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Episode #570 - Learn What to Ignore with Dr. Daniel Crosby

Roger: The show is a proud member of the retirement podcast network. 

“Don't let the noise of other opinions drown out your own inner voice.”

- Steve Jobs. 

Hey there. 

Welcome to the show dedicated to helping you not just survive retirement, but to have the confidence because you're doing the work to really lean in and rock retirement. 

Today we are going to have Dr. Daniel Crosby on the show, author of The Soul of Wealth. It is a wonderful book. We'll have links to it in our 6-Shot Saturday. A great gift. Every chapter is a little vignette or essay on a particular subject related to wealth. Not just from the financial sense, but from the inner sense. Today we're going to talk with Dr. Daniel Crosby about one of his chapters titled Learn what to ignore. This is a really important skill when it comes to life, but when it comes to retirement planning in general, it's a new domain. 

You definitely want to build some confidence in your retirement planning chops. Even if you're working with an advisor, the more informed you are, the better you're going to extract value from that advisor. Obviously if you're doing this on your own, you want to build up that skill set. The desire to build up that skill set probably leads you to listen to a podcast like this or read a book or hire somebody, but you want to be careful because nobody knows exactly how to do this. It is not a complicated problem that's just easily solved by one formula or one spreadsheet or one software tool. This is a complex problem that has many facets and it's easy for you, just like it's easy for me when I'm looking at a new domain, to go to the experts. That's a reasonable thing to do to build some competence. But we can't abdicate our trust in ourselves of what's the right path for us, what fits us. There are so many different ways to build a retirement plan that is feasible and resilient. There are so many different ways to do many things. Just because you see one person's iteration of it doesn't mean that that fits you. Their situation is totally different than yours, just like a particular expert. 

Some would call me an expert in retirement planning. I don't have the way. I can help you build your competence, but don't think I can figure this all out or anybody can. This is where it comes down to trusting your inner voice, that can be hard to do when you're in a domain that's a little bit scary. There's a balance between there. You want to leverage people like me to inform the process that you use to make decisions for yourself. But you don't want to depend on people like me too much. You don't want to depend on anyone else too much either. The one you want to depend on most for the judgment calls is you, because your entire life experience practically and business and in finance and professionally, but also your life experience, your preferences, your desires, what motivates you is integrated into those judgment calls. Trust yourself, trust yourself, trust yourself. You're more capable than you likely admit to yourself.

All right, with that said, today, what we're going to do is we're going to chat with Dr. Daniel Crosby and learn what to ignore. In addition to that, we're going to have a chat with Dr. Bobby Dubois about what your style of receiving information is, because that's important in the health domain so you can find the voices that connect with how you think about your health journey so you have the energy to show up. He created a little quiz or a quiz that will help you put some labels to that to hopefully improve your health outcomes. 

Before we get started, a couple of announcements. Number one is Retirement Plan Live. Our live case study starts in January and we're focusing on a single person that does not have children. But the twist this year is we're actually going to have two subjects that you're going to hear from every week. I have never done this before so, we’ll see how it goes. We're going to have a gentleman who doesn't have children and is not married and we're also going to have another subject, a female with no children, not married. Each week they're going to share the same part of the journey as I tease out the information we need to work on to have a vision and create a feasible plan. Honestly, as I record this, I haven't figured out, I guess we're going to have to have two results episodes, so we can focus on the man and then we can focus on the woman separately. Stay tuned in to see how we figure that out. No doubt Nicole is already turning the dials in her head to help me achieve that. 

Second quick announcement is that there'll be some changes in the show for 2025. The show is going to be hopefully tighter, more focused on retirement, and always having some little baby step you can take. I want to make sure when we answer questions that we empower somebody to do something and not just simply talk about the potential answers to a subject. We're going to try to close the aperture, and get more focused, because you don't need to be an expert in retirement planning. You need to build up a level of competence and you need to take action to create a great life. Life is not what we talk about, it's what we do. With that said, let's get to Dr. Daniel Crosby

INTERVIEW WITH DR. DANIEL CROSBY

Dr. Daniel Crosby, the award winning whatever you are. What are you, by the way?

Dr. Daniel Crosby: The thought leader of the year. Roger, please.

Roger: Is that what it says on the award?

Dr. Daniel Crosby: That's what the plaque says.

Roger: That's what it says. Side story. Nicole “Rockstar” Mills, who is our COO, her husband works for a large company, he gets lots of awards and she was getting frustrated because he had all these plaques. So, for her birthday we got her an award. So now she has something. It's rock star-ish.

Dr. Daniel Crosby: That's awesome.

Roger: But anyway, I want to dovetail off of my conversation with Michael Easter last week on gear, not stuff, and talk about one of your chapters in your book, The Soul of Wealth, which is an amazing book. We'll have links to it in 6-Shot Saturday. Any chapter you could expand into its own book if you wanted too. It's that type of wisdom.

Dr. Daniel Crosby: Right.

Roger: I want to talk about learning what to ignore. Before I get into this with you, I firmly believe, especially in the domain of retirement planning, but for someone to thrive as a human, there are two superpowers that we're going to have to master. 

One is learning what to ignore because the speed in which trash or information comes at us is overwhelming now, even before AI gets really going.

The second superpower, which is related, is the ability to focus. That makes me think of Cal Newport, his book Deep Work, which I'm a big fan of his. Your chapter on learning what to ignore I think is critical if you want to, in our vernacular, rock retirement, have a great life. Why did you write this chapter?

