Pod Insights How I Built This with Guy Raz How I Built Resilience: Live with Deval Patrick About this episode Former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick talks to Guy about how the protests for racial justice have resonated with him personally, and how this moment can spark meaningful change for African Americans — in the world of business and beyond. These conversations are excerpts from our How I Built Resilience series, where Guy talks online with founders and entrepreneurs about how they're navigating turbulent times. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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4:21 Guy Raz? NetSuite Next surfaces insights exactly when you need them, puts agents to work on routine tasks and problems, and lets you ask complex questions in plain language, like talking to a knowledgeable colleague. But technology is only part of the story. AI is also reshaping how people and teams work together, and that shift is already underway. That's why NetSuite wants to put a new expert-created business guide in your hands today. It's called Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work. And right now, it's yours, absolutely free. Inside, you'll discover how AI could reshape work across your entire organization and how to position your business to prosper from it.
5:06 Guy Raz? If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get NetSuite's free business guide, Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work, at netsuite.com/built. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/built. netsuite.com/built. Hey, everyone, and welcome to How I Built This: Resilience Edition. This is where we've been talking with entrepreneurs about how to think creatively during this moment of economic instability. A few days ago, we invited Deval Patrick, the former governor of Massachusetts, to join us. Governor Patrick is now an entrepreneur, investor, and mentor to younger business leaders.
5:46 Guy Raz? And he recently wrote a deeply personal article about his own experiences with racism. Governor Patrick, one of the reasons why we really want to talk to you today, not only because I've interviewed you before in the past and you're just so thoughtful, but you also recently wrote an article, and you posted on Medium. It's called "America's Awakening to What It Means to Be Black." And I just want to quote a couple of things that you wrote in that piece. "We hear from the famous and the accomplished how their fame and accomplishment has not immunized them from the presumption of dangerousness by police." I gave up going to baseball or football games long ago because I got tired of having to overhear drunken fans at Fenway Park or Gillette Stadium shout out epithets at players on the field.
6:29 Guy Raz? You write, "Like every other black trial lawyer," I know you were a trial lawyer, "I've been mistaken for a defendant awaiting trial and directed elsewhere when I came to sit with other attorneys near the bench. The cut of my suit or the quality of my briefcase never mattered." This is, I mean, I read your memoir. This is one of the most personal things I've ever seen you write. Tell me about, about writing it.
6:52 Speaker 01 Well, you know, we've, we've all been, or at least so many of my friends have been, and I have been contacted by our friends, white and black and every other kind, asking how we're doing, you know, in the wake of the, of the videotaped killing of George Floyd and of the shooting of Ahmaud Arbery and that astonishing Central Park video of Amy Cooper reacting to being told to leash her dog. Some of my black friends and I, we've been exchanging with each other some of the things that we have written and some of the things that we have read that really are a longer
7:33 Speaker 01 form, a more complete form of answer to the question, "How are you doing?" Because it's not simple. We're not doing well. In a way, especially for those who have been as blessed as I and some of my professional friends to have lived very much the American dream, we are reminded that that dream has been elusive for so many other young men and women, just as creative, just as ambitious, because of structural barriers that only a few of us have been able to overcome. We're reminded of what my, what my wife calls the indignities du jour. You know, it's the sort of thing we talk about all over the dinner table, but you find
8:16 Speaker 01 in order to function in the larger world, you have to tamp down and even, you know, try to put out of your mind. I hadn't remembered Guy until a young, then young, Now, less so, aid of mine in the campaign and in the in the governor's office reminded me that in the early days of being governor, maybe in the early months of being governor, I was in the front seat of a black sedan official car in the passenger seat, being driven by a black state trooper in plain clothes, and we were pulled over by a marked state trooper car. You know, just why? It was even more ironic, because we had lights
8:59 Speaker 01 on our car as well, and when we put them on, he still wouldn't back off. And he just, I think he was new, he just couldn't process that there was a, you know, a trooper who identified himself as a trooper, who was black in plain clothes, and a governor who identified himself as a governor in a suit, sitting in the front, in the front seat. The fact that it happened in some ways is less significant in the point I'm making than the fact that I had forgotten it, because you push this stuff down, so you can keep going and do what you, what you need to do.
