The Millionaire Next Door

But like they're all Italians from New Jersey and I was just like really this was any other ethnicity It's like every prosecutor was an Indian or something like JD Vans would be talking about

“Do they have a Jersey Shore accent? How do you tell them that they're Italian?”

They're their names. We was like I'm Danny Goomba Jay this is a Jenna pop the Roni this is such an insane way to run a justice system honestly There was a moment when we're all standing outside the courtroom 50 people dead silence Except for this one girl who like was having a full fucking chat with the woman next to her Who obviously like was less into it?

We were right next to the elevator which was under construction and she kept saying is there are they doing Construction or is that just like a very loud elevator and like when I tell you that it was like the most obvious Construction noises. It was like fucking jack hammers and men shouting and she kept Waffling every two minutes. She's like maybe it is construction You know, maybe it is just a loud elevator and I think the other lady was a little too polite to be like more on

Buckingawking about also like the several of the elevators were blocked off with giant signs that said like I was like this woman is about to decide whether a murder one Some of the life is in this woman's hands Like there is a murder fucking murder defendant in there. All right. We got to we got to jump in. All right

“Did it get a sense you you have to start you to rent Peter Michael. What do you know about the millionaire next door?”

Finally a book that lionizes the rich

So the name of the book is the millionaire next door colon the surprising secrets of America's wealthy It's by Thomas J. Stanley comma PhD and William D. Dango comma PhD two guys two guys and two importantly two academics Yeah, so this book comes out in 1996 It is apparently on the New York Times bestseller list for more than three years It sells many millions of copies. It's extremely influential. It basically launched a whole genre of book

This like ordinary millionaire book like millionaires are all around us You can be an ordinary millionaire. I didn't know this until I was reading up on it But rich dad poor dad is like a ripoff of this book. Oh, like it's like a dumber version of this book It comes out a year after this book. So within a couple of years We get the one-minute millionaire the top ten distinctions between millionaires and the middle class

Millionaire by 30 the millionaire maker the automatic millionaire the thin green line the money secrets of the super wealthy Secrets of the millionaire mind cracking the millionaire code in 1999. There's one called smart women finish rich

“Which I imagine a guy named rich carrying around bars and like showing to women. Can we circle back?”

Is there a way that we can just talk about the one-minute millionaire because that is Pretty quick and I feel like maybe worth a read that's like the four-minute abs You're like this is even faster. This is three-minute abs. This is two-minute abs. You can be a millionaire and have three minutes of abs remain And then one of the authors of this book also wrote follow-ups called the millionaire woman next door and the millionaire mind But the billionaire next door and then he's like obviously that was about men

Girls can be a millionaires too. So the authors and interviews very explicitly say like this isn't a get rich quick book We're not giving advice. This is a descriptive

Basically study of who has a million dollars in net worth and they also talk about how they've been doing for 20 years

They've been doing focus groups where they kind of dig more deeply into rich people's finances What are they spending money on? How have they earned their money? We're getting a real portrait of people with high net worth in America This is 1996 you said right so millionaire had a little more meaning back then I did the math a million dollars in 1996 is almost exactly two million dollars So any of the figures that they give in the book roughly doubled them right? So this is a paragraph from the introduction to like the updated version of the book

This is like an introduction of the book like ten years after it was published prior to writing the million Our next door. I spent nearly an entire year reviewing my survey data and the transcripts of the interviews conducted between 1982 and 1996 This extensive research and analysis I believe is what makes the millionaire next door a perennial best seller for the price of a book

The reader is essentially buying the equivalent of more than one million dollars worth of invaluable research and interpretation

So you're already a prugal millionaire. You're already having good spending habits by buying this. This is like when people are like would you rather have a million dollars or ten minutes with Jane This is the first sign that the book just by being written by academics This is not like that's smart of a book. This shows that like if you have a PhD and then you write a bestselling book You get dumber. Yeah Absolutely like it's not just that dumbasses write these books. It makes you stupid

So the introduction of the book. They give sort of the origin of it

What they find out is basically this idea that when you think of a millionaire you think of someone who like lives in a big house They're driving a fancy car, but what they've discovered in their research is basically there's this huge Tranch of like modest Millionaires people who like drive a used car

They wear normal clothes, but they're sitting on like a million two million dollars in well

They're trying to draw this distinction between people who earn a million dollars a year versus people who have a million dollars in Network. There's a lot of people who have a million dollars in that worth who are like teachers and firefighters and kind of ordinary jobs. They talk about dull normal jobs But they're they're they're sitting on this like massive nest egg and then they talk about the kinds of wealthy people that they will be Discussing in the book. So here's the end of the introduction

It is seldom luck or inheritance or advanced degrees or even intelligence that enables people to amass fortunes Well, it's more often the result of a lifestyle of hard work perseverance planning and most of all self-discipline. It's because people are

“Shelter discipline. That's how they became millionaires”

You're like, do I make the one book joke now or do I make it later or do I say fit for later? It's like a myth that like rich people don't spend money and that's why they're rich Yeah, like that like a rich person is you with better spending. Yes, yes, no, dude

I've never seen this there's a meme that's just like a drawing of two guys

And one is like dripping out in like all sorts of shit And it's like jacket $2,000 hat $150 Shoes $300 and above him. It's like poor Right, there's a rich guy and he's just wearing a $25 shirt and like fifty dollar pants or whatever and that's the lesson It's like poor people are poor because they spend all their money and rich people are rich because they're dressed

Modestly right and they live in a house and they drive them on his car this I mean this is kind of the spoiler of the episode Peter, but this book is essentially invented that myth when I was in college I No woman whose Uncle was mega rich like CEO of like a fortune 50 company sort of guy and also super cheap Yeah, it was like, you know hanging on to a doll yeah frequently when she told these stories someone would be like well

“That's how that's how he got rich. Yeah, yeah, no, no, this is salary is $10 million a year”

So the first part of the book is basically just like a bunch of statistics on who are the millionaires in 1996 3.5% of households in America are millionaires at this time 92% of millionaires are men half of them have wives who are like housewives who are not working outside the home Around one in five of them is retired of the people who are employed Two-thirds of them are self-employed, but then they immediately get to the number one factor that they think explains why people are millionaires

So they do this throughout the book they they use specific names for people So in this section they talk about a guy named Johnny Lucas who's one of these humble millionaire types But it's not clear if this is like a real person or just like a name that they've given this person. So here is this Why are so few people in America affluent even most households with six figure annual incomes are not affluent? These people have a different orientation than does Johnny Lucas

They believe in spending tomorrow's cash today. They are debt-prone and are on earn-and-consumed treadmills To many of them those who do not display abundant material possessions are not successful to them Non-display oriented people like Johnny Lucas are there in furiers. They're looking down on you for being frugal. I'm already annoyed But also what are these guys? What are the PhDs in? They're both professors of marketing. I knew it was fake Thomas Stanley before this book comes out. He's written a number of books called like selling to the affluent net working with the affluent

“So that's why he's doing all this anthropology on rich people. This is like flattering rich people”

It's like you're the people who aren't rich. They're not disciplined like you are here's more of this Johnny Lucas the affluent business owner is very punctual Are this get this guy's fake? You can't really tell but they're clearly presenting all these millionaires is like very virtuous throughout

He has never laid for meetings and arrives at work each weekday at 6.30 a.m.

