David Batstone: Like I thought, look, I was at the end of a river pulling bodies out as they were drowning and flailing, and that’s compassion and something is very important. Part of my spiritual journey is to practice compassion, but at the same time is wisdom, and that is to look upstream and say, well, how are these bodies falling in? Like, what are the systems and what are the people, the demand behind it? How do we solve the problem there?

Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast. We’ve got a special guest today, David Batstone is in the House talking about the ministry that he started with regards to human trafficking. And, David, it’s great to have you on the program. Thank you very much for being here.

David Batstone: It’s a real pleasure to talk to some brothers about my heart.

Henry Kaestner: So there’s so much to talk about with what is on your heart. And I want to get into that, provide our listeners a context about the industry and the problem that you’re looking to solve and how you as an entrepreneur have gone about solving that problem. But before we do that, love to start our show every time by asking our guests who they are, where they come from, what their faith journey has been, and really bring us up to that moment in your life when all of a sudden this became a big, big deal for us. So what is it like growing up brings up to speed?

David Batstone: Well, you know, I grew up in the Midwest and I grew up in a evangelical background, the Plymouth brother. And maybe some people who are listening are familiar with the Plymouth Brethren. But it’s a small community that very much values the scripture and looked for ways to implement it in the life of the church and in the community around. And I went I went to Westmont College, which is a Christian evangelical school. And in Santa Barbara. Really? Really. Yeah. And I went on to get an objective and studied theology and have a Ph.D. in theology. And so, you know, today I’m a venture capitalist and teach business at the University of San Francisco. I don’t know if I’m probably the only business professor in entrepreneurship that has a Ph.D. in theology.

Henry Kaestner: Then you may be the only one. The only one I know Rusty.

Rusty Rueff: I don’t know any others either. So whether or not that you’re the only one, we’re going to give it to you today. You got that badge, you know.

David Batstone: Yeah, a dash. My dreams. I had one thing I stand up for.

Henry Kaestner: OK, so tell us I want you to take us back to the restaurant that you used to frequent that you later found out was a center of human trafficking. So this is a restaurant, the United States, correct?

David Batstone: Yeah, it’s in the San Francisco Bay Area. And I was a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley at the time, and I was also a professor teaching University of San Francisco. So it wasn’t like I was looking for another gig, Henry. I mean, you know, my life was full and it was just a shock to learn that my favorite restaurant I would go to regularly. You know, I love the Italys and Poppadoms and Teriyaki Chicken. Yeah, but I learned that this restaurant had trafficked young girls from the ages of 14 to 19, over 500 young girls. Oh, my goodness. Into the San Francisco Bay Area for the purpose of forced labor. First in this restaurant, they were being forced to work against their will and then they’d be taken out the brothels and fruit and vegetable fields in California. I didn’t discover it and that was part of my journey. The trafficker kept these young girls and fifteen to twenty in an apartment and there was a natural gas leak that killed one girl and injured others. And when the police showed up, they said, we need to get you away from the gas and we’re more worried about him and pointed to the trafficker. And so front page of my newspaper, I read it and I’ve been going to this place for years. And I was like, how could I not see this? How could have been blind to it? And it’s really funny how, you know, when we often say we pray that God would give us some wisdom or teach us a path or open a door. And I could have changed my philosophy on this because I think God is always putting things in front of us. It’s how we respond to those things. That’s how it builds our character, the way we respond to things that God puts in front of us. It’s not like we need to somehow go out and find it. It’s there. And I can’t tell you why. That was a defining moment of my life. I had to do something about it because I’m sure many other people went to that restaurant. I said, well, that’s a very bizarre experience. But for me, it was a calling. I had to respond to it.

Henry Kaestner: That’s incredible, the size and scope, and it’s just right there, I think that when we think about human trafficking, we think that, yes, we’ve heard about girls coming from Nepal or India, but we generally think that they I don’t know, they go to Amsterdam or they go to some other places. It’s far from us. But that many girls, it’s not two or three or 500 through a restaurant in San Francisco. Reasonably civilized city. That’s incredible.

David Batstone: I’m shocking. So I should call in other people that, you know, if you heard of this and some friends in L.A. said, well, yeah, we just had a sewing factory in East Los Angeles where 112 girls from Thailand were imprisoned and forced to sew clothes every day. And they would then be locked into rooms in the same facility where they were sewing clothes. And then I called friends in the Texas area, Houston and Dallas, and they would tell me of these bars or cantinas where young girls would be lined up with a numbers printed on their chest and a man would come to get a beer and then point to number 30 for who he wanted to buy for a night or weaker. And it was just, you know, just so shocking to me that this was a part of, you know, my country and my reality that I felt like, OK, I need to really understand this. So I took a leave of absence from my university and my venture capital bank. And I went around the world for a year, follow the money. I went from San Francisco to Bangalore and went from Los Angeles to Thailand. I went from Houston and Dallas to Peru and Guatemala. So, you know, basically follow the money to understand this trade in people.

Henry Kaestner: So I was going to ask you, so you’re an entrepreneur, you’ve been a venture capital. You understand it. Entrepreneurs solve problems. You see that there’s clearly a problem. But instead of doing something right away, you say, I want to fully understand the problem, let’s follow the money. So what an incredible adventure that must have been. Oh, you know, I wish that there’s a documentary filmmaker along with you as you kind of leave San Francisco in this restaurant and then you go to Bangalore and you’re in the back alleyways. So you spent a year trying to understand the problem, following the money. And at some point in time, you’re like, I got it. There’s a big problem. I think I have a sense about how I might address it. What was that?

David Batstone: It’s funny how we have an accepted paradigm of how you approach a concern, whether it’s social, environmental. And I’m sure everyone listening today has something that they really care about, whether it’s malaria or global warming or extreme poverty. So it’s very funny, though, that many of us, when we attempt to address these problems, we open our heart and we shut down our brain. At least that’s what I did, because here I was a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. And when I confronted with this problem of trafficking, you know, over 40 million individuals living in some form of forced bondage or slavery, what I did is I started a bad business model called a nonprofit, a charity. And now I do want to clarify, I don’t think charities are all bad or wrong or they’re foolish, but they are not sustainable and they’re not scalable. And if you really want to address a problem of the magnitude we’re talking about, you need to develop a business model that has the scalability to it to actually solve the problem. So what I did is I set up a nonprofit and we would go to churches and rotary clubs and schools and, you know, we get donations and then we build a shelter. And I mean, we were good at it. It was fine. It was great. But it was small and it was very difficult to build something that would actually, I believe, solve the problem.

Rusty Rueff: But you did find a way to release the talents that God had given you. And one of the things I find fascinating about your story, and I think it should be enlightening to all entrepreneurs. And I remember, you know, we were much younger than when you wrote Not for Sale, when you and I first met years and years ago in San Francisco. But I was impressed then and I’m still impressed now that you not only had the heart for it, but as you started to allude and get into. You also had some skills, some talents that you’d been given that all you needed to do was sort of look inside of yourself and say, wait a minute, I can do something with this. And you had these journalism skills. That you uncovered, so take us through that and then take us into, you know, what you ended up doing with those writing skills.

