Stacey Abrams on Leveling up and Serving the Common Good

Ryan talks to Stacey Abrams about the true meaning of the word Stoic, the notion of scaling and leveling up in business, the importance of serving the common good, and more. The name Stacey Abrams has become synonymous with voting accessibility and turnout, making history by becoming the first woman and first African American woman to hold positions in state and national politics. Stacey is now one of the most prominent African American female politicians in the United States. She rose to national prominence when she ran for governor of Georgia in 2018. While she lost that race by about 55,000 votes, her candidacy was historic in and of itself. When she won the Democratic primary in that race, she became the first African American woman to receive a major party’s nomination for governor. Stacey continues to advocate for and help with voter registration and founded Fair Fight Action in 2018, an organization created to address the issues of voter suppression. Among her many accolades, Stacey is also an author. She has written three books: Minority Leader: How to Lead from the Outside and Make Real Change, and Our Time Is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America, and her most recent: Level Up: Rise Above the Hidden Forces Holding Your Business Back. Blinkist takes top nonfiction titles, pulls out the key takeaways and puts them into text and audio explainers called Blinks that give you the most important information in just 15 minutes. Go to Blinkist.com/STOIC to start your free 7 day trial and get 25% off of a Blinkist Premium membership. The Jordan Harbinger Show is one of the most interesting podcasts on the web, with guests like Kobe Bryant, Mark Manson, Eric Schmidt, and more. Listen to one of Ryan's episodes right now (1, 2), and subscribe to the Jordan Harbinger Show today. Kion Aminos is backed by over 20 years of clinical research, has the highest quality ingredients, no fillers or junk, undergoes rigorous quality testing, and tastes amazing with all-natural flavors. Go to getkion.com/dailystoic to save 20% on subscriptions and 10% on one-time purchases. Bambee is an HR platform built for businesses like yours –– so you can automate the most important HR practices AND get your own dedicated HR Manager. Go to Bambee.com/stoic right now for your FREE HR audit. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: https://dailystoic.com/dailyemailCheck out the Daily Stoic Store for Stoic inspired products, signed books, and more. Follow us: Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, TikTok, FacebookFollow Stacey Abrams: Homepage, Twitter, Instagram, FacebookSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

• 38:17Speaker 0

  Confidence is when you have the ability to admit foibbles and vulnerabilities and move on beyond despite it. Confidence exists when your movement through the world is galvanized by your understanding of the world that you're in, not by your pretense of the world you as you want it to be.

• 6:34Speaker 1

  So I I want to talk uh a little bit about probably the stuff that people think that you're gonna come on and talk about. Uh but let's move, let's move that to the end. Uh because I really want to talk about business with you, but but I feel like I have to start with something that that ties directly to what this podcast is about, which is in your post-election speech, as you were frustrated and pained and sort of wrestling with what happened. You said, uh, let me get this exact quote, because it struck me, and I I emailed a mutual friend of ours, uh Adrian Bosch, uh, who I knew was doing something with you, and I told her to talk to you about it. I don't know if she did. But you said, uh, as a leader, I should be stoic in my outrage and silent in my rebuke.

• 7:24Speaker 1

  But stoicism is a luxury and silence is a weapon. Um, as a person who writes about stoicism, I'm fascinated with your that like that is the one definition of stoicism, the sort of lowercase stoicism. But but what does that word mean to you? I guess when you when you thought people wanted you to be stoic about it, what did you what were you, what do you take that to mean?

• 7:49Speaker 0

  And the common parlance, stoicism is often presumed to be a sort of a strong face that does not react with emotion or with indignation. Not that you are sublimating your emotions, but that you simply refuse them in the audience. And in politics, in particular in politics for women and women of color, emotions are incredibly complicated. Sure. Uh outrage is you know described stereotypically as your angry black woman. There, they're just there's so many pieces that get attributed to gender and race. And when those two things are conflated, the, you know, the you know, the possibilities are endless.

• 8:35Speaker 0

  And so for me, the the notion of stoicism was that I was supposed to just you know accept my fate and move on with things as they are. And for me, that is something you get to do when the consequences are yours alone. But just as women and and people of color and and again, women of color are you know, we are assailed by these different stereotypes of our reaction, a lack of reaction is also a response that then validates the following, you know, the actions that follow. And for me, it really was a choice because one of the critiques of me and my legislative performance was always that I wasn't emotional enough.

• 9:21Speaker 0

  I wasn't emotive or gladhander, and that people were surprised when I actually felt things. And so it there it was a deliberate choice to not only respond, but to also articulate why the response was gonna be met with critique.

• 9:39Speaker 1

  Isn't that funny how we get people both ways? We say, like, they're too emotional, and then they're not emotional enough. So then we say they're not emotional enough, and then they get emotional. We go, why are you being so emotional? Exactly.

• 9:51Speaker 0

  Well,

• 9:52Speaker 1

  well, what I love uh what I what I loved about that, and I think it's a discussion worth having is I kind of feel like epicurean and stoic are two words that, and I'm sure uh knowing where you went to school, I'm sure you touched on these topics uh philosophically quite a bit. There are two words that have been done a grave injustice by the English language, because epicurean doesn't mean hedonist, and stoic doesn't mean doesn't ever sort of apathetically just sits back and lets life happen to them. But that is kind of what people think the lowercase epicurean and lowercase stoic mean.

• 10:29Speaker 0

  Yeah, I mean, there's an attribution of the worst aspects, in part because understanding more means reading more. And often we are we are driven by our society and our culture to gain the sort of superficial understanding of any of this language. Plus, we sound smart when we use these words. And I don't regrudge anyone that, but it does take time. I I tease some of my uh staff. They are they are they're younger. And one when we were meeting all together, when I had a new group of folks come on board, someone said, you know, what are your pet peeves? And I said, misapplication of words. So one example. And they said, Well, can you give me an example? And I couldn't because the person who'd done it who who had been the culprit was standing near me.

