♪ California's top casino and entertainment destination is now your California to Vegas connection. Play at Yamaha Resort and Casino at San Manuel to earn points, rewards, and complimentary experiences for the iconic Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas. ♪ Two destinations, one loyalty card. Visit yamaha.com/palms to discover more. Today on Radical Personal Finance, it's a live Q&A.

♪ Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the 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 Joshua Sheets. Today is Friday, January 6, 2023, the first live Q&A show of a brand new year.

I'm excited that you're here with me. It's gonna be a fun and meaningful and productive year for both of us. ♪ I'd like to welcome lots of new listeners recently. The show's really been growing and I'm really happy that you are here. So welcome to all of the new listeners, especially those of you joining us with a fresh new focus on your finances for the new year.

I love to set financial goals for the new year. I love to set lots of goals for the new year. And the new year is such a convenient time to look at your finances, to understand the progress that you made in the last year, and to start with a fresh slate.

I'll share in a separate episode, I'll share with you some of the new year's financial goals that you can set that are really meaningful and useful, and also some of the new year's practices that you can put in place. But we'll save that for a separate show. If you're new, on Friday, any Friday when I can arrange the technology, I record a live Q&A show.

Works just like Call & Talk Radio. I publish a phone number and a call in time, and then listeners of the show call in and we chat. I don't screen the phone calls. Right now we've got one, two, three, four people on the line. Usually we get somewhere between six and 12 callers call in, and we talk about anything that you want.

Think of this as open line Friday. You can ask me questions, you can share your own thoughts. I've had people advertise things, share various kinds of questions. You can talk about anything that you like. Ask questions, share your opinions, share what you agree on, et cetera. One of the best ways to talk to me personally, and a great way 'cause it helps me, I enjoy the conversations, and it allows us to create useful and interesting content for the podcast.

If you would like to gain access to one of these Friday Q&A shows, the way that you do that is by becoming a patron. Go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. If you go and become a patron of the show, then that will give you access to one of these call-in shows and you'll be able to speak with me live.

With that said, we go to Caleb in Illinois. Caleb, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? - Hi there, Joshua. So I recently transitioned from an office job and I got back into blue collar work. And my main purpose is I want to use this to build my own business, and I'm just building some skills right now.

So I was wondering if you had any thoughts on how to start a business part-time so that I can try to replace this main income that I'm learning from right now. - What kind of blue collar work are you doing? - Right now I'm in a kind of a maintenance role over a park, it's actually a zoo.

So I get exposure to a lot of things, but I'm trying to use it to get a lot of skills in construction and landscape. - Describe to me the business that you are interested in starting. - The business that I'm interested in starting would be a niche section of landscaping and maybe lawn care.

Getting into natives, edible landscaping, water features, and basically a green living style approach to landscape design. - Okay, and how long have you been doing the maintenance work at the zoo? - At the zoo, only a couple months. I've got a background in construction and landscaping. - Okay, well I guess what I would start with as far as kind of good general advice is quite simply this.

The day you find your first customer, that's the day you're in business. And in general, with what you're describing of niche landscaping, lawn care, or kind of property development, this is not something that requires you to have 30 years of experience. Now, you will want to have some specialized knowledge about what local plants will work best, what would be kind of the most, again, the best kinds of plants for the environment.

But this is several weeks of study. This is not years of study. This is weeks or perhaps months of study and design. And most of your energy and focus should simply be in acquiring your first customer. In this type of business, your only limitation is the number of customers that you can find and attract.

You can work a job during the week or whatever hours you're there, and then you can do this kind of job on the weekends and at night or early in the morning or whatever works with your other hours. The limiting factor is simply your finding customers. And your customers really care only about what you sell them as far as the vision.

They're gonna have input into that, and then your ability to follow through on the vision. So my overall advice would be, make your transition plan as short as possible, and focus heavily on finding high-quality customers. Because the day you find your first customer, that's the day that you're in business.

You don't need anything more than that. - Okay, thank you. Awesome advice. Do you mind if I ask you another thing specific to the job I have now? - Sure. - I started recently being at the zoo. It's actually a city position. And they do offer a pension plan that's after five years.

Do you have any advice on calculating how much that would be worth to jump into my own business full-time? If it's worth it to stay the five years or to branch out on my own once I start getting customers? - What is your current salary at the zoo? - The current salary is about $42,000 a year.

- Yeah, so it's almost certainly that this should be maximum a six-month deal for you. Much quicker than six months, you should be out on your own. And so there's no point in participating in the pension. There's no point in kind of working towards that. Now, let me explain, just so you understand very clearly why I'm saying what I'm saying.

You said to me, "I took a job as a bridge "so that I can start my own business." And then you described the business that you are planning to start. If you said to me, "I took the job "and I'm planning to do this job for a long time," well, of course, participate in the pension plan.

But you're taking this job to learn some skills and to give yourself some income while you're starting a business. And my point is, there's never gonna be a better time to start a business. And maybe you'll vest five years from now, but so what? Just because you vest, still is not gonna make a meaningful difference in your income.

So you should be able in 12 months or less, you should certainly be able to replace a 40-something thousand dollar salary. And you should certainly be able to double that next year. And you should certainly be able to double it again in year three. And so this is just not that, I don't think this is in any way out of reach.

What kind of price range are you imagining? Describe to me a job that you might do for a potential client and how much you're gonna bill that client for that kind of job. - So it would be totally dependent. I think I would start just to start building a portfolio.

It would be kind of a front yard installs, lawn replacements, raised bed gardens, so small carpentry. So a lot of those jobs on the material side it would probably be between one to $5,000 in costs. And then it depends on the size for my labor and if I end up getting anyone else onto the business.

And then a 20% markup seems to be about what I'm looking at there. So it's just filling up with enough market demand. I haven't done enough research on that area, specifically being in the area that I am. I'm not sure how many compared to big cities, how necessary all the green living style landscape design is.

- Okay, so I don't wanna get too deep into the specifics here, but I think you're dramatically underestimating the kinds of jobs that you could do fairly quickly. I mean, I can't imagine somebody hiring you for a $1,000 job. And you gotta understand that the kinds of people who are gonna hire you for your services are the kinds of people who don't wanna do their own work.

Any kind of Joe homeowner that wants to put in some raised beds and spend $1,000, he's very likely to go do it himself or hire a couple of buddies to help him or just 12 pack of beer and do it on the weekends. $1,000 expenditure on a front yard is nothing.

And so I think you're dramatically underestimating the size of the jobs that you should be looking for. I'm guessing, and again, to be clear, I have no personal experience in this kind of business. This is just a generalized perspective from a little bit of life experience and thinking about some of this stuff.

But your minimum job that you would bid should be $5,000. And you should very much not be working from a, okay, what, the percentage of markup basis. You should go in and do your best to present plans, present ideas, present clear proposals, and then bid them on a job cost basis.

Now, clearly you're not yet a landscape designer who's going to have the fullness of that. But I think that you're basically, your minimum job size, what I'm saying, should be $5,000. I don't think building a business on $1,000 jobs, unless you somehow have a lot of them and you have a clear markup for that, is in any way sustainable.

So think about what is a $5,000 job look like? What does a $5,000 job entail? What's the material cost, et cetera? And then focus on getting yourself into a situation where you can do one of those every weekend. Because if you're building out a $5,000 job, let's say that you have, say, $2,000 of profit in that, then if you could do those one every other weekend or two weekends per job, then pretty quickly you can replace your income.

But you need to get to the point where you understand what it's like to sell those jobs, and then you need to deliver some so that you can build that portfolio. You might, I'm generally pretty skeptical of the idea of doing work to build a portfolio that doesn't pay well.

You might have to sell a little harder. You might lose a few clients while you're getting to that first job, but I don't see why you shouldn't be paid well for your first job, or at least paid adequately. Maybe not paid handsomely, but paid adequately for the first job, and then boom, take lots of pictures and get going.

But it sounds to me like you're a little short in terms of the kinds of things that you're imagining doing. Otherwise, maybe I'm wrong. And so you need to go and talk to people in that business, develop some relationships with people. At the very least, I would hire myself on as a day laborer, at least on the weekend around my other job for someone else.

Guys who do what you do are always looking for somebody who's willing to do side work for them. Working for them on the weekend might work really beautifully for their needs, 'cause maybe they have crews that work during the week, but they could use a little bit more weekend help.

So building some contacts and getting around it. But I think your numbers are too small. Think about what a $5,000 job would look like. How would you deliver on that? How would you build $1,500 to $2,000 a profit into a $5,000 job, and then develop a few of those?

And if you're gonna do portfolio work, go to your mom's house and do it for her. And then really make sure you max, or do it in your own yard, maximize your pictures. But you don't need to give your services away to paying customers. That's the whole point of having a day job that provides you with income, is it allows you to just to be patient and go for actual good and real customers.

So on the weekend, you're not doing work for free. Either you're going out looking for customers and showing them the portfolio that you've created in your yard, in your mom's yard, et cetera, or you're at the library studying the books, or you're volunteering and/or working for a landscape designer, someone else.

You're becoming, you're going to the local, every, you're giving tours at a local botanical garden for local native species. You're setting up a wildscaping tour of town so that you really know your stuff, and you can make those contacts in kind of the native species world. But I guess my point is, don't, you're not gonna make a living on $1,000 jobs.

I mean, so raise your sights, and then build your skills in accordance with it. Fair enough? - That sounds good, thank you. Yeah, I think that my problem is, I'm approaching it from like a handyman style, you know, ones and two, odd-in jobs. I should be really looking at more of a contracting company style of getting large jobs to get the profits in.

And I'm hoping, I've learned a lot. There's a summit coming up, where they're having a big gathering for a lot of already in-progress businesses. So hopefully I can learn a lot from that in the next couple of weeks. - Yeah, that sounds wonderful. I guess the key thing is just, narrow down on who your customer is.

And your customer is not you, right? The guy who hires a handyman is not the guy, the guy who does work on his house on the weekends doesn't hire a handyman. The guy who hires a handyman is who has more money than time, and wants a good quality result, and is willing to pay for it.

So you may not have a lot of experience personally being the kind of guy who hires the handyman. But recognize that when people hire a handyman, or when people hire someone, what they want is quality work. And they want a fair price, but they're not looking for a cheap price.

All right, and this has been a transition that I've made in my own life. I grew up, my parents didn't, we didn't have a lot of money growing up. I was normal middle class, but we didn't have a lot of money. And my dad did a lot of his own work, and I grew up working with him on stuff.

And so I was very much in the DIY mentality. And as I got older, and as I started to have more money, I realized I don't wanna DIY this stuff anymore. I don't enjoy it, I don't wanna do it, I don't like it. And so I want to hire it done.

And so I, over the years, have hired more people to do stuff. Now, and I do have a budget. So there are times in which I don't do things because I just don't feel like that's worth it. But when it's worth it for me to hire somebody, I'm not looking for the cheapest price.

I'm looking for the guy who's the most reliable. I'm looking for the guy who's gonna follow through and do what he says he's gonna do. I'm looking for the guy that can provide the insight and the expertise that I don't have. I'm looking for a guy that's gonna make sure the job site is totally clean at the end of the day.

I'm looking for a guy who's gonna be trustworthy. Those are skills that you already have, or I hope you have, or if not, fix them, right? Show up on time, do what you say you're gonna do, and clean up before you leave. In the United States, you can make multiple six figures a year if you just show up on time, do what you agree to do, and clean up before you leave at the end of the day.

Because the other skills are relatively quickly earned. So don't think that you're selling to the people who, you know, again, are gonna do a $1,000 job. You're not. You're selling to people who are willing to spend more money and what they're looking for is good advice and good service.

We go to Ben in Tennessee. Ben, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? - Hey, good afternoon. First time calling, so I appreciate the opportunity. I guess I have a question. Maybe it's a prioritization question. So I've got a few things on my plate that I know you've discussed in the past.

So my wife and I are both working. She works part-time. And we total make about $250,000 a year. And we have two little girls. One of them is three, coming up on school age, and we're thinking about homeschooling. We also recently purchased a vacation property that we really like, but now we're wondering if maybe it's too much of an anchor financially.

What I'm considering doing is somehow, you know, reducing our income to try to make homeschooling more doable for us from a time standpoint, whether that means me going down to part-time and her continuing part-time, or she really enjoys her part-time work, so I would like for her to be able to continue doing that.

I guess my question is, I can tell you what I'm thinking is that potentially we just exit the vacation property and allow ourselves a little bit more room to reduce income. But the other option would be, of course, we maybe skip homeschooling and continue to both work the current amount that we're working.

Sort of general, I guess I just don't know if there's maybe some ways you would advise me to think about this, thinking about sort of these multiple priorities. - Let me clarify, your eldest is three and you also have a younger child? - That's correct, and we hope to have another one, maybe by the end of 23 or early 24.

- And of the $250,000 household income, how much of that do you generate and how much of that does your wife generate? - Yeah, so she's doing about 80 and I'm doing the other 170. ♪ Listen in the mornin' ♪ ♪ Come back Sunday mornin' ♪ - California's top casino and entertainment destination is now your California to Vegas connection.

Play at Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel to earn points, rewards, and complimentary experiences for the iconic Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas. Two destinations, one loyalty card. Visit yamava.com/palms to discover more. - Okay. (sighs) If your wife wants to stop working or if she wants to make income generation a more modest priority, what I mean is, you said, okay, she really likes her work, she wants to stay involved in it, you can work around that, but the key is just to separate yourself from it financially, that you're not dependent on it.

But you should certainly be able to comfortably provide that. The hardest situations are when you have a household income of 250 and you earn 125 or she earns 125. When there's a, then it's like, well, what do we do? Where do we go, how do we make the money work?

