RPF0619-Empathy_and_Personal_Responsibility_When_Living_Paycheck-to-Paycheck
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00:00:14.720 | Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge,
00:00:18.400 | skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now,
00:00:22.400 | while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.
00:00:26.000 | Last week I released a show titled "If Missing One Paycheck Is a Problem for You,
00:00:31.360 | You Are Behaving Stupidly." It was episode 616 of the podcast. I encourage you to go back and
00:00:36.720 | listen to it if you have not yet listened to it. But today on the show I have a guest who
00:00:41.760 | listened to that show and took Umbridge with me. She wrote to me on Twitter saying,
00:00:45.760 | "This content, this meaning this content, this show is unbelievably shamey and tone deaf."
00:00:51.520 | And she followed up with a series of arguments in a Twitter thread, which I'll share those
00:00:54.640 | arguments with you and then we'll bring her on the line. I thought this would be
00:00:57.760 | a great discussion for us to have to talk about practical personal finance,
00:01:02.240 | especially as it relates to people in our current environment, especially our current
00:01:08.800 | political environment. So here are my guest's comments. She writes this, she says, "If I see
00:01:12.800 | one more personal finance thought leader shaming federal employees or anyone who lives paycheck to
00:01:18.320 | paycheck, I swear, look out, y'all have made me mad on a Saturday. Now if you'll excuse me,
00:01:23.440 | I have to go to my side gig and work so I can pay my gas bill, but I'll be back."
00:01:27.040 | She wrote to me and wrote specifically about me and my content. She says, "First off,
00:01:32.400 | if your first thought is to use this historic moment of the government shutdown to weaponize
00:01:37.360 | the financial independence philosophy to promote your shady podcast with some clickbait headline,
00:01:43.360 | re-examine your priorities. Secondly, way to show us who you are, making a name for yourself on the
00:01:48.240 | backs of people caught off guard by the behavior of a sociopath who happens to be in the White
00:01:52.400 | House. But anyway, you're not the only one," referring to me. "I wish you were, but you're not."
00:01:56.480 | She references a tweet by another man. "Hmm, what do these two guys have in common? Could it be,
00:02:01.600 | just making a guess here, honestly?" With a link to an article titled "Unpacking Privilege,
00:02:08.480 | Straight White Male Is the Lowest Difficulty Setting in the Game of Life." Anywho, you're
00:02:14.160 | both numbers guys, you math a lot, you got that awesome emergency fund set aside, so let's math.
00:02:19.280 | 800,000 federal employees are furloughed right now. 4 million government contractors are also
00:02:25.280 | affected. And a significant number of those government contractors, they're janitors,
00:02:29.280 | security guards, maintenance workers, not exactly moneybags positions. Here's the GS schedule. This
00:02:34.720 | dictates pay levels for federal employees. You'll see there's a base and then regional variations.
00:02:39.600 | She links to a data table showing the salary tables for government employees. Here's another
00:02:45.440 | view. It doesn't reflect the higher and somewhat rarer senior executive service levels. Most
00:02:50.080 | working federal stiffs are GS 1 through 15. Links to another article on the federal government pay
00:02:55.600 | scale. So if you're not a super duper extra special SES type, the most you will ever earn
00:03:02.160 | in the federal government right now is $122,000 per year. And that's after years of service and
00:03:08.480 | making it to the top or coming in from the private sector. The bottom third of tiers of federal
00:03:14.320 | government employees are making less than $40,000 per year, often in our most expensive cities.
00:03:20.960 | And she links to a chart of how much each federal employee makes and continues with this commentary.
00:03:26.560 | You know that whole drain the swamp thing and the general hatred of federal workers that a
00:03:31.440 | certain element likes to encourage? Here's where federal employees work. Gives a listing,
00:03:35.840 | a link to an article showing where federal employees work. No one's getting rich in the
00:03:39.680 | federal government. Well, maybe some are, but Congress isn't furloughed. A few of them are
00:03:44.000 | doing the right thing. Links to an article from CNN indicating that more than 70 members of Congress
00:03:48.960 | are choosing to reject their paychecks during the government shutdown. Oh and hey, federal
00:03:53.440 | government workforce is 35% people of color, half of them black, 43% women. So yeah, let's pick on
00:04:00.080 | people who demonstrably earn less in equivalent positions with equivalent education to their
00:04:04.560 | white male counterparts. Links to an article indicating the demographics of the federal
00:04:08.880 | workforce summarized. I have more to say but cannot even. Main takeaway, if you are carving
00:04:15.520 | out a little brand for yourself in the financial independence, fire, or personal finance space,
00:04:20.560 | remember this. You don't know someone else's life. So offer real help or sit down. If you do want to
00:04:30.800 | help, a food bank is a good place to start and links to some information on food banks there in
00:04:35.840 | the Washington DC area. Lisa, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. I'm glad you're here today.
00:04:40.400 | Thank you. You do such a good job of channeling me.
00:04:43.760 | Great. And bonus, you clean up my potty mouth. So that's like really good.
00:04:50.560 | I did choose to censor a few of your adjectives there in that tweet. So I want to skip past all
00:04:56.800 | the stuff at the beginning. If there's time, we'll get back to it. But the basic argument
00:05:00.960 | that I hear you saying is essentially this. If I were summarizing, your basic argument is that
00:05:08.400 | many federal employees don't have very much money because they aren't paid very well. You link to
00:05:14.400 | various articles on the federal pay scale showing that it starts at relatively low numbers. You
00:05:19.040 | allege that many employees earn less than $40,000 and live in expensive cities. And then you're
00:05:23.760 | further frustrated that many of these people are black or brown or red or yellow in their skin
00:05:28.880 | color, which you believe means that they earn less than white people. Is that a good summary of your
00:05:33.680 | basic argument as you put it to me in that series of tweets? No, those are all supporting points in
00:05:40.000 | a bigger argument. They're important points. I think that I've lived in Washington DC. I didn't
00:05:48.000 | grow up here, but I've lived here for 30 plus years. And I have learned a lot about what kind
00:05:57.040 | of the vast majority of the country perceives as federal workers and what federal workers really
00:06:03.920 | do as people. And so I wouldn't say, I think those are all extraordinarily important points
00:06:10.880 | in terms of really understanding who works in the federal government. I'd also link that, however,
00:06:17.040 | to a much bigger point about shaming anyone who is living paycheck to paycheck. I think, first of
00:06:23.760 | all, a lot of people in the United States don't realize that many federal workers really are
00:06:30.000 | living paycheck to paycheck, not because they're irresponsible, but because they're making poverty
00:06:35.760 | wages. About a third, I actually looked up that to figure it out, about 600,000 federal workers
00:06:43.280 | make $50,000 or less per year. And that's not a poverty wage in a lot of parts of the country.
