This episode is brought to you by eight sleep. My God, am I in love with eight sleep? Good. Sleep is the Ultimate Game Changer more than 30 percent of Americans struggle sleep. And I'm a member of that, sad group temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep, and heat has always been my Nemesis. I've suffered for decades tossing and turning throwing blankets off, putting them back on and repeating Ad nauseam. But now, I am falling asleep in record time, faster than ever, why? Because I'm using a simple device.
Called the Pod Pro cover by eight sleep. It's the easiest. And fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature, it pairs Dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer the most advanced but most user friendly Solution on the market. I pulled, all of you guys on social media, about the best tools for Sleep, enhancing sleep. And eat sleep, was by far and away the crowd favorite. I mean, people were just raving fans of this, so I used it and here we are.
Add the Pod Pro cover to your current mattress and start sleeping as cool as 55 degrees Fahrenheit or as hot as a hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit. It also splits your bed in half, so your partner can choose a totally different temperature. My girlfriend runs hot all the time. She doesn't need cooling. She loves the Heat and we can have our own bespoke temperatures on either side which is exactly what we're doing now for me. And for many people, the result eight sleep users fall asleep up to 32 percent faster, reduce sleep interruptions.
By up to 40% and get more restful sleep. Overall, I can personally attest to this because I track it in all sorts of ways. It's the total solution for enhanced recovery so you can take on the next day. Feeling refreshed. And now my dear listeners. That's you guys, you can get 250 dollars off of the Pod Pro cover. That's a lot. Simply go to eight, sleep.com Tim or use code Tim that's a tall. Spelled out. TIG HT, sleep.com Tim, or use.
Code. Tim TI M8. Sleep.com, Tim for $200 off your pod, Pro cover.
This episode is brought to you by Magic spoon. Magic spoon is a brand new cereal that I eat just about every day. That is, low carb, high protein and zero sugar. I just ate a huge bowl of their cocoa flavor about an hour ago. After a short, workout magic spoons, cereal has received a lot of attention, since launching last year, Time Magazine included it in their list of best inventions of 2019 and Forbes called it the future of cereal. It tastes just like your favorite sugary cereal from childhood, remember that but it's actually good for you.
Each serving has 11 grams of protein, 3, grams of net carbs, 0 grams of sugar and only 110 calories. It's also gluten free grain freak. You do friendly soy free and GMO free. All the things, it's delicious. And I don't see that lightly because most of this healthy version of X stuff is not delicious. But these guys, really nail it. Magic spoon has nailed. It, it comes in your favorite traditional cereal flavors. Like, Coco, frosted and blueberry. You can try them all by grabbing a variety pack at Magic spoon.com.
Tim or you can just grab box or a bunch of boxes. I'm going to order some more today of the cocoa, which is my personal favorite, but there's a new Contender for favorite flavor because they just launched two limited edition flavors Honey, Nut and peanut butter which are delicious. I am a sucker for peanut butter and it is outstanding. So I think Coco and peanut butter are my two new favorite flavors and fun fact. My friends are also obsessed with magic spoon. One other podcasts most
Popular guest, dr. Peter Atia. Routinely crushes. Six to seven servings at a time. That's a lot with no glycemic response. He's looked at this with a glucometer. He likes it so much. He invested other friends to very fine gentleman and also past podcasts guests. Kevin Rose and Ryan holiday also invested. So go to magic spoon.com, Tim to grab some delicious cereal and try it for yourself today. Use promo code Tim, that's T. IM at checkout to save five dollars off of your order and Magic spoon is so confident.
Their product. I have boxes and boxes and boxes. It's backed with a 100% happiness guarantee. So, if you don't like it for any reason, they'll refund your money. No questions asked get your next delicious bowl of guilt. Free. Cereal at Magic spoon.com / Tim and use the code. Tim to get five dollars off at this altitude. I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Another answer the question now. It is
I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton.
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 each and every episode to interview, world-class performers from all different, disciplines, all different, walks of life to tease out the Frameworks Lessons Learned. And so on that, you can apply to your own lives. My guest today is Jacqueline, novogratz you can find her on Twitter, @jj, novogratz and OVO. GR8 easy. She is the founder and CEO of Acumen in 2001.
Khan started Acumen with the idea of investing. Philanthropic patient, Capital. We will talk about what that means in entrepreneurs. Seeking to solve the toughest issues of poverty. As a pioneer of impact, investing a queuing, and its Investments have brought critical services like healthcare, education and clean energy to hundreds of millions of low-income people. That's a big number, folks, let that sink in after supporting hundreds of entrepreneurs Jacqueline and her team recognized character as The crucial ingredient for success in 2020. They launched Acumen a cat.
Ami to instruct others in global social change under Jacqueline's. Leadership Acumen has also launched several. For-profit impact funds designed to invest at the intersection of poverty and climate change and has spun off 60 decibels. Founded on the principle that serving all stakeholders is as important as enriching shareholders. Jacqueline is the New York Times bestselling author of the blue sweater. I'm sure we will talk about what that means and refers to and Manifesto for a moral. Revolution practices to Build a Better World.
She has been named one of the top, 100 Global thinkers by foreign policy. One of the 25 smartest people of decade by The Daily Beast and one of the world's 100 greatest living business Minds by Forbes, which also honored her with the Forbes 400 Lifetime Achievement Award for social entrepreneurship of that man's. Yes, I'm nervous to interview this person LinkedIn, you can find her Jacqueline - novogratz Twitter @jj novogratz Instagram. Also, @j novogratz, and of course you can
Find Acumen at Acumen, dot-org, Jaclyn, welcome to the show. It's great to be here with you Tim. Thank you and I'm going to just go with the layup. I'm not going to say lazy. Question is really more of a setting of The backdrop. For people who don't know, you could you please describe your childhood, your parents. Just give us a little bit of color there. So we know from where you have come, I was raised in a
House with seven siblings, the seven of us, amazing parents. That 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 are also expected to somehow be good. Number of your siblings, have also gone on to do great things very much on a national and global scale to what do you attribute that? Is it just inheriting good?
Software. Is it environmental? Are there any particular inputs or habits that your parents have anything that comes to mind? I'm sure you've been asked this before. But what was in the drinking water so to speak. I think it was a funny combination of one constraint that when you have so many kids on a military income, you 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. Mythmakers mythmakers, 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 genes from the post exchange unless you can learn the difference for those Levi's. But I have to tell you, I'm really disappointed in. You guys, why would you need Brands your novogratz has and
We laughs Val. We're like what the hell was a novogratz, but she had the sense that this was who we were. So to kind of a driven myth-making mother and three this big extended immigrant Catholic Family. And so this idea that to whom much is given much is expected was also reinforced. And so I guess in a funny way Tim we grew up in a tribe but also allowed to be wild.
It's who had to be entrepreneurial. And here we are. So you're known for impact investing social impact and all the things that we, or I should say. I mentioned in the bio that I just read, but that's not weird. 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 in North,
Star for seemingly much of your life, but that wasn't the first step. In other words, you didn't just graduate from high school and start Acumen. Could you just walk us through your first professional decisions? Where did you go after school? And why did you go there? I think I did. Always want to change the world from the time. I was six and I guess that was part of the both the positive end, the pressure. And so, there was always that idea that I had, but to go,
To a college. Certainly has, the first we had to pay for school and so I worked two or three jobs the entire time I was at the University of Virginia, what were your jobs? What types of jobs? Well, mostly I was a bartender and in the summer I work a hundred hours a week as a bartender which was actually quite something. When I graduated I told my parents that I 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 in 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 it. So I go to the interview and there's this cute guy sitting across the table from me and he says, tell me Jacqueline, why do you want to be a banker? Which was of course, the
The question I wasn't ready for that's like actually my mom got her. Making me do this. I don't want to be a banker and he said what he said? Yeah, yeah, I mean, I'm only it's probably, the only answer, it wasn't prepared for what something did. He was prepared because it 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
Or says 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 introduce myself I sat down he was like, tell me Jaclyn, why do you want to be a banker? And I said ever since I was six years old, all I ever wanted to do was be a banker
Of course, there are interviews after that to make sure I had a brain but I got the job and sure enough for the next three years. I was in 40 countries at a really extraordinary time when the financial systems were also imperil in the early 1980s. That was my first job. Now, how did you end up traveling? The world? I suppose thinking back to my own undergrad, experience in the recruiting on campus by investment Banks and so on.
