The Cool Kids Table — What Success Leaves Behind

Every cafeteria had a cool kids' table. You knew exactly who sat there and what got you a seat. Well, society has one too—and in America, money talks. The bigger the boat, the more houses, the more lavish the vacations, the higher you climb. But then what? 

Here's the thing nobody tells you on the way up: people reach the top and so many of them report still feeling empty. Restless. Like something's missing. It's a thread that runs through study after study on wealth, meaning, and wellbeing—the stuff we're sure will complete us keeps leaving people wanting.

This episode marks part three of the Impact Spending series, and in it, Stacie asks: what if we changed what the definition of success looks like? What if the real flex was how much impact one can make with their wealth before they go instead of  how much one person can stockpile and show off. 

What if our goal in life was to create a legacy? A legacy people could use and build on for generations to come.

To see how upside-down our priorities really are, Stacie follows the money—and the numbers tell the whole story. 

• $10 billion on political ads in one election cycle, versus the $11–30 billion a year it would take to house every person on the street. 
• $152 billion flowing through the pet industry, while a rescue dog brings in just $150–500 at adoption. 
• Billions to treat anxiety and depression, almost nothing to build the connection that keeps people well in the first place. 

The pattern is always the same: we fund the crisis and starve the prevention.

Plus a first look at TH-CA's newest app feature, the rescue-specific matching pathway, and a free webinar teaching rescue organizations how to put this new tool to work.

Because making money shouldn't be the flex anymore—what you do with it matters more. It's time to start making legacies by leaving this place better than we found it.

Resources for this episode:

• Free Webinar for Rescues: https://youtu.be/N7sg2Fe-b24?si=j2-55whm-hfrbJ4D
• Real Impact by Morgan Simon
• The Financial Activist Playbook by Jasmine Rashid
• Impact Spending Pt 1 — "Your Dollar, Your Vote: The World We're Funding"
• Impact Spending Pt 2 — "Society Regenerated 2.0 — Follow the Money"
• Political ad spending, 2024 cycle (~$10.2B) — AdImpact
• Cost to end U.S. homelessness ($11–30B/yr) — Scioto Analysis
• U.S. pet industry spending ($152B) — American Pet Products Association
• U.S. weight-loss market (~$90B) — Marketdata LLC
• Corporate vs. individual charitable giving (1% vs. 2–3%) — Chronicle of Philanthropy
• Loneliness epidemic advisory (2023) — U.S. Surgeon General
• Shelter euthanasia statistics — ASPCA / Shelter Animals Count

The Human–Canine Alliance is a patent-pending platform that matches people in need with rescue dogs in need using AI-powered compatibility matching and personalized training prescriptions to improve loneliness and isolation and reduce dog euthanasia.

🌐 Subscribe to The Alliance Insider: JOIN OUR PACK!

Transcript

Stacie: [00:00:00] Everybody dies.

It doesn't matter how much money you make, you don't get to skip that part. So the only question that actually matters, is what will you leave behind?

We are answering that question like the world ends with us. Like the only people who matter carry our last name. We pile it up, we show it off, we pass it on to our own, and we call that winning.

/

Stacie: Hey everyone, it's Stacie. Welcome back to The Human-Canine Alliance [00:01:00] Podcast. If you've been with me this year, you know we've started something a few episodes back. A series I've been calling Impact Spending, and this is part three.

You don't need to listen to the last two to understand this episode, but if you're curious, I recommend listening to those next. 

There's one idea from that series I keep circling back to, and I want to put it right at the center of today.

In Follow the Money, I told you about Morgan Simon, financial activist and author of Real Impact, and the point of hers that I genuinely cannot let go of.

 In our version of capitalism, profit and personal wealth sit on the throne, and the people and the places that created that wealth get pushed to the bottom and relabeled.

Relabeled as charity.

Charity isn't really part of the plan. It's an afterthought, a [00:02:00] tiny corrective tacked on to the very end of the supply chain, making up a fraction of the profits.

I wanna sit in that idea today because once you really see it, you can't unsee it. And for me, it changes how we should be thinking about how our society defines success.

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Stacie: Let me back up and say something I think we tend to forget or breeze over. We built this. America runs on capitalism. That's the water we swim in. And capitalism is extraordinary. It builds, it scales, it rewards people who make something people want.

But it also quietly hands you a definition. A definition of what it means to be successful.

And that definition got simplified over time [00:03:00] down to one thing.

 Money.

 Not what you built, not who you lifted, not what's still standing after you're gone.

 A number. When the only scoreboard is money, everything that isn't money starts to look like a waste of time.

Connection looks inefficient.

Community looks optional.

