Ep. 352: Is Ambition Anti-Happiness? Former Facebook Employee Shares [REMASTERED]

Paul Ollinger was one of Facebook’s first 250 employees. At age 42, he walked out with a pocket full of cash in what most would consider an ideal situation, but what he found instead left him wondering what’s next while he explored the relationship between money, happiness, work, and meaning. 
 
 In this episode, we discuss how wealth changes us, leaves us the same and why it even matters for the average middle class American as we explore the question.
 
 

This episode originally aired January 20, 2025.

If you liked this episode, you’ll also like episode 330: IS YOUR HAPPINESS BEING POLITICIZED [REMASTERED]?

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2:12 Walking away from silly money

4:17 Was it burnout or something deeper

5:44 Does ambition kill happiness

9:34 Why the top 1% work the longest hours

10:36 The Meritocracy Trap explained

16:26 The one question you get to answer

19:06 Everyone has a Facebook story

21:17 The Saturn SL2 and narcotic gratitude

24:37 Why it's hard to remember life is good

27:38 Still a grumpy fuck half the time

28:22 Why we count steps instead of love

29:26 Flow state and podcasting addiction

32:38 Vast wealth as an unnatural state

34:09 The 80% who can't cover a $1,000 bill

36:22 Does pursuing wealth also isolate you

39:44 Finding work you're curious about early

40:05 Mind time traveling to define happy

41:27 Six years of podcasting, honestly assessed

43:39 Final question: are you reasonably happy

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Anyone who's had a bad day at work has fantasized about fuck you money. You know the kind that lets you loudly sing, take this job and shove it as you dramatically get escorted out with security? Basically because that would lead to ultimate happiness, right? Well, my next guest has another story to tell. He's one of Facebook's first 250 employees, but at age 42, he walked out with a pocket full of cash in what most would consider an ideal situation. But what he found instead left him wondering what's next as he explored the relationship between money, happiness, work, and meaning. He's now a stand-up comedian and the podcast host of Reasonably Happy, a concept we'll be exploring today as we talk about how wealth changes us, leaves us the same, and why it even matters for the average middle class American as we explore the question: Does money equal happiness? Comedy and contemplation, author and fellow podcaster Paul Ollinger. Thanks for being here. It's super nice to meet you.

SPEAKER_01 1:05

Thank you for having me. It's lovely to be here.

SPEAKER_00 1:08

I really enjoyed your book, like a lot, a lot.

SPEAKER_01 1:11

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 1:12

I love that you quoted the Bible and Michael Pollan in the same chapter. I was like, okay, we're getting it along just fine.

SPEAKER_01 1:21

I mean, we're all just trying to find wisdom where we can find it. And it turns out that the Bible had a head start, but you know, it tapped into a lot of themes that still resonate with people today because the the operating system between our ears is exactly the same as it was 2,000 years ago, uh, even though our technologies changed drastically in that time.

SPEAKER_00 1:45

And some would argue that the burning bush was DMT.

SPEAKER_01 1:49

So I mean, there's Abraham loved party. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:54

That's I mean, Jesus did turn water into wine. So I mean it's it's all it's all it's all relative. So, but I want to start at the point of your story where you were like, hey, you know what, Facebook, uh, it's been fun, but we're all wrapped up here, and I'm I'm gonna move on. So, what motivates a person to totally bounce out on an obvious trajectory towards silly money?

SPEAKER_01 2:20

Well, thank you for that kind introduction, by the way. And I think just to summarize for people that the the the takeaway from the FU money essay is that just because you have it doesn't mean you should say it. And that's something, you know, you have to learn when you make mistakes under new circumstances you've always dreamed of. And sort of the net of the things that I write about are that the things that we think are going to make us happy end up not making us as happy as we think they will. And, you know, you read about all the lottery winners that go crazy and end up in jail and broke and all that kind of stuff. And I just had sort of a a much uh less extreme version of that. I was working at Facebook and I got there early by mistake because I I had worked with with some some great guys on the sales team of Facebook when I'd worked at Yahoo! When all three of us had worked together previously, and they said I was doing stand-up comedy in LA. I'd gotten engaged, and I thought, you know what? I need a job because I want to raise a family and I'm not gonna be a deadbeat who lives off his wife. And um, right about that time, those buddies called and said, Would you want to join face? We joined this small company called Facebook. And I thought to myself, someday this company could be as big as MySpace. So that's that's about just that's that's how big my my dreams were. But it turned out to be something way, way bigger. But it's also very, very frustrating. In the four years I was at Facebook, four four years in change, the company grew by 16x, the audience grew by 16x, and there were a lot of there's a lot of stuff that happens in a small company that's growing very, very fast. It's just hard to deal with. And if you can't, you know, to quote 38 special, hold on loosely, you're gonna kind of burn yourself out. And that's sort of what happened to me. I let a lot of stuff that wasn't super important distract me, and I got frustrated and I quit and I left a lot of professional upside and money on the table in in the in the process.

