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At Wine Enthusiast, we bring wine to life. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. On today's show, my guest is Jeff, the happy philosopher.

Jeff is a physician who faced a significant challenge in his career. Facing burnout and depression, he had to learn new skills and new tactics to build a happier life for himself, even though he wasn't yet financially free. And on today's show, we discuss his journey and the specific action steps that he suggests you consider taking so that you can avoid depression and suicide, which faces so many people when they face career burnout.

Jeff, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. Joshua, thanks. Glad to be here. So you reached out to me and said, "Joshua, I don't know if you're giving a fair shake to all the physicians and I might have a little bit of a different take on things." And you certainly have put together your own little philosophy.

You've built your own little niche in the financial freedom physician world. Share with us a little bit about your story, especially as it relates to money and your career. Sure. So let me just give you a brief background of how I got to be a physician. It's a pretty typical path.

I grew up just regular, normal middle class, did all the sorts of things a kid did. Did well in school. School came pretty easy to me. When I got to college, I decided to become a physician. I liked science. I wanted to do something to get involved in helping people and a physician seemed like a good fit.

So I went to medical school, did a residency, did fellowship, and at the young age of, the young old age of 32, started my career as a physician. Everything up to that point was pretty routine. My first couple years of practice were busy, difficult, but about what I expected.

What I didn't expect, however, was about probably four or five years into my practice, I started noticing that I was becoming pretty burned out. And I didn't really know it was burnout at the time. I sort of diagnosed that in the rearview mirror. But I noticed that I was becoming less and less satisfied with my job as time went on.

I had less energy. I was anxious. I was stressed out, becoming cynical, less efficient, and I just couldn't recharge on my days off and on my weeks off. So I knew something had to change. My life just didn't feel right. And I kind of lashed out at the one thing that I thought it could be, and that was my job.

And at this point, I was in my mid-30s. I was really confused and in a pretty bad place because I was doing everything that society told me I was, I should do to have a happy life. And I was doing everything that I thought I should be doing. But yet I was quite miserable in many ways.

So a couple of things happened that sort of nudged me in the direction that I ended up going. Well, first of all, stepping back. When I came out of training and got into practice, in spite of being pretty frugal and careful with my spending, and we funded retirement accounts and did all that, I still had a net worth of about zero coming out of training.

Welcome to the world of six-figure student loans, right? Right. So I thought I was doing pretty well, and by comparison, I was. But I had a net worth of about zero, that the student loans about zeroed out with the retirement savings and everything I had done up to that point.

In 2008 or 2009, whenever the middle of the financial crisis, that was a pretty stressful period, as I sort of watched 25% of my net worth just kind of evaporate there. And at the same time, I was burning out. I had a couple of events in my life, a couple of people that either died or had near-death experiences that were around my age or a little bit older.

And so I kind of had a midlife crisis. I was not happy with the way things were going, and I decided to look into early retirement. That was my solution. So I went on the internet and started searching early retirement. And as you know, there wasn't a whole lot back in five years ago or so.

There just wasn't a whole lot out there when you typed in early retirement into the search engines. You got the big brokerage sites giving you advice on how to retire at age 55 or 60. And that was not what I had in mind. So I typed in extremely early retirement into the search engine.

And I know you know what came out of that. So I stumbled onto early retirement extreme, which is Jacob's site. And that was my first glimpse into sort of something that I had never even given thought. Let me guess. You walked into the kitchen, said to your wife, and said, "I'm going to live on $7,000 a year.

Forget this physician lifestyle thing." That's not exactly how it went. So everything about the website was just awesome. Even the website was extreme. I mean, it's like two colors. There's no fancy graphics. It looks like it was coded by Jacob himself. Just awesome. And I absorbed the whole thing and read his like, I think he had a 30-day plan.

And after I was done, I was thinking, "There's no way I would be able to sell this to my family. I'm just, this is crazy." And I don't even think I could sell it to myself. It was pretty radical compared to the lifestyle I was living. Even though by comparison to my peers, I was still living a pretty reserved, frugal lifestyle.

So I was going through his site and I saw a guest post by a ridiculous sounding guy named Mr. Money Mustache and wandered over to his site. And his site is quite popular and was a lot more accessible. It just made a lot more sense to me. It was closer to what our lifestyle was.

And I started going through all of the financial articles and financial independence, early retirement blogs and pretty quickly realized that it wouldn't be difficult to retire early with such a high income and a frugal lifestyle. So after researching this for a few weeks or a few months, I can't remember exactly, and having a particularly stressful, horrible week or weekend of call, I kind of had a breaking point.

I went to my wife and I said, "I'm retiring in five years. I'll give five more years to my career and I think we'll have enough money." And I went through the math and just said, "That's all I can promise." And how many years ago was that now? That was five years ago.

And so now you've walked into your boss last week and you said, "That's it. I'm done. I'm quitting." Right? That was the plan? No. So what'd you do? So after I made that conscious decision, actually my life, it was very relieving to make that decision. I felt good about it.

But after really sort of thinking about it for a while, I started diving into some deeper philosophical topics and started asking myself what I really wanted. Was this what I really wanted? Did I want to retire in my early 40s? What would I do? And there's a lot of literature out there and I think you've probably even interviewed people on your podcast, I know you have, that talk about retiring to something rather than retiring away from a job that you're not satisfied with.

And there were things that I did enjoy about medicine, about my job. So I ended up looking into engineering a job share, part-time work. And after about three years, I made that happen and that's what I've been doing ever since. So you're still in medicine, but now instead of working full-time, you work how many hours?

How many days a week? I work half-time, basically. So a job share and we split up a full-time equivalent. And how do you actually set this up? What was the arrangement that you found in the field of medicine? So I'm in radiology. And that's where you're looking at x-rays?