• 11:17Speaker 0

  And I said, notorious actually has a specific meaning. It notorious and notoriety actually tend towards bad actions. You cannot call someone notorious as a compliment, generally speaking. Now, I know in common parlance, we've gotten to the place where we just think that means famous, but famous has a specific meaning, and so does notorious. And when I explained it to the person offline, they were like, oh, I hadn't realized that because they'd refer to me as infamous. I'm like, I don't need I need you not to do that again.

• 11:51Speaker 1

  Right. Right. There's there's a there's a little subtle shade being thrown on on calling you the infamous Stacey Abrams.

• 11:59Speaker 0

  And and he had no, there was no malintent. And and back to your point about epicurean and stoicism. We hear words so often that the meaning becomes the meaning of the last person who used it in front of us.

• 12:11Speaker 1

  Yes.

• 12:12Speaker 0

  And that is one of the dangers of language, but it's also one of the opportunities of language. And part of our responsibility is to be very careful about when we use it, how we use it, and to provide enough context that our meaning is actually understood.

• 12:27Speaker 1

  So my definition of stoicism that I've uh tried to propagate is that a stoic believes that the stoic, the philosopher as opposed to the lowercase stoic, is that we don't control what's happened, but we control how we respond to what happened, which is why uh I loved or wanted to talk to you about it, because you were saying, if you're if we're using my definition, you're saying I'm not gonna be stoic about it, but then that's exactly what you did, right? You didn't get emotional about it, but you focused on what you were going to do about it, whether the circumstances were just or unjust, you focused on what could be done in response to it, which is to me quintessential stoicism.

• 13:09Speaker 0

  And I agree, and I appreciate you seeing that.

• 13:12Speaker 1

  Well, and it's funny because you know, and I I know I said we're gonna talk about politics later. We have this idea that the Stoics were apathetic or not involved in politics. And then uh, and and every time I talk about politics on Daily Stoic, people get mad and they go, you know, what would so-and-so think about this? And I go, well, Marcus Aurelius, the career politician, would probably not have that much of a Cato the Senator, George George Washington, the uh, you know, the founder of a the revolutionary founder of a new country would not have objected to using uh ancient philosophy in uh the political setting, because that was the whole purpose of philosophy in the ancient world was how to create a better society or system or or protection of of rights and property and all these things.

• 14:03Speaker 0

  Absolutely. And it goes back to the fundamental understanding of what politics are and the popularization of the phrasing versus the intention. I my parents are United Methodist ministers, and often I am not often, but I've been castigated more than once about discussing politics in church. And I point out that if you read the Bible, the Bible is nothing but a political thriller. The the crucification, the crucifixion of Christ was a political act. Here was a rabble browser and an upstart who was attempting to create, you know, a challenge to the political order. Sure. We can't divorce these things, but we have to understand them in context, and we have to understand their application.

• 14:50Speaker 0

  And we do ourselves a disservice when we try to divorce the spaces where we operate so completely from their origin story.

• 14:59Speaker 1

  Epic Tita said that philosophy wasn't this dry abstract thing. It was a thing he said you should be talking about, writing down, reading about, exploring with other people all the time. That's how I think about philosophy. And it's weird. For the last five years, every single day I've been writing this free email about stoic philosophy. It's been not just cool to meet all these fellow practitioners of stoic philosophy, but in writing about it, talking about it, reading it for our podcast, I have got to internalize these ideas in a way that I never would have been able to under any other circumstances. That's the idea. Philosophy is something you're supposed to engage in, not keep in these dusty old books or read once and be done with.

• 15:46Speaker 1

  It's a constant process. And I think that's why the email has worked so well for the people reading about it and sharing it and talking about it, all of that as well. So I'd love to have you join us on this email. You can sign up at Daily Stoic.com/slash daily email. It's totally free. No spam. You can unsubscribe whenever you want. I've basically given away a book for free every single year for five years, and I'm gonna keep on doing it until I dropped it. Check it out. Daily Stoke.com/slash daily email. I think that's right. Well, let's let's actually transition then. So because Stacey Abrams, the political activist, political candidate, uh organizer is so well known, not infamous, but well known. Uh I would imagine that most people are uh either not familiar or not very familiar with Stacey Abrams, the businesswoman and entrepreneur, which I was fascinated to read about in the book, uh, which was published by my uh friends at My Publisher uh portfolio.

• 16:46Speaker 1

  But how how did you you started in politics and then went to business, or you've kind of been leaping back and forth for a long time. How do you get into that part

• 15:44Speaker 0

  of your life? I was a tax attorney by training. So practiced for three years and private practice, moved over and became deputy city attorney for Atlanta, did that for a little over three and a half years and decided to stand for public office. I ran for the state legislature. I decided as a personal matter that I could not legitimately serve in my role as a city attorney and stand for public office for the state level. This is not a there's no prohibition against it. It just personally did not feel right to me. Conflict of

• 16:17Speaker 1

  interest.

• 16:19Speaker 0

  There were no actual conflicts, but the appearance of conflict for me was problematic.

• 16:24Speaker 1

  Sure.

• 16:24Speaker 0

  So I stepped down from that role, but I had started a few major projects for the city and was asked to keep doing the work until I got elected. They said, you know, once you're elected, we can have another conversation, but we kind of need your help since you created these new entities. And I created my first company, my consulting firm. And that was my first uh foray into business ownership. It was terrifying. I had no interest in being an entrepreneur. I like paychecks. They make me very happy. And

• 16:55Speaker 1

  being dependable, right?

