 Okay, thanks everyone. We're about to get started. I'm Christine Benz. I am the president of the board of the John C. Bogle Center for Financial Literacy. This is our closing session of the conference and we wanted to end on something that's a little broader than these topics that we typically noodle on and Bill Bernstein and Jonathan Clements, I think, set us up well for some of the topics that we'll be discussing in the course of this presentation. I am so thrilled to introduce to my right Jordan Grumit. He is a physician who is also a blogger and podcaster and has aligned himself with the fire community because he did achieve financial independence and has been pursuing some other interests since then. Jordan's book came to all of you as conference attendees and we wanted to make it available because I thought it was just a fabulous book and in interviewing Jordan, I had kind of a pinch me moment in that, you know, I'm like, I get morning start to pay me for this kind of stuff. This is pretty good thing I have going here. So Jordan is just has a lot of insights about his work with patients in hospice and what they have regrets about sort of their moments of clarity about what they wish they had done differently in their life and Jordan feels passionately about this idea that we need to think about this earlier in our lives to think about what we want our lives to be. So that's what I'm hoping we will discuss or we will discuss during the course of this conversation. Jordan, thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much. It is a pleasure to be here and I'm humbled by the quality of both the participants and the speakers at this conference. It's been truly exceptional. Well, thanks Jordan and I wanted to mention Karen DiMotto is here. She will be collecting your questions for Jordan. So we'll leave room for some questions at the end. But Jordan, maybe we can start out by you sharing a little bit about your personal journey. I mentioned that you're a physician, but at one point you sort of had a moment where you decided that you wanted to do something a little bit different. So my life changed drastically when I was seven years old. My father died suddenly. He was a physician and an oncologist, which means he took care of cancer patients and he had a berry aneurysm, which is an aneurysm in the brain that burst all of a sudden. And so one day I had a father and the next day I didn't and being a seven-year-old kid, I looked at everything really through the lens of it's all about me. So when my father died suddenly, unconscious of this now, I wasn't then, but I somehow felt like it was my fault. Like I had done something wrong or I wasn't good enough. And so I struggled for months, even years trying to figure out what does this mean? And eventually I came to a conclusion. I realized or I thought that I could psychically fix the problem of his death by becoming a physician like him and walking in his footsteps and doing the good deeds that he was doing. And that notion carried me. It created a sense of identity and purpose at the time I had a learning disability. So I was way below my grade level for reading. Everyone was passing me by. But somehow the certainty that I would be a physician carried me through. And I got past learning disability. I went through high school and college. I would be the guy who was at the library on Saturday morning at the University of Michigan while everyone else was at the football game. And I became a physician and it filled me up somewhat. It became very, very clear as the years went on that my vision of what being a physician was, a vision of the physician my father was, didn't fit me. It wasn't rushing in and saving people's lives all the time. It was also the paperwork and the burnout and the not sleeping. And for me realizing that this didn't feel like the purpose and identity that I thought it would, and I started searching for a way out. And I went to my accountant and I asked my accountant, well how much money do I need to retire? Because if I can retire I can leave this thing that isn't filling me up anymore. And she said $10 million. Didn't tell me why. Didn't give me any reasoning. I didn't have $10 million. So then I went to my financial advisor and he did all sorts of simulations and he didn't ask me how much I wanted to spend every year. And when we finally started talking about it I had never tracked my expenses. So he said how much do you want to spend every year? I said $300,000. I had no idea how much money I was spending. And so he did the calculations and came up with a number close to $10 million. And of course I wasn't there so I couldn't retire. And then something amazing happened. I was writing a blog about medicine. I'd been writing about what it felt like to be a doctor. And in 2014 a person sitting in this audience called me and asked me to review his book. And that's Jim Dolly. And I have to tell you I give Jim Dolly a lot of credit for where I am today. But up to this point I've also made the mistake of not including his wife, Katie Dolly, who actually is a big part of the White Coat Investor platform. And so I should be thanking her also. But I got his book and I read through it in like one sitting. I mean it took about three, four hours. I was so engrossed. And I realized that I was financially independent. His book gave me the vocabulary that my financial advisor and my accountant didn't. He helped me see a little bit of what enough truly looks like, at least when it comes to enough money. And I was elated. I could leave this job that was no longer fulfilling me. I could live the life I wanted to live. And then I had a panic attack. Literally that same day. Because I had no idea what the life I wanted to live