WCI #295: Your Money Or Your Life with Vicki Robin

This is the White Coat Investor Podcast where we help those who wear the white coat get a fair shake on Wall Street. We've been helping doctors and other high income professionals stop doing dumb things with their money since 2011.

This is White Coat Investor podcast number 295.

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All right, let's do our quote of.

The day now because we got an awesome guest coming on Philip Fisher. That's the person with the quote, not the person that's going to be. Our guest said the stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything but the value of nothing. I like that one.

Okay.

Our guest today is somebody that I've been wanting to talk to and have on the podcast for a long time. Someone whose thoughts have influenced my thinking. And someone that you should know about, if you are in the personal finance community, it's Vicki Robin. Let's get her on the show.

Our guest today on the White Coat Investor podcast is none other than Vicki Robin. Vicki, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me.

Yeah, I've been looking forward to this for a while. We've met before. We were kind of on a podcast panel before. But, you know, I've been familiar with your work for many, many years, and it's just such a pleasure to have you here with us. And I bet there's a large percentage of our audience that don't know you, and. And they should. They should know about you. They should know about your work. They should know about you as a person, because you're an awesome person, and it's been fun getting to know you a little bit better today. For those who don't know, Vicki is probably most famous for a book called you'd Money or your Life. And we're going to talk about that for a few minutes, but we're going to go in all kinds of other directions on this podcast and talk about a lot of other interesting stuff before we get to the book and most importantly, the ideas in the book. Let's talk a little bit about your upbringing because your father was a doctor. Can you tell us a little bit about that and your upbringing and.

Sure, sure.

The life lessons there for our audience?

I. I shared that with you in preparation for this conversation because I know that it's going to be doctors in the audience. And so, yeah, my father was a radiologist. We lived on Long island, on the North Shore of Long Island. You know, so he had basically status. Our family had status. He loved sailing. He had. He raced a star. Yeah. And his father had been a very prominent doctor in Wilmington, Delaware, was the personal physician to Irinad dupont. And so my father, even though really what he was, was a sailor, you know, had to find a way to go through medical school and follow in his father's footsteps and his brother's footsteps. So he was basically trapped in that, you know, perfected life. And he. He was a depressive. I barely knew him because his body was there, but his mind was elsewhere. And when I was turned, turned the car on, the 1957 Lincoln convertible, powder blue in the garage and killed himself. And so it's sort of woven into my own personal story, that understanding that you can have everything just right on the external and be dying inside. And so that's why I mentioned that to You, Jim. And it's because I know that the way our professional lives are structured, it probably influenced me. I was definitely, I was voted most likely to Succeed in my high school class. But come graduation from college, what I did was I got a van and a dog and I went on the road. And so there was something probably about that experience and my own experience of, you know, having all the kudos, but having there was something big missing inside and I wasn't going to just put myself on that professional conveyor belt. And. And so, I mean, I had the opportunity to rethink my life very early. And I met my co author, Joe Dominguez along the way and he. Of youf Money youy Life, he explained to me basically how I could take the savings that I'd accumulated in order to, to be able to buy myself some freedom and that I can invest them and I could live on passive income if I lived very frugally. And I did live very frugally. And I've. I've often said, to this day I say I buy my freedom with my frugality every day. And it's not just freedom to, you know, cast off into the great unknown. It's basically freedom to direct my attention toward the things that I think are really important, not to have the important things around the edges of life and the center of my life occupied with making money, to maintain my, my assortment of stuff, you know. And so I, I've been a saver my whole life. I've learned that the less money I spend, the further it goes, you know. So all of this is arranged around the ability to basically use my attention for the things that matter, for things philosophical, spiritual, relational, friendships, community service. You know, my life is full to the brim. I have created many, many social innovations because I have had my attention free. And who knows whether that moment when I was 13 and came home to find out that my father had killed himself somehow bumped me onto another path.

Yeah, you know, this. There's a concept that I was introduced to in a book I read recently called Spaciousness. And this was a book about how to live life after you're rich. You know, how to be rich, not how to get rich, but how to be rich. And it talked about having spaciousness and that it's okay to have some space in your life and that allows you to do things that are you. That are, you know, you don't set goals, you discover them, you know, was kind of the premise behind it. But I want to, before we get too far into This I want to introduce people to the main concept in your book, your money or your life. For those who don't know this, this is a classic financial book, right. Of all the books out there that you've heard of that were, you know, written in the 90s or the 2000s or the 80s even, this is one of those that everybody ought to know about, everybody ought to read. You may not agree with everything in it, but you should still read it and be aware of it because it helps you talk to other people about personal finance. But the main premise of book is that people are trading their life energy for money and that most people are probably selling way too much of their time in this life energy because they're spending way too much money. Can you talk about this concept of life energy and why it's so important to understand?

