2024-03-05_Episode

00:00:00.000 | Buy now, ride now at Big Bear Mountain Resort, where 24/25 Season Passes are on sale now

00:00:06.500 | for the lowest price of the year.

00:00:08.240 | Save up to $200 when you buy before April 9th.

00:00:11.320 | There's something for everyone at Big Bear Mountain Resort, with three pass options offering

00:00:15.400 | the access you want and plenty of pass holder perks to fit your style and budget.

00:00:20.140 | To get your 24/25 Season Pass, go to BigBearMountainResort.com.

00:00:24.840 | Big Bear Mountain Resort.

00:00:26.640 | Winter Lives Here!

00:00:27.660 | Today on Radical Personal Finance, we celebrate Episode 1000.

00:00:50.980 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,

00:00:54.140 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life in a planned

00:01:11.620 | room of financial freedom in 10 years or less.

00:01:24.900 | My name is Joshua Sheets, I am your host, and today on the show, we are going to celebrate

00:01:41.600 | a little bit together, because as long time listeners know, Episode 1000 is an important

00:01:47.860 | milestone for me in the history of Radical Personal Finance.

00:01:52.280 | Why you may ask?

00:01:53.280 | Well, because if you go back in the very beginning of this podcast, back to the very first episodes,

00:01:58.980 | you will find in Episode 11, I believe it is, that I committed to doing a thousand episodes

00:02:05.800 | of this podcast.

00:02:08.540 | And I said in the very beginning that I'll do a thousand episodes of this podcast, whether

00:02:13.060 | anyone listens or not.

00:02:16.020 | And thankfully, I'm quite grateful that many people have chosen to listen.

00:02:19.660 | That's an honor, and I'm grateful for that, because while I'd like to talk tough and say

00:02:24.140 | that I would have followed through on that, whether or not anybody listened, that was

00:02:29.580 | my intention and that was what I planned to do, but it certainly would not have been as

00:02:34.240 | easy to get to Episode 1000 as it was to get here with having listeners and having people

00:02:42.160 | knowing that I'm making a difference, knowing, getting so many nice letters from so many

00:02:48.300 | of you, etc. has made it much, much easier to get to Episode 1000.

00:02:52.380 | That's not to say it has been easy.

00:02:53.940 | It has not been easy.

00:02:54.940 | It has required a significant amount of determination from me, and I'm proud of that.

00:03:00.300 | What I thought we would do today, there are many things that I was considering, how could

00:03:02.740 | we celebrate Episode 1000?

00:03:06.160 | Over the months, I've had various big plans.

00:03:09.400 | Originally, my goal was to do a cross-country tour and have meetups all around the United

00:03:16.400 | States and perhaps all around the world.

00:03:18.440 | I had to put those plans on hold.

00:03:20.240 | I couldn't quite bring them to fruition.

00:03:22.720 | Maybe we'll be able to do them.

00:03:23.800 | We are having a family camp, which in my mind is a celebration of more in-person events,

00:03:29.160 | something I've been wanting to accomplish.

00:03:30.560 | Of course, in Episode 500, I played many of your wonderful notes and audios and things

00:03:37.160 | like that, but I thought what would be most interesting for me and for you would be just

00:03:43.640 | to use Episode 1000 and reflect a little bit on the milestone and share with you a few

00:03:49.400 | of the lessons that I have learned from this experience, because in my own life, doing

00:03:56.200 | radical personal finance was one of the most significant events in my life, because it

00:04:05.920 | was one of the most significant times in which I believed in myself and I charted my own

00:04:15.200 | path.

00:04:18.280 | I did it in the face of quite a lot of, not opposition, that wouldn't be fair to say,

00:04:23.200 | but just lack of people really understanding.

00:04:27.240 | Yet for me, as a man, making a decision, saying this is something I want to do, I'm going

00:04:34.740 | to do it even when it's uncertain and here's what I'm going to do.

00:04:39.840 | It's going to be a significant investment of time, resources, et cetera, may or may

00:04:43.560 | not work out and has enormous possibilities of failure, has some slight possibilities

00:04:48.840 | of success, it's outside of areas that I can predict, it's not predictable, but it's something

00:04:57.180 | that I want to do and I'm going to do it.

00:04:59.320 | That is something that for me has been extremely transformative in my life and in my character.

00:05:09.180 | When I reflect upon that, I can clearly chart the decision to pursue radical personal finance

00:05:19.980 | as a dividing point in my life.

00:05:22.820 | I don't want to be hyperbolic.

00:05:25.260 | This is not hyperbole.

00:05:29.360 | If it is hyperbole, it's only a little bit, but making the decision to pursue radical

00:05:34.860 | personal finance was for me a very large decision where I had to believe in myself, and I hadn't

00:05:40.520 | done a lot of that previously.

00:05:44.320 | It's not a sob story.

00:05:46.240 | I've lived a very privileged and charmed life.

00:05:48.960 | I have nothing but blessings in my life, but there comes a time in a man's life, in any

00:05:54.160 | man's life, in which he has to make a decision, a decision as to what he's going to do, why

00:05:59.160 | he's going to do it, and he has to make that decision on his own.

00:06:03.420 | But when he finally does that, it seems to me that whether it's a success or whether

00:06:08.720 | it's a failure, it has good effects, good effects in a man's life.

00:06:15.680 | It's something that I'm quite proud of because it has spurred me to make more of those decisions.

00:06:23.100 | As I reflect, there were other decisions that I made prior to starting radical personal

00:06:29.140 | finance, of course, many other decisions that I made that were also in that similar vein.

00:06:33.340 | But those decisions often seemed relatively small and relatively safe.

00:06:38.220 | I can think of some of them.

00:06:39.240 | For example, when I graduated from college, I decided I was going to go and travel around

00:06:44.680 | the United States.

00:06:46.280 | I set off by myself.

00:06:47.520 | I didn't have a job.

00:06:48.520 | I didn't have any clear plans.

00:06:51.000 | I had a little bit of money saved up.

00:06:52.640 | But I went off and I traveled all around the United States in my old cheap car, and that

00:06:56.960 | was something that I did all by myself.

00:06:58.560 | It was challenging for me, but it was also a great experience that I really enjoyed.

00:07:03.480 | And I started to experience the joy of having to rely on myself, and I saw how that decision

00:07:09.560 | impacted me.

00:07:10.940 | There were other decisions when I became an entrepreneur after getting laid off from my

00:07:15.160 | corporate job that I had after college.

00:07:18.240 | Then I had to go and be an entrepreneur, but it was still relatively safe in the sense

00:07:22.840 | that I wasn't bearing responsibility.

00:07:24.740 | But radical personal finance was different because I was bearing more responsibility

00:07:30.460 | when I decided to do that.

00:07:33.020 | So let me lay out the story for so many of you who were not there in the early days because

00:07:38.140 | I think you'll find some of the inside history interesting.

00:07:43.180 | After I graduated college, I worked for a short time in a large corporate marketing

00:07:48.240 | and brand management consulting company.

00:07:50.820 | And it was a company that I had started working for during college, and they had provided

00:07:55.900 | me the opportunity to have a flexible work schedule when I was in college so that I could

00:08:00.840 | finish my college work.

00:08:02.500 | And in exchange, they asked me to consider working for them after college.

00:08:08.740 | So when I graduated, I went and said, "Okay, I graduated.

00:08:12.920 | Do you have another job for me?"

00:08:14.560 | And basically they said, "No, we don't."

00:08:17.680 | And I didn't want to keep working in the relatively low-level job that I was working

00:08:20.980 | in.

00:08:21.980 | So I quit.

00:08:22.980 | But as I was quitting on the way out, then they said, "Hey, listen, we'd hate to

00:08:26.860 | lose you as an employee.

00:08:28.440 | Come back to us in a little time."

00:08:29.720 | And that was actually when I went traveling.

00:08:31.160 | I loaded up my car and traveled all around the United States by myself in an old, old,

00:08:36.120 | tiny, cheap car.

00:08:37.960 | And then I went back and saw my boss when I got back, and they offered me a job.

00:08:43.040 | And the job came with a nice pay raise.

00:08:45.200 | It came to a new set of duties and to a new job that they had set up into the company.

00:08:49.740 | And they hired me and then two other ladies into the same position.

00:08:53.600 | So I worked for that company for, I think, a year or so.

00:08:57.680 | And I was doing it—I didn't like the job.

00:09:00.560 | I didn't enjoy the job at all, but I was doing it because I felt like I was fulfilling

00:09:05.240 | a commitment.

00:09:06.240 | They had given me some extra scholarship money for college in exchange for my considering

00:09:10.300 | working for them, and so I thought I would work for them.

00:09:12.840 | My plan was to work for them for a year and then to quit.

00:09:18.600 | And so my planned quitting date was January of 2009 that I had decided I was going to

00:09:25.280 | move on to something else.

00:09:26.280 | I didn't have a clear idea or goal of what else I wanted to do, but I was going to quit

00:09:31.080 | in January of 2009.

00:09:32.860 | In June of 2008, I got called into my boss's office and I got laid off, totally out of

00:09:38.240 | the blue, didn't expect it.

00:09:40.720 | And I had just gotten a pay raise, I thought everything was going great, I thought here

00:09:44.880 | I am doing something I don't want to do to satisfy corporate loyalty, and I got laid

00:09:50.720 | off.

00:09:51.720 | And I didn't exactly know what to do.

00:09:53.520 | So I was looking around, considering options.

00:09:56.640 | And then a few weeks later, I had lunch with one of my supervisors—I think it was the

00:10:03.760 | vice president or something—the guy had laid me off.

00:10:05.880 | And we were having lunch, and I was sharing with him a little bit of vision that I had

00:10:09.300 | of what I wanted to do.

00:10:10.300 | And he suggested to me that I consider going into the world of financial services.

00:10:16.300 | And at the time, I was a personal finance aficionado, but I had no interest in the world

00:10:21.040 | of professional financial services.

00:10:23.480 | Being a personal finance aficionado, I had developed an intense skepticism towards financial

00:10:29.660 | advisors, the financial advisor industry, all of the scams, all of the worthless financial

00:10:34.240 | products, et cetera.

00:10:35.540 | And I had pretty much become a boglehead, and I was a by-term investor difference, I

00:10:41.440 | was a Dave Ramsey guy, I was a boglehead, pretty through and through, and didn't have

00:10:46.080 | much interest in financial services.

00:10:49.020 | But this guy's son had been a college intern doing the college intern program at Northwestern

00:10:54.800 | Mutual, which is a large life insurance company and now large financial services conglomerate.

00:11:00.720 | And they'd had good experiences, and so he referred me in, and I went in for an interview.

00:11:04.840 | And I went in pretty skeptical.

00:11:06.480 | I did a little research, found out that Northwestern Mutual was basically the whole life insurance

00:11:12.220 | king.

00:11:13.220 | And so half of my first interview, I spent grilling the Northwestern guy about whole

00:11:16.860 | life insurance and what use does this possibly have, et cetera.

00:11:21.800 | And after that, though, I liked him, and I liked how he was able to respond to my questions.

00:11:29.120 | He was a thoughtful analytical guy.

00:11:31.440 | The guy that I interviewed with was a retired Navy guy, engineer, very analytical guy, really

00:11:38.120 | enjoyed the interaction.

00:11:39.720 | So I started interviewing, went through the whole round of interviews, interviewed with

00:11:43.000 | a couple of other companies, and basically I realized, you know what, I've always wanted

00:11:47.340 | to learn to sell, and this would be a good chance for me to learn to sell.

00:11:51.960 | And I don't have much of something that's better, and if I do this and I learn to sell,

00:11:56.800 | I'll be really grateful for that, even if I don't do this for the long term.

00:12:00.960 | And I had found enough discussions and arguments and information about financial products that

00:12:07.280 | I realized that I was overall fairly ignorant of the financial space, and I didn't think

00:12:12.600 | that I was going to have an ethical issue working in the financial services industry

00:12:17.360 | as long as I was careful, so I joined the company, Northwestern Mutual.

00:12:22.440 | And I'm glad that I did, because the time that I joined the industry was during the

00:12:29.440 | stock collapse and basically economic collapse of 2008.

00:12:33.680 | I was driving to my insurance licensing course in Miami every day, listening, at the time

00:12:40.260 | I was an inveterate NPR listener, so I would listen to NPR all the time, back and forth,

00:12:46.680 | and here I am listening to the world collapse as I head into the financial services industry,

00:12:51.640 | and that was when I began.

00:12:54.160 | As I began, I did fairly well in the industry, I was never a real star, but I was always

00:12:59.200 | a solid producer, and over the years I invested quite heavily into learning more about financial

00:13:06.760 | services because I got into the business more with an interest in finance and personal finance

00:13:12.640 | rather than being entirely focused on making a fortune for myself, I was focused on education.

00:13:19.880 | And I would still love to listen to talk radio, I never listened to music, I still really

00:13:26.120 | don't, and so I listened to talk radio, and then this was the early days of podcasting,

00:13:30.760 | I had started listening to podcasts in college, and so I would listen to hours and hours and

00:13:35.320 | hours of podcasts.

00:13:37.280 | And as I learned and studied, over time I became a chartered life underwriter and a

00:13:42.040 | chartered financial consultant and a certified financial planner, and about four or five

00:13:46.000 | other designations, I ultimately started pursuing a master's degree in financial services, and

00:13:51.020 | ultimately finished that, and as I grew to learn more and more, I found that I couldn't

00:13:55.640 | really enjoy financial media the way that I once did.

00:14:00.120 | And I just, the biggest frustration in my life was when I'd be sitting at a table talking

00:14:05.900 | to somebody about finance and they would say, "Well Dave Ramsey says such and such, or Suze

00:14:09.800 | Orman says such and such," and I just got annoyed that it seemed like Dave Ramsey could

00:14:13.700 | spend more time speaking to my clients than I could, and I thought, "Well Dave Ramsey

00:14:18.000 | doesn't know anything about financial planning, he's saying this is this that's wrong, this

00:14:21.740 | that's wrong, this that's wrong, and Dave's not looking at it from this perspective and

00:14:24.720 | that perspective and the other perspective, and after all, I should be the guy who is

00:14:30.060 | doing this."