was. The only sense of purpose and identity I ever had outside of family and getting married and have kids, the stuff we all have. But all I knew was being a doctor and to let go of that was to step away from my identity, even if it wasn't fulfilling me. And to also step away from the little wisp of connection I had with my father. So instead of throwing the baby out with a bath water and just stepping away from medicine, I was way too afraid to do that. I did what I always do when I face difficult things in life. I started writing. In this case, I started a financial blog because personal finance and fire and all that stuff is what I was enthralled with. And that eventually turned into a podcast. And when it comes to personal finance, I didn't want to talk about the how. And the reason why is we have so many people in attendance here who are better than that than me. I wanted to talk a little bit about something different. I wanted to talk about the why and what's next. So you now have a plan for making money and that money will sustain you. How does that relate to happiness? How does that relate to purpose? What do you wanna do with all this power you've gained? And so I had all these experts on my podcast, these entrepreneurs, these fire practitioners, these educators. And I found that they had some of the answers, but I found their answers were lacking. In the meantime, professionally, I'd realized that being a physician wasn't fulfilling me, so I started doing what I call the art of subtraction. I got rid of all those things that weren't fitting me because I had enough money. So I got rid of nights and weekends and I eventually jettisoned my private practice. The one thing I kept was I loved to do hospice medicine, taking care of the terminally ill and dying. I would do that even if people weren't paying me to do it. And so I knew that that was a part of my purpose. So it was something worth holding onto, but I could do that in such a way that I only spent 10 or 15 hours a week doing that. So what would I fill the rest of my time with? At this point, it was a podcast and a blog, but all those big questions that I was having with my podcast guests, all those huge conversations, I was finding the answers in a very unique place. I was finding them at the bedside with my dying patients. You see, when you're being told that you have weeks or months to live, it changes the lens in which you look at life. You are able to let go of all of those societal expectations and family expectations. For the first time in life, it gives you permission to ask what's really meaningful to me. And that's what my patients were doing. And I had this epiphany. What if we didn't have to wait till we were dying to start thinking about these things? What if we could start thinking about these things in the young and the healthy? All these people who were listening to my podcast who were trying to figure out what to do with their money and how to live a purposeful life, the dying had some of these answers. And that became the book, Taking Stock. Yeah, thanks, Jordan. That was a super helpful encapsulation. I want to go back to you talking about how being a physician was such a big part of your personal identity. And I think that's the case for a lot of us as we go through our careers. It becomes part of our identity. And that's very hard to step away from, whether you're making kind of a career pivot, maybe you don't love some aspects of what you do or maybe you're retiring, which requires you to step away from that working identity entirely. Can you talk about that? Because I think a lot of people are navigating that sense of purpose and identity that they get from work. How do you make changes to that? Well, here's the interesting thing. If that purpose and identity from work or whatever you're doing is filling you, you tend not to walk away from it. Jack Bogle, did he stop wanting to come to Boglehead's conferences? No, right? He was gonna do that until he literally couldn't anymore. The reason why we have trouble is because many of us are realizing that that purpose and identity is no longer serving us. Let's say you're getting close to retirement or you're like, I have enough money. If this thing you were doing was really filling you, you wouldn't even think about leaving it. But if you are thinking about leaving it, it means that maybe it's time to consider a pivot in your sense of purpose and identity. Maybe what was serving you before is not serving you now. The question is, will you have the courage to do that deeply difficult work of asking yourself, well, if I'm not this job anymore, if I'm not the thing that people recognize me for because it's not feeling good, what am I then? And that's the question is, are you ready to start working on those things? Are you ready to pivot? Because your psyche is telling you that you should, right? If you're finding that you've had enough of work or you've had enough of doing this thing, then you probably have to start asking, well, what comes next? And what part of myself am I not addressing? I wanted to follow up on the conversation that Bill and Jonathan had where they were talking about happiness set point. And I mentioned to Jordan that was a new term to me, but I am familiar with the hedonic treadmill and it sounds like there's a relationship. So maybe you can talk us through that. So happiness set point is key to the idea of the hedonic treadmill or hedonic adaption. This idea that we have a set point of happiness and we scuttle around and try to increase that by either buying things or maybe achievements and job titles or in my book, Taking Stock, I talk about, some of us actually try to increase happiness by saving a lot and getting a high net worth