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Today on Radical Personal Finance, it's 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 or meaningful, rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Josh Rasheeds. I am your host. Today is Friday, January 7, 2023. And I'm excited to kick off the inaugural Q&A. No, it's actually the second Q&A show for 2023, now that I think about it. I've been a few weeks behind on my 2023 due to being in baby mode, as my wife and I welcomed our fifth child over the last few weeks.

And so forgive me, but I do remember I did one right at the beginning of the year. And we'll be doing these consistently. If you're new to the show, welcome. Each and every Friday when I can arrange the appropriate technology with an internet connection, I'll be able to do the call-in show.

Then we have a live Q&A show. It works just like call-and-talk radio. Open line Friday, you call in, talk about anything that you want. You're welcome to join. You're welcome to ask any questions. You can talk about your personal situation. You can opine on anything that you wish to discuss.

You can ask for my opinion, perspective, etc. It's completely open line. I don't screen the calls in any way. If you would like to gain access to one of these Q&A shows, the way you do that is by becoming a patron of the show. Go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Sign up to support the show there on Patreon.

And that will gain you access to these Friday call-in shows. We begin today with Ethan in Wisconsin. Ethan, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? Hi Joshua. Thanks so much for taking my call. I'm a huge fan of everything you do. I just wanted to say thanks and congratulations on the new baby.

Thank you. My question is basically where is the value in a financial professional if I can open a Roth IRA on my own? Like through Vanguard or something like that? Why should I have a financial professional in my corner? Where is the value in that? That's a good question.

How much money do you earn? Right now I make about $61,000 a year. If you could work with a financial professional who could coach you into doubling your income over the next two years, would you be willing to pay for that? Yeah. That would be a good example. How much do you spend normally in your budget?

Like putting away in the retirement account? How much do you spend in your normal budget? What are your living expenses? Oh, cost of living per month is about $2,200 a month. Okay. So if you could work with a financial professional who was able to lower your expenses from $2,200 a month to say $1,200 per month, would it be worth paying that person for his help?

Yeah, I suppose. Okay. So the answer to your question is it's worth working with a financial professional if you believe that that financial professional can help you to improve your situation. Now, where you immediately went was to what the financial industry has done, which has been to focus primarily on investment, saying, "Okay, we'll come and buy stocks and mutual funds." What has happened over, I would say, the last 30 years is that there has been a revolution in the delivery and application of financial advice, specifically as it relates to stocks and mutual funds.

If you were to go back to, say, 1950, and I know that I just went back now 70 years, but I'm just trying to go far enough back that we get before the revolution of mutual funds, before we get the revolution of passive funds, etc. But if you were to go back to then, to say 1950, the advice and input of a financial professional would be really tremendous that that financial professional could help you improve your overall rate of return.

Well, what's happened is that first we had the stockbroker kind of revolution where previously it was hard to buy stocks, it was expensive to buy stocks, and stockbrokers saw we can make a lot of money, so they started selling stocks more aggressively. Then we had the mutual fund revolution, then Jack Bogle came along and revolutionized the mutual fund industry with his basically invention and marketing of the index fund.

The index fund and also the development of no-load mutual funds, meaning mutual funds that could be purchased without any sales commissions, that upended the entire stockbroker industry and the entire mutual fund sales industry. So we're in the current incredible world that we live in where you can go out and with literally a few hundred dollars you can purchase mutual funds with no sales charges, extremely low expense ratios.

You can put those right into your Roth IRA, you can do that at any number of great institutions. And so there's been an absolute revolution in investing. And so the investment advice industry has had to come to terms with that, and that's the question that you're looking at. But that question is only a small subset of your overall financial lifestyle.

And you could use a financial professional in any number of areas of your financial lifestyle. So I immediately went to income, right? If you're earning $61,000 per year, and how old are you, Ethan? I'm 25. Okay, so at 25 years old, if you're earning $61,000 per year, your number one financial priority should be to double and then double and then double again your income.

And you should be investing into resources and teachers and products, etc., that can help you do that. When you are young, your most important asset is your earning ability. And the younger you are and the more effectively you can grow that, the better. So you should be out buying books from financial professionals, career coaches, taking courses, taking seminars.

If you want to start a side business or develop a new skill, you should be investing into that. And you should look at your overall financial situation holistically, recognizing that those people are financial professionals. That was why years ago, the very first course I created and sold here at Radical Personal Finance was not a course on buying mutual funds or what stock to pick.

It was a course on how to build your career and build your income. And I, today, coach a significant, decent number of clients where we work on that day after day after day. How do you increase your income substantially? And good coaching makes a world of difference in that space.

But that's not something that T. Rowe Price is going to sell funds to or Fidelity or your Edward Jones guy is usually talking about. But that is, at its core, financial coaching. Now, you can go to other aspects of financial coaching. I talked about expenses, and of course, I don't know.

It's hard to trim your expenses a ton. And I think that those things are often not worth paying for specific people. But I've taken courses on couponing. I've taken courses on credit card hacking and credit card mileage and how to travel the world cheaper, etc. So ways that you can spend your money effectively is good things to take training on.

The challenge is a lot of that stuff is not--that kind of advice is pretty inexpensive, and you're already fairly close to as low as you can reasonably go. Now, when you go to investing, it's important to look at investing and ask yourself, "Can a financial professional help me with my investing strategy?" Which is, again, the question you asked me.

I just diverted for a moment. The answer is if all you're going to do is go and buy a Roth IRA--excuse me, go and open a Roth IRA and put mutual funds inside that Roth IRA, you don't need any kind of financial professional at your current stage of financial growth.

And I would recommend against it. There's no financial professional who's going to take you on as a client. You don't make enough. You don't have enough. Unless you have a lot of money that you haven't told me about, you don't make enough. You don't have enough to get the attention of a good professional.

And that professional probably can't provide any real value to you. If you're earning your income at a job, for example, a professional can't do any tax planning for you. If you're just investing in mutual funds, you are a perfect fit for being a DIYer and doing it yourself very, very inexpensively.

But you should consider if you could learn better investment strategies that would create for you more long-term rates of return. Now, in general, I like to discourage young guys from focusing too heavily on rate of return because the most important thing is how much money you're putting in. But there's no question that you can develop investing skills.

And if you will develop investing skills, you can substantially increase your lifetime rate of return by developing those investing skills. So if you have an interest in a particular area of investing, then your particular way to engage with a financial professional might be to go and, again, take a class, take a seminar, go through a – read a book, read 10 books.

Go through and develop your own skill set in your areas of interest. And if you find that investing is something that's interesting to you, that's how you'll engage with financial professionals. So in summary, the financial industry, the mainstream financial industry is not looking to work with you, not looking to help you, and they don't offer you any value.

But you may find quite a lot of people who do want to sell you stuff that will help you, and it'll help you to increase your income, lower your expenses, increase your investment rate of return, and that will pay off in the long run. So what I would encourage you to do is take 5% to 10% of your income, set it aside, and invest it into yourself.

Most importantly, your earning ability, invest it into the books, the courses, the seminars, the coaches, et cetera, and focus heavily on earning, keep your expenses low. And then when you're looking at investing, ask yourself, "How specifically do I want to invest as an individual and what would be the best way for me to do it?" And if it costs you money to get the best quality coaching and advice that can cut years off of your learning curve, that's money well spent.

You muted yourself, Ethan. I'm going to unmute you here so we can hear you. Go ahead. Cool. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. Thank you. I really appreciate that. I've actually been thinking about, I'm kind of on the brink of starting my own bookkeeping side hustle here.

I currently work as a civil engineer as a W2 job, and so I'm trying to make the transition to working in a small business setting where I'm kind of the owner. So I think that's really good advice. I've got one other really quick question for you. Do you got a sec?

Go ahead. So I'm just also just trying to educate myself as much about the real estate market as possible. Do you have like a course or an instructor that you'd recommend going to to educate myself about the real estate market? My preferred place to start is by getting and reading John Reed's books.

I think that of all of the real estate gurus, he is the most honest, the most analytical, and the most straightforward. I also like Jack Schaub's, John Schaub's books. I usually recommend first Building Wealth One House at a Time by John Schaub. I don't know if he's updated it in the last decade.

