Hello, everybody. It's Sam from the Financial Samurai podcast. And in this episode, I have a special guest with me, Brad Stolberg, author of his newly written book, Master of Change. Welcome to the podcast, Brad. Sam, it's great to be here. Thanks for having me. Well, thanks for coming on.

The reason why I wanted you on was initially because I read your previous book, The Practice of Groundedness, which was very helpful during the pandemic. Because during the pandemic, it was quite chaotic. You didn't really know what was going on. And I read the book, and you were with Portfolio Penguin Random House at the time, as was I.

And I thought, wow, this made me feel pretty good. So I'm excited to talk to you about your new book, Master of Change. Why did you decide to write Master of Change? I think that it started off as just a personal inquiry and curiosity around change and conventional ways of thinking about change and stress testing those.

So over the past five years in my own life, I've undergone all sorts of change. I became a father for the first time, moved across the country, suffered an injury that led to pretty significant orthopedic surgery that ended my career in a sport that had been a real outsized part of my identity.

I was doing some contract work with large corporations, and I decided that I'm ready just to go at it on my own completely as an author. And then became a father again for the second time. Oh, congrats. Yeah, thank you. Within the last five, six years, it just seems like there was all of this change that was very compressed.

And I was talking to other people, and they're like, yeah, it's just like things just feel like they happen fast, and they never stop. And then, of course, this is against the backdrop of the pandemic, which is a significant disorder, disruption, chaos, change, whatever you want to call it, that we all live through and was a challenge for all of us in many similar ways and also in unique ways.

And I distinctly remember when I decided that I wanted to dive deep into change. I was in my kitchen here in Asheville, North Carolina, and it was midday, and I was just doing what I do midday, which is sometimes taking a break to read. And went to the New York Times.com, and the headline was about getting back to normal.

Went to the WallStreetJournal.com. The headline was about getting back to normal. Saw The Economist. When are we going to get back to normal? And it occurred to me that getting back to normal is probably never going to happen. And why do we conceive of change as something that we want to get back to where we were?

And this was about three, three and a half years ago, and that started this – what started off as just a personal project and then became a book into looking at some of the historical roots of why we think about change the way that we do and exploring if there are alternative, better models.

>> Right. In your book and in your previous book, you actually talked about going through a session of OCD, severe OCD for eight months, and then what you call secondary depression. Can you talk about how that came to be? Was it a sudden onset or have you been feeling this kind of OCD lingering for a while?

And how did that motivate you to write this book and try to help others? >> That's right. So that's a big part of the practice of groundedness, which is the book that came prior to this. And let's see, right around – that was what, 29, 30? So this is almost seven years ago now, over seven years ago.

It was a very stark onset. I didn't have a history of mental illness. I was wired to be a pusher and I am probably a very – I'd score high in conscientiousness in terms of a personality test or temperament. But it was always something that was productive for me.

I was always able to channel that. And for whatever reason, things went haywire and I descended really quickly into a very rough, utterly debilitating, to be honest, spot with obsessive compulsive disorder and then secondary depression. And when I was going through that, there was no thinking about writing books.

Like my whole goal was just to survive. I was so fortunate that I had great care from a psychiatrist and a therapist. However, when I got to the other side of that, I of course did look back and say like, "Huh, I want to explore more about why this happened and how this happened and also some of the tools that I learned in my journey in recovery and how these tools can apply more broadly to people that aren't even necessarily struggling with clinical mental illness." And I didn't mention that because that was like seven years ago.

But talk about another big life change, cruising along, performing really well, just completely, utterly upended by mental illness. Go through that and then recover and have that perspective. So I guess we can just add that to the list of these pretty significant changes that I underwent. I feel like there's been a lot of discussion on mental illness since the pandemic began, especially loneliness, mental illness.

I feel like society, at least here in the United States, is really a striving culture, go, go, go. You're seeking accolades, achievements and so forth. How much do you think that part of achievement and success drove you to have this episode of OCD? It's a good question and I think about that a lot.

And the short answer is I don't think at all, to be totally frank and honest. I think the experience of true clinical OCD is so far removed from what I thought being neurotic or anxious was. I mean, it is just a 24/7, your brain is broken. It's like living in a different galaxy.

And whether or not striving and pursuing success kind of primed the pump for that, I can't say. I think that there's all sorts of challenges and issues that are wrong with our striving culture. But I don't think that that was part and parcel of OCD, particularly because I kind of got off that hamster wheel long before I got sick.

I wasn't in a place when I got sick that I was striving for the next thing. I was actually pretty content with how things were going. And so yeah, it's not as tidy of a narrative to say like, "Oh, I was burning the Midnight Oil and I wasn't sleeping and I was just striving and chasing and therefore I got OCD." I think that, and I'm careful with this, I think that true significant clinical mental illness, while it can result from that, it often feels just like otherworldly levels of different.

Well, I'm glad you got out of it. What were some of the steps you took to get out of it and move forward? So the most important thing was finding a therapist who practices evidence-based third wave clinical therapies. For me, what was most helpful was something called acceptance and commitment therapy.