00:14:31.240 | And so as I observed this, and I became aware, I started listening to a couple of podcasts

00:14:36.360 | about podcasting, and I thought, you know what, it's probably not that hard, I should

00:14:41.160 | start a podcast.

00:14:43.340 | And the challenge is that being in a regulated industry, I figured, you know what, I'm not

00:14:50.120 | sure if I can do this, and I tried to look into the laws, I tried to, I spoke to a couple

00:14:54.040 | of lawyers, and I thought I had found a solution, I thought that, you know what, I could start

00:14:59.940 | a podcast if I could do it and not make wrong, forward-looking statements and absurd claims

00:15:09.840 | and things like that, and I just did it anonymously, I didn't tell people I was a financial advisor,

00:15:14.480 | then I could start a podcast, and then I would have the ability to say to my clients, "Hey,

00:15:19.320 | listen to this, I did a podcast on this subject, here's an hour of me teaching about this thing.

00:15:24.020 | One of the things that annoyed me as a financial advisor was that, in essence, you have to

00:15:29.660 | have the same conversations very repetitively.

00:15:33.980 | And I just grew really frustrated with it, I thought, why do I have to have this conversation

00:15:38.340 | again and again, why can't I just send somebody a video that I make or an audio file that

00:15:42.840 | I make and explain, hey, listen to this, and then you'll know everything about, there's

00:15:48.520 | these 10 questions you're going to ask me, and I'm going to answer all these upfront,

00:15:52.300 | but I'm going to do it in a way that's going to be really time-effective.

00:15:55.160 | And of course, I didn't have to start a podcast to do that, I could have just recorded those

00:15:58.520 | audio files and done it, but I wasn't smart enough to actually follow through and do that

00:16:01.920 | at the time, I didn't test it and see how it would work.

00:16:09.080 | So I decided I would start a podcast, and so in 2013, I sat down in my spare bedroom

00:16:16.120 | with a cheap little voice recorder that I had gotten with my Dragon Naturally Speaking

00:16:19.920 | subscription and recorded episode one of Radical Personal Finance, and I have still kept it

00:16:26.280 | in the podcast feed.

00:16:27.280 | So if you're interested in listening to episode one, it is still there.

00:16:31.280 | And it's available and you can hear it, it was just me talking, basically giving my frustrations

00:16:35.720 | and my vision of what I thought a good financial podcast could be and what I was going to try

00:16:41.520 | to do.

00:16:42.560 | Then I worked through all the tech of figuring out how to launch it, and then I started recording

00:16:46.100 | more podcast episodes, so I wound up in the first three weeks, I recorded 10 episodes,

00:16:50.820 | and I found that I really loved doing it, I felt like it was good.

00:16:55.160 | After I had recorded episode one, I went back and listened to it, and I basically just asked

00:16:59.400 | myself the question, would I listen to that?

00:17:01.800 | And after all, here I am as a guy who listens to huge amounts of talk radio and podcasts

00:17:06.900 | and things like that, and I recognized that, yeah, I would listen to that, it wasn't terrible,

00:17:11.000 | it kept my interest.

00:17:12.420 | And so I said, "Well, good enough for me, let's keep going."

00:17:15.720 | So I recorded 10 episodes of the podcast in the first three weeks, figured out how to

00:17:18.620 | get a logo, figured out how to get an RSS feed online, did all the stuff, and was just

00:17:23.540 | getting going.

00:17:25.180 | During that time, again, I had spoken with a lawyer at the home office and I thought,

00:17:29.020 | "Okay, I need to go ahead and make sure they know about it, I've got the legal standing

00:17:35.980 | here."

00:17:36.980 | So then I submitted an outside business activity form to my chief compliance officer, letting

00:17:41.940 | her know what I was doing.

00:17:43.540 | I get a phone call, and she basically says, "Joshua, are you crazy?

00:17:49.700 | What on earth are you doing?

00:17:50.820 | How could you possibly think that this is something that you're allowed to do?

00:17:53.740 | What is wrong with you?

00:17:55.360 | Take that thing off the internet, you can't have this on the internet."

00:17:58.280 | And basically, I was given an ultimatum of either take it off the internet or you're

00:18:01.840 | done here today.

00:18:02.840 | Well, at the time, my wife was six months pregnant with our first baby, and I had spent

00:18:07.860 | six years building a financial planning business that was finally profitable, was finally working,

00:18:12.760 | I was finally making money, it wasn't that hard, I was pretty good at it, and I had no

00:18:18.920 | idea of what to do with a podcast, it was just kind of an interest of mine.

00:18:25.900 | And so I took it down.

00:18:27.780 | And I remember that being an enormous emotional crisis for me.

00:18:32.940 | I remember writing Cliff Ravenscraft, the podcast answer man, this emotional email of,

00:18:40.340 | "Here's my thing, I don't know what to do," and just kind of dealing with it.

00:18:45.100 | And it took me a while to calm down a little bit and just deal with the emotions of it.

00:18:50.680 | And I just decided to try to think, "Well, what's going on here?"

00:18:53.420 | And I started to look at the number of people who had downloaded the podcast, I had a few

00:18:57.040 | emails by them, and then I started to do a little research and I realized that, hey,

00:19:01.020 | a lot of people had actually started listening to the podcast, that the initial download

00:19:04.600 | numbers were pretty healthy, and people were interested in what I had to say, which was

00:19:08.680 | very, which was pretty cool.

00:19:11.100 | And more importantly, I had found that I really loved the experience of recording it.

00:19:15.240 | All during those first three weeks, it was an obsession.

00:19:17.700 | I was getting up at four o'clock in the morning, working late at night, recording the podcast,

00:19:22.820 | just loving every minute of it, and I realized that was a real obsession of mine to talk

00:19:27.140 | about this.

00:19:28.140 | And I imagined all the different things that it would be interesting to dig into, that

00:19:32.080 | you can't dig into in the life of a normal everyday financial advisor.

00:19:36.440 | But I had no plan.

00:19:38.060 | And so it took me about six months to become convinced that this was something that I wanted

00:19:43.520 | to pursue.

00:19:45.180 | And then the problem was that I had no plan.

00:19:49.380 | And podcasting was just a crapshoot.

00:19:51.720 | There was no way to know how to make money on it, because basically I became convinced

00:19:56.600 | that if you have an audience, then there's lots of ways to make money.

00:20:00.120 | If you don't have an audience, there's no way to make money, and it all comes down to

00:20:03.360 | having an audience.

00:20:04.360 | Well, how do you know if you can have an audience?

00:20:06.300 | Well, ordinarily, the appropriate path would be to build an audience, little by little,

00:20:12.240 | and then only make some kind of change when you have an audience.

00:20:17.300 | But since I wasn't allowed to do a podcast, then I didn't see any pathway forward.

00:20:23.240 | What am I supposed to do?

00:20:24.800 | So at that time, I decided that I needed another plan.

00:20:30.520 | Now, I had money saved, I wasn't broke, but I had, again, a newborn baby and a wife to

00:20:37.120 | take care of, and I was the sole income earner for our household and wasn't going to change

00:20:43.420 | that.

00:20:44.420 | And so I figured, well, what do I do?

00:20:45.420 | How am I going to get myself out of this mess?

00:20:47.740 | And I wasn't willing to spend savings down because there was no predictability with it.

00:20:55.000 | I didn't know how long.

00:20:56.620 | Do you need to do a podcast for five years and then you make a dollar?

00:20:59.380 | Do you need to do it for five months and then make a dollar?

00:21:01.660 | I had no ability to project.

00:21:03.820 | So finally, I realized that the way to solve the problem was two things.

00:21:09.280 | Number one was to leave financial services because if I couldn't do this as a licensed

00:21:15.200 | individual, then I would just leave financial services and step two, get a job.

00:21:21.560 | And I just needed a job, any kind of job doing anything else in the world that would allow

00:21:26.240 | me to record a podcast on the side.

00:21:29.020 | So I looked around.

00:21:30.120 | I thought about selling cars.

00:21:32.680 | I went and interviewed with-- I was looking for sales jobs.

00:21:35.860 | So I went and interviewed with selling cars, thought about a number of different things,

00:21:38.540 | tried a handful of different things.

00:21:40.720 | But ultimately, I was able to get a job working as a back office financial planner.

00:21:46.580 | And once I secured that, then I closed my business, surrendered all of my licenses,

00:21:52.980 | canceled all my licenses, and started.

00:21:57.300 | And so again, what I negotiated was I was working as a back office financial planner

00:22:01.260 | for a financial planning firm.

00:22:03.100 | So I would create financial plans for other advisors, and then I would train young advisors

00:22:09.180 | on how to present them, how to understand the financial planning, et cetera.

00:22:12.920 | And that was just enough to make a living.

00:22:15.100 | Wasn't making anything more than covering my bills, but it allowed me to podcast work

00:22:18.280 | from home, et cetera.

00:22:19.780 | And so in 2014, I shut down my business, surrendered all my licenses, and launched.

00:22:27.660 | And that was episode 11 of Radical Personal Finance in July of 2014.

00:22:34.700 | And so in those early months, I didn't have a plan other than just to podcast as much

00:22:39.060 | as I could-- podcast, podcast, podcast.

00:22:41.880 | And so I was basically doing four to five episodes a week.

00:22:46.580 | And I was trying to figure out, well, as the show started to grow and continued to grow,

00:22:50.500 | I was trying to figure out, how do I make a living off of this thing?

00:22:54.020 | In the early years, my plan was to go ahead and start a new financial planning firm because

00:22:59.740 | I had figured out that if I registered my own registered investment advisory firm, RIA,

00:23:07.000 | that I could be my own chief compliance officer.

00:23:10.140 | And if I was my own chief compliance officer and I wanted to go and do a podcast, then

00:23:15.320 | I could go and do a podcast.

00:23:17.360 | And to comment on that for a moment, there's no fundamental reason why a financial advisor

00:23:24.380 | or an insurance agent is legally barred from having a podcast.

00:23:30.000 | You would know that because many financial advisors for years have had radio shows where

00:23:34.360 | they answer questions and they advertise their services.

00:23:39.060 | And podcasting is fundamentally no different.

00:23:41.060 | A financial advisor may go and have a morning money minute, can go and be interviewed on

00:23:46.140 | a talk show.

00:23:47.140 | And YouTube and podcasts are just other expressions of that.

00:23:50.340 | The problem comes down to a large firm controlling its liability.

00:23:55.320 | If you have a large company that has a bunch of lots and lots of agents, then they have

00:24:00.960 | to create very large policies to protect their liability.

00:24:06.340 | And an enormous company like Northwestern Mutual, who I was working for, is not going

00:24:12.860 | to let every agent just go out and start a podcast.

00:24:16.060 | So they did have a compliance route for doing things like TV appearances at the time.

00:24:22.980 | And I'm a decade removed from the business, so I don't know much about it anymore.

00:24:26.420 | But at the time, the process was if you were going to go be on the local TV show, you would

00:24:31.580 | write out a script of everything you were going to say.

00:24:34.020 | You would submit the script to the compliance attorneys in advance.

00:24:37.480 | They would review the script, give you their approval.

00:24:39.580 | You would go do the show, and then you would, of course, have to keep a copy of it in the

00:24:44.300 | compliance records in case it was ever needed.

00:24:47.060 | And that was how you could go and do public appearances.

00:24:49.540 | But I couldn't figure out any way that I could possibly do that with a podcast.

00:24:53.060 | I wanted to do a lot of content, and there was just no way.

00:24:56.300 | And they wouldn't let me advertise it, so I just threw up my hands.

00:24:59.940 | But if I opened my own REA, then I could be my chief compliance officer, and I could do

00:25:05.620 | that.

00:25:06.620 | And basically, the thing you really have to stay away from if you're a licensed financial

00:25:10.260 | advisor is just being a bozo and making forward-looking, ridiculous statements.

00:25:17.620 | So you would never say, "Hey, the stock market is going to go up by 50% next year.

00:25:21.900 | Here's why you should buy this fund."

00:25:23.500 | But most normal, educated, ethical financial advisors don't even get anywhere near those

00:25:28.060 | kinds of things.

00:25:29.060 | So it really doesn't matter.

00:25:31.540 | So that was the original plan.

00:25:32.700 | I wrote up the paperwork, wrote my form ADV, I filed it with the state, I was waiting for

00:25:39.520 | approval when the show really started to go well, and I started to have a significant

00:25:45.140 | number of listeners.

00:25:47.140 | And I looked at the amount of time that I was investing into the podcast, and I realized,

00:25:51.920 | I don't know that I can do both of these things.

00:25:54.140 | I don't think I can be a good financial advisor and also a good podcaster.

00:25:58.180 | I don't think they work well together for the same reason why it's hard to be a good

00:26:01.020 | financial planner and a portfolio manager.

00:26:03.900 | The jobs are just better served by two people.

00:26:06.700 | It's better to have a financial planner and a portfolio manager working side by side just

00:26:11.980 | like it'd be better to have a financial planner and a podcaster working side by side so that

00:26:17.820 | you have one person who's doing marketing, who's doing the public-facing stuff, and you

00:26:21.340 | have another person who's meeting with clients.

00:26:23.660 | Because the burden for a financial advisor of serving clients and serving them effectively,

00:26:28.020 | it's a significant amount of time, a significant amount of work.

00:26:31.540 | And I didn't see how I could do both.

00:26:37.240 | So I withdrew my application for the RIA before it was approved and decided I was just going

00:26:44.040 | to go all in on podcasting and keep financial planning as a backup option.