On, although this may not have been in the investment banking category, but when I think the promises of various recruiters I associate, the you're going to travel the world meet Fascinating People learn various a b and c about X Y and Z Industries. I associate that with the management consulting pitch. So what was the job that you ended up getting that allowed you to travel like that? In banking it was an extraordinary job. It's called credit audit where the bank hired primarily liberal arts majors
I think young people who were critical thinkers, who ask the dumb questions, and they literally would send us around the world a month at a time. I think I was in New York, three weeks, one year, and you would just get this note on your desk that you had to be in 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
He changed because I remember talking to my boss because I had a reputation for unwittingly getting people fired by asking the really dumb questions and then uncovering, I can't let that go without asking for an example. How does that happen? What would a hypothetical or real type of question? Or actual question be that might get someone fired. The biggest one for me was in Switzerland, when I was pretty much a solo act to look at this whole Suite of Swiss banks, which
Everybody just assumed were safe because of Swiss banking and Tim I kept looking at the numbers and the spreadsheets for this one bank and nothing added up to me. And so I went to the head of the division, the office and I was incredibly nervous because I wasn't that confident that I was that great at all. These spreadsheets and I pointed out what I saw as real flaws in real vulnerabilities and he
He essentially told me I was too young, too naive, didn't I understand Swiss banking and that the bank was completely protected and I scratch my head I want 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.
Seven, which put it on a big warning list, which meant it went all the way to the top of the bank. And it turned out that I was right. The bank failed. And I learned really young, Tim that I went from being seen, as kind of scared and not that serious overnight to them being seen. As this whiz kid, I was the same person, nothing had changed and how ephemeral
The way the world sees you became to me because I know that I was exactly the same woman the morning after that. I was the morning before so I guess learning really young sometimes just speak that truth even through Trembling Lips. Yeah wow what a story I mean it's it's something that's so few people especially new hires would actually dare to do it's just strikes me as unusual that you would have the conviction.
And to potentially and I don't know the politicking or the power dynamics inside of that bank obviously but to piss off your boss by giving it a seven, which then flies straight up the flagpole after getting reprimanded.
That's quite a move. It sounds like that wasn't a first though that you'd sort of cultivated this. Speaking of Truth coming up to that point. Is that accurate? Yeah, I think it probably was and in fact kajari make me get emotional. But I think I saw myself as less courageous 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? Why?
I 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 fight for the underdog effect. I got thrown out of trigonometry for standing up for what was right? What were you standing up?
Or was it the answer to something or was it a personal the teacher, he was a great Pop Quiz guy and I had promised us that we wouldn't get a pop quiz that week. And one of my friends had been sick and she was very, very insecure when it came to trigonometry. I said, you don't have to worry about it because this teacher told us that we weren't going to have a pop quiz and promised us and then of course, he gave us the pop quiz and I just felt such a need to protect my friend that I stood up. I made a big deal about
It. And that was the end. That was my last day of trigonometry for that year. And the worst of it is I had to do home economics for the last six weeks of the year, 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 success.
This is to that but I think it's no small thing. One of the aspects of your story that has stuck out to me as I'm doing homework is the power of asking
I wouldn't say dumb questions asking the questions, right asking questions and speaking truth and it's just how you talk about patient Capital. We might talk later about how that's differentiated from just long-term capital and long-term investing and how you differentiate the two. But if you're making a long-term sort of patient investment in yourself like over the short term, you might get reprimanded for truth and asking questions or seemingly naive questions but they
Seem to be really good long-term bets and I suppose there's not a question so much in that but does that resonate with you as being true? How does that land for you? When I say that my missing anything? I've actually never thought about it for myself personally, but it deeply resonates, that I am not comfortable in. 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 as a compass, a moral compass and that speaking of Truth and standing for truth. Not only builds a sense of Courage, but deepens I think ones and certainly my own understanding of where lines are. So yeah, so thank you for that. Yeah, also, I know some 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 imagined and more confidence to continue doing the same but it's a skill mean. It seems like a practice that you need to reinforce. Let's come back to this banking.
And in your retake ever since the age of six, I've always known, I wanted to be a banker. Clearly you are no longer a banker. So what happened, what happened? Your do you're doing these Audits and where does the next chapter enter the picture. So it's 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, Dand, and truly Columbia falling in love with the vibrancy of 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 are 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 and they lost hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, billions of dollars at that time. So I would sit inside the bank looking at loans that should never have been made often money. That was actually never even put into what it said. It would be put into. Meanwhile on the weekends, I would just be drawn to the favelas and into the slums and into these parts of the
Cities that were so full of life and vibrancy and work and diligent people. And I would talk to people about their businesses and realize that this was a group of people that could not even walk in through the doors of the bank. They had no confidence with the banking system and so I again asking dumb questions, which may be a theme of my life, went to my boss with all good faith and said that, maybe we would do better for the country do better for the people and
Actually get our money back, do better for the bank. If we actually made smaller loans to local people doing what they were doing. And he literally gave me a book called the innocent Anthropologist, and it became very clear to me that the bank wasn't ready to Pivot in that way. And so I had to go outside, which is where I've stayed trying to disrupt systems from the outside. Not the inside, which I think I'm better at
So the innocent Anthropologist I assume as a very formalized, way of giving you a book that basically says, listen kid, that's adorable, but also very naive. I mean, is that the thrust of that gift? Yeah. I mean he gave me two gifts actually, that was the first gift and then when we were talking a little bit later and he was trying to convince me to stay at the bank, he's like, look, you're one of our top producers and performers but culturally you don't really fit your dress like
Linda Ronstadt and you laugh too much. Which now I think may have been code for. You're not actually acting enough like you know, it'll eat one of us and I realized in that moment that not only did I want to see how we could actually use the tools of banking to solve poverty but that if I stayed that he was essentially asking me to be a completely different person and that helped make the decision. What was your next move? You know, some people will get the Checkmate in one move but
It's often an evolution. Where did you go from there? Well, the next move was telling my parents that I had to. I made the decision. Yeah, tell us about tell us about that getting up on ya. This middle-class immigrant family saw as the job of Lifetime and to make it worse, the CEO of jstor, nutricion. Oh, who just such an amazing man, was giving me an opportunity. Then I think he liked that I was this crappy bartender, girl and not the
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 truth in what they were saying and so I think that was incredibly hard because I we were all raised to quote unquote. Do the right thing. I was looking for an opportunity to get to Brazil but I found one that would bring me to West Africa.
Which was absolutely not on my playbook. But I realized that this was a chance to pursue a different kind of dream that was looking at taking the tools of banking and reaching low income people. I read about Muhammad yunus, and the Grameen bank, and another Heroes of mine, and I wanted to try it myself. And so I went, and as you said, it was sort of a next move. I met with absolute crushing failure, made all the worst because I turned down this really big job offer.
So we're going to definitely roll up our sleeves and get into the crushing failure. But before we do, maybe we'll 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 of that. I was the end of the conversation. I mean, how did it turn out? And how did you approach it or maybe the other Arrow? Well, I just told
M, what I was going to do. So you didn't say I'm thinking of actually just like this is what I'm doing. God's work, giving you guys a heads up. Heads up, 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 on my mother's. 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 free cell phone pre. Real understanding of what this big continent was about. The only images they had of Africa, was a, as almost as a single country. Rather than 54 all looking like Ethiopia during the Famine of 1983. Probably the worst thing that she said to be with, you know, I could understand if you were a nun and I was like, what are you doing?
