The Dangerous Mistake Western Leaders Keep Making - Dickie Shearer

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Anthony Scaramucci (1:00)

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Anthony Scaramucci (1:30)

I'm going to channel in the role play here for a second, because I'm a Western politician, a hulking figure, and I believe that might makes right, and that he who has the arms wins. And you're going to listen to me by dick tat. You're going to have a gun to your head. I'm going to tell you what to do and when to do it. And if you don't do that, I'm going to obliterate you. I may even possibly put on my social media feed that I'm going to wipe out your civilization. Is that going to fly in this part of the world?

Richard Shearer (1:59)

I think no. It's a short answer, and then I'll expand.

Anthony Scaramucci (2:04)

Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us today is Richard Shearer. He goes by Dickie. So Dickie Shearer, founder of Tintra. Welcome to the show.

Before we dive in into your ideas, and the reason I brought you on is you are a pro-lific writer. You didn't write a book, but you've got an interesting philosophy that I want to share with our viewers and listeners. And so you spent your life traveling through the Global South rather than just following the conventional Silicon Valley venture capitalists. So let's start there. Where did your journey begin? And how did you end up doing what you're doing, Dickie?

Richard Shearer (2:41)

Hi, thanks for having me. Pleased to be here.

Well, it goes back, I started maybe 20 years ago. I grew up in Southeast Asia, so I've always been somewhat third culture. I'm clearly very British, but I'm also very not. So from around 20 years ago, we started, and Tintra is a very old business in its new incarnation. It's five years old. But for a very long time, a lot of my work sat both inside philanthropy, for-profit, and just the general philosophies of my life.

Trying to pull together how we can use the things I'm interested in, essentially culture, and try and move away from a phrase that I use a lot, white is right. I say people that look and sound like me have run around the world for thousands of years saying we are right, and when you do it like us, you're going to be right too. So trying to build based on that philosophy into build businesses and build philanthropies that fight against that dogma. So for a long time, for maybe 15 years, a lot of that work centered on ultra-high net worth and ruling families and very influential families from emerging markets, we now call it the Global South, and how they interface with the West. How do we conform a non-Western footprint? How do we take a Qatari family office and make it work in the US.? How do we take a Kenyan family and make their investment strategies work in the UK.? So that's the background, and that's what's sort of colored most of my work for the last 20 years.

Anthony Scaramucci (4:26)

One of the things that you've said, which I agree with, but I have a hard time doing, is don't view the world from the framing you inherited. And so we know that we have our own nature, and then we have the nurture in terms of the way our families raise us and the lifestyle that we live in. You're looking at the quintessential New Yorker, Dickie. So I see the world everything through the lens of a New Yorker. So I shouldn't do that, but I do do that. Tell us the problem of doing that.