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My name is Joshua Sheets. Today is Friday, December 9, 2022. And today we do live Q&A. Each and every Friday here at Radical Personal Finance when I can arrange the appropriate technology. And ironically, that was actually difficult today. I had a couple failures. But each and every Friday when I can arrange the appropriate technology, we record a live Q&A show.

It's open line Friday. You call in, talk about anything you like. You can talk about financial planning. You can talk about the economy. You can talk about the news. You can talk about your opinions. You can talk about my opinions. You can air your complaints and frustrations and views in front of thousands and thousands of people here at open line Friday.

Don't screen the calls. You call in, talk about anything that you like. If you would like to join me for one of these calls, if you'd like to be on next Friday's call, then go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Sign up to support the show there on Patreon. And that will give you access to the live call in time and the live call in number so that you can join me on one of those calls.

And with that, we begin with Daniel in Texas. Daniel, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? Thank you, sir. And I've actually got two questions depending on time. Let's start with the first one. So I am, so it has to do with basically career advice and when to move over financial compensation.

So I have been compensated the last couple of years with a base salary with some amount of extra compensation potential above that based on gross profitability of the company at large and some various different compensation plans over the years. And the numbers are always kind of slightly off. There's either a mistake in the formula or things don't go quite as well as we're hoped, right?

I don't think it's by any means like the company trying to pull one over on us. It's just life. So I guess and that this year worked out to about $85,000. Based on some conversations I actually had a little while ago today due to where our company is at and lack of reaching goals this past year.

I'm not kind of sure if it would be much more than that this coming year. And even potentially that. I guess my question is. Where do you, when is the kind of go point in some ways of saying. Do I stick it out, see how it goes? I didn't really trust my company, but like you said things just happen.

Do I change careers? Do I just try and find a job along the same line of work that'll pay me an extra $30,000? Or I kind of had to go about that decision process on making the big jump. Do you have a better offer? Not at the moment, but it's a thought process of how do I go change careers or change jobs so I can make more money?

Right. That question is, so the answer to your question is when do you go? You go when you have a better offer. But clearly the question you're asking is broadly how do I cultivate a better offer? And that one is much of a broader question. I don't think that you threaten much.

Right now you do the best job you can at the opportunity that you have. Always maximize the opportunities that you have while you also systematically cultivate a new offer. And I think that it's important that you are always cultivating another offer that is good for you. It's good for your company.

It's good to keep everyone on their toes, keep everyone competing, keep everyone fair, keep everyone focused. I think it's good all around. And so I think that it's always a good time to reassess your overall career and then to think about what the future is, what you want in a career, the features and attributes of a job that makes it a good fit for you versus not a good fit for you.

How old are you at this point? Let's see. I'll be 33 in February. And how long have you worked this job? Four years. So now with four years of experience, if you were going to take this job all over again, knowing what you know, would you take the job or would you look for something else?

I might take the job. Okay. So that's an important question to answer. Things are not always better in other places. If you would take this job again in the current scenario, that's a pretty good indication that, okay, well, maybe the formulas and all that haven't worked out exactly as they are, but this job might be a great fit for me.

You should have a—it's good if you have a sense of confidence in what you're doing and that it's a good fit for you. If you got fired today, what are some of the jobs or opportunities that you would go after? If I got fired today, I would—I was the one who was asking about entrepreneurship last week— I might either work on pushing this business, partially being forced by I have to feed my family to figure it out, right?

Or I would be looking at—and kind of what I'm somewhat looking at is something in the data analyst field or potentially product or project management, because that's what I've—project management is effectively what I've done the last four years. And through all of my various jobs, I've been doing data analysis to some degree for 10 years now.

Okay. So we talked a little bit about the business then last week. If you think about data analysis jobs, have you hunted around or browsed around to kind of see the kinds of postings that are publicly advertised? I've poked around a little bit. I have talked to some of my friends who work for larger companies, oil and gas and such, to partially to see, hey, if I'm looking at doing this, what—that was actually recommended to me by a friend who's known me for a while and thought I could get into it fairly easily just by learning the tools, basically, and be able to probably start out making around $100,000.

So a modest increase, but an increase nonetheless. And that would be the starting out standpoint. If you did that, what would be the medium-range career and income potential of that opportunity? That I don't know. That would be a good thing to find out. Yeah. So that would be a good place to start, is get a sense of kind of what the opportunities are.

What do you think is the medium-range opportunity of the job that you're in, say, five years from now? I truly don't know. Maybe the low hundreds, depending on how things go. My guess would be somewhere between $100,000 and $120,000, if things go well, kind of situation. Okay. Well, in the past, I've had an entire course called the Career and Income Planning course.

And I had about something like 10 or 15 hours of instruction in that course, kind of going over how to build a career that you love. And I may release that course at some point. So go ahead. My second question actually had to do with that, because I signed up for that originally.

Well, you should have. Yeah, I do. So my question was, I mean, I figured it was, but do you feel like most or all of that information is still relevant, I guess, what is that, five years later or whatever it is? Yeah. I don't think there's anything in the course that's not relevant.

The reason I pulled it from the market was I wondered if I had made it concise enough to be impactful. I wanted it to be impactful. And it was an area where I'm not as much of a subject matter expert as I am in finance. And it has always bothered me.

And I thought, did I make it concise and clear enough? It was the best I could find on the marketplace. And then the other thing was I wanted to upgrade the production value of it. So the production value of that course was it was information packed, but it wasn't full of fancy pictures and looking pretty and whatnot.

And I felt like I needed to upgrade the production quality of it. But as far as the content, everything I have to say is still in that outline. So what I would say is start with, go and grab the outline that you have in the course and just read through the PDF that I included and see what's there and see what sparks you.

In general, you're going to need to do some introspection and make some lists of the things that you're looking for. And then you're going to look around and see what's available for you. And ideally, you want to be going after something that is pulling you forward, that's exciting to you.

I think as a man, I think we have a pretty built-in desire to conquer something. And so that desire can be expressed in different areas of our lives. It's expressed in self-improvement. It's expressed in building skills and competencies. It's expressed in, I don't know, fighting battles. But in our careers, it's really exciting to feel like you're working at something and you're getting better at it.

You're being forced to develop and to create and to grow, etc. And so I think you're looking for that sense. And I often put it in terms of income because that's a measurable factor. And what I like about that is because many of us have been conditioned to be complacent about income, when I talk about income and I use surprising estimates, like in that course specifically, I teach a thousand percent, right?

Add a zero to your annual income and ask yourself, "How can I make that?" So if I'm making $85,000, then we go to $850,000 and I say, "Ten years from today, how and where can I be earning $850,000 with the restrictions that I need to be doing something that I feel really enthusiastic about?" And I try to stay away from the concept of, "Oh, do something you're passionate about," because often I think people automatically substitute hobbies and kind of fun leisure things for do something you're passionate about.

I prefer to use the word passion in this sense, that find something that you can do with passion. Find something you can passionately accomplish. Find something that you're passionate about the outcome rather than just kind of focusing on, "Well, I like to drink coffee, so I should go open a coffee shop." Maybe you should.

That's fine. But there's a whole world of hard, difficult, challenging work out there that when you approach it with passion, you feel good about it. So I like to start with income and say, "What are the kinds of $850,000-a-year opportunities that I would be really enthusiastic and excited about?" And if you lay out something that is in that direction with those restrictions, even if you're half wrong, a decade from now your family income is fundamentally transformed and your lifestyle is fundamentally transformed.

