All The Feelings • The Sins & Virtues
Greed: The Dopamine of Desire and that New iPhone Smell
Thu, 17 Oct 2024
Pete and Tommy tackle the sticky subject of greed in this episode of All the Feelings. They dive deep into everything from the biblical definition of this cardinal sin to its complicated relationship with modern capitalism. They wrestle with their own consumerist tendencies (hello, new iPhone!), explore the psychology of materialism, and manage to connect greed to Tommy's impressive DVD collection without breaking much of a sweat. Plus, Tommy’s childhood trick-or-treating story might just make you rethink your Halloween candy strategy. ---Learn more about supporting this podcast by becoming a member. Visit our website to learn more.
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Hi everybody, it's me, it's Pete, and this is Tom, and we are... I don't know how to do a podcast.
You go first.
Yeah, this is 9-11. This is the 9-1-1 episode, and you can tell that we're coming to the end of the season. We still have not figured out how to start every episode of this podcast.
How are you, Pete? Today's a big one. It is a big one. I feel like this is one... We're in Sinville, and we are... This is one that is... Close to our hearts because it's also, you know, has an anthem in the form of the movie Wall Street.
Correct. Yes. Because, well, should we give up the ghost? I guess everyone that has a podcast knows what we're talking about today.
It's literally written in the title of the show. Weird, right? The ghost has been given.
Yeah. Today we are talking about greed. Greed.
greed noun a selfish and excessive desire for more of something such as money than is needed last episode you said next to lust this might be the one that gets us canceled why did you say that are you worried that we're going to out ourselves as horrible greensters yeah yeah i'm worried about that because it's all the pornography that we collect oh no pete
I don't know. I just think that greed in a... This is a show... Here's the thing. I am coming at this without a whole lot of knowledge about the pop culture view of greed in the rest of the world.
What?
My view of greed is rooted in Western capitalistic kind of foundations. Sure. And it's not great. It's not going great. You mean America's reputation or just generally what you think of? Yeah. Yeah. Right. It's so loaded. Like it's such a heavily loaded term. And I also think that there are a lot of people who feel like greed is a motivator these days and not a classic, you know, cardinal sin.
Yeah. Right.
So it's like, oh, I see a motive. Like, I'm greedy. Therefore, I am. So I want to go out and get mine and get yours.
Exactly. I'm just going to this greed for lack of a better purpose motivates me to succeed. Right. I want things. Therefore, I fight hard for them. I work long hours. I make choices in order to acquire.
Are you saying the greed is, for lack of a better word, good? Are you saying the greed works?
The new law of evolution in corporate America seems to be survival of the unfittest. Well, in my book, you either do it right or you get eliminated. In the last seven deals that I've been involved with, there were 2.5 million stockholders who have made a pre-tax profit of $12 billion. Thank you.
I am not a destroyer of companies. I am a liberator of them.
The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures. spirit.
Greed, in all of its forms, greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind, and greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much.
Yeah, well, that is the thing.
But the working hard. Yeah.
I feel like working really hard for something isn't aligned with greed as much in my head. That seems like a reward, like a just reward for working really hard. Greed is getting way more than you ever need, and I think that there's something that you haven't worked totally hard for. At some point, greed means you are being outpaid for what you did or accomplished or need. Talk more about that.
That's really interesting. I think that that's – I mean if you work really, really, really hard and you get rewarded for it, that seems like a good plan. That is the American dream in effect. If you work – but that's like – but then the gross part of that is like CEOs getting 600 times what their employees get. Which is –
And like golden parachutes, all of that, where the, I mean, the leader of Warner brothers right now is leading a masterclass in how not to run all of these things. And he's making so much money. There's no real reciprocal. I do this. Therefore I am rewarded or cheated as a result. So I don't know. I think that the working really hard, that's a good sign.
It's the unwarranted rewards is what I think of for green.
So here's the thing. When you look at – I don't know if you know this, but the Bible has an opinion. Yep. Something about camels.
Something about camels?
Well, I want to back up on that. Wait, I have to say this thing about camels. What is it? Oh, okay. Okay, it's Luke 1825. It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom.