00:06:48.880 | But if it's the only wage for a family of four, it might be. So just to know that. But the second
00:06:56.000 | and bigger point that I was making, just as you made a point beyond the federal worker picture,
00:07:01.600 | for those of us who don't work in the federal government, I don't, I assume you don't, is that
00:07:07.280 | if you're living paycheck to paycheck, it's actually quite possible, especially right now,
00:07:13.920 | even in the richest country in the world, for a high level of personal responsibility,
00:07:21.040 | intelligence, sharpness, to actually coexist with financial trauma and financial difficulty,
00:07:28.720 | and longstanding financial difficulty. So I think that's, you and I are on the same page with regard
00:07:34.240 | to the importance of personal responsibility and how you literally can't get out of poverty or get
00:07:40.160 | out of debt without that. But I think where we part ways, and my biggest argument is, I believe
00:07:45.920 | there's a significant portion of people in this country who are not able to get out of debt,
00:07:51.360 | are not able to get out of poverty, whatever the color of their skin, whatever their gender.
00:07:57.120 | And they are highly responsible people. It's not because they're being stupid with their cable
00:08:03.440 | bill. There's a way bigger, slow-moving debt crisis happening in our country right now.
00:08:10.560 | But it has nothing to do with personal responsibility. It has a lot to do
00:08:15.200 | just with the way that our economy runs, to be honest. We run on debt.
00:08:22.640 | So then when I published a podcast episode with the title, the thesis of the show was
00:08:31.040 | encapsulated in the title, "If missing one paycheck is a problem for you, you're behaving stupidly,"
00:08:36.960 | it sounds like what you're saying is that's very frustrating because for somebody who is
00:08:42.800 | working hard, they feel as though they're expressing personal responsibility, but they're
00:08:47.200 | still going to be very much pinched financially if they miss a paycheck. Then it sounds like
00:08:52.400 | that's very frustrating to you because you believe that's exactly the wrong thing to say to someone
00:08:57.520 | who's in that situation. Is that what you're saying? >> Yes, exactly. I would amplify that by
00:09:04.000 | saying I don't object to it just because like, "Oh, it's a mean thing to say," but because if
00:09:10.080 | you're being very pragmatic and very hard-headed about how you want to reach people who are in
00:09:14.800 | trouble, if you start with that, I think their shame is going to prevent them from learning.
00:09:22.000 | Their shame is going to prevent them from getting anywhere, particularly where,
00:09:26.240 | as has been the case for people that I've known, they're doing all the right things already.
00:09:35.840 | You can imagine how frustrating it is for one of the people profiled in the NPR piece that you were
00:09:42.880 | looking at, the single mother whose kid is in college who's been working for TSA for 16 years.
00:09:48.320 | And your response was, "Hey, if you've been working there for 16 years, you've had time
00:09:52.880 | to figure this out." I'm here to tell you it's not that easy for a single mother. I was a single
00:09:59.360 | mother. I actually do have a kid in college. I'm no longer a single mother. But for over 10 years,
00:10:06.160 | I was widowed. I was working, but I wasn't in a great place for career advancement. I didn't
00:10:12.560 | have a lot of energy to get my act together. It just happens. It wasn't because I was having
00:10:18.240 | steak dinners or running up my cable bill. It was a little bit more basic than that.
00:10:23.440 | So you can imagine how frustrating it is to have someone come along and say, "Well,
00:10:26.720 | you've just been stupid for 16 years." It's like way to negate my entire existence. Do you have
00:10:33.920 | any idea? It's not as simple as take the bus. I'm already taking the bus. It's not as simple as
00:10:39.520 | stockpile insulin. My drug, my pharmacy won't give me more insulin than we need for a month.
00:10:47.680 | And I can't afford to buy it from Mexico. So these are the very real concerns people,
00:10:53.440 | I think, have when they're told, "You've just been stupid."
00:10:58.080 | Right? So let's assume the fact. Let's talk about the mother that was reported in the NPR story. I
00:11:04.320 | forget her name. But let's assume that you're speaking to somebody. And so if you were given
00:11:09.680 | the same platform that I have, and you feel like my shaming that mother and using strong and
00:11:17.200 | emphatic language, things like that, is inappropriate, what would you say if given the
00:11:22.960 | chance to speak to that mother? Yeah. Well, it's very... Gosh. I mean, I think the first thing is
00:11:29.440 | I would relate my own experience to hers. And so I don't want to pry, Joshua, but I always love
00:11:34.800 | people's life stories. And so I'm imagining you have some really difficult things that have
00:11:38.960 | happened to you in your life. In fact, I would hazard to say most of us who are doing personal
00:11:43.360 | finance work, it's partly because we haven't liked that feeling of being helpless. And we want to
00:11:49.440 | help other people feel less helpless. And so I would probably, though, come at it from a
00:11:55.360 | "Not only have I been there, but I'm still there" point of view. I don't know how much you've
00:12:01.760 | followed. I'm not a new blogger, but I'm very new at the project that I'm working on now,
00:12:06.800 | because I've been in chronic debt for about 20 years. And I'm just being a very, very, very
00:12:12.480 | and I'm just being transparent about that. And I'm saying, I've learned a ton of good stuff about
00:12:18.240 | managing money, and I'm on a path to become debt free. But don't come to me for advice about how
00:12:25.520 | to get out of debt. Do come to me for advice about how to just live your life and keep going and not
00:12:30.240 | get in trouble and eventually find your way out. So I think I would never paint myself as having
00:12:38.720 | the expertise to tell that woman how to live her life, but just show her my life and see if there
00:12:46.320 | are things from my life that she can adapt that she would be interested in, if that makes sense.
00:12:51.120 | It's a very interesting question, because I think I do perceive some parallels with her.
00:12:57.920 | I definitely felt like, what if that were me? What would I do?
00:13:03.760 | One thing that I have done, I'll just add this because it is advice. I've had to shift gears
00:13:08.560 | lately. I now have one full-time job and some gigs. But for about 20 years, I was self-employed,
00:13:15.760 | and I never felt comfortable having just one job. And a lot of us who work in this world talk about
00:13:22.240 | stackable income. I think it's crucial. It's really crucial. But that's not the same as saying
00:13:27.360 | to her like, what were you thinking not having a second job? If that makes sense.
