Today, we have an amazing guest on the podcast. Vicki Robin, author of “Your Money or Your Life” and “Blessing the Hands That Feed Us” and podcast host of “What Could Possibly Go Right?,” has a fascinating discussion with Dr. Dahle about our relationship to finances, healthcare, housing costs, and food. We are certain you will enjoy this compelling conversation.
In This Show:
Getting to Know Vicki Robin
Our guest today is somebody that I’ve been wanting to talk to and have on the podcast for a long time. Someone whose thoughts have influenced my thinking and someone that you should know about if you are in the personal finance community. Her name is Vicki Robin. We have met before, but I've been familiar with her work for many, many years. It's just such a pleasure to have her here with us. Vicki, I bet there's a large percentage of our audience that doesn't know you, and they should. They should know about your work. They should know about you as a person because you're an awesome person.
For those who don't know, Vicki is probably most famous for a book called “Your Money or Your Life,” and we're going to talk about that for a few minutes. But we're going to go in all kinds of other directions on this podcast and talk about a lot of other interesting stuff. Before we get to the book and, most importantly, the ideas in the book, let's talk a little bit about your upbringing, because your father was a doctor. Can you tell us a little bit about that and your upbringing and some of the life lessons there for our audience?
“I shared that with you in preparation for this conversation, because I know that it's going to be doctors in the audience. My father was a radiologist. We lived on the North Shore of Long Island. He had basically status; our family had status. He loved sailing. He raced a star boat. Yeah. His father had been a very prominent doctor in Wilmington, Delaware, and he was the personal physician of René Dupont. My father, even though really what he was was a sailor, had to find a way to go through medical school and follow in his father's footsteps and his brother's footsteps. He was basically trapped in that perfected life. He was a depressive. I barely knew him because his body was there, but his mind was elsewhere.
When I was 13, he turned the car on, the powder blue 1957 Lincoln convertible, in the garage and killed himself. It's sort of woven into my own personal story that understanding that you can have everything just right on the external and be dying inside. That's why I mentioned that to you, Jim, because I know that the way our professional lives are structured, it probably influenced me. I was voted most likely to succeed in my high school class, but come graduation from college, what I did was I got a van and a dog and I went on the road. There was something about that experience and my own experience of having all the kudos, but there was something big missing inside. I wasn't going to just put myself on that professional conveyor belt.
I had the opportunity to rethink my life very early. I met my co-author of “Your Money or Your Life,” Joe Dominguez, along the way, and he explained to me basically how I could take the savings that I'd accumulated in order to be able to buy myself some freedom and that I could invest them and I could live on passive income if I lived very frugally. I did live very frugally, and I've often said to this day that I buy my freedom with my frugality every day. And it's not just freedom to cast off into the great unknown. It's basically freedom to direct my attention toward the things that I think are really important, not to have the important things around the edges of life and the center of my life occupied with making money to maintain my assortment of stuff.
I've been a saver my whole life. I've learned that the less money I spend, the further it goes. All of this is arranged around the ability to basically use my attention for the things that matter—for things philosophical, spiritual, relational, friendships, community service. My life is full to the brim. I have created many, many social innovations because I have had my attention free. Who knows whether that moment when I was 13 and came home to find out that my father had killed himself somehow bumped me onto another path.”
There's a concept that I was introduced to in a book I read recently called spaciousness. And this was a book about how to live life after you're rich. How to be rich. Not how to get rich, but how to be rich. It talked about having spaciousness and that it's OK to have some space in your life. That allows you to do things that are you, that you don't set goals, you discover them, was kind of the premise behind it.
More information here:
Your Money or Your Life? Both, Please
Trading Your Life Energy for Money
But before we get too far into this, I want to introduce people to the main concept in your book, “Your Money or Your Life.” For those who don't know this, this is a classic financial book. Of all the books out there that you've heard of that were written in the '90s or the 2000s or the '80s even, this is one of those that everybody ought to know about, everybody ought to read. You may not agree with everything in it, but you should still read it and be aware of it, because it helps you talk to other people about personal finance. The main premise of the book is that people are trading their life energy for money and that most people are probably selling way too much of their time and this life energy because they're spending way too much money. Can you talk about this concept of life energy and why it's so important to understand?
“This is a key concept that my co-author Joe Dominguez hammered on. I actually think it's the linchpin of the book. The book has a nine-step program for transforming how you earn, spend, save, and invest money.
This idea that money is life energy, we discuss, ‘OK, what do we think money is?' There's a level at which money basically facilitates transaction. It's pieces of paper, metal; it's bits and bytes. It's the transactional flow through a gazillion computers. It's debt, it's savings accounts, it's all of the mechanics of the financial system and our interaction with the financial system. But around that, there are our emotional feelings about money. If we have less money than somebody else, we can feel one down. We can feel less attractive. Or on the other side, we can feel we're better than the people who are super rich and buying their way through life. There are so many emotional reactions to the amount of money we have, the stuff we have, the kinds of transactions, that vacation we can take, blah, blah, blah, blah. Basically, it's a struggle, and we're primates. It's a struggle for basically dominant status mating. That struggle is now all projected onto these transactions.
Money has an intense emotional connection—envy, jealousy, revenge. All of these things show up in our money behavior. If you don't understand that you have an emotional relationship with money as well as a material relationship with money, then you are missing the boat. You are never going to be able to adjust the bits and bytes and then your choices, because your choices are all governed by unconscious emotions. Basically, you take a look at the emotional thing, and then you go out and you take a look at what are the ideas in our society that we drink with mothers’ milk? And the fundamental one—because we live in a capitalist society—is more is better. Why is more better? It's not better because we think it's better. It's better because it keeps the wheels of industry going.
We live in this ‘more is better,' and it's never enough. Growth is good. We live in this. I think it’s Bob Dylan who said, ‘He who isn't busy being born is busy dying.' It's this anxiety at the edge of your life that you always have to somehow have more and more status, more stuff, more whatever, bigger house. This is the miasm. If you don't understand that, then your financial decisions, what you invest in, what you buy, they're all going to be influenced by these unconscious forces. But then what we say, what Joe said—and I am parroting because I absolutely believe it—is that if you look at this rationally, all money is, is something that you trade your life energy for. Basically, you sell your time for money.
It sounds pretty obvious. We suggest people do a calculation about what's their nominal hourly wage or nominal salary or nominal income, and then what's their real income, because there's a lot of costs associated with having the job and maintaining the job. Just simply, if we take a look at the struggles of young people paying off the debt to get the degree so that they can do the work. And some people never do. Money for other people may be something else, but for me, I'm trading X hours of my life for X number more dollars. Let's say you think you're earning $100 an hour, but after taxes and daycare, car fare, education, debt, expected Christmas presents, after all of that, what are you really trading an hour of your life for? And once you have that number, which is usually about a quarter of what people think, in that calculation, we'd say, ‘OK, you're trading an hour of your life for $25.'
For somebody who considers that it's status that they're making $100 an hour, that's a comedownance. But then you go and say, ‘OK, fine, I'm going to go out for lunch with a friend,' and the bill is $30. OK, that was an hour of my life. So that calculus, what is your real hourly wage? That awareness that every time you spend money, you're spending an hour of your life and you want it to express your values and bring you pleasure. That's what we suggest people do, is you do that translation around all your expenses. And you ask yourself, ‘Am I getting happiness in proportion to the amount of my life I invested in this?'
It goes both ways. It affects the way you spend, but it also affects what you're willing to work for. You now might say, “Well, if I can't get a job that pays me better than this, I'm not going to spend my time on it. Because I don't need that money to live.”
“Then of course, now we're up against the identity crisis, because who am I if I am not this job, this house, this lifestyle, these vacations, this position in my community. Once you rupture that bond between ‘I am my work.' For example, me, Vicki, I am an author, I am a podcaster, I am a famous person. Once I break that bond between me, just little me and all these identities that I put out there to sort of protect myself and impress people, who am I? We want freedom, but we don't want the existential crisis that comes when these illusions, when we look behind the Wizard of Oz curtain and see the machinery. This is an important moment in our lives. Many people get to it at the end of their lives, but it's an important moment in our lives to say, ‘If I want to live a beautiful life, a meaningful life, a life well lived, if I want a life well lived, I may have to go through some uncomfortable questioning of how I have invested my life energy, i.e. my time and my money to date.'
In “Your Money or Your Life,” we have a mantra. We say, ‘No shame, no blame.' It's like, OK, fine. You spent the first 50 years chasing a dream that was just a mirage. No shame, no blame. You have another 30 left; what are we going to do now? It's liberating but the liberation isn't just about the money and things. It's not just about minimalism. The liberation comes from shedding identities that no longer fit or assumptions that no longer fit. And that could be a very simple little adjustment, or it could be a major life tweak.”
You call it jobism in the book. And in some ways, it’s just as bad as sexism and racism. This idea that we are our jobs. That's particularly difficult, I think, for our audience. Doctors spent their 20s becoming this thing. They spent their 30s paying for it and everybody calls them doctor and gives them a little bit of respect. Maybe not their administrators, but everybody else gives them respect. It's very difficult for our audience to separate who they are from their job. I think more so than even the average person who has a lot of trouble with it. At the cocktail party, the question is, “What do you do?” And people aren't expecting me to say, “Oh, I play on a hockey team and I coach my son's hockey team.” That's not the answer they're expecting. They want to hear that I practice emergency medicine, that I'm running this side business. That's what they're asking about. But in reality, is that really who I am?
“Wait, wait, wait. So, you say, I play on a hockey team and I coach my son's hockey, and then the person's thinking, ‘Geez, I wish I could do that. I just never spent any time with my kid. How do you get to be a doctor and have any time with your children?' Suddenly, we don't know whether your status goes up or down at that, but you've told the truth. And the truth is always liberating. Not only for the truth-teller but the truth-hearer. We have all these minor moments where we can just sort of break some of those agreements. I'm not dissing doctors. Definitely, I just went through choosing my Medicare thing, miasm. I have a thing about insurance companies, but I love my docs and I'm sure doctors have a thing about insurance companies, too.”
That's the understatement of the year right there.
