What Is Ethical Investing & Principled Entrepreneurship | Andreas Widmer

When you go in and decide is this CEO, is this chairman, do they have a harvester or a creator attitude? And I think that is at the core of a long term value creation.

Welcome to the Alternative Investor, the definitive show for investors seeking private alternative investments. Here's your host, Matt Johns.

Today I had the pleasure of speaking with Andreas Widmer, entrepreneur, author and director of the SIOKA center for Principled Entrepreneurship at the Catholic University of America. Andreas expertise was shaped largely by his time as a member of the Swiss Guard, serving Pope John Paul II and then sharpened through decades of experience as a global entrepreneur and investor. After leaving the Vatican, Andreas launched a successful career in international business. He held executive roles in tech companies ranging from startups to multinational corporations. Over the course of his career, he's contributed to the launch of over 100 technology based businesses in the US and developing countries, many with a strong emphasis on human dignity and economic empowerment. He also serves on numerous non profit boards and even co founded the Seven Fund, a philanthropic organization focused on finding enterprise solutions to poverty. Andreas has been featured in numerous media outlets including the Financial Times, cnn, npr, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune and Bloomberg News. In our conversation, we focused on the human side of due diligence, assessing the ethical fabric of a company. Andreas graciously shared some of his own experiences, both wins and even painful lessons that shaped how he views business and illustrated how to assess a company. Andreas has a tremendous joy for life and the positive value of business in the world. I'm really excited to share his perspective with you. Welcome to my conversation with Andreas Widmer. I've got to talk about the Swiss Guard. You were kind of in that role at around the time that he had faced an actual assassination attempt himself. I'm just curious. It was, it was right after. What kind of courage did that take from you and your colleagues at that time who decided that you wanted to come in and protect the man who was just targeted by somebody?

Well, you know the Look, I was 20 years old and yes, I heard about this, but this. And I was in the military trying to be a tough guy or thinking I was a tough guy. And I actually went in there for all those reasons, the military reasons, not the religious reasons. And so for me, bring it on. Like I was happy to go. I was in the military for a year before in Switzerland and saw this opportunity to become a bodyguard. So none of this would scare me off. I head first in there. And the thing is if you, you adapt to your environment and this is what's in a way There was an attraction to, you know, that physical presence and everything. So it didn't phase me at all. The surprise eventually was, was the religious side of it to actually meet this. Meet John Paul ii, who was just a behemoth of. Of faith and. And. But was just a. A larger than life person. And that blew me away.

Yeah. I was actually with one of your colleagues this week, and he mentioned a really unique story. I think it was Dr. Abella, I think, was the one who mentioned it at Catholic University with you. But he had said that the Pope approached you at one point and singled you out, pointed at you and said something like, I'm praying for you in this moment. And that was a big point of.

Yeah, it has to do with this. Yes, exactly. That was right when I. It was one of my. One of my first assignments when I was so down and out and was regretting going there. And truth be told, I was actually so sorry for myself that I was actually, you know, and it was like, you know, way in the bowels of the whole thing, and I was actually crying and. And he came out, and I didn't expect that, but. But he came out of the. Of. Of where he was, and I was there and he noticed and. And he kind of embraced me and told me that we would work well together and that everything will be well. And that kind of said, I'll tell you what, I'm going to go pray right now for you. I'm gonna go say Mass and offer Mass for you. And it was. I consider that to be one of the key turning points in my life. His literally, his intercession by praying a Mass for me.

And your experience there, that all kind of became the subject of your first book from the CEO, but your most recent one is the Art of Principled Entrepreneurship. I read it recently, and it was your one.

Yeah, no, it was terrific.

It was terrific because it really. It's so engaging because it attaches itself to the human person. Everything else is about business strategy, the numbers, everything behind it, but it's about the human person and the dignity of the person behind the business and the people behind the business. So I'm curious, though, you wrote this at this particular time, why now?

Why.

Why do you feel like this needed to be said at this point in time?

