Subscribe to the Podcast:

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.

Subscribe to the Podcast:

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.

Subscribe to the Podcast:

 Obie McKenzie is the Vice-Chairman of Cordiant Capital and has served at some of the largest financial institutions like BlackRock, and managed hundreds of millions in assets. Obie joins us to talk about what it’s like living out your faith in the public square and the basic principles of Bible Economics. 

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.

Obie McKenzie: So then I began to fold that into the doctrine of Bible economics, which is where I am today, and it says a lot about all the components of what I think is a perfect investment plan. Invest in God’s word first, invest in God’s work second, and the combination of investing in God’s word and his work yields God’s wealth, which is eternal.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor podcast. I’m here with my buddy, my partner, great friend, Luke Roush. Welcome, Luke.

Luke Roush: It’s good to be on. It’s going to be on as always, Luke.

Henry Kaestner: I think we’re actually recording this video because we’ve got Ovie McKenzie on and we’re going to be using a segment of this, I believe, for the Faith Driven Investor conference that’s coming up here. Not the time to eat this too much. But for those of us who are watching this on video, we’ve all known that we get to learn a lot about somebody from the background they have in Zululand. So what’s on some of these walls tells you a lot about themselves. You think at least, but you’ve got this epic, epic landscape behind you. What is that and why do you have it?

Luke Roush: It’s actually a landscape from where my wife’s family lives in Montana. So we got we had a piece of property out there for a while and just actually recently got rid of it. But it’s a wonderful part of the country and it’s a place that absolutely speaks to my soul. So I love going to the in-laws.

Henry Kaestner: That’s a good spot. Although I’ve been up there in Bozeman, too. We’ve got a really special guest today. We’ve got the first kind of multigenerational element to any of the podcasts we’ve done. We’ve gotten to know OBIS daughter Keisha from her incredible work at Clode Factory, one of our favorite companies ever, the way that they are able to blend excellence at scale and have a very thoughtful spiritual integration in their work. And Keisha is such a big part of that. We’ve got her dad today and I’ve known Ruby for a while now. It’s been several years and I got to know him in New York City. And Obie is and has been a leader on Wall Street for a long time. I mean, he’s a founding board member of the National Association of Securities Professionals. He is a guy that has been at the top tiers of Wall Street. A good friend of ours worked with Bob Dole for a long time. Bob’s been on the podcast, great encouragement to the space and the movement and the different conferences we’ve done. And he’s always said great things about Olby. There’s so many different, really cool things about Will to include the fact that at any second he can break down or break out in song. And it’s a beautiful thing. It’s an amazing thing. I’ve seen it happen before and if I could sing as well as it would be, I’d sing all the time too. And he’s got just a joyful heart. And what makes him the perfect guest for today is the fact that he’s very, very thoughtful about his faith and he’s very, very thoughtful about what the Bible says about money. He is and he’s been called this the Bible economist. So I can think of nobody better to have on the program would welcome.

Obie McKenzie: Well, thank you so much for having me this morning. And I wonder where you are. It’s a beautiful background there. So I’ve seen the mountains and now see flowers and a nice garden. You guys know how to do it.

Henry Kaestner: And now we’re very fortunate. I tell you, I’m doing this episode al fresco, as they say in Northern California. We’re recording this relatively early in the morning and the kids are still asleep. So I thought I’d go outside and hopefully I won’t be defined by some of these birds around here. Obbie you and I met in New York and I was introduced to you as the Bible economist. We’re going to talk a lot about that. But one of the things we like to do with all the guests we have on is to have a little bit of biographical sketch. Who are you? Where do you come from? What brought you to being a Bible economist? Just tell us a bit about it.

Obie McKenzie: I’m a Southern boy by birth. I was born in Tennessee to a family of sharecroppers in West Tennessee, and we moved to Indianapolis, Indiana, when I was a very young boy. And as an African-American family, many African-American families left the South because we couldn’t make a living picking cotton and moved north to find jobs. Many of us wound up in automobile factories in Detroit and some of the other industrial centers to escape the inability to make enough money in the cotton belt to make a living. And so I grew out of that background. My father and mother stopped in Indianapolis, Indiana, where I grew up. I was educated in a multicultural high school there. Shortridge High School, Indianapolis, Indiana, participated in many entrepreneurial or extracurricular activities to include, you know, sports, music. I was good in academics left there in the sixties and went to Tennessee State University in Nashville, Tennessee. And so I wound up going to Tennessee State, graduating there in nineteen sixty seven and took a job in the Human Resources Department at Bethlehem Steel, where I went around the country recruiting engineers, civil engineers, electrical and mechanical engineers from around the country, the major engineering schools. Someone told me while I was at Bethlehem Steel that I probably ought to consider Harvard Business School. And I said, help me over business. I couldn’t even spell it. So he helped me write my essays. And lo and behold, I was accepted to Harvard Business School in nineteen seventy. I came from a working class family where we really didn’t have a lot of money. We’re a very humble background. So the. Idea of going to Harvard Business School, which I had heard was a West Point of capitalism, was really kind of far fetched from my dinner table. But I did wind up at Harvard Business School and fell in love with the subject of finance, probably because we just never had very much money. But I wanted to understand what this thing was called, money. So I began to study finance. And even though I wasn’t a quant, I was very good at conceptualizing ideas. So I would start with the concept and work back to the formula. And I did pretty well and as a matter of fact, wound up tutoring a lot of my classmates in finance while I was there. And so I left Harvard Business School in nineteen seventy two and became the second African-American hired in the business department at Morgan Stanley. There was no such thing back in those days. Morgan Stanley was white shoes, rolltop desk, polished brown shoes with blue suits and doing spreadsheets with slide rules. And that’s where I started my financial life in a bullpen, working all night long on a spreadsheet, which if in fact it wasn’t correct, and the senior partner found a number in the middle of the spreadsheet the next day he would throw in the garbage. Even though you had been up all night with a slide rule, trying to put a spreadsheet together with a slide rule, a slide. Oh, yeah. I mean, these young people today, you know, they can push a button and do a spreadsheet and they have valuation models and algorithms and all of these valuation models and algorithms and spreadsheets were done with Cybele. Wow. Oh, yeah. And it better be right. And you better have the right attitude when in fact you presented it to a senior partner the next day after being up all night reading prospectuses at BAM Printing. You better come back to work the next morning by 7:00 with a smile on your face and don’t scowl if in fact you found something wrong with the spreadsheet because you were discarded and you’d have to start again. So I came up the rough side of the mountain in finance, but I’m happy that I did. It gave me discipline that I have been benefiting from since my days at Morgan Stanley. So I left Morgan Stanley through it the next oh, I say twenty. Twenty five years has been spent in a variety of positions in the financial services community to include commercial banking with Citibank International banking within what was chemical bank, which no longer is, as you know, Assistant Treasurer and New York Times newspaper, our senior vice president and Freedom National Bank of Senior Credit initial. I had my own broker dealer, McKinsey and Co., as the first African-American sole proprietor, broker dealer on the street. And then I left I joined Bob Dole at Merrill Lynch. Given that Merrill Lynch and Chase investors, I chase investors went to Merrill Lynch and Bob Dole was president of Merrill Lynch Investment Managers, and I raised money for Merrill Lynch investment managers. Along came BlackRock, bought Merrill Lynch investment managers. I went with that group as a managing director with BlackRock. BlackRock, as you know, is the largest institutional asset manager in the world. I’ve been blessed to be a part of teams to raise probably 30 to 40 billion dollars of institutional assets to be managed across a number of asset classes. I stayed in that for 18 years. I left BlackRock about two and a half years ago to become now. They said I was going to retire, but I tell them that Phobe is retired, asked where he’s buried. I don’t I just am not going to do that. So I was blessed to take a position with Portland and Capital in Montreal where I work now. I am a part of that. Basically, I put OBM McKensie LLC together as an advisory business and then I developed verticals for cash flow with the likes of property and capital, which is a infrastructure debt platform out of Montreal, and then established relationships with Stern Brothers, which is a hundred year old woman owned company in St. Louis. So I’m allowed to do brokerage and investment banking. So effectively, the model is owned by McKinsey LLC in the middle with a number of verticals where I provide advisory services, strategy, business development and a number of other things. Now, the intersection of Olby professionally and Bible economics started many years ago when I ran into Crown Ministries and I discovered that there are twenty three hundred scriptures in the Bible about money. And that really piqued my curiosity. Again, being from a humble background and a Christian family, the whole idea that the Bible actually had something to say about money was very interesting to me. So many, many years ago, I started studying the Bible. Became a Bible teacher at Canaan Baptist Church in Harlem. I was inspired by a preacher out on the West Coast named Fred Price, who recently passed away God rest his soul. And he inspired me. He was an expository Bible teacher who really took some of the themes and values out of his delivery in a way that I understood what it was saying, what it meant, and more importantly, what it meant to me. And so as I began to teach, I went to a retreat as a part of Canaan Baptist Church. And they had asked me as many years ago to ask me to teach some passages from the book of Galatians. And I said again, Oh, me, I really hadn’t done a lot of study. So I really started studying the Bible years ago and I became a Bible teacher. And then that exploded while I was attending Baptist Church. And I discovered that that the Lord given me a gift of expository teaching and that I had a gift of reading scripture and my daughter. I’ll never forget. She was 13. She used to carry my Bible to church and she used to listen to me teach. And she said, Daddy, what’s the difference in the way you teach in the rest of the people? What’s the difference in you and them? I said, Well, I believe it. They believe about it. And she said, Oh, that’s yeah, daddy. What’s that mean? I said, Well, I believe it down deep in my heart. I believe what I’m saying. I don’t just believe about it. It’s just not words. I believe it. And so it was very important to her. So I understand what the difference was and why people were reacting to the teaching that the Holy Spirit was giving me the way they were. I also learned during those periods that I wasn’t really doing the teaching. I had to make a fool of myself a number of times being so absolutely sure I was right, that I was wrong and that I was humbled by little old ladies who had been studying Bible for many, many years and were not, you know, Harvard trained. They were Holy Ghost strange. And they used to pop in the back of the church. It’s like, Brother McKenzie, we want to talk to you. You know what you said about this or that. And by the way, we’d like for you to keep your jacket on while you’re teaching. We don’t like you taking your jacket off while you’re teaching. So all those little old ladies used to straighten me out. Well, after that, I went to New York Theological Seminary for a minute, a hot minute. And interestingly enough, I wound up on the board later in years, New York Theological Seminary. But back in that time, I didn’t stay in seminary because I felt from what that particular seminary, if you didn’t have Jesus when you went, you certainly wouldn’t have Jesus when you left. And so they were so theological. I didn’t feel that there was any Holy Spirit there. I felt that there was a lot of learning there. But not a lot of burning there. And so that was many years ago, so fast forward I began to get more and more enmeshed in what the Bible had to say about money. And knowing that I lived in a money environment. And when I really started digging into the fact that there were twenty three hundred scriptures in the Bible about money and fewer than the 500 or so about faith and fewer than the 500 or so about love, and the fact that over 15 or thereabouts of Jesus’s parables use money as a subject to reveal spiritual truth. It really got me started on becoming what some people refer to as the Bible comes, and that’s who I am today. And what is that? A friend of mine who is the dollar? And Greg told me that the word I think the economy Amen economy keeper of the laws of the House stewardship. And so is I really began to dig into the word of God, which I believe is between Genesis and Revelations. I do believe that it is God breathed. I do believe that it is irrefutable and it’s very difficult for many to understand where I’m coming from if, in fact, they don’t believe that the Bible is irrefutable. Just so you know where I’m coming from, I believe that the word is the logush Jesus who stepped out of eternity into time to show us how we ought to live to be reclaimed to God, which is his purpose for Amen is to reclaim us back onto himself. And so I find that the road map for that reclamation is between Genesis and Revelations. And I walk by faith and not by sight. Now, over many years, what I’ve had to come to is that there was a difference between believing God’s word in my head and believing God’s word in my heart. So I have been for many years trying to close the gap between my head, my mouth and my heart. And so I have had to work real hard in making sure that what comes out of my mouth is what is in my heart, what we believe becomes what we say, what we say becomes what we do. What we do. Becomes our habits, our habits. Become our character and our character becomes our destiny. So somewhere along the line, I begin to understand that that was very important, what I believed, my point of view. And so I always begin with letting people know what my point of view is and where I stand. So they will know, frankly, whether or not we can communicate at all or whether we’re speaking. You know, I’m speaking English and they’re speaking French or we’re just speaking a different language. And so so I had to as I have matured, I hope I have become less arrogant about what it is I think I know or what I thought I knew. I realized that God is omnipotent. Yes. And for me, God is omnipresent is in all. And he’s a nation. He knows all. So if God knows all, how can I know anything? The only way I can know anything is to borrow from the all knowing library of the Great I am and hope that my ego and my little pea brain will let me comprehend what it is I’m trying to know and hoping that I listen and I’m listening to God and I’m not listening to. So this whole walk for me has been an effort to legalize, if you will, me to say, hey, look, pal, you got a Harvard degree. But I had to work on my other age, and that’s my Holy Ghost degree. I had to really understand. That when Jesus left the Earth and went back to sit at the right hand of Father God to make intercession for those of us who believe in him and that have confessed to him and have them in our heart, that he said, I have given them thy word. He gave us logush. The word in the beginning was the word or was God. The word was with God. He came to dwell among us and we looked at him but didn’t understand it. So he was and is the word the logos. And so I had to try to really peel back my ego to the point where I really believed what I was reading, that I really understood that it was God breathed and that it was good for instruction and was good for direction. It was good for everything. And so then I began to fold that into the doctrine of Bible economics, which is where I am today. And it says a lot about all the components of what I think is a perfect investment plan. Invest in God’s word first. Invest in guys work second and the combination of investing in God’s word and his work yields God’s wealth, which is eternal. That’s in God’s word, first, invest in God’s work, second, and the combination of investing in God’s word and his work will yield God’s wealth, which is eternal. The other thing I had to realize and really accept, so I’m sorry for, is really the beginning of Bible economics is very difficult to cross into the concept of Bible economics until you really understand that the Earth is the Lord’s, the fullness there of everything in it there is belongs to him, including you and me. And if we belong to him, and if the Earth belongs to him, if the world belongs to him, then he ought to have something to say about what we do with this stuff. And so in Matthew, six thirty three, I think it’s six thirty three. But you know where it is. It says, see first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things will be added onto you. We’ve got it backwards. We seek the stuff rather than seeking God. First, the things will come. If, in fact you turn it around. There’s a countercultural relationship between man’s economy and God. This is what I mean. Man’s economy seems to be motivated by self-interest. Greed. The objective is money. God’s economy, on the other hand, is motivated by love. The objective is abundant life in the here and eternal life in the hereafter. Both economies are in pursuit of a contented life, but one gets you there and the other one does. Let me say that again. Two economies, man’s economy is motivated by greed, self-interest. The objective is money. God’s economy is countercultural to that is motivated by love. The objective is abundant life in the here and eternal life in the era. The Bible teaches seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness. And all these things will be added on to you. Matthew Luke. Six thirty eight years and it shall be given to you not yet given. It shall be given unto you. Good measure. Pressed down, shaken together and running over for as you give it shall be given unto you. God gives to you. So you can give. So you can give to you again. So you can give again. The irony of it all is Satan, who was kicked out of heaven after having been the head of the Praise Ministry, is here to kill, steal and destroy. That is his job on Earth. Every single day is to steal, kill and destroy. And the place he does that best is in your mind. That’s where he works. That’s why the Bible teaches to put on the full on the whole armor of God, the helmet of salvation, which is where your mind is. OK, you can put on a breastplate, you can do anything you can dress up in any anything you want. But if your mind is exposed to thoughts that are not of God, that’s where you get killed, because that’s where Satan gets you. If you don’t think that it’s important to fight back with scripture, look what Jesus did. When Jesus was in the wilderness for 40 days and 40 nights exposed to Satan, he was hungry. So he’s vulnerable. And Satan said, Hey, I got you. Why don’t you come on up here? I’ll give you some our money. I’ll give you stuff. Jesus responded with scripture. He responded with Deuteronomy eight three. He said, man does not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God, there’s Deuteronomy eight three. Whoa. You mean to tell me Jesus was using scripture to fend off attacks from Satan? Well, if he does, why shouldn’t we? If it’s about what would Jesus do, we see what he did? He used scripture and then when Jesus left and went back to Father God. To make intercession for you and me, he said, I have given them that word, that word is true now that rolls into what the Bible has to say about money, because the truth is irrefutable, because scriptures irrefutable. And by the way, when we doubt the fact that scriptures irrefutable, we’re questioning, frankly, God’s integrity because it’s either true or it isn’t. So I have to ask myself, are you challenging the integrity of God when you don’t trust that the word is true? I think yeah. I think yeah, so when I read Deuteronomy eight, 18, where it says that God gives you the power to get wealth, that is covenant might be established upon the face of the earth. What covenant? God gives us wealth, so we might do is will on Earth as a true statement for the covenant relationship that we have with him, and that is regardless of what we do in business, whether it is budgeting, saving, investing or giving, that’s my four pillars for business activity budgeting, saving, investing and giving, budgeting, saving, investing and giving. Given it shall be given under UV good measure. So as you give, it will be given unto you. And that’s what he wants us to do, because we’re walking by faith in the reality of his word, which is motivated by love, which means to give and not to get. And that’s you know, I could go on about the scriptures that are Bible, the silver and the gold belong to God. I don’t be too impressed with yourself again. Deuteronomy Sikhi, first Matthew

