Charlie Gay has committed his life to changing the world. He said, All we need to do is to tap into and unite each other’s brilliance in action, to make each of us the best superstar each of us can be, to change the world forever. During his career, he has seen the brightest lights of superstardom and the bleakest moments of human suffering.
Charlie Gay began his career by organizing events for Margaret Thatcher’s government in the Conservative Party in England. He then became one of the top event promoters in the world, creating events for Luciano Pavarotti, Pink Floyd, Duran Duran, Fleetwood Mac, and Phil Collins.
In 1991, Cher invited Charlie to the US as part of her personal management team. He was responsible for managing Cher’s relationship with Geffen Records in the US and MCA in Europe, and for a direct-response marketing program that generated over $100 million in sales within two years. Over the past eight years Charlie has organized events at the Rose Bowl, Candlestick Park, the Cotton Bowl and the Washington, DC Mall. In total, over one million people attended those events.
He co-founded Promenade Pictures with Frank Yablans, founder of Buena Vista and the head of Paramount Pictures, and he is the executive director of Mineseeker and The Sole of Africa, working with Nelson Mandela, Sir Richard Branson, Brad Pitt, and Queen Noor of Jordan. Charlie is also the chief visionary and co-founder of Humanity Unites Brilliance, or HUB, a for-profit-or as he says, ‘for-benefit’-organization committed to moving people throughout the world from survival to self-empowerment to sustained abundance. It is this organization and its radically different business model that we examine in the following interview.
Mark Victor Hansen will co-host Charlie’s interview. Mark is the co-creator of the bestselling nonfiction book series of all time, Chicken Soup for the Soul. He is a sought-after speaker and transformational leader, and a recipient of the coveted Horatio Alger Award.
Mark’s Mega Events have gained renown for the quality of their speakers and the opportunities for direct connection provided to their participants. If you want to find out how to extend your life and live in perfect health, then be sure to visit this website: www.MegaYoungevity.com.
MARK VICTOR HANSEN: This is going to be exciting because I think Charlie Gay is one of the great enlightened, enlivened, enriching, enhancing, exciting minds of our time. Beyond that, he’s my friend. Charlie, what role have your passions and the things that you care most about played in your life?
CHARLIE GAY: Every role, Mark. Initially, probably unconsciously, I believe we are given fruits of the spirit and irrevocable skill sets that come out the passions of our younger years. I went to Eton College; Eton College breeds bankers, it breeds generals, it breeds politicians. Yet my passion was events and music at a young age. I became a rock-and-roll promoter by 22 and was doing events for Prime Minister Thatcher at 24. Obviously, I didn’t become a banker.
The passion and the enthusiasm of life were always there. A lot of people called me a rebel when I was young. Passion for me is asking the question, not just settling on the answer, not holding onto the past or fearing the future. Enthusiasm and passion were abundant in my youth. It got me into a few pickles, and it got me to see mountaintops and valleys. It allowed me, though, to forge a path that at some point became a little bit clearer and more choreographed as I progressed through life. The passion is critical.
MARK VICTOR HANSEN: Tell me about your background, about how you got started, and ultimately how it led you to create Humanity Unites Brilliance, HUB.
CHARLIE GAY: I have a passion for uniting. I’ve always done that, Mark, as you know. I see the brilliance in people, and I love to bring them together. You were one of those people who brings your two index fingers together and make it 11, magnify and multiply. If we stay isolated we can’t do that. I was blessed that I was asked to be the arrangements chairman for the final Billy Graham Crusade in Los Angeles.
Dr. Graham had a passion for uniting churches across the world, and he asked me to do that at his final Crusade. I brought churches together that perhaps were not so good at uniting, but just doing their own thing in their mega churches, and under that brand of Billy Graham he brought them together. Two days later, I was asked to be arrangements chairman and executive director for the Mineseeker Foundation.
I first of all had passion for that because they asked me to do it from a music standpoint. They wanted to put on some events. They then took me down to Africa, and I got to see the passion of patrons of Mineseeker, like Nelson Mandela. There’s no one more passionate about humanity after 27 years of imprisonment, no one more passionate about forgiveness than the man who created forgiveness councils when he came out of prison.
You’ll find Jean Paul DeJoria of Paul Mitchell and Sir Richard Branson. Richard was passionately starting six companies by the time he was 17. Those companies all went bankrupt and failed. The seventh company was called Virgin. Jean Paul DeJoria, as you know, was collecting cans in his car the month before he started Paul Mitchell. They were passionate men about what they believed in; never worrying about what someone else was going to say when they created, when they put across their passion and their idea.
