Summary
Joe shares his deeply personal journey with money, from childhood where his father’s pursuit of status made money feel like a rival for love, through rejecting money in his teens and twenties, to gradually transforming his relationship through gratitude practice, intellectual study, and ultimately a somatic breakthrough that revealed his entire money story was a projection of wanting his father’s love.
The episode traces a progression: money as bad (childhood imprint), push-pull with money (Investment Banking then art), gratitude practice revealing abundance, recognizing money as projection, seeing money as energetic exchange, and finally the gut-punch moment reading about WhatsApp’s success that traced back to wanting Dad’s love. After that integration, money became simply a tool—one Joe used creatively in coaching through “the Happy Money game,” where financial arrangements were designed to serve each client’s specific transformation.
Key Concepts
- Money is a screen for projection
- Gratitude reveals abundance already present
- It is expensive to be poor
- Money as expression of alignment
- Giving without exchange is destructive
- Money wounds trace to parent wounds
Key Quotes
“Money was the thing that took my dad’s love away from me.”
“I started seeing all the opportunities. I started seeing what was right and how to grow it instead of what was wrong and how to fix it.”
“I’m a billionaire. There’s no difference really. My reality is either I have a ton or I have nothing or I don’t have enough, and it doesn’t really matter how much you actually have.”
“It’s expensive to be poor. I was spending my energy in a way that wasn’t fully aligned with who I was.”
“Money doesn’t—I don’t work for money. Money works for me. My job is to make sure that money is an expression of what I want to see in the world.”
“My entire relationship with money has been a projection of me trying to get my dad’s love.”
Transcript
Early on we did a couple of episodes on money and we’ve gotten a lot of questions since then people wanting to go deeper on that topic and the other day you were telling some people about your story with money and there was a lot of components to that that I found really fascinating and I’d really love to just go deeper into that on this episode. That sounds awesome. I have to be confessional—I’m not sure if I remember. I remember us talking about the business money for a bit. Did we actually have a whole podcast on money, like what is money? Yeah, we did. We did two short episodes and it sort of worked out so that the first one was on the projection that money is good, the second one was on the projection of money is bad, or maybe I got that reversed, but basically it was the good and the bad projections of money. Okay, yeah. This will be cool. I’d love to make it a little less abstract and more personal from your experience. Yeah, let’s do that. That sounds great.
So tell me about your experience with money. I’m just gonna go sequentially and feel free to drop any questions in. Sequentially, the first thing that happened was that I was raised in a family where money was really important—like status and having the right car. And my dad, he grew up—I think as a lot of people do—he grew up without enough. His mom grew up in the Depression. He was born in the Depression. And so having money was really an important thing. And as a kid it always felt like he cared more about money than he did about me. And so I saw the deep urge for the Cadillac and making sure that the house was just right and they had the Rolex watch and all that stuff. And somehow my brain interpreted that as money isn’t—money is a more important thing than me. And so in my brain, money became bad. Money was the thing that took my dad’s love away from me. Money was the thing that took people out of presence, out of being there with their kids. Money was this thing that was to be chased after, and I was like, well, I’m right here. What do you need to chase after? That was pretty much the emotional experience for me as a kid around money.
Before you move on, how much did you also maybe paradoxically take on the belief, the water you were swimming in, that we don’t have enough money, money is important? To what extent was that sort of a—great point. Yeah, both were taken on. So there was a part of me that wanted money and wanting to have enough of it, and there was a part of me where money was bad and I was rejecting it. So it was absolutely a push and pull thing. I didn’t really want the money when I was younger, but that desire for the money kicked in for sure by the time I was in my 20s. But the money was bad—that kicked in at 13.
And so anybody with money was bad. Really rich people were bad. The guy in the Porsche was a prick. That was my experience. Money was something that took you away from anything that was important in life and you were vapid if you had money. And so that’s really how I was walking through life in my teens and in my 20s.
And what did that do to your development with that lens coloring your experience? It kept money away from me. And it kept it away in two ways. One of the ways it kept it away from me was because I would naturally get a lot of money thrown at me. I remember I graduated from college and then I worked in a fishery in Alaska and then I taught in Head Start and then I was like, oh, let’s make some money. And I found a job in Investment Banking, and seriously within 16 months or something like that I was making enormous amounts of money. And I was like, this is bad, and I quit.
