[on-hold music] It's Quinn. Maybe you're like me, and sometimes you just spiral out, not just because everything is a lot all of the time, but because some part of you actually wants to do something about it.
But, I mean, holy shit, where to start, right? Great news. We built an app for that. It's called What Can I Do? Even better news, it's free and it's fast. It takes just three clicks to start unfucking the world.
Visit whatcanido.earth to get started for free.
[on-hold music] If our mission is to help people, everyone, answer the most important question, what can I do?
Then at some point, we need to talk to the people who help really wealthy people help people. So today's question, what can I do about high net worth philanthropy? And look, hey,
maybe you're among the vast majority who just heard that and they're like, "Well, this one doesn't apply to me," but hear me out. We have some of the worst billionaires of all time.
But if billionaires are gonna continue to exist, we all need to have a good idea of how we can push them to distribute their resources more effectively and ASAP.
And I truly do believe that among high net worth individuals, there are some, especially younger folks, that are dying to do exactly that. So
whether that is you or definitely not you, or maybe you are adjacent to someone like that, I think there's something for everyone here, and I'd appreciate you listening and sharing this conversation.
Because every week, thousands of people ask us the most important question in the world, what can I do?
And so every week, I turn around and ask someone who actually knows what they're talking about the very same question. I am your host, Quinn Emmett, and my guest today is Sharon Schneider.
Sharon is the founder of Integrated Capital Strategies, LLC, a consulting firm that helps founders and family offices create positive social change using an expanded toolbox of resources and strategies that spans the return spectrum from grants to market rate investments.
She's also the author of Handbook for an Integrated Life, A Practical Guide for Aligning Your Everyday Choices With Your Internal Compass, a number one new release on Amazon that helps individuals live into their values the same way her consulting helps business owners and family offices.
Sharon previously served as the executive director of the Telluride Foundation, the founding director of the Walton Personal Philanthropy Group, and the co-founder and CEO of Moxie Gene, a for-profit social enterprise that was acquired by Skoola in two thousand and fifteen.
Sharon was named a Colorado Governor's Fellow in two thousand and twenty-two, and in two thousand and twenty-four was named an Aspen Institute Finance Leaders Fellow and a member of the Aspen Global Leadership Network.
Again, I really do think there's something for everyone here. This is a really important conversation in a time of growing inequality. We gotta help more people.
So for questions, feedback, responses, whatever you got, email us at questions@importantnotimportant.com. [on-hold music] I'm very excited about this.
I will have done a whole intro without you. I won't put you through that, so that means we get to jump right into it. Do you have any questions, thoughts, dreams, visions before we get going?
You know, my question, I think, is just who is your audience? Who's the target audience for this? For sure. Is it people, like, with wealth? Is it regular everyday people or some combination of both?
We should be universal. It's a really good question. I, I think this is very different. I mean, we've done, you know, two hundred something of these, and they're usually targeted at all of our listeners, right?
Which is to say, "Look, we don't care how you show up as long as it's an effective way to do that," and we try to give you the tools to do that.
If you can't donate right now or ever, then you can volunteer or you can learn about something and be a bottleneck on misinformation. Whatever it might be. You're a teacher, great. Got it all.
If you can donate some amount, three bucks a month, that's a great way in, and hopefully it doesn't overextend you too much.
But we do have listeners, and obviously in a time of a lot of inequality, who could potentially move some mountains that need to be moved.
And so I would like to target this specific conversation towards them, which a bunch of people might hear this and think, "This is not for me," but maybe they know somebody who this is applicable to.
And that's really my aim with this one because I don't think enough of those folks are being reached, and I know a fair amount of them, not just through work, friends, family, things like that, who understand
the options that are available to them, frankly, if they can get through their family drama, and we can talk about that as well. Does that make sense? Does that answer the question? Yes. And 'cause I will say my book,
which I wrote, it came out maybe three years ago, was much more aimed at everyday people. Yep. And then I thought it was quite separate from my day job, actually, which is- Sure...
working with, you know, ultra-wealthy families. And then the most recent paper, which I think is how we got here- Mm-hmm...
on, you know, meet the integrator in family offices, was, like, sort of applying all of that to the family office context, like, to the ultra-wealthy context. So I can kind of go either way.
I mean, they're similar- Yeah, no, I-... in principles underlying. No, a hundred percent. But, uh, let's really target it towards- Okay...
those folks or people who are adjacent to or know those folks in some way, 'cause again, everything is really changing in a lot of ways. We can get into all that. So hopefully that helps.
I have, before we dive in, a two-part question for you that I ask everyone.To get us started, and it's gonna sound like it's the same question, but it is not. Does that sound good? Okay. Okay.
The first part is why, Sharon, do you have to do this job? So of everyone in the world who could do what you're doing now, why you? And the second part is, why do you have to do this work?
So personally, of all the ways you could have answered the call in this time of opportunity and calamity, why do you have to do this work? I think what I brought with me from my
upbringing was a very Catholic orientation to social justice and a realization that I was born on third base and didn't hit a triple. And it's not that I was actually born into wealth. Not at all.
My parents were accountants. They had a nine-to-five job.
They had to choose between fancy shoes and Catholic school tuition, and they picked the Catholic school tuition 'cause they wanted us to get a better education than they perceived we could get.
And so I wasn't born at all around wealth, but I still had all the third base kind of opportunity of a loving family, a great education, you know, very kind of middle class upbringing.
And it was when I went to college and sort of realized, oh, e-everybody didn't have that kind of, you know, security, opportunity, et cetera, that I felt really compelled to
kind of level that playing field. I mean, it's honestly the worst insult I could say about someone is they were born on third base and think they hit a triple. And so I think that awareness
was fundamental to me and therefore feeling compelled to try to make it right and try to, you know, give other people the same opportunity.
And then I stumbled into the world of ultra-high net wealth, you know, working with literal billionaires, and because I'm not a native to that land, you know, there's a well-known writer who talks about natives to wealth and immigrants to wealth, and it's not even my personal wealth.
It's the people I work with, but I'm very much an immigrant, maybe even a tourist- Sure...
in that world, and so I think have the fresh eyes perhaps to see things that might feel normal to people that are more accustomed to it. And then that's combined with a little bit of a personality trait.
Why do I ha- you know, why do I have to do this, is that people often will say, "Wow, she's such a truth teller. She, like, drops those bombs," and you know. And it is honestly a personality trait.
It's like I can't help myself. I... Sometimes it's helpful, sometimes it's not. Hey, but you're self-aware. That's amazing. Yeah, I'm incredibly self-aware, but I can't help myself.
I, like, I'm compelled to say the things, and so I think all of that just combines to say what I'm really doing and what I see as my calling is kind of calling out what is the status quo, but not accepting it as, you know, what must be or what is just or right.
It's just the way things are doesn't mean it has to be that way, and I think we could do it differently, and so really that's why I have to do what I do. I love all of that.
Thank you for r- such an honest reflection of it. I have so many thoughts about it in so many ways.
You know, parents who hit a triple and say it's for you, and then you're like, "Oh, that was for me," and they're like, "Yes, but here's seven thousand parameters on how you can benefit from it, and if not, I'll take it away."
But also, I love this idea that just we need a much fuller understanding of what it means to be on third base because it isn't necessarily just...
and this is a big part of, obviously, m-another part of the conversation, which is it isn't just, you know, a, a family's net worth.