Yeah, it's like I'm sort of deciding how far back to go. This is a key concept that my co author, Joe Dominguez hammered on. I actually think it's the linchpin of the book. The book has a nine step program for transforming how you earn, spend, save and invest money. But this idea that money is life energy, we discuss, okay, what do we think money is? And there's a level at which money basically facilitates transaction. It's pieces of paper, metal, it's bits and bytes, it's the transactional flow through a gazillion computers. So it's debt, it's savings accounts, it's all of the mechanics of the financial system and our interaction with the financial system. But around that there is our emotional feelings about money. If we have less money than somebody else, we can feel one down, we can feel less attractive, we can feel virtuous, that, you know, we're just hair shirt, you know, we're better than the people who are super rich and buying their way through life. There's so many emotional reactions to the amount of money we have. The stuff we have, the kinds of transactions, the vacations we can take, blah, blah, blah, blah. So basically it's a struggle, you know, and we're sort of, we're back, we're primates, you know, it's a struggle for, for basically dominant status, you know, mating. I mean, that struggle is now all projected onto these transactions. There you go. So money has intense emotional envy, jealousy, revenge. All of these things show up in our money behavior. So if you don't understand that you have an emotional relationship with money as well as a material relationship with money, then you are missing the boat. You are never going to be able to adjust the bits and bytes and then your choices, because your choices are all governed by unconscious emotions. So you basically, you take a look at the emotional thing and then you go out and you take a look at, you know, what are the ideas in our society that, you know, we drink with mother's milk. And the, the fundamental one, because we live in a capitalist society, is more is better. Why is more better? It's not better because we think it's better. It's better because it keeps the wheels of, of industry going. So basically we live in this. More is better and it's never enough. Growth is good. We live in this. And so it's like, I think, as Bob Dylan said, he who isn't busy being born is busy dying. It's this anxiety at the edge of your life that you always have to somehow have more, more status, more stuff, more whatever, bigger house. So this is the miasm. And if you don't understand that, then your financial decisions, what you invest in, what you by, you know, they're all going to be influenced by these unconscious forces. But then what we say, what Joe said, and I am parroting because I absolutely believe it, is that if you look at this rationally, all money is, is something that you trade your life energy for. Basically you sell your time for money. I mean, it sounds pretty obvious, but once you start to realize that, you realize, okay, then you do a calculation. We suggest people do a calculation about what's their nominal hourly wage or nominal salary or nominal income, and then what's their real income? Because there's a lot of costs associated with having the job and maintaining the job, just even simply. If we take a look at the struggles of young people, it's paying off the debt to get the degree so that they can do the work. And some people never do. So basically, you know, money for other people may be something else, but for me, I'm trading X hours of my life for X number of dollars. Let's say you think you're earning a hundred dollars an hour, but you know, after taxes and daycare, car fare, education, debt, you know, you know, expected Christmas presents, you know, after all of that, what are you really trading an hour of your life for? And once you have that number, which is usually about a quarter of what people think. So that in that calculation we'd say, okay, you're trading an hour of your life for $25. And for somebody who considers that it's status that they're making $100 an hour, that's A come downance. But then you go, and you go like, okay, fine, I'm going to go out for lunch with a friend and the bill is $30. Okay, that was an hour of my life. So that calculus, what is your real hourly wage? That awareness that every time you spend money, you're spending an hour of your life and you want it to express and bring you pleasure. So that's what we suggest people do, is you do that translation around all your expenses and you ask yourself, am I getting happiness in proportion to the amount of my life I invested in this?

And it goes to both ways, right? It affects the way you spend, but it also affects what you're willing to work for, right? You're also all of a sudden, well, if I can't get a job that pays me better than this, I'm not going to spend my time on it, you know, because I don't need that money to live.

And then, of course, then we're. Now we're up against the identity crisis. Because who am I if I am not this job, this house, this lifestyle, these vacations, you know, this position in my community, you know, once you rupture that bond between, I am my work, like Vicki, I am an author, I am a podcaster, I am a famous person. Once I break that bond between me, just little me and all these identities that I put out there to sort of protect myself and impress people, who am I? And so we want freedom, but we don't want the existential crisis that comes when these illusions, when we look behind the wizard of Oz curtain and see the machinery. This is an important moment in our lives. Many people get to it at the end of their lives, but it's an important moment in our lives to say, really, if I want to live a beautiful life, a meaningful life, a life well lived, if I want a life well lived, I may have to go through some uncomfortable questioning of how I have invested my life energy that is my time and my money to date. And in your money, you, life, we have a mantra. We say, no shame, no blame. It's like, okay, fine, you spent the first 50 years chasing a dream that was just a mirage. No shame, no blame. You have another 30 left. What are we going to do now? It's liberating. But the liberation isn't just about the money and things. It's not just about minimalism. Deliberation comes from shedding identities that no longer fit or assumptions that no longer fit. And that could be a very simple little adjustment, you know, just like a Little minor tweak. Or it could be major. It could be a major life tweak.

Yeah, I mean, you call it jobism in the book. In some ways, just as bad as sexism and racism. You know, this idea that we are our jobs, and that's particularly difficult, I think, for our audience. It's hard for, I mean, Doctors spent their 20s becoming this thing, you know, they spent their 30s paying for it, you know, and everybody calls them doctor and gives them, you know, a little bit of respect. Maybe not their administrators, but everybody else gives them, you know, respect. It's very difficult for our audience to separate who they are from their job. I think more so than even the average person who has a lot of trouble with it. You know, I mean, at the cocktail party, the question is, what do you do? You know, and the, and people aren't expecting me to say, oh, I play on a hockey team and I coach my son's hockey team. You know, that's not the answer they're expecting. They want to hear that, you know, I, I, I practice emergency medicine, that I'm running this side business. That's what they're asking about. But in reality, is that really who I am? You know, and, and that's.