Henry Kaestner: Obbie, as you talk about Deuteronomy 18 and talk about managing the wealth that God has entrusted us with for his purposes. Help us understand a little bit more practically about what does that look like? What does that look like in your life? I think that at some level and to be clear, it’s awesome to hear you unpack it and it just is more of a conviction for me about God’s word and then also just the opportunity we have to to participate in what he’s doing with Matthew. Six thirty three. But when we get to practical purposes about storing that wealth, what do you think that looks like? And maybe the answer is that it’s not always the same for each person. But how do you as an individual,

Obie McKenzie: I can I can apply that. And I’ve said very simply, I believe that there are multiple gifts in the body of Christ as you all the Bible scholars know that there’s a list of the gifts of the Holy Spirit in the body. There are a couple in the first Corinthians, one in Ephesians and one in Romans. And the gifts of the Holy Spirit are to edify the church. And one of the gifts is we know the gifts of helps, prayer, et cetera, et cetera, sometimes gifts of prophecy, gifts of preaching, all these different gifts. But everybody has a gift, our gifts. And so I have been in search of my gift, my gift. I have a gift of teaching and a gift of help and a gift of song. And so I take those gifts to try to line up with God’s will for my life. So one has to ask oneself. What is God’s will for my life? What is my purpose? Every one of us has a purpose. We had a purpose before we were born, Jeremi 9/11. We were destined to do certain things while we were here. And we are all either locally or otherwise in search of what that purposes and when. What we’re doing lines up with God’s purpose for our lives. There’s no traffic in the lane. You will know because you’ll know when you’re nowhere. Now, what does that mean to me? Practically? I’ve spent over 50 years in financial services and 30 plus years studying Bible. And part of my purpose is exactly what’s happening here is to take the message that God has given me and give it back. But on a practical level, and this is practical. I am vice chairman of a infrastructure debt platform in Canada which makes loans that have impact on people’s lives to multigenerational families that are not being banked by the banks and don’t want to do private equity offerings. And so at the table, when I structure a deal in my or help to structure a deal, my concerns are whether or not it has the quantitative metrics to reflect an impact on the lives of those who are less fortunate. For example, I’m supposed to have an interview today, frankly, about this hour with Advanced Communications given to Communications is a satellite company out of London. It was mission. Part of his mission is to get into rural Africa with Internet connectivity to unlock the genius in the minds of those who do not. Africa has millions and millions of people, and there are millions of them that do not have broadband connectivity. And cable does not reach certain rural regions. And as a result, the satellite is probably a more effective way of connecting broadband to people who really need to be supported educationally, agriculturally, economically, etc.. Without that connectivity, the genius that is there is not enough. That’s just one practical way that I am currently involved. I’m an impact investor now and I have taken my financial skills from my fundamental finance and gotten involved in initiatives that have a double bottom line and they’re not mutually exclusive. You do not have to leave your IRR and your MLSE off the table when in fact are engaged in business activities that have a social impact that’s in line with what God would want to happen in as much as you’ve done it to the least of these, you’ve done it unto me. Jesus peeps are the least. As everybody and so to the extent that on a practical level, I can make some modest contribution by bringing a different way of thinking about a transaction to the table, then I have fulfilled part of my purpose and I’ve taken some of the gifts that God has given me and planted them on a practical level, i.e. to produce. I are an animal. I see and do it again. But at the same time bringing other people along to benefit from that. So the Cordie Capital Vice Chairman there, and I am also being interviewed for a non executive board directorship at a Vontae Communications, and they’re both situations that allow for impact. And I could go into several other practical examples of what that can mean,

Luke Roush: what your encouragement, just as I think about biblical economics and just the way that Wall Street is perceived maybe from the outside. I mean, 20 years at BlackRock at the most senior level of what Wall Street does with a real deep understanding of what the Bible says about money and now identifying kind of this new evolution. Let me ask a question. How would you see impact investing having changed over the last 10 years? And then what would your encouragement be to other managers who maybe find themselves where you were 15, 20 years ago in a key role and a key bank? What would your encouragement to them be to practically implement in terms of how their faith manifests?

