In which we talk with another family member about the reasons a family may want to handle finances cooperatively rather than separately and independently.
Recorded October 10, 2024.
Show notes and links:
34 Ways to Make Extra Money – Ramsey Solutions
Definition of “Silo”
Why Communities Matter
Draft Horse Synergy
Genesis 2:18
1 Corinthians 10:24
Rothschild Family
Vanderbilt Family
The Trump Organization
Kardashian Family
The Little Red Hen
The Ant and the Grasshopper
Way of the Peaceful Warrior, Dan Millman
Shirley Temple Staircase Dance
Malthusian Growth Model
The Starfish Tale
O Youth of the Noble Birthright, Brad Wilcox
Think and Grow Rich, Napoleon Hill
Build a Better Mousetrap
7 Baby Steps, Dave Ramsey
Jacob 2:18, Book of Mormon
Philippians 4:10
Nicomachean Ethics, Book 8 Ch IV-VII, Aristotle
Non-Violent Communication, Marshall Rosenburg
Transcript:
Jump to end
[teaser clip] Like the single payer health care system that the country is considering, saying everyone
pays the government for health insurance.
It’s the way Canada and England operate.
Under one system, that’s it, and you hear bad things about that system.
The motivation is down for the doctors.
There’s no, you’re on a waiting list for everything that you’re doing.
So being on that waiting list, it’s not necessarily good for everybody.
It’s not good for everybody, not even the doctors.
They stay busy, but they have no incentive to work harder or to gain more education because
they’re paid to do the job they do.
That’s the downside of communism is you lose your passion for work.
[intro] Hey there.
This is our podcast, Do You Have a Minute?, in which my dad and I dive into deep discussions
about both the most profound and most mundane questions of life.
While we know we don’t have all the answers, probably none of them actually, we are opening
our minds to new perspectives and most importantly, we are having a good time in conversation.
Join us as we explore the unknown together.
[conversation] Okay, we’re going to start talking about, about families and how they operate together
and the problems with that.
What are those problems?
Financial problems.
Families have financial problems.
They also have decision problems as I’ve seen exhibited and what we expected one more member
of the family here that forgot.
So memory problems, commitment problems, the ability to have your calendar direct your
life or your…
Or how tired you are at any given moment.
I’ve been trying to move him out of his storage unit for four or five weeks now.
Every Sunday he asked if I can and I always say yes and then he cancels.
And then he can’t do it.
Yeah.
Sunday.
It happens.
It’s family.
So you could call that, what do you call that?
Dependability?
Yeah.
Punctuality?
All right.
So following on from the episode, the conversation we had about mooching, I feel like there was
a question there that we didn’t, we weren’t able to answer.
We weren’t able to answer how do you train out a mooching philosophy?
Train out a mooching philosophy.
That’s assuming the mooching is bad, right?
Yeah.
Are we going to agree to that?
We had a discussion about that and I…
Well, in what case would mooching be good?
So what’s the opposite of mooching?
That’s the question I have here.
Why is there mooching and what is its opposite?
So let’s start with that question to clearly identify what we’re talking about.
Why is there mooching?
Because someone thinks that they can’t fend for themselves.
It’s maybe an accountability issue.
They don’t feel like they can, I don’t know, fear or accountability.
They’re afraid to go through it themselves and so they just try to find the quickest
solution.
Quickest solution, meaning they want the easy button.
Is that the quickest solution?
They want an easy button and it’s always easy just to go and take something instead of work
for it.
That’s why people get into debt in the first place.
They’re, oh no, this is going to take me months to figure out.
It’s a lot easier.
So we talked about part of the last conversation, we talked about the possibility of earning
money that there are online things you can do to earn money.
The only examples you could come up with were telephone scams.
Right.
You could be a telephone scammer and you can make money doing that.
That’s the only thing you can think of that someone can do online.
There are others.
Well, through the Dave Ramsey system, they put that, Rachel Cruz, she does that.
There’s a list of businesses that you can accomplish to get extra income in your household.
So they’ve done a compilation.
I didn’t look at it, but there’s got to be things you can look at.
Maybe things you can do for local people.
You’ve had experience with counting cars on corners.
Right?
Yeah.
Is that an income earning?
Traffic studies.
Yeah.
It’s not lucrative, but it does earn a little bit of money.
And do you take your time during the day?
It has to be done during the day.
That’s not something you can do at 10 at night.
Very specific times in the morning during high peak traffic times.
Okay.
So if someone needs something, they’ve got specific times it needs to happen.
Yeah.
I recently talked to someone who does designated driver services from bars at 2 a.m.
You can do that at 2 a.m. if you found the right places to frequent.
How do you advertise yourself for that though?
Do you talk to the bar manager and put out cards?
I bet.
I don’t know how they set it up.
So the guy in [redacted city] that says he’s done that for a number of years and he’s just
known, he’s known as the one to call.
Yeah.
There’s a bulletin board outside of a couple of places I’ve been to.
Not outside of, but in their entryway.
So if you’re available.
And you could probably charge whatever you want for that service.
Yeah.
And if you had two of you, you could take their car back home too.
I think that’s what he talked about.
He said, you know, we generally try to bring their car with them to get it home so they
don’t have to go back again.
Yeah.
But those are entrepreneurial stuff.
We talked about that.
So it’s easier.
You mooch because it’s an easier route to get what you want right now.
Instant gratification.
Mooching is fine.
What’s the opposite of mooching then?
Total independence, self-sufficiency.
And full responsibility, personal responsibility, personal self-sufficiency.
Is that operating as a silo?
And we talked about that kind of an idea.
If you operate fully independent, you’re just a silo working in your own realm and you don’t
talk to anyone else out there.
There’s no community.
You’re you.
I don’t really understand the silo reference.
You just have to go along with it.
It holds grain.
Good.
And there’s a group of silos holding maybe different types of material.
They are working together to hold it, but it’s a storage facility.
It’s not a…
Okay.
As a business entity, you’re missing the business entity connection to that analogy.
So the analogy is one silo holds the grain it holds.
It holds wheat.
And the corn is over there and the maize is over there.
So each silo has its own responsibility.
You can’t put wheat in the corn silo.
Wheat’s wheat, corn’s corn.
The connection between those is the elevator system that allows you to move grain from
one silo to the next.
If you want to change that corn silo to a wheat silo, you can do that.
You have to empty out the corn and then clean it and then put the wheat in.
So the silos mean they have one responsibility, one thing.
They don’t really care what the next silo is doing.
And they’re not at all.
So a silo in business is a group that operates without talking to the other parts of the
business.
The marketing department is the marketing department.
That’s the definition on Google.
It’s the third definition is a system department, et cetera, that operates in isolation from
others.
Right.
It’s just a definition that we didn’t know yet.
So the marketing system or the, I don’t know, the accounting, the accountants, they’re
just accountants.
They don’t care what marketing does or what sales does.
They just want to account that this is what happened.
If you have a silo business like that and with no communication back and forth, it’s
hard to accomplish things.
So that idea of the family, if a family operates in silos, that means that this one, well,
we’re talking extended family or siblings that are outside of the home, no longer in
tier one, but tier two extended family people.
Yeah, everyone’s operating in their own households and they’re not connected at all.
Right.
You never talk to the sibling.
You talk to the sibling at reunions, but then it’s just silly conversations.
How’d you like that hurricane last night?
Hm.
So you’re talking about stuff that happens in the world rather than stuff that’s important
to the silo and helping that silo work.