Dr. Daniel Crosby: Well, because I'm in deep agreement with you about the currency of our attention and how it's being pulled on in negative ways. So, Roger, I came across a stat. It's been probably 15 years ago, but even 15 years ago, it's gotten worse since then. Google executive said the volume of information that was created from the year zero to the year 2000, we now exceed every two days in the internet economy. Everyone's a creator now. AI is going to hasten that even more. We just live in a world where we are utterly unprepared for the volume of information that's going to be coming our way. Most of it is completely inconsequential to anything that would pass for something that would matter to living a meaningful existence. Much of it is designed to either scam you or get you to buy something or to mislead you or to try and get you to vote for someone. So, it's a wild world out there and our brains are candidly not prepared for it because it's such a new phenomenon.

Roger: When I think about rocking retirement from an organizational standpoint, we created four pillars of how you should organize your planning. 

First, what do I want? Who do I want to be when I grow up? Which is the question you talked about before you got on. That question never goes away if you don't know that already. Then comes organizing your resources to make sure that your vision is feasible. If not, how to get to a feasible direction and then make that feasible vision or path resilient and then optimize. I think of Roth conversion strategies or optimization is all the bling of planning financially oftentimes. This is why we're talking about this. Part of the chapter is market forecasts, investment products become the thing rather than put in their place. The cool stuff is what we want to look at, and the more clutter we have, it's easier to ignore all the other stuff, the important stuff.

Dr. Daniel Crosby: Yeah. So, we'll go back to the top of your funnel. As I understand it, figuring out what you want, even that thing which seems so fundamental and seems so basic for many of us can be deeply, deeply obfuscated, obscured, made cloudy by focusing on the wrong things. I'm sure you've had this experience a lot of times when we're talking to someone about their financial goals, what we get is something that's deeply mimetic, which is to say it's a meme, right. Their neighbor got a boat, so now they want a boat. You know, their brother in law sold a business for 5 million, so now they want to sell theirs for 6 million. I think that paying attention to these things that are on the periphery can actually lead us to misapprehend that very first step in your process. We're wired to work together, which is lovely. it allows us to form communities and churches and governments and lots of wonderful things. But it also tends to lead us to look to each other to try and figure out what we want. That's not always the right way to do it.

Roger: When we're thinking about what we want, what you're saying is it becomes a comparative game because we're seeing what other people have. Then that refines the aperture of our vision rather than coming from within.

Dr. Daniel Crosby: That's why I love it. The aperture of our vision. I love it. That's perfectly said.

Roger: Okay. It's hard to get out of this, right? 

Dr. Daniel Crosby: I mean, it's next to impossible. You could argue, smarter people than me have argued that it is the thing that separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom is the ability to cooperate. You know, we're not fast, we don't have sharp teeth, we don't have thick fur or scales. The only thing that we are good at, the reason that we're at the top of the food chain, is because we work together. Part of working together is deeply empathizing with each other, but also benchmarking to each other, looking to each other, and sort of indexing our needs and wants and desires to the next person's needs. Wants, desires, and that can lead us profoundly astray if we're not careful.

Roger: I want to go through the questions that you pose in the book to filter out what you should not be paying attention to. But before I do that, I want to pull a little bit more on this thread. In our practice, we've learned that before you even get to the beginning step of vision, you have to establish your top 10 values. The idea is that your goals should reflect you living out your values. They should be in congruence, right? They're the output of your values. I don't know if you've ever done an exercise like that, do you? How difficult is it to come out with your values? Even on our values worksheet, we have all these words that they can choose from so it's sort of giving them words rather than letting them just develop themselves. 

What was that word you used about memes?

Dr. Daniel Crosby: Oh, Mimetic.

Roger: Mimetic. That's a good word. Okay.

Dr. Daniel Crosby: Mimetic. Yeah, it's super hard. I have a couple of chapters on values in the book and I don't think I included the actual list. I think I just mentioned it and pointed the reader to James Clear, the bestselling author. It has a great list of values. But you know, one of the things that we find is there's often a lot of differences between our stated values and our actual values. I think we can be self-serving in the way that we talk about our values. I talk in the book about how the way that you spend your money is in some respects the ultimate reflection of your values and maybe they aren't what you would like them to be because I think plenty of folks say they value self-growth but they're not spending money on coaching or therapy. I think many people say they value spirituality but they're not being very generous with their faith community. There are people who value fitness but spend a lot more money on McDonald's than personal trainers. I actually think that looking at our budgets, looking at our AmEx card every month is a decent place to see how we're living out our values. 

Roger: Recognizing if there's differences between our stated values and our lived values is a powerful exercise as well because it's going to point out the incongruency and that's going to create tension that you're going to have to resolve some way or not resolve. If you don't resolve it internally, you're not going to feel as much at peace, I would imagine.

Dr. Daniel Crosby: Yeah. Because I mean we could get super deep with this. But I mean there's plenty of folks who use values to get away with bad stuff. There's plenty of folks who are excusing their workaholism. I see this very commonly, people who are excusing their workaholism by saying, well I'm, I'm doing this for you all. Ah, like I'm doing this for my family and being sort of a martyr about it. It is very, very easy to lie to yourself and sort of hide it under this thin patina of a value. It takes work and it takes candor, and it takes just being brutally honest with yourself and probably frankly bringing someone else in, whether that's a Roger or a therapist or a coach or someone because it gets very easy to hide behind our purported values as well.

Roger: The way I see that presented in retirement planning is like, I have one of my top 10 values as adventure. That helped in the purchase of this home in Colorado. It helps. I'm doing a seven day wilderness expedition next year. It helps me say I have to have those on my list in order to feel congruent with who I am. That's a healthy way. I think I'm doing this in a healthy way. But the way that I see it presented unhealthy is like, I value family, and then I use that value as a justification to go buy an RV or something that's not really well thought out. I'm buying the image and the purchase temporarily takes away that tension. But now you created a whole other issue if it wasn't feasible and if it was the wrong representation of the value.

