The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – MoneyZen: The Secret to Finding Your “Enough” by Manisha Thakor

Episode Date: August 7, 2023

MoneyZen: The Secret to Finding Your "Enough" by Manisha Thakor https://amzn.to/45jlzkm A leading financial expert breaks down the personal, cultural, and societal forces that have led us to falsely believe we can never have, do, or be enough, and shows us a fresh new path toward “MoneyZen”—her joy-based approach to living a life rich in financial health and emotional wealth. For anyone who has ever felt that they can never measure up, MoneyZen is your cure. No matter your age, income, or profession, it’s all too easy to fall prey to the false belief that the amount of money you earn, or accomplishments you achieve, or praise you receive is just Never Enough. In MoneyZen, financial industry veteran Manisha Thakor candidly shares how she overcame toxic behaviors around work, money, and prestige that had threatened her relationships, her health, and her career, told alongside the inspiring stories of individuals from all walks of life who reveal their own struggles with “Never Enough.” Through Thakor’s interviews with a wide range of interdisciplinary experts, you’ll learn how personal traumas, cultural influences, societal pressures, and even our own biology have conspired to make us believe that “more” is the answer to all our problems. And you’ll discover a unique way to reclaim your life using a formula that’s ultimately rooted in less: Financial Health + Emotional Wealth = MoneyZen. The result is a powerful, research-based framework for getting off the hamster wheel of 24/7 striving so you can start to live a life fueled by authentic joy, connection, and meaning.

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I think we're starting to get cool on TikTok. I'm not sure. We're starting to get cool or maybe they're just pity likes. I don't know. Could be that too. We have an amazing author on the show. She's a brilliant mind who comes to us with her newest book that's coming out August 8, 2023. Manisha Thakkar is on the show with us today. She's the author of the newest book to come out, Money Zen, The Secret

to Finding Your Enough. She's on the show with us today and she's got a hell of a resume. Let me tell you, she has worked in the financial services for over 30 years with an emphasis in women's economic empowerment and financial well-being. She's a nationally recognized thought leader in the space. She's been featured in a wide range of publications, including the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, NPR, PBS, CNN, CNBCbc real simple and women's health prior to writing money's in she co-authored two personal finance books for women in their 20s and 30s today her work focuses on helping individuals of all ages to balance financial health and emotional wealth she earned her

mba from harvard business school her BA from Wellesley College. Wellesley. Wellesley College. You can tell I flunked second grade. And is both a chartered financial analyst, CFA, and certified financial planner, a CFP. She splits her time between Portland, Oregon, and rural Maine. Boy, that's just beautiful beach vistas on both those continents. Both those continents?

Which continent are those? Sides of the continent. It feels like continents when you fly back and forth between them. I've heard that about Portland. Anyway, her website, we'll get to her website here in a second. I'll let her throw that out. Welcome to the show. How are you, Manisha?

I'm great. Thanks for having me on, Chris. There you go. Thanks for coming. Give us your.com so you can tell everybody where to go to find out more about you on the interwebs. It is moneyzen.com and please come visit. There you go. And so what motivated you on to write this book? You know, I realized on the cusp of turning 50 that I had spent virtually my entire life

on a 24-7 hamster wheel of hustle culture. And I felt like I had literally missed living for the past couple of decades. And I wanted to figure out how that happened and how to prevent it going forward. And as I did that research, I thought, oh my God, I've got to share this with people. Now what's this living you speak of? Oh, yeah. I've never heard of it. I've been on that same hamster wheel. I feel like we're in a world of human doings, not human beings. There you go. Never mind.

There's a magnesium joke in there somewhere. So you've written this latest book. This is in your first book. And Money Zen, why did you pick that title? So I wanted people to feel calm and confidence and clarity about their relationship with money. And one of the things I've noticed over the years, Chris, is that I've spent a lot of time teaching and helping people understand the financial logistics. But what I missed was that until people have made peace with their relationship with money, what they feel is enough in terms of money and what it often represents, i.e. success, your identity, status in the world, oftentimes it's really hard to put through the mechanical steps or you do it and it's boring, but it doesn't bring you joy. And joy is kind of important. I don't know what it is. I always hear about it, read

about it in books like yours. Do we need to to try and are we trying to establish a money life balance maybe your work money life balance uh what are we trying to establish here you know not so much a balance as um let's say a finish line after which you can go get a cold drink and relax that isn't constantly moving forward. And what I mean by that is I feel like balance is a ridiculous word, particularly in the word, particularly in the post-COVID universe, because for most of us, even those who aren't workaholics, our personal lives and our work lives have blended together so much. And so it's more about understanding what is enough for you in a variety of different ways. One certainly is what's enough money in order for you to be able to feel safe, but then move on to actually live your life. But another is around what is enough effort to be putting in work? What are enough promotions? What are enough accolades? And those may change over times.