00:13:32.960 | Yes. So one of our questions here is basically communication methodology,
00:13:39.440 | displays of empathy. How do you show somebody that you care about them? When do you be direct
00:13:45.600 | and metaphorically slap someone across the face? When do you come alongside and sit and cry with
00:13:51.200 | somebody? That's basically a communications methodology. And I was going to go on to
00:13:57.440 | another point. Let me go ahead and respond to that briefly. So I wholeheartedly agree with you
00:14:03.520 | in terms of moderating one's tone when communicating with people. I think any of us
00:14:11.360 | who've sought to work with people have learned that one particular tack is not effective in all
00:14:18.560 | circumstances. I think there are times in which you metaphorically want to slap somebody across
00:14:25.680 | the face. There are times in which that can be an effective communication tactic.
00:14:29.440 | There are times in which that's exactly the worst thing that you could possibly do.
00:14:33.200 | And if you do that in that circumstance, then you can really cause all kinds of problems and really
00:14:41.520 | hurt somebody. And so in general, when you create content for a public audience, it's very difficult
00:14:48.000 | to know who the person who is listening to that content will be. So I'll concede here fully and
00:14:54.720 | clearly that I took in that podcast an extremely blunt and perhaps intentionally inflammatory tone
00:15:02.640 | in an intense effort to trigger somebody to confront somebody with a very clear and specific
00:15:12.880 | argument. And I did that intentionally. And I have a graphic designer who prepares all of my artwork
00:15:20.400 | for my shows, and I send her over my titles, and she got that title. She's like, "Wow, that doesn't
00:15:24.880 | sound very nice." And I said, "Well, I don't know." And I would say specifically, this is definitely
00:15:31.200 | one thing where men are very different than women. And in general, my bias, if I'm speaking to a
00:15:36.160 | woman, if I'm speaking to the single mom in that story, I would generally be much more soft, much
00:15:42.880 | more empathetic in my approach. If I were speaking to a man, I would also seek to be empathetic,
00:15:48.960 | but I would default more quickly to a direct confrontation, because a lot of times that's
00:15:57.360 | more effective with men. So we never know. And so my hope in creating a show like that, my hope is
00:16:05.440 | that it would be effective at breaking through. And sometimes, when I think back to many of the
00:16:12.320 | stupid things that I have done and the times when I have behaved stupidly, sometimes you don't see it
00:16:18.240 | until you get very emotionally intense about it. And so I wholeheartedly concede that that
00:16:24.800 | particular tone was recorded – sorry, that particular show was intended to be inflammatory,
00:16:31.760 | it was intended to be confrontational, it was intended to make somebody think in a very
00:16:38.080 | kind of loud and direct way. So I concede that point. I'll give you a chance to comment,
00:16:44.720 | and I want to move on from there. Any comment on that? Yeah, a couple things maybe that we'll come
00:16:50.080 | back to. I agree with you totally about the methodology. I think a lot about how we all have
00:16:57.840 | to build personas for ourselves, whether you're a blogger or not, even just an ordinary person with
00:17:04.480 | a Twitter. Build a little bit of a persona for who they represent themselves to be in those social
00:17:10.400 | settings versus like – we're all much more complex than that, obviously. But I think related
00:17:15.920 | to that, and if we can come back to this if we have time, it would be great, is yes, methodology,
00:17:20.880 | it's sort of different approaches, and I think gender differences sometimes, intentional
00:17:26.480 | differences, but then also there's a sort of set of assumptions. I singled you out, but really it
00:17:33.920 | was part of a bigger pattern that has been centuries in the making in the United States,
00:17:38.800 | which has to do with being only about personal responsibility and losing a lot of the nuance
00:17:46.320 | about what happens in larger contexts. That's a huge thing to unpack, so we can come back to it.
00:17:53.520 | Maybe it's even its own other conversation. I don't know. But glad to just kind of put a marker
00:18:00.480 | on that. It's like the assumptions we're making about personal responsibility and then come back
00:18:04.400 | to it later. Well, I think that fits into where I'd like to go from here because any long-term
00:18:10.640 | listener of radical personal finance would know and be familiar with how I seek to keep things
00:18:18.880 | quite varied. So sometimes I do very light, fluffy content. Sometimes I do very heavy content. I try
00:18:25.200 | to keep the show interesting, and as a broadcaster, of course, that's always a challenge to know.
00:18:31.120 | So I think we can agree that I was extremely blunt. But this is where I do want to go on
00:18:36.640 | and speak to specifically what I said and also specifically to kind of the broader impact of
00:18:45.680 | that. So the premise of my show, the argument that I advanced, was very specific, and it was
00:18:51.200 | summed up in the title. Quote, "If missing one paycheck is a problem for you, you're behaving
00:19:00.320 | stupidly." And of course, that wouldn't be true 100% of the time. I tried to provide at least one
00:19:07.600 | or two very simple examples of caveats. If somebody has newly employed, for example, and they haven't
00:19:14.000 | had a chance to – this is their very first paycheck, right? They just got hired,
00:19:19.680 | and all of a sudden their job shuts down, and they were desperate for that paycheck. I think most of
00:19:24.800 | us have been there where you're asking your boss and you're saying, "Please, can I have just a
00:19:28.080 | short advance on my paycheck?" Certainly. Then the lack of being able to make it through one paycheck
00:19:34.080 | is not a measure of stupidity. It's a measure of – sorry – of behaving stupidly. I want to be
00:19:39.680 | careful because I'm using "stupidly" as an adverb, just simply describing behavior, not people.
00:19:47.040 | But certainly in those situations, it's extremely understandable. But that argument is very,
00:19:54.720 | very clear. So do you agree or disagree or how much do you agree with my argument that if you
00:20:02.800 | have been in a situation where you've been earning income, you've been working in a government job,
00:20:06.720 | etc., that if missing one paycheck is a problem for you, you are doing it incorrectly, and you
00:20:13.920 | can't expect anything but problems because you're living so close to the line? What are your
00:20:18.240 | thoughts in terms of do you agree with the argument? >> I would love to say that I do,
00:20:24.240 | because as I mentioned, I really am a huge fan of personal responsibility and of planning and
00:20:30.720 | of saving and all of those things. So I wish that I could say that. But as we're talking,
00:20:35.840 | I'm sitting here looking at something called the Housing Plus Transportation Index. This is
00:20:40.720 | an incredible instrument. I highly recommend if you love to geek out and play with numbers,
00:20:46.400 | it's htaindex.c as in cat, n as in neighborhood, t as in tragedy.org. And I'll send you the link
00:20:56.560 | for your readers after this. What you can do here is you can plug in any city you'd like,
00:21:01.600 | and it will tell you what housing plus transportation costs on average for people
00:21:07.600 | living in that city. So I'm looking at San Francisco, and most people living in San Francisco
00:21:12.480 | are spending 41% of their income. So that's an average, right? So some people are spending a
00:21:18.880 | lot more, some people less. 41% of their take-home income is going only to housing and transportation.
