348 - From Tanzania to Tech: A Journey of Resilience and Innovation with Rwazi's Joseph Rutakangwa

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show, and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started.

Joseph Rutakengwa, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You're the founder of a company called Ruhp— Rawazi, is that right?

Yes, that's right, that's right.

It's an African spelling, R-W-A-Z-I dot com. It's AI data. And I am really want to learn a lot about you and a little bit about your company. So let's just start off from the beginning. Who are you and what's your backstory? What's your background?

Thank you so much for having me on your platform. And that was a good first try. I loved it. Yes, I'm Joseph. I'm based here in LA. I co-founded the company called Ruazi with my co-founder Eric back in 2021. We build decision AI for enterprise teams to help them drive growth. But how did we start? So I'll take you guys back a bit on, on how it started. I'm originally from Tanzania, which is a country in East Africa. I was born in a family, second of 4 kids. My dad started the first electrical and mechanical engineering consulting company in the country. My early years, like 0 to 9, were very nice, full of a lot of experiences. My mom was my first teacher, taught me how to read, write, all of that stuff. We had a library in the house, we had like a lab, like laboratory in the house, so do like a lot of experiments with my dad. So that was a very good experience. And I ended up going to boarding school in another country, in Uganda, when I was like 7. So that was so much of an interesting experience. Bad at the time as a 7-year-old, but later, now looking back, that was a very nice experience. Got me exposed to other cultures when I was young. But when I was around 9, my dad's company went bankrupt. It was a combination of a lot of things. As I grew older, I understood the macro environment of so many of these countries, right? So right now in the US, we're seeing a lot of these macroeconomic changes like currency devaluation, inflation, and so on. But now imagine in a developing country and back in the '80s through the '90s, how much more volatile that was. Give you an example. When my dad started his company in 1981, like a US dollar was equivalent to 8 Tanzanian shillings. So Tanzanian shillings was like the currency. 20 years down the line to the point where his company went, had shut down, one US dollar was equivalent to 1,000 Tanzanian shillings.

Wow.

Incredible. So that was like 12,400% devaluation.

Massive inflation in the country.

And that's just currency devaluation. Then you have inflation on top of it. Even if you increased prices 20% year over year or whatever, there's nothing you could have done to stop that. So it was a kind of wipeout, 99.2% of his wealth and all that. So we ended up finding ourselves in a pickle, right? So we moved to a village. We were these city kids living a good life. We had a nice IBM computer and all that stuff. But we found ourselves in a village, no electricity, no access to like clean water or any of that stuff. And we're out of school and my parents separated because of that chaos. It was a massive chaotic environment. So we found ourselves in the village, like heading Kato with nothing, no school, nothing. In that moment, what I'm very thankful for is my mom taught us how to create our world in our own minds. Instead of succumbing to the outside world and the external reality, we started building our own worlds and started building the vision we had for ourselves at that point. And one of the early lessons my mom taught us was you are not what happens to you. So we are what we think of ourselves and how we see ourselves. So that, that kind of effect kind of derailed us massively, but because we had our mom, we're able to stay with a dream and my mom to get us out of that situation, she asked us, do you guys want to stay in your granddad's ranch in the village? Or should we just make a move and start doing steps to move back to the city and crawl our way out of this hole? We picked the latter and that started with business. Luckily for us, my mom was a very good cook and she had this book called Food for Fifty. So when we went back to the village, she kept the book. And we looked at, okay, what's something that we can provide in this environment, in the village environment where there's no real currency or anything like that? What could we make and sell in this environment that would generate enough cash for us to move? And lucky for us, we had, we timed an event that was coming. There was a school anniversary in that village, one-week event. Of course, if there's an event, people need food because we didn't have any restaurants in the village. So we went on the road, we took all our furniture on the road and set up a fake restaurant and we borrowed, we didn't have any cash, so we borrowed like flour and cooking oil and things like that. And my mom made donuts. We picked donuts because in that entire, like in a 200-mile radius from that location, no one had ever seen or heard of donuts and real donuts. And the ingredients were already available. So we made donuts, sold donuts and milk tea. And we sold out by 10 AM in the morning. Wow. Did that 7 days in a row, created our initial cash, used that to leave the village. And that's, that was the start of our journey.

That is amazing.