But it's this broader concept of having a floor of enough so you feel comfortable. And again, I use that analogy of the finish line, one that is not constantly moving forward. And I can say more about more if you'd like to talk about that. Please do. Please do. Let's get into it. All right. So one of the things that my research indicated is that we have literally, as a society, basically come to believe that the answer to almost anything that ails us is more.

You're not satisfied with the things you are able to buy. Well, you need to earn more money. You don't feel good about yourself. Well, then you need to achieve another promotion or get a bigger title, you are bored. Go shopping, get more stuff. And so we are so focused on more and collecting, and I don't just mean tangible items that we have. It's like we're hoarders and we can't peel away and see what is at the essence of what would actually make us happy and living our life. There you go. I were hoarders.

I, I sometimes I refer to us as consumer locusts. I like that. Yeah. We're just like consuming everything. And there, there was a point where, um,

I, I, I, when I, when I got very successful, I started going and I, you know, I was buying stuff for the house,

the new house and all that kind of crap. And I got like this addiction cycle or some sort of emotional cycle where I felt like I needed to go to the mall and buy stuff every weekend or else I, I felt really insecure about it. And I was like, but I got to go buy stuff and I got to fill the house. You know, when you buy a house and you're like,

yeah, no, now you got to put shit in it. It's kind of like that old line. It's kind of like that old bit from George Carlin about how once you get shit, you need more shit to put your shit in. And then you got to buy shit to store your shit,

which is more shit. You know what I mean? I certainly do. And then, you know, and then when you travel, you got to take your shit which is more shit you know what i mean i certainly do a whole bit and then you know and then when you travel you got to take your shit with you so you know it's a whole it's a whole carlin bit and and so you talk about in your book how to manage this better i think there's something you uh one of the concepts you lead off on is um they're a famous study and where there's a person if they hit an annual income of $75,000, any earnings above that have no bearing on life satisfaction. What's that about?

Yeah. So, I mean, that study has been cited for like, I don't know, the last 15 years. And usually people roll their eyes at that, especially if they live on the East or West coast where the cost of living is through the roof. But just generally speaking, a lot of people think like, well, are you kidding? That's not enough. And some recent research that just came out of a joint team from Princeton and University of Pennsylvania found that that study was invalid, but not for the reason people think it is. It's because if you lack well-being, emotional well-being, or feeling emotionally wealthy, you've got that foundation in your life, more money above that threshold does not increase your life satisfaction. So you literally need to establish well-being in your life before these other things can start

actually increasing life satisfaction. And that's why so many people find, you know, you buy the McMansion, you buy the fancy car, you lease a fancy car and you go, you know, you get the country club membership and the fancy clothes and you're still not happy. Yeah. Plus you're a lot of debt too. You put that kind of crap on their credit cards. Well, and you know what, Chris, let me just say something about the credit cards, because you bring up a really good point with that. So you might ask, like, you know, has this problem been going on forever? You know, I think humans have always wanted to have some, you know, a sense of being and we're a little bit competitive, a sense of status. But for years, we were financially constrained in our

ability to do that, because it was not easy to get credit. And over the last 30 years, there has been a flood of ways, right. So now, you know, when I'm 53, and when my parents went to go get a credit card, you know, they had to go to the bank, and they had to talk to a loan officer, and they had to, you know, explain what they were going to be doing with it. You didn't get to go to your mailbox in your PJs and, you know, have five applications waiting for you. So we had easy access to credit through credit cards. And then, you know, over the last 15 years, we've had such an array of ways to suck equity out of our homes to spend even more. And so

when you combine those two things, on one hand, it's been a little bit helpful in the sense that it's been able to give people a bit of a buffer in case something goes really, really wrong. But it's that benefit has just blown up into some kind of toxic mess as most people are living beyond their means. And I'm talking I meet people who make one100,000 and are spending $130,000. I meet people who make a million dollars, but they're spending $1,300,000. They're in the same hole. They're in debt. Yeah. And, you know, it's interesting to me.