00:21:26.240 | In Dallas, it's 44%. In Cleveland, it's 39%. I can put in any city you'd like. We can find out.
00:21:34.240 | It gets kind of addictive to look at this. But you kind of get the gist of my point, which is
00:21:39.040 | for most people in America, I don't know, 50 years ago, maybe 15% or 20% of their paycheck was spent
00:21:50.240 | on these things. Now, and don't quote me on that one, because I haven't looked that up, but it's
00:21:54.960 | just sort of general rule of thumb. It was a lot less to live and travel in America about 50 years
00:22:03.200 | ago. Now people are spending sometimes close to half what they're bringing home just on that.
00:22:09.600 | So that's one among several reasons why I would tend to disagree with you. The other being that
00:22:18.720 | there's a dimension of this that disproportionately hits women, single parents, people of color who
00:22:27.920 | are already earning less, not because of educational attainment, but just because of
00:22:33.920 | discriminatory practices. There are people with disabilities, people whose gender is not either
00:22:42.320 | man or woman, people who identify as gay or lesbian. They may be in and out of work, but if
00:22:51.200 | they are holding down jobs, they may not have access to all the terrific jobs that other people
00:22:55.760 | have. And they're spending about 40 to 50% sometimes before they even get home. So in that
00:23:05.760 | scenario, it becomes really difficult. And mind you, if you have one setback, 40% of Americans,
00:23:12.240 | this is a much quoted cited figure, 40% of Americans are about $400 away from disaster if
00:23:21.040 | they have an emergency. When you have that level of people in America who are not saving, I don't
00:23:26.960 | think we can anymore blame like, "Oh, everybody's lost the saving habit." There's actually some
00:23:32.800 | functional things that are happening. One of them being that it no longer pays well to have a little
00:23:38.960 | bit of savings in a passbook account, which is what my parents raised me to do. It's like, "Put
00:23:43.680 | aside a little bit in a passbook account. You'll get 4% interest." Well, if you're lucky and you're
00:23:48.480 | really smart, you'll get 2% interest now. And most people don't have enough money. I wouldn't say
00:23:54.560 | most, but many, many people don't have enough money to invest in a mutual fund. You usually
00:23:59.360 | have to have... This isn't always true, but often you have to have about $1,000 to get into a mutual
00:24:05.440 | fund. Thankfully, places like Acorns and others are changing that. I know I'm rambling a bit and
00:24:12.880 | bringing in a lot of different factors. I hope you can edit me to sound really super smart, but
00:24:18.320 | my main takeaway is when I started... I come at this from a place of deep shame myself because
00:24:24.560 | I've had a lot of advantages and yet I was just in a lot of debt, partly because of personal
00:24:30.080 | situations and partly, I think, because of some bad decisions. When I really began to look at how
00:24:36.320 | hard it is to save every month, that is number one when I started to get really interested in
00:24:43.600 | personal finance and started to teach myself things. But it's also when I think I developed
00:24:48.640 | a real... I no longer could say it was just stupidity. I couldn't in good conscience say
00:24:56.560 | people are living paycheck to paycheck because they're just not planning well.
00:25:00.160 | I think good planning can help. If I didn't think that, I wouldn't be participating in the personal
00:25:07.440 | finance community. But I do think the way to approach it is not to presume that the individual
00:25:13.840 | is at fault. So that's a very long way of saying, "I wish I could agree with you and I don't agree."
00:25:20.960 | >> Andrew: Understood. So that's entirely fine. So let me share a few thoughts for you to consider
00:25:25.920 | and we'll see if we wind up in any common solutions or if we're very far apart. So first,
00:25:35.920 | I concede, without question, I concede that the United States of 2019 is different, very different,
00:25:45.200 | than the United States of 1919 or of 1989 or any year that you want to face. I concede that point.
00:25:51.840 | I concede the point that costs are extremely high. As far as I can tell, the housing and
00:25:59.360 | transportation index affordability scale is entirely accurate. I concede the point that
00:26:06.560 | different people have different advantages in life. Some people have more advantages than others.
00:26:11.600 | I concede that point. I concede the point that many people have experienced intense trauma that
00:26:17.760 | makes them psychologically unequipped or poorly equipped to deal with the challenges of the modern
00:26:23.920 | world. I concede all of those points. And yet, once we go through that, you still have to come
00:26:31.360 | to a point of saying, "Well, what do I do?" And I also happily concede that personal responsibility
00:26:39.280 | is not a panacea. It's not something that just simply solves everything. You can take personal
00:26:47.680 | responsibility. I could take personal responsibility for everything in my life and still be diagnosed
00:26:54.640 | with cancer. It happens all the time. I could take personal responsibility for everything that
00:26:59.280 | happens in my life, be hit by a drunk driver, and become a quadriplegic. So we all have to concede,
00:27:06.000 | as is in some ways obvious, but of course useful to acknowledge, that things happen that we're not
00:27:14.560 | in control of. And yet, we have to choose to respond. And so what I'm trying to do is to incite
00:27:23.520 | somebody, to shock somebody, to say, "You know what? Even when my circumstances stink, even when
00:27:33.600 | I live in an expensive place, I am choosing to live here." Because with the exception of somebody
00:27:40.240 | who is a physical slave, somebody who's a sex slave, or who's physically locked up, or who's
00:27:46.800 | jailed in San Francisco, in the San Francisco County Jail, everybody who lives in San Francisco
00:27:52.560 | chooses to live in San Francisco. Now, they choose for different reasons. Some people live there
00:27:56.880 | because they like it. Some people live there because that's the only place they can think
00:28:00.080 | they can find a job. But that is a conscious choice. And so in choosing to live there,
00:28:05.840 | every person who lives in San Francisco is making the choice to accept this extreme
00:28:11.520 | unaffordability. Every person who chooses to live in Des Moines, Iowa, or in, I don't know,
00:28:18.160 | you pick the city, we all choose to live there. Every one of us who chooses to live in the United
00:28:21.760 | States of America, we choose to live there. And so even if everything is against us, even if we
00:28:28.480 | are complete victims, the only rational response is to say, "What choice can I make?" And I'm happy—
00:28:37.200 | - Yes, I would interrupt and say, "Choice says," because if you can't make that one,
00:28:42.400 | you might make another one. - Fair enough. Fair enough.
