Farnoosh Torabi: Healing Our Money Fears

Written By Alexandra Brockman

 Farnoosh Torabi is host of the podcast So Money, and the author of numerous books, including the just-released A Healthy State of Panic: Follow Your Fears to Build Wealth, Crush Your Career, and Win at Life. Farnoosh got her start as a financial journalist, though she quickly came to understand that understanding money and investing was really just a cover for a desire to understand life…and all the animating impulses that drive us toward safety and security. When we talk about money, we’re talking about so much more than dollars and cents. Money is one of the most essential energies alive in our culture: It says a lot about who we are, collectively and individually, and what we value. It’s these types of underlying emotional states that are at the root of Farnoosh’s work, including her just released book, which is an exploration of all the different types of fear that guide and refine our days, whether it’s Fear of Failure or Fear of Exposure or Fear of Loss. Okay, let’s get to our conversation.

TRANSCRIPT:

(Edited slightly for clarity.)

ELISE LOEHNEN: Hi friend, this'll come out your launch week, but, third book, you ready to go?

FARNOOSH TORABI: I've been ready for my entire life. Let me tell you. I mean, no, you're never really ready. I think that this has been such an emotional, as you know, to say that it is emotional is an understatement. I'll give you a story. I got the box of books. Every author, usually the publisher, generously gives us like 50 copies of our books. If you got more, I'm jealous. I got 50. And they came and at first it looked like our spin thrift order or something. Like I wasn't sure what these three boxes were. And then my husband said, no, it's a Simon and Schuster. It's probably your book. And I ran away. I ran away from the books and I started crying. I think because while I want this book for everybody to be their permission slip to love their fears and find the wisdom in their fears and that is the message of this book. For me, this book represents like 40 years of learning and unlearning and going really deep into the material of my life, which sometimes looked really hard and felt felt tough.

And then also I wrote it in the pandemic, right? When I'm a room staring at a blank Google Doc and my kids are in the other, trying to like kill each other, and wanting more cheese sticks and I'm like all of that came to the surface when the books came finally to my doorstep and I didn't want to, I had to like, as fear sometimes does, it leads us to avoidance. And then I had a moment to collect myself and my thoughts and just, you know, realize that this is a celebratory moment, and while there's a lot in the past, there's also a really fun future ahead, and I'm really, at this point, I've gotten, now I'm in the place, like I think, you know, I've been at like, how many stages of grief? This is, I'm now in like the acceptance, it's here, I'm excited, and I'm happy to be here with you.

ELISE: I get it. It's funny reading your book and I've obviously known you for many years. I mean, I think probably four years, five years. I'm not sure how long. It was interesting to read a healthy state of panic and to expect ultimately, a book about money because you this is theoretically like this is this is who you are in the culture, and to recognize like actually money is the understory to this book and to so many parts of our lives. I loved that you took the opportunity to actually just talk about and write about yourself and your own career and unfolding as you recognize the way that you have been corralled or guided, I would say, by fear. Because this also isn't a book that's like a rallying cry. Fear is the one of the most animating emotions for all of us. Fear, anger, joy, right? Fear is an everpresent state, it's part of our history and it keeps us alive. So I liked that it was in many ways a celebration of that. And then I also saw myself I mean, our trajectories are, I know everyone feels a communion with you, Farnoosh, and that's part of your charm. But, I also, we're not dissimilar in our career trajectories in being primary breadwinners. And now, you know, you worked in magazines, I worked in magazine, like, we've both played in a lot of parts of media. And to now, reading about your formation of a more substantive, stable, I wouldn't even call it career, but like, the empire of you, was really interesting and also, I was like, Oh, I very much see myself in this experience. And it's scary.

