[Music] okay this is going to be part Confessional As some of you know I am recently single in 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 6 months it's a
simple proxy for finding people who have their [ __ ] 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 interest as I like to spend say 2 to 3 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 on the league include multi-city dating LinkedIn verified profiles ability to block your
profile from co-workers bosses family Etc 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 body builders but you get the idea could be a rock climber dancer whatever but has some muscle loves to read and loves learning if this sounds like you send #d Tim so #d Tim in a message to your consur 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 3 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 # Tim to your Ina 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 elswhere 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 have 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
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now you can go to expressvpn.com and get three extra months for free when you sign up just go to expressvpn expressvpn.com Tim for an extra three free months of expressvpn one more time expressvpn.com Tim optimal minim at this altitude I can run flat out for a half mile before my
hands Shake can I ask you a personal question now broken time what if I the opposite I'm a cybernetic organism living dissue over a metal [Music] endel hello boys and girls ladies and germs this is Tim Ferris welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris show
where it is my job to sit down with worldclass 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 combo and now without further Ado please enjoy and thank you for listening first up Jamie Fox Oscar bafta and Golden Globe award-winning actor Grammy award-winning musician standup and improv comedian and the owner of BSB Ultra smooth flavored whiskey you can
find Jamie on Instagram am Jamie Fox and in his up coming films Tin Soldier and back in Action so one day my boy Brion brings in this kid he has a backpack on his Jaws a little busted his name is Kanye West and I say yo yo who's who's that they said
yo that's a new Kid Kanye W he coming on I said really what he do said he R I said well [ __ ] he got to perform that [ __ ] CU everybody comes to this to my house they got to perform so I said yo man they say you the [ __ ] and he was really quiet I said man let me hear you
you rap you need your Beats or whatever he said I don't need no beat chopped everybody's head just amazing 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 says I actually have a song for you I said Mah
me a song like what you mean he said I got this song he says I want to record 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 n
it was like a lay jet it was compact it was compact the sound was toasty I had uh Engineers from all over the the city dial it in so that when real artists come they don't think that oh this just comedian [ __ ] around some real [ __ ] 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 want some Marvin Gay some Luther van Jo a little I said I got it and I started going she say she wants some my get and he said what the [ __ ] are you doing I said well see young man you
don't know nothing about R&B see I'm an R&B [ __ ] see I I got to give him the [ __ ] you know I got to put the [ __ ] on it and he goes really politely he says hits the the button he says don't do that I said but you don't know what you're talking about uh 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'mma sing this [ __ ] the song is whack it's not going to make it cuz I'm thinking old school R&B but he was teaching me me the Simplicity of hip-hop which I didn't know I was like what 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 boy say remember that song you said was whack I said yes it's the number one in the country You Kanye and twister Kanye's first record and it was actually
Twister's record I said oh [ __ ] so I'm at a club he said you don't believe me I said no I'm 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 you know 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 oh so that hard drive is magical because we also did just to give you a history on the on the music Brion found that song Slow
Jams it went number one and then as we started getting into music there was a song that Brion brought in Brion would call me like he you want to be in the music business it's like you know 2:00 or 3: 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 so you ready [ __ ] are you ready and Brion always says everything three times are you ready
[ __ ] are you ready are you ready I said yeah yeah man play this [ __ ] so he plays it and the song was blame it on the goose got 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 an exactly like the record which goes way in contrast to my R&B Roots cuz it was
auto 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 [ __ ] 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 club strip club we went on we we did a East Coast run so we we're going to break the record in the east coast so we went to the strip we went to New York my man pek us 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 Hal Barry you get her back home she looks like Hal scary you know what you got to
do blame it on Goose guys feeling loose blame it on the 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 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 blaming 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 bingfield has been here she's cut Kelly Roland's 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
sharing 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 so really want to do your life share if it's possible uh you know have some music that 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 the 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 baby face I said so this is the real [ __ ] you 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 said I think I'll be okay that's all
right so I Tak it to my live night 800 people there people just playing black folks sweating just getting it you know what I'm saying I mean people singing and you know they would tear American Idol up you know these people haven't necessarily made it so all of a sudden a
Sharon gets up with a ukulele walks onto the stage and the brother that was next to me was like yo Fox man who the [ __ ] is this dude right here man with the red hair and [ __ ] in the [ __ ] ukulele I said man his name is Ed Shar let see what he does within
12 minutes he got a stand in Ovation wow from that crowd and I said bro you're on your way so this studio has a uh like I said a lot of history and it has that magic to it as well Mojo yeah how do you think of teaching confidence with your own kids because you're 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 with my daughter is I there's the phrase that when you see annais my daughter and my oldest daughter Karan I would always ask