SPEAKER_00 4:16

Do you think that your mindset at that time could be summarized simply and neatly as burnout, or was it more complex than that?

SPEAKER_01 4:25

I think it was burnout. I think it was burnout and sort of I was already 42 and a half. So I'd been around the block once or twice in my career to paint the picture. I mean, I'm working, I don't know, 60, 70, 80 hour weeks sometimes. I have a one-year-old at home. My wife is on bed rest with our second child in the hospital for weeks at a time. And it was just a very difficult time. And I'm also a very ambitious, motivated person. And so I probably didn't tap the brakes to the degree that I should have. I probably didn't take as much time for myself or for my health as I should have. But, you know, when I'm in a situation I want to win, when I'm when I'm entrusted with responsibility at a team, I want my team to exceed their goals. I didn't run the marathon. I I I I tried to win sprints, and that probably wasn't the best career decision to make in those in those times.

SPEAKER_00 5:22

I mean, I could see where it would feel like, okay, we're all sprinting, right? Because we're growing by 16x. So there's probably a little bit of a uh, I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 5:31

Everybody was sprinting back then. There wasn't a lot of room for people who weren't willing to sprint, but but the people that were able to sort of play the long game um benefited significantly and by so doing.

SPEAKER_00 5:44

You talked about your family and and and obviously like the name of your podcast and your book, reasonably happy. And so it's it's easy and natural to think of like, okay, success is over here and a reasonable dose of happiness is over here. They live in two separate buckets. You said you were an ambitious guy. Do you feel like that ambition is antagonistic towards happiness?

SPEAKER_01 6:10

Not to name drop, but I'm gonna name drop. But I interviewed Deepak Chopra and he said, Oh gosh, what was the quote? I'm gonna butcher, but he basically said mental mental well-being is an oxymoron. And the point is that our brains have evolved to keep us alive and keep us safe. And it it is that brain that helps us achieve that also makes us miserable because no matter how much we achieve, we want more. This is an evolved human trait. Our ancestors uh were the were the ones who could survive the most. They were they were also the most paranoid people who lived in their generations. They survived, they passed on their genes, and we have this trait called negative filtering, through which we look for those things that can hurt us or destroy us, and we we stay alive, but we miss the good stuff that's around us. And so, really, what this journey for me has been is an exercise in taking the time to recognize how good I have it. I've always been a bit of a a discontent in eighth grade. My classmates voted me biggest complainer.

SPEAKER_00 7:14

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 7:15

And also voted me most school spirit, which I find to be an interesting dichotomy of, you know, yeah, I'm I really want the best. And if I don't get it, I'm gonna whine until I get it. You know, I'm either gonna work real hard or I'm gonna whine until I get it. That's a pattern that is that shows up in different ways in different parts of my my life. Since my wife find that found that out about biggest complainer, I haven't won an argument in our household yet. Um, obviously, because she can always say, Well, it sounds like the biggest complainer is coming out. Yeah, the journey is like, look, you can get what you want, but unless you take the time to stop and say, Oh, I have what I need, I'm good, I'm happy, I am fulfilled, and then start to behave uh motivated by intrinsic motivations as opposed to extrinsic ones, abdicate our happiness to the outcomes of our actions instead of uh on the things we choose to do with our life, we'll never be happy until we really decide, you know what? I have X. I'm not gonna sit here and ask for or pin my happiness on the potential of getting 2x, because once I get to 2x, I'm gonna want 4x, etc., etc. The horizon, the financial horizon, never stops being out of reach. That's the definition of a horizon. Some of the people I've interviewed, there's a guy named Mike Norton, who is a Harvard Business School professor, and he did a study with a woman named Liz Dunn from the University of British Columbia. They wrote a book called Happy Money. In it, they talk about a study that they did where they interviewed millionaires and said, How happy are you on a scale of one to 10? And they said, Okay, considering where you what you said you are now, what would it take you to get to a 10? And they all said, two to three X what I have. It doesn't matter how much you have. If you sit there and think, I'll be happy when I get twice what I have. And I certainly think that too. We have a lovely life. We do lots of great things, but boy, wouldn't it be nice to have a net jets card, you know, that kind of thing. Boy, wouldn't it be nice to take four trips a year instead of two. Wouldn't it be nice to have a lake house? Or if you have a lake house, wouldn't it be nice to have a beach house? These things never ever stop. And so we have to choose to stop and be appreciative, or we'll never be appreciative.

