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Andy Crouch, best-selling author and a partner of theology and culture at Praxis, is a leading voice in the Faith Driven movement. Andy spoke at a recent Faith Driven Investor Conference on a topic that many faith driven investors are wrestling with regularly: God and money, we cannot serve both. How do we balance out Jesus’ teaching and our calling as Faith Driven Investors? Listen to what Andy had to say for some insights and inspiration.

Episode Transcript

Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.

Andy Crouch: I want to talk about two mysteries relating to Jesus most famous words about money. And of course, you know what they are. You cannot serve God, and most modern translations will say money. So the first mystery is why not? Why couldn’t you serve God and money each in their appropriate way, the way Jesus said you could God and Caesar. So Caesar’s, the pagan emperor of the Roman Empire, people pressed Jesus on the question of whether they should even pay taxes disease. Is there any says, well, render to Caesar what Caesar’s and render God wants God. So serve Caesar in a proper ways. Don’t serve Caesar the way you serve God. Don’t treat Caesar like a God. But you can serve Caesar in his appropriate way and serve God. Why does Jesus never say you cannot serve God and Caesar? But he does say you can’t serve God and money. And then what exactly does Jesus say? Because older translations have Jesus saying You cannot serve God and Mammon? What does that word doing there, and what would it mean that Jesus said, You cannot serve God, not just in money, but God and Mammon? So first question first, why? Why is money more powerful than Caesar? I want us to justice because money, especially in large quantities, gives you a power that Caesar does not have. What is money? You learned it in economics. It’s a medium of exchange, a unit of account and a store of value. And this means that money is fungible, countable, storable power. Power, the ability to get things done in the world. The ability to get what you want in the world. The ability to get that and get things done, perhaps even without other people wanting that to get done. That’s power and money gives you a form of power that’s fungible, countable and storable. So fungible it can be exchanged for other things. So this this obviously is one of the key things about money. It’s actually a very little use all by itself, but you can turn it into whatever you want. Not true of most forms of power, including Caesar’s. Caesar has a great deal of power as the Lord of the Roman Empire, but he can only exercise his power in that office in that land. He’s not the emperor of China. He can’t just arbitrarily decide he wants something totally different or wants to exercise his power in somewhere totally different. His power has to be used in a particular context because most power is contextual, but money allows you to use power wherever you want anywhere that legal tender is accepted. You can exchange it into anything. That’s power that Caesar doesn’t know, at least doesn’t know because of his role as emperor, then it’s accountable. You know how much you have of it, and this is definitely not true of most kinds of power. How much power exactly does the CEO of a company have? Well, certainly some. But if you’ve ever been in that role, you know, it’s hard to know exactly how much you have. There’s certainly no way to count it, but you can measure money, you can count money. You can know how much is on your balance sheet, how much is available to spend, and you can’t really do that with power. There’s an uncertainty to other kinds of power, but not with the kind of power that we call money. And maybe most powerfully, you can store it. It’s storable, a store of value. You can save it for later. And most kinds of power have to be exercised now at the moment that you have it because you may not have it later or it may not be given, except in a given moment. I’m I have a certain amount power as speaker at FDE. I’ve got this moment. I’ve got the power to speak to you right now, but I can’t save it for next month or next year. I’ve got to use it now. But if I have money at a time of my choosing, I imagine at least I can use it. And all of these kinds of power are kind of Caesar doesn’t have. And all of them add up to a power that is not dependent. There is no dependance in the power of money in the way there is in most other forms of power, even political and military power. Caesar only had his role because he was the adopted or sometimes biological son of a powerful man. It was a relationship that gave him power. Even in our modern democracies, people get power through the consent of the governed. But if you have enough money, the honest truth is you can get whatever done you want without anyone really having to know or care or even validate who you are because money talks without you having to be a person, it’s impersonal power. This is a power greater than any other in the world. And if you have it or had it or can imagine having it, why would you need God? Who needs God? When you can get what you want, whatever you want, when you want it, when you know how much you have, you can store it and you don’t have to be any particular kind of person to get what you want. Who any God? When you add money. So this is the first reason you can’t serve it, because this is a the most direct rival to God in human affairs. And the reason people come to you and the reason you and I live with anxieties about money with hopes for money is because of the kind of power we imagine that will give us. But there’s also a deeper thing going on, and it gets to the word that Jesus used. Jesus was speaking Aramaic the way he probably did his whole life. His biographers, the gospel writers, translate his words into Greek, and then we translate in case of English speakers into English so we can understand. But every once in a while, the Gospels will leave an Aramaic word untranslated, and they do so in this case. They write down in Greek, you shall not. You cannot serve God, and they just leave it on translate mammon. It’s a Semitic word that roughly means money or assets held in trust or the create trust. Why is why do they not translate this word? Well, what kinds of words do we not translate the most common kind of word? We don’t translate our names. You don’t translate a name from one language, although you just transliteration that name. And that’s what the gospel writers do here. And the early church concluded that the reason they did this is they understand they understood something that Jesus was saying, which is that we’re not talking about an ordinary noun here. We’re not talking about even just a principle or an idea. We’re talking about a quasi personal name, mobile power in human affairs that intends something that has a will in the world that is opposed to the will of God. And the ordinary way we talk about this ordinary, extraordinary way is that we are talking about a demonic power. The early church concluded that Mammon was not just an idea or a principle, but the name of a being in service of the enemy of all that is good. The opponent of all of God’s works in the world that we sometimes call Satan or the devil. That Mammon is this demonic force at work in history with a kind of quasi personal ability to whisper and speak to human beings and to arrange and distort human affairs in a particular direction. And what is it that man and wants to get done in the world wants the opposite of what God wants. God has made this good, beautiful, abundant material world. He fills it with persons. He says this world is already very good, but now I want you to feel the Earth multiply and bring forth all the possibility and all the value out of the world. As the world is filled with persons that will become full of the knowledge and love of God and the knowledge and love of one another, and in some ways, the knowledge and love of the world itself. While Mammon being aligned with the demonic, being part of the demonic forces that work in history hates all of these things. Of course it hates God. It wants us never to depend on God. Mammon hates creation itself, doesn’t like the material. World wants an immaterial world that’s purely spirit. And think about how money functions as a as as it gets more advanced, it becomes less and less metaphysical. We don’t carry around gold anymore. We just account in our minds the imagination of how much we have. And Mammon hates persons. It wants you to operate impersonally. It actually wants to turn persons into things. In fact, one mammon really gets its grip into a human society as it had gotten its grip into the Roman Empire as it got its grip into capitalism that built our western world. The result is treating persons like things, treating persons impersonally. This is what slavery is. It’s treating a person like property. It’s treating a person like a thing. And while God wants the world to be filled with persons so that the whole world will be known and loved and God will be known and loved and everything Mammon wants to empty the world of persons want Mammon wants everything to be impersonal so that there’s no one and nothing. No one left only things and ultimately not even material things, just an immaterial world that is devoted to pure power without dependance. You cannot serve a demon that wants to destroy a person’s relationships creation itself. And also serve the true God who wants to reunite persons, restore relationships and liberate creation from its bondage to decay. You cannot serve God and Mammon and this demonic power called Mammon. Besides our world, our modern world in an absolutely unique way in history. How can you doubt this is the principle that is driving human events in a way that wasn’t even true in Jesus Day wasn’t even true a thousand years ago, but is incredibly true today. You cannot serve God and Mammon. And so I’ve started to think that what’s Faith Driven Investor? I mean, investing is about the deployment of many kinds of resources, but especially financial ones, especially in our modern world. Money based resources. Is our job just to sort of do that with Christian principles, kind of, you know, obviously not violate Christian principles, but just do things with money in the world and maybe make money in Christian ways in the world. I think that is not nearly deep enough for what we’re actually called to do. We are actually here insofar as we are people who operate proximate to money and the whisperings and power of Mammon to take back territory from this demonic power and from these false promises of fungible, storable, accountable power. And reclaim territory for the relational creation loving God, who has placed us here to tend his world. So we’re going to do that. We’re gonna need to do two kinds of things. We’re going to need to have some detox moves and some creative moves or creative resistance, let’s say, to the empire moment. The first thing we’re going to have to do is just thoroughly dethrone Mammon and this imagination of money as power, without relationship abundance, without dependance, we’re going to have to dethrone that from our lives. So just two quick detox ideas that I think all of us need to take super seriously. The basic way to dethrone money and mammon is generosity. It’s giving because most ways we use money give us control and safety, but giving releases control by definition, when you give you no longer have control giving is risky. By definition, when you give, you’re giving up some store of value. You could have held on for some other use. And you’re just you’re just saying, I release it. It is the basic detox activity. The Christian Church has often taught a kind of principle of tithing on income, and I think that’s a really good thing, though I think many of us should probably aim for a higher percentage than ten. I just want to say what what has been absolutely transforming for my own life and our family in the last 10 years is twice now we have felt God leading us to tithes, not on our income, which we continue to do and a graduated way, but to tithe on our assets. So we calculate our net worth, all the things that are entrusted to us that we know how to value, and we find a way to liquidate 10 percent of that and give it away to the purposes of God’s kingdom and the good of our neighbors. I will tell you, I don’t know if you’ve ever tried this. If you try it first, it is incredibly hard to pull the trigger in that way. It feels really risky in a way that tithing on your income doesn’t because you can’t know that income is coming in. But this store of assets I have I mean, this is my store for the future. This is my promise of security for the future of options, for the future. And 10 percent is enough to hurt, at least for us. And once you do it, the joy and freedom you feel with relation to money is just unbelievable. It has been the thing that has just truly emptied me, especially having done it twice now in the last 10 years, just emptied me of the fear and love of money as near as I can tell, and my life is just gone. It’s just not part of my anxieties. And instead, I’m joyfully anticipating the next time I got to give away this level at this level in my life. The second detox was so generosity is the first. The second would be something I’m not really going to model here so directly, but it’s transparency. If we were together in person and I do this with many, many groups, have you been part of it? And I do it with many individuals. Rather than just talking about our family’s generosity in percentage terms, I would put up graphs and tables that have numbers on them. They show you how much we make in a given year our family, our household, how much we have been entrusted with our net worth, how that’s changed over time, how we’ve given, how we’ve spent, how we’ve saved all with real numbers. And when I do that consistently, people say I have never, ever heard a fellow Christian outside of some kind of confidential fiduciary relationship. Tell me how much they have and how much they make. Brothers, sisters, this should not be so this secrecy that we have around these numbers that are are the most immaterial thing about our lives is a sign that Mammon has its grip on us. And a very powerful way to detox is to open up your books. Not in a willy nilly way, and I don’t do it when it’s virtual and online because it’s severed from our relationship right now. But in any kind of relationship, I’m happy to share the complexities of what what God has entrusted to our family and how we’re trying to be faithful with it. Why is this not normal in the Christian community? Because we are trying to serve God and money. We’re trying to serve God in heaven at the same time. If we detox, if we are so lavishly generous for so openly transparent, what will we be free to do? What will become possible for us to strategies of creative resistance to man? And the first is we will be able in every transaction, every investment, every business decision to prioritize not money, but people to prioritize people, relationship with people, connection with people. The primary question we will ask about every deployment of our assets, including our spending as well as our saving and our investing and our giving is what will this do to strengthen relationship, to create capacity of love and dignity and respect for other people so that we can all do in the world what we were made to do? Only those who are free of mammon can realize that every transaction is actually an opportunity for love, to grow, for love, to be expressed in the world and a secondary byproduct is whatever accounting we may make of. The value that we can trust will be created as we operate a loving and people prioritizing where a person prioritizing where in the world. And then the second strategy of creative resistance to Amen, amen is that we can learn to be just ridiculously patient, ridiculously patient, ridiculous. That is to mammon. Because Mammon is in a hurry. Mammon wants you to make more of that money. Fast Mammon wants you to move so fast you don’t notice the people you’re running over to make it. And we learn from our Lord Jesus, and we learned from God’s own way with his creation that there’s this incredible divine patience that’s available to us. We are not in a hurry, so we will think less and less about IRR, more and more about what you know, some people call MLA multiples on investment. God is in the world. God wants us to be in the world to create multiples on investment, for sure. But our timing, how fast the velocity of money that’s ultimately up to God. That’s not the most important, not the most important thing. And this will lead us to have a thousand generation vision for our lives. If you give yourselves over to madmen, give yourself over to mama and you act and all the exploitive ways that madmen would have you act in order to get more of that countable, storable fungible power. You will do a lot of damage, but we know exactly. Or we know, according to God, how long that damage will last. God says if you enter into that kind of iniquity and mammon leads us to iniquity, it will do damage unto the third and fourth generation. This is Deuteronomy five nine. But the interesting thing is, even if you operate very ethically in the way that we’re taught to in modern investment in business, the truth is that the results financial and otherwise of of even our best investments, even our best enterprise building also probably will last about three or four generations. Honestly, most family wealth is kind of exhausted after three or four generations deluded. Most businesses don’t last more than that. Most of the work you and I do in our daily work, let alone the financial investments we place. I mean, realistically, it’s only going to last three or four generations. Picard says to those who love me and keep my commands and walking my way, I visit blessing to the thousandth generation. That is not going to be measured primarily in any kind of financial return that is measured in the flourishing of persons in the transmission of a love in the creation of redemptive possibility in the world. And it’s only available when we are completely serving God. We’ve completely detoxed from serving money. Any use of money is simply to serve this God on on whom we are completely dependent. Can we do that? Can we live in this world that mammon rules in a totally different way? Can we totally dethrone its power from our lives so that all of our workers, investors and spenders and savers and givers? Is devoted to God and God’s ways, prioritizing people. Pursuing patients, it’s as easy as a camel going through the eye of a needle, right with human beings, it’s impossible. But with God, all things are possible. Thanks.

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“How are we using the platform that God has given us to influence decision-makers and our communities to do good?” This is the question that drives Tsitsi Masiyiwa. One answer is by utilizing catalytic capital—a patient, flexible, risk-tolerant form of financing. Sometimes it accepts lower returns to accommodate the economics of high-impact organizations that are profitable but not profit-maximizing, whether due to an early stage of business development, tough markets, or a focus on impoverished populations. Tsitsi draws on her years of experience in philanthropy and as a social entrepreneur to share how Faith Driven Investors can leverage their capital to solve global challenges.

Episode Transcript

Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.

Jacktone: Faith Driven Entrepreneur Africa spotlights the stories across the continent, which is why you will mostly hear distinctively African stories on this podcast. But we are also part of a global network, so we’ll mix in some of the best stories from around the world to hear what God is doing in other areas as well. Today’s episode with Tsitsi Masiyiwa, what was originally recorded on the Faith Driven Investor podcast, and we are excited to share her story with you. Tsitsi is a philanthropist and social entrepreneur, she is executive chair and co-founder of Higher Life Foundation, whose primary goal is to invest in human capital development to thriving individuals, communities and sustainable livelihoods. Her work has garnered global recognition. She has received honorary doctorate degrees from Morehouse University in Atlanta, Georgia, and Africa University in Mutara, Zimbabwe, as well as the prestigious Champions for Change Award for leadership from the International Center for Research on Women. I. C. R. W. More recently, Tsitsi has pioneered impact investing in Africa through the establishment of Delta Philanthropies in 2017, which seeks to unlock and catalyze innovative solutions to the elimination of poverty by convening strategic partnerships and incubating new development models. We are excited to share her story.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor Podcast Special International Edition today with a special International Edition co-host, Reuben Coulter. Welcome to the program.

Reuben Coulter: Thank you. Delighted to be with you Henry.

Henry Kaestner: Reuben, you and I have known each other for years, and you’ve been the director of international strategy here and faith driven for what, about a year now? Something like that. And we’ve talked about all sorts of different really cool things going on in the world and projects that we get a chance to work on together as we look to encourage a global movement behind Faith Driven Entrepreneur and Faith Driven Investor, which is the topic we’re talking about today. And yet most of our listeners probably don’t know who you are. So, Reuben, who are you? Where do you come from?

Reuben Coulter: Well, as you may hear by my accent, I’m originally from Ireland, but based in Bristol in the U.K. and I’m married to a wonderful Polish lady. And we have two children, five years old and a three years old, the first born in Switzerland and the second born in Kenya. So we’re a truly international family, and I guess we’ve been called by God all over the world to serve him. I originally started off really wanting to understand how do we tackle poverty and help alleviate poverty around the world. And more recently, I realized that the question needs to be changed and needs to be flipped. How do we create prosperity and how do we help communities flourish? And so that’s taken me from working in the refugee camps in Darfur and Liberia for many years as a public health specialist. Then to the corridors of power at the World Economic Forum, where I curated the Davos event and the Africa Summit, and worked with business leaders and governments, helping them think through inclusive economic policies. More recently, I’ve become passionate about the role that entrepreneurs can play and how they are pioneers and changemakers and at the forefront of really tackling some of the big problems in our world. And some of the most incredible entrepreneurs I’ve met are from the continent of Africa, from Kenya, from Zimbabwe, from Nigeria. And they’re basically there isn’t a legacy infrastructure. And so they’ve had to build things from scratch in the area of financial technology, in agriculture, in health care. And it’s been just so exciting to be on that journey together with you. Henry over the past year.

Henry Kaestner: It has been and as I’m listening to you, it’s strange, of course, that we’ve waited a whole year to have you talk about it, and yet you’ve been behind the scenes. You’ve been helping us put together guests. And I’m so encouraged about doing this our first time, and I look forward to doing many more. And for this first time, we’ve got a very special guest that you have known now for a while and admired and had known that she would be a perfect guest for the podcast. And I’m hoping that you can introduce Tsitsi to us help us to understand what about her story really brought you in and then of course, we’ll ask her to tell her story. But Reuben, why don’t you introduce our guest and then I’ll ask her some questions and and then we’ll have a good conversation today about the balance between giving and investing and how to think about sub-Saharan Africa as a Faith Driven Investor.

