2022-02-24_Believe_That_Bad_Things_Can_and_Will_Happen
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00:00:30.820 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,
00:00:34.060 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while
00:00:38.340 | building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.
00:00:41.380 | My name is Josh Rasheeds.
00:00:42.380 | I'm your host.
00:00:43.760 | Today on the show, I want to talk about belief.
00:00:47.860 | The power of believing in the possibilities of what is actually in front of you.
00:00:56.540 | I've been thinking this morning about the war in Ukraine right now between Russia and
00:01:04.340 | Ukraine.
00:01:05.340 | For context, today is Thursday, February 24, 2022.
00:01:10.500 | In the last 12 to 18 hours, there has been a dramatic change in the relationship between
00:01:20.780 | Russia and Ukraine.
00:01:23.020 | The conflict has now gone kinetic.
00:01:26.220 | It's hard for me to understand fully at the moment in the fog of war what's actually happening,
00:01:32.940 | but there are abundant reports of Russian attacks on Ukraine.
00:01:38.740 | There's plenty of evidence of incursions of Russian tanks, troop carriers, et cetera,
00:01:43.380 | across the border.
00:01:44.860 | There's a massive breakdown in international relations.
00:01:50.780 | Ukraine has closed its embassy in Moscow, cut off diplomatic relations with Russia.
00:01:55.100 | Around the world, many nation states are issuing strong condemnations of the actions of Russia,
00:02:02.700 | et cetera.
00:02:03.700 | Clearly, we have entered a new phase of this particular conflict.
00:02:10.900 | This is something that's actually come up on Radical Personal Finance in the past few
00:02:14.140 | weeks, which I'll be talking about in a moment, where we had a listener call in and said,
00:02:19.340 | "Hey, my parents are in Ukraine.
00:02:21.740 | What should we do?
00:02:22.740 | Should we get them out?
00:02:23.740 | Should we not?"
00:02:24.740 | We'll be talking about this.
00:02:25.740 | But as I consider the topic and what I wanted to say about the topic, I believe it's a useful
00:02:32.780 | learning point for us.
00:02:36.980 | And I don't have any insight or wish to make any commentary on the actual details on the
00:02:42.780 | ground.
00:02:43.780 | It's unknown.
00:02:44.780 | I want to always condemn violence, immoral violence.
00:02:49.940 | I always want to condemn immoral violence.
00:02:51.620 | I always want to stand for peace and for righteousness.
00:02:55.220 | And so that should be the first thing, of course.
00:02:59.760 | But beyond that, I don't have any insight.
00:03:01.260 | And so I'm not going to make any commentary on Russia or Ukraine or anything.
00:03:07.140 | I don't understand the history.
00:03:08.420 | I don't understand that region of the world.
00:03:10.140 | I don't understand.
00:03:13.660 | And that lack of understanding goes deep.
00:03:15.740 | Two in passing, it's interesting, two things that have troubled me for years.
00:03:19.220 | About a decade ago, I started to take some interest in the Soviet Union and the history
00:03:23.980 | of the Soviet Union.
00:03:24.980 | Because, of course, I had what I was taught in school as history.
00:03:30.220 | And I grew up, when I was a young boy, I grew up and I took an interest in political thrillers,
00:03:35.100 | primarily Tom Clancy political thrillers.
00:03:36.820 | And a key part of the story arc of Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan series involved the conflict between
00:03:42.580 | the Soviet Union and the United States.
00:03:45.140 | Of course, that was the defining feature of that age in American politics and American
00:03:51.140 | international relationships, was the conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States.
00:03:57.340 | And a bunch of Clancy's thrillers were set in that age of conflict.
00:04:01.260 | Of course, there's the famous Hunt for Red October.
00:04:04.860 | But then he had many lesser known books, such as The Cardinal, The Kremlin, and others that
00:04:10.020 | were situated in the Soviet Union.
00:04:12.300 | And so, of course, I had kind of the standard American viewpoint of that, reinforced by
00:04:16.280 | what I learned in school.
00:04:17.820 | And then, probably 10 to 15 years ago, I don't remember exactly, I started, I came across
00:04:23.660 | the research of Anthony Sutton on the technological influences in the Soviet Union.
