kids on a military income, you got to get entrepreneurial young, fast. And that was probably a very important piece. Number two, my mother is one of the great myth makers of all times. Myth makers? Myth makers. I remember when we were little, Bob, Mike, and I, all we really wanted was Levi's jeans. There weren't a lot of things to differentiate us. So my mother made a

deal with us and said, look, I'll buy you the dungarees, which is what they used to call jeans, from the post exchange, unless you can earn the difference for those Levi's. But I have to tell you, I'm really disappointed in you guys. Why would you need brands? You're Novogratzes. And we laugh now. We're like, what the hell was a Novogratz? But she had this sense that this was who we were. So two, kind of a driven myth-making mother. And three, this big extended immigrant Catholic family. And so this idea that to whom much is given, much is expected was also reinforced. And so I guess in a funny way, Tim, we grew up in a tribe, but also allowed to be

wild individualists who had to be entrepreneurial. And here we are. So you're known for impact investing, social impact, and all the things that we, or I should say I, mentioned in the bio that I just read. But that's not where things began from square one. You weren't just hatched out of the egg as this imminent world change. Or maybe you were on some level. I mean, your brother, Mike Novogratz, who's been on the podcast, talked about how you have had this very clear North Star for seemingly much of your life, but that wasn't the first step. In other words, you didn't just graduate from high school and start Acumen. Could you just walk us through your first professional decisions? Where did you go

after school and why did you go there? I think I did always want to change the world from the time I was six. And I guess that was part of the, both the positive and the pressure. And so there was always that idea that I had, but to go through college, certainly as the first, we had to pay for school. And so I worked two, three jobs the entire time I was at the University of Virginia. What were your jobs? What types of jobs? Well, mostly I was a bartender. And in the summer, I worked 100 hours a week as a bartender, which was actually quite something. When I graduated, I told my parents that I'd really never had a proper vacation and that I was going to take a year to just explore the world, never really gone outside

the United States or anything like that. And my parents, being very wise, said, we think that's fine, but at least go through the interview process. And so I agreed quite reluctantly, and I threw my resume, without thinking, into the boxes for foreign affairs econ majors, which were my majors. And Chase Manhattan Bank called and said, we'll take you in as an interview. And so I go into the interview, and there's this cute guy sitting across the table from me. And he says, tell me, Jacqueline, why do you want to be a banker? Which was, of course, the only question I wasn't ready for. And so I was like, actually, my mom and dad are making me do this. I don't want to be a banker. And he said- That's what you said.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't lie. It's probably the only answer he wasn't prepared for. He was like, well, something in him was prepared because he was like, well, if you got this job, you would be in 40 countries the next three years and you would be understanding the economic and political situation in each of those countries. And of course, as this kid that always dreamed of knowing the world, loving the world, I was like, oh, God. So I said, could we start this interview over? And he let me literally leave the room. I knocked on the door. I introduced myself. I sat down. He was like, tell me, Jacqueline, why do you want to be a banker?

And I said, ever since I was six years old, all I ever wanted to do was be a banker. Of course, there were interviews after that to make sure I had a brain, but I got the job. And sure enough, for the next three years, I was in 40 countries at a really extraordinary time when the financial systems were also in peril in the early 1980 campus by investment banks and so on, although this may not have been in the investment banking category. But when I think the promises of various recruiters, I associate the, you're going to travel the world, meet fascinating people, learn various A, B, and C about X, Y, and Z industries. I associate that with the management consulting pitch. So what was the job that you ended up getting that allowed you to travel like that in banking? It was an extraordinary job. It was called credit audit, where the bank hired primarily liberal arts majors. I think young

people who were critical thinkers who asked the dumb questions. And they literally would send us around the world a month at a time. I think I was in New York three weeks one year. And you would just get this note on your desk that you had to be in Kuala Lumpur three days from then and a package of traveler's checks, which was the way that we would get money, and a reservation at a hotel and we would go. And so it's one way the world has really changed. Because I remember talking to my boss because I had a reputation for unwittingly getting people fired by asking the really dumb questions and then uncovering.

I can't let that go without asking for an example. How does that happen? What would a hypothetical or real type of question or actual question be that might get someone fired? The biggest one for me was in Switzerland when I was pretty much a solo act to look at this whole suite of Swiss banks, which everybody just assumed were safe because of Swiss banking. And Tim, I kept looking at the numbers and the spreadsheets for this one bank, and nothing added up to me. And so I went to the head of the division, the office, and I was incredibly nervous because I wasn't that confident that I was that great at all these spreadsheets.

And I pointed out what I saw as real flaws and real vulnerabilities. And he essentially told me I was too young, too naive. Didn't I understand Swiss banking and that the bank was completely protected? And I scratched my head. I went back. The numbers still didn't work. I called my boss. He yelled at me. And I just knew that I might be wrong. I might be all those things he said, but I could only tell my truth. And I literally had to hold on to the chair because I was so afraid. And I turned it in. I gave it, in those days, a seven, which put it on a big warning list, which meant it went all the way to the top of the bank. And it turned out that I was right. The bank failed. And I learned really young, Tim, that I went from being seen as kind

of scared and not that serious overnight to then being seen as this whiz kid. I was the same person. Nothing had changed. And how ephemeral the way the world sees you became to me. Because I know that I was exactly the same woman the morning after that I was the morning before. So I guess learning really young, sometimes just speak that truth even through trembling lips. Yeah. Wow, what a story. I mean, it's something that so few people, especially new hires, would actually dare to do. It just strikes me as unusual that you would have the conviction to potentially, and I don't know the politicking or the power dynamics inside of that bank, obviously, but to piss off your boss by giving it a seven, which then flies straight up the flagpole after getting reprimanded,

that's quite a move. It sounds like that wasn't a first, though, that you'd sort of cultivated this speaking of truth coming up to that point. Is that accurate? Yeah, I think it probably was. And in fact, God, you're already making me get emotional. But I think I saw myself as less courageous a voice than other people experienced me as. A great gift of my latest book, where I talked about the need to learn how to use voice, was that one of my colleagues at the time, who I hadn't seen in more than 30 years, was like, you were always the one that was standing. And I think I always stood for the underdog, but I also just couldn't tell a lie.

And they hired me for a particular purpose, and I felt like that was my duty. That was just my job. As a kid, I was the one that would fight for the underdog. In fact, I got thrown out of trigonometry for standing up for what was right. What were you standing up for? Was it the answer to something or was it a person? No, the teacher, he was a great pop quiz guy. And he had promised us that we wouldn't get a pop quiz that week.

And one of my friends had been sick and she was very, very insecure when it came to trigonometry. I said, you don't have to worry about it because this teacher told us that we weren't going to have a pop quiz and promised us. And then of course he gave us the pop quiz. And I just felt such a need to protect my friend that I stood up, I made a big deal about it. And that was the end. That was my last day of Trigonometry for that year. And the worst of it is I had to do home economics for the last six weeks of the year. I'm just imagining how happy you were about that. But I think it's worth really underscoring that you develop this and reinforce this truth speaking. You take some lumps. Of course,

you're going to take lumps along the way, but ultimately, not to attribute all of your successes to that, but I think it's no small thing. One of the aspects of your story that has stuck out to me as I'm doing homework is the power of asking, I wouldn't say dumb questions, asking the questions, right? Asking questions and speaking truth. And it's just how you talk about patient capital. We might talk later about how that's differentiated from just long-term capital and long-term investing and how you differentiate the two. But if you're making a long-term sort of patient investment in yourself, like over the short term, you might get reprimanded for truth and asking questions or seemingly naive questions, but they seem to be really good long-term bets. And I suppose there's not a

question so much in that, but does that resonate with you as being true? How does that land for you when I say that? Am I missing anything? I've actually never thought about it for myself personally, but it deeply resonates that I am not comfortable and it's hard sometimes both for people who work with me and for the people who take our courses online at laying out a roadmap because the world is too complex for a step-by And that speaking of truth and standing for truth not only builds a sense of courage, but it deepens, I think, one's and certainly my own understanding of where lines are. So yeah, so thank you for that. Yeah, also, and I'm getting on a caffeinated soapbox here for a second, but we're going to cover a lot of ground. So we have space for my caffeinated soapbox. And that is to say, these things don't manifest out of the ether when you need them most necessarily, right? You were practicing and conditioning yourself to tell

the truth. And you had a choice to stuff or to speak in that moment, you made the decision to speak, rated a seven, and that gave you the positive reinforcement, I have to imagine, and more confidence to continue doing the same. But it's a skill. I mean, it seems like a practice that you need to reinforce. Let's come back to this banking. In your retake, ever since the age of six, I've always known I wanted to be a banker. Clearly, you're no longer a banker. So what happened? What happened? You're doing these audits. Where does the next chapter enter the picture? So it started, again, having always dreamed of traveling around the world and loving the world, in fact. Now I'm in Brazil and Chile and Ecuador and truly Colombia falling in love with the vibrancy, the color, these stories that as a young American kid, we didn't ever get about the developing

world. And it struck me in this era again, Tim, when the banks were falling apart, they had been making all these bets based on relationship and long-term debt. And suddenly the markets were in crisis and they wanted to call all their loans and they lost hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars at that time. So I would sit inside the bank looking at loans that should never have been made. Often money that was actually never even put into what it said it would be put into. Meanwhile, on the weekends, I would just be drawn to the favelas and into the

slums and into these parts of the cities that were so full of life and vibrancy and work and diligent people. And I would talk to people about their businesses and realize that this was a group of people that could not even walk in through the doors of the bank. They had no confidence with the banking system. And so I, again, asking dumb questions, which may be a theme of my life, went to my boss with all good faith and said that maybe we would do better for the country, do better for the people, and actually get our money back, do better for the people, and actually get our money back, do better for the bank if we actually made smaller loans to local people doing what they were doing.