It is how the choices they make and how those are used to, like you said, give you what seems to be the best education giv- considering the circumstances and like you said, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
There might not have been, you know, some fancy net worth to, to back it up, but you had the trappings of it, which were effective, and that matters, you know, quite a bit obviously. Yeah.
I mean, and just being in a, you know, healthy, loving home- Correct. Yeah... alone is... and by the way, that has completely nothing to do with wealth. Um- Yeah. No, and o-often contradictory to it, which is super fun.
[laughs] And we can get into that as well. So let me set the table a little bit, if that's okay. We talked about it a little bit, but I really wanted to have this conversation, which again is, like, relatively niche
for our audience usually for a number of reasons, but growing inequality means a lot of things cause and effect wise. But in my world and for this work, which is to most effectively help people help other people,
right now it means more people need more help from fewer people who have much more than ever. And
there is, we are somewhere in the midst of a great wealth transfer brewing from boomers to younger generations, and it seems like all these different folks are planning and structuring those transfers very differently.
And additionally, and I was revisiting your wonderful LinkedIn post, which I get so much out of. I, it's like the only stuff I actually read on there. The rest is terrifying. Thank you.
Anyways, you had this great, a great phrase. There are quite a lot of intergenerational misunderstandings among the members of these families to-Generalize, I guess.
There are some very wealthy boomers and then there are millennials and Gen Z who have very different beliefs about, for example, how much is enough and what does enough mean?
There are very different beliefs about taxes and how the taxes are used in the separation of family life and money life and roles and expectations, and
what a return on investment means, if philanthropy should even be executed at all, much less while you're living. So there's a lot of purse strings involved. There's a lot of emotions. It is family, after all.
And it's easy to say, "Oh, well, we should just have separation of church and state. It should be this and this." But people like you are required.
This wealth does need to be managed, especially during such a transition with people that can be very different for a lot of reasons. So let's talk about this family side of it.
What are the most common issues you see working with these folks to help set these younger generations up for success, knowing these purse strings can come with a lot of requirements and emotions and things like that?
Does that help? Yeah. You know, at the very highest level, I think the most fundamental disconnect between previous generations-- I mean, every generation, right? There's always a generation. Of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I think the most fundamental one that you're pointing to is what I call the integrator, the rise of the new kind of integrator as a wealth holder or, you know, asset owner.
And the integrator is the person that is the opposite of siloed.
So the old mentality was there's business, and then you make as much as you can, and you maximize your own wealth, and then you give five percent of your wealth into... maybe ten percent into a private foundation.
And then that private foundation, in turn, is managed for perpetuity, and five percent of it is given away in the form of actual grant-making. Mm-hmm.
Where if you do that math, that means that point five percent of your assets are given in a way that's supposed to be values, pro-social- Mm-hmm...
you know, making the world better, and ninety-nine point five percent of the wealth is managed entirely to maximize your own, you know, benefit. Mm-hmm. And that
idea is what integrators reject because they say, "Look, I would actually really like that values intention and my desire to be a force for good in the world. We're not gonna get there with point five percent.
Like, I want that to be spread through everything. So the way I conduct business, the way my assets are invested, the way I live my life, right? Lifestyle elements of property management."
And that's where each of these can be almost its own field, right? There's socially responsible business. There's green lifestyle kinds of, you know, considerations. Mm-hmm. There's impact investing.
But they all come from the same kind of root intention, which is to apply your values in a holistic and integrated way across all of the aspects of your wealth.
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And while you're living, to build relationships, to kindle those, and again, you know, without getting too far into it, and just on the philanthropic side, for example, you know, to
try to listen to these organizations, the most effective ones hopefully, and say, "What would be most helpful to you?" You know? It's a choice you can make. You, you can do that.
But it's complicated because, again, sometimes these strings are not just emotional. They are real and legal, and there's no joke.
I mean, I also have friends, by the way, and just to paint a fuller picture, again, through work and personal whatever, privy to a lot of these different things, and my favorite question to ask people is, "What's it for?"
And whether it's your wealth or your income, which are two different things, but also your time and your resources and your job, whatever it may be.
But, you know, I still have friends who haveCome into enormous wealth had very little idea until they were like teens that this was happening and were very intentionally not prepared for it in any way by their family.
And what does that do to the family unit, to them, psychology, money, settings? And then they're like, "Well, now I have my own kids. I have five years to figure out my version of this."
There's so many different versions, and it's not done well on the whole. Yeah. So, so yeah, it's easy to be like, "I wanna be the integrator," but often the response is like, "No." It--
Yeah, there's a lot of controlling going on, and using the wealth to control your offspring or to decide which paths you find acceptable for them, right?
Like business success or taking over the business or whatever narrow path. That can often be enforced through the terms of a trust.
I mean, that was kind of the standard, and they would say, "Well, you can use it for this education, but not for..." You know, what if you wanna be a teacher?
What if you wanna be a, you know, childcare provider because you feel like this is your calling? Well, that's not really, you know, what was imagined for you. And so I actually...
I think that the control that gets turned into legal structures, as you're alluding, is actually one of the biggest barriers for integrators, and frankly, for really changing how investing and philanthropy and other things are done.
That if that trust says you have to maximize return, it often treats fiduciary duty, which is my least favorite phrase ever, because what it literally means is the beneficiary's wellbeing, right?
You have to prioritize the wellbeing of the beneficiary, and yet it gets interpreted by trust attorneys, by the fiduciaries who are appointed as the trustees, you know, all that, meaning your financial maximization, right?
Your net wealth, again, is the only definition. Whereas if you really said, "What is in this person's best interest? What advances their wellbeing?"
And looked at that question holistically, I mean, how do you answer that it's in their best interest to live in a planet that is burning, a society that is on the edge of revolt, you know, in businesses where the people aren't educated, aren't healthy.
Like, how do you argue that's really in your best interest? I mean, I guess you can pull a Zuckerberg and build your compound on Hawaii and be like, "Well, you're gonna separate from the world."
But again- Yeah, the Swishes. You know, that's one option, and that seems to be the majority interpretation, is just maximize your wealth- Right...
and you'll be above it all, and you'll be insulated from the problems of the world. But I don't think that historically bears out. Yeah. Not great.
And you talked about how, you know, hopefully you can use each of these folks you're working with to, you know, not be a drop in the ocean, to start to nudge the entire mechanism, the entire operation, the system, to a more useful place.
I wanna talk about all those mechanisms, but I wanna talk about one in particular right now, which again, in isolation could be very effective. However, we have the data long enough in now to know that
humans are humans, wealthy people are wealthy people. It's not the way it's being used, and that's DAFs, donor-advised funds. Which is to say, you don't wanna take part in the private family foundation.
You do wanna give some money away. You can use a DAF. Again, which I work with plenty of people who use them. They can be extremely effective.
That's not how most people use them, and we have the data to back that up, which is to say they contribute the money, they get the tax write-off, and then again, the numbers are out there.
I'll find them and put them in the show notes. But ninety percent, something like that, is not actually ever distributed.
And so just enormous wealth across the spectrum, much less, you know, sort of for each family, never gets distributed. And so again, it's become another way of that version of control. How do you navigate
that as an option? Just again, because it has become so, so, so popular, but also we have the numbers to know it's not being used effectively to help with these issues and opportunities.
How do you navigate those expectations and relationships with, again, the boomers, but also a family's tax advisors, things like that? Yeah.
It's interesting actually you mentioned the tax advisor because that was one of the insights that really drove me to kind of construct my consulting practice, was realizing that most wealthy families are just getting tax advice.