How does he do this? It must be his wristwatch Could it be that Johnny wears an expensive watch fully one half of the millionaires surveyed never in their lives spent more than two hundred and thirty five dollars for a wristwatch about one in ten never paid more than forty-seven dollars Certainly some millionaires purchase expensive watches But they are in the minority

Even among millionaires only twenty five percent of those surveyed paid eleven hundred and twenty five dollars or more Are you just doing this debate me? I I specifically chose this I could have chosen any kind of Exerpt but he goes on about watches for like a very long time and I want you to read it. Folks

Let me tell you about watches Let me ruin this episode with an extremely long Daggeration about watches. It's an investment. It's really an investment when you think about it. So as we're hinting

Have a ton of watches. There's no need for you to

“Do this man. You don't need to you know he did it then yourself. Well, I'm gonna I need to I need to explain”

Why I know so much about this because I'm about to share information. Okay. I have a ton of watches most of them are cheap Some of them are fancy, but the thing that you learn very quickly is that no one gives a shit Oh, other people don't know and like the percentage of the population who likes nice watches is super small So he's presenting this as like they must be so frugal but in reality 25% of these guys paying 1,100 and change for a watch is actually pretty

hefty especially since that's like 20, 200 now Yeah, so a full quarter of millionaires are buying fancy watches for themselves. What's so weird? It's like this Peter is like a third of the book like they have a whole chapter on buying cars They have a whole chapter on buying clothes It's like very detailed how much they are spending on these consumer goods and it's all kind of the same point

They say the typical American millionaire reported that he never spent more than $400 for a suit of clothing

So that's $800 in today's money. Yeah, that's like not cheap They say half of them have never spent more than $140 for a pair of shoes But half of them have spent more than $20 for a pair of shoes. You're hitting these thresholds where it's like yeah

“To spend more than $300 on a pair of shoes. You need to really want nice”

Yes, you know what I mean you need to kind of like like shoes like fashion or whatever Big chunk of these guys don't really care about shoes or watches or whatever, so they get a nice one and they move on It's also true that they don't have a chapter about how many are sending their kids to private school Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah major things that we'll actually do spend like huge sums of money for when they're like 50% of these millionaires have never spent more than x on a watch or x on a car

It's like okay, right? It's not the same guy every time you might be a car guy And so you spend your money on cars you might be a watch guy. You spend your money on watches. You might be a shoe guy You spend your money on shoe They're not all frugal. They just have different priorities and care about different things So this is also this actually the book where you see that they're just laying it on a little too thick right?

You're right about how it's good to be frugal. Which is true. I mean like yeah fundamentally at the heart of this book is like good advice Right if you don't have a ton of money. Don't spend a ton of money fair enough. Whatever or like if you're like upper middle-classish Yeah, and you save your money you can be a millionaire. Right that that might have been something that like someone in 1996 needed to hear Okay, and like doing the math compound interests. It's like kind of useful. Yeah, yeah, yeah

He's exactly right, but if you're like I don't know this. Yeah, it's getting a little too

“He shows up promptly at 630. What are we talking about? Yeah, does that make a more money? What do what's going on?”

The other thing that he starts doing is in the chapter about buying cars He's contrasting doctors. There's Dr. North and Dr. South. One of them has like the good car buying method and the other has like the bad car buying method So Dr. North buys used cars. He's like a very frugal millionaire. He's the good kind. So here's this By the way, Mike you you introduce these is like I'm not sure if these are real guys Dr. North and Dr. South. Yeah, I know they can be goes back and forth between like obviously fake names and like okay

Maybe logistically real names. I don't know

So in this section, he's basically talking about how buying a used car being like a frugal millionaire saves you time

Compare to buying a new car. Dr. North decided that his best choice would be a three-year-old Mercedes-Benz He telephone to few dealers and advised them of his interest He also examined several advertisements in the classified section of the paper. Finally, he decided on a low mileage model Offered by a local dealer the North method took only a few hours Contrast this with Dr. South's automobile purchasing crusade a process that took him at least 60 hours as

Someone who only bought used cars back when I had a car. It's a huge fucking hassle to buy like a decently priced Not scammy used car. I mean, I do agree that it's good to to spend three hours as opposed to 60 Yeah, I mean, I guess, but also people if you're buying a new car I feel like a lot of like wealthy purchasing habits are like they just don't want to think about it that much They go to the dealership the guys like 80,000 bucks for a Jaguar. He's like, yeah, fuck it. I'll get it

This is like the biggest benefit of having money. Yeah, the idea of never having to think about this shit because you can just

You're paying for the convenience of who cares right exactly, but also I this is it We're really slobbing on these guys, right? Yeah, no, it's really bad. I know this is getting a little weird And also it's like why even do this? It's like you could say. Oh, it's a hassle to buy a used car But it's worth the hassle, you know compounded interest blah, blah, blah, blah, yeah, but instead they're just like lying to your face and being like, oh You spend way less time on buying a car if you buy a used one. That's true. They also say in most of the cases

We've examined prodigious accumulators of wealth love working well a large proportion of a under accumulators of wealth Worked because they need to support their conspicuous consumption habit for a book by two academics It's like what are you talking about people like oftentimes teachers love their work and they don't make a ton of money But they do it because they love it the idea that like if you're wealthy, you'll love your job

The slob and leave middle-class idiots like it's what the fuck is this it's really like they're creating this binary

“But they're just like doing it way too much the idea that like self-discipline leads to money and money is replicated through”

Self-discipline. I just don't think that's right. And then this is the only meaningful factor

I mean, it's basically what they're setting up here, right? The the mistakes that you can make financially if you have a high income

If you make $500,000 a year and you burn straight up just like no reason to have bought that 60 grand a year. You're still so fine. No, someone making one 50. This is also the weird obsession with things like wristwatches Where if you're very wealthy the different $1000 watch and a $5000 watch is not going to make a meaningful difference to your network It's weird that they focus on like almost exclusively these consumer items. It's so weird to talk about well Like income is like the second thing right right right

What I mean the other this is the other Extremely like just laying it on to thick thing They have an extended anecdote about one of their qualitative interviews with millionaires

“The first time we interview to group of people worth at least 10 million dollars decamillionaires the session turned out differently than we had planned to make”

Sure our decamillionaire respondents felt comfortable during the interview. We rented a posh penthouse on Manhattan's fashionable east side We also hired two gourmet food designers They put together a menu of four pat tays and three kinds of caviar to a company this the designer suggested a case of high quality 1970 board dough Plus a case of wonderful

1973 Cabernet seven yon armed with what we thought would be the ideal menu. We enthusiastically awaited the arrival of our decamillionaire respondents The first to arrive with someone we nicknamed Mr. Bud Mr. Bud owns several valuable pieces of commercial real estate in the New York metropolitan area

You would have never figured from his outward appearance that he was worth well over $10 million

Nevertheless, we wanted to make Mr. Bud feel that we fully understood the food and drink expectations of America's decamillionaires So after reintroduced ourselves, one of us asked Mr. Bud may I pour you a glass of 1970 burdo Mr. Bud look at us with the positive expression on his face and then said I drink scotch and two kinds of beer free and budweizer. We hit our shock as the true meaning of our decamillionaire's message dawned upon us During the subsequent two-hour interview the nine decamillionaire respondents shifted constantly in their chairs