We lose half our income. In your situation, because you earn two thirds and she earns a third, then you can handle that and you can deal with that. So here are a couple of framework questions. Number one, your child is three. None of this is particularly pressing. You're in greater need of childcare than you are of quote unquote homeschooling.

Homeschooling in the early years is much more about character development, it's much more about personality shaping, it's much more about relationship development than it is about anything academic. And academics, you don't need to think about at all about academics for three or four years. Now, this is actually one of the reasons why it's so important that you make whatever decisions you're gonna make now.

I'm convinced that the most important years are the first few years for, in terms of shaping a child's personality, shaping a child's character, et cetera. And that's why it's so hard to hire those things out or institutionalize those things. As huge of an advocate as I personally am for homeschooling, there's no denying the fact that you can hire excellent teachers to teach your child academic subjects.

There are many very high quality schools, private schools, Christian schools, government schools. There are lots of wonderful schools out there with dedicated teachers who do a great job at teaching academics. The problem is, how do you hire somebody to shape your child's character? How do you hire someone to teach your child virtue?

How do you hire someone to instill these things into your child? You can't do it. The only person that can do it is a mom. That's it. A mom who has the patience to be with a two year old, a three year old, has the patience to work with, to encourage kindness, to encourage stick-to-itiveness, to build relationship connection.

And so, when you institutionalize your three year old, you're taking the most valuable years of life and you're putting those years of life into the hands of a minimum wage or close to minimum wage clerk kind of thing. And that person, that daycare worker, even if he or she is beautifully dedicated, is never gonna have the patience that you and your wife are gonna have with your own child.

And so, it's not a homeschooling question, it's a child raising question. That's the most important thing. And you're already there. You're not there from a schooling perspective, you're there now from a child raising perspective. Now, one of the great things to look at is if both you and your wife have significant demands on your time, you have a few basic strategies.

Strategy number one is one of you can become a full-time parent or close to a full-time parent. In some situations, that can be the father. In your situation, it would obviously be your wife. If she can minimize her work to just enough for her to stay current and connected to her interests and her love of whatever she does, et cetera, and if you hope to have more children, then it is obviously a solution for her to be a stay-at-home mom.

And you just do whatever is necessary to make the finances work. Notice you don't necessarily have to trim expenses, you can increase income. And sometimes, what's necessary is just for you to decide to do it. And so, not everyone can increase income, but in your situation, you can figure out a way to live on $170,000 very comfortably, and/or you can increase your income.

You can increase your income that's associated with your employment or your business. You can also increase your income that's associated with the thing, right, the vacation home. And so, obviously, you've considered things like short-term rentals or even longer-term rentals, but if your wife gives up her income from her job, or let's say half of it, and she's making 30 or $40,000 doing it part-time, and she's also making $20,000 a year from your vacation home, well, now the bite is not so big, especially when you factor in the costs of, the saved costs of childcare, et cetera.

So, choice number one is you can have one parent become a stay-at-home parent. That's a great choice, and I think in many cases, it's an ideal choice. Unless a mom or a dad is just not suited to being with children all the time for some reason, a handicap or a physical ability or emotional instability or something like that, I think in many cases, that's the best solution.

You also look and say, is there another family member? So, this is where grandparents can be hugely helpful. And for many people, they say, hey, we still have an income, or we need to work, but is there another family member who doesn't have an income or who could provide some form of childcare?

So, grandparent, sister, close family friend, doing something with another couple that we like from church or something like that. Then you also look and say, is there a way that we can adjust schedules? So, some parents can handle this very well because he works four days a week and she works three days a week.

We don't have a lot of days off together, but at least one of us was with the children all the time. And then you can go to institutions, but you can try to choose your institutions really strategically. So, you try to choose an institution that provides you with more of what you're looking for.

And in some cases, maybe that's, we found a wonderful daycare, four hours a day, and that's just enough to where then, one of us can pick our daughter up and be with her from noon to eight. The point is that I think at the ideal perspective, you probably have two full-time parents.

And then at the least ideal perspective, you get your child up at sunup, you rush him out of the house and rush him to a daycare and you pick him up right before he goes to bed. And so, finding a practical solution between those is the key. Now, what's going to make the difference for you is just simply the level of conviction that you have about it.

It's not gonna be a financial question. You could figure out the finances if you had the level of conviction. So, I have a high level of conviction, which is why I speak clearly and try to convey that to you, while of course being respectful of each person's own individual choices.

But because I have a high level of conviction, I know that I would do whatever it takes to make this happen. And that drives my decisions. It's not a matter of whether or not to take this course of action. It's a matter of how does it make the most sense for our family to take this course of action.

If you have that level of conviction, then you will be able to chart out the path to get there. And if that means sell the vacation home, done. You can always buy another vacation home five years from now, no big deal. If you're lacking that conviction though, then recognize that that is what you're missing.

It's not a pathway through the finances, it's the conviction. And so, you just wanna think about it, talk about it, and between you and your wife, make whatever decisions and consider what your level of conviction is. And if your conviction is low because you have a great, you know, just a daycare at the house across the street by this wonderful family that has beautiful children, wonderful, done.

If your conviction is high because you have to just take your child and enroll him in a subpar environment, well then the answer is obvious. So, what I'm focusing on is don't mistake financial constraints with need for conviction. If you have the conviction, then the financial path will be fairly evident.

You've already laid it out. It's either increase income or decrease expenses, fix whichever one of those ones makes more sense to you. Or if you need more conviction, then spend your time thinking about that and don't worry about the money until you develop the conviction. - Yep, that makes sense.

I think you could probably sense that the conviction is low. We are just sort of starting to talk through this. Like I said, she's only three, right? So, we've got a couple years before academics start. So, we're just trying to make sure, you know, that we're being intentional about materials that we're looking at and just, you know, making sure that we're putting everything on the table so we can make the right call when it comes time.

I guess one quick question. I'm not gonna ask you for homeschooling resources. Do you have any, have you ever read anything that you would recommend about someone who has an anti-homeschooling view? We wanna make sure that we read both sides of this thing. - Yeah, no, it's a very perceptive question and excellent.

So, from the anti-homeschooling view, there are a couple of major schools of thought. No pun intended. Usually I intend my puns, but I should acknowledge when they're not intended. The first school of thought has to do, or the first major objection. So, actually, let me start in reverse order.

The first major objection is generally practical, right? It's the situation that you're facing right now. Our modern world is set up for mom and dad to have jobs and make an income and to be professionals and then to go hire professionals to teach the children. That's the norm. And I don't know any homeschooling families that have not sacrificed tremendously to do that.

That's why I say it does come down to a level of conviction. Virtually all of the homeschooling families that I know, and I'm racking my brain, I'm sure there's a couple of exceptions, which I'm trying to say virtually, right? But most homeschooling families that I know could make a whole lot more money, could live in a nicer house, could have lots more spendable money if they weren't committed to homeschooling.

And the homeschooling costs a lot. It costs a lot in terms of foregone income for the homeschooling parent. It costs a lot in terms of family lifestyle. It costs a lot, especially most of the time, it's a homeschooling mom, it costs her a lot in terms of her career potential, et cetera.

And so you have to have a conviction where it's worth that cost. I think it is. Homeschooling families that do it generally come to the conviction that it is. If they don't come to that conviction, then they just switch back and they move on with their lives. But those who you see do it have come to the conclusion that it's there.

But it's not cost-free. We're all pretty aware of the costs, but we do it because we want the benefits. Now, so the first reason is practical, right? If I'm coaching a single mom who has limited career potential and she's making, I actually knew a friend of mine, a lady in our church growing up was like this.

She was a single mother, she had four daughters and she had very limited career potential. I would not encourage her to homeschool. No one did encourage her to homeschool. And today, if I were doing it, I would not encourage her to homeschool. What she did in her situation was she had a, and she was a single mother with a very low income.

Her ex-husband was very unreliable with regard to child support, et cetera, and she struggled. So what she did was she rented a little house that was close to a local Christian school. She worked at that Christian school driving a bus as well as working in the lunchroom. And that allowed her to have significantly discounted tuition for all of her daughters to enroll them in the school and that allowed them to make it through.

And so she was able to give her children the highest quality education that she could, but without going and doing homeschooling. There's no way that I can see where she would ever be able to homeschool. But she didn't just settle for enrolling her children in the government school. She worked really hard to give them the education that she wanted for them.

And I've known quite a lot of single mothers who have done similar things. They work night and day to try to enroll their children in a high quality private school of some kind that's gonna give their children more educational advantages than they can get in the government school system.

The other flip side is I've also known many parents who enrolled their children in the government school system and just simply supplemented it significantly so that their children had a higher quality education. That supplementation can come to family environment and background. Asian cultures are famous for this, right? They'll come to the, many Asians around the world have immigrated to the United States.

They enroll their children into government schools, but they have such a culture of studiousness and academic performance, and the parents hold very high standards for their children so the children succeed in school and they get moved on to the gifted track. And once they're on the gifted track in a government school, then they can write their ticket and so they can achieve a very high level of academic education.

And a lot of times when you can move your child out of the median group into the gifted group, then you can improve the social environment where you get into better families, better students, fewer problems, less bullying, less harassment, et cetera, and you can get better problems. And so the first reason people don't homeschool, the biggest reason is simply the practicality of needing to have a full-time teacher.

Now, I don't know anybody who doesn't homeschool because they believe that the government is gonna do a better job. If you look at the people who are the loudest advocates of government schooling and the loudest opponents of homeschooling, very frequently they themselves do not participate in the industrial government school system.

So President Obama and First Lady Obama did not enroll their children into the local government school, even though they would be the first to step up and say, well, we should limit homeschooling, we should maximize government schools. Most politicians enroll their children into the elite private schools that are available to them.

But this is a significant area of opposition from in the political sphere. What I'm trying to point out is it's not in the practical sphere, but it is in the political sphere. In the political sphere, a major objection to homeschooling involves the lack of ability by government officials to coordinate curricula, to coordinate one consistent curricula that all people are, curriculum, excuse me, that all people are passed through, and the ability to use the schools to shape the culture, shape the civic culture, shape the perspectives and opinions of the people.

And so this is usually the hot political debate. And people say, well, parents shouldn't have the right to pull their children out of schools. If you look at the countries in the world where homeschooling is strictly illegal, right, Germany, Sweden, et cetera, the reason has largely to do with this idea of government indoctrination.

And so like the Germany's anti-homeschooling laws are an artifact of the Nazi regime under Adolf Hitler. So Adolf Hitler instituted mandatory schooling and forbade individual privatized schooling as a way of shaping the minds and the ideology of the people. So after World War II, Germany threw off virtually all of the Nazi era kind of social programs, et cetera, except this one.

And so it's a remaining artifact from that mind control era that the government has chosen to continue to pass forward. And so that is a big objection that many people have is that how are we gonna survive if everyone, if parents have the right to educate their children the way that they should be?

And so the point is this is an objection, but it's not a practical objection, it's a philosophical objection. The next objection that you will hear has a lot to do with the professionalization of teaching. And so teachers say, listen, I was a trained professional teacher. I went to a teaching college, I have a four-year degree, undergraduate degree in elementary education.

I can do a much better job teaching your child than some uneducated mother. How is that possible? And so it is important to recognize this. And I think that unfortunately, there's a severe lack of confidence on behalf of many homeschooling mothers, that homeschooling mothers have this major inferiority complex where they go through life wondering is what I'm doing okay?

Like, am I doing good enough? Should I do better? And they think that somehow the professionalization of teaching is necessary. I myself think that this is largely nonsense from a couple of perspectives. Number one, it's nonsense because generally the stuff that we're talking about teaching is pretty basic stuff.

If you can read and if you have a book that gives you an outline of how to teach someone to read, then you can probably teach someone to read. You don't need to go to college for four years to teach someone to read. If professional help is needed, so for example, let's say that your child has a speech impediment, or let's say that your child has a learning disability, dyslexia or some other various learning disabilities, then that's where I think professional training is very, very helpful.

But even in that situation, I would still bet on the mother rather than the professional every single time. Because the mother in schooling her child with disabilities is the one who has the motivation to seek out the world's best therapies. The mother is the one who has the motivation and the time to make sure that those therapies are accomplished.

And she's gonna be able to do a lot more than a teacher who has to work with 10 children who are in need of therapies. And so I think you definitely want to seek out the advice of experts if you have a unique child with a disability, et cetera, but that expert is your consultant and you're doing the work at home, just like with physical therapy, right?

If your child has some other physical disability, well, your physical therapist is gonna do his professional work, but you're gonna supplement it with all of the work that you're gonna do at home. So I don't think that there's the professionalization of teaching is something that is necessary, and it's certainly not necessary in the elementary school, middle school, and high school.

If and when professionalization of teaching is necessary, you can and should access those professionals. So let's say your child wants to learn violin. Well, violin seems to me like one of those things that is generally not acquired well through reading books. You don't read books about violin to learn to play the violin.

And you're gonna have a hard time teaching a child to play the violin if you yourself don't play the violin. And so what you're gonna do is you're gonna go and find a violin teacher. And this is the same thing that homeschooling parents do, is they bring in professionals when those professionals are warranted.

You hire a violin teacher, you hire a calculus tutor, you hire a chemistry tutor, or something. When there's a subject where you need a specific professional input, then you go and you hire that professional input. But most subjects are not this way. High school chemistry does not need an expert to teach it.

All you need is a chemistry book, a few chemistry books. And in some cases, a little bit of apparatus. But even the apparatus is not necessary, right? You're not actually doing experiments, generally, in high school. You're just following directions and doing chemical recipes that are supposed to tell you something about how the process works.