Obie McKenzie: I think that the whole concept of purpose driven investing has evolved enormously over the last 10 years. I think that more and more people have lived in corporate America long enough to feel that the whole idea of looking for a purpose, for example, Larry FDE, who was my boss, he was chairman and CEO BlackRock has written to many investors about purpose and about impact. I mean, his letters go out every year. And one of his most significant, most impactful letters as recent as the last couple of years was on purpose. And so I think there’s a much more corporate conversation about purposeful living that’s occurred. You said use 10 years as a timeline, but it’s still evolving. Now, of course, we when purpose and impact and ESG at the market, there are always charlatans around who use that as a catch word to attract capital and to continue doing what they’re doing. And we call that impact washing or FDE washing. But as we’ve evolved, we have learned to identify metrics and keep records of those metrics and checks and balances on the metrics to know who really is an impact investor and who isn’t. So if you ask me how it’s evolved, it’s continuing to evolve. You’ve got your back there. You had the unresponsible investor principles, and then you have the establishment of Gen Global Impact Investors Network and then Ierace and then the IFC and then sustainability jumped in there. And then people started debating the difference between ESG impacts and sustainability. So it is a road under construction, but it’s a good road because now there are more and more people that are talking about it. And given that I’ve had a heart for the right side of my being as well as the left side, they stepped into my wheel well, which is, you know, caring about somebody else other than just myself.

Luke Roush: Thank you. That’s helpful. I think that your commentary around impact ESG and how some of that has evolved in the last 10 years, it’s become more professionalized. And it’s also a topic that I think a lot of CEOs are now paying attention to. And you know, how BlackRock thinks about ESG is oftentimes similar, but oftentimes different than other firms. And I think there’s more and more understanding of how different capital providers think through those issues and things that they care about that maybe once or we’re not on the radar. So it’s a hugely timely topic.

Obie McKenzie: The one thing I skipped over that really has been a major milestone for me in that is I learned that Obbie was depending on the size of his stock portfolio and for one K to represent security for me. And as that sometimes will ebb and flow and occasionally it will dissipate in a big way between deals or between situations. And what I’ve had to learn first, I didn’t know just how much I was depending on my phone when it came to the level of my savings, my investment portfolio for security. And during those times when I didn’t know what to do and I was crying out in my heart for help from Jesus Christ, I learned as my bank account went down my trust level, I don’t know how I could possibly feel better when my bank account went down than it was when it was a lot more robust. And in the middle of that battle, I learned to trust Jesus. I learned to trust God. Elementum know, I found out that the Lord is my shepherd is a real personal, that he is my shepherd. He may give me. He restores my soul. And if I would bungee jump. With the reality of the word that he’s got me, that he will supply all my needs according to his riches and glory by Praxis is that I would be freer, that I would feel more secure, that I would have more peace in knowing in my noer for real in my heart that he got me. He got me within my bank account. Is up or whether it’s down? He got me in, so that, frankly, is a a recent phenomenon that I thought I’d already I’d already jump that hurdle. I thought I had, but I hadn’t really until I got smacked a little bit again. And I prayed and called out to him and he answered, I heard him. I’m a walking testimony that God answers prayer. And if you will trust him and trust what his word says is an incredible wealth. My wealth is in my relationship with him. My wealth is in how much I can trust to have my faith in him as my well.

Subscribe to the Podcast:

What a thrill it must be to get a call from Jerry Jones and be told you’re going to get to play professional football with the Dallas Cowboys. That was the case for Jaylon Smith in 2017. Even at a young age Jaylon was noticed for his athleticism and talent, being named “Mr. Football” in the state of Indiana and then winning the spot as Linebacker his Freshman year at Notre Dame. Jaylon joins us today to talk about how he overcame what could have been a career ending injury and what he’s doing off the gridiron to inspire change and invest in the next generation of rising entrepreneurs.

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.

William Norvell: Can you walk us through that moment? We don’t have many people in the show that have gotten a call from specifically, as you mentioned, the greatest franchise in one of the most well known owners, if not the most well-known owner in the game as well. What was that moment like when Jerry called? I mean, a face of him pop up on the caller ID and you were like, oh, my gosh, that’s him

Jaylon Smith: when I was in actually Dr. Jerry yesterday, by the way. But I just walked in to my Draupadi and I was selected maybe like seven minutes after I walked in because I was third pick in the draft on that second day. So it was like boom, boom. But when draft started, I sat down by my brother, Rod Smith, who was actually playing for the Cowboys at the time. Soon as I sat down, maybe a minute later, I got a call and it’s two one four two one four number. That’s the Dallas number. Mind you, I had surgery by the Cowboys physician four months prior. So they had a little more inside information on my healing process and the sting operation and things of that nature. But to see that it was a two one four, no understanding that it was me and my brother’s dad’s favorite team, America’s team, the Cowboys. And then the fact that he was on the team, it was like, wow, I’m going to get a chance to play with my brother.

William Norvell: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Investor, we are so excited that you took the time to join us today, to take the time out of your day to listen to what God’s people are doing through investing throughout the world. And we are just so excited about our guests today, were so excited about the conversation that we get to have. And we’re pleased that you joined us, grateful that you’re here, always grateful for our audience coming in. And today we get the incredible, incredible, exciting opportunity to welcome in Jaylon Smith from the Dallas Cowboys. How are you, Jaylen?

Jaylon Smith: And I am blessed, definitely blessed and highly favored. I’m thankful to be able to speak with you today. This wonderful man.

William Norvell: Well, we’re grateful for you and we’re grateful for what you’re doing. We’re going to get into that a little bit. And as our audience knows, one of the first places we would love to start this program is shocking for our audience. I went to Alabama, so the fact that I’m not going to start with a football conversation is a big thing, but I’m going to save our audience that right now, Jalen was was a star at Notre Dame and a first round draft pick. And we’re going to get to that, I’m sure, in a story. But we would love to start there. Jalen, tell us a little bit. Who are you? Where did you come from? How did you end up where you are today and how is God walking alongside you?

Jaylon Smith: Yeah, Jalen Smith, linebacker for the Dallas Cowboys Amen. There was a brother from the Hoosier State born and raised in Fort Wayne, Indiana. My old dad saved my family’s from Uniontown, Alabama. So he’s Alabama fan. So definitely some connections there. But I believe and go to Macfarlan, Delmar is just an incredible experience is being from a basketball state. But and we play some football as well there and especially out there and stuff in Indiana. There’s just been a wonderful journey answering my sixth year in the National Football League. I’ve dealt with adversity, I’ve dealt with adversity, and I’ve been able to to have a clear view. I’ve been able to have a focused, determined belief in ERG dreams. That’s really what helped me get to where I am today and all the battles that I’ve kind of endured and persevered through, all by the grace of God and then putting in work. So I’m just like I said, I’m happy to be here today to speak with you all and just to have a conversation. And it’s this is dope

William Norvell: cos it’s fun and tell us a little bit. So obviously you’ve got the athletics and we’re going to jump into that, you know, where did faith and work come into your world? Where did God kind of push you down your professional journey that, you know, obviously we’re going to get into what you’re doing on the side of being a professional football player, which takes a lot of time. Where did those intersections happen in your life to where you started seeing that there could be good holy work in the marketplace?

Jaylon Smith: I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur, probably since I was about 11 years old and I fell in love with the business aspect and not having a lot of knowledge of it, but just understanding that that’s a way that I could be able to shed light and put smiles on people’s faces through that education. It’s all about freedom, financial literacy, the financial freedom, and develop some mentors along the way. Our first mentor, Michael, later became my mentor since I was 13 years old. Now he’s my business manager, operating out of a family office that he owns, Colibri Sports Advisors, which helps athletes become entrepreneurs and run themselves like entities, providing governance, expert partners, et cetera, et cetera. For me, my cousin Eugene Parker rest in peace, who’s arguably the greatest NFL agent of all time. He represented D-R Sanders. He represented the Smith, Larry Fitzgerald, Curtis Martin, Ray Lewis, Rob Watson, a bunch of guys, Hall of Fame players. And he kind of taught me how to understand the value of cost and just through platforms, being able to gain access to quality relationship quality, deal flow through going through an amazing high school sports high school where we won four state championships, by the way. And then. Wow, four for four. Yeah. And then headed to Notre Dame to be a part of the Global Institute, you know, in the in the transition to play for the Dallas Cowboys, America’s team, which is the most valued franchise in all of sports, any sport. So all of these things I’ve learned from those of the most high, I’m a sponge and I soak everything in and it’s all about minimizing the mistakes and growing that. So it’s an everyday process for me. Like I said, I’ve always wanted to be an entrepreneur and God has blessed me with the gift to be able to play the game. I love that I’ve been playing since I was seven years old. So it’s a wonderful thing that.

William Norvell: That is and I’m curious, was there something specific that triggered you wanting to be an entrepreneur at such a young age? I don’t I don’t think that’s super common. You know, you mentioned, you know, just really 10, 11 years old. You know, did you start a business? Did somebody shed light on that journey? Is there something specific or was it just kind of in you and you just felt that from the Lord?

Jaylon Smith: Yeah. Something that was just in me, honestly, and developed through time. My mom always preached to me on being observant, always seeing through a different lens and then through work with my mentors, just learning how to think, understanding that it’s OK to think the concept, the value of that is so critical and crucial to our growth as humans. You know, I’m just blessed to know that I’m on the right path and I’m just constantly seeking peace.

William Norvell: Absolutely. Absolutely. And so I want to transition a little bit and hear how, you know, a setback really could have shaped, you know, your life a little bit. And you’re senior in college. I feel like I was watching this game. I just remember this. You know, you were projected top five draft pick. You know, everything in the world was going incredibly well. And then you had a season ending injury, which I remember. Right. It wasn’t even season ending. I mean, this was probably going to hold you out of your first year of the NFL as well. Yes, it was a devastating injury. How did that change you? How did that change your view of life? Could you walk us through that season of life?

