43. Unlearning scarcity: How to steward big money - with Dr. Joey Liu

You can have the most beautiful vision for change — but without material resources, your vision can't go very far. 

Dr. Joey Liu and I chat about why good-hearted people have been systematically kept away from money, and what becomes possible when we step into our power as stewards of capital.

Listen to hear more about:

• Why scarcity is a lie... there's actually a f*ck ton of money in the world
• Why decolonization REQUIRES massive amounts of capital
• Why business gives you autonomy over capital in ways that grants and nonprofits never will
• The spiritual work of expanding your capacity to generate and redistribute wealth

So many of us have been taught that caring about money corrupts you.

This episode offers a different path — one where your ambition to build wealth is in service to your community and your ancestors' dreams.

---

Take the free course Building Post-Capitalist Wealth: https://play.simonegraceseol.com/pcw

Apply for the 8-week course, Ancestral Wealth: https://play.simonegraceseol.com/ancestral-wealth

Transcript

 Welcome back to Liberatory Business. 

I'm Simone Seol, and I'm here again with my co-conspirator, Dr. Joey Liu. In our first conversation, the last episode, we talked about commuting with your ancestors, why it matters, how to do it, and why this is essential decolonization work. 

And today we're talking about money because here's the thing, you can have the most beautiful vision for your community, the most radical dreams for a different world, but.

Without material resources, without money, those dreams stay dreams. The truth is, revolutions require funding. Liberation requires capital. And here's what Joey and I are talking about in this episode: scarcity is a myth. There is actually so much fucking money flowing in the world.

But good hearted people, people who actually care about communities and justice and equality and the planet have been systematically kept from touching it, from seeing even how it moves, much less stewarding it. 

So if you think that there are only two paths available to you, chase money and sell your soul, or dedicate yourself to improving the world and accept that you'll be poor...

keep listening because there is a third way, and we're gonna tell you all about it. Spoiler alert: it starts with accepting the truth that you have the capacity, maybe even a responsibility, to be a steward of a lot of capital. Let's get into it. 

---

Simone: You know what's so interesting? The college I went to, lots of ambitious people. I almost feel like everybody who graduated had to choose one of two tracks. One track is you go into finance, banking, consulting — these kinds of high status jobs that pay you tons of money. 

Then the other track is, if you are idealistic and you care about people, you go into nonprofits, public service. And you can guess which one I chose. 

And for a long time I thought those were the two options.

Joey: I definitely went the path that you went, which is, I wanna make a difference for the world and I don't care about money. But there is something to be said about there's almost a need that a lot of people have in those spaces to prove that they aren't corrupted by money. That they aren't motivated by money. And that somehow that makes the work that they're doing more pure.

Simone: Yeah. A friend of mine who's been in nonprofit spaces all her life calls it the Martyr Syndrome. The Martyr Complex. Like, the more you can suffer, the more pure you prove yourself. You know, like the more noble you are, the poorer you are. If you can enjoy yourself, it's like, oh, you know, what's wrong with you? You're corrupted. 

Joey: So here, this already reminds me why decolonization is so important because it's almost like people with good hearts are grasping for this monastic model of being. But what's the issue is that under settler colonization and under capitalism, we no longer have the communal infrastructures that used to be in place to support people of those roles with those gifts. 

Right. So back in our ancestors' days, if someone was a healer or a spiritual guide, they would be patroned and supported communally. They didn't have to worry about their material needs because that was fed in a collective way.

Simone: And the systems that are in place that administer to the communities — these structures are formed within the larger structures of capitalism. Like, who's funding a hospital? Who's funding a nonprofit? Who decides who gets the grant money? These are all decisions that are made by the drivers and winners of the capitalist system. 

So it's not that these structures don't exist, it's who's making the decisions? Who's calling the shots, and whose benefit ultimately, are these systems being run for? 

Joey: A hundred percent. Whatever gets funded is whatever is the closest to the status quo.

Simone: And I think that you and I both exited ourselves from those systems because — maybe you had a better idea, but I did not know if there was a third way that could work, but I was like, I gotta try this.

Joey: I know that for me, it took me a much longer journey to get here, to view business and the freedom to independently generate and redistribute capital as that third possibility — that third space possibility. 