You know, it has two reasons. Two reasons really, why I did it. Now, I have now taught for 10 years in business school before. I'm not an academic, okay? I don't have a PhD or a doctorate. I'm a business guy. I'M a startup guy. I help start companies and I grew companies. And now for 10 years, I'm seeing what students come in with, with their preconceptions, what society is telling them about business with what schooling is doing to them, quite frankly. And I would like to say this is what needs to be said now about business. There's fundamental misinformation out there about what business is and the mischaracterization often also a misuse of what the free market economy is. And I feel very strongly that I need to set this record straight, but not in a, you know, I'm not on the, on the global campaign. In a sense, what I'm doing is just to say what it is that I teach. Because once you teach, I love teaching and you get such a feeling with and for your students that you start to see where they're at and you can help them grow and progress into their own excellence. And so. But sometimes some of these issues, some of these preconceived notions that our culture is proposing about business and our attitude towards work are just not true. And I'm here to correct those. And you need to do this long before you, you know, I'm. I used to run a business strategy company. Okay, I know business strategy, but it's. But before you can do any of this, it's the fundamental why that makes all the difference. You can know all the strategy in the world isn't going to. To anything if you have the wrong why. And so I'm very interested in doing that first. And so I wrote a book about what I call principled entrepreneurship. And so I say what it is. And then at the end of the book, I also say, how do I teach this? How do you enthuse the next generation for this? The reason why I wrote it now was because of COVID Yeah. So many people had negative effects about this shutdown. And I feel somewhat guilty to say that I had a positive effect because it gave me time to do something like this. Writing a book is a long process and is painful, but I took this time and yeah, the reason why now is because it was my Covid project.

Did this lead to the center that you are the director of now or is it kind of the other way around?

Which.

Which led to the other.

It's the other way around. I. I have a friend, Arthur Sioka, Art Sioka, who's, who's. Who created one the second largest wine company in the world called the Wine Group. And he and I have been friends for many, many years, long Before I taught. And when I came here to Catholic University and started teaching here, he and I founded this center for principled entrepreneurship together because we very much felt this is. We have the same vision of what business is. And that's the other touching story for me is that while I. While I wrote this book, I asked Art if he. If I could use him as a story. Because I'm just a super fan of what this guy did. It was 84 at the time. And I remember I called him and I said, listen, Art, I'm going to write this book now, and I want you to be sort of the red thread in it. And he's just like in his. How he was. He says, well, Andres, I have good news and bad news. And I say, what's the bad news? And he says, well, my cancer came back. They gave me three months to live. I said, well, what's the good news? And he says, well, I have no appointments until then. And so he offered. This is just how he was. And he says, look, I'm. You can record. You can ask me any questions, and we can record this. And then you. You finish this when I'm, you know, after I go to the Lord. And so we had. We also had death and dying, always as a part of our conversation. And Art didn't die in three months. He died in two years. He died the day that the book went to print. So he saw everything. He helped choose the COVID the title. I chose the title, but he liked it. And he's not the whole book. And I ended up. He died on a Saturday. The book went to print on Monday. And I did one quick change way at the end, just at the very end of the book. And otherwise it's exactly as he proved it, in a sense. And that was very, very providential that we were able to do that.

Okay.

When.

When people are going through that last phase of life and. And having the unique experience of knowing they're going through that last phase in life, they usually unveil some things that may not have been revealed or even understood before them. Was there anything that you learned in that time or that experience with him that you may not have otherwise?

Yeah, I find very strongly. So Art and I love to argue with each other. We would call it fight. And we like a good fight, you know, Know, because iron sharpens iron. I'm not. I love conflict in that sense, in. In a sense of iron sharpening iron. And. And it's so that a fight is never an existential fight, because you and I We should be able to fight about a topic. And just like we would wrestle. I'm, I'm, you know, when you wrestle, you don't try to kill the other guy. You're just trying to measure. And so with an argument, you should try to fight about it. And so Art and I thought about all kinds of things during this whole time, during these whole two years. And I was able to see that somebody who is literally on their deathbed has a very different perspective of what long term camps. This is why I'm so humbled, but also grateful to be able to give you this book. And what, because I tried to let him, you know, he was of course, a way more successful business person than I am and that to tell you his story and to allow these things where he felt very strongly from his life's perspective that I pulled put those things into special emphasis. For example, the fifth, the fifth pillar of principled entrepreneurship is always think like an entrepreneur her. And the whole explanation behind it is what Art told me. That's told 100% from art. And I put it there because it was one of his, it was the underpinning of his worldview. And so I, I left that as raw as he told it to me. And so that, that is from somebody who's looking at all of life and say, this is what matters.