So the concept of, well, mooching, how does that relate to mooching?
How would a silo mooch?
If you mooch from another silo, you don’t really care what that silo is doing.
So you have to care about the silo and then you’re not mooching.
The definition, what was the first definition of mooching was taking something without paying
for it.
So it was accessing something without paying or returning anything and that’s operating
in the silo.
You can mooch as a silo.
Can you mooch as a community?
I don’t know that you can.
I think you, as a community, you care about the other person that you’re stealing from.
You can steal from somebody, but if you know something about them, you’re less likely to
steal.
Okay.
So maybe it’s possible, but it’s difficult to come up with an example for a community
to mooch.
So are you saying then that operating as a silo is not ideal?
It’s a much slower way to get to the goal.
Sure all the silos are working.
They’re doing their jobs for the farm as it were, but they’re not looking across the board,
across the row of silos to see how everything can be improved all at once.
That’s the role of the CEO or the farmer in that case is to make sure that there’s enough
wheat in the silo for wheat to get the project done, the whole year met.
Or if you’re a grain mixer and you need millet for it or you need molasses, make sure if
you run out of molasses, then you introduced a bottleneck that can’t be solved and you
have a shortage of one thing, then it stops the whole system.
Nothing happens.
That silo isn’t working.
Or if a silo breaks down, you can’t get the corn out of that silo.
Or it got wet, the roof didn’t work and it ruined the whole silo of corn.
You’re hurting.
You can’t do anything.
So you have to protect the whole system.
Everything has to be aware of it all.
So yeah, I think it’d be better if you didn’t work as silos.
That’s the whole discussion of community.
Are you better in a community or better on your own?
Is that subjective?
You have to consider whether somebody feels like they want to be part of a community or
wants to be a hermit.
Like individually, if you pull back and you look at everything objectively, people that
are part of a community are doing better financially and mentally, mental health, they’re doing
better emotionally if they’re part of a community.
And the people that aren’t part of the community are probably doing that intentionally and
they think they’re doing better, but they’re maybe not happy, maybe not doing well.
I don’t know.
It’s draft horses.
If you have one draft horse, it can pull a certain amount of pounds.
You would think you add another one in there and it doubles it.
But no, it quadruples it because now the community is working together for that same goal and
they’ve got somebody to keep up with.
They’re pushing each other.
That would be more beneficial to work together because it does improve efficiency when everybody
has the same goal and they’re working together, not against each other.
It’s more of a team effort at that point.
Your own self-confidence goes up when you’ve got people behind you or next to you pushing
as well.
Exponential gains.
That’s good.
That’s a whole other topic.
Exponential gains, that’s geometric.
It works geometrically and goes exponential even though you’re just adding one horse.
That one horse adds much more than one horse in the power, the effective use.
What else did you mention?
You mentioned working alone.
That’s Genesis, how the whole description of the world in Genesis 1 and the first
real good command, and I just went through the Hillsdale course on Genesis.
It’s how he points out.
The first big insight is that it’s not good for man to be alone.
So identifying that we were built supposedly in this system, in this world not to be alone.
So you’re built to work together in a team, yoked to something, yoked to someone else,
working with someone else.
You know, a husband and wife, that’s how that started out.
But then if it’s good that a husband and wife work together, it’s good that a brother and
sister work together with their own husband and wife and continue building together as
opposed to apart.
So the big picture with that is should we be under communism?
Communism, a thought of communal work as opposed to silo work.
I always thought that communism was looked down on.
People don’t like that idea, but then isn’t that how the world is going to operate after
Jesus comes again?
When we talk about the millennium and if you have one head, which is Jesus Christ on the
whole earth and everyone knows he’s the king, that’s a communistic society.
And we’ll share alike.
Everyone is expected to give.
Zion, there’s no poor among them.
You’re sharing all of your assets.
So everyone is okay with, I mean, this is a conflicting thought that I’ve been having
my whole life.
No one’s okay with communism if it’s a government dictating it, but everyone’s okay
with it if it’s Jesus Christ.
If it’s a religious thing.
As a religious statement, it’s good.
As a secular statement, it’s not good.
But we’re not talking about as a family operating or operating as opposed to siloistically,
you’re working communistically.
And what’s the word for siloistically?
It’s not a word.
Independently.
Rather than independently running your own family and your own retirement plan, your
own money.
This is my money.
I’m going to use it.
This is my job.
I’m going to just do my job and not ask anyone else any information.
No one else can help me.
No one else.
I don’t want anyone else to help me.
My business is my business.
Mind your own business.
That was the thing.
We brought that up as to should we use that placard, mind your own business, leave me
alone and I’m going to leave you alone, or should we mind each other’s business?
It starts talking about privacy too.
Like, people want to keep their successes private in a way so that other people don’t
come to them and be like, I mean, if you win the lottery, you don’t tell anyone.
You don’t want anyone to know because then everyone’s going to be coming to you asking
for a loan.
And that would be mooching, right?
It generates mooching.
If you’re doing kind of successful, it’s like the crabs trying to get out of the barrel.
You don’t let the other crabs get out.
They’ll pull them back in.
So is communism good or bad?
As an idea
it’s good.
I mean, if everybody works together, but it just makes, if everybody’s needs are met,
it makes you more of what you are.
So the lazy people become more lazy because all their needs are met.
They don’t have to do anything.
The people that are ambitious, hardworking, they end up, they don’t have to worry about
their wife and kids at home.
So they end up working hard just because it’s their passion.
The passionate people become more passionate.
The lazy people become more lazy.
The moderates.
I don’t think the passion become more passionate.
The passionate become more lazy in a communism.
The history, the history of the world, we’ve tried it seven or eight or 10 times.
Russia specifically.
You say we’re going to provide everything for everybody and that generated bread lines
and no one then began to work.
No one started to work.
And even now with the welfare system that we have, once you get on welfare or what do
they call that?
Temporary welfare?
What is that?
When you lose your job.
Oh, unemployment.
Unemployment.
Once you get on unemployment, you relax.
You’re done.
You’re getting two thirds of your wage and that’s enough to survive on and so you relax
for the 26 weeks or 99 weeks or whatever it lasted.
You’re off work.
I’m just going to relax.
Like disability, you mentioned disability.
If you can get on disability, if you can say my back issue is such that I should qualify
for disability and you do qualify.
You get your $2000 a month and you say I can live simply on this and you do.
You lose your incentive to do anything.
You don’t have to.
I mean, you could decline the disability, but that’s too altruistic for anyone actually
to do.
If you qualify for disability, you take it, but you should use that to do something else.
So what causes that degeneration?
What causes that attitude of relaxing if you have your needs met?
We don’t know.
I don’t know.
Distractions?
Comfort.
Yeah.
If you’re comfortable with $2000 a month, you’ll do almost anything to keep that $2000 a month
for doing nothing.
You re-file every couple of months.
It’s sufficient for your silo.
So if my silo is working, why would I care about anything else?
So let’s say you’re making $20,000 a month and you have sufficient for your silo.
What do normal people do in that case?
Let’s use Donald Trump as an example because in the public view, does he have to run for
president and did he like his salary as president?
He didn’t take it.
He didn’t take it, he gave it back.
I guess he did something else with it.
He doesn’t have to.
His silo is operating just fine.
He said, you know, I don’t need to do this.
And that’s what he said a number of times in this thing.
He says, I’m doing this for you and they’re after me, but they’re after you and I’m just
in the way and I want to stay in the way.
I’m going to do that.
