#758: Jamie Foxx and Jacqueline Novogratz

This episode is a two-for-one, and that’s because the podcast recently hit its 10-year anniversary and passed one billion downloads. To celebrate, I’ve curated some of the best of the best—some of my favorites—from more than 700 episodes over the last decade. I could not be more excited. The episode features segments from episode #124 "Jamie Foxx on Workout Routines, Success Habits, and Untold Hollywood Stories https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/" and #514 "Jacqueline Novogratz on Building Acumen, How to (Actually) Change the World, Speaking Your Truth, and the Incredible Power of 'Dumb' Questions https://tim.blog/2021/05/04/jacqueline-novogratz/." Please enjoy! Sponsors: ExpressVPN https://www.expressvpn.com/tim high-speed, secure, and anonymous VPN service: https://www.expressvpn.com/tim (Get 3 extra months free with a 12-month plan) AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement: https://DrinkAG1.com/Tim https://drinkag1.com/tim (1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase.) The League https://click.theleague.com/qmhm/timferriss curated dating app for busy, high-performing people: https://click.theleague.com/qmhm/timferriss; available on iOS and Android Timestamps: [00:00] Start [06:50] Notes about this supercombo format. [07:53] Enter Jamie Foxx. [08:19] When Jamie met Kanye West. [10:58] Why Jamie considers his studio magical. [13:32] When Jamie met Ed Sheeran. [15:00] What's on the other side of fear? [16:53] Making impressions. [22:15] How Eric Marlon Bishop became Jamie Foxx. [24:49] Overcoming fear at open mics. [26:12] Could Prince or Michael Jackson find a career break in today’s "Age of Memes?" [27:49] How Jamie learned to read the room. [33:27] Why do some comedians lose the ability to make people laugh? [39:04] Enter Jacqueline Novogratz. [39:37] Jacqueline's background and siblings' accomplishments. [42:06] Jacqueline's journey into social impact investing. [45:15] An early banking career and reputation for asking tough questions. [48:36] A tendency to champion underdogs. [53:18] From banker to disruptor. [1:00:04] Jacqueline's first opportunity in her new path. [1:05:28] Failures, small wins, and perseverance. [1:09:21] Jacqueline's first real win in Rwanda. [1:13:37] The path between Rwanda and founding Acumen. [1:16:06] Jacqueline's reasons for applying to Stanford Business School. [1:18:10] How the Rwanda genocide redefined poverty for Jacqueline. [1:20:42] Lessons Jacqueline learned about human nature from the genocide. [1:26:25] Acumen's three main functions and naming process. [1:29:12] The quantification of impact investment through Lean Data. [1:37:28] Alternative names for Acumen that got left on the cutting room floor. [1:40:43] The concept of moral imagination. [1:44:55] An early win at Acumen. [1:50:43] Advice for young people aspiring to create positive change. [1:53:20] The benefits of committing to something larger than oneself. [1:56:10] Characteristics of a good mentor. [1:59:36] Book recommendations. [2:02:48] Advice for impact investors at various levels. [2:09:20] Next steps for investors to start making a difference. [2:14:00] Jacqueline's authenticity. [2:17:07] A taste of potential topics for a future round two. [2:20:55] Parting thoughts. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts https://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books https://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss http://linkedin.com/in/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, Margaret Atwood https://tim.blog/2022/02/22/margaret-atwood/, Mark Zuckerberg https://tim.blog/2022/03/24/mark-zuckerberg/, Peter Thiel https://tim.blog/2014/09/09/peter-thiel/, Dr. Gabor Maté https://tim.blog/2018/02/20/gabor-mate/, Anne Lamott https://tim.blog/2021/07/09/anne-lamott/, Sarah Silverman https://tim.blog/2022/01/12/sarah-silverman/, Dr. Andrew Huberman https://tim.blog/2021/07/06/andrew-huberman/, and many more. 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Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

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

• 0:43Tim Ferriss?

  So, more than half of The League users went to top 40 colleges, and you can make your filters really selective. So if that's important to you, then go for it. It does work, and that is one of the reasons that I use it. Second, people verify using LinkedIn. So you can make sure they have a job and don't bounce around every six months. It's a simple proxy for finding people who have their shit together. It's infinitely easier than trying to figure things out on Instagram or whatever. Third, you can search by interest and in multiple locations. I haven't found any other dating app that allows you to do this. So for instance, I usually search for women who love skiing or snowboarding. Have those as interests, as I like to spend, say, two to three months of the year in the mountains. I'm a rivers and mountains guy. The UI is a little clunky, I'll warn you,

• 1:27Tim Ferriss?

  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 coworkers, 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.

• 2:12Tim Ferriss?

  Someone who's default upbeat, likes to smile, smiles often, glass half full type of person, who would ideally like to have kids in the next few years. Her friends would describe her as feminine and playful and she would love polarity in a relationship. She's athletic and has some muscle. I like strong women, not necessarily bodybuilders, but you get the idea. Could be a rock climber, dancer, whatever, but has some muscle, loves to read and loves learning. If this sounds like you, send hashtag date Tim, so hashtag date Tim in a message to your concierge in the app to get us paired up. So, these are all reasons why I was excited when the league reached out to sponsor the podcast. They even have daily speed dating where you can go on three, three-minute dates with people who match your preferences, all from the comfort of your couch. So check

• 2:57Tim Ferriss?

  it out. Download the league today on iOS or Android and find people who challenge you to swing for the fences and who are in it to win it. I found it to be super fascinating. You can really get good matches instead of just looking at pretty faces and kind of rolling the dice over and over again. Much better. So, download the league today on iOS or Android and check it out. Message hashtag Tim to your in-app concierge to jump to the front of the waitlist and have your profile reviewed first. Check it out. The league on iOS or Android.

• 3:31Tim Ferriss?

  I don't know about you guys, but I've had the experience of traveling overseas and I try to access something, say a show on Amazon or elsewhere, and it says not available in your current location, something like that. Or creepier still, if you're at home, and this has happened to me, I search for something or I type in a URL incorrectly and then a screen for AT&T pops up and it says, "You might be searching for this. How about that?" And it suggests an alternative and I think to myself, "Wait a second. My internet service provider is tracking my searches and what I'm typing into the browser?" Yeah. I don't love it. And a lot of you know, I take privacy and security very seriously.

• 4:12Tim Ferriss?

  That is why I've been using today's episode sponsor, ExpressVPN for several years now. And I recommend you check it out. When you connect to a secure VPN server, your internet traffic goes through an encrypted tunnel that nobody can see into, including hackers, governments, people on Starbucks, your internet service provider, et cetera. And no, you are not safe simply using incognito mode in your browser. This was something that I got wrong for a long time. Your activity might still be visible, as in the example I gave, to your internet service provider. Incognito mode also does not hide your IP address. Also with the example that I gave of you can't access this content or that content wherever you happen to be, then you just set your server to a country where you can see it. And all of a sudden, voila, you can say, log into your normal Amazon account as opposed

• 4:55Tim Ferriss?

  to being routed to .uk or whatever. And everything works. So ExpressVPN protects you and enables you because it encrypts and reroutes your network traffic through secure servers. So even though your traffic is still passing through your internet provider, now they can't read it. ExpressVPN is so fast also, it doesn't bog things down at all. I usually forget that I even have it on. I can stream high-quality video with no lag or buffering, even on servers thousands of miles away. Gives me access to servers in 105 countries around the world, which is very helpful as I am constantly traveling and love to do so. It's easy to use. You just choose a server location and tap one button to connect. You do not need to be technologically savvy. You don't need to know anything about how it works.

• 5:40Tim Ferriss?

  It's just one click and it works on every device, phone, laptop, tablets, even TVs. ExpressVPN has really changed the way I use the internet and I can't recommend it highly enough. Check it out. Right now, you can go to expressvpn.com/tim and get three extra months for free when you sign up. Just go to expressvpn, E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash tim for an extra three free months of ExpressVPN. One more time, expressvpn.com/tim.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 6:17Speaker 02

  No, it is an inappropriate time.

• 6:21Speaker 02

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 6:33Tim Ferriss?

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

• 7:17Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  First up, Jamie Foxx, Oscar, BAFTA, and Golden Globe Award-winning actor, Grammy Award-winning musician, stand-up and improv comedian, and the owner of BSB Ultra Smooth Flavored Whiskey. You can find Jamie on Instagram, @IAMJAMiefox, and in his upcoming films, Tin Soldier and Back in Action.

• 8:19Jamie Foxx?

  So one day, my boy Brian brings in this kid. He has a backpack on. His jaw's a little busted. His name is Kanye West. And I say, yo, yo, who's, who's that? I said, yo, that's a new kid, Kanye, where's he coming on? I said, really? What he do? He said, he rap. I said, well, shit, he gotta perform that shit. Cause everybody comes to this, to my house, they gotta perform. So I said, yo, man, they say you the shit. And he was really quiet. I said, man, let me hear you rap. You need your beats or whatever? He said, I don't need no beat. Chopped everybody's heads, just 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, moi? Me a song? Like, what you mean? He said, I got this song.

• 9:03Jamie Foxx?

  He says, I wanna record it. I said, well, you happen to be in luck because I got a studio in the back. So we go in the back and my studio at that time, I called it the Porsche. It was a lot smaller than this. It was really like, it was like a Learjet. It was compact. It was compact, the sound was toasty. I had engineers from all over the, the city dial it in so that when real artists come, they don't think that, oh, this is just comedian fucking around, some real shit. So we go in and Kanye, you know, quiet, but at the same time, he knew what he wanted. He says, okay, the song goes like this. She say she want some Marvin Gaye, some Luther Vandross, a little. I said, I got it. And I started going, she say she want some Marvin Gaye. And he said, what the fuck are you doing?

• 9:47Jamie Foxx?

  I said, well, see, young man, you don't know nothing about R and B. See, I'm an R and B motherfucker. See, I, I got to give him the shit, you know, I gotta put the shit 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, brother. Uh, Danny had a song go, you gotta sing it this way. So in my mind, I'm thinking, you know what? I'm gonna sing this shit, this song is whack, it's not gonna make it. Cause I'm thinking old school R and B, but he was teaching me the simplicity of hip hop, which I didn't know. I was like, cool guy, great rapper, I don't think it's gonna happen for him. So I go off and do a bad movie, but when I come back, my boy says, remember that song you said was whack? I said, yes, number one. In the country, you, Kanye and Twister, Kanye's first record.

• 10:33Jamie Foxx?

  And it was actually Twister's record. I said, oh shit. So, I'm at a club, he says, 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, 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. So that hard drive is magical because we also did, just to give you a history on the, on the music. Brian found that song, Slow Jams, it went number one. And then as we started getting into music, there was a song that Brian brought in. Brian would call me, like, he said, you wanna be in the music business?

• 11:15Jamie Foxx?