00:28:44.480 | So what choices can I make given my constraints? And what I find very frustrating,
00:28:53.200 | and I'm perceiving this, and so feel free to correct me if I'm projecting something onto you
00:28:59.360 | and to something similar to the arguments. What I find deeply frustrating is if you don't offer
00:29:06.320 | somebody something that they can actually do, then nothing ever gets better. Now, I have not
00:29:12.960 | reviewed your work on budgeting, et cetera, but what I mean is it's fine to begin with empathy.
00:29:18.480 | Great, we need that. It's fine to begin with understanding. We need that. It's fine to begin
00:29:23.760 | with acknowledgments of trauma. That's great. But at the end of the day, nothing about any of those
00:29:30.480 | things is going to change the actual circumstance that somebody is in. Maybe there's a small
00:29:36.320 | argument you could say if somebody feels validated and affirmed and psychologically
00:29:41.120 | in a better state, then maybe they'll be able to get up and go to work better the next day.
00:29:46.640 | True. But all of those things basically lead to a continuing, a constant and perpetual continuing
00:29:53.920 | of a culture of victimhood, where instead of saying, "What small choice can I make
00:29:59.040 | in this circumstance?" Because for every single person in a brutal situation, for every single
00:30:06.480 | mother who just doesn't earn a lot of money and is discriminated against by everyone and is
00:30:12.320 | handicapped and doesn't have money and they can't save money and they're completely behind there,
00:30:17.520 | we can point to somebody else who has those exact same situations and they're scrimping and
00:30:22.720 | scrapping and some little bit is getting tucked aside. If we're talking about money, the point I
00:30:27.520 | made, they're setting something aside. They're doing something so that they're not at the risk
00:30:33.120 | of one single paycheck. And at the end of the day, that has to be acknowledged if we're ever
00:30:38.560 | going to make any progress. Go ahead. I don't think you and I disagree very much
00:30:45.520 | at all. I think it really is semantics or a little bit of a different worldview, but
00:30:51.280 | we arrive at similar places. Thank you for admitting you haven't yet read my work at the
00:31:00.080 | traumatized budget, which is currently in beta. It's on medium. And eventually I'll shift to a
00:31:08.880 | website if it feels like enough people really want to hear things the way I'm doing them. But I
00:31:14.960 | definitely don't groove out on victimhood. Nor do a lot of the people that I really resilient people
00:31:23.680 | that I've come in contact with who have been living paycheck to paycheck, have been dealing
00:31:28.000 | with debt. I sometimes say, you actually, if you want to know how to like hack your grocery list
00:31:33.760 | and make things work, ask a poor person. If you, you know, sort of one of the pieces of advice you
00:31:39.600 | gave in your podcast was, you know, you could go to your neighbor and say, my children are hungry
00:31:43.920 | and they'll feed you. And I'm like, yes, a poor person already knows that. Like they've done that
00:31:49.120 | many times over. So there's, I think the difference is to not that you're doing this, but the
00:31:56.400 | assumption that it's either or. Either it's all about, like, if I bring up someone's disadvantages,
00:32:02.240 | especially if I do it in my intersectional feminist way, and we're talking about race,
00:32:07.920 | we're talking about gender, and we're talking about sexual preference. I think a lot of people
00:32:12.000 | will hear that and they'll be like, you're just making excuses. You're just, you know,
00:32:16.000 | coming from this, like, you know, safe space culture, like, you know, sit down and grow a spine.
00:32:23.040 | I don't think that having a spine is necessarily the opposite of what I talk about when I talk
00:32:31.440 | about some people have had some different difficulties getting to where some of us start.
00:32:37.680 | You know, some of us start out at a place we take for granted that there was a little wealth in our
00:32:42.880 | family. We were able to go to dad for, you know, to loan us a thousand bucks for something. And
00:32:48.320 | some people don't have that. I think you can have both understandings coexist. In other words,
00:32:57.520 | you can acknowledge someone's difficulties and that they didn't start at the same spot in the race,
00:33:02.000 | and you can inspire them. What choices do you have? Make those choices. You can do both. And that's
00:33:09.920 | what I'm hoping to do. So what I actually, since you asked about my work, what I do with the little
00:33:18.080 | posts that I've been putting up is I try always to have really pragmatic, immediate advice, like,
00:33:25.760 | do this and do this. And it's hard because I'm also not painting myself as a great expert. I'm
00:33:32.960 | just a fellow traveler, but there's some things I've learned how to do. But I always try to focus
00:33:38.000 | on what can I give this person right now who's drowning? They don't need my sympathy. They need
00:33:44.000 | a rope. You know, like, they need to get out of the drowning. So I don't know if that makes sense
00:33:50.000 | to you. But, you know, and you've alluded to kind of sort of the current sociopolitical moment. I
00:33:56.560 | think like you, there are many times that I'm just wringing my hands because I feel like people are
00:34:01.440 | not talking with one another. And so often we share values. We share a lot of values. And so
00:34:07.280 | I'm really excited to be able to talk with someone who's really focused on the personal
00:34:14.400 | responsibility end of the spectrum, where I'm really focused on the, you know, kind of big
00:34:21.200 | picture context that individuals have to operate in. Because I think you and I can learn so much
00:34:28.960 | from one another. I've learned so much already from this conversation. Yeah. So one comment on
00:34:35.600 | kind of solutions. One thing that you haven't done, which I expected, is you haven't thus far
00:34:42.960 | taken on an overt political tone in any of the comments that you've made,
00:34:48.320 | which is what I expected. Because most of the time when I receive feedback such as yours,
00:34:53.520 | usually people generally are seeking to say, "Well, you should advocate for a political position. You
00:35:00.880 | should advocate for, you know, after all, if President Trump would just make a different
00:35:05.520 | choice, then he could open up the government and then that would alleviate the suffering of these
00:35:08.880 | people. Or if you come from the other end of the political spectrum, if Senator Schumer or Speaker
00:35:15.440 | Pelosi would just, you know, open up the government, then that would solve a solution." Basically,
00:35:20.800 | so I want to first, you're welcome to comment on it, but I'll tell you why I think almost any kind
00:35:28.640 | of conversation or anything that paints, you know, so-called sympathy or, I didn't mean to say so-
00:35:36.560 | called sympathy, anything that just focuses on the victimhood or the alleged victimhood of people who
00:35:42.960 | are working for their federal government is because it's an impossibility in terms of changing the
00:35:48.400 | political system is an impossibility. In some ways, the people who are working for the federal
00:35:56.640 | government and to find their lives disrupted probably ought to be thankful because usually
00:36:00.720 | when people are political pawns, they're usually marched off to war and sent off to some, you know,
00:36:05.680 | forgotten corner of the world to die for the political ambitions of the politicians in charge.
