2024-07-05_Friday

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00:00:30.000 | It's Friday, and today, live Q&A.

00:00:34.000 | [Music]

00:00:50.000 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,

00:00:52.800 | skills, insights, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now,

00:00:56.640 | while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

00:00:59.280 | My name is Joshua Sheets. I'm your host. Today is Friday, July 5, 2024.

00:01:04.240 | And today, on this Friday, as on any Friday, in which I can arrange a microphone,

00:01:08.480 | we record a live Q&A. You call in, talk about anything that you want.

00:01:12.400 | [Music]

00:01:22.080 | It's open line Friday. You can direct the call. You can ask any questions that you want,

00:01:25.520 | raise any topics, raise any disagreements, raise anything that you want to just shout out.

00:01:30.880 | I mean, I don't necessarily let people advertise their stuff, but that does happen sometimes.

00:01:34.720 | When you call me with a good conversation, you get to drive the show.

00:01:38.800 | So if you'd like to be on one of these Friday Q&A shows,

00:01:40.880 | you can do that by going to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance,

00:01:44.000 | patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance.

00:01:46.080 | Sign up to support the show on Patreon,

00:01:47.920 | and that will gain access for you to one of these Friday Q&A shows.

00:01:51.760 | We begin today with Will in North Carolina.

00:01:54.560 | Will, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today?

00:01:56.240 | Hey, Joshua. Thank you for taking my call, and thank you for all the awesome work you do.

00:02:02.880 | My pleasure.

00:02:03.380 | Yeah. I had a quick question for you. It's kind of a two-part question.

00:02:08.400 | So I've had this idea or dream in my heart for several years now to start, at some point,

00:02:17.520 | a family foundation, a charitable foundation that hopefully, like, one day, you know,

00:02:24.960 | our kids and grandkids could also contribute to and that we could,

00:02:28.880 | as a family, direct the charitable giving.

00:02:31.360 | So I had kind of a two-part question. The first part is most of the information I've

00:02:37.840 | seen online looking into it seems to be geared toward people

00:02:41.600 | with millions of dollars, which we do not have currently.

00:02:46.640 | So I guess the first question is, is this even worth pursuing right now with limited money,

00:02:54.960 | assuming that we will continue to give to it, you know, yearly and invest the money?

00:02:59.760 | And we're young. We're like, you know, 31, 32.

00:03:03.360 | So hopefully, by the time we're 80 or 90, it could be in the million.

00:03:06.000 | Right. You said 31, 32. How old are your children,

00:03:11.120 | and how much money would you put into the family foundation immediately?

00:03:16.160 | We have one daughter that is three months old and hope to have more children.

00:03:20.400 | And right now, I mean, I know it's really small, but probably like

00:03:25.360 | five or $10,000 and maybe, you know, $20,000 a year, $30,000 a year for the foreseeable future.

00:03:34.800 | Right. So I would say that the reason this is all pitched towards expensive,

00:03:40.400 | towards rich people is because the fees to properly set up and then run

00:03:45.600 | a family foundation are often quite significant. And I don't know the exact number.

00:03:54.720 | I've heard people talk about, when I've heard people talk about it, I've heard,

00:03:59.680 | you know, $250,000 to $500,000 is kind of a number that people talk about.

00:04:04.640 | So in my mind, a family foundation is always targeted towards the large, you know, a large

00:04:10.480 | giver. That's why things like donor advised funds and community foundations and everything

00:04:18.080 | associated with the local shared management of charitable funds has come into being.

00:04:24.160 | And so the normal recommendation for the kind of money that you're describing would be a donor

00:04:28.400 | advised fund because the fees are much, much more modest in order to run it properly.

00:04:35.360 | I don't think, however, that that necessarily even should be the key focus. I think the most

00:04:40.480 | important thing at this stage would be to really get an idea of some of the organizations or causes

00:04:47.520 | that you are trying to, that you want to be involved in. And I have some thoughts on that,

00:04:52.800 | but let me begin just by saying, is there anything specific that you've targeted

00:04:56.400 | of a particular area that you want to focus on with your giving?

00:04:59.120 | There's organizations that we give to monthly now, and I would look to, you know,

00:05:06.880 | I would look to other things in the future as well, and hopefully, you know, decades from now,

00:05:12.400 | like, you know, my kids would also get to weigh in on that, and we would kind of look at it as

00:05:17.280 | a family. But typically, we're Christians, so just like ministry-related, yeah, kind of stuff.

00:05:25.520 | Right, good. And do you feel like the organizations that you can give directly to right now,

00:05:32.400 | are they not doing something that you think needs to be done? Is there a reason other than just the

00:05:38.000 | concept, the attractiveness of the idea, "We have a family foundation and we coordinate our giving,

00:05:43.200 | we make a big impact on the world," other than that psychology, which I'm not saying is not

00:05:47.520 | valuable, but other than that, is there a particular reason now why you need the structure of a family

00:05:53.040 | foundation? I would say probably not, other than I would like to have the money. I know it's not a

00:06:01.840 | large amount, but, you know, just the financial, like, nerd part of me would like to have it

00:06:06.640 | invested versus just sitting in a savings account that we set aside for future use. And then,

00:06:15.840 | honestly, yeah, probably just that legacy component, the psychology component, I guess.

00:06:21.120 | Have you looked into a donor-advised fund?

00:06:23.520 | I have, briefly. I don't know that I saw where the, like, the kind of the generational aspect

00:06:38.000 | that I would love to be a part of it would be as feasible for that, but I could be wrong,

00:06:43.680 | because I've not looked extensively into it. Okay. Well, I feel ill-equipped to answer the

00:06:48.000 | question directly here on a live call, because I have not worked with anybody in detail on any

00:06:54.400 | of this stuff. So, my knowledge is very general and not specific. So, I can't answer extemporaneously

00:07:01.680 | without further research. I can't answer a lot of specifics. The basic idea, though,

00:07:10.240 | that from my general knowledge that I would say is simply, number one, a family foundation is

00:07:17.440 | generally not a tool that would be appropriate for the amount of money that you currently are

00:07:22.800 | able to give because of the costs of establishing it, running it, running the administration of it,

00:07:28.720 | things like that. It's an appropriate tool for very large gifts. Donor-advised funds

00:07:34.960 | are the general tool that has been developed that is ideal for what you're describing. And so,

00:07:41.760 | and if you want to orient your giving around Christian causes, there are a significant,

00:07:48.400 | there are a number of Christian foundations and charitable organizations that have established

00:07:53.360 | donor-advised funds that are focused on that. If you want to orient your giving in other directions,

00:07:58.160 | again, you look at your local community foundation or look at just some of the donor-advised funds

00:08:03.760 | that are administered by large investment companies. That would be the normal recommendation

00:08:09.360 | for somebody at the amount of money that you are describing. I think what you're trying to

00:08:14.480 | accomplish in terms of the family vision and the impact is something that can be accomplished

00:08:21.440 | without imposing the strictures of the actual gifting vehicle of a foundation on yourself.

00:08:28.880 | So I think one of the most important things to establish is, why are we here? What are we doing

00:08:35.200 | in the first place? So this comes down to getting a vision for yourself. So if what we're going to

00:08:42.240 | do is fund Christian ministries, then what's going to be the vision for that? So are we going to fund

00:08:47.680 | international missionaries? If we're going to fund international missionaries, then you can go ahead

00:08:52.240 | and do that directly now. And I think that the culture building that you're looking to do for

00:08:57.440 | your children will be something that you build with how you handle that as a family rather than

00:09:04.880 | going first to the technical vehicle. So what do I mean? Well, if what we're going to focus on is

00:09:10.560 | international missions, and by the way, I'm using this as an example because I've spent the last

00:09:13.600 | couple of weeks digging super deep into the international missions. The Lausanne organization,

00:09:19.600 | what do they call it, Lausanne Movement, is having their fourth congress in South Korea

00:09:25.360 | in a few months, and they're just releasing, they're in the process of releasing this enormous

00:09:28.640 | report on basically the state of, I think it's called something like the state of the Great

00:09:32.560 | Commission. And so I've been reading some of the data in it and just really thinking about it. And

00:09:37.600 | one of the things that is enormously shocking to me, I had no clue how bad it was, is the state,

00:09:44.240 | the current state of global Christian giving and supporting of international missions.

00:09:52.240 | When you look at the amount of money that Christians in the world control and spend,

00:09:57.280 | and you look at the amount of that, the money of that that goes to church or religious related

00:10:02.960 | causes, it's pretty astonishingly low. But what's worse is when you look at the percentage of that

00:10:13.440 | that goes to things like foreign missions, there's actually more money that is estimated to go to

00:10:19.440 | ecclesiastical crime in the current giving space in Christian work than is going to foreign missions.

00:10:27.040 | More money is going to ecclesiastical crime than is going to foreign missions.

00:10:31.120 | And then what's even more shocking is of the amount of money that is going to foreign missions,

00:10:36.560 | the vast majority of that is going into regions of the world that have been evangelized,

00:10:42.320 | and only a shockingly tiny percentage is going into unreached people groups and unreached regions

00:10:49.520 | of the world. So I know that's probably pretty common knowledge to some people, but I was aware

00:10:53.920 | of some of that, but to see the stark numbers was super shocking. So this has been an obsession of

00:10:59.200 | mine for the last few weeks. I've been thinking a lot about it. And I've been thinking, "Okay,

00:11:02.560 | what role does my family have to do with this?" So I'm just using this as an example. Your burden

00:11:07.760 | may be different. But as I've thought about this, I've considered, "Okay, well, how do you build the

00:11:14.240 | culture?" Well, first, some people might go and be full-time missionaries. That would be a different

00:11:19.920 | perspective. But let's say you're not going to do that. You're going to continue to work. Well,

00:11:22.880 | the first thing that you would do is you would make foreign mission work and foreign missionaries

00:11:30.560 | something that you routinely pray for. And so one of the things that I did when pulling out that

00:11:37.760 | data was I pulled out—I don't really use it, but I've been aware of some friends that really love

00:11:42.480 | kind of a prayer app that you can use to create your own kind of scheduled prayer. And I started

00:11:47.440 | filling in prayer things because we pray together as a family basically four times a day. And so

00:11:53.760 | I want to make certain that I'm holding the vision in front of my children that we at least can pray

00:11:58.240 | for people. And so that kind of thing consistently done over time will make a big difference. And

00:12:03.120 | there's lots of organizations—Lausanne has it, Joshua Project, there's other people that have

00:12:08.000 | things where, "Here, we'll give you a prayer calendar, and you can pray for these peoples,

00:12:11.440 | these unreached peoples, these specific tribes, or these specific missionaries who are working

00:12:15.280 | with these tribes, or these specific regions." And so something like that can be enormously

00:12:20.160 | impactful to start to set the mission in your family to say, "This is what we're working on."

00:12:25.760 | In addition, then, you would do things like go and choose the missionaries that you support. So you

00:12:30.320 | would choose the specific missionaries that you support. You would make certain that if you're

00:12:34.800 | getting their monthly email newsletter, that you print it, that you put it on the refrigerator,

00:12:39.680 | that this is constantly in front of your family and your children, and in front of your family,

00:12:43.760 | you're continually talking about it. And when those missionaries come on furlough,

00:12:47.520 | they absolutely come to your house and tell stories. And then whenever possible,

00:12:51.200 | you absolutely go and visit them, and you take your family, and you start to build a connection,

00:12:55.040 | and you sponsor some short-term missions groups from your local area to them, and you take your

00:12:59.760 | children with them. And these kinds of things will expand out to where now this is a fundamental part

00:13:05.600 | and component of our family. And I think this can be done—I'm using foreign missions as an example—but

00:13:10.560 | it can be done in almost any area. If your family really—the mission that you really care about is

00:13:16.240 | bringing clean drinking water to the children all around the world that don't have any clean

00:13:22.640 | drinking water, and you're just providing a humanitarian aid work, then you would do the

00:13:27.360 | same basic thing using the same basic steps. And those types of things will make a difference in

00:13:33.200 | terms of articulating continually and holding the vision in front of yourself, in front of your wife,

00:13:38.720 | in front of your daughter, that this is one of the reasons our family is put here on earth is to make

00:13:43.120 | a difference in this particular issue. Then I think you would also start to orient and discuss

00:13:49.600 | how you can bring skills to bear to this mission, to this particular thing. And so this will be

00:13:55.680 | partly with you, but then with your daughter, you'll be talking about how can you contribute

00:13:59.680 | to this cause? What is needed for it? So let's say, for example, that what is really harming

00:14:05.120 | us right now in this particular cause that our family has adapted or chosen to focus on is we

00:14:11.280 | don't have—we're being frustrated by the legal system. And so if you want to become a lawyer,

00:14:18.320 | then we'll support you in that. And one of the expressions of the legal work you could do

00:14:22.240 | would be to work in this particular problem area that we're focusing on.