And he literally gave me a book called The Innocent Anthropologist. And it became very clear to me that the bank wasn't ready to pivot in that way. And so I had to go outside, which is where I've stayed, trying to disrupt systems from the outside, not the inside, which I think I'm better at. So the innocent anthropologist, I assume, was a very formalized way of giving you a book that basically says, listen, kid, that's adorable, but also very naive. I mean, is that the thrust of that gift? Yeah. I mean, he gave me two gifts, actually. That was the first gift. And then when we were talking a little bit later, and he was trying to convince me to stay at the bank, he's like, look, you're one of our top producers and performers, but culturally, you don't really fit.

You dress like Linda Ronstadt, and you laugh too much, which now I think may have been code for you're not actually acting enough like an elite one of us. And I realized in that moment that not only did I want to see how we could actually use the tools of banking to solve poverty, but that if I stayed, that he was essentially asking me to be a completely different person. And that helped make the decision. What was your next move? Some people get to checkmate in one move, but it's often an evolution. Where did you go from there? Well, the next move was telling my parents that I had made the decision.

Oh, yeah. Tell us about that. I was giving up on this middle-class immigrant family, saw it as the job of lifetime. And to make it worse, the COO of Chase, Tony Triciano, who just such an amazing man, was giving me an opportunity then. I think he liked that I was this scrappy bartender girl and not the more refined version that my immediate boss wanted. He really gave me an opportunity that could have changed, would have changed the trajectory of my life.

My dad thought I was giving up that opportunity. My mother thought I would never marry. Both had truth in what they were saying. And so I think that was incredibly hard because we were all raised to, quote unquote, do the right thing. I was looking for an opportunity to get to Brazil, but I found one that would bring me to West Africa, which was absolutely not on my playbook. But I realized that this was a chance to pursue a different kind of dream that was looking

at taking the tools of banking and reaching low-income people. I read about Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank and other heroes of mine, and I wanted to try it myself. And so I went. And as you said, it was sort of a next move. I met with absolute crushing failure, made all the worst because I turned down this really big job offer. So we're going to definitely roll up our sleeves and get into the crushing failure. But before we do, maybe we'll get into another failure. I have no idea because I don't know the details of this, but how did the conversation with your parents go? Did you deliver it in a way that they were able to hear? If so, what was that way? Did you try it and they were just like, terrible idea. Time will tell. Watch us. That was the end of the conversation. How did it turn out and how did you approach it? Or maybe the other way around.

Well, I just told them what I was going to do. So you didn't say, I'm thinking of X. You were just like, this is what I'm doing. I'm giving you guys a heads up. Heads up. This is really, it's not such a request. This is what I'm going to do next. My mother was like, you are out of your mind. She could be very forceful then. And what she will say now is that she kind of understood by then that I had a very strong will when I decided something. I don't think I quite understood until much later how afraid they were.

This is pre-internet, pre-cell phone, pre-real understanding of what this big continent was about. The only images they had of Africa was almost as a single country rather than 54, all looking like Ethiopia during the famine of 1983. Probably the worst thing that she said to me was, you know, I could understand if you were a nun. And I was like, what are you doing? So I think there was a lot of fear. I think there was a lot of fear. What's been so thrilling is to watch them along the journey, not only feel deeply proud, but get more and more excited. And that happened fairly quickly as long as we had a few rules. If I went to a war zone, I didn't tell them until after I got back because communication was too hard. It was not fair to them.

I think those are things that parents don't have to deal with today because they can be in more constant contact. So before we get to the crushing defeat, which I definitely want to spend a little time on, how did you find the next opportunity? Because I think many people listening will have some experience, maybe it's a current experience, of doing something that generates income, but that is not deeply rewarding to them on some level. And they want to have a greater impact.

They don't know what to do. And I'm not asking so much for prescriptive advice yet. We might get to that. But how did you at that time, especially this is pre-internet, how did you find this next lily pad to jump to? And then please tell us about your crushing defeat. Again, we had far less tools then. And so I had read one tiny article about Grameen Bank, which was still very obscure. I sent a letter to Muhammad Yunus that probably never reached Bangladesh. And then I heard from a young woman who also was at Chase that her aunt had started an organization called Women's World Banking and that there might be an opportunity. So I just went there and offered myself to go to Brazil. And as I said, she said,

we don't have any opportunity there. We do, though, in West Africa. And I just took it. It was super risky. It didn't come with health insurance. It just was an opportunity. I knew that if I were waiting for the perfect, I wouldn't have done it. I also knew I might lose my nerve. And it was the only thing that was on offer to really test out my theory that the tools of business and banking could actually serve people who had been fully left out. And I don't think it was until I was actually on the plane listening to Joni Mitchell's Blue album over and over and weeping that it really hit me that I was on my own. Why were you weeping? Was it fear? Was it something else?

I think it was loss. Everything I'd left behind, no understanding of where I was going, fear, a lot of loss in transition. And then the minute I landed, both excitement for being there and yet almost immediate confrontation with the first big true failure of my life, which was that I had been told that I had this opportunity to be an ambassador to African women. I was going to help build all these microfinance organizations across the region. And I would say the arrogance underneath was that I was going to save the world, at least this part of it. And what the confrontation helped me understand pretty quickly was that most people don't want to be saved, and certainly not by a 25-year-old white American girl

whose French was not very good and who had very little understanding whatsoever of the local culture. And so I hung in there for a number of months. It was very hairy. Hairy in what way? Everything from just kind of a daily rejection, where I would go to my little office in the African Development Bank and the door would be locked. Or I was supposed to do this big conference

and I would ask people for help and they'd be like, that's not my job. Okay, I didn't really know where to go. And then this one Nigerian extraordinary woman befriended me. And she's like, you know, they really want you out, the powers that be. And so don't eat anything in front of the women who didn't want me in the country. And I said, what do you mean don't eat anything? She's like, well, they're going to poison you. And they're also talking about voodoo. Holy shit. Jesus. That's intense. And you know, I don't believe in voodoo, but I will tell you, when you are stripped down to nothing and you're afraid to eat anything in front of people and you're being locked out of your office and you don't really have much of a safety net, nor do you know a single person

except for this incredible Nigerian woman who's befriended you, I would lie in bed and be like, is anybody here coming to get me? And then I got unbelievably sick with food poisoning. Like, deathly sick. Did you think it was poisoning or did you think it was food poisoning? I mean, after hearing that story, my God, I mean, I would imagine. I couldn't go there. I couldn't go there.

She thought it might be poisoning. But I didn't remember eating anything in front of anybody. And I was a little thing to start off with. And so after about eight days of just lying on the bathroom floor, I decided it was enough and told the women, trying to be respectful, but also clear that I got what they were saying. I really heard that they had not asked for anybody like me and that we shouldn't be just parachuting in to go and build things without doing it in real partnership. And that that was a mistake on every level, including mine. And nobody should be treated the way that they treated me,

and that both were true. That said, I left everything that I owned in the boxes that I had in the Abidjan Hilton, goodness knows whatever happened to them. And I moved to East Africa, where I kind of started again, hopefully with a lot more humility and maybe a different kind of courage. Was it with the same organization? I have to ask because I'm sure I'm wondering, and I'm sure people listening are wondering, I've heard stories of resistance and conflict when people parachute into different places, whether it's with an NGO or with other organizations.

I have never heard of possible poisoning. I mean, that is a next level. How do you explain that? I mean, would the intent be to make you sick, to kill you? I don't know how to make sense of that degree of kind of counterattack. Again, I think it's really dangerous to assume, but I think that what I've learned and what I used to read novels about the mystical and the magical, that in cultures including the United States that were very orally based, storytelling, myth-making can be as powerful and potent as the real things. And so there was, particularly in those years, a lot of giddy-giddy, people relieved in wearing different amulets and medicines. In a way, you see the guys at Silicon Valley kind of replacing that

with new things that we do to give us a sense of strength. And so the way I always attributed it to, which is why I would never accuse anyone of having done it, but the threat of it and my own fear and isolation may have been made manifest in this this literal purging that I did. The threats were not that unusual. Again, and I see it in places where there's often insecurity and deeply oral-based society. And you got to remember too, Tim, it was 30 years ago and the world operated in very different ways then. And I just was caught up in this world that I had no understanding of. And of course, is now a place that I'm deeply in love with and love all of its different layers and see the reflection in our own societies. We just make manifest in different ways.