  It's like, you know, two or three in the morning, he called me, says, you wanna be in the music business? I said, yeah. He said, then wake your ass up. I said, what? He said, I got this song you gotta hear. So I drove all the way from my house in the valley to this little studio. He says, so you ready, motherfucker? Are you ready? And Brian always says everything three times. Are you ready, motherfucker? Are you ready? Are you ready? I said, yeah, yeah, man, play the shit. So he plays it. And the song was, blame it on the goose, got your feeling loose, blame it on the ah, ah, ah, ah, ah. 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 gotta record it right now because a lot of people are listening to this song and they don't know if it's a hit or not. He said, but I know it's a hit. We did Blame It on the Alcohol that night. I sung it exactly like the record, which goes way in contrast to my R and B roots.

• 12:00Jamie Foxx?

  Cause it was autotune 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 wanna be like, blame it on the alcohol, you know, some corny shit. So we did that and then we went from every, the way we broke that record is that we went from every club, we went to the strip clubs first. Went to the strip clubs? Strip club, we went, we went, we did an east coast run. So we were going to break the record in the east coast. So we went to the strip, we went to New York. My man Pekka 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 been drinking, you think she look like Halle Berry? You get her back home, she looks like Halle Scary. You know what you gotta do?

• 12:43Jamie Foxx?

  Blame it on the goose, guy's feeling loose. Blame it on the ah, ah, ah, ah. Stop the record. Ladies, you ever meet a guy, you get back to the house with him and you been drinking too much? And you say, I usually don't do this, but you do it anyway? You gotta blame it on the ah, ah, ah, ah. So we took that and we went all the way down from New York, all the way down to Miami. This is like 2008. And then the song took off. And so, long story longer, Blame It On Alcohol is done here, Slow Jams is 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 Beddingfield's been here, she's cut. Kelly Rowland's been here, she's cut. The Game has been here, he's cut.

• 13:25Jamie Foxx?

  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 over from London, he heard about a live show that I do in LA. Said, really wanna do your live show if it's possible? Uh, you know, because I have some music that I love. I hear this kid with this red hair, I'm like, man, you do my live show? And it's all, it's mostly black, you know what I'm saying? But it's really like music people, like really hardcore music people. They're very finicky. You know, people that have played for Stevie Wonder. People will come there to, I mean, I had Miranda Lambert one night. I had Stevie Wonder on stage, I had Babyface. I said, so this is the real shit you talking about?

• 14:10Jamie Foxx?

  You know, you come here, I don't care about the London and the accent. You gotta really come with it. So I think I'll be okay. I said, alright. So I take it to my live night, 800 people there. People's playing, black folks sweating, just getting it, you know what I'm saying? People singing and, you know, they would tear American Idol up, you know? And these people haven't necessarily made it. So all of a sudden Ed sharing gets up with a ukulele. Walks onto the stage. And the brother that was next to me was like, yo Fox, man, who the fuck is this dude right here, man? With the red hair and shit and the fucking ukulele? I said, man, his name is Ed sharing, let's see what he does. But then 12 minutes, he got a standing ovation. Wow. From that crowd. And I said, bro, you on your way. So this studio has a...

• 14:55Jamie Foxx?

  Like I said, a lot of history and it has that magic to it as well.

• 14:59Tim Ferriss?

  The mojo.

• 14:59Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah.

• 15:00Tim Ferriss?

  How do you think of teaching confidence with your own kids? Because you're clearly a very confident guy.

• 15:06Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah.

• 15:07Tim Ferriss?

  Grandmother was very bold, very strong woman. How do you try to teach that to your kids?

• 15:12Jamie Foxx?

  Well, what you do with your kids is like with my daughter is I there's the phrase that when you see Annalise, my daughter and my oldest daughter, Corinne, I would always ask them, what's on the other side of fear? And they'd be like, huh? I said, what's on the other side of it? Meaning like if I stood in the middle of this floor right there and just yelled, ah! What's on the other side of that? Or if I stood in the middle of the floor and went, ah! What's on the other side of it? Meaning like either you do or you don't, but there's no penalty. There's no reward. It's just you just be yourself. So I taught them, what's on the other side of fear? Nothing. People are nervous for no reason because there's nothing, no one's gonna come out and slap you or beat you up and then you're just nervous. So why even have that?

• 15:56Jamie Foxx?

  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, a school teacher, or tech guy, or whatever, or girl, whatever it is, there's nothing on the other side of it.

• 16:15Tim Ferriss?

  What's on the other side of fear?

• 16:16Jamie Foxx?

  Nothing.

• 16:16Tim Ferriss?

  I like it.

• 16:17Jamie Foxx?

  When people say, well, I'm so nervous. What are you nervous about?

• 16:19Tim Ferriss?

  Reminds me of this quote that I sort of recite to myself and I'm gonna paraphrase it because I have it written down, but it's from Mark Twain. It says, "I'm an old man who's known a great many troubles, most of which never happened."

• 16:30Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah, exactly. Because all of it is in our head. When we talk about fear or lack of being aggressive or whatever, it's just it's in your head. So not everybody's gonna be super aggressive, but the one thing that you can deal with is a person's fears. So if you start early, if they are a shy person, they just won't be as shy if you keep instilling those things, so.

• 16:53Tim Ferriss?

  The mimicry, the impersonation.

• 16:55Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah.

• 16:56Tim Ferriss?

  How early did that start? Because I read.

• 16:57Jamie Foxx?

  As a kid.

• 16:58Tim Ferriss?

  And maybe you can tell me if this is off or not, because you never know with the internet, that your second grade teacher

• 17:07Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah.

• 17:07Tim Ferriss?

  used to reward the class if they behaved by letting you tell jokes.

• 17:10Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah, they would let me tell jokes because I would get in trouble. Ms. Reeves, my, I think it was my third grade teacher, Ms. Reeves. Because I would like talk, but I was very smart. My grandmother had a school. I was, I lived in a school. So I, I'd 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 gonna get in trouble. So she would, uh, let me do stand-up comedy on Fridays for the kids. And all I would do is my grandmother would watch Johnny Carson. And the only room that had the television was my room. So I had to watch Johnny Carson too as a kid. So nine years old, seven, eight, nine years old. I would just take the jokes that were being told by David Brenner and Steve Allen and a young, uh,

• 17:55Jamie Foxx?

  David Letterman. Who else would be on there? Franklin Ajay. Uh, you guys, when you, when you're hearing this, go Google these guys. A young Jay Leno. These were like, sort of like, you know, Richard Pryor. What, so I would take those jokes and tell them at school because those kids wouldn't watch.

• 18:11Tim Ferriss?

  Please tell me he used Richard Pryor on Fridays. Well, I guess it was on primetime, so it wasn't Richard Pryor.

• 18:15Jamie Foxx?

  Richard Pryor on primetime, you couldn't, you couldn't, he couldn't really say anything on primetime. He was clean. But like Rich Little. Google Rich Little because Rich Little was the first person that I saw do impersonations. This had to be like seventy-six, nineteen seventy-six. 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, uh, was getting caught drunk all the time, like, uh, Billy. So it was Jimmy Carter goes, uh, so many nights, uh, 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 impersonation.

• 19:00Jamie Foxx?

  And then it went on from there to do a recognition, I am not a crook. So, you know, who else would I do?

• 19:05Tim Ferriss?

  Reagan.

• 19:06Jamie Foxx?

  But here's it, Reagan came later, but Reagan came like in the eighties when I was actually like twenty-one. And I was the first black guy doing the Reagan impersonation, probably the only one. So I would be, uh, on stage doing my impersonations and going to Ronald Reagan. People are like, no, it ain't no way. Well, well, as a matter of fact, I, uh, well, uh, oh, no, there you go again. And so that being, being young and, and, and that teacher, Ms. Reeves and Ms. Miss Douthat and all those teachers allowed, Miss Cole allowed me to be myself. You know, helped me hone in on what I was gonna be doing for the rest of my life. Like, literally, my friends from Tarrell go like, "How the fuck did you do that? This is the shit you used to do."

• 19:50Tim Ferriss?

  You turned your third grade act.

• 19:52Jamie Foxx?

  It was literally the same shit. I'd be like, "Wow." Millions of people are watching this shit and it's the same. And now Doc Rivers from, uh, the Clippers. "Hey, you know, we're gonna try. You know, it's not Blake's fault. You know, next year we gotta, we gotta 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...

• 20:19Jamie Foxx?

  So it's sort of like, where you do your...

• 20:23Jamie Foxx?

  You know what I'm saying? It's finding...

• 20:26Jamie Foxx?

  Right, so...

• 20:31Jamie Foxx?

  So the actual voice tone is in the key of G for Kermit the Frog.

• 20:40Jamie Foxx?

  "Kermit the Frog here, here with the sesame tree." So that's, and then, once you get the voice tone, it's how you manipulate your mouth to get the sound. Cause you know it's...

• 20:52Jamie Foxx?

  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. "Kermit the Frog here, here with the three little pi..." 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. "Uh, because you know, man..." So now Kermit the Frog is one way, but if you just twist your voice, or twist your mouth to the right and grab some swag, now you're Sammy Davis Jr. "Kermit the Frog, because, man, you know, it's the same voice." You know? So, that's sort of like the mechanical way of getting to the impersonation.

• 21:28Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 21:36Jamie Foxx?

  Mannerisms are, are important because like, uh, like I, I do a 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.

• 21:48Jamie Foxx?

  Let's go roll. You know, the go roll, you know, the game of basketball, you know, we just try to, you know, you know, it's that, you know. It's right, it's right after, it's right after playing, you know, when it comes off to, off to the court, they catching me still tie, you know, uh, you know, the game of basketball, we just try to, you know, do the best, you know, so it's the, the mannerism, so people will appreciate the mannerisms first.

• 22:06Tim Ferriss?

  Physicality.

• 22:06Jamie Foxx?

  The physicality of, of someone like LeBron, or, you know, different, different personalities bring about, bring about different things.

• 22:15Tim Ferriss?

  What is your birth name?

• 22:16Jamie Foxx?

  Eric Marlon Bishop.

• 22:18Tim Ferriss?

  And how did Eric Marlon Bishop become Jamie Foxx?

• 22:22Jamie Foxx?

  Man, I was Eric Marlon Bishop. Graduated high school, eighty-six. I get out to California and I started doing, I'm in college and, and, 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 ovation. And then I came to LA, got a standing ovation. And then when I came back every week, I wouldn't get called up. I was like, man, what, what's going on?

• 22:51Tim Ferriss?

  How does the open mic work?

• 22:52Jamie Foxx?

  Well, here's 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 three, four weeks, I didn't, they never called my name. I said, yo, Money, did you see my name? Yeah, yeah, you weren't on the list. You were on the list, but we, we, we got other people. But I found out that the comedians were actually running the list. So the comedians that had been here for a while, I was like, we, we don't want him on here because he's showing us up. So I was like, fuck. So I ended up going to this evening at the improv, the improv like in Santa Monica. And so I had never been there, so I would notice that a hundred guys would show up, five girls would show up. The five girls would always get on the, on the show because they needed to break up the monotony.