00:26:49.620 | I decided that—so one more comment—one of the things that frustrated me for many years was

00:26:58.520 | the enormous quantity of real conflicts of interest and perceived conflicts of interest

00:27:07.660 | in the financial planning business.

00:27:10.460 | I'm someone who cares deeply about ethics, morality, right and wrong.

00:27:15.860 | Part of it is my nature.

00:27:17.580 | Part of it is how I was raised.

00:27:19.640 | Part of it is just, I don't know, I guess by nature.

00:27:23.340 | It's an inward—I want to see the weak and the innocent protected.

00:27:27.420 | I despise bullies.

00:27:28.820 | I despise predators.

00:27:33.340 | So it's important to me to deal with those things.

00:27:36.860 | And when you're in financial planning or any aspect of financial services, it's an extreme—it

00:27:42.080 | can be—it's certainly an industry that is fraught with risk and potential problems.

00:27:48.760 | And in many cases throughout history, it is and has been an extremely predatory business.

00:27:55.720 | Because of the nature of the business, where you're dealing with large amounts of money,

00:28:02.440 | where people can get rich quick, it attracts a certain type of person.

00:28:08.080 | And there's a high correlation between the kind of people who are attracted to financial

00:28:11.600 | services and to predators.

00:28:14.960 | There are also other people who are attracted who want to serve people and want to help

00:28:19.360 | people effectively.

00:28:20.780 | But because there's big money and it's all other people's money and there are enormous

00:28:24.780 | leverage abilities, financial services attracts a lot of predators.

00:28:30.000 | And so those predators prey on innocent, helpless, undefenseless—excuse me—defenseless people.

00:28:37.280 | And that creates a very difficult reputation for the industry.

00:28:44.640 | And at the time, I was very young.

00:28:46.920 | When I started in financial services, I was 23 years old.

00:28:50.560 | And so I was very young.

00:28:53.000 | And I didn't have the kind of self-confidence that a more mature man would have.

00:28:58.000 | And so all the things, even just selling life insurance, for whatever reason, there were—I

00:29:02.320 | don't know if there still are, but maybe just my perspective has changed.

00:29:05.800 | But there were all kinds of reputational issues about people being life insurance salesmen.

00:29:12.080 | Life insurance salesmen were perceived as being aggressive and pushy and all of that,

00:29:17.040 | especially whole life insurance salesmen.

00:29:20.820 | And I didn't want to be associated with a lot of that.

00:29:23.920 | Today, I now appreciate life insurance salesmen more than I ever did, but that just has come

00:29:29.980 | with maturity.

00:29:31.940 | So I was frustrated with the conflicts of interest.

00:29:35.280 | And I remember when I finally got out of the industry, and I finally had severed all of

00:29:43.140 | my licenses.

00:29:45.360 | And I was sitting at the breakfast table with my family, and I realized I feel free.

00:29:52.400 | I feel free for the first time in years.

00:29:59.880 | And I realized how heavy the burden of all of that was on me.

00:30:04.800 | And it's not only conflicts of interest and perceived conflicts of interest, but when

00:30:09.760 | you're a financial advisor, you constantly have to think about making the right decision

00:30:13.800 | every single time.

00:30:14.800 | You have to think about your duties to the client.

00:30:17.920 | You have to keep careful case notes for when you get sued.

00:30:20.720 | It's just a nonstop, never-ending burden.

00:30:26.800 | And even those who manage it straightforwardly still wind up with issues.

00:30:33.520 | Because in that business, even the most righteous of intentions don't work out, because people

00:30:41.200 | are people.

00:30:42.200 | I remember, as an example of this, I remember one friend of mine who was a young lady.

00:30:49.260 | I came along, counseled her with finances.

00:30:52.040 | I helped her set up an investment plan, helped her open up a Roth IRA, helped her get life

00:31:00.460 | insurance.

00:31:02.000 | And I sold her a small whole life insurance policy.

00:31:06.560 | And it fit.

00:31:09.240 | Everything was good.

00:31:10.240 | My recommendations were prudent.

00:31:11.840 | Everything was good.

00:31:13.340 | There was nothing that was wrong with my professional recommendations.

00:31:17.260 | Everything that I had recommended to her was reasonable and appropriate.

00:31:21.120 | And then three months later, maybe six months, I don't remember.

00:31:25.560 | But some months later, she cancels everything and bails on the whole plan.

00:31:32.700 | And when you do that, you lose all your money.

00:31:36.160 | You lose all your money in the life insurance policy.

00:31:38.120 | You get back money on investments, less commissions and fees that I had gotten paid.

00:31:43.880 | But the worst was she just canceled everything.

00:31:46.460 | And of course, I got chargebacks, et cetera.

00:31:49.000 | And it took me a while to figure it out, because what I realized was I had a very forceful

00:31:54.920 | personality.

00:31:55.920 | I never used aggressive sales tactics.

00:31:58.900 | I think to the extent that life insurance agents ever used to use those aggressive sales

00:32:03.920 | tactics, that was basically a 1980s thing.

00:32:06.360 | And it just wasn't a thing when I'm-- and I don't think it's a thing anymore.

00:32:11.320 | But I was good at painting a vision.

00:32:14.840 | I was good at showing people where they could be, helping them see a vision of where they

00:32:19.440 | could be in 30 years if they started saving money.

00:32:23.740 | And yet when I would disappear, then they would get distracted and do other things.

00:32:27.440 | And I just felt terrible.

00:32:30.160 | And so it was just an example of how you do your very best, then things don't work out.

00:32:33.680 | And you know then that you've harmed someone.

00:32:35.800 | And of course, you've been harmed yourself, because all your commissions are reversed.

00:32:38.920 | You now have a reversal on your history, et cetera.

00:32:43.520 | It's frustrating.

00:32:44.860 | But I had harmed someone, even though I had the best of intentions.

00:32:49.400 | So being free of all that felt amazing.

00:32:52.120 | And my mission in the early days of the show was I don't ever want to go back into those

00:32:56.980 | conflicts of interest.

00:32:57.980 | I want to be perfectly objective.

00:32:59.700 | I want to have perfect objectivity.

00:33:04.260 | And so this guided my early efforts on the show.

00:33:06.240 | So in the beginning of the show, I said, I'm going to build a podcast that doesn't rely

00:33:12.620 | on things that would harm my objectivity.

00:33:16.540 | I'm not going to take any sponsors.

00:33:18.380 | I'm not going to take any ads.

00:33:20.060 | I'm exclusively going to work with people in a purely independent and objective way.

00:33:27.000 | That was the vision.

00:33:28.000 | That was the goal.

00:33:29.760 | So my first plan was to build a listener support model.

00:33:32.320 | At the time, I was a great admirer of Jack Spierko and his The Survival Podcast.

00:33:38.040 | And he had built his revenue model on a listener support model, where he had some extra member

00:33:46.580 | resources and things like that for those who supported his show financially.

00:33:50.760 | And he had some advertisers.

00:33:52.680 | And so I thought, this is a good model.

00:33:54.800 | I like how this is going to work.

00:33:56.560 | So I started building a membership site.

00:33:59.300 | And some of the difficult early stories, I think I was planning on launching the membership

00:34:06.220 | site with episode 100 was the plans.

00:34:08.700 | I built out this membership site.

00:34:10.840 | And it was going to be a voluntary contribution for my audience to support me so I could be

00:34:15.400 | independent of conflicts of interest.

00:34:18.660 | And somewhere around, let's call it, episode 95, right before I'm ready to launch my membership

00:34:24.300 | site, I was getting everything ready and changing with some of the settings with my RSS feed,

00:34:29.680 | which is the technical behind-the-scenes thing that makes podcasts work.

00:34:33.220 | And I wound up deleting my RSS feed.

00:34:36.380 | And so I went overnight.

00:34:39.900 | Right before my big launch, I deleted my entire RSS feed.

00:34:45.080 | Then I deleted all of my subscribers.

00:34:47.560 | I can laugh now, but it was not fun at the time.

00:34:51.380 | And it was an innocent mistake.

00:34:52.500 | I can't remember any of the technical details at the moment.

00:34:54.600 | I was trying to redirect something.

00:34:57.180 | And I pushed the red button somehow that I didn't know was a dangerous thing.

00:35:03.380 | And so I launched my listener support model with my new membership site.

00:35:08.740 | And the whole thing fizzled.

00:35:12.220 | And it took a while.

00:35:13.220 | It took a couple of months.

00:35:14.620 | But all my listeners eventually found their way back and more.

00:35:18.500 | But it was a pretty difficult-- it was a pretty challenging thing.

00:35:22.580 | Anyway, some people signed up for the listener support model.

00:35:25.140 | And that was good.

00:35:26.180 | But then I faced this challenge that every time I would sit down to create-- I was trying

00:35:30.920 | to figure out, what is the value proposition?

00:35:32.700 | What do I offer to my members that they're willing to pay for?

00:35:38.220 | And my ambition, because of all this conflict of interest stuff, was my ambition was always

00:35:42.220 | to provide a 10x return on anything that someone would pay me.

00:35:45.420 | So if someone's going to pay me $50, I want them to get $500 worth of value.

00:35:49.640 | It's always what I've shot for.

00:35:51.580 | And I tried.

00:35:54.980 | But every time I would sit down to create extra content, I would just say, oh, this

00:35:57.900 | is too good.

00:35:58.900 | I should just put this out on the show.

00:36:00.280 | So I would just create more podcasts.

00:36:01.280 | I would just podcast, podcast, podcast, podcast.

00:36:03.700 | And I basically didn't have much to offer the listeners.

00:36:08.060 | And it was sort of kind of working.

00:36:11.040 | Along the way, I upgraded the website.

00:36:13.500 | And a friend of mine is a web developer.

00:36:15.160 | So he started building me a really beautiful website.

00:36:17.780 | So we just scrapped the whole listener thing.

00:36:20.940 | And I replaced it with other things.

00:36:22.780 | I don't need to go through the blow by blow.

00:36:24.440 | But these were continual themes along the way that, over the last 1,000 episodes of

00:36:29.500 | things that I tried to figure out and struggled with, I would do things like ads.

00:36:34.780 | I would bring on ads, sponsorships, and then some of them were a good fit.

00:36:39.580 | Some of them weren't a good fit.

00:36:40.860 | I always worried, well, I have to personally vet all the sponsors.

00:36:44.780 | And I have to do this personal endorsement.

00:36:47.360 | And that was something that became very difficult to do because how do I check out a company

00:36:51.340 | well enough to know that they are excellent, et cetera?

00:36:57.340 | And again, I don't need to go through all of the twists and turns.

00:37:01.460 | But I'm trying to share just a little bit so that you can understand that while the

00:37:05.640 | life of a podcaster might seem exotic and, oh, it was just wonderful if you've just got

00:37:11.700 | a great podcast and it's all made, no, it's work.

00:37:15.100 | It's a business just like anything else.

00:37:17.100 | I enjoy it.

00:37:18.100 | I enjoy being able to exercise my ideas for the most part.

00:37:21.840 | But the twists and turns of the business model are difficult.

00:37:28.500 | What I've ultimately done, which has turned out to be a pretty good fit, was, number one,

00:37:34.820 | I started taking on private clients from the work.

00:37:38.220 | So at various times, I have done a number of different things.

00:37:42.660 | But the things that have really stuck is, number one, I have a small number of entrepreneurs

00:37:48.100 | that I work with on an ongoing coaching basis.

00:37:51.820 | And it usually starts with personal finance, I mean, financial planning, et cetera.

00:37:57.880 | People like my objectivity and the fact that I still don't have any connections with--

00:38:03.360 | I've never sold financial products on here.

00:38:05.560 | I've never made those kinds of connections.

00:38:07.840 | And so I have ongoing clients that I work with on an ongoing basis.

00:38:14.940 | And that I really enjoy.

00:38:17.380 | I really enjoy working with entrepreneurs because it brings together all the best of

00:38:24.000 | everything from personal finance and just kind of standard CFP-type stuff.

00:38:28.860 | It brings in, a lot of times, all the international stuff that I really enjoy.

00:38:32.700 | And it brings in all the business stuff and all the marketing and things like that.

00:38:36.020 | That's worked out well.

00:38:37.020 | The second thing that I do related to individuals is I offer paid consultations.

00:38:42.160 | What has worked well is I offer these throughout the year at different times.

00:38:46.080 | But these are just straightforward phone consultations.

00:38:49.700 | And what I like about them is that I'm able to focus on the 80% return, which is the ideas

00:38:58.640 | or the direction.

00:39:00.600 | I've developed a pretty unique skill of usually being able to cut to the heart of an idea

00:39:06.560 | due to broad knowledge and exposure and due to just broad interest.

00:39:11.840 | I can usually focus on the heart of the idea.

00:39:14.300 | What I cut out of the equation is all of the implementation stuff.

00:39:18.520 | So I don't implement financial plans the way that a financial planner would do.

00:39:22.420 | I don't go through and make sure everything gets signed and et cetera.

00:39:24.920 | And so it's kind of up to a client.

00:39:26.680 | Client shows up.

00:39:27.680 | They pay me.

00:39:28.680 | And at the end of the phone call, I'm done.

00:39:30.600 | I move on.

00:39:31.780 | And then if there's implementation or follow-through, then that has to be accomplished by the client.

00:39:38.080 | And it's an imperfect model because a huge component of the usefulness of a financial

00:39:43.600 | planner is being able to prod people forward and get them to take action when they otherwise

00:39:49.120 | wouldn't.

00:39:50.160 | As with most of us, how much better would we be if we had coaches in all the important

00:39:53.600 | areas of our lives nagging us and prodding us and reminding us for all the things that

00:39:58.280 | are necessary so that we continue to press forward?

00:40:01.080 | That's really great, but it's not something that I'm interested in doing.

00:40:04.640 | And so offering those kinds of consultations has been good.