Thank you. But the journey was too long. I won't get into the details. It was like a very long journey. And that got me into the world of like in, in that point when I was in the village, my, one of my dreams was to be in a school in the US. And 9 years later that happened. I was in Iowa as an exchange student in Monroe, Iowa, which is a great experience.

So you went to university in Iowa?

No, high school.

This is like high school in Iowa.

Yes, this is high school.

How the heck did you get from Tanzania to Iowa?

Long, long story. That's got an hour. Wow. It was a big jump.

Yeah, I can't think of anything different than an Iowa cornfield from Tanzania. East Africa.

I was so lucky to actually end up in Iowa because I can't imagine leaving Tanzania and ending up in New York or any other of these big places. Iowa was a great fit. I had the best experience I've ever had. Those are the nicest people you can live with, right? So I have my American parents in Iowa, right? So post-Iowa, I started, I got into this loop of how do you get a job? Because I wanted to get full scholarships, go to university. But I couldn't, cuz like in the US you get presidential scholarships for university, but that's, let's say $30,000, $40,000 a year. How do you finish up the $20,000, $30,000? My mom was earning like $300 a month at the time. So I ended up, I wasn't able to go to university, went back to Tanzania, tried to get a job, but you can't get a job if you don't have experience. You can't get experience if you don't have a job. That kind of paradox. And my solution to that was volunteering. So when I was in Iowa, We went to a mission trip in New Orleans, which was building houses for people who were affected by Hurricane Katrina. And that gave me a lot of experience on like volunteer, like you're useful the way you are regardless of the resources that are available to you. Just as a person, you're useful to someone else. So when I was in Tanzania and ended up in that, in that loop, chicken and egg situation, I decided to volunteer. Long story short, end up running one of the most successful zero-budget development campaigns in the country. Got a lot of young people to get into agriculture and produce a lot of easy to produce fruits and vegetables and generate income from that. And that took me now to Lehigh. The US State Department sponsored me to go to Lehigh University for a postgrad program.

Wow.

Out in Pennsylvania. So that was now my introduction into the world of business. So when I was at Lehigh, I had an understanding that the world of like development projects and aid and all that. Isn't sustainable because people are dependent on continuous donations and that's not the most sustainable way to do it. My under— my revelation was I should help large companies be able to expand internationally and invest more internationally and in, in across different markets such that as they invest more in the supply chain, which creates a lot of kind of stimulation, a lot of small businesses that end up hiring more people and everyone benefits from that kind of cycle. So I got into consulting post-Lehigh. I got a lot of consulting for multinational companies in the US, in Europe. But what I realized, which was shocking for me, these were like large companies, multi-billion dollar companies, but they were still making decisions based on gut calls, right? So you still have, you have all the information, the data, first party data, which is like transaction data, customer feedback data and so on, was available. Where there were massive gaps was how do you actually know the actual demand from real consumer activity across multiple markets, multiple consumer segments and so on. Massive data gap, right? But even in the areas where the data was available, executives still made decisions based on gut calls.

And it's a really bad way to make decisions, by the way.

Exactly. Exactly. And if you, it's still going on right now. If you look at the example of Bud Light with AB InBev. Still made this commercial campaign and everyone was, all their actual customers were angry and ended up losing company billions of dollars. This is despite the company having a lot of data on who their customers are, what kind of products they want, what kind of messaging and ad campaigns they lean towards. Same thing with Jaguar, right? Jaguar has been in business for years. The CEO, these guys are experienced. It's not, they're not new on the job, but they still decided to go all electric and lost 97% of sales. With that move. So these are like these gut calls. I saw them in this environment and I was like, look guys, we can build decision systems internally that can help us make decisions. So we need to capture the correct type of data, use that correct type of data to get to the correct conclusions. And if we can simulate outcomes.

And what happens if the data points in a direction that you don't want to go in?

Oh, you, you, that's when you make, that's when you do recommendations and you assess with simulated outcomes. Which is based on the data that I have, what are the recommendations? What are the possible moves and what are the simulated outcomes? And then you make the call based on that. But the problem, I did that for 8 years. The problem along the way was building it internally within these companies wasn't scalable because none of these companies had the, like the mastermind alliance or like the internal team build to build that kind of product. So I ended up leaving and starting Wazi with Eric, who was my co-founder, and Eric was coming from capital markets and the finance world. So we started Wazi to solve for that problem, to build decision systems for people. And the problem we started solving for the first layer was understanding truly what's happening in the market right now, today, by capturing zero-party data. A lot of these AI systems are trained on public data and copyrighted information. That's why they end up in lawsuits.