Well, that paints that whole picture in a different perspective then. I'm glad you mentioned that.

Huh.

I'm gonna have to go back and read that now. But you mentioned that he was a far more successful entrepreneur than, than you've.

Been so far, at least I'd say.

But, but you are. You have been an incredibly successful entrepreneur, Having started over 100 companies or at least been a part of that. You've had a few exits yourself. But I do know that there was one point where you had a successful exit until it wasn't that you found out that the company on the other side was fraudulent. Now how did that experience maybe tell me a little bit about what that experience was like and how did that shape your perspective moving forward in these kinds of transactions and your interactions with other people in business?

Yeah, it was with Dragon Systems innovator, inventor of the speech recognition. I was a part of that in the management team. And we sold that company to a company called Learn out in House Speed from Belgium, NASDAQ listed. And it turned out that we had a stock swap and that country was fraudulent. And you know, this is after you hire Arthur Anderson and all of this, there's no guarantees, right? And Three months after we were bought, I was, I was now an executive in this new company or in the merged company. And it turned out that the whole, that they were lying. And the most basic, most basic kind of fraud, meaning just basic accounting fraud, like saying there were sales that weren't and stuff. And that was, you know, that was a $600 million deal and their company was much larger than they did a lot of these deals. It shook my confidence and my faith in the market economy or capitalism to its core. And I'm. I come from a small village in Switzerland. I come to America. I live the American dream. I was part of FTP software, brought, you know, ported the Internet to the PC, then part of Dragon Systems. I mean, but I was 20, I don't know, 30 years old at that time and already had two, Two major exits with companies that changed the landscape. To me, the American dream was, was just an amazing thing. And, and than this. And at the time I saw the protests against this, and so I had to. It was the reckoning to say, can I be a Catholic capitalist? And today I'm glad I asked that question because much of what I do today is to actually help other people find their answer to this question. I teach at the Catholic University of America, so I'm helping our students here to figure this out. And what it triggered and which is, I'm tremendously grateful for, is it triggered a soul search, but also the academic search for me to understand my faith better, Christianity better. I ended up getting a master's degree in ministry theology. And instead of going back to the business school, I joined Monitor Group, know the, the Harvard Business Professors consulting firm. I, I joined that strategy firm and I led one of their divisions and spun it out, which was a business strategy for uncertain environments. It was called OTF Group. And, and that gave me, in my opinion, a crash course on business strategy. I mean, it was Michael Porter's company. And so, so I, I got very quickly on what business strategy is all about and then put the two together. And my first book, the Pope and the CEO, is really a book I wrote for myself to say, here's what I learned. It's my answer to the loss that I had with Dragon. And I can honestly say that the meaning, you know, that saying in the Bible, what does it, what does it benefit man if he wins the world but, you know, wins all the riches, but loses his soul? And I think I hope I win my soul or win my entry into heaven some at the end of my life, but I feel that That's. I did correct a lot of my views and I corrected a lot of my whys and hows through this research, through this soul searching. And what I wrote in the book, I wrote primarily from me, and I'm sort of sharing it with you of what I. What I found. And today I regard this as important, as a pivotal point in my life, as having met John Paulus.

Wow. Okay. So I was going to say we've had two major pivotal points here. And actually, in the book, it's interesting you brought up this. Really, it was almost kind of a. It seemed like not a major thing in the book, but I think it was a really important perspective about the difference between company owners and just stock traders or people who just trade on behalf of. So this is a great example because you're talking about a company that. It was on nasdaq. I mean, it was a tradable, at least publicly tradable stock in some way, shape or form. And. And there are people who are just kind of trading based on the numbers, but you're talking about ownership. And then you also dive in to a lot of sustainability.

So I'm.

I'm curious to get your take on that. What does that mean when it comes to investing? How should investors think about the two things differently? Is there merit to both?