“We are all trapped in systems. And so, in a way, this silly little money is the life energy thing that brings you into a sort of safe internal questioning of the systems within which you operate. If you're frustrated with the insurance system, maybe a beautiful question among doctors is not the complaint, but what kind of system would allow us to deliver the care we want to deliver and have a life we love so we can play hockey and coach our kids? What kind of system do we want?
I know my father was in the AMA, and they resisted socialized medicine. We're not going to go there about socialized medicine, but it just introduces a little bit of truth about how it feels to be trapped in the systems that you're trapped in. A little bit of truth. You don't even have to admit it to somebody. Really it can initiate a process of reclaiming that self that we all know is inside us, that's been there all along, wanting to live, wanting to express.”
Vicki, you're not a personal finance guru; you're a philosopher.
“You got it. I've never been a personal finance person. Joe was the personal finance person. I've always been this.”
More information here:
Best Financial Books for Doctors
Relational Eating
Alright, well, let's set “Your Money or Your Life” aside for a minute. Everybody listening to this, go read this book. If you haven't read this book, go read the book because we're not going to tell you all about it. You should read it. It will change the way you think about how you earn money and how you spend money for the better. Let's talk about something else you've been very interested in recently, that you call relational eating. Tell us what you mean by relational eating and what's wrong with the way we do food as Americans today.
“Well, I'll give a little background to how I stumbled into this. I'm an eater. Everybody eats. I'm actually a sport eater, and I enjoy sport eating and all the things that Americans enjoy. I enjoy sugar, salt, and fat. I could eat ice cream with a spoon late at night from the freezer. I'm an American. But I'm also very concerned about the impact of whether you call it the sixth great extinction, whether you call it climate change, the impact of the kinds of disassembly of natural systems that have been the byproduct of the way collectively on this planet we live and how it's going to impact us in the future or even right now.
Right now, it looks like, ‘Oh, everything's working.' I thought, ‘Oh, we have these long supply chains, just trucks everywhere transporting food.' I live on an island. I thought, ‘Well, what if the bridge goes down because it's a narrow little bridge to the mainland and the ferry stops running. Could we feed ourselves here on Whidbey Island?' I asked a farmer to do the calculation and she said, ‘Yeah, we could.' Number of people, calories per day, what grows well here. For about two weeks in August, we might be able to feed the 65,000 people who live here if we didn't have access to that ginormous agricultural industrial food system. That got my attention. So, I did an experiment. I thought, ‘OK, well, I'm going to see if I could live from just what grows here.' I partnered with a neighbor who is a farmer, and we created this 10-mile circle around my house. She brought me vegetables, and I could find anything else in those 10 miles just to experiment for a month.
That's what started it. It was this concern about the fragility of what is an apparently sturdy system. I told people I was going to do this month of a 10-mile diet. They said, ‘That's not a problem. You just go to the grocery store; it's like a mile from your house.' But my grocery store had only one item that was from my 10-mile circle, which was honey. That was just a total revelation. As you can tell, I really like to do intense experiments and have big insights. I wrote a book, “Blessing the Hands That Feed Us,” that's all about this quixotic experiment to find food and the realization that people say, ‘Oh, local food, oh, we have a farmer's market.' No, no, no. We don't have a food system. We don't have a local food system. We have a few lovely people with maybe 5-10 acres who grow food for us and sell it at the market. But that's not a system. It's like a complete retooling.
Then along comes the pandemic and we start to see, ‘Oh, right, a grocery store doesn't have groceries in it. It has shelves.' That's what's in the store, everything on the shelves. In three days, it's all empty. You can't even store enough food for that. You have to have a different system. As I was doing this, I realized that humans are the only animals who are completely inept at feeding themselves within the world they live in. Every successful animal lives from the food it gathers from its territory. We have been completely rendered stupid about feeding ourselves by this industrial system where all production is so far out of sight, we don't even understand it anymore.
Basically, for me, food became belonging. I realized if I can live from these 10 miles, now I belong here. We're talking these days a lot about indigenous wisdom, that basically there were people for millions of years who walked this earth, who were able to live here without destroying it. Let's learn something from them. What did they know that we've lost? A lot of people I know are asking this question and turning to indigenous people. One thing is that their culture was identified with its food. The food was identified with the landscape, and the traditions are identified with the harvest, with the planting. Culture is mostly created around foraging, hunting, growing in a landscape. So, you belong someplace. I live in the Pacific Northwest. I live in the Cedar Salmon region. The salmon is crucial to our food system. The Coast Salish people, they ate camas root bulb that grew plentifully on the prairie on Whidbey Island. The farmers came and plowed it up and planted wheat. That's sort of the settler approach to it.
But there were people here who knew how to live here. And is this just sort of an interesting little silly experiment by some old lady in the Northwest? I think it's very important for provisioning. I would encourage everybody if you have land to just turn up the grass and turn it into turnips, just to use a turn of phrase. I would encourage everybody to grow food because then you start with this relational eating. You start to feel yourself as part of something, not an isolated unconnected being. We're biological beings. Food is our biology. There are many other approaches to changing diets. Most of it about changing the size of your body or optimizing or maximizing or minimizing or whatever. But that's more a personal quest for perfection through the body. What I'm talking about is a systems approach to being really effective human beings in intact, flourishing landscapes. If the landscape does not flourish, we do not flourish. Everybody who lived on this planet until about 200 years ago absolutely knew that. We've forgotten it.”
I'm going to push back a little bit on this idea. How many people can Whidbey Island support if everybody is only eating food from Whidbey Island?
“Oh, very few.”
That's kind of the dark spectre behind this idea though, isn't it?
“OK, OK, OK. We could absolutely support everybody who lives here. However, people would have to change their diets. The mid island is a beautiful prairie. It's got topsoil, not a mile deep, but that's hyperbole. But it's got really deep topsoil. It's beautiful farmland. Currently, there are many things to say about that farmland, but the farmers who farm it, they have to get a crop that can sell. A lot of it is hay for horses because that's what sells. But we have enough farmland, absolutely, that we could grew crop for the people here—potatoes, beets, rutabagas, turnips, carrots, parsnips, root crops. We have a bean that was developed here in Whidbey Island called the Rockwell Bean. That's beans, corn, potatoes.
Then, we have a year-round climate. We can grow kale. We can grow mustard greens. You could have a delicious diet. We have sea water. You can make salt. We have hazelnut orchards. We could make oil. It would be a complete retooling. But the argument, Jim, of industrial agriculture is, ‘Oh, well, we have to be able to feed the world.' We have lost the idea that the world was feeding itself perfectly well until industrial agriculture came along, because people had developed farming methods that worked in their situation. Yes, there were floods, there were famines, there was drought, there were things that we couldn't control. I'm not saying it was perfect, but people have traditionally been able to grow the food that they eat. Anyway, we don't need to go into a critique of that, but I think that our imagination needs to expand a little bit to say we have not become so incompetent about taking care of ourselves that we must feed our lives into the industrial system through the insurance companies, through the professions, through the cars. We may choose it because it's very difficult to go countercultural, extremely difficult. Why bother in a lot of things? But we have to know we have a choice.”
We definitely have to. I think as you put it, you'd have to eat meat as a treat, not as a meal. We can't all be eating chicken and beef every meal, and expect Whidbey Island to support 65,000 people.
“Totally. It's a total luxury. People said, ‘Oh no, this would not be a problem. Because we have all these wild deer going around.' I said 65,000 people, the deer would last a week. They said, ‘Oh, but we have all these rabbits running around.' Yeah, OK. That's another week. I'm going to say it's value neutral. We now do not live in nature. We live in a constructed world, an override of the natural world that suits humans. Or some of us. And that's the world we live in. I might sound like I'm ragging on things and I'm not exactly. I just find it so much fun to deconstruct things that we assume are true.”
I do think we have to acknowledge some of the good that has come out of the industrialization of our food chain. If you go back 200 years, I don't know, 70% of the world, their day-to-day work was engaged in producing food. And now it's like 1% or 2%. As you pointed out, there are five times as many farmers over 75 as there are under 30 or something like that. I think you pointed that out in your TED talk that you did on this subject. People are able to do other things with their lives because they don't have to spend all their time just feeding themselves. We have to acknowledge the benefits even though we probably ought to be addressing the problems as well—which is the fact that if the chain went down, we will die.
“Yes, OK. Benefits. But then if we're saying that collectively we want to have this industrialized food system that provides bounty for us, we need to share the bounty more fairly. Because at this point, the agricultural industrial system lobbies have an outsized influence on where tax dollars go and what's permitted and what's not permitted. For example, the whole battle over glyphosate. I don't know what you think about glyphosate or what other people think about glyphosate. It's been a miracle cure for industrial agriculture, but it seems to have had some downside health effects that doctors probably have looked into. People now have wheat allergies that they didn't have before. You travel in Europe where they don't use glyphosate, suddenly you can eat that wonderful bread. We're aware that there's a downside to the bounty of the industrial system. If we're honest, we just have to say, ‘Yeah, that's true.' I could go deeper and deeper and deeper into this about the health effects of some of the chemicals that are used for industrial agriculture, which I'm sure that doctors are seeing in their offices all the time. But we don't have the capacity politically to challenge that system. In part because the system tells us, ‘Without us, you will die.'”
I don't think a lot of people realize how hard it is to do this relational eating, to eat food produced within 10 miles of your home.
“I'm not even saying 10 miles. Here's a little thing for you. I call it OWL. You go to the store and I'm not advocating 10 miles. Ten miles is stupid. It's not really realistic. What I advocated in the second part of that TED talk that people could watch called “Relational Eating” was to think about a 500-mile radius around yourself. Think about a food system that goes out 500 miles. My 500-mile food system could totally, totally feed me. To think about it in concentric circles, the fresh stuff we want to get locally. That's the best thing. Came out of the ground this morning. Having a system where fresh food and then maybe meat and then beans and then grains, it goes out further and further. That's a thinking tool. Ten miles was just an experiment. Then the idea of an OWL is you go to the store. Is it organic? Is it whole unprocessed? Is it local? OWL–organic, whole and local. Any one of those is great. If you have a choice for organic, whole and local, great, you buy that. But if you can buy organic food, you are supporting an agricultural system that is less dependent on petrochemicals.”
I don't think people realize how many legal obstacles have been put in place to keep people from doing that. You mentioned that it's actually illegal for your neighbor to sell you milk from their cow.