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 a more constant contact. This is 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. I'm not asking so much for prescriptive advice yet we might get to that. But how did you at that time? Especially this is pre-internet.
How did you find this next lily pad to jump to and then please tell us about your crushing defeat. Again, we had far less tools then and so I had read one tiny article about Grameen bank which was still very obscure. I sent a letter to Muhammad yunus, the probably never reached Bangladesh. And then I heard from a young woman who also was at Chase that her aunt
It started an organization called Women's World Banking and that there might be an opportunity. So I just went there and offered myself to go to Brazil. And as I said, she said we don't have any opportunity there. We do though in West Africa and I just took it, it was super risky, it didn't come with health insurance. It just was an opportunity. I knew that if I were waiting for the perfect, I wouldn't have done it. I also knew I might lose my nerve and it was the only thing that was on offer.
To really test out my theory that the tools of business and banking could actually serve people who had been fully left out. And I don't think it was until I was actually on the plane listening to Joni Mitchell's Blue Album over and over and weeping that it really hit me that I was, I was on my own. Why were you weeping? Was it fear? Was it something else? I think it was lost everything. I'd Left Behind no understanding of where I was going fear.
We're a lot of loss in transition and that 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
Going to save the world, at least this part of it. And what the confrontation, help me understand.
Pretty quickly was that most people don't want to be saved and certainly not by a 25 year old white American girl who's French was not very good and and had very little understanding whatsoever of the local culture. And so I hung in there for a number of months, it was very hairy hairy and what way, everything from just a kind of a daily rejection, where I would go to my little office in the African Development Bank. In the door would be locked.
I was supposed to do this big conference and I would ask people for help and they really likes Napalm will provide. That's not my job. Okay, I didn't 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 older, they're going to poison you and they're also talking about Voodoo holy shit. Jesus.
It's a cell and you know kind of believe in Voodoo but I will tell you what you are stripped down to nothing and you're afraid to eat anything in front of people and you're being locked out of your office and you don't really have much of a safety to that nor do you know a single person except for this incredible, Nigerian woman who's perfect with you. I would lie in bed at Ed feel like is anybody here coming together? And and then I got unbelievably sick with food poisoning.
Like deathly, sick, did you think it was poisoning or did you think it was food poisoning? I mean, after hearing that story, my God, I mean, I would imagine I couldn't go there. I couldn't go job. She thought it might be poisoning, but I didn't remember eating anything in front of everybody, 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 and nobody should be treated the way that they treated me.
And that both were true. That's that. I left everything that I owned in the boxes that I had in in the Abu jahl Hilton. Goodness knows whatever happened to them and I moved to East Africa where I kind of started again, hopefully with a lot more humility and maybe a different kind of courage.
Was it with the same organization?
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 LinkedIn jobs. Small business owners have always shown an incredible ability to adapt and innovate. This past year has certainly highlighted many examples. Now, another way you can adapt and innovate in 2021 is by finding the right people to help you grow your business LinkedIn jobs. Makes it possible for you to do exactly that get started by posting your job for free to reach LinkedIn, network of more than seven hundred and forty million.
Nationals fill out targeted, screening questions to get your role in front of the most qualified candidates with the experience skills and motivation. You're looking for then with simple filtering and management tools. You can easily review rate and Home in on your top candidates LinkedIn jobs, can help you find the right person to help you. Grow your business. And your first job post is free. So just visit linkedin.com /, Tim to learn more again, that's linkedin.com. Tim to post your first job for free.
Terms and conditions. Do apply.
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, with 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 counter-attack.
Again, I think it's really dangerous to assume but I think that
What I've learned and what I used to do, what I used to read novels about the mystical and the Magical that in cultures, including the United States. That were very orally. Based storytelling myth-making can be as powerful and potent as the real thinks. And so there was particularly those years, a lot of giddy giddy, little people are believed in and wearing different
Let's and medicines in a way, you see the guys at Silicon Valley, kind of replacing that with new things that we do to give us a sense of strength. And so the way I always attributed it to which is why I would never accuse anyone having done it but the threat of it and my own fear and isolation may have been made manifest and this literal purging that I did the threats were not
Not that unusual again. I and I see it in places where there's often in security and deeply oral based society. And you got to remember to Tim, it was 30 years ago and the world operated in very different ways. Then. And I just was caught up in this world that I had no understanding of and of course, is now a place that I'm deeply in love with and and love all of its different layers and
The reflection in our own societies, we just make manifest in different ways
at the time though you had just suffered this defeat of sorts. It had really met with tremendous opposition. What was your first meaningful win after that? In your mind could be small or big for the first time and you're like, okay this this isn't a Fool's errand, like I'm actually onto something. I'm on the right track here
at such an interesting question. I had another
Big failure. Right after where I analyzed Bank portfolio of a microfinance organization and saw that I was excited by seeing all of the problems in the portfolio and and the CEO rather than sharing my excitement that now we could actually fix the problems. Burned, my work and didn't want to work with me after that. And so I had to learn a whole new approach,
clearly was in that was in East
Africa, that was in Kenya. So I had a second, big failure. The little winds were that in my everyday life.
The relationships that I was building including with the person who serve 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 nonprofit, the leaders who were also
hours of who got resources in, who didn't and it actually reinforced for me, why I believed in the power of business of Entrepreneurship because I was in this other world where who got control of the resources meant everything, the first real win for me was when a woman walked into my office in Nairobi and said that she was from Rwanda which was a country. I was completely unfamiliar with at the time. Fact, I thought she said Uganda and they had just
Just 1986 they had just passed a new law that abolished Napoleonic Code, under a Napoleonic Code. Women were put in the same category as children and the mentally impaired. And until that moment, we're unable to open a bank account without their husband's signature. And she asked me, if I would go to the country to do a study, if you will, for whether it might be possible to create some kind of financial institutions,
Ali for women. It was the first time an African woman had asked me to help solve a problem. I think I was so beat up by then and yet really did feel this sense that if we could get markets to work for poor women, they would have so much more dignity than what I've been seeing that. I probably went for a three-word assignment and knew somewhere inside of me that I wasn't leaving to we'd built a bank.
So presumably, that's what that's what happened, what happened?
So that's what happened. I mean, a couple things out of it again. I had learned from my own lack of humility that it would have been really easy to go in there and be like II. 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.
Work. And so I was really lucky to find a small group of Rwandan Powerhouse, women who are my co-founders, and we did everything together. It reinforced, the African adage that. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far go together and it became one of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. Because I saw that you really could change a little corner of history with the right people. The right kind of capital.
Right, value system. And certainly a lot of hard work,
I want to put a bookmark in that for a second and ask from that initial plane flight crying. Listening to Joni Mitchell to that. Rwandan woman walking into your office. How much time had elapsed roughly
roughly probably seven months. Okay, so
over that seven-month period.
What were the ingredients that kept you going? Was it that you'd said, yourself come hell or high water? I'm sticking around for a year and you made that kind of commitment was it? I cannot go back to the US with my tail between my legs and let all these naysayers prove themselves right, was it something else I'm just wondering, what kept you kind of slogging away over that period of
time? I would say that the whole first year and a half was that slog.
I would say a combination of this man Tony trischka ah no one had given me this job offer her and he was like you're going to go to Africa its stead of do this and I was like mr. Tracy. Ah no. 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
Saw the vibrancy, I saw the beauty and 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's didn't seem like rocket science to me to build different kinds of systems that actually allowed their capability to flourish. And so, I think it was a mix of hubris and a desire to be used.
In ways that I felt that I had something to offer.
So, coming back to the bookmark of Rwanda, and you finally start to in close collaboration with these co-founders, these, these local women, create something meaningful. You start to chalk up some marks in the wind 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 study because people get to see, sort of how you got to the point where you could self-perpetuate and kind of build success on success. So, Rwanda to Acumen.
