December 27, 2016 • 50 mins
Seems like it would be nearly impossible to live without a bank account these days. But it is possible! Learn all about banking and personal finance in today's riveting episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
San Francisco, the s Y s K treet Yes, San Francisco, Oakland,
the entire Bay area and dare I say, all of
Silicon Valley. Yeah, we love you. And we're coming back
to Sketch Fest this year in January. Yeah, we're gonna
be there on Sunday, January one pm, a very rare
(00:21):
afternoon show. Uh, and we will be ready to go.
So you guys better be drunk from the night before
or getting drunk for that evening. Yeah, however it crosses over,
I think it'll be proof positive that uh we endorse
afternoon drinking, you know, yeah, you know, a couple of drinks,
maybe it'd be bloody Mary. What were we talking about. Oh, yeah,
(00:43):
we're promoting our show. Oh, that's right. So we're doing
that show on January. Uh. You can go to the
s F Sketch Fest website to get tickets and it's awesome.
It's a great, great comedy festival. Lots of awesome shows
that weekend and for the following weeks. So I encourage you,
like to buy lots of tickets just by ours first. Yeah,
(01:04):
and hurry, hurry, because they're selling out fast. No joke,
that's not a ploy. That's not as a marketing ploy.
They're really selling fast. We get emails every time. Guys,
you told me to hurry, I didn't hurry. I'm shut out.
And since this promos petered out, it ends right now.
Welcome to stuff you should know from how Stuff Works
(01:25):
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and it's just us.
We've been abandoned this week now. No one was in
there for a second earlier, but it's like home alone.
(01:48):
Ah boy, I love that movie. When it came out.
Oh yeah, yeah. I thought the sequence, the big break
in sequence where he had everything rigged that fifteen or
twenty minute I thought that was one of the funniest
things I've ever seen. It was a pretty good movie.
I just laughed and laughed and laughed. Was that a
John Hughes movie? Yeah? Okay, makes sense that Chicago Suburbs
(02:12):
setting he loved, Yes he did. R I P Chicago
Suburbs alright, P John Hughes. Oh I see that makes
way more sense. Yeah. It was just a couple of
years ago, right, not too long ago, for sure, Within
the last five I would say, Man, all those great movies,
(02:33):
cry baby um in Flamingos, Nope, Apocalypse now, yeah, he's good.
Oh wow. He passed away in two thousand nine, so yeah,
seven years ago. What No? Wow? Yeah, I thought it
was way more recent than that. Time flies in a
world without John Hughes, you know where time doesn't fly
(02:53):
chuck at the beginning of our episodes kind of drag.
That's funny. So today we're talking about the possibility, the
potential of living in this modern American life, this modern
world in general, without a bank account. Yeah, this ended
(03:15):
up being a little more interesting than I thought it
was gonna be. Oh yeah, I'm glad that was the case.
It was less interesting than you thought it was gonna be. No, no,
but I mean we've had some of those before, Like
jack Hammers comes to mind. That was better, it was
going It was the opposite. I was like, wait, wait, wait,
there has to be more on jack Hammers than this. Nope,
(03:38):
that was your pick. Yeah, it was no forever bear
that cross. So you would think that banks in general
is ubiquitous and huge and powerful and um out of
control as they are had been around for millions of years, right,
(03:59):
Terry maybe not millions, tens of thousands of years. Uh.
It turns out actually the bank, the concept of the
bank as we see it today, is actually only about
five hundred or so years old. Yes, I would have
guessed way older than that. Yeah, and I'm glad this
article did a little history there, because I didn't know
(04:20):
any of this stuff. Um, the first actual bank, kind
of modern bank that we think of as a bank,
was the Bank of St. George or the Banco the
San Giogio in Genoa, Italy or is it Genoa. I've
always seen Genoa, Genoa, Genoa, Genoa. So that was um.
(04:44):
And and they point out in this article that wasn't
the invention of banking, because banking is different than a bank. Yeah,
banking actually did start several thousand years ago, as far
as far back as Mesopotamia and Egypt. And this article
says that the that grain started to be kept in
(05:05):
temples in a grain bank, I saw gold. But the
upshot of it was is that these temples that were
built were basically sacrosanc the armies would protect them with
their lives. So it would just make sense that if
you wanted to store something extremely precious and valuable UM
like gold, We'll just put in a temple, so the
(05:27):
earliest reserve banks I guess you could put it, or
temples in Egypt and Mesopotamia. And then one at some
point some of the local people or local rulers came
along and said, hey, I really need some money. You
guys have tons of gold just sitting in there. Can
I borrow some of it? And then I'll give you
that amount back plus a little more for letting me
(05:49):
borrow it? And they said, why should we call this?
And they call it banking. Do you know where that
work came from? No? I don't either, because they probably
didn't call it banking. They probably called it like sun
crow or something like that. So, uh, let's go back
to UM in Italy. And this is when Italy had
(06:14):
a city states. Oh wait, I had more, I had more. Yeah,
it's it actually is kind of interesting. All right, Well,
let me down the machine. Okay, yeah, just keep it idling,
keep on um. They so you had the initial banking practices,
and they kept developing and developing, and then Greece and
(06:34):
Rome really kind of took them and and went to
town with them, and things like UM book transactions where
you could go into a bank in one city in
deposit some money, and the banquet handle credit arranging credit
for you in another city, so you didn't have to
travel from one city to another, which is very dangerous
with a bunch of money on you. It's a book
(06:56):
transaction that came from like the Greeks and the Romans,
and these were going to smoothly. And then Rome fell
and it was replaced by the Holy Roman Empire, which
was a Christian empire, and Christianity had this very strict
rule against usury, and usury today means extremely high interest rates,
(07:16):
whereas at at the origin of the word it meant
just charging interests at all. So there was no money
whatsoever in banking UM, so there weren't any bankers. Well,
the Jewish faith didn't have any rules against usury. So
as the Holy Roman Empire was in in UH in
(07:36):
power for these several hundred years, they fulfilled the banking
UH industry UH until finally about the I think thirteenth
and fourteenth century when UM, like the Italians started to
get into it and they kind of created that that
UM modern banking system that we see today. Can I
(07:57):
get back in, Yeah? Can I? Can we go to
fourteen o eight, Yes, specifically March fourteen o eight. This
is UM, like I teased before in Italy, this is
the at the time of the city state UM, when
(08:17):
you would go to war with one another within your
own country UM. Specifically in this case, UH, Genoa was
getting UH trod upon by Venice. Long long war with
Venice big rivals. And basically as what happens many times
in war is it's sort of bled that city state
(08:40):
of Genoa dry and it was in bad shape. So
these folks got together. I did look it up. I
can't remember who it was, though, the initial investors UM
that started the Bank of St. George, and he said, hey,
let's create this thing and like literally in a building, UH,
it will be a bank and we can finance reap
aim it of all these war debts UH and earn
(09:03):
a little seven percent on top interest on top of
it all. And in fact we got a better idea.
Why don't we even have the power to go and
collect uh city taxes and customs and stuff to make
sure we get paid back. And it worked, Yeah, it did.
They brought Genera out of bankruptcy and apparently the bank
(09:24):
went on until the nineteenth century, like four hundred years George, Yeah,
it is cool. Um. One of the reasons probably why
it was successful is that the people who were overseeing
it were directly invested into the bank, like substantially, Like
if you were one of the treasurers, you had to
um invest at least sixteen thousand lira, which is several
(09:47):
hundred thousand dollars in today's money, um directly into the bank, right, So,
so you wanted to see that bank succeed like crazy
because you were directly invested in it, and if the
bank went under, you stood to lose quite a bit.
That's that's not the case with banks today. I mean
companies and I'm sure including banks too like their employees
(10:08):
to be invested in the company. But certainly there it's
not a requirement that you have several hundred thousand dollars
worth of your company's stock to be a director of
the bank. And then the bank itself can very easily
be overextended, um, just because of what are called reserve requirements. Right,
we should do like a whole episode on banking, by
(10:29):
the way, Yeah, boy, especially that that fall out recently
with Wells Fargo. Oh about the fake um, the fake accounts, dude,
have you seen the ad that they have about it.
They have this ad and it's almost like they shaved
off the first five seconds where they admit that their
(10:52):
people created all these fraudulent accounts, right, and then the
ad comes in at everyone who has affected will be
fully refunded. We want to gain your trust back. But
they never say specifically what they're talking about, like they
never cop to it. Like it's bizarre. You know that thing,
it makes it stand out like a sore thumb, you know. Yeah,
(11:14):
it's an oily, oily, weasily add and they have it
like it's you know, they've got the Wells Fargo guy
like running in the background to distract you, to make
you think about your childhood, playing with stage coaches and stuff,
and Elizabeth Warren is somewhere like blood dripping out of
our eyeballs. Yeah, yeah, for Elizabeth Warren circus two ten right,
(11:37):
So yeah, no, I mean she's watching the commercial and
crying blood tears. No, I'm saying, Elizabeth Warren circus, who's
who doesn't ten would have? I think these days she's
like whatever, No, man, she laid into him? Oh did
she go after him? Oh yeah, yeah, you gotta see
that that video. That was pretty awesome. Well, good for her.
(11:59):
When was that may oh, when when she lambasted him? Yeah,
it was right after it happened. It was like, you know,
a month, a month or two ago, okay, because I
feel like she was a little more lionized in the
last several years than she has been lately. Yeah, I
mean she she went after specifically. I mean she just
read the riot Act to the CEO. That's good, and
(12:19):
was like, are you going to give back your bonus money?
Like this happened on your watch? Why don't you give
that money back? He was like, who are you talking
to me? But one of the one of the things
I wanted to say though about banks, um that that
is just such in such stark contrast to the idea
where you used to have to um contribute your own money. Um.