Mm-hmm. They're getting advice that is, again, based on the entire assumption that you wanna maximize your wealth and minimize taxes. And so rather than other objectives, like y-you alluded to purpose.
I mean, for me, that's the fundamental question, is what is the purpose of this wealth? And nobody ever asks it.
They just assume, and then they give you advice based on that assumption that, again, the cookie cutter assumption is maximize wealth, avoid taxes.
So I actually explore with people first kinda what is that North Star of purpose for the wealth, for a family office, for, you know. And by the way, at best, what you mostly get is
still an inward-looking purpose among kind of traditional family office and wealth management, which is the purpose is to keep the family together, right?
But the purpose of keeping the family together is to maintain the wealth. You know what I mean? They're like in a circular [chuckles] - Mm-hmm... argument with the, with maintaining. It's all about the wealth.
And so for me, finding that North Star, like for me, it's shared prosperity, right?
The idea that I want my family to be healthy and happy and flourishing, but I want your family and the people who grow our food and the people who work at, you know, the clothing store, whatever, and make our clothes, I want those people to be healthy and happy.
And so if that's my fundamental North Star, how do I activate these assets in that purpose?
And the analogy I like to use is that, you know, rather than starting with tax planning and the kind of usual route, I said that's like-Opening ways and saying, "Where do you think I should go today?"
Instead, you need to tell me- We need you. Mm-hmm... here's where I wanna go, and here's the mode of transportation that I'm gonna use, you know, to get there.
You give me the most tax efficient route to get to my- Sure... intended destination, and that's great once I've figured that out.
But most people flip it, and it's like they're letting their tax attorney drive the bus rather than purpose. So how do you most successfully say, "I'm not gonna turn this into just 100% purpose. I'm not gonna win those."
I mean, maybe once in a while, but how do you work with the families, again, multi-generations, whatever purse strings, an investment advisor, and a tax advisor, again, who are understandably schooled in, like you said, this fiduciary duty, however you wanna phrase it and however you wanna apply it, of n-number go up, you know, tax costs go down.
And that, for some families, is, like, moving, right? But they will do that much. Like, it's, it's wild.
It is what it is, but I guess, is there a common denominator to how you have those conversations to help people integrate purpose in a meaningful way and go, "Guys, honestly, the number's still gonna go up.
We know enough about how these things work." Right. "Like, it's still gonna go up. It might not be the percentage points you want, but that's not the problem here," right?
How do you most commonly, most effectively start and, I guess, maintain those conversations? Yeah. And, you know, it is certainly the most challenging in the multi-generational situations, right? Yeah.
Because usually the younger generation, frankly, it's women, it's new wealth creators, and it's next gen that are most likely to be integrators. They just are. Nothing, nothing about that surprises me. No. Yeah.
And so y- I think you're kind of alluding to a next gen where, like, they're not really in control. This is why actually the door I usually walk through is philanthropy. Okay.
And when most people think of philanthropy, they think of making grants. Sure.
And my kind of specialty is expanding that toolbox from grants, and this can be in the context of a private foundation or a donor-advised fund. All of these vehicles are capable of all these things. Okay.
But to say, what are their tools of finance or of influence, or, you know, how do we actually achieve impact? They have to start by caring about achieving impact. If they don't actually care about impact,
and they're just doing it to feel good, to have a good reputation in the community, for social reasons- Right... go to all the galas. Sure. I can't work with that, right? Yeah. Yeah. There's not a lot I can do.
You gotta peel your part out, and then I can work with you on your part. Do you know what I mean? Sure. Yeah. Like what you can control.
But if you're trying to influence the bigger system, then starting with philanthropy and expanding their idea of what philanthropy can be, meaning how are you changing the system, how are you making people's outcomes actually different by using all these tools, is like the wedge to open up.
Because once you go, "Oh, we-- like, we could do a loan to our favorite nonprofit 'cause they're trying to build a new facility, or they're trying to add housing services or whatever, and we could do a loan for that instead of just a grant, and then we could get that money back and we could recycle it."
Right. And that starts to click a little bit, this idea that not everything means giving it away. Sure. Sometimes it really is about recycling. You're trying to activate it in the world using the tools of finance.
So you can still be very financially savvy. Mm-hmm. You can still be very... You know, but s- crack open that door and then start to go, "Well, maybe there's opportunities in the rest of our portfolio."
So the problem with sort of getting to impact investing is that most people mentally, when they hear about impact investing, they're thinking of venture capital kind of deals.
They're thinking of, like, direct investing or investing into an impact fund that does clean energy or that does educational work or whatever, and that's actually the hardest form of [chuckles] impact investing.
Like, it takes a lot of expertise, it's very high risk, and frankly, it's a very small slice of your portfolio. Mm-hmm.
Like, how much is actually allocated to VC in a foundation or in a family's portfolio unless you made your money that way? Right. Five percent, maybe ten percent, right? But you have that much in cash. Mm-hmm. Great.
Where are you keeping your cash? Like, where's your money market account? Where's your, you know, bonds? Can you start to go, what if we did a bond to this, you know, school bonds?
What if we did green bonds and blue bonds?
They still have the same yields, but instead of funding the same old, like, problematic, you know, expand the roads forever and ever for more cars, they could be funding, like, green infrastructure or water-friendly infrastructure.
And so start to creep then into the rest of that portfolio to say how can these other asset classes... So it's almost like a grant becomes... That's an asset class.
That's 5% of the portfolio, and it's a total loss of capital. That's what a grant is. Mm-hmm. A total loss of capital, right? Yep.
And so if you start to go, what can we do with the rest of these asset classes that aren't total loss of capital, but that we'll get it back and be able to still complement our impact.
So that's kinda usually the door I walk through- Mm... with a family, is that philanthropy and trying to expand their toolbox, which just starts to make them get excited about what else they might be able to accomplish.
I love that because, again, I imagine it's very easy for you, and again, I do not want to be clear, none of this is modeled as financial advice, et cetera, et cetera, and I have that conversation with people, you know, whether they're got a few bucks or much more when they just go, "Which places?"
And I go, "Well, we've vetted a lot of these. We work with these people. These places are doing great work on the front lines," right?
And if they just never kinda wanna think about it or, like you said, they wanna be part of the community or whatever it is at the simplest version, great. 501[c][3]s are great, and I would- Yeah...
urge you to do it on a recurring basis while you're alive. You see it in action. They get a predictable revenue. Taxes are pretty straightforward, and you can plan for it. You can turn it up or down.Great.
Like you said, you can get more and you get a little, you get a tax benefit, right? You do. Is it enormous? No. But it's there for sure.
But I love the idea of expanding the idea of philanthropy beyond that, which again, like great, rinse and repeat. It works. Yeah.
And it's getting to the organization 'cause the most recent expansion, again, that, that has become most prominent is this DAF idea.
You get the same tax benefit-ish, obviously keeps changing, but you don't have to put it to work. That can be later.
But what you're saying is, great, you should probably have some bonds or money market in your portfolio.
If, for example, you know, we started invading other countries and the market got questionable, I'm just throwing that out there, and it was only five percent and it was only intended, again, answering this question of applying it to a, a specific asset class.
What's it for? Well, your money market is not for more than four percent, right? And with inflation, it is what it is. Right.
You're saying that's great, but I can get you that four percent in something that's actually useful to people. Yes. To your local school system. Definitely. To clean energy, whatever it might be.
And I imagine, and correct me if I'm wrong, do you get into a fair amount of modeling to be able to look at those generations that are really attached to that four to twelve percent number and say, "Look.