• 16:57Speaker 0

  They are, exactly. And I've met me. I wasn't sure I had not met myself as a business person. I had met my employers before. I trusted them. I had less you know, faith in myself, but that was my aforay into business. And I did okay because I had these clients that came to me and said, please represent me. But once I was successful, I then had to find new clients. And that's where Laura and I who'd become friends actually became business partners because she wanted to leave her company and go out on our own. I needed someone who actually liked doing this, and we decided to go into business together.

• 17:35Speaker 1

  Yeah, that what you what you just said there about how you'd met yourself as a sort of salaried employee but not met yourself as an entrepreneur, is an interesting one because I I also imagine like both my parents were civil servants. We grew up in Sacramento, which is a government town. Uh, you said your parents were ministers. I think it's also that we tended to meet pretty much everyone else who was a salaried employee or uh or or not employed, but very rarely do we meet people who work for themselves. I mean, the the or we don't even tend to see people as working for themselves. So you you said you you you you started your firm, but I people we don't often even think of consultants or accountants or uh lawyers as entrepreneurs, even doctors that run their own practice are an entrepreneur, but we see them as what they do, not the that they do that in addition to running the business around it.

• 18:30Speaker 0

  There's that absolutely, and I think the other corollary for me was that I knew my parents did other things, but it was always to make up for the the gaps that were left by the lack of full salary or how tenuous a salary could be, depending on the job that you had, because before they became ministers, my mom was a librarian and my dad was a shipyard worker, and they had six kids. And so they often had to take on side jobs. So for me, the notion of someone who was employed, it was because you couldn't get a job that paid you. It was not, or that you needed an extra job because your job didn't pay you enough. It was not the intent to stand on your own and to start your own thing. It was usually to make up for a lack in some other space.

• 19:14Speaker 1

  Yeah, it's like you're almost seeing it as a disempowered thing instead of a somewhat empowered thing, which is like they're going off and making something from nothing. We see it as, oh, they're just making ends meet or they do this on the side as opposed to they're this and have this entrepreneurial side.

• 19:31Speaker 0

  Exactly.

• 19:32Speaker 1

  It's sad too. We don't even see like uh as a writer, I don't think I saw writing as an entrepreneurial thing that you you, you know, that you work for yourself, that it's a business and you have to create an LLC and there's expenses and a PL. Like you again, we just see it as the work product, not the business behind it that makes that product succeed.

• 19:56Speaker 0

  Exactly. I I am in the midst of going through a bit of a public discussion, and we're gonna get to politics later, but there is a bit of a social media debate about my source of income and the interim between me running for office. During my time as a private citizen, one of my businesses was writing. It's something I've been doing for 20 years. I published my first novel in 2001. I've been writing for a very long time, but for many, it is seen as a hobby, or it is a term that is disconnected from the ability to make a living at it, unless you are hyper famous. But yes, it and as you know, it's making sure you plan your time. It is being able to make your deliverable. It is having a conversation with your editor when you are you're gonna be a little bit late and you've got to get permission.

• 20:47Speaker 0

  It's an actual business that requires the this the structure that you described, but also requires a discipline that I think is sometimes missing in the public understanding of what it means to be a writer who can actually make a living at writing.

• 21:07Speaker 1

  Yeah, I mean, when I was a kid, my father was a police officer and he sort of cobbled together this little you know collection of rental properties. You know, the first house they bought, then we moved and they kept it. So I was familiar with the idea that you could make money from property, right? And it it I'd probably written three or four books before it really also occurred to me that like it was called intellectual properties. Yes. And that you you are you've created a thing, you know, you said you've written books for 20 years. Those books are still earning income. Sometimes it's a little bit of income, sometimes it's a lot. But suddenly you get a royalty statement and you're like, oh, I created this thing from nothing and people are paying for it.

• 21:44Speaker 0

  Yes. In fact, I just got a royalty statement last week, and I'm like, oh my. I I knew it intellectually when I started, but the reality that something I did 15 years ago is still creating yield. That is exciting and is absolutely an entrepreneurial effort because there was a risk in doing this, a risk of time, a risk of talent that it would not yield what I needed. And I was certainly not paid at the time that I started writing, I was not paid what I receive now when I write things. But the long-term benefit is absolutely there.

• 22:24Speaker 1

  My my first book, which I I wrote in 2011, just earned out its advance last month. Uh so I remember getting this large advance being like, I've made it, I'm a writer, but now if I divide it over 10 years, I was making much less than minimum wage. Oh, I can beat you.

• 22:42Speaker 0

  My very first book that I published, they paid me 2500 for it.

• 22:47Speaker 1

  Wow.

• 22:48Speaker 0

  Yeah. I aren't 2500. Uh, it's being reissued. The upside is much different.

• 22:56Speaker 1

  Yes. Well, because now you've built a platform and a brand uh that the that draws people in, which yes, the I saw some of the criticism about your your success and wealth. Um, I remember there was a Jerry Seinfeld uh joke someone was making someone was implying that he was very successful. And he says, Isn't that the whole point? Isn't that what we're all trying to do? Like uh I I would I can't imagine being upset that someone's been successful uh in business and in life. Uh that that seems like a silly thing to criticize them for, especially when you have criticized them for the exact opposite, also. I

• 23:35Speaker 0

  contain

• 23:36Speaker 1

  multitude. So when you think about when I was reading about your business, uh your business trajectory or your business, uh your career in business, I kept coming back to this the theme of pivoting. It seems like you started in one thing and then it became another thing, and then it became another thing. Even your you you invented this uh this basically baby bottle uh with your partner, and somehow that turned into a payments company. Like uh you seem like you embody the uh the uh the the sort of a certain entrepreneurial flexibility that I thought was unique.

• 24:12Speaker 0

  We I and I want to give a great deal of credit to Lara because Laura Hodgson is my my business partner. We've gone into business together four times. Uh we started with Insomnia and then we created Nourish. We so three times Insomnia Nourish and uh now account. And yes, each one of those iterations was a pivot where we acknowledged there was something about what we were doing that could yield something else, or there was a flaw in what we were doing that revealed something. When Insomnia Consulting, which is the firm we started together, when we realized that we were only making money when we were awake and thinking hard, and we had this very broad set of clients.

