Brian Hooks on Finding Common Ground in a Divided World | NXT Chapter with T.D. Jakes

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Speaker 1: We have a saying around here, those who look for common ground to find it right. And if you start off a conversation and you say, wait a minute, what is it that you want to accomplish? What is it that I want to accomplish? And then you start to ask yourself how could I make him better? How could he make me better? All of a sudden you're building together right, and then those differences, as I said, become a strength, not a weakness.
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Speaker 2: Welcome to next chapter. I am Td Jakeson. I'm delighted to have the opportunity to be with you, to share, and to allow you to experience expertise and the brilliancy of a young man who has just done some amazing things in reimagining ways that we can make a difference in our society and our community and our country and ultimately in our world. He is the CEO and chairman of Stand Together. Stand Together as committed to doing a myriad of things to uplift, to maintain, and to galvanize the community d into a more perfect union. And he's here with me today, would you help me? Welcome mister Brian Hooks. Hey, everybody, listen up as we share Chapter one the calling in a word, In a word, who is Brian Hooks?
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Speaker 3: In a word?
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Speaker 1: Well, I'll use one word, and I'll start at first things. First, thank you for the opportunity to be here. You know, I'm such a huge admirer of yours. Ever since we had a chance to meet several years ago and the chance to partner with you, I've already learned a lot.
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Speaker 3: From you and I've been really looking forward to this conversation. So thank you. So I guess that's that's the word I would. I would start with.
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Speaker 1: You know, I'm grateful, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to do what I do, Grateful for the experience that I have to work with absolutely incredible people who are finding new and better ways to help, you know, unleash the potential of every person in the country. So there's a lot of different words you could use, but I guess I would start with great.
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Speaker 2: Okay, that's grateful. We have that in common. Grateful, and I think the gratitude is the gateway to everything else that comes to pass in your life if you keep the right attitude, don't take yourself too seriously that's right, and maintain a spirit of gratitude means so so much. You could have done anything anything. You could have worked for anybody. You could work in banks, you could work in Fortune one hundred companies, You could have yielded your expertise in education into so many different areas. What brought you to the philanthropic area and has kept you here so long?
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Speaker 1: Well, you know, there's a lot of different ways to think about that that question. I candily never really thought too much about what comes next. I've always looked at the opportunities and of me and try to make the most of them. And you know, you keep your head down, you do good work, and all of a sudden you're twenty six years into a career and you wind up in a field called philanthropy. I actually don't think about the work that we do as philanthropy, although absolutely there's quite a bit of philanthropy in what we do.
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Speaker 3: I think we're the.
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Speaker 1: Problem solving business, and we're in the business of empowering people to realize their potential. And some of that is philanthropy. It's grant making to organizations that are working in communities to solve some of the hardest problems.
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Speaker 3: But it takes all sorts of different forms.
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Speaker 1: You know, I'll tell a little bit about myself that that's all right, just just to kind of explain my journey. You know, I'm a kid that was born in Detroit, Michigan, to hard working parents who you know, taught me just kind of the basics, right, the idea that when you work hard, when you treat people well, and when you follow your passions more often than not, you're.
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Speaker 2: Going to do all right.
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Speaker 1: I think back to people who had a big impression in my life, and now I can kind of draw a straight line between what I'm doing now and the lessons that I learned from them. I think about my grandfather. My grandfather was the child of immigrants. They came from Poland with nothing, and they wound up in a little town in Indiana called Hammond. You ever heard of Hammond? So most people have never heard of Hammond. Most people have heard of Gary, which is just down the Lake, Michigan. And growing up, my mother used to say that as rough of a place as Gary was, the people from Hammond used to aspire to be able to move to Gary. It's a tough place, you know. A grandfather grew up in a dirt floor tenement building, and despite all of the challenges that people face back then, you know, his passion was was art of all things wow. And he followed his passion, you know, and he was able to make a life for himself and his family. And I think about that as you know, a story that inspires the work that we do today at stand together, the idea that in this country, every person, no matter who you are, no matter where you come from, no matter what you look like, no matter what language you speak, no matter what your parents do, every person deserves to have the opportunity to realize their potential. And of course that's not the case, right, and so the work needs to be done in order to remove the barriers that are holding people back.
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Speaker 2: There are a lot of barriers, and all of them are not in the fairs. There are barriers that you're working with people who are busy, who are accountable to shareholders and stockholders and boards of directors and have all types of oversight that they have to comply with and make sure that they get the bottom line, that their fiduciary responsibilities are met and so forth and so on. That's right, you can it is so easy to live in a bubble to be cut up into what you do and forget the whole world around you. How do you peers or penetrate that bubble to make them have the sensitivity to know that you are only as great as the soil your planted.
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Speaker 1: Did this is this is such a wonderful metaphor, this this good soiled metaphor.
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Speaker 3: That that you talk about.
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Speaker 1: And this is one of the reasons that I think we hit it off so well early on, right, Because as different as our experiences have been, and as much as you've accomplished, and as much as we aspire to accomplish, we start from some of the same principles, right, And I think that's the answer to your question, how do you make sure that life doesn't get in the way of doing the things that need to be done? Yeah, And to me, the answer is that there are a certain set of principles that guide our work. You know, principles like dignity, right right, the belief that every single person, no matter who you are, just by virtue of being born a human being, you have inherent dignity moral worth, and that requires respect and it creates all sorts of opportunity because as you realize your potential. Not only do you succeed, but you do it in a way that creates the opportunity for other people to succeed.
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Speaker 2: To stig a little deeper and go to chapter number two, Core Values. You have a material that expressly teaches those principles and management principles. Would you talk a little bit about that?
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Speaker 3: Sure? Yeah. You know.
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Speaker 1: Stand Together was founded twenty four years.
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Speaker 3: Ago now by Charles Koch.
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Speaker 1: And Charles Koke is a businessman who in the nineteen sixties took over a company that was a small Midwestern company and grew it into one of the largest companies, largest private companies in the world. And Charles did that through the application of what he calls principle based management. And this is the management philosophy that that Stand Together we've also applied to build and grow our work to remove the barriers that are in the way of people realizing their potential. You know, for me, I've grown up in the system, and so it just feels like common sense.
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Speaker 2: Yeah.
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Speaker 1: It's things like if you are hiring people, don't hire people to fit them in a box. You know, a lot of businesses start with a job description and then they go out looking for a person to fill that job description, and there is no job description that perfectly fits a person, and so at the very best, you're gonna get a portion of what that person has to offer if you try to fit him or her in that box. Principle based management, So to start with a person really understand what is their gift goes back to this principle of dignity, the idea that everybody has a gift and that if we can help them to realize their potential within our organization, we talk about self actualization within the organization as one of our principles. Not only are they going to live their best life, but they're going to do it in a way that creates value in our case, Stand Together or anybody's organization. And so it's the application of some of these principles that are just to my mind, universal truths about how the world should work right, and we apply those inside our organization to get the best out of people and also offer them the opportunity to live their best lives.