“Right, exactly. I did that experiment in 2010, so I don't actually know what the legalities are now because there is a dairy in our area that does sell raw milk. But yeah, basically all of this stuff, it wasn't evil in the beginning. It was like, ‘Oh, oops, there's a problem here, let's solve it with this regulation.' You put in the regulation and that problem gets solved, but it starts to rigidify. I can't buy cuts of meat from my neighbor who might raise three beef animals. I can't buy the cuts. I have to buy a quarter of an animal if I want it. Then we send it off the island to get processed because people are not allowed to process their own meat anymore. The whole thing has been sent because of health concerns and not inappropriately. Basically, what I say is there's a relational food system where I can trade with my neighbors, and that should be legal. There should be nothing against it. Then there's an industrial system where if I go to the grocery store, I want to know that my milk isn't going to kill me.
To have scale appropriate regulations so that we can have this relational food system and allow the relational food system to grow stronger, allow more people to decide to grow hogs or beef or chickens or eggs, to allow that system to grow strong in the understory among people who are willing to basically take responsibility for their own food. I know that if my milk provider killed me, he would be out of business. He knows that, too. Because we are in a relational system, your reputation is everything. In an industrial system, it's not really because it can all be manipulated by the public relations people. That's what I'm advocating, is for something that the 10-ton gorilla gets off the back of people in communities who want to feed one another. The underground system is alive and well. You have to know the secret code; you knock three times. That's what I'm advocating. It's like in terms of this, I am a libertarian for sure. I'm sort of a Bernie progressive on so many other things, but in terms of food, I think farmers are some of the smartest people I know.”
Relational Housing System
Yeah, there are definitely appeals from both sides of the political spectrum on this subject. You're working on another important problem. We've talked about our financial problems and jobism and that sort of stuff. We've talked about this issue we have with our food system. Another big problem we have—and it's in probably almost every community now in the US—is the housing crisis. It's particularly acute in vacation towns. I imagine it's a big problem on Whidbey Island. It's even a problem here in Salt Lake City. Affordable housing, there's a huge housing crisis. You're doing something really unique about it on Whidbey Island. Tell us what you're doing about the housing crisis.
“It's a relational system. It is a relational housing system. In the city that I live in, this little town I live in and in the county, there are people who are tucking other people in on their property. I have one friend who has a number of trailers, nicely maintained trailers on his property, tucked into little groves. He rents those, and the county knows that that happens. All the sanitations are handled very well. Everything is handled very well. We know that this person is providing housing. I live in what I call a people box, a split entry house. It is 1,850 square feet. I said this is way too big for one person. I put a mother-in-law apartment on one side, and then I converted the garage into what I call an in-home suite.
In other words, it's not an apartment; it's not a separate accessory dwelling unit. Because in my town, if it were an accessory dwelling unit, I would have two sewer and water bills. I have two electric meters, the cost of it. Basically, it's sort of like having a housemate. But the housemate has a separate bathroom, a separate entrance, and some countertop appliances. The housemate can live a separate life, but we share all the infrastructure of the house. We share the washer and dryer. It's this not exactly defined space. It's not a roommate. It's not a renter, per se. That's what we're trying to do. Some friends and I, all of us have done this sort of thing. We've tucked people into our properties because we care. Our restaurants couldn't open full-time this summer because they didn't have any servers. That's what it's like. The businesses don't have staff. Our hospital doesn't have enough workers. There aren't enough teachers.
We're not talking about people who are living in the woods who need just a warm, dry place. We're talking about what we used to call during the pandemic, the essential workers. They don't have room in our town. We have plenty of square footage of an already built environment to house everybody who would want to come and work here in our light industry or our restaurants. But it's all private property. We're trying to lift up this idea, we're trying to define it in terms of city and county codes. ‘OK, where's the sliver of legal here?' It's sort of like raw milk, ‘Where's the sliver of legal?' And then we're making a case for, ‘Look, you are a homeowner, the average age of my town is 67.' We're a naturally occurring retirement community. This just breaks my heart. Because this town had a totally fabulous, diverse culture until all the housing was bought up by financial institutions or retirees.
Maybe you're living alone in a 2,000 square foot house or whatever. You can get income, you can get security, you're not alone. You can get a strong, young man to carry your cat food upstairs, you can do work trade, you can continue having your big gorgeous garden because you've got a big, gorgeous person someplace who can help you out with the garden. It's just sort of the pitter-patter of big feet. You have that sense that there's other people around and we're a social species. We like that. There are so many benefits to people of carving out. If they have a space that they could carve out, that has private or semi-private access that has a private bath and can put in a mini fridge and an air fryer or whatever, somebody else can have a life there. Somebody who's a server or a writer or a shopkeeper or an artist. You can have a real community because you can have young people in it.
Anyway, I just did this myself in my own house and then I started renting out the guest room and I just had a guy live with me. He was 28. He lived with me for five months. He took care of my cat every time I traveled. That was very important. We cleaned the chicken coop together. He vacuumed, he did the recycling and the garbage, and carried all heavy items up and down and up and down. And we had such great conversations. We were philosophically not necessarily aligned, but we were both really smart and loved good conversation. I miss him terribly. Not just because I have to do my own recycling. This is another thing. It's relational housing. We are not going to solve via building more tiny houses. We're not going to solve this. We're going to have to become a society that shares and cares and that remembers that other people are not the enemy. Excluding other people from your life is not success. It's loneliness.
We've become so frightened of one another. The pandemic did us no good on that one. I am not a libertarian on that regard. I definitely miss public health. But we didn't have to have the fear of others. The vilification of others that happened. We could pull together like New Zealand. I think that we're in a narrow point now in society where the systems that we built to solve the problems—probably at very least coming out of the Depression—the systems we built to solve a set of problems in the 20th century or maybe some of the 19th century are inappropriate to who we are now, to a world with 8 billion souls on this planet. We either are going to have to moderate to make space for one another in this world, or we're going to have to say, ‘Yeah, I have privilege and I just got the luck of the draw and what the fallout is for other people, so what?' We're going to have to face that that's kind of the choice we're making now. Back around to doctors. What is healthcare in an 8 billion world? What is healthcare in a world with 8 billion? How do doctors who are the people who care for our bodies, how are they thinking about this? I really would be interested.”
Relational Healthcare
I don't know that I have any of the answers to that. You see these problems, and they're big problems. They're big problems with big obstacles. There are legal obstacles. They keep you from relational eating and relational housing, relational living. You're having to work with these accessory dwelling unit laws and all these sorts of things. And then there are people's attitudes and people's fears to overcome. There are lots of obstacles with that. But when I think about big problems to solve, there are very few that I fear and one of them that I fear and that I'm embarrassed to be a part of is the mess of our healthcare system. I have often thought about another career; I guess White Coat Investor is my second career. A third career in helping to fix this broken healthcare system that we have. But it is such a huge problem. I look at something little like fixing financial illiteracy among doctors as simple compared to this task. It's so intimidating to work on a problem that big. Anybody who thinks there's a simple fix to our healthcare woes does not understand the problem. It is a difficult, complex problem to solve. And stuffing more people into the system doesn't make it easier, for sure.
“Wow. OK. More power to you. You want a thinking partner on this one? I'll tell you, I just mastered the maze of Medicare. I'll tell you, it's really frightening. You may not agree with this, but the research I did into the history of Medicare Advantage is it comes out of the stream of thought that says that basically corporate healthcare can better serve the public than Medicare. But it’s like they make it so cheap. It's like, ‘Oh, come, we have a special 50 rolls of toilet paper for 75 cents. Medicare Advantage, pay nothing. We'll pay you back for this.' Once you're in the system, basically care can be denied. I was shocked with that because I just scooted into the Advantage system because I thought, ‘Oh, that seems easy.'
People are getting care, but we forget that basically a corporation is a fiefdom. Government, we actually get a vote. Anyway, just even that, running that gauntlet for somebody, I'm pretty smart and it took me a lot to get through it and to see why there's a difference and what the difference is and what system I want to be part of. What is relational healthcare? Maybe it has to grow like this relational food system. Maybe it has to grow with something like doctors having every Friday, they have a two hour open clinic for anybody to come in—payment optional.”
Vicki, you would be shocked to find out how little doctors know about insurance and even Medicare. It's not like you have to learn all these insurance companies. Just Medicare. We have a conference every year now that we call the Physician Wellness and Financial Literacy Conference. Our first one was in Park City in 2018. I gave a talk where a good chunk of the talk just explained how Medicare works. The audience was enraptured; no one had ever explained to them how Medicare worked. I'd been practicing at that point for 15 years and I had to do all this research for the talk, because I didn't know how Medicare worked. You'd be shocked. Doctors, I think, are a huge part of the solution to our healthcare woes, but they don't even understand the problem we have for the most part.
“There's one doctor in our town. I have not availed myself of her services, who just has a subscription service. It's just like you pay a monthly fee and you have complete access to everything.”
It works really well for primary care. We have not yet made that system work well for specialties and, particularly, for emergency care. Because I'd love to be part of it but I'm an emergency doc. I'm like, ‘insurance is important because you can come in the door and I can spend $25,000 in 10 minutes on you.' I really can. There is a role for insurance. But it's messed up. For sure, the system is messed up. I can chat about this subject all day, though, Vicki.
“Totally. Relational healthcare, let's just set that out as a thing. Let's make it a thing. In-home suites is a thing. It's not a thing. We just made it up; let's make it a thing. Then, what would it be like? What would relational emergency care be like? No. 1, it would be that it's so inexpensive to go to your local clinics that people are not using the ER for healthcare because they don't have any other access.”
What's interesting is the people who tend to use the ER for primary care the most are the people for whom it costs the least to do so: Medicaid patients. In Utah, the copay to go to the ER if you're on Medicaid is like $3. Of course, you're going to come in for your ear infection, whereas the person with a job, with insurance and a high deductible health plan, that visit might be $1,000. It might be $1,500 just to have someone look in your ear and write you a prescription for Amoxicillin. Those people don't come in. When you talk about ER abuse, it's a very specific subset of patients.
