Change Your Relationship to Money w/ Amanda Clayman #824

The ‘DTR Talk’, but with your money! That’s what we’re covering today with therapist turned financial wellness and relationship coach, Amanda Clayman. There is an intrinsic connection between money and mental health, and Amanda’s 20 years of experience in the field allows her to dive into some of the thorniest, most personal dilemmas we face, in order to bring compassionate clarity to the conversation. She’s a counselor, accomplished speaker, and educator as she offers and facilitates workshops, seminars, and courses across the country. And Amanda’s work now extends to a twelve-part podcast: Emotional Inve$tment which is out now on Audible, by Fresh Produce Media. Listen in as we discuss Amanda’s own struggle with money, cognitive behavioral therapy’s impact on better understanding your finances, as well as a number of case studies - individuals Amanda interviewed who opened up about their relationship with money, and the lessons we can all learn.

 

Want more How To Money in your life? Here are some additional ways to get ahead with your personal finances:

• Knowing your ‘money gear’ is a crucial part of your personal finance journey. Start here. 
• Sign up for the weekly HTM newsletter. It’s fun, free, & practical.
• Join a thriving community of fellow money in the HTM Facebook group.
• Find the best credit card for you with our new credit card tool!
• Massively reduce your cell phone bill each month by switching to a discount provider like Mint Mobile.

 

During this episode we enjoyed a Fort Point by Trillium! And please help us to spread the word by letting friends and family know about How to Money! Hit the share button, subscribe if you’re not already a regular listener, and give us a quick review in Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Help us to change the conversation around personal finance and get more people doing smart things with their money!

 

Best friends out!

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to How to Money. I'm Joel and I am
Matt and today we're talking about how to change your
relationship to money with Amanda Claiman.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Yeah, today we're talking with therapist turned financial wellness and
relationship coach Amanda Claiman. And you know there is an
intrinsic connection between money and mental health, and Amanda's twenty
years of experience in the field it allows her to
dive into some of the thorniest, some of the most
personal dilemmas we face in order to bring compassionate clarity

(00:50):
to the conversation. She is a counselor and accomplished speaker
and educator as she offers and facilitates workshops, seminars, courses
across the country. And now Amanda's work now extends to
a twelve part podcast called Emotional Investment. It's out now
on Audible that is produced by Fresh Produce Media, and
we're going to discuss everything related to financial therapy today. Amanda,

(01:13):
thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

Speaker 3 (01:16):
I am so excited to be here. Thank you for
having me.

Speaker 1 (01:18):
We're pumped to have you. Amanda. So much to cover
on today's show. But of course, the first question as
always is what do you like to splurge on in
the here and now while you're still being intentional saving
investing for your future. What's your craft beer equivalent?

Speaker 3 (01:30):
So I really had to think about this because there
are so many splurges that have been amended in my life.
But one thing that has has really been a source
of so much joy for me, especially recently, is taking classes.
I am a lifelong learner. I love being exposed to

(01:51):
new ideas. I don't always enjoy the homework that comes
to taking classes, but like, I love that UCLA and
my they have the UCLA Extension, so you can you
can take classes as a graduate. Sometimes if you want,
those can go toward accredited program. But in my case,
I just kind of study the things that are interesting

(02:12):
to me. And right now I'm doing a class on
the sociology of emotions and it is deeply fascinating interesting.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
So okay, yeah, I was halfway expecting you to say,
you know, like a cooking class, I'm learning from like
Emerald how to like spice up my cage. I am.
That's not the case. Amanda is incredibly nerdy.

Speaker 3 (02:33):
Although no, you don't want to know my secret though,
which is that I took a macroeconomics class and I
found it so anxiety producing that I literally dropped out
and took the f macro econ.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
Hey you got to know when it cut them free,
because those cause me a stress. It sounds like that
was a mentally emotionally healthy thing for you to do. Man,
is that class worth abandoning?

Speaker 4 (02:57):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (02:57):
Well it was like it was a lot of algebra
is not so much the existential, like what are we
all doing here? It's the future of a planet, which
is kind of where I wanted it, Okay, where I
wanted to go with it.

Speaker 2 (03:07):
You're looking for the dooming gloom, but instead you got
like algebra or just.

Speaker 3 (03:11):
Kind of like, hey, the math's not math in here, folks.
We maybe our models need to be adjusted and expanded
in terms of just thinking about like GDP.

Speaker 2 (03:25):
Yeah, yeah, no, that's true.

Speaker 1 (03:26):
And actually, you know, not to get political, but some
politicians have talked about that we were using old school
metrics to talk about how things are going in the
economy these days, and we need some updated metrics to
reflect kind of the reality on the ground. But yeah,
nothing's really been done about that. But okay, let's talk
about your story, Amanda. Let's start there and we run
to get to kind of so many things in today's episode.

(03:48):
But the first thing you read if you go to
your website is you saying that you win in the
financial therapist direction because you and I quote, blew up
your own financial life so spectacularly, which is, I don't know,
that's a lot to admit on the home page of
your website, Like can you tell us about that though?
And yeah, get real for the beginning with it.

Speaker 3 (04:08):
Yeah, So the facts of my financial failure in that
period of my life are not all of that dramatic,
by which I mean I was just a person living life.
I decided that after college, I wanted to look for
work and move to the East Coast. I wanted to
move to sorry, to New York. But I didn't really,

(04:31):
like like many twenty two year olds, I didn't have
a very well thought out plan. I just kind of
landed there and figured that I would make my way
just boots on the ground kind of. And what happened
is that I discovered that you need things like money
for broker's fees and for first and last month's rent
and security deposit. And I didn't have that money, and

(04:53):
so it just kind of started a cycle of overspending
and incurring debt that was very, very anxiety producing for me,
and like so many of us, I responded to my
anxiety by with good old avoidance. And that was just
not something that I wanted to know the details about.
And I didn't have a regular financial management practice. I

(05:15):
just was very romantic, I would say, and my ideas
about money, and some of that was about, you know,
being confident and just saying I'm going to figure it
out and I'm going to make my way, which I
did because the mistakes that I made in eventually incurring
just under twenty thousand dollars worth of credit card debt
back in the nineties, I want to say, inflation adjusted,

(05:38):
that's kind of more in the mid thirties now of
how much.

Speaker 4 (05:41):
Debt that would be.

Speaker 3 (05:42):
But it was really kind of I was doing things
like avoiding bills, as I mentioned, avoiding any kind of
financial management tasks. I would get stressed out about my
credit card debt and send all of the money to
pay down a balance, but then not have enough money
to kind of meet my needs, and I would need
to use those cards again in order to cover things.