00:36:10.400 | So, not getting paid is probably better than being sent off to war. So, we can be thankful
00:36:15.120 | that this is the way that this particular TIF is being worked out. But at the end of the day,
00:36:20.640 | when you cut through all that stuff, it just, it seems to me that, and I concede it's important,
00:36:26.720 | especially in interpersonal communication, it's very important to just acknowledge
00:36:31.520 | where somebody's coming from because it certainly can feel extremely raw to not acknowledge where
00:36:42.080 | somebody is coming from in terms of the challenge that they're facing in interpersonal communication.
00:36:47.840 | At the end of the day, the only solution is for each person to recognize, and that's why I tried
00:36:51.360 | to focus on, if you are working for the federal government and you're expecting to be paid long
00:36:58.000 | term, it's hard for me to imagine what you're thinking. Now, you may have your own reasons
00:37:03.920 | for doing it, but to expecting to be paid long term, expecting your pension to be paid out long
00:37:08.800 | term, this is, it's not reality. And so, I don't mind bearing a little bit of the burden of being
00:37:18.800 | somebody who is speaking bluntly to try to say, "You gotta face reality. If you didn't see this
00:37:25.360 | coming, it's not because you weren't affirmed, it was because you weren't paying attention."
00:37:30.720 | And how can we not pay attention to one of the most important things of our life,
00:37:35.280 | which is our income stream? Yeah, I listened to, and probably will listen again to that portion of
00:37:42.800 | the podcast. As you can imagine, living here where, even though I've never worked in the
00:37:48.480 | government, it's sort of all around me. I'm aware of the relationship between this particular
00:37:56.400 | metropolitan region and the federal government. And it really gave me pause. And it's funny,
00:38:01.760 | I've been thinking about it since because this is going to make you laugh, but it actually has not
00:38:06.800 | ever dawned on me, even knowing that the federal government has been in some crisis. It's never
00:38:13.840 | dawned on me that a federal job is now not a secure job anymore because of the many shutdowns
00:38:21.440 | and the political maneuvering, what have you. I chalk that sort of ignorance of mine up to age
00:38:27.920 | a little bit. And by ignorance, I don't say that I necessarily agree with you, but I definitely
00:38:33.120 | am giving it a lot of thought. So I was born actually the same year that John F. Kennedy was
00:38:41.360 | killed. So I've been around for a while, and I actually have a memory of a government, federal
00:38:46.480 | government that worked better than this one did. I was doing a fellowship, I was in my 20s, when
00:38:53.760 | Newt Gingrich led the charge for the first really significant shutdown that the government had had
00:39:00.240 | for a very long time. And it was really the first time that it was used in such a highly political,
00:39:05.360 | kind of as a bargaining tool. It didn't work, but they keep trying it, you know. And I've lost count
00:39:12.960 | of how many shutdowns there have been since then. I guess there's a part of me that's like feeling
00:39:17.760 | hopeful that perhaps we'll renew that commitment to politics across the aisle and to people,
00:39:25.360 | co-sponsors from different parties, good heavens, if that could ever happen again, passing bills and
00:39:32.000 | kind of like making things work. Maybe I was naive even then, you know what I mean? Maybe I was
00:39:38.720 | even then sort of over-believing in federal government. But I do feel, you know, I feel
00:39:46.880 | that you have a point, and I'm just, I'm sitting with it, you know, because I don't
00:39:55.680 | kind of know what would come next or how we would, how things would work. We're really
00:40:03.360 | relearning how federal, state, and local government can or should work with one another.
00:40:09.760 | You know, cities now are taking on the majority of the work around climate adaptation, and nobody
00:40:17.520 | could have foreseen that. But that's what's happening because the federal government's
00:40:21.200 | not doing a whole lot. So. - Well, I appreciate you're considering it. And I think we all,
00:40:27.200 | especially those of us who have a political bone, I think most of us would desire for there to be
00:40:34.960 | an ability for people to talk, which is why I invited you on the show today. I don't,
00:40:41.360 | I've argued with plenty of people on Twitter, but I don't find it to be particularly productive,
00:40:45.120 | because it tends to be an echo chamber where we go and try to find who we can. And, you know,
00:40:50.720 | I thought about, in responding to your tweet thread, I thought about responding point by point
00:40:57.120 | and, pardon the hubris in the statement, but point by point trying to tear you to shreds,
00:41:06.960 | you know, because I wrote down each of, you know, I wrote down each of the logical fallacies in your
00:41:15.360 | comments and blah, blah, blah. And I could do that, but I don't see that as being particularly
00:41:18.560 | productive. And I thought this would be a more interesting way to discuss it. So, I think most
00:41:23.280 | of us do look for it. But unfortunately, I would say what I try to do is look at the hard facts.
00:41:30.720 | And my concern is that we, that seems to be difficult to do. And I haven't gotten to it yet,
00:41:39.600 | but my first, it was supposed to be before Christmas, I was going to do yet another show,
00:41:43.600 | which is a common theme in radical personal finance, yet another show on the federal debt.
00:41:48.160 | You know, we are in an incredible territory for the last year. In 2018, the federal deficit was
00:41:54.720 | almost a trillion dollars, and it is on track for that in 2019. And yet, you know, we're arguing
00:42:00.960 | about 5.7 billion dollars over funding for a border wall and ignoring a trillion dollar deficit.
