CW 1087 - GRATEFUL, The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks, A People's History of Christianity

Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine self made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He's a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your Financial Independence Day. You really can do it. And now, here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Welcome listeners from around the world. And for those of you who celebrate it, Happy Thanksgiving to all. This is the one time of year when we make a special point to be grateful to celebrate what we have. You know, if you are listening to this show, you have more than 2/3 of planet Earth, I am sure. So congratulations. Let's have a good reminder on that. You know, this is not a 10th episode show but we are going to talk about gratitude today and I think you'll really like it. We have the author of Great full on the show here in a few moments. But before we do that, I want to tell you we have a fantastic once a year Black Friday Cyber Monday sale going on@hartmaneducation.com it is our biggest and possibly only sale of the year. It's certainly the only sale we've done in the past year where you can get all of our products at hartman education, hartmaneducation.com not our main website, hartmanneducation.com they are less than half price so you don't want to miss that. If you want to stock up on our various educational products, go to hartmaneducation.com and stock up on those because they are just a little more than half price, so. Or a little less than half price, I should say. Very, very good deal. Okay, so I am up here in Sacramento and I am here with my Aunt Joanie who is quite a real est mogul. You've heard her on the show before. Many of you have met her at some of our live events. She was at our last event in Hawaii and then earlier this year she was at Meet the Masters where we had Ron Paul speak and so many other famous speakers. We're going to take a little look around probably tomorrow and look at some of this dreadful fire damage. Really just amazing and tragic. What has gone on the most disastrous, most devastating fires in California history. There's a lot to talk about on future episodes about that. But I want to just give you some insight into something that Aunt Joni and I were talking about at lunch today. My mom was there and we were talking about all of her rental properties. I was asking her for some just firsthand experience on what's going on in the marketplace. And she said something to me that was very interesting. And, you know, this is the kind of stuff you're not going to hear in the news media. It's not statistics, it's just person on the streets type of information. Aunt Joni, how are you?

Fine.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Thank you, Jason. Same to you.

Okay, so today at lunch you were talking about, I was asking you how the market was and you were talking about this interesting thing. It may be nothing, but it may be something. It's just a little insight that might be worth hearing, I thought, for the listeners, and that is that you have a surprisingly large number of your tenants now. You own many, many single family homes. You've been real estate investing for decades. And they're all right here around the Sacramento area. And people are breaking leases more often. Right. What's going on with that?

I believe that they're finding bargains in the real estate market. And this is not the ideal time to find a whole lot of houses or an ideal time to find a lot of houses to rent. However, people that have been on the borderline of wanting to buy and maybe not quite able to buy, I think that they're finding some bargains that they just can't pass up.

Okay, so you're referring to maybe a couple of things at the same time here. So let's just unpack this a little bit, as the saying goes. So the first off is the seasonality. There's a seasonal nature to real estate, of course, for traditional home buyers, especially where this time of year, during the holidays, things kind of slow down. So there might be fewer properties on the market and the properties that are on the market are sitting a little bit. But also we have seen in the, in the higher price cyclical markets, things are slowing down a lot. Home builder stocks are down, which is kind of a litmus test for the future. What investors want to price into the market in terms of home building still, the lower priced bread and butter type rental properties that we sell through our network all the time, those are booming. Inventory is very tight. But in the higher prices, things are definitely cooling off. You think that the people just were sort of felt really shut out of the market the past several years as things were booming. And then, and then now they're. They're seeing that things are loosening up and there's better deals, huh?

Exactly. I've had some tenants that were looking for houses during the summer months, during the late spring months, and they were trying to invest in so many houses, they got so discouraged. Finally they came to me and said, joni, I'm getting tired of trying to put deals together and I just want to stay here another year. I hope you don't mind.

Right, right. So you'll be happy to renew their lease, right? Yes, I will. But now they're breaking the leases and they're not even finishing the lease and they're telling you we want to buy something right away, huh?

Yes. They've found something that's priced really very well. And I think it's because of the basis of the fact that it's off season. A lot of people aren't going out looking for houses in Thanksgiving time and Christmas time. They're just thinking about two holidays and all the activities that they're planning to do. And so the last thing on their mind is buying a house.