(06:04):
So it was just like just these wild swings with
nobody kind of in charge in any sort of organization.
I say nobody. I was the one who was not
organized in that dynamic, but I kept it very much
a secret. It was my secret shame. And what happened
is my mother came to visit me and I asked

(06:26):
her to cut my hair, and she had used to,
She had cut my hair growing up or from the Midwest,
like that was not a weird thing when I was
growing up, and she gave me the terrible haircut, and
I promptly freaked out and just became hysterical. And it
turned out that this was kind of just the straw
that broke the camel's back, because what happened was I

(06:46):
had to admit to my mom that I had bounced
to check at the hairdresser. I was just I was
not able to kind of fix the problems in my
life that were largely created by by inattention and impulsive
decision making and behavior. And my mom, I really thought
that she would just be shocked and horrified and wanted

(07:09):
disown me, but she was in fact very kind and
constructive and she showed me how to create a budget
which was not an instrument of punishment, which was kind
of how I had been approaching budgeting before.

Speaker 2 (07:25):
Alone A lot of people do totally.

Speaker 3 (07:27):
And now this is really fundamental in one of the
ways that I work with people. If we experience budgeting
as a tool of no as a tool of punishment,
that's not a long term healthy place to be with
our money. And so that was really my first lesson.
But that made me start to look at money. Once
I wasn't actively panicking every time I tried to kind

(07:49):
of open a credit card statement, once I started to
bring some organization, I started to really see how emotional
money was. And once I saw how emotional money was
like that actually gave me something to be interested. I
wasn't interested in just the dollars and cents. I didn't
want my life to be on fire. But I wasn't

(08:10):
intrinsically interested.

Speaker 4 (08:12):
In money in and of itself.

Speaker 3 (08:14):
But I was really interested in money as a way
of grounding myself in kind of the details of my
life and asking myself some really important questions about like
who am I and what do I want this story
to be? What do I want money to do in
my life? And once that flipped for me, everything really flipped.

(08:35):
And suddenly, because I had been working in marketing, I
was like, I don't want to influence other people to
be spending money that they may not have. Like it
really just set off a chain reaction that ended in
a total career change for me because I became so
deeply interested in the complex meaning that we attached to

(09:00):
our financial lives, and more importantly, the way that money
can really surface this unconscious meaning in our life, and
that when we pay attention to money, when we look
at our behavior with money, when we examine our choices,
that is one of it's like an express train right
to the heart of our unconscious And as a therapist,

(09:22):
as a person in a helping profession, that's the thing
that's most interesting to me about money, and that's kind
of what I've made my career.

Speaker 2 (09:30):
I love that. So I'm curious, like, do you think
that at some point, like basically you're you're in credit
card debt, maybe live in kind of paycheck to paycheck,
but there was an event that kind of upset the
entire order that you had, and maybe you will admit
that there wasn't a whole lot of order going on
at that point in life, but you were slowly constraining

(09:53):
your financial life. And do you think that eventually, at
some point you would have gotten to like some other
tipping point or do you do you think it required
something like this, like something like this terrible haircut for
you to kind of, I don't know, it almost like
removed you from yourself a little bit and you could
kind of see this situation for maybe how ridiculous it was.
So I'm curious if you think you would have gotten
to that point without some sort of big event like this.

Speaker 4 (10:16):
That's such a good question.

Speaker 3 (10:17):
I mean, I do feel like I'm kind of a person,
like so many of us, who needs to learn things
the hard way. Avoidance definitely sets you up for a
bigger consequence in many instances. The thing that was so
important about what happened with the haircut, and the reason
that that was my bottom was because I couldn't hide anymore.

(10:39):
Like every time I would have to look in the
mirror and see that hair and know that I couldn't
fix it, that was avoidance was no longer an option
for me. So there would have I think had to
have been some other form of kind of kicking me
out of that closet in order to spark to look
at it.

Speaker 1 (10:59):
Yeah, okay, when you talk about kind of riding the ship,
you talk about how your year of debt payoff was
one of the happiest of your life. I'm so curious
to hear why, because you would think, actually, the happiest
year of your life is the year where you're kind
of oblivious racking up all sorts of credit card debts,
spending in the ways that are kind of fun, and hey,
I'm living life in my early twenties in New York City.

(11:20):
This is how grand is this? But now you've got
to pay the piper, so you're starting to address the
debt that you've accumulated. Why was that so enriching for you?

Speaker 3 (11:30):
The thing that I had never had before in my
financial life. Even as I was kind of unconsciously getting
the things that I wanted on some level, I never
had a feeling of safety around those choices. I never
felt like I always felt guilty, I always felt worried.

(11:51):
I didn't have any refuge from those fears or from
the shame. And so what I learned is that if
I I am able to organize myself and organize my
life such that I can stay within these I mean,
some of them were external boundaries, right, like having to

(12:15):
just debt maintenance started to take up more and more
of my income as my credit card balances got bigger.
So there were very real constraints, but I was also
making purposeful and contextualized decisions about where I wanted all
of the rest of my money to go. And I
had never felt safe around money. I had never felt

(12:37):
confident around money. I had never been reliable to myself
when it came to saying, hey, this is important to me,
and I'm going to put my energy and attention and
behavior around this thing that's important to me. And that
was the thing that was the Eureka kind of a moment,

(12:57):
was like, and one of the things that I learned
is you can't have time that you're not thinking about
money unless you have time where you specifically are thinking
about money. Otherwise it's just going to you know, knock
around in the back of your mind or in the
front of your mind twenty four to seven.

Speaker 2 (13:14):
Yeah, it's funny because, like so much of what you
hear folks talk about is a need for financial literacy, essentially,
like understanding how to invest, how to pay off your dad,
doing all these things, And certainly that is a part
of the problem. But with you, like you you write
and talk about this like you say you knew better,
but you actually didn't know how to quote do better?

(13:36):
Can you unpack that for us? And I guess sort
of where you were mentally just at that point in
time in New York.