And then working with that therapist for the better part of a year. And I also took medication for the better part of a year, for more than a year. And seeing a psychiatrist that specialized in treating obsessive compulsive disorder. So the tools that I learned in therapy, it's so hard to know if these medications for psychiatric conditions, whether or not they actually do anything, because the evidence is somewhat mixed and you're kind of throwing the kitchen sink at the problem, right?

You're doing therapy, you're making sure. So I always had pretty healthy habits. So I'm still exercising, I'm still trying to eat well. And yeah, when you're really sick and you're suffering, you just do anything. And it's hard to isolate what variables actually made a difference, but I'm sure I got some help from the medication as well.

Right. I feel as a fellow author, writing is therapy as well because it forces you to be very clear and concise with your thoughts. Sticking to the book, because there are a lot of terms that I really appreciated and I wanted to delve deeper into. One of the terms is tragic optimism.

Can you talk about how tragic optimism can help us be happier and live less stressful lives? It's one of my favorite parts of the book. So I'm glad that you keyed in on this. Tragic optimism was coined by Viktor Frankl, who is a Holocaust survivor and psychoanalyst. He's most well known for his book, Man's Search for Meaning, which has sold gazillions of copies and is just absolute must read if you are into psychology, personal development.

He's lesser known though for this essay that he published after Man's Search for Meaning came out, which is called The Case for Tragic Optimism. And in it, Frankl says that life is full of inevitable tragedy and suffering. And he gives three reasons for that. The first is that we humans are made of flesh and bone and we are going to age and we're going to experience illness and injury and nobody escapes life without going through this.

And that's a cause of pain and suffering. The second reason is we're one of the few, if not the only species that can think ahead and make plans. Some people argue that elephants and dolphins can do this, but humans are at least the most advanced species that can think ahead and make plans.

And because we can think ahead and make plans, occasionally, if not often, things aren't going to go like we thought they would. So we're going to experience frustration and disappointment. And then the third great tragedy of life that Frankl identified is that everything changes. The things that we love, the people that we love, our skills, our capacities, our talents, our youth, all of that is impermanent.

So we have these three insurmountable, inevitable tragedies that we all face. And even though it wasn't a term then, what Frankl would say is toxic positivity or delusional optimism is so stupid because part and parcel of being a human is going through pain and suffering. So that's where the tragedy comes from.

But what Frankl said is in spite of that or because of that or knowing that life is finite, we also can take that tragedy and accept it and not delude ourselves, but combine it with resolute, reasonable optimism, which simply means trudging forward with a positive, hopeful attitude nonetheless. And I love this because there's such a dichotomy in modern thinking, especially on the internet, where there's one camp that is what I'm going to call the Pollyanna, bury your head in the sand, everything is great, don't worry about anything camp.

And I think that's pretty dumb and not realistic. And then the other camp is the despair, nihilism, everything is so broken. Let's just like despair all the time. And I think that's a dumb approach too. But in between that is a huge chasm. And I think that's where tragic optimism lives, which asks you to say, yeah, like there is a lot that sucks.

It is hard to be a human. There is a lot that's broken about the world. And yet we don't have to become broken people. And we can still find so much joy and meaning in life, even in spite of all those things. Right. It sounds like if we can manage our expectations to just accept that there will be tragedy, that we will go through it, but we will experience better things ahead.

Can you talk about toxic positivity? Because I've heard this term more and more recently, and I don't quite understand what it means. You know, it's definitely like a cultural term. I'm not sure it made it into the dictionary. So maybe I'm contributing to this mess. But when I talk about toxic positivity, I simply mean it is a type of optimism or positivity that borders on delusional.

So it refuses to acknowledge challenges. It suppresses negative emotions. It only focuses on what's happening within arm's length from you and completely shuts down to the challenges that family members or friends or colleagues might be going through. And it trudges along and says, you know, everything is absolutely fine, even though clearly that's not the case, because nothing is ever absolutely fine.

So I view it as like this polar opposite to despair. And I think that neither of these emotions or neither of these mindsets are helpful, because they both absolve you of doing anything. So they're cop outs. They're freaking lazy. Because if you are a toxic positivity person and everything is great, well, then you're never going to need to do anything to improve or to make things better.

But if you're also suffering from despair, well, then there's no reason to do anything, because by definition, despair is a loss of hope. So it's so funny, because I think what you see is you see these two camps, again, like the Pollyanna people and the despair people. And I actually think both of those mindsets are just lazy cop outs.

>> Yeah. Why do you think – how does one become a Pollyanna and a toxic positivity person? Because I would think that if you look at the Belker, most are not that way. Maybe these are tail end folks. >> I think these are tail end folks, and I think that they get amplified on the internet, to be totally honest, because it's provocative, and that's – especially on social media, that's what sells.

I do think that all of these concepts have some nuance, right? So there's a difference between completely shutting down to the world and to other people's problems and to your own problems, but also not just over indexing on them and focusing on them all the time. So – and there's all sorts of research that shows that this kind of tragic optimism is associated with better well-being and resilience.

Because it does two things at once. It is optimistic and it is hopeful, but it is in a way that also acknowledges that things aren't always great, and that's okay, too. >> Right. One of the equations in your book I thought was interesting was suffering equals pain times resistance.