I need to check to see if he has a new edition of that because the market has changed dramatically. But what I love about his book is it's got the motivational element, and I think the motivational element is important, right? Especially when you're young, you need to get a vision in your head of what you're trying to accomplish.

And so getting a vision to try reading a very motivational real estate book where you're trying to build a $5 million real estate portfolio is really, really helpful and important to help to give you a vision. And I really like the no-nonsense analytical approach of John Reed. So johntreed.com.

You can buy all his books for like $600. You don't need all of them. Start with a few of them. They're $30 a pop. But I would get his books and work my way through those. Because if you understand the real estate marketplace holistically and you understand the strategies that can be applied at certain times and in certain places, then you can look around in your area and you can get involved.

What I would caution you though is real estate is a rich man's game. You need money to play in real estate. And so you should be focused on saving, I don't know, $100 grand as fast as you can. So keep your money, only put the minimum into a Roth IRA.

Stack up as much other money as possible. You need to make sure you pile up capital before you get involved in real estate. Make sense? Yeah, perfect. Thank you so much, Joshua. I appreciate it. My pleasure. We go on to Kyle in Washington. Kyle, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today?

Hi, Joshua. Hope the lady's doing well. I have an easy one and a hard one. Well, a short one and a long one maybe. So what's the best, when I Google this question, what's the best e-reader? I don't really feel like doing the research. So I've got somewhere like six or seven library cards set up right now and I don't want to get an Amazon e-reader or maybe I do.

I just don't want to do all the research about all these different doggone formats and what e-readers use which and all this stuff. And so I'm looking for a good one. One that I can go out and get these free books and the PDFs and that I can use it on my Libby library cards and all that manner of stuff.

So in most cases, especially with e-readers, it pays to start with the biggest and the best which is going to be a Kindle. And the Kindle is universally, to the extent that you can borrow free e-books from your local library, it's almost certainly going to be set up to work with Kindle for those free books that you can borrow from the local library.

Kindle also has access to Amazon's, what do they call it, their unlimited Amazon, I've forgotten the name of it, I don't have it currently. But they have a little subscription service where you pay, I can't remember, ten bucks a month, something like that. Kindle Unlimited, that's what it is.

And so they have access to Kindle Unlimited which works really, really well with the Amazon system. And then of course you have access to the Amazon Kindle bookstore. And again, when you go with the biggest brand, you will always have the biggest selection. So there are other platforms that have perfectly great products, right?

You've got the Nook. Does Barnes and Noble still make and sell the Nook? They have their own e-book store. They have the Kobo, it's pretty big, right? Owned by Walmart. Kobo.com, they sell an e-reader, etc. But having Amazon means you're going to have access to the biggest library, the books are going to come out, the newest and they're going to be the most available.

The only reason you wouldn't choose Amazon is that you'll be completely locked into a locked down ecosystem where you can't easily get your books out. You can't easily get the digital rights management stuff off of it. You can't control your library yourself. It's just a hassle. And so you get kind of this double-edged sword.

You get the best library, you get the simplest way to purchase books, view books, the best reading experience, etc. But you can't control the content in any way. So if you want control, then you'll go with another solution. But more and more, I myself have come to appreciate, while I have a couple other ones that I use so that I can control all the content, I've come to appreciate just the ease and simplicity of the Kindle system.

So we use, in my household, I have four or five Amazon Kindles that are just set up in the conventional way. I used to take the Kindle and hack it a little bit so I could put files onto it manually, etc. I don't do that anymore. I just use the Amazon servers.

It works really well. And then I have a couple of other e-readers. I use one with Kobo that I like a lot, and I use another one that I use to view stuff from my computer. So I think the answer for most people is just Kindle because you're probably not going to want to get involved with all that techie stuff.

Yeah, and that's what I hear you espousing often is the ability to own and control the files. I'm not entirely sure how important that is to me, but I do like the idea of, as you say, the ownership portion. Philosophically, it's a very powerful point. I was just recently speaking with a friend of mine, and his point that he made to me that persuaded me afresh is that more and more, if we're not going to commit ourselves to learning how to control our devices and our library, etc., it's going to put us very much behind.

So we need to be consistent about learning how to do it. And so I'm in favor of that. I'm just not willing to become a teacher in that space. I'm mediocre. I'm better than most, not as good as some in that space. And I think that the key is to notice why am I doing this.

So, for example, if I'm reading, which is what you're doing with a reader, why am I reading? What's my purpose in reading? What am I going after? And so I want to not sacrifice the actual outcome of what I'm trying to accomplish, which is to consume targeted information that is helpful and appropriate for me in my industry, in my hobbies, in my goals, etc.

I don't want to lose sight of that because of putting up too many tech walls. And what I've done over the years is I've put up lots of tech walls, and that keeps you from doing the thing. So just spending the money and getting the thing and actually doing it.

And again, at this point in time, and I think for most people, and almost certainly for you, saving money on books should not be a priority. So you want a system that allows you to get the right books, meaning the ones that are actually the useful ones, to get them immediately when you want them and need them so that you can get the specific information that you need out of them so that you can achieve your goals.

You're not looking to save money and read junky books that you can get on Kindle Unlimited just because you don't want to spend $15 on a book. That's silly. Certainly. Okay. And then if I want to get crazy, more advanced, however you want to call it, then I'm going to start running a different product like you have going.

You're going to do different things. And so if you have a huge library, if you just want a reader, I'll tell you there is probably the best system. Like if you want a no screen reader, then there are plenty of e-ink readers that you can use. But none of them are going to give you what you're looking for in terms of the reading experience.

If you're going to be reading a lot of PDFs, you cannot beat the experience on an iPad Pro with an Apple Pencil. Or if you want an e-ink version of that, get a Remarkable tablet. A Remarkable tablet is going to work well for PDFs. You can read them, you can mark them up, and you don't have to have the bright screen.

You can have the e-ink. So I would say at its core, my favorite reading experience is on the iPad Pro with the Apple Pencil because I can have access to all the books, I can mark them all up, I can have them how I want them. That's kind of the best experience if you are going to go with a screen as well.

Okay. Yeah, I've tried reading on my computer screen. I tried reading on my phone. I didn't like it. So I'm trying something different. So I appreciate those. And then is the system you're using on your computer, is that what you're posting? For example, you posted something on Twitter the other day about, I forget the name of the book, about trying not to get raped and murdered in your own home.

I forget the title. The subtitle stuck hard. But you posted like four pages of this book that I read, so I got that book. But is that what you're using on your computer? Because I've seen you post a few things like that where you're reading what appears to be an actual full-color book on your machine.

Yeah, so when I was posting that, that is pictures of… With that it's totally different. So with that, I got the physical book, I read the physical book, what you saw was just how I mark up and interact with the physical book. And then later, I scanned the physical book.

And so I cut the spine off of it, I scanned the physical book, and then I put that into my computer. So going back about three years ago when my wife and I started traveling in our RV full-time, I decided to go ahead and digitize my library. There's a whole podcast episode where I explain the whole process.

But I digitized probably, I don't know, a thousand to fifteen hundred book library. And I did what's called destructive scanning. So I cut off all the spines of the books, and then I fed the books through a duplex scanner. And for me, that was a really great solution. I really love it because I have on all of my devices, I have access to my entire library that I can pull up and I can see, I'll tell you right now how many books are in there.

And I can search it, so it looks like there's, oh come on, three thousand, so I have three thousand and sixteen books right now in my library. And I can put any one of these, and it's actually a combination of formats. It's e-books, PDFs, etc. And I use the popular library application called Calibre to manage it.

So what this gives me is it gives me access to all of my scanned PDFs of my books, all of my textbooks, all of my everything there, that I can pull it up anywhere in the world. And so any book that I want to read, I can just grab it, and if I'm preparing a course or I want to look something up, I have all of the stuff in there.

And a lot of it is tagged, not all of it, but if I look at tax planning and someone asks me a question of tax planning, I can search it and I can see I've got fifty-seven books here on tax planning that are here. So tax planning for the family home, or tax planning for overseas property, or international tax and business guide.

And so all of this stuff that I collect is all in one place, and so that helps me in my work. So what that was, I was going back to the scan of a book that I read, you know, however long ago, eight years ago, something like that, and I just took some screenshots from my PDF.

