[00:00:00] Dylan Bain: Ladies and gentlemen, I want you to imagine you’re on a hike with a friend. You’re going through the woods in the beautiful mountains of Colorado and you’re hiking up alongside this river and suddenly you hear cries for help and you and your friend go to the banks of the river and see a bunch of men flowing down the river, drowning.

[00:00:19] And you and your friend, being good people, just, you know, grab a couple of sticks and get out to the bank of the river and start pulling these guys out. You’re pulling them out and pulling them out. And then, oh, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And then they walk off into the woods. But you and your friend, you keep pulling guys out of the river and you become really good at it.

[00:00:37] And you suddenly find yourself with a system and you can, you know, okay, then my, my buddy can handle it for a while. I’m going to sleep and then while I’m going to cover him and eventually your buddy comes over to you and says, Hey, um, you got this, uh, it looks like you’re doing a great job. I’m going to go.

[00:00:54] And you’re like, but there’s still people who need our help. There’s still people drowning in this river. And he says, yeah, I know, I know it’s terrible, but I’m going to go upriver and find out who’s throwing these men in in the first place. I tell that story, ladies and gentlemen, because I heard it from a man by the name of Desmond Tutu.

[00:01:13] For those of you who don’t know, Desmond Tutu was a bishop in South Africa during the apartheid era, and I had the pleasure of being able to see him speak when I was in university. And that speech really touched on me. Uh, very deeply. And this relates a lot to this podcast because it’s going to be changing.

[00:01:32] I’ve been doing financial coaching for five years and I’ve been podcasting about two of it. I’ve had a couple hundred clients, uh, that have come through the practice. And have really learned to take control of their financial lives. You know, back in my original podcast was called Fiscally Savage and the tagline was take control and live free.

[00:01:53] I believed at the time that if we, you know, just made the right choices and had the right education, that everything would be fine and every, you know, people could live, you know, free lives. And I worked really hard on that and myself first was highly successful. And then, um, later with others. And ladies and gentlemen, I have to tell you, I’ve made some observations that have made changed my focus.

[00:02:20] See, when you look at people’s finances, it’s so easy for us to say, well, they spend too much money. This is what my, my cousins and my aunts and my uncles like to say all the time. They’re all those kids, you know, they got cell phones, so they can’t be doing too bad, completely ignoring that cell phones are required to participate in economic life in this place.

[00:02:41] They’re completely ignoring the skyrocketing cost of health care. They’re complaining about inflation with, uh, while ignoring the massive profits that all these companies are making record profits and record layoffs and record inflation all at the same time. These things seem to be related, but people don’t want to talk about that.

[00:02:59] And here I am standing at the banks of this financial river, helping pull people out. And when people come into the practice, we sit down and they always tell me, Dylan, I just got a spending problem. I got to have my more discipline. And I say, okay, cool. And we ask some questions. What do you spend your money on?

[00:03:18] How do you make your money? Have you considered that maybe you’re not bad with money, you’re just addicted to scarcity? And these are all valid questions. They’re good questions. They’re foundational questions to getting your financial house in order. And increasingly, they’re the wrong questions. Because when I actually look at people’s budgets, I find more often than not, there’s an emotional underlying story going on here.

[00:03:44] Which means it’s not a money problem. It’s an emotion problem. And where did the emotion problem come from? Or, you know, another common case that I see a lot is people come in and they don’t have a spending problem. They have an income problem. They’re working a job that 40 years ago would allow them to have a stay at home spouse, afford a home, groceries, a vacation.

[00:04:08] And over the last 40 years, everything’s eroded around them. They, and they are no longer economically viable. This was in fact, my story as a teacher, when I was teaching in Flagstaff, Arizona, I had a full time job, but I did not have health insurance for my kids. I had health insurance for me, but I did not have health insurance for my kids.

[00:04:27] And I wasn’t making enough money. To just teach. I had to work additional jobs. My wife, as a graduate student, was bringing in more money than I was as a full time teacher. And even with that, we were barely scraping by. And when I would say to, you know, people, Hey, like, this is hard. I don’t like driving trucks on the weekend.

[00:04:50] I don’t like having to bounce, uh, at night when I should be putting my daughter to sleep. They’d say, well, you know, it’s all, it’s really tough. We’ve got to mire your gumption. Got it. You know, you got real bootstrap mentality there, Dylan. You know, or my parents would sit there and dismiss me about, well, things were tough when I was your age.

[00:05:05] Yeah. Yeah. Okay, dad. And you know, while he completely ignores that he paid for an entire year of my mother’s tuition, working two weekends, hauling steel from Chicago to Milwaukee. That’s not even possible anymore. And so I’m standing here on the banks of this financial river, pulling people out. And I’ve decided, let’s go, let’s go look up the river.