At the time, though, you had just suffered this defeat of sorts, had really met with tremendous opposition. What was your first meaningful win after that, in your mind? Could be small or big. Or the first time when you're like, okay, this isn't a fool's errand. I'm actually on to something. I'm on the right track here. That's such an interesting question. I had another crushing failure right after where I analyzed a bank portfolio, a microfinance organization, and saw that I was excited by seeing all of the problems in the portfolio. And the CEO, rather than sharing my excitement that now we could actually fix the problems, burned my work and didn't want to work with me after that.

And so I had to learn a whole new approach, clearly. That was in East Africa? That was in Kenya. So I had a second big failure. The little wins were that in my everyday life, the relationships that I was building, including with the person who served tea, with drivers, were quite real. I kept going back to this human potential that I was seeing all around me and starting to understand the crushingly complex systems that were in their way

that nobody really wanted to confront, including the supposed good guys, the NGOs, the nonprofits, the leaders who were also arbiters of who got resources and who didn't. And it actually reinforced for me why I believed in the power of business, of entrepreneurship, because I was in this other world where who got control of the resources meant everything. The first real win for me was when a woman walked into my office in Nairobi and said that she was from Rwanda, which was a country I was completely unfamiliar with

at the time. In fact, I thought she said Uganda. And they had just, 1986, they had just passed a new law that abolished Napoleonic code. Under Napoleonic Code, women were put in the same category as children and the mentally impaired. And until that moment, were unable to open a bank account without their husband's signature. And she asked me if I would go to the country to do a study, if you will, for whether it might be possible to create some kind of financial institution specifically for women. It was the first time an African woman had asked me to help solve a problem. I think I was so beat up by then and yet really did feel this sense that if we could get markets to work for poor women, they would have so much more dignity than what I'd been seeing, that I probably went for a three-week assignment and knew somewhere

inside of me that I wasn't leaving until we'd built a bank. So presumably that's what happened. What happened? So that's what happened. I mean, a couple of things happened. Again, I had learned from my own lack of humility that it would have been really easy to go in there and be like, I, I, I, I. But that if we were going to build an enduring institution, and I deeply believe in enduring institutions, that I had to be a minor role, even if I was doing a lot of the legwork. And so I was really lucky to find a small group of Rwandan powerhouse women who are my co-founders. And we did everything together. It reinforced the African adage that if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together. And it became one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life because I saw that you really could change a little corner of history with the right people, the right kind of capital, the right value system, and certainly a lot of hard work. I want to just put a bookmark

in that for a second and ask from that initial plane flight, crying, listening to Joni Mitchell, to that Rwandan woman walking into your office, how much time had elapsed, roughly? Roughly, probably seven months. Okay. So over that seven-month period, what were the ingredients that kept you going? Was it that you'd said to yourself, come hell or high water, I'm sticking around for a year? Had you made that kind of commitment? Was it, I cannot go back to the US with my tail between my legs and let all these naysayers prove themselves right? Was it something else? I'm just wondering what kept you kind of slogging away over that period of time? I would say that the whole first year and a half was that slog. I would say a combination of this man, Tony Triciano, when he had given me this job offer, and he was like, you're going to go to Africa instead of do this? And I was like, Mr. Triciano, don't you understand if I don't go, I might never do it.

That moment kept coming back to me and it's like, how do I go back to him as a complete failure? I have to show him that we can do something. But also, Tim, I saw the vibrancy. I saw the beauty in this world that I had never imagined existed with people who were so eminently capable, but who weren't really given a chance to be everything that they could be. And it didn't seem like rocket science to me to build different kinds of systems that actually allowed their capability to flourish. And so I think it was a mix of hubris and a desire to be used in close collaboration with these co-founders, these local women, create something meaningful. You start to chalk up some marks in the win category.

How do we go from there to Acumen? What is the timeline or the series of events that leads? And I know we're covering earlier chapters, but I like really looking at these things closely because it shows the development before you reach escape velocity. And I think that makes for, at least for me, a fascinating study because people get to see

sort of how you got to the point where you could self-perpetuate and kind of build success on success. So Rwanda to Acumen. So Rwanda to Acumen saw both the power of using markets. With the microfinance, I learned that it wasn't enough that giving women just small loans was amazing, that you could give them access to credit at, say, 12% a year rather than 400% a year, which is what they paid the money lenders, that you could build community. My assumption that if you gave women small bits of credit, that it would be enough for them to create jobs was wrong. Most people aren't entrepreneurs,

and that's probably a really good thing. I could say it as an entrepreneur married to an entrepreneur. We need the builders. We need all these other personalities around us. So I also started a little bakery with 20 women to really understand what it would take to build entities that gave people good jobs. And that was a whole other learning point in the apprenticeship, if you will, before Acumen, that access to markets is important without the capabilities of actually using that access. We're only halfway there. I think because I was beginning to understand that I wanted to build companies, not just make small loans, that I wanted new skills. Also, in the context of East Africa at the time, degrees and other markers of success, particularly for women, seemed really important.

I was often called Nsitana Kidogo, which means little girl, even though we actually created a very successful lending operation. So I applied to Stanford Business School. It was the only school I applied to. I thought, well, if I get in good, if I don't, it doesn't matter. Why Stanford? Besides the pretty trees on Palm Drive. It was really, really hard to get an application anywhere. We only had word processors. We didn't have computers. It took 10 days to get a letter to Stanford or wherever. And then another 10 days after they sent the application to you. And then you had to write on that little airplane paper, send it back. It was a nightmare. And that particular year, Harvard, on its annual report, had a picture of all of the

graduates with dollar signs on the back of their hats. And I thought, well, I think I might be a misfit, given that I really want to solve poverty. That is so bad. That is so bad. And I have close friends who have gone to Harvard, but oh, God, that's terrible. But put yourself back there, right? 1987, that was the height. That was the Mike Milliken. That

was like the height of market belief. In fact, market fundamentalism. Gordon Gekko. Gordon Gekko, exactly. And so Stanford had a public management program that I thought fit more with what I wanted to do with my life. It was very clear that I didn't want to go back to just make money. I wanted to go back to build the tools to build companies that could employ and serve poor people. And so at Stanford, I met an extraordinary mentor named John Gardner. And I think he shaped my life as well in terms of getting me focused on the United States, the rest of the world, and talked to me about the importance of leadership,

which I hadn't really thought about as much, Tim. Then I went to the Rockefeller Foundation, where I really saw the power of philanthropy. So by the time I was nearing 40, I had worked in the private sector with banking. I had built several institutions, but most notably Duterembere, the microfinance organization, and this bakery and a couple of others. And then probably the other critical thing that happened was the Rwandan genocide. So suddenly, having worked on a social justice institution by then that had been in existence for seven years and seeing a country explode into a bloodbath, losing many of the people that I loved and that I worked with, and seeing my co-founders play out

every role of the genocide from being murdered to watching their families be murdered to being bystanders. I think that was probably one of the most important, not experiences because God forbid I'd watched it from afar, but both an understanding of patient capital, that the work of change is so often a couple steps forward and sometimes the whole thing blows up, that societies are highly complex. And again, that at the heart of my work had to be a redefinition of what poverty was. That we so often look at poverty and we think the answer is income. The answer is jobs. What I had seen by now, both in banking and in development and certainly with the genocide, is that the opposite of poverty is dignity.

It is having a choice, having opportunity, having agency over who you are in your life and what you're capable of doing. And we miss that. And that was really the beginning of Acumen, that we have all these tools. We have the superpower in capitalism, but when we raise it to the rank of religion and everything goes around one end profit, we can do amazing things, but we exclude a huge chunk of the world and we create great inequality. We're seeing that today, not to mention not consider the environment. If government decides everything or top-down approaches to aid, it's just too easy to give to the people that are close to you or for reasons that have nothing to do with anything but power. And so the question I started asking myself is, what if we looked at capital as capital, understand it exists on a spectrum,

take the power of business and capital, but rather than let it control us, control it in service of creating a world where we can actually solve our problems. Acumen was born in 2001 with that idea in mind. We're going to spend a fair amount of time on acumen, no big surprise there. But I want to spend just a few more moments on the Rwandan genocide, because I think it may be helpful in exploring the tendency that we all have to oversimplify things. And the example that comes to mind, and this is based on reading and prepping for this conversation that I'd love to hear you speak to,

is the tendency to separate the world into monsters and angels and how unhelpful that can be. And I think you alluded to it with your description of coworkers andworkers and people you knew, or certainly people you had exposure to, being on all sides of this genocide. Victims, bystanders, perpetrators, I'm sure you had interacted on some level, even just going to the market or otherwise with people who were on all sides of this. Could you speak to that? Because I wrote it down because it seemed important, not just within the context of

a genocide, obviously, but just within the context of life in general. I'd love to hear any of your thoughts. First thought is absolutely that I didn't just know people in the market. Our first executive director was jailed as being one of the highest ranking or the highest ranking planner at the genocide. Before the genocide, she was co-creating a liberal party based on multi-tribal democracy with another one of our co-founders. But when it was clear that power looked like it was going to Hutu power or the genocide regime, she switched. And so early on, I saw those who seek power and those who seek purpose and that power can be very tempting.

