Speaker 1: Everybody's still courting with an army and normal folks. Welcome
Speaker 1: into the shop for shop talk, Alex, how are you?
Speaker 1: I'm doing well? Bill?
Speaker 2: Uh.
Speaker 1: Normally we just kind of play with the avid seeing
Speaker 1: you like I haven't seen you in five or six days?
Speaker 1: How you do that?
Speaker 3: That's also pathetic, and it's usually when people say that,
Speaker 3: it's like you haven't seen you in a month or
Speaker 3: in three months, like I haven't seen you for five
Speaker 3: or six days.
Speaker 1: Well I haven't. And you normally are in the shop
Speaker 1: every day looking at our Sundrys. It's nice not to
Speaker 1: drive three hours around trip. That's true. That's good. Gosh,
Speaker 1: it's true. How are you seriously good? Good?
Speaker 3: Actually going with the kids all next week and we're
Speaker 3: going to Chicago. We're really doing a bunch of fun
Speaker 3: stuff all there. And I still have a ton of
Speaker 3: family there.
Speaker 1: So I was going to say, I know your family
Speaker 1: moved to Florida, but you.
Speaker 3: Used to have lots of up Thereably got the fifteen
Speaker 3: people there.
Speaker 1: Are all Bears fans. Yeah, okay, all right, everyby this
Speaker 1: shop talk number one fourteen. What forty million tax returns
Speaker 1: reveal about America? Actually, I know a little bit about
Speaker 1: this because we've talked about it in the past. I
Speaker 1: think you guys are going to really dive into it
Speaker 1: and like it. Hold on, we have first there you go.
Speaker 1: But first, in honor of shop talk, wasn't fourteen and
Speaker 1: our lovely history lessons? We like to play with Alex
Speaker 1: what happened one hundred and fourteen years ago today? Well? First, Bill,
Speaker 1: what year was one hundred and fourteen years ago? Well
Speaker 1: that would have been nineteen eighteen, ninety nineteen twelve. Do
Speaker 1: this right, Yeah, you're own a business whatever. I've been
Speaker 1: here such for this woman, So kissed my butt. The
Speaker 1: Titanic sank really April fifteenth, nineteen twelve. Well, in that hilarious.
Speaker 1: We shouldna be laughing about people dying. You just did
Speaker 1: it this way the Titanic sake. That's great.
Speaker 2: It's not great though, that's said so funny. Okay, let's
Speaker 2: we're both going word dog, But it is it like
Speaker 2: one hundred and fourteen years ago the Titanic said.
Speaker 1: That's that's yod I may I mentioned this before.
Speaker 3: That was my dad's birthday, also the day Lincoln was assassinated,
Speaker 3: and also Tax Day.
Speaker 1: It's quite a day in American history. Incredable. All right.
Speaker 1: The other thing, the modern oreo cookie was introduced. Really yes,
Speaker 1: Oh that's that's a huge thing. Anybody liked a national
Speaker 1: biscuit company.
Speaker 3: I don't know that was the original name of Nobisco,
Speaker 3: nobisca national biscuit company.
Speaker 1: Do you uh? Lisa introduced me this. She she makes
Speaker 1: homemade chocolate chip cookies and she does it with the
Speaker 1: oreos and she puts them in the freezer so they're
Speaker 1: really cold and hard. But and then she puts a
Speaker 1: glass of milk in the freezer for like fifteen minutes
Speaker 1: and then gives me the glass of milk with a
Speaker 1: hard frozen cookies. Man, I never thought, Oh my gosh.
Speaker 3: It's Grace saying the world. So the oreo thing is important.
Speaker 3: Have you ever had My mom taught us.
Speaker 1: We do it.
Speaker 3: The kids like white chocolate covered oreos and then you
Speaker 3: put it in the freezer. They are ridiculous. I don't
Speaker 3: know if you've ever seen the movie parent Trap. Yeah,
Speaker 3: the Lindsay Lohan versions, the more modern one where do
Speaker 3: you know what she does with the oreo? She dips
Speaker 3: it in peanut butter.
Speaker 1: No need, have you had it? No? You got to
Speaker 1: do that? So good but you got to have milk
Speaker 1: for something like that. You don't have to be you
Speaker 1: have to. It's a moral imperative as an American to
Speaker 1: have very cold milk when you eat stuff like that.
Speaker 1: All right, let's get rolling, Okay, Coming up on shop
Speaker 1: Talk number one fourteen, where oreos were invented the same
Speaker 1: year that the Titanic sank, which is interesting in and
Speaker 1: of itself. What forty million tax returns reveal about America?