them what's on the other side of fear and they' 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 what's on the other side of that or if I stood on in the middle of the
floor and went 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 anything 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 school teacher or Tech guy or whatever or girl whatever it is there's nothing on the other side of of it what's on the other side of fear nothing I like it when people say I'm so nervous what are you nervous about reminds me of this
quote that I 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 has 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 it's just 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 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 so the mimicry the impersonation how early did that start because I read and and maybe you can tell me if this is off or not because you never know what the internet uh that your second grade teacher used to reward the class if they behave by letting you
tell jokes yeah they would let they would let me tell jokes cuz I would get in trouble Miss re my I think it was my third grade teacher Miss Reeves cuz I would like talk but I was very smart my grandmother had a school I I lived in a school so I i' already knew
that from like first to eighth grade I already knew all of the lesson plan so you know a kid like me sitting there with nothing to do I'm going get in trouble so she would um let me do standup 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 too was a kid so 9 years old seven 8 n years old I would just take the jokes that were being told by David Brenner and Steve Allen and a young uh David Letterman who
else would be on there Franklin aai you guys when you when you're hearing this go Google these guys a young Jay Leno these are like sort of like you know Richard Pryor what so I would take those jokes and tell them at school cuz those kids wer watch please tell me he is
Richard prior on Fridays well I guess it was on prime time so was on prime time you couldn't you couldn't he couldn't really say anything on prime time 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 uh Billy so it was Jimmy carteron uh so
many nights oh me and my brother Billy uh would sit by the window waiting for somebody to bring some peanuts and beer and so that was my first attempt at an an impersonation and then it went on from there to do Richard nexton I am not a crook so you know who else would I do
Reagan but here's 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 ain't no way well well as a matter of fact I uh well oh no there you go again and so that being being young and and and that teacher Miss re and Miss Miss D it and all those teachers allow Miss Cole allow 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 [ __ ] did you do that this is the [ __ ] you used to do you turned your third caeria it's literally the same [ __ ] I'll be like wow millions of people are
watching this [ __ ] it's the same and now Doc Rivers from uh the Clippers hey you know we're GNA try you know it's not Blake's fault you know next year we gota we got to do better you know it's 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 so it's sort of like way you do you you know what I'm saying it's it's fineing right [Music] so so the actual voice tone is in the key of G for Kermit def frog the FR here here with the so that's
and then once you get the voice tone it's how you manipulate your mouth to get the sound because you know it's so it's it's sort of constricting and then and then and then it's and then it's asking the character to come sit with you hey come the Frog here here
with the three little p so you know it's 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 J 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 are important because like uh like I I do in LeBron James impersonation which is really not a voice it's more of his mannerism it's the jaw you know it's the look let's go R you know just go R you
know the game of basketball you know we just try to you know you know it's that you know know it's right it's right after it's right after playing you know when he comes off off the court they catching me still tired you know uh you know the game of basketball we just try
to you know do the best no so it's the the mannerism so people will appreciate the mannerism first physicality the physicality of of someone like LeBron or you know different different personalities bring bring bring about different things what is your birth name
Eric Marlon Bishop and how did Eric Marlon Bishop become Jamie Fox man I was Eric Marlon Bishop graduated high school 86 I get out to California and I start doing I'm in college in in uh doing the music but I would go up on these Open Mic nights for comedy so I go I do
really well did I get like standing ovations and then I came to La got a stand in Ovation and then when I came back every week I wouldn't get called up I was like damn what what's going on how does the open mic work well here it is what you do is you put your name on the
list put your name on the list and they pick from the list and they say okay these are people that are going up so I went up had a great set then for the next 3 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 were 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 was like we we don't want him on here cuz he's showing us up so I was like [ __ ] 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 would notice that a 100 guys would show up five girls would show up the five girls will always get on the on the show because they needed to break up the monotony so I said hm I got something 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 that's that's me ah oh okay all right well you're going up you're the fresh meat I
said what is that they was shooting evening at The Improv this old old comedy show back in the day said you'll be the guy that will just throw up to see if you get a laugh or two you know 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 like who's the kid is he on the show I said no he's fresh me's am so then they started yelling my name yo Jamie yo Jamie hey Jamie but I'm not used to the name so now they think I'm arrogant this
[ __ ] thinks he's she's not even listening to us so I I I took that name and it stuck and then I started building everything out off of it back in the day people used to wear jackets and put names on the jacket so I had Sly as a dot dot dot come 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 no you because first I looked at it first like I I went to open mic night and saw the guys I was like man these dudes is