SPEAKER_00 9:34

When I think about like people who are in these jobs that are, you know, traditional jobs. Well, I guess even non-traditional jobs, but but ones that produce the opportunity to get more in in the linear way that you're describing it. Like, okay, now we have a second house, or now we have a better car, or whatever. You said in your book that more than half of the top 1% earners work more than 50 hours a week. And you said earlier, you know, I was working like 70 or whatever.

SPEAKER_01 10:05

That's right.

SPEAKER_00 10:06

Why would executives who have the team that they could delegate to, the money to hire more team members to delegate to, certainly they have enough money to pay for the things that they need. Like that would be the perfect, you know, scenario for you to do a four-day work week or something cool like that. Why is it the people who have more in those jobs and have more resources, like they work a ridiculous number of hours?

SPEAKER_01 10:36

Yeah, that that was from an interview with Daniel Markowitz, who teaches at the Yale Law School. The book of Daniel Markowitz's, which I definitely remember, which I did, which I did read and did enjoy, is called The Meritocracy Trap. And basically what he's talking about, there's two, there's two issues with this. There's too much work at the top of the economic uh scale, and there's not enough work, and certainly not enough fulfilling, well-paying work at the lower end of the economic ladder. And so what you have is this concentration of very high-paying, very labor-intensive, and by labor I mean time-intensive work, where you might be a lawyer at a top law firm in Manhattan or Washington, D.C. or Atlanta, or an investment banker or a consultant. And your life is, you know, back in the day in the you know, 1800s or whenever the the aristocracy, they owned factories or mines or railroad, and they could sit on their front porch and drink iced tea or lemonade while their capital did the work for them. Today's affluent, today's working affluent, can and and these can be people born of uh, you know, in the middle class who go on and get fancy law degrees, fancy MBAs like I have, and they go to work for the top firms, Goldman Sachs, Bain Consulting, you know, the top law firms, and their currency is the hour, is there are their brains, and they rent it out by the hour. And I mean no disrespect to them, but even if you're a senior partner, you're still going to work 50, 60, 70 hours a week because that's what it takes to provide service for your clients who pay you very, very well. And you might be a very senior partner making a few million dollars a year. And of course, what generally happens is that people's lifestyle grows to absorb their even varied lucrative incomes. And so they become kind of trapped by this lifestyle and they don't have a lot of, they don't have a lot of outs there. But if you ask them, well, would you give up, you know, 20% of your income for 20% of your time back? The answer is generally no, because people really evaluate themselves on the size of their paycheck. It's kind of like when the airlines say people complain about how small the seats are on the airlines. They complain constantly, but when they go back and say, Would you pay more for a bigger seat? People say no. And so you you don't watch what they say, you watch what they do, and you create a system based on actions, not on words.

SPEAKER_00 13:13

So when you you know get together with your old, your old uh co-workers, and y'all, I'm sure this topic has to come up. I mean, it has to, right? Like, do they just look at you and scratch their heads because they're still on that what they perceive to be a linear path that only goes up, up, up, and you're like, hey, I'm happy and I'm you know, living the dream, and I have a podcast and I wrote a book and I'm doing stand-up comedy.

SPEAKER_01 13:42

What's interesting about these professional service jobs is that you don't get an IPO generally. You don't get one big pot of money that if you, you know, hit some numbers, you're gonna make $50, $100 million, whatever the number is. You're gonna work every year and you're gonna make, you know, a million, you're gonna make one percent money every year as long as you're working. And you know, there's a natural goal line at a certain point, you're 60, you're 65, maybe you're 55, where people go, I've had enough. I just need to get off the roller coaster. This the you know, the the old rat race treadmill thing is just not something you can do until you're 80 years old for most people. Um, the thing I try to tell them is, you know, when you jump off the treadmill and you say, even if you have enough money to live, even if you did have a uh an IPO or you know, hit a had a big payday, you know, everybody else's career keeps going. And so when I jumped off the treadmill 13 years ago, all my friends were to certain level. Well, a lot of those guys kept working, and so you know, they kept putting money in the bank, they kept hitting the next, the next, you know, markers of achievement and affluence. And what you have to deal with, whether regardless of which of these paths you're you're on, is that you have to be okay when other people, people that you've been peers with for a long time, go on to heights much greater than the ones you've achieved. And I have to remind myself constantly that we have chosen career flexibility, the ability for me to spend my time writing, creating a podcast, speaking to corporate audiences, uh, and doing stand-up comedy over whatever next level of affluence there is. And there are many, many levels of affluence above where we are. And that's one of the things I wasn't really aware of. When I, you know, when I hit at Facebook, I got to the point where I was frustrated at work and I was like, if I quit, I'm gonna have X millions of dollars. And the number was far greater than I ever dreamed of. And I quit. And then you start hanging out at the country club and going to fancy places, and you're like, oh, wait, there's people out there that have billions, and I know them. And if I'm to compare myself to them, that is a recipe for misery. And so you have to just stop and go, like, I have what I want. I'm doing the things I want to do. If I continue to do them and I do them well, maybe I'll make some more money, maybe I'll get to that next level. But I'm not doing them for the money, I'm doing them for the intrinsic reward because I think they're worth doing. And a lot of people have told me they they get a lot out of the podcast and my writing and stuff like that.