I wouldn't recommend this system to most people. So it works well for me, and I like it, but what I have often done actually is gone through and purchased, I've gone back through and I've repurchased a lot of those books. The problem is with books is always the space, is where am I going to keep them?

And when I started traveling, I figured, well, let me just go ahead and do this. So I will often now just go ahead and buy a physical copy of the book and a digital copy of the book. And I have found that I read better with a physical copy for all of the bonuses of digital.

I read better with a physical copy. I'm less distractible. My marginalia is easier to engage in, and I remember the book better when I interact with a physical copy. But because of my weird international lifestyle, it's often hard to get my hands on the books that I want in the format, etc.

So I basically just do all of the above. And so I have books that I purchase in every platform. I have books that I purchase, physical ones and e-books, etc. And just for my needs as a thinker, basically a professional thinker, that seems to be what I've come to for me.

But I don't recommend that system, but that's what it was. Okay. Wonderful. Thank you. Remember, it's not so important the format that you read. It's much more important what you're going to read and why you're going to read it. And then when you understand what you're going to read and why you're going to read it, then the format will be fairly apparent.

And reading as a technology is not something that is in and of itself good somehow. It's just a way of acquiring information and a way of accessing things. So you want to think about your goals in reading. So if I want to read current novels, then I'll just get those from my local library or make sure that I've got something set up with my local library subscription.

If, on the other hand, I'm trying to read professional work that's going to improve my career or help me to accomplish my goals, then I may need to approach it slightly differently. So think more about why you're reading and what you're reading and make sure you're reading the right stuff at the right time rather than these particular details.

Sure. Yeah. The thing I've been struggling with a little bit mostly is I've been going through so much material and I need a note-taking system, I think, more than anything else right now so I can keep straight. When a topic comes up in casual conversation, I say, "Oh, it would be a great thing to read about that," and then I don't remember it.

And it'd be nice to have a more refined note-taking system to go along with. Otherwise, you're just chewing through content. You might as well be listening to some podcast. So there's a lot of good thinkers out there who are working on that and who have ideas. I think that simple scales and fancy fails.

So having a simple system that you know how to use is a productive and effective thing to do. So anything that you design, it should be simple. There's nothing wrong with an analog system. One of the people who's really famous is the author Robert Greene. Probably his best-known book would be The 48 Laws of Power.

Robert Greene is this remarkable researcher, very interesting guy. He has a system of note-taking that he uses that's entirely based on physical cards, physical three-by-five cards. His pupil, his apprentice for many years, was Ryan Holiday. Ryan Holiday, author of probably about a dozen books now, big into Stoicism with the Stoicism books, etc.

But he has a similar system where he goes through and he takes notes on all of his books with a physical system of flashcards. So if you're interested in their systems, you can go and you can find both of them discussing them on YouTube. You can find interesting videos of them.

It kind of works with the Kettle. It's a German word from a guy who invented this system. I've forgotten the word, but it's Kettle something or other that you can find online as well. Now you can modernize that with electronic technology systems, but again you have to say, "What am I trying to do?" For a content creator like Ryan or like me or something like that, ideas are our raw materials.

Ryan is putting out a book a year. He needs a system that's going to allow him to read the necessary books that he needs to read to write a new book of his own and synthesize those ideas. So he has a system, Zettelkasten. Now I'm going to actually look it up.

Yeah, Zettelkasten, that's what it is. Zettelkasten is the system that is an old-fashioned way of doing it with card files. So the point is there are a lot of technology systems that are created for you and if you think about your application, you can find one. So for students, I'm a big fan of the application RemNote.

RemNote is a note-taking application that was invented by this guy. I think it's Kai Academy. I'll look it up here while I'm talking to you. This really smart brothers, or maybe it's, yeah, there we go, Kajin Koi Academy. Two brothers at Kajin Koi Academy who created this system called RemNote.

And RemNote is a note-taking application in some ways similar to applications like Notion, but what it allows you to do is it allows you to create spaced repetition flashcards directly from the note-taking system. And so I really love this application, especially for students, because it allows you to take notes on the content you hear and then turn those notes into flashcards.

This is kind of an update of SuperMemo, kind of the classic, if you went back 20 years, the software package that was created by, I forgot his name, Piotr something or other, I think it was a Polish guy. Super smart guy, he created this system called SuperMemo, which was a software application that allowed you to basically do all of your reading inside the system and then you put all of your thinking into this system of spaced repetition so you could remember the concepts and things that you worked at.

So if I'm studying for, if I'm reading to study for something, then I'll take notes with something like RemNote using all of the different tools that are available so that I can drill that into my head with that. That would be different than just taking notes for your own personal files.

So I can't tell you exactly the note system that works for you. I would say a simple one, right, using just the native apps, the native notes app on your phone is probably the best place to start, especially if you can synchronize it over to your PC for easier typing.

So if that's Google Notes or Google Docs or if that's Apple Notes, that's a good place to start. Yeah, I started using Evernote a while back at your recommendation and it's fallen short in a few areas. I just haven't made a switch to something new so I'll have to go looking around.

I think I'll add that to your podcast you just did about the five things I should do this new year. Virtually all of us have a long string of applications that we've tried and different things we've done and journals we've started and filing systems we've done. I've actually learned to be super careful of it.

I often find myself, if I find myself creating a new system, a lot of times it's just resistance. I'm procrastinating by saying, "Let me go and design a cool new productivity system." I know now that I'm resisting the actual work that I should be doing and I don't need a new system, I just need to go do the work.

Right. Was that both your questions or that was the easy question? Yeah, I know. I probably shouldn't say that. Folks say that all the time and then you end up really helping. If you've got time, if I'm still the only guy, I'd love to hit you with another one.

I've got one more. Let me look at Evernote real fast. I'll read it to you. "How do you reconcile the idea that the population demographic shift will largely affect the productivity of a country with the idea that building a rental portfolio will be a good investment long term?" This is something that frightens me as I build a rental portfolio and wonder if the population crashes, what the heck's going to happen to my investment?

I think you have to take that into account. You certainly have to take that into account and you have to think about it very intentionally. Let's use an example. There's a big difference between building a rental property portfolio in Tucson, Arizona versus in Leningrad, Russia. I haven't been to Leningrad, Russia, but I'm pretty confident their population is not increasing.

The Russian demographics are fairly terminal. They've lost hundreds of thousands of young people through their war and they're going to lose many, many more. They've had out migration of hundreds of thousands of people fleeing the country. The idea that my rental property is always going to be valuable in – again, I made up Leningrad.

I don't even know where that is or if it's a real city. My Russian geography is poor. The idea that this is going to be valuable forever is just simply not true. You can go to all around the world. You can find ghost towns and ghost cities. Go and look at Italy, the famous $1 houses in Italy.

YouTube is full of some really remarkable – I should have used Italy rather than Russia. Go to YouTube and search $1 houses and search basically ghost towns of Italy and watch some of the documentaries that are on there in Italy. What you'll see is there are entire towns that are full of beautiful houses, at least the bones, the basic bones of these houses that have been abandoned and they're just sitting there.

Again, you can literally come in and buy the house for $1 and have an Italian villa that of course you're going to need to put some tens of thousands of dollars into fixing up if you'll come and move to this town. But what you see, why does that exist?

Well, the Italian demographics have imploded. The Italians didn't have babies and now they don't have enough babies to have babies and so the country is dying and it already doesn't really matter. It's not big enough to really matter on a big space, on any like significant level and as the old people die off, it will shrink more and more into kind of global impotence.

The Italian culture, we're probably going to appreciate a lot of things about it, but 50 years from now, Italy as we know it, the Italian language, the Italian culture will just be a small kind of provincial place. In addition to that, but in those lessons, that doesn't mean that you can buy a $1 house in Rome or in Verona or in some places.

There are many towns in Italy that are doing very well and are thriving. And so the biggest danger is if you own real estate that is out in the suburbs or is out in a small town in a place with dying demographics. The big cities, the big trend of the last decades, I don't know if it's a century is too much, but basically the big trend of industrialization has been the movement from the rural farm and the small town to the big cities.