So that’s his altruistic, passionate reason for being there is he doesn’t need the money.
He’s not going for power.
He doesn’t even need the power.
It doesn’t need the recognition.
It doesn’t need the acclaim.
He’s already got everything he wants in the world, but he wants to do something to benefit.
If you’re on welfare or disability and you still want to benefit society, how do you
do that from that position?
You can’t run for president, but what can you do?
Volunteer work.
You could volunteer.
You could run the homeless shelter or do the every Thursday thing, feeding, whatever.
Work every day in a food pantry.
You could open your own food pantry.
You could do something for the homeless.
You could.
Generosity looks different to everybody.
Donald Trump’s generosity is running the country so that he’s in the way, as you said.
And yeah, normal people can’t do that.
That’s not within their wheelhouse.
They can run for city council though.
Yeah.
And that’s generous if you’re leaving something for that to…
They could work in…
It’s meaningful work less than what you could be doing.
They could learn.
They could go to some new educational system and learn plumbing or electrical work or
hair cutting.
They could do a number of things.
Yeah.
Any sort of servile work, practical work, like services that people need, you can learn
how to do those and you can provide them for free in return, for free to the community
that can’t pay for it in return for the benefits that you’re receiving for free.
I know a guy that works for the city teaching piano classes to kids and they’re very, very
affordable piano classes.
He can’t be…
He’s not getting paid as much as a piano teacher that you pay $120 a month to.
I’m sure he’s not getting paid that much.
But he’s in an electric wheelchair.
There’s not much he can do.
But he teaches piano classes through the city.
He’s using it as much as he can.
He wants to use it.
It’s a personal desire thing I think that keeps people’s passion going.
You can let your passion die or you can build your passion.
If you don’t have anywhere to build it, you’re not going to.
To avoid…
We were talking about education.
It’s not necessarily education.
You can teach people, but just the fact that you have an education doesn’t mean you’re
going to do anything with it.
The action has to be there.
You have to be able to do something and have an avenue to do it in.
If you’re a silo and they say…
So let’s say a family operates that way and says, now you’re 18, you’re 19, you’re going
to be out of the house, you just do your own thing.
And I’m not going to talk to you anymore.
And don’t talk to your sisters, your brothers anymore.
Good luck with your life.
Move to Missouri if you want to, but don’t talk to us anymore.
With that expectation, there’s a disconnect.
And then if there’s problems there where you are, you don’t have anyone to talk to about,
you’re just solving it with the local charities or your local community.
But you don’t have this family connection.
We did talk about families that operated together, like Peaky Blinders, right?
They operated together.
Did they break apart at some point?
Few of them from time to time.
They have their own ideas and ambitions and never worked.
Something went wrong because they weren’t working together.
What other families do we have examples of?
The Rothschilds.
Rothschilds who run the world and they’ve been invisible for 100 years now.
But apparently they still run the world.
Allegedly.
Allegedly, yeah.
Whether they’re actually running the bilateral commission and whatever those groups are.
Maybe the family still is.
You have other famous families like the Vanderbilts who lost all their money that worked together
for a while.
Who else do you have?
The Trumps.
The Trump family.
And clearly Eric and Don are running the business for Donald Trump.
They come in and they’re operating things.
And the other kids are going to do it.
Laura’s doing her thing.
You’ve got members of the family that are all completely involved with each other and
no one’s off on their own venture.
What about the Kardashians?
Are they all in business with each other?
Yeah.
And are they successful?
We’ve got the Kardashian brand and then everybody does their own things.
They all have their own line of whatever, clothing or makeup or what have you.
And they do successfully, they do well individually, but I think it also counts toward as a whole.
Because the brand is there.
Everyone knows, you say Kardashian, everyone knows it.
I have no idea what Kardashians do.
I’ve seen the, they’ve been on TV.
And they say something, but I wouldn’t recognize any of them if I ever saw them in a picture.
Nobody.
Well, you’re running in the wrong circles.
Right.
I’m running in the circles.
It doesn’t matter.
But I do know the brand is out there.
So just the fact they’ve got the brand out there, it seems like nothing the Kardashians
present would be of use to me.
That’s why it doesn’t match.
If they came out with some financial planning software or a book, I might be interested
in the book describing how they organize their business.
That would be a good thing.
And maybe they’ll write one of those someday and it’ll be part of my bookcase.
So how do you motivate the community to work together?
It’s a problem of motivation.
Motivation or action?
The family.
Yeah.
Motivation being different from education.
If some members of the family are doing well and they want to continue operating on their
own in their own silo, they don’t have any motivation to work with everybody else because
their needs are met.
Well, maybe they’re-
And they’re not lazy.
They’re just not motivated to bring everybody else.
Worried that if they start working with everybody else, then everybody else is going to start
being moochers-
I’m worried about it.
Off of their success.
But then the, yeah, then everybody else, maybe they don’t want to be moochers.
They’re like, no, I’m going to figure this out myself.
I can do it.
And are they at a disadvantage because they think they can do it themselves?
Go back to that thing that it’s not good for a man to be alone.
It’s not good to operate as a silo.
If we believe that, if we can prove it, that it’s not good to be a silo, then why do we
always work as silos?
We work as silos for the reason that you said, because you’re afraid someone’s going to mooch
or steal it.
If you do win the lottery, let’s say we have a family member that loves to play the lottery
and plays every week and has the numbers.
We know that those numbers are going to win at one point.
Does the family support that lottery player?
Do we all have to play the lottery?
We say our lottery player is-
We all pitch in-
This.
And, you know, now let’s get five tickets each week instead of just one.
Yeah.
That’s that-
Let’s pitch in.
Quintuples our chances.
We’re playing that number.
Your numbers are going to work.
We have all the faith and confidence.
And so that supports them.
Does it benefit his motivation to do a better job?
The lack of control in that scenario.
People who are comfortable and are doing well and they can control their own lives, they
can’t control the lives of others.
They can’t control the lottery winnings.
There’s no end date.
They can set their own goals and work for those.
But if you start supporting other people’s goals, they really don’t know what is going
to happen.
You don’t know if they’re just going to stop playing the lottery.
You don’t know if those numbers are never going to hit.
The uncertainty of it.
Uncertainty.
Lotteries there.
Let’s say we had a construction company, which we do.
We have a construction company, right?
And let’s say it’s working and it’s gone through a couple of years of struggle and challenge,
but there’s good prospect for the future.
If the construction company owner operates as a silo and just does that by himself, there’s
certain success that’s available, but all the challenges are there.
Would it be better?
And how do you motivate the family to be involved in that appropriately benefiting the work
of one of the silos, one of the aspects of the brand?
It makes me think of the whatever story, the chicken that made the bread and everybody
didn’t want to help.
The red hen.
The little red hen.
Yeah.
Okay.
It’s once they saw the loaf of bread, that’s when they wanted to join.
That’s the evidence of success.
When they got an immediate gratification.
So that’s the pleasure center.
I can eat the bread now.
Most people need evidence that there is bread before they, not just the prospect of bread.
If you have an ingredient of bread and you say, Hey, we can all work together and get
the rest of the ingredients.
The little red hens mindset in that story was different than anyone else.
Can we describe what that mindset was?
She was inviting everybody to help her.
She wanted to be communal.
She wanted to have the community join her and help her.
She said it’s going to be good for all of us.
Would it have been good for them to help?
Is it good to help?
Yeah.
And everyone else was thinking that sounds like work.
And it was like the ant and the grasshopper.
The grasshopper says, why are you working so hard?
