Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 544: The Dharma of Money | Spencer Sherman

Episode Date: January 11, 2023

When we think about Buddhism or the dharma, we probably don’t think about money. But when the Buddha laid out guidelines about how to make an ethical livelihood, this didn’t preclude material success. This episode is part two of this week’s series on money, and dives into how we can bring Buddhist principles to an area of our lives that can create so much fear, greed, and dread. Spencer Sherman is the founding CEO of Abacus, a values-driven financial firm, and certified mindfulness teacher.  He teaches the Fearless Finance program and The Mastery of Money program for NYU’s Inner MBA program.  He is also the author of The Cure For Money Madness.In this episode we talk about: How to identify and reframe our potentially harmful beliefs about moneyHow to apply the Four Brahma Viharas to having a healthier relationship with our financesHow to use the RAIN technique when we become anxious about moneySpencer’s ‘Enough Practice’ designed to give us a sense of equanimity How generosity helps us let go and can create a sense of abundance How mindfulness of money can key us into interconnectionAnd whether you can actually be a successful investor if you’re guided by Buddhist valuesFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/spencer-sherman-544See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hello, party people. For most of us, when we hear the words Buddhism or the Dharma, we probably don't think about cash money. We might picture robed monks and think about asceticism and renunciation, But the Buddha talked quite a bit, in fact, about money. He knew we weren't all going to become monks, and he laid out lots of guidelines about how to earn an ethical living.

And importantly, this did not preclude material success. Some of his followers were actually wealthy merchants. So how do we bring Buddhist principles to an area that can create so much fear, dread, greed, anger, envy, and general awkwardness? My guest today has a lot of thoughts about this. He says it is very possible to train ourselves to be more Aquanimists in the face of financial ups and downs and that this will lead us to make better decisions. Vis-a-vis our money. One of his central contentions is that our anxiety and stress about money has more to do with our thoughts

about money than our actual finances themselves. Spencer Sherman is the founding CEO of Abakiss of Values Driven Financial Firm. He's also a certified mindfulness teacher. He teaches the Fearless Finance Program and the Mastery of Money Program for NYU's Inner NBA Program. He's also the author of the Cure for Money Madness. In this conversation, we talked about how to identify and reframe our long-held, often subconscious beliefs about money, how to apply the four Brahma Viharas. That's a Buddhist

term that for new listeners, Spencer, will thoroughly explain how to apply the four brahma viharas? That's a Buddhist term that for new listeners, Spencer will thoroughly explain how to apply the four brahma viharas to having a healthier relationship with money. How to use the popular meditation technique, reign, when we get anxious about money. He runs us through his enough practice, which is designed to give us a sense of sufficiency. He talks about how generosity helps us let go

and counter intuitively can actually create a sense of abundance. We talk about how mindfulness of money can kiss into interconnection and whether you can actually be a successful investor if you're guided by Buddhist values. I should say this is part two of a week long series. We're doing, if you missed it, go check out Monday's episode with Morgan Hausel, author of the Blockbuster book, The Psychology of Money.

We'll get started with Spencer Sherman right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us wanna live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your

own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly Kelly McGonical, and the great meditation teacher, Alexis Santos, to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10percent.com. All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer.

I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts, the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad, where the memes come from, and where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby This is Kiki Palmer

on Amazon Music, or wherever you get your podcast. Spenser Sherman, welcome to the show. Thanks Dan, great to be here. Before we dive into some of your practical insights, I'd love to hear a little bit about you. As I understand it, your origin story as it pertains to the Dharma and money, at least one aspect of it has to do with a fire. Can you tell that story?

Yes. Yes, so this happened in my 20s. I was working in Philadelphia for a large investment firm on independent square. And a fire broke out on the ninth floor. I was on the second floor. It took the Philadelphia Fire Department over 24 hours to put out the fire. On the second day when I came back to the building, I had a panic attack. Because I realized that the most important thing in my life was in

that building. And somehow I convinced the fire marshal to let me into that building just as they were putting out the fire. So he escorts me in these darkened hallways, murky water, knee deep, the smells were horrific. It was something like out of the beside an adventure, if you remember that. And we arrived at my office, I grabbed my stuff, I get out of the building, and I looked down, and I see what I thought was the most important thing in my life, and it's my worthless, completely water-drenched computer. And that was a wake up call because there was such risks in going into that building, asbestos, electrocution, all kinds of risks. And yet I was willing to sacrifice my health, my life, to try to find this computer, which of course had everything backed up anyway. So that was a real

wake up. And I had started doing a little bit of mindfulness, but that was the lightning rod that got me to do a silent retreat. I actually signed up for a 10-day silent retreat because I knew that I had to really investigate what's going on here. And one of the things that came up was the message that I received from my father that money is more important than anything. And that message I've colored my life for years and I've led to many unfortunate things, including the fire. In addition to that, there was the workaholic tendencies that I had as well.

So this tend to retreat was amazing because there I am, I did it at I am mass in Massachusetts and I have nothing with me. So there's no stuff with me. I don't have my friends with me. I have a very simple room with just a bed. And yet in that sparse setting of emptiness, I find this sense of abundance, of joy. So it really turned upside down this idea that I grew up with that money is more important than anything. And yet, you know, I grew up with many of the same messages. I think many

people listening, maybe not as extreme, but for sure we get the message through our family or through the culture that money is very important, if not the most important thing. And I've been on many silent meditation retreats I'm leaving for one in a few days. But I'm still pretty neurotic about money. So, did you conquer all of your neuroses about money on that one retreat? No, I did not conquer all my neuroses about money. And in fact, there were many other practices

that have been extremely helpful to me. That was the wake-up call. That was sort of the beginning of me recognizing that I had this belief. One of the things I talk about is this metaphor of the iceberg. That the tip of the iceberg is everything we can see. And that's things like taxes and investments, insurance and taxes and mortgages and houses. All that is very important, but that's the only stuff that we tend to talk about and notice.

And then there's this submerged part of the iceberg, and that's where these fixed beliefs are that we tend to cling to around money. That's where the fear and anxiety lives around money. And I didn't even know I had this belief that money is more important than anything. It was just living in me. I was just responding to that belief in my life most of the time. So that first awareness was incredibly helpful.