[00:05:30] Now, if I were going to extend that story, here’s how it would go. The man leaves his friend behind at the river, pulling out these other guys. And he walks up and he suddenly finds that at the top of the headwaters of this river. There’s a one lane path and there’s all these men carrying loads of stuff to a factory at the top of this path, but to save money, the factory didn’t make a second path to go back down the mountain, leaving the only option for the men to drop off their loads and then jump off the cliff because to the factory, there’s always people coming back behind them.

[00:06:08] And it was a good cost saving measure and it really helped with the quarterly reporting and no one wants to make the investment. When, you know, it doesn’t seem to really be bothering the flow of workers. And so that’s why the men are ending up in the river. And you’re like, Oh my God, that’s terrible. Who would, who would allow that system?

[00:06:27] And so then they, they run back down to their friend to tell them what they found and they get to their friend and their friend has incorporated the river rescue incorporation and they’re pulling people out and they’ve got government grants and everyone’s applauding their good work in the community.

[00:06:41] And you say, Hey, join me. Let’s go up here with nothing else that’s forced this corporation, this factory to put in a just one second row. On the path so the guys can walk back down and then we don’t have to pull anyone out of the river, no one has to jump in, no one has to be threatened with drowning, it’s going to be fine, and your friend says, well, hold on, this is my livelihood, I’m a member of the community, I donate to charities, I’m, I’m helping people, I provide jobs, and so you don’t have the support to stop men from ending up in a river and being threatened with drowning.

[00:07:19] And if you say, Dylan, that’s a farfetched story, I got some bad news for you. It’s the system we have right now. This is what we’ve done and increasing. When I look and work with people’s personal finances, that’s what I’m seeing. They’re people who have lost their humanity in this system. Because just like those men who are walking up that single path to drop their load off, and they’re being pushed into the river, that factory is not seeing them as men.

[00:07:45] They’re seeing them as cogs in their machine. And my buddy who I left at the river to pull out these guys and rescue them, sees them as customers. He’s done exactly what everyone advises you to do when starting a business. Find a problem and solve it. Okay, well the problem is there’s guys in the river.

[00:08:04] I’m gonna solve that problem. My issue with that is we didn’t ask why they were in the river in the first place. And I see this all over the place. I have, I have so many clients who come in and they say, well, I work this job. I’m a good resource. And I stop and be like, what, whatever happened to human resource, you’re no longer a human resource.

[00:08:27] You’re a resource. I don’t have any resources for that right now. Well, you mean technology or money or whatever? No, no, no. I don’t have, I don’t have a worker who’s skilled. They’re terrifying. It’s terrifying. It’s a hard thing to actually have to think about. And increasingly, I’m asking myself what exactly it is we’re doing here.

[00:08:56] And I see this in food too. Like, food is a great example where you can see this because you have so many people who go to the grocery store and they’re gluten intolerant. Heh. That’s weird. Human beings have been growing grain for centuries. We, the empires have risen and fallen on their grain production.

[00:09:19] Bread is a staple in most of Western Europe. If you’ve ever been to France, you know exactly what I’m talking about. There’s a local bakery on the corner of every fricking block and that’s how they feed themselves. So what happened? Why is it that suddenly we’re gluten intolerant? But that’s not the question we asked.

[00:09:36] The question we ask is where’s the gluten free bread? The question we ask is why, why is there not more gluten free options instead of why are we suddenly all gluten intolerant? Well, the reason that I think that this is is because we changed the strain of wheat, the strain of wheat that we use in the United States and most of North America is genetically different than the heirloom grit strains they use in Europe.

[00:10:08] As a Great Dane is to a Chihuahua. Yeah, technically still a dog, not the same thing. And yet we’re treating it like the same thing. Why do we use that strain of wheat? Cause it’s really good for the machines. We designed a food system that goes to the point of sale and we don’t care what happens after that.

[00:10:26] We designed a food system that’s focused on nutrition and not a nourishment. One is economic, the other one’s human. And then of course, when people started, you know, being gluten intolerant, we said, well, we’ll just insert a middleman. So I’m going to make gluten free products. Ooh, and now we’re providing more jobs and we’re having more economic activity.

[00:10:46] We don’t have to go back and change and eat in a more human centered way. No, no, no, no. We’ll just find problems. And of course, as we eat more processed food, we get more obesity. As we have more car dependency, we walk less, we have less, less community. And then we have a rise of therapists and gyms and yoga studios and weight loss drugs.

[00:11:05] And everyone is pulling people out of rivers. We’ve created entire industries around it without ever asking, is this good for the humans? What’s really interesting is I know a number of people who are gluten free. They, they cannot eat. gluten at all in the United States. Go to France. Hey, how was it? I ate croissants and bread every day without a problem.