I feel like a lot of us resist change a lot, especially as we talk about in Master of Change book. Can you talk about that equation and was this something that you discovered or how did you come about it? >> So this equation comes out of pain science and cutting edge rehabilitation practices.

I think that change is painful for a lot of people. So I took this thing that is rooted in really clinical medicine and applied it more broadly. But I'm going to use a more clinical example to make the point really clear. So pain equals suffering – excuse me. Suffering equals pain times resistance.

So Sam, let's assume that you pulled your back, okay? And your back is really sore, your low back. >> Yeah, I've done that before. >> And as a result, you have six units of pain. >> Yep. >> So currently, you've got suffering equals a six. But now let's say that because you pulled your back, you start freaking out and you start saying, "Oh my God, I'm not going to be able to sit in this chair and record a podcast.

I might not even be able to sit in this chair ever again. I was supposed to go out with friends this weekend and I'm not going to be able to do that. And I just took Motrin and Advil and it's not even working yet. Oh my gosh, am I going to need to go on painkillers and then I could get addicted to painkillers and on and on and on." So all of that is resisting the pain, right?

So now let's say that your resistance is also six units. So six times six equals 36. So now you've got 36 units of global suffering. >> Sounds like a lot. >> Whereas if you just had the back pain and you just said, "This sucks. I pulled my back. It really hurts.

I don't know what's going to happen next, but I'm probably going to be okay. I'm going to seek out the resources to help me. I'm not going to catastrophize and I'm just going to let the pain be there because it's okay to have some pain." You're still suffering. You still have six units of suffering, but six is a lot better than 36.

So I took that concept and I broadened it to say that when change occurs, especially negative changes or things that we didn't foresee that we didn't want to happen, there is going to be some pain associated with it. But the more that we freak out and catastrophize and resist or pretend it's not happening or delude ourselves, the more that we suffer.

So much like the example of a pulled back, when an unexpected change comes up, the best thing that we can do is just say like, "This is what's happening right now. I don't want it. I don't necessarily like it. It's not necessarily something that I'm happy about, but it is what it is and I need to accept it because only when we accept it can we start taking action to make it better." >> Right.

I'm glad you brought up the back pain thing because I had terrible back pain, sciatica. I couldn't really drive for more than 10 minutes. This was back in maybe 2010, 2009 and it was really bad. TMJ as well. Couldn't sit at my office table for more than 5 minutes.

It was bad. And then I read a book called Healing Back Pain by Dr. Sarno and I love that book. I think the best book ever for anybody who has chronic pain and it just talks about recognizing the anger and the frustration you have inside you, bringing it to the forefront, accepting it and telling yourself you don't need to manifest this chronic physical pain.

You already get it. And actually yell at yourself and say, "It's okay. Just leave me alone." And then three months later, my back pain went away and it's been gone for about 15 years. And I look back to that time in 2009, 2010. I mean, what was happening then?

Well, I was sitting on the training desk at Credit Suisse and it was the global financial crisis and Lehman Brothers was going bankrupt. And there was just so much stress back then. So there's definitely a mind-body connection. What are your thoughts on that? Ryan Neuhofel: Yeah. I think that I – I'm hesitant to say anything too definitive because it's outside of my area of expertise.

There's absolutely a mind-body connection. I think pain comes in all sorts of flavors and no two people have the same experience. I think that sometimes what we experience as physical pain is probably more psychosocial and it's just manifesting as physical pain. I think other times, it's more organic and biological.

You herniate a disc in your back. Well, that's probably what's driving it. But even then, if you've got all kinds of other life stress or you can't accept what's going on, you're going to suffer more. So in a way, you can think of this equation and maybe what Dr.

Sarno would say is that the resistance is all the emotional, psychological, social stuff around the pain. If you can just dampen that resistance and get it from six units to four units to two units to ideally one unit, then eventually the pain is going to subside. But everyone has their own experience of chronic pain.

I will say that this is the evidence-based model that is used at the Mayo Clinic's Pain and Rehabilitation Center, which is probably the best in the world. People from all over the world come there to treat chronic pain. For the book, I got to report and explore their methods.

It's fascinating because the first thing that they do is they try to help patients understand that the goal isn't to get rid of their pain. So stop trying so hard because trying to get rid of it is its own form of resistance. It's like this Zen cone. The goal is to get them to accept their pain.

Once they accept it, it tends to dissolve or at least get much better. Dr. Seheult: Right. No, that's absolutely true. Dr. Sarno is talking about, "Well, if you go to the chiropractor and the physical therapist and all that, you're accepting the pain and you're kind of resisting the pain.

Just accept it." So I do believe in that and I do believe there is a really strong mental and physical connection, at least based on my own experience. Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And I think we have to separate and then I'll say one more thing then we can move on because it's important for listeners.

I think we have to separate chronic pain from acute injury. Dr. Sarno: Okay. Yeah. Dr. Justin Marchegiani: So if you tear your ACL– Dr. Sarno: Of course. Dr. Justin Marchegiani: –and you like rupture a disc, you know, no amount of mindset is going to heal that. Like you need– Dr.