And for me, the journey was going through higher education. For my research I studied schools grown from the grassroots in indigenous communities that had been the most radical in terms of not depending on as much state funding or any state funding at all. So they could really exist in service to their communities and as radically as possible. 

But in that research, I was given the charge by my co-researchers and indigenous teachers. The questions that they were still left with was how do we continue to generate windfalls of money to sustain our movements at the tip of the spear? And I was shocked in that research to find out that the most pressing thing that they wanted to talk about was money. 

I started to realize how naive I'd been in just examining doing world-changing work without pairing that conversation with money.

Simone: When you first told me this, you were talking with these people about what they would do if they got a windfall of money, and then there was a moment you asked, what if I became the windfall? 

Joey: Yeah. That question for me came up realizing you can almost either do the teaching work and the founding work of running a school, or you can do the work of generating the money. I spent years in relationship with them and realizing that as much as they were pouring into their students, their communities, and solving really, really complex problems on a daily basis, the work of generating money could not also fall on their shoulders. 

They're doing way more than enough already. And it had to be someone else. And maybe it's also my positionality and my identity — like seeing that I am not an indigenous person. I could just see how they were marked out for doing the work that they were doing. 

And the question also was, well then what is the work that I'm marked out for? Where has my community called me into? What have my living elders called me into? Yes, I am meant to be a teacher, but so many elements of my life have also prepared me to be a builder of new spaces. 

Like, okay, I have all this courage, I have all these skills, I have the blessing to try things that are riskier. I just have devotion to see this mission through and to serve the people that I'm so indebted to for pouring into me. 

So this is where I'm at now.

Simone: As for me, right? Starting my own business, my highest aspiration was to be able to pay myself a living salary, doing the work that I love, that genuinely helps people. Like if I had that, that would feel like winning the lottery for me, right? 

And so no one was more surprised when my business grew to be more than that. But I think the sort of family ethos, you know, slash the cultural philosophies that I grew up with, plus all my years in nonprofit — it all put me in a place where it was clear to me that the end goal wasn't personal enrichment to the maximum, right? 

So from the beginning, I thought very actively about what redistribution looks like. 

And so from when I was making a small fraction of the money that I do now, you know, I had set aside a portion of my monthly revenue to redistribute towards the causes that I believed in. 

I worked on those numbers with my bookkeeper every single month. And it has evolved into things I can do at a much bigger scale. But I have witnessed firsthand, from being able to move big amounts of money around, how much difference money makes. 

And at the same time I see so many of my clients struggle with who am I to make money? Who am I to charge higher prices?

Joey: Okay, hearing your story right now just kind of turned on a light bulb for me. So what I'm gonna tell you, I think this is by capitalistic design. So few people in the roles that they currently occupy are actually touching and handling large amounts of money. 

I'm recalling in my own experience that even in the education system — so I was a teacher on special assignment. I was a coordinator of a team of 20 teachers. And for a couple years in my career, I consulted with the principal and the assistant principal and somebody in the district office. 

Essentially I had to advocate for the English learner population at my entire school. 

And there I started to understand, wow, we are spending tons of money so irresponsibly, right? I started to just get a peek behind the curtain of how money was flowing. 

Within a general narrative that people have of, there's no money in public schools. Oh, you'd be so surprised how much money is sending principals and admin to five star resorts for conferences. How much money is being paid for curriculum specialists who are selling curriculum for for-profit companies and brands, of course. 

Right. That they are reserving seven figure salaries for these people. And I, in my less than six figure salary at the time, was doing double the amount of work. 

Simone: Sure. 

Joey: You know, I just started to get a peek behind the curtain of how much money is moving that generally people just have no idea that it's even there, how people are making decisions around it. 

Simone: I think one of the big narratives that — when this narrative gets challenged, I think things start to shift in a really big way for people — is the narrative that there just isn't enough money to go around. Right? And you start to see, wait a minute, there's actually a lot of money, it's just being used in weird ways. 

And I think people who again, who have good hearts, who care about the world, are especially being sold this story. That there just isn't enough. 

So how you started to see that challenged was through observing public education.

Joey: You can also begin to see the cracks in that narrative when you just look around at the world economy and just see how many giant industries there are that have nothing to do with preserving life and just protecting human welfare or the environment. Like let me just give you some facts and figures because I actually just looked this up, right? In 2024, the US alone spent $997 billion on weapons. The global luxury goods market, a little under 400 billion. The global cryptocurrency market, 2.29 trillion. Luxury travel, 1.4 trillion. 