And yet you were attracted to Investment Banking—the other side of that paradox was active. Yeah, exactly right. I was a push pull in my system. And I found my head wanting the money and thinking that the money was freedom—like if I had enough money I could be free. And I had that whole thought process happening, which would become illuminated later. And at the same time I was like money’s bad, all these people in Investment Banking, all they care about is making more money. So I was in a situation where I was pushing and pulling against myself and I was constantly finding proof that it was bad.
So I went into Investment Banking and I was like this is horrible, this is all bad. And then I chased art. And it was like seven years later I realized they were the same thing. And so this amazing recognition that everything I saw was just shaded by “money is bad” and anything that I saw that was bad that related to money, money was the cause of it. If there was a rich person who was acting like an ass, it wasn’t “they’re an asshole who happens to be rich,” it was “money makes that person act like an asshole.” So I was constantly finding the proof of it.
And what did that do for you emotionally, to continuously find more proof that money was bad? What did that protect you from feeling? My wanting for it. And the fact that I was bad for wanting money. And I wanted money. And so there was that constant fight. Actually more than anything, it prevented me from my joy and my ease. So it was almost a way of proving that you were bad—absolutely. Proving that the aspect of you that wanted money was bad. Yeah. In my 20s I was constantly self-abusive. I hadn’t really—it wasn’t even until like 24 or 25 that I realized that I had a critical voice in the head that was abusing me.
So that’s that. And so everything that I had was a fight, and this was particularly probably one of the biggest fights I was in with myself. And so as we talked about in your story, you started to recognize around that time that you had this voice in your head. How did spirituality and your self-exploration journey play into this?
Yeah, so any spiritual teacher that had anything to do with money, any development teacher that had anything to do with money—they were corrupt and crappy, right? So my first thing to do was a 10-day Meditation Retreat and I only went because the person was like, you can’t pay, this is donated to you. You have to assume it’s a gift. If you want to donate afterwards, fine, but you can’t pay for this. I was like, okay, that’s real.
The irony is that is actually very much defined about money—it’s pretty much about money to be like you cannot pay. Yeah, exactly. But in my head it was just like, oh, they’re not doing it for the money, therefore they can be trusted.
And I mean, I remember somebody who became one of my really favorite teachers—I was looking at their book and in the back of the book there was a picture of them and I was like, oh they’re trying to get notoriety and fame and money, so they can’t be a good teacher because there’s a picture of them on the back of the book. Like it got that deep in my system. Anybody doing anything—I couldn’t conceive of the fact that their picture was on the book because they wanted people to be able to connect, or they wanted to present themselves as a real human, not some fantasy that people could project on.
And so there’s a linkage here with fame too—power, fame, any kind of cachet, notoriety, status. Anything around status, because to me my father’s quest for money was all about status. And spirituality was the opposite of it. Whatever I had this idea of what spirituality was, which was interestingly to find out later that the beginnings of my spirituality were all about status—being perfect in some way.
And then somewhere along the line I was more and more in touch with the fact that I wanted money. And I think that happened because I lived without it. I lived without it for close to a decade. I went into debt so I could sit and meditate. I would worry about money but I wouldn’t do anything for money, or I’d work for a week every month just to have enough money to pay the bills, but I was still going into debt.
And so as the money thing got tighter and tighter, I wanted it more and more. It became more and more this thing that was supposed to give me freedom. And somehow or another I started to practice having gratitude for money and doing a gratitude practice every day for 10 minutes a day, and I did it with Tara.
What did that look like? It was literally being grateful for what I did have. The concept was: I’m constantly thinking about what I don’t have. What happens if I constantly think about what I do have? How does that change things? If I stop thinking about the lack and start thinking about all that I do have, how does that change the way I look at everything? Because I was just looking at everything like there wasn’t enough.
And so every day, 10 minutes a day, we would sit and just be grateful for everything—oh look, we have a working car, oh we had food today, whatever it was. And it was always around resources money could get us. And we just did it. And literally, it was like six months later, there’s just more—a ton of money in our world, what I thought was a ton of money at the time. And in that gratitude practice I started seeing all the opportunities. I started seeing what was right and how to grow it instead of what was wrong and how to fix it. I could see all these opportunities that came. And I could see that they were everywhere.