Occasionally they glanced at the buffet But not one touched the pat-tay or drank our vintage wines. We knew they were hungry But all they ate were the gourmet crackers. That's something about decamillionaires. They hate patay and wine

This is like when Kevin and home alone to

gets the limo and the pizza like what would a baby think that the rich people do We got three kinds of pat like the idea that they wouldn't be like they imagined a world where they supplied one type of caviar And the decamillionaires were like what the fuck is this right? I don't eat this type of caviar I love that they're treating them like zoo animals to the like we have to make them comfortable Like we have to do a penthouse and like it's like the special kind of foods. They eat also

I like that the guys like I drink two kinds of beer free and budweizer Okay, the pat-tay's free eat that bitch. But this whole thing seems really fake and also just kind of unnecessary to the thesis of the book The fact that rich people like drive humble cars live in humble houses It's not like they're actively hostile to the trappings of wealth if someone put me up and was like here three types of caviar I wouldn't be like I'm a book and a more of a chicken wings guy

Yeah, you'd probably just eat something. It's just like why why lay it on this thick in your book It doesn't need to be here right right it's like bizarre

“So this sort of all speaks to the weird between the lines ideology of this book that the only thing that matters to net worth is”

Frugality right is your spending habits on these things like food and clothes, etc. But throughout the book They keep down playing the influence of income So in a chapter on budgeting They say one of the mistakes people make is people allow their income to define their budgets What they also say it's easier in America to earn a lot than it is to accumulate wealth

They just start taking for granted that like yeah, yeah You're earning like hundreds of thousands of dollars in the United States, but what really matters is how much you're spending Right and so this is an excerpt from a New York Times article about this book that was came out a couple years later Because this book really does show up everywhere it shows up in Articles it shows up in like there's a David Brooks column about it from like a couple years afterwards

It shows up in academic articles. It's like taken relatively seriously So many more of us could become millionaires as was amply demonstrated by Thomas Stanley and William Danco and their fascinating book the millionaire next door They found that inheritances or even extended educations aren't necessary the main requirement given time and a decent income is Thrift. I love given a decent income. Yeah. Right. Well, that's the hard part is the given a decent income

Intelligent spending habits can make a well-off person kind of rich, which is I think probably true They're going the other way and saying like rich people are rich because of their Yeah, exactly because of their spending habits and they also again they're laying it on too thick They say later in the book

We've interviewed many people worth two or three million dollars who have total realized annual household incomes of less than eighty thousand dollars

So they're also creating a spread where you can have massive net worth at like remarkably low income Right, I'm sorry, but how they're basically saying like it's virtuous to say 15% of your income and that's like the one thing that matters But of course if you make five hundred thousand dollars a year and you only save five percent of your income You're going to be a millionaire much faster than like a teacher who saves 20% of her income like that just is the case

“Right, this is such a simple thing to understand, but like let's say you make a hundred and fifty, right?”

You probably maybe you save 30 grand a year, right? If you double the income you're not doubling the savings You're like quadrupling the savings. Yeah. I don't know if this is to flatter rich people or if it's to like trick the middle class Somehow. Yeah, maybe it's maybe it's like aspirational Like right like you don't need a better job

You just need to like focus up. It's your fault basically. Yeah, anyone can do this, right?

Other people other people making fifty thousand dollars a year. They have three million bucks in the bank

I don't Because I'm sorry, but they they're people making eighty grand a year that have three million dollars cannot exist So I did actually do the math on this because there's all these like retirement calculators online So first of all, he says eighty thousand dollars in realized income so that's post taxes and that's Nineteen ninety six dollars, so we're talking about a hundred and sixty thousand dollars in twenty twenty five post tax

“Which first of all is just a lot of money like that puts you firmly in the top ten percent of income earners in the United States, right?”

But even if you have this high salary starting at age 30 You managed to put away 15 percent of your income, which is what they recommend in this book every single year of your life You will have three million dollars in net worth when you are seventy eight years old Right, that's the way you get to three million dollars So this is actually kind of a demonstration of how hard it is to get to three million dollars in net worth

I mean look maybe you like yeah, if you have whatever if you fucking buy IBM in nineteen seventy one Yeah, whatever, I don't know, but there's a way, but it's I just don't believe it

It's also very funny that throughout the book they almost never talk about income other than to like kind of downplay it

But they do mention at one point one single point in the book They say in the survey that they did of of people with high net worth the household media In taxable income is a hundred and thirty one thousand dollars a year so two hundred and sixty k in twenty twenty five money It's like a lot that's a shit load of money and they just like never talk about it again Right, right, I really don't think wristwatches are like that important if you're making that much money

Yeah, I think I think if you're making a quarter million now and you're sitting there like how do I Ensure that I have three million dollars when I retire or whatever Then like this is probably part of the calculus. Yeah, but like if you're sitting there right now making ninety grand Like this is not the way right you're going to become a millionaire. It's just not so There's these kind of sketchy

Qualitative stories about these focus groups. They're doing there's also the issue of like where are these statistics coming from right? Because the entire book is based on this survey of millionaires and it's actually not a given This is a population that's easy to study right because by definition, this is only 3.5% of households Right, so if you send out like a general survey to the entire population You're going to have so few millionaires that you can't really say anything meaningful about them

“Right, you have to find this population, but they're difficult to find right well not a few not a few lower them to your east side”

House with caviar But so finally in appendix one they describe how they are finding millionaires before you get into this I'm going to say what I would do. I would go to the cheapest stores Because that's where the millionaires shop the use card dealerships where the real beaters are getting Go to the shittiest clothing store you can find right and then to just talk to anyone there

The dollar store every question in there is a millionaire. So basically they start with neighbor hoods Which is like yeah, you look at sort of where houses worth a lot you find rich people there, right? But they specifically say that they're not looking at wealthy neighborhoods. They say that they're stratifying them across what what they call the estimated net worth scale They're looking for neighborhoods where people have a high estimated net worth not necessarily a high income

And so in his follow up book one of the authors Thomas Stanley describes this in more detail He's talking about working with a researcher Actually, let me send this to you so his researchers name is John John found that some neighborhoods have high concentrations of people who have Substantial investment income and thus would have the millionaire mindset From his national database of

227,000 neighborhoods John selected 2487 his mathematical model predicted that these would contain high concentrations of people who were actually wealthy as opposed to those who had big homes with big mortgages

They're basically selecting neighborhood that will have frugal millionaires right that will have people with relatively low incomes But high net worth you're not looking at the wealthiest neighborhoods where the actual wealthiest people on America

Li you're looking for this like upper middle-tranch that maybe has a million dollars in network

But not super high incomes, but that's also the conclusion of your entire book. Right so that the way that they're selecting neighborhoods is like pretty sketchy They also the way that they're doing the actual studies. They're doing it by mail. Oh, hello. I am

“I am here to interview men of means. Do you want to hear what they did Peter mash some caviar into the envelope?”