We were down there with a very passionate group of people: Brad Pitt, Queen Noor, as you know, and Mandela’s wife, a passionate lady. There were three women who are presidents of their own countries in Africa. She had been married to the president of Mozambique. We were looking at creating alternatives to the landmine issue. As you know, landmines blow up every 19 minutes and a woman or child is maimed. They cost a lot of money to remove.
There are 70 to 100 million of them. I think of organizations like the United Nations and politicians, who are not necessarily passionate; they’re working more through the mechanisms and the structures that have been set up in sort of an anachronistic way, and they can’t actually move out of them. The old model is broken. I think it’s awfully good for us to be able to go down with new passions and new insights.
Of course, Mandela and Richard figured out a way of reducing landmine removal, therefore passionately moving countries from survival through self-empowerment to self-sustainment. I did that in Mozambique. I had 500,000 people come into a refugee camp in Mozambique last February. Cyclones happened; they’d just happened before, and the United Nations ran out of a food program.
A half-million people, Mark, came into a refugee camp. I had a passion of a humanitarian who loves the one. The greatest humanitarians in this world love one, then another one and then another one. They’re passionate about it. Heidi came to me and said, I don’t think I can deal with this issue. A year before, I was down there with Larry Jones, your friend and mine, who’s passionately feeding the world through Feed the Children.
Larry and I offered her whatever she needed; we’d get it for her. She couldn’t bring herself to say that. Her passion came from God, from the universe, but last February she did ask for help. I did reach out to my Circle of Brilliance, and that was Larry Jones and Lee Iacocca’s organization at Nourish the Children. We were able to move $2.5 million worth of food from China factories to Mozambique and feed that position. I knew at that point that Humanity Unites Brilliance was it. Larry was brilliant at distributing and moving food from China.
The food was there because of the passionate distributors that Lee Iacocca had, and it was just a matter of uniting them. Then I realized that everyone else at this time on the planet had a universal code. All we needed to do was to give them an action roadmap and move them out of the confusion, giving them the awareness, of wondering where to put their money, what impact it was having, and give them the roadmap, give them action, unite them. That’s what we’re doing with HUB.
MARK VICTOR HANSEN: Why does HUB put so much emphasis on the importance of HUB members clarifying their individual passions?
CHARLIE GAY: That’s a great, great question because we give, but also we passionately give in our lives. We’ve passionately given in anger or aspiration; that’s giving. We’ve passionately blamed ourselves or blamed ourselves for not being another, but that passion that we do there is actually confusing. What’s happening is we’re holding onto the past or we’re fearing the future when we’re in that place.
Now you take that into the world of giving and philanthropy and humanitarian concerns. Mandela showed me, and many others have shown me, and you’ve been a leader of this, that giving alone-because we’ve given trillions and trillions of dollars to Africa, for instance-doesn’t do it, Mark. We have to be effective givers. To be effective givers, we have to understand how to receive.
We have to be able to move away from holding on or fearing. We have to be in the ‘I am’. ‘I am’ is a translation for enthusiasm or passion. Man’s greatest sin is expectation: If I give to you, what do you give back to me? Passion, just as you exemplify in your life, is, How can I help you? It’s not, How can I help you help me? It’s absolutely critical for people to understand that there’s a learning line, and the receiving aspect of giving is absolutely critical to become effective givers.
Then, it’s to bring out the brilliance. People are brilliant. We’re all born to be brilliant. We know that. It’s in the words. Sometimes our brilliance comes out like Tiger Woods in the first stage of life. Obviously, Tiger is undeniably the greatest golfer who probably ever lived, along with Jack Nicklaus. Then there is passion that stays on the pillow at nighttime.
The passion is there in the evening or in the day, the download comes, the idea comes, but then in the morning it’s frozen still on the pillow. It doesn’t come forward. It is mirrored and veneered in the heart by the minefield of the mind, and the expectation or the holding-on stops us from moving into the brilliance. Then there’s a third brilliance that may not have been unveiled.
For instance, you gave me permission to be brilliant in communicating and into the calling of my life. I was brilliant at supporting others to be the best they could be. When you allow me to come onto a platform at a Mega event, when you gave me that opportunity to be authentic in my own expression about passion and humanity, that unveiled a new brilliance that’s now been put into the world.
There’s brilliance in all of us, and it’s a matter of bringing it together, buffering each other’s mirrors. I buffer each mirror that I can find, and I like to see the brilliance come forward in someone. Why? Then that light shines more greatly into me, and I get to know myself better in the next second of my life. That’s enough.
MARK VICTOR HANSEN: Wow! You’ve said that HUB is going to become the MySpace on steroids. What do you mean by that?