You make a good point. You know, we always, everyone always kind of puts off happiness. You know, they're like, well, I'll be happy when I make a million dollars. I'll be happy when I make $2 million. I'll be happy when I make $3 million. I'll be happy when I get the job promotion. I'll be happy when I get the new job. I'll be happy when I, you know, achieve, you know, pick your, pick your achievement in life, you know, whatever that next level is for you. And, you know, people put off that happiness, don't they? They do. And what I wanted to understand was what are the factors that lead us to do this? And what I realized is that there are three core elements. One is personal small T traumas that happen before typically the age of 25 the second is social and

cultural influences and then the third are evolutionary biological influences and if we have some time to parse apart each one of those three it's really fascinating um what is behind the phenomenon that you just perfectly described. There you go. My first guess was going to be stupidity, but let's get into these three items. Well, so personal small T traumas. One of the things that research has shown is that when you look at super successful people a really large percentage of them are driven by things that happened to them before age 25 when the brain is fully formed that you know when you look at them on the outside they may not seem like such a big deal. But they stick with you for a really long time. And I'll just give a personal example, because this is what

drove me. When I grew up in a small town in Indiana, and I'm half Indian. And my mom's from upstate New York, my dad's from India. And it was a time where there really weren't a lot of mixed race folks in my school. In fact, I don't think there were any. And I was pretty chubby back then, and I had Coke bottle glasses, and I was not a cool kid, to put it mildly. And I was teased and bullied. The kids called me cow butt and thunder thighs.

And, you know, it got to the point when I was in sixth grade that the teasing was so bad that I would leave school at lunch and I literally would sit under the picnic table at my home. My parents worked because I just couldn't bear to go into the cafeteria and have kids making fun of me. And, you know, so then I went to, you know, junior high, high school, got focused on academics, things move on. But literally that, I think I was 40 years old before I was able to describe that without having like this guttural feeling of not being enough as a human, not being enough. And I think that really was a big factor in driving me to work seven days a week and put in, you know, 60 plus hours. And my research leads me to show I'm not alone. Now, not everybody has small T traumas.

The mix between those factors I told you will vary in percentage between people. But a lot of people don't realize that stuffing down things that may have happened and may seem so ridiculously small in retrospect that you think that can't be something that is still revving up my engine. But for a lot of people chasing after more, it is because you don't feel enough as a human. Hi, Voxers. Voss here with a little station break. Hope you're enjoying the show so far. We'll resume here in a human. you can find all the different stuff that we do for speaking engagements if you'd like to hire me uh training courses that we offer and coaching for leadership management entrepreneurism uh podcasting corporate stuff uh with over 35 years of experience in business and running companies as ceo and be sure to check out chris vossinstitute.com now back to the show yeah uh and so you're saying

small t traumas so they're not like traumas like i don't know you watch your parents you're batman you watch your parents die in an alley uh either they're just like smaller ones well i mean any kind of trauma but i i feel that um you know it. I have a friend, her parents died in a car wreck when she was 21 years old. And she basically raised her sister and her whole world turned upside down. And now that's trauma. That's trauma, yeah. And she's still dealing with that, you know, in her mid-40s. I think we understand when major trauma happens that that can affect people's lives for a very long time.

But what I wanted to highlight is that it can also affect you even when it's something smaller. Like one of your parents always putting you down or being in a family unit where other siblings were praised and you were kind of ignored can lead you to fall into this trap of intensely chasing after more, thinking that more, going back, will solve all your problems. You know, I grew up, I don't know if this is small T trauma or one of the other two categories, but I grew up poor. And so I was trying to always make up for the way I was raised. I didn't blame my parents. They, they did the best they could, uh, you know, and times were tough in the seventies. Um, and there was four children and one was born with birth defects. So there was an issues there, you know, that blew through a lot of money, but, um, I was

always trying to reconcile that by being successful. And my dad struggled with his, uh, his narcissism and, and me not getting along with others at work. So, uh, you know, there was money issues. And so, uh, you know, we had welfare, uh, food in the house. I couldn't have my friends come over because, you know, they'd be like, Oh, your parents are on welfare. And, you know, they weren't all the time, but now. And so I, I, I wanted to become successful. And then when I became rich and successful, I was like, is this all there is? This is, I feel really soulless.

I feel really lonely. Uh, I mean, I, I thought there would be something more here and there wasn't. So I don't know. Is that a part of one of these issues? Chris, that's exactly what I'm talking about. And that would go in what I would call the small T trauma. And I put it in parens because it's not small T to those of us who've experienced it. It's not um but it's dramatically underestimated

in it's the longevity of its pain and how hard it can drive you to be successful yeah there you go uh do we need to touch on the other two then oh absolutely So social and cultural focus factors are gigantic as well. And there are a couple of them. One is that we have come in our society here in the US to really equate what we do with who we are. And the most common example of this is, you know, you meet somebody and with, you know, one of the first two questions, maybe three is, what do you do? A couple experiments were done where people were put in social situations, and they were not allowed to ask, what do you do? And they found it very uncomfortable to try and engage in conversation with people they did not know without bringing this up so i mean from a and you know from a young age people ask

you you know you know what do you think you want to do when you grow up they don't ask you like what do you want to be do you want to be? Do you want to be happy? People are still asking me that at 55, if when am I going to be when I grow up? Well, and you're someone who helps a ton of people by sharing all these powerful messages. Yeah, but I still live down by the river under a viaduct in a boat or something. In a van? In a van, Emma? Yeah, that's it. That's the line.