So Rwanda to Acumen saw both the
Or 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. It's a 12% a year rather than four hundred percent a year which is what they paid. The money lenders that you could build community. My assumption that if you gave women small bits of credit, that it would be enough for them to create jobs was wrong, most people aren't entrepreneurs and that's probably a really good thing. I could say it as an entrepreneur married.
To an entrepreneur. We need, we need the builders. We did all these other personalities around us so I also started a little Bakery with 20 women to really understand what it would take to build entities that gave people good jobs and that was a whole other learning point in the apprenticeship. If you will before Acumen, that access to markets is important without the capabilities of actually
Using those that access we're only halfway there, I think, because I was beginning to understand that I wanted to build companies, not just make small loans that I wanted new skills. Also, in the context of East Africa at the time degrees and other markers of success, particularly for women, seemed really important. I was often called insert on Aikido go, which means little girl, even though we actually created a very
Successful lending operation. So, I applied to Stanford Business. School was the only school I applied to I thought. Well, if I get in good, if I don't doesn't matter
why Stanford besides the pretty trees on Palm Drive.
It was a really, really hard to get it obligation Eddie where we only had word processors. We didn't have computers. It took 10 days to get a letter to Stanford or wherever and then another 10 days after they sent the application to you,
And then you had to write on that little airplane paper, send it back, it was a nightmare and that particular year Harvard on its annual report had a picture of all of the graduates with dollar signs on the back of their hats. And I thought
well I
think I might be a misfit. Give it that. I really want to solve poverty.
That is so bad. That is so bad. I know.
I've like close friends have gone to Harvard but oh God. That's
terrible. So, 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 for them down Gordon
Gekko, Gordon Gekko.
Exactly. And so Stanford had a public Management program that I thought fit more with what I wanted to do with my life. It was very clear that I didn't want to go back to just make money. I wanted to go back to build the tools to build companies that could employ and serve.
For people. And so at Stanford I met an extraordinary Mentor named John Gardner and I think he's shaped my life as well. In terms of getting me focused on the United States as rest of the world and talk to me about the importance of leadership, which I hadn't really thought about as much Tim. Then, I went to the Rockefeller Foundation where I really saw the power of philanthropy. So by the time I was nearing 40, I had worked in the private sector with banking. I had built a several institutions, but most notably
Notably do to remedy the microfinance organization and this Bakery and a couple of others and then probably the other critical thing that happened was the Rwanda 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.
Every role of the genocide from being murdered to watching their families, be murdered to thing bystanders. I think that was probably
One of the most important not experiences because God forbid, I watched it from afar, but both an understanding of patient Capital that the work of change is so often a couple steps forward. And sometimes the whole thing blows up that societies are highly complex and again that at the heart of my work,
Had to be a redefinition of what. Poverty was that? We so often look at poverty and we think the answer is income, the answers jobs. What I had seen by now, both in banking than and 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 missed that.
And that was really the beginning of Acumen that we have, all these tools, we have the superpower in capitalism, but when we raise it to the rank of religion and everything goes around, one end profit, we can do amazing things but we exclude a huge chunk of the world. And we create great inequality, we're seeing that today, not to mention, not consider the environment. If government decides everything or
Top-down approaches to Aid. It's just too easy to give to the people that are close to you or for reasons that have nothing to do with anything but power. And so the question I started asking myself is what if we looked at 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
Lems Acumen was born in 2001 with that idea in mind
we're going to spend a fair amount of time on Acumen no big surprise there but I want to spend just a few more moments on the Rwandan Genocide because I think it may be helpful in exploring the tendency that we all have to oversimplify things and the example that comes to mind,
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 you alluded to it with your description of co-workers and people you knew or certainly people you had exposure to being on all sides of this genocide victims bystanders. Perpetrators 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 in the, within the context of life in general, I don't hear any in our
thoughts. First thought is absolutely the, I didn't just know people in the market. Our first executive director was jailed as being one of the highest ranking or the highest ranking,
Planner at the genocide before the genocide. She was co-creating. A liberal party based on Multi tribal democracy with another one of our co-founders, but when it was clear that power look like, it was going to Hutu power or the genocide regime. She switched. And so early on, I saw those who seek power
And those who seek purpose and that power can be very tempting. And I also saw how in a time of real insecurities 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, in a prison with Agnes, the woman who was the major perpetrator need, any asking her, how this could have happened, and there she was to him and a pink dress like the prisoner's uniform her head, shaved bald, with a freckled face. She looked like a young woman. She didn't look like a monster and we had founded this.
Ian 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 broken parts. They are our petty fears, our insecurities the Grievances that that grow, and it's just too damn easy to pull into those parts. When we, as a society feel insecure, we blame other people a. We other them and that was very
At the heart of the genocide and that that has very much informed. The way I see the world and the way it Acumen, even the way that we talk about and inscribe our values, it's always in tension, it's always recognizing the light in the dark and 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 the it's capitalism's fault, it's socialism's fault. Its stakeholders that shareholders rather than quit focus on the values here. What are we trying to solve? And then, can we pull back and find ways to use the best of the tools that we have at our disposal and actually solve that problem?
Everything you just said, I think is. So it's always been important. I think it's exceptionally important when you have technologies that are in a
Designed to polarized because the incentives are such that, that becomes sort of a driving design and engineering and imperative in a sense. And just to comment a bit further on that, I would encourage everyone out there to, to look at the work of Derren Brown. So Darren Brown is a mentalist performer, also an incredible artist from the UK and he has a number of special.
Cells, including one called the push, he is 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 where 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.
Horace and Levi judgment against others. And to say I would never have participated in a Rwandan Genocide or I never would have been a member of the Nazi party and so on and so forth. But it's not quite that simple, right. And I think to simplify it down to the black and white people being all one or all other is not in service of solutions. I really appreciate you expanding on that. Let's jump to acumen.
Acumen. How did you choose the name or how is the name?
Decided Acumen stands for perspective in sight? Well, we started document. I was focused on revolutionising philanthropy and too often the way we think about philanthropy has soft. This was saying again, the hard and the soft, you've got to bring an edge start with business, start with Insight build from there, and bring the same level of accountability that you would expect from a financial investment into the world.
Of social change. Therefore Acumen.
So, could you just recap for people? I know we mentioned it in the bayou but a lot has been discussed so far. What does acumen do?
Academic? 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, Health Care, education, energy, agriculture,
We will invest not only for 10 to 15 years but we accompany those entrepreneurs with our social capital are 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 at several for-profit impact funds. The second thing we do is build a community of Builders through the world school for social change, Acumen Academy. And that is not only trying to identify link Inspire the talent that exists, I believe, in every corner of the world but also to offer rules tools blueprints so that anyone anywhere who want to be on the path of social change using this
This combination of head and heart hard skills and the what I think are the even harder skills can be part of it. The third is to measure what matters if you're going to say that you invest for impact, you better be able to measure what that impact. Is a couple of years ago, we spun off a company called 60 decibels. That uses an approach to measuring change that we created called lean data, which we could talk about.
Essentially upholds, one of our main values, which is listening and it measures impact, not from the perspective of The Giver or the investor, but from the recipients, from the customers themselves so that we can actually serve the poor in ways that we hope to
does the lean data. And I may ask some follow-up questions just to make sure I'm clear on how it works and how it works, does that apply to the for-profit?
Vesting as
well. The for-profit ACT funds. Yeah. And in fact the reason we spun it out is a number of other nonprofit and for-profit. Funds asked us, if we would, essentially provide them with lean data Consulting and we thought that again, going back to our mission, we want to change the way the world tackles poverty. We would serve that mission better. If we spun it out, let it grow. And that 60 decibels, which has been really exciting to watch take off. I'd love to see black rock using it, frankly.