David Batstone: I appreciate that, Rusty, because it is I think many people listening. They say, well, how could I do? I like to do something more meaningful. I’d love to be involved and say works that that would bring about a benefit for the world. And oftentimes they don’t think about, well, what do I know best and who do I know best and what would be the process I would follow. And I guess I started to look at the fact that in Silicon Valley, if I wanted to build an enterprise, what I do is I’d find the best capital, the best talent and cutting edge technology. And I would build a company based on that that would be profitable and would reach internationally. And in the case I said, well, what if I took those same skills, that same kind of formula, and I applied it to human trafficking? And the first thing to do is bring together the best talent, so I got 50 people who, you know, the smartest people I knew, the most successful, you know, the founder of Twitter was one of them. I got the founder of the largest health care online company. I got a you got a baseball player for the San Francisco Giants, like people who are successful. And I said, look, help me come up with a business model or a business plan for a very specific situation. And this situation is in the Amazon of Peru, my nonprofit not for sale. We build a shelter for young kids coming from native or indigenous communities in the Amazon. They’re being trafficked into Lima. Help us come up with a business model. So we had a 24 hour period where we brainstormed and had a competition. The winning idea was to start a company that would source the wonderful assets or ingredients that come out of the Amazon. These super herbs like Mocha Mocha suddenly pay a fair wage, create an economic platform that would provide long term security for the native communities, put into a beverage, sell it in mainstream grocery stores and return profits back to those communities. It’s a wonderful, beautiful idea. Unless you’re the guy on Monday morning that now has to start this company, that’s a beverage. Right. And I knew nothing about beverage. And so, again, I thought, OK, what would I do if I was in Silicon Valley now? What would I do if I was just another charity? Well, I go and find the best beverage maker in the world who could use these herbs and put them into the beverage and make a wonderful product. And that’s what I did. I just found the best beverage maker in the world, hired them, paid them what Coca-Cola would have paid him. I didn’t pay them a nonprofit salary in equity in the company. And, you know, fast forward six years. We are now the number one health beverage in America. Rebel groups extract Barberi leaves rebel, and we have now returned over a million dollars back to those communities through our profit sharing. We’re sourcing ingredients in three countries now and we choose the ingredient based on the most impact, not the cheapest ingredient. But where will we have the most impact on poor communities? So over 30000 families, one hundred twenty thousand people, more or less, are being empowered in poor, rural, exploited communities. So to me, this was like a revelation. It’s taking the same principles and mission that I had a nonprofit, but embedding the DNA into a enterprise, a for profit enterprise.

Rusty Rueff: Well, I got to give you a plug, because unless I’m wrong, Serena Williams is on your side, right, with Rebel, right. I see her on television all the time.

David Batstone: We got we’re fortunate. We have so many. Rubirosa is a great actress. She’s a bit one of our big ambassadors, Michael Franti, who’s a musician. So we get a lot of actually actors, musicians, artists who come to us and say, is there any way I could be an ambassador for your brand? And that’s the great thing about, you know, doing well by doing good. People want to be a part of it.

Rusty Rueff: Yeah, that’s awesome. So it reminds me of and we all know the story of Esther did write in the book of Esther. And Mordechai says to her, you know, is it that you’ve been called for such a time just as this? Do you feel like God specifically prepared and equipped you to make the headway into this sort of massive, let’s call it a massive force of evil in this world? Did you have that Esther moment?

David Batstone: Oh, very much so. You know, coming out of that experience of understanding that in my own backyard was this trafficking of hundreds of young girls from Bangalore. I just could not walk away. It was a calling. And to have walked away would have meant for me a betrayal of a character that I was being called to fill. And, you know, I suppose even today, now, 15 years later, people ask me, well, gosh, know, aren’t you just being overwhelmed by this evil or by the enormity of the problem? And I say, you know, for whatever reason, I’m more inspired by what we do achieve and the people we can rescue and save and the empowerment that does happen, that inspires me more than the enormity of what we haven’t done. And I think once you’re on that calling, then your inspiration comes through your daily walk and not through some kind of expectation of how much of it you’re going to solve.

Rusty Rueff: So I’m going to encourage everybody to jump on Amazon and go back and get that book not for sale, because it tells your story and it tells the story of the beginnings of what you tried to conquer. If you were writing an epilog or a new chapter for not for sale, what would it say right now?

David Batstone: I would say I’d say it’s the art of being a rebel and of course, is the name of the first company we started. We now have 10 companies, by the way. And I could talk about some of those if you’d like. But the art of being a rebel, meaning that we’re so much through social media or through advertising or just through our environment that we live in, that we’re so, you know, told to what makes us valuable, what we should consume or what career we should pursue. And to be a rebel, anything in the best sense is to hear a different voice, to follow a different path. And that requires us to have a strong spiritual grounding that we realize that where the world is going and what is named as what is valuable, what will make me a success may not be what’s true for my character. And so I think the art of being a rebel is about choosing a path that you’re going to follow, regardless of what the rest of the world tells you.

Henry Kaestner: So I’m fascinated by, you know, we’ve been around the space long enough to know that there’s this thing of impact investing, and so there are social entrepreneurs that come out of programs like Praxis and others that really have a desire to really make an impact on communities in many cases, work with them on the business side, which I love, which is there’s injustices in this world. Yes, there’s an opportunity for philanthropy. But in terms of providing dignity rather than dependency, there’s a place for the markets in all of this. You teach about social entrepreneurship in innovative entrepreneurship in San Francisco. I’m wondering what you do as you take a 19, 20 year old student that is starting to understand the enormity of the injustice in this world. They’ve got a heart for these things. What is it that you do as you train them, as you give them this kind of alternate imagination and you equip them? What do you tell them? How do you get them trained up?

David Batstone: Hmm. What I find my students is they are looking for a bridge to tie together with their heart. And talent is what they’re really passionate about and their expectation of creating a life that is, you know, financially responsible and maybe having a family. And and they feel like they have to choose between the two. And probably the most helpful thing that I do in my classroom is to help them understand that their skills are needed all over the world. And there’s incredible opportunities for them to deploy investment or accounting or, you know, their entrepreneurial passion in environments that are basically untouched. And so there’s so much opportunity in the world today, the way that we’re rewriting our energy systems and the way that we’re going to be moving into new economies of transport. And this is every area health care is going to transform that. I would say to my students that even though you’re getting the message that, wow, it’s almost like you’re nineteen eighty four, you wish you joined the Beatles, it’s over. There’s nothing new and there’s nothing in the truth of the matter is, is that you’re living in the most exciting moments in history and you can use your skills to build livlihood not only for yourself but for those who typically are being left out of the world economic picture today. So I really do encourage them to think bigger than simply can I get a job at Goldman Sachs or Apple?