00:14:25.680 | And you can hold the vision in front of your children as to how their individual skills and

00:14:31.040 | giftings may fit into the long-term vision and mission of the family. So if you focus mostly

00:14:38.320 | on that for the next 10 or 15 years, while also giving, but giving through the vehicles that you

00:14:43.760 | have right now, and along the way you're building your business, you're building your income,

00:14:48.000 | you're accumulating more investment capital, and now you have a large payday where you sell a

00:14:56.320 | business or something like that. Now we've got several million dollars to tuck aside.

00:14:59.760 | Then I think at that point in time, establishing the family foundation will be absolutely a

00:15:06.240 | perfectly compatible thing. And you've done the really hard work up front of identifying the

00:15:11.440 | issues that are most important to your family, building a culture around those issues,

00:15:15.840 | supporting those issues in the way that your finances currently do. And then when you have

00:15:20.400 | a liquidity event where you can fund the family foundation, then you turn around and fund the

00:15:24.560 | family foundation. Your daughter is hired as the executive manager of the foundation.

00:15:28.640 | You're collecting more and more donations for it. And along the way, you've probably built out a

00:15:33.120 | vision for the kinds of projects, the large projects that need to be done that your family

00:15:37.920 | foundation can actually go ahead and fund. So that's, in my mind, a way to accomplish what

00:15:47.520 | you're trying to do that will ultimately probably be the most impactful, and it brings in the

00:15:53.760 | technicalities of a particular type of trust when it's appropriate, but it doesn't jump to that

00:16:00.000 | prior to it. Make sense? >> Yeah, that makes honestly so much sense.

00:16:06.320 | I knew that talking to you would help bring some clarity to that, so I thank you for your wisdom.

00:16:10.960 | >> My pleasure. What was part two of the question? >> It was about specifics of setting it up,

00:16:17.520 | so I don't know that I even need to get to part two.

00:16:19.600 | >> Yeah, I would... >> At the moment, anyway.

00:16:21.520 | >> Yeah, I couldn't even answer part two just because I've never done it.

00:16:24.400 | So it's something that's been on my research list and I've neglected it. But I really want to see,

00:16:33.680 | this is a big interest of mine, and it looks like I've got, at the moment, one other caller on the

00:16:38.480 | line, so I may talk more about this on the back half of the show just because I've got some time

00:16:42.000 | today. But I had a really interesting consulting call recently that really just stimulated my mind.

00:16:46.800 | I'm going to expand on this, but I really want to see philanthropy and charitable work

00:16:52.400 | addressed again, and this is something I think we really need to focus on.

00:16:57.440 | So I appreciate you giving me a chance to kind of start the question. But create the culture,

00:17:02.480 | build the vision, and then bring in the technical pieces where they're warranted

00:17:06.560 | and where they're wanted. And I think that's the best place to be going at this point in time.

00:17:11.440 | All right, move on to great state of New York. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today?

00:17:15.520 | >> Hi, Joshua. My name is Michael. I'm looking to gain your perspective on currently a career

00:17:23.600 | versus family balance decision that's my wife to make, but it's currently on the table and we have

00:17:30.560 | to make a decision in short order. And we could use a different perspective, maybe to see if we

00:17:36.800 | are missing something or if there's a better option for us. Let's get your thoughts. So I

00:17:43.040 | thought the best way to maybe lay it out is kind of highlight our goal, our current state, or what

00:17:48.160 | she currently has in the future state. And ask me any questions that you have. But the goal at the

00:17:56.080 | high level is that my wife is, we have one child and she's taken a slight step back from work,

00:18:01.840 | so she still wants to remain employed through her childbearing years. And we expect a second child

00:18:08.800 | here in November. And so she wants to remain employed, effectively. Her current role,

00:18:15.360 | her current job has that three-two split, three days in the office, two at home. She makes 96K

00:18:21.440 | over 24 clinical hours, but it's an hour commute away. And it has below average benefits,

00:18:28.480 | specifically the maternity benefit, healthcare, you name it. But it is very prestigious and it

00:18:39.520 | offers very stimulating intellectual work, which she values. Her future offer, the one currently

00:18:46.080 | on the table, is 151K. So a significant increase in pay. It's a two-minute commute from the house.

00:18:54.960 | So basically, literally within walking distance. It has significant benefits that are better for

00:19:01.200 | her, but she needs to expand her hours work from three-two to four-one, basically 24 clinical

00:19:09.120 | hours to 32. And it also has the benefit of basically being portable. So she can basically

00:19:15.600 | move to other states, potentially international if she wants. So it's gotten us to begin

00:19:21.680 | questioning whether our goal that we set out is even the right goal, or because all these other

00:19:28.400 | benefits have started to say, like, these are really attractive. But when we set out, our goal

00:19:34.240 | was to have her employed and to stay with the child as many hours as she could. I guess the

00:19:39.840 | question is, how do you think about this? It's not really a problem. It's two good options, right?

00:19:45.280 | But it's, how do you think about this, right? How can I frame it in a way that, you know,

00:19:50.400 | it's her decision to make, and I'm trying to be neutral. I don't want to lean one way or the

00:19:54.960 | other, but I'd love to get a perspective on, you know, is there a third option? How do you approach

00:20:00.080 | this, right? - Well, when you said two-minute commute, I about interrupted you to scream,

00:20:04.800 | "Take it, take it, take it," without another word. - Yeah, I know. It's literally a two-minute

00:20:09.280 | commute. And this is kind of where I thought you would add, you're a few years older than I am,

00:20:13.360 | and we're about to have our second child, and we had no idea, you know, zero to one changed our

00:20:17.360 | life completely. One to two is going to change your life completely. So I'd love to get your,

00:20:21.680 | yeah, the commute definitely was unexpected benefit here, but. - Yeah, I'll, just a brief

00:20:27.680 | interjection on that. I don't know this is entirely true, but here's the model I've made up,

00:20:32.560 | is that zero to one completely changes your wife's life, and it changes your life too. One to two

00:20:40.000 | changes your life significantly, because now you're, there's a lot more that you're doing with

00:20:45.360 | the older child, and your wife's usually entirely focused on the first child. Two to three, not much

00:20:50.480 | of a change, although you have to change your parenting style, because now you're outnumbered,

00:20:55.200 | so you have to go to, you know, one to many instead of one to one. And so there's a bit of

00:21:00.240 | a change in a parenting style, and from then on, they're just, it doesn't, it's not that big of a

00:21:04.800 | deal. You know, a couple of my children are away at the moment, and you know, we have three children,

00:21:10.080 | and what's always amazing is when you go from two to one, or from, in my case, down five to three,

00:21:15.680 | you're like, there was a time when three was, felt hard, but today it's like, where's all the

00:21:21.120 | children? It doesn't, it just kind of feels easy. So the point is, everyone's skills grow along the

00:21:26.400 | way, and I don't, I don't know, maybe it's not true, but it does, I think, I think one to two

00:21:32.400 | does change dad's life a bit more, because moms are usually pretty clingy to, to the first baby.

00:21:37.600 | Question, how is child care currently being handled right now with, with her current arrangement?

00:21:42.800 | Great, yeah, great question. So we had a, we, when we were going to have our first child,

00:21:48.640 | we were going to do daycare, and when my wife, we actually visited a daycare that a high school

00:21:55.200 | classmate of mine unexpectedly set up, and I'm, and it was a phenomenal daycare, except that

00:22:01.120 | before we hit the car in the parking lot on the way out, she was quitting her job. She was like,

00:22:05.360 | writing an email to draft. Basically daycare, she found, she couldn't, she, she, she was mortified

00:22:11.440 | about the prospect. Right. So we took a step back and we're like, okay, this is clearly not the

00:22:16.160 | option. And we had to quickly pivot and we chose to do a nanny. And so we're paying a significant

00:22:23.280 | amount of money, but worth every penny, right, for us to allow her to continue to work. And that

00:22:28.240 | would be the, that would be the, the state that we would currently, we had no parental support in,

00:22:33.680 | in, in this. So it's, it's either, you know, I make, I should have said this, I make significantly

00:22:40.800 | more money than she does. So the money is not, does not factor into her decision-making really.

00:22:47.200 | It's nice, but it's like, I make over 2X if she, you know, that she may, I make 350. So she's,

00:22:55.120 | we don't need the money effectively. Yeah. But that nanny is what, is what we currently use.

00:23:00.640 | Well, I think when you think about a career, when you look at what you're trying to get out

00:23:07.200 | of your career, and especially what your wife is probably trying to get from what you're describing.

00:23:12.480 | So you said we don't need the money. It's not like you're going to be poor if she weren't working at

00:23:16.960 | all. So what is she trying to get from her career then? She's trying to get a sense of purpose,

00:23:23.840 | right? A sense of contribution, a sense of contributing to the world. She cares about

00:23:29.760 | her patients and she wants to provide good quality care for her patients. She's looking for things

00:23:35.200 | like a sense of engagement with stimulation, stimulating her intellect, growing, learning,

00:23:42.560 | advancing as, as a physician, as in her role, in her work. She's, wants to feel part of the

00:23:50.160 | community, a needed and valued part of the community. These are all basically fulfillment

00:23:54.880 | goals. And so what it sounded like was that the new potential position, I think if I got,

00:24:04.320 | if I'm reading my notes right, I think you said that it would be a substantial increase in

00:24:09.520 | engagement. And it would also open up more flexibility in the future because it would

00:24:14.320 | expand her horizons. You did say it would be a lot more engaging, right?

00:24:19.120 | It was, it's not more, the current role actually is more stimulating of the two.

00:24:23.760 | Oh, I see.

00:24:24.560 | Every day. The current one is, is, is a highly prestigious role, but it, you know,

00:24:28.960 | but it's, it, the, the work that she does is very intellectually stimulating. You'll never have two

00:24:36.400 | same patients. It's highly complex. You know, it's, it pushes her every day, but it, you know,

00:24:42.960 | requires her, you know, this is, I didn't mention this, but, you know, she spent significant time

00:24:47.280 | out of office, unpaid prepping, you know, having to learn about these very, you know, one in,

00:24:53.600 | one in a 10 million type of event, right. Which wouldn't be the new role. The new role would be

00:24:58.560 | far more, uh, you know, I would say not like a common cold, but, but you'll see far more of it

00:25:04.960 | in your common everyday man. All right. So that's, this is important. And I, and I did misread my

00:25:10.480 | notes. I wrote down prestigious and stimulating, but I had it in the wrong grouping. Yeah.

00:25:17.120 | With regard to her vision, like let's say you fast forward 10 years, 15 years,

00:25:23.120 | does she have a vision of where she sees herself 10 or 15 years from now in her career?

00:25:27.040 | Yeah. Good question. Yes. You know, interestingly enough, not in the patient world, actually in the

00:25:33.600 | teaching world, which eventually she would like to do is eventually pivot her career into one of

00:25:40.320 | collegiate higher level education where she would be able to, you know, pass on her knowledge to

00:25:47.440 | the next generation in, in medical, you know, in nursing school or medical school or some type of,

00:25:52.480 | you know, um, you know, but not directly with clinical patients at that point.

00:25:56.960 | Is there an obvious difference between these two opportunities in terms of advancing her more

00:26:02.880 | quickly in that direction? So, um, I may be not the right person to ask that. I'm in a different

00:26:11.040 | field. Um, my, my opinion on this is no, my opinion is that, um, you moving and expanding

00:26:20.480 | your network is never a bad thing. And I think, uh, uh, you can always, you meeting new people,

00:26:28.000 | building bigger connections can always lead to, to different, you know, opportunities in them,

00:26:32.560 | you know, in other areas, including teaching. Yeah. Right. Well, at your household income level,

00:26:41.040 | it, and it becomes much less important to be focusing on maximizing the small things.

00:26:48.400 | Okay. This one makes a little bit more money. That one makes, you know, a little bit closer.

