transcript

Speech-to-text transcription can look a little quirky. Please excuse any grammar or spelling errors.

Episode #525 - What is the FIRE Movement?

Roger: The show is a proud member of the Retirement Podcast Network. 

"In the course of my life, I've often had to eat my words, and I must confess that I've always found it a wholesome diet." 

-Winston Churchill.

Hey there. Welcome to the Retirement Answer Man show.

My name is Roger Whitney and this is the show dedicated to helping you not just survive retirement but have the confidence to lean in and rock retirement. 

Now by day, I have been a practicing retirement planner for over 30 years, but my side gig is thinking with you on how do you actually do this stuff? How do you create a life that you're proud of in retirement? Not just the money side, but the nonfinancial side as well.

This month on the show, we are going to explore FIRE. Financially independent retire early. This is a movement that has come about in the last 10 years or so That is focused on, well, financially independence and retiring early. Now retirement means something different than maybe you and I have thought of, and to help me this month, I'm bringing on one of my good friends, Kevin Sebesta, who's a coach in the Rock Retirement Club, but also retired early. I think he retired at 42. We're going to hear a little bit of story. We're going to explore this FIRE movement of what these 20, 30, 40 or something year olds are focused on. Maybe it's something that you can pass to your kids, but I think there's some things that you and I can learn in order to rock retirement today. 

So that's what we're going to do this week, and then we're going to have Doctor Bobby Dubois on in our Rock Life segment to talk about, should we take supplements or not? I'm excited about that. 

Now before we get started, because it's the first of the month, I want to talk about the books that I read in January. This seems to be something really fun to do. I get a lot of great from you as we've started this monthly review.

The first book I finished was Scarcity Brain by Michael Easter. Now we're going to have Michael on. I just came back from Costa Rica and got to spend about a week with Michael. He is a wonderful guy. There's a lot more to explore here, not just with his first book, The Comfort Crisis.

Scarcity brain is interesting and essentially is talking about how we are structured to always feel in scarcity in the loops that we go through to try to satisfy that. A lot of that has kept us alive, but in this modern world, it has been manipulated in consumerism, etcetera. He explores that. 1 thing I really like about Michael's writing is that he's a journalist. 

He and I were at dinner, and we were talking about his writing of this book. He has a loose outline, but as he explores the topic. It evolves because he is constantly curious and going directly to the source of a concept that he is noodling on, which I think is brilliant. He's not going to second or third- or fourth-hand sources. As an example, if he wants to know about living a simple life, in the book, he talks about going to live with monks for a week and experiencing it and talking to them about that lifestyle. I like Michael Easter's writing. After getting to hang out with him, I really like him as a person.

Second book that I read was Moby Dick. Classic book. I'm trying to read a lot more classics. I did this one via audiobook. 

The narrator, I forgot his name, is amazing. He really brings it to life. I have some mixed feelings about the book. It's a long book. You learn a lot about the Nantucket whaling industry of the mid 18 hundreds, which is interesting, but it really gets into it, you know, how they catch a whale, how they process a whale, the characters and the culture involved around that.

It was a lot of that and a little less of the story than I had anticipated. Now that said, the last chapters, the chase chapters, where everything comes to a head with Moby Dick and Captain Ahab and the crew is amazing. The writing is just poppy. The command of the English language is incredible. As you probably know, I struggle with that a little bit, So I appreciate when I read good writing or hear good commentary.

So, Moby Dick finished that. 

Third book I read was called the Eye of the World, which is the first book in the Wheel of Time series. My wife suggested that I read this. It's a classic series. It's one of her favorite books from, I think, the eighties or nineties.

They made it into an Amazon series. I enjoyed it. I would call this Ear Candy. I listened to it via audio because I was traveling a lot in January. Ear candy.

I'm reading some very good books for February. I can't wait to chat with you about those next weeks. Another little cleanup item, Nichole, who really writes a lot of our 6-Shot Saturday. She's the engine behind that. She always does this, and I got a lot of voice mails and emails wishing me a happy birthday.

I listened to every single one of them. I listened to every single audio note. It was great to hear some of your voices and just thank you. It's uncomfortable being celebrated, whether it's a birthday or other things. Nichole knows that. That's probably why she did it, but I appreciate it. I feel like it's such an honor to have so many people in my life, A lot of them I have never met. So, thank you so much for those birthday wishes. 

We're starting off age 57 in epic fashion. 

With that, let's move on to our practical planning segment and bring on Kevin and define what FIRE is.

PRACTICAL PLANNING SEGMENT

So, to help walk us on this journey of understanding what FIRE is and how we might learn a thing or 2 from these younger folks. I wanted to bring on the most on FIRE person I know, Kevin Sebesta. How are you doing, Kevin? 

Kevin: I'm doing great. Thanks for having me.

Roger: Kevin and I have known each other for how long? 

Kevin: Since a few months after you started the podcast. 

Roger: It's almost 10 years. Yeah. Almost 10 years, and when I think of FIRE, as someone my age, I think of you because you retired relatively early. 

Kevin: 43. 

Roger: 43. So your bona fides are so what did you do for careers in tech. Right?

Kevin: I was a computer guy at aerospace company, just middle technical kind of person, had a global job over time, and just a normal person.

Roger: Then what motivated you to retire at 43, which seems really crazy.

Kevin: I don't know.

