Thibault Manekin | How to Create Something Larger Than Yourself - Part 1

Srini Rao

Thibault welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us.

Thibault Manekin

Thank you so much for having me. I'm stoked about this conversation.

Srini Rao

Oh, I it is my absolute pleasure to have you here. I found out about your work by way of your publicist. And then Alec Ross, who was recently a guest to his episode, we haven't aired yet. Also said that you would be an amazing guest. And the moment he said that, I was like, OK, this is a no brainer. And then when I read the book, I thought, oh, my God, this is absolutely a no brainer. This is amazing. But before we get into the book, I wanted to start by asking you what birth order were you and what impact did that end up having on the choices you ended up making throughout your life?

Thibault Manekin

Yeah, so I was the first born, the oldest of four, and I think what's fascinating in that is that I am the only boy. And I tell this story a lot. I remember, not for the sister that's just under me, but for the other two, I remember sitting at the hospital, like fingers crossed, toes crossed, praying to whatever God I might have believed in at like four or five years old to just give me a brother.

And the third baby came out and it was my amazing sister, Sophie. And then I did it again at eight years old and I'm in the hospital praying twice as hard this time. And the fourth baby was my amazing sister, Celine. And so I was outnumbered from day one. And, you know, my dad was, my dad was always busy at work. And so I like to a certain extent, I was left to fend for myself, you know, and this was the growing up.

Srini Rao

Hahaha!

Thibault Manekin

I lived in a really cool neighborhood in the city of Baltimore and you just had to be home when the bell rang at dinner. And we'd get kind of like lost in the woods and we'd run around with bikes throughout the whole neighborhood and just, it was amazing. We'd find whatever wood we could from old construction sites and build tree houses and there was a river that we used to build dams in and it was amazing. But yeah, so I was the oldest of four.

Srini Rao

Uh, so several questions come to that. Usually like when you're the only boy in a family of girls that plays out in one of two ways, you're either the prince or the person who basically just takes orders from the women in your family.

Thibault Manekin

Yeah, I look back at that time period and I have a lot of regret.

You know, I really intentionally distanced myself, right? My sisters weren't necessarily into the same things. I was super into sports at the time and I got kind of caught up in my own world with my own friends. And I always wish I could get that time period back because my sisters are incredible. And I just didn't spend enough time at their level digging into whatever it was that they were interested in. I'd say that I'm a mama's boy, you know, my...

My mom's always been my number one, up until I got married, of course. And she was just, she was incredible. But they, you know, the oldest is kind of the prince, especially when it's a boy. And I was the first born in the family and had all the benefits of that grown up.

Srini Rao

Yeah. So it's funny because you mentioned a sister and I have a younger sister and I remember I think a few weeks after she was born, I asked my dad, I was like, can we return her? Yeah. Not knowing that that's not how things work. And then I remember people were bringing gifts. You know, every kid goes through this like sibling envy and everybody would bring my sister gifts. And one of my parents' friends was nice enough to actually bring me some cookies. And I looked at her and said, I want the, I don't want these stupid biscuits. What a real gift. And her parents were like, go to your room.

Thibault Manekin

Ha ha!

Thibault Manekin

I'm pretty sure I've tried to return all three of my sisters.

Srini Rao

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So, what's the age gap between you and your siblings and which one are you closest to, do you think, and why?

Thibault Manekin

So we're all pretty close. There's eight years between all of us. So we're all about two plus years apart from each other. I am probably the closest to Lauren, who's two years younger than me. And she is just this beautiful, adventurous spirit. And that kind of mirrors my purpose in life as well.

You know, what is out there? Who are these incredible people on this planet, these human beings that we're blessed to be in space with? How deeply can we listen to them? How can we find ways to walk in their shoes? What's the highest mountain we can climb? What's the biggest wave we can ride? What's the most lost we can get and still somehow make our way back? And that's my sister Lauren.