Henry Kaestner: So I think that you’re probably finding this new generation is really, really open to that in a way, not the to options weren’t. Do you ever see there’s a book that we all know called When Helping Hurts by guy named Brian Fisher, talking about some great intentions? And what are things like that might go wrong? What are the unintended consequences? Are there examples when impact investing or social entrepreneurship might also go wrong, where somebody comes at it with the right intentions, wants to really address an injustice, but there’s something that they don’t see that ends up maybe even doing more harm than good. And I shouldn’t focus on the negative side because there’s so much positive that can happen. And yet there are probably some examples where it’s done poorly as well.

David Batstone: Absolutely. The best way to talk about poor examples is start with my own life. You know, when I first started working in social entrepreneurship, I was in Latin America and I tried to create economic opportunities for poor communities and teach them agricultural skills or teach in the show or whatever skills training. And you often find this in the nonprofit or ministry world that we train people to do a job. But some of that we never think about is, well, if there’s no ecosystem, if there’s not a environment where then there’s investment opportunity or there is a supply chain or a demand for the products or services, then really you’re equipping someone for a very disappointing and frustrating life. And I find this is not only within a training program, but say, in well hearted people who want to teach people in Africa how to grow mangoes better. OK, but how do you think about the system that allows for that success, whatever investment that might be for that community? And so I suppose from the start, you need to think about both the demand and the supply and the ability to use your investment in a way that those communities can actually begin to build out an economy and a platform that will sustain itself over a long period of time. Unfortunately, I find that many social impact enterprise groups. What they do is that they have a very, you know, three to five year investment and then it dries up and it goes away.

Rusty Rueff: So, David, I want to go a little deeper into sort of the faith journey that you took. Right. That at the time when you said, I’m walking away from all of this and I’m going to travel around the world and I’m going to go solve or I’m going to try to solve or try to understand sex trafficking, that’s as much of a faith journey is sitting there going, I’m going to solve world hunger. I mean, because it’s a big thing, like you were trying to put your arms around so we can. Call that a faith journey, but let’s also call it a faith journey, you know, with your faith. Take us through that journey that God put you on and share some of the stories, maybe ups and downs of your own personal faith journey as you embarked on this.

David Batstone: You know, it’s really interesting, Rusty, that we like to make heroes out of people when we see the whole narrative. So while it’s very heroic, but everyone’s journey, whether it’s a hero’s journey or not, starts with just one step. And that’s the hardest step, is to say I’m going to leave my security and my comfort to do something. And it it’s scary to take that one step. And I honestly was not thinking of anything beyond, you know, I need to understand how this was happening in my backyard. My one step is I’m going to go to India and Thailand, follow the trail of trafficking from California to Asia and just understand it. It was curiosity. And also, if I made it visible, I was going to go back to my venture capital firm at my university. But what happened is that you made that one step. Then I met this woman who in northern Thailand, she had rescued twenty seven kids who were in karaoke bars being forced to sell their bodies to male clients. And she was living out in an empty field without any resources. And so I went, oh, man, OK, I have a second step. I’ll take. I promised I would build her a home. That was OK. Now I’m going to, you know, write this book about my understanding of what we’ve learned and to build a home. Then I’ll go back to my life. And that just keeps cascading. So, you know, the fact that not for sale does what it does today, if you think, oh, my gosh, it’s wonderful, what you do is that, you know, that I’ve just been stumbling my way toward it now. You know, there’s been a lot of ups and downs and things that I wish we had done differently. And, you know, one saying I learned and gone I really would love is that we don’t mind stumbling because it makes us move forward more quickly. And I think that’s probably than my journey is. Like I’d like to say that there was clarity, but probably reluctantly. I took each step and then you look back and say, well, God really blessed that narrative. God bless that journey

Henry Kaestner: or take us forward in a second to some of the other ventures that you’re involved with and energy and a number of different projects. I want to go backwards, though, first, which is to go into this kind of atwar about understanding the larger ecosystem. And I’m compelled not only about the stories of where these girls come from, but also through to the demand side. And part of me is just thinking, oh, my goodness, if you can have prostitution where people have numbers on their chest and dozens and dozens of girls being sold in the field, what role does the demand side have in the equation on trafficking?

David Batstone: Well, it really is. The preponderance of the problem is that there is a demand for either the use of someone’s labor or their body for someone else’s pleasure or someone else’s greed. So, you know, after five years of my first five years of not for sale, Henry, what I felt like I thought like I was at the end of a river pulling bodies out as they were drowning and flailing. And that’s compassion. And something is very important. Part of my spiritual journey is to practice compassion, but at the same time is wisdom, and that is to look upstream and say, well, how are these bodies falling in? Like, what are the systems and what are the people, the demand behind it? How do we solve the problem there? And I suppose I don’t see there’s enough of that being done within the anti trafficking movement to actually solve the problem of the area of demand and not only the supply problem, that is people who are the consequences of these actions. So I think it’s really important to understand that demand side. And, you know, it’s everything from factories to agricultural fields to brothels to fishing industry, fishing boats. I mean, it’s embedded in so many systems that one thing that I felt as a business entrepreneur, I’m probably the best thing I could do is rather run after every one and kind of try and stop. All of the negativity was to start creating models of desire in the world that I wanted to live in. I’m sure other people want to live in as well. Start designing companies where there’s dignity and goodness at the core of the company in the DNA of the company, thereby inspire other young entrepreneurs to be able to want to live that life and pursue those dreams.

Henry Kaestner: So I want to get into that. But one last thing, the deterrent part, because I’m just thinking right through the demand side. I mean, the demand for lust and all that stuff, I mean, is biblical. We all know it. We all know that it’s inside of us. I’m wondering, you know, some number of people have there’s a debate about whether the death penalty is a deterrent or not. I wonder how, though deterrence enters into the demand side of the equation with sex trafficking, is somebody listening to this? Can you lobby your legislator to be able to have stricter rules? Does that even work? Do you find that rules are just lax enough and that just authorities kind of look the other way even in America, does deterrence and punishment work or is that just a myth?

David Batstone: Deterrence is effective and I think there’s different levels of deterrence. One is simply prosecution and rule of law that actually takes seriously the practice of same sex trafficking. I remember when we first started not for sale. I mean, it was hard to get, you know, local police officials and FBI to believe the extent of the problem in our American cities. And, you know, I’m not trained as a law enforcement officer, but I my team and I, we would have to go undercover with a camera and go into these brothels and massage parlors and the like and then take that footage to law enforcement. And it’s changed now. It is a much more of an awareness and a much more of a compliance with that in the United States at least. But so that’s one of the other is I think probably the biggest deterrence is the public shaming that comes from being exposed. It’s really interesting. I’m in Sweden right now. This interview in Sweden, what they’ve done is they put in newspapers or on billboards and shaming the johns and the demand side. And, you know, all too often it’s the victims is the young women who are kind of shamed or put into the spotlight. And, you know, it’s remarkable the level to which that puts another fear of the social community even more than in many cases, just the being arrested.