Reuben Coulter: Yes, I’m so delighted to have Tsitsi Masiyiwa with us today. She’s an African philanthropist and a social entrepreneur and she’s a pioneer. She is someone who has been working for decades as the executive chair and co-founder of the Higher Life Foundation, whose mission is to build thriving individuals, communities and sustainable livelihoods. And with a particular focus on her home country of Zimbabwe. I had the privilege of meeting Tsitsi and her husband Strive at a conference a number of years ago where thought leaders in the UK came together to think about how do we use our talents for the common good? And the reference for that conference was the small group at the Clapham Circle who met a few hundred years ago in this little suburb of London, headed by William Wilberforce and many others. And they said, How do we use our influence, our gifts to change slavery, change the labor laws in the country, and bring about what we now understand as reformation during the Victorian era. And that conference was asking how do we do the same? And Tsitsi has been asking these questions for both our home country and of course the continent of Africa. Tsitsi is also a founding board member and the chair of the Africa Philanthropy Forum, as she’s the trustee of the Legatum Institute, the End Fund, UNICEF’s Gender Unlimited Initiative. And on the boards of many other organizations, the list goes on. And we’re just delighted to have you today to share a little bit about your story and your journey, both on the philanthropic side and on the impact investing sides.

Henry Kaestner: Indeed. Indeed, that’s an incredible background with amazing depth. And yet Tsitsi you have not yet been on the Faith Driven Investor podcast.

Tsitsi Masiyiwa: No, never.

Henry Kaestner: Never. We’re humbled and honored that you’re with us. You’ve got an incredible life story. Give us an overview of that journey. Who are you and where do you come from? Please.

Tsitsi Masiyiwa: So I am a Zimbabwean born in Zimbabwe. Zimbabwe is a beautiful little country in southern Africa, population 15 million, very tiny GDP in comparison to the United States, around 21 billion. 70% of our population lives in the rural areas. And also it’s a very young population like the rest of the African continent. So 62% of the Zimbabwean population is under the age of 25. Primary economic activity is around agriculture, mining and a little bit of tourism. And with COVID, of course, tourism is not really making any headway. And I’m sure people have heard of one of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Victoria Falls. So that’s what Zimbabwe is famous for. In terms of me personally, you know, I trained in business not with any intention of going into business. And I also didn’t come from an entrepreneurial family background by any chance of the imagination. It was purely because I started studying agriculture and then discovered too much chemistry and moved to study business, which was a lot easier. But how we got into philanthropy was very much through the business door. So my husband used to be in construction buildings and his main customer was the government. And he decided after having come across an exciting new technology called mobile telephone technology, decided to set up mobile network service in Zimbabwe. So he applied for a license and the government said no private citizens cannot carry communication on behalf of the government and the public because of this sensitivity of information. And when he looked at the Constitution, what he read was that everybody had the right to access to information. So he decided to take the issue to court because he felt that the position the government had taken was contrary to our constitutional rights. And of course, I asked him he wasn’t a believer. I was a Christian then. And I looked at him and I said, Do you want to sue the government? He said, Yes. I said, Well, I have faith, and if it were me, I wouldn’t do that. What’s the basis of your confidence? He said, No, no, no. It’s a very straightforward case. I would take them to court. It will take three or four months after that will be done. And I would have my business. I believed him. And guess what? It turned out to be like a five years legal battle where we ended up literally losing everything we had. But in the process during that period, Zimbabwe was going through a pandemic, just like we’re going through a pandemic right now, and it was HIV and AIDS. And when I saw just firstly members of my own family die, I had an aunt who lost eight children from HIV and AIDS. And these are people I loved that I grew up with. And I began to question myself as a believer that what can I do? What role can I play? And it was in the process of that. Plus I was going to taking the government to court and ending up losing literally everything we had that I began to ask God, what is the purpose? What is my purpose? And if we went to have a business, what would we do with the money? Because. You can only sleep in one bed, drive one car, live in one house. So for all the pain and suffering. What was it all about? And I connected the dots between the terrible, heart wrenching experience I was going through and seeing communities just decimated by HIV and AIDS. And then also that opportunity, that intersection was about. Use the resources that you have to do what you can. And for Strive and I an obvious choice on how we could play a role in alleviating the suffering was to go into philanthropy and use our resources to give scholarships to orphaned children. So in a nutshell, that’s how we started the business and how we went into philanthropy.

Henry Kaestner: So this is no small business that you all have started. It’s got some level scale. Most of our audience are entrepreneurs and investors. Give us a concept to think about a business in Zimbabwe. Most people will have an image in their head. And yet what God has done through you all is something altogether different, a greater scale. Tell us about the business and what Econet Global has become.

Tsitsi Masiyiwa: Sure. So when we started, you know, we thought we’ll probably get 100,000 customers and live happily ever after. Well, as you know, that technology just opens amazing doors for development on the African continent. But in terms of our business in Zimbabwe grew from literally 0 to 100000 customers and over a period of time to 11 million customers. So currently, you know, we are the biggest MNO or mobile network operator in Zimbabwe. But we also saw opportunity so around early 2000. My husband left Zimbabwe and decided to move to South Africa so that we could explore new opportunities in South Africa. And that led us to begin to build the business. And we expanded from South Africa to the UK and then built a footprint on the African continent. So currently we are in more than 19 African countries. The business has since gone beyond mobile telephony to building fiber so millions of Africans can have access to the Internet. So we have built undersea cables, we have built on land cables, and we’ve really opened up Internet access into areas that honestly, there was just no way of people communicating from village to village or town to town. So it’s been incredibly fulfilling as entrepreneurs and also as believers to just see communities that would have no access to the Internet being used to open up these countries and build infrastructure. From DRC, Congo to Zambia to South Africa to Kenya, you know, the list goes on. We’ve actually built a connection from literally from Cape to Cairo. Yeah. So it’s an incredible journey.

Henry Kaestner: That’s incredible. And I recently saw a map of Africa and saw the United States in it, India in it, China in it, Africa. So when you’re going from Cape Town to Cairo, you’re not talking about a small area. There’s a lot of customers. It’s a lot of land. Tell us a bit about how your faith impacts the business you run and how you’re able to do business as you’re guided by your faith. That might be different than others that are in the same marketplace.

Tsitsi Masiyiwa: So I think right from the beginning, for me, it was important to be very transparent about my faith. So when we started our foundation, we just openly said it’s a faith based foundation. And we also decided not to really look for funding from anybody so that we would remain true to our values, our mission, our purpose and our vision. So faith is central to what we do. We hire stuff that’s come from all different religious beliefs. We have men who are not believers, who are not Christians, etc. but they come into the business and they come into the foundation knowing what our beliefs are, because that really informs the way we make decisions in partnerships, the way we make decisions in investments, and also the culture in the organization. So faith has been a central part of who we are and of what we do. And I think what has helped is just being very, you know, not everybody is able to do it, but for us, it’s just been very easy to be very open and transparent about it and and to talk about it openly here.

Henry Kaestner: So you and Strive have this incredible platform and influence because of the size and scale of the success that God is giving you. You’ve been labeled Africa’s power couple. How do you steward that influence and blessing?

Tsitsi Masiyiwa: Well, you know, thank goodness. You know, we have the Bible to build context on what power is and the ways things could get very complicated. So when people say power couple, for me it is more about how are we using the platforms that God has given us to be able to influence decision makers to do good and also to influence our communities that we are very heavily embedded in. Our philanthropic work is we implement all our projects. So we are very embedded in the communities that we work in. So in that respect, I think we are very much, let me tell you, rely on the power of the Holy Spirit more than any other power. It’s given us just the ability to be able to understand other forms of power that either affect what we do political power. Because a lot of the work that we do involves governments, regulators and […]. So it’s understanding the different forms of power, but knowing the power that moves us and informs how we do our business, our investments and our philanthropy.

Reuben Coulter: I’d like to shift gears. As the name of this podcast implies in the conference. We’re mostly focused on investing. However, we realize that not all the world’s problems can be solved purely by investing. Some issues do require philanthropy, or sometimes we like to call us gospel catalytic giving. That might be whether it’s a humanitarian response or addressing basic needs. So I’d like to understand a little bit more about your foundation, Higher Life. You have this wonderful tagline, Investing in People for Africa’s Prosperity. Can you unpack a little bit of what you do?

Tsitsi Masiyiwa: So at Higher life, we do impact investment at different levels. So we do grantmaking and scholarships because of the type of communities that we are working with and the type of communities that we invest in. Our primary target groups are vulnerable communities and in particular orphans. So that has informed the manner in which we do our giving the communities from early childhood development level to primary school to high school to university to Ph.Ds. So because we are building human capital resource, we see that is our contribution to strengthening Africa’s ability to provide highly skilled and competent pool of human resources, plus also lifting levels of literacy, especially for those who are not able to really go beyond high school. So the investment has to be scholarships and grants in then comes to working with communities where sustainable livelihoods is. At the center of what we try to do is to provide grants, but also low interest or no interest loans in order to give our communities the opportunity to invest in their livelihoods, but in a way that honors their ability to contribute something, which is, you know, their labor, their efforts, their times, their skills, but also in a manner that doesn’t burden them by having to carry out loans. You know, so where it’s appropriate, we look at doing impact investment and giving out patient capital in order to strengthen sustainability in communities, so ability for the communities to improve livelihoods. We’ve also found it important for us to also partner with your big suppliers, where we’ve gone in to invest in businesses for profit so that they can increase their capacity to be able to provide goods and services to communities that would be unattractive for them if they did not access our type of patient capital or types of investments.

Reuben Coulter: So it’s going to say, let’s unpack each of those, because each of those is, as I know, a huge piece of work. And so I’d love to kind of understand a little bit better. So you talked about patient capital. So can you explain to us kind of what that looks like in practice? And yeah, how do you go about doing that?

Tsitsi Masiyiwa: So for Patient Capital, we’re looking at where we have given loans at very low interest rates. So initially, I’ll give you a specific example of investments we did. Our goal was to increase poultry production because the two companies we’re working with needed to build capacity. But the investment that they needed for them to build capacity to service your small buyer required funding that was fairly inexpensive and also that gave them a lot of leg room to be able to build on their cashflows and also profitability. So that’s the patient capital. So what we did, we invested in these two companies. They were able to increase their capacity. Number one, to train new smallholder farmers. That would then be given a batch of one day old chicks, look after them, raise them over a period of 8 to 12 weeks, and then be the supplier back to the company that we invested in. So it has worked very well. Because it allowed those companies, like I said, to consider investing in small holder farmers that they ordinarily would not consider or would be unattractive for them also to. It allowed the companies to go into areas where levels of poverty are very high, levels of rainfall are very low, and where economic activity is at a minimum. So communities were able to see income generating projects that actually made money and improved the livelihoods of those farmers who have participated in projects like that. So I’m very excited in that. It’s an area we are expanding and in the next season we are hoping to recruit a lot more farmers. We also, if I can also just add one other project which also excites me. So there is a group of farmers who came up with a very climate smart type of approach to farming agriculture to increase productivity among small holder farmers. So we partnered with them and trained small holder farmers as a pilot during the 20, 20, 21 agricultural season. So we provided training, which was around $118 per person, and that included comprehensive training over a week, plus a small pack of your seeds and all the inputs that are needed for the farmers to plant a seed and be able to harvest enough maize for a family of six. We had a mixed bag of results, I have to say. I would love to say it was highly successful, but I think for the pilot we learned a lot of lessons. There were things, of course, that we didn’t know but we should have known or we were too ambitious. But I think the important lesson for me was to understand the impact that if we are to invest more of this patient capital in these small holder farmers, the impact is not only evident to the farmer in terms of higher income per family, but also it gives the farmers the ability to really be empowered and have skills so that even once we are gone, we are not able to offer them patient capital. They still have the ability to grow their crops in a sustainable manner.

Reuben Coulter: Yes, now that it’s super exciting and I believe the partner you are working with is foundations for farming. Is that correct?

Tsitsi Masiyiwa: Absolutely. Foundations for farming. And they have gone all over the world now. I think they are quite their rock star in terms of climate, smart agriculture.

Reuben Coulter: Yeah. So foundations for farming for our listeners is a wonderful organization helping farmers in regenerative agriculture, really using natural organic methods to grow, and they’ve just seen phenomenal results. I believe that Craig Deall is the CEO of Foundations for Farming. We were with them just a couple of weeks ago, and I believe this year was the highest crop yield that Zimbabwe has seen and 25 or 30 years, which is just so encouraging for the country.

Tsitsi Masiyiwa: Absolutely. I think that for me, the turning point was when the government realized that this was a sustainable strategy that would enable the country to be more food secure and also provide farmers with the right skills to be able to produce at a level that can take care of your average family in a village.

Henry Kaestner: Tsitsi I’m hoping you might be able to help us unpack a topic that’s come up a lot, and I’ve thought about it as an investor in Africa a bit too, and navigated through it with the help of some good counsel. But it’s just the concept of patient capital. There’s an investor in America named Marc Andreessen, and he’s famous for saying, I will buy a house, meaning I will make an investment or I will buy a boat, which he says is making a gift, a philanthropic gift. But I won’t buy a houseboat. A houseboat is a combination of two, and they have them on lakes here in America. And what he was doing is he was referring in that illustration to a houseboat being patient capital or an impact investment because it combined too many aspects of both giving and investment. And he just couldn’t make sense of it. So he wanted to stay away from that. I think that we as Christ followers need to be drawn into that space of patient capital, that it’s not so black and white. That’s not just market return capital. We clearly can see through to a 20% return on investment or that is just a gift that there’s a huge area in the middle and yet it is complex. Some of those complexities, as I’ve seen in the past, is how do you think about patient capital amounting to a subsidy and does that create an artificial market distortion that the entrepreneur can work their way out of so that they can then graduate to someplace where they can get access to maybe larger pools of capital that are in the market, but at market rates, how do you process that with your investing? And maybe I’m even thinking about the framework wrong.

Tsitsi Masiyiwa: It’s always important, I think, to look at the context because if you’re sitting in the US. And you’re looking at patient capital. What it means in the US is very different to what it means in Africa. Our histories are different. In the US you are probably maybe second or third generation university exposure to entrepreneurship. You’ve seen US grow from, you know, industrialization to information age, all those phases. We are not in an environment like that. Majority of the people that you are going to come across is first time graduates from university. These are those who you are likely to meet in a conference. But remember, 70% of the population still lives in the rural areas, number one. Number two. 70% of the population has no access to clean water and they have no access to power. So even the concept of a houseboat is strange. So if the fundamentals are different, it’s very difficult to arrive at the same conclusions or to see patient capital with the same lens. So patient capital for me allows us the runway we need as Africans to be able to catch up. So we need to where Europe and the US where the West is there to far ahead. You are talking of GDP per capita of 60,000, 80,000, 100,000. Majority of the sub-Saharan Africa is living on a dollar 90 a day. And so you have to look at where are the areas one needs to invest, number one, to build the skills necessary in order to create an environment that allows open space for innovation, for high levels of productivity, and that requires, you know, high levels of literacy and education. So that’s at one level. And then at the second level to understand the importance of business entrepreneurship. Capitalism is something that many sub-Saharan countries are not familiar with because we come from a background of countries. We are young countries that were born out of liberation movements and most of them with financed and funded by Union of Soviet Socialist Republic and China. So the influences of Russia, India, China in terms of entrepreneurship made entrepreneurship something that is not general mindset was a lot of people generally think of employment and jobs and not job creation and entrepreneurship and then added to that a perception that capitalism is evil and that it takes it does not give. So all these underlying factors, I think, have really affected the way in which you look at investment, you look at wealth creation, and also the way you look at what economic empowerment means. So when I then look at patient capital, I see it as it’s one of the strategies that we need to ramp up and ramp up very quickly in order to help us leapfrog so we can get to a place where we can begin to build an entrepreneurial class that is highly competitive and that can produce products or services at the level of your highly developed countries.

Henry Kaestner: That’s very helpful. So this is an investment. It’s an investment in a generation to be able to build the infrastructure, to build the culture, to build the mindset that encourages innovation and entrepreneurship. And I think what you’re suggesting here is that if you accelerate too fast in expectation that that these entrepreneurs who don’t have the university training and don’t have generations of this type of mindset, if you accelerate them too fast and to needing to return the same type of results you might have from a Western European investment that the system will break, it’ll be thought of as being exploitative and that we just we need to be patient and that the market will develop when people can start to trust the market. Yeah, along those lines, tell me a bit about the participants and I understand enough about sub-Saharan Africa to know that there’s not a broad base of local investors that can put local skin in the game. And yet you clearly are leading by example in that regard. And they bring so much confidence to a Western investor that wants to deploy capital but wants to do it on terms with others that really know the market, understand the culture, and also put their capital at risk, whether it’s patient capital and market return capital. Do you see that developing or are you and Strive just such an anomaly that that has not yet developed? Are you hopeful? Talk to us a little bit about the state of local investment, people investing back into the local community.

Tsitsi Masiyiwa: You know, I would like to think that the story of an I over time becoming the norm rather than the exception. And simply because we were very blessed to go into an industry in which Strive had expertize in. He was a telecoms engineer, so he understood what it takes to invest in an industry like that. He understood that local capital alone will not do it. So he knew that if years to build the business, some of the options he has to look at not only domestic capital to invest in the business, but also to look at long term capital, which is you’re taking the company public in order to deepen and widen the pool, the access, the capital for the business. Also, I think the experience he had had working with, you know, the World Bank has IFC, which was very much active when we started our business in the 1980s, especially in Zimbabwe, investing in medium size businesses and that is patient capital. So he was able to attract some of that funding. But Zimbabwe is not a normal country, by the way, because of the political complications around the US, sanctions against the country, etc.. But we’ve seen an amazing crop of entrepreneurs develop in your Nigeria, in Kenya, we’ve seen even a rising class in Ethiopia, in South Africa. And I believe that has come about by. Government’s understanding the importance of creating a macroeconomic environment and also a regulatory environment that makes it possible for local entrepreneurs to be able to access funding and also to just lower the entry barriers so that it’s easier the opportunities are easier to take advantage of. I think yeah so. h onestly, I don’t think, you know, we are a unique couple by any stretch of the imagination. I think we are very blessed to be able to have done what we’ve been able to do, but we are also in an industry. What we picked was a high growth industry and transitioning from mobile telephony to building fiber internet. I think that also was just very strategic in helping us to expand very quickly in a short period of time.