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Speaker 2: In chapter number three, we'll be talking about second chances. One of the things that I think is very interesting. Earlier you were talking about we may have come from different backgrounds, so they're really not that different. My mother was a school teacher. My father was a janitor who started a janitorial company and ended up with oodles of employees and trucks and turned it into an entrepreneurial pursuit. But we knew what it was the struggle. We knew what it was to have hard times. And I find as I talk to people around the country, the people who excelled the most generally come from either middle class or hard times. In order to cause them to expel and go to their highest potential. That's something that's hard to teach. The things, the principles that you learn from the struggle, it's hard to teach somebody. And sometimes I think that we give them too much of what we didn't get and then expect them to turn out like we did. Our families are our first environment that we learned society in how to have conflict resolution, how to get along with people, how to solve problems, how to make things work, how to make things go, and we're having trouble keeping our families together. On a very grassroots level, I know, Stand Together has been involved in everything from people who've been incarcerated, people who are trying to get their feet up on the ground and get a second start in life. You don't have to quote unquote get your hands dirty, but you chose to get down there in the trenches and help them re establish the idea of family and get a second chance so that they can propel themselves into their funeral, into their future. What makes that important to Stand Together?
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Speaker 1: We know our community, our philanthropic community at Stand Together, is a very diverse community. And so we've got, you know, some of the most successful business leaders, some of the most innovative philanthropists, people who have come together under this banner of Stand Together. They could have gone on their own, but they decided that they could accomplish more by working together than any one of us could on our own. And we work with thousands of what we call social entrepreneurs, people doing the work in communities right and often in very rough communities, to help people to overcome the barriers that are holding them back, help people to realize their potential. And so people ask me, and so to your question, what is the thing that unites all of those different people?
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Speaker 3: And it's pretty simple. It's these principles.
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Speaker 1: And for us, it starts with this deep belief in people right, the idea that every person has potential, and the.
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Speaker 3: Role of society. The whole reason that we organize.
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Speaker 1: Ourselves into societies is to help people to discover their gift and to realize their potential.
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Speaker 2: I absolutely believe you and agree with you and understand that. But when I look at the world we're living in now, there's a lot of polarization. There's a lot of people living in silos. We've become more travel seemingly almost every day. It's a real fight to get people out of those sallos and to even notice what's going on. I think there's a willful blindness that perpetuates itself amongst many, many people today and stand together there just by virtue of the name itself, you know, just the name itself introduces the concept of unity and the betterness of unity, and how much better we are together than we are apart. How when you talk about the upwardly affluent who are busy and jumping on and off planes and have offices all over the country, what's your pitch when you walk in there to say, hold up, stop for a moment and recognize you can have a great business. But if you don't have a middle class, you don't have a customer. How do you get them to have compassion that you can extract from a community without adding to that community. That's a hard job, seems like to me.
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Speaker 1: You know, I understand why you say that, and I'm curious for your experience too, because you are consistently in touch with a whole range of people. Yeah, and you are inviting them into a shared project.
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Speaker 3: And that's the way I see what we do. You know, I don't have to make a pitch.
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Speaker 1: Most of the people that I meet, whether they are the affluent donors that you describe or they're the people who have been working for decades in some of the roughest neighborhoods, most of the people that I meet are not satisfied with the results that they're getting.
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Speaker 3: They know that we can do better. They know that we can do better as a society. And so when we.
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Speaker 1: Invite them into the project that stand together to stand together right to we say. You know, a lot of people say we're stronger despite our differences. I think that's wrong. I think we're stronger because of our differences. And so the more diverse that our group can be the more different life experiences that we can integrate into our work, the stronger our operation is, the stronger our capabilities are, and we're able to make a much greater difference. And so when we invite the donors in or of those groups on the street and we say, hey, why don't we figure out a way where what I've got can make you better and what you've got can make us better and you don't have to pitch that. That's an opportunity that they've been looking for. Can I tell you a story about how this shows up. We support, you know, thousands of these incredible social entrepreneurs, people who are finding new and better ways to help people succeed. And there's a group called the Phoenix, which is an addiction recovery organization. We've been working with the Phoenix for about the last decade, so we've got some experience with them. When we met the Phoenix, they were led by a guy named Scott Strode, still their leader. You've met Scott before, and Scott has his own addiction struggle. So Scott is somebody who knows the problem through personal knowledge, through firsthand knowledge. And when we met Scott, he was operating about four cities in Colorado, and he had already helped around ten thousand people over the ten years that he'd been at this.
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Speaker 3: Do you think about that?
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Speaker 1: That is an extraordinary accomplishment for any one person, ten thousand people.
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Speaker 3: That you've helped overham a struggle. Last October.
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Speaker 1: Scott called me out and he said, we just crossed the one million person mark. A million people that Scott has helped overcome addiction and one of the biggest problems in our country these days. If you ask Scott how did he do it? It's a totally different operation today the Phoenixes than it was when we met him ten years ago. And it's not because we came in and we told Scott what to do. Quite the opposite. We came in and we said, Scott, you're the expert here. You're the guy that's actually struggled with this, You're the guy that's put in the real work in these communities for a decade. You tell us what you've learned, and then you look at our operation you say, what do we have that can make you better?
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Speaker 3: And I'll tell you what.
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Speaker 1: It's been a bunch of different, diverse voices, a bunch of people, people who have their own addiction struggles that have come into this organization, Technologists that have transformed their platform so that they can take on many more people, volunteers that never thought in the world that they would be leading chapters of the Phoenix, but now they are. And so it's that opportunity that Stand Together offers people that, Hey, bring your own experience, bring your own knowledge, and then be open minded to what others have to share, because together, by building together, we can just accomplish a whole lot more.
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Speaker 2: In chapter number four Common Ground, Well, I'll tell you something. I'm going to be transferrent. I did my first podcast with Oprah Winfrey. My second one was with Denzel Washington Melody Hobson. Well, out of all of the people that I have done interviews with, I was probably most excited to do this interview with you.
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Speaker 3: And I think serious company.
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Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah.
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Speaker 3: But.