No, look, it's still here, and it's useful." Like, h-how do you go about really convincing them with the math there? You know, I'm not a investment manager. Of course. Yeah. Yeah. And so, I mean, there's, at this point,
there is plenty of market rate, you know, investment opportunities that are aligned with whatever your values might be. And- At least not ruining the world, right? Yeah. It's not complicated. Yeah.
And I call that aligned investing because it's like, look, you're not changing the stock market by screening out guns and oil. [chuckles] You know? But it's aligned with your values and you're- Right...
putting your money to work. And so I don't think I have to convince people on individual products, I guess, because usually they have a investment prospectus, right? Sure. That says, "Look, here's what we expect."
And- Yeah... so it's more about sending them looking for that. Mm-hmm. Making them realize it's out there. Right, right.
And then directing them to the investment advisors who can help them select the individual- Right... opportunity.
So, you know, for example, what I just shared with you about, look, there could be a CDFI, which a CDFI is a community development finance institution. Okay.
Some of them are banks, some of them are like credit unions, some of them are... There's green banks out there.
There's some that specifically lend the money that you deposit to small businesses, to, you know, green projects, right? Mm-hmm. So the question of saying, look, it just doesn't have to be same old, same...
You could activate that four percent in a CDFI, and then you've got five percent in bonds. Guess what? You could activate that five per- And we just keep trying to activate- Right... the slices.
And I would say about DAFs, I mean, the interesting thing is, again, if your only objective is tax planning, y-you achieve that the moment you put the money into the vehicle.
You never have to give it out to achieve that. People ask me, "Why don't people do more innovative things?" I go, "Well, if it was just a tax planning exercise, they achieve their objectives when they put the money in."
You really do have to care about impact. But the exciting thing about DAF, I'll actually say two things.
There are huge loopholes right now that need to be fixed, and one is that individual donor-advised funds, DAFs, do not have a payout requirement. That is wrong.
They should have at least five percent, like foundations, and all of them- Yeah... should probably be raised.
And the other big loophole that is not acceptable at all is that you can meet your foundation's five percent requirement by putting that money into a DAF you control, which effectively reduces the payout of every vehicle to zero, because you could just put your entire five percent, and those loopholes absolutely need to be closed.
But in defense of DAFs in this moment, one of the big reasons that my clients tend to use them is, yes, ease of administration, but they're usually big enough that, like, they can handle the administration. Sure.
It's actually anonymity, and that is always painted as being quite ominous, like dark money and, you know, people doing things anonymously. Well, more than one thing can be true at a time, right?
More than one thing can be true. Yeah. That is certainly an issue. But in this moment, where donors are literally being targeted- Yeah...
for supporting causes unpopular to the government, that is a really helpful way to keep that money from completely drying up.
People, especially people that have operating businesses that are still, like, the main source of their wealth- Mm-hmm... they get quite nervous about becoming a target. Sure. And so using the donor-advised fund.
But even before this, the anonymity was really helpful in that sometimes it's like I don't wanna be a public figure. Mm-hmm. I want to, like, live my life, take my kids to the park. Nobody knows who I am.
I don't want, you know, to have a public profile. Or the next gen, let's say, wants to give to Planned Parenthood, and the parents wants to give to the right to life, you know? Mm-hmm.
And, and so you use the donor-advised funds so that it stays separated or whatever. So, you know, there have been a lot of uses that aren't really is the phrase, but I do strongly think those loopholes need to be closed.
A hundred percent. I did a fair amount of informal work with the last Congress, who was pretty fed up about those,
really working hard as much as they could, which obviously, you know, the financial complications of Congress are
m- m- myriad, obviously, in a lot of ways, and there's even more straightforward loopholes they need to close as well.
But there was a lot of hope that, again, we could recognize the benefits of a vehicle like this.But put some regulations in place that aren't gonna again stifle business owners or wealth creators as they wanna call it, but still impact these frontline places that need it so desperately, and by the way, do great work.
They're measured as well, you know? So why shouldn't this new big potential input be, be measured and say, "Okay, thank you, but l-let's get a little bit of this out."
'Cause even a jump from four percent to five percent would be huge, and it's not a four percent. So like you said, I love that multiple things can be true. I think that's really important. Again, and if you wanna have...
continue to have relationships, you could just do it directly with your fucking credit card, or you could put your name on the def or whatever. It doesn't even need to be a foundation, you know? Yeah.
Or you could find a route in the middle, but I think it's probably always helpful to have someone who's not in the family doing explaining those things. Does that- Hmm. -hold water? Explaining to other generations.
Basically an outside advisor as opposed to just the relatively young, and I'm going to stop counting myself as young pretty soon here, being the voice arguing for those things.
I imagine a trusted advisor like yourself would carry a little more water. You know, it is sadly true.
I mean, that prophet in their own land, the child in their own family, you know, even though they're yet an adult in their 40s. Yeah. I think there's a, a story that a kind of very well-known
younger family member of a prominent family tells about how she had been trying to convince her family about impact investing, and she brought in a sort of gray hair, you know, investor who w-- who had been doing this, who had the respect of elder members of the family as an investor.
Mm. And it was that person's voice that carried. And yeah, I mean, I definitely... You've heard the truism that an expert is someone from a hundred miles away. Yes. God, it's so true. And I definitely, yeah- Yeah...
I definitely serve that role sometimes. I'm saying the same things, but can back it up with a lot of experience having done it with families whose names you recognize. Yeah. And I don't know.
It's a little like money in politics, right, where of course you wish that this was not the case. Yes. And you would like it to be different,
but how do you need to be effective in this moment to achieve what you need to achieve, which is for good, right? So sure, you'll play that role, you know? Yeah.
As, yes, to these old gray-haired men almost exclusively, you are gonna be the most effective voice, and that's... it is what it is. Yeah. So what are some of...
Let's say you've got a relet-relatively, I don't wanna say open-minded, but let's use that word, situation, the family that is coming to you, and they're interested in some of these new vehicles.
And it sounds like you almost sometimes play like the inception game, right? Planting the idea, not the specific retail investment or whatever it might be.
What are some of the vehicles you notice folks get the most excited about? What are some of the most models that you find folks go, "Oh, okay"? What's, like, your first idea that you plant with folks?
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I start with what are we trying to accomplish here. Yeah. So let's give an example then. Let's, uh- Yeah... someone who's like, "We're really focused on our mid-size community and our school system," something like that.
Where would you start those folks? So that falls in the category of what we call place-based philanthropy- Okay... or place-based investing.
And when you have a geographic constraint like that, then you start to say, "Okay, great. Who are the partners who can give us a good view of what the big issues are?"
I will say most people do come with an idea, like you said, education. Mm-hmm. And so we'll do a listening tour of other funders. And the reason- Mm-hmm...
I wanna talk to other funders is because they have a bird's eye view. So the professional staffed foundationsIt is their job to know the entire field.
Like, I love leaders, passionate, wonderful, effective leaders of nonprofits, and they're gonna tell you all about why their nonprofit is the solution. You know, that's why they do it, right? Of course.
They go, "This is the solution." Yeah. And so, yes, you wanna listen to those people, but the kind of professional funders have, as their job, they are scanning the landscape. They get to know.
So it's sort of a shortcut in my mind- Sure... to understand who are the really effective folks, who sh- else should you talk to, what is the experience been, and where are the gaps, frankly.