Reuben Coulter: Yeah, no, it’s it’s so encouraging. You were one of the first couples to sign the Giving Pledge, which, of course, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett and were encouraging other people to give away their wealth and become more generous philanthropists. And but you’ve also gone on to chair the Africa Philanthropy Forum, and you’ve been mobilizing others and encouraging others. And over time, that’s really grown into a substantial movement. And it’s great to see the emergence of philanthropists and investors giving back and making a difference. And COVID 19 has obviously devastated the world. This third wave has been hitting Africa and Zimbabwe particularly hard. What is the situation like on the ground now and how should international philanthropists and investors who are listening to this podcast respond? What should they be doing to support what’s going on?

Tsitsi Masiyiwa: I think, you know, COVID has it has devastated every country globally. And I think initially when it started, when we began to see the effects in countries like the UK, Italy and the US, a lot of people were talking about that maybe between 20 and 25 million Africans would die simply because the health systems, there’s no capacity to respond to the pandemic. And thank God it hasn’t happened that way. And I will say one of the things that I have seen that has really helped was, number one, all hands on deck. That is, everybody understanding they have a role to play in order to ensure that this pandemic does not decimate communities. And it also helps that the tools to make sure information gets very quickly to communities and communities are quickly educated about what COVID is, and its impact really helped a lot. So we were able to see information go quickly, move very quickly into communities on, you know, what is COVID, what are the dos and don’ts and how do you, you know, keep safe? But at the African philanthropy level, the philanthropists really stepped in and they stepped in in millions, not small amounts of money. There was deep levels of collaboration, especially in the private sector. We saw in South Africa a big solidarity fund put up in order to quickly get protective clothing and PPE and also testing equipment in collaboration with the government. We saw Nigerians also step in. They put in more than $100 million to quickly, again, partner with the government to get their test kits on the ground and get as many masses of people tested as quickly as possible. In the smaller countries, what we have seen through our work in African Philanthropy Forum is to see how smaller countries have built networks for resource mobilization money and also businesses have stepped in and a lot of private hospitals have been built in various countries in order to ensure that the health support systems are put in place. What we did in Zimbabwe, for example, we partnered with a philanthropist called Elma Philanthropies, and we’ve done a lot of training of literally from doctors to nurses to auxiliaries, staff training to build morale and strengthen the skills of the health sector. We also were able to partner to bring in quickly deploy equipment that was basic equipment that was needed in the major hospitals in order to ensure that we did not see a breakdown in health delivery services. So, you know, I’ve been very encouraged as an African philanthropist at seeing just how at the local level how communities have stepped in and mobilized resources to be able to respond. Of course, we’ve also seen, you know, schools close. And I think we’ve. Really lost two years in terms of education, kids not learning anything. I think majority of the children in especially in rural communities, just haven’t been to school for two years. So that is a major, major problem we are facing. How do we respond? I think you need the private sector to step in. The government needs to step in. And, of course, philanthropy needs to step in. And I think the donor community needs to change its model. This is also one of the things that became very obvious during COVID. You know, in the past, you’ve had all these donor agencies, communities that are constantly flying all over the continent and spending, having a very high cost structure to deliver their services. And what has been very evident is, well, no one can travel. And it’s not like the continent has collapsed because the donors have not been coming. What has become very evident is change the model, become more efficient in how you deploy resources and that the donor community must can do what it does effectively without having to, you know, to make too many decisions out of, say, in New York, Washington, D.C. or London, but rather to be more trusting of what local communities can do and partner with them to implement work that needs to be done on the ground. And then lastly, leave the private sector to do what the private sector knows how to do, which is they are very good at innovation, good at deploying resources, good at logistics. And also, they’re just an amazing reservoir of ideas to solve problems.

Reuben Coulter: Thank you. I think that’s a wonderful notes for us to end on is the challenge to philanthropists. We need to be locally led. We need to be driven by capable local leadership and trust them and empower them to do what they do best. They know their community, they know their people, and for the private sector and for the investor community to come in and innovate and supports the innovators and entrepreneurs on the continent to help them grow and develop. But don’t just transplant a venture capital model from the US, but understand what type of capital and supports is relevant in the local environments, and how can that help entrepreneurship and innovation flourish for the prosperity of Africa? One final question. We always love to wrap up our interviews with this question, which is Where does God have you, in his words, right now? What is he speaking to you?

Tsitsi Masiyiwa: Oh, I am so excited about what lies ahead, but I really feel we all need to take a very long term view in the decisions we make, whether it is in investment or making decisions in our own growth as individuals or families taking a long term view. See, when we make decisions with a long term view, you are always more willing to absorb the pain of change and decisions that one needs to make. So yeah, that’s what I feel. The Lord is saying that let’s not look at short term benefits and forego long term gains because we want instant gratification.

Henry Kaestner: Tsitsi., I’m grateful for your time. I’m grateful for your leadership in Africa and for the message that you shared with us today. I’m wondering if you might pray for us as we all leave and go out and have days where hopefully we’ll honor God and be used by Him for His glory. In Europe, where Reuben is, and in North America or Justin and I are in and in Africa where you are.

Tsitsi Masiyiwa: Sure, Father, in the name of Jesus. I’m just so grateful for this opportunity. The conversation we’ve had, Lord, these are not ordinary words. These are words that are spirit and life, that not only will they impact the way we think and the way the listeners think and see and perceive what we can do to make the world a better place, but also that these conversations will open up our minds to see just how great our God is and that we, through a difficult season of COVID, that we have an opportunity to do something compelling in unity with the Spirit of God, in unity with one another driven by love. Father, I want to thank you for the impact also of the work that is being done by your children, and that the doors that are open to the new doors that are opened will result in us being able to do things that cause your name to be glorified and to be testified in all this, in the name of Jesus Amen.

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Jonathan Reckford is the CEO of Habitat for Humanity International. Before joining Habitat, Jonathan spent most of his career in leadership positions at Goldman Sachs, Marriott, The Walt Disney Co., and Best Buy.  Since joining Habitat in 2005, Jonathan has grown Habitat from serving 125,000 individuals each year to helping more than seven million people annually. It’s no surprise why he was named the most influential nonprofit leader in America in 2017. Today, he serves on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the World Economic Forum. Jonathan joins us today to share some of his story, what God is doing in and through Habitat, leadership lessons he’s learned in his career, and what it means to serve God at scale. 

Episode Transcript

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Jonathan Reckford: Help, you know, find the cause, the thing that’s bothering you and your community and jump in. But to me, it’s do get your own hands involved in your own feet involved because if you do it just at a head level and you’re not relationally connected, you know, the relational connections create the heart change that then allows us to create the next change.

Speaker 2: Welcome to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. If you’re a fund manager, investor or a financial advisor driven by your faith or want to be driven by your faith, then you’re in the right place. The best way to stay connected in the Faith Driven Investor community is to sign up for our newsletter at Faith Driven Investor talk. This podcast doesn’t exist without you. Our community. One of the things we’ve heard the community asked us for is help in finding great deals to invest in. And so we’ve launched Marketplace. It’s a new platform of funds and direct deals. Everything from private equity and real estate funds to ETFs from philanthropic and market rate deals, Spain to the U.S. and emerging markets. Check it out at Faith Driven Investor. Talk for Marketplace While you’re there, please send us any thoughts you have about how this podcast might better serve you for any questions you have about being a Faith Driven Investor.

Speaker 3: All opinions expressed on this podcast, including the team and guests, are solely their opinions. Host and guest may maintain positions in the companies and securities discussed. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as specific investment advice for any individual or organization.

Rusty Rueff: Hey everybody, welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. We’re so happy you’re back with us once again this week. Today we have a guest by the name of Jonathan Reckford. Jonathan is the CEO of Habitat for Humanity International. Before joining Habitat, Jonathan spent most of his career in leadership positions at Goldman Sachs, Marriott, The Walt Disney Company and Best Buy. Since joining Habitat in 2005, Jonathan has grown habitat from serving one hundred and twenty five thousand individuals each year to helping more than seven million people annually. It’s no surprise why he was named the most influential nonprofit leader in America in 2017. Today, he serves on the board of the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta, is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the World Economic Forum. Jonathan joins us today to share some of his story, what God is doing in and through habitat, and what it means to serve God at scale. Let’s listen in.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. I’m here with my co-host Luke Roush. Luke, greetings. Welcome.

Luke Roush: It’s great to be here. Great to

Henry Kaestner: be here. How are things in Nashville?

Luke Roush: Things in Nashville are lovely. What a great place to live. Come join us.

Henry Kaestner: A lot of people are you don’t even need to issue that invitation anymore. We miss you out here. We miss you out here. We’re grateful that we’ve got an incredible guest and a friend of both of ours and friend of Justin’s too. As we’ve gotten to know Jonathan over the years at the Christian Economic Forum, so shout out to chuck Bentley and his incredible leadership and bring together a group of men and women just really committed to understanding how God is at work in the marketplace, the financial markets and the macroeconomic environment. And I’ve been looking for this episode in particular because, as I said before we went on air this summer, I had several different highlights which are really cool. It’s just great to emerge from COVID and spend time with friends and family. But there is a hike that I took with Jonathan before the events get started, the Christian Economic Forum that was super encouraging for me and it was encouraging to me on multiple levels. One was a leader in the space that could challenge and encourage me. So it’s great just to spend time with Jonathan Richard just for that reason. But then there are two different things that really made an impact on me. Number one, we spent about half our time talking about what does it look like to be and Russell through being good fathers and how to attend to the different needs of our children. And I hadn’t expected to go on a hike with Jonathan Rickford and come away having been blessed in that area, but I most assuredly was. And then the second one was we spent some good time not just talking about habitat, but the broader macro economic environment that he operates in. Having been the CEO of Habitat for Humanity for a long time now, having served on the board of the Federal Reserve in Atlanta and helping me to just understand just the larger societal challenges that impact poverty and what does that look like and the merger of NGOs and public policy and free enterprise? And just the kind of the bigger cocktail, if you will, that we found ourselves in. Those of us were on this podcast caring about how we invest the assets that God is in trust us with, according to our faith. And in some ways, that can be really simple in terms of being faithful and obedient and getting down on our knees and asking God to lead us in other ways. It can be pretty complicated. And so when you find somebody like Jonathan, they can help you to navigate through that and make it less complicated. And to be clear. Poverty is a complicated process, but whenever you get the chance to spend some time, whether it’s on a hike in Colorado or on a podcast like I hope that you will experience today when somebody can help you to make sense of all that in a way that might be actionable, that’s a big deal. So that’s what we’re hoping to accomplish today. Jonathan, thank you very, very much for being with us.

Jonathan Reckford: Thanks so much, Henry. It’s great to be with you all.

Henry Kaestner: So we’d like to understand everybody’s story that comes on the podcast. And there’s a lot, of course, to you and who you are. And I know a bit about the fact that you grew up in one of the greatest towns in the world. So why don’t you share a little bit about your background and your time before habitat and before the Federal Reserve? Please.

Jonathan Reckford: So thank you and great to be with all of you. More broadly, my story, I would break it. Maybe two parts one the family side and how I got launched, and then a very unlikely career that just shows that God has a sense of humor, I think. But in one now I can look back and see how all those pieces were useful, even if my career didn’t make sense. In some parts along the way, I grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, which is a spectacular place to grow up. Yes, Father was a classics professor at USC, now retired, and that was the fourth of five kids, and it really was a special place to grow up. Did a brief stint in England, which was very formative for second grade when he was on sabbatical, and that probably first opened my eyes to a bigger world in a new way, and I was blessed with a couple of really powerful role models beyond my immediate family. My grandmother was a quite iconoclastic and formidable woman. Her name was Millicent Fenwick, and she was one of the relatively small number of women in the US Congress in the 70s. And she was a civil rights pioneer and ferocious fighter for human rights. And some people know the comic strip Doonesbury. She became famous because Gary Trudeau created his character, Lacey Davenport, after her in the comic strip. But every time I saw her as a kid every summer and Christmas, she would say Myka six eight and is shown your man. What is good and what does the Lord require of you but to act justly love mercy and walk humbly with your God? And then she would ask us what we were going to do to be useful and her view of the good life as we’re supposed to be useful. And it took me a long time to live into that and my other real role models. My godmother, who was an extraordinary pathbreaking woman as well, an Australian who was the first woman president of Smith College and ended up through this talent, becoming lead director of Merrill Lynch, Nike Colgate-Palmolive and the executive chair of Lendlease Corp in Australia. So along with all sorts of nonprofit and writing bestselling books, and she had that incredible ability to be so gifted and yet fully present, which I found quite amazing and really tried to emulate her and I miss. She was my go to person for career advice all the way along, so was launched with that. On the career side, I was going to go to law school and go into politics because that was I was really passionate about and came to the shocking realization as a senior in college that I was only going to law school because I thought, that’s what you did to go into politics. And I had no actual interest in being a lawyer, so had to quickly find something else to do. And I’m not sure I would advise this from a career perspective. But as a political science and English major talked my way into a job in corporate finance at Goldman Sachs. With the hubris that I could learn finance faster than I could teach other people to communicate. And then I suffered mightily for that for a couple of years, and it was a great education and including the learning that I probably wasn’t cut out to be an investment banker. But it was also probably the low point for me in many ways, from a personal perspective, because I wasn’t leading a life that in any way really seemed to line up with who I was hoping to become. I was working all the time and in some ways acting out, and I think that period made me think I needed to readjust. And the first big inflection point for me was then I, instead of going on to grad school and I’d become interested in business. At this point, I applied for a bunch of things and was lucky enough to get a grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to work for a year in Asia and lose. His parents were missionaries in China. He was the founder of Time Magazine and created and still just 15 young Americans from all different fields every year to go work in Asia. And I was a huge sports fan, and Korea was going to host the Olympics so lined up and I was able to go over with Goldman, who was going to finance the first convertible equity offering for a Korean company. And I worked on that deal and then set up a job working for the Olympic organizing committee, doing marketing. And then in a giant twist, and they told me because they were the host country and qualified that they had just fired their rowing coach. They saw this rowing in my background and wondered if I would come and help coach their rowing team. And I told them I was completely unqualified and they said, No, we’re really serious about this. So I quit Goldman early and went to the US rowing coaching college. And if you sort of think Jamaican bobsled team, it would give you a, you know, they they were not globally competitive, but the US coach. We’re not intimidated and loaded me up. And the important part of that story is I spent the year living in the training camp with all the Korean coaches and athletes. And, you know, in a pre-internet pre-digital age, it could not have been a more complete immersion and removal from anything that was familiar for me. And that was the year I really got serious about face. I’d grown up in a nontraditional but devout Catholic family and had never walked away from my faith but never really owned it. And that year in Korea, God put the right person in my life. There were two of us of the 15 of us spread across Asia. The other person in Korea and the only non Korean I would see was my lifelong friend Jim Peterson, who was an American Baptist pastor and had just finished his Ph.D. in the ethics of genetic engineering and just in a brilliant scholar. And he was that person who could both go as deep intellectually, but also had the kind of the Holy Spirit flowing through him. And I met people who had one or the other, and I think he gave me the extraordinary gift of every Monday night for the rest of that year, and we went through systematic theology and the whole New Testament together. And it was really I had such a high bar of not wanting to be a hypocrite, but it was through that process that I gradually got to the point where I could take that leap and make a full adult commitment to my faith. And that really changed everything. So came back and went to Stanford Business School because Stanford was one of the only business schools back then that believe we needed professional management of nonprofits. And I was intrigued with the idea of at that point, I actually wanted to go be Peter Ueberroth and run the Olympics, but I wanted to find a mission that really mattered. And in business school, which is less true today than it was then I thought I should go to the private sector first, learn the skills and then put those skills over once I find the right mission. And what really intrigued me was strategy. And how do you grow organizations? And I know many in this audience are people who are true startups I got interested in how do you start new things within big companies? So I went to Marriott Corporation first and worked on two new businesses for them and then actually got laid off in the S&L crisis, went to The Walt Disney Company and got to work on a couple of big successes and one spectacular failure leading strategic planning for their real estate based entertainment. And then was recruited to a company called Circuit City

Henry Kaestner: before you move on from there. Everybody’s a Disney fan, and I know that you hired one of our great friends and partners at Sovereign’s Capital as an Imagineer. Michael Tremaine. But before you go in there. So two things. How did the cranes do? Did they do better in optics?

Jonathan Reckford: They did not do very well in the Olympics, but we beat the Japanese, which there you go. This context was there was a huge day.

Henry Kaestner: Okay. What did you work on at Disney?

Jonathan Reckford: So at Disney, I worked on their urban entertainment and something called the Disney Vacation Club, which was Disney’s timeshare strategy, which has become a large and very successful business, and then worked on this as a whole podcast in itself or a book someday. But a project called Disney’s America, which was going to be a new urban entertainment concept that then turned into a history based theme park in northern Virginia, which then drew the ire of The Washington Post and turned into a huge mess and ultimately got canceled. So that’s a whole story in itself, but the the original idea actually evolved in a couple of other businesses, which was how could Disney bring entertainment to kind of urban areas in addition to its theme park strategy?

Henry Kaestner: And then downtown Disney ended up being a pretty good success. I think you should take credit for that.

Jonathan Reckford: It is. I certainly don’t. And then there were projects like the town of Celebration, which is actually Disney’s first residential community trying to live a little closer. And that was actually very much tied to their actually their highway and road improvement strategy. So there’s a whole build out of the giant Disney complex, but I love living there and working there. The theme park side is very pixie dust movie studio side, a little more sharp elbowed, but

Henry Kaestner: OK, so going. I’m sorry, I interrupted you. So Circuit City?

