Mellody Hobson
speaker
238 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard May 2025
Mellody Hobson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Correct. You had to go to church looking a certain way.
Of course, Mary Janes. But we didn't have lights at home. And so that was one of those things that caused me so much anxiety. So at a very young age, I said, I want to understand money. I want to understand it. I want to not repeat what I'm seeing all around me. I want to make better decisions. It wasn't about an amount of money.
It was about truly breaking it down so that I could do and live life in a different way. And so I think that it's no accident I work in the investment business and have my entire career. My trauma in life became my purpose.
Yes. 77% of people say they have anxiety about money. A lot of that is rooted in a lack of knowledge and information. And why are people so uncomfortable talking about it? Because we don't grow up in schools where we learn about money.
Correct. I think the thing is when you can anchor it, not only do you not have fear, you're kind of excited about what you're learning because everyone who's read the book, and I've had so many different types of people read the book, they always say to me, Who knew? Yes. And they feel so empowered by knowledge that they think that they hold that other people don't have. That's right.
And it makes it especially for kids. Kids love facts, but this is not an encyclopedia.
Yes. So my first draft of the book I gave to my husband. Yes. And who knows a thing or two about telling stories? Yes. And he looked at me and he said, it's too sophisticated. And I was like a little offended. I was like, I know how to talk about money. He's like, I think it's a little sophisticated. So I gave it to Everest, who was eight years old, nine years old, the first draft.
And I said, because I started when she was eight, I said, read it and circle every word you don't know. And it came back with a lot of circles. Yes. And so I said, you know what? I'm not dumbing this down. I'm going to explain every word that she circled. So sometimes I gave the phonetic definition. Sometimes I gave the definition.
We did funny, hilarious footnotes, all sorts of things where I said, I'm not going to walk away from the concept, but I do understand I need to break it down another level. And so she read multiple drafts until I felt that she truly understood the concepts, which I was just literally using her as my, you know, one person focus group child.
Then we took it to expert readers and did peer review with teachers and things like that.
There are so many facts, and I was just so... I mean, I spent a long time researching. Mm-hmm. And everything had to be vetted and we had to make sure everything was absolutely true. But one of my favorite ones is we think about the first official credit card having been born basically 75 years ago.
When this businessman was traveling in New York and he forgot his wallet. He had dinner. Right. And he didn't have any money and he ultimately invented what was called the diner's card for dining. It was originally cardboard, not plastic, even though we call credit cards plastic. Right. But that wasn't really the first credit card.
The first credit card was a knight's ring from a thousand years ago. I know. Who would have ever? They used signet rings to pay for things because the king or queen did not want the knights on the road where they could be robbed. And as a result of that, they gave the knight a signet ring. The knight would stay at an inn or go to a pub and then put their ring in the wax seal.
And then the innkeeper or the pub keeper would take the bill to the castle and get paid. So when I was reading this, I was like, did you know that already? Or did you research it? I didn't know that one, but there were a lot of things I did know, like bull and bear. That's one of my favorite facts. Why do they call it bull and bear markets when I started to work in the investment business?
And very early on, after doing lots of research, because I wanted to know, the best answer I got was it had to do with how they kill their prey. That when a bull kills its prey, it takes its horns and it pulls up. And when a bear kills its prey, it runs and bears down on the prey. So stock market going up as a bull market, stock market going down as a bear market.
That is something I knew, for example. And there were a lot of other facts in the book that I knew. I didn't know that when I read that. I knew Wall Street was because of where Alexander Hamilton lived. Now, a lot of people know that fact today because of the show Hamilton. The play, yeah.
So the first thing is that their lack of willingness to talk about it basically means that they pass on all of their money habits. So whatever they do, the child is actually just acclimating themselves to the same behavior. Then you can't break the cycle. There's not that 10-year-old melody saying, I don't want to do this. So you can't expect a child to do that. That's number one, that in not...
dealing with money, they are de facto teaching their children everything that they do. So if you pay the minimum payment, your child's going to do that. If you overspend, your child will spend. These are things that we know for sure. The second thing is shielding their children from money. This is where I give my mother a lot of credit.
She maybe made some money decisions that were questionable, but she put me in the real world every single day. And what I loved is she had me handle money. We would go to a restaurant from McDonald's to a diner. She would have me pay when I was little, four or five years old, go and give the money at the counter. Then she'd have me count the change.
Then count the change. Yes. Then calculate the tip. Every step along the way that I became more sophisticated, I never saw my mom pay a bill because I paid them. And so it let me know what things cost. I knew what a hamburger cost at McDonald's versus at a fancy restaurant. Let me ask you this.
Showing 141–160 of 238 · page 8 of 12
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