00:26:54.320 | This one gives me a little more job satisfaction. I have to work a little bit more at this thing

00:26:58.720 | just becomes not so important to focus on maximizing the small things. And it becomes

00:27:02.800 | more impactful to look at the big, big options that are going to make big moves in, in your

00:27:08.960 | direction. So let's, let's bring it to your career for, for example. Did I hear you're shopping for

00:27:14.240 | a car? Cause I've been at it for ages. Such a time suck, right? Not really. I bought it on Carvana.

00:27:19.600 | Super convenient. Oh, then comes all the financing research. Am I right? Well, you can,

00:27:25.120 | but I got pre-qualified for a Carvana auto loan in like two minutes. Yeah. But then all the number

00:27:29.520 | crunching and terms, right? Nope. I saw real numbers as I shopped, found my dream car and

00:27:34.400 | got it in a couple of days. Wait, like you already have it. Yep. Go to carvana.com to finance your

00:27:41.120 | car. The convenient way. If you had a job, a job offer where they said, Hey, listen, come over here

00:27:48.640 | for, we'll pay you 375 instead of the 350 you're making right now. You wouldn't take it. You

00:27:54.720 | wouldn't take it because you don't know anything about that. And for all, you know, there could be

00:27:59.600 | a whole bunch of worse options that you don't know about. You'd be the low man on the totem pole and

00:28:04.880 | seniority. There would be all kinds of, you know, a coworker that you don't like or a smelly bathroom

00:28:10.240 | at the new place or whatever it is. And so it's just not worth it. And so for her, it's kind of

00:28:15.120 | a similar thing. Now, clearly there's a big difference between 96,000 and 151,000, but at

00:28:19.680 | your tax rate, it's an extra $30,000 and you're listening to a finance show. So you're probably

00:28:25.440 | saving money. All you're probably going to do with it is save the money anyway and get a little bit

00:28:29.280 | richer, a little bit quicker. So it's like, okay, well, that's not, that's not really going to make

00:28:34.160 | a big difference to your life. So we have to look and say, what is going to make a big difference?

00:28:39.600 | Now, I'm not convinced that three days of work versus four days of work is going to make a big

00:28:45.520 | difference in the life of your family. But, you know, that is good. You know, being away three

00:28:53.840 | days and having the children with a nanny three days is less than four, and it gives her more time.

00:28:58.800 | If she's got four days off per week, and if she could be fully off per week, or at least she can

00:29:05.440 | arrange her at-home work around your children's schedule, then certainly that's significant,

00:29:12.080 | because it'll provide her a lot of flexibility. And since I believe that her work with children

00:29:16.880 | during those early years before they're in school is really important, that seems significant to me,

00:29:22.000 | and it's worth paying attention to. The hour-long commute versus two minutes commute, I would say

00:29:27.120 | that's a big deal. However, if it's a big deal where it's only three days a week, then we're

00:29:32.480 | talking about six hours of time, and it's only three days a week. And I enjoy having some commute,

00:29:40.880 | because I can put that time to good use. There's so many things I'd like to listen to and I'd like

00:29:45.440 | to learn. And so if she can put that time to good use in her career, then maybe that could just be

00:29:49.840 | part of the overall plan. So I'm tempted, based upon what you're saying, to say, "Stay put where

00:29:55.360 | she is right now, but look for the third option." So if there's no clear distinction between option

00:30:03.280 | A and B in terms of which one is going to lead her in the direction of working as a teacher

00:30:09.280 | in collegiate education, and the best we can come up with is a little bit of random encounters with

00:30:15.120 | expanding the network—which is true, it's good, it's just kind of random—then I'm inclined to say,

00:30:19.760 | "Well, is there a third path? Is there a job that if we really said what would be the next step that

00:30:25.680 | would have her teaching full-time as a full-time professor at a prestigious university 10 years

00:30:30.640 | from now, then what would be the job that would model that? Is that available to her? Or if it's

00:30:36.560 | not available to her today, then what could she do to get on track for that job?" So I'm inclined

00:30:42.560 | to look for the third option for that reason, because if she knows where she'd like to be a

00:30:46.480 | decade from now or 15 years from now, it's not a small increase in pay or a small decrease in

00:30:52.800 | some job satisfaction that she should be working on. I would look for what it would be the job or

00:30:59.200 | job description that would so obviously be right for her that moves her in the direction of where

00:31:05.200 | she wants to be 10 years from now that it's a no-brainer, and then work on that rather than

00:31:09.920 | worrying about two things that are relatively similar. >> Very insightful. Yeah, we'll see

00:31:18.240 | what she decides. I definitely think it's interesting because in some ways, at the top,

00:31:25.200 | her goal was to spend more time with... You spend three days a week, and there's just these other

00:31:31.280 | benefits that we are now questioning if our goals should be different, because they're very

00:31:37.280 | attractive. They're very attractive benefits. >> I would bet if we try to compare a two-minute

00:31:42.720 | commute to three versus four days, I'm not sure about this, but I would bet that the three-day-a-

00:31:48.400 | week job with the long commute would be a better fit for her family goals than the opposite,

00:31:54.000 | because by the time you get all set up and ready to go to work, you've got your mindset in work

00:31:59.440 | mode. The children know you're going to be gone. The nanny knows she's going to be there working.

00:32:03.440 | You know you're going to work, so working an extra two hours on those days is probably less

00:32:08.960 | cumbersome than having to spend a whole 'nother day at the office just because you have a two-minute

00:32:14.560 | commute. Like I said, I'm not entirely sure about that, but that's my bet. We go to Ontario. Welcome

00:32:20.000 | to the show. How can I serve you today? >> Hello, Joshua. >> Yep. Welcome. Go ahead.

00:32:27.520 | >> Perfect. Thank you. Yeah, I'm just back from a beautiful three-week trip with my family. You

00:32:33.360 | and I actually spoke during that trip, and I thought I was going to call in and ask about

00:32:38.720 | corporate burn rates and a bunch of other now seemingly unimportant things, because my 15-year-

00:32:44.720 | old has just a week ago received a type 1 diabetes diagnosis, and so my new part-time job is to

00:32:50.560 | understand everything about this, about the pancreas and blood sugars and how to best help

00:32:57.520 | her. Honestly, on the financial side, being in Ontario, Canada, they'll pay for a pump and

00:33:06.800 | insulin and most costs, but up to age 25, so I've got 10 years before I have to really worry about

00:33:15.520 | the financial side of things. I'm actually more thinking about, I mean, we have now in the family

00:33:22.000 | a lifesaving medication that I kind of want to figure out how to appropriately stockpile. Some

00:33:30.800 | people seem to just keep very little on hand, and I think, "Wow, that feels scary to me," so

00:33:36.240 | I'm not sure exactly. When I called in, I wasn't even sure what exactly I was going to ask about,

00:33:43.040 | but then I remembered this has filled my brain for the last week.

00:33:46.240 | – Absolutely. Well, I've got a solution for you, and stand by one second. All right, so I hit

00:33:54.240 | record again, and from the pause, what I'll do is I'm going to answer your question in just a moment

00:33:59.200 | on how to prepare for this from a prepping perspective, which is basically what you're

00:34:04.880 | asking. So first, I'm not a doctor. I don't play one on the internet. I really don't know,

00:34:10.240 | obviously. I do know— – That will not be considered medical advice.

00:34:13.600 | – Yeah, exactly, exactly. So I do know that there is an enormous amount of controversy

00:34:20.160 | around diabetes diagnosis, and obviously, there's a difference between type 1 diabetes and type 2

00:34:28.000 | diabetes, and there's a lot of information from people who are out there doing things on this.

00:34:35.920 | So the first thing I would say is you should work with your doctor, and

00:34:41.280 | nothing I say is ever going to go against your doctor. You should also find as much

00:34:52.160 | alternative advice and information on this as you can. I had a friend of mine recently whose

00:34:58.000 | 8-year-old was just diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. He himself is a doctor. He's a crunchy

00:35:03.280 | doctor. So he worked with his doctor, followed the advice, but immediately instituted enormous

00:35:16.640 | changes in his family's diet, eliminated all carbohydrates, eliminated all—I had to ask him

00:35:24.000 | for the—I could get him online, and I could ask him about all the questions, but he eliminated

00:35:29.760 | everything, all of the bad stuff, and they progressively stepped down the insulin amounts

00:35:35.280 | that his son was receiving, and at this point in time, they've been able to get the disease entirely

00:35:41.120 | managed exclusively based upon diet, 100% managed based upon diet. Now he's doing constant testing,

00:35:48.480 | and they're watching it very closely, but my observation is that very few people are willing

00:35:53.680 | to actually take those steps to control the disease completely based upon diet, and he was

00:36:02.160 | and is and does that. In fact, he knows—he consulted with another physician who has made

00:36:09.520 | a specialty of advising people on how to cure type 1 diabetes with this. Now I know I used the magic

00:36:15.920 | word that you're not supposed to use because type 1 is uncurable. All that stuff is true. So I'm not

00:36:20.080 | going to go any further than to say that there are a lot of people still debating this and still

00:36:25.360 | trying to figure this out, and so of course you need to be very careful with it, and be very

00:36:33.520 | careful with it, but go after it with the idea that let's—as we're making a plan for preparing

00:36:40.000 | for insulin, let's also make certain that we're doing what we can to cure the disease to that—to

00:36:45.200 | whatever extent possible for this particular person. Yes, totally yes. When they say, "Oh no,

00:36:52.080 | you can just eat ice cream. That's fine, and dose for it," it's like my daughter even at 15 is like,

00:36:58.000 | "Wait, like don't lie to me. Like if there's a better option, at least tell me, and then I can

00:37:03.360 | choose to do it or not do it." Right. She was kind of—she saw right through it. It's like the

00:37:07.680 | standard American diet is not the best option at this point. Right, right. So what the reason—I

00:37:13.680 | paused for a second—was I messaged my friend Stephen Harris, who is I think the world's expert

00:37:18.320 | on this particular issue, and I got him to jump on with us. Oh, well I live an hour and a half

00:37:21.920 | from Stephen. Stephen, welcome to the show. I'm glad you're here. Hey, I brought my four-inch

00:37:28.320 | fire hose. You really want the information, don't you? I did. So I have talked through this with

00:37:34.320 | you, but the question is we've got a listener here whose daughter was newly diagnosed with type 1

00:37:39.040 | diabetes, and so now he says, "Okay, I've got to keep this life-saving medication cold." And so I

00:37:44.480 | was saying, "Well, I could give the Stephen Harris speech on how to do this and how to prep for this,

00:37:48.960 | but if I can get Stephen Harris to do that, it'd be even better." So that's the question,

00:37:53.280 | and the question is, how does a type 1 diabetic plan to save his daughter—or sorry, how does a

00:37:58.080 | father who is proactively thinking about saving his daughter's life, how does he prepare as much

00:38:04.240 | as possible to make certain that she has appropriate insulin supplies saved? Okay,

00:38:10.000 | continental United States or not continental United States? Canada. I live within one hour

00:38:16.320 | of Detroit, Michigan, but on the Canadian side. Oh, okay. Yeah, well, you're about one hour from

00:38:21.840 | me, my friend. Anything you need, I'll help you out personally, I guarantee it. I'm aware. Thank

00:38:27.040 | you, Stephen. Okay, so insulin pump or not insulin pump? We're one week into a diagnosis,

00:38:35.280 | so we're on pens at this point. Okay, are you going to be looking as the doctor going to be

00:38:40.800 | looking at an insulin pump for her? I believe so, that is their plan, yes. Okay, and insulin—now

00:38:48.960 | type 1 and type 2 are dramatically different worlds, okay? Definitely. Type 1 really is a

00:38:57.200 | fundamental body problem, and Joshua is so correct in many aspects. There are and have been people

00:39:09.280 | who have controlled their type 1 insulin with diet. There are other people out there that

00:39:17.440 | that are just completely impossible to do, and now I am supposed to be type 2, okay, because

00:39:27.120 | slightly overweight, so I control mine very much with diet and with pill, and believe me,

00:39:38.960 | I have over a year's worth of pill. Now, the point is we're controlling it with diet. It's like I

00:39:46.480 | have a freezer full of protein, okay, and, you know, ham and bacon and other such things, and I

00:39:57.120 | can keep that cold. So, the question comes about is, is it more difficult to control the food?