You always go deep, Daniel. This is why I enjoy it when I get to talk to you.

Dr. Daniel Crosby: You talk to a shrink. You're going to get the deep in the dark stuff.

Roger: Well, let's table that, because I'm not lying on a couch at the moment. 

I think the big point I want to bring out is we have to know what to pay attention to when it comes to practical planning so we don't spend 20 hours focusing on our Social Security decision when we haven't made our plan resilient in the first place. What are those filtering questions? Before I go there, I just randomly thought of this story that I've used and think about often of that airline. I think it was an Eastern Airlines flight in Florida back in 73. They use it in pilot training now where the plane crashed because the pilot, the co pilot and the navigator got fixated on focusing on the wrong thing. Basically a light that wasn't supposed to be on and someone inadvertently took off the autopilot and they were so paying attention to what they shouldn't have been paying attention to that they ended up crashing the plane. So let's. When we think about Ralph, when I'm on social media or someone's on social media, you need to be doing Roth conversions. Right now you need to worry about this. You need to use this investment product because of this, that and the other thing. Let's go over the filtering questions that you outline in your book. And I can just read them and you can comment on them or, you can read them either way.

Dr. Daniel Crosby: Sure. either way. I've got them here. You can read them. Okay, whatever's easy.

Roger: So the first one is ask yourself, do you have a reason to believe the accuracy of this information? Question one.

Dr. Daniel Crosby: Okay, so the, real quick aside the, the, whole, this whole concept came to me when I was, I started my career before I sold my soul to Wall Street, I started my career, I started my career as a clinician. The first place I ever worked was in the eating disorder treatment center. The very first thing they taught these mostly young women who came into this eating disorder treatment center wasn't about nutrition, wasn't about therapy, wasn't any of these things. The first thing that they taught them to do was to be an informed consumer of the marketing messages that they were receiving every day and the way that airbrushing and starvation diets worked, and all these things worked so that marketers could sell you a vision that you weren't enough or that you were flawed or that you needed to buy their lipstick or their clothes or whatever it was to feel better about yourself. I felt like that was such an empowering thing. 

One of the things that we see out there in the world is that we just don't really have reason to believe what the person on, you know, what the man on the screen is telling us. I was at the gym the other day. I was watching an unnamed cable financial news program. It was before the election and they were talking about who was going to win. The person that they had to talk to about the economy and who they thought would win was a professional wrestler. I'm talking about like WWE, you know, like WWE, like the fake wrestling. We live in a world of bite sized truths and sound bites and TikTok and Twitter and the next thing. The truth about life is seldom binary, It's seldom pithy, it's seldom short, it's usually kind of complicated, it's usually kind of boring. People who know about it often go to a lot of schools and aren't as good at positioning it, as a Kardashian or a wrestler. So, I think we have to ask ourselves whether the person that is giving me this advice is even expert enough to give it.

Roger: Good question. We'll have a list of these questions in our 6-Shot Saturday email that will help you build a filter as you're doing your retirement planning

Second question to ask yourself, this is an important one in our industry, I think, what is the motivation of the person who is giving the forecast or information to you?

Dr. Daniel Crosby: If you show me a person's motivations or especially the way that you are, they are compensated. I can also almost perfectly predict their behavior. I tell a story in another one of my books when I was going on a cable financial news program and I had the little clear earpiece in my ear and you hear what's going on on the tv, right? You hear what's happening live, but you also have a producer in your ear kind of counting you down and telling you you're about to go on. Today I'm wearing a casual shrink classic of a cardigan. but on this day, I was dressed in all of my shrink finery. A tweed suit, a bow tie, tortoise shell glasses, elbow patches. The whole nine yards. I've really bought into this life. The producer is counting me down. 5, 4, 3. And she says to me, as we're approaching one, “give me something good. Don't be a nerd”.

Roger: Put you in a good mindset, doesn't it?

Dr. Daniel Crosby: Tough but fair first of all, I mean I did, I did look like a nerd, so I can see where she got that. But if she were purely motivated, right, like if she were motivated by the best interests of her viewers, she would have said something like, hey, please give me evidence based research backed, empirically validated insights into investing. But that's not what she said. She said, don't be a nerd. Give me something good because she's not selling financial advice, she's selling sizzle and she's selling ad space. The way to do that is to have me come on and say something wild, to say something bombastic. That's how the sausage gets made. All of the people from whom you would receive some sort of message about your retirement, about your finances, have some sort of motivation, whether it's fame or notoriety or personal gain or just cash money, everybody is selling something. It always makes sense to say, okay, what are this person's motivations? 

Look, the fact that they have motivations is not a problem. No, we all work for money. We all need to eat. There’s nothing wrong with having motivations or even having a profit motive, but we need to be clear on them and then talk about how they intersect with the type of advice that we're receiving.

Roger: I think of the Internet as a sales funnel at its core. One thing that we've tried to create as a safe space in the club is you pay the tuition on an annual basis. But there's never any upsells within the club or talking about even charity. If someone's doing a charity event, we don't allow that to be posted in the club. But what I found interesting, even in that domain, to try to isolate ourselves some from what you're talking about is another motivation or incentive for some. It's something that a lot of us don’t even realize. I have an opinion about a certain investment strategy, so I've implemented it in my life. A lot of my motivation of preaching that whether it's safety first or variable spending rates or whatever is to reaffirm myself in my decision. That's another kind of motivation that's less commerce based, but we do naturally as humans.