Generosity gets filed under, "Nice if you can afford it."

And here is where it really shows up. Corporations make billions of dollars every single year from products and services tied directly to treating problems in society. And then at the end of all of that profit, how much do they actually give back?

On average, big companies give about 1% of their pre-tax profits to charity. 1%. You wanna know what regular [00:04:00] people give as a donation? 2 to 3% of their income.

So the everyday person with less to give outweighs the donation percentage of billion-dollar organizations.

 So here's the reframe I wanna try on with you today.

Think back to school for a second. Every cafeteria had one, the cool kids' table. You knew exactly who sat there and exactly what got you a seat, and whatever that thing was, the whole room organized itself around it. Well, society has a cool kids' table, too, and in America, money talks.

The bigger your boat is, the more houses you have, the more lavish your vacations are, the higher up the cool kids club you climb. But then what?

What happens when you make it to the top? Here's the thing nobody tells [00:05:00] you on the way up. People reach the top, the money, the houses, the success we're all told to chase, and so many of them report still feeling empty. Restless. Like something's still missing.

The achievement didn't fill the hole they thought it would. And that's not me guessing. It's a thread that runs through study after study on wealth, meaning, and wellbeing. The stuff we're sure will make us feel complete keeps leaving people wanting.

So what if we changed what success means to us in our society? What if the real flex wasn't how much one person can stockpile and show off, but how much impact they can make with their incredible wealth before they go?

A legacy.

What if we cared [00:06:00] more about our legacy than our abundance?

What if we cared more about making sure clean water was a sustained resource in every town, city, and state in America before we died?

What if we cared more about providing options for unhomed people so it didn't keep growing into a bigger problem for our kids and our grandkids?

What if we cared more about implementing prevention solutions instead of treatment solutions in every aspect of our economy?

Instead, our focus is on ourselves.

As if caring about the community we live in doesn't apply to us. And when that community provides us with opportunities that made us successful in the first place, we turn around and pretend like we did it all on our own.

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Stacie: Look, you [00:07:00] can't buy your own products and services. To be successful in business, you need customers, and those customers are the same people in your community.

So why does our society not expect businesses to invest back into our communities in meaningful, impactful ways?

Not as charity. Charity should be reserved for the unexpected, the family hit with a medical bill they could never have planned for, the disaster nobody saw coming. The person leaning on their friends and family through a hard season.

That's what charity is for.

Charity should not be the system that decides whether unhomed people eat. It should not be how an uninsured person gets the medication that keeps them alive. It should not be how the animals nobody claimed get fed and cared for.

Those aren't [00:08:00] surprises. They happen every year, in every community, like clockwork, and leaving them to whoever happens to feel generous this month isn't compassion.

It's a society choosing to ignore segments of its population, a society choosing to pretend we don't see them.

 And yet we have the resources, we have the money, we have the intelligence to create better pathways for these situations.

And instead, we just buy bigger boats. We just buy more houses. We go on more lavish vacations.

And we call that winning.

/

Stacie: And while we're talking about it, let's talk numbers.

Let's look at just how upside down we [00:09:00] are in America, and you don't need a philosophy degree. All we have to do is follow the money, like Morgan Simon and Jasmine Rashid have taught us.

I pulled up some comparisons. I want you to actually picture these because the numbers tell quite a story when you see them side by side.

Picture the last election. Every ad break, every YouTube pre-roll, every mailer crammed in your box, and multiply it across the entire country. That's $10 billion. $ 10 billion.

 In just the 2024 cycle on 30-second spots built to make you and I feel something for a moment and then forget it. Now, picture what it would take to get every person off the street and into housing in America. Researchers who study this put it somewhere between $11 and $30 billion a year.

So hold those [00:10:00] two pictures next to each other.

Practically the same amount of money, and one of them just talks at the problem while the other could actually solve it.

And here's the kicker. Housing people is often cheaper than leaving them out there once you count the emergency rooms and the crisis calls.

But it lives in the charity bucket because nobody's figured out how to profit off it, so we never build it. We never get a solution. As long as it's considered charity, as long as it's not profitable, it's not buildable in America because we're a capitalist society, and we have decided it's more important to buy a bigger boat.

 Next example.

Picture the pet aisle, the organic food, the orthopedic beds, the little raincoats. $152 [00:11:00] billion a year flows through that world. An average pet generates $15,000 to $30,000 for the economy over its life.

Rescue gets $150 to $500 per dog one time. It's like a tip, and it doesn't even cover the cost of caring for that dog at the rescue, let alone fund help for the next one.

Next example. Picture every weight loss ad you've scrolled past this year, every clinic and subscription, injection pen.

