An Army of Normal Folks - What If Success Isn’t What America Told You It Was?

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

What happens when a self-made millionaire realizes he’s losing everything that actually matters? This episode tells the unbelievable true story of Millard Fuller giving away $10 million (in today's dollars), intentionally making himself poor, and expectedly building one of the most well-known charities in America.Support the show: https://www.normalfolks.us/#joinSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Hey everybody, is Bill Courtney with an Army of Normal folks. Welcome to the shop. What's up, Alex? How are you? I'm doing great, Bill. We got our new merch. Well, I was going to tell you, we've built onto the shop, and there's this new section back here. Well, yeah, I want to know if I can interest you in an Army and Normal Folks hoodie or a T-shirt or a cap over here in the shop. Are you paying for it? No, I'm not paying for it. It's a shop. I mean, I live and sell them this stuff.

So what can I interest you? Well, you can't make a living because we're selling it at zero markup, zero profit. Well, I didn't say I was making a good living. I'm just making a living. You can't make any living if we're selling it a cost. That's true. Which we are, guys, which is pretty cool. It is very cool.

And I really do hope you guys will go to normalfolks. Dot us, click merch, buy a hat or a T-shirt. It's a perfect way wearing around on a Saturday or cutting your lawn or whatever. Somebody say, hey, what is that? It gives you an opportunity to tell people about us. and help us spread the words. So y'all do go to the merch. All right, shop talk number 104.

What if success isn't what America told you it was? Shop Talk 104. Yeah, the numbers are getting hard. I'm not seeing anything. 104? 104? Mm-hmm. 104?

I don't know. I don't know a 104, so we're going to have to skip it. If anybody's got out... Apparently Lockheed has a high-performance supersonic aerospace trainer. That's named 104A. Well, there you got. That's the closest thing I got. Good as you got.

After the break, we're going to talk about what of success isn't what America told you it was, right after these brief messages from our generous sponsors. Harry Styles, live in London, England at Wembley Stadium. This is Harry Styles. IR Radio wants to send you in a mate across the pond with flights from Virgin Atlantic, hotel from TripCentral.ca, tickets, and $1,000 cash. Here we got it. Download the free IHeart Radio app. Listen to IHeart new music for 10 minutes. Enter to win. Every day is another chance to see Harry Styles.

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Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Saigon, the story of my family and of the country that shaped us. The United States will not stand by and allow any power, however great, take over another country. From IHeart Podcasts, Saigon. allow me to introduce Joseph Sherman. You don't think I'm serious about a free Vietnam? I should stop talking so much. I like hearing you talk.

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I'm joined by doctors, researchers, and those with lived experience. We'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety. I started living in my car, and then my car got stolen. I was shoplifting. I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic. And making it through hardship. To be present is a learned skill, and it's hard to be present.

We'll talk with John Nelson about clinical depression and the brain implant that saved his life. What I learned is that perceived. procedure made me happy because I'm disease-free. And we'll talk with leading experts like Judd Brewer about anxiety and John Hirschfield about obsessive-compulsive disorder and the science of how the brain can change. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course and what we can do about it. Listen to Inner Cosmos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your

podcasts. Everybody, welcome back to the shop. Shop talk. Number 104, what if success isn't what America told you it was? Here we go. Army member, Terry Smith, shared this shop talk idea with us. It's from a Facebook page called Weird and Beautiful Things. So before we begin, Terry, thank you so much.

We love when listeners give us ideas. And as long as they're not horrible, we take them up. And clearly yours was a good idea. shouldn't Terry get a hat or something? Oh, geez, Bill. That's actually a good idea, though. I think Terry. Actually, we should do that.

Like, anytime somebody gets one of their ideas on the show, a shop talk or a guest, they should get some merch. They should. Yeah. All right, Terry. You're giving me one more thing to do, Bill. You work in 75 hours. Watch this.

It's going to be so easy. Terry, email me, and I'll buy it for it. That's not what I was proposing. It doesn't matter. I'm going to do it for Terry. Terry, first one out the game. I'm not doing it for everybody else going to do it. Terry, email me and say, hey, I'll listen to the shop talk.

Thanks for taking up the idea. Just email me, and then we'll get our stuff together in your address, and I'll... Bill at NormalFolks.com. Actually, go to NormalFolks.com, go to merch, pick out what you want, and then it'll mail me and tell me what it is and give me your address, and I'll buy it and send it to you. How's that? That's awesome, Bill. That's cool.