• 24:59Speaker 0

  Uh we had NASA, we did a case study for NASA, and we were doing uh water desalination. That meant we had to research and learn and study and write and craft. And it was exciting and fun, but it was also exhausting. And you cannot replicate your brain.

• 25:16Speaker 1

  Yes.

• 25:17Speaker 0

  You can only hire people and hope that they will think about things the way you do. We then realized we wanted to do something where we could create a template, and that template would then generate the revenue we needed. And that was our products company that was nourish. It was based on Lara having a young child and our discussing wanting to create this manufacturing opportunity. But it was absolutely a pivot where we took one challenge that we found and tried to solve for it. And when it did not work because of the payments challenges we had, the fact that we could not float major corporations while we waited for them to pay us. That then became now account, a solution to a problem that could not solve. We couldn't go back in time and solve the problem for nourish, but we could be forward looking and solve the problem for the next nourish wherever it came from.

• 26:08Speaker 1

  That is the that is the problem with a lot of the sort of intellectual or knowledge-based businesses where you're a consultant, you perform professional services, is if depending on where you come from, it suddenly seems like it's a very profitable business. You're like, I'm charging $100, $200, $500 an hour or whatever. That seems great. And then you go, ah, but there's only a finite amount of hours in the week. So you hit this ceiling. Those businesses are hard to scale. And that's where intellectual property comes in, because that does scale.

• 26:41Speaker 0

  Exactly. And part of what I've been able to do with my intellectual property, what we've been able to do with Now Account is that I'm no longer with now account, but I continue to be an owner. And so I benefit the better it does, the better I will do. We are not public yet. And so it's it's still in the private sec, the very private ownership phase. But there is a there's an upside and a possibility that will exist for me regardless of my contribution in 2022 or 2024. When I write a book, the moment NBC Universal said we want to possibly turn your book into a movie, that meant that the intellectual property that I created more than a decade ago had a life that I had not imagined.

• 27:27Speaker 0

  And the tale on that can be extraordinary. The same thing is true with a romance novel I wrote in 2004. Those are opportunities that can proliferate, and I don't have to write another word for it to be true.

• 27:41Speaker 1

  And that someone else can pick up the ball and run with it, right? So that you're that now still exists and is operating without you having to be involved day to day, just like the movie rights of a project can be purchased from you, someone else can do it. That's where you start to uh to to use your phrase. That's where leveling up comes because you're it's no longer your ceiling.

• 28:07Speaker 0

  Exactly. And that's the notion of scale. Scale is the ability to take a core construct and to magnify it and to continue to grow it without sacrificing the the core notion. And so whether it is now account, which is bigger than it was when we started and will continue to grow, whether it was nourish, which didn't scale because we could not afford the we could not afford to level up, or my writing, which has leveled up not because of anything I thought I was doing to benefit it, but the corollary to my other life is that now people read stuff I wrote when I was 25 and uh had some time on my hands because I needed to find a way to make my rent. Those all have the ability to scale and to allow us to level up.

• 28:57Speaker 1

  That was one another theme through the book. If pivoting is one of them, the other theme is you seem to not have a lot of time on your hands. You seem to manage to make a lot of time and and juggle a lot of things at the same time, which is another part of entrepreneurship that I think is, you know, we we tend to think it's like this 20-year-old college dropout in in Menlo Park. Um, but really you and your founder are doing multiple things at the same time, using, you know, maybe a paycheck from over here to fund this side project over here until eventually you switch and then you're writing books and holding public office all at the same time. You you seem like you you're very good at multitasking.

• 29:40Speaker 0

  I I am. And part of having such an extraordinary business partner in Laura was that I had someone who understood that for me, it was both necessity but also nature.

• 29:50Speaker 1

  Sure.

• 29:51Speaker 0

  The necessity was I had family obligations and personal obligations, and I did not have the resources on my own to do what I needed to do. We never drew a paycheck from Nourish, but that was many years of our lives and many hours in our day. And so during that time, I wrote, I think two novels. Uh Laura understood that I also had a very deep commitment to my public policy work through politics, and she understood that that would take time. That didn't relieve me of my responsibility to do our day jobs, but it did create for me both the necessity of being able to deliver and then my nature is I I like doing different things. It excites me to have multiple ideas happening in my mind, and I've been privileged, blessed, opportuned to be able to do multiple things, which sometimes strikes people as dissonant.

• 30:47Speaker 0

  But for me, it's it's again, it's of it's of my nature.

• 30:58Speaker 1

  Yeah, I mean, the most uh other than supply and demand, the most fundamental law of economics in my view is the law of comparative advantage. And it seems like the way that you have leveled up is by finding one one with Laura, but also other people is we can level up by finding partners who complement us so we can do what we do and they can do the things that we can't do, and vice versa. And that's what allows like when I look at someone who who does multiple things like you, I don't think, oh, they're a superhuman. I go, they must have a really great team, right? Because that's the only way that's possible.

• 31:34Speaker 0

  Absolutely. And if someone tells you that's not the case, they are either lying or they're underpaying their staff. I I am very forthright about the fact that I have amazing partners. When I created the nonprofit organizations I created in the last four years, or even the New Georgia project, which I started in 14, I always bring a partner on board. I know my limitations. I know that I know what I'm very good at, but I also know the spaces where I'm weaker and I know the demands that I cannot meet. And I find partners for whom that is their sweet spot, but also people who want to grow into these opportunities, whether I'm there or not, because I create entities or work with the assumption that I will either be obsolete or that I will have something else to do.

• 32:25Speaker 0

  And that intended obsolescence for me, I think makes me a better business partner because I'm going to put everything I can into it, but I'm not going to encroach on your salience because I don't need to be you for us to be successful.