“But maybe that's telling us that what we need is maybe we elevate that to a success story. How would that be a success story? Not that an ER doc with your skills needs to deal with it, but we have a triage and we have this fabulous team of physician assistants who greet you and give you a cup of tea and Amoxicillin. Why isn't that the clinic? That is the clinic and then you have an ER department in the clinic where somebody comes in and they've just been shot and they have three holes in their body. Well, OK, they go to that one, but everything else is a welcome open door. Do you know what I mean?”
The answer, Vicki, is that people respond to incentives. It's the first law of economics. People are not comfortable with that, either, because the truth is there will be people who choose not to get care, that leads to them getting sicker, that leads to them dying because of economic reasons. We're not comfortable with that. Even those of us in medicine, we are not comfortable with the idea of someone dying because they don't have the money for care. So, we're going to give everybody care, but then we get all these weird incentives and unforeseen consequences and a broken system. Because we still haven't decided as a society, is this a right that we're going to tax everybody for and provide for everybody? Or is this a privilege and at what level is it a right? It’s complicated, and anyone who thinks it's not does not understand the problem.
“Totally. I hear you totally on this. I just had an experience going to my little local clinic and I needed an MRI, and it took eight days for Kaiser to affirm that. I could have been dead in eight days. They didn't know why I needed the MRI. I realized because I'm clever, if I went on Medicare, I could have gone to the ER.”
And my hospital and my radiology group, they would've encouraged me to order an MRI on you even though maybe you could have waited a week to get it because they get paid and they get paid very well, particularly to do them emergently. So, we got all kinds of crazy incentives from this combination of right and privilege and market system combined with a non-market system. It's just a mess.
“Totally. Then the other thing is, I take one drug that I get generic. I don't need it, but I have to play the roulette of, ‘Oh, what happens when I need a $1,000 pill?' It's just like, ‘Do I choose like I'm choosing now? OK, fine, I'll just take the generic whatever they have at that time and maybe I'll live and maybe I'll die.' Another part of it is that the leading edge of technology is always evolving. They change one little formulary for a pill and suddenly it's $1,000 because it's been altered so that the drug company can make their money when one generation back is now generic. It may work as well. You're so right. It is so crazy. More power to your relational medicine. I will get in there with you, Jim, and I will be a thinking partner because I would love it to be. I would love there to be an intelligent system where there weren't perverse rewards so people have extra children because the mind is always working the system. How does the system encourage what we really want to encourage, which is health?”
In a lot of ways, it is a disease care system, not a healthcare system. There's a lot of truth to that. Well, we are getting short on time, Vicki. It's been a true pleasure to chat with you. We've got time for maybe one more thing. You've got the ear now of 30,000-40,000 high-income professionals, mostly doctors. What have we not talked about today that you think they should know?
Gratitude for Doctors
“I would just say gratitude to doctors for the hard work of getting the education. People can complain about all the systems around it, but there are human beings who really worked hard. You don't get to be a doctor casually. That's a lot of work. I really appreciate all the work that people who've chosen the medical profession have put in to care for us. I think when we're talking about issues, we can throw the baby out with the caustic bathwater and I don't want to throw doctors under the bus. I had stage 3 colon cancer a hundred years ago, 18 years ago, and I had surgery and I was encouraged to do chemo. I didn't want to, but I decided to for a variety of reasons. I had side effects that they hadn't seen my side effects the first-time round, the first round. Second round, I had to be airlifted to a hospital and intubated because it looked like I had poured lye down my entire system. And so, I thought that's it. I gave it a try. I satisfied all the voices within and without that said I should do it and I'm stopping.
I went to my oncologist and I prayed over it and in my mind, I thanked my oncologist so profoundly for the dedication he had that brought him to that moment when he could serve me. It wasn't out of hatred for him, it was just what the medicine or the chemotherapy had done. I went to him and I told him, I said, ‘I'm done.' Not like, ‘I'm done, goddammit.' I told him I'm done. And he said, ‘Oh, well, we have this other protocol that could be . . .' I said, ‘No, no, no, no, no, I'm just done. I'm done. I'm done. I'm on my own.' He turned away from me, and then he turned back and he said, ‘It's people like you who survive.' I felt like he gave me a real blessing. But what I want to say is that doctors who are delivering service in our system have taken the time to educate yourselves to be able to deliver the kind of extraordinary, heroic interventions that have kept many of us alive. And I'm grateful for that. But also, in that moment with my doctor, I felt him come out from behind doctor to human to human and tell me, ‘There is another healthcare system and you're in it. It's called your Body Mind system. And I honor your choice.' Anyway, that's what occurred to me to say, because I think doctors get beaten up a lot.”
Well, thank you, Vicki. I thank you from the audience for your kind words and I recommend to the audience, check out Vicki's book “Your Money or Your Life.” The first edition was written years ago. It's been updated since. The ideas in it are timeless and everybody should be familiar with the book and its ideas. Also be sure to check out Vicki's podcast, “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
Thank you, Vicki, for coming on the podcast.
I hope you enjoyed that discussion with Vicki. Obviously, Vicki and I have a lot we like to talk about and bat around, and these are kind of big-picture ideas sometimes. But the truth is there's a lot there that's little-picture ideas, little things you can do that help your personal finances, that help the way you think about money, that help your financial plan, and help you implement some of those in your life.
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Quote of the Day
Philip Fisher said,
“The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything but the value of nothing.”
Milestone to Millionaire
#98 — Entrepreneur Takes New Product to Market
This episode features an entrepreneur who is launching a new product and after five years of work, it is finally ready for consumers. He shares his insights into what is required to create a product and take it to market. It is a long journey with a lot of ups and downs and even more learning, but he believes anyone can do it.
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Full Transcript
Intro:
This is the White Coat Investor podcast, where we help those who wear the white coat get a fair shake on Wall Street. We've been helping doctors and other high-income professionals stop doing dumb things with their money since 2011.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
This is White Coat Investor podcast number 295.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
PearsonRavitz are disability and life insurance advisors founded by and for physicians. This White Coat Investor recommended agency grew out of one MD's experience with a career-changing on-the-job injury.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Today, PearsonRavitz serves the medical community in all 50 states. At PearsonRavitz, they help you as a doctor safeguard your most valuable asset, your income so you can protect the most important people in your life, your family. PearsonRavitz makes human connections before they make quotes. Go to www.pearsonravitz.com/wci today to schedule your consultation with a PearsonRavitz advisor.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
In case you're not aware, we're doing a course sale right now. Give yourself the gift of education. Start your year out right with a jumpstart in your final education. It’s our gift to you this holiday season. If you buy any of our courses, you get our Continuing Financial Education 2021 course absolutely for free. That's the course we make at our WCICON conference every year. It qualifies for CME that you get, and is dozens of hours of awesome financial and wellness education.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
You don't need any code. This is $699 value. You can buy any course, you can buy Fire Your Financial Advisor, you can buy the version of Fire Your Financial Advisor that qualifies for CME and get this other course at the same time. You can buy No Hype Real Estate, any of our courses, you can buy CFE 2022 and you get 2021 free. Any course. You get this one thrown in for free.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
This goes from December 26th to January 4th at midnight. January 4th at midnight that course sale is over. Go to www.wcicourses.com for more details and to purchase that.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Let's do our quote of the day now, because we have an awesome guest coming on.
Philip Fisher, that's the person with the quote, not the person that's going to be our guest, said “The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything but the value of nothing.” I like that one.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Our guest today is somebody that I’ve been wanting to talk to and have on the podcast for a long time. Someone whose thoughts have influenced my thinking and someone that you should know about if you are in the personal finance community. It's Vicki Robin. Let's get her on the show.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Our guest today on the White Coat Investor podcast is none other than Vicki Robin. Vicki, welcome to the podcast.
Vicki Robin:
Thank you so much for having me.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah. I've been looking forward to this for a while. We've met before. We were kind of on a podcast panel before, but I've been familiar with your work for many, many years and it's just such a pleasure to have you here with us. And I bet there's a large percentage of audience that don't know you, and they should. They should know about you. They should know about your work. They should know about you as a person because you're an awesome person. And it's been fun getting to know you a little bit better today.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
For those who don't know, Vicki is probably most famous for a book called “Your Money or Your Life”, and we're going to talk about that for a few minutes. But we're going to go in all kinds of other directions on this podcast and talk about a lot of other interesting stuff.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Before we get to the book and most importantly, the ideas in the book, let's talk a little bit about your upbringing because your father was a doctor. Can you tell us a little bit about that and your upbringing and some of the life lessons there for our audience?
Vicki Robin:
Sure, sure. I shared that with you in preparation for this conversation because I know that it's going to be doctors in the audience. And so, yeah, my father was a radiologist. We lived on Long Island, on the North Shore of Long Island. He had basically status, our family had status. He loved sailing. He raced a star boat. Yeah. And his father had been a very prominent doctor in Wilmington, Delaware, was the personal physician Irénée du Pont.
Vicki Robin:
And so, my father, even though, really what he was, was a sailor, had to find a way to go through medical school and follow in his father's footsteps and his brother's footsteps. So, he was basically trapped in that perfected life. And he was a depressive. I barely knew him because his body was there, but his mind was elsewhere.
Vicki Robin:
And when I was 13, he turned the car on, the 1957 Lincoln Convertible, powder blue in the garage and killed himself. And so, it's sort of woven into my own personal story, that understanding that you can have everything just right on the external and be dying inside.
Vicki Robin:
That's why I mentioned that to you, Jim, because I know that the way our professional lives are structured, it probably influenced me. I was voted most likely to succeed in my high school class, but come graduation from college, what I did was I got a van and a dog and I went on the road. And so, there was something probably about that experience and my own experience of having all the kudos, but there was something big missing inside. And I wasn't going to just put myself on that professional conveyor belt.
Vicki Robin:
I had the opportunity to rethink my life very early. And I met my co-author of Your Money or Your Life”, Joe Dominguez, along the way and he explained to me basically how I could take the savings that I'd accumulated in order to be able to buy myself some freedom and that I could invest them and I could live on passive income if I lived very frugally.
Vicki Robin:
I did live very frugally and I've often said to this day, I say I buy my freedom with my frugality every day. And it's not just freedom to cast off into the great unknown. It's basically freedom to direct my attention toward the things that I think are really important, not to have the important things around the edges of life and the center of my life occupied with making money to maintain my assortment of stuff.