SPEAKER_00 16:26

As a fellow podcaster who also started her show uh during a large life transition, I was like immediately interested in your story and how the podcast kind of was centered to that. And I think that's that's really cool. And it also makes me think about what you shared with me in the pre-chat, which I literally haven't been able to stop thinking about since you said it. You were saying when you get the answer to one question, you kind of give up the the right, if you will, to get the answer to the other question. So if I say, well, what what if I quit my career and I I try this podcasting thing, what would happen? Then I answer the question, what would happen? But I I lose the ability to get the answer to the question, well, what would happen if I stayed in the same career? Talk more about how that plays into the idea of being reasonably happy and how you have to like have peace with which question you decide to answer. It's almost like some sort of weird life game show, you know?

SPEAKER_01 17:30

Well, it's it's it's a very common one that we all delude ourselves with the game of if only. If only I didn't have to work at this job, I could be a famous stand-up comedian. If only I didn't have to go to work tomorrow, I could travel the world and write a travel blog that would be read by millions of people and I'd be famous and I'd make more money than I'm making now and I'd live a lifestyle, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. If only I didn't have to stay in Atlanta and take care of my aging parents, I could live in New York or Milan or someplace and live a different kind of life. The thing is, is that you only get the answer to one of those questions. If you choose to quit your lucrative job in ad sales to pursue a career in stand-up comedy, then you only get the answer to the question, what would happen if I gave it my all? If I gave comedy my all. And when you do that, you go, oh, wait a minute. I just realized that there was a lot of great stuff happening for me at Facebook that I wasn't giving Facebook credit for before I quit. I worked with really smart people in an industry that was fascinating and growing and has become more fascinating in the decades since I've decade plus since I've left. Oh, and by the way, the company, the stock that I thought was valued, you know, just so richly 13 years ago is now like 100x what it was today. But more importantly, I got a lot of not just belongingness at Facebook, but I got a lot of self-esteem by working there because I was a person with interesting knowledge with deep knowledge in an interesting industry, um, one that everybody has a tie to, especially in the early days. I can't tell you how many people would come up and be like, oh my God, you work of Facebook. Let me tell you my Facebook story. I reconnected with my high school friend I hadn't seen in 20 years, blah, blah, blah. So you're working for a company that touches every, you know, every person that you know. Now, you know, it's it's it's way it's it's gone up and down in popularity or in its brand respect over the years, but everybody has a point of view on it. The the question of you only get answer one question is like when you decide that you'll be more happy doing B instead of A, I really encourage people to sit down and go think about all the great things you're getting from A before you decide to fully commit. My wife and I moved our family from Atlanta, where I grew up and where we lived for the last 13 years, to New York City this summer. And it's really exciting to live in New York. It's wonderful to walk out the door and go, oh, there's Central Park. It's wonderful to walk down the street with all the cool shops and restaurants and bars and coffee shops. But I miss Atlanta, you know, because and that was my home. And I miss, I miss knowing everybody in my neighborhood. And I miss being able to walk up to our club and and see my friends and all these different things. I miss being known in the Atlanta comedy community. I'm an unknown quantity here. So it's not that New York is is better or worse. It's just different. And whenever we choose a basket of goods that's that's different than the one that we have, we're gonna learn that not everything in that new basket is gonna make our life perfect. And we're gonna realize once we've given those things in basket A up, that there was a lot of good stuff there. We should have been giving ourselves credit for earning through our hard work.

SPEAKER_00 20:49

That makes me think of the role of gratitude when you were talking about be sure to take a good hard look at what your current option is before you start automatically trading it in for the newest model. And you you also in your book talked about how certain levels of I'll call it status or affluence or lack thereof, when you get to that next level, it's like a narcotic hit, you know, where you're you're like, yes. And that it does feel like a rush of happiness and achievement and like dopamine, but also gratitude. Like I remember I had my first car and it was cool for a lot of reasons. But then I got a Saturn and it had one of those automatic seatbelts. Do you know what I'm talking about? It was like, but it also definitely felt like driving in a Tupperware container because I don't know, shit was plastic. Like it was wild, right? But I just felt rich. If I had a full tank of gas and I was driving around in my Tupperware mobile, I just felt like on top of the world. Huge hit of gratitude, huge hit of like, I've made it, it feels so good. And then, you know, in your book you even use this example, like upgrading a Tesla to, I think you said Mercedes or something. Forgive me, I don't know cars. That's okay. But like, but like it hits a little less. So how do you keep, you know, hoop de-level gratitude as you reach these higher levels of affluence?