00:40:05.280 | Is it more difficult to control the food that would keep your type 1 diabetes in check,

00:40:13.040 | or is it more difficult to control the type of insulin your daughter is going to get

00:40:18.480 | to keep it in check? Now, with Canadian health plans and the way they work in the United States,

00:40:29.040 | life becomes easier for the child when they're on an insulin pump, but it's also a lower dose

00:40:37.360 | of insulin, and it's a special dose of insulin. Are they just telling you that the insulin for

00:40:43.680 | an insulin pump has to be refrigerated, or are they telling you that you just going off a popular lore

00:40:51.520 | about insulin being refrigerated? So, we were instructed to refrigerate our insulin to get to

00:40:58.400 | keep it at 1 to 3 years of shelf life. They say once it's out of the fridge, our our medical team

00:41:04.480 | says says it's going to be like 28 days out of the fridge. Well, I mean, it says refrigerate your

00:41:11.760 | jelly after opening is loaded with sugar, which is a preservative, and it took me three years

00:41:17.520 | of yelling at my wife to get her to stop putting my damn peanut butter and jelly in the refrigerator.

00:41:22.400 | Yeah. Now, okay, the insulin pump is a little bit different. Are you familiar with like,

00:41:31.920 | I don't want a lot of people to get confused, so I'm going to qualify my answers. Are you familiar

00:41:37.840 | with the very expensive injectables that you give yourself like once a month for type 2 diabetes?

00:41:45.520 | Depends. Yes. Those are shelf stable for a long period of time without refrigeration,

00:41:56.240 | but that's a whole different world of type 2 diabetes generation meds. One of the meds you

00:42:04.880 | are probably going to be falling back on to see if you if you can control is actually available

00:42:11.680 | from Walmart in the United States without a prescription for $25 a bottle, and it's called

00:42:20.960 | Novalin 70/30. Now that has to be refrigerated, and they say, well, you can't freeze it,

00:42:33.040 | and I have done tremendous amount of work with the work of keeping insulin cold,

00:42:41.280 | and I have done it chemically. I haven't released a video on it yet. I should,

00:42:49.280 | but there's quite a few ways of doing that, and no, it has nothing to do with digging a hole and

00:42:55.920 | putting it in the ground or in the water. The ground temperature up here is not good enough

00:43:00.480 | for keeping insulin cool. The definition of insulin cool is below 40 degrees Fahrenheit,

00:43:10.800 | although below 50 extends that it wants to be 40 degrees or below, but they go, oh, but you can't

00:43:18.400 | freeze it. However, no one has looked up the definition of insulin freezing, and I have.

00:43:24.960 | I had to go back all the way into the patent literature, and that happens between 10 to 15

00:43:30.160 | degrees Fahrenheit, because if you do do that, it'll destroy the proteins.

00:43:33.920 | First of all, for the sake, and insulin is not water or liquid. It is a bunch of proteins,

00:43:42.640 | so for the sake of us in the rest of the world, you want to keep it between 32 and 40

00:43:51.120 | degrees Fahrenheit, and my postulation is that it is going to be easier for you to keep

00:43:59.600 | the insulin stored and cool than it is going to be able to keep

00:44:08.480 | the right amount and quality of food preserved and cool, although I would recommend a dual-prong

00:44:15.760 | approach. I have a CGM, continuous glucose monitor. Let me tell you, anyone out there with type 2

00:44:23.520 | diabetes, you get a CGM, it is going to change your life, like the Freestyle Libre 3. There's

00:44:30.960 | a Freestyle Libre 1, 2, and 3. I just found out Dexcom will send you a free sample that works for

00:44:39.200 | 10 days, so I ordered one. My daughter hit me with it last night, and just because I want to compare

00:44:45.200 | and understand more. The Dexcom is the superior device. The Dexcom is much more expensive,

00:44:52.880 | but you're in Canada, and the Dexcom will talk to your CGM, I mean to your glucose pump. They

00:45:01.840 | will talk back and forth. The other thing the Dexcom does is let you monitor your daughter's

00:45:08.560 | CGM remotely on your phone, and they'll send you warnings and everything else. Now, you put it on

00:45:16.320 | yourself, right, not her. I did put one on myself, yeah. That was incredibly intelligent, my friend,

00:45:23.440 | because now you get to play around with it. Even when you're a normal average person with a

00:45:28.480 | perfectly working pancreas and everything, you will be amazed to see how your sugar changes with

00:45:35.440 | what you eat. It's like you're going to see you're going to eat your ice cream, you're going to see

00:45:39.600 | it rise, and then you'll see your pancreas go, "Oh, we need insulin," and it comes right back

00:45:45.040 | down to normal. You will see that, and it is fascinating, especially for people who are into

00:45:51.520 | body hacking and life hacking, or if you're pre-diabetes, it helps a great deal.

00:46:00.560 | But as far as diet goes, we're talking no carbohydrates, no sugars, and so it is literally

00:46:11.840 | nuts, meats, protein, fats, oils, and all the wonderful, delicious stuff out there that takes

00:46:21.520 | time to get used to eating. And once you have a CGM on your daughter, you can experiment with diet.

00:46:29.040 | You can actually turn off the insulin pump, keep the CGM on, experiment with diet and what you can

00:46:36.640 | do to regulate it. But that is up between you and your medical practitioner to see how you want to

00:46:46.000 | do that. Now, I have, like I said, a dozen different ways of keeping insulin cold, some of

00:46:53.040 | which are chemically done that you can't even buy the chemicals in Canada because you live in a

00:46:59.280 | socialist country. Over here, we can get them. I'm serious. - I know, I know. Keep going. I'm

00:47:09.920 | just laughing. - They're illegal. So, it's like, there's stuff, I'll talk with you personally

00:47:19.360 | and privately if you want to come over if you have more issues and you want to go longer,

00:47:24.240 | but the easiest answer for you right now is we are going to get you a magical device called

00:47:33.600 | a thermos, a stainless steel thermos. You know exactly what I'm talking about, right?

00:47:41.280 | - Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. - Now, they come in quart, half gallon,

00:47:45.920 | and gallon sizes. And they're stainless steel inside and out so they won't break when you drop

00:47:51.680 | them and they have a vacuum in between of them. And you can put your bottles of Novolan 70/30 in

00:48:01.280 | there. You can put your, the bottles are much smaller for the insulin pump for type 1. Remember,

00:48:07.840 | type 1 is a different world than type 2, okay? - Yeah. - If this was 10 years ago and you asked

00:48:16.000 | me, "How am I going to do this?" I would say, "I'm sorry, your daughter's going to die."

00:48:20.880 | That's the way it was 10 plus years ago. It's like, "She's dead. There's nothing you can do."

00:48:26.320 | And in fact, until the invention of synthetic insulin, which was done only recently in history,

00:48:33.440 | like, I believe, 60s, that was the case. Type 1 people died. In fact, there's a whole story arc

00:48:42.400 | in the book, "One Second After" about a type 1 diabetic daughter dying. - I've read, yes,

00:48:51.200 | I've read that. - Yeah, and that will, as a father, I'm sorry, that'll probably scare the piss out of

00:48:56.640 | you because you'll do anything in the world to keep your daughter alive. And I will supply you

00:49:02.720 | with everything you need to keep your daughter alive as long as possible. But yeah, you can have

00:49:08.880 | a three-year supply of insulin. You might have to be going and buying that personally and everything

00:49:13.840 | else. You're going to have to find out with your doctor's consultation if the injectable 70/30

00:49:21.200 | NovoLen with a needle, which you get at Walmart as well, will work and control your daughter

00:49:31.520 | type 1 with and without diabetes. Now, Canada also did some other laws and some other stuff.

00:49:39.040 | They made insulin, the other types of insulin, very affordable in the United States. This is

00:49:45.360 | the only one at this moment in 2024 that I know that you can get without a prescription over the,

00:49:51.760 | it actually called behind the counter, it's not over the counter. You have to ask the pharmacy

00:49:57.440 | for it and they go, "Yeah, sure." But if you walk up there with a CGM and you say, "Hey,

00:50:03.520 | I need three bottles of NovoLen 70/30 and I need two boxes of 30-unit needles." It's like,

00:50:11.200 | "Yep, okay, here you go. Not a problem, no question, anything. They know you're not a

00:50:17.440 | druggie looking for needles or anything else like that."

00:50:19.840 | So Stephen, what I was going to say, not having heard some of your other methods,

00:50:23.920 | back to the thermos. I've heard you when talking about this in the past, talk about the efficiency

00:50:29.200 | of a thermos and how incredibly well insulated it is. And so, in fact, years ago when I heard

00:50:35.600 | you talk about this for the first time, I went out and got a big giant Stanley thermos. No one's

00:50:40.640 | diabetic, but I thought like this could be life-saving for somebody. So I went and got one.

00:50:44.640 | And then in addition to that, you have, or I would say based upon, let's say that there's a

00:50:50.320 | grid down emergency one second after, then you would store fuels for running a generator. You

00:50:57.520 | would use the generator to create ice, and then you would use the ice to keep the thermos cold.

00:51:01.680 | And that would be the most efficient way, running an ice maker, that would be the most efficient way

00:51:06.400 | to turn stored fuels, which can be stored for the long-term, into ice, which can be used to

00:51:11.520 | keep the insulin cold using very high quality, huge amounts of insulation. So putting that

00:51:16.880 | chain together is how I would have answered that. Is that correct?

00:51:19.600 | Yes, you're stealing my thunder sheets.

00:51:22.160 | Uh-oh, well, I was just trying to get you to do it. So go ahead and...

00:51:25.280 | Yeah, I know, but it's a difficult subject that you have to process because there's so

00:51:30.640 | much medical involved, and it has to be... The idea of, you won't be able to store

00:51:37.680 | the little vials of insulin for the insulin pump, because you just can't get basically more than a

00:51:45.120 | month or so in advance with the Canadian health care or US health care system. And to go and buy

00:51:51.840 | them is extremely expensive. So the idea of, well, the $25 or whatever, the $30 a vial insulin you

00:52:01.040 | can get in Canada, work for you, has to be determined between them and their medical

00:52:07.120 | practitioner. And then it's like, yes, we can keep it cool, but what uses are keeping it cool

00:52:14.640 | if they can't get it or can't afford to get it?

00:52:16.560 | Right, I see. Yep.

00:52:17.600 | And it's like, hey, you want to come over to Michigan, you can't get insulin there for $30

00:52:22.800 | a bottle? Well, come over here, I'll give you all the 70/30 noble in you want.

00:52:26.160 | Right, right, right.

00:52:27.440 | And you can just take it across the border. You know, my friend, you're an hour away,

00:52:31.440 | I'll help you. So Josh is exactly right. And what you want to do is you want to get an ice maker,

00:52:39.040 | like one of the $75 to $125 countertop ice makers that makes only 26 pounds of ice a day.

00:52:48.640 | And what you're going to do, what you're going to do is you're going to put the insulin into,

00:52:56.080 | a year's worth of insulin can fit inside of a thermos, plus maybe some more. I've done it,

00:53:01.520 | I got the bottles here, I got the thermos. And you can put the ice into it. Now, you have to

00:53:08.080 | understand the magic is not in the ice, the magic is in the thermos. It is a vacuum-walled

00:53:15.040 | insulation device. And nothing passes between a vacuum except for thermal radiation. And they've

00:53:23.440 | cut that down very low with what's called the emissivity of the walls of the vacuum chamber.

00:53:30.080 | This is the same way you would store liquid nitrogen, liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen,

00:53:36.400 | liquid helium, they all go into a door or a thermos. And the thing is, you might have to

00:53:44.240 | make your ice, you know, the first day you're going to have to put more ice in it because you

00:53:50.880 | got to cool down thermos and you got to cool down the insulin. Now, once it's cold, you'll be adding

00:53:57.600 | less ice a day, like you might be adding a pound or half a pound of ice a day to the insulin. You

00:54:06.000 | get a little fish tank from Marlboro, you drop it in there, and you read the temperature and away

00:54:12.720 | you go. But the thing is, if there is ice and water in a thermos, it is at 32 degrees Fahrenheit,

00:54:18.720 | period. And that is not freezing for insulin. And I would do a combination of very intelligent

00:54:26.800 | stuff. And, you know, for what you're talking about, I would go with a solar power method,

00:54:34.880 | which I can help you with. I'm not one of these damn solar generators.