So most knowledge that can and should be acquired is acquired much more simply than people think. And this is where I go back to kind of teaching modality. When you have a child who is older, the most important tool to use for the curriculum that a child is following is simply accessing and absorbing knowledge from high-quality books.

Because there you get a professional teacher, an author who is an expert at a subject, who has created a book that's going to open the eyes of the student and teach the student what he needs to know and is gonna do it in a vastly superior way than a classroom teacher can do.

And this is what drove me crazy myself throughout high school. Not everybody learns well through books. Maybe that's the case. I should give my caveats, right? Maybe some people like to sit in class and listen to lectures. But it drove me crazy that my high school experience was we would have a textbook, right?

McGraw-Hill went out and hired five PhD chemistry people or five PhD biology people to write a biology textbook. And they sat down and they wrote a book with 400 pages in it and 30 chapters, teaching systematically, carefully, and clearly everything that was needed in the textbook. And they laid it out, and not only did they put in the useful text, but they put in diagrams, pictures, charts.

They highlight the key points. They put in titles and bullet points. At the end of every section, they put comprehension questions and review questions, and then they give you all the answers to those things so you can go through them. And so then you walk into ninth grade marine biology.

You're issued this textbook, and then you proceed to listen to a teacher who has a few years of teaching experience go through and deliver her lectures of what she thinks you need to know to pass her test on marine biology. And you wind up reading cumulatively 75 to 100 pages of this 400-page textbook.

It wasn't until I was doing my graduate work after my undergrad degree that I actually read a textbook. Prior to that time, I hated textbooks because I just thought they were boring, et cetera. But when I did my graduate degree, for the first time, all of my study was all self-directed.

The way it worked was they sent me a textbook, I read the textbook, and then I had an exam. And so I started reading textbooks, and I came to learn how wonderful textbooks actually are. And I thought, back to my high school and college experience, and I thought, why did I sit for hours and hours listening to somebody give subpar presentations when I could have simply read the textbook?

And that's a personal thing. Again, maybe some people like those kinds of presentations. I think there's a place for lectures, but there's not a need for lectures for high school-level subjects. There's a need for lectures when you're dealing with very kind of new, cutting-edge science or graduate-level stuff, or a seminar where the lecturer is going to be able to enhance what you've already read in the textbook, or something like that.

We're not, when we deal with K through 12 stuff, nothing here is cutting-edge. You don't need a professional teacher. What you need is a coach and a guide. You need a teacher to help with some of the basics of reading, of learning to read, the basics of learning mathematics, the first kind of few lessons.

And then you need somebody who's capable of seeking out the best books and guiding the child into reading those best books, et cetera. Let me go more, give one more example. What about something like writing? Do you need somebody who is gonna grade and address, improve somebody's writing? What if you have a mother who is illiterate and who is teaching her children to write?

First, we have, do you need a professional teacher then? My answer is still no, probably not. It would be helpful, probably in some cases, but not. The best example here would go to Dr. Ben Carlson, the famed neurosurgeon, who, he and his brother only found out after they were extremely accomplished and very well-educated that their mother was completely illiterate, but she required them to spend their time reading books.

And then they, of course, went through government schools and they had help from the teachers and whatnot who were there, and they became very, very skilled. But what was the thing that their mother did for them? She required them to read a lot. And the key to being something like a good writer is not to have a teacher go through your writing with a red pen and mark everything.

The key to being a good writer is to spend lots of time doing good reading, and then to have something that you care about enough to write about. So I believe that writing is important, but I don't think that the grading of writing is particularly important. There are perhaps a few things that can help, right?

Pointing out a misspelling or something, but most of that is not necessary. What is necessary is to create an environment where a student spends time reading quality literature and then has an opportunity to write about things that he cares about rather than to have a professional teacher. So I went into that one because I think this is the big, probably the biggest reason people don't homeschool, other than practicality.

The practical features are a big deal, and then also, well, I'm not a professional, right? I need a professional. My answer is no, you don't. You need a loving coach. You need someone who's knowledgeable. You do need to know what the best books are, but the great thing, especially in the English homeschooling world, is you could pretty much pick any curriculum or any book list and go through it, and you're gonna be in a really great scenario.

Finally, I think the biggest downside of homeschooling has to do with the social aspect. Let me describe, though, specifically what I mean by the social aspect. I don't know any homeschoolers who are hermits. The socialization objection is the most commonly heard objection to homeschooling. People say, well, how will my children learn social skills?

That, to me, that objection is presented by people who have never spent any time thinking about it, and let me answer that objection, and I'll give you what I think is the real objection. The first objection is, well, if children are at home all the time, they're not gonna learn how to socialize with other people their age.

My first answer to this is there is positive socialization and there is negative socialization. There are many children in the world with whom I do not want my children to interact in any way whatsoever, because I do not want my children to be affected by those children, and so an uncontrolled social environment that takes all children, for example, in one 10-block area and sticks them into a room in an age-banded environment where it's all the 12-year-olds within this 10-block area, and then creates an adult to child ratio that is 20 to one or 30 to one, that is a recipe for disaster.

It's one of the most artificial, destructive, social environments you can possibly imagine. It takes away the normal social structure of socialization where you have adults that you look up to, where you have peers that you enjoy being with and that you work with, and that you have younger people that you coach and that you lead, and it just strips all that out and sticks people in an age-banded classroom.

And then, without the ability to discriminate against well-behaved students and poorly-behaved students, against students with good character, good virtue, good morals, and students with poor character and no virtue and low morals, it creates an environment for destruction, and the leaders never win. You always go down to the least common denominator.

You can have 15 children who show up and who want to learn every day, and you have five children that show up who just wanna goof off and play games. The 15 children are not gonna bring the five children up. The five children are gonna ruin the experience for the other 15, and the only way to deal with that is either to have a system of very high discipline where you can discipline and force the behavior of the five children to change or to remove the five children from the classroom.

That's it, because your entire classroom environment will be destroyed by those who are there in a destructive capacity. And so, this is the basic problem with government schools. Government schools cannot discriminate against students. They can only have all of the students that are in that area. Now, there is, of course, the positive side to that that we all appreciate, the anti-discrimination fights that have gone through, but today, what that means is you have to accept everybody, and the government school teachers have very few tools of discipline, especially at the more modest levels.

And so, what this means is when you enroll your child into a government school, you're putting them into one of the most dangerous environments where the thugs and the bullies and the predators on all sides are not controlled by the discipline of the system. And so, at the very least, you can move into a private school environment where they can have stronger tools of discipline and they can expel more freely troublemakers.

And this is one of the biggest reasons why most wealthy people don't frequent government schools. You cannot thrive in a system where you have even a small percentage of undealt-with troublemakers because they will destroy the atmosphere for the entire group. So, the socialization that happens in schools is often negative socialization.

It's not positive socialization. And here, I have some interesting insight because of my own experience. I was homeschooled, with the exception of third grade, when I went to a government school. I was homeschooled through seventh grade. In seventh grade, I went to a traditional local private Christian school. And in that context, for the first time in my life, I understood what class systems were.

I understood what bullying was. I understood what all those things were. Prior to seventh grade, I had always been in a completely loving environment, a kind environment. Everyone had always treated me well. I had never had any kind of question about self-esteem. I was involved in a family where I was loved and I was appreciated and I was cared for.

And then I went into a school where all of a sudden, even though it was a better environment than it would have faced in a government school because of the ability of the school to restrict the specific students that are enrolled in it, i.e. discrimination, I was in a better environment, but it still had kind of all of those things.

And I vividly remember, number one, how quickly I started to be aware of how I fit into the pecking order. But what was worse is I look back with shame and I can think of a couple instances where I myself partook in starting to bully other students. Now, thankfully, I never was physically aggressive.

I never punched anybody. I never threw anybody in a locker, et cetera. My bullying was limited in scope to saying unkind things or basically taunting and teasing. But I was taught by the environment that there were some kids that you looked up to and there were some kids that you taunted, that you teased.

And it was years later, several years after high school, I went to a high school reunion and I went and I sought out two of the boys that I remembered and I apologized to them because it took me years to realize how I had mistreated them. And again, I didn't ever physically assault anybody.

I just teased people, but still I was ashamed of it. And so I was taught, even in the most quote unquote positive environment, a private, selective Christian school, I was taught those social dynamics, those negative social dynamics by my classmates, things that I never would have done previously. I never would have been unkind to somebody.

I never would have chosen to pick on somebody because the group was. But once I got in that environment, within a year I realized that this was the thing that was to be done. So negative socialization is a big problem of the school environment. And it's a problem, especially in government schools, but it's still a problem in private schools.

The way I talk about this is quite simply that most people are not prepared, until they're in their 20s, are probably not prepared to face the hell that is middle school. I don't understand why we do this to our children. Elementary school for most people is a pretty happy-go-lucky environment and people like them and everyone's kind.

And they go through elementary school, they get to middle school, and then it just turns into a hell for a lot of people. And they start to build up calluses and whatnot. Many people go to high school and it's a little bit better. And I remember this feeling when I got to college.

And I looked at all of the weird-looking theater kids hanging out together and I thought to myself one day, they're having fun. And I had always kind of had to hide a little bit that I enjoyed theater and I enjoyed singing. I was never a theater kid. But I remember when I got to college and I saw the theater kids like, they're having fun.

They have friends who think like them. And then I got out of college and I realized that once you're an adult, you can associate with whomever you want to associate with. You can associate with people who are kind to you, people who make you feel good. And I realized that this forced association of the school system is so destructive.

You know, when I reached 25 years old, I felt like, you know what, I could probably go back to high school now and deal with it. But the average high schooler can't deal with it. And my evidence for that is look at everything from at the hardcore rate, the suicide rate in the United States, all the way up to just the weird social vices that people have.

So it's a huge problem. Now, let me continue to the other aspects of socialization. I think that once we step away from the negative socialization of schooling, which is primarily caused by the structure, the artificial structure of forced association of students in age-banded environments, the socialization that does happen generally doesn't happen very well.

So you say, well, I'm gonna go to school to see my friends, but I'm gonna see my friends for the four minutes between classes, and then we're gonna whisper in the back of the room. Or I'm gonna go to school and enjoy my lunch break with my friends and enjoy the 25 minutes that we have to eat lunch and visit.

Well, that stuff's really great, but it's not quality socialization. It's not a time where you actually have significant time to interact with your friends. And so one of my huge objections to schooling is that it's a colossal waste of time. If you look at the amount of time that the average teacher can spend teaching in a classroom environment, I think that, let's say you have a 50-minute period.

Of course, some schools have different scheduling, block scheduling, et cetera. But let's say you have a 50-minute period. I think the maximum that a teacher could expect to teach from a 50-minute period is probably 25 minutes, right, 20 to 30 minutes. And so if you look at the actual percentage of time used by the 15 to 18,000 hours that we enroll a child in school, the actual learning time of that 15 to 18,000 hours is probably something on the range of three to 5,000 hours total.

And yet we suck up all of this time and we have subpar learning opportunities and we have subpar socialization opportunities because there's not free association. There's not actually a lot of time spent together. From the learning opportunities, if you go to homeschooling or more interest-directed individualized learning, you could have a significantly higher level of learning happen in a dramatically lower, less amount of time.

So let's go back to that ninth grade marine biology classroom. Teacher's standing up in front of the room. She's got a 50-minute period and she's probably gonna have 25 minutes of teaching. Well, she's gonna teach her 25 minutes using verbal expression. I'm using verbal expression right now. I'm talking fast, I think fast, and I talk fast, pretty fast.

And some of you are listening to me at 2X speed. In fact, many of you are. In a classroom, you can't listen at a 2X speed. The maximum verbal rate of delivery for a prepared presentation is probably about 8,000 words per hour. I measure because of my language interests.

I've measured the average audio books that I listen to. And so a professional audio book narrator reading an audio book from a prepared book reads usually at a rate of about 8,000 words per hour. So if a teacher has 25 minutes, she's probably going to be able to deliver about 3,000 to 4,000 words of instructional content in that period of time, of actual 25 minutes of teaching.

That's assuming that every sentence is carefully chosen, that every piece of knowledge that she wants to impart in the presentation is prepared, it's outlined in advance, et cetera. And so she stands up in front of the room and she conveys 3,000 to 5,000 words of information in a 50-minute class period.

But when you read and you use books as the primary method of acquiring that information, just give me a good quality marine biology textbook and let me read it. A normal skilled reader probably reads at the rate of 15,000 to 20,000 words per hour. I read at about 25,000 to 30,000 words per hour in English.

I watch my students are reading, my children, my eldest is reading at a rate of something like 15,000 words per hour, I would say. And so what the teacher might take all week to accomplish at that 3,000 to 5,000 words per hour times five hours turns out to be basically one hour of reading for a student who's acquiring information.

And it's the same information, but actually a lot better. Remember, the textbook is prepared by somebody who took dozens of hours to plan it, to prepare it. They prepared the best visuals, the best illustrations. They edited the text multiple times to make it really, really pithy. So I think it's actually more extreme than that.

But basically it's a ratio of one hour of reading versus five hours of classroom instruction from an actual education perspective. So what happens in homeschool is you swap out the five hours of class sitting and you substitute one hour of reading, which leaves four hours available for other stuff.

And so what you can do is you can say, let's do two hours of reading instead of one hour of reading so we double the academic accomplishment of learning, double the amount of information consumed, double the amount of learning. And then we still have two hours, we have an hour or two for socialization and an hour or two for, say, a part-time job or for, say, going and swimming at the reef and actually doing marine biology up close 'cause we can do a field trip every week.