Well, it's a complex question. You know, the last thing that let me go back to saying, you talk about sustainability and this and that. The why is important. What is work all about, Therefore, what is business all about? And what is the end and the goal of business? And I'm saying that because what struck me is that the last thing the guy who ran the other company who bought us, I ended up. I was in the senior management, so I ended up reporting to the new CEO of the people who bought us or who acquired us. And I was a very close collaborator to this guy who ended up being apparently the guy who cheated or. Yeah, some. And the last thing he told me before he ended up going to jail was Andreas, you know, don't get me wrong. There's no, no offense, no bad feelings. It's just business that gave me what this does. It gives you a. This is. It gives you the view of the inner life of the person in terms of saying, why am I doing this and what am I doing? What are we doing here? If you misunderstand what business is about, then you will also say at the end, hey, no offense, it's just business. You know, that's like in a boxing match where you say well, the, the point here in the boxing match truly is to hit the other guy. So when you hit the other guy you say, hey, no, no offense, just boxing. If business is to cheat the other guy and to just make as much, get as much money, a zero sum game, I got to take it from somewhere. If that's your understanding and you, then you say it's just business. I have a fundamental problem with that. And the interesting thing I found out and that speaks to sustainability and things like that, I'm telling you, the interesting thing I found about that is that this is done from both sides. So you have on the one hand this Wolf of Wall street attitude. Greed is good and it has an underlying understanding that we're all this, the boiler room, we're all in this and it's a zero sum game, grab what we can. On the other side you have this, I'm going to call it corporate social responsibility. It's, it's a, you know, I know it's a cliche and there's a lot of good things about corporate social responsibility of people who did. But what sticks, what, what sticks at the end, it's like with the marketing message, right? What sticks at the end is business people have to give back, right? They have to give back. Well, what. Think about what that means. If you have to give back, you will have taken something, if you may, if you, if you draw that to the conclusion, you realize that they also say business is bad, actual act of business is a bad thing and therefore you have to make up for it afterwards. So both of these, the, the, the, the CSR and the, the sort of the Friedman justification, which is both this again I realized that the two come from a different direction. But what's stuck in our culture is the greed is good and you get to do this dirty deep, but you have to give back afterwards. At the end of the day, what we're looking at is the consensus in our society that business is an evil thing to do, that it's a zero sum game and one loses and one wins. And that is exactly what I'm trying to show. Sustainability to me doesn't mean it's a non profit company or we're singing kumbayaho to each other. Sustainability to me means business has a very simple question at the core of it. And the question is how may I help you? And if how I help you creates more value than it costs me to create the help, we call that a business and that's sustainability. And we can go into details, but it's I just want to make sure that we understand at the core what this is about. Unless we answer that, unless we answer the question, is work the way we do this in this system? Is this an evil thing or not? I know people who are on the CSR side, who are on the. Even on the Christian and the church side, who when they do business, they say all bets are off. You see, because the seeing of this as an evil thing is so deep that it's like if you and I were in a box ring, I wouldn't hesitate to hit you. Because that's the point of boxing. Right. Well, if we propose business as a bad, then good people do really bad things in business.

But what you're saying is that business provides value, right? And that that value is unique to the business, unique to the people in it.

The.

Unique to the.

The whatever.

The business is organized and structured to perform. And that value is purportedly a good for society in and of itself. Right. And maybe you can elucidate that a little bit more too, because I know that's what you dive into.

