RPF-0025-Interview_with_Jacob_Lund_Fisker_Author_of_Early_Retirement

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00:00:32.000 | Radical Personal Finance, episode 25.

00:00:35.000 | On today's show, an interview with Jacob Lund Fisker,

00:00:40.000 | author of Early Retirement Extreme, the book, and the blog.

00:00:45.000 | ♪

00:01:02.000 | Good morning and welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast

00:01:04.000 | for today, July 22, 2014.

00:01:08.000 | It's a Tuesday today all day, and I want to thank you for being here.

00:01:12.000 | Today's show is one I've been looking forward to bringing you,

00:01:15.000 | an interview with someone I'll now call my friend, Jacob Lund Fisker.

00:01:19.000 | Jacob's cracked the code on how to retire,

00:01:22.000 | how anybody can retire in five years or fewer.

00:01:26.000 | If you're interested, join us.

00:01:29.000 | ♪

00:01:36.000 | This is definitely an interview that I've been looking forward to.

00:01:39.000 | I've read a lot of Jacob's work over the years.

00:01:41.000 | In fact, episode three of the Radical Personal Finance podcast

00:01:45.000 | was actually an introduction and an overview, a review,

00:01:49.000 | of his book, Early Retirement Extreme.

00:01:52.000 | If you go and listen to that show,

00:01:54.000 | you'll find that I give it an unqualified recommendation.

00:01:57.000 | Absolutely, in my thought, it should be a must-read

00:02:00.000 | for anybody who's interested in finance.

00:02:02.000 | Today's show is going to be an interview with Jacob

00:02:05.000 | where we're going to go into some philosophy.

00:02:08.000 | We're going to just basically have a conversation.

00:02:10.000 | I really enjoyed talking with him.

00:02:12.000 | This interview was recorded on Saturday afternoon.

00:02:15.000 | We had a very nice time together.

00:02:18.000 | A couple of notes, however, before we get started with that,

00:02:22.000 | that you'll need to be aware of for the show.

00:02:25.000 | I want to talk you through--

00:02:27.000 | you need to understand, prior to this conversation with Jacob,

00:02:30.000 | you need to understand a little bit about

00:02:32.000 | the Early Retirement Extreme philosophy.

00:02:34.000 | This interview is going to be different

00:02:36.000 | than many types of interviews that you would hear.

00:02:39.000 | A lot of times when you hear an interview on a podcast,

00:02:42.000 | you'll hear the host ask the expert or the interviewee

00:02:47.000 | to basically teach and talk a little bit about their philosophy.

00:02:51.000 | I really wasn't that interested in doing that kind of interview.

00:02:55.000 | It actually worked out really well with Jacob

00:02:57.000 | because in our email correspondence before the show,

00:03:00.000 | he was a little concerned.

00:03:02.000 | He said, "I'm a little rusty when it comes to talking about early retirement.

00:03:05.000 | I don't really think about this stuff anymore."

00:03:07.000 | His blog, he's put it on autopilot for several years now.

00:03:10.000 | He doesn't really post much new content.

00:03:12.000 | If he does, it's extremely occasional.

00:03:14.000 | He's got a widget that cycles posts through the front page.

00:03:18.000 | His comments to me in the email thread,

00:03:21.000 | he said, "I just don't think about this stuff anymore,"

00:03:24.000 | which to me, I think, is actually a really important consideration.

00:03:28.000 | Just a point I want to dwell on for a moment,

00:03:31.000 | we all need to go through our transition time

00:03:33.000 | of understanding, really understanding,

00:03:36.000 | the in-depth nuts and bolts of something.

00:03:39.000 | But there's more to life than money.

00:03:41.000 | You know, it's hard for me to imagine still being excited about doing budgets

00:03:49.000 | 40 years from now or being excited about some aspects of personal finance.

00:03:53.000 | It should--just like riding a bicycle,

00:03:55.000 | the first time you ride a bicycle,

00:03:57.000 | you're pretty thrilled with yourself that you're able to stay on two wheels.

00:04:00.000 | After a while, though, you're just riding a bicycle

00:04:03.000 | and you're more thrilled about where you're going to go

00:04:05.000 | and how you're going to get there.

00:04:06.000 | So I think there is a very important progression

00:04:08.000 | that we need to understand in financial topics

00:04:11.000 | that over time, we really should master this stuff

00:04:14.000 | and then not have a need to think more about it.

00:04:16.000 | I think Jacob has done that.

00:04:17.000 | So a little bit about his story.

00:04:18.000 | You'll also need to understand a little bit about his philosophy

00:04:20.000 | and his story in order to make sense of this interview.

00:04:24.000 | So I'm going to share with you a couple of things

00:04:26.000 | about his philosophy and about his story.

00:04:29.000 | I'm going to read just the first little bit short part of this--

00:04:34.000 | of his about page from his website

00:04:37.000 | because I think this is the--I think this is the--

00:04:41.000 | I think this is his--the best update

00:04:45.000 | as far as to give you a background on who he is.

00:04:48.000 | So this is from his about page, which is from his website,

00:04:50.000 | earlyretirementextreme.com/about, about me.

00:04:55.000 | Current net worth in 2014, 64 years worth of annual expenses.

00:05:00.000 | "My name is Jacob.

00:05:01.000 | "My greatest claim to fame and overall impact on the world

00:05:03.000 | "is probably this blog and the concept of ERE,

00:05:06.000 | "early retirement extreme.

00:05:08.000 | "Before that, I used to be a nuclear astrophysicist,

00:05:10.000 | "but in reality, I've done many other different

00:05:12.000 | "and, to me, interesting things,

00:05:14.000 | "and my aim is to continue this way of life

00:05:16.000 | "for the rest of my life, never getting bored.

00:05:19.000 | "ERE is much, much more than just retiring extremely early

00:05:23.000 | "by, quote, sacrificing travel and expensive restaurants.

00:05:27.000 | "It is effectively a philosophy of life.

00:05:30.000 | "Now, you can read a summary on the wiki,

00:05:32.000 | "a much longer version in the book,

00:05:34.000 | "or you can try to piece it together from the blog,

00:05:36.000 | "but the short story is that ERE is a set of values and principles

00:05:39.000 | "that gives me the freedom and opportunity

00:05:41.000 | "to live a life I find exciting and interesting.

00:05:44.000 | "This, quote, accurately describes my philosophy of life.

00:05:48.000 | "Quote, 'A master in the art of living

00:05:50.000 | "'draws no sharp distinction between his work and his play,

00:05:54.000 | "'his labour and his leisure, his mind and his body,

00:05:58.000 | "'his education and his recreation.

00:06:00.000 | "'He hardly knows which is which.

00:06:02.000 | "'He simply pursues his vision of excellence

00:06:05.000 | "'through whatever he is doing, and leaves others to determine

00:06:08.000 | "'whether he is working or playing.

00:06:10.000 | "'To himself, he always appears to be doing both.'"

00:06:14.000 | François René de Chateaubriand.

00:06:17.000 | "In contrast to Chateaubriand,

00:06:19.000 | "most people separate their work and entertainment

00:06:21.000 | "and refer to it as their work-life balance.

00:06:24.000 | "They go to work doing their one specialization

00:06:27.000 | "so that they can afford to be entertained

00:06:29.000 | "at an expensive restaurant, a ball game,

00:06:32.000 | "or by travelling to some tourist location

00:06:34.000 | "and engaging in entertainment activities as a consumer.

00:06:37.000 | "Concentrating on just one thing, like a specific career, all one's life,

00:06:42.000 | "and engaging in other activities at the spectator level

00:06:45.000 | "would actually bore me somewhat.

00:06:47.000 | "I don't think humans obey the law of comparative advantage well.

00:06:51.000 | "At least I don't."

00:06:53.000 | Here's another one of my favorite quotes.

00:06:55.000 | "A human being should be able to change a diaper,

00:06:57.000 | "plan an invasion, butcher a hog, con a ship,

00:07:00.000 | "design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts,

00:07:03.000 | "build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying,

00:07:05.000 | "take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone,

00:07:08.000 | "solve equations, analyze a new problem,

00:07:10.000 | "pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal,

00:07:14.000 | "fight efficiently, die gallantly.

00:07:17.000 | "Specialization is for insects."

00:07:20.000 | Robert A. Heinlein.

00:07:22.000 | That's very different from,

00:07:23.000 | "A human being should go get a job to get money,

00:07:25.000 | "to buy a house and car, and go out to eat at restaurants

00:07:27.000 | "and play tourist a couple of weeks each year."

00:07:30.000 | I engage in almost everything with the aim to get good at it.

00:07:33.000 | To me, it's more fun to score a goal by top-shelving the puck

00:07:36.000 | in the local hockey league than watching the Blackhawks

00:07:38.000 | while eating a hot dog in the stands.

00:07:40.000 | That's just my preference.

00:07:42.000 | I'm not a good spectator.

00:07:44.000 | Mastering things is highly entertaining to me.

00:07:47.000 | I like becoming and being good at things.

00:07:50.000 | Sometimes this leads to people willing to pay me.

00:07:52.000 | Sometimes it doesn't.

00:07:54.000 | For the first 30 years of my life,

00:07:55.000 | I was lucky to have people pay me for doing what I thought

00:07:58.000 | was the most interesting thing in the world,

00:08:00.000 | researching arcane details about neutron start.

00:08:03.000 | At 30, I became financially independent,

00:08:05.000 | and therefore I no longer have to resort to luck.

00:08:09.000 | Because I'm now financially independent,

00:08:11.000 | I don't have to care what other people are willing to pay for,

00:08:14.000 | but that doesn't stop me from trying to get better

00:08:16.000 | at what interests me, from doing the right things

00:08:18.000 | or helping people, or even from making money if I can.

00:08:22.000 | On the whole, I have fully internalized the ERE philosophy

00:08:25.000 | you read on these pages.

00:08:26.000 | I think this way naturally and automatically.

00:08:29.000 | I walk the talk.

00:08:30.000 | I don't think of my choices as a sacrifice

00:08:32.000 | any more than a toddler who has learned how to walk

00:08:35.000 | thinks of having sacrifice crawling around.

00:08:39.000 | At this point, 2014, I have enough saved

00:08:42.000 | to continue this lifestyle for the next 64 years,

00:08:45.000 | and my passive income is twice as large as I need.

00:08:48.000 | And he goes on into his background and his history.

00:08:50.000 | So that should give you a little bit of an insight

00:08:53.000 | into kind of his philosophy,

00:08:55.000 | and you need to understand his philosophy

00:08:57.000 | to understand this interview.

00:08:58.000 | You also might want to consider listening first,

00:09:00.000 | if you haven't, to my review of Early Retirement Extreme,

00:09:03.000 | the book which is found at radicalpersonalfinance.com/3.

00:09:08.000 | It's episode 3.

00:09:09.000 | And if you listen to that review,

00:09:11.000 | you'll get an idea of the philosophy behind the book

00:09:14.000 | with some extensive passages that I read and commented.

00:09:18.000 | Forgive the audio.

00:09:19.000 | That was back in the handheld voice recorder days of the show.

00:09:23.000 | So I would encourage you to consider that,

00:09:26.000 | and that will help this interview to make a lot more sense

00:09:29.000 | because we don't really talk much about the practical realities

00:09:32.000 | of the financial planning world with Jacob.

00:09:35.000 | We talk more about just philosophy and have a conversation.

00:09:38.000 | In essence, if I were to summarize

00:09:39.000 | the Early Retirement Extreme philosophy,

00:09:41.000 | I would say it's to see through the fallacy

00:09:44.000 | of the work to earn to buy system that we currently live under.

00:09:51.000 | Work at one thing so that you can earn enough

00:09:53.000 | to buy everything else in life.

00:09:55.000 | See through that system.

00:09:57.000 | Develop skills that will allow you to end that loop

00:10:01.000 | where you're able to step out of that cycle

00:10:03.000 | and provide the needs for yourself with skills

00:10:06.000 | that don't require just simply the skill

00:10:08.000 | of being a consumer and spending money.

00:10:11.000 | This skill development, skill acquisition,

00:10:13.000 | allows you to save a massive percentage of your income,

00:10:17.000 | ideally 70% to 80% or more or less,

00:10:20.000 | just depending on how you're able to do it.

00:10:22.000 | But by saving 70% to 80% or more of your income

00:10:26.000 | and by replacing the need to buy with the goal for skill,

00:10:30.000 | then it allows one to be in the situation

00:10:34.000 | where you're able to retire in a very short period of time,

00:10:37.000 | say five to seven years, something like that.

00:10:40.000 | And this is done, there's two parts to that equation.

00:10:43.000 | It's the high savings rate, but it's also the fact

00:10:45.000 | that by eliminating a lot of the need for money

00:10:48.000 | through skill acquisition,

00:10:50.000 | you're able to maintain that lifestyle going forward

00:10:53.000 | and in Jacob's terms, not sacrifice anything

00:10:55.000 | that's important to you.

00:10:57.000 | So that's an introduction to the interview

00:11:01.000 | and I hope that is helpful for you.

00:11:03.000 | Two quick technical notes before I start the interview for you.

00:11:06.000 | Number one is a couple of quick notes

00:11:11.000 | about my interview style.

00:11:12.000 | This is a lengthy interview and I get,

00:11:15.000 | if I want to watch a three-minute interview with somebody,

00:11:18.000 | I can go watch CNBC.

00:11:20.000 | I don't have any interest in those types of interviews.

00:11:23.000 | And if I know the background of somebody,

00:11:27.000 | then I really don't have much interest,

00:11:29.000 | me personally, in hearing their background.

00:11:31.000 | I'm more interested in having a conversation with them

00:11:33.000 | and just talking about things that are interesting between us.

00:11:38.000 | So with this interview, and I actually really enjoyed it

00:11:43.000 | more than some conversations I've had,

00:11:45.000 | but with this interview, I didn't have any desire

00:11:47.000 | to ask him lots and lots about his history

00:11:51.000 | and explain the whole philosophy.

00:11:53.000 | The man's written a book on it.

00:11:54.000 | There's no reason to go into that kind of conversation.

00:11:58.000 | Why, if somebody has spent weeks and months of their life

00:12:01.000 | pouring everything they think into a book,

00:12:03.000 | why would I not just do them the dignity

00:12:05.000 | of spending a few hours reading their book?

00:12:07.000 | And that's what they've struggled to articulate.

00:12:11.000 | That's where they've struggled to clearly articulate

00:12:13.000 | their entire philosophy.

00:12:15.000 | So this interview is not a CNBC interview.

00:12:18.000 | It's not a professional "Here are my 30 minutes of questions."

00:12:22.000 | It's a conversation, and I hope you enjoy it.

00:12:24.000 | This is the type of content that I enjoy.

00:12:26.000 | I have to overcome a little bit of my insecurity

00:12:28.000 | of not doing what everyone else does

00:12:30.000 | because it seems as though these types of interviews,

00:12:32.000 | these types of in-depth, lengthy conversations

00:12:35.000 | are not popular in the press,

00:12:38.000 | and they're certainly not popular in the podcasting world.

00:12:40.000 | But this is the type of thing that I enjoy

00:12:42.000 | and the content that I like.

00:12:44.000 | So I'm interested in your feedback.

00:12:46.000 | If you like it as well, let me know.

00:12:48.000 | This is the type of thing that when I was out looking for financial podcasts,

00:12:50.000 | this is the type of thing that I was always looking for,

00:12:52.000 | not for a beautifully structured 30-minute conversation

00:12:56.000 | to understand what someone's book is about.

00:12:59.000 | I wanted to hear from the person.

00:13:00.000 | I really get to know the person.

00:13:02.000 | And I really think that we've accomplished that in the interview today.

00:13:04.000 | The second procedural note,

00:13:06.000 | we were on Skype, and especially towards the end of the call,

00:13:09.000 | we had some major Skype connection issues

00:13:11.000 | where our call ended up disconnecting

00:13:14.000 | at least a half a dozen times,

00:13:16.000 | which was a real challenge.

00:13:18.000 | I have edited the file,

00:13:19.000 | so most of those disconnection times

00:13:21.000 | will not actually be obvious to you.

00:13:23.000 | However, you may find a couple of them.

00:13:26.000 | If you hear Jacob repeat himself on something

00:13:28.000 | or if it seems a little bit wonky,

00:13:30.000 | just assume that that was a place

00:13:32.000 | where I had to cut out the disconnect,

00:13:34.000 | and then we picked up the conversation

00:13:36.000 | and tried to continue the theme as well as possible.

00:13:39.000 | With that, here's my interview with Jacob Lundfiske,

00:13:42.000 | author of the book and blog, Early Retirement Extreme.

00:13:45.000 | Well, Jacob, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast.

00:13:52.000 | I'm thrilled that you're here.

00:13:53.000 | I've been looking forward to this conversation, so welcome.

00:13:56.000 | Thank you very much.

00:13:57.000 | I'm glad to be here.

00:14:00.000 | I'd like to start and just give you kind of an opportunity.

00:14:03.000 | In the introduction, I've given a little bit of background.

00:14:06.000 | If anyone wants details on your life,

00:14:09.000 | we're going to assume that the listeners

00:14:11.000 | have listened to my other show that I did,

00:14:13.000 | reviewing your book called Early Retirement Extreme,

00:14:15.000 | and we're going to assume that if they're looking for details,

00:14:17.000 | they can find that on your website.

00:14:19.000 | But would you give just a quick background on kind of

00:14:22.000 | how did you become the Early Retirement Extreme guy?

00:14:25.000 | What was your story?

00:14:26.000 | Where did you come from, and how did you become

00:14:28.000 | known as Mr. Early Retirement Extreme?

00:14:30.000 | Yes.

00:14:33.000 | With respect to the blog, for instance,

00:14:40.000 | I used to have an account on MySpace back before Facebook,

00:14:45.000 | so many, many years ago.

00:14:47.000 | I started writing these blog posts.

00:14:50.000 | I really had no idea what a blog post was,

00:14:53.000 | and I was writing on all kinds of different subjects.

00:14:58.000 | At one point, I probably had them pretty randomly,

00:15:01.000 | and I started Googling around on the rest of the Internet

00:15:04.000 | for people who were writing, and I found that

00:15:07.000 | there was an actual thing called blogs.

00:15:09.000 | You know, on the real Internet,

00:15:11.000 | and I found a personal finance blog,

00:15:14.000 | which was Lazy Man and Money.

00:15:16.000 | And that seemed pretty interesting,

00:15:20.000 | to be able to write about personal finance,

00:15:24.000 | especially since I had somewhat of a background

00:15:27.000 | in that field already at that point,

00:15:30.000 | namely that I was practically financially independent.

00:15:33.000 | And I figured that by starting a real blog,

00:15:37.000 | I could reach an audience that was somewhat bigger

00:15:40.000 | than maybe my 50 MySpace friends.

00:15:43.000 | So that's pretty much how I got started.

00:15:46.000 | Other than that, at that point,

00:15:48.000 | it was just kind of built as I went along.

00:15:51.000 | There weren't very many personal finance blogs back then.

00:15:57.000 | They kind of come in waves.

00:16:00.000 | The first ones probably started in 2002, 2003,

00:16:04.000 | and I kind of divided into three year slots,

00:16:07.000 | and then maybe the next wave,

00:16:10.000 | which is where some of the biggest ones,

00:16:12.000 | I think, get rich slowly, et cetera.

00:16:14.000 | They start around 2004, '05, '06,

00:16:17.000 | and then I came in in the third wave,

00:16:19.000 | which was 2007, '08-ish.

00:16:22.000 | And then you have the fourth wave, 2010 and on,

00:16:26.000 | and the fifth wave, and so on.

00:16:28.000 | So I kind of forget where I was going with all that.

00:16:32.000 | - It's certainly a fascinating world.

00:16:35.000 | I have similar memories.

00:16:37.000 | I'm trying to remember,

00:16:38.000 | what was the first personal finance blog that I used to read?

00:16:42.000 | I remember reading, yeah,

00:16:44.000 | Get Rich Slowly was J.D. Roth's project.

00:16:47.000 | I remember reading that right from the very beginning.

00:16:51.000 | I don't even know how I stumbled across it.

00:16:53.000 | - The Simple Dollar.

00:16:54.000 | - Yeah, The Simple Dollar.

00:16:55.000 | I don't know even, I think Trent was the author there.

00:16:58.000 | I don't know if he sold that or if he's still writing it.

00:17:01.000 | - I think it was a similar solution to J.D.

00:17:04.000 | in that he sold it, but he's still writing.

00:17:06.000 | - Okay, okay.

00:17:07.000 | - He doesn't like editing.

00:17:09.000 | But I mean, I guess my point was

00:17:13.000 | that I kind of started the blog

00:17:15.000 | without really having read much

00:17:16.000 | in terms of personal finance blogs.

00:17:18.000 | I mean, I've probably been reading

00:17:19.000 | for like two weeks or something.

00:17:20.000 | It's like, okay, what should I call this?

00:17:23.000 | Well, maybe something with early retirement

00:17:26.000 | since I kind of had the impression of myself

00:17:30.000 | that I'd figured the system out and everything

00:17:32.000 | and then I just kind of like,

00:17:33.000 | okay, retirement extreme sounds pretty good.

00:17:35.000 | That's kind of like during the era

00:17:37.000 | where they had all these extreme shows on TV, on the radio.

00:17:41.000 | So that's kind of like where the name came from

00:17:44.000 | and that's kind of come back to bite me

00:17:47.000 | because people have a lot of strong preconceptions

00:17:49.000 | of what retirement should be.

00:17:51.000 | I mean, if I had to do that all over again,

00:17:53.000 | I would have called it something completely unrelated.

00:17:56.000 | Just like my name, I keep saying,

00:17:59.000 | I would call it like Muckluck or something

00:18:01.000 | or Penguin or whatever.

00:18:03.000 | Just to sort of have some more intellectual freedom

00:18:07.000 | in terms of what you can say on the blog

00:18:09.000 | without people having any kind of prejudices

00:18:11.000 | against how things should be.

00:18:13.000 | - Right, right.

00:18:15.000 | Well, I'd like to talk about that for a minute

00:18:17.000 | because to me, that's an important topic

00:18:22.000 | is that in general,

00:18:23.000 | and I know you've written on this,

00:18:26.000 | but in general, when people talk about retirement,

00:18:29.000 | they have this idea of playing for 40 years,

00:18:34.000 | the stereotypical, I live in Florida,

00:18:36.000 | so we have plenty of golf courses.

00:18:38.000 | So the idea is I'm gonna go golfing every day

00:18:40.000 | and go fishing every day

00:18:41.000 | and I'm just gonna play for 40 years.

00:18:43.000 | So we work until we're 65 and then we quit

00:18:45.000 | and then we retire for 30 years

00:18:47.000 | and we never do anything productive again.

00:18:49.000 | And this is the image that people have of retirement

00:18:52.000 | and I'd just like to point out

00:18:55.000 | that the emperor has no clothes on

00:18:57.000 | and be the one to point it out,

00:18:58.000 | I'm sure you'll join me in that.

00:19:01.000 | Nobody does that.

00:19:02.000 | Even though everyone thinks they're supposed to do that,

00:19:04.000 | nobody does that.

00:19:05.000 | So in the past when I've done financial planning,

00:19:07.000 | I'd find the majority of my clients

00:19:08.000 | will never be able to afford to retire

00:19:10.000 | because they're not really that committed to it

00:19:12.000 | and the people who can afford to retire

00:19:14.000 | don't retire in that sense.

00:19:16.000 | So the idea of retirement being,

00:19:20.000 | I don't remember what age you were when you,

00:19:22.000 | what age were you when you considered yourself retired

00:19:25.000 | or financially independent or whatever word you wanna use.