And this is still the case. It's a case all over the United States of America that very few people that grow up in a small town want to stay there. They want to go for opportunities. They want to go to the city and they go to try to strike their fortune.

And as romantically as we might see the small towns, we understand that living in a place with small towns is in some ways an economic death sentence and especially was prior to internet connectivity and our ability to more and more earn our living online. And so I think that if I owned a rental property portfolio in a little town that was 200 miles from a city, I would be very concerned that there's just not going to be a lot of growth.

There's always going to be a ban on buildings, etc. It might give me some current income, but there's certainly not a lot of growth. Now on the other hand, if I'm in a big population center and if I'm in a big city that has that attractive quality, then perhaps it's different.

And especially if I'm in a downtown area, an area where there is a neighborhood that's very attractive, etc., then now we have much more quality. Big cities attract people from other places who are coming for opportunity. In many countries of the world, this is very easy to see because it's very different in the United States.

In many countries, there's one city or maximum say three cities that has all of this attractive power. If you are growing up in Nicaragua and you want to go and make your fortune, there's one city you're going to go to. A city is Managua. If you're growing up in Costa Rica, there's one city you're going to go to.

It's San Jose. You're not going to other places. There's just one city and that's where everyone's going to go. That's different than the United States, where the United States certainly has New York City, L.A., Miami maybe, some of these big cities. But there's also Tucson and there's Denver and there's Seattle and there's Atlanta.

The United States has 40 big cities that have this attractive power. Then in those cities, inside any city, if you're in the great neighborhoods, those neighborhoods don't lose their attraction. I think that there's very good reason to want to have downtown property in the best neighborhoods, the old neighborhoods, the historic neighborhoods, etc.

Where I think the danger is in the suburbs or in a bedroom community suburbs that's outside of the big cities. The good thing is the demographics in the United States are not as bad as Italy, but does need to be considered. I think there are some good examples of how it is working out today and how it's likely to work out in the future in the United States.

Okay. Who am I looking to for more information on this topic? Do you have any other resources before I let you go? Probably CityData, right? Yeah, CityData website. Look at the demographics of your area. Look at the numbers, etc. and just compare them. Beyond that, I don't know. I mean, Peter Zahan, I've been mentioning him a lot lately.

He's been super active and he talks about some of that stuff in the United States as well. You can go and you can hear his arguments, right? For example, he will give the argument that Texas is perfectly positioned to continue to thrive in the coming decades. There's this massive confluence of factors, long-range factors, that mean that the economic prospects for Texas, especially the Houston-Dallas-Austin triangle, are really, really powerful on a number of levels.

You can go in here and talk about some of those things. I think that in general, you could probably just feel it yourself in your town and feel it. I guess the other thing I would say is I don't know how impactful this would be for you as an individual investor.

Because when you're talking about demographics, you're talking about something that's probably beyond most people's investment lifetime. You're talking about a 40-year projection when you might want to own a property for 20 years. Yes, you're concerned about it, but it may not actually affect you that significantly. I may or may not be handing down a house to my children's children.

It's not necessarily the only consideration to make. That's all I've been doing when I check out areas is looking at census data and growth and stuff like that. I haven't been to Zyhan's work yet, but I have heard you mention it. What region of the country are you in?

I'm in the eastern side of Washington. I love that area. I just don't know where other than Tacoma. I'm not sure where your base is. That's my phone number, but I'm on the other side of the mountains. We divided the state down the Cascades Mountain Range. The people on the west side are the wet-siders and the people on the east side are the east-siders.

What is the free state of—I forgot the name of it—Liberty or something? Yeah, man. Wouldn't that be something? The 51st state movement out there. At the end of the day, unless you're trying to build a portfolio of 100 houses, I don't know that that's going to be super important.

If you have 5 houses or 10 houses, depending on what your target is, I think if you have 5 or 10 houses that are attractive, that rent well, etc., then I don't know that demographics should be the key thing. The house quality matters a lot. I get worried about small towns.

I get worried about suburbs. I think that in the future the suburbs are going to hurt in many places, but I don't think any of that stuff is near enough to this. I don't think that these factors are as significant in the United States as they are in many other countries.

The U.S. demographics are not awesome, but they're less bad than the vast majority of places in the world. The United States has a fertility ratio of 1.8 or 1.9. South Korea has a fertility ratio of 1.1. It's almost half. How do you invest in South Korea? I don't know.

When you have a fertility ratio of 1.1. The United States is better and has a lot more future, so it wouldn't be my primary factor. I might be getting a little wrapped around the axle on something, but it was just an interesting idea that I had. Go and watch a couple documentaries on YouTube of Italy.

I think there is the obvious solution of here's this attractive country, this tremendous culture that around the world people really love, and yet look at what happens in a country that loses its young. You can see it play out very, very clearly in front of your face. Then consider, "Okay, if that happened where I am, where would it be?" But again, I come back to timing.

If it happened where you were, you would have a whole lot of time to adjust to it. Italy sealed its fate 60 years ago. What you see today is a result of what was 60 years ago. The United States has not yet sealed its fate to that degree. Understood.

All right. Good talking to you. Check your Evernote file and call me back next week with more questions. We move on to Tim in Virginia. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, Tim? Hi. Thanks, Josh. Wow. I guess that felt like a very perfect transition for me.

My question is I'm surprised from listening to you for a long time, I'm surprised that you haven't put more focus or emphasis on keeping your family situated geographically close to extended family or where you grew up. Background for that, I'm getting out of the military and trying to figure out where to land.

I'm from a small town kind of area. That obviously is a downside for the discussion with your last caller. But I also grew up in an environment with all of my extended family around, value that a lot. I've been trying to figure out how to balance that. I was wondering what your thoughts were on that question.

This is probably an area where I myself don't have perfect clarity. I think about it a lot, but I also see the apparent – I'm struggling for the word – but the apparent contradiction, I guess I'll say, among these things. I'll describe forthrightly what I think about. First, what I do today is not necessarily what I will do tomorrow, nor is it necessarily what I did up until recently.

For context, from the time I was born until I was 33 or 34 years old, I lived in one city. I traveled a good amount. I've been to a lot of places. I've been to 47 of the 50 states. I've been to dozens of countries, et cetera. But I lived in one city.

Because of that, I enjoyed strong family relationships, strong ties, et cetera. When I started traveling outside of my city, I didn't have any long-term ambition to leave. This started – I'll go ahead and go through the timeline of it along the way. But this started when I went on an RV trip, and I wasn't planning to leave Florida and just not be back.

I just decided to go on an RV trip and go and travel for a time. We were interested and open to settling down in different places in the United States, but it wasn't a specific goal. It was like, "Let's go do this thing that I've wanted to do for a while and try it out." While we were on the RV trip, we conceived a baby.

When we conceived the baby, I needed a place to have the baby. We were planning to go back to Florida to have the baby, but we were having trouble. We had some communications issues with the midwife that we had, and so we were just kind of heading back that way.

But we didn't know where to go, and we didn't have a house. Then I came up with the idea of birth tourism, which for me had the potential to solve a significant issue that I faced. The issue that I faced specifically was that I was worried about whether I would be able to ethically pay taxes to a government that would use that tax money to pay for abortions.

What happened is, in the 2016 presidential election, the two leading Democratic frontrunners, which were Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, promised that if they were elected as president, that they would repeal the Hyde Amendment, which was a law in the United States that prohibited the use of taxpayer money to pay for abortion.

I thought to myself, "How can I look at myself in the mirror if I'm paying taxes to the U.S. government and that money is being used to murder little babies? How can I do that? How is that right?" The great moral conundrum that I face is being a Christian, and Christians are clearly commanded to pay their taxes.

I'll lay out the logic for you, because it's what I wrestled with at the time. I thought, "Okay, I have a choice. I can pay taxes, and those taxes can be used to pay for abortion." For years, I've struggled with the ethics of paying taxes to the war machine that is the United States of America.

That's no secret. From probably the first 20 episodes, I talked about tax protesting and wrestled with it. My entire life, my country has been at war. That was not something fresh or new or different. It's just always been that way. Then I thought, "What do I do about this new thing, though?