All right. Black
Look, I'm sure there's somebody listening combat against you. The flash. Let's just assume they are listening. And also for my benefit for listeners, could you just reiterate what lean data are? I'm going to be a pompous princetonian what exactly is or are lean data? Because the question of measuring impact is one that at least in my circles comes up a lot. Like how do you actually do this? How do you try to invest not just for our own
Ey, but for good for impact, but how do you do that? Without just waving your hands around and claiming that you've done a lot of good. I'd love to hear you expand on on,
WE invest in entrepreneurs that are trying to build markets where they haven't existed for people who make two or three dollars a day where there's no infrastructure. There's no trust. There are very few skills and talent, there's a lot of corruption and complacency and so it would be really easy for us to essentially say that anything we do in a difficult.
Environment is impact. And so we decided that we had to hold ourselves accountable to a higher standard. That at the end of the day, what really matters when it comes to dignity, is to record and understand the voices of those, you are there to serve the poor for many years. Tim, our impact measuring was fairly mediocre because we didn't have the tools once you had cell phone technology and you could text customers.
Suddenly, you had a one-on-one communication, where your warmth in the room, where people aren't always as likely to tell you the truth because I don't really think you want to hear it anyway, but in this case, the more anonymity they had the clear people would give. So imagine a solar light company where the largest off-grid solar investor for the poor in the world. So we have a lot of them, we could go to a company like delight and text five, six thousand
More simultaneously, ask those customers a series of questions from which we can deduce, what matters to them, how many more hours of light do they have when they buy a solar home system that gives them three lights a radio or television? What is the quality of that light? We could measure? Carbon offset. That's easy. It has their health changed because they're no longer using dangerous. Noxious kerosene, are their children doing better in education?
Which was an assumption we had. When we first went into it, then we collate all of that and suddenly we can help our entrepreneurs understand whether they're serving people which is sometimes shocking when they find that. They actually are not in the way that they thought they were. But equally we can start to look across the sector like solar.
Electricity and we can see which companies may have the best product but it's reaching people with the highest income. And so you've got a trade-off which companies are doing the most to displace carbon but they may have another trade-off and which companies have the happiest customers then. We can decide more effectively where we want to allocate our dollars for impact. Not only for financial returns, it not only has held us more accountable.
Well, Tim, it's allowed the entrepreneurs, a much deeper, understanding of, who their customers are. It allows us to see our, we actually reaching the poor, which is our mandate, and it's shown us where we were wrong, what it came to off-grid energy. We assumed, as I said, that kids would do better in school. They don't necessarily do better in school if you want kids to do better in school and really, really hot areas, get him a solar system that includes a fan because with the fan, the
Removes at night bugs are kept away. The kids sleep, they do better. It's a lean approach because you're not doing a three-year randomized, control trial and it is a deep approach because you are hearing from the perspective of those who actually most matter. Yeah, the
three-year randomized, controlled approach has its place. But honestly I mean and this is speaking as someone who is very involved with financing scientific studies. It's not the right tool for all jobs and particularly when you are outside of a
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 non-profit and you're investing in various Enterprises,
You can apply this data or offer this type of tool across the board. I would imagine with the underlying belief that a rising Tides raises All Ships, once you are 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&z category, otherwise it doesn't really give us a competitive Advantage. So why would we pay for it? Do you ever run into anything like that much like a law firm.
Have a conflict? Check.
No. I mean when there's conflict then, you know, you're on to something and I'm looking forward to that day, when we do have that conflict, I would say the more internal conversation that we have as a board, is how transparent to make it so that we start actually taking seriously the level of impact that different investors around the world. Actually are getting you mean
transparency in terms of like what you learn how much to make publicly
available. Yeah.
And it goes to the ethos at the beginning of Acumen even and I guess it goes to that girl. We were talking about, I just wanted to know the truth ourselves so even if the world didn't care, we would always have a forced ranking of our investments. And if you just sat there trying to defend your investment as an investor, that was a way you could get fired. If you were the one who talked about everything that was wrong with it and what made you worried that was a way you could become more of a hero and now we're
Grown quite large. And I think we have a different set of questions that we ask, but I think it was that ethos Tim of holding ourselves to account for the kind of impact that we are trying to create in the world. Not protect that allowed Acumen to partner with just incredible market makers, like the guys who founded Delight, which has brought clean solar light and electricity, to over a hundred million people and really launched an energy Revolution and taught me that the kind of
And we need to think about right now. At scale, doesn't only reward the building of a single company, but those companies who ultimately create entire markets, I think that's the next Frontier in so many ways.
So you gave an example. Just one example of many of just the scale of the large-scale impact that Acumen and these these various spin-offs and for-profit funds have been able to have in the world but if we go back to
2001 Circa, 2001 Acumen, you know, I always like to ask aside from Acumen. Did you have any other names that were on the short list for consideration that you remember, do you remember any other rough
dry surface? Yeah, of course. I do. In fact, we had, you know, 2001 just to put us back again, it was the.com craziness. Well, 2000, 2001 by to that. 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, it's a great. I think that was my brother Mike's but I'm not, I can't remember. But there was a lot of wide involved in the naming of Acumen and then I really love the word immersion I still do. It's one of the principles of moral imagination. There's a great line from
Until the Olsen where she says, may, you live a life of immersion, I'm paraphrasing. But what price will you pay to truly understand the complexity of the issues that we are trying to solve? You have to get close Ryan Stephenson. The Civil Rights activist says, you have to get proximus, I say you have to immerse, it's the same. But when we did trials, particularly across gender women were attracted to the word immersion men, hated it hated it, and so acumen.
Seemed a little less offensive to one of the other two groups.
How did you test it? Were you sending out a poll to a group of friends? How did you do the split testing?
Well, a friend of mine, Antonia bearing was working for a now. No longer.com called, I think it was called March 1st. They did this big ideation project with us, so they actually did some true Consumer Testing, but I also
Having so many people in my life and being it is extrovert just kept asking asking asking and I couldn't find a single man who was with me on immersion and in fact I can remember one person was like I just hear that word Jacqueline. I feel like you're making me drown in a sea. There is something to that. There are moments when you feel like you're drowning but that you come out to Clarity. But so have we
decided I never would have guessed in a million years that you would have such a
Gender split on immersion, maybe I'm just a language geek so I find it attractive as a
concept. I think, now in fact, our housing company in Pakistan devout Aslam, he actually named one of his funds, the immersion fund. Once you really think about, it's a beautiful word, all of us right now, need to immerse more in each other's lives. All of us need to design with the imagination, not just through our own lens. But with the imagination, that is morally based
You don't get that if we don't have immersion, I think it's changed.
Yeah. I was just gonna ask if you could just explore for a moment and then we're going to come back to Acumen and I'm going to ask you about the earliest winds and if you could speak to those, but I don't want to gloss over moral imagination, could you just take a moment? I think you're kind of walking into that territory, but just to frame it. What is moral
imagination? Moral imagination is essentially putting yourself.
In another shoes and building from their perspective. As I said, it's
we often designed 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
Stomach lie about those issues that get in people's way and then, frankly being honest, enough to recognize where people get in their own way. And then moving from there,
When you say empathy in some cases, enforces, the status quo, could you elaborate on that this? Do you mean that? It's just an US versus not versus, but like an Us and Them kind of the savior of the film. The blank is that that dichotomy that's created or not. That that is what empathy does of course. But what do you mean by enforcing the status
quo? I think it's even deeper mean. I think when I first learned about the moral imagination was in college, when I was at Charles.
Ironically given everything that happened in Charlottesville few years ago and I signed up to bring a turkey dinner and all the trappings of a Christmas to this community. That was 30 minutes away from the University where low-income people lived. I was also kind of a wild co-ed. It's so we had this big party. We asked everyone to bring food and toys to make a perfect Christmas for these kids.
I was really excited because I felt at some level. So sorry for these people that didn't get to have a Christmas the next morning my girlfriend and I got up and we got in her car. We loaded it with all the stuff we were both completely hung over. We drove into this place that I've 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 say, 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 grab the stuff. I ran it, I threw it on the porch. I ran back to the car was like just go.
And I think, in a way it was the beginning of my moral imagination, that that act was an act of empathy. It was well intended, and I hope that they had a really lovely Christmas, but the moral imagination would have said, look am I willing to do the work of actually understanding? Who these people are at the very least and building from there.