I was always taught about money and household budgets and planning, spending since I was 12, so I always kind of my spending. My wife and I are both professionals, and when I was 29, my company was going through layoffs, I thought, wow. That could happen to me. We decided to start we even though we'd been saving, we decided to start living off one paycheck and saving the other paycheck in case something happened, we lost our jobs, and we didn't want to stress out.

So, you know, you do that for 20 something years, and all of a sudden, you have 20 something years banked of lifestyle expenses. We actually set a 7-year goal to retire, and we made it in 4 or 5, and I stayed a little longer. It was kind of like accidentally realizing we had saved decades worth of spending that had grown some.

Roger: What was your perception of what retirement was when you were 40 something and getting ready to leave work. I mean, what did you expect?

Kevin: You know, what's funny is I always worked hard at my job, but more specifically, worked smart and delivered. I always wanted control of my time, my schedule, how I structure everything. I wasn't grinding to get new titles. It was just an extension of being able to do the things I want, the interests I want, the passions I want. That's why now I'm so busy learning and helping others and sharing and communicating, it's kind of similar, but it's just a different boss.

The boss is me, I guess. 

Roger: So, the people listening probably can't see you. Now how old are you now? I want to make sure we get that on the record. 

Kevin: 53.

Roger: 53. You have beautiful crazy hair. 

Kevin: I don't look normal.

Roger: It's not hippie-ish, but you're sort of a free spirit. So, is this something that you think free spirits do, or you think you're just an outlier in this case?

Kevin: I've met probably well over 500 people who are looking at financial independence and interested in being in control of their money, and it is almost always intentional people, people who are intentional, intelligent, and organized. I was a computer guy, just kind of what I fell into.

I think that's the heart of how it worked for me. 

Yeah. I'm a spreadsheet geek and started that in the Rock Retirement Club, but it's not all about spreadsheets. It's just about organization and planning and a vision and freedom. So, it's kind of like both sides of the economy of free and structured. 

I'm a weirdo. I know.

Roger: I think what we're going to do in this series well, I don't think I know. Today, we're just going to define what FIRE. Is, sort of set the table. Then next Week, we're going to talk about the benefits of FIRE, and then the week after that, the challenges, and then wrap it up with what someone that's beyond retire early, normal retirement. What a lot of us that listen to the show can learn from the FIRE movement because I think there's a lot of good things that we can learn from it. 

So, let's Start with defining what FIRE is. By the way, this is a movement out there.

It's a small subsection of society that is really focused on this concept. So, let's define what FIRE is.

So, what's the FI in FIRE? 

Kevin: So that stands for financial independence, which is the core principle of intentional life, I believe. There are many meanings for that, but that's where we'll leave it at the moment.

Roger: So financial independence defines that for me. What does that mean to you? 

Kevin: Okay. So, it means that you have set aside money and funds that are available for you to use as resources in the life you choose now and in the future. Okay. How's that?

Roger: Would that include resources as well, like cash flow? 

Kevin: Well, yes. I mean, one point of a larger, safer Financial Independence position is that you stop working for money, you let your money work for you. 

Roger: Okay. Okay.

Kevin: So right? So, in good weeks and months and years, we bring in more money by doing nothing because it's working for itself and for us. 

Roger: So, it's a lot of self-denial in getting to financial independence. I know there are stories I've read about stories of people. I only spent 3 cents last month and I've banked everything. The very aggressive, I'm trying to get to a number that represents this financial independence. 

Is that the normal way people approach this? 

Kevin: What we read about all the time is the 25-year-olds who want to retire in 2 years and live off 36000 dollars a year from the age of 30 till the age of they'll probably live beyond a hundred. That's what we hear about because that gets clicks. But of the 500000 people that I've met pursuing this, there's been probably 200 people that have left their careers.

They usually leave their careers that the ones I've met at gatherings, 45 to 55. Okay so, they've lived good lives. They've balanced it. A lot of them saved maybe 20 percent of their income.

We saved more because we didn't have children. Well, we still don't. We traveled around the world. We did things, but it was more organized thought, and we also saved the money before we traveled.

It wasn't credit card-based lifestyle, seeing the new things and keeping up with the new trends. But then again, 53, I'm a generation before social media showing me what's cool.

Roger: Now I think of baby boomers and even me growing up, I'm 57, of the model, the mental model all that I worked with, and I don't know where I learned this was, you get a career, you grow in your career and you sacrifice and you sacrifice, and then then at the end when you higher, you'll be able to slow down the pace of all the work and the savings, et cetera.

It sounds like this sort of flips that upside down.

Kevin: I think in my case and a lot of other people that are middle life career departures, I think it has to do with finding a satisfaction level and determining how that's funded. So, I mean, I had tough jobs and traveled a lot for work, but it wasn't a grind in the sense that I did that so we could pay for vacations or buy new things we lived in the same house for 30 years. We picked a good location and a good enough house, and we would buy a 3-year-old car that was pretty new and drive it for 10 years. Starting around year eight of ownership, my wife would say, this is what I want my next car, and so she would break it too slowly that she wanted a BMW SUV, so we would take two years so I would say yes and buy a used car.

We also buy off peak, and a lot of people do. They travel during the Peak season, we bought an SUV when gas prices were really low in 2008, so they were giving them away. Then we bought a hybrid in January 2021 when no one was thriving from COVID so we get better deals by planning ahead, that whole intentional thing. 

We have the same stuff, but it might be one generation older. 

Roger: Do you think some of this financial independence in these kinds of decisions is connecting the dots of money and spending money versus the freedom that not spending it will give you?