• 32:41Speaker 1

  When I look, I think the the biggest mark of success for like a coach in professional sports is not just how much have they won, but what is their coaching tree look like? Like what are the coaches that have worked with them gone on to do? And so if you're the kind of leader that can develop a reputation for the people who worked for this person have gone on to do great things, uh you not only not only is I think like a morally indecent thing to do, but also it helps you attract great talent. Yes. And it can save you money because you don't have to pay them as much because they realize, hey, what I'm getting here is the opportunity in two years. I'm not going to work here for 30 years. It's a it's a training program.

• 33:23Speaker 0

  Exactly. And if I'm doing my job well, I'm the person writing the letter of recommendation for you to leave me to go to the next best thing.

• 33:32Speaker 1

  Yes, I'm I'm proud of what my assistants have gone on to do. Yes. And uh that people can pay them a lot more money than I can. Absolutely.

• 33:42Speaker 0

  So I encourage them strongly.

• 33:44Speaker 1

  So to go so go back to the failures a little bit, uh, because some of the businesses exceeded, some of it hasn't. There's a story at the founding of Stoicism, uh, which again, I think the connection between stoicism and entrepreneurship. Um, Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, he's uh he's a merchant and he grows up in his parents' uh uh uh die business. It's a purple die that they ship all over the Mediterranean and he ends up suffering this shipwreck and he loses everything. He washes up in Athens, and this is what turns him on to philosophy. But he he loses all his money, loses his career. And he would joke later that he made a great fortune when he suffered a shipwreck because the the failure of one thing uh opened up this whole other path. And that struck me as kind of similar to your story too, that you probably wanted each one of these things to succeed more than anything, and yet you wouldn't be here had you gotten what you wanted in some ways.

• 34:40Speaker 0

  Absolutely. I I never celebrate failure as a native good. I like success, but I never underestimate the value of failure. And I think it's about failing forward, I to use all the terms of art. But it's also about understanding that you learn your lessons, not your losses. When failure is problematic, it's when you dwell on. The act of not getting or the act of not achieving. And when that becomes the core of what you know, failure is debilitating. But if you learn the lessons of failure, why did you fail? Was it you? Was it someone else? It's usually both. And more often than we like, it's mostly us. And so understand what you did, what you could have done differently, what do you, what should you have known, or what you couldn't have known, but now know and can take with you.

• 35:33Speaker 0

  And when you're willing to learn those lessons, that failure then becomes absolutely a gift because it's a set, it's knowledge that you've gained that you would not have had had success visited you earlier.

• 35:51Speaker 1

  Does that require a certain confidence though? Because I could see where someone uh who's sort of uh it's it's it's this winding path, you're not taking a paycheck, it's not working. Uh, or or even you know, an election doesn't go the way you want it to go. It's so easy to identify with the lack of success or the failure to be like this isn't this doesn't reflect on me. I am not a failure. I think that's an underrated skill for leaders and entrepreneurs because it's a fact of life that's gonna happen. Yeah.

• 36:21Speaker 0

  Well, it there are two things that happen. One is that you have to be able to accept it and and understand it and embrace it. I'm not saying celebrate. Don't throw it a ticker-tate parade, but you have to embrace it because that's how you're going to be able to excavate it and understand it. But there's also, I think uh people chafe a bit at your refusal to bow your head in shame. I don't see failure as shameful unless you have done something wrong in the process that you do not repent from. And I think that's the dynamic that unfortunately we amplify. We amplify this desire to see people feel ashamed of not succeeding, ashamed of stumbling. And what that tends to lead to is lying. People will mask, I mean, there's an entire subgenre of net of streaming services covering all the people lying about their successes.

• 37:13Speaker 1

  Sure.

• 37:14Speaker 0

  And that doesn't happen suasponte. It happens because we have so created this notion of success as an independent good that is divorced from any effort or any stumbles. But we also have created this notion that shame should follow you if you fail. Thus, you have to manufacture an entire life to sustain your you know, faux success.

• 37:41Speaker 1

  Well, what I've I've come to point out is like uh uh fake it till you make it, which is this sort of uh mantra a lot of people have. Elizabeth Holmes reminds us that another word for that is is fraud, right? You have to be honest and vulnerable about the reality of what you're doing and where you're going. Yes, marketing is part of it, but there's a fine line between marketing and lying, as you said. Right.

• 38:08Speaker 0

  And part of confidence is confidence, isn't real if it's borne out only by success. You're not being confident, you're just being you. Confidence is when you have the ability to admit foibbles and vulnerabilities and move on beyond despite it. Confidence exists when your movement through the world is galvanized by your understanding of the world that you're in, not by your pretense of the world you as you want it to be.

• 38:36Speaker 1

  Yeah, I I say that too. I I don't believe in myself. I have evidence, right? Like because I know what I've done, I know the traits that I have, I am able to then endure ups and downs without changing because I know who I am for better or worse, and you celebrating me or you criticizing me does not really change that too much one way or another.

• 39:03Speaker 0

  I I like to say I've met me, I'm not overly impressed.

• 39:08Speaker 1

  So you get into politics, but you seem to be very interested in local politics almost from the beginning. Not super not hyperloc, but like, you know, not the sexiest, most uh uh highly paid, highly sought offices. What attracts you to getting involved in in a whole other domain when you already have writing and business and I'm sure a bunch of other stuff on your plate. I

• 39:39Speaker 0

  grew up poor in Mississippi, uh, which is the beginning of a blues song, I'm certain. But I I was raised by parents who wanted us to understand that we had an obligation to our own enrichment, education was critical. They raised us with a faith tradition, although my parents told us very baldly, like we're not taking you to heaven with us. If you're gonna get there, you need to learn what this is and why you believe and do it yourself. But we'll give you the books and help you get started. Having your minister parents tell you they're not taking you to heaven is a real, it's an eye-opener and it it

• 40:12Speaker 1

  you know, it

• 40:13Speaker 0

  solidifies your your true degree of faith.