So in our homeschool, we do school four days a week and then we always have one to three days a week that's available for other stuff. And then that actual learning time is constrained to something like, depending on the age, four to five hours. And yet we can accomplish, if not twice, at least probably three times as much as a teacher can accomplish in kind of a normal structured environment.

So that opens up so many opportunities for socialization that are better and more positive. So now the socialization that the children can do is lots and lots of time of playing together, the afternoons together, or working on projects or other events where you don't have that artificial forced socialization that happens in school classrooms, but you have more free association.

And so now if somebody is not treating you kindly, well, we're not going to play with that child anymore or we're just gonna walk away or whatever the appropriate response is and you get a much more reasonable approach. Then the socialization that can happen can also happen across age barriers.

So you get older children teaching younger children, younger children looking up to older children, adults being involved, all of that kind of inter-age stuff that's really, really important and really, really healthy. So socialization is in many cases the biggest objection that people have. And they say, well, my homeschool student is gonna be weird.

There are lots of weird homeschool students, just like there are lots of weird students in government schools. The weirdness that you have is largely gonna be driven by your parents or your own personal, unique peculiarities and personalities. But my stance on weirdness is your weirdness is not gonna get better if you get enrolled into a school where you're bullied for being weird.

If I've got a child who is weird, I'm gonna protect that child and allow his weirdness to work its way through and then we're gonna work on getting non-weird and then when he's non-weird, we'll kind of introduce more of those social pressures. The other thing is just that weirdness is often a sign, something that you love.

Many of the greatest people in our history have often been those who were considered to be weird. As adults, we call it eccentricity and we appreciate it or we just call it genius. And yet when you put everyone into an environment where there's no adult perception on kind of what can happen, you wind up creating these weird things where people wanna insult them.

Now, socialization where homeschooling is subpar. The biggest thing where homeschooling is subpar has to do with ability to access a highly ranked group academic focus or something where you need a lot of people to do it. And so let me give real examples. Let's say that you're like hardcore into the classics and you wanna do all of your schooling in ancient Greek and you're gonna study the Greek philosophers hardcore.

I think in some cases, especially in the high school years, you're probably better off with a really high level kind of classical school for that kind of work than you are in a homeschool environment because while you can hire tutors in a homeschool environment and you can hire virtual, you can put people in virtual classes, et cetera, if you could get a group of say 10 or 15 students who were all in a hardcore classics program and you're speaking ancient Greek in class and you're doing all this through, that group dynamic of a very carefully chosen academic discipline is really, really positive.

This is the kind of thing that happens in college where you have a group of people who are high level students and they get around other high level students and the creative juices that can grow and the positive peer pressure of a small group of people like that, that's really hard to create in a high school.

There are other things, so things like theater and things like sports. Let's say that you have a child who seems very naturally gifted with vocal performance or acting. Well, you're not gonna be able to maximize that talent in a homeschool environment. There's just no practical way to do it.

Even if you went to the professional level, that still has its own problems because in the same way that having your 16 year old who's good at basketball, you don't put your 16 year old who's good at basketball in the NBA. There's something to be said for coming up through the ranks and learning with peers and people who are at your level and having time to make mistakes rather than experiencing professional pressures.

So if you have a child who's a talented vocal performer or a talented musician or something like that, in a homeschool environment, it's very hard to really fully actualize those things, especially if they relate to something where you need a big cast like musical theater. Sports is the other example.

If your child is really skilled in football or in basketball, having a school environment is generally gonna be the best place for that. There are sports where homeschooling is much better. So if you have individualized sports like swimming or archery or something like that, then having your child in a homeschool environment allows you to engage in much more training.

But in a team sports environment, you can't recreate that effectively in a homeschool environment. The good thing is many of those things are accessible to homeschoolers. They're accessible at the high school level. So for example, many homeschoolers play sports at their local government school. They go and they, because the government school can't discriminate, that means the government school can't discriminate against high schoolers if the state law allows for it, excuse me, homeschoolers.

And so they might do their homeschool, but then after every afternoon at 3.30, they're down on the basketball court playing basketball with a local basketball team or joining a musical theater or going to a computer class. Many parents will use college classes for this. And they enroll their teenagers into dual enrollment classes.

And they use that to get an experience of the classroom environment, but doing it in a more upper level and more controlled environment. And they're doing it intentionally where it's something we're gonna invest five to 10 hours a week instead of five to 10 hours a day into that kind of inefficient environment.

Or this is just a good area where you say, my child's gifts are really well met by this particular school. So I'm gonna enroll my children into this art school or into this school that has tremendous access, et cetera. So I think I've covered most of the important objections.

I've also done my best to dismantle them, but to point out where they could be valid for most people. But the practical stuff you have to solve yourself, the philosophical stuff, I think most of those objections are empty. To me, actually, let me add one more. And this actually is, I think, important.

I shared a few minutes ago why I was not, that I was homeschooled through seventh grade. And you might be wondering why. My parents enrolled us, enrolled their children into a school because they had seen homeschooling families that were excessively sheltered. Because we're from kind of a Christian minority, there are many people who homeschool not for the purposes of academic excellence, but primarily for the purposes of protecting their children from undesirable, immoral influences.

I think this is a powerful and appropriate reason to homeschool. But the application of this at different ages can vary. And so I think that what you do at the age of five, in many cases, can and should be different than what you do at the age of 15.

And so my parents' concern was that they had known homeschooled children who were raised and were schooled and educated in a very protected environment. But then they turned 18 and they went out and faced the world and there was no point of transition. And in some cases, the children who were in that scenario were so shocked by what they encountered in the wider world and how different it was from their protected bubble that they very quickly renounced the ideology with which they were raised and they embraced the ideology that was in the prevailing culture around them.

My parents didn't want that to happen. So they wanted us to be non-sheltered at an early enough age where we would be able to work through the questions and the issues in a collaborative, consultative relationship with our parents as teens, rather than as late teens and early 20-somethings when it's less likely that a child would seek out his parents' advice on a continual basis.

For a time, they enrolled various of my older siblings into government schools, but this was at a period in the 1990s when the material that was being discussed in government schools was making a significant change. And there was a point where one of my sisters who was in a kind of a highly rated magnet school, they were reviewing some of the books that she was going to be exposed to, and the books were quite simply pornographic.

And my parents said, "No, we're not going to require "our teenage daughter to read pornography in school." So they withdrew her from the government school and enrolled us into a local private Christian school, and that was the path that the rest of us went on. It was a major strain financially.

It was the one time that my mom had a job outside of the house because my parents couldn't pay the tuition, except that she was able to get a job at the school, which gave her enough of a tuition discount that they were able to afford it. But all of us as students contributed a nominal amount from our summer jobs to be able to make it work as a family.

And I would say that this is the reason not to homeschool that bothers me the most. And the reason it bothers me the most is this. My parents had seven children. One of my sisters is dead. Seven children. Of the six adult children, all of the six adult children continue to be faithful Christians.

I know quite a significant number of Christian families, and to have all of the children of Christian parents continue to be Christians as adults is very unusual. Now, I think there are a couple of aspects of that. Number one, the faith of my parents and the environment that we were raised in built a tremendous level of respect from us children to our parents.

And so that respect was a consistent thing. And so I wouldn't say that school was a causal factor, but it does remain the case that this was a big concern for my parents, that they didn't want us to be excessively sheltered. And so they intentionally exposed us to, in a still somewhat sheltered way, but they intentionally exposed us to these challenges of the world.

And that does seem to have had a good influence, at least by that testimony. So this is the thing that actually bothers me the most as a homeschooling parent, is that because of that experience that I had, I often wonder, will I do the same thing? Will I enroll my children into a school when they're older?

I believe that five-year-olds should be exceedingly well-sheltered 10-year-olds should be pretty very much well-sheltered. 15-year-olds need to be significantly unsheltered in order to progress healthily into adulthood. I have often gotten frustrated at what could have been. And when I think about the massive waste of time that was my high school experience compared to what I could have done in terms of academic accomplishment, in terms of business building, in terms of career building, et cetera, sometimes I get frustrated with that.

But in hindsight, I have to look back and say, I'm sure I learned more lessons from that environment than I give credit to. And the reason I wanted to raise that objection, number one, it's real, but it's also an important thing that in schooling as a parent, I don't believe the right way to approach things is from an ideological perspective first and foremost.

As parents, our responsibility is to raise and parent this specific child at this specific point in time. And that may look different as the years go by. And so we should inform ourselves about various ideologies and approaches, et cetera. We should listen to strong and robust defenders of those ideologies.

That's why I try my best to defend as robustly as I'm able to my perspective. But at the end of the day, we have a responsibility to filter those things down and look at this child, this boy, this girl, this young man, this young woman, and then say, what is best for this young man and this young woman at this point in time?

And that may be one thing at the age of three. It will be a different thing at the age of eight, and it will be a different thing at the age of 13. And I think that it's perfectly acceptable to go in and out and among these systems as you, the parent, decide is best.

For example, I mentioned that I was, I went to a government school in third grade. Well, the reason I went to a government school in third grade was because my 14-year-old sister died from an epileptic seizure. And working their way through that in our family, I don't think my parents, my parents decided that, you know what, homeschooling this year is not for us.

And so they enrolled us, or they enrolled me, I don't really remember everyone else, but I think no one was homeschooling during that year. But then after one year of homeschooling, then our family was in a stronger place, able to press forward. And so they started homeschooling again. And along the way, sometimes my mom homeschooled me, sometimes my grandmother homeschooled me, sometimes the work was good, sometimes the work was bad.

Sometimes the academic achievement was high, sometimes the academic achievement was low. Sometimes motivation and the good, it was a good environment, sometimes there was less of a good environment. And when I use that term, I just mean in terms of, you know, academic structure and friends and such. So as a parent, what I want to emphasize is that it's our responsibility not to be slaves to an ideology, but to be good parents and to study what is right for this child at this point in time.

I defend homeschooling quite robustly because I believe it's a wonderful solution and really brings many opportunities and possibilities that are not available otherwise. The modern industrial factory school system is failing our students on every single metric. There is a very small minority that escape intact and that succeed in that system because of academic skills, academic prowess, internal self-motivation, et cetera.

There is a very small minority that is saved by that system, right? This is where you get into another objection to homeschooling that some people raise is, well, how do we control for abusive environments, right? You find parental neglect, childhood neglect, child abuse happening, and sometimes homeschooling can conceal that because my child doesn't have to go to a school where the teacher's a mandated reporter about the bruises that my child has and things like that.

And those things are true, but they're statistically unimportant, right? And that's more, I don't think we should invent this giant system to account for those horrific crimes. But that is a concern that some people have about homeschooling broadly. The key thing is that just simply the modern industrial school system was never developed and built with the primary intention of educating a child effectively and well.

The modern industrial school system was designed and built with the goal of creating a uniform population that would be easily governed and easily controlled and by giving that population a certain way of thinking, a certain mindset, a certain worldview. And you feel free to go down as deep as that rabbit hole as you want, right?

John Taylor Gatto's "Underground History of American Education" is good. "Crimes of the Educators" is good. You can kind of go down that rabbit or you can just go to the philosophical perspective. Go read John Dewey's writings and the progressive school system era in the mid 20th century. The point is that the school system was never developed to help your child succeed to his or her maximal ability.

That's why the elites have always had a secondary system. There are great schools out there that are accessed by the elites of our country and every country in the world. It's not your local government school. And so if you are actually looking for a personalized solution to your child's success, which is what we as parents want, then we need to be aware of the opportunities that are available to us and then go and seek out the thing that is gonna be the best for this child's success.

And we should want more and desire more from our schools than them to serve as babysitters so that we can put more people in the workforce so we can have the income so we can boost corporate profits. I want my children to be well-educated and I wanna use whatever tools are at my capacity to do it.

And as a parent, just like almost all parents, this is our primary goal. We want our children to go beyond us. And in our current day, especially in a post-information age society, we know that education is core and the industrial factory school system that can be defeated with our children using chat GPT to write their essays is not a school system that's going to prepare them to function in a world in which chat GPT is taking their jobs.

And so I'm more concerned about building the skills so that chat GPT is a tool and not a threat 'cause it's not going away. And the entire industrial factory school system is antiquated and out of touch. About the only thing it does well is give children a, I can't say safe environment, some gives them a supervised environment on a daily basis so mom and dad can go to work.

And that just sucks in my opinion and we ought to do better. So one hour podcast on that for you, Ben. But hopefully that gives you a little bit to think about. - I got a little bit more than I bargained for there. I appreciate it, yeah, it definitely does.

Yeah, no, I appreciate the time, thank you. - That's a good place to move on from there. Let's go to Bradley in California. Bradley, welcome to the show, how can I serve you today? You muted yourself again, let me unmute you, Bradley. Bradley, are you ready to go? Go ahead.

- I'm here. - Go ahead. - So I got a sleeping newborn in my arms so we'll see how many questions I get through. - Absolutely. - But my first question was, a couple of years back, I had subscribed to an email newsletter of yours and you had 12, both recommendations for 12 months and I'm trying to put together kind of my reading list for this year.

And I was wondering if you had any newer recommendations that you could put out for this year? - That's a great question. And I would love to answer it. So now for a limited time until I'm on motorsports, get financing as low as 1.99% for 36 months on select 2023 Can-Am Maverick X3.

Considering the Mavericks taking home trophies everywhere from King of the Hammers to Uncle Ned's Backcountry Rally, you're not going to find a better deal on front row seats to a championship winner. Don't lose out on your chance to get a Maverick X3. Visit Del Amo Motorsports in Redondo Beach and get yours.