And then think about what you're willing to accept and what you're not willing to accept. Look for the opportunities that are available for you and then kind of go for them. So that's a generalized answer to the question, but I think you need to look to see what's available to you.

You're going to have different opportunities if you're in Dallas, Texas than if you're in a little town in the Rocky Mountains. You're going to have different opportunities if you're in the United States of America or if you're in Nicaragua. It's just you can't make something up, but you can think about what you want and search for opportunities.

And when you find something that's clearly moving you more in the direction of your ideal vision, then go after it. And the good thing is if you'll do that intentionally, always come back to your current employer and say, "You know, I'm resigning. I'm planning to resign. I'm thinking about it.

I've gotten a better offer." And a lot of times just the act of systematically looking for a better offer every couple years, every few years, and then bringing that to your employer will be an upgrade in your current situation. And it can be an upgrade in terms of salary.

You got a better offer? Well, hey, what if we match it? Or it can be an upgrade in terms of trajectory. You could say, "Well, why are you quitting?" "Well, listen, I've been here four years. I've been in the same job position. I wanted to advance and I found something that's going to give me a little bit more of a challenge." And your boss might say to you, "Well, tell you what, I really value you.

Give me a few days to think about it and we'll see what we can come up with." So just the process of continually filtering options and ideas is a winner even if you wind up staying where you are. Sure. That makes sense. Yeah, I have not been good about doing that thing when I probably should have been more so.

Good. Go ahead with your second question, please. Yeah, well, my second question was about your course. I felt like it was still relevant. So one thing I've always kind of, and I referenced it last week a little bit, but is kind of finding that thing that you do enjoy.

I kind of do enjoy data analysis stuff. I think I'm pretty good at it. But anything can get kind of boring, right? Do you have a thought as you're trying, like, how to try different fields and kind of stuff in that to figure out what you want or are you just going to have to poke around?

Well, I would say that the first suggestion I would offer is a slight semantic difference. Instead of finding the thing that you do enjoy, focus on identifying the things that you enjoy about what you do. And learn from the last, I mean, you've been in the workforce probably something like at least 12 years now at this point.

So all of that is valuable experience. You have real valuable experience to inform you about things that you enjoy, attributes, features of things that you enjoy. So make a list of those things. Keep a list of those things. Identify, I enjoy doing data analysis, parenthesis, not too much. Or, you know, I enjoy finding and hunting down problems.

I enjoy using data to discover truth. I enjoy sitting at a desk and staring at a spreadsheet. I don't want to sit at a desk and stare at a spreadsheet. Your list, you write it however you want, but identify the things that you enjoy and the things that you don't enjoy so much.

So that as you're considering options, it can be clear to you, you know what, this would be a good option to me because it would offer me more. And in the past I enjoy these certain attributes of it. So you can get there just through introspection and paying attention to your experience.

And as you accumulate more and more experience, you'll get more and more in the right direction. Remember that one of the things that was so interesting in that course, I talk about many of the various career tests and the various career kind of personality tests and diagnostics you can do.

I think you should do those things. And I think they're very helpful because they will give you ideas. And one of the reasons I have come to be a big believer in those is that when I did them and I looked at the list of careers that were suggested as ideal careers for me, something like 80% of the careers were already careers that I had identified exclusively from introspection as, hey, this would be a good potential fit for me.

And that sold me. It was certainly a confirmation of the hard work that I'd done on introspection. So if you're lacking, so do the introspection and then go through and take some of those career profiles. I think my favorite, I assume he still sells it, is the disc profile that Dan Miller from the 48 Days brand always championed.

And I thought that was one of the most concise and useful ones. So go and do that one and look at the career options that are there. Okay, perfect. Yeah, I've done some of them. I haven't done disc. So, okay. And perfect. Well, yes, sir. Good. Last comment is, remember that if you get a list of results that you, let's say it says, well, hey, you've done data analysis.

You should be a Wall Street stockbroker. And if your reaction to that is, yeah, absolutely. I've never thought about that. Then you might say, okay, there's a good idea for me to look into. If you have the opposite reaction, that's also useful feedback. So a negative reaction, say, oh, I would never want to do that.

This personality thing screwed it all up. That's also useful. Then you write down, here's why I would never do that. And then explore the other options. We go to the state of California. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Now for a limited time at Delamo Motorsports.

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Visit Delamo Motorsports in Redondo Beach and get yours. Offer in soon. See dealer for details. Hi, Joshua. This is Thomas. Hey, Thomas. Welcome. Yeah, I remember in the past you had talked some about productivity tools you're using for project management, note-taking, etc. I'm just wondering, have those tools changed?

Have you swapped platforms for any reason? What are you currently using? What do you like about them? Why? I love the question. And then the follow-up to that is specifically about outsourcing. Okay. Let's start with the tools. Are you an Apple user or an Android? Are you an Apple in the Apple sphere or the non-Apple sphere?

I actually, I should switch back and forth between both. I have both. I have some Apple computers and then I have also a desktop and Android phone. Okay. But then also Apple tablets. So I'm all over the place. You are all over the place. All right. Well, so you're going to want to consider, so I do think that there's not that one is better than another.

This is the endless argument. A number of years ago, I decided to move to Apple because primarily, number one, I wanted stuff that just worked. And as a media producer, basically the whole world of like media and all the business related around it, all of the apps that everyone uses are all available on Apple.

And sometimes they're available on other platforms. And so I just decided, you know what, I'm going to make my life easy and I'm going to move to an Apple ecosystem. And the other thing was that I appreciated that Apple had a modestly higher commitment to privacy and security than some of the other options that were available.

And as someone who appreciates that, I felt like that modest increase was useful for me. I have plenty of arguments against Apple, but the nice thing about Apple is their entire ecosystem is very nicely integrated. And the other thing is they have massively improved their basic application level or that's the wrong word, system level applications.

So Apple Notes is fantastic now. Apple Reminders is fantastic. And the cross platform integration of these is outstanding. And that to me is the big benefit right now of committing to one particular ecosystem. Because, for example, I use an Apple Watch and I have it set up with my Reminders system.

I have it set up with various capture systems so that I can capture my ideas, capture everything right there. And the integration between the calendar, between all of that, and the fact that it's at, I think I'm using the words rightly, the system level, means that it's basically seamless from my MacBook to my iPad to my iPhone to my Apple Watch, etc.

And so while there are other applications that sometimes have features that I would like to have, Apple has continually improved these systematically. They have a brand new app called Freeform that hasn't really been talked much about. That's an Apple iPad app. I think it's going to be the next super valuable Apple platform.

Even like the Apple Notes. I formerly used various premium note scanners, but now Apple Notes has built-in scanning function that is great. And so having everything in one place and on one system has been, for me, kind of the biggest thing. So I stopped using some of the tools that I previously used and I focused on those tools because their ubiquity across all of the devices makes them really, really nice.

The other tool that I use is, I still use massively, a tool called Workflowy. And to me, Workflowy as an application is the perfect expression of a writing application for my brain. If you're not familiar with Workflowy, it's an endless outlining application. So it allows you to write in the form of bulleted outlines and you have an unlimited ability to increase or decrease your indentations.

And all of the text and content that is held under each level of indentation is movable, is collapsible, is expandable, it's all searchable, etc. And I find that incredibly powerful. I have something like a... I mean, the last time I checked the database, it was well over a thousand pages when I backed up the database.