(12:42):
The reserve requirements of banks. I was looking into this, Chuck,
you ready, if if if there's a ten percent reserve
requirement of um that a bank has, and they they
have a hundred dollars, they can loan out ninety of
that hundred dollars to somebody, right, Okay, so they have
(13:02):
a ten percent in reserve. Now, let's say that that
person um writes a check for that ninety dollars, like
they borrowed that hundred bucks to um to, or they
borrowed that ninety bucks to pay off a debt. So
they write a check for that ninety bucks to somebody
who banks with that bank, So that ninety bucks comes
right back to that bank, right they they can loan
(13:28):
of that, and so on and so forth until this
one hundred dollar chunk can be like loaned and repaid
and loan and repaid all over the place, which makes sense,
and it keeps everything kind of going um financially. But
the problem is that if something happens, if a panic
sets in. This is why runs on banks are so
um such travesties, and everybody calls in their loan all
(13:52):
at once. Well, there's a lot of people who are
calling in that one single hundred dollar hundred dollars rather
than having the time to pay to to to pay
it back and then call it in from somebody else
and use that to pay the other person back. It's
just a big cluster all at once. That makes sense.
(14:12):
That's just one of the many interesting things about banks. Yeah,
I mean, there are clearly other podcasts that we should
tie to this one, I think, but since this one
is about not banking, we'll take a break. Here, go
withdraw our funds, and we'll be right back. All right. So,
(14:53):
if you live in modern society today, uh, it is
pretty tough to get by without a bank. Um, most
cases these days, you have well I don't know about
most cases, but in many cases you have automatic deposits
of your of your work checks. A lot of people
(15:16):
pay their bills wirelessly online directly from their bank. Uh.
You might have a student loan, you might have a
car loan, you might have your house mortgage, you might
pay your credit card bills. All of this stuff is
running through a bank most likely. And you would think
it's probably impossible to not have a bank account these days.
(15:39):
And I would say pretty much all Americans have them.
Not true, You well know, pretty much all Americans do. Like, yeah,
but that's not all. No, No, it's true. Yes, seven
percent of Americans do not have bank accounts. About nine
million people last year in two thousand fifteen did not
(15:59):
have bank accounts. Not million peoples, a lot of people. No,
it really is, um, and apparently that's that's households, sorry,
not people. Yeah, you're right, you're right. That is a
big distinction to UM. And the f d i C said, man,
that's the lowest since we've been tracking this by far,
And someone said, well, how long have you been tracking this?
They said, well, of the last six years really yeah,
(16:23):
which I'm like, really that's when they started tracking it.
But apparently so two thousand nine. So if you want
another number, that's the nine million American households don't have
bank accounts at all. Uh. Then there are twenty five
million households in addition to that, so that makes almost
that's like thirty four million households, which that's a substantial
number at this point. The twenty million or what's called
(16:46):
underbank meaning they may have a bank account, but they
don't use the bank account. Yeah, they don't use it because, UM,
they are probably afraid of overdraft fees, or they have uh,
maybe a bank account that got grandfathered in so that
(17:07):
they don't have to pay minimum amount fees UM and
who knows. There's all sorts of reasons for people to
not use a bank account that they they have, UM,
but probably chief among them is overdraft, which you'll talk
more about. Yeah, and the majority of these underbank people
in the United States are poor usually um, A lot
(17:30):
of times, their minorities, a lot of times they are
less educated. Um. And these communities, I mean, there's there's
a few reasons why they may not want to use
a bank. One, maybe they don't trust banks. And if
you look in the history of the United States, are
certainly even we're just talking about the Wells Fargo scandal.
Like when you see stuff like that on the news, um,
(17:52):
it should be upsetting to everyone. But obviously if you're
poor and you don't have a lot of money, that
will that may scare you into not wanting to use
a bank at all, right, you know. Yeah. And another
one is that the overdraft fees, which so basically, I
guess in two thousand one, the current overdraft fee idea
(18:15):
scam you could call. It was set up as a
way to generate like way more money for banks, right.
And the way that overdraft fees generate money for banks
is when you are overdrafted on your account, they can
charge you a fee for covering that amount, right, and
then you still have to deposit that amount, but they
(18:38):
don't return your check. They cover, They cover the check
that you paid, but they charge you a fee, say
like thirty five dollars for that amount. And it seems
fine and dandy and everything's fine. But there's something called
clearing checks from high to low, right, okay, where the
bank will clear checks in descending order of value. So
(18:59):
if you have of UM a hundred dollars in in
your bank account and you have a checkout for a
hundred and fifty dollars, check out for twenty dollars, to
check out for five, and to check out for fifteen dollars. Right,
if they cleared the lower amounts first and then the
last one, only the last one would bounce and create
(19:21):
an overdraft fee. If they start with the bigger one,
well you've got an overdraft draft fee right out of
the gate. But then you also have three more because
the other smaller checks all bounced as well, and so
instead of one over draft fee, they get to charge
you four overdraft fees UM. And that was a huge
thing when when that was finally reported and exposed, and
(19:42):
that actually resulted in that UM rule that now you
UM either I think you have to opt in for
overdraft protection, whereas before you had to opt out. Yeah.
I remember back in the day when I was broke
as back and I would overdraft things in there, I remember,
(20:03):
and I knew nothing about how things worked with finances.
Still don't really, but um, I just remember thinking, like
I would rather it's say no, you you like, don't
cover me and then charge me. Just just say no,
you don't have the funds, right, that's the smart way
to do it. So I never understood, like it was
(20:23):
like I think they even called it overdraft insurance maybe
at the time, or I might be making it up.
I seem to remember them saying that, and I was like,
I don't want that, like just to like let the
check bounce and I'll take it up with them. Yeah.
The way it was marketed though, was like hey, we
we we value you. We want to make sure that
(20:43):
you can pay all your bills. So if something happens
and you're overdrafted, we'll cover it. We're just going to
charge you a fee. And it sounds good. But again,
when you go from high to low and all of
a sudden your overdraft fees go from one to four
or five or however many, um, you know, that's a
huge problem. Well, and the people that are overdrafting in
the people that are at least able to afford those
(21:04):
fees exactly. So it's a disproportionate burden on the poor,
which makes it as a scam, one of the more
evil scams around. Yes, it's just wrong man. So so yeah,
the idea that that if you are if you open
an account, you should not opt in for overdraft protection.
(21:25):
And that's easy to say when when you're talking about
checks for like, um, you're writing a check for a
mountain dew and some cheetos, you know, who cares if
you if you're if you're short for that, you can
go without that. But you know, when you're talking about
like your rent check or like an actual grocery bill
or something like that, you know, it sucks that that
you can't get that stuff. But it's better to have
(21:48):
to put a couple of things back than to pay
thirty five dollars for one two dollar item that that
you went over by. Yeah, that's a good point. And
this was in my case too. This is also back
in the day when you uh, I mean a lot
of times it was a mystery how much you had
in your account, Like you couldn't just get on your
phone and and before you write the check and be like, oh, well, no,
(22:09):
I don't have enough money to cover this. Yeah, because
even if you balanced your checkbook, sometimes you forgot to
carry the one like it wasn't always a d percent
in accurate. And if you had a life, you didn't
necessarily rectify your bank checkbook every day. Oh wait, what
is balancing a checkbook means? Serious? Yeah? Thank god for
my wife. Um. So another reason you might avoid a bank,
(22:32):
uh is philosophically. You may um, you may have that
there may be a longstanding distrust of banks in your
family that you don't want to put your money in.
Or you may just want to be like, you know what,
I don't want to take part in this modern society.
I want to kind of drop out a bit. And
a really good first move is to shut your bank
(22:53):
account down. That's a big statement. Oh yeah it is,
you know, but a lot of people that are under
banked and don't have accounts aren't. They're on purpose. It's
not some philosophical statement. A lot of times is simply
because uh, they are poor and they don't have a
(23:13):
lot of alternatives. Yeah. And the other thing about um
about not having a bank account. Not only do you
not have a bank account, you also are like basically
just avoiding banks altogether. There's plenty of other things that
banks offer, like loans and mortgage stuff like that. Yeah, yeah,
maybe some free nasty coffee UM. But the so when
(23:36):
you're when you don't have a banking account, that's like
the the most basic unit of the banking world. Right.
If you don't have that, you obviously aren't going to
be exposed all these other things that can help things
like um build your credit history through like a revolving
loan UM or a mortgage or a car loan or
something like that that you can build up your credit
(23:57):
for and ultimately save money. UM. So when you don't
have a bank account for whatever reason, you are effectively
out of the banking system. The problem is, you can
live parallel to the banking system outside of it, but
it can be really dangerous, especially if you're just dealing
with cash, because that cash has to stay somewhere, and
(24:18):
whether it's on you or in your mattress or in
a coffee can in your backyard, you're you're exposed for
for having that UM readily available to anybody who finds
it or comes into your house with a gun to
get it, which is another thing that sucks. Yeah, there's
no insurance for that. You know, if you lose your cash,
you lose your cash. So one thing that people rely
(24:42):
on sometimes these days as an alternative source for a
loan at least is something called a payday lender. You
might have seen these little brick and mortar shops with
UM with the the neon sign in the window. Cash
now available to you, uh X business day stuff like that. UM,
(25:03):
you can you can go to these places. It's a
quick application process. UH won't affect your credit score sometimes
UM that you know, they'll say that if it doesn't,
and you can get money like the next business day.