Right. X-rays, CT scan, MRI, all that stuff. So some specialties in medicine lend themselves a little bit better to job share or part-time work and radiology happens to be one of those. So there was a situation where somebody else who complimented my skill set also wanted to be part-time and we just took my full-time position and now we share it.

And was this other physician was facing a similar thing or how did you find them? She was working, so she was doing a teleradiology job, which basically you just kind of work from home. It's shift work. You work typically for large companies that are covering other radiology practices. And it was a job that she really wasn't very satisfied in and she was looking for a more traditional radiology practice.

So it was just kind of a unique situation. It was a good fit. How common is burnout for physicians? So burnout is actually incredibly common for physicians. If you look at the most recent statistics, I think it's about at any time 50% of physicians are exhibiting some symptom of burnout.

And just anecdotally, I think that every physician is on the verge of burnout or frankly burned out at some point in their career. So it is a big problem. It seems to be increasing over the last five or ten years as medicine has changed. I think some of the structural changes to medicine have contributed to physician burnout.

So it's a pretty big problem. And one of the problems with talking about physician burnout is it seems like such a first world problem. I mean you have a very high income, a great stable job, but yet you have physicians that are burning out. And it's easy to sort of reduce it to, well, you know, you're very lucky to have this job and you shouldn't be burning out and just kind of suck it up.

But having gone through it, those sort of rational discussions, they don't make it any better. So I can understand why they wouldn't make it, rational discussions wouldn't make it better. But what I don't fully understand is the causative factors. Because people have been doctors for a long time and you're right.

It's very time we say suck it up, people have been doctors for a long time and you ought to be thankful to have a nice fancy cushy job. What is it, what are the changes that are happening or what's going on or what has changed that's led to this endemic sense of burnout that you're describing?

So I mean that's a great question and I'm not sure I have all the answers, but I'll certainly try to address it. So when you talk to, when you survey physicians, some of the big reasons are loss of autonomy, increasing caseloads, you know, just being busier and more administrative tasks.

So loss of control, going faster and spending less time actually healing people and doing medicine and more time doing administrative tasks. I think those are probably the three big things. Some physicians, maybe it's about loss of income and reimbursement, but I don't really believe that. Just anecdotally and talking to people.

I think it's something people worry about, but I don't think it's real because I've noticed that a five to tenfold difference in my income from medical school to private practice didn't really make a difference in my level of happiness at all. That's really hard for a lot of people to believe.

I know. It was hard to convince myself that it was real. Tell me more. So, I mean, some of the happiest times of my life were in medical school when I was living off of almost nothing. Medical school is very demanding and most people don't have an income. Your only income is student loans.

And so you're living like a college student. I didn't have much, but I was happy. I mean, that was a great time. And then residency, you make a little bit of money in residency enough to live a very comfortable middle class lifestyle. And then when you get out into the real world of practicing medicine, your income goes up substantially.

So physicians get to experience a wide range of income in a very short period of time. And I think for some people that the money is important, but for me, it never seemed to be that correlated with happiness. And if you look at the happiness/money literature out there, you know, above a certain level, above a certain amount of needs, of basic needs being met, you really don't increase happiness.

You know, when you look at people and study them and do survey data, I think, you know, looking at all the studies I read at about 70 or $80,000 a year of spending, you really don't buy a lot of happiness after that. You may actually be buying unhappiness in terms of complexity and obligations and such.

What was the thing that you bought or the thing that you did or what was the financial transaction that when you were not earning much, you thought, "Well, this will be great." And then you got there and you experienced it and you found out that it didn't do much for you.

What stands out in your mind? You're talking about something that I bought like in… Yeah. Did you buy a BMW? Did you go on a fancy trip or something or do something that you thought, "This is going to be great." And then you went on and realized, "Wait a second.

This is not all that great." You know, nothing is jumping out at me. But I do, you know, I know people that as soon as they got that signing bonus for their first job went out and leased a new BMW, for instance. But I've never been that kind of guy.

I mean, I've always been pretty careful with my money, even as a kid. So, but I guess in retrospect, yes. I mean, just recently, and I even wrote a blog post about this, we went through this massive decluttering sort of minimalism phase. And that seems to be all the rage these days, you know, getting down to like a suitcase full of possessions and traveling the world.

We didn't quite go to that level. But we went through everything and got rid of, you know, maybe a third to a half of our stuff. And thinking of all the money I spent on that stuff and how little of it actually brought me any happiness and what such a large percentage of it I never really even used.

So I guess in that respect, I was a typical consumer, although not to the level that I could have been with my income. And taking van loads full of my possessions to charities and just giving them away made me realize how much money I wasted on things that just brought me no happiness.

So it was a good exercise. And I can't think of any one thing, but it's just sort of that experience and looking at all of the things, all the little things. Now that you're working in this part-time job share arrangement, do you perceive that this is a lifestyle that you can sustain for the long-term future?

Absolutely. For me, it was a great change. I don't know that this would be the number one thing that burnt out physicians should do. I think that it's going to be a small percentage of people that this is going to be the right decision for. It'll be very situation dependent.

So after I went through the financial side of things, as I said, I started going into the philosophical side of things and really trying to figure out what I wanted. And really what I wanted more than anything was more time with myself and my family and more freedom. So that's what I bought by getting rid of half of my income.

I bought that freedom in my life. And it does feel a lot more sustainable for me. I have a lot more energy for work. I'm a lot more excited about doing it now that I have cut back. How have you filled those hours that you were formerly working? You know, the time just seems to fill itself.