Speaker 1: Coming up right after these brief messages from our genter sponsors, everybody,
Speaker 1: welcome back to the shop shop Talk number one fourteen,
Speaker 1: where Alex and I try to be exceedingly interesting. What
Speaker 1: forty million tax returns revealed about America? A few years ago,
Speaker 1: a group of researchers asked a question that gets argued
Speaker 1: about all the time. Does the American dream still exist? Oh?
Speaker 1: My gosh, how many times have we heard that the
Speaker 1: last decade? Does the American dream still exist? Before I
Speaker 1: even read this, I believe the American dream not only exists,
Speaker 1: but is more readily available today than it has been
Speaker 1: in the history of our country. The problem is social media,
Speaker 1: and all of it we've got has created all kinds
Speaker 1: of longing for what some might say is pretty unreachable
Speaker 1: for the vast majority of us. And then when we
Speaker 1: do reach what the quote American dream is, we're unsatisfied
Speaker 1: because we don't have the yacht. Okay, I'm just going
Speaker 1: to tell you. I think that's going on a lot
Speaker 1: in our culture today. But a few years ago, a
Speaker 1: group of researchers asked a question that gets argued about
Speaker 1: all the time. Does the American dream still exist? Not
Speaker 1: on social media, not on cable news, in real life.
Speaker 1: The lead researcher was Raj Chetty, then an economist at
Speaker 1: Harvard University, along with Nathaniel Hendron and a team of researchers.
Speaker 1: They did not conduct a survey. They didn't interview a
Speaker 1: few hundred people. They analyzed the tax records of almost
Speaker 1: forty million American children and their parents forty million. I
Speaker 1: would say this carries weight from a standpoint of the study.
Speaker 1: It's one of the largest studies ever conducted on economic
Speaker 1: mobility in human history. Their goal was simple, if you're
Speaker 1: born poor in the US, what are your chances of
Speaker 1: climbing the latter. What they found was both encouraging and alarming.
Speaker 1: The American dream, Oh they're saying, what I think, The
Speaker 1: American dream is still alive, but where you grow up
Speaker 1: dramatically affects your obs of reaching it. For example, they
Speaker 1: found a child born to parents and the bottom twenty
Speaker 1: five percent of income earners had about an eleven percent
Speaker 1: chance of reaching the top twenty percent of earners if
Speaker 1: they grew up in Salt Lake City. Holy moly, let
Speaker 1: me read that again. They found that a child born
Speaker 1: to parents and the bottom twenty five percent of income
Speaker 1: earners had about an eleven percent chance of reaching the
Speaker 1: top twenty percent if they grew up in Salt Lake
Speaker 1: City and Charlotte, that same child had a four point
Speaker 1: four percent chance, same country, same economy, same generation, but
Speaker 1: more than twice the odds of reaching the top simply
Speaker 1: because of where the child grew up. That's interesting. Now,
Speaker 1: that really is interesting, So you got to keep going.
Speaker 1: It raises an obvious question, what is Salt Lake City
Speaker 1: doing that? Charlotte isn't where the kids smarter, No, with
Speaker 1: the parents trying harder. Now does one city have better slogans?
Speaker 1: I mean, it could be argued, but not really. So
Speaker 1: the research dug deeper and they found four things that
Speaker 1: consistently produced whether children would flourish. The first was family,
Speaker 1: not perfect families, not wealthy families, stable families. Places with
Speaker 1: higher percentages of children growing up in stable homes, regardless
Speaker 1: of income, had dramatically higher rates of upward mobility. The
Speaker 1: second was community. The researchers called it social capital. I
Speaker 1: might call it knowing your neighbors, churches, coaches, mentors, volunteer organizations,
Speaker 1: people who know your name, people who notice when you're struggling,
Speaker 1: people who simply show up. Communities with stronger social connections
Speaker 1: consistently produced better outcomes for children. The third factor my
Speaker 1: big one. Education, not spending, not pretty buildings. Could kids read,
Speaker 1: could they do math? Could they graduate? Were they being
Speaker 1: prepared for opportunity? The fourth was the neighborhood environment, crime rates, trust,
Speaker 1: role models, the presence of working adults. So there's another
Speaker 1: big one, meaning to children, see people getting up and
Speaker 1: going to work every day, the presence of working adults.
Speaker 1: The researchers found that children surrounded by more employed adults
Speaker 1: were significantly more likely to become employed themselves. Really, kids
Speaker 1: become what they see. Now here's the statistic that absolutely
Speaker 1: floors me. Study Chetty and his team looked at families
Speaker 1: who moved. This is going to speak to the thing
Speaker 1: we learned from the guy in Charlotte. They found that
Speaker 1: children who moved from a high poverty neighborhood to a
Speaker 1: higher opportunity neighborhood before age thirteen earned approximately thirty one
Speaker 1: percent more money as adults. That is incredible. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: say it again. They found that children who moved from
Speaker 1: a high poverty neighborhood to a higher opportunity neighborhood before
Speaker 1: age thirteen earned approximately thirty one percent more money as adults.