and I call that overdrive in the book. But the point of it is we tend to get to that place and then we adapt back to our baseline or we habituate. So it is very common for us to return to our baseline. Some of that is human nature, but I think when it comes to things like money, part of it is that we tend to make things like money a goal instead of a tool. And the reason that they don't fulfill us is when we get to that higher net worth or we make more money, we think it's gonna fill us up, but it doesn't because money's a tool and we want to use that tool to do the more important things. So if you don't have any idea of what your purpose and identity are, you don't know what those more important things are. So you get to that higher net worth and you ask yourself a question. You say, well, what now? And you're really happy for a moment, a week or a month, but eventually you fall back to that set point and you have to ask yourself, well, what comes next? Now I think the mistake a lot of us make is instead of doing the hard work of thinking about purpose and identity and what fills me up, we instead just double down and we say, well, a million dollars was my net worth and I got there and I'm not feeling great anymore, so let's set a new goal of two million. I think that happens or the other, the opposite happens, we get to a million dollars and we were hoping upon hope we'd get to that net worth and then we become petrified, we're gonna lose it. And that's loss aversion, right? The market's gonna go down the next day and all of a sudden we had a net worth of a million dollars but now it's only $999,000. And some of us become so afraid of losing what we gained it's actually doubly as painful but all of this focuses on the point that things like money or even achievements are not particularly good goals. Money is a great tool, so I challenge all of you, you've been so wise and savvy about your money, most of you here will die with far too much money, it's just, it's gonna happen statistically, we know this. The question is, did that money serve you to do the deeper, more important things in your life? So you have argued that one of the reasons that we tend to focus so much on money and our financial wherewithal is that it's something we can actually measure, whereas the other stuff you're talking about it's like, oh, I can't measure that, so it's a little harder to latch on to. Can you expand on that? Yeah, I mean, money is the low hanging fruit. It is measurable, we can define it, we can decide I need to make more money, I can save more, I can get a more aggressive job, I can get a promotion. It may not be easy to become financially independent or get a high net worth, but we definitely know what the right steps are and because of that it's comfortable. But I think it creates a certain amount of mirage, it confuses us and makes us think that that's the most important thing and it's an easy trap to fall into. The harder trap is to say what kind of person do I wanna be and what's purposeful in my life. To figure that out takes a lot more brainpower, a lot more time and the answers are not nearly as finite, they're ephemeral and we are very uncomfortable with that. And I think even though it seems almost a touch distant, I think we're also afraid of dying. To look at your life and start thinking about those ephemeral things like purpose and identity is to recognize that life is finite and if you don't start working on it now, one day it will be too late. We don't like to do that, it is much easier to focus on something not nearly as important like our personal finances are net worth. And so we reach for the low hanging fruit because it's comfortable. But what I always tell people like you is when a guy like me, a hospice doctor walks into your room and gives you that prognosis of six months or less, you're not gonna be thinking about your net worth, you are not gonna be thinking about whether you worked more nights or weekends, you're not gonna be thinking about whether you made it to partner or not. And God forbid I hate to say this, you're not gonna be thinking about whether you did that 30 year tips ladder. But you will be thinking about those things that you regret that you never had the energy, courage or time to do. And my guess is, as I said, 90% of you here will die with more money than you'd ever need. But I'm gonna also guess that probably 90% of you will also die with regrets. And yet we spend so much time talking about our money and so little time talking about purpose. Why is that? So let's dive into that, Jordan. You have spent a lot of time with hospice patients and you've heard their regrets. You say you've also heard some fabulous insights from some of these people. So let's talk about some of the key things you've learned from people who are in their last days or months. So to say what are the most common regrets of the dying, we can have this conversation without talking about Ronnie Ware, who was a palliative care nurse who wrote a book called The Five Regrets of the Dying. Basically she gives five things that people tend to regret and they're not specific things, it's more generalizations. But the way I'd summarize it is we regret that we never had the energy, courage or time to do those things that were important to us. And guess what? That's different for every person. Like for me, one of the big things for me was traditionally publishing a book and I'd put it off forever and ever and ever. And God forbid I'd gotten terminally ill before I'd done this. That would have been one of my regrets. But for you it might be something else. It might be building that business or pursuing that hobby or whatever it is that's important to you. It might have to do with