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Speaker 2: It is different work being done, and it's hard work. It's difficult work. There are forces that desire us not to come together. Our enemies would want nothing better than to divide us in as many ways as possible, work hard, through technology and every other way to keep us at each other's throat. And so I was curious to see what kind of guy this is. You know, I met you, I've had dinner with you with broken bread and all of that, but just to get an up close look. And this is why my audience knows Oprah Winfrey exists. They know Denzel Washington exists. Most of them know the Melody Hopson exists. They don't know that the people that you encircle yourself with exist, and they don't know about all the programs that are available. They don't know that there are people out there who care. And I think they would find it astonishing to find out that somebody who sits in an executive suite in a twenty twenty floor building actually cares about somebody at the bottom. And the unifying force is not only our will to do good, sometimes it is our propensity to fall into the same pitfalls. Just because you make a lot of money doesn't mean you're exempt from addiction or depression or suicide or divorce or scandal or trouble. That we're really not as different as we make out to be. And whenever I get a chance to walk into that type of office and that type of atmosphere and juxtapose it against other atmospheres that might be homeless people or people who have been suicidal or depressed of that sort of thing. I am shocked at how similar.
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Speaker 1: Yes, yes, I completely agree. You know, we have a saying around here. Those who look for common ground tend to find it right. And if you start off a conversation picking at each other's differences, you can spend your whole life doing that. But if you just take a pause and you say, wait a minute, what is it that you want to accomplish? What is it that I want to accomplish? And and and well different ways of going about that. We may disagree about how to get things done, but we want the same things. And then you start to ask yourself, well, how could I make him better? How could he make me better? All of a sudden you're building together, right, and then those differences, as I said, become a strength, not a weakness. And what we've found is, you know, talk is cheap. Yeah, And the people that you're talking about at the extremes who want to divide us, they do a lot of talk, and they've got a loud voice, you know, And part of that is because of the information environment that we live in, the technology you know, a colleague of mine told me that eighty percent of the content on Twitter on X comes from about ten percent of the users. And so if we mistake, if we make the mistake and we say, well, I guess X is the world. We think eighty percent of the people are out there sort of trying to get us at each other's throat. But it's not, it's not, And so they do a lot of talking. What we found is that when you start doing things together, and specifically when you start solving problems together, you start to create a camaraderie. You start to create a fellowship where you don't look past your differences, you can explore them in a way where you can both learn something. You may not change your mind, offen, you don't change your mind, but you learn something and you come to find a deeper respect than those who are different.
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Speaker 3: But you've got to do things together.
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Speaker 1: You actually got to get the work done and accomplish things together.
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Speaker 2: The big secret is that we're all people.
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Speaker 3: We're all people.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, we're all people, and we have people problems no matter what we drive or where we live, and we have people problems. I think the algorithms add to the chaos because they feed you the message you already believe, and so you're inundated with people who think like you think until you think that's the only way to think. And we're not exposed to diversity of thought. And when you stop being exposed to diversity of thought, you stop growing and start fighting. It's only when you're exposed to different philosophies and ideologies that you begin to open your mind just the slightest degree that perhaps I might not be right about everything. Perhaps I may have misjudged you. Perhaps I may think that you don't care, and you do. There have been some stand together meetings that I wanted to go and round up a busload of people and bring them in. Oh yeah, see. I love it just to see people really sitting down laboring over what can I do to make a difference, because that a lot without put aside what they do their desire to do. It give something more precious than dollars or time. It gives hope.
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Speaker 1: That's right, and it binds us together, and that is that's essential for anybody to have a good life. Right, you have to have community. You've got to see that we're all in this together. And it's you know, you and I have talked about this before. I think the most important thing for people to to live a good life is to see that they matter and that there's other people who care about them. Belong right. And how do you do that. You do it by helping people live better lives. You do it by solving problems in communities. And this is why you know you asked me, do we have to pitch people?
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Speaker 2: No?
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Speaker 3: Absolutely not.
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Speaker 1: This is a basic human need and being able to offer people the opportunity to get involved in solving problems that they care about alongside other people.
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Speaker 3: I mean, this is the stuff of a good life.
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Speaker 2: Chapter number five, the crisis. You know what's funny is I have worked with people who were affluent who really felt like they drove around in really expensive cars, maybe had twelve or twenty of them, collector's items and all that kind.
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Speaker 4: Of stuff, hang out in pretty rarefying. Yeah. I get in there. I get in there for worses, but they don't always feel like anybody cares about them either.
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Speaker 3: Yeah.
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Speaker 2: And I've worked with homeless people in shelters who feel like who feels like nobody cares? We have more ways to get in contact with each other than we ever had before, and yet we've never been as lonely and had as many mental health problems suicides as we have right now. How do we begin to break through that?
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Speaker 1: So I think you're exactly right, and I think that the problem is even bigger than that. So I'll tell you how I think about all all of the challenges that we face right now, Because if you don't really understand what's wrong, chances are you're not going to be able to find a solution. You're not going to be able to find things that have helped people move forward. So the way I look at what's happening in our society right now, and the polarization and the division and the US versus them thinking the idea that in order to get ahead, other people have to be left behind, which is not at all how things should work, and is to my mind, threatens to destroy our society. To me, this isn't because we've got bad people. We have some people who are doing the wrong thing and they know it. But to me, most people are lost, you know, And you ask the question, why are they lost? To my mind, it's because we're going through a period of disruption, you know. You say unprecedented, and you know, people who study like you, you know, thousands of years, it's hard to say I'm precedent and we've been through disruption before, yes, but I think it's disruption like we haven't seen in a few lifetimes. That's right, and you think about what that means. It means that the systems and the institutions that people have relied on to order their lives to be able to plan what is my life going to be like, they're being disrupted. Education used to be you get a high school diploma. You might forego some opportunities, but you're going to be able to live a good life. Employment used to be you get a job, maybe two jobs, and that was going to be your job for life. I think kids under or kids people under the age of thirty right now, average tenure in a job is two years. This is disruption. And then let's talk about some of the more fundamental institutions, faith, the family. The stability that people had counted on to figure out how to get by just isn't there anymore. And when that happens, we're you know, we're human beings, and so that creates uncertainty. And when we have uncertainty. We look for some to make it stop, and the voices at the extremes are promising big. I can tell you what's wrong. It's those other people over there. Let's blame those other people. Give me the power and just let me make decisions on your behalf and everything will be okay. They're promising big, but they always deliver low. And so to my mind, if we want to talk about how do we bring people together and how do we get past this period of disruption, we're not talking about changes at the margin, just small changes. To my mind, our project right now is we have to reimagine the institutions that can help people live well together. And if we do that, not only are we going to be able to get past this period of disruption and disorder, but we're going to be able to do a whole lot better than we used to do. Because remember those institutions in the past, they provided stability, but.
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Speaker 3: They weren't great.
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Speaker 2: Right.