FARNOOSH: Yeah, I was gonna say it's terrifying and yet you are where you are and I am where I am and life is good most days and I think that's the irony and I think when there is something counterculture that you've discovered or that there's something really ironic about your life like that's worth writing about and this book initially began as a series of essays. You know, I've written very technically for a lot of my career. Although I really like my first love is, is writing creatively, although I haven't had a whole lot of chance to do that as a financial author. And so now in my forties, I'm thinking if I'm going to write a book again, I'm gonna make it fun. Or at least like, Get outside my comfort zone, learn something new, challenge myself because writing a book is not for the faint of heart and if you can get on the other side of that going, wow, that was worthwhile and I learned something and I'm like more talented now as a result of it, like I actually feel very successful in having written this, I mean, like more than any other book just because I approached it like a student, you know, I hired a writing coach. I got like a very accelerated MFA in writing by working with Suzanne Kingsbury, who does have her MFA and does teach, you know, some of the greatest creative writers in our time, how to put words to a page and move people and write story. And, I don't think I got that out of, like, I think the book is good. I don't think it's like, you know, a Pulitzer, but I think it is, For me, like, you gotta know where I'm coming from, like, I'm writing about five ways to slice a budget kind of articles and so done to write about my immigrant parents and their comeuppance and to write about the fear and to use my grandmother's story as I tried at least to sort of needle that through the book and create, develop an arc and have people like come for the advice, but stay for the stories, right? Stay for this kooky Iranian family that, risked so much. My parents risked so much to come here. They are, in many ways, The poster man and woman for taking risk. They came from Iran, 6, 000 miles to suitcases, like a lot of immigrants that their stories began similarly. And so the irony is that they got here and they were like, no more chances. You got it. You kid Toorabi, you're going to just stay home, you know, you can't even watch punky Brewster. Like that is too much. That is totally out of the line. Don't eat other people's snacks. Don't talk to other people. Preferably don't talk to like other men who, you know, pretend to be nice to you. It was the eighties. It was Worcester, Massachusetts. I think they did the best they could, but they purposely raised me to be afraid. And, as my mother said, it kind of worked out, right? So, right? So, here we are, and I'm like, you know what? Damn it, she was right again. As a kid, I got into a lot of weird trouble because of my fears. I was the kid who would run into oncoming traffic, trying to get away from someone she thought was a stranger. I was the kid who, the opening story in the book is like, throwing myself onto a running vehicle because the babysitter was going to leave us alone in the house, which probably was the right instinct.

But I was that, I was that Tarsu, which is Farsi for fear someone, you know, the, the scaredy cat. And now I wear the badge of honor, like I've made bracelets that say Tarsu now, you know, because I feel like for me, that inner child is still in me, but she's learned how to evolve with fear and how to not, like I tried to as a kid, try to fight the fear, but instead bring it in. It's like, I guess, keep your enemies closer and really get to understand why it's shown up for me. As I say in the book, when fear shows up, it's an opportunity to learn more about yourself. Just like when happiness shows up and grief shows up and embarrassment shows up and fear shows up, like all of these emotions, I think that we've evolved now to a place where we can understand and appreciate all of our emotions as valid. But fear tends to be the one where we really have the most resistance, because you can't blame us so much of the culture, whether it's books, media, television, in conversation, we're learning that fearlessness is the way, fearlessness is what is courageous, what is the marker of success.

And I don't know about you, but I've never been able to just walk into a situation just being like, Hey fear, can you just sit right there for a minute while I go do the thing? You know, I'm often bringing fear with me. And so the challenge and the opportunity as a writer was to like, figure out what happens in that middle place where you're scared and then you still did the thing. And you didn't abandon fear, but you didn't like sabotage yourself either. What is that framework? What are the things? And truthfully, it's not like a five step way of doing it. You know, it's really about, as a journalist. I think what I have found to be helpful is to ask fear questions. Really what you're doing is you're asking yourself questions. And so for all of the different chapters in the book, and I go through nine different fears, there are different kinds of questions that I think can be the toolkit for when the fear shows up to get closer to the answers that you need to then be able to go and do the thing that's presenting as terrifying.

ELISE: Yeah. I mean, and I've thought about fear a lot in the last, well, my whole life, having an anxiety disorder as well. I mean, opened my book talking about my anxiety disorder and my chronic hyperventilation and sort of how I recognize like I couldn't outrun it so I had to understand what it was and then Interestingly as you know, my book is about the seven deadly sins which were first written down by this monk, Vagaris Ponticus, who is credited as an early father of the Enneagram. And the Enneagram is nine points, and it includes the seven sins, plus fear, plus deceit, which is sort of interpreted as vainglory. And then that came through sort of a Sufi tradition, G. I. Gurdjieff and so there's something really interesting to me, because vainglory is sort of wrapped up in pride, it feels present in the way that the sins were passed down to us.

But fear has always stood out to me as the emotion that, not the one that got away, but it's interesting to me that it wasn't codified in the same way, in part because I think it is so fundamental. And including a fear of God, right, but it's interesting to imagine it as like, it is both a natural birthright, and in some ways a cultural birthright that wasn't renounced or was seen as something that like, maybe it was inescapable, or maybe it was essential, or maybe it's something around which we shouldn't have shame. Even though I think we now live in a culture that insists that, You need to be brave and courageous and conquer your fears. And yes, but those things are not like mutually exclusive.