00:19:27.000 | - Well I was financially independent when I was 30

00:19:30.000 | but I was still working in physics at that point

00:19:32.000 | and pursuing an actual career in it.

00:19:35.000 | I stopped doing that when I was 33

00:19:38.000 | and that's kind of like the cutoff date

00:19:40.000 | that I would consider.

00:19:41.000 | Not really any longer pursuing

00:19:43.000 | any kind of 40 year work plan.

00:19:47.000 | - Right, and this idea that you're supposed to turn 30

00:19:51.000 | and then you're supposed to what, golf every day

00:19:54.000 | for the next 65 years of your life?

00:19:56.000 | I mean it's utterly foolish.

00:19:58.000 | - It's like quite restrictive in terms of like,

00:20:01.000 | I coined the term internet retirement police at one point

00:20:05.000 | and it kind of got popular

00:20:07.000 | and there's like a bunch of people on the internet

00:20:09.000 | who likes to sort of specify what you're allowed to

00:20:12.000 | and what you're not allowed to do.

00:20:14.000 | And I mean one of the funny things is

00:20:16.000 | I mean after three years, two years of,

00:20:21.000 | when I was 35 I actually went back

00:20:23.000 | and got a real job again

00:20:26.000 | and I feel that's always fascinated me.

00:20:29.000 | And there was like a bunch of people

00:20:31.000 | who were like really upset

00:20:32.000 | because they had sort of now put me in the pigeon hole

00:20:35.000 | of someone who was supposed to be retired

00:20:38.000 | and therefore I was not really allowed to have freedom

00:20:41.000 | that I pretty much spent the past, you know,

00:20:44.000 | five, 10 years of my life building up.

00:20:47.000 | I was not supposed to have that.

00:20:49.000 | See what I mean?

00:20:50.000 | - Right.

00:20:51.000 | - And you know, but I mean it's,

00:20:54.000 | the kind of thing I really want to talk about,

00:20:58.000 | really want to promote is not so much

00:21:00.000 | like the traditional sense of life prescription

00:21:04.000 | where retirement is at the end

00:21:06.000 | but building up the freedom to do like

00:21:08.000 | many different things to sort of like interact

00:21:11.000 | with the world as much as you sort of like,

00:21:14.000 | sort of like maximize your human potential or something.

00:21:16.000 | You know, it sounds kind of like hippie-ish

00:21:19.000 | but I mean that's kind of what I'm aiming at.

00:21:22.000 | - Right.

00:21:23.000 | Well the thing that I like to point out

00:21:27.000 | and it took me a while to learn this

00:21:29.000 | because when I was a kid I would read

00:21:31.000 | all of these personal financial books,

00:21:33.000 | personal finance books,

00:21:35.000 | and the main thing that,

00:21:36.000 | I mean I consumed hundreds of these books

00:21:38.000 | that all said the same thing.

00:21:39.000 | Look Joshua, if you'll just start saving

00:21:41.000 | at an early enough age

00:21:42.000 | and you'll save X small percent of your income,

00:21:45.000 | somewhere between five to 25 percent

00:21:47.000 | depending on which author you wanted to read,

00:21:49.000 | then you'll put that into an IRA

00:21:51.000 | and you'll invest it in the mutual funds

00:21:53.000 | over the next 40 years,

00:21:54.000 | you'll be a millionaire.

00:21:55.000 | And so being interested in finance

00:21:57.000 | and being interested in being smart with money,

00:21:59.000 | I did that.

00:22:00.000 | I started saying,

00:22:01.000 | okay well I'm 18 years old,

00:22:02.000 | I'm gonna open my Roth IRA,

00:22:04.000 | I'm gonna buy my mutual funds

00:22:05.000 | and I'm gonna do it.

00:22:06.000 | And then I started,

00:22:07.000 | kind of just kept me on going.

00:22:09.000 | And what really fixed it for me

00:22:11.000 | was doing financial planning

00:22:12.000 | and actually working with hundreds of people.

00:22:15.000 | And what I discovered is that,

00:22:17.000 | in my opinion I'll be strong just for this,

00:22:19.000 | it's not stupid for everyone,

00:22:21.000 | but it's a dumb idea

00:22:22.000 | because I haven't met anybody who says

00:22:24.000 | I want to retire at 65 and play.

00:22:26.000 | So therefore this whole

00:22:27.000 | invest in IRAs for 40 years

00:22:29.000 | is a pointless discussion.

00:22:32.000 | Now there are a lot of ways to skin the cat.

00:22:34.000 | So you've promoted one way

00:22:36.000 | of achieve maximum financial independence

00:22:39.000 | at an early age

00:22:40.000 | through the route of extreme savings

00:22:42.000 | and extreme frugality,

00:22:44.000 | using skills to replace the need for money.

00:22:46.000 | That's the way you've promoted.

00:22:47.000 | But there are many other ways.

00:22:49.000 | And so whether that means

00:22:50.000 | you're gonna work from,

00:22:52.000 | let's say you're gonna work from 18 to 25

00:22:55.000 | and then be financially independent,

00:22:56.000 | that's fine.

00:22:57.000 | Or if you're just gonna save enough money

00:22:59.000 | to take a couple years off and travel

00:23:00.000 | and we're gonna get into this

00:23:01.000 | work for eight years on,

00:23:03.000 | take two years off

00:23:04.000 | or work three years on,

00:23:06.000 | take one year off

00:23:07.000 | or any variation of it.

00:23:09.000 | I'm not gonna retire at 65.

00:23:10.000 | I'm gonna plan to work forever,

00:23:12.000 | but I'm gonna work in jobs that I love.

00:23:14.000 | I'm gonna skip the whole saving money thing.

00:23:16.000 | There's dozens and dozens of ways to do this.

00:23:19.000 | And it seems like the only time

00:23:20.000 | that people are gonna join

00:23:22.000 | the internet retirement police

00:23:23.000 | is when they're stuck in a job

00:23:25.000 | or a career that they hate.

00:23:26.000 | And if you're stuck in cubicle hell

00:23:28.000 | where you're just sitting there

00:23:29.000 | working, working, working for the man,

00:23:31.000 | then all you do is dream of retirement.

00:23:33.000 | But if you're working on something

00:23:34.000 | you're interested in,

00:23:35.000 | whether that's studying physics

00:23:37.000 | or with me talking about financial planning

00:23:39.000 | and teaching financial planning

00:23:40.000 | or whether it's fishing,

00:23:42.000 | if you're working on something

00:23:43.000 | you're interested in,

00:23:44.000 | you really have no reason to stop.

00:23:46.000 | And so the whole word retirement is so,

00:23:50.000 | and I think you've been a central part

00:23:53.000 | of that discussion

00:23:55.000 | just simply due to the name of your blog

00:23:57.000 | and due to some of the stuff you've written,

00:23:59.000 | it's a flawed concept

00:24:00.000 | and it always has been.

00:24:02.000 | - I've written like a million,

00:24:04.000 | I've definitely written more than five posts

00:24:06.000 | on just how do we define this stuff.

00:24:08.000 | And I mean, it's sort of like,

00:24:11.000 | I have sort of like a generational interpretation of it

00:24:14.000 | in terms of like what people object to.

00:24:17.000 | So I've kind of like divided it

00:24:19.000 | into generational objections,

00:24:22.000 | kind of like the fourth turning book

00:24:23.000 | that has like the silent generation,

00:24:25.000 | the boomers, et cetera,

00:24:26.000 | where people who today,

00:24:29.000 | so often in the 70s or 80s,

00:24:32.000 | silent generation,

00:24:33.000 | thought of retirement as what you did

00:24:37.000 | when you were simply too old to work.

00:24:39.000 | Like you're put out to pasture.

00:24:41.000 | You could not work anymore.

00:24:43.000 | And they have that conception

00:24:45.000 | of what retirement is supposed to be.

00:24:48.000 | The baby boomers,

00:24:50.000 | it's a little bit different.

00:24:52.000 | I mean, they're kind of like the work

00:24:54.000 | until you're like 65,

00:24:55.000 | save up a lot of money.

00:24:57.000 | And then when you're 65,

00:24:58.000 | you know the party starts.

00:25:00.000 | You're supposed to do all the things

00:25:02.000 | that you never had time for

00:25:04.000 | for the past 65 years of your life.

00:25:07.000 | And then you're supposed to have fun like that.

00:25:09.000 | I think what I'm talking about

00:25:11.000 | is sort of like more the generation X

00:25:14.000 | and probably also kind of partially

00:25:16.000 | like the millennial generation interpretation

00:25:18.000 | of what our retirement is,

00:25:21.000 | which is somewhat different

00:25:23.000 | due to like economic effects.

00:25:25.000 | I mean, we're kind of like lagging the boomers,

00:25:26.000 | so we never really had.

00:25:28.000 | We're sort of like in survivalist mode

00:25:31.000 | with respect to careers.

00:25:33.000 | I mean, the idea of staying with the same company

00:25:35.000 | like forever for a pension plan

00:25:37.000 | was like pretty much gone

00:25:38.000 | by the time we came onto the job markets.

00:25:40.000 | And I mean, if you look at it currently

00:25:42.000 | for the millennials,

00:25:43.000 | I mean, they have like 25% unemployment,

00:25:45.000 | so they might not even be able

00:25:47.000 | to have a job and save money.

00:25:50.000 | So the focus has become a lot more

00:25:53.000 | on like how to like survive in the system

00:25:58.000 | the way it currently is.

00:26:02.000 | And I mean, the only way,

00:26:04.000 | but the only way that retirement comes into planning

00:26:08.000 | is because we can sort of figure out

00:26:10.000 | how to like exploit the financial independence

00:26:13.000 | to actually liberate ourselves from work.

00:26:15.000 | And we can like avoid the trappings

00:26:18.000 | that are sort of like have set the boomers on their path

00:26:20.000 | with like Mac mansions and car financing, et cetera.

00:26:24.000 | And the very idea that you have to stay

00:26:26.000 | with the same company or stay at a job

00:26:29.000 | until you're like old enough to like party on.

00:26:35.000 | - And there's a lot of influence in it.

00:26:37.000 | And in a sense, you go after what's marketed to you.

00:26:42.000 | And the thing is, is that,

00:26:44.000 | and that's where one of the things that I wanna do

00:26:47.000 | is I wanna market finance as a path to autonomy,

00:26:53.000 | as a path to self-direction.

00:26:56.000 | Because if I'm, if you,

00:26:58.000 | and here's why what you've done

00:27:00.000 | is so powerful for many people.

00:27:02.000 | All you gotta do is get online and jump into your forum,

00:27:04.000 | jump into some of the early retirement forums,

00:27:07.000 | jump into Money Mustaches forums.

00:27:09.000 | I mean, this is a powerful concept to people

00:27:12.000 | of the idea that I can direct my own life.

00:27:15.000 | But it seems to me that we go through in our modern society,

00:27:18.000 | it seems to me we go through years and years,

00:27:20.000 | decades even of being marketed to the products

00:27:23.000 | that the marketer wishes to sell.

00:27:25.000 | And then somebody finally wakes up and points out that,

00:27:28.000 | "Hey, this product is not bringing you happiness."

00:27:32.000 | But unless you're effectively able to market something else

00:27:36.000 | as far as the freedom or the lifestyle,

00:27:38.000 | then the person is trapped.

00:27:40.000 | And so I've seen no matter how many times people are told

00:27:43.000 | you should save money, you shouldn't spend money,

00:27:46.000 | if they associate saving, you know, spending money with pleasure,

00:27:49.000 | they're gonna keep on doing it.

00:27:51.000 | But if you associate money with something different,

00:27:53.000 | freedom to do the things that you love to do

00:27:55.000 | and live the lifestyle that you wish to live,

00:27:58.000 | if you associate freedom with that,

00:28:00.000 | then you have the option to pursue a different path.

00:28:03.000 | And so I see our job is to market

00:28:06.000 | the idea of autonomy and independence.

00:28:09.000 | And there are, whether that means doing a job

00:28:11.000 | you're passionate about--you read that all over the place--

00:28:14.000 | find a job you're passionate about

00:28:16.000 | or an industry that you're passionate about,

00:28:18.000 | whether it's building financial independence

00:28:20.000 | through an online business,

00:28:22.000 | whether it's building independence

00:28:24.000 | through a real estate portfolio,

00:28:26.000 | whether it's building independence

00:28:28.000 | through being an urban homesteader

00:28:30.000 | and growing enough food to feed yourself

00:28:32.000 | and feed your neighbors that you can make an income on it,

00:28:35.000 | whether it's being a spin farmer, whether it's being--

00:28:37.000 | I mean, there's dozens and dozens of ways to do it,

00:28:39.000 | but all of this is trying to gain back the autonomy

00:28:41.000 | that we've lost in an industrialized system,

00:28:43.000 | just the way I see it.

00:28:44.000 | Not to get all philosophical, but to get all philosophical.

00:28:47.000 | Well, yeah, I mean, in a sense, it's kind of like--

00:28:50.000 | it's like with all interactions with society,

00:28:54.000 | like investing, et cetera.

00:28:56.000 | If you don't have a personal strategy,

00:29:00.000 | someone else will have a strategy for you.

00:29:03.000 | And you might not even be aware that they do that,

00:29:05.000 | but they'll sort of influence you.

00:29:07.000 | If you're not the one behind the driver's seat,

00:29:09.000 | you're going to be driven.

00:29:13.000 | Yeah.

00:29:14.000 | So were you always Mr. Frugal, Mr. Saver,

00:29:19.000 | or did you come across these ideas--

00:29:22.000 | some idea and some concept that helped you

00:29:24.000 | to change your behavior, or were you always frugal?

00:29:28.000 | I would say, like, Scoots, my MacDuck,

00:29:30.000 | has probably been my favorite Disney character

00:29:33.000 | for as far as I can remember.

00:29:36.000 | But I mean, I grew up in Denmark, for instance,

00:29:41.000 | where things like investing is not really something people do.

00:29:48.000 | People put money into a pension plan,

00:29:51.000 | but they don't really think of the concept of, you know,

00:29:55.000 | using money to make more money.

00:29:58.000 | And that revelation didn't come to me until I was, yeah,

00:30:03.000 | very close to financial independence, actually,

00:30:07.000 | because the original--I mean, it kind of gets into

00:30:12.000 | very idiosyncratic details due to the reasons that,

00:30:16.000 | as I explained before, that a lot of this I was sort of,

00:30:20.000 | like, making up on the fly.

00:30:21.000 | I didn't really have anyone to sort of follow

00:30:25.000 | when I started this.

00:30:26.000 | You know, I mean, back in--I mean, I originally started

00:30:30.000 | getting focused on this back in 2001

00:30:33.000 | for entirely different reasons.

00:30:34.000 | And back then, you couldn't really go on the Internet

00:30:36.000 | and find a personal finance blog or find other people

00:30:39.000 | who have done anything really in this regard.

00:30:43.000 | I mean, you could--there were books out there,

00:30:46.000 | but you didn't--there was no easy way to know

00:30:48.000 | that these books existed.

00:30:51.000 | So the whole thing started by me sort of discovering

00:30:56.000 | the idea of the mortgage, which is sort of the idea

00:31:01.000 | that you borrow money from the bank,

00:31:04.000 | and then you spend 30 years paying the cost of the house

00:31:09.000 | pretty much times 2 back to the bank.

00:31:11.000 | And being sort of like the Scrooge McDuck,

00:31:14.000 | I was like, "No way I was going to pay, like,

00:31:16.000 | three times the amount for a house just to own the house now."

00:31:20.000 | So the original plan was simply to sort of save up

00:31:23.000 | all my money to buy the house in cash.

00:31:27.000 | And then much later, I found out, well,

00:31:30.000 | instead of buying a house and keeping--

00:31:33.000 | and staying in a career for the next 40 years,

00:31:35.000 | I could sort of invest this money,

00:31:37.000 | and that would be enough to cover my lifestyle.

00:31:41.000 | The second part was sort of like on the lifestyle choice,

00:31:44.000 | sort of which is using--it's not so much to spend less.

00:31:50.000 | It's--what I advocate is actually using resources

00:31:54.000 | much more efficiently than the average consumer,

00:31:57.000 | way more efficient, way more efficiently.

00:31:59.000 | And that came about due to the realization

00:32:03.000 | of that idea of, like, eternal technological progress,

00:32:08.000 | that everything would get fancier and fancier,

00:32:10.000 | was probably somewhat of a myth, and that might not hold,

00:32:14.000 | especially driven by considerations like peak oil and so on,

00:32:18.000 | and overpopulation.

00:32:21.000 | And so I sort of, like, engaged in sort of, like,

00:32:24.000 | a self-designed crash course in how can I survive

00:32:27.000 | with far less resources.

00:32:29.000 | So I spent a couple of years trying to learn

00:32:31.000 | how to do things myself, and that was--

00:32:33.000 | that was kind of like what people refer to

00:32:36.000 | when they talk of sacrifice.

00:32:39.000 | You know, they're sort of, like, giving up the things--

00:32:41.000 | they're giving up the idea of spending money,

00:32:43.000 | but they don't have anything--any skills to replace it with,

00:32:46.000 | so they just do without.

00:32:48.000 | So you spend, like, a couple of years, like,

00:32:50.000 | developing such skills, which is nothing really more than,

00:32:56.000 | say, you take a consumer, and the consumer walks into a shop,

00:33:00.000 | and they buy, like, $100 worth of goods,

00:33:02.000 | and they pay $100, and I'll have, like, $100 worth of goods.

00:33:07.000 | A frugal person or someone who can sort of, like,

00:33:09.000 | shop for sales or whatever, they can get the same $100 worth of--

00:33:13.000 | like, a savage shopper-- let's not call it a frugal person.

00:33:16.000 | Like, say, a savage shopper can get the same $100 value of goods

00:33:23.000 | for, say, $50.

00:33:26.000 | And so you get the same resources for half the price.

00:33:35.000 | Now, if you start adding skills into it, then--

00:33:40.000 | oops, my computer just kind of did something weird.

00:33:42.000 | Okay.

00:33:44.000 | Then you might be able to get, like, $100 worth of goods for $25,

00:33:48.000 | which means you are now four times as efficient as someone

00:33:50.000 | who sort of just blindly shopping for everything.

00:33:54.000 | So it's this kind of, like, skill set that you develop

00:33:56.000 | in order to become more efficient,

00:34:00.000 | and that's really the thing I've tried to promote.

00:34:05.000 | And it was that combination of having, like, a--

00:34:10.000 | sort of like a 400% efficiency increase

00:34:15.000 | in how effectively I spend my money to get pretty much

00:34:17.000 | the same middle-class lifestyle as everybody else

00:34:20.000 | for, like, a quarter of the price,

00:34:22.000 | and the fact that I saved so much money--

00:34:25.000 | saved almost all money--

00:34:27.000 | that I was no longer, like, wasting on, you know, like,

00:34:33.000 | consumer stuff or the easy solution--

00:34:35.000 | let's put it that way--

00:34:36.000 | the things that people do to you.

00:34:39.000 | So combining these two kind of led to the financial independence

00:34:43.000 | as soon as I found out, hey, you could actually take this money

00:34:45.000 | and invest it.

00:34:47.000 | Yeah.

00:34:48.000 | And I think that that idea of just skill

00:34:52.000 | is one of the core ideas that I don't often see talked about

00:34:55.000 | in the finance world,

00:34:57.000 | and I think one of the misconceptions that many people have

00:35:02.000 | is this idea that you only need to do that

00:35:04.000 | when you don't have any money.

00:35:07.000 | Right.

00:35:08.000 | I've never found anybody who has any money--

00:35:10.000 | I've never worked with anybody who has any money--

00:35:12.000 | who doesn't have that skill.

00:35:15.000 | And I can point to academic research on it.

00:35:17.000 | For example, I think the best academic research--

00:35:20.000 | the formalized, defensible, non-anecdotal evidence--

00:35:24.000 | would be Tom Stanley's books, his studies of millionaires.

00:35:27.000 | He wrote one--what was his most recent one?

00:35:30.000 | It was called--I don't remember--

00:35:32.000 | it was his most recent book that he wrote.

00:35:34.000 | Oh, it was called Stop Acting Rich.

00:35:36.000 | That's what it was.

00:35:37.000 | And the entire point of it was that if you actually look at people

00:35:40.000 | who are wealthy, you will find that they are less concerned with--

00:35:45.000 | they're less concerned--

00:35:47.000 | they're mainly concerned with the maximum utilization

00:35:50.000 | of the resources that they have.

00:35:52.000 | And so he defined--and I don't think many people understand

00:35:55.000 | what it is like to be extremely affluent.

00:35:58.000 | And he defined--he says there is a segment of society--

00:36:00.000 | and I'm kind of just loosely paraphrasing.

00:36:02.000 | It's been a couple years since I read his book.

00:36:04.000 | But he defined a segment of society that he calls the glittering rich.

00:36:07.000 | And he says there is the glittering rich.

00:36:09.000 | And so if you have massive amounts of money,

00:36:13.000 | it is very, very easy for you to simply spend a high amount of money

00:36:17.000 | and it to never affect your net worth.

00:36:20.000 | And the example that I can think of from a show I recorded in the past

00:36:23.000 | is I did a calculation one time on Paul Allen,

00:36:28.000 | the co-founder of Microsoft.

00:36:30.000 | And--or he was an early--I don't know if he was a co-founder--

00:36:33.000 | he was engaged with--involved with Microsoft.

00:36:35.000 | And I remember a decade or so ago, he had built a yacht.

00:36:39.000 | He had built a yacht that was called--I think called Octopus

00:36:43.000 | or something like that.

00:36:44.000 | And I remember reading articles that it was this massive mega yacht.

00:36:47.000 | And it was the biggest one in the world at the time.

00:36:50.000 | So I went and I looked up how much it costs--how much it cost him.

00:36:53.000 | And I found out that it cost him $200 million to buy

00:36:57.000 | and $20 million per year to run.

00:36:59.000 | And the--and so you say, "Well, that sounds like a lot of money."

00:37:05.000 | But then I went and calculated his net worth

00:37:07.000 | based upon just some celebrity net worth site I found.

00:37:09.000 | I assumed he spent 5%--I assumed he had a 5% annual income off of his net worth.

00:37:14.000 | I assumed he has no skill with investing.

00:37:16.000 | He has nobody who is at all proficient to be able to do better.

00:37:19.000 | And he's just taking a 5% across-the-board flow off of his net worth.

00:37:24.000 | And for Paul Allen to go and buy with his net worth--

00:37:27.000 | for him to go and buy a $200 million yacht

00:37:30.000 | and spend $20 million a year maintaining it

00:37:32.000 | is exactly the same as somebody with a net worth of $2 million

00:37:37.000 | with a 5% dividend flow off of their net worth of $200,000 a year

00:37:42.000 | buying a $20,000 boat and spending $2,000 a year maintaining it.

00:37:46.000 | And so when you put it in perspective, you say,

00:37:49.000 | "Well, I wouldn't tell someone that had $2 million

00:37:52.000 | if they wanted to buy a $20,000 boat that they couldn't afford it."

00:37:56.000 | Well, that's the same thing for Paul Allen to go and buy a $200 million yacht.

00:37:59.000 | It's a meaningless drop in the bucket.

00:38:01.000 | But then you have much of society is trying to emulate the glittering rich

00:38:05.000 | without being actually affluent.

00:38:08.000 | But it's the major skill--you have to have that major skill

00:38:11.000 | of being able to utilize the resources efficiently.

00:38:14.000 | You can't escape the math.