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Speaker 1: You know, you look at education, for instance, and you know this is not something that I need to tell you about. You've you've thought a lot about this, but our education system, it consistently and underestimates the potential of people and it leaves so many people behind. And so if the system of education is going to be disrupted, let's shoot big. Let's let's make sure that we end up on the other side in a way that was better than where we were before. And you know, we're supporting again these social entrepreneurs who are some of the most creative and imaginative builders of these new institutions that you could ever imagine. So in education, for instance, just in the past five years, and this really started after COVID, when parents woke up and said, wait a minute, we need to do something different. We've helped more than five thousand educational entrepreneurs in all fifty states offer parents something better for their kids. And the story after story, if you were to predict where do those education entrepreneurs come from, They didn't come from Harvard, They didn't come from twenty story buildings. Their parents that had an idea about what their kids needed and what their neighbors needed were their teachers who had been able to see what needed to improve in the system before and given them just a little bit of resources, both financial but also support from other people who are walking the same journey. These entrepreneurs, these education entrepreneurs are reimagining this foundational institution, and they're doing it in a way that is much better than what came before. I tell you, eighty percent of the folks that we've supported in this.
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Speaker 3: One program are women.
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Speaker 1: Ninety percent of them serve middle and lower income communities, and almost all of them, more than eighty percent of them, in just a short period of time, are sustainable on the tuition dollars of the people that they serve. So to my mind, this says there is a huge opportunity to help people to live better lives, but we have to do things very differently than we did in the past. And I think you could tell that story about just about any one of these institutions.
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Speaker 2: Absolutely. You know, I had the sorrow and the privilege of working with Katrina and the victims of Katrina. The winds and the rain and the thunder and the lightning did its fair share of damage. I don't want to minimize that at all.
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Speaker 3: That's right.
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Speaker 2: But what made it a terrible disaster is when the levees gave way levees that needed to be innovated. We created, modified, but needed to be there. And I so often look at our times and think about those levees, our institutions, our constitution, our commitment to faith. Those levees that you don't see the under the water, but they keep the flood of evil from taking over and drowning the innocent. It has taken over to such a way that we find ourselves on the roof, yes, waiting on help to come from anywhere we can get it to come from. And I think our job is to fix the levees.
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Speaker 3: I love that. I love that. I think that's exactly right.
00:31:23
Speaker 2: Yeah. If we do that, our educational institutions must move from education, to move away from what it's called education to toward recognizing that what we do a lot of times is indoctrination. That's right, And it depends on what school you went to, how you are indoctrinated. So the facts have variables based on what part of the country do you live in, how you were raised, how you were taught. We've got to give an even playing field, especially with the technology. And one other comment, cause you got me started, Yeah, yeah, me fired up. You got me. You were talking about we've seen these times before, we have, and we've often seen them, and they've been horrific times. But we have never seen these times come upon us with such dangerous tools and weapons. Musket rifles, ships, cannons. We've seen it before. Lynchings and mobbings, killings, all these sort of things. We've seen it before. And for me, being a boomer, I've seen it. I was born in it. I was born in the sixties. You know, Woodstuck and Jimmy Hendrix and all of that kind of stuff. Yeah, you're too young for that, but.
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Speaker 3: I got some very very strong appreciation.
00:32:47
Speaker 2: For Ji't do you, okay, okay, I remember Jimmy well. So we came up in that air. We came up in the air of the Vietnam War. We came up in the where women were burning their bro other than people were fighting, and people were picketing work on wits all day. But we didn't come up in a world where we could text on our telephone all the way to Afghanistan Japan, that we that we could hit the grid, hack into a grid, and shut down the power systems in a country. Our concern is the fierce urgency of now is that we have to move quickly. We cannot be stagnated, We cannot put it off for tomorrow. Because our weapons have improved so rapidly that from week to week, you're getting the upgrades on your phones, You're getting upgrades on everything. Because it is moving so fast, how do we recover the speed and the ground that we need where we really get out there to the people. And I agree with you there are more that are in the middle than there are on the extremes, but they don't get the interviews.
00:34:01
Speaker 1: That's right, that's right now, that's exactly right. So I think this is the challenge of our time. But the pace of change is faster than it's ever been. I think that's fair to say. And the scope of the disruptions as you described, both through technology but just through geography, right, is unprecedented.
00:34:22
Speaker 3: I think it's fair to say. So when I think.
00:34:25
Speaker 1: About what do we do, you know, when the world is sort of spinning and it's hard to find something to hold on to, what we hold on to that stand together in my life and as I think about what I can do to solve problems and bring other people in. Are these principles? You know, we call them the principles of human progress. It's the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this year. These are the principles that the founders of our country wrote about in that document. They're the principles that Frederick Douglass called saving principles that Doctor King talked about being part of a promisory that it was up to each generation to find new and better ways to live up to that promise, to live into those principles. And to my mind, that is how we solve our problems. That is how we solve We do a better job of living into these principles. So, if technology is dividing us, how do we turn that technology on its head so that tool can be a tool to help unite?
00:35:27
Speaker 2: Absolutely, because it can, it can Chapter number six A and us. It's I don't want to demonize technology because I'm sitting here alive because of technology.
00:35:40
Speaker 3: That's right. Yeah, you had an incredible scare last week.
00:35:42
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, And it's only because of artificial intelligence and technology that they went in through my arm and went all the way into my heart and I'm sitting here today. So it can be used for good and in a lot of amazing ways. It's really really exciting. Eli Whitney created the Cotton Gin. It changed the world as we know it. When the railroads came to America, it changed transportation as we know it. When the Wright Brothers created the airplane, it changed the world as we know it. Now we can get places that would have taken us days to get We can get there in hours. Now technology has changed the world for us. I woke up one morning and I was living on another planet. Everything else well, then, yeah, totally changed. I can't afford equipment, I can't run. I have to call my kids to help me navigate things that they can't pay for it, but they can run. I can pay for it, but can't run it. It's a new world, but it's a new opportunity. What do you say to the people who are a little bit intimidated by that new world?
00:36:50
Speaker 1: I say, I understand. I'm intimidated too. I mean, as you say, this is not a small change.
00:36:55
Speaker 3: This is a revolution.
00:36:56
Speaker 1: Yes, but we've been through this before, and technologies, just as you described, they can either be used to improve society or.
00:37:06
Speaker 3: To make things worse.
00:37:08
Speaker 1: And so we have to see artificial intelligence and AI as the opportunity to lift everyone up to improve society. The challenge is it's not going to happen on its own. Rarely are the least fortunate in our society the first to benefit from leading edge technology. But I think we have the opportunity to make sure that they are. And there's lots of different projects that are doing this. We're involved in one called Next Latter Ventures, brand new project. It was announced just this last summer. It's a consortium of philanthropies that have put together a billion dollars to make investments in leading edge technology that help those who are at or below two times the federal poverty limit. And the way I look at it is when you or I have an important life decision to make. Should I buy this new house? Should I go back to school? How am I going to handle these healthcare bills that I just can't afford right now? We call somebody we know, whether it's a friend, a parent, a colleague, an associate, and we say, hey, help me think through this.