And then it took many other things for me to keep making the progress that I needed to make to undo my neurosis with money. Would you say the neuroses are truly undone or are you still managing it but more skillfully? I would say managing it but more skillfully. Yes, I mean, it's every now and then I notice that tendency to think more about money than my well-being and then I sort of come back to it. It can come in very simple

ways. Like I can be at a store just buying $20 worth of pens. And it came up this sense of anxiety, of this panic, like I'm spending all my money. And this money is like so sacred. It's more important than anything. So it can still grit me in the moment, but I'm more responsive, more able to see that this is coming from that message from the past and that I don't have to react to it. I can take a breath, I can create some spaciousness and pause and then make a new decision. You said something about money not being more important than your well-being, but isn't money connected to well-being? Yeah, so money gives us options.

Money is necessary in our lives for most of us. It's very few who can do life without money in it. But it's the grasping of the money that's got me in trouble and causes suffering for many of us. So what's our relationship to money? Is it reactive or is it spacious? And when it comes to money, often there's not a lot of mindfulness. There's not a lot of spaciousness or intention. It's often that we're very speedy with money, very active.

And often we end up making decisions that are based more on emotion than really based on what's really best for us, or based on our common sense and wisdom, which I would say we all have an abundance of wisdom with our finances, with money, but our emotions, these fixed beliefs block us from accessing that wisdom. So how do we access it? How do we become more spacious rather than reactive? Well, there's a series of practices that I offer. So one of them is to slow down, to start paying attention. That money is unfortunately this arena where it's so laden with emotion when we were growing up, even if our parents didn't

talk about it, we felt their emotions. There's these fixed beliefs, of course, that our parents have it. They pass on to us. And then there's the taboo nature of money that we're not allowed to talk about. It's taboo as sex, religion, or politics. So it makes it kind of difficult to bring mindfulness to it, but that's exactly what's needed. So I'd say to first begin with awareness of every spending, saving, investing, giving, decision that you're

making. And the good news about money is that we have many opportunities to bring mindfulness to it without adding on another thing to our schedule. That it just arises naturally in our days. So that's the first step. Is this awareness of what's happening? So if like I started noticing that I went to the store to buy big ticket items, I started noticing my heart racing. This fear that if I didn't buy the item, I was a loser. If and I bought the item, I was a loser. If I bought the item, I was a loser.

And feeling that pain, feeling that anxiety can help to quell those emotions so we can access our common sense and say, do I really need this item? So just to drill down on that a little bit on being mindful of our spending or any of our interactions with the world of money. It sounds like the first step, I mean, this is almost straight out of AA, the first step is admitting that the first step is just getting in touch with what happens to your body, to your psychology, when you're spending money or thinking about money and just to try to bring some awareness, self-awareness, mindfulness to those moments,

that's kind of the key first step of just gathering some data. Yes, it's mindfulness of the emotions that are arising and mindful of any thoughts that are arising because those recirculating thoughts might clue us in to those inherited messages, those fixed beliefs that we don't even know are fixed within us. Like beliefs like money is the most important thing, or don't talk about money, or money doesn't grow on trees, or you should save all your money or spend all your money, those beliefs are running through us, and it takes something to uncover them.

So yes, that mindfulness also slows us down and we tend to speed up with money. So that also can help bring insights and awareness of what's happening. So a key first step is just to get a sense of what the territory is and the way to do that is just to look at your mind, look at how your body's reacting in those moments where you're dealing with money. Where do we go from there? Yes, I was gonna go to the brom of the horrors because I think they kind of reveal so much about money

curiously. So let's go there. And the way I tend to talk about the brom of the horrors is I do them backwards because I feel like Upekar which is the polyword for equanimity is really the first higher emotion that is important to get to. And I want to say that one of the things I love about Buddhism, the Brahmvaharas, is that it's about higher emotions. And often when it comes to money we're in lower emotions of greed, aversion, delusion, confusion. emotions of greed, aversion, delusion, confusion. So this first step that I call equanimity is about being able to be okay with what's happening. To being okay

with your finances the way they are, being able to be okay with the volatility in the financial world. So often, you know, the markets go down and journalists react as if it shouldn't be happening. And we all almost respond that way. Like, what's going on? The markets are going down. It must be because of X, Y, or Z, instead of realizing that there's always been impermanence with the market.

So it's been impermanence for everything. Impromanence is here to stay. And that recognition can help us with this volatility. The volatility in our work world, we're not always going to have a great day at work. As we're with that, those feelings around volatility, we can gain some patience and resilience to relax reactive to the winds. There's a bunch there that we should probably go into.

But just on a practical note, just say, I lose my job and I have fixed mortgage payments or maybe even I've got a variable mortgage and my mortgage could go up in this environment of rising interest rates. How am I supposed to stay equanimous in the face of a looming layoff given that it might result in not being able to afford the house where my family and I live. By the way, I'm not talking about my own life right now. I'm just trying to pick an example from the broad swath of humanity. So it just seems easier said than done, being cool in the face of this kind of close to the bone insecurity. Yes, you're right. And there's such fertile ground here, I think, to recognize that we have

the courage to dive into the difficult feelings. There is an immense opportunity both for ourselves personally and for our finances. So there's this double benefit that we may receive. for our finances. So there's this double benefit that we may receive. So I'd say to go into it, maybe to do something like the rain practice, which allows us to feel and acknowledge any difficult feelings that are arising without judgment. What we're aiming for is if we can be with these difficult feelings that arise when we're losing a job or our mortgage rate might increase, then the wisdom mind can come in and say, well, what should I do instead of just panicking? Maybe I should get some advice from a financial advisor

or talk to some friends. Maybe I can find a money ally, somebody who could give me some feedback on what I might do, some actions that I might take instead of doing something impulsive, which is our normal way of responding to money. Can you describe the rain practice? Sure. So the rain practice, the R stands for recognize. So to recognize the emotions that are arising. So when your example is the emotions that are arising. So when you're examples, the fear that the interest rate on my mortgage might increase. So feeling that fear, where is it in the body? What are the sensations around that fear? Getting as close to those

emotions as possible, I like the metaphor of you have two boxers hugging each other, they become harmless when they're that close to each other. And so we're trying to get very close to these emotions in that recognized step. The next step is the A for allow, except I also say maybe even amplified, really allowing these feelings, the sensations to be there because our ordinary way is to push them away, to distract ourselves from them, to really have the patience to be with them. The third step in that rain acronym is the eye for investigate. So here's where we asked some soft questions like, what's

underneath this? What is this emotion or these sensations trying to tell me? And we listen without expecting an answer. But just posing the question can sometimes bring this spaciousness. And then that last step, the N in rain, it has sort of these two ways of working with the N. One is through nurturing. So becoming that loving, grandparent to yourself and saying, it's gonna be okay. I'm gonna figure out this mortgage situation.