No, that was outstanding. I love how you just had that right off the dome. It was perfect. It could not have been stated better. This is the thing about sort of the biblical definition. It was viewed as a spiritual and moral failing, right? Described as excessive and selfish desire for more than is needed. It's pretty much what robots said, which is really important.
It's also linked to idolatry as it places material wealth above spiritual devotion and ethical behavior.
It's always that, right? Instead of looking at God, we're looking at our bathtub of money.
Yeah, love of money is the root of all evil. That's the Bible thing, right? That's the Bible thing I got. So spiritual and moral failing in the Bible, pop culture definition, natural human inclination with social implications, right? Okay. It's a moral failing, but it's also human nature. Okay. That's what's confusing about this stuff, right? Because it's just so natural.
Yeah, idolatry and spiritual ruin or... Economic growth and social responsibility.
Right.
Right.
Because it is like you're if you're a contributing part of society, usually that has to do with money at some point or the exchange of goods.
Right. Especially when greed is so tied to economic growth leads to spiritual distance from God and ruin. Can drive innovation, but also cause societal harm. But innovation is the thing that we tend to lean on. Like, hey, we work harder. We have factories that, you know, I just read this article that they're gearing up for iPhone 16 manufacturing. Whoa.
And that they just hired 50,000 new factory workers in Taiwan to put these things together. That is an extraordinary number of people living in factory dorms to make a thing that we, like, what is the motivation behind wanting the new phone? And I have a hard time with this because I want the new phone, right? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think it's where does it become selfish or excessive?
That's the line. That's the thing. This is what I tell my wife. There are certain areas of technology that I love and I want to keep up on. And I say, look, I don't have any girlfriends outside of our marriage. I don't do a lot of drugs. I don't gamble.
These were your vows, right?
These are my vows at the wedding. I don't even remember what that is. I don't gamble. There's just so many things I don't spend money on. And here is an area that's important to me, is the gear. I feel like by these definitions, in this one area, I am greedy. Right. Well, how do you feel about that? Pretty good and bad.
But you rationalized it. You gave me a list of all the things you don't do. But see, I don't think – is that greedy? Because it's not selfish and excessive for all the reasons that you just said.
You have a – But it also does global harm. I think you can make more of a case that my greed is doing 50,000 people. Extensive harm to humanity because that represents the capitalist footprint, and that's the thing I feel so shaky about. Like my consumerist habits – Um, and the things that are important to me that are material. Yeah.
Are, uh, have, you know, wide ranging reaching ripples in that particular bond. And so then it gets back to like, how is greed associated with materialism and the things that you just want? How is greed associated with your DVD collection? Oh, Pete. Pearls.
How dare you? Oh my goodness. Um, Well, I don't think it's, I don't know, because it's not like I was going to buy that DVD or give my money to an orphan. Like, I think I'm allowed to have these things.
Different show, Tom. That was charity. We already covered it. We're not talking about that. It's not opportunity costs.
I am glad. I mean, I do have a new rule where if I ever get another physical DVD, I have to get rid of one. I have to donate one because at one point my DVD collection got excessive. So I guess that is greedy and it is physical. I get that.
I recently had, because you were talking about your capitalism footprint or whatever, I had that experience that I'd never personally had, but I'd heard a bunch. I don't think it's greed, but it's the fact that America or certain companies, like I'm going to name check Amazon, seem to want you to be greedy. Like the access to greed has become so easy that I bought a Rubbermaid thermos.
And they sent it to me and it was the wrong size. And I wrote them and I said, this is the wrong size. And they went, keep it. In the process of how do I return this? Should I bring it to Whole Foods? They're like, whatever, just throw it in your yard. That kind of, that feels excessive. That feels like that living in a world like that leads to greed just becomes the norm.
Like you're talking about. I mean, innovation leads to, Amazon is an incredible, incredible company that is also the end of the world if taken out further enough exponentially. So I think it's hard to not – I don't know – I'm going to finish one of these sentences. Which one should I finish?
How many parentheses do you think you've used so far? I do commas. You're a Russian nesting doll of commas.
It's because I don't know where I'm going. I guess what I'm saying is there's a good chance that I am greedier than I think I am. And I don't know it because of normal life and the trappings of normal life hide greed as something else. They hide greed as ease or access to. Yeah. So it doesn't feel greedy because I didn't have to do anything for it.