And I also saw how in a time of real insecurity, and we're in one again. It can be very easy for demagogic leaders at all levels of society to prey on insecurity and sometimes make us do terrible things. And that's where Monsters and Angels came in. I was literally sitting in a prison with Agnes, the woman who was the major perpetrator, knee-to-knee, asking her how this could have happened. And there she was, Tim, in a pink dress, the prisoner's uniform, her head shaved bald, with a freckled face. She looked like a young woman. She didn't look like a monster. And we had founded this institution together. We're taught that there are bad people and good people, monsters and angels.

And yet the truth of the matter is that monsters and angels live in every single one of us. Monsters are our broken parts. They are our petty fears, our insecurities, the grievances that grow. And it's just too damn easy to pull into those parts when we as a society feel insecure. We blame other people. We other them. And that was very much at the heart of the genocide. And that has very much informed the way I see the world and the way at Acumen, even the way that we talk about and inscribe our values. It's always intention. It's always recognizing the light and the dark in almost any choice that we make so that we're much more cognizant that there is no system that's all good, nor is there any human being that is all good or all bad. I worry sometimes when I hear conversations in the social media moment that we are in that it's capitalism's

fault, it's socialism's fault, it's stakeholders, it's shareholders rather than, can we focus on the values here? What are we trying to solve? And then can we pull back and find ways to use the best of the tools that we have at our disposal and actually solve that problem everything you just said i think is so it's always been important i think it's exceptionally important when you have technologies that are in a sense designed to polarized because the incentives are such that that becomes sort of a driving design and engineering imperative in a sense. And just to comment a bit further on that, I would encourage everyone out there to look at the work of Darren Brown. Darren Brown is a mentalist performer, also an incredible artist from the UK. And he has a number of specials

including one called the push he has another i can't recall the name of but the the objective putting ethical considerations aside the objective is to show how you can mold people who are otherwise upstanding moral people to do terrible things, like push someone off a building or to shoot someone. And the sad reality is that it is very much possible and that it's easy to sit on a moral high horse and levy judgment against others and to say, I would never have participated in a Rwandan genocide, or I never would have been a member of the Nazi party, and so on and so forth. But it's not quite that simple, right? And I think to simplify it down to the black and white people being all one or all other is not in service of

solutions. I really appreciate you expanding on that. Let's jump to Acumen. Acumen, how did you choose the name or how is the name decided? Acumen stands for perspective, insight. When we started Acumen, I was focused on revolutionizing philanthropy. And too often, the way we think about philanthropy is soft. This was saying, again, the hard and the soft. You've got to bring an edge, start with business, start with insight, build from there, and bring the same level of accountability that you would expect from a financial investment into the world of social change. Therefore, acumen. So could you just recap for people, I know we mentioned it in the bio, but a lot has been discussed so far. What does Acumen do?

Acumen does three things. First, we invest long-term patient capital. This is 10 to 15-year investment backed by philanthropy. So equity and debt into entrepreneurs that are going where markets have failed, healthcare, education, energy, agriculture. We will invest not only for 10 to 15 years, but we accompany those entrepreneurs with our social capital, our access to networks, to supply chains, to knowledge, sometimes to talent. Any money that comes back, it's reinvested. As you said, Tim, to grow these companies and scale is at the heart of everything that we do. We then need to tap into more traditional forms of capital in the impact investing space. So we also have a management company that runs several for-profit impact funds.

The second thing we do is build a community of builders through the World School for Social Change Acumen Academy. And that is not only trying to identify, link, inspire the talent that exists, I believe, in every corner of the world, but also to offer rules, tools, blueprints, so that anyone anywhere who want to be on the path of social change using this combination of head and heart, hard skills, and what I think are the even harder skills can be part of it. The third is to measure what matters. If you're going to say that you invest for impact, you better be able to measure what that impact is. A couple of years ago, we spun off a company called 60 Decibels that uses an approach to measuring change that we created called Lean Data, which we can talk about. It

essentially upholds one of our main values, which is listening. And it measures impact, not from the perspective of the giver or the investor, but from the recipients, from the customers themselves, so that we can actually serve the poor in ways that we hope to. Does the lean data, and I may ask some follow-up questions just to ensure I'm clear on what we mean. How it works. Does that apply to the for-profit investing as well, the for-profit impact funds? Yeah. And in fact, the reason we spun it out is a number of other non-profit and for-profit funds asked us if we would essentially provide them with lean data consulting. And we thought that, again, going back to our mission, we want to change the way the world tackles poverty. We would serve that mission better if we spun it out, let it grow. And that 60 decibels, which has been really exciting to watch, take off. I'd love to see BlackRock using

it, frankly. All right, BlackRock. I'm sure there's somebody listening. Coming to get you. Who is involved with BlackRock. Let's just assume they are listening. And also for my benefit and for listeners, could you just reiterate what lean data are? I'm going to be a pompous Princetonian. What exactly is or are lean data? Because the question of measuring impact

is one that, at least in my circles, comes up a lot. How do you actually do this? How do you try to invest, not just for ROI, but for good, for impact? But how do you do that without just waving your hands around and claiming that you've done a lot of good? I'd love to hear you expand on that. We invest in entrepreneurs that are trying to build markets where they haven't existed, for people who make $2 or $3 a day, where there's no infrastructure, there's no trust, there are very few skills

and talent, there's a lot of corruption and complacency. And so it would be really easy for us to essentially say that anything we do in a difficult environment is impact. And so we decided that we had to hold ourselves accountable to a higher standard. That at the end of the day, what really matters when it comes to dignity is to record and understand the voices of those you are there to serve the poor. For many years, Tim, our impact measuring was fairly mediocre because we didn't have the tools. Once you had cell phone technology and you could text customers, suddenly you had a one-on-one communication where you weren't in the

room, where people aren't always as likely to tell you the truth because they don't really think you want to hear it anyway. But in this case, the more anonymity they had, the clearer people would give. So imagine a solar light company. We're the largest off-grid solar investor for the poor in the world. So we have a lot of them. We could go to a company like D-Lite and text 5,000, 6,000 customers simultaneously. Ask those customers a series of questions from which we can deduce what matters to them. How many more hours of light do they have when they buy a solar home system that gives them three lights, a radio, a television? What is the quality of that light? We could measure carbon offset. That's easy. Has their health changed because they're no longer

using dangerous, noxious kerosene? Are their children doing better in education, which was an assumption we had when we first went into it. Then we collate all of that. And suddenly we can help our entrepreneurs understand whether they're serving people, which is sometimes shocking when they find that they actually are not in the way that they thought they were. But equally, we can start to look across the sector like solar, electricity, and we can start to look across the sector, like solar, electricity, and we can see which companies may have the best product, but it's reaching people with the highest income. And so you've

got a trade-off. Which companies are doing the most to displace carbon, but they may have another trade-off? And which companies have the happiest customers, then we can decide more effectively where we want to allocate our dollars for impact, not only for financial returns. It not only has held us more accountable, Tim, it's allowed the entrepreneurs a much deeper understanding of who their customers are. It allows us to see, are we actually reaching the poor, which is our mandate? And it's shown us where we were wrong. When it came to off-grid energy, we assumed, as I said, that kids would do better in school. They don't necessarily do better in school. If you want kids to do better in school in really,

really hot areas, get them a solar system that includes a fan. Because with the fan, the air moves at night, bugs are kept away, the kids sleep, they do better. It's a lean approach because you're not doing a three-year randomized control trial. And it is a deep approach because you're hearing from the perspective of those who actually most matter. Yeah, the three-year randomized controlled approach has its place. But honestly, I mean, and this is speaking as someone who is very involved with financing scientific studies, it's not the right tool for all jobs. And particularly when you are outside of a laboratory with lots of uncontrolled variables, it's just trying to

hammer screws a lot of the time. I think there's a real place for this lean data approach. And I have a question about how this is used. So here's a hypothetical, maybe it's not hypothetical, I would imagine you've run into this. If you are acting as a nonprofit and you're investing in various enterprises, you can apply this data or offer this type of tool across the board, I would imagine, with the underlying belief that a rising tide raises all ships. Once you are a consultancy and you are providing lean data to for-profit companies, would you not say in a given sector, run into someone who wants you to avoid conflicts by providing them this data, which could help their businesses or business, and they might say, hey, I know that you have this valuable data. We would like to be the only one to

receive it in the X, Y, and Z category. Otherwise, it doesn't really give us a competitive advantage, so why would we pay for it? Do you ever run into anything like that, much like a law firm would have a conflict check? No. I mean, when there's conflict, then you know you're onto something, and I'm looking forward to that day when we do have that conflict. I would say the more internal conversation that we have as a board is how transparent to make it so that we start actually taking seriously the level of impact that different investors around the world actually are getting. You mean transparency in terms of what you learn, how much to make publicly available? Yeah. And it goes to the ethos. At the beginning of Acumen even, and I guess it goes to that girl