Van, Emma. or something in a van in a van demo yeah that's it that's the only well i that and that brings me to another point which is we um uh are comparing ourselves to false financial images and by this i mean whether it's in movies magazines instagram or my favorite regular old TV shows. I added up, I picked a couple different medical dramas, legal dramas, and police dramas. And if you, and I'll just use a legal drama example right now. There's a show, some people may know about it because of megan markle it's called suits um and when it was on air there was a group of paralegals and when you looked at them and mind you this show is supposed to take place in you know a major city like new

york their hair was picture perfect like no frizz i'm sorry new york has humid no, like no frizz. I'm sorry, New York has humid. No woman has no frizz unless she's had a blowout that morning. Their clothes were exquisite, clearly tailored. And you could tell the fabric was unbelievable. And then the images of them going out for the $15 cocktails with friends after drinks, and then going back to their apartments. Well, I've lived in New York. And let me tell you, when I was in my 20s in New York and early 30s, no one lived in apartments

like that. And I was making good money working in finance. And so I decided to add up to see how much money you'd actually have to make to dress, groom, live and socialize in that manner if you had those actual positions. And what I found was it's 30 to 50% more. So we're comparing ourselves constantly to these images that are not financially realistic. And so that's another thing that is driving us for this more, more, more because we're trying to keep up and then we get in debt trying to keep up and then we really do need to earn more. There you go. So, you know, a lot of our media does this to us. They kind of paint this, the word escaped me just now, but this whole sort of menagerie of stuff, even like, we had one of the husbands on the show, the housewives of Beverly Hills and these housewife shows. And it's so funny how many of them have, they've had to file bankruptcy, or I think there's one couple that is going to prison for not paying their taxes or scamming the IRS.

Don't do that, people. And you hear about some of their things i think there was one here in utah that she was like supposed to be worth all this money and i think now she's going to jail or she filed bankruptcy and turns out like you know a lot of their stuff is kind of fake and yet people watch those shows they're like oh i want to be like them yeah and and you know something else that i find really interesting um when you and i were growing up there was a show called lifestyles of the rich famous and i remember watching that and it just never occurred to me that like i was gonna be like them um i mean there was like normal people.

And then there was the lifestyle of the rich and famous. And so growing up, I felt like we compared ourselves more horizontally to people who were living kind of like we were because people didn't. And if you wanted to buy a house, you had to put 20 percent down. So and the bank didn't give loans to just anyone. And so you tended to live in neighborhoods where. So and the bank didn't give loans to just anyone. And so you tended to live in neighborhoods where people were making similar amounts of income. And so people weren't going off on these incredible vacations. And you're wondering, well, how can they do that? I might as well do that. So but what's happened is we now compare ourselves vertically, because of

the easy access to credit, but even more because of what we're seeing in Instagram, all the social media feeds, the bombardment of ads for luxury goods and homes. I can't tell you how many people I know who strive for success and then end up with homes that have like three times as many bathrooms as they have occupants. And then the toilets go dry and break, and then you got to go get those fixed. It's these false images that we are chasing after by comparing ourselves to a images that aren't real and be people who are in professions that pay varying amounts. And then three from a cultural standpoint is that I think we really have come to assess each other on completely the wrong metrics. We no longer assess each other on completely the wrong metrics. We no longer assess each other on character

and kindness and humanity and how we treat each other. And do we give back? We assess by, well, how successful are you? And that's a really big change over the last 200 years of human life um and so when i think about cultural and societal reasons there are many more i talk about in in the book um but those are some of the ones that i'd highlight there you go you know you you bring up some really good points and you know there has always kind of been the keeping up with the Joneses thing going on.

But I think, tell me what you think. I think Instagram has really maligned the concept of reality, success, and money to a new generation or at least one or two generations. I guess it's been around for 15 years maybe. But there's kind of a crossover there between millennials and Gen Zs coming into Instagram. But it's really maligned what reality is. Am I wrong there? Has Instagram made it worse?