Kevin: As people get older in this community, or you talk to people that are late thirties, forties, it's not about the spending money side. It's about the activity side and what it costs to do those activities. Tons of people in this community like camping. They play board games for fun, for social interactions. So, it's a slant on what many people think of travel or activities, but it might be less expensive version of the same tasks.

Roger: I can recall in my twenties, this is not the version of me that I liked, Kevin. I remember buying my 5 series BMW and just thinking that was what I was supposed to do to be successful. So, a lot of it in this FIRE community is anti that. The badge is to go do things that don't cost money rather than the things that I grew up thinking it was supposed to do. 

Kevin: Yes. But look at it in two different ways. one is you worked hard. You grew that. You built a successful position in life, and therefore, you have the car or the house that you work in and then enjoy, and the people around you probably had similar things.

When you get into the financial independence community, you’re around people who are wealthy for their age. They're very smart as a peer group. They do a ton of things, activities with people in the community all over the world. So, they've built those 5 friends around them to average into that position. It all just kind of Is where you fit at that moment if you found that community, I think.

You met 50 something people at a Camp Fi weekend, and they were from 18 to 60. And they were all dialed in on life and progress and challenging themselves regardless of the money side in general. Right? 

Roger: Yeah. I think this for a lot of us, we may have heard of FIRE I think most people listening probably haven't. It is truly a community. 

So that's the FI, financial independence, which is essentially being very intentional about your money in order to have financial capital to provide you choices earlier in life.

Now the RE, which is retire early.

I remember early on when I became exposed to the FIRE movement, I'm like, retire early? That sounds silly. I don't even like the idea of retirement. What will I do for the rest of my life. So, what does the RE really mean, at least from your view?

Kevin: It's really commonly thought of as retiring from your career at an earlier age, and I just say before 60, it counts as an early retiree. Someone who's 57, 55, that's an early retiree. That's a person who, or even a household who has Deferred qualified accounts, IRAs, 401k that they can't touch without penalty unless they go through special procedures. So, you fall into a different category. You don't have medical insurance from Medicare and no longer from your employment generally.

So those are what I call retired early. Now many people in the FIRE community don't like the “retired” term. There's a new term I keep coming across as recreationally employed, and I would say so many people, dozens and dozens of people that retired in there, you know, mid-forties up to mid-fifties, they're so busy helping other people, taking on new challenges, getting certifications, joining groups, working part time, I just met someone on a FIRE retreat in Bali. She mentioned she's been retired from her career for, like, a year, and she got swooped up and has to go has to go work part time for another small company, small business. When that business asked me about her work, I said, don't steal her FIRE. Just because she's good and intentional and intelligent, don't take her, and he still did. 

So, the FIRE people are not these lazy people just going camping in the woods and living off 2000 dollars a month. They're driven, intelligent, Skilled people in so many ways.

Roger: The way I think of it, Kevin, is in retirement in general, I think even traditional retirement, a good percentage of people that are traditionally retired are working at some level whether for money or not. Right? 

When we've surveyed people that about what retirement means to them. By far, the number 1 term that they identify with is having time, freedom and to pursue things of interest. And so that's retiring from the traditional career is probably what it is. Right? So, you can go work part time or flex work or on and off. It's not sitting around. It's not the brochures. 

Kevin: Correct.

I consider it leaving a career. Some people used to think the safety of a career, which with all the layoffs you hear constantly and reductions in force, is not that safe. 

But I was thinking about it yesterday if you grind for 40 something years and you're 65, Work 45 years. You're 67. When you stop working, you're not really going to want to do as much. You're not going to want to go out and get a certification or spend 3 months or 6 months learning some new skills. But if you're 45 or 50 and you did 20 something years in a career, and now you know you have 40 ish years ahead of you, and you're still motivated. You just didn't want the grind. You're going to do things. I think that's what happens, especially if you're an intentional person in that position.

You just have more life energy for new things at those ages, I think that's part of it.

Roger: You're probably a lot more self-aware of your strengths and interests in curiosity when you're in your forties or fifties and you are in your twenties. Right?

I think of you. I think of Kevin Lyles. I think of Mark Ross. I think of Veronica McCain, who was at the roundup. They're all 50, 60 somethings that earn income, not near what they could earn if they were in their career, but they have so much time freedom to pursue things. So that's really in your mind what retiring early means, not sitting around being lazy.

Kevin: Yes. It's leaving your career. A number of the people you've mentioned, Kevin Lyles, Mark Ross, were pulled into your world because you saw something in them, knowledge and passion. They didn't come looking for any extra activities with you. So that's that whole thing where people look for good people. People hire good people, and this community is good people, whether they're 25, 31. They're smart, intelligent people, and they're going to be successful at almost anything they do. 

It's not just the media version, the bloggers, the podcasters that we keep seeing. There's a whole underlying community of normal people who are exceptional. 

Roger: Why do you think this FIRE structure has taken hold of at least a section of 20, 30, 40-year-olds? 

Kevin: I think it's because of social media, Because of a different position, some people that want to be different, that want to outshine their peers, and then it becomes an internal power position where when you have money saved, when you have your first 400 dollars saved and you don't have to worry about something breaking, if you have a thousand dollars saved, and you can fix major repairs, or you can fly off and do something with friends that you really stressed out before on a credit card.

I think younger people feel that power, and I think it's also easy to connect with other people who are doing the same activities, lifestyle, intentional money management. Before social media, you didn't read articles about this. You didn't see a clip on the news of this is a good story on the news of someone who's money smart. So, I think social media has found those same people. They call it a tribe, a community.