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 just [ __ ] around so if I hit cool if I miss I wasn't trying to be that anyway you know I wanted to do more music but but when I went on stage it
was just like it was just natural it was a you know I belong here so I think 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 in 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 surgeon or a lawyer or something you know you know if 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 sort of simplify things like now I just execute I have to ask people like Ricardo Justin 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 mediad driven ridicule and
criticism like I always say like this like 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 [ __ ] out of it you know so now it's not a fear but it's just a a question that I have to always ask them like yo is this is this the cool [ __ ] to do or not the cool [ __ ] 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 is 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 gota 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 is
just like you know questions does that make sense makes sense no it does make 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 second internal dialogue is boy you stink boy you
bombing I bomb and it wasn't a lot of I only bomb like twice do you remember your first yeah yeah I I did this this show for this guy named ladimore old blues singer I'm 21 what was his name Latimore Latimore sounds like Voldemort yeah lore Latimore so this guy saw me at this
other club and said hey man you know lore is performing around the corner man would you come open whatever I said how much you paid he said pay $50 I said I'm there 50 bucks I need it so this is like 8990 so I get there and I don't know who lore is I just know there a lot of older
people like I mean like oh oh I'm like oh [ __ ] 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 it was like a banquet setting and it's in the middle of the hood you know
crha and like the tables are like from here to where like 20 feet away 30 feet away from me so I don't had it oh you didn't have thatx and I hadn't been doing standup comedy that long i' 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 [ __ ] cuz 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 [ __ ] I'm daming near all the 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 [ __ ] I'm going to 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 G 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 M 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 and so what I started doing from that day on I would go to like de Mo iow Davenport iow boys Idaho where it's all white gunis in Colorado all white and I will 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 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 by or I would
ask y'all know who this is as 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 will go to my chocolate City Chicago DC Florida and do all of my political highbrow stuff and
see what the black folks understood man what the [ __ ] you talking about dog 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 har no matter
where in the world they're going to laugh becoming a great comedian is also having that formula going on your head because if you paint yourself into a corner like you're only the black comedian or you're only the Hispanic comedian whatever that is then it's hard
for you to become Universal I mean Eddie was Eddie Murphy was great he had an opportunity through Saturday Night Live to get it to everybody but uh it's definitely a formula to not bomb it so that's 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 postgame analysis when you step off the stage after bombing say the second time well you got to when I bomb 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 we're in a I think it was Irvine so you don't tell people you're working on no no no no I think that's cheating and I think you you get bad habits so I I do a show in Irvine California first show I
killed it was just ready for him I'm like oh man everything works second show bom because I didn't take time to dig out the jokes and that 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 my guys I said let's go okay that didn't
work no you got to put this in front of that you got to put that behind this cuz that's going to kick this off people didn't know what that was so maybe we don't say that so you know you have to when you take the bomb 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 [ __ ] 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 standup because now you got to top that the hardest part for Eddie Murphy because Eddie wants to come out and do standup is how do I top that in your head the hardest part is coming
for Kevin Hart in the fact that you smashed them now you know what I'm saying you got to know how to you got to know how to refresh yeah because when you do something like like I I would look at my stuff and go like I got to quit doing that because that stick that
I'm doing people will catching on and they're like okay [ __ ] we didn't already seen that [ __ ] so that's the other thing you got to have great material and you got to know how to move cuz 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 stalgic it was 30 years ago so now you can catch a new Young you can still excite the older you know what I'm saying so being a standup 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 the Jim Carrey you go like okay man where you at where you at you know what I'm saying you know don't give up to funny or or you look at Chris I always look at Chris tuck and be like [ __ ] where you at don't leave us
because being a standup comedian is an interesting thing most standup comedians want to look good in what way we just want to look good think about this when Eddie Murphy started doing standup he was funny but then he started doing you know to wear the leather suits and it
was a fly [ __ ] and the Rings and 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 like what the [ __ ] are you doing you
ain't cute [ __ ] we just want to laugh you know what I'm saying but when we start getting into our [ __ ] that's when we l CU I did that like I got to uh my thing was after Living Color the show called The Living Color that I did I felt like I had made it so I wasn't
necessarily on a good-looking [ __ ] 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 [ __ ] is looking at me like what the [ __ ] is you talking about
and then uh uh I was talking about you know square footage of the house man when they get a certain square feet man that [ __ ] is crazy and maintaining you know [ __ ] is like [ __ ] if you don't get off the goddamn State I lost it I lost it and I walked off stage