Oh, my God. It's making it horrible. I mean, you know, and what happens is, and we all know this, right? Like you take 50 pictures and you use the one that is the best after you've filtered and you've cropped it just the right way. But I even think, you know, it started even as early as Facebook where, you know, families would post pictures from vacation. But it was like the one at the end where they're all smiling on the beach together. And it's not the one where the kids are having a food fight or mom and dad

are giving each other the silent treatment, like all the stuff that actually happens in a family vacation. And what's so dangerous around Instagram is that we have all become our own magazine editors, our own curators. Our own brand. Yeah, exactly. And now, I mean, that's what people aspire to is to build their brand. And I'm not talking about, you know, people who are trying to make a business off their brand. I mean, kids, teenagers, young adults are trying to build their brand,

not build their character, build their brand. Yeah. And no one builds character anymore. That's, that's, uh, that's probably what, that's what you're writing about in your book. You know, people should maybe focus on being happier. That's what I did when I, when I found that I wasn't happy. I mean, everyone hated me and wanted me to, you know, wait, it's an old, it's an old sticks line, you know, people love you as long as I'm buying drinks and whatever. And, you know, the party was, as long as I was paying for the party, go on, people love me.

But even then they hated me. And you're just like, I can't buy anyone's love. I can't buy anyone to like me. In fact, it seems like the more money I have, the more things I do, people, you know, I would go on dates and girls are like, when are you going to have this big house? When are you going to have a BMW and, you know, one in Vegas? And it's like, I don't know. I grew up poor.

So I just do this to try and make up for some sort of hole. I don't really, I don't really care about impressing other people. I think I did care about impressing other people. I think I did. And then one day I saw Fight Club and I broke. But what's interesting to me is how this new generation with Instagram and the mindset of what these people expect. We've talked about on the show these people that are influencers or brands. Down in LA you can go for like I think 60

bucks or something, 70 bucks you can pay to sit in a you look like you're sitting in a private jet and it's just a studio it's just set up you know is that not ridiculous it's ridiculous but what's interesting is it's created such an expectation of wealth i see these interviews online of young women from college students up and they'll interview them go what kind of guy are you looking for how much does he need to make to facilitate you you know setting up a family and children etc etc and it's I don't know if you've seen these videos but they're extraordinary to watch these young women will be like he needs to make like half a million dollars a year at like 25 and um you know their their stats you can look on the on the internet and there's these

things called the i don't know if you've heard of them it's called the three sixes now it's something that women are looking for when you date and one of them is a six-figure income the other is six foot taller and and we'll just leave the third one off the deck there you can figure that one out but there's literally women saying if you don't have these three sixes they won't date you or they'll refuse it and the average guy i think makes in america 60 grand i think it is you might know better than i am because you're in the financial business yeah average and median um yeah have a little bit of differences but on average yeah yeah and so you'll see these these these women thinking that because of instagram there there's these, these millionaires just running around, just rampant, you know, they're just everywhere on the street. And, you know, I, I, I, there's a, there's different websites, and some of the other aspects, well, that's not measured by the government. But if you just use the two main metrics of the three sixes, I'm literally in the.005 percentile of available men, available being single, that you can get. So the chances of, of finding people like me is 0.005%,

which I don't know how it's going to work out for all these people. And it's not just young women. I was talking to, um, a woman, um, in, uh,

her, uh, early sixties, um, who was widowed. Um, and you know, she was saying, saying um what she happened to have been reading a lot of um historical romance and then she'd gotten into more modern day romance and she was

saying you don't have Manisha like you know I'm reading these books and like you know these are my heroes and they're you know they're six foot four they're they're they're wealthy they're handsome they've got you know the six-pack abs and she's basically me right and she says i look around i've never seen one of those men in real life oh you know you know they've actually have graphs that you can see of what women have put into their dating apps and what their cutoffs are, you know, what their preferences are. And it, it, it literally, uh, until you hit about, I think it's five 11, you literally can't get seen on a dating app unless you're five 11 or taller. I'm six, two, almost three. And, uh, and it, it goes up goes up which is kind of it's even extraordinary it actually hits its highest peak about 6.6 6.7 and you're like how many 6.7 size men are running around this place um and but anyway it's it's you

know and i'm not picking on women i'm not but I think both men and women have this delusion from Instagram, but just some good examples there. Well, and that's an intersection of small T trauma and social and cultural. So, for example, I mean, if you take a look, there's a stereotype because it's real. I guess it's not a stereotype of like the short, crazy, successful man. And he's got the quote Napoleonic complex, right? Making up for some.

Yeah. And then you see these really, you know, these really tall guys oftentimes and they walk in a room and people immediately assume power success. And so again, we have all of these different factors that come into play. But in defensive women, I have to tell you that I have been noticing increasing number of of women, successful women telling me that they have found men who are looking for sugar mamas. The second go around. They've got alimony and, you know, in the divorce, they lost half their assets. And now what they want is a, you know, a partner in a consulting firm. And they want the woman to be making that five, you know, that six figure income.