• 23:37Jamie Foxx?

  So I said, hmm. I got some. So I wrote down on the list, all of these unisex names. Stacy Green, Tracy Brown, Jamie Foxx. And now the guy chooses from the list. He says, is Jamie Foxx, is she here? She'll be first. I was like, no, money, that's me. Ah, okay, all right, well, you're the fresh meat. I said, what's that? They were shooting Evening at the Improv, this 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 gonna be a tough crowd.

• 24:11Tim Ferriss?

  Fresh meat.

• 24:12Jamie Foxx?

  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 meat, amateur. 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 motherfucker thinks he's the she, not even listening to us. So I took that name and it stuck. And then I started building everything off of it. Back in the day, people used to wear jackets and put names on the jacket. So I had Sly Azay, dot, dot, dot. Coming to the Foxhole, Foxhole, you know, things like that.

• 24:49Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 24:56Jamie Foxx?

  Nah, because first I looked at it first. Like I went to an open mic night and saw the guys, I'm like, man, these dudes is terrible. So when you go on stage and your whole life is not, I wanna be a comedian. I went on stage like, yo, I'm gonna just fuck 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 when I went on stage, it was just like, it was just natural. It was, 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.

• 25:41Jamie Foxx?

  And that's with anything and anybody, like when you can sort of listen to that. Voice in your head or what's in your heart? And you get a chance to do something that you really feel like you're supposed to do? That alleviates a lot of the fear. Now, if it was surgeon or lawyer or something, you know, something, you know, if something that I'm not versed in or something like that, then maybe there would be more fear. But with this, I don't have those types of fears. As I've gotten older in the business, I've sort of simplified things. Like now, I just execute. I have to ask people like Ricardo, Justin, Justin, what should I execute?

• 26:21Jamie Foxx?

  So the fear of a celebrity or an artist now is how do I get my art off? In a world where it's the social media driven ridicule and criticism. 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 shit out of it, you know? So now it's not a fear, but it's just a question that I have to always ask them like,

• 27:04Jamie Foxx?

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

• 27:46Tim Ferriss?

  Makes sense. No, this makes sense. The considerations. Have you bombed on stage before?

• 27:50Jamie Foxx?

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:51Tim Ferriss?

  Two things. When you are bombing, what is your internal dialogue or response? And then secondly-

• 27:56Jamie Foxx?

  Internal dialogue is, boy, you stink.

• 28:00Jamie Foxx?

  Well, you bombing. I bombed, and it wasn't a lot. I only bombed like twice.

• 28:06Tim Ferriss?

  Do you remember your first?

• 28:07Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah, yeah. I did this show for this guy named Latimore. Old blues singer. I'm 21.

• 28:14Tim Ferriss?

  What was his name?

• 28:15Jamie Foxx?

  Latimore.

• 28:15Tim Ferriss?

  Latimore. Sounds like Voldemort. Yeah, Latimore.

• 28:17Jamie Foxx?

  Latimore. So, this guy saw me at this other club and said, "Hey, man, you know, Latimore is performing around the corner, man. Why don't you come and open up?" I said, "Whatever." I said, "How much you pay?" He said, "Pay fifty dollars." I said, "I'm there. Fifty bucks? I need it." So, this is like eighty-nine, ninety. So, I get there, and I don't know who Latimore is. I just know it was a lot of older people. Like, I mean, like, "Oh, oh," I'm like, "Oh, shit." Where the people at, these other people? So, I go up, and the setting was different. It was like the chairs and stuff were way in the back. It was like a banquet setting. And it's in the middle of the hood, you know, Crenshaw. And like the tables are like from here to where like twenty feet away, thirty feet away from me, so I don't have it.

• 29:00Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, you didn't have that proximity?

• 29:02Jamie Foxx?

  And I hadn't been doing stand-up comedy that long. I'd only been doing it for like a year. So, I had, if I'm funny, I got an hour. If I'm not funny, it's about ten minutes worth of shit, because I would just take a joke and just keep spinning it and spinning it. So, my first joke, they didn't get. Second joke, they didn't get. I said, "Shit, I'm daring 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, shit, I'm gonna talk about him with the butterfly collar." But before I could say that, I looked around. Everybody has a butterfly collar. This is what they really want to look like. And so, uh, I just said, "Hey, man, I, you know, I don't know what else y'all want."

• 29:47Jamie Foxx?

  And pretty soon, Latimore is gonna come up. "You guys ready for Latimore?" And I started doing that. I said, "I'm gonna take a break." So, I get offstage, and the dude that was washing the dishes takes his apron off and goes, "Man, I got it." Has a mic. "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 gotta 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 this and that. So what I started doing from that day on, I would go to like Des Moines, Iowa, Davenport, Iowa, Boise, Idaho, where it's all white.

• 30:31Jamie Foxx?

  Gunnison, Colorado, all white. And I would go do like forty 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 fifteen minutes, I logged that fifteen minutes. I can go to any place where it's just all white.

• 30:50Tim Ferriss?

  You would determine if they understood it by the last.

• 30:52Jamie Foxx?

  By the last, and I would ask, y'all know who this is? And so I would tell the joke. If fifteen minutes, they understood it, I can go to any place in the world that's all white, and they get it. Then I would go to my chocolate cities, Chicago, DC, Florida, and do all of my political highbrow stuff and see what the black folks understood. Man, what the fuck you thought my doc? Now they understood fifteen minutes. Now I got fifteen to thirty minutes or forty-five minutes that wherever I go, no matter what age, they'll understand. No matter what gender, no matter what race, they'll understand this forty-five 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

• 31:37Jamie Foxx?

  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 of that so that now, when people see Kevin Hart, no matter where in the world, they're gonna laugh. Becoming a great comedian is also having that formula going on in your head. Because if you Paint yourself into a corner like you're only the black comedian, or you're only the Hispanic comedian, or whatever that is, then it's hard for you to become universal. I mean Eddie was, Eddie Murphy was great. He had an opportunity through Saturday Night Live to get it to everybody.

• 32:21Jamie Foxx?

  But it's definitely a formula to not bomb.

• 32:24Tim Ferriss?

  So that's the first bomb. You mentioned two.

• 32:26Jamie Foxx?

  Yeah.

• 32:27Tim Ferriss?

  What was the second? If it's hard to recall, the follow up question is going to be, what is the post game analysis when you step off the stage after bombing? So the second time.

• 32:37Jamie Foxx?

  Well, you gotta, when I bombed the second time, was way later in my career when I'm working out jokes. But I don't like to work out jokes and tell people I'm working out. I like to actually do a show, come and do the show. So when, I think it was Irvine.

• 32:51Tim Ferriss?

  So you don't tell people you're working on.

• 32:52Jamie Foxx?

  No, no, no, I think that's cheating and I think you get bad habits. So I do a show in Irvine, California. First show I killed. They was just ready for me. I'm like, oh man, everything worked. Second show.

• 33:06Jamie Foxx?

  Bombed. 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 guys. I said, let's go. Okay, that didn't work. No, you gotta put this in front of that. You gotta put that behind this because that's gonna kick this off. People didn't know what that was, so maybe we don't say that. So, you know, you have to, when you take the bomb, when we take the L, it's not like you're not funny.

• 33:31Tim Ferriss?

  What's the L?

• 33:32Jamie Foxx?

  Like you take the loss.

• 33:33Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, okay.

• 33:34Jamie Foxx?

  When you take the loss, it's not like you're not funny. It's just like, okay, you just didn't put the shit together. So that's the other thing too. When you do become funny, it's gonna be harder now to make people laugh because you set the bar. So watch this. The hardest part for Chris Rock was after he had done something great in stand up. Because now you gotta top that.

• 34:00Jamie Foxx?

  The hardest part for Eddie Murphy, because Eddie wants to come out and do stand-up is, how do I top that in your head? The hardest part is coming for Kevin Hart in the fact that you smashed him. Now, you know what I'm saying, you gotta know how to, you gotta know how to refresh. Because when you do something like, like I, I would look at my stuff and go like, I gotta quit doing that. Because that shtick that I'm doing, people are catching on. And they're like, okay, motherfucker, we've already seen that shit. So that's the other thing, you gotta have great material. And you gotta know how to move, because like, right now is the perfect time for Eddie Murphy to come out and do stand-up. Because it's been so long, it's nostalgic, it was thirty years ago.

• 34:44Jamie Foxx?

  So now you can catch a new young, you can still excite the older, you know what I'm saying? So being a stand-up comedian is tough. And you've seen a lot of funny guys not be funny anymore. Why? Because you can't top what you did. You look at a Jim Carrey, you go like, okay, man, where you at? Where you at? You know what I'm saying? You know, don't give up the funny. Or, or you look at Chris, I always look at Chris Tuck and be like, motherfucker, where you at? Don't leave us. Because being a stand-up comedian is an interesting thing. Most stand-up comedians wanna look good.

• 35:15Tim Ferriss?

  In what way?

• 35:16Jamie Foxx?

  They just wanna look good. Think about this, when Eddie Murphy started doing stand-up, he was funny, but then he started doing, you know, the way the leather suits, and it was the fly shit and the rings, and they didn't wanna look good. Joe Piscopo started working out with the muscles, you know what I'm saying? So as a stand-up comedian, we gotta be careful not to look too good. Because people start going, what the fuck are you doing? You ain't cute, nigga, we just wanna laugh, you know what I'm saying? But when we start getting into our shit, that's when we lose, because I did that. Like, I got to, uh, my thing was that after In Living Color, the show called In Living Color that I did, I felt like I had made it. So I wasn't necessarily on the good-looking shit, but I was on the, I've made the jokes.

• 36:01Jamie Foxx?

  I went on stage and was doing rich jokes. Just got that Range Rover, anybody else? It's crazy out here, you know, they're so finicky, right? Motherfuckers are looking at me like, what the fuck is you talking about? And then, uh, I'll say, man, you know, the square footage of the house, man, when they get a certain square feed, man, that shit is crazy and maintaining, you know? Motherfuckers are like, motherfucker, if you don't get off the goddamn stage. I'd lost it, I lost it, and I walked off stage and all of a sudden... I walk off stage, they give it up for Jamie Foxx, and I'm thinking, I'm 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 fuck they doing? I just went off stage, what the fuck are they laughing at? And I opened the door and there was a kid, skinny, little tank top on, barely fit. His name was Chris Tucker.

• 36:46Jamie Foxx?

  He was smashing, he was... No one has been that funny within 15 minutes. I've never seen, and I watch them all, I've never seen a stand-up where people were laughing so hard, like, I said, he's gonna kill somebody. Like, when he says, last night, how was you? Oh, I killed, it's gonna be true, somebody gonna have a fucking 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 bombed, like, it wasn't, you know... So finally, I went over to Okinawa where the troops were. I started doing stand-up over there for the troops to sort of get back, it was my Rocky moment. Like, you know, I started running up the steps, chasing chickens and shit.

