It's funny that one of our guests, Kevin Dahlstrom, he, you know, very similar stories and he is a rock rock climber, mountain climber. And so he goes there and it's just no one cares that he's a, you know, eight figure, whatever, you know, it just they couldn't it doesn't even register in their plane of of words. It's just we're here to climb this mountain. Can you climb it? Can you not climb it? And the story, like that's the only thing. So his advice was to just, you know, I think that that that what you're, what you're saying or what I'm hearing is, you know, if you're always around finance people, if you're always around people who work at Google and Facebook, if you're always around entrepreneurs that are trying to exit, you're just going to, you're going to have a very distorted view of your enoughness just by osmosis. Right. And it's, it's very hard to unwire that because we're social comparing creatures

and the comparison has now gone three sixty. So the comparison is our peer group and oftentimes our peer group are the people we work with and they become our friends because we're working all the time. And then of course, we all know social media where you put stuff up and you know, the best of your life curated. But now the images that we see in media are also financially unrealistic. And this is a huge one where I ran the numbers on some core frontline jobs. Let's just say a police person, a fire person, a physician's assistant, a staff assistant. And I looked at the clothes they wore, the cars they drive, the homes they're portrayed in as living in. And what I found is when I added up the cost, they would have to earn 30 to 50 percent more to live, groom and retain the way we're seeing on TV. And this is at all income levels of jobs. Yeah. And as a result, we are comparing ourselves to what I call financial funny mirrors. And so when you stir up all of that and then you sprinkle easy access to debt, man, that's a dangerous combination. Ducked in the cycle of comparison.

Yeah, that, that example blew my mind where, what TV show was it? You got the assistant.

I picked suits because I've long been obsessed with the royal family. And so I would make the mark holds in

it. And so yeah, yeah. But for a list, there's a I'll paraphrase it, but there's a character and suits and an assistant, I think, or Donna. And Donna is the assistant and Donna looks to the teas and blowouts and like nice suits. And Manisha in the book compares, tries to reverse engineer. Like if she got a manicure of this and blow out and this suit and this bag and all that and the number it was like X orders greater than the income that she was making. So media, forget that's even traditional media, right, where, you know, at least there's some guardrails in traditional media. Like social media is completely unhinged in that regard. I wanted to ask you, you, you spoke to Vicki Robin from the fire movement. And I just briefly for our listeners, the fire movement, most of you heard of it's financial independence, retire early. It's all about the numbers, SW single withdrawal rates and really like heavy delayed gratification. But Vicki Robin is kind of this unsung folk hero, lives in a commune and Seattle. Yep. I think Ireland. And I think she never really wanted to be the leader of the fire movement, but just wrote this book called Your Money or Your Life that got picked up by the movement. And I'm curious. So you speak to this woman who has inspired this movement. I think it's kind of I think it hits on a lot of the things that we are struggling with that we've talked about in this conversation. I don't think it's bad. I don't want to say it's bad, but I think there's a lot of unhealthy elements to the fire movement of delaying gratification, extreme frugality, believing that this one number is going to provide you this salvation, let you know yourself, answer these questions about it. I have to go on and on about that. But this woman becomes this leader of this movement accidentally. And so you spoke to her, what, what did she say? What was she like?

First of all, let me just tell you that I read the book in the year it came out in 1992. I just graduated from college. And it's probably the financial book that has most influenced my life, although I haven't always paid attention to the core, core message. The idea of having enough enough money to not have to work to hit what she calls in the book, the crossover point where you don't have to work unless you want to work. She and the original author, Joe Dominguez, who since passed, I got to know Vicki when the second edition of the book came out in 2018. We spoke on a variety of different panels together. And what she told me was that the point of the book was that you were living lightly on the planet. The quote, frugality was about not buying stuff that you didn't need because that stuff had a cost on the planet. And it also had a cost on your time that an opportunity costs on your time that could be spent giving back to the broader community. The point was to simultaneously lower the cost of your needs while you were putting money aside, investing and helping to build that nest egg. It was not to grow that nest egg as big as possible so that you could buy as much stuff to destroy the planet and lose all of your relationship. And so, you know, she mentioned that she went to several different fire conferences and met people and that they were lovely people, but that she was worried that it had now become a competition who could save the most, who could be the most frugal and extract joy from a period in life where you're healthy, hopefully, and vibrant. And that was not ever the puppet of the book.