And this is a thousand pages of notes that I have created, that I have written, outlines that I've written, etc. And it's all right there for me. And they've massively improved a lot of things as well. I have tested a number of the modern, more kind of popular solutions.

I've tested Notion. It hasn't stuck. I'm a fan of the application RemNotes for note-taking because RemNotes has a basic... Inside of the RemNotes application, which has a good note-taking application, basically it's very Notion-esque in terms of its function, they have a built-in SRS spaced repetition system. So I think that's a really powerful feature.

And so if I'm coaching students, then right now, I think that the primary note-taking tool, at least that I'm aware of, should be RemNotes. Because it allows you to take notes on the subjects that you're learning and studying, and then seamlessly, with just the insertion of a simple function, turn those notes into spaced repetition flashcards that you can then review within the system.

And I think that's really powerful. It saves you the hassle of going to Anki and creating the flashcards twice. Once in your notes and then the second time in Anki. It's all built there. The counter-argument to that is the act of creating a flashcard is in many cases half of the learning process.

And so perhaps by lowering the friction, we're not getting as much memory retention as using two separate applications. But I still like RemNotes. Beyond that, I think that's all the commentary I would have as far as what I'm using. There are still applications that I like better. I mean, there's so many good applications.

But what I have found is that by forcing myself to be simple, then it's just better. I guess one more thing I would say as far as productivity. I've really struggled a lot over the last couple years with focus for whatever reason. And I think this is the same thing that we've all been facing is constant distractions.

And I have found that doing more things on my phone has actually been a smart idea. For some people, I think their phones are probably more distracting to them. But my phones are all basically notification free. And so one of the things that I have found is that if I have my phone and I work on my phone, especially using voice dictation, the voice dictation has gotten so much better now that it's extraordinarily useful.

That because I can pace easily while I work on my phone, that helps me as well. So I've been actually writing on my phone just using voice dictation. I've been handling a lot more of my communication on the phone. And because I don't really enjoy being on it, that's been a little hack that I've been trying to help myself avoid the endless web crawling that is a little bit too easy on my computer.

Got it. When you mentioned pacing, are you just talking about pacing within your speech and voice dictation? No, I'm talking about walking in circles in my office. Oh, okay. Got it. I have found, so I've been really, really working hard over the last months, really working hard on my health and really committing to walking a ton, hiking, and etc.

And so I pace most of the time now. Whenever I'm on the phone, I always pace. Whenever I'm doing something that I can, I get up and I just walk around my office. And by working on my phone, it's given me, it works better than kind of sitting at my desk.

It's harder for me to get distracted. And I can get quite a lot of steps in. I've calculated my, when I do consulting work, I don't have a treadmill desk. At some point I'll probably get a treadmill desk. But when I do consulting work, I have kind of a standing desk that I stand at.

But I walk around the room, I have a huge, large office. And I can do, without too much trouble, I can do, I can walk a mile. I can do about 2,500 steps. And I can burn about 250 calories just pacing on a one-hour phone call. And so that's been something that it, it also actually helps me to concentrate as well.

Because I often, if I'm on phone calls or something like that, I'm tempted to go surf the internet. And so by walking while I'm on the phone, it helps me to focus and do a better job of being fully engaged. That's great. Yeah. It's funny because I did pick up Workflowy from one of your courses.

I remember as you were going through it, I was like, what is he using? That looks amazing. And so I'm taking notes from our call on Workflowy as we speak. And then the walking tip is good. I found anecdotally that that was helpful. So might be something to try out more.

For your cross-platform thing, I think one of the big, if I were not on Apple, at this point, I would have one of those, what's it called? I think the, one of the Samsung folding phones. I can't remember the brand, the notes for whatever, the folding phones. Those are, I think, so good now that in terms of productivity, it solves that thing that's so frustrating about the phone.

Because with having the completely foldable screen and being able to put multiple applications side by side, but without having the hassle of a full-size iPad or something like that, I think that's a really useful feature as well. So if I weren't in Apple, that's the phone that I would be using.

Okay. Have you checked those out or tried one of them for yourself? I haven't tried one out personally. I have seen other people use it. So it is, it did catch my eye, but haven't made the move yet. Yeah, they're really good now. And I think beyond that, you just got to, I think the most important thing is cross-platform ubiquity.

The big scenarios, most of the things that we used to need a computer for, we don't really need a computer for anymore. And because of that, there are downsides, right? Because the work can follow you home, but there are upsides because you can do things that otherwise you wouldn't be able to do.

And I don't need to go on forever on this, but I would just focus on, all right, what works seamlessly on my different devices? And I like, I just don't know what they are for the Android-based and Microsoft devices anymore. I'm out of that world at this point. Right, right.

Okay. All right. You said you had a second question? Yeah, I did have a second question. It was all revolving around outsourcing work. That was another thing that I believe you had mentioned a while back. I was just wondering what your takes were on where to find good, I guess, places to outsource what things you have found to be valuable in outsourcing.

So where to find it and what have you found to be valuable to outsource? When you look at outsourcing, it's probably to start with, you got to think of a couple of examples of tasks. Because the tasks that you want help with are going to determine the solution. In many cases, we can use simply technological solutions, digital technological solutions that can solve a lot of the issues.

So, for example, I don't outsource podcast production. I never have. I get, I don't know how many solicitations every week for it, but I've never done it. And I have a very simple podcasting workflow that allows me to hit record, hit done and click publish and I'm done. And that has been far more valuable than outsourcing it.

And certainly with a lot of tasks, this is the change, right? It used to be that you, if you were going to have right letters, you had a secretary that came and took dictation and then typed your letters. Well, now we all do it. And now we dictate our own letters using voice dictation.

So we're back to what we did in the 1940s. It's just a machine doing it instead. So that's the first thing to always look for. People are expensive and look for a digital solution or look to eliminate it first. Then with the other tasks, then we obviously need to be clear on what we want.

I think for many people who are getting started, the best thing to start with is an on-demand virtual assistant. So I use, I'm not the expert in this. I think probably I would first look, I haven't looked at his stuff. I took a couple of courses a few years ago, but Ari Maizel, his brand used to be Less Doing.

I assume it still is, but Ari Maizel was kind of a guru in that space and he started a company that I've used. I haven't used it in the last year or so, but he started a company that I used quite a lot called Get Magic. And what I like about it is it's a team of virtual assistants that are available for you that you pay by the minute when they do stuff for you.

And you can text them, you can call them. Most of the work is done in texting. And you can text them directly from your phone or you can use their application or communicate with them on their website. And I just found it to be one of the simplest and best ways to have help when I needed it.

And they're very good, very competent, etc. And so a lot of tasks can be outsourced. Overall though, if you get into business level tasks, then you have to look at what skills are necessary. And it's a more complex question, but those are my suggestions. Basically, Get Magic would be my starting place for virtual assistant.

What types of things have you found useful with Get Magic? So I haven't used them in the last year, and so I did some stuff with them, although I'm struggling for it. What I have found is that for many things, I don't need it anymore. I have a simpler life that most of the tasks can just be not done or done by me just doing them quickly on my phone.

I do have an assistant who works with me in my business stuff and is improving the processes, helps me with kind of a lot of business processes. And that's, I think, a more appropriate thing for someone behind the scenes. And I have worked with a number of consultants on different areas.