• 37:28Jamie Foxx?

  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 gotta get right back up and you gotta acknowledge it. Okay, I stunk, nigga. Because they're gonna let you know. Like, today's world, you can't do nothing in today's world without somebody letting you know, oh, nigga, you fucked that up.

• 37:59Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot, what I would take if I could only take one supplement? And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health. And try AG1 today. You will get a free one year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1

• 38:42Tim Ferriss?

  travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink AG1, the number one. Drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.

• 39:04Speaker 03

  And now Jaclyn Novogratz, the founder and CEO of Acumen, a global force of entrepreneurs, investors, philanthropists, and social innovators working together to break the cycle of poverty, the New York Times bestselling author of The Blue Sweater and Manifesto for a Moral Revolution, and one of the world's 100 greatest living business minds, according to Forbes Magazine. You can find Jaclyn on Twitter and Instagram, at Jay Novogratz.

• 39:37Tim Ferriss?

  Jaclyn, welcome to the show.

• 39:39Speaker 05

  It's great to be here with you, Tim. Thank you.

• 39:42Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 40:00Speaker 05

  I was raised in a four bedroom house with seven siblings, the seven of us. Amazing parents. Dad was in the military. My mother was a force to be reckoned with. I would say it was a noisy, chaotic, loving, house full of cowboys who were also expected to somehow be good.

• 40:20Tim Ferriss?

  Number of your siblings have also gone on to do great things, very much on a national and global scale.

• 40:30Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 40:47Speaker 05

  I think it was a funny combination of one constraint, that when you have so many kids on a military income, you gotta 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.

• 41:05Tim Ferriss?

  Myth makers?

• 41:06Speaker 05

  Myth makers. I remember when we were little, Bob, Mike and I, all we really wanted was Levi's jeans. There weren't a lot of things to differentiate us. So my mother made a deal with us and said, look, I'll buy you the dungarees, which is what they used to call jeans, from the post exchange, unless you can earn the difference for those Levi's. But I have to tell you, I'm really disappointed in you guys. Why would you need brands? You're Novogratz's. And we laugh now. We're like, what the hell was a Novogratz? But she had the sense that this was who we were. So two, kind of a driven myth-making mother. And three, this big extended immigrant Catholic family.

• 41:48Speaker 05

  And so this idea that to whom much is given, much is expected, was also reinforced. And so I guess in a funny way, Tim, we grew up in a tribe, but also allowed to be wild individualists who had to be entrepreneurial. And here we are.

• 42:06Tim Ferriss?

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

• 42:49Speaker 05

  I think I did always want to change the world from the time I was six. And I guess that was part of the, both the positive and the pressure. And so there was always that idea that I had, but to go through college, certainly as the first, we had to pay for school. And so I worked two, three jobs the entire time I was at the University of Virginia.

• 43:12Tim Ferriss?

  What were your jobs? What types of jobs?

• 43:14Speaker 05

  Well, mostly I was a bartender. And in the summer, I worked 100 hours a week as a bartender, which was actually quite something. When I graduated, I told my parents that I'd really never had a proper vacation and that I was going to take a year to just explore the world. Never really gone outside the United States or anything like that. And my parents, being very wise, said, we think that's fine, but at least go through the interview process. And so I agreed quite reluctantly. And I threw my resume without thinking into the boxes for foreign affairs, econ majors, which were my majors. And Chase Manhattan Bank called and said, we'll take you in as an interview. And so I go into the interview and there's this cute guy sitting

• 43:56Speaker 05

  across the table from me. And he says, tell me, Jacqueline, why do you want to be a banker? Which was, of course, the only question I wasn't ready for. And so I was like, actually, my mom and dad are making me do this. I don't want to be a banker. And he said-

• 44:11Tim Ferriss?

  That's what you said?

• 44:13Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm, I don't lie-

• 44:16Tim Ferriss?

  It's probably the only, it's probably the only answer he wasn't prepared for.

• 44:20Speaker 05

  He was like, well, something in him was prepared. Cause he was like, well, if you got this job, you would be in 40 countries the next three years and you would be understanding the economic and political situation in each of those countries. And of course, as this kid that always dreamed of knowing the world, loving the world, I was like, oh God. So I said, could we start this interview over? And he let me literally leave the room. I knocked on the door. I introduced myself. I sat down. He was like, tell me, Jacqueline, why do you want to be a banker? And I said, ever since I was six years old, all I ever wanted to do was be a banker.

• 44:56Speaker 05

  Of course, there were interviews after that to make sure I had a brain, but I got the job.

• 45:03Speaker 05

  And sure enough, for the next three years, I was in 40 countries at a really extraordinary time when the financial systems were also in peril in the early 1980s. That was my first job.

• 45:15Tim Ferriss?

  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 A, B, and C about X, Y, and Z industries. I associate that with the management consulting pitch. So what was the job that you ended up getting that allowed you to travel like that in banking?

• 45:48Speaker 05

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

• 46:31Speaker 05

  the really dumb questions and then uncovering.

• 46:35Tim Ferriss?

  I can't let that go without asking for an example. How does that happen? What would a hypothetical or real type of question or actual question be that might get someone fired?

• 46:45Speaker 05

  The biggest one for me was in Switzerland, when I was pretty much a solo act to look at this whole suite of Swiss banks, which everybody just assumed were safe because of Swiss banking. And Tim, I kept looking at the numbers and the spreadsheets for this one bank, and nothing added up to me. And so I went to the head of the division, the office, and I was incredibly nervous because I wasn't that confident that I was that great at all these spreadsheets. And I pointed out what I saw as real flaws and real vulnerabilities. And he essentially told me I was too young, too naive, didn't I understand?

• 47:28Speaker 05

  Swiss banking and that the bank was completely protected. And I scratched my head. I went back. The number 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

• 48:09Speaker 05

  and not that serious overnight to then being seen as this whiz kid. I was the same person. Nothing had changed. And how ephemeral the way the world sees you became to me. Because I know that I was exactly the same woman the morning after that I was the morning before. So I guess learning really young, sometimes just speak that truth, even through trembling lips.

• 48:36Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Wow. What a story. I mean, it's, it's something that so few people, especially new hires, would actually dare to do. It just strikes me as unusual that you would have the conviction to potentially, and I don't know the politicking or the power dynamics inside of that bank, obviously, but to piss off your boss by giving it a seven, which then flies straight up the flagpole after getting reprimanded. That's quite a move. It sounds like that wasn't a first, though, that you'd sort of cultivated this speaking of truth coming up to that point. Is that accurate?

• 49:16Speaker 05

  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, it was like, you were always the one that was standing. And I think I always stood for the underdog, but I also just couldn't tell a lie. And they hired me for a particular purpose and I felt like that was my duty. That was just my job. As a kid, I was the one that would

• 49:58Speaker 05

  fight for the underdog. In fact, I got thrown out of trigonometry for standing up for what was right.

• 50:05Tim Ferriss?

  What were you standing up for? Was it the answer to something or was it a person?

• 50:08Speaker 05

  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.

• 50:46Tim Ferriss?

  Just imagining how happy you were about that. But I think it's worth really underscoring that you develop this and reinforce this truth speaking. You take some lumps, of course you're going to take lumps along the way, but ultimately not to attribute all of your successes to that, but I think it's no small thing. One of the aspects of your story that has stuck out to me as I'm doing homework is the power of asking, I wouldn't say dumb questions, asking the questions, right? Asking questions and speaking truth. And it's just how you talk about patient capital. We might talk later about how it's

• 51:30Tim Ferriss?

  differentiated from just long-term capital and long-term investing and how you differentiate the two. But if you're making a long-term sort of patient investment in yourself, like over the short term, you might get reprimanded for truth and asking. Questions, or seemingly naive questions, but they seem to be really good long-term bets. And I suppose there's not a question so much in that, but does that resonate with you as being true? How does that land for you when I say that? Am I missing anything?

• 51:59Speaker 05

  I've actually never thought about it for myself personally, but it deeply resonates that I am not comfortable, and it's hard sometimes, both for people who work with me and for the people who take our courses online, at laying out a roadmap, because the world is too complex for a step-by-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.

• 52:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, also, I know I'm getting on a caffeinated soapbox here for a second, but we're going to cover a lot of ground, so we have space for my caffeinated soapbox. And that is to say, these things don't manifest out of the ether when you need them most necessarily, right? You were practicing and conditioning yourself to tell the truth, and you had a choice to stuff or to speak in that moment. You made the decision to speak, rated a seven, and that gave you the positive reinforcement, I have to imagine, and more confidence to continue doing the same. But it's a skill, and 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,

• 53:20Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 53:32Speaker 05

  So it started. Again, having always dreamed of traveling around the world and knowing and loving the world, in fact. Now I'm in Brazil and Chile and Ecuador and truly Colombia, falling in love with the vibrancy, the color. These stories that, as a young American kid, we didn't ever get about the developing world. And it struck me in this era again, Tim, when the banks were falling apart. They had been making all these bets based on relationship and long-term debt. And suddenly the markets were in crisis and they wanted to call all their loans and they lost hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars at that time.

• 54:16Speaker 05

  So I would sit inside the bank, looking at loans that should never have been made. Often, money that was actually never even put into what it said it would be put into. Meanwhile, on the weekends, I would just be drawn to the favelas and into the slums and into these parts of the cities that were so full of life and vibrancy and work and diligent people. And I would talk to people about their businesses and realize that this was a group of people that could not even walk in through the doors of the bank. They had no confidence with the banking system. And so I, again, asking dumb questions, which may be a theme of my life, went to my boss

• 54:57Speaker 05

  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 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.

• 55:31Tim Ferriss?

  So the Innocent Anthropologist, I assume, was a very formalized way of giving you a book that basically says, listen, kid, that's adorable, but also very naive. I mean, is that the thrust of that gift?

• 55:44Speaker 05

  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 Rosted, 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.

• 56:26Tim Ferriss?

  What was your next move? You know, some people get to checkmate in one move, but it's often an evolution. Where did you go from there?

• 56:33Speaker 05

  Well, the next move was telling my parents that I had to have made the decision.

• 56:38Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. Tell us about that.

• 56:41Speaker 05

  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 Triciano, who just such an amazing man, was giving me an opportunity than, 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 direct trajectory of my life. My dad thought I was giving up that opportunity. My mother thought I would never marry. Both had truths in what they were saying. And so I think that was incredibly hard, because we were all raised to... Quote unquote, do the right thing.

• 57:25Speaker 05

  I was looking for an opportunity to get to Brazil. But I found one that would bring me to West Africa, which was absolutely not on my playbook. But I realized that this was a chance to pursue a different kind of dream that was looking at taking the tools of banking and reaching low income people. I read about Muhammad Yunus and the Grammy 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.

• 58:02Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 58:29Speaker 05

  Well, I just told them what I was going to do.