Jaylon Smith: Really just understanding that, you know, injury is a threat. You know, when you’re playing the last gladiator sport that I play in football is something that I was definitely aware of, but I didn’t think that I would get hurt in my final collegiate game. Fiesta Bowl is a bowl game. Notre Dame versus Ohio State had no intentions of our understanding that that would be when I would get hurt. But it was a career threatening injury, ACL, LCL. But the severity of it was I have peroneal nerve damage, which gave me drop foot so I couldn’t lift my foot up for about a year. While still I stepped out on faith. I still entered the NFL draft. I was going to be a top three pick. And, you know, because of the injury, I got word that I would fall out of the first round and probably be drafted the next day. I didn’t know when or where I was going to be drafted, but I just needed one team to take a chance on me and I would make sure that they got their return on their investment. And that’s what the Cowboys did. The Cowboys took a chance on me, and I’m just happy to continue to be delivering in that moment. It was all about my clear view. It was all about my clear view, which is my core values. It’s how I live my life to walk through life. And it’s broken down into three pillars focus, vision of determined belief in ERG dreams. I’m a focused vision is just about having a laser beam focus, really being able to see clearly what you want to accomplish, where you’re trying to go. What’s that next step being in the present, the determined belief is the second pillar, and that’s about a belief capacity. It’s about a belief in God that he has your back on my belief in yourself, a belief in others, understanding that there are people out there who do believe in you and who are writing for you. And then finally, that third pillar is about ERG dreams. It’s about sweat equity. It’s about how bad do you want it? It’s about, you know, what work are you willing to put in, you know, to accomplish that. So I think everyone should have a clear eyed view in all aspects of life, whether you’re a firefighter, whether you’re a stay at home mom, whether you’re a janitor doesn’t matter the profession. Everyone should have a clear view. It’ll help you persevere. It’ll help ground you for sure. So that’s how I live my life. That’s really what’s helped me by the grace of God. I’m just thankful that.

William Norvell: BAM Amen, yeah, it had to be an amazing time, I remember watching the draft, too, I love the draft and I remember when they said you were going to go early second round and just, you know, it was a big story. It was a big story that they took a chance on you there and you have earned their return made Pro Bowl. I mean, I’m curious, though, can you walk us through that moment? We don’t have many people in the show that have gotten a call from specifically, as you mentioned, the greatest franchise in one of the most well known owners, if not the most well known owner in the game as well. What was that moment like when Jerry called? I mean, the face of him pop up on the caller ID and you were like, oh, my gosh, that’s him.

Jaylon Smith: Well, I was actually talked to Jerry yesterday, by the way, but I just walked in to my Draupadi. And I was selected maybe like seven minutes after I walked in because I was third pick in the draft on the second day. So it was like boom, boom. But then draft started. I sat down by my brother, Rod Smith, who was actually playing for the Cowboys at the time. Soon as I sat down, maybe a minute later, I got a call and it was two one four two one four number. That’s the Dallas number. Mind you, I had surgery by the Cowboys physician four months prior. So they had a little more inside information on my healing process and the sting operation and things of that nature. But to see that it was a two one for no understanding that it was me and my brother’s dad’s favorite team, America’s team, the Cowboys. And in the fact that he was on the team, it was like, wow, I’m going to get a chance to play with my brother, you know? So that was just the first thing that I was about through through by to answer the phone is Jerry Jones. And it’s like everybody hears about Jerry Jones. But, you know, you get a chance to really talk to him. It’s like, OK, is extra confirmations.

William Norvell: That’s amazing. It’s like dreams coming true on top of dreams coming true not only to the NFL, but with your brother to the Cowboys. What an amazing story that God was weaving there. And, you know, especially through crisis. And, you know, unfortunately, I found in my life that God speaks the loudest during crisis sometimes and during struggles. Is there one or two things maybe as you reflect back on that season that you could share with our audience that maybe God was teaching? You might have been in your points earlier. So apologies if I’m asking you to repeat things, but just wonder if there’s a couple of things that God torture during that time that you might want to share.

Jaylon Smith: God taught me faith. He taught me resilience. He taught me patience the most patience. He taught me awareness. He taught me how to be present because I had no choice and I had to face those. That was the first time, the first love of my life football was taken away from me. Honestly, I have never been hurt. I’ve been playing since I was seven years old. That’s when I made the decision that I was going to play in the National Football League. So. I’ve been laser being focused on this dream, so really I learned a lot and I’m still learning to this day because constantly healing, constantly work in this world. There’s so many things that has happened in this world in the past year, year and a half that you just got to make sure your your faith is right. You’ve got to make sure your belief capacity is right. And like I said, what helps me is my clarity.

William Norvell: Amen Amen. Well, I’m going to move over to investing a little bit. You know, I would love to hear just you know, investing is sort of taking the world by storm. I feel like it’s happening in a lot of different spheres. I feel like every day, even this morning I saw Kevin Durant invested in this and Tom Brady invested in a crypto exchange with Jazelle FDX. I’m curious about investing in the NFL. I mean, you can give us some insight here. Is this something people are talking about a lot or is it still a niche industry? Tell us more

Jaylon Smith: is definitely a niche industry, but the conversation is being brought up more. A lot of players are understanding that our careers are short and there’s life after football and there’s power and having more than one revenue stream of income. It’s OK to be more than an employee, but it requires work and requires education. It requires trust in a team because you can’t do it alone. We don’t have the time to do it all on our own due to our main thing, which is employees in our profession. But there’s so much room for growth out here that I think it’s just a matter of time before, you know, everybody’s on board with it. So we’re learning. We’re learning access matters in equity matters. Equity creates freedom. So I’m happy with where we’re headed. We just got to keep growing. You got to keep digging.

William Norvell: Absolutely, and I want to switch now to the Minority Entrepreneurs Institute, and I know we got connected through a good friend, Jay Hein, at Sagamore. Well, I know he’s been working with you a little bit on this. Could you tell us a little bit? Tell our audience, where did the idea for Minority Entrepreneurs Institute come from? How did it get started?

Jaylon Smith: Really, like I said, becoming an entrepreneur and having this access to all quality deal flow, doing a lot of alternative investing, getting us some deals as an LP, as a GP, getting some returns, getting dividend payouts. As I’m experiencing all of this now, I was just thinking to myself, how can I provide this access or this create a marketplace for people who look like me that don’t have the Notre Dame background or connection or the Dallas Cowboy affiliation and connection? A platform, a huge platform that I have. There’s so many people that look like me that that have great and tremendous ideas that can add value to our world. But they don’t have the access to financial funding, to mentorship, to help with putting together their infrastructure or strategic execution plan. You know, I was just thinking about how can I help provide that I to help fix this scandal. There’s an educational and a wealth gap that exists in this world today. And that’s why I created the Minority Entrepreneurship Institute to help close the economic and educational gap.

William Norvell: That’s amazing. That’s amazing. And could you tell us a little bit more? What are the initiatives? You know, what is the program like? And just take us down a layer deeper.

Jaylon Smith: Yes. So there’s two parts. We have educational seminars and we have venture coaches, venture Pitchess business targeting type of vibe and really investing in the black and brown alad next community. We’re opening up marketplaces each year. We’ve opened up Indiana, we’ve opened up Texas. And this year we’ll be opening up the Florida marketplace, having our third annual venture bitch, July 9th this year in Tampa, Florida. It’s going to be an amazing event where last year we raised a total of six hundred thousand dollars invested in the five companies, five vegetable companies. The Jaheim has been amazing in helping me with the structure of helping me with doing the due diligence with him and his amazing group, Sagamore Institute. You know, to find our goal is to find vegetable companies that impact investors can believe in investing. So it’s the marketplace will growing myself. I’ve committed two and a half million dollars over the next ten years towards this. So I’m acting as a lead investor. I’m a believer and we’re getting some great traction. So definitely anybody that wants to be involved here more, please reach out. Like I said, we’re just trying to help close the economic and educational gap that exists in this world. So it is really a bust

William Norvell: and we’ll link to everything here. So, you know, if you want to find more information, that should be easy to find and always and let us know if you can’t and you want to learn more to get in. So we’ve had a few guests coming at this from different angles. I’d love your view. What are the needs of minority entrepreneurs? You know, that you’re hoping to be able to give access to how are they different at some level or are they not? And they just need more notoriety. Just walk us through some of the people you’ve met and how you’re trying to structure the program and what exactly you’re trying to provide that maybe the world is not given right now on creativity.

Jaylon Smith: These companies and people that we’re investing in, they have vegetable companies. They’ve either started or they’re beginning to start and they have an amazing plan, a team behind them, a vision on where they want to go. And you just need some assistance. And we all need help in some form or shape. There’s just been a huge lack in the black and brown community. So I’m just trying to fill that void, that scandal. These are all people with great ideas, great companies that are fixing to be successful. They just need help. So there’s no real format other than that. There’s all different companies that we invest in, all creativity. There’s no real shot. It just has to be one of your goals, has to be able to really make community impact. So my team does a great job of helping really do due diligence on each deal and each company. So it’s definitely a team effort. Sure.

William Norvell: That’s amazing and that’s amazing. And so, you know, as we come to a close, Jaylen, unfortunately, we have to come to a close with love always. Our closing question is we’d love to hear, you know, kind of where you are right now in your life and what God might be teaching you. You know, if there is specific that just sort of in the season that you’re walking through.

Jaylon Smith: Yes, God has been teaching the truth through me. It’s extremely important for me to operate off the truth when I’m truthful in every aspect. It brings peace to my life. And that’s really what I’ve been focused on, especially these first two quarters is just peace, a peace of mind, a wholeness as a human being, and just doing things the right way and being myself really exploring and tapping into my creativity and just being someone’s who’s doing right. So that’s that’s really where I’m at. I’m thankful God is using me. And I love

William Norvell: Amen. Thank you so much for joining us. It’s been a gift. We do encourage everyone to check out Emii and what’s going on. Like I said, we’ll have links there. But just please check out what Jaylen and his team are doing. And if you want to get involved, get involved. Don’t stop. Push forward and make that call and get involved in what the great work they’re doing.

Jaylon Smith: Thank you so much. I appreciate you. Besides.

Subscribe to the Podcast:

Convinced that Christians would better handle their personal finances if they were counseled objectively with the highest technical expertise and from a Biblical perspective, Ron Blue founded a financial planning firm in 1979. Today that firm manages $13.5 billion in assets for more than 10,000 clients nationwide. Ron joins us to discuss why he thinks stewardship is just as much about investing as it is giving. 

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.

Ron Blue: All of a sudden in five years, I had a national clientele, a rich, wealthy Christians who wanted to give, and that’s how the whole thing got started. And today, there’s ten thousand clients at that firm Serve’s that are giving away one hundred and fifty million a year. They’re managing about 12 billion in assets. And I look back and I realize how God prepared me to do what I did. I can take zero credit for it.