So when somebody says there's not enough money to go around — actually, there's a fuck ton of money flowing in the world. It's just going into things that have nothing to do with sustaining life, and in many cases, they flow directly into things that are antithetical to life. 

Simone: Tons of capital flow that almost become obscured from the view of people who worry about the world. Do you know what I'm talking about?

Joey: Yeah, a hundred percent. I definitely think there's just so much obscured because if we saw enough to start asking questions — we'd start imagining new possibilities. That's why we've created the course we're creating, because we want to peel some of that back and not give people answers or tell people what to do, but just open those cracks for them to ask the questions. Wait, if you saw this, what questions would you ask yourself? What would you start to imagine as possible? If we started having these conversations in thousands and thousands of places everywhere around the world, what ripple effect would that cause? 

Simone: There is so much fucking money in the world. The question is who has it? Who's controlling it? Who calls the shots about how it gets to flow? And so something I thought — this was such a brilliant example that you put in your post. You were talking about something very concrete, which is land back. 

Joey: Mm-hmm. 

Simone: What does it take to give land back to say, an indigenous community? 

Joey: Yeah. So for those who are less familiar, land back is the acknowledgement and the movement behind this, which is that indigenous lands have been occupied, stolen, and that we have collective moral responsibility to re-indigenize these lands to the original stewards who are in the deepest lineage and relationship with the land and know how to best care for it. 

That this will solve our climate issues, that this will solve so many issues that we're facing as a global community today. So with land back, I really broke it down into if you look at three different strategies for actually accomplishing land back, right? One through just going off of the real retail market and people — good people maybe even pulling together resources or you already have established some level of wealth — and you buy land and you just donate it back. 

That's very clear to see that wealth and capital was necessary to buy the land off of the real estate market. The second example is through legislation, which is I think where a lot of social justice-minded people focus their attention. But do we talk enough about how much money it costs to run for government seats, right? To fund legislation, to even get on the bill, to be voted on? And it still requires capital. 

And then the third option, which is the most potentially extreme, and probably the least talked about, is direct action by force, by seizure — which is exactly how the land was stolen in the first place.

Simone: Yeah. 

Joey: What I mean, if we talk about decolonizing thinkers like Frantz Fanon, there is no decolonization without violence because violence is the reaction to which colonization happened. So what would it look like to train and organize and mobilize mass numbers of people to simply take the land back by force?

Simone: Requires capital again. In every scenario of getting land back, it requires massive amounts of capital. 

Joey: Massive amounts of capital. 

Simone: And I know that land back is not something that maybe, you know, not everyone is familiar with it. But even if you think about things like food sovereignty, right? Places like Hawaii — and I know it is far from being the only place — where people for hundreds of years, and in other places thousands of years, used to be able to steward the land, to create more than enough food for themselves, for generation to generation. 

And suddenly all of that land is stolen, seized by external forces —

Joey: — military forces —

Simone: — or private interests backed by military forces to produce food for export. 

So many lands that have the capacity to produce more than enough food for its inhabitants end up being exploited and extracted from while the people of that land struggle to have enough to eat. And so that's a food sovereignty issue. 

How do you begin to solve these issues? It requires hard power. And we talked about military force, right? I think so many of us who care about the world aren't used to thinking of ourselves as potentially stewards of hard power. 

And military power is hard power. Political power is hard power. And money is hard power. And I'm not about to go and become a military general. I'm not about to go become a politician. But there is one form of hard power that I can steward and that is money. 

You don't need to be a millionaire to be a steward of hard power. Like if you have $20,000 extra dollars, if you have $200 extra dollars, that is a form of hard power. And I think it is such a disservice to again, kind-hearted people that I think we've been systematically programmed to sort of count ourselves out of the work of stewarding hard power and just how much systemic change becomes inaccessible to us because we assume that work is not for people like us.

Joey: Okay. I'm so glad you're touching on this. This has just opened such a segue that I had wanted to speak on earlier. Right now in your example you said $20,000 extra dollars is hard power. And I immediately thought until we help folks unlearn scarcity and decolonize their relationship with both scarcity and abundance, being able to discern what is extra is almost impossible under capitalism. 

Simone: Ooh. Say more.

