eorge grombacher 0:02
James to get us started give us two truths and a lie. All

James Bashall 0:05
right, I racked my brain, my brain for these. Number one, I learned to surf when I was six years old. Number two, I was nudged out of the way by a wild gorilla in Uganda. And number three, I’ve run every day for the last 760 days in a row.

george grombacher 0:25
Those are really good. Those are really good. I bet you started surfing earlier than six.

James Bashall 0:32
Wow. No, not my life. You nailed it. It’s the one that I wish. If only I could change one thing in my life. I wish I had learned to surf and I was like six years old. Okay,

george grombacher 0:44
what’s that? Is it safe to surf in South Africa?

James Bashall 0:47
It is. It’s very good surfing. I mean, it’s it’s a numbers game, right? They lots of sharks, but they’re also lots of people in the water. So you distribute your risk with the number of legs that are floating around you.

george grombacher 0:58
Okay. All right. You run every day for how many days? As

James Bashall 1:02
760? or something? Yeah, for you, everyone,

george grombacher 1:07
knowing even when you’re sick, or maybe you just don’t get sick. No,

James Bashall 1:11
yeah. I mean, the worst day of the 760 was I was in Bali, and I had food poisoning. And I was like, oh, yeah, like 500 days into this thing. You still need to go for a run. And I was like, Okay, I need shoes you go in for and, wow. I mean, it’s like not like a full run, like the shortest runs are like a mile. But it’s like, put your shoes on and get outside our restaurants, probably four or five miles long runs around 35 the other day. So, you know, make too small.

george grombacher 1:38
For you. Life is a story of commitment. It is. Yeah. I love it. Excellent. Well, James, what is top of mind for you right now?

James Bashall 1:50
Yeah, I’ve got some words bouncing around my head of late. And it kind of speaks to a core philosophy of life and what I do what we do here and everything, and that is it kind of irritates me. I’m gonna quote my dad. But my dad had this saying when we were kids, he says, you know, kids, money doesn’t make you happy. But it showed us how. And we’re always kind of irritated, because he was like this very financially conservative guy. And, and in hindsight, he nailed it, because he, you know, lived a great life and retired 58 and is now living his best. But it kind of speaks to this ultimate philosophy of, of my practice and our practice that feature wealth, which is that of, of wealth for wellbeing. So how does wealth lead to a good life? And where does that overlap come from? You know, putting your money to work to building your best life. You know, it’s not about just having more money, it’s about actually using it so as to create the best life you could live.

george grombacher 2:52
When did you accept or realize that your dad was a pretty smart guy?

James Bashall 3:00
Yeah, journey, that’s been a journey. You know, like out of out of high school, every kid hasn’t got a clue what they’re going to do, by a process of elimination went into finance, because I don’t want to be a doctor, I don’t want to be a lawyer, ended up in finance, did the what’s the equivalent of a CPA here, but as a chartered accountancy, and in South Africa, which is like an eight year process, and you’ve got an intuitive like an undergrad and postgrad and right to professional exams and do a three year training contract. So it’s like a very rigorous process, and I got to the end, and I was like, You know what, this whole money thing is dumb. And I packed my bags, and I traveled for like 14 months around the world, I lived in Amsterdam, and I traveled Europe. And then I moved to the States. Well, I flew over to New York, and I did the lens to the Americas by bus. And I got to the end of that, and I felt like I was a changed man. And I got home to South Africa. And I was like, great, you know what, I’m gonna change the world, I’m gonna go into the nonprofit world, and I’m going to do for purpose work forever. And I quickly learned two things. One was an income really helps to live. You know, because I was constantly I was going into this world at a very young age, and earning next to nothing, suddenly, a lot of things that were peripheral to my sort of core direction being my job, were falling away, like I had no autonomy to go travel, which is something I love doing, and to explore and do a diverse range of fun things. So while you’ve got a lot of meaning, and the core, you know, the money really helps enable a lot of other experiences. And the second thing I realized is that, you know, the nonprofit world is not really a spot for a 25 year old who’s naively trying to change it. It’s it’s a, it’s as tough as the private sector. So yeah, it was probably when I was about 25. I realized that my dad, there was some truth in that and it’s been kind of a trick close to where I am now. bouncing between extremes. But yeah, I really I feel like I’ve landed in a good space now of putting the two together. Excellent.