Bit. Yeah. What I gave you is a view of business that I think is false, misleading, and is a fraud. Just like we can abuse love or, or would use food or something or something like that and deviate it from its actual intention and its actual purpose. The actual purpose of business and of work is to imitate God. Let me explain the part of us. If you look at Genesis, it's something John Paul would point out. If you look at Genesis, we're just like the animals. We're made just like the animals. That goes in clay, you know, dust to dust. God made us with the clay because this is the material we are all, all physical things here made out of. But at the end, in comparison to the animals, God sets out to say, nobody is here like me and then starts to make this being with the clay, but just like the other animals. But what God did on top of it is to breathe his spirit into this clay thicker us. And the condition that he made is to say, I want somebody like me. Well, he made somebody in clay for which God doesn't look like that. It's the spirit part, in a sense, the spirit that's indwelling in us in fleshliness. That's the godly part that explains why the animal can't work and why I can work. The reason why the animal cannot work is because it's an animal. It has no choices. It's a. It's an object. The reason why I can work and create. And create a business and create new products and services is because I'm made in the image and likeness of the Creator. I have a mandate that at the end, God made this Garden of Eden to a certain extent and then said, hey, now, I made you in my image and likeness, meaning you are a creator. You have my creator spirit. You can make something out of nothing. Now you continue this garden, and we call that work. And so we can now create companies that by working, imitate God and make new plants, new products, new services. And it's a direct reflection in physical continuation of God's work that is the core of business. And we can now work for each other and say, can I, you know, can I help you? How may I help you? And we can create the value for each other in a way just like God would make food or feed for animals or for fish or the soil for plants and all of that, that we actually create that kind of value together. But if we do so, we have a choice, because we're like God. We can choose, in a sense, between good and evil, right? And we can choose when we say, how may I help you? We can choose to create goods that are truly good or provide services that truly serv. Earth or not. I can create goods that will. Or goods that will addict you or goods that will kill you or service that. That will, in a sense, abuse you and demean you. And so there we have there this godly thing again, that what a company has is this power. What you have in your work is this power to do good or evil. And that is a great responsibility. And by living out this responsibility, we either follow God or we go away from God. Now, when we use work and we follow God, then we become more like God. Because you're imitating God. That is why the church says work is a path, a part of the path to holiness. And unless we understand that, we will forever do work the wrong way.

All right, so let's take these two things, and I want to say from the outside perspective, looking in, we. We judge companies all the time. We, we determine whether what they're doing is good or evil or, you know, anything like that. But as an investor, how do we approach these companies, especially private companies that we don't have all this public information about. But same is true for public companies that put on, you know, lipstick on a pig. Right? How do you. How do you assess. I'm going to call this. How do you do a. Values diligence on these companies? How do you look at them? I Use determine the heart of them.

I used to have a friend in Chicago who was a very successful investor. He had a whole portfolio that way outperformed the market. He had a questionnaire, he would send the CEO of the company and then he said, I invest in people, not products and not companies. And he would have a character questionnaire for that CEO and based on that, would invest or not invest to say, is this a person that I, you know, I would trust my money with? Yes or no. And if yes, then he would invest in a company. When that CEO left, he, he sold the shares no matter what. Like the company might still go up no matter what. And so that's, that's somebody who, who's looking at, at something beyond the, you know, performance of a company is always like a looking in a ship backwards. You know, see what they've been doing. Character is looking at their compass of seeing where they're going. And so how could you, how can you not ask for the captain's compass and look at them and test them a bit to see where this company is going? He has so. And I have to say, because I know you're going to ask me, he never shared it with me, of course, because he was a secret sauce and God rest his soul, he passed away. But he was very successful with this investment profile. But in the book I talk about this one example of an artsyoka who was able to create behavior or solicit behavior in a company that was values driven. It's one thing he told me once, he actually wrote when he first he ended up buying the buying it was a management led buyout and he was leading it. And he says, the first time I sit down and I'm writing a manual, an HR manual this thick. And I said, well, did you finish it? And he said yes. And then I said, so what did you do with it? And he said, I threw it away. Because what he ended up doing, and you'll see this in the book, what he ended up doing, is to write almost like the 10 pillars or the 10 inspirations or values of the company and say this, this is what we all agree with. And then from then on, instead of looking what other people did for it, although he did some of that, he defined what he could do to live in line with those values in front of the, you know, he always saw himself as a performer of the values in front of the company. And then people started to imitate him. Mimetic, basic memetics. And so I cannot overstate how important it is to know who is leading this company. And I. And if you, and if that person is truly invested in long term value creation and we can break into that a little bit.

Did Art ever make those 10 pillars or 10 values, whatever he called them, did he ever make that public or available to other investors or.