• 58:32Tim Ferriss?

  So you didn't say, I'm thinking of actually just like, this is what I'm doing. I'm giving you guys a heads, heads up.

• 58:37Speaker 05

  Heads up. This is really, you know, it's not such a request. It's a, 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.

• 59:21Speaker 05

  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?

• 59:31Speaker 05

  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.

• 59:59Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:00:37Speaker 05

  Again, we had far less tools then. And so I had read one tiny article about Grammy Bank, which was still very obscure. I sent a letter to Mohammed Yunus that probably never reached Bangladesh. And then I heard from a young woman who also was at Chase, that her aunt had started an organization called Women's World Banking, and that there might be an opportunity. So I just went there and offered myself to go to Brazil. And as I said, she said, we don't have any opportunity there. We do though in West Africa. And I just took it. It was super risky. It didn't come with health insurance. It just was an

• 1:01:21Speaker 05

  opportunity. I knew that if I were waiting for the perfect, I wouldn't have done it. I also knew I might lose my nerve. And it was the only thing that was on offer to really test out my theory that the tools of business and banking could actually serve people who had been fully left out. And I don't think it was until I was actually on the plane listening to Joni Mitchell's Blue album over and over and weeping that it really hit me that I was. I was on my own.

• 1:01:50Tim Ferriss?

  Why were you weeping? Was it fear? Was it something else?

• 1:01:53Speaker 05

  I think it was loss. Everything I'd left behind, no understanding of where I was going, fear. A lot of loss in transition. And then the minute I landed, both excitement for being there and yet almost immediate confrontation with the first big true failure of my life, which was that I had been told that I had this opportunity to be an ambassador to African women. I was going to help build all these microfinance organizations across the region. And I would say the arrogance underneath was that I was going to save the world, at least this part of it. And what the confrontation helped me understand

• 1:02:38Speaker 05

  pretty quickly was that most people don't want to be saved and certainly not by a 25-year-old white American girl who's French was not very good and who had very little understanding whatsoever of the local culture. And so I hung in there for a number of months. It was very hairy.

• 1:02:59Tim Ferriss?

  Hairy in what way?

• 1:03:01Speaker 05

  Everything from just kind of a daily rejection where I would go to my little office in the African Development Bank and the door would be locked. Or I was supposed to do this big conference and I would ask people for help and they'd be like, "That's not my job." Okay, I didn't really know where to go. And then this one Nigerian extraordinary woman befriended me and she's like, "You know, they really want you out, the powers that be. And so don't eat anything in front of the women who didn't want me in the country." And I said, "What do you mean, don't eat anything?" She's like, "Well, they're going to poison you and they're also talking about voodoo."

• 1:03:35Tim Ferriss?

  Holy shit. Jesus.

• 1:03:38Speaker 05

  And so, 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 to get in front of people and you're being locked out of your office and you don't really have much of a safety to that, nor do you know a single person, except for this incredible Nigerian woman who's befriended you, I would lie in bed and be like, "Is anybody here coming to get me?" And then I got unbelievably sick with food poisoning, like deathly sick.

• 1:04:11Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:04:18Speaker 05

  I couldn't go there. I couldn't go there. She thought it might be poisoning, but I didn't remember eating anything in front of anybody. And I was a little thing to start off with. And so after about eight days of just lying on the bathroom floor, I decided it was enough and told the women, trying to be respectful, but also clear that I got what they were saying. I really heard that they had not asked for anybody like me and that we 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.

• 1:05:03Speaker 05

  And nobody should be treated the way that they treated me. And that both were true. That said, I left everything that I owned in the boxes that I had in the Abidjan Hilton. Goodness knows whatever happened to them. And I moved to East Africa where I kind of started again, hopefully with a lot more humility and maybe a different kind of courage.

• 1:05:25Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:06:00Speaker 05

  Again, I think it's really dangerous to assume, but I think that.

• 1:06:06Speaker 05

  What I've learned, and what I used to, you know, and 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 and wearing different amulets and medicines. In a way, you see the guys at Silicon Valley kind of replacing that with new things that we do, to give us a sense of strength. And so, the way I always attributed it to, which is why I would

• 1:06:49Speaker 05

  never accuse anyone of having done it, but the threat of it, and my own fear and isolation, may have been made manifest in this literal purging that I did. The threats were not that unusual. Again, and I see it in places where there's often insecurity and deeply oral-based society. And you've 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,

• 1:07:33Speaker 05

  and, and love all of its different layers, and see the reflection in our own societies. We just make manifest in different ways.

• 1:07:42Tim Ferriss?

  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 errand, like, I'm actually on to something, I'm on the right track here?

• 1:08:04Speaker 05

  That's such an interesting question. I had another crushing failure right after. Where I analyzed a bank portfolio, a microfinance organization, and saw that I was excited by seeing all of the problems in the portfolio. And the CEO, rather than sharing my excitement that now we could actually fix the problems, burned my work and didn't want to work with me after that. And so I had to learn a whole new approach, clearly.

• 1:08:28Tim Ferriss?

  That was in, that was in East Africa?

• 1:08:29Speaker 05

  That was in Kenya. So I had a second big failure. The little wins were that in my everyday life, the relationships that I was building, including with the person who served tea, with drivers, were quite real. I kept going back to this human potential that I was seeing all around me and starting to understand the crushingly complex systems that were in their way, that nobody really wanted to confront, including the supposed good guys, the NGOs, the nonprofits, the leaders who were also arbiters of who got resources and who didn't. And it actually reinforced for me why I believed in the power of business, of entrepreneurship,

• 1:09:15Speaker 05

  because I was in this other world where who got control of the resources meant everything. The first real win for me was when a woman walked into my office in Nairobi and said that she was from Rwanda, which was a country I was completely unfamiliar with at the time. In fact, I thought she said Uganda. And they had just, 1986, they had just passed a new law that abolished Napoleonic code. Under Napoleonic code, women were put in the same category as children and the mentally impaired. And until that moment, were unable to open a bank account without their husband's signature.

• 1:09:56Speaker 05

  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 the sense that if we could get markets to work for poor women, they would have so much more dignity than what I'd been seeing. That I probably went for a three week assignment and knew somewhere inside of me that I wasn't leaving till Wade built a bank.

• 1:10:35Tim Ferriss?

  So presumably that's what that's what happened. What happened?

• 1:10:39Speaker 05

  So that's what happened. I mean, a couple of things happened. Again, I had learned from my own lack of humility that it would have been really easy to go in there and be like, I, I, I, I. But that if we were going to build an enduring institution, and I deeply believe in enduring institutions, that I had to be a minor role, even if I was doing a lot of the legwork. And so I was really lucky to find a small group of Rwandan powerhouse women who are my co-founders. And we did everything together. It reinforced the African adage that if you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

• 1:11:22Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:11:37Tim Ferriss?

  I want to just put a bookmark in that for a second and ask, from that initial plane flight, crying, listening to Joni Mitchell, to that Rwandan woman walking into your office, how much time had elapsed, roughly?

• 1:11:57Speaker 05

  Roughly, probably seven months.

• 1:12:00Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. So over that seven month period, what were the ingredients that kept you going? Was it that you'd said to yourself, come hell or high water, I'm sticking around for a year? Had you made that kind of commitment? Was it, I cannot go back to the US with my tail between my legs and let all these naysayers prove themselves right? Was it something else? I'm just wondering what kept you kind of slogging away over that period of time?

• 1:12:31Speaker 05

  I would say that the whole first year and a half was that slog. I would say a combination of this man, Tony Triciano.

• 1:12:40Speaker 05

  When he had given me this job offer and he was like, you're gonna go to Africa instead of do this? And I was like, Mr. Triciano, don't you understand if I don't go, I might never do it? That moment kept coming back to me and it's like, how do I go back to him as a complete failure? I have to 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

• 1:13:24Speaker 05

  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 had something to offer.

• 1:13:38Tim Ferriss?

  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 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

• 1:14:19Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:14:30Speaker 05

  So Rwanda to Acumen saw both the power of using markets with the, with the microfinance. I learned that it wasn't enough, that giving women just small loans was amazing, that you could give them access to credit at say 12% a year rather than 400% a year, which is what they paid the money lenders, that you could build community. My assumption that if you gave women small bits of credit, that it would be enough for them to create jobs, was wrong. Most people aren't entrepreneurs. And that's probably a really good thing. I could say it as an entrepreneur married to an entrepreneur.

• 1:15:08Speaker 05

  We need.

• 1:15:10Speaker 05

  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,

• 1:15:53Speaker 05

  degrees and other markers of success, particularly for women, seemed really important. I was often called in Shatana 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.

• 1:16:13Tim Ferriss?

  Why Stanford? Besides the pretty trees on Palm Drive?

• 1:16:18Speaker 05

  It was really, really hard to get an application anywhere. We only had word processors. We didn't have computers. It took 10 days to get a letter to Stanford or wherever, and then another 10 days after they sent the application to you. And then you had to write on that little airplane paper, send it back. It was a nightmare. And that particular year, Harvard, on its annual report, had a picture of all of the graduates with dollar signs on the back of their hats. And I thought, well,

• 1:16:54Speaker 05

  I think I might be a misfit, given that I really want to solve poverty.

• 1:17:01Tim Ferriss?

  That is so bad. That is so bad. And I have like, close friends have gone to Harvard, but oh God, that's terrible.

• 1:17:07Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:17:16Tim Ferriss?

  Gordon Gekko. Gordon Gekko, exactly.

• 1:17:18Speaker 05

  And so Stanford had a public management program that I thought fit more with what I wanted to do with my life. It was very clear that I didn't want to go back to just make money. I wanted to go back to build the tools to build companies that could employ and serve poor people. And so at Stanford, I met an extraordinary mentor named John Gardner. And I think he shaped my life as well in terms of getting me focused on the United States, this 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

• 1:17:59Speaker 05

  in the private sector with banking. I had built several institutions, but most notably DuTerembre, the microfinance organization, and this bakery and a couple of others. And then probably the other critical thing that happened was the Rwandan genocide. So suddenly, having worked on a social justice institution by then, that had been in existence for seven years, and seeing a country explode into a bloodbath, losing many of the people that I loved and that I worked with, and seeing my co-founders play out every role of the genocide, from being murdered to watching their families be murdered, to being bystanders.

• 1:18:42Speaker 05

  I think that was probably one of the most important, not experiences, because God forbid, I'd watched it from afar. But both an understanding of patient capital, that the work of change is so often a couple of steps forward, and sometimes the whole thing blows up, that societies are highly complex. And again, that at the heart of my work.

• 1:19:08Speaker 05

  Had to be a redefinition of what poverty was. That we so often look at poverty and we think the answer is income. The answer is jobs. What I had seen by now, both in banking and in development, and certainly with the genocide, is that the opposite of poverty is dignity. It is having a choice, having opportunity, having agency over who you are in your life and what you're capable of doing. And we miss that. And that was really the beginning of Acumen. That we have all these tools. We have the superpower in capitalism. But when we raise it to the rank of religion and everything goes around one end, profit,

• 1:19:54Speaker 05

  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 capitalist capital, understand it exists on a spectrum, take the power of business and capital, but rather than let it control us, control it in service of creating a world where we can actually solve our problems.