• 40:16Speaker 1

  That's the opposite of helicopter parenting.

• 40:18Speaker 0

  Exactly. I mean, there they took us to church, but you they were like, we can't make you listen, but we will make sure we avail you of the opportunity. We had to go to school, but they couldn't make us learn. But they also taught us that you're responsible for the world around you. And for me, the sense of responsibility is both selfish and I don't think it's altruistic, but it's selfish, but it's also communal in that obligation is not simply to solve problems for myself. If I figure out a solution, my responsibility is then to share that solution with others, to scale those solutions. And so for me, politics was the way to scale the solutions that I saw embedded in poverty and in lack and in disinvestment in marginalized and disadvantaged communities.

• 41:04Speaker 0

  Local politics is the closest politics to the people. And so I started at the city level, and I've been very focused on state politics because in the South, it is at the state level that so many decisions get made. Uh it and it's true absolutely in Georgia, and it's largely true across the South that there is this ability called preemption that local governments can try to solve problems, but those solutions can be overridden by the state. And so when I was deputy city attorney for Atlanta, for example, I helped pass a law that would have guaranteed a minimum wage in the city of Atlanta that would have been a living wage. It was my first major initiative when I became deputy city attorney, and it was soon overridden by the state. And it they outlawed the ability of any local government to guarantee a living wage for any of their citizens.

• 41:54Speaker 0

  That really trained my focus on the fact that the state government had this outsized power that could override the most well-intentioned local response to local need. And what drives me in politics, what drives me in business is if you see a problem, your job is to figure out how to solve it. And if you're gonna create a solution, you need to create a solution that is sustainable, that is irreplicable, and that's scalable. And so whether it's leveling up in the private sector or leveling up in the public sector, for me, it's how do you take solutions to problems and scale them so that they are sustainable and that they don't require a cult of personality to keep them working.

• 42:35Speaker 1

  That is been an interesting thing as a person who comes from the West Coast and now I live in a small town in rural Texas. Uh, it's watching exactly what you just said, where the state government seems to be interested in smacking down attempts to change or try or do things. Now, if if the motivation was, well, we don't want that, we want this instead, I think it would make more sense to me. But it's this kind of almost like vetoocracy where it's just like, no, you can't do that. And in fact, you can't do anything, and therefore things should stay exactly as they are. Absolutely.

• 43:17Speaker 0

  And to tie it back to level up and to tie it back to the conversation we're having in the book, it's the same in policies when it comes to small businesses. It is not that we are seeing this proliferation of solutions for small businesses. We are seeing this very rigid response, which is we know what we want you to have, and we are not going to let you have anything else, and you're going to like it. And whether that's in business or in politics, and let's take politics, if it's business or in policy, in the public policy space, you're constraining people from innovation, you're constraining them from progress, and you're constraining them from opportunity. And going back to the beginning of this conversation, we should want success for people. We shouldn't castigate success. And if we are going to hold as our mantra that success and opportunity is what we want for our people, then why would we create these barriers to those opportunities and to that success?

• 44:11Speaker 1

  Well, that's what I so I have a small bookstore here in this town that I live in. And uh so a number of people that I know said, oh, it must be nice, you know, during the pandemic to live in such a pro-business state, right? And my argument was when the government washes its hands of its public health uh obligations, or when the government actively interferes with what I can do as an owner to keep myself and my employees uh safe, or because it ignores uh, you know, investments in in infrastructure or science, and and then there's a freak snowstorm and my roof collapses and my power goes out and my pipes freeze. That's not pro-business at all. That's that's killing my business and telling me that I'm free to do whatever I want with it.

• 45:01Speaker 1

  It and it's it's maddening.

• 45:03Speaker 0

  Yeah, absolutely. And it's it comes from a very slogan driven. Notion of freedom. Freedom requires not only the ability to do what you need to do, but going back to philosophy, freedom is an interdependent notion. Because when your freedoms interfere with mine, when your liberties constrain mine, that's why we have society. That's why we have these negotiations that have been argued throughout throughout time and history. And those negotiations cannot be forestalled through a slogan that I'm just trying to make sure you're free. If I'm free to die of COVID, that's not really freedom. Yes.

• 45:47Speaker 1

  Right. Right. No, and just because it's not illegal to do something doesn't mean you haven't made it very hard for me to do that thing by making it so dangerous or so unpredictable or unmanaged. And yeah, that's what that's something I've always loved from from the Stokes. Marcus Realist refers to the common good, like 40 times in his meditations. And is my favorite line that says, what's bad for the hive is bad for the bee. And to me, if businesses could think that way, and I try to think about that with my business. Do I pay people a fair wage? Do I give them access to health care? You know, it's not just, you know, multinational corporations that decide whether they're going to outsource or pollute the environment, but like, what does my packaging look like?

• 46:32Speaker 1

  You know, what right now I have a supplier that I've used for several years that's in Belarus. And now I have to decide, you know, do I want to continue using that person? Right now the answer is no. But it's like this isn't a thing that that uh Apple is thinking, just Apple is thinking about, but small businesses have to and get to think about also.

• 46:53Speaker 0

  Absolutely. When we started nourished, Laura and I had a very long and thoughtful conversation about whether or not we were going to have our bottles manufactured in China. Uh the cost differential was extraordinary. And the cost of the molds would be lowered, the cost of production would be lower, our ability to scale would be dramatically exponentially different. But the challenges that were embedded in not having direct oversight because of who our customers were, being the most our customers were the most vulnerable members of society, babies and toddlers. We could not afford to fly back and forth to China to oversee the production. There were concerns that we had about how production would actually be achieved. And particularly we we both had human rights concerns.