I'm gonna figure out this job situation. You've got this, like offering some loving going to figure out this job situation. You've got this, like offering some loving words to yourself can be very helpful. And then the other way of viewing the end is to not identify, to see that yes, all this is happening with the mortgage with my job, but it's not all of me. It's just a very small piece of who I am to recognize that there is immense wisdom within me Skills that I have resources that I have connections that I have a sense of humor Billy to see things from a new perspective that I have all this in me beyond just the mortgage That not identifying with it not seeing it as a fixed state of being

not identifying with it, not seeing it as a fixed state of being can be also very freeing. And then once the rain practice is done, you can use to sort of let yourself receive the benefits of the rain practice, you sit there for another minute or two, and then you're ready to maybe take some action. Maybe that action could be calling up your mortgage broker and finding out the actual information. Maybe it's not going to be as bad as you imagine or maybe it's going to be having a discussion with yourself or you and your partner about what can we do with our living expenses given that the mortgage is going up. So I think those are the steps that we tend to not take because we stay just in that paralysis

of the emotion. So this rain practice, which we have talked about on the show before, do you recommend this be done in a formal meditation or sort of informally on the go or yes to both? Yes to both. And I love that you said on the go, damn, because I've been in situations. I've been in negotiations with business colleagues and I've done the rain practice right in a meeting.

I've done the rain practice when I've been out buying a car. It's been very helpful and you can do it in a shortened way. Sometimes just that first step of recognizing the feelings and letting them be, you know, instead of trying to push them away, as I said, really befriending them, welcoming them, that can help us move beyond the stuckness that we often feel when we have those gripping emotions, especially emotions like fear or worry or confusion. When you talk about the end of rain,

you mentioned that it can be either nurture or non-identification. When you were discussing nurture, you talked about kind of talking to yourself like a coach, a good coach, a good friend. And you said something like, you can figure this out, you've got this. And sometimes I find it perversely comforting,

but I'd be curious to see if you think this is wise. When I'm worrying about money, especially even if I'm talking about it with my wife, to go to the worst case scenario, what if we can't figure this out? What if actually, no, we really are going to have to sell the house or take another job or whatever. I find that I do this naturally, but I felt a little vindicated when I heard that there's a practice in stoicism that it suggests that people, you know, sort of imagine the worst case scenario and then you realize that's, I can probably deal with that.

So I just wonder what you think of that because I often find my nurturing voice or my wife's nurturing voice says something to the effective. Yeah, that could happen. The worst outcome you're imagining could happen, but we'll figure that out too. Yes. Yeah. I think that can be very powerful. That's distinct. What you're describing from just allowing our minds to just ruminate with all this proliferation of paranoia about worst case scenarios, because they tend to get very exaggerated. And we go down a spiral with that. But having a conversation with someone, a contentional conscious conversation with someone or with yourself,

I think it can be very helpful and actually look at it. Okay, so the worst scenario is, yeah, I'm going to move in with some friends if I lose everything. That's actually not so bad, that idea. You talked about a double benefit. Did I give you enough of an opportunity to describe how bringing rain or bringing mindfulness or bringing equanimity to financial concerns can have two benefits? Yeah, so what I love about money is that it's so present in our lives. It's often that we're in some kind of money interaction. It's often that we're having thoughts about money. So we have this opportunity. We don't always have our cushion with us, but we have money thoughts often. So we have these constant opportunities to practice. And the point

of practice really is to take it off the cushion and money brings us all these opportunities because it's this uncharted territory. We haven't brought a lot of mindfulness to money. So anything we bring to money has this possibility of really putting the practice to work, seeing the benefits of the practice, and bringing spaciousness to our lives, giving us some evidence of the possibility of transformation that that fixed belief that we've held so strongly can start to loosen. And I always say you don't have to get rid of any of these beliefs around money that you have.

We're just loosening our attachment to these beliefs. And then the other benefit is that it actually often changes the amount of money we have when we're in a more present, less reactive state with money that we tend to show up better at job interviews, at work, in making investment decisions were less likely to react when the market goes down and just sell, which is really interesting because everyone knows not to sell at the bottom,

including people with PhDs and finance and MBAs, and yet I've seen people with these advanced degrees sell at the bottom, because there are motions override what they know. So if we can actually quell our emotions, not only do we see this change in our personal and spiritual lives, but we can also change the amount of money that we have. So the double benefit of bringing equanimity to our money is that it can boost our practice because this is not an area where we often apply mindfulness.

Usually we're pretty mindless when it comes to money and the other benefit is that we can make better decisions. I do however wanna go back to something you said before, you talked about the ups and downs of the worlds of money and you use the word wins. And it got me thinking of this Buddhist concept of the eight worldly wins. The Buddha talked about there are these sort of four pairs of kind of ups and downs that

we all go through praise and blame, gain and loss, fame and ill-reput. And so I've always found it very interesting that he described them as like meteorological phenomena that doesn't feel that personal. So I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that. Yes, I think that's beautiful. Yeah, people talk about the economy going down or their business having a bad year or the stock market going down. It's as if winter comes and we all say, why is it so cold?

Why is it winter? Well, there's always been a winter. There's always been gain in loss, success, and failure, praise and blame, pleasure and pain. That's just part of the human existence. And to recognize that is wisdom, I think. And to really know that that is going to happen, and it also puts us on a path of cultivating this resilience, the skill

of resilience, so that we become less reactive, even though it's not easy. But we can do it in smaller ways to gain this resilience, this patience with the cycles of life. I love this quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseauau who said that patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet. And I always think that is the perfect description of the stock market, for example, of investing. And if you invest in a spread out diversified way, patience is your friend. Coming up Spencer Sherman goes deeper into applying the four Brahma Viharas to your financial life, and he runs us through his enough practice.