george grombacher 5:09
Yeah. Well, it’s true that there’s no solutions, only trade offs in life. The notion that if I’m doing meaningful work, it means I have to take a vow of poverty. And then if I need to make want to make a lot of money, I have to sell my soul. That’s, that’s not it’s just doesn’t need to be that way.

James Bashall 5:28
Yeah, that’s such a false dichotomy. And it’s, it speaks to so many extremes. I think we as people, we love like heuristics. We love shortcuts in our brains. And we love binary outcomes, because it simplifies the complexity of every decision. It’s like, well, either, you know, as you’ve spoken about, you know, the vow of poverty, or I’m going to, you know, be a bloodthirsty capitalist, the middle ground is is huge, and you can be on both ends. With them without purpose. So you can be the blood 3030 capitalist who is actually changing the world for the good. And you can be someone who is the vow of poverty is actually not helping anyone. So it’s, you know, it’s so much gray, it’s all gray. And figuring out the balance is fundamental. Yeah.

george grombacher 6:18
So well, for well being. Yeah. Tell me a little bit more about that.

James Bashall 6:26
Yeah, so I mean, my, my background primarily in finance, and I asked all these big questions myself, and I stumbled upon this field of positive psychology. And I was asking myself the big question of, you know, what are you doing with your life? Where are you going, and I’m a deeply strategic person and have big intention drives everything I do. I’m not someone who, who likes to take unwarranted risk. I’m not risk averse, but I’m definitely a risk trade off of us. So if the trade off doesn’t justify the risk, I’m not keen. And the world of positive psychology was fascinating. And I was just, like, drawn in. And if you look at psychology, you know, a quick 32nd background to that world is psychology as a study was focused very much on what we would kind of turn negative psychology, so deficit based psychology. So what is wrong with you? And how can we fix it as opposed to how do we make what is you more right? You know, how do we build a good life that was such a nice to have. And it wasn’t a fundamental concern for any. And with the evolution of, I guess, the human race that we’ve done, I love you. You’ve all know Harare writes an amazing, like five paragraph description of how we’ve come so far as humanity. In essence, we were playing around in the mud in the stone age, and can we’ve gotten to this place of abundance now where you can live a good life. And in about 2000, there was a guy called 98 Actually, Martin Seligman was the chairman of the American Psychological Association was asked the question, what do you think of the state of psychology? And you said, Well, it’s not very good. And they said, why? You said, Well, we only focus on the negative, like, what about the positive? And that created this whole field, which for the last 25 years has been running, like sprinting, trying to figure out what is it that makes a good life? And it’s, you know, it’s not by any means distilled. They don’t know the answer, but they know what the core core components are. And we should be putting your time and energy. And there are there are tools which are amazing and can be used. And one of the big questions that’s been asked in the field is whether there’s the relationship between money and happiness. And, you know, Daniel Kahneman is an academic who is a Nobel Laureate, and he was kind of the founder of behavioral economics and behavioral finance. And he came up, they published a paper in 2010, that basically showed the diminishing marginal returns of income post a certain points, which means, basically, at the time, they said it was about $75,000, I think, now dollars, it’s probably about 95,000. They said, the marginal benefit of every dollar thereafter is exceeded by the cost of getting that extra dollar. And so you’re better off earning 75 than the more because actually, it comes with big trade offs beyond that, which it always greeted me. And, you know, my personal experience was on both sides of that kind of point of inflection. And my experience was, it gets better, the more you learn, and I was always kind of frustrated, but you know, study the positive psychology and then 2021 A guy called Matt Killingsworth came out with a study which basically said the opposite. He was like, the more money the more opportunity you have for wellbeing, and the happier you’re going to be. Which creates a big conflict you now got a Nobel laureate who is got you know, I’m sure you know the book Thinking Fast and Slow like he’s a he’s a really famous guy and you got this like, other psychologists with less bigger name, but they will did a really cool thing in academia called an average Serial collaboration. So they came together. And they looked through each other’s data. And they came to a conclusion as to who was right. And at the end of it published this year was Killingsworth was right there. Although there is a tapering effect, you still do see an increase in well being associated with marginal increase in income. And that’s really cool. And it makes total sense, right? So with wealth, you get access to things you wouldn’t have access to otherwise, for example, health. You know, it’s something we take for granted. And it’s a fundamental building block of life. And, you know, I live in New York City, and I recently tried to find a gym and I was, it’s insane. What a gym costs, and like, just getting access to that requires you have a certain amount of disposable income. But then if you go back to the health paradigm, it’s like, Well, Jim is really important, both from a present Quality of Life and Longevity perspective. And so yeah, wealth just really opens up these experiences. And that’s just a fundamental building block, don’t, you know, you can then go on to talk about you reach financial independence, you can do with your life, what you want, you can literally allocate your time to those things, which make you happy all day, as opposed to spending the sort of 810 hours doing a job, much of which might not be your core purpose and meaning and positive emotion generating elements for life. So yeah, so that’s like a long answer to your question, but it kind of gives the broad perspective of how we get there.