00:42:09.200 | And unfortunately, basically, we have two political parties, those who want to spend
00:42:15.040 | all the money times three and those that want to spend all the money times two. And there's really
00:42:19.600 | no functional difference between those because at the end of the day, we're past all the money,
00:42:23.600 | the money's gone, the money's run out. And even the federal budget shutdown, one of the things
00:42:28.640 | that's happened in the last 50 years, and the difference between JFK is if you, versus an
00:42:33.920 | administration like JFK versus today, it used to be that a US president in his executive power to
00:42:41.120 | be able to direct things and the Congress and their budget allocations, they had a huge amount
00:42:45.360 | of control over the money. In turn, what I mean is specifically the percentage of federal spending
00:42:52.000 | that was discretionary was very large, whereas today, the total discretionary spending is
00:42:57.520 | something like, I don't have the charts in front of me, but this is directionally accurate,
00:43:00.960 | something like 25 or 30% of the federal budget. So that means that instead of having large,
00:43:06.960 | grand sweeping political agendas, I'm going to run on this particular thing, I'm going to get
00:43:11.360 | elected into office, and we're going to radically divert the federal budget. At this point,
00:43:16.560 | the federal budget is so constrained by the entitlement programs and by defense spending,
00:43:21.840 | that the most that a US president can affect or the most a US congressman can decide about
00:43:26.640 | is really only a small piece of the pie, it's 25 or 30%. And so it is absurd that we have these
00:43:34.720 | arguments. It's absurd that we are engaging in a $5.7 billion argument, which is,
00:43:41.280 | I don't know what metaphor to draw, what analogy to use to show how meaningless that is and the
00:43:49.280 | trillions of dollars that is the federal budget, but that is the moment that we're in, unfortunately.
00:43:54.640 | And I guess to close this particular thought stream out, I would just say,
00:44:02.000 | I don't see any possible way that it improves. I don't see any change. I don't see any solution.
00:44:08.640 | I see no possible way that it improves. So my pragmatic solution is, assume as we live in the
00:44:16.160 | sunset of the American empire, and as we face the decline and collapse of the American empire,
00:44:22.080 | now, how do you and I as individuals succeed in the face of collapse? And how do we help
00:44:30.000 | those around us who we can affect succeed in the face of collapse? And that's my question.
00:44:34.320 | I assume at this point that it's a fact that the American empire will die and is dying,
00:44:40.960 | and it will take several decades until it ultimately dies. Now, how do I help individual
00:44:45.680 | people prosper in the face of that? Because at the end of the day, when somebody is disabled
00:44:53.760 | and they're depending on that social security disability paycheck for everything that they have,
00:44:58.800 | and they can't work, at the end of the day, that person's life is still important when the federal
00:45:04.480 | government runs out of money. So I've still got to figure out how to help care for them when the
00:45:09.040 | federal government runs out of money. I can't fix the federal government, but I can work on trying
00:45:12.880 | to help that person. -
00:45:15.000 | Is this, I'm taking it all in, but I'm assuming it's a rhetorical statement. I'm not sure you
00:45:22.720 | need anything from me on this just now, do you? - No, yeah, correct. I just was giving you an
00:45:27.840 | opportunity to, if you have any response, I was just giving you an opportunity to respond.
00:45:32.240 | - I do have some thoughts. They're not especially well-formulated, so I don't spend very much of my
00:45:39.440 | time. Interestingly, I do spend a lot of my time on the macro forces that have brought us to this
00:45:47.920 | moment. So that could be a productive, interesting conversation for us one day. I haven't spent as
00:45:54.400 | much time thinking about what's next or how that's going to play out at a really big picture level,
00:46:01.920 | the way you're thinking about it. So it's interesting. I think you and I are kind of
00:46:05.520 | meeting at the fork of the road, and I've given a lot of thought, not nearly enough yet, but a lot
00:46:12.160 | of thought actually to the concept of American empire and how deeply flawed and messed up that
00:46:20.480 | was to begin with, and what it was based on was economically and humanely unsustainable.
00:46:27.440 | And no empire can go on forever because they're always based on some essential,
00:46:36.480 | there's a word just at the tip of my tongue, but just some essential
00:46:45.600 | taking advantage of, there are haves and have-nots in every empire, right? A lot of have-nots
00:46:53.360 | working, passing up the wealth to the haves, that's my feeling. And because that's gotten us
00:47:01.520 | to where we are, other forces have gotten us to what you're talking about, but here we are,
00:47:06.800 | we're about to lose it all, and I think you are probably right that we are about to lose it all.
00:47:11.840 | My hope would be, could we possibly get ourselves to more of a collaborative model of all the
00:47:20.320 | things in your podcast, the one that really sticks with me right now is, if you're out of food,
00:47:25.920 | you live in a wealthy country and you can go to a neighbor and you can ask that neighbor to take
00:47:30.400 | you to the store. I don't think that's true for every single person, but it's true for enough of
00:47:35.520 | us that I could go to my neighbor and she could say, "I have extra potatoes." Maybe, just maybe,
00:47:44.080 | we have a shot at being that kind of America, I don't know. I would hope that we would,
00:47:51.600 | when everything fell apart in 2008, I was looking at how frugal people were becoming and how
00:47:57.600 | collaborative they were becoming, and it was like the first blush of the sharing economy,
00:48:02.240 | and it really did feel like it was sharing at that point. It wasn't just driven by money.
00:48:06.560 | I was like, "Wow, could we become those people, the people who share? That could be really amazing."
00:48:12.720 | Pollyanna, but that's where I'm at.
00:48:16.800 | I certainly do hope it, and I would say, in general, when neighbors talk to neighbors
00:48:24.640 | and work with neighbors and don't just yell at one another, in general, the solutions are common,
00:48:32.480 | and it does exist. And one of the just the basic, my diagnosis of, of course,
00:48:41.600 | it would be foolish to think that any one thing is what causes the problems, just like it would
00:48:48.560 | be foolish just in any kind of physical ailment. I think one of the aspects of myopia in the modern
00:48:54.960 | kind of Western system of medicine is we try to identify one thing and say, "Well, this one
00:49:00.240 | particular thing is causing this other one specific problem," but the body is a whole organism,
00:49:04.720 | and so there may be a multitude of factors and symptoms are expressed in different ways,
00:49:09.040 | and they might have common causes or they might not. In the same way, when I analyze a society,
00:49:16.400 | I see that there are, well, I identify multiple things, but I do think one of the aspects of it,
00:49:25.040 | and this is where you get the political arguments between classical conservative arguments and
00:49:30.400 | classical liberal arguments and the place of the state, etc., which is certainly in today's
00:49:37.200 | political climate, this is not particularly a common argument, but I look at it down to
00:49:45.040 | – I look and think about the doctrine of subsidiarity, which is basically the idea that
00:49:53.600 | if something can be handled on a small and local level, that's the best place for it. And I would
00:49:59.600 | say many of these pains that we are facing are – or can be caused by the fact that we're trying
00:50:07.520 | to handle things on too large of a level. For example, this is why I'm opposed to all entitlement
00:50:13.520 | programs. I'm opposed – personally, I'm opposed to all welfare programs, and the reason is that a
00:50:19.280 | large government bureaucracy doesn't have the capacity to identify if somebody is in truly
00:50:25.920 | in need and they're in need of charity or if somebody is choosing to go without – sorry,
00:50:33.200 | somebody is choosing because of personal laziness or lack of personal responsibility, etc. So you
00:50:39.120 | and I as individuals, if we go and interact with our neighbors, we can go and we can see and we
00:50:43.520 | can say, "Man, this person is in a rough spot," and we can open up our storehouses and dispense
00:50:50.320 | copious charity without any reservation, recognizing that they simply need help.