Think they actually did a version of this so they say we selected 3,000 heads of household each received an eight-page questionnaire a form letter asking for his participation and guaranteeing the anonymity and confidentiality of the data We collected and a dollar bill as a token of our appreciation. Oh my God So they send out a 8-page questionnaire, which is just while they they say in the book that their response rate was 45 percent That can't be right. I know I was like what the fuck but then I post this on blue sky to like social science researchers

I was like doesn't sound remotely possible to you and people said response rates have like cratered across the board since the 1990s

This was at least plausible. It was like laughably false. I also feel like again this might control

Out some of the richer Pete like some of the higher income folks the people who are willing to talk about this shit might be your You're quote unquote humble millionaires with people who are like more frugal or whatever But yeah, if you're just like a super high income person and someone's like tell me about your money. You're probably like no So they're selecting neighborhoods with like frugal millionaires that they're only getting a half and half response rate Which I think would select for frugal millionaires and then the questions on this actual questionnaire

They they don't print the entire questionnaire in the book and there's no peer-reviewed Studies based on this data, which is fucking wild for two academics Which also just like makes me very skeptical of this entire project But at a couple of points they say what the questions are so when they're talking about like the predictors of millionaires They have a list of questions. So one of them is were your parents a very frugal are you frugal is your spouse more frugal than you?

Okay, asking are you frugal is fucking wild not great data like everyone's gonna say yes That's no one thinks that they spend too much money frugal is like a virtuous thing. Like are you generous? Are you kind? Everyone's gonna say yes to that. It's not meaningful at all. Yeah

“I feel like you need to see the data on their spending”

Which they're not getting it's all self-reported like how much have you spent on a suit like all of that is just asking people Yeah, and again, I think that data just kind of sucks because People spend their money in different places, right? It's really hard to tell if someone is generally frugal from that sort of data

So basically the rest of the book is them describing the characteristics of

Millionaires so we found with these millionaires they're in our sample what distinguishes these people from the rest of the population right? So the first chapter on this this sounds like I'm being mean to the book, but this is actually true The first chapter on what makes millionaires different is their ethnicity And you just assume like okay with wealth data you'd be like my black Asian Hispanic like you can find these statistics anywhere Yeah, they don't include black people or Hispanics or Asians yeah, no, let's get down let's get down to business folks

Which are the best types of whites so there's literally this is the list Peter these are the ethnicities English German Irish Scottish Russian Italian French Judge Native American and okay Hungarian all I am interested in here is what are Italians doing Doing like French as a subset here is

“Fucking crazy doing Hungarian as a subset here is fucking crazy. Are what do you want to out Peter?”

Do you want to know which kind of whites are the most likely to be millionaires according to the state of this Extremely non-represented of data. I'm gonna knock some out of contention right away It's not the hungarians. It's not the Irish It's not the French it's not the Russians. Okay. Thank we're are we down to Germans Anglish and Dutch. Yeah, those are my top three contenders. Who's number one?

I'm gonna say that the Dutch are number one trash Dutch are number fifth fuck fuck you got it way wrong Peter I forgot about the Pennsylvania Dutch keep in mind this is like a fake survey, which is not really Obviously it's a fake survey I do think that what I just said was probably more accurate than their survey My vibes about the subspecies of whites yeah are

Pretty scientific. I got to say Did it was at the French it is the Russians that makes a lot of sense to me in the sense that I do Feel like a lot of Rich ass Russians came here after in the like 80s and 90s. So that is now what they say that is that what they say? No, they say that

Russians are ethnically inclined to start businesses. Hell yeah. They have a quote from a Russian like a guy who grows up in the Russian community Who says Russians? They are the best horse traders and like obviously he's not the French they they're Lazing about They do also mention that Germans are trash Germans make up

I think it's mostly sampling though because it's all the large ethnic groups all do bad and small ethnic groups all do well

I think it's just like how big is their sample like again I think this is just like fake ass data because the English do bad too and there's a shitload of English people in America English have been here for too long. They're too assimilated That's what they say they literally have a whole section about the longer you're in America The more you acclimate to like the American consumptive lifestyle

But immigrants don't do that. Yeah immigrants are more likely to start businesses and shit But that's not like some fucking genetic No, it's a position. It's like if you're first generation You're more likely to start a business. So where does thing too is that they have even though Scottish people are number two What in millionaires what? So do you know why Peter? Do you know why I would love to know

But the theory is it's because Scottish people are cheap skates. That rocks dude They're like they're like Scottish people are known for their fruitality, which like is a stereotype about Scottish people

But it's also not true. They're basically just like repeating like oh because they like never spend money

“That's why they're all wealthy in the United States. I love that the only thing that we've talked about”

Scott on this show was J.D. Vance's book talking about how the Scott the Scott's Irish are like degenerate losers Anything but they're also cheap skates. Okay, J.D. Vance should just hold on and wait for that Scottish DNA to kick in for and perhaps than Appalachian will lift itself out of poverty. So that's the first characteristic of Millionaires. They are the correct ethnicities. The other thing about Millionaires is that they tend to buy

Specific stocks. Yeah, they say that Millionaires like hold on to stocks. They're not like day traders. She's like that's pretty good advice Also, who was a day trader back in the 90's? How do you even do you're like calling a broker? You're like a degenerate gambler calling a broker and there's like a $20 transaction fee You're like wasting your time

You're just losing $500 a day on transaction fees. So he says 79% have at least one account with a brokerage company But they make their own investment decisions. This is something they say a lot in this book. They the term like mutual fund and like index fund

“Target date fund none of these appear in the book and they're basically saying like you should be spending an”

Inordinate amount of time like investing in specific things So here is a little thing yet of some of the Millionaires we've met Mr. Willis a highly productive sales professional Had a Walmart as a client for more than ten years All during this time Walmart was exploding in growth and value How many shares of Walmart did Mr. Willis ever purchase? Zero. Yes, zero even though he had considerable first hand knowledge of his client success

And an annual six figure income, but he did purchase a foreign luxury car every two years during this time What a fucking scumbag he could have been doing insider trading A high-income marketing manager Mr. Peterson was employed in the high tech field

But he never invested a dollar in Microsoft or any other growth company never in spite of having considerable knowledge about

Many of the firms in the technology industry The owner of a printing business enjoyed having one of the leading beverage companies in America as a customer The customer bought millions of dollars worth of printing from him annually But how much has the printer invested in his customers equity offerings? Zero. That's basically the advice is like if you're somebody who does like professional services

“You should invest in the companies that you work with what if the companies who are your clients are not good investments”

What if it's bad a bit like such a weird advice also like just having a little bit of vision into a company Does not terrible like advanced stock knowledge. No, it's such this is Great, just like bad advice. Yeah, I read other reviews of this book that mentioned like the idea of having somebody else do this for you It was like not as widespread in 1996 ETS didn't exist right there are mutual funds, but there aren't really yeah

You didn't have as many options. That's why it was very popular at this time to just buy a handful of blue chip companies But yeah, this is just stupid advice and also my guess is that some of what they're looking at is that the richest people will be People who put a ton of money into one company that did well. Yeah. That's just survivorship bias, right? They're like you happen to have invested a ton of Microsoft that you got like super rich But there's also people who invested a ton in like codec. I remember seeing someone say like you know

The best investors are not investors who diversified The best investors if you look at like the numbers the Warren Buffets of the world are people who made Huge bets right on a single company, and it's like right yeah Those the people who are the most successful will be people who took extreme risks And then hit yeah, but that doesn't mean that that's a good strategy. Yeah, that's just survivorship bias

So as well as doing your own investments they also have two entire chapters about how you must make budgets You have to spend a ton of time budgeting every single piece of spending that you do Everything you spend on like leisure food activities. Where is the tax fraud chapter? Is that everything to the tax fraud chapter?