Yeah. And there was this quote that I just pulled up here. As you said, your friends and family and your love of things have nothing to do with money or your biggest treasure. Right. And I love that. And it just shows how, I mean, maybe it's just my cynicism of, you know, Western capitalism, but you can kind of just take this very spiritual. She probably wouldn't like me using the word folksy, but, you know, it comes across as one. She would. So this folksy idea and it becomes this, you know, chest puffing, Reddit threading world of this like singular obsession with this one number. And it's just and and look, I can knock it, but I'm I've just done my own version of that. So so, you know, I am the doctor, the doctor who spoke in that regard. That that's I think it's so cool that you got to speak with her because like her book was very influential to me. And then now I have this kind of adjacent complex relationship with fire that we will get into on this podcast. But I do

want to say everyone credits her with being the grandmother of fire. And I think Vicki would say that's not the fire. I wanted to be the grandmother. Yeah.

Wow. Wow. And so you in that chapter of you talk about there's financial well-being. So we talked about the number and investing and all that stuff, which everyone listening is is a plus on that. Guys, guys and gals, you're a plus on that. But there's this other piece, emotional wellness. And how do you, what does that look like for again, let's go back to one of our, you know, startup heavy per people waiting for that next exit. Delaying, delaying, delaying, but just, you know, disconnected from themselves. And what is the road back to emotional wellness, connecting money with joy, connection with other humans? Like, how does that, how do you start now instead of waiting for that imaginary exit or that imaginary milestone that's just going to move once you get there?

It's not easy. When I recognized that I needed to change, I started thinking, what do I like to do for fun? And I couldn't think of anything. I mean, work? You know, that was my initial answer. And then, you know, people say, well, go back to your childhood and think about some of the things that you liked to do then. But most of us have become so disconnected from those things, which down the road in investing in our emotional wealth, many of us come back to. I have, my mom told me I'd regret quitting piano when I was in high school. And she's absolutely right. I'm now taking up piano again. And I am taking up Spanish, which I was obsessed with in high school because I wanted to get good grades in it now because I enjoy speaking it. But initially, I had to use the advice of one of the women I interviewed in the book who has a philosophy that connection creates balance. And when you feel discombobulated, the question to ask yourself is to who or what in this moment do I need to be connected to move ever so slightly? Incrementally towards feeling happier. And what I found in the beginning was maybe it was 15 minutes of allowing myself to read the latest gossip on the royal family. I'm obsessed with trailer, Travis and Taylor. But eventually, it started to grow into broader areas as I started to put value on connection. And then the next thing was to put value on curiosity. And for me, one of the tools that helped do that is a book called the Artist's Way at work. And that really helped me. There's a variety of tools, but the three core ones in the book are doing three pages of stream of conscious writing first thing in the morning. Like literally, you do not censor yourself. You just write down whatever's in your mind. And if nothing's in your mind, you're right. Nothing's in my mind. Nothing's in my mind until something pops in your mind. And when you're done, you tear them up. You don't go back and read them or analyze them. I found that after doing that, ideas would start to bubble up for me. And combined with Dickey's second tool, which is to go on a date with yourself once a week for a half hour and go do something that you've never done before. And in the beginning, the only thing I could think of was like walking into a store. I don't even like purchasing things, but I would walk into a store. Well, ultimately, that led me to go take ice skating lessons. In my 15th. So doing something out of your comfort zone. And then the third tool is to take a 20 minute walk every day with no noise in your ears, no podcast, no walking buddy to talk to just you and the sounds in your head. And so that's another tool that I think can be incredibly, another set of tools that can be incredibly helpful. And if people haven't read the artist's way, it were on the surface, it may seem kind of rear wheel, but I've been amazed at how many of us with a male accomplished oriented mindset buying such value and nuggets. And the last thing I'll just say about this is many of us will remember years ago, there was a study that said $75,000 was the amount of money you need to be happy. Anything beyond that doesn't increase happiness. And if you inflation adjust that number, let's call it a hundred and fifty thousand now. But if you're a family of five or so and you live in New York, that still could be a bit of a struggle. The researchers behind that study, the original study teamed up with some folks from Penn and what they discovered was, yeah, that number is wrong, but it's not wrong because of the size of the number. It's wrong because for each one of us, there is song number that enables us to meet all of our core Maslow hierarchy of the need. But things beyond that will not increase our life satisfaction if we do not have a base of well-being or what I call emotional well. Yeah. I've had the pleasure or the interest of working for two self-made billionaires over the course of my career, both of whom are amazing human being. But I saw that in the absence of life satisfaction, even that much money. Yeah. Didn't make a difference over the long run. Yeah. Yeah.

Beautiful.