00:54:39.040 | Oh, I know you're amazing with solar.

00:54:41.760 | I can, we know, you and I can do solar intelligently. If I let you lose to do

00:54:50.640 | solar on your own with YouTube and the idiots on the internet, you're going to do solar wrong.

00:54:55.840 | Solar can be done intelligently. And this, for you, since we're talking health, life and safety,

00:55:03.920 | is one of the critical uses of solar because what price do you put on your daughter?

00:55:10.400 | So we take a multi-prong approach and I can actually recommend some of the products from

00:55:17.920 | EcoFlow, not Jackery. I have them. There are other options as well. You don't want to use

00:55:25.680 | their panels if you're cost conscious, but if you say, screw it, I just want it, just get it.

00:55:32.400 | That will power your ice maker. And, or we can put, I'd rather over-panel you because you're

00:55:38.560 | in Ontario. We have this thing up here called, that other people don't understand, like Joshua

00:55:43.440 | doesn't understand, called winter, where it's cloudy literally for, I mean, literally in

00:55:51.840 | December where he and I live, I live in Detroit, he lives in Ontario. There are three days of

00:55:56.800 | sunshine a year. And it's like, no, the solar panels don't work in clouds or rain or moonlight.

00:56:05.520 | They're called solar panels, not cloud panels, not rain panels. But the purpose is for every day,

00:56:12.640 | for every moment you get sunshine, that reduces your level of fuel you need.

00:56:21.920 | Because since your daughter's life is so critical to you, I am going to tell you that

00:56:29.440 | if you're going to do this at like the highest level of sincerity, you cannot have a gasoline

00:56:37.360 | generator. Okay. You cannot have one as your main generator. You're going to have to go with either

00:56:46.800 | a diesel generator and, or a diesel vehicle with an inverter on it in order to do this.

00:56:55.360 | And I would prefer you to have a direct diesel generator. That will also do your house,

00:57:01.440 | your home and everything else because us treating and storing diesel fuel, and basically for diesel

00:57:07.760 | fuel, all you got to do is make sure water doesn't get into it. And most diesel, everything have a

00:57:13.280 | water fuel separator on them. And you have to make sure a fungus doesn't want to start growing

00:57:19.440 | in the diesel fuel. So diesel fuel is easy to store and treat. In fact, for a diesel generator,

00:57:26.800 | we can get you jet A, which is aviation kerosene, which is basically the same as diesel fuel. And

00:57:35.040 | it's like, it'll last utterly forever. And it's only $5 a gallon over here in the United States.

00:57:43.600 | And yes, we can go and buy as much of it as we want over here in Detroit.

00:57:48.080 | You get to tell the border what you're bringing across. But if you're going to go with the ice

00:57:55.040 | making method, one, you're going to have three ice makers. Okay. You're not going to have two,

00:57:59.840 | you're going to have three ice makers. You're going to, oh, thank you, Josh, for giving the

00:58:05.920 | thermos. That was really considerate for you of other people, let alone if any of your children

00:58:11.520 | develop type one. So we're going to go with three ice makers for you. We're going to go with

00:58:19.520 | a battery system, some type of solar input to run the ice maker. And we're going to get you lined

00:58:29.200 | up with a diesel generator and/or some other type of diesel power, diesel storage, because you can

00:58:37.040 | do that city, country, whatever, in Ontario. And it's like, yeah, guess what? It's going to cost

00:58:46.000 | money and everything else, but you can't change that. These cards have been dealt to you. Your

00:58:51.760 | 15 year old is now a type one. And it's like getting your tax bill or having the assessment

00:59:00.800 | on your property change. It's like, if you want to keep on living there, this is what you're going

00:59:05.760 | to have to, this is what you're going to have to do in order to do this because you can't change

00:59:13.520 | the situation. And the only way you can do food augmentation of, only way you can do food

00:59:24.800 | augmentation is with a CGM to see how it affects your type one diabetes. Standard medical care just

00:59:33.040 | wants to go throw an insulin pump on them and let them have normal life. And it's like, you know,

00:59:39.440 | your diet has to absolutely change when you get into that regime. And you're going to have to do

00:59:47.840 | that with an awfully intelligent endocrinologist. - Yes. It's funny, Steven, at 15, she already saw

00:59:57.760 | through the medical team when they said, oh, just eat what you want and dose for it. She's like,

01:00:01.600 | well, there's gotta be a healthier option. Tell me what it is and I can choose to do it or not.

01:00:06.160 | - Yeah, absolutely. - Well, I very much appreciate

01:00:10.080 | the answers and I'm sure I'll follow up offline. - Right. Joshua, you can get my email at

01:00:19.360 | harris1234.com. Of course I had to throw out my website, but no, you can get my email on

01:00:27.280 | harris1234.com and then you can send me an email. Make sure in the subject you put Ontario type one

01:00:34.720 | diabetes, Joshua Sheets, and it will gain my attention. And see, the other thing is

01:00:45.440 | CGM monitors don't last forever. I've got an extra CGM monitors and they just died in the box.

01:00:54.240 | So even if she is type one and you got insulin pump and a CGM, there's no way you're getting

01:01:00.240 | extra insulin pumps and CGM for, it would be an extraordinary amount of work to get them for a

01:01:08.320 | year, okay? Let alone for multiple years. So which means you're gonna have to fall back to,

01:01:17.280 | you can buy multiple years of finger prick stuff and strips and do it the old fashioned way.

01:01:24.400 | And I have at least a year's worth of finger strips and finger prick stuff and the meters that

01:01:32.080 | read the blood glucose strips. And so you can do like three years of those things. And you're

01:01:40.400 | gonna have to go with like one, two or three years of, if again, between you and your doctor,

01:01:48.880 | keeping my language carefully, will whatever is off the shelf in Canada that you can buy with

01:01:55.520 | cash for quote $30 a vial, like Novoland 7030 at Walmart in the United States. And Walmart is the

01:02:03.200 | only place you can get that because they bought the insulin company. The question is, will

01:02:10.560 | kept cold Novoland 7030 work for your daughter in her type one situation or not? It's a mid acting

01:02:22.480 | insulin. So it's not like an immediate acting insulin. You would have to take it like two or

01:02:29.440 | three hours before you ate. And of course the easiest thing to store is going to be

01:02:37.680 | your regular foods of carbs, beans, oil, flour, that type of stuff for long term food storage.

01:02:47.520 | And maybe your long term food storage is definitely going to have to change

01:02:53.120 | more and focus with your daughter. Yeah, there are all sorts of difficulties. I think we addressed

01:03:02.960 | it enough for Joshua Sheets audience now, but you're free to reach out to me personally and

01:03:10.160 | I'll get, we'll get you tailored for your daughter and where you live and what your budget is and

01:03:20.240 | what your concerns are and how much the Canadian healthcare system will supply you and everything

01:03:27.520 | else. It's like, well, how did you first notice your daughter was becoming the type one diabetic?

01:03:32.720 | Was she like, you know, being sleepy a lot or peeing a lot? What led you to the type one

01:03:38.560 | diagnosis? You know what? We went in for almost routine blood work for something that seemed

01:03:44.640 | innocuous and they came back and said, drop what you're doing and get to the hospital. You know,

01:03:49.440 | fairly critical that you do that immediately. So I mean, her A1c was 12 at the time, so it was

01:03:55.280 | definitely up enough to know there's something up. What was her blood glucose though? 17.

01:04:01.920 | No. Oh, you're using different measurements. Oh, sorry. Canadian system. Oh, that would be like,

01:04:08.640 | sir, 300, fairly high. Wow. Yeah. 300 is an ER trip, my friend. 300 is, for a 15 year old,

01:04:19.840 | 300 is an absolutely immediate ER trip. And one, congratulations to you as a father,

01:04:30.320 | as a responsible parent for taking your daughter in and your child and having just routine panels

01:04:36.720 | run on them. That will pick up problems in your children. It's like, gosh, all your children

01:04:43.760 | should have a panel every six months from your local doctor. You know, it's cheap enough and

01:04:48.320 | everything else, you know, that just screens for like more things than you could possibly imagine.

01:04:56.800 | But yeah, you know, congratulations on just taking your daughter in and having a blood

01:05:01.600 | panel done on her. And it's like, everything's fine. Everything's fine. It's like, oh, well,

01:05:06.240 | you know, we noticed you're a little deficient in this, in like vitamin D or B or something,

01:05:12.560 | and you should just take a Flintstones daily, multivitamin daily supplement.

01:05:18.160 | And it's like, so many lives would be improved around the world if people just had a standard

01:05:26.640 | a penny a day multivitamin supplement. But yeah, congratulations on one going,

01:05:33.840 | this isn't normal or something and taking your daughter in and having a panel done.

01:05:38.240 | The other best way of knowing if there's anything wrong with you is, you know, literally a CAT scan.

01:05:46.240 | That's how all the early cancers and everything are all detected is with a CAT scan.

01:05:51.680 | - I'm going to cut you off there because we actually spent a good amount of time on last

01:05:54.960 | week's episode talking about exactly this. I don't know how it's become this radical

01:05:58.640 | personal finance has become radical medical advice hour or something. Thank you both gentlemen.

01:06:03.280 | - Well, it's because we're talking about preparedness and long-term storage and

01:06:09.920 | wanting to live and to find the problem before it becomes the problem. So it's very much in

01:06:17.600 | your subject and in your wheelhouse, as well as with the, I mean, this is dramatically going to

01:06:22.880 | impact his finances. - Absolutely.

01:06:24.880 | - This whole type one diabetes thing is going to impact with his daughter, his finances.

01:06:31.040 | So it very much falls underneath the auspices of radical personal finance.

01:06:35.600 | - Yeah, absolutely. - Thank you very much.

01:06:38.160 | - I'll let you gentlemen connect offline. I'll meet you both out here. And in closing on this

01:06:42.400 | topic before I go to the final caller here, I want to just list some of the symptoms. As I

01:06:47.680 | have observed people as this caller has just experienced, type one diabetes is usually

01:06:54.880 | undiagnosed. And I've observed various stories and listened to a number of people, including

01:07:00.240 | personal friends who have gone through a diagnosis and they never had a clue before, but then

01:07:05.040 | something happened and they had the tests. And as you just heard straight to the ER. So here is a

01:07:10.880 | list of symptoms to watch out for and just to file away in the back of your mind. Number one is

01:07:16.480 | increased thirst and urination. So if you're interacting with a young person who is experiencing

01:07:22.800 | increased thirst and urination, then think about what that might mean. Extreme hunger, number two.

01:07:28.880 | Number three, weight loss. Number four, fatigue. Number five, irritability and mood changes.

01:07:34.480 | Number six, blurred vision. Number seven, yeast infections. Young girls may experience yeast

01:07:39.680 | infections and infants can develop diaper rash caused by yeast. Number eight, bedwetting in

01:07:45.120 | previously toilet trained children. Number nine, fruity scented breath. And number 10, nausea and

01:07:51.040 | vomiting. And so one of the things that I've heard of stories is where people experience relatively

01:07:56.400 | mild symptoms with a teenager, and then they wind up going to the hospital or they wind up going,

01:08:02.640 | just kind of not worrying about it. And then it winds up in the emergency room. So file away in

01:08:07.520 | the back of your head. The type one diabetes is something very serious that we want to pay

01:08:11.120 | attention to on an ongoing basis and think about those symptoms. Kyle in Washington,

01:08:15.920 | welcome to the show. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, Kyle?

01:08:18.720 | Hi, good afternoon. I am curious, did you grenade your Twitter account?

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01:09:08.400 | Okay. Is that what I have to look forward to? You did a good job curating a lot of things that

01:09:14.240 | pertain to my specific interest. It's not a permanent thing. I love Twitter. Twitter speaks

01:09:22.160 | my language through and through. And so it's not a permanent thing necessarily, but I have a hard

01:09:28.640 | time getting anything done. And as much as I like to believe that I'm a person who's uninvolved with

01:09:34.560 | politics, I can't take it. It's a drug for me and I'm an addict. And so I have to just be off of it.

01:09:41.200 | I can't do it. If I let it in at this point, especially going into an election or in an

01:09:46.080 | election season and whatnot, then I'll spend half my day arguing with random strangers on the

01:09:50.400 | internet and get nothing done. I've done it repeatedly from time to time, but that's the

01:09:58.080 | story. So it was nice of you to notice. And I will be back on Twitter in the future undoubtedly.