FARNOOSH: Exactly. Exactly. I think that when someone Proclaims to be fearless, I think they're not being honest with themselves. I think that the truth is that they probably have a more mature relationship with fear than they're recognizing. And I hope this is good news to them, you know, what I want to say to this person is that. There was a moment when you were afraid and, you know, perhaps you think what you did was you just ignored it and went and did it anyway. But I think that there was, and it could have just been seconds, could have just been minutes where you were like unpacking that a little bit. Or the fear was fuel for you to go and be more strategic about some things because ultimately what fear is doing, I think when often when it shows up in our lives, whether it's in our careers, in our relationships, with money, it is trying to signal us to protect something that we value, that we feel is potentially going to be compromised or made vulnerable. In the process of doing the thing, and that's not a little thing. You know, for example, maybe if it's the fear of loneliness, what are we fearing there? It's like we're fearing a lack of connection. We're fearing maybe not having someone to turn to. We're fearing sometimes the uncertainty that comes with loneliness because you don't know, you know, if something happens to you or who's going to help you. Feeling like you have a lack of resources, with the fear of failure, what you're trying to protect is maybe your ideal of success, your definition of success, which might actually need some reengineering, as I talk about in my book, but there's always something that it's almost the opposite, right, that you're trying to protect. And so I think that as evolved adults and people that ultimately want to have fulfilled lives, when fear shows up, the first thing is to figure out what is it that you want to protect. Then try to create a plan that respects that thing, but you're still doing the thing like so many times in my career, whether it's investing for a lot of us, investing is really scary, the fear is not telling you to not invest the fear of saying, what do you want to protect? Well, I want to protect, you know, my money. I want to make sure that I have more of it at the end than when I started. I want to make sure that I'm not just going to be like throwing it away. So maybe what you have to do first is like get a little educated on how to invest, because the truth is there are good ways and bad ways.

And sometimes fear is a nudge towards just more learning. Sometimes it's the fear of asking for help. Sometimes it's not saying don't do the thing. It's saying do these things along the way or do these things first and then go do the thing. So at the end, you know, people looking like, oh, we don't understand how you have fear, Farnoosh, because you have this career, you started a business, you're an entrepreneur, like you go on stage and you talk to people. And it's like, yeah, because I have gone through the process of addressing the fear. And then the idea is not that you take fear everywhere, that fear never leaves you, and that we should always be scared all of the time. That's not the message. The message is just, you know, the simple act of even just recognizing that your fears might just have something important to tell you and deserve some space for a little bit of time is the message.

ELISE: Yeah. And what was interesting in reading your journey was there's nothing complacent about you and your quest for security and stability. And then also where I very much relate is that you seem to, you know, you write at the end about autonomy and creating that for ourselves, how all we really want in some ways is freedom, but freedom is also very scary and many of us choose to structure our lives in cages to some extent, which can be very comfortable cages, but where we're relying on outside structures. And at least for me, like one of the reckonings in my life has been with my fear of not having enough, not being able to support my family, and then recognizing in that I'm relying on all these external structures in order to do that for my family. And that's actually, as much as we're sort of culturally inured to this idea that that's how you do it. You go and you get a great job at a great company and you get your health insurance, there's not actually that much security in that. Business is a cold lover. And that owning your path in some way or creating true autonomy, I think for both of us, has been controlling our destiny, rather than relying on Condé Nast, wherever it is. It's sort of the opposite too, right? That we are told is the path to security. And you write about your dad, right? Like your physicist dad having to retool his whole life at 60 when he was laid off. Like, this happens to all of us.

FARNOOSH: Right. And, whatever path you choose, my dad wants to always be working for someone else. Like, you know in some ways we are very similar and then others like I take different risks than my dad, but I think where we are similar is in our insistence on always calculating for that risk. And so even as my father doesn't have control of his paycheck or his even time because he works for a big employer. I think the way that he has to approach his finances and his family planning is different than I because he just has to prepare for a potential layoff. Right. And so he might be more of a saver and he might be more of an of a risk averse investor. And, you know, they do live below their means more than maybe my husband and I do because in my world as an entrepreneur, if I need to make ends meet, I don't have to ask A boss for a raise. I just had to come up with a business plan and hopefully try to go execute on that. And it's just more of my own doing, but, you know, what you talk about that last chapter, which is the fear of losing your freedom, which I felt had to be the last chapter because from a narrative standpoint, it made sense because it's like where the arc finishes, but then also where I think a lot of us feel In some ways, the most lost right now and the most scary and what could be scarier than losing your freedom and everyone has a different definition of this and it's isn't about the freedoms at large, like the freedom that Congress has any say in, but rather things like the freedom to marry who you want, but your culture and your religion dictates otherwise. The freedom to have a career and a family and not feel as though You are just a pawn in this world and you have to answer to so many other people. For me, the freedom to marry who I wanted Wasn't so much that my parents were Iranian and they wanted me to marry an Iranian. That was never the issue, But I write about this in my last book, When She Makes More, about how as a woman who was making more than a lot of her Male peers and then to be in a relationship with somebody where I made more, didn't feel like tension for us as for me and my husband and my then boyfriend. But for my parents, this was like very confusing. They were like, how's this going to work? Is this really what you want? And, you know, ultimately we got married and everyone's fine, but there was a lot of reckoning along the way that had to happen. And the fear of, for me, of having a weakened relationship with my parents was less then the fear of living a life with someone that I didn't love wholly or feeling as though I passed on love because I had to make my parents happy. And as soon as I sort of made a commitment to that, what happened? I started to make boundaries for myself and my family. My mother had to have sort of a big talk it out. And I made very clear to them, because this is going back to some of the ideals in the book around fear is that the strategy around fear sometimes is that, when you think you're afraid of something, maybe a good exercise is to think about something else that makes you even more frightened and that is the thing that you hold onto. That is the thing that will actually propel you to do the thing that you, at the end of the day, should do because it is most aligned with who you are. So like in that example I was more afraid of just like letting my life pass without, I've seen it happen.