What you saw at Camp FI, people 18 to 60, we'll say it that way. Usually, they're in their twenties to their fifties. Any of those people sat down and talked to each other, a 55-year-old and a 21-year-old, and they had this conversation, and it was engaged. That doesn't happen in real life. 21-year-olds don't go talk to 55-year-olds.

It's a common ground that can be in their own positions, but I call it 20/20, having friends that are 20 years younger than you and 20 years older than you. Not just acquaintances because there's a lot of knowledge that you can get from intelligent, intentional people on that wide spectrum that you might not have. These people are open to listening and learning from that. 

Roger: I think it is a lot of people that are intentional with money and that think a little bit differently about not sacrificing their entire life to their career. They're able to connect now where they felt they were weirdos or one offs, right? When I attended that Camp Fi so there's this organization called Camp Fi. It's run by I can't recall his name off the top of my head. Do you? 

Kevin: Stephen Boyer.

Roger: Stephen Boyer, and I was invited to present at one here in North Texas. I had no clue what I was going to do. I mean, I know Kevin Sylvester here and others just from my journeys. I think of FIRE as sort of the mister money mustache living in out in the woods and picking up roadkill to eat for lunch and just really extreme versions.

I was blown away. I was blown away by the younger people. There are some 17-year-olds. I hired one of them to be a video editor, Mia, and about their intentionality about money. Now you get the, yeah, I'm a travel hacker or I'm a yeah, they have all these hacker things going on and not hacking in terms of, I guess, playing the system a little bit to try to do it more frugally, and you get extreme in this. 

Kevin: Optimization. 

Roger: Yeah. You can get a little too extreme just like you can in retirement with optimization, but they were being intentional about a matter of pride about being wise with their money. 

Kevin: But how many of those travel hackers have been to other continents and experiencing other cultures? 

Roger: Yeah. Good point. 

Kevin: That broadens their perspective just because they figured out a point system that hurts my brain, I just ask them when I need to do something. 

But so yes. That's That other intention of learning about the life, and there's even been some famous people talking about life credits where they didn't want to buy certain things, 200-dollar jeans, because they had to work a few hours in the studio to make that money. So, it's the, what do you have to give to get the money to give away to get a product?

Roger: I think it's a healthy movement. I mean, there are extremes just like they're in anything. 

So, what we're going to do this month is next week, we're going to talk about some of the benefits of thinking like this that you and I can take as 50, 60 something’s incorporating in our decisions about rocking retirement. Then we'll look at the challenges of FIRE because maybe some of your kids are Interested or in this movement so they understand some of the challenges. Then lastly, in the last episode, we'll wrap all this up with some key learnings that we can try to incorporate.

So, Kevin, excited to chat with you next week. 

Kevin: That's right. Let's talk more. 

ROCK LIFE WITH DR. BOBBY DUBOIS

Roger: So welcome to the Rock Life segment where we're going to focus on the energy pillar with Dr. Bobby DuBois. How are you doing, Bobby?

Dr. Bobby Dubois: I'm feeling wonderful. 

Roger: I'm excited about this discussion because this morning, I took my Athletic Greens, and then a few hours later, I used a protein powder because I'm really focused on protein. And in the past, I've taken vitamin D. I've bought a fair number of supplements.

We're going to talk about nutritional supplements and how do we incorporate those into our energy protocols. So why are supplements such an important topic? 

Dr. Bobby Dubois: Well, I think they're a really important topic. I mean, you're not alone. 50 percent of Americans take at least 1 supplement on a routine basis.

So, you're among many, many others, and there's about 50 billion dollars spent by Americans on supplements. So that alone suggests that it's good to talk about. 

Now one of the caveats is that these can be very profitable for retailers. So, it's 1 of those buyer beware.

They're going to advertise. They're going to push the limits of what's feasible to advertise and they're going to make a lot of money. That's the challenge to keep in the back of our mind. 

Now the pitch for a supplement is really compelling, and I understand that. Folks, when it comes to their health, want to be proactive. They want to feel like they have agency. They're in charge. It isn't just God's will whether they get cancer. That's a scary proposition. So, to feel like I'm doing something, it's going to make a difference is a really compelling story.

I totally, totally understand that. 

Now the problem, of course, is that the enthusiasm outweighs the evidence, that there's a lot of about athletic greens or any of these other things, but the evidence is pretty darn scanty and not particularly supportive. So that's the challenge that we need to wrestle with today. 

Now the good news is by and large, most of these are pretty safe. They're not going to hurt you. They may hurt your pocketbook, but they're not going to hurt you by and large. I mean, there are some weird ones that can hurt you. You can take too much of certain things. So, the problem from my standpoint is that I tend to focus not on what is just safe, but whether it actually works or not, and that's where the evidence gets pretty scanty. 

Before we get any further, there's got to be a couple of disclaimers.

First, I am not a nutritionist. I don't even play one on TV. So, I'm pretty good at looking at evidence to see what does and doesn't work, but I have no formal training other than being a physician about the things that we eat and how they work in our bodies. 

The second is I have a personal bias, which is if there isn't evidence to support doing something, I generally don't do it. I don't do things in medicine because it seems hypothetically to be a good thing.

I am generally wary until I come across evidence that says this works in these kinds of people. That applies to pharmaceutical prescribed drugs and especially to supplements. 

Roger: I have a question about that. How do you navigate the world when a lot of evidence is indicative, but not directly causal in most instances? 