Okay. So here's what Terry shared with us off a Facebook page called Weird and Beautiful Things. By the age of 29, Millard Fuller was already a self-made millionaire. Six months later, he didn't own a house, a car, or even have a bank account. The year was 1965. Millard lived in Montgomery, Alabama, where he and his business partner had built a massive direct mail empire. They started by selling tractor cushions to farmers, moved into public. publishing cookbooks and eventually branched into real estate.

Everything they touched seemed turned to gold. Miller had everything a man was supposed to want in mid-century America. He owned a sprawling house, acres of land, horses, and a cabin on a lake. He worked 14-hour days. His mind constantly calculating the next deal or planning the next expansion. He was a machine built for commerce. Slow down just a little bit. He was a machine built for...

Not that slow. Built for commerce. Keep this in here so that people can hear how ridiculous bill is, but keep going. Don't sneeze anymore. But while he was building an empire, he was also destroying his own home. His wife, Linda, was frequently, quietly suffocating. She lived in a mansion with a man who was physically there, but mentally thousands of miles away. His focus forever locked on a ledger.

All the money was. in the world couldn't make up for the silence at their dinner table. One afternoon, Millard came home to an empty house. He found a note. Lended back to suitcase and taken a train to New York City. She needed time to think and space to decide if she was going to file for a divorce. Suddenly, Miller's empire looked very small. Miller stopped working and canceled his meetings. He bought a ticket to New York and tractor down. They met in the back of a taxi moving slowly through Manhattan traffic. He looked at the woman he loved. He looked at the woman he loved. He was. He bought a ticket to New York. He and asked what it would take to save their marriage.

She told him the truth. The wealth was a wall between them. The pursuit of it was eating him alive. He was so busy securing their future that he was missing their present. Right there in the back of the cab, they made a life-changing decision. They would sell the business. They would sell the house, the cabin, the horses, the land, and the cars. They would give all the money away to churches and charities.

They decided to make themselves entirely poor. In the 1960s, American success was strictly measured by accumulation, suburban expansion, and corporate climbing. To voluntarily give away a million dollars in 1965, the equivalent of roughly $10 million today wasn't seen as an act of grace. Most of the business community viewed it as a psychiatric breakdown. They liquidated everything, keeping just enough to cover basic living expenses while they figured out their next move.

In a humble twist of fate, the month he gave away his fortune. He actually owed $20 in back taxes to the state of Alabama, a debt the revenue department sternly reminded him of in a letter. Miller and Linda packed their bags and moved to Kionia, I'm going to spell it, K-O-I-N-O-N-I-A-K-O-N-I-A, Koyonia Farm, a Christian farming community in America's Georgia, Georgia, run by a biblical scholar named Clarence Jordan. Clarence saw families in the area living in severe poverty, wooden shacks with tin roofs, dirt floors, and no indoor plumbing. Because banks refused to lend to them,

the financial system essentially ignored their existence. Sitting at a wooden kitchen table, Clarence and Millard sketched out a concept they called Partnership Housing. It wasn't charity. They believed charity could strip people of their dignity. Instead, they would build houses using volunteer labor and sell them to families at exactly cost with no profit margin and no interest. Just like our merch. Just like our merch.

Families would pay the mortgage over 20 years, and that money would go into a revolving fund to build the next house for the next family. There was one more rule, sweat equity. The families had to physically help build their own homes. and then the homes of their neighbors. It sounded simple on paper, but it was a grueling practice. The Georgia red clay was hard as rock, and digging foundations by hand of the Somersen was brutal. Funding was scarce.

Miller's letters to wealthy contacts were mostly met with silence. The work was slow, painful, and really unclamorous. They also faced fierce local opposition. Keonia was an integrated community, where black and white volunteers worked in eight together. In the rural south of the late 60s, this invited deep, deep anger. The farm faced boycotts,

and someone even fired a gun into their produce stand. Yet, they kept building. One house became two, then three. Families moved out of shacks and into warm, dry homes with running water. Those small mortgage payments, just $20 or $30 a month, began trickling into a metal of lockbox. The model worked.

In 1976, Millard and Linda decided to take the concept national. They officially incorporated as Habitat for Humanity. They traveled the country in a used car speaking in church basements and community halls. Miller used the same relentless energy that had made him a millionaire

to sell a new vision, a world without shacks. The organization grew slowly until 1984, when a neighbor from just down the road in Plains, Georgia, the former president, Jimmy Carter, heard about that work. He and Rosalind put on work boots and showed up at a build site New York City. With the world's cameras, following the former president, everyone finally saw what Millard and Linda had built.