00:04:30.980 | And Sutton was a, I think, a professor who was very, who did a very detailed analysis
00:04:35.340 | of what technology was in the Soviet Union.
00:04:38.780 | And it opened my eyes to the revisionist history that many people had argued with regard to
00:04:45.340 | the Soviet Union.
00:04:46.340 | It left me very confused.
00:04:47.340 | I thought, how on earth is it the case that there's all this hard evidence for the American
00:04:53.900 | investment in the Soviet Union, the building up of the Soviet Union?
00:04:58.020 | And yet, this is not, I don't understand how this could be the case, because this doesn't
00:05:01.540 | fit the standard history that I was taught.
00:05:04.380 | And so I've had an interest in that for years, but never pursued it to a point of trying
00:05:08.100 | to actually have an opinion on it.
00:05:10.500 | Second thing that happened was actually the YouTube algorithm started to affect me, I
00:05:14.780 | guess, a couple year or two ago.
00:05:16.660 | I stumbled across some videos of President Putin of Russia.
00:05:20.980 | And I started watching videos of his speeches, some interviews, etc.
00:05:25.300 | And some of them were quite, some of them were just public speeches, some of them were
00:05:29.180 | interviews, some of them were aggressive, confrontational interviews.
00:05:34.260 | And of course, when you start watching something on YouTube, then of course, there's up next.
00:05:39.180 | And you train the algorithm, the algorithm sees you're interested in this, and you watch
00:05:42.100 | these videos.
00:05:43.420 | And I kept watching them.
00:05:44.420 | And I've watched a couple dozen videos, some fairly long of President Putin in various
00:05:48.220 | public contexts.
00:05:49.820 | And I came away saying, that is not a stupid man, whatever he is, he may be evil, may not
00:05:55.380 | be evil, I don't know.
00:05:57.120 | But that is not a stupid man.
00:05:59.380 | And it was interesting, because I came away with a very different impression of him from
00:06:03.500 | actually watching just the way that he dealt with public events than I had from absorbing
00:06:11.820 | the American news media.
00:06:14.540 | I read mainstream American news media regularly, on an almost daily basis, read the Wall Street
00:06:20.540 | Journal, New York Times, etc.
00:06:23.020 | And you get this certain impression of the world based upon reading mainstream news.
00:06:29.660 | And that impression doesn't hold up to my understanding of just trying to watch direct
00:06:34.140 | from the source.
00:06:35.140 | So forgive the sideline, just all that to say that I don't understand what's going on,
00:06:40.420 | and so I don't want to comment on that.
00:06:42.380 | I don't want to comment on what is actually happening, etc. until more information becomes
00:06:47.540 | clear, except to the point that I want to condemn violence, and those who perpetuate
00:06:52.500 | violence.
00:06:53.500 | Violence doesn't solve anything.
00:06:55.340 | Or at least, it very rarely solves anything.
00:06:59.400 | But there's a long history there that is very difficult to understand for me.
00:07:05.140 | What is not difficult to understand is that the lives of Russians and Ukrainians have
00:07:11.820 | been dramatically affected in the last 12 to 24 hours.
00:07:17.900 | And it's the lives of all Russians and all Ukrainians.
00:07:23.940 | Secondly, there is the risks and the fears of violence.
00:07:33.000 | Obviously the Ukrainian people all across the country are now facing risks of violence
00:07:39.160 | that they weren't facing a couple of months ago.
00:07:41.640 | You have air raid sirens going off in major cities, you have shelling coming in, you have
00:07:46.560 | tanks driving down the street.
00:07:48.540 | These are major, major changes in life.
00:07:52.520 | At this point in time, although of course I'm sure that the Russian desire is not to
00:08:01.280 | kill thousands and thousands of ordinary civilians, that would seem to me from my limited understanding
00:08:07.960 | quite counterproductive for them, the fact is that when violence happens, the results
00:08:15.000 | are often uncontainable.
00:08:16.960 | When a gun goes off, a bullet lands somewhere.
00:08:20.500 | And sometimes that bullet lands in the intended target, sometimes it passes through the intended
00:08:25.760 | target and hits someone behind, sometimes it goes crazy, flies up in the air, falls
00:08:29.540 | down and kills a random kid.