Sarno: Right. Dr. Justin Marchegiani: –surgical repair or PT. Dr. Sarno: Right. Dr. Justin Marchegiani: But if after you tear your ACL and got the surgery or after you did all the PT– Dr. Sarno: Yeah. Dr. Justin Marchegiani: –and the MRIs and the x-rays, structurally things are "fixed" but then you're still experiencing a lot of pain, I think that's where some of these psychosocial aspects come in.

And it's not to negate the pain. I hate this. Like pain is all in your head. Everything's all in your head. That's where our brain is. So like of course, your experience is–is derived or mediated through your brain. So it doesn't make the pain any less real. I think it just says that the tools we have to treat it need to change.

It can't always just be what we think of as traditional medicine. Dr. Sarno: Right. I hear–I hear in your voice you're pretty fired up. Did–did this bring back memories of that injury that derailed your sports career? Dr. Justin Marchegiani: I've had so many injuries. I think I'm just fired up about this because I think it's this area where there's so much judgment, right?

People are like, "Oh, you're in pain. Like it's all in your head." What a shitty thing to say to someone that's in chronic pain. Dr. Sarno: Sure. Dr. Justin Marchegiani: And I think that we can talk about this in a much more compassionate way. Realizing that if it was as easy as like, you know, saying, "Oh, I'm gonna accept this pain and have a growth mindset," then everyone would do that.

So these are like hard, nuanced topics and I think that we can be both kind to ourselves and to other people that are going through this at the same time as we teach these skills. And I don't think because, you know, it doesn't show up on an x-ray, it makes the pain any less real.

Again, it just means that we might need to bring different tools to bear. But our culture in the West is so like freak out, catastrophize, worry, try to fix everything right away. And you know, that has its limits and that also fires me up. You could argue that the opioid epidemic is in no small part born out of convincing people that all pain should be minimized and go away immediately and that led to a lot more suffering than just accepting the pain.

Dr. Sarno: Yeah. Why do you think we've got to this stage in society? It seems like there's just this crazy amount of anxiety and strive to do better and one up everybody. What's going on here? Matthew Fossum You know, I think that it's twofold. One is I think that consumerism itself runs on an engine of people feeling like they need problems to fix or they need to do more to be enough.

Because if everybody felt like they were enough and everybody felt like they didn't have problems to fix, then they wouldn't buy stuff. So I think some of it is just the consumer model. And I am not a monk. I don't practice renunciation. I own a nice watch. I live in a nice house.

I wear clothes. So I'm not here to like bash consumer capitalism. But I am here to point out that the entire system, especially like consumer products and goods, the fancy car, the fancy house, the bigger house, the gold, the diamonds, that's really there to make you feel like you are enough.

But it's an illusion because like feeling like you're enough is an inside game. So I think a lot of it is just it's kind of like the sea that we swim in. And this has extended more recently, talk about change, into the internet where everything is quantifiable now. So how many downloads does your podcast have?

Where does it rank? How many followers do you have on Instagram? How many followers do you have in Twitter? How many people commented on your LinkedIn post? So it almost takes ourselves, our very personhood, and like makes us commodities on a personality marketplace. So of course, that's not a great way to attain mental health.

And the last thing that I'll say is we have experienced accelerating change societally. So in America, the Overton window on our politics has shifted by a million percent in the last eight years. We've gone through a pandemic. The emergence of the internet is still, you could argue, in the historical scheme in its infancy, and your artificial intelligence is knocking on the doorstep.

So we have all of these massive changes that are affecting just about everyone. And I think that like it can feel like the ground that we're on is really shaky. And if we don't have the skills to navigate that shaky ground, then it's easy just to latch on to buying something or to having something to make us feel secure.

No, I totally hear you. It's funny you talk about bigger house because I'm thinking about getting a bigger house myself. And I have a lot of doubt in my mind because I'm thinking, "Well, what if I buy the bigger house and I'm not happier?" And I kind of use tragic optimism to say, "I probably won't be happier.

I'll be happier for maybe a month or two or three months." But then it's like, "Eh, it's just another bigger house with more maintenance." That consumerism thing is really a big one. I'm pretty frugal by nature. That's kind of how you have to be to try to retire early or achieve financial independence.

You got to save aggressively. So I hear you on that and it definitely sounds like social media is not a good thing for most people's mental health. Yeah, and I have to be careful here because like social media can have very real benefits. I think that people just overlook the cost and they aren't intentional.

I think that you could take so many of the principles from the financial independence movement, which I know you're one of the founding pioneers of, and apply it to just about anything because at the end of the day, it's really about how much intentionality are you bringing to your actions.

So my understanding is the financial independence movement says, it doesn't say never spend money, but it says be really intentional and ask yourself, "How does this fit into a broader plan and what are going to be the downstream effects of this and how is this going to make me feel two years from now?" I think that we should bring that kind of intentionality to how we interact on the internet, to the people that we surround ourselves with, to how we take care of our health because I think that like all of this, the biggest risk is going on autopilot because if you go on autopilot, you're just going to get swept up wherever society wants to take you and maybe 80 percent of the time, that's fine, but 20 percent of the time, it's not.