Henry Kaestner: Yeah. OK, so I want to move forward towards your equipping some of these entrepreneurs to solve more problems, to create these businesses where business is done the right way. You’ve got just business and not for sale was maybe your first foray into that, but you’ve not stopped there. You’re in Sweden right now on an energy deal. Walk us through some of the different projects you’re working on.

David Batstone: Certainly, you know, part of this was it’s an ongoing evolution of understanding how could we scale the solution? And that’s really the objective here is not for me to be able to come on your show. And I could tell you three stories of young women or boys. And that’s a fantastic again, I don’t want to undersell that, but is being able to say, look, now we can impact millions because it’s the size of this, the scope of that. So, you know, I had a great entrepreneur come to me and I’m always looking for entrepreneurs. And he said, look, I have this idea of being able to assist big companies with mobility. And so if you look at the big tech companies or the big pharmaceutical companies or retail companies, they’re hiring people from all over the world. They want talent and they’ll move them around the world. So they’re in mobility. And so I thought about this, you know, look at all make an investment in your company and I’ll get behind you to be able to get the Apple, Facebook, Googles, Nike’s, and those are all our customers today for this company. But you have to take one percent of all the revenue. We generate one percent of the gross revenue and dedicate it to those people who are in mobility, refugees, human trafficking victim. But they don’t have those services. They don’t have someone to help them say when you come to a new city, find a place for your children to go to school or find a dentist. And so basically, we created a concierge service that now is global. This company, we’re the only investors in it, and it’s called velocity. And now we do have Apple, Facebook, Google, Nike, Twitter, all the companies, Nike, Walmart, Starbucks, they all pay us to take care of their employees. And what we’re doing is we’re taking some of that revenue directly to those communities that also are in deep need of mobility. Security.

Rusty Rueff: That’s very cool. That’s actually inspiring, David, that you’ve extended what you’ve done into, you know, organizations that we all know that needed to be shook at their core to say this is something important. And, you know, to that point, you know, on this podcast, you have the ears now of thousands of entrepreneurs, Faith driven entrepreneurs. What would you like to tell them about how they can, even in the earliest stages, you know, use their businesses to do more than just create a bottom line profit? And how would you like to see Faith driven entrepreneurs, you know, solving these types of problems?

David Batstone: I’ve been involved in a lot of faith driven entrepreneurial events. You know, there’s great things like businesses, Mission BAM and The Lion’s Den. And, you know, I could go on and on with faith driven organizations. And I guess my message continually to them is you’re not thinking big enough. You know, it’s almost as if it’s a ministry that we’re stamping a Bible verse on top of or some kind of a mission. But, you know, it’s not about transforming the business. And what I want to see is that we transform business, that we actually redeem the business model to bring about goodness for the community. And that requires thinking, you know, with grabble, my goal is to compete with Coca-Cola. Right. With velocity. I want to be the number one mobility company in the world. Doesn’t sacrifice my mission. My mission is at the heart of all that I do. But I have to think bigger. And I think entrepreneurs are making. Or God too small, they’re making their mission too insignificant and they’re not saying that, you know, this is a warrior’s test, is a lions task, and it’s to start to build the best companies in the world, but with faith and values of the center of the company.

Rusty Rueff: Yeah, we had Tony Evans on the podcast recently, the pastor of Cliff Fellowship Bible Church in Dallas, and he had a great sort of calling out to Faith driven entrepreneurs, to King Demised. Their business kingdom is your business, you know. And as I listened to that and I listened to you, sort of what I read into all of this is, look, the core of what we do, we might be out there running a agricultural business or cleaning business or a technology business. But if we’re faith driven entrepreneurs, you know, we are to give back, take our talents and our skills and kingdom is our business, but also to find these areas where we have the skills, talents and maybe resources, maybe financial resources that we need to put to help those that can’t be helped. And I’m going to turn this over to Henry to close this out. But I want to continue to encourage you, David, and thank you for the work that you’ve done in such an important area that’s happening all around us that, you know, we don’t see. You had to look into the shadows and you had to go into the shadows to find it. And I appreciate the courage and the journey that you took to get there.

David Batstone: Well, thank you. I appreciate it, Rusty. You know, now my being in Sweden today, I think the other thing that spiritual vision gives you is the audacity to think that you can start to kingdom eyes the world we live in. And, you know, right now I’m really compelled not only to the work of my own people and dignity of people, but also the planet. And how do we rethink and redesign the world so that the planet is something that has the same dignity. But God made it with, you know, working with all the big car companies, Tesla, GM, Ford, for the next generation of car. We’re recycling all the batteries. We’re extracting the minerals that they need for the batteries. But it’s done all with a new kind of technology that is going to just really remarkably change the way that transport is done so that companies, American Battery Technology Company, we also have a hydrogen company. So rethink the world, redesign it, put values at the very center of it

Henry Kaestner: by saying, that’s awesome. So much more to go to. I think that we could do an episode on each one of those ideas about how you’re looking to solve for them, how you’re tracing the money and the problem, just like you did with child trafficking and understanding how the supply chain works and things like energy and how it needs to be redeemed and what does it look like right down to the end user. So we’re going to come back to that. For now. We want to ask you, as we do all of our guests, what you’re hearing from God through his word and doesn’t need to be this morning. But it very well could be. But maybe the last week or last couple of weeks now, as one of the things that unites all of our guests together is God is at work. One of our guests has said Auslan is on the move and he’s very much at work. And what’s your sense with all that?

David Batstone: I’ve been drawing recently to the Proverbs, I’ve been reading a lot of the proverbs. And one of the problems over the last week I’ve been thinking a lot about is Proverbs 17. Twenty two about a cheerful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones. And I just think about what do I surround myself with, what is a cheerful heart? You know, the people around me and I guess in a very glib way of saying is that toxic people really do dry your bones, cheerful people, people who have a good heart, people who are positive, they inspire you. And, you know, I just don’t think a lot about time is precious, relationships are precious. And to surround yourself with people who are hopeful and encourage you, they want to see you succeed. And, you know, if people are a negative force in your life, get rid of them, walk away because they never get better. I know it sounds harsh, but really it’s about building communities of hope and inspiration and faith.

Henry Kaestner: David, thank you very much for being with us. Great joy. Thank you for being one of those people that is a positive force in the midst of all this going on with covid being able to look at some of the challenges that can be solved and getting out there and doing it creatively and then also inspire the next generation through your work in school. That’s super cool as well. Thank you.

David Batstone: Thank you very much. Entrain Rusty really been good to connect with you today.

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.

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.

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.

Bertie Lourens: I think God went after the very thing that could become a mammon stronghold in my life, that very thing that I believe I’m building, something of massive equity value. He said he wants that. And it was very difficult, but at the same time, I knew this thing is actually really worth minus something to deal with. I said, OK, God, I’ll give you shares.

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Darryl Heald: Hey, William. Doing well. Excited to be here today, especially to hear from our friend in South Africa.