Wait, wait, wait. So you say I play on a hockey team and I, and I coach my son's hockey. And then the person's thinking, geez, I wish I could do that. I just never spend any time with my kid. How do you get time with your, how do you get it, Be a doctor and have any time with your children? Suddenly you are, we don't know whether your status goes up or down at that, but you've told the truth. And the truth is always liberating, not only for the truth teller, but the truth here. So it's like we have all these minor moments where we can just like, sort of break some of those agreements. I'm not dissing doctors. I mean, I definitely, I just went through a Medicare, like, choosing my Medicare thing. Miasm. So I have a thing about insurance companies, but I love my docs, you know, and I'm sure doctors have a thing about insurance companies too, but I'm.

Just saying that's the understatement of the year right there.

Exactly. Exactly. We are all trapped in systems. And so in a way, this silly little money is life energy thing brings you into a sort of safe internal questioning of the systems within which you operate. Or if you're frustrated with the insurance system, maybe a beautiful question among doctors is not the complaint but what kind of system would allow us to deliver the care we want to deliver and have a life we love so we can play hockey and coach our kids? What kind of system do we want? You know, it's like, I know my father was. Was in the AMA and they, like, resisted. They resisted socialized, you know, medicine. But maybe, you know, like, I'm not talking about. We're not going to go there about socialized medicine, but it just introduces a little bit of truth about how it feels to be trapped in the systems that you're trapped. A little bit of truth, you don't have to admit it to somebody, really can initiate a process of reclaiming that self that we all know is inside us, that's been there all along, wanting to live, wanting to express, you know.

Vicki, you're not a personal finance guru, you're a philosopher.

You got it in the great.

In the greatest tradition of, you know, Aristotle and Plato and everybody else.

All right, I've never been a personal finance. Joe was the personal finance person. I've always been this.

Yeah, exactly. It's so true. All right, well, let's. Let's set your money and your life aside for a minute. Everybody listening to this. Go read this book. If you haven't read this book, go read the book because we're not going to tell you all about it. You should read it. It will change the way you think about how you earn money and how you spend money for the better. Let's talk about something else you've been very interested in recently that you call relational eating. Tell us what you mean by relational eating and what's wrong with the way we do food as Americans today.

Wow. Okay. Well, I'll give a little background to, like, how I stumbled into this because I'm an eater. Everybody eats. You know, I'm actually a sport eater and I enjoy sport e and all the things that Americans enjoy. I enjoy sugar, salt and fat. I could eat ice cream with a spoon late at night from the freezer. You know, I'm an American, but I'm also very concerned about the impact of whether you call it the sixth Great Extinction, whether you call it climate change, the impact of the kinds of disassembly of natural systems that have been the byproduct of the way collectively on this planet we live and how it's going to impact us in the future, even right now. And so right now it looks like, oh, everything's working. And I decided I was going to. I thought, like, oh, we have these long supply Chains, just trucks everywhere transporting food. And I live in an island. I thought, well, what if the bridge goes down because it's a narrow little bridge that to the mainland and the ferry stops running. Could we feed ourselves here on Whidbey Island? And I asked a farmer to do the calculation and she said, yeah, we could. You know, number of people, calories per day, what grows well here. For about two weeks in August, we might be able to feed the 65,000 people who live here if we didn't have access to the, to that ginormous agricultural, industrial food system. That got my attention. So I did an experiment. I thought, okay, well I'm going to see if I could live from just what grows here. So I partnered with a neighbor who's a farmer and we created this 10 mile circle around my house. So she brought me vegetables and I could find anything else in those 10 miles just to like an experiment for a month. So that's what started it was this concern about the fragility of what is an apparently sturdy system. You know, like we think. I told people I was going to do this month of a like a 10 mile dive. They said that's not a problem. You just go to the grocery store, it's like a mile from your house. It's like. But my grocery store had only one item that was from my 10 mile circle, which was honey. And that was like just a total revelation. As you can tell. I really like to do like intense experiments and have big insights. And so I did, I found the, I wrote a book, Blessing the hands of Fetus. That's all about this quixotic experiment to find food and the realization that even, you know, people say, oh, local food. Oh, we have a farmer's market. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We don't have a food system. We don't have a local food system. We have a few lovely people with, you know, maybe 5 to 10 acres who grow food for us and sell it at the market. But that's not a system. It's like a complete retooling. And then along start to see, oh, oh right. A grocery store doesn't have groceries in, it has shelves. That's what's in the store. Everything on the shelves. Three days, it's all empty. And you can't even store enough food for that. You have to have a different system. And what I realized was as I was doing this, I realized that humans are the only animals who are completely inept at feeding themselves within the world they live in. Every successful Animal lives from the food it gathers from its territory. And we have been completely rendered stupid about feeding ourselves by this industrial system where all production is so far out of sight, we don't even understand it anymore. And that. That basically, for me, food became belonging. I realized if I can live from this 10 miles. And I. I was like. I was foraging people's like nut trees, you know. Yeah, if I. I am. I belong here. And. And we. We're talking these days a lot about indigenous wisdom, you know, that basically there were people for millions of years who walked this earth who were able to live here without destroying it. So let's learn something from them, like, what did they know that we've lost? A lot of people I know are asking this question and turning to indigenous people. And one thing is that a culture was identified with its food. The food was identified with the landscape, and the traditions are identified with the harvest, with the planting of. I mean, culture is mostly created around foraging, hunting, growing in a landscape. So you belong someplace like, I live in the Pacific Northwest. I live in the cedar salmon region. The salmon is crucial to our food system. The Coast Salish people, they ate camas root, the bulb that grew plentifully on the prairie on Whidbey Island. The farmers came and plowed it up and planted wheat. Okay, that's sort of the settler approach to it. But there was a people here who knew how to live here. And is this just sort of like an interesting little silly experiment by some old lady in the Northwest? I think it's very important for provisioning. You know, I mean, I would encourage everybody, if you have land to just turn up the grass and turn it into turnips, just to use a turn of phrase. But. No, no, but, but, but I would encourage everybody to grow food because then you start with this relational eating. You start to feel yourself as part of something. Not an isolated, unconnected being. We're biological beings. Food is our biology. So there's. I mean, there's many other approaches to, you know, changing diets. Most of it about changing the size of your body or being optimizing or maximizing or minimizing or whatever, whatever, you know, but that's more a personal quest for perfection through the body. What I'm talking about is a systems approach to being really effective human beings in intact, flourishing landscapes. If the landscape does not flourish, we do not flourish. Everybody who lived on this planet until about 200 years ago absolutely knew that, and we've forgotten it.