Yeah, nowadays like your bank just kind of tells you how much you're spending on various things

It's like very easy to track your spending like the concept of like balancing your checkbook Yeah, it doesn't really exist anymore because you can like check your app like what am I spending But at the time it was pretty easy to lose track of things like what's right? I've been eating out last month I think again. This is like fairly good advice Yeah, but because this book so closely links virtue and money

“They have this thing where you have to be spending like a ton of time”

So they say the average person in their survey spends 8.4 hours a month planning their investments and planning like knowing what their budget is. That's a crazy amount of time It's so much time. It's like that's like two hours a week in my mind every hour

I spend budgeting is an hour. I'm not podcasting

And that's bad business. They also have a weird section About how you shouldn't give money to your kids. Okay, there's this paragraph what happens when Weekend children become adults They typically they typically lack initiative more often than not they are economic underachievers But have a high-prepensity to spend that's why they need economic subsidies to maintain the standard of

Living they enjoyed in their parents home. We will say it again the more dollars adult children receive the fewer Dollars they accumulate while those who are given fewer dollars accumulate more This is a statistically proven relationship yet many parents still think that their wealth can automatically Transform their children into economically productive adults. They are wrong Discipline and initiative can't be purchased like automobiles or clothing of a rack

They have a section in this chapter called the unemployed adult child. Yes, and no offense to all of our listeners who fall into This category but they're right about this I mean again, it's like good advice don't like spoil your kids don't like whatever. Right. Yeah, I mean look everyone Everyone knows someone who's like you know on on the extreme end of this spectrum where it's like Their parents are just constantly funneling them so much money that like they don't ever really get a sense of what money is

But also this is not really based on the data that they've collected. This is just like a thing They want to complain about I would be shocked if there's real data about this because I'll see this I know a few people who went from this sort of lifestyle to just like making mid six figures in finance because their dad was in finance The other tell that this is not based on their data is that they also have an entire chapter about how

Millionaires marry the right kind of housewife so true. So here is a little section of this Chapter five how to keep your girl in check. This is literally Peter has this chapter. It's cool All right. How did the wife of a millionaire respond when her husband gave her $8 million worth of stock in the company? He recently took public according to her husband of 31 years. She said I appreciate this. I really do then

She smiled never changing her position at the kitchen table where she continued to cut out 25 and 50 cents

A food coupons from the week supply of newspapers

“Nothing is so important as to interrupt her Saturday morning chores. That's why if you want”

We're there's I think three things I want to talk about here one is like yeah, if you take a company Public the reason you're rich is probably not frugality I think that you you did an IPO yeah second of all if I did keep separate money on my wife and then I gave her $8 million And then she was like thanks. I appreciate this and then went back to what she was doing The way the life wouldn't drain out of me my goal. It's like you should marry a woman who hates you

It's like okay Back to what she's doing. I understand that they're trying to be like look. She's still does the coupons Which like yeah, how much she's saving but that's the thing they want you to perform Fragality right and like yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean it's part of the thing with the budgeting too Like you shouldn't have financial advisors that do this for you, right?

You're only the good kind of millionaire if you're spending time doing it right even if it's totally useless and pointless

“You should be clipping coupons because you're performing from Galilee this could be a”

Manosphere Tik Tok video tell it people a rich because they're cheating. They didn't throw it away on their Week children and they're profligate wives also do not date a whore So we then get into the two kinds of housewives. There are type A housewives They say type A is 10 to marry high income producing successful men They tend to take leadership roles and caring for their elderly sometimes disabled parents

The gifts and inheritance they tend to receive are in part compensation for these efforts We then have a type of B housewives. They say type B housewives in contrast are viewed as adult children who need economic outpatient care and Even emotional support they tend to be dependent on others and are unlikely to be leaders in any capacity And that goes on for like many paragraphs Yeah, no doubt no doubt like the bad kind of house

And unfortunately this is all of our female listeners

You want oh, yeah, you need you need one leader housewives take care of parents and ones come bag like in lady

“One do one lead so the whole the whole time I'm reading this and like why is this it your book?”

It's not based on any of the survey data. They haven't as like what kind of housewife do you have this is just like they want to say There's just like a chapter called like the bitch spectrum It's so funny that like you get to see again like stretching out what should be a relatively short book into a relatively long book They're like, okay, well first we'll break down the whites by ethnic group and rank them Second, let's divide wives

Kind of wives we like and wives we don't like but they also have an extended section about they do admit that the gender wage gap is real They say the objective data make it quite clear in America the odds are against women earning high incomes Which is true but then they're like, but discrimination can't explain it all we think it's because Daughters get more help from their parents Yeah, and when you're a woman growing up you see your mother not working and then you're like well

I don't have to work either and then you basically free load

Okay, that's why we have the gender wage gap. I feel like a lot of men never recover from watching

Women get their drinks paid for for a period of time in their early 20s. Yeah. Yeah, you're like this explains everything It's all fades away by the time. Yeah, yeah, no, none of this This anymore or like it in much smaller degrees But if women could invest the cost of those drinks they'd all be millionaires now. That's even compound interest if you're smart And you're a woman in your early 20s someone buys you a drink you sell it and you invest in stocks

Do you have a share of a target date fund with you instead of a month?

“That's what I'd prefer but the most important characteristic of millionaires and this is a”

Thuddingly repetitive book that returns to this like 3,000 times throughout the text is that millionaires are self-made Yes, they go out of their way to sort of establish this like salt of the earth Kind of character of millionaires, right? And a lot of that is because they did hard work to get where they are So here's this who becomes wealthy usually the wealthy individual is a business man who has lived in the same town for all of his adult life This person owns a small factory a chain of stores or a service company

He is married once and remains married. He lives next door to people with a fraction of his wealth He's a compulsive saver and investor and he has made his money on his own 80% of America's millionaires are first-generation rich. They're all business owners They all took on great risk to themselves. They have the right wife. They've only been married one time They had like type A wife. The kind of lady who barely looks at you when you give her 16 million dollars

Until there's money a good Russian lady. Most of you might think that it's okay to marry a German. No. They also go out of their way To say Millionaires did not inherit their wealth So they have

“Statistic after a statistic about how inheritance just isn't an important thing for today's millionaires”

So here's this have you always thought that most millionaires are born with silver spoons in their mouths if so

Consider the following facts that are research uncovered about American millionaires Only 19% received any income or wealth of any kind from a trust fund or in a state Fewer than 20% inherited 10% or more of their wealth more than half never received as much as one dollar and inheritance 91% never received as much as one dollar of the ownership of a family business So they really laid us on thick. I feel like occasionally you'll find some people on the left or sort of like obsessed with the idea that it's all a full-dice roll