Dr. Daniel Crosby: Yeah, you know, it's, it's interesting. I, I've written another book that's unpublished, not The Soul of Wealth. I have a book that I'll publish at a future date that I'm still kind of working on. It's about finding meaning and purpose in life. I was talking to a friend about it recently and he said, well, a book like this, a book that's so meaningful, surely you can't sell it. Like you, you need to take this knowledge and you need to give it away. I said, look, my time as a pro bono therapist tells me that that is exactly wrong because the people that I had come to my club, you know, come to come to my therapy couch for free, were the laziest, least engaged, most likely to no show. That which we obtain too easily, we esteem too lightly. There's nothing wrong with someone who's creating good stuff charging a fair price for that. 

I think we have to be extra careful though, when it's our attention or our psyche that's being monetized. When someone says, hey, you, you know, you give me X dollars, I give you Y product, it's a lot clearer than I think a lot of the social media and media applications where literally what they're trying to do is get us to stick around or get mind share or get eyeball share. A lot of times the way to do that is in a hair on fire kind of way. It's salacious, it puts you to the edge of emotions that are natural in us.

Roger: Gauge the accuracy of the information. Understand the motivations behind the person delivering the information. The next filtering question is ask yourself, will I care about this in five years?

Dr. Daniel Crosby: Yeah. I will illustrate this with an advisor buddy of mine who does something which I think is so, so brilliant. I wish I had thought about this. When clients come into his office and they're like, hey, you know, Bob, I'm worried about XYZ disaster du jour. The worry of the day. He brings out a newspaper and goes, yeah, you know, things are bad. You know, it says right here, fed ponders rate cuts in the middle of tight environment. Read some of the headlines. He goes, yeah, no, things are pretty bad. You still worried about these things? The paper is from five to 10 years ago. What he does is he'll bring out a literal newspaper from five to 10 years ago and say, hey, you still worried about COVID right? You know, like March of 2020, right? Like, what were those headlines like? You still worried about that? Are you still worried about that?

Roger: That or excited about the fad du jour? Right?

Dr. Daniel Crosby: Sure. I mean, COVID was legitimately a big deal. COVID in some ways is a bad example because it was far reaching and quite dangerous and other things. So there's a million examples of this. If you go back and think about what we were worried about five years ago, heck, five months ago. I mean, I can scarcely remember what we were worried about five months ago. There will always, always be something. Just know that so little of this is going to matter to you five years from now. I think that's a great question. Will I care about these five years from now? The answer is almost always no, unless it's to do with a relationship.

Roger: The listeners can't see this, but I wrote this down when I was talking with a client.

I like to write down words that they say and they say, given the state of everything, was sort of the preface and then on to. In this case, I think it was fear. Important question, go ahead. Did you have something else you want to say?

Dr. Daniel Crosby: Yeah, I think that given the state of everything, is kind of how everyone feels all the time.

Roger: Yeah.

Dr. Daniel Crosby: Scripture talks about this, right? War, disease, all of this has been with humanity forever. So given that sort of like waving your hands and saying, given the state of everything, it always gets nods from people. Yet it has always been and always will be the case. Given that that is always the case, given that the state of everything is always the state of everything, I think we just have to push forward.

Roger: Yeah. 

A book that comes to mind that was written a long time ago. I don't know if it's been updated. Was it Rational Optimism? I think it is. That sort of gives some perspective on how good things actually are, because when you're on the ground, you can't see it. 

The last question, and I think this is even the order the questions should be in, ask yourself, does this matter to my finances or my soul?

Dr. Daniel Crosby: Right.

I think we optimize for the wrong things sometimes. We try to optimize for every incremental dollar. We try to optimize for never losing money. I think a lot of us give away a lot of life in the pursuit of that incremental dollar. That minute you spent worrying about, you know, what the Fed was going to do or who was going to win the election or what the new year would bring in, Q1, that minute could have been better spent worrying about how to get closer with your grandkids or how to leave a charitable legacy or how to get better at guitar or a million more productive things. I think so little of what we worry about financially matters, and we'd be a lot better off worrying about how it impacts who we are more fundamentally.

Roger: One way that I see that presented a lot. Well, I'll share two. 

On the financial side, the optimization side of things, and think in optimizing for the finances, in some sense is a sense of. It's a grasp at a sense of agency, because we live in a world of uncertainty. What's the Phil Stutz quote? My favorite quote is, “you will never be exonerated from uncertainty, pain, or the need to do work” It's easy to do when you're at work, right? At work, It's easier than raising a family or dealing with family situations. Two planning examples really quickly. Roth conversions are an optimization, enhancing a plan that's already feasible and resilient. The answer is it should not have an impact on your actual life. It's just an accoutrement to enhance the journey. You should still have a great life either way, but we make it such a big decision. 

The other one is Social Security. Now, that can be a very big decision for some. But, Dan, I've had, two client instances I can think of this year because of their fundedness. They were so overfunded and they came to me. I know we're planning on taking it at 70, but I want to take it at 67 or 68 because that was their age. After looking at it, I basically said, I don't really care. It's not that big a decision. Let's just do it and move on because your life is more important. I think that's the filter you're trying to express here, I think.

Dr. Daniel Crosby: That's exactly right. I talk earlier in the book about when people look back on their lives, right? We're going to be dead a lot longer than we're alive. When people look back on their lives, the concept of money and work only comes up once, and it comes up in the negative. People say, I wish I hadn't worked so much and worried about money so much, which is wild. People with 20/20 lucidity about what matters in life just really don't care about work and money all that much. Yet here in a couple of weeks, when we all go on diets and set goals to be Superman and Superwomen, here in two weeks, money is going to be the number one topic. So, it's not nothing, right? It's not nothing. It's important, even. But I think it can become a red herring.