Offer in soon, see dealer for details. Let me give you, let me just give you a couple or three that I have really enjoyed and benefited from lately. The book that has probably really impacted me significantly this last year is called "Stolen Focus." And let me find the subtitle here.

Okay, it's called "Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again" by Johan Hari, "Stolen Focus, Why You Can't Pay Attention and How to Think Deeply Again." This book is so good that I had planned, I didn't do it yet, but I was gonna do a standalone kind of summary podcast of it, but I just thought it was really, really wonderful.

In that book, Hari talks about the problem of our modern inability to focus, and then talks about potential solutions to it. And I really appreciated his approach because he didn't limit himself to kind of stereotypical cheap answers, right? Well, turn off notifications on your phone. That's good, that's useful, but it's much more than that.

And it has really, it really opened my eyes to kind of the immensity of the problem and the immensity of the problem, and I guess I can't go any farther. It was a really, really good book. A second book that's related to that is, I went and I reread, in light of that, Cal Newport's book, "Deep Work." And "Deep Work" is called, the subtitle is, "Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World." And this book is kind of the solution to it, but one of the things that I appreciated, let me look and find, I wanna find a quick quote from it, from the beginning of the book while I'm talking.

This book basically talks about the usefulness of doing deep work, but here is the hypothesis, right from the introduction, and it says this. The deep work hypothesis. The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy.

As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill and then make it the core of their working life will thrive. I wanna reread that. Listen to this, the deep work hypothesis, and let me define deep work. Deep work means that you sit down and you focus single-mindedly on an important work task, an important project, et cetera, and you eliminate from yourself distractions and a distractible environment in order that you can spend significant amounts of intellectual capital on that project.

So again, the deep work hypothesis. The ability to perform deep work is becoming increasingly rare at exactly the same time it is becoming increasingly valuable in our economy. As a consequence, the few who cultivate this skill and then make it the core of their working life will thrive. And even related to education of my long monologue that I just finished, to me, this is actually one of the other big benefits and things that I'm working hard to focus on in our homeschool environment is the importance of staying very focused on a task with no distractions.

And I look around and I don't like to be the kind of the old fogey who talks about kids these days. That's a natural generational thing that has approached. But I do mourn for most of our environment, most of our culture, and mourn for especially most of our youth, the ability that we need and that we have to do deep and important work.

And I noticed this with myself, which is I'm my own guinea pig. I remember when I was younger, how good I was at staying focused for very long periods of time. And then I remembered how that changed. And when that changed, I understood that I saw the change. And so because of that, I was able to notice how my ability to focus was declining.

Then when I noticed it, I worked really hard on getting it back. And I've made significant progress in getting back my ability to focus, which has been really, really useful to me. And then now, thankfully, a friend of mine just sent me this week, published January 3rd, we're getting some data on this.

Let me read you this headline. This is from, I'm reading from the University of North Carolina, unc.edu. One of their research from their news and updates department says, quote, "Study shows habitual checking of social media "may impact young adolescents' brain development. "The study provides some of the first findings "on how social media usage could have longstanding "and important consequences on the development "of adolescent brains by the College of Arts and Sciences, "Tuesday, January 3, 2023." And I'll just read the first few paragraphs.

In one of the first long-term studies on adolescent neural development and technology use, researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill report adolescents' habitual checking of social media is linked with subsequent changes in how their brains respond to the world around them. The study, published today in JAMA Pediatrics, reveals that adolescents' brains may become more sensitive when anticipating social rewards and punishments over time with increased social media usage.

Quote, "The findings suggest that children "who grow up checking social media more often "are becoming hypersensitive to feedback from their peers," said Eva Telzer, a professor in UNC Chapel Hill's Psychology and Neuroscience Department and a corresponding author. And so, you know, they go through it. We're just starting, we're at the starting point of getting data and good, decent studies on some of the impact of this.

But I am convinced that Cal Newport's hypothesis is correct. And I see this as kind of a huge danger. I mentioned just a few minutes ago, CHAT-GPT, which has, of course, taken over the world by storm over the last month. And I look at CHAT-GPT, and I think it's important not to have the perspective of a Luddite, just saying that all new technology is bad.

At every stage in human history, when we invented new technologies to solve a problem and eliminate human labor, there was a major societal fear that, well, this just means people are gonna be out of work, going back to everything from an elevator, the Bellman operating the elevator, to people operating the elevator themselves, to the printing press, to almost anything.

At every stage, we go through this perspective where we take away jobs, et cetera. But when we come back from it, we wind up using those technologies, generally, to improve things. And so I'm very optimistic about new technologies. And while it's probably not quite right to call it AI, the current use of AI technology is going to dramatically improve our world in many ways that we can't predict yet.

But what it requires is that we upgrade our skills. So the teacher who can be replaced by AI, or the student whose work can be replaced by AI has a problem, he has to upgrade his skills. And the most important skill that we have as humans is our creativity and our focus and our ability to imagine new things.

And so that's been a big deal for me, thinking a lot about that. And I want, even from an educational perspective, if I were elected emperor of the world, I would spend a lot of time creating environments of focus for children to be in. Now, those environments of focus for children, of course, will be different than for adults.

When I want to encourage focused work, we want to focus on the work, 15 minutes, focus, then be done. And we want to have lots of unstructured playtime of no focus. The goal is not to take a 10-year-old and put him into an environment where 10 hours a day is doing deep work, but we need to build our muscles in that perspective.

And that to me is really important. So those would be just two that I would suggest off the top of my head. Let me make one more, actually, which is interesting, 'cause you didn't give me any guidelines. I have really been enjoying the book, "Making Numbers Count, "The Art and Science of Communicating Numbers," by Chip Heath and Carla Starr.

Chip Heath wrote the book, "Switch" and "Made to Stick." And this is a book that a friend of mine told me about it, and I went and picked up a copy. And it affirms with good examples kind of what I have often noticed in financial planning is quite simply that the human brain is not well adapted to conceive of numbers.

And so the entire book gives instructions and tools for basically translating everything into user-friendly numbers, translating things into context where they make more sense. And this happens in many areas. Let me give you a couple of interesting examples just from the beginning of it, right? So this is the numeric expression.

97.5% of the world's water is salinated. Of the 2.5% that's fresh, over 99% is trapped in glaciers and snowfields. In total, only 0.025% of the water on the globe is actually drinkable by humans and animals. So that's a compelling statistic, but it's hard to remember. So here is the rewrite of it.

Imagine a gallon jug filled with water with three ice cubes next to it. All of the water in the jug is saltwater. The ice cubes are the only freshwater, and humans can only drink the drops that are melting off of each. And so it takes the same numbers but puts them into a human scale.

And they give example after example after example out of it. So this is something that I'm studying 'cause I wanna do a better job of making numbers make sense. And so I'm trying to learn the lessons and then figure out how to apply them. So much of my work is extemporaneous, and so I struggle with that.

But I wanna do a better job of making numbers count so that they make sense for people. So there are three books to consider. - Yeah, no, those would be great. I love Cal Newport. I'm familiar with Deep Work, but I haven't read Stolen Focus, so I'll definitely check that one out as well.

And just since you have interest there, another one to put on your radar might be Indistractable by Nir Eyal, if you haven't checked that one out. And I definitely haven't heard of the Making Numbers Count. So much appreciated. I will challenge you 'cause I have a long year ahead of me.

If you have interest in it, to put out a full reading list 'cause I got 12 months of reading to fill. You've done a good job of effectively persuading me the benefits of reading. And actually, I should thank you for that 'cause I spent more time reading in the last year or so than I ever have, and you're largely to thank for that.

And actually, it's funny you mentioned Cal Newport because I always think of him when I think of you and your show because whenever someone's looking for career advice or looking to make a career change, his book on So Good They Can't Ignore You and Your Career and Income Course are my two most popular resources to refer people to in terms of thinking through those decisions.

So I put you in the same league as him in that regard for advice there. My second question regarding kind of just a plan for spending. Every year, I create an annual budget and I'm trying to do the same for this year. I've been at a point where I've been saving and investing about 40 to 50% of my pre-tax income.

And I really don't have much interest or see too much marginal benefit in going beyond that. So instead of focusing on being more frugal this year or investing more, I really wanna figure out areas where I can spend more for the most return on my personal happiness, my family's happiness and spending more.

Not a big amount that I have to add here somewhere around 10 to 15,000 disposable income to do that. But I was wondering what broad categories should I be looking at? I had a few in my mind, but I'm sure there's things I'm not thinking of because I've kind of been in this really frugal mindset of just going at it full throttle for the last four or five years now.

- Love it. I should probably devote an entire, see, probably a series of podcasts to that because it's such a powerful way to think. Years ago, I did a show on budgeting and one of the points that I made in that budgeting show was the importance of identifying whether certain categories in your budget should increase, stay the same or decrease.

When you look at your budget, spending less money is not the goal, but rather there should be an additional texture to say which categories of spending would I like to spend more money on, which categories of spending would I like to spend about the same or in which categories would I like to spend less money on?

And a lot of this comes down to personal values, et cetera. So what I would do is let me use my three question, let me riff off of my three question to give you a framework for this three question idea. So remember, I've done shows on the three questions that are prior to financial planning.

Question number one is, who do you live with? Question number two is, where do you live? And question number three is, what do you do for work? The idea being that if you live with people that you love and you love who you live with, you can live a happy life regardless of your financial abundance or scarcity.

Secondly, if you live in a place that you love and you just really enjoy that, that's gonna drive everything about your life experience. And so choosing a place that you love at the macro level, country level, climate level, down to even just the specific house is a big deal.

And then number three is what you do for work. And so I think that those are three categories that then would give you the insight into what specific areas of expenses do you want to focus on. And so like a house, for example, we can go the other way.

Well, actually, let me take it in this direction. I'll split the order because it'll make, I think, the explanation simpler. So on your house, spending money on your house, I think one of the best areas where you can increase your expenses is often on your living environment. Anything that you can do to make your living environment more pleasurable for you based upon your specific scenario is a good thing.

Sometimes this means changing houses. And so if there's a big structural change that can be accomplished, when I lived, I think it was four tenths of a, two fifths of a mile, less than half a mile from my office, it was what a wonderful structural change. To eliminate commuting, I didn't work in the house, but to eliminate commuting was one of the best structural changes to my life.

In that particular house, when I was so close to my office, that house, I had a grocery store that was a 10 minute walk away and about a five minute bike ride. We had a library that was a 10 minute walk and a five minute bike ride. We had a wonderful park that was a five minute walk and a five minute bike ride.

And so like having all of those amenities and not having to get into a car to drive everywhere is just a major lifestyle improvement. So sometimes changing the location of your house can be a smart thing to do. And if it costs you an extra $10,000 a year in interest payments, that might be a great thing to do.

Then in terms of the specifics of your house, a lot of times, you know, you said, I got this frugal house, but you know, here we are now, we need to home, we wanna homeschool, but we don't have a homeschool room. Well, spend $15,000 and add a homeschool room to your house or spend $50,000 and add a homeschool room to your house and just cover it out of your annual mortgage expenses.

Things like that, that give you the ability to live the kind of lifestyle that you want will be good investments. And in addition, spending on your house in terms of amenities. So whether it's taking out an interior wall and expanding the dining room so you can have bigger dinner parties or putting an extra window in so that you can have more light and feel like you are in a better situation or upgrading the kitchen so it's a useful, functional place to be.

These are, this is good money spent because your house provides one of the basic bones of your life and it's really, really useful. I personally think that as men, we often discount the importance of this. I did myself when I was younger. And my wife would talk about wanting to do something on the house and I'm like, "No, let's be frugal." And then one day I just realized, her situation is unique, but I woke up and I said, "You know what, Joshua, you're being dumb, right?

"All of my wife's life is either in the house "that we live in or out of the house that we live in." So as a mother, and a full-time mother and a homeschooling mother, et cetera, she's always either in the house or working out from the house. And so her ministry to her children is in the house.

She's in the house a lot. Her ministry to others is in the home, right? Opening up our home, bringing in guests, et cetera. And so money that I spend on our home is in a very, very important expenditure for her. That's different than me, right? Much of my life is outside of the house.

I'm probably at home for more than most men, but still, when I go out for work, I work outside of the house. When I go out for play, I often play outside of the house. When I go out and do work in the community, it's generally outside of the house.

And so as a man, it's easy to underestimate the importance of the house and the home for my wife, because we have different roles. We have different functions. And so I think that spending money on the house is a wonderful thing to do. And it has the side benefit that in some cases-- not all cases, but in some cases-- it can result in a financial increase when it comes time to sell the house.

The second thing that can really be a great expenditure of money is on your career, on increasing the pleasure that you gain from your career. I talk a lot about increasing the amount of money that you gain from your career. But I think spending money on your career to increase the pleasure of the career is a really good thing to do.

And there are many levels at which you can do that. So first, recognize that most of what we do in life is optional. And if we intentionally, consciously choose to do more of the things that we want to do, more of the things that give us energy, more of the things that invigorate us, and we intentionally choose to do fewer of the things that drain us, the things that we're not well-suited for, the things we don't like doing, the things that make us feel frustrated and angry, et cetera, we're increasing the quality of our life.

And sometimes all that's needed is to spend $10,000 or $15,000 and make that happen. And so it might be you spending $10,000 or $15,000 to hire a personal assistant. Sometimes it's spending $10,000 or $15,000 to upgrade the tools of your life. Sometimes it's spending $10,000 or $15,000 on decreasing your salary by going to your boss and saying, boss, I don't want to do these things anymore, and swapping it out.