So it really does go in a variety of directions. I was talking about, you know, there's kind of some interesting things. If you study what's going on with men in college and women in college, like I think there's fewer men going to college than women now. And I know women, you know, they, when women set up in their high program is they, women date up, men date down. That's typically how we work. I learned this lesson in high school when i wanted to date all the girls who were in my uh you know junior senior software whatever that whole thing with freshman class um but but they're like no and we're dating senior bob or you know whatever and because you know bob's got a car and he's got stuff going on women have always dated up

and um and that helps the species it's a feature not a bug and uh and that helps the species. It's a feature, not a bug. And, um, the propagation of the species. And, uh, but now, you know, with women, with, with us, some men going to, uh, college, uh, then women, that means there's a smaller pool of men for them. And, you know, like you mentioned, there's a lot of women today that are out earning men because they're going to college and stuff. Uh, in fact, there's a projection from, I think it's Goldman Sachs or one of the other big venture capitalist firms that say by 2030, 45% of childbearing age family, you know, creating age will be single and alone with no prospects on the thing by 2030 in, in, uh, in either London or, uh, Britain or the EU, that's already now 50%.

In fact, I think it's 55 where there are women above 30 who have no children and no husbands and their past technically what should be the prime cutoff about 30 for having children at least safely and healthy wise. I mean, you can still have a healthy child, but you're just gambling with stuff. And so it's kind of interesting, that dynamic. I was talking about one of my friends. I guess she's got money. I don't know. But I think she's successful probably from either divorce or maybe she inherited it, but she was talking to me about this and we were joking about, you know, masculine frame and, and, and, you know,

my dating and stuff. And she goes, yeah, there's these sugar guys now that they want a sugar mama. And I'm like, really? That's crazy. Well, and you know, you mentioned a word that I thought was really, so that triggered a thought in my mind when you were talking about kind of, you know, the there are certain biological destiny elements such as, you know, height and so forth. But if we moved on to that third factor of the book, that really got me thinking about what drives people to have a never enough mindset. Something interesting has happened. If you threw either one of us 250 years ago into the woods, likely we would be able to figure out how to survive on our own for a couple days. And certainly we would, if we had a tribe of people with us, we'd absolutely be able to make it work off the land. But today, how many of us can do that? So money has become the

the literal item that brings us safety. So our amygdalas in our head that want to keep us safe, no longer are thinking, wow, I've got to learn these skills. Our amygdala is thinking, I got to have money. And that's, it's understandable, right? You can't buy groceries. You can't get a roof over your head. And so the other thing that's interesting going back is back when we lived off the land,

we, you know, people lived in area seasons of feast and famine. And so when you had feast, you ate as much as you could during those seasons, because there would also be sparse seasons. But the problem is today we live in plenty. And so we are constantly feasting. We're constant, like our brain is hardwired when we see plenty to want to grab as much. And, um, now we are. There you go. My friend refers to it in dieting. Cause I, I lost a lot of weight with this concept, but we, we live, we eat for a winter

that never comes. Cause like you mentioned earlier, you know, we would eat a lot during the summer cause we could harvest and, you know, find stuff to lot during the summer because we could harvest and you know find stuff to kill and eat and stuff but then when winter comes you know you can't harvest very well and grow wheat or whatever and you can't you know it's harder to track down animals and stuff and cavemen sort of speak um and so we would you know we'd thin out over the winter but now we live in 70 degrees all the time like you say you know you know we we have to do our hunting down at the grocery store there eh well and you get blueberries year round so you can

eat them whenever you want and um but it's it's it's interesting those are the things that i found really drove this and then i tried to figure out like well well, okay, this sucks. What do we do about it? Like, how do we, how can we let go of this way of thinking? And, you know, you asked me at the very beginning why I wrote this. And a big part of it was when I had that realization of basically having lost so many years of my adulthood to working like a maniac, I also realized I had come to equate my self-worth with my net worth. Oh, I mean, that is if that's not a recipe for just never feeling like you've arrived there or hitting the number. You hit 1 million in net worth, then 5, then 10, and everyone else is thinking,

holy cow, this person is successful. And you're like, no, that's not enough. I need to earn more. And so the book and also the thing that i worry about and i want to help people with is if you have and not everybody does but if you have in your head the thought that my self-worth equals my net worth i want to help people flip that and have a new equation that they're optimizing to live their life which is financial health plus emotional wealth is what gives you money zen so you can have emotional well-being it's probably worth more than money because you know like like i say i mean you know you're not gonna i i'm at the age of 55 where

i'm starting to look back on my life and go, what the fuck did I do wrong? No, I'm just kidding. But I started to look back on my life. And there are things that I remember, my dogs that passed through my life, people that may have passed through my life that aren't here anymore, experiences that I had that had some emotional value to them. And to me, I just start feeling like when I'm sitting on that porch, you know, I don't know, at the mental home, which I should be anyway, my psychiatrist says. And, you know, I'm sitting there rocking back and forth and drilling down the side of my mouth. The one thing I'm going to remember are those moments. I'm not going to remember, like, how much did I make in January of 1993?