00:38:16.000 | So while working on the income side, you've got to build the skill

00:38:19.000 | and replace the spending money with skill

00:38:22.000 | so that you have capital to invest if you ever hope to achieve financial freedom.

00:38:26.000 | That's probably one of the most challenging things to convey to people

00:38:32.000 | because they have this one-dimensional perspective on standard of living

00:38:39.000 | and what they can do with their life--namely,

00:38:42.000 | how much money are they spending and how much money are they making.

00:38:46.000 | Before this podcast, I spent all yesterday thinking of trying to come up

00:38:51.000 | with an analogy that people can understand.

00:38:54.000 | But it's kind of like you can't really--it's like this stupid proverb--

00:38:59.000 | you can lead a horse to the water but can't make it think.

00:39:03.000 | It's very hard to explain something to people if they never had the thought before

00:39:10.000 | because it just doesn't enter their mind.

00:39:13.000 | The best thing I came up with was a mixed martial arts analogy.

00:39:18.000 | Before that, you had pretty much--most people are kind of like a one-armed boxer

00:39:26.000 | in the sense they know how to throw a punch,

00:39:29.000 | which is sort of like handing over their wallet or spending money to get stuff.

00:39:35.000 | Someone like Paul Allen might be like a 270-pound superhuman power thrower.

00:39:45.000 | Someone who lives in poverty would be like a scrawny 80-pound guy.

00:39:52.000 | It's pretty clear comparing these two who's going to win this fight.

00:39:57.000 | You have people thinking that if they think one-dimensional in terms of fighting,

00:40:02.000 | it's--you line up, say, the fighters based on weight class only

00:40:11.000 | and exactly how much money they can spend.

00:40:13.000 | When someone says, "Well, I weigh, say, 180 pounds,"

00:40:18.000 | well, you must be able to fight this well.

00:40:20.000 | You can beat the 150-pound guy but can't beat the 200-pound guy.

00:40:25.000 | That's kind of like--I'm trying not to say everything at once.

00:40:32.000 | I have a bunch of notes, a ton of things I want to say.

00:40:35.000 | Go ahead. Here's your forum.

00:40:37.000 | It's very much a problem for conveying this whole new way of thinking

00:40:42.000 | because there's so many layers to it.

00:40:45.000 | When people start training, for instance, martial arts,

00:40:49.000 | they typically start with a simple technique and they learn how to punch.

00:40:54.000 | They learn one punch and maybe they learn two punches

00:40:58.000 | and then they learn a couple of blocks and then they learn a kick.

00:41:02.000 | That's sort of like their repertoire.

00:41:05.000 | That's kind of like when they're in the tips and techniques phase

00:41:10.000 | of their maturity and mental skill development.

00:41:15.000 | At one point, they'll learn all of them.

00:41:19.000 | They'll learn all the tips and they'll learn all the techniques.

00:41:22.000 | That's typically when you hand over the black belt

00:41:26.000 | because that sort of signifies that, okay, this guy now knows every tip in the book

00:41:32.000 | but anyone who's ever reached that level knows that that's kind of like--

00:41:37.000 | It's the same thing with the PhD.

00:41:39.000 | That just signals that true learning is about to begin.

00:41:42.000 | It just means you've mastered all the basics.

00:41:45.000 | The next step is sort of like to reduce these tips and techniques

00:41:50.000 | back to a set of principles.

00:41:54.000 | You can learn a thousand tips but they probably only have a handful of principles

00:41:59.000 | in common, how to use your arms and how to use your legs

00:42:03.000 | and how to use your body to hurt your opponent or live efficiently and so on.

00:42:11.000 | Once you get to that level--

00:42:14.000 | That's kind of like what mixed martial arts demonstrated

00:42:17.000 | because suddenly you had fighters who were not just trained in how to punch hard.

00:42:24.000 | Some of them would kick, some of them would do takedowns,

00:42:27.000 | and some of them would use their whole body to fight with.

00:42:31.000 | Back when the whole thing started, for instance, you had these Brazilian jiu-jitsu guys

00:42:36.000 | weighing like 170 pounds and this guy is defeating this 250-pound boxer

00:42:44.000 | with no problem at all because he's using his entire body.

00:42:49.000 | He's not just punching anymore.

00:42:52.000 | That's not just a difference--

00:42:56.000 | It's no longer like a difference in degree when you have this transition.

00:43:02.000 | It's a difference in kindness. It's a whole new fighting style.

00:43:08.000 | The problem with conveying these ideas to philosophical ideas behind the theory

00:43:18.000 | is that it's not immediately obvious that the considerations that go into spending money

00:43:26.000 | four times more efficiently than the average consumer, but it's sort of like the same idea.

00:43:35.000 | The problem is that when you try to explain that to people,

00:43:39.000 | they'll look at my 7K a year spending, which is now getting down to $5,000 a year.

00:43:46.000 | That was going to be one of my questions.

00:43:48.000 | Do you still track your spending and what's the number?

00:43:50.000 | Yeah, it's about 5K now since we bought the house.

00:43:52.000 | We're no longer paying rent, so real estate taxes and insurance

00:43:55.000 | is somewhat less than rent is in this area.

00:43:58.000 | That's 5K because you're married, so 5K, just to be clear,

00:44:01.000 | would count for half of your household expenses.

00:44:04.000 | Yeah, 5K for both of us.

00:44:05.000 | Okay, that's great. Keep going.

00:44:08.000 | You were giving the example of people look from the outside

00:44:17.000 | and they can't quite understand when they say I'm spending 5,000.

00:44:21.000 | Yeah, they're still just looking at my punching strength.

00:44:25.000 | They're not looking at the fact that I'm also using my other arm,

00:44:28.000 | I'm using my legs, I'm using my entire body to fight.

00:44:32.000 | I'm not just pulling out my credit card whenever I want something.

00:44:39.000 | I'm looking at where else can I get help.

00:44:43.000 | Are there any other ways I can solve this problem

00:44:47.000 | other than paying for some technology or calling someone

00:44:52.000 | and having them come over and fix it?

00:44:59.000 | I think consumers and essentially consumer society,

00:45:02.000 | which is probably like 90% of the population has, or maybe 95,

00:45:06.000 | most people have this perception that all human potential

00:45:12.000 | is strictly limited by how much money you can spend.

00:45:17.000 | I think that leads to a somewhat limited existence.

00:45:21.000 | I know people who earn tons of money, amazing amounts of money.

00:45:27.000 | In general, many of them still think in the same terms that I hear

00:45:32.000 | whenever someone objects to ERE and my lifestyle is like,

00:45:38.000 | "Well, since you're not spending money, you can't do the three things,"

00:45:41.000 | which is strictly only three things that everybody likes to do,

00:45:44.000 | which is number one, going to restaurants.

00:45:48.000 | Number two is going to sports events and watching sports.

00:45:55.000 | It's kind of like a question whether it's the front seats

00:46:00.000 | or whether it's the bleachers.

00:46:02.000 | The third thing is that you can't afford tourism.

00:46:06.000 | You can't afford your annual two-week vacation.

00:46:09.000 | That's kind of like the three things that come up again and again

00:46:12.000 | as sort of like the pinnacle of human entertainment and achievement.

00:46:17.000 | But there's so much more you can do.

00:46:20.000 | It's way more fun to play baseball than to watch baseball, say, and so on.

00:46:29.000 | There's a law in ecology called Leibniz law of the minimum,

00:46:38.000 | which kind of has to do with feeding plants.

00:46:44.000 | What it says is that your plant growth is sort of restricted by the minimum.

00:46:52.000 | I mean plants need many things to grow.

00:46:54.000 | They need sunlight, they need water, they need potassium,

00:46:56.000 | they need nitrogen, and so on.

00:46:59.000 | The growth is limited by the minimum ingredient that is supplied.

00:47:04.000 | Once you don't supply any more nitrogen, if you're nitrogen deficient,

00:47:10.000 | you can't substitute.

00:47:12.000 | You can't just add more water and expect the plant to grow.

00:47:17.000 | I think life as a human being is sort of similar in that there are

00:47:22.000 | sort of significant restrictions on how much you can do.

00:47:27.000 | Money does not substitute for everything.

00:47:30.000 | That's sort of like this economic idea that's yet very pervasive in society,

00:47:36.000 | the law of substitution.

00:47:38.000 | It doesn't really hold in reality.

00:47:42.000 | You might have a guy who's worth like $100 million, but there's no amount of money

00:47:49.000 | this guy can pay if he can't run, say, 10 kilometers.

00:47:54.000 | He can't write a check big enough to make him run 10 kilometers.

00:48:00.000 | He has to put in the physical effort and the training and so on in order to

00:48:05.000 | have that experience.

00:48:07.000 | It's just that most people, especially consumers, are completely blind to all

00:48:12.000 | the experiences they can have because they are sort of like minimum limited

00:48:17.000 | because they only look at what their money can buy.

00:48:20.000 | I think that's kind of tragic.

00:48:23.000 | It seems--I think there's many reasons for it, but one of the reasons--I mean,

00:48:28.000 | I'm a downright complete total optimist about just about everything in life,

00:48:32.000 | but I like to call myself a rational optimist, and that was largely driven

00:48:36.000 | by reading Matt Ridley's book by the same title where he goes--it's called

00:48:40.000 | "The Rational Optimist," which suggests that people really enjoyed kind of his

00:48:44.000 | going through and charting the history of basically the world.

00:48:48.000 | But my point is that one of the biggest things that I see is that it's only

00:48:53.000 | exposure that allows people to--we're usually limited by our own experience.

00:49:01.000 | So I've come from a certain experience.

00:49:03.000 | You've come from a certain experience.

00:49:05.000 | We're generally limited by our experience.

00:49:07.000 | If I grew up speaking English and I never knew anyone who spoke another language

00:49:11.000 | and I never met anybody who--I never knew an English speaker who had learned

00:49:16.000 | another language and I never met anybody who spoke another language,

00:49:19.000 | I would have no concept of languages if I weren't exposed to them.

00:49:24.000 | But if I were exposed to somebody who spoke other languages and I saw a value

00:49:28.000 | in it, I would realize, "Wow, I could do that.

00:49:31.000 | I could do that too."

00:49:32.000 | And so with every aspect of life, I think you see this.

00:49:35.000 | And so whether it's I could live on a smaller amount of money,

00:49:38.000 | I could follow my dreams and build a business, I could travel.

00:49:41.000 | I remember when I first started to travel outside of the country

00:49:45.000 | and I'd meet these people from--usually from Europe, either German tourists

00:49:49.000 | or Australian tourists in the backpacking hostels and various places.

00:49:54.000 | And you find out that here's somebody who really doesn't have much money,

00:49:58.000 | but they've been on the road for 18 months traveling through South America.

00:50:02.000 | And you say, "Oh, so the American concept of a two-week vacation where I go

00:50:06.000 | and spend all my money, spend thousands of dollars over two weeks

00:50:10.000 | and I can't afford to travel ever again, there is another way to do it."

00:50:13.000 | Now, I wouldn't tell somebody, "You have to do it this other way."

00:50:17.000 | But one thing I'm so excited about the Internet is you don't have to wait

00:50:20.000 | until you meet--you don't have to wait until you meet someone in a hostel

00:50:24.000 | in San Jose, Costa Rica. Rather, you'll stumble across them online

00:50:30.000 | while you're goofing off at work doing a job you don't like.

00:50:33.000 | And then you say, "Whoa, look at this guy here. He's traveling on $10,000 a year,

00:50:37.000 | traveling the world. I've got $30,000. I could go travel for a couple of years."

00:50:41.000 | And then that spreads and that spreads and that spreads. And I see--

00:50:44.000 | And that's something that's become a lot easier over the past 10, 15 years.

00:50:50.000 | And it's so--I mean, just to get to the concept of efficiency, I mean, I'm with you.

00:50:55.000 | I'm sure that I don't live the same lifestyle that you live.

00:50:59.000 | I'm not nearly as efficient as you are.

00:51:01.000 | We probably live similar lifestyles. It just might be--

00:51:04.000 | Ah, there we go.

00:51:05.000 | --less than you do.

00:51:06.000 | That's probably true. In fact, I've got a couple of personal questions

00:51:09.000 | that I'm going to ask you about during the course of this conversation.

00:51:13.000 | I'll tell you that my neighbors, they can't tell. Visitors, they can't tell.

00:51:17.000 | It's just it's kind of like when they ask, I'll tell them.

00:51:20.000 | I don't believe that. Yeah.

00:51:22.000 | Yeah. One of the ones that I'm--I'll get to the questions in a second

00:51:27.000 | because there's a couple of budget categories that just I cannot figure out how to fix.

00:51:32.000 | And I'll get to them in a second.

00:51:33.000 | And I'm working on them, working on them, working on them.

00:51:36.000 | I can't figure out the solution for me.

00:51:38.000 | But the thing is that there's so many areas of inefficiency.

00:51:41.000 | You talked about, for you, the turning point was the mortgage.

00:51:45.000 | And I think if everybody--I'm appalled at how slow the process of progress is

00:51:53.000 | with construction methods and how expensive construction methods are.

00:51:57.000 | But yet, in general, I've rarely found a financial planning client

00:52:01.000 | who has said, "Joshua, I want to buy a house, and I'm not willing to take out a mortgage for it."

00:52:05.000 | But when I go and read--have you ever read the book called Mortgage Free by Rob Roy?

00:52:10.000 | No, but I have heard a lot about it.

00:52:13.000 | Okay, so I found that book years ago, and it blew my mind when I started reading his plan

00:52:19.000 | for how to have a mortgage-free life by building your own house.

00:52:23.000 | And then that got me going on ecological design, on housing design.

00:52:29.000 | And you go out and you start researching, and you find out there are dozens and dozens and dozens

00:52:34.000 | of incredible building methods, building design methods, that are in a climate--

00:52:41.000 | they have to be climate appropriate, and that's how housing should be,

00:52:44.000 | that are climate appropriate.

00:52:46.000 | And you can build a beautiful house that is incredibly energy efficient,

00:52:50.000 | incredibly comfortable, incredibly beautiful, and it only costs you

00:52:54.000 | a relatively much smaller amount of money, whether it's $10,000, $20,000, $30,000,

00:52:58.000 | instead of $100,000, $200,000, $300,000.

00:53:01.000 | But ironically, it's probably hard to get approved by the local zoning board.

00:53:05.000 | You can't do it. You cannot do it.

00:53:07.000 | And so if you want to know what makes--if you want to get my wife going,

00:53:12.000 | this is the topic--if you want to get me going, then this is the topic that you can get me going on.

00:53:19.000 | You cannot do it.

00:53:21.000 | I live in Palm Beach County, Florida, and so we have substantial zoning regulations,

00:53:25.000 | code regulations, hurricane regulations, and there's all this talk among everyone,

00:53:30.000 | "Well, we want to be green, and we want to promote eco-efficiency."

00:53:34.000 | And so the greatest idea is to build a passive house--passive house in the German sense

00:53:39.000 | is a brand name--or a LEED Platinum house.

00:53:42.000 | And you look at it and say, "Yeah, but consider the cost of this thing,

00:53:45.000 | and consider what you could do with much simpler--could we get 80% of the way there

00:53:50.000 | with completely non-human messed-with materials,

00:53:56.000 | without all this massive expensive infrastructure required to put all these materials

00:54:01.000 | into your LEED Platinum house? Could we get 80% of the way there building with lime

00:54:06.000 | and wattle and daub or whatever the version is?"

00:54:10.000 | But the government is what gets in the way.

00:54:13.000 | And I think you see this in industry and innovation.

00:54:15.000 | Why do we have such incredible technology?

00:54:18.000 | Well, because the tech industry was very unregulated,

00:54:22.000 | so people--entrepreneurs can just simply design and go and do it.

00:54:26.000 | Well, why is it that we're still driving cars that get an average of under 30 miles per gallon?

00:54:29.000 | It's absurd. But yet, what's the most regulated industry?

00:54:33.000 | It's the vehicle industry.

00:54:35.000 | I remember seeing a car built in the '70s.

00:54:39.000 | It was sort of like one of those gas-guzzling steel monsters--

00:54:44.000 | two-ton steel monsters from that era, but that had been modified

00:54:48.000 | to run at 300 miles per gallon by taking out the weight

00:54:54.000 | and replacing the transmission with a chain that ran down the cabin, etc.

00:54:59.000 | And it's kind of funny thinking that you could make vehicles like that,

00:55:03.000 | but yet people are focused now today on hybrids,

00:55:06.000 | which requires a massive technological infrastructure.

00:55:10.000 | It's probably one of the least green cars you can imagine.

00:55:13.000 | I hope Toyota doesn't sue me now.

00:55:16.000 | And people are kind of focusing on that, spending that much money,

00:55:21.000 | getting 10 miles per gallon more than just buying an old car that already exists.

00:55:27.000 | It might get fewer miles per gallon, but what you waste more in gas

00:55:35.000 | by driving the old beater, you definitely save by not overpaying by $20,000.

00:55:41.000 | But it's not in the mentality, I would say, of this society.

00:55:49.000 | Again, it's kind of like if you don't have a personal strategy,

00:55:53.000 | someone will use their strategy against you.

00:55:55.000 | And right now the strategy being used against people is built on the fact

00:56:01.000 | that there has to be--solutions always have to be technological.

00:56:06.000 | You can't have a solution that would require people to start thinking

00:56:10.000 | and changing their habits.

00:56:12.000 | It's kind of like the medical industry.

00:56:14.000 | You could fix--I think it's like 60% or 70% of all diseases,

00:56:18.000 | lifestyle diseases, which could be avoided if people would just live more healthy

00:56:23.000 | and take care of themselves.

00:56:25.000 | But you cannot have a lifestyle solution.

00:56:29.000 | You have to have a technological solution.

00:56:31.000 | In many cases, you also have to have a financial solution.

00:56:35.000 | You can't pay cash.

00:56:37.000 | It has to be financed in the sense that almost--the drivers really towards

00:56:44.000 | financialization are turning people into recurring cash streams.

00:56:49.000 | You can kind of see that with cell phones.

00:56:51.000 | You give the cell phone away in exchange for a binding contract.

00:56:55.000 | So now you've sort of secured that.

00:56:59.000 | It's exactly the same thing with the markets.

00:57:01.000 | You give a house in return for people essentially becoming indentured to you.

00:57:08.000 | So that's just how it works.

00:57:11.000 | I saw a funny question, and I think it was on MMM's forum,

00:57:15.000 | like whether I believe in aliens and whether I believe--

00:57:18.000 | don't believe that aliens hacked the technology to enslave humanity or something.

00:57:23.000 | Right.

00:57:25.000 | So in that regard, yeah, there's certainly no physical laws preventing aliens

00:57:29.000 | from existing.

00:57:31.000 | But the second question is much easier.

00:57:33.000 | It's very easy to enslave humanity.

00:57:36.000 | All you've got to do is to give them a credit card and a markets application

00:57:42.000 | and then give them a job title, like as an associate in Who Cares Incorporated,

00:57:48.000 | and a day job.

00:57:49.000 | And you're pretty much there, right?

00:57:51.000 | Problem solved.

00:57:53.000 | You're there.

00:57:54.000 | Yeah.

00:57:55.000 | I'm glad you brought that question up because I made a list of those questions.

00:57:58.000 | That was the one that I struck, and I said, "How on earth am I supposed to ask

00:58:02.000 | Jacob if aliens exist?"

00:58:06.000 | I want to ask all these questions for the forum members,

00:58:10.000 | but how on earth am I supposed to do that?

00:58:13.000 | The thing that I see, and I think that your book points this out--

00:58:16.000 | which, by the way, I would like to give you a compliment

00:58:18.000 | specifically on the strategies that you use in your book.

00:58:22.000 | And here's what I mean.

00:58:24.000 | In the world of money, when you start researching the world of money

00:58:28.000 | and you start reading books, you have to be very careful to find a strategy

00:58:34.000 | that's going to work for everybody because it seems like many of the strategies

00:58:38.000 | and ideas that are out there are structured much more like a Ponzi scheme

00:58:42.000 | than they are anything else.

00:58:44.000 | For example, if I'm talking about financial planning and I'm saying,

00:58:48.000 | "Pursue financial independence," and, "Look, you should go out and start a podcast

00:58:52.000 | just like me, and you should make lots of money," or I'm a financial blogger

00:58:55.000 | or a book, and you say, "You should go and tell people how to make money,"

00:58:59.000 | you get this Ponzi scheme, and everyone's getting rich off of telling other people

00:59:02.000 | how to get rich.

00:59:04.000 | Making money, blogging about how to make money by blogging about it.

00:59:08.000 | And it's absurd.

00:59:10.000 | And the thing is about your strategy is that none of that comes into that.

00:59:13.000 | In fact, I'm hoping that over time, over the coming years--

00:59:18.000 | I don't know how long it'll take. It may take a few years.

00:59:20.000 | But over the coming years, I would love to do this financial planning podcast

00:59:25.000 | as a primary source of income to support my lifestyle.

00:59:29.000 | That would be my lifestyle dream that I think I would do if I were financially independent.

00:59:33.000 | But if that were to occur in the future, I will always have this problem,

00:59:38.000 | is that I was not financially independent before starting the podcast,

00:59:43.000 | and now I've kind of done this selling a dream, so to speak.

00:59:46.000 | So my hope is not to sell a dream. My hope is to teach rules and laws,

00:59:50.000 | and I think that's an ethical way to approach it.

00:59:52.000 | But your strategy is completely--your strategies that you outline in your book

00:59:56.000 | are completely industry agnostic, person agnostic.

01:00:00.000 | They scale.

01:00:02.000 | Exactly. Exactly.

01:00:04.000 | And here's what I see.

01:00:06.000 | In one sense, I have almost no hope for general society,

01:00:11.000 | and this is just from a personal perspective.

01:00:14.000 | And I'm not a pessimist about that,

01:00:17.000 | but I don't have any plan that will make any kind of change for general society.

01:00:22.000 | It seems that as years go by, it seems that as a society,

01:00:25.000 | we surrender more and more of our freedoms.

01:00:28.000 | We don't stand up for the things--for our ability to run our lives.

01:00:32.000 | And yet--so we've never lived in one way.

01:00:34.000 | We've never lived in the U.S. context in a society of greater tyranny.

01:00:39.000 | If you were to compare the things that--

01:00:42.000 | I was reading an article the other day that was talking about

01:00:44.000 | the number of home invasions accomplished by police SWAT teams

01:00:52.000 | versus the invasion of British soldiers in this country back in the American Revolution.

01:00:59.000 | If you were to wake up and tell somebody in 1776,

01:01:03.000 | "Look, here's the--I think it was 20,000 home invasions a year by SWAT teams,

01:01:07.000 | and we just let it go without changing anything,"

01:01:10.000 | they would be shocked.

01:01:11.000 | So tyranny grows day by day, and yet it has never been easier in the history of mankind

01:01:18.000 | for individuals to practice personal freedom,

01:01:21.000 | for individuals to just simply say, "I'm going to step outside the cave,"

01:01:25.000 | to borrow the allegory of the cave from Plato's Republic.

01:01:28.000 | "I'm going to step outside the cave. I'm going to see it for what it is.

01:01:30.000 | I'm going to pursue a different path."

01:01:32.000 | It's never, ever in the history of mankind been easier.

01:01:35.000 | There has never been fewer consequences.

01:01:37.000 | It has never been harder to fail.

01:01:40.000 | There has never been greater tools.

01:01:41.000 | There has never been ability to live with greater comfort than it is right now.