00:40:09.400 | I also have found that I really enjoy teaching courses and I create all my courses from scratch.

00:40:17.640 | And basically what I've discovered is my personal superpower is I am world class at taking a

00:40:27.040 | subject that I'm interested in, absorbing either all of the material or huge quantities

00:40:33.360 | of the material that is available on the subject, and then organizing and synthesizing those

00:40:40.420 | ideas to where they're practical.

00:40:44.120 | And that's what I'm really good at.

00:40:47.160 | And so then the natural expression of that is to take that and reorganize the material

00:40:52.060 | from a question or a topic or whatever that we're dealing with, reorganize the material

00:40:59.320 | in a way that makes sense so that you understand what's important now and what's important

00:41:05.040 | later and you can move through a process of change in a really effective and efficient

00:41:09.560 | way.

00:41:10.880 | And for me, creating those courses is, again, a real joy because I'm able to, I think, answer

00:41:22.000 | questions that people have about seeming paradoxes in various industries.

00:41:28.960 | And I'm able to do that by using things like a lens of scale or understanding what matters

00:41:33.680 | now.

00:41:34.680 | And this is why so much, and helping people understand where is advice actually in conflict

00:41:41.520 | and where are you just perceiving advice to be in conflict.

00:41:45.600 | And most financial issues especially really are fairly straightforward.

00:41:51.160 | And if somebody understands both sides of an argument or eight sides of an argument,

00:41:58.040 | you can see how it's the individual conditions of the person that ultimately determine which

00:42:05.680 | of these eight arguments is the correct argument.

00:42:08.400 | And to me, that stuff just falls in place pretty easily and logically, et cetera.

00:42:13.300 | So I've tried to do that with my courses, and I'm pretty satisfied with most of them.

00:42:18.080 | Put some of them on the market, pulled some of them off, gone back and forth.

00:42:23.920 | But I'm satisfied with the quality of the content.

00:42:25.760 | I've never been really satisfied with the quality of the production.

00:42:28.880 | One of the things that's happened in the world of ideas is simply we have created more beautiful

00:42:38.080 | production around ideas, and that has made it harder for idea people to match that level

00:42:45.140 | of production.

00:42:47.200 | There's a real balance here because-- let me just articulate this to teach the concept.

00:42:58.200 | Books are a profoundly valuable way to share ideas.

00:43:06.400 | And throughout history, one of the key features of a book is simply that a book requires one

00:43:12.900 | person to create it.

00:43:15.220 | One man can sit down with a notebook, a legal pad, and a pen and write a book.

00:43:21.240 | And that book, if he has skill as a writer, that book can be powerful and persuasive.

00:43:26.440 | And that's all of the great books that we read.

00:43:28.700 | That's how they've been created with one guy sitting at his desk writing it out, one lady

00:43:34.740 | with a vision for what she wanted to create sitting down and writing out the book.

00:43:39.700 | Most other forms of media require a much larger team.

00:43:43.480 | This is the difference between a book and a movie.

00:43:45.140 | A movie, to bring a movie to fruition, requires an enormous team of skilled specialists to

00:43:51.500 | create something.

00:43:53.180 | And in some cases, it's better and more satisfying than the written version.

00:43:57.580 | In many cases, it's not.

00:43:59.780 | But it requires a lot more specialists.

00:44:04.040 | In the past, the way to get rich on ideas was to write them down and then sell people

00:44:10.500 | the ideas for a cost.

00:44:14.080 | And that has been a very effective business model.

00:44:16.740 | I've spent a lot of money over the years on extremely valuable information products.

00:44:21.300 | I still reference many of those information products.

00:44:25.380 | Today, the expectations have changed, and digital courses, because of their ease of

00:44:30.820 | administration and delivery, have become much more attractive.

00:44:35.640 | But creating successful digital courses starts to create the problem of transfer, of needing

00:44:44.320 | a big team, the same way that you have the problem of needing a big team to create a

00:44:47.480 | movie as compared to writing a novel.

00:44:50.240 | And so I've always been frustrated with my ability to create the high production value

00:44:54.680 | that I've wanted.

00:44:58.880 | And so that's one of the reasons I took a lot of my courses down.

00:45:02.580 | Not complaining, not saying I should have, just sharing honestly a little bit about the

00:45:06.700 | journey.

00:45:08.700 | Fast forward, those are the basic-- and then advertising, of course, I have ads on Radical

00:45:16.100 | Personal Finance now.

00:45:17.580 | It has been frustrating to me to figure out a solution for that.

00:45:21.660 | I had planned to create a solution where there were ads, and then there was a premium version

00:45:26.580 | where you could just pay to have the ads off.

00:45:29.080 | That hasn't worked, but the ads matter.

00:45:32.420 | They pay me enough to keep me wanting to go and wanting to create podcasts.

00:45:38.120 | And so those are the basic things that I have done.

00:45:40.800 | Now in the future, there's a lot more room for more things, but I'm not getting into

00:45:45.020 | the future today.

00:45:46.020 | Just sharing that these are some of the twists and turns of entrepreneurship.

00:45:49.460 | Thanks to you, the show has grown.

00:45:51.320 | The show has provided a lot of opportunity for me.

00:45:54.620 | Radical Personal Finance, I haven't looked up recent numbers, but it's in the top few

00:45:57.280 | percent of all podcasts.

00:45:59.580 | Right now, with episode 1,000, my total downloads-- and these numbers change based upon whether

00:46:05.260 | you want to use impressive numbers or less impressive numbers, and there's a bunch of

00:46:09.700 | metrics for measuring this-- but something like 30 million downloads, just under 30 million

00:46:14.380 | downloads for episode 1,000, which is great.

00:46:18.100 | And it's been quite the journey.

00:46:20.940 | I've enjoyed it.

00:46:22.420 | Speaking personally, my longtime listeners have gone with us on quite a journey.

00:46:27.620 | I never really expected all of the twists and turns over the last 10 years, but I'm

00:46:32.800 | grateful for them.

00:46:34.660 | When I began the show originally-- again, my wife was pregnant with our first baby,

00:46:39.100 | and then the second launch in 2014, we had our first baby.

00:46:42.340 | Well, fast forward 10 years later, here we are in 2024, and we've had five babies.

00:46:49.480 | We've traveled quite a lot.

00:46:51.260 | We've lived in multiple places.

00:46:53.700 | We've traveled a good amount.

00:46:55.620 | We've traveled all around the United States, lived in an RV with our three children.

00:47:00.820 | We've lived abroad.

00:47:01.820 | We've traveled around the world.

00:47:03.340 | I don't know how many countries, but quite a lot.

00:47:07.860 | And a lot of that stuff has just been me testing things.

00:47:11.300 | I enjoy learning ideas, testing them, and sharing with you some of the lessons that

00:47:16.300 | I have learned.

00:47:17.780 | And radical personal finance, in many ways, has been a perfect outlet for me in that way.

00:47:23.420 | I can take an idea that I'm really interested in, I can talk about that idea, I can learn

00:47:27.580 | about that idea, I can share with you the ideas and concepts, and then see those ideas

00:47:36.420 | implemented in other people's lives.

00:47:37.940 | And that's been really exciting.

00:47:40.420 | Some of the things I never anticipated.

00:47:42.060 | So I never anticipated leaving the United States.

00:47:44.260 | That was not 10 years ago.

00:47:46.460 | It wouldn't have surprised me, I guess, if you had said, this is where you'll be.

00:47:49.940 | Just because, OK, I'm open to that.

00:47:51.500 | But it was never a plan.

00:47:52.500 | It was just one of those things that's a reaction to various events, and saw an opportunity,

00:47:57.460 | and went for it, and then learned a little bit more, and then realized, hey, you know

00:48:00.900 | what?

00:48:01.900 | I kind of like this stuff.

00:48:03.380 | And that was part of the dream.

00:48:06.500 | Also, though, the dream has changed, and even just the business plan has changed over the

00:48:11.500 | years.

00:48:12.500 | When I was 15 years old, that was the point in which we were first starting to use the

00:48:19.300 | internet to sell ideas to one another, and sell packages.

00:48:23.940 | And I remember I bought some online business course at 15, and I developed the goal of

00:48:30.340 | a laptop lifestyle.

00:48:32.220 | And I wanted to be able to make money from my laptop.

00:48:34.560 | That way I could live anywhere in the world, do what I want, and live how I want.

00:48:38.780 | And it took me 15 years to accomplish it, but eventually I did.

00:48:43.100 | And in the beginning, my goals were rather modest.

00:48:48.740 | When I started Radical Personal Finance, I wasn't trying to make a million dollars.

00:48:52.600 | I wanted to make 100 grand from a laptop, because I figured with geo arbitrage, and

00:48:56.660 | with time arbitrage, and et cetera, if I can make 100 grand from a laptop anywhere in the

00:49:01.100 | world, man, I'm doing well.

00:49:02.580 | And so that was good.

00:49:04.320 | It took me, I don't know, two, three years to do that.

00:49:07.180 | And I was content.

00:49:09.460 | That was what I was going for.

00:49:12.000 | And then I realized though that because that model of just kind of a rather modest business,

00:49:21.720 | I realized that I was never going to be able to have the kind of impact that I was capable

00:49:27.280 | of having.

00:49:28.280 | I remember distinctly in the beginning of 2017, I was reading my Bible, and I was reading

00:49:35.300 | the book of Matthew.

00:49:37.140 | And there's a passage in the book of Matthew that really struck me in a way that I had

00:49:43.880 | never thought about.

00:49:45.240 | But it basically says, "Your light of the world, a city set on a hill, cannot be hidden,

00:49:50.400 | nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the stand, and it gives light

00:49:54.660 | to all in the house.

00:49:56.260 | In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works

00:50:03.320 | and give glory to your Father who is in heaven."

00:50:06.640 | And I'm sitting here looking at my Bible, and I have a note in it, but it just seemed

00:50:09.720 | like in 2017, it just felt like with that verse that God spoke to me and said, "Stop

00:50:16.740 | playing small."

00:50:17.740 | And I realized that I had this very small vision, and I needed to change that.

00:50:24.520 | Because if I was going to be faithful, then it's not enough just to see to what I need

00:50:28.960 | or what I want or have enough money to pay my bills, but I needed to be much more diligent

00:50:33.820 | than that.

00:50:34.820 | And that started a process of trying to figure out, "How do I stop playing small?

00:50:38.480 | How do I think bigger?"

00:50:39.480 | And I think this is an appropriate time for me to pivot to, over the years, many things

00:50:44.120 | have changed in my own philosophy relating to money, and long-term listeners have heard

00:50:51.160 | those changes.

00:50:53.020 | Probably one of the biggest ones, if I went back to 10 years, was that when I started

00:50:58.480 | the podcast, I very much saw myself as part of the FIRE movement.

00:51:05.560 | I was extremely interested in financial independence, early retirement.

00:51:10.200 | That was a real vision of mine.

00:51:13.740 | I read all of-- the big influence that I first found was Early Retirement Extreme by Jacob

00:51:20.140 | Lund Fisker, and then this was the time that Mr. Money Mustache became popular, and I read

00:51:24.360 | all of his stuff, and I just loved it.

00:51:26.160 | And I started integrating those concepts with my clients even when I was a financial advisor,

00:51:30.160 | and I was really committed to hyperfrugality and working hard for early retirement as much

00:51:36.720 | as I possibly could.

00:51:38.960 | And when I started Radical Personal Finance, I was still interested in that.

00:51:43.960 | I had made the decision that-- because if I had stayed in traditional financial planning,

00:51:50.160 | I would have made a lot more money faster, and as I saw it, that was a faster path to

00:51:55.160 | financial independence.

00:51:57.200 | But I realized if you have a business that provides you with a lifestyle of financial

00:52:02.640 | independence, it allows you to live the way you want to live, then you don't have to wait

00:52:06.840 | 10 years or 20 years, whatever it takes you to accumulate the money to retire.

00:52:10.240 | You can just do that now.

00:52:11.880 | And I realized, OK, I'll just do that.

00:52:14.020 | And I felt a little bit hypocritical because I was going to be talking about money, but

00:52:17.040 | I figured as long as I'm honest about it, then that'll be fine.

00:52:20.740 | I'll just tell people honestly, but this is why I'm doing it.

00:52:23.240 | After all, there's nothing morally wrong with it.

00:52:25.000 | Just build a lifestyle business instead of trying to build an enormous fortune.

00:52:28.720 | And so I was really, really interested in early retirement.

00:52:33.640 | It was important to me.

00:52:36.100 | But over time, I had a variety of realizations.

00:52:40.520 | The first one was simply that a significant problem for me in those years was not that

00:52:50.840 | I needed to retire from work, but just that I was in a job for which I was poorly suited.

00:52:56.340 | And that was the basic thing.

00:52:58.200 | And I realized what I teach now, it's easier to find a different job than it is to build

00:53:02.860 | a fortune and retire.

00:53:05.520 | And that probably should be the first thing that you do.

00:53:07.760 | And that was why my first course that I did was the Radical Personal Finance Career and

00:53:11.120 | Income Guide.

00:53:12.680 | Because if you can generate your income in a way that is pleasing to you, that provides

00:53:19.620 | you with the kind of lifestyle that you want to live, you don't need to build a fortune

00:53:26.600 | so you can quit work at 30 years old.

00:53:29.600 | And it's better, it's easier for you to spend a couple of years trying different jobs, trying

00:53:35.260 | different businesses, going from this to that until hopefully after a few years, you can

00:53:39.360 | find something that really fits you.

00:53:41.560 | That's a lot easier than building a fortune so that you can retire early.

00:53:45.320 | And that was a big realization that I had.

00:53:47.800 | A second big realization was something that occurred more slowly.

00:53:52.140 | And it's probably just a natural phase change of life.

00:53:55.900 | But I became a lot less selfish in my thinking.