William Norvell: I know. It’s amazing. It’s amazing to have you and Bertie and Darryl have known each other for a while. So it’s going to be fun to tease out the story. I know our audience is going to hear something that they probably haven’t heard before, and we hope the spirit can use BAM story and what got him and his faithfulness to encourage and inspire other faith driven entrepreneurs as we’re listening. So, Bertie, welcome to the show.

Bertie Lourens: Hello, William. Thank you for inviting me.

William Norvell: We’re happy to have you. And, you know, as we get started, one of the things we just always love to do is just to hear a little about you, who you are, where you came from, where you grew up, how you ended up becoming a Faith Driven Entrepreneur and you know, how you ended up sitting in that chair today with us telling the story.

Bertie Lourens: Thank you, William Norvell. First of all, I’m a son of God, God Almighty, the creator of the universe and everything in it. And I’m married to a beautiful, gentle Canadian lady. And she calls South Africa home for 15 years already and Foljambe grandkids. But I was really born and raised in a small mining town in the south east of Johannesburg in the 70s. I grew up in the 70s and 80s and that was during apartheid South Africa. It was a very difficult time for South Africa. And everything that we are facing today is the legacy of apartheid. And a lot of things that we do today is still trying to fix all the wrongs of the past. So I grew up as a young teenager seeing all these wrongs, and I just thought it might be wise just to give a little bit of context about apartheid and what the past is and was. But it was really a governing system that denied all nonwhite people any decent education, no voting rights and no rights for any managerial jobs. So you can understand what that means over a period of 40, 50 years of a father that needs to work in the best job we can get, as in a mine, as a general worker or in a factory or a construction company and a father teaching his son, this is the best that you can ever be. Just try and be the best general worker that you could ever be. And hopefully you could become the supervisor of general workers. And if you just keep perpetuating that over decades, a whole lot of anger happens, a whole lot of hurt and a narrative of blaming. So that’s that’s the South Africa that I grew up in. And I saw how apartheid came to an end. I saw how a new era was born for South Africa, and so how Nelson Mandela was released from prison and how he was elected as the first democratically elected president. And I started seeing how the entire country started rallying together to try and correct the wrongs of the past. And it’s been two decades and we still doing that. But it almost feels like we fail every decade. Our failures are bigger than the decade before. So that’s the context where I grew up. And personally, I was a very insecure teenager when I grew up because my father never told me that I had what it’s like. You never told me that he loved me. So I always grew up never knowing what that real lack was that I had inside of me. But I always knew that I just do not feel complete. Of course, I ran to alcohol and women and I was also a very good salesman when I was in school. And I very quickly learned that I could make money. And that’s when I realized how hold on, money will maybe fill that gap and it will make me popular among my teenage friends, which I did, of course. But luckily I got saved very early in my twenties. It’s just off to the one relational failure of the next. I realized that I just do not have what it takes to keep a life together and a surrender to Jesus at the age of twenty three in the late 90s. And it was wonderful. It almost felt like it was the beginning of a healing journey for me. Shortly after that I found a mentor that saw something in me and decided to help me to build the business because I knew I wanted to be a businessman because I could sell stuff and I thought if I can sell something, I can build a business. I started a business in 2004 and I am still running that same business.

William Norvell: Well, that’s amazing. Thank you for walking us through that. I’m going to ask if you would would you maybe spend. A few more minutes for our listeners. I mean, I hear that I’ve you know, I’ve read a little bit about apartheid maybe, but maybe it’s been a few more minutes on what it was like growing up. Like what did you sense in the air? What did you sense was was there and sort of from your perspective, because we have a listening audience as a white man. Right. What did it feel like at school? I don’t know. I don’t even know the right question to ask. But I’m just really curious for I just always learn, obviously, from people in different worldviews. And they grew up in different scenarios than me. And I just want to give you kind of an open mic for a couple more minutes to say just kind of what were some of those experiences like for you?

Bertie Lourens: William, you know, when you’ve become a teenager, when you hit your 10, 11, 12, 13 age, you start asking questions, you know, just things around you, you know, just that there are no black kids in your school. You notice the kids that you play sports against are all white. You’d notice that when you drive out of your town, you drive into a we call them townships, but it’s really chanty towns. And you just see black people there and you see that the people who work in the white people gardens are black people. And you don’t see black people driving cause they’re driving bicycles and their clothes don’t look decent. She’s noticed all these things and then you start asking you questions, you ask your parents these questions. But why you see beggars at the traffic lights are only like people and not white people. And you ask them, but why are beggars only black people? And then they answer you. But you can see it’s almost a governmental brainwashed answer that does not make sense for a 12 or 13 year old. And that’s when you start realizing. But hold on. Yes. Something wrong with the entire system. And you listen to adults, the way they talk around the barbecue, around the Sociales about them and us, and you ask yourself, but we are all one, we’re all one country wiser, them innocent. You know, you ask these questions and you get answers that just do not make sense. And to take it one step further. For most of these answers, there was a biblical scripture to, quote, to justify the system of apartheid and. You see black people doing the hard labor, almost like the Hebrew slaves, that both the infrastructure of Egypt, I saw how the black people, the majority of South Africa was like people were building the infrastructure for the minority. And something inside of me just said that is wrong. It just doesn’t make sense. It’s not sustainable. And then you start watching news, you start understanding what you hear on the news. You start hearing the conversations in the kitchen and around the dinner table with your parents, really as the tension started building up of the masses of South Africa, just saying enough is enough. We want voting rights. And you start hearing those conversations, the family conversations, the fear. And it’s a fear is a massive bloodbath, revolution coming. And we just do not have answers anymore. And I saw all of that and the fear also gripped me. But then I saw the miracle of a peaceful negotiation between Nelson Mandela and the ruling president, F.W. de Klerk, back then, and all of a sudden, very quickly, the tension released and there was an election. All the black people were granted voting rights and the ANC, which is the party that represented them, won, and there was joy and there was fear all at the same time, the wealthy whites that were able to flee, fled, packed up all the goods, and they fled everywhere else in the world because they believe that all the white people in South Africa were going to be murdered, that they believe in communities rejoiced and they sang Hallelujah. And you started hearing these messages of the fearful and the jubilant all more or less in the same space. And something inside of me said, that’s a miracle. What happened here. And it really was looking back now, it was a miracle, and very shortly after that, in the 90s, we just had a great leader and Nelson Mandela, who was very verbal in his communication. He understood the fear of the white communities. And he spoke to us on public television, where he made very, very bold statements of how you will protect us. And he made very bold statements to the angry majority black community in South Africa, saying we need our brothers, our brothers in our country to help us rebuild this country. And you just hear that propaganda coming from him and eventually you start believing this is going to turn out to be something beautiful. And that’s why we named it the Rainbow Nation, because we really believed something beautiful that was going to come out of it. And we still hold on to those hopes in those dreams because it’s still beautiful, but it just sometimes feels like it’s taking too long. But our timing is never the same as God’s timing.