and all of a sudden I walk off stage give it up for Jamie Fox and I'm thinking they going crazy yeah yeah oh 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 [ __ ] they doing I just went on stage what the [ __ ] 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 goingon to kill somebody somebody like when he say last night how was you oh I killed it's going be true somebody gonna have a [ __ ] heart attack and I sat down and said and I went I can't do that I lost that so I left went to another
club that night bomb like it wasn't just you know so finally I went over to Okinawa where the troops were and started doing stand up over there for the troops to sort of get back it was my Rocky moment like you know I start running up the steps chasing chickens and
[ __ ] 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 give right back up and and you got to acknowledge it okay I stunk [ __ ] cuz they're going to let you know yeah like today's world it ain't you can't do nothing in today's world without somebody letting you know like
oh [ __ ] you [ __ ] that up like 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
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first subscription purchase so learn more check it out go to drink a1.com Tim that's drink ag1 the number one drink a1.com Tim last time drink a1.com Tim check it out and now Jaclyn novag grats 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 best-selling 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 jacine on Twitter and Instagram atj noag grats 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 cha chaotic loving house full of cowboys who are also expected to somehow be good 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 mythmakers 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 dungar which is what they used to call jeans from the post exchange unless you can earn the
difference for those Levis but I have to tell you I'm really disappointed in you guys why would you need Brands you're novag grates and we we laugh now we're like what the hell was a novag grats but she had the sense that this was who we were so to kind of a dri driven
mythmaking mother and three this big extended immigrant Catholic Family and so this idea that to whom much is given much as 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 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 changer maybe you were on
some level I mean uh your brother Mike novogratz who's been on the podcast talked about how you have had this very clear Northstar 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 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 your jobs what types of jobs well mostly I was a bartender mhm
and in the summer I work 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 Ecom 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 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 great I mean probably the only it's probably the only answer it wasn't prepared for he like what something in
him was prepared because he was like well if you got this job you would be in 40 countries in 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 and he let me literally leave the room I knocked on the door I introduced myself I sat down he was like tell me jacine 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 [Laughter] banker of course there were interviews after that to make sure I had a brain but I got the [Laughter] 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 Peril in the early 1980s that was my first job now how did you end up traveling the world I suppose thinking back to my own undergrad experience and the recruiting on 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 ab and C about X Y and Z Industries I associate that with the Management Consultant 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 ask 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 quala Lampur 3 days from then and a package of Travelers 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 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 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 over night 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 it's something that so few people ESP new hires would actually Dare To Do It just strikes me as uh 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 flag pole after getting reprimanded that's quite a move it sounds like that wasn't a first though
that you 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 haven't you know hadn't seen in more than 30 years he was like you were always the one that was standing in 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 of the year 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
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 it'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 uh 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 road map because the world is too complex for a step-by-step guide to how to solve poverty but what we do have is a compass
a moral compass 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 I know this I'm getting on a caffeinated
soap box here for a second but we're going to cover a lot of ground so we have space for my caffeinated soap box 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 to 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 knowing and loving the world in fact now I'm in in Brazil and Chile and Ecuador and 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 the markets were in crisis and they wanted
to call all their loans and 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 favellas 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 realized 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 bank if we actually made smaller loans to local people doing what they were 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 nice 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 ret and you laugh too much which now I think may have been code for you're not actually acting enough like you know 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 you know some people will 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 to had made the decision oh yeah yeah tell us tell us about that giving up on you know this
middle- class immigrant family saw as the job of Lifetime and to make it worse the COO of Chase Tony tricano who just such an amazing man was giving me an opportunity then I think he liked that I was the 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 D 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 I 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 yunice and the grammi bank and and other Heroes of mine and I wanted to try it myself and so I went and as you said it it was sort of a
next move I I met with absolute crushing failure made all the worse because I turned down this really big job offer so we're we're going to definitely roll up our sleeves and get into the crushing failure but before we do maybe we'll 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