I remember at some point I could look out and I just saw that everything—somebody made money on everything I was looking at. I was living in LA at the time. And it was just like, oh, that concrete—20 people made money on that concrete. That road light, the electricity that it brings to the road, the paint on the road light—I could just see like everywhere I looked there were ways people were making money. Money was so available. It was all over. It was endless. And I had never seen that before. I thought that there was a shortage of it. I thought I believed that there was not enough of it and that you had to fight for it. Instead of like, holy crap, this is like walking through a jungle of money. You just have to reach up and pick stuff off.
And so that gratitude really helped with that experience. And that’s when money started to flow into my life just comfortably, easily. I think it was like six or eight months from starting that practice to being completely out of debt, making a living doing art, happy. And we’re like, oh let’s have a kid, because I wasn’t worried about money. That practice was a real big life changer for me.
So one thing I’m noticing here is that you went from all that debt through this gratitude practice. Maybe perhaps something that was dismantled there was the idea that status and money was gonna get you love or make you lovable? And then that didn’t really get dismantled until a little bit later. Okay, it was more that money wasn’t bad. Yeah. It was like, if I can be grateful for it, there’s something good here. And then all of a sudden it started to open up—there’s tons of it and it’s something to be grateful for, instead of a demon that I’m trying to exorcise. It wasn’t so much that money equals being loved. I hadn’t figured that out yet. What I figured out was that money was something you could be grateful for, so it could be good. And I figured out there was a ton of it—a holy crap ton of money out there.
And those were the two things that practice really helped me with. And that’s when the money door started opening up for me. And it’s fascinating that you didn’t go back to Investment Banking where you had been making money before. I’d been focusing on trying to make money as an artist for an extended period of time. And I had that moment of recognition that the thing I was running towards in the art was the same thing I was running away from in Investment Banking. It was the same crap, as far as soul killing, for the kind of art I wanted to do.
And then all of a sudden this new form of art just appeared. As I started appreciating, all of a sudden opportunities appeared and I started doing large-scale video art installations. It just happened. And I just loved it. And it just started occurring. And so money just became this thing.
And I also started educating myself on money at that point. It was the first time that I was just like, oh, I’m so fascinated. What the hell is this thing that I was completely not attuned to at all, that I had rejected in so many ways—from friends and family and just so many ways I had rejected money. I was like, what is this thing that I’m rejecting? And then I started educating myself on it.
So I’m hearing that you kind of dropped into a view around the topic of money—that’s right—and started to have the wonder and the curiosity to learn more about it. Yeah, that’s exactly what happened.
And then the next big experience I had was driving my car and thinking about how I didn’t have enough. And in that moment I thought of the two billionaires I’d met and I’m like, they are also right now probably thinking they don’t have enough. Because I knew them. And I knew even if they would have logically said “I have enough money,” their minds were constantly going to what they didn’t have. And I was like, oh, I’m a billionaire. And I saw that if you’re some of the poorest people in America, you’re in the top one percent in the world. There’s people on Earth who are like, how could that dude be unhappy and think he doesn’t have enough when he can go to a restaurant and buy a pupusa?
And I just saw the whole thing—this shackle of thinking that I didn’t have enough. And in that I’m like, oh, I’m the same as a billionaire. There’s no difference really. Yeah, perhaps they can rent or buy a jet and I can’t, but my reality is either I have a ton or I have nothing or I don’t have enough, and it doesn’t really matter how much you actually have, within a level of being able to feed yourself or put yourself in a safe environment.
And in that recognition came another recognition, which is: it’s really expensive to be poor. I was really good at being poor. I figured out a way to do a whole bunch of things with no money—found my way down the Grand Canyon on a 14-day trip, found a way to buy musical equipment. I found ways to do stuff, but it took a lot of time. And it was like, oh, I’m spending a lot of time to be poor. Instead of doing stuff that I really love, making money so that I can buy other stuff I really want to do, I would do a whole bunch of stuff to cajole my way into a situation, none of which I wanted to do, none of which was creating the reality I wanted to see on Earth. So that’s what I mean by expensive—I was spending my energy by avoiding money in a way that wasn’t fully aligned with who I was.