I've seen friends who are still single and it's not by choice. It's because they are trying to live up to certain ideals that are homegrown that are in their family and for generations and they have to marry a certain person with a certain religion or a certain person born in a certain village in India, like it gets so specific and I'm like you live in Sunnyvale, like how are you going to find this person, but here they are in their 40s and wondering why they're not, you know, With anybody and it's because they weren't scared enough of the right things.

ELISE: Yeah, well, similar to you, in my twenties, which I spent largely alone, I feel like I dated everyone in New York to the point where it was sort of like a joke. Like you'd go out for dinner with other single women and be like, have you been on a date with this person and this person and this person? Like you just, there were these rounds that I felt like we were all going on and I never dated anyone seriously, but I, you know, found that I attracted a very specific type of person because I went to boarding school, went to Yale, but I'm from Montana, and I'm like, my parents are not in the social registry, you know, like I am a little countercultural. A little outside of the box for a lot of these people. And, but I was very compelling to sort of, I called them like the trustafarians, also to like the corporate lawyers and hedge funders who would then, you know, thought I was like a funny novelty that would maybe shock their grandparents in quag. You know what I mean? And it was also like such a specific time. It was like sex in the city and like such a cliche, but you'd get into the building at Conde Nast and like, The well heeled, beautiful magazine editors would go to this elevator bank and the investment bankers and the lawyers were going this direct It was such a cliché, Farnoosh, but I was definitely in the midst of it and I had all these anxieties and was definitely struggling to support myself and, like, knew I would need to Support myself always and that not only that I would need to but that what came up for me It was like how much I wanted to and I would have gone these dates with these Men who thought that, and maybe this is fair It was more of a job at that point for me than a career, but like saw no potential in my sort of becoming as a person who had something to contribute in the world. And instead, I remember it was like, oh, that's like, nice that you have this, like, walking around money. It was like shoe money. And I just felt like I could see the fork in the road. Like, yes, I can conform and contort myself. And, there are times that I really wanted to because like, my 20s were miserable, hard. I was so broke, panicked most of the time, couldn't pay my cell phone bill, you know, just like that anxiety. Living above the Burger King on Canal Street with three roommates and what wasn't really fit to be, like a living space.

FARNOOSH: Nothing on Canal Street is designed to be a living space, I tell you.

ELISE: It's really not. Even my mom, who is not at all a fancy person, when she moved me out of that building, there was like a leak in the ceiling, in the stairwell. It was like gushing water. She was like, holy shit. You know, like, this is, nothing about this is okay. But, anyway, I felt a moment's like, oh, it would be really nice to be saved, like, I could just do this, like I could do this. And yet there was that part of me that fear that deeper fear that was like, fuck no, like you are not doing this. And I'm so glad I pushed through. I mean, ultimately I met my husband. It was nothing like what I thought it was going to be. He did not fit that type at all. We moved to Jersey City and like, I cannot imagine. And we have been a very much a dual family income. I have out earned him because of my workaholism and compulsive personality. But like, there was something so essential about like that need for both of us at the beginning to be like, we are very much in this together.

FARNOOSH: Yeah, I feel that so much. I think women in their twenties who work in cities like New York, where maybe even not so much in New York, but New York, not so much for the finances, but because of kind of the industries, right? There's finance and media where finance people make so much more money than people in media and more people who work in media are women and more people who work in finance are men. So then they go on dates and the women are like, how am I ever going to be able to make this kind of money. And either, there's two pathways. It's either marry the guy who's making the money or figure something else out. You know, like, you know, not everyone's going to become the editor in chief of a glossy magazine. And there's a big pay gap in between. Like I was that junior reporter making 18 dollars an hour before taxes. My editor in chief was making a million dollars a year. This was early 2000s and this was only money magazine. So where does that, you know, like then we were popular, but we weren't Vogue.