Well, it doesn't feel greedy because I didn't have to do anything for it. Yeah. That's not right. That is great.
Exactly.
That's exactly how I was defining greed when we were talking earlier. Okay. This is all staying in. Okay.
I, I have to, I do, this is the thing that I wanted to land on. This is if we're lack of a better, a better direction, this is my bit. Um, I wanted to talk about modern psychological theories on materialism, and I have summarized a couple of sources thus. Modern psychological theories describe materialism as a value system that prioritizes possessions and wealth as key to personal happiness,
and social progress. Materialism is often linked to negative mental health outcomes such as depression and anxiety, and it fosters a continuous cycle of desire and then dissatisfaction. The pursuit of material goods is seen as a coping mechanism that ultimately fails to provide lasting fulfillment, leading to lower life satisfaction and well-being.
It is the pursuit that is emotionally damaging because the acquisition of things that you are in pursuit of leads to a very short dopamine hit of satisfaction and immediately back into the cycle of pursuit and acquisition.
There's a hole in you. And you're just trying to fill it up.
You think it's shaped in the form of an iPhone, but it's not. It's always shaped in the form of next year's iPhone.
That reminds me of a movie that I just rewatched for the 9,000th time. And I just now realized, oh, it can just be a complete study of greed in personification. Is it Wall Street? I just figured it out. Hey, I think this movie might be about green to a certain extent, like the dumbest guy in the world. No, there will be blood. Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood.
Yes.
Because Daniel Plainview is just acquiring to acquire. And at the risk, I mean, he loses his family. He loses all friends. And at the very end, he just commits murder in a bowling alley and then goes, I'm finished. That's an incredible, that's someone who is completely leaking. and doesn't have anything to fill up his life with, right?
Yeah, right, right. And so you have these, like there are psychological traits that are linked to greed. And in terms of personality and psychopathology, greed is linked to antagonism, disinhibition, and negative affectivity. It's associated with negative emotional states like depression, anxiety, which we already said. And can deteriorate self-esteem and life satisfaction.
So it eats away at your own sense of self-worth.
Because it keeps not solving the problem.
Yes. You know why? That's what I get from it. Yeah. Yeah. It shares similarities with narcissism, both arising from the sense of self-doubt and the need for external validation. While narcissism involves emotional self-aggrandizement, greed focuses on material accumulation. But both are addressing the same whole. Got it. Right? That's the thing that feels so gross to me.
There is something about this idea that That any of our desire to have a thing, right, is motivated by something else we're running from.
yes i took a class in college it was called on death and dying it was a real retreat of uh of a class and all we talked a lot about how the accumulation of wealth of art is just a denial of death that you're trying to have some sort of a legacy that look if i own this if i have this then somehow i am going to live on for forever
Yeah. When legacy is one of those terms that should be approached with both capital L legacy and lowercase L legacy. And most people think that they're building capital L legacy when really what is most important is small L legacy. The stuff you leave behind is your, you know, the most important relationships. We hear this all the time. What the hell is it going to take to believe it?
Right. You know what? Do you feel does it make any difference of the fact that you legitimately like the phone and like using all of the knobs that you're not just putting it on a shelf, you will actively use it and use the heck out of it. Like you're such a tech and device guy. Does that give it more worth to you? Does that help placate your or no? Because it's still a thing.
What did what did when Harry met Sally, wasn't there a bit in when Harry met Sally about rationalizations and orgasms? Have you ever gone a whole day without a rationalization? Do you remember that bit? No. There's a bit about rationalizations orgasms that orgasms are the most important thing that we strive for. And the argument is, no, it's rationalizations.
Have you ever gone a day without a rationalization? Well, that's how I rationalize that acquisition is that, well, I'm using the whole buffalo. I really am investing my time in trying to do better, create better, and be better with the stuff.
And I don't just better. I mean, that does feel like not a rationalization that feels like a justification in effect. Okay.
Are you greedy about anything? Like, does it feel, do you have the same? I don't mean greedy about anything. Do you have the same sense that I have about my, my devices that are important to me about anything?
Yes. I, well, yes, it was important to, There's no real reason for these two bookcases to be where they are behind me. One is filled with DVDs and Blu-rays. One is filled with books and plays and things that I've read.
It's just to prove that when people walk in that you know how to read. I think so.