So we, we start with sort of a problem map of what's the issue and why is that the problem, and go multiple layers of why, and try to understand, like, what's really happening.
And then we can formulate, okay, given that the problem is, you know, lack of qualified teachers willing to kind of stay in these classrooms in this area- Mm-hmm...
and that's the thing we wanna attack, then we start to go, okay, who and how can we address that specific aspect of the problem, and sort of then go forward to say, you know, who are the nonprofits?
What have people done in other communities? And that's also where you can start to introduce other tools. So for example, if you say why do those teachers not stay? Mm.
And yes, you could increase their income, so maybe you wanna do ballots or advocacy- Mm-hmm... like C4 work or ballot measures or political work to get them paid more.
Maybe there's also an issue of affordable housing for those teachers, and so how do you address workforce, you know, housing development, and can you provide financing, which again might be loans- Mm-hmm...
loan guarantees- Mm. Mm... other, other forms of finance besides grants. You can't give everybody a grant to buy a house. Sure. But you can, you know, do it other ways.
And so as you start to really hone in on a problem that you're excited to solve, and then we are going to not just look at how can we make grants to solve this problem.
That's one part of it, and that's certainly gonna be, you know, helpful, but we also look at what are the other levers and what's the right kind of financing.
Okay, so, so now we've got, like, an idea, and this may come before or after we do structure. But the, you know, the interesting thing is it used to be the, it was just a private foundation. Mm.
You'd set up a private foundation, and you'd make grants. And then it became a private foundation or a donor-advised fund. Which one should you do? And at the time, donor-advised funds were very limited.
You really could only do grants to 501[c][3]s, but they've since expanded quite a lot in a lot of more niche... There are thousands, by the way, of DAF sponsors. Mm-hmm.
People think there's, like, Fidelity and Schwab and Vanguard. Yeah. Oh, got it. There are, like, 1,000 out there, and some of them are quite, I don't mean politically progressive- Mm-hmm...
but progressive in, in what they have figured out, allowing donors to do all the same things, loans, loan guarantees, equity investments. Like, th- they're really quite flexible.
But so then y- you know, you start to say, "Look, y- you can use all these different tools in your toolbox."
Going back to your question about structure, the thing that's become quite popular among certainly the families I work with is to have an LLC that is sort of the hub of activity. Mm.
And there's an LLC structure that probably houses the staff. They actually are employees of the LLC and the operations. And the reason for that is if they're employed by the LLC, they can work on C3 work, C4 work- Mm...
for-profit investments. Whereas if they're employees of a C3, like a private foundation- 100%... is a form of a C3, they can only work- Yeah... on the C3. The strings are crazy. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
The strings are crazy. So you get a tax advantage if you're paying- There is... their salary with tax advantage dollars, but the trade-off is quite a lot less flexibility.
So people put an LLC, they put the staff in the LLC, and then they use those different entities, so a C3, a C4, you know, maybe direct investments as sort of checkbooks or pass-throughs.
And they may or may not try to have a contract with those sub-entities. So for example- Sure... the foundation maybe can assume the 20% of their salary that represents the amount of time they spend on- Sure...
foundation grant-making or whatever. But that LLC also gives you an element of privacy. It gives you an element of control. So it's a trade-off.
And again, well, you wouldn't do that if maximizing tax savings was the most important thing. You'd put everybody- Mm-hmm... into a tech. But that's just not the most important thing for the families I work with.
Like- Right... it's just not at the top. They want to accomplish what they want to accomplish is goal number one, and so they're willing to take some amo- to, you know, to avoid getting on the wrong side of- Sure...
of IRS rules. And you have to consider all that stuff. It's like we always tell people- Yeah... you know, getting too political, but it all is. You know, after...
When I say we, I mean, uh, people who give a shit about other people on the planet got slaughtered in the last election. The Congresswoman AOC said, "We can't just be right. We have to be effective."
And you know, one of the things we talk about with people is we don't categorically endorse any person, party, company, whatever it might be.
We support people who are measurably doing the right thing, and we are very outspoken about folks who don't, and we think that's one of the clearer ways forward. But to be effective
does mean, you know, you have to look at how politics works. Like, of course, I want 100% clean energy everywhere,
but I've worked in political campaigns, and again, informally with all these folks, I, I was partial to the, good Lord, it's still a thing, the California task force about
insurances and insurance and reinsurance and m- mortgage providers and f- with fires. I mean, best wishes. You know, there is no perfect version of that.
It's a nightmare, and Florida's the same way.But you have to go into it that way, right? Like you said, which is to understand that some people really do want, often now,
need to be more anonymous or just don't want, you know, again, to kinda getting into the separation of church and state a little bit, that's not what they want their reputation to be in town.
Of course, you wanna be, you know, everyone would like to be not known for their virtue. Hopefully, their virtue is, is the payback itself, the action of it.
But it would be nice to just be able to hang out at your kid's soccer game without that being the only thing, right? Yeah. Over the course of my career, I've often felt like I keep trying to go upstream.
I started in philanthropy, right? I started pure, like, grant-making. Yeah. A pure charitable trust.
And then saw that, again, it's 5%, and then we had an endowment that's 95% when I was at Foundation Source working with all of these entrepreneurs, and I could see all the assets of all the foundations, and sort of realizing the disconnect and started to say, "Well, you know, the endowment, the 95%, I mean, that's 20 times more.
Like, we're not gonna get there with just the 5%." So I started... That's when I got interested in impact investing. And then the next step upstream was I said, "Wait, how did you make this money?"
Because, again, the operating business that had been the source of the wealth sometimes was creating the problems that, like, a little tiny fraction was being set aside to give. Oh, yeah.
I'm very aware of a few of those situations, for sure. But here's the thing. Then you gotta look at policy.
In some ways, like, public policy is upstream even of that because it's creating the container within which those businesses operate legally, if not ethically or whatever. Yep.
And so that same evolution that has been over my career happens to a lot of philanthropists.
They actually start their journey making grants to direct service organizations because they feel like they wanna see the money, you know, going directly to help that homeless person. They wanna feed people tonight. Yes.
Which is- They wanna... Yes. Keep doing that. Yes. Keep doing that. That... I'm not saying don't do that. Awesome.
But after five years, 10 years, you know, whatever, they start to go, "There's still the same number of people in the food line. Why is this not getting any better?" And then you gotta...
You know, they tend to gravitate toward, and hopefully in conversation with their grantees, right? What are the issues that these people are facing?
And they go, "Well, you know, the issue is unemployment doesn't kick in for six months," or, "It doesn't cover," you know, whatever. But they kind of start to understand, and then they are pushed to policy.
And so I, I find that is often an evolutionary journey that philanthropists go on themselves because it feels abstract to give to policy issues or advocacy issues. It feels, you know, removed.
And so you kind of have to find your way there for most people. It sounds...
And I had a very similar conversation with a woman named Elizabeth Sowen, who wrote a book called "Multisolving" that I think you'd really like.
It sounds like you have as much fun pulling the strings on this sweater as I do and as Elizabeth does, which is to say now you could influence the policy part, which again, like, money and politics, total nightmare.
However, the example I use, fortunate and unfortunate, is the minute we were in a post-Dobbs world,
people discovered what federalism really means and that there were a lot of states with 100-year-old truer laws about bodily autonomy and abortion rights that instantly kicked in, and there were a lot of people living in those states that had no idea,
first of all, that those laws even existed or that they could, or that's how the law worked, much less that they were going to kick in, much less who could do it.