[00:11:28] That should give us pause. That should make us sit back and go, huh, what’s going on here? But it doesn’t. It doesn’t because we don’t want to have the jobs threatened. And because we need money and we need jobs in order to not be homeless in our society, we don’t want to have the conversation we really need to have.

[00:11:53] Well, I do. I want to have that conversation. We need to have that conversation. And I’m not the only one saying it, but I am somebody who’s decided I want to talk about that. This podcast is going to stop being financially focused. I will still talk about finances. It is for better or for worse, a cornerstone of our living in society.

[00:12:16] And it’s not that I’m anti society because I’m not. I live in society. I have a house in the suburbs, a house in the suburbs that without an HOA. So I’m allowed to have my garden and I’m sitting less than 10 feet from where my garden is going to go. When, you know, it finally becomes nice here in Colorado.

[00:12:35] If I got sick or hit by a car, I did the only place I want to be is in a Western hospital because they’re, they’ve got the tools to actually be able to put me back together. That’s great. And I think we can all admit that the suburbs create a lot of isolation. That leads to a lot of negative externalities for the humans and that I, our healthcare system is really not a system and it’s not really focused on healthcare.

[00:13:04] Yes, it can do wondrous things, but at the end of the day, it’s owned by private equity firms that want nothing more than to, you know, increase the bottom line and they don’t care how they do it. We, I think we can really acknowledge the wonder that is modern pharmaceuticals. The fact that we’re, we, we do create in fact, wonder drugs.

[00:13:25] And there’s a huge financial incentive for us to not actually address issues because we can just make wonder drugs. There’s a balance point. And in my view, we’ve gone too far. And I want to bring us back a little bit. If there are like four areas where we can really see this, it’s food. And I’ve already outlined that.

[00:13:48] Walking to a grocery store is both the most wonderful experience of my day. I love grocery stores. But the Middle Isles terrify me. Like, Red25, what is that and why is it allowed in my food and not the rest of the world? You pick up some pork. I love pigs. I’m going to be going to hunt for pigs. In fact, as you’re listening to this, I am probably driving to my next pig hunt right now.

[00:14:14] Love me some pork. Kind of wondering Why we put nitrates in all of our stuff. And I’m remembering when I lived in Taiwan, that they actually literally rioted in Taipei to keep American pork out because of the nitrate, let’s go back because of the added nitrates gives you pause, makes you think that’s going on here, so food’s a big one.

[00:14:40] I think we we’ve moved too far away from our food and I’m not advocating that everyone get a bunch of backyard chickens. Chickens are really expensive and they’re a big pain in the ass. But I would argue that there are people who really like to raise backyard chickens and buying eggs from them is probably a better plan.

[00:14:57] You know, when was the last time you actually sat down and was like, hey, I bet you I can make butter. When was the last time you fermented some onions? Made your own pickles? Have you ever wondered how ketchup’s made? These are very human centered things. One of the things I do in my personal life that’s highly successful is whenever there is an opportunity, I have people for dinner.

[00:15:19] The people around in Colorado, it’s almost starting to become a joke. Oh, there’s going to be an event. Well, I guess we’re having dinner at Dylan’s. You know, how many different variations of tacos can Dylan’s family dream up? And my children, you know, they, they love being adventurous. And one day my daughter came home from the library with a tamale cookbook.

[00:15:40] The first thing about tamales, but I’m sure as hell going to give it a shot. And what it turned into was my wife, my two kids, my roommate, myself sitting around a table, filling tamales and having a wonderful time talking and creating food that was just so much more sweet because it came from our hands.

[00:15:55] An intensely human experience. That we all shared in another place is our relationships. It seems to me that there are, we look at relationships as transactions. Now, how much can I get in value while giving the least amount of return? How many self help columns sit there and go, well, if you’re not getting anything, get out well, maybe, maybe, maybe the inputs are wrong.

[00:16:23] Like we, we just move on so quickly without stopping and going. Is there a better way to do this? Did I miss something? Maybe I did. Maybe I should stop. Maybe I should go to somebody who’s older than me, who might have a clue or have gotten through this. My grandparents, God rest their souls, were people I called all the time in the early days of my marriage.

[00:16:48] How did you get through that, grandpa? Well, my wife’s doing this, grandpa. What, what did, did, did grandma ever do that? Oh yeah. Yeah. Tiger. Uh, here’s how I got through it. Okay, cool. That’s a human experience. We don’t all have that, but it’s still a human experience. What about our hearts? Our hearts are a big place where we’ve been domesticated.

[00:17:11] As a, as a guy, I’m allowed anger, irritation, and, and that’s about it. I’m not allowed to express my anger because then I’m dangerous and I might end up in cuffs. And if you’ve ever seen me, I’m a big dude. I’m very strong and I’m energetically huge and I’m very loud. So if I get angry and I let that show, man, it’s, it’s going to be a bad day for me.