01:10:03.040 | I've had an account since 2008 and I'm sure that I'll be back posting more stuff in the future.

01:10:07.520 | But quite literally in my password manager, Twitter has a label on it that says, "Do not

01:10:14.960 | open this password until..." And I usually put a goal in there because I know that if I want to

01:10:23.440 | get something done, I can't be on Twitter for whatever reason. Some guys are addicted to video

01:10:28.880 | games. I'm addicted to Twitter. So I just got to manage it. So that's it. Hold me accountable.

01:10:39.840 | I didn't tell anybody. I don't announce anything. I don't say I'm leaving Twitter.

01:10:46.160 | I just delete everything and disappear. And you're the first person to call me out on it.

01:10:52.720 | Yeah. I check every handful of weeks and I'm like, "Nasim Tlaib still. Okay. Well,

01:10:56.480 | I guess he's gone. Fine. I'll look for something else to do. Maybe I'm killing time too."

01:11:01.840 | What do you mean, "Nasim Tlaib"? Do I have a tweet up about that?

01:11:05.520 | Yeah. It was like a year old tweet. It's the only thing up.

01:11:11.760 | That is hilarious. So I deleted every tweet that I can see. And what happens when you delete all

01:11:18.160 | your tweets is depending on how you do it, which app you do it. I don't do it manually. I use

01:11:24.400 | various apps and whatnot. But you'll delete them all and then there'll be a few left and you go

01:11:28.160 | through and you delete them. So I got rid of all of them. So I can't see a single tweet on my profile.

01:11:32.960 | But what's funny, what does the tweet say? Is it when Tlaib blocked me?

01:11:40.400 | Yeah. That's what I was wondering. Is it because... I don't know if it's when he blocked you,

01:11:46.000 | but I'm wondering if that's why. I'll tell you the story. That's hilarious though.

01:11:51.200 | So there are very few people that... I'm not a heavy blocker and I'm sure I'm blocked by some

01:11:58.400 | people, but I've had my share of arguments and things like that. But for the most part,

01:12:03.200 | I've learned not to argue with people on the internet. I just say, "You're right," and move

01:12:06.080 | on with my life. But I've long been a fan of Nassim Tlaib. He always had an interesting Twitter

01:12:17.760 | feed. So for many years, Twitter was broken. I used to use TweetDeck. I wanted to see all the

01:12:25.440 | tweets of the people that I chose. That was what I wanted to see. Anyway, I've changed the system a

01:12:30.000 | lot over the years. But I would always go and check Tlaib's feed and I always appreciated his

01:12:34.400 | insight. He's a very deep thinker. I respect his ability. I really do. I respect him a lot.

01:12:43.120 | He's also a jerk, a total jerk on Twitter. But I'm good at dealing with jerks. I have lots of

01:12:49.600 | jerks in my life that I learned from and move on. So that doesn't really bother me. So I watched

01:12:54.880 | him. I watched Tlaib all through the pandemic. And if you think back about all of the controversy,

01:12:59.920 | Tlaib was an early warner of the pandemic. And he would go left, right, and center about how

01:13:08.080 | stupid everyone was for not reacting. And so I watched him all through the pandemic. And he was

01:13:12.960 | a strong proponent of COVID vaccination. And I always respected his statistical ability. So I

01:13:20.400 | followed him as a trusted source of information. So after the pandemic, though, we started to see

01:13:28.880 | all kinds of aberrations in medical data. And so the question is, what's going on?

01:13:36.880 | What's going on with all these heart attacks and this heart disease? What's going on with

01:13:42.320 | the myocarditis that was going on? And I'm reading and I'm watching and I'm finding all kinds of

01:13:47.040 | information that this is concerning. And then the excess deaths. I'm watching all the excess

01:13:52.480 | death numbers around the world. And the excess deaths in every country that has the data just

01:13:56.480 | going up and up and up and up. So one time, I chose my time, because I know that Tlaib's a jerk

01:14:03.440 | and he insta-blocks everyone. And so I came back to him one time. And I said, "I'm looking forward

01:14:11.280 | to hearing..." This was my quote, or this was my tweet. "Nassim, I'm looking forward to hearing

01:14:17.360 | your analysis of the current rates of excess deaths. I'm looking forward to hearing your

01:14:25.840 | statistical analysis of this situation when you have the time." I come back to Twitter blocked.

01:14:33.440 | And that really frustrated me. Because it's like, when your block hand is so heavy,

01:14:38.880 | and you actually... Anyway, that drove me nuts. And so whatever tweet I had there,

01:14:43.120 | that was the context. And I'm still blocked by Tlaib. And I still find it annoying,

01:14:48.960 | because I genuinely would like to hear from somebody like him do an analysis of the excess

01:14:54.960 | death problem. And I'm totally... I'm not a conspiracist. I'm totally willing just to follow

01:15:00.960 | the data. But we need to actually look at the data. And so when there's astounding levels of

01:15:04.560 | silence of this global, never-ending excess deaths in every country that has the data,

01:15:10.560 | then it's pretty astonishing. And it really makes you wonder if your heroes are as honest as you

01:15:14.720 | wish they were. Yeah, come on, man. Hire some economists. We all know you love them.

01:15:23.280 | So that's the story. And that's hilarious to me, that that's what would show up.

01:15:29.120 | I remember when you got blocked, because I knew he didn't know your personality or anything,

01:15:33.120 | because otherwise, he would have thought you were being genuine. It was to crack me up.

01:15:37.920 | How could I have stated it any differently? I didn't...

01:15:40.560 | What do you do? I understand that Twitter is a pretty toxic place, and you think everyone is

01:15:47.520 | doing it. But how could you possibly more politely just express, "I want to hear your perspective on

01:15:54.320 | this issue, because I'm interested in how you view this." And you're so sensitive that Insta-block.

01:16:02.000 | Thank you for being on Twitter. I will be back on Twitter soon. Probably won't be back on Twitter

01:16:08.960 | till after the election season, just because I can't take it. I don't have enough self-control.

01:16:15.200 | If I have it on my phone, which is of course where you wind up most, then I wind up just wasting all

01:16:19.520 | my time. If I'm signed in it on the computer, I wind up wasting all my time, and I can go into

01:16:24.160 | zombie mode on that thing. So I'm not strong enough to resist it. I have thought that maybe

01:16:30.080 | at some point I'll do what some people do, have someone else post your tweets for them. So here,

01:16:35.440 | put this on Twitter, put this on Twitter, put this on Twitter. But I haven't done that.

01:16:40.800 | Well, and so I don't care for social media too much. I don't really like it, but that's what I

01:16:45.680 | mean about you curating that stuff for me is I've gone on since you deleted that and tried to find

01:16:50.720 | the kind of thing that interests me. And boy, you're not wrong. You can end up, like you say,

01:16:54.880 | just wasting time in rabbit holes that ultimately lead to nothing.

01:16:58.880 | I can see how you just want to call it here and there.

01:17:05.840 | Exactly. I'll be back. I'll be back. I'm not sure when.

01:17:07.760 | I'll put a question if you feel like it.

01:17:09.600 | Please, that'd be great. We'll round out with your question. Go ahead.

01:17:11.840 | So you've spoke about your son's reading level, and I'm curious how you're

01:17:19.840 | establishing his reading level and how you're testing it. If you're just giving him hard books

01:17:27.520 | to read and you read them, or if you're actually testing it, if you've got some methodology,

01:17:31.600 | some type of framework or reading level competency framework that the college uses that you're putting

01:17:40.320 | in front of him, I'd just be curious to see how you do that. If I say something like I've said

01:17:46.160 | in the past, so I have a child who, I've said, reads at a graduate degree level, that's an

01:17:53.280 | offhand comment, first of all, but it's not one without substantiation. I'm doing that based upon

01:17:59.040 | Lexile score. So the simplest score that I have looked at is, there's what's called a Lexile

01:18:06.080 | score. I forget all the data that goes into it, but it's a standardized measurement. So if you're

01:18:09.920 | out shopping for books, one of the things that you can find, they may or may not have it on Amazon,

01:18:14.240 | but one thing you'll find is, oh, this book has a Lexile score of 473 or 862. So what I did one

01:18:22.160 | time was I took some of the school books that I know that I'm assigning that are being read,

01:18:28.160 | and then I know that they're being understood because I require narration after the reading,

01:18:33.360 | so I know that it's being understood, and then I just checked the Lexile scores. And due to the

01:18:40.480 | kind of the homeschooling curriculum that we use, we use a lot of advanced books.

01:18:44.160 | In the philosophy that I follow mostly, which is the Charlotte Mason philosophy,

01:18:50.320 | we don't really shelter language. We don't try to give children dumbed-down books

01:18:58.320 | once they're doing. What we do is we make the language accessible by, for example, reading it

01:19:05.760 | aloud to the student instead of causing the student to read it himself. We make it accessible

01:19:11.520 | by taking it in short segments. We don't require 60 minutes of reading. It's just six minutes.

01:19:17.440 | So sit and listen to this difficult book for six minutes, and then we try to stimulate interest by

01:19:22.160 | finding the very best books that are on the subject written by somebody who's a real expert.

01:19:28.880 | So those books are in many cases written for adults, and they're written at a very erudite

01:19:36.880 | level. They're very sophisticated in the language, and then the student just gets used to that,

01:19:44.320 | and that becomes a core component of the kind of things that he reads.

01:19:47.520 | So I have observed that this works fine, is that we don't need to shelter language

01:19:52.800 | if we recognize that there's a pace at which you have to work into this.

01:19:59.520 | But that's not to say that I require those kinds of books all the time. That's just for the school

01:20:05.600 | books that I do require, but I make them acceptable. I'm always testing to say,

01:20:09.520 | "Do we have comprehension? Test comprehension by narration. Is it too hard? If I have pushback

01:20:14.560 | on the book, then I recognize it's too hard. I need to make it easier."

01:20:17.440 | And then the children just have access to a broad array of books that they can read from for free,

01:20:22.720 | voluntary reading, and they can pick and choose, and I don't really care what they choose. It's

01:20:26.640 | fine if it's low. So that's why I've made that statement. What I think is true is that young

01:20:33.440 | people can access young students if they have a good educational platform—and remember,

01:20:39.840 | this is thousands of hours of reading aloud and good books and all the stuff that's working up to

01:20:44.320 | it. I think young people can handle intellectually the same ideas that older people can handle.

01:20:51.680 | I think an 8- or 10-year-old can handle the same exact ideas that an 18-year-old can handle

01:20:58.960 | in terms of the study of biology or the study of physics. What he can't handle is he doesn't

01:21:03.760 | have the stamina. So it's my observation that what an 18-year-old builds or a 25-year-old builds is

01:21:10.000 | stamina, and so it's hard work for the brain to absorb those concepts. And so what we're basically

01:21:17.520 | building in school once we get past the initial phases is stamina, not necessarily sophistication

01:21:23.200 | of language. >>Gottcha. Yeah, and are you asking

01:21:30.640 | for narration right after the reading? You're not, I imagine, coming back for long-term retention a

01:21:36.880 | day or a week or a month later for that type of assessment? >>You're supposed to ask for narration

01:21:42.960 | right alongside the reading. So one of the things that the experienced educators that I really

01:21:51.760 | admire, they will read a segment of the book, and then they'll require narration for the segment of

01:21:56.880 | the book. My wife and I aren't that good enough to do that, so what I found that worked—we really

01:22:02.320 | struggled with narration for a long time. Not only did I have terrible narrations for a long time,

01:22:07.280 | but we also just struggled to do it because we weren't really used to it. What has worked for us

01:22:13.280 | is to put narrations in at mealtime. So since we eat together, and we eat together as a family

01:22:19.360 | 23 times a day, what I have done is to make mealtimes productive, since I want to have

01:22:26.880 | conversation, but a lot of times with young children, it doesn't flow the same as with teens

01:22:31.840 | and adults. So I do narrations at mealtime. So I come in for lunch, I have the children bring me

01:22:36.240 | their checklists, and then I go around the table. Child number one narrates, and I choose something

01:22:42.800 | from the morning's readings. Child number one narrates it, then I go to child number two,

01:22:48.160 | choose something from that child's checklist that has been read in the morning, and that child

01:22:53.040 | narrates it. Child number three, and I go through. Then what has happened is this has fixed our

01:22:57.760 | narration problems because with my oldest, we didn't have a culture of narration. Now with my

01:23:04.000 | younger children, they're way better narrators because they've been narrating since the beginning,

01:23:09.920 | and they just think it's fun and it's what we do. Then what I'm also hoping winds up being the case

01:23:14.960 | in the fullness of time, is that this stuff becomes a test of basically what you're saying,

01:23:19.920 | long-term memory. Because if child number two or three is narrating a story or narrating a book

01:23:25.040 | that is two or four grade levels behind child one or two, then the older child is being reminded of

01:23:32.480 | the concept from the book previously. So that's the K. I'm not doing much in the area of long-term

01:23:38.720 | retention. I've thought about it, I just don't have the capacity to do it. I think in a perfect

01:23:44.160 | world, we would all read everything in SuperMemo, the app that Piotr wrote years ago. We would just

01:23:55.280 | do all our reading in that, and everything we put into a spaced repetition system, and we would put

01:24:00.080 | everything in, but I can't do that. So I don't worry too much about retention because I figure

01:24:05.440 | the brain's going to hang on to what the brain wants to hang on to. As we get towards exams,

01:24:10.800 | then we'll prepare for exams, and that'll be kind of where we start to put in more of those

01:24:15.120 | structured things. But as I see it, the philosophy that makes sense, I really like Charlotte Mason's

01:24:21.760 | ideal vision of spreading a delectable feast before the child. And basically, if I continue

01:24:28.160 | to do my job of spreading a delectable feast of ideas in front of my children, then it's my idea

01:24:34.080 | that in the fullness of time, they'll choose what they want and they'll discard what they don't,

01:24:40.080 | and then we'll just observe what they're more attracted to, what they're less attracted to,

01:24:44.000 | as individuality sets in. But I'm going to keep putting those ideas in place.

