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Visit yamava.com/palms to discover more. Today on Radical Personal Finance, it's live Q&A. ♪ Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Josh Rasheeds. I am your host. And today is Friday. I'm actually recording this on Thursday this week. But regardless, it's Friday, September 16, 2022. And today we do live Q&A. ♪ Each and every Friday here at Radical Personal Finance, when I can arrange the appropriate technology to have an internet connection and a phone line and all that stuff set up and working, we record a live Q&A show.

Works just like Call & Talk Radio. You call in, talk about anything that you want. I record it, release it as a podcast. If you would like to gain access to one of these shows, go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Just find the show on Patreon. Sign up to support the show there.

That's where I let people know what time I'm going live and give the call-in number and everything like that. That helps me to make sure that I can meter the number of callers to a manageable number. So go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, find the show there, and sign up to support the show there.

We begin with Lucas in New Jersey. Lucas, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? Hey, Josh. First of all, great hold music. I would recommend everyone call in early just to hear it. It's hilarious. But I have two questions. I'll start with the one that is probably the more important answer, and we can get to the second if we have time.

So my wife and I had our first child, and we're talking about going from a two-income household to a one-income household. And there may be some intention to go back into the workforce for both of us at some point, but for now, we just want the flexibility of being a one-income household.

I'm not very concerned about our lifestyle changing, since we both have six-figure incomes, but I do want to ask for advice if there's anything that we should do now when we have two incomes that would be harder or less efficient when we downsize to one. We talked about applying for a mortgage on rental property before as part of our investment plan, but what else should we do?

Should we go all in and try to fast track more things now, while we have two incomes, and would it be easier than when we go to one and try to do something similar? So I'm open to any and all radical and mundane ideas, and just wanted to hear what you had to say on that.

Yeah, there are a few things. It's kind of a standard toolbox full of ideas that I'll go over with you. But in essence, you want to do anything that's going to require significant amounts of income. The first obvious step is applying for debt or debt refinancing. So when you lose half your household income, you're going to immediately find it more difficult to get great financing.

So if there's anything that you can refinance or that you want to refinance, this is the time to do it before you go from two incomes to one income. Obvious targets include student loans, obvious targets include mortgages, home equity lines of credit, personal loans, anything that you currently have financed that you would like to refinance.

Now's the time to do it. Now, obviously with the recent increase in rates, there's probably nothing really attractive to you, but that's the first thing. The second thing that I would do is if you use credit cards in your household, if you have open lines of credit, and if you want those open lines of credit to be as high as possible, then you should call up your credit card issuers and request a higher line of credit while you can honestly and truthfully report your higher household income.

And that can be useful to raise your credit lines. That way you have a total, a larger total overall amount of credit available to you. Once you lose that income, you won't be able to report such a high level of income and thus you won't be able to get larger credit lines.

Those are the big ones. Other than that, many of the advantages go in the other direction that when you have a lower income, you'll have some other benefits. You might have lower costs on certain things, but those are the big ones that stand out that you want to do while you have two incomes.

Okay. Okay. Gotcha. To my knowledge, we don't have any reporting requirements on current debt obligations like a mortgage for when we change incomes. Is that consistent with your understanding? It is most, most things like a mortgage, they go based upon the information that you tell them at the time of inception.

So when you open the mortgage, you'll report your income, but no, there's no requirement to disclose to them when your income goes down or when you lose your job or anything like that. Okay. Clear. All right. My second question has to do with babies. I'm sold on the sustainability, environmental and potential cost savings of cloth diapering.

I haven't been able to find anything that talks about potential health benefits for the child or, or the benefits for the family. I'm not sure if you can talk about the potential health benefits for the child or I should say risks for the child of using disposable diapers with the chemicals and dyes that they put in them.

Do you have any compelling resources that you and your wife used when making the cost diaper decision with regards to safety for the baby? The biggest argument in favor of safety for the baby that might big might right. Big might. I'm not saying it does, but the biggest argument for the benefit of the baby would apply if the baby is a boy because cloth diapers are cooler than plastic diapers.

And so by having his testicles not be kept warm by the plastic, then there's some potential that that's healthier for him in the long run. So that's one, that's one of the things that is nice about cloth diapers. They allow more airflow. And because of that, that if your child is a boy, his testicles will be at a warmer or excuse me at a cooler temperature than at a warmer temperature.

I think it's, it's, it's important that boy is not again, you're in the world of might. You read something and you're like, okay, that makes sense to me, but I don't know that there's ever been any double blind, you know, 50 year study on it. But I think that wrapping up your testicles and keeping them warm is generally not a great idea.

They need to be, they need to be kept cool. Other than that, chemicals with regard to just the, the, the dye free diapers and things like that. So I think most people, at least most of my peers, most of us are pretty crunchy. So we go out and we buy the chemical free.

We don't just buy the cheapest Pampers. You buy the Pampers organic or the clean and free or the seven, a seventh generation, natural diapers and those kinds of things. So that's, that's another benefit. The, the other thing you want to be careful of is that it can't go the other way with cloth diapers.

You have to be much more careful to make sure that the cloth diapers are fully cleaned. And if you ever notice any kind of skin rash or something like that, then you should immediately switch to disposables for a time until that cleans up. So it's not hard to do cloth diapers are perfectly clean, but you need to make sure you're using the right soaps.