relationships. It might be fixing that relationship that went awry. So for each of us it's different but most of us have something in our past that we'd like to do over. We have something that we'd regret. And guess what? We call it regret when you're dying because most likely we don't have the agency to fix it. What do we call regret in a young person who has tons of life left? We call it purpose. I call it the fodder for something I call the climb which is purpose and action. But it is an anchor to start deciding what kind of life we wanna live today. So the dying very much taught me that. And one other thing I think it's really important to mention is the dying also taught me that it wasn't the success or failure of that important thing. It was being in the arena and fighting the valiant fight. So in my book I talk about a patient of mine. This is not his real name. The story's been changed slightly but his name was Ernesto. And he was in his 20s and he did something that everyone around him couldn't understand. He left his high flying corporate job for a year to train and then to go climb Mount Everest. And everyone told him that he was getting out at the wrong time and he was a rising corporate star and if he left now he would miss out on all these chances and he would never make it up again. But this was deeply important to him. So Ernesto went, he left work at the age of 25. He trained and trained and trained. He went to climb Mount Everest. He made it about halfway up. The weather changed and they had to come back down. I met Ernesto in his 40s when he was dying of leukemia and all he could talk about was being up on Mount Everest. Those were the stories he regaled all the hospice nurses with. He didn't regret that he didn't succeed but he would have deeply regretted if he had never tried. So a lot of people use the excuse that I don't wanna go do this thing because I'm gonna fall on my face and boy how horrible I'll feel then. I can tell you the dying don't regret what they failed at but tried deeply. They regret what they never had the courage to try. So keep that in mind. You already win the game. If you go out and start pursuing these things it actually doesn't matter the outcome. So one other thing that you said to me, we were talking about this at one point and you mentioned that it doesn't have to be writing a book or trying to climb Mount Everest. There can be smaller things that we should tackle and pursue. It doesn't have to be that bucket list super aspirational item. Can you talk about that? Sure and I think we have to talk about the nature of purpose and admittedly this is a little bit controversial but the feedback I got from my book Taking Stock after giving several talks and going to all sorts of conferences is people said look your book talks about purpose identity and connections I've been trying to find my purpose and it's making me anxious and in fact I've given up on purpose why do people keep telling me to find my purpose? And it really made me go to the literature and think well how important is this idea of finding purpose in our life and the literature shows us that it's actually pretty darn important. People who have a sense of purpose in life live longer, are healthier and tend to be happier. On the other hand I did more research and found that people also 90% of us at some point in our life have what's called purpose anxiety. This idea of purpose is so big and scary it actually makes us feel worse and not better. So what we have here is a paradox what I call the purpose paradox and I think fundamentally why it can be the most important thing in your life as well as the most anxiety provoking is we've done a horrible job of understanding purpose in our life. It's not just one thing in my opinion it's two things and specifically and here's where the controversy comes I think one of them is good and one of them is bad. The bad type of purpose believe it or not is what I call big P purpose or that big audacious purpose like I wanna change the world I wanna make a million dollars I wanna cure cancer. Why are these things bad? Ultimately I have nothing wrong with the idea of having big goals but a lot of times we don't have as much agency. No matter how hard you try you probably will not become a billionaire. You probably will not cure cancer. So if you are setting your sense of purpose on these big audacious goals that you have very little control over you have to be the right person at the right time with the right knowledge and have a lot of luck. If you are gonna base your sense of purpose and happiness on that you're probably going to get a lot of purpose anxiety cause you're probably never gonna get there. But what if we change things around? What if instead of big audacious purpose we start looking at what I call little P purpose? This idea that purpose actually is just doing something that's deeply meaningful and important to you and doesn't have to be goal oriented. Instead what if we made purpose about doing the things that we enjoy doing in the moment and we don't care the outcome. If you change the way you start looking at purpose and look at it in that manner then instead of being scarce the way big audacious purpose is only so many people are gonna win the Nobel Prize or cure cancer or cure even one cancer. It becomes abundant. Think about all the million things we could find to do that fill us up and that we enjoy doing in the moment. And so I think we fundamentally have to look at purpose different and I'll tell you when I say this to people they look at me and say well what about impact? And certainly we can talk about impact if you want but my belief is that you actually impact more people when you pursue what I call little P purpose than you