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And end in equanimity, however, Spencer likes to invert this and start with equanimity, because in the realm of finance, it's such a hard to access state of mind. So we haven't yet moved to the other three, Brahma, Vaharas, but we're staying just for a minute on equanimity because it's so important here. And you, Spencer, have a contemplation that you recommend people recite in order to cultivate equanimity. I have in front of me, I don't know if you've got it memorized, but if you don't, I can read it, and if not, maybe you can recite it for us. Please, Dad, please, go ahead. Okay, so I have in front of me, on the one hand, I really like it, and I really like the

idea of talking to ourselves. I think we're talking to ourselves all day long and usually in a really shitty way. And I very intrigued by the notion of reprogramming our inner dialogue. So contemplations like this are little mantras, slogans that you can use internally or just talking to yourself in a supportive way. All of that is very intriguing to me and there's quite a bit of science to suggest. It's really good for us. However, there was some, as you'll hear,

and I will voice, there are some things in this contemplation from you that I'm about to read that I wonder about. So let me read it to you, and then we'll talk about it. Here's the contemplation. I have enough money and resources. I do enough for myself and others. I am enough just as I am. I can and I am responding wisely

to whatever the winds of change bring. So, I mean, leelistically, I'm gonna take a telemotic lens to this. I agree with all of it. And yet, it does on some level, and this is me maybe just being a jerk, but it does feel a little bit like Stuart Smiley, you know, the Al Franken,

Saturday Night Live character who stares in the mirror and says, I'm good enough and goddamn it, people like me or whatever it is. So I'm just wondering like, do you think I'm just being a jerk? Respond if you will to my cramudgenliness. Yes, yes, and I've certainly updated that practice so that it really fits what I'm speaking

to today. But I now call that practice the enough practice. And we live in a world of more. The world's first billionaire, John D. Rockefeller in 1916 said, when a journalist asked him how much is enough, he said a little bit more. So that, I don't think that is very different from how most of us act. We might say, well, when this happens, I'll have enough. When I get to this level of money or when I retire or when I get that next job, I'll have

enough where my kids fully launch, I'll have enough. But when enough is that moving target, we never really arrive. We never get to that place of contentment. And in fact, what ends up happening is we train our brain for the future. So we'll be arrived at some destination that we think is going to deliver us. The brain is already trained to anticipate the next destination. So that's the problem with going for more. And this meditation or this practice of enough is a practice that to defy that cultural current, which is all about more. And if no one

can say they have enough, and it's not just about money, This is a practice that I speak about in terms of having enough intelligence, enough skills, enough sense of humor, enough new perspective, enough friends, enough time, enough money, enough resources. This is our opportunity to break through a pattern that all of us have become a legion to that doesn't really serve us. So I think it's possible to actually sense into the possibility of enough, and it's right now we can't we can't find enough in the future because that's just setting up another anticipated

goal for ourselves. That's just going to make us more future oriented. So I say it's possible to experience this sense of enough in this moment. And I also say that if you don't have enough for the basics in life, then certainly having more money is extremely beneficial. There's been many studies on this, Daniel Conneman and others

have shown studies at happiness and wellness is very correlated with money up to a certain level. And then I go to the next step of that practice, which is around doing. And we certainly live in a world, at least for me and many of my friends where it's an endless to-do list. I never feel like I'm doing enough. So this reflection of the possibility that in this moment I do enough is a way of cutting across that grain. And then the third one is just this

recognition that I am enough. And sometimes I'll quote Oscar Wilde who said, be yourself, everyone else is already taken. We can only be enough. No one else can do ourselves the way we do ourselves. No one else can be me. So I am enough just the way I am even if none of my nearest resolutions come to be, even if nothing changes. This practice is a way of quelling the mind, is a way of coming into this contentment. And that wellness, that relaxation contentment is like one of the best ingredients for doing well with our finances, because that helps us access our wisdom.

It helps us be discerning when we're making purchases because we're less reactive. So that's what this practice is about is putting us into that place of sufficiency or enoughness, which I think can be equated to this place of equanimity, which is a very exalted state in Buddhism. It's really a boundless place. I mean, be it word enough might sound limited, but when we're in that place of enough,

then anything is possible. So we can still have our goals. We can still have intentions for things to happen, but we're no longer attached to them. We're no longer gripping them. So we walk into the job interview. We're not gripping for the job. We're probably more likely to get the job.

So it doesn't equal complacency. No, not at all. Not at all. This enough practice is really recognizing what's true in this moment and moving us out of grasping. I mean, the Buddha said that grasping is the main cause of suffering. So it's moving us away from that because we're letting go of all the grasping as we accept this possibility or try on this possibility of sufficiency in this moment. So I find sufficiency or enoughness

to be extremely attractive as a concept. And occasionally I get there, however, it's only occasionally. And so I guess what you're saying is, it's gonna be hard for anybody unless you're practicing it on the regular. So we should take these words, we can tailor them to our own personality nature,

but just to use this recitation as a way to kind of pound this reality into our neurons. Yeah, I don't know if I'd use the word pound, but it's a knit. Knit, yeah, yeah, I like that. What we're really cultivating here isn't enough mindset. A mindset that isn't looking for the grass to be greener. That isn't looking for the new shiny object that can find peace with what I have, with what I'm doing, with who I am. And I say that when

when you move towards that, that's when anything is possible. So there's the irony that in moving towards enough, you actually might be moving towards abundance. When you're moving towards enough, you're actually opening the door to abundance because you're no longer in this posture, this leaning forward, ripping, stressed out posture. I believe that kind of on faith, really where I'm, where I have my skepticism is on whether it is achievable. Maybe it's achievable for other people, but I sometimes wonder whether it's achievable for

me. And I guess what I'm picking up from you is that we should think about this contemplation that you're recommending the way we might think about Brahma, Vihara practice generally. And you know, in Buddhist meditation or in certain flavors of Buddhist meditation, we pick one of these exalted states of mind like compassion or loving kindness or equanimity. And we do a very systematic and for some people it feels kind of mind like compassion or loving kindness or or equanimity and we do a very systematic and for some people it feels kind of forced practice where you close your eyes envision somebody and then you know like maybe you envision you start with an easy person and then you move to yourself

and then you move to a neutral person a difficult person and then all beings and you repeat phrases like may you be happy safe healthy may you live happy, safe, healthy, may you live with ease. And at first, you may not feel it. In fact, you may not feel it for a while, but the act of just doing this sort of bicep curl for the gooey or parts of your brain and psyche, over time, you just get better and better at it. And so I guess what you're saying is is if I were to take on this contemplation as a practice, I might get to enoughness over time.