Dr. Bobby Dubois: That would be a wonderful podcast all in itself.

Related to what we're going to talk about there's a lot of people who are anti carbohydrates and the insulin effect and all the rest. The problem with a lot of those studies is that a lot is based on some biochemistry. 

Well, when you have sugar, this is what happens to your blood, and that can't be good, and it must cause long term problems. It's that piece of connecting what they observe in the blood or in the lab or in a mouse, connecting that dot or those dots to what happens in humans is where things fall apart. That's where nutritional supplements fall a lot on this, but so do a lot of other things that people claim we should do.

Roger: Okay. So how do we want to explore this topic? 

Dr. Bobby Dubois: I think like you always do, set up a framework. We're going to set up a framework. The first is we have to define terms.

What are supplements, and what are the most commonly used ones? 

Second, I think we want to have a brief discussion around the supplement industry and how it's quite different from the pharmaceutical industry and why the levels of evidence that we run across are so different. 

Third, we want to talk about a few of the most common supplements, and I'll share what I think we know and what we don't know. Ultimately, this comes down to a benefit, risk, and cost decision, and each person will have to make their own. 

In medicine, you have the Hippocratic oath, do no wrong. But other people are like, well, you know, it might help. It probably wouldn't do much wrong. Yeah. It'll cost me some money. I like the idea of taking supplements. I'll do it.

That's fine if that's where you net out. I net out differently because if there isn't evidence, I don't want to spend the money, take the effort to do it, and have the false belief that it will help solve problems that it probably won't. 

Roger: So, when I think of the word supplement, I think of its supplementing something that We should have a certain amount of, and we don't either because of nutrition or personal biochemistry or whatever. So, what are supplements in your mind or the common ones?

Dr. Bobby Dubois: I think it's a great way to think about it. Now these are referred to as nutritional supplements, and that'll be important a few minutes when we talk about what the FDA can and can't do in this space. 

So, they fall pretty much into kind of four categories, vitamins, vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin D, vitamin E. Minerals, calcium or magnesium. Herbals, Echinacea, turmeric, and a variety of others, and various probiotics that you might get in your yogurt, or you might take a packet and add it to things. These are typically taken on a routine basis. They can be taken for specific needs, but where you generally hear about it is you should take this every day.

Now the most common ones that people spend money on and take are multivitamins, your one a day type vitamin, omega 3’s, probiotics, vitamin D, calcium, protein powder and psyllium, which is like Metamucil. Those are the most common. Obviously, there's a whole raft of others, but that's the most common. 

Roger: Okay, and so that's what we're talking about.

Now, do we want to talk about the industry and how it's a little bit different? 

Dr. Bobby Dubois: I think so. Because when you go to a doctor and the doctor says, I think you need to take valsartan for your blood pressure, the FDA is very involved in both approving the study you want to do making sure that the data are analyzed correctly, that it's a sufficient size that you can prove something, that there's real safety that's been assessed, and that it actually works. All of that is tightly examined by the FDA. Before you put anything in your advertisement or your label, they have to sign off on it.

So, it's a very closely scrutinized industry. Not that every drug works for every person, and maybe there's some people that take certain drugs that probably really won't help them. But to be on the label, to be in the advertising, there's very close oversight.

Roger: When we think of some of the instances with the FDA, we've seen where things have turned out to hurt people in certain ways or become addictive in certain ways, even with all that oversight. 

Dr. Bobby Dubois: Even with all of that oversight. That's a good point.

Roger: Now we are switching to the supplemental industry. 

Dr. Bobby Dubois: Yep. Now before we immediately turn, there's one other piece of the puzzle. 

The studies that the pharmaceutical industry does are ridiculously expensive. You know, it's estimated to cost between a billion and 5 billion dollars to bring a single drug to market. You get a patent for a certain number of years. Nobody can compete with that molecule. So, a lot of costs go in to do these fancy studies, but you have the potential for real gain. 

The problem on the nutritional supplement side is that there aren't any patents. You can't patent calcium. You can't patent echinacea. Without patents, the willingness to do a lot of studies is going to be lower. The FDA is prohibited from limiting what you do and speak. I mean, you can say this will improve heart health, and you don't have to have any data really to support that.

So, because you can pretty much say what you want, because it's a nutritional aid, you know, it's like saying broccoli is good for you. Nobody's going to say that the broccoli growers association can't Tell you in their ads, eat broccoli. It's good for you, and it'll make you healthy and live longer. Because it's a supplement, it fits into that same category. 

It's a very high profit industry, so there's an incentive to kind of push things further than what the data would support. When we get into a study, that's an example of 1 of these nutritional aids, you’ll get a sense of why this can be problematic.

Roger: Well, it makes me think back to when I was doing longer distance triathlon. I was taking a lot of nutritional supplements from a marketer for endurance athletes, and I would get all of these newsletters with all of these scientific articles about why this supplement's important and what that supplement does. They had letters behind their names and words that were very long, and I had no clue what they were saying, and I just said, okay. I'll try it. At least it can't hurt me.

It can get very confusing on our end or the consumer end. 

Dr. Bobby Dubois: Oh, totally. Totally. I don't malign anybody for getting excited about certain supplements and especially since that the agency thing really makes us feel good.

Doing an endurance event is a painful exercise. If you think placebo or otherwise, that a gel that has protein in it is better than a gel without protein or a drink with protein. Hey. If it makes you feel better longer, great. 

Let me give you an example of a study and it falls very much into what you just said.