And more importantly, that from time to time you strip the diapers of the soap so that the baby's baby's skin doesn't get, doesn't get a reaction over time. If you if you use the wrong kind of soaps and you get a detergent buildup on the diapers, then they stop.

Then they start to react with the urine and that can actually cause a rash. And so if you ever notice any kind of skin conditions or rash, it's just a redness or anything like that. You should have some disposable diapers ready to use in that scenario while you strip the diapers and get them ready to go again.

Thanks. Yeah, we've been going about a, I'd say a 60 40 split on 60% of the time we'll use cloth and then 40% disposable. And I'm just wondering, I guess the question of what's the right ratio for us and our family. I'm just trying to figure that out and I appreciate the input.

Yeah. I mean, you'll figure it out. Some people, some people like cloth diapers. Some people don't. It's just a personal thing. You figure out what, what is right for you. I don't like throwing away plastic diapers. I think plastic diapers are one of the biggest and most ridiculous sources of waste in the universe.

And you fill up a landfill. If you look at how many diapers a baby goes through, and you think about throwing all those away, it's just huge. And I don't, I don't like using plastic for that myself. And so I'm drawn to the, to the waste reduction benefits of cloth diapers.

My wife actually strongly prefers cloth diapers because you don't get all the problems that you have with plastic diapers. You don't get blowouts. You don't get all the weird stuff. They just, they work better. So the times that cloth diapers are not great is of course, if you don't have access to a washing machine that makes it easy to keep them clean, a nice, you know, sunshiny place to hang them or a great dryer to keep them clean and fresh.

And of course also when you're traveling. So they're a nuisance when you're traveling. We always switch to disposables when we're traveling. And then the issues that I said, you have to make sure that, that you pay attention. And if you ever do get a detergent buildup or something, then you should be ready to switch.

But other than that, they're just a lot easier. And, you know, I'm not gonna, I don't go, I'm not gonna go broke myself with neither are you with, with putting diapers in the, in the garbage can. It's kind of annoying to sit there and count how many diapers you go through in a day and calculate and do the math in your head and know how much money you're throwing away.

And then to see that giant bag of plastic trundled off to the landfill for someone else to deal with. I feel like dealing with your own human waste is, is probably a kind of a starting point of, of good sustainable practices. So I hope they work out for you and I hope you guys like them.

I would say if you haven't kind of created your collection, you're already using it. But the, the, what I tell new parents is simply that at the beginning you get all interested in, Oh, they've got this and they've got that. I remember we started with, I don't know, it was fuzzy buns or something like that.

It was a whole, you put the whole anyway, all these like fancy ones. And over time you just want simple. And so a cover and an insert is really all you want. You want a plastic cover, a PL, what's it called? I forget the name of it for the lining that, that they use, but you just simply use a cover and then an insert and that works great.

It's fast, easy. You don't have to sit there and stuff all the diapers in advance. And so it's simple and it works and people have been doing it for thousands of years. Yeah. It's been a good experience for us so far. Good. Anything else? All right. I mean, do you have a lot of callers?

I don't actually, I only have a, I only have just second one has dropped off. I got, I got a couple of questions for you. So go ahead. If you've got another question. Yeah. Okay. So another question, I've been working my way through your book list and it's been really helpful.

I've gotten through the first two so far. Good. I followed, I followed Brian Tracy's recommendation of writing down my goals every day. And one of the, one of the goals that we were able to make pretty quickly here, we just purchased a lot. Outside the country. So in, in Latin America with the intention to build on it.

And. It was, it was my first purchase of any kind of second property, but I really had my heart set on it. And an awesome location that I really like. And I'm just, I'm not really sure where to start in terms of. Accounting for that within my own records and taxes and everything.

I bought it under a limited liability company where the, you know, the equivalent of that in Latin America limit Tata, I think we call it. And I guess I'm wondering how do I, how do I begin thinking about that? Are you planning to rent the property out or create income from it in some way?

Yes, that would be the plan we would have to build on first. But the plan will be to rent it out in eventuality. Okay. So when you start creating income, that's when everything becomes complicated. If it's just a property that you own and you just hold it and you use it for personal use and there's no, and you use it, there's no, there's no complications.

You choose a valuation that you think it's worth to put on your net worth sheet. So you can update it and say Latin American property worth $50,000. And then there's no, there aren't any reporting requirements. There are no tax reporting requirements, et cetera. So until you start generating income, it's pretty simple for you to, to handle the details that way.

When you start generating income from it, then the accounting for it is just like the accounting on any other property. All of the same accounting rules apply that would apply to any US based real estate. So you'll have a little bit of a complicate. Some of your complications will be currency fluctuations.

And also things like reporting requirements. You'll have probably a harder time keeping all your paperwork straight, having perfect, I had a perfectly itemized receipts for everything, et cetera, but you're, you would account for it just like you would account for any other American based property. Okay. Yeah, it sounds good.

That's a good, that's a good starting point. This is a fairly recent, so I'm just trying to get my head around what the next step is. Are you willing to share which country you bought in? Costa Rica. Great. Great. Costa Rica is wonderful. And yeah, so I hope, I hope it works out well for you.

Costa Rica is a wonderful tourist hub. Lots of, lots of demand. And are you going to build like a, like a nice jungle property or some kind of ecotourism property? It's, it's located very close to a beach that, that my family really likes. And so our intention would be to create, you know, something of a more upscale house, something between a, you know, a bungalow and a two to three bedroom just for our own use and then to rent when it's, when we're not there.