do when you pursue big audacious purpose. I wanted to ask about some of the exercises in the book. You have some very tangible things that you can go through to help arrive at conclusions about your own purpose, small P or big P. But let's talk about the life review, what that means and why and how someone would go about doing it. So I think the life review is like the greatest answer to how do I find my purpose. So what a life review is is a structured series of questions that often in hospice and palliative care we go through with our hospice patients. So the first thing we make sure is that their pains controlled and nausea is controlled and they're in a safe place and hopefully they're dying where they wanna die whether that's at home in the hospital or at a nursing home. But then a doctor or a nurse or a chaplain or social worker can sit down with them and go through a series of structured questions that helps them come to terms with their life. So it's what were those most important moments in your life? What were your biggest successes? What were your biggest failures? Who were those key relationships? What did you fail to accomplish? What are you most proud of accomplishing? What would you like to accomplish in whatever time you have left? And so by doing this, it's a really good inventory of our lives and it might be the first time that someone actually systematically looks at their life and starts asking those questions. What was important to me? And now that I'm dying, what do I regret not having the time to do? And so again, this is the idea of the life review. You can go to Google and search hospice life review and find some very detailed questionnaires. But the one second life review comes back to that most basic question. If I found out that I was gonna die in the next six months, what would I regret never having the energy, courage, or time to do? And this is the place where you start to anchor your search for purpose. And I wanna be clear here. I think we search for anchors of purpose, but we don't find purpose, we create purpose. So it's a very active pursuit, but most of us can look back at our lives and start thinking about what some of those anchors are. So the dying are very clear because they start thinking about boy, I really wish I did X or pursued Y. I encourage all of you now to do the same thing. What are some of those anchors, those things that were important to you? A life review is one way to do it. There are several other exercises you can do to start working on them. But what are some of those anchors that you can then actively build a life of purpose around? Because ultimately you're gonna have to create purpose, you don't find it. You certainly don't find it on Instagram. That's basically trying to take someone else's sense of purpose and make it your own. And that almost never makes us happy. Well, to follow up on that, I mean, I do think that the Instagram culture is contributing to this sort of live-for-today type mentality, can you talk about that? How social media and sort of trying to put out a certain persona for the public and influence some of the things that people do that maybe don't contribute to their personal well-being? I mean, I think we have a lot of societal ideas of what purpose should look like. And I hate to say it, but it's really been sold to us. Look at the marketing industry, look at the ad industry. That was before. And now look at the social media influencer industry. And basically someone is trying to sell to you what purpose is most likely to put money in their own pockets. And so all of these images that are bombarding us of people working out and wearing fabulous clothes and going to fabulous places, sounds great. And if you are searching for purpose, it's really easy to co-app someone else's sense of purpose and try to make it your own. The problem is, unless those things deeply speak to you, you may spend money on that course or take that expensive vacation, but it may not really fill you up. So big part of finding purpose is to let go of everyone else's purpose and to start looking inward at what lights you up. Because for everyone that can be slightly different. So two of us can both be lit up by the same thing. But for all the people in this room, each of us might have something different. My wife likes to buy coached purses on eBay. This is not going where you think it is. There's a problem though. When you buy a coached purse on eBay, it could be a fake. So guess what? There's this guy who you can take, when they put the purse on eBay, they take a picture of it. And a lot of times there's some numbers on the tag and they take a picture of that. There's a guy who for free, you can send him those pictures and he will authenticate it online for you and then you can go buy it and know that it's authentic. And the guy doesn't charge a thing. You know why? The guy worked for coached for 30 years, loves the company and loved what he did. That is purpose. And there's not a single other person in this room that's gonna have that purpose, but that must light this guy up. Right? You can't get that stuff off of Instagram. You can't learn about that kind of thing on Facebook. We are very unique individuals. And for one person, it might be collecting special, rare medals. For another person, it might be writing books. For another person, it might be teaching people about finance. I don't want you to think you're here and it's not bringing purpose. For many of you out there teaching finance or learning to help people with their money or teaching in general might be a big part of your purpose. So it's not like we're being frivolous by being here. But be brave enough to ask yourself what really matters to you. Not what society