Yes, yes he did. And of course with him he did it specifically. It was a management buyout. So he left. He never changed. To this day it's a management owned company. It's just that it rotates and he created the incentive. So long he always felt like he told, you know, I must. I started in sales and so I guess I'm always a sales guy and in software sales, you know, early on I've done, I went through the whole 90s into the 2000s and in a way in a setting in venture capital based companies with a sales attitude, right. And he would tell me, oh, I got rid of sales incentives. I'm saying what he says, yeah, we have no quotas, no sales incentives. I'm saying that's crazy. I mean, so there's some hungry people there and you're not feeding them. I can tell you in my company I would lose my best salespeople. And he would look at me and say, well that's for your company. But those are not my best salespeople. What he meant is it's like when you go fishing, you use different bait for different fish. And he's looking for relationship salespeople who have a long term perspective and patience. They want high end rising wages, but they are in it for the long term to hit a home run. In his company, you wouldn't hit a home run unless you're there for 10 years. There's just not a chance. And he says, you know what, I will tell you this during your interview process that if you're into a short run and he burns all those ships, all the quotas, all the yearly incentives, all these kind of bonuses, he burns it so there's nothing left and there's no exit there. So that he puts the flag up and says 10 years from now that's the goal. And I have the privilege to talk to a lot of those people. And these are thousands of people who became very affluent by going along with Art to create long term value in that, in that industry, which by the way is much harder to compete in than anything I ever did. People think it's interesting cool that I was with that. I helped with tcp, ip, promote the Internet and, and then with Dragon, with speech recognition, you know, What? It's easy to sell a product. Nobody has ever, you know, which is like miraculous. But you sell table wine or, you know, that's like selling salt is like a commodity market of commodity markets. If you know how to do this and create a brand out of it and create brand loyalty, that's a great point. Hats off. And that's why I'm using art is way harder than what I've ever did in life. My life.

That, that's so interesting. So as you're looking at him, you're thinking about all the things that he did throughout, I guess, his career and throughout his company. What, what kinds of questions would you ask a leader of a company? I don't know if it'd be the CEO or otherwise, any kind of leadership to dive into their, their ethos, their, their heart to find out the why behind what they're doing.

So the number one thing is, and that shows where I'm a quarter guy, is what are your, what is your competitive advantage? How do you compete? And I definitely would want to hear that. It's the employees and if so, how. It's not just to say, well it's my employees. Yeah, but how, and how do you invest in that? How do you defend that competitive advantage against somebody else? And look, there's no way around it. There is only one investment with infinite return. Only one. It's not the stock market, it's not gold, it's not oil. It's the human person. And I want to know how you invest in your infinite return asset, right? Then it's, this is all kind of person centered stuff and, and team centered stuff. Of course I want to know, eventually see the stuff in terms of the, the strategy stuff with the five forces and, and, and competitive strategy and everything. You can watch it, you can watch a couple of YouTube videos and, and read some books or something and, and it'll come together pretty quickly. But to actually say, how do I get to know what matters to your employees? Like the two people, the three guys you have in shipping, what's their life goal? Do you know, like, do they have kids? Where do the kids go to school? Private school, you know, public school? What's, what's their goal in life? And, and the people in sales, how, you know, how do they sustain their sales? Who are the top private camps and how do they relate to them? How do you, can you show me how they solution sell, how they do relationship selling versus you know, just being opportunistic? How do you celebrate? What it tells me is that the wisdom of all of this is this, the first part is you have to invest in the one asset you have that has infinite return, which is the human person. That is true on the customer side as well. At the customer side, most purchase decisions are made with a primary emotional part. With primarily an emotional long term relationships where you start to develop something that has a long term return on investment. Many people are not interested in that. And don't say, oh, I don't have the patience for that. That's usually an indication to me. And this goes to Art's last principle or last pillar that I want to, that we need to paint. If you say, I don't have that time, I need a short return, then Art would say, well, that's exactly where it's at. Because there are two kinds of people. Where he says, always think like an entrepreneur. Know what he means is there's two kinds of people he ever met. He says, Andreas, I've met two. Everybody I meet I can put in one or the other other bucket. One bucket is harvesters and one bucket is creators. It's like in agriculture. He's a, he has a vineyard and he says there's people who are only showing up at harvest time and just harvest the heck out of this place and just squeeze everything out of this. If they could, they would, they would squeeze the plant itself to make wine. And there's those who are the creators and they're the ones who till the soil and to make sure that the sun isn't obstructed and to make sure it's water and the nutrients and not. And they prune and this and that, of course they harvest. But their primary thing is the health of the vineyard. And he says business, business is like this. When you're doing this, are you riding this company like a, like a rented bike, you know, you run it down the stairs and just, and just try to get from A to B. Or do you have reverence for this, for this community of people that builds this? This isn't just good, this isn't just about, and I may mean it in a negative way, this isn't simply about morality, it's also about good business. Yes, actually the two things are together. It's like with your life, the fact that you live a moral life isn't just about doing right now, doing the right thing right now, but it's also long term happiness and health. This is what's going to pay off when you're 90 years old too, just like now. And I think always remember this Chairman, is this person who runs this team, do they have a harvester or a creator attitude of a long term value creation?