How do I stand and look myself in the face if my money is being used to fund abortion?" I thought, "How do I get out of it?" Back to Christian theology, I could become a tax protester. I could say, "I'm just not going to pay money that I owe." The problem is that in the Bible, universally, Christians are commanded to pay taxes, pay the taxes that they owe.

You say, "Well, maybe they were being commanded to pay taxes, and it wasn't so bad. Maybe the government that they were being commanded to support was a little bit nicer." That's hogwash, right? We're talking about Nero, the guy who's sticking Christians in vats of oil and putting a stick up their butt, and sticking them in his garden for torches, human torches, right?

And they're still saying, you have Jesus said, "Pay your taxes." Paul, "Pay your taxes." Peter, "Pay your taxes." So there's no question, right? Jesus says, "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's," knowing that this is the government that's going to put him to death, an unjustified death. And so I don't see any way that a Christian—let me rephrase that.

I see almost no way—I want to leave myself a tiny out—but I see almost no way that a Christian cannot pay the taxes that he owes. But then one day, I was thinking about it, and I realized, "Wait a second. Taxes are optional. Taxes are entirely optional, and it's a choice that we make based upon a lifestyle.

And if I don't want to pay taxes, I could make the ethical choice of moving and going somewhere else. And by the way, taxes are also optional based upon lower income." So I thought, "Well, I could do what's called legal tax protesting, right? I could lower my income and eliminate my tax burden by simply earning a lower income.

So I could move to a rural part of the United States. I could grow my own food. I can make enough money in my business where I have enough deductions and whatnot to support my family. And we do homesteading or something like that, and we have a zero-dollar tax burden.

Thus, I'm not funding abortion, but I'm following the law, right? That would be an option. It's just not an option that appeals to me very much." But when I realized I could move, and when I realized I could move and I could renounce my American citizenship, and I could follow the law, but I could also release myself from that tax obligation, and oh, by the way, if I weren't an American citizen, I could make 10 million bucks a year and live in a tax haven and pay zero dollars of tax to anybody completely legally.

It completely changed everything for me. And so that was something I came to, and I realized, I said, "Well, I probably am not going to want to… I'm probably not going to do this, but I'd really like the option to do it." Because when Donald Trump got elected in 2016 on that issue, it felt like I dodged a bullet.

I was like, "I don't have to make that… I don't have to solve that right away." And so I said, I resolved when on the election night 2016, I resolved I will never be in this situation where I'm so vulnerable to a political election again, especially an unpredictable one.

So when I left, it was basically to build an escape route, and that was what birth tourism did for me. So I thought, "I'll build an escape route out. I'll give my children options, and I'll give myself options." But I didn't plan to not leave, to live outside the country.

I figured, "Well, I'll probably be gone for a few months, then I'll be back in the United States, probably back in Florida where my family and I are." So then, back to the timeline. Well, after being outside the United States for a little bit, then COVID hit along the way, and we were able to set up a pretty good lifestyle, and we were able to travel back and forth frequently, and I was enjoying certain aspects of being outside of the United States.

And along the way, the entire country has changed underneath me. And the United States of 2023 doesn't feel like the United States that I grew up in, and it doesn't feel like a country that I have much connection to. And so as I went more and more into the international space, I realized I actually am more interested in a lot of the international stuff than I am in specifically the United States.

And the United States culture, which is basically, broadly speaking, worships at the altar of money, it doesn't feel like a very friendly, welcoming culture for me to be committed to. And so I have this tremendous wrestling point that there are a lot of people in the U.S. that I really like, but broadly speaking, the culture is pretty disgusting.

I mean, the amount of pornography that the United States exports around the world, the amount that you have to on a daily basis, you're basically slapped in the face with disgusting stuff on an ongoing basis, it's just horrific. And so you say, "Well, I can go get rich, but I have to live in this cesspool, or I can go somewhere else and do something else." So I've traveled back and forth a lot, but it's just not been super attractive.

Now, long story short, fast forward, a year or so ago, I was in the process of moving back to the United States. And in fact, I actually did, actually two years ago. I moved back, my wife and I, we rented a house in Florida near where my family was, etc.

But at that time, I couldn't accomplish some of the things that I needed to accomplish. Turned out the house had mold in it that I rented, so we moved out of there a month later. We were bouncing around all around the country, kind of thinking about things. And I came to the conclusion that if I live in the United States, I should live in Florida to be near my family.

But if I'm not going to live in Florida, then I should move elsewhere. So then look at the Florida lifestyle. It's not very attractive to somebody who lives the way that I live. You pay through the nose for a house that has very few amenities. The weather is not awesome most of the year.

And basically, your kids wind up sitting inside in front of a screen most of the time because it's not super attractive outside. And I'm most attracted to the state of Florida versus any other state for many reasons. But it just doesn't feel like the kind of lifestyle that I want my children to grow up in.

And it just isn't awesome. So the reason I would live in Florida would be to be close to family. So here's the other side though. My wife and I were talking. Over the years, we've talked a lot. And one of the questions we've talked about is, "Okay, well, where's going to be home?" We're living this weird multiple country lifestyle.

We're bouncing all around the world. We're traveling a lot. And I really enjoy certain aspects of that. But her question was, "Where's going to be home?" What is going to be the concept of home that our children connect to? And I thought a lot about that. And what I came to realize--because I'd always imagined always living close to my parents, always living close to my extended family, etc.

What I realized is I'm not raising my children with the sole and exclusive goal that they be next to me when I'm old. I appreciate that. I want to be close to them. But that's not why I'm raising them. I'm raising my children to go out and make an impact on the world.

I'm raising my children to go out and do something. I'm raising my children to go and to be productive and to go and establish a beachhead wherever they feel that God leads them. I've always admired Baron Rothschild, the banker guy who sent his children all around the world, knowing basically to go and set up his empire around the world, knowing he's probably never going to see them again.

And in fact, he didn't. I don't think he did. But he has all these sons and he sends them out and he builds the Rothschild banking empire. It's a remarkable story. And so I realized if I want that for my children, then what is the goal for--like, why do I not give my father the same thing?

Like, I want to be close to family, but I want to be productive. I want to go out and I want to work. I want to go out and impact the world in a significant way. And so sitting at home just to be close to family, if to the extent that that hinders my ability to make a difference in the world, it's not the right decision.

And so over the years I have tested that. And I've kind of gone back and forth. The other challenge is simply what makes a bigger difference on a day-to-day basis. So is it being physically next door to people? If you can be physically next door to your parents or physically across the street, and I mean that quite literally, then that's an amazing kind of lifestyle to live.

But if you're 30 minutes away, okay, that's good. But sometimes you don't have as much of a connection as if you could be physically next door, physically across the street. And so I do miss my family. I don't see them as much as I would like to. So I've been testing kind of the concept of being away and wondering and considering how that impacts and how those relationships can be engaged in.

There is some, to some degree, I think that visiting people regularly can lead to deeper relationships versus the familiarity that comes from being close on a daily basis. That sometimes I think that it's better to be with your family for a week and a half at a time where you're really focused on visiting and connecting on a deeper level and do that three times a year than it is to be there all the time.

But it is, I guess, to conclude, it is something that I think about. It is something that I miss, but I also factor that against some of the other benefits that I have from the way that we live and where we live, etc. And I'm not sure where I'll be two years from now, but at the moment I feel like I shouldn't live my life with the sole goal of living next to my parents.

My parents didn't raise me with the goal of, "Okay, Josh was going to live next door to us and we can just be together and be happy." They raised me to make a difference in the world and I honor them not by just living next door to them. I honor them by doing that.

And I certainly have a responsibility as a son to care for them, to make sure that they're cared for, etc. And I want to have close relationships, but that is not the goal of life. The goal of life with your children, you know, there's a classic psalm that I like that says, "As arrows in the hands of an archer, so are the children of one's youth." And the point of an arrow is to go out and hit its target, to do something.

And so if you have little arrows in your household, you're raising them to send them out to go and do something. And I believe that there's a significant element of which I honor my parents, not by having this idea that I just have to live next to them, but by going out and doing something in the world.

So that's not a perfect answer. I recognize that the apparent conflict. I've only been gone for four years now and I'm not sure where I'll be a year or two from now, but that's where I'm at at the moment. Okay, thank you. Yeah, that makes sense. Is there, I can't think if I've ever encountered this in your podcast, but do you have a resource somewhere for the list of countries that you've focused on that met those requirements?