CHARLIE GAY: I have a lot of enthusiastic co-founders who gave that quote. That’s not a ‘Charlie’ quote, but it is in relationship to social communities; they’ve all been really on one level. You’ve been able to put yourself out to a community. You’ve never really been able to put out on different levels your personal beliefs, your business beliefs, your world beliefs, your humanitarian beliefs.
How about this social marketing, a social network that’s been put together but, yes, provides the tradition or viral opportunity to share music, video, blogging, words, pictures, and profiles? That’s like MySpace, LinkedIn, and Facebook, but we go beyond that. We have a series of technologies that have been put together that will really round the Circle of Brilliance, just like the one I had in Mozambique.
We looked to marry everyone up through the passion profile and The Passion Test; Janet and Christopher are very significant in that environment. Let’s bring forward the passion as people come into HUB. How difficult is it, Mark, for people to ask for help? How difficult is it for people to really expose themselves to their own brilliance? HUB allows that.
The Internet has always provided a place of safety for people, where a public forum is very difficult for people to communicate from. There are only a very few people as blessed as you, Janet and Chris in being able to communicate. The web actually is a place of safety. People can go there at any time of night. They’re there on the web, and they can take baby steps.
They just go forward, just a bit more forward. Here we are linking them with The Passion Test, Circles of Brilliance, and all sorts of backend programming to support them to be the best they can be and to connect with their community and the world.
MARK VICTOR HANSEN: I’m astounded. Exactly how can HUB help someone discover and give expression to their own brilliance?
CHARLIE GAY: By people showing up. If someone is listening to this, my word is to show up inside of HUB and allow everything else to show up around you. What I mean by that is that as we look at getting involved with something, we look at it from a place of what we know we know, not from a place of what we don’t know we know, which only the universal God knows. We’re operating from a paradigm.
Now the question is, are we going to move out of the safety of the way that we traditionally do things or just throw ourselves out into a leap of faith? HUB, first of all, asks people just to bring themselves forward in their own authentic expression. We have confidence, with the brilliance that is around HUB, that we’re able to buffer those mirrors and bring extraordinary people and ordinary people to do extraordinary things.
We absolutely believe that the superstars of the world are you and I and every single person in the world. It didn’t take Nelson Mandela, Brad Pitt, or Richard Branson to feed the 500,000 people in Mozambique. It took impassioned distributors, who were people who were in a force for good to do that. People like you or me know, and everyone in the world knows, that each of us has the ability to be brilliant and to make a difference in our own lives in the world.
That probably wasn’t the case recently, but it is now. We really encourage people to bring their brilliance to the table, and then also go into a place of vulnerability and allow themselves the freedom to say, What if I were going to do this? What about that brilliance that I left on the pillow when I was 20 or 30, last year, when I had a family and five children? The children were still growing up, and I had to make them their breakfast and I had to get the husband out. Maybe I’m at work doing this, that, or the other.
What if I can move into the true calling of my life? What if I can take all the shaping of yesterday, all those pieces of battle that have shaped me for today, and I could put it in a place that really makes impact, not for this week, not for this month, but for our entire lives? What if we could do that? We believe we can do that inside of HUB for every member.
MARK VICTOR HANSEN: You’re wowing my soul, and I think everybody’s who is listening, Charlie. Congratulations. Why is providing humanitarian aid such an important part of HUB?
CHARLIE GAY: It’s the essence. It’s the whole essence. Humanity itself, Mark, is the finest tool to actually know ourselves better. I believe that what was central in the world when the world was first started became peripheral. The world went from creation to childhood into its confusion to a place of compromise. The fruits of the spirit, the truth, the consciousness that each of us have are always there.
In compromise, we often dwell on ‘lesser than’. The world did that. The Industrial Revolution and the way fuels have gone forward have done that. We know that. We have compromised ourselves for the love of power rather than dwelling in the power of love. That compromise led to conflict and it led to crisis. The world was in that place. We’ve probably been in it ourselves as individuals in our businesses and our homes.
We went from creation to childhood to confusion to compromise to conflict and crisis. The point is now that humanity-not dogma, not religion, not color or creed-has brought the world together. For the first time, there’s a generation that is awake. That generation-and it doesn’t matter its age-faces a challenge. It knows the challenge, and the challenge is simple. It’s choosing the destiny and the fate of our planet today.
Humanity, first of all, Mark, supports me in the act of giving gracefully, in the act of being in service. ‘Don’t judge lest ye be judged’. The truth of humanity is the most powerful tool, in the giving of it, to truly understanding how to receive on a very cellular level and to shift one’s soul greatly. For me, the cycle of giving and receiving is constant. It’s just repetitive, and it’s a motion that’s going so fast, as we know our friends talk about.