Sometimes it's spending $10,000 or $15,000 on flying business class instead of economy class, or whatever the actual application is. The question I ask is, can I spend more money on my career in order to improve the emotional juice and the emotional satisfaction that I get from my career? Because this is easier for an entrepreneur.

If I'm coaching an entrepreneur, I coach the entrepreneur, and I say, the goal is to spend all of your time on things that fascinate you and motivate you, to steal Dan Sullivan's nomenclature. Fascinate me and motivate me. I want to do those things that fascinate me and motivate me.

And then I want to get rid of everything else. But you can do that to a significant degree as an employee as well. And a lot of times, if you say, how can I spend the money on that, then it's good. And that's a different spin than what I talk about with increasing income.

If it's increasing income, certainly spending money on a coach, spending money on an advisor, spending money on those things is really productive. But could you spend money on increasing the quality of your career? And then finally, I think just broadly speaking, spending money on relationships. I am convinced that perhaps the best way to spend money where you get maximum bang for buck is on people and on relationships.

And we know that. We talk about that commonly. We say, spend money on experiences, not stuff. But I focus specifically on relationships. And I take this from my Christian ideology. Jesus said, "Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal.

But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven where moth and rust do not destroy and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." And that, as a financial planner, I spent years thinking about that. And I struggled with it, because there seems to be this intentional-- there is this clear conundrum, at the very least, whether it's just conflict or conundrum.

I don't like to go to-- I prefer paradox or conundrum or seeming disconnect between working as a financial planner, teaching people how to pile up money on earth, versus what Jesus said. And some people, many good-hearted Christians, believe that what Jesus was teaching was to be taken in a literal fashion.

There are many Christians who consciously and intentionally choose not to accumulate money because of Jesus' teachings there. The hard thing for me was always working in an American context, where money flows like water. There's just money around everywhere, just flying through the gutters. And all you got to do is just stoop down and pick some and do some work.

And you got more money than you can spend if you just follow some basic principles. And so I thought, well, it seems irresponsible not to pile up money. But what brought me a lot of joy and clarity was when I thought about how I would actually lay up treasures in heaven.

And sometimes Christians take this in the sense of winning souls. So they say, the way that you lay up treasures in heaven is to go and to preach the gospel and to go and encourage people to be born again and help to usher them into the kingdom by being born again.

I think that's absolutely true. But I like to look at it just more broadly. If I think about what is in heaven, which is exclusively souls, that's what's in heaven, then to me, if I can spend money on people, then that seems really, really appropriate. And so the way that I lay up treasures on heaven is by spending money on people.

And then the specific application of that will come differently in my life and in my lifestyle over time. So one application of it is my wife and I are expecting our fifth child. Well, they're not cheap. They're not as expensive as all the studies say, but they're still not cheap.

But I'm laying up treasures in heaven because the one thing I can take with me into heaven is souls, the souls of those I impact and the souls of my children who I can impact more than anybody else. And so I want to have a large family. And if it costs you another $10,000 or $15,000 a year to have a large family or to homeschool or something like that, I think those are good categories to spend money on.

But I think it goes much beyond that. And so some of it would involve charitable giving. If I notice that my neighbor is in need and I have the ability to give more money to my neighbor to help him in his time of need, then that's something that I should do.

And I'll gain a great deal of joy out of that. And then it can go beyond that, though. I think a big thing that we can do is we can create special experiences with other people. And sometimes all that's needed is to have a sum of money that we're willing to spend on it.

And so if it means setting up a dinner date with your friends and you're going out with you and your wife on a double date, and then all of a sudden, the last minute, you swap from the frugal spot that's kind of the normal boring spot-- I don't know, Chili's or some boring place that would have just been a humdrum experience-- and all of a sudden, you put on a black tie and you go to the fancy steakhouse and you go to a show.

Well, those are the memories that are going to pervade in life. And a lot of times, this has double benefit. First, people say, well, spend money on memories rather than on possessions. But they don't tell you how to spend money on memories. And the way I think you do this, just from my thinking about it, is simply that you spend money on making situations that are out of the normal situations.

So if I ask you what you had for dinner last week Thursday, you're not going to remember. But if I ask you what you ate at neighbor Ted's barbecue last Saturday, then you can immediately remember it because you have a hook to hang it onto in your thinking. You remember, oh, neighbor Ted's barbecue.

I had barbecue ribs, and I ate ribs and baked beans and corn. And so you can come up with something because of the differentiation, the distinction from day to day. And this distinction is really, really important to creating a life that you can remember. Distinction doesn't always require money to be spent.

But what distinction does require is thoughtfulness into creating something that is different than the normal life. I started thinking about this, I guess, a decade ago when I started thinking about holidays. There's this interesting-- so I've never been a big holiday guy. I didn't celebrate a lot of holidays when I was growing up.

And then I started to have children. And as I started to think about children and what I was going to do, I started thinking about holidays. In the Old Testament, God establishes for the people, the children of Israel, He establishes certain holidays. And He says, keep these holidays. And if you look at why, He says, so that you will remember.

Keep these holidays so that you will remember. The holidays were all instituted to memorialize a specific happening, a specific example, right? God's-- the Passover or other events in the Exodus. And so I came to the point that the point of holidays is so that you will remember something. So come to our modern secular holidays, right?

Why do we have Memorial Day, right? Well, it's supposed to be so that you will remember. Why do we have Thanksgiving Day? So that you will remember. And so the distinction of a holiday, the thing that makes a holiday different than a non-holiday, is that our activities are different and our actions are different.

So we can design a lifestyle where we can either go through life and live a very humdrum existence, where day to day, week to week, month to month, year to year, there's very little distinction. There's very little-- there are few things to remember. And then when we look back over the years, we can't see any texture to the past.

And that's not very fulfilling. And if you compare that to building texture into your life, where you go through a day and you do something special on a certain day, right? It's a Thursday night. But today on Thursday night, we get out to find China and we light the candles and we all put on our best suits and ties and our fanciest dresses and we sit down for dinner at Thursday night.

That's memorable. Or on Tuesday night, instead of coming home to a same old, same old dinner table experience, we light a fire in the backyard and we go and we cook our food on the fire. That's memorable. And all of a sudden, you go through life. And if you're intentional about it, we can build these experiences day by day by day, week by week, month by month.

And those things are the things that we treasure. And then back to the money, I think that one of the things that we can and should do with money is work to bring people into that kind of lifestyle. That sometimes you can spend money on people and you can craft a beautiful experience.

You can craft a memorable event. You can craft something that they're going to appreciate. And that's when they look back on the past year, they're going to, those events can be significant. They don't always need to cost money. And in fact, I think that some of the most interesting ones are actually the ones that don't cost money.

They just cost time and thinking. In the American context where money is so abundant, a lot of times what we can do to make an experience memorable is consciously not spend money. Because we're so used to just spending money, spending money. And if you institute the constraint of not spending money, you have a much more interesting experience.

A short story, years ago, one of the most memorable dates that I ever had with my wife was a date in which we spent almost no money. And I can't remember why, I was somewhat broke at the time and I just spent a bunch of money. I didn't have a lot of money.

It was actually Valentine's Day. And we came home from a conference and it was before we were married, we were going to go on a date. And I didn't have any plans for Valentine's Day and I didn't have a lot of money. And so you had the same, the normal humdrum Valentine's Day thing is you go to a nice restaurant and you dress up and you spend hundreds of dollars and blah, blah, blah.

But it's the worst night in the world to go out to eat 'cause restaurants are full and everything's overpriced and it's just crowded and it's no fun at all. So I was thinking, what can I do? What can I do? And so I picked her up and we tossed our bicycles into the car and we went to the grocery store and I said, listen, we got a budget.

I can't remember, I think it was $20. And I said, oh, I've got $20. What we're gonna do is we're going to build a meal off of $20 and we cannot spend more than that. Here's our $20 bill, we will not spend more than that. And so we went around and we spent 30 minutes wandering around the grocery store together, figuring out how to put together this memorable, how to put together a meal with our $20 and we did it.

We went out with a picnic lunch, we took our bicycles down to the beach, we sat on the beach, we had our picnic lunch. And to this day, it is literally the only Valentine's Day date that I can ever remember with my wife. Like I can't, the rest of them, and I'm preaching to myself, I haven't done a good enough job of differentiating them.

I need to do that, we've been a baby mode. I have reasons, but anyway, like that's the one that I can remember. And it wasn't the constraints, the financial constraints didn't make it bad. It actually made it far more fun and far more interesting. And it's the one that I can remember.

I can remember how I felt sitting on the beach with her that night. I can remember, oh, I can't remember what we ate. I can remember what we did. I can remember the dress that she was wearing. I can remember everything about that date because it was different and it was unique.

And if I go through life, it's a lot of times those experiences that don't cost money that actually make a difference. Now, where does money come in? Well, a lot of times you can invest money into people and give them those experiences. And so if it's, hey, normally we'd go on vacation, but let's invite that family over there that wouldn't ordinarily be able to afford this kind of vacation to go with us and let's take them with us.

And now you have days to spend visiting with them and engaging with them, et cetera, et cetera. So I just, I mean, there are more good categories to spend money on, but that's my just off the cuff answer to your question is that your house is a really good area to spend money on.

And the good thing, not only for daily pleasure and kind of dollars spent versus time enjoyed, but also for, it can potentially pay off. Your career is a very good area to spend money on in terms of dollars spent versus pleasure engaged. You're gonna spend, other than being in your house, you're gonna spend most of your time at work doing work.

And then the third thing is relationships. Anytime you can spend money on relationships or spend money on other people, I think those are good dollars spent. And those are the kinds of dollars you wanna increase every year in your budget, not decrease. - Oh, I love it. Especially, I mean, I have a growing family.

Like I said, I have a newborn. You know, my significant other, she can be off work for six months. She's spending all of her time in the home. So just realizing that and just the enjoyment she gets out of having a nice home. She's very aesthetically minded. I'm not.

So pouring more into that, I can definitely see the benefits there. I have family out of state who can't afford to travel here. Often, I've brought them out a few times and whatnot. You said including others who maybe couldn't otherwise afford to be included, who you get a lot of enjoyment out of them being included.

I think that's another really good point. Last quick question for you, 'cause you've mentioned chat GPT a few times. And I have a brother who's actually become pretty infatuated with potential applications of just chat GPT and other AI technology and has become very interested in trying to invest in the space.

I don't really have any advice for him 'cause that's not the way I invest and I don't really have any education there. Do you have any thoughts though on how one could best educate themselves if they were interested in doing exactly what he's looking to do? - I thought you were gonna ask me how someone could invest in the space.

My answer was gonna be no, I don't have any thoughts. But then you asked me the useful question is how someone could do about it, how someone could go about it. I would, I think the primary thing there is Twitter. There is no better information flow, information source to connect with the most intelligent, most connected people in the world than Twitter.

It is the world's greatest social network. And it's one of the greatest social networks because of its openness and because of the caliber of people that are there. And so what I would spend my time doing if I were him would be to just simply going on Twitter and following all of the discussion related to chat GPT.

The tool that I use to do that is TweetDeck. TweetDeck is owned by Twitter now. But the powerful thing about TweetDeck is that you can set it to automatically search Twitter. And so what I would do is I would set up a use TweetDeck and I would set up a column related to every relevant search term, obvious one, chat GPT, AI, et cetera.

Then I would study the tweet results and find people who are using the tool significantly and then follow them individually as well with their own TweetDeck column. And if you do that, you can pretty well keep yourself at the cutting edge of almost any industry or at least on the public information of any industry.

It is the best way to do it. And so if you set up a properly cultivated TweetDeck system with about 20 or 30 columns with targeted keywords, keyword combinations, and then all of the relevant companies and people that are most involved in that, that's the best way I know of to keep current.

And then of course, Twitter is just a referral service. So it's gonna refer him to the articles, the thinking, the threads, et cetera. And you just follow those things along and then put in the thinking time into it. And then of course, the other aspect to it is you need to be a thought leader.

And so I don't know, 'cause I'm not super into it, but if a dedicated, if he's interested in it, then he should have a Twitter profile that is dedicated to AI investing or something like that, where he curates all of the content on that. Because what he, the goal is to not only go out and search for the content, but to have it referred to you because you are the curator of timely information and good discussion in that industry.

So that's what I would do. - Okay, great. I love that answer. And yeah, I wasn't gonna ask you what your specific advice would be, 'cause I think I knew you wanna give it. And two, what the value I always get from talking to you and listening to you is thinking about how to think and just ways on how to learn.

And I think nobody's gonna be able to predict what's gonna happen there perfectly. I mean, we can all make our prognostications, but rather I'd have him just have some useful ways to think about it. And I think that's what you gave me. So appreciate it, Josh. - My pleasure.

It's an exciting time. It's an exciting technology. It's not new, there's been versions of it, but it seems to have captured the public imagination. And that's pretty cool to see kind of where things can go. Daniel in Texas, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir?

- Thank you, sir. I appreciate it. So two questions, depending on time, but I'll start first one, back to the whole job search thing. Do you have a recommendation on, as we are, of course, we're always looking at the next recession, right, but we may more likely be going into a recession, but generally, do you have a suggestion on where to start of how to look at, how do I look to find a job that is going to be more recession layoff resistant as opposed to others?

- Absolutely. When I was younger, I loved the joke that economists have successfully predicted 17 of the last three recessions. And I always thought, ah, what a funny joke, right? Economists have successfully predicted 17 of the last three recessions. And I thought I would be immune from that. I look back on my life and I think, hmm, Joshua, you've successfully predicted 17 of the last three recessions.