• 1:20:37Speaker 05

  Acumen was born in 2001 with that idea in mind.

• 1:20:42Tim Ferriss?

  We're going to spend a fair amount of time on Acumen. No big surprise there. But I want to spend just a few more moments on the Rwandan genocide because I think it may be helpful in exploring the tendency that we all have to oversimplify things. And the example that comes to mind, and this is based on reading and prepping for this conversation that I'd love to hear you speak to, is the tendency to separate the world into monsters and angels. And how unhelpful that can be. And I think you alluded to it with your description

• 1:21:24Tim Ferriss?

  of coworkers and people you knew, or certainly people you had exposure to, being on all sides of this genocide, victims, bystanders, perpetrators. I'm sure you had interacted on some level, even just going to the market or otherwise, with people who 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 within the context of life in general. I'd love to hear any other thoughts.

• 1:21:56Speaker 05

  First thought is absolutely that I didn't just know people in the market. Our first executive director was jailed as being one of the highest ranking, or the highest ranking, planner of the genocide. Before the genocide, she was co-creating a liberal party based on multi-tribal democracy with another one of our co-founders. But when it was clear that power looked like it was going to Hutu Power or the genocide regime, she switched. And so, early on, I saw those who seek power and those who seek purpose, and that power

• 1:22:35Speaker 05

  can be very tempting. And I also saw how, in a time of real insecurity, and we're in one again, it can be very easy for demagogic leaders at all levels of society to prey on insecurity and sometimes make us do terrible things. And that's where monsters and angels came in. I was literally sitting in a prison with Agnes, the woman who was the major perpetrator, knee to knee, asking her how this could have happened. And there she was, Tim, in a pink dress, the prisoner's uniform, her head shaved bald, with a freckled face. You

• 1:23:16Speaker 05

  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 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.

• 1:23:59Speaker 05

  And that, that has very much informed the way I see the world and the way I accumulate. Even the way that we talk about and inscribe our values. It's always intention. It's always recognizing the light in the dark in almost any choice that we make. So that we're much more cognizant that there is no system that's all good. Nor is there any human being that is all good or all bad. I worry sometimes when I hear conversations in the social media moment that we are in. That it's capitalism's fault, it's socialism's fault. It's stakeholders, it's shareholders, rather than can we focus on the values here? What are we trying to solve?

• 1:24:40Speaker 05

  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?

• 1:24:49Tim Ferriss?

  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 polarize. 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

• 1:25:15Tim Ferriss?

  To look at the work of Darren Brown. Darren Brown is a mentalist performer, also an incredible artist from the UK. And he has a number of specials, including one called "The Push." He has another, I can't recall the name of. But the the objective, putting ethical considerations aside, the objective is to show how you can mold people who are otherwise upstanding, moral people to do terrible things, like push someone off a building, or to shoot someone. And the sad reality is that it is very much possible, and that it's easy to to sit on a moral high horse and levy judgment against

• 1:25:59Tim Ferriss?

  others and to say, "I would never have participated in a Rwandan genocide," or "I never would have been a member of the Nazi Party," and so on and so forth. But it's not quite that simple, right? And I think to simplify it down to the black and white, people being all one or all other, is not in service of solutions. I really appreciate you expanding on that. Let's jump to Acumen. Acumen, how did you choose the name? Or how is the name decided?

• 1:26:30Speaker 05

  Acumen stands for Perspective, Insight. When we started Acumen, I was focused on revolutionizing philanthropy. And too often, the way we think about philanthropy is soft. This was saying, again, the hard and the soft. You've got to bring an edge. Start with business, start with insight, build from there, and bring the same level of accountability that you would expect from a financial investment into the world of social change. Therefore, Acumen.

• 1:26:58Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 1:27:07Speaker 05

  Acumen does three things. First, we invest long-term patient capital. This is 10 to 15-year investment backed by philanthropy. So equity and debt into entrepreneurs that are going where markets have failed: healthcare, education, energy, agriculture.

• 1:27:25Speaker 05

  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 several for-profit impact funds. The second thing we do is build a community of builders through the World School for Social Change Acumen Academy. And that

• 1:28:08Speaker 05

  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 Sixty Decibels that uses an approach to measuring change that

• 1:28:51Speaker 05

  we created called Lean Data, which we could 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 actually serve the poor in ways that we hope to.

• 1:29:12Tim Ferriss?

  Does the Lean Data, and I, I may ask some follow-up questions, just to ensure I'm clear on

• 1:29:18Speaker 05

  How it works.

• 1:29:19Tim Ferriss?

  What we mean, how it works. Does that apply to the for-profit? Investing as well, the for-profit impact funds?

• 1:29:27Speaker 05

  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 60 decibels, which has been really exciting to watch, take off. I'd love to see BlackRock using it, frankly.

• 1:29:54Tim Ferriss?

  All right, BlackRock. I'm sure there's somebody listening.

• 1:29:57Speaker 05

  Come and get you.

• 1:29:57Tim Ferriss?

  Who's involved with BlackRock.

• 1:30:01Tim Ferriss?

  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 pompous Princetonian? What exactly is or are lean data? Because the question of measuring impact is one that, at least in my circles, comes up a lot. 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 that.

• 1:30:35Speaker 05

  We invest in entrepreneurs that are trying to build markets where they haven't existed for people who make $2 or $3 a day, where there's no infrastructure, there's no trust, there are very few skills, ed talent, there's a lot of corruption and complacency. And so it would be really easy for us to essentially say that anything we do in a difficult environment is impact. And so we decided that we had to hold ourselves accountable to a higher standard, that at the end of the day, what really matters when it comes to dignity is to record and understand the voices of those you are there to serve the poor. For many years, Tim, our impact measuring was fairly mediocre because we didn't have the tools. Once you had cellphone technology and you could text customers,

• 1:31:24Speaker 05

  Suddenly you had a one-on-one communication where you weren't in the room, where people aren't always as likely to tell you the truth because they don't really think you want to hear it anyway. But in this case, the more anonymity they had, the clearer people would give. So imagine a solar light company. We're the largest off-grid solar investor for the poor in the world. So we have a lot of them. We could go to a company like D Light 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

• 1:32:06Speaker 05

  buy a solar home system that gives them 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 collate all of that. And suddenly, we can help our entrepreneurs understand whether they're serving people, which is sometimes shocking when they find that they actually are not in the way that they thought they were. But equally, we can start to look across a sector like solar electricity. And we can see which companies may have the best product, but it's reaching people with the

• 1:32:51Speaker 05

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

• 1:33:34Speaker 05

  If you want kids to do better in school in really, really hot areas, get them a solar system that includes a fan. Because with the fan, the air moves at night, bugs are kept away, the kids sleep, they do better. It's a lean approach because you're not doing a three-year randomized control trial. And it is a deep approach because you're hearing from the perspective of those who actually most matter.

• 1:33:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the three-year randomized controlled approach has its place, but honestly, I mean, and this is speaking as someone who is very involved with financing scientific studies, it's not the right tool for all jobs. And particularly when you are outside of a laboratory with lots of uncontrolled variables, it's just trying to hammer screws a lot of the time. I think there's a real place for this lean data approach. And I have a question about how this is used. So here's a hypothetical, maybe it's not hypothetical, I would imagine you've run into this. If you are acting as a nonprofit and you're investing in various enterprises, you can

• 1:34:42Tim Ferriss?

  apply this data or offer this type of tool across the board, I would imagine, with the underlying belief that a rising tide raises all ships. Once you are a consultancy and you are providing lean data to for-profit companies, would you not say in a given sector, run into someone who wants you to avoid conflicts by providing them this data, which could help their businesses or business? And they might say, hey, I know that you have this valuable data, we would like to be the only one to receive it in the X, Y, and Z category. Otherwise, it doesn't really give us a competitive advantage, so why would we pay for it?

• 1:35:26Tim Ferriss?

  Do you ever run into anything like that, much like a law firm would have a conflict check?

• 1:35:31Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:35:53Tim Ferriss?

  You mean transparency in terms of like what you learn, how much to make publicly available?

• 1:35:58Speaker 05

  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 the 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

• 1:36:43Speaker 05

  Acumen to partner with just incredible market makers like the guys who founded D Light, which has brought clean solar light and electricity to over 100 million people and really launched an energy revolution and taught me that the kind of investing we need to think about right now at scale doesn't only reward the building of a single company, but those companies who ultimately create entire markets. I think that's the next frontier in so many ways.

• 1:37:12Tim Ferriss?

  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 spinoffs and for-profit funds have been able to have in the world. But if we go back to 2001, circa 2001, Acumen, you know, I always like to ask, aside from Acumen, did you have any other names that were on the shortlist for consideration that you remember? Do you remember any other rough drafts?

• 1:37:42Speaker 05

  Of course I do. Of course I do. In fact, we had a, you know, 2001, just to put us back again, it was the dot com craziness. Well, 2000, 2001, by the time I picked Acumen and we started, there was a bust. But you could not get a URL and no names were working. And so I had this night at the Rockefeller Foundation where I was working in, and we came up with really, really great names, including Ain't Your Grandma's Philanthropy.

• 1:38:13Tim Ferriss?

  That's great.

• 1:38:14Speaker 05

  I think that was my brother Mike's, but I'm not, I can't remember. But there was a lot of why involved in the naming of Acumen. And then I really loved the word immersion. I still do. It's one of the principles of moral imagination. There's a great line from Tilly Olson where she says, "May you live a life of immersion," I'm paraphrasing, "but what price will you pay?" To truly understand the complexity of the issues that we are trying to solve, you have to get close. Bryan Stevenson, the civil rights activist, says you have to get 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,

• 1:38:54Speaker 05

  men hated it, hated it. And so Acumen seemed a little less offensive to one of the two groups.

• 1:39:05Tim Ferriss?

  How did you test it? Were you sending out a poll to a group of friends? How did you do the split testing?

• 1:39:14Speaker 05

  Well, a friend of mine, Antonia Bowery, was working for a now no longer dot com called, I think it was called March First. 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, Jackson. I feel like you're making me drown in a sea."

• 1:39:47Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:39:55Tim Ferriss?

  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.

• 1:40:05Speaker 05

  I think now, in fact, our housing company in Pakistan, Javat 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.

• 1:40:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I was just gonna ask if you could just explore for a moment, and then we're gonna come back to acumen, and I'm gonna ask you about the earliest wins, and if you could speak to those. But I don't want to gloss over moral imagination. Could you just take a moment? And I think you're kind of walking into that territory, but just to frame it, what is moral imagination?

• 1:40:56Speaker 05

  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

• 1:41:37Speaker 05

  frankly, being honest enough to recognize where people get in their own way, and then moving from there.