People ask me that all the time. And I just, I, so for my personality, I enjoy the space between things just as much as I do the things. So I know there's some people that just love to go, go, go. But I like to just go on walks, go hiking, go running.

I like to read. I like to write. So mainly, mainly those, those little things. Being, being with my family, I like to have more days that I am here when my kids get home from school. Go on field trips if I want to volunteer at the schools, things like that.

So at this point in time, financially, how have you adjusted your financial goals to fit your new reality? So I really haven't adjusted much of anything. I haven't changed my, my spending patterns. They've, they've drifted down to a level that are, that are comfortable for me. And in spite of still working half time, I still have an abundance of time.

An abundance of income to cover my, our, to cover our needs. So really the only thing that going part time changed for me is lengthening my, my career and, you know, working towards the, the number, whatever that, wherever, wherever I hit that and having a much more sustainable path going forward.

I don't, I don't really worry about it too much anymore. I don't think about it. Do you still care about medicine? I do, but I have a different, a different attitude towards it. Tell me more. So I enjoy what I'm doing, but I look at it more, more now as simply an activity that I, that I trade my time to do for money in return rather than a calling or my, one of the big problems I think physicians have and, and actually let me take a tangent.

So one of the things that really affected me happened a couple years ago. A good friend of mine from, from medical school died by suicide and he, he was a physician. We were about the same age and it got me really thinking about the topic and I started really diving into it and physicians in addition to having a very high rate of burnout have a very high rate of suicide.

They commit suicide or die of suicide at about a rate two times the national average. And it's really quite amazing when you think about it. It is, absolutely. And it's, it's, it's just horrible and tragic. And I think part of the problem is that we get to a point in our career as a physician where we, we maybe hit burnout.

Maybe we start to get less satisfied with our work. Maybe the administrative realities of practicing medicine and the, the monotony of it and the, the, it starts to wear us down. But our ego is so tied up in our career. Being a doctor is very different than being, you know, than any other job I've had.

So for instance, when I was, you know, waiting tables or, or, or bagging groceries or it was even a door to door salesman for a while in college, when, when I walked away at the end of my shift, I didn't identify at all with being whatever I was doing at my job.

I just, I became, became me again. But physicians and ego are tied up. You become a physician and you're always a doctor even when you're not working. So I think that tying your ego to a career like this and having it become you, you become the physician, it can be destructive to you when, when things fall apart and they don't go well.

And I think that's one of the big reasons why, why suicide and burnout are so high. So I think subconsciously I just kind of untied my ego to my career. And I think that in some ways it's just made me a better physician because I can go just do my job and not, not be so tied up in, in, in being a physician.

I can just go be the same guy I am sitting here talking to you and just go do my job and be excited about it and do it well. So I don't, I don't know if that answered your question. Meandered a little bit there, sorry. You've written your advice for physicians, not, not who are necessarily seeking, who are in the most acute stages, having suicidal thoughts, things like that.

But you said you've laid out five options for people who are in similar situation to where you once were, should consider. Walk us through those five options and five ideas of advice. Okay, sure. Yeah, I think that's a good, I don't know if it's the only framework, but it's, it's the framework that I, that I like.

And as, as I go through the five, really it's only three, but I divide them out. There are kind of three things that you can do. And this isn't just physicians. This is anybody really that's, that's burned out with their career. You can change yourself and work on yourself.

You can find another job where you can change the job you're in. That's, those are really the only three things. But I've sort of have a framework of about five things that I, that I think are helpful. So number one is to just work on yourself. So if you're in a high stress, high burnout career, it makes sense to make yourself the best version of you in order to withstand the rigors of that career.

And it's usually the simplest and easiest because it requires no one to change, but you, you don't have to change anyone else's mind or, or, or change their attitudes. So the things that have, that have helped me and the things that I've read about include just mindfulness and meditation and that those sort of practices, time management skills, becoming effective at saying no.

That's a very important thing for a physician to, to learn how to do. We tend to want to do everything and that is a recipe for disaster and burnout. We need to learn to say no and to delegate, delegate things. Becoming better at using EMR, electronic medical records, getting plenty of sleep, exercising, eating better, getting rid of addictive substances from our lives.

We can do all of these things and in order to help us and we should probably be doing these regardless of the other four things. I would say a good book that I read on this and probably has a lot more information than I could ever give you in a podcast.

It's called Stop Physician Burnout by a guy named Dyke Drummond. He's an MD. He burned out. He now coaches and the book is great. His website is great called the happymd.com and has a lot of tactical information about these little things you can do. So for me, this, this was a big part of what I did.

I worked on myself and even before I went part time, I had fixed a lot of the structural problems with just my attitude and having more gratitude for my life and so definitely everybody should, should do number one, work on themselves. Getting into some of the other things, number two is just to change your job.

Sometimes the job is just not the right one for you. It's not a good fit. It's less easy than working on yourself because it can be pretty disruptive to your life. You may have to move. You may live in a community that doesn't have a lot of opportunities, especially if you're a highly trained subspecialist.

You know, there may not be more than one job for a neurosurgeon in a geographical area, for instance. This also includes creating your own job though. There's another doc that I'll mention here. Her name is Pamela Weibel and her website is idealmedicalcare.org and she is sort of a pioneer in addition to talking a lot and writing a lot about physician suicide.

She is a big advocate of creating your own, she calls it the ideal practice. So finding a practice that really fits you and that you'll be happy with. The third thing, and this is probably the thing that I'm least knowledgeable about, but if you decided that you've done all you can with yourself, you don't want to change your job or you can't for whatever reason, family reasons, etc.

You can work on the system that you're in. Now the problem with this is that it requires other people to be cooperative. So in order to change a system, you have to get administrators on board, you have to get support staff on board, you may have to go through a process.