And it’s suns out.
It’s a fun day.
There’s food to eat, plenty of food.
Why are you working?
And then the grasshopper ends up without food because they had no long-term vision.
The red hen had a long-term vision.
She said, I know that this burying this wheat and watering it and watching a girl is going
to give us some bread.
And I want to work for the long-term.
No one else could see that in the story.
Everyone else in the story was just living for today being grasshoppers.
She was being an ant.
So how do we get our view off of the grasshopper to the ant?
You tell stories like the little red hen and the ant and the grasshopper.
And you identify what they mean.
It has to have a meaning.
It has to have a moral.
So that’s what they call morals, right?
Yeah.
Fables and books of virtue.
You read those.
Moral stories.
Uplift.
That’s the biggest value.
And that’s education though.
And we talked about educated derelicts.
People can know the little red hen story.
But if you don’t internalize it and use it, it’s just a fun fable, its a story.
You thought of it for a reason though.
Was that the reason you were thinking of it?
Most people don’t want to work together because they don’t have the vision altogether.
So me running a construction business, I can see where it can go.
And if I do these steps, there’s a reasonable process that I can go through and I can see
those steps in front of me.
If everybody else is in an elevator in what they’re doing, the steps are out of sight.
And it’s a little bit easier work because somebody else laid the foundation for that
elevator to work correctly.
They’re on an elevator and I chose the steps because…
The staircase?
You chose the staircase because…
The staircase.
Long time vision.
You don’t atrophy when you’re doing the work.
So if you’re in a company that you’re working for forever and it’s just taking you floor
by floor, it might be quicker to get to a comfortable place.
But if you take the steps, the stairs, it’s a bad analogy for sure.
But just taking the steps, you don’t atrophy.
You don’t get lazy because you’re always there.
You’re always working towards something rather than standing there.
Yeah, your goal is keeping…
Being taken for a ride.
Maintaining your fitness, whether it’s your physical fitness or your business fitness.
You continue to grow as you travel.
Yeah, growth.
You learn the lessons, you learn how to do the things, do the steps to get to the top
rather than just going for the ride up to the top.
Let’s say that analogy of the stairs, taking the stairs to the ninth floor instead of the
elevator.
If you do that, it’s your business.
You kind of introduced it as that’s your business, that’s your work.
But if it’s just family at a vacation place and they live it on the ninth floor, you can
as you’re going up, you can get in the elevator and you’re there in 30 seconds up the thing
or you can take two minutes walking up the staircase.
That two minutes of discussion, is it valuable?
Is it worth taking the time?
The experiences you have, what if it’s a good vacation with a scenic stair route?
You’re not in a box.
Usually hotel stairs are the darkest, stinkiest.
We’re talking about a nice resort.
But in nice resorts, the [redacted] hotel, the elevators have windows everywhere and you can see everything
they make.
The elevators is as appealing as they can.
Four of those staircases are the same boxed dark staircases.
One of the staircases is wide open and it’s more interesting too.
Right in the center.
So yeah, you can do something different with staircases.
But it’s not necessarily the staircase, it’s the people that you’re walking it with.
It’s the trail, the people you’re walking.
Peaceful Warrior where he was going up to, all excited about getting to the top of the
mountain to see the thing that the guy was telling him to come up and see.
And he got to the top.
You remember what he did?
He said, well, what’s up here?
This rock.
Rock.
And he was all upset.
He said, you were all excited coming up the mountain.
You were going to show me something amazing.
This is! A rock!
Amazing.
You’re on the top of the mountain.
Now what’s the difference?
Why were you excited?
So that was the teaching of the Peaceful Warrior thing.
You’ve got to be energetic and interested in the process you’re on as opposed to just
getting, take the elevator, you’re just going to get to the ninth floor.
There’s nothing in that.
You get nothing out of it.
But if you’re enjoying the journey and learning on the way, you can take more time and get
there.
When I’m walking a staircase by myself, you know what I do?
You sing.
Do you sing as loud as you can in the staircase?
Do you skip a step?
I think it’s two steps at a time.
You skip steps?
I never have.
Never sung.
Like singing in the shower.
I don’t sing in the shower.
Do you do the Shirley Temple up and down dance on the steps?
Look at this.
What do I do?
You lay out all of your books.
You read.
I already always have a book when I’m walking on a staircase.
So I read as I’m walking up or down.
So I’ll go, it gives me an extra minute.
I can get an extra two pages in.
And that extra two pages makes a difference.
And it’s something to think about.
And then you come up with an idea that you’ll think about for weeks.
What Malthus said, which was really crazy.
He mentioned it.
Malthus was the guy’s name.
Thomas Robert Malthus in 1798 wrote about geometric and arithmetic ratios and things
that grow geometrically exponentially.
And my thought for the last two weeks or three weeks since I’ve read this is that I don’t
think there are any arithmetic processes.
Like you add one horse, you add one horse, it’s going to multiply.
There’s synergies involved in everything.
Even if you’re adding one at a time, just one at a time, you’re going to get synergies
that make it geometric.
At some point, everything goes exponential.
That’s my statement.
He used this in the late 1700s to say that populations grow geometrically.
You get four or five kids in a family and then they expand geometrically.
But our support systems, our systems of sustenance grow arithmetically.
And so we’re going to overpopulate the world.
That’s the basis of that thought and that theory that there’s not an abundance of available
resources in the world to handle all the geometric growth that’s going to happen in the people.
So that’s the initial population control idea.
Malthusian economics.
But I think even demonstrated it’s wrong.
Now one simple change in the way that wheat is grown solved the world’s food population.
Now you’ve got shorter stocks and it’s a bad wheat.
No one should eat it.
But there’s enough.
It’s a bad gluten.
There’s enough for everyone to eat.
And we’ve just got to make the next change to get that gluten out of the wheat product
the way that’s…
And that’s going to happen too.
I think everything’s exponential.
You just can’t do it.
Those things are interesting though.
And if you use that in every business, you can always take those examples like the little
red hen or the grasshopper or the tortoise and the hare or Malthusian economics.
And you can understand it and relate it to your construction company or to your financial
planning practice or to your music teaching.
You need to apply all that.
And applying it is the I think the benefit of it.
Yeah.
So now how do you get people to want to apply it?
How do you promote the motivation?
Yeah.
I mean, you can put up motivational billboards everywhere and hope that people care enough
to read them or to take it to heart.
You can’t make people take things to heart because maybe they’re comfortable enough.
They think, well, I’m okay with how things are.
I’m okay with it.
I’m okay with being on welfare.
I’m okay.
You know, I’m comfortable.
An individual decision.
Yeah.
It’s the can you make a difference?
But nobody’s brave enough to tell people that they shouldn’t continue living on welfare.
They shouldn’t be comfortable.
Like I bet their friends are like, yeah, you’re so lucky that you have your disability check.
I wish I could live like you.
I wish I didn’t have to work.
Or you could just love your work and know that you’re not working.
You know, to make a different story, the starfish.
The guy throwing the starfish in.
There’s no way you can make a difference.
And he throws one and says, I made a difference for that one.
That’s really all we can do.
Changing the world is changing one at a time.
If it gets viral, if it goes viral, I mean, it’s this conversation.
Who knows if we’ll ever even publish this one.
Don’t know that we’re going to publish any of it.
Oh, we will.
But if it’s published, it has the chance of going viral, has the chance of benefiting
and interesting people.
And if we can come to the motivation concept, it doesn’t matter how long it takes or which
one it helps.