00:08:31.640 | There was a horrible story the last couple of days, the five-year-old shot in, I think
00:08:37.960 | it was Detroit, I think.
00:08:42.360 | So the point is that any time you have violence, there's always unintended consequences, there's
00:08:49.680 | always collateral damage.
00:08:51.840 | And so regardless of what a military tries to do or tries not to do, it's a dangerous
00:08:58.180 | place to be.
00:09:00.400 | So the life of every Ukrainian in Ukraine is now affected just simply by that increasing
00:09:09.280 | risk.
00:09:10.280 | What will happen is in a time of war and violence, the risks across the board go up.
00:09:16.600 | You have always primary effects, secondary effects, tertiary effects.
00:09:20.040 | You have the primary risk of a shell coming in, a warplane going over, a tank lobbing
00:09:26.480 | off some kind of explosive round, people being killed, people being shot.
00:09:31.440 | Then you have the secondary risk that now local criminals will have more freedom to
00:09:39.160 | engage in higher levels of crime.
00:09:40.880 | So you have your more standard criminals that use the cover of violence to engage in other
00:09:46.880 | levels of crime.
00:09:47.880 | Then you have, of course, all the secondary and tertiary effects of disruptions in markets,
00:09:53.280 | disruptions in goods.
00:09:54.880 | Right now the international airport is shut down.
00:09:58.120 | Across the country, international airports are shut down.
00:10:00.120 | So of course, there's nobody coming in, there's nobody going out, there's no tourists coming
00:10:03.600 | in, no tourists going out.
00:10:05.000 | There'll be blockades of supply lines.
00:10:06.960 | The grocery store shelves will start to run short.
00:10:10.640 | Prices will skyrocket on certain goods that are hard to get.
00:10:15.160 | There'll be shortages across the board.
00:10:18.000 | And so everyone in Ukraine is going to be feeling the effects.
00:10:22.640 | However far it goes, whatever ends up happening, the effects are going to last and be very,
00:10:27.240 | very significant for a significant period of time.
00:10:30.280 | And then everybody in Russia or everybody associated with Russia in any way is going
00:10:35.080 | to be affected.
00:10:36.080 | They're going to have significant international sanctions, most of them being economic sanctions
00:10:41.360 | being levied against the Russian people.
00:10:44.680 | We'll see what the long-term impact of those sanctions is, but they will be heavy on anybody
00:10:50.260 | associated with Russia.
00:10:52.000 | Businesses in Russia are being sanctioned.
00:10:54.760 | Businesses doing business with Russia are being sanctioned.
00:10:57.000 | If you're running a company in the United States but you have Russian clients, that
00:11:01.080 | will come under heavy problems.
00:11:03.920 | Russians' ability to convert money, to transfer money, people are arguing cut them off of
00:11:08.240 | the swift banking system.
00:11:10.720 | Russian banks will undergo greater scrutiny.
00:11:13.640 | You're stuck, right?
00:11:14.640 | It's a major problem.
00:11:16.120 | So you could be Russian, living in Russia or not living in Russia, and now at this point
00:11:21.240 | in time, because of the actions of the Russian government and the Russian military, there
00:11:26.280 | will now be major, major effects that will be felt by you.
00:11:31.440 | Now what do I talk about belief?
00:11:34.200 | The point is, I didn't think a few weeks ago, I didn't think it was likely that President
00:11:43.280 | Putin would actually invade Ukraine.
00:11:46.920 | The topic came up on a Friday Q&A show and I had been reading some of the news reports,
00:11:51.360 | but I have a very hard time reading and believing anything that I read in the news reports about
00:11:55.080 | things like that.
00:11:56.520 | Sometimes they get it right, sometimes they don't, but the Western media is so wacky in
00:12:03.640 | terms of the things that they report, I believe very little of it.
00:12:08.040 | And you look at it and you say, "What does a country like Russia have to gain by invading
00:12:14.520 | Ukraine?"
00:12:15.520 | It seems to me how, based upon my understanding of the conflict, the cultural differences,
00:12:21.760 | the nationalism of the Ukrainian people, the nationalism of the Russian people, obviously
00:12:25.960 | there are close, close connections and ties, culturally speaking, but it just seemed to
00:12:30.920 | me like you can't, it seems, I don't understand how a nation can militarily pacify another
00:12:41.240 | nation.