And that actually started hitting home when I read this book called The Soul of Money. It wasn’t written in a great way—I was annoyed reading it—but the ideas were really quite priceless. And I ended up meeting the woman, Lynn Twist, later in life. The main thesis was that money is a neutral thing that can be aligned with who you are and not aligned with who you are. If you can use money to be an expression of who you are and what you want in the world, then money is a wonderful thing. And if you are controlled or ruled by money, then it’s a whole different thing.
And I remember one of the stories that hit me really hard: this Amazon tribe or something said, “If you’re here to help us, no thank you. But if we’re here to work together for our mutual freedom, let’s get to work.” That stuck with me like a seed that didn’t sprout till much later around money.
But the thing that sprouted right away was: money doesn’t—I don’t work for money, money works for me. My job is to make sure that money is an expression of what I want to see in the world. And that was the first big crack in how I saw money. I no longer saw money as something that was solid. I saw money as the thing in which I projected onto it.
And that was the first time that I got to really see it as projection too, which means I could see—oh, I projected it was bad and so it was bad. I could project that it’s anything. And what I noticed is that everybody had a different projection around money, and it related not to money at all. It was just the way that we would project our past traumas on our current lovers or our mom and dad on our lovers. I just saw—oh, money is just this thing, like an authority figure or anything, a famous person. It’s just there to catch our projections. It’s going to give us freedom—no it’s not. You can project it. It’s going to give me safety, it’s going to give me blah blah blah. It’s like all of that I just saw—all the projections on it. Money is what you make it to be.
And then—this is kind of where it all came together. I was doing Venture at this point. I’m in El Salvador for spring break and my wife and daughter have to leave because somebody died. And I’m sitting there in a hammock and I read this news about WhatsApp—this venture capitalist tried to get their venture team to invest in WhatsApp, they wouldn’t, so they invested their own money, a half a million or a million dollars, and a year later he’s a billionaire.
When I read it, it felt like someone punched me in the gut. Just hit me as hard as they could. I had a visceral somatic reaction. Through Grace, immediately I was like, what is that feeling? When did I feel that feeling for the first time? I closed my eyes, I went into my body, I did not think about it, I let my body trace it back to the very first time. And I was like, oh—that’s me trying to get my dad’s love.
It was at that moment I realized my entire relationship with money has been a projection of me trying to get my dad’s love. The whole thing—it was bad, I wanted it but I didn’t want it at the same time, there wasn’t enough of it. I just bawled. I just sat in this hammock awkwardly crying in this semi-public pool for a while. And something—my whole body, my whole system had changed. And all of a sudden money was just a tool. Money for the first time was just something that I could use. It was the first time that I fully felt: money works for me, I don’t work for money, in a way that was fully embodied.
At that point on, money has always just come incredibly easy. But more importantly, I started deciding to coach folks. And I started to coach some folks. Two of the first four people who wanted coaching were both incredibly wealthy folks. And I would go through this process with each of them. The process I called it the Happy Money game. I would say, okay, I will coach you for one session, you have to reciprocate in some way—I don’t care if you give me a million or put a million dollars into my kids’ college fund or give a dollar to a homeless person. Don’t care. Just want you to reciprocate in a way that feels right for you.
And then if you want to work with me and I want to work with you, we will play the Happy Money game, which was an exchange of proposals. The person who had a proposal that worked for both people won. With one of those two people, our financial agreement was I will not take any money from you—refused to take any money—because that person’s particular situation was that they bought everything, they’d had money for so long that they could buy anything. And so the only way that the relationship could have trust for me was that he couldn’t buy me. The other person, it was: you’re gonna pay me some enormous amount of money, and if you do not do the work, you’re gonna pay me twice the money, and you’re going to send me a recording every day for 30 days telling me that you love yourself. If you don’t do that, you’re going to pay me triple. That was a relationship.
And so money just became this tool of: how do I use money as one more tool to help people in their transformation? Which is what I care about, which was what was in alignment with me. And that’s when money—I could not do that until that moment of seeing through money and what it was and what I had made out of it.