SPEAKER_01 22:21

Well, the the the point I was making is that money is kind of like a drug, and material goods are like a drug, and you get used to them, you habituate to the high that a that a smaller dose used to give you. And I used my car experience as as evidence of how this works or as an example of how it works. When I was 23 or 24, I was broke as all can be, driving a beater through in Memphis, where I lived at the time, making $25,000 a year, which left precious little for thousand-dollar, you know, mechanic bills that would happen once every few months. And in a very short period of time, I ran my credit card balance way up that I was never going to be able to repay. But I got a but I got a promotion, I got a I got a nice little raise. And so I bought a Saturn SL2 in 1994. And this car at that time in my life provided me with this cathartic relief, a measurable increase in my standard of living because it it eliminated pain from my life. The pain of worrying that my car was going to break down, the pain of not knowing if it was going to start, the pain of thinking I was going to get another thousand dollar mechanic bill that I never could have paid, right? And so I felt like I had achieved at least a little a level of safety in my car, you know, in my automobile life. And it really did change my life. But as you get older, as you accumulate more assets, going from one luxury car to another doesn't give you that kind of boost of that narcotic boost, if you want to use the drug analogy, that going from one beat up Honda to a Saturn SL2 did because it relieved pain. You know, one luxury car to another is just like another kind of chocolate sauce, right? It's just a different niceness. It doesn't provide that sort of like, aren't I lucky vibe every time I get in my very mid-priced car and it starts, you know, so and that's hard to maintain. It's hard to remember when your life is going well, that your life is going well. It's only when you get sick or somebody you love gets sick that you remember how important your health is, you know? And so it's remembering to take the time to be grateful for all the wonderful things we have in our life, for your health, for the people you love, for having enough to eat, for your air conditioning, for your heat. But those are things we just take for granted. And it gets it gets harder to remember to be grateful the more you have. And so that was the lesson from that one particular essay.

SPEAKER_00 25:00

Well, hey there. Since you seem to be enjoying this episode so far, double check that you've hit the follow button on your podcast listening app and subscribe on YouTube. And to join my free private Facebook group, search MFR Curious Insiders on Facebook or click the link in the show notes. Okay, back to the show. So, what does that look like for you? Because it's one thing to remember to be grateful. I mean, that's very cerebral. Like I am like the little kid at the prayer at dinner. I am grateful for my electronics. Thank you for grandma and grandpa. You know, it's like like rote memory type vibe, but there's a different thing in that very visceral uh feeling that comes from you know your gut and like just moves upwards towards your heart. That's like a totally different level of gratitude. What's your personal, you know, practice, I guess, to to call that into yourself again? That sounds so hippie. I sound like such a hippie right now. Well, but you know what I mean.

SPEAKER_01 26:02

Like, well, you can just call whatever you want. I I mean, but it's I I think meditation gets a bad rap as being a woo-woo thing. You know, when I meditate and I don't meditate as much as I should, I I but but the more I meditate, the more grateful I am. So go figure. And meditation isn't like you're lighting incense and sitting under the, you know, the Bodhi tree or whatever. It's you're taking time to stop and to listen to your breath, to, you know, to focus on your breath, to not think. And what it does for me is allows me to see how much noise there is in my head on a daily basis and focus on the things that you're grateful for. If you want to do a gratitude meditation or just not think about anything, you just do sort of a mindfulness meditation and you can you can open or close it by, you know, kind of enumerating the things that you're grateful for. A lot of people do gratitude journals, a lot of people journal in general. I get a lot of satisfaction out of writing these essays that I write, are really practices. You know, the podcast itself and the writing that I do, it's not just to talk about the concept of gratitude or fulfillment. It's to remind myself that this is the stuff that's important. And I, even though I do all this, I don't I don't want to present myself as somebody who is has achieved nirvana, but I'm I'm still a grumpy fuck half the time, you know. Like I, I mean, you know, and and I don't, I'm not proud of that, but I'm working to try to, you know, recognize it and find my way toward a level of equanimity on a daily basis where it's I sit there and I stress about oh, my podcast not reaching as um as many people as I want. And by the way, it's it's not just money, but it's anything that you can count, right? Your Instagram followers, your podcast listeners, your weight, your you know, whatever.

SPEAKER_00 27:52

It's not your steps on your watch.