Her and I have been on so many adventures together, many of which we almost didn't make it out of. And she's incredible. When you are in Lauren's presence, you feel like you are the only person on the planet and the most important person on the planet. And she just gives you a hundred percent of what she has at all times. And she's an inspiration. She's incredible. And we've had a blast. We've had a blast together.

Srini Rao

Well, you've you referenced your mom throughout the book, especially in the early chapters. And I remember you mentioning that she came here from France, much against her parents, which is one thing I wonder, particularly when people are raised with parents from different cultures, is how your parents integrate aspects of both cultures, but also letting you kind of define your own. Because I think that as an Indian American immigrant, one of the things I think about is

Srini Rao

generation. So even I can give you the example like my parents and I speak this language called Telugu and it's funny my sister married a Bengali guy and kind of like okay are they are they when they have kids are those kids gonna speak Telugu and now me and my sister like our parents will talk to us in Telugu we reply in English even though we can speak it fluently and like okay if language is the first thing to go what else is gonna go so how did your mom preserve aspects of her culture in the process of raising you?

Thibault Manekin

Yeah, it's interesting. I think that for sure the language piece, right? So she was 20 when she married my dad, and my dad was busy at work, and she didn't speak very much English at all when they first got married. And so I was the only one in the home, and it was 100% French to me. And she...

dropped me off at kindergarten, I think I was four years old at the time, and I didn't speak a word of English, to the point that my grandparents on my dad's side had come back and had a, come over and had a very serious sit down dinner with both my parents saying they were worried about my future, that I was never going to be able to speak English, and what kind of way to raise a child was this. And, you know, first, within

two months of being in kindergarten, I was fluent in both English and French. I was probably the little weird kid on the playground running around speaking both languages. But I think that was the main piece of the...

of the French culture that she tried to bring over. You know, my grandparents on the French side lived on this farm about an hour outside of Paris. And I remember that travel was always really important to my mom and my dad. You know, we never really got gifts for her.

the holidays and stuff like that. It was, it was our gift was always travel. That was really important to my mom that we were raised understanding that this world is an enormous, inspiring place full of incredible people. And our gift was to be able to experience that. And so from a very young age, and there's a lot of privilege in the statement, but you know, we were gifted the ability to go to spend the summers on that farm in France and it was incredible.

Thibault Manekin

the world. They'd come from Argentina and all corners of France and we'd come from the United States. And from what I remember, we would just get dropped off. I don't even know if our parents were around. And it was this lawless adventure. French countryside, like looking for snails in the woods, fishing, milking cows. When my grandmother was going to make eggs or make dinner and she needed chickens, we'd go down to the farm and...

pick chickens, cut their heads off, or the farm lady would cut their heads off, we'd bring them back and pull their feathers out. That was a really neat part of the culture, was this melting pot of people from all over, and just getting to experience that, and we had cousins from Italy too. I'm so grateful, I'm still grateful for my mom for a number of reasons, countless things.

but the one that really sticks out was the gift of travel, the gift of curiosity, and the gift of compassion, and always really wanted to listen.

Srini Rao

siblings and this is something I'm always curious about when people are the older of the two group of siblings because I am as well. Did your siblings get away with murder and comparison to you and the way that your parents raised them in terms of giving them advice about how to make their way in the world change with each sibling?

Thibault Manekin

I'd say it was the other way around. I'd say that I got away with murder and that as a result of the incredible amount of poor decisions and mistakes that I made growing up, my sisters were incredible kids. If I did everything wrong and if I messed everything up, they took notes. And I don't think it was my parents whispering in their ear saying, don't fuck up like TiVo.

Srini Rao

Hahaha!

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Thibault Manekin

I think it was more of them observing and watching and realizing that my way of doing it in my adolescent years was probably not the right way.

Srini Rao

What?