Because the, I guess what I'll say is the different countries for a different lifestyle sounds like it achieves a higher magnitude of value for being away from home than what I've looked at from just being in a different city of the U.S. Right. I don't have a list. I can talk about it with you now and I can, I'm happy to tell you where I'm most interested in and kind of what I'm, what I personally, again, what I'm interested in.

Actually, I don't know if I want to do too much, but I have a vision for how I want to live. I've been setting it up. We, we, I have been slow on some of that because I've been having a baby. Right. That's a factor that I push my wife pretty hard, but I try not to push her that hard.

So, you know, she deserves to be comfortable and still and coddled and taken care of when we come to having a baby. And what I want to be clear on is I, one of the other, I guess here's another aspect I would say. One of the reasons I haven't gone back to the United States, although I, and I've tried to say this repeatedly, that I, I very well could and I very, I might, I very well perhaps will.

Every, the longer I have been gone from my home country, the more independence I have been able to gain of my perspective. When I left the United States, I had nothing but bad things to say about the country. I was so frustrated. I was so angry. I had nothing but bad things to say.

Today, I can give you a list of bad things, but I can also give you a really good list of good things. And so I've come to be much more sanguine about the whole thing. I've come to be much more detached. And if I move back today, I would move back with a much happier attitude, really appreciating so many of the benefits from it.

And I should hasten to add that because earlier I didn't mean to be so negative about, about the country. There's so many beautiful people. There's so many wonderful things about it. It's not all, all bad. In terms of regions, I think you have to identify the factors of what you're going for.

So if it's economic opportunity, I don't know of anywhere in the world that beats the United States. And if it's economic opportunity for your children, I don't know of anywhere in the world that beats the United States. One of the things that greatly frustrates me about many countries in the world is how excluded and discriminated against young people are.

And I mean adolescents. Adolescents around the world are very highly and heavily excluded from society. They're excluded from opportunities. They're locked in schools. They can't do much. And if I move back to the United States in the future, one of the key reasons I will do that is so that I can more effectively launch my children and give them more opportunities than they would have in many places in the world.

Everything from the driving age of the United States versus other countries to kind of the freedom that you have, the broad acceptance of homeschooling, which allows a child to have much more freedom and flexibility, early entry into the workforce. In many countries, children can't work legally until they're 18 years old.

And so this denies a child years of experience in the workforce. And in addition, access to all the fascinating little entrepreneurial opportunities that are so easily done in the United States that are not so easily done in other places. This is my biggest frustration with the regions of the world that I have checked out.

So economically, it's hard to beat the United States. Now, on the other hand, one of the great tragedies of the United States is that it's such a—one of the great tragedies is that there has become a major—do I call it nanny culture? Basically, this idea that children have to be coddled constantly, right?

You know, your neighbor calls CPS because you have your 11-year-old, you know, ride his bike a mile to go to school. How can an 11-year-old ride his bike a mile to go to school? It's like, come on. The country is so full of people who are frustrated about that.

I don't like the car culture in the United States. Not Just Bikes has a really great video on—which is basically why I won't raise my children in the suburbs. And I'd encourage you, if you haven't seen it, go to the Not Just Bikes YouTube channel and watch his video called "Why I Won't Raise My Children in the Suburbs." And one of the points that he makes in that video is that car culture in the United States and suburb culture really harms children's ability to kind of establish themselves because they're stuck in the house.

They can't walk to anything because it's too far. Biking is not safe and it's not pleasurable in the United States and suburbs. And they're completely dependent on rides, on people to give them rides. I think Uber has improved this some, but they're completely dependent. Whereas if you live in—in his example, he's raising his children in Amsterdam.

In Amsterdam, it's very normal that your 10-year-old can go and with his bicycle, he can go to all of his friends' houses, he can go to all of his school events, et cetera. And so you can encourage greater independence at an early age in a city that has good infrastructure versus other things.

So I find that really, really interesting. Now, if you're—another way to analyze this would be in terms of cultural kind of multicultural appreciation and/or bicultural or multicultural experience. One of the things I find very distasteful about U.S. American culture broadly is it's so—there's often a—children who grow up in the U.S.

American culture easily acquire a strong sense of cultural superiority. And they often lose a sense of curiosity with other cultures and other ways of thinking. I don't have a hard line position on this because I think sometimes people who attack the United States as being an insular country are wrong about the way that they do that.

So kind of a classic one is I'm quick to defend Americans who don't have passports. And the point that I make is just simply that the United States is so almost inconceivably large and varied and diverse that you don't need to go to another country in order to experience broadly different cultures.

I mean, compare the United States and maybe a Croatian guy is insulting the United States. Compare Croatia to the United States and it's just—it's so—such a vastly different experience that it's hard to—you're in a totally different space. And in many ways, the U.S. exceptionalism, right, this classic case of the psychological idea of American exceptionalism, in many ways is very well justified.

When you look at the exceptional nature of the United States as a country, when you look at the exceptional nature of its cultural achievements, of its international renown, of its power, etc., a lot of American exceptionalism is genuinely justified. But that same justification of American exceptionalism, I think, becomes a major blind spot where it keeps many Americans from being willing to be humble and appreciate the areas in which the country is not exceptional, the areas in which it's truly behind and where it could be advanced so dramatically and things that would make things so much better.

And so there's this really frustrating flip side of American exceptionalism to say, "Well, we're always exceptional." And I think that harms people a lot. And so I think traveling can be a really good antidote to that. I remember where I first experienced this was I was, I think, a freshman or sophomore in college and I went to Hong Kong for the first time.

Prior to that, the big cities that I had been in the United States were the big American cities on the East Coast. I've been to New York City, I've been to Boston, I've been to Miami, I've been to Chicago. And I thought, "We're just the king of the world with these cities." And I remember going to Hong Kong when I was a freshman in college.

And first, I remember my experience flying on Korean Air. I flew from Atlanta to Seoul and then Seoul to Hong Kong. And I had the best flight experience of my life. And I thought, "Wow, that was a little bit different." When you compare Korean Air to American Airlines, it's just night and day.

You don't ever want to go on American Airlines ever again. I actively try to avoid flying on American flagged carriers whenever I can because the experience is just so much worse than most carriers, international carriers that are flagged in other countries from a service perspective. Then I get to Hong Kong and I remember waking up my first morning in the city looking around and I was stunned by what I saw.

The skyline made Manhattan look like a joke. And then I went and I got on the MTR, the subway in Hong Kong. And the MTR station sparkled like a shopping mall. And I thought to myself, "I don't ever want to go to New York and ride on that rat infested 1950s technology." And that experience started to open my eyes about the things that are good and bad in the world.

And so the more time I spend outside the United States, the more I come to appreciate kind of the texture of the world and I appreciate more about the country and more about other things. I also think that giving children the ability to be comfortable in multiple cultures is a tremendous gift.

I often recommend against Americans moving abroad because I don't think they're going to be comfortable. If you are restricting yourself to countries where English is the language spoken, the primary language spoken, you are restricting yourself to a fairly small subset of the world. And even if you go to a country where English is broadly spoken, if you don't develop at least the confidence that comes from having learned one second language, it's going to be very difficult for you to feel confident that you can learn the local language.

And if you don't learn the local language, you're always going to be excluded. You're always going to be on the periphery. I'm super hardcore. One of the things that is a big deal in the United States, and I've been this way for years, every unacculturated Hispanic immigrant to the United States, I preach constantly, "You have to learn English.

You have to learn English." And I tell them this because if you don't speak English in the United States, your opportunities and your ability to assimilate into the culture and to access the great parts of the American dream are hindered massively. But then the same thing happens if you go abroad and you say, "Okay, I'm going to move to Austria, but lots of Austrians speak English.

I'm going to be fine." Yeah, to a degree, but it also freezes you out. And so I enjoy exposing my children to the world. I enjoy the multilingual aspect of life. It's become a big part of our family culture and identity, and I intend to continue it. And I also enjoy – one of the things I'm really enjoying myself is I enjoy challenging my Western thinking.