• 47:40Speaker 0

  And we had to weigh each of those things against our ability to produce a product that could we could scale and could serve a population we wanted to serve. Those are really good conversations to have. Those are important debates to have. But ultimately, to your point, to Marcus Aurelius' point, the minute you make the choice that only bit benefits the bee.

• 48:01Speaker 1

  Yeah,

• 48:02Speaker 0

  you are ignoring the hive and the hive will revolt. And the revolt may not happen in the instant, but you start to see a diminution in the success of your your honey production, and you start to have quality control issues, and more than likely something else will happen that will drive the decision making. And the same thing is true in government. When you start to see multiple cities and counties trying to do something that the state will not permit, the state's responsibility is to figure out are we serving the hive or are we only serving the bee?

• 48:38Speaker 1

  That's right. And just because the bee, and now we're getting pretty tortured with this, just because the bee is directly in your ear and has better access to the political representatives, does not mean that that's who you should be serving. Exactly. Yeah, I think about that too. Like uh, how how do we uh how do we decide what like again, we only control what we control. So if each individual business owner is deciding to be responsible to make better decisions, cumulatively, it has an enormous impact. We don't just have to sit there and hope that this big company or that big company does something, uh, we can do it. And then the other thing I think is funny is you know, now there's this critique of woke capitalism. But I I tend to find that that those are the companies that care about the labor conditions and that want to make things in the US and care about the environment and work with small businesses.

• 49:32Speaker 1

  So it's it's this weird thing where we've we've almost taken the things we want people to care about and made them this partisan thing that we make fun of instead of being in agreement about them.

• 49:44Speaker 0

  And we have to consider what the antonym to woke is it's comatose. Do we want a business that is non-responsive that ignores its environment? There is not a single business owner that would tell you that they operate an effective business by ignoring their customers, their product, their delivery system, and their their financial statements. If you are not awake to these things, if you were not cognizant of how these things move and operate, then you are not doing your job and you are going to be in trouble unless you can artificially manufacture the environment that you operate in. And that's the challenge I see. That to the extent business exempts itself from direct involvement in the larger questions of how society moves, or worse, when it creates an artificial construction for what that society is, there will be a consequence.

• 50:41Speaker 0

  And the time, the question is not if, but when. And part of leadership is anticipating when and trying to stave off the consequences of delayed outrage and delayed pain and delayed gratification.

• 50:57Speaker 1

  When I I've started to, you know, people go, why is Major League Baseball getting involved in this uh political thing? Or, you know, why is Disney getting involved in this? Why are Twitter's employees, you know, pushing this agenda? It's I think it's because if you want to get that out of the private sector, just make government more responsive. What these employees have figured out is my my democratically elected representatives won't listen to me. They are catering to a tiny minority, the most radicalized uh percentage of the population uh in in perhaps in either side of the aisle. And so the only person I can get to take my concerns seriously is my boss because I have talent and my labor is worth something and they don't want to lose me. So I have to go where my energy is gonna have impact.

• 51:43Speaker 1

  I'd love for that to be at the ballot box, but when you guys are screwing with the ballot box, uh you know, it makes it hard for me to do that.

• 51:52Speaker 0

  Absolutely. And and the reality is people do not, when you enter the doors of a company, you do not cease to be a citizen of your community. You bring all of yourself into that business. That's part of why they hired you. And this notion that you can divorce the consequences of a company's actions from the consequences in your daily life, it's just it's it's a fiction. And to your point, the most important response is one from a business that says, I'm the one they can get to because I open my doors to them. They've closed the doors to the precinct, they've closed the doors. You cannot go to the governor's office, you cannot go into the Capitol, but you have to come to work. So here is where you will take your stand.

• 52:37Speaker 1

  Yeah. So uh a couple years ago, and I actually really enjoyed it. I read a book by another entrepreneur who became a politician in your state. I don't know if you've read Jimmy Carter's campaign book. It's fascinating. It is. Uh uh, and you know, his history as a small business owner, I found to be so interesting. What do you think your uh experience in business has taught you about uh politics, policy, and then more interestingly, recently just reaching people uh trying to create sort of momentum and change, if not directly in office, but by galvanizing voters uh as part of you know many of your initiatives.

• 53:23Speaker 0

  I think there are three things. One is that I became both a politician and a business owner at the exact same time. And so I've grown into both roles and responsibilities without the ability to divorce myself from either. And so I've tried always to think about how what I know drives the market, how that then applies to what decisions we're making at the Capitol. And the converse is what are the consequences of decisions at the Capitol on my ability to generate revenue. That this notion that you are one or the other is again, it's a fiction. It doesn't exist. That's not how the human mind works. And for me, it has been a common growth. Number two, my business partner and I do not share the same politics. Oh. She and I became friends because we had a shared vision.

• 54:09Speaker 0

  Uh, we both we met because we both were interested in the same job one day in our lives. And she came up to me and Laura tells a story, you know, she runs up to me because I said that I was asked to reveal a dark or reveal a secret I'd never shared with anyone because of the expectations of me based on race. And I said, I want to one day possibly be president of the United States. And that's not something I walked around talking about, but she came up to me after the uh event and she was like, I want to do that too. And I've never heard another woman say that. And so she and I got to know each other, and the more we got to know each other, I realized we had divergent politics. She had been appointed by the Republican governor, who I was fighting at the Capitol every week.

• 54:57Speaker 0

  But what I learned from her and learned from being in business with her was that we don't have to have the same politics to have the same purpose. Yeah. And that carried over often to the Capitol. I worked with Republicans. On moving bills and moving issues, because I didn't have to convince them to do it for the same reasons I was doing it. We just have to have the same intention on the other side.

• 55:21Speaker 1

  Sure.