And the problem with that— So when you say zero-party data, what do you mean by that?

Voluntarily shared by people, like data voluntarily shared by people.

Okay.

Very important because in terms of the legalities of data acquisition and also the fidelity of the data, you want to capture data within someone's default activity, right? Default setting and activity. And you want them to actually voluntarily share it with you and give you permission to use it to train your AI system. Because otherwise, of course, that's how you find out all these general AI systems that we use have a lot of lawsuits right now in different courts because they're using publicly available data and they end up using people's books and people's content and all that, and then they're in trouble. So our thinking was you need to do it in a clean way where you capture someone's default activity. The person actually voluntarily gives you permission to use their data for training and you deliver value back to the person. So that was the foundation of how we train our AI system, which is called Senna. And then after, when you have that kind of data, we train Senna to uncover signals, correct signals for the executives and all these large companies to understand, so what's happening in the market and what does it mean for my business? Most of these companies, most of comp— many companies have data, by the way, like even small businesses have data because you have data on who your customers are, how much they're paying, how often, their feedback and all that stuff. All of that is data and that's great. But if that, if you don't have a correct system that uncovers correct signals that will get you to make decisions that will increase your desired results, then all of it is meaningless. I'll give you an example. You have these companies, giant companies, even like Bed Bath Beyond, right? These are like very big companies. They know what they're doing. They've been in business for years, but they still create chaos, right? And mess up. They have retail outlets, they have massive portfolios of products, they have customers, they have customer data, they have whole loads or loads of first-party data, but not having correct AI systems that uncover correct signals that you can use to make decisions is what ends up having all these executives using their instincts and gut calls. Like for instance, kicking out all the distributors or D2C brands or—

They ended up going upside down and selling in bankruptcy.

Exactly. So we solve for that. Now after that layer, the question we started getting from our customers was, how do I, what should I actually do? Like, so you've told me what's happening in the market. Your AI is telling me, is uncovering all these signals and telling me what it means for my business. What should I do next? So we developed, instead of doing consulting, which is like the traditional approach of doing it, which the problem with that, it doesn't scale, it's not context-based, it's not role-based and so on. So we took an approach of training Senna, which is our AI, to generate recommendations that are context-based. So based on the context of the actual, not just the customer, the company, but the team, the function, the role of the person who is actually looking to optimize XYZ, their constraints and their desired results. And those recommendations come with simulated outcomes. So you see, this is possible move 1, and this is the possible outcome, and this is possible move 2, and this is the outcome, and so on. So that gives you proper clarity and confidence in what could you do in your scenario to execute. And then the last layer, we released our Copilot this quarter, and the Copilot's job is to help you now execute. So like, how do you go about the execution process? That's where the Copilot comes in. Now, we, when we started Rasa in 2021, of course, as with business, like it wasn't easy. It was like you started and you had a team and everything's great. We started Rising in 2021. I was naive. I thought all my consulting clients will come in and sign up. And of course, it didn't happen. It didn't happen. And so we spent all our savings, Eric and I, and we went broke. And okay, so what do we do next? We tried to pitch, we pitched like 1,000+ investors for pre-seeds and we didn't get any because people understood that the problem is real. They agreed that this is a solution, but they didn't see us as like the kind of guys to solve the problem.

Yeah, kids from Tanzania doing AI development, right?

Exactly, exactly, exactly.

I got it.

