Outside my office window is one of the most beautiful and important rivers in America, the mighty Hudson River, and today it is perfectly calm, smooth as glass.

Hey, it's Seth, and this is a Kimbo.

We'll be back in a second after this word from our sponsor.

I just said two things about the Hudson that aren't actually true. The first one is calling

it a river. It's actually a fjored, a tidal estuary, a body of water that's brackish, half-saltwater, half-fresh.

And the coolest part is that the water flows in both directions. Half the day, the tide comes in and the other half the day it goes the other direction.

And calm? Well, while it might appear calm, the Hudson River is almost always moving, except for those

in-between moments when it switches from one direction to the other, the water is moving. And this is a

podcast about a different kind of movement, the movement of money. Cash flow is an amorphous concept that really needs to be understood by anybody who buys or sells, who starts something, who borrows money, who saves money, or who interacts with money.

There are two things that are worth understanding straight up. The first one is this.

Money, thanks to 500 years of capitalism, is everywhere.

Everything, every opportunity, it has a value,

but it's a giant but.

The relationship between money and your worth, your value, your contribution is money at best.

People who make more money aren't better, aren't even better at the thing that they

do necessarily than people who don't. People who sell their music aren't necessarily better musicians than the people

who don't. And we live in a culture where those two things have been conflated. That somehow, being ranked as one of the 500 richest people in the United States,

is more than a measure of how much money you made.

But that's all it is.

So we have to keep reminding ourselves of that.

That if you set out to make money and you don't make money,

then you didn't do a good job of making money.

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