And somehow it just seems so much easier to connect with the negative side of life, the negative psychology, the doom and gloom predictions, than the happy-go-lucky positive, everything's gonna be wonderful. So let's be prudent in all affairs, but not put excessive stock in our recession predictions. Yes, I would say there are two things that are really important.

The first is, there are certainly more than two, but there are two that I want to give an answer to you. The first kind of job that is not affected by a recession, or if that's too strong of a statement, is we could say the first kind of job that is the least affected by a recession is a job that is where you can specifically connect your job work to the revenue created.

Because if you can prove that you are creating revenue that is in excess of what you are costing, then your job security is pretty well assured. Now, the classic representation of this is sales. Salesmen do not risk job insecurity in a recession if they can demonstrate that their work is bringing in more money than they're costing.

If I can show that I brought in $1 million of revenue, and thus I can justify my $150,000 commission rate, I'm gonna have a job, because that other $750,000 or $850,000 of revenue for the company is actually supporting a lot of other people based upon my efforts. So sales-related jobs are where you have one job supporting many other jobs.

I think there are other expressions of work where you can prove it. So let's say the guy who is producing the widgets, right? If he can say, "Look, I produced a widget, "and I added $100 worth of value to this widget, "and my cost was $50 for the work that I did, "I'm worth it," right?

Then that guy's got a good case as well. But you want to be able to tie your specific output to people, you wanna tie, be able to tie your expense to your employer to the specific output that you are creating. So let's use Twitter as an example, right? We're just talking about Twitter.

When Elon Musk came in and took over Twitter, bought the company, et cetera, it laid off huge swaths of the workforce. And there were apocalyptic predictions about how quickly Twitter was gonna collapse without these huge swaths of the workforce. The engineers, the ESG consultants, the diversity consultants, the trust and safety team, blah, blah, blah, right?

He laid off huge swaths of these people. None of those people could prove that their job and their work was making the company more money than they were costing. Otherwise, they would not have been gone unless there was a deep ideological problem or something like that. And the company seems to be running as well as ever.

I'm enjoying Twitter more than I ever did. And everything about the experience is just as good if not better. So that's the problem that you face. If you're kind of a mid-level manager and you're responsible for a department, but your department is not bringing in money, it's just spending money, how do you predict that?

So anything you can do to specifically show, hey, listen, boss, yes, I cost you $150,000 a year, but I can point to my million dollars of new contracts that I brought in, you're golden. I think also these positions are really good because unless your entire marketplace changes, these positions are good because you can, you get accustomed to defending your price and then you can do that in a recession or out of a recession.

One of the things that I'm so grateful for learning in the financial services business was that a good salesman can make money in any market. I started selling life insurance in 2008 at the depths of the financial crisis. I couldn't tell you how many mortgage brokers and real estate people and broke real estate investors I sat with and tried to sell insurance.

They didn't buy it, generally speaking. But what I learned through that was there were lots of people who needed insurance and it didn't really matter what, it didn't really matter that there was a recession on, because there were still plenty of people who weren't being impacted significantly by that recession.

My data point that I point to is this. Remember that during the Great Depression, 25% or one in four, let me apply that, making it stick or making numbers count methodology, right? One out of four people was out of work. But what that means is practically three out of four people still had jobs.

Three out of four people still had work, which means that you had a huge population that you could sell to. And so sales is, it kind of puts that into perspective that even in the worst financial depression ever known in the United States, there was massive protection. Okay, so category number one is can you have a job where you can specifically demonstrate that you make your boss more money than you cost him and hopefully a lot more?

The second thing that I believe is really important is can I work in a job where we cater to wealthy people? Can I work in a job where we cater to wealthy people and especially in luxury goods in some way? Now, not everything is perfect, but the point is this.

If we go through a recession and your local, your accountant who earns $80,000 per year has 10% of his client base go to free online alternatives instead of using his tax preparation services. And so his income goes from 80,000 to $72,000, 10% decline. That's gonna hurt that accountant quite a lot.

That's almost coming up on, I wish I knew the number off the top of my head. It's like $750 a month of spending, right? $600, $700, it's almost $1,000 a month. $8,000 a year of declined revenue out of over 12 months, it's significant decline in his ability to spend money.

And so he's gotta go through his budget and he's gonna start trimming out, call it $600 a month of expenses. And that means that, okay, my maid who was coming once a week is just not gonna come anymore. We're gonna cut back our eating out budget by $200, we're gonna spend less on vacation, et cetera.

But now flip it. Let's say that you're working for a local anesthesiologist who's making $800,000 a year. And that anesthesiologist has a decline in his business by 10%. And his decline now means that he's making $720,000 per year. That's probably gonna have very little impact on his lifestyle. He might choose to forego a new car purchase, but he's not gonna lay off his maid.

He's not gonna fire, he's not gonna end his golf club membership. He's gonna continue. Now, let's say that you're working for a guy or there's a guy who has $20 million and he has a 10% decrease in his portfolio values. Well, it's just not gonna make any difference in his day-to-day life.

And so the point is that wealthy people are much less affected by recessions than non-wealthy people because they don't have to pull back so much. They have so much more margin in their lifestyle. And so there might be fewer Gulfstream orders in a bad recession, certainly. There might be fewer Boeing sold or fewer kind of luxury goods.

But if you are working with and serving the wealthy, in general, you're not going to be affected significantly in a recession. So if your job involves serving wealthy people, you're well-protected in a recession. - Okay, yeah, I think that totally makes sense. Jack Spierger likes to say, I don't know if he's heard him say this in particular, but like, you wanna be in the wants business, not the needs business.

'Cause people will argue for 12 years to negotiate down their cell phone bill by $5, but they won't give up their daily Starbucks. - Absolutely. - So how does that, maybe this is too hard to answer, but like, as I'm trying to get into the, basically at least within two to four years, get into the mid hundreds range.

Sales is not something I really wanna pursue, so I'll say that. I think I'm just not great suited for it unless it's something I'm just super into. So it's like, I'm especially looking at larger corporations. Obviously for that dollar amount, you're topically looking at middle management kind of style stuff too, because that's where a lot of that money is, right?

Do you have a suggestion on how like, and it feels like as you get more into middle management, it becomes harder and harder to track the dollars associated to your job, right? Do you have a suggestion on kind of how to sort that out, or it's just so situation dependent?

- It is very situation specific, because you do have to be very careful to identify, I mean, there's so many different career paths, different kinds of companies, et cetera. Before you dismiss sales though, let me just defend sales for just one moment. Many people have a very limited view of what counts as sales.

So many people, their view of sales is selling life insurance, right? Selling life insurance is a great business. I myself could happily sell life insurance for the rest of my life and nothing else today. Like I love life insurance, but that's not in any way the only kind of sales.

There is sales in virtually every business and in virtually every industry. And the way that you approach sales can change dramatically based upon the industry. The guy who sells Airbus A330s for Airbus is in sales, but the day-to-day function that he has is very, very different than the guy who sells life insurance.

There are sales jobs that are extremely engineering focused. Then there are sales jobs that don't in any way involve personal contact. So many times people who wouldn't ordinarily be quote unquote a salesman, really thrive in industries where they don't have to make contact, right? There are people who sell you stuff all day long online that never wanna see another human being, never wanna go out and shake hands and do your how are you's and who are you's, but they thrive on building complicated landing campaigns or designing beautifully performing email marketing campaigns or ads or constructing sales videos, et cetera.

There is no quote unquote type for sales. There is this wrong and flawed impression that some people have that salesmen are extroverts that love to go out and do their how are you's and who are you's and glad hand all the people. That is a false impression. Sales is a very professional industry, excuse me, a very professional business with incredible diversity in the ways that it can be applied.

The key thing that is the same across all sales activities is what I said, that I can prove to you that based upon what I have done and what I have performed, I make you more money. And you can apply that and that kind of thinking is the best answer to your question.

So if I go into a local business, let's say that I develop a skill of improving online presence for local businesses and I become skilled with doing that. If I can go into a local business and I can say, listen, I'll improve your revenue or increase your number of bookings by this number of customers or something like that, I can prove that I've got those results.

And when I go into the same, into a business offering that and I start going up to levels, I lose that ability. So I don't think, I guess I just wanted to defend sales for a moment because there is a false impression that people have that it's all kind of what we stereotype as the used car salesman.

That stereotype by the way is also significantly broken, but there was like this 1980s, hey, you wanna buy a car today and do you want the purple one or the red one? And that the wet world is dead and gone. Sales can be any expression. And many times introverts, engineers, people who even don't even love being with people are often the best sales people because they're the best sales engineers and they understand people.

Last example, I have always loved Dan, left me, the sales guy wrote, rewrote "Psycho-Cybernetics". Anyway, Dan, it'll come to me in a moment, but now this is gonna bother me. It's not gonna come to me in a moment. He republished "Psycho-Cybernetics" and anyway, the sales guru himself, Dan, whatever his last name is, I've listened to hundreds of hours of his audio.

And he was very famous. He sold billions of dollars of stuff. But one of the things that's so interesting about him is he was a copywriter and a salesman, an incredible salesman. And he literally to the end of his career, he's at the end of his career, he sold his business to what's his name in Boise, to Russell Brunson.

But he literally to the end of his career, he's only contactable by fax machine. That he sits in his home office surrounded by dozens and dozens of clocks reminding him of the shortness of time. And he has run his entire business exclusively through a fax machine. And he doesn't interact with individuals really almost ever.

He spends his time thinking and mostly in isolation. Now on occasion he will go and he will give a presentation, he'll work with somebody, et cetera. But he's one of the world's all time greatest salesmen, sold billions of dollars of stuff and he never interacts with individuals. So he's my, if I could come up with his name, he's my go-to example of showing you how effective you can be as a salesman, even if you literally don't like people.

But you understand people and you can sit back and you can coordinate and organize. Beyond that, I would say, don't worry too much about a recession. Recessions come and go, focus on the long-term plan, deal with the recession if it comes. But sometimes they come, two weeks later, they're gone.

- One more question. - Sure, go ahead. I've done these hour long answers, so go ahead. - There you go. I wanted to say, I meant to say it at the beginning, but I forgot. For the first caller, I think his name is Cody, if he's still listening, and I already posted on the Facebook group.

But I have actually a lot of experience in a lot of that world with water features and landscaping and edible stuff. So if he wants to chat, I think I've got some great resources to him. You should reach out to me through Facebook and we can connect. So I think I can help him somewhat in that.

- Beautiful. So that second question being, and I guess the answer is probably relationships. But there's a lot of people who are largely successful. Most of my jobs I've gotten have been through relationships. At this point, I don't necessarily have any more relationships, or especially looking at large corporations.

It's like, I know people at Boeing, I know some people at Halliburton, some of these big companies where there's lots of money, et cetera. But they're all like, well, apply for the job. I might be able to give you some thought of what it is. I feel like I'm kind of at the end of how to build relationships to potentially connect you to other jobs.

Do you have a suggestion on how to build more of those relationships? Or where, for especially some of the higher paying jobs, those connections are? Do they just, do those not exist for larger companies? Or, yeah. - Do you know the industry and the company and the job description that you would like to have?

- I know somewhat the job description. Beyond that, I'm really open to whatever works. - The problem is not that you've run out of people. The problem is you have not been able to clarify for yourself the specific industry, the specific company, and possibly the specific job that you want.

You can build relationships. The world revolves around relationships. But you can't build them randomly. The random ones are the ones that are available to you now. The intentional ones are the ones that you go after. So if you wanna build a relationship, you have to know what am I trying to build a relationship around?

If you wanna meet the top 10 people involved in programming chat GPT, like the previous caller, you can do that. And six months from now, you can know all 10 of them. But you have to have an organizing principle that these are the 10 people that I want to know.

If you wanna know 10 people at Halliburton, you could do that. But knowing 10 random people at Halliburton isn't gonna help you very much. And so you have to have some basic idea of a job that you want in an industry and ideally at a company so that you can then target your relationship building.

And so you can figure out who you're going to reach. Once you have that, then you can make your list of who are the 10 people that are most connected to this or who are the 10 people that are likely to have the resources that I need in this.

You can't just do it randomly. You have to know what you're going after, at least have some basic idea. - Okay, yeah, that makes sense. I just have to figure out that. - Yeah. The man who says, "I want a job," is gonna have a hard time finding it because he can't know where to start looking other than just a random help want a job.

But the man who says, "I want a job working in a mortgage company as a mortgage loan officer but not selling," that man now pulls out the phone book, finds certain number of mortgage companies, starts meeting people, and a month later he'll have the job. So you gotta have some idea of where to start your search based upon what you want.

Then you can start making the contacts that you need. So that would be my recommendation. All right, move to Mark in Georgia. Mark, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Mark in Georgia, are you there? Going once for Mark. - Once for Mark. - Going twice.

Mark, we'll come back to you in a minute. We go to Trey in Texas. Trey, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? - Oh man, Joshua. (Joshua laughs) It's been a long one, hasn't it? - My bladder is telling me to answer your question quickly. - It's been good, man.

I'll tell you what, man, I had three questions, but one of them's probably better for my attorney anyway, and I'm gonna be talking to him next week. So I'm gonna give you two, and feel free to do rapid fire if you want to. The first one, you mentioned loving motorcycles on your recent Goal Setting podcast.

And I also love motorcycles. And I currently have an Indian and a Harley. And of course, it's a fairly risky lifestyle. I just wanted to ask, how do you balance your love of motorcycles with your fatherly responsibility to stay alive? - Good question. When I first started riding motorcycles, I thought it through very carefully.