Yeah, that's not something I'm super invested in but I will say that like 20% Inheriting their money or not being first generation rich feels like a decent chunk of life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, buddy This is also a unique situation and that if you look generationally Somebody who's a millionaire in 1996 and they're in their late 50s their parents would have grown up in the great depression Right and so yeah, the fact that they're more rich than their parents

It's kind of everybody's more rich in their parents right? I mean the America just had a huge explosion in living standards And wealth and income over the course of the last hundred years literally everyone our age has a story about their parents buying a house Yeah, and now they're rich somehow. I mean they do mention in this section again kind of off-hand

That the children of millionaires have a 1 in 5 chance of becoming millionaires and the general population has a 1 in 35 chance of becoming a million

Right, that's that's like the relevant fact It's not necessarily Did all rich people just get it from their parents or whatever Right, it's how much of a leg up is it so this gets into like a lot of the research that I did What what this book is doing is actually

Expressing an ideology of the new class of wealthy people in America that has now become like the dominant ideology of wealthy people the the first thing we have to talk about is there there really was a shift in the demographics and the make-up of

The composition of U.S. elites has changed significantly since Ostrander conducted her research nearly four decades ago

In that period as in most of the 20th century the upper class was exclusive and homogenous Dominated by old money families such as the Rockefellers and the Astres elite college and professional education We're typically close to all-but white men wealthy women rarely worked for pay Social status was largely inherited and the old elite looked down on newcomers in the past few decades In contrast elites in the United States had become more diverse in terms of race ethnicity, religion, and class of origin

The post war opening of higher education, especially in elite institutions to people besides elite was men was a major catalyst for this shift Importantly not only the composition but the outlook of elites in the United States has changed from a view that accepted inherited status as legitimate to one that stresses meritocratic achievement through hard work and cultural openness to a diverse world

So this is a real change the sort of old money elites of course those people still exist

But they don't dominate the elite the way that they once did the great Gatsby was entirely about How you can be super rich but still not be accepted. Yeah, I really don't understand why we have to read that book

“I was like an action remember thinking and high school like just being confused about this cultural dynamic that it was describing”

Well, one of those interesting things I read for this was an article called family education and sources of wealth among the richest Americans 1982 to 2012 where they looked at the Forbes 100 every single member for this entire like 30 year period and just looked at like their sources of wealth and You do see this huge shift right from like real estate empires to like tech CEOs, right? And Piccaddy talks about the working rich like people who are CEOs exactly

Sorry, I'm sorry. We need to pause Michael Hobbs read Capital in the 21st century a fucking thousand-hage I audio booked it. I audio booked it so I missed the job. Oh my God, that the fact that you were like reading the Slop and you're like What what is capital in the 21st century about this but one thing he does talk about is the that this concept of the working rich

Right where people not not to say they're like, oh, these people work so hard and they're so good or whatever But it's like these are people with jobs. You're not sitting there getting quietly getting money to you You are somebody with a job, right? And that's a huge part of your identity. It's not like salt burn money or something

“Exactly you you are working and have have income and that's why you're really and what you find in this article about the”

Forbes wealthiest is they say those in the Forbes 400 today are less likely to have inherited their wealth or to a grown-up wealthy They are more likely to have started their businesses having grown-up with some wealth would we consider to be the equivalent of upper-middle class The Forbes 400 of today also are those who were able to access Education while young and apply their skills to most scalable industries technology finance and mass retail podcast The percent you grew up well, they fell from 60% to 32% while the percent they grew up with some money in the family rose by similar amount

The share that grew up poor remained constant at roughly 20%. So getting from the poor to the rich is still really fucking hard And has only gotten harder, but getting from the upper to the super upper has gotten a lot easier There's circulation between this sort of top 10% and the top 0.1% and that is the circulation that I think feeds this idea That the rich are hard working right because if you are Mark Zuckerberg You did work really hard. You worked really long hours. You launched Facebook. You had this idea, right?

Right, but also he he was the son of like a dentist in Westchester County. Yeah, it's like the the Bayzos thing where he Was like given 300 grand by his parents or whatever and it's like yeah He probably doesn't get ultra rich without the 300 grand that said you can give me 300 grand I'm not creating Amazon So it's yeah, there's a there's a huge gray area when you're talking about what who's self made and who's not well

What's interesting about the way that they framed us in the book is they very narrowly Focus on inheritance, but inheritance. I mean your parents don't typically die until you're in your 40s or 50s in which case Oftentimes you're kind of financial fortunes are relatively well-established the much more important Form of wealth transfers from rich people to their kids is in getting them into elite colleges Oftentimes wealthy people are helping their kids with down payments right for homes

Often I'ms are helping them with sort of startup capital for their businesses

And we couldn't have done this podcast if your mom didn't give us $10 million

But I didn't inherit it. I didn't inherit what's interesting about the shift is not just that it's a shift in sort of

“quote-unquote meritocracy. I mean on some level. These people are self made but in other I think very meaningful ways”

They aren't self made. They're getting a ton of privilege But it also created an ideology among the rich that I did this myself, right? Yeah in this book on easy street It's essentially a series of qualitative interviews with like mega rich people in New York where she's like sits down with them and talks them about money

So the first thing is that rich people

“explicitly describe themselves as middle class so here is this Helen was a stay-at-home mother who had worked in banking and was married to a lawyer”

With a household income of over $2 million and assets I estimate at well over 8 million including two homes

She told me I feel like we're somewhat in the middle in the sense that there is so many people with so much money They have private planes. They have drivers. They have all these things and so you see the sense of like well There's people who are richer than me, so I don't I don't feel rich, right? Yeah. What you find in other qualitative interviews is they oftentimes refer to their childhoods To say like well, I grew up in a normal home right I went to public schools. Yeah, oftentimes they did. It's a it's almost a social identity

More than it is a description of their wealth. You also have survey data There's a 2025 survey that asks millionaires whether or not their self made and 79% say their self made Okay, people have this like idea of themselves is pulling themselves up by the bootstraps I'm actually kind of impressed with the 21% who were like no I didn't I'm a fucking loser

Did I do not deserve this money at all there's also survey that two thirds of US millionaires don't consider themselves to be wealthy

Yeah, this is also how you you have these constant articles that are I think rage bait at this point They're like you can't even get by a New York on $500,000 a year and that's true folks That's why I had to move out

“It's also very important to wealthy people to constantly emphasize how hard they work, right?”

That they're not one lazy rich. They're not just sitting there getting like rent money Yeah, yeah, there is another excerpt from uneasy street near the end of the interview I asked if he felt he deserved his lifestyle I had started asking interviewies this question after I noticed they often seem to feel conflicted about their advantages Paul responded without hesitation

Absolutely damn right. I fucking deserve it where I am today I've earned every dime on my own no one's done it. I mean my in laws have helped, but I've done it I mean you know what you know the money real when it's like, yeah, sure my in laws help like not even like my parents Right, it's like he has a type A wife one of those type A housewives. Yes. Was it helpful? marrying in to to the Bayesos family

He goes on my job my career my current employer my previous employer. This is all me no one's helped me It's been me so I've earned every fucking dime absolutely and then Rachel asked him and people who have less than you Do you think they deserve less he responded some of them? Absolutely. I mean occupy Wall Street I mean what have they done? They sat in a park doing nothing, you know You haven't done shit. Look it's so important to

Be self-made in a sense that you marry a rich lady It's underrated to count that as self-made But it was also so interesting to me about how consistent this is throughout the book is that people's advantages are immediately written off Yeah, I did have advantages, but I worked hard right. This is the number one thing that people describe often

“I've like totally unprompted like how hard they work and often this is true right?”