Henry Kaestner: Welcome to a special edition of the Faith Driven Investor podcast, From time to time, we’ll get involved in a broader definition of investing. And this is one of those times when we think about storing the wealth that guys entrust us with. Much of that is going to take place with investing in mutual funds and in stocks and bonds and venture capital, private equity, all the different topics that we have rolled out over the course of the last year and a half or so, over 75 or 80 podcasts with speakers like Frank Chen from Andreessen Horowitz, Andrew Stevens. And gosh, we’ve had just about every asset class. But lest we think that it’s just about investing that God cares about, which is different, of course, in a way, a lot of people think about it, the reverse of that as people just care about giving. But since we and you is listening to this podcast, subscribe to more of this one pocket mentality, that is we stored these assets. We have an opportunity to participate in the work that God is doing. We need to, from time to time, start focusing a bit on the giving side as well, and in some cases were called to go ahead and make that investment into the private equity fund or into the mutual fund. And in some cases, we’re called to be faithful to the giving opportunity that’s right in our midst. And so every once in a while, maybe every 10 episodes or so, we’ll get into that a little bit more deeply. And whenever we do that and do that with one of my best friends in the world, Darrell Heald, you probably know enough about my story by now to note, at age 28, I came to faith. At age 38, I had what I call my born again again moment when I met Darryl. And Darryl asked me the simple question, Henry, why do you give? And that sent me into God’s word. And it just changed my life. So whenever we have an opportunity to talk about this, I’d like to bring Darryl back on board. We’ve been partners in ministry and invested in so many things since that time 13 years ago, which I’m super grateful for today. We’ve got an incredible guest in Baila. So before I go any further, Darryl, welcome. Welcome to the program.

Darryl Heald: Thanks. And good to be on the program. And I’m super excited. You could have just skipped over any of my intro. Let’s go straight to our guests.

Henry Kaestner: Well, before we do that, we’re going to go almost straight to our guest from Blue. And Ron, by the way, welcome to the program. It’s awesome. Have with us back again

Ron Blue: a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. I’d love talking to you guys.

Henry Kaestner: You’ve always been such a great encouragement to me talking about this, these formative experiences that God has put in my life in these really important relationships. Ten years ago, we started Sovereign’s Capital and it was Darryl that introduced us to you, and you went ahead and got it right away and said, I’ll do anything I can do to help you. And we asked if you’d be on our board of advisors and if we could get this guy who’s probably the biggest name in Christian investing and the generosity with which you said, yeah, absolutely. You know, if any way I can help you and you put my face on your website and just tell other people that you’ve talked to me and that blew me away. It blew me away. I’ll never forget. I’ve told you before, but I’m going to tell you and our listeners that again, as we’re getting ready, though, I was taking certain liberties with our relationship and I showed up this podcast nine minutes late. And what our listening audience may not know is that we on occasion will have several of these podcast recordings we do in sequence. And we just got off the podcast interview with Dallas Jenkins, who is the guy behind the chosen, and we’re talking about him. And he had a message. He also has known Ron, interestingly, and this is something Ron, I don’t think you knew, is that Ron hired Dallas well before he was famous to direct a video that Ron did, which I think is super cool. But one of the things that came up in the interview we had with Dallas was that somebody had come to him early on in his career and said Dallas. And I was on a Facebook post on a video he’d done, and he wasn’t sure that the film they had done had been received as well as he had hoped. And somebody from Romania four o’clock in the morning said, Dallas, your job is not to feed the 5000, it’s just to supply the five loaves and two fish. Now, they’re just beginning with what you have. And then, Ron, as I was explaining interest, apologizing for being late, you shared an anecdote that was very similar to that. And whenever I hear those repeated themes, it makes an impact in my life. It makes me feel like God is trying to tell me something and maybe as well. And you were talking about a time when you thought you showed up to an event and it wasn’t as well received. Or maybe there weren’t as many people there as you would have wanted in your bride. Told you what

Ron Blue: she said, Ron. She said God said feed the sheep, don’t count them. And it changed my whole perspective. You know, it just it took away the whole idea of how big the audience don’t make any difference. It may be an audience of one because you don’t know who God is going to put it in the audience and you don’t know what he’s going to say to them. So my job just to be faithful to deliver his message and he takes it from there however he wants to. So don’t count them. Just feed them. And appreciate. Henry, you’re feeding. Flock here of people that are really becoming serious, you know, when you get serious about your money, you’re serious about your faith, and when you put those two together, that’s a big deal. That’s why Jesus spoke so much about money, because it’s the greatest barrier to my relationship to the Lord. The God of Mammon steals that every single day. And we live in a culture that I think is the most difficult to live in because there’s so many temptations. And I don’t mean that in a condemning way, but I say, you know, I didn’t even know what I needed till I went to the mall and that and there’s billions of dollars being spent every day trying to make me discontent. And a lot of it gets through.

Henry Kaestner: So I’m still with you.

Ron Blue: It’s hard to live in this culture and have the proper perspective on money. So I’m delighted that you’re doing what you’re doing.

Henry Kaestner: Well, thank you. And to your point, we’re trying not to count our listeners in, but they know all three of them know that I love them. And Mr. Tony

Ron Blue: Abbott, your wife doesn’t count

Darryl Heald: two of them. Love I love.

Ron Blue: I’ll tell if

Henry Kaestner: you are one of those two people, though. You’ll know that we’ve had Ron on before. We featured Ron and one of our conferences, and he weren’t our first ever lifetime achievement award. And so some number of the folks listening to this are going to understand some of who you are in your background. But before we get into that, I really want Daryl to guide our conversation today because it’s something that’s so near and caught to who he is and and the ministry that guys got him on. But give us a flyover. Who is Ron Blue? What have you done? What is God done through you in your career? Bringing us up to speed real quickly and then going to go real deep on generosity?

Ron Blue: Well, can it real quickly. I turned 79 this year just a few months ago, and I was fine with that until I realized that I was living in my 80th year. Then I began to feel really bad

Henry Kaestner: right now that if we could all look as good as you do in our 80th year, then nobody would ever have to fear being 80, that’s for sure. But you’re now to be clear, you’re seventy nine.

Ron Blue: Right? And the good news is that before long I’m going to be able to shoot my age in golf. If I can live long enough,

Henry Kaestner: I’m not going to live that

Darryl Heald: long.

Ron Blue: Well, that quick story, I was raised in a Christian home, but I totally rejected the faith. And I went to college. I went to college to have a good time. I did got kicked out twice, got back and got married. That changed everything. Got my MBA from Indiana University in nineteen sixty seven and went to work on Wall Street with at that time Pete Margaret Mitchell and was with Pete Murray for three years, starting my own firm. I didn’t want to stay with the big firm, so I started a firm in Indianapolis which today is still going by the way and

Henry Kaestner: name on the door to

Ron Blue: the same name on the door. They don’t know who I am. Anyway, I spent seven years doing that and during that seven years my wife came to Christ in nineteen seventy two, asked me what I thought about that, and I threatened her with divorce because I was on the success track. Then I was an entrepreneur and I wanted to become wealthy and I was getting it. So she didn’t say anything for two years but she lived out first beta three and there was a godly woman that I there was something different. And so I prayed to receive Christ on my way to play golf. In nineteen seventy four, I had the four spiritual laws. I was by myself read through those and I said to the Lord, I don’t want to change anything, but I’m willing to be changed. And that day I shot a thirty six on the front side and I said, man, if I had known this how to become a Christian in a long time ago, if I got back on my game on the backside. But that led to joining Campus Crusade two years later and working in Africa for two years. I traveling to Africa. I made ten trips. But during that time I was also teaching leadership seminars and decision making seminars in the United States. I was gone 70 percent of the time and my wife, we were in a strange city when we moved to Atlanta. My income had gone from one hundred and fifty thousand to twenty five thousand and we had five kids below the age of 12 and she had a husband gone 70 percent of the time. And she called me at the office one day and she said, How do you get on Christian? And I said, What do you mean? She said that this is the abundant life I’ve had, all the abundance I can take. And what that led then was I was with Dr. Howard Hendricks, who was a friend and mentor, and he had been asking for financial advice from me. And I had been out of the financial world for a couple of years. But he said, would you take a look at my finances? Which I did, and I was able to sit down with him and Gene and say, you know what, Howie, you’re doing just fine. And it was like a load came off of his shoulders. This was in nineteen seventy nine. And now when I look back over those 40 some years, I realized that the question he was asking is really the question almost everybody wants the answer to, and that is how am I doing? They want to know the answer to that question, every one of us wants to know, and of course, it changes over time. So I felt like having traveled to Africa, that there was a lot of money in the United States. So I determined through a series of things that I wanted to help Christians plan to manage their money so they have more to give away. And that was not called financial planning at the time. Financial planning didn’t exist. There was no such thing as a CFP, and it was product sales or investment sales and insurance sales and so forth. But the first client that I had, he wanted to give a million dollars to Campus Crusade. I did not know him. He was a physician. And I said, well, what’s your income? He said, eighty two thousand a year. I said, What’s your net worth? He said, I don’t know, three or four hundred thousand. And so I’m thinking, there’s no way he can give a million dollars away. But God in his providence had done something. And that was the last couple of years as a CPA. I had done a lot of bank projection work and all it was was projecting cash flows over five years and working them out to a final net worth statement. So that’s what I did for this doctor. And it turned out he could give away a million dollars. He gave he had more property than he realized. He gave away his property, lowered his taxes, increase his cash flow, increases giving with Florida’s taxes were to increase his cash flow. And you worked all that out. And in five years, he could give away a million dollars and still have basically what he started with. And I thought there’s a lot more people like that. And I thought recently, what if he’d only wanted to give one hundred thousand? That would have been my bar. But it was a million, and so my bar became a million, and because he gave it to Campus Crusade, Dr. Bright asked me to speak at all of their donor events. And I would say, look, if you want to give away a million dollars or more, I can help you do that. And not only that, you can pay me to help you. And so I knew how to build a time based business, so I didn’t have to sell any product. And I knew how to do financial planning. And all of a sudden in five years, I had a national clientele, a rich, wealthy Christians who wanted to give. And that’s how the whole thing got started. And today, there’s ten thousand clients that the firm serves that are giving away one hundred and fifty million a year. They’re managing about 12 billion in assets. And I look back and I realize how God prepared me to do what I did. I can take zero credit for it. And it’s such a joy now to I can look back and say, wow, isn’t this great? And I’ll finish with this. What I found was the people that gave away those huge sums of money were the most joyful people I knew and the most contented. They were accomplishing something with the resources God had entrusted to them and they were experiencing the joy of giving. So they were good investors. They were good entrepreneurs, but they were better givers. And I don’t mean that on a comparative basis, but so I’ve had a great life. Henry, helping people give away money

Darryl Heald: your life, indeed. Thank you for sharing the history. What a legacy it’s got. I mean, it takes a while to tell a story when you start to your seventy ninth year.