Yeah. So mental health, there's this great highlight in your book called The Psychological Immune System by Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert. Can you talk about that because I never heard about it and it makes a lot of sense to me. All right. So let's start with the physical immune system because that's going to be a concept that everyone's heard of.

So our physical immune system, we get sick or we get injured and the job of our physical immune system is to marshal the appropriate resources in our body to help us heal and to move on from that. The more aggressive the insult, which is just science speak for saying the more we get hurt, the bigger the injury, the more severe the disease or the illness, the harder it is for our immune system and the longer it takes.

So to simplify even more, a small cut, if you're healthy, generally heals within a day or two. A big gash in your arm could take a month to heal. Why? Because the bigger gash takes your immune system more time. The inflammatory process, the white blood cells that come and rush into the area, it takes more time.

So we don't wonder why bigger injuries take longer to heal than small injuries. We just know our immune system needs more time. But we also have this psychological immune system and its job is to help us heal and make sense of big changes that occur in our lives. And much like our physical immune system, the bigger the change, the longer it takes our psychological immune system to help us integrate it into our narrative.

So small change. You think that you're going to record this podcast with me and your dog has diarrhea on the carpet and your kid has strep throat, so you have to cancel. Kind of messes up your day. Maybe you're frustrated for a while, but my guess is by tomorrow, you're totally fine.

Like your psychological immune system says no big deal. Like, you know, that's a paper cut. These things happen. That's very different than a cancer diagnosis or a divorce or the loss of a close friend or a family member. For those things, the psychological immune system takes so much more time to find meaning and to integrate it into our narrative.

So when we undergo these major disruptions in our life, we all want a quick fix. We want our immune system to work really fast. We want to find growth and meaning and move forward. But we can't rush that process because the bigger the change, the longer it takes. And I think this is such an important expectation to have because we can show ourselves some grace in the middle of all the grit that we have to bring to these big changes.

Right. No, that makes a lot of sense. In terms of, you know, you work out a lot. You say you're at the gym a lot. And I'm assuming you're trying to maintain strength or increase strength. So what about increasing our immune systems, our physical and psychological immune systems? Can we do things to increase and strengthen those?

Or it is we're born with what we have and that's it? We can absolutely. That's a question I think you probably know the answer to. We can absolutely do things to increase our physical and psychological immune systems. So our physical immune system, the most important things that we can do is sleep, move our bodies regularly.

So it doesn't have to be super strenuous, but just engage in regular physical activity and then do what we can to eat a relatively nutritious diet, which today means avoiding ultra processed foods. Those are the big three. And I would also add eliminate tobacco products. So if you're someone that smokes or uses a vape pen, I think it's really important to try to get help quitting if you care about your health.

And then alcohol is the elephant in the room because it's such a part of culture. And the research is pretty clear that any more than five drinks per week, alcohol starts to have negative effects. Now there are trade-offs. Some people say I'd rather drink five drinks a week because we're all going to die anyways.

So if it has a slightly negative effect, that's fine, but less is more. Now that's the physical immune system. The psychological immune system, to me, this is a little bit more interesting because it's not as clear cut. It's harder to study. Where we do have research, what it tells us is that the best things that we can do to strengthen our psychological immune system are kind of work on these two polar opposite ends of a spectrum or of a barbell.

So on one end, we can gain sources of ruggedness and strengthen our lives. So we can strengthen our relationships because the people are ultimately what's going to hold us when we fall, when things are hard. We can develop really good daily habits and practices that are portable, that we can take with us even when things around us change.

So that is having some sort of anchor or stability in your life regardless of what else is happening. And then we can also strengthen our psychological immune system by developing these tools to navigate change skillfully. And I think the most important one that I go into great detail in the book is this skill of responding, not reacting.

So when a change happens, there's two roads we can go down. We can react, which tends to be rash. It's a very hot emotion. It's often infused with anger or panic. Or we can respond, which is thoughtful. It's deliberate. It's planful. We use our prefrontal cortex, the more evolved parts of our brain.

And the more that we can respond to the disruptions and the changes in our lives, the more we develop what psychologists call self-efficacy, which is this confidence that's based on evidence that regardless of what life throws at us, we can endure and we'll be okay. And that is ultimately the definition of a strong psychological immune system.

So it's these two rungs, right? It's doing what you can to build these anchors and these sources of ruggedness and stability in your life, particularly relationships and these portable routines on the one hand. And then on the other hand, it's when change happens, because as I said, it comes for all of us, practicing this skill of responding, not reacting.

Right. No, responding, not reacting. That's a tough one because let's say you drive a car and someone cuts you off or honks at you or yells at you. The instant reaction, at least for me, is to yell at them back and I don't know, mow them down. And then I have to think, "Well, I've got a family now.

I don't want a lawsuit. Let's just try to let it go." But I don't succeed all the time and it gets me and I think a lot of drivers riled up when something bad happens on the road. I mean, how do we counteract that? It's a practice. It's not a switch that we can flip.