You know, one of the other things. And we just really don't know what goes through people's mind. But as we see interest rates climbing, people buy a house on a payment more than a price they're looking for. What can they afford per month more than the overall price of the home? The home could be, you know, an extra $500,000 more money. But if the interest rate is low enough and the loan is long enough, you can somehow afford it. Right. So people buy based on a monthly payment, and that's of course how they qualify, too. But maybe they feel like they might get priced out of the market. With these interest rates increasing, they, you know, I've noticed that fear of loss in the real estate market or pretty much anything in. In the human spectrum is more powerful than desire for gain. Do you think it's the fear of getting priced out with a increasing rates like the deals are better? Yes. The prices are softening in the mid to higher price markets, but, you know, maybe it's the interest rates, too. Any thoughts?

That very well could be, and it's anybody's guess where the interest rates and the house prices are going to be when we get back to the spring. It's a real speculation. And some people think, oh, they're going to go back up, they're going to be higher, there's going to be less availability. But you don't really know.

You don't really know. But we have been saying for a while that there are real signs of cooling in the real estate market. And I think investors ought to be very mindful of that. Again, not applying to the low price bread and butter stuff that our investors are buying, but certainly could trickle down to that. So we will see. And I will tell you something. As our listeners know, I am a lender and I lend a lot of money. I've got probably a couple million bucks of my own money in the financing market right now, where I am through entities that I have financing properties. And for the first time ever in many years as a private lender, I have a first trustee loan that has gone bad. I never had that before. I've had second trust deed loans go bad or second loans. I shouldn't necessarily say trustee second mortgages. Yeah. And I don't do any third loans. But second loans go bad, but never a first. This is the first time I've had a first default on me. We're trying to clean that up now. I've got a couple partners in that deal, so we're working on it. But you know, there are signs that there are some changes. I mean, things have been pretty overdone for several years now. So, you know, that's always a cycle, isn't it?

It is. And we've just been riding on some high waves for quite some time. And that wave can't always stay that high. It's going to peter out or it's going to soften. And I think there's a very good chance that that could be happening.

Yeah. And one of the interesting things about it, as I talk about in my three dimensions of real estate philosophy, is that rents and prices are opposite. They counterbalance each other. So. And it's kind of counterintuitive and it takes a while to play into the market, it takes a while to adjust in. But when the housing market cools, rents strengthen. Because as affordability declines and people can't afford to buy, that's the market cooling. Right, the for sale market. But the rental market actually strengthens because people have nowhere to go. You know, they've got to stay in the renter pool or if they're entering the housing market, like millennials, who, by the way, this is the funniest thing. Of course, Aunt Joanie, you know the game Monopoly? I'm pretty sure we played that.

Yes, indeed.

Yes, I'm pretty sure we played that a few times when I was A kid. I was watching you build your real estate empire here in Northern California. But you know what's interesting about it is there is a new monopoly for millennials.

I've heard of that.

Okay, okay, So I didn't know you heard about it. But it basically doesn't include real estate, and it pokes fun at millennials, saying, look, you can't afford real estate anyway. I hate to laugh at that, because it's really not a laughing matter, but it's just amazing that they would make a game like that, Right? You know, it tells them to focus on things like avocado toast and experiences, because real estate is just too darn expensive, which is another thing I talk about a lot about. Project that out 10. And you have a whole generation of people who really don't enter the investor class. And that has huge effects on the economy and the marketplaces. And it's great for landlords. You know, we're going to be there to serve these people for many, many years to come. But it has major, major effects on things overall. So good stuff. And, Joni, thanks for joining me. Let's get to our main guest here. Appreciated any. Any closing thoughts on real estate?

Yes, it's a fun market. It's one that always keeps you guessing and you just never know.

Why did you get into real estate again? I think you said that on one of my shows earlier. But you've been investing for, what, about 40 years?

Yeah. Yes. We moved locations from the Bay Area market where the prices are really, really high. And we came to Sacramento, and the prices there were just no comparison. And so we had some extra money, and I said to my husband John, we should be buying some houses.