William Norvell: Man, thank you so much for it. Such a beautiful job of taking us into some of those moments. And I just thank you for walking through that for our audience. And I’m interested in how did all of those experiences impact you as an entrepreneur, as someone who was studying what God wanted you to do? Right. And what was your part of that story that was being written in South Africa? Where did God find you and push you to an entrepreneurial journey?

Bertie Lourens: So I knew that I wanted to be a businessman for selfish reasons. I wanted to get rich. And that’s the end of that story. So I pursued that dream of becoming rich and I could see how this new South Africa attracted so much foreign investment. This was truly the hope for the continent. And we achieved amazing GDP growth. And I just realized I am in this ecosystem that is filled with growth and I have the skills to sell and I want to be a businessman. But as I went on doing this, I noticed that the people that we employ in business are poor and they are, many of them general workers that work for a very, very low salary. And that started bothering me. Now, the salary we pay is equal to what competitors in the market pay for those laborers. And when we pitch for contracts with clients, a big chunk of our service costs is labor costs. So if we overpay, then we are not competitive and we can grow. So we were forced to pay the same salary, but we realized we can do much more. So it’s just an awareness. It grew over time that while we employ poor people, we have the power of influence over them more than what political leaders have and more than what the church could ever have. Well, they work in our business. We found out that the one that receives a salary submits quite easily to the one who pays the salary. So the one who pays the salary has tremendous influence. And we I thought, let us use that and help people learn how to better themselves so that they can build a better future for themselves. And all of that comes down to education the way you think, because if you could educate yourself, you can acquire more skills or a higher skill, you can bring it to your workplace, you can get more responsibilities and then the higher salary. I’ve personally worked with some of the guys in the early years, and I’ve seen once they get that, it’s almost as if you’ve put them on a perpetual path out of poverty because he’s connected the dots. You said, I see how this thing works. It’s not a secret any longer. Bring more value, take more responsibilities and more money and then repeat. And that made me excited that we have this influence that we can help people out of poverty.

William Norvell: Amen, amen. Yeah, you’re sharing a gospel. You know, you share in the good news with people that you’re holding this good news that they don’t know about yet and educating them. What a beautiful reflection of the gospel where God placed you and where he put you. And and what are the unique things I’ve heard you talk about before that I’d love to have you share with our audiences? You know, you set out to build a business also where God would be a shareholder. And could you tell us a little about what that looks like to you, what that felt like to you as you dug into that and prayed about that? What does it look like to make God a shareholder of Voice Plan?

Bertie Lourens: Will needs to understand how that started. First of all, if you have a really good mentor and he is building a really successful business, all you need to do is just listen to him and do what he tells you. And that’s what I did because I didn’t know much. And what happens is if you enjoy enough success upon success and if you do not have people around you that are willing to hold up a mirror to you so you can see who you become and you will become proud. And I became very proud because I enjoyed tremendous success quite quickly and in the first years of the business. And I had to define later on to myself what is pride and pride to me is the conversation with self that says that I am better then and you can fill in the gap there with any name. I’m better then. And very quickly after that, pride leads to strife or strife and striving says that I would like to be better than so-and-so. So it’s a situation of measuring and seeing that you’re better than some, but then coveting the success of others. And that just put you on the spiral of destruction, which I didn’t see. I didn’t see it coming, but God did. And and luckily he rescued me there again shortly after the business, about seven years in, we started losing a tremendous amount of money, buckets full of money. And it came as a shock because I his Blue-Eyed Boy, I’m so successful. What happens? Why all of a sudden all these losses, whatever I worked so hard for over seven years, could be gone in a moment. And I found myself in my garage a year later on my knees, crying out to God to have mercy on me and rescue me from the situation and repenting of my pride and my arrogance and my striving and building it in my own strength. And he did. He came and he rescued me. William, it was very shortly after that the situation turned. It was miraculous and it turned. So you could imagine early the next year, I was still very raw and I was covered in the fear of God and just asking him, how do you want me to build this thing out now? I do not ever want to make the same mistakes again. And I felt God say to me, he wants me to give away, well, what did I have? I had detonated an insolvent company and I asked him if he wants that. But I heard God say the word equity to me. And that’s a very interesting word. Now, the founder of a business always believes that the equity value is hundreds of billions. The balance sheet could showed deep zeros that the founder always believes it’s worth more. And I think God went after the very thing that could become a Maymont stronghold in my life, that very thing that I believe I’m building, something of massive equity value. He said he wants that. And it was very difficult, but at the same time, I knew this thing is actually really worth minus something to deal with. I said, OK, God, I’ll give you shares that you’re going to show me how. And I asked him if he does if you about by 30 percent. And he remained quiet and then I gave him 30. And that’s where we are. So from three very shortly after that, we grew to fifty one because I immediately so I started understanding the benefits of inviting God Almighty, the creator of everything, to have him as a shareholder in your business. The value proposition is just so big at first you don’t know it. But once I did it, I started realizing what I did and I realized, but hold on, let’s let’s give him a controlling stake and then I can sit back and watch this thing grow. And that’s where we are today.

William Norvell: And hey, man, I love parts of that story that, of course, because we have a God that runs after us harder than we can imagine that he rescued you. But hearing a practical it just gets me every time when you hear of God coming to the rescue and the audience knows I cry a decent amount. So, you know, I may cry again now, but it’s just a beautiful story of you submitting. And, you know, and it’s not a prosperity gospel. It’s a reality of the scripture. Right. That like, when we do turn to the Lord and when we do repent and we do give it back to him like he’s here and he’s there for everyone listening and not everyone’s in that spot. People have already done it. But, man, if you are run to him, be with him. It’s an amazing story. And, you know, and I would imagine the the way God wants to run in their business or be a shareholder may look different, but to submit that to him is the point. Right.

Bertie Lourens: William, I think, is going after the one thing that he knows will drive the biggest wedge between you and him sometime in the future. And he’s going to go after that thing. And all he’s really asking is just to surrender, to surrender, whatever it is, just surrender. I’ve got this. I know your future better than you will ever know. Just let me do this with you and it will be so worth it. It’s always asking,

William Norvell: hey, man, I’m going to turn you over to Daryl after one more question here. I realized, of course, we got so excited about the wisdom you have here. I forgot to ask you. Could you tell our audience a little bit of what a waste plan is, how many employees you have, what you guys do in South Africa? I think the name tells a little bit. I think people are already on the edge of their seat knowing a little bit. But could you tell us a little bit more just about the business and who you try to serve and how you try to care for God’s world through the business?