Yes. Well said it. I think that there's a couple of other pieces that might help. One is really recognizing, maybe you can use the rain practice for this, recognizing the suffering that results from the grasping, from not feeling a sense of enoughness. We have a lot of thoughts about not having enough, but can we really feel the ramifications of that constant striving, of that constant reaching for more. That recognition of that pain, being able to be a friend, that pain, I think, will help open up this enough practice. And then I think it's always helpful to have some sincere motivation for doing it. And then I think you're right. I think sometimes it is, once you have that,

it might take some time until these sink in. I mean, we've had decades where we've been training ourselves to not feel enough. I mean, the culture is always telling us, we're not enough so that we kind of buy more stuff or we're constantly improve ourselves. So we're really doing something here that might take some intention some time to carry out. And I can definitely speak to that in the next practice.

When we move over to Modita, I can definitely speak to the time that it took for that practice to take effect for me. Please. Again, we're doing the Brahma Viharas in opposite of the usual order. So we've just done equanimity and we spent a lot of time there because it's probably the trickiest. The next is Mudita, which is an ancient word that is currently most popularly translated as sympathetic joy, as I said before, the opposite of Shadon Freud being happy for other people's happiness. So how does that apply?

I think it's actually probably pretty obvious, but how does that apply in this area of money? Yes. Yes. Well, like you said, sympathetic joy is about being able to feel the happiness of another. And often we are doing the opposite. We're comparing ourselves to others. We're feeling envious of what others have. We're feeling this to be angst of not being enough, of not having enough house or enough job status or enough of anything maybe compared to a friend or colleague of ours.

And this really hit me. So I have a friend who has all these best sellers. He's got an incredible meditation practice. And every time he would tell me about one of his successes, instead of feeling delight, I would feel this tension in my body. I mean, I actually started thinking about Sharon Salzburg because she will sometimes say a phrase like, why can't the light shine a little bit more on me

and a little bit less on them? Those were the sort of negative thoughts I was having. And it hurt my relationship with this friend, this way in which I was in, but I enjoy him telling me about his successes. It also was holding me back because I was holding on to all this comparison. And this comparing mind, we know, is universal. And this moodita practice is a practice that can help us with that comparing mind, which gets us in all kinds of trouble with our finances, because as we compare ourselves to others, like I was to this friend, is

I'm trying to buy things that my friend has bought, which may not be aligned with my values. I got to such a place of suffering, and this is why suffering can be the lightning rod. It's when we really feel it. It can be so motivating. I said, I have to do this practice. And I said, may your success increase. Now that sounded crazy to me to say that because you already have some of success. But I started wishing that for him. May your happiness continue. May you flourish in all ways. I started saying those three phrases to him every day. So it would be like five minute section of my meditation. And I believed in this moody to practice and I was doing it for about a month and nothing seemed to change. You know, he called me up and I have the same angst that I

always did. But somehow I trusted the practice. This practice has been around for 2600 years. And I continued, but I did it with a lot more sincerity. I said to myself, I'm letting go of how much success he has. Even if it's a million times my success, I'm okay with it. I sort of went there. And I took these phrases on with that kind of intention. And somewhere around six, seven weeks, I started noticing neutrality when he told me about another one of his achievements.

And then I sort of knew like, okay, this practice has some some jays to it. And I kept going with it. And eventually I could feel some sparks of joy. I'm not saying I've gotten to this immense joy when he tells me about an accomplished, but I can only tell you how freeing it's become to actually feel okay when he tells me about an achievement he's had. It has helped me quiet this comparing mind, this moody to practice.

So I owe a lot of gratitude for this practice because I feel like it not only I think has helped me with my own success in my life to not be comparing myself as much to others, but it also transformed my relationship with this friend. I believe you just based on what I've seen happen in my own mind from doing a much more general way these brama vihara practices,

which I really resisted first, but I just see my own mind warming up, and that's kind of miraculous given its previous state. So I do believe you, I find that quite moving. Yeah, I mean, these practices are so counterintuitive, but that's what it often takes, I say, to counter the decades of conditioning with money and we're surrounded by people that are supporting that conditioning. So we need something really in some way strong

to undo that. And these practices have been so beneficial to myself, to clients, to students. So should we move on to Karuna? Sure. Karuna is the polyword for compassion. Yes. Yes. And compassion might sound like, what is the word compassion doing in a talk about finances? Well, I use compassion in a couple of ways. One is, well, compassion is powerful. One of my first meditation teachers actually

called compassion a weapon. I don't know not going to use it that way, but we often benefit from having compassion, offering compassion ourselves for all our past money mistakes, for our current money situation. There's so much judgment that so many of us have around our finances. Like, I have around some of the speculative investments that I've done in my life because a friend told me this is definitely going to hit a home run and you're going to miss out on it. And I was led by that. And it's like, I had to offer compassion to myself to resolve that.

So that has been very beneficial to people that have done just that part of the compassion practice of offering this nurturance to themselves for their past and current money situation. And then the next way I use this, Karuna practice, this compassion practice, is I do something called a reframe meditation or practice. And what I'm reframing is that childhood belief that we inherited. So I mentioned the belief that I inherited that was most prominent was that money's more important than anything.

Well, this practice starts with recognizing the scene where I inherited that message. So maybe when I was five, six, seven, eight years of age, I go back to that scene, remember it, remember the people in the scene, see myself as this young version of myself and have compassion for this child that didn't know anything about money, money was so abstract, is so abstract, and he was confused confused and then there was this messaging that came to him and of course he took on this belief that money is so important given those causes and conditions. So that compassion for that young child is so important. Then once that gets going, then you can start offering compassion to

the caretakers or parents or the other people who gave you that message or you inherited that message from. And this is something that I never thought of doing before, but it just sort of came to me that I need to offer compassion to my father. And it was not an easy thing to do because I had so much resentment towards how much he made money the number one thing. Everything was framed in terms of the material world. What did you accomplish today? It was so much about you've got to do everything you can to get straight A's, work all the time, and be successful. It was very fear-based.