That was a beautiful quote about uncertainty. I'm in deep agreement with it and I think a lot of times we focus on money to the exclusion of life because money's a lot cleaner. It's a lot cleaner for me to worry about the financial trade offs of taking Social Security at this age versus that age, than to wonder if my kid loves me.

Roger: Right.

Dr. Daniel Crosby: It's a lot cleaner for me to try and make that incremental dollar by working a couple hours more at work or getting some kudos from my boss than it is for, for me to worry about. Have I done any good in the world today? Have I left a creative legacy? What have I done with this life of mine? So, in a lot of ways, money is clean. Money is certain in some respects. I think a lot of people go there to try and avoid the messiness of life, but the messiness of life is a hell of a lot more rewarding, as well.

Roger: So it's a trade off, learning what to ignore. We just spent 30 minutes talking about one chapter. This is good for your soul, as is talking to you, Dan. Thank you.

Dr. Daniel Crosby: Well, you're a wonderful human. Thanks for having me on

INTERVIEW WITH DR BOBBY DUBOIS

Roger: Okay, now it's time to talk about energy. You have got to have the energy to show up for your retirement and to help us with that is Dr. Bobby Dubois. Bobby, how you doing, buddy?

Dr. Bobby: I'm doing great. Excited as always to have another one of our dialogues.

Roger: Okay. I feel like this is a fatherly moment for me.

Dr. Bobby: Oh, oh, now I'm worried. We didn't prep on this issue.

Roger: No, he's learning to handle randomness coming at him.

Dr. Bobby: Exactly.

Roger: In this case, I feel like the mentor, father, whatever. It's really been cool to see you blossom with this topic in serving people. One, speaking, directly to people that are dealing with life and your podcast and what we're going to talk about today. It's been very cool to see you lean into something that's really important to you and I know it is. So bravo, buddy.

Dr. Bobby: Thanks, dad.

Roger: All right, so what are we going to talk about today?

Dr. Bobby: Well, what we're going to talk about today is something I'm particularly passionate about. 

So, over the last year and a half, I guess since we've been doing these, we've talked a lot about what exercises should we do, what's the data on sleep and its importance? What can we do to improve our sleep? Today I thought we'd switch from the what to the how. This is a critical topic because how we approach our health is critical or the what's don't matter because we may not pursue things. So, it may sound a little esoteric right now, but hopefully it'll become clearer as we dialogue.

Roger: I think this is a good segue and growth because there's so much information on what, what we need to think about, all the different ways to think about it. But what do you mean by how?

Dr. Bobby: So, in working with folks over the decades, it's obvious we're all different people. But yet the field of longevity and wellness is often a one size fits all. Everybody should eat this diet, everybody should cut down on their alcohol, everybody should do this. But in reality, we haven't made the progress we'd like, in part because the one size fits all doesn't actually reflect our personality types. This is where the how comes in, how much do each of us focus on health? For some, it's front and center, others it's not. How things motivate us is not the same from one person to another. How we get stuck in the decision making process or the continuing process, how do we react to illness, all these things differ amongst us. It became very clear looking at my family. Start at home is the kind of the adage. So, I've lived with my siblings forever and, and I've realized, wait a second, we have the same genetics. Not exactly, but, you know, similar genetics. We grew up in the same environment and we actually all had a very important event in our life, which is my dad getting ill when we were quite young, so we had the same kind of trigger and we all kind of focus on health, but we focus on it in such completely different ways. I became a doctor and health is front and center for me and everything I can do. My brother has kind of a single focus, he's a runner and he's really good at that, but he doesn't think about all the other pillars or aspects that we might deal with. My older sister, you know, life's important and if health fits in and exercise fits in great, and if it doesn't, well, it doesn't. My younger sister, she gets overwhelmed. She's motivated to do stuff, but she gets lost in the data and gets confused and doesn't know which way to head. This made me realize that there are different health types and they all exist in my family and my friends and that maybe this could be more broadly applicable and help motivate people, guide people, support people, because we're all different.

Roger: Right before you and I hopped on here to have this discussion, a quote popped up in my read wise, which captures quotes from books that I've read that I've highlighted in Kindle. I can't find my Kindle, by the way. One was from Cryptonomicom by Neal Stephenson. I may paraphrase because I don't have it here in front of me. “Most of us are too busy living our lives to think about longevity.” How I think that quote might apply to what you're talking about, Bobby, is we're all so busy in the rat race of life, if we don't hear the messaging that approaches us, in the way that we need to hear it, these different types that you're talking about, we're going to get confused or maybe not as motivated. What I think I'm hearing is we all have these different types and each type has to be given information and approach it in a different way. Would that be correct?

Dr. Bobby: That's absolutely correct.

Roger: It reminds me of the RISA exam that is about retirement income awareness where it's identifying the type of withdrawal strategy that matches the personality type. It works to at least tease that out. These are not black and white types, but it teases that out so you can get an approach that matches your personality. I think it really jives well with that.

What are some of the health types that you're working on identifying and communicating to?

Dr. Bobby: Well, it turns out there's five different types and I'll walk through each one of them in turn. There's a very simple quiz, which takes a couple of minutes. You can go to my website, drbobbylivelongandwell.com. I suspect we can put a link in the show notes and you know, 550 people have already taken the quiz, we actually have pretty good data on which types are more common and which types are more uncommon. I'll walk through each of the five and then we're going to dive into the type that is Roger. Then I think it'll really come to life as to how this works.