So basically, the point of the study and kind of the headline is broccoli sprout extract improves exercise performance. That sounds good. I have broccoli, but, boy, if I can supercharge my broccoli with an extract, even better.

The theory makes some sense because broccoli has antioxidants, which everybody feels is good for you. You have free radicals that are destroying your tissues, and an antioxidant will stop that. So that's, of course, have to be good. The study was done and they showed statistical improvements.

Roger: We have a study that showed improvement. 

Dr. Bobby Dubois: Exactly, and they have big words and they had letters after their names and all the rest.

When you actually read the study and think about it, all of a sudden, the house of cards begins to fall apart. First, there were only nine people in the study. That's not a lot of people. If there were a hundred and nine people or a thousand and nine people, I could get more excited. 

When they said your heart rate didn't go as high, meaning that this broccoli extract Clearly must have helped you because it didn't force your heart rate to go up as much. The difference was less than 2 percent. So, without broccoli extract on average went up to 187, heart rate, which is really high actually, these must have been pretty young people. Instead, it only went up to 184. The time to exhaustion was not 401 minutes. It was 406 minutes, one percent difference. 

So, nine people, tiny differences. Yes. They were statistically significant, and then it gets worse. It's funded by the study was funded by the vegetable growers. The authors have a patent that relates to this. So, is it possible that broccoli extract would actually improve performance? It's possible. Is it going to hurt you? Not likely. Is it going to help? I don't think so. 

I don't think this convinces me, and I certainly and broccoli extract is probably a lot more expensive than buying a crown or two of broccoli. 

Roger: There's not really any motivation or incentive to do large studies. 

Dr. Bobby Dubois: No because, again, they can make the claims they want and, you know, to spend 10 million dollars on a study when somebody else can make broccoli extract the next day. The numbers don't work. 

This is where, and I'm not a big government person, but this is where the government can help. They can fund some of these studies and as we get to, they have funded some of these studies. I've spoken to the military, our military, and said, you know, you've got a ready laboratory of, like, these aren't end of one, but you have boot camp that you run every month or two that you start a new boot camp. Have some people drink water before they go on their long runs? Have some people drunk Gatorade? Have some people tried broccoli extract? You'll know the answer.

You know, you got lab rats for recruits, but I don't think I convinced them yet to do this. 

Roger: The point here is that we have to be careful when we read studies to see if they support what they say as we're consuming things, not just because of the potential benefit might not be there, likely it's not going to hurt us, but it's still a serious cost. 

So, what evidence supports supplements?

Dr. Bobby Dubois: Supports or doesn't. So, let's just walk through some of the common ones and what we do and perhaps what we don't know.

Now there's a famous adage in kind of the evidence world, which is the absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence. Well, what does that mean? 

It means that evidence of absence means I've done a good study and it doesn't work. Absence of evidence is what it sounds like. I don't have a good study to tell me the answer. So, you have to kind of separate, well, has it been tested well and shown not to work or frankly, the study hasn't been done, but it still could be really helpful. So, let's tease that apart as we get to some real stuff. 

I've mentioned this before, but I'll mention it again. examine.com is a great starting point to look at nutritional supplements, whether it's melatonin, whether it's vitamin C, that's a good place to start. They do a summary of things and then they'll list the actual studies and you can pour through them if you wish.

So, let's start with what up until maybe five, ten years ago was probably the most popular supplement that people got excited about. Omega 3's. Now they're antioxidants. They're going to go after that really bad free radical stuff. And the thought was that these could prevent heart disease and cancer.

Now what was the theory behind this?

Well, they looked around the world and found that people who eat fish live longer. Okay? Fish has omega 3's, like anchovies and salmon and sardines and tuna. So, if eating fish is good, taking the extract out of the fish has to be even better because it'll be more powerful.

But when you actually did the clinical trials, there were 98 studies on this topic. So, it's not like, oh, there was one study done in Ethiopia. There are 98 studies. They showed that there were no reductions in heart attacks, cardiac death, and the enthusiasm for omega 3's, at least in the scientific community, has fallen by the wayside. 

That doesn't mean people don't take it. That doesn't mean there aren't functional health doctors that are excited about it. But when you look at the evidence, it's really hard to say they help anybody. Eating fish? Perhaps. But it may not be the omega 3's and the fish that are what are helping you.

So that's an important kind of example.

Roger: I want to stop for a second. And the reason I think we are talking about this when it comes to the energy pillar is we only have so much money, obviously, time, and energy. This is part of the discussion to make sure we use those precious resources as best we can. This is not saying that supplements are definitely an out, but it's one of them, I think, paints a clearer picture for us to make those decisions.

Dr. Bobby Dubois: I think that’s right, and I think there is a hidden risk here. I have a lot of folks in my personal circle who take supplements in lieu of what is traditional proven therapy. So, I got a bunch of people with elevated cholesterols, and they're on, you know, you name it, turmeric, omega 3's, whatever. They're like, no, I don't believe in this statin stuff. It doesn't really help, and It has side effects, and I'm going down this route. That works for people that have osteoporosis issues. You hear this over and over and over again. That's probably my bigger worry. If you want to spend a thousand or two thousand dollars a year, now go have fun, do it.

But when you avoid the mainstream approaches to these problems because it sounds like a great alternative. That's when I get worried. 

Roger: I see your point. I see your point. So, do we want to highlight one other study? Then we can go out and think about what to do about this. 

