Clipping Chains Podcast

In normal times, rent prices, like most everything else, slowly yet surely increase at about 2-3% per year. This is inflation. But in terms of the housing market, these aren’t normal times. In the pandemic era, as demand surged in supply-restricted markets, both sale and rent prices soared, with year-over-year inflation rates at 30% or more in some markets. To speak generally of the world of pricing, what goes up might come down. So, when I approached our landlord a few weeks back about lowering the price of our rent, she wasn’t so surprised.

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According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, chronic pain—pain lasting at or beyond three months—affected over 20% of U.S. adults, or 51.6 million people, in 2021. Symptoms were severe enough to substantially restrict daily activity for 6.9% of Americans that same year. And with chronic pain comes soaring medical costs, pharmaceutical over-reliance, and addiction.

Mounting multidisciplinary research suggests that most chronic pain is not of structural origin. In other words, most chronic pain can not be directly attributed to injury or physical abnormality. Neuroplastic pain results from the brain misinterpreting signals from the body as if they were dangerous. We habituate to pain, creating behaviors that either avoid pain or alleviate symptoms.

Encouragingly, those undergoing a psychological treatment known as Pain Reprocessing Therapy (PRT) are showing vast improvements in pain management without pharmaceutical or other medical interventions. One major study found that two-thirds of chronic back pain patients were pain-free or nearly pain-free after four weeks of PRT interventions. In addition, patients showed visible changes in the prefrontal brain regions associated with pain after therapy. While psychological treatments are effective in managing chronic pain, this does not imply that the pain is imaginary.

My guest today, Miriam Gauci Bongiovanni, suffered needlessly until she discovered the concept of neuroplastic pain. Today, now pain-free, she works from her home in Malta as a Certified MindBody Practitioner and Trauma-Informed Coach. But beyond her skills as a wonderful teacher and educator on chronic pain, I found her story of embracing a nontraditional career fascinating. Today we dive in on everything from how our personalities and fears inform our pain cycles to living a good life.

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Topics Discussed with Miriam Gauci Bongiovanni

• Miriam’s history with debilitating pain and the methods she used to cure it
• What is neuroplastic pain?
• Cycles of worry that feed neuroplastic pain: How fear contributes to body tension and muscle spasms
• Why neuroplastic pain often develops from real injuries
• Why emotional experiences are creating real physical changes in the body
• The role of personality on neuroplastic pain and who is most likely to suffer
• Conditioning and pain triggers
• Key indicators of neuroplastic pain
• How neuroplastic pain can imprint on structural pain
• The nocebo effect, expectations of pain
• Why continuing to see practitioners (PT, etc) can contribute to neuroplastic pain
• Why exercises aimed at injury prevention may not be useful
• Somatic tracking and learning to explore painful sensations
• The importance of play on pain mitigation
• Miriam’s personality and personal journey. How frustration at work resulted in pain
• The importance of accountability and individual agency in pain management
• The danger of hiding our stress
• Living a nontraditional life and career: challenges and rewards
• So much more!

If you haven’t noticed, the concept of achievement and even competitiveness has weighed heavily on my mind as of late. A gift of the nontraditional life is the opportunity to step back and see the world around us with a degree of unusual clarity, far from the treadmill. For years I valued athletic and professional progress in ways that weren’t making my life better, but I thought they were. I searched for and implemented solutions to the wrong problems. Meanwhile, what truly mattered—mainly my relationships—withered on the vine. The journey toward rectifying these tendencies continues today.

My guest today, Lincoln Stoller, is a former mountaineer who now specializes in psycho-, hypno-, and neurofeedback therapy, in tandem with numerous other counseling and coaching services. Lincoln holds a PhD in Theoretical and Mathematical Physics from UT Austin, including a post-doc assignment at UC Berkley. Lincoln eventually moved from quantum physics to create a management and automation software platform for businesses, learned to build Norwegian log homes, traveled and lived abroad in far-flung foreign lands, and is even a certified pilot. To say Lincoln lives well outside of the bounds of normalcy is probably a half-truth at best. As he says in the interview, we should “just keep doing out-of-the-box stuff. And if people aren't calling you a little crazy or a little nutty, then you probably aren’t exploring enough of the boundaries.”