You don't like take it away from somebody they did work really hard Well, we're actually just talking about is how much of it was look? Yeah, yeah, how much of it was outside of your control because it might be that it couldn't have happened without a ton of hard work Yeah, I think of many cases that is true The actual question though is was a ton of hard work on its own enough

Yeah, and the answer to that is basically unequivocally no in a really every single situation Yeah, there's like statistics on this. Yeah, there are a ton of people who work very hard and don't have what you have Right, so can you explain what that gap is right or can you explain if you're a Mark Zuckerberg or whoever why you if you think you deserve what you have deserve 50,000 times someone who works very hard in a normal job right. There's like there's like almost a moral question

And they're especially if you're looking at income in terms of like well, did we order society in such a way?

Yeah, this is a trade-off right this guy gets 3 million a year and our welfare states a little bit smaller than it might be

Also speaking of morality Peter another argument right for this super fascinating is called wealth elite moralities Well they entrepreneurs moral boundaries by Anna Cantola and Hanaku Saila to finish researchers who interviewed rich Finish dudes and what they found was that people have this like mythos of hard work But oftentimes they keep that mythos even after they're not really doing the hard work anymore So here's a fucking brutal series of paragraphs and this is just this is the fins

I know they're not even on the list Overall the entrepreneurs create symbolic and moral selves as hard working risk taking humble ordinary blooks who do not show off their wealth However, their actual lifestyles contradict this moral self Especially when describing their current lives the interviewies share anecdotes of idleness and relaxation one interview e for example states that everyone should work an hour more each day to save the national economy

He quotes sun bathed for one or two years

“Four or five years later. He still is not working at the interview conducted in June”

He said he plans to return to work in October quote, I don't really work. I was just thinking of putting an automatic reply in my email saying Let's get back to the issue on October 1st I do some real estate business, which is not really that hectic and then there is investing But I had people to do that, so I don't really work

This is what the millionaire next door should have been right interviewing these people would be like You're actually not working that hard dude. The only you people I want to hear from are the 21% of millionaires who said they are not self-made My guess that those people are kind of cool, but then what's also interesting about the millionaire next door focusing so much on Frugality is that when you read both uneasy street and these qualitative interviews with rich finished people This thing of frugality comes up all the time. This is a huge part of the ideology and the self-conception of people as

Someone who isn't like those other millionaires rich people will mention out of nowhere all the time They're like, I know fly business class. I live in a modest home. I don't hear designer clothes, right in the finish interviews They say another interview we who kept his sunglasses on throughout the interview regard humility as One of his defining characteristics. I consider myself a normal bloke a sense of humility comes from my upbringing and because of that Even if I was a lead, I don't know how to show off. I would I would love to do this interview as a gag

Where I'm I could I am in like a full fur coat and some glasses I say my my defining characteristic is how humbly I am this is the mythology of the wealthy now, right? I think it's you see this in like Mark Zuckerberg wearing hoodies a lot of the aesthetics are not about like bright gold and shit Right, like ostentatious displays of wealth. It's ostentatiously displaying how you're not like the bad kind of rich person Zuckerberg's a good example because they all yeah, they all have this like duality where they are like

“Sort of an every man, but then of a large part of their life is like completely ridiculous and unattainable, right?”

Yeah, yeah Zuckerberg is maybe in like a hoodie and some casual jeans But then like has a yacht. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, and also three houses or whatever, but like in his self conception That stuff doesn't count right? What kind of the hoodie and you're seeing this a millionaire next door, right? Where's like people are ignoring that they send their kids to private school for $50,000 a year and they're like, oh my car is three years old Actually a little little Zuckerberg anecdote that ties into the the watch stuff. Oh most normal people

If if this becomes your hobby and you're like I want a luxury watch and maybe you save up in one day You buy a Rolex right one day you buy a cardier right Mark Zuckerberg got into watches a couple of years ago and then just like Immediately bought like 10 of the rarest watches in the world. Oh, yeah, and there's actually something so weird and artificial about it Where it's like I'm gonna start this hobby and then like you like ask someone you know like yeah You know what are like the most what are the rarest most expensive watches because I'm worth so much money

And I'm so famous that I can just get them all right now Yeah, like every time you see him in a public appearance

He has a watch work like $3 million on his wrist and it's like yeah, there's something so fucking fraudulent about it

Yeah, we're not only is he like not this character that he plays this like regular doom that he plays

“But he actually doesn't even really know what to do anymore. Look at what can you do with that amount of money?”

It's like an infinity symbol money makes having a hobby like that almost A relevant right like he gets into watches and just buys 50 million dollars worth of the best watches in the world and now what now? What are you gonna do? It's also it's very similar to like normal people when you're like my newest Our solution is to start running and then you go on Amazon you're I'm getting running pants I'm getting running shoes. You're like buying binge even you haven't actually like started the thing yet

It's the same thing that he's doing is if he's been like four million dollars right instead of like two hundred dollars There's something there's something I can't quite articulate, but like their conception of themselves is so Fucked yeah, yeah, they no longer even understand themselves So this is also this to me is so key to like the political ideology right because one thing Rachel Sherman mentions in her book Is it rich people voted for Harris in the last election, right?

So this isn't necessarily a sort of partisanly right-wing group But these are all people who experience any Idea of increasing taxes on the wealthy as a personal a front right because they're like well I work hard for this. I'm not the bad kind of rich person I'm not an aster. I'm not a Carnegie. Yeah. You can't really get any kind of political consciousness out of these people because they don't understand themselves as rich people

Right, they will never admit it right and one thing she mentions the book to is this this concept of luxury

Creep we're kind of like Decision by decision as somebody stays rich for many many years. It's like they'll fly business once Yeah, I fly business It's just easier for my neck, you know, and then they'll fly private like over time They just go up the wealth ladder right it's like on one decision like oh by a new car this time

And then it rolls Roy's blah, blah, blah. It's like over time

“They entrench themselves into these buying habits, but she also mentions that they they actually get stronger in their mindset of themselves as middle-class people”

Partly because they're hanging out with more elites, right? So they are kind of in the middle like of the income band

People that they're spending time with but there's never a point at which these people start to identify as rich people

Right, it's always like a fluke Right, they're like right middle-class person. I'm an interloper here But that makes it so hard to do any kind of political organizing or like political punishment at these people Because they experience it's such an attack If you try to reduce the amount of wealth that they have because they don't think they have that much wealth right because they don't view themselves as having done anything wrong

The idea that it would be better or more moral to take some of their money from them Never sits right in their brains right? It's an injustice. It's like well, I worked for this money

You're taking it away from me, right? It's a theft right you can't tell me that I've done something wrong to get this all all I did was work hard

