Money Can't Oppress You

All that's required is to not have the money be personal, right? So you don't actually have to see it as a game. You don't actually have to see it as a means to an end. All that's really required is like, oh, the money isn't personal. You just have to see yourself as human beyond the money, and then money has a way of flowing very differently in people's lives.

Welcome to The Art of Accomplishment, where we explore how deepening connection with ourselves and others leads to creating the life we want with enjoyment and with ease. I'm Brett Kistler, here today with my co-host, Joe Hudson. All right, welcome back everybody to our topic on money. And now we're going to get to the second half of this discussion on the belief that money is bad. So Joe, what makes it that people develop this belief that money is bad or evil?

Yeah, what I typically notice is that money is bad comes because somebody felt that money hurt them. Right, so maybe they had a parent who cared more about money than they— it felt like the parent cared more about money than they did about time with the kid, or that somebody with money did something bad, or that somebody with wealth did something that made them feel less than. Also, we have— there are certain people that have perspectives, internal perspectives, that when something makes them feel bad, they attack. That's the way their personality system works. And so, you know, just being, observing great wealth and the way that great wealth moves can make people feel like, oh, like if they have that moment of insecurity or that moment of like, oh, I'm not good enough, then their natural response might be to attack the way that their personality works. And so for, I think all of those reasons, people think that money is bad. And I mean, you can see it, all over our society. You want to, like, you'll, if you just start saying how people with a lot of money are bad, you'll start getting a following. So it's a fascinating thing, but it's often not just even people with a lot of money, it's just money. You know, the system sucks. The, what an asshole, he drives a $120,000 car. It's just like, there's this whole set of judgments that come along with money. And I think they're usually some reflection or some sort of projection of our own relationship with money and/or ourselves, or like I said earlier, with our parents or authority figures or something like that.

What you were saying there with like the $120,000 car, like money can point at glaring inequalities in all the things that money can be a surrogate for. Like you might see somebody with a lot of money and they're getting a lot of affection from people and a lot of attention because they have money. And so then that makes you feel your lack of affection and attention. And maybe in the opposite framing of what we were talking about in the first half, instead of buying into it and being like, you know what, I need more money and then people will love me, you instead just say, well, fuck that. I don't want to play that game. So then money becomes this like lava that you don't want to touch.

Yeah, let's take a look at like that, the person in the, let's call it a $250,000 car. There's a person driving around in a $250,000 car. Now some group of people are going to be like, that guy is just a good person, cool, like they've accomplished something, I like that. I like him or her. And some people are going to be like, what a douchebag, you know, like whatever, a whole bunch of greedy, selfish, What happens to our whole system if we just see the person as a person? They are neither good nor bad. They are neither insecure, more insecure, less insecure than all the rest of us. They're just a human being and flawed like all of us and healthy like all of us. And that we can't even know, do we know, does the person in the car, do they have that car because that's what their job requires of them because they need to exude status? Are they doing it because they're trying to get their mom's love? Are they doing it because they just really love— it's just their passion is sports cars, and— or their passion is just really well-made machinery, or, or really complex machinery? Like, what— we don't even know. We don't even know what's happening for that person. And so it's— it takes the humanity— whatever perspective you have around money that takes the humanity out of the person that's a prejudice, including that they're good or that they're happy. And so I think that's like the really interesting way to look at your own views around money. What are the daily judgments that you walk through the world with and how is it separating you from connection with yourself and other people?

Yeah, I'm curious about some of the things that money stands in for that we can have issues with, like authority and with power. How does that happen?

Yeah, I can't say neurologically exactly how it happens. I can point to some of it, but I can say, you know, how I've seen it work in me. And so what I've noticed is that you get emotional patterns that happen, right? So what I mean by that is that when I had a green mohawk as a teenager, my parents worried 15% of the time, and they worried over things like me, my haircut, if I was gonna grow up right. Now my parents are, our kids are fine, everything like that. And they still worry about 15% of the time, but now it's over like, are they gonna burn the chuck roast? So we seem to get into these emotional patterns. And as kids, we get into very specific emotional patterns and we're in theta brainwave, which is kind of like where you go in the subconscious. It's like how we program ourselves or unprogram ourselves often is most effective in theta. And so kids are mostly in theta from 0 to 7, 0 to 8 years old. And so they get into a certain kind of emotional patterns. And then as they grow up, they're going to place those patterns on something and probably have something of equivalent importance in their life. So when dad leaves or mom leaves, or they leave mom and dad, then that pattern needs to hit something else. And money is a great place for it to hit. It's a great place because it, it can really— you can project anything you want onto money. You can think it's like we were talking about it. You can project it's great. You can project it's bad. You can project it's neutral. You can project. And there's evidence to show all of it. You can show how money created a society in which more people are able to thrive than any other society. And you can also look at how money creates all the disenfranchisement inside of our society. So you can just project anything you want onto money. And since it's such an important part of our lives, it's so much about— determines so much for most people. How they spend their time, what they can do and what they can't do in their mind, that of course, right? So mom and dad used to be that. Mom and dad used to be the thing that said what I could and couldn't do. And now money is. Now money's the thing that says what I could and couldn't do. And so it's just natural for the emotional process to lay itself on top of money.