And therefore, like, yeah, I mean, part of me, if I could, wishes I could somehow take all the books that I've read on my Kindle and have those on display too. because i've read an enormous amount but some people will walk in here and think i've only read like 20 books but my kingdom is heavy that wasn't my original plan speaking of greed was every time i bought a new book i'd get a new kindle
I was just thinking about that. And then I just have stacks of Kindles in case I want to reread something. So no, that's sort of a greed and effect of needing, I don't need these physical copies of things, but I'm greedy for them because then they are a symbol of something for me.
for this apartment that no one comes over to why am i trying to impress my dog like i haven't had a ton of i haven't had a dinner party since the pandemic why because everyone lives in nicer places than mine if you work at the french laundry you don't meet friends at denny's like what am i doing here
So maybe it's that maybe there's some sort of greed of like, I want these physical copies because they represent something. I don't know. I'm not sure.
It's like, but that's back to the idolatry, right? Like, like that's the, that is like part of the definition is that you're putting the thing above the acquisition and demonstration of the thing above, you know, all else. I, you know, I don't know.
But then I, but then I watched them all. Yeah. I guess the greedy part would be if I just put them on the shelf and was like, look, see, I have this. Look at all of my stuff. But I rewatch things constantly. Yeah. I don't know. I'm worried that greed is like a real backdoor Sally for me. Like, I'm very greedy about something and I don't know what it is.
50.
50.
50. All right. It's three words. You ready? Uh-huh. Thank you, notes.
If you start now. By the time the iPhone 17 or 18 come out. You'll be, you're, yeah. I'll have everybody covered. You'll be in a real groove at that point. They'll write themselves. Well, AI could help. I'll just have AI do it. There's nothing problematic with that idea. Oh, no, not at all.
Charles Bianchi was never a patient man. He always knew he wanted to get rich and get rich quick. It was this greedy impatience that ultimately led to his downfall and his lasting legacy. Born in Italy in 1882, Charles traveled to America at 21 years old to find his fortune. Tellingly, he arrived in the new country with only $2.50 to his name, having gambled the rest of his money during the trip.
Once in America, he went through a staggering amount of odd jobs in multiple cities. He was a waiter, a grocery clerk, a dishwasher. He repaired sewing machines and sold insurance. None of these jobs lasted long for his greed always got the best of him. And he was continually caught cheating customers or stealing from his employers and was fired for his transgressions.
Then he stumbled on his own personal gold mine in the form of a coupon. an international reply coupon, in fact. Back in those days, an IRC was a type of voucher accepted in different countries that could be exchanged for local postage stamps. Bianchi realized that he could make a profit by buying international reply coupons in his home country of Italy and sell them for a profit in the U.S.
due to differing exchange rates. And with that, Charles Bianchi had found his meal ticket. But once again, remember, he didn't want to be rich. He wanted to be rich quick. greed took over. In order to purchase IRC is at scale, he began taking in money from investors huge sums of money over $220 million in today's economy.
And he would pay off old investors with money from new investors in effect robbing Peter to pay Paul as it were the original and legal
IRC investment plan that could have made him rich was largely forgotten as he raced to gather more more money faster and faster of course the scheme eventually fell apart as once he ran out of new investors to build it was revealed that there was no there there just a scheme that left his investors wiped out
And it was this scheme where Charles found his ultimate legacy, not in fortune, but in fame. As you have almost certainly surmised by now, Charles Bianchi was just one of the many aliases he used after arriving in the United States. His birth name was Carlo Pietro Ponzi.
And while he spent much of his later life in prison and was eventually deported, the Ponzi schemes that are his namesake live on in America today. Looking for an investment that won't leave you bankrupt? Then call your broker and become a Feeling Friend today for the low, low price of 35 smackaroos. You won't be robbing Peter to pay Paul. You'll be robbing yourself to pay Uncle Peter and Tommy.
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become a feeling friend today that's one scheme that you just can't lose now back to the show peter here's a story that may or may not relate to anything that comes after it but it has to do with greed this took place in around this would have been fifth or sixth grade and we were out i was out with friends and we were trick-or-treating And we were going down the block trick-or-treating.
Do people still trick-or-treat? I feel like now people all go to like a mall.