01:01:45.000 | So it's all about adopting that individual perspective

01:01:49.000 | and not looking at society for solutions,

01:01:51.000 | but rather saying, "I'm going to change my life.

01:01:53.000 | I'm going to make a difference in my life,

01:01:55.000 | and I'm going to pursue the plan that's appropriate for me.

01:01:59.000 | And then if other people want to follow, that's awesome,

01:02:01.000 | but I'm not going to try to force anyone else."

01:02:03.000 | I would say maybe that's the third ingredient that kind of caused me to start the ERE block.

01:02:09.000 | I would say I'm kind of like a rational pessimist

01:02:16.000 | in that I usually always look at the worst cases of what can happen,

01:02:19.000 | and then I try to avoid them.

01:02:21.000 | That usually leads to pretty good cases, but it's just a matter of perspective.

01:02:25.000 | But the reason I talked in the very beginning of this podcast

01:02:31.000 | about my discovery of the myth in Western civilization of eternal progress might not be true.

01:02:42.000 | That is sort of the revelation.

01:02:45.000 | That was maybe the progenitor to what started me off the path of the standard career, job, markets, and so on.

01:02:57.000 | I spent several years talking about peak oil and overpopulation,

01:03:05.000 | which are the two primary problems at the turn of the millennium.

01:03:10.000 | What I found was the focus was always on what we should do as a society.

01:03:18.000 | What was that?

01:03:19.000 | That's mine. I'm sorry. I forgot to turn this off.

01:03:21.000 | There we go. Keep going.

01:03:23.000 | The focus was always on what we should do as a society.

01:03:27.000 | If only we can change these things, then we can do this and that.

01:03:32.000 | After a few years, it became obvious to me that people here in this news group and so on,

01:03:42.000 | we're basically preaching to the choir.

01:03:43.000 | We're talking to ourselves.

01:03:45.000 | It's never going to happen.

01:03:47.000 | Let's put it another way.

01:03:50.000 | If you have a minority point of view that maybe the majority is wrong in this kind of progress,

01:03:57.000 | debt-fueled economy, it's not going to come around through rational argument

01:04:03.000 | that you suddenly magically manage to convince the other 90% of the population

01:04:08.000 | to radically change national policies or even global policies and something.

01:04:14.000 | My focus changed from what we can do to what you can do, what I can do.

01:04:22.000 | Then I started building up what kind of lifestyle is compatible with the future I'm seeing.

01:04:29.000 | If a sufficient amount of individuals adopt this lifestyle,

01:04:35.000 | can we maybe have an emergent change to what we would like to see?

01:04:41.000 | Instead of talking about what we can do, it's like, "Here's what you can do.

01:04:45.000 | If you do that and if enough people like you do that, then this group of yous become the new we.

01:04:53.000 | Then that we will pretty much have changed it already."

01:04:58.000 | Is that what you mean?

01:05:00.000 | Yeah. That's exactly the—I agree with you.

01:05:05.000 | I've spent a lot of time thinking about some of those challenges,

01:05:08.000 | whether—peak oil is probably one of the more—it's a major one.

01:05:17.000 | I have a soft spot for—go ahead.

01:05:21.000 | Yeah. You have—well, one thing I consider that I always consider important,

01:05:26.000 | so first strategy is avoiding bad things, but also setting myself up

01:05:32.000 | so I can take advantage of it if good things happen, right?

01:05:36.000 | So suppose fusion gets invented in 10 years or the shale boom is actually not a bubble

01:05:44.000 | and things will just be hunky-dory for the next 100 years.

01:05:48.000 | I also need the strategy to actually succeed in that scenario.

01:05:52.000 | So you're sort of doing this contingency planning.

01:05:55.000 | Well, will it work if the world goes this way?

01:05:58.000 | Will it work if the world goes that way and so on?

01:06:01.000 | So you need a strategy that works in all scenarios

01:06:04.000 | and then pretty much no matter what happens, you'll be all right.

01:06:07.000 | So with ERE having a substantial money foundation,

01:06:12.000 | if, say, the economy turns around and doesn't turn into like Japan for the next 30 years

01:06:18.000 | but kind of replicates what the U.S. has done over the past 50 years with massive growth,

01:06:25.000 | then this strategy with, say, the financial hedge will do very well.

01:06:33.000 | If you ever change your mind and you don't want to use any skills anymore,

01:06:38.000 | you can just ignore that and go back to being like the 250-pound boxer,

01:06:43.000 | punching with this one arm and buying everything.

01:06:48.000 | If the economy kind of bombs, not just the economy but sort of really structurally,

01:06:54.000 | let things go down the drain, well, then you can rely on your skills to carry you

01:06:59.000 | and probably set yourself up as a force in the neighborhood in the sense that you'll be like the go-to guy

01:07:05.000 | who knows how to feed yourself from the garden.

01:07:09.000 | You're the one who knows how to fix the car when it breaks

01:07:12.000 | or turn the car into a bicycle once there's no more gasoline and so on and so forth.

01:07:18.000 | So it has to be sort of like a multi-pronged and hedged approach to it.

01:07:23.000 | And one of the things that sort of concerned me a little bit is that--

01:07:27.000 | and that might just come with experience, but people who come from the consumer world

01:07:32.000 | are still mainly focused on the let's just save enough money.

01:07:38.000 | I don't really care to learn any skills or anything whatsoever.

01:07:41.000 | I just want to save a bunch of money.

01:07:43.000 | And then once I have enough money to pay for the things I pay for, then I'm good.

01:07:48.000 | I think that's a risky strategy.

01:07:54.000 | So I actually have a soft spot.

01:07:57.000 | I have a personal soft spot and enjoyment of dystopian fiction.

01:08:00.000 | And I really enjoy reading apocalyptic dystopian fiction about the world falling apart

01:08:08.000 | and trying to figure out--because I think it's a really interesting thought experiment.

01:08:12.000 | And you've just made a point.

01:08:13.000 | You stole it right off of my notes of things that I wanted to talk about.

01:08:16.000 | In your book, you talk about--here would be one of the biggest, I would say, fears that people have about retirement.

01:08:23.000 | And so one of the fears that people have about retiring is, "Well, what do I do if I run out of money?"

01:08:28.000 | And so the concern is that, "Well, if I run out of money, then how am I going to be in a position

01:08:34.000 | where I'm able to do anything again?

01:08:37.000 | If I'm old and I've retired and I've dropped out of the--I've surrendered my career,

01:08:43.000 | so I'm no longer as employable as I once was, then what am I going to do?"

01:08:48.000 | So people are oftentimes looking for a financial solution.

01:08:51.000 | So they're saying, "Hey, Mr. Financial Planner, can you absolutely guarantee me that this retirement distribution plan,

01:09:00.000 | including an investment plan, is going to work no matter what?"

01:09:04.000 | Well, the answer is no, I can't.

01:09:06.000 | I don't have a crystal ball. I don't know what's going to happen.

01:09:09.000 | There certainly could be a nuclear warhead fall on the United States.

01:09:12.000 | We could go into a Japan-style malaise.

01:09:16.000 | I don't think that's going to happen.

01:09:19.000 | But then again, I'm a human being, and I could be completely wrong about what I think.

01:09:23.000 | But the backup plan is not usually a financial plan.

01:09:26.000 | So if you get into the peak oil world or you get into the financial disaster world

01:09:30.000 | or you get into people convinced that the dollar is going to blow up

01:09:33.000 | or you get into these solutions, usually people are looking for a financial solution.

01:09:40.000 | I don't know of a financial solution that works.

01:09:42.000 | The solution is skills, because the type of person--and here's the missing link that I see--

01:09:47.000 | the type of person who develops skills, he or she has to develop human capital.

01:09:52.000 | So you develop your human capital, and then the market rewards you for that human capital

01:09:56.000 | with financial capital, something we call money, which is an accounting for value.

01:10:01.000 | It's basically a system of accounting among people.

01:10:04.000 | So those with higher skills in a free market, those with higher skills,

01:10:08.000 | earn and acquire higher money.

01:10:10.000 | Now, you can become a capitalist and turn around and you need to deploy that capital,

01:10:13.000 | but if you have built skills, if the entire money system disappeared

01:10:17.000 | or if the entire economy disappeared or oil overnight went up to $20 a gallon,

01:10:23.000 | would there be substantial repercussions?

01:10:26.000 | Absolutely there would.

01:10:27.000 | But the people who will come through that are the people with skills.

01:10:30.000 | And so the solution to "What do I do if the world goes crazy?" is not a financial solution.

01:10:35.000 | It's not stacks and stacks of gold coins.

01:10:37.000 | It's building out skills.

01:10:39.000 | And whether they're very mechanical skills, hands-on skills, like you said,

01:10:42.000 | the ability to grow food, or their skills of leadership, inspiration, salesmanship,

01:10:46.000 | organizational management, these are all still applicable in any kind of human settlement.

01:10:51.000 | And I think that's kind of where it comes back to this whole retirement argument,

01:10:55.000 | because the point really is not to retire and sort of become useless to people.

01:11:01.000 | It's really to become more useful.

01:11:04.000 | Right.

01:11:05.000 | And you kind of set up--I mean, I would say in many ways,

01:11:10.000 | which goes back to the aliens enslaving humanity--I kind of like this line--

01:11:16.000 | is that in many ways, if you go to college in order to just sort of get your degree

01:11:24.000 | so you can become employable, in a lot of ways the world is sort of set up

01:11:30.000 | to try to make you more useless, aside from the very thing that you use to make money.

01:11:35.000 | Like the more useless you become at practically everything else,

01:11:40.000 | the more controlled--or the less choice you have and the more predictable you are.

01:11:46.000 | And so one of the points of ERI is sort of to get out of that funk

01:11:53.000 | and to sort of liberate people.

01:11:57.000 | And the main way of doing that is sort of to give first the financial wherewithal.

01:12:03.000 | And ironically, that's done by the very job that tries to keep people packed in their cubicle.

01:12:10.000 | But once they're financially liberated, I mean, it's kind of like--

01:12:15.000 | that's just--okay, that just means you have the black belt or the PhD or whatever.

01:12:19.000 | That just means that your learning is starting now.

01:12:22.000 | Now you're sort of supposed to--I mean, okay, if you want to go on a lifelong vacation forever after

01:12:29.000 | and do--I wouldn't say do nothing, but not do anything that anyone could possibly pay you for.

01:12:36.000 | And also I don't want to emphasize the requirement that people will pay you for what you do.

01:12:43.000 | I mean, there's plenty of important things that people can do that are not governed by money transactions.

01:12:51.000 | Like taking care of relatives or something is not remunerated.

01:12:57.000 | But the main point I want to emphasize is like the financial independence is an easy way for people

01:13:05.000 | who like tends to earn a lot of money to get out of it.

01:13:09.000 | It's not the only way.

01:13:11.000 | I mean, you could also become wildly skilled and be able to pick up like jobs whenever you need the money,

01:13:16.000 | something which I think is actually a superior solution.

01:13:19.000 | I have much more respect for someone who can like go out and find a job tomorrow if they need money

01:13:25.000 | and they can do it like 20 different ways than someone who worked as, you know, like a career specialist

01:13:31.000 | for like five years, which is what I did, and then just amassed the financial capital.

01:13:37.000 | So, yeah, I mean, I'm kind of going in circles here, but the main point is to continue creating value

01:13:47.000 | once you kind of like retire from your career.

01:13:50.000 | So here would be my question for you.

01:13:53.000 | So you retired and then you went back and you are now employed.

01:13:58.000 | You're not self-employed. You're not an entrepreneur.

01:14:01.000 | You are employed in some capacity.

01:14:03.000 | How has that transition back to employment affected your sense of freedom?

01:14:10.000 | It has certainly like restricted it a bit in terms of like the time.

01:14:16.000 | You know, it's 9 to 5, which means that takes a lot of time.

01:14:24.000 | It's also somewhat restricted in terms of it being like a salary position.

01:14:33.000 | It's not so much like a money question.

01:14:35.000 | It's more like if I want to keep doing what I do, I have to sort of like come back the next day and so on and so forth.

01:14:44.000 | So there are like other bounds on you if you want to do that in a salary position.

01:14:52.000 | So these are somewhat restrictive.

01:14:55.000 | So that's kind of like the price you pay.

01:14:57.000 | And I mean I can absolutely see how people say, "Well, I don't have time to."

01:15:07.000 | So the call dropped for a moment and now we're back.

01:15:09.000 | And so Jacob, the question I have, you were talking just for a moment when the call dropped about employment and kind of the challenges of employment.

01:15:18.000 | But do you feel – here would be my question.

01:15:21.000 | Now that you are financially independent by your statement of, "Hey, I'm even spending less money than I was when I lived out in California,"

01:15:30.000 | and assuming that you haven't destroyed your investments with something stupid, we'll just make that assumption.

01:15:35.000 | I won't ask you to comment.

01:15:36.000 | My withdrawal rate now is like 1.1 percent.

01:15:41.000 | That's fantastic.

01:15:42.000 | There we go.

01:15:43.000 | So the question would be do you find it different to work being employed in what sounds like a nine-to-five job without complete autonomy?

01:15:53.000 | Do you find it different being employed knowing that you could quit at any time if you wanted to versus when you were a young man before you were financially independent

01:16:03.000 | and being employed in a mainstream job at that point in time?

01:16:06.000 | Is it a different experience?

01:16:08.000 | Well, in those terms, the ability to quit at any time certainly makes for a much different feeling.

01:16:16.000 | You're not really putting up with as much bullshit as you might be willing to if you had to stay there.

01:16:22.000 | And I also think of it much more as sort of like a hobby, sort of like a mutual exchange of value if you want.

01:16:30.000 | Like they let me work there and I work for them and we're both happy about that rather than you work here because you're sort of forced to

01:16:40.000 | and therefore I can tell you to do the stuff you don't really want to do but you have no choice because you need the money I'm paying you.

01:16:47.000 | So that's a huge change in sort of like the working relationship.

01:16:53.000 | But I mean I work in a field that probably most people know that it has something to do with investment where a lot of people actually are also financially independent.

01:17:04.000 | So like the entire culture is kind of like predicated on that kind of attitude which you don't really find in many other fields of work.

01:17:14.000 | No, you don't.

01:17:16.000 | Yeah, one of the things I also get a lot from the forums is that once people reach the crossover point, the point where they get financially independent,

01:17:24.000 | a lot of them actually, I mean it's kind of like you have this probably much above average drive compared to other people to like succeed and to become more competent and so on.

01:17:37.000 | And it's kind of like I mean a lot of people have and me too had a hard time letting go of that.

01:17:44.000 | So we like big projects and completing those and like being engaged and so on.

01:17:51.000 | And so what many people have done is they reach the crossover point, they don't really like some aspects of their jobs or their day jobs.

01:18:01.000 | So they go into the boss and say, "Well, I'd like to either quit or I like these changes."

01:18:07.000 | For instance, I would prefer to like – are you still on?

01:18:11.000 | Yep, you're still on.

01:18:12.000 | Okay.

01:18:13.000 | I would prefer to like retain my access to like this $10 million lab you have because I like tinkering with the machines.

01:18:22.000 | But I would rather not go to any more sales meetings and I'd like to cut that out because I don't like sales.

01:18:27.000 | I'm an engineer for instance.

01:18:29.000 | And they actually negotiate some – tend to negotiate some very good terms because they can now whereas in the past, like the manager would just say, "Well, I'll just promote this other guy but you still have to do this."

01:18:44.000 | So that's a much more common strategy than the "I reached the crossover point and now I'm just going to quit my job and do nothing."

01:18:54.000 | And I think I see that as one of the observations that I've had is that you don't have to be financially independent to feel financially independent.

01:19:04.000 | Is that there are many strategies and so I define financial independence.

01:19:09.000 | My personal definition is the ability to live off of the production of your investment portfolio without needing to – and maintain your lifestyle without needing to add to that portfolio on an ongoing basis.

01:19:22.000 | Because I would say the only real passive investment – the only real passive income that exists would be investment income where other people are running other companies that you're living off of their labor.

01:19:33.000 | It's definitely a matter of degree.

01:19:36.000 | I mean that's a term called "a few money."

01:19:38.000 | I got in trouble for saying that explicitly at one point on the podcast.

01:19:42.000 | I won't do it here but I presume everybody knows what it means.

01:19:45.000 | Right, right.

01:19:46.000 | And we tend to sort of like – especially like Yuri and Eminem, we kind of look at it as like the truth, like 100% financial independent, like never need to work again.

01:19:58.000 | But in the original definition of the work, which is like decades old, apparently there's been some like attempts to trace it back.

01:20:07.000 | But I don't think – I'm not aware that anyone has actually found like the original person who said it.

01:20:12.000 | But it could be down to like just having like one or two years worth of expenses saved up, which would allow people to say, "Well, I'm not going to do this anymore.

01:20:21.000 | I'm just going to quit now."

01:20:23.000 | But I presume that I'm perfectly capable of finding a replacement given two years.

01:20:27.000 | It's just a matter of say risk tolerance and habits and so on.

01:20:34.000 | Right.

01:20:35.000 | I think actually like Jay Collins, the blogger, I think his original – that is something he originally did.

01:20:45.000 | Like he had a few years saved up and he wanted to go to Europe.

01:20:50.000 | So one day he just quit and went.

01:20:52.000 | So I mean – and I think this might be way more common than let's say like 25 or 35 or 40 years of expenses before we do anything.

01:21:03.000 | I think it is more common and the problem is that it's easy in an online world.

01:21:11.000 | Clearly if someone is listening to this, they're listening to a podcast which is distributed through the internet.

01:21:15.000 | And it's hard sometimes if people haven't had personal interactions with people in their local life, an example that they have to talk to.

01:21:23.000 | So then we tend to think there's only just the way that we read about online.

01:21:26.000 | But at some point I want to sit down and chart out various degrees of financial freedom and financial independence.

01:21:33.000 | Because although that's my definition, the attitude that you just described of knowing that I don't have to do this job.

01:21:40.000 | If you have this wide network and some marketable skills, you can deploy that attitude with zero dollars of capital in the bank.

01:21:51.000 | I was reading a book this weekend.

01:21:54.000 | I'm going to review it.

01:21:56.000 | It's called The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving.

01:21:59.000 | I love this stuff because you read – this book was written I think back in the 70s or 80s.

01:22:05.000 | And this guy is talking about how he's been a dumpster diver his entire life.

01:22:09.000 | Now you wouldn't expect necessarily some hoity-toity financial advisor to be interested in that stuff.

01:22:14.000 | But I say this guy solved the problem by being able to find a waste stream in society that was useful for him, dumpsters.

01:22:23.000 | He was able to provide an income for him.

01:22:26.000 | And I see this every week when the guys drive by in their truck to pick up the scrap metal off of the roadside.

01:22:32.000 | I see this when I go down to the dump and I find people there utilizing the free resources from the dump,

01:22:40.000 | the free topsoil and the free mulch and all of this.

01:22:42.000 | And you can go to – it's the example I would give for your skills versus buying.

01:22:48.000 | You can go to Home Depot and you can pay $3 a bag for a nice pretty red mulch to put around your flowers.

01:22:53.000 | Or my local dump, they take all of the vegetation, they chip it up, and you can drive down there and you can take a pitchfork

01:22:59.000 | and toss it in the back of your trailer or your truck or whatever you got.

01:23:02.000 | And you can go spread it around and it costs you the gas to get there and back versus $3 a bag.

01:23:07.000 | So you can always buy a solution.

01:23:09.000 | And capitalism and a market economy is based upon people saying, "I want to deliver a solution."

01:23:16.000 | I see somebody that wants something and I can meet that need.

01:23:19.000 | And that's fine.

01:23:20.000 | I made a small point of that in the book in chapter 7.

01:23:25.000 | At one point we had a thread on the forum.

01:23:29.000 | It was like, "How do you understand ERE?"

01:23:31.000 | And there was a lot of definitions and they were strangely different from mine.

01:23:37.000 | And so I believe I kind of had it totally distilled down to two principles, two fundamental principles.

01:23:46.000 | The first principle is try to eliminate undesirable effort or work.

01:23:53.000 | And the second principle is try to eliminate all kinds of pollution that is sort of like undesired waste.

01:24:00.000 | So it's very similar to permaculture in the sense of trying to close the cycles, close the resource cycles.

01:24:10.000 | In industrialized society, everything pretty much goes from producer to consumer,

01:24:17.000 | but people are somewhat alienated from the production process.

01:24:20.000 | So most people are really consumers.

01:24:22.000 | So they just look at, "What can I consume from the producers?"

01:24:26.000 | They don't really care about, "Well, as a consumer, I generate waste."

01:24:29.000 | But that usually goes to the landfill, into the garage, down the toilet.

01:24:34.000 | And closing the cycle from the waste and back to the products is not considered either.

01:24:41.000 | But those, for instance, like dumpster diving, they take someone's waste and turns it into a product.

01:24:46.000 | And then they can consume that.

01:24:48.000 | So they've closed the cycle.

01:24:50.000 | They have eliminated some work.

01:24:52.000 | They have eliminated pollution.

01:24:54.000 | So that's sort of like the way to go.

01:24:58.000 | And the more cycles you can close that way, the more efficient you get.

01:25:04.000 | Right.

01:25:05.000 | And you're stealing all -- don't steal all my thunder for when I do my book review for the show about the art and science of dumpster diving.

01:25:13.000 | But you just stole the words out of my mouth.

01:25:16.000 | You find a waste stream and you close it.

01:25:18.000 | And the example that I would use, you brought up permaculture as an example, and I think it's a good example.

01:25:22.000 | So permaculture design, I'll talk about it some other time.

01:25:25.000 | But if you look at permaculture design, the primary principles of permaculture design is simply this and how I would describe it.

01:25:34.000 | And just like ERE would have many different descriptions depending on what aspect you were talking about and who you were talking to, same thing with permaculture.

01:25:41.000 | But here's how I think about it.

01:25:42.000 | How can I design my environment to provide for all of my needs in the most efficient way possible and care for the earth, care for people, and return a surplus?

01:25:53.000 | So those would be the three ethics of permaculture design, care of the earth, care for people, and return a surplus.

01:25:58.000 | So how can I, using those design constraints in permaculture design, how can I design my environment to provide for myself?

01:26:05.000 | And so the example, the American way of getting rid of trash is to put it out by the road.

01:26:09.000 | So if I cut down branches in my yard and I haul those out to the road, then I pay taxes based upon my property value.

01:26:17.000 | Those taxes go to hire a waste company, and this waste sanitation company is going to be paid.

01:26:22.000 | This is going to be a for-profit company, so there's an entrepreneur taking his profit at the top.

01:26:27.000 | Then that entrepreneur is hiring workers to work for them, and those workers are earning wages, which are all being taxed, so they get a certain small amount going back.

01:26:36.000 | They drive a big diesel truck that's expensive to buy, but that does promote the diesel truck guy, but they drive a big diesel truck.

01:26:42.000 | The guys who are driving it are hourly workers who just want to get done with a massive load, so they can't be efficient at all in their driving of the truck.

01:26:49.000 | So they nail the gas, screech from house to house to house.

01:26:52.000 | They toss all of the yard waste in the back of it.

01:26:57.000 | They grind it all up.

01:26:58.000 | They take the plastic bags where I live, all the landscape companies come every Saturday, and they cut all the lawns, and so they bag everything up in a plastic bag.

01:27:06.000 | They toss plastic in with the good vegetation, take it down, chip it up.

01:27:11.000 | Thankfully, they make it available as mulch, so I go down there and I get it as mulch, and I can bring it back.