So we didn't get back to the book. We have to talk about his chapters on taxation. Yeah, this is gonna be a little script Peter about two IRS workers so he says a soon for a few moments that you are Mr. Bob Stern a scholar who works for the IRS one morning your manager Mr. John Young calls you into his office So do you want to be the IRS guy or the manager Peter? I will be the manager. Okay, Bob I keep reading reports about the growth of the millionaire population The number of wealthy people keeps rapidly increasing, but our income tax revenue for a lot of these people is not keeping pace

I wish Congress would wake up with this country needs a tax on wealth. I know what you mean

“But sooner or later we will get them remember. It's inevitable death in taxes not so fast Bob”

Look at this case study. Here's a woman Lucy L Big names. It's funny to not give the full name in a casual conversation Here's a woman Lucy L who had seven million dollars just a year before she died. She lives on her pension money

Never in her life sold a share of stock out of her portfolio her wealth doubled in just the six years before her 70th and 76th birthday's

But what did we get out of it in terms of income tax nearly zip, but the Reaper. He got her right death in taxes wrong Bob She died last year and do you know what her net worth was at the time the Reaper finally showed up less than $200,000 No-with-state taxes some days. I wish I were in another line of work. The enemy is winning But where did her money go? She gave it to her church two colleges and it doesn't her more charitable organizations She also gave $10,000 to every one of her children grandchildren and he's in nephews

She's real country loaded with relatives like a mountain of people. She's real country loaded with relatives like a lot of mountain people She's the wrong kind of white. She's the wrong kind of white. That's right. Well, she sounds like a pretty nice person to give so much money to a church colleges and charities Bob shame on you Every one of those churches is racist Bob shame on you. She and her ilk are the enemy American needs their wealth to keep our government operating

We need her mind to pay off the federal debt We need to fund all of our social programs. Perhaps she feels that her church the colleges and the charities also have needs. Bob You are so naive this woman is an amateur what type of experience that she have with rolling out her wealth We are her government. We should decide where and how wealth is distributed We are the pros we have to start taxing wealth before all the millionaires transform themselves into non-millionaires

So this isn't this is insane in general, but it's also so insane to include in a allegedly academic book Survey data like wealthy in America a fucking marketing PhDs are doing they're doing like an extended bit

“I don't think you should legally be allowed to put PhD on the cover of your book. It's a marketing PhD”

I love that there's a creating like the IRS as these like demons who are like this bitch gave money away Right hate her for it and also it's just like some fucking middle management asshole at the IRS is like But you see like this weird kind of like radicalization, right? That it's like you have to construct these efforts to tax rich people as amount like totally illegitimate and only Appealing to like the worst kind of people like Mahaha she gives money to charity. She's evil right right all the book. They say we believe in the next 20 years

The affluent will have to use every option within the law to remain affluent It's a segment of our economy that will be underseed by the liberal politician and his friend the tax man Yeah, well, they got they got that right the affluent. Of course Change in our country since 1996 baby It's been pretty tough for the affluent in America like fucking like Newt Gingrich got his fucking claws into their

Marketing brains yeah, and they were like my god

The last thing I want to read is also another part of the ideology that shows up throughout the book about like being a Frugal millionaire right they're basically creating this identity for yourself is like one of the good kinds of rich people, right? So here is him Talking about this millionaire that he made up Johnny Lucas He has a long thing about like baseball players and celebrities have like all their spending habits are so glorified by the media Yeah, so he's talking about whether you would ever have a TV show about someone like Johnny Lucas is

a show about the typical American millionaire won the mass TV audience would enjoy we doubt it Let's take a look at why not The camera zooms in on the typical millionaire household of mr. Johnny Lucas Like most millionaires Johnny 57 has been married to the same woman for most of his adult life He holds an undergraduate degree from a local college

He's the owner of a small janitorial contracting firm that has thrived in the last few years to his neighbors Johnny and his family appear to be non-descript middle-class folks

But Johnny has a net worth of more than two million dollars

How will the TV audience respond to the description of Johnny's wealth and the images of Johnny on the screen? First, viewers will likely be confused because Johnny does not look like the millionaire most people in vision Second, they may be uncomfortable Johnny's traditional family values and his lifestyle of hard work discipline sacrifice thrift and sound investment habits might threaten the audience What happens when you tell the average American adult that he needs to reduce his spending in order to build wealth for the future?

He may perceive this as a threat to his way of life It is likely that only Johnny and his cohorts would tune into such a program. Why would Johnny watch a program? About a guy not buying stuff. He's like no, he's just like is he like a guy at work? What are you talking about? Yeah, of course people are going to watch that show. It's the fun more on your shit, too

“But it's also I think the other part of the ideology, right? Is this sense of victimhood?”

Yeah, yeah, millionaire, but no one wants to admit that the way you got there was with fruitality No one wants to congratulate you Americans feel threatened by you Yeah, not not only are you a special boy, but right just hearing about it would upset people And you can argue that like sort of celebrity culture is like a lot of spending stuff But if you talk about like sort of standard financial advice

It's all about like being prudent. Yeah, the idea that like a Frugal rich guy is like offensive to people. What are you talking about? What is that is that based on something? There's later this whole section about how Johnny sometimes parks his like janitorial truck in the driveway And then his neighbors like try to kick him out of the neighborhood

Yeah, because they're like oh, we hate your values. We we hate that you and one way They're like they hate that he sends his kids to college. If I found out that one of my neighbors was working class That would be disgusting to me. I would say no no start throwing your watches at him unless you are Doing some sort of rent seeking on American capital Then I'm not interested in living near you if you heard a story if you told a like the average American history of like oh this guy only makes

$80,000 a year

But he has a net worth of $2 million because he lives like a prudent lifestyle

“How many of you are gonna be like fuck that guy think he's like a hero?”

You're not under attack for this at all. I mean the fact that this man like doesn't exist is pretty important Yeah, because like you are you are literally creating a mythical hero But this is what's so interesting is I think that this book between the lines is creating giving rich people the story about themselves Right a lot of people right this book and this book showed up in popular media all the time and it really created this story of like You're not the bad kind of rich person right and and they hate you for being thrifty not just that

But like where where is the chapter that's like yeah Look some people are just like high-income big spenders, right? They they seem to collapse all rich people into this category of like guy with reasonable income Who's just very frugal very smart very very responsible by the way. Doesn't she don't it's wife They hate you for only being married once where does like the scumbag rich guy that we all know fit into this

Right this framework right I mean they basically talk about this and they basically say they're not really rich Right, if you see somebody driving a role as boys, he's not rich because he drives a role as a voice right the guy with a fancy watch can't be rich Because because he's outside of the category that we that we have created right of course well inequality that guy might just earn like

10 million dollars a year and the fucking watch doesn't matter right it's so it's so interesting that they just carve those people out of the equation

Yeah, they're frauds we don't real data on them because we didn't survey them basically yeah I net worth I pin at

“25 million dollars but that's mostly brand equity that's what I that's where I value that's your IP that's my estimation my personal calculation of the peer brands”

The only the only epilogue I will say about the aftermath of this book is that obviously it's sold a billion copies They made a ton of money Thomas Stanley one of the authors went on to write a bunch of these other slot books

bought a brand new Mercedes hell yeah in a book that says over don't get never by a brand new car and the other author

“bought a brand new Corvette so long suckers literally leaving their readership in the dust just fucking”

Just cruising away in the new vet go boy. It was a fucking for rod. Well, but there's their self-made

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