But I used to think, "Well, I need someone to schedule a phone." All the stuff that we used to outsource to people, to me, are more easily outsourced to apps if you're familiar with it. So if I'm flying somewhere, I can book a plane ticket in 10 minutes and have a great plane ticket and have it all done.

And have the best deal. I don't need to write to someone and say, "Get me a plane ticket." I can book a hotel in 10 minutes in any city in the world and be done. And so I have basically just turned my phone into that assistant that works for me.

And I don't have much use for the "tasks" anymore. Now, I will say, when I moved abroad, I got a fixer. And for me, this was a great move. I never thought about doing this in the United States. But basically, I have two guys that work for me. And they're basically smart, capable guys.

And so one of the things that I have done is I've basically stopped doing a lot of chores. In the sense that if I need a swap out of an internet signal or something like that, then I don't do it. I just say, "Can you get me an internet signal?

Here's my credit card. Here's money." Or whatever. And they get it done. And so things like internet, things like getting the house painted, all that stuff, I pretty much eliminated all those chores from my life. And that's been pretty cool. Years ago on the podcast, I interviewed a fixer in the United States.

He was a guy -- I have to go back. I don't remember his name. I met him at the Camp Phi meetup in North Florida that I went to many years ago. And there's an interview with him in the archives of the show. And his career, he was just kind of a capable guy living in California.

And some wealthy people figured out that he was a capable guy. And he basically made a business working as a fixer. And there's no determined job description to it. People just knew that he could figure out how to get things done. And if they needed something done, they would call him and get it done.

And I thought to myself, "That'd be pretty cool." But I was skeptical of my ability to afford those kinds of services. But when I moved abroad, I found a couple guys. And I've used them as my fixers. And it's been awesome, basically, to have a personal assistant for all the house stuff.

But I can't tell you how to find that or use that. It's just been great for me to not have to deal with any of this stuff. I just send a WhatsApp message, "Hey, this is what I need. Can you get this done for me?" And I just hand a stack of cash and I go on with my life.

It's great. Okay, great. Awesome. Yeah. There were some questions I had. I've talked to other people a lot about just outsourcing all these things. And I don't know. Outside of just house stuff, I always kind of questioned how valuable it was. That's one of the questions I had. Yeah.

Well, I guess you can tell from my answer that I haven't found it super valuable. It was interesting to read the ideas of people doing all that stuff. But the whole concept has been turned on its end by various entrepreneurs creating world-class applications. And those applications that do what we want and do it fast have replaced most of our need for assistants to do things.

Yeah. Outside of something specialized, yeah. I think that was my conclusion, too. Great. Great. Fun questions. It's interesting to think about. So it sounds like just get yourself a fixer and then you'll enjoy that. We've got Ryan in Florida. Ryan, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir?

Ryan, are you there? You are there. Hold on. Let me unmute you again. There you go. Go ahead, Ryan. Yep. Sorry. I had myself muted there. Okay. So probably nine months to a year ago, maybe, I called in. You may or may not remember this, but I asked you a question about Celsius.

And I asked you about storing either Bitcoin or stablecoin there. And I have to give you major kudos because you said it's risky and you could wake up the next day with your money gone. And it turns out that is what happened. I didn't lose a lot. It was just a small investment.

It was something I was trying to do to reap the interest on stablecoin and whatnot. But it wasn't a large amount. So it's all good. I hope to get some of it back. But who knows. But that's not really my question. My question is really about Bitcoin and crypto itself in light of what's happened with not just Celsius, but the other exchange that just went down.

And you talked a lot about it in your privacy course and whatnot. And at that time, Bitcoin was like 50, 60,000. And now it's, I don't even know, 16 or so. And I wondered if your thoughts had changed on whether it is a good store of wealth going forward or just if you had any updates on your thinking since that time.

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There's actually one other topic which I should address. Let me write it down for myself. I want to address even the comments that I made some months ago on famine because things have improved since then. I'm gratified to see some of the improvements. So first, I'm glad you only lost a little bit.

What I would say is that with anything, skepticism is warranted. We can learn some principles from past experience and then apply those with new technologies and new opportunities. That was the reason when I answered because I have thought about that question. I have thought about my answer to it.

When we talked about stable coins and things like that, then my comment at that time was none of it is proven. It hasn't been stress tested yet. I hope that I would-- I want the concept of a stable coin to work. I think it'd be pretty cool but it's not stress tested yet.

What we've found out is that basically it's the same basic problem of many other kinds of financial products that claim to have something and then don't actually turn out to have it. Then we discover that there are major problems. Let's go to the cryptocurrency space, Bitcoin specifically, my thoughts.

I continue to be hopeful that Bitcoin-- Again, I still include other options as well in that. I continue to be hopeful that Bitcoin and other useful tokens will be increasingly widely accepted around the world because I'm ideologically committed to the benefits of competition with regard to money creation. That comes from my sympathy towards the Austrian model of economics that says that there should be competition among money creators and to my sympathies of wanting people to be able to interact with each other and transact and have stores of value with one another without the intervention of a central authoritarian party.

Because I believe that the modern fiat monetary systems enable some of the grossest and most horrific behavior in the world, I would like to see some alternatives created for that. Of all of the proposed alternatives or all of the possible alternatives, Bitcoin comes the closest to solving the majority of problems that are out there.

I believe that money has value simply and only because people believe that it has value. I don't ascribe to the idea of, for example, gold-backed currencies and things like that. I don't ascribe to the idea that only gold is money because gold has been used as money for 6,000 years.

Sure, I like gold, I own gold, I want people to own some gold, but I think that money has value simply because people believe in it. It's the same exact thing with modern fiat currencies. They have value because people believe in them and people are willing to accept them as a storehouse of value.

My biggest complaint against Bitcoin, if I were to go back, say, 7 or 8 years, I don't know the number of years, but go back to before I changed my mind and became a more enthusiastic supporter of Bitcoin, my number one complaint against Bitcoin is that wild price fluctuations cause people to want to hoard the token instead of use it.

And I was sensitive to this because when I was younger, I thought it would be pretty cool if there were opportunities of banking in precious metals. There was a guy, I forget his name, Chris someone or other, that was super into the silver world and he had gone around and started a bank, I think it was called the Lakota Bank or something, we're going back almost a decade now, and it was all about, you're going to bank in silver.

And ideologically, I have sympathy for the precious metals guys, the gold bugs and such, I often appreciate their arguments and their critiques and whatnot. And I thought, wouldn't it be cool if you could actually store your wealth in precious metals? And I thought about it a lot, and I started to own more metals and use more metals.

But I came to the conclusion that the basic problem with transacting with gold and silver in the modern day and age is that nobody wants to get rid of their gold and silver because they think it'll go up. And so I have bought stuff with gold coins and silver coins, I've traded with people with gold and silver coins, and I virtually never want to spend the stuff.

And I noticed that I would always rather part with Federal Reserve notes than with a silver coin because I was always thinking, oh, maybe the silver coin could go up, or at the very least it could hold its value. So when we got to Bitcoin, that was kind of the same issue.

I thought, how can Bitcoin work as a form of money if it's being hoarded for the idea that it's going to go to the moon? And so that was my number one complaint. That was why I did not become an enthusiastic early on supporter, because people said Bitcoin is money.

I looked at it and said, Bitcoin can't be money because people are just hoarding it because they think it's going to make them rich. And instead of buying a bunch of it and getting rich like I should have done, I continued to cast aspersions from the sidelines and watch.