Vicki Robin:
I've been a saver my whole life. I've learned that the less money I spend, the further it goes. All of this is arranged around the ability to basically use my attention for the things that matter for things philosophical, spiritual, relational, friendships, community service. My life is full to the brim. I have created many, many social innovations because I have had my attention free. And who knows whether that moment when I was 13 and came home to find out that my father had killed himself somehow bumped me onto another path.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah. There's a concept that I was introduced to in a book I read recently called spaciousness. And this was a book about how to live life after you're rich. How to be rich. Not how to get rich, but how to be rich. And it talked about having spaciousness and that it's okay to have some space in your life and that allows you to do things that are you, that you don't set goals, you discover them, it was kind of the premise behind it.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
But before we get too far into this, I want to introduce people to the main concept in your book, “Your Money or Your Life.” For those who don't know this, this is a classic financial book. Of all the books out there that you've heard of that were written in the 90s or the 2000s or the 80s even, this is one of those that everybody ought to know about, everybody ought to read. You may not agree with everything in it, but you should still read it and be aware of it because it helps you talk to other people about personal finance.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
But the main premise of the book is that people are trading their life energy for money, and that most people are probably selling way too much of their time and this life energy because they're spending way too much money. Can you talk about this concept of life energy and why it's so important to understand?
Vicki Robin:
Yeah. I'm sort of deciding how far back to go. This is a key concept that my co-author Joe Dominguez hammered on. I actually think it's the linchpin of the book. The book has a nine-step program for transforming how you earn, spend, save, and invest money.
Vicki Robin:
But this idea that money is life energy, we discuss, “Okay, what do we think money is?” And there's a level at which money basically facilitates transaction. It's pieces of paper, metal, it's bits and bytes. It's the transactional flow through a gazillion computers. So, it's debt, it's savings accounts, it's all of the mechanics of the financial system and our interaction with the financial system.
Vicki Robin:
But around that, there are our emotional feelings about money. If we have less money than somebody else, we can feel one down. We can feel less attractive. We can feel virtuous that we're just hair shirt, we're better than the people who are super rich and buying their way through life.
Vicki Robin:
There are so many emotional reactions to the amount of money we have, the stuff we have, the kinds of transactions, that vacation we can take, blah, blah, blah, blah. So, basically, it's a struggle and we're primates. It's a struggle for basically dominant status mating. That struggle is now all projected onto these transactions. There you go.
Vicki Robin:
Money has an intense emotional envy, jealousy, revenge. All of these things show up in our money behavior. So, if you don't understand that you have an emotional relationship with money as well as a material relationship with money, then you are missing the boat. You are never going to be able to adjust the bits and bytes and then your choices, because your choices are all governed by unconscious emotions.
Vicki Robin:
Basically, you take a look at the emotional thing, and then you go out and you take a look at what are the ideas in our society that we drink with mothers’ milk? And the fundamental one, because we live in a capitalist society is, more is better. Why is more better? It's not better because we think it's better. It's better because it keeps the wheels of industry going.
Vicki Robin:
Basically, we live in this “more is better” and it's never enough. Growth is good. We live in this. I think it’s Bob Dylan who said “He who isn't busy being born is busy dying.” It's this anxiety at the edge of your life that you always have to somehow have more and more status, more stuff, more whatever, bigger house.
Vicki Robin:
This is the miasm. And if you don't understand that, then your financial decisions, what you invest in, what you buy, they're all going to be influenced by these unconscious forces. But then what we say, what Joe said, and I am parroting because I absolutely believe it, is that if you look at this rationally, all money is, is something that you trade your life energy for. Basically, you sell your time for money.
Vicki Robin:
It sounds pretty obvious, but once you start to realize that, when then you do a calculation, we suggest people do a calculation about what's their nominal hourly wage or nominal salary or nominal income, and then what's their real income, because there's a lot of costs associated with having the job and maintaining the job. Just simply, if we take a look at the struggles of young people is paying off the debt to get the degree so that they can do the work and some people never do.
Vicki Robin:
Money for other people may be something else, but for me, I'm trading X hours of my life for X number more dollars. Let's say you think you're earning a hundred dollars an hour, but after taxes and daycare, carfare, education, debt, expected Christmas presents, after all of that, what are you really trading an hour of your life for? And once you have that number, which is usually about a quarter of what people think, in that calculation, we'd say, “Okay, you're trading an hour of your life for $25.”
Vicki Robin:
And for somebody who considers that it's status that they're making a hundred dollars an hour, that's a comedownance. But then you go and you go like, “Okay, fine, I'm going to go out for lunch with a friend” and the bill is $30. Okay, that was an hour of my life. So that calculus, what is your real hourly wage? That awareness that every time you spend money, you're spending an hour of your life and you want it to express your values and bring you pleasure.
Vicki Robin:
That's what we suggest people do, is you do that translation around all your expenses. And you ask yourself, “Am I getting happiness in proportion to the amount of my life I invested in this?”
Dr. Jim Dahle:
And it goes to both ways. It affects the way you spend, but it also affects what you're willing to work for. You're also all of a sudden, “Well, if I can't get a job that pays me better than this, I'm not going to spend my time on it.”
Vicki Robin:
Exactly.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Because I don't need that money to live.
Vicki Robin:
And then of course, now we're up against the identity crisis, because who am I if I am not this job, this house, this lifestyle, these vacations, this position in my community. Once you rupture that bond between “I am my work”, like Vicki, I am an author, I am a podcaster, I am a famous person. Once I break that bond between me, just little me and all these identities that I put out there to sort of protect myself and impress people, who am I?
Vicki Robin:
And so, we want freedom, but we don't want the existential crisis that comes when these illusions, when we look behind the Wizard of Oz curtain and see the machinery. This is an important moment in our lives. Many people get to it at the end of their lives, but it's an important moment in our lives to say “If I want to live a beautiful life, a meaningful life, a life well lived, if I want a life well lived, I may have to go through some uncomfortable questioning of how I have invested my life energy, i.e. my time and my money to date.”
Vicki Robin:
And in “Your Money or Your Life”, we have a mantra. We say, “No shame, no blame.” It's like, okay, fine. You spent the first 50 years chasing a dream that was just a mirage. No shame, no blame. You have another 30 left, what are we going to do now?
Vicki Robin:
It's liberating but the liberation isn't just about the money and things. It's not just about minimalism. The liberation comes from shedding identities that no longer fit or assumptions that no longer fit. And that could be a very simple little adjustment, just like little minor tweak, or it could be major, it could be a major life tweak.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah. You call it jobism in the book. And in some ways, it’s just as bad as sexism and racism. This idea that we are our jobs. And that's particularly difficult, I think, for our audience.
Vicki Robin:
Yes.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Doctors spent their twenties becoming this thing. They spent their thirties paying for it and everybody calls them doctor and gives them a little bit of respect. Maybe not their administrators, but everybody else gives them respect. It's very difficult for our audience to separate who they are from their job. I think more so than even the average person who has a lot of trouble with it.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
At the cocktail party, the question is, “What do you do?” And people aren't expecting me to say, “Oh, I play on a hockey team and I coach my son's hockey team.” That's not the answer they're expecting. They want to hear that I practice emergency medicine, that I'm running this side business. That's what they're asking about. But in reality, is that really who I am?
Vicki Robin:
Wait, wait, wait. So, you say, I play on a hockey team and I coach my son's hockey, and then the person's thinking, “Geez, I wish I could do that. I just never spent any time with my kid. How do you get to be a doctor and have any time with your children?” Suddenly, we don't know whether your status goes up or down at that, but you've told the truth. And the truth is always liberating. Not only for the truth teller, but the truth hearer.
Vicki Robin:
So, we have all these minor moments where we can just sort of break some of those agreements. I'm not dissing doctors. Definitely, I just went through choosing my Medicare thing, miasm. So, I have a thing about insurance companies, but I love my docs and I'm sure doctors have a thing about insurance companies too but I'm just saying.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
That's the understatement of the year right there.
Vicki Robin:
Exactly. Exactly. We are all trapped in systems. And so, in a way, this silly little money is life energy thing brings you into a sort of safe internal questioning of the systems within which you operate.
Vicki Robin:
If you're frustrated with the insurance system, maybe a beautiful question among doctors is not the complaint, but what kind of system would allow us to deliver the care we want to deliver and have a life we love so we can play hockey and coach our kids? What kind of system do we want?
Vicki Robin:
I know my father was in the AMA and they resisted socialized medicine. We're not going to go there about socialized medicine, but it just introduces a little bit of truth about how it feels to be trapped in the systems that you're trapped. A little bit of truth. You don't even have to admit it to somebody. Really can initiate a process of reclaiming that self that we all know is inside us, that's been there all along, wanting to live, wanting to express.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Vicki, you're not a personal finance guru, you're a philosopher.
Vicki Robin:
You got it.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
In the greatest tradition of Aristotle and Plato and everybody else.
Vicki Robin:
I've never been a personal finance person. Joe was the personal finance person. I've always been this.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah, exactly. It's so true. Alright, well, let's set “Your Money or Your Life” aside for a minute. Everybody listening to this, go read this book. If you haven't read this book, go read the book because we're not going to tell you all about it. You should read it. It will change the way you think about how you earn money and how you spend money for the better.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Let's talk about something else you've been very interested in recently, that you call relational eating. Tell us what you mean by relational eating and what's wrong with the way we do food as Americans today.
Vicki Robin:
Wow. Okay. Well, I'll give a little background to how I stumbled into this. Because I'm an eater. Everybody eats. I'm actually a sport eater and I enjoy sport eating and all the things that Americans enjoy. I enjoy sugar, salt, and fat. I could eat ice cream with a spoon late at night from the freezer. I'm an American.
Vicki Robin:
But I'm also very concerned about the impact of whether you call it the sixth-grade extinction, whether you call it climate change, the impact of the kinds of disassembly of natural systems that have been the byproduct of the way collectively on this planet we live and how it's going to impact us in the future even right now.
Vicki Robin:
Right now, it looks like, “Oh, everything's working.” And I thought, “Oh, we have these long supply chains, just trucks everywhere transporting food.” And I live in an island. I thought, “Well, what if the bridge goes down because it's a narrow little bridge to the mainland and the ferry stops running. Could we feed ourselves here on Whidbey Island?”