Jonathan Reckford: No, I was giving you a long story. So Circuit City was starting something called CarMax, and I was just fascinated by that. And they were going to disrupt the whole way cars were being sold and sort of solve the conundrum of the lemon law and used car sales. So I went to and became head of strategy for Circuit City, and now my business credibility will be shot because of course, CarMax has done great. Circuit City is no longer around. And my hope was actually to start the next car max after we took it public. And then if people read Jim Collins, my old business school professor suggested is the only company that was in both good to great and how the mighty fall. So it became a cautionary tale. And at that point when I joined, they were, you know, had been the top stock on the New York Stock Exchange for a 10 year period and had really redefined big box retailing where retail is a tough area. And if you don’t re redefine, you can still get challenged. And I was then recruited. I really wanted to move from strategy into an operating role and have the the opportunity to be president of another. Now, sadly dead retailer called Music Land and some of you listeners on may be old enough to remember going to the mall to buy music or movies. And back then, Music Man had Sam Goody and Sancho’s video and two other chains and was the largest specialty retailer, music and movie. You said I always loved the entertainment world. And clearly, they had a huge challenge because the internet was coming. And what I didn’t plan on, but we had had grown. The business is the best buy bought it and I’ll fast forward that was in two thousand and two and it was clearly the right thing for the business to sell. It turned out to be a flawed acquisition, and I stayed for a year to help make it work. And then had one of those tough calls, as do I stay or do I go? And as my wife and I prayed about it, it just felt clear I’d already stayed in the private sector longer than I’d ever planned. And this led to a decision to leave, and I usually recommend don’t leave if you don’t know what you’re going to do next. But we just took the lead with a big non-compete clause into protection. And the next big inflection point in the way was that next period because with my wife’s blessing, I finally decided I’d want to do it went off on a short term mission trip to India to serve with a group of Presbyterian pastors in rural India. And it was one of those next moments where I think all those late in issues of social justice came roaring back where we were serving with the bank, which among the Dalits or the outcasts in India and rural areas. This is at the absolute kind of lowest social tier in society, where there are literally only allowed to hand clean latrines or clean up dead animals. And at that time, about half the children were dying before their 13th birthday because of the conditions they were living in.

Luke Roush: So Jonathan, where are you by yourself on this trip?

Jonathan Reckford: I was by myself, but with a group of I think it’s 12 or 13 other. No kids, no, no family on this trip. Actually, my kids were too small. They would have been it would have been overwhelming, I think, at that age. For them, though, they have since been on many trips with me. And so I really had the pastor who founded Habitat or came up with the idea of Habitat for Humanity had this phrase that divine irritation. But it’s that idea that we’re also good at seeing problems in our world and thinking someone ought to do something. But I think that moment of divine irritation is where God grabs you by the scruff of the neck and the responses that I have to do something. And I just came back from that trip with a deep sense of upset around poverty issues and how to engage and turn down a couple of really good business jobs, thinking, OK, I’ve got my deal with God now and almost got a couple of nonprofit jobs with international profits. And in both cases, I got to the finals and then they picked someone who’d already run a nonprofit, which was completely logical. And I was like, God, we had a deal. And suddenly all the doors closed and nothing was opening. And what I really learned in that would turn into quite a waiting period is one it was spectacular for my family and less spectacular for my ego, but in a really good way. And two, if I’m really honest, which is a little embarrassing. My deal was God, I’ll do anything you want as long as it meets my geographic time, financial and social gratification and all my other big deal cutting deal. Yeah, getting the deal and what I had to as imperfectly as I could get there. Move towards Okay God, no conditions is best able. I will. I will follow where you lead. And that, to my great surprise, led to my local church asking me to be the administrative executive pastor, which was not at all what I was looking to do. And all my friends who I trusted for career advice said not to. But Ashley and I really had a sense of that. This was a call and we should be obedient to it. And this is such a nice God part in retrospect accepted the job almost immediately got a call from one of the big headhunting firms with a great opportunity to run an internet retailer. And I remember just telling the search partner, Gosh, that sounds like a great job. I’m going to go work for my local church and I thought I am exiting the market and will be blacklisted forever. And two years later, when I was happily working at the church and not looking, she was the partner leading the habitat search who called up out of the blue and said, Jonathan, do you know anybody who’d be interested in Habitat for Humanity? And if I went back to that list with God, it checked every single thing on the list and I never thought they would hire me, but wrote this very passionate letter, saying, I think this is the kind of thing God has been preparing me for all this time. So that was 2005, and as you can tell, I could never keep a job. But this is it is a challenge, but an incredible joy to be part of this mission since then.

Luke Roush: So how do you think one of the things we talked a lot about in the context of Christian Economic Forum is human flourishing. And what does it look like for human flourishing to exist? Maybe speak a little bit just about housing and the role that plays in individual security community. Maybe just speak to that a little bit.

Jonathan Reckford: You know, I’ve I’ve had a chance to learn so much, Luke about housing. And, you know, I came with the lens not to solve housing by the lens, to think, how do you solve poverty? And certainly what I have experienced and then seen all around the world is housing is clearly not the only thing, but in some ways it’s a prerequisite. So if you think about after food and water, shelter is almost the most basic level of need. And what we know from the data is if people. Child grows up in good housing, she stays healthier, she does better in school and then is in a position to lift herself up over time. If you pull housing out of that equation, it’s extraordinarily unlikely that someone can both stay healthy and be educated. And so in many ways, we think of it as a prerequisite, almost for all the other things we want in life. But if you think about it, we certainly recognize that housing is only one component and people need all the elements of a healthy community, so they need access to food and fresh water. They need, of course, employment and the ability to earn income. They need health, they need education. So they are all interconnected and none of them by themselves. One challenge sometimes the nonprofit world is we all say, well, if we just solve housing, everything will be perfect. And I think the reality is, no, we have to actually partner in ways that create the conditions so that we can meet all the needs of a healthy and sustainable community.

Luke Roush: Absolutely. Absolutely. When you think about so we’ve dabbled as an investor in the kind of real estate technology and through different ways to re-imagine home ownership and trying to broaden access, but maybe just speak a little bit about some of the efforts, whether it’s Terwilliger center or kind of other things that habitat has done to really actually be a first mover in terms of real estate, technology and innovative models to change the system and how homes are owned.

Jonathan Reckford: Well, what I think the giant realization and when I joined in 05, it was an interesting it was not only a part of my plan, but we had the Indian Ocean tsunami, this massive regional disaster in Asia. And then we had Hurricane Katrina hit. Literally, the week I was joining, which was a massive U.S. disaster in terms of housing. And in both cases, it forced us to start thinking about scale in different ways, and habitat had gone really wide. One hundred and three countries and we had at that point one thousand eight hundred U.S. chapters or affiliates, but we were building very small number of houses and all those places. And so the question are in some ways, our core metric had been how many houses can we build? And that’s a really good it’s a good metric. But we flipped it to say, what would it actually take to meaningfully reduce the housing deficit in all the geographies that we serve? And that’s a much more scary question, but forces you in the system thinking a little bit to it what Henry talked about at the opening. Because in many ways, then you have to look at the whole housing value chain and think about how do you create the conditions so that markets would actually work for low income families? And I would argue we started primarily outside the U.S. in low and middle income contexts. Right now, you can clearly make the case in the U.S. that the market is failing because we can’t produce enough housing for low and moderate income families in this country, either. So that started us down a journey. And the first place was really policy and especially in the international context we take for granted in the US that you have property rights, you can get title to your house or entitled to a piece of property. In much of the world, especially women and marginalized groups can struggle to have legal right to stay on their property. And if you don’t have the right to stay on your land, it doesn’t really make sense to take a loan out. It doesn’t make sense to take risks to upgrade. So we created a global advocacy campaign called Solid Ground All Around Property Rights. And if you have a quick example, one of my favorite stories in Bolivia, women didn’t have the right to own land. And if you think about inheritance, divorce, abuse, all the different things that can happen if you have no right. And so we trained an incredibly impressive cadre oblivion women, and they not only successfully got title of their own land, they got the federal law changed. So if a man is married and wants to register either his land or his home, it has to be joint titled with his wife so that that would be an example of changing the enabling environment. Now the next step is can we help those 1.8 million women in Bolivia who now were enabled to be property owners to actually become property owners? And we would count that in the next layer? But so the first step is can we ensure property rights and good housing policy? Next layer was how do we increase access to finance? And what we found is banks in most low and moderate income countries would only lend to the top five percent of the population who actually had both income and property and were viewed as a credit risk. There was a huge unmet need. So we started with a bet that the microfinance industry there could be a business in making small home improvement loans to very low income families. And we started lending our own capital and training microfinance banks to do home lending and then working in the communities with the recipients of those loans that worked so well, we actually created a wholesale fund called Micro Build. We raised $100 million the first time we took on debt, and we started lending that out as a wholesale lender and then fund is now getting closer to wrapping up now. But we have directly helped over a million people get loans and then with add on capital, it’s now helped approaching 10 million people get housing finance. And so we have demonstrated which was the real goal that there a market opportunity for housing lending. And then the next step going down that housing value chain was could we impact services and products? And we created under this umbrella of our 12 Center for Innovation and Shelter, a shelter venture fund, small scale and shelter tech accelerators where we’re investing with and alongside entrepreneurs around the world who are coming up with better building products for very low income families. And then in some cases, they can actually test their markets with habitat in terms that we can be a buyer in a test market for them. In other cases, we’re creating cohorts to help them grow or scale their businesses because that would improve the access to good products for the families we’re trying to serve. And then the last step has been around skilled trades and how do we increase access and validate quality trades in the community? So the goal would be if we did this successfully, that all the conditions for healthy market would exist, where in some ways we could pull back and families can improve their own housing, which can scale. That’s how we’ve moved from helping tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands to millions of. Families, but we know the need is still far greater.

Henry Kaestner: So that’s super motivating on a bunch of different levels. One of them is that presumably at the outset of Habitat for Humanity, there was a desire to address the felt need of more affordable housing in partnership with the families. And there’s so much about the habitat model that we’ve come to know their families several skin in the game, they labor and it’s just a great opportunity to partner with local church. So we’ve understood that. And that’s one of the things that I learned on this hike that really just really changed my my context, my framework about the space. I thought that habitat was known for the 50 houses that it built in Durham, which is for those 50 families, is a very big deal, to be very clear. But we talked about the fact that Durham was short 14000 housing stock. And what you’ve been able to look at, let’s look at the problem that we’re trying to solve here. And at the beginning it was let’s get affordable housing. We’ll do it by building houses. But then under your leadership, you’re let’s say, what’s the bigger picture here? And are we ever going to be able to make a big enough splash through the tactic that we have of building houses? And let’s take a step back and understand what the broader mission and vision is and some of the other things we can do in addition to building houses. And so I thought that was great. And whenever an executive director of the ministry comes up and talks less about their programs, but more about why they’re doing what they’re doing in the larger systemic issues, I don’t I think that that’s awesome. That’s the type of ministry partner I get really fired up about. And then after coming out of that, you’ve been able to provide us all with a framework that starts off with policy and talking about homeownership and talking about title. Then you talk about finance and you talk about innovation, and then you talk about increasing access to skilled trades. And in none of those did you actually talk about building houses, but that’s how you’ve gone from serving 10000 families seem to be clear. All those 10000 families have had lives changed and transformed. But how you able to go ahead and look at the global issues? That’s super motivating and encouraging. I love all that talk about both of us.

Jonathan Reckford: But what I left out, which I hope many of your listeners and if you haven’t, you should is the volunteer peace and COVID has really gotten in the way of some of that BAM one lens that went with that. That sort of circles the loop is we want to engage the huge number of volunteers with habitat in some ways, not as a construction strategy, but as a social change strategy. And so if you put that together, and the reason we want people to come out and volunteer is when they come out. In some cases, it’s the first time they’ve actually had meaningful interaction with somebody outside their socioeconomic class in a relationship. And it helps them to understand and experience the mission in a way so that hopefully they will then become the people who are willing to change those local zoning laws. They’re willing to actually get engaged in thinking about housing differently. So if you then do the full circle, if we can change hearts and minds so that we can change policies so markets can work better, so habitat and other houses can build more houses in our case, then we can engage more volunteers who hopefully then keep making that change happen.

Luke Roush: And that’s powerful.

Henry Kaestner: So if I’m listening to this in Memphis, Tennessee or Eugene, Oregon or Billings, Montana and I’m just impacted by food, water and shelter, and I’m just really drawn to the shelter part. What are some tangible next steps about getting involved? What can people do? Maybe a good point of entry is to volunteer and to see how habitat does it. But talk to us a little bit more about bridging that gap of getting people in the game, advocating for policy change. I love the fact that, you know, Luke comes out this Luke, you know, public policy guy out of Duke. And so this is right up your alley, too. But public policy seems like it’s so politics. It’s just hard to just even get your arms around. How do you advocate for that? And yet some of that public policy change will do more than if you volunteered it, you know, building 100 houses. So how do you get involved?

Jonathan Reckford: I think it’s a both end. Of course, we want everyone to come help with habitat, so that goes without saying. But the reality is that everybody should help habitat help, you know, find the cause, the thing that’s bothering you and your community and jump in. But to me, it’s do get your own hands involved in your own feet involved because if you do it just at a head level and you’re not relationally connected, you know, the relational connections create the hard change that then allows us to create the next change. And I would say, sadly, all across America, it’s all talk us context. Now, what we have moved from is historically mixed income communities to economically and sometimes racially segregated communities, and economic segregation is creating an outcome that your zip code to some extent determines your economic future. Because what we know is that mixed income communities create the best outcomes actually for everybody, but particularly for historically disadvantaged groups or low income families. And so, you know, a great example my beloved hometown and actually just happened last week. So very fresh example when I grew up. If you worked for the university, you could live in the town. That’s not true anymore, really. Only the business school and medical school professors or tech entrepreneurs can live in town. Everyone else has to live outside Chapel Hill, so it’s no longer, you know, when I went to Catholic. Church growing up, anybody who is Catholic, so the church had blue collar and white collar doctors and business people and academics, all in community together. Not true anymore because only upper middle class people can live and therefore are the ones who are worshiping together. And then what has happened is sadly, this is not a Democrat or Republican thing. Human nature is once you’re a homeowner, you want to protect your major investment. And so not in my backyard or nimbyism is such a big deal and the brand of affordable housing is so broken. So that was a long way of getting to your question, which is what we really need are people of goodwill, and churches and people of faith should be at the forefront of this, which is how do we create inclusive communities where you do have mixed income and where there is a path of opportunity for folks? And in Chapel Hill, actually, I got to do the groundbreaking last weekend of an amazing mixed income community, and I’m so excited. But it took almost 19 years to get done because of community resistance. And so they were going to give up after 15 years of being rejected for being allowed to use it for habitat homes. They actually expanded their vision, which was a step in faith, bought more land. And last week we broke ground on a community that is going to be one hundred and one habitat homes and another one hundred and fifty market rate, affordable market rate, condos and houses. And it’s going to be a spectacular community, but it’s a good example. It couldn’t happen unless you got both City Council and the mayor and private sector leaders and the university. Everybody had to kind of come to the table to get that passed. And that’s where I think if people can first kind of get skin in the game and then translate that into being willing to talk to their neighbors and actually create some of that change, those two can go together.

Henry Kaestner: Is there a central resource also? So I love that example. I love the new expression nimbyism. I’ll use it three more times today. I may or may not give you credit. Is there another resource also that once you go ahead and you’ve done the the hard side and you roll up your sleeves and you’ve actually worked and you’ve gotten to know a little bit? Are there resources? Are there Bly’s? Are there podcasts that kind of explore the housing situation and where people can learn more about this? Yeah.

Luke Roush: Or funds or people who have kind of made a name for themselves, either through the investments it made or the strategies they’ve employed, he’d love to get your sense

Jonathan Reckford: from several different things. So, you know, a shortcut. We actually through COVID, have been doing a campaign called Homes Community Hopes and you and we’ve done a series of episodes so you can go to Habitat Ward and each one is tackling a different elements. The last one I did was with our new HUD secretary talking about some of these issues. Before that, we had one focused on housing and race and some of the historical issues there. We did one on economic models for housing innovations and housing. So those are some accessible kind of shorter versions. Actually, one of my dear friends and heroes, Ron Tolaga, who is the founding donor behind our Tillegra center, has also created a bipartisan center for housing at the Bipartisan Policy Center. And that’s a good source. There is the Urban Land Institute. There are a number of places that you know where there is as good information around housing and housing policy. Certainly the National Housing Conference, which we are a member, you know, and there’s federal level housing policy. But a lot of it is still local. And in some ways, the fundamental thing which is I love this audience is we have a supply problem. So the real question is how do you change the market conditions such that we can actually build way more houses we’ve been under building ever since the Great Recession? And that means we can now have a cumulative gap of four to five million units of housing. So one of the sessions actually I really enjoyed was what would it take to build ten million houses in the United States? And we had the the president of the Atlanta Fed and we had the head of the National Housing Conference and we had the chief economist for the Mortgage Bankers Association. And that was a great conversation because, you know, what would it take to do a step change level of increasing supply? And in some ways, we’ve got to think at that level from a federal perspective, but at the local level in your community? Same question. What would it take from a multi sector approach to make it possible to build enough housing for everybody in that community and make the math work? And the reality from a public policy perspective is that we’ll take some subsidy in either land or financing.

Luke Roush: So 10 million units is a lot. How many years of sort of, you know, pedal down work is that to actually dig out of that hole?

Jonathan Reckford: So we’re building depending on the month and year, you know, we were building between 700000 and 1.4 million units a year as a country. So that gives you a sense that, you know, we’ve got to significantly increase our build rate to catch up because we are if you assume any kind of growth in households, you’ve got a little bit of COVID distortion. But Covid’s actually made it worse because suddenly everybody wanted more living space. And so it’s actually exacerbated the problem because incomes haven’t gone up nearly as fast as housing prices, and that’s part of that supply imbalance problem.

Luke Roush: One, he’s got a whipsaw problem on materials, too, you

Jonathan Reckford: know, and huge supply. And issues lumber has just exploded, but many other items have slowed down, and skilled labor is scarce, so you’re getting squeezed on of all the key inputs.

Henry Kaestner: So you talk about that. So the last two areas, your framework, having added volunteers in to it as well, but where innovation and increasing access to the skilled trades. Can you talk a little bit about both of them? So you have a fund you alluded to? You said you’ve got a fund that invest in innovations in building better building products. Can you talk a little bit about that before you get into the work that you’re doing in increasing the amount of skilled tradespeople they come in? But tell us about running a fund.