I'm going to push back a little bit on this idea.

Okay, let's go.

I'm going to push back on it. How many people can Whidbey island support if everybody is only eating food from Whidbey Island?

Oh, very few.

I mean that's kind of the dark, the dark specter behind this idea though, isn't it?

Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. We could absolutely support everybody who lives here. However, people would have to change their diets. You know, we have a beautiful, the mid island is a beautiful prairie. It's got like topsoil, like, you know, not a mile deep, but that's hyperbole. But it's got really deep topsoil. It's beautiful farmland currently. I mean it's, there's many things to say about that farmland, but it's, you know, the farmers who farm it, they have to get a crop that can sell. And so some are. A lot of it is hay for horses, you know, because that's what sells. But we have enough farmland. Absolutely. That if we grew crop for the people here, potatoes, beets, rutabagas, turnips, carrots, parsnips, root crops. We have like great for root crops, beans. We have a kind of bean that was developed here in Whidbey island called the Rockwell bean. I mean that's a, you know, beans, corn, potatoes. And then, you know, we have a year round climate. We can grow kale, we can grow chard, mustard greens. You could have a delicious diet. We have seawater, you can make salt, we have hazelnut orchards, we could make oil. It would be a complete retooling. A complete retooling. But this is the argument, Jim, of industrial agriculture is, oh, we have to be able to feed the world. And so we have lost the ideas that the world can feed. It was feeding itself perfectly well until industrial agriculture came along because people were developed farming methods that worked in their situation. Yes, there were floods, there were famines, there was drought, there was things that we couldn't control. I'm not saying it was perfect, but people have traditionally been able to grow the food that they eat. But there was an interest, industrial interest in anyway, we don't need to go into a critique of that, but I think that our imagination needs to expand a little bit to say we have not become so incompetent about taking care of ourselves, that we must feed our lives into the industrial system through the insurance companies, through the professions, through the cars, through the, you know, we don't. This is not. We may choose it because it's very difficult to go countercultural. Extremely Difficult. Why bother? In a lot of things. But we have to know. We have to know we have a choice.

Yeah, we, we definitely have to. I think, as you put it, you'd have to eat meat as a treat, not as a meal.

Exactly, exactly.

You know, we can't all be eating chicken and beef every meal and expect Whidbey island to support. Support 65,000 people.

Totally. It's a total luxury. People said, oh no, this would not be a problem. You know, it's like we have, because we have all these wild deer going around. I said, 65,000 people, the deer would last a week. They said, oh, but we have all these rabbits running around. Yeah, okay, that's another week. You know, it's. I'm going to say it's value neutral that our lives, we now do not live in nature. We live in a constructed world, an override of the natural world that suits humans, some of us, and that's the world we live in. That's. If you want to talk about relational eating, a relational eater in our system eats oil. It's fertilizer. I mean, I might sound like I'm ragging on things and I'm not exactly. I just find it so much fun to deconstruct things that we assume are true.

I do think we have to acknowledge some of the good that has come out of the industrialization of our food chain. Right. If you go back 200 years, I don't know, 70% of the world, their day to day work was engaged in producing food and now it's like 1 or 2%. Right. I mean, as you pointed out, there are five times as many farmers over 75 as there are under 30 or something like that. I think you pointed out in your TED Talk that you did on this subject. I mean, people are able to do other things with their lives because they don't have to spend all their time just feeding themselves. There are, we have to acknowledge the benefits. Even though we probably ought to be addressing the problems as well, which is.