And suddenly they go, "I think I'm interested in state politics. Like, when did this happen?" And that's where I get really excited. That's where I'm like, "You have no idea.
From education to all these different things, and you can move the needle on these things. Like, your dollar can go so much."
And like you said, policy can seem abstract, and money and politics is a nightmare, but let's play the ball game, and let's give some kids some school lunches, right?
I will say just noting that there is a difference between advocacy and policy level advocacy- 100%. 100%... and electoral politics, right? Of course. And so actually, private foundations, people say, "Oh, no.
You know, you have to be really careful." Yes, you cannot lobby. Mm-hmm. Lobby means you take a position on a specific bill, vote against it, vote for it. You're trying to influence- Mm-hmm...
you know, specific legislation. But advocacy means, you know, supporting a position, right? Mm-hmm. So if your position is that kids should not go hungry- [chuckles]...
and that we should have universal, like, s- free school meals, you can advocate. There's a quite a lot that the foundation can support- Mm-hmm... in favor of that position that doesn't cross the line into lobbying.
Whereas, you know, the difference is, again, if you do wanna get into a lobbying, having an LLC- Right... allows you to have the staff or the resources, you know, distributed from there, you know, in that flexibility.
But a lot more people are actually comfortable with advocacy that aren't necessarily ready yet for electoral politics. But there's still a lot they can do.
But I love that you're so open and eager to shed a light on maybe what these root causes are 'cause like you said...
A- and we try to operate this way with our app and how we advise people, which is kids need diapers tonight, or let's use a more prominent example that's not food or water.
Kids need formula tonight, and we need to help give it to them, and there's a lot of direct services organizations that do wonderful work with that, or breast milk donations, right? A- and again, you can just fund it.
Don't have breast milk to give away? Great. You can fund the operations. That's great. Again, those are 501(c)(3)'s usually. They do what they do.
But we also need to put those organizations out of work because they will be the first to tell you that they wanna put themselves out of business.
Or like my friend Jay, who runs Alex's Lemonade Stand, a pediatric cancer foundation, it is the job he never wanted to do. But that's-Which you do. And he would love to just be done with pediatric cancer.
We gotta help those kids. We gotta run some trials, and we gotta help pay for families to travel and helping people understand that they can try to do both in their lifetime is pretty incredible.
You know, it's easy to come back to the Jimmy Carter guinea worm thing, right? Which is, holy shit, he eradicated a disease. That's crazy. You could do a version of that, and that's pretty awesome. And because
relative to some of these high net worth families, it is still a minority percentage of the portfolio, th-the number can still go up, right, which is crazy. Yeah. But- Yeah...
it comes back to this idea we always have with people, which is, again, so many of our problems are just choices we and our elected officials and business leaders have made, and we can make different ones. That's right.
And if you have enormous wealth in this country, you have a lot of influence. And I will say about the kinda guinea worm
example of eradicating, like, picking a really specific targeted problem is actually often [chuckles] the hardest part. I mean, if your child suffered from a disease, then yes, you're like, "That's-" Totally...
"That's my cause." But a lot of times it may not be that obvious. Mm-hmm. But what you can accomplish if you get a really narrow
kind of problem definition and then focus all your resources on it for an extended period of time is a lot more than you think, right? It's sort of what they say in startup world.
We tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in a year and underestimate what we can accomplish in 10 years. Mm-hmm.
And that discipline to pick something and have a strategy is reinforced if you as the philanthropist, you as the person distributing resources, not necessarily through philanthropy- Mm...
is measuring your own progress separate and apart from the individual organization. So we tend to measure our effectiveness or our impact by the dollars we've distributed, but what about progress on the problem?
And that's where I think, you know, philanthropists and foundations can really go to the next level of saying, "Yeah, I'm trying to eradicate guinea worm," or, "I'm trying to raise the, you know, average wage in this county to meet the living wage standard.
For those two lines to meet, that's my goal." Well, right? And- Yeah. I love a clear, measurable outcome, and this is kinda what I meant about, yes, we need to be... W-we can't just be right and idealist.
We have to be effective and know that there's gonna be jumps to get there and steps back. But to get to the point where you say, I live in a... I mean, look, I'm literally in Colonial Williamsburg, right?
And we've got this combined school system with the, with James City County, and they're great schools. Are they perfect? No. But they're great public schools. My kids are in them, this and this.
My kids do not have lunch debt, but this is still a school system that has lunch debt. Mm-hmm.
And recently a restaurant owner, shout out to them, local restaurant owner, found out the kids had lunch debt, and he was like, "I'm just gonna pay that off.
I'm not gonna make up any sort of thing, and I'm gonna put it in the newspaper," 'cause he was like, "This is fucking ridiculous."
But he was like, "Just need to solve this for these specific families that are carrying this debt." Now, why do we have this when there are examples of so many school systems and cities and states- Yeah...
that have gotten, gone away with it? What are the best practices? How do we apply those? How do we influence that? Is it a foundation? Is it a 501[c][4]? Is it just advocacy?
Because clearly there is a model, and I wanna participate in that. And again, having that desired outcome, like when I tell people, "Please don't just..."
Again, not financial advice, but, like morally, please don't wait to give it to your end of your life to give it away. Wouldn't it be incredible to be like everybody gets food? Yeah.
Well, I'll tell you a story on that idea of not waiting. One of my clients, you might have seen this story, it was quite national.
Her husband died, and he had been a kind of close partner and friend of Warren Buffett and an early investor in Berkshire Hathaway and then started his own firm and, you know, did quite well. And
so when he died a few years ago, she then inherited, you know, control of these assets- Mm-hmm... some of which went to the foundation, some of which were hers.
And she had a lifelong relationship with the Albert Einstein School of Medicine in the Bronx as a faculty member, as a board member. Oh. Oh, I remember this story. This is incredible. I love this story.
So she had made gifts certainly over time. Mm-hmm. But a few years ago, like I said, when she had control, she gave them a billion dollars in order to make tuition free forever for everyone. Mm-hmm.
And she actually went to Albert Einstein and was in the auditorium and made the announcement, and the kids that they were there lost their minds, and they had their phones going, and you s- and it went viral, right?
Mm-hmm. This, like, thing of their kids losing their minds.
So she and I are sitting in her apartment, you know, in, in Manhattan later that day, and her grandchildren are sending clips, you know, from TikTok or Instagram.
Everybody she's ever known in her life is calling and texting and saying, "Oh, my God, it's amazing." And she's like, "This is the best day of my life," you know? "This is the most amazing thing."
And the joy that she got from that, and then she was invited to the Berkshire Hathaway meeting and was, like, honored, you know, as having done this amazing thing,
and I thought, "My God, why wouldn't you want that experience when you're alive?" Imagine she just left it to them in her will. Also great. However...
And by the way, here's the other thing, and this is where I love to get people. It's a little addicting to get your foot in that door. And here's y- the... This is no offense. My family participates in it. It's great.
My favorite example of this, and I talk about it all the timeIs DonorsChoose. Are you aware of that foundation? Yeah, yeah. Okay.
And this isn't always the outcome but basically, you know, teachers in these struggling school systems, schools, whatever it might be, will say, "I need chairs." Sometimes it's further.
Sometimes we need these specific musical instruments or, y-you know, this is a classroom with kids who have whatever challenges might be, we need different kinds of chairs or whatever it is.
These math books or a set of these novels. It's so specific and you can see the little bar, like Kickstarter, how much they need to raise, which is usually like nothing, to be clear, but it's everything to them.