Speaker 1: Thirty one percent not because they suddenly became smarter. They
Speaker 1: didn't work harder, They didn't, you know, show up. Somebody
Speaker 1: started handing out money because their environment changed. The people
Speaker 1: around them changed, the expectations around them changed, the examples
Speaker 1: they saw every day changed. And it even gets crazier.
Speaker 1: The recent found that every additional year of exposure to
Speaker 1: a better neighborhood before age thirteen increase future earnings by
Speaker 1: about one percent. One year, one percent, one more percent,
Speaker 1: another percent. I mean, think about that. If you earn
Speaker 1: thirty one percent more by age thirteen, if you move
Speaker 1: at three now, you're going to earn forty one percent
Speaker 1: more one year, one percent one more per year, the
Speaker 1: effects compounding. Those children were also more likely to attend college,
Speaker 1: less likely to become single parents, less likely to experience incarceration,
Speaker 1: and more likely to build stable adult lives. That's not economics,
Speaker 1: that's flourishing. Three of our four biggest predictors weren't programs.
Speaker 1: They were relationships, family, community, neighborhood, the things we often
Speaker 1: overlook because they seem ordinary. And who builds those things?
Speaker 1: Who creates families? Who mentors kids, who coaches Little League,
Speaker 1: who teaches Sunday School? Who starts businesses, who engages in
Speaker 1: their community? Who hires somebody trying to rebuild their life,
Speaker 1: who fosters children, who adopts them, Who checks on the
Speaker 1: widow next door, Who notices a struggling teenager, who organizes
Speaker 1: the block party or the potlock alex, who starts the
Speaker 1: service club, Who becomes the trusted neighbor. It doesn't happen
Speaker 1: at Harvard, It doesn't happen in DC. It doesn't happen
Speaker 1: in Manhattan. It's not the billionaires the people that do
Speaker 1: all that, normal folks. The research didn't set out to
Speaker 1: prove the philosophy and army and normal folks. But after
Speaker 1: studying forty million Americans, they accidentally proved the philosophy of
Speaker 1: an army of normal folks, because what they found is
Speaker 1: the American dream grows best in healthy soil, and that
Speaker 1: soil is made up of family, community, neighborhood, education, the
Speaker 1: very things ordinary people help build every single day. So
Speaker 1: maybe the lesson isn't that we need bigger systems. Maybe
Speaker 1: the lesson is we need stronger communities. Maybe the lesson
Speaker 1: is not that every one of us have more influence
Speaker 1: than we think. You may not be able to solve poverty.
Speaker 1: You certainly may not be able to fix Washington. You
Speaker 1: may not be able to reform the education. But you
Speaker 1: can mentor a kid, you can coach them. You can
Speaker 1: foster a child, you can adopt one. You can help
Speaker 1: somebody who has adopted a child. You can help a
Speaker 1: family who is fostering a kid. You can help a neighbor,
Speaker 1: you can strengthen a family, you can build community, And,
Speaker 1: according to one of the largest studies ever conducted, those
Speaker 1: things matter more than most of us even realize. The
Speaker 1: American dream doesn't just happen, but it is alive. It's cultivated,
Speaker 1: one family, one neighborhood, one community a time. See, that's
Speaker 1: what we mean when we say do what you can.
Speaker 1: That's a stark.
Speaker 3: My friend, so Joe Woodward on a recent episode, talked
Speaker 3: about this a little bit. I thought we might as
Speaker 3: well dive deeper into it.
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I mean, honestly, when you hear it laid out,
Speaker 1: it makes so much sense, and when we say it
Speaker 1: all the time, it makes so much sense. It's very
Speaker 1: nice to have the largest study ever conducted by Harvard
Speaker 1: with forty million tax receipts to look at and evaluate
Speaker 1: it across the spectrum of our unit in the United
Speaker 1: States to prove what we're saying and armunermal folks is
Speaker 1: the answer, community involvement, all of it. So when we
Speaker 1: say do what you can, we're actually saying, when you
Speaker 1: do what you can, you change lives. That's it. That's it.
Speaker 1: I mean, I guess I'll share one thought.
Speaker 3: It's been on my mind lately and trying to figure
Speaker 3: out what our service clubs too, just the whole idea
Speaker 3: of like doing life with people. I heard somebody riff
Speaker 3: on this too, like, Hey, if you're going to go
Speaker 3: to the Old Miss Baseball game, bringing.