So then we come to the big price increases and whatnot. And along the way I thought, wait a second, maybe, in fact, the massive increase in price in Bitcoin is solving the problem that previously wasn't solved, which is people learning how to own it and how to hold it.

Because there have been other attempts at currencies, especially digital currencies, digital gold, etc., that didn't succeed. And Bitcoin seemed to capture the public imagination. And I asked myself also, why shouldn't money go up in value? Why should I not want to hang on to my money? And with that personal experience of recognizing what it was like to own gold and silver coins and not want to give them away, I thought, why do I even need to accept this basic system that has been imposed upon me since my childhood of a continuously, massively devaluing US dollar?

And I measure my dollar in terms of its – and I know that it's always becoming increasingly worth less. And as I've gotten older and started to become a crotchety old man, thinking, "Oh, in my days, things cost such and such," then it's become more and more apparent to me.

The big one for me is that I remember when I was a child always being the one who would take the $20 bill into the gas station and pay for the gas. And for whatever reason, I have a vivid image of gas being $0.97 and $0.99 when I was a child.

And now I look at the price of gas and I can really see those impacts of inflation with my own eyes and on everything, of course, right? We're all suffering from inflation. So we live in a system where the money is designed to devalue. So I questioned that fundamental assumption.

Now, back to the big decrease in Bitcoin price. Does that prove or disprove anything about the utility of Bitcoin? I don't see that anything has fundamentally changed about the usefulness of Bitcoin. The system works better than it ever has. We've got Lightning now. We've got many more people are able to take it.

We've got much better applications, much better wallets. It's much easier to use. So the basic Bitcoin system has only improved. Nothing has gotten worse. Everything has gotten better. What has happened is the underlying price of the currency has collapsed when measured by US dollars and other fiat currencies. So I don't know how that plays out.

It certainly is going to smoke out a lot of people who were buying just so that they could get really rich really quick. But then again, maybe that was a necessary feature of the price to go up really high. Maybe that was a necessary feature in order to attract attention so that more and more people would adopt it.

Because so far, Bitcoin has been the most successful implementation of a new way for people to exchange value and to store and transact value without being tied to the legacy systems. And I think that with Bitcoin, I think that knowing that it may go up in the future continues to be something that maybe it's not a problem.

Maybe it's a genuinely good thing. But maybe it was good that some of the euphoria has worn off. So it remains the case that there's a limited number of Bitcoin. It remains the case that people can use the transact services. It remains the case that it's easier to use than it ever was before.

It remains the case that even in the collapse of several of these big cryptocurrency exchanges and other speculators, that at its core, Bitcoin has not been affected by that. I mean, the functionality of it. So a technician, I think, can make a strong argument for it. But it also remains the case that the price has gone down.

And what that will do in the psychology of the people, I don't know. So I want Bitcoin to succeed. I am more worried than ever before about the harsh collapse of privacy around money. I'm more worried about the restrictions of people's accounts based upon non-criminal distinctions. People just saying, "I don't want to do business with you," and/or, "We're going to get all of these kinds of people from our bank," etc.

And that's a complicated ethical issue because I believe in a business owner's right to discriminate for any reason that he wants to discriminate. So I believe that Bank of America is perfectly within its rights to discriminate against people who sell firearms parts. I believe that Chase Bank is perfectly within its rights to discriminate against me because I'm a Christian.

I support people's right to discriminate as a fundamental basis. If we don't have the fundamental ability to choose who we do business with, then what is even the concept of freedom? I think I should hasten to add, of course, because most people misunderstand if I say that I support your right to discriminate.

I should hasten to add that I think you're generally stupid if you discriminate for reasons that are clearly silly. But I believe I'm going to support your right to do that. And I'm not going to go and try to call on the government goons with guns and support my side in that.

But I think we need to build alternatives to those systems. So it's a complex answer. The way I approach Bitcoin is as a speculation. I'm not willing to go all in on Bitcoin. I'm not willing to risk my wealth or my family's wealth on Bitcoin. I call it a speculation.

And so in terms of the growth of Bitcoin, I see that as a speculation, perhaps a very worthy speculation, an appropriate speculation for many people. But I'm going to label it as a speculation and I'm going to try to practice good financial planning principles around it. With regard to the utility of Bitcoin, the utility of Bitcoin continues to increase.

And so I seek to try to continue to increase the number of payments that I make in Bitcoin and the transactions and all of the stuff that I teach in the privacy course. How to own private Bitcoin. I think those things are strong and it's still the best option we have.

So that's my answer. Okay. Would you consider personally Bitcoin being on sale, quote unquote, on sale right now? If you were a buyer, maybe you are, I don't know. But I kind of pride myself on being like a value investor. Equities, of course, but it kind of extends to this too.

And so I feel like, yeah, I've invested at $40,000 and $30,000 and now we're at $16,000. I'm kind of thinking, well, why not? Right. That's an excruciatingly hard question to answer because the careful logical side of my brain says I can't tell you what the value of a Bitcoin should be.

How do I even know? And so if I can't tell what the value of a Bitcoin or a Satoshi should be, then how do I know if it's on sale or not? So if you're a value investor, the model that we use as value investors to give value to a stock is based upon a discounted cash flow, discounted profits.

So we look at the profits and the earnings of a company and we discount them to the current day. We give a value to them based upon our own formula. And now we say we think the stock is fairly valued at $50 a share. We think it's overvalued at $75 a share.

We think it's a buy deal at $40 a share. With Bitcoin, how do we know? So if we could get, you know, and I've read a few papers on this and whatnot, but I'm unconvinced of any formula that I could say, here's what Bitcoin should be. So then we go to basically that the value of any currency is based upon the acceptance of it.

And that's a psychological kind of mass psychology phenomenon. The US dollar right now is an exceedingly valuable currency, but it's not, and it's buttressed by the reality behind the business of the United States. But in terms of its global demand, it's primarily because of perception. But I've been around, I've seen enough currencies fail that I think that it could completely fail.

So I don't think Bitcoin's going to go to zero. I don't know that Bitcoin's going to go to a million when measured by the US dollar. But therein lies the basic fundamental disagreement, right? Whenever we, if you're valuing Bitcoin in terms of US dollars, is that really the metric?

Because, and this is the thing that bugs me about the people who just constantly are saying, well, buy Bitcoin. And they're constantly throwing charts out there and rubbing it in Peter Schiff's face about look at the value of Bitcoin, etc. You're still valuing your Bitcoin in terms of what you really value, which is the US dollar.

And so that's proving to you, that's proving to everybody that what the thing that you believe is money is the US dollar, not the Bitcoin. And so when you say that the value of the Bitcoin is Bitcoin, and in what it can buy for you, then we'll be a lot closer to being able to figure out if it's a deal or if it's not a deal.

Because that's what we base currencies on, is what they can buy. So, I remain convinced that it's early. I remain convinced that for those who are involved, want Bitcoin to succeed, and want an opportunity, yes, I'd rather buy it at $17,000 than at $57,000. But I want to label as a speculation, and I want to deal with it as such in my personal portfolio.

Okay, yeah, it's kind of the same way you responded on the Celsius question, and it turned out to be true. So, I appreciate your thoughts. I think that's it. Thank you. My pleasure. We'll see if it turns out to be true. The key is, I do think if you're going to have potential for a big win, you need to actually speculate.

So, one shouldn't be always so fearful of loss that they don't ever get in and play. So, if you want to actually win, you need to get in and play. And I think that would apply here for many people. But I'm going to label it as speculation and treat it as such, and try to avoid putting my own price targets on it or anything like that if I can.