9:32 Guy Raz? You know, I, I wonder whether, because I think there was a line in that article you wrote about, everyone I know who is African American in America suppresses rage all the time, just to function, just to get through the day. And I imagine that watching these mass demonstrations and these conversations about racial injustice, and also a racial reawakening, I, reading that article, it, it seemed like, kind of the words in that article just flowed out of you.
10:01 Speaker 01 Well, there was more. I cut it, I cut it down, but you know, it's, I share the rage. I also, I also share the optimism. You know, this, this country's been good to me, but I have never, I've never forgotten it has not been good to everyone. And I think that there have been all kinds of situations that I and others are recalling where the, and by the way, none of my experience amounts to what happened to George Floyd. I'm not trying to equate them. I'm talking about the through line of devaluing black life, black talent, black ambition.
10:41 Speaker 01 You know, that that is an experience for all of us and that we are so often in interactions with with our white colleagues and friends or with others reluctant to bring up because we don't want to have to, number one, do the additional work of just making them feel comfortable before we bring them up. And secondly, having to persuade them that it happened. You know, there is a kind of a curse. I describe it to being black, which is that you're always asking yourself in this country whether the thing that went sideways in your life was on account of race. It isn't always, but sometimes it is.
11:20 Guy Raz? Yeah.
11:20 Speaker 01 And the way you know, isn't entirely to do with whether it, you know, is peppered with the N word. And if you look at the, you look at the stats, you can see there's an awful lot of what we've been doing in this country and how and whom we've been leaving behind. That is as the result of policies or practices that have their roots in racially motivated decisions.
11:45 Guy Raz? Yeah. You, you have worked in major corporate environments, Coca-Cola, Texaco, investment firms. And now I'm sure you're noticing a lot of big companies, Fortune 500 companies are speaking up about their support for racial justice. What do you make of it? I mean, do you think it's authentic? I mean, do you think businesses will, will or could actually lead the way towards a more equitable and, and just country? Or, or is it, is it an illusion?
12:13 Speaker 01 Well, so I'm going to say two things. First of all, we all have reason to be skeptical. But it is a definitely a step in the right direction because frequently businesses stay out. Of things that are viewed as politically hot or socially uncomfortable. You know, I guess I'd step back and say, I believe that we need to recapture a notion of community in this country, that we have a stake in our neighbors' dreams and struggles as well as our own. The way I understood community growing up on the South Side of Chicago, you know, and we, I think we may have talked about this, where every, every child was under the jurisdiction of every single adult on the block. Yeah.
12:55 Speaker 01 You messed up down the street in front of Ms. Jones, she'd go upside your head as if you were hers. And then call home, so you got it two times. And I think what those adults are trying to teach us is that we, we belong to each other. That doesn't absolve anybody of personal responsibility. It doesn't negate the necessity for grit and determination and so forth, but that a community does owe something to each other. And I think that is also true of the corporate community. And my work in the corporate community has been to that effect. They have been traditionally quite timid because they have customers and business relationships across the political spectrum.
13:39 Speaker 01 But it seems to me, you know, we could move a lot more away from right and left and in the direction of right and wrong, and businesses could do that without jeopardizing their commercial relationships. So I am encouraged by what I have heard. But everybody needs to watch for what these companies do. And if I may, when I left my second term as governor, I founded and led an impact investing fund, a fund that was designed to make equity investments in going concerns,
14:18 Speaker 01 small, medium-sized businesses for both financial return and so measurable, social or environmental impact. And I did that at Bain Capital. And I was proud to do it, and it's, it's been a terrific success, and it goes on. When I saw the first internal statement that Bain Capital put out to its employees after, you know, in the last few weeks, after the George Floyd videotape. It was appropriate and restrained and measured. And it, you know, it was, there was nothing wrong with it, but it felt negotiated. It felt like what you would kind of expect. I'm glad there was one, no doubt about it. About 10 days later, the firm issued a different statement or a new statement.