01:27:16.000 | Then I've got to spend time picking all the plastic out of it so that I can put the mulch down on my yard,

01:27:21.000 | or I have to go to Home Depot and buy it for $3 a bag and then pour it out of a plastic bag to pour it on my yard.

01:27:27.000 | Or I can implement some decent permaculture design, and I can say, "There's no such thing as waste. I'm not going to have waste.

01:27:35.000 | So if I've cut these trees down and I have these stumps, let me pile them up in the corner of my yard.

01:27:40.000 | Let me plant a ring of bananas around it, and let me efficiently use and create a banana circle, which will be an incredibly rich environment

01:27:46.000 | on which I can grow bananas and sweet potatoes and papayas all in exactly the same place,

01:27:51.000 | efficiently utilizing the space and providing a source of fertility and using this waste stream to feed my bananas,

01:27:58.000 | which the bananas will then go to feed this and that and the other thing and feed my children ultimately.

01:28:03.000 | You can bypass the whole stupid system just by understanding a little bit of design.

01:28:08.000 | The funny thing is that the Internet retirement police will look at you and say,

01:28:13.000 | "Hey, this guy is not spending any money. He must be living in poverty."

01:28:16.000 | Exactly. I think permaculture is one of the most useful design concepts for people to understand.

01:28:25.000 | If you understand permaculture design, you can start to think about how you can design your environment to provide things for you in the most efficient way.

01:28:34.000 | It's also kind of funny. I've tried to take ideas from a lot of different fields.

01:28:43.000 | Probably the permaculture guys are the people who are most compatible with what I say.

01:28:49.000 | They get it instantly. Probably the people who run investment blogs, they're some of the hardest people to reach.

01:28:59.000 | Ironically, also the retirement groups, they're also kind of like, "Yeah, I'm not really. This is wrong."

01:29:06.000 | There's some kind of cognitive dissonance.

01:29:09.000 | Permaculture, they're used to thinking in systems and increasing efficiency.

01:29:17.000 | It's that kind of thinking that needs to be conveyed to the individuals.

01:29:26.000 | Hopefully, by conveying it to individuals, the system will also start thinking in these patterns.

01:29:34.000 | Frankly, if you look at management science, systems theory is still kind of like this minor sideshow.

01:29:44.000 | People tend to look at specific points. They're still sort of in specialization mode.

01:29:51.000 | Let's just look at this isolated part of the system and see what we can do with that without considering what kind of further effects does it have as it interacts with the world.

01:30:01.000 | What kind of side effects does that have?

01:30:04.000 | People really need to start considering the side effects of practically everything they do.

01:30:09.000 | The more side effects they can consider, the more undesirable loops they can close off and turn waste into a new resource.

01:30:21.000 | That is what drives efficiency way higher than the old-fashioned way of thinking in terms of earning money, spending money, consumption, consumption.

01:30:35.000 | I agree with you. I find it challenging to break through sometimes when people are in the personal finance space.

01:30:47.000 | I'll give you an example. By the way, you don't have to comment a bit on this so you can keep your mouth shut.

01:30:53.000 | I'll give you an example. I look at something like the efficient market hypothesis.

01:30:57.000 | If you understand the efficient market hypothesis theory in investing, the efficient market hypothesis leads you to the most popular number one investment strategy that exists in the financial world called index funds.

01:31:11.000 | I don't have any problem with that and I don't want to get into a discussion on it today.

01:31:15.000 | However, taking the efficient market hypothesis to extremes leads you to say, "The world is efficient."

01:31:23.000 | The world is so inefficient it's laughable. The areas of opportunity come from exploiting inefficiencies.

01:31:31.000 | All advancement and progress comes from exploiting inefficiencies.

01:31:35.000 | You may have a theory about a well-developed capital market and whether it's efficient as far as setting the prices, but that doesn't mean that your capital market is efficient.

01:31:44.000 | The investment choice should not come down to how much money can I put into my Roth IRA, although there's nothing wrong with that conversation.

01:31:52.000 | The investment choice should come down to what are the skills and the assets that I have, both financial and non-financial.

01:31:58.000 | With the financial assets, what would be the most productive way of investing those financial assets in a way that will get me further towards my goals?

01:32:07.000 | That may be going to school, whether formal or not. That may be buying a bike so I can get to the library.

01:32:13.000 | That may be going to a conference in my field. That may be putting insulation in my attic so my cooling bill is less or my heating bill is less.

01:32:21.000 | That may be planting a garden and learning skills and taking a permaculture design course so that I can design my property to produce surplus for me.

01:32:28.000 | That may be buying a mutual fund. That may be exercising skill and choosing companies that I feel have prospects because I have some knowledge of it.

01:32:36.000 | There's a massive world out there, but we can't give people prescriptive -- if you just give people prescriptive solutions and say, "This is what you should do,"

01:32:46.000 | as soon as they get to the end of that, A, they may not get it, but as soon as they get to the end of that, they're going to say, "Well, what do I do now?"

01:32:52.000 | Rather, the value is not in saying, "Here's what you should do," but in teaching people how to think.

01:32:57.000 | My whole show is not, "Let me tell you what you should do." It's, "Let me tell you how to think like a financial planner so you can look at your situation

01:33:05.000 | and understand the unique scenario you have of how to do it." You could use your martial arts example.

01:33:09.000 | You could use a driving example. You could use a permaculture example.

01:33:13.000 | If you tell someone a banana circle, and if you understand what that is -- and I won't go into it right now -- but if you say to someone, "Look, you can create a banana circle,"

01:33:22.000 | then they say, "Well, I just got to go create banana circles." No, no, no, no, no, no. Stop.

01:33:26.000 | Understand why a banana circle works and the principles that are behind it.

01:33:30.000 | Now you can deploy those principles in a completely separate field because you'll spot a little section of your land and say, "Ah, I know what I can do in that place in my land."

01:33:38.000 | Yes, it's kind of like the difference between "Teach how to fish" versus "Give a fish."

01:33:43.000 | I actually got some complaints and some bad reviews on my book on that.

01:33:47.000 | It's like, "It doesn't contain a plan. It doesn't tell me what to do."

01:33:51.000 | I'm like, "Well, if I give you a plan, it's going to be good for 10 years and then something is going to change."

01:33:59.000 | If you don't understand how to plan, you can't change. You're stuck there.

01:34:08.000 | It's better to learn how to plan. If I can teach you how to plan, then I pretty much plan for you for a lifetime.

01:34:15.000 | It's also kind of amazing in that sense with the investment stuff in terms of looking for efficiency and really understand what investing actually means.

01:34:24.000 | It's very common for people to say, "I've worked very hard for all the money I got. I've worked for 10 years, 5 years, 20 years, 25 years.

01:34:35.000 | I've spent 25 years of effort. That's like 2,000 hours a year saved. 25 years is like 50,000 hours."

01:34:45.000 | Then they come and say, "What should I invest in? I don't want to spend more than 5 hours educating myself on how to convert all this effort."

01:34:58.000 | It's 50,000 years versus 5 hours. People don't want to be bothered. I just find that very strange.

01:35:06.000 | Even worse, coming from formerly in that professional side of the market, one of my personal frustrations being out there as a blogger,

01:35:17.000 | you may understand, one of my personal frustrations was this idea that all investment advisors are out is to screw you and screw you out of your money.

01:35:26.000 | Hang on a second. My favorite clients always have been my most knowledgeable clients.

01:35:32.000 | The easiest clients to work with are the ones that know the most because then you can clearly express your value proposition.

01:35:38.000 | You can clearly say, "Here's what I do and here's what I don't do."

01:35:42.000 | If you value this, then you should do this. The clients that would understand what you do and understand, "Okay, that makes sense to me,"

01:35:50.000 | they're dream clients. I could earn my money and earn my fees and we'd have a beautiful relationship.

01:35:56.000 | But if I had a client who wasn't comfortable with the language, they weren't educated, they weren't financially literate,

01:36:02.000 | then they would say, "Well, you're going to do this." "No, I can't do that." "Well, you're going to promise that."

01:36:06.000 | "No, I can't promise you that I'm going to beat the market. That's not what I do."

01:36:10.000 | It was a very, very difficult relationship to have.

01:36:15.000 | I feel like the value is if we can bring education and help enhance people's ability to understand the words and understand the terms,

01:36:23.000 | then the whole conversation can be lifted.

01:36:26.000 | That even goes as far as hiring an electrician or a plumber.

01:36:31.000 | Even if you don't want to learn all the skills, just knowing the rudimentary basics, you can make better hiring decisions.

01:36:38.000 | Again, people don't want to do that. "I just want to call someone, fix my problems, quote a price like $800,"

01:36:47.000 | which comes down to a $3 part, half an hour of effort, and then $600 worth of bullshit or something,

01:36:56.000 | confidence that I'm actually getting my money's worth.

01:37:00.000 | But if people would know these kind of things, that's valuable.

01:37:06.000 | That's just the linear approach to things, back to learning a bunch of tips and tricks, just being slightly more educated in these things.

01:37:15.000 | Once you start putting them together, you might – I can't really think of the good –

01:37:24.000 | for instance, in permaculture, they have these things called gills, which you probably know as plants that go well together.

01:37:32.000 | In personal finance, you can also think of gills, which are kind of like plants – not plants – plants that go well together.

01:37:39.000 | One of the most popular ones is kind of like the "sell your big house, buy a smaller house, make sure it's closer to where you shop and work,

01:37:47.000 | and this way you can eliminate your car."

01:37:49.000 | So plant your little house next to your work. That way, you don't have to waste money on the car.

01:37:54.000 | So that's like one gill.

01:37:56.000 | That comes from three independent considerations, which is housing, transportation, and services or income.

01:38:08.000 | Another gill is sort of like the "get rid of your car again, start getting around by foot, by bicycle, and learn how to cook.

01:38:18.000 | This way you become more healthy, you eat better, and you get transported around."

01:38:23.000 | So these three things also go together, and just by doing that, we'll avoid two-thirds of all statistical health issues.

01:38:33.000 | Jacob, that just turned a lightbulb on for me.

01:38:38.000 | I had never thought about the application of the concept of gills to personal finance, but that makes all the sense in the world.

01:38:44.000 | But because you know permaculture, you immediately understood what I said.

01:38:47.000 | I do. And let me explain, just in case someone's not familiar with permaculture.

01:38:52.000 | Let me give my explanation of a gill.

01:38:54.000 | A gill is like – you already said it, but I want to just give a couple of examples so people can understand.

01:39:00.000 | The idea from permaculture of a gill is a series of species of plants or a series of elements that seem to work well together,

01:39:09.000 | that generally will produce good results.

01:39:11.000 | This could be something very specific and prescriptive.

01:39:14.000 | So as an example, although it doesn't really work as well as many people think,

01:39:18.000 | the best example that's the most overused is the concept of what they call the "three sisters garden."

01:39:25.000 | And it's a good example of that. The Indians in the United States, the aboriginal Americans that were here before the pilgrims came over,

01:39:32.000 | they used what they called the "three sisters garden."

01:39:35.000 | And so what that would be is a gill of a corn plant, a bean plant, and a squash plant.

01:39:40.000 | And the idea is you plant corn in the ground.

01:39:42.000 | Corn has a vertical stalk that grows vertically, and you follow it with beans and with squash.

01:39:48.000 | And then as the corn plant is established and grows, the bean plants will grow up the corn plant,

01:39:55.000 | and the squash will spread out and become a ground cover to cover the ground.

01:39:58.000 | And so you're using, instead of our current way of approaching life,

01:40:02.000 | where you have a large corn field and you drive your combine through,

01:40:05.000 | because you have the land and you can just do that and that's more efficient,

01:40:08.000 | then you're using the same space and you're producing three crops.

01:40:11.000 | And then the interactions among them are important.

01:40:14.000 | So the bean plant fixes nitrogen in the soil, which helps the corn plant, which is a heavy nutrient hog.

01:40:23.000 | And then the squash plant gives a ground cover to the ground and protects and keeps the soil moist

01:40:27.000 | and performs a mulching function and produces a crop.

01:40:30.000 | And so that would be on a plant-specific basis, or it could be applied on a larger basis.

01:40:35.000 | So one gill, for example, if you're into organic agriculture, you'll see Joel Salatin.

01:40:40.000 | Joel Salatin has a guild of cows and chickens together, and I'm using the word loosely,

01:40:45.000 | but you pasture your cows through, you move them in a rotational cropping system,

01:40:49.000 | you follow them with chickens behind, the chickens scratch up the cow manure,

01:40:52.000 | the cows mow the grass for the chickens so the chickens can actually do that,

01:40:55.000 | the chickens scratch up the cow manure and eat all the bugs that are growing in the cow manure,

01:40:59.000 | and so they're fed, and then their scratching function distributes the manure through the pasture.

01:41:07.000 | And so you have this beautiful system that works perfectly because it's designed.

01:41:11.000 | You're essentially closing off all the loops, water, nitrogen, and you're making the system more efficient.

01:41:17.000 | So that concept of guilds applied to financial planning solves, that's a light bulb for me,

01:41:21.000 | because you're exactly right.

01:41:23.000 | One guild would be move close to your job and learn and dispense with, and move close to your job,

01:41:29.000 | so that allows you to downsize the number of cars in your house or to sell your car,

01:41:33.000 | to get rid of all your cars, that allows you to get more physical exercise, saves you money,

01:41:37.000 | allows you to become more financially independent more quickly.

01:41:40.000 | However, another guild might be figure out a job that you love and figure out how to be so good at it

01:41:47.000 | that you can earn a massive amount of money, so that even though you're fairly inefficient with your spending,

01:41:52.000 | you've built great wealth.

01:41:54.000 | I can tell when you pull out of work.

01:41:56.000 | Right, right, right.

01:41:57.000 | Or become this world-class entrepreneur, and when you're turning around and making millions and millions of dollars,

01:42:02.000 | you can become a multi-millionaire or a multi-billionaire,

01:42:06.000 | and you're not really so worried about the expense side.

01:42:09.000 | I would warn about the passionate approach a little bit, though.

01:42:14.000 | I used to be a passionate worker myself.

01:42:19.000 | You still there?

01:42:20.000 | Yes, I am.

01:42:21.000 | Okay, sometimes the noise just cuts out.

01:42:24.000 | I remember when I was 28 doing neutron star physics, and I was commenting to myself and everybody,

01:42:31.000 | and you were like, "This stuff is awesome."

01:42:33.000 | Even if I wasn't getting paid, I'd still do it.

01:42:36.000 | I imagine doing this until I'm 85, until I can't do it anymore.

01:42:40.000 | I would come in on weekends and Sundays, just checking to see if there was some kind of new thing coming out of the computer.

01:42:50.000 | I see there's a lot of people coming, I would say, straight out of college, getting their first awesome job,

01:42:57.000 | and not being able to imagine that they might ever grow tired of it.

01:43:03.000 | But if you then ask them 10 years later, there's definitely quite a fall off.

01:43:15.000 | Having saved money is a backup plan, but losing passion, passion doesn't have a backup plan.

01:43:22.000 | It's very hard to get repassionate about something, or having the skills to immediately become passionate about something else.

01:43:29.000 | It's kind of like a risky proposition.

01:43:32.000 | It's especially risky in what I like to call "rock star professions."

01:43:37.000 | You can see whether you're in a rock star profession by essentially walking into an office and look at the age distribution of people there.

01:43:47.000 | If you see a lot of young people, but you see maybe a few 30 years old, you see maybe 10% 30 year olds,

01:43:54.000 | maybe someone who's 40, but there's practically no 50, 60 year olds, other than maybe as an executive or a secretary or something.

01:44:06.000 | But none in the promotional line, then you're probably in a rock star business.

01:44:12.000 | Academia is that way.

01:44:14.000 | Each professor tends to train 10 successors, and obviously only one of them can replace that professor.

01:44:21.000 | That's kind of where the passion approach is very dangerous.

01:44:28.000 | If you're passionate about plumbing or driving a truck or something, something that scales where your effort translates into a product one to one,

01:44:45.000 | then the passionate approach can work.

01:44:48.000 | If you're in a rock star profession, like being an author where the number one author sells 1,000 times more than the number 10 author,

01:44:59.000 | who again sells 1,000 times more than the number 20 author or the number 100 author,

01:45:04.000 | or software engineering where the most productive guy is perhaps 100 times as productive as the least productive guy,

01:45:13.000 | then if there's this kind of scaling, passion is dangerous.

01:45:20.000 | Right. I want your feedback on my concepts. Let's apply permaculture concepts to this again.

01:45:28.000 | If we said we've got this really great guild, but we're not going to consider what the water transfer across our property is like,

01:45:36.000 | we're not going to consider the nutrient cycles, we're not going to consider the shade requirements or the sun requirements,

01:45:42.000 | we're not going to consider the solar aspect, then no matter how great this guild of plants that we've put together is,

01:45:51.000 | when they're in an ideal environment, if we haven't considered these larger infrastructure needs in our plan, then the whole thing falls apart.

01:45:59.000 | Which also drives home the necessity of understanding why the strategy is what it is, not just what it is.

01:46:09.000 | Right. Here's what I see between financial planning and I've worked hard, I still struggle with,

01:46:15.000 | I'm trying to write something to introduce the show with as far as a couple of lines of here's what the Radical Personal Finance podcast is about.

01:46:22.000 | I'm struggling with it because I'm struggling to describe it, but the closest I've gotten is essentially to bridge the gap

01:46:29.000 | between the idealistic visions and goals and dreams and the practical realities of today.

01:46:35.000 | That's the closest I've gotten so far and what I'm trying to express is that there's no,

01:46:41.000 | I don't see any reason not to pursue doing something that you enjoy.

01:46:45.000 | All else considered equal, no matter whether it's a job that you're passionate about or not,

01:46:50.000 | if you're facing the decision, I could be equally qualified as a plumber or I could equally be qualified as an electrician.

01:46:58.000 | Let's assume that you're not that passionate about them.

01:47:01.000 | Then which one, you're going to consider certain effects, certain earning abilities, certain lifestyle characteristics,

01:47:06.000 | but at the end of the day it's a valid consideration to consider,

01:47:09.000 | I think I would enjoy electrical work more than plumbing work and to choose to do something we enjoy.

01:47:15.000 | All of us do that and so that's a valid consideration.

01:47:19.000 | However, to say to somebody which is sold in some circumstances, do what you're passionate about.

01:47:25.000 | So don't worry about your expenses, don't worry about your tax planning, don't worry about your income,

01:47:30.000 | just take a flying leap off into the dark, that does nothing for you.

01:47:34.000 | But if you understand and apply the financial laws that do exist in good planning,

01:47:41.000 | you can still pursue the passion and I'll give you an example.

01:47:44.000 | Let's say that somebody wants to start a company.

01:47:46.000 | I read a company, I think it may have been a Dutch entrepreneur or he was in Scandinavia somewhere

01:47:51.000 | and he wanted to start an internet company but he had no money

01:47:54.000 | and he was really a passionate coder and he wanted to do it.

01:47:57.000 | So what he chose to do was he chose to move out into public land on a tent

01:48:01.000 | because his coding didn't require an active internet connection.

01:48:04.000 | And so he bought a tent and he moved out on public land and he was able to stretch

01:48:08.000 | and he lived in a tent, it was in Scandinavia in a nice climate during the summertime

01:48:11.000 | and he lived in a tent for a period of months so that he could code his computer, his program.

01:48:19.000 | And it wound up being successful and he was able to transform his life.

01:48:22.000 | So he applied the financial planning realities of I have limited resources,

01:48:27.000 | I need to be efficient with those resources, I need to spend less than I make,

01:48:30.000 | it would be foolish of me to go deeply into debt to chase a passion that may or may not work out.

01:48:35.000 | But he still was able to pursue the thing that he wanted to do by applying that strategy.

01:48:41.000 | That was a mouthful but I see them as being able to be integrated if you fully understand both of them

01:48:47.000 | and don't just turn a blind eye to one or the other.

01:48:49.000 | Yeah, it's sort of like be realistic not idealistic.

01:48:52.000 | Right.

01:48:53.000 | Make a plan.

01:48:54.000 | Yeah.

01:48:55.000 | I think, I mean it's my experience in the US, people tend to be like a lot more realistic

01:49:00.000 | than like where I got my education where we were always told just go study whatever you're most interested in.

01:49:07.000 | And I later found out that the reason they tell you that is that the universities are paid by the state

01:49:13.000 | according to the number of people they graduate.

01:49:16.000 | And obviously if the students are interested in what they're studying, the likelihood of someone,

01:49:21.000 | I mean they wouldn't get anything until the student had like a piece of paper with a degree on it.

01:49:27.000 | If they flunked out, like zero pay.

01:49:32.000 | And so that's like a huge conflict of interest right there.

01:49:35.000 | And as a consequence of that, like a lot of people have gotten essentially sold down the river

01:49:42.000 | ending up with like very useless degrees.

01:49:46.000 | And I think this whole passion spiel kind of does a little bit the same over here.

01:49:50.000 | It does, yeah.

01:49:51.000 | With people going into debt, like private universities getting a degree in like clockmaking or whatever,

01:49:59.000 | underwater basket weaving.

01:50:02.000 | And they cannot possibly make it back.

01:50:06.000 | And some very simple like financial considerations should have shown that.

01:50:11.000 | Like what is the person with such a degree, what are their like prospects and so on.

01:50:16.000 | So like my suggestions have always been okay.

01:50:19.000 | So first thing you do is first you kind of like have to -- it's kind of like an iterative process.

01:50:24.000 | First you write a list of what am I interested in like perhaps working at.

01:50:31.000 | And then you go through that list with an eye for okay, which of these make money?

01:50:37.000 | Like which of these have like good prospects is probably a better way of putting it.

01:50:41.000 | They don't necessarily have to make a lot of money, but they have to at least be able to like provide or be useful.

01:50:47.000 | So they're not a waste of time.

01:50:49.000 | So now you have like your derived list.

01:50:51.000 | Now you go back to that list.

01:50:53.000 | Okay, now the list is realistic.

01:50:56.000 | And then you pick out of that one instead of the first one, which just had like the -- I mean I guess all this is obvious.

01:51:03.000 | But I mean it's obvious in retrospect.

01:51:06.000 | Exactly.

01:51:07.000 | But it's not obvious when you're like 17 or 19 year old and trying to like pick your major from like a huge list of like opportunities.

01:51:15.000 | And everybody tells you just do what you're passionate about.

01:51:18.000 | Right.

01:51:19.000 | I'll lend some credence to your argument and then I actually want to pivot the conversation a little bit.

01:51:27.000 | But I'll use your earlier example to give you -- to show how I see it as very applicable to every area including education.

01:51:35.000 | I was struck this weekend.

01:51:37.000 | I was listening to a new podcast.

01:51:39.000 | I try to avoid financial podcasts because I don't want to repeat something that someone else is doing.

01:51:43.000 | So I look for --

01:51:44.000 | Echo chamber.

01:51:45.000 | Yeah, exactly.

01:51:46.000 | Because I remember what I hear and what I learn and I'm really concerned if I forget to cite somebody and I say, "Well, such and such, this person."

01:51:54.000 | And I don't want to steal somebody's idea and not give credit.

01:51:58.000 | There was a question on one of the forum lists like what other personal finance blogs or blogs in any case do I actually regularly read?

01:52:07.000 | And I'm pretty much close to none whatsoever is the answer.

01:52:10.000 | Good.

01:52:11.000 | So, yeah, and I understand that.

01:52:14.000 | And what I was going to do is I know we're going long but I enjoy the conversation.

01:52:19.000 | If you've got time, I want to do a good service to those forum participants and kind of go rapid fire through a couple of their questions and let you just answer in a couple sentences or as long as you want.

