Transcript
Hello everyone, welcome to another Daily Gym. Today is Tuesday, March 12th, 2024, and today I want to talk about a phrase that came to me earlier, and I'm not fully sure what it means, but, financial intimacy.
So I was talking with a friend of mine, actually Caleb, who's been on the show before quite a few times, and I was talking about how this famous podcaster named Tim Ferriss, in 2019 decided to do an experiment where he stopped having ads in his show and he was going to have it be fan supported and part of the idea was that ads take a lot of time for him to find the sponsors and to negotiate all that and he thought it would be easier for fans to support him, require less of his time so that he could have more time to experiment and come up with new new creative things. I think he even titled the post, Less Hustle, More Art. And so I like that framing, as you know, the less more. And so it was supposed to be a six-month experiment. And I found out that just a few weeks after he started in June, just a few weeks after in July, he stopped the experiment. And he had a write-up about it. And I was curious to learn and more. And the first time I read it, it said something like, realize that a lot of people like the ads. They discover new products through the ads. I'm going to give all the money back to the people. Stopped all their subscriptions. Thank you everyone who supported. I'm going to go with the ads. And the first time I thought through that, I thought, okay, maybe he just doesn't have that much money coming in from the fans. But maybe he did. I don't know. What really confused me was is that he said he was going to give 100% of it back. I was like, but this is to save you time, and you also said it was because you wanted to give fans a way to support.
And it had me thinking about a former American poet named David Foster Wallace, who talked about the MacArthur Genius Grant, or the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, and how he received this no-strings-attached grant from them, and I don't know, at the time, maybe $500,000 over five years or something like that, and how difficult it was for him to receive that. There's an essay I can link in the show notes if people are interested. Talking about somebody talking about David Foster Wallace, talking about how much of a struggle it was to just receive that money without any strings attached. And it got me thinking about how often in life we don't receive cash gifts from people. Maybe we receive them from family maybe a friend here or there but most of the time when we're when we're given money or we're given cash there is almost a quid pro quo there is a direct exchange expected i give this money to you and therefore you give me this service now or in the near future but there is the expectation of this money has many strings attached i give you this money you give me this service or you give me this service i give you this money directly and i think when i think about giving and receiving without having to give back immediately so this idea of giving to somebody and not wanting them to give back immediately or vice versa somebody giving to me, and them not wanting me to give back, them just wanting me to receive it? How does that play out in a financial space? How many of us actually have that level of financial closeness to someone?
I know the first time that my parents ever gave me money, I was terrified and pissed off and ashamed and embarrassed. I mean, once, you know, I was an adult. When I was a kid, maybe I was excited because I got allowance. Oh man, you can hear the train going by. This tells you I'm recording this in a parking lot. But it was a short train, good.
And I think many of, some of us never received maybe cash or money from our parents when we were kids. But maybe some of us have, and maybe some of us have received from our parents, how many have received from a sibling? How many have received from a friend? How many have received from a stranger or an acquaintance or somebody that we've known a long time ago?
You know, when I asked for money recently, when I was putting out a crowdfunding campaign, I asked on Facebook and somebody hadn't talked to Many, many, many years, really, reached out and sent some money. And I've noticed I feel a closeness to her now, just as a result of that. And I wonder how hard it is for us to feel intimacy in general, but especially when it comes to money. How many of us know how much money our friends make or our family members? How many of them know how much we make? Like, how many of them know our financial situation? Maybe we, quote-unquote, earn a lot of money from an income or from certain revenue streams, but maybe we spend a lot, and so maybe we got hit hard with money problems, and we're quite low on money.
How many people in our lives have a close financial relationship with us?
And how many do we want to? too. I mean, a lot of, I think, intimacy can be really taboo in many ways in at least parts of my culture and parts of U.S. Society, but I imagine around the world, too. But I'm curious to learn more, obviously. But how much do we keep our financial clothes on and not show kind of of where we're, the raw situation of our financial life and hide it from even people who are very close to us in other ways. And so I'm curious how much of Tim Ferriss's experiment was him, okay, I'm just not making enough money. Let me go back to ads because they pay a lot more versus other things. And one of those other things being how uncomfortable it can be to receive receive financial help from other people even if like why would he give the money back i don't know it's like some people in the comments were like oh no why keep the money because you're doing things i really appreciate and i'm glad i had an opportunity to support.
I don't know. And so just really thinking about that for Tim, but for me, and for other people who are running nonprofits, or who are struggling financially, and maybe asking friends for help, or just this concept in general of financial intimacy, and how much do we open up and disclose our financial situations? And how much do we give financially? How much do we receive financially? How much is it conditioned? How many strings do we attach when we give? Do we give give people loans and then we force them to pay back? How does it screw up relationships? Do we give them gifts? How bad do they feel because there were no strings attached if they wanted strings attached? All sorts of things. But just curious about our financial relationships with each other and what a life or a business model of higher or increased financial intimacy might might look like. All right, that was eight minutes. I'm going to stop now. So I will talk to y'all tomorrow. Bye.
No comments yet