And I discovered a couple of statistics that made a big difference. So I can't cite the original factors today, so I'm just gonna use directional numbers, and you can look up the actual numbers. But I heard something like 50% of motorcycle accidents involve alcohol, something like that, a high percentage.

And alcohol is extremely dangerous to a motorcycle rider, even in amounts that are not over the legal limit, because just a tiny bit of alcohol can cause slight variations in response times, et cetera, which can be the difference between life and death. So I made a promise to myself.

Number one, I'm gonna cut out 50% of accidents by never consuming a drop of alcohol when I'm riding. And I never had a single drink, not a single drink ever when I'm riding a motorcycle. Number two, a huge percentage of motorcycle accidents are driven by riders who out-ride their ability.

So one of the great problems of motorcycle statistics have to do with the sample set. The most recent death, was it Joe Blow out on a Saturday morning ride down to see his buddy's house on his Harley, or was it the guy in his Hayabusa going 190 miles an hour down the interstate, right?

Which was it? Well, they're all included in motorcycle deaths. But a lot of motorcycle accidents involve the rider out-riding his ability, right? Takes the curve too hard, flips over the top side, and is dead down on the cliff below. So I promised myself I would never be an aggressive rider, and I would never out-ride my ability.

Makes me not super fun, but that was the promise I made, is that I'm never gonna out-ride my ability. The third thing that I chose was focused on rider skill. Very many riders, especially kind of the weekend warrior riders, don't ever practice the skill of motorcycle riding. They don't actually practice the actual skills.

Now here's where I think a lot of times the sport bike guys do better, but they're riding so fast that it's pretty dangerous a lot of times. But the weekend guy doesn't actually practice the skills. And so I would go out and practice all my slow speed stuff, slow speed maneuvering.

I bought all of the Ride Like a Pro info products. Back then it was the DVDs, and I watched them all, and I would go out in the weekends, and I would practice in the parking lot, practice everything until I could come up and I could do a U-turn in a tiny space without putting my feet down.

I practiced emergency stopping. I practiced all the skills. And then related to that, one of the big skills is proactive riding. So you can't, as a motorcyclist, you can't control other drivers, but you can be prepared for them. So little things like covering the brakes whenever you're coming, whenever there's an opportunity where someone could pull out in front of you that you've already got the brakes covered.

That micro second to where you have the brakes covered 'cause you're watching for someone to pull out in front of you from the left-hand side or whatever it is, that micro second is a big deal. And so practicing those things and constantly thinking where is the danger. Then I tried to focus on riding in safer environments.

And so the most risky places to ride are stroads in the United States, right? These mixed lane things where you got people crossing all over the time. I hate those. And so riding on the interstate for a motorcyclist, very low risk. Riding on a back two-lane road, relatively low risk.

Riding on four, six-lane stroads through town, there's a death sentence in many cases. And then also I committed to wearing all the gear all the time. So all the gear all the time to try to be protected. So today, even including airbags, right? Having a, and doing it. And people don't do it 'cause they don't like the heat or they don't like the cool, et cetera, but that gear saves lives.

So having a high quality helmet, having high quality riding jacket and stuff, that saves lives. And there are plenty of options available that give you kind of the riding environment. That said, I pretty much have given up motorcycle riding these days because whenever I'm out there, it's not that I'm worried about the safety, but primarily it's that I think about what I could be doing instead.

And so being out on a motorcycle is gonna limit you to one or maximum two people. Whereas, you know, right? If you've got a bunch of children, what are you gonna do? And I just can't justify that stuff. I don't need to have a hobby that takes me away from home every Saturday for five hours.

My hobby is my children. And so I wanna do something that's gonna be with them. And so it just doesn't fit into my life. Now, when I'm older, maybe, will it change? Sure. You know, I always loved, one of my favorite stories was the, I think it was the Underwoods, the Horizons Unlimited, who this Australian couple who took their Harley-Davidson to every country in the world.

Like, that's awesome. But that's not at this stage of my life. So I just don't bother anymore. I don't ride much. - There you go. Yeah, okay. Well, it's funny 'cause I mean, you're very logical. That's exactly the thought process I did as well. I looked up the stats and was like, oh, okay, well, don't drink and ride.

You know, wear the gear. I don't do so great wearing the gear all the time. I should probably get one of those airbag vests, but you know, I wear my helmet and that kind of thing. And I typically will just build it into travel that I have to do already anyway, rather than travel for leisure.

So it doesn't really take much time. So cool, man. Thanks for clearing that up for me. Kind of confirms the way I was feeling about it. I don't wanna give up my life because also I wanna set an example for the kids. You know, that hey, you can still have fun when you're an adult.

You should have hobbies. So the last one is gonna be really quick. I noticed some recent advertisements on your podcast and I wondered how can someone advertise on your podcast? - The recent ad, so over the years, over the years I've had a complicated relationship with podcast advertising. When I started the podcast, I had spent so many years in a deeply conflicted industry with lots of conflicts of interest and potential conflicts of interest that I just didn't want any of that.

And I thought, you know what? I'm just gonna give everything away and I'll do like a listener support model. Well, the listener support model was okay but the income was a fraction of what it could be. Basically, tiny, I had to go back and look at the numbers but it was a tiny, tiny fraction of the audience engaged in a listener support model.

But I stuck to my guns and I'm like, no, I want the purity of this. And so then I started selling courses and the courses have been my most profitable endeavor. I do some consulting here and there but the course sales are my highly profitable endeavor that I really like.

And so I basically say, well, I'll do the podcast for free and then I'll sell the courses. But along the way, I'm coming up pretty soon on episode 1000 of the podcast. Should be here this next year. And when I started off to do the show, I said, I'll do 1000 episodes and then I'll decide.

Well, doing the podcast, I enjoy doing the podcast but I don't enjoy doing the podcast for free. I enjoy doing the podcast as advertising for the courses but I don't enjoy doing the podcast for free. So I thought, well, how can I make it so that I want to do the podcast?

That sounded really selfish. Like, I'm really grateful to do the podcast but it is also something that I don't, anyway. So I thought, how can I make myself want to do the podcast? Well, I can make myself want to do the podcast if I actually earn money directly from the podcast.

So years ago, I used to take some kind of, I used to take some sponsorships and I would sell ad packages and do those ads. And I wanted, I started with like the very altruistic, noble, like I'm gonna be the guy who personally endorses these advertisers. And I would go through and I'd do all this research and all this thinking and I would give them my voice and I would play the ad.

The problem with that is number one, it's hard to do enough due diligence over your advertisers. So that, let's say that FTX came to me a year ago and says, Joshua, we want to sponsor your podcast. Well, would I have said yes to them or would I have said no to them?

I don't know, right? I probably would have said yes if I were selling ad spaces because I didn't have any unique insight into the fact that it was a giant Ponzi scheme. I just, I'm not that connected to the industry. And so like that whole concept of personal endorsement is a very excruciating thing for me.

So the problem is that in podcast advertising, there's something called dynamic ad insertion. And there's been over the years that that's been available from several providers, but I never pursued it because I didn't really wanna do advertising for other people's stuff. I primarily like to just advertise my own stuff and I like to make my money from my own courses, my own products, 'cause those I can endorse.

I know they're high quality and I'm happy with them and the money's really good. So anyway, but I said, well, let me try it. So then my podcast host, which is Libsyn, came out and they created their own what's called dynamic ad insertion where they automatically put ads on the show.

And my audience size is quite large in the podcast space. And it means that the ads that can be bought get a pretty good rate. And so the actual cost of them makes it worth my showing up and doing a podcast, because if there's three or four ads that play on the show, then they do it.

And by doing it that, and by using the dynamic ad insertion system, I actually have no control over the ads that are played. And I'm not choosing them and they're not in my voice. So that helps me to feel good. It's just like the radio, right? Where they play something in between what you say.

I'm responsible for what I say. I'm not responsible for what other people say. And so I, anyway, that's what it is. It's a company that Libsyn interacts with and they buy ad spots. So how can you buy an ad on my show? Short answers, you can't. I can't guarantee you that anything will be on my show, 'cause I don't control the ad flow or the ad inventory.

You could go and figure out who that company is and buy it by advertising from them, but that advertising would not appear just on my show. It would appear on other people's shows. Now that may change in the future. So that dynamic ad insertion is a little bit annoying because I don't have control over the ads.

I have some control. I can control like to some degree what gets advertised, but some of that stuff is pretty, like even if I exercise the category selection, I don't get the finite category selection. So I may move to a different provider or I may just go ahead and go back to doing my own thing and setting up my own system where I did actually sell ad rates from people who were allied with my show.

There was a show recently where somebody, they published an ad for HIV testing and they publish an ad for a transgender lifestyle podcast on my show. And one of my listeners wrote to me and said, "Josh, FYI, like these are the ads "that are playing on your show. "They're probably not a great fit for your brand." And I was like, "Yeah, they're not.

"I don't wanna be served with ads for HIV testing. "That's just, I don't even wanna think about it. "It's not what I want showing up in my financial podcast "and I don't want a transgender lifestyle promotion "podcast advertised." So they're still working out some kinks and I'm patient and we're working on it and we'll see.

I haven't decided that, but at the moment, I'm not accepting personalized advertising. Maybe that can happen in the future, maybe not. We'll see, but at the moment, the best thing you can do is plug your thing. So plug your thing, you got 30 seconds, go ahead. - Well, it's a, I appreciate that.

It's actually HIV testing for LGBT. (laughing) - Wonderful, wonderful. Very much in favor of the Radical Personal Finance audience you're gonna be overwhelmed with business. - No, I'm just kidding. No, I'll do it real quick. So it's a budgeting and financial forecasting software for companies to use in their financial planning.

So really just like forecasting income statements primarily. - Wonderful, do you have a website? - Well, actually no, we just bought a domain and we've been building it locally, but it's called Bridge First. - Bridge First. - Yes, sir, one word, Bridge First. - BridgeFirst.com. - Because it's based on a bridge, yeah, like, yep, yes, that's right.

And you can get ahold of me in the meantime at Trey, T-R-E-Y @maloneconsultingfirm.com. - Wonderful, so if anybody's looking for budgeting and cashflow forecasting software for companies, you can contact my loyal listener Trey at maloneconsulting.com or potentially in the future go to bridgefirst.com. Fair enough? - Thank you very much, I appreciate it.

- Best ad deal you're ever gonna get on Radical Personal Finance, I promise you that. All right, Mark in Georgia, are you there this time? - Yes, Joshua, I am. I just tuned in to listen. - You just tuned in to listen. - Sorry, I just tuned in to listen.

- All right. - Yeah, so good news for you, right? Hey, great answer on the motorcycle perspective. I'm a motorcyclist too and that was a very good answer at every point. - I think you can reduce the risk enough to make it acceptable. And I don't think that living risk-free is life's goal.

It's always just a matter of what's an acceptable level of risk. And so to me, when I look, like driving a car is risky, very risky, it's not as risky as riding a motorcycle, but it is very risky. And yet we still drive cars. There are many things that we do that are risky.

And so for someone, I don't know that life is a computer program. I know for me, when I went through those risk reduction exercises, I felt like that adjusted the numerical risk significantly enough to where I would be content with it. And I would encourage when there is something you can do to reduce risk, it's silly, that doesn't harm anything.

It's silly not to do it, right? It's fun to take your motorcycle out and practice slow speed maneuvering in a parking lot. It's fun to go out and do emergency braking. It's fun to swap in your old antiquated motorcycle for a modern motorcycle with ABS. I was borrowing a friend's motorcycle recently, it was some time back, and we'd gone to an event together and he had ridden there and I had driven.

I was like, "Listen, swap me out." So I was riding his motorcycle back and I was riding through the mountains and blew out a tire going around a curve. And I wobbled off the road. And I was thankful at that moment for all of the training and all of the practice.

But every time I ride an older motorcycle and I lock up the wheels and have to recover, I just think to myself, "Joshua, why are you riding a motorcycle without ABS?" There's just no reason for it. So all those risk reduction things, I think, bring it into an acceptable zone as long as you're not riding around on city streets all the time.

And at the end of the day, living a risk-free life is not the goal. The goal is to do the things that you want, to live the way that you want, et cetera. And my biggest reason is just simply, I agree with the previous caller about that it's fine to have hobbies, but my biggest thing is just simply, it just seems like not something that I love to do.

My wife is with the children all during the week, a lot of times when I'm working. And so the idea of my getting on a motorcycle and going out on a four or five hour ride is just distasteful to me. So 20 years, I'll probably be in a different situation, but I'll be riding an ABS motorcycle, that's for sure.

All right, Mark. Well, thanks for calling in. Next time, just wait for the recording 'cause I promise you it is exactly, it's just published very soon after the show. Thank you all so much for listening. Any closing announcements? I've got a new course coming out. Gabriel Custodia and I are launching a new course that should be out with information on that this next week.

We're excited about that. I've got a bunch of new things that I'm working on. It's gonna be a great new year and I'm very excited about sharing it with you. Thank you for being here. I don't say thank you enough, but I do wanna just say as I close today's show, thank you.

For you to be here, listening to me is an honor and I will continue to do everything I can to make it a good and valuable use of your time. Happy new year and I'll be back with you very soon. (upbeat music) - Are you ready to make your next pro basketball, football, hockey, concert or live event unforgettable?

Let Sweet Hop take your game to the next level. Sweet Hop is an online marketplace curating the best premium tickets at stadiums, arenas and amphitheaters nationwide. Sweet Hop's online marketplace makes it easy to browse and book the best seats with no hidden fees and a 100% purchase guarantee. You can feel confident when you book your premium LA tickets with Sweet Hop.

Visit suithop.com today.