And in a world where we know if you don't catch kids who are struggling with reading by, I think, it's like second or third grade, you basically never get them back, right?
But there's some teacher who is putting herself out there. You can contribute like two hundred dollars, which again, right now for a lot of people, not happening.
You often get the equivalent of what you just talked about, which is like a month or two later, 'cause you forgot about it, a big fat envelope in the mail and it's thank you letters from these children.
And i-if you're like me and you're Irish, it's just like you're like a bucket of tears after the first one. Like, it's a nightmare. Mm-hmm.
But how you don't just immediately go back on the website and go, "Who else needs musical instruments?" It's incredible.
And again, you can do it for that reason, I don't care, but it's amazing and you have directly changed those twenty-one lives and that teacher's.
And yeah, it's not funding Albert Einstein forever or, or the folks William and Mary's down the street.
Two donors in the past two years have given, I think it's like a total of a hundred and fifty million dollars and it's gonna be the first
completely free undergrad marine science degree, I think, and they just work on the Chesapeake Bay. It's amazing. And what kids are gonna get to do that now, it's amazing. And they did it while they were alive.
Older, but alive. Took that long for the capital to accumulate. But to benefit from that and go, "Well, the world's burning, I'm going to help in a big way." Or you can just buy teachers crayons.
And well, and fundamental to that, you know, again, for people for whom that two hundred dollars is j-just feels out of reach.
Like most of us, what we're doing planning with our financial advisor, like retirement planning, there's a number, right? That they're like- Mm-hmm... okay, we want it for this lifestyle- Uh-huh...
for this payments, for that. We're trying to get to this number. Yep. But we don't exactly do that for people with the kind of wealth that well exceeds whatever that number is.
And I actually think that for me, increasingly I'm realizing this is sort of fundamental to unlocking that level of generosity, is that they have to answer what is enough? What is enough for me?
What is enough for my kids? What is enough to be healthy and happy and have opportunity, but maybe not squish opportunity, right? Mm-hmm. You know, wealth can have this perverse- Mm-hmm... kind of impact on young people.
And once you realize, well, wait, I, I mean, and I don't care if your number's two hundred million dollars is enough. Like, maybe that feels like the right number given what you've done so far. Okay.
Whatever it is, let's figure it out. The point is not to say your number should be X. The point is to introduce the concept that there is such a thing
as enough, and if you really look at it, you probably have enough, which means you don't have to continue to try to maximize. And even if you said,
you know, the rest of that can be risk capital, it can be philanthropic capital. Sure. It can be... You know, it becomes opportunity that is waiting to be activated, but not until you sort of answer that question.
And look, I know billionaires that feel like they don't have enough 'cause they're still- Yeah...
looking at the guy above them on the Forbes 400 and saying, "Well, you know, I'm only on, you know, number three hundred," or whatever. And so
i-it really is a freeing, like an incredibly liberating exercise to go through and realize that you actually have enough, and therefore you get to do this addictive, amazing...
It's, you love it, it's great for you, and it's good for the world, right? Yeah. And I think I just...
I really feel like that is a fundamental practice, that we need more advisors to kind of be brave enough to ask the question and say, "Have you thought about what is enough?" Yeah.
And, you know, "Can I help you, like, figure that out so we can see, like, where we are?" 'Cause again, for, for somebody like me, the financial advisor's like, "Okay, we gotta figure out what is enough for retirement."
Yeah. Yeah. And then have a spice [laughs] insert a number- Hundred percent... other than, you know, if we do it the opposite, be like, "Good news, like, you're way above enough." Yeah.
What does that open up for possibility? Well, and that's the thing, and that's what some... There's some incredible modeling tools out there that can really help.
And again, this is, again, targeted towards very specific people or people you know this and this. There are amazing tools.
I use one that I really love, I'll put out there, that enable you to, again, put it all in, understand
maybe we're not there or what is the goal or w-how do I wanna spend my time in retirement if I'm lucky enough to get there, if I'm healthy enough, if I have a partner or a family, whatever it might be.
And then to go, okay, now what's it for? And what are the years left on this timeline of this model for, and how do I match the resources to those years going, I might need this much.
My kids might, quote unquote, "need this much." I'll give them this much or turn it down. And how can I apply that? Again, like you said, you wanna do grants, great, it's gone.
It's gone, and somebody doesn't have to worry about giving it back, who would worry about it much more than you worrying about it being gone. But there's also all these other incredible vehicles like you said.
I love this idea of the LLC. I've always thought, man, I wish I had that director of special projects in town- Yeah... who could just like execute, like you said.
Whether it's, you know, strategic, tactical, timely philanthropy or it's advocacy stuff or it's whatever, like you said, just straight business p-for profit. That would be great, and that's a...
You can do that it sounds like.Yeah, absolutely. I mean, if you look at one hint is often when the name of the entity does not have foundation in it. So like- Mm-hmm. Okay...
the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, that's a foundation, right? But the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, that was LLC. There were things under. That Arnold Ventures, they actually went from being the- Arnold...
foundation, right, John? Oh, I didn't know that. Arnold- I've always only known it as Arnold Ventures. That's so interesting. To Arnold Ventures, which has underneath of it a foundation, a DAF or two, maybe three.
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. C4 work, right? And so Emerson Collective. Mm-hmm. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So all of these are actually LLCs with multiple entities underneath of them because of that flexibility. Yeah, that makes sense.
And again, for better or worse, we made it very easy to create those, much, much easier than it used to be 10, 15 years ago. That's really interesting. What am I missing?
You know, I, I feel like there's a million other versions of questions, and obviously, again, this is targeted at very specific folks, but, uh, you know, again, I wanna put this out there, and I do say privately to a lot of folks, "We need you now."
And obviously, it would be great if it didn't have to exist, but as much as we half-joke that, like, we have the worst billionaires ever, you know, [chuckles] if Twitter existed, our previous billionaires probably wouldn't be as popular as they are.
And we already know part of them weren't, you know, as good-natured as possible. But they built parks and museums and stuff like that that are pretty useful. John D. Rockefeller made Colonial Williamsburg, you know?
Not a perfect person by any stretch, but did some great stuff. And we need you to do more, and you can do wonderful things. You really can. You can.
And I think what I would add is that, again, the door I walk through is often the philanthropic door, which is a limited part of your budget, whether you're a billionaire or a regular person. Sure. Yeah.
You know, 5%, maybe 10% if you're tithing.
But I'm always interested in the work that I do now with family offices, again, is to look at the other verticals in your enterprise, which might include an operating business.
And I think we tend to overlook, like, there are lots of ways to make your operating business also a contributor to good rather than causing problems in the- Sure... name of profit, right?
Whether it's ESOPs, you know, sharing profits, whether it's supply chain issues- Yeah... whether it's paying living wages. Like, there's lots of levers inside of a business.
So sometimes I work with a small business to, again, say w- if our value is to support women, then what does that look like in the context of our operating business?
And the other one is frankly, like, lifestyle stuff, things like property management. So again, families I work with, you know, they own five properties, and one of them's maybe a working farm or something, right?
And- Yeah... and so looking at how that property... Because each of those elements of their portfolio, their, you know, family office or their enterprise, has a whole bunch of really good professionals running it.
Mm-hmm. And those professionals are not trained to maximize your values, right? They're trained to be cost-effective, to- Sure... maximize profit.
And so in the absence of you actually translating your values to those professionals, th- they're probably not living your values the way that you would ideally want. I, I realized this somewhere a couple years ago.