Today’s conversation revolves around the high-risk potential of hard-charging performers and achievers, whether they exist in sports, business, or other areas of life. While these individuals hold our collective attention and admiration, Lincoln outlines how their psychological roots run shallow. They often struggle to stay satisfied with themselves or those around them. Lincoln might even say he holds an anti-hard-man philosophy. I think you’ll see why.

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Topics Discussed with Lincoln Stoller

• Quantum physics to therapist/coach
• Lincoln’s history in mountaineering amongst some of the legends of the sport
• Why almost all climbers are “high-risk”
• “Resilience is not throwing yourself at a climb until you are torn and bloody, it’s exploring your limits and working them gracefully.”
• Why some people crave risk
• Emotions on the rock and exploration and mastering of triggers
• Getting past societal expectations of productivity
• Can satisfied people be high performers?
• How dissatisfaction can lead to pathology: “If you’re not satisfied with yourself, you won’t be satisfied with anyone else, either.”
• Is competition healthy?
• Is personal growth selfish?
• What is productive suffering and why is it important?
• Taking ownership: the dysfunctional mental model that experts can solve our problems
• How high performers can assess mental health concerns that might not be apparent
• Relationships with parents and why these are often commonly fraught
• “You can’t change people directly. You can only change people indirectly by changing yourself.”
• The importance of doing out-of-the-box stuff and why it’s okay to be considered different
• High achievement and the difficulty with love and long-term relationships

The concept of play conjures the image of my three-year-old (and blonder) self, plastic shovel in hand, amorphous stains down the front of my pants. And certainly slobber. Lots of slobber. That three-year-old was certainly not concerned with social hierarchy or status, lacking a whiff of ambition to put the best version of himself forward. He played with a shovel in the sand because something needed to be dug and that was all that mattered.

As we age (and start to exhibit bladder control) the nature of play changes but is not altogether lost, at least not at first. Instead of digging in the sand, we might play a game of Twister, something I played as late as my college years. I challenge you to toss out that board on the floor—putting your head through someone else’s legs—and try and stay serious and stoic. It’s impossible. You’ll be giggling like a child. And that’s the point. We need more play.

Source of Inspiration: Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life (Bill Burnett, Dave Evans)

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For four years I’ve watched something slowly bloom. In my old life, the “before time” you might call it, I moved from task to task. If I wasn’t working, I unknowingly made a practice of turning recreational or hobbyist pursuits into something that, from an outsider’s perspective, looked an awful lot like work. Goals and accolades were everything, and the more quantifiable, the better. But the farther I’ve separated myself from this life in space and time, the more clarity I’ve gained.

Grasping for metaphors, I was tempted to explain this budding awareness as a slowly growing flower. But for perhaps all the wrong reasons, I hesitated to describe my growth and awareness as floral, preferring to drop the metaphor. But I can’t quite shake it, because I have watched something slowly grow. It’s not me that has bloomed–again, all the wrong imagery–but it is the world I could not see then. I could not see the flawed logic buried in the cold and wet earth because I identified with it. It was my life, so I could not reject what protected me. And four years later I’ve watched something slowly take root.

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When we make important decisions, we are often not as rational or objective as we’d like to believe. The base rate fallacy is the tendency to misjudge the probability of a situation by not accounting for all relevant information. This cognitive bias affects everything from first impressions to voting preferences to broad market behavior.

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If you follow economic news at all, you’ve taken note of the changing conditions of the American housing economy in the last few years. First, high demand, low supply, and cheap debt fueled an extraordinary (and unhealthy) price surge. In response, the Federal Reserve ratcheted up interest rates to cool an overheated economy in the wake of pandemic-related disruptions

In years prior, economic conditions supported a vast proliferation of real estate investment. Individual investors to multinational corporations scooped up properties across the country for cheap. The returns were fantastic. But in my mind, those days were decidedly over.