But yeah, that's, that's the intention. It's, it's kind of been a decade long dream for me and I, and we really got it kicked off here. So I'm excited about the prospect and we'll, we'll be calling in the future with a lot of questions about it. I'm sure. Absolutely.

Well, congratulations on, on the property purchase. Good job writing down your goals every day. I think that that simple habit and for the uninitiated, the, the advice that comes from Brian Tracy, long time, you know, kind of success coach and a speaker and hit from his book goals is very simply sit down every day and write out a list of goals.

Keep it simple, write down 10 things you want to accomplish in the next year. And if you just commit to that simple discipline of every morning, sitting down and writing that list out, it focuses your mind in a way that, that few other things do. And it can be a really powerful and effective way of making progress towards your goals.

Move to John and Pennsylvania. John, welcome to the show. Thanks for joining us today. Joshua. Thanks for taking the call. Can you hear me? Okay. Sounds good. All right. Well, I have a question for you about, I'm pretty sure you're the one that mentioned this thing. Caught me down the rabbit hole.

In one of your recent podcasts, I've been sort of the way through his, maybe the way through his newest book before. And a lot of video. And old presentations of him. And I. I've been watching. Eight years old. When I first watched some of the newer. I guess I'm old enough now to feel like anybody is talking so confidently and so eloquently about.

Easy to want to believe them. Someone knows the future, but. Seven, eight year old videos. The guy's been really consistent and. But everything. Came to pass, was going to come to pass. As quickly as it did, but there's not any giant gaping holes. That I've seen yet. And in some of his.

No geopolitical outlooks, I guess. And I was just curious what you thought of him overall, as far as. Not just as predictions, but just the general way he thinks the world's going. Cause it's pretty terrifying for everybody. It seems. And then it seems a little. Going to be. But the Americans.

So that's the general vibe I get from him, but just curious what your. Your thoughts overall about him. I guess my thoughts in general are that I like him a lot and I appreciate his insights and his data. I think that. You know, predicting the future is famously a very difficult thing to do.

There was a, I guess, Yogi Berra quotes. And like predictions are always hard, especially about the future. It's obviously a difficult thing to do. What I find interesting though, is to consider how things can really. Things can really emerge over the fullness of time. One of the, one of the things that I appreciate very much.

I'm going to pull up a quote. From a book by George Friedman. Who is another analyst that I have benefited hugely from, but one of the things that he explains. Is. Let me find this quote here. He explains that when people are making geopolitical. Forecasting. That you wind up, you wind up basically.

Doing it because of the fundamental nature of the world. So let me read for a moment here. This is not Zaihan. This is from a George Friedman book called the next 100 years, which was basically Friedman's forecast of what will happen over the next century. Published the book just after the turn of the century.

Probably something like 2010 or so. I read it when it was new. And so Friedman, Friedman says this, and this, this. Introduction is important. Friedman says this, he says, before I dive into any of the details of global wars, population trends, or technological shifts, it is important that I addressed my method.

That is precisely how I can forecast what I do. I don't intend to be taken seriously on the details of the war in 2050 that I forecast, but I do want to be taken seriously in terms of how wars will be fought then. About the centrality of American power, about the likelihood of other countries challenging that power, and about some of the countries I think will and won't challenge that power.

And doing that takes some justification. The idea of a US-Mexican confrontation, and for context, Friedman predicts a war between the United States and Mexico sometime around the middle of the 21st century. The idea of a US-Mexican confrontation and even war will leave most reasonable people dubious. But I would like to demonstrate why and how these assertions can be made.

One point I've already made is that reasonable people are incapable of anticipating the future. The old New Left slogan, "Be practical, demand the impossible," needs to be changed. Be practical, expect the impossible. This idea is at the heart of my method. From another, more substantial perspective, this is called geopolitics.

Geopolitics is not about the political system. It is geopolitics. Geopolitics is not simply a pretentious way of saying international relations. It is a method for thinking about the world and forecasting what will happen down the road. Economists talk about an invisible hand in which the self-interested, short-term activities of people lead to what Adam Smith called the wealth of nations.

Geopolitics applies the concept of the invisible hand to the behavior of nations and other international actors. The knowledge of short-term self-interest by nations and by their leaders leads, if not to the wealth of nations, then at least to predictable behavior, and therefore the ability to forecast the shape of the future international system.

Geopolitics and economics both assume that the players are rational, at least in the sense of knowing their own short-term self-interest. As rational actors, reality provides them with limited choices. It is assumed that, on the whole, people and nations will pursue their self-interest, if not flawlessly, then at least not randomly.

Think of a chess game. On the surface it appears that each player has 20 potential opening moves. In fact, there are many fewer because most of these moves are so bad that they quickly lead to defeat. The better you are at chess, the more clearly you see your options and the fewer moves there actually are available.

The better the player, the more predictable the moves. The grandmaster plays with absolute predictable precision, until that one brilliant unexpected stroke. Nations behave the same way. The millions or hundreds of millions of people who make up a nation are constrained by reality. They generate leaders who would not become leaders if they were irrational.

Climbing to the top of millions of people is not something fools often do. Leaders understand their menu of next moves and execute them, if not flawlessly, then at least pretty well. An occasional master will come along with a stunningly unexpected and successful move, but for the most part the act of governance is simply executing the necessary and logical next step.