If it helps one, it’s going to be not arithmetic.
We’re not looking at doing the arithmetic thing.
It’s going to be geometric.
There’s going to be one person that talks to another person.
And then that’s going to talk to five and that’s going to affect their business.
It will affect something else.
So what was it?
Just by talking about it, we’re creating a new geometric.
This is the act of creation that we’re doing.
We’re building.
We are gods.
Right.
Gods of this idea.
I’m going to get a misquote, but Brad Wilcox.
You guys probably didn’t listen to General Conference.
Brad Wilcox, you need to listen to him.
Oh yeah.
You know how much I love that guy.
Yeah.
His talk was incredible though.
He said, why would you?
Yeah.
You were built to change the world.
If you were sent here to change the world, be that, be who you’re supposed to be.
Yeah.
I can’t really bring it up because I can’t remember the exact quote, but we are here
for more than just us, more than just the silo.
If you think that you’re just here to be a silo, then you can do that.
And most people do do that.
Right.
Most people think I’m building my retirement plan.
If I’ve got sufficient for me and my family and me and my wife and we can live and you
know, if I die, she’s got enough to live the rest of her life, but that’s the limits of
my involvement on this earth.
I don’t like that view.
Yeah, it’s not meant to be that way.
You’re responsible for taking care of your household, your family, your wife to make
sure that they’re set up just in case something happens.
There’s no responsibility to take care of anybody outside of that.
Further than motivation, you’re not motivated to be generous.
You can feel a certain responsibility to be.
The corn silo is responsible for the corn inside the silo.
And that’s as far as they may go.
That’s all they’re willing to do.
They don’t feel responsible for anything outside of that.
And that’s where.
So taking the analogy, the grain silo certainly can’t think about the wheat silo next to
it.
They don’t relate.
There’s no desire there.
They don’t relate and there’s not an avenue.
But if you have two people, a marketing department and an advertising department, can they talk
to each other?
And that’s the idea of silos in a corporate environment.
They should talk to each other.
And if they do, they’re going to be better off.
There’s going to be that synergy.
It’s going to be if they yoke each other together, there’s more power than they can do by themselves,
even more than additive power.
It’s a geometric power that happens.
It’s the third mind, the mastermind of Napoleon Hill.
He talks about if you get groups talking to each other, then something else happens.
You get the benefit of the third mind, of the spiritual, of whatever the ethereal.
That can happen in people.
It can’t happen with inanimate silos particularly.
But what you just described was irresponsible as part of responsibility.
Is that the limit of our responsibility?
Just us and our family.
I guess more of the recent experience I have with this, what I’m trying to say, I guess,
is I’m the general contractor.
All my subcontractors work independently and I bring them in on an as-needed basis.
And I had this idea for the past two years or so that I’d like to entertain, but it’s
having one company that has everybody within it.
One construction company that has everybody working for it, not as subcontractors.
Working within it.
Because any time somebody calls a plumber, they tear up the walls and then we need something
else.
Everybody works together in these anyway.
But nobody is talking to each other when you’ve got subcontractors.
Nobody’s working with each other.
Right.
They come in, they do their part and they say, okay, everything else is the next guy’s
problem.
That’s what the general is supposed to be aware of is when do we get the plumbers in,
what three days do they have to work before we get the framers, the rest of the framing
done.
They’re working together and I’m sure a lot of companies have figured it out and they
do the same thing.
Rather than a bunch of different entities, they have it as one single group working together
as a team.
They’re kind of like a handyman that can do everything except you’ve got 20 people doing
everything.
No, not necessarily.
Just working together, not being separate entities like the silos.
It’s like a factory floor.
If you have a part that you’re making, you have an assembly line, there’s bottlenecks
you can identify in that process in operations management.
If you can identify the bottleneck, the bottleneck really gives the speed of the whole system.
You might be able to do plumbing, it may be really quick, but it has to be done in the
right realm, the right time.
If it’s done in the wrong time, you have to pull the sheetrock back off and then finish
the plumbing and then the sheetrock has to come in and do it again.
It becomes a bottleneck, becomes an issue.
You’ve got to have things done in the right order.
Or like the electrician, if you try to get too far in the electrical process before you
get your mudding done and your sheetrock on, then you’ve got problems.
It takes extra time to go around those outlets.
Yeah, it’s much easier when everybody is working together as a group.
That’s the only reason I see that you need a construction manager is to protect the property
that you are improving.
It’s another layer of protection to make sure everything gets done at the right time, in
the right order, and the quality stays the same.
Good quality and good timing.
You can do one thing at a time, tear the wall down and then put the wall back up and then
tear it down again for the plumbing, then tear it down again for the heating system.
Or you can do it all at once.
It’s the timing.
You can get the project done in a lot less time, more efficient.
It’s avoiding middlemen.
That’s a problem that I have.
I’m the middleman for everything.
I’m in between the homeowner and all the subs.
If the electrician needs information for equipment that the plumber is installing, then it makes
much more sense to just have them communicate together.
I just only had that finally happen to me yesterday.
The plumber and electrician already knew each other before I got them both involved in this
project.
Now they’re taking care of it.
Their bids are going to come in exactly accurate, and I don’t have to do that extra step, which
will take more time.
To merge the two.
To get all the information collected and pass it to all the different people that need to
know.
If it was operated as a community rather than separate entities, then everybody can grow
together, I would think, for more velocity.
Don’t you believe all the larger construction companies have the divisions, electrical and
plumbing and sheet rocking and whatever.
They’ve got their divisions inside the company that all communicate with each other.
They have plumbing estimators and electrical estimators.
They have the estimators that delegate the work out to the subcontractors.
If the company gets large enough, wouldn’t it not want to have subcontractors?
Let’s just own all the subs, keep it in the company.
Is there any company that exists like that?
That’s where I’m finding the problem.
I don’t think there is.
I don’t know if, I mean, there’s like the master plumbing, heating and air companies
that do 24 hour service and they do very well, but it’s still not, yeah, it’s still not the
rest of the project.
These million dollar companies, people that build shopping centers, do they still have
the same subs come in and do the work?
Or do they have their own plumbing department?
I think that’s where the responsibility to the property owner comes in.
Because you have a responsibility to make sure that they’re getting it for a fair price.
So if you use the same subcontractors all the time throughout all the years and they’re
slowly increasing their rate because they’re growing and they don’t have as much time to
do it and they need to make it worth it for them.
And the newer, smaller companies coming up could potentially be giving you a more competitive
price.
And so I think everybody still gets multiple bids because of that.
They have a responsibility to the owners of the property to give them a quality product
at a fair price.
So that may be a big hurdle that would have to be taken care of.
It would be more efficient to do it all in house, but I don’t know if it would be economical.
If you had a family business, you could do it.
You could have one person as a licensed plumber and one person as a licensed electrician.
And you turn it into because everybody’s invested in the success of the company rather like
everyone’s ownership instead of just employees.
And that goes back to the Trump family or the Rothschilds.
They all work together for the greater goal.
Success of their family.
So can you do that with strangers?
You want to do that with strangers?
I don’t know.
You want to be a commune with strangers.
I’m thinking that there has to be a company that operates with all the divisions inside
the company as opposed to using subs.
They are their subs.
They run that.
You think there exists one already?
Yeah.
I think they exist that way.
They work that way.
You can’t be at the behest of some plumbing companies out there and say, we’ve got five
subcontractors in the area.
If you’re a small company like we are, you can’t do that.
You can’t hire your own division.