When my guest today, Michael Farnsworth, discussed his novel concept of real estate investment, I was all ears. Do many of the real estate investment rules-of-thumb still function in a world of 7%+ mortgage rates and all-time high prices? Is now really the time to start a real estate investment portfolio? Is this even the time to buy a personal residence? And when it comes to short-term rentals, what are the ethical considerations to local economies and community fabric? We cover all this and more in today’s episode.

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Topics Discussed with Michael Farnsworth

• The “Triangle of Death:” Michael’s unique form of House Hacking
• 2024 climbing goals: 100th first-try 5.12 and V10
• Stock market vs real estate investing
• Michael’s struggle with remote work and feeling grounded
• The characteristics of a real estate investor
• The viability of real estate investing in a high-interest and low-supply (e.g., expensive) market
• Michael’s ongoing landlord nightmare scenario
• Decision to leave his traditional career to pursue property management full-time
• Intellectual stimulation without a traditional job
• Financial metrics and characteristics of the ideal rental property
• Understanding costs and the importance of detailed accounting
• When and how much to raise rents
• Nontraditional means of mortgage funding
• Considerations on property managers
• Ethical considerations of short-term rentals (Airbnb, etc)
• Michael’s ideal lifestyle
• Suffering from lupus and two kidney transplants
• So much more!

We’re back to the digital mailbag to answer your questions!

For this week:

• An update on markets and our personal finance situation
• The role of dividends in growth and withdrawal assumptions
• Expectations vs reality on a life of financial independence
• Our experience with health insurance without employer-sponsored plans
• Real estate investing: an update on our experiences and economics as remote landlords
• Health insurance considerations for long-term travel
• Short- to medium-term savings goals (like a house) versus saving for retirement
• Loss of purpose without a traditional job
• So much more!

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Show Notes and Links at Clippingchains.com

Q1: What’s the latest on markets and your financial situation since you left your corporate career? (00:02:38)

Q2: Expectations versus experiences on the financially independent life (00:16:33)

Q3: Could you provide an update on your experiences and costs with ACA (Obamacare) insurance? (00:27:42)

Q4: I’d like to hear any details you’re willing to share on your remote landlord experience (00:39:36)

Q5: My partner and I are taking a sabbatical! What should we do about insurance? (00:50:30)

Q6: How do I prioritize retirement savings against saving for short- to medium-term savings goals, like buying a house? (00:56:20)

Q7: Why are we so concerned about the loss of purpose when we stop working a traditional job? (01:04:31)

When I left my corporate career in early 2020, I didn’t fully understand the ways that I would, in later years, slowly become decoupled and desynchronized from a society that values hustle, status, and self-worth generated to a large degree around our career titles. You’ll read the same thing repeatedly on the internet: Ignore the haters, do your thing.

But when I actually sit down and talk with those who are living similar lives, regardless of their financial position, I find that the tidy internet talking points leave many of us dissatisfied. After all, humans are one of the most social species on the planet. We shouldn’t be surprised by the difficulty in overriding instinct, to go against the grain of what the herd values most. My thinking has evolved dramatically on this subject in recent years, so let’s dig in.

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By popular demand, I’ve decided to extend a travel series centered around the topic of building community or maintaining our need for social interactions when away from home. Community building is especially complicated when abroad, where cultures and languages vary considerably from our own. My guests today, veteran travelers with considerable expat experiences, are perfectly suited to discuss this topic.

Meghan Walker, a previous guest who writes at awaytofi.com, spent many of her formative years living abroad in Kenya and New Zealand. Her husband, Callan Cooper, is an expat living in the United States from New Zealand, where they met. Meghan and Callan joined me in my home in Colorado for a rare in-person interview, where we discussed in detail the beauty and challenges of international extended travel, careers, evolving travel philosophies, and financial tactics that can have you living a similar life much sooner than you think.

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Show Notes and Links at Clippingchains.com