15:02 Speaker 01 And it talked about some of the things it was going to do. Interestingly, hiring and promotion was a part of it, but it's not where it started. It talked about taking the firm's resources and expertise, I think it was $100 million, and investing it alongside coaching in black business development and entrepreneurial growth in the greater Boston area. That's action. That's the kind of thing I'm looking for as the next step from corporate America.
15:28 Guy Raz? Why don't we come back in just a moment. Governor Patrick offers some thoughts on how political leaders can respond to the protests. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This, Resilience Edition from NPR.
15:46 Guy Raz? Hey, welcome back to How I Built This, Resilience Edition. And we're going to continue my conversation with Deval Patrick, the former governor of Massachusetts, now a managing director at Bain Capital. And as always, we got some great questions from people in the audience. We're getting a bunch of questions. This is from Alison Biggs. She asks, what concrete actions can elected officials at all levels of government take to answer the calls of protesters in cities and towns across the country? So it's a policy question. It's a tricky, challenging question because I think if we had the answers, we would be able to give them. But what sort of actionable, measurable things could be implemented that could actually have a significant impact very quickly?
16:28 Speaker 01 So I think it's really, really important that we not look for quick solutions. I mean, if they avail themselves, great. But we got here by decades and decades of bad habits. And we're going to have to commit to undo those habits and stick to that, sustain that. So we get long term results. And I think in some ways, it starts with a kind of philosophical question. We've got to stop acting as if justice is this limited resource that gets apportioned in ways. So that, you know, if you get a little bit more justice, I get a little less. That's not how it works, right?
17:05 Speaker 01 There is a notion, much of it is instinctive, but that has practical implications about how we let the values of equality, opportunity and fair play not be one offs, but be central to every decision leaders leaders make. So concrete, if we start with policing, we've been asking the police, by the way, on this point, I think it's quite true of teachers as well. We've been asking the police to do a lot more of what used to be done in other parts of the community and through other services to communities, mental health services, domestic abuse services and supports.
17:47 Speaker 01 You know, poverty is sort of the underlying challenge of so many of the communities where policing is excess. But when I hear calls to defund the police, what I hear at their most constructive is to rethink the range of services and supports that enable people in community to help themselves and to strengthen themselves. And that's going to be, you know, everything from education to some of the specific social services that I'm talking healthcare, right? And then alongside that, you know, how you teach de-escalation as a first response. By police, we could demilitarize the police.
18:32 Speaker 01 That's a path we've been on for some while now that President Obama halted, if not slowed down, and President Trump accelerated. So those are a couple of things. You move on up, you know, we talked to, I mentioned healthcare briefly. We've, we've had a lot of conversation about how to move to universal care. And there are a lot of great ideas about how to that, we ought to get on with that. And we ought to deal with, with the need for affordable housing. And, I mean, you know, I'm talking as if these are things unique to black people, but more and more Americans everywhere are struggling with the very same kinds of limitations on their ability to reach for the American dream.
19:15 Guy Raz? Which I think speaks to this idea that when you begin to really reckon with racial injustice, actually, it benefits everyone.
19:23 Speaker 01 Yes, from a program point of view. But, you know, this, the other thing that's happening right now is we're having a lot of conversations that are making some of our friends and colleagues and fellow members of our community uncomfortable. And we're going to have to get comfortable with being uncomfortable for a little while. We just have to have those conversations. By the way, that's what folks like me have had to learn, how to manage being uncomfortable. And frankly, I mean, and I would say fortunately, I'm curious about people, I'm interested in people, I have learned through lots and lots of trial and error to open my heart and leave it open. And, and I have discovered, you know, alongside some occasional heartbreak, that there are
20:04 Speaker 01 some remarkable, deep, intimate, loving, and meaningful relationships that I've built across all kinds of, all kinds of differences. And I think those friends feel that way about me as well. But you had to be uncomfortable, you had to take a chance on that, you know what I'm saying? And I think we have to take a chance on crossing the race line, as it were, if we're going to get to a place of better understanding.