When politicians run a country's foreign policy, they operate the same way. If a leader dies and is replaced, another emerges and more likely than not continues what the first one was doing. I am not arguing that political leaders are geniuses, scholars, or even gentlemen and ladies. Simply political leaders know how to be leaders or they wouldn't have emerged as such.

It is the delight of all societies to belittle their political leaders, and leaders surely do make mistakes. But the mistakes they make, when carefully examined, are rarely stupid. More likely, mistakes are forced on them by circumstance. We would all like to believe that we, our favorite candidate, would never have acted so stupidly.

It is rarely true. Political politics, therefore, does not take the individual leader very seriously, any more than economics takes the individual businessman too seriously. Both are players who know how to manage a process, but are not free to break the very rigid rules of their professions. Politicians are, therefore, rarely free actors.

Their actions are determined by circumstances, and public policy is a response to reality. Within narrow margins, political decisions can matter. But the most brilliant leader of Iceland will never turn it into a world power, while the stupidest leader of Rome at its height could not undermine Rome's fundamental power.

Geopolitics is not about the right and wrong of things, it is not about the virtues or vices of politicians, and it is not about foreign policy debates. Geopolitics is about broad, impersonal forces that constrain nations and human beings, and compel them to act in certain ways. So that is a long-winded argument to basically say that I believe that geopolitical forecasters do have useful tools for predicting the future.

In the same way that you and I could say, go to, let's say we went to a friend's house for dinner, and we're there with our wives, and we walk in, and there's a couple, there's a man and a wife there. And we start listening to them, and we notice that their relationship lacks the basic elements of mutual respect, love, appreciation, care, kindness, consideration, et cetera.

It's not too, it's fairly reliable that we could predict that that relationship will end, and based upon the severity of those factors, we could predict that that relationship will end within a reasonable degree of accuracy. Now, that's not to say that the ending of that relationship and the impending divorce is guaranteed.

Those people could change, but those people are not going to change all that much, and they're not going to change much beyond the constraints of their basic personality, et cetera. And so you can look at a relationship, and you can understand where it's likely to go, especially as you get older, you start to gain a little bit of experience.

You can watch the life course of a young man or woman, and you can see that based upon these decisions, these decisions are likely to lead to this place. It's not that the person can't change, but it's that life is fairly predictable. You can observe that if this, then that, if this, then that, with a high degree of predictability.

Now, humans are vastly more unpredictable than nations are, because a nation has certain immutable characteristics. So when someone like Zion comes along, and he talks, he's talking very deeply from the perspective of fundamental inalterable characteristics. So some of his biggest factors that he labors on include demographics. Demographics do not change quickly.

And once you see the course that a nation is going on demographically, it's very unlikely to change dramatically over the course of a very quickly. Now, you can watch it year by year, and you can say maybe there would be a change in demographics, but it's unlikely to happen very quickly.

Or other factors such as natural resources. The natural resources of most places are relatively known. And so you can predict with a fairly reliable amount of certainty where the resources are going to come from. Or when he talks about inalterable physical geographical features. For example, one of the, a really great book that I like a lot is a book called Prisoners of Geography.

And it explains the basic features of a nation based upon the virtue of its geography. And so when you understand the geography of a place like the United States, or you understand the geography of a place like Brazil or like Russia, you can make certain predictions based upon that.

And so this was why, and that geography is not going to change. This is why people like Friedman and Zayhan predicted a war, predicted the war of Russian aggression with a fairly high degree of accuracy. It was basically putting three factors together. Factor number one is the geography of Russia, Russia's basic indefensibility.

And you see that based on history, that Russia has been famously indefensible. And the most secure geography that Russia had was when you had the borders of the Soviet Union. But when the Soviet Union collapsed, then Russia became very, very insecure. The second factor was, and I should qualify that slightly, the Russian perception was that of insecurity, which is based upon the third factor, which is history.

I'll come back to that in a moment. The second factor was based on demographics. Russia is facing, was facing a massively cratering population. And so if Russia were going to muster a significant and viable army, they would have to act quickly while they still had enough young men to enroll in the armed forces and send them off to war.

Because 15 years from now, regardless of whether they had invaded Ukraine or not, they would not have had those eligible soldiers. Those men would have been too old, and they don't have enough children to be good, to have a broad base of soldiers. And then the third factor is simply history.

If you look at the history of the Russian people, they have a unique historical identity. They fear invasion because they've been invaded by everyone again and again and again. And so you can look from an American perspective, and you can say as an American, you have, Americans have virtually no fear of invasion.

Yeah, we know in theory there were some soldiers that came over and did a thing in 1776 and thereabouts. We know that in theory there was an invasion in 1812. We know that in theory there was an attack on, in theory, that's the wrong thing to say, but basically there was an attack on Pearl Harbor.

But other than that, I've just listed the three invasions that most learned Americans could name to American territory. And none of those have been significant. Significant in terms of a destruction of a country. Obviously burning down the White House in 1812 was pretty significant. But the Russians have a very different cultural identity because they have a very different sense of peace and safety.

And so an American can easily look at a Russian and say, "Why are you guys worried about security? No one's going to invade you. Who wants to invade Russia?" Especially those of us who have been raised and grown up and had virtually all of our kind of lived experience in a fairly peaceful era, it's hard to understand why the Russians would have this concept that they're insecure if they don't control this giant land mass.