And physicians and administrators speak a different language. We oftentimes are very ineffective at communicating with each other and this is just, I think, how we were trained, the educational system we went in. So this area would require a skill set that I don't have. And many physicians probably don't have the skill set and this is a good, good, changing the system is something that may require coaching or outside consultation really to be effective.

The fourth one is what I did and that's a part-time or job share situation. Sometimes, and for me this is true, it's simply about having more time and more space in your life. And if you're over all satisfied with your job and you just want more time, this is probably the best option.

Certain specialties lend themselves very well to this, certain specialties do not lend themselves well. So a lot of primary care where you have a set amount of patients and they expect to see you when they come in for an office visit, it's a lot harder to do shift work or job share in that scenario.

But it can be done. This is pretty destructive to your finances. So you have to be willing to be frugal and live a life of reduced consumption and reduced spending to go down this path. It doesn't have to be that bad though. We're talking for some people about going from, I don't know, 400 grand a year to 150.

It doesn't have to be that bad. That's true. That's absolutely true. But a lot of times people are, especially in like a primary care where they're starting out at a lower, if they're starting out at 150 or 180 and going to 70 or 80, that may be, it all depends on the level of spending that you're starting at.

So I know people that, you know, these financial independence bloggers, they're living off of $25,000 a year and they feel like they couldn't spend another dollar if they had to because they have abundance. And then I know people making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, $500,000, $600,000 a year that never have enough.

And I think it's worth going, it's worth cutting back on your spending and seeing if you can live off that before you take the plunge or else you just may not, it may not be for you. You may be extremely unhappy. I don't see how somebody, you know, making half a million dollars a year could not cut in half and be completely happy.

But everybody's different. It requires a philosophical change. That's the difference. If you, many people have a philosophy of hedonism where the goal is pleasure in all of its variations and all of its forms. In that context, extra expenditures mean additional pleasure. That has to be replaced with a completely different philosophy.

There would be a few options that we could go through that would replace it. But ultimately, to put it simplistically and to keep the conversation fairly mainstream, you would have to go to, you have to have some sort of philosophy that doesn't have hedonism as its primary core goal.

And that runs absolutely counter to the mainstream US-American culture around us. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And the, and I think this is what's so great about like Pete's blog, Mr. Money Mustache, is that he, he talks about these issues in a way that's very accessible to people. And, you know, guys like JD Roth and, you know, I write about this stuff too.

I'm trying. The framing it in terms of freedom, I think, is something that people understand. People understand freedom. Nobody wants less freedom. So when, instead of framing something as deprivation or cutting back, I look at it as buying my freedom. And I think that, I think that's the sometimes the easiest way to go from hedonism to frugality is to think about it that way.

You are being hedonistic, but it's not about pleasure or materialism. It's about your freedom. You're being very selfish about buying your freedom, if that makes sense. Yeah, absolutely. So I cut you off on number four. What's number five? Right. So number five is the nuclear option, and that's just to quit medicine.

And I, this would be something that hopefully not many physicians are going to do. But, you know, I've met some physicians that they just, they're just not a good fit for medicine. They don't enjoy what they're doing. And the problem is that there is such a fixed high cost in terms of money and time to become a physician that you get so far down this path, you know, after training that you're 30 years, you're in your early 30s, you have a ton of debt, and you've got one skill.

And usually you can't even pick which part of medicine you're going to work in. You've got, you're very specialized. So you're pigeonholed into a very specific career. And if you don't like it, it can be quite distressing. This is probably the most destructive to the ego and the finances, unless you have some other skill set or you can leverage being a physician to become something else.

And I know people who've done this, who've gone into consulting with like biotech companies or have gone into the financial planning or financial space. But I only know a couple people and I don't think that a lot of people end up doing that. But that's certainly a possibility. Let me run an idea past you and I'm interested to know if, I'm interested to know what you think.

I'm relatively ignorant with regard to the screening that medical schools do to determine whether or not the field of medicine would be an ideal career choice for varying personalities. But it seems to me like one of the contributing factors is the young age at which many people pursue medicine and the absence of life experience that they have to identify whether or not it might be a good fit.

And I'll give a couple of examples. There are two friends of mine. One of them is presently in medical school in his mid-30s. The other one was a peer of mine who went through medical school under the ideal, excuse me, under the standard bright academic track. And so the first option, my peer, and this is probably indicative of several of my friends who've gone into medicine.

They seem to be, number one, academically extremely capable. You have to be academically capable in order to pass the vetting process to get into medical school. So very, very focused, work hard in high school, good grades, good student, move into college, pursue the biology track or related to biology probably in some way because of the focus and intense academic focus.

My observation is that many of these students, their primary expertise and skill is in academics and that limits some of their extracurricular activities, some of their extracurricular exposure. They just don't have, they're not working a lot of times in varying jobs. They're just focused on academics. Perhaps they come more likely, my guess.

I could be wrong. I'm just guessing. It's more likely to come from an affluent family who's supporting them financially. Just focus on your studies. I've watched a few of my friends go right in, get their undergraduate degree, get the biology degree, move into med school, right through med school, right into specialty, right into residency, right into all the stuff you guys do to get the highly specialized.

And here you come out of school at 30 and the very first thing is that highly placed specialty, but the number of, the amount of exposure to different fields, to different things. I remember talking with several of my friends who've gone through med school. They're trying to figure out what they want to specialize in.

So they're interning here, interning there, but it's all related to medicine. And it seems to me like a lot of physicians jump into that path because they have the skills for it and they're academically and intellectually suited for it without really getting a chance to test drive it or without being aware of all of their other options.