we were talking about, I just wanted to know the truth ourselves. So even, and I guess it goes to that girl we were talking about, I just wanted to know the truth ourselves. So even if the world didn't care, we would always have a forced ranking of our investments. And if you just sat there trying to defend your investment as an investor, that was the way you could get fired. If you were the one who talked about everything that was wrong with it and what made you worried, that was a way you could become more of a hero. And now we've grown quite large, and I think we have a different set of questions that we ask. But I think it was that ethos, Tim, of holding ourselves to account for the kind of impact that we are trying to create in the world, not protect, that allowed Acumen to partner with just incredible market makers like the guys who founded D-Light, which has brought clean solar light and electricity

to over 100 million people and really launched an energy revolution and taught me that the kind of investing we need to think about right now at scale doesn't only reward the building of a single company, but those companies who ultimately create entire markets. I think that's the next frontier in so many ways. So you gave an example, just one example of many of just the scale, the large scale impact that Acumen and these various spinoffs and for-profit funds have been able to have in the world. But if we go back to 2001, circa 2001, Acumen, I always like to ask, aside from Acumen, did you have any other names that were on the short list for consideration that you remember? Do you remember any other rough drafts? Of course I do. Of course I do. In fact, we had a, you know, 2001, just to put us back again,

it was the dot-com craziness. Well, 2000, 2001, by the time I picked Acumen and we started, there was a bust. But you could not get a URL and no names were working. And so I had this night at the Rockefeller Foundation where I was working in, and we came up with really, really great names, including Ain't Your Grandma's Philanthropy. That's great. I think that was my brother Mike's, but I can't remember. There was a lot of Y involved in the naming of acumen. And then I really loved the word immersion. I still do. It's one of the principles of moral imagination. There's a great line from Tilly Olson where she says, may you live a life

of immersion. I'm paraphrasing, but what price will you pay? To truly understand the complexity of the issues that we are trying to solve, you have to get close. Bryan Stevenson, the civil rights activist says you have to get proxamous. I say you have to immerse. It's the same. But when we did trials, particularly across gender, women were attracted to the word immersion. Men hated it, hated it. And so acumen seemed a little less offensive to one of the two groups. How did you test it? Were you sending out a poll to a group of friends? How did you do the split testing? Well, a friend of mine, Antonia Bowering, was working for a now no longer.com called, I think it was called March 1st. They did this big ideation project with us. So they actually did some true consumer testing.

But I also, having so many people in my life and being an extrovert, just kept asking, asking, asking. And I couldn't find a single man who was with me on immersion. And in fact, I can remember one person was like, I just hear that word, Jacqueline, and I feel like you're making me drown in a sea. He's like, well, there is something to that. There are moments where you feel like you're drowning, but then you come out to clarity. But so we decided. I never would have guessed in a million years that you would have such a gender split on immersion.

Maybe I'm just a language geek, so I find it attractive as a concept. I think now, in fact, our housing company in Pakistan, Javad Aslam, he actually named one of his funds the Immersion Fund. Once you really think about it, it's a beautiful word. All of us right now need to immerse more in each other's lives. All of us need to design with the imagination, not just through our own lens, but with the imagination that is morally based. You don't get that if we don't have immersion. I think it's changed. Yeah. I was just going to ask if you could

just explore for a moment, and then we're going to come back to acumen, and I'm going to ask you about the earliest wins and if you could speak to those, but I don't want to gloss over moral imagination. Could you just take a moment? I think you're kind of walking into that territory, but just to frame it, what is moral imagination? Moral imagination is essentially putting yourself in another's shoes and building from their perspective. As I said, we often design through the lens just of our own imagination. That doesn't work when we're designing for people whose lives are completely unlike our own. So moral imagination starts with empathy. But I've learned time and time again that empathy by itself reinforces the status quo, or at least risks doing so. And so the idea of moral imagination is

understanding by immersing a particular problem and then thinking systemically about those issues that get in people's way and then frankly being honest enough to recognize where people get in their own way and then moving from there. When you say empathy in some cases enforces the status quo, could you elaborate on that? Do you mean that it's just an us versus, not versus, but like an us and them kind of the savior of the fill in the blank? Is it that dichotomy that's created? Or not that that is what empathy does, of course, but what do you mean by enforcing the status quo? I think it's even deeper. I mean, I think when I first learned about the moral imagination was in college when I was at Charlottesville, ironically,

given everything that happened in Charlottesville a few years ago. And I signed up to bring a turkey dinner and all the trappings of a Christmas to this community that was 30 minutes away from the university where low-income people lived. I was also kind of a wild co-ed, so we had this big party. We asked everyone to bring food and toys to make a perfect Christmas for these kids. I was really excited because I felt at some level so sorry for these people that didn't get to have a Christmas. The next morning, my girlfriend and I got up and we got in her car. We loaded it with all the stuff. We were both completely hungover. We drove into this place that I'd never been to a place like that before. And it was literally when we got to the house, it's like a shanty, a shack. And suddenly

I just felt shame, Tim. I was like, oh my God, like, I don't know who these kids are. I don't know what kind of things they like. I don't know if the parents want the kids to know that somebody else is bringing them Christmas. And this is all wrong. And literally, I said to Suzanne, my friend, I was like, just keep the car running. And grabbed the stuff. I ran it. I threw it on the porch.

I ran back to the car. I was like, just go. And I think in a way, it was the beginning of my moral imagination that that act was an act of empathy. It was well-intended. And I hope that they had a really lovely Christmas, but the moral imagination would have said, look, am I willing to do the work of actually understanding who these people are at the very least and building from there. If I'm not, find an organization that does. Even better, ask the questions around what got them there in the first place and where can I be spending my time and my energy and my capital to solve that problem. And I'm not saying we

shouldn't give charity. I think there's a real role for moving from that place of empathy and from that place of unbridled love in a moment. Our job right now, when the pandemic and everything that's happened in the world has broken our systems open, is to think bigger than that and to hold ourselves to account at a systemic level. And that's what my obsession is. Thank you for explaining that and telling that story also, which I think drives it home. Acumen. So, wing and a prayer. Good idea. You've tested the name. Here we go. Buckle up. Do you recall any of the first wins where you're like, okay, I think this might actually do something? Oh, yeah. I recall it like it was yesterday. We had helped put together this collaboration,

this deal to bring long-lasting malaria bed nets into Tanzania. It started with Sumitomo, who had developed this bed net and also recognized that 95% of malaria is in Africa, and yet there was no manufacturing capability for this particular kind of bed net. And so it was a real experiment. Could we build manufacturing capability with similar throughput rates to the kind that you might get in Asia, where the long-lasting bed nets were created? We went through all these different entrepreneurs. We identified this incredible guy named Anusha in Arusha, Tanzania, and worked with Global Fund to buy these nets and didn't really know what it was going to look like. And of course, I'd seen a lot of things fail. This was a complex collaboration. And then I went to go visit just as the factory was getting going. And there was one line of bed net making

machines. And I was like, this is cool. I love operations, factory operations. A few months later, I went back and there were four. A few months later, I went back and there were eight. And there was that moment when suddenly I was seeing hundreds of women operating these machines that I thought, oh my goodness, we're doing this. And then they ended up creating jobs for 10,000 people, manufacturing 30 million nets a year. They ended up being 15 for 10,000 people, manufacturing 30 million nets a year. They ended up being 15% of global production. And when you think about that, that's like a half a billion people who have gotten access to malaria bed nets because of this little company in, not so little anymore, company

in Arusha, Tanzania. I was like, bingo, this is what we're about. Boom. Proof of concept. Boom. Let's look at this example because I'd like to explore the thought process or the process a bit in so much as I think many people who are considering impact investing, or even perhaps starting a firm or a fund or a company that has that as its intended purpose, particularly a fund, they might solicit proposals or business proposals

and then choose from that menu of options. But it seems like you started with selecting a problem and then you canvassed to find candidates. Is that how you approached it? In the beginning, we selected sectors. We were mostly focused at the very beginning on health technologies. And then the idea was we would find entrepreneurs. I was and am such a believer in entrepreneurs. And in fact, people would say, oh, are you trying to solve malaria?