So I started having compassion for him and it was like, why offer compassion for him? But then I realized he was a child too, which I couldn't see at first. And in that offering of compassion to him, something really softened in that. And I started to see that he also had imprints from his parents. So first part of this reframe, meditation is offering all this compassion for ourselves, for the adults that were in the room as well when we got this money initiation, let's say. And the last part of that reframe practice is asking ourselves what is the message that we wish

we had received growing up. And some people might have asked me, well, how can you imagine the message that you wish you had received growing up? And I feel like I have permission to ask that question because I've worked with many siblings close to an age and they take totally different messages from the same economic event. You know, like the business failed in the family. One adult daughter says, well, that means you should save everything because you never know when disaster is going to strike and the other daughter, close to an age says, no, you should save everything because you never know when disaster is going to strike and the other daughter, close to an age, says, no, you should spend everything because you never know when disaster is going to strike. So sometimes I'll say, think of a message you might have received that you can't imagine

your parents, let's say, saying. And that often produces some lightness. And the message that came to me was, don't worry about money. And I even laugh as I say that because I can't imagine my father saying, don't worry about money. But as I contemplate that, I actually saw the truth in it that in some ways he wanted that for me, he had his own methodology for moving me towards not worrying. So, Karuna is to wrap up is about using this powerful about using this powerful tool of compassion to heal both ourselves and also to loosen the grip on the message or the belief that we took on early around money. And the final of the four, divina boats, is meta, the holy word for loving kindness, I translate that loving kindness to mean generosity.

I really feel that's what loving kindness is about. And I feel that's the culmination of the other three as we get to this place of generosity. And interestingly enough, the Buddha taught generosity before he taught meditation. I was talking with Joseph Olstein about it, and he said it's because generosity is easier to teach. So that's another sort of validation for some of these financial practices like generosity is that it can help us with our spiritual practices

and it helps us in our financial life. So generosity is sort of the equivalent in some ways of mindfulness, because in mindfulness we're learning how to let go of the grasping. And generosity by definition is a letting go practice. And I'm not just talking about generosity with money, it's a generosity of your presence, of your attention, a generosity with your resources or skills. And the great thing about it is that you don't have to be generous with more than you can be generous with. I mean, if it's going to be money, you can give smaller amounts, but the brain is getting the message, this is going to bring us back to the idea of enough,

the brain is getting the message that you must have enough when we're generous. When you take on that generous posture, it's kind of moving us towards that posture, that place of enough, because we must have enough if we have something to give. But you're not saying what the old televangelists would say, give till it hurts. It sounds like you're saying you can give in lots of ways, and that just creates new neural pathways that lead toward enoughness. Yes. Yes. And generosity, again, like some of these practices, actually this is a quote really Joseph, it's the path to abundance. He said, yes, he said, in all ways, not just with money, but as we give, we let go of that grasping of that angst of that worry. And it's connecting us to other people. It's moving us to a place

of wellness and happiness. I mean, there's been all these studies showing that people gain more happiness from giving than they do from receiving. So as we move towards happiness, everyone wants to work with somebody who's happier, or wants to hire that person or buy things from that person. So it makes sense to me that it would be the path to abundance. But Joseph has this thing that he's talked about here on the show that I found to be really challenging and interesting, which is that anytime a generous impulse flips through the mind, you should act on it. With don't second guess, it just do it.

And often I find this very powerful. Usually it has nothing to do with money. It's more like a friend who I haven't talked to in a minute pops into my mind and I just send him a text out of blue. However, whenever I hear Joseph say, you know, if you're a generous impulse to arise, just go for it. Well, then, perversely, you know, the thought arises, I should give all my money away, but I'm not going to do that. So that's one little roadblock I've run into. I know you struggle with it just a little bit. What say you? Yeah, I have to say that I'm not, I haven't taken on that practice yet of just acting on

every generous impulse. I do think it's an incredible practice and maybe it's going to happen to me in the new year that I'm going to take that on. The way Joseph describes it is that he trusts the impulses. My sense is that once you take this on with sincerity and have that intention to do that, that the extreme thoughts will not come up of just give everything away, that these impulses, and maybe we also have to learn how to recognize more authentic impulses than just impulses that are coming from, you know, wanting to look good, that those sincere impulses will be within our

means to do. I think it's something that I've been very tempted to take on, but I haven't yet said to myself, I'm gonna act on every generous impulse. Coming up Spencer talks about our motivations around money, how values driven investing is connected to Buddhism, and why there's so much wisdom in having an attitude of not knowing.

I want to go back to something. You made a robust nod to this earlier, but when we talk about enoughness without virtue signaling here, I think it's incumbent upon us as two successful older white men to acknowledge that we have enough money, even though we may worry about money or have all sorts of complicated feelings about it. I think, you know, from any sane analysis, I think it's safe to say we have enough money. There are however people listening to the show who really may not have enough money and are in dire straits. So how do we apply enoughness in those scenarios? Well, first, as I mentioned that there have been these studies that show that yes, if you're below a certain levels of income where you don't have the basics, you gain a lot from having

more money. And I would say that doing these enough practices, doing all these practices moves us into a place of wellness, a place of non-grasping. And the booted-in say, well, these practices are only for wealthy people. I mean, they're for everyone. So these practices move us into a more wholesome state. And from that place, I think we're more likely to take action steps. Like, for example, what I've seen in classes is people going out and talking to friends

or colleagues and saying, hey, I'm looking to earn more money, what am I good at? What do you, do you have any feedback from me? I mean, that takes some courage to do that. It takes some work on yourself to get to the place where you can have those conversations. And that's why I think these practices apply to all of us. Where do you come down on the issue of motivation? I sometimes worry that I may have created a life where I have warped my motivations to a certain extent. Let me see if I can explain this. That just because I have some fixed

expenses having to do with my kid or living situation, whatever it is, I mean, I think I have largely and very luckily been able to structure my work life around the things that I really care about and the things where I feel I can make a difference in the world, you know, I quit being a news anchor and just full time meditation nerd, but I do sometimes worry that I'm a little bit hemmed in because I do have a burn rate that is kind of what it is. And if I had made different decisions, I don't know, five, ten years ago, maybe I would have fewer bills to pay and would be able to do more pro bono work or say yes to projects that, you know, wouldn't make any money. So I suspect I'm not alone on this, although maybe I'm close to alone and being willing to admit it publicly. What thoughts do you have on this? Because it is something I think about a lot. So you're asking me if you had just to make sure I'm clear on the question that if you had kind of done things differently, you might have a little more spaciousness now with

your money, you might not have this burn rate that you have now with the current structure of fixed expenses. As my communications coaches, Dan, Claremont, and Moodita Nisker would say, that was good reflection on your part. Yes, it was a good summation. And it goes to me to the issue of motivation. And I try to kind of humiliating or humbling to look at what really motivates you. But I do notice that if I'm evaluating potential projects, yeah, you know, it's not,