That's interesting. Okay, so I'm going to go kind of piggyback off that right now and talk about some of the other stuff or touch on some of the other stuff that was earlier. Impact investing. Right now a lot of people are talking about that. It's become even more of a buzzword in recent years. You see the value of the company focusing on core competencies and impact investing often involves doing something external, something that may be outside of those core competencies, investing in something beyond the company itself to do something good in the world. What is your take on that as far as the value provides the value provided by the company?

I should say I always assume that people have good intentions. So I leave the bad intentions aside. The good intention here is the same intention that I have is to say business is an intrinsic force for good, force for good. And so people who want to have impact investing, they say, you know what I like patient investor, I like the term patient capital. Rather than, you know, anything that smells of business is actually non redemptive. You have to do something good aside of business to redeem it. I'm immediately my hackles go up because that's the ticket. You need to say, oh, boys will be boys, but we can be nice afterwards. Afterwards it's like I, I, I summarily reject that business qua business in the act of doing business has to be a redemptive thing or you shouldn't be doing. Why would you possibly do something that is not a good thing? So the, the business by the mere, mere existence of itself has to have. So the way I like to say it is the path of it has to be a good thing, not just the end of it. So in that sense, when you're looking for impact, the first impact I'd like you to have. So the fact that you will create goods that are truly good and service that truly serve is a given to me. Why would you give somebody something that kills them? That's just, that's just right. But in terms of your business, your lowest employee in the company, the least paid employee in the company, how do they live? Well, let me ask and this is something I think you should go into. I have a friend in Africa who has a business in Africa, a large, like a photo hunting lodge. Right. And so, and in, in southern Africa, like in Lesotho or something, they have this huge preserve and they, people can go there and photograph, you know, Wild animals and stuff. And his measure is this. There's a lot of people who say, oh, I'm a Christian entrepreneur, or I'm a Catholic entrepreneur, or I'm an ethical entrepreneur. Forget that. Don't tell me this beforehand. Show me what you're doing and what your results are. Because ethical is what ethical does to me. It's always suspicious when somebody comes at the flag before the fact. No, let's look at after the fact. So what he does, this friend of mine, what he measures is to say this game reserve how many of. And. And this is now for the African context. Put this into your own context wherever you live or whatever these companies are in the African context. How many of the people who work in that place have an actual house with their own four walls in it? And how is that growing year to year? How many of them sent their kids to school? How many of them have had running running water in their house? How many of them have a contribution for old age, you know, have savings for old age? How many of them can get a doctor when they need a doctor? You see, we can, we can talk about this around the world or this other place or so, but business as a business should be good in the path for everybody involved. And the primary people involved in this are of course, your employees. You're a steward of these employees, treat them well. And I like the treatment of them. Arthur. Arthur did this with the migrant workers who were. Because he was in California and this is the Vineyard and his place had never its own union because his door was open. He would go out there and have lunch with the migrant workers and say, tell me what you need. And they would have quinceaneras together and Christmas parties together. And he would always say, look, I'd rather pay you more and have you like to come here rather than nickel and dime your press and press you on it. And so it was at the time of Cesar Chavez and Arts Group was never. They voted about it, but they never had a union. Because if you as the CEO, show that you care properly care about the outcome, then people in Switzerland, we have the saying, the way you holler into the forest is how the echo comes back, you know, and so that when I say impact, look first on the impact immediately in the company and around the company, the suppliers that you have, how are their employees? Do their employees go to. Go to kid, go to school? Do their employees have above minimum wage? Do they, you know what I mean? Then we're starting to act in the proper realm of the business of What? See, we can talk about business charity or the business philanthropy. I'm somewhat suspicious of that because if your business has extra money for philanthropy, the first people that need to be considered for that are the investors and the employees and the customer. Either you're paying your, either your price is too high or you should give the customer a deal, or your salaries are too low and you should hire to put the salaries up, or your returns are too slow, too low and you should give money back. Right? But, but to give that money away, that's a moral act. Charity is a moral action. And a company has no right to do that. It's not their money. And so, but it is their money to say, how do we take care of our employees, of our suppliers, of our customers? And to say, what do I measure there? That's the key. And I'm telling you that if the kind of measurements that I'm talking about will have a long term impact on the prosperity of that company, because it has to do with the tending the soil and the, and the vine in art's metaphor, that makes sense because it.