you know this is the end that was the end of the conversation I mean 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're just like this is what I'm doing I'm
giving you guys a head heads up heads up this is really you know it's not such a request it's uh this is what I'm going to do next and 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 a as 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 till 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 they 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 and so I had read one tiny article about gramine bank which was still very obscure I sent a letter to Muhammad yunice 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 Nerf 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 Joanie Mitchell's Blue Album over and over and weeping that it really hit me that I was I was on my OED 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 you know African women and I was going to help build all these micro Finance 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 want to be saved and certainly not by a 25-year-old white American girl whose French was not very good and 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 said well they're they're going to poison you and they're also talking about voodo holy [ __ ] Jesus so um 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 that nor do you know a single person except for this incredible
Nigerian woman who's defended you I would lie in bed and and be like is anybody here coming to get me and um and then I got unbelievably sick with food poison 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 the women trying to be respectful but also clear that I I got what they were saying I really heard that they had not asked for anybody like me and that we don't 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's said I left everything that I owned in the boxes that I had in in
the Aban 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 mean that's 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 you know when 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 you know people believed in
wearing different amulets and medicines in a way you see the guys at Silicon Valley 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 um may have been made manifest in this literal purging that I did the threats were not that unusual again I and I see it in places where 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 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 this isn't a Fool's erend like 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 I analyzed a bank portfolio of micro Finance organization and saw that
I was excited by seeing all of the problems in the portfolio and 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 I had to learn a whole new approach
clearly that was in 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 of 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 noos 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 we're 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 assignment and knew somewhere inside of me that I wasn't leaving to weade built a bank so presumably that's what that's what happened what happened so that's what
happen I mean a couple 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 leg work 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 and 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 Janie Mitchell to that Rwanda woman walking into your office how much time had elapsed roughly roughly probably seven months okay so over that seven Monon period what were the
ingredients that kept you going was it that you'd said yourself come hell 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 the the whole first year and a half was that slog I would say a combination of of this man Tony teresiano 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 trano 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 like 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 ways that I felt that I I had something to offer so coming back to the bookmark of Rwanda and you finally start to in close collaboration with these co-founders
these 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 I
like really looking at these things closely because it shows the development before you reach escape velocity and I think that's 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 with the micr finance 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 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 those 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 inan 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 but I thought well if I get in good if I don't 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 Stamford or wherever and then another 10 days after they sent the application to you um and then you had to write on that little airplane paper send it back it
was a nightmare and 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 like 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 Miller kid that was like the height of Market belief in fact Market fundamentalism Gord Geck Gordon gecko
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 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 as 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 a several institutions but most notably due to De
the micro Finance organization and this Bakery and a couple of other 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 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 are highly complex and
again that at the the heart of my work had to be a redefinition of what poverty it 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 then in development and certainly with the
genocide is that the opposite of poverty is dignity it is having a a choice having opportunity having agency over who you are in your life and what you're capable of doing and we missed 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
is capital understand it exists on a 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 aiman was born in 2001 one with that idea in mind we going to spend fair
amount of time on Acumen no big surprise there but I 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
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 I think you you you alluded to it with your description of co-workers 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 you had interacted on some level even just going to the market or otherwise with people who are 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 in the within the context of life in general I'd like to hear anyal thoughts first thought is absolutely that I didn't just know people in the market
our first executive director was J 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 hu power or the 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 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 pray on insecurity and sometimes make us do terrible things and that's where monsters and Angels came in I was literally sitting in a in a prison with Agnes the woman who was the major perpetrator Nidan asking her how