Well, there's a mall and there's like trunk parties, you know, at school parking lots where everybody puts candy in the trunk and you go around. That's not a thing you probably ever did. Yes, people trick-or-treat. Okay. But I do think there are, you know, there are other gatherings, especially for younger kids to get the job done in other ways.
I would like to file a formal complaint that we should not be mixing children and car trunks. We are. That's the opposite of stranger danger. It wasn't my idea. You know what's in car trucks? Surprises. Get in there. Okay. Anyway, I digress. This one year, this one year, I remember there was like three houses in a row and they were not there. But they had put out a big bowl.
and a sign saying... Oh, the people weren't there. Oh, the people were not there. My apologies. The cars were gone, trunks were closed, and they were just big bowls, and there were signs saying, please take just one, you know, for trick-or-treaters, we'll see you next year, or whatever. And all the bowls were empty. And then we went to a fourth one, and there was one more. This is down the block.
And one of my friends, who will remain nameless, there was a good amount of candy in there... And they took all of it. This is one of your friends. One of my friends. Yes. They took all of it. And they were like, haha, suckers. And I've never really forgotten that. Because I didn't I didn't was sort of my realization of Oh, is that what's happening in all of these houses?
There's one person taking everything. And I remember feeling weird of, why didn't you learn? We were disappointed the three houses in a row didn't have any candy. And so then the response is to cause the same problem for everybody else. I've never been able to get that out of my head.
There is a mentality where kids are like, well, hey, it's one house for each of us. We'll take it all and then no more trick-or-treating.
Right. And I think I had a big – maybe that's when I became a social justice warrior. I don't know. I was just like, no.
I didn't say anything, of course, because I was – Only on Halloween does your social justice warrior persona come out.
And it made me think of something in science. And I'm going to ask you to tell me what you know about it. Because this is an interactive format. The marshmallow test. What do you know about the marshmallow test? Because I believe it is comparative. And I do think that this all has to do with greed. I know that the marshmallow test, spoiler alert, has to do with gratification delaying.
But that still greed is at the heart of it, I would like to think.
What do you know about marshmallows? Tell us. Well, the marshmallow test is the, I don't remember who pioneered the marshmallow test.
Walter Mischel and then graduate student, Ebby Ebbison in the early 70s. So, there you go.
I wasn't there. Yep. That's what I'm saying. You couldn't make it. Everything I know is hearsay. Yeah. that they would put people in front of the table, and there are all kinds of different ways to execute the marshmallow test. You can say, hey, I'll give you a marshmallow right now, and you can have it, or you can sit here for some...
an amount of time and not eat the marshmallow, but look at it. And at the end, I'll give you a whole bag of marshmallows or $1,000 or whatever, right? And so do you take the immediate gratification and go steal more candy? Or do you sit there and get gift candy after you are forced to wait while looking at the marshmallow? Is that close?
100% close. There's one big factor that you maybe overlooked that I think is important is it was for children. Yes. It was not for people. This was for children. Yeah. And yes, there was all sorts of different things. Sometimes the certain kids would not look at it and they would do better. Some would, would have to stare at it and they would do worse.
And all of that was very interesting about pleasure gratification, the delay gratification. Um, And then things got a little crazy because the doctors started saying that there was real ramifications, that the marshmallow test had been proven. They went and found these kids later, and there was a positive correlation for higher SAT scores.
and healthier BMI, body mass index, that there were whole changes in their brain, that people, there was a real craze for a while about how if you gave your kid the marshmallow test at home, you could see how they were going to do because people that didn't eat the marshmallows and waited for more marshmallows then did so much better in life. Had you heard that part?
It's one of those things, not specifically, but I feel like I kind of knew there was a craze about it as a parent of kids, right? Like you hear about it.
Yeah, because everyone started doing it.
Yeah.
Well, I'm not exactly sure where I'm going with this, but I wanted to point something out is in 2018, that all fell apart. For decades, we have been espousing this and regurgitating this whole stance because of something called replication crisis that is going on in psychology and has been going on for a long time is instead of just taking it as truth, you redo it. And it doesn't work.
It never works. They've tried with tons of different kids doing the marshmallow test, and there is no correlation about later adult behavior. And even Mischel, one of the guys that co-authored the original study, came out and later said in 2018 that it revealed nothing about adult behavior when looking at outcomes like capital formation, social standing, or intelligence.