Speaker 3 (13:42):
Yeah, I feel like the thing that's not taught when
we think about the curriculum, if you will, of what
constitutes financial literacy is we really need to teach emotional
literacy as well. As part of that, we need to
help people anticipate that money is going to feel profoundly emotional,

(14:05):
and that there's not necessarily simply a spreadsheet or a
list of pros and cons that comes from a kind
of like practical, concrete perspective that can get us through
some of the biggest and most important, the most most
significant kinds of places that money money takes us in

(14:28):
our lives. So I think that oftentimes one of the
reasons that you get people like me, or like a
lot of the people that I work with who are
anxious and very avoidant with money is because they feel
like something must be going wrong if their emotions are
really intense around money, or if they are having experiences
where they kind of want to do something but they

(14:52):
end up behaving in a way that's contrary to that goal,
and that if we are teaching people sort of like
how to handle situations, for example, where you want to
go out to eat with a friend and the restaurant
that they want to go to is more expensive than
what you can afford, how do you handle that conversation?

(15:13):
Or when it comes to, you know, inflation and all
of the sudden things that are part of your regular
life that you that our needs, not even wants, but
that you really need to have, like groceries, gas, et cetera.
When those prices go up and all of a sudden,
you're feeling really rebellious and angry about that, but there's

(15:34):
no one, there's nowhere to really kind of put that
put those feelings. So sometimes we turn those around at
ourselves where we get mad at sort of like you know,
big macro circumstances. I think we need to teach people
to anticipate the emotional landscape that they are going to
encounter when they start to examine and really get more

(15:57):
directed about how they want money to come in and
how they want money to go out in their.

Speaker 2 (16:02):
Lives, which is I mean, it's so interesting too is
the fact that this seems like something that is intuitive,
Like this seems like something that everybody should know, but
I think so few folks have actually taken the time
to do this because of the fact that we are
robbed of our attention and this isn't I'm not going
to spend like thirty minutes harping on smartphones and social media.
But it's one of those things where your default, and

(16:23):
we don't even realize it, is just to immediately like
pacify ourselves and entertain ourselves, when normally that might be
a time that you would think back to something that
you said to a friend earlier, or the events of
the last week or something like that, and think, oh,
what happened back then, and you start emotionally or mentally processing.
But it's like we've completely eliminated that. I don't know

(16:43):
what you call it, like this time of purgatory. It's
like it's like this weird phase of life, like while
your memories are and emotions are curing. Yeah, in a sense, that's.

Speaker 1 (16:50):
What boredom allowed us to do was processed some of
those things. You're right, and I think, yeah, we're just
generally less emotionally and relationally healthy these days. And my
wife and we're talk about that just the other day.
Not only do we need personal financial literacy courses in
high school, but emotional and relational literacy courses would be
great too. And I'm not saying that like physics doesn't
have a place in high school anymore.

Speaker 2 (17:11):
But it's great.

Speaker 1 (17:13):
But we kind of need all the above and in
order to learn how to because we all have different
parents and different upbringings and different ways of learning about
how to relate to the world. And I don't know,
maybe some of this stuff, especially that like some of
the great tools that you learned going to school to
become a therapist, would be helpful for normal, everyday folks too.

Speaker 3 (17:30):
There is really so much around. I agree that the
kind of attention, the circumstances around which attention is kind
of used as a resource nowadays, that we're in a
whole different kind of environment than any of our ancestors
have ever been, for sure. And the other part of

(17:51):
that is around self regulation, like physiological arousal and what
happens when our body is in a defensive mode, when
we're in kind of fight or flight. Literally, Like, what
is happening in our body when that's occurring? And to
notice how often it's occurring in places where we might
not expect it, for example, when we sit down to

(18:11):
think about and make some decisions about money.

Speaker 1 (18:14):
Yeah, I saw a devastating statistic thirty percent. I would
not have believed this unless I saw it written out
thirty percent of five to seven year olds now of
a TikTok account.

Speaker 2 (18:22):
Like mind blowing. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe
it. I was shocked.

Speaker 1 (18:25):
Okay, I mean to tell us financial therapy, you're kind
of in in that field. It's relatively new.

Speaker 2 (18:31):
In so many ways. Matt and I were for it.

Speaker 1 (18:34):
We will need to process kind of money in a
greater context as well, in the emotional context. Do you
think like everyone would benefit from seeing a therapist who
specializes in like the financial therapy realm or what's your
take in regards to like a money therapist versus like
a money coach and who needs what?

Speaker 3 (18:52):
I think that that there? First of all, it kind
of depends on what is the benefit or the outcome
that you're looking for. I do think that all of
us would benefit from doing some reflection, doing some exploration
around the meaning of money, around unpacking some of the
events that we experienced as kids, the messages that we

(19:14):
got around money, some of the events, the meaning that
we created out of all of that. These are really significant,
impactful influences on the rest of our lives. So I
think that we should definitely look at them. I find
myself really in my practice now because I'm a private
practitioner now. I was an agency practice for almost fifteen years,

(19:37):
so what I do in private practice really straddles. I
would say, look, if we were looking for a label
for it would be therapeutic coaching, because we are looking
more at the present. In the future, we are looking
more at behavioral change. There's an element of kind of
looking at the past. Which is one of the distinctions
when we talk about the difference between psychotherapy or any

(20:00):
kind of mental health work versus coaching, is there will
be more of an emphasis or more time spent. I'm
looking at some of the stuff and exploring things in
the past versus looking at things in a forward casting view.

Speaker 2 (20:14):
Okay, so on that note, like you specialize in using
cognitive behavioral therapy, which is often known as CBT, But
why is that such a helpful tool to help folks
to change their relationship with money?

Speaker 3 (20:27):
I love it because it's so concrete. It really says, okay,
like what are some of the thoughts that you're having?
Like a question that I ask clients all the time.
I love this framework, which is like, what is the
scary thought? Tell me the scary thought, you know, and
that is the fear. But it's not just the emotion
of fear that we're feeling. It is attached in the

(20:50):
mind to some kind of a story that it's telling.
So cognitive behavioral therapies and techniques get us into what
are the stories that we're telling ourselves? What are the
beliefs that we can uncover about the world through this
kind of an exploration, and then ultimately like how does
this how do these thoughts beliefs, how did these emotions,

(21:12):
how do they live in the body, and how do
they impact some of the behavioral choices that we're making.
So CBT is just a really helpful framework. There's so
much wonderful literature behind that modality in terms of its efficacy.
So that's been a place where I'd say a lot
of my work has been influenced. But I also use

(21:34):
like internal family systems, like talking about the different parts
of ourselves and what those parts may want, and sometimes
how these different parts of ourself can be in conflict.
I do a lot of stuff with more somatic techniques
as well, so like really recognizing what's happening in the body,
taking very seriously what the work of self regulation looks like.

(21:55):
So's it's helpful to have maybe a bit of a
grab bag. I mean, I told you I'm a life
long learner, so I always find it fun to say like, ooh,
what's working over here? What's working over here?