And so as an extension of kind of Americanism, I have a high opinion of Western culture broadly, but I really think that there's some tremendous excesses in Western culture that are really vicious and evil. And so trying to think about how things are happening in other parts of the world and considering that, I find really interesting.

I guess that would be the last thing, is that I'm pretty bored by life in the United States. And what I've discovered is that to me, having it all is really boring. Sitting on vacation on a tropical beach is wonderful when it's three days after a long and heavy work week, whereas sitting on a tropical vacation on a beach for months and months, to me, is not something that I want in life.

And so I love the challenge and the constant effort and the battle that comes with global living. It keeps my life interesting in a way that I have a hard time perceiving if I move back to South Florida or to Tacoma, Washington or something like that. So does that give you any insight at all, or you want to ask a clarifying question?

No, that's good on that topic. I don't know if you have time for another short question. Go ahead. There's no short questions around here, but go ahead. It's true. So last, I think it was your last Q&A, you mentioned the book Stolen Focus. I read it on a trip recently, and I was wondering what you liked about the book.

The first half I thought, OK, this guy's making a lot of sense. And then as I started to hear his solutions, I thought this is a lot of abdication of personal responsibility. And it was a surprising recommendation. So, yeah, there's always the… I can understand why you would have that response.

And so for those who haven't read the book, one of the author's big focuses, he's against kind of the classic individualized exposure, just the classic idea of, well, you know, turn off your phone. And he's in favor of legislation. He's in favor… What were some of his other recommendations?

He talked about legislation. What were some of the other collectivist policies he proposed? He wanted to do away with surveillance capitalism was the buzzword on that front. He talked a lot about raising children at the end, which that part was not surprising that you could be… that you could like that part.

I don't actually remember too many of his specific suggestions. So I guess I'm… now you've stumped me. So I ignored most of the suggestions. For me, the first half of the book was the key. I'm not going to go out and start, you know, banging the drum for kind of collectivist stuff.

I'm not… I think there's probably an area for that. I have really wrestled a lot, and I don't have an answer on this. Let me just start with that. But I've wrestled a lot with the appropriate application of the collective law to two things. An example would be this, right?

TikTok. I laughed when the… I think it was under the Trump administration. When President Trump and some of his administration were starting… were talking about we're going to ban TikTok. Because that just goes against kind of the basic concept of freedom that I think is so valuable in the world.

But on the other hand, I've read several essays recently that I think it's very plausible that TikTok is or has become like a genuine attack by a foreign power against US-American culture, to basically destroy the culture from within. And so the question is, if it were that kind of attack, regardless of intention or not, if it were that, what would be the right response in your household, as a father, in your community, in the government, from the government level, etc.?

And I think we're living in a world in which the old definitions don't… are going to need to be rethought. Like, I can't apply a political label to myself that I feel is accurate. I say, "Well, I have these tendencies here," etc. And I think the same thing is basically the case with many aspects of life, that we're living in a hinge of history where some of the things of the past have not… some of the issues of the past are not well-defined by the vocabulary and the terms and the structure of our past conversations.

So we need to wrestle with these things and then discuss them. And I guess the best example would be, if you look at Republicans and Democrats, the old ideas of what defined and what distinctions there were between these parties, they don't really exist anymore. Republicans are not kind of the party of free markets.

Neither are the Democrats the party of communism. Those are not… that's not where they are. We need new terms, new definitions. So I don't… let me just say that what helped me with the book was to recognize that when I first bought the book, I bought it because I read the op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

And I said, "This guy is speaking to me." And then when he went through kind of the whole experience, I was like, "That's what happened to me." And then my own application is, "I'm going to carefully create an environment around my children and around myself that results in the ability to focus, not in allowing these thieving algorithms to steal their focus." And it doesn't mean being a technological Luddite, but it means that I'm going to always maintain that focus is really, really important.

And so my application was very much personal to me and to my family of reinvigorating my resolve that, as I stated in that recent episode, I'm convinced of Cal Newport's deep work hypothesis, that the ability to do deep work consistently is the superpower of today and of the future.

Go ahead, Tim. Finish up. Is that good? Oh, sorry. I think my phone stopped for just a moment. Yeah, thanks for that answer. I probably was uncharitable maybe in assuming too much agreement on your part with the book. But thanks for the answer. That's all. You know, one of the things—and I'll move on to the next caller with this—is that when I recommend books, what anybody should know is I have a very high tolerance for reading books that I disagree with.

And I have a very high tolerance for basically personally taking things away that aren't there. So don't—I always tell you, if you want my opinion, ask me my opinion, and I'll give you my opinion. But don't judge my opinion based upon the person that I listen to or the person that I talk to because I think some of the most important people to listen to and talk to are those that you disagree with so that you can test your own opinions.

So the book is Stolen Focus. You go ahead, all of the rest of you, and read it, and then feel free to see if it helps you, and then take what's useful—as with any book, take what's useful and reject what's not. Orlando, Florida, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today?

Hey, Josh, how are you? Very well, sir. Good. I called in maybe a month and a half, two months ago about reading to your kids in Spanish and kind of learning Spanish as a second language for the kids and also for me as well. And you gave me some good advice in terms of what to consider to reading to them, and you talked about your situation and kind of how you read throughout the day at breakfast and throughout the day and stuff like that.

The question is following up on that and is more like, how do you do it? So I bought some graded readers, I think. I hadn't heard that term other than you talking about it, but I bought some first grade level Spanish books, a big set of them on eBay, and started reading to them.

For one, I don't know how first graders read them because some of those words are really long. And I thought I would know all the words, but I didn't in terms of translating. But I just kind of was wondering, do you read a sentence? Do you translate the sentence after that?

Do you read it all in Spanish? And then also on the same line with audiobooks as well, like you talked about your kids listening to foreign language audiobooks. Do you just let them listen to foreign language without translating, or do you kind of jump in at points? So that's kind of where my question is, a broad one, today.

It's a good question, and I'll do my best to give you a useful answer. I'm hoping in the coming months to create a—let me rephrase. I am building a done-for-you solution that will help you with this. I've gotten so much interest from listeners and from people that I've talked to about this technique, and I have proven it now, its effectiveness, so many times over now in my own family with my children, that I believe that it's something that's useful.

And since the commercial solution doesn't exist, I am in the process of arranging to create it. And Spanish is going to be my first language. So there's my kind of pre-sale ad that look out in the coming months for a kind of a done-for-you solution to create something that will help you for it.

But I'll tell you exactly how I do it. First, on the subject of graded readers, I'm not sure what you got, but it is important to note that that phrase can be used in two ways. And what you're looking for is for graded readers for language learners. And the example is, and this is why kids' books are not awesome material to begin with for learning a language.

Books that are written for children are written assuming that the child already speaks the language. So this is why you can go and pick up the book, you know, Sammy the Seal, or as my wife would correct it every single time. In fact, our book has scratched out Sammy the Sea Lion, because Sammy is a sea lion.

He is not a seal. So if you go and pick up Sammy the Sea Lion, and you try to read that as someone who's learning English, you will encounter all kinds of vocabulary that you're not familiar with. And you have to look up these words all the time. But for a native English speaker, a three-year-old loves Sammy the Sea Lion, because it's just a book that he totally understands.

He knows all the words. When you buy graded readers for language learners, then those graded readers for language learners make conscious use of easy words, and especially of cognates. So I guess I would look at, for example, one brand that I could, because I don't have any graded readers for Spanish, but one brand I would mention would be Eli.

Eli is a big publisher of graded readers. I have their graded readers in French. And if you go through and you look at them, you'll see that they are designed and built to be very simple and to have lots and lots of cognates. So when you're buying graded readers, make sure you're buying graded readers for language students, not graded readers for first graders.

Because if you're just talking about kind of simplified books, those books might have words that are hard in them. Then what I do is I just simply read them, and I translate. And so let me give an example. All right, so this is a file that I made. This is an example in Spanish.

This is a file that I made for my nieces and nephews to teach them Spanish. This is me reading a book in Spanish. The Hollisters in Switzerland, or Jerry West, by Jerry West, a bilingual recording, and say, Directamente hacia los Hollister, directing themselves, sorry, one second, landed on the tip of the little nose de la pequeña Sue Hollister, of the little Sue Hollister.