And hope that people will deal with it responsibly, as is right for them. We go to California. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hey, Joshua. I just want to, before I ask my question, say thanks for everything that you've done over the years. My wife and I have been big fans of yours, and we credit you towards definite paradigm shifts and how we look at parenting and other aspects of our lives.

So, thank you so much for that. My pleasure. And this is a parenting-related question. So, we have a two-year-old and a newborn, and I just kind of want to get your thoughts on screens. You know, last week you mentioned how little you guys utilize screens in your house, and my wife and I are very much on board with that.

How do you keep your kids busy at this age and not rely on those things? Because it gets pretty exhausting trying to keep our two-year-old satisfied and still get the necessary things done in the house that we need to do, you know? Yeah, absolutely. It's the eternal question, right?

All of us as parents go through it. I will say this. If my wife—there have been times—so, I'm pretty hardcore about a lot of things, and I'm somewhat hardcore about screens. My wife is militant. Like, she's just—she won't have anything to do with it. No screens. She's militant about it.

And I will say that if she had not been militant, and if she were not still quite extremely militant over the years, then, man, how many times we probably would have changed that family policy. And I should hasten to add that I think that as parents or as people, we should recognize that most tools in and of themselves are fairly—they can be used for good, and they can be used for ill.

They can have positive effects, and they can have negative effects. And I'm not sure that zero screens is the right policy. It's something that I think a lot about. It's something that I talk with my wife a lot about. It's something that I read about, and I think that it—but I'm not convinced it's always the right policy.

I think it's probably the right—as I've said—as I said last week, I think it's probably the right policy with very young children, and I'll answer why in a second. But there are many things that are fundamentally better and can give big advantages of using screens appropriately. The challenge is it can be such a slippery slope that once you start using them, the number of things expands dramatically.

And so in some things, I myself am convinced the slippery slope is not a fallacy. We often refer to it as the slippery slope fallacy. I'm convinced it's not a fallacy. Perhaps there can be fallacious applications of the idea, but in many cases, there are many slippery slopes, and there are many times when you open the doors to certain things, then it leads to bad—in bad places.

And I think that this is one where extreme caution is very much warranted. So first, with young children, I am convinced that the screens themselves and the applications that we commonly use fundamentally rewire our children's brains. And if you're using them and then going to not using them, you need to detox your children from them and expect it.

I observe—so the thing that we use screens for, as I mentioned recently, is we watch basically one movie a week. And I'm justifying it to myself because while we watch the movie once in English, I'm primarily using it for foreign language acquisition. And so that's how I kind of convince myself that, okay, one movie a week is not too much.

Every single time I turn the movie off, we have at least a 20% reduction in obedience, sweet attitudes, etc. Now, I've improved this. I've pointed it out to the children, and they're pretty on guard. So like they remind each other that we need to be super careful with how sweet we are towards one another and towards daddy if we want to watch a movie.

So they're on guard now. But it's just blindingly obvious that there is a massive decrease in appropriate behavior after simply watching a movie. And I see this in terms of massive decreases in intelligence and in creativity. So ordinarily, when children can live at a kind of slower-paced lifestyle, they develop a skill of creativity.

They learn how to fill their time, and they learn how to be engaged with the things that are around them. When we park them in front of a device, it plummets massively, and their discontent with life increases significantly. I'm convinced this is not only children. It's us too. We just are more accustomed to recognizing it in ourselves.

But our lust, both sexual lust and lust for things and such, is massively increased by what we expose ourselves to. And the constant stimulation, it changes and rewires fundamentally our brains. And I've seen it so clearly and obviously with my children, and I've seen it so clearly and obviously with just observing other children in the world that I'm convinced it has a significantly negative effect, broadly speaking.

So if you're dealing with a two-year-old, and if your two-year-old is accustomed to some interaction with screens, then there's going to be a detoxification time needed to where he or she can start to rebuild some of those skills and rebuild some of the engagement with the world around. And that's the first answer.

The second answer is it is important to have an environment that is conducive to children having things that are there for them. So having a playroom, having well-thought-out toys, having a backyard with plenty of opportunities and toys and games is fundamental. And same thing, I think novelty, so taking some toys away, one of the things that my wife and I have done, we haven't done in the last month, so I need to be careful with being proper with my language, we have done, and I think it's been good, is we forbid access to the entire toy closet.

And instead we've started rotating toys. And so instead of, we have a lot of toys, but it's like they stare at all the toys and they have no interest in them. So we say, "Here are the two toys you're allowed to play with today." And then the next day we put those away and we bring out, "Today you can play with these ones." And that's been helpful as well to kind of regain some of the interest.

And then finally, I would say that it helps immeasurably as your family grows to where they have playmates. Because a lot of the inability to get stuff done is because children are generally social creatures. They want someone to hang out with. And they want to hang out with mom, they want to hang out with dad.

And so a lot of times when they're just following around and getting in everything and messing with everything and asking constant questions, etc., they're just expressing their social need to be with you. So if you can, in a couple of years, you'll have a whole different problem of breaking up the squabbles and teaching them how to be polite and kind towards one another.

But in a couple of years it'll be a lot easier because they have a built-in playmate. Yeah, that's great. And a lot of that very much is what we're experiencing now. And we do, I'd say, an okay job of minimizing how much exposure our son has to movies. Maybe he watches 30 minutes of a movie once or twice a week or something like that and then loses interest.

But yeah, I appreciate that insight. That actually kind of goes along with, I don't know how much you've read John Roseman or other kind of parenting "experts," but that idea of rotating out toys, it seems like a great one. I got another question, but I can save it for another week.

Go ahead. Well, sure. Okay. Yeah, so I'm curious how much you've read on, you know, have you ever read any of Gabor Maté's books, "Hold On To Your Kids"? Maybe I got the recommendation from you. That is one of my most recommended books. Great. Okay. So yeah, I'm reading it now.

And it seems kind of antithetical to, I've also, like I mentioned before, read John Roseman's books. And? They seem, you know, almost antithetical to each other and how you treat your kids. And I'm just kind of curious if you have any thoughts on that or, you know, his parenting philosophy and, you know, just what your general thoughts are.

What is Roseman's position that disagrees with Maté's? How would you articulate it? You muted yourself. I'm going to unmute you here. And go ahead. What is Roseman's position that disagrees with Maté's? Sorry about that. Yeah, sorry. I disconnected myself on accident there. It just seems there's more of the standoffish, maybe in the disciplinary sense of not saying that disciplinary, you know, discipline isn't necessary.

It absolutely is. But some of the ways it seems, and maybe it's in the sense of older children as opposed to very young children, how he kind of deals with discipline issues being, you know, rather severe at times. Versus, you know, the Gabor Maté view being, you know, children need more than anything to know that they're loved and accepted as opposed to being more of a, you know, a burden or a hindrance on their parents.

Right. So when you get into kind of the conversation of discipline, then I don't think there's a thornier thing to discuss with in regards to children where there's more extreme views, etc. And I'll actually give you some thoughts on that in a moment to filter it through. What I appreciate about Hold On To Your Kids, and in fact, really the only thing, I'm sure he talked about it, but what I thought was the best, the reason I recommend that book is because he is so crystal clear about the negative influence of youth culture.