So anyhow, the first one, which is what I am, and it's called a holistic health hacker. We're the ultimate health optimizers. 14% of our data, that's where people fit in. Wellness is front and center for them. They have knowledge, they're always seeking kind of ways to do things and other people seek them out. Oh, you know a lot about nutrition or exercise or going to the gym and people come to you and, and you're curious about it and you track things, you might have an aura ring and whatever and you thrive on sort of delving into what we know about this or that. Your superpower is that you optimize, you tweak, you adjust to try to be as healthy as you can. 

Now the downside, because we all have upsides and downsides, the downside here is you're trying to do so much. It can be exhausting. As you get older or you retire, whatever, all of a sudden, wait a second, gravity is having an impact on my body and I'm getting a little more tired. For these folks, when health is so important to them, as things get tougher, they can have challenges especially if they get an injury or an illness. So that's kind of the first one.

Roger: Some of the challenges might be the high expectations of who you are. Then matching that to what the aging process does, and that can be frustrating for for this type, I would think.

Dr. Bobby: Very much so because they associate their self worth, being who they are, a lot with their health and wellbeing. 

Okay, second one, also minority. This is about a 20% of, of folks. These are called single minded achievers. Now they focus on generally one or maybe two things. It may be, oh, I'm really, really into exercise or that cold plunge stuff, forget it, I'm really, really focused on losing weight. I don't really think about my sleep too much. Their superpower is their laser focus and they're very results driven and they feel like they're really in the groove, focused on whatever it is. They have, in essence, tunnel vision. 

The challenge with this group is as we've talked, there's more than just one aspect of longevity. If you're focused on health and nutrition and weight loss, that's great. But there's all these other things like mind/body harmony and social relationships. It's really important to get these folks outside of that laser focus and realize that there are some other important things they may want to focus on and they too have a problem when illness arises because they've been so focused on exercise. As an example, they can't exercise now, and now they're depressed and now they really don't have other avenues to boost their health and wellbeing.

Roger: This arch type sounds like your brother the runner or a major bodybuilder that, you know, a literal bodybuilder. Arnold Schwarzenegger. I think they will develop natural imbalances because of the laser focus.

Dr. Bobby: That's right.

Roger: Okay.

Dr. Bobby: Again, it doesn't have to be exercise, mediated. Some people are really into yoga and meditation, but they lose sight of other things. Wait a second. I guess I should do some aerobic exercise and, you know, there is this sauna stuff I haven't been doing. It isn't just exercise, but they generally have one or two areas they focus on. I'm hoping as I walk through, these people will be like, oh, my God, that's me. oh, my God, that's me. 

Third, now, this is the one you are. It's also the most common. 38%.

Roger: I'm a very common guy. Bobby. Yes.

Dr. Bobby: I won't go there. These are called purposeful path planners. 

Now, these are folks who are motivated about their health. They listen to podcasts, they read, they enjoy making lists. They're very curious, and they're very diligent in an effort to do better in their lives. Their superpower is that they're curious and diligent. But these folks can get overwhelmed by information. I read this thing. I'm supposed to do this. My doctor says I should do that. My friend said this was amazing. They sort of get into analysis paralysis. Now, I should point out these are all focused on health. But what I found is that your strengths in the health realm are exactly the same as in the other aspects of your life, whether it's thinking about retirement or interacting with folks at your work. We all kind of have a type, and so that's what this group is. If you are willing, I would like to drill into your data because I looked at your actual questions and answers and had some insights.

Roger: Do you want to do that before we talk about the other two?

Dr. Bobby: Whichever way, you decide.

Roger: Let's do the other two for flow purposes. Then we'll come back and fix my life.

Dr. Bobby: Well, we'll put a magnifying glass on it. Whether we fix it, that's another story. That'll be the next episode.

Roger: Okay, good.

Dr. Bobby: So.

The fourth, and this is the second most common is called a contentment creator. 

These are folks who have mastered the art of enjoying life. Life is front and center and health and exercise has to fit in. So the holistic health hacker may put health front and center and having fun with their family may be secondary, but these people do it the other way around. Health has to fit into their life and their life balance or they're not going to do whatever it is we talk about. They don't stress over every new trend. They don't read a Healthline Health headlines and say, oh my gosh, I have to focus on that. They enjoy life. but these folks age just like the rest of us and things they hadn't been paying attention to because again, they're focused on the other aspects of their life can sneak up on them. What we found is for these folks, you know, maybe they don't want to do it. My sister's never going to do a cold plunge, that's just never going to happen. If she has to drive somewhere to do a sauna, that ain't going to happen. Tweaking some aspects of her environment to sleep better, okay, that's something she might do if you approach it in a way where she's going to be willing to listen and realize it's not going to upend the enjoyable parts of her life. So again, you have to pitch these things in ways that will, these folks will respond.

Now the last. This is the smallest in our database and I don't know that it's smallest in the world. I just think it's smallest in my database. Why? Because the data the people who took the quiz listen to me on my podcast or whatever and so they're already interested in health. Some of these folks may be more common in the real world, they may be somewhat less common in folks that, that listen to podcasts and stuff like this. These are called hopeful health seekers. There's about 6% in my database that are this. 