Bertie Lourens: Yes, absolutely. So most companies have ways as part of the production or service offering, and we found that that’s normally an afterthought and it’s a liability. It’s an ever increasing cost that somebody somewhere has to manage. But there’s no specialist or an expert or dedicated person to do that. So we offer a service companies, food companies, factories, hospitals, hotels, shopping centers. We will bring our personnel onto your site. We will segregate your waste. We will divert as much away from landfill as possible, and as we divert the waste away from the landfill, we turn it from a liability into an asset and we have enough data to show it’s an appreciating asset. So we take waste with segregated at the source in separate streams. We sell those streams. The value of those streams we sell increase in value year on year. We return the biggest part of that value back to the client. But what happens in the process is that person that did that sorting and the handling of the waste, he realizes. But I was part of turning a wasteful item that’s a liability into an asset. And in that process, we generated new revenue. I earned a salary. And with that comes dignity because I was part of turning value out of something with no value. And that’s the beautiful part of what’s happening here. We have about a thousand employees scattered over 10 cities and we have about six hundred and thirty clients that we service and waste gets segregated from all the sites moves into big processing centers, which we call recycling centers. Where we do final sorting, we compress them and we sell them to the highest bidder. So we always try to put

Darryl Heald: a lot of that waste trader in a variety of ways. Just love hearing the story. And, you know, my love for South Africa, I mean, it just we’ve had lots of great adventure. This a lot of fun to be have a chance to tell more people just how God’s moving in your life and your business in the country, things like that. So I want to take us back when we first met. I think our audience has already heard there is a deep thinker and I just remember where we have a mutual friend. He invited you and Leslie to this journey, generosity. Why don’t we just start there? What did you think about that? And just the process that happened yesterday?

Bertie Lourens: It was mind boggling to process all the information that was presented over that week. And now I saw how very, very poor people gave everything in those videos. I mean, those discussions. And I saw how excessively wealthy people did the same. But what struck me was that the richest and the poorest were equally happy. Joy, Joy, that is deeper than what a dictionary can define for you. And I think that’s what hooked me, that I was chasing really after satisfaction all my life. And you think that wealth will give it and then you’ll meet people and they’ll tell you, no, it doesn’t. But that we can realize. Hold on. I think I got the secret. Yes. This is the thing that I’ve been chasing after all my life. This deep satisfaction and joy comes only from a place of true generosity. And I was just trying to piece that together. What would that look like for me when I leave this weekend? And I wanted to just take in as much as I possibly can while I’m there so that I have as much to work with when I go back home on the Monday.

Darryl Heald: Thanks for sharing that. I know there’s a hope and desire that all of us as entrepreneurs and investors, that we understand that value proposition that is more blessed to give and receive and that we can truly live in that point of joy. So a couple of things, though, that I just when I think about Botein, I just I love how you are walking out this jury. One of them is when we were driving home from the office to your house for a dinner one night and up ahead of us, there are some guys at the light who were begging for money and things like that. So take the story from there. I thought that was just I forget the date of its day, but tell our audience just what you do. I mean, this is just like everyday generosity. I just love this piece.

Bertie Lourens: Is there so the South Africa that I just told you about, I just want to give you a little bit more context. The unemployment level now sits at thirty eight percent unemployment. The amount of school dropouts is ridiculous. Something like forty eight percent of people at starting grade one get to grade 12. So you could imagine the amount of people on the streets that do not have jobs. His name is Bennett, is a baker, is bent over. He was hit by a car. A drug is back and he’s never been able to get surgery. So he’s bent over almost 90 degrees. And he’s just let the traffic light on my way home. And he’s got the brightest of smiles. So it’s easy to be generous to him. But surprisingly, most people are not. After the Jörg weekend, one of the first discussions that I think you see every time is, well, is it right to give to a beggar? It’s just going to buy alcohol. And I remember that weekend someone say that I don’t know who it was. So that person said, but it’s his job to give account for the money he received. It’s not your job to give account on his behalf. You just gave your job is to give account for the money God gave you. And the way you live with that, so I just decided my wife and I, we decided we are going to give to every beggar we went ERG we started changing money to have as much money as possible. We quickly ran out of money. So that plan didn’t work well. We then became a lot of Budweiser and we broke it up into smaller denominations of money and so that you can give less but give to more people. And then it is just one of the beneficiaries of that decision. And they love seeing my car. And if he hasn’t seen my car for a while, especially now during covid, if I drive past it on my way to the office and he sees me, he will stop all the traffic just to get to me because he knows he’s going to get something.

Darryl Heald: Well, I just love the relationship you have. I mean, it was obviously that was I mean, that’s happened dozens and dozens of times. You’ve talked about education and the importance of education. Let’s talk about what you and lesslie is from a kingdom investing side. We think about this giving. What are your particular passion about? What are you excited about giving to right now?

Bertie Lourens: There are it’s really the education the education states and South Africa are alarming. It is a bomb that will explode if nothing happens. There’s another state. About four percent of kids that start in grade one will pass. Math increased above four percent. So you have ninety six percent of your population that cannot count. So the quality of jobs and the amount of jobs that they’ll get is few. And so the amount of unemployed people, the volume of people that are unemployed is growing year on year. And it just doesn’t make sense that one should live in this country and think that that’s OK. So we put as much effort into educating people and just basic skills. So first of all, a capital is the foundation that reform really is the structure we formed where we could have got as a legal shareholder in our company. And the Nyko Capital uses all of its funds and it throws it into schooling. So there’s a few schools up here in Pretoria and Johannesburg, Christian schools. So we try and throw all our skills in there, all the networks, all our relationships, and as far as possible that we could use our resources and our assets. And money is just a very small part of that. The lady that works in our kitchen, who cleans our house, looks after the kids when we are not there to try and do as much as we can for her and her kids in terms of housing, schooling, the gospel, help them understand the gospel of the gospel and preach the gospel in the communities. The guy works in our garden and we just felt that that is practical in South Africa. If one just starts there, you’ll stay busy for the rest of your life just there. You do not have to go after big things, just those immediate lives around you influence them and help them educate themselves.

Darryl Heald: Yeah. Thank you for sharing. Some of that is a real joy for me to see some of those schools with you on that last trip. I mean, how many students do you have in these schools now?

Bertie Lourens: They’re all there’s about a thousand students, I think in all the schools where we’re involved. I’m particularly drawn to one school with its two hundred kids. It’s in the middle of Mamelodi township. It is a Christian private school. It’s private because there’s no other support coming from the government. So it’s really donations. And some of the parents are paying fees to keep the kids in there. But it’s beautiful what’s happening there. It’s kids that have all the odds stacked up against themselves. If they did not go to the school, they would go to one of our failing government schools that are producing the results I’ve just mentioned. So here we are creating an environment for them where they have great education, great principal with a great teaching group that we teach the gospel, we model the gospel, we show the gospel, we model grace. We model generosity. And we try and show them what good fatherhood looks like because that’s the one big lacking thing in the poor communities. There are no fathers there. So the way I see it is zero two hundred kids that will become two hundred families one day and 200 families. We’ll have a chance at success in South Africa because of the school and that on its own is so rewarding because you look in the eyes of these kids and you interview them and you hear what they say and you hear kids say, I need to live generous with my fellow students. That comes from a kid that has nothing. And that’s beautiful because that kid gets it and that kid is going to enjoy success and joy because they get that concept of generosity.