That's a massive bias we have to work with. Okay, so what we did was, who's the most important person in the entire business process and the structure? It's the customer. So while we've been pitching investors, go to the potential customers, tell them what we're building, tell them where we are at, that we can't, we're still at prototype, can't get to the final product because of funding XYZ. So what do you actually need to solve for as like layer 1 so we can start running the subscription for us to get to the end product? And customers told us, look, we just want to know what's happening in the markets, not just the markets that we are in, but also markets that our competitors are playing in. Want to know what's happening. If you can capture this data in a way that's 100% accurate, verifiable, scalable at the highest speeds. We'll just subscribe. We don't care how you deliver data. You may deliver data in Excel files, we couldn't care less. We just need you to capture it in a verifiable way and so on. And that's how we started business. So we got our first customer 2 months in, got our subscriptions. By the end of the year, we'll be profitable, right? And we go to profitability, of course, because we were paying ourselves like $1,000 a month. But that's how we forced the company up to profitability. And customers were very happy at that time and they started expanding fast. But then we had this problem, which was we have correct, the correct product for the correct customer. We're solving the most foundational layer of our entire problem set. How do we actually scale our customer base if we don't have enough cash to hire a sales team? And we don't have enough resources to build up an engineering, like a giant infrastructure for data pipeline and training for AI system. So, okay, we need to get in a program, an accelerator program that has a massive corporate network where we can acquire all these customers without necessarily expanding our team. So we reached out, we did our research, reached out to accelerators. We reached out to LA, the Techstars LA program and got in immediately. And that saw our revenue quintuple, right? Within 6 months. So we can triple our revenue massively within 6 months because we were able to tap into this entire corporate network. And the problem was like a true problem every one of these companies have across multiple verticals. And we had a solution. And by what they have, like in these accelerators, you have like demo day, which you present now your solution and your traction. In 2 minutes, I was up to present first. In the 2 minutes I presented, we had $4.5 million. Wow. 2 minutes. 2 minutes. Because now at that point, we're like a million dollars revenue and all that. Completely undeniable that, that we are the, we're the solution for this problem. So since then, we've grown massively. We right now, we have over $20 million in revenue and they deliver a lot of value to Fortune 100, Fortune 500 customers across the US, Europe, and, and other countries.

An amazing story. I gotta back up though. How the heck do you go from, you go to Iowa, then you go to Lehigh University. How do you move? How do you transition into AI? Where did that happen?

Yes. So I, it, it's just problem solving and things that used to look like they're obvious things for me aren't obvious for everyone. Like I'm a, I'm like an analyst brain. If I'm talking to someone or if I'm watching a, like a video on the internet, I look at the background, I try to figure out which country this is, what's the environment and things like that.

Right?

So that's my brain, but that's not an obvious thing for everyone. So my. My kind of thinking, if I take you all the way back to Iowa, my kind of thinking was this place, massive potential and opportunities around me. I didn't know I could act, but as an Iowa, I acted, got medals for it and so on. How, and then I moved from there, went into the world of development projects with the UN volunteers and so on. And then moved from there to Lehigh, from Lehigh to consulting. As I was transitioning, In my mind, I was mapping what moves am I making? What kind of like decisions am I making? What information are those decisions based on? And how could I build a system that could make, could predictably make more accurate decisions over time for business and then for other life solutions, right? And that became more pronounced when I was doing consulting for 8 years. In that the companies had two-layered problems. The first one being there's no decision system. The second one being there's no data to feed into the decision system, right? So as I was approaching that, I was like, we need to capture data first, but it needs to be, we need to be able to continuously capture that data in a massive, before, like a massive process that is scaled in like, in terms of like broad coverage. So 190 countries, 200 countries. Deep across languages, cultural context, and so on. Continuous. So not once, you're doing that every 24 hours, but highly verifiable and accurate. That is, that in itself is like a whole company. That's like a company in itself. It was like, how do you capture that level of data, that level of volume continuously and make sure it's 100% verifiable? And you can use that for AI training because as with AI systems, garbage in, garbage out. So you need perfect perfection there. So I spent most of my 8 years doing tri— when I was in the companies. So I was using, most of these companies have a lot of resources. I use those resources, like test out what could work. And I found that you can't build it in a large corporation because the corporation, let's say corporation is doing healthcare equipment. It can't be an AI company for decision systems. So when I end up starting Wazi with Eric, we had done, we had collected, we had a lot of collective knowledge about what are the limitations, what are, what are things we need control for, how do we capture this kind of underlying data correctly to begin with. And from there, once we perfected this machinery of capturing underlying data, then the challenge became how do you now build correct decision AI, which—

this is stuff you just have to educate yourself on.

Yes. I didn't go to school.

And you were, if you were talking about you started your company in 2021, that's before most people even knew what AI was.

Exactly.

And it was still very new as a technology. Yes.

100%. 100%. And the thinking was it can't be algorithmic building because that has human bias infused in it. Right. It has to be pure AI because like, for instance, our system builds a relationship between the ketchup I'm using and based on my ketchup and the sauces and things I have in my fridge, SENA can predict what kind of clothing brands I'll like, what kind of food. That's right. And then—

Incredible, isn't it? Yeah, mobile phone people can take your mobile phone data and tell you where you're going to be a year from now.