Like, I don't know. There might be some other months I might want to remember but you know it's it's i'm not gonna remembering that i'm gonna be like oh damn that was really cool i'll be remembering you know the uh hopefully the beautiful times of my life maybe i don't know but the times i screwed up you know i um have had two near-death experiences due to illness one of them um i had been riding on with my ex husband um on the back of his motorcycle two up in motorcycle parlance off road through laos um and uh i got bit by an infected mosquito and got dengue fever and a whole series of complications um normally dengue fevers like malaria there's you know most people are get get over it with time but i i ended

up having a whole series of unexpected complications and there was a point at which I'm in the hospital and the doctor's like, we need to call your family in because this this could be. And I remember it still makes me tear up. I remember like quite literally thinking at that moment, holy crap, it's completely true. You don't think I wish I had worked more, had more stuff, had more money. You think back to the things that, what's interesting to me was I thought, I wish I had spent more time with my family. And then I think about the key moments in life that I missed, several big ones for people I love and family because I put work ahead of them that's what I thought as I was sitting there not knowing over a 24-48 hour period whether

that was going to be it and so you're absolutely right yeah yeah and your COVID kind of brought us kind of to that brink too like I had to sit down over COVID and go, well, this is something that can take someone I love my mother and my sisters, uh, away from me in a moment's notice. I mean, and you couldn't even go to their funeral. I mean, first you can go to people's funeral and you couldn't even go see them off in the hospital, which was you know horrifying and then you know i you sat down and you're just like well shit like the cars and all this kind of crap doesn't mean anything because i mean i could be dead they could be dead and i mean what the fuck is going on and it it you know i think a lot of people had to reevaluate their value reevaluate their values and some of us need to go learn some books on how to pronunciate shit um but you know it seems like we come out of it now we're just all like back to the same shit we're like buy shit and do shit well and that's why i think it's so important to have a new mental model because if if, you know, people for so long were encouraged by just our

culture to seek financial wealth. And as I said earlier, each one of us will be driven towards it by different factors and different elements, whether it's the small t traumas or the cultural and social or the evolutionary biological. But the problem is there is nothing in society that is telling us what a healthier way to look at things would be. And so we chase financial wealth, but the vast majority of Americans don't have even financial health. And so getting your financial state into a place of just true health then enables you to have the mental freedom to be able to spend time on some of these activities that enhance your emotional wealth, which literally are priceless. And then you can come back. I mean,

some people really like money. Nothing wrong with that. It's just when it comes at the expense of your emotional wealth, it doesn't mean anything. There you go. Or the expense of spending time with your family, your loved ones. You know, I used to shush my dogs and be like, hey, you can't bother me right now. I can't play with you right now. Dad's got to make some money. And then, you know, they pass through your life fairly quickly. And, uh, you realize you're like, shit, you know, I wish we were to spend more time with

them. You know, one thing I was going to say. That's emotional wealth, Chris. That's exactly what I'm referring to when I say emotional wealth. Yeah. Now I just, I just forced them to go get jobs so that I know I can spend more time with them because then we have more money. Uh, I rent them out to pull sleds they're huskies uh one thing i was going to mention to you i don't

know if you've seen this but it's an interesting trend um you know i have a big paypal account of course we do a lot of business that and then i noticed this on i think it was amazon i was buying something one day and i was buying like a 400 water purifier thing and it popped up it's like hey there's i think it was it called there's a couple of them now i think one was called a firm i think and then there's paypal credit and it's like hey do you want to buy this to your credit thing i'm like not really but i was like what are these things i'm like i'm seeing like these little sort of weird small teeny loan micro loans sort of micro loans and uh so it's like look at them and i guess i get the cookies now right so i started noticing i was getting these vacation

things from vrbo i think it is they're the competitors to the other place yeah and they're like hey do you want to do you want to put that uh thailand vacation or you know pick your vacation wherever in the world you want to put that uh you want to put that on your uh on your uh credit thing you want to you want to take a credit small credit loan to do your vacation and i'm like wait you know vacation was used to be in the old days when you and i grew up i think uh where you know that was you know mom and dad saved up all year long and, you know, then they got some money to blow at Disneyland, right? Exactly. People are going to take out loans. They got to make payments on to go on vacation. Well, you know, and I bet, you know, people in their twenties, thirties, forties, listening to this probably haven't heard about layaway, but you know, when our parents were growing up

and you didn't have money for something and you wanted a particular item to buy as a gift for yourself or a holiday gift for someone in your family, and you didn't have money for it, you put it on layaway. You did not get it. And you know, you made small payments until you'd paid it off, but you didn't get it until you paid it off. I think I have a wife that's, I have a lot of way right now. I make a payments too. And then I, once I get it paid off, then I can get married or something. I don't know.