What year is this?

About 1973.

Okay, so don't wait to buy real estate. Buy real estate and then wait.

Exactly.

Yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. But why real estate? Why did you. Why were you attracted to real estate? Like, why not buy? Well, you're certainly an antique collector. I'm looking around your house now, and you're definitely an antique collector. Why was real estate the thing for you and your husband?

Well, our first house, which we owned in the San Mateo Highlands, it was a very nice house, very serviceable, four bedrooms, three baths, modern glass all across the back. And we decided that we wanted to get something a little different, maybe move into a little more expensive market. And we did. We moved into the Hillsborough, California market. And so at that time, since we didn't have to sell our first house, we rented it. And that sort of was the start of My rental career.

Yeah, that's, that's a, kind of a, kind of a sort of stumbling into it, which happens for a lot of people. And now you live right around. Well, it's like what, a block away or so. I gotta always say this because I just think it's so cool. When I was growing up here, I remember walking by Ronald Reagan's house when he was governor of California. He lived right down the street from you, right?

A block away. Yes.

And tell us just an interesting fun fact for listeners when he would go out on a bike ride or whatever it is. What did you tell me before about that?

All his Secret service men would be biking in back of him, not walking, but they would all be on bicycles too. And then at one time we owned a restaurant and sometimes we'd come home late at night. And I always felt very, very secure because up in front of Ronald Reagan's house was a guard house. They had a person there 24 7. So I thought, well, if anything, it doesn't look right. I can just stop in and visit his, his one man guard. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Interesting. And, and California sure has come into some difficulties since then, but the government has definitely changed here, sadly. And we talk about that a lot. Okay. Hey, go to hartmaneducation.com check out our cyber Monday Black Friday specials. They are the best you'll get all year. Until next year. Take advantage of that. Hartmaneducation.com let's get to our guest and talk about grateful and Happy Thanksgiving to all. Here is our guest. It's my pleasure to welcome Diana Butler Bass. She is a Christian writer for the Huffington Post and the Washington Post. She's best selling author of Christianity After Religion. But her newest book out of the 10 that she has is entitled the Transformative Power of Giving. Thanks. Diana, welcome. How are you?

I'm good. I'm glad to be with you today.

Good to have you. So you have a really interesting thesis. It's not really about gratitude per se, even though I'm sure it is. But it's more how it comes into the public sphere and how we interact with each other and how it sort of doesn't express itself, I guess as much as you would think. Like people, if you ask them, a lot of people will say, hey, I'm grateful. You know, I see that on social media all the time. I see people literally in their Facebook descriptions about themselves saying they're grateful. Is there a gap here somewhere?

The idea that there's a gap between the private experience of gratitude and Our Public Lives is one of the ideas that inspired this book. It goes back to November of 2015, when I was reading the Washington Post one morning, and, you know, here it was almost Thanksgiving, and they had a little story from the Pew Forum, which is a research organization. And the Pew had asked people, have you felt a strong sense of gratitude in the last week? And 78% of Americans said they had. And I looked at that number, and I thought, well, that's astonishingly high, because it's hard to get people to agree on anything, you know, more than 65%. And so here were 75% or 78% of people saying that they felt grateful. And so I just was kind of startled by the size of that number. One of the things that I knew about gratitude is that, you know, gratitude makes us healthier. You know, if we're grateful people, we have better health outcomes. If we're grateful people, we're less stressed. If we're grateful people, we have less depression and anger and fear. So I thought to myself, wow, you know, that's really amazing. If 78% of us feel strongly grateful in a week, that shows something really good about the United States. Three days later, there was a poll that came across my email from an organization that I follow called Public Religion Research. And they had just completed a survey asking Americans a series of questions about different kinds of social and political issues and cultural change issues. And by asking this series of questions, they had been able to figure out some of the emotions that were pushing our political life. And they discovered that Americans were more fearful, more hopeless, and more divided than any time that they could draw sort of a parallel in our political or emotional lives.

Well, okay, so here's. Here's an interesting point. So here's the thing. Are they divided, Diana, between the grateful and the ungrateful people?