Now, if I compare that to a friend of mine who never had any interest in pursuing medicine, has worked at, supported himself at different things, became an EMT, was a firefighter, working with various ambulance companies, et cetera. And then later this particular person recognized they really wanted to be a doctor and they wanted to be an emergency room physician that had been proven out through years of focus and now this person in their mid-30s is putting their way through med school to become an emergency room physician.

I am much more confident that that career is going to be a perfect fit for this particular friend because they've test driven it for years. They know of this interest. It's an interest that has survived for a long time and I think their career will be long and appropriate for them.

And I feel like we do, especially physicians, a disservice because we do college students in the US American system a disservice because we send them right into school and then they come out and you're starting and just trying to figure things out at 22, 25 years old. Whereas physicians even worse except there's another decade of school on top.

And we know that a lot of people, very few of us, use our college degrees in our current careers in any capacity. And so it's a little easier though if you just switch from, "I got a four-year undergraduate degree in this study over here and I'm just switching to something else." That's less costly than it is as you described if you've invested 15 years.

Do you think it would help if we approach the career process a little bit differently? Yeah, I mean those are really good observations, Joshua. And I agree with a lot of what you said and a lot of the sentiment. For sure, one big problem with medicine and actually a lot of careers is that you're forced to make decisions about things before you really have all the information.

And it's hard to get all the information. It's very difficult to know what it's like to be a physician without actually becoming and being a physician. And I think some careers are just like this, like a firefighter or police officer or a soldier. You know, you can intellectualize it and imagine what it will be like.

But when you start getting into these very stressful kind of different careers, it's hard to know. And certainly, I think like your friend you described who was an EMT and then decided to become an ER doc. I mean, that's a great way to become a doc, I think, because you know exactly what you're going to get.

You've worked around the system. You know what to expect. And for me, I know that every step of the way was different than I thought it was going to be. That being said, I think there's a lot of people, in fact, maybe most of my medical school classmates, I mean, they just knew that they wanted to be a doctor.

And even in practice, they couldn't imagine being anything else. The big problem I see with careers that require so much upfront investment is, number one, you don't know how the industry is going to change. I mean, medicine has changed a lot in the last 20 or 30 years. It's really, if you talk to docs in their 50s and 60s, medicine, practicing medicine is very, very different now than it was.

So you don't really, you can't really predict how the industry is going to change. And you can't predict how you're going to change. My attitudes and philosophies and things that are important to me have changed a lot in the last 10 to 15 years. Not the core things, but a lot of the things that I thought, like I said earlier, would make me happy ended up not making me happy.

So I don't have a great solution for that other than the fact that knowing yourself and knowing, trying to figure out what you want from life, knowing your personality, whether you're introverted or extroverted or what your tendencies are, knowing that stuff as early as possible in life, I think, can help guide you into a career that will be appropriate.

And maybe interning or shadowing docs early on as high school students or in college is a good idea. Hard to think, hard to implement on a large scale. I think a few people do that, but it would require big structural changes, I think, to really have it make a big impact.

And it's across our society. My own anecdotal experience corroborates what you said, that many of my friends who've gone the medical route, they always knew that was what they wanted to do. They were very focused. They knew that this is going to be what I'm going to pursue. And sometimes you got to do that.

You got to follow it, of course. But it is daunting to me when you look at, exactly as you described, the costs that are involved. And on the concept of knowing yourself, there's a philosophical distinction. And even though your blog is called The Happy Philosopher, I'm trying to rein in myself in and not pursue these philosophical rabbit trails that we could.

But first, I'm not philosophically aligned with the idea that introspection is the – that truth is not found internally, which is a major philosophical divide. But the biggest practical application is just simply without a diversity of life experience, you don't have anything to know. You can't without – I mean, I can't say it any better.

Without a diversity of life experience, you don't have anything to draw on. The most boring people in the world are those who've done just one thing and pursued one thing because they – and they can talk about their unique specialty. The most interesting people in the world – think of a Dos Equis commercial.

The most interesting man in the world was a man of diverse experience. And I'm judging by my own experience here, but I can't imagine knowing who I am, knowing the things that are a fit for me, and having any confidence in that if I didn't have a broad and diverse experience.

I know we can't create a rule for society, but I see it as a major challenge that the medical field faces with such a focus of – such a long-term focus at the beginning of a career without a broad and unique and diverse life experience. It's a tough career fit.

Yeah, I actually agree with that. I think that's what caused me to introspect and try to figure things out and look around and scratch my head in my mid-30s. I'm not sure knowing what I know now if I would have chosen medicine as a career. I don't have regrets about it.

I'm not unhappy. I mean, I'm really the happiest guy usually within arm's reach of myself. I'm a very happy guy. I don't have regrets, but I'm not sure had I had more knowledge when I was in high school and college that I would have chosen the path that I did.

I mean, it's a paradox. It is. I'm glad I am where I am because all of my – who I am today is a result of everything that's happened to me. And I wouldn't change anything. I mean, because I love my life right now. So I'm glad that I went down that path.

But I guess for my clone in another universe, maybe I would advise him to do something different. I don't know. We're going to start talking about the multiverse next. The reality is two roads diverge in a road – two roads diverge in a wood and we took one of the roads and you can never go back to that point in the past.

We can only go forward. Have you seen being connected to the practice of medicine and also paying attention to finance, have you observed anything about physician financial behavior that for you stands out? I've got some opinions on the subject but coming from the financial planner background is – I'm probably more biased than as a physician.

But what do you think about the way physicians handle money? I think physicians are some of the worst people at handling money. Why? So there's a bunch of reasons. So first of all, doctors are really smart like intellectually. But they're not smarter than anybody else with money. They just have more of it to make mistakes with.