Vicki Robin:
And I asked a farmer to do the calculation and she said, “Yeah, we could.” Number of people, calories per day, what grows well here. For about two weeks in August, we might be able to feed this 65,000 people who live here if we didn't have access to that ginormous agricultural industrial food system.
Vicki Robin:
That got my attention. So, I did an experiment. I thought, “Okay, well, I'm going to see if I could live from just what grows here.” I partnered with a neighbor who is a farmer, and we created this 10-mile circle around my house. She brought me vegetables and I could find anything else in those 10 miles just to experiment for a month.
Vicki Robin:
That's what started it. It was this concern about the fragility of what is an apparently sturdy system. I told people I was going to do this month of a 10-mile diet. They said, “That's not a problem. You just go to the grocery store, it's like a mile from your house.” But my grocery store had only one item that was from my 10-mile circle, which was honey. And that was just a total revelation.
Vicki Robin:
As you can tell, I really like to do intense experiments and have big insights. And so, I did. I wrote a book “Blessing the Hands That Feed Us”, that's all about this quixotic experiment to find food and the realization that people say, “Oh, local food, oh, we have a farmer's market.” No, no, no. We don't have a food system. We don't have a local food system. We have a few lovely people with maybe five to 10 acres who grow food for us and sell it at the market. But that's not a system. It's like a complete retooling.
Vicki Robin:
And then along comes the pandemic and we start to see, “Oh, right, A grocery store doesn't have groceries in it. It has shelves.” That's what's in the store, everything on the shelves, three days, it's all empty. And you can't even store enough food for that. You have to have a different system.
Vicki Robin:
As I was doing this, I realized that humans are the only animals who are completely inept at feeding themselves within the world they live in. Every successful animal lives from the food it gathers from its territory. And we have been completely rendered stupid about feeding ourselves by this industrial system where all production is so far out of sight, we don't even understand it anymore.
Vicki Robin:
Basically, for me, food became belonging. I realized if I can live from these 10 miles, and I was foraging people like nut trees. Now I belong here and we're talking these days a lot about indigenous wisdom, that basically there were people for millions of years who walked this earth, who were able to live here without destroying it. So, let's learn something from them. What did they know that we've lost? A lot of people I know are asking this question and turning to indigenous people.
Vicki Robin:
And one thing is that their culture was identified with its food. The food was identified with the landscape, and the traditions are identified with the harvest, with the planting. Culture is mostly created around foraging, hunting, growing in a landscape. So you belong someplace.
Vicki Robin:
I live in the Pacific Northwest. I live in the Cedar Salmon region. The salmon is crucial to our food system. The Coast Salish people, they ate Camas root bulb that grew plentifully on the prairie on Whidbey Island. The farmers came and plowed up and planted wheat. That's sort of the settler approach to it.
Vicki Robin:
But there were people here who knew how to live here. And is this just sort of an interesting little silly experiment by some old lady in the Northwest? I think it's very important for provisioning. I would encourage everybody if you have land to just turn up the grass and turn it into turnips, just to use a turnip phrase.
Vicki Robin:
But I would encourage everybody to grow food because then you start with this relational eating. You start to feel yourself as part of something, not an isolated unconnected being. We're biological beings. Food is our biology. There are many other approaches to changing diets. Most of it about changing the size of your body or being optimizing or maximizing or minimizing or whatever, whatever.
Vicki Robin:
But that's more a personal quest for perfection through the body. What I'm talking about is a systems approach to being really effective human beings in intact, flourishing landscapes. If the landscape does not flourish, we do not flourish. Everybody who lived on this planet until about 200 years ago absolutely knew that. And we've forgotten it.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
I'm going to push back a little bit on this idea.
Vicki Robin:
Okay, let's go.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
I'm going to push back on it. How many people can Whidbey Island support if everybody is only eating food from Whidbey Island?
Vicki Robin:
Oh, very few.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
That's kind of the dark spectra behind this idea though, isn't it?
Vicki Robin:
Okay. Okay. Okay. We could absolutely support everybody who lives here. However, people would have to change their diets. The mid island is a beautiful prairie. It's got topsoil, not a mile deep, but that's hyperbole. But it's got really deep topsoil. It's beautiful farmland. Currently, there's many things to say about that farmland, but the farmers who farm it, they have to get a crop that can sell. And so, a lot of it is hay for horses because that's what sells.
Vicki Robin:
But we have enough farmland, absolutely, that if we grew crop for the people here, potatoes, beads, rutabagas, turnips, carrots, parsnips, root crops. We have bean that was developed here in Whidbey Island called the Rockwell Bean. That's beans, corn, potatoes.
Vicki Robin:
And then we have a year-round climate. We can grow kale. We can grow mustard greens. You could have a delicious diet. We have sea water. You can make salt. We have hazelnut orchards. We could make oil. It would be a complete retooling. A complete retooling.
Vicki Robin:
But this is the argument, Jim, of industrial agriculture is, “Oh, well, we have to be able to feed the world.” And so, we have lost the idea that the world was feeding itself perfectly well until industrial agriculture came along, because people were developed farming methods that worked in their situation.
Vicki Robin:
Yes, there were floods, there were famines, there was drought, there was things that we couldn't control. I'm not saying it was perfect, but people have traditionally been able to grow the food that they eat. But there was an interest, industrial interest in.
Vicki Robin:
Anyway, we don't need to go into a critique of that, but I think that our imagination needs to expand a little bit to say we have not become so incompetent about taking care of ourselves that we must feed our lives into the industrial system through the insurance companies, through the professions, through the cars. We may choose it because it's very difficult to go countercultural, extremely difficult. Why bother in a lot of things?
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah.
Vicki Robin:
But we have to know we have a choice.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah. We definitely have to. I think as you put it, you'd have to eat meat as a treat, not as a meal.
Vicki Robin:
Exactly.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
We can't all be eating chicken and beef every meal, and expect Whidbey Island to support 65,000 people.
Vicki Robin:
Totally. It's a total luxury. People said, “Oh no, this would not be a problem. Because we have all these wild deer going around.” I said 65,000 people, the deer would last a week. They said, “Oh, but we have all these rabbits running around.” Yeah, okay. That's another week.
Vicki Robin:
I'm going to say it valued neutral. We now do not live in nature. We live in a constructed world and override of the natural world that suits humans. Some of us. And that's the world we live in.
Vicki Robin:
If you want to talk about relational eating, a relational eater in our system eats oil. Eat fertilizer. I might sound like I'm ragging on things and I'm not exactly. I just find it so much fun to deconstruct things that we assume are true.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
I do think we have to acknowledge some of the good that has come out of the industrialization of our food chain. If you go back 200 years, I don't know, 70% of the world, their day-to-day work was engaged in producing food. And now it's like 1% or 2%.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
As you pointed out, there are five times as many farmers over 75 as there are under 30 or something like that. I think you pointed out in your TED talk that you did on this subject. People are able to do other things with their lives because they don't have to spend all their time just feeding themselves. We have to acknowledge the benefits even though we probably ought to be addressing the problems as well, which is the fact that if the chain went down, we will die.
Vicki Robin:
Yes, yes. Okay. Benefits. But then if we're saying that collectively we want to have this industrialized food system that provides bounty for us, we need to share the bounty more fairly. Because at this point, the agricultural industrial system lobbies have an outsized influence on where tax dollars go and what's permitted and what's not permitted.
Vicki Robin:
For example, the whole battle over glyphosate. And I don't know what you think about glyphosate or what other people think about glyphosate. It's been a miracle cure for industrial agriculture, but it seems to have had some downside health effects that doctors probably have looked into. And so, people now have wheat allergies that they didn't have before. You travel in Europe where they don't use glyphosate, suddenly you can eat that wonderful bread.
Vicki Robin:
So, we're aware that there's a downside to the bounty of the industrial system. And so, if we're honest, we just have to say “Yeah, that's true.” I could go deeper and deeper and deeper into this about the health effects of some of the chemicals that are used for industrial agriculture, which I'm sure that doctors are seeing in their offices all the time. But we don't have the capacity politically to challenge that system. And in part because the system tells us, “Without us, you will die.”
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah. I don't think a lot of people realize how hard it is to do this relational eating, to eat food produced within 10 miles of your home.
Vicki Robin:
I'm not even saying 10 miles. Okay, here's a little thing for you. I call it OWL. You go to the store and I'm not advocating 10 miles. 10 miles is stupid. It's not really realistic. What I advocated in the second part of that TED talk that people could watch called “Relational Eating” was to think about a 500-mile radius around yourself. Think about a food system that goes out 500 miles. My 500-mile food system could totally, totally feed me. And to think about it in concentric circles, the fresh stuff we want to get locally. That's the best thing. Came out of the ground this morning.
Vicki Robin:
So, having a system where fresh food and then maybe meat and then beans and then grains, it goes out further and further. That's a thinking tool. 10 miles was just an experiment.
Vicki Robin:
And then the idea of an OWL is you go to the store. Is it organic? Is it whole like unprocessed? Is it local? OWL – Organic, whole and local. Any one of those is great. If you have a choice for organic, whole and local, great, you buy that. But if you can buy organic food, you are supporting an agricultural system that is less dependent on petrochemicals.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
I don't think people realize how many legal obstacles have been put in place to keep people from doing that. You mentioned that it's actually illegal for your neighbor to sell you milk from their cow.
Vicki Robin:
Right, exactly. I did that experiment in 2010, so I don't actually know what the legalities are now because there is a dairy in our area that does sell raw milk. But yeah, basically all of this stuff, it wasn't evil in the beginning. It was like, “Oh, oops, there's a problem here, let's solve it with this regulation.”
Vicki Robin:
So, you put in the regulation and that problem gets solved, but it starts to rigidify so that people who could grow your meat, I can't buy cuts of meat from my neighbor who might raise three beef animals. I can't buy the cuts. I have to buy a quarter of an animal if I want it. And then we send it off the island to get processed because people are not allowed to process their own meat anymore.