And I think that practicing in those smaller scale examples, driving is like a perfect place to practice, is really helpful. So I think the most important part is just pausing. So when someone cuts you off or when someone edges into your lane and you hit the horn because that's what you need to do for safety, after that, when you feel your blood boil, when you feel that visceral reactionary thing in your body, just try to use that as a cue to take four deep breaths, maybe even just two deep breaths, maybe even just one.

And then you can process what happens and you can make a plan. And maybe your plan will be, "I'm going to mow that guy down." But odds are, after you've taken a deep breath and you've said, "All right, that just happened," generally speaking, it's easier to calm down. And in that particular instance, something that I found helpful, because I'm a human too, I'm not this Jedi master.

I also get pissed off when people cut me off. But I try to remind myself that I don't know if that person just got served divorce papers or I don't know if that person is rushing to the hospital to see their child who's in a pediatric intensive care unit.

I have no idea what's going on in that person's life. And I don't know if that person just missed me in their blind spot, because I don't know about you, but I've cut people off before completely by accident. Never done that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But so I think this is part of the practice, right?

It's like taking this broader perspective, because all of these ways of zooming us out from this acute, visceral, hardwired, reactionary thing helps us to create some space to respond. And the more that we go through this cycle, the more that we succeed in responding, the easier it becomes in the future.

Yeah. It's interesting with Financial Samurai since 2009. Do you have kids, Sam? Oh, do I have kids? I do have two kids. So that's another great place to practice, right? Because kids are constantly – and how old – are your kids young or old? Three and a half and six and a half.

Perfect. So I got kids in the same age range. They are sometimes the best thing in the world, but they can be annoying little devils, right? And that is great practice. So like how often do you probably get angry or almost maybe you're tired or you're hungry and like you want to snap on your kids?

Those are the best and most important times in daily life to practice just responding, not reacting. So just remembering like this is not a small adult. This is a child. And yes, this child is being really annoying, but they're probably doing the best that they can and me yelling or showing aversive body language is not going to help the situation.

So then when we have these massive changes in our life, when we get laid off or we put out a new project and it doesn't do as well as we thought or really good things happen to us, we hit a bestseller list, our podcast becomes ranked number one, we get a big promotion at work, we just get practice in kind of riding these waves instead of getting swallowed by them.

So kids and traffic are two great places to practice. >> Yeah. Well, I've had a lot of practice being a stay-at-home dad for six and a half years. I've heard crying multiple times a day for six and a half years in a row every single day. And that is a lot of practice and a lot of patience.

And it's part of the reason why I was thinking to myself, "I need to get a day job so I can take a vacation from being a father for 10 hours a day." I don't know if parents really realize who have day jobs how actually nice it is to take a break and recharge from family for 8 to 10 to 12 hours a day versus always being at home.

It's a tough balance. >> It is. >> I have a question for you in terms of seeing the world a little differently because I was saying I started financial assignment in 2009 and over the course of 14 years, I've seen it grow. And as it grows, you have more opinions, good and bad.

And what I really enjoy is actually reading fired up comments because it means that somewhere the motions have been tickled. And what I've found is if I start realizing that everybody has something going on in their head, some problem, some stress, and just the comments are just kind of like a sounding board or reflection, it makes me feel at peace.

I'm like, "Oh, man, I'm sorry you feel so angry." Do you feel this is a healthy way to look at things where you don't know what kind of mental issues or challenges each person has and you just kind of accept and empathize or do you think that's just not a healthy way to look at things?

>> I think it depends. I think if you're going to read the comments, then yeah, that's a really healthy way because like anger plus anger just equals more anger. So I'm very similar. I don't – where I'm different is I don't tend to engage with these people that often because I just find it's a time and energy suck.

But when I do and I'm the best version of myself, I don't go back at people. But I sometimes will point out and I'll just say like, "I'm sorry you're so angry." Or like, "Why does everything make you so angry?" Or maybe I don't even type that. But maybe in my head I'm like, "Man, like it would stink to be this person on social media who just gets so angry about everything." >> Yeah, it's interesting.

But I actually like to dig a little bit deeper because sometimes, maybe 30% of the time, I uncover something that's going on in their lives that's really tough and then you just kind of make a connection. As a writer, it's always interesting to hear people's stories and personal stories and then share it if they allow me to and then maybe we can learn from that as well.

>> Yeah, I think that that's right. It takes a lot of patience though to do on the internet. I found that it's so much easier to do that in in-person forums and even over email. But like on a comment section, it can just be hard because you don't know someone's situation but you also don't know their motivations.

And sometimes it's just to be a troll. Sometimes it's they know that the more provocative stuff gets more attention. So it's a tricky balance I think for anyone on the internet is when to engage because you don't want to just be in an echo chamber where you only surround yourself with people that think the same way.

But you also don't need to be a masochist and expose yourself to people that are like just out there to rile you up or hurt you or are struggling with their own insanity. >> Yeah. No, it's interesting, the journey of the internet. So actually, tell me, why did you decide to move across country?

Why go through all this change? What was going on with you? >> Yeah, it's a couple of reasons. The predominant reason, so we used to live in Oakland, California. And now we live in Asheville, North Carolina, which is a smaller mountain town in the west part of the state.