But for a Russian it can be very different because they have a different concept of history. So that's just a current example. You can predict, if you understand what the Russian identity is and you understand what their history is, you understand what their demographics are, you understand what their geography is, that's what allowed these forecasters like Zayin and Friedman and there are others as well to predict a Russian invasion of its neighboring states beginning with Ukraine over sometime in the 2020s.

And then if you look back at the Crimean Peninsula, et cetera, you can see that the pieces are there, which is why the next piece, if it weren't for the recent absolute rout of the Russian military by the Ukrainians, the next prediction is an invasion of the Baltic states.

And it's not that it's guaranteed to happen, but that's the next logical thing that will happen. And since Russia is already facing all of -- they're already dealing with the fallout of the invasion, that's their likely next move. Now, we'll see. Hopefully it doesn't happen, of course. So that's the base of a prediction.

So it's those big factors that make a difference. And you can predict based upon those big factors. Another example I would say, if you know a culture, right, so I know the American culture. You know the American culture. When I looked back at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, I made a comment in a recorded podcast at the time where I said that there's a very good chance that if isolation and restrictions are what's necessary to contain a pandemic, there's a very good chance that Americans will not comply with that because of the basic rebellious nature of the American population.

The United States of America is a country founded on the principles of rebellion, and this rebellion against the crown and the monarchy of King George and the American Revolution, and this is soaked into our fabric. And so Americans are famously iconoclastic, we're famously rebellious. It's like, "Don't tell me what to do.

I'll be the one who says what to do." And that leads to a very kind of violent culture, a lot of argument. And I figured that how would the Americans actually fall through on public health measures requiring the population to shut down given this basic nature? Well, I think that something like that, a knowledge of the cultural fabric of the American people has turned out to be true.

There was a short time where the Americans basically all agreed, "Hey, let's figure out what will happen." And then a huge portion of the population said, "This was a wildly overblown risk. The coronavirus is not such a significant risk," as some people said it was. "And so we're just going to avoid--we're going to ignore the restrictions." And you saw this play out with huge amounts of predictability.

Florida and Texas, the population handled the imposed restrictions very differently than did California and New York because the population self-sorts itself, the great sort, the grand American sort that's been happening over the last couple of decades into places with like-minded people. And so you saw the expression very, very differently.

So that prediction has nothing to do with what any one individual person is likely to do. It has more to do with understanding the cultural fabric. So back to--let's go now to Zyhan's predictions. What Zyhan spends huge amounts of time covering is basic inalterable geography. And so when you look at--I forget--but when you see that the United States of America has more rivers than virtually the rest of the world combined, then you understand why there was so much power in the development of the American culture.

And you see the strength of the transportation system. When you look at the size of the American economy and the favorable demographics, when you look at things like the significant amount of American production that's consumed in the country, it leads to greater stability. When you look at the barriers of the moats around the country, right, giant oceans on two sides, a giant wilderness with a friendly and relatively impotent neighbor to the north, giant desert to the south and a friendly neighbor there, then you see, hey, with the exception of intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear devices, the United States is pretty secure.

And so that's going to lead to a certain truth being expressed. When you look at the size of the U.S. Navy, bigger than the next 20 countries combined, then you see that dominance is unlikely to change. So again, I'm trying to defend the concept of predictions and to say that I believe that these kinds of predictions are fairly certain.

And I think you can make these socially. You can look at a society. You can make these economically. You can see what's being drawn. They're fairly predictable. Social conservatives often talk about the breakdown of the family, right? What happens? Well, if you have a society that is not based upon strong and productive family units, then it leads to unhealthy children raised by the government or raised by single parents or raised in these things.

And that results in a whole long line of very, very predictable things that can happen from that. So I think that predicting things is valid. Now to Zaihan. Zaihan's incredible strength is his competence with data. The man has a walking encyclopedia, and his grasp of big-picture data and specific facts and figures is remarkable.

And I think that you see that expressed in his books, in his conversations, et cetera. And wherever possible, I think that data-driven, right, evidence-driven and data-informed predictions are some of the most reliable things that you can make. This is what allows for a broader range of forecasting. A physician can look at a population level of obesity and blood sugar levels, et cetera, and make fairly consistent and reliable forecasts as to the morbidity and mortality of a population.

That's why you have actuaries, right, actuarial science. It's all based upon this. So the key is that there are always individual decisions that people can make. You can forecast that this guy's 300 pounds overweight, and then he can get motivated and get a band strapped around his stomach and exercise every day, and all of a sudden he's not 300 pounds overweight.

And now he can completely change. And so some nations can change as well. But I think that those nations that change are likely to be at the smaller ones, the more nimble ones, not the big established ones that have a giant mass going forward. And so, yeah, I guess in summary, yes, I think that his predictions are good.

And I would say absent a compelling counter-narrative with compelling arguments, go with the best prediction and the best argument you can find. I was listening the other day to a podcast interview with I think you say his name, Balaji Srinivasan, really smart guy, I like him a lot. And he was talking about his disagreement with some of Peter Zahin's predictions.

And what I found interesting is that Zahin brought data and Balaji brought broad sweeping statements. And I'm going to rely on the people that have data with coherent arguments and then wait for better data to present itself. So nothing is certain. I believe that there can be large changes, et cetera.