A fortune cannot build a home if it breaks the people living inside it. Millard Fuller died in 2009. He never became wealthy again, and he never became wealthy again. never wanted to. Today, Habitat for Humanity operates in all 50 states and 70 countries. They have helped build a repair more than get this number. Eight million homes. Millions of people sleep under sturdy roofs today because a man in a taxi decided his money was worth less than his life. The houses still stand and the mortgages are still paid. One interest-free payment at a time. And what's really cool about this is about seven years ago, some guys from Habitat

Humanity came to my lumberyard and said, hey, we need a place to park about 250 cars. And I'm like, what for? And they said, well, have you ever heard of Habitat for humanity? And I said, no, because I had. This is eight, nine years ago. And they said, well, we got a bunch of volunteers coming down here for two weeks. And we're about to build like 60 homes. And in two weeks, they built 60 homes all volunteers and all their cars parked on our lumberyard and if you go is this all the all those all those nice houses on the stretcher one block south of here yeah right off a reminder with bill's business is in the hood but there's a whole stretch of these beautiful homes that's right down here just south of marble yeah going down seventh yeah jimmy carter was here

with those people really then habitat for humanity built that entire neighborhood back there in conjunction with Hope Church from Memphis. Yeah. That's where a lot of the volunteers came from. Are you actually doing that CEO build coming up? I was just talked to Bill Sealy about it today. Really? Agreed to be on the board.

Yeah. So I caught up with Bill like three months ago and he was telling me about it that he was going to call you. Yeah. Just as of this morning, agreed to do it. So you're going to like volunteer. I think you guys are all going to volunteer for a day too and do a build, right? Yeah, there's a little bit of money involved too. Why not?

Yeah. Yeah, but yes, we are doing that. It's basically a mini. It's cool, you guys are also spending your time. Obviously, the money matters, but you guys are going to all be out there. Yeah, building. Yeah, I'm going to the first meeting, May 19. It'll be great.

But Habitat Humidity is. So this is really a full circle story for me. But the whole point is, this guy may have been a millionaire, but eight million homes and ended up working with a former president. Well, he was worth nothing. He brought himself down from a million. to nothing. Incredible. What even million back then was, I think it might have said like it was 10 million back in the day.

Give away $10 million have become broke and then you end up doing it again. So Terry, Terry Smith, you get a hat or a t-shirt or something. Don't forget to email me. We'll take care of that. And this is a great idea, weird and beautiful things. I love it. One lesson, too, just to pull on a string is sweat equity is really cool about Habitat's model too. So we're not just giving people's houses.

they have to participate in the labor too and how much more meaningful is to them, right, if they have contributed towards it. Just like the line, nobody washes a rental car, right? It's not your own. It's also true that, I mean, this also touches on something we've talked about,

you know, off and on, but the whole idea of toxic charity, build out and give it to somebody, well, yeah, they'll live in it. But if they built it and put their equity, in it. One, they show they have value. And two, they put equity in it too. And so now it matters to them. I think just giving stuff away can be toxic, but engaging with people to help them get what they need can be life-changing. That's it. That's it. Buy your merch.

Buy your merch. If you enjoyed this episode, ready to review it. If you got ideas for people for Army and normal folks, please. Apparently, we're going to get you free merch if you get something on the show. That's right. Please email us. If you got ideas for Shop Talk, this is proof positive. We will take it up if it's a good idea. Rate us, review us, join the Army at normalfolks.com. Subscribe to the podcast and go to NormalFolks.combe. Click merch and buy a hat and walk around and tell people what an Army of normal folks in. Help us grow. I hope you enjoyed Shop Number 104. We will see you next week. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy,

not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes.

Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you. you get your podcasts. There are times when the mind becomes a difficult place to live. This is David Eagleman with the Inner Cosmos podcast, and for Mental Health Awareness Month, we'll talk with singer-songwriter Jewel about anxiety. I started living in my car, and then my car got stolen.

I was having panic attacks. I was agoraphobic. This is a month of deeply personal and honest conversations about what happens when the brain goes off course. Listen to Inner Cosmos on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This week on Crimless, Rory and I welcome a very special guest. When I did podcasts, I wear my sleep masks.

I like where this is going. So if you guys will indulge me. That's right, the incredibly talented and hilarious Will Ferrell on an episode dedicated to crimes committed by people named Will Ferrell. You're good for 300 crimes? Yeah. We've got two. I'm ready to go.

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