Well, okay, so yes, okay, okay, okay, yes, yes, okay. Benefits. But then if we're saying that collectively we want to have this industrialized food system that provides bounty for us, we need to share the bounty more fairly. Because at this point the agricultural industrial system lobbies have like an outsized influence on where tax dollars go and what's permitted and what's not permitted. For example, the whole battle over glyphosate. And I don't know what you think about glyphosate or what other people Think about glyphosate. It's been a miracle cure for industrial agriculture. But it seems to have had some downside health effects that doctors probably have looked into. And so people now have wheat allergies that they didn't have before. You travel in Europe where they don't use glyphosate, suddenly you can eat that wonderful bread. So we're aware that there's a downside to the bounty of the industrial system. And so if we're honest, we just have to say, yeah, that's true. And I mean, I could go deeper and deeper and deeper into this about the health effects of some of the chemicals that are used for industrial agriculture, which I'm sure that doctors are seeing in their offices all the time. But we don't have the capacity politically to challenge that system. And in part because the system tells us, without us, you will die.

Yeah, I mean, I don't think a lot of people realize how hard it is to do this relational eating, to eat food produced within 10 miles of your home. I mean, maybe.

I'm not even saying 10 miles. Okay, so here's a little thing for you. I call it owl. You go to the store and you. I'm. I'm not advocating 10 miles. 10 miles is stupid. You know, it's not really realistic. What I advocated in the second part of that TED talk that people could watch called relational eating was to think about a 500 mile radius around yourself. Think about a food system that, you know, goes out 500 miles. My 500 mile food system could totally, totally feed me. And to think about it in concentric circles, the fresh stuff we want to get locally, that's the best thing came out of the ground this morning. So having a system where fresh food and then maybe meat and then beans and then grains, it goes out further and further. So that's a thinking tool. 10 miles was just an experiment. And then, so the idea of OWL is you go to the store, is it organic? Is it whole? Like unprocessed? Is it local? Al. Organic, whole and local. Any one of those is great. If you have a choice for organic whole and local, great, you buy that. But if you can buy organic food, you're supporting an agricultural system that is less dependent on petrochemicals, less.

I don't think people realize how many legal obstacles have been put in place to keep people from doing that. You mentioned that it's actually illegal for your neighbor to sell you milk from their cow.

Right, exactly. That was like I did that experiment in 2010 so I don't actually know what the legalities are now because there is a dairy in our area that does sell raw milk. But yeah, basically in order to all of this stuff, it wasn't evil in the beginning. It was like, oh, oops, there's a problem here, let's solve it with this regulation. So they put in the regulation and that problem gets solved. But it starts to rigidify so that people who could grow your meat, you can't buy. I can't buy cuts of meat from my neighbor who might raise three beef animals. I can't buy the cuts. I have to buy a quarter of an animal if I want it and then we send it off the island to get processed because people are not allowed to process their own meat anymore. So the whole thing has been sent because of health concerns and not in appropriately. So basically what I say is there's a relational food system where I can trade with my neighbors and that should be legal. There should be nothing against it. And then there's an industrial system where if I go to the grocery store I want to know that my milk isn't going to kill me. And so to have a scale appropriate regulations so that we can have this relational food system and allow the relational food system to grow stronger, allow more people to decide to grow hogs or beef or chickens or eggs, to allow that system to grow strong in the understory among people who are willing to basically take responsibility for their own food and to. You know, I know that if my milk provider killed me, he would be out of business. He knows that too. Because we're in a relational system. Your reputation is everything in an industrial system. It's not really because it can all be manipulated by the public relations people. So that's what I'm advocating is for something that the 10 ton gorilla gets off the back of people in communities who want to feed one another. And the underground system is alive and well. It's just you have to know the secret code. You knock three times. Yeah, that's what I'm advocating. I'm advocating for allowing, for taking, allowing people. It's like in terms of this, I am a libertarian for sure. I am a sort of a Bernie progressive on so many other things. But in terms of food, I think farmers, just farmers are some of the smartest people I know. They are some of the smartest people I know.

So there's definitely appeals from both sides of the political spectrum on this subject. You're working on another important problem. You know, we've talked about Our financial problems and jobism and that sort of stuff. We've talked about this issue we have with our food system. Another big problem we have in, it's probably almost every community now in, in the US is the housing crisis. It's particularly acute in, in vacation towns. I imagine it's a big problem on Whidbey Island. It's even a problem here in Salt Lake City. Affordable housing. There's a huge housing crisis. You're doing something really unique about it on Whidbey Island. Tell us what you're doing about the housing crisis.