And when – like I alluded to earlier, in a very short period of time, you go from being broke to being middle class to being rich for all practical purposes. And you have this length of training, medical school and residency which is anywhere maybe 7 to 12 plus years where you're working hard, you're not making a lot of money, you're working incredible hours and it's all about sacrifice and delayed gratification.

And then when you get out of training, there is all this pent up demand for consumption because you deserve it and you're fatigued of delayed gratification. So a lot of docs come out of training and just go crazy which is the absolute worst thing to do. The best thing to do is to come out of training and slowly ramp up your lifestyle or keep it how you had it as a resident and kind of grow into it.

But a lot of docs don't do that. So that's the number one thing. Number two, and this goes back to kind of basic financial stuff, is when you look at your biggest financial expense, for most people it's their house. And physicians for, in my experience, most of them buy way too much house.

They just, they love buying land and building houses and spending a lot of money on housing. And that can, so that can be pretty, pretty destructive. The, also buying vacation homes, this seems to be a very popular thing for physicians to do and that's probably never a good financial decision.

I've seen it work out a couple times where they've used them more as rental properties. So going crazy coming out of residency, buying way too big of a house. You know, this is not unique to physicians but divorce is a financial weapon of mass destruction. I mean, it is just, it's horrible for finances.

Even the best planned divorces are incredibly destructive. So choosing a spouse who aligns with you on your major philosophical issues like money and things like that is very important. Do you know anything about the divorce rate among physicians as compared to other professions? I don't, actually. I don't either.

I'm just, I was just curious. I don't have any insight into it. My hypothesis would be that it would be perhaps slightly higher than some others simply due to the stresses of the lifestyle and the stresses of the job. I could be mistaken in that I have no data to support that.

But it certainly seems like it can be a very difficult, especially when you're a physician who's on call, things like that. It can be very taxing on relationships. Yeah, it is. I mean, it can be. I'm going to look that up after this podcast because that's an interesting question and I don't know the answer to it.

But yeah, divorce is not good for finances. It seems to me the biggest challenge of being a physician and what you described about time at house or divorce or vacation homes or any expenses associated with lifestyle is the problem of your reference group. And most, we all have a reference group.

We all hang out with people and our lives are going to reflect other people's, our lives are going to reflect the people with whom we associate predominantly. And as a physician, your group of association, physicians just like financial planners, I understand other financial planners better than people who aren't financial planners are.

Physicians are going to understand each other more than people who are not physicians. You're going to be able to discuss the normal daily challenges of life. And how that impacts financially is if you're accustomed to going on snow ski vacations, you can't just talk to everybody at your workplace and say, "Hey, by the way, would you like to go to Utah this year or go to Colorado?" And yeah, to take the family, it's going to be 20 grand, but that's all right.

We're going to do it. You can only do that with your certain reference group. And what happens is you wind up, most of us, we don't wind up intentionally choosing our peer group. We wind up in a peer group or a reference group just simply after the fact by happenstance.

It's where we've landed. And then we unconsciously start to adopt the habits and practices of our peers. It's harder to say no when you are invited on the snow ski trip than it is if – it's just harder to say no. And so when you add on to it, like you talked about of the intelligence, the status, the ego, and I'm not being disparaging here, just recognizing that you are a different type of person.

You also have the need to maintain impressions. And we want to be with people who are like us. So all those things can very easily lead to a high consumption lifestyle. And unless you're very proactive about consciously choosing something different and unless you have the self-confidence to be the weird one, it can lead to a high consumption lifestyle.

Yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, I think that summarizes a lot of the problems in not just positions, but a lot of high income earners is that the human mind really is pretty poor at absolutes. Like we don't know whether we're happy or comfortable or doing well in a vacuum.

We have to look around and who do we look around to? We look around to our peers. So if all of our friends are driving $50,000 luxury SUVs and going on five trips to Europe every year and living in 4,000 square foot homes, that's our norm. We're going to associate with that group of people.

So I think it is very important to stay grounded and to not get sucked into that. And unless it's something that's your thing, fine. But if your goal is financial independence, then those two things are not compatible. Right. And I want to point out two additional thoughts on that because I think it's important.

First, to affirm what you said, it's not just positions. It's the same in financial advice. I can't tell you how many financial advisors, and there's tons of people listening to this show, who this will happen to. So many financial advisors come into the business of financial advice with a practice of frugality because they recognize that your expenses need to be lower than your income.

So they practice frugality. They get pretty good at handling their own money. They say, "I'll go be a financial advisor. I'll help other people handle their own money." And then they come into the world of financial advice. They begin from frugality. But over time, as they start to adjust, they start to feel weird and start to feel weird and say, "Wait a second.

I'm not so sure." I could list several stories. I won't to protect the guilty, but I could list several friends of mine who I've watched systematically come into the business being very frugal and wanting to help people and preach frugality. And a few years later, they're justifying to me, because they have a guilty conscience, not that there's anything wrong with a BMW, but they're justifying to me that buying a BMW is an intelligent financial decision.

Now, ignore for the moment the importance of signaling theory and all of that of trying to project a success. They are not thinking about that. They're telling me, "Oh, it's a good buy," blah, blah, blah, and they're justifying to themselves. And I recognize it because I almost did it myself.

And I always thought I was pretty inoculated against it, and I almost did it. So it's very, very difficult to do it. The second major thing, and this affects financial advisors, it affects physicians, it affects attorneys, it affects high-income professions when you have this peer group. It's important to point out that some people can easily afford five trips to Europe every year and a brand-new BMW every year and a brand-new luxury SUV every year.

