Welcome to the Gathering Pod, the audio version of my weekly gathering room broadcast.

I'm Martha Beck.

Today's topic, very apropos I feel for our first ever COVID December, is making friends

with money.

So as I talk about this, I know a lot of you

are gonna have reactions and I'm very interested

in people's experience of this particular issue.

So if you have a question, do formulate it

and put it through so that Roan Mangum,

the Distinguished Badger, can send it through to me during our Q&A part of the, well, it's more just a.

No, you get cues.

So, yes, I'd love to have some of those up and going if you want some personalized advice

on this extremely sticky topic.

Yeah, money of all the things in the universe is one of the most frightening and maddening

of things. They've actually shown when they do studies on chimpanzees and they take away things

that are directly good for them, like fruit or other forms of food, they take that away and they replace it with

tokens that they have to accumulate and then trade for food. And once they do that, this really

bizarre thing happens where the chimpanzees go mad over these tokens. They become warlike, They become querulous. Their friendships fail. They become

obsessed with these tokens. They can't get enough of them. So there's something about being one

step away from the thing you actually need and having money be the thing in the middle or a token

of some kind being thing in the middle that makes us crazy even at the very

apy level. So I've been coaching this my entire career. One of the biggest things is, oh my God,

...