I actually don't think so. People were divided because they. Well, they were not only divided, but also mistrustful. That was the really strong, strong number in the poll, is that we didn't trust institutions, and we didn't trust one another, and that lack of trust was causing division. So, anyway, it was just fascinating in the same week to get two polls side by side, different organizations, one showing all this positivity around gratitude, and then the other one showing all these negative emotions in our political and social lives. And that, for me, became the framework of the book that I eventually wrote. I that the Gratitude Gap. Why is it that we are so strongly grateful and private, but it seems to make no difference in our public lives.

Very interesting. First off, those two surveys that you mentioned, though, were surveying different sets of people. Right. They're not the same populace.

Well, they were general surveys of the American public. So, you know, of course they wouldn't have hit exactly the same people, but both organizations are interested in religion and ethics, and they were looking for things that matter to us, that shape our spiritual lives, that shape our ethical choices. And so even though they were certainly framing the questions differently and doing the kinds of things surveys do differently, nevertheless, I mean, that's a pretty difficult bridge to get over. You know, how is it that on one hand we know that gratitude is good and so many of us will say, yes, yes, yes, I'm grateful, I'm grateful, I'm grateful. But on the other hand, when we're asked questions about economics or community or who counts as a citizen or all of these different kinds of questions that are obviously, you know, pretty hot button questions, but that our negative emotions come forward rather than positive ones.

Okay, so I want to go back, Diana, to something you said at the beginning, because I think it was really kind of critical that we just kind of go back a minute here.

Sure.

I agree with what you said at the beginning, by the way, and I'll remind you of what I'm talking about in a moment. However, I want to play devil's advocate and I want to play as if I didn't agree or didn't know. You made a bunch of statements about how gratitude makes us healthier and all these benefits of gratitude. And I completely agree, by the way. I think gratitude is one of the first keys to success. You know, if you're not grateful for what you have, you're just going to find it very difficult to get more of whatever it is in life. I just. But I don't know exactly why that is. I believe it to be true. I just don't know exactly why or how that plays out. I've struggled with that question for many years. How do we know that's true, that, you know, we're healthier if we're grateful or all. It has all these benefits, the ones you mentioned at the beginning of the.

Interview, that was one of the really fascinating things for me. I'm trained as a theologian, as a historian of religion, and so the gratitude literature mostly comes out of psychology and medicine at this point. And so for me to explore this topic, and I was interested in it culturally and was interested in, you know, why didn't our Americans seem so grateful right now, which is a kind of a historical and cultural question.

Right, right. But, but, but what you're going to say, I think is going to be about the sort of the psychosomatic component. Is that what, you know, mind body relationship?

Yeah. In order to get to understanding gratitude, I had to really stretch and go and read a lot of literature that I normally wouldn't. And I was kind of, I was actually fascinated by it because in psychology, a lot of the movement is towards things like stress relief and changing psychosomatic reactions to threats and how mind body connections occur. And so in all of that literature, people find that gratitude is calming, that it redirects our sort of brain function into more evolved parts of our brains where gratitude, compassion and empathy live, rather than things like fear and anxiety. So gratitude functions out of our higher brain, whereas fear functions out of our primal brain. So that was all really fascinating to me, all this neuroscience and how psychologists are trying to help people move towards our more mature selves when dealing with gratitude. And that just helps us be able to function better in the world and make more sense of our experience. But then in medicine, the stuff that they're discovering, which is mostly out of the National Institutes of Health, that's equally interesting because they're finding with this calming response of gratitude, which psychologists look at one way in medicine, it's really obvious what it's doing over there. If you're a grateful person, you actually have better blood pressure numbers and that your ability to be able to manage the physical effects of stress, you sleep better at night. And so there's literally physical bodily expressions that medical scientists, now, medical researchers have been able to track by looking at people who do things like keep gratitude journals or practice daily meditation, those sorts of things. And they have discovered that if you do this, you're actually healthier, physically healthier.