Giving and receiving are happening pretty well simultaneously. Humanity itself is critical. The second part of that is that I don’t believe-and this is my own stuff, so I have to own it-that there is a model out there that fixes the world. I don’t believe that charities by themselves are able to do that, and I’ll share why in a minute. I don’t believe the United Nations is able to police.
I don’t believe politicians and governments are able to do this. I believe it’s a coming together of society, a caring, sharing society that will be a grassroots movement that moves upward to shift the planet. I truly believe that, and I believe that-because Mandela showed me-that if we’re going to give and we’re going to be in the humanitarian position, we have to be effective.
That means integrating; that means putting food together with water at the front end, together with healthcare, together with technologies like I talked about, together with land/eco self-sustainment, together with education and together with microloans, which empower the women. We’re moving from survival through self-empowerment to self-sustainment.
I truly believe that we have to integrate. Now the issue is that most charities work by themselves, so as with Katrina, 78% of charities worked separately. Why? A donor is very valuable. A charity goes to a donor and gets $1.00, goes back and puts it into the field, goes back to the donor and gets another $1.00. He goes back and back and back. The donor gets fatigued. The dollar also never comes back from the field.
The critical thing was to create a humanitarian, sustained impact program that fixes the issues in relationship to allowing a country and its community to be empowered from within, not to just keep giving to it, because that’s a Band-Aid on a hemorrhaging wound, but from within. Humanity and the giving of humanity for HUB, obviously, is everything. Humanity Unites Brilliance; it’s everything. It’s unity, it’s brilliance, and it’s humanity; those three words are very specific to the company and to the operation of it.
MARK VICTOR HANSEN: What are the kinds of humanitarian projects that HUB is now supporting?
CHARLIE GAY: After I came back from Mozambique, and obviously looked at the issues regarding disasters and having abundance, the two things that were really important were these. One was putting together a force for good that recognized each other’s talents. We saw after Katrina a lot of organizations going around headless looking for the chicken’s head to put on. I won’t point fingers, but there were those who were already connected and joined together who were ready to take the outpouring from New Orleans, for instance, into the Houston Astrodome, which was very well-organized.
There were those like Larry Jones, who had 57 trucks, and the NBA; there were Larry King and CNN who got into the field of Mississippi really fast. When I came back, I recognized that we really also needed to find people in the field who knew what they were doing, that we weren’t just going down there and saying, We’re the ‘be-alls’ and ‘end-alls’, this is the best product, and this is what we should be doing.
I look for the irrevocable skill sets in each country of the caregivers, the people who understand how to love the one. That started in the first few months of HUB with impact programs in Kenya. We have two impact programs down there. One is taking the orphans, whose parents have both died of AIDS, out of the slums of Nairobi and putting them into the Child of Destiny Jubilee program, where they’re taught, sustained, and educated.
We’re now going back and giving microloans to the women. We’re the first group to do that in the slums. How important is that, Mark? There’s a woman called Ingrid Monroe, who studied under Muhammad Yunus, who had an ‘aha!’ moment. Three percent of microloans are not paid back because of health reasons; we knew that. Ingrid Monroe knew that. What she does is she says, Aha! What happens, Mark, if we put 30 cents per microloan as health insurance as a wrap?
Today, as we speak, health insurance is in existence with the poorest families, the poorest women, in the worst slums in the world, and yet our political leaders in America still debate it as to how to deal with health insurance in America. Humanity and the Third World will be freeing up America. Africa will free America. India will free England. It will go on that way. South America will free many countries, as we know, with our friend, Lynn Twist down in The Pachamama Alliance in the Ecuador jungles.
MARK VICTOR HANSEN: I just interviewed Lynn Twist, our girlfriend, just a minute ago on how to maximize your giving and receiving. What a brilliant mind and an enlightened human spirit she is.
CHARLIE GAY: She’s remarkable. She’s truly remarkable. Why? Because she’s been shaped for decades for who she is. She’s been doing this 30 or 40 years.
MARK VICTOR HANSEN: What you’re saying reminds me of a great Biblical line. Jesus said the last would be made first, and the first would be made last. Africa, on a lot of levels, India and countries like that look last are going to be made first, because they’re going to show us how to do that 30 cents per microloan. This is such brilliant stuff, ladies and gentlemen.
I know, because you’re listening to this or you’re reading this, that you’ve heard this stuff or you’ve seen Dr. Yunus interviewed. It’s wonderful. How do HUB members contribute to these projects, Charlie?
CHARLIE GAY: That was the next point. We wanted to create …
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