Joey: Capitalism keeps us in the experience of scarcity. No matter what dollar amount is in your bank account, you will always be made to believe you do not have enough. 

And we've all existed under systems that have optimized us to be labor and consumers. That's it. That's it. So for us to actually viscerally experience, I have enough. And I can now see this extra as my responsibility to be generous with and to steward and to redistribute — this is impossible until we have a new form of education that allows people to exist whole and intact and spiritually congruous. 

Simone: That's so sharp. Because if you aren't aware of that and you're constantly living in a state of your nervous system being hijacked by this ghost of not enough, not enough — how can you even think of what is excess? What is overflow beyond what I need for survival, much less think about how can I be a steward of great flow of resources, great flow of capital. We have to contend with scarcity first.

And I really wanna say for everyone, everyone listening to this podcast, if you go back far enough, far enough generations up the line of your lineage, you have ancestors who were not brainwashed by scarcity, who were not touched by capitalism, who knew how to steward material resources in wise ways that generated abundance for all. All of us have ancestors that knew that. And so scarcity actually is something that we learned.

You know, I'm not saying there were never periods of privation in history. Of course there were famines and all kinds of — there was poverty. But scarcity as a kind of never-ending, gnawing, existential... I think that is new. The inability to know what safety and enoughness feels like. I think that's something that's new with capitalism. So what I wanna say is that if it's something that we learned, it is something that we can unlearn.

Joey: Oof. 

Let's go.

Simone: Right. And what happens when we all collectively commit to unlearning scarcity? And opening up the capacity in ourselves to be stewards of the material resources that do exist, that flow in great quantities in the world.

Joey: Okay. Can I share a personal example that may make this unlearning process a little bit more tangible here? 

Because what's coming up for me now is my experience of starting my business. And I wanna really stress how important relationship and being grounded in community is to see this process through. When I started this business very early on, I did so with the intention of creating jobs. I wanted to create six-figure jobs for people from my own community and potentially people that other players in this industry would not look at as somebody that they could put into that type of position.

I was so blessed to have one of my former students who — she's been my right hand now for over a decade. She helped me run shit in my classroom and her life set her up to where she was available to work with me as I started my business pretty much from the offset. And we talked about the big vision. 

We talked about growing her position into a multi-six-figure position. We talked about the long road it would take to get us there. And so I didn't think anything really of it until I learned more about business. But I guess I made the unconventional choice to hire somebody that early on in my business and knew it would prolong me being profitable in my business. 

Like, I would've rather redirected whatever money was coming in for me early in my business to pay for her salary than to have a salary myself. This wasn't without difficulty though, right?

Simone: Like you had kids to feed.

Joey: Well, I will say this, it highlighted so many needs and allowed me to learn in such an accelerated way. 

It made it absolutely necessary for me to get right and stay right in my marriage and in my relationship with my family. And the outcome of that, which took a long time — it took months, if not a year to get right, in like as full alignment as possible with my husband — is we are now in a situation where he essentially patrons me in the way that we talk about in the old models of, you know, he has so generously said, I will make the money to take care of our family. 

And that was never our role before. By the way. I was always the higher earner in our relationship for like almost the last decade of our marriage. And we got to the point where he was like, I want you — I believe in your vision so much. I believe in what you're doing. I wanna take care of everything for the family so that you can reinvest everything that you make in Malia's salary and in this reserve that you will need to carry out the big vision for the world-changing work that you're gonna do. Running this business is extremely existential work. It's extremely spiritual work. To get into this right relationship I had to get into a right relationship with him. 

And then in 2020, I hired Malia, who was one of my former students. And I actually credit her as the catalyst that really started shifting things. Because when I hired her, it's the first time that I was financially responsible for another person and I couldn't let her down. So she became kind of like the practice ground for me starting to reckon with my relationship with money. 

Because all of a sudden I have an employee, and I wanna pay her well — like, really well — because she deserves it. And how can I grow this? And I have someone else to now provide for. And so I've shared this with you before, but I never faced scarcity so much as — I have to be excellent. I have to make money. I have to have this work because I need to pay Malia. That has always been my biggest motivating factor. I have to grow this position for her gifts to shine, and that required me to expand my capacity as a leader and to accelerate my deconditioning with scarcity because it was rooted in relationship and community.