george grombacher 11:36
That’s an awesome answer. I was not aware of that. I didn’t know about adversarial collaborations. Isn’t that cool? How very mature of people in a very short time? It’s super cool. So cool. Yeah. So I’m looking forward to digging into that, but I appreciate your synopsis of it. And that that makes sense to me. You mentioned a minute ago that you live with a lot of intention. So was condiments thought, is it just if I’m unintentional, I’m just working harder to earn more money, that that’s not going to lead to happiness, versus if I’m earning more money, and then making good decisions based on what’s most important to me. That’s how it’s going to be better.

James Bashall 12:20
Yeah, I think I mean, comments. Psychological data is difficult. Right? So you’re, you’re evaluating a broad population based on a sequence of, of questions you asked. And so, you know, to look at that depth Clemens work, I think would be, you were probably looking too deep, in terms of like, what it meant, but I think his point was all his conclusion was, the marginal benefit of earning more money becomes eroded by the cost of earnings. And so if you work, you know, you’re a banker on Wall Street, and you’re working 80 to 100 hour weeks, with 10 days of paid time off a year, you know, what’s the point? You know, why, why do that, unless, unless you adore what you’re doing, in which case, go ahead, you know, you’re living your best life, and you’re earning a bunch of cash, which means you can probably stop whenever you want to. So once again, very gray. But I don’t think that’s the majority of people, a lot of people will chase wealth, at the expense of other pieces of their life, which are fundamental to their well being. And that was the general kind of consensus. But, you know, if you look at happiness, as measured, there kind of two components to it is the affective component, which is, which speaks to the balance of positive and negative emotions in your life. And so, you know, that element, you can feel extremely happy with very little, that element is not necessarily going to be increased by having more wealth. It can be, you can spend money on amazing things like I love going to Broadway shows, we went the other day, and it’s like, well over 100 bucks a ticket, like that’s a real privilege to be able to go. That’s a huge positive emotion driver, but at what cost? That said, you can go for a walk on the water, you know, along the Hudson River, and it’s beautiful, and you get huge positive emotions, and that’s free. So well, you know, you can debate either way, negative emotions. Wealth is really important because it can take away a lot of things which actually detract from your happiness. So it can make things easier those garage things like a long commute to work. You know that that’s not a nice thing to have to endure every day. And we’ve seen that with the post COVID era of so many people working from home because the commute was detracting from their well being. Well, with more income, you can live closer to work, which allows you to have a shorter commute You know, so there’s that aspect of portion, you can see how wealth can really play into it. But there is an intention piece there, which is really important. What are you using it? Right? What are you putting your money towards, in a buying stuff doesn’t increase either positive emotions or reduce negative emotions. So that’s the one portion is that affects a portion, but the other portion of happiness really speaks to kind of life satisfaction. And that’s a much broader picture. And it’s asking the question, how satisfied are you with your life, you know, over the past months, and it’s a it’s, it’s, it transcends your, your day to day emotions. A good example here is a lot of parents with young kids, their positive emotions are probably improved. But the negative emotions are wild, right, you’re sleep deprived, you’ve got like angry noises in your ears all the time with a child crying, like it’s not a great, you know, the trade off there doesn’t look great. But the satisfaction with life peace is huge. Because people find immense satisfaction from having children. So it’s like, you can see that kind of difference in the way of measuring happiness and satisfaction with life as well. Killingsworth found goes up substantially with wealth. So and we can we can delve into theories as to why we think that’s the case, I’m sure he’s gonna publish a lot more. He’s got incredible amounts of data, and he’s probably working through it. But, you know, people got wealth through doing something and they probably did something that was meaningful. That’s why they got so much wealth, you know, and so, there’s, it’s an interesting trade off and yeah, so to go back to Kahneman, I think his data was quite surface level. And it was quite, you know, it was, I think it was oversimplifying the point, which is like killings versus work has been kind of the I think it’s the future of the perspective on wealth and well being. Yeah, it sounds