Jonathan Reckford: So that has been quite a learning experience. So we’re actually exploring two additional funds. So we actually hired a fund manager. So in this case, we use a group called Triple Jump from the Netherlands because we didn’t have experience being a fund manager that we control the investment committee. But they do the vetting of the potential microfinance banks and organizations that are borrowing from us against our criteria. And then we’re looking at a larger fund that would continue to do housing microfinance, but also look at potentially micro mortgages and some larger scale loans as well, and a little bit bigger scope. So we’re just finishing the feasibility and we’re actually doing our feasibility for our first ever U.S. focused fund around a housing opportunity fund to help habitat affiliates, but also other housing non-profits to be able to acquire property. Because there’s a little bit of a gap today in the ability to the private sector can move so fast to grab property that non-profits are often at a big disadvantage. So we want to bring some more capital to that space. And again, we’re doing feasibility work there. Some examples outside the U.S. of the kind of we just made an investment in a company called Vaster TV, a stay in India, and they are building 3D printed houses in India. So we just built the first 3D printed home in India, and we think there’s an interesting growth opportunity there. There’s another company, also India based, that I think is really interesting. They have a great waterproofing technology that a lot of people are living in concrete homes with flat roofs, and there’s a huge cost if they get leaks, obviously quality of life and health issues, but also it degrades the quality of the home over time. So it’s a relatively low cost treatment that extends the life of that home significantly and improves the quality of life for the family in terms of livability. A third example is a company in Africa. In multiple countries now, which started in Rwanda that is called Earth Enable, and they found a process for sealing Earth floors to give them the health benefits of a cement or concrete floor. And so by compacting and then sealing it, it helps with many of the health benefits. There’s a huge health benefit for a family to have a proper or hard floor. And this, for a fraction of the price, allows the family to get those benefits from a smaller piece. So those are examples of. We also have a clean cookstove investment that’s rolling out very quickly in Africa. And because indoor air quality is such a big issue, even though it’s you could say it’s a little peripheral to housing, but if you’re cooking with kerosene indoors or charcoal or even worse, the health and air quality is so bad. So if we can actually lower costs for the family and improve their air quality, that’s a that’s a significant quality of life. But those are all private sector investments. And our thesis actually is the private sector can scale those things faster and they’re actually coming with solutions that are meaningful for those low income families and the communities we serve.

Luke Roush: One last question and then we’ll wrap, but 60 seconds or less. How do you see habitat partnering with the local church? Is there anything to be done there? Yeah, speak to that.

Jonathan Reckford: Maybe, you know, the church has been so much at the core of habitat, and it goes in some ways, a wise person say a long time ago, there are problems you solve and tensions you manage. And how do we keep that grassroots faith side and have the benefits of scale? Because as we move towards market based solutions, private sector actors, public policy, you lose that incarnational personal relationship on the ground in the community. And I think that’s where the church really comes in in a powerful way. And my hope is, you know, how that literally started in church basements all over the country and world. And my hope in some ways now is that we can be a servant back to the church because I think in our increasingly unchurched world, I think the face of the church has got to be come served with me, creating the credibility for a spiritual friendship that can then lead to come worship with me. And I think finding so if we can be a vehicle for churches to express in a very tangible way in the community, their faith and build relationship, I hope that. But for me personally, that’s a huge value because it is, I think, one of the the other tensions we want to live in is can we be Christ centered and radically inclusive? And some people today would say, you have to pick one. We are fully committed to both ends of that, but there are tensions that come with that.

Luke Roush: OK, so we got to keep going on that topic, though, because that’s actually the most interesting conversation that I had this year at the Christian Economic Forum is what you just said. So I know we got another call coming here, but this is really important. Maybe speak a little bit more to what you just mentioned in. Terms of radical inclusion, but also Christ centered. How do you navigate that leading an organization as diverse and as broad as habitat?

Jonathan Reckford: You know, our board is actually going to be talking about it in a couple of weeks and it’s something that I don’t think you ever saw that that we have to hold up that the, you know, the front of our mission statement is putting God’s love into action and the center is bringing people together and in ways those reflect those two pieces. So at our best, I think about when I was in Indonesia, in Banda Aceh, after the tsunami, one of the saddest places ever been context was there was a civil war. Christians were not allowed into Aceh and we had a habitat team from both the region and Habitat Indonesia that was part Christian, part Muslim. And I heard one of the comments and habitat as a Christian ministry. And one of the comments, one of the families when we were visiting with them was and obviously among all the heartbreak that they had rebuilt now they were starting to put together. And they said, you know, we may not share their faith, but we’re so glad they’re here. Those Christians helped us rebuild our community. You know, I think God can do a lot with that. And sometimes you know, what our call is is to show up with the serving towel and just love people and have faith from that. But it is tricky in today’s environment, and I think the biggest if the framing is, you have to pick one. It’s all over because we will tilt towards inclusion and end up drifting. I think from the center we would actually reframe that to say we are inclusive because of our faith. Jesus modeled inclusion and God loves every child in this world and in fact, the greatest love you or I have for anyone that we know is a pale shadow of God’s love for every child. So that’s the moral call to inclusion. It’s the reflection of our faith and our call.

Henry Kaestner: OK, that was gold. That was awesome. Jonathan, I’m so grateful for you and your friendship and your partnership and your leadership and being at the front end, the pointy end of the spear of a really global organization that’s doing things at scale, serving at the highest levels of government with the work that you’re doing with Federal Reserve, speaking into small communities and large ones. And yet, you know, a point back to your foundational faith and trying to understand not just like, well, I go to church on Sundays. And then I do have a and we just get an air on that radical inclusion side. But fighting that fight and just being able to point back to the most inclusive exclusive religion of all time, the inclusive story of Jesus Christ. So that was awesome. Thank you. Is there something that you’re hearing? One of the things we asked for every one of our guests on either a Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast or Faith Driven Investor? My. Is there something that you’re hearing from God through his word and it doesn’t need to be this morning. It could be over the course of last week, last couple of months, but something that you feel that he’s speaking to you about through his word.

Jonathan Reckford: You know, thank you. Thank you for that opportunity. I was actually reflecting. I gave devotions. We have a virtual leadership conference going on this week with all of our board chairs and national directors from across Latin America and the Caribbean. And I was giving devotions on Monday night and and talked about the idea of waiting on the Lord and the AHA. And it reminded me of a conversation we’d had many years back with a group of theologians and often in my mental model waiting on the Lord is sequestering myself and having time to go deep and listen. And that’s really important. But this was a little bit of a twist on that day of wait on the Lord, which is we should actually put our serving towel and go serve the Lord. So it’s actually turning that around. Do can we wait like a restaurant server on the Lord? And how do we, as we’re trying to hear God’s voice, do that in faith? And it reminded me certainly of which we need for the COVID time of, you know, the message Joshua heard over and over again to be strong and courageous. The Lord, your god will be with you. And then I’m struck by that moment where finally, after 40 years, they’re going to cross into the promised land and the Jordan. Not the trickle it is today. Is this rushing river? And they had to actually step into the water, the end of the storm and then God’s still the water, and they were able to cross into the promised land. And so I think combining that idea, wait on the Lord with how do we keep stepping out into faith in the middle of the rushing rivers that are around us right now? And trust that God will be with us.

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Faithful listeners of the show might recognize the voice of Tim Macready on today’s episode. Today, he’s going to talk to us about a topic we haven’t really covered yet—investing with environmental care in mind. 

Tim took us from the Garden of Eden to Narnia to Middle Earth and explained why the creative vision that created all of these places focuses on the beauty within them, and how it’s our responsibility as image bearers of God to take care of what we’ve been given to cultivate and care for.

His work as CIO of Brightlight has given him a unique platform to lead this conversation, and we can’t wait for you to hear the investing opportunities he’s seeing that have environmental stewardship at the forefront.

Episode Transcript

Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.

Tim Macready: When we look at the new heavens and the Earth, we look at the new creation in Revelation, it’s not new in the sense of destruction and recreation, it’s new in the sense of purification and refinement, in the same way that I, as a human being made in God’s image, will be renewed and restored and given a body that is unlike anything I could imagine and yet has obvious links back to me, present day to Macready on Earth. I think the new creation will be a purification, a restoration, a renewal of what God created in Genesis.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. I’m here with Luke Roush Sovereign’s Capital in the house from his remote studio in Durham, North Carolina. Luke, welcome.

Luke Roush: It’s great to be here sitting in Durham Bulls ballpark

Henry Kaestner: that I love. I love Durham. Are you getting back to Duke? Are you getting back to your alma mater on this trip?

Luke Roush: We did and got a great walk around this campus with none other than Jake Thompson last night. It’s really wonderful to win.

Henry Kaestner: That’s a win. I wish I was there. We’ve got one of our favorite people on the planet on the podcast with us today. This is something we’ve been looking forward to a lot. When you’re last here. You’re working for Christian silver, but things have changed recently. Now you’re with bright light, which is very, very similar and yet a little bit different. So talk about that a bit. And then what led you to the transition for your current role?

Tim Macready: So, as you mentioned, Henry has spent the last 15 years working on what it looks like to faithfully apply Christian values in the context of diversified institutional scale pension funds, investment portfolio, which is an immense privilege, an opportunity to get to think through how our faith applies across every public private growth defensive and how we do that in the context of an organization that was investing one and a half billion dollars on behalf of thirty thousand people. What we saw as we did that was an opportunity to take that approach much broader. And so as I and some of the others, the Christian said, it reflected on personal calling and sensed God’s movement within faith based investing and saw some of the things that were happening in this movement more broadly. We saw an opportunity to take the work that we had done at Christian support and serve a whole range of other faith based and values based investors with the same type of work so that not just Christian Super, but more and more people might be able to align. And so we launched it like we launched it out of Christians before we took a number of the team that had worked together to build a Faith Driven Investor BAM portfolio there. And we launched them into an organization that was going to be able to help others. Christians, super wonderful organization. Pension funding constraints to being a pension fund is an organization that has been more so we can help all sorts of investors all around the world. And so we work with clients across Australia, New Zealand, Japan, the United States. We’re hoping to add more countries to that list. And we do a bunch of work all around this idea of aligning portfolios with values. So we support on screening activities. We help identify managers who are going to be able to deliver values, the portfolios in listed equities, for example. And then a bunch of the work that we do is on the faith driven side, helping institutional investors, registered investment advisors and others to think through personal conviction and application on Faith Driven Investor portfolios. And so sometimes that looks like outsourcing services. Sometimes that looks like one of diligence on a Faith Driven Investor. But I’ve found whose operating strategy that they’re not familiar with. And so we come in and do a research report, due diligence on them and make recommendations. But it’s been a real blessing as we’ve built this out over the last four years now and launched it out from Christian Super into the broader world of faith and values driven.

Henry Kaestner: So there are some number of people that are talking about values investing and have been for some time. What makes you all unique is the faith driven part of it. When Luke and I started Faith Driven Investor and several years back, we remarked the fact that as investors, it was very ironic for us to get involved in a market in which there wasn’t any real supply nor any real demand. And yet we see both of those increased. And I’m going to presume that you’ve seen the same as you’ve gone ahead and started to launch Bright Light. What are you seeing in terms of the demand for people saying, I don’t want to just necessarily just have values based investing, but also on the faith side, are you saying that the demand is picking up there?

Tim Macready: Yeah, absolutely. In the secular world, impact investing is taking off and we’ve seen that grow and the rise of ESG strategies, environmental, social and governance oriented strategies. But in the faith driven world, we’re seeing significant interest in Faith Driven Investor in applying our faith into our investment portfolios. Luke, you’ve spoken before about the analogy of a supermarket that has the customers in the doors and the products on the shelves think well and truly past that. There’s lots of products on the shelves. There’s still gaps in the aisles where products need to fit the certain types of products that as consumers we might want to buy that aren’t out there yet. But the shelves, the feeling and the customers are starting to come into the store. And then what’s happening around that is this ecosystem is springing up of people who support buyers and sellers, intermediaries who might help you to know what sorts of products you want to buy so that you can cook up. If we’re going to stretch the analogy so that you can cook up a delicious meal that is Faith Driven Investor.

Henry Kaestner: So for any listeners that might be new to the show or just new this conversation, some amount of them are thinking that, OK, this is a recipe for lower return. OK, invest according my values. I can just go ahead and just. Off six or seven hundred basis points of return right off the bat, and yet you haven’t seen that. Exactly. Can you speak to that?

Tim Macready: A bit of our experience has been that you can apply these sorts of strategies across the portfolio without damaging return, in some instances, maybe even seeing a return enhancement from the sorts of strategies that we’ve adopted. We can demonstrate that in certain points in the market cycle, our exclusions add value and they certainly don’t detract value in the Faith Driven Investor we’ve invested in Faith Driven Athlete and values the line assets across public and private markets, across real estate, private equity, private debt, infrastructure. And we’ve found that the returns from those investments have been as good, if not better, than the returns that we get from similar investments in other asset classes. We don’t think this is about giving up or sacrificing return in order to live out values. In fact, one of the things that we think all Faith Driven Investor is a call to is excellence and achieving the best that they can with what God has entrusted to them. There are certainly parts of the market where concessional returns are being offered and taken in order to catalyze certain impacts. And we do have some clients who want to be cavaletti and sacrifice for them. But most of the people we work with are looking for market rate returns with their values, large portfolios.

Luke Roush: So there’s a bunch of Christians and we’re talking about social, spiritual and financial returns with how they steward capital. But there’s another word that oftentimes comes up in that same list that you’re keen to focus on, and that’s environmental. So why do you think, Tim, believers have tended to overlook that as part of the conversation?

Tim Macready: I think there’s a whole bunch of reasons. It’s a really complex question. And I think some of those reasons are actually theologically, I think our focus should be primarily on the way that our business affects people of all creation. We humanity are uniquely made in God’s image. All of creation is God’s fingerprints, but we uniquely and solely his image bearers and God’s word contains constant exhortations for us to trade his image bearers with dignity and respect and care to work towards reconciliation of relationships between God and people or between people and each other. And even when we look at the reconciling work of Christ, I think it’s first and foremost about restoring the relationship between us and God. And so I think when it comes to Faith Driven Investor, we have rightly focused on firstly on the way that our investments reflect the creatures that are made in God’s image as a foremost priority. But I think what that has meant is a lot of people have stopped there and there’s been perhaps some not so great reasons why we’ve shied away from investing for environmental water theologically. I think there’s many Christians today who consciously or unconsciously see the world in a dualistic sense. What I mean is they see the physical world as corrupted and decaying and they see the spiritual world as holy and being redeemed. But I don’t think that’s how the Bible describes the world. Yes, the physical world has been subject to the effects of sin. And yet at the same time, the whole creation groans for its liberation from the effects of sin longs for restoration. I think when we talk about reconciled relationships, it’s not just between us and God. It’s between us and each other and between us and the rest of creation. I also think we may have misunderstood what Revelation teaches us about the new creation. I will be the first to admit that I struggle to understand revelation and that channel has been doing at the Village Church a great series on this over the last four or four months, which has been really helpful for me. But I think what we have from Revelation is this idea that the whole earth is going to be destroyed and so are not going to burn and pillage it and just take its resources now because the whole thing is going to be destroyed and recreated. And I think that when we look at the new heavens and the earth, we look at the new creation in Revelation. It’s not new in the sense of destruction and recreation. It’s new in the sense of purification and refinement, in the same way that I, as a human being made in God’s image, will be renewed and restored and given a body that is unlike anything I could imagine and yet has obvious links back to me, present day to McCrady on Earth. I think the new creation will be a purification, a restoration, a renewal of what God created in Genesis.

Luke Roush: Yeah, channelers. Great on that. And I think and right, right on some of that too is surprised by him.

Tim Macready: Yeah. Fantastic book wasn’t what I thought it was going to be about, but amazing. A book called Surprise. I hope it was all about death, but it was all about death and in the context of the new creation. And then I think there’s other reasons we’ve shied away from it as well. Relationally, we’ve often associated care for the environment with a particular worldview that rejects God and idolizes creation, that treats humanity as just another animal, not as unique image bearers of God. And we all have that tendency as humans to judge ideas and concepts based on people we hear them from rather than the merits of the idea. And so the. We reject a lot of that world view that idolizes creation, we rightly reject that worldview. Unfortunately, we throw out parts of the world that are actually scripturally based around K4 creation. I think it’s also practically very difficult. Understanding the role I have to play in showing love to my neighbor is quite concrete. It’s quite tangible. Understanding my role as a steward of creation is much more difficult. It’s less tangible. It’s hard to understand what affect my personal actions are having on God’s creation. It’s hard to understand what sacrifices I might need to make. But the reality of our present situation is quite clearly that we are consuming the natural resources that God has given us at a faster rate than they are able to be replenished. And I’m not saying it’s impossible that we could continue that our current right and that human ingenuity will find ways of being more effective and being more efficient and managing creation better. And of course, Jesus could come back tomorrow and restore and redeem the whole of creation. But I think if we continue at that pace of consumption without rethinking the way that we approach using the planet’s resources, we will cause significant harm to our planet’s ability to sustain human flourishing, which is one of the things that you’ve heard me say before, love human flourishing. I think C.S. Lewis and Tolkien both got this. Think about the world that they created. I find it fascinating that both of them created this fantasy world where evil destroyed the creation. When you’re talking about Middle Earth or Narnia, evil trees creation as a set of resources to be used and exploited for its own ends. And both Lewis and Tolkien created this world in which humanity, the men, the people in the story, the women and the people in the story has agency and dominion. The fates of Narnia and Middle Earth depend on the actions of the human actors in those worlds, in those stories, in overcoming evil. But both of them created worlds in which nature is a force in itself. And nature is this force that works alongside the humans and the good team, so to speak, in those universes to rescue the world. The trees in both Narnia and Middle Earth as support actors to the protagonists to help them on their quest. I think you find in both writers these profound reflections on the relationship between environment people and underlying spiritual realities and the mission that we’ve been given as people to advance God’s cause in the world so good.

Luke Roush: So I want to get just tactical because I think that that kind of over ERG of both why it is oftentimes neglected, because people are focused on the human human interactions rather than sort of human and God’s creation interactions. I think that’s really helpful, just as a construct and also why it’s important. And I think that the Narnia and Middle Earth tie ins are really, really good. I want to get tactical, though, and just have you talk about one of the creative or several of the creative investments that you guys are looking at now in the environmental care space. And why should our listeners be excited about what God has shown you now?