Speaker 2 (22:06):
Let's get it cool.

Speaker 1 (22:07):
Also, okay, we want to talk about your new podcast.
It's particularly interesting because you're putting literally putting us in
the therapy room with some of your clients, and so
it's so much to learn and so much to experience
in that process. We'll get to a bunch of questions
on that front.

Speaker 2 (22:21):
Right after this, and we are back from the break
talking with Amanda Claimant about how we can change our
relationship to money, and I mean essentially your podcast, like
Joel said, it's like we're sitting It's like we're a
wallflower sitting there or in the counseling room, and you've

(22:42):
got a bunch of different case studies that we get
to journey with them through some of the hard work
that they're doing. And the first full length episode covers
instant gratification, it covers like, like what triggers spending and so,
can you shed some light on your episode with Samantha
and the emotional underpinnings that influence our spending habits.

Speaker 4 (23:03):
Yes, absolutely so.

Speaker 3 (23:04):
One of the best ways I think to understand the
conversations that I had with Samantha is how people can
sometimes respond to constraint, and specifically the way that we
experience that is feeling trapped. Samantha had done a number
of pivots in her life where she needed to change

(23:24):
careers and that meant going back to school and getting
more education. So one of the most significant constraints in
Samantha's life was the amount of money that she had
to pay to service her student loan debt, and that
constraint the same thing that was part of Samantha's personality
that sort of made her say like I'm not going
to let a situation get me down. I'm going to

(23:45):
figure it out, I'm gonna pivot, I'm going to go
in this new direction. That was the same attitude that
Samantha was kind of having when it came to the
feeling of financial pressure in her life. But the challenge
was there was nowhere to escape to. There was no
way to just kind of like step out of that situation.
There was no career to change in that sense, or

(24:08):
different city to move to. So what was happening was
that some of that that same kind of impulse to
flee or to escape meant that Samantha wasn't paying attention
to her money, and that emotional spending, impulsive spending was

(24:28):
her kind of go to to relieve some of the
stress that she was experienced and experience and experiencing in
her life around these financial pressures in particular, but also
around she had a very she has a very stressful
job working with teenagers in crisis. So you can imagine
there are a lot of bad days, a lot of

(24:48):
hard days where you just kind of, I mean, I
really empathize with Samantha, because you like, you just want
something to work right, You just want to get a meal.
You just want to believe that there's something sort of
beautiful and easy and like you can get a new outfit,
and that that's going to change the emotional state that

(25:10):
you're in when life is hard.

Speaker 1 (25:12):
I think a lot of people feel like they beat
themselves up and they say and I think you even
said to Samantha in the episode, you said, it's not
a matter of willpower and discipline. But so much of
us feel like that's it that needs to be our response.
It's a buckle, buckle down, pick ourselves up by our bootstraps. Gosh,
can I just get my stuff together? What are better
tools to overcome some of our financial responses Because for

(25:35):
so many people, they might think that that's going to
be the answer, but they've tried and tried and tried,
and self disciplined is hard to come by and it
never seems to work out in their favor and to
help them make progress.

Speaker 3 (25:45):
Well, there's a saying in the therapeutic world that you
never take away somebody's defensive strategy or negative coping matter
until you can replace it with something healthier. Because that's
kind of that gets to the heart of why that
like just white knuckling and trying to be more disciplined.

(26:06):
Why that doesn't work over the long term. So with Samantha,
one of the first things that we just really wanted
to do was help her kind of validate her own
feelings that she was having. She did not grow up
in a house where people's feelings were given much attention,
and so one of the things that was coming up

(26:27):
then through her money was kind of like what to
do when you feel in pain, And so part of
what we looked at was just being able to kind
of sit with the pain to hopefully realize it's not
going to kill you, because it really can feel like,
oh my gosh, if I turned toward this this feeling,
if I turned toward this emotion, it's going to overwhelm me.

Speaker 4 (26:46):
I feel like I'm going to die.

Speaker 3 (26:48):
So part of it was just sort of like almost
like exposure to the thing that was emotionally triggering to
her and being able to witness and stay connected with
her as she was experiencing that emotional pain.

Speaker 4 (27:02):
The other thing.

Speaker 3 (27:04):
Related to, like as an extension of kind of that
work that I was doing one on one with Samantha,
was saying, Samantha, you need other sources of support and
comfort for yourself. We need to think about, like, for example,
finding a community for you where you can talk about

(27:24):
your goals with money or talk about your challenges with money.
So this is not a secret, but that you can
get a source of social and relational support, while you
might also get some practical advice. But the larger picture
is that it doesn't just have to be you kind
of feeling these feelings and trying to shut them down.

(27:46):
You can find a more healthy and supportive environment in
which to process those emotions, and that that can be
a way of supporting the behavioral change without over relying
on just the muscle discipline.

Speaker 2 (28:01):
Totally totally agree. Yeah, it's I think it's a universal
truth that like shame breeds isolation, and it sounds like
that that's what Samantha was experiencing. And because of that,
so many people feel that they can't talk about money
until they finally get their crap together, but then they
feel alone and because of that, they like that tends
to keep them stuck in a cycle. And I like
it makes me even think about your story, like you know,

(28:22):
you only shared it with us briefly about with you
up in New York City, and I'm like, I'm starting
to I'm starting to be the one sitting there on
the couch next to you and like starting to think,
is it because of her environment? You know? But for you,
it sounded like it took your mom, Like that was
that spark right, Like obviously it wasn't just your mom
was also the haircut, but like her showing up there
and to be somebody else who you were in community with.

(28:43):
And I think oftentimes, especially for young folks when they
move off to a new city, that's something that they underestimate.
But I'm curious how it is that folks can sort
of break that pattern of shame, isolation, loneliness and then
more shame. Yeah, and then just draw the little the
arrow that loops back to the beginning of the thing,
and it starts all over again.

Speaker 3 (29:04):
I will say, though, that there is reason to hope.
I mean, like, we're sitting here together having conversations, like
deeper conversations about money, and I would say that twenty
years ago, nobody was trying to do this right. So
we can appreciate that we are in a process of

(29:25):
cultural and social change around what what we consider normal
or healthy with money. And I think that that's that's wonderful.
And you know, we are all we are all participating
in that.

Speaker 2 (29:41):
We're a part of the change. We're going to be
the change we want to see. The chan made it,
you might be a larger part of the change than
just sure, that's right. As we occasionally talk about feelings,
we're trying though, we're.

Speaker 4 (29:52):
Trying, but it does.