Simone: I think that's such a stunning example, and I think that just points to the reason that this work is difficult. That it is difficult, right? The work of growing a business, making it actually yield profit and then making it yield profit consistently and then making it yield bigger and bigger profit. The reason that this is hard isn't because business itself is rocket science. 

But what is hard, what is really deeply challenging is the spiritual work of getting congruent, right? Getting in right relationship. And you said I had to get right with my husband, but before even that, you had to get right with the gifts that you've been given. You had to get right with yourself. 

You had to get right with your own ambition and vision and why they were important to you. Because if you can't stand in the integrity of that, like good luck, you know, talking anyone else into supporting your vision. Right? So I think where so many of the people that I see struggle is that they don't have enough support within themselves, or external to themselves in getting right with themselves, right? 

And like believing in their vision and owning their vision. 

Joey: Okay, so you saying that just made me realize — it is no small thing and no accident that the person to first buy into my vision, Malia, was one of my former students a decade ago, and we've been in close relationship ever since. Because getting right with my gifts didn't happen outside of the context of my students constantly speaking into me, who I was, who I was in their community, what my gifts were. 

They were the first to tell me you're meant to be a teacher to the world beyond the four walls of our classroom. And so once again, getting congruent with yourself — for me, it just doesn't exist outside of a collective context.

Simone: And like who's calling on you, who needs you to step up, who sees the truth of your bigness and who you are and what you're meant to do. 

Let me tell you this because I'm like, that's so beautiful, Joey. But also you could have had 10 classrooms full of students telling you, Dr. Joey, you're meant to teach out in the world. You're meant to do these big things. And you could have still been like, well, I don't know. You know?

Joey: Totally. 

I did that for like six, seven years. I was like, nah.

Simone: Yeah. So, you know, I was there for a long time. And when I think about myself, it's my family and my close friends and my mentors who saw that in me and reflected it, and it took me forever to believe them too. And so what I wanna say is that, you know, if anyone is listening thinking, oh, well I wish I had a class full of people who are affirming, you know, what I'm capable of. 

But the thing is: you have your people too. You do. You probably are ignoring it. When someone tells you, oh, you changed my life. You're capable of this. I think you're meant to do that. Just notice who says that to you and how often you go, "Yeah. Well, that's not true because..." right?

Joey: Grandmas count. Grandmas count. If it's your grandma telling you, your grandma, your mom. Your mom. And those are the first that I think Western society wants us to dismiss, discount. In our paradigms, in our Asian paradigms, it's like those are the most important voices to listen to. 

Simone: And I know from talking to a lot of people that your immediate family, your partners are not always — they don't start out being the most supportive ones. And for many reasons, right? A lot of our parents' generation, especially if you come from immigrant families, you know, they just absorb so much fear and scarcity. And it's like, oh, whatever's not an established safe path — they're just worried for you. Like, don't do it. Or people, for whatever reason, you know, your family might not be the first ones. 

But then I promise you, you have people in your life who are reflecting back to you who you really are and what you're capable of. And Joey and I, you know, we put a lot in our free course "Building Post Capitalist Wealth" about just like developing the skillset of being able to listen to those cues. 

Because those are ancestral cues. Your ancestors are speaking to you through your community. Who are your ancestors using to get to you and are you listening to them? 

Joey: A hundred percent. It takes some discernment. It takes some discernment to turn down the volume on the voices that aren't helpful. And it takes some discernment to sit with and hear the voices that really have been — you'll start to notice the patterns, the synchronicities. The patterns become unmistakable. The more you pay attention to it. 

Simone: Right. Again, it took Joey years and years. It took me years and years to listen. So we're not saying it needs to be instant. But just start listening. 

Talking about revolutions need capital, liberation requires capital. And you and I have talked about the kind of projects that we are envisioning that we want to amass capital for. 

Joey: Yes. The visions have been placed in my heart and stayed there for like eight, nine years now. 

And at the core of it has been an alternative learning space. A space that platforms indigenous knowledge, collective people's knowledge. And beyond that, then it is land stewardship, right? And community spaces. So to make this concrete — my husband grew up in Hawaii. And so his home is Hawaii. 

My home is Taiwan. We have hopes to fill in some of the gaps in both places. And in Hawaii we see a huge need. You spoke to it already — land sovereignty, food sovereignty. To use wealth to acquire land and to redistribute it back to indigenous sovereignty, to create spaces where food is grown and food education is being carried out. 