• 1:41:44Tim Ferriss?

  When you say empathy in some cases enforces the status quo, could you elaborate on that? Do you mean that it's just an us versus, not versus, but like an us and them, kind of the savior of the fill in the blank? Is it that dichotomy that's created? Or not that that is what empathy does, of course, but what do you mean by enforcing the status quo?

• 1:42:07Speaker 05

  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 coed. And so we had this big party. We asked everyone to bring food and toys to make a perfect Christmas for these kids. I was really excited because I felt, at some level, so sorry for these people that didn't get to have a Christmas.

• 1:42:52Speaker 05

  The next morning, my girlfriend and I got up and we got in her car. We loaded it with all the stuff. We were both completely hungover. We drove into this place that I'd never been to a place like that before. And it was literally when we got to the house, it's like a shanty, a shack. And suddenly, I just felt shame, Tim. I was like, oh, my God. Like, I don't know who these kids are. I don't know what kind of things they like. I don't know if the parents want the kids to know that somebody else is bringing them Christmas. And this is all wrong. And literally, I said to Suzanne, my friend, I was like, just keep the car running. And grabbed the stuff.

• 1:43:37Speaker 05

  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?

• 1:44:20Speaker 05

  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 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.

• 1:44:49Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you for explaining that and telling that story also, which I think drives it home. Acumen. So, winging a prayer. Good idea. 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?

• 1:45:14Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. I mean, I recall it like it was yesterday. We had helped put together this collaboration, this deal, to bring long-lasting malaria bed nets into Tanzania. It started with Sumitomo, who had developed this bed net, and also recognized that 95% of malaria is in Africa, and yet there was no manufacturing capability for this particular kind of bed net. And so it was a real experiment. Could we build manufacturing capability with similar throughput rates to the kind that you might get in Asia, where the long-lasting bed nets were created? We went through all these different entrepreneurs. We identified this incredible guy named Anusha in Arusha, Tanzania,

• 1:45:59Speaker 05

  and worked with Global Fund to buy these nets and didn't really know what it was going to look like. And of course, I'd seen a lot of things fail. This was a complex collaboration. And then I went to go visit just as the factory was getting going. And there was one line of bed net making machines. And I was like, this is cool. I love operations, factory operations. A few months later, I went back and there were four. Few months later, I went back and there were eight. And there was that moment when suddenly I was seeing hundreds of women operating these machines that I thought, oh, my goodness, we're doing this. And then they ended up creating jobs for 10,000 people, manufacturing 30 million nets a

• 1:46:44Speaker 05

  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 and not so little anymore. Company in Arusha, Tanzania. I was like, bingo, this is what we're about.

• 1:47:04Tim Ferriss?

  Boom. Proof of concept.

• 1:47:06Speaker 05

  Boom.

• 1:47:08Tim Ferriss?

  Let's look at this example because I'd like to explore the thought process or the process a bit, in so much as I think many people who are considering impact investing or even perhaps starting a firm or a fund or a company that has that as its intended purpose, particularly a fund, they might solicit proposals or business proposals and then choose from that menu of options. But it seems like you started with selecting a problem and then you canvassed to find candidates. Is that how you approached it?

• 1:47:47Speaker 05

  In the beginning, we selected sectors. We were mostly focused at the very beginning on health technologies. And then the idea was we would find entrepreneurs. I was and am such a believer in entrepreneurs. And in fact, people would say, oh, are you trying to solve malaria? And I'd be like, no, we are trying to find those health technologies that could fundamentally change people's lives and bring them dignity. Now, again, we're in a very different place where we have all local teams on the ground. Depending on the region, there's much more focus on the sectors. And Tim, what we find then is if you think about Acumen as a laboratory, when we see

• 1:48:29Speaker 05

  a company really move up like a D-light, then we can start to build other companies around it to really help create that ecosystem. So we're a bit different. In the U.S., for instance, it wouldn't make sense for us to be looking at off-grid energy or investing in the social determinants of healthcare, financial inclusion and workforce development, which we feel are so critical to. Where the nation is now when it comes to the poor or low income people.

• 1:48:56Tim Ferriss?

  The, 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 and indicated to these, I suppose conglomerates would be a lazy way to, to translate that in Japan, but that.

• 1:49:14Speaker 05

  As is a very long-term approach.

• 1:49:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's, look at some of these companies, they've lasted a very long time. They're not five or 10 year companies. I look at your story. I look at your chronology and one thing that stands out to me, and please feel free to disabuse me of any misconceptions, but you cut your teeth in banking. You got to understand that machine from the inside. You then, well simultaneously in some respects and then after, looked at microfinance, access to capital. You started a bakery. I don't think that's a small thing. You, you actually were boots on the ground, getting firsthand experience

• 1:50:00Tim Ferriss?

  in an immersive way of what entrepreneurship looked like in your chosen environment. You got your ass kicked in West Africa, but put another way, you really got an extended education

• 1:50:19Tim Ferriss?

  on someone else's charter with someone else's organization and support. You, through that entire period of time are developing grit, learning what doesn't work, certain approaches to parachuting in. You're learning conversely what does work. And then suddenly you're Jacqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO of Acumen. But I think it's tempting for people to jump straight to the Acumen. And I'd love to.

• 1:50:46Tim Ferriss?

  Here you answer the question, what advice you would give to young people who say they want to change the world, because it strikes me that if you had tried to jump straight to acumen, correct me if I'm wrong, but you wouldn't have been viewed as backable, you wouldn't have had the operational experience, it just wouldn't have worked. I sometimes worry that these young or older people, quite frankly, who could really make a positive dent in the world, are putting the cart before the horse in terms of skill development. They don't have the chops, but they want to change the world. You've spoken to students, I know you've given commencement speeches, but for those people listening who are like, I just want to change the world, what advice would you give to them?

• 1:51:31Speaker 05

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

• 1:52:11Speaker 05

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

• 1:52:56Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:53:19Tim Ferriss?

  Here, here. You've also, I don't know if you've said this or written it, but I vaguely remember, and maybe you can provide some, 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.

• 1:53:38Speaker 05

  I actually think Jim Collins said that to me when I was lucky enough to be his student, and I paraphrase Jim. I say that a lot, where it's like, well, you know, Jacqueline, I need to keep my options up. And 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.

• 1:54:21Tim Ferriss?

  That is something that I don't think I would have fully been able to wrap my head around until, just in the last few years, really becoming dedicated to scientific research around psychedelic compounds. And I don't want to take us down that rabbit hole necessarily. Certainly, your brother Mike has a fair amount to say.

• 1:54:41Speaker 05

  I'm the wrong never aggressive sibling for that one.

• 1:54:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Your brother Mike has a fair amount to say about that. Mr. Mr. This ain't your grandma's philanthropist. 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.

• 1:55:09Tim Ferriss?

  It's so relieving. I just it's hard to overstate that. I'm glad you mentioned it.

• 1:55:17Speaker 05

  Well, and none of this is entirely altruistic. If we're seeking purpose, if we all buy into, you know, the rose that so many men live lives of quiet desperation and we don't want to be those people, then there is no clear path than making a commitment to problems that might be so big, you won't solve them in your lifetime, because then you are constantly just starting. You're constantly learning and unlearning and renewing. And I think that's been also the story of this work of trying to solve these big problems with entrepreneurs that are as relentless in their seeking. It's just that what drives them is to solve

• 1:55:59Speaker 05

  a problem. What does not drive them is is just profit, though they recognize they need the profit for long term financial sustainability and scale. It's the prioritization.

• 1:56:10Tim Ferriss?

  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 and mentioned John in passing from, I believe that was your GSB days, right? The Stanford days to what makes a good mentor or a good leader, the type?

• 1:56:48Tim Ferriss?

  You might want to follow or learn from.

• 1:56:50Speaker 05

  For me, there's really no one like John Gardner in my life, Tim. He was this very patrician man who almost spoke in koans by the time I met him. We were 50 years apart in age. So he engaged 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 and 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.

• 1:57:36Speaker 05

  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 Costs. 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, you know, we've had over a million signups on our, on Acumen Academy. When I see these hundreds and hundreds of Acumen fellows and the entrepreneurs, I

• 1:58:19Speaker 05

  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.

• 1:58:36Tim Ferriss?

  So Jacqueline, I, I've 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.

• 1:58:52Speaker 05

  We could do a do-over.

• 1:58:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Oh, definitely not a do-over. Are you kidding me? 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.

• 1:59:34Tim Ferriss?

  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, and 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?

• 2:00:06Speaker 05

  Chinua A. B.

• 2:00:07Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you. There's so many words and names that I know how to read, I recognize, but I have no idea how to pronounce. And then A Fine Balance by, oh, here's another one. Rohinton Mystery?

• 2:00:18Speaker 05

  Rohinton Mystery.

• 2:00:19Tim Ferriss?

  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?

• 2:00:47Speaker 05

  I have reasons for each of those books, and certainly The Invisible Man in this moment of the Black Lives Matters protests and continuing racial reckoning. Invisible Man really taught me to not see through anybody, ever. But the book I give right now, in this time of so much despair, is Viktor Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning, where he.

• 2:01:14Speaker 05

  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's Search for Meaning is, should be required reading for all of us.

• 2:01:52Tim Ferriss?

  I could not endorse that strongly enough. For anyone who's listening to this also, across 500 plus episodes of this podcast, the single book that has come up most often is Man's Search for Meaning. So if you have not read this book, do yourself a favor. Do everyone around you a favor and pick it up. It is just a tremendous, tremendous book. And also a great example of someone, in this case Viktor Frankl, embracing something larger than himself, the completion of Man's Search for Meaning, the concept of writing this and compiling it as a book that helped him to get through so much suffering also.

• 2:02:30Speaker 05

  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.

• 2:02:48Tim Ferriss?

  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 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

• 2:03:25Tim Ferriss?

  it might be, who would like to begin to experiment with investing for greater social impact, or impact. And then the players in the institutional space, those people who may be at asset management firms, or otherwise, what, who also would like to, either in a management or leadership position, begin to steer the ship, at least carving off a portion of activities to focus on impact, maybe lean data, or who just as intrapreneurs within these companies want to, want to try something. What would you say to any of those groups?

• 2:04:06Speaker 05

  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 muscles so that they can solve it themselves.

• 2:04:30Tim Ferriss?

  By book, in this case, you mean manifesto?

• 2:04:33Speaker 05

  Manifesto for a moral revolution. And the whole idea of moral revolution is, you know, give more to the world than you take. It's not, there are some who have the moral responsibility and some who do not. It's like, all of us. So I really appreciate that you would ask for all three categories. When you look at the brokenness of our criminal justice system, the opioid epidemic, poverty, the arts community that's out of work, there is such an opportunity to be of use, to pay visits, to just talk to people who are lonely right now, to be more conscious about the way that we spend our money, even for small things, and buy sustainably. And so it's building into your everyday, a much greater consciousness and awareness

• 2:05:16Speaker 05

  of the fact that our action and our inaction impacts people everywhere. For the individual investor...