Speaker 3 (29:54):
That's where it kind of begins, right. It's a bunch
of these little little points of contact. It's a bunch
of like putting content and different narratives into our head.
It's maybe having a conversation with somebody else about a
podcast like this. This is a three hundred and sixty
degree change, I think in terms of the connections that

(30:16):
really facilitate us moving into like being our best selves,
especially in the area of money.

Speaker 1 (30:22):
I think we also have to remind ourselves that change
takes a long time. And I think just like paying
off credit card debt, Hey, it took you five years
to get into that credit card debt, it's probably going
to take you years to climb back out. And the
same thing with kind of rewiring our brains. I've had
to learn this too. It's like that childhood influence sticks
for a long time, and it doesn't mean that there
isn't hope and light at the end of the tunnel.

(30:43):
But be patient with yourself because my goodness, it is
going to take some time and some steady movement. And
like we want to take these giant leaps and strides.
That sounds phenomenal, it's just not the way most of.

Speaker 3 (30:55):
Us work, definitely not with money. The best thing I
think that we can you in terms of like setting
ourselves up for money being a source of health, security, confidence,
et cetera, is to envision kind of like I want
my financial life to feel like a jog across an

(31:16):
even surface, as opposed to a sprint up a hill
that I think I'm going to then coast down.

Speaker 2 (31:22):
Yeah, the other.

Speaker 1 (31:23):
Side, because most of us could, even if we're not
great at exercise, like jog for a couple of miles uninterrupted, right,
But a sprint up up a mountain sounds tough for
even the people who jog regularly. So yeah, yeah, I
think the like that as a much healthier approach. Let's
talk about some of the other episodes that you created.
You had an episode with a guy named Melvin and
with him you talked, I think a lot about the

(31:45):
intersection of intellect and emotions, and you guys discussed judging
verse relating to our feelings and so, yeah, what did
that look like for Melvin and how does that play
out for most folks.

Speaker 3 (31:56):
Well, when Melvin came in, Melvin was very clear what
the problem was, and the problem was that his feelings
were in the way, and he could just get these
feelings out of the way, everything was going to be fine.
And the feelings that Melvin was having, Melvin was experiencing
kind of two big moves in his financial life. One
was that he had had a goal because Melvin's family

(32:20):
lived in an unsafe neighborhood, and the whole family had
a goal of we want to move out of this neighborhood.
We want to be someplace safer. Melvin had started a
business as a young man and had rented and then
done all of this this wonderful development of designing and
creating these creative studios so people could come and book
them for events or if they want to do a show,

(32:41):
or if they were recording a podcast, all kinds of
different things. But one of the locations was making money
and the other one was just hemorrhaging money, and so
Melvin needed to make some business decisions. But one of
the sort of context for the decisions that Melvin was
making he had now suddenly he was contributing a significant

(33:04):
significant portion of his income to the new home, the
new expense more expensive home where the family was living.
So it kind of felt like, again going back to
the theme of constraint and how we operate when we
are feeling trapped and are not sure where our next
move is, that situation was really causing Melvin to kind

(33:25):
of shut down and feel like he couldn't use his
emotions to move through the process of being able to
make some calls. And so when it came to like
controlling his emotions versus really being able to kind of
relate to his emotions, we started to acknowledge with Melvin, like,

(33:47):
what are these feelings telling you? What's the story of
the feelings? And it came out really quickly that it
wasn't even a very complex decision that had to be
made about closing down one of these studio spaces. On paper,
the numbers were very very clear. It was more the
emotional work of letting go of kind of what had

(34:08):
been the first baby of his business. It came to
letting go of some associations that Melvin had that pivoting
in this way felt like failure to him, which was
a really scary thing first time in his life really
that he had encountered that. So, like money, and this
is more of a global sense in my work in

(34:30):
general with the reason that I love it is like
money services all of this unconscious important personal meaning. So
when we pay attention to money, what we need to
make space for is the predictable reality that these financial events,
these financial choices, even just looking at the numbers, is

(34:52):
going to bring up stuff that then kind of is
in front of us that we need to work through, right,
And so that's what was happening with Melvin. And once
we started to do that, it was like he kind
of found the root and he could just run run
right through it.

Speaker 1 (35:10):
It makes it, I mean, just thinking like in Melvin's case,
it could be I'm a successful entrepreneur and then giving
up on this location means it completely upends.

Speaker 2 (35:20):
That apple part.

Speaker 1 (35:21):
And I don't see that about myself anymore. I don't
feel that way about myself. So you're right, it's like
those the money or the failure in an area of
money can have all these other like cascading domino effects
on how we perceive ourselves and the people around us
and how they perceive us.

Speaker 3 (35:36):
And that was the scary thought, right that we got
to with Melvin, like say, the scary thought. The scary
thought was he felt like if there was failure somewhere,
if there was a mistake. He was feeling the vulnerability
of all of these these the self concept that was
part of that, the wanting to help support his family,

(36:00):
and feeling afraid of kind of the loss of security
that they had achieved. All of that stuff was really
coming up and needing to be processed so that Melvin
could feel clearer about first of all, what are the
facts of the situation, and what are my options? And
then how do these options make sense to me?

Speaker 2 (36:19):
I think there could be a temptation to think that, like, well,
assuming everything goes well, then you won't have to deal
with any of this. But I'm guessing I'm assuming Amanda,
that you'd also argue that like, well, no, no, there's
also these false narratives that can come out from the
perceived success in the eyes of the world, right, Like
even if like on the surface, like in the world
of business, you are actually successful not a failure. Oh

(36:41):
you didn't have to close your shot. There are other
sort of narratives that come out of that that can
also go sideways, and there can be like this. I
think you could just end up at the end of
this sort of path and think, why don't I feel satisfied,
like what's going on below the surface? Because actually, my
buddy Melvin, he actually had a shut down. I didn't
have to shut down. I'm actually doing doing pretty well.
Why is he so much happier than I am? But

(37:01):
there's yeah, exactly, well he went and talked with Amanda
that way. But but yeah, I guess what I'm wanting
to highlight is the fact that financial success isn't always
isn't necessarily going to lead to happier outcomes either totally.

Speaker 3 (37:15):
And the thing to really be I think most wary
of is rigidity. Anytime we are holding onto something so
tightly or feel like like we can only survive one outcome, right,
like I have to be successful or else, that's that's

(37:35):
a very fragile and vulnerable place to be. Whereas if
we envision a way of being resilient, of being adaptable,
of being able to encounter failures and learn because failures
can be the best teachers, right. I mean I failed
so hard I had to change careers and that was
like the greatest thing that ever happened to me. So

(37:56):
I think like making boom in our self concept and
in our concept of success to say, like the especially
as an entrepreneur, right that we include a vision of
being successful and loving ourselves and feeling like we're good

(38:18):
worthy people.