00:12:42.520 | And so we'll see how far Putin goes and what happens, we'll see what his game plan is,
00:12:46.800 | but in the modern age it has seemed, I don't understand how it can be smart, a smart thing
00:12:55.720 | to do.
00:12:56.920 | But time will tell, history will give the verdict.
00:13:01.640 | In a couple decades we'll have a greater understanding of what the impact of the actions
00:13:05.880 | today are or are not.
00:13:09.720 | But what I have done, I didn't think it would happen, but I have always believed that it
00:13:15.920 | could happen.
00:13:16.920 | And so if you think back to the Friday Q&A shows where I had a listener with Ukrainian
00:13:22.980 | roots calling in and saying, "Should I get my parents out?"
00:13:25.960 | My answer was, "Absolutely, get your parents out."
00:13:29.640 | And we talked through some of the details, but I said, "If you think that it's a possibility,
00:13:34.480 | the consequences of not getting out are simply too high."
00:13:38.800 | And so I hope very much that that listener got his parents out, I hope that they went
00:13:42.920 | to the United States and that they're safe in the United States at the moment.
00:13:46.560 | The consequences of being, there are certain things where the price is so high and the
00:13:51.000 | consequences are so high that regardless of whether you know what will happen, regardless
00:13:55.600 | of whether you're sure of what will happen, you must take action just in case something
00:14:00.200 | does happen.
00:14:01.680 | And you must take action early and put a plan in place.
00:14:05.000 | Again, that plan can have certain triggering points.
00:14:08.600 | I always think about this in the context in my line of work as a financial planner of
00:14:13.280 | what's called a springing trust.
00:14:15.920 | In financial planning, you can build in a trust certain springs, things that if this,
00:14:22.120 | then that, a trip wire, so to speak, or a conditional clause, right?
00:14:26.800 | If this happens, then that happens.
00:14:28.840 | And so in asset protection planning, there's a really interesting design that I think is
00:14:35.480 | quite smart when it comes to domestic asset protection trusts and offshore asset protection
00:14:41.600 | trusts.
00:14:43.000 | And the basic idea is whenever you do offshore planning, the prices go up, the hassle goes
00:14:49.440 | up, the costs go up.
00:14:51.400 | And so a lot of times, you're better off keeping your assets in the local area, in the domestic
00:14:57.740 | economy, because prices are lower, hassle is lower, you can, it's just an easier, it's
00:15:04.360 | easier to do business.
00:15:05.720 | It's quite complicated and frustrating to do business offshore, whether that's an offshore
00:15:09.880 | company, whether that's an offshore trust, et cetera.
00:15:13.680 | And there are higher costs associated with those things.
00:15:17.020 | But you recognize, especially in things like asset protection planning, you recognize that
00:15:21.280 | there are certain things that could happen, that if they happen, that might make this
00:15:25.500 | line of planning no longer doable.
00:15:29.320 | So you can build a trust where the trust is managed in the United States, if you're from
00:15:34.760 | the United States, its assets are mostly in the United States.
00:15:38.940 | That keeps your costs low, keeps things simple, et cetera.
00:15:41.800 | But then you put certain springs in there, where if this happens, if the threat goes
00:15:45.840 | up, then the trust, the trustee has the direction to immediately move the trust from the United
00:15:52.720 | States to an offshore jurisdiction.
00:15:55.400 | And then in the offshore jurisdiction, the trust has greater protection from the attacks
00:16:00.880 | that it is receiving.
00:16:02.540 | And so it's called a springing trust, it can spring, something happens.
00:16:05.880 | And there are other uses of springing trust in other contexts as well.
00:16:10.040 | But I love that picture, I love that image of simply we have a plan, but then if things
00:16:14.800 | get bad, then it springs into another plan.
00:16:18.120 | Because that's a good way of dealing with reality.
00:16:21.440 | Reality is, I don't want my trust to go offshore, it's a hassle.
00:16:25.500 | But I recognize that there are attacks that can come, and that would be, those attacks
00:16:29.800 | would be significant.
00:16:32.280 | The same thing applies to where you are, right?