Dr. Bobby Dubois: Sure. So, vitamins and minerals are, again, very, very, very popular. There was a summary recently that looked at, again, here we have 84 clinical trials, and they looked at vitamin D, beta-carotene, which was the bee's knees for a while, vitamin E, they had really no benefit. In some cases, actually increases risk.

The one thing that actually might suggest that it could work was just your boring multivitamin. Now it was a small benefit in cancer reduction. I don't know how much to make out of it. But here's another kind of going down the path of we love vitamin and mineral supplements, but when you look at the evidence, it doesn't pan out.

Roger: Let's talk about multivitamins. We mentioned it once or twice. A daily multivitamin. It's a huge industry. It seems like good practice. You're one a day or whatever. Have you examined any of the evidence around multivitamins or are there studies on that?

Dr. Bobby Dubois: Well, the multivitamin concept presupposes you're not getting enough of what is indicated on a daily basis. So, this sort of fills in the cracks.

Most people, you know, get all the vitamins they need and the requirements that are listed under the recommended daily allowances are pretty small. So, a multivitamin which just has that minimum amount is not going to hurt you. I take multivitamins just because it's 10 cents a day. It's easy to do. You know, I have weird diets sometimes and, you know, I may try intermittent fasting, so I'm not going to get many times to have broccoli during the day.

I figured, okay, you know, do I think it's absolutely proven that it works? No. Is it cheap and isn't going to hurt me? Yes.

So, I take them. So that's one that I actually do. 

Roger: Okay. Since we are all on the journey to aging and we want to age as well as we can, Any thoughts on cognitive decline and supplements? 

Dr. Bobby Dubois: So, people worry probably more about cognitive decline than they worry about dropping dead.

I mean, we were all very frightened of kind of the specter of Alzheimer's being in a nursing home not recognizing friends, that's just an awful experience. So, anything that kind of leans in the direction of can I do something, agency here is really critical.

You know, I saw my sister deteriorate and I'll do anything and I've heard these dietary things could help. So, there was a lot of excitement around two different diets, the Mediterranean diet, which people know about, and the DASH diet, which was sort of invented for high blood pressure folks, but they're all pretty similar in terms of, you know, whole grains, leafy vegetables. Particularly in this Study, they included nuts and beans and berries, things that were purported to help you with cognitive issues.

So, they did this very large study. It was a three-year study. Lots of people measured cognitive ability over time, and they even looked at MRI scans to see what was going on in the brain. 

Bottom line is there were no benefits for cognitive decline, and they didn't measure cancer and other things. This is what they focused on.

Now is this a supplement study? No. But if this study where you eat beans and berries and nuts and leafy vegetables didn't help people, then an extract of leafy vegetables and nuts and beans and berries is probably not likely to be that beneficial, meaning show me the money, show me a study that shows the extract works when this whole food approach, which everybody says whole food approaches are better, didn't work. 

Roger: I remember the mind diet. I remember reading that book.

When you think of a study like that and I think of three years, I go back to, like, Peter Tear talks about the compounding of habits. three years seems like a very short time in the scheme of things to see if eating, say, mediterranean or whole food diet has an impact Just as a layman. 

Dr. Bobby Dubois: Well, they didn't choose three years between the ages of 21 and 24 where you wouldn't expect much decline at all. 

These were people who were older where you would anticipate there could be some decline in at least some of the people and you randomize them. So, yes, this is not a study of people starting at the age of 30 following this set of diets, which are pretty hard to follow for 40 years and saying, no. Didn't help. 

But again, I'm a show me person. If this didn't work, the burden of proof is on you to come up with some evidence that longer would have made a difference. Now that longer might be doing a study in dogs or chimpanzees where you say, oh, for two years in a dog, there were no benefits. But in eight years and a dog, there were benefits.

So, you need something to tell me that this study doesn't answer the question. 

Roger: Okay. So, are there supplements that you like? 

Dr. Bobby Dubois: Yeah. There are. I mean, I'm not a complete nihilist. 

I'm a physician, so I prescribe stuff. So, if you have a known deficiency, not like, oh, yeah, my doctor thinks my vitamin D levels are low. People who have Crohn's disease or real gastric problems or intestinal problems, their bodies don't absorb certain things. By all means, if it's been demonstrated that that is low, a supplement is absolutely important. But that's not a routine blood test that says your calcium is this or your B12 is that. So, I absolutely support it when it's demonstrable that you have a condition that makes it a low. 

Now I differentiate from an excitement standpoint. Supplements, you have to take your whole life versus ones that treat a particular acute problem. So, if I say to you, you should take calcium, magnesium, and omega 3's for your whole life, and you won't really know if it works until 40 years later. I don't get excited unless there's evidence that supports it.

On the other hand, if you have bowel irregularity and you add psyllium to your diet, Metamucil, and it changes it, well, that's your n of one study. You've done it. It works. 

If you're trying to build muscle or maintain muscle and you have protein supplements and you actually can show my strength is improving, whatever. Love it.

I think it's fantastic. As we've talked before, caffeine is the supplement. It's a drug. It's a supplement. It does improve exercise performance.

But those are discrete, short term assessable supplements as opposed to, just trust me, 30 years of this will work. 

Kevin Lyle is one of our coaches, you know, is on certain supplements, and he had certain things that were low or high in his blood. He said to me earlier today, he sent me a message that if his repeat blood tests while taking a whole raft of supplements that we're supposed to help, if it didn't improve his blood values, he was going to stop him. I think that's a perfect way to go about it. It's your n of one trial.

If turmeric doesn't affect your cholesterol, then don't worry about having a lot of turmeric or whatever it is that you think is going to solve the problem.