I would agree. It also directs focus. You know, whatever we think about, that's our focus. Right. And if we're thinking about negativity and fear, we're going to move toward that. You know, it's been proven many times over that the subconscious can't distinguish reality from fantasy. And so we just move toward dominant thoughts. And the higher level thoughts are the thoughts that create opportunities for us, and the lower level thoughts are the thoughts that potentially at least keep us safe and avoid threats. And, you know, many times the world just isn't as threatening as some of us believe it to be. And we act like we're in a world of threats when we're not. We're in a world of opportunities. So it's kind of Interesting.

Yeah, it's really, it's fascinating that we do feel so threatened. There have been some very interesting books in recent years that have shown people across the world are actually wealthier and safer than we ever have been in world history before. Poverty is actually being reduced on a massive scale across the planet, and we're far less likely to die by violence than any other time in human history. And yet people like, oh my gosh, everything is falling apart. It's just the worst possible scenario. And so when we live into that kind of threat, as you say, and you're exactly right, we're activating our primal brain. And while our primal brain was really important to keep us alive thousands of years ago, when there were threats all the time to mere human survival, and we needed that in a globally connected world where there's actually less disease and less violence and less poverty, to be always acting out of the primal fear and threatening instinct is not helpful. As a matter of fact, we're discovering it's very hurtful.

Yeah. Okay, good. Okay, so talk to us more about. Let's go back to the bigger topic at hand, gratitude. And you know, how we should practice this and the difference between the private and public. I think that's the main focus of your book. Correct me if I'm wrong, but is it the private, public gap that we had talked about?

Yeah, I talk about gratitude from what I refer to in the book Four Dispositions. I talk about our emotions, how we feel, and that's probably one of the first places we go when we think about gratitude. And then I talk about our actions, that is, how do we act upon those feelings. You know, everything from writing thank you notes to sort of mannered approaches to appreciation, giving to the poor, you know, all that kind of the actions that result from feeling grateful. So emotions and actions. And then I talk about it as an individual reality, how I feel about it in my own life, and then how we in a communal setting experience those things. So there's really, there's these four quadrants of the self and community and emotions and ethics. And so when we talk about private and public, you know, that's immediately talking about the me, the individual and the we, the communal of gratitude. And I think that's actually a really fascinating issue right now because most of the stuff that's written about gratitude is very privatized and very individualistic. It's about keeping a gratitude journal, making sure that every night you say thank you about something that happened during the day, writing letters to people of appreciation to people who have meant something to you. And so those are all great things. Those are all wonderful things, actually. So you feel gratitude, and then you do something about it. You write it down. You make sure you tell someone. You connect with a person in some meaningful way who has given you a gift, or you might give a gift back to someone who has given you something. So that's a very strong part of this sort of self help and spirituality literature around gratitude. And there's a lot of great books that are written about that. But I kept thinking the whole time I was working on the project, if gratitude is good for us as individuals, would it be as good for us as a society? So if it lowers our blood pressure, if it helps us sleep better, if it relieves our fears, if it helps us live in compassion, if it's doing that for us as individual members of society, what if we could focus on gratitude more communally? In everything from, say, churches or businesses to school groups to maybe even political kinds of movements? Could there be communal practices of gratitude that would lower the heat, as it were, of our current political and social life?

Okay, so what are those practices and how do we put this into society?