So that emotional pattern could be about anything. And like you were saying earlier, it's often about love. But you know, in society, money is just something that is so present that it's really easy for it to become about money.

Yeah, it's easy for it to come about money. And I mean, it's just like it's easy for it to become about your boss. Like you see that all the time where people aren't, they think it's their boss, but it's not. They're treating their boss like their dad or their mom or a teacher that had an impact on them.

Right. So how does this show up in business? I have sort of examples here in my life with, like not asking for what I needed, like not like feeling shame about asking to be paid like more money for something and then finding myself in the position of not having my needs met enough to actually do great work or not having the needs of the project met enough for the project to work out really, really well because I was afraid to ask for money. And this has happened.

Yeah.

You know, over the course of my life in fractal ways. And so what's some other way that you see this showing up commonly in business when people have this kind of squirmish discomfort around money?

Well, I see it happen in business in many ways, not even if they have squirmish discomfort. You know, I see people who think that money is the way you determine if you win or lose in business. And to some degree that's true, right? Like if you don't have enough revenue, you don't stay in business, so you lose. If you think of it that way. But there's some people think the most money wins, right? That that's the currency for a good business is who made the most money rather than maybe who had the best impact or who has the happiest employees. And so you see people who create fights and lose profit because they care about, you know, how the deal came out in a way of winning and losing instead of in a way of winning and winning. So you see that happen all the time. You see people avoid marketing and sales, whether they're CEOs who are avoiding it or employees that are avoiding it because sales and marketing is dirty, because you're trying to convince somebody to do something for money, right? And then you see other companies say, marketing is just education. We're just telling people we have a product that we think is important, and we want to give them an opportunity to experience how important this product can be in their lives. And then that's a different way of looking at it. And some people get off on convincing people to do things that aren't good for them and they feel powerful over it. And some people just can't do that with their lives. You know, it doesn't feel good in their system or they realize that the short-term power is not worth the long-term disconnection with themselves. So I think there's all sorts of ways. I see CEOs who feel bad for asking for money or they feel like they deserve money. Both of them are gonna not get enough money money probably for their own, for the needs of the company. Or yeah, so there's all sorts of ways of looking at it. It seems like the people in the venture capital business who seem to do the best with money comparatively are people who see it as a game, as a means to an end or a game. So a game meaning that it's like, oh, it's like I don't take it personally. And a means to an end meaning my vision is to 'Plant 10,000 trees,' and I just— the money is the thing that I have to do to get there. And I think both of those two things depersonalize the money, and then people who have depersonalized the money are more successful with it typically.

There could also be a danger in that because depending on what the game is, the game might just be a game to maximize money for a particular milestone. Like, let's just bring a company public, dump it on the public.

Correct.

And then walk away with the bags. And that could be a game that can have really negative consequences.

Oh, correct. As is the other thing, as is seeing the, you know, having the money just be a means to an end. An end to what? I think it all has like a particular danger. And the good news is, is that all that's required is to not have the money be personal, right? So you don't actually have to see it as a game. You don't actually have to see it as a means to an end. And all that's really required is like, oh, the money is impersonal. It's not a reflection of me. It's not a reflection of who I am. It's not a reflection of who other people are. You just have to see yourself as human beyond the money. And then money has a way of flowing very differently in people's lives.

I mean, there's a way that it can be helpful that it's impersonal, but also there's a way that it always is personal. Something that happens often is that people insist the impersonality of it and then separate themselves from the connection of the people that they're working with.

Yeah, right. So the classic, like, you know, it's just business. That basically is what you're saying, right?

Yeah, that it's just business, like kind of avoidant.

Yeah, that's totally personal. That's not taking it non-personally. That's taking it incredibly personally, at least in the semantics that I'm— in my head, so maybe I haven't explained it right. And in fact, I can be confident that I haven't. Um, so saying it's just business means that you have taken it personally, you've taken something personally, you have some level of shame or something to that effect, and you want to push that down. You want to push that emotional experience down. Just think of it this way: there's— you're about to get fired and you have a choice. And the person who is about to fire you can say it in many different ways. One way they can say it is, "It's just business." Right? "We had to let you go. It's just business.

It's nothing personal." Which is really personal because it's like, "I don't trust you to be able to handle my telling you the real reason that I'm firing you." Correct.