But I think that understanding the broad scope of geopolitical forecasting, understanding the broad scope of and going with the data is the best way to make informed guesses about the future. And then try to simply develop, what I've tried to do is develop a decision-making criteria that says, here's the bet I'm going to make and then I'm going to cover myself with insurance on the back end in case the bet that I make is not the right one.

So I think it is an effective form of forecasting. And while the little details are always going to be wrong, the broad stroke is often correct. Yeah, I appreciate that perspective and commentary on it. Because that's, I guess what I found so compelling and concerning is that, as you said, Lai Han uses data, but it's such a small section of data that he has to use to prove his point.

So there's not a lot of like, oh, yeah, he could be wrong about 10 out of 20 things. He's only pointing to like two or three major things and then everything else is at the margins. And as you said, and as he admits, a lot of that stuff is less specific, I guess.

And as you also mentioned, since the number one thing he uses is demographics, if it shifts, it shifts very slowly or not at all. And only in very small, less populated countries, can they make big shifts more quickly. So that was what was seeming really compelling to him. I kept watching more and more stuff and was reading through the first half of his book so far and trying to find like where could he possibly be outrageously wrong.

But that comparison you read in the Ford's book about it being similar to economics and health, and an individual businessman not affecting an economic forecast, that's a really good analogy. So to put it into perspective, it's just a geopolitical forecasting is a new thing to me. So it's kind of mind-blowing in a way.

So yeah, I appreciate hearing about it and hearing your thoughts on it. I've discovered that I love it. I mean, it was funny because it was one of those things that I had forgotten about. I was really into it in the past. And it was actually the Friedman book that I read from that got me into it.

I stumbled across it in the library one time right after it came out. I was like, "Oh, the next 100 years, that'd be cool." And so I picked it up and I read it. And I don't remember, I think I read a couple of the books related to it.

And then I kind of set it aside and I got involved in other interests. And over the last, and it was actually when Russia invaded Ukraine that I was caught flat-footed by that. And I thought, "Wait a second, how did I miss this?" And so I went back and I reread all the Friedman books.

I think I have three of his. And then that kind of got me started on the kick. And I find it very interesting and very enjoyable. I have some of my own long-ranging predictions because I think a lot about the future of the world and what will happen over the next 100 years and 1,000 years.

I have a bunch of things that I've considered. And so I've rediscovered it as an interest. I'm no expert in it, but I have rediscovered it as an interest. I will say that as I tried to articulate in the show that I did on my changing thoughts on the United States of America, I even read a note from a listener who had sent me a note saying that I was underappreciating the United States.

I think that Zion has reaffirmed, he has certainly strengthened with his data and his approach, especially in the end of the world as we know it is just the beginning. He has reaffirmed or enhanced my appreciation of the United States of America in a very powerful way. It's not that I don't have my frustrations, I do.

But the underlying factors in the United States that make the country so successful are not factors that can be easily changed by one political party or another. They're not factors that can be easily changed on a whim. And so my current thesis actually comes, my operating framework on the United States actually comes from another Friedman book called The Storm Before the Calm.

And in The Storm Before the Calm, Friedman analyzes, that one's a much more recent book, but he analyzes the American social scene and he identifies some generational issues and some large-scale trends that have affected the United States significantly. And his two issues are both converging in the 2020s. I get super nervous when people make observational predictions based upon cycles unless I can understand the real underlying factor.

So for example, the fourth turning, right? The whole concept of the fourth turning has been very influential in some markets over the last few years. I myself have not signed on to the concept of the fourth turning being an accurate predictive model because I don't understand yet the basis of it.

And so this is the big difference between data-driven factors like what Zaihan does and what Friedman does where they say, you know, here are the inputs and outputs. These are the data and these are the causal factors versus more observational trend observations of the past. Hey, there's been these changes over time.

But I find the Friedman model of the 2020s being an extraordinarily restless and difficult time in the United States of America to be a model that makes sense in my head with my observations and experience mixed with his kind of causal factors. But yet that being something that recedes over time.

So we'll see. Time will tell. Again, I think the best personal operating program is to do your best to be insulated from those societal factors because if you can personally be insulated through wealth, through detachment from the grid, right, such as it is, through insurance programs, etc., then I think that the stability of your life can be higher.

And I think that there are principles that play out that are universal in every scenario. So that's what I have tried to focus my personal financial planning work on the concept of those fundamental principles. Those fundamental principles that will work in the roaring 20s and the fundamental principles that will work through the Great Depression.

Those fundamental principles that will work through the booming 90s and those fundamental principles that will work through the 2020s. And so I think those things are constant and available to any person. There may be some investment bets that you would make based upon a geopolitical forecast, but those fundamentals of personal finance as I see it don't really change.

Yeah, no, I agree. And I agree that overall this stuff is very fascinating and the macro look of it is interesting and useful information to have just if nothing else, just as a compass. And it also just seems so compelling because it reminds me of a book I read recently, but I can't remember, but it was all it was talking about the history of the world.

And a lot of that came down to the way they write things about certain histories of the world are. Well, just look at the geography. It was inevitable. And this just seems to be the Ford extrapolation of it. So, yeah, when I when I came across my radar and I started by you guys and I started looking into it, it just it scratches a whole bunch of itches.