If I'm not find an organization that does even better, ask the questions around, what got them there in the first place and where can I be spending? My time and my energy and my Capital to solve that problem and I'm not saying we shouldn't give charity, I think there's a real role for moving from that place of empathy and from that place of unbridled love in a moment.
Our job right now, when when pandemic and everything that's happened in the world has broken. Our systems open is to think bigger than that and to hold ourselves to account at a systemic level. And that's that's what my obsession is. Thank you
for explaining that and telling that story also, which I think drives it home acumen.
So wing and 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. Oh yeah. And I would call it like it was yesterday. We had helped put together this collaboration this deal to bring long-lasting malaria bed, nets into Tanzania and 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 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. I know Shah in Arusha Tanzania and worked with global fund to buy these nets. And
Didn't really know what was going to look like. And of course, I had 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. Few months later. I went back in. There, were four few months later, I went back in there were eight. And there was that moment when suddenly I was seeing
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 nuts, a year they ended up being 15 percent of Global Production. And when you think about that, that's like a half a billion people who have gotten access to malaria bed nets because of this little company in. Not so little anymore company in Arusha Tanzania. I was like Bingo. This is what we're about.
Boom
proof of concept. Boom. Let's look at this example because I'd like to explore the thought process or the process a bit in so much as I think many people who are considering impact investing or even perhaps starting a firm or a fund, or a company that has that, as its intended purpose, particularly a fun, they might
Solicit proposals or business proposals, and then choose from that menu of options, but it seems like you started with selecting a problem. And then you canvassed to find candidates, is that how you
approached it in the beginning? We selected a sectors. We were mostly focused at the very beginning on how 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 be like, no, we are trying to find those Health Technologies that could fundamentally change people's lives and bring them dignity. Now, again, we're in a very different place where we have all local teams on the ground, depending on the region, there's much more focus on the sectors. And Tim, what we find then is, if you think about Acumen, as a laboratory, when we see a company really move up like a delight, then we can start.
Build other companies around it to really help create that ecosystem. So we're a bit different in the US, for instance, it wouldn't make sense for us to looking at off-grid energy or investing in the social determinants of Health Care. Financial inclusion and Workforce Development. Which we feel are so critical to where the nation is. Now when it comes to the poor are low-income people
the you know you mentioned Sumitomo which is Japanese and developing an ecosystem around a company is
In some ways, very Japanese concept or something, it's been very well explored and developed in the cater to these, I suppose conglomerates would be a lazy way to translate that in Japan but that
as is a very long term approach.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's a look at some of these companies have lasted, a very long time, not five or ten-year companies and 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 while simultaneously in some respects and then, after looked at microfinance access to Capital, you started a bakery. I don't think that's a small thing. You actually were boots on the ground getting first-hand experience.
In an immersive way of what entrepreneurship looked like in your chosen environment. You got your ass, kicked in West Africa, but put another way you really got an extended education.
On someone else's Charter, with someone else's organization and support you through that. Entire period of time are developing grit learning what doesn't work certain approaches to parachuting in your learning conversely, what does work and then suddenly your 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
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 back abby'll you wouldn't have had the operational experience and just wouldn't have worked. I sometimes worry that these young or older people quite frankly who could really make a positive Den 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 or like, I just want to change the world. What advice would you give to them?
Well, the first would be this idea of just follow your passion. I don't even really have an understand what that means. Even though my whole life, I have been very clear about the way I wanted to create change and for whom it wasn't this as you said out of the box really understanding that we were going to use different forms of capital and support it with the right kind of talent.
To work a system to create real change. I would say just start don't start by asking. What is my purpose? What is my passion start? By asking what are the problems that need to be solved? Which one's attract me and take a step toward that. Take one step and the work will teach you where you need to take the next step. Build Tools in your toolbox. If you still don't know what your passion or your purpose is as you take those steps, follow a leader.
And learn from that later, there are something so powerful. And I think this is what you're getting at to Tim in. Apprentice sing, I would say, I apprenticed for 15 years and also to your point that Bakery in some ways, probably look like a Girl Scout project to a lot of people when I think about some of the most important things I've ever done in my life, that one sits at the top for all the reasons that you implied,
I had to learn the gritty realities. Talk about learning humility. I also saw that we could succeed and I had to let go of a lot of my assumptions yet again. And so I do think you're right. Skipping steps, particularly because life is both shorter than we think it is and it's longer than we think it is. It doesn't serve the world and it doesn't serve you
here here. You've also I don't know if you've said this or written it but I vaguely remember and maybe you can provide
Add some, some context here for when it was said or written. But something along the lines of if you try to keep all of your options open, you may just end up with a bunch of
options. I think. Jim Collins said that to me when I was on my behalf to be his student, and I have paraphrase. Jim, I say that a lot where it's like, well, you know, Jaclyn I had to keep my options open. I'm like, seriously, just commit to something. This, we don't tell you,
People or even old people, we don't expect that enough, but I think the cultivation of the individual is, there 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 and layering of life that you never really understood. You had
that is something that I don't think I would have fully been able to wrap my head around.
And 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 sairaag. Never aggressive like that one. Yeah. Well your brother Mike has a format to say about that mister mister this ain't your grandma's philanthropy but the great relief and unburdening
Me Centric living that comes from dedicating yourself to something. Larger is, is really profound. And I mean it's not entirely altruistic. It's so relieving. I just it's hard to overstate that. I'm glad you mentioned it.
Well and none of this is entirely altruistic. If we're seeking purpose, if we all buy into throws that so many men
live lives of quiet desperation and we don't want to be those people. Then there is no 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 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. You mentioned following.
A leader earlier and also practicing, 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 leader? Doesn't have to be John Gardner? I wrote that down just because you mentioned it in pain, mentioned, John and passing from I believe it was your GSB days, right? The the Stanford days to what makes
Good Mentor or a good leader, the type you might want to follow or learn from
for me. There's really no one like John Gardner in my life. Tim, he was this very Patrician, man, who almost spoke in Cohen's. By the time I met him, we were 50 years apart. Hey, Kate. 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, welfare. So he was at the table and negotiated some of the great civil rights. Legislation talk about courage. He would say things to me, like, you know, focus on being interested. Jacqueline, not interesting. When I would get some fancy job offer and he would think that it's that was a vanity project. Rather than a character building project John left, the cabinet and resigned his his position in protested the
More and in response, he created a Grassroots citizens organization at age 54 called to common cause and it was that level of integrity and of doing the right thing. Not the easy thing that I think we're all yearning for in our leaders today.
John.
Could have done anything. But when I think about what Legacy is, I think about him and I look at the the now
We've had over a million sign ups on our document Academy when I see these hundreds and hundreds of Acumen fellows in the entrepreneurs. I sometimes hear John's words in them. And I think this man who's been dead for almost 20 years, is fully alive with the kind of Legacy that matters because he focused on investing in the world around him and not just in himself,
so, Jaclyn I've good news, bad news, depending it's actually the same news, I just don't know.
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 it's
over.
Yeah. No definitely not a do-over. 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 that a longer question. The shorter question is going to be about books and
the longer questions going to be about advice to different types of listeners. Those people who have more time than money. Maybe their earlier in their careers, maybe they're just in a transition, then you have the investor types. I would consider myself an investor type also, who are looking to have more impact, make more impact. And then to institutional those people who might be in positions within institutions before we get to that. So you were, you were kind enough to contribute to tribal mentors. My
Spoke. 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, two, three books that have greatly influenced your life. Now you mentioned a few. Now you can also revise these one was Invisible Man. By Ralph Ellison another Things Fall Apart by. Can you pronounce this author's name for me.
Chinua Achebe.
Thank you. There's so many words and names that I know how to read.