And I'd be like, no, we are trying to find those health technologies that could fundamentally change people's lives and bring them dignity. Now, again, we're in a very different place where we have all local teams on the ground. Depending on the region, there's much more focus on the sectors. And Tim, what we find then is if you think about Acumen as a laboratory, when we see a company really move up like a D-Lite, then we can start to build other companies around it to really help create that ecosystem. So we're a bit different. In the US, for instance, it wouldn't make sense for us to be looking at off-grid energy or investing in the social determinants of healthcare, financial inclusion, and workforce development,

which we feel are so critical to where the nation is now when it comes to the poor or low-income people. You mentioned Sumitomo, which is Japanese. Developing an ecosystem around a company is in some ways a very Japanese concept, or it's something that's been very well explored and developed and dedicated to these, I suppose, conglomerates would be a lazy way to translate that in Japan. As is a very long-term approach. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look at some of these companies. They've lasted a very long time. They're not five or 10 year companies. I look at your story. I look at your chronology. And one thing that stands out to me, and please feel free to disabuse me of any misconceptions, but you cut your teeth in

banking. You got to understand that machine from the inside. You then, well, simultaneously in some respects, and then after looked at microfinance, access to capital, you started a bakery. I don't think that's a small thing. You actually were boots on the ground, getting firsthand experience in an immersive way of what entrepreneurship looked like in your chosen environment. You got your ass kicked in West Africa. But put another way, you really got an extended education on someone else's charter with someone else's organization and support. You, through that entire period of time, are developing grit, learning what doesn't work, certain approaches to parachuting in. You're

learning, conversely, what does work. And then, suddenly, you're Jacqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO of Acumen. But I think it's tempting for people to jump straight to the acumen. And I'd love to hear you answer the question, what advice you would give to young people who say they want to change the world? Because it strikes me that if you had tried to jump straight to acumen, correct me if I'm wrong, but you wouldn't have been viewed as backable. You wouldn't have had the operational experience. It just wouldn't have worked. I sometimes worry that these young or older people, quite frankly, who could really make a positive dent in the world are putting the cart before the horse in terms of skill development. They don't have the chops, but they want to change the world. You've spoken to students. I know you've given commencement speeches, but for those people listening who are like, I just want to change the world, what advice would you give to them? Well, the first would be this idea of just follow your passion. I don't even really

understand what that means. Even though my whole life, I have been very clear about the way I wanted to create change and for whom. It wasn't this, as you said, out of the box, really understanding that we were going to use different forms of capital and support it with the right kind of talent to work a system to create real change. I would say just start. Don't start by asking, what is my purpose? What is my passion? Start by asking, what are the problems that need to be solved?

Which ones attract me? And take a step toward that. Take one step and the work will teach you where you need to take the next step. Build tools in your toolbox. If you still don't know what your passion or your purpose is as you take those steps, follow a leader and learn from that leader there is something so powerful and i think this is what you're getting at too tim in apprenticing i would say i apprenticed for 15 years and also to your point that bakery in some ways probably look like a Girl Scout project to a lot of people. When I think about some of the most important things I've ever done in my life,

that one sits at the top for all the reasons that you implied. I had to learn the gritty realities, talk about learning humility. I also saw that we could succeed And I had to let go of a lot of my assumptions yet again. And so I do think you're right. Skipping steps, particularly because life is both shorter than we think it is, and it's longer than we think it is. It doesn't serve the world and it doesn't serve you. Here, here. You've also, I don't know if you've said this or written it, but I vaguely remember, and maybe you can provide some context here for when it was said or written, but something along the lines of, if you try to keep all of your options open, you may just end up with a bunch of options.

I actually think Jim Collins said that to me when I was lucky enough to be his student, and I paraphrased Jim. I say that a lot where it's like, well, Jacqueline, I need to keep my options open. I'm like, seriously? Just commit to something. This, we don't tell young people or even old people. We don't expect that enough. But I think the cult of the individual is also the cult of optionality. And the secret is that when you commit to something, particularly something bigger than yourself, it will set you free. And suddenly you will find a freedom and layering of life that you

never really understood you had. That is something that I don't think I would have fully been able to wrap my head around until just in the last few years, really becoming dedicated to scientific research around psychedelic compounds. And I don't want to take us down that rabbit hole necessarily. Certainly your brother, Mike, has a fair amount to say. I'm the wrong number, but I still like that one. Yeah, yeah. Your brother, Mike, has a fair amount to say. I'm the wrong number grad sibling for that one. Yeah, yeah. Your brother Mike has a fair amount to say about that. Mr. This Ain't Your Grandma's Philanthropy or whatever the name was. But the great relief and unburdening of me-centric living that comes from dedicating yourself to something larger is really profound. And I mean, it's not entirely altruistic.

It's so relieving. I just, it's hard to overstate that. And I'm glad you mentioned it. Well, and none of this is entirely altruistic. If we're seeking purpose, if we all buy into throws that so many men live lives of quiet desperation and we don't want to be those people, then there is no clearer path than making a commitment to problems that might be so big you won't solve them in your

lifetime. Because then you are constantly just starting. You're constantly learning and unlearning and renewing. And I think that's been also the story of this work of trying to solve these big problems with entrepreneurs that are as relentless in their seeking. It's just that what drives them is to solve a problem. What does not drive them is just profit, though they recognize they need the profit for long-term financial sustainability and scale. It's the prioritization. You mentioned following a leader earlier and also apprenticing.

And there are many different types of leaders out there. Many people who might seem to be good mentors, but make terrible mentors. Could you speak to an example in your life of a mentor or a leader? It doesn't have to be John Gardner. I wrote that down just because you mentioned John in passing from, I believe that was your GSB days, right? The Stanford days. To what makes a good mentor or a good leader, the type you might want to follow or learn from? For me, there's really no one like John Gardner in my life, Tim. He was this very patrician man who almost spoke in koans by the time I met him. We were 50 years apart in age, so he gave a lot of wisdom. Where he stood apart, and again, we need him so much right

now. He was the only Republican on Lyndon Johnson's Democratic cabinet and was the head of health, education, and welfare. So he was at the table negotiating some of the great civil rights legislation. Talk about courage. He would say things to me like, focus on being interested, Jacqueline, not interesting. When I would get some fancy job offer and he would think that that was a vanity project rather than a character building project. John left the cabinet and resigned his position in protest of the Vietnam War. And in response, he created a grassroots citizens organization at age 54 called Common Cause. And it was that level of integrity and of doing the right thing,

not the easy thing, that I think we're all yearning for in our leaders today. John could have done anything. But when I think about what legacy is, I think about him. And I look at the now, we've had over a million signups on Acumen Academy. When I see these hundreds and hundreds of Acumen fellows and the entrepreneurs, I sometimes hear John's words in them. And I think this man who's been dead for almost 20 years is fully alive

with the kind of legacy that matters because he focused on investing in the world around him and not just in himself. So Jacqueline, I have good news, bad news, depending. It's actually the same news. I just don't know how you're going to take it, which is I think we're going to have to do, or I would like to do round two at some point, because there's no way we're going to cover even a fraction of what I have in front of me. We could do a do-over. Oh, definitely not a do-over. Are you kidding me?

You've been nothing but net for an hour and 40 minutes. I'm not letting this one go. I would like to ask about, actually, first a short question, then a longer question. The shorter question is going to be about books. And the longer question is going to be about advice to different types of listeners. Those people who have more time than money. Maybe they're earlier in their careers. Maybe they're just in a transition. Then you have the investor types. I would consider myself an investor type also, who are looking to have more impact, make more impact. And then to institutional,

those people who might be in positions within institutions. Before we get to that, you were kind enough to contribute to Tribe of Mentors, my last book. Thank you very much for that. And you answered quite a number of questions. One of those questions is, what is the book or books you've given the most as a gift and why? Or what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life? Now, you mentioned a few. You can also revise these. One was Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison. Another, Things Fall Apart by, can you pronounce this author's name for me? Chinua Achebe.

Thank you. There's so many words and names that I know how to read. I recognize, but I have no idea how to pronounce. And then A Fine Balance by, oh, here's another one, Roentgen Mystery. Roentgen Mystery. There we go. If you had to pick one of these or another book, it doesn't have to be one of these three, but a book that you've given as a gift or that has had a strong impact on you for people to start with, which might you recommend and why? Of course, I recommend people also read your books, The Blue Sweater and also Manifesto for a Moral Revolution. So not to exclude those, but for the sake of conversation now,

if they weren't those books, what comes to mind? I have reasons for each of those books and certainly The Invisible Man in this moment of the Black Lives Matters protests and the continuing racial reckoning. Invisible Man really taught me to not see through anybody ever. But the book I give right now

in this time of so much despair is Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, where he really looks at people in the Holocaust and asks himself, why did some just sort of crumple up and die and others stayed resilient and strong? And that at the end of the day, no one can take our dignity away from us. And so I think that we have to be reminded right now that between stimulus and response, there is a choice. And we're in that moment. And I have seen myself personally so often that in the darkest times, we can find our best selves. And that's our opportunity right now. And so I think for this moment, Tim, Man's Search for Meaning should be required reading for all of us. I could not endorse that strongly enough. For anyone who's listening to this also, across 500

plus episodes of this podcast, the single book that has come up most often is Man's Search for Meaning. So if you have not read this book, do yourself a favor, do everyone around you a favor, and pick it up. It is just a tremendous, tremendous book. And also a great example of someone, in this case, Viktor Frankl, embracing something larger than himself, the completion of Man's Search for Meaning, the concept of writing this and compiling it as a book that helped him to get through so much suffering also. Yeah. And moral imagination that he had in seeing not just the ugliness of the world that is and the humility that that takes, but he truly had the audacity to imagine what could be and to see the infinite

potential in every human being. Let's use that as a segue to help others to embrace the audacity to imagine what they might do. And you can take these in any order. And there might be other archetypes we want to touch upon. But for those people listening, and I'll just grab three, we have the person with right now, for any number of reasons, more time than financial resources, what they might do. And you don't have to tackle them in this order. investing in public equities, or in my case and many others, startups, cryptocurrency, whatever it might be, who would like to begin to experiment with investing for greater social impact or impact, and then the players in the institutional space, those people who may be at asset management firms or otherwise, who also would like to, either in a management or leadership position,

begin to steer the ship, at least carving off a portion of activities to focus on impact, maybe lean data, or who just as entrepreneurs within these companies want to try something. What would you say to any of those groups? To the person with not a lot of money but time, I would say focus on both immersion and understanding the problems around us

and also another practice from the book, which is accompaniment. By accompaniment, what I mean to walk with someone, to try and understand their problem, not take it on and solve it for them, but to help them build the muscle so that they can solve it themselves. By book, in this case, you mean manifesto for a moral revolution. And the whole idea of moral revolution is give more to the world than you take. It's not there are some who have the moral responsibility and some who do not. It's like all of us. So I really appreciate that you would ask for all three categories.