Vicki Robin:
The whole thing has been sent because of health concerns and not inappropriately. Basically, what I say is there's a relational food system where I can trade with my neighbors and that should be legal. There should be nothing against it. And then there's an industrial system where if I go to the grocery store, I want to know that my milk isn't going to kill me.
Vicki Robin:
And to have scale appropriate regulations so that we can have this relational food system and allow the relational food system to grow stronger, allow more people to decide to grow hogs or beef or chickens or eggs, to allow that system to grow strong in the understory among people who are willing to basically take responsibility for their own food.
Vicki Robin:
I know that if my milk provider killed me, he would be out of business. He knows that too. Because we are in a relational system, your reputation is everything. In an industrial system, it's not really because it can all be manipulated by the public relations people. That's what I'm advocating, is for something that the 10 ton gorilla gets off the back of people in communities who want to feed one another. And the underground system is alive and well. You have to know the secret code, you knock three times.
Vicki Robin:
That's what I'm advocating. It's like in terms of this, I am a libertarian for sure. I'm sort of a Bernie progressive on so many other things but in terms of food, I think farmers are some of the smartest people I know. They are some of the smartest people I know.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah, there's definitely appeals from both sides of the political spectrum on this subject. You're working on another important problem. We've talked about our financial problems and jobism and that sort of stuff. We've talked about this issue we have with our food system.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Another big problem we have and it's in probably almost every community now in the US is the housing crisis. It's particularly acute in vacation towns. I imagine it's a big problem on Whidbey Island. It's even a problem here in Salt Lake City. Affordable housing, there's a huge housing crisis. You're doing something really unique about it on Whidbey Island. Tell us what you're doing about the housing crisis.
Vicki Robin:
As I said about, it's a relational system. It is a relational housing system. In the city that I live in, this little town I live in and in the county, there are people who are tucking other people in on their property. I have one friend who has a number of trailers, nicely maintained trailers on his property, tucked into little groves. And he rents those and the county knows that that happens. All the sanitations are handled very well. Everything is handled very well.
Vicki Robin:
And so, we know that this person is providing housing. I live in what I call a people box, a split entry house. And this was 1850 square feet. I said this is way too big for one person. I put a mother-in-law apartment on one side, and then I converted the garage into what I call an in-home suite.
Vicki Robin:
In other words, it's not an apartment, it's not a separate accessory dwelling unit. Because in my town, if it were an accessory dwelling unit, I would have two sewer and water bills. I have two electric meters, the cost of it.
Vicki Robin:
Basically, it's sort of like having a housemate. But the housemate has a separate bathroom, a separate entrance and some countertop appliances. So, the housemate can live a separate life, but we share all the infrastructure of the house. We share the washer dryer. It's this not exactly defined space. It's not a roommate. It's not a renter per se.
Vicki Robin:
That's what we're trying to do. Some friends and I, all of us have done this sort of thing. We've tucked people into our properties because we care, our restaurants couldn't open full-time this summer because they didn't have any servers. That's what it's like. The businesses don't have staff. Our hospital doesn't have enough workers. It's like the teachers.
Vicki Robin:
We're not talking about people who are living in the woods who need just a warm dry place. We're talking about what we used to call during the pandemic, the essential workers. They don't have room in our town. We have plenty of square footage of already built environment to house everybody who would want to come and work here in our light industry or our restaurants. But it's called private property.
Vicki Robin:
And so, we're trying to lift up this idea, we're trying to define it in terms of city and county codes. “Okay, where's the sliver of legal here?” It's sort of like raw milk, “Where's the sliver of legal?” And then we're making a case for, “Look, you are a homeowner, the average age of my town is 67.” We're a naturally occurring retirement community. This just breaks my heart. Because this town had a totally fabulous, diverse culture until all the housing was bought up by financial institutions or retirees.
Vicki Robin:
So, maybe you're living alone in a 2,000 square foot house or 3,000 or whatever. So, you can get income, you can get security, you're not alone. You can get a strong young man to carry your cat food upstairs, you can do work trade, you can continue having your big gorgeous garden because you've got a big, gorgeous person someplace who can help you out with the garden. It's just sort of the pitter-patter of big feet. You have that sense that there's other people around and we're social species. We like that.
Vicki Robin:
There are so many benefits to people of carving out. If they have a space that they could carve out, that has private or semi-private access that has a private bath and can put in a mini fridge and an air fryer or whatever. Somebody else can have a life there. Somebody's who's a server or a writer or a shopkeeper or an artist. You can have a real community because you can have young people in it.
Vicki Robin:
Anyway, I just did this myself in my own house and then I started renting out the guest room and I just had a guy live with me. He was 28. He lived with me for five months. He took care of my cat every time I traveled. That was very important. We cleaned the chicken coop together. He vacuumed, he did the recycling and the garbage and carried all heavy items up and down and up and down. And we had such great conversations. We were philosophically not necessarily aligned, but we were both really smart and loved good conversation. I miss him terribly. Not just because I have to do my own recycling.
Vicki Robin:
This is another thing. It's relational housing. We are not going to solve via building more tiny houses. We're not going to solve this. We're going to have to become a society that shares and cares and that remembers that other people are not the enemy, excluding other people from your life is not success. It's loneliness.
Vicki Robin:
And we've become so frightened of one another. And the pandemic did us no good on that one. I am not a libertarian on that regard. I definitely miss public health. But we didn't have to have the fear of others. The vilification of others that happened. We could pull together like New Zealand.
Vicki Robin:
I think that we're in a narrow point now in society where the systems that we built to solve the problems, probably at very least coming out of the depression, the systems we built to solve a set of problems in the 20th century or maybe some of the 19th century are inappropriate to who we are now. To a world with 8 billion. We just passed 8 billion in November 15th. They weren't out there finding the 8 billionth baby.
Vicki Robin:
But just nominally we're at 8 billion souls on this planet. We either are going to have to moderate to make space for one another in this world, or we're going to have to say, “Yeah, I have privilege and I just got the luck of the draw and what the fallout is for other people. So, what?” We're going to have to face that that's kind of the choice we're making now.
Vicki Robin:
Back around to doctors. What is healthcare in an 8 billion world? What is healthcare in a world with 8 billion? How do doctors who are the people who care for our bodies, how are they thinking about this? I really would be interested.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah. I don't know that I have any of the answers to that. You see these problems and they're big problems. They're big problems with the obstacles. There are legal obstacles. They keep you from relational eating and relational housing, relational living. You're having to work with these accessory dwelling unit laws and all these sorts of things. And then there's people's attitudes and people's fears to overcome. There's lots of obstacles with that.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
But when I think about big problems to solve, there are very few that I fear and one of them that I fear and that I'm embarrassed to be a part of is the mess of our healthcare system. I have often thought about another career, I guess White Coat Investor is my second career. A third career in helping to fix this broken healthcare system that we have.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
But it is such a huge problem. I look at something little like fixing financial illiteracy among doctors as simple compared to this task. It's so intimidating to work on a problem that big. Anybody who thinks there's a simple fix to our healthcare woes does not understand the problem. It is a difficult complex problem to solve. And stuffing more people into the system doesn't make it easier for sure.
Vicki Robin:
Wow. Okay. More power to you. You want a thinking partner on this one? I'll tell you, I just mastered the maze of Medicare. And I'll tell you, it's really frightening. And you may not agree with this, but the research I did into the history of Medicare Advantage, is it comes out of the stream of thought that says that basically corporate healthcare can better serve the public than Medicare, than government run.
Vicki Robin:
But it’s like they make it so cheap. It's like, “Oh, come, we have a special 50 rolls of toilet paper for 75 cents. Medicare Advantage, pay nothing. We'll pay you back for this.” And once you're in the system, basically care can be denied. And I was shocked with that because I just scooted into the advantage system because I thought, “Oh, that seems easy.”
Vicki Robin:
And people are getting care but we forget that basically a corporation is a fiefdom. Government, we actually get a vote. Anyway, just even that, running that gauntlet for somebody, I'm pretty smart and it took me a lot to get through it and to see why there's a difference and what the difference is and what system I want to be part of.
Vicki Robin:
So, what is relational healthcare? Maybe it has to grow like this relational food system. Maybe it has to grow with doctors having every Friday, they have a two hour open clinic for anybody to come in payment optional.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah. Vicki, you would be shocked to find out how little doctors know about insurance and even Medicare. It's not like you got to learn all these insurance companies. Just Medicare.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Our first conference, we have a conference every year now that we call the Physician Wellness and Financial Literacy Conference. Our first one was in Park City in 2018. And I gave a talk where a good chunk of the talk just explained how Medicare works. And the audience was enraptured, no one had ever explained to them how Medicare worked. I'd been practicing at that point for 15 years and I had to do all this research for the talk because I didn't know how Medicare worked.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
And so, you'd be shocked. Doctors I think are a huge part of the solution to our healthcare woes but they don't even understand the problem we have for the most part.
Vicki Robin:
Yeah. There's one doctor in our town. I have not availed myself of her services, who just has a subscription service. It's just like you pay a monthly fee and you have complete access to everything.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah. It works really well for primary care. We have not yet made that system work well for specialties and particularly for emergency care. Because I'd love to be part of it but I'm an emergency doc and so I'm like insurance is important because you can come in the door and I can spend $25,000 in 10 minutes on you. I really can.
Vicki Robin:
Right. Exactly.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
There is a role for insurance.
Vicki Robin:
Totally.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
But it's messed up. For sure, the system is messed up. I can chat about this subject all day though, Vicki.
Vicki Robin:
Totally. Relational healthcare, let's just set that out as a thing. Let's make it a thing. In-home suites is a thing. It's not a thing. We just made it up, let's make it a thing. And then what would it be like? What would a relational emergency care be like? Number one, it would be that it's so inexpensive to go to your local clinics that people are not using the ER for healthcare because they don't have any other access.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah. What's interesting is the people who tend to use the ER for primary care the most are the people for whom it costs the least to do so. Medicaid patients. In Utah, the copay to go to the ER if you're on Medicaid is like $3. Of course, you're going to come in for your ear infection, whereas the person with a job, with insurance and a high deductible health plan, that visit might be $1,000, it might be $1,500 just to have someone look in your ear and write you a prescription for amoxicillin. And so, they don't come in. When you talk about ER abuse, it's a very specific subset of patients.