this could have happened and there she was Tim in a pink dress of the prisoner's uniform her head shaved bald with a freckled face you know 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 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 that has very much informed the way I see the world and the way it acumin 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 could 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 to look at the the work of Darren Brown so Darren Brown is a a mentalist
performer also an incredible artist from the UK and he has a number of 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 to sit on a moral high horse and Levy judgment against others and to say I would never have
participated in a Rwanda 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
uh really appreciate you expanding on that let's jump to Acumen Acumen how do you choose the name or how is the name decided Acumen stands for perspective Insight while we started Acumen I was focused on revolutionizing philanthropy and too often the way we think about
philanthropy as 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 the 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 gets 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 a several for-profit impact funds the second thing we do is build a community of Builders through the world school for social change acument 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 the 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 Deb that uses an approach to measuring change that we created called lean data
which we can talk about it essentially upholds one of our 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 serve the poor in ways that we hope to
does the lean data and uh I I may ask some followup questions just to sure I'm clear on how it 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 nonprofit 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's 60 DB which has been really exciting to watch take off I'd love to see black rock using it frankly all right Black Rock I'm sure there's somebody listening involved with Black Rock Let's just assume they are listening and also for my benefit and
for listeners could you just reiterate what lean data are if I'm going to be a pompus princetonian what exactly is or are lean data because the the question of measuring impact is one that at least in my circles comes up a lot like 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 on on uh we invest in entrepreneurs that are trying to build markets where they have
an ex Ed for people who make2 or3 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 and 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 oneon-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 delight and text five six thousand 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 know three lights a radio a television what is the quality of that light we can 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 CID 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 a 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 got a tradeoff which companies are doing the most to displace carbon but they may have another
tradeoff 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 uh 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-grade 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 a 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 are 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 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 Tides 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 on to 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 like 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 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're 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 Delight 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 you know an example just one example of many of just the scale the large scale impact that Acumen and these these various
spin-offs and for-profit funds have been able to have in the world but if we go back to 2001 Circa 2001 acumin you know I always like to 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 DRS I do of course I do in fact we had a you know 2001 just to put us back again it was the dot craziness well 2000 2001 by that by the time I picked acument and we started there was a bust but um you could not get a URL uh and no names were
working and so I had this night at the uh rockfeller Foundation where I was working in and we came up with really really great names including ain't your grandma's philanthropy that's a great I think that was my brother Mike's but I'm not I can't remember but there was a lot of wi
involved to the the naming of Acumen and then I really love the word immersion I still do it's one of the principles of moral imagination there's a great line from Tilly Olen 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 Ryan Stevenson the Civil Rights activist says you have to get proximus 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 acuan seemed a little less offensive to one of the 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 Bing was working for a now no longer. comom 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 jacine and I feel like you're making me drowned in a [Applause] sea 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 jaat Aslam he actually named one of his funds the immersion fund once you really think about 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 winds and if you could speak to those but I don't want to gloss over moral imagination could you just take a moment and 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 it's 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 does 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 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 and so we had this big party with 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 hung over 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 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 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 that's what my obsession is thank you for explaining that and uh telling that story also which I think drives it home Acumen so Wing in 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 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 Sumit tomu who had developed this bedet and also
recognized that 95% of malaria is in Africa and yet there was no manufacturing capability for this particular kind of bedet and so it was a real experiment could we build manufacturing capability with 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 um 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' had seen a lot of things 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 bedet making machines and I was like this is cool I love operations Factory