Ron Blue: Yeah, but

Darryl Heald: I love you. So Henry and I know each other thirteen years, but Rodney and I’ve known each other over 30 years. Yeah. So I was the young real estate broker and the company I was working for actually owned the building where you all were Ozzfest. And so I was two floors below Rodell Balloon Company and I was going to church with a couple of the young financial planners that were working for Ron. And they started give me these books that he wrote, Money Matters and Money Matters for Your Kids. And I was very much influenced by Iran. And Judy, Kathy and I both have been. And one of the reasons why we did what we did, a lot of ways that we raised our kids around these money issues, giving and things like that were influenced by you. And I’m thankful. So we’re really grateful for that. And it’s kind of fun that our families are friends. We’ve served on a number of boards together as well. But Rodney, thanks for joining us today. One of the things that I know that I’ve heard you talk about a number of times is what are the impediments to giving? You have this triangle like why aren’t more people giving? Because you just gave this great example of this guys says, hey, I want to give a million and so on. But where is that kind of a state of giving? And in one sense, there’s a lot of resources out there. Occasionally we see a person like this doctor being generous. But what’s holding a lot of other people back?

Ron Blue: Well, I think if I were to boil it all down, Darryl, I think there’s three things that have to happen in giver’s life. No. One, there has to be transformation. You’ll never see maximum giving apart from transformation. So it begins with a heart attitude, a belief in what the Bible says about eternity and about my life here. But secondly, there needs to be intentionality. A lot of people give, but they really give out of their surplus. So they give large sums of money maybe, but they don’t necessarily maximize their giving unless they have intentionality. And I used to say there’s two questions. No one who owns it, you got to answer that question. But the second big question is, how much is enough? You know, how much is enough to accumulate, how much is enough on a lifestyle? And there’s not a right answer on that. There’s only a faith answer on it in the faith answer says, OK, God, what would you have me? And I would ask this way, how much do you want me to keep? And the rest I’ll give away. I love what Bob Buford, my friend, said to me one time, he had heard me ask that question, how much is enough? He said Ronnie said, I figured out how much is enough. I doubled it and gave the rest away.

Darryl Heald: I said,

Ron Blue: But that’s OK. He said, a finish line. And if you have a finish line, then the question becomes if you’re accumulating. Why am I accumulating more? And I believe so. There needs to be intentionality. But I think there’s a third thing that is very helpful in maximizing giving, and that is accountability. And I was in that business of providing accountability and I required all of my financial planners to have a financial planner, myself included. I have a financial planner. You know, I’ve written 20 books on finances, but actually read one book 20 times. But I have a financial planner because I can’t hold myself accountable. And Judy and I think differently a lot on the giving. She’s far more generous than I am. I mean, she’d give it all away. When we sold the business, I felt pretty good. She said, you know, God gave you all that. I said, you’re right. She said, you better give it all away so that when my retirement. But when she said that, then we told the financial planner what we were going to do. And so we’ve been held accountable to not accumulating them. And I would continue to accumulate if I didn’t have a financial planner holding me accountable to a decision that I felt like I had made at a particular point in time. Anyway, there are lots of stories about that. But I think transformation, intentionality and accountability are really three things that when they take place, you see maximized giving. And I will say this to that. I know that the only thing that breaks the power of money is giving. You ain’t got to open your hands or you’ll never experience the freedom of a relationship with Christ because you’ll always be there be two things to be going on. No one will be fair. And fear mentioned a lot in the Bible. And when you if you haven’t done that, there’s a fear of loss. And you obsessed with it, and that’s the biggest, you know, I talk and you’ve heard me say this, the paradox of prosperity and the paradox of prosperity is that the more you have, the more choices you have. Therefore, the more confusing it becomes. I mean, anybody that’s owned a boat knows what I’m talking about. When I sell the boat, they say it’s the second happiest day of their life, or if you own two homes or whatever it may be. And we’ve had two homes and I’ve had a boat and was happy with all of it was gone. But the more you had, the more choices you have and therefore the more fear of loss and the more confusing life becomes contrary to the American dream. And I’m not talking against people living well at all. That’s not the issue. God places people such as you guys, and I think probably such as the audience in positions of great influence because of the success they’ve had either invested in rebuilding their businesses. And that’s a good thing. And it’s OK to enjoy that. It says God gives me Rusty all things to enjoy. But he doesn’t say that joy should be my objective. He said also says right along with that, you’ve been given much in order to give much. So generosity, investment, entrepreneurship, they all tied together because they represent success in many ways, but then conquering the success by living generously.

Darryl Heald: That’s great. Thanks, Ron. I love those three things there. And so what is the so I mean, there is a significant financial services industry out there, right. That is looking to serve, you know, everyone listening to this podcast. So then what’s the disconnect with the current level of service and what you’re talking about? And if I’m kind of leaning in to what you’re saying right now as an investor and wanting to be more intentional, have that accountability, what does that look like?

Ron Blue: Well, the problem in the financial services world is that there’s a conflict of interest inherent in it. So, you know, when I tell people that my metric of success in the financial planning firm was how much our clients are giving away. Not how much we were accumulating, and today, if you would talk to around the blue adviser, they would talk about how much their clients give. And, you know, as a consequence of that, we almost never lost a client one. And number two, we almost never lost the client generationally. So now I’ve lived long enough to see people and I knew through it Kathee years and years ago. And he’s now in there for generations of the cafes. And they’re all working with advisors that are faith based, an advisor that is faith based and a client that is faith based, share the same language and the same value system. So if I’m an investor or an entrepreneur, I’m looking for an advisor. I want to know what that adviser believes. I want to know what motivates you. I want to know what he thinks about giving, because theoretically, if a client gives to a million dollars, I’ve lost the fees on a million dollars. What I found is when a client gave away a million dollars, got replaced with somebody who had two million. So I think there’s a scarcity mentality. And to me that is almost it just can’t be because the scarcity mentality says I serve a God who can’t create and I serve a God who’s not sovereign. I was once talking to a group of advisers and there were six Merrill Lynch advisors sitting next to one another. And I said, Are you guys in competition? And they kind of squirmed and I said, if you are you do not believe in a sovereign God, God can raise up those clients and he will. But, you know, faith, I see the evidence of faith in retrospect. I never see it in prospect. So I’ve got to make that decision, do that thing. That’s right. And then God honors that and blesses it.

Henry Kaestner: By that you mean you can see patterns in your life where God was faithful and blessed you in times when you didn’t see that happening. But it’s so much more difficult for us to anticipate how that pattern will continue in our lives. We’ve seen it time and time again about how God is provided right when we needed. And yet it’s so hard to just kind of project that forward as if God was sovereign and love me up until May. Twenty six, twenty twenty one. And then after that I was on my own.

Ron Blue: Yeah, well that’s true. And the life of faith never stops. You know, I struggle like everybody day to day. Now I do say this. I had good mentors and I do have a quiet time almost every day. And today I was meditating on abiding in Christ. What does that mean? You know, and it means total surrender. But I knew that, but I needed to know it again today. Yeah, and now it’s near the end of the day and I need to know it again. So the life of faith doesn’t end, but it is a life of fruitfulness and joy. Also, when you look back and, you know, I got the privilege now of looking back and not seeing what I did, but seeing what how God used even me. He used Balan’s as he could use me. And my wife taught me that

Darryl Heald: we love dearly. We love to feel. But what are the things that we actually just had a discussion on today? So we’ve seen this out of covid, this incredible rising market, so many asset prices going up so often. So one of the conundrums, it seems like with when we think about what we’re stupid in asset is like, if I think it’s going to continue to go higher, why give now? What would be your advice on that?

Ron Blue: That’s a great question. Yeah, I love that question. I used to get that a lot when I used to get it. When I was speaking to donor groups, they said, you know, if I’d give me a million dollars, I could make two million and I have more to give. So I said, well, let me let me give you an illustration. Most people know the magic of compounding. If I took ten thousand dollars and compounded it at twenty five percent over 40 years, it would grow to seventy three million dollars without adding another penny to it. If, on the other hand, it only compounded out at twenty four percent, same time period, it would be 52 million. So it’s the twenty one million dollar difference on one percentage point. Now the reason I say that is because what is God’s interest rate. Thirty fold. Sixty fold. One hundred and thirty fold is thirty thousand percent and sixty four to six thousand percent. Nine hundred dollars. Ten thousand percent. So how much is ten thousand dollars given to the kingdom. At ten thousand percent for all eternity. That’s the difference, so I want to do my given while I’m living, so I’m knowing where it’s going and I want it I want it invested in the kingdom because the return in the kingdom is far more than what the stock market’s going to return. So I use that illustration because people can grasp that and to say, well, I’m going to give when now you need to give right now and say something else. I think you need to give some cash to nondeductible cash. And I got this from a pastor who he did this and I picked up the example. So it was not mine, but I carry cash in my pocket and I look for people that are unnoticed. The most unnoticed are those who clean the bathrooms in airports, and so when I go out and I do a lot of flying, so when I go in the bathroom, I look for that cleaner and they’re always standing in the corner head down, sometimes not saying anything. And you walk over and you give them 20 dollars or forty dollars or one hundred dollars, whatever it may be. And the joy that you see on their face, that’s far more fun, if you will, than writing a big check to a ministry that had a guy followed me out one time and he said, I saw what you did. Why did you do that? And I said, listen, I am so blessed. I want to share that blessing with somebody else I love.

Darryl Heald: Rod, one of my favorite stories you have, why don’t you tell our audience is the Chick fil A’s story, the lady that.

Ron Blue: Yeah, I’ll make it short. I used to take my son many years ago to breakfast every Friday, one of my sons to and there was this lady named Rex and she worked at Chick fil A. We’d always meet at the Chick fil A and she was always the most pleasant, smiling and so forth. If she got saucy when I opened the door, she would have our meal ready for us because we’re always ordered the same thing. So I was walking out one day and I thought, I wonder if you can keep a fast food waitress. And I’ve never done that. So the Lord convinced me to tip her, give her something. So I reached in my pocket and I pulled out of twenty and the Lord said, You cheapskate, you got a lot of toys. And I said, Oh, no. So I took five hundred dollars and I followed him up. I went back in and I said, Can you take a tip? Is it OK? She said, yes. So I gave her one hundred dollars. She didn’t know how much it was and walked out. And the next week I was back in the chick Ticketfly and I was before my son had come and she came over to the table and she said, I was so happy. When you gave me the money last week, I needed a new set of tires, she said. But when I got home, my daughter, who was in high school, came home and there was a girl in her class who had had a fire in their apartment and they lost everything. She said they needed the money worse than I did. And so I had the ability to give that hundred dollars to that family. And I thought, man, I gave out of my abundance and she gave out of her property at that impacted me, I mean, and convicted me for sure. So I encourage people who you can give a lot of money away, but I encourage people to give some cash away to give it away. We’ve got a family that has ten kids that, you know, here in Atlanta. They had two of their own and they adopted three from Africa and then a family. The parents died and they adopted all five of them. So they have ten. So at the end of the year, Judy said we need to give them some money. We go to Costco every now and then fill up some cards and take it over there to them. But she wanted us to write them a check. And I thought, well, if I write that the helping hands, it’ll be deductible, but they’ll also take their percent. So I wrote the check and we drove over there and we gave it. And that type of giving is is just blessed giving. I really enjoy that. And I don’t want I don’t want to talk about me in the sense of I’m so good because I am not naturally generous by any means. I’m naturally pretty selfish. And, you know, I like nice things. I like to fly first class. I like to drive a Lexus, but I God won’t let me drive a brand new Lexus anymore. I have to buy. I used to run ride.