But I just also when I get into things so quickly, so deeply, I start wondering why and certain fucking guess my my motivation is like, do I just want to believe in something? Because it sounds like it's coming from an eloquent speaker, basically. So, yeah, good to get your thoughts on.

I really appreciate it. We're all facing that, right? You kind of feel like, oh, I'm the smart guy because I got the prediction. And what I've noticed is having been in the world of finance, which is famous for its predictors of doom and gloom, and having been heavily influenced by that at various points, I've I've I've built up a pretty thick skin about those kinds of predictions.

Also, just understanding it. And let me take a moment. I don't have any colors after you. Let me take just a moment and articulate a couple of concepts, because I think it's important that people need to understand this. The first one I want to articulate is simply the the classic scam of stock picking.

And I'm not saying that you can't pick stocks. What I'm saying is classic scam of stock picking. And the way it works and it worked is basically you get a database of ten thousand people and ten thousand mailing letters, etc. It was in the old days of how you talked about it.

So you have these ten thousand people that you're going to write a letter to and you choose a stock stock for company A and you write a letter to five thousand people that says the stock for company A is going to go up. And then you write a letter to the other five thousand people and you say the stock for company A is going to go down and you send those letters out.

And lo and behold, two weeks later, this the stock either went up or down. Let's assume that it went up. Now you've got five thousand people that said, wow, Joshua is really smart. He predicted that this company was going to go up and here it went up. So then you would take that set of five thousand and you split them in half.

You just ignore the five thousand that got the letter that was wrong and they're not going to remember it because they got a letter just like every other letter. So then you divide that second group and you say, now I prove to you that I know what I'm talking about with company A.

I'm going to prove to you again that I know what I'm talking about with company B. And so you send twenty five hundred of them a letter that says company B is going to go up. And then you send the other twenty five hundred a letter that says company B is going to go down.

You wait and see which which prediction happens to be correct. And now you've got a pool of twenty five hundred people that are are really impressed. He's done it twice. Then you repeat it a third time. And at the end of the day, you now have a list of one thousand two hundred and fifty.

Prospects that are primed into believing that you are the best predictor in the world. After all, you did something that no one else could do. You successfully predicted three stock predictions and you were exactly right. So you call them up and you say, listen, I've sent you letters and I've shown my my stock predicting prowess to you.

Would you like to become my client? Of course, a huge number of them will sign up. And who cares whether you're right on the fourth or fifth? You sell them some expensive commissioned product and you're on your way. So that's a classic scam in the financial space. But you see variations of it worked out in many, many conditions.

So there are people who are famous for their bearish predictions. And every single year they say there's going to be a massive recession. There's going to be a massive recession. There's going to be an economic collapse. And eventually what happens is there's a massive recession. And the people say, look, this guy predicted 10 years ago there was going to be a massive recession.

You go back and you look into it and he's been predicting that every single year because that was his mindset that everything was going to collapse and just eventually turns out to be right. And so I think it's really important not to trust predictions as and to see through them and understand them at a deeper level.

And it's very important to look for people with, as Nassim Taleb would say, skin in the game and find people who are making bets. It's important to find people who have a model that's predicting change in multiple directions and who are committed to that. And that can be effective.

Back to your comment about geography. One of the great realizations that I have had and one of the reasons I love homeschooling as a father is that I can now reflect. Because I was quite self-aware when I was in school about what was working and what wasn't working. And I developed my own kind of thoughts and theories about things, even at a young age.

And I've continued to test my theories along the way. But one of the things that I've come to realize is how important the study of geography is. And I personally feel completely gypped by my studies of geography. Because I was exposed to the concept of geography primarily as can you name the countries, can you memorize all the capitals of those countries, and do you know some basic facts about it.

And the cool thing about homeschooling is you have a chance to do it all over again. And so I labor on geography in my homeschool. And I labor on geography in a totally different way, in more of this way of the geopolitical sense. So one of the books that I have, that I found that I'm using for my fourth grader this year, is the kids version of that book that I said called Prisoners of Geography.

And what's so great about Prisoners of Geography is he takes the book, and of course we read tons of actual books too. He takes the book and then breaks it down into a bunch of beautiful pictures with the explanations. And shows the explanations as to why there is war and peace in certain places.

Shows the explanations of the nations and showing kind of how these fundamental things play out. And if you understand geography in a way that is deep and is practical, then I think it makes everything different about your understanding of the world. So this is a real passion of mine now, is to say how can we teach geography in a way that is connected?

I'll give one more factoid. When I finally understood the Silk Road, and I even understood how the Silk Road went through... I'll cut myself off. It's incredible the predictive power that geography has on so many factors. And I think that we do our children a disservice by teaching them the idea that geography is rote memorization of states and capitals.

And we don't expose them to the powerful affecting forces that geography has on a place and on the culture in that place. And so I hope I can do better in my homeschool, and I hope that many other parents can do better as well. Yeah, I fully agree. I think that Prisoners of Geography kids version sounds really interesting.

I'll have to look that one up. It is. That's fantastic, yeah. My only hesitation about... I don't... So, from an educational perspective, I don't think that pictures and pretty pictures and things like that are actually a useful thing for children generally. What I mean is the narrative matters. And so I decided to try this one because we already have thousands of pages that we're reading this year.

I intend for my students to read this actual book in the years to come, the actual Prisoners of Geography. But I thought it would be interesting to try the picture book version. And it's interesting about a picture book is you can break things down to the essentials. But I believe that just simply reading these books and reading them, the powerful books where the author is presenting the arguments and seeing them laid out is actually the most effective form of education.