tells you, not what Instagram tells you. But what really lights you up? When are you your best self and what are you doing at that time? Jordan, maybe you can talk about your own path while you're still a physician trying to figure out what was your purpose. What about what you're doing now really lit you up? Maybe you can talk about that sort of journey. So I'm 50 years old and I finally have come to terms with my purpose and the reason why is I Googled my name and it said, you know, Google put some descriptive information and the first thing that came up was writer. And it filled my heart with joy at the age of 50 seeing this and the reason why is I finally felt seen by Google a search engine. What does this mean? There was always a writer in me. There was always a communicator but I had submerged that sense of purpose and identity. A, because my father died and I felt like I had to cosmically fix that. But B, because somewhere deep down inside I told myself that I could never succeed or that wasn't a profession. See, being a doctor is a profession and you can do that and you can make a lot of money and you can get awards and accolades. But I never saw a path as a writer or a communicator. That was something I did in my free time. That was a hobby. And so I pursued it as a hobby. I spent all my time being a doctor and I would fit writing a blog into that 30 minutes at lunchtime when I was grabbing something to eat or I'd wait until the kids went to bed and I was yawning because I hadn't slept in 30 hours but yet I was scrolling down that blog post without editing it and hearing the next day about how many grammatical errors I made by the public who was then commenting on it because I didn't have time or energy. I pushed these essential important things away because I somehow convinced myself that they weren't good enough to be purpose. I had to become financially independent to finally give myself permission and even then it was difficult to be the person who Google has clearly told me I should be. But what I'm realizing is maybe younger people don't need to do that. Maybe it's not all black and white but they're shades of gray. Maybe we can do jobs that we don't love to make money and yet still build in a sense of purpose into our lives. The lucky ones of us might be able to find a job that also lights us up and builds purpose but I'm not Pollyanna, I don't think it needs to be but think about how much better off we would all be if we could start building our financial future, having an idea of what purpose looks like and then incorporate it. Realizing what the trade-offs are, realizing what working those extra nights and weekends means and then deciding whether it's worthwhile or not. The truth of the matter is we've mostly been doing this blind. We've convinced ourselves that some monetary goal is what should drive us and we haven't looked past it. We haven't seen past the mirage and so I had to give myself permission to see past the mirage but the only way I could personally do it is I had to have tons of money. What I'm trying to convince younger people now is that we should actually look at purpose first and then build a financial framework around it. We're receiving some questions, here's a good one. What are some of the common or specific regrets you've heard from your hospice patients? Oh my God, I mean, they're various. I mean, they tend to focus on, I never did that thing that was important to me, I never fixed that relationship that was broken. I didn't spend enough time doing things that were important to me. It's much easier to say what they don't regret. They don't regret not working more, they don't regret not having more money. They don't regret not having enough things. I mean, it is true. Sometimes I walk into a patient's room, someone who's on hospice and they are surrounded by material things but it's almost never those material things themselves that are important. It's the meaning behind them. It's the memories that they evoke. It's that these things happen to be an outer extension of who they are on the inside. And so, again, the number of regrets are as varied as the number of people. What I find more interesting is what people don't regret. What do hospice patients say about their spiritual goals or their faith goals? Again, that's incredibly varied and it depends on the purpose. If religion and spirituality are important to you, make that part of your purpose. Engage in things which connect you to that religion or to that feeling of spirituality. I don't know if I said this clear enough in the book. Winning the game is not about getting to financial independence and it's not about purpose and it's not about identity. It's actually about connections and community and almost everything we do ends up in service of that. So, especially in the book, I talk a lot about how we find our sense of purpose. I talk a lot about how we think about identity. I talk a lot less about connections and the reason why is connections and community naturally flow from the first two. When you start doing things that deeply interest you and you get a better hold of who you are as a person, whether you mean to or not, you are gonna create communities. And again, I would go back to Jack Bogle. Jack Bogle was doing something deeply, deeply purposeful to him. He wasn't doing it necessarily, probably to create a community, but he created that community nonetheless because we are drawn to people who are intentional and authentic about doing things that light them up. We all know people like this in our world and we wanna be around them. And if you can find someone who has something that lights them up that is similar to something that lights you up, that connection will be stronger