Tim Macready: It’s not just stuff going on, which is really cool. We’re seeing traditional things, renewable energy that provides power that’s not harming the planet. And it’s often cheaper than the power that we are able to get from burning forms of fuel to produce energy with any bunch of innovations in clean technology. And with that comes innovation in using the resources that God’s given us better. And this is a really interesting example of where I think the financial and the creation care aspects of pooling work really nicely together, because of course, when you find ways of reusing or reducing the amount of inputs that you need to produce a certain output, that’s not just good for the planet and for God’s creation, it’s good for the bottom line as well. Similarly, as I’ve alluded to, we’re finding that in many parts of the world, renewable energy is now cheaper than fossil fuel based forms of energy. That doesn’t mean that all the problems have been solved. There are still challenges in many parts of the world with using renewable energies as a baseload power source. The sun shines during the day. The wind only blows on windy days. Hydro is completely stable most of the time until you get a drought. So I don’t want to shy away from the challenges here. But certainly more and more of our energy needs globally is coming from sources that are doing less harm to the planet. And then we’re seeing some fascinating stuff in more thoughtful approaches to creation care in other areas sustainable agriculture, sustainable forestry, even things like sustainable tourism and thinking about the way that we use the natural beauty of the creation in ways that cause reflection and awe and enjoyment of God’s creation rather than simply just taking it and using it. I think one of the amazing things about creation is it reflects the beauty of the creator. Look at the mountains, the rivers, the valleys. Imagine who made them and how awesome and majestic is. Imagine the creativity of the creator. Who created rhythms of days, of seasons, of months of years, and when we find ways of enabling people to contemplate and reflect on God’s creation. My personal experience has been a deep sense of growing closer to the creator, to our father in heaven, as I reflect on his creation of being amazed by what he’s created and being drawn to him through his creation. And so we’re finding, as I said, sustainable tourism, thinking about land and the environment in ways that are financially profitable through being amazed that God’s creation, rather than just taking the resources he’s given us and using them to produce more widgets.

Henry Kaestner: So I’m fascinated by this and I’m fascinated because I’m trying to figure out, do I find myself more drawn to creation care because of revelation or am I more focused on the original job of us to tend the garden? But what I’d like you to comment on, actually, before we bring it back into the field of investing, my partner will bring us back into this. But for you to comment on what might otherwise be an obstacle to people to come to faith. So the inverse way of talking about what you mentioned, which is people that would otherwise be seen by CROSSFIREs, is just worshiping the creation rather than the creator. It would seem that if Christ followers are known for a not necessarily the state of creation care or maybe an apathy toward it, that that might be an obstacle for folks that might say, well, I’d be more inclined to investigate the Christian faith, but this is what they stand for and what they don’t stand for. And so I thought I’d brought to Romans, which is the evidence of God’s creation bears witness and testimony to God. And so maybe they’re seeing something in creation and the beauty of it worth preserving that maybe even Christ followers don’t really get. Can you talk a little bit about what you’d like to see, maybe theologically and maybe in just in terms of how Christians lean into that as a way to be able to make the Christian faith to seem more attractive and winsome? Because I don’t think people talk about that that much. I hadn’t expected to ask you this question because it’s not exactly with regards to investing, but my sense is that you’re thoughtful about this, too. What would you say as this being an obstacle or a hindrance for people otherwise they come to faith.

Tim Macready: What I look at the world, at what God has created, I see the work of an artist and at the same time simultaneously the work of an engineer, I’m immensely thankful that over the last several hundred years we have developed plumbing and hot water and logistic systems that can bring to me the produce of the land from all over the world that I might enjoy. And I think we’re right to see creation that way as the resources God’s given us to sustain human flourishing and catalyze human ingenuity. And yet, as I said, I also see this work of an artist. And I think if we as God’s children look at his creation as merely a set of resources to be exploited for our own benefit, we ignore the artistic value of what he’s created. And in doing so, I think we say to the world that watches that we don’t care about the artistic ness of the creator. Imagine walking into a museum and seeing a beautiful Van Gogh, not for the beauty of the painting, but for the resources that can be extracted from the paint. Imagine looking at it and saying I could take this frame and cut it up and use it to fuel my fire at home. And I could take this canvas and I could repurpose it as a shelter. It just completely misses the point of what Van Gogh created in the first place, but only looking at the raw materials rather than the artistic value of the creation. And I think when we as Christians ignore the beauty of creation, we say to the watching world that we don’t value God’s artistic creativeness. We say that we don’t value creation for the creativity and beauty that it clearly has. Theologically, I go into Genesis one where God created man and woman and gives them dominion over everything that he has created, not so that they might conquer it or exercise power over it, so that they might manage his creation in a way that reflects him, that reflects his creativity, his beauty. It’s about tending the garden. It’s even about tenderness. God, through the sounds that Thomas writes of God’s continued care for his creation, sending the rain, sending the seasons, changing the ground, looking after what he’s created. And to me, this is exciting by the creation mandate is not just a mandate to maintain, but to create and to cultivate, to take what God has given and to steward in ways that are creative and beautiful, to take what he’s given us. We can’t create from nothing the way that God did. But we can use what he gave us to create objects of function. And remember that creation still testifies to its creator remains a creation, right, in your expectation for our revelation as the children of God, Colossians one, not just in Jesus, everything was created not just through him, everything was created, but for him, everything was created. Not just people that might be restored to relationship with him, but an entire creation live in harmony, in relationship. And I’m reminded of a book that I read often to my children, Yunos Garden, which depicts this emergence of human civilization and nature in harmony, in parallel, flourishing together, and compares it to this idea of the factory city where there’s plenty of economic profit, but human flourishing suffers because we’ve polluted the air, we’ve destroyed the rivers, and we’re not able to look out and see the trees and the beauty of God’s creation. It fascinates me that the opening and closing images of God’s word, the garden we have the Garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve live in perfect harmony with the rest of God’s creation. And we have the Garden City where the fullness of what God has created is revealed. Man has tended to and cultivated and developed this civilization, this city. And yet it’s not just a city, it’s a Garden City water flowing from the tree of life, trees that bear fruit in every season, the throne of God. Above all of that, it’s an image of harmony between the creator, the human beings made in his image and the rest of his creation. That, to me, is the profoundly exciting vision to look forward to.

Luke Roush: And that’s powerful. So if you can’t see the vision. So let’s continue on that theme. And just trying to borrow and learn from what scripture tells us next five or ten years, what would you want to see Faith Driven Investor doing in this space and what could environmentally conscious investments look like in the world? We talked about some of those for you guys that you’re seeing, but just cast a vision maybe for the broader community.

Tim Macready: There’s so much stuff I’d love to see. First thing I’d love to see is wrestling with our responsibility as stewards. And cultivators of creation more, I think I’m really excited that as Faith Driven Investor as a movement, we are waking up, we have woken up to the influence that our investments can have on human flourishing, on training people with dignity and respect. And I think is a powerful message when we do that as Christian investors, when we invest in ways that are financially excellent, but also show that we value people, we testify to what we believe. We testify to the fact that every human is made in God’s image, equally worthy of dignity and respect. And we testify to a world that’s watching to the beauty of God’s way, of looking at the world. And I see so much potential with the way that we look at investing and creation as well, that as we embrace this idea that we are not just users and consumers of creation, but cultivars and stewards of it because of its beauty and because of the importance of creation in sustaining and preserving human life and human flourishing, we testify to the awesomeness of God as the creator. And so the first thing I want to see is us just wrestling with what creation care looks like and not doing it in a way that idolizes the creation. Doing it in a way that remembers that man is made in God’s image and that we have been given a mandate to use the resources of creation for the benefit and flourishing of human thought at the extremes of the environmentalist movement. Start to talk about the human extinction and this hope that one day humans won’t live on the planet because in their view, we’re bad for the planet. We’re destroying it. Well, that’s not the picture that God paints, paints a picture of. Mankind is good for his creation as causing it to flourish, as shooting it well. And then in a real practical sense, I’d love to see Christians at the forefront of environmental innovation in the way that we’ve been at the forefront of social innovation, I think as Christians, as exciting ways in which we could be at the forefront of innovation in ways that promote human flourishing and creation care simultaneously. Imagine what cheap, clean energy can do for millions of low and middle income people, billions of low and middle income people in Southeast Asia and in Latin America and in Africa. Instead of seeing this as constraints of how we won’t produce energy, let’s take the opportunity to be creative about how we do produce energy. Let’s think about how we use water and air and the resources that God’s given us in ways that absolutely relentlessly pursue human flourishing and creation simultaneously. And I think that’s something, as Christians that we can bring to the debate, not that we idolize creation, but that we value it as made to reflect God’s beauty and support human beings made in his image.

Luke Roush: I think it’s compelling. I think that oftentimes people kind of come back to Genesis one twenty eight on what does it mean to subdue the Earth. But I just as you were talking, I kind of reread it, God bless them, and said to them, be fruitful and increase in number. So we’re not intended to actually like, you know, the problem isn’t more people fill the earth and subdue it, rule over the fish in the sea. The birds in the sky are for every living creature that moves on the ground, which establishes man’s primacy within God’s creation. But within this space, he wants us to be the rulers and administrators. But it’s not exploit the fish in the sea and the birds in this kind of exploit. It’s actually rule over. What does it mean to rule over to me that kind of governance, which is something different than exploitation. So I’m kind of just rereading something that I’ve heard quoted by maybe folks that might disagree and just trying to understand what did God really intend.

Tim Macready: I think people are not the problem here. People are the solution. This idea that we do with God’s creation by reducing the human population by voluntary human extinction, that’s not God’s picture. But the picture is of people exercising stewardship, governing God’s creation in ways that are mutually beneficial for humanity and for everything else that God created.

Henry Kaestner: Tim, you’ve made a better theological case than anybody that I’ve heard thus far. I’m interested in the Matt Chandler podcast series, the sermon series you mentioned, but you’ve made a very good case about the overall the pragmatic make it a little bit more granular for us. Are there some specific innovations, technologies that you have seen that have required investment capital along the way that give you some excitement about, you know, this is super cool, bunch of people focused on maintaining the engineer, the artistry, the beauty of God’s creation. And with these different technologies, I’m encouraged that we’re going to be able to maintain this beautiful tapestry that’s all around us.

Tim Macready: And one of the things I found really neat is when we find ways of using the resources that God has given us, when we find new uses of products and resources that were previously just kind of negative, I think about tobacco. Does abundant evidence that the way that we’ve been using tobacco to smokers is severely detrimental to human flourishing? And yet God gave us the results of tobacco. And in the last decade, we’ve discovered other uses of tobacco as an alternative fuel substitute through crop based fuels that are actually using what God has given us in a way that Stuart’s creation will and doesn’t cause severe damage to human flourishing. I find it really neat and cool the way that alternative meat substitutes are being developed. And I say this to someone who, when I saw this coming out, was persuaded about the potential environmental benefits of them. The environmental impact of the scale of industrial meat farming that we have in the world today is quite significant. And I have friends who are vegetarian for that reason. I think God in Genesis and then again in the New Testament gives us animals as food. But I think the scale at which we’re consuming them is potentially problematic. And so I get excited. I was someone who when these alternative meats started coming out, I thought, that’s not viable. There’s just something too good about cutting into it and enjoying the beauty of God’s creation in a state. And yet I find myself choosing these not infrequently, these alternative meats because they are good for me and they taste good and they feel like meat. And I find that kind of stuff really cool. And so I’m looking forward to the days when we can find ways of using things that are potentially right now damaging God’s creation in ways that actually enhance it. Because I think when we look at what God has created and what God has given to us to use for our joy and for his glory, we see that so often the problem comes not because God gave us a bad gift, because, of course, as Jesus is a heavenly father doesn’t give us bad gifts, but because we found ways of using that gifts that are damaging to us and to his creation. And I find it really cool when we rediscover ways of using God’s gifts that support human flourishing and creation care.

Henry Kaestner: Tim, as we get ready to close out and Luke, we’ll do that for us here in a second. I want to ask you a question that’s been on my mind in the minds of our listeners a lot recently as we’ve started exploring this concept of faith driven giving as well alongside Faith Driven Entrepreneur and Faith Driven Investor. Is there a cause? And it could be very much within creation care. We can stay on that topic if you like, but is there a cause that you and I enjoy giving to where you see God at work and just become more alive? Because your ability to give to a particular ministry or charity

Tim Macready: one of the ministries that God has brought us into contact with recently, and this is very specific to Australia, is a group called Common Grace. And Common Grace is a I mean, the term comes from this idea that came out of the Reformation that God’s good gifts are given to everyone. They are given to the people who recognize God’s generosity, and they give in to the people who don’t recognize God causes the rain to fall on both the righteous and the Praxis. And there’s a movement in astronautical Congress that is it’s about pursuing Jesus and justice. And so they work for reconciliation. Australia has a significant challenge in that when Western settlers came to Australia, they displaced quite violently Australia’s indigenous people and caused a centuries long rift between indigenous Australians and Australians who have arrived and lost two hundred and forty years. And the common grace pursues reconciliation between indigenous Australians and the Australians who’ve come more recently. They pursue justice for indigenous people who have died in custody, but they also. Pursue action to steward God’s creation. Well, I want to touch you on an issue that I know is going to be controversial, and I know you might cut this out. And that’s OK. I want to talk about climate, because if the consensus scientific projections are accurate and I accept that from many of our listeners, that is a big if. But if they are accurate, then the changes to our planet are going to be very damaging. And Henry, people like you and I can sell our houses and move to higher ground. We can build more tornado proof basements. We can protect ourselves from the damaging effects of climate change if it happens. But the vast majority of the world’s poor cannot. If sea levels rise, there are tens of millions of people in Bangladesh who will be displaced if hurricanes and typhoons increase in intensity. There are hundreds of millions of people in Southeast Asia in low lying areas of Southeast Asia, in low lying Pacific islands and in coastal areas of Africa and Latin America, who cannot just move to a new house, whose lives will be thrown upside down. And I think we need to take that seriously. I think the consequences for the people who are made in God’s image if we are wrong about climate change in the wrong direction, and I think we need to wrestle with that, I realize that there’s significant ways in which the debate and the argument around climate change is being shaped by forces whose worldview is not our own and is being significantly driven by an agenda that we would not support. But I think we’ve got to ask the question of what the implications are if we get this wrong. And so back to your question about one of the areas in which we give one of the things I love about human rights. This organization that we’ve started to support recently is that it weaves together justice for people and care of creation in a way that I really resonate with. It weaves together this idea of proclaiming the gospel in word and proclaiming the gospel. Indeed. I’m really excited to come across as Australia’s first Christian organization working in this area that’s actually led by an indigenous Australia. And that to me is really cool. And so that’s the cause that we support. And at the same time, I’m passionate about global mission. We’ve got missionaries we support in France in different parts of Africa, in Papua New Guinea. I’m passionate about the work of Christians here in Australia, in working against homelessness and working against domestic violence. And there’s a whole bunch of things that I’m passionate about. But the one that ties into what we’ve spoken about today is this common grace movement, which I just encourage our listeners to look up. It’s unique to Australia, but I think the way that they’re approaching reconciliation really points to this idea that God’s work, that Jesus work on the cross was about restoring relationships between people and God, between people and each other and between people and the rest of God’s creation.

Luke Roush: That’s a good closing quote. We also like to close each episode by hearing what God is teaching you right now. So, Tim, what have you found in God’s word that has stuck out to you recently?

Tim Macready: So I’ve been really wrestling in God’s word with what pursuing first and foremost a relationship with him looks like. I understood many years ago, through God’s word, through some great mentors, through other readings that I was doing, that my work was not found in what I do, but in who I am. And I understood that. And I tried to live that. And I struggle as someone who is very passionate about the movement of Faith Driven Investor. And I see the work that we’re doing here as so important to capturing hearts and showing how winsome the gospel is. And so I work passionately, and yet I need to find my purpose and my identity not in what I do is part of this movement or any other movement, but in doing as meaning God’s image. But over the last 12 months, I’ve been reflecting in God’s word and in my readings more deeply on what it just means to rest in him, to accept that the role that I have to play in this movement and in the other parts of God’s work that I’m involved with is not because God needs me, but because one of God’s many gifts to me is the privilege of being involved in the work that he’s doing in the world. And it’s just changing the way that I think about it. It’s giving me more patience because I know that this is his work, not my work. And it’s giving me more appreciation for the privilege of being involved in his ministry. And I would always have said it’s a blessing to be involved. It’s a privilege to be involved in God’s work. I would always have said God doesn’t need me to do his work. But as I’ve wrestled with a bunch of things personally, questions about where God wants us living, questions about what loving my family looks like, questions about what investing into my kids looks like at this point in their lives. I’ve just come to a deeper sense of peace and patience about the work that God is doing and just the immense privilege that needs to be involved in that. To have conversations like this, God could just as easily be using twenty fifty one hundred thousand other people to do this work. And yet he lets me be part of the work that he’s done and that causes me to slow down. It causes me to reflect with joyfulness on the beauty and the generosity of African.

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In 1969, Tom Kehler was hunched over a Model 33 Teletype connected to an IBM mainframe developing a program to learn a function from data. Today, he’s here to talk about the future of artificial intelligence. 

A lot has happened in the in between decades, both in society and in Tom’s life in Silicon Valley. As the CEO of CrowdSmart, a business using AI & Collective Intelligence software platform to improve the accuracy of predicting investment success while reducing ingrained bias, he’s seen it all. 

Tune in and hear where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going…

Episode Transcript

Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.

Tom Kehler: We wanted to create a platform whereby you could just use collective intelligence to create kind of a way to score innovations in such a way that it doesn’t matter what your background was, where you came from, it was a great idea. It should get funded. So that’s the core idea of that leveling, making sure capital flows based on the value that they’re creating, not who they are, where they went to school.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast, I’m joined by William and Rusty, as always and guys, today, this is a special occasion. It’s rare that we stay within Silicon Valley for a podcast. All three of us, of course, live in different towns here. But we’ve got a guest from Half Moon Bay. We’re talking before we went live, Half Moon Bay, of course, being the home to lots of really cool things, including the greatest pumpkin festival of all time, but also mavericks.