Speaker 1: With you, you know, or if you're have.
Speaker 3: Dinner at your house, bringing with you, like you don't
Speaker 3: need to be like doing some big, grand like crazy things.
Speaker 3: Just include people who are less fortunate and all your
Speaker 3: activities that you would have done anyway, right, you could
Speaker 3: have exposed a kid to DC obviously exposing kids their
Speaker 3: football team all the time, but you know those kind
Speaker 3: of things, right, or bring them to the Grizzlies game,
Speaker 3: or you know, bring them out to dinner with you
Speaker 3: or hang out with you.
Speaker 1: I often this is not to talk about myself, which
Speaker 1: I almost never, never, never do like this, but I've
Speaker 1: often wondered what effect coaching football really has, you know.
Speaker 1: But then I think about, you know, we raise money
Speaker 1: to get our kids on charter buses, and we take
Speaker 1: them to eat at decent places when we're out, and
Speaker 1: by being good, we get to travel to other places.
Speaker 1: And a lot of kids that we've coached had never
Speaker 1: been out of Memphis, and so they're exposed to stuff,
Speaker 1: you know. And when young men who are thirty or
Speaker 1: thirty five or forty come back and say, coach, I
Speaker 1: remember when you said this, you know, it made me
Speaker 1: look at this differently, you know, It does make a difference.
Speaker 1: Just engaging in community, just engaging and someone that may
Speaker 1: not be as fortune as you, just getting to see
Speaker 1: a different look at stuff. It just matters. It's just
Speaker 1: an army and normal folks. It's just being a normal
Speaker 1: person and engaging where you might not otherwise, engage outside
Speaker 1: of your you know, your your vacuum of people and family,
Speaker 1: and it does change lives. It does make a difference.
Speaker 3: I always think of the story of Jeffrey Kanna is
Speaker 3: the founder of the Harlem Children's Zone. Like this great
Speaker 3: charter school network in New York, that's the Harlem Children's
Speaker 3: Zone Zone. Yeah, that's amazing. But one of his board
Speaker 3: members has been stand drunken. Miller is one of the
Speaker 3: most successful investors ever. But they would always bring the
Speaker 3: kids to his you know, like Penthouse, you know, part
Speaker 3: of it and New York kind of thing, but to
Speaker 3: see it and obviously spend time with you know him too,
Speaker 3: and I think you know, Stan probably gave them hundreds
Speaker 3: of millions of dollars, like just an incredible flathrobust to them.
Speaker 3: But they talked about this line, like anything in life,
Speaker 3: you need to have a taste of it, whether it's success,
Speaker 3: or it's drugs, or it's alcohol. You have to get
Speaker 3: a taste of it somewhere, right, So if these kids.
Speaker 1: That's interesting kid, never an alcoholic. If you don't first
Speaker 1: taste alcohol, you'll never have success if you first don't
Speaker 1: taste it.
Speaker 3: See what no one exposes you to it, or or
Speaker 3: what a stable family you know looks like?
Speaker 1: Right, that is such a good point. Yeah, so just
Speaker 1: the taste, just the exposure can light a flame that
Speaker 1: you know your life. You're riff at the beginning too.
Speaker 3: Talking about income and people's expectations, Daniel Kahneman and this
Speaker 3: other guy and Malcolm Gladwell have always talked about this
Speaker 3: that really happiness plateaus after one hundred thousand dollars worth of.
Speaker 1: Income, Is that right?
Speaker 3: So you actually do see happiness increase to one hundred thousand,
Speaker 3: and then there's.
Speaker 1: No money came by happiness to two.
Speaker 3: Hundred thousand, and Malcolm's original book with seventy five thousand,
Speaker 3: and then there's been you know, inflation since. So yeah,
Speaker 3: the number now is supposed one hundred thousand. You get
Speaker 3: no gains after that, no happiness, no happiness gains after that,
Speaker 3: You just buy more stuff Yeah, it's interesting and obviously
Speaker 3: it can create other problems too.
Speaker 1: No, that's also true. Yeah, okay, your body. What forty
Speaker 1: million tax returns were billed about America? The American dreams alive.
Speaker 1: People just need access, they need community, they need family,
Speaker 1: they need coaches. You better close this the right way,
Speaker 1: and they need you a taste, and then they need you.
Speaker 1: That's true. They do, They do need you. So that
Speaker 1: chap Talk one fourteen. I hope you enjoyed it. If
Speaker 1: you did, share friends of the social subscribe to the podcast,
Speaker 1: rate it, review it. Join the army at normal folks
Speaker 1: dot us, Join us Risk Club, buy some merch until
Speaker 1: next week. Do what you can, baby, Do what you can.