Darryl Heald: I mean, we could love to hear more stories than all, but why don’t we do this? I mean, because you have helped people do all this planning. So you talk about this blessed giving. What is your allocation look like? Kind of know we think about asset allocation all the time. And and so I’ll go from a giving standpoint, what is your advice on what are the dimensions and all in a giving allocation?

Ron Blue: Well, no one there’s nobody including Bill Gates or Warren Buffett that has enough money to solve all the needs. So you can’t solve every need with money. And so I generally counsel people. Where’s your heart? You know, what’s your passion? One of the things that you think are important, you can give broadly, but have again, I’ll come back to this intentionality. What is it that you really want to give to that you’re committed to? And I think husbands and wives need to be talking about this together because they probably have different interest. And that’s OK, that’s the way we grow. So I think giving it’s not an allocation. Well, I do believe in tithing to the church, but that’s the beginning point. I don’t really consider that the giving. I mean, it is. Yes, but the real giving takes place after that. I’m giving out of obedience. I want to give out of obedience, but I also want to give out of desire. So what is it that motivates me and that can change over time? So I can for people, it’s not necessarily an allocation. The Bible talks about giving to widows, giving the orphans, giving to the poor for sure, and giving to the church. But there’s a lot of ministries and I want to attach my money to my heart when it comes to giving. So I have things that I like and things that Judy likes. You know, it is funny because every time we get a letter from John Erickson, I know it’s going to cost me money because Judy loves Johnny. She loves the minister. We’ve known John for 40 some years and that’s a passion. So any time Johnny goes, she gets money because it’s a passion. So I said, give her your passion is tell your heart to your money in terms of your giving. So, yeah, I’m sorry, Daryn, when you’re asking me questions, you’re asking me questions in my sweet spot.

Darryl Heald: Why does the government. So what is that? Let’s say your blessed peace is like how much percentage of your giving and what do you all look like it? What about global? What about, you know, nationally? How do you kind of break that down and think about some of the different buckets that you’re giving to?

Ron Blue: We made a decision early that we like to give to people, so we give a lot to missionaries. We made a decision along that line that people that are working in Third World countries have more difficulty in raising money than they do in America. So we have a tendency to get more internationally when we’re giving to missionaries and missions than we do in this country. We like to give it comes down to people. What’s the impact on people? So the sex trafficking, the poor, that’s where we like to put our money and that’s our passion. I heard today we have high school curriculum on personal finance and we charge the school twenty five dollars a student to give them the curriculum. The guy that heads up our high school ministry and our institute read a testimony today of a high school junior who how, having gone through the class, it had changed the direction of his life to wanting to be in ministry. And that’s where he was going. And he said, twenty five dollars bought a changed life. That type of thing means a lot when you’re giving and I think we’d like to give to where we see the results. Also, it’s hard to give some place that you’re not tied to, literally tied to. So we pray about it a lot. We don’t give to everything that comes to our door by any means. And I don’t feel guilty and not giving because God has given us the ability to give. He’s given us the places to give and I can’t give every place. And in some cases it may be if I give, somebody else doesn’t have to give. So I don’t feel guilty at all about turning down requests for money.

Darryl Heald: Thanks, Ron. Another thing to where I’m just curious with I’m sure a lot of the listeners probably have children, grandchildren and all how you, Judy, have written on this before, but could you give us some ideas on how we can help our kids or grandkids understand that it’s more blessed to give our safe?

Ron Blue: Well, there’s two things about training children that can really sum it up. And I had a father asked me one time, how do you train your kids to manage money? And I said two things. No one more is caught than taught. So they’re going to do what you do. That’s the biggest factor in how kids handle money and think about money, and I said, the second thing is you learn to manage money by managing money. And that’s the really hard thing today. And a credit card society of having your kids manage money. But there needs to be a way and there are ways that they can do that. And that same father said to me later, he said, I realized when you said that, that because I do online giving my kids had never seen me tithe. And we didn’t talk about it because we had made that decision. We did our online giving so they’d never seen me tithe. So just think about it. What am I doing to communicate the values of giving one? And number two, how can I train my children to manage money? And here’s the mistake that parents make. They don’t let their kids make mistakes, especially the wealthy. I see they can afford to bail them out. And I don’t mean out of jail, but they can afford to do a lot of things. So what would that look like?

Darryl Heald: What how would you set that? What would be a couple of suggestions that you would say, hey, you know, you should try these couple of things?

Ron Blue: Well, no one intends on the age. OK, so we started training our kids. By the time the youngest was eight, we kind of had the system figure it out. And so we gave them a budget to buy their clothes and we knew that they would have spending money needs, that they would have needs to make gifts to Christmas and so forth. And we wanted them to say, but we wanted them to tithe. So we gave them money and we did it on a monthly basis so that they had to manage the money. So when you give them one twelfth of their clothes, money. In February, they don’t have to buy their school clothes until August, so they had to learn to say, but they also had to learn that when the envelope was empty, they were done and we allowed them in some cases to trade from one envelope to another, with the exception of tith in savings. But there had to be their ability to make the financial decisions. So somehow you probably need to help him set a budget and then figure out the management side of it, especially with the credit cards today, because cash, you just don’t deal with cash much anymore.

Subscribe to the Podcast:

Cathie Wood is the founder and CIO/CEO of ARK Invest. She believes that ARK can identify large-scale investment opportunities in the public markets resulting from technological innovations centered around DNA sequencing, robotics, artificial intelligence, energy storage, and blockchain technology. Basically, she’s a rockstar and the queen of innovative investing. Today, she’s going to talk about how she developed ARK’s investment philosophy, what her role as Founder, CEO, and CIO entails today, and how her faith influences it all.

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.

Cathie Wood: Our job in terms of seeking the kingdom, I think, is in that 12 trillion because again, saving lives, making lives better, increasing incomes and really creating a virtuous cycle as opposed to and turning back the vicious cycle that we’ve seen. I’ll say benchmark style investing caused some of that. You know, the myopia and the misallocation mask, the most massive misallocation of capital in history. This is allocating capital to its highest and best use, which will create miracles. That’s bringing heaven to Earth.

Henry Kaestner: Cathy, thank you very much for joining us today.

Cathie Wood: Well, I’m happy to be here, Henry. Very happy to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Henry Kaestner: Before we get into the investing side of your story, can you share how your faith has guided you throughout your life?

Cathie Wood: You know, I think I was born with the gift of faith, and I do understand what a gift that is. And as I was evolving my faith over the years, first the childlike faith, but then getting into career and so forth. I really began to understand more about the Holy Spirit and the guidance and counsel. And my father would say counselor of the night that the Holy Spirit is and will probably get into this later. But at one moment in my life, I got a big push from the Holy Spirit to start arc. So really important to me

Henry Kaestner: today, you’re known for innovative investing. Has it always been your reputation? And what were some of the early ideas you’re picking up on that other people are mostly ignoring?

Cathie Wood: Yes, the focus on innovation really came from my startup Jennison Associates at Jennison. I was in economics, but I really wanted to get into equity research, and Segal is the chief investment officer there then and still now. So in the 80s and now, he said fine, but you’re going to have to find your own universe because our analysts are lifers and they’re probably not going to give you any of their stocks. And so it was serendipitous because at that time we had something called database publishing evolve, and the technology analyst didn’t want it because it had publishing in the name and the publishing analyst didn’t want it. So here I’m thinking Reuters and tolerate because it had technology in the name, and I said, I’ll take it. I love this idea. And of course, that was the precursor to the internet. Same with wireless. No one wanted Vodafone. First of all, it was a foreign stock at the time. And you know, these big bricks, they were never going to amount to anything. And of course, we know what happened in the wireless industry. And so I used to say that I picked up on stocks that fell through the cracks. But what really this was the earliest manifestation of was the convergence between and among technologies, which is moving into overdrive right now and creating amazing investment opportunities.

Henry Kaestner: What did you learn in your professional life up until the point you founded Arc and realized that you need to go out on your own? And where did the name come from?

Cathie Wood: OK. Yes. I started in the business at Capital Group on the West Coast Capital Group had a 10 to 20 to 50 year time horizon, which I just loved. So in 1977, they were looking at Hong Kong, 1997 the changeover. And I was saying, this is the business I want to be in. And it was fantastic for the first 20 years, up until the tech and telecom bust and then the tech and telecom bust and 08 09 the meltdown, the calamity. What happened during that period was our business became very risk averse and quantitative moved in and began to worship at the altar called benchmarks. I would consider this benchmark to be an idol, which basically took over the industry. Well, what is a benchmark? It’s backwards looking. The companies and stocks in benchmarks are there because of past success. And if we’re moving into a world where five technologically enabled platforms are going to converge and transform the world entirely, that kind of investing is anathema to productive investing. And yet I couldn’t get anyone really to embrace this idea in a big way and became more and more of an odd duck within my own firm to the point where they thought the strategy I managed was too volatile and they wanted to risk control it with benchmarks. So I knew the writing was on the wall that if I really wanted to do this, I had to go out and blazed the trail not only in investing but in research, changing research, transforming research so that analysts don’t follow industries or sectors. They follow technologies. They are specialists in technologies and they are generalists when it comes to industries and we give away our research. Why? Because we want to engage with and become a part of the communities we’re researching. So it was really a shaking up of our industry. You know, this idea of why don’t you just transform your own industry with the technologies that have transformed other industries? And the name arc came from. Ark of the Covenant. I did a lot of soul searching, literally starting in 2006, probably 2000 for personal reasons, but for professional reasons in 2006. And part of the soul searching was just going to the Bible and saying, OK, God, tell me what you want me to do. And how many times did I open the Bible up to the Ark of the Covenant, which for as many times as I open to the page and it wasn’t the same page each time. It’s probably miraculous, and I said, I have to name my firm Ark for Ark of the Covenant and think about it, Ark of the Covenant. So the Israelites took the Ark into battle ahead of them. The presence of God was going to protect them during their battles, and that’s what I was going to do a fully active, transparent equity ETF. When the ETF world, which was taking share from the mutual fund world, was all passive, and so shaking things up a little bit in that realm as well to the point where most people thought it would not work. You know, I thought I didn’t know what I was doing. And even those and Eric Bell, Tunis basically said as much. But in seeing our success, he had to do a double take and has been very fair in terms of our progression through the ETF world.