I recognize, but I have no idea how to pronounce and then a fine balance by, here's another one. Right in
mystery wrapped in mystery. There we
go. If you had to pick one of these,
Or another book. It doesn't have to be one of these three but a book that you've given as a gift or that has had a strong impact on you for people to start with which might you recommend. And why. Of course, I recommend. People also read your books, the blue sweater and also Manifesto for more Revolution. So not to exclude those, but for the sake of conversation. Now, if they weren't those books, what comes to mind? I
have reasons for each of those books and certainly the Invisible Man, In This Moment of the black lives matters.
Protests and 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 Victor Frankel's Man's Search for meaning where he
Really looks at people at the Holocaust and asks himself, why did some just sort of crumpled up and die and other 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 but 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. I
could not endorse that strongly enough for anyone who's listening to this also across 500 plus episodes of this podcast. These 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 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 is a book that helped him to get through so much suffering. Also,
yeah. And moral imagination, that he had and seeing not just the ugliness of the world that is and the humility that that takes. But he truly had the audacity to imagine
What could be and to see the infinite potential in every human being.
Let's use that as a segue to help others to embrace the audacity to imagine what they might do. And you can take these in any order and there might be other archetypes. We want to touch upon but for those people listening and I'll just grab three, we have
The, the person with right now, for any number of reasons, more time than financial resources, what they might do, and you don't have to tackle them in this order, the individual investor. So that's someone who is accustomed to perhaps investing in public equities, or in my case and many others startups, cryptocurrency. Whatever it might be, who would like to begin to experiment with Investing For Greater social impact.
Or impact, and then the players in the institutional space, those people who may be at Asset Management firms, or or otherwise, what, who also would like to either in a minute and 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.
And what would you say to any of those
groups to the person with not a lot of money? But time I would say focus on both immersion and understanding the problems around us. And also another practice from the book, which is accompaniment by accompaniment what I mean to walk with someone to try and understand their problem. Not take it on, and solve it for them, but to help them build the muscles, so that they can solve it
themselves by book. In this case, you mean manifest
Manifesto from work.
Relation. And the whole idea of moral Revolution is going to give more to the world than you take. It's not. There are some who have the world responsibility itself, 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.
Only right now to be more conscious about the way that we spend our money, even for small things, and by sustainably. And so it's building into your everyday, a much greater Consciousness. And awareness of the fact that our action in our inaction, impacts people everywhere for the individual investor. I would say that one of the broken parts of our current system of capitalism which bifurcates how we make money?
And how we give it away, is that we often disregard how people are treated inside and outside our companies, and then we, as well as the environment and then we try to make amends for the fact that we are the status quo with our philanthropy on the outside and that model is deeply broken. As investors, how do we think more holistically about the impact that were were making positive and negative with all parts of our money?
I am cost that Spectrum. There has never been such opportunity as there is right now to invest in extraordinary, entrepreneurs that are that are reimagining. How to use the tools of capitalism to solve big problems. As I said to may 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.
Turns we have a company in the United States called every table and it is a fast food healthy. Nutritious, affordable restaurant chain. Now in Los Angeles. It's about eight different restaurants. And with the pandemic, it just has exploded in the best ways of delivering food and partnering with governments and individual philanthropists that are willing to pay meals forward. So that people in low-income parts of Los Angeles can get healthy affordable food with
Black lives matter protests what sound poke 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 3 of 13 million dollars. You know seven-year dead at 2% that will allow him.
To identify the entrepreneurs amongst his employees, give them the opportunity to start their own franchise. Enable them to have $40,000 a year salary for the next three years. And hopefully we're going to see a whole group of black and white necks entrepreneurs that are running every table franchises in of and for their communities. That's the kind of creativity that exists right now in the United States and everywhere else in the world that we work from Pakistan to Colombia if I were and I am
I'd investor that really cares about impact. I would urge myself and urge everyone else to think more expansively about themselves as investors using all the tools at our disposal and for the big institutions, I would say one thing that, as long as we have an investment model that is still based on extraction rather than
Actually Investing For good. We are going to continue to build more and more inequality in ways that are fully unsustainable for this world. It has been really exciting to me to see, not only a seven hundred billion dollar impact investing sector emerge over the last 20 years. But also to see big companies like BlackRock and others say it enough but we've got to move from a place where we do no harm.
To warm where real investing is not only accounted for by what a few shareholders earn come what may. But that real investing is truly measured by the amount of the jobs, the beauty, the human capability, the opportunities that are enabled in the world.
So, I would love to
Ask you for some simple next steps for. Also, each of those three categories, like what people could do tomorrow. And the reason I ask that is that I think it's very easy for people to take next steps towards impact investing, whether the form of investment is time or money or energy and to push it into the someday category. I think it's very easy to do and I don't wrong them. I don't wrong anyone.
For that. Because it can seem like kind of stumbling through a fog if they don't have a direction in so much. As if we take, just an individual investor, I'll use myself as an example. 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
Those relationships and put in the time to get an understanding of let's just call it the 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 you? We could tackle the investment side first but the kind of individual the institutional and then person with more time like what could they do tomorrow?
Oh, or next week for instance, is is a simple answer. Like, hey if you don't want to figure this out, invest in one of our for-profit impact funds, understanding that this podcast is not giving investment advice. I'm not a registered investment advisor, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I would love to hear what some simple next steps might be. If they agree with you, they want to begin to get a, get some skin in the game to get on the playing
field. I mean, I appreciate the self-promotion
Invitation there Tim. If I gotta go down that path, I would say that this, The symbolist Next Step would be to get onto Acumen Academy on our website and check out the courses, including the path of moral leadership that Seth Godin. Who's so extraordinary and every ways helped us build, which takes the different practices of the book and really looks at the examples of companies that go from you.
Chocolate and coffee and Colombia to bed, nets to chickens in Ethiopia and really shows some of the fundamental business models that have it enabled, extraordinary levels of change as well as identify 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, Andy, e, dot org, I think and so get smart, learn on the Acumen website. Are also all of our companies and the stories of many of them, that give a real sense. Again, not only of the possible, but of ways that people can get involved. As I said, Tim all of our actions increasingly matter,
And so pay 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 to such different routes as young people and yet all along the way asking these questions.
You change the world. How do you change the world? How do you change the world? I actually think it's about getting started, where you can with what you have and who you are, but it's also about asking yourself the question. Not am I making more money? Am I rich or famous more favors for 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
see Bank. What am I doing to insist on Elevate and enable human dignity? I would start there and then I'd get smart.
You invoked the name of 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 have to make a little bit more money. You can use all sorts of socially acceptable, excuses, not to take action. And that there are in fact, easy things, simple things, and you can do the easy thing first. If in doubt, don't hit snooze for three years, go
to Acumen dot-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 to 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.
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 dot org or Ahmed org forward slash moral Revolution dig around commit to 3060 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 over use someone's name it's a very effective way of I'm at would hope that I'm already engaged but keeping me even more engaged. Is that something that you've always done? Or is that something that you developed some?
Damn, you're making me laugh. You remind me of the first book thing I did with blue sweater.
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 not to imply that
this is some artificial thing. I just, I feel like it's, of course, genuine, but it's something that not a lot of people do or they try to play real. So deliberately they end up saying your name, every other sentence and you're like, I feel like you're trying to sell me as you used car or something, but you are no Irene
natural. I think it goes. I actually think it goes to immersion which is probably why I didn't get to like talk about many of the things I really wanted to talk about because
I just get so focused. I like who you are. What you're talking about that? No, it's not conscious, it's not conscious. So I wish I had a better
answer. Oh, what a gift, I quite appreciate it. Well, let's let's give I'm going to cheat, I'm gonna ask you more than two questions, but my last question is going to be recommendations. Closing comments, things you'd like to say before we wrap up for this round one, but would you like to give a teaser for other things that you would have liked to have talked about?
We didn't get around
to.
Is there anything you'd like to mention lest it be left out of this, this first edition?