If you want three hundred bucks, you can go in
there and get three hundred bucks. But you're gonna pay
a fee on that UM and it's big, they say,
(25:25):
the fees if you pay back within eight days, it
works out if you if you put it on a
scale of a p R annual percentage rate of like
three d is what you're paying on that loan. I
saw one for a hundred dollar loan on cash net
usas site. UM for a one hundred loan pay back
in eight days for their flat fee and the interest
(25:47):
you pay six It's one of those things, man, when
you see this and you're like, man, how can you
not look at it as bilking poor people out of
more money? Well, some people who use payday lenders say, hey,
if you look at this, you when you look at
their rates in terms, it's all laid out. It's not
(26:08):
some crazy percentage I have to figure out and come
up with compounding interest or anything like that. It is
it says, if you borrow one hundred dollars, you have
to pay us back one hundred and fifteen dollars. There's
a like a ten dollar service fee, and then for
a hundred dollars it's five five dollars in interest. Right,
So that's what you owe us is a hundred and
fifteen dollars. It doesn't require a lot of thought, a
(26:30):
lot of um. There's not a lot of wiggle room
for them to um to add more fees or anything
like that. It's you know what you have to pay back.
But that said, they they very quickly can comprise a
trap payday lending trap that people get caught in, especially
when they start rolling over loans. Yeah, and you know
(26:53):
when I said it's like hard to not look at
it that way, it's because it's it's not like it
just feels like, hey, these people have their backs up
against the wall and they really need two hundred bucks exactly,
so you can come get it from us. But then
of course there are another complete other set of people
that say, yeah, dude, that's the deal, and you know what,
(27:13):
don't use that place then right right there. The thing
is that some people are saying, Okay, that's a that's
a valid philosophy, but you need to have an alternative
that's fair for people, because people need loans, people get overextended,
emergencies come up, there's just things that people need money
for legitimately, and like they shouldn't have to be preyed upon.
(27:37):
So one of the alternatives that's been proposed is to
get the regular standard banking industry involved in small um
short term loans. Is what a paid a loan is
um and six to ten times less, right exactly. But
you would, as far as the bank's concerned, the customer
(27:58):
would still be paying way more than what the standard
APR that a normal bank charges, but to the customer
it would be way less than what they're paying to
the payday lending place. UM. I'm not sure why banks
aren't into this yet. I don't know. I got the
impression that there might be some regulation that prevents them
from being involved, or they're just not interested. But that
(28:20):
seems to be the key, because that also would seem
to be a pretty good gateway to getting people who
wanted to have a bank account into the banking um
network by starting out with a small a small loan.
You know you would think so you would? UM? What else?
Prepaid credit cards? Those are more and more popular these days.
(28:42):
You can get them at a convenience store. You can
load money onto it, use it like a regular old
debit card. What I say, credit card, debit card, and
it's just what you think it is. UM. Here's the
deal with those is uh? They are really really easy
to scam. UM. In two thousand thirteen, the Federal Trade
(29:02):
Commission got eighty five thousand complaints totally forty three million
dollars in in scam frauds with debit cards. What do
you mean like, there's no they're they're almost impossible to
track anything after purchase, impossible to trace. So it's it's
(29:23):
really easy. It's like a prime opportunity for someone to
to scam someone. Like if someone says, hey, uh, we
request payment from a prepaid credit debit card, then once
they have that information, they can just go use it.
And it's not like they have some bank behind it
that can trace it and track it down and it's
it's it's just a really easy way to scam people
(29:45):
out of money. UM. And that's just one of the
problems with them. Well, despite that, the UM they've grown
incredibly in popularity in the US Between two thousand three
and two thousand twelve, the amount deposited I'm prepaid debit
card went from one billion to sixty five billion dollars
between two thousand three and two thousand nine years up
(30:07):
to sixty five billion dollars right from one billion UM.
And this this despite the easy scam ability, but also
getting kind of scammed by the people who legitimately run
these prepaid debit card companies, Like apparently there's fees for
everything from like loading your card, which you usually do
(30:28):
it an a t M, using an a t M,
checking your balance. Um, there's just a lot of additional
fees that really kind of quickly sapped the amount of
money on your prepaid debit card. So fortunately UM, the
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau stepped in and as of the
last month, is it December yet? Okay? So as of
(30:53):
October of two thousand and sixteen, there's new rules that
say that if you are prepaid debit card company, you
have to disclose your terms up front. You have to
let people UM find out their balance for free. UM
cuts on on some of the fees. They have to opt.
They have to be able to UM have the option
to not have overdraft charges, overdraft protection. It's a lot.
(31:15):
It's a lot more regulated now as of last month. Yeah,
but I wonder what if it's the same thing as
like banking. If they they're like, sure, we'll disclose that
in a fifty page document and that no one ever reads.
Like what they need to do is say how they
need to disclose this. Yeah, that's true. Some guys to
come to your house, maybe bring a little dinner and
(31:39):
and just tell you straight up. All right, I got
a little worked up, so I'm gonna go splash my
face with egnog and how many right back after this?
(32:12):
All right, Chuck. So let's say that you don't feel
like getting scammed by anybody. Nope, you just want to
be free. Yeah. Uh, what what can you do? What
are some of the things you can do? Well, um,
there are a few things that you can do. You
can try an alternative currency. So if you want to
(32:37):
be really weird dollars, that's what you mean. No, I'm
talking about Well we've talked about bitcoin. Um, is that
even still a thing? Did that go out? No? No,
it's still there's much a thing. Yeah, okay, I didn't.
I think it's just maturing and growing constantly. So we
did an episode on bitcoin. But I had no idea
that there are alternative currencies in communities all over the world,
(33:02):
but right here in the US and had no idea.
And it's a really cool thing, I think. Yeah, like
burk shares. You looked into berk shares, right, Yeah, burke
Shares a very clever name because it is a western
Massachusetts and the Burke Shears launched in two thousand six. Uh.
They have sixteen branch offices and four local banks that
(33:23):
support where you can actually get a berk share trade
in your money for burke shares um four hundred participating businesses.
So here's here's what it is, and in fact, I'm
even gonna read directly from their website because it just
makes a lot more sense. It can get a little convoluted.
Can we get some background music? You probably should something
(33:46):
berk Shire. So there's a five percent discount, and here's
how it works. They follow a hundred dollars UH through
a day to explain it. So wait, tell tell us
when you start the quote. Right, ready, here we go.
You go to a bank and you purchase your birth
shares because you want to go to a restaurant that night.
Let's say, Uh, you go in with ninety five U S.
(34:07):
Dollars and you say I would like to exchange of this,
So they give you one hundred birth shares back. Yeah. Right,
So you go to your dinner, your dinners, let's say
a hundred bucks right on the nose. The restaurant takes
your birth shares, takes all one hundred of them. You
pay your whole bill and your birth shares, and so
you have actually spent ninety five U S. Dollars for
(34:27):
a one dollar meal. So you've gotten your little five
percent discount. Then the owner of that restaurant has that
hundred birth shares they want to deposit that for real money,
or let's just say us dollars, return them to that bank.
They bring him to the bank and the bank deposits
that hundred birk shares and gives the restaurant the ninety
five dollars, the same ninety five bucks that you exchange.
(34:50):
So in the end you get that five percent discount
because all because of that initial exchange, that same ninety
five dollars you traded for the Berkshires goes to the
business where you spend it. Yeah, So that's yeah, and
that's that's the key to this whole alternative hyperlocal currency
is that it's intended to keep goods and services and
(35:14):
within the community. Yeah, because you can't go spend a
Berkshire anywhere else but the Berkshires. They'll say, what is
this weird looking bill? Where are you from the future
or something? And it's actually very cool looking. It's not
weird looking. I looked it up. The one Berkshire unit
is uh Mohican, the original inhabitants of the Berkshires. The
five is W. E. B. Dubois born in Barrington. The
(35:38):
ten is Robin van In, co founder of the community
supported Agricultural movement Indian Line Farm. This just keeps getting better.
The twenty is Herman Melville, awesome, author of Moby Dick.
Of course. The fifty is Norman Rockwell. Is it a
Rockwell painting of Rockwell? No, it's just Rockwell. And then
(36:01):
the one thousand Berkshire it's a photo of him drunk
on account. Yeah, pretty much. The one thousand Berkshire is
John Hodgman. Yeah, he's the National Treasure, not just the
Berkshire Treasure. Now I'm just kidding. There is no one thousand.
But it's cool. They have their own money, and it's
like it just is a really really cool thing, like
(36:22):
you're you're spending. There's, like I said, four hundred participating businesses,
so it seems like a really successful program. And there's
a lot others. There's the Toronto Dollars, Salt Spring Dollars,
Ithaca Hours, uh, but the Berkshire seems to be like
one of the more robust programs. Yeah, I mean I
had heard of it before. I hadn't heard of the
(36:43):
other ones. I think Detroit has one as well, um,
but the Berkshire's i'd heard of before, so it must
be doing pretty well well And this is nothing new.
In the early, like into the early nineteen hundreds, local
currencies were a big thing. Oh yeah, like every bank
could legally print money for the federal government finally said no,
we're really the only ones who can print money. And
(37:04):
there were I think like a hundred or a thousand
or ten thousand or some ridiculous amount of currencies in
the United States up until like the eighteen sixties. Yeah,
that's crazy. What about the m paisa? Have you heard
of that before? I hadn't heard of that, but it's
it's really pretty cool as well. So m paisa is
stands for mobile paysa paysa means um money in Swahili,
(37:27):
and it's this kind of new alternative currency that's um
come up in Kenya in the last few years, right
right right, I forgot that part. Um. So in Kenya
most people don't have bank accounts, but they do have
cell phones and they rely on cash a lot. Well.
As we said before, cash can be very dangerous. There's
(37:48):
all sorts of bad guys out there who need or
want cash for their own But I don't feel like,
you know, going out and doing anything for aside from
robbing somebody, right, so cash is dangerous no matter where
you are, and uh and and pays. It gets around
that by allowing the people with the cell phone. I
think it's the country's biggest cell phone provider who's created this.
