Mel Abraham runs a live money game with an audience member named Jeff, offering pairs of bills to show how people's financial choices become predictable when they're inside someone else's system. Jeff ends up with $211 while the speaker receives $151.
$100, $50, and $20.
$151.
$211.
We're going to play a game with money. You're going to make all the choices down here. So I got 100 and I got a 50. You get to choose which one you want to keep, the 50 or the hundred. See, he's going to keep the 50. All right. He is strategizing something. I can see it going on in his head now. This is when psychology kicks in. So the question is, which one of these do you want to give me? The 20 or the hundred? You're going to give me the 100. We're going to do this a little differently. So I've got a 20 here and I have 100. I want you to imagine for a moment that you're at a crossroads and one path is going on the left towards the 20. The other path is to the right towards the hundred. And in your mind I want you to go back and forth, back and forth. Now, if you made one more switch, what bill or what path are you looking at? The 20 or the hundred? The hundred. That just goes to show you how fragile some of your money decisions are. So if I open it up, read what it says, you'll give me $151. So he gave me $151. You'll keep 211. You'll keep 211 for yourself. That's what happens when you are in someone else's system. All the outcomes are predictable. Let's look at the give bills for a moment. And I turned them around. Give, give, give, give and give. Hold on, hold on. The keep bills had keep, keep, keep, keep and keep on, which meant one thing. All your choices were written before you made them. And that's what happens when you run in the system. But here's the crazy thing. When you're in a system, all the choices are predictable. And there was one more choice we had to make, right? That choice was this. Who was going to play the game with me. And that was written to see. You were meant to be here, Jeff, and we were meant to have this conversation.