and more enduring and you will change that person and that person will change you more. And if you multiply that by tens or thousands, you find, and this comes back to this idea of impact, the difference between big pee purpose and little pee purpose. If you pursue your little pee purpose and find what lights you up, you will impact the people around you, who will impact the people around them, who will impact the people around them. And a hundred years from now, there will be thousands of people who are touched by your life and they won't even know your name. Let's talk about parents and how they should think about this when they're talking to their children, as their children are kind of picking a career path or maybe they have picked a career path, how they should counsel their children to help find the right purpose. I was inspired listening to Michelle and Kevin yesterday talk about how they really looked at their kids and looked at what lit them up and urged them to pursue those career paths, regardless of the remuneration that might be associated with them. Talk about that. Let me parrot a little bit about what I think Michelle and Kevin said. If you find your purpose that's the hard thing, you'll find a way to make the money. There are countless ways to make money. There are countless ways to maximize a purposeful job and there are countless ways to side hustle. The purpose is actually the hardest part of the equation. And again, I'm not Pollyanna about it. It is fine to say, look, I think I'm gonna live a long life and I can go into engineering and I can work really hard for 10 years and that's gonna create enough money that I can then pull back from engineering and do something that's more purposeful for me. And if you are aware of that and thoughtful about it and authentic about it, I think that's a reasonable trade-off to make as long as you know that it's a trade-off. Other people will say, you know what? Life is short, I could die tomorrow like my father did and I'm gonna do something I love today and maybe there are financial consequences. Maybe I may not be able to retire until 65 or 70, but I'm gonna enjoy every moment of the life I'm living now. These are all choices and none of them are bad. What's bad is going through life with blinders on your eyes and not even thinking about it. Have you encountered patients where that was a regret, where they felt like they were in that mode where they were just trying to maximize their earnings while they were young and they just worked so hard at the expense of everything else they might have considered important? I mean, I tell a story in the book and I refer to the person as the patriarch, but this was a gentleman who had a multi-billion dollar industry that he had created and had enough money to buy the hospital wing in which he died in. But his heirs were all busy fighting over his money and basically were just kind of counting the time until he died so they could move on. And I remember very clearly him having this sense of I did this all wrong because I'm sitting in a hospital room alone. Yes, my family members are doing the perfunctory visiting, et cetera, but they were more interested in the board meeting and who is gonna end up taking over the company. And we often talk about Maslow's pyramid, right? This idea that self-actualization is at the top and our economic needs are at the bottom, but I think we look at it all wrong. I think there are plenty of people who totally have their economic needs covered and are nowhere near self-actualization or understanding their purpose or what's important to them. And I've had patients who've died in poverty who had such loving and meaningful lives and yet they couldn't afford the basics and were worried about paying for the heat. So I get it. I get this idea that we have to have enough money so that we can even start thinking about those other things. But I think we have to flatten the pyramid a little bit and I think we have to think about all of them at the same time. I don't think you can afford to wait to think about purpose. I wanted to follow up on something Mike Piper's been talking about, this idea of how it's suboptimal for people to save and save and save and not, if they have more than enough to die with a bunch of money and give their kids who are then in their 60s, this inheritance, how it's ideal if you can try to find a way to do some lifetime giving. Do you have any reflections on that concept, Jordan? Yeah, I mean part of living a life of purpose is to connect and make connections and community with the people around you so you can wait till you die obviously to give away all your money. But what an amazing effect it has to do that while you're alive. And can talk to those people and can be involved with them and can see your money doing well in the world. So I think either is okay and I love this idea that people wanna pass on their wealth and to do good with it. But why not do that now? Like Paul Merriman in fact is doing, right? He just gave a huge amount of money to an educational institution. He will be able to live in that purpose now. And he will be able to go and teach at that institution and not only did he then give the money, but will be able to continue in a sense in his purpose as he goes and gives lectures and interacts with people and changes lives. So I think you can wait, but if you can get to that point where you're comfortable with enough with a lot of us still have trouble with that, but if you can get to that point where you're comfortable with enough, why not live some of those things out now? You have been aligned with the fire community, the financial independence retire early community. We had Brad Barrett here yesterday who was also