(38:12):
And you can go to one of the cell phone
company's kiosks. There's like a hundred thousand of them around
the country, and you can say, here's some money, I'd
like it deposited as credits on my phone, and all
of a sudden you have a phone full of money. Well,
the cool thing is you can take that money and
transfer it via text to somebody else's phone, and it's
(38:34):
as simple as that. It's as simple as that. You
go load up your money or your phone with some
money at a kiosk, and then it's up to you
to spend that money however you want. And you can
use your phone to pay things like um for groceries,
for water, for goods and services, all using your phone.
It's basically what everyone who's thinking about the future of
(38:55):
money thinks of when they think of the future of money.
That there's not gonna be dollars or anything like that's
all to just be credits associated with your name. In
this case, with the m PAYSA and Kenya it's associated
with your phone number. Yeah, and it's a big deal.
Now it's not just in Kenya, it's in Tanzania, m Mozambique, Egypt, UH, Sootho, Ghana, India,
(39:16):
UH Democratic Republic of Congo, and then even in a
couple of Eastern European countries now Albanian, Romania. They don't
think it will spread west but you never know. It's
a much bigger deal than anyone thought it was going
to be. I think, well supposedly the the there's a
big push to keep it from spreading westward by the
(39:36):
banking industry because one of the things that makes it
so attractive is there's really low overhead involved in this
and so the the self, the cell phone company is
charging very little interest or fees, so it's way cheaper
to borrow or get or use money through the m
pays the system than it is through traditional banks. Apparently
(39:59):
m pays is just kicking their butts all over the place. Yeah.
And of course what has happened then is that the
banking lobby has started barking all over the world to
block things like MPAs are from coming into their markets. Yeah,
that's what I'm saying, because they would just completely undermine them.
And again, this is basically the future of money. That
(40:19):
there's credits associated with your name, which I mean if
you if you bank virtually online, um, where you your
get your paycheck electronically and you pay your bills um
over over websites and all that, like, that's you're already there. Basically,
it's just dressed up to kind of look like what
(40:40):
you think of as money too, but it's still it's
just credits and numbers associated with your name and in
this case bank account numbers. This is just with your phone,
and it also removes the bank because it puts it
on your phone. So it's up to you a lot
more closely. Shout out to our our episode on currency.
Yes that was a good one. Shout at um. So
(41:03):
then there's this other thing. If you want to get
a little more hippie dippy even um, if you thought
berkshires were crunchy, prepare for the Yeah, I get ready
for time banking. Uh. Time banking is a thing where
you uh, it's a given give and take an exchange
of services, with the core principle being it's all equal.
(41:24):
So if I babysit for your kid, you build my deck,
and the hours are the same that the the value
per hour is the same, right, no matter what you're doing,
it's a value. It's a an hour of your time
and effort. So it sounded kind of cool. It's like
a barter service exchange where basically all you have to
(41:48):
do is get people to agree on that core principle
and then you have kind of the same cool thing
going on in your community. Um. So I went to
their website and there's these little there's a map if
you can view by map, like the places where you
can time bank, and I clicked on. Boy, I feel
like I clicked on about fifty of them, and none
(42:11):
of them had any activity within like three or four years.
I could see that. So I don't know if time
banking took off like they thought. And so then I thought,
you know what, maybe I'm looking in the wrong places.
I was like, let's go to like Burlington, Vermont, And
sure enough, Burlington had had some time banking going on
in like the last week, but other places in Vermont didn't.
(42:34):
I was like, let me go to some really crunchy towns,
and a couple of them looks like they were still
using it. But it doesn't look like I don't know
when this article is written, but I'm not sure how
viable it still is. Well, I mean, I like the
the sentiment as a concept. It's cool. But but I mean,
is are all hours of there, all types of effort equal?
(42:58):
If you agree that they are, they are? I mean, yeah,
sure in that case, for sure, But I I it
just seemed ripe for introducing like um leechers and and
hard feelings and resentiment and stuff like that. Yeah, I
got is he like, well, you fix my fridge, I'll
I'll watch your driveway. What do you mean you know,
(43:19):
I'll stand out there and watch it, make sure it's good.
I'm a driveway watcher. It's an hour. Did you say challenge?
Did you say washer? No? No, no watcher. Rain Showers said,
we can't challenge each other's hours. Uh. And then we
got to finish up with this dude, Mark Boyle, the
moneyless Man yep, which I thought this was pretty admirable. Yeah,
(43:42):
he's He's written a couple of books, one called I
think the first one was called The moneyless Man Colin
A Year of Free Economic Living, and then a more recently,
one called What Have I Done? The more recently called
The Moneyless Manifesto. Uh, both of which are available for
purchase unnoticed. But the money doesn't go to him. They
(44:05):
just dump it into a landfill and it goes to him.
But in his uh, I don't want to slag him.
He does offer it completely free online. Oh that's cool.
If you want to read it for free, uh, it said,
or if you'd like to support the author, you can
buy the paperback. So he was, Um, he basically just said,
I'm gonna live without money for three years. Yeah, it's
like an experiment. He's like, Uh, have you ever heard
(44:27):
of a J. Jacobs? Is that the guy who traded
up from a paper clip to a house? No, he's
just uh, he's a writer in uh in New York
that has done Um. I mean I think they call
it stunt writing, which cheapens it a bit. I think
because he's awesome, but um, yeah, he'll do things like
he did one called the Year of Living Biblically, where
(44:48):
he completely just lived according to the Bible's practices and
stuff like that. So a J like is probably down
with this Mark Boil guy, because a J lives in
New York, so he wouldn't live moneyless, No, I don't.
Yeah he Mark Boyle went out to the woods, right, Yeah,
well he a j listens to the show. Oh hey,
(45:08):
um so this Mark who Mark Boyle may listen to
the show. Who knows if it is free? Um? But
he uh he went out and lived in the woods
and sustained himself through farming, foraging, em bartering, right and
um he basically just said like like money doesn't exist
(45:29):
to me, not like, uh, you could give me money
and I can use it for something like that. Like
he just didn't use money at all. And apparently he
said he was way happier during this time, like it
made him more creative. He had to get by with
his personality or on his personality, so had to make
sure it was a good one. Yeah, that one that
really jumped out at me is something beneficial? Like I
(45:51):
didn't think about that. Like he literally was, like my
currency was was me and my character, And how can
not work on that if that's what you're counting on?
Can't be a jerk to everybody, right, you know you
gotta like you gotta be a good person. Yeah, No
one wants to give a jerk. A free bag of carrots.
(46:11):
You know that's a T shirt. Sure he's Irish by
the way too, which means he's a great person. Right.
Maybe he was at our show in Dublin that wasn't free. No,
I guess he could have snuck in this theft count.
I wouldn't mind. He would have had to have explained
himself that we take stow aways. We do. Don't encourage that.
(46:34):
You're like, we didn't talk about this. Ah, you got
anything else? I got nothing else. Let's see, don't feed
your baby's junk food or alcohol wise words across the board, yes,
no matter the episode agreed. If you want to know
more about living without a bank account, you can take
those words in the search bar at how stuff works
(46:55):
dot com. And since I said how stuff works, it's
time for listening amount. I'm gonna call this uh cool
email from cool Kid. Hey guys, I am Ryan uh
Gun Sorrowsky. I'm sixteen years old. I don listened to
your show, UM since two thousand and ten, when I
(47:17):
was just ten years old. Absolutely, I wanted to email
you guys for so long, UM, and I'm finally doing that.
I found your show through my cousin, and when I
first started listening, I downloaded all the podcast to my
small iPod, all that could hold, and I listened almost
every night before I go to sleep or to go
to sleep with wonderful learning and entertainment, and you two
(47:37):
are masters of So I like this kid all over
the I do too. Last year, you came to Philadelphia
for the live show on Public Relations and I was there.
I was in awe to see you do your show live.
When I was there, I got me thinking I should
complete my task of emailing both of you. So he
came up with an idea and how to share his
story with how he's diagnosed with type one diabetes on
(48:00):
August seven, fourteen. He said, with that came a different
world than the one I knew before. It was tough,
but I knew that others would Type one. I've had
it so much harder than I. I'm doing well and
I'm healthy, which is something I'm proud of. Another reason
I'm writing is maybe you could take this on as
a topic, maybe a two parter, Type one as one
part in Type two as another. Not a bad idea,
(48:22):
not a bad idea. The reason I want to make
that request is that a lot of people don't understand
the difference between the two and you two being the
best at explaining things that I know. I thought you
could totally explain it excellently. Man, this kid has mastered flattery.
He's the best. He's I like this guy a lot.
You have shaped my mind. You too, have shaped my
mind from the very start. Keep doing what you're doing
(48:44):
and keep being the best. Much love, Ryan gunt Siowski
from Pennsylvania. Thanks a lot, Ryan, We appreciate that. If
you want to put this on listener mail, I wouldn't mind.
Wink wink, nudge nudge. What a cool guy. Yeah, he's
a cool dude, Ryan. We appreciate it. We will put
that on the great list of ideas and maybe we'll
(49:06):
do that one day. Yeah. And you know what, Ryan,
if we ever come back and do a show and
Philly or anywhere near you that you can get to
you my friend or on the guest list. Nice, You'll
just have to remind us of that hi writing us
and saying hey give me free tickets in the subject line.
Chuck will be like, wait, who are you? You will
(49:26):
have to show us some idea, though, because there's so
many people who will try to fake it. Now, yes,
and you will probably have to come with your parents
and that'll probably be the tickets are left thunder. Okay,
so we've hammered all this out. This is a thrilling
end to this episode. If you want to get in
touch with this, like cool dude, Ryan did, you can
tweet to us I'm at josh um Clark and then
(49:49):
the official s y s K one is s y
s K podcast. You can hang out with Chuck on
Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant or Stuff you Should Know.
You can send us an email this podcast at howstuf
Works dot com and has always joined us at our
home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com.