Exactly, that level.

Just so I do teach a course, I teach a graduate course in decision-making under stress and uncertainty. And so I'm a I'm a student of decision-making and how humans make decisions. So this is all very interesting to me.

Love that. I love that.

And it turns out we're very predictable.

Yes, we are very predictable. We are very predictable. And so the challenge for us, the challenge as we evolved was how does that become more, more accurate? And accuracy is heavily tied to nuance, right? So you don't want to treat any two people the same. You don't treat any two environments the same. So even if, You know, on the customer side, even if people are in the marketing team, you don't treat them the same. Social media, even social media, LinkedIn, Instagram, not the same people and so on. Same thing with customers, like the consumers, you don't treat any tool the same. Like someone who lives in even downtown LA, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and so on, completely different experiences.

Right.

Or out to the San Gabriel Valley where I grew up.

Exactly. Exactly. Exactly. So that's the approach we're taking, which is heavy context-based training with a lot of variety of data, 6,000 languages, 40,000 device types, 190 countries, millions and millions of—

Extraordinarily complex. Okay, I got a picture of the business. Now I want to learn more about you. Yes. Tell your organization, are you guys all remote? Are you hybrid? Are you in person?

How does it— Yes. So we are all remote. We're all remote. We have clusters. So we have cluster in New York, we have a cluster in Florida. So we have people who are in the same regions, so they have clusters. We're fully remote. We have an office here in LA. The office, people show up as they please in the office. What the approach I take is what, what do, what did I want when I was in corporate? I wanted autonomy, right? I could always overdeliver, right? I always took initiative and I always did more with less. The way we were hiring at Razi, we're always listening for those things when you're talking to someone. Is this someone who wants and values autonomy and they want to just be autonomous? Do they have the highest level of responsibility that they can always overdeliver even if they're not micromanaged? Do they have a very sense, big sense of ownership such that they will take initiative and then they'll do more stuff with less resources consumed? And when you hire the same people with the same DNA across the board, you end up having this nice orchestra.

Oh yeah. You get this massive synergistic effect.

Exactly. Exactly.

I'm curious. So on your website, you talk about how you're enabling African youth to get into this work. Tell me more about that.

So it's not just African youth. So it's not the youth even per se. It is people ages— we have minimum age of 18 all the way to however the maximum is. We have people who are like 87 are using our system. So the value we provide, we have an app called Ella for the consumers. People use, consumers use that app to get value from Ella in terms of if they're optimizing for travel, if they're optimizing for health consumption, if they're optimizing for—

so people download the app, use it for advice, you capture the data.

Yes, correct.

Oh my God.

But we built a loop for people, which is the app has to generate value for people immediately. And the value is, If you're optimizing for the overarching values, budgeting, but not everyone optimizes for budgets, right? For savings. So we have people who optimize for like, I want to get the best priced products in my area, which looks like the products I already have. So Ella, which is the AI for the consumers, will do that. I want to have health, like right now we have something called Snap and Score. You just take a picture of what you have in your fridge. It's gonna tell you how healthy your combination of stuff looks like. What else can you add? And so on.

Ella, Ella will do that.

Yes. Ella will do that. And that's like instant, right? And we'll be rolling out one for the wardrobe. Like, this is my wardrobe. How do I optimize my wardrobe?

Wow.

And so on. And as Ella generates more value for the consumers, Senna, which is the AI for the customers, is telling the customers, look, this is what Joseph values. This is what Joseph is optimizing for. So if you want, this is how you can optimize your portfolio to meet Joseph's true demands. So the problem with current advertising in the world is I am just shoving my stuff to you. I don't even listen to what you want. I just say, hey Doug, I have this new phone, buy it.

Buy it. Buy it. In fact, yeah, I was just talking to my wife about that over the weekend and I said, you know what marketing is really all about at the bottom? It's all about decision making.

Yes.

And good marketing lowers the cognitive load of decision making to as close to zero as possible.

I love it. I love it.

I love it.

I love it. I love that. Isn't that right? I love that Satoshi, exactly. The cognitive load is the point. That's the objective, right? So for us, we're like, you don't lower the cognitive load. Yes, lowering the cognitive load. And you don't want, as a business, you don't want to convince the consumer to buy a product. You just want to meet them, to meet them where they are at.