00:38:14
Speaker 3: Most people who.
00:38:15
Speaker 1: Are economically vulnerable, they don't have that kind of a resource, and so they're one bad decision away from a really hard life. Technology can help, and so how do we build the AI tools to help people to navigate those important life decisions so that they can have a coach in their pocket, and that coach can be aligned with their life aspirations. So not only are they going to live above escape poverty and avoid poverty, but they're going to build a life that reflects who they want to be. And I think technology has the opportunity to do that. There's just one example. But if we approach this transition, this revolution and technology from a perspective of strength, and we see it as a two to help improve the lives of everyone, I think we can be Okay.
00:39:03
Speaker 2: I think you're right, and I think something else needs to be said. Even though a person is exceptionally endowed with the gifts that are necessary to make them fluent with technology, doesn't mean that they know everything. Just because you know technology doesn't mean you know how to be a good father. That mean you know how to be a good husband. That mean you know how to rest, That mean you know how to stop. You can bring something to the table too. It's we're not talking about welfare here. We're talking about exchanging strengths from one to the other. Because you can learn something, but you can also teach something and together we become better people because of it.
00:39:43
Speaker 1: Let's let's approach this technology challenge. Not as though technology is going to replace human connection, right, but it's going to accelerate human connection.
00:39:53
Speaker 3: You know, you know better than anybody the.
00:39:57
Speaker 1: Role that faith can play, Yes, and uplifting people who are struggling. Yes, I think technology can even accelerate that. There's a group that we work with called care Portal, and I love to turn you onto care Portal.
00:40:10
Speaker 3: It's an incredible organization and it's very simple technology. It's a needs offers market.
00:40:17
Speaker 1: It's kids who are struggling and are at risk of being taken away from their family and put in a foster care. Rather than the nurse or the teacher or the social worker reporting their situation to Child Protective Welfare child Protective Services, they put their need on this technology platform. Johnny came to school four days in a row with the same clothes. His mom needs a new washing machine. And then care Portal on the other side of the technology they go in and they recruit churches because congregations are natural sources of support, but they don't necessarily know who needs their support, so this technology platform connects them. But what's really important about this the church doesn't just send the dollars so that Johnny's mom can buy a new washing machine. The church delivers that washing machine and at the same time delivers community, well delivers personal relationships. Says, hey, if you need a washing machine, there's probably something else going on. How else can we help? And they engage in long term relationships because this technology helped them to discover where they can.
00:41:22
Speaker 3: Make a difference.
00:41:22
Speaker 1: That's amazing we think about technology is accelerating human relationships rather than replacing them. It can be a force for good at a scale that just hadn't been possible before.
00:41:34
Speaker 2: Then there's chapter number seven measuring impact. If we take the time to think of it from a positive perspective instead of a negative one. It is proven that it secretes hormones in the brain that causes us to be more healthy in our thinking. It changes not only our psychology, but even the biology and the physical components of the brain flurries when we just have positive thoughts. I have been working on making sure that my thoughts were healthy before my life was healthy, because my life can't be healthy if my thoughts are negative. And learning how to have and you have to work at it. You have to because you have to break old habits up. You know, there you go again until you get yourself into a place that you can you can look at technology, you can look at life, you can look at the future, and instead of saying it's all bad and the good old days are gone, you can say, the good old days are ahead, and I got to go see what's going to happen next.
00:42:38
Speaker 3: This is there's so much wisdom in what you just said.
00:42:40
Speaker 1: This idea that we have to sacrifice to help others, I don't believe that right. I think when we help each other, when we help others, we help ourselves.
00:42:48
Speaker 2: That's right.
00:42:49
Speaker 1: And when we find those opportunities we call that mutual benefit. It's one of our principles.
00:42:52
Speaker 2: That's right.
00:42:53
Speaker 1: When we find opportunities to succeed by helping each other succeed, you expand the pie.
00:42:57
Speaker 2: Oh, yes, everybody's better off everybody. If you've ever been to the hospital to visit somebody who was sick and you came in to encourage them and left encourage that's right. It's the most shocking thing in your life because you came in there to lift the burden up off of them, and they fool around and lift the burden up off from you. All of us have something to offer. That's right, we have something to give to me. Success requires metrics. Yes, you'll only know that you've gone a yard if you've got some measurement to measure with a mouth is signified by some metric. How do you how do you measure success as the operation of what you're trying to do to be the people?
00:43:38
Speaker 3: You know, you're only as good as the information that you've got.
00:43:41
Speaker 1: Right, if you're going to make decisions about groups to support, programs, to begin projects, to walk away from because they didn't work, you've got to have the data. You've got to have the information and the information that powers that fuels the social sector, whether that's philanthropy or government programs.
00:44:01
Speaker 3: It's lousy, it's really bad information.
00:44:04
Speaker 1: And so we shouldn't be surprised that a lot of the outcomes that we see in the social sector, in government programs or allows the outcomes. You know, what is it sixty seventy years of the War on poverty, twenty trillion dollars from philanthropy and government programs, and when what do we have to show for it? When I look at the outcomes? You know, I think at best you can say we've made poverty a little bit easier to endure, maybe, but still very difficult to escape. And so this question of how do you measure is so so important. At Stand Together about four years ago, we introduced a novel concept in the social sector. We said, if our goal, ultimately our goal of everything that we do, no matter what the program is, our goal is to help empower people to become their best self. We believe that people have potential. We help We helped to empower them to realize their potential. How can we find out whether a program for the homeless, a program that's a women's shelter, a program for education, different programs. How can we find out whether they're working? The novel concept of this, how about we ask the people who've been served? Right, all of this measurement all of the data. We measure inputs, how much money was spent, We measure outputs, how many beds were filled.
00:45:26
Speaker 3: Very seldom do.
00:45:27
Speaker 1: We measure outcomes. And who knows the outcome best. It's the people who are struggling. Absolutely, And so this project we call Customer First Measurement, and it's a data platform that artificial intelligence. We talked about the technology tools enabling people to succeed if we apply them right. It's an example of that. It's a data platform that through texts because most people these days now have a phone, will follow up with somebody who's been referred or who's seen a nonprofit organization or a government service, three days, three weeks, three months.
00:46:00
Speaker 3: Whatever the right interval is, how to go that's good.
00:46:04
Speaker 1: Is this a project that met your needs that's important to know or is this a project that transformed your life? Because if it's a project that transformed your life, we want to know more about that project. We want to bring resources to that project, and we want to most importantly recommend other people in a similar position they go to that project and.
00:46:20
Speaker 3: Not the one that didn't meet their needs.
00:46:21
Speaker 2: So this.