Speaking of your adolescent years, this was something that really stood out to me in the book. You say, my mom was my number one. Now she appeared to be gone, an unrecognizable shell of her former self. I couldn't handle it, so I turned away from it all. As I prepared to turn 13, I simply hid from the reality of my family's problems. I was in denial. To me, we were still the perfect family and I couldn't admit to myself or to anyone else that we were still struggling. And I think that this conversation about mental health is one that we often avoid.

about this. It's highly stigmatized. I think that it's only become acceptable to go to therapy, pretty much in my generation. But it's one of those things that we've swept under the rug for generations. But as a 13 year old kid, how do you process and deal with that kind of, you know, magnitude of problem?

Thibault Manekin

Not well. You know, I didn't know this feeling that was growing inside of me, right? For the first 13 years of my life, my family and I were invincible. You know, we were the model family, as I say in the book. At least that's how the outside world looked at us.

And I wasn't prepared for it. You know, my mom had gone into a really deep depression, totally out of the blue, at least from my perspective at 13 years old, and was institutionalized and hospitalized. And I literally didn't recognize her. And as I said, she was my number one. And I'd...

couldn't comprehend what was happening. And, you know, that's a tricky age to begin with, to temporarily lose your mom, not sure if you'll ever get her back, challenges it to its core.

And while she would have been my rock and the one that I would lean on, and then her and I talked about everything growing up. Like she was the cool mom. We'd talk about sex and, you know, she'd give you a sip of champagne at dinner. That was a big thing in France and a glass of wine or something like that. And there was nothing off limits that me and my mom wouldn't talk about. And look, my dad's incredible, one of my heroes in life and amazing too. And I have so much respect for him for holding us all down during those challenging times.

times with my mom away. But, you know, I literally didn't know who to turn to at that point. And the things that I began to turn to were through my peers and the poor decisions that they were beginning to make and, you know, trying to want to fit in. Really for the first time in my life, I'd always been this like really pretty confident, you know, little pure boy.

Thibault Manekin

as my mom disappeared, again temporarily, but it was a shock in the moment. I turned and went deeper into the circle of friends I had, some of who were amazing in our today and some of whom weren't.

Srini Rao

Well, I think that there was something that really struck me throughout the book that you alluded to numerous times, which I knew I didn't want to get out of this conversation without talking about. And that was this whole concept of privilege. I remember that story that your mom brings home a homeless guy who ends up living with you. And in the conclusion of that, you say this upper middle, the upper middle class bubble, I grew up and never felt right to my mom. And she did all she could to make sure that my three younger sisters and I understood the world was a vast and powerful place full of amazing people.

ideas and different ways of being. I think that to me, I realized how often we're all privileged blind. Like I grew up the son of a college professor. Like we weren't, you know, wealthy by any means, but I think we'd fall into the upper middle-class bubble like yourself. And that's not really something that I was truly aware of until I talked to people like Chris Hill Wilson, who I know wrote you a blurb for your book. But how do you make sure that your kids are aware of the fact that the life they're living is not

to what a lot of people go through. And how do people develop that awareness of privilege without necessarily bringing home a homeless person to live with them?

Thibault Manekin

Yeah, I think I need to kind of hit on that story and that episode for us too. So my mom, as she was coming out of the depression, and my mom's purpose in life is to make everybody else feel incredible, right? And just to like cover everybody that she touches with this warm blanket of love, and she had lost that. And when she was coming out of her depression, we had moved into this new neighborhood.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Thibault Manekin

And she was driving through one of the shopping centers around and she saw this homeless black guy sleeping on a bench. And it was the middle of January or something like that. And she ended up going back home but couldn't sleep because it was negative 10 degrees that night and she went down and stayed on the bench with him that night. Brought him blankets and pillows.

She gave him her phone number and the next day, Charlie called and my mom came home with Charlie and Charlie ended up living with our family for over 20 years. He was in his mid 80s when he came back and it was a lot of people.