a fire guy, but let's talk about the evolution of fire because I'm happy to see that it seems to have moved away from the RE, the retire early to be more on the financial independence piece. Can you talk about your perspective on that issue? Brad was interesting because he wanted to make sure at the beginning of his talk, he said, look, we don't really talk about fire anymore, we talk about FI, financial independence. And the reason why is the movement really has evolved quite a bit. At the beginning of this movement, I'd call that people have been talking about financial independence forever. I mean, go back hundreds of years, Benjamin Franklin, other people have been talking about financial independence, but it really caught hold in the 2000s. And at that time, a lot of people were involved in the movement were young, particularly men, often highly educated, like engineers who did not like their jobs and wanted to do what I call front loading the sacrifice. They wanted to work really hard, make a lot of money, even if they had to grind it out and not enjoy themselves and then hit a retirement date and never work again. That was kind of the beginning vision of what fire or financial independence could be, but it has evolved over the years and it's really moved much more to lifestyle design. So this idea that I can grind it out and do something I don't like and retire early and then find freedom then, or I can start building freedom in my life now. And instead of thinking of work as anathema, we can start thinking about creating the work environment we can live with and maybe prolong that period and retire later. So here's where we see these ideas like slow fire and coast fire and we can go into what all those are, but these are ways of building in the life you wanna live today instead of deferring it to some date 10 or 15 years down the road. And so I think this has been a really nice evolution to realize that we don't have to wait to some long-term plan to start pursuing purpose and doing the things we want. We can start doing those today and in fact it's okay to prolong your work life because if you can create a situation in which you really like your life and still work, then you can do that for much longer periods of time. I often like to speculate what my life would have been if I had discovered hospice at the beginning of my career. I guarantee I would have made a lot less money but I probably would have enjoyed myself more and I wouldn't have been able to retire in my 40s but I probably wouldn't have wanted to retire in my 40s because I would have been much more filled up by my job. And again, I think either way is okay as long as we're thinking about it but many young people today are opting for let's design a lifestyle that we enjoy both today and tomorrow. And I think it's a much softer, better version and Christine and I have talked a lot about this idea of the conception of work. A lot of people think work is a bad thing so fire was great because you get to escape work but the truth of the matter is I consider myself retired but I do all the things that people would call work 40 hours a week anyway. I mean, I produce and create a podcast which is a lot of work. It's more joyful for me so I don't dread it, I enjoy it. I write books. I do things that even God forbid make me money. I don't do them because they make me money. I do them because they're joyful because they feel purposeful to me. So if you imagine you're gonna work your whole life the question is what type of work do you wanna do and how important is getting paid for that work? And you can toggle between those things to design the lifestyle you want today. And so young people have been very savvy about taking what was a very stringent message about how to quote unquote fire and they're turning it into something better and I think it's fantastic. A related question is I have friends in my peer group who really love what they're doing. They love their work and it's sort of insulting we've commented among ourselves. You have people saying when will you retire? And you're like well I could retire but I really like what I'm doing. There's sort of a thing in your culture that if you hit, in this culture that if you hit a certain age it's time to go not necessarily. And that's why I love the term financial independence because financial independence says I am financially where I need to be but then you get to choose what work looks like in your life and for some people that will be continuing doing exactly what they're doing now and again in a lot of ways that's winning the game because you know what? If you take a job at the age of 22 that you love and that supports your monthly needs assuming you don't become disabled or have a problem you're pretty much financially independent at 22. I mean you're doing something that's purpose filled that makes you feel connected to the world and helps you build your sense of identity and it's paying the bills. There is no reason to ever change until you have to. Now does that mean we shouldn't save for retirement? No because we know that the way you feel at 22 might not be the way you feel at 40. At 22 I couldn't even imagine doing anything but being a doctor. At the age of 50 I only want to be a doctor about 10 hours a week but I didn't know that. So of course we should save for retirement. Of course we should build our net worth. Of course we should invest wisely but don't be afraid to love your life and if that includes the work you're doing being employed and getting paid for it that's fantastic. Well Jordan thank you so much for being here. We so appreciate your insights. Love your book. I hope everyone else enjoys this. Please join me in thanking Jordan. Thank you so much.