So, I think that there is fear, this fear of money, which is that I'm never going to have enough, I'm never going to be able to support myself, and so maybe we misinterpret that fear initially as like, well, I guess I just have to, like, become dependent on somebody else, and somebody else can afford and finance my future, but then again, what is the other fear potentially? Like, aren't you also afraid of becoming a dependent on someone else and what that would mean for your autonomy and your sense of self? And that fear, that latter fear for me was such an anchor. I saw it in my family, my mother, my father. On the one hand, we had a lot of conversations about money growing up that Some were intended for me, some weren't, but I was an only child for the first ten and a half years, so I was always in the room, and I got it all, I got all the ups and downs and sideways of their money lives, and mostly though, what was patterned in their arguments was my mother feeling extremely powerless, because my dad At sometimes was the only one making money, and if my mother was making some money, it paled in comparison. And so she never was able to really feel like an equal partner financially. My dad, she thought was very controlling and probably was, and so I saw that early on and that messaging was also part of the foundation and part of the fear of like I don't want to repeat that for myself and, know, then of course, the irony of like becoming the breadwinner, my parents being like, really?

ELISE: Went too far.

FARNOOSH: Too far. Yeah.

ELISE: But these scripts and these family patterns, I mean, I didn't break my mom's pattern. You know, my parents both grew up poor. My dad's a South African Jew who, and my mom was the oldest of seven from a very poor Catholic family in Iowa. And so my mom experienced more scarcity I think than my dad, just by virtue of my dad growing up in a country where he was already extremely privileged in terms of just the color of his skin. Whereas my mom was, you know, just sort of a woman who really felt like she had to create it all herself at a time also when there was so much split programming, you know, it was like second wave feminism, but so there was this sort of nudge towards like, you can do anything. But then a lack of, you know, she went to a now defunct nursing college, because that's sort of the only way nursing, was the really the only way she could see where she could assure herself of a career. And then she married my dad and made that decision. You know, she ran his practice, she always worked But always unpaid, running his practice, various volunteering things, etc. She worked as a nurse for a little bit, but she passed on to me both this similar to your mom fear of me being dependent in a way that I think she herself felt very dependent as much as they were sort of codependent and building something together. Which I'm sure you can relate to. And also this like, generosity That was hamstrung by fear. So growing up it was like, you know, I was a doctor's kid. So We didn't have intergenerational wealth, but we had sort of the accrual of wealth apparent, My parents also live like well beneath, very well beneath their means way below their means Almost compulsively to the point where it's like I don't think you should you guys are in your 70s, Let's like take a direct flight. Like you don't need to, you know, like it's that level of oh my god people but...

FARNOOSH: But it's so ingrained in us. And I think that when the fear of money, whether it's the fear of, and this is central to the book, the sixth chapter is about the fear of money, which I waited five chapters to get there. And people might be like, what is going on? You're a financial author. But I think the reason is because money Is central to our lives in some ways, it's central to what I do and what I teach, but in terms of fear, if there is a timeline or a, an anatomy, maybe a fear that there's the fear of money is sort of central to a lot of the other fears that we experience sometimes very much a part of the other fears too, like Loneliness and rejection and FOMO and the fear of losing your freedom. Like how can money not show up sometimes in these moments, but when the fear of money shows up and you find yourself afraid of something, and you're not even sure how or why, like, it doesn't make sense because maybe you are 70 and you're still taking those, you know, indirect flights and, or you're a millionaire and you're like, Hemming and hawing over the 7 organic blueberries, I don't know, I mean, I don't, these are real stories like I have come across. I think that, you know, we're all, we have like cognitive brains, like we can all like kind of be like, okay, that's kind of irrational. What's up with that fear? The healthy step is to say, okay, well, let's trace it. You know, let's go back and understand where we picked this up. And often it's in childhood.

And this comes up on my podcast all of the time on So Money where I ask listeners about their earliest money memories. And it's like just the quickest way, the shortcut to connecting those dots to say, okay, I have these hangups about money today and lo and behold, they're rooted in what I experienced as a child when I didn't have maybe the control, the agency, the know it all to choose differently or to think differently. And, but now I do. And now that's my work, that's my job, right, is to go, that happened in the past, and it doesn't need to repeat unless I want it to, in some ways, you know. Not to say that there aren't external factors that impact our financial lives that are out of our control, yes, but if you have a mindset around money that is something that's like, I'll never have enough, and yet you have a job, you are employable. You're able bodied, you can make money, you have Wi Fi, you've made money in the past. Sometimes we forget who we are. Sometimes, like, haven't you always been gainfully employed more or less for the last 15 years? And if you haven't, you've found a side hustle. Yes, but, and yet, you still fear this? So I think that maybe it's about just getting more in touch with how you got here and that journey might quite revelatory and like I perhaps decide that from that experience, like I need to drop some people from my life because they're feeding me this really bad information, making me feel bad about my money. Not just the stories we have to give up, but maybe there are people too. Maybe there are boundaries we have to create. Maybe we have to distance ourselves for a while from that culture, from those influences to get back to some level, some baseline level of clarity and rationale. Because only from that place can you make healthy choices. And sometimes it means getting therapy, to be completely transparent and honest, you know.