But if you get to Jacobson or HK Contractors, maybe, someone that builds multi-million dollar
projects, you’re going to own the plumbing company that does that for you.
And you’re going to be able to tell them exactly when to come in and do that.
And they’re in the community.
They were going to schedule them all together in our meeting because they’re our employees.
They don’t go out and get other bids.
They’re captive for our jobs.
And consequently, their price is a lot less than you get anywhere else because they’re
not battling for work.
They’re on these jobs.
I don’t think you want to be part of the whole community.
You don’t want a city to work together as a commune.
Why not?
Too many variables.
The Branch Davidian.
They tried it.
David Koresh.
The Jones Town Massacre.
You get everyone thinking the same way.
Any cult ever.
Any cult.
But that’s…
You’re going to cultize your city and say, we operate this way.
In that situation, though, you’ve got one person in charge of… the Amish
are very successful in the way they live.
They keep it together.
They know the way they do it.
But do they have one guy at the top saying, I know what’s best for everyone.
Do what I say.
Tyrannical?
I don’t think Amish are tyrannical that way.
As far as tyranny or oligarchy.
But Jonestown.
Jonestown had one.
And David Koresh was one.
at Waco.
And they had one up on Ruby Ridge and whoever that was.
So maybe it’s not a commune, but a cooperative or something.
But I mean, that’s kind of like a bunch of silos still being silos, but coming together
for parts of their community needs and not all of them.
The communistic idea.
That’s why it’s communism.
Like the single payer health care system that the country is considering.
That’s saying everyone pays the government for health insurance.
It’s the way Canada and England operate under one system.
That’s it.
And you hear bad things about that system.
The motivation is down for the doctors.
You’re on a waiting list for everything that you’re doing.
So being on that waiting list, it’s not necessarily good for everybody.
It’s not good for everybody.
Not even the doctors.
They stay busy, but they have no incentive to work harder or to gain more education because
they’re paid to do the job they do.
That’s the downside of communism is you lose your passion for work.
This type of family economy or communism, that’s the wrong word for it.
But it is a community.
A tier 2 community of a family working together.
We’re going to help the businesses operate the best way possible.
So would you say they’re all completely dependent on each other?
Then in a family like that, if someone doesn’t do their work, doesn’t do their job, doesn’t
pull their weight, then everybody else suffers.
Everyone suffers from it.
How could you make it so that everyone suffers?
Dependent.
Because your job, I mean the construction company that exists, it doesn’t affect the
financial planning business or the working as an accountant or being a music teacher.
Whether that works doesn’t affect everyone else, it doesn’t damage anyone else if it
works or not.
How can you engage it so that it would help?
So I do want to find that answer, the right answer of how does the grandchild’s work
at the fast food store make a difference to the whole family, succeeding at that?
The server at the restaurant, how does that job benefit the whole family and how do we
make it important?
How is it important?
What’s its importance to the community?
And I think dependent’s the wrong word.
You said they’re dependent.
It’s not dependent because it really doesn’t matter.
We’re not relying on the income.
We’re not as a community relying on the income from that, but we’re relying on that income to
support that silo.
Siloes exist in the community still, but since we’re people and not metal objects, we can
affect each other and benefit each other.
And just like walking up and down the stairs and taking two more minutes to talk about
something as opposed to just taking the elevator in the quickest route to something, stealing
time, we can talk about it and find a better mousetrap, build a better mousetrap.
There’s probably some idea from Malthus of that arithmetic and geometric, knowing that
you’re not going to be slowed down no matter what small effect you take.
Whatever small effect you’re able to make is going to be geometric.
Just having that realization in your mindset is going to change whether you decide to do
that next little step today.
Take the step.
It means a whole lot, a lot more than you can ever see.
If the burger flipper at the restaurant knows that, will they make a different decision
when they have a decision to make? Yes.
If they have a long-term view, and that’s what you’re talking about motivation.
If you’re only thinking about today, the little red hen and everyone else around the little
red hen, if you’re thinking like a little red hen, you’re going to make different decisions.
You can go ahead and plant and harvest and grind and bake.
You can envision the bread at the end and recognize that there is value to that and
you’re willing to do the work to get to that point.
Right.
And that’s just one closed system to the bread loaf.
But if you open that system and say, we’re going to run a company now, the little red
hen sees five grains of wheat.
Let’s plant all five and then next time let’s save 10 grains from this thing and next year
we’ll double it.
And if you see the long-term vision plan, we’re going to have a farm of a thousand grains
of wheat and 10,000 and billion and we can feed the whole city with bread in a year,
two years.
We can feed the whole city.
Yeah, even just knowing the goal will help you.
Yeah.
Knowing it’s going to go geometric.
Her bread and that the end of that story was one loaf of bread and they enjoyed it.
That was fun.
That’s not the geometric side.
That’s saying it’s arithmetic.
You’re going to do one act and your one act gets one value at the end.
Every act we do is going to get 10,000 values at the end.
Even if what you’re doing is just working at a burger joint or just teaching music to
one person.
Yes, so you need to identify what the long-term goal is and tell everyone.
Can’t just keep it secret.
Because that’s a silo if you don’t tell it.
If you don’t have a way to communicate, then you can’t communicate.
You need a social environment that is willing to communicate with each other.
What are we afraid of saying in that social environment?
So what would you not say?
You talked about privacy.
What would you not want to say?
All your money belongs to us.
From now on, from now on, we’re all working together and everything that you have, you
must give to and this is the goal.
That’s a possibility.
Is it possible to pull all of our cash?
Anytime you get a check, it just goes into the family account.
The family then spends all the needs.
That’s the way communism works.
Give everyone or a single payer system.
Give your budget to the family and the family will take care of your needs.
A single payer system, that’s what that is.
Any income, anytime you get a paycheck, you don’t put it in your own account.
You don’t have a personal account.
You have a community account.
Even a portion of the paycheck, you brought up that we can do like tithing, an offering
to the family.
If somebody wanted to, if the ones that had the breathing room for it, they did, or everybody,
did 10% into the community for the benefit of the community.
Rather than totally communist, it’s an offering based.
It’s a portion.
That concept of tithing, because it’s talked about in Dave Ramsey’s system in the first
step is give your contribution.
Giving is part of the whole system to start with.
Of course, they’re religious based, so they talk about it as tithing, 10%.
You can pay your 10% tithing to somebody.
As that tithing goes in, what if you’re not religious and you don’t have anyone to pay
tithing to?
Where does that money go?
Is that still a valid concept?
Should they still promote that concept, even though you have no church to send it to?
What do you do with the 10%?
A community can make that decision.
That was my thought, is let the community decide.
Either the silo, if it’s a family, the silo decides what I’m going to do with that 10%.
If it’s a valid principle and I want to participate, but I don’t want to send it to a church, I
want to send it to my brother, because my brother’s got a construction company and he
needs that money.
So I’m going to do that with my 10%.
I’m giving it away.
It’s a gift.
It’s exercising generosity.
You’re learning how to be generous with small acts.
Exercising that muscle.
And then you get better at it and you get more generous over time as that grows.
So the reason that you do that, that you want to do that is because you do think that’s
a valid principle.
So as a community, you can promote that principle.
And if we did it as a whole family, if you had 10 families together, 10 silos working
together saying, yeah, let’s all promote this principle.
Even the first brand newest employee that’s flipping burgers, it’s going to take 10% of
that income and apply it to the gifting concept.
And that giving makes sense.
That’s a way to structure what you believe is a good financial principle and a good muscle
to exercise is the giving muscle.
