Casey Gerald says ruining his reputation saved his life

Tonya Mosley (0:00)

This is Fresh Air, I'm Tonya Mosley. My guest today, writer Casey Gerald, has walked away from his own success twice. The first time was in 2016 at the height of everything. He was a kid from Oak Cliff, a working class neighborhood on the south side of Dallas, who had made it out the way America tells us to make it out. A football scholarship to Yale, a job at Lehman Brothers, an MBA from Harvard. He created a nonprofit that put him on magazine covers and TED stages with a talk viewed millions of times. He opened for President Barack Obama at South by Southwest in 2016, and there was even a New York magazine headline that asked, Does Casey Gerald know how to fix America?

And then just like that, he shut down his nonprofit, stopped answering the phone and disappeared. His memoir, There Will Be No Miracles Here, was his first report back. Then he went quiet again. And now, after that second long silence, Casey Gerald has returned with a book that reads less like a memoir and more like a challenge. It's called The Great Refusal, A New Vision of Resistance. It's his attempt to make sense of the choice at the center of his own life, to stop trying to convince America that he deserves a place in it and take back the authority to decide what his life is for.

Casey Gerald, welcome to Fresh Air.

Casey Gerald (1:26)

Thank you, Tonya. So good to be with you.

Tonya Mosley (1:29)

Well, you know, the first time we spoke, I think it was around 2018, 2019

You had just come back into view after shutting down MBAs across America. That is your non-profit, which you created that sent MBAs all across the country to help small business owners. And you left New York, you went quiet. And in this book, you described that choice as a desperate one. And I thought that was a very interesting choice of words, to call it a desperate one. Desperate to get away from what?

Casey Gerald (2:05)

Well, I wasn't getting away from anything. I was going towards something. I just didn't know what it was. You know, people ask me all the time, they say, hey, my cousin wants to write a memoir. Do you have any advice for them? I say, absolutely. Do not do it unless your life depends on it. And that certainly was the case for me. I had accomplished by my late 20s about everything the kid is supposed to achieve. You know, when I first left Oak Cliff, South Oak Cliff High School in 2005 and went off to Yale, they put posters up in every school, public school in Dallas. Look who's going to Yale. He did it, you can too. And despite doing it or maybe because of it, I was really cracked up.

I don't know if you'd say I was having a nervous breakdown, but I wasn't too far off and I was awful sad. But all I knew was that something was wrong with me.

And something was wrong with a lot of my friends.

When we finally talked about it, and something was wrong with the world, it was 2016 So I just said, I'm leaving.

Tonya Mosley (3:21)

Where did you actually go? What did you actually do?

Casey Gerald (3:24)

Well, I went to Texas. I went back to Texas. I went to Austin. I'm from Dallas. And so I had two friends in Austin and I woke up one morning. I said, hey, do you think I can rent a house in Austin?

To write, because I had agreed to write this book. I didn't know if I was going to finish a book. I didn't know that I could write a book. There will be no miracles here. All I knew was, you know, the book business is about the only one that will pay you to investigate your own problems. And so I figured, okay, I'll try this as long as I can. So I went to Austin and kind of hid away, you know, in this little house for two years to write.

Tonya Mosley (4:04)

I'm just curious, those unanswered calls, those text messages, did you listen to them? Did you read them? All of the people trying to get in touch with you during that time that you were away?

Casey Gerald (4:17)

Not really. But I don't necessarily say that with pride.

I write in this book, sometimes you have to ruin your reputation to save your life. So, you know, I like people. I don't like putting on this front of, oh, I'm too busy to answer the phone. And so I didn't really listen to any of them because I was trying to listen to whatever this little heart of mine was trying to say.