When you look at the brokenness of our criminal justice system, the opioid epidemic, poverty, the arts community that's out of work, there is such an opportunity to be of use, to pay visits, to just talk to people who are lonely right now, to be more conscious about the way that we spend our money, even for small things, and buy sustainably. And so it's building into your everyday a much greater consciousness and awareness of the fact that our action and our inaction impacts people everywhere. For the individual investor, I would say that one of the broken parts of our

current system of capitalism, which bifurcates how we make money and how we give it away, is that we often disregard how people are treated inside and outside our companies, as well as the environment. And then we try to make amends for the fact that we are the status quo with our philanthropy on the outside. And that model is deeply broken. As investors, how do we think more holistically about the impact that we're making, positive and negative, with all parts of our money across that spectrum. There has never been such opportunity as there is right now to invest in extraordinary entrepreneurs that are reimagining how to use the tools of capitalism to solve big problems.

As I said, Tim, they exist in every country. And we have to think with more openness to how we would look at our overall portfolio. Again, thinking of it going from philanthropy to more market-driven returns. We have a company in the United States called Every Table, and it is a fast food, healthy, nutritious, affordable restaurant chain now in Los Angeles. It's about eight different restaurants. And with the pandemic, it just has exploded in the best ways of delivering food and partnering with governments and individual philanthropists that are willing to pay meals forward so that people in low-income parts of Los Angeles can get healthy, affordable food.

With Black Lives Matter protests, what Sam Polk, the entrepreneur, understood is that he had within him, within his operation, individual employees who had the capability to become franchisees. But in the United States, the franchise model usually expects that you will have your own capital to put into the system from the beginning. So he's created a university and he's now raised probably three of $13 million, seven-year debt at 2%. That will allow him to identify the entrepreneurs amongst his employees, give them the opportunity to start their own franchise, enable them to have $40,000 a year salaries for the next three years. And hopefully we're going to see a whole group of black and Latinx entrepreneurs that are running every table franchises in, of, and for their communities.

That's the kind of creativity that exists right now in the United States and everywhere else in the world that we work from Pakistan to Colombia, if I were, and I am, a investor that really cares about impact, I would urge myself and urge everyone else to think more expansively about themselves as investors using all the tools at our disposal. And for the big institutions, I would say one thing, that as long as we have an investment model that is still based on extraction rather than actually investing for good, we are going to continue to build more and more inequality in ways that are fully unsustainable for this world. It has been really exciting to me to see not only a $700 billion impact investing sector emerge over the last 20 years, but also to see big companies like BlackRock and others say enough.

But we've got to move from a place where we do no harm to one where real investing is not only accounted for by what a few shareholders earn, come what may, but that real investing is truly measured by the amount of the jobs, the beauty, the human capability, the opportunities that are enabled in the world. So I would love to ask you for some simple next steps for also each of those three categories, like what people could do tomorrow. And the reason I ask that is that I think it's very easy for people to take next steps towards impact investing, whether the form of investment is time or money or energy, and to push it into the someday category. I think it's very easy to do. And I don't wrong them. I don't wrong anyone for that because it can seem like kind of

stumbling through a fog if they don't have a direction in so much as if we take just an individual investor. I'll use myself as an example. It took me a long time to build the relationships and the deal flow in the for-profit sector where the pass-fail marks are very clearly defined to get to the point where I could invest in really good companies. And for people who have developed those relationships and put in the time to get an understanding of,

let's just call it the more black and white capitalist model, it can be very intimidating, the idea of starting from scratch to try to figure out what makes a good impact investment. Could you speak to that for the person who has, we could tackle the investment side first, but the individual, the institutional, and then a person with more time. What could they do tomorrow or next week, for instance, is a simple answer like, hey, if you don't want to figure this out, invest in one of our for-profit impact funds. Understanding that this podcast is

not giving investment advice, I'm not a registered investment advisor, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I would love to hear what some simple next steps might be. If they agree with you, they want to begin to get some skin in the game, to get on the playing field. I mean, I appreciate the self-promotional invitation there, Tim. Am I going to go down that path, I would say that the symbolist next step would be to get onto Acumen Academy on our website and check out the courses, including the Path of Moral Leadership that Seth Godin, who's so extraordinary in every way, has helped us build, which takes the different practices of the book and really looks at the examples of companies that go from chocolate and coffee in Colombia to bed nets to chickens in Ethiopia, and really shows some of the fundamental business models that have enabled extraordinary levels of change, as

well as identified role models. So I would get on to the Acumen Academy. The second would be both for institutional and individual. There are increasingly trade associations, for lack of a better word, that can direct you to really strong impact investors. The Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs is probably the best. Andy, andde.org, I think. And so get smart. Learn. On the Acumen website are also all of our companies and the stories of many of them that give a real sense, again, not only of the possible, but of ways that people can get involved.

As I said, Tim, all of our actions increasingly matter. And so paying more attention to where and how we buy and giving ourselves license within our communities to be a little radical in the way that we might make sure that we're investing in each other and giving back more than we take, I think becomes a mantra every day. Having my brother Michael at Galaxy and going to such different routes as young people, and yet all along the way asking these questions of how do you change the world? How do you change the world? How do you change the world? I actually think it's about getting started where you can with what you have and who you are. But

it's also about asking yourself the question, not am I making more money? Am I richer, famous, more famous, more beautiful today? But rather, what am I doing in the way that I run my business, in the way that I invest my dollars, in the way that I interact with everyone from the waiter to the president of some fancy bank who texted me prior to this conversation also, Seth Godin. And I bring him back up because I think Seth would agree that it's easy to hide with big aspirations in the sense that if you say, well, I just want to change the world, it's easy to hide. You can make the argument that you're not ready. You can make the sense that if you say, well, I just want to change the world, it's easy to hide. You can make the argument that you're not ready. You can make the argument that you have to make a little bit more money.

You can use all sorts of socially acceptable excuses not to take action. And that there are, in fact, easy things, simple things. And you can do the easy thing first. If in doubt, don't hit snooze for three years. Go to acumen.org. Just commit to spending 60 minutes educating yourself. You will learn something. Or getting Manifesto for a Moral Revolution, your book. Commit to getting that on Kindle. Maybe you try it for just 20 pages. You give it a taste test. See what you think. There are simple things that you can do

first. And it's easy to hide behind the big, ambitious, world-changing thing that may or may not come. That's a way of hitting snooze and I think absolving oneself of responsibility. And I'm as guilty of that as the next person. So I'm not casting stones. But there are some very simple options here, as you mentioned, including just going to acumen.org or acumen.org forward slash moral revolution. Dig around. Commit to 30, 60 minutes. There's very limited downside. And I want to ask you maybe two more questions.

And one, I didn't want to ask you earlier because I didn't want to make you self-conscious. But you are really good, exceptional, at nailing the Goldilocks amount of using people's names. In this case, Tim, you use it very well. You don't overuse someone's name. It's a very effective way of, I would hope that I'm already engaged, but keeping me even more engaged. Is that something that you've always done or is that something that you've developed somehow?

Tim, you're making me laugh. You're reminding me of the first book thing I did with Blue Sweater and I got off the stage and a famous actor came up to me and said, oh my God, you do real so well. And was like excuse me not to imply that this is some artificial thing i just i i feel like it's of course genuine but it's something that not a lot of people do or they try to play real so deliberately they end up saying your name every other sentence and you're like i feel like you're trying to sell me a used car or something. But you are very natural. I think it goes, I actually think it goes to immersion, which is probably why I didn't get to talk about many of the things

I really wanted to talk about because I just get so focused of who you are, what you're talking about. No, it's not conscious. It's not conscious. So I wish I had a better answer. Oh, what a gift. I quite appreciated it. Well, let's give, I'm going to cheat. I'm going to ask you more than two questions, but my last question is going to be recommendations, closing comments, things you'd like to say before we wrap up for this round one. But

would you like to give a teaser for other things that you would have liked to have talked about that we didn't get around to? Is there anything you'd like to mention, lest it be left out of this first edition? I really appreciate that you are even asking me that opportunity, giving me that opportunity. And I think another reason that I probably know when to say your name or not, or don't even know, but without meaning to flatter, you truly are deeply engaging conversationalist and interviewer. And I really appreciate that. Yeah, you really are. There are many things that I'd like to talk about in terms of what it actually means to bet on character. That I think that one of the mistakes I made at the beginning of Acumen was to be so excited by a particular technology or business idea and over time understanding character. And that you used a lot of the words, the grit, the resiliency, the vision, the ability to take feedback.