01:52:30.000 | But I want to -- the point about education.

01:52:33.000 | So I try to avoid financial -- I try to avoid financial podcasts especially because I don't want to steal anything that someone else is doing.

01:52:40.000 | I want all of us to contribute to the conversation in a positive way.

01:52:43.000 | And so I was listening and I found -- I heard on a different show, I heard a reference to something called the Thomas Jefferson podcast.

01:52:51.000 | And so I went and checked this out.

01:52:53.000 | And I found -- I was stunned by how great this show is.

01:52:57.000 | And this is -- the show is done by a -- it's distributed on NPR as well as on a podcast.

01:53:03.000 | And the show is done by a professor who is an extremely learned humanities scholar.

01:53:08.000 | And he's an expert on Thomas Jefferson.

01:53:10.000 | And so in the first part of the show, the entire show, and he's up to -- they're almost at 100 episodes, something like that, is about Thomas Jefferson only.

01:53:17.000 | And so they were talking about Thomas Jefferson's education.

01:53:20.000 | And in our country, we view something -- education as something that we buy.

01:53:26.000 | So as a financial planner in the past, most of the time when people would ask me, I'm concerned about education, what they mean is I'm concerned about paying for my kid's education.

01:53:36.000 | So I don't know how I'm going to pay for this private school, if it's primary or secondary school.

01:53:41.000 | I don't understand how I'm going to pay for college because the cost of college is increasing at 7% per year.

01:53:46.000 | And so we've -- and I sit down and say, well, let's talk about it.

01:53:49.000 | And the answer is that nobody can afford to save enough for their kid's college education, period.

01:53:54.000 | I've never seen the client who's done it.

01:53:55.000 | The people who pay for college are the ones -- are the people who are rich and they just usually pay out of cash flow, although we still can apply some financial planning techniques.

01:54:03.000 | So if anyone wants to know the financial planning techniques, there's the short answer.

01:54:06.000 | But we've used education as something we buy rather than as a skill we learn.

01:54:12.000 | And so I was struck in listening to Thomas Jefferson, I learned that Thomas Jefferson, he went to college when he was 16 years old.

01:54:19.000 | He never had any formal schooling before that that the professor referenced.

01:54:24.000 | He had the informal schooling of the day.

01:54:27.000 | But his father had a pretty sizable library for the time of about 40 books and he would read all those books and he would borrow and he would work in the community and read those books.

01:54:35.000 | He went to college at the College of William and Mary at the age of 16.

01:54:38.000 | He spent either five or seven years -- I'm getting these confused because I only heard it once.

01:54:44.000 | But he spent I think it was -- he was seven years in college.

01:54:48.000 | But the entire time he was in college, he read for 15 to 17 hours every single day.

01:54:55.000 | He read for 15 to 17 hours a day.

01:54:58.000 | And then he engaged with topics and not just reading loose books.

01:55:03.000 | He was reading all of the literature of the Western civilization basically.

01:55:07.000 | He was reading in English, in Latin, in Greek.

01:55:10.000 | He was reading the literature of the Western civilization that has contributed to the current world that we live in.

01:55:17.000 | Then he went and he apprenticed as a law clerk.

01:55:20.000 | He went into the field of law and he spent another -- I think it was maybe five years in college and then seven years as an apprentice to this law clerk.

01:55:26.000 | And he continued reading for 15 to 17 hours a day.

01:55:29.000 | And I was just struck by here's this man who's made probably in many ways greater contributions to the American society than any other of this country's forefathers.

01:55:39.000 | And his education was something that he did.

01:55:44.000 | But it was hard work.

01:55:45.000 | It wasn't something that he bought.

01:55:47.000 | And today, information is free.

01:55:49.000 | It's completely free.

01:55:50.000 | You could go to the library and you could read for 15 to 17 hours a day for free.

01:55:55.000 | But yet nobody thinks about getting the education.

01:55:57.000 | We think about buying the education by buying the college degree.

01:56:01.000 | So there's my rant for the day.

01:56:03.000 | But you're right.

01:56:04.000 | You can either gain the skill or you can buy the solution.

01:56:07.000 | You can buy the degree and it may or may not be useful for you or you can apply yourself and learn the knowledge.

01:56:14.000 | And I mean so I was just doing some quick mental calculations there.

01:56:19.000 | Like seven years of like 15 hours a day or 16 hours a day amounts to something like 25,000 to 30,000 hours.

01:56:27.000 | Exactly.

01:56:28.000 | So if you go like with the expertise rules, that's becoming an expert in like three different fields.

01:56:35.000 | I'm probably like a minor expert in like 30 different fields.

01:56:39.000 | And so I mean I've read a ton as well and I know people who have also read a ton.

01:56:47.000 | You know like one of my friends was at one point keeping track with about 800 RSS feeds.

01:56:53.000 | Wow.

01:56:54.000 | And one of the things that sort of noticed is that sort of like the underlying – have you heard of Charlie Munger's – Charles Munger's, Le Berkshire Hathaway guy's partners' lattice work?

01:57:08.000 | His lattice work or his lettuce work?

01:57:10.000 | Lattice.

01:57:11.000 | No, I'm not familiar with that.

01:57:13.000 | So the idea is that basically all human understanding can be summarized in about 100 different like metaphors or models or ways of thinking.

01:57:24.000 | Yes. Okay.

01:57:26.000 | And I found that to be true.

01:57:29.000 | That there's like a limited amount of ways to understand pretty much everything you can possibly read or experience.

01:57:39.000 | And once you sort of like have a good grasp of most of these, then it becomes extremely easy to learn new things.

01:57:48.000 | If you already for instance have a good grasp of like physics for instance, you can get a grasp of like finance and economics pretty quickly, much, much more quickly than if you didn't.

01:58:01.000 | If you already understand how to speak French as a foreign language, it might not be that hard to pick up say Spanish.

01:58:07.000 | If you know how to say do plumbing, doing electric work is not hard.

01:58:15.000 | If you know how to do woodworking with hand tools, constructing like random stuff out of like plastic, it becomes easy.

01:58:27.000 | And so there's this sort of like exponential benefit to this kind of education of just reading and reading and maybe not just reading because I mean reading also sort of like follows an S curve in the sense that there's at one point sort of like a diminishing point of returns.

01:58:42.000 | I mean there's also some questions of what kind of books have I read lately.

01:58:46.000 | And I would say I actually don't read that much anymore either because one thing I found and others I know who read a lot have found is that at one point you find yourself, you read through an entire like non-fiction book.

01:58:59.000 | You know like 300 pages bestseller, et cetera.

01:59:02.000 | You find maybe like two sentences that okay, this is an interesting idea.

01:59:05.000 | I'll just add it.

01:59:06.000 | The rest of the time is like a waste of time.

01:59:08.000 | Right.

01:59:10.000 | So instead I kind of started at taking like technical skills, you know like how do I fix a faucet or something.

01:59:16.000 | So that's kind of like what I'm currently interested in.

01:59:19.000 | Yeah, I've had that same experience that you just said with I mean you reach a point where things just make sense to you.

01:59:28.000 | Yeah.

01:59:29.000 | I mean I learned that with financial planning and I was always interested in personal finance.

01:59:36.000 | And so I would study the tactics and the techniques and I would tell my friends, you know, here's what you should do, here's what you should buy.

01:59:43.000 | And then I learned kind of through doing financial planning I started to learn some other things.

01:59:48.000 | And then now when I talk with someone it's kind of interesting right at the end before I closed my financial planning practice when I would talk with someone I had this vivid, there's this lunch that's vivid for me.

01:59:59.000 | And the guy that called me up, we sat down for lunch and I'll make the story very short.

02:00:05.000 | We sat down for lunch and he was like I think I need to do this XYZ thing because I'm way behind for retirement and this, this, this, this, this, this, this.

02:00:13.000 | And just the whole picture just kind of clicked in my head and I could just, this is going to sound weird, but it felt like art.

02:00:21.000 | Like I understood, I've never been able to express myself visually, creatively speaking with, with, with paint or with drawing or things like that.

02:00:28.000 | I've always struggled with that.

02:00:29.000 | But I had the feeling that I think some people have with those visual expressions.

02:00:34.000 | I had the feeling of just seeing the picture in my head and just seeing the plan.

02:00:38.000 | And it was part technic, it was part technical tax plan and it was part career plan and it was part motivation plan and it was part, like, but I said, but he walked out.

02:00:49.000 | And I shared the plan in about like 10 minutes and he walked out and his jaw dropped and he said, you know, when I came in for lunch, I was, this is what I was feeling.

02:00:58.000 | And then when he left, you know, he says, wow, you're exactly right.

02:01:02.000 | And I can see how in a very short period of time this could be achieved.

02:01:06.000 | And now it still has to be implemented.

02:01:08.000 | Just having a good plan, you know, your book could set someone financially free in five years.

02:01:13.000 | But just having the book and doing the book and doing the, implementing it, two different things.

02:01:18.000 | But you reach that point of mastery where it just kind of, you see things and then you get, you kind of get done with the subject over, over after a while and you're ready to move on to something completely unrelated because it gets really boring.

02:01:29.000 | And you read through and I go down to the bookstore and I just say, let me look through the top 10 personal finance books.

02:01:34.000 | And I don't wish to be cruel because I love that every author is contributing.

02:01:39.000 | But for me at this stage, I'm like, boring, boring, boring, boring, done, done, got it, get it.

02:01:44.000 | Yeah, OK, that's this angle.

02:01:45.000 | That's this angle. Fine.

02:01:46.000 | That works. That works.

02:01:47.000 | That doesn't mean I've achieved.

02:01:48.000 | I haven't.

02:01:49.000 | I haven't arrived.

02:01:50.000 | But I don't need to read that anymore.

02:01:52.000 | I need to go and read permaculture design and think about how on earth, you know, how on earth can I figure out how to plant my trees in such a way that I can shade my house from the sun so my air conditioner is not running constantly during the summertime.

02:02:06.000 | It's, I mean, it's, it's, it's on a similar level.

02:02:10.000 | It's like learning the multiplication table, right?

02:02:14.000 | You go, I mean, that's, I mean, what, what some of these insights you talk about is a little bit like what I understand enlightenment to be like an enlightenment moment where you just feel everything sort of like fit into place and do exactly the right thing.

02:02:28.000 | I mean, it doesn't have to be like intellectual.

02:02:30.000 | I mean, you can just like experience it with like if you do like a particularly good run with a hockey puck, you know, where you're just in the flow, the Western interpretation of this is not enlightenment, it's flow, but that's exactly what, what, what you're looking for.

02:02:45.000 | I'm kind of, I'm very curious about this, this, this kind of like mental stage one can, one can reach. I mean, I read a lot about it and I like, well, there's this kind of Zen Buddhist saying of like before enlightenment you chop wood and carry water and after enlightenment you chop wood and carry water.

02:03:04.000 | It's, but what's interesting there is like the process in between, you know, where, where like Zen Buddhist monks spend, you know, like many years trying to meditate their way out of their previous conceptions.

02:03:17.000 | And so like a lot of like effort goes in, into like understanding the new way, but can't.

02:03:26.000 | But once you've seen the new way, then the entire process of like getting to the new way becomes sort of like irrelevant. It's not really very interesting anymore, at least not to most people.

02:03:37.000 | I mean, if you want to become a teacher, for instance, then it could remain interesting. And I think it seems to happen fairly commonly, especially like, I mean, you can see it like in personal finance blogging people like that.

02:03:51.000 | They're like these, these kind of like blogging rules. That's like the 90 day rule, which is that most people have no more than 90 unique ideas.

02:04:00.000 | So once people have made like 90 blog posts, it's like, okay, now what do I do? Now a few, few kind of move beyond that and they can keep like saying things.

02:04:10.000 | Then there's another barrier, which is like the two year rule. After two years, you know, they're kind of like running dry again. I've been saying the same thing over and over again.

02:04:18.000 | There's a five year rule too. And so I know very few people who have lasted like more than five, five years, unless say you want to sort of become the teacher rather than sort of like the student teacher who kind of learns as they go along and write about stuff.

02:04:35.000 | Right. That's why I'm glad you retired because you, I mean, from, from the blog, because you said, I read somewhere, it may have been in your book or maybe it was one of your posts. You said, I don't have anything more to add to the conversation. Here's my book on the subject. I'm done. And I hereby pass the torch. And that's how it should be. Right?

02:04:57.000 | I mean, it also like makes room for others to come. I mean, that's like really, I mean, you're almost, I mean, what one of, one of the main things I observed was that I was, I would think I had gotten like a great new idea. So I write down a blog post and then I press publish and then I had this like really annoying plug plug in called like similar posts or something, which would find three posts that are like similar in content.

02:05:22.000 | And I read those posts and I'm like, oh no, this was so much better. I was much, much better at expressing this like two or three years ago when, when these were first written. So after, you know, like experience this practically every time I wrote a new blog post, it was kind of like you have to sort of like have sufficient like self-acknowledgement and knowledge to be able to say, okay, I'm done. You know, I have, I'm only hurting myself here if I keep, keep going down this path.

02:05:49.000 | Right.

02:05:51.000 | And I think that's great. And I think that, that I think that funny blogging, financial blogging for money is not a sustainable proposition. I think financial, not that you can't, I don't think not that you can't make money on it. I think there's a lot of people that are doing fine, but that is not a way to get rich.

02:06:19.000 | It should be a way to contribute and to learn. And I think it will benefit the blogger more than it will benefit, it should benefit the blogger. I read, I read a book or I read, I heard an interview with William Bernstein.

02:06:31.000 | Or no, no, not William Bernstein, the guy who wrote the book. I don't remember. I heard a book with, it was a book, it was either, it wasn't Stocks for the Long Run. It was another book that was a similar, a similar example. It may have been Stocks for the Long Run. It may have been William Bernstein. I'm blanking.

02:06:49.000 | But his point was somebody was asking him, the interviewer was asking him about what his next project was. And he talked about his book and he says, you know, I use books as a way of learning about things that I'm interested in. And it was in a completely different field. And he'd written four or five, six books.

02:07:06.000 | This was the guy, and again, it may have been Bernstein. It was a guy who's a physician and he's a physician and then he wrote these books on investing. And he says, I write books and that just gives me a structure for the research that I'm doing on something that I'm interested in.

02:07:22.000 | So it allows me to guide my interests. And then I figure I might as well write a book summarizing everything I've learned about it so that I have something to refer back to in the future of all the things I learned about these things I'm interested in.

02:07:32.000 | That's how it should be. I'm interested in something. So if it's finance, that's why I love, I'm going to FinCon this year, which is a conference of financial bloggers. And I'm excited about meeting financial bloggers because I love meeting people who are saying, I'm serious about my money. I'm going to take this on. I'm going to write a debt blog. I'm going to write an investing blog. I'm going to write this certain thing.

02:07:53.000 | And how exciting is that? Because what better way is there to learn about something than learning about it and writing about it?

02:08:01.000 | I wrote my book pretty much concurrently with the blog. I started the project probably six months after I started the blog. I got contacted by an editor from one of the big publishing houses.

02:08:18.000 | I said, "You should write a book. I would be very interested in trying to promote this for the company." I was really flat. So I said, "Sure, I'll start writing a book, but I'm not going to send the proposal, etc. I'm going to write this and I'm going to finish it and then I'm going to give you a finished copy."

02:08:38.000 | That was a lot of effort trying to rehash the things I already knew intuitively, put structure onto it. And given my academic background, the book ended up looking a lot like a textbook.

02:08:55.000 | I have the Kindle version. It's less intimidating.

02:08:59.000 | Yeah, yeah. There's just no section numbers, like in sub-sub-sub-section numbers.

02:09:05.000 | I've got a section open here. It is kind of funny. I have to chuckle at the academic language, which the question I'm going next and then we'll kind of get to wrapping up here.

02:09:14.000 | I was reading here, "Storing also avoids having to engage in the proverbial scramble for milk, eggs, and bread whenever the weather forecast is unfavorable."

02:09:23.000 | And I chuckled and I said, "You academic, you."

02:09:26.000 | I have one question. I alluded to this earlier. This is my personal question, which I have been itching to ask you and I'm interested in your response.

02:09:34.000 | And then if you've got a few minutes, I want to run through these rapid fire through the questions from the forums and see if there's anything we haven't covered and let you just give a couple sentence responses.

02:09:44.000 | You say in your book, "Budget $80 a month per person for food and only shop once a week, keeping track of food costs with a notebook about paying in cash.

02:09:53.000 | As novices, you may find it challenging to spread the budget equity over the month, blah, blah, blah."

02:09:57.000 | Okay. "Eighty bucks a month per person per month."

02:10:01.000 | "My wife and I, we consider ourselves pretty skilled. We can't seem to crack 400."

02:10:07.000 | Are you still doing this or is this a lie in your book or did you actually figure out how to spend 80 bucks a month per person?

02:10:15.000 | Yeah, I actually figured out 80 bucks per person, but then I stopped cooking and my wife took over.

02:10:20.000 | So now we spend about 200 to 250.

02:10:23.000 | Per person or for the two of you?

02:10:24.000 | Total. That includes the dog, too, and household stuff.

02:10:28.000 | So you're still half of what I'm asking.

02:10:30.000 | How do you do it and eat any kind of healthy options?

02:10:34.000 | What are some of the techniques and the skills that you employ?

02:10:38.000 | Because we can't seem to crack this now.

02:10:40.000 | Your main costs are probably going to be basically meat and dairy, like meat and cheese and milk and stuff like that.

02:10:47.000 | Things like pasta, rice, beans, legumes, vegetables, as in the sense of raw vegetables.

02:10:56.000 | Put it another way, there's what's called the Standard American Diet or SAD as the acronym, which is very self-descriptive.

02:11:07.000 | That diet is characterized by the selection of things you find in most supermarkets.

02:11:14.000 | It's canned, pre-processed food. It's lots of meat packages.

02:11:21.000 | It's like a big dairy section. That is kind of what most people eat and it's not ultimately very healthy.

02:11:30.000 | So what we eat a lot of could be characterized as either Mexican, Indian or Chinese food.

02:11:37.000 | So we practically shop in the perimeter of the grocery store, which is the produce we get from regular grocery stores.

02:11:47.000 | We do bulk purchases. We go to ethnic stores. They're typically run by immigrants.

02:11:55.000 | You go buy 50 pounds of rice or something. You can get produce really inexpensively there as well.

02:12:02.000 | They typically have a much larger selection as well.

02:12:06.000 | So that's, I mean, cook everything from scratch essentially and cut down. Think of meat as a side dish or a condiment.

02:12:17.000 | Something that changes the taste but does not really constitute the main part of the dish in any way.

02:12:25.000 | How do you do that? Do you try to restrict your carbohydrates at all? Because that's my concern.

02:12:30.000 | I'm overweight and so I'm trying to restrict my carbohydrate intake and I can't seem to figure out how to do that without relying on meat and vegetables.

02:12:39.000 | Do you have any tips there?

02:12:41.000 | No, I wouldn't say it's not like we're going Atkins or Paleo or anything.

02:12:47.000 | So if you want to restrict carbohydrates, the immediate solution would be to eat more green stuff.

02:12:56.000 | That would require a ton of green stuff.

02:13:00.000 | Essentially fruits and vegetables do not have a lot of carbohydrates in them.

02:13:08.000 | The other thing I think is if you go down and look in our fridge, we just got an under the counter.

02:13:18.000 | We're cooking 1920s style instead of 1980s style in that almost everything gets made from produce or bulk like rice, etc.

02:13:31.000 | On the day it's eaten.

02:13:33.000 | So the only thing we have in our fridge is essentially a bottle of ketchup and leftovers from the day before.

02:13:39.000 | Whereas in most American fridges, you find these huge double door fridges and they're just full of food.

02:13:49.000 | I can only presume that there's a lot of food waste going on there.

02:13:53.000 | We have practically no food waste.

02:13:56.000 | So that's another loop to close off.

02:14:01.000 | Do you still practice, after I read your book and read your ideas on the warrior diet, I went and read Ori Hoffmechler's book.

02:14:10.000 | I did it for a few weeks and I thought it was a really interesting experience.

02:14:14.000 | Do you practice that style of eating?

02:14:16.000 | Yeah, I do. My wife doesn't.

02:14:18.000 | Okay.

02:14:19.000 | I'm lazy. If I can save half an hour in the morning and half an hour at lunch not eating, then I'm happy doing that.

02:14:29.000 | I haven't found that to work for me because for me, meal time is a primary social time and time with my family.

02:14:39.000 | Breakfast is my favorite meal of the day to sit down and spend 30-45 minutes before the day starts and just have a quiet time to visit and be with my family.

02:14:50.000 | And then lunch, same thing. Good time in the middle of the day, although I'm usually quicker about lunch.

02:14:55.000 | And then dinner, I want to linger over dinner.

02:14:57.000 | So I haven't been able to get out of that social construct of having breakfast as a social event and being happy with a cup of coffee or a cup of tea.

02:15:07.000 | But I did do it for a couple of weeks and I found it surprisingly easy to do.

02:15:14.000 | And I thought this is a great solution if someone doesn't have that social problem that I have.

02:15:20.000 | Oh, you can do all the social things and then have to move around eating.

02:15:25.000 | You are right.

02:15:27.000 | Alright, so I'm going to go rapid fire just through a couple of these questions from the forums just because these forum participants were awesome to help us out.

02:15:38.000 | Are you inflating your lifestyle? We answered that question. You're spending less.

02:15:41.000 | So are you just simply saving the money that you're earning?

02:15:44.000 | Yeah, yeah.

02:15:46.000 | Great. What post on your blog are you the proudest of?

02:15:49.000 | I don't really have a particular post I would say. I'm probably most proud of the book.

02:15:56.000 | Because the post was kind of like a hodgepodge. I just had written a post whenever I felt I had something to say. I just hammered it down in 32.

02:16:05.000 | Most of these, even the long posts were written extremely fast, which is why they tend to be full of typos and grammatical mistakes.

02:16:14.000 | You know, things like that.

02:16:19.000 | There are posts that are more successful than others and I put those in the sidebar posts to hook people in.

02:16:29.000 | But I wouldn't say I'm proud of any of them in particular.

02:16:32.000 | Is there a topic you regret publishing about?

02:16:35.000 | Yeah, I probably should not have said anything negative about index investing.

02:16:40.000 | Because I kind of called out the inquisition. I still get flak for this.

02:16:45.000 | I said, "Well, there might be this kind of particular problem about this."

02:16:49.000 | And at the time, nobody was really thinking about it.

02:16:52.000 | Now, probably once a year or something, someone posts something like, "Jacob hates index investing. Can this really be?"

02:17:00.000 | And then people are just hammering me, which is kind of sad and pathetic.

02:17:05.000 | So I wish I hadn't written those because I don't think they help people much in terms of their investment knowledge anyway.

02:17:12.000 | You can see that even reflected in the forum posts where several people are saying, "Ask him about index investing. We won't talk about it."

02:17:20.000 | Really on the advanced level, so they take the wrong message out of it.

02:17:24.000 | Right, exactly. We'll leave it there.

02:17:29.000 | Any plans for the future that you want to talk about? Feel free to say no.

02:17:34.000 | We just bought a house. We bought it in cash, just as was planned many years ago, a couple of months ago.

02:17:46.000 | It was like a fixer-upper.

02:17:49.000 | We're currently overwhelmed with trying to figure out how to fix all these things that need to be fixed.

02:17:56.000 | Long term, we'd like to do some permaculture in the garden.

02:17:59.000 | I'd like to learn how to do machine work like welding and machining.

02:18:04.000 | I'd like to build a boat of travel plans.