That's exactly— Yeah, perfectly said, right? So just feel how that would land. And then you can have like, "I feel really sorry that we—" 'Couldn't do it. You know, we wanted to and we tried and we weren't able to keep you here.' There's that way of getting fired, right? And then there's the way of getting fired, which is just like, 'Okay, so this was our expectation of what you were to do here. We made that really clear to you, and those expectations aren't being met.' My experience is that you're either capable of doing that, the stuff we've asked you to do, in which case you're choosing not to do it, which means you know on some level this isn't the right job for you and you're making sure that it it doesn't last in your world. Or secondly, you're not capable of doing it and therefore you must always be feeling like, I'm not doing a good enough job, which also isn't a really great thing for your world. So it's clearly not a match. And like, how do we move forward if this job isn't a match? How do we help you? How do we, you know, what do you need so that you can get to where you wanna go in your life next? And how can we be of service in that that's mutually beneficial? That's another way to fire somebody. And to me, that's the least personal of those things, right? It's like, this is the situation that we find ourselves in.

Yeah, it's the taking it the least personally. It's the least caretaking, least avoidant.

Yeah, the thing that we're avoiding is that we actually feel bad for firing them. So we harden ourselves down and become assholes to fire somebody, which is just a huge— if you have to harden yourself in any way, if you have to like, become defensive, build a wall between you and other people, you are taking it personally. That is a clear sign that you are taking it personally. We somehow get in our head that if we take it personally, we're scared or we feel guilty or we're sad. But the clear sign of taking something personally is that you have shut yourself off to your own emotional experience.

So bringing this back into the money aspect, the way that we show up in the world with one another, with all of our concepts and projections about money. You know, there's many ways to take that personally. And there's many ways not to. There's ways that we can be successful and then that will make other people feel their shame. And there's ways that we can be unsuccessful by money standards and people will still feel their shame somehow or something else. So like— That's right.

Your relationship with shame is definitely gonna Yeah, exactly. It's like money is a projection. Money, at some level, money is a projection. What if that were true for a moment? What if it were true that the money in your life, specifically to you, the money in your life is a projection? Maybe it's a projection of your value, maybe it's a projection of your lack of value, maybe it's a projection of your needs, of your lack of love. Of what if it it was only that. At the beginning of the conversation, I said I don't really know what money is. And I think the thing that I'm pointing to is when I take all the projections of money away, it becomes something I can't name.

So when I do that exercise, there's like, okay, letting go of money as a projection. Then there's this thing that immediately comes in where it's like, Like, no, it's not just that. There's also environmental factors. There's, you know, the privilege that I was born or not born in. There was the luck that I did or didn't have in my, you know, in my career or in my business or even just in my family relationship that patterned my relationship that's underneath money. And so my question is, how do you hold this sort of this like koan where money is entirely projection so that we can let that projection fall away and find out what's underneath it and love ourselves more. And also hold the truth that our entire relationship with money and our experience with money has also been influenced by external factors.

Yeah, I mean, this is the question of life. It's like, how do we recognize the unity that we are in the self-interest that moves every one of our actions. It's really the question you're asking, right? If we— even that is a projection, meaning on some level, if I really look at the essence of what I am, it's also very empty, very massive and very empty. And at the same time, who I am is the person who is driving a car and polluting the atmosphere. And the person who I am is the person who is hurting somebody with the hamburger that I just bought. So it's like this unbelievable koan on one level, this unbelievable koan of both like human side and this illusionary side coming together, this material side of money and the illusionary side of money coming together. And how do you handle it? And the answer that I found that creates the most freedom in me is with integrity, you know? And when I say integrity, I mean when I listen to my deep truth, when I am spending money or when I am receiving money, what does that require of me? What do I have to do to feel most aligned around my behavior with money? That's the question that I ask. And it doesn't feel aligned to have no money, and it doesn't feel aligned to accumulate wealth for the sake of accumulating wealth. And it doesn't feel aligned to have me say, like, to try to use my money to save people. Just like it doesn't feel aligned for me to use my money to, or my non-money, my anything, to try to save somebody. But it feels really important for me to use my money to work with people for our mutual freedom, our mutual saving. So it's this really interesting thing where it's like this moment-to-moment learning for me around money, where it's, how does it feel right now? What does this transaction feel like? How does having a transaction feel as compared to being in connection and letting the money sort itself. This is the way that I think about how I wanna live with money at this point.

Yeah, thanks a lot for that.