00:50:55.680 | But on the other hand, we can go to our neighbor and the neighbor is asking us for help and we
00:50:59.440 | can identify, "Wait a second. This person doesn't actually need help. What they actually need is to
00:51:03.600 | get a job. They need to get to work. They're lazy, and I'm not going to facilitate this behavior."
00:51:07.600 | And so individuals can make that kind of choice, whereas a government bureaucrat,
00:51:11.920 | it doesn't have the – number one, it's not possible for them to either gather the data
00:51:16.400 | because they have to have a standardized process and a set of intake forms, etc.,
00:51:20.080 | but they have to have a standardized process, and they're not allowed to make those kinds
00:51:25.200 | of decisions because government is supposed to serve all. And so, I mean, we all have different
00:51:30.240 | – >> Well, I think there's a partnership that needs to develop because I actually think there's
00:51:37.040 | a role for a larger government to figure out, in collaboration with local and state governments,
00:51:45.360 | some standards, and certainly the federal government has to enforce the Constitution.
00:51:49.760 | And I made a very similar argument not too long ago and was brought to heel
00:51:59.840 | by some considerations around, for example, we see that, again, it goes back to who you are in
00:52:11.120 | your body, what risks you might run. A person like me feels perfectly at home in my neighborhood,
00:52:20.000 | and I'm just doing great, and local government's good for me. But in other situations where you
00:52:27.120 | have local governments that have been corrupt, that have had brutal policing strategies, that
00:52:35.360 | have done stop-and-frisk type things at will, and they don't feel like they have any oversight,
00:52:40.800 | they don't have to answer to anyone, suddenly it does become important to have a feeling of
00:52:48.160 | accountability, and I think that's where a better federal government could play a better role,
00:52:54.640 | is in exerting some accountability, some common standards, some shared standards.
00:52:59.120 | And I know that's very controversial and super liberal, and I'll own it, but I will say,
00:53:04.160 | I work in a field where local decision-making is the most important thing, and I love what you're
00:53:13.600 | saying so completely, but also there's this delicate partnership that has to do with local
00:53:21.120 | accountability that I think we should keep in mind as well, if that makes sense.
00:53:26.720 | >> JF: Well, I have no – trust me, I get along well with liberals, I have no problem. I get along
00:53:33.120 | well with most people from just about any perspective. So I don't mind a good liberal
00:53:40.400 | argument. The concern to me is when – I would rather deal – me personally, I would rather deal
00:53:51.200 | with the local thugs who may or may not have badges than ever deal with the federal thugs
00:54:03.040 | who control everything. And that's the problem, is that if you have a virtuous people, of course,
00:54:07.920 | it sounds great, but if you don't have a virtuous people, then you essentially go on a constant
00:54:16.800 | pendulum. President Trump is certainly a very different person than President Obama, and
00:54:21.920 | President Obama is a different person than President Bush before him, who was a different
00:54:25.600 | person, etc., back on down the line. And my concern is always anything that – I guess we can't go on
00:54:37.840 | and on, otherwise we wind up just talking for hours about political theory, but I'm always very
00:54:42.320 | concerned about the power that any person or entity or political party has, because I always
00:54:48.880 | think, "What if I'm in the minority position, and I'm automatically in this situation?"
00:54:53.520 | - Well, thank a career federal worker, because they are the backbone who keep things consistent
00:54:59.920 | when these politicians come and go. That's actually the secret, right?
00:55:04.960 | - Well, don't assume too much about my niceness. I don't have many nice things to say about most of
00:55:13.920 | those. I would be happy if they just eliminated the TSA, but that would be better than paying
00:55:18.080 | them. Lisa, anything else that you'd like to say as we kind of wrap up today's show?
00:55:22.080 | - No, no, no. I'm looking forward to our continued deepening disagreements over the years, Joshua.
00:55:30.960 | It's really great to meet you. - I like that attitude, Lisa. And I thank you for listening
00:55:36.400 | to the show and for being willing to share your thoughts. And I would just simply – I would say
00:55:41.120 | to you this. Each of us – and this is one of my goals with my listening audience – each of us has
00:55:49.120 | an opportunity where we can make a difference. And each of us has a unique voice where I think that
00:55:56.960 | difference is most importantly applied. And so I think there's a place for, again, strong and
00:56:06.160 | offensive public arguments. I think there's an important place for those arguments. I also think
00:56:12.240 | that there is an important place for individuals to come along and to work with individuals very
00:56:20.320 | empathetically. And only the people who are involved in that circumstance and in those details
00:56:28.800 | will actually know the difference. And I think of it like this. If you walk into a friend's house
00:56:36.640 | and we have that ability of someone we know to instantly discern their emotional state,
00:56:41.680 | and you should be able to discern if you know somebody, does this person need a sharp and clear
00:56:46.080 | word or does this person need a loving hug? That's the place of us as individuals. Now, the
00:56:50.720 | place of being in a public space where you're speaking in public I think is very different,
00:56:55.440 | and it's important to convey messages clearly. And my hope is that there are enough kind of soft,
00:57:02.560 | thoughtful shows in the archives to help people who are in that emotional state. And I hope that
00:57:08.000 | my blunt and clear words about – and the message I wanted to share was simply this.
00:57:13.840 | No matter the circumstances you're in, you always have a choice and you have to choose to do the
00:57:19.440 | thing that's best going to be for you. So Lisa, thank you for doing your work and I'll continue
00:57:23.680 | doing my work and hopefully one by one we will be able to help our neighbors. Tell us your website
00:57:29.440 | and I'll point your Twitter handle Lisa, but go ahead and tell us your website in case any of my
00:57:33.040 | listeners are interested in reading more of your work. >>LISA Thank you. So I should have an actual
00:57:38.240 | website this fall, but for the moment you can find me on Medium. If you go to Medium, look for
00:57:46.800 | the Traumatized Budget or look for me on Twitter @CheapBohemian and I'll get you there.
00:57:55.200 | >>SAM Thank you for coming on Lisa. >>LISA Thank you so much,
00:57:58.400 | Joshua. It's really a pleasure to talk with you.
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