20:28 Guy Raz? I want to go back to something you talked about with Bain and their initiative to support black entrepreneurs and ventures. It's a tricky question to ask because we're in the midst of an economic crisis, but in a sense, is this a moment or an opportunity to revive and revitalize black entrepreneurship?
20:49 Speaker 01 Oh, Lord, I hope so. I think entrepreneurship is one of the ways that we're going to save the economy generally. And I think it's a terrific way to start to build generational wealth and create opportunity among black people. But, you know, usually, at least in my experience, Guy, when this conversation comes up, we get to access to capital and the conversation is really about working capital, about loans, and not about equity. And that's different, as you know. And I will tell you, even in my fund, when we were looking to invest alongside black
21:28 Speaker 01 entrepreneurs, there was unease, sometimes an unfamiliarity, often with the idea of having an equity partner come in and work alongside you. And I understand that, but, you know, some of that is exposure and coaching. And that's why I think that part of what Bain Capital is doing, and I think there are going to be others who do it, is so important. It's not just money, it's exposure.
21:55 Guy Raz? I have got so many questions for you. Alison Biggs writes, "Your medium piece is beautiful." And she asks, "Are there other pieces of art or media that inspire or sustain you that you'd like more people to read or hear or see?"
22:11 Speaker 01 Well, you know, this will surprise some of you, but I'm a great admirer of Winston Churchill. And he was an unlikely leader in many respects, without giving away all of his story, a deeply flawed person. But who had an openness to what ordinary people were experiencing and how to engage them so that they could surmount incredible challenges and and expect more of themselves as well as of their leadership. And I've always admired his model of leadership. So I go back to, I think I've read just about everything that's ever been written about
22:53 Speaker 01 him. I go back to him over and over again, as I do to Lincoln, who I think also in crisis, grew and knew he was growing and evolving and stayed humble enough to be able to do so, which I think has always been a lesson for me. And then there, you know, there are poems and paintings I love as well.
23:15 Guy Raz? This is a question that several people have asked, including Claire Marashima. Hello, Claire. Do you think this moment, Governor, is different? I mean, because it seems like it is. It seems like there is a mass movement in this country now that is is speaking loud and clear.
23:32 Speaker 01 I hope so. You know, we have a famously short attention span in America. You know, we tend to turn to the next flashy and shiny outrage and forget what it is we were just focused on. I am feeling so grateful to the marchers who have stayed out and on the streets overwhelmingly peaceful for as long as they have and who are insisting on more than, you know, kind and sympathetic comments, but are more and more coalescing around an action plan. And so I'm just incredibly grateful for them. And I'm grateful for the many, many
24:15 Speaker 01 others who have unrest in their heart, but can't be out on the on the streets and are expressing themselves in ways that we see that that, you know, we got to start paying attention to justice again.
24:30 Guy Raz? Governor Deval Patrick, thank you so much.
24:32 Speaker 01 Thank you, Guy. Be well.
24:34 Guy Raz? That's an excerpt from my conversation with Deval Patrick, the former governor of Massachusetts. To see our full interview, you can go to facebook.com/HowIBuiltThis. And if you want to see all of our past live interviews, you can find them there or at youtube.com/NPR. And if you want to find out more about the How I Built This Resilience Series or other virtual NPR events, you can go to nprpresents.org. This episode was produced by Candace Lim with help from John Isabella, Julia Carney, Gianna Capadona, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Thanks for listening. Stay safe, and I'll see you in a few days. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.
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