Thibault Manekin

reference my mom and say what an incredible thing she did for Charlie. And while that is true, I think the biggest takeaway for me personally and for us as a family is that one, Charlie came to us at one of our most broken times. And Charlie taught us arguably more than we could have ever taught him.

and his presence in our life completely opened up our eyes. And one, he brought my mom back to her amazing original self. And he taught us the importance of never passing judgment and of walking in someone else's shoes and deeply listening and.

being compassionate around all of the decisions that we make in life. So, Charlie was incredible. And your question around how we teach privilege is I don't know that you can. I think that it is something that, or an understanding of privilege. I think that it's something that...

comes through life's experiences. You know, I'm a dad now, I've got 10 year old and 12 year old sons. And one of the greatest things that I've realized from my own father is that lecturing our kids and telling them how they should be or what they should think about or how should they think has the opposite effect. Our role as leaders in life and as parents and as friends and as mentors.

is to lead by example. And when we blur that line and we take the more dictator approach, the message gets completely lost. And I'm speaking from experience from having failed as a dad and succeeded as a dad. And so I think that we and you know, especially kind of me having grown up in this upper middle class bubble and having realized the privilege that I had later in life,

Thibault Manekin

and asking myself every day what I can do with that privilege to help in some small way change the way that the world turns. And then how do we pass that along to our kids in an organic selfless way? And for me it's through lived experiences. You know, there's a chapter at the end of the book there. I think it's the epilogue where on weekends I would

I take both my kids and we put every sports ball that we had, the crossballs, the crosssticks, baseball bats, basketballs, frisbees, into the back of the car and we'd drive around Baltimore and we'd find a park to play in. And this was a park that wouldn't have been in a neighborhood that my kids would have otherwise been to.

and we would park the car and we'd get out and sometimes there'd already be kids playing in the park and oftentimes there wouldn't be the first ones there and this one particular day got out of the car, had a basketball, the kids sprinted across the road and went to the nearest hoop and started shooting and a couple kids from the neighborhood came around and you know this was my cue to kind of step off to the side and just observe and the

Two of them, my two kids and the two kids from the neighborhood, ended up splitting up teams and played this incredibly hilarious game of basketball together that ended in roaring laughter. The kids from the community there invited my kids to go play a football game with some of their other friends and I basically had to pull them away. And look, I...

I'm really aware of even the privilege of that story to be able to choose the communities that I go into and that they go out of when I'm done, when it's, when it's, when it's time to go home and to go back to a relatively safe, safe apartment, and a safer part of town. So I don't want to downplay that at all, but that's been the, it's been the way that we have raised our kids is through lived experiences. You know, we can,

Thibault Manekin

We can talk a little bit more about it. We just spent the last year and a half living in Brazil, where my wife Lola's from, and Brazil's a third world country. And we showed up there, and the community that we lived in was a gated community. That's what the world told us we needed to live in Brazil to be safe. Right or wrong, I'm not sure yet. And right next to that community, they just finished building a skate park when we arrived. And...

We showed up, my kids had never skateboarded before and kind of went over there one night and it was full of kids skateboarding. My kids looked nothing like any other kid in the skate park. And the kids are kind of like staring at each other for a minute and then one of the kids from the park comes and grabs hands with one of my kids and pulls him in and asks him if he's ever skateboarded and they had a couple extra boards and again I just disappeared off to the side and watched the magic happen.

And it turns out that the skate park was in one of the favelas. I'm not sure if you know what a favela is. It's kind of like a ghetto or a shanty town.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Totally.

Thibault Manekin

And it was one of the largest favelas in the area. And we didn't even know that we were in it at the time. It was just where the skate park happened to be. And that experience was incredible for us as a family and for our kids. And they ended up forming this incredibly deep bond with really everybody there, young and old. But there was, I don't know, a crew or a tribe of 15 kids that kind of adopted us and that we adopted them. Most of them had no fathers.

and we're in jail and my mom's weren't around they were living with auntie or grandma and these kids like moved into our home you know and we helped them with school and we learned from them as much as they learned from us but it's those it's those lived experiences for our kids that

I talk a lot about this in the book too, of the importance of getting out of our bubbles. We are so comfortable in our comfort zones and in the bubbles that we live in that we're incapable of seeing the real beauty of this world. And I'll never say that out loud to my kids. Maybe they'll read the book one day. But what they will have will be by the time they're 18 years old, hundreds of these kinds of experiences for them to form their own opinion of what it is that they have, what

do with what they have and how they're going to show up for everybody else that they're blessed to meet throughout their lives.