A whole other conversation I'd love to have with you is on courage. I shared with you at the beginning of this that you do remind me of my brothers, plural, and that you've got just an extraordinary level of what flex those fearlessness muscles early in your life and you practice them all along. But because of the vulnerability and the real courage that you've shown in your podcast with Debbie Millman, there was a whole set of muscles that went untended and that the key to us becoming not just good at what we do or famous or what have you, but becoming wise, is to learn how to flex those muscles of courage that we don't always flex. And I think this is another moment in history that really demands that of us. And third, I'd love to go deeper into the holding of tensions. That we are at a moment in history where we have to learn

how to find each other across what might seem like impossible divides to cross. And yet, we're all we have, each other. And we're on this earth for a short time. And it's up to us to be a generation that actually gets stuff done rather than being seen as being blind and disconnected from one another. And so Acumen has worked for 20 years in communities where people are raised to hate each other. And when I think about who our global community is, it also has been raised with many, many different people who were taught to hate each other. And yet it is possible to build out of diversity, a sense of wholeness, but not if we just focus on what we're getting from an organization or a

nation or community, but the responsibility that we have for each other. And I hear that in different conversations that you've been having with people, and I'd love to go there too. Finally, I would just love to say you're really one of a kind, Tim Ferriss, and the prep and the curiosity that you bring, and frankly, the love that you bring to every conversation and to the work that you're doing is really unparalleled. When I think of true moral imagination, it's based in a deep curiosity and people who are willing to follow that thread of curiosity to wherever it might lead. And so thank you for modeling that for all of us. Thank you so much. Talking about unflexed muscles, I'm not very, I haven't flexed the muscle of letting things land very much. So I'm going to tuck that away and think about it for the rest of today.

So thank you very much for saying that and for providing such a wonderful conversation to me and to everyone listening. My God, you are so good. You're so good at this. And you're such an inspiration. And I just love the fact that you have traveled so many paths that many would assume diverge, and yet you have found a way to make them converge, if that makes sense. You have the operational chops.

You have the toughness and the honesty to speak truth. And I recall the process of doing homework for this, finding someone, I can't recall who it was, saying something along the lines, maybe an investor in one of your funds, I don't know, saying something along the lines of, Jacqueline, you always talk about love, but then we get you around the negotiating table and you're so hardcore. And you are living proof that those do not need to be mutually exclusive. Furthermore, that they can be mutually reinforcing. You can combine the hard and the soft in a way that is tremendously effective in the world. And that in fact, there are, some might say an imperative, or there are imperatives to be able to combine those things and to not view them as

separate. And I'm just so extremely happy that I had the chance to have this conversation. And I hope it is just the first of many. So thank you again for taking the time. Thank you, Tim. And I'm just so honored, truly, and feel so, so privileged. And thank you too for making Manifest the hard and the soft. It's what we need to do in our world together. And so looking forward to many conversations as well. And I wish you good luck on this. To be continued. I love saying that. I always mean it. And I mean it very, very sincerely right now. Everyone, check out acumen.org. There's a lot there that is worth digging into. We will have show notes for everything we've discussed, links galore, resources galore at tim.blog forward slash podcast. That will be easy to find.

And until next time, ask dumb questions. They're often the smartest questions you could ask. Be honest. Bet on character. Use courage. It is the mother attribute for all other attributes. I'm stealing someone else's quote, but all other attributes at their testing point require courage. It is the mother attribute for all other attributes. I'm stealing someone else's quote, but all other attributes at their testing point require courage. And thanks for tuning in.

Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off. And that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field,

and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. I don't know about you guys, but I've had the experience of traveling overseas and I try to access something, say a show on Amazon or elsewhere, and it says not available in your current location, something like that. Or creepier still, if you're at home and this has happened to me, I search for something

or I type in a URL incorrectly and then a screen for AT&T pops up and it says, you might be searching for this. How about that? And it suggests an alternative. And I think to myself, wait a second, my internet service provider is tracking my searches and what I'm typing into the browser. Yeah, I don't love it. And a lot of you know, I take privacy and security very seriously.

That is why I've been using today's episode sponsor ExpressVPN for several years now. And I recommend you check it out. When you connect to a secure VPN server, your internet traffic goes through an encrypted tunnel that nobody can see into, including hackers, governments, people in Starbucks, your internet service provider, etc. And no, you are not safe simply using incognito mode in your browser. This was something that I got wrong for a long time. Your activity might still be visible, as in the example I gave to your internet service provider. Incognito mode also does not hide your IP address.

Also, with the example that I gave of you can't access this content or that content, wherever you happen to be, then you just set your server to a country where you can see it. And all of a sudden, voila, you can say log into your normal Amazon account as opposed to being routed to.uk or whatever, and everything works. So ExpressVPN protects you and enables you because it encrypts and reroutes your network traffic through secure servers. So even though your traffic is still passing through your internet provider, now they can't read it. ExpressVPN is so fast. Also, it doesn't bog things down at all. I usually forget that I even have it on.

I can stream high quality video with no lag or buffering, even on servers thousands of miles away. It gives me access to servers in 105 countries around the world, which is very helpful as I am constantly traveling and love to do so. It's easy to use. You just choose a server location and tap one button to connect. You do not need to be technologically savvy. You don't need to know anything about how it works. It's just one click and it works on every device, phone, laptop, tablets, even TVs. ExpressVPN has really changed the way I use the internet and I can't recommend it highly enough.

So check it out. Right now, you can go to expressvpn.com slash Tim and get three extra months for free when you sign up. Just go to expressvpn, E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N.com slash Tim for an extra three free months of ExpressVPN. One more time, expressvpn.com slash Tim. Okay, this is going to be part confessional. As some of you know, I am recently single and navigating the world of modern dating. What a joy that is. Sometimes it's fun, but it's mostly a goddamn mess. As many of you probably know, I've tried all the dating apps. And while there's some slick options out there, the most functional that I have found is The League. Why did I end up using The League? First, most dating apps give you almost no information. It's a huge time suck. On The League,

you're starting with a baseline of smart people, and you can then easily find the ones you're attracted to. It's much easier. It's like going to a conference where everyone is smart and then just looking for the people you think are cute to go up and speak with. So more than half of the league users went to top 40 colleges and you can make your filters really selective. So if that's important to you, then go for it. It does work. And that is one of the reasons that I use it. Second, people verify using LinkedIn so you can make sure they have a job and don't bounce around every six months. It's a simple proxy for finding people who have their shit together. It's infinitely easier than trying to figure things out on Instagram or whatever. Third, you can search by interest

and in multiple locations. I haven't found any other dating app that allows you to do this. So for instance, I usually search for women who love skiing or snowboarding, have those as interests as I like to spend, say, two to three months of the year in the mountains. I'm a rivers and mountains guy. The UI is a little clunky, I'll warn you, but it's incredibly helpful for finding good matches and not just pretty faces. So you can search by interest and specify multiple cities. So to summarize a few things that I think make it stand out, features available in the

league include multi-city dating, LinkedIn verified profiles, ability to block your profile from coworkers, bosses, family, et cetera. That's very easy to do. You can search by interest. You can get profile stats. And there is a personal concierge in the app. There's someone you can text with within the app as a personal concierge to get help. So what am I looking for?

I am looking for a woman who is well-educated, who loves skiing or snowboarding or both. These are, and I've used this word already, proxies for like 20 other things that are important. So just I'll leave it at that for now. Someone who's default upbeat, likes to smile, smiles often, glass half full type of person who would ideally like to have kids in the next few years. Her friends would describe her as feminine and playful, and she would love polarity in a relationship. She's athletic and has some muscle. I like strong women, not necessarily bodybuilders, but you get the idea. It could be a rock climber, dancer, whatever, but has some muscle, loves to read and loves learning. If this sounds like you, send hashtag DateTim, so hashtag DateTim, in a message to your concierge

in the app to get us paired up. So these are all reasons why I was excited when the League reached out to sponsor the podcast. They even have daily speed dating where you can go on three three-minute dates with people who match your preferences all from the comfort of your couch. So check it out. Download the League today on iOS or Android and find people who challenge you to swing for the fences and who are in it to win it. I found it to be super

fascinating. You can really get good matches instead of just looking at pretty faces and kind of rolling the dice over and over again. Much better. So download The Leak today on iOS or Android and check it out. Message hashtag Tim to your in-app concierge to jump to the front of the waitlist and have your profile reviewed first. Check it out, The League, on iOS or Android.