Now their superpower is they keep at it, they don't give up. But these are people who have faced failure. I don't mean career failure or financial failure. I mean health related stuff. You know, they've had back pain for 20 years and they just can't quite get it figured out. They've tried every diet known to man and they're, you know, they're overweight and they want to do something, they don't give up, but they haven't found the secret way towards health. These people need guidance, these people need support and most importantly, they need a win. You need to start slowly and give them the confidence that they actually can make progress because they've had decades of failure. This is a wonderful group of people. I have them in my life and you have to deal with them differently. If you talk to them like a holistic health hacker and say here's the 24 things you need to do, they're going to run away and hide. If you try to nurture a holistic health hacker, like, I know you've had troubles before, they're going to be like get out of here. So again, how we talk to people, motivate people, how people face challenges health wise varies based on these types.

Roger: You have got to meet people where they're at.

Dr. Bobby: Absolutely. That's a great way to put it. All right, so should we talk about you?

Roger: Yeah, let's fix me. Let's do it. It's all about me. I mean that's why I do the show.

Dr. Bobby: Right, that's why we do the show.

Okay, so the purposeful path planner is somebody who's very motivated, very, very diligent but can get lost in the enjoyment of finding options and information and may need some focus to decide. Once they are decided, they're in a pretty good place to move forward. 

I looked at your raw data and of the eight questions, four of them were straight on purposeful path planners. You answered exactly how one would. But the other four were in other types. One was you more towards a holistic health hacker, very focused, really wanting to get it done in a broad area. One of the other questions was more like somebody who's focused on one aspect of their health. But let's drill in a little bit to the ones that really were more typified by the purposeful path planner.

Roger: It might be helpful too, I think Bobby, my strategy in answering questionnaires of all types and I've answered a million of them in my life, you know, is I don't think a lot about it. I just react to the question, answer, and move on. I think that probably reveals myself more than contemplating each question.

Dr. Bobby: I love that. That is a great way to go because I would say half of the people yell at me. It's like, there's no answer that's perfect for me. I'm like, just trust the approach. Just answer as best as you can. I haven't had a single person come back and say, yeah, I hated the questions but boy was it right on target when it came up with the final answer and the report that comes out and all that kind of stuff. That's very interesting that you don't obsess over it. 

You're not a single minded achiever and you're not a holistic health hacker digging into every research. One of the questions is that sometimes you can be a holistic health hacker, their health approach can be a bit scattered. They're not as focused on one or two or three things. They kind of get lost and have a little bit of difficulty coming to closure and saying these are the three things I'm going to work on. You answered that question in that way. I'll give you some more and then you can react to all of them. You're somebody who does research but you're always in the back of your mind saying, ah, is this worth it? Is this worth it? I'm just not sure. You're ultimately trying to avoid a serious problem. That's how you answer that question. You want to stay healthy enough that something bad doesn't happen. So it's not a laser focus for you and you may enjoy the thinking process and may have more difficulty coming to a decision. 

Let me pause there and then I have another insight.

Roger: Yeah, is it worth it? In my mind when I read things I’m thinking, can I believe it or is it just faux science? There's this part of having you on the show where there's everybody's telling us we're supposed to do all of these different types of things and when you read the articles they come off as extremely believable and science based. From my experience most of them aren't there, so it's less about do I feel like doing it or not. It’s more like I don't want to go down a lot of rabbit holes that are just empty. I want to do the things that matter.

Dr. Bobby: That makes a tremendous amount of sense. We've talked about decisions in your own life, where for me, making decisions is second nature. I look at something, I sit back and say, okay, what am I going to do? But for you, I know that you've made key decisions in your life and moved forward, but it may take you a bit to get to that point. Does that ring true to you?

Roger: Oh, definitely. I think there's a difference between deciding indecisive and undecided. I feel like I'm a very quick decision maker, but I also think that I'm able to sit in undecided for a long period of time, which is different than indecisive.

Dr. Bobby: Yeah, good point. When I was out running today, and this is where I do lots of thinking and I was like, Roger loves frameworks. You had a whole month on decision, algorithms and, and how you prioritize and how you make decisions. Roger loves this stuff. He's fascinated by the decision process and, oh, by the way, that's what he brings to the health arena as well. I thought wait a second, that sounds like Roger.

Roger: I do get very lost in some decisions. It's okay to be undecided as you gather information, but then you overlay the psychological emotional fears and aspirations, that emotional level over it, that gets me in my own way, which in retirement we get in our own way a lot. The Colorado adjustment was much more of a psychological getting out of my own way, fear, and aspirations than it was a financial decision. The financial decision was relatively clear. From a health perspective, I think it goes the same way.

Dr. Bobby: I mean, we had a discussion yesterday, which I won't talk about the specifics of, but it was very clear to me you had said, oh, well, I'm thinking about this and I'm thinking about that and it was very clear to me what I thought the right decision was, but you were in the midst of it. Whereas for me it was so obvious. but, you know, we're different types.

Roger: We're different types. 

The other part, I think when it comes to health and guidance is we're in our own bottle, we have zero perspective. That's what I do with clients and hopefully on the show, hopefully it helps give people perspective and then gives them a path that matches their type of personality exactly. That's what we're talking about from a health perspective.

Dr. Bobby: These people like you need some kind of guidance. I'm hearing you say this, this, this and this about your health. I think from where I sit, this is a direction you may want to seriously consider. That's what these people need. The other people need much more motivation and a lot less direction. Some people just need cheerleading. You're doing great. Just keep at it.

Roger: Exactly. I think that's why these archetypes or profiles are important. They're not perfect, the science isn't perfect. You're a little bit of everything in some way, but it allows you as the guide to communicate with them, where they're at so they can actually see progress.

Dr. Bobby: Absolutely, yeah.

Which you now brought us to the next topic, which is this health type. If I took the quiz today, will it be the same, you know, 10 years ago and 10 years from now? The answer is it depends. But it's very likely. 