Srini Rao

Well, speaking of decisions that you make at 18 years old, what was your parents' advice to you in terms of making your way in the world? Because I know that your path is anything but conventional. I mean, pretty much like anybody I've interviewed, it's not a sort of series of linear steps, not that anybody's life is. Talk to me about the decisions you made at that time in your life.

Thibault Manekin

Look, again, I think the beauty of watching my parents parent us is that there was no pressure to do anything other than what felt right in our hearts in the moment. And that is the hardest way to do it. Again, like I have struggled with that as a dad. But that 280 is how my parents raised us. They gave us incredibly long leashes to mess up on our own, to succeed on our own. They were always there if you needed to fall back on them or ask them anything. But they really let us go on their own.

grew up working for his family's real estate company. Again, in a bubble full of privilege, in the comfort zone of the community he knew, and at no point in my life was my dad ever like, hey you need to pull yourself together and get yourself ready to come work for the family business. He gave us the freedom, all of us, to explore and to chase our dreams

Thibault Manekin

that felt right in the moment. So, you know, I was a bit lost, I think, maybe for that reason, and I've held some resentment towards that approach. But as I've gotten older, I've also respected it more, going into college and kind of wishing I could get those years back again. But upon graduation from college, so Srini Rao, I...

I kind of skipped over this in the beginning, but from a very young age, I've had two burning questions inside of me, right? And they are, why are we so divided as human beings? And what are the creative ways that we can bridge those divides? I had two really very significant experiences happen at 10 years old that began to grow those questions in my head and in my heart. And as the older I grew, especially growing up in Baltimore City, the more I saw the reasons that I needed to continue, not only ask those questions, but try to find solutions to them.

try to find the answers to them, which by the way is impossible. But it is those burning questions, especially from young ages, that start to develop our purpose as human beings. And so my purpose became more clear the older I got. And when I graduated from college, you know, you're faced with this decision in life. You're faced with it every day. But there's a point where you start to realize that it's in front of you. And that's...

We have two choices. What are we going to do? Are we going to sit on the sidelines hoping that someone else does the heavy lifting or are we going to get involved? Are we going to be a part of the problem or are we going to be a part of the solution?

And so with these questions of why are we so divided and how can we bridge those divides with a couple of friends, I helped to launch an organization called Peace Players. And the idea was that we would go to war torn countries, deeply divided countries, and we would use sports, in our case basketball, to get kids from two sides of a conflict, meet each other, find a common ground, and hopefully over time becoming friends. So we were 21, 22 years old at the time. We raised, I don't know, $8,000 from friends and family.

Thibault Manekin

and Tui. And Sean and I, Sean was over there before I was and I met him over there and started dribbling basketballs in black townships and rural areas and really affluent white suburbs with the idea that the kids from a young age would begin to fall in love with the sport, get drawn to it and then begin to form friendships and find common ground. And it was a kind of incredible experience, you know, within the first like three or four months.

We gotta.

We had just about run out of that money and got a call from Nelson Mandela's foundation. And the call was, President Mandela is a huge believer in the power of sports to unite. And he loves your program and he wants to become your largest sponsor. So we went from like no credibility and not a lot of money to President Mandela's name and recognition and money behind us. And from that moment on, the floodgates were opened. We were invited to replicate the model all over the world. Today the program's, you know, this is 20 years old.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Thibault Manekin

years ago. It's programs in over 20 countries around the world. It's worked with over 100,000 kids in some of the most in the Middle East and Northern Ireland and Cyprus and Yemen back here in the United States at this point. And it's been amazing to watch it grow.

you know, couldn't have come at a more relevant time. And kind of my personal growth and search of the answers of those two questions, my first real ability of jumping really far out of my comfort zone, you know, really bursting that bubble and the exploration to see what I was made of at the end of the day.

You know, could I make it somewhat on my own? And it was, yeah, there's hundreds of Peace Flare stories, but an incredible experience.

Srini Rao

Well, you know, I wanted to bring a clip from a previous episode after reading about peace players and then kind of dissect this with you. Take a listen.

Srini Rao

We'll edit this out, Tebow. This is taking a second to load. I don't know why.

Thibault Manekin

Yeah, go for it.

Go for it.

Srini Rao

So I think that part of the reason I wanted to bring that back is I just, you know, it reminded me so much about what you talk about in terms of peace players.

It seems like we can build these bridges between kids and then, you know, on the flip side of that, you've got a president who's saying, let's build a wall between two cultures. How do we bring this mindset into adults? Like, why have we lost the ability to connect and find common ground with people who are different than us?

as adults because I feel like to your point, we're so divided. I mean, India is basically this place that could be an economic superpower, but they've been in the same stupid conflict for 30 years over this same religious conflict with people who are arguing over something that is a personal choice, which is religion. And I've yet to understand why we can't find this kind of common ground as adults.

Thibault Manekin

It's such a beautiful question and you know there's a part of me that wants to say that we won't be able to And that it is up to this future generation. I listen to my kids talk And they speak in completely different way as far as like an openness to Everything around them than we did as kids

And so, you know, maybe the answer is that it isn't our generation that is going to be able to find that common ground. You know, our experience with the Peace Players program, that was a beautiful clip that you just played, by the way. And it can be art and it can be sports and it can be theater. It can be so many different things. But brought under the right guidance, incredible relationships are formed.

So I think that our challenge as society is that we are afraid of fear. You know, the word frightened came up in that clip, which is one of the things that causes us to retreat. You know, what I have always believed and have always talked about is the importance of fear as a motivator, right? As a driver. As a.

an understanding that when it comes up it's because we're missing something. There's something that is triggered within us in our subconscious that we are without that makes us nervous, that gives us that sense of fear and unfortunately we run from it and the lesson in all of that is that we are not to run from it. We must run towards it because within that fear is a great lesson as you heard from that clip.

Right? While I'm not sure if that young person had the option to not get off the bus, my guess is that if the event wasn't chaperoned and supervised, the 50 Israeli kids on that bus, when they realized where they were being taken, would have turned the bus around and not gotten off. Because that's our default setting, to run from fear.

Thibault Manekin

And programs like the one that we just heard of in the clip, and programs like Peace Players and so many others are kind of reprogramming the internal compass of this next generation, where fear is not only a motivator, but one of our greatest teachers. I think that I'm an internal optimist, so I really do believe that our next generation, our generation has a chance to

begin to change the narrative, but in a very small way. And it's our investment in that concept and philosophy that needs to be made in this next generation and the generation after that, until we've really made progress.

Srini Rao

So, you know, I think that the next part of this that really struck me is you come back from South Africa and you decide to start a real estate company with your dad. But I think that the parts that struck me when you started talking about this was you say that my family has been part of the real estate business in the city for generations. So why have I never seen this part of Baltimore? Why have they never taken me here? Why aren't they helping to build in this part of town? Somewhere in that anger came the realization of where to direct it. There was something about the ownership and control of land that was contributing to holding

communities back. In Baltimore, I was just beginning to see this separation, the abandoned houses, the collapsing infrastructure and what happened to be a lack of resources. Yet, even though it is the most connected industry on the planet, the control of land and manipulation of it by a small handful of privileged companies and countries has always been the largest divider of the human race. The real estate industry itself was born out of our desire to control land, to gain power. In fact, the control can be traced back as the cause for so many major conflicts on our planet. And as I mentioned, I know that Chris Wilson

actually wrote one of the blurbs for your book and I was talking to him about this. Take a listen to what he had to say.

Srini Rao

So you having been in the real estate industry, growing up in the real estate industry, and actually working in the kinds of neighborhoods that Chris is talking about, I think it's one thing for us to hear that. What do we actually not understand until we see it up close?

Thibault Manekin

So first of all, Chris Wilson's incredible. He's a great friend and he is changing the narrative. And his mission and the clarity of his purpose and his book, The Master Planner are incredible. I'm glad that he was a guest of yours. I'll have to go back and listen to that episode. I think that I need to add a little bit of context for that to answer that question as well. So, you know, I basically, after six years of living out of a suitcase, ended up.

Srini Rao

Yeah.

Thibault Manekin

Knowing that it was time to Living in a suitcase in some of the most divided countries on the planet knowing that it was time to pick a city and settle it onto it and I unexpectedly ended up back in Baltimore and I never thought that I'd come back here and I Found myself early one morning in my car

driving south towards Baltimore City and I pulled off on the exit for North Avenue and headed west and I pulled over at the intersection of Pennsylvania and North Avenue. For your listeners who aren't familiar with Baltimore, that is the intersection, this was 2006, that was the intersection that nine years later would be the epicenter of the Freddie Gray uprising, right? A neighborhood that in Chris Wilson's clip that you just played has been not only long

Thibault Manekin

opportunity intentionally for generations if not longer than that and so I'm pulled over the side of the road and I have this like kind of panic moment where you know, this is a community that I really never spent any time in and that I'd been made to believe my whole life that I wouldn't be safe in and The this narrative of you won't be safe Didn't resonate with me anymore. Right? I had heard it all over the world. I had heard it when we would go into the townships in South Africa

dead as a white guy, we should never go in. I'd heard it as we went into the West Bank in Palestine. I had heard it in different parts of Northern Ireland and Cyprus and I had seen the importance of not listening to that narrative and actually going into these communities, but going in a very humble way, right? In a way that was prepared to listen.

And so I ended up getting out of my car and I kind of start walking around that day, Srini Rao, and I saw all of the things that society told me I'd say, right? The vacant homes, all the things Chris described, the disinvestment, the drug dealers on the corners, the liquor stores, the clients of those drug dealers, not enough at the intersections, the vacant buildings. And I just kind of kept walking and it was

about five minutes in that I had that realization. The two realizations actually. One is that.

Our country, the United States, and particularly my city of Baltimore, are more divided than these so-called war-torn countries, where I'd spent so much time for the last six years, so much time and energy trying to heal those divides. We have an inability here to have open and honest conversations with people who don't look like us about our differences, but also our similarities. And I began to see that as a ticking time bomb. And the second realization was the piece that you read from my book, which is that the real estate industry is the most powerful connected industry

Thibault Manekin

but it's done more divide us than actually bring us together. And so like I had this kind of rage grow inside of me, like how have I missed this my entire life? And then it kind of made my way back to my car.

and ended up calling my dad, inviting him out to dinner. And that was the beginning of the company that we had launched. And you called it a real estate company. And I guess at its core, that's probably what we are. But what our intent was, was to set out to reimagine the real estate industry.

Right? To prove that buildings brought to life in really inclusive ways could actually empower communities and unite cities and help to launch really powerful ideas. So the further that I dove into the real estate world and the more I understood the importance of really reimagining it, flipping it completely upside down so that we were able to kind of lead with our purpose over our profit.

And since then, you know, I've done a ton of research, I've run a lot of books, I've had tons of conversations with friends like Chris, and there is truth in everything that he said. The intentional displacement, the redlining that took place. There are so many intentional policies that held poor black communities down in cities like Baltimore and others across the country.

And if real estate was the tool that did that, then real estate should be the tool to help fix that. And that's what we're working on.

For the rest of the conversation please visit Part 2