[00:17:33] And if, if I, and you might say, well, Dylan, you should let that out. You should learn to cry. Well, I, I’ve recently learned this and I got to tell you as a guy that that’s not really a great option either because you suddenly seem useless. If I break down at work, I’m probably going to end up in an HR meeting where they’re going to make me available to industry so I can work on the important things, which is a fancy way for saying we’re firing you because we don’t think you’re useful anymore.

[00:17:57] And that doesn’t even get into the social ramifications, particularly from women. Who will think less of me because that happens a lot. And on the other side of things, women have lost their voices. My, my good friend and mentor, Dewey Freeman likes to say that for the sake of trying to generate attachment, men give up their hearts and women give up their voices.

[00:18:22] And I think he’s right. We don’t express ourselves, we don’t sing. I remember in college going on camping trips and singing around the campfire and thinking. How fulfilled I felt doing that and why I couldn’t be doing it all the time. And then if I’m in the grocery store and I decide to sing, or I’m in a bar with my friends and I decide to sing, it’s weird, but it’s also very human.

[00:18:48] Playing instruments, laughing with friends, being expressive, truly grieving. They’re all human things that have washed out. And I think the last place where we can see this is really our lifestyles. You know, our ancestors used to get anywhere from 15, 000 to 20, 000 steps a day. Just based upon some experimentation that we’ve done with, you know, the last few remaining hunter gatherer tribes.

[00:19:14] It’s astounding. The average American gets like 4, 000 steps a day on good days. And then we wonder why everyone’s obese. We’ve created a car dependent hellscape here in North America, but if you go over to other places where you don’t have the same car dependency, that doesn’t mean there aren’t cars. I love my car.

[00:19:33] It’s a manual transmission Nissan Sentra. I drive it like it’s a race car. It’s amazing. And I wish I had other options where I could walk more. What would the world look like if we all just designed a life where, without thinking about it, you got upwards of 10,000 steps? NASA Maybe a lifestyle of, am I reading books?

[00:19:54] Am I sitting with friends? When was the last time I had a cup of coffee and a good conversation? Am I making sure that I, you know, I’m using utensils and have things that I’m consuming food out of that are actually for me? Am I close to my environment or am I just cluttered up with having bought shit I don’t need to impress people I don’t like?

[00:20:16] These are all, I think, the right questions. And so where this is all going is that this podcast is going to stop being finance focused. Intuitive finance is going to go the way of fiscally savage. A time in my life that was very important and very center to what I was seeing at the time. And it’s going to be replaced by a new podcast about creating a more human centered world.

[00:20:50] You know, if you’ve looked at my guests, I’ve had people like Traver Bohm and Jordan Gray, links to those in the show notes. And they’ve been amazing guests to have on the podcast. And then my conversations with them where I wanted to be focused on, you know, the emotional side of things, the intuitive side of things.

[00:21:11] You know, when I had Demetra Gray on, you know, we, we talked about intuition. I had Ryan Conklin on, we talked about grief. While I was having all those conversations, I’m sitting there thinking to myself, we’re missing the human element here and we need to, we need to reclaim that. And so this podcast is going to change again.

[00:21:32] And for those who’ve been with me from the beginning, God bless you and thank you so much. God bless you. And we’re going to be heading into a more human-centered conversation and we’re going to focus on four pillars. We’re going to focus on food, relationship, heart, and lifestyle. And I’m going to bring on guests to talk about that.

[00:21:52] Now we’re still going to talk about finance. The finances are in part of all of those things. And we’re going to start kickstarting what I’m calling the human revolution. And as part of that, I’ve started my own men’s group called the Ascendant Legion. And I’m going to be opening that up for anybody who’s interested in leading a more human centered world.

[00:22:16] It’s a men’s group. So if you consider yourself to be a man and you want to be a more human man. You want to be able to look at your food, look at your relationships, look at your heart, look at your lifestyle, and this is the place for you. When inside of that legion, we do look at a lot of things, finances being one of them, and we have monthly challenges.

[00:22:45] We have weekly calls and check ins and we are always in contact throughout the week. That’s the type of brotherhood that’s going to drive us forward. And that’s what we’re going to be building here. As we continue down this path, I mean, I am very tentatively excited about everything that’s coming. And I say tentative, not because I don’t think it’s going to be amazing.

[00:23:08] It’s going to be amazing. It’s because it’s a big step. It’s a big step to be able to stop for a second for any of us and say, am I, am I living a flirt, a human centered, flourishing life? Or am I just going through the motions marking time until I die? So if you’ve been with me from the beginning, thank you.

[00:23:33] I’m excited that you’ll come with me on the next ride. And to that end, um, we’re probably going to take a break here for a couple of weeks and stay subscribed and I’ll see you on the other side.