And the driving force was my wife's family is all on the East Coast. >> Oh, perfect. >> And she's really close with her family. And I love my wife and I want to support her. And it felt really hard for her to be this far from family, especially when we had our young kids.

>> Yeah. >> But that was hard for me at first because I loved living in the Bay Area. I had a big network there. >> How long were you here? >> 10 years. >> Okay. >> I had a large network there. As an author, it's a great place. There's great bookstores.

It's a huge market of people. There's a lot of other intellectual people. The weather is great. I mean, do you live in the Bay Area? >> I live in San Francisco. >> Yeah, so you know, like there's a lot that's good about it. So it was a big change and it was hard.

Now of course, my psychological immune system has kicked in. I found meaning and growth and I couldn't imagine living anywhere else and Asheville squarely feels like home. But at the time, it was challenging. And then I think the other reason gets to our own goals of financial independence. And it's just easier to attain that in a place like Asheville than in the Bay Area.

>> Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. Where are your parents? >> My parents who I'm not very close with are in Michigan. And my brother who I'm extremely close with is in Utah, Salt Lake, although he's moving to Philadelphia. So he'll be a lot closer. >> Okay.

Yeah, I've struggled with relocating for a while now. I've been here since 2001 after living in New York City for two years. And I love the place. And it's a great place if you can afford it. But my parents are getting older and they live in Hawaii. And the one better place than San Francisco, in my opinion, is anywhere in Hawaii.

So, and the funny thing is Hawaii is actually about 25% cheaper than San Francisco, anywhere in Hawaii. So that's good that you made a move. How long did it take for you to say, "Okay, I'm willing to move to Asheville from Oakland"? >> That was a process that took, I don't know, three years.

>> Three years. Wow. >> Well, in multiple conversations, you know, the most important conversations today in our marriage, to be honest, about like, what's it going to take for us to be happy? How do we find a solution that is best for us? Not for me or you, but what's best for us?

Where are the various places that we think we could be happy? Let's go visit these places. Let's also like really try to envision what it would look like to buy a house outside of Oakland or in Berkeley. And like, let's go look at houses and let's see how that feels.

And let's really be methodical. >> Yeah. >> And ultimately, we reached a point where just like, the path to living in Oakland was one or in the Bay Area more broadly, I should say, was one that particularly my wife just like could not get excited about. And I always loved mountain towns.

So like, you know, even the biggest decisions in marriages are sometimes like, you know, quasi negotiations to get to what's best for us. So I remember saying like, "I don't think I really want to move to D.C. where your family is because that's just a big East Coast city." But man, there are some great small mountain towns in the mid-Atlantic and I bet we could both get really excited about one of those.

>> Right. >> So we did a little tour of these mountain towns and we fell in love with Asheville and now I couldn't imagine living anywhere else. I really couldn't. >> What's the median home price in Berkeley nowadays versus Asheville? >> So without getting into too granular of details, I can broadly say that you can triple to quadruple the price of a house in the Oakland Hills versus Asheville.

So a $1 million home in Asheville is going to get you one of the nicest homes in Asheville. That would be about $4 million. A $500,000 home in Asheville is probably looking like a $2 million home in the Bay Area. >> Yeah. >> Although we haven't done this, we haven't played this game in four years so I'm sure it's changed because we moved, we made this decision prior to the pandemic so it wasn't a pandemic move.

So I'm sure these numbers have changed. >> Yeah. No, it's definitely the geo-arbitrage folks. I mean, one of the things I talk about a lot is move to a place that you can better afford and have a better lifestyle. You don't have to stay stuck anymore thanks to the internet.

>> Yeah. And Asheville has its quirks. So like there's no big airport. It's two hours from the biggest airport. I mean, it's a much smaller town. And for us, it made a lot of sense but I think when I talk to people about this, I think there are a lot of like middle grounds, you know, where it's not such a drastic change from a place like the Bay Area or New York City but it still affords people a lot more autonomy.

>> Actually, one of the things, do you know what the demographic, the racial makeup is of Asheville? >> I don't know off the top of my head but I can promise you it's not nearly as diverse as the Bay Area. >> Yeah. >> And that's something that we miss.

>> One of the blind spots that I have, that other people have is that, oh, just move anywhere that's lower cost and you'll save a lot of money and you'll get to financial independence sooner. But you might not be comfortable living in a place where nobody looks like you, right, for example.

And it might be easier for other people to go to a place where everybody looks like them, right? So it's something to consider as well. >> I think that's really important and that is probably the thing that we miss most. You know, in Oakland I'd go into a coffee shop and as a white guy I'd be like the minority and here I'm the majority.

And that is something that I don't know if I'll ever get fully used to but when we first moved here it was definitely a bit of a shock. >> Right, right, right. So try before you buy, folks. Go visit it. Maybe take a two, three week vacation. >> Oh, you have to.

Yeah. >> And it's not going to be like, you know, manic sight unseen. I mean, where you live has such a profound impact on who you are. Gets back to the book, right? There's this section in the book on identity and how we think of ourselves as our Myers-Briggs score or our Enneagram number and we think of ourselves in the confine of our skin and skull but ourselves are actually completely wholly shaped by our environment.