00:16:34.880 | If you're living in Ukraine, and you're happy in Ukraine, that's where your life is, that's
00:16:39.160 | where your friends are, that's where your business is, that's where everything is, then
00:16:44.680 | you would obviously want to stay there.
00:16:47.160 | That Ukrainian person doesn't want to move to Hawaii, doesn't want to move to Latvia,
00:16:52.640 | doesn't want to move to Finland or to the United Kingdom.
00:16:55.960 | The Ukrainian person wants to be in Ukraine.
00:16:58.200 | But you have to acknowledge there are certain things that could happen that could change
00:17:01.560 | that.
00:17:02.560 | So I put in place a plan to say, if this happens, then I'm going to take these certain actions.
00:17:09.400 | And I think war is a really good example of this.
00:17:12.200 | This is one of the reasons why years ago when I left the United States the first time, I
00:17:16.640 | said, I need to have a plan to where I could go if I wanted to leave the United States
00:17:20.760 | in the future.
00:17:21.760 | It's not that I want to leave forever, but if I wanted to leave in the future because
00:17:25.200 | things got bad, what would I do?
00:17:27.360 | What would I do if the tyranny increased?
00:17:30.380 | What would I do if there broke out increasing levels of violence due to structural instability
00:17:38.040 | and social instability, et cetera?
00:17:39.760 | I need a plan.
00:17:40.880 | I need a plan that could spring into action.
00:17:45.680 | But in order to develop the plan, you have to believe it.
00:17:48.640 | And then in order to actually take action, you have to believe that something is possible.
00:17:52.400 | And this is what happens, is that very few of us actually believe that the bad things
00:17:57.100 | that could happen to us are possible.
00:17:59.280 | Think about a heart attack, right?
00:18:01.080 | You're 40 years old.
00:18:02.980 | You're stuffing your face every day with junk food.
00:18:05.880 | You are sedentary, et cetera.
00:18:08.160 | You know intellectually that something could happen and your heart could get clogged and
00:18:13.340 | you could have a heart attack and die.
00:18:15.700 | Heart disease kills millions and millions of people.
00:18:18.720 | You know that it could happen, but you don't believe it.
00:18:21.600 | You don't believe it.
00:18:22.600 | And so we don't start doing the things that we need to do to avoid that kind of outcome.
00:18:26.880 | You know that you could get in a car accident today and die.
00:18:32.700 | You know that your family could be left fatherless, motherless, penniless, but yet you don't believe
00:18:39.180 | it enough to go and increase your life insurance.
00:18:43.040 | You don't believe it.
00:18:44.940 | You know that war could bring significant disruptions and gasoline could go from $3
00:18:50.280 | a gallon to $6 a gallon basically overnight, but you don't believe it enough to prepare,
00:18:56.200 | enough to stockpile gasoline, stockpile money, make a plan of what you would do if you had
00:19:01.020 | to reallocate your budget.
00:19:03.000 | You know that things could happen and grocery shelves could go bare.
00:19:05.920 | You know that supply lines could be disrupted, but you don't believe it enough to say, "Oh,
00:19:10.240 | here's what I would definitely need, so I'll make sure that I have in place some preparations."
00:19:15.320 | And when something like this happens, right, I didn't—we don't believe that a nation
00:19:21.200 | could go to war with another nation to take territory.
00:19:24.360 | We ignore the fact that throughout all of human history, this is what people have done.
00:19:28.500 | This is what governments have done.
00:19:30.080 | It doesn't matter whether it's Genghis Khan or Napoleon or Germany and Hitler, Hitler's
00:19:38.920 | Germany, or whether it's Putin's Russia or whether it's the United States.
00:19:43.600 | It doesn't matter.
00:19:44.600 | We don't—we ignore the fact that this is the way that it has been throughout all human
00:19:47.880 | history.
00:19:48.880 | And you go through a period of time, right?
00:19:50.520 | You go through—let's see, when did the Soviet Union collapse?
00:19:53.080 | Let's call it almost 30 years.
00:19:54.840 | You go through a 30-year period and you say, "Oh, we're in a new world order.
00:19:57.880 | The world is totally different."
00:19:59.400 | And then something happens and it should wake you up and you say, "Oh, you know what?