(50:12):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff Works dot com
San Francisco, the s Y s K treet Yes, San Francisco, Oakland,
the entire Bay area and dare I say, all of
Silicon Valley. Yeah, we love you. And we're coming back
to Sketch Fest this year in January. Yeah, we're gonna
be there on Sunday, January one pm, a very rare
(00:21):
afternoon show. Uh, and we will be ready to go.
So you guys better be drunk from the night before
or getting drunk for that evening. Yeah, however it crosses over,
I think it'll be proof positive that uh we endorse
afternoon drinking, you know, yeah, you know, a couple of drinks,
maybe it'd be bloody Mary. What were we talking about. Oh, yeah,
(00:43):
we're promoting our show. Oh, that's right. So we're doing
that show on January. Uh. You can go to the
s F Sketch Fest website to get tickets and it's awesome.
It's a great, great comedy festival. Lots of awesome shows
that weekend and for the following weeks. So I encourage you,
like to buy lots of tickets just by ours first. Yeah,
(01:04):
and hurry, hurry, because they're selling out fast. No joke,
that's not a ploy. That's not as a marketing ploy.
They're really selling fast. We get emails every time. Guys,
you told me to hurry, I didn't hurry. I'm shut out.
And since this promos petered out, it ends right now.
Welcome to stuff you should know from how Stuff Works
(01:25):
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark,
and there's Charles W Chuck Bryant, and it's just us.
We've been abandoned this week now. No one was in
there for a second earlier, but it's like home alone.
(01:48):
Ah boy, I love that movie. When it came out.
Oh yeah, yeah. I thought the sequence, the big break
in sequence where he had everything rigged that fifteen or
twenty minute I thought that was one of the funniest
things I've ever seen. It was a pretty good movie.
I just laughed and laughed and laughed. Was that a
John Hughes movie? Yeah? Okay, makes sense that Chicago Suburbs
(02:12):
setting he loved, Yes he did. R I P Chicago
Suburbs alright, P John Hughes. Oh I see that makes
way more sense. Yeah. It was just a couple of
years ago, right, not too long ago, for sure, Within
the last five I would say, Man, all those great movies,
(02:33):
cry baby um in Flamingos, Nope, Apocalypse now, yeah, he's good.
Oh wow. He passed away in two thousand nine, so yeah,
seven years ago. What No? Wow? Yeah, I thought it
was way more recent than that. Time flies in a
world without John Hughes, you know where time doesn't fly
(02:53):
chuck at the beginning of our episodes kind of drag.
That's funny. So today we're talking about the possibility, the
potential of living in this modern American life, this modern
world in general, without a bank account. Yeah, this ended
(03:15):
up being a little more interesting than I thought it
was gonna be. Oh yeah, I'm glad that was the case.
It was less interesting than you thought it was gonna be. No, no,
but I mean we've had some of those before, Like
jack Hammers comes to mind. That was better, it was
going It was the opposite. I was like, wait, wait, wait,
there has to be more on jack Hammers than this. Nope,
(03:38):
that was your pick. Yeah, it was no forever bear
that cross. So you would think that banks in general
is ubiquitous and huge and powerful and um out of
control as they are had been around for millions of years, right,
(03:59):
Terry maybe not millions, tens of thousands of years. Uh.
It turns out actually the bank, the concept of the
bank as we see it today, is actually only about
five hundred or so years old. Yes, I would have
guessed way older than that. Yeah, and I'm glad this
article did a little history there, because I didn't know
(04:20):
any of this stuff. Um, the first actual bank, kind
of modern bank that we think of as a bank,
was the Bank of St. George or the Banco the
San Giogio in Genoa, Italy or is it Genoa. I've
always seen Genoa, Genoa, Genoa, Genoa. So that was um.
(04:44):
And and they point out in this article that wasn't
the invention of banking, because banking is different than a bank. Yeah,
banking actually did start several thousand years ago, as far
as far back as Mesopotamia and Egypt. And this article
says that the that grain started to be kept in
(05:05):
temples in a grain bank, I saw gold. But the
upshot of it was is that these temples that were
built were basically sacrosanc the armies would protect them with
their lives. So it would just make sense that if
you wanted to store something extremely precious and valuable UM
like gold, We'll just put in a temple, so the
(05:27):
earliest reserve banks I guess you could put it, or
temples in Egypt and Mesopotamia. And then one at some
point some of the local people or local rulers came
along and said, hey, I really need some money. You
guys have tons of gold just sitting in there. Can
I borrow some of it? And then I'll give you
that amount back plus a little more for letting me
(05:49):
borrow it? And they said, why should we call this?
And they call it banking. Do you know where that
work came from? No? I don't either, because they probably
didn't call it banking. They probably called it like sun
crow or something like that. So, uh, let's go back
to UM in Italy. And this is when Italy had
(06:14):
a city states. Oh wait, I had more, I had more. Yeah,
it's it actually is kind of interesting. All right, Well,
let me down the machine. Okay, yeah, just keep it idling,
keep on um. They so you had the initial banking practices,
and they kept developing and developing, and then Greece and
(06:34):
Rome really kind of took them and and went to
town with them, and things like UM book transactions where
you could go into a bank in one city in
deposit some money, and the banquet handle credit arranging credit
for you in another city, so you didn't have to
travel from one city to another, which is very dangerous
with a bunch of money on you. It's a book
(06:56):
transaction that came from like the Greeks and the Romans,
and these were going to smoothly. And then Rome fell
and it was replaced by the Holy Roman Empire, which
was a Christian empire, and Christianity had this very strict
rule against usury, and usury today means extremely high interest rates,
(07:16):
whereas at at the origin of the word it meant
just charging interests at all. So there was no money
whatsoever in banking UM, so there weren't any bankers. Well,
the Jewish faith didn't have any rules against usury. So
as the Holy Roman Empire was in in UH in
(07:36):
power for these several hundred years, they fulfilled the banking
UH industry UH until finally about the I think thirteenth
and fourteenth century when UM, like the Italians started to
get into it and they kind of created that that
UM modern banking system that we see today. Can I
(07:57):
get back in, Yeah? Can I? Can we go to
fourteen o eight, Yes, specifically March fourteen o eight. This
is UM, like I teased before in Italy, this is
the at the time of the city state UM, when
(08:17):
you would go to war with one another within your
own country UM. Specifically in this case, UH, Genoa was
getting UH trod upon by Venice. Long long war with
Venice big rivals. And basically as what happens many times
in war is it's sort of bled that city state
(08:40):
of Genoa dry and it was in bad shape. So
these folks got together. I did look it up. I
can't remember who it was, though, the initial investors UM
that started the Bank of St. George, and he said, hey,
let's create this thing and like literally in a building, UH,
it will be a bank and we can finance reap
aim it of all these war debts UH and earn
(09:03):
a little seven percent on top interest on top of
it all. And in fact we got a better idea.
Why don't we even have the power to go and
collect uh city taxes and customs and stuff to make
sure we get paid back. And it worked, Yeah, it did.
They brought Genera out of bankruptcy and apparently the bank
(09:24):
went on until the nineteenth century, like four hundred years George, Yeah,
it is cool. Um. One of the reasons probably why
it was successful is that the people who were overseeing
it were directly invested into the bank, like substantially, Like
if you were one of the treasurers, you had to
um invest at least sixteen thousand lira, which is several
(09:47):
hundred thousand dollars in today's money, um directly into the bank, right, So,
so you wanted to see that bank succeed like crazy
because you were directly invested in it, and if the
bank went under, you stood to lose quite a bit.
That's that's not the case with banks today. I mean
companies and I'm sure including banks too like their employees
(10:08):
to be invested in the company. But certainly there it's
not a requirement that you have several hundred thousand dollars
worth of your company's stock to be a director of
the bank. And then the bank itself can very easily
be overextended, um, just because of what are called reserve requirements. Right,
we should do like a whole episode on banking, by
(10:29):
the way, Yeah, boy, especially that that fall out recently
with Wells Fargo. Oh about the fake um, the fake accounts, dude,
have you seen the ad that they have about it.
They have this ad and it's almost like they shaved
off the first five seconds where they admit that their
(10:52):
people created all these fraudulent accounts, right, and then the
ad comes in at everyone who has affected will be
fully refunded. We want to gain your trust back. But
they never say specifically what they're talking about, like they
never cop to it. Like it's bizarre. You know that thing,
it makes it stand out like a sore thumb, you know. Yeah,
(11:14):
it's an oily, oily, weasily add and they have it
like it's you know, they've got the Wells Fargo guy
like running in the background to distract you, to make
you think about your childhood, playing with stage coaches and stuff,
and Elizabeth Warren is somewhere like blood dripping out of
our eyeballs. Yeah, yeah, for Elizabeth Warren circus two ten right,
(11:37):
So yeah, no, I mean she's watching the commercial and
crying blood tears. No, I'm saying, Elizabeth Warren circus, who's
who doesn't ten would have? I think these days she's
like whatever, No, man, she laid into him? Oh did
she go after him? Oh yeah, yeah, you gotta see
that that video. That was pretty awesome. Well, good for her.
(11:59):
When was that may oh, when when she lambasted him? Yeah,
it was right after it happened. It was like, you know,
a month, a month or two ago, okay, because I
feel like she was a little more lionized in the
last several years than she has been lately. Yeah, I
mean she she went after specifically. I mean she just
read the riot Act to the CEO. That's good, and
(12:19):
was like, are you going to give back your bonus money?
Like this happened on your watch? Why don't you give
that money back? He was like, who are you talking
to me? But one of the one of the things
I wanted to say though about banks, um that that
is just such in such stark contrast to the idea
where you used to have to um contribute your own money. Um.