00:54:00.540 | And I started to care more about the world in general, the kingdom of God more specifically,

00:54:08.120 | my own children more specifically.

00:54:11.180 | And I started to realize that it was kind of dumb to spend all my life thinking about

00:54:17.980 | pleasure.

00:54:19.020 | And I realized that that was a unifying theme through much of the content that I was absorbing

00:54:25.400 | at the time, that I was spending all my time listening to people who would go on and on

00:54:29.320 | and on and on about pleasure and happiness and personal pleasure, et cetera, this never

00:54:34.500 | ending list.

00:54:35.760 | There were differences.

00:54:37.120 | Jacob Lundfisker, for example, is not necessarily that way.

00:54:40.200 | He's much more of a guy who wants to be creative.

00:54:43.680 | But Mr. Money Mustache and Tim Ferriss and all these other people that I was really looking

00:54:49.380 | up to and absorbing all their content and really trying to do everything, as I grew

00:54:54.020 | older, I've just come to think of their ideology as very immature and very shortsighted.

00:55:02.080 | And to be clear, I don't want you to think I'm saying more than I am.

00:55:05.360 | They've matured.

00:55:06.360 | They've changed as well.

00:55:07.600 | All of us go through a process of maturing in life.

00:55:09.960 | And so I don't fault them.

00:55:12.000 | But what I realized is I don't want to be one of these guys who sits around and smokes

00:55:16.960 | weed and goes on and on about how all I just do is what I want to do, and I don't make

00:55:22.860 | a difference in the world.

00:55:23.860 | Like, I want to make a difference in the world.

00:55:25.280 | And I expect it to be a rather modest difference, but I still want to make a difference where

00:55:28.520 | I can.

00:55:29.760 | And as I sorted through my own theology and realized that work is not a curse, work is

00:55:35.520 | a blessing, then it's not something that I want to be without.

00:55:40.240 | And I want to work.

00:55:45.080 | And I just want to work in things that are meaningful and things for which I'm well-suited.

00:55:50.320 | So that was an enormous change for me as I stopped being interested in the fire stuff

00:55:56.280 | because it just seems like in many ways, not all, it doesn't have to be, but it seems like

00:56:03.240 | something that attracts people to a rather shallow vision.

00:56:07.860 | And I probably came to that conviction somewhere around, I don't know, 2017, probably 2018.

00:56:16.180 | But I've watched other people come through that journey as well.

00:56:19.280 | And that's really fascinating for me.

00:56:20.320 | I'm glad we come through the journey.

00:56:21.320 | And again, I'm not upset at anybody.

00:56:23.480 | We all go through our own journeys of learning.

00:56:26.800 | And although we wish we could be smarter and find things without learning them the hard

00:56:32.280 | way, a lot of times, of course, we wind up learning things the hard way.

00:56:35.240 | My point is simply that what resonated with me then doesn't resonate with me now.

00:56:40.320 | What resonates with me now is desire for impact and change.

00:56:45.800 | And this leads me to the next topic, which is that a lot of my ideas have changed as

00:56:51.360 | well.

00:56:52.360 | There's some foundational stuff.

00:56:53.360 | For example, I'm no longer as radical as I once was.

00:56:57.760 | I think the radical personal finance brand is good branding.

00:57:01.080 | It really works well.

00:57:02.800 | It's intriguing.

00:57:03.800 | I'm happy with the brand.

00:57:05.600 | But I'm not as radical as I once was.

00:57:09.160 | And the best expression of this is that as I've grown older, I've realized how many of

00:57:15.600 | my radical ideas were not supported by a clear examination of the systems that be.

00:57:26.560 | Rather, it was me looking at something and saying, "Well, here's everything that's wrong

00:57:31.440 | with it, and here I'm going to fix it."

00:57:33.400 | I've come to love the example of Chesterton's fence post, a well-known writer named G.K.

00:57:41.040 | Chesterton.

00:57:42.040 | He wrote something.

00:57:43.040 | I'll read the original quote.

00:57:44.040 | But here's the original quote.

00:57:45.560 | He says, "There exists in such a case a certain institution or law, let us say, for the sake

00:57:52.320 | of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road.

00:57:56.840 | The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, 'I don't see the use of

00:58:01.560 | this.

00:58:02.560 | Let us clear it away.'

00:58:03.560 | To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer, 'If you don't see

00:58:07.560 | the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away.

00:58:12.040 | Go away and think.

00:58:13.520 | Then, when you can come back and tell me what you do see the use of it, tell me that you

00:58:18.400 | do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.'"

00:58:23.200 | And again, that's G.K.

00:58:25.080 | Chesterton.

00:58:26.080 | And what I have realized over the last decade is that when I began radical personal finance,

00:58:31.240 | I was reformer number one.

00:58:33.280 | I was a modern reformer who goes gaily up to the fence and says, "I don't see the use

00:58:37.240 | of this fence.

00:58:38.240 | Let's clear it away.

00:58:39.240 | I don't see the use of working in offices.

00:58:40.720 | Let's get rid of that.

00:58:41.720 | I don't see the use of working on a certain time.

00:58:43.640 | Let's get rid of that.

00:58:44.640 | I don't see the use of working until you're 65.

00:58:48.820 | Let's get rid of that.

00:58:49.820 | I don't see the use of this, that, and the other thing."

00:58:51.720 | Just kind of this very young, immature, find-nothing-but-fault-with-the-system-and-wanna-be-a-fire, a brand-waving revolutionary.

00:59:02.300 | Today, I probably still have that tendency, but today, I'm much more in camp number two,

00:59:10.660 | which I want to understand the structures of society.

00:59:16.280 | I want to understand the structures of life, of finances, et cetera.

00:59:21.400 | I want to understand them very, very well before I call to abolish them.

00:59:29.320 | It's not to say that the opinion and the direction may not still be true, or the overall thing

00:59:36.200 | could be true, but I want to be very cautious about that.

00:59:38.920 | I want to be wise and affirmation.

00:59:40.960 | For example, I still hold lots of unusual opinions.

00:59:46.020 | I'd love to see the welfare state disbanded, but if I were, today, anointed emperor of

00:59:50.780 | the world, I would not disband the welfare state today.

00:59:54.500 | I would try to put in place some kind of slow plan that would actually come to fruition

01:00:02.680 | to make that happen, but it needs to happen slowly.

01:00:06.300 | I'm a bit of a firebrand when it comes to the topic of education.

01:00:09.720 | I think most people should pull their children out of government schools, but if I were anointed

01:00:13.840 | emperor of the universe today, I wouldn't just whole-handed, right away, shutter the

01:00:19.080 | government schools and financial examples as well.

01:00:23.520 | I wouldn't just end everything today.

01:00:24.880 | I wouldn't end the US dollar.

01:00:25.880 | I try to be thoughtful about these things because we need to grow into new changes.

01:00:32.400 | I reflected this years ago with a show that I think it is a show on basically the difference

01:00:37.340 | between revolution and reformation.

01:00:39.700 | When I was younger, I saw myself as I aligned or identified with the revolutionaries.

01:00:47.040 | Today I don't identify with the revolutionaries.

01:00:49.220 | I see the revolutionaries as dangerous.

01:00:51.040 | Today I identify with the reformers, and I don't want to be a revolutionary.

01:00:55.140 | I want to be a reformer.

01:00:58.060 | You can never predict the direction a revolution will go, but you can predict the direction

01:01:02.380 | that reformation can go.

01:01:04.740 | I can clearly see that this is something that's due to age, due to experience.

01:01:08.340 | I can clearly see the frustration that young people have with older people who want to

01:01:14.420 | slow things down.

01:01:16.200 | I hope that my generation, or at least I, can effectively harness the zeal and enthusiasm

01:01:24.160 | that young people have and then point it in a healthy direction and inform it by wisdom.

01:01:30.480 | I don't think that zeal has to always be ignorant.

01:01:33.120 | In fact, it shouldn't be.

01:01:34.540 | I was never one myself who…

01:01:36.900 | I had a lot of zeal.

01:01:37.900 | I still have a lot of zeal, but I've always tried to listen to people.

01:01:42.020 | If people could explain to me a better way, I'll happily get rid of one set of ideas

01:01:46.540 | and adopt another.

01:01:49.820 | I see myself as independent from my ideas in the sense that I can pull any set of ideas

01:01:56.420 | out of my mind, put it on the table, look at it from all the different directions, assess

01:01:59.900 | it, see if it's valid.

01:02:00.900 | If it's valid, I'll pick it up, stick it back in my mind.

01:02:02.560 | If it's not valid, toss it in the garbage can and pick up a new set.

01:02:06.300 | And while certainly ideas are connected, I'm not threatened by thinking about ideas and

01:02:12.440 | talking about them.

01:02:13.440 | And so I hope that we can do a good job of continuing to nurture youthful zeal and enthusiasm,

01:02:20.720 | but it should always be informed by the wisdom of the elders.

01:02:25.800 | And I see that more clearly today than I did a decade ago.

01:02:29.120 | I'm generally satisfied though with testing ideas.

01:02:32.700 | I can share with you some of the ideas that I've tested at Radical Personal Finance.

01:02:37.720 | Tested the concept of entrepreneurship specifically.

01:02:41.660 | And what I'll tell you about entrepreneurship is it is a solution to many of the things

01:02:46.880 | that frustrate people about work and business.

01:02:51.260 | I prize very highly the general sense of independence that I have, the fact that I can say what

01:02:59.060 | I want and do what I want.

01:03:01.500 | That is very meaningful to me.

01:03:04.020 | When I was just starting the podcast, there was a very popular financial brand who had

01:03:13.140 | a very established brand, and this guy entreated me to come and work with him.

01:03:20.600 | He could see that we could make a good partnership, et cetera.

01:03:23.980 | And I seriously considered it because I admired the brand.

01:03:27.600 | I was a big, big fan.

01:03:29.380 | I considered the advice very strong and excellent, et cetera, just all good.

01:03:35.360 | I was happy with it.

01:03:36.740 | I ultimately said no, and I said no to retain my independence of speech and my independence

01:03:43.520 | of action.

01:03:44.520 | I knew that there was a good chance that in the coming years, I wanted freedom after having

01:03:51.320 | so many restrictions on my speech for so many years in the formal business, I didn't want

01:03:56.860 | to establish some kind of sense of duty or obligation to a business partner, that I had

01:04:02.280 | to tone down something that I genuinely believe in order to not harm his brand or do something

01:04:12.660 | that I thought was right.

01:04:13.960 | And so I stepped aside from-- so I didn't take that partnership.

01:04:19.120 | And I think I would have made lots more money if I had, but I haven't really regretted it

01:04:24.840 | because I've been grateful to have the freedom that I've had.

01:04:28.020 | And so entrepreneurship can provide a lot of those things.

01:04:31.280 | When I look at why people want to be fi, why they want to be financially independent, it

01:04:36.540 | a lot of times just comes down to these silly things of I have to be here at a certain time

01:04:40.660 | and a certain day, and I don't have any control over my schedule.

01:04:44.700 | And so I appreciate entrepreneurship as one potential solution to those things.

01:04:48.700 | However, entrepreneurship brings with it a whole different set of advantages.

01:04:53.020 | I think I'm a pretty good match for entrepreneurship, but there's a lot of things about it that I

01:04:57.720 | find really frustrating.

01:04:59.700 | And there are many times that I have wished just for a job where I just went to work.

01:05:05.480 | And I think that's common.

01:05:07.620 | So if you're in a job, don't think that entrepreneurship is going to solve everything.

01:05:11.200 | And likewise, don't think that if you're an entrepreneur, everything's going to be solved

01:05:14.040 | if you just go and get a job.

01:05:15.400 | I now think that I could go back and forth between these things fairly happily.

01:05:20.120 | Things like working in an office, when I was younger, one of my goals was not to have to

01:05:25.060 | work in an office.

01:05:26.060 | I didn't like going to an office every day.

01:05:28.260 | Today I now appreciate an office.

01:05:29.820 | I work in an office.

01:05:31.140 | I just work in an office alone.

01:05:32.940 | But that's one of the things I don't like about entrepreneurship.

01:05:35.900 | I get lonely.

01:05:37.900 | And not on an emotional level, but in a sense of feeling like I'm working alone, not on

01:05:44.700 | a daily basis, don't sound so pathetic, I get lonely.

01:05:49.140 | What I mean is, on a daily life, I'm around a lot of people.

01:05:53.400 | But I miss the sense of camaraderie and purpose that comes from working with others.

01:05:58.340 | So there's really something really strong and valuable about being in an office, feeling

01:06:03.880 | like you're a part of a team, working towards the team's outcomes and not just my own outcomes.

01:06:09.360 | That's something that is really wonderful that I miss.

01:06:13.880 | And I haven't found yet the offer or something that would take me, but I've thought about

01:06:18.180 | it.

01:06:19.180 | And I have ideas about the kinds of things that I would take, where I would take a job

01:06:23.820 | again or I would take a job or an opportunity because of that desire to have a sense of

01:06:31.100 | camaraderie with other people and wanting to work with other people towards a common

01:06:36.060 | vision, towards a common goal.

01:06:38.520 | Those things make a difference.

01:06:40.820 | I've tested other things.

01:06:41.820 | I've tested many retirements along the way.

01:06:44.360 | I've tested travel.

01:06:46.900 | And what I've discovered is simply that there's a reason we live in houses, just as a very

01:06:54.140 | practical example.

01:06:56.140 | When I was younger, I thought I was pretty obsessed with the idea of just living in an

01:07:00.060 | RV.

01:07:01.060 | I was a Tynan fan years before most people were, and I just thought, "Oh, this is how

01:07:07.100 | I want to live."

01:07:08.940 | And I still am attracted to that.

01:07:11.900 | But there's a big difference between being attracted to it as a single man or as a married

01:07:16.620 | couple versus doing it with children.