Give them a choice that's so easy to make they can't say no.

Exactly, exactly. If you do that This is what you'll be doing. You're generating value to the consumer by making the products they want accessible to them and priced appropriately based on their earnings and their purchasing power. And on the other side, you're helping businesses get customers and sell more and so on. The system was—

that's amazing. Okay, I got it. Amazing. Thank you. So I, we've gone way over, but that's okay. Yeah. Tell me about listening. How important is listening in your business?

Very. Listening is very important and not just listening to customers, listening to consumers, listening to each other in the company, but also listening to ourselves, right? And listening to, to, to listening to silence, which is one thing I do a lot. As I was getting older and getting more accustomed to this role and as everything gets bigger and bigger, the decisions I have to make become more and more important, I've learned to actually spend more time off, more time in, in like silence than actually on the go all the time. Like I used to do when I was, when I was younger. And what I understood was my brain is telling me, our brains are like the most superior intelligence you will ever meet. I've learned that my brain actually has most of the answers. But I'm not listening.

Ah, interesting.

I'm not listening. Yeah. So as I grew older, I learned to stop panicking and worrying. And like, when things are going bad, you just do— I stopped doing that, and I started just having more pauses, more silence. Just like a day, I'm just in my house, I'm just doing things, not speaking, not doing anything, not— my TV is not on, my phone is not on, I'm just there. And in those moments, what I found is then ideas and answers will just show up out of the blue or pushes or like nudges to do certain things that, and in the moment that those nudges are coming, I don't know why they're coming and why I'm being pushed. Like for instance, I wouldn't know why I'm being pushed to interview someone like people cold email us, right? And I mostly don't open the emails, but if I have silence, I would get a nudge, open your email, then I open the email, then you scroll and then all of a sudden you stop at some random email, you open it and then you have a nudge to schedule a meeting and then you end up hiring the person, right? And the person ends up being the most transformational person in the team because of silence and listening to myself.

Learning how to be really present with yourself.

Yes.

And not allow yourself to be distracted by social media or phones or people or anything else.

Yes.

Yeah, I agree with you. That's absolutely correct.

And there's something I've also learned, which is paying attention to what people are saying when I meet them for the first time. I've learned that as you meet, as you have like more conversations with people, they're like, they're also like intelligent systems, like human brains are intelligent systems. They optimize their interactions with you to meet you where you are at. But the first time, the very first meeting, they're more of themselves and they're sharing more of their true mission, values, and so on. So like fundraising, for instance, we just closed our Series A. And what in the beginning, like when I was young, I used to think, oh, you want investors, you want the most investors you can get. And then I learned, no, you actually want to be extremely careful who you pick to be in your company, be on your team. Because the investors you choose will tank or help your company succeed, will get it to like complete collapse or help you succeed, right? So when I was going through the Series A process and I was talking to different investors, people are very friendly and all. But in my mind, I'm just, I'm not making a decision. I'm not showing up with any bias of I'm excited. I want this person to join or not. I'm just listening and I don't know what I'm listening for. I'm just listening. And I will absolutely over time learn to know which person is right for me and which person isn't. And that's been like a good, a good thing we've taken advantage of.

So there we go.

Yes.

That for everybody that's listening, that's probably the, some of the sagest advice you're going to hear on this show. We've run out of time, Joseph. Unfortunately, I could talk to you for another hour, but I got one more question for you.

Yes.

What's one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

I make music. I make music. So I have my songs on. Oh, I love it.

Can I get it in focus?

Berlin. Very nice.

I play jazz.

Oh, I love jazz. I love jazz. I can make jazz very complicated, very high level, but I'm into like normal. I do pop, indie, folk, stuff, a lot of things. I also write. I write. I just released my book, Never Stay Broke, which was out on the 9th of September. It's doing well.

Good for you.

The book. Thank you. Thank you. And the book is essentially my reflection and the lessons I've learned through this entire journey. And to be used as a tool for anyone in any stuck position to get themselves out of that position. So I do a lot of these fun things as a way of expressing myself during the weekends and things like that.

Excellent. Thank you. I really appreciate your time today, Joseph, and it's been a real honor and pleasure to meet with you. And I hope, hope our paths should cross again. I know they will.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Appreciate it.

You're welcome.

Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes, go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com. Or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.