Rusty Rueff: Yeah. Yeah. Well, I’m a little peaked out today because our guest, you know, when you want to talk about somebody who’s been there from the beginning. Right. This whole Silicon Valley thing, you know, and a lot of people just think Silicon Valley from the show, you know, which is pretty funny. Unfortunately, sometimes it was too real. But, you know, there was a beginning. And our guest today was pretty much at the beginning. So I yeah, I got a little. Yeah. Geek things going on. Your intro, you talked about

Tom Kehler: a little bit about my age, but I was only 14 when I can’t I’m just.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah, well you talked in the intro Rusty about nineteen sixty nine and I’ll tell you what, I was done in nineteen sixty nine. I was only around for about two and a half months of it. Oh yeah. Yeah. So that’s super cool. That’s a faithful obedience in the same direction, working in an incredible industry. So maybe just typically we start off by asking our guests who they are, where they came from, their faith journey and how it’s all worked up. We do want to get that from you. But as we get started, just maybe some thoughts and observations of the last 50 years in Silicon Valley. I mean, it’s got to be much, much, much different than it was 50 years ago.

Tom Kehler: So actually, I came here in nineteen eighty two, so it’s just about 40 years ago. But actually it was a wonderful experience because I literally ran the age group at Texas Instruments in Texas and I’m originally from the East Coast. We’ll get there in a minute. But I invited Ed Feigenbaum, who was one of the fathers of expert systems, and I invited him to speak to the tea group. And after it was over, I was telling him I had grown up on the East Coast where I like mountains and good scenery and no offense to anyone from Texas here, but the scenery wasn’t quite as good as I wanted in North Texas. And so two weeks later, he basically said, why don’t you come out to California and do a startup? And I thought about it and did it. So I arrived here. An unfortunate thing of that part of the story is that I got to meet John McCarthy, who was one of the other fathers of A.I. So two things happened. I got early stage of Silicon Valley, but right in the heart of the development of artificial intelligence.

Henry Kaestner: So some number of our listeners will think of artificial intelligence as being something that’s been going on for two or three years. They’ve just heard about it starting to come into the mainstream. You’re talking about a very different start. I mean, it’s been going on for a long time. You’re talking about the very beginning.

Tom Kehler: Well, in fact, it was very big. There was a first wave that was quite big and it was around something called expert system. So the first wave is how do we take what humans are good at and put it in a program? And DARPA will call this hardcoded AI, where you would literally try to model how people use logic and knowledge to solve a problem. And so you actually built something called symbolic processing systems that think of the math here being logic, reasoning and knowledge representation as the basis of it. Current AI is all about mathematically learning patterns from data, but the two play together. In fact, we’ll get into this. But what’s happening now is there is a return to bringing together the first wave of AI with the second wave AI to create a new wave around human centric or human in power day.

Henry Kaestner: I mean, OK, I want to get more into that here in a little bit because there’s a lot there. We need to start talking about artificial intelligence. There’s a theological underpinning to all of this and I want to unpack that a bit. OK, let’s go back to who you are. You come from the East Coast. Who are you? Where do you come from? Have you always been a Christian bringing us up to speed?

Tom Kehler: So I was born in Carlisle, Pennsylvania,

Henry Kaestner: and home of Jim Thorpe.

Tom Kehler: Yeah, that’s exactly right. It was an interesting little town. It was a pre Revolutionary War town. So we had our bicentennial in the mid 50s. And, you know, we have the George Washington slept here, I think kind of going and Joe is one of the colonies. But my father was a minister in that town. And that’s also interesting as a teenage kid growing up, I will leave that alone for a minute. But I basically committed my life to Christ when I was 16 and literally thought I was going to go into missions work. And it’s a funny life story. Every time I try to go into missions, guys pushed me into. And seriously, I tried over and over again, you’ll hear that later as we get into this, but I really had a heart for Bible translation and the heart for Bible translation literally led me into artificial intelligence because I got very fascinated with the idea of how can you learn a language and then translate the Bible into that language. So that was my beginning journey and faith was setting off to do that. I got to me, actually, Cameron Townsend, who is the founder of Wycliffe Bible Translators, as well as Kenneth Pike, who is a professor at the University of Michigan who developed a linguistics theory that actually has a lot of the components of what we now use in A.I. But what was going on at that time and this is actually I graduated from high school in sixty five and there were people who were beginning to think about using computers more for the text processing side, but to help in translation and in fact went very from the beginning of when computers were born, they began to try to do machine translation machine translation actually goes back to the early 50s. And so I got caught up in that vision that maybe there was a there there on how you could take computing technology and marry it with this notion of machine translation. And could you somehow and that was the initial vision. I mean, I thought, wow, you can translate the Bible into all the languages quickly. And there was another component to it, which is the method by which Summer Institute of Linguistics is for learning languages was kind of a learning technology where you try to learn patterns and sell. My initial foray was into mathematical linguistics. There’s a professor at Cornell University by the name of Joe Grymes, who was doing some early work on that. But there was a number of academics who could see this vision of the possibility of computing technology completely changing the way that we got the word of God out to the world. And also as part of that, I mean, I’ll get into that a little bit later. But there was actually an ongoing thread there said literally the way I got in, I was inspired by this mission of, you know, can you apply computing technology to enabling people to learn languages and then translate the Bible into those languages?

William Norvell: Again, I’m fascinated by one question. We can go deeper at some point. But when I hear you talk about that, my mind goes to, well, it should have worked. Did it did I feel like there’s still a ton of people working on Bible translation? Why wouldn’t that have worked at this point?

Tom Kehler: Massive underestimation of how hard it is to understand language. And that became my life journey in my part of a I was natural language understanding and still is. If you dig in to what’s at the core of crowd smart, it is really working with how do we understand when people are saying something, what it communicates to someone else and all of those kinds of things. But it is a harder problem. And this is more about what I expect about the future of A.I. We’ve made more progress in natural language understanding in the last five, ten years that went on for 50 years prior to the massive improvements has been in that area. But today it would be more possible. But it’s still not quite there because deep understanding, you have to understand the culture, the meaning, the amount of knowledge that gets applied in Bible translation is way deeper than you can still encode into a machine

Rusty Rueff: is one of the issues. Also, like who has authority? Like I mean, people are translating the Bible all the time. Humans, right. They’re spending hours and hours poring over their interpretation of the Greek and how it was applied. And then they say, this is my translation is one of the issues with machine learning that you can’t have authority. It should be the crowd.

Tom Kehler: Well, that’s a good point. And now you’re playing into my beliefs about that. It should be collective intelligence and no one even has gotten close to doing that. So in my own you know, I continue to stay fascinated with linguistics. But one of the things that, as we all know, if we were all students of the Bible, we have to get into what was the context and what was going on. So cultural context and all of that determine semantics and meaning. And so that is I mean, to your point is that is the hard part. Now, I would dream of a day when people could use a collective intelligence to perhaps generate some more integrated translation, but anyway, yeah, it’s in general, I would say, very hard problem.

William Norvell: That’s interesting. That’s interesting. And so that’s how you got into I could you walk us through, maybe do a quick flyover of your career to date? Obviously, you mentioned Crowd Smart a couple of times, and I want to make sure we tell our audience what that is. But what else have you worked on during the season? And sort of tell us a little bit about where you are today and what crowds are trying to do.

Tom Kehler: So it’s a crazy path. I started out, I thought, well, I’m going to go at the time. Keep in mind, artificial intelligence. Well, it had been named in the summer of nineteen fifty five at Dartmouth. It was still very nascent by the mid 60s at that point. So the areas you could study and actually computer science was barely coming into being as a degree. Most schools, even like MIT or others, had Dubberly and within Devilly you have some work around computer science. That’s what I did. I was a doubly at Drexel, but while they’re in retro, I can see it. I couldn’t see it for decades, but God intervened in my career in a very strange way. I was planning on being a Dubberly with the idea of working on this linguistics stuff while helping out in missions with things like radio communications and all that practical. I lost my scholarship. I walked up and down the halls of Drexel looking for work study as pastors get ahead. No money. And I was going to a private school, which was at the time Tim Keller, which was a lot of money. And so this Jewish professor by the name of Richard Corren befriended me, but he said, you know what? You’re going to have to study solid-state physics. And he got me into a fully supported research fellowship where I went from being an undergrad to being in the graduate program, working on my Ph.D. in applied physics. And I couldn’t figure out what God was doing with that at all, except that another little thing, his next door neighbor was a very, very on fire believer. We’d have daily prayer meetings together. So God put these two people together in the same hallway. And so I studied this and this was the summer of sixty nine. When I’m on the teletype, I’m literally I happened to have a professor also at the University of Pennsylvania, Herb Callon, famous in thermodynamics, who had this vision of how you could take things from statistical physics into computer science. And if you look in the literature today, a lot of that work is what is in machine learning. So literally, I was getting exposure to early forms of mathematical A.I. through that process, and I didn’t figure it out until the current wave of A.I. showed up, but I literally went down that path. So that was one path. So I had no choice but to go into the academic. I went off to try to be a Bible translator. I thought maybe I’ll do that. I studied with Summer Institute of Linguistics after I finished my PhD and then I got offered a position in physics, teaching physics and computer science at a local university, Texas Woman’s University. And I did that for seven years until I got recruited into TII to run a part of their age group because it was during that period at the university. Then I started to publish papers that touched into the area and befriended a bunch of people who were at the AI Group from MIT, and they brought me into that group. Then from that group, I got recruited out to Silicon Valley. So that’s a high level view that in Silicon Valley I became CEO of Intel Corp., which was the first and I think only a company to go public. In the 80s. It was called in I for the stock symbol, very successful in the area of expert systems, essentially helping corporations take the expertize of their experts, putting it into computational systems. And then from there, I was then in the track of being CEO of tech companies and through current. So after Intel, a corporate was Kinect, which spun out of Apple, one of the first e-commerce companies to go public, and then after that, another company that won’t go into those details. But basically, that’s been my I’ve been part of kind of three ways. The AI wave, the first one, the e-commerce wave in the nineties, and then what became kind of the social media technology wave, which I consider what we’re doing, a crowd smart. So part of that,

William Norvell: those are good ways to be a part of fun,

Tom Kehler: just fun.

William Norvell: And one of the things I want to duck into this for a little bit, you know, we talk a lot about jobs here. On the podcast, we talk a lot about how employment is such an amazing thing that Faith driven entrepreneurs can bring to the world, how God desires work, how he had worked before the fall, just the dignity of work, the dignity of giving a good job to someone and what that does for them. And I know recently you wrote a paper talking about job creation through sustainable investing with artificial intelligence, which is a bit of a mouthful, but I think you’re going to deconstruct that a little bit. Could you walk us through a little bit of some of your thoughts?

Tom Kehler: Yeah. So the whole basis for founding crowd Smart initially was we wanted to find a way to level the playing field for entrepreneurs the way Silicon Valley works. And I happened to enter it that way. Right. You have a Stanford professor bringing you in. How hard is it to attract funding? Right. I mean, the point was, is we were connected immediately. I met with Gordon Moore, the famous Moore’s Law, Gordon Moore. I met him when I came here. So connection is all about connection, not about. Do you really have a good idea, even if you went to school somewhere other than, you know, if you were in the main view, somebody knows, you know, somebody else can and myself. And we really believed that we wanted to create a platform whereby you could just use collective intelligence to create kind of a way to score innovations in such a way that it doesn’t matter what your background was or where you came from. It was a great idea. It should get funded. So that’s the core idea of that leveling, you know, making sure capital flows based on the value that they’re creating, not who they know or where they went to school. Now, we ran a small fund for three or four years applying this technology to that. And one of the things we found out is we were funding 40 percent of the founders and CEOs were female, radically different from what was going on in the venture world. And we’re a minority driven and they didn’t necessarily go to the same schools. So what that led to is that article is we believe that if you sort of do this in general, get out where you can. And we’re working with groups like Angel, M.D. or others that are, you know, angel investors or early stage investors. How can you use technology to make it such that if you have a great idea and a great team and you built something, that you’re going to be able to get funding for it and thereby create jobs? It was we all know job creation comes through new companies. And so the driver is finding capital flow to the ideas that are most likely to do the job creation.

Rusty Rueff: Thompson, you heard at the beginning of this thing that I was kicked out. Great to have you on here because I actually built my first expert system Shell in nineteen eighty seven. Wow. Good. IBM had delivered it to it at Pratt and Whitney where I worked at the time and I was working.

Tom Kehler: You were a customer of Intel?

Rusty Rueff: We were. And yes. And so we had this tool and I was working in a group called the Hourly Compensation Group and it was where we scored and rated jobs, the work that people did against a pay grade. And we had all these different pay grades and we had the National Metal Trades Association scoring system. And there were five guys in this group that had been doing it for like 50 years. And they were all getting ready to retire. And they were like, who’s going to do this in the future? So we took the IBM expert system, Shell, and I took all everything I could from these guys heads and I put them in. And so if a job used a drill, it went this way. Did you have to pick the drill bit yourself? Then it went that way until you finally could score the job against the eleven different levels of the match.

Tom Kehler: Exactly. And by the way, IBM, our product that Intel Corp., the key product, knowledge engineering environment, was an IBM program product. So they were very close partner. I don’t know if you used our product or not, but we were very close partners with IBM in those days. Like I said, you know what IBM program product means as part of their core product offerings. And I remember Pratt and Whitney we worked with probably I don’t know, I remember at one point sixty seventy percent of the Fortune 100. We did all kinds of cool stuff, by the way, just so you guys don’t feel bad, you know, the fact that this variable pricing on airplane seats that unfortunately came from us so that it used to be there were just airplane ticket prices that were singular, you know, you paid. Get from here to there, then someone figured out, hey, there are all these people who do these cool decisions about inventory management, could we put that in an expert system? We did. Republic Airways did it. Republic got bought by North-Western that then propagated through the industry as using this rule based inventory assignment. So you may pay twelve hundred dollars and the person next to you spent four hundred dollars and dies.

Rusty Rueff: We just heard the beginning of DEVAM pricing there. It was right there.

Tom Kehler: That’s why they came out of the fact that you guessed it. What’s important about that is computational models can then scale right. And therefore it suddenly it goes through the industry.

Rusty Rueff: All right. So let’s fast forward this all turns into what we now know is a I or think of a I. Can you dispel some of the myths of A.I.? Right. Because we’re all kind of scared of it. I actually I’m really excited about it because I think when it democratizes and we all are running a smart machine learning programs on our phones, the world will get amazing. But right now, I think there’s a bit of a fear some small groups are going to control them, then that’s going to control us, you know, take us down the path of dispelling the myths. And then I also want you to weave in how your faith is a lens on what should or shouldn’t happen with A.I.

Tom Kehler: It’s very, very good question. And I mean, you’re tapping into something that, you know, you’re sort of making my mind explode at the moment. But let’s start off with, first of all, one of the things we did at Intel Corp. is we had the ability one of the things I was most fascinated about my specialty has been in knowledge, representation and reasoning in that first wave. And there is a paper that was published in the late 80s in the ACM around the rolls of frame based reasoning and knowledge, representation and A.I. systems. But underneath that, we had an ability to do something called truth maintenance. You love that idea. The idea is in a logical system. You say if these are your assumptions, then all of these things have to be consistent with that. So it’s about logical consistency of truths management. You can only begin to toy with that idea about what that means in terms of faith. But there literally is an ability to do what are called multiple worlds where in this world this assumption set. These are the logical consequences of that in this world and this subset. These are the logical consequences of that now, I believe, for the future of A.I. and one of the reasons I believe we need to marry this knowledge representation side because we can use that to build ethical systems, are ethically driven operating systems into A.I. And how is that going on yet? No, it is right now, the National Science Foundation is looking to fund with twenty million dollars a new center for human and powered A.I.. I have been part of sort of a mission driven thing early on to move from the current generation of A.I. to human empowered A.I. just to have this ability to integrate how we think we should have machines as an extension of human capability, as the way we make sure that A.I. systems are working at the request of what humans want to see happen now cannot get perverted possibly. By the way, I’ll tell you this. I do not believe generalized AI is around the corner. My statement on that, I think I have it. One of my papers is generalized. I will be a decade away for many decades to come, meaning that.

Rusty Rueff: So I’m not going to get my program on my smartphone.

Tom Kehler: Well, you will get some snippets. I mean, some of this stuff you can do right now, for example, the bad stuff, ability to completely create false identities or take someone’s identity and falsify it. That’s all real and that’s really dangerous. The ability to make you believe that every bit of news you’re reading is agreeing with you is real right now. And that’s caused by a and that’s disastrous as we see it. What it’s doing in the world right now, people kind of they’re in a chamber reflecting their own biases. And it’s a very dangerous thing. And we see some of the I mean, people can go into imaginary worlds where they’re no longer grounded in truth. That’s a very dangerous thing in A.I. Is that the root of that? Needs to be dealt with and there are groups that are forming this ethically oriented. But the notion of just a generalized thinking machine is a ways off, I believe. But the components we have now need to be brought under some kind of ethical guidance. I really believe that. So where my faith comes in, it is first of all, I have a couple of things that have integrated in this. If you think about the investment world and you think about the definition of faith, faith is about evidence of things hoped for. Right. Investing is kind of bad. That, too, is you see some evidence and then you hope there are some outcomes out of that. The high technology for that is Bayesian. Reverend Bayes was a Presbyterian minister in the seventeen hundreds who is trying to connect the notion of evidence with what we believe about the future. So he is literally taking this notion of evidence based reasoning with we see through a glass darkly, and he was trying to put math around that and that is now the foundation for a lot of A.I. systems was which is this. And literally what we do in our system is we create Bayesian belief networks. Certain beliefs will imply certain outcomes. So for me, this integration of faith and A.I. is pretty real because you can actually, you know, kind of create this sense of, well, based on this set of reasons or facts, these are the outcomes we might expect applying that to investing. It’s fairly straightforward. It’s things like, well, if the facts are that the company’s had some traction and people agree that on the traction and if the team is hot and people agree on the team being hot, that would predict that they’re likely to do. I’m oversimplifying that. But you can see where what we’re trying to do in our system here is we’re literally saying, what are your reasons for believing? And then we try to project from that, what do we think the outcome is going to be? So, I mean, I know I wrapped a lot into that, but I really believe the way we think about evidence and then what we want to do is how do we think about evidence and what does that imply about what we expect? There’s a lot of overlap.