02:18:09.000 | Once my current job is over and my wife doesn't really feel like she wants to work anymore, we want to essentially do a very extended camping trip, visiting a lot of different parts of the U.S.

02:18:23.000 | We've also talked about it, and that probably comes after that, once we've gotten used to living out of a tent, to sail the Intracoastal Waterway, doing a loop there.

02:18:35.000 | These are all plans, and the probability of them working out might be small, but it's something we think about.

02:18:42.000 | If you do sail the Intracoastal, come on down and stay with me.

02:18:46.000 | My house is about a half mile from the Intracoastal, so you've got a spot.

02:18:51.000 | I actually just sold a bicycle to a guy who had done that.

02:18:54.000 | A young guy from up in the Northeast, he'd bought this old, junky sailboat.

02:18:58.000 | It's not at all seaworthy, but he had bought it for cheap.

02:19:02.000 | He'd sailed down from somewhere up in Northeast, somewhere, and he'd sailed it down the Intracoastal.

02:19:08.000 | He was planning to stay in West Palm Beach, where it actually was Jupiter.

02:19:16.000 | He bought an old, junky 10-speed bicycle I had on Craigslist.

02:19:21.000 | He was so great, totally frugal.

02:19:32.000 | He says, "Hey, can you deliver it?"

02:19:34.000 | He didn't have a car, so I didn't realize until I got there and sold it to him.

02:19:38.000 | He said, "Do you have any kind of bike pump?"

02:19:40.000 | The way it worked out is I wound up delivering his bicycle to him.

02:19:43.000 | It needed a little bit of work, but he'd already Googled to find a bike shop nearby that he could go and get some tubes and whatnot.

02:19:49.000 | I hadn't fixed it up, and it got delivered with a bike pump and everything for a good deal,

02:19:55.000 | so he could continue living on his boat and working.

02:19:57.000 | I think he was working at a gym near his boat somewhere, but that was fun.

02:20:03.000 | Question, "Ms. Library Joy would love it if you'd describe your wedding."

02:20:09.000 | That was a compromise, as with many other things.

02:20:13.000 | My personal preference, I don't really like big spectacles and so on.

02:20:18.000 | My ideal wedding would have been if we just went down to City Hall and signed a few pieces of paper.

02:20:25.000 | My wife wanted a family wedding in the backyard, and her sister had a really great backyard.

02:20:32.000 | Where the compromise fell, we only invited half the guests that were originally intended, so only closest family.

02:20:41.000 | That pretty much was like a barbecue in the back of her sister's yard.

02:20:50.000 | With the metal thing that makes you stand under it, etc.

02:21:02.000 | The trellis.

02:21:05.000 | Yeah, the trellis.

02:21:08.000 | It was kind of very informal.

02:21:11.000 | We mostly went with the wife's way of wanting things compromised.

02:21:19.000 | It's another one of those areas where I think whatever people choose to do that's right for them is great.

02:21:24.000 | I've seen so much.

02:21:26.000 | The idea that has been perpetuated in our culture of having a big fancy wedding,

02:21:33.000 | and then the burden that that puts on the young couples when their parents aren't able to pay for it,

02:21:38.000 | or their parents are choosing not to pay for it, that they still do it.

02:21:41.000 | I don't understand.

02:21:43.000 | My wife and I, we didn't have an inexpensive wedding.

02:21:46.000 | We had a wedding that was exactly how we wanted it to be, and we were very blessed with it.

02:21:50.000 | But I talk a lot of times, and I just say, "I don't understand how it is that it's supposed to be your wedding, your party,

02:21:56.000 | so you're going to pay a lot of money to throw a big party for all of your friends who are coming together to celebrate you,

02:22:02.000 | but especially if you don't have the money, and then you borrow the money,

02:22:06.000 | and you're doomed with paying this off for the next four years of your life.

02:22:10.000 | How much better to take the money and go travel a lope,

02:22:13.000 | or use it on traveling around the world for a year or two? Be selfish."

02:22:17.000 | Yeah, I completely agree with that.

02:22:21.000 | There were some things that money was spent on that might not have met my efficiency standards, but made my wife happy.

02:22:30.000 | She got to wear a dress, the kind of dress that's really only worn once, which ate a quarter of the money.

02:22:38.000 | I gave her a ring which ate half the money of the entire project, which at the time I think was 1% of my net worth.

02:22:45.000 | So, knowing that number is always good.

02:22:47.000 | I think that's also what Warren Buffett spent at that point.

02:22:50.000 | That's where I got the idea, "Okay, you should spend..."

02:22:53.000 | It's kind of like people always say, "What's an engagement ring supposed to cost?"

02:22:57.000 | It's like two-month salary or three-month salary.

02:23:02.000 | It was funny. We had some people at work discussing that, and I'm telling them,

02:23:07.000 | "No, no, no, no, no, it's completely wrong. It should be 1% of your net worth."

02:23:10.000 | Are you familiar with the history of engagement rings, with the De Beers family and the marketing campaign that brought that around?

02:23:16.000 | Have you ever researched that?

02:23:18.000 | I know some of how they figured out how to create an entire market so they could sell diamonds.

02:23:26.000 | I haven't. Yeah, it's completely a manufactured market.

02:23:30.000 | It's astounding. Completely a manufactured market.

02:23:33.000 | Go research it and form your own opinions, but I think it's amazing.

02:23:37.000 | Yeah, it's a crazy idea.

02:23:39.000 | It's sort of like a prevalent idea, so you just got to do what you got to do.

02:23:44.000 | I saw a humorous skit on YouTube, and a guy was going into that and he was saying,

02:23:50.000 | "Yeah, here's all the history, here's all the history," and yet you're still doomed.

02:23:54.000 | There's no way that if you love your girlfriend or your fiancé in our culture,

02:24:01.000 | no matter how much you're going to describe, this doesn't make any rational sense,

02:24:06.000 | I still bought my wife an engagement ring that she really loves, and I was happy to do it.

02:24:11.000 | It's culture.

02:24:13.000 | I would also say, in terms of priority, with half the money going into the ring versus the party,

02:24:19.000 | it's kind of like the party is one day, and it's going to be a memory from that point.

02:24:23.000 | If you're not very past-oriented, then memories are not as important,

02:24:27.000 | because the ring you're going to look at every single day.

02:24:31.000 | My idea was, "I'm probably going to get the most enjoyment out of it."

02:24:34.000 | So it was somewhat efficiently allocated in that sense.

02:24:38.000 | What's the craziest thing that North Americans spend their money on to you?

02:24:41.000 | My reasoning.

02:24:45.000 | Sorry, I think I spoke over you.

02:24:46.000 | What do you think is the craziest thing that North Americans spend their money on?

02:24:55.000 | I was talking about the engagement ring.

02:24:57.000 | I'll just go on to the next question, because we had finished,

02:25:01.000 | and I'd asked another question when you dropped out.

02:25:04.000 | The next question was, "What do you think is the craziest thing that you see

02:25:08.000 | North Americans spending all their money on?"

02:25:14.000 | Probably the financialization of everything.

02:25:18.000 | People turning themselves into what is euphemistically called "recurring cash flows."

02:25:24.000 | Cell phones is a great example now.

02:25:27.000 | Do you own a cell phone?

02:25:29.000 | I do own a cell phone.

02:25:30.000 | After many, many years of rejection, I finally bought one.

02:25:35.000 | It's not a smartphone. It's a dumb phone.

02:25:40.000 | It has a plan, which is something like $40 a year.

02:25:46.000 | I practically never use it.

02:25:49.000 | I think I've carried it around for two weeks now.

02:25:55.000 | Still there?

02:25:56.000 | Yep, I'm still here.

02:25:57.000 | I was just letting you finish.

02:25:59.000 | The only people I have found, now that you've succumbed,

02:26:02.000 | the only ones I know of who have not yet succumbed is the Bumfuzzle blog.

02:26:13.000 | Have you ever seen that blog?

02:26:15.000 | Yeah.

02:26:16.000 | Pat and Ali, who write that blog, to the best of my knowledge,

02:26:19.000 | they still haven't succumbed to actually buying a cell phone.

02:26:23.000 | Maybe they're the last people in the world who are holdouts.

02:26:27.000 | I think $50 a year was my limit.

02:26:30.000 | In terms of the number of calls I make annually,

02:26:34.000 | I'm probably still paying $5 a call.

02:26:37.000 | Sure.

02:26:38.000 | I really try to arrange my life the old-fashioned way.

02:26:43.000 | We make an appointment and we meet at this place at this particular time.

02:26:47.000 | If people don't show up, then we have a back-up plan,

02:26:50.000 | rather than trying to arrange stuff on the fly.

02:26:52.000 | You and my dad, we get along well.

02:26:54.000 | Yeah.

02:26:56.000 | You had a question here about, "Do you ever see yourself going full-on Borsatti?"

02:27:00.000 | I didn't know what that was, so I had to go check that out.

02:27:03.000 | Do you want to make any comment on that?

02:27:05.000 | Explain what that means.

02:27:06.000 | Yes, I do see that.

02:27:08.000 | For those who don't know what he is or who he is,

02:27:11.000 | he's one of those neglected personal finance--

02:27:16.000 | The thing about personal finance, and especially frugality,

02:27:22.000 | is that it actually tends to come in waves.

02:27:26.000 | The last time--

02:27:27.000 | With the way the economy has gone over the past five years,

02:27:34.000 | it has had a huge resurgence of popularity.

02:27:38.000 | A lot more people are taking these ideas seriously.

02:27:40.000 | Which is not really the case during boom times like the '90s and so on.

02:27:44.000 | The last time this happened was during the '70s,

02:27:48.000 | which is kind of like where the foundation of your money or life got established.

02:27:54.000 | The other guy there was Ernest Callenbeck,

02:27:57.000 | which is also an interesting guy to look up.

02:28:01.000 | It tends to happen in 30-year cycles, for some reason,

02:28:06.000 | some long cycle economic thing or whatever.

02:28:09.000 | Before that, the '70s, you had the Great Depression and the time leading up to that.

02:28:15.000 | Ralph Bosoli was one of the guys.

02:28:18.000 | He was strongly connected or inspiring this Helen and Scott Neering.

02:28:25.000 | Who were Helen and Scott Neering?

02:28:27.000 | Those-- Yeah.

02:28:29.000 | They were sort of like political philosopher radicals

02:28:33.000 | in the sense of rejecting the idea of capitalism and consumerism at that point.

02:28:39.000 | Bosoli was a little bit the same way.

02:28:41.000 | He was connected to the ad industry.

02:28:44.000 | The '20s were kind of like the time where mass production really got underway.

02:28:49.000 | For the first time in history, things had gotten really cheap.

02:28:53.000 | You could get all the sort of what we call modern amenities,

02:28:57.000 | except computers were kind of coming into existence at that time.

02:29:03.000 | One of the problems that businesses found,

02:29:05.000 | it used to be that products were built really well,

02:29:09.000 | so that once you bought a product, you had it sort of for life,

02:29:12.000 | and if it broke, you repaired it and so on.

02:29:16.000 | Industrialization, especially the way it was implemented as consumerism,

02:29:20.000 | the industries found that once you sold a really good product to someone,

02:29:26.000 | they were not likely to buy from you again because they didn't need to.

02:29:30.000 | So the problem there was essentially like a distribution problem.

02:29:36.000 | How do we distribute all these many products that we create in our factories

02:29:42.000 | when people don't really seem to have any use for them?

02:29:45.000 | Well, the answer to that was like marketing and later planned obsolescence.

02:29:48.000 | And he kind of saw that, and he kind of rejected--

02:29:52.000 | Bosoli, he kind of rejected that.

02:29:55.000 | And so he started this kind of like home self-reliance.

02:29:59.000 | It wasn't a homestead.

02:30:00.000 | It was more like what kind of household skills can we do for ourselves

02:30:07.000 | so as not to get suckered in by this entire cycle of like buying, throwing out,

02:30:12.000 | buying, throwing out.

02:30:15.000 | One thing that was kind of fascinating at the time,

02:30:17.000 | he had his own loom in his house,

02:30:21.000 | and he wove the cloth for a suit, like a business suit,

02:30:25.000 | and got some tailor to make it for him,

02:30:27.000 | and he calculated how much cheaper that was than to go into Brooks Brothers,

02:30:31.000 | for instance, and buy a new suit.

02:30:34.000 | So that was a time when you still could do that.

02:30:36.000 | So it was kind of like in that direction, you know,

02:30:38.000 | like learning basic skills that had been outsourced to like industry

02:30:45.000 | and then insourcing them back in again.

02:30:48.000 | So I find that rather fascinating,

02:30:51.000 | and I think kind of like the future direction is kind of going that way.

02:30:55.000 | I mean there's no reason to overpay for something if you can like manufacture

02:30:59.000 | a better and cheaper version for yourself just by through a few skills.

02:31:03.000 | It kind of plays into the whole thing.

02:31:04.000 | Right. Right.

02:31:06.000 | Yeah, I'm very interested.

02:31:07.000 | I've learned a lot from the whole -- I mean largely from the permaculture design movement,

02:31:12.000 | and once I understood the basics of permaculture design,

02:31:16.000 | it really helped just guide my thinking in a lot of ways.

02:31:20.000 | And like we talked about earlier,

02:31:22.000 | I was able to apply a lot of the same principles to other areas of life,

02:31:26.000 | and it makes all the sense in the world to me.

02:31:28.000 | And I hope it doesn't happen now.

02:31:32.000 | What annoys me is when things become political,

02:31:35.000 | it seems like they will quickly -- they'll quickly die.

02:31:38.000 | And I wish that -- my hope is that I want to sell ideas based upon their ideas

02:31:44.000 | and leave you free to implement them if you want to.

02:31:47.000 | But sell the idea to me.

02:31:49.000 | Don't tell me that I've got to do it or we're all going to be politically doomed.

02:31:52.000 | Right.

02:31:53.000 | Don't tell me you have to get rid of your SUV because there's this crazy global warming thing,

02:32:00.000 | and all of a sudden we're going to destroy the planet because of your SUV.

02:32:03.000 | Tell me the SUV is a stupid vehicle,

02:32:05.000 | and why don't we have this much more intelligently designed vehicle that meets your needs more fully,

02:32:11.000 | that is more efficient in every way, and let me choose.

02:32:14.000 | And I think most people will choose the more efficient version if they understand it

02:32:19.000 | and if it's presented in an attractive way.

02:32:22.000 | Yeah, exactly.

02:32:23.000 | I mean, that's also kind of like -- yeah, it's a solution that focuses on you kind of instead of we.

02:32:29.000 | But also, I mean, this is kind of like where the good thing about calling --

02:32:32.000 | having called the whole project early retirement extreme,

02:32:35.000 | even though it's really like prepare for the worst kind of blog in case it happens.

02:32:41.000 | And that is you kind of like give a positive outcome.

02:32:46.000 | You can do this, and it will be great for you.

02:32:48.000 | And if bad things happen, well, you'll be better off.

02:32:51.000 | And if good things happen, you will be even better off.

02:32:54.000 | But it's like good things you can do for you,

02:32:57.000 | not something like you can't have this because we don't think you should have it because of that one.

02:33:03.000 | Right.

02:33:04.000 | My favorite show on that, and I know he interviewed you, is Jack Spierko's show, the Survival Podcast.

02:33:11.000 | And to me, he has the most rational approach to it,

02:33:14.000 | and his entire philosophy is his show toward emergency preparedness and disaster preparedness is

02:33:19.000 | everything you do should make your life better if everything goes wrong or if nothing goes wrong.

02:33:26.000 | So even if nothing ever goes wrong, everything that you do should make your life better even if nothing ever changes.

02:33:37.000 | And so the idea is that everything you do should make your life better even if nothing goes wrong.

02:33:43.000 | And so I would say the same thing about financial planning.

02:33:46.000 | I would say every change you make in your life should just simply make your life better.

02:33:51.000 | It's not that – I recorded a video over the weekend for a FinCon video conference,

02:33:56.000 | and one of the things that I used as an example is I said, "Don't look at your budget and say, 'Where can I cut?'

02:34:03.000 | Look at your budget and say, 'Where can I optimize?'"

02:34:05.000 | And don't cut on anything that's important to you.

02:34:08.000 | Spend on the stuff that's important to you, but optimize it.

02:34:10.000 | And if you want to spend all your money traveling the world, do it.

02:34:13.000 | If you want to spend all your money on a BMW, do it.

02:34:15.000 | If you value your time and you don't want to spend your money on that stuff, do that.

02:34:19.000 | But don't cut. Optimize.

02:34:21.000 | It's the Kaizen approach, the Japanese philosophy.

02:34:24.000 | Right. Constant and never-ending improvement. Right.

02:34:27.000 | Any opinion on the current or future state of solar energy technology?

02:34:32.000 | It's not going to be enough.

02:34:35.000 | But other than that, yeah, I mean, as a primary energy source, it's not going to replace the fossil fuels.

02:34:46.000 | I mean, it has disadvantages.

02:34:49.000 | What about for individuals as far as financial planning? And here's what I mean.

02:34:53.000 | In that sense, as in terms of putting panels on the roof, it's something I would hold off on since the payback period is still pretty long.

02:35:02.000 | Right.

02:35:04.000 | As in you can buy way more electricity than the panels can supply you.

02:35:11.000 | The payback period is on the order of decades until the price comes down substantially.

02:35:17.000 | And the problem with if you buy panels now, you might find that in five years they only cost half the price.

02:35:23.000 | Right.

02:35:24.000 | So unless you want to sort of make a statement.

02:35:27.000 | Even in the last two years, they've dropped in price.

02:35:30.000 | And I'm working, to me, what seems rational as far as implementing alternative energy solutions is it seems rational to first focus on efficiency.

02:35:39.000 | You're going to have a guaranteed savings from day one if you can improve efficiency.

02:35:43.000 | And only after you've solved as much of the efficiency fruit as possible do you go to producing the energy.

02:35:50.000 | Right. There's a lot of slag in the system.

02:35:53.000 | Instead of buying a new furnace, seal the windows first, change your light bulbs, don't have your monster computer that eats 1500 watts sitting there just to write emails.

02:36:04.000 | If you want to do that, use a laptop or something that uses 20 watts.

02:36:09.000 | It's kind of like that kind of thinking.

02:36:11.000 | Right.

02:36:13.000 | What are your guilty pleasures or indulgences?

02:36:18.000 | I drink a lot of coffee.

02:36:20.000 | You do both.

02:36:24.000 | Other than that, no.

02:36:26.000 | I mean, not in the traditional sense.

02:36:28.000 | I don't think I really have any kind of guilty pleasures as such.

02:36:33.000 | I mean, sometimes we actually do go out and get a pizza from Little Caesars for five bucks.

02:36:38.000 | But I kind of justify that.

02:36:40.000 | Well, it's kind of like our dinner budget anyway.

02:36:44.000 | What area of self-improvement are you focusing on right now?

02:36:50.000 | Well, this whole enlightenment thing we talked about.

02:36:54.000 | I mean, it would be kind of cool to reach a state, if that's possible, where everything in your life is just experienced as flow.

02:37:02.000 | Like you're never bored.

02:37:04.000 | You always feel in the moment.

02:37:07.000 | I mean, you're just sort of in the flow, but I don't know if that's even possible.

02:37:13.000 | But yeah, that thing and then just kind of learning new stuff.

02:37:19.000 | How to fix a faucet, for instance.

02:37:23.000 | I think one of the things that I'm saddest about is the loss of the love of learning in our society.

02:37:28.000 | And I don't know whether it's intentional or not.

02:37:31.000 | I can't figure it out.

02:37:32.000 | But it sure seems like the result, regardless of whether it was intentional or not,

02:37:36.000 | seems like the result of schooling is that most people come out and they don't enjoy learning.

02:37:42.000 | And to me, the best enjoyment, and I see this.

02:37:47.000 | I mean, and again, you've gone all the way through school, so you were one of the few who escaped and still like learning.

02:37:51.000 | That's why you did the PhD, I'm sure, because you were interested in it.

02:37:54.000 | Can I say that my attitude, the reason I did not -- okay, so here's some stories.

02:38:03.000 | So I interviewed for two PhD programs, and the first one, they asked me, "So why do you want to do this?"

02:38:10.000 | "I want to become a professor." "Why do you want to do that?"

02:38:13.000 | "Well, so I can teach students who are really interested in what I'm trying to teach them."

02:38:17.000 | And they just laughed at me.

02:38:20.000 | Like that was terribly naive to believe that people who go to college actually would major in, say, physics,

02:38:25.000 | are actually interested in learning physics.

02:38:28.000 | And after being like a TA for four years as a graduate student, it really kind of like dawned on me.

02:38:35.000 | Only like one in ten in the year actually pay attention to anything I do and say,

02:38:39.000 | "The rest of the year, just here to get some grades and get out of here."

02:38:44.000 | You know, they're not really interested in learning.

02:38:47.000 | I kind of found, unfortunately, the same attitude in many professors.

02:38:52.000 | They only do their specialization.

02:38:54.000 | They're not really intellectuals in the traditional sense of the word.

02:38:57.000 | They don't read books other than like the trade journals.

02:39:01.000 | And that kind of like just kind of like destroyed it for me, and that's why I kind of left academia.

02:39:08.000 | If you were going to go back to university and start over, what would you major in?

02:39:12.000 | Who's to say I would want to go back to a university?

02:39:15.000 | Explain that. So explain that. What do you mean?

02:39:18.000 | What would you do?

02:39:20.000 | I think that, well, I mean I probably would go back to university.

02:39:24.000 | I think as I get older and more experienced, I mean if you'd ask me that like five years ago,

02:39:32.000 | I would have said like electrical engineering, software engineering,

02:39:36.000 | because then I would have considered that maybe these would offer much better career opportunities than physics does.

02:39:42.000 | Physics has surprisingly fewer career opportunities.

02:39:47.000 | And it varies. I mean people always think I have a PhD in physics, so I must be making megabucks.

02:39:53.000 | That's not really true.

02:39:54.000 | You probably make a lot more with an undergraduate degree in like, I don't know, definitely accounting,

02:40:05.000 | maybe even history as you do as a researcher, a full-time researcher in physics in a government

02:40:11.000 | or like an academic setting.

02:40:14.000 | So if you ask me now though, I think I'm becoming more getting back to the physics,

02:40:22.000 | because I think it provides a somewhat unique way of thinking,

02:40:26.000 | of always questioning whether what you actually understand about a given concept or theory is the correct one.

02:40:34.000 | And you're always in the mental mode of like this might not be true.

02:40:38.000 | I mean there might be something which is more accurate and maybe I should think about how I can figure that out.

02:40:43.000 | I would say, I mean I think in that sense, I have to acknowledge that probably that mode of thinking

02:40:50.000 | was what made this entire development of the URE concepts possible.

02:40:58.000 | If the idea is simply to like retire early, you know, there are things like long haul trucking

02:41:04.000 | or even delivering pizzas might be a faster way.

02:41:09.000 | You can certainly be self-educated and multi-skilled and make out really well.

02:41:15.000 | I mean you got to consider that going to college is essentially just continuing the process of,

02:41:24.000 | it's kind of like the finishing process of how to be a good employee.

02:41:28.000 | You can sit and you can take orders and you can follow simple instructions provided in writing

02:41:35.000 | and you can kind of like deliver on a schedule.

02:41:37.000 | That's kind of like the meta lesson of college.

02:41:41.000 | It's not so much that it actually educates you in anything other than like a few technical terms.

02:41:46.000 | It's really that can this person take written instructions and deliver writing in return and follow deadlines.