As I said about. It's a relational system. There's a relational housing system and there are in the city that I live in, this little town I live in and in the county there are people who are tucking other people in on their property. I have one friend who has a number of trailers, nicely, you know, maintained trailers on his property, tucked into little groves and he, he rents those, you know, and, and the county knows, knows that that happens. And it's, you know, all the sanitation's handled very well. Everything's handled very well. And so we know that that's, this person is providing housing. I converted the, I live in like what I call a people box, a split entry house. And this is, was 1800 and 1850 square feet. This is like way too big for one person. So I put a mother in law apartment on one side and then I converted the garage into what I call an in home suite. In other words, it's not a, an apartment, it's not a separate accessory dwelling unit. Because in my town, if it were an accessory dwelling unit, I would have two sewer and water bills. You know, I have two electric meters. The cost of it. So basically it's sort of like having a housemate. But the housemate has separate bathroom, separate entrance and some countertop appliances. So the housemate can live a separate life. But we share all the infrastructure of the house. We share the washer, dryer. So it's this not exactly defined space. It's not a roommate, it's not a renter. So that's what we're trying to do. Some friends and I, all of us have done this sort of thing. We've tucked people in to our properties because we care. Our restaurants couldn't open full time this summer because they didn't have any servers. You know, that's what it's like. The businesses don't have staff. Our hospital doesn't have enough workers. It's like the teachers, I mean this isn't. We're not talking about, you know, people who are living in the woods who need just, you know, a warm, dry place. We're talking about what we used to call during the pandemic, the essential workers. They don't have room in our town. We have plenty of square footage of already built environment to house everybody who would want to come and work here in our light industry or our restaurants. But it's called private property. And so we're trying to lift up this idea, we're trying to define it in terms of city and county codes. Okay. The sliver of legal here that we can. It's sort of like raw milk. Where's the sliver of legal? And then, then, you know, we're making a case for. Look, if you're a homeowner, the average age of my town is 67. We're a naturally occurring retirement community. This is it. Just like breaks my heart because this town had a, like a totally fabulous, diverse culture until all the housing was bought up by financial institutions or retirees. Yeah, so you, maybe you're living alone in a 2,000 square foot house or 3,000 or whatever. So you can get income, you can get security, you're not alone. You can get a strong young man to carry your cat food upstairs. You can do work, trade. You can continue to having your big gorgeous garden because you've got a big, gorgeous person someplace who can help you out with the garden. And if, you know, it's just sort of the pitter patter of big feet, you know, it's like you have that sense that there's other people around and we're social species, we like that. So there's so many benefits to people of carving out if they have a space that they could carve out that has private or semi, semi private access that has like private baths and, you know, can put in, you know, like a mini fridge and a, like an air fryer or whatever, somebody else can have a life there. Somebody's who's a server or a writer or a shopkeeper or an artist or, you know, you can have a real community because you can have young people in it. Anyway, I'm, I, I just did this myself in my own house. Then I started renting out the guest room, you know, and I, I just had a guy live with me. He was 28. He lived with me for five months, took care of my cat every time I traveled. That was very important. We cleaned the chicken coop together. He vacuumed, he did the recycling in the garbage and carried all heavy items up and down and up and down. And we had such great conversations. We were philosophically not necessarily aligned, but we just both really smart and loved good conversation. I miss him terribly. Not just because I have to do my own recycling. So we're just trying to, like, this is another thing. It's relational housing. I don't think we are not going to solve via building more tiny houses. We're not going to solve this. We're going to have to become a society that shares and cares and that remembers that other people are not the enemy. Excluding other people from your life is not success, it's loneliness. And we've become so frightened of one another. And the pandemic did us no good on that one. I am not a libertarian on that regard. I am definitely miss public health. But we didn't have to have the fear of others, the vilification of others. That happened. We could pull together like New Zealand. So, yeah, it's just, it's. I think that we're in a narrow point now in society where the systems that we built to solve the problems, probably, you know, at very least coming out of the Depression, the systems we built to solve a set of problems in the 20th century or maybe some of the 19th century are inappropriate to who we are now. To a world with 8 billion. We just passed 8 billion in November 15th. You know, they weren't out there finding the 8 billionth baby, but, you know, it's just nominally, we're at 8 billion souls on this planet. We either are going to have to moderate to make space for one another in this world, or we're going to have to say, yeah, I have privilege and, and I just got the luck of the draw and what the fallout is for other people. So what we're going to have to face that. That's kind of the choice we're making now. So back around to doctors. I mean, what is health care in an 8 billion world? What is health care in a world with 8 billion? How do doctors, who are the people who care for our bodies? How are they thinking about this? I really would be interested.

Yeah, I don't know that I have any of the answers to that. You know, you see these problems and they're big problems. They're big problems with obstacles. You know, there's legal obstacles that keep you from relational eating and, you know, relational housing, relational living. You know, you're having to work with these, you know, accessory dwelling unit laws and, you know, all these sorts of things. And then there's people's attitudes and people's fears to overcome. There's lots of, of obstacles with that. But when I think about big problems to solve, there are very few that I fear. And one of them that I fear and that I'm embarrassed to be a part of is the mess of our healthcare system. You know, I have often thought about another career. I guess White coat investor is my second career, right? A third career in helping to fix this broken healthcare system that we have. But it is such a huge problem. I look at something little like fixing financial illiterate among doctors as simple compared to this task. You know, it's so intimidating to work on a problem that big. Anybody who thinks there's a simple fix to our healthcare woes does not understand the problem. It is a difficult, complex problem to solve. And stuffing more people into the system doesn't make it easier for sure.