george grombacher 16:57
like a lot of it. Well, James, already for that difference making tip, what do you have for us? Yeah.

James Bashall 17:05
Okay. So we workshopped this amongst the three of us in the office. And I got three answers, they very short. The first was, Lauren said, don’t eat yellow snow. Which, as a South African, I have no idea what that means. And my one was have a cold shower every day. And this is something that speaks to the world of longevity. And Andrew, humans done a lot of work on this, which is cold showers have incredible benefits. But I found waking up first thing in the morning and enduring a minute of a cold shower makes your whole day better. So one bad minute for every other minute, which is good. So put that out there. And most people will understand that, but I thought around was the best. And his was, as we go into this new year, and we start setting intentions for the new year and goals and New Year, define your constraints and non negotiables before your nice to haves. Because if you can get your constraints and live within those and you can live your non negotiables every day, you open up a lot of opportunity for those nice to haves that. And an example of that goes back to my running, you know we spoke about I’ve run for 760 odd days. You know, that’s a non negotiable for me, I run every single day of my life. And why do I run every single day in my life, because it’s easier to run every day than it is to run some days. It’s non negotiable. And every day it makes my life better. And I think that that is you know, a daily habit that can make a huge difference to people’s lives to find those constraints and non negotiables and hold fast to those as we go into this new year.

george grombacher 18:42
Well, I think that all of those are great that definitely get to come up. All right, so Lauren said don’t eat yellow snow. I think that, you know, grew up in Duluth, Minnesota, and there’s plenty of snow we learned early on. You don’t want to put the yellow in. Yes, in your mouth. So the cold shower, I think that that’s awesome. That is that is an acquired taste for sure. But I’ve certainly found that the more you do it, the easier it is and and finding what those non negotiables are and doing them. What was it that you said about running he run every day because it’s easier to do that than running some days?

James Bashall 19:21
Yes. Yeah,

george grombacher 19:23
that’s 100% the truth. Well, James, thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you? How can they engage with you? Yeah,

James Bashall 19:32
so where our website is future you.com So you can plug in there. I’m on LinkedIn, James Paschal easy to find. Those are probably the two best. Excellent.

george grombacher 19:46
Excellent. Well, if you enjoyed as much as I did, check out everything a little bit. Dig a little deeper into what James is talking about at future you wealth.com So much enjoyed your perspective and Ryan’s perspective when we talked a couple years ago, and I’m sure that I would enjoy it Lauren’s perspective as well. So, go to future you wealth.com and dig in to everything that we’ve been talking about get in touch. Thanks again, James. Yeah, thank you, Josh. And finally, friendly reminder, never gonna beat anybody more interested in your financial success then you are so act accordingly.