Henry Kaestner: I may come back at the end and ask you a little bit more about the indexing and benchmarking you and I had talked about that maybe six months or 12 months ago, and I’m fascinated by that. I don’t think that people understand how that needs to be redeemed and restored, and you have an angle on it. Maybe at the end we can come back in that chair for the first three years. You’re funding out on your own. What did that season of life look like and how is your faith tested and what motivated you to keep going?

Cathie Wood: Well, it was really almost four years because I invested in ARK during my gardening leave as well. And I really thought if I built it, they would come because I had a very wide network, lots of clients. But what I didn’t understand was that the ETF world and the traditional world that I had come from did not communicate, didn’t understand one another. So I had fallen into the trap that many entrepreneurs fall into, not understanding the market completely. And so we sat for three years, so 2014 15 through the middle of 16 and really the end of 16, which is when we struck a distribution deal. But during those years, we were basically stuck at $40 million, 30, 40 million dollars and losing a lot of money. Now did I think we were going to fail? I never thought we were going to fail. I know many others did because our needle was not moving at all. And so there’s something called the death watch for ETFs, and I think we were on that death watch list, but I never thought we were going to fail. I knew we needed a distribution partner, but I will tell you during many days when things weren’t going so well, you know, when we thought there would be good news and it didn’t come or we were rejected entirely, I would just go into the bathroom and just kneel down and pray and say, OK, not in my hands. You are in control. And I know we’re going to make it. I know we’re going to make it. And so my faith actually was strengthened during that time. And I’m so grateful for that period because of how much it did strengthened my faith.

Henry Kaestner: What was the investment philosophy you originally founded the company on and how does that play out today?

Cathie Wood: Yes. The original philosophy, which is still our today, was if you go back to the 80s and 90s, you will see a period where new technologies were surfacing. The seeds were being planted for what we are enjoying today. Now what happened in the interim is this fear of innovation became apparent during the tech and telecom bust, and there’s still a fear of innovation. So much so that, as I mentioned before, many investors started to become very benchmark sensitive, even if they were so-called active investors. They started leaning close to their benchmarks. And, you know, when I say worshiping them and I do call it an idol, they would feel good or bad about themselves at the end of each day because of how their portfolios performed relative to the benchmark. And it became obsessive compulsive. And of course, if your style is benchmark sensitive, then by definition you are looking backwards. You’re not looking at the new names that are evolving, the new companies that are evolving, the new creation that is evolving, and that’s what we dedicated ourselves to doing. We are not looking at any benchmark. We are focused on the future, on the new creation on these five platforms involving 14 different technologies that are all growing exponentially. And in fact, they’re all in what you would recognize as various places on SW curves and news as curves because of the convergence, as I mentioned earlier. They are intersecting, so one curve is feeding, another is feeding another. And I do not believe that most investors understand today how explosive the opportunities are going to be and how destructive they are going to be to the traditional world order or the benchmarks.

Henry Kaestner: OK, so, so many places to go there, but I stick to the script again. And you mentioned the five platform, so talk to us about the five platforms of innovation that you and your team have identified. What are they and why should Faith Driven Investor just pay attention to them?

Cathie Wood: Well, I’ll start with the why faith based investors should pay attention to them. This is the new creation we have been put here on Earth to procreate and create right not to mimic what might have happened historically. In fact, to change, transform and make the world a better place, these five platforms are going to do that. DNA sequencing is going to transform health care, bringing science into decision making. For the first time, because now we can identify among the six billion letters in our genome. I call them pieces of code where there are mutations or programing errors. And for the first time, it was impossible before. And we’re going to be carrying disease. We’re already seeing that happen. And then robotics, many people worry about robots as taking away jobs. Yes, there will be displacement. The history of technology, however, is technology takes over the mundane tasks and adds to the productivity gains of countries around the world and therefore adds to wage gains because the jobs that are being created are much higher value add. So that’s robotics, especially adaptive robotics, collaborative robotics, then energy storage. Here is where those who are really concerned about the environment are going to see some wonderful developments. We already are so electric vehicles, battery technology is ready. We’re going to transform the world from the internal combustion engine to battery technology. And it’s going to scale magnificently because of how quickly the costs are falling. And that’s the key. With each of these platforms, costs are falling fast enough that we’re beginning to see the uptake at an accelerated rate. Artificial intelligence, artificial intelligence. Again, it’s like I described DNA sequencing. We are going to be able to get at information to make better decisions more quickly. Artificial intelligence training costs are dropping at a 68 percent rate per year. Think about that when the cost of something drops out rapidly, more and more researchers and businesspeople harness it to make their businesses better and their lives better, more productive. So AI is going to infiltrate every industry, every company, and we’re in a bit of a land grab for the pole positions. And then finally, blockchain technology bitcoin represents the first global monetary system, a rules based monetary system that my mentor, Art Laffer, thinks is wonderful. He’s been looking for this all his life as a necklace. And so that’s part of it. Then there’s DeFi, which is built on top of a Therian. DeFi decentralized finance is going to take away a lot of the middlemen roles in financial services and take away the friction, increasing yields, lowering lending rates. We’re already seeing that. So those are the five and there are 14 different technologies involved in them. But I want to get back to this idea of convergence again. Three of the five major platforms are converging and creating autonomous taxi networks. So that would be robotics. Autonomous vehicles are robots, energy storage. They will be electric. It’s going to be the much less expensive route to go and artificial intelligence. They’re going to be powered by a AI and they’re going to save lives there. Thirty five to forty thousand lives lost in automobile crashes every year in the United States. That is going to collapse. There are nearly one and a half million lives lost to fatalities in auto accidents globally. So again, changing the world, making it a better place.

Henry Kaestner: What are the areas where you’d like to see Faith Driven Investor get more involved? How would you like to see in the answer to that may very well be and being involved in what God is doing in redeeming restrain all things. How would you like to see our audience step up and use their influence for good?

Cathie Wood: Well, I think if they’re in the financial world, perhaps leading the charge at their own companies into directing and allocating resources towards the new creation, again making the world a better place solve. Problems in aviation took off during the coronavirus crisis because innovation solves problems, in fact, we have an impact fund in Japan, hopefully coming to the US at some point, which it takes the 17 Sustainable Development Goals of the U.N.. They were developed around well about six years ago, and we’ve mapped our 14 technologies against those sustainable development goals. The first one is eliminating poverty just to give you a sense, and that matrix is beautiful and is filling in day by day with new technologies that are going to solve problems. The second way, I think, is to encourage education leaders to bring innovation into the classroom. I founded the Innovation Foundation. It’s primarily for education right now. We just got our IRIS designation and we are developing a pre-K through 12 curriculum of education through the lens of innovation, starting with Montessori method in the early years. And just to give you an example of that battery technology and high school, the students will be learning about the chemistry of batteries, physics, the design, the applications and so forth. And how are we going to start this knowledge base in those kindergartners? What are we going to talk about? How could we get them to understand this concept of energy storage? Well, what do they understand? They understand sunshine. So in their earliest days, they’re going to be learning indirectly about energy storage, but beautifully. And I do believe that educating individuals about innovation to inspire them is going to level the playing field and the opportunities we just did. Two pilots at Jericho Partnership in Danbury economically disadvantaged areas, one on drones for high school, one on 3D printing for fourth and fifth graders. And at the end of that six part seminar, we were able to say to each group, OK, now you know more about drones and 3D printing than 99 percent of the people in the United States. Does this inspire you? If so, follow our analysts on Twitter. Read everything you can about this. Educate yourself and you’ll be far ahead of the game.

Henry Kaestner: OK, that is super cool. So I want to ask that one other question that unites all of our different interviews that we do, which is, is there something that you’re hearing from Guy through his word right now? And maybe it’s this morning. Maybe it’s last week. Maybe it’s over the course of last month or so where you just like he’s he’s speaking to me.

Cathie Wood: Well, I guess I can come at that from many directions because I feel, thank God that he is speaking to me all the time and that I must pick up on these cues and run with them. And I think a big one for me has been, you know, having gone through this journey for seven years. And then all of a sudden, the Bible, as I’m opening it, I’m seeing more about giving back, you know, sharing and evangelizing in some way. So I think that means two things to me. I’ve been criticized by many in the financial community for bringing my faith into this discussion. And yet I feel that’s one of the things that God is asking me to do. And especially this idea of new creation. Now, do I at Ark Invest, you know, go in and talk in the way I’m speaking to you now? No, I am deeply involved in our research and investing, which is all about the new creation and others in the firm. They may have the same faith I do, or maybe not, but we know we’re doing something meaningful together. We know it and it speaks for itself. And then the second is, OK, take that research and move it into our educational system. So that’s what I’m doing.

Henry Kaestner: So tell me just a little bit. If you have time and Lisa can interrupt at any point. But I’m fascinated by this concept, of course, of the new creation and reading the books they’re talking about. You know, as we pray God’s kingdom come about on Earth as it is in heaven. And he writes, speaks about this. Spend a little bit more time talking about how you see that playing out on Earth as it is in heaven and what are the things that Christ’s followers really need to be paying attention to? I suppose that a lot of that are the five platforms, but it’s maybe speaking to the fact that this is how you see God at work and the sooner we tap into it, we’ll be able to unleash that power.

Cathie Wood: Well, I think we’re talking about miracles here now when we think about the power of God and causing miracles on Earth. I do believe we’re going to be curing disease. We’re going to be saving lives not just because of the genomic revolution, but because of autonomous taxi networks and autonomous technologies, generally drones, trucks, ships and so forth. And we will be increasing productivity so that by our calculations, because of this innovation explosion, GDP in the United States alone in 2035 will be 12 trillion dollars higher. So instead of 28 trillion, $4 trillion, our job in terms of seeking the kingdom, I think, is in that 12 trillion because again, saving lives, making lives better, increasing incomes and really creating a virtuous cycle as opposed to and turning back the vicious cycle that we’ve seen. I’ll say benchmark style investing caused some of that. You know, the myopia and the misallocation mask the most massive in allocation of capital in history. This is allocating capital to its highest and best use, which will create miracles that’s bringing heaven to Earth.