Wow. Okay. More power to you. You want a thinking partner on this one? I'll tell you, I just, just mastered the maze of Medicare. And I'll tell you, it's really frightening because, you know, and, and, and you may not agree with this, but the research I did into the history of Medicare Advantage is, it, is, it comes out of the stream of thought that says that industry, you know, you know, basically corporate health care can better serve the public than Medicare, than government run. But they're making it, you know, it's like they make it so cheap. It's like, oh, come we have a special, you know, 50 rolls of toilet paper for 75 cents. You know, like Medicare Advantage pay nothing, we'll pay you back for this. You know, and once you're in the system, they, you know, basically care can be denied. And I was shocked with that because I just, just scooted into the Advantage system because I thought, oh, that seems easy, you know, and, and people are getting care, but it's, it doesn't, you know, we forget that basically a corporation is a fiefdom, you know, government. We actually get a vote. So, you know, anyway, it's just like just even that running that gauntlet that for somebody, I'm pretty smart and I, it took me a lot to get through it and to see why there's a difference and what the difference is and what system I want to be part of. So. Yeah, so what is relational health care? Yeah, and maybe it has to grow like, like you know, these relational food system. Maybe it has to grow with doctors having just, you know, having every Friday they have a two hour open clinic for anybody to come in, you know, payment optional.

Yeah. Vicki, you would be shocked to find out how little doctors know about insurance and even Medicare. Right. It's not like you got to learn all these insurance companies, just Medicare. Our first conference. We have a conference every year now that we call the Physician Wellness and Financial Literacy Conference. Our first one was in Park City in 2018, and I gave a talk where a good chunk of the talk just explained how Medicare works. And the audience was, you know, enraptured. No one had ever explained to them how Medicare worked. Right. I'd been practicing at that point for 15 years. Right. And I had to do all this research for the talk because I didn't know how Medicare worked.

Right.

And so you'd be shocked at, you know, doctors, I think, are a huge part of the solution to our healthcare woes, but they. They don't even understand the problem. We have. Have for the most part.

Yeah. There's a one doctor in our town, I have not availed myself of her services who just has a subscription service. She doesn't take insurance. It's just like you pay a monthly fee and you have complete access to everything.

Yeah. It works really well for primary care. We have not yet made that system work well for specialties and particularly for emergency care, which is too bad because I'd love to be part of it. Right. But I'm an emergency doc, and so I'm like, you know, insurance is important because you can come in the door and I can spend 25 grand in 10 minutes on you. You know, I really can.

Right, exactly.

We, you know, there's got. There is a role for insurance.

Totally.

But it's messed up. For sure. The system is messed up. I could chat about this subject all day, though, Vicki.

Totally. So let's. Let's like relational healthcare. Let's just set that out as a. As a thing. You know, let's make it a thing. Like in home suites is a thing. It's not a thing. We just made it up. Let's make it a thing. And then what would it be like? What would a relational emergency care be like? Number one, it would be that it's so inexpensive to go to your local clinics that people are not using the ER for healthcare because they don't have any other access.

Yeah. You know what's interesting is the people who tend to use the ER for primary care the most are the people for whom it costs the least to do so. Medicaid patients, like in Utah, the CO pay to go to the ER if you're on Medicaid is like three bucks. Of course, you're going to come in for your ear infection, you know, whereas the person with the job with insurance and a high deductible health plan, you know, that visit might be a grand, might be $1,500 just to have someone look in your ear and write you a prescription for amoxicillin, and so they don't come in. So when you talk about ER abuse, it's a very specific subset of patients that.

But maybe that's telling us that what we need is maybe we elevate that to a success story. How would that be a success story? Not that an ER doc with your skills needs to deal with it, but we have a triage, and we have this. This fabulous, you know, team of physician's assistants who, like, greet you and give you a cup of tea and Promoxicillin. You know, it's like. It's like, why isn't that the clinic? Why isn't the clinic the clinic? And then you have an ER department in the clinic where somebody comes in and they've just been shot, you know, and they have three holes in their body. Well, okay, they go to that one. But everything else is welcome. Open door. Why, you know. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah. Well, I mean, the answer, Vicki, is that people respond to incentives. You know, it's the first law of economics. And people are not comfortable with that either. Right. Because the truth is there will be people who choose not to get care that leads to them getting sicker, that leads to them dying because of economic reasons. And we're not comfortable with that. Even those of us in medicine, we are not comfortable with the idea of someone dying because they don't have the money for care. And so we're like, we're going to give everybody care, but then we get all these weird incentives and unforeseen consequences and a broken system because we still haven't decided as a society, is this a right that we're going to tax everybody for and provide for everybody, or is this a privilege and at what level is it right? At what level is it approved? It's complicated. And anyone who thinks it's not does not understand the problem.

Totally. I hear you totally on this. And I just had an experience going to my little local clinic, and I needed an mri, and it took eight days for Kaiser to affirm that I could have been dead in eight days. They didn't know why I needed the mri. And I realized, because I'm clever. If I went on medication, I could have gone to the er. I could have Gone to the ER.

And, and my hospital and my radiology group, they would have encouraged me to order an MRI on you, even though maybe you could have waited a week to get it. Because they get paid, you know, and they get paid very well, particularly do them emergently, you know. So we got all kinds of crazy incentives from this combination. Right. And, and you know, privilege and market system combined with a non market system. It's just a mess.