Rusty Rueff: That’s really good. Flip it around for us. What does I do to expand the kingdom in the future?

Tom Kehler: Well, let’s go back to my dream in the U.N. as a kid was can this help with communication? And what I mean by that is, you know, essentially Bible translation is one, but I would think more is how do we use I for example, what we’re just talking about here, use I to level the playing field for capital flow. To the right, I mean, this is just about integrity of where that money goes and will that create jobs and will it do things for the least of these? My brother and I mean, one of the things probably the most haunting scripture verse is that one for me. Right. What did you do for these? Least of these? My brother, particularly in Silicon Valley. Right. You live in Silicon Valley. That’s not your first thought. And for me, it’s always been a dream to take a technology. And how can we use this to perhaps help with entrepreneurs that may be in developing world? How could we create an ability? I did a little thing where there was a group called Guys of Geeks and I thought, well, could we use the technology to help people who are behind in the Gaza Strip? I get advice from people like Google and other places to be able to build their startups. I mean, you start to think of knowledge sharing on a global basis where we might be able take our experience here in Silicon Valley and enable someone in Kenya to build a business. It creates jobs that fascinating.

Henry Kaestner: I think that I think that you’ve talked yourself into two other podcast episodes, at least the future of A.I. emissions, and then also just how A.I. and the work that you’re doing across smart impacts investors and investing models and democratizing access to capital. I want to ask you about your reflections and not so much just on A.I., but on what being an entrepreneur in general has taught you about God and your faith. How have you seen God show up? What is it about God that you now know from your entrepreneurial career that maybe you didn’t know as a pastor’s kid growing up in Carlisle, Pennsylvania? Wow.

Tom Kehler: They really good question. One of the benefits I think I alluded to earlier, I’ve had, you know, the guy I created the key product with, which was intellect. Our product was a humanity, but a solid believer. So I’ve had this benefit of in each company to have some co creators of that company be people of faith. That’s been great. But it’s also I’ve seen myself sometimes get when Intel Corp. went public and all that open confession, I got completely caught up in that. And literally I went from when I first came out here as a pastoral intern while trying to do a startup at Peninsula Bible Church because I was still wanting to do something with ministry. And yet when that thing took off and in the 80s, Intel, it was kind of like the Google. We had the free meals and everybody we were IBM was a shareholder, so was Harvard Endowment Fund. So we were like and I was traveling all over the world. I was busy, busy, busy and kind of got pulled away, just got swept up. And so one of the things that taught me to say grounded. Right. It’s real. It’s important how you finish, not how you start. And so it was about getting back to grounding. And frankly, I went through a divorce and had to do a restart in my faith walk and I left my faith walk. It set the centrality of it to how I made decisions. It faded off to the side. And so one of the things I learned is you keep the centrality of your faith while at the very core of how you relate to people and how you make decisions. And so now today, if you were to say, how do I spend my day, I start today of forty five minutes to an hour, a word praying because I realize it almost every day. It’s easy for me to get caught up in those pressures and go off track. And then I finish the day with a review, you know, because it’s the last thing I do at night is go through the word and prayer. First thing I do in the morning is that and a key element of that is be anxious for nothing. Think about that. And being a CEO of a company where you may know all the different things that go on, that has been the biggest spiritual discipline for me is live and the peace of God and live in a sense of joy. No matter what’s going on, if you’re down to a thousand and you can’t you can’t make the next payroll, but then, you know, whatever is going on is that centrally you focus on. Just spend your mental energy in today and focus on what God wants you to do today. And it may even take care of some employee situation more than some business deal, but just stay focused on that. So that’s what I’ve learned, is that I call it micro obedience, obedience into very little things. We’re supposed to be people of joy. So if I’m in a meeting stressing out. That’s so good. Yeah, and it’s inexcusable, you see, what I’m saying is or if I’m being anxious or playing out scenarios, that’s not good. And by the way, I failed this week on what I did, too. Yeah. So but the point of that is that passion about micro obedience, I think is very important.

Henry Kaestner: Micro obedience. That’s really good.

Tom Kehler: Well, I mean that because we so often read the scripture verses like be anxious for nothing and say, yeah, it’s a good idea. No, it’s a commandment. If you’re a Christian and you’re running around showing all kinds of anxiety about whether it’s running out of money or making a lot of money, which either side of it, it’s that peace, contentment. And that has to be right now,

Henry Kaestner: some number of people listening to this are going to identify with the Tom that is going through the Intel Corp. IPO or just crazy. Yes, they still believe they believe enough to listen to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur. There are lots of other more entertaining podcasts by Joe Rogan you could listen to with your time. So they believe enough to listen to his podcast, and yet they just aren’t they’re not there yet or not that yet. It’s that they’ve lost it along the way, as maybe you had during the time of just a lot a lot of work going around that IPO. How’d you get it back and what would you tell them when they’ve kind of drifted away?

Tom Kehler: Well, first of all, you know, God’s intention for you are far better than anything you can imagine for yourself. And I know that’s hard to get in your head because a lot of times you’ll have you walk into something that doesn’t look like it’s good for you at all. And so, you know, God blessed me with a marriage where it was literally I got married a second time and and we’re now married going on 30 years. But there was a kind of a rebirth there. A believing woman who I partnered with. And I literally just in that transition lifestyle was I’m never going to do that again. I’m always going to put a boundary around the work thing. Work is not, my God. Right. And so that’s part of the part. I would say that you really have to be careful about idolatry. You know, idolatry is the real deal. And if you say that, you know, once I get all this money, I’m going to do great things with it. Forget that idea, because, you know, the real thing is God can provide you anything you need. And so your focus should be totally in trust on him. I mean, so I had that attitude for a long time. Hey, I’m just going to work like a maniac now, and this thing is going to do really great. And then. And then. And then, you know, I’ll do all these things. Well, that is not the right way to go. Only thing I could say is the enjoyment of everyday life comes when you trust God. And we’re supposed to live in the light and content and enjoy. And it’s just better to live that way then and worry and strife and trying to make something happen. I don’t know if that helped Amen.

William Norvell: I can’t imagine not helping. And that was an amazing thing. And I’m about to come to our clothes and ask you about a scripture that God is using in your life right now. But one just came to mind to me as you were giving that talk. And I want to share with our audience. My wife and I were recently reading through Proverbs, doing the monthly proverbs, and we were in Proverbs 30 and just read this different proverbs. Thirty seven through nine, I think speaks to what you were talking about. It says two things I ask of you deny them not to me before I die. Remove me far from falsehood in lying. Give me neither poverty nor riches. Feed me with the food that is needful for me lest I be full and deny you and say Who is the Lord? Or lest I’d be poor and steal and profane the name of my God. And I just love that picture of daily bread from Proverbs. And of course Jesus repeats that in the Lord’s Prayer. And I hear you speaking to that of you know, that can’t be your focus either achieving so much or having so little. Your focus has to be on that micro obedience to what God called us to do. So I just want to share that. And now I’ll invite you to share. We love this portion of our episodes at the end where we get our guests to share how God’s working on their heart through his word and through the scripture and how that can transcend our listener. So love to invite you to share a little bit about maybe what is coming to your mind through the word of God. Could be something today, could be something in a season of your life that you’ve been meditating on. But if you wouldn’t mind share and we really appreciate it.

Tom Kehler: We are this morning it was in James and how the tongue is a rudder. Right. And, you know, I mean, that was the focus of your words really matter. And so when you’re leading a company, you have a lot of interactions with people where it’s very easy for your words to either be discouraging or hurtful or whatever. So I look at the role of CEO of a company. It’s primarily is how am I relating to the people in the company, to customers, you know, all the stakeholders within that. You know what words are my using. And there’s a lot in that right. Don’t create words of overpromise to investors. Right. Be transparent. Don’t create words of discouragement. But on the same time, you have to manage to heart problems. So how do you deal with difficult situations? So to me, today was like my prayer. Was, you know, the words that flow out of my mouth would bring grace and kindness or support or growth to people. And so hopefully that happens. I mean, it was interesting, I beg you, version fan. So this just happened to be in a scheduled study are going through. And it happened that came up today is that verse. And I just thought how, you know, the tongue can just you can turn the course of a relationship with a few words and it’s very powerful.

Henry Kaestner: That’s a great word. God is use your time to help steer us, the three of us in our audience. And we’re really grateful. Thank you very much for your time. And thank you for your wisdom. Thank you for agreeing to be back on our podcast, on the Faith Driven Investor podcast and the business that’s called the presumptive close, by the way.

William Norvell: Well, the good thing is he’s in Tampa Bay, so we can go find him if we need to.

Tom Kehler: That’s right. I know. Look, this is first of all, I want to encourage entrepreneurs because it’s hard. I mean, I jokingly say to my friends, I don’t bungee jump know, I don’t do anything like that. But when you’re doing an early stage company, some days you think you’re going to die. Some days you think you’re going to rule the world. And it is actually it’s exhilarating and fun, but it’s important that you maintain a youthful mind at all times. And that’s another thing I think we learned so much from scripture is as literally having this useful line in how we approach situations, which I think is God’s will for us, meaning all things are possible, all of that, that my joy in working in early stage companies is around this, that sense of the adventure. It’s more fun than you can imagine.

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Founding Pastor of Redeemer in NYC, Tim Keller, unpacks the hidden truth of identity formation, its habits and rituals, in both the Western and greater world. We are fed these belief systems from the moment we breathe and too often we are defined by the greater world without our consent. He steps us through examples of how our thinking is specifically impacted by these external forces that define us outside of the context of Christ. Tim shares with us the cultural problems of both traditional (your community defines you) and modern (you define you) identity formation and shows why the gospel is the only solution to living an authentic, impactful life.

Episode Transcript

Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDI movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.

Tim Keller: I want to talk to you about what it takes to be a Faith Driven Investor now at this point, at least in this talk, I’m not talking so much about people who are professional investors who happen to be Christians. I’m talking about how every Christian who wants Jesus Christ to be lord of every area of your life wants to make sure that he’s lord over your your money, your wealth and how you use your finances, because all Christians should be people who use their money not just on themselves, but who are also investing in the good of others and in God’s kingdom. And so let me talk to you about just two principles on how to be a person who is a Christian, who is using God, allowing God to be in charge of every area of his life or her life, especially when it comes to the financial world. Here’s two principles. The first one, which I think people tend to miss because it’s so foundational, is you’ve got to make sure that your identity is solidly rooted in who you are in Christ and not in having money or being successful. It’s extraordinarily important. So the first thing is you’ve got to make sure that your identity is not your success or your money, but who you are. And Jesus Christ, just some thoughts on this. David Martin Lloyd Jones, who was a doctor before he went into the ministry, he was a physician and a very prominent one says he thought that there’s a lot of people who you could have put on their gravestone born a man, died a doctor, and he’s working back in a in a time in which basically only men were doctors. But what Lloyd-Jones is getting at is just this is that some professions being prominent, making money, having status, having nice big homes becomes an identity. Everybody has to live for something. And whatever you live for most becomes your identity. I remember a couple of times in my life that I this really was driven home to me as a pastor. One time I was counseling two women almost at the same time, both of whom had teenage sons, both of whom were mothers of only one child, a teenage son, and both of their teenage sons were not doing well at all. They were becoming rebellious and having troubles in school and so forth. And I do remember that even though both of them, their children did not improve and their their son’s life did not get better, but one woman using the resources of the gospel was able to get through it, and the other women just became more and more bitter and depressed. They’re both professing Christians and yet one God one was able to get through it and one was became more bitter and depressed. I also was counseling with or working with two men, young men who were actors, single men, and they were both professing Christians and they both were up for a great role that could really make or break their career. And neither of them got the roles and neither of them did well in their career. But one man became bitter and depressed and the other man got through it. And I came to realize as time went on that though they were they were all Christians, all four of those people were Christians. Nevertheless, one of the actors had made acting into his real identity, not who he was and Jesus. And so when he failed to be successful, he didn’t have a self left. And one of those mothers, though, they were both Christians, one of those mothers, her real identity was being a good mother. So if my son turns out well and he loves me, then I know I’m a good person. But one had made that our identity. And when she wasn’t successful as a mother, she had, like, no self left. Now, the reason I bring this up is because if if your success or your finances, your money is your identity, you will not be generous. You will not be able to give it away as radically as strategically as you should. You will tend to either not give enough away or you will tend to give it away and do it in such a way that you get a lot of esteem and you really will not be thinking about how do I invest this money in the good of others, our investors money and the good of God’s kingdom. You’ll really be it’s it really becomes you rather than something you can give to other people. And so, Luke, Chapter 10, there’s a great place where. The disciples are sent out to heal and cast out demons, and they come back and they’re really excited. This is Luke, Chapter 10, and they said, wow, God, sort of like that. Wow, Lord Jesus. Even the demons are subject to our name. We have all this power. And Jesus says to them, this is the old King James version. Rejoice. Not that the demons are subject to your name, but rejoice that your names are written in heaven. And what he’s actually saying is you’re getting to your eye, you’re getting too much identity out of your ministry success. Your identity ought to be rooted in the fact that your names are already written in heaven. You’re already saved your citizens of heaven, you’re loved in Jesus Christ. That is the real thing, that you should be rejoicing in an identity that’s received, not achieved. And so, first of all, you will never be a Faith Driven Investor unless you are willing to recognize that you must make sure your identity is in who Jesus is and who you are in Jesus Christ rather than in your your financial success or your business success or the money you have for your possessions. Now, the second thing is going to be even more practical. That’s a little more basic. The most practical thing is you have to make sure you are. Secondly, you are investing in line with the work of the Holy Spirit in your life. Now, what people are constantly asking me is how do I let the Holy Spirit guide me so I know where I should invest my money, which is another way where I should give my money, where I should do philanthropy, for example, or where I should invest in a way that I know is going to do really good in the world. And here’s what I suggest. There’s an objective and subjective way to let the spirit guide you. Now, here’s what I mean by objective. The objective way is you want to put your money or give your money to some ministry organization that is meeting an important need. Very well. It’s meeting an important need. Very well. Which means you’re first of all, you have to have some idea about what is an important need. You know, Mark, Chapter two, Jesus has a man brought to him on a on a who’s a paralyzed. So he’s carried in on some kind of stretcher. And it’s very clear that the all of this it may be the man himself and all of his friends say his main need is he’s paralyzed. So help him. Jesus Christ, first of all, comes up to him and says, my son, your sins are forgiven, which everybody is shocked at since he didn’t come to get a sense forgive and he came to get his his body fixed. But God but Jesus shows that having your sins forgiven is more important than having even your body healed. And yet then he goes on and heals him anyway. So you haven’t text like this and this is what a Faith Driven Investor needs to do, need to be reading your Bible, always looking for this question. What are the most important needs as far as God is concerned? What are the highest priorities as far as God is concerned? I love Chapter two of Mark because it does show that that that evangelism and spreading the faith is an extraordinarily high priority. On the other hand, it’s just as important to see that God also does care about the body. He doesn’t say, well, as long as you’re going to heaven, who cares whether you’re hungry or poor or paralyzed? Now, of course he cares. But you see, when you read texts like that, you see, OK, what is God thinks, which is God is important. And so one of the things you’re going to do is from the word of God, you’re going to learn objectively what are the most important needs. So you’re looking for organizations and initiatives and ministries that are meeting important needs. Well, but subjectively and here’s maybe the most maybe this might be the thing that many people remember most from what I’m about to tell you is God has a calling on your life and he’s giving you certain gifts. And the way you can tell what your gifts are is what needs do you resonate to? Because one time, one thing people are going to say is they’re going to say there’s so many things I could be giving my money to. There’s so many things I could be investing in. How do I know where I should go? Well, I’m trying to say objectively, yeah, do some analysis. What is God say are important things and look at it that way. But subjectively, what do you resonate to? When I first got to know you to Hopewell, Virginia, many, many years ago, I was twenty four years old. I became a pastor of a brand, a brand new pastor, never been a pastor before. And I’m a pastor. This tiny little church in Hopewell, Virginia, and over the first three days I was there, I got a visitor each day, a different person. The first day a visitor walked in and said, you see that trailer caught at the end of the street away from the church? And it was a little trailer caught at the end of the street. As you see, that trailer caught there is lost people in there and our church is not evangelizing them. So I listened to him the next day, somebody came in a different person and walked in the door and said, do you see that trailer court down at the end of the street? I said, yes, I do. I said, You realize there’s poor people in there. There’s people who just can hardly you know, they don’t have enough food to eat. And we really need to go down there and we need to find out ways in which we can help them, help them get jobs, help them support their children, help them with job training and things like that. We really need to help them because they’re poor. The third day, somebody walked in the door and said to me, Do you see that? Do you see that a trailer court down at the end of the street? And I said, yes, I absolutely, definitely do see that trailer. And they said, well, you know what? Over the years, we’ve tried so much to have an outreach to that child care. We try to evangelize and we tried to help them because there’s so many poor people there. But the trouble is this church is just not administratively very smart. Nobody knows how to get things done. They have good intentions and they sit down and they say, we’re going to do this and that. And nothing ever happens because our biggest need is we just need better management here in this church. And I realized suddenly that here is three people that walked into or they looked at the trailer court. But because of their gifts, one of those people had a gift of angels and one of those people had a gift of mercy and justice and caring for the poor. I’m one of them had an administrative gift. And because of their gifts, they actually saw the need somewhat differently, which is great, by the way, all working together that you can really reach the trailer court, but only working together. But it was how do you know what those person’s gifts were? I knew immediately because it was what they noticed what what they resonated to what what gave them a certain passion. And that’s what you need. There’s nothing wrong with all these different great possibilities. But some of them you resonate to, some of them that you feel burdened for. That’s the Holy Spirit leading you through your gifts and through your calling. Now, to really do this. Well, you need to take time. You need to pray. You need a journal. You need to talk to a lot of other people. But get your identity straight or none of this is going to work objectively. Ask, what is the Holy Spirit doing in this world? And subjectively, what is the spirit leading me to do in this world? And you will be a spirit led faith build investor.