And let me articulate his position on that for our perhaps uninitiated friends who have not read the book. So the book is called Hold On To Your Kids by Gabor Maté. And he's a psychologist and I can't remember whose co-author is. Good guys. But anyway, in the book, he argues very strongly that in the modern era, we have something that is fundamentally new and has never before existed.

It's only existed since World War II. And that thing is called youth culture. And the basic idea is in youth culture, instead of young people looking to elders in the community for guidance on how they should live, they look to their peers. So instead of looking to superiors, they look to peers.

And this is something that we have created and encouraged. And I think I agree with him that this is a catastrophic outcome of our society. Because for all of the human history that we know of, prior to the, again, World War II, young people have always looked to elders for their cues.

And elders have never been perfect. But elders have had more wisdom than young people. Young people don't have wisdom. They're sometimes smart, but they often behave stupidly because they don't have wisdom. And they don't understand how to apply their brains to life around them. And what we've done often as parents in this youth culture is we have encouraged our children to be attached to their peers rather than to be attached to us.

And we've encouraged them to look to their peers for acceptance and for social cues and guidance rather than to look to us as parents or as elders in the community, et cetera. And one of the great problems of this -- well, there are several. First, a big one is often youth do not understand what they're saying or what they're talking about.

You think about this in terms of somebody looking for advice. If you're looking for advice on sex, should you as a 16-year-old go and ask another 16-year-old about sex or should you go and ask your 80-year-old grandmother who had eight children? The obvious person to go and ask for, to ask advice on sex is from your grandmother.

And yet we've created a culture in which those conversations are taboo in some way, and yet the children are going to freely give advice to one another. And in fact, where I've observed this myself is that -- or an added problem with this is that we not only have encouraged young people to go and seek advice from their peers, but worse than that, we have encouraged people to go and seek advice without knowing who's giving them that advice.

So I had a family member in my family who some time ago went through this catastrophic collapse. And I think that when trying to understand what happened, one of the basic foundations was that this particular person was spending all of her time in online message boards trying to gain advice from every corner of the internet in a place where you can't filter the quality of the advice.

On the internet, you can't know if the person who is typing a message to you is someone that you want to be like, at least if you're in high school and you're talking to your classmates. You can look at the fat girl and you can say, "I'm not going to take beauty and health advice from that girl." And you can go to the skinny girl and say, "I'm going to take beauty and health advice from that girl." Or you can go to the popular guy and you can say, "I'm going to take advice from you.

I'm not going to take advice from the unpopular guy." Or you can go to the one with a person with good grades and you can say, "Show me about how to get good grades." And go to the person that is failing out of school and ignore what that person has to say about doing well in class.

But on the internet, you can't even do that. And so young people are bombarded with information. And if in real life, they would often ignore the information or advice based upon the poor presentation or the fact they don't want to be like the person. But on the internet, that's hidden.

So back to pure culture or youth pure culture. Another huge problem with pure culture is that children do not yet have the ability to support one another. So for example, as a parent, if my teenager is behaving in an antisocial manner, and I come and I correct the antisocial behavior of my teenager, I can do it with patience, with gentleness, and with love, right?

With complete love that I'm not going to turn away. I'm going to consider that. Or if my child makes a mistake, I can come with love. But children often haven't developed those virtues yet. And so they have a short temper and they say, "Well, you should have known better and much worse." So you look at the modern bullying culture, especially online harassment, online bullying.

We live in an epidemic of teen suicide. We live in an epidemic of all kinds of social disruption. And I think pure culture is an obvious indicator of what is at the root of some of these significant societal problems. So what's the solution for it? Well, it's, Matei would, or Matei, I don't know, Gabor Matei would say, "The solution for that is for parents to connect with their children in a much stronger way." And so the connection involves a loving relationship.

And this should be intuitive to many people, and I think is intuitive to many good parents, that we ought to have a loving, close relationship with our children. But what I gained from the book is the fact that I myself had adopted the normalcy of this youth culture as being a normal thing.

And I always wanted a loving relationship with my children. But before I read that book, I would have unconsciously encouraged them to be more attached to their peers, rather than being very conscious about keeping them attached to me so that I can provide appropriate guidance. And what does that mean?

Because there's a fine line of distinction between children having friends and engaging in normal social growth, etc., and facing the challenges and the joys of the world in relationship with their friends. But I think it means not prioritizing friends over family, not prioritizing your time with your children over your time with your parents.

And as a parent, making sure that I'm very, very connected. In the Christian community, we talk about this like having your child's heart, right? This is a common phrase. But I think it's so fundamentally important. So I think that's what I gained from "Hold On to Your Kids." I'm sure you had more in there, but that's what I gained in it.

And it was worth the price of admission just for that one thing. Do you agree with that assessment? Absolutely, yeah. And I completely agree in the sense of how much it shifted our perspective on peer association versus parental-child association, and how important, like you just said, everything you just said, I could not agree with you more.

But yeah, that's a fantastic analysis of it. So when we pivot to discipline, I'll just make a couple of comments about this. My first comment is, when I had one child, I would have been quick, I was quick, to want to share advice on effective ways to discipline children.

Then I had a second child, and I was still pretty quick about wanting to share advice on effective ways to discipline children. Now that I have four children, I very rarely want to open my mouth on this subject, because I'm now intensely aware of how unique and different all of my children are.

And there are brutally obvious differences between my sons and my daughter, brutally obvious. And so I have a hard time listening to any parent who has girls and who does not also have boys. My favorite, for example, is Stefan Molyneux. Stefan Molyneux is a, he got banned, he got canceled from the internet a few years ago, but he's a philosopher, kind of a pundit and whatnot.

I've always appreciated him, because he's a very thoughtful guy. And Stefan is super hardcore of anti-spanking, and I don't know if he would identify as a gentle parent, but he's super hardcore in that direction. He has one daughter, and I find it almost impossible, I can listen to the academic research, and think about issues and whatnot, but I find it almost impossible to want to take his advice, knowing that he has one daughter, just from my own experience with having four children.

So my first caution would be that children are very unique and very different. And the way that you discipline your children, I am convinced, needs to be based upon what that particular child needs. And because what is effective with one is not effective with another, what is effective with the other is not effective with the third.

And so I don't think in this context I would want to go, actually I'll make one more comment in this context. I also think that, and I couldn't articulate Roseman's position on things, but I think there are, and I learned this from my dad, because this is the way he raised me, but he articulated it to me, and I always observed that it was good and useful.

The mistake that we make, often in parenting, is we are too loosey-goosey with our young children, primarily because they're cute, or we can ignore easily enough the expressions of defiance, the antisocial behavior, whatever you want to call it. We can ignore that stuff, because they're cute and they're little, and they're not very strong, etc.

And then our children start getting older and bigger, and the same expressions, when they come out, we get a little bit more worried, and they are more hurtful, the expressions are more disruptive to society, and the consequences are much more severe. We start to wonder, is this child going to end up in prison?

Is this child going to, you know, what's going to happen with this child? And I think that, and so what I think a lot of parents do is they ignore what happens in the younger years, and then as the child gets older, they try to kind of clamp down and fix the problem.

And first, I think the context for discipline always has to be a loving relationship. Children know whether you love them and care for them, and if discipline is received in the context of a loving relationship, where there's a confidence of relationship, it will bear fruit. If discipline is received outside of a context of relationship, it will often bear negative fruit.

It will not produce good. And then in terms of an approach, my personal mindset is I need to be a very, very, what word do you use? Strict? I need to be a very, very strong, I prefer strong, because I don't think of myself as a strict father. I need to be a strong father very much when my children are young.