Totally. And then the other thing is, is that I, the whole part d thing is that I, I take one drug, that I get generic, you know, I don't need it, but I have to play the roulette of like, oh, what happens when I need a thousand dollar of pill, pill and it's just like, do I choose like I'm choosing now, like okay fine, I'll just take the generic, whatever they have at that time and maybe I'll live and maybe I'll die. So another part of it is that the leading edge of technology is always evolving. And so like they change one little formulary for a pill and suddenly it's a thousand dollars because it's been altered so that the, you know, the drug company can make their money. When one generation back is now generic may work as well. It's just. You're so right. It is so crazy. And more power to you relational medicine. I will get in there with you, Jim, and I will be a thinking partner because I would love it to be, I would love there to be an intelligent system where there weren't perverse rewards so people have extra children because they're getting, you know, the mind is always working the system.

Right.

How does the system encourage what we really want to encourage, which is health.

Yeah, it's in a lot of ways it's a disease care system, not a healthcare system.

Oh, totally. No, I call it the sickness care system and I call health insurance nest egg insurance.

There's a lot of truth to that. Well, we are getting short on time, Vicki. Okay, a true pleasure to chat with you. We've got time for maybe one more thing. You've got the ERA now of 30 to 40,000 high income professionals, mostly doctors. What have we not talked about today that you think they should know?

I would just say gratitude to doctors for the hard work of getting the education. People can complain about all the systems around it, but there's human beings who really worked hard. You don't get to be a doctor casually. That's a lot of work. And I really appreciate all the work that people who've Chosen the medical profession have put in to care for us. And I think when we're talking about issues, we can throw the baby in with the, you know, the caustic bathwater, you know, and I don't want to throw doctors under the bus. I had stage three colon cancer 100 years ago, 18 years ago, and, And I had surgery, and I, I was encouraged to do chemo. I didn't want to, but I decided to for a variety of reasons. And I had. Were side effects that they hadn't seen my side effects the first time around, the first round, second round, I had to be airlifted to a hospital, intubated, because I. It's like it looked like I had porn poured, lie down, my entire system. And so I thought, that's it. I gave it a, you know, I gave it a try. I satisfied all the voices within and without that, said I should do it, and I'm stopping. So I went to my oncologist, and I. And I prayed over it, and I said, you know, I, I, I thanked that in my mind. I thanked my oncologist so profoundly for the dedication he had that brought him to that moment when he could serve me. So it wasn't out of hatred for him. It was just what the medicine or the chemotherapy had done. And I went to him and I. And I told him, I said, I'm done, you know, not like, I'm done, God damn it. You know, I told him, I'm done. And he said, oh, well, we have this other protocol that could be. He said, no, no, no, no, no. I'm just done. I'm done. I'm done. I'll be. I'm on my own. And he turned away from me, and then he turned back and he said, you know, it's people like you who survived. And I felt like he gave me, you know, a real blessing. But what I want to say is that, you know, doctors who are delivering service in our system have taken the time to educate yourselves to be able to deliver the kind of extraordinary, heroic interventions that have kept many of us alive. And I. And I'm grateful for that. But also in that moment with my doctor, I felt him come out from behind, doctor to human to human, and tell me there is another healthcare system, and you're in it. It's called your body mind system, and I honor your choice. So, anyway, that's what it occurred to me to say, because I think doctors get reified a lot and beaten up a lot.

Yeah.

Well, thank you, Vicki. Thank you from the audience for your kind words and I recommend to the audience. Check out Vicki's book, you, money or your Life. The first edition was written years ago. It's been updated since. The ideas in it are timeless and, and everybody should be familiar with the, with the book and its ideas. Thank you, Vicki, for coming on the podcast.

Yeah, thank you. And I will just mention that I also have a podcast called what could possibly go right. So if people. Yeah, people are entranced by the current version of Vicki. We publish every week with really amazing guests.

Thank you very much.

Yeah.

All right.

Hope you enjoyed that discussion with Vicki. You know, obviously Vicki and I have a lot we like to talk about and bat around. And these are kind of big picture ideas sometimes. But the truth is there's a lot there that's little picture ideas, little things you can do that help your personal finances, that help the way you think about money, that help your financial plan and help you implement some of those in your life. We'll have a link to her book in the show notes. But it's not that hard to find your money or your life is what it's called.

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Don't forget about this course sale we're having right now. It's buy one course. Get CFE2021 free. You don't need a code. That's an extra 699 value. You get that@www.wcicourses.com or you can buy any of our online courses, our real estate course, our fire your financial advisor course, the courses that qualify for CME that you can use your leftover CME dollars for any of those available there. WCICourses.com thanks. For those who are leaving us 5 star reviews, telling friends about the podcast, the website, et cetera, this most recent review comes in from Omega CRNA says worth your time. I've been following the blog since 2012 and credit much of my knowledge in financial literacy to the White Coat Investors. Focus on helping us get a fair shake on Wall street by empowering us with the Knowledge has expanded greatly since he launched the podcast. Great job, Jim. Keep up the good work and congratulations on growing your business while helping others succeed in their shares. It's very kind of you. We appreciate your kind words for everybody else, as Vicki said earlier, you're doing awesome work. We appreciate what you're doing. Keep your head up and your shoulders back. You've got this and we can help. We'll see you next time on the White Coat Investor Podcast.

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