01:24:48.880 | And my concern with extensive testing goes back to another Charlotte Mason philosophy,

01:24:53.360 | that she always said that what matters with a good education is not how much the child knows,

01:24:59.680 | but how much does a child care. And that really rings true with me, is that the test is not to

01:25:07.200 | see how much knowledge can we pound into a child's head in whatever years we're directing his

01:25:13.200 | schooling, because who knows, right? There's always more knowledge, and knowledge is multiplying

01:25:17.440 | enormously. So I want to think more about the character of how we do it, because the goal is

01:25:22.080 | how much does the child care. And so I want to create a world in which the resources are there,

01:25:28.800 | and the child is there for caring. I appreciate very much some of the contributions of

01:25:35.600 | the self-directed learning community. I think they make some really strong arguments.

01:25:39.840 | And so if we listen to the unschoolers or the self-directed learning community,

01:25:44.880 | and we take the good things from them, one of those things is just following the interests of

01:25:50.960 | children. And so what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to shoot the middle, to say I'm going

01:25:55.280 | to require some feedback, because I believe that testing is an important learning tool,

01:26:00.880 | but I'm not going to make it onerous. I'm not going to subject you to this like complicated

01:26:05.280 | scheme where I have to make sure that you remember every single page of every book.

01:26:09.120 | I'm going to expose you to the widest possible array of beautiful ideas, and I'm going to let

01:26:14.560 | you pick and choose. And what I look for is, do my children pick up their school books outside

01:26:20.640 | of the assignments? And I see that happening pretty regularly, which makes me really happy.

01:26:27.520 | Yeah, that's good. And I think about that when I was a kid taking,

01:26:31.920 | I guess it would be, your teacher would give you a test about the book you read, right? It's kind

01:26:38.960 | of like she writes the book report and you fill in the blanks that she pulls out. And if you get

01:26:45.840 | a B, you read the book, but is it making you love the book more because you're getting a B on this

01:26:51.520 | thing? Or is it making you love it less because she's pointing out that you're a bad reader?

01:26:55.840 | I don't know. I want to do that. Yeah.

01:26:58.640 | It seems if you listen to people, if you listen to the stories of school children,

01:27:03.200 | they're pretty consistent to say, "If I knew I had to make a book report, I'd have hated the

01:27:08.560 | book. If I knew I was going to be tested on it, I didn't want to do it." So why should we create

01:27:12.160 | that if we don't have to? Yeah. And it's a lot more engaging to say,

01:27:18.960 | "Narrate the story for your dad at lunchtime at the lunch table instead of

01:27:23.760 | getting a B and having a label assessed to your ability of enjoying this piece of art."

01:27:31.440 | Right. Exactly. Yeah, it seems silly.

01:27:35.280 | Grades, I'm trying to figure out how do we integrate these things. I learned a lot from

01:27:39.680 | changing my philosophy on testing, just for those who may not have heard me say it. Years ago,

01:27:45.040 | I knew I was going to homeschool my kids since I was 15 years old, and I never understood the

01:27:49.040 | point of testing. I always said, "Well, testing is pointless. Testing is pointless. There's no

01:27:52.800 | point in testing. After all, testing is just to tell a teacher how you're doing on it."

01:27:58.000 | I've since changed on that. I believe that testing should be seen as a learning tool,

01:28:01.920 | because what we're tested on, all the learning scientists show us with their research that

01:28:06.000 | when we're tested on something, we retain it more effectively. So I've changed my philosophy on that.

01:28:10.640 | So we go to grades. Is there a point to grades? I don't see much of a point to grades,

01:28:15.360 | but I'm open to the fact that we have to change it. But right now, I still see that grades are

01:28:20.800 | very much a... Grades don't make sense to me, because if the goal is to get an A and that's

01:28:30.240 | the actual goal, then I'm going to do things that are less difficult so that I can just get an A.

01:28:39.520 | This happens all the time. I coasted through all of my academics. I've never done challenging

01:28:47.440 | academics. I didn't care too much about getting A's, but I never tried to do something hard.

01:28:54.400 | But if you think about it as an adult, do you want your child to take an easy class that he

01:28:59.440 | can coast through and get an easy A, or do you want your child to take a hard class that he has

01:29:05.200 | to work at and get a C? I think you're going to learn a lot more in the class that you wind up

01:29:09.200 | getting a C on. So the whole concept of grades just doesn't make sense to me. I understand it's

01:29:14.720 | necessary in an industrial environment. We've got to have some system. I'm not calling for

01:29:21.360 | destroying the school system by getting rid of grades, but I don't have to worry at all myself

01:29:26.800 | about anything related to the industrial school system. So the concept of grades doesn't make

01:29:30.400 | sense in my head. But what does make sense is that we want to make certain that we're at the

01:29:36.960 | difficult frontier. I'm not sure what to call it, maybe the efficient frontier of learning,

01:29:41.600 | which is probably something like 80% to 90% accomplishment and 10% to 20% hardship.

01:29:48.400 | So if we're getting hundreds on everything and we're getting straight A's, hundreds on every

01:29:53.680 | test, then we're not challenging. And so we need to dial up the difficulty of the subject

01:29:59.360 | so that the student is actually being challenged. On the other hand, if we're getting 50% on every

01:30:04.800 | test, then we've got a problem. Now this is probably going to be the child's going to be

01:30:09.680 | frustrated by the constant and never-ending difficulty and the drudgery. It's too intense.

01:30:13.920 | So let's dial back the intensity. And that's what I try to focus on. And so I give a daily math

01:30:20.480 | lesson and I say, "Okay, tell me how many you got right out of 17 problems." And what I'm hoping for

01:30:25.760 | is we get 14 right. And my children check their answer. So they do the math problem, then they

01:30:30.880 | check their answer, and they tell me how many they got right. So I want to focus on what we got right

01:30:34.480 | and I'm going to celebrate it. And if we get 17 out of 17 right, great, let's celebrate that.

01:30:38.400 | But I don't want to see 17 out of 17 right every single day or I know that we're not pushing things.

01:30:42.960 | Not sure how that relates to what you said, but just a little back and forth on the topic of

01:30:48.320 | education. Yeah, no, it does. And mine aren't as old as yours, but I'm trying that, as I read aloud,

01:30:56.080 | to be the narrator and to ask those test questions. Why is he doing that? Why is he picking

01:31:03.520 | that up? Why is he going there, you know? And seeing if my son can remember and tell me what's

01:31:10.800 | going on two pages ago, you know? And at least when he turns 10, what you're doing now, yeah.

01:31:17.360 | It's absolutely great. I think it's what we should be doing. It's engaging in activity.

01:31:22.320 | But the only point would be that you're not penalizing him if he doesn't know, you're just

01:31:26.480 | reminding. And these things are good. The other thing that, just back to Mason,

01:31:31.840 | she always talked about narration, was one of the reasons we narrate is to cultivate attention.

01:31:37.040 | And so when she taught about narration, her focus was we never reread. We read something,

01:31:46.080 | we read it beautifully, it's an attractive book, carefully chosen. We read it with an

01:31:54.240 | appropriate amount of time. We're not trying to make you listen to 60 minutes of something when

01:31:58.400 | you're six. But we never reread, or we never go through it again. And so the idea is you need to

01:32:04.880 | train the habit of attention to focus on what you're doing, listen, or pay attention when you

01:32:11.200 | go through it one time and then be done. So I still take it as a matter of trust,

01:32:17.520 | trusting the experience of those who's gone on before. I have a narrator who's not very good,

01:32:23.520 | and I have narrators who are better, but I think it does help. And it's a good practice. It's

01:32:29.120 | simple, it's easy, the children don't resist it. They just think it's kind of fun, but it keeps

01:32:33.120 | them focused on things. And it allows you to continually assess what's working and what's not

01:32:37.200 | working. I am doing some new experiments, by the way. So how old are you, oldest?

01:32:40.560 | Four.

01:32:42.500 | Good. So I'll try to be, you keep on calling and poking me and I'll try to keep sharing what I'm

01:32:47.600 | learning. I am doing some experiments with regard to kind of long-term knowledge learning. So I have

01:32:55.200 | this theory, I've never read anybody who has it, I don't know if it's true, it's just a theory.

01:32:59.200 | But I have this theory that learning is actually easy, and that learning any subject is actually

01:33:04.480 | easy. And the basic reason learning the subject is hard has to do with the compressed nature of

01:33:10.320 | learning generally. If I think about the subjects that I know really well, there was a time in which

01:33:17.360 | they were really hard for me, and now they're easy. So what was the difference? Well, usually it just

01:33:24.000 | has to do with working with the ideas more consistently for a longer period of time.

01:33:28.720 | And so, you know, if a math teacher is teaching advanced mathematics, and let's say he's teaching

01:33:36.320 | calculus, the math teacher is not having a hard time with calculus problems any more than you and

01:33:41.920 | I have a hard time with a long division problem. But when we were in fifth grade sweating our way

01:33:46.080 | through a long division problem, it felt really hard. So it's just a matter of doing it more over

01:33:50.160 | a longer period of time. So when I look at academic subjects, one of the reasons academic

01:33:54.800 | subjects seem to me to be hard is, number one, they're siloed, and they're compressed into a

01:34:00.320 | very short period of time. So let's say you're going to take AP biology in high school.

01:34:04.080 | You've got 181 school days, minus all the days for snow days and hurricane days and, you know,

01:34:12.480 | homecoming days and whatever. So the teacher might have 150 days or 160 teaching days,

01:34:18.240 | where, you know, he's got to bang in all this advanced knowledge. And so it's like drinking

01:34:23.840 | from a fire hose. And so the only reason AP biology is hard is because it's all new,

01:34:30.080 | it's all novel, and you have to learn it all at once while you also have four other classes going

01:34:35.680 | on. So my theory is, what if we took an AP biology class, and what if we stretched it out over four

01:34:40.880 | years? And what if we introduce things at a much slower pace, giving the brain time to do it, and

01:34:47.200 | instead of doing 50-minute class periods, we did five-minute class periods. And we did five-minute

01:34:53.600 | class periods. And what if we just drilled it for five or 15 minutes every day, but we stretched it

01:34:57.600 | out over four or five years? Wouldn't it be pretty easy actually to learn AP biology in that context?

01:35:03.120 | And so that's one of the things I've been testing. And so quite literally, well, first way I've been

01:35:08.720 | doing it is before we get to high school and college-level work, one of the theories I have

01:35:14.800 | is we should have been introduced to it several times over, primarily with narrative books.