I really appreciate that. You are even asking me that offered to give me that opportunity. And I think another reason that I probably know when to say your name or not, or don't even know, but without meaning to flatter you truly are deeply, engaging, conversationalist, and interviewer, and I really appreciate that. Yeah, you really are. There are many things that I'd like to talk about in terms of what it actually means.
Tibet 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 overtime, understand it character and that you used a lot of the words, the grit, the resiliency, the vision, the ability to take feedback, a whole other conversation, I'd love to have with you is on Courage. I I shared with you at the beginning of
This, let you do remind me of my brother's plural and that you've got just an extraordinary level of what looks like fearlessness. And I'm betting that you've learned to flex those Fearless - muscles early in your life and you practice them all along. But because of the vulnerability, and the real courage that you've shown in your podcast with Debbie Millman, there was a whole set of muscles that went untended.
And that the key to us becoming not just good at what we do or famous or what have you but becoming wise is to learn how to flex those muscles of Courage that we don't always flex. And I think this is another moment in history that really demands that of us and third. I'd love to go deeper into the holding of tensions.
We're at a moment in history where we have to learn how to find each other across, what's might seem like impossible, divides to cross. And yet we're all, we have each other and we're on this Earth for a short time. And it's up to us to be a generation that actually get stuff done, rather than being seen as being blind, and disconnected from one another. And so Acumen has worked for 20 years.
And communities where people are raised to hate each other. And when I think about who our Global Community is, it also has been raised with many, many different people who were taught to hate each other and yet it is possible to build out of diversity, a sense of wholeness, but not not, if we just focus on what we're getting from an organization or a nation, or Community, but the responsibility that we have for each other. And I hear that in different conversations that you've been.
Having with people and I'd love to go there too. Finally, I would just love to say we are really one-of-a-kind, Tim Ferriss and the prep and the Curiosity that you bring and frankly the love that you bring to every conversation and to the work that you're doing is really unparalleled when I think of true moral imagination. It's based in a deep curiosity and people who are willing to follow that thread.
Of curiosity to wherever it might lead. And so thank you for modeling that for all of us.
Thank you so much talking about on flexed muscles. I'm not very. I haven't Flex the muscle of letting things land very much. So I'm going to, I'm going to tuck that away and think about it for the rest of today. So thank you very much for saying that and for providing such a wonderful conversation to me and to everyone listening, my God, you are so good.
You're so good and you're such an inspiration and I just love the fact that you have traveled so many paths that many would assume diverge and yet you have found a way to make them converge. If that makes sense. You have the operational shops, you have the toughness and the honesty to speak truth. And I
Call 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 year funds. I don't know, saying something along the lines of Jacqueline. You always talk about love but then we get you around the negotiating table and you're so hardcore and you are living proof that those do not need to be mutually exclusive. Furthermore that they can be mutually reinforcing, you can combine the hard and the soft in a way.
A, that is tremendously effective in the world and that in fact, there are some might say, an imperative, or there are imperatives to be able to combine those things and to not view them as separate. And I'm just so extremely happy that I had the chance to have this conversation and I hope it is just the first of many. So thank you again for taking the time.
Thank you, Tim. And I, I'm just so honored, truly, I feel so. So
Privileged and thank you too for making manifest, the hard and the soft. Hmm.
It's what we need to do in our world together. And so, looking forward to many conversations as well and and I wish you good luck on
this to be continued. I love saying that. I always mean it and I mean it very, very sincerely right now. Everyone check out Acumen dot-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 top log for
As podcast that will be easy to find. And until next time, ask dumb questions. They're often the smartest questions. You could ask be honest, bet on character use courage. It is the mother attribute for all other attributes. I'm stealing someone else's quote, but all other attributes at their testing Point, require courage and thanks for tuning in.
Hey guys, this is Tim again just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me and what do you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday and that provides a little more soul of fun for the weekend. And five bullet, Friday's a very short email, where I share the coolest things I found or that I've been pondering over the week, that could include favorite new albums that have discovered it could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've
How dug up in the other world of the esoteric? As I do it could include favorite articles that I have read and that I've shared with my close friends for instance and it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that check it out. Just go to four hour workweek.com. That's 4-Hour workweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email. You will get the very next one and if you sign up I hope you
Boy, this episode is brought to you by Magic spoon. Magic spoon is a brand new cereal that I eat just about every day. That is, low carb, high protein and zero sugar. I just ate a huge Boulder cocoa flavor about an hour ago. After a short, workout magic spoons, cereal has received a lot of attention, since launching last year, Time Magazine included in their list of best inventions of 2019 and Forbes called it. The future of cereal. It tastes just like your favorite sugary cereal from childhood. Remember that
But it's actually good for you. Each serving has 11 grams of protein, 3, grams of net carbs, 0 grams of sugar and only 110 calories. It's also gluten free grain, freaky toe, friendly soy free and GMO free. All the things, it's delicious. And I don't say that lightly because most of this healthy version of X stuff is not delicious, but these guys really no magic school has nailed it. It comes in your favorite traditional cereal flavors like cocoa, frosted and blueberry. You can try them all by grabbing a variety pack at
Magic spoon.com, Tim, or you can scrub box for bunch of boxes, I'm going to order some more today of the cocoa, which is my personal favorite, but there's a new Contender for favorite flavor because they just launched two limited edition flavors Honey, Nut and peanut butter which are delicious. I am a sucker for peanut butter and it is outstanding. So I think Coco and peanut butter are my two new favorite flavors and fun fact. My friends are also obsessed with magic spoon. One of the
Cast was popular guest, dr. Peter Tia, routinely crushes, six to seven servings at a time. That's a lot with no glycemic response. He's looked at this with a glucometer. He likes it so much. He invested other friends to very fine gentleman and also passed podcast. Guest Kevin Rose. Ryan holiday also invested. So go to magic spoon.com, Tim to grab some delicious cereal and try it for yourself today. Use promo code Tim, that's T. IM at checkout to save five dollars off of your order. And
McQueen is so confident in their product, I have boxes and boxes and boxes. It's backed with a 100% happiness guarantee. So, if you don't like it for any reason, they'll refund your money. No questions asked get your next delicious bowl of guilt. Free. Cereal at Magic spoon.com / Tim and use the code. Tim to get five dollars off. This episode is brought to you by eight sleep. My God. Am I in love with eight sleep? Good. Sleep is the Ultimate Game Changer more than 30 percent of Americans struggle sleep.
Another member of that sad group temperature is one of the main causes of poor sleep and heat has always been, my Nemesis have suffered for decades tossing and turning throwing, like it's off-putting the back on and repeating Ad nauseam. But now, I am falling asleep in record time, faster than ever. Why? Because I'm using a simple device called the Pod Pro cover by 8. It's the easiest and fastest way to sleep at the perfect temperature, if there's Dynamic cooling and heating with biometric tracking to offer,
The most advanced but most user-friendly Solution on the market. I pulled. All of you guys on social media, about the best tools for Sleep, enhancing sleep. And eat sleep, was by far and away the crowd favorite and the people were just raving fans of this. So I used it in here. We are, add the Pod Pro cover to your current mattress, and start sleeping as cool as 55 degrees Fahrenheit or as hot as a hundred and ten degrees Fahrenheit. It also splits your bed in half so your partner can
He totally different temperature. My girlfriend runs hot all the time. She doesn't need cooling. She loves the heat. Then we can have our own bespoke temperatures on either side, which is exactly what we're doing now for me. And for many people, the result eight sleep users fall asleep up to 32 percent faster, reduce sleep interruptions by up to 40% and get more restful sleep. Overall, I can personally attest to this because I track it and all sorts of ways, it's the total solution for enhanced recovery so you can take on the next day.
Day Elaine refreshed. And now my dear listeners. That's you guys, you can get 250 dollars off of the Pod Pro cover. That's a lot. Simply go to eight sleep.com Tim or use codes of Tim that's eight all spelled out TIG HT. Sleep.com Tim or use coupon code. Tim TI m, 8, sleep.com Tim for $200 off your pod, Pro cover.