So a farm or something of that nature. And then also community gathering spaces. So we actually think of this as a laundromat because in high-density areas people need to do their laundry. But to have it also be a spot where people can really hang out, where we'll have spoken word — I have a background in spoken word poetry, so I always envision having a spoken word space there, an arcade, a healthy smoothie bar because it's also a food desert in those spaces. 

Going back to the example that you talked about. And then having like a farmer's market pop up there every once a month. And then having a mini bus come bring city-dwelling kids to the farm so they can learn land education for free. So we have this intricate vision of what it will look like to be members of the community. Oh, and to create jobs, right? So people to actually work in all these positions and serve and be paid very, very well. 

It would cost like a couple million dollars a year just to — at least — and then to create enough revenue to where we are funding climate mitigation work, political sovereignty work and things like that. 

Funding indigenous schools so that they don't have to keep writing grants and then being beholden to institutions and government. So that's part of the big vision in Hawaii. And then I'll just go really briefly in Taiwan. Part of my responsibility is to my ancestral land here, which is under threat. 

So we've already had the government build a road through our family home, our family farm, decades ago. And now it's under threat of being lost along with our ancestors' tombs. And so I still have a very personal responsibility to the land that the Liu family has called home for 22 generations. And I feel like it's my blessing to have been, you know, educated in the West and to be doing the work that I'm doing right now to be able to give back and give my living elders and my ancestors some real rest if I can with whatever resources I'm able to steward.

Simone: Thank you so much for sharing all of that. And as for me, my business for a while has been functioning like an unofficial grant-making entity operating on a very ad hoc basis. And my vision for the future isn't as clearly delineated as yours is, even though it kind of is on a spiritual level. 

Simone: But for the vast majority of us in our experience, we have only occupied roles where we don't even get to touch the money. And if you've never been in those rooms where people decide who gets the money, where the money is going, you don't have any lived reality of having that power yourself. 

Right? So therefore, you will always believe that you don't belong there. That it's not for you. That you couldn't do a better job. That you couldn't be more just with this money. 

And so that's why I think business is our most direct route to a person having autonomy over capital. Because of course, the other routes still exist — grant making, philanthropy, you know, all these structures. But the thing is they're so slow and they're so subject to fickle decision making. 

Who's on the board? Who's making decisions? Who decided the, the criteria for this grant? How much hoops do you have to jump through? How much unpaid labor do you have to do in order to get this amount of money? Like when you think about the return on investment of writing a grant, it's like — yeah, we got $10,000, but it took us like 120 hours of labor to get it.

Simone: And you're lucky if you get selected. A very tiny percentage of people who apply for grants get them. Most of the time you're gonna go through all that and not get anything at all. Not to mention, um, the degree to which you have to like, soften and whitewash your language and make it palatable to whoever might be on the grant committee who could be well-intentioned but probably are not even like members or from the community that you're trying to serve. 

I mean, I have stories from my nonprofit days where, you know, I was teaching English to immigrant kids at a public school, and there was this elderly white woman, you know, on the nonprofit board who would come in to observe me and my students. And the degree to which she just had zero understanding of what our students needed or what good teaching for English language learners looked like. And yet, you know, all the people who are actually doing the work, we have to bend over backwards to keep the donors and the board members happy.

Joey: Right. And I actually left the education system right at a moment when I had already paid all my dues. I was a classroom teacher for many years. I was probably like a few years away from actually being in the room where they were deciding large amounts of budget. But for me, it just took too long. 

And so I've heard stories like you're saying, about having to sort of perform, perform your worthiness, and not only perform your worthiness, but be under scrutiny. And the power dynamic of you always being underneath someone, having to justify and explain yourself. And then what if they just don't get it? What if they're just not educated or have the cultural competency to understand the groups of people that you're trying to serve? 

It's absolutely horrific. It's absolutely horrific. And meanwhile, people in other positions — they're just moving money around for their homies. They're getting bags and bags of money for their like, you know, college buddy.

Simone: Yeah, or a friend of a friend. You know, it's like, oh, so-and-so went to this school. They know someone who like, you know. It is actually who you know. Yeah. If you are well-connected with people who already have resources and power, you're gonna get it. But if you're not, you're not gonna get it. 

And most of the time the people who know the people with the money are not the people who are trying to serve marginalized communities, right? So it is designed to uphold status quo and to maintain class hierarchy. It's designed for people who are already comfortable to stay comfortable.