00:46:23
Speaker 1: Is a to my mind, this is a project and this approach again believe in people, the people who are struggling. They are not problems to be solved. They are most often the source of the solution. And if we believe that they have the knowledge that can fuel this whole social sector. To my mind, a project like this, like customer first measurement, it can transform the entire social sector, turn it on its head and actually focus on. Are we helping the people that are being served not just to overcome whatever barriers in front of them, but to transform themselves so that whatever barrier comes are going.
00:47:00
Speaker 2: To be Okay, that's excellent. You know, I have met a lot of people who have started on this entrepreneurial journey, and as you know, it is not easy. No, no, what can we do to make that more palatable and more successful? I mean, we can go in the HQ app, we can encourage each other, we can be exposed to tutorials, we can learn better how to officially do what we do. Most time, most of the time people go into business because they have a talent, but not a teaching and so we can do that part of it. We can do grants, we can help people to get up on their feet. But what else can we do to be able to facilitate the American dream and bring it down out of the sky and put it within the reach of the average person who's struggling to make bills meet.
00:47:56
Speaker 1: Well, this is definitely an instance of the teacher asking the student, you have you have the wisdom on this one?
00:48:01
Speaker 3: Bishop.
00:48:02
Speaker 1: I mean, one of the reasons that we were immediately attracted to working with each other those those many years ago, is because of this metaphor that you've come up with of good soil. And so I think the first thing that we have to do is we have to recognize that communities that are underinvested are not underinvested because they don't have value.
00:48:24
Speaker 3: They are good soil.
00:48:25
Speaker 1: That requires the cultivation, the planting within, and the support, the nurturing to realize the potential. And to me, that is and and you say it much better than I just did, but to me that is, that is. That is the answer to your question. And then and then it's how how do we do that? And and I think, you know, to my mind, we have to follow the lead of those entrepreneurs. You know, we're not here to tell them what to do. We're here to ask them what we can do and what and what they need. And often that's that's trust, that's experience, that's camaraderie. And yes, that's capital, that's investment, but it's that whole ecosystem that you surround them with. You know, people look at entrepreneurs as business leaders, and certainly they are, and they create value for themselves, their families, their communities by providing a service and by bringing capital into those communities, and it's it's exponential that it compounds. But I think they're more than that. I think entrepreneurs are the heroes of our society because if we we believe in progress, right, we believe that no matter how well we're doing now, we can always do better. Who are the ones that are taking the risk to discover what comes next? They're the entrepreneurs, and so they're driving us forward, not just through their business, but through their courage and through their discovery. And it's the entrepreneurs that are helping to to redefine what's possible and to move us forward.
00:49:54
Speaker 3: So what do we need to do.
00:49:55
Speaker 1: We need to encourage them, we need to support them, and we need to believe in them because they are really helping us to make sure that we do all we can into the future.
00:50:02
Speaker 2: My mom had a habit of doing something on Sundays. We would go to a restaurant that we couldn't afford to eat in and we would go there and have dessert. She put us in an atmosphere with people who were going places and doing things until it felt natural. Success doesn't feel natural to somebody who's only known struggle, and if you've always nursed at the breastplate of struggle, success seems foreign, and you will go back to struggle just because it's familiar. People ask why I do abusive for him and go back to the same man again. Sometimes it's because it's familiar. Why do x cons end up back in jail again? Because it's intimidating to come out in the world where there are no phone boosts anymore, there no taxi cabs in the world has changed, and they go back to what's familiar. Change your familiar and go into new territory until you put it on and it becomes a part of your life. Learn how to golf, learn how to play chess, learn how to do something that's different than what you normally do. You don't have to be good at it. You can suck at it. You can do like I do and eat more grass than you do ball. But it's okay because it's not the golf that you're going for. It's a camaraderie and it's the listening and overhearing things that irrigate the way you think with another perspective that changes your life. Chapter number eight. Be the people you.
00:51:33
Speaker 1: Know, we work with these entrepreneurs that are solving problems in communities, and two of them have used the same phrase with me, which which I think captures what you just said. They say, we dream what we see. Yeah, we dream what we see, and if all we see is struggle, we don't dream beyond that.
00:51:51
Speaker 2: That's right.
00:51:51
Speaker 1: But if we see people who are like us, who have overcome barriers like we've overcome, we see that we can dream that that can be us as well. And so I think what you just said is so smart and so important. Get out there and experience other other things and set your sights higher than you might otherwise. It's it's it's a big part of some of the secret to the successful organizations we support.
00:52:15
Speaker 2: I just hope the people who have been listening at us are as excited as we are and motivated as we are. I'm ready to go out and slay a giant somewhere.
00:52:24
Speaker 3: Let's do it.
00:52:24
Speaker 2: After talking to you, I think it's I think it's highly, highly possible, And I hope you are really taking in the sincerity the death and the wisdom that's being imparted to you to share today. Thank you for doing that for us. One of the things you mentioned. You alluded to a campaign and costs you have now called be the People.
00:52:46
Speaker 3: Be the People.
00:52:47
Speaker 2: Yes, And when I first heard that title, it reminded me of a conversation I had while I walk around the house talking to myself. So you might want to learn about that way. Yeah, yeah, yeah, talking to myself. I was just frustrated us. Somebody how to do something. Somebody had to do something. A voice inside of me said, why can't that somebody be you?
00:53:07
Speaker 1: You've said this to me before, when you look at the problems that people are facing. The message to the American people is we are the people that we've been waiting exactly. You are the people that you've been waiting exactly. And that's what Be the People is. It's a call to action too.
00:53:26
Speaker 2: And not just for one group. I noticed the diversity that you included around the table takes all of them. Martin Luther King the third to all types of people from different walks of life, for an infusion of thought and perspective that often people are trying to fix it force and not with us.
00:53:46
Speaker 3: That's right.
00:53:47
Speaker 2: You seem to be more inclusive in your thought process. Is that natural or did you think that.
00:53:54
Speaker 1: Through Well, you know, I appreciate you you're recognizing that, and it's certainly the thing that attracts to me and stand together to this project Be the People. But Be the People is a collaborative project between dozens of organizations. At this point, there's fifty two members of this National Leadership Council, which you've been so kind to join you. And so what you see is the product of the experience of so many groups and individuals, people who have come to a similar conclusion that if we want the kind of country that we know that we can have, then it's up to each of us to find the part that we can play to make things better.
00:54:31
Speaker 3: And that's the idea of be the People.
00:54:33
Speaker 1: If we want a country of the people, by the people, and for the people, it's up to each one of us to play our part to be the people.
00:54:40
Speaker 3: And so, you know, at a time when.