02:41:55.000 | If they have a college degree, you have a reasonable chance to believe that that is actually the case

02:41:59.000 | and most jobs are kind of structured for that.

02:42:01.000 | It's not really can this person like come up with a novel idea, bring together the right people

02:42:07.000 | and start a new company.

02:42:10.000 | They don't teach that in college.

02:42:13.000 | So, I mean.

02:42:15.000 | I've actually struggled with the college like my own perspective on college because my degree was in international business.

02:42:23.000 | I was interested in business but I went to a liberal arts school.

02:42:26.000 | So, I have a liberal arts education.

02:42:29.000 | But I don't think I didn't get what a liberal arts education was when I was going through it

02:42:34.000 | and I didn't value it as much as I value now.

02:42:37.000 | The college, it's very popular now to despise college and to say,

02:42:41.000 | "Well, there's no point. Just do an un-college thing."

02:42:44.000 | I'm totally in favor of people pursuing that path.

02:42:47.000 | But lately, I've been doing a lot of thinking about why did college ever get wrapped up with the idea of earning more.

02:42:54.000 | And if I were going to do it over again, I think, I may still go to the same school that I went to.

02:42:59.000 | But I think one thing that I would do differently if I were going to do it over again

02:43:03.000 | is I don't think I would study something "practical."

02:43:06.000 | I don't think I would study business because I feel like I've gained more business education from doing it,

02:43:15.000 | from entrepreneurship, and then also from studying business-focused books.

02:43:20.000 | So, for example, the personal MBA curriculum.

02:43:23.000 | That's been far more effective than this ridiculous textbook on finance that I had to read through in college.

02:43:29.000 | But if I were going to go back, I would do something like philosophy or liberal arts

02:43:33.000 | because there are not that many periods in life, except for that beginning, those college years,

02:43:39.000 | where you would have the time and the opportunity to just spend time thinking and to spend time exploring.

02:43:45.000 | You do have every evening after work.

02:43:48.000 | Right. That is true.

02:43:51.000 | That's kind of like the people stop learning because they think they don't have the time,

02:43:54.000 | but they do have the time if it's made a priority.

02:43:57.000 | Right. And it has to be a priority.

02:43:59.000 | I'd love to read a few books a week.

02:44:01.000 | Now, I'm trying to get one or two in, but it's tough.

02:44:05.000 | I've got a young son, and so I'm prioritizing that time.

02:44:10.000 | I'm building a couple of businesses, and so I'm prioritizing that time.

02:44:14.000 | And I just think back, the Thomas Jefferson 15 to 17 hours.

02:44:18.000 | That sounds like heaven to me if I could just have that opportunity again.

02:44:22.000 | Originally, the college education was intended to create better citizens.

02:44:27.000 | I think that happened. I forget the exact back story,

02:44:31.000 | but that was, again, something that happened in the 1920s,

02:44:35.000 | that you essentially needed people to run this new industry that people were building and what they found.

02:44:47.000 | So go ahead.

02:44:48.000 | Okay. So back in the 1920s, the problem with the new industry was in retaining workers.

02:44:58.000 | Primarily, people at that time were still so skilled in providing for their own needs without having to go out and shop and stuff.

02:45:04.000 | It actually used to be weird to go and buy groceries.

02:45:07.000 | I mean, that's pretty hard to imagine today.

02:45:09.000 | But the problem the factories had was that people would simply not show up the next day if they didn't need the money.

02:45:16.000 | This whole idea of a standard schedule of nine to five every day, five to six days a week.

02:45:23.000 | There was probably different hours back then, but the idea of a regular schedule was somewhat alien to employees.

02:45:31.000 | So colleges were essentially, the entire school system was essentially to set up,

02:45:36.000 | to provide people who were conditioned is probably the right word,

02:45:41.000 | to sit down in rows, doing work in front of a manager that would be the teacher.

02:45:49.000 | So from a very young age, people then became conditioned to factory conditions.

02:45:56.000 | It was not really learning.

02:45:59.000 | It's more like, can you sit still on your ass for eight hours, ten hours a day doing stupid things,

02:46:06.000 | solving small, isolated problems for the guy up in front telling you to do things,

02:46:12.000 | and then subsequently grade you depending on how well you have answered this simple, well-defined, closed-end problem.

02:46:22.000 | So if you have people who have been doing that for ten, fifteen, and almost twenty years now,

02:46:30.000 | as educations have gotten longer and longer, then you can easily hire these guys to do the same thing in a cubicle for the next forty years.

02:46:40.000 | At the same time, saying that this is actually education, or that people are being educated or learning anything by doing that,

02:46:51.000 | that's almost disingenuous because it totally takes the joy out of learning things.

02:46:56.000 | People just don't want to learn anything anymore.

02:46:59.000 | They just want to pass the test and get on with it so they can move on to the next course.

02:47:04.000 | Then they kind of load the answers into their brain, they dump them out, and two weeks later they've forgotten everything about it.

02:47:12.000 | So that's kind of what education has been reduced to.

02:47:17.000 | You're hitting on a subject we could go on for another two hours talking about that.

02:47:22.000 | I thought about launching a podcast on education just simply as a way to guide my research.

02:47:28.000 | I'm not willing to make the time for it right now.

02:47:31.000 | You can invite me back and I'll spill my bitterness for two hours.

02:47:35.000 | It's almost like if you just look at it, no thinking, rational person would design the modern system the way it seems to function.

02:47:51.000 | But what I can't figure out, what really bothers me, is I can't figure out, was it planned to fail?

02:47:56.000 | Or was it planned to have this result or was it just a natural consequence?

02:48:01.000 | Was it a natural evolution over time?

02:48:03.000 | I read John Taylor Gatto's book called The Underground History of American Education.

02:48:07.000 | If you haven't read it, it's fascinating.

02:48:09.000 | When I was looking through it, I'm just saying, "Was this conspiracy or was this not?"

02:48:14.000 | I can't figure the answer out and I can't find anyone who can convince me one way or the other.

02:48:19.000 | I look at it rationally and say, "Regardless of the origin, this is what exists and we got to do something different."

02:48:27.000 | Last question that I have, unless you have anything else on that.

02:48:30.000 | We'll wrap up the interview with this question.

02:48:33.000 | How many weapons am I proficient in?

02:48:35.000 | Not that one, but go ahead and answer it.

02:48:37.000 | How many weapons are you proficient in?

02:48:38.000 | I would say two.

02:48:40.000 | The right hand and the left hand?

02:48:42.000 | No, that would be the Japanese longsword and probably the Glock 17.

02:48:46.000 | There we go. You live in Chicago, right?

02:48:51.000 | Yeah.

02:48:52.000 | So, how do you...

02:48:54.000 | They've been reading a lot of gun laws lately.

02:48:57.000 | I couldn't live in Chicago. I couldn't put up with those laws.

02:49:02.000 | The highest murder rate in the country and the highest gun restriction laws in the country.

02:49:07.000 | Anyway, that's circumstantial.

02:49:09.000 | What did you get wrong when you wrote the book?

02:49:11.000 | I don't mean the title using the word "retirement."

02:49:13.000 | What did you get wrong when you wrote the book?

02:49:16.000 | I don't think I got anything wrong.

02:49:19.000 | That's what I was hoping for.

02:49:22.000 | It's kind of like if I had to write it.

02:49:24.000 | I mean, I made some choices, right?

02:49:27.000 | So, one of the choices was to make it to talk about the strategy and how to think rather than get a plan.

02:49:38.000 | And I think that was the right choice.

02:49:42.000 | But people complained about this being the wrong choice.

02:49:45.000 | Still there?

02:49:46.000 | Yeah, I'm still here.

02:49:47.000 | The second choice was to write it in the academic style, which again, some people really enjoyed that it's sort of complete and everything.

02:49:58.000 | But unfortunately, I also have probably like 10% of reviews complain that it's too hard to read, and some take it nicely and some don't.

02:50:11.000 | Ideally, I would want to be able to write at sort of the – have you ever read the Book of Five Rings?

02:50:18.000 | No, I haven't.

02:50:19.000 | So, this is like a famous sword instruction manual.

02:50:25.000 | Really?

02:50:29.000 | Okay, so in the Book of Five Rings, if you read it without any previous knowledge of like sword fighting, it's actually much broader about that.

02:50:41.000 | It's more about how to be a warrior in feudal Japanese society, and you can sort of read it as how to be a warrior in general, which is why people still read it, or how to sort of like think that way.

02:50:53.000 | The interesting part about that book is that it's written in a simple language, and yet it's very deep, so that the more you sort of understand – every time you understand more, you get a different message out of rereading it.

02:51:07.000 | So, you can keep cycling through it and learn more and more and more.

02:51:11.000 | And I would really love to have that in my book.

02:51:14.000 | Instead, my book is kind of like, well, you probably need to have a sort of substantial reading comprehension to get through it.

02:51:21.000 | People say it's sort of like college level.

02:51:24.000 | And so, if you're used to reading like standard nonfiction, which is sort of written at a sixth grade level, that's sort of like an unfortunate leap to make.

02:51:36.000 | Some of it was somewhat intentional.

02:51:38.000 | There's been some commentary about the Bessar equations in Chapter 7.

02:51:45.000 | But those equations are sort of freshman level annuity and mortgage calculations that you would have in the first year of university, and really should be somewhat – something that if you do want to sort of live off finances, it's something you should know.

02:52:05.000 | So, in some ways, it's kind of like the book is written in a way that it's something like, "You must be this tall to play –" kind of like they have in like civil lilies and fun fairs and so on.

02:52:17.000 | You must be this good to actually do it.

02:52:19.000 | And if you're not, say, tall enough, you're sort of naturally precluded from knowing about what you can do.

02:52:28.000 | It's sort of like a built-in safety.

02:52:31.000 | Right.

02:52:32.000 | What happens if you don't go into that, though?

02:52:35.000 | And that's a good example, and I see this all the time in the finance world.

02:52:38.000 | I was reading a post on a financial blog, and the post – the question that was sent to the blogger was a question about how much money he needed to get through a certain period of time.

02:52:52.000 | And there was a period of time from the end of a certain employment through the beginning of a formal defined benefit pension.

02:53:01.000 | And I'm reading it, and I'm saying – and the author gave – the blogger actually gave a really great answer, but he took a completely different tact than I would have taken.

02:53:10.000 | And my answer would have been, "Here's a financial calculator.

02:53:14.000 | Present value, n equals x, interest rate equals x, monthly payments are present value you have now.

02:53:21.000 | Let's discount this, put in our inflation rate, and in two calculations, we can have your answer to the penny."

02:53:27.000 | But the thing is that if you don't – but what happens is that that obviously doesn't solve the problem, because I could tell you you need $232,000 based upon these assumptions.

02:53:36.000 | What that leads you then is that leads you to say, "But wait a second.

02:53:40.000 | Why did I use x percent rate of return over x percent rate of inflation rate to yield my inflation-adjusted return rate?"

02:53:47.000 | That's a problem.

02:53:48.000 | That's an assumption.

02:53:49.000 | And so when you challenge that assumption, then you back up and you say, "My plan is vulnerable because of this."

02:53:54.000 | And so then as a planner, that puts you in the position where you say, "How do we solve for that?"

02:53:58.000 | Well, we look at our client and we say, "Does the client have a lifestyle that's going to be – would be significantly affected by inflation?

02:54:05.000 | Does the client's investments – what is their expected return?"

02:54:10.000 | And then we look and say, "Do we need another strategy?"

02:54:12.000 | So maybe in that situation, if I were doing that for a client, the strategy would be maybe this person should purchase an annuity, an annuity that can provide them a guaranteed payment for life.

02:54:23.000 | So on the one hand, if you understand that, then you say, "Well, in this solution, because we have this financial problem of this financial formula, we're now going to purchase an annuity."

02:54:32.000 | But what happens in the personal finance space is everyone says, "Annuities are bad.

02:54:36.000 | Clark Howard says annuities are a four-letter word, so therefore we can't use annuities, so this is a bad financial product.

02:54:42.000 | No one should ever buy an annuity," let alone not forgetting what an annuity – we don't understand what an annuity calculation is.

02:54:48.000 | And because we don't understand a very simple present value, inflation-adjusted return, monthly payment financial formula,

02:54:55.000 | then we walk away from this solution, which is a great solution in certain situations, and we say, "Annuities are bad.

02:55:02.000 | I'm not going to buy one."

02:55:03.000 | And to be fair to Clark, he specifies the type of annuity.

02:55:06.000 | I didn't want to be misfair.

02:55:07.000 | It's just that's his word.

02:55:08.000 | He says annuities are a four-letter word.

02:55:10.000 | And so we walk past the solution, which is an annuity, not recognizing the mathematical construct as to why in some situations the annuity is the ideal solution.

02:55:20.000 | Yeah, that's kind of like – yeah, chapter seven is definitely the biggest challenge of "Say the Book" because it's sort of tried to –

02:55:27.000 | I tried to write it in a very general sense to make it possible for people to consider what should you actually think about when you're investing.

02:55:38.000 | What are your concerns?

02:55:40.000 | And make it possible for them to actually answer the right questions when they're considering something.

02:55:46.000 | And of course, you get kind of like the negative feedback that, "Well, this guy doesn't know anything about investing because he doesn't provide a specific plan for me to follow."

02:55:56.000 | And even worse, then they go on to say, "Well, you should read these particular two books," and then implement exactly the plan they say.

02:56:03.000 | Right. Read "Bogo Head's Guide to Investing" and do what it says.

02:56:06.000 | Yeah, and I'm just like, "Oh, no. This guy is screwed," because if he does that – I mean, it'll probably work fine now, but in 10 years, in 20 years, those two books are completely invalid.

02:56:20.000 | And people will promote two other books after probably some kind of massive problem developed.

02:56:27.000 | You know what I mean? Something I kind of –

02:56:36.000 | So a massive problem developed.

02:56:38.000 | Yeah, and then the books will essentially change.

02:56:42.000 | Right.

02:56:43.000 | And so I find it very hard. I mean, I wanted to sort of write advice that would be sort of good for the ages.

02:56:52.000 | Right.

02:56:53.000 | And I think I did that, but unfortunately, that also means it has to be very general.

02:56:58.000 | And so the message people should take away from it is sort of like what they should think about and what they should consider, not what they should specifically do.

02:57:09.000 | And I think I succeeded in that, but I mean –

02:57:12.000 | I think you did as well, and it'll be interesting to see how your book sells over time, to see if you have a steady sales and if those sales increase with time.

02:57:22.000 | And I'm facing this challenge with my podcast, even just trying to figure out how to –

02:57:29.000 | Okay. I mean, I would say the final thing that the book is missing was kind of like what happened afterwards.

02:57:34.000 | But I mean, obviously, you can't really write about that.

02:57:37.000 | And those would be kind of considerations. What do you do after retirement? How do you structure your life?

02:57:43.000 | And also probably more like how does it fit into the rest of the world?

02:57:48.000 | I even had like one person – are you still there?

02:57:52.000 | Yep. I'm here.

02:57:53.000 | Okay. I just need to sort of like verify a heartbeat or something. So if you can just like clap every five seconds.

02:58:00.000 | I try not to put in like the laughs and the agree with people to keep the audio clean, but I'll go ahead and add those in.

02:58:07.000 | Keep going.

02:58:09.000 | So –

02:58:13.000 | I'll pick up. It'll come back to you. What I was going to say is that I really appreciate that about your book is that it has a perennial nature.

02:58:20.000 | And one of the things that I find interesting is I like to go back and read books from 50 years ago that –

02:58:27.000 | All right. Let's try. We'll try again.

02:58:42.000 | So I guess we'll consider that question answered and kind of just wrap up.

02:58:49.000 | Otherwise, I'll just like keep adding more and more stuff to it.

02:58:52.000 | Exactly. Keep adding and wrapping up. Anything else that you want to say before we go?

02:58:55.000 | Nope. I'm good.

02:58:57.000 | Anything you want to mention or plug as far as where people can find you? The book is Early Retirement Extreme.

02:59:02.000 | The website, earlyretirementextreme.com. Anything else?

02:59:05.000 | It should be pretty easy to find. I'm still active on the forum, not very active on the blog.

02:59:12.000 | So I just want to say thank you. And if we get cut off, that'll be fine.

02:59:16.000 | But I just want to say thank you that I appreciate the book that you wrote.

02:59:19.000 | And kind of the point that I was trying to make before we got cut off was that I appreciate perennial content.

02:59:26.000 | I like to go back and I enjoy reading books that are about 50 or 100 or 250 years old.

02:59:32.000 | And I think there is a time and a place for content that is for today.

02:59:36.000 | But principles don't change. There have been people that have built financial independence over time,

02:59:43.000 | no matter what the path was there.

02:59:47.000 | And when you understand how they've done it, it makes it a lot simpler than just saying, "Well, here's what you should do."

02:59:53.000 | So your book may not be a bestseller on the New York Times because it's written at a third-grade level to sell someone,

02:59:58.000 | insert investment strategy this and do this other thing.

03:00:02.000 | But it's like half the people I ask about, and I'm not mad at index investing.

03:00:06.000 | In today's world, there's nothing wrong with it.

03:00:08.000 | But the only reason it works is because we have advanced efficient markets.

03:00:12.000 | That's the theory it's built on. And we haven't always had that.

03:00:15.000 | And we may not always have that. And not all markets are efficient.

03:00:19.000 | So once you understand that, you can decide whether or not you want to employ it in your life based upon your goals and outcomes.

03:00:25.000 | I appreciate you writing a perennial book and not talking about any product, any specific strategy,

03:00:31.000 | but rather helping to give people the ideas.

03:00:34.000 | And it's only our culture that has dumbed things down to the point where people can't get through it,

03:00:39.000 | or they can't read it, or they can't understand it.

03:00:41.000 | Because the book that you've written is far more valuable than the latest mocha factor book.

03:00:47.000 | I don't want to be cruel to the latte factor, so I'll call it the mocha factor.

03:00:50.000 | Not that there's anything wrong with cutting back on lattes or mochas,

03:00:54.000 | but the book you've written can stand the test of time.

03:00:58.000 | That is what I would consider my criteria for success.

03:01:02.000 | It's like, will it still be interesting to read in 10 years or 50 years?

03:01:08.000 | My second is my rule for seeing whether a book is good.

03:01:11.000 | You go to Amazon, you look at the new price, you look at the used price.

03:01:16.000 | If those two are close together, then it's probably a pretty good book.

03:01:19.000 | If the new price is $20 and the used price is like $0.02, it's probably not a good book.

03:01:24.000 | Absolutely.

03:01:25.000 | Your money or your life, the biggest flaw in the book, it's an amazingly great book,

03:01:31.000 | but the biggest flaw is he goes into investment strategy.

03:01:34.000 | And in today's world, retiring on government bonds is not possible.

03:01:38.000 | But in his time, it was.

03:01:40.000 | And I'm sure, I've never met him, never talked to him, I think he's dead now,

03:01:43.000 | but I've never talked to the authors.

03:01:45.000 | But I'm sure that their strategies changed over time because he came from an investment background.

03:01:49.000 | So what he should have said is, this is working for me now,

03:01:53.000 | or he should have just left it out and written an article that was an addendum to the book,

03:01:56.000 | because there's no way that he stayed retired on government bonds.

03:01:59.000 | They actually wrote a second book, like an update, which changed the investment strategy.

03:02:03.000 | Right, exactly.

03:02:04.000 | So now when someone reads it, the foreword to the book has to say,

03:02:08.000 | this was appropriate in the 1970s.

03:02:10.000 | When you're dead and gone, your book will not have to say that.

03:02:13.000 | Although by then, the cars will be 300 miles per gallon, or 3,000 miles per gallon, or Fusion.

03:02:19.000 | Jacob, thank you for being with us today.

03:02:21.000 | I've really had fun just kind of chatting with you, and I've really enjoyed it.

03:02:26.000 | And I wish you great success in all of your endeavors.

03:02:29.000 | And I mean my invitation.

03:02:30.000 | If you guys get down here to Florida, on your sailboat or in your tent, come on down.

03:02:34.000 | We've got a place for you.

03:02:35.000 | We'll do it too at some point.

03:02:38.000 | All right, sir. Have a lovely afternoon.

03:02:40.000 | All right.

03:02:41.000 | Thanks.

03:02:43.000 | And that's our show.

03:02:45.000 | Jacob, thank you for coming on the Radical Personal Finance podcast.

03:02:48.000 | I really enjoyed it, and I hope you enjoyed listening to that interview.

03:02:52.000 | I found it inspiring and thought-provoking,

03:02:55.000 | and I really enjoyed just being able to connect with someone who has thought deeply about these subjects,

03:03:00.000 | and then to be able to connect a little bit deeper on the philosophy side of things.

03:03:03.000 | And hopefully you can start to see how, if you really understand philosophy and principles,

03:03:07.000 | you can apply them in every area of life.

03:03:09.000 | Now, ultimately, what you choose to do is going to be different than what I choose to do.

03:03:13.000 | So I may live a different lifestyle.

03:03:15.000 | I like Jacob's quip of, "We live the same lifestyle, but he does his on far less."

03:03:20.000 | I am not as skilled as he is with his ability to live on less.

03:03:24.000 | But we may live a different lifestyle.

03:03:25.000 | We may live in a different place.

03:03:26.000 | We may have different pursuits and different adventures,

03:03:29.000 | but we can take these ideas and these philosophies, and we can integrate them into our own lives.

03:03:34.000 | And each of us can chart the course that is appropriate that will help us to build our version of financial independence,

03:03:40.000 | what it looks like, and we need a plan that will fit our skills, our abilities,

03:03:44.000 | what each of us individually actually has.

03:03:47.000 | So I hope that you've enjoyed the show, and I'd like to bring you lots more of these.

03:03:52.000 | So if you have any recommendations of people you'd like me to interview, feel free to let me know that.

03:03:58.000 | That's our show for today.

03:04:00.000 | Again, thank you for being with us.

03:04:01.000 | If this is your first time listening, come back every day.

03:04:04.000 | We're here every weekday with in-depth content like this, in-depth interviews, in-depth financial planning teaching

03:04:10.000 | on everything from the very, very technical to the philosophical.

03:04:14.000 | We do a lot of commentary, and basically what I'm trying to do here every day is create the type of financial planning podcast

03:04:20.000 | or radio show that I would always have enjoyed listening to, that wasn't the same old, same old hum-drum every day,

03:04:26.000 | you know, put money in an IRA and get a will type of financial talk show that I've heard in so many places.

03:04:32.000 | So I'm trying to create the type of show that I would have enjoyed listening to,

03:04:35.000 | and if this is the kind of thing that you like, come back every day.

03:04:38.000 | We'd be thrilled -- thank you for those of you who have been leaving reviews in iTunes.

03:04:42.000 | We'd be thrilled if you would take a moment and leave us a quick review.

03:04:45.000 | Pull out your phone. You can do it right on your phone.

03:04:47.000 | If you need any help with that, go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/review,

03:04:51.000 | and all of the show notes for today's show are at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/25.

03:04:57.000 | Let me know what you thought of the interviews. Leave a comment on the blog.

03:05:00.000 | Shoot me an email, Joshua@RadicalPersonalFinance.com, or on Twitter @RadicalPF.

03:05:05.000 | We're on Twitter @RadicalPF.

03:05:07.000 | And if you like the show, I would appreciate -- share some love and share it with others so that others can benefit.

03:05:12.000 | Thanks for being here. Have an awesome Tuesday.

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03:06:00.000 | Peace out, y'all. Come back tomorrow.

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RPF-0025-Interview_with_Jacob_Lund_Fisker_Author_of_Early_Retirement_Extreme