Because the seventh step of the Dave Ramsey system is to live like no one else.
So you can live like no one else and give like no one else.
So you can fully exercise that muscle and you have 60% of your income that’s now discretionary.
You have no obligations for it.
And it can be used to do whatever needs done.
It can buy a tractor or a truck.
That money is available every month.
You could buy a new vehicle if someone needed it.
You could do a full home renovation for somebody.
And that giving muscle, if you’ve exercised it well enough and you know that it’s going
for good purposes and you can identify what those are and you’ve got a community that
you’re benefiting and making sure everything is done.
Is there anything wrong with that type of thinking?
I don’t think so.
Why would you not want to participate?
Why would someone be afraid of being a part of that?
Most companies do some sort of charitable giving, whether it’s just for the tax purposes
or if that’s just who they are.
There’s Spencer Stevens construction.
They do events.
They sponsor city events. [redacted]
They do a 9-11 memorial service event and it’s fully funded by that construction company.
It’s a way for them to give back to their community through experiences rather than
literal, supporting individuals.
Individuals can do that too.
You can become a sponsor of the rodeo, the parade or city days.
Have your name listed on there.
Those are valid ways to give money.
Is that marketing or is that giving back to the community?
It feels good to give.
I think once you do it and that’s like building the charity muscle or whatever you were talking
about is you do it a little bit and you realize, hey, actually I like that.
Let me do it a little bit more and then like you get addicted to the feeling.
You notice that you don’t miss that small amount over time and then, hey, I’ve got X
amount of dollars.
Somebody needs a roof.
I won’t miss this either.
This wouldn’t matter, but driving past that roof and knowing that it’s solid, that’s a
good feeling.
You feel good about that.
Yeah.
If you had a community you’re working with, you had 10 families that had that.
You say, I don’t know if it’s $10,000.
It’s only $1,000 each of us when we do it.
It’s a lot easier to do if you’re not putting the full cost into it.
You’re putting a portion of it into that gift, but that’s still giving.
That’s the gift muscle.
That’s still choosing that over putting money into a family cabin.
Are we assuming that we’ve already got a family cabin at this point and then we’re giving
before you get a family cabin?
It’s just whatever you have.
It’s taken the 10%.
Right now, if you started out with the lowest level of that, say there’s 10%, there’s a
tithing amount.
Let’s just say there’s some of us that are going to put it to a church.
We have a specific place for that 10%.
But if we total that 10% up for everybody in the community, is there a chance that some
of that doesn’t have a place to go yet?
The possible that there’s not a church receiving that tithing, a God that they’re paying it
to.
It’s possible.
That has a number.
That has a number is $2,000 a year.
So $100 a month.
Let’s say there’s $100 a month.
Could the family, could the community figure out what to do with that $100 a month that
would be beneficial as a gift as opposed to it just-
Within the family?
Yeah.
To fill a legitimate need within the family.
Is it useful to benefit the family by those charitable gifts?
Yes.
Is it valid?
Just as valid?
I think it’s Jacob 2:18, I think it’s what it is, Book of Mormon.
It says, if you seek for riches, seek for the kingdom of God before you seek for riches.
But if you seek for riches, you’ll do it to clothe the naked and liberate the captive and
administer to the sick and the afflicted.
What I always thought that, and I still think that’s relating to your family first.
The first people you clothe are your kids, and the first people you feed are your kids
and your family.
And that’s the first thing you do.
If there’s someone that’s living- And this is the problem of the mooching debt system.
The mooching debt system comes in if you don’t have enough money and you’re living
outside your means.
If your living expenses are beyond what means you’re able to provide by flipping burgers
and the jobs that you can get, your expenses are higher.
The first place that’s valid for that charitable money to go to is to the family to get that
budget in line.
So that’s the first goal.
It’s the first step of the Dave Ramsey system.
And if we, as a community, I agree that that’s the first step.
We can identify where everyone is.
Some people are well, living well within their means and have excess discretionary income.
Some people are still well underneath that.
And so that’s the first goal.
If you take that goal as a community, can you better solve it?
Even if you use the partial part of it being that charitable money.
And you say, here’s this family is trying to operate, but they’re well under their means.
Their means are way beyond.
So let’s solve a portion of that.
Every month they get the $200 just to their budget.
And instead of mooching it, how do you, they know that they’re getting it from the family.
It’s a family decision.
It’s a community decision.
That’s where we want to go.
That’s the next issue to solve right now is getting that budget in line.
You have to identify how to get that family that’s receiving the help, how to get them
to where they don’t need to receive the help anymore. Self Reliance.
Bring up their income so that their needs are met by what they’re doing.
And then they can have access to help someone else.
That’s what we talk about the little red hen story, making sure that their vision is long
enough that the next decision they make has been to be the right one and not the wrong
one.
Not to buy the next lottery ticket with that 200 bucks.
That’s really not your role.
We’ve got a guy buying lottery tickets.
You don’t need to do that.
Right.
We just got a windfall.
We’ve got money.
We’ve got money and now let’s have a party instead of putting it towards education.
Or buying the boots that you need.
That is keeping everyone’s mindset on the long term.
Rather than having these grasshoppers jump around and just spending the money and throw
it away, we’re taking care of everyone’s finances in a conversation, in a community.
So they don’t necessarily tell you exactly what to spend your money on.
But if we believe that the principle of tithing, a 10% gifting muscle upfront is important
and that paying debts off is, or paying for your own house, structure to live under is
next important.
And then paying the debts and making sure that you get out of debt is the third most
important.
If those are in order and the community understands that, then we’re going to work in a concert
to make sure those things happen for everybody.
And if someone new joins the family that’s way out of line, the rest of the family, the
rest of that group can more quickly and easily solve that.
What if you have someone already in the family that is destructive to the plan?
Tries to break it.
Yeah, but they, they, let’s say they drink alcohol.
Let’s say they’re an alcoholic.
And that just costs way too much.
And they spend too much money on that.
And so a third of their budget’s gone.
Whatever the amount is.
The $200 goes right to the alcohol, to the bar.
Yeah.
Or maybe like, what if, what if they legitimately feel like their budget requires this, this
thing that they’re paying to?
Like Netflix.
Let’s say it’s not a sin type thing.
Say it’s a health food that I need to buy gluten free everything that costs five times
as much as the standard wheat.
Yeah.
And I’m going to go on this health kick that means my, my food budget increases three times.
Right.
And so like, what if you’ve got that in the family, that person’s food budget is five
times more than everybody else’s.
And also they need another $200 to pay their electric bill.
Yeah.
Because the electric cost is still the same with everybody, but yeah.
Yeah.
So there’s that fear of opening up your budget to somebody.
They’ll say, what are you buying this gluten free stuff?
Or why do you take those 20 supplements?
They’re $5 a piece or $50 a piece.
Yeah.
You’re taking 20 of them.
Why are you going to Starbucks every day?
Yeah.
What’s this Rock Star business?
You buy $5 worth every day and you drink them.
And you’re not even drinking that.
He finished it already.
It’s gone.
Now you’re putting stuff back in.
You can drink that tomorrow.
Making a tea.
That’s fine.
Making a tea.
Okay.
So you got those individual tendencies or challenges.
Habits.
Habits.
They’re not necessarily wrong.
Preferences.
And maybe the 20 supplements are necessary at $50 a piece.
What is that?
$100?
No.
I don’t know.
20, 10, 50, a thousand.
Yeah.
It doesn’t matter.
It’s a lot.