I'm not embarrassed to say that money is a factor, but I'm a little embarrassed that money is so much of a factor given that I have a kind of, at least for now, fixed or somewhat fixed set of bills I need to pay. And it might impact my motivations and move me away from more purely altruistic stuff, which I do do, but maybe not as much as I might otherwise do, if that makes sense. Yes, yes. I would say one thing that I'm hearing perhaps

in the question is, you know, when I was in recently in Durham, so I know you were also, and I was with his holiness to die a lump, and one of the things he said is we sometimes underestimate all of the ripple effects of our actions, all the impact that we're producing in the world. And I'm wondering, Dan, in your case,

if you're underestimating that the structures, the fixed expenses that you have in place, that you're underestimating that the structures that fixed expenses that you have in place, that you're saying maybe are keeping you from doing other things that might, quote, do, maybe do more good, I'm wondering if you're underestimating all the good, all the service that you're doing with your current work. So let me just see if I can reflect that back to you. You're saying I'm awesome and as close to flawless as achievable and so I just should stop worrying about it. I think that we often underestimate sort of

the benefits of what we're doing in the world and the dilemma sort of confirm this that we don't recognize, we don't pay enough attention to or imagine all the ripple effects of how we're benefiting people. And I think that we also tend to compare ourselves to other people or we compare ourselves to what we where we should be. It may be in the future and we don't look also at how far we've come. So that's another important thing that I would add is to recognize sort of the growth that you've made over the past five, ten years, and then to recognize the incredible ripple effects of all that you've brought to the world

through what you do, and that the fixed expenses, yes, they may limit some of your options, but I also wonder, so here's my question back to you, is that just you saying that or have you actually looked at the numbers? I guess what's implied in that question is that if we were to look at the numbers, might they suggest that you have more options than you might imagine? Yes, I think that's possible. I think that's possible. I actually, my wife handles the finances so I have not deep in the numbers. So this could be a story I'm telling myself, and so I appreciate it. I appreciate you giving me free therapy. It could be connected to that

message you got early in life as a child around, you know, never doing enough or that I should be doing more service work or whatever that message might have been. I don't know if anything comes to you in this moment of what might be leading you to almost judging yourself for not being able to do certain things. You know, it's possible that it's from messages from childhood or the culture. I think really that at least what I'm conscious of is that I'm just aware that it feels good to do good. And I'm not saying, I'm not in some self-flatulation story about how I'm no good, Nick, or whatever, but I do do quite a few things because they're remunerative.

And I guess if I wanted to be really hard on myself, I could say, well, what's the opportunity cost there? I could be doing things that are pro bono, but that I might enjoy more. And that just becomes a whole thing. Again, we don't need to dwell too much more. And that just becomes a whole thing. Again, we don't need to dwell too much on me to universalize it a little bit. I do think that many of us do look at out the world

and see people who are doing all sorts of good and wonder, do I measure up? Yes, yes. And I think I can go both ways. So one way that we can compare is like, yeah, I should be like that person and with a heavy voice. Or we might say, I should be like that person in that heavy voice. Or we might say, wow, look at that person is doing.

I'm inspired by that person. Maybe it really fits me. And how can I move a little bit towards that? I mean, in your case, and I think, you know, generalize this to all of us, is sometimes we say, well, I can't do more, but we could actually take a step in that direction. And that the energetics of just taking a movement, a small movement in that direction, who knows what that might open up for us.

If you're feeling like, oh no, I can't do that, do all that philanthropy that my friend is doing. Again, the amounts don't have to matter that much because we still get a lot of the benefits from, for example, doing philanthropy with smaller amounts of try, doing it with an amount that feels really doable and see what happens. Often when it comes to money, we stay in recirculating thoughts in our head, recirculating these childhood beliefs in our mind, instead of taking an action that's maybe doing an

action that's safe enough to take to try something out. A good example of that is I wish someone had told me that when I invested in my friend's company many, many years ago, just like, you can do this with a homeopathic amount. You don't have to invest that much money in this enterprise to receive the joy when it goes crazy and you hit this major home run with it, you'll get enough joy from starting with a home you're about to think about. Spencer, as we head into the home stretch here, to your credit, I know you told my colleague, the mighty Justin Davie, who's producing this episode, that you did not want this episode

to come off as an advertisement for your company. But if you're okay with it, I would like to ask you a question or two about advocates. Is that, are you open to that? Yes. So just to remind people, Spencer is the founding CEO of Advocates, which describes itself as a values driven financial consulting firm.

And I think there's probably this, and I'm sure you run into this all the time, this bias that values driven means leaving money all the time, this bias that, you know, values driven means leaving money on the table. That you can no way can you be as effective in investing if you're you know, fettered by all of these pesky values. So how do you respond to that? Well, five years ago, I was at a conference at Yale University on sustainable investing and there were people on both sides of the aisle there politically. And the people who did not believe so much in solar, wind, or climate change, they said

they took their money out of oil just like the rest of the people there because they didn't want the profit exposure, the environmental risk of being in fossil fuel companies. So I think that many people are realizing that, well, there's two things. Investing with your values might actually make as much of not more money. And two, I think there's a benefit when one feels aligned with their investments. Again, we're moving from being disconnected to money to having more engagement. And I meet many people, especially in the Buddhist community,

who are doing everything very much within the constructs of Buddhism and the rest of their life, but somehow their money is completely separate. And why does that have to be? And, you know, aligning your investments with your values is way to affirm your values in all areas of your life. And your rate of return is comparable to folks who aren't dealing with, as I said before, pesky values. Yes, I mean, the studies are showing that there's no difference in returns. You don't have to give up returns that Returns are driven much more by spreading your money out into many many different categories Not putting all your eggs in one basket and there's certain other dimensions of the market that have produced more returns Over time like tilting your portfolio a little bit towards value stocks versus the higher growth stocks That's what the evidence is about what actually produces more returns over time. You talked there about diversification.