01:07:19.300 | With children, there's a reason why we have the ideas that we have about people going

01:07:23.200 | to the suburbs, that in order for a family to build towards something productive, stable

01:07:28.160 | infrastructure is very useful.

01:07:30.380 | Now, it's not that traveling is bad.

01:07:35.020 | We've done full-time RV travel.

01:07:36.620 | I have a plan to do more of it in the future because I think it provides a cool set of

01:07:41.340 | adventures and experiences that really are hard to get in any other way.

01:07:46.840 | But it doesn't magically solve anything.

01:07:49.460 | It doesn't magically fix your life just because you have these external things.

01:07:54.860 | One thing I've given up on is finding some kind of thing that's just going to magically

01:07:58.260 | fix anything.

01:08:00.300 | Changing your location doesn't just fix anything.

01:08:02.780 | Changing the time of day that you work doesn't fix anything.

01:08:05.700 | You're still there.

01:08:06.700 | You still got to do the work.

01:08:07.700 | So, disciplining yourself to sit down and do the work whether you feel like it or not

01:08:11.580 | is still kind of a fundamental secret of success.

01:08:16.740 | I've changed some perspectives on various financial planning things.

01:08:21.500 | Some of those are pretty significant and a lot of them have to do with the sense of being

01:08:25.660 | radical.

01:08:27.140 | For example, one that is probably the first one that comes to mind is I used to be against

01:08:32.300 | home ownership.

01:08:34.180 | In the early days of radical personal finance, I was influenced by Jim Collins' essay on

01:08:41.860 | how you're better off renting because you're flexible and you can move here and move there

01:08:46.660 | and after all, your money is more productive in the stock market.

01:08:49.940 | I think that's interesting and a useful perspective and I think, again, there's a proper application

01:08:55.840 | for that.

01:08:56.840 | A 21-year-old guy or girl who's working on building a career, I would say home ownership

01:09:04.440 | might turn out to be less of a blessing than flexibility.

01:09:08.160 | Stay flexible.

01:09:09.160 | On the other hand, I've come to appreciate and also, I felt that a home should be viewed

01:09:15.500 | as an expense rather than as an asset, kind of channeling the Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad,

01:09:23.440 | Poor Dad ideology.

01:09:25.520 | That was my perspective back then.

01:09:27.240 | Today I don't see it that way.

01:09:28.500 | Today I'm persuaded that investing into a primary home that you live in is a perfectly

01:09:35.280 | legitimate form of real estate investing.

01:09:38.020 | Not only is it legitimate but it's often quite profitable.

01:09:40.500 | John Reed wrote his book, An American Principal Resident is the Most Advantaged Investment

01:09:45.180 | in History.

01:09:46.180 | Worst title ever.

01:09:47.180 | I don't know why he did that but it's a very good book and it persuaded me of the value

01:09:51.380 | of simply investing into your home and that's become something that I've frequently done.

01:09:58.020 | Whereas in the past, I would say to a wealthy business owner, a wealthy doctor or something,

01:10:04.140 | I would say, "Oh, yeah, you should go ahead and have real estate today."

01:10:06.620 | I just say, "Listen, if you want to do real estate, that's fine but just go ahead and

01:10:10.820 | buy a more expensive home and upgrade your home systematically throughout your life and

01:10:15.300 | that's a perfectly valid form of real estate investing."

01:10:18.620 | So I think that's a good example of something changing.

01:10:21.420 | On the whole, there's not a lot in my views on money or investing or financial planning

01:10:30.260 | that have changed a lot.

01:10:32.420 | The biggest one that I was pretty blind to in the beginning was internationalization.

01:10:38.940 | Like most financial planners, I didn't know anything about international planning.

01:10:42.620 | When I started doing this, you can be a CFP, certified financial planner and not have a

01:10:47.140 | clue about anything that I talk about now international.

01:10:50.540 | I remember when I first—I was doing this show when I first learned about the foreign

01:10:54.380 | earned income exclusion.

01:10:55.380 | I was like, "What?"

01:10:56.580 | And as I've shared, that came in response to me of a moral crisis of basically how on

01:11:02.020 | earth can I pay taxes and have a clear conscience?

01:11:05.300 | And I realized, "Oh, I'm not stuck.

01:11:06.700 | I can choose who I pay taxes to.

01:11:08.100 | I can actually choose whether or not I pay taxes."

01:11:10.660 | And that was one of the things that launched the whole international space.

01:11:14.060 | So that would be a big thing as I now see international planning as something that really

01:11:18.020 | everyone should do to some degree as I teach in my International Skate Planning course,

01:11:22.260 | but not something that is—it's something everyone should do to some degree, but it's—and

01:11:30.020 | it should be more mainstream.

01:11:31.600 | And it is becoming mainstream, which I'm glad about.

01:11:33.780 | So that would be a big change.

01:11:35.420 | I have a list of other things, but I won't go deeply into them at the moment.

01:11:40.300 | But I've tried to track the things that have changed and the things that haven't changed.

01:11:43.980 | On the whole, probably the biggest one was my own opinion of early retirement and of

01:11:50.940 | retirement in general.

01:11:53.420 | I thought, "Oh, okay, you can just navigate through it."

01:11:56.640 | In terms of early retirement, it was in the beginning of the show where I did shows on

01:12:00.580 | kind of the retirement scam.

01:12:02.360 | But then I realized and I still realize that work is such a profoundly valuable part of

01:12:09.520 | our life, and it's how we contribute to the world around us.

01:12:17.040 | All the great change that we all want to see in the world is going to come from work.

01:12:21.660 | That work doesn't have to be paid, doesn't have to come with money, but it does need

01:12:26.020 | to come, it does need to happen, and it is a valuable component of our overall life.

01:12:33.880 | I thought it would be fun now to share with you some thoughts about individual episodes

01:12:38.340 | of Radical Personal Finance, share with you some of the more popular episodes, share with

01:12:42.600 | you a few of my favorites, share with you the most controversial episodes, et cetera.

01:12:47.320 | Let's begin with the most popular.

01:12:49.180 | As of this current recording, the most popular episode of Radical Personal Finance ever was

01:12:53.640 | episode 666, How to Prepare for the Coming Recession, followed by episode 716, called

01:13:01.620 | How to Profit from a Recession.

01:13:03.680 | It's interesting, we certainly see that the most bad news, clickbait works, first of all.

01:13:13.580 | So if I try to not use too much clickbait, but clickbait works, and I say how to prepare

01:13:18.820 | for the coming recession, then there's an element of people who want to just hear, wait

01:13:24.280 | a second, how do I prepare for it?

01:13:25.800 | And also, is there a recession coming?

01:13:28.160 | So that's clearly a component of it.

01:13:30.000 | And then also, our eyes are attracted to bad news far more than good news.

01:13:34.640 | We hear a lot about when the stock market is falling apart.

01:13:38.000 | We don't hear so much when the stock market is doing well.

01:13:40.920 | And so let's just be aware of that with regard to overall psychological understanding.

01:13:47.940 | I'm proud of those episodes.

01:13:49.280 | I think they're useful.

01:13:50.600 | I've tried to always strike a tone of sensibleness, and yet seriousness.

01:13:58.640 | I've tried to treat topics with seriousness, and yet be sensible.

01:14:02.960 | So those would be the two most popular.

01:14:06.320 | If you're curious, the next one is how to read a book, and then how to set financial

01:14:11.480 | goals.

01:14:12.480 | There was really probably a golden time in those download numbers where some of the most

01:14:19.520 | popular ones are from episodes in the high 600s and early 700s.

01:14:26.400 | Most of the most popular episodes come from that time.

01:14:30.560 | And that was before the coronavirus pandemic.

01:14:33.160 | So that was 2019, 2020, and that was when the podcast was getting the highest number

01:14:38.160 | of podcast downloads.

01:14:40.160 | Then when coronavirus came on, it seemed to change the podcast listening experience.

01:14:46.280 | And downloads have been down across the industry since then.

01:14:50.640 | And then there's been some technical changes that have happened behind the scenes that

01:14:53.680 | have also created changes in the download numbers.

01:14:57.280 | So those are most of the highest shows for me come from the high 600s and the lower 700s.

01:15:06.120 | There are, I'll skip kind of the least popular shows because that's not something that's

01:15:11.120 | interesting necessarily, but it's been interesting to me to watch how I'm basically incapable

01:15:19.720 | of predicting what is the most popular.

01:15:24.080 | And that's been frustrating because I'd like to plan and create popular content.

01:15:29.840 | I've done that a little bit.

01:15:31.440 | One of the things I said I was going to do in the early days of the show was that I was

01:15:34.760 | going to teach my way through the CFP curriculum.

01:15:36.680 | That was something that I originally said I would do, but I kind of, I didn't intentionally

01:15:42.720 | abandon it, but I just practically abandoned it after several dozen episodes because I

01:15:48.380 | just found that people didn't listen to those and yet they required enormous amounts of

01:15:53.400 | time to create.

01:15:54.960 | And the things that people listened to were often things that I just sat down and had

01:15:58.520 | an idea and boom, went for and then people listened to them.

01:16:05.000 | So that was something that I learned from that perspective.

01:16:09.360 | Some of my favorite episodes, I've really enjoyed a lot of the series that I have done.

01:16:13.960 | One of my favorites was the asset protection for mere mortals series.

01:16:18.280 | I enjoyed that because it dealt with a technical area of financial planning that is wildly

01:16:26.300 | under discussed in serious ways.

01:16:29.260 | And I was satisfied with, I love the sense of empowerment that I got, that I could empower

01:16:35.320 | ordinary people to protect their assets so that they, in a time that they might most

01:16:42.420 | need it.

01:16:43.420 | One of my favorite series was also kind of foundational philosophy series, my seven rings

01:16:48.500 | of Liberty series, I really loved doing that one because I feel like in that series I encapsulated

01:16:58.560 | the ideas that lead to a free lifestyle.

01:17:04.300 | And while they're not easy to implement, I think that they are the most effective way

01:17:10.000 | of accomplishing some of the things that people are looking for Liberty with.

01:17:14.900 | I have this continual challenge that I try to answer people's questions and what people

01:17:19.960 | are looking for, but I don't see a lot of the financial solutions as the fast and straightforward

01:17:25.080 | way to achieve the kind of lifestyle you want.

01:17:28.720 | And so when I started that podcast series and I talked about ring number one, which

01:17:33.580 | is spiritual Liberty, to me, that drives at the heart of what people are trying to do.

01:17:39.400 | They're trying to solve things with money where their spirit is broken.

01:17:44.360 | But if you can find spiritual Liberty, you can be free no matter what the money looks

01:17:48.240 | like.

01:17:50.280 | And I think that's something that's dramatically under-discussed, and we talked about all the

01:17:54.120 | different lifestyle design things that for me have really paid off.

01:18:01.720 | So that was one of my favorite series, and I think the third one that I really loved

01:18:05.280 | doing recently was the Investing in Your Children series.

01:18:08.340 | That series was longer than I intended, but once again, it was me indulging that frustration

01:18:16.800 | of years of people saying, "What about my 529 plan?"

01:18:20.820 | And my answer is, "Your 529 plan is great, but it's not going to do what you're hoping

01:18:26.220 | it does for you because it's only one thing, and what you need is this more comprehensive

01:18:31.360 | plan, this more comprehensive approach.

01:18:33.940 | And if you'll do these other things, then the 529 plan is completely unnecessary."

01:18:38.120 | And it's often hard for me to judge with things like that, those kinds of ideas.

01:18:42.460 | It's hard for me to judge how much people can implement them.

01:18:48.020 | I'm something of an extremist by nature.

01:18:51.500 | When someone says, "This is really hard," I say, "Ooh, let me pay attention."

01:18:55.900 | And I'm aware, though, that hard things are hard to do, but you do hard things and you

01:19:00.220 | get great results.

01:19:02.940 | But I don't know, I just record stuff and let things go where they may be.

01:19:11.560 | Most controversial episodes of radical personal finance, well, there's one touching on hot

01:19:16.920 | button topics.

01:19:18.160 | Probably to date still, probably the most controversial one was, I think 181, 181.

01:19:26.360 | I talked about why we need more of a discussion of politics, religion, and I don't know, something

01:19:31.480 | else in financial discussions.

01:19:37.600 | And obviously, a bit of an inflammatory title here.

01:19:40.180 | Why we need more discussion of politics, religion, philosophy, morality, and ethics in finance,

01:19:44.720 | not less.

01:19:45.780 | That was the title of it.

01:19:47.220 | And what I shared in that episode was, I had just read, I had an enormous epiphany.

01:19:52.140 | This was 2015 when I did that podcast episode.

01:19:56.120 | And this was right at the time of the passing of the Obergefell decision in the United States,

01:20:03.160 | legalizing same-sex marriage in the United States.

01:20:07.040 | And as I was following those events, I read a book called After the Ball by Hunter Madsen

01:20:15.520 | and Kirk something or other, sorry, I can't remember the other author's name.

01:20:19.160 | But they had written a book called After the Ball, How America Will Lose Its Fear of Gays

01:20:23.460 | in the '90s.

01:20:24.920 | And when I read the book, I was absolutely blown away that for the first time in my life,

01:20:32.440 | I understood and could believe how societal influence and propaganda works.

01:20:41.300 | I had been aware of the concept of societal change prior to that.

01:20:48.460 | How could you not?

01:20:49.460 | I had been aware of conspiracy theories, et cetera.

01:20:53.760 | How could you not be at least aware of some of these things?

01:20:56.760 | But I've never been a big believer in most of those things.

01:21:00.100 | And a lot of it is just that I don't understand how most conspiracies could come to fruition.

01:21:07.060 | So for example, there are two ideas that I think some people hold.

01:21:13.520 | Idea number one is that government is incompetent.

01:21:17.200 | And idea number two is that government is engaged in a vast conspiracy.

01:21:21.400 | And I don't see how either those ideas can go together.