Darryl Heald: That’s great. Thanks for sharing that, Betty. You also have a real passion for leadership so that you’re studied this for your own self as a leader, your company and your community and your family things. Tell us a little bit more about these. What’s driving you to do these interviews with other leaders there in South Africa?

Bertie Lourens: Daryl, I just started with interviewing my mentor when he was getting old, and I needed to have some video footage of what he’s taught me over the years. So I asked him and questions some of the questions are ones I’ve never had time to ask him. And some of the questions that I asked that deeply impacted me. So I asked him that. I took a video of it. We broke it into 10 little snippets, videos, and the purpose was really just to release it into our organization. But the value was so much that we thought, let’s literally just start a YouTube channel called Stories that Inspire. We posted on there and then for anyone to enjoy. And I thought, that is wonderful. And I asked God if he wants me to continue with that and felt free to go find another leader like him. And my deal with God was if he had to keep sending me people that are willing to be interviewed by me, I will continue to do so. And we are on series six, I think, right now. And I am just enjoying hearing from these people because everyone who has achieved the level of success are always keen to share it. They’re not stingy. Everyone who has had success wants to share it. So that’s what I do. Like I ask them and I try and package it in snippets that other people can enjoy and use and benefit from Amen Burty.

William Norvell: As we come nearer to close, I want to give you an opportunity just to maybe speak, just to have an open mic a little bit again to talk to the entrepreneurs out there that may be listening. And any other advice that you might have about, you know, just how God taught you to lead a business from a faith first perspective.

Bertie Lourens: Thank you, William. Yes, this all comes from the journey of starting to surrender, and I have developed a conviction that our father wants us to steward his stuff on his behalf. Now, we’ve heard this. This is all tacky, but if we can just pause for a moment and think of your earthly dad had assets with hundred billion dollars and he asks you, my son, would you take over the running of this company while I’m alive, then what would you do? How would you do that? Well, the first thing is you’ll be very fearful and respectful. And as you step into those very big shoes, but you will honor him and every one of your decisions, you will seek him in every one of your decisions. And you must check in with him daily. And our father, the creator of the universe, has created resources that generates about 90 trillion dollars of GDP every year. We are his sons and daughters and he wants us to stay with these assets on his behalf. So why do we get caught up so much and what we create and what we hold onto this such big journey out there? And by calling for us and I almost feel like our father is sitting on the edge of his seat waiting for us to surrender and let go of our stuff and the power that our stuff has over us and said, God, I’m your son and I’m here to steward your assets on your behalf, for your glory. God showed me in Romans eight. I’m about 19 and this is my translation of the all of creation is waiting eagerly for the Sons of God to stand up and reveal themselves and say, here we are. And then to do what? To risk your creation out of the bondage of corruption and to then steward it in a way that gives glorious liberty. What is glorious liberty? It is it’s a freedom that gives glory back to him. And I think that’s our calling our sons and daughters. So when he gives us assets to steward companies and people, he wants us to steward in a way that brings liberty, freedom to the resources of the earth that we stewarding the animals, the plants, the rivers, everything, the resources in it and the people and all of creation should the glory to father because of the way that we is sons of stewarding his assets. And I just think it’s such a big calling that we cannot waste time to get caught up in stuff and status, you know, and accolades. And I just felt that the only way that I was able to do this is to reach a place of complete surrender. So when I gave God shares in the business and I gave him control, it almost felt like that was absolutely necessary for that to happen before I could really stupid things on his behalf. Before then, it was all for me, as for me, my family, their inheritance, my legacy and all that nonsense.

William Norvell: Oh, I love that the it wasn’t something you begrudgingly did or maybe you did, but it was necessary. It was like that was the only way for it to work, actually, in sort of God’s world is to take that step of obedience.

Bertie Lourens: Yeah. And I want to add one more thing. The second point to that is the idea of generosity, how to be generous lives. I realized that a father is a generous father and the father of lies is a stingy father. And selfishness and stinginess come from the fear of scarcity. And generosity comes from the understanding of abundance and abundant provision from our father. And it’s almost as if we could live our lives in either one of these two veins. You can’t be in both. And when you realize that my father is the father of a Bynum’s and I can share my resources abundantly with the ones around me and I can live abundantly gracious with the people that I lead, employ my family, my friends, my neighbors, then you see the lie of the enemy. But until you make that choice, you live in the lie of the enemy. You always think, especially in South Africa, in a declining economy. How can I put away as much as I can now so that my kids will be OK? The day when I die. And I think we all live with that fear. That is the father of lies that are whispering those lies until years. And he whispers little lies. He puts little packets of lies and fear around our lives, neatly wrapped as gifts, tiny little packets. And as soon as you take the one and you open it up, you give him legal right to enter and cause havoc. And you cannot live in faith and fear. So Faith says, my father is abundant, is my provider, and he will look after me and my family. And fear says it’s up to me to put away as much as I possibly can so that my kids and my family are going to be OK one day.

William Norvell: Amen, I almost hate to ask another question, a wonderful place to end, but we do have to get to our closing question because we always ask it. And so usually I would cut myself off. But thank you for sharing that. And our closing question, will we love to ask, is just where God has you in his word today, where he has you in his scripture. And that’s something that you could have been meditating on for a season. It could be something God revealed to you this morning. But just to let our audience in to where God’s walking with you in his holy word today,

Bertie Lourens: William, I want to share something that happened over the last week. I got busy. I had to travel to Capetown, came back, went on a mountain bike race, traveled again. And this morning when I sat down, I opened my word. I saw it for the last eight days. I did not have a quiet time. So the last eight days, I got so busy that I didn’t sit with my father and I speak with him. And I realized the day before I exploded in the meeting because I acted out of my flesh, out of anger. And when I said with God, I repented for not seeking him daily. I allowed business to come and take me away from him. And I felt the father showed me the picture that the enemy wants us just to move away from my father slowly. You’ll never come with a big bang for your give away. His plan will come slowly. You’ll distract us with things that he knows will move us away from our father. And if you can get us away for long enough, then introduce a stage to riches, lies and fear. Because if we’ve been away from our father long enough, he know that we will not hear this Holy Spirit in the moment and introduce introduces little lines once we take them. He comes in with a lot of lies and after a week I was operating fully in my flesh, making fleshly decisions and exploding at people. I’m making bad decisions and that’s just a fresh revelation that I did not set before my father every day. And I ask him advice and if I don’t sit in his word, so his presence and I listen to the Holy Spirit, I do not care how long I’ve been a Christian. I will fail. I will act in inflation, will make bad decisions, and I’ll disappoint them.

William Norvell: Amen Amen, so grateful for you joining us today, so grateful for your story, so grateful for sharing what God’s done and through your obedience and at times your disobedience. And thank you for sharing both of those and how he still comes to the rescue through all of those examples. So grateful for you and grateful for your story.

Bertie Lourens: And give William.