It could change for two reasons. I had a cousin of mine and she's kind of winding her career down and she came out as a contentment creator. You know, life's for enjoyment and yeah, health's important but it's got to fit into my life. She said to me, you know, if I had answered this three years ago when I was in the thick of my career, I would have come out as a single minded achiever. I'm going to get my exercise in the morning before I go to work and I'm going to get that done five days a week. But she said at this point in my life things are different. Your health type may change over just the progression of life. 

Here's the critical one, if you get ill or get injured, your health type may change. You may be somebody like yourself, purposeful path planner who may, you know, get lost in the data, but if you get injured or have an illness, I suspect you would delve into the data and you would figure out the path and you'd be a single minded achiever. Somebody who has a strength in one area may find when something hits, all of a sudden, they draw upon other areas. The holistic health hacker who sort of had it all dialed in and now is told they have cancer. Oh, by the way, you're not likely to be able to exercise like you did for quite a long time. They may fall apart and no longer be a holistic health hacker. 

Roger: You know this, if I can't be the best, forget it.

Dr. Bobby: What's that?

Roger: If I can't be the best, then what's the point?

Dr. Bobby: Yeah, they get lost. The doctor you want for that person is to know where you've come from, which is somebody who is very focused on their health, realizes you're in a position of lack of control now that you have this serious illness and you need more guidance than ever before. You'll hopefully have a doctor who can treat you that way, which is unique to you.

Roger: In my head as a purposeful path planner, which is a new tongue twister, I aspire to live with the same intentionality that I would have if I had cancer. I aspire because I saw this with my mom and I've seen it with others. When this happens, cancer or some other illness, that hyper focus comes into play. The research, looking for agency wherever you can find it. I think there's a lot of healthy aspects of that. I have a coin around here, memento mori means to live like you're going to die right now. That's the issue with life, is even though intellectually we know we are going to die and we will have illness, we know that, but we don't live that way. We live as if we're going to live forever. I don't know if it's a curse or whatever, but that's interesting.

Dr. Bobby: I had an example last night. My mom, who is 95 years old and was coming to Thanksgiving at our ranch, so she has to get on an airplane along with a bunch of other people. Very strong woman, you know, take charge, tell everybody else what to do. First time in her life she called. Well, she called. First time in her life, it wasn't that she called me, but first time in her life she called me last night and she said, I'm having cold feet about coming to Thanksgiving. It was very clear she was scared that for the first time in her life, she wasn't in control. She had to depend upon other people and her strengths of who she is were useless. Obviously, the way I needed to deal with that situation is not as she used to be, but as she was right now, and she needed reassurance that her oldest daughter would be there, her caregiver would be there. There'll be people throughout the process that want to take care of her and she can let go and she can do it. That was a new mother that I had not really ever seen before. Her health type and her type changed as she has aged. That's the point of this exercise, not define it in cement, but to identify, and, and I think that's the point of the quiz because your plan, I understand, is to, as people identify, start to provide information on actions based on the type of person they are. That way they can make more progress in their health.

Roger: Yeah.

Dr. Bobby: Ah, I'm finding that this kind of construct is applicable everywhere. I just did a podcast that came out this week on reading health headlines. It was sort of built on what we did at the, at the roundup with our breakout session. It was very clear to me that each of the five types is going to approach a health headline in different ways. You know, one's going to eat it up, like, what can I do to add to my regimen? Another is going to be like, don't bother me with the facts and don't bother me. I don't want anything else in my regimen. Others will be like, I'm so darn confused. The headline said this, but another headline said something opposite. I just realized that it applies everywhere and it applies, I suspect, to the financial decisions we need to make and everything else. I'm excited. I hope people are motivated to take the quiz and give me feedback and help guide me to show how I can help you with sharing information.

Roger: We will have links to Bobby's website and the quiz in our 6-Shot Saturday email. It'll be in the show notes so you can check that out and start to identify how to improve your health journey. Thanks, Bobby.

Dr. Bobby: You're so welcome, my purposeful path planner.

TODAY’S SMART SPRINT SEGMENT

Roger: On your marks, get set, now it's time for a smart sprint where you can take a baby step in the next seven days to not just rock retirement, but rock life. 

All right, in the next seven days, I challenge you to use Dr. Crosby's focusing questions to strengthen the muscle around what things you should pay attention to and what you should ignore. I think this will be a superpower in you not just rocking your retirement plan but rocking life.

BONUS STORY

All right, thanks for hanging out with me today. I am back in my Fort Worth HQ, so I have my grandfather's journal and I'm going to continue at the end of the show to read all of his missions that he flew in B-17s in World War II, just to get them on the record someplace other than this notebook.

All right, mission number seven and eight.

“July 8, 1944. Ship number 188, sortie 5th Vienna and I've never seen such flak. Never thought we would ever come make it through. Red Bear and I were the only ones of the crew flying. Maybe it was better that they stayed home. Target not bombed. Covered by smoke screen. City of Vienna bombed instead. Enemy aircraft encountered. Escorts were P-51s and P-38s. Carried 12500 pound bombs. Mission 7 and a half hours long. Altitude 22,000ft.” 

CONCLUSION

Hope you are having a wonderful New Year's celebration. I like renewals. I'm not a big fan of the New Year's holiday, but I like renewal. It's going to be a great 2025. You're going to face challenges, but it's still going to be great. 

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 reference is historical and does not guarantee future results. All indices are unmanaged and could not be invested in direct directly. Make sure you consult your legal, tax or financial advisor before making any decisions.