Speaker 4 (38:19):
That includes not getting it right all the time.

Speaker 1 (38:23):
Heart in this culture of perfectionism where we feel like
we just have to be spot on with everything.

Speaker 2 (38:29):
For sure.

Speaker 1 (38:30):
I don't want to like get into every single episode
that you did because I want people, I want there
to be a lot left on the five more to
go right. And there is a lot more that we
didn't uncover in each of these conversations. And you should
totally go listen to the podcast, but talk to us
just a little bit about Stella and Lucas and how
we relate to each other about money inside of a
relationship like you walked through. I would say, like some

(38:50):
classic money difficulties with the two of them, Can you
like just discuss how we move towards our partner relationally
in the area of money and maybe the ways that
we're kind of, I don't know, stiff arming each other
as in the context of money and harming our relationship
in the process.

Speaker 3 (39:05):
Absolutely, some of the hallmarks of the situation with Stella
and Lucas were Number one, that they got married when Stella,
in particular was quite young. Lucas was. He came to
America as a skateboarder, but he had been a refugee

(39:25):
from Kazakhstan living in Belgium. That's kind of where he
grew up, and so there was an immigration reason for
them to when they met and fell in love, very
deeply in love. In order to make that make it
possible for that relationship to move forward, they got married
when Stella was twenty and Lucas was twenty five. So
when we meet, we are now five years into their
marriage and Stella is the breadwinner and both of the

(39:51):
spouse's work. But Stella is she's college graduate, she has
an executive track career path, and she's starting to think about,
oh my god, what does this mean for me to
be a breadwinner? This maybe wasn't the view that I
had in my future even as I was choosing, you know,
Lucas as the person who is the choice of my heart.

Speaker 4 (40:12):
So she was really juggling with.

Speaker 3 (40:14):
A lot of worries that she felt very ashamed about.
She said, you know a few times in our sessions
about how it feels like these are not thoughts and
feelings that a wife should have. She felt like she
was being selfish. She worried all the time that Lucas

(40:35):
would be emasculated because people would literally say that to
her face, you should worry about this. Your husband is
not going to be able to tolerate.

Speaker 4 (40:46):
Yes.

Speaker 3 (40:47):
So, and both of them came from families where there
wasn't a lot of room for emotional expression either. So
it was really hard for Stella and Lucas to feel
like like they really needed to kind of a reaffirm
their connection to and commitment to each other in these

(41:10):
new set of circumstances. In a way, even though they're married,
they had to rechoose each other. From the perspective of adults,
we have to rechoose into the marriage. I mean, that's
the truth about commitment, is that you need to rechoose
that commitment continuously in order to stay committed to each other,
so kind of like accepting that that was part of

(41:34):
the work of this phase of their marriage, but also
that the quality of intimacy that they could have together,
that quality of intimacy was limited by the things that
they were not able to or were unwilling to talk about.
So being able to share the scary thought of you know,

(41:55):
I'm really worried that this is a dynamic that is
going to blow up in my face was one of
Stella's worries. She was very worried that if Lucas were
to betray her as somebody they had a close friend
relationship where there had been some betrayal in the marriage,

(42:16):
she just could not conceive of the level of hurt
and devastation that that would cause her. So she was thinking, like,
do I need a financial instrument to protect me here?
So some of our discussions were about like their interest
in a post nup agreement. And I'll say that like

(42:37):
in all of these conversations on the show and in
this work in general, there's very often something that people
are coming in and saying, like, I think the solution
is this right, and I just need to like tell
me how to do this solution. But what we find
when we kind of step back from just a straight
line sort of focus on getting to that solution and say, like, well,

(42:59):
we've where we commit to that solution, why don't we
just open up the problem a little bit more before
we go there. And in the process of just opening
up the problem a little bit more helping Still and
Lucas have these conversations. It was kind of amazing how
their concept then of what the solution would be, how
that shifted once we got once we got the communication

(43:21):
more open, more honest, once it felt like it was
the two of them facing a life together and thinking
of themselves as a team rather than more of a
focus on simply like, how does this partnership serve our
individual needs?

Speaker 2 (43:40):
Yeah? Well, and I can't help but to think of
something you said earlier, which is rigidity, and the fact
that she had this idea of what a relationship and
what marriage looked like, and so to be able to
revisit that and for that to be more fluid sounds awesome.
So it sounds incredibly healing.

Speaker 1 (43:55):
And the right financial tactic without the right relational approach,
it doesn't necessarily solve the problem. Either we think, oh,
it's the post now that's the answer, but then it's like, actually,
it's all the communication that happens around that that's actually
way more powerful.

Speaker 2 (44:07):
Seems like there's a focus on the tool as opposed
to like a healthier approach to what's going on within
the dynamic of But Amanda, we've got more to get to.
We're going to talk about. Maybe we might get to
like this technical term that kind of connects our bodies
to our emotions. We'll get to that and more right
after this. All right, we're back to the break.

Speaker 1 (44:31):
We're still talking with Amanda Claiman about changing our relationship
to money, And we were just talking about changing our
relationship to our partner with how we talk about money. Well, Amanda,
a very like intra personal thing is how our body
reacts to kind of the information that we're taking in
and how we feel about things. There was this famous book,

(44:53):
The Body Keeps Score, and it just part of it. Yeah,
I mean like even just not therapists, but a bunch
of just arm TA consumers read that book too. What
can our body reveal about our relationship to money? My
wife will sometimes talk about, like what are you feeling
in your gut when you say that, and like what,
I get what she's getting at in some ways, but
in other ways it kind of it's lost on me.

Speaker 2 (45:14):
So can you explain that a little bit?

Speaker 3 (45:15):
Yes, If anybody can figure out how to just be,
you know, a disembodied mind that wanders through through life,
I hope they will let me know, because you know,
most of us are tethered to this embodied experience and
we need to kind of find a way to exist

(45:35):
with some kind of peace with that, because our body
is the source of so much of our experience, and
yet it's not necessarily the thing that gets the most
attention from us. And I think one of the reasons
why the body keeps the score was as successful as
it was is because it really it just like made

(45:58):
such a a compelling and easy to understand case of
realizing how our body signals us in some ways, first
of all, how much we rely on our body to
process these things that we call thoughts and emotions, et cetera.