ELISE: Yeah I mean one of the things for me that Has been critical has been and this sounds so basic and you would probably say like that's making a budget But it is been writing down both my wants and my needs and actually as now I'm completely self employed and have an LLC and have had to get sort of structurally organized around myself To write these things down in part to track exactly what you're saying, oh look Every year, not every year, but most years you've managed to exceed What you made the year prior or like kept up with inflation, etc. Like when you work with people, how do you help them get their arms around that fear of not enough and then, and or break that story also I mean you write about this that so many of us are like I have more than others therefore I shouldn't want any more and I feel like much of that is gendered. So two questions, but how do you help people actually put some structure around what can feel very amorphous, this like, I don't have enough.

FARNOOSH: Well, first, it is more of a journey of going through your past and figuring out what the root of it is. And maybe you've realized this isn't a fear. This is a fallacy. And I've been holding onto this for what? And pairing that with where you want to be and where you want to go. In the middle, you have to get tactical sometimes, right? Like it is not a wasted effort to go through, like you had, your annual income and kind of just track it because the numbers don't lie. And in almost any realm of financial uncertainty whether it's like, You know, people are worried about recessions or investing and I say, yeah, those things are scary and those things are very unpredictable and you can't control those things. But let's look at history. This is something that I have access to and it's my industry, so I recognize that I have an abnormal amount of access and interest in this stuff than the average person who's not a financial geek like I am, or doesn't work in finance, probably doesn't have the time or capacity or interest. And that's normal. I'm not the normal person. So I have to remember that. But when I introduced to someone, Hey, look at this 30 year chart of investing, you know, in the U. S. Stock market, like we have to sometimes get very Acquainted with our own psychology, our own behavioral ways, where there are truths to this. I mean scientists have won Nobel prizes around recognizing just how irrational we can be when it comes to very rational things like dollars and cents. So with recency bias, for example, it plays up in our financial lives, where if like the stock market just went down, we think that it's going to happen again.

Like we think the most recent event, whether it was good or bad, is what's going to repeat. So we have sometimes irrational exuberance. We think like, Oh my God, the market's always going to go up because last month it was always positive. So we have to put things in context. And that is a very tactical thing. And it's a step and has to be very deliberate, but like looking at patterns in the past, not to say that they're always going to necessarily repeat, but looking at a long enough stretch of patterns, not just the last year or the last six months as your subset, but like, you know, your whole career or the last five years. And, to say, Oh, okay, that's going to tell you a different story. And hopefully we'll be more of a truthful one. That can give you the real lens through which to look at the future. But I also say that when it comes to navigating financial fear or sometimes what it is financial uncertainty or the fear of uncertainty is we think that money is just going to solve the problem. We think that we can get rid of the fear by making more money. We can get rid of the fear by having more money. If only someone just gave me a million dollars, well, I mean, I wish that for everybody, but I would be lying if I said that that's going to solve everything. You have to also recognize some of the other resources that you have that I think are equally quantifiable as richness. These are rich things, things like your health, the measure of your health, the measure of your relationships, the measure of your time, the measure of your ambition. All of these things are assets and when you can remember that and start to put those things into play again and leverage them, that's when you realize that you've been focused on this fear of money of not enoughness and you've been focusing maybe too much on the actual money and not so much on everything else that plays a big role in your ability to say, I'm wealthy. You know, I'm rich. I'm wealthy, not just because of what my bank account says, but because I have my health. Honestly, there are days where I just, I'm so thankful for having mental health, you know, and that's not to say that I don't have bad days and I don't need breaks and I don't burn out, but I don't have a chronic issue with mental health. And I think that for me is like, it's just another type of money. It's just another type of money. And time, it's just another type of money. You know, these are resources that you can leverage.

ELISE: Yeah. I mean, money is just, it's just energy in some way too. And I think that that's such an important reminder that we forget, particularly in a culture that wants to price us all by the hour and determine our value by theoretically, like what that breaks down to. And I remember when, you know, in the early days of being completely out on my own talking to this woman Anne Emerson who I work with, sort of as a Coach in some ways. I sort of call her as I need her. She's full of wisdom and humor and She's also highly intuitive and I was sort of Voicing my fears like just talking through some of my anxiety and she said Elise like what you also need to remember as a creative person and I think this applies to anyone and I think we're all creative to some extent, but she was like, you are not allowed to do day rates. You are not allowed to do hourly rates. That is not how you function. When you're in a creative place and you understand this, like the cost is very high. It might be fast. Like if I spent an hour writing or structuring something for someone in an hour, Like there's not an equivalent price for what that output actually is, if that makes sense. And every hour as a creative person is certainly not the same. We all know that there are times when you're in flow and then times when you're sort of like, I'm essentially an admin. Like I'm just doing some like data entry cause I'm dead. I'm dead inside. But you know, she was like, you have to change the paradigm around which you think about your time and your money. And. Your creative expenditure because this you're not oh, you're not no offense to lawyers Because it probably applies to them as well, but not the way that they're structured, it's not the same thing, you know.