SPEAKER_01 27:56

The reason we count the reason we count our steps is because they're countable, right? And if we count them and we get to 10,000 every day, we feel good about ourselves. It's the same reason when the dean's list came out in high school every month, every quarter. I would run to the dean's list and try to see my name on it just because if I was on there, then I was doing okay, right? We're putting we're putting our okayness, you know, in in the hands of some other metric that really isn't about us. It's it's it's like some exogenous number that means nothing to us, but we give it way more credibility than it than it deserves. And the things that are harder to count are things like your health, how much you're loved, how many people you love, you know, all that kind of stuff, or the quantity of love that you give or contribute to the world, how much you help people around you. You can't count that stuff, but we focus on the things that can be counted, and I do it as much as anybody. And so the these things that we're talking about, the writing, the meditation, the podcast, these are just exercises for me. It makes me feel good to um, if if only because it reminds me to, you know, quit being so grouchy all the time.

SPEAKER_00 29:04

Well, I think it's a good reminder anytime you have people into the mix that those sources of happiness, like you said, can cannot always be countable. Like I find that being in flow state brings an enormous amount of very visceral happiness. And I find it Where do you get it?

SPEAKER_01 29:26

Where do you get flow state?

SPEAKER_00 29:27

Podcasting.

SPEAKER_01 29:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:29

A hundred percent podcasting. I love it so deeply. Even if the downloads are, you know, not what I want, even if they're not always on an upward trajectory, that feeling of flow is, I mean, it's up there with addictive chemicals.

SPEAKER_01 29:47

Paul Schaefer at the end of the episode that's coming out next week on Raisably Happy Podcast. Um, I asked him when you know when he was happiest and said when he was playing the piano. And, you know, it was he was like, because I'm when you're playing the piano at a level that that guy's been playing the piano for 60 years now or whatever it is, he's not thinking, he's just expressing emotion through an activity without any analysis. And you know, the thing that gets us is sitting there thinking about our especially when we're thinking about ourselves. Because in vet in in, you know, invariably when we're thinking about ourselves, we're generally saying things like, I should have more money, I should be more famous, I should be more appreciated, my wife should be nicer to me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. As opposed to when we're thinking about others. Well, how would this make somebody else feel? Or what could I do for that person? Like, just think about the difference in those two orientations and and how our brains and and the direction in which we point it affects our well-being. We can think ourselves, for the most part, I don't mean in the face of tragedy, even though um, you know, there's a lot of people that would would say that even in tragedy, you can you can have a positive mindset or or a negative one. But like I really do believe that that that we can point ourselves in a more positive direction most of the time.

SPEAKER_00 31:03

It's interesting though, how podcasting plays into what you just said. So I want, I would love to hear your take on this because as an interview show, which yours is to, although I think you you also do solo episodes, right?

SPEAKER_01 31:15

Sometimes I'll read some of my substacks.

SPEAKER_00 31:18

Yeah, I yeah. But when I'm doing the interview ones, it's all about the guest, right? Like my my goal is to explore my curiosity, and I try to tap into that of what I perceive my listeners' curiosity to be in order to, you know, um highlight the experience or thoughts of the guest. I mean, that's the very like rudimentary definition.

SPEAKER_01 31:43

And isn't it funny when you know 15 minutes after the conversation's done, you'll be like, did we, what did we talk about? You know, because you're just in the moment. You're just sort of, you know, you're you're not necessarily sometimes if you've got like a whole list of questions, you want to be sure you ask this, this, this, this. But sometimes you get off the conversation, you're like, I'm not even, I don't even remember, I just remember how I felt. I don't remember exactly what we talked about necessarily.

SPEAKER_00 32:05

Yeah, that's funny that you say that. Yeah, that's actually how my memory works. I didn't, I don't know. I'm be interested to see how many other people's memories work that way. But I'll go, okay, I was talking to someone the other day, and I remember feeling like I admired them. Shoot, well, who were they? I can't even remember their gender, nothing, but I remember how they make me feel.

SPEAKER_01 32:23

Yeah. I mean, well, that's uh, isn't that like a Dale Carnegie thing? People won't remember you, but they'll remember how you made them feel, something like that. Something I don't know who that sounds like a Dale, I know it's a thing, um, which sounds like a Dale Carnegie thing, but anyway, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:38

You quoted Sebastian Younger in your book, and I'm gonna read this. It said, vast wealth is an unnatural state of being. Needing nothing from those around us falls way outside more than a million years of human experience. Financial independence can lead to isolation. I thought this was such an interesting thought. Like I sat on this for quite a few minutes, but it made me wonder do you think the middle class should rethink the way that they seek upward mobility with this in mind? Like because we were talking about relationships and we're talking about like being others focused and and and flow state and all this stuff. And none of these are things that you're thinking about when you're trying to pay your freaking bills, right?