00:20:03.720 | Something could happen."
00:20:05.420 | So when you come across a risk, when you come across something that is happening, that could
00:20:11.320 | happen, believe that it's possible.
00:20:13.080 | Right?
00:20:14.080 | When I did a show last week on Canada about the Canadian government freezing bank accounts,
00:20:19.680 | which thankfully seems to be coming to an end.
00:20:22.440 | Right now, yesterday, amazingly, before the Senate in Canada actually voted on the act,
00:20:31.200 | Prime Minister Trudeau ended the Emergency Measures Act.
00:20:33.760 | So with the ending of the Emergency Measures Act, hopefully the freezing and whatnot is
00:20:38.320 | coming to an end.
00:20:39.320 | I saw several reports of people who had their accounts frozen that they were unfrozen again.
00:20:43.600 | We'll see what happens.
00:20:45.040 | But something like that happens and you say, "Ah, I don't believe it could happen here."
00:20:48.200 | But you've got to believe it.
00:20:49.200 | You've got to recognize, "Hey, that happened once.
00:20:51.280 | If it happened once, it's going to happen again."
00:20:52.960 | Right?
00:20:53.960 | I did a show this week.
00:20:55.360 | I didn't release it because I've decided to sit on it for a couple days and I'm going
00:20:58.520 | to release it as part of promoting a new course that I'm almost ready to release.
00:21:04.000 | But I did a show on Executive Order 1602 in the United States back in 1934 when President
00:21:10.160 | Roosevelt in the United States banned the private ownership of gold coins, gold bullion
00:21:17.440 | and gold certificates.
00:21:18.440 | For 41 years in the United States, it was illegal from 1943 to 1974, it was illegal
00:21:27.440 | in the United States for an individual citizen to own gold coins, gold bullion or gold certificates
00:21:32.760 | more than I think five ounces.
00:21:37.040 | We look at that and say, "Oh, that's ancient history.
00:21:39.100 | They would never ban gold coins again."
00:21:41.640 | I think it's unlikely they ban gold coins again because at the time gold was very pervasive.
00:21:46.480 | But we say, "Oh no, they'll never ban bitcoin."
00:21:50.280 | Then we ignore the fact that many of the big countries around the world have tried to ban
00:21:55.200 | bitcoin.
00:21:56.200 | Russia just this week I think came out with a proposal that said that if you're going
00:22:03.080 | to have bitcoin, you have to have it in a custodian wallet.
00:22:06.640 | You can't store it yourself in cold storage.
00:22:09.600 | It has to be with a custodian, right?
00:22:11.160 | So they can manipulate them.
00:22:12.320 | Same thing you see happening in Canada right now.
00:22:14.840 | Canada can control and affect the use of bitcoin for any bitcoin that is held in a wallet with
00:22:20.680 | a custodian because they can impose military power over the custodians, but they can't
00:22:26.320 | over cold storage.
00:22:27.640 | So you look at it and you say, "I don't believe it."
00:22:30.480 | Well, my course coming out is about bitcoin is a collaboration I'm doing.
00:22:34.520 | It's going to be that you need to prepare for the fact that your government says you
00:22:38.280 | can't own bitcoin.
00:22:40.440 | Now do I think that they'll do that?
00:22:42.040 | I sure hope not.
00:22:43.040 | They'd be stupid to do it, but they've done it before and all you need to do is look at
00:22:46.440 | history and recognize they've done this again and again and again from 1934 to 1973 to 1974
00:22:54.600 | I think it was.
00:22:55.840 | It was illegal for you to own a gold coin.
00:22:59.560 | So why would they not make it illegal for you to own bitcoin?
00:23:03.000 | Why would they not?
00:23:05.040 | Throughout human history, countries have invaded other countries.
00:23:08.800 | Why would they not do it again?
00:23:10.840 | Throughout history, civil wars have broken out all over the planet.
00:23:13.680 | Why would they not break out again?
00:23:15.600 | Throughout history there has been chaos.
00:23:18.400 | The normal pattern of history is chaos and disorder, violence and conflict.
00:23:23.760 | So when you have a period of peaceful prosperity you have to look and say, "What created that?
00:23:28.560 | What created peace?
00:23:29.840 | What created harmony?