(12:42):
The reserve requirements of banks. I was looking into this, Chuck,
you ready, if if if there's a ten percent reserve
requirement of um that a bank has, and they they
have a hundred dollars, they can loan out ninety of
that hundred dollars to somebody, right, Okay, so they have
(13:02):
a ten percent in reserve. Now, let's say that that
person um writes a check for that ninety dollars, like
they borrowed that hundred bucks to um to, or they
borrowed that ninety bucks to pay off a debt. So
they write a check for that ninety bucks to somebody
who banks with that bank, So that ninety bucks comes
right back to that bank, right they they can loan
(13:28):
of that, and so on and so forth until this
one hundred dollar chunk can be like loaned and repaid
and loan and repaid all over the place, which makes sense,
and it keeps everything kind of going um financially. But
the problem is that if something happens, if a panic
sets in. This is why runs on banks are so
um such travesties, and everybody calls in their loan all
(13:52):
at once. Well, there's a lot of people who are
calling in that one single hundred dollar hundred dollars rather
than having the time to pay to to to pay
it back and then call it in from somebody else
and use that to pay the other person back. It's
just a big cluster all at once. That makes sense.
(14:12):
That's just one of the many interesting things about banks. Yeah,
I mean, there are clearly other podcasts that we should
tie to this one, I think, but since this one
is about not banking, we'll take a break. Here, go
withdraw our funds, and we'll be right back. All right. So,
(14:53):
if you live in modern society today, uh, it is
pretty tough to get by without a bank. Um, most
cases these days, you have well I don't know about
most cases, but in many cases you have automatic deposits
of your of your work checks. A lot of people
(15:16):
pay their bills wirelessly online directly from their bank. Uh.
You might have a student loan, you might have a
car loan, you might have your house mortgage, you might
pay your credit card bills. All of this stuff is
running through a bank most likely. And you would think
it's probably impossible to not have a bank account these days.
(15:39):
And I would say pretty much all Americans have them.
Not true, You well know, pretty much all Americans do. Like, yeah,
but that's not all. No, No, it's true. Yes, seven
percent of Americans do not have bank accounts. About nine
million people last year in two thousand fifteen did not
(15:59):
have bank accounts. Not million peoples, a lot of people. No,
it really is, um, and apparently that's that's households, sorry,
not people. Yeah, you're right, you're right. That is a
big distinction to UM. And the f d i C said, man,
that's the lowest since we've been tracking this by far,
And someone said, well, how long have you been tracking this?
They said, well, of the last six years really yeah,
(16:23):
which I'm like, really that's when they started tracking it.
But apparently so two thousand nine. So if you want
another number, that's the nine million American households don't have
bank accounts at all. Uh. Then there are twenty five
million households in addition to that, so that makes almost
that's like thirty four million households, which that's a substantial
number at this point. The twenty million or what's called
(16:46):
underbank meaning they may have a bank account, but they
don't use the bank account. Yeah, they don't use it because, UM,
they are probably afraid of overdraft fees, or they have uh,
maybe a bank account that got grandfathered in so that
(17:07):
they don't have to pay minimum amount fees UM and
who knows. There's all sorts of reasons for people to
not use a bank account that they they have, UM,
but probably chief among them is overdraft, which you'll talk
more about. Yeah, and the majority of these underbank people
in the United States are poor usually um, A lot
(17:30):
of times, their minorities, a lot of times they are
less educated. Um. And these communities, I mean, there's there's
a few reasons why they may not want to use
a bank. One, maybe they don't trust banks. And if
you look in the history of the United States, are
certainly even we're just talking about the Wells Fargo scandal.
Like when you see stuff like that on the news, um,
(17:52):
it should be upsetting to everyone. But obviously if you're
poor and you don't have a lot of money, that
will that may scare you into not wanting to use
a bank at all, right, you know. Yeah. And another
one is that the overdraft fees, which so basically, I
guess in two thousand one, the current overdraft fee idea
(18:15):
scam you could call. It was set up as a
way to generate like way more money for banks, right.
And the way that overdraft fees generate money for banks
is when you are overdrafted on your account, they can
charge you a fee for covering that amount, right, and
then you still have to deposit that amount, but they
(18:38):
don't return your check. They cover, They cover the check
that you paid, but they charge you a fee, say
like thirty five dollars for that amount. And it seems
fine and dandy and everything's fine. But there's something called
clearing checks from high to low, right, okay, where the
bank will clear checks in descending order of value. So
(18:59):
if you have of UM a hundred dollars in in
your bank account and you have a checkout for a
hundred and fifty dollars, check out for twenty dollars, to
check out for five, and to check out for fifteen dollars. Right,
if they cleared the lower amounts first and then the
last one, only the last one would bounce and create
(19:21):
an overdraft fee. If they start with the bigger one,
well you've got an overdraft draft fee right out of
the gate. But then you also have three more because
the other smaller checks all bounced as well, and so
instead of one over draft fee, they get to charge
you four overdraft fees UM. And that was a huge
thing when when that was finally reported and exposed, and
(19:42):
that actually resulted in that UM rule that now you
UM either I think you have to opt in for
overdraft protection, whereas before you had to opt out. Yeah.
I remember back in the day when I was broke
as back and I would overdraft things in there, I remember,
(20:03):
and I knew nothing about how things worked with finances.
Still don't really, but um, I just remember thinking, like
I would rather it's say no, you you like, don't
cover me and then charge me. Just just say no,
you don't have the funds, right, that's the smart way
to do it. So I never understood, like it was
(20:23):
like I think they even called it overdraft insurance maybe
at the time, or I might be making it up.
I seem to remember them saying that, and I was like,
I don't want that, like just to like let the
check bounce and I'll take it up with them. Yeah.
The way it was marketed though, was like hey, we
we we value you. We want to make sure that
(20:43):
you can pay all your bills. So if something happens
and you're overdrafted, we'll cover it. We're just going to
charge you a fee. And it sounds good. But again,
when you go from high to low and all of
a sudden your overdraft fees go from one to four
or five or however many, um, you know, that's a
huge problem. Well, and the people that are overdrafting in
the people that are at least able to afford those
(21:04):
fees exactly. So it's a disproportionate burden on the poor,
which makes it as a scam, one of the more
evil scams around. Yes, it's just wrong man. So so yeah,
the idea that that if you are if you open
an account, you should not opt in for overdraft protection.
(21:25):
And that's easy to say when when you're talking about
checks for like, um, you're writing a check for a
mountain dew and some cheetos, you know, who cares if
you if you're if you're short for that, you can
go without that. But you know, when you're talking about
like your rent check or like an actual grocery bill
or something like that, you know, it sucks that that
you can't get that stuff. But it's better to have
(21:48):
to put a couple of things back than to pay
thirty five dollars for one two dollar item that that
you went over by. Yeah, that's a good point. And
this was in my case too. This is also back
in the day when you uh, I mean a lot
of times it was a mystery how much you had
in your account, Like you couldn't just get on your
phone and and before you write the check and be like, oh, well, no,
(22:09):
I don't have enough money to cover this. Yeah, because
even if you balanced your checkbook, sometimes you forgot to
carry the one like it wasn't always a d percent
in accurate. And if you had a life, you didn't
necessarily rectify your bank checkbook every day. Oh wait, what
is balancing a checkbook means? Serious? Yeah? Thank god for
my wife. Um. So another reason you might avoid a bank,
(22:32):
uh is philosophically. You may um, you may have that
there may be a longstanding distrust of banks in your
family that you don't want to put your money in.
Or you may just want to be like, you know what,
I don't want to take part in this modern society.
I want to kind of drop out a bit. And
a really good first move is to shut your bank
(22:53):
account down. That's a big statement. Oh yeah it is,
you know, but a lot of people that are under
banked and don't have accounts aren't. They're on purpose. It's
not some philosophical statement. A lot of times is simply
because uh, they are poor and they don't have a
(23:13):
lot of alternatives. Yeah. And the other thing about um
about not having a bank account. Not only do you
not have a bank account, you also are like basically
just avoiding banks altogether. There's plenty of other things that
banks offer, like loans and mortgage stuff like that. Yeah, yeah,
maybe some free nasty coffee UM. But the so when
(23:36):
you're when you don't have a banking account, that's like
the the most basic unit of the banking world. Right.
If you don't have that, you obviously aren't going to
be exposed all these other things that can help things
like um build your credit history through like a revolving
loan UM or a mortgage or a car loan or
something like that that you can build up your credit
(23:57):
for and ultimately save money. UM. So when you don't
have a bank account for whatever reason, you are effectively
out of the banking system. The problem is, you can
live parallel to the banking system outside of it, but
it can be really dangerous, especially if you're just dealing
with cash, because that cash has to stay somewhere, and
(24:18):
whether it's on you or in your mattress or in
a coffee can in your backyard, you're you're exposed for
for having that UM readily available to anybody who finds
it or comes into your house with a gun to
get it, which is another thing that sucks. Yeah, there's
no insurance for that. You know, if you lose your cash,
you lose your cash. So one thing that people rely
(24:42):
on sometimes these days as an alternative source for a
loan at least is something called a payday lender. You
might have seen these little brick and mortar shops with
UM with the the neon sign in the window. Cash
now available to you, uh X business day stuff like that. UM,
(25:03):
you can you can go to these places. It's a
quick application process. UH won't affect your credit score sometimes
UM that you know, they'll say that if it doesn't,
and you can get money like the next business day.