All builds on itself. Of course, you're strengthening the machine that's doing whatever it's doing extraordinarily well. That's a really good, really interesting perspective too. So I'm going to ask you to project a little bit since you had a relationship with Pope John Paul ii and thinking back to how pivotal he was in your life and thinking to what, you know, this conversation's been, what you're doing today, really, what would, what do you think he would say to investors who are looking in to get, who are assessing companies and as far as what they. What would he tell them to look for in a company to perform that ultimate good or to pursue the common good, so to speak?

I'm telling you it's creativity. The thing that he's always told me and all the young people around him is I cannot want for you, cannot want for you. You have to want. And the way you learn to want. Wanting is a form of love. It's an expression of love. I want what I love, you know, I want the food I love all the way up to I want my wife, who I love. And then at the end, I want God, who I love. And that, that is so intertwined with your will that at the end he would say love in its highest part, namely faith in God is a decision. So then he has this sentence. Love is a decision that means you go against your natural instincts, your natural wants and dislikes. This is why we fast during fasting times and so on, to learn to go against these natural instincts. And what he says is because the greatest freedom you have been given. We started with this with Genesis, with that being different than animals. The greatest gift God has given us is our will. We have this free will. Free will doesn't say, nobody gets to tell me what to do. Free will means let me decide what I love and who I love. And here we get to do this. When we invest, you practice your free will, what you love and who you love and how you love. So when you're saying, do I love short term gain or do I long love long term gain, do I show my will by putting my money at work in a, in a, you know, in a 90 day cycle, or put my money to work to support something that takes maybe nine years to come to fruition, then that is something where you practice your will and your steady hand to, to withgo, forego in a way, the full short term benefit. What he's talked about a lot is then that you have the responsibility to form your conscience. People talk about Catholic social teaching a lot. And one of the keys I think is super important, but something you have to remember. You have a responsibility to study that and to learn that. But it is not a Ten Commandments case. The social teaching of the Church is a mental model thing. And you have to take on that mental model and then make moral decisions, which are your decisions. And I want you to take responsible for responsibility for those. So what John Paul would tell you today is study the Bible, study the Church's teachings, especially Catholic social teaching, and then form your conscience to that point that you can express your love through your investments in a way that you intend and are proud of.

Andres, I just wanted to say thank you for joining me today. This has been excellent, Praise God. Absolutely love the perspective that you bring to this conversation.

So.

And I hope that we can do this again sometime.

I'd love to. You know, this is close to my heart. I teach this at the Catholic University of America. So we have a lot of courses also open courses like we publish some things online that you can see that if this interests you. And then of course you can reach us always on LinkedIn and all the social media and so on. We just launched a new, a new website, siokacenter.com I think so I'd love to.

Oh, outstanding.

I'd love to get people get involved with us.

Anything else that you want to share before we close?

No, this is, I mean, I don't know when this is going to go live, but next week is his or two, let me see after tomorrow is his 20th anniversary of his passing away and so I pray for the intercession with him that he Bless you your all the things you and all the things you do and everybody.

Thank you so much Andres. I really appreciate it. May God bless you and all that you're doing too and all the great work you're doing for the church in the world.

Thanks.

All right, take care.

God bless.

We hope you have enjoyed this episode of the Alternative Investor. If you found this value, please be sure to like, subscribe and share. This show is brought to you by Honeyhive Capital Partners. Visit us at HoneyhivePartners.com to continue your Alternative Investment Jury this recording represents the views and opinions of its guests and does not reflect the views and opinions of HoneyHive Capital Partners, LLC. Nothing in this recording nor any communications from it should be treated as constituting financial, investment, legal, tax or other advice of any kind, or as a recommendation to buy or sell an interest with respect to any investment. We look forward to you joining us next time.