Chapter 1: What is the initial claim about Bill Gates' financial support?
Bill Gates is going to write us a check for $2 million. One day, I'm going to walk to that mailbox thinking it's just bills and our life is going to change. It did happen. He got the letter and came back in and went, Bill Gates. And we all were like, oh! So now we're getting $14 million from Bill Gates and his family. Let's start at the beginning. Yeah, thanks for having me on.
My family grew up with the Gates family. When you say grew up with, like, were they in the same neighborhood? Not exactly in the same. They were about 15 minutes away. So every summer they would go to their summer home on the Hood Canal. They'd be barbecuing. Bill Gates Sr. would be out on the boat with my uncles and aunts, and they'd be swimming across the lake.
They would meet for social gatherings a lot. Mary Gates and my grandmother Sarah were best friends. They would do social gatherings, and every year they had this Christmas party. It was this huge Bill Gates family Christmas party that my family would go to. So I had never heard of the Gates family until this story starts.
So to give you a little context of who my dad was before we get into this, I always compare him to George Costanza from Seinfeld. He's just chronically unemployed, bald, fat, thinks he's the smartest guy in the room, but none of his schemes ever work out, and a total womanizer.
Chapter 2: How did the speaker's family know the Gates family?
Yeah, my dad was deeply religious. And yeah, I know, ironic, right? Yeah. And especially involved with the prosperity gospel, the idea that if you just give the church your money, God will rain down money on you and you'll just be this wealthy. You know, when you see all the super churches, mega churches, they're all preaching the prosperity gospel and they're all profiting off of it.
I was going to say, it's funny because some of the biggest, matter of fact, Every Ponzi schemer, almost every Ponzi schemer that I met in federal prison could quote scripture like nobody you've ever met. And almost all of them were super involved in the church. Oh, yeah. Luke 638, man. You know, good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and overflowing. Like, that's the idea. Yeah.
So yeah, the televangelist, you know, make $1,000 leap of faith, send me that $1,000. And the Lord's gonna someone out there with credit card debt. Oh, the Lord's gonna take care. My dad was the guy in the living room going, I have credit card debt. Oh, my God, the Lord is telling me to send this guy $1,000. And my dad didn't work. So $1,000. I mean, especially for the 90s.
That's a lot of money anyway. So how did he how did he have a family? He didn't work? All right, so I was born in California. I was born in Santa Barbara. And pretty soon after that, because he had no money, he went up to Washington where my uncle owned an apartment complex. My uncle is a very successful real estate guy, mostly with commercial properties.
So he owned an apartment complex, and he offered my dad a look. You can have an apartment for free. You can live there. I just need you to do like one shift a week security. You don't even have to be out driving. Just every couple hours, just peek your head out and take and take a lap and just make sure everything's good and you can live in this apartment for free.
So that's how we ended up in Washington. We were there for a while. And yeah, my uncle showed up to the apartment one day and my dad was being real weird. And my uncle was like, what's going on? And my dad's like, well, I haven't worked in forever and we don't have any money and we don't have any food and we don't have any diapers. So my uncle's like, You should have told me.
So he goes to the store and gets all that and brings it to us. And that's kind of how we were surviving was church, food banks, welfare checks, food stamps, stuff like that. And then every once in a while.
Why didn't he get a job?
I mean, even a shitty job plus a free apartment. Yeah, because he was too good for that. He was too good for the shitty job. But not too good to accept handouts. Well, he would hate you for the handout, but he would take that money. So he hated my uncle. My uncle and him grew up together. They have the same education. They both have business degrees. They both worked on the pipeline in Alaska.
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Chapter 3: What is the significance of the prosperity gospel in this story?
If he just sticks to this, it leads to success. But within two months, oh, this guy's an idiot. He doesn't know what he's doing. Oh, I could do this better. And then, but instead of quitting, he would just be the shittiest employee until you fired him. So he could blame you. Yeah. I was going to say, I always meet these guys who are like, you know, it's funny. Like I met a guy who was homeless.
Yeah. hired him, gave him a job, gave him a truck, cleaned him up, you know, and two months later, he's trying to tell me how to run my business. Like you were homeless two months ago. Yeah. Yeah. I did stucco when I was 18 and you know, we would get guys from the halfway house and it was always, oh man, Jesus, Jesus saved me. Halfway house. I'm the hardest worker in the room.
And then in like a month, they just wouldn't show up. They've absconded with the work truck that they were given or The truck is found at the airport and they're gone and their parole officer is looking for them. So yeah, it's a whole thing. So your dad. Yeah, yeah. So my dad did that.