• 2:05:25Speaker 05

  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

• 2:06:09Speaker 05

  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

• 2:06:50Speaker 05

  of delivering food and partnering with governments and individual philanthropists that are willing to pay meals forward so that people in low-income parts of Los Angeles can get healthy, affordable food. With Black Lives Matter protests, what Sam Polk, the entrepreneur, understood is that he had within him, within his operation, individual employees who had the capability to become franchisees. But in the United States, the franchise model usually expects that you will have your own capital to put into the system from the beginning. So he's created a university, and he's now raised probably three of thirteen million dollars. You know, seven-year debt at 2%.

• 2:07:31Speaker 05

  That will allow him to identify the entrepreneurs amongst his employees, give them the opportunity to start their own franchise, enable them to have forty thousand dollar 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.

• 2:07:54Speaker 05

  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 more and more inequality

• 2:08:38Speaker 05

  in ways that are fully unsustainable for this world. It has been really exciting to me to see not only a $700 billion impact investing sector emerge over the last 20 years, but also to see big companies like BlackRock and others say enough. But we've got to move from a place where we do no harm to one where real investing is not only accounted for by what a few shareholders earn, come what may, but that real investing is truly measured by the amount of the jobs, the beauty, the human capability, the opportunities that are enabled in the world.

• 2:09:20Tim Ferriss?

  So I would love to ask you for some simple next steps for also each of those three categories, like what people could do tomorrow. And the reason I ask that is that I think it's very easy for people to take next steps towards impact investing, whether the form of investment is time, or money, or energy, and to push it into the someday category.

• 2:09:47Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 2:09:48Tim Ferriss?

  I think it's very easy to do, and I don't wrong them. I don't wrong anyone for that because it can seem like kind of stumbling through a fog if they don't have a direction, in so much as if we take just an individual investor. I'll use myself as an example. You know, it took me A long time to build the relationships and the deal flow in the for-profit sector, where the pass fail marks are very clearly defined, to get to the point where I could invest in really good companies. And for people who have developed those relationships and put in the time to get

• 2:10:24Tim Ferriss?

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

• 2:11:06Tim Ferriss?

  But I would love to hear what some simple next steps might be. If they agree with you, they want to begin to get some skin in the game, to get on the playing field.

• 2:11:20Speaker 05

  I mean, I appreciate the self-promotional invitation there, Tim. If I'm going to go down that path, I would say that the symbolist next step would be to get onto Acumen Academy on our website and check out the courses, including the Path of More Leadership that Seth Godin, who's so extraordinary in every way, has helped us build, which takes the different practices of the book and really looks at the examples of companies that go from chocolate and coffee in Colombia to bed nets to chickens in Ethiopia, and really shows some of the fundamental business models that have enabled extraordinary

• 2:12:05Speaker 05

  levels of change, as well as identified role models. So I would get onto the Acumen Academy. The second would be both for institutional and individual. There are increasingly trade associations, for lack of a better word, that can direct you to really strong impact investors. The Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs is probably the best, Andy, A-N-D-E.org, I think. And so get smart. Learned 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.

• 2:12:50Speaker 05

  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 routes as young people, and yet, all along the way, asking these questions of how do you change the world? How do you change the world? How do you change the world? I actually think it's about getting started where you can with what you have and who you are. But it's also about asking yourself the question, not, am I making more money?

• 2:13:33Speaker 05

  Am I richer, famous, more famous, more beautiful today? But rather, what am I doing in the way that I run my business, in the way that I invest my dollars, in the way that I interact with everyone from the waiter to the president of some fancy bank? What am I doing to insist on, elevate, and enable human dignity? I would start there and then I'd get smart.

• 2:13:59Tim Ferriss?

  You invoked the name of a mutual friend who texted me prior to this conversation also, Seth Godin. And I bring him back up because I think Seth would agree that it's easy to hide with big aspirations, in the sense that if you say, well, I just want to change the world, it's easy to hide. You can make the argument that you're not ready. You can make the 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.

• 2:14:43Tim Ferriss?

  If in doubt, don't hit snooze for three years. Go to acumen.org. Just commit to spending 60 minutes educating yourself. You will learn something. Or getting Manifesto for a Moral Revolution, your book. Commit to getting that on Kindle. Maybe you try it for just 20 pages. You give it a taste test, see what you think. There are simple things that you can do first. And it's easy to hide behind the big, ambitious, world-changing thing that may or may not come. That's a way of hitting snooze and I think absolving oneself of responsibility. And I'm as guilty of that as the next person, so I'm not casting stones. But there are some very simple options here, as you mentioned, including just going to acumen.org or acumen.org/moralerevolution.

• 2:15:28Tim Ferriss?

  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 would hope that I'm already engaged, but keeping me even more engaged. Is that something that you've always done? Or is that something that you've developed somehow?

• 2:16:11Speaker 05

  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."

• 2:16:27Tim Ferriss?

  Not to imply that this is some artificial thing. I feel like it's, of course, genuine, but it's something that not a lot of people do. Or they try to play real so deliberately that they end up saying your name every other sentence. And you're like, "I feel like you're trying to sell me a used car or something." But you are very natural.

• 2:16:47Speaker 05

  No, 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 of 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.

• 2:17:04Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, what a gift. I quite appreciated it. Well, let's, let's give, I'm gonna cheat. I'm gonna ask you more than two questions, but my last question is gonna 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?

• 2:17:28Tim Ferriss?

  Is there anything you'd like to mention lest it be left out of this, this first edition?

• 2:17:33Speaker 05

  I really appreciate that you are even asking me that opportunity, giving me that opportunity. And I think another reason that I probably know when to say your name or not, or don't even know, but without meaning to flatter, you truly are deeply engaging conversationalist, an interviewer, and I really appreciate that. Yeah, you really are. There are many things that I'd like to talk about in terms of what it actually means to bet on character. That I think that one of the mistakes I made at the beginning of Acumen was to be so excited by a particular technology or business idea and over time, understanding character.

• 2:18:14Speaker 05

  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 brothers, 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 practiced them all along. But because of the, the vulnerability and the, the real courage that you've shown in your podcast with Debbie Millman, there was a

• 2:18:55Speaker 05

  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.

• 2:19:39Speaker 05

  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.

• 2:20:24Speaker 05

  Finally, I would just love to say, you're really one of a kind, Tim Ferriss. And the prep and the curiosity that you bring, and frankly, the love that you bring to every conversation and to the work that you're doing is really unparalleled. When I think of true moral imagination, it's based in a deep curiosity and, 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.

• 2:20:55Tim Ferriss?

  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 gonna, I'm gonna 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.

• 2:21:40Tim Ferriss?

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

• 2:22:23Tim Ferriss?

  And that in fact, there are, some might say, an imperative, or there are imperatives, to be able to combine those things and to not view them as separate. And I'm just so extremely happy that I had the chance to have this conversation, and I hope it is just the first of many. So, thank you again for taking the time.

• 2:22:45Speaker 05

  Thank you, Tim, and I'm just so honored, truly. I feel so, so privileged. And thank you too for making manifest the hard and the soft. It's what we need to do in our world together, and so looking forward to many conversations as well. And I wish you good luck on this.

• 2:23:03Tim Ferriss?

  To be continued. I love saying that. I always mean it, and I mean it very, very sincerely right now. Everyone, check out akiman.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.

• 2:23:44Tim Ferriss?

  I'm stealing someone else's quote, but all other attributes, at their testing point, require courage.

• 2:23:52Tim Ferriss?

  Thanks for tuning in.

• 2:23:55Tim Ferriss?

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

• 2:24:37Tim Ferriss?

  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 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.

• 2:25:16Tim Ferriss?

  Or creepier still, if you're at home, and this has happened to me, I search for something, or I type in a URL incorrectly, and then a screen for AT&T pops up and it says "you might be searching for this, how about that?" And it suggests an alternative, and I think to myself, "wait a second, my internet service provider is tracking my searches and what I'm typing into the browser?" Yeah, I don't love it. And a lot of you know, I take privacy and security very seriously. That is why I've been using today's episode sponsor, ExpressVPN, for several years now, and I recommend you check it out. When you connect to a secure VPN server, your internet traffic goes through an encrypted tunnel that nobody can see into, including hackers, governments, people on Starbucks, your internet service provider, etc.

• 2:26:02Tim Ferriss?

  And no, you are not safe simply using incognito mode in your browser. This was something that I got wrong for a long time. Your activity might still be visible, as in the example I gave to your internet service provider. Incognito mode also does not hide your IP address. Also, with the example that I gave of you can't access this content or that content, wherever you happen to be, then you just set your server to a country where you can see it. And all of a sudden, voila, you can say login to your normal Amazon account. It's supposed to be routed to .uk or whatever, and everything works. So ExpressVPN protects you and enables you because it encrypts and reroutes your network traffic through secure servers. So even though your traffic is still passing through your internet provider, now they can't read it. ExpressVPN is so fast also, it doesn't bog things down at all.

• 2:26:47Tim Ferriss?

  I usually forget that I even have it on. I can stream high-quality video with no lag or buffering, even on servers thousands of miles away. Gives me access to servers in 105 countries around the world, which is very helpful as I am constantly traveling and love to do so. It's easy to use. You just choose a server location and tap one button to connect. You do not need to be technologically savvy. You don't need to know anything about how it works. It's just one click and it works on every device, phone, laptop, tablets, even TVs. ExpressVPN has really changed the way I use the internet, and I can't recommend it highly enough, so check it out. Right now, you can go to expressvpn.com/tim and get three extra months for free when you sign up.

• 2:27:30Tim Ferriss?

  Just go to expressvpn, E-X-P-R-E-S-S-V-P-N dot com slash tim for an extra three free months of ExpressVPN. One more time, expressvpn.com/tim. Okay, this is gonna be part confessional. As some of you know, I am recently single and navigating the world of modern dating. What a joy that is. Sometimes it's fun, but it's mostly a goddamn mess, as many of you probably know. Tried all the dating apps, and while there's some slick options out there, the most functional that I have found is The League. Why did I end up using The League? First, most dating apps give you almost no information. It's a huge time suck. On The League, you're starting with a baseline of smart people,

• 2:28:15Tim Ferriss?

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

• 2:28:59Tim Ferriss?

  For instance, I usually search for women who love skiing or snowboarding, have those as interests. As I like to spend, say, two to three months of the year in the mountains, I'm a rivers and mountains guy. The UI is a little clunky, I'll warn you, but it's incredibly helpful for finding good matches and not just pretty faces. So you can search by interest and specify multiple cities. So to summarize a few things that I think make it stand out. Features available on The League include multi-city dating, LinkedIn verified profiles, ability to block your profile from coworkers, 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?

• 2:29:44Tim Ferriss?

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

• 2:30:28Tim Ferriss?

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