FARNOOSH: I agree. I remember a conversation with a fellow journalist earlier this year who is very senior and can do things very fast and he was like, I feel really bad when I said, you know, I get a task, I get an assignment, and I turn around in like 30 minutes, an hour, and they say, and his editor Doesn't want to pay him by the hour. She's like, I'm paying you what the work is worth and he's fighting with her and saying, but it only took me 20 minutes, please. Like, he's trying to be nice. And she has to remind him, like, I have other people on this team. It would take them three times as long for them to do what you turned around in 20 minutes. Your work is better, that's actually worth a lot more, you know, like can we just reframe it? Like being fast is valuable to me because I'm running a newsroom and I need things done on deadline So like you're a bill and maybe it comes easier to you, But it doesn't mean that it's not as valuable to me or if not more valuable to me. So that's another way that

ELISE: Yeah, And when you're in your genius zone that we tend to like not prioritize or value the things that come easy to us Right? Because they come easy to us. Whereas, like, that's actually your zone of genius. That's where you are uniquely gifted. That's the most valuable thing that you can offer. And we have sort of this, like, backwards way of only valuing what feels hard and arduous and quote unquote time intensive. And then I would also offer that, which can be hard when you're sort of 20 and you feel full of wisdom, But when you're asked, Farnoosh, to do a piece on finance, you have, what, 20 plus years of experience. I mean, I, all I do is try to learn and read and feel equipped in my particular area. I know you're not dissimilar. And there is... Something to that wisdom, which is more than knowledge. It's wisdom. I mean, in some ways we our culture does prioritize like as you ascend through the hierarchical ranks, you make more blah, blah, blah. But our whole system feels quite broken in terms of what we value and at what price.

FARNOOSH: The best piece of advice I've gotten around Asking for your, and I love the word value and not worth because then it gets really. Sticky, but value is just, you know, the value that the market places on your output. And if you're not scared asking for more, you're not doing it right. As I speak specifically to women, people of color, people who feel marginalized, who don't see themselves represented in a particular industry, who may not be the ones who are given the benefit of the doubt and just like given the job and given the raise without having to ask. I'm scared still a lot, you know, if you're just like really comfortable asking for your fee, and you get it, well, congrats, but I wonder if there was a part of that that could have been pushed further, you know, you could you have started maybe a little bit higher and ended in the middle. There's always more money then we think.

ELISE: Yeah, I know. And people are so, women in particular, are loathe to negotiate. We're excellent negotiators. I don't know if you've ever interviewed Maury Taherehpour at Wharton, but she writes a lot about this, like how women are Excellent at, particularly at negotiating on behalf of other people, and we're sort of emotionally alive to everything that's present in the room, but we're so uncomfortable with discomfort that often, instead of just saying, this is what I would need, like with love, and then letting it be silent, we rush to fill the vacuum with, maybe that's too much. Well, I mean, I do the exact, I am not exempt from this behavior.

FARNOOSH: And you know, the truth is that when women ask for more, the room may not be so warm to that the room is not, and it could be even other women at the table on the other side of the negotiation. And so I think there's some truth to why we feel the way we do. We show up, we ask for more and it kind of backfires sometimes. My mother actually got fired for asking for more in the eighties. She took my dad's advice because it worked for him. And then she did it and to this day, she'll, she, you know, she resents it and is sometimes scared for me, you know, when I go out there to ask for more because she knows that in the world is a scary place. As I opened the book with, you know, it's like not to brag, but I've known this for a while. And so I just, I play in that field.

ELISE: Yeah. There were several moments in the book, and maybe this is so specific to my life, but you write too about, you know, and I frequently cite this woman, Carissa, who said to me your vibration must be higher than what you create, otherwise you can't manage it. And you write about being at dinner with a friend, a guy who had created a course at a time when everyone was creating their online courses and courses about courses. And essentially, I think he had made, you know, 2 million. And you were sort of berating yourself, did you even try to make one? And he was like, do not do it because like what's required in marketing and pressure, completely, Like you end up, I don't know if he had spent more than he had made but..