After all, that's why we do a lot of reading in our homeschool. John, thanks for calling in. I love talking to you, and I really appreciate the question. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Yeah, I agree. Every time I'm reading a book, I just think, "How can I read digest this to my kids in a different way or just read it to them directly?" I will say on the home education, I'll give the two things that I have learned.

So, number one, here are the secrets that I... So, in our homeschool, we do kind of a Charlotte Mason inspired approach. I have a blending... We do a blending of classical education and Charlotte Mason. And at its core, I believe that reading is the most efficient way for the vast majority of people, not everyone, I'll leave some exceptions, but the most efficient way to acquire information and education.

It's also one of the most powerful ways to acquire information and education. It's not all sufficient. There are subjects that are better served with a five-minute video than a 500-page book. Those things do exist. There are things that must be practically experienced and physically touched, etc. But for at least 80% of the educational topics that we cover with children, reading is the most efficient way.

And let me defend the technology of reading. Number one, reading... Sorry, writing has been accessible to more people over history than any other technology. Even today, writing is an easier technology to handle than shooting pictures or than making video because writing requires virtually no equipment. It's literally as simple as a piece of paper and a pen or a slate and a piece of chalk or a stick and a tub of sand.

And so writing has been available to more people, which has allowed experts to convey things even if their expertise was not large and nationally known. It could be done with a much lower budget. But the technology of consuming information through reading has certain features that no other format has.

Number one, it's very fast. You can read it... Any normal reader can read at least twice as fast as the average person speaks. And many times much faster than twice as fast as the average person speaks. So if you compare the effectiveness... And the reason I'm talking about this is because I've been thinking about it a lot this week.

We started our school a couple weeks ago and I always test my own concepts. And one of the things that's interesting is I stick a few textbooks into our homeschool. And I don't think highly of textbooks because I don't think they're generally interesting and they're not necessary at the younger ages.

The stories are better ways of conveying facts than just raw facts. But I stick them in. But I can take a textbook, right, for my fourth grader. I take a textbook and the textbook is often divided into 12 or 14 chapters. And if you understand... In a fourth grade sense.

If you understand the textbook is designed to convey the information that the student needs at that particular stage of development. It's designed to be a 183 school day textbook. But in our homeschool that textbook becomes basically 12 40 minute readings. That I'll give my fourth grader a chapter. Here, read this chapter of the textbook and it's 45 minutes.

But that was 1/12 of the whole term. And the reason I'm saying this is I'm amazed at the inefficiency of a teacher standing in front of a classroom speaking in terms of the efficient transfer of information. I'm not saying that teachers aren't very useful. In certain contexts I'm not saying there's not a place for that.

But in terms of a transfer of information, reading a textbook is a vastly more efficient transfer of information, rate of transfer of information for somebody who is capable of doing the reading. And then what's more... The information is prepared better. It's much easier to take your time and labor over written content.

And then the reader himself has the ability to scan and to skim and to speed up through and to choose the parts that are the most appropriate and most important. So emphasizing reading as the foundation of education, be it self-education or any educational practice, should be... I don't understand why it's not done.

Even in... I mean I guess I do understand. I've had to become a conspiracy theorist to believe it. I don't understand why it's not done as the foundation of educational practices everywhere. Again, it's probably 80%. 20% is better taught through experience, hands-on learning, some audio methods as well. So if you work with your children and you engage them in reading practices, then that is the best thing for them.

The next thing is children who are confident readers can basically read any level of content but for short periods of time. So the magic number is about 15 minutes, 10 to 20 minutes. This is the same for adults, same for children. But you can give a very complex high-level book to a young student as long as it's given in about a 10 or 15-minute burst because that may be what the young untrained brain is capable of handling.

A mature, experienced learner of 20 years old, 25 years old, someone who has dedicated hours or thousands of hours of practice can develop the self-discipline of focusing for hours on end. But I've proven that you can give a young child powerful information but break it into chunks. And then the third factor is if you add audio to it to help the very young and you keep it in chunks, you can convey tremendous information.

So I've played a game in my family just to test my own theories and we do this with audiobooks. And so I have a set of about five to six audiobooks on topics that I think are important for children to know. And they're books that are written for adults and they're dense but I put them on in the car and I put them on for 10-minute stretches, the really dense ones.

And even my youngest children can pay attention for 10 minutes and gain from it. So when I test them and have them narrate and tell me about what's happening, they can do it. So we can really level up the education for our children by using some of these techniques.

And it starts with of course helping them to be skillful readers, feeding them interesting books, age-appropriate books. But then filtering in those adult books at a young age, just doing it in bite-sized chunks, sometimes accompanying it with audio and sometimes even just relying on audiobooks themselves. So I hope that that gives parents who want to give their children good, useful information some tips that I have found and proven that are working very, very well.

All good stuff, Joshua, as usual. Thank you. Thank you, John. And with that, we wrap up today's podcast. As we go, I just want to tell you that if you would like to join me on next week's podcast, then go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Sign up to support the show there on – oops, wrong button.

Sign up to support the show there on Patreon and I'd be happy to have you and then you'll be able to gain access to next week's Q&A. Love talking with you. Have a wonderful weekend and I'll be back with you very soon. The holidays start here at Ralph's with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new.

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