00:54:44
Speaker 1: The majority of Americans have lost faith in each other, right, And I saw a study the other day which has been very formative for me. The Pew Research Center has been tracking this for thirty plus years. They ask the American people, do you believe that the American people can solve our own problems? And over the last thirty years, it's, you know, sixty percent say yes. Sometimes it's seventy percent say yes. For the past three years, it's less than half half the people say they believe that we can solve our own problems. And when you lose faith in each other, you know, bad things happen. And so be the people. Is an opportunity to connect every person, every person to the opportunity to make a difference in the lives of others and to make a difference in their community. And the thing about this, we talked about this, we're not pitching anybody. We know this is what people want. The majority of people, when you ask them what does it mean to live the good life, they'll tell you it means making a difference in the lives of those that I care about, the lives of those.
00:55:47
Speaker 3: In my community.
00:55:48
Speaker 1: But when you ask people how you doing it that, only about thirty percent of Americans say they feel like they're fulfilling that that aspiration, that goal.
00:55:57
Speaker 3: So there's this huge.
00:55:58
Speaker 1: Gap between what people want to do do and frankly, what we need everybody to do if we want the kind of future that we know, we can have huge gap between that and what people are actually doing. So be the people helps to bring the opportunities to make a difference in a community. Hundreds, ultimately thousands of organizations that are doing the real work in communities to solve problems in people's lives, together with the tens of millions of Americans who are already raising their hand and saying they want to help.
00:56:26
Speaker 3: They just don't know how.
00:56:28
Speaker 2: You know, the thing about it is, this is not really a new concept. It's been in the dna of your organization for a long time. You've been in the grassroots working with people who have been previously incarcerated. You've been working with us because so health and entrepreneurs to get up on their feet and show them that you do have the power to get access to capital and get a push, get a shove to get started. Once you get rolling, you got to roll on your own. But we want to get you started, and you've helped to do that, and we're very, very grateful to be in partnership with you and doing that. You've and that's just a miniscule part of all the things that you've done around the world. Philosophically, You've been doing this for a long time, but I want to point out something. Two hundred and fifty years sounds like a long time for somebody that's not quite seventy yet. But in actuality, we're a very young country.
00:57:24
Speaker 3: That's right.
00:57:25
Speaker 2: We're a very adolescent country, and we bear all the attributes of adolescents. Who am I, Why am I? Where am I? Don't tell me anything, I'll do it on my own. You know, we're going through through the adolescence.
00:57:40
Speaker 3: I have a twelve year old. You just described my breakfast this morning.
00:57:45
Speaker 2: We're going through that, and we need to be parented and stewarded, yes, through this transition. Because the founding fathers had a brilliant idea. They didn't always live up to it, but they had a brilliant idea. We must realize that the idea is still embryotic compared to what it's ultimately going to be if our generation passes the test of making it bigger and making it better and making it more inclusive. And inclusion has become a dirty word, but inclusion is up and down the streets of America. Now.
00:58:21
Speaker 1: Look, every time we have done more as a country to expand the we in we the people, we have all benefited. We have done better, and so I couldn't agree with you more. The project of America is never done. The problem that a lot of people have when they think about that is that that project is for somebody else to do. It's for the experts on high to do to us, and that's never worked.
00:58:46
Speaker 3: No, it is for all.
00:58:48
Speaker 1: Of us, with our own lived experience to find how we are the best people to solve the problem in front of us, and for all of us to realize this project. Can I tell you you said this is a product of a of a lot of work we've done, and he couldn't be more right. Can I tell you a story about something that inspired this. Dozens of experiences over the past twenty years have inspired this for us. But one of them is in your backyard. And I wonder if you know Billy Daide Middle School. Yes, in South Dallas. It's a rough place. First time I was there was about ten years ago, and I was invited in by a group that we work with out of Dallas, a group called Urban Specialists.
00:59:27
Speaker 3: An Urban Specialist at the.
00:59:28
Speaker 1: Time was led by a man who became a dear friend and a mentor of mine, got named Omar Jahwar. Omar was a bishop, and he was the first guy that the State of Texas put into the prison system to negotiate gang truces, and they did that when he was nineteen, which kind of tells you just how brilliant this guy was. And Omar ran an Urban Specialist, which was a group of people, most of them for incarcerated, many of them gang involved, who had kind of reformed their life, and they would go into schools and they'd put their arm around the kids who were kind of repeating the same mistakes that these guys had made. It's usually about ten percent of the kids that caused most of the trouble in a school, and they're not gonna listen to anybody, but they're gonna listen to Anton Lucky, who was Omar's partner at Even Specialists, who used to run the Blood's gang out of Dallas, and say, hey, don't make the same mistakes I did. So the story I want to share though, is this is about eight years ago something like that. The principal at Billy Dade Middle School, her name was Emily Washington, phenomenal woman. She had a vision for how to approve this school, and so she started a project that she called a day for fathers.
01:00:47
Speaker 3: Very simple.
01:00:48
Speaker 1: She said, look, Tuesday at eight thirty, all the fathers of the young men in this and the kids in this middle school show up. We're gonna spend a day together, and you're gonna put your arm on their shoulder and you're going to show them you know how to look people in the eye, how to have self respect and respect others. As soon as they issued this call, they realized this could backfire because a lot of the kids at the school didn't have a father in their life right, and so if everybody else's dad showed up but not there as they could reinforce the negative. It's about sixty kids in the school. They didn't have a dad that was going to show up. So Principal Washington turned to Omar and Antong at Urban Specialists and said, hey, can you guys put out a call to the community. Any men in the community in anywhere in Dallas show up eight thirty on Tuesday and be a surrogate.
01:01:35
Speaker 3: For these kids. Put your hand on their shoulder and spend the day with us.
01:01:40
Speaker 1: They needed about sixty They figured they probably wouldn't get sixty, then maybe they'd get twenty.
01:01:43
Speaker 3: Maybe they get thirty. They could double these kids up.
01:01:46
Speaker 1: Simple email that urban specialists sent out to the people that they knew in Dallas eight thirty in the morning on Tuesday. It wasn't twenty men, it wasn't sixty men. It was six hundred men from Dallas all over the city, not just South Dallas, all over the city.
01:02:05
Speaker 3: They showed up. They had a double and triple up guys on kids. Yeah, and to me, that's the lesson of the potential in our country.
01:02:13
Speaker 2: I think that's what every well not every but most Americans are thinking, what can I do?
01:02:20
Speaker 3: I do?
01:02:21
Speaker 2: You know? And you're sitting here listening at us right now or watching us and trying to figure out how do I get involved with the people? You are the people number one? And being empowered by what can they do beyond that to really get in grafted.
01:02:38
Speaker 1: Well be the people puts a name to a movement that is already happening in communities across the country. So the first thing they can do is keep doing what you're doing.
01:02:46
Speaker 2: Right.
01:02:46
Speaker 3: The story I just told you is a story.