Roger: I was thinking of this the other day, Bobby, in terms of this n of one study that you always talk about. Just try it and see if you feel different. Would you agree that I'll use my brother-in-law as an example, is He started taking Athletic Greens, and we meet every week. About a month or 2 later, it's like, it's really my belly feels better. I don't feel as bloated. 

Whether it's placebo or not, he is connecting the dots rightly or wrongly to, hey I'm taking Athletic Greens, and I feel better. That can still be a win as long as you understand that it's not necessarily scientifically based. Would you agree?

Dr. Bobby Dubois: Yes. I would do a couple things. One is I would ask him after six months and say, you know, that boost in feeling, is it still there? He may well say, nah, not so much but I'm still taking the Athletic Greens anyways because I like the idea.

Then he should try stopping the Athletic Greens for a period of time. The ideal way, and I don't remember how Athletic Greens is. Is it a packet? Is it a pill? What is it?

Roger: It's a powder that you mix, But it's like 80 dollars a month, so it's not inexpensive. 

Dr. Bobby Dubois: So ideally what I would do is, well, the simple thing is just stop it and see what happens. 

The one that's a little more difficult is have your wife make your smoothie in the morning and add something that kind of tastes like an athletic green thing, but not athletic greens, and see if it makes a difference. That would be the best way to do it. 

Roger: So, what's our take home message here?

Dr. Bobby Dubois: Nutritional supplements are very popular, and as you said, a lot of money can be spent on them. Yeah. There's a good reason people want to do it. It gives them a sense that they have some control over their health, but there's not a lot of evidence that any of these things work for these long term uses. 

You know, they're pretty safe and it really just comes down to the risk that you think you assume by taking these, the benefit you hope or you think will happen and the cost and make your own decision.

I mentioned earlier, I take multivitamins. Do they absolutely work? No, but who knows? I've recently tried something that's popular in sort of the strength community, NMN. You've people may have heard of NAD and various other things.

Anyhow, the evidence is Interesting, perhaps promising. For me, I don't yet know whether they work or not and I'm, like, giving it a six-month trial, and we'll see what happens. If I feel like it doesn't help, then I won't do it. It doesn't seem to be any harm.

Roger: So, your n of one study is, okay, the risk of the actual material Is negligible, if any. There's this potential benefit and for whatever you're paying for it, it's worth trying.

Dr. Bobby Dubois: Exactly. Exactly. I'll decide based on whether I think it has helped or it hasn't helped and either continue it or I'll stop it. 

Roger: I love these discussions because they help us be intentional about spending our time and our resources on building energy and make us better consumers. So, thanks as always, Bobby. 

Dr. Bobby Dubois: Oh, you're so welcome.

TODAY’S SMART SPRINT SEGMENT

Roger: On your marks, get set, 

and we're off to take a little baby step we can take in the next seven days to not just rock retirement, but rock life. 

Alright. In the next seven days, I challenge you if you are not a normal reader to start a book. Start a book and consider building the habit of reading books.

They don't have to be textbooks, nonfiction, get better books. Just find something that piques your curiosity. It will change your life. 

CONCLUSION

Many of you have asked about my trip to Costa Rica with Michael Easter and doing a Musogi. We're going to have Michael Easter on to talk about the concept of a Musogi and a little bit about the trip. I'm not going to share a lot of details about the trip. 

The basic concept, just to tell you a little bit here, is to, on an annual basis, do something really, really hard. It doesn't have to be physically hard, just something that's a little bit outside your comfort zone, and perhaps you have a 50/50 chance of completing whatever it is. So that's the concept, rule number one.

Rule number two is don't die. Do something where you're not going to die. Obviously, it is an important rule. 

In this Musogi, part of it, I can tell you this, is we hiked in the Rainforest in the Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica, one of the most biologically dense places on Earth, it was a serious jungle. The trek that we did had about 4000 feet of climbing. I can say that. It was a bushwhack kind of trail. It wasn't like a groomed trail. Everything wants to hurt you there. 

So, my experience in that segment of this larger thing was I got dehydrated.

It was 90 degrees, 90 percent humidity. I drank a ton of liquids and electrolytes. I don't feel like I got behind on those things over this trek. But at the end of it, I stumbled out, got put into a van and driven to the doctor and had to, like, have 3 IVs and then some B12. I was at the doctor for a while.

I had never collapsed in that way. I've never not finished anything in terms of the challenges, not that this was a race or anything. I hit a limit, and I'm still processing that. It was very interesting. I'm proud. I'm glad I did it. But there are a lot of firsts. I've never not completed all the things in something. I've never collapsed. I've never had to depend so much on the people that were with me.

I had a couple people, and one of them was an EMT, Norwich, who I give a big shout out to, and Curham. They essentially had to guide me through getting out of the jungle. So, it was an interesting experience, and it reminded me that we depend on a lot of other people than ourselves, and we're not just totally self-sufficient.

I'll share that little tidbit, but I don't want to share all the details of what we did because it was personal with the people that we were there but there'll be some lessons that Michael Easter and I will explore.

For those of you that are wondering, that's what I did. I am here. I am happy, I'm healthy, and I am here to help you rock retirement. 

The opinions voiced in this podcast are for general information only and not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individual. All performance references are historical and do not guarantee future results. All indices are unmanaged and cannot be invested in directly. Make sure you consult your legal, tax, or financial adviser before making any decisions. you consult your legal, tax, or financial advisor before making any decisions.