El topo se derritió antes de que los ojos oscuros de Sue, the snowflake melted before the dark eyes of Sue, se hubieran vuelto a abrir, had gone back to open, mientras parpadeaba con asombro, while she blinked with surprise, mirando la nevisca que caía sobre el camino, looking at the snow that fell on the road, bordeado de árboles, bordered with trees.

So there's the example for you of what I do. I just go a phrase at a time, and that's just me doing simultaneous translation as we go. So that's all you do. >> That sounds easy enough. I just got to find the right books. >> You got to find the right books, and you got to just work at it.

And in the beginning, it feels like this is never going to work, make any progress. But as you go through it, and as you continue, and as you go through it, and as you continue, you will find that in the fullness of time, it will work more and more.

I don't have an exact number, but maybe do that for six months. And if you do that for six months, then -- and back to your audio book question. If you do that for six months, then you can test and start seeing what happens if you drop the translation.

So if you find a book that you really liked and that the children enjoyed a lot, then go back to that one and now skip the translation and just see if they can enjoy the story. If you get a lot of pushback, oh, you have to translate, you have to translate, fine, go back and translate and do it for another few months.

If you can skip the translation, then skip the translation and do that. Then go ahead and get audio books that are audio books that are already known in terms of the story. So if you've read, you know, the Little House books in English and they love the Little House books, then get the Little House books in Spanish and go on and do a story that is known so that they understand the plot already.

And that way they'll pick up some of the words. And basically, I judge it based upon the amount of resistance that I get. If I get a lot of resistance, then I know that they're probably not understanding enough to make it interesting. If I get a little bit of resistance, that's fine.

Then I know they're probably understanding things well enough. And then just start doing it by a certain amount of time, right? Fifteen minutes a day, fifteen minutes a day. And if you do that over time, the children continually protest, well, not continually, but they will often protest because they're children.

But then they'll protest in ways that are funny. So funny story, a couple of months ago, my wife and I were at a Christmas music, like singing prior to Christmas with some friends. And many of them spoke Spanish and there were some Spanish-speaking, primarily Spanish-speaking people there. So it was funny that I said, "No, tal vez debemos hablar o cantar algunas canciones en español, right?

Perhaps we should sing some songs in Spanish." And so I spoke it in Spanish and then my son, my younger five-year-old, he resists. He says, "No, no, because then I won't understand." So it was funny because he betrayed himself. He understood what I had said. I had spoken in Spanish.

He understood perfectly, but he was still resisting. "No, I don't want to do it because then I won't understand." So children will do that and you basically just ignore it and keep on going. And eventually they stop resisting once they can understand everything very, very easily. So there you go.

That's funny. Thanks, Josh. And I'll just keep asking until you put that course out. I hopefully do it. I just got to get the copyright. Right now I'm just working on appropriate copyright stuff to get the interesting stories because if I'm going to read somebody's book in a bilingual format, I've got to get the copyright.

So I'm working on that right at the moment. All right. We finish off today's show with Dan in Alberta. Dan, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? Hello, Josh. Are you all right? Sounds great. All right. Yeah. My question was, "Which country is the easiest to purchase and invest in in Latin America?" I've looked at a few properties in Mexico and then Costa Rica.

Yeah, I really enjoy those countries and would like to buy a property just partly as an investment, partly as a business, and partly as a potential future homestead. Just have about $50,000 US dollars. Could fluctuate from $25,000 to $100,000 to invest. And I know in the past we've said $100,000 US to start a business is a healthy amount.

So that was encouraging. But at the same time, just putting $20,000 somewhere, just kind of a place to put it as an investment, would also be appealing to me. So what would you say is the easiest way to go about that? Do you speak Spanish? Fairly well. I would want a lawyer to help me through some of that stuff, but I do feel comfortable walking around, having conversations with people.

If you bought a property, would you live in the property? Probably at first, just for a couple months a year maybe. And then if I really enjoyed it and it felt like a place where I'd want to raise a family, then maybe I would move there full time to raise a family.

Of all the countries in Latin America that you've traveled to, which have you most enjoyed being in? Nicaragua was kind of the first place I traveled to alone. But a few things about it just really, really appealed to me. The chaos of the markets and the bus system I find quite interesting.

I want to give you a good and useful answer to your question. I'm not 100% sure that I can, but I will try. First, $50,000 is a significant amount of money, but it's not a ton of money if you're trying to buy a whole property. With $50,000, you're probably going to wind up either with unimproved land or with a condo.

It is technically possible that you could buy a freestanding house in many places in Latin America with that, but it may not be in the most desirable places. It's going to depend a lot on where you're looking at. To begin with, what is your home city in North America that you'll be traveling from?

Calgary, Alberta. You want to begin by recognizing that if you're going to go back and forth living an international lifestyle, then one of your biggest hassles is going to be getting there. There's going to be significant expense involved with getting to a place. Calgary is going to have much better connections to Mexico than to Argentina.

Getting from Calgary to Mexico, you've got direct flights into Mexico. You've got direct flights possibly into Costa Rica, into Liberia, at least seasonal on Sunwing and WestJet, so those don't look cheap. You've got direct flights into Belize City. On the west coast of Mexico, you've got Mazatlan, Puerto Vallarta, Manzanillo, Huatulco, and etc.

You don't have any direct flights from Calgary into South America. You want to think about this because this winds up being a big deal for you if you're going back and forth. If you've got $1,200 tickets from Calgary to Argentina, to Buenos Aires, even if Buenos Aires itself is inexpensive, then your flight cost, if you're going there for two months at a time, your flight cost is going to eat that up.

Think carefully about where you're traveling from. If possible, you want to be in a place where you can have a direct flight, and if possible, you want to have a place where there's going to be relatively inexpensive flights. Calgary is not a really great connected city to Latin America, but explore that and think about that.

Try to have a minimum amount of hassle to get back and forth. In terms of the countries, with $50,000, you're not going to be able to get financing in Latin America, so you're not going to mortgage a property. You're going to have either the money that you have out of pocket of your savings, or you're going to have money that you can get from your Canadian financing system, the money that you put an extra mortgage on your house in Alberta, and then use some of that money to go there and spend time and invest it into Latin America.

In terms of countries, then also ask yourself, "Am I trying to get something where there's also a residence permit or papers, or am I just trying to get a piece of property?" One of the things that you can do in many countries in Latin America is you can leverage your purchase of real estate to get some form of residency paperwork, so that you have the legal right to live there full-time, and then sometimes that residency in the fullness of time can lead to citizenship.

If you're interested in having an additional citizenship, that can be a pathway to do that, but every country has a different set of laws and requirements that need to be considered. Mexico is your biggest and best opportunity for economic growth. I think I'm very bullish on the future of Mexico.

I think Mexico has a lot to offer, and I think from a lifestyle perspective, the Mexican lifestyle is a really great lifestyle. One of the big advantages for you is that Mexico is very drivable. Obviously, it would be a very long day to get there, a very long couple of days, but if you chose something in the northern part of Mexico or in Baja Mexico, you could possibly find yourself something and you could drive back and forth between Calgary and Mexico in reasonably two or three days.

So choosing something like Mazatlan or Puerto Vallarta or something like that, where there's a great community and maybe you found a condo that would be a fit for you, being able to get back and forth would be great. Also, you could use your $50,000 to get a Mexican residency based upon their person of means visa.

You don't have to buy property for that, but you could use the Mexican person of means visa to get yourself a residency permit, and that residency permit in the fullness of time can lead into potentially citizenship in the future, which I think would be a great mix. My primary guess would be Mexico, but the problem is where in Mexico?

It's such a huge place that you'll need to find a place that you like and then think about the lifestyle that you want. There are lots of Canadians, lots of if you want English-speaking expat communities, there are lots of those all throughout Mexico that you can find as well.

Down through Latin America, you don't have any direct flights to Guatemala, and if you go down to Guatemala, it's going to be a much longer time to drive. So now if you went down into Guatemala, you're talking about two days driving to cover the United States, two days driving to cover Mexico.

That's not nearly as reasonable of a drive as it is to go from Puerto Vallarta to Calgary. Go down Belize, Belize is attractive from the English-speaking perspective. I don't think there's anything much else attractive about Belize, but your mileage may vary. El Salