Andy Gray: I’m talking today to Don Samuels. Don is a fascinating man who is a council member in Minneapolis, a father, an immigrant, a former executive – a lot of fascinating stories to tell. Don, welcome to A Congruent Life!

Don Samuels: Thank you very much. It’s just so great to be here. And the audience can’t see, but I’m seeing you. And so, I feel that I’m really in your presence and it’s great to be in the presence of the audience.

Andy: Thanks! It’s great to make this connection with you. Don and I met I guess about a year-and-a-half ago, attending a men’s event, and it’s great to make the reconnection and talk again today.

So Don, just maybe to start at a high level, can you introduce yourself to the audience?

Don: Yeah. I’m Don Samuels. I’m 64 years old. I’m of Jamaican origin and I currently live in the Jordan neighborhood in Minneapolis with my three daughters – well, two daughters left, one’s away in college – and my wife, Sondra. And we moved into this neighborhood because we concluded that the brain drain – first, white flight and then black middle class flight – are the main purpose or cause of the demise of most inner city communities, and that the quickest path to healing those communities would be the reversal of the brain drain. And so, we thought we would do that with our lives, and then work from there.

And that has transformed our lives from being, in my case, a designer/inventor with a small design studio and a couple of partners to being a council member and a candidate for mayor and it transformed her life from being a business consultant to corporations to running a non-profit called the Northside Achievement Zone modelled after the Harlem’s Children Zone, which is to end poverty using education as a lever. And so, it’s fascinating that our lives have been totally changed by that decision to “reverse” the brain drain and we are pretty much full time now in that effort subsequent to the actual physical move.

Andy: Can you maybe share a bit of your early story? You mentioned you were of Jamaican origin. What was your childhood like and how did you come to be living in the United States?

Don: Well, I grew up in a very religious home. My dad was a pastor. It would be necessary to explain that my dad did not go to high school or graduate from high school. He was a poor pastor of a poor community in a Pentecostal denomination, which does a great job of rising up a local indigenous leadership to any level that their leadership skills will take them. So a relatively uneducated man can become a pastor if he learns the Bible and all that.

A very religious home. My parents did not have the global view of the world as perhaps I do, but understood it from various religious principles. And very strict religious principles: I must say I had a lot of physical constraints on what you could and couldn’t do, blended into all of the great stuff.

And so, from a very young age, I started asking questions about why couldn’t we do this or that and where in the Bible does this say this or that? I learned very early to limit my questions. That it was not going to be smiled on to expose weaknesses within the theological or scriptural or thought processes of my leaders, and this was very clear to me from a very early age and I tried from time to time, up until the time I left home, to push the envelope on that. And so, I was never really settled in where I was theologically and in the hierarchy of thinking of my community, and it turns out that that has become my way of life [Laughs]. That I never really settled in to the hierarchies of thought and always questioning and believing that there is kind of a purer form of the truth under what we really have now and a purer form of existence, a more humane or human form of existence than where we are now. And so, I’m always kind of pushing for that.

Andy: So somehow, that translated into a sense of adventure for you. You weren’t really supposed to ask these questions, but you had this curiosity and desire to push the boundaries. How did that translate into going to the United States and embarking on education and an executive type of career?  

Don: Yeah. Well, it’s interesting. I was a very good draw-er and then painter in high school. By the way, that high school, you had to get a scholarship to go to high school. It was not just free. And so, I passed the scholarship at 10 years old to get into the high school stream. One of four in my elementary school, along with my sister. So you can imagine, there were five of us who passed that scholarship from three different homes. Two homes had two kids. Another family had twins. And so, you can see out of an entire school of hundreds of kids, having just five kids go on, that was a very precious gift. I struggled because when I got to high school, all the kids were richer than I was and I always felt very out of place and spent a good part of my early years in that high school stream being a comedian, trying to kind of cover over my discomfort.

And so, my academics slipped. My confidence slipped. I was a bright kid and a lot of my confidence slipped and I kind of languished into academic failure for a while. Until towards the end of graduation, I really was frightened into buckling down and doing well. One skill that never faded or angulated or wavered was my skill at drawing and painting. I was always the best one in my school and entered national contests and exhibits and so on. And so, I knew I could do this as good as most people, and so I wanted to do it. I wanted to do some form of art and design.

And so, I resolved in my heart to go to the London School of Arts or some school in the United States, which was preposterous. It was just preposterous! A poor kid in Jamaica, trying to go to school in London or in the United States. The visa requirements, the resource, the demonstrated self-support you would have to have; I had nothing like that. And through a series of circumstances that were too complex to go into, a confluence of circumstances led to me getting a visa to the United States and a school that I applied to and got entrance.

And so, that was for me a great demonstration of what being true to what you want to do can work out. My father wanted me to be a lawyer. There was a path for that. Go to university in the West Indies, pass an exam, go in. In fact, two of my siblings did that subsequently. I’m one of 10 kids, the third of 10, and they are lawyers in Jamaica now. I found that to be kind of a little more tedious than I wanted to live. I wanted to kind of express myself and be creative.

When I was 15, my dad bought a piano and I banged away at it. Nobody taught me to play. He was having my younger siblings in piano lessons and I found out I could play without reading notes. So I did that for years, a few years until I got good enough to start performing. And I got to be pretty popular in Jamaica and at 19, 20 I had the number one hit on the Jamaican Hit Parade.

Andy: Wow!

Don: Yeah! Which was a gospel song, which was kind of weird that a gospel song was this pop hit. But in any event, because of that, and pouring my life and energies into that, it opened up the windows for me to come to the United States and to study. And I came here and I walked away from all of that music and all of that adulation and people begging me to stay and offering me jobs where I wouldn’t have to do much, just so I could do music and that kind of a thing, but I didn’t see that as what I wanted to do with my life. The thought of having songs that were popular and being the cool guy as my way of life, I just could not see that happening [Laughs] because I was an introvert and I did not have the socially magnetic personality. I have siblings who did, so I could see the contrast.

And then here I was belting out these songs, and suddenly I was a magnetic person. And I thought, “You guys don’t know me. You love me now, but I was the same loveable guy yesterday. But there’s something that the music’s done to attract you to me and I don’t want to live off that. I don’t want some kind of a skill to be what drives my relationship with the world.” It was a really weird thing for a 20 year old to come to, but I decided I wanted to have a secure source of income that did not require popularity and would give me the freedom to be who I was and not to be constantly thirsting for the popularity to put food on the table or to feed my soul. And so, I left it and came to the United States to do design.

Andy: That’s remarkably insightful as a young man to get that little taste of fame and to have sort of the wherewithal to say, “You know what? This isn’t really true to who I am or what I want from my life.”

Don:  Right. When I look back at it, at the time I thought it was just me being me, but when I look back at it now, I think, “Why, that was weird for a 20 year old to do that!” [Laughs]

Andy: Absolutely!

Don:  But I’m absolutely glad I did.

Andy: So you came to the United States and you studied Industrial Design?

Don:  Yes. I studied Industrial Design, and then got a job as a toy designer. So I spent 30 years designing toys for kids to play with, which
is a strange way to make a living! [Laughs] But it was a lot of fun and extremely exciting because you had to do new things every year. You could not do the same thing. So I had a very creative energy around my life in terms of cutting from the past, forging new ideas, seeing them become real product, and then moving on to creating new product again. My challenge each day was an empty page, and I had to put new ideas on it.

And then Fisher-Price called me up and said they wanted a 5 ½ inch doll that had Barbie-like play, but would be smaller. And they have a lot of role play activities related to it, three accessories, shelf-demonstrable and that was going to have a commercial, so I had to think about that. Then I had a blank piece of paper, and that was it! You had to figure out how to get your mind to work to come up with something totally brand new. You’d be stealing from everything you knew, but this had to be a singularly new permutation of a doll. And so, at that point, you of course immediately want to go to the bathroom or go to the fridge or remember something you had to clean, or anything but this page that was looking back at you.

And so, the discipline of having to deal with that for 30 years was truly consistent with how I loved to live my life. And so, it’s informed most of everything that I have done and allowed me to, in a way, institutionalize, questioning the past, being able to let go of the past, to embrace the challenges of the present and to create something for the future.

Andy: So you had this long, successful career doing some pretty exciting things. As you said, it was sort of preposterous that you were there
in the first place.

Don: Yeah.

Andy: But circumstances conspired to give you this amazing career. Why did you end up leaving that?

Don: Well, during my entire career, I had this other life. It was as if I had two lives. I was a designer professional. And yet, there was this other thing going on at the same time. When I was in Jamaica, I saw Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement playing out in the United States and his death, and it brought to light the inequities in the United States for public global consumption. So when I arrived here, I had both the great hope of the American Dream, and also, a consciousness of this American nightmare that was mostly addressed and was in the process of transition.

And so, I wanted to be part of that so badly because here I was, a Jamaican kid in a very, very strongly, overtly religious life and community and the social inequities was not a problem. It was just the way life was. If you’re poor and whatever religion you are, and you’re rich and whatever religion you are, the religion and your life had nothing to do with each other. And for me, I felt the inequities because I was plucked out of a situation of poverty and put into a school situation where middle and upper middle class and the rich kids attended; one of five poor kids going into these schools.

And so, the inequities of that were always churning away at me. I couldn’t afford a book when it was time to buy a book and getting detentions because you didn’t have this or that thing. No sympathy to say, “Well, his mom’s poor or his parents are poor.” It’s like if you don’t have it, you get a detention. And you just take on all of that pain and responsibility as a kid. I’m just wrong for being poor. I’m in the wrong state [Laughs].

And so, to see a country where people were saying such inequities were unjust, that was galvanizing for me as a kid. So when I arrived here, that aspect of my consciousness was more alive than my own personal ambitions. So while in college, I moved to Lower Manhattan, the lower east side of Manhattan, into a really destitute part of town. A violent, drugged part of Manhattan. Avenue D and 7th street. Anybody who lived there back then can tell you what that was all about [Laughs]. Just in my last year of college, I lived in there. And then, I proceeded, I think, since that time, and I have never lived in a middle class community – certainly suburban – for all but two years of my adult life. I’ve always lived in the inner city because I feel that this is where that dream is going to be played out. I just feel so excited about it [Laughs].

And certainly, the experience of the Civil Rights Movement or the observation of the Civil Rights Movement totally cemented that as a real goal and a real achievable eventuality. If human beings put their minds together and are dedicated and willing to take the risks, we can move our culture and our economy and we can change our world. But you have to be willing to put yourself there, whether it be sitting in a lunch counter or sitting in somewhere or marching into a space that you’re not supposed to be in or applying for a job you’re not supposed to get or to vote when you’re not supposed to, you put yourself in that place and you refuse to move. And so, part of my whole life, I have kind of moved forward that way. Moving into the most dangerous community, wherever I live, and just planting myself there and saying, “I am going to be part of this transformation. I’m going to be in the middle of it.”

And so, carrying that along during my entire career, living always in the most challenged community. And because of my religious past, and also, the paradigm of the civil rights movement, I tried to do that by becoming a member of a church in those communities and being very active, volunteering especially with children. And so, I was always involved in children’s programming and children’s activities and children’s classes and all of that, and I felt that the children had the highest hope. I did for about 25 years, and while I was working. Whatever city I moved to, six different cities, that’s what I did.

And then, around 1992, a series of cataclysmic events led me to shift my focus from volunteering in church to volunteering in community. I just
came to the conclusion that this dream that the church had kind of been the crucible for, that the church had given up on that. And that it was probably more Martin Luther King’s consciousness of making a better world as a pastor than the civil rights movement as a whole that tied the church so much with the civil rights movement, at least in my mind.

And so, when I finally got frustrated that the church was no longer embarking on that grand project of changing the world, that it was more involved in changing individual lives and the gains that have been made through the civil rights movement, or even making more gains, but making gains for your people, your flock, your group, but the concept of categorically changing the world had been kind of given up on.

So I started to volunteer in community. And about this time – this was in 1992 or ’93 – and I floundered for a while, trying to find the traction in that world and volunteering in school districts and tutoring programs, large tutoring programs and helping to organize that. And then finally, we moved into the Jordan neighborhood in Minneapolis about 17 years ago and started to organize our neighbors around dealing with the crime and blight and socially destructive behaviors. And out of that, after a few years, my Council member resigned and my neighbor prodded me to run for office. And by the way, that was very shortly after I graduated from the seminary [Laughs]. Because at the tail end of all of that, of my 30 year career, of all of that social engagement, I went to seminary at Luther Seminary here in the Twin Cities, and graduated and was ordained. And then my neighbor, a pastor, called me up and he said, “Don, you have to run.” And I said, “Run from what?”

And he said, “You have to run for office.” [Laughs] He said, “We have 50 kids in my church’s afterschool program and we think two of them might graduate.” This is teenaged kids. And he said, “The mayor doesn’t get it. The superintendent doesn’t get it. I’ve tried to get the governor. We’re trying to, but the government has no interest or little interest and no idea of the world we are creating with this sweeping failure in large swaths of our city and state and country. There’s this apathy about it that going to pull our country down and it’s going to pull our city down. We need someone in office. We have enough preachers in North Minneapolis.”

And so, it was quite a challenge. And I never knew that a single phone call from a single person could make me make a decision like so categorically to change my life. But it did, and my other neighbors came around him and they all decided that this was a good thing to do and we had a meeting, a neighborhood meeting. I said I would do this if we did it together and everybody agreed we would do it together. So without any prior political engagement – I only voted when the President was being elected [Laughs]. And with no base, no party affiliation – well, we decided to run as Democrats and we had to fight against the party’s endorsed candidate who got all the endorsements. Nobody had ever worked on a campaign before and we totally overwhelmed the system with just grassroots campaigning.

Andy: As a young man, a youth earlier in your career, did you ever envision going to seminary or becoming involved in politics?

Don: Well, first of all, I determined I would not go to seminary. I would not be a pastor. And in fact, there was a period there where I was thinking about it, and I said to my dad, “Dad, I’m thinking about going into ministry.” This is my dad. He’s a preacher. He said to me, “I think you need to go to college, find a career and figure out what you can do to make a living for yourself with your skills. And then, if you want to be a preacher or a pastor, you can decide.” And that was telling about there are some things about my dad that were a little unconventional that might have been in spite of the somewhat oppressive theological stances he had, he might have freed me up more than I realized in the little things he said and did to be the kind of person I am today.

But after that, I just put that on the shelf. In fact, I saw so many people becoming pastors because their pastors were, their dads were or family members were. And I thought, “That seems circumstantial. It doesn’t seem totally like a fully objective decision-making. So let me push against it and I’m not going to fall in line with destiny in that way.” And so, I kind of pushed against that for years and made peace with it. It wasn’t a source of anxiety for me.

And then politics, absolutely not! I am an introvert and I love to spend time by myself thinking about the world and coming out every now and then to eat and drink and make a living. But hey, I live in my head! [Laughs] And I experienced many times socializing as inconvenient. And so, for me to be a politician is quite a journey.

Andy: It’s an interesting contrast with your experience as a 20 year old and the fame of your music.

Don: Right.

Andy: And leaving that behind. And now, working as a public servant for the good of the community.

Don:  Yeah. It’s quite a set of bookends and the possibility of making a difference motivates me to transcend some of my personal constraints like my own personality, if you can call it that, and reach out to people and do what I need to do because I have a job [Laughs]. I got an important task on hand and I have to do it.

Andy:  So Don, the purpose of this A Congruent Life project is really to explore stories of authenticity. What does living authentically or congruently mean to you?

Don:  Well, I mentioned earlier that I find that when you’re a child, you may or may not get to live authentically. And by that, I mean that in my case, I grew up in a Pentecostal home. There were ways you had to dress, especially women. And the things you couldn’t do or could do, some of them did not make sense to me. They didn’t seem to be biblical or based on reasonableness. And so, I pushed against them and was quickly told that if I did that, I would lose my place, my comfortable place in the family and in my community [Laughs]. Don’t ask those questions. You cannot be happy and safe if you do.

And so, I realized I couldn’t. I mean, I guess I could. I don’t know what my life would be like if I took that to the limit, but I know that a lot of disenfranchisement was going to be part of it and I didn’t know that my childhood apparatus could handle what was going to be the repercussions for me. I just needed to be safe, I needed to be able to go to school, do my lessons, have friends, play outside, and this allure to ask tough questions was going to put all of that in jeopardy. So I didn’t [Laughs]. I figured out pretty soon how close I could get to the edge without falling over. Every now and then, I would get in trouble up until I left home. I was always kind of trained to push it, and sometimes I got pretty slapped down.

In fact, once we had a convention, an island-wide convention, and there were about a thousand young people in this youth seminar thing and I was on a panel. They were talking about issues that concerned young people and I mentioned that some of the strictures around lifestyle and dating and socializing between boys and girls seemed to me to be unreasonable. And in some cases, the concern about dressing, especially for girls, the level of modesty seemed to be inconsistent with what our counterparts in the United States had even, let alone within reason, and I think that we should talk about these things. And oh gosh! Man, I’ll tell you! The pastor, the man who was the National Denomination’s head, he preached after that and he put me in my place. I mean, it was a national whipping because this was on national stage and I was thoroughly chastised for daring to make that challenge. It was painful and I was 17 or so. That was very painful for me and I knew I couldn’t survive. I was still in my dad’s home. He was not happy. So I took a posture of “Okay, I’ll just wait this out. I’ll be a good boy for the next two or three years, and then I’ll be my own man.”

And so, living that authentic life still carries those kind of constraints. There are some things you can say and some things you can’t say right now because people are just not ready to deal with that. But it is the responsibility, I think, of an authentic person or a person trying to live an authentic life to always push the envelope because we’re trying to move the world along. And in every case where there is inauthenticity, where there are rules or morals or values, social customs or laws that deserve questioning, there is a victim somewhere under it who is being treaded on because of the pressure of the unfairness. It’s not unfairness in a vacuum or lack of logic in a vacuum. In fact, you don’t even have to question unreasonableness. You can just follow the victims and you will find unreasonable rules, laws, social conditions or whatever. And then, you can question those.

But sometimes even people who would benefit from the change will find that challenge to be unacceptable because as I as a kid was challenging the system from which I would benefit for the change, I suffered for it. So people intuitively know that if you have someone coming along to raise issues that are going to change the world, that there is a period of discomfort when there is going to be pushback. And the people who are victims of the injustice are likely to be the victims of the pushback. And so, there’s a natural inclination to not change things, even in the heart of those who suffer the consequences of those things because at least, we are living in relative peace. Besides, we don’t know if this effort to change things is going to work. We could just end up being beaten up, beaten down, and then retreat back to where we were yesterday. And so, just leave it alone. Leave it alone! And just let’s live in peace. But I think if you are grounded in a way, you know pretty well who you are and you made peace with the fact that the world is designed for evolution and change. And that you are a part of it, whether you like it or not. You’re going to be part of the dying breed or you’re going to change and become part of the future. If you embrace that as a way of life, then you can handle the conflict. In fact, the conflict is in a way a beautiful thing because it is part of change.

This is going a little bit afield, but I was in the delivery room with my wife having our oldest daughter and she was struggling. It was kind of painful. Of course, childbirth usually is. And the midwife, she said to her, “You know, your baby is trying to get born, and you are holding back. You’re not working with her because of the pain. But you should move into the pain. Okay? Because she is working and you need to work with her. Move into the pain and help her get born.” And that changed the whole delivery room dynamic. My wife just decided that “Okay, this is good work. This pain work is good work. And my daughter is working too. And I’m going to work with her.” It changed everything. And of course, if your wife’s experience changes in the delivery room, your experience changes too. Right? [Laughs] If mom’s not happy, dad’s not happy.

And so, not only does your life change, but the lives of those around you change. And people see change in your life as something that can be embraced and celebrated and reinterpreted. The trauma can be reinterpreted as a delivery. This is not just trauma we are going through here like inflicted pain. We’re involved in the delivery of the future! And that’s a whole different thing we’re going to go through it in a different spirit.

So I think the authentic life brings you up against the inauthentic or the challenge of the inauthentic. And if you are willing to stay in that place of discomfort – for a while. It’s never permanent. It’s like childbirth or the delivery room. It might last a day, but it’s not forever. If you’re willing to stay there in your authenticity and push through for what you know wants to happen or needs to happen, then you make these steps of delivering something, of seeing things born that then inspire you for all of your future efforts. And so, I think the authentic life is, at many stages, a traumatic life [Laughs]. But it is not meaningless suffering. It is suffering in the birth of new, better realities.

Andy: What a nice analogy. Thanks!

Don: Yeah.

Andy: So Don, what would you consider to be some of your notable failures and what have they taught you?

Don:  Yeah. Well, I’ve been divorced a couple of times. Those have been the failures of my life, no doubt about it. They taught me that I can’t succeed at everything, that I can’t fix everything, that I can’t handle everything. That there are some things that I should not walk into because I think I’m invulnerable or that I am a savior. That is not what this is about. It also taught me that everybody is their own person and you can’t go into someone’s life and make it be your life. It’s going to be your lives together [Laughs]. And no matter how great you think you are or how hard you work, it is life together, and you better be ready for that.

And so, it’s also taught me that I can be a pretty imperfect guy, and I’m still redeemable and I’m still accepted. And up until those experiences, I was getting a lot of comfort from being just a pretty good, darn good guy [Laughs]. You grew up in a Pentecostal family, you live up to the standards of that. That’s pretty tough to do. You can be morally living better than a lot of people. A pretty good guy. And I took a lot of comfort in that without really realizing it. It got all confused with true virtue for me.

And so, to get to a point where I had two grand failures, as grand as human failures can be. This is about family, about the basic building block of society. And certainly, religion, and certainly, a Pentecostal religion would be obsessed with that [Laughs]. And I failed the biggest test [Laughs]. And so, that really humbled me and it has made me much more accepting of human failure, of my own failure and understanding that there is hope for people and that people can fail in one area of their lives and still make great contributions in life and people deserve a second chance. That’s given my life a lot of grace and I’m grateful for that.

Andy: And what’s going on in your world now, Don?

Don: Well, I’ve been a Council member for a decade and because of the communities I have lived in, I have seen poverty perpetuate. I have seen people stuck in poverty for generations. All the while, I’m designing pretty toys on the shelves of Target and Toy “R” Us and being involved in the great world of supply and demand and the marketplace. And these failures continue and I see, here I am at 64 years old, and I see another cycle, political cycle, come around.

Our mayor is resigning and there are people in the race to be the next mayor, and I know for a fact that I have heard nothing to suggest to me that eight years from now, after our next mayor has been in office two terms, anything about that will change. I think Toys “R” Us will have new toys. Target will have great, new toys on their shelves. Better than what I designed when I was a designer. That the marketplace, supply and demand will be regenerated. We will recover from this economic slump we’re in. We’re going to be just build gleaming new buildings and make new millionaires. But the unchangeable will be the folks I live around. Generational poverty will continue and we have made peace with that. I have not made peace with it [Laughs]. I think it can change. Absolutely!

And so, people ask me, “Why do you deserve to be mayor and why do you want to be mayor?” And I’m not sure I deserve to be mayor and I really don’t want to be mayor. I want to see these things change. And after all these years of observing the realities of what these things are and how intransigent they are and having strong convictions of how it can be changed and seeing it in my own life, on my own street, in my own circle, in my own family, that these things can be taken to scale. When I contemplate that, I simply am offering myself to the constituency and saying, “This is me. Here are the ideas I have. I think this could make Minneapolis a really just city. If you agree, elect me. I’m going to be a really different mayor. These are going to be my priorities and things are going to change if we work together.” And so, that’s what I like to see it as. It’s an offering of myself for the public to decide if this way in the world of a leader, this set of priorities by a leader, is something the city is willing to embrace at this time in its history to make categorical, historical change in the lives of people who otherwise would continue their generational failures. And when I put it like that, I am totally jazzed! [Laughs] I’m very excited about the prospect of being the new Mayor of Minneapolis.

Andy: How can our listeners engage with you, Don?

Don: Well, they can go to my website. It’s samuelsformayor.com. Or they can write to me at *protected email* and I would love to hear from and discuss with anyone, especially anyone considering a life of authenticity and especially if it’s related to life in American cities and America’s perennial underclass or America’s potential to solve these ancient problems and create a new era of prosperity, no matter what your zip code is or the color of your skin.

Andy: Do you have a final thought that you’d like to leave our listeners with about authenticity?

Don: Yeah. The world needs authenticity to grow. We can’t grow unless a few people are willing to take the risk to be who they are and to be that well. And you might not have been. You’ll not be able to be 100% authentic in the sense that you say whatever you feel to anybody, anywhere at any time. That’s not what I’m talking about. But it’s never letting go of that dream, that childhood sense of the world, the way the world should be – fair, humane – and never letting go of that. And that you have something inside of you that your family felt the need to suppress in order to keep you safe. Many times, it’s actually killed your will, your personality and your authentic stuff. And that’s waiting to come out and that is not in any way separated from making the world a better place. When you move into that personal authenticity, you become groomed to be a tool for creating an authentic world. In an authentic world, inequities disappear and opportunities become egalitarian and the world just evolves and gets better every time, one authentic person at a time.

Andy: Well, Don Samuels, it’s really great to have this opportunity to chat with you. Thanks very much for sharing this time with us and sharing your stories, and thank you for the good work that you’re doing in the world.

Don: Thank you, Andy, for having me on the show and for opening this opportunity for conversations on this very, very important topic.