I think that dividing it up and thinking about the emotions and the actions of gratitude is really helpful. One of the pieces that I had great fun with when I was writing the book is I kept thinking about what are the communal expressions of gratitude emotionally, where have I ever seen that or experienced that? And I realized right away, I love baseball. And I thought immediately of when, like, the Chicago Cubs won the World Series. And what that was was this huge communal sense of thanksgiving, you know, oh my gosh, the Cubs won. I've seen the hundred year curse broken. My grandparents would have lived for this moment, but they never saw it themselves. And there was this wonderful story that was in the Washington Post where a sports reporter interviewed the manager of the Cubs about a year after they won the series. And the Cubs manager said, you know, you would think all kinds of things that the fans would come up to you and say after you've won a world Series. But I have to tell you, the main thing that people have said to us in this last year has been thank you. He says it was like living in a year of gratitude. After I read that story and I was thinking about those kinds of feelings that we sometimes get around unexpected sporting events, I thought of other things too, that are communal gratitude. So there's this vast sense of playfulness that really is present in our culture, but don't pay that much attention to it. And an awful lot of what happens when we play together, not just about competition, but it's really about appreciation. It's about the beauty of sport. It's about movement and celebration and all kinds of things that get caught up into the emotions of gratitude. And so that is present in our culture. And I think that if we paid more attention to it, that it would take us to a healthier place, because so many of those kinds of events bring people together instead of separating people. And then the other piece is, okay, so say we can feel gratitude together. Well, what do we do about that? A really important part of American culture are actually ritual celebrations of Thanksgiving, taking time and expressing our thanks. We have an entire holiday for that. Thanksgiving sometimes gets lost in the midst of the rush to Christmas or whatever it is. But to really take Thanksgiving again and attend to it and think about what does it really mean to live in a country. There are only 10 countries in the entire world that celebrate Thanksgiving, and we're one of those countries. And so that's an action that we've chosen to do every year as a ritual. And it says something about us, and it says something about who we can be. So that really, I think, is very important. It matters deeply to me. I'm kind of really passionate about Thanksgiving right now. And the other piece, of course, is oftentimes, as communities, when we appreciate the gifts that surround us, we take time to give back. And so acts of charity, goodness, kindness, caring for the poor, taking care of the strangers among us, all of those things aren't to earn points to go to heaven. I mean, they might be in some people's religions, but what they really are is saying, hey, I have enough. I have been gifted. My community has been gifted. And so we're going to turn around and take care of the least of these. And so I think that the action of Thanksgiving, that ritual celebration that we have every year, we should really lift that up and say, this is central to our identity, and we're going to act on what it means to be a Thanksgiving people. And then, second of all, that expression of gratitude, that is a very beautiful.

And inspiring message about Thanksgiving. I love that. Yeah, Very good. Did you want to say something else about that? Sorry to interrupt.

No, I just hope that people can really hear it and rebrace it. It's a. It's a really beautiful holiday, and we shouldn't let it get lost with Black Friday and all those kinds of things. So I'm all about reclaiming Thanksgiving.

Fantastic. Good stuff. I'm curious. You said 10 countries celebrate Thanksgiving. Can you tell us about that a little bit? I thought that was a US Holiday, pretty much. I mean, I know Canada has a version of it, I think.

Yeah, you know, I think it's Canada, Japan, Germany, US One country in Latin America, maybe it's Panama. It's really kind of an American thing. And so countries really within the sphere of influence of the United States have picked it up, you know, over the years and said, hey, we like this. As a matter of fact, there was a group of people in Hawaii in 1960 who liked Thanksgiving so much that they created World Gratitude day, which is September 21, to try to share the idea of Thanksgiving as a holiday around the whole planet. So not only should we celebrate Thanksgiving here in the United States and be really happy that there are nine other countries who do this, but the idea of a great global Thanksgiving, I think is a pretty cool idea. I've always hoped that it would go further than it has.

Diana, that's a great message. Give out your website. You've got 10 books. Of course, those are available in all the usual places, but what is your website?

It's my name, dianabutlerbath.com and people can follow me on Twitter especially, which is a lot of spirituality, a little bit of politics, a whole lot of hope, and always I'm challenging people with history and theology. It's a fun Twitter feed. I keep it good. No insults allowed in my Twitter feed.

Fantastic. Diana, thanks for joining us.

Well, thank you for having me. I've really enjoyed it, and giving thanks can bring us back to being the best people we can be.

Well, we are grateful to have you on the show today. Thanks so much.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for listening. Please be sure to subscribe so that you don't miss any episodes. Be sure to check out the show's specific website and our general website, hartmanmedia.com for appropriate disclaimers and terms of service. Remember that guest opinions are their own, and if you require specific legal or tax advice or advice in any other specialized area, please consult an appropriate professional. And we also very much appreciate you reviewing the show. Please go to itunes or Stitcher radio or whatever platform you're using and write a review you for the show. We would very much appreciate that and be sure to make it official and subscribe so you do not miss any episodes. We look forward to seeing you on the next episode.