01:21:25.920 | Either you believe that governments are incompetent and thus most big conspiracies, at least on

01:21:32.080 | a governmental level, can't happen.

01:21:34.800 | Or you believe that government is highly competent and thus elaborate, carefully held, multigenerational

01:21:41.280 | conspiracies can come true.

01:21:43.480 | Now, that may be a simplistic expression of the idea, but it's always bothered me.

01:21:49.520 | But when I finally read the book After the Ball and I realized I could look back on my

01:21:54.440 | entire lifetime growing up in the '90s and the '90s and the 2000s, leading up to 2015,

01:22:02.960 | that not only was there the single largest measured change in opinion in recorded history

01:22:10.000 | where the entire country in about 15 years went from strongly opposing the concept of

01:22:17.120 | same-sex marriage to strongly supporting it.

01:22:21.900 | And I could see all the politicians of my lifetime—President Obama was for same-sex

01:22:27.640 | marriage, then he was against same-sex marriage to get elected the first time, then he was

01:22:30.720 | for same-sex marriage to get elected the second time, and just kind of this flip-flopping.

01:22:34.540 | And I never understood it.

01:22:35.540 | And when I finally read After the Ball, it just opened my eyes in an astonishing way

01:22:41.120 | because I realized, "Wait a second, I was a victim of all these societal things.

01:22:48.160 | I was present for all of these."

01:22:49.760 | And as a young man, that was an enormous eye-opener for me because it was one of those things

01:22:54.400 | where for the first time in your life, when you're young, the world that you're born

01:22:59.600 | into is the world that you conceive of.

01:23:02.480 | If I try to describe to my children how when my dad would come back from a business trip,

01:23:06.960 | we would go and wait for him at the gate and he would walk off the jetway and we were there

01:23:10.500 | hanging out and giving him a hug.

01:23:14.520 | They have no concept of that because their entire concept of airports is this elaborate

01:23:19.540 | security theater that we all go through all the time.

01:23:22.280 | And so they will have a hard time believing.

01:23:24.920 | So when you're young, you have a hard time believing that the world was different than

01:23:30.360 | how it is in your childhood.

01:23:32.840 | But then as you start to live for a while, you start to see change and you realize that,

01:23:38.800 | "Wow, this is different, that's different, this is different."

01:23:42.160 | And for me, reading that book was just an enormous epiphany.

01:23:48.380 | And it really impressed me enormously because I could, for the first time, see how societal

01:23:54.380 | change happens and to see how societal change is manipulated and how you and I are manipulated

01:24:03.240 | by propaganda and those who desire to change us.

01:24:08.920 | And sometimes they have good intentions, sometimes they don't.

01:24:11.800 | You judge for yourself.

01:24:13.000 | But an awareness of that is really fundamental.

01:24:15.560 | As part of my homeschooling curriculum for my children, I plan to have a very deep dive

01:24:20.680 | into propaganda so that we can understand it so we have a good defense mechanism.

01:24:24.840 | Anyway, that one is the one that I...

01:24:28.920 | That episode though, I published the episode and then non-stop for the next week, non-stop

01:24:36.840 | emails, non-stop comments on the show of, "Josh, you hate gay people, blah, blah, blah,"

01:24:41.920 | just never ending.

01:24:43.000 | And that was good.

01:24:44.000 | It was hard for me.

01:24:45.000 | I don't know.

01:24:46.000 | I think I cried.

01:24:47.000 | I don't remember.

01:24:48.000 | I just know it was really hard because I'm a people pleaser.

01:24:49.720 | I like people to...

01:24:51.080 | I want everyone to be happy.

01:24:52.760 | I don't like to disagree with people.

01:24:54.200 | I don't ever like to tell people they're wrong.

01:24:55.720 | I'm a people pleaser.

01:24:57.520 | But that experience hardened my skin quite a lot and I was really grateful for it.

01:25:05.040 | What I find fascinating is passing on since then, 2015, I should go back and listen to

01:25:09.120 | that show, but here we are almost 10 years later and the trends have only continued and

01:25:17.200 | we continue to be subjected to the same social manipulation tactics, but I see people waking

01:25:24.760 | up and paying attention to that.

01:25:26.960 | So it'd be interesting.

01:25:27.960 | I haven't listened to that show, but interesting for me to go back and listen to what I actually

01:25:30.960 | said and consider it.

01:25:35.080 | Other controversial ones.

01:25:36.520 | The only shows that I've only ever deleted in the history of radical personal finance,

01:25:41.420 | one show, one podcast, and that was the interview that I did with Andrew Tate.

01:25:48.560 | This was a few years ago and I interviewed Andrew.

01:25:52.600 | I observe a lot of things and so I try to keep my proverbial fingers in the stream of

01:25:59.240 | culture and understand what's happening.

01:26:01.000 | And I saw Andrew and his content coming to the fore and I followed him closely because

01:26:09.520 | Andrew has some, he's an incredibly smart man and incredibly well-spoken.

01:26:16.840 | He has honed his craft very, very diligently and a lot of his ideas are very, very useful

01:26:24.680 | and a lot of them are very appealing.

01:26:26.700 | So I saw him coming up and I asked him for an interview and he said yes.

01:26:31.040 | And I did it because I've learned now long enough, I've recognized that I'm not bad at

01:26:37.480 | seeing trends.

01:26:38.480 | Like I can see trends happening and I can predict with some degree of confidence where

01:26:44.000 | they're going.

01:26:45.000 | I haven't been able to figure out how to apply this to financial markets but I can see this

01:26:49.020 | with social trends at least to some degree and so I knew Andrew was getting ready to

01:26:52.300 | blow up.

01:26:53.320 | So I was clout chasing a little bit, asked him for an interview and his background, his

01:27:01.000 | business, his persona, a lot of his public persona is for shock value.

01:27:11.440 | He has embraced the idea that there's no such thing as bad publicity but a lot of his background

01:27:16.900 | is very distasteful to me but I also felt like he was good at offering ideas.

01:27:21.200 | Anyway, point is I asked him for an interview and I interviewed him and it was a good interview.

01:27:25.760 | I thought I did a pretty good job with it and I published it and then a couple days

01:27:32.100 | later I got an email from a listener, this wonderful sweet woman that wrote me a very

01:27:37.120 | nice email and talking about persuasion and whatnot, just kind of a textbook case of persuasion

01:27:43.240 | and she wrote me this story and she said Joshua, I don't fault you for interviewing Andrew

01:27:50.600 | Tate and talking about interviewing and et cetera and I don't fault you for that but

01:27:58.800 | she said let me tell you my story and she told the story of how her daughter from her

01:28:02.320 | perspective, how her daughter was victimized and was by a predator and was pressured into,

01:28:10.680 | was basically sex trafficked and had faced all these difficult situations and she, I

01:28:16.120 | don't know, I don't remember all the details of the letter.

01:28:18.280 | What I remember is her tone and she was so kind, she was so respectful, she didn't yell

01:28:22.920 | at me, she didn't say take the showdown, she didn't say anything just to share her

01:28:28.260 | story and then she asked the question, is this who you want to be associated with?

01:28:33.940 | And she had just that sweet motherly, grandmotherly tone that it really shook me and I thought

01:28:40.840 | no, I don't want to be associated with this.

01:28:46.280 | I do, I think today especially, I would say Andrew is a predator and if I'm involved

01:28:54.000 | in promoting a predator, what moral guilt do I share in that?

01:29:02.300 | And on the one hand, and I've never solved this because generally speaking, I'm a free

01:29:08.860 | speech guy, I want to hear from people and so I want journalists to do their job, I want

01:29:13.260 | journalists to go and interview nasty evil people, I want psychologists to interview

01:29:17.940 | people on death row, I read all the terrorist manifestos, like I want to hear what people

01:29:22.560 | say and what people think because I don't think that we do right when we hide from information

01:29:29.340 | and I don't know, that just to me is, so I don't like to be the guy who engages in

01:29:33.920 | censorship, like that's not me, I try not to censor.

01:29:39.060 | But then on the other hand, there is obviously some element of responsibility, so I may go

01:29:44.680 | and I go and read terrorist manifestos but I don't publish them and so then as a publisher,

01:29:52.060 | you feel like you have some sense of responsibility and I just, I don't know, so I don't know

01:29:57.080 | if I made the right decision, I took the show down and I've gone back and forth and back

01:30:01.240 | and forth and back and forth on should I publish it, should I not publish it, should I publish

01:30:04.520 | it, should I not publish it and it's, I could talk about it with my wife, she's like, why

01:30:11.600 | do you, just who cares, move on with your life but like, but babe, freedom of speech,

01:30:16.060 | like I don't want to be censoring people, it's like, but come on, it is, anyway, I still

01:30:20.560 | don't know if I did the right thing on taking that down.

01:30:24.400 | It was just a split second decision, it was just the, I don't know, I just imagined talking

01:30:31.240 | to my mom about it and my mom would say, Joshua, are you really promoting this guy who's made

01:30:39.280 | his fortune off of pornography, like that's who you want to be?

01:30:43.600 | And I realized that I was clout chasing quite a lot and so who knows, I never figured out

01:30:49.700 | whether that was the right decision but since I took it down, then I just figured, well,

01:30:54.120 | it's down and I told a friend of mine that I was going to put it back up and then I went

01:30:57.840 | through endless months of deliberations on it and I still don't, I don't know how to

01:31:02.820 | reconcile that, those decisions.

01:31:05.820 | I think if I were doing it over today, I wouldn't have taken it down but that doesn't mean that

01:31:10.100 | I want to republish it and then the problem was that then at the time, Andrew was controversial

01:31:17.000 | but not, there wasn't as much evidence of who he really was at that time and to be clear,

01:31:26.560 | I'm not ascribing to Andrew legal guilt.

01:31:29.280 | I believe in innocent until proven guilty in a court of law and even then, legal systems

01:31:34.900 | can be messed up but I think there's enough evidence that there's abundant court evidence

01:31:41.800 | to confirm my own assessment that Andrew is a very smart and well-spoken predator and

01:31:48.580 | I don't really like predators.

01:31:49.880 | I don't like bullies.

01:31:50.880 | I don't like predators.

01:31:51.880 | I don't like people who prey on men and I'm not alleging, for those of you who are big

01:31:57.740 | Andrew Tate fans, I'm not alleging anything that even based on court documents of his

01:32:04.040 | alleged crimes, I'm just talking about things from his own mouth of the way that he made

01:32:08.840 | his money and so as much as I enjoyed the conversation and as much as I thought it was,

01:32:14.360 | I had tried to walk that line, I don't know, that was the one episode of Radical Personal

01:32:19.360 | Finance that I deleted out of a thousand.

01:32:21.440 | I've deleted probably, I pulled, you know, a few months ago, I pulled a question from

01:32:26.840 | a Friday Q&A show because I had answered it poorly.

01:32:30.280 | Other than that, I don't remember ever deleting anything else.

01:32:32.400 | It's all there.

01:32:33.400 | Good, bad, ugly, long-winded, crisp, concise, it's all there for you to see and that was

01:32:40.040 | always my hope.

01:32:41.320 | That was always my idea was that, and I said this in the very beginning, I'll leave up

01:32:45.640 | the early episode so that other people can see that you don't have to be great to start

01:32:51.120 | but you got to start to be great and you can go back and you can see early episodes on

01:32:57.020 | some things I've gotten a lot better, on a few things I've come to the conclusion that

01:33:01.640 | I've been standing still.

01:33:03.600 | Recently my forays into the world of deliberate practice really showed me that I have not

01:33:08.600 | been engaging in deliberate practice with my speaking abilities.

01:33:12.760 | I've been engaging in naive practice, just doing more of the same and not getting better

01:33:17.240 | and that annoys me so I'm changing that.

01:33:19.880 | So I intend to be a lot better 10 years from now than I am today.

01:33:24.520 | And so now the obvious concluding transition is, "Alright Joshua, what's next?"

01:33:30.000 | I can hear you saying, "Alright, that's all well and interesting and it's kind of fun to

01:33:33.080 | talk about old times but after all the past is dead and gone, what's next?

01:33:36.800 | What's your plans?"

01:33:37.800 | Well, I'm going to disappoint you by not publicly telling you what's next but rather just say

01:33:44.200 | watch and see.

01:33:47.280 | And the reason is simply that I have learned over the years that ideas are a dime a dozen,

01:33:55.640 | it's great to talk about plans but it's meaningless, all that matters is execution.

01:34:01.980 | Ideas are a dime a dozen, execution is everything, doing is everything.

01:34:06.080 | And I've learned that the hard way because being a good talker, I'm also good at talking

01:34:12.240 | to myself and I've realized and there's some good data behind this from the scientific

01:34:19.760 | psychological community but talking about the things that you're going to do gives you

01:34:24.380 | a little bit of a burst, a little bit of a dopamine hit of, "Hey, this feels good."

01:34:30.120 | And you kind of feel like you've achieved something because you've talked about it.

01:34:34.120 | But then in reality you've achieved nothing and all you've done is talk about it.

01:34:38.080 | And I've found that this is a great problem for me.

01:34:41.440 | It's very easy to say all the things that you're going to do but it's harder to actually

01:34:45.760 | do those things.

01:34:48.520 | And this has been a significant form of frustration for me over the past years, especially over

01:34:55.100 | the past five to eight years.

01:34:57.400 | In some ways over the last decade, I felt like I'm swimming in mud instead of swimming

01:35:02.920 | in water.

01:35:04.260 | And I can identify a few reasons for them, some explainable and understandable, some

01:35:08.920 | not so much.

01:35:10.740 | So one obvious thing is that I have five children and so those responsibilities require time,

01:35:19.780 | attention, distraction, all of those things.

01:35:23.300 | And so I'm not as effective of a businessman as I was when I was single on that regard

01:35:28.420 | just because I have more weight on my shoulders.