FARNOOSH: The headline is that he's made seven figure launch everybody likes to call their seven figure launch, but it took six point nine Figures to get there, you know, so they took home like fifty thousand dollars, which at the end of the day They should have just been like they could have had a job with like a lot less pressure, you know and just clock in and clock out and when I heard from Someone who had actually done it, To say with all sincerity, and it wasn't because he didn't think that I could be successful if I really, really wanted to, but he's like, it's not what it's being presented as. And I think you have to also remember that the industry is promote, it's like self promoting itself because we want everyone to be successful. So we're going to say like, this is a successful course. It made the owner of the course millions of dollars, everyone goes, Oh, wow, this must be a great course.

So, you know, but they don't, no one's telling you the backend and I'm telling you the backend and it's a lot of work that for me, like I did not get into journalism to track sales units. I didn't get into journalism to AB test newsletters. I didn't get into journalism to give Facebook a lot of my advertising dollars or anyone advertising dollars that got into this business to teach, to help. And make great content. And like, the course is just sort of the online course. And yes, like maybe I could hire people, but I also am terrible. I'm terrible at managing people. I don't like it. I don't want more of that in my life. And so everything was just pointing me to a dead end. But, and I talk about this in the chapter on FOMO because I was having a lot of FOMO about the course. And I thought, you know, if I don't do this, well, And this is what everybody else in my field is doing and making a lot of money. Like I'm leaving money on the table. I would say that a lot, you know, I'm not doing it right. Am I doing the internet right? I don't know what I'm doing. What am I, what's my thing?

Am I just an author? Like, great. You know? So I was struggling and then I realized, like, as I sat with that fear, because it wouldn't go away, I was like, all right, what is the deal? And I realized it was that what attracted me to the course concept was The potential for ROI, like I liked the money, but I really liked that these folks were creating something of their own and not having to answer to somebody else. Like the course was in some ways giving them more freedom. Once it became successful, it was like recurring income and they were making impact. And I said, what can I do that does all those things, but isn't a course.

ELISE: Yeah, well no and I'd say yeah consulting and just having a lot of friends and different ...yeah, no but just to say like having talked to so many different people about their content strategies and different fields too like, what you offer is a great and essential warning, again, for people who I think get completely over their skis and outside of what they originally intend to do. And so they end up creating something that they themselves can't support, or that they then need support to support. And then they need to support all of that support to support the thing until suddenly they are like, what have I made? I'm enslaved.

FARNOOSH: Not sustainable. I will say because I was raised to never do the things that were cool. Like, I didn't do sleepovers, I didn't date, I wasn't allowed to, I wasn't allowed to go on, I wasn't allowed to go ice skating. You brought up skates, I was like, what are those, skis, no. And so, I think I've been weirdly lucky in that I don't have a lot of FOMO over social things, but career things I do sometimes. But it's a quicker calculus for me to kind of like, okay, FOMO's here. I know it's telling me to turn inward. I know it's telling me to figure out what I want to feel as opposed to what I want to do. That's sometimes the wisdom in FOMO. FOMO is very much a modern construct. I'm sure the cave people had it, but it was, I feel like it's very us right now with social media and all the barriers are down. So we see everything. We want everything. And really FOMO is a derivative of That scarcity mindset, we all only have so many hours, we have all equal hours in a day. And so how you divide up that time, what you spend doing in those hours, there's a measure to it. And then what we worry and what we fear is that we're not measuring up. We're feeling like we're missing out. I mean, it's very literal. It's the fear of missing out. So that's not a little thing and it's, I think it's universal, but I think our job when that shows up is to figure out what's going on with me. You know, that's the question. What does FOMO want me to experience? No two people are the same, so the way that you're going to go about experiencing that ultimate feeling is going to have to look different and your job is to go map it out.

ELISE: Well, on that note, thank you, and congrats on the book, bud, and I can't wait to watch it come out in the world.

FARNOOSH: Thanks so much, Elise.

ELISE: I could talk about fear for days. I think it’s so primal and essential and I loved this idea of going deep into it rather than just negating it, which is what I think we are taught to do. And so, Healthy State of Panic, Farnoosh, she talks about the fear of rejection, the fear of loneliness, the fear of missing out, the fear of exposure, the fear of uncertainty, the fear of money, the fear of failure, the fear of endings, and the fear of losing your freedom. And most of our conversation was about that last chapter, this fear of losing your freedom, and what it vital and essential to you and how can you scaffold your life around that idea, rather than sublimating your life around security. I think Farnoosh is a great example of what it looks like to do both—to be herself in the world, even when that felt scary, particularly as a child of immigrants, with a name that’s unlike everyone else’s name, but she also is a testament to moving into the fear to create the stability and structure you need so you can operate with less fear. Well, as always, thank you for listening. I will see you next week.

Alexandra Brockman
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