Yeah.
It’s more money than anyone else is spending if no one else is using supplements.
It’s a lot.
It’s a lot.
It’s a lot.
It’s a lot.
It’s a lot.
It’s a lot.
It’s a lot.
It’s a lot.
It’s a lot.
It’s a lot.
Why do you think the supplements are that important?
But they are that important.
And that person has to be able to make that decision.
You have to allow that autonomy that rock stars and drinking and lottery playing is
an important part of my life.
That’s how I relax.
Or watching football.
You trust that their budget is right for them.
Yeah.
Even if they do drink alcohol.
And so how do you help them?
How should a community operate with that saying, it’s your budget, you’re still a silo, but
we want to, how do I get comfortable sharing with you my full budget?
Now I have no problem with that.
I don’t care what anyone sees or knows.
It’s going to be a very slow process and you have to ease them into it individually.
You can’t propose this as a family meeting.
I don’t believe.
Why?
The hesitant ones that don’t want to be mooched from are going to be worried about their own
perspective of the others as being moochers.
In any community, you’re always going to assume that there are moochers in there and you’re
going to be like, no, they’re going to suck us all dry.
It’s not going to be equitable for me because I’m the one giving all the time.
So no.
Because I worked hard enough to get my budget in line.
I know that I’m the only stable person in this family.
What if the few people that are on board with it and want to plant the seed of everybody
helping everybody else, if we express concern, I looked this up, I tried to find the right
one.
I think this is it.
We read this last night and it might not even have anything to do with anything.
So keep that in mind.
But Philippians 4, it starts at verse 10.
And I rejoiced greatly in the Lord that at last you renewed your concern for me.
Indeed, you were concerned, but you had no opportunity to show it.
I am not saying this because I am in need, for I have learned to be content whatever
the circumstances.
I know what it is to be in need and I know what it is to have plenty.
I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed
or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want.
I can do all things through Him who gives me strength, yet it is good of you to share
in my troubles.
If we share in the troubles of those who are not in need, we ask them, how are you doing?
You know, hey, we’ve been doing this thing.
The people who are on board with this have been tithing into helping the family.
Is there a need that needs to be filled in your house?
And they can show we lead by example by doing that.
You are doing it to everybody, but you are also the ones who don’t need.
You are still offering that hand and they can see that it is well managed, it is available
if something arises.
It is an emergency fund for those in need, not just a Starbucks fund.
It is not going out to have fun fund.
It is filling an immediate need.
It has to have a structure, a definite structure of what you are filling first.
So if the first need is…
And that plants the vision in those who are doubting it.
Yeah.
I think it is interesting.
You got the sharing thing out of that.
The thing I have always gotten out of that group of scriptures was therewith to be content.
So it is not looking for something else.
It is whatever, if I am in want or if I am in need, I am content with my current life.
I looked at it as if the person who is content is still being cared for, whether they need
it or not, there is the offer.
You have to be able to receive.
It is the receiving.
So it is not saying, you know, we are fine.
Don’t worry about our budget.
We are working it out.
I am going to be a silo and I am going to solve all my problems because it is my problem.
But if you share it as a community, it is not just my problems, it is everyone’s problem.
Everyone can help and put their idea.
But I would think it has to have definite steps to it, like the baby steps.
The first step is the giving muscle.
If you start out with something that simple, let’s just start out with the giving muscle.
You have got an income.
You have got money that comes in this month.
Can you identify 10% of that and identify what you are going to give it to?
And if it can help someone else in the family, let’s do that with it.
If it just goes out, that is fine too.
And if you want to just spend it at Starbucks because you feel like that is the charity,
that is the God you want to promote.
Identify that.
So we are an hour and 25 minutes in.
We have got to be done.
We have got to be done.
But I do want to say let’s further talk about judgment and respect and trust.
Not today, but another time we need to.
That is part of the further baby steps or whatever is getting everyone good with each
other.
Does that make sense?
I mean, the problem is I hold a lot of judgments for people in my family.
I am looking at you, everyone.
I am looking at everyone thinking I would not have made that choice.
Why did you make it. Now…
I do not want to give you anything because you made a choice that I do not agree with.
And that needs to be healed.
That needs to be changed.
It needs to be not changed.
You cannot change someone.
It needs to be dealt with.
It needs to be acknowledged.
Acknowledged that I have judgment.
That I am judging someone.
I can change whether I am judging someone or not.
I can change my mind about whether someone’s choices are valid or not.
You can choose to be content with it.
Yeah, I can be content.
But that is something that I need to practice.
Allowance. An allowance, allowability of forgiveness that needs to happen.
Yeah, but from the start, having nothing to forgive.
Be like, yeah, you are fine from the start.
I never want to have from the beginning any negative thoughts about what other people
are doing with their money or their life or how they live, the food they eat.
I want to be OK with the person that’s spending $1,000 a month on nutritional supplements
without judgment.
And yeah, that has to be allowed.
Yeah, so you’ve got to get to that level that’s allowed, whatever you spend the money on.
Because you can’t have this family working together on a long-term goal.
The problem, if you’re trying to fix the goal, you’ve got two ways to solve the budget deficit.
You can increase the income or you can cut expenses.
You can stop spending $1,000 a month on supplements.
But you’ve got to allow that family, that silo, the opportunity to do one or the other.
And so as a community, I mean, you have a business that needs extra employees, extra
people to help do this or that.
You say you can come and join this group for a while, even though all you can do is sweep.
We need sweepers.
You can do that every afternoon for two hours or whatever.
You find the thing that they can do to benefit someone else, benefit a community, and earn
an income.
Or because you can’t legislate morality.
You can’t legislate what people do.
Just like paying tithing.
You can’t say, tithe into this church.
This is the only place tithing can be paid.
This God.
If tithing is a muscle that we agree with, the community agrees with, that has to be
something that’s made universal and it can go wherever you want it to go.
And whether it goes to the family or not, just from our respect and trust.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Aristotle would put that in.
He talked about friendship categories in Book 8.
I just was listening to a podcast about this.
There’s friendship of pleasure, friendship of utility, and then there’s the top most
bestest friendship of excellence, friendship of arite is the Greek word.
Arite.
But excellence.
In that friendship of excellence, you are friends with someone free of judgment.
They don’t judge you.
You don’t judge them.
And you both know you’re working to be better people.
And we want a family of excellence.
We don’t want a family of pleasure and a family of utility.
Right.
And that’s the red hen.
The red hen is after excellence long term.
It’s a long term thing.
Allowing the pig to be a pig that, you know, come out and root up the weeds around this
garden.
Yeah.
Okay.
Very cool.
Thought of this super late, but the criticism and judgment that you have.
There’s a, Marshall Rosenberg said this, I don’t know who it is, but basically every
judgment, criticism, judgment, diagnosis, and expression of anger is the tragic expression
of an unmet need.
You think your needs aren’t being met?
Your expectations of the family are, is that a need that your family succeeds rather than?
Well let’s say that the supplement purchase, say there’s a thousand dollars a month going
out in supplements.
It would only bother you if you say there’s something else I could do with that thousand
dollars.
Yeah.
It would be the need that would be filled.
I could use that thousand for something much more valuable.
In my, in my own opinion.
My opinion is that if I had that, I would be spending it on.
And since I have a avenue in to talk to that person, let’s discuss it and let’s make them
change and benefit the family and the community.
If we just fix this street, it would be much better than those supplements or Starbucks.
That institution doesn’t need your money.
Yeah.
Yeah.
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