01:35:31.360 | And it's a good thing.

01:35:32.360 | I think it drives me to do more, accomplish more, but it also makes it more difficult

01:35:38.240 | to accomplish.

01:35:40.060 | And so that's been one factor.

01:35:41.980 | Another factor is just the fracturing of my mind.

01:35:45.740 | I've been victimized by the same trends that we all have been victimized of, of fracturing

01:35:53.460 | of attention, fracturing of our ability to pay attention.

01:35:58.920 | I remember this going back very early and for me, I can clearly remember the world of

01:36:07.320 | pre-Firefox tabbed browsing versus post.

01:36:11.600 | I'm not kidding.

01:36:12.600 | I was in high school when Firefox came out and I think it was them that invented tabbed

01:36:19.240 | browsing.

01:36:20.520 | And at the time, my family, we had computers and whatnot before a lot of other people did

01:36:25.900 | because my dad was a software engineer.

01:36:30.880 | But at the time, the internet was a linear function.

01:36:34.860 | And for someone who's interested in everything, the internet was a great boon to me.

01:36:38.980 | I grew up in a fairly quiet way.

01:36:43.340 | I read a lot.

01:36:44.340 | We never had a TV in the house, so I didn't have my attention distracted by those things.

01:36:49.760 | And so I read books and I had an enormously powerful attention span.

01:36:54.700 | And then we had the internet and now I could indulge all of these different interests.

01:36:59.980 | And I distinctly remember when we had the concept of tabbed browsing.

01:37:03.980 | For me, it was the greatest thing in the history of humanity because now, instead of having

01:37:08.720 | to follow a train of thinking forward and backward, I could click on every shiny little

01:37:14.020 | thing and I could open up 50 tabs in my browser window or whatever the limit was at that time.

01:37:19.540 | And I loved it because I could absorb everything.

01:37:23.280 | But I noticed how that approach started to harm my attention span.

01:37:29.920 | I noticed that I would be halfway down a web page and now I was just bored and I would

01:37:37.280 | click to the next web page, click to the next tab in the browser.

01:37:42.360 | And I didn't like how that felt.

01:37:44.400 | And I started very early at that time to try to pay attention to it and be careful of it.

01:37:49.480 | And over the years, I've had times of advancement and times of retrenchment, of more distracted,

01:37:56.680 | less distracted.

01:37:58.280 | But in some ways, over the last 10 years, it's been a fight and I think it seems like

01:38:02.640 | it's a fight for all of us.

01:38:03.640 | It's not just me because not only is it now we have tabbed browsing, but now we have endless

01:38:07.280 | opportunities for distraction.

01:38:09.340 | And so cultivating the ability to do important, meaningful work without distraction and cultivating

01:38:16.400 | the ability to pay attention to hard work, that's a never-ending challenge.

01:38:21.800 | And I'm doing my very best, but I am frustrated with my results at times.

01:38:27.400 | And I guess the final reason would simply be one of the great challenges of an entrepreneur

01:38:33.820 | is to know what to do.

01:38:35.680 | Again, when I think about the swimming in mud, a big portion of it is basically represented

01:38:42.800 | by me sitting at my desk having a bazillion things I could do and seeing how every single

01:38:49.640 | one of them could be successful and could lead me in the direction that I want to go

01:38:55.040 | and not knowing how to choose among them.

01:38:58.240 | And that's very different than a job.

01:39:00.280 | In a job, your boss says, "Here, do this."

01:39:03.920 | Or if you are a leader in the company, you come together with other people, you talk

01:39:08.560 | to the boss and the boss says, "We want to go in this direction," you talk about plans

01:39:12.160 | and you commit and say, "This is what we're going to do."

01:39:14.420 | But as a solopreneur, you can go in any number of directions and you can change on a dime

01:39:19.880 | and you can pivot and you can switch and you can do all kinds of things.

01:39:23.960 | And as a very creative person who's good at coming up with ideas, I am king of sitting

01:39:29.160 | down and writing a list of ideas and they all sound super new and enthusiastic and exciting

01:39:33.760 | to me.

01:39:35.000 | And interestingly, kind of a classic cycle for me goes basically like this.

01:39:39.800 | I have the idea to write a tweet.

01:39:42.520 | So I sit down to write a tweet and then I start writing the tweet and I realize, "You

01:39:45.720 | know what?

01:39:46.720 | This is probably a good podcast episode."

01:39:48.520 | So I expand my tweet into a podcast episode.

01:39:51.360 | Then as I'm in the middle of writing the outline for the podcast episode, I realize, "Nah,

01:39:56.120 | this is not an episode.

01:39:57.280 | This is a series.

01:39:58.760 | Because wouldn't this be a great series?"

01:40:00.360 | So I start expanding into a series and then I realize I've got such good stuff that I'm

01:40:04.560 | like, "This should be a course.

01:40:06.620 | Like if I just created a course on this, that'd be so much more helpful."

01:40:10.120 | And so then as I'm most of the way into the course, then I'm like, "No, you know what?

01:40:13.480 | Instead of a course, this should be an entirely different brand.

01:40:16.860 | Like this would just be amazing business if I built this."

01:40:19.840 | So then I go and buy a URL for the brand and stick it into my stable of URLs.

01:40:24.280 | And then it's such a big project that I don't know where to begin.

01:40:30.200 | And so I just quit because I've got 30 pages of notes on something that could be its own

01:40:36.920 | brand and I don't even have a tweet.

01:40:39.840 | And so I hope that you'll laugh at me because it's ridiculous to say it out loud, but I

01:40:45.640 | believe in honesty.

01:40:47.080 | But that's basically the experience that I've had of so many things.

01:40:49.720 | I've got a dozen courses with dozens and dozens of pages of notes, of outlines, of these elaborate

01:40:55.000 | things that I have built of great content.

01:40:58.760 | And then I've been frustrated by my ability to get that stuff out and serve anybody with

01:41:04.080 | it because, "Oh, it's so good.

01:41:05.840 | It should be its own separate thing."

01:41:08.180 | So as me trying to deal with that, I have told myself to stop talking about things that

01:41:17.160 | I'm going to do and just do stuff and then talk about what I've done and to do the same

01:41:23.880 | thing to myself as well.

01:41:25.520 | So I still set goals and ambitions, but I'm trying to avoid the deadly trap of thinking

01:41:31.900 | that you made progress just because you wrote your goals down or talking about your goals

01:41:36.440 | because that's something that I think really happens.

01:41:39.640 | You say, "This is what I'm going to do," and you feel great because you talked about

01:41:42.800 | what you're going to do.

01:41:44.040 | But now that you feel great, you move on to something else because you talked about it.

01:41:52.040 | And in reality, talking about it doesn't matter.

01:41:55.460 | The ideas don't matter.

01:41:56.720 | The only thing that matters is execution, execution, doing, doing, doing, doing.

01:42:01.880 | And that's been something that I'm doing.

01:42:05.380 | So as an expression of that, forgive me if I just simply sidestep the question about

01:42:09.800 | what are Joshua's plans?

01:42:11.800 | What is Joshua going to do and watch me and come along for the ride?

01:42:16.520 | And with that, I want to close with just a very genuine thank you because I have been

01:42:27.640 | extremely fortunate in my life.

01:42:30.900 | I've been extremely blessed.

01:42:32.360 | And if I reflect on the last 10 years, it's been an adventure.

01:42:36.640 | And it's been an adventure if I had to make the same decision over again, I would make

01:42:39.880 | the same decision over again.

01:42:42.960 | Even though not everything has worked out like I've liked, there's been a lot of disappointment,

01:42:48.000 | a lot of pain, a lot of frustration, a lot of disillusionment, all kinds of negative

01:42:54.600 | stuff.

01:42:55.600 | But at the end of the day, I'm proud of what I've done.

01:42:58.720 | I'm proud of myself for saying what I was going to do and then doing it.

01:43:03.840 | I'm proud of myself for sticking through it when it's been difficult.

01:43:07.160 | I'm proud of myself for sticking to my guns and not backing down.

01:43:17.120 | Even if I was wrong, even if I want to change, I'm not going to just do that.

01:43:20.160 | And that's been the hardest thing for me.

01:43:21.880 | I have not enjoyed being a public figure.

01:43:25.480 | And it's not because of anything that you've done, it's just that it's uncomfortable.

01:43:28.880 | It's uncomfortable to know that your words and your ideas impact others.

01:43:36.020 | It's uncomfortable to know that if you're wrong on something and you persuaded someone

01:43:40.480 | to have something and then you have to say you're wrong, that's really uncomfortable.

01:43:44.120 | I haven't enjoyed having all of my ideas on record in terms of what that means because

01:43:50.520 | sometimes you'd like to go and erase the past.

01:43:52.800 | And I've certainly thought many times about just doing that.

01:43:56.720 | I've thought many times about deleting everything and disappearing into obscurity again.

01:44:04.440 | That is an option and it's a very attractive option to me.

01:44:08.280 | I don't crave fame in any way, shape, or form.

01:44:12.060 | I run from it and I consciously do things that try to avoid it, to avoid it.

01:44:20.400 | However, because of you and the wonderful relationship that I've built with you over

01:44:28.280 | the years, I'm not going to do that.

01:44:31.660 | I'm not going to disappear from the internet.

01:44:33.720 | I'm going to keep pressing forward because I believe that I need to put as simply as that.

01:44:45.080 | I believe that I need to and I want to.

01:44:47.360 | I want to be useful in this world.

01:44:49.640 | I want to be useful to you.

01:44:51.440 | I want to serve you and I want to be useful in my corner of the world to see, to do something

01:45:02.080 | if at all possible, to see to the flourishing and the betterment of my fellow man.

01:45:09.640 | And I want to see our world continue on an arc towards justice and righteousness and

01:45:17.800 | peace and prosperity.

01:45:20.440 | I want to see people living satisfied lives, contented lives.

01:45:26.320 | I want to see families prosper and thrive.

01:45:31.000 | I want to see young people grow up and in safety and security and surrounded by love,

01:45:39.520 | free of trauma, able to expand in the world.

01:45:44.120 | I want to see, I want to see a further expression of the kingdom of God in this world.

01:45:52.280 | I want to see a furthering of human flourishing.

01:45:57.400 | I want to see poverty eradicated.

01:45:59.720 | I want to see peace brought on a global basis.

01:46:04.660 | Now obviously I think we all do, right?

01:46:06.480 | Those are things that we all do.

01:46:08.100 | We all want to see that.

01:46:09.640 | And it's one thing to want something and it's another thing to actually do it.

01:46:13.880 | But if you want to see something happen, then the most rewarding and fulfilling thing that

01:46:23.480 | you can do is to work at making it happen.

01:46:26.540 | Because while we all acknowledge that it's unlikely that the fullness of any of these

01:46:32.000 | things will occur within a single lifetime or within because of a single person's efforts,

01:46:39.540 | that doesn't diminish the importance of the task.

01:46:42.400 | It doesn't diminish the importance of a single person laboring in obscurity because that

01:46:47.800 | person may be even unknowingly laying a road, a pathway for someone else to follow who picks

01:46:54.640 | up their work and moves on.

01:46:57.100 | And we want to see, and while it may be frustrating how limited we are on a daily basis or a weekly

01:47:08.080 | basis or a yearly basis, when you reflect on something like a decade, you can see that

01:47:14.500 | some progress can be made in a decade.

01:47:18.620 | And that's exciting.

01:47:20.840 | And when you recognize that most of us may have five or six decades of, or more hopefully,

01:47:28.640 | five to eight decades of productivity within us, then that's enough time to feel like we

01:47:36.160 | can make a difference in something.

01:47:39.400 | I am very grateful to have made a difference with my decade of work.

01:47:46.320 | I have a smile file of the many notes that I've received telling me about the difference

01:47:51.120 | that I've made.

01:47:52.120 | And I know that that's real.

01:47:53.760 | And I really am grateful for that.

01:47:56.540 | And so when I look forward and I think about what could possibly be accomplished in another

01:48:04.360 | five decades of work, then I start to get excited.

01:48:08.040 | And that's really what I want to do is I want to feel like my work is useful to other people

01:48:17.240 | in accomplishing that global vision that we all have.

01:48:20.680 | And I mean global as a-- anyway, I don't have to define all my terms.

01:48:25.680 | So I just want to say thank you because the fact that you're here listening to me right

01:48:31.980 | now is rewarding, and I will do my best to try to find, uncover, and teach the most useful

01:48:40.580 | impactful ideas that I'm able to find.

01:48:43.700 | And I hope that you will take those ideas, build on them, and then turn around and teach

01:48:47.320 | me and implement them and teach your neighbor.

01:48:49.960 | That's always been my goal.

01:48:51.980 | And then along the way, I have been able to live a very rewarding lifestyle because of

01:48:57.280 | it.

01:48:58.280 | And I'm very grateful for that as well.

01:49:00.180 | I don't take that for granted as well.

01:49:02.080 | I live a very rewarding lifestyle, fairly simple, fairly quiet, but I find it very rewarding

01:49:10.440 | as well.

01:49:11.440 | And it's something where I'm just grateful the opportunities we have.

01:49:14.320 | We live in such an amazing time to be alive.

01:49:17.260 | If I got picked up and plucked back in 100 years ago or 300 years ago, my life decisions

01:49:23.600 | and life choices would be very limited.

01:49:26.520 | I'd probably be hoeing my row of corn somewhere in the world.

01:49:31.280 | And I'm sure there are many great things about that, but that doesn't appeal to me, doesn't

01:49:35.940 | appeal to me at all.

01:49:36.940 | And so the many modern choices that we have of how we live in today's world are overwhelming

01:49:42.900 | at times, but they're very rewarding.

01:49:44.940 | So I just want to say thank you.

01:49:47.620 | Thank you for being here, and I really appreciate you, and I'll be back with you very soon.

01:49:52.420 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

2024-03-05_Episode_1000