So where you live is going to have a huge impact on who you become. So if you want to guide your own personal evolution and you want to do what you can to guide the way that you, your identity changes over time, it's so important to consider things like where you live and what kind of person you'll become living there, who you surround yourself with, what kind of job you do, who you keep as really close friends and like what does that mean for who you'll become.

Because it's a very Western thing to just think of our identity as just independent and I can exert control and it doesn't matter if I live in Asheville or New York or Oakland. Like I'm me. And all sorts of research shows that's just like patently an erroneous view. >> Right.

In terms of I guess success and money or – well, this is a personal finance podcast or thematic podcast or at least site. What does success mean to you and how much is enough for you as the author, the coach, the father? >> So I define success as knowing my core values and the things that I really value in life and being able to live in alignment with those.

And one of those things is autonomy. So being able to spend time and energy on the people and things that mean the most to me, that is my definition of success. And the truth is if we stayed in the Bay Area, I'd have less autonomy than I do now.

I probably would still be doing all sorts of contract work with large corporations just to be able to afford to live there. So that value definitely drove some of this. But I really think it just comes down to like being able to spend your time and energy on the things that matter to you and not necessarily being like utopian about it.

I think part of being a mature adult is realizing that there's always going to be some stuff that you don't like to do that you have to do. Like if you own a cat, you got to scoop the litter and I think that's a really important metaphor for life.

But you don't have to create more complexity if it's not needed. >> Yeah. That's a good perspective. And it really hammers home the point. I wonder how much of living in big cities like San Francisco, New York, LA really grinds people down because of the cost of living. But it's not just the cost of living.

It's surrounding yourself with super motivated successful people that you see constantly and that remind you, "Oh, maybe you got to be doing more, trying harder." >> But it's the double-edged sword, right? Because like there's such an intellectual energy that comes from those places too. And I think that there's a lot of nuance here.

So I'm not arguing for people to live any particular place. I think like you said, it takes a lot of knowing yourself and if you're in a family, knowing what's best for your family and experimenting. But I do think that there's a lot of energy and that's the benefit.

But as you said, like the cost is there's a massive keeping up with the Joneses. I'm close friends. One of my mentors is a prominent venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. And he does very well financially and he jokes that like he hates Halloween because all his neighbors are handing out like iPads and iPhones.

And that's a joke but I think that there's some truth to that. >> Sure. How much stress, okay, what would you rate your stress out of 10, 10 being the highest when you're in Oakland versus now in Asheville if you could kind of solve for the variables? >> If I'm being totally honest, the biggest source of distress is I knew that my wife wasn't happy there.

So now she's happy. She's far from her kids and now she's happy. So my stress level was very high because like she's the most important person in my life and to see her unhappy and then to get into a dynamic that most people don't talk about, but I think happens often in marriages to young people where you're deciding where to live is I didn't want her to resent me for being happy in the Bay Area.

But she didn't want me to resent her for moving. So we kind of got into like this double bind where at the heart of it, we're really just caring about each other. And that caused a lot of stress. And it took some time and maturity to really unpack that.

And then once it was unpacked for me to say like, if we move, I'm going to be sad because I'm going to leave my best friend in the world who's like a brother to me, who's an emergency medicine doctor. He works for Kaiser Permanente, a big health system in Oakland.

So he's not moving. I'm going to leave him, I'm going to leave the coffee shop that I wrote three books at. I'm going to leave all my other good friends. So I'm not going to be happy. I'm going to be sad, but I'm not going to resent you. Like I want to do this because I want to do this for us.

And it doesn't mean I'm going to move to DC and live in a suburb right next to your sister. Let's find a place that I can get excited about that's closer to DC. And that was really like the process that led us to move where we did. Yeah. And in this worst case, you tried for one, two years, you can always move back and say, Hey, you tried.

That's right. And we also kept that open. But it's funny because now that we're here, you know, I joke like my wife would not want to live in DC. And I probably if I, if someone offered me to move back with Caitlin being stoked about it, I'd still say no, I'd be like, nah, we should stay in Asheville.

But our minds are interesting. So like how much of that is just the psychological immune system, you know, doing its thing versus now I've built a life here versus it really is better. And it's probably some combination of all those things. Right. Now it's life's a great adventure full of compromises, twist turns and unknowns.

Well, Brad, it's been great chatting with you and congrats on your book, Master of Change. Can you tell listeners where they can buy a copy of your book? Thank you. It was really nice chatting with you too. The book is available pretty much everywhere. So you can definitely get it on the Internet, Amazon, Barnes and Noble.

If your independent bookstore is something that you want to support, that's great. They should all have it. It's in audio, Kindle and of course hardcover. And if you dug this conversation, I think you'll love the book. So I encourage folks to pick up a copy and check it out.

Great. And if people want to check out what you're doing, I know you have a podcast as well and you have a website. Where can they find you? That's right. My podcast is called The Growth Equation Podcast and my website is just my name, www.bradstahlberg.com. Great. All right. Thanks so much, Brad.

Thank you, Sam. This was a pleasure. All right. Take care. pleasure. Alright, take care.