01:35:20.800 | So what I've done is I've taken and built a map where I take every high school course,

01:35:25.120 | and I break it out, and I try to find two or three books that are related to that course that are

01:35:31.520 | going to teach it, but that are going to just teach it in a straightforward way. So if I use

01:35:36.720 | chemistry as an example, like we know, all right, the capstone achievement for chemistry studies is

01:35:42.480 | going to be to take the AP chemistry exam and pass it, right? That's the achievement. So this child

01:35:47.920 | is what you're required to do. You're required to pass the AP chemistry exam. All right, so let's

01:35:51.840 | back off of that. So when you're 15 years old or 17 years old, then of course you can take an AP

01:35:56.960 | chemistry high school class, and you can take an AP chemistry study book, and you can do all that

01:36:00.720 | stuff. But what can we do today to make it super easy for you when you are 15? And so what I do,

01:36:09.280 | what I've done is collect a series of books that I hope will make it doable. So with chemistry,

01:36:17.040 | we read a biography of Robert Boyle, who was the founder of chemistry. I'm pretty persuaded that

01:36:22.880 | what we need in order to have a better science education for students is we need a lot more

01:36:27.200 | literature. And I think that literature is actually probably a better way to teach science

01:36:33.360 | than is a textbook. We need the textbook to absorb the knowledge set of the subject,

01:36:42.800 | but it's not a very good teaching tool. And so I think biographies of great scientists is probably

01:36:47.120 | a better teaching tool, because now you're going through the actual scientific process with the

01:36:52.000 | person who discovered it. And so last year, my eldest, we read a biography of Robert Boyle.

01:36:58.560 | And then we went through, right now he's going through the Cartoon Guide to Chemistry. I've found,

01:37:03.200 | I forget the name of the illustrator, but there's all these cartoon guides to microeconomics and

01:37:08.720 | macroeconomics and statistics and chemistry, and they seem to be really engaging. And they

01:37:13.360 | give kind of the, when you do a cartoon, you give just the very essence of the idea. So he's going

01:37:17.440 | through the Cartoon Guide to Chemistry now, and I forget some of the other ones that I have on my

01:37:22.560 | list. But the point is, if we've gone through a chemistry course several times over before you get

01:37:30.000 | to AP Chemistry, then AP Chemistry should be pretty easy. And we'll see how it works, but so

01:37:35.440 | far I'm optimistic. And then what I actually just started doing is I actually just started taking

01:37:41.040 | through one of the AP, I bought a box of AP flashcards, and now I'm starting to go through

01:37:46.960 | them at the dinner table of, "Hey, let's just spend two or three minutes on this particular concept

01:37:51.920 | and let's talk about it." And I really think that this should make, in the fullness of time, this

01:37:57.120 | should make learning a lot easier. Now, I don't have, there's probably no possible way that this

01:38:02.480 | could be integrated in any kind of industrial system, but I don't have to worry about that.

01:38:06.080 | So I'm testing that now and I'll, you know, give me a couple years and I'll let you know how it goes.

01:38:11.520 | Yeah, it'd be great if they could orchestrate a well-built curriculum like that across the country.

01:38:17.040 | They exist, but for whatever, yeah, go ahead. I didn't mean to interrupt.

01:38:22.480 | Yeah. No, that's okay. I'm just saying you're not going to see somebody like, "Okay, this biology

01:38:27.440 | term, we're only going to read a biography about biologists and we're not going to do any biology."

01:38:33.120 | It would, you know, there'd be letters and school board meetings about it. I don't know.

01:38:39.200 | I scratch my head. I don't like to just always stick my finger out at the industrial school

01:38:45.040 | system and say, "I can't do anything for you." So I listen to some of the debates,

01:38:48.240 | I read some of the debaters and some of their points, and my heart goes out to people who are

01:38:53.840 | working in that system because it just seems so hard to do. And when you have to design a system

01:39:01.440 | that appeals to everyone, it seems really hard to do. And the debates that are happening in that

01:39:07.520 | space are really nothing like the debates that are happening in the home education space.

01:39:12.240 | And I don't fully understand what some of the mainstream school educators are trying to do,

01:39:19.440 | but there are people who are integrating things and there's good evidence. I've been reading E.D.

01:39:27.680 | Hirsch's books recently, and he's kind of known as the guy who is working hard on trying to get

01:39:35.120 | people to focus on knowledge, even not just kind of the modern standards. If you read through

01:39:39.280 | the common core standards and things like that, they just focus on skills, skills, skills, skills.

01:39:43.040 | And it's like, how do you do skills without knowledge? It just seems impossible to me. So

01:39:47.840 | at least if we focus on knowledge, we can test things. But I'm rambling now. So we'll keep it

01:39:53.760 | up. But if you keep testing stuff and we'll keep communicating, and let's see if I'm optimistic

01:39:59.040 | because I really think that 50 years from now, we've got to do better. We need to do better than

01:40:03.760 | what we've done. So I'm trying to do my best to be well-educated and test anything I can.

01:40:09.520 | Yeah, there is opportunity out there. That's to be sure. Can I follow up with you on one

01:40:17.120 | thing that you mentioned about rereading? When she says that, is it rereading being

01:40:24.480 | assigned as a punishment for not narrating well? Or right now, I've got a four-year-old,

01:40:31.120 | almost five, and he likes, like you complain about, I have to read the same book over and over again

01:40:37.440 | because they like to, they're building, you know, he's got whole books memorized that he'll just sit

01:40:42.160 | and narrate to himself if we're not reading to him. And so, is it something where should I be

01:40:48.480 | trying to introduce more variety? We've got quite a lot, but what is that rereading avoidance?

01:40:56.080 | What's the point of that? Is it just to make sure you're not punishing?

01:41:00.640 | Yeah, I would, well, no. The point of it, as I understand it, is to cultivate the habit of

01:41:07.440 | attention. So let's say that you read two paragraphs to your child, and the child,

01:41:14.000 | you get to the end, you ask for a narration, and the child says, "Well, I don't know what,

01:41:18.800 | you know, I don't remember." Well, then the temptation would be to say,

01:41:23.600 | you know, "I'm going to go back. Okay, well, I'll reread it to you again because you don't

01:41:28.080 | remember." And let's say you test it and your child really doesn't remember. So, "Okay, well,

01:41:32.240 | no problem. I'll just reread it to you so then you can remember." Well, in that situation,

01:41:36.320 | what you're doing is you're cultivating the habit of inattention. You're cultivating an environment

01:41:41.280 | in which, "Oh, I don't have to pay attention because if I'm asked about it, I'll just do it

01:41:44.640 | again." And so, I think, if I understand Mason, and again, I'm not an expert on her stuff, but

01:41:50.400 | there's plenty of, go find some of the Charlotte Mason moms. They're amazing. But I think what she

01:41:56.000 | would say is she would say, "Let's go back to what you can pay attention to with perfection.

01:42:03.040 | So, let's read one sentence, and then let's narrate one sentence. And when you can show

01:42:09.200 | me that you can pay perfect attention to one sentence and narrate it back, then we'll move

01:42:17.360 | on and we'll make it a paragraph. And then we go to a paragraph, and then we go to a page,

01:42:20.720 | and eventually you go to a chapter in a book, and kind of going from there." And so, we're not

01:42:25.840 | trying to penalize the child, but we're trying to cultivate the habit of attention. So, I think what

01:42:31.920 | she would do is just say, "Well, you know, Johnny, next time pay attention." And then the next day,

01:42:36.560 | she wouldn't do two paragraphs. She would do two sentences and then require the narration.

01:42:39.920 | Okay. So, you're not distinguishing between pleasure reading and reading for the curriculum

01:42:47.680 | you've developed. No, and I don't think that there's any reason to forbid any kind of re-reading.

01:42:52.880 | So, first, we know from the reading researchers that the secret to having a good reader is free,

01:42:59.600 | voluntary reading. And so, whatever the child wants to read on his own, the child can read.

01:43:03.920 | If he wants to read the same book 10 times through, great, read the same book 10 times through.

01:43:07.280 | If you want to read 10 books one time through, it doesn't matter. So, there should be abundant

01:43:11.280 | amounts of time for voluntary free reading. I see no reason at all why we should forbid

01:43:16.240 | reading of any books. So, all the school books are there, and like I said, sometimes the children

01:43:20.000 | pick up the school books and read them. They don't really take that much of a distinction

01:43:23.120 | between the assigned books and the non-assigned books. Although, certainly, they tend to go for

01:43:27.520 | pure narrative, pure story, pure fiction more than the subject matter books.

01:43:34.480 | So, I don't think re-reading is a problem. It's just that we're not going to re-read

01:43:40.320 | before narration. We're going to cultivate the habit of attention.

01:43:44.080 | Gotcha. Yeah, and that's one thing I worry a little bit about, is him getting tired of

01:43:49.520 | what we're reading to him before. For example, the Magic Treehouse books made our way into our home,

01:43:55.840 | and he's just now learning to read, and he loves them. And we've got probably 30 volumes,

01:44:02.560 | and I worry that when he can read, he's going to be sick of hearing them. And maybe that will

01:44:07.360 | or won't happen, but if it does, I guess I'll find something else he'll be interested in besides

01:44:11.840 | those. But I don't know if you find that to happen as well, where you've read aloud something that

01:44:18.640 | is maybe too old or whatever it is for the child, and then you end up not having material that's

01:44:25.200 | appropriate for him. You have to find new stuff. My friend, I have spent on my life...

01:44:29.520 | Or you want to go and read what you already read.

01:44:31.680 | I have spent on my home... I drive a cheap, junky car,

01:44:34.320 | and I have spent on my home library what most people spend on a beautiful car.

01:44:39.120 | So there's no chance of running out. My hobby is collecting book lists. So I literally have a file

01:44:50.400 | with book list after book list after book list after book list. I collect them from every corner

01:44:54.480 | I find them. There's no chance of it. I think, "Don't sweat it. Let the child read what he wants

01:44:59.120 | to read." If my children, we read something and they kind of get tired of it, then we just quit

01:45:05.440 | the series for a time. I mean, there's 56 books in the Magic Treehouse series. And so if you get

01:45:10.640 | 20 or 30 in and you quit for six months, then come back then. I also find that there is just

01:45:18.640 | personality differences. So I have one child who gets obsessed with something, and I have 56 books

01:45:23.840 | in the Magic Treehouse series, and that child read through 56 books in the Magic Treehouse series

01:45:28.320 | without stopping. And then on the flip side, I have a child who doesn't get obsessed and just

01:45:34.240 | kind of does that, although with age, it's changing. So I say not worry about it. At the

01:45:38.640 | end of the day, if you've got a good environment and you've got good habits and there's not any

01:45:43.280 | negative damaging stuff, then the rest of it will all work out. It really will. It'll be fine.

01:45:48.000 | Yeah, I'm not going to run out of books.

01:45:50.720 | We're living in a golden age of books, book lists, and access to them. And especially if you're in

01:45:59.360 | the United States, we have libraries and Amazon right there. It's just amazing. There's no limit

01:46:06.480 | to it. I run out of bookshelves, not books. That's my problem. As I find myself, my wife goes,

01:46:12.960 | "Again? We're running out of room." I go, "Yeah, I'll make another shelf."

01:46:17.520 | We'll start a support group for homeschool dads because it sounds vaguely similar to

01:46:24.160 | conversations my wife and I have. "Babe, let's get a bigger house. We'll get a bigger house so

01:46:30.160 | we can fit more bookshelves." And she refuses. Her theory is that walls must be free in order

01:46:35.120 | that the mind can rest. So we have a library and she forbids books from the rest of the house. But

01:46:39.200 | we'll see. I'm working on her. I'll wear her down eventually.

01:46:41.280 | Yeah, you'll get her in a minute.

01:46:43.440 | Thanks for the fun calls, Kyle. I really appreciate it. It's a fun way to...

01:46:50.160 | Oh, sorry. I muted you halfway through, but you're good. Thank you. It was fun to chat about.

01:46:55.920 | Thank you all for listening. That ends today's Friday Q&A show. Quite a fun

01:46:59.200 | diversity of topics. I hope that you'll join me next week. If you'd like to join me next week,

01:47:02.720 | go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Sign up to support the show on Patreon,

01:47:08.000 | patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, and that will gain access for you to next

01:47:11.680 | week's Friday Q&A show where we can visit together then. Thank you.

2024-07-05_Friday_QA