So it just sort of all falls apart. Except there is something there. There is something there involving greed and wanting something right away versus waiting for it. And this is where science rebounded. Do you want to hear this part? Of course. The marshmallow test was thrown out, and then it came back because they started studying pizza. They started studying pizza. You've read the study? No.
The idea is they started looking at the other pressures, the other things that were going on around the kids, that they were using the kids originally as these blank slates, these tabula rasa that then either ate a marshmallow or didn't. They started using things, and this is why I wanted to compare it to Halloween.
One of the kids, like the kids that were my friends, he took all of the candy, right? When I would have learned, I thought, and would have just taken one. Do you think maybe he did that because the situation was deemed untrustworthy?
Talk more about that. What is that? Untrustworthy where?
In the first three houses. There was now a potential scarcity of candy. There was worry set into motion because there was no candy, no candy, no candy. Then you have the chance for candy. You grab it. You take more than you need. it's a hundred percent toilet paper during the pandemic. When I famously was like, I'm not going to hoard. And America said, thanks. And I wiped my ass with bath towels.
That's gross. That's not true. I mean, they weren't my towel. Um, Because what they did when they reset up the new, new, new marshmallow test is they had preschoolers, they would have the experimenters lie or misbehave with another adult in front of them. So the adults are breaking the rules.
You're setting a standard.
And then when that happened, they would leave the room across the board. Those preschoolers would grab it. They would grab the marshmallow right away because they no longer trusted that the promise you made to give me more marshmallows because I've already seen you break rules. It seems like greed, but it's not. So it wasn't driven by like a lack of self-control.
It was this person isn't trusted and I should cut my losses.
Yeah, that's really interesting.
It's kind of interesting. I know it's greed adjacent, but there's ways of looking at greedy behavior and seeing it as something else. In the way that I was trying to reposition or take your rationalization and make it a justification for your phone, you are using the entire buffalo.
If you were just taking it, putting it on a shelf, or just showing people it and not really using it, if I just owned all these movies and never watched them again and just stacked them up, that's different. But I think the idea of that it's not a lack of control, that maybe grabbing these immediate rewards sometimes is more...
So what's so fascinating about that, it connects to what we were talking about before Ponzi Alley, which was what do you need to do to cultivate anti-greed behavior? What are the things that you do if you really are struggling with greed and these feelings and the behaviors that lead you to do things like fight scarcity with greed? What do you do?
There's a cognitive behavioral therapy, a therapeutic intervention. You can address feelings about money and self-worth and healthier attitudes toward possessions and all those things. But at its root is let's reframe your feelings about or your understanding of empathy. Right? Right? Because that would have addressed all of these things. It would have shifted from a me, me, me to a we, we, we.
Would it, though, in the marshmallow situation? Because the marshmallow definitely would in the Halloween candy one. Yes. That person did not learn any empathy. It's like they wanted to inflict what they felt on the first three houses to everyone else.
Yes. Exerting their Halloween vent. And you're right. The marshmallow test really doesn't address that. But the marshmallow test isn't designed to address empathy, I guess, in that regard, right? It's not like you're looking at here's one marshmallow and you could have it or you could cut it into 10 tiny pieces for all of these orphans. That would be different. Yeah.
That would be a different test. Yeah. And just like pretending to be an asshole in front of a preschooler does not lead toward lessons in empathy. Correct.
I think... In like the Halloween example, or like you were saying, what are the tools that you use to try to, if you feel like you're getting greedy, is try to see what's really going on. Like when I really, really, really want something, a lot of times it's because it's just, it's like heightened attention. Yeah. Like someone has pointed it out. Like I'm never hungrier.
then the minute I have to start fasting for a colonoscopy. And it's like, I'm not hungry. I can't be hungry. But as soon as you say you can't have anything but broth, all I can think about is nachos.
And it's like, I wasn't thinking about nachos five minutes ago, but it's the perceived scarcity and it's psychological reactance is what that's also called is you don't like being to be told what you can and can't do. And so you immediately take the something and, you know, a really amplify its importance or your fair need for it. Okay.
Okay.
Yeah.