00:23:31.680 | What created unity?"
00:23:33.720 | Because that's not the norm.
00:23:36.160 | But in our modern age, many of us come to think that's the norm.
00:23:41.560 | Now belief is not only on the negative side.
00:23:45.720 | The same argument can be made on the positive side.
00:23:48.080 | If you're going to go and start a business you have to believe that success is possible.
00:23:52.000 | If you're going to enter into a marriage you have to believe that your marriage can be
00:23:55.960 | full of love and happy and for life.
00:23:59.640 | You have to believe that outcomes are possible.
00:24:02.560 | I'm of course just kind of in a negative mood thinking about the examples in Ukraine today.
00:24:08.960 | But you have to believe it and then say, "If that did happen what would I want to have
00:24:14.320 | in place?"
00:24:16.320 | Remember that it's all in your head.
00:24:18.440 | There's not a cost to believing something.
00:24:21.140 | There does come certain costs to preparing for certain things.
00:24:24.720 | Preparedness has certain costs.
00:24:26.500 | But those costs are usually lower than what people actually think.
00:24:30.260 | The cost of preparing for, "Hey, what would I do if my country went to war?" is actually
00:24:34.000 | pretty low in terms of a most basic plan.
00:24:38.840 | I have another course that I'm going to be releasing in the next couple of weeks on kind
00:24:44.120 | of a springing plan.
00:24:45.440 | How do you put in place a plan with certain levels?
00:24:48.600 | But at its core it's just a matter of, right, our Ukrainian listener on the Q&A show, at
00:24:54.120 | its core it's a matter of, "Hey, I was going to go this summer and visit my children in
00:24:59.400 | the United States.
00:25:00.400 | I'm just going to go now and spend a few months there.
00:25:03.440 | And they can always start any kind of residency process that I need later.
00:25:07.780 | But let's just go now.
00:25:08.780 | Why not?
00:25:09.780 | Let's go for a few months.
00:25:10.780 | There's no reason why we can't.
00:25:11.780 | Not holding down a job, not holding down a business.
00:25:13.160 | Let's just go now."
00:25:15.380 | The cost is relatively low is the point.
00:25:18.220 | So when you hear of things happening in the world, believe that they can happen to you.
00:25:22.840 | You hear of a volcano blowing up, if you live near volcanoes don't look at your volcano
00:25:26.840 | and say, "Oh, my volcano is dormant."
00:25:28.800 | Say, "Hey, those people's volcano was dormant for a long time and then it wasn't.
00:25:32.920 | What would I do if my volcano became less dormant?"
00:25:36.800 | You see of hurricanes going through other places and you live in a place where you get
00:25:39.440 | hurricanes, then say, "Hey, what if a hurricane came through here?
00:25:43.200 | What would I do?
00:25:44.200 | What would I do if there were political unrest?
00:25:47.880 | What would I do if crime were going up in my neighborhood?"
00:25:51.600 | And believe that it's possible where you live.
00:25:55.960 | You'll just simply believe it.
00:25:57.520 | Train yourself to believe that it's possible.
00:26:00.160 | It'll put you far ahead of the people that put their head in the sand and ignore what's
00:26:03.880 | happening.
00:26:05.680 | Believe that it's possible.
00:26:07.640 | And look at history as your guide.
00:26:10.320 | A lot of things have happened in the past and then they happen and we say, "Oh, this
00:26:15.840 | can't happen."
00:26:17.600 | But yet somebody who looked at history realized that it happened again and again and again
00:26:24.000 | and again and again.
00:26:26.640 | Wars have happened again and again and again and again in human history.
00:26:31.840 | Dictatorships have happened again and again and again and again.
00:26:36.560 | Believe that it's possible and then make a plan for what you would do if it happened
00:26:40.960 | again.
00:26:41.960 | Let's be diligent to pray for and support all of those in this new area of conflict.
00:26:51.320 | Pray that peace would prevail.
00:26:53.000 | Pray that God would arrest the hearts of dictators, of people committed to war and violence, and
00:27:01.000 | turn them from their wicked and evil ways.
00:27:05.560 | And yet, let's also learn from the lessons that we see happening right now.
00:27:11.880 | Hey, parents.
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