Vicki Robin:
But maybe that's telling us that what we need is maybe we elevate that to a success story. How would that be a success story? Not that an ER doc with your skills needs to deal with it, but we have a triage and we have this fabulous team of physicians assistants who greet you and give you a cup of tea and amoxicillin. Why isn't that the clinic?
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah.
Vicki Robin:
Why isn't the clinic, the clinic and then you have an ER department in the clinic where somebody comes in and they've just been shot and they have three holes in their body. Well, okay, they go to that one, but everything else is a welcome open door. Do you know what I mean?
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah. The answer, Vicki, is that people respond to incentives. It's the first law of economics. And people are not comfortable with that either because the truth is there will be people who choose not to get care that leads to them getting sicker, that leads to them dying because of economic reasons. And we're not comfortable with that. Even those of us in medicine, we are not comfortable with the idea of someone dying because they don't have the money for care.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
And so, we're going to give everybody care, but then we get all these weird incentives and unforeseen consequences and a broken system. Because we still haven't decided as a society, is this a right that we're going to tax everybody for and provide for everybody? Or is this a privilege and at what level is it right? It’s complicated and anyone who thinks it's not does not understand the problem.
Vicki Robin:
Totally. I hear you totally on this. And I just had an experience going to my little local clinic and I needed an MRI and it took eight days for Kaiser to affirm that. I could have been dead in eight days. They didn't know why I needed the MRI. And I realized because I'm clever, if I went on Medicare, I could have gone to the ER.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
And my hospital and my radiology group, they would've encouraged me to order an MRI on you even though maybe you could have waited a week to get it because they get paid and they get paid very well, particularly to do them emergently. So, we got all kinds of crazy incentives from this combination right and privilege and market system combined with a non-market system. It's just a mess.
Vicki Robin:
Totally. And then the other thing is, the whole part D thing is that I take one drug that I get generic. I don't need it, but I have to play the roulette of, “Oh, what happens when I need a $1,000 pill?” And it's just like, “Do I choose like I'm choosing now? Okay, fine, I'll just take the generic whatever they have at that time and maybe I'll live in, maybe I'll die.”
Vicki Robin:
So, another part of it is that the leading edge of technology is always evolving. And so, they change one little formulary for a pill and suddenly it's $1,000 because it's been altered so that the drug company can make their money when one generation back is now generic. It may work as well. You're so right. It is so crazy.
Vicki Robin:
And more power to you relational medicine. I will get in there with you, Jim, and I will be a thinking partner because I would love it to be. I would love there to be an intelligent system where there weren't perverse rewards so people have extra children because the mind is always working the system.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Right.
Vicki Robin:
How does the system encourage what we really want to encourage, which is health?
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah. In a lot of ways it is a disease care system, not a healthcare system.
Vicki Robin:
Oh, totally. No, I call it the sickness care system and I call health insurance, nest egg insurance.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
There's a lot of truth to that. Well, we are getting short on time, Vicki. It's been a true pleasure to chat with you. We've got time for maybe one more thing. You've got the ear now of 30,000 to 40,000 high income professionals, mostly doctors. What have we not talked about today that you think they should know?
Vicki Robin:
I would just say gratitude to doctors for the hard work of getting the education. People can complain about all the systems around it, but there's human beings who really worked hard. You don't get to be a doctor casually. That's a lot of work. And I really appreciate all the work that people who've chosen the medical profession have put in to care for us.
Vicki Robin:
And I think when we're talking about issues, we can throw the baby in with the caustic bathwater and I don't want to throw doctors under the bus. I had stage three colon cancer a hundred years ago, 18 years ago, and I had surgery and I was encouraged to do chemo. I didn't want to, but I decided to for a variety of reasons. I had side effects that they hadn't seen my side effects the first-time round, the first round.
Vicki Robin:
Second round, I had to be airlifted to a hospital incubated because it looked like I had poured lie down my entire system. And so, I thought that's it. I gave it a try. I satisfied all the voices within and without that said I should do it and I'm stopping.
Vicki Robin:
So, I went to my oncologist and I prayed over it and in my mind, I thanked my oncologist so profoundly for the dedication he had that brought him to that moment when he could serve me. So, it wasn't out of hatred for him, it was just what the medicine or the chemotherapy had done.
Vicki Robin:
And I went to him and I told him, I said, “I'm done.” Not like “I'm done, Goddammit.” I told him I'm done. And he said, “Oh, well, we have this other protocol that could be…” I said “No, no, no, no, no, I'm just done. I'm done. I'm done. I'm on my own.” And he turned away from me and then he turned back and he said “It's people like you who survive.” And I felt like he gave me a real blessing.
Vicki Robin:
But what I want to say is that doctors who are delivering service in our system have taken the time to educate yourselves to be able to deliver the kind of extraordinary, heroic interventions that have kept many of us alive. And I'm grateful for that.
Vicki Robin:
But also, in that moment with my doctor, I felt him come out from behind doctor to human to human and tell me, “There is another healthcare system and you're in it. It's called your Body Mind system. And I honor your choice.” Anyway, that's what occurred to me to say, because I think doctors get reified a lot and beaten up a lot.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Yeah. Well, thank you Vicki. I thank you from the audience for your kind words and I recommend to the audience, check out Vicki's book “Your Money or Your Life.” The first edition was written years ago. It's been updated since, the ideas in it are timeless and everybody should be familiar with the book and its ideas. Thank you, Vicki, for coming on the podcast.
Vicki Robin:
Yeah, thank you. And I will just mention that I also have a podcast called “What Could Possibly Go Right?”
Dr. Jim Dahle:
I love the optimism.
Vicki Robin:
Yeah. If people are entranced by the current version of Vicki. We publish every week with really amazing guests.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Thank you very much.
Vicki Robin:
Yeah.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
All right. I hope you enjoyed that discussion with Vicki. Obviously, Vicki and I have a lot we like to talk about and bat around, and these are kind of big picture ideas sometimes. But the truth is there's a lot there that's little picture ideas, little things you can do that help your personal finances, that help the way you think about money, that help your financial plan and help you implement some of those in your life. We'll have a link to her book in the show notes but it's not that hard to find. “Your Money or Your Life” is what it's called.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
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Dr. Jim Dahle:
Today, PearsonRavitz serves the medical community in all 50 states. At PearsonRavitz, they help you as a doctor safeguard your most valuable asset, your income so you can protect the most important people in your life, your family. They make human connections before they make quotes. Go to www.pearsonravitz.com/wci today to schedule your consultation with a PearsonRavitz advisor.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Don't forget about this course sale we're having right now. It's buy one course, get CFE 2021 free. You don't need a code, that's an extra $699 value. You get that at www.wcicourses.com where you can buy any of our online courses. Our Real Estate course, our Fire Your Financial Advisor course, the courses that qualify for CME that you can use your leftover CME dollars for. Any of those are available there, wcicourses.com.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
Thanks for those who are leaving us five-star reviews, telling friends about the podcast, the website, et cetera. This most recent review comes in from Omega CRNA and says, “Worth your time. I’ve been following the blog since 2012 and credit much of my knowledge and financial literacy to the White Coat Investor. His focus on helping us get a fair shake on Wall Street by empowering us with the knowledge has expanded greatly since he launched the podcast. Great job, Jim! Keep up the good work and congratulations on growing your business while helping others succeed in theirs”. It's very kind of you. We appreciate your kind words.
Dr. Jim Dahle:
For everybody else, as Vicki said earlier, you're doing awesome work. We appreciate what you're doing. Keep your head up and your shoulders back. You've got this and we can help. We'll see you next time on the White Coat Investor podcast.
Disclaimer:
The hosts of the White Coat Investor podcast are not licensed accountants, attorneys, or financial advisors. This podcast is for your entertainment and information only. It should not be considered professional or personalized financial advice. You should consult the appropriate professional for specific advice relating to your situation.
What was the title of the book you read that spoke on spaciousness in regards to living life when you’re already rich?
Here you go: https://www.whitecoatinvestor.com/what-happens-when-you-get-what-you-want/
Podcast is one part live simply and below your means, three parts blithe idealism.
Well, I think Vicki would be happy to be called an idealist.
How on earth did you make it all the way through an hour long podcast about “your money or your life” saying that phrase dozens of times and not ONCE mention the classic 1986 Nintendo 8 bit video game “The Legend of Zelda”? In the second quest several of the dungeons have a room you get locked in and a man says “Leave your life or money” and you either have to give him 50 gems or a heart container. I was waiting the whole podcast for that establishing detail and it never came. Respect the classics!
I played that game a ton as a kid. And I only vaguely remember that. Great memory from you!
Ha ha, never connected those two. I even went back and played Zelda a few years ago when I bought the Classic NES. Was son was impressed. He would have been more impressed if I had still been able to beat Super Mario Brothers. 8-3 and 8-4 are still just as tough as they were 35 years ago.
Dude, I think even my grandmother beat 8-4. She absolutely owned Bowser.
Nobody believes you. Even 8-1 was no joke.
When I left the Army I attended a class with all others on post leaving that month. The teacher warned “next month people will call you Mr or Mrs Jones not SGT or CPT.”
I panicked and reassured myself “I can still introduce myself as Dr. Jenn!!” (And as a retired doc now, unlicensed as I remind also unlicensed spouse when he offers medical advice or rx to a friend/relative, I still/ will always consider myself a doc, and tell nurse friends “you’ll always be a nurse!” when they mumble “I used to be a nurse”)
Read my 82 yo Mom (not on Medicare Advantage plan) Robin’s comments on that and she said “I heard the term ‘advantage’ and thought the company will take advantage of me”
I was really disappointed in this guest. I was, however, glad to hear they are letting rooms so they’ll have ample waiters on the island. Ms Robin was quick to discredit “industrial” medicine and agriculture. I’ll note that world population limit has historically been determined by disease, famine, and war. It was the industrialization of agriculture and medicine that allowed humans to overcome those limits.
Thanks for the feedback. We discussed your last point on the podcast and she conceded it to me.
A very thought provoking discussion. I was disappointed in the guest’s throwaway comment about people having more children to make money there at at the end. Irresponsible.
As an emergency physician living and practicing on…. Whidbey Island, this was a pretty cool and “close to home” podcast.