SPEAKER_01 33:26

Like I but the but the fact of the matter is is that almost uh depends how you define the middle class, but most people well under the 90th percentile of income are still struggling to pay their bills. Now, how many of those bills are actually really important or necessary? And I and this is another, you know, this is the flip side of this question, which is well, we're crippling ourselves with material things that we that that we're we're stuck in jobs that we don't like to pay for things we don't need, you know, and and and that kind of thing. But so many people have so little cash in their bank. You've read the statistic that like 80% of people couldn't pay a thousand dollar emergency hospital bill or something like that. That's a problem. And um worrying about isolating themselves in wealth is many orders of magnitude away from their net worth. Right. I think we do, speaking of fetishes, I I do believe that we fetishize wealth in a way that leads to the dehumanization of wealthy people or a fascination with wealthy people as if they're more virtuous or smarter than the average person. I I, you know, many of them are smarter or have found a solution to something that has provided value to a great number of people, thereby earning them a great deal of wealth. A lot of people have inherited their wealth um through no brains of their own. Um, but they are no more virtuous or smart or worthy of that wealth than the average person. None of us chooses our parents. So we have this weird obsession with wealth, and yet many of us are incredibly naive about how you get it or what you would do if you ever achieved it. Yes, wealth can be very isolating because, you know, look at the perfect example of this is private air travel. Dealing with humanity can be very stressful. Going to the airport is a very inefficient use of time. Sitting in coach class is often miserable. And so, what do you do when you when you get a little bit of money? One of the one of the things most people do when they start earning money is buying a seat at the front of the plane, and as soon as they can afford it, they go and rent their own plane. Because, you know, being out there among Joe Q public is pretty miserable at times. Now, they often find it to be a great use of money because they can get work done on that plane in first class that they can't get done in coach, or they save a whole bunch of personal, valuable personal time because they can roll up at the private airport five minutes before their flight instead of two hours before their flight. Um, so you just have to be careful though, with your with yourself and especially with your kids. You know, my kids don't fly private. They have they have flown private with friends of ours, but like boy, your kids are gonna grow up with a distorted view of the world if that's what they think is normal.

SPEAKER_00 36:22

You said wealth can create isolation. And obviously, this person also, Sebastian Younger, also said it too. But what about the pursuit of wealth? I mean, I feel like that would create isolation at whatever income level that you're at. Like if you're barely paying your bills and all your bills are essential, let's assume. Then I mean that would also create isolation. So does being reasonably happy in that scenario, I mean, what what does that look like?

SPEAKER_01 36:52

I don't think I don't think anybody should pursue wealth. I think people should pursue financial independence and uh financial autonomy. And that's the problem. We glorify wealth, we we piss all over financial independence as if you know you're a sucker if that's what you're going for. But you see it every day on the subway. There's people wearing, you know, watches and you know, brand new iPhones and whatever. And it's like, boy, I'd like to see that person's credit score. You know, we should be, you know, people should be applauded for being responsible, but that's not the world we live in. And it's like you can't walk around with your credit score on your on your jacket. You can walk around with a big, you know, Louis Vuitton logo on a sweatsuit or whatever that shows people that you've got taste or style or whatever, or that you can afford whatever luxury good. That's the problem to me. Now, once you've achieved financial autonomy, go to the next level if that's what you want. I had a negative net worth until I was 32. But shortly thereafter, that inflection point turned very positively in the right direction. And I was like, I have I've I went into the industry I went into because I was I wanted to have fun, I wanted to do something cool, and I happened to pick the right industry, which was digital media in 1997. And because I had experience in that industry, when somebody at Facebook needed a salesperson, I happened to have eight or 10 years of experience in that industry. So I stepped into a job and accidentally made a ton of money. I didn't go after the money, the money happened to result from being in the right place with the right skills at the right time and having a reputation as a hard worker. And so, but I think if you're if you're pursuing the shiny object right out of the gate, you're generally going to make a lot of bad decisions instead of just doing things for the right reasons. One of the things I say in the book is that, you know, we'll all be better off if we do the right thing for the right reasons and keep doing it. And I don't, I haven't seen the big payoff from comedy or writing yet, or maybe I have and I just didn't recognize it. I guess the big payoff is being able to do it and getting the answer to the question, what would happen if I gave it my all? But like, you know, maybe there'll be money at the end of the rain of the at the end of this rainbow. Maybe I'll get a big million-dollar book contract someday. Not that that's really a thing anymore, but you know, I do believe there'll there'll be something there. But in the end, I'm doing this thing because I think it's worth doing and because it's an expression of myself in the ways that that I find satisfying. Um, and that is a huge luxury to be able to do that. But but you might follow that earlier in your job career too, which is try to find something that you're really interested in. And I'm not saying go, you know, go do something in the arts early on, because that's that's very challenging to make a long-term living at. But if you find something you're interested in that could provide a career that you could grow in, being passionate about it will make you want to work harder. People will be drawn to that passion and your commitment to to the space, you'll be curious, you'll want to get better at it, and at some point, you know, you'll end up probably making some money on it.