And once you get into circles with successful people and you kind of fuck them all over, they start talking and nobody hires you anymore. So I remember in the early 90s, he went to Saudi Arabia to help with the oil spill that happened. And he was gone for almost two years. He left right before my sister was born. I would have been four at this point. You'd think that'd be good money, right?
It was good money. Yeah, it was good money. I don't know why he came back after just a couple of years or what he did with this money. But when he came back, my sister didn't even know who he was because he had been gone her whole life. And then at one point he got an accounting job for a construction company in Michigan and we're living right outside Seattle in Federal Way.
So why he got a job in Michigan never, I mean, I'm a kid, so not, not a lot of anything makes sense, but he was gone for a little while. And my mom had this really interesting way of dropping super inappropriate details about their relationship to us kids.
So all of a sudden he came back and a couple of years later, she let it slip that he had met a girl in his apartment complex and there might've been some fraternizing there. So she demanded he come back. Right. So we're living in Federal Way, and at this time, my entire family, except for my uncle, is living around Seattle. We're very close.
My aunts and uncles and cousins, I remember birthdays and holidays and everything. It was great. And I was too young to realize that my dad was the black sheep of the family, the guy that – was just not like everyone else. So eventually he got a job with Raytheon in Chicago. So we moved from Seattle to, we lived in Indiana, Hobart, Indiana, about 45 minutes from Chicago.
And he had that job for, I want to say a year to two years. I think he was a construction foreman because he had a trailer like on the work site. He had to wear the hard hat. He brought me there a couple of times, like bring your kid to work day. Right. So I never really understood what he did, but it was like this big construction site. So in 1996, my grandma dies of cancer.
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Chapter 4: How did the father's financial struggles affect the family dynamics?
And John's brother was there, right? Yeah. What are you talking? I'm like, was Jennifer there? And they're like, no, bro. We didn't even meet her for another year.
I'm like, I could have swore she was there at the party with us when this happened. And I would have looked and I would have swore that's what happened. Oh yeah. One of my good friends, Danny has a tattoo I did on him 13, 14 years ago. And I still don't believe that I did it. I have no memory. He showed it to me. Have you ever had that, John? I always remember the tattoo. Oh yeah.
He's like my good friend. And he was like, dude, remember when I got in that car accident right outside where you were tattooing? I just came in and you gave me this thing as a consolation. I'm like,
no i don't remember that at all but i look at him like hey if you say so i believe you i was gonna say people will say yeah remember you said this and i'm like i don't remember saying it but sounds like sounds like me yeah yeah and the quality of it was about where i was at at that time so yeah i was all blown out and shitty
but yeah so silver silver's gone no money no money jewelry's not real what are you doing here yeah yeah exactly i mean i'm surprised he didn't just pack it up and fly us back to indiana the next day so but he just goes into a rage And this is the, my dad can talk himself into anything. So I think that this was a big projection of the resentment he felt towards my uncle for helping us out.
Because that apartment story is only one way. My uncle got my dad out of some sketchy tax shit. Yeah. And my dad, he just, my dad always wanted to be with wealthy, well-to-do people. But he resented them because he wasn't one of them. But he wasn't one of them because his pride was too big for him to pass entry level positions.
If he could just shut his mouth for two years, you know, he could be put on a fast track for success. He just couldn't do it. So I remember in the car on the way to our hotel that night, he is just raging. They have stolen everything. There was absolutely cash in that house. There was absolutely jewelry in that home. And my aunts had actually gone through and the jewelry belongs to them.
It's their mother's. Basically, the sale of the townhouse and the sale of whatever was left over after the kids picked through everything was gonna go to my grandpa. But until then, like the family could claim anything that was in the house if they wanted it. So my aunts had actually gone through and divvied up the jewelry between them. And then they were like, oh, you know what?
Let's save a few things for I'm not going to say my mom's name, but for her. Right. You know, we like it would be nice because, you know, she loved our mom also. So when so they gave her I don't I don't know exactly what it was. It was a small collection of jewelry. And my dad was so fierce. He was like, they gave us the worst of the whole collection. Like he didn't see the collection.
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Chapter 5: What significant event occurs during the hospital visit?
And we went to the, and the dad was actually a surgeon. So very wealthy, of course, family. Right. And it's funny because we always hung out with way better families, and it's only occurred to me as an adult, they probably knew exactly what was going on. They probably felt terrible for us, which is why we were allowed over. So we go to the hospital to visit the new baby.