I'm just kidding. I don't know what that means. Seem like a good joke at the time. So anything more you want to tease out of the book before we go? Yeah. You know, a lot of people will say like no no i'm fine i don't have any of these problems manisha and so i i want to encourage people um i've created a quiz and you can find it at moneyzenquiz.com. And it's a series of seven simple questions. But I think a lot of people

will be surprised where they fall on the spectrum between financial health and emotional wealth. And again, it's moneyzenquiz.com. And it's, it's fascinating. So if you think what we've just been talking about does not relate to you, check it out. And if you think what we've just been talking about does not relate to you, check it out. And if you think it does relate to you, check it out because you can see how far down the spectrum you are and what are some of the steps that you can start taking. There you go. I learned that the hard way. I went from being poor to having money and buying everything I possibly could. And I set up my home as a giant sort of arcade, being a single guy. And I bought all the stuff that I kind of wanted.

And I was the most unhappy I've ever been in my life. And it's that famous line from, uh, what was it? Fight club. You know, the, the things you own end up owning you.

Yes. Yes. Martha Stewart. Uh, it's a line from Facebook, from fight club. You know, why,

why, why do men have to know what a duvet is? Like, why is it? You know, and the guy's like, I, I was living basically that life of,

of, uh, Ed Norton in, in, in uh fight club where it's like okay i got all the things and i i've set myself up and i know that you know that that uh three-part couch is you know that's taken care of now you know and then i'd have girls over my house be like uh this is all going to go because this isn't my style. On this note, I just want to say I have been blessed all of those years of crazy workaholism. And because I happen to work in the financial services industry, I have done well financially. And I have lived in a number of beautiful places. I have a lovely place in Portland, Oregon. But I'm talking to you right now from my cabin in rural Maine. It is 550 square feet, 550 square feet. It was built in 1915.

I do not have potable water. I do not have a heater or an air conditioner. And I am so happy here. They call these camps in Maine lingo along lakes. And I literally live five feet from a lake. And I spend the summers out here. And it's just incredible because my life is so simple there you go who are you hiding from what authorities no i'm just kidding can you get lobster out there uh oh my gosh absolutely oh man wow yeah maine is really beautiful

really beautiful uh countryside and then i if i live there i would just eat endless lobster it's kind of like if i ever moved to texas i would just end up being 500 pounds gorging on barbecue all day long and so those are two states i can't move to um if i moved to california of course i would just live on tofu be 500 i don't know california's lovely place uh but no it's beautiful and if i move to portland i think i'll be eating those what are those voodoo donuts is that where they have them oh you know what don't go to voodoo donuts go to coco donuts they are like the best um that that's where the real insiders go for their donuts ah there you go there you go well there we have it folks um so uh thank you very much for coming the show show. We really appreciate it. Very insightful and brilliant discussion. And people need to find their money zen, as it were. Give us your

.com so people can find you on the interwebs, please. Sure. So you can find me at moneyzen.com and all my socials and links and all that kind of good stuff is right there. And again, if this conversation has piqued your interest, I encourage people to go to moniesandquiz.com and kind of see where you fall on the spectrum. Yeah, and a lot of the childhood traumas too, like we talked about, you know, I mean, some people just had parents that were like, hey, we don't have enough money for that when, you know,

they were trying to get their mom to buy a Snickers bar or something. It might have been me at the thing, you know, we don't have enough money for that when they were trying to get their mom to buy a Snickers bar or something. Might have been me at the thing. We don't have enough money. She would give you that excuse. She had the money. She was just holding out on you because she didn't love you. We all know that. But no, people took that paradigm and incorporated it into their life.

Well, we never have enough money for what we want. There's all sorts of things that go into people's mental money hang hang-ups i guess as it were so there you go uh folks order up the book wherever fine books are sold uh stay away as alleyway bookstores because you you know you might you might get uh you know you need a tetanus shot there eh it's a dangerous in the subway ones uh money is then the secret to finding your quote-unquote enough. Thanks to my audience for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress Chris Voss. YouTube.com, Fortress Chris Voss.

LinkedIn.com, Fortress Chris Voss. And all those crazy places on the internet. And try and help us out over there on the TikTok. We're trying to be cool. It's not working because we're just old and not fun and interesting anymore. But thanks for being here. We certainly appreciate it. See you.