If you want three hundred bucks, you can go in
there and get three hundred bucks. But you're gonna pay
a fee on that UM and it's big, they say,
(25:25):
the fees if you pay back within eight days, it
works out if you if you put it on a
scale of a p R annual percentage rate of like
three d is what you're paying on that loan. I
saw one for a hundred dollar loan on cash net
usas site. UM for a one hundred loan pay back
in eight days for their flat fee and the interest
(25:47):
you pay six It's one of those things, man, when
you see this and you're like, man, how can you
not look at it as bilking poor people out of
more money? Well, some people who use payday lenders say, hey,
if you look at this, you when you look at
their rates in terms, it's all laid out. It's not
(26:08):
some crazy percentage I have to figure out and come
up with compounding interest or anything like that. It is
it says, if you borrow one hundred dollars, you have
to pay us back one hundred and fifteen dollars. There's
a like a ten dollar service fee, and then for
a hundred dollars it's five five dollars in interest. Right,
So that's what you owe us is a hundred and
fifteen dollars. It doesn't require a lot of thought, a
(26:30):
lot of um. There's not a lot of wiggle room
for them to um to add more fees or anything
like that. It's you know what you have to pay back.
But that said, they they very quickly can comprise a
trap payday lending trap that people get caught in, especially
when they start rolling over loans. Yeah, and you know
(26:53):
when I said it's like hard to not look at
it that way, it's because it's it's not like it
just feels like, hey, these people have their backs up
against the wall and they really need two hundred bucks exactly,
so you can come get it from us. But then
of course there are another complete other set of people
that say, yeah, dude, that's the deal, and you know what,
(27:13):
don't use that place then right right there. The thing
is that some people are saying, Okay, that's a that's
a valid philosophy, but you need to have an alternative
that's fair for people, because people need loans, people get overextended,
emergencies come up, there's just things that people need money
for legitimately, and like they shouldn't have to be preyed upon.
(27:37):
So one of the alternatives that's been proposed is to
get the regular standard banking industry involved in small um
short term loans. Is what a paid a loan is
um and six to ten times less, right exactly. But
you would, as far as the bank's concerned, the customer
(27:58):
would still be paying way more than what the standard
APR that a normal bank charges, but to the customer
it would be way less than what they're paying to
the payday lending place. UM. I'm not sure why banks
aren't into this yet. I don't know. I got the
impression that there might be some regulation that prevents them
from being involved, or they're just not interested. But that
(28:20):
seems to be the key, because that also would seem
to be a pretty good gateway to getting people who
wanted to have a bank account into the banking um
network by starting out with a small a small loan.
You know you would think so you would? UM? What else?
Prepaid credit cards? Those are more and more popular these days.
(28:42):
You can get them at a convenience store. You can
load money onto it, use it like a regular old
debit card. What I say, credit card, debit card, and
it's just what you think it is. UM. Here's the
deal with those is uh? They are really really easy
to scam. UM. In two thousand thirteen, the Federal Trade
(29:02):
Commission got eighty five thousand complaints totally forty three million
dollars in in scam frauds with debit cards. What do
you mean like, there's no they're they're almost impossible to
track anything after purchase, impossible to trace. So it's it's
(29:23):
really easy. It's like a prime opportunity for someone to
to scam someone. Like if someone says, hey, uh, we
request payment from a prepaid credit debit card, then once
they have that information, they can just go use it.
And it's not like they have some bank behind it
that can trace it and track it down and it's
it's it's just a really easy way to scam people
(29:45):
out of money. UM. And that's just one of the
problems with them. Well, despite that, the UM they've grown
incredibly in popularity in the US Between two thousand three
and two thousand twelve, the amount deposited I'm prepaid debit
card went from one billion to sixty five billion dollars
between two thousand three and two thousand nine years up
(30:07):
to sixty five billion dollars right from one billion UM.
And this this despite the easy scam ability, but also
getting kind of scammed by the people who legitimately run
these prepaid debit card companies, Like apparently there's fees for
everything from like loading your card, which you usually do
(30:28):
it an a t M, using an a t M,
checking your balance. Um, there's just a lot of additional
fees that really kind of quickly sapped the amount of
money on your prepaid debit card. So fortunately UM, the
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau stepped in and as of the
last month, is it December yet? Okay? So as of
(30:53):
October of two thousand and sixteen, there's new rules that
say that if you are prepaid debit card company, you
have to disclose your terms up front. You have to
let people UM find out their balance for free. UM
cuts on on some of the fees. They have to opt.
They have to be able to UM have the option
to not have overdraft charges, overdraft protection. It's a lot.
(31:15):
It's a lot more regulated now as of last month. Yeah,
but I wonder what if it's the same thing as
like banking. If they they're like, sure, we'll disclose that
in a fifty page document and that no one ever reads.
Like what they need to do is say how they
need to disclose this. Yeah, that's true. Some guys to
come to your house, maybe bring a little dinner and
(31:39):
and just tell you straight up. All right, I got
a little worked up, so I'm gonna go splash my
face with egnog and how many right back after this?
(32:12):
All right, Chuck. So let's say that you don't feel
like getting scammed by anybody. Nope, you just want to
be free. Yeah. Uh, what what can you do? What
are some of the things you can do? Well, um,
there are a few things that you can do. You
can try an alternative currency. So if you want to
(32:37):
be really weird dollars, that's what you mean. No, I'm
talking about Well we've talked about bitcoin. Um, is that
even still a thing? Did that go out? No? No,
it's still there's much a thing. Yeah, okay, I didn't.
I think it's just maturing and growing constantly. So we
did an episode on bitcoin. But I had no idea
that there are alternative currencies in communities all over the world,
(33:02):
but right here in the US and had no idea.
And it's a really cool thing, I think. Yeah, like
burk shares. You looked into berk shares, right, Yeah, burke
Shares a very clever name because it is a western
Massachusetts and the Burke Shears launched in two thousand six. Uh.
They have sixteen branch offices and four local banks that
(33:23):
support where you can actually get a berk share trade
in your money for burke shares um four hundred participating businesses.
So here's here's what it is, and in fact, I'm
even gonna read directly from their website because it just
makes a lot more sense. It can get a little convoluted.
Can we get some background music? You probably should something
(33:46):
berk Shire. So there's a five percent discount, and here's
how it works. They follow a hundred dollars UH through
a day to explain it. So wait, tell tell us
when you start the quote. Right, ready, here we go.
You go to a bank and you purchase your birth
shares because you want to go to a restaurant that night.
Let's say, Uh, you go in with ninety five U S.
(34:07):
Dollars and you say I would like to exchange of this,
So they give you one hundred birth shares back. Yeah. Right,
So you go to your dinner, your dinners, let's say
a hundred bucks right on the nose. The restaurant takes
your birth shares, takes all one hundred of them. You
pay your whole bill and your birth shares, and so
you have actually spent ninety five U S. Dollars for
(34:27):
a one dollar meal. So you've gotten your little five
percent discount. Then the owner of that restaurant has that
hundred birth shares they want to deposit that for real money,
or let's just say us dollars, return them to that bank.
They bring him to the bank and the bank deposits
that hundred birk shares and gives the restaurant the ninety
five dollars, the same ninety five bucks that you exchange.
(34:50):
So in the end you get that five percent discount
because all because of that initial exchange, that same ninety
five dollars you traded for the Berkshires goes to the
business where you spend it. Yeah, So that's yeah, and
that's that's the key to this whole alternative hyperlocal currency
is that it's intended to keep goods and services and
(35:14):
within the community. Yeah, because you can't go spend a
Berkshire anywhere else but the Berkshires. They'll say, what is
this weird looking bill? Where are you from the future
or something? And it's actually very cool looking. It's not
weird looking. I looked it up. The one Berkshire unit
is uh Mohican, the original inhabitants of the Berkshires. The
five is W. E. B. Dubois born in Barrington. The
(35:38):
ten is Robin van In, co founder of the community
supported Agricultural movement Indian Line Farm. This just keeps getting better.
The twenty is Herman Melville, awesome, author of Moby Dick.
Of course. The fifty is Norman Rockwell. Is it a
Rockwell painting of Rockwell? No, it's just Rockwell. And then
(36:01):
the one thousand Berkshire it's a photo of him drunk
on account. Yeah, pretty much. The one thousand Berkshire is
John Hodgman. Yeah, he's the National Treasure, not just the
Berkshire Treasure. Now I'm just kidding. There is no one thousand.
But it's cool. They have their own money, and it's
like it just is a really really cool thing, like
(36:22):
you're you're spending. There's, like I said, four hundred participating businesses,
so it seems like a really successful program. And there's
a lot others. There's the Toronto Dollars, Salt Spring Dollars,
Ithaca Hours, uh, but the Berkshire seems to be like
one of the more robust programs. Yeah, I mean I
had heard of it before. I hadn't heard of the
(36:43):
other ones. I think Detroit has one as well, um,
but the Berkshire's i'd heard of before, so it must
be doing pretty well well And this is nothing new.
In the early, like into the early nineteen hundreds, local
currencies were a big thing. Oh yeah, like every bank
could legally print money for the federal government finally said no,
we're really the only ones who can print money. And
(37:04):
there were I think like a hundred or a thousand
or ten thousand or some ridiculous amount of currencies in
the United States up until like the eighteen sixties. Yeah,
that's crazy. What about the m paisa? Have you heard
of that before? I hadn't heard of that, but it's
it's really pretty cool as well. So m paisa is
stands for mobile paysa paysa means um money in Swahili,
(37:27):
and it's this kind of new alternative currency that's um
come up in Kenya in the last few years, right
right right, I forgot that part. Um. So in Kenya
most people don't have bank accounts, but they do have
cell phones and they rely on cash a lot. Well.
As we said before, cash can be very dangerous. There's
(37:48):
all sorts of bad guys out there who need or
want cash for their own But I don't feel like,
you know, going out and doing anything for aside from
robbing somebody, right, so cash is dangerous no matter where
you are, and uh and and pays. It gets around
that by allowing the people with the cell phone. I
think it's the country's biggest cell phone provider who's created this.