Yeah, I notice I'm nervous that people won't get to it, you know, 'cause there's, I realize as we're talking about money, there's so many, really, it's like religion, you know what I mean? Like there's no conversation you can have about religion where you're probably not gonna offend somebody. I think it's the same way around money. I don't think that there's really a way for us to talk about the money where somebody isn't going to feel like either we have poverty mentality or that we're part of the oppressive class or, you know, like, and I think this is why people don't talk about money. This is why we don't talk about our credit card debt. It's why any conversation that's happening in the world around money is like how to make it or what's wrong with it. There's no conversation of like, what is it? There's no conversation of what's the relationship we want with it. There's a little bit of a conversation right now with like electronic currencies of like, what are the rules to it? But I mean, this is the perfect example, you know, if you create a currency out there that has rules of money that don't have shortage of supply as a part of that rule, nobody has faith in the currency. So is it the money's problem, or is it what we put our faith into that is the problem? Humans naturally put their faith into things that have short supply, that they can hold on to, that have power, immediate power. That's where humans naturally put their faith, for a good reason. You know, like a spear is a good thing to put your faith in if you're a hunter. And it fulfills all those requirements. And you're hunting a limited supply of game. Exactly. And if you're making your own spears, there's somewhat of a limited supply. It requires effort because there's a limited supply. There's not just spears growing off trees. There's effort involved. And this is what we put our faith in. So if it's not money and we put our faith in something else, if it's not the US dollar, if it's not the euro, and we put our faith in something else like Bitcoin, the question is, what are we putting our faith in? And if we ask ourselves deeply, like, am I willing to put my faith in something that has abundance, that isn't limited, that anybody can have at all, and that doesn't have short-term power, and I'm going to rest my entire family's security on the faith in this thing, like the way we do with money, How does that feel? Money isn't the issue at the core. The core issue is that. Like, if every human being on the planet put their faith in something that was in utter abundance, and there was, like, clear that, "Oh, we have enough for everybody," and that I can give freely, I can have faith in long-term investment. Like if we all had that, like what would happen to the problems of our world? And that's a really difficult thing to ask. And what would that be? I have no idea. I have no idea. But it's a difficult thing even to ask you and I in this moment.

I mean, it sounds like one thing that could be is investing in relationships, investing in trust.

Which is what communities without money have. Right. It's what they do. Right, I remember when I was young, I was in my 20s, I worked in the Hayes Valley Projects and Head Start, and I realized, and then I went from that into international stock lending. Lending. And I remember you saying, like, one has money, one has community. One relies on money for survival, and one relies on community for survival. One generally relies on money for happiness, one generally relies on community for happiness.

Which were more successful?

Depends on how you measure success, you know. But what I noticed is— what I noticed is the people with the community wanted the money, and the people with the money didn't always want the community. Sometimes the community was heavy for them, right? Because whatever they were taught, but both of them had poverty in one way or another.

So speaking of poverty, I've heard you say this a couple of times in some of the courses as well, using the term poverty mentality. And you were just saying earlier about like feeling a little bit of fear in your system about how, you know, this talking about money is like talking about religion and everybody's gonna be offended about something. I have a, something about this word, the poverty mentality that I— That offends you? Well, it's not even so much that it offends me personally, but I think that it might offend a lot of people because it may associate like poverty mentality is a thing that keeps you from having money. Then poverty mentality is like this thing that's holding you back and that's associated with poverty, which is something that people are born into and don't have a choice of starting there. I'm curious if like if it's poverty or if it's like a scarcity mindset?

Yeah, yeah, that's a great question. So for me, poverty mentality doesn't mean anything about money. You know, I was born with a poverty mentality, but the poverty wasn't around cash, though there was some of that as well. The poverty was around love and the poverty was around attention. That I wasn't gonna get enough attention, I wasn't gonna get enough love. And so I grew into a life where I, created a world where I didn't get enough love and I didn't get enough attention. And it took a lot of work to switch that autopilot off in my life and in my system. So that's what I'm speaking to about poverty mentality. It's the false belief that we can't get what we need and what we want generally, not specifically we're not gonna ever get everything we want, but like that, we can't have our needs met.

But yeah, just living, living in and recreating that in whatever way, whether it's about money or anything else.

Correct. That's what I'm speaking to. And I, and I can see your point that like just the word poverty could trigger and it could speak to, you know, a class of people that didn't have a choice, or a group of people who didn't have a choice around their financial situation. But I, I don't like the, the term that you used. I don't like using it for a different reason, which is scarcity mindset, because it feels ungrounded. It doesn't feel like it's as pertinent or real to me as the word poverty. But I can see how that also is a bias. Yeah.

Well, maybe we'll find a better word someday. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah, there's a flip side to every coin.

All right, well, thank you, Joe. This has been a really great episode. Yeah, I think we could do a couple more on money-related topics. Yeah, but for now, this is— yeah, this is great.

Awesome. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Take care. Bye.

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