Some people can easily afford that while still becoming massively wealthy because of a high income. If you are a trial attorney and you're making $5 million a year, a $150,000 vehicle is meaningless in your financial life. But the problem is that trial attorney is sitting with other attorneys who go by the – who have – their business card says attorney, but they're not making $5 million a year.

They're making $350,000. And now all of a sudden, they feel that pressure of the peer group, but they don't have the same financial opportunities. The neurosurgeon is in a very different financial state than the primary care physician. And so you don't actually know who can afford it and who can't.

Same thing in financial advice. Remember, 20% of the financial advisors are going to make 80% of the money. 4% of the financial advisors are going to make 60% of the money. So you walk into a financial advice office and the guy sitting on one office is making $2 million a year and the guy sitting in the next office is making $130,000.

But yet the reference group is next door and that's one of the – is the guy in the office next door. That's one of the reasons why it's so destructive because you start to add that gentle social pressure of, "Hey, you bought a round of drinks. I'll buy a round of drinks.

Hey, we'll go out to the fancy place and maybe you're the – I was here. I was this guy." You don't really particularly want to be the – go out to the fancy dinner but now you've got the social pressure to accept the invitation and you don't want to look like the cheapskate.

You don't want to look like you can't afford it, blah, blah, blah. And now you wind up spending $200 on a night out when you prefer to do something different. So it takes a lot of self-confidence to stand against the tide. It takes a lot of clarity of your own goals and vision and self-confidence to come against these social forces.

You're absolutely right. I mean, that's spot on. Life is so easy when it's on paper. But we unfortunately have to live our lives in the real world. So things that are rational and make sense, once we start really living it, it breaks down a little. And yeah, you're absolutely right.

I mean, our reference group really influences us. And that's what was so great for me and I think for a lot of people. They get a lot out of the Financial Independence, Financial Freedom blogosphere and the podcast, your podcast and others that expose other people that are doing things that are totally different.

So we can read about these and we can hear about these people and we can use those people to associate with. You know, even though they're not our peers that live down the street, it was very comforting to me to read all of these Financial Independence blogs and Mr.

Money Mustache and all the blogs that I'm sure everybody reads who's interested in frugality. You get involved in that community and that becomes your reference point. It becomes a counterbalance to the consumerism and just the craziness that we're all exposed to. So yeah, I mean, your podcast is great, Joshua.

And you get a lot of these people on, a lot of diverse opinions about things. And you open up a lot of rabbit holes to explore and go down. I appreciate that. Good, good. I love your podcast. So you've been blogging for a little while now and I think I had at least some influence on your beginning your website to some degree, thehappyphilosopher.com.

Tell me what you've learned since starting to put your ideas and content out there into the world of the internet. Yeah, real quick, just to let people know. Yeah, I did write a blog post where I referenced to you how a podcast can change the world. And it was an interview you did, who was that guy?

JB Glassner, was that his name? Mm-hmm. Yeah, MorningCoach, the morningcoach.com. Yeah, and I was just listening to the podcast and just kind of walking. I was on a walk actually and he told the story about how his writing and his online presence had really impacted somebody and made a huge difference in their life.

And I thought to myself, I mean, I actually stopped. I stopped the podcast, I sat down, I had to absorb it, listen to the story again. And I said, "You know, I think everybody should do this. Everybody should tell their story," or as I refer to it as just downloading my brain on the internet and see if somebody can make use of it.

Blogging has been pretty cool. I'm not sure, I've learned to be a little bit better of a writer. I think to get my ideas a little clearer, it's made me more disciplined. I've never been a disciplined writer and having a blog sort of holds you accountable, as I'm sure you can attest with the podcast.

It kind of holds you accountable to create. And I think that either a blog or a podcast is creating something, it's creating art in a way. And it's been pretty therapeutic for me to write and get my ideas out there. I've had a lot of fun. - Good, and I'm glad that you're doing it.

And I'm glad that my show was able to be some encouragement in that direction. I'd love to see, I want to see every listener of the audience begin some form of expression. Blogging, podcasting, video, whatever, making local speeches to your local Rotary organization, whatever it is that is appropriate and whatever the next technology is.

Because if nothing else, it forces you to be a better learner. You're going to go, because of the thoughts that you've expressed on this show, you're going to go and research physician rates of divorce and you're going to be thinking about that subject. And I'm forced and held accountable to being a better, more effective learner because I'm forced to share my thoughts and I don't want to sound like an idiot.

So it's a good impetus in our lives. And also you can help another person. And that person to person contact can be tremendously, tremendously valuable. - Yeah, and I think just one last comment on that. I think people are nervous about starting a blog because they don't think it's going to be that popular and you know what, it probably won't be.

But even if you reach just a few people, I mean some of the coolest things I've learned are on blogs that are pretty tiny and that have sort of nudged me in a direction and made me think about something in a different way. So you don't have to reach, you don't have to have a blog like Mr.

Money Mustache where I don't know how many page views he has. But you don't need that. That shouldn't be the goal. The goal should be in the creation itself of content and making you a better person and maybe helping somebody else. I think we're all, or most of us are wired to want to help others.

And I think blogs and podcasts are really a great way to do that with a very low barrier. - Yeah, and two suggestions for you and for anyone else. First, I agree with you with regard to numbers. Unfortunately, we have a tendency to always think that big is better.

But any person who's writing something, just imagine yourself simply writing let's say on your Facebook feed and you write something that gets 40 likes. So you know that maybe a couple hundred people have read what you've written. Imagine yourself in a room speaking to a couple hundred people. First, that's a place of incredible privilege.