(38:12):
And you can go to one of the cell phone
company's kiosks. There's like a hundred thousand of them around
the country, and you can say, here's some money, I'd
like it deposited as credits on my phone, and all
of a sudden you have a phone full of money. Well,
the cool thing is you can take that money and
transfer it via text to somebody else's phone, and it's
(38:34):
as simple as that. It's as simple as that. You
go load up your money or your phone with some
money at a kiosk, and then it's up to you
to spend that money however you want. And you can
use your phone to pay things like um for groceries,
for water, for goods and services, all using your phone.
It's basically what everyone who's thinking about the future of
(38:55):
money thinks of when they think of the future of money.
That there's not gonna be dollars or anything like that's
all to just be credits associated with your name. In
this case, with the m PAYSA and Kenya it's associated
with your phone number. Yeah, and it's a big deal.
Now it's not just in Kenya, it's in Tanzania, m Mozambique, Egypt, UH, Sootho, Ghana, India,
(39:16):
UH Democratic Republic of Congo, and then even in a
couple of Eastern European countries now Albanian, Romania. They don't
think it will spread west but you never know. It's
a much bigger deal than anyone thought it was going
to be. I think, well supposedly the the there's a
big push to keep it from spreading westward by the
(39:36):
banking industry because one of the things that makes it
so attractive is there's really low overhead involved in this
and so the the self, the cell phone company is
charging very little interest or fees, so it's way cheaper
to borrow or get or use money through the m
pays the system than it is through traditional banks. Apparently
(39:59):
m pays is just kicking their butts all over the place. Yeah.
And of course what has happened then is that the
banking lobby has started barking all over the world to
block things like MPAs are from coming into their markets. Yeah,
that's what I'm saying, because they would just completely undermine them.
And again, this is basically the future of money. That
(40:19):
there's credits associated with your name, which I mean if
you if you bank virtually online, um, where you your
get your paycheck electronically and you pay your bills um
over over websites and all that, like, that's you're already there. Basically,
it's just dressed up to kind of look like what
(40:40):
you think of as money too, but it's still it's
just credits and numbers associated with your name and in
this case bank account numbers. This is just with your phone,
and it also removes the bank because it puts it
on your phone. So it's up to you a lot
more closely. Shout out to our our episode on currency.
Yes that was a good one. Shout at um. So
(41:03):
then there's this other thing. If you want to get
a little more hippie dippy even um, if you thought
berkshires were crunchy, prepare for the Yeah, I get ready
for time banking. Uh. Time banking is a thing where
you uh, it's a given give and take an exchange
of services, with the core principle being it's all equal.
(41:24):
So if I babysit for your kid, you build my deck,
and the hours are the same that the the value
per hour is the same, right, no matter what you're doing,
it's a value. It's a an hour of your time
and effort. So it sounded kind of cool. It's like
a barter service exchange where basically all you have to
(41:48):
do is get people to agree on that core principle
and then you have kind of the same cool thing
going on in your community. Um. So I went to
their website and there's these little there's a map if
you can view by map, like the places where you
can time bank, and I clicked on. Boy, I feel
like I clicked on about fifty of them, and none
(42:11):
of them had any activity within like three or four years.
I could see that. So I don't know if time
banking took off like they thought. And so then I thought,
you know what, maybe I'm looking in the wrong places.
I was like, let's go to like Burlington, Vermont, And
sure enough, Burlington had had some time banking going on
in like the last week, but other places in Vermont didn't.
(42:34):
I was like, let me go to some really crunchy towns,
and a couple of them looks like they were still
using it. But it doesn't look like I don't know
when this article is written, but I'm not sure how
viable it still is. Well, I mean, I like the
the sentiment as a concept. It's cool. But but I mean,
is are all hours of there, all types of effort equal?
(42:58):
If you agree that they are, they are? I mean, yeah,
sure in that case, for sure, But I I it
just seemed ripe for introducing like um leechers and and
hard feelings and resentiment and stuff like that. Yeah, I
got is he like, well, you fix my fridge, I'll
I'll watch your driveway. What do you mean you know,
(43:19):
I'll stand out there and watch it, make sure it's good.
I'm a driveway watcher. It's an hour. Did you say challenge?
Did you say washer? No? No, no watcher. Rain Showers said,
we can't challenge each other's hours. Uh. And then we
got to finish up with this dude, Mark Boyle, the
moneyless Man yep, which I thought this was pretty admirable. Yeah,
(43:42):
he's He's written a couple of books, one called I
think the first one was called The moneyless Man Colin
A Year of Free Economic Living, and then a more recently,
one called What Have I Done? The more recently called
The Moneyless Manifesto. Uh, both of which are available for
purchase unnoticed. But the money doesn't go to him. They
(44:05):
just dump it into a landfill and it goes to him.
But in his uh, I don't want to slag him.
He does offer it completely free online. Oh that's cool.
If you want to read it for free, uh, it said,
or if you'd like to support the author, you can
buy the paperback. So he was, Um, he basically just said,
I'm gonna live without money for three years. Yeah, it's
like an experiment. He's like, Uh, have you ever heard
(44:27):
of a J. Jacobs? Is that the guy who traded
up from a paper clip to a house? No, he's
just uh, he's a writer in uh in New York
that has done Um. I mean I think they call
it stunt writing, which cheapens it a bit. I think
because he's awesome, but um, yeah, he'll do things like
he did one called the Year of Living Biblically, where
(44:48):
he completely just lived according to the Bible's practices and
stuff like that. So a J like is probably down
with this Mark Boil guy, because a J lives in
New York, so he wouldn't live moneyless, No, I don't.
Yeah he Mark Boyle went out to the woods, right, Yeah,
well he a j listens to the show. Oh hey,
(45:08):
um so this Mark who Mark Boyle may listen to
the show. Who knows if it is free? Um? But
he uh he went out and lived in the woods
and sustained himself through farming, foraging, em bartering, right and
um he basically just said like like money doesn't exist
(45:29):
to me, not like, uh, you could give me money
and I can use it for something like that. Like
he just didn't use money at all. And apparently he
said he was way happier during this time, like it
made him more creative. He had to get by with
his personality or on his personality, so had to make
sure it was a good one. Yeah, that one that
really jumped out at me is something beneficial? Like I
(45:51):
didn't think about that. Like he literally was, like my
currency was was me and my character, And how can
not work on that if that's what you're counting on?
Can't be a jerk to everybody, right, you know you
gotta like you gotta be a good person. Yeah, No
one wants to give a jerk. A free bag of carrots.
(46:11):
You know that's a T shirt. Sure he's Irish by
the way too, which means he's a great person. Right.
Maybe he was at our show in Dublin that wasn't free. No,
I guess he could have snuck in this theft count.
I wouldn't mind. He would have had to have explained
himself that we take stow aways. We do. Don't encourage that.
(46:34):
You're like, we didn't talk about this. Ah, you got
anything else? I got nothing else. Let's see, don't feed
your baby's junk food or alcohol wise words across the board, yes,
no matter the episode agreed. If you want to know
more about living without a bank account, you can take
those words in the search bar at how stuff works
(46:55):
dot com. And since I said how stuff works, it's
time for listening amount. I'm gonna call this uh cool
email from cool Kid. Hey guys, I am Ryan uh
Gun Sorrowsky. I'm sixteen years old. I don listened to
your show, UM since two thousand and ten, when I
(47:17):
was just ten years old. Absolutely, I wanted to email
you guys for so long, UM, and I'm finally doing that.
I found your show through my cousin, and when I
first started listening, I downloaded all the podcast to my
small iPod, all that could hold, and I listened almost
every night before I go to sleep or to go
to sleep with wonderful learning and entertainment, and you two
(47:37):
are masters of So I like this kid all over
the I do too. Last year, you came to Philadelphia
for the live show on Public Relations and I was there.
I was in awe to see you do your show live.
When I was there, I got me thinking I should
complete my task of emailing both of you. So he
came up with an idea and how to share his
story with how he's diagnosed with type one diabetes on
(48:00):
August seven, fourteen. He said, with that came a different
world than the one I knew before. It was tough,
but I knew that others would Type one. I've had
it so much harder than I. I'm doing well and
I'm healthy, which is something I'm proud of. Another reason
I'm writing is maybe you could take this on as
a topic, maybe a two parter, Type one as one
part in Type two as another. Not a bad idea,
(48:22):
not a bad idea. The reason I want to make
that request is that a lot of people don't understand
the difference between the two and you two being the
best at explaining things that I know. I thought you
could totally explain it excellently. Man, this kid has mastered flattery.
He's the best. He's I like this guy a lot.
You have shaped my mind. You too, have shaped my
mind from the very start. Keep doing what you're doing
(48:44):
and keep being the best. Much love, Ryan gunt Siowski
from Pennsylvania. Thanks a lot, Ryan, We appreciate that. If
you want to put this on listener mail, I wouldn't mind.
Wink wink, nudge nudge. What a cool guy. Yeah, he's
a cool dude, Ryan. We appreciate it. We will put
that on the great list of ideas and maybe we'll
(49:06):
do that one day. Yeah. And you know what, Ryan,
if we ever come back and do a show and
Philly or anywhere near you that you can get to
you my friend or on the guest list. Nice, You'll
just have to remind us of that hi writing us
and saying hey give me free tickets in the subject line.
Chuck will be like, wait, who are you? You will
(49:26):
have to show us some idea, though, because there's so
many people who will try to fake it. Now, yes,
and you will probably have to come with your parents
and that'll probably be the tickets are left thunder. Okay,
so we've hammered all this out. This is a thrilling
end to this episode. If you want to get in
touch with this, like cool dude, Ryan did, you can
tweet to us I'm at josh um Clark and then
(49:49):
the official s y s K one is s y
s K podcast. You can hang out with Chuck on
Facebook at Charles W. Chuck Bryant or Stuff you Should Know.
You can send us an email this podcast at howstuf
Works dot com and has always joined us at our
home on the web, Stuff you Should Know dot com.
(50:12):
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff Works dot com
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