(46:19):
And one of the places where I would say that
that particularly comes up around money is around the topic
of physiological arousal. So our autonomic nervous system is the
part of our brain and body that's really tasked with
keeping us safe first and foremost, so anything that's going

(46:39):
to be a threat, and a very sort of like
concrete old school understanding of threat is like if a
tiger is about to jump on you, you know kind
of what your body does to get into fight, flight
or freeze as a response. But in this modern, quote
unquote civilized world that we live in, most of the

(47:00):
threats that we face are not necessarily as clear cut
and immediate as a tiger. It can be things like
i feel a sense of threat and vulnerability that I'm
not going to have my job in six months. I
feel a sense of threat and vulnerability that everyone in

(47:22):
my social group has more money than I do, and
I feel like I'm in a subordinate or kind of
risky position. These kinds of situations can trigger the same
kind of threat response, a physiological arousal that would come
in an evolutionary sort of context from a different kind
of physiological threat. Now, the challenge is that what happens

(47:45):
in the body around this physiological arousal when the part
of our brain called the limpics system is activated, is
that our body is doing a survival job and survival
jobs in the body always go to the front of
the queue, always one hundred percent of the time. If
we're not alive, nothing else can happen. So our body

(48:06):
has an automatic way of saying, if we're in a
state of threat, we're going to deal with being in
a state of threat first and foremost before anything else
can go on. So when we're trying to do a
stressful money task, for example, a lot of times we
may not be conscious of the state of physiological arousal
that we're in. Unfortunately, what happens is, even if we

(48:30):
can manage to overcome avoidance, which is going to be
one of our first tactics, right, avoid the threat, get
away from the threat. I'm going to avoid it. Even
if we can somehow override that, get ourselves to put
the tush in the chair to do the money task.
Our brain, the prefrontal cortex, the part of our brain
that is tasked with being able to do things like
evaluate complexity, consider different options, anticipate consequences. Those functions in

(48:57):
the brain are literally offline for as long as we
are in that state of physiological arousal. So understanding the
state of the body is absolutely critical for us to
be able to do the work the higher sort of level,
the higher level cognitive work involved in being able to
do these money tasks. So I think that it is

(49:20):
I think we need to take that seriously. I think
that we need to be humble in saying, like, you know,
my body is going to be in charge of what
this experience is. I can't always just tell my body
what to do, and we need to work in partnership
with our body, which means being in more accepting connection

(49:45):
with our emotional life, which is what's creating the meaning,
which is what's kind of creating the sense of threat.

Speaker 4 (49:51):
If that makes sense.

Speaker 2 (49:52):
Yeah, Well, like what exactly does that look like? Again,
I'm thinking back to some previous previous examples that you've shared,
and what I hear is maybe being like being more flexible.
But what does that look like as far as being
able to be accepting of what our body is telling us?
And how do we recognize that? Is it journaling? Like
that's something that came to mind? Is it like, say, Okay,

(50:13):
today was stressful, Let me sit down and just write
because I don't think I have anything to say, but
maybe I do, and maybe I just need to write
a little bit. Is would that be an example of
a way for us to kind of be aware of
that or just asking the question, how does this make
me feel? I don't know.

Speaker 3 (50:25):
I mean, I absolutely love that kind of introspection.

Speaker 4 (50:29):
I love journaling. But I mean even in.

Speaker 3 (50:30):
More practical, concrete ways, just in terms of money tasks,
there are a couple of things that we can do
that really help the body be able to do its
work of self regulation. Number one is when we have
a kind of like when we're trying to assign ourselves
a money task, that we give that task not only

(50:53):
a beginning time, but we give it an end time.
So it's not like I'm going to deep dive into
my finance for the next five hours, leaving myself emotionally
exhausted and physically depleted. It's like, I am going to
do this specific task. I'm going to start it at
two point thirty and I'm going to end it at
three o'clock. And even just having control over how we

(51:17):
structure the task. And this is a cognitive behavioral technique
right here, Like how we practice opening up this box
called money, working with the contents of that box, putting
the things back in the box, closing the box and
putting it away so that we can have non money time.
So like having that start and specifically the end time
can be a really helpful way to kind of give

(51:37):
our body, to let our body know that it's going
to be engaging in a task, but that task is
under control. It's not like we're giving up control. We
still maintain some control over that. And the second part
of this where we can really work with our body
around this, is to give ourselves a transition into the task.

(51:58):
So like, if money is a a really emotionally triggering thing,
if you already know that this is something that pushes
your buttons, find a way to not just kind of
like have the task, but to bring yourself into the
space of it in a more regulated way. So, like
my go to for a little while this fall, because

(52:19):
I have a twelve year old daughter and I got
very introduced to the world of Taylor Swift this year,
was like I got really obsessed with her ten minute
version of All Too Well, and I could play that
song and that song would take me on.

Speaker 4 (52:34):
A journey that had a beginning, middle, and end, and.

Speaker 3 (52:38):
I would feel my feelings for that ten minutes and
at the end, I would feel calmer for having just
spent ten minutes feeling my feelings, and I would be
able to move with a little bit more fluidity into
that next task because I had already done the job
of facing my feelings, experiencing them, and giving my body
that ten minutes to be able to come to a

(53:01):
state of lowered arousal and hopefully some calm.

Speaker 4 (53:06):
Does that make sense.

Speaker 2 (53:07):
Oh yeah, giving yourself room to Yeah, Like, we're not robots.
We're not just immediately going from like program A to
program B.

Speaker 1 (53:15):
It's like from a stressful work meeting directly to family dinner.
Oh yeah, it's not gonna work. Well, No, there's gonna
be some overhang from the last hour that you spent,
like maybe in some sort of awful setting, and you're
gonna accidentally take it out in your family. Whereas if
you had, like you said, transition time, if you had
some sort of transition that you go through if you're
working from home, and maybe it's a song, maybe it's

(53:37):
maybe it's a ten minute walk around the block, whatever
it is that gives you that break in between that's
going to help facilitate a better atmosphere for the next
thing you're going into. So I think that's right, and
we're not as effective as we could be in the
things that we're doing because we don't take the time
to enter into them. Well, Amanda, you rock. Thank you
so much for joining us today on the podcast. Where
can our listeners go to find your new podcast and

(53:57):
kind of find out more of the stuff that.

Speaker 2 (53:59):
You are on to.