operations few months later I went back and there were four 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 were doing this and then they ended up
creating jobs 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
canvased to find candidates is that how you approached it in the beginning we selected a 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 Tech technologies that could fundamentally change people's lives and bring them dignity now again we're in a very different place where um 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 dite 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 we investing in the social determinance 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 the uh you know you mentioned Sumitomo which is Japanese and developing an ecosystem around a company is is in some ways very Japanese concept or something that's been very well explored and developed in the cad so
these I suppose conglomerates would be a lazy way to to translate that in Japan but that's as it's a very long-term approach yeah absolutely I mean that's so look at some of these companies they've lasted us a very long time they're not five or 10e 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 micro Finance access to Capital you started a bakery I don't think that's a small thing you you actually we 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 uh but put in 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 your Jaclyn novag grat 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 bable 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 Deb in the world are putting the cart before the horse in terms of skill development they 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 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 even understand what
that means e even though my whole life I have been very clear about the 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 you know 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 to Tim in apprenticing I would say I apprenticed for 15 years and also to your point that Bakery in some ways probably looked 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 you're 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 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 Collin said that to me when I was lucky enough to be his student and I have paraphrased Jim um I
say that a lot where it's like well you know jacine 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 of the individual is the 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 a and layering of life that you never really understood you had that is something that I 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 never regressively for that one yeah your brother Mike has a fair amount to say about that Mr 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 is really profound and I mean it's not entirely altruistic like it's so relieving uh I I just uh 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 you know 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 are constantly learning and unlearning and 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 is just profit though they recognize they need the profit for long-term Financial sustainability and skill 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 doesn't have to be John Gardner I wrote that down just because you mentioned it in mentioned
John in passing from I believe that was your GSB days right the 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 co-and by the time I met him we were 50 years apart age so he GED 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 uh negotiating some of the great civil rights legislation talk about courage he would say things to me like you know focus on being interested Jacqueline not interesting when I would get some fancy job offer and he would
think that it's that was a vanity project rather than a character building project John left the cabinet and resigned his his position in protest of the Vietnam War and in response he created a Grassroots citizens organization at age 54 called common cost 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 the now we've had over a million signups on
our on Acumen Academy when I see these hundreds and hundreds of acumin 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 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 we're
there's no way we're going to cover even a fraction of what I have in front of me but but we do do over yeah oh definitely not a doover are you kidding me you you've been you've been 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 so you were 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 chin 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 here's another one roon mystery Ron 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 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 men really taught me to not see through
anybody ever but the book I give right now um in this time of so much despair is um Victor frankl's man 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 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 search for meaning is 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 uh pick it up it is just a tremendous tremendous book uh and also a great
example of someone in this case Victor Frankle 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 we want to touch upon but for those people listening and I'll just grab three we have the 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 the individual investor so that's someone who is accustomed to perhaps 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 or otherwise what who also would like to either in a man 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 want to try something what would you say to 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 Manifesto for moral Revolution and the whole idea of moral Revolution is you know 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 and then we 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 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 that are reimagining how to use the tools of
capitalism to solve big problems as I said Tim they exist in every 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 Angels can get healthy affordable food with black lives matter protests what Sam pul the entrepreneur understood is that he had within him within his operation
individual employees who had the capability to become franchises 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 $1 13 million you know 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 an 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 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 A700 billion doll impact investing sector emerge over the last 20 years but also to see big companies like Black Rock 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 asked 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 it's very