Joey: Yeah. But business and revenue is where we get to occupy a position of choice. We get to occupy a position of choice in multiple ways. One, how we're getting the money. We get to be choosy about how we're getting the money, where we're getting the money from, and from whom, and under what terms. 

Two, we get to be choosy about how we use that money. Where is it going? Who's benefiting? And not have to run it by a board or, or a grantmaker. 

And three, we get to do it on our own timeline.

Simone: Yes. And the speed at which money can move. Just to give you guys an example — so whenever there is a natural disaster anywhere in the world, I'm able to find grassroots organizations that are doing mutual aid in those affected areas, and I can Venmo them $5,000 immediately. 

I don't have to write a memo. I don't have to sit in a committee meeting. I don't have to like, justify to anybody. I can just do it. Like literally within five minutes, the money is there and it's in the hands of people who need it and who are gonna use it well. 

Or you know, whenever I am traveling and I meet someone who's doing incredible work — just last month, I was in Korea and I met someone who's doing work around, um, LGBTQ issues in Korea, which is really, it's really hard over there. And we just had a conversation, and at the end of it I was like, here's my Venmo. And like, you know, sent money. 

That is the kind of freedom that business money — you know, that you create through business — can give you. As opposed to, "let me put in this grant request and hopefully in six months you're gonna hear back."

Joey: Yeah, thank you for sharing those examples because that's what we're talking about. There are organizations out there doing the most life-saving work who cannot afford to have someone on salary, or to pay someone to write grant proposals. 

And so therefore they're left — the most ingenious people, the most devoted people — they're left, they have no recourse. And they're like, we just have to do what we can do with the people that are here. And that often means people are working for free or they're working and they're being extremely underpaid, or they themselves are living in poverty while they're trying to do this work. 

And so there's this huge amount of need. There's huge need. That's why I think it's so valuable, especially for people who are close to communities that they want to serve, that they begin generating the windfalls themselves, and they become the stream of capital going towards those initiatives.

### What would you do with a windfall?

Simone: So we wanna invite you, those of you listening, to ask yourself — it doesn't matter how much money you're making right now or how much savings you have, or like what your current financial situation is — if you had a windfall, what would you do? Like if you could do anything, if a million dollars dropped into your lap, what would you do with it? 

I'm not confused about what it feels like, but the exact shapes, I'm not sure. But I really do want to increase my capacity to essentially give grants — like fund things that need to be funded without them having to go through other channels. I am working on expanding my network of relationships with people doing meaningful work all across the world. 

I wanna continue to expand my capacity to just funnel funding towards projects that need it all over the world, whether it be food sovereignty projects or environmental projects or whatever. And so that's on the international scale. 

And also, like you, you know, we talk about this a lot, but I feel a very personal sense of obligation to my ancestral homelands. And I have a really big vision, which I have no idea how this is actually gonna pan out, but I see this as like a 50 year project — like spanning multiple decades — where I wanna build up my own personal and infrastructural capacity to restore and repopulate the Korean countryside. 

Yes, there are so many issues there I can't even tell you about. These are the things that Joey and I spent a lot of time talking about. And I wanna share with you guys just one more little story about what can happen. And naturally, Joey and I are sharing these stories in hopes of getting you to envision — like, what is yours, right? 

What is your vision? What is your multi-decade community project that you want to build up the capacity to funnel hard resources towards? 

But when I talked to my brother about this, I told him about Joey's story of asking herself what would happen if I was the windfall. Like what would I do with the windfall that I have? And so I asked my brother, if you just had a sudden windfall of money, what would you do with it? And he told me that he would go to the most economically struggling neighborhood of the city that he lives in and that he would build a Buddhist temple. 

He wants to be able to administer to people living in those neighborhoods through the Buddhist temple that he wants to build. And I said, how much do you think that would cost to get up and running? 

And I could tell that while he had sort of vaguely fantasized about this, he had never asked himself, okay, but like dollar amounts — like how much money per year? And so he started thinking about it for the first time. He was like, well, I guess the biggest expense would be the real estate. We should get a building, like a nail salon in a strip mall.

Joey: Sorry to laugh. 

Simone: That's just really funny, right? Because those are the structures that are available in those — 

Joey: — for rents. Yeah. 