We spend around $90 billion on weight loss in a single year, and tens of billions more on the newest medication on top of that.

But picture the other side of that scale, what we actually put towards prevention, such as making sure there is access to healthy foods in every town, city, and state in America, towards minimizing ingredients in our [00:12:00] foods, the upstream stuff that means fewer people ever needed the fix in the first place.

It barely moves the needle. We pour everything into the patch-up and almost nothing into the stopping the problem before it starts.

Next example. And this is the one closest to everything we're doing here.

Picture the cost of treating anxiety and depression, the prescriptions, the appointments, the management year after year. It's enormous.

Now picture what we spend building the conditions that keep people from getting that sick in the first place.

The connection, the community, the places people belong. Almost nothing. That's the pattern. Every single time. We fund the crisis and we underfund the prevention. We are reactive instead of proactive. And it's not that we don't have the money.[00:13:00] 

Look at those numbers. We clearly have the money.

We've just decided that prevention lands in the 'nice if someone gets around to it' pile. That's insanity. But it's a choice we're making in America.

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Stacie: So why is the dog matching person standing here comparing numbers about political ads and weight loss drugs?

Because the Human-Canine Alliance lives at exactly this intersection. A lonely person and a homeless dog are both predictable. Both expensive when we ignore them.

And here's the thing the whole disconnected system has never noticed.

They're part of each other's solution. We are more digitally connected than ever and lonelier than we've ever been in decades. Loneliness was declared a public health crisis in 2023 by the US Attorney General. [00:14:00] It's compared to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.

And meanwhile, dogs have a proven natural ability to ease exactly that, the loneliness, the depression, the social anxiety.

And we euthanize them at a rate of about a thousand per day.

Those dots have been sitting there disconnected this whole time.

Connecting them isn't charity. It's prevention. It's proactive solution building.

It's keeping a person out of the mental health crisis pipeline and the pharmaceutical pipeline, which can cause many types of addiction or other problems as we know, and a dog out of the euthanasia pipeline. With one connection, built on real [00:15:00] science.

That is the legacy version of success. That is leaving this place better than we found it, creating new pathways that create better solutions and better outcomes.

/

Stacie: Okay. So I wanted to share our first major feature addition to the app. It's a unique pathway that provides matches limited to one rescue, and here's why.

I discovered exactly where the app fits in the rescue adoption process, and it doesn't start with the person. It's with the rescue.

Visualize this. A person walks into the rescue, and instead of being walked straight back to the kennels, they're handed an iPad, or they pull out their own iPhone, and they take the THCA five-minute questionnaire using that rescue's unique link.

That personalized pathway only shows them matches from the facility that [00:16:00] they're standing in.

So now, both the person and the staff can see plain as day based on life, energy, and home responses, which dogs are a perfect fit for this person.

The technology isn't replacing the rescue worker. It's handing them a better instrument, a modern tool. The match gets smarter, the conversation gets richer, and the dog that walks out the door is far more likely to stay out in a home that's truly right for them.

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Stacie: Which brings me to my next announcement. We built a webinar for rescue organizations specifically, but if you're not a rescue, it'll still help you understand what THCA is and how it fits into the adoption process. It walks through exactly how the five-minute questionnaire works, how to implement it at your facility, how to introduce it to [00:17:00] prospective adopters, and why it makes so much sense to start using it today.

If you run a rescue, volunteer at one, or know someone who does, this is the thing to send them. It's built for rescues, and it's free. The link will be in the show notes, so check it out.

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Stacie: So here's where I'll leave you. We've been sold this quiet myth that only the rich and the elected get to decide where money flows. That's just not true. The most common way people give up their power is by believing they don't have any.

We have so much more than we think, especially in today's world. Look at the power of social media. Cancel culture, for all its mess, is proof of it.

The people decide who gets the platform and who doesn't.

So it's time we start rethinking [00:18:00] why we hand someone a seat at the cool kids table in the first place. I'm not saying it shouldn't be cool to make money. I'm saying what you do with that money is what should actually matter. 

Do you spend it all on yourself, or do you give credit where credit is due? Do you strive to leave this world better than you found it? Does your success lift your community, or just you?

Thank you so much for listening to The Human-Canine Alliance Podcast. Please be sure to follow this podcast wherever you're listening from right now, and get plugged in with us on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn if you're not already.

If you are listening to this, you should be on the Alliance Insider email list. The email folks are the ones who find out what's happening first. Go to my website, HumanCanineAlliance.com, scroll to the bottom of the page, click Subscribe.

 Let's keep connecting the dots, people.

Let's make it [00:19:00] cool to leave this place better than we found it.

 I'm Stacie, your host. I hope you continue to listen and watch. ​