easy to do and 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 you know it took me a long long time to
build the relationships and the deal flow in the for-profit sector where the past fail marks are very clearly defined to get to the point where I could invest in really good companies and for people who have develop those relationships and put in the time to get an understanding of
let's just call it the the the more black and white capitalist model uh 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 uh we could tackle
the investment side first but the kind of individual the institutional and then person with more time like what could they do tomorrow or next week for instance is 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 adviser blah blah blah blah blah but but I would love to hear what some simple next steps might be if they agree with you they want to begin to get a get some skin in the game
to get on the playing field I mean I appreciate the self-promotional invitation there Tim if I G to go down that path I would say that the the the simplest Next Step would be to get on to Acumen Academy on our website and check Che out the courses including the path oforal
leadership that Seth Goden who is so extraordinary in every way has helped us build uh which takes the different practices of the book and really looks at the examples of companies that go from you know chocolate and coffee in Colombia to bed nets to chickens in
Ethiopia and really show 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 uh
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 and.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 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 a my brother Michael at Galaxy and going such different rots 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' changed 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 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 what am I
doing to insist on Elevate and enable human dignity I would start there and then I'd get smart you invoked the name of uh a mutual friend who texted me prior to this conversation also Seth Goden 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 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 acen.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 ones self 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
acen.org or acen.org 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 like you use it very well you don't overuse someone's name it's a very effective way of I 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 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 I was
like excuse me not to imply that this is some artificial thing I I I feel like it 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 no very natural I think it goes I actually think it goes to immersion which is probably why I didn't get to like talk about many of the things I really wanted to talk about because I just get so focused on what
who you are what you're talking about that 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 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 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 no one 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 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 I I shared with you at the beginning of this that you do remind me of my brother's plural and that you've got just an extraordinary level of what looks like fearlessness and I'm betting that you've learned to flex those fearlessness
muscles early in your life and you practice them all along but because of the the vulnerability and the the real courage that you've shown in your podcast with Debbie milman 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 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 Ferris 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 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 uh I haven't flexed the muscle of letting things land very much so I'm going to 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 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 shops uh you have the toughness and the honesty to speak truth and I 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 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 hard 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 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 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 and I wish you good luck on this to be continued love saying that I always mean it and I I mean it very very sincerely
right now everyone check out acen.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 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 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 1 and 1/2 and 2 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 friend 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 Friday type that into your browser tim. blog 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 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
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/ Tim for an extra three free months of expressvpn one more time expressvpn.com Tim okay this is going to be part Confessional As some of you know I am recently single in 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 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 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 6 months it's a simple proxy for finding people who have their [ __ ] 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 interest as I like to spend say two to 3 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 on the league
include multi-city dating LinkedIn verified profiles ability to block your profile from co-workers bosses family Etc that's very easy to do you can search by interest you can get profile St 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 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 a beat 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 could be a rock climber dancer whatever but has some muscle loves to read and loves learning if this sounds like you send # dat Tim so # dat Tim in a message to
your consur 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 where you can go on three 3 minute dates with people who match your preferences all from the comfort of your
couch so check it out download the leak today on iOS or Android and find people who challenge you to swing through 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 Le today on iOS or Android and check it out message # Tim to your inapp concierge to jump to the front of the wait list and have your profile reviewed first check it out the league on iOS or Android [Applause]