And this is hard, and in fact, I think I need to be even stronger in my own family. But as my children age, the goal is to be strong when they're young, so that I can be much more hands-off when they are older. And I can transition to the perspective of a coach rather than an authoritarian in a child's life.

And it seems like we kind of get these things wrong. And so my issue with a lot of the public conversation around this is, first of all, children are children. I don't expect a five-year-old to know how the world works. I don't expect an eight-year-old to be wise. Children are children.

But on the other hand, adolescents are no longer children. And so we treat often adolescents like children. We treat children like adults, and we treat adolescents like children. And those are both counterproductive. And so I believe that around the age of adolescence, what we call adolescence is basically what most of the world has called adulthood.

And so as such, I can't treat a 13-year-old like a child, or it'll create a problem in the relationship. It'll create rebellion. A 13-year-old is not a child. A 13-year-old might be a minor, legally speaking, but a 13-year-old is not a child. A 15-year-old is not a child. A 15-year-old is, throughout virtually all of history, an adult.

And so I need to be focused on treating a 15-year-old with respect while also recognizing that as a parent, I have authority. On the other hand, a child is a child. And a child should be very comfortable and very clear about his or her place in society, a place of being loved, protected, secure, but also knowing that a child is not in a position of authority, is not in a position of sovereignty.

The child is a child. And it drives me, forgive me if I'm ranting, but the thing that drives me crazy is why parents kind of intentionally expose their children to issues that are far beyond what they should be dealing with. You see these tweets when someone saw one politician last week that said, "My child woke up having nightmares about climate change." I'm thinking to myself, "What?

On Earth? That's abusive. Why would you involve your child in an adult problem when your child is a child?" Or people come out and say, "My child has decided that he's a she or she's a he." It's a child. Your child, my children are dinosaurs one day, and Indians the next.

And so in our Western American society, we treat our adolescents like children, which creates major problems there, and we treat our children like adults, which creates major problems there. So there's my two cents that I think we should switch out around. Effective discipline can only be effective in the context of security of relationship, and the relationship between a parent and a child should be the most secure expression of love, unconditional love that has ever been known.

And so the child should feel perfectly secure, and then the discipline that we exercise should be primarily with a goal of helping a child to develop self-discipline. As a parent, my goal in discipline is to help my child develop self-discipline. If my five-year-old gets angry and goes and hits his brother, I'm not disciplining him because he went and hit his brother.

Clearly, that's a behavior that needs to be corrected. But my goal in discipline is to teach him how to have self-discipline, to master his emotions, to master his actions, etc. And that's why the discipline at a young age should be strong, so that the child can master his emotions, master his tongue, master his body, master his brain, master his laziness, master his self-discipline, etc.

Then, if I can succeed—I hope I do, right? We all do. None of us are guaranteed. But if I can succeed and a child can master himself, then I can coach him in that period of transition of adolescence of how to express those basic qualities of self-mastery so that he can then grow into a fully-formed adult.

That's my mental model. That's great. I appreciate that a lot. I appreciate the wisdom, too, about talking about how children are individuals and different from each other as well. You gave me a lot to chew on there. Thanks, Joshua. Yeah, my pleasure. You will see this with your children.

I remember—I'll save the stories—but you will see this with your children, that your children are unique creatures, each and every one of them. I think the models are important, but I think that more important than the models is simply to study our children as individuals and try to understand what they need.

Two more comments as I close. It's really hard as a new parent because you're not sure what they need, right? And it takes time to discern. Is my child crying because he's hungry? Is my child crying because he's got a pin sticking into him somewhere? Is he crying because his tummy hurts?

In the beginning, it's just so hard to discern, and then over time, it gets better. And then similarly, even with behavior, right? Is my child behaving poorly because we just watched a movie and he's 20% off of his normal space because he's so excited by the movie? And all he wants to do is run around in circles because the movie just fired him up?

Is he misbehaving because he had a short night's sleep because I didn't get him to bed on time? So discerning these things is really important. And then that comes with experience. I wouldn't open my mouth to talk about it if you hadn't asked the question, so I'm sharing this in the spirit of humility as a fellow journeyer, not as a master teacher.

And in closing, I will share the thing that has been one of the most impactful statements from a parent that I think about regularly. A number of years ago, I went to the funeral of a young boy who was good friends of my family. It was a young boy, he had muscular dystrophy, and he died when he was 15 of muscular dystrophy.

And his mother had conceived him when she was a teenager, and she was a teenager out of wedlock. And this was really tough for her, for the mother of course, being a teen mother, and it was really tough for the boy's grandmother. The Christian community, as Christians, we want to be celibate and chaste with our sexual actions, and so you have a pregnant teen mom.

And it's not a normal, obviously it's common around the world, but it's not a normal thing. And of course it's hard for a parent when you say, "I was hoping my teenage daughter wouldn't get pregnant, but now she is." And the birth of that baby worked a big work in the grandmother.

She spoke at the son's funeral, at her grandson's funeral, and she said something that stuck with me. She said, "The lesson that God taught me in this event, with my being humbled, is that my children's job in life, or duty in life, is not to make me look good." And I've thought about that nonstop since then.

Because if you're really dedicated to your children, you often, like I derive a significant amount of my self-image from who I am as a father. It's obvious to anyone who listens to me for 10 minutes. I talk about my children, I think about my children, I think constantly about these questions, I research, how can I help my children, how can I encourage them, etc.

So I derive a good amount of my self-image and self-worth from my children. And when my children misbehave, it's, at the very least, it's extremely embarrassing. Because it's not who I see myself. I want to have respectful children, I want to have polite children, as we all do. And yet, at its core, I always think of that.

Because it's so tempting to think that my children's job is to make me look good. But that's not their job. My job, as a father, is to labor day after day for the good and the well-being of my child. And so, it's not my child's job to make me look good.

And that lesson that that grandmother shared at her grandson's funeral was just so beautiful. And I think about it very, very frequently, especially as a parent. So in every decision, I mean, obviously, as a parent. But every decision that I make, in every interaction, am I thinking about what's best for my child?

Or am I trying to kind of... And am I willing to do the hard work? Because that's the other thing that children don't understand. A lot of the things as a parent, you don't want to do, right? I don't want to discipline my children. I want to let them go free.

I want to let them just do what they want. Because it's easier. It's hard for me to impose rules. It's hard for me to enforce rules. It's hard for me to come up with creative and appropriate consequences for breaking the rules. It's exhausting to be consistent. And yet, if I don't do that, then I'm not loving my child.

I'm not helping him. I'm not helping her to conquer her emotions or to learn how to be polite to other people, etc. So I just share that because it's been super important to me over the years to constantly remember my child's job is not to look good. And when those times that my child is behaving very poorly and I'm deeply embarrassed, I remind myself in that moment that this position that I'm in, I need to be focused on what's best for my child, not how it makes me look.

So I hope that encourages someone. Thank you all so much for listening. I really appreciate your being here. Enjoy this Q&A show. If you'd like to join me on next week's Q&A show, become a patron of the show at patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. I would be so grateful. Oh, by the way, I had a couple of cancellations on some consulting calls.

So we sold out and then I had some cancellations. So if you're interested in a personal consulting call with me, make sure you go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/consult. Only available until next week. Fill up those cancelled slots. I'd love to see you there. The holidays start here at Ralph's with a variety of options to celebrate traditions old and new.

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