They might have just found your dad entertaining. They could have been. Most people that hang out with me just, not because they think, hey, we're on the same level. They just think, this guy is entertaining. Yeah, he opens his mouth and the party starts. Like I wouldn't lend him money. Right.
Right.
I wouldn't give him my Soch. He does keep us laughing. Oh, that's funny. I wouldn't take him to the Bank of America Christmas party. Exactly. Yeah, so we arrive at the hospital to visit this new baby, and we found out that the baby was born dead. And the family is absolutely devastated. And on the way home, my dad says, well, it was born dead because they don't tithe.
Chapter 6: How does the father's belief in tithing impact his family?
Like, and the thing was, is at the time I'm still, it wasn't until I was much older that I realized all this was bullshit. So I'm just like, oh, they didn't. Oh, they don't know about tithing. How can they not know about tithing? It's like the main thing. Because like, did you ever have an allowance when you were a kid? Yeah. All right. So we had an allowance.
All my friends were getting like 20 bucks a week. We got $2.50 a week allowance. And on an Excel spreadsheet, we had 35 itemized items we had to do every single day from the moment we got up to the moment we went to bed. And if one of them was missed, we did not get the 50 cents for that day. Okay. I mean, it's insane. I'll just forsake the whole 250. Oh, well, then you would just get hit.
You'd just get hit. And then at the end of the week. So, I mean, he would literally grab the list and go through the whole thing. And one of them is sweep the kitchen. If it had been longer than an hour since you did that, it might be dirty again.
Chapter 7: What are the implications of the father's financial decisions?
So it's like, no, I did, but this is new. We'd be like, nope, not good enough. So at the end of the week, if we got the $2 or $2.50, we had to tithe and give on that money. So we're already being given slave wages for dozens of things we have to do for a day. Everyone else I'm seeing, wait, you're getting $20 a week because you take the trash out every night and you do the dishes? Right.
Can I come live at your house? Like what the hell? So we're tithing. So the tithing and giving thing is beaten into us from the time we're little. So it's like, Oh man, their baby died. Why didn't they tithe? Why didn't they give? It's so obvious. Like we're so brainwashed that like tithing and giving is the way to success or to keep your unborn children alive. According to my dad. Yeah.
All right. So, so he does the same thing that he did at the old church. He integrates, he becomes friends. We're the perfect family and,
Chapter 8: How does the father's disappearance affect the family dynamics?
The pastor's coming to our house. We're going to the pastor's house. The church was smaller, so the pastor was a little more accessible. And people would come over, and he would be like, okay, I need prayer warriors. I need to tell you guys what's happened. But the way he would present the story is, my family stole everything from me.
I should have gotten blah, blah, blah from my mom dying, and I didn't. What I got was this collection, and now that's been stolen from me. So now, it's really funny.
After one of those meetings, now we have a family meeting, and my dad says, so I know that everyone is thinking that it's over because I sent the collection back, and all this money that God promised us is not coming, but it's actually not true. It's the opposite. We actually are going to have more money coming now. We're like, okay, how?
And he goes, well, I was reminded, I wrote down the scripture, but I forget. I think it's Proverbs something or Paul something. One of those P chapters. It basically says when a man steals from another man, he must repay seven times the amount that he stole.
So my dad saw this situation as, okay, this is what the Lord has declared, that the Gates family used their power and influence to steal that collection back from me, the collection that God had blessed me with that was going to lead us to this insane wealth. That collection is worth $2 million. So now we're getting 14 million from Bill Gates and his family unequivocally.
And that's just for the collection. All the other stuff that already existed on the Excel spreadsheet from him sending welfare money to John Hagee on TBN, all that's added in. Bill Gates is on the hook for the entire bill. So at this point, it's like 14 and a half or whatever it is. It's freaking nuts. All right.
So one day, one Sunday after church, he's like, hey, we're going to go on a little drive. And where to? Well, there's this cool neighborhood and there's this cool house that I want to show you guys. And we're like, oh, great. Now, the house that we're living in at this time, it's reeked of wet dog.
Like whoever had the house the day before us, their dog smell just got into the carpet and they didn't replace the carpet. So our house smelled like wet dog. The crawl space was full of mold and mildew. And my brother's asthmatic. Black mold was growing up past the carpet onto the wall. He was going to the hospital.
The floor in the corner of our room and in the closet was actually coming off the wall. So you could just move it and you'd be looking down into the crawl space. I mean, it is a horrible home. So when he says there's this cool neighborhood with this cool little house, we're thinking – did he get the Gates money? Right. Oh, are we moving? This is great news.
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