Let's go. Let's go back to Gordon Gekko. Okay. Because greed is good. Greed works. Greed is good. This is something really interesting to me. What is going on for this character that was created as a form of dark satire of Western culture that did exactly what you're talking about with a lot of money behind it? Right? This guy was extraordinarily wealthy.
And he used that wealth essentially to take the whole bowl of candy off of the porch. Right. Right? I mean, is there something more going on with, I guess, Western finance than that, than just this desire because we're manufacturing scarcity and we're going to create our own alternative to it by just taking everything that we can?
I have a theory that I just thought of just now, so I don't know how great it is. So it's well studied.
Yeah, good.
Yes. So do not. So like get Wikipedia on the phone and just start typing. Right now. Okay. I think part of that comes from, especially in the idea of, let's say, Bonfire of the Vanities or Wall Street. These type of jobs can, for a lot of people, what they're hiding or what's being missed is actually creating something.
having something and making it different in there's the golden little crumbs speech in bonfire, the vanities where she's like, do you make things? And the, the wife who is mad that the main guy is like, Oh no, they just take, they don't make anything. They just move things around.
Like think of the, think of the economy as a giant cake and they just, they take it and they move it over here and move it over here. And then little crumbs fall down and you just take those little crumbs and just picture daddy running around, scooping up all the little crumbs he can find. It's incredibly emasculating. And the character, it's like a real, it's, it's actually, it's so important.
They put it in the movie and that movie gets everything about the book wrong. And so I wonder if part of it that the whole is, I can't look and see what I've done. Therefore, I need to take as much as I can to prove that I am a person, that I really have. What did you do today? Look at my watch. It's that kind of response. I moved a bunch of figures around.
I don't know what I'm talking about, so I apologize. I'm not saying lives or work in finance is a problem at all. I'm just saying that it seems like Painting a house, you can drive by that house and go, look what I did. You can't do that on a balance sheet as easily.
Well, I'll tell you. I mean, we are sort of, I don't know, we kind of exemplify that, right? In the family, we have a business that was thriving for 18 years, and it was sold to essentially a venture capital-backed firm in acquisition mode. And here we are two years later, and that company doesn't exist anymore. It doesn't exist anymore. They created nothing.
They only destroyed as an effort to move figures around a spreadsheet. So I don't know that I would have had the same sort of feeling that this entire mechanism is quite so poisonous had we not lived through it. It is poison. It's poison. To have something just stripped for parts.
It was built from the ground up. That's capitalism at its grossest.
At its grossest. At its very worst. And I think it is the lack of empathetic approach to these things, like not realizing what the true value is. And the true value is what the people there create. Like you said, what is the painted house of that business? And do you realize that when you're moving these figures around, you may be doing damage to the painted house?
And in fact, in this case, you were lighting the house on fire. Right. I find that just horrifying. It's just horrifying. And so I think that goes back to empathy, right? And that is what the Gordon Gekko exemplifies. That's what all of the things like we, you know, the fight back against the Gekko in that movie is the empathetic one. It's like, look at all the people.
The people are standing up for what they do. And I think that's the... That's the thing that puts me sideways behind rationalizing acquisition at scale. Right. Yeah.
50,000?
50,000.
I got an idea for you. It's three words. Do you remember what the three words were before? I do. Do you know what they are now? Ice cream party. Taiwanese ice cream party, Pete.
You're really taking us down the severance road. Maybe we could play some aggressive jazz at the time.
Thank you all so much for joining us for this episode. Boy, we're coming. We are hurtling towards the end of this season. We got one more. We got one more, Pete. One more, and it's a twofer. And it's a twofer. Real quick, this week's tune is Fancy by June Bloom. And what is coming up next week, Pete?
Next week, our last show, because we do 12-episode seasons and we have too many things to talk about, we're talking about patience and kindness. I don't remember how we got there, but it's going to be great. We're going to find a way to weaponize patience and kindness because that's what we do.
Exactly. What we're going to do is we're going to put one podcast episode in front of you. And if you wait to listen to it, you can have another episode of this dumb podcast. If you listen to it right away, that's all you get. You don't get the next part. Yes. Cliffhanger. Yes, exactly right.
Well, that sounds great. Until then, you're Pete Wright. You're Tommy Metz III. Thanks for downloading. We'll be back next week with all the feelings, sins, and virtues.