To be honored by the attention of a couple hundred people who are looking at you and listening to you is a tremendous honor. And it's also pretty scary for many people. And yet people discount the value of having a couple hundred readers of their thoughts. It frustrates me because we diminish, many people diminish their impact because they recognize that they're not the most popular.

Popularity is fickle. It comes and goes. And it's not even particularly valuable. It can be valuable if you've been able to stay authentic and true to your message, which is the second danger I'll talk about in a moment. But it's much more valuable to impact a few people with something that matters.

And the second point is that popularity brings with it a whole set of problems and a whole set of dangers. I actually prefer generally to read unknown sources and not popular publications because people are generally more willing to be honest and they're more willing to speak clearly based upon what they believe.

Where when you go into mainstream popularity, the danger is instead of speaking clearly and directly about what you believe, you start to have a desire to be popular and you start to modify your message with the goal of maintaining popularity. And this has happened, you can see it in the lives of many, many, many people.

They become prominent because of their ideas, but then they abandon their ideas with the goal of maintaining their fame and their prominence. It happens, I mean, you could see this every day in the political sphere. How many times have you been disappointed because you saw somebody that stood by their ideas, you thought, "Wow, this person will stand by it." You vote for them and all of a sudden a few years later, they've completely buckled.

The fame and the popularity got a hold of them and it's a real challenge to maintain your commitment to your ideas and your ideals in the face of losing that popularity. So, why did I go into that? Simply to say that don't judge your success based upon the large numbers.

Recognize that statistically it's improbable that any of us will ever have large numbers. However, that doesn't mean it's not worth doing. Mike Alfred: Yeah, you're absolutely right. It's just a win-win to write and to create, I think. You know, when I first started, I was very, you know, looking at the statistics and I was worried about them and, you know, how do I grow the blog?

But now I have a much more relaxed sort of zen attitude towards it. I mean, I'm just, I realize you should do it for you, not to please other people, I think. Is that why you do your podcast? It is and everything I just shared is from personal experience.

I started the podcast because I felt it needed to exist. But as the show has grown and become more popular and more mainstream, I often find myself wrestling with that problem of should I take this tack? Should I do a show on this topic, et cetera? And I have to continually, consciously lay aside the desire for mainstream acceptance and stay the course to what I believe should exist.

The allure of fame and fortune is strong. It's a siren song that many sailors have succumbed to and it's extremely challenging to withstand it. And yet, one thing that I find helpful is I respect people who stay true to their opinions or beliefs or convictions or philosophy or whatever word you want to insert there.

I respect people who stay true to those things even in the face of difficulty, even in the face of the fading fortunes. And so, among other things, I remind myself that if you respect those people, you've got to – it's easy to respect other people but yet not want to do it yourself.

But it's important to do it. And the only way that – I mean, one of the ways that freedom and liberty are advanced is by many more people doing that. That's why we live in the golden age of this and I'll wrap it up. But we live in a golden age but it only happens – of freedom to express and influence and impact at very little financial cost.

And I want to see more people do that. But it's certainly – it's a challenging process. It's a challenging growth process to stay true to. RIDGEN: It's unbelievable how many opportunities are out there. I agree. It is. We live in a remarkable time and yet it's our responsibility to maintain it and to be faithful in this time.

So, Jeff, thank you for coming on. Any final words of advice that you'd like to share about and any particular content or resources that you'd like to share with my audience? JEFF BOOTH: Well, I'll just give you my blog. It's thehappyphilosopher.com. I have a contact form on there and all the social media buttons if anybody wants to reach out to me or tell me their story.

I would say that anybody who is on the edge, either suicidal, pre-suicidal, depressed, burned out, don't give up. There are a lot of resources out there. Seek them out. Seek out the people that really are passionate about this stuff and care about it and get out of that spiral because it's really quite fantastic on the other side.

I can attest to that. RIDGEN: Yeah, absolutely. And I'll say, if anyone – I'll just say personally, if anyone is in that situation, call me, email me. And I mean that sincerely. In closing here, it is very important to be in that situation. I don't know that it's – I think the – I don't know.

Maybe you've got a magic philosophy or formula, Jeff, that results in your continually being up, but I don't have one. I find that life is cyclical. But oftentimes, when you're in a period of challenge – if you're in a period of challenge and – when you're in a challenging period, it can feel very difficult and especially difficult if you stay in your own head.

The last few weeks, up until the last couple weeks for me, were very challenging weeks. And you can't stay in your own head. You've got to involve other people. It's dangerous to stay in your own head and to try to go it alone. So I mean I haven't talked about suicide on the show, but if any listener is number one, if you're just feeling down or if you are – hey, if you're suicidal, I'm not – I'm not counseling or anything, but call me.

My phone number is 561-386-6034. Text me. I don't answer the phone. Text me and I'll call you. So 561-386-6034 is my cell phone number. Anybody can ever reach me if they're ever in a difficult situation and they just need a friend to talk to. It's an important subject. We don't talk enough about it, but it's an important subject.

Kind of a downer to end on, but it is important that we talk about it. Yeah, I know it is important. I mean suicide is a medical emergency. I mean and you're absolutely right. Don't try to get through it yourself. Reach out to somebody – a physician, a counselor, a suicide hotline, a friend.

You're a person who cuts your hair. Reach out. Get help. Depression and suicide are horrible. And my friend from medical school, I mean that was awful. Yeah, I guess we'll end on that high note. Jeff, thanks for coming on. It's not a high note, but it's real life and that's what podcasting is about.

So thank you so much for coming on today. Joshua, thank you so much. Thank you for listening to this episode of Radical Personal Finance. If you're interested in building financial freedom for yourself and your family, please subscribe to the podcast with our free mobile app so you don't miss a single episode.

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