Ironically, the wealthier you are, the harder it is to implement this across your entire life because there are all these professionals between you and the execution of these things.
So I do my own grocery shopping, [chuckles] so I know what's going in the cart. I use reusable bags. I even use produce, reusable produce bags, like little mesh produce bags. They don't do their own grocery shopping.
They don't do their own lawn care. And so the people that are doing them, if you're super environmentally focused and passionate, well, you better tell them- Yeah...
that you want them to do that, and what does that look like for them in terms of glass versus plastic, in terms of chemicals, in terms of, you know, all, all kinds of things.
In terms of what do you do with the clothing, the furniture when you redecorate? What happens to the stuff that you no longer want? Do you sell it? Do you donate it to a nonprofit that could use it?
Like, what happens to those things? If you don't give that kind of guidance, they don't know, and they're gonna go with what they were trained for, which is not gonna be your values.
And so the work that I do then to kind of say, "Okay, how do we bring the same values that are informing your impact work to the other parts of your enterprise?" is what I get really passionate about.
Because I know, as you said, like, everybody doesn't wanna be 100%, but for integrators to just keep making progress in all of these areas, I think is what helps them feel more joyful, more fulfilled, more like they're living in alignment with their own purpose.
Yeah. And I love how you break down the aligned versus impact a- and not to like, like you said, you know, the rise of the index fund and the passive index fund and passive investing and stuff,
you know, for, again, for better or worse, like, makes it pretty easy to not ruin things with the majority of your money that you intend to grow for retirement or whatever it is.
But because they are so passive and at least check this, like, ground floor box, it actually, if you do it right, can enable you to spend time being considerate of how you do all the rest of the stuff, right?
'Cause you don't actually really need to worry about that part of it. You get the freedom to, like you said, start pulling the string of, "Okay, but why can't teachers afford houses here?"
W- or starting with, "Okay, they're all leaving. Okay, and it's very easy to see they don't make as much as the state average, and maybe the state average is below the other states.
Okay, so I can't just grant them all house money." You know, to go down that... You have the freedom to do that, and that's- Mm-hmm... exceptional in our society, but please do it. You know, do...
Make the other prudent choices so you can do that, 'cause we need you to do that.
And it's amazing, like you said, the outcomes that can be had should someone-Have the direction from someone like yourself to be able to do that, who gets inceptioned by you. [chuckles] Yeah.
Yeah, and I would say what I would inception to your listeners perhaps, I like how we verbed that. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Uh, but what I would maybe- I have children. I inception things all of the time.
[chuckles] It's the only way to do it. Okay. Here, here's my little inception brain worm for you- Okay... which is
I think we tend to fundamentally have the wrong yardstick to measure our actions, which is if we say, "Is it really going to change the world if I go in or out of this investment?
Is it gonna change the world if I use this plastic straw? Does it really matter?" Then, you know, a lot of times the answer is no, and that lets us kinda say, "Well then, you know, I'm not gonna bother.
It's not gonna change the world."
But I think that's the wrong yardstick, and the yardstick that I try to use for myself, and I encourage people to consider, is not will this change the world, but is this in alignment with the person I aspire to be in the world?
Mm-hmm. And if that's the question, then it's always worth trying to answer yes.
You know, the way that I'm running my household, the way that I'm sourcing food and clothing, the way that I'm donating and, you know, being a voter and a neighbor, and all of those different levers you have,
it's worth it to be the person you aspire to be and live in alignment with your own stated values. I love it.
Our friends at the Environmental Voter Project, who do not support specific candidates or parties, are very good at this, and they will send you text messages, and it is all highly researched and effective and makes so much sense.
They'll be like, "Hey, Sharon, thanks for being a climate voter. Have you voted yet?" And you're like, "I can't really call myself a fucking climate voter if I don't actually vote," right? Yeah.
And because identity i- is this lever, right? And it really is. And, right? It's the idea of how we spend our time. It's how we- Mind-... spend our days. Mindset- Yeah...
and identity are, like, the key shifts, and that's why this is so hard, and that's why, you know...
I mean, I'm trying to change mindsets of the advisor industry, the wealth management industry, of the estate planning industry. [chuckles] Yeah. So wish me luck, but I think it's- Best wishes. Yeah... it is- Thank you...
changing that mindset first so that the practices follow. Yeah. And many things can be true at once, right? You know, that's, that is how the markets tend to work, and again, we're...
This is just the US, basically, by the way. There's a thousand other versions in a thousand other places. None of them are necessarily better than the others, kinda like versions of democracy, other conversation. But
you can just do things, and you have a lot of power to do that and a lot of influence, and much more than you think. There's many more things that could use your help, and then we could just not talk about them anymore.
That's right. It would be great. Anything else I'm missing, Sharon, before I let you go? No. I mean, people can find some of this. Yes. Of course. I've got white papers, book. Yeah, so. Yeah, yeah.
Where can the people stalk you?
My website is incapstrategies.com, and as you mentioned, I'm pretty active on LinkedIn, so if you like people being mouthy about wealth management, philanthropy, family offices, then, [chuckles]
you know, come and find me there. That's fantastic.
And if I am someone, again, most probable sort of young Gen X, millennial, older Gen Z, that is about to go through this transition, part of it, however complicated their family office may be or whatever the number looks like, this and that, what is their first step to getting in t- contact with you or someone like you to say, "This really rings true, and I need help"?
Yeah, I mean, you can reach out to me on our website. There's a Contact Us form, and that comes to me personally. Okay.
And so, yeah, I've, I talk to many, many a next gen, and I don't know if it feels comforting or condescending to be like, "Yeah. Oh, yeah, I know this story.
Like, I've seen this movie a million times" because it makes people feel less alone. It, it really... Similar. It's very easy to look at your own- Yeah... family's drama and be like, "How is this? We're the worst."
Or it's kinda... And again, [chuckles] I throw them under the bus all the time, but, you know, there's nothing better than seeing other people's kids acting up 'cause you're like, "Oh, thank God. It's not just me." Yeah.
Yeah. Other people are in my nightmare too. Yeah, that's what we get. I love making people feel less alone in that nightmare. Worked with so many families. I've seen so many situations, and patterns absolutely repeat.
You know, the flavor's a little different, but- Yeah... the pattern repeats. Oh.
And, and yeah, there are, you know, a million examples of how we can try to address it and kind of help you take incrementally better steps, you know?
We, we probably can't change it all tomorrow, but, you know, get you on a path and get your family on a path that feels more aligned to your own ambition and purpose. I love it.
I always ask guests what's a book you would recommend. I am gonna read your book. I also picked up The Purpose of Capital, which I believe you recommended at one point. Yeah.
Is there anything else you would recommend to folks? Could be any... I mean, it can literally be a coloring book. Like, we all need self-care right now. Could be anything.
I think The Purpose of Capital is powerful, and that one's free, by the way. That's Jed Emerson and my book. Great. We can just do those. Yeah. If you have any other ideas, send them to me. Okay.
We put our whole list up on Bookshop. People love it, you know? So great. And we truly- That's awesome... have everything from, like, Dragons Love Tacos to, you know, the Constitution. Pretty popular. Great.
Sharon- People should read it as we- Both of them... also retail it. Dragon Loves Tacos is legendary. [upbeat music] That's it for this week's conversation.
For more conversations, scroll back in the feed or visit podcast.importantnotimportant.com to search by name, topic, whatever. Thanks for sharing, thanks for leaving a review, and thanks for giving a shit.
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