01:02:48
Speaker 1: There's stories like that, and we're in thirteen hundred communities that stand together, and you can tell a similar story of people showing up when they're asked to help. It happens all the time, just not breaking through. So step number one is keep doing what you're doing. But if you're not involved in your community, do two things. Ask yourself, what do you care about? What is a problem that you see that you wish somebody would solve? And then do something to help the people that are struggling or the people that just need a little bit of a handout to solve a problem. Do something to help others. And then what's most.
01:03:24
Speaker 3: Important is tell people about it.
01:03:26
Speaker 1: Yes, because when you tell people about your experience, guess what I did. You know, I showed up and I shoveled my neighbor's driver, or I showed up with Habitat for Humanity and I spent you know, a few hours building a wall. If you've got three seconds, if you've got three minutes, if you've got three hours, you can make a difference. And if you don't have that opportunity, if you don't know where that is. Bethepeople dot org is a digital platform that brings those problem solvers in communities together with anybody who wants to make a difference, and then it allows you to tell your story, because when you do, you inspire others to do it.
01:03:59
Speaker 2: I think one of the things that goes even deeper than that. You have to first realize that you have a seed, a talent, a gift that is uniquely yours. Whether you're a homemaker or whether you're a chemical engineer, you have something to bring to the table that would make a difference. And then out of that capsule, out of that seed, out of that embryo, building a circle of people that broaden it, that have what you don't have. It's the beginning of transformation. That's what we do with good soil HQ, and you can download that and be a part of that. If you're an entrepreneur interested in it, maybe been scared of it, didn't think you had what it took. It takes more than talent now, because just because you're just because you can fry chicken means doesn't mean you how to open up a chicken shast, right, okay, But it does mean that you can possibly surround yourself with the leadership, the business people, the accountants, the acumen to become successful. You may not realize that you are the people. It is very easy, especially if you grew up in an environment where somebody told you what you were not. It is very easy to get to the point that you think you have nothing to offer, or I'm too old, or I'm retired, or it's too late. You are never too old or too young to make a difference. Whether you're a kid and a grade school playground to whether you're a senior citizen and a senior living facility. You can still you have a light to shine, and the smallest light will light up the darkest room, It will eat that darkness up. And I hope today that we have been in some way compelling persuasive. You've certainly been charismatic enough to cause people to think that that it is possible. And I hope that you walk away with the idea that there are other people like you, whether they get on the TV or not, who really care about this country going into its fullest maturity, its brightest light, the opiate of what the founding fathers hope for it to be. We've got a lot of work to do. We're long ways from that idea that city set up on a hill, but we can climb to the top of that hill, and our generation owes it to the next generation to strap on our boots and start moving in the right direction. I don't want to take advantage of your time, but as we prepare to close, what do you think about in this hour, with these tools, with this benefit, with the fact that everybody can make a movie from a phone, what can we begin to do to dispel the mississ seems it's like all the people who want to produce product are the very people who we don't need to hear from.
01:07:07
Speaker 1: Well, look, you know, Charles Cook and I co authored a book called Believe In People, and I think that that is the message that every single person has something to contribute, and the solutions to our problems are going to start with a deep belief in people, in all people. And then everybody needs a little bit of help to figure out how they can contribute. And so if we can, if we can help people to discover their spark, and then as you say, you know, give a little bit of oxygen, right, let it grow. You're going to light the way for others to come into that project, that conversation, and ultimately that's what it takes to move our country forward. It's what it's always taken to move our country forward. If you look at the great social movements, the things that have transformed our society for the best, it didn't start from the top down. It started from everyday people who saw a problem and they figured out, what's the first thing that I need to do to start to solve that problem. They didn't figure out how to solve it all at once. And when other people said, you know what, I care about that too, and they went first, Now I'm going to join them, all of a sudden, you've got a society that's been transformed by everyday people from the bottom up.
01:08:24
Speaker 2: I loved the fact that you had the courage to say that the change is going to come from the bottom.
01:08:30
Speaker 3: From the bottom up every single time.
01:08:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, I love that. That was my favorite line because so many times we tried to do it from the top down and it never got down to the people who needed it most un till they got discouraged. I want to say this before we close it. I think it's very very important. I think that Brian and I represent a lesson just by sitting here together. We don't look alike, we're not the same skin tone, we didn't go to the same schools. We may not have the same proclivities or habits. But we found common ground in coming together. And in order to find common ground, you have to lose your fear of different. You have to lose your fear of different. It is not my job to make Brian be TD. It is not my job.
01:09:22
Speaker 3: That'll be a hard job.
01:09:26
Speaker 2: Yeah no, And it's surely in my job to be him. But we complement each other real will our differences in nature, the be cross pollinates follen from a lot of different flowers that cause us fruit to spring forth. So get out of the little bubble, the safety zone, the little cubicle that you're in, and overcome the fear to engage people in the slightest ways who seem to have similar values as you do. And let's get this thing, starting it off the ground and get it up and go on. Two hundred and fifty years, I will celebrate fifty years in ministry at the same time you're celebrating. We're celebrating two hundred and fifty years in this country. We've come a long ways in this country, We've got a long ways to go. My great grandmother was born in this country a slave, and her great great grandson is helping to shape in some small way, the texture the tenor of the destiny of this country. It doesn't look like it all the time because the news never shows the planes that land. It only shows the ones that crash. But there are changes coming hold on. We're going through some rough waters and some turbulent times. I was looking at the Stark Market that's going up and down, and it's got a little flutter in it right now. There's a lot of things going on right now that would give you angst, depending on where you are in life. But there's been that before. We've seen it go all the way down to the bottom and we came back up again. We've seen wars and rumors of wars and we came back up again. We are strong people, and we are only strong as our weakest link. So let's get together and help make a difference. It has been an amazing joy to listen at your brilliance and your expertise.
01:11:24
Speaker 1: Well, thank you very much for the opportunity, Bishop Jackson. I will maybe and my comments where we started. Grateful for the opportunity, grateful for the partnership and all that you do.
01:11:35
Speaker 3: So thank you.
01:11:35
Speaker 2: It's an honor for me Thank you, sir, God bless you. Now let's get to work and be the people that we've been waiting on. I'm TD Jakes and I'm proud to have this opportunity to introduce or share with those of you who don't know this brilliant, brilliant individual, and more importantly, to challenge you to be the people that we're calling for. This might be your next chapter, think about it and turn the page. Hey everybody, I want to take this time to thank you for watching the Next Chapter podcast. If this conversation inspired you, helped you reflect on an idea, or spark something new inside of you, make sure to like, comment, and subscribe so you don't miss future episodes. Remember, life isn't about how you begin, It's about how you finished strong. So start your next chapter with us right here. Every week