• 55:22Speaker 0

  And then the third is that you're going to mess up. You're going to make a mistake. Something is going to go horribly wrong. And you can either own it and acknowledge it, or you can try to hide it and get caught later. And there are politicians who are sharing cells with business owners who both think that lying about their mistakes were that was the way to go. And I didn't have to, I didn't have to learn that lesson, but I think there is a there's a very real sense that you're the end is nigh if you acknowledge a mistake. And both in politics and in business, I have discovered that the job is to you do if you're doing your best job, you are going to mess something up. Acknowledge it, apologize for it, try to fix it. Some will forgive you, many more will not.

• 56:09Speaker 0

  And the internet is forever. And you cannot let that shake your sense of your responsibility to do the next thing.

• 56:16Speaker 1

  Well, it's the ego is the enemy in business and in politics, and that sort of fragile ego that doesn't want to admit error that doubles down that hides is the ego that takes a bad problem and makes it a criminal problem or whatever. Exactly. Yeah. How do you keep the faith? I think that that's something I struggle with. I mean, I love where I live. I I love America. But then when you watch people seem expend so much energy to do something like evil is too strong a word. But it's I just, it's like, why do you care so much about this? Like, why are you so intent on preventing people from doing this, making these people feel shame about that, right? Limiting these people's voices or rights or access over here.

• 57:02Speaker 1

  How like in business, the nice part is like you kind of are in it for yourself, and you can get so focused on your thing. You don't have to, you know, it doesn't tug at the heartstrings the same way as when you look out and you go, how is our system doing this? How do you keep the faith in all that? Because you seem like I wouldn't say an optimistic person, but you seem like a person who has not been made cynical despite having some very real reasons to be cynical and angry.

• 57:33Speaker 0

  I've described this before. I call myself an ameliorist, which is not a term of art that actually exists in nature. Uh this is my appropriation of the word ameliorate, but essentially it means to try to mitigate harm. My very crass description is I think the glass is half full. It's just probably poisoned, and my job is to find the antidote. And that's how I move through life. I am neither optimistic nor pessimistic. I'm just very determined, and that helps me keep the faith.

• 58:07Speaker 1

  So you sort of focus on where you have some agency, uh, which is the glass is poisoned and an evil person did it, but I am strong enough, creative enough, determined enough that I can unpoison it.

• 58:19Speaker 0

  Well, I'm gonna get thirsty. And if it is poison, I can I can be hopeful that the poison isn't in my glass, but it probably is. I'm going to get thirsty, so I can't avoid the poison. And so my responsibility is to anticipate how do you solve for the poison that will be in your glass? So I create companies and nonprofits and I write books and I do these things, and I run for office, trying to find the antidotes to the poisons that are going to inevitably pervade our society and pervade our superstructures. My my self-appointed responsibility, the way I see my space in this world, is that I'm searching for an antidote. And it is not out of naivety, and it is not out of pessimism. It is simply the reality that there are ills and evils and poisons.

• 59:08Speaker 0

  They're going to find us. Let's make sure we can respond.

• 59:12Speaker 1

  My my last question for you is uh, you know, the the so-called great man of history theory, which gendered as it is, uh fall is somewhat uh out of style these days, right? The the idea everything is systemic, everything is broken, everything is rigged or awful. And there's there are some truth to it. But this idea that that one person can change the course of history on a little level or a big level, people don't like to think that way. But what I think so, and and I wonder if this comes from your time as an entrepreneur, that like you can make something from nothing. I mean, here you are, uh the the governor race goes the way it does. You you go in another direction. And I'm not sure if the Democrats take the Senate in a counter-narrative there.

• 1:00:02Speaker 1

  And as you and I are talking, that people will be listening to this later, but as you and I are talking, uh Justice uh Brown Jackson was confirmed to the Supreme Court. And again, I'm not sure that happens if you don't, if you decide to be lowercase stoic about what happened.

• 1:00:23Speaker 0

  I am grateful for the role that I can play. And I can only play the roles that I can. One of the challenges in the notion of the great man theory is that that person will rise. I'm more of a Buffy the vampire slayer potentials person. So Buffy, the vampire slayer, she was the chosen one. She was the one and every generation is called to kill the vampires. Buffy realized, and I don't want to spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen the last 20 years, but boom Buffy realizes that she can defeat the greatest evil, not by being the only person, but by doing everything she can to animate the potential greatness in others. And so she animates all of these other possible slayers who would only come into being if she dies and they together defeat the evil.

• 1:01:13Speaker 0

  I choose that theory. I am not alone in this. I am often the person who can start it because I might have access to information or opportunity, or I simply just don't care if I mess up at it. And so I'll do things others won't do, but I am only good as long as I'm doing it to make certain that others also see their potential and can do it themselves.

• 1:01:37Speaker 1

  And that goes to the idea of the coaching tree. Who are the people that you are influencing that then can that can then go on and influence things. And so it's not as it you're right, it's it's both individualistic and collective in its uh view of change, but it does start with you and each individual person saying, I don't have to accept things as they are. The world is it is possible to change things, even if it's just a uh, you know, two degrees.

• 1:02:09Speaker 0

  Exactly. Two degrees is a big deal when you live in the South.

• 1:02:13Speaker 1

  It is, it is changes changes slow, and as Faulkner said, the past is uh is not even dead yet. So we're not as far from these things as uh we'd like to tell ourselves that we are, and so any bit of progress is perhaps getting the momentum going. Exactly. Well, Stacey, I'm I'm a big fan, and uh I loved the book, and I loved talking to you. And uh I think uh even if people don't agree with uh all of your politics, I think the story is itself what we need more of, which is a person decides they're gonna do something about uh about what they can do something about, which is also the definition of entrepreneurship, is it not? Exactly.

• 1:02:58Speaker 1

  This is lovely. I appreciate it.

• 1:04:01Speaker 0

  Brian, it's been a delight. Thank you so much for having me.