How does that connect to Buddhism? I think it's, I'm thinking back to I was in college and my sociology professor brought in a Zen teacher and this teacher answered most of our questions with this profound baritone voice of Dono. And it was such a profound dono. And I know that I was actually looking at this book by Nizor Gadata, this meditation teacher from India, who says that knowing your ignorant is wisdom. And I think that when one embarks on a path of diversification of spreading your eggs in many baskets,

of not trying to predict the future, and not trying to predict whether the US or Japan or Canada or Europe are gonna be the right place to be next year, you are moving to that don't know place. And that humility, which is very much present in Buddhism, is actually a path that the study show leads to earning more money. That many know about present economists, like Eugene Pharma have said, that the more you can say you don't know about the future, the more money you'll make because you'll spread it out into maybe thousands of companies. And that over time, generally leads to the most success.

But from a sales and marketing standpoint, I can see how we tend to want our investment advisors to be steady as a mountain and certain in all of their pronouncements. And if your motto is, yeah, I don't know, I can see how that would be tricky. Yeah, it is. I mean, the temptation, I think, for financial advisors is to say, I know what's going to happen. I'm going to protect you before the next downturn. Well, that's a great thing to hear, but caring that out is virtually impossible. And there is no study that's shown that someone can reliably do that. And the first time

they miss it is a huge cost that you probably were better off if you just decided on the don't know path, the diversified path from the beginning. So we say that the evidence points to this diversification, what we're gonna bring is the best ways to diversify, but we don't claim to know anything about the future. We're gonna use the evidence of the past of what's really worked. Maybe that's a little bit of a tilt towards smaller companies, because they've tended to outperform the larger companies

over time, but we're not gonna get in and out of the market and make those kinds of predictions. And not everyone wants that kind of philosophy. Some people really want to hire someone who thinks they know what's gonna happen. Venture, is there anything that you wanted to say that I didn't give you an opportunity to say? Here's a question I would throw out there

that has been very helpful to me, client students, and that's when you're looking at your finances. And this applies to you know, that question you asked me about the person who doesn't have much money, but all of us is if you are advising somebody else who had your exact situation, or if we're who had your exact situation. Or if we're advising another couple who has our exact situation, what would we recommend? And it takes some setting up of this question so that it really drops in and you move into that objective space.

But people have reported it, and I've experienced this, that we come up with some of the wisest things when we're advising another, that it can move our brain into that place of objectivity. That's hard when we're dealing with our own finances, because the emotions just automatically pop up, the beliefs automatically pop up, but it's easier for us to often see, oh yeah, that person should definitely sell their house or buy a house or whatever it is. And really, we start to see that financial advising is a lot of common sense along with objectivity. That's what an advisor offers. And many of us can do that for ourselves. Or with that question, or taking on a friend, a trusted friend to be a money ally so we can be sounding boards for each other.

That makes a lot of sense to me. And I think one of the big headlines that's come out of the research into self-compassion, these practices on informal and formal that we can do off the cushion or on the cushion to be cooler to ourselves. One of the headlines as far as I understand it is that if we learn to counter program against our own negativity bias against our own self-hatred and just talk to ourselves

the way we would advise a good friend, it can have lots of benefits. So applying that to money makes a lot of sense to me. Yeah, we often think of things we wouldn't have thought of before and couples couples have benefited a lot from this too, because they might be polarized around one and wants to spend one, wants to save them, and they may say to themselves, well, how would we advise another couple exactly like us? They can have a little bit more compassion, because they're they're now in the role of being a financial advisor instead of just being in the role of being the client. Yes, that makes a lot of sense. I'd say the other thing, I mean, we've talked about it, but a gratitude practice, and

there's different ways to do gratitude practice, can be another very beneficial thing to fill your cup up with your finances, especially before you're making a big money decision. That has been proven to be very powerful. What does that practice look like? So it take a couple of forms. I mean, I'm also, I'm just, for some reason, it's coming to me. I don't know if you saw the Mr. Rodgers movie with Tom Hanks when he says, remember everyone in your in your life who has helped bring you to become this person that you are today who's responsible for all of your

achievements that you have in your life, all the wellness that you have in your life. So this is really a gratitude practice. We often don't appreciate how many things we already have, how much intelligence, friendships, and creativity we have. This kind of gratitude to practice shifts us from fear and scarcity to a sense of enough. These ideas of sufficiency and enoughness are very much woven into Buddhist philosophy. And Dan, I had a reminder of this when I was in Darmshali India where the Tibetan culture there puts a high value on enoughness. It actually defied my Western belief that you should always go for more.

And I thought, what if each of us could cultivate an enough mindset and experience the liberating possibility that you have, you do, and you are enough at this moment? you have, you do, and you are enough at this moment. Meditation practices facilitate this pathway to ease being more equanimous and making wiser money decisions so that we can develop this internal sense of enoughness. Agreed. Such a pleasure to talk to you. Before I fully let you go here, anything you want any resources you've put out into the world that you want to let people know about, if they want to learn more about you.

Yes, yes. So, I'm all about engagement. I offer easy to engage financial courses, mindfulness practices, a monthly newsletter, I'm a clubhouse on Instagram, My website has it all. It's spencer-sherman.com. And then I also offer a program just for financial advisors called the mindful advisor. And you can find that at mindfuladvisor.org. Spencer Sherman, thank you very much. Thanks again to Spencer Sherman. Thank you as well to everybody who worked so hard on this show. 10% Happier is Produced by Justin Davy, DJ Cashmere, Gabrielle Zuckerman, and Lauren Smith. Our supervising producer is Marissa Schneidermann. Kimmy Regler is our managing producer,

and our executive producer is Jen Poient. Scoring and mixing by Peter Bonaventure of Ultraviolet Audio. We'll see you all on Friday for a bonus episode. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today, or you can listen early and add free with Wondery Plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondery.com slash Survey.