Speaker 3 (54:00):
Yeah, you can find the podcast on Audible. The name
of the show again is Emotional Investment. It's an Audible original,
so it's free for Audible subscribers, or you can buy
it just like you would buy a book, or you
can do a trial of Audible see if you like
it and access the content there. For me, the easiest
place to find me is if you remember my name,

(54:22):
Amanda Claiman. You can find me at my website. That
will link to all of my socials and yeah, I'm
out and about in all the spaces that's right.

Speaker 2 (54:31):
Yeah, we'll link to all that in our show notes
as well. Amanda, thank you so much for talking to
us today.

Speaker 3 (54:35):
Thanks guys, it's really been a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 2 (54:38):
Okay, Joel, about halfway through, I thought that maybe we
should have called this episode your money DTR nemem we're
having a DTR talk? Sure do significant others in high school?
I don't know. That's actually I'm super curious if DTR
is still a thing. But defining the relationship that was
a big deal after going on a couple of casual

(54:58):
dates and you're like, Hey, what's what's going on right
here between you and me? We just playing around. Hopefully
folks are able to have their own DTR with their money,
But yeah, what was your big takeaway with our conversation
with Amanda Clayman?

Speaker 1 (55:11):
All Right, I wrote this down, I think word for
word when she said it, because I was so struck
by it. And she said, you can't have time where
you aren't thinking about money, if you don't have time
where you intentionally are thinking about money, and I was like,
that's we talk about this. Look the the twelve percent
or twelve point reduction in IQ that people face when
they're constantly under money stress. It is the cloud over

(55:33):
your head that messes with you constantly if you can't
get it under control. And that is just reinforces. It's
just another way of saying it that, Hey, if you
don't have time on your calendar, with your significant other
and with your win NAB account or whatever it is
to kind of figure some of these things out, to put.

Speaker 2 (55:50):
A plan together.

Speaker 1 (55:51):
Yeah, then you're going to be constantly thinking about it.
It's going to be that constant emotional disruptor in your life.
And we all know what that feels like. We know
what it feels like to not know where we're going
and to feel pretty aimless and to feel like money
is happening to us rather than the opposite way around. Yeah,
it's not that you have to have a five hour
sit down, like Amanda said, but just small bits and
chunks here and there to start moving in the right

(56:13):
direction is so powerful from an actual getting the thing
done perspective, but also from kind of how you feel
about life and how money impacts your life too.

Speaker 2 (56:21):
And isn't that the essence of CBT, like the gold
standard of cognitive behavioral therapy is to is to address
it head on? And like, is that not what a
budget is? To sit down and cred a plan for
your money? And so that's what I like, as she
was talking through that, That's what I was thinking the
whole time, is that, like, yes, you have to sit
down and talk about it and put a plan together
and then guess what, then you don't You've earned the

(56:42):
right and the ability to not have to think about
it for the rest of the month or occasionally if
you need to check back in and see where we're
spending is for her story reflected that spot on right,
that she didn't have a plan behind by ignoring it,
and yeah, with sticking your head in the sand, the
situation only out where the.

Speaker 1 (56:58):
Most joyous period of her life was putting together a budget,
which actually she realized was free, not controlling, not constraining.

Speaker 2 (57:05):
Yeah, so my big takeaway is going to be when
she was talking about doing the work. And it's funny
because I think both you and I were both immediately
kind of going into a more counselly kind of direction
of like reflection, awareness, journaling perhaps and she and she
was like, well, those are all good, but and she
was talking about, actually I was thinking more concrete measures
and steps that you can take and specifically just like

(57:27):
doing the task, which kind of dovetails into your big takeaway,
And she specifically was pointed out how knowing that there
is going to be a beginning to this task but
then also an end this isn't some sort of perpetual
state that you are going to be in. I love
the picture of pulling out the box, opening the box,
you know, doing the thing, putting it back in the box,

(57:48):
and closing it. And yes, like like literally that's what
I do when I open and close my budget file,
you know, like it's removed from my mind when it's
not there, I'm not at all thinking about it. It
was that, and her other concrete piece of information was
that transition, the ability to build in time and not
going from one thing to another. It makes me think

(58:08):
of so the.

Speaker 1 (58:09):
Beer vibe can be so handy. It's like you're setting
the table for a more productive, more casual approach to it,
as opposed to feeling like I got to make all
the progress in one fell swoop.

Speaker 2 (58:17):
Totally. Yeah, it makes me think of I was gonna say.
Our pastor talked recently about how he like automatically builds
in fifteen minute segments of time before and after meetings.
That way, he's not just going from one thing to
another to allow some of that time to decompress. And
I think that can be mean. I think that is
so healthy, and I think that can be incredibly beneficial
when it comes to our when it comes to our
finances as well. But yeah, glad we got to have

(58:39):
a nice conversation with Amanda Claiman. Let's introduce the beer
that you and I enjoyed today was a fort point.
This is a pale ale by Trillium out of Boston, Massachusetts.

Speaker 1 (58:50):
Okay, So I got thoughts lucky to pick this one
up because there was some beer festival in town and
one of my favorite bottle shops, which is like right
by my parents' house. Actually it's like ten minutes from mine.
Just a punch of Trillium and some other goodies, and
so I am made a point to stop by there
to pick up the good stuff that I could while
it lasted. And this bear did not disappoint because Trillium
has never disappointed.

Speaker 2 (59:10):
E're one of the best, man They are so stinking good.

Speaker 1 (59:13):
Yeah, and for a pale ale in particular, like palels
can be a little lacking at times, right, I've had
some boring pale ales in my day.

Speaker 2 (59:21):
This was not a boring paleo, No, you know this was.

Speaker 1 (59:24):
This one was like juicy, it was full, It was
impactful to my taste buds.

Speaker 2 (59:28):
They thoroughly enjoyed it. Juicy, citrusy like it felt really
wet like as I was drinking it, and then what
they say about soap like fund your tongue, Like they
say the reason that soap works is because it makes
water wetter than water actually is and it causes the thing.
I've heard that before, and that's kind of what I
felt about this As I was drinking. I'm like, this

(59:49):
is this is wetter than water. It was really hydrating too,
I hear, yeah, it's really good it Uh. It was
like it felt really light in the mouth but packed
so much flavor with all the I assume hops and
other cool stuff that they include when they brewed this beer.
But yeah, glad you were able to pick this one
up and then we got to enjoy it today on
the podcast. But that's gonna be it. We will link

(01:00:10):
to some of the different resources that Amanda mentioned up
on the website at howmoney dot com. No doubt that's
gonna be it, right for sure? Until next time, Best
Friends Out, Best Friends Out,