Simone: And he was saying, yeah, the thing is like, you know, if you want a temple, you don't need a whole big thing. You really just need a couple of rooms. And then he started essentially immediately negotiating with scarcity, right? To think like, how little can I get away with? Right. It doesn't even need to be a special building. It can just be like, we have a sign on the door that says temple and then just a couple of rooms where people can come in and meditate. 

And I was like, but is that the kind of temple that would actually serve the people who live there the best? Like don't — don't let your own sense of scarcity call the shots on what gets to be built. Like what would be the best thing for the people who are living there? 

And so it was an amazing discussion because I had no idea that my brother was even thinking about something like this. And it just showed me — and I'm not picking on my brother because I'm constantly interrogating the same mindset in myself as well, right? 

Where we dream and then we immediately have to sort of talk ourselves down. We have to scale it down. We have to make it minimal because who are we to hope for the best? Who are we to envision what the community actually needs — the most beautiful, flourishing vision of what the community needs. 

We don't let ourselves go there because we're so energetically shrunken, right? I just wanna alert listeners that your brain is probably gonna try to do this too, right? Like as soon as you have an idea, your brain's like, well, that's not realistic, or we can't have that, or we can't do that because blah blah blah. 

Okay. But like I always say, imagination is free. It doesn't cost a dollar to just imagine the optimal scenario. And then how that actually gets built — no one has the blueprint from day one, right? You work with your ancestors, you work with the spiritual powers that want to make this happen through you, right?

Joey: Yes. Right.

Simone: I think that's another facet of modern Western capitalist individualism, is that you have to be the hero who figures everything out through the sheer force of your willpower and your exceptional brilliance. But no, you are not. It's not all you. No one's asking you to be a lone superhero. 

No, you can't. You can't. And that's how people give up and burn out.

Joey: Or get corrupted. Right. You also shouldn't. You can't and you shouldn't. 

Simone: Exactly. You can't and you shouldn't. But you are being asked to play a part, right? If you have an imagination, an idea that you saw in the eyes of your mind, that's because there is a spiritual force that wants to use you as an instrument.

Joey: Yes. It was placed there for a reason. Exactly. 

Simone: So you don't have to figure everything out.

Joey: Right. Oh, I love this story. I'm so glad that Billy felt good sharing with you. 

Simone: Oh, he gave me permission to tell this story. 

Joey: I love this story so much because it's just so revealing of our own human condition. So thank you Billy, for helping us see ourselves through your story. And I just wanna invite folks, if this is activating something in you — I'm thinking about workbook two in Building Post Capitalist Wealth, our free course. I think we included what, six pretty in-depth case studies there, historical case studies that I think will really start to push your imagination beyond what on a regular daily basis right now, you've probably considered what is possible. 

I'm so curious to see what people start to come up with in their mind's eye once they negotiate a little bit more beyond this realm of scarcity and "this is what's been done before." So this is like, you know, I just can't wait to see what people start dreaming up.

Simone: Revolutions require funding and liberation requires capital.

Joey: That's it.

Simone: There are tons of funds flowing through the world. You're just not controlling it.

Joey: And you're not even seeing it. It's been obscured from you. So once you start to see it and talk about it, what are you gonna do about it?

Simone: What are you gonna do about it? What are you gonna do? Whatcha gonna do to accept that you have capacity to steward some of that flow? And what are you gonna do to nurture that capacity and grow that capacity? 

A great place that you can start with again is with our free course Building Post Capitalist Wealth. I'll put the link in the show notes. And if that resonates with you, we would love to invite you to the full eight week program starting in December called Ancestral Wealth.

Joey: It's gonna be amazing. I love this work. I can't wait to do this with people. 

It's been so fun. 

Simone: Joey and I, we'll have a lot to say and a lot more to teach you, a lot more to lead you through. Okay. Thank you for joining us, and we'll be back with another episode. Talk to you soon.

---

 Hey, thank you so much for listening. If what we share today resonated with you, I want to invite you to take our free course Building Post-Capitalist Wealth. It's designed specifically for people of the global majority. 

It's completely free, and it's also a beautiful introduction to the work that Joey and I will be doing together in our full eight-week course, Ancestral Wealth, starting in December. You'll find the link to the free course in the show notes, and I'll be back next week with more with Joey.  Until then, may you feel the love and protection of your ancestors.