SPEAKER_00 40:06

It kind of sounds like, you know, deciding ahead of time what makes you happy, or not deciding, but determining, recognizing what ahead of time makes you happy. Like, is it I think this is a Tony Robbins concept, or at least I've heard him talk about it, about your drivers. And some people it's achievement and status, others it's to be unique, others it's it's freedom. And uh yeah, I could see where that would be very helpful, especially in creative spaces, right? Like for your podcast, you know, I imagine or I would hope, I guess, that at the beginning of it, you would go, okay, what at the after five years of podcasting, what will I look back on and go, yep, I'm glad I did this. Like, what will make me go, this was a great idea. I'm glad I invested all this time and money to do this, you know, and and what is that answer? And so I think that kind of I think they call that mind traveling. I think that this that mind time traveling could be helpful for anyone in any socioeconomic place to go, okay, what's next? But make that next thing meaningful and not just measurable, not just outwardly countable, as you said.

SPEAKER_01 41:27

You know, I think I I I I think I would have had if you would have told me six years ago when we started this, what my results would have been, I would have been disappointed in one level and very excited on another. If you'd have told me six years ago that my numbers would only be what they are today, which are which are real but modest, I'd be like, I'm gonna put six years in. I'm gonna spend, I mean, you know, six years of editing, 40 podcasts a year. It's tens of thousands, it's it's it's a hundred thousand dollars, right?

unknown 41:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 41:59

By the way, I have figured out how to monetize podcasting. And for ten thousand dollars, I will talk any of your listeners out of starting a podcast, thus saving them fifty thousand dollars on average.

SPEAKER_00 42:10

But you're a podcast producer who makes her money from helping others launch and produce their podcast.

SPEAKER_01 42:16

I mean, well, listen, we'd probably have to argue. If you want to be honest with people, like if you're gonna do this six years, a hundred grand, dozens of hours, well, not dozens of hours per episode, but like a half dozen hours per episode on average, you know, and you have this audience. Okay, that's a real audience, but it's not huge. I'm not famous. On the other hand, if you would have said you're gonna interview LL Cool J, Judd Apatau, uh Steven Van Zant from the E Street Band, uh uh Deepak Chopra, you know, Paul Shea, all these people that I've talked to, people will that you've never met in your life, will email you from countries around the world and say, hey, I really enjoyed the conversation you had today. It helped me think about the situation I'm having in my life. You will have a stronger connection with friends that you went to school with 30 years ago, yeah, who will tell you that the work you're doing is valuable for them as they navigate life's ups and downs. Uh, and you will build relationships with people you never imagined meeting. You go, huh, that sounds that sounds very satisfying, and it is. But the things we think are going to make us happy are the things we think we need to be satisfied, are not necessarily the things that actually deliver that satisfaction.

SPEAKER_00 43:39

Final question. Are you reasonably happy?

SPEAKER_01 43:42

I am very reasonably happy. And part of that is having the right expectations that some days you're gonna be grumpy and it's okay.

SPEAKER_00 43:51

Thank you so much for this chat. I I really loved the excuse to get to know you. I enjoyed your book. So thank you so much. Tell people where they can find your book and um yeah, give a plug for anything else you want to promote, your podcast.

SPEAKER_01 44:06

Thank you, Meredith, for having me on. I really appreciate it, and it's very nice to talk to you as well. Um, you can find my writing at words.paulollinger.com, and Olinger is O-L-L-I-N-G-E-R. My book is available at Amazon, little bookstore there on the web.

SPEAKER_00 44:23

Say it again. Book is available.

SPEAKER_01 44:24

My book is called Reasonably Happy, and it's available on Amazon. Uh, and my Instagram is at paul underscore allinger.

SPEAKER_00 44:33

Thank you again.

SPEAKER_01 44:35

Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 44:36

Thanks for listening. Since you've made it this far, I'd like to invite you to be a part of my private Facebook group. And there I post content that I don't share anywhere else. You can talk to me directly about past and future episodes, and I even do occasional giveaways. Search MFR Curious Insiders on Facebook or click the link in the show notes. If you liked this episode, you'll also like the one with the researcher exploring the idea of your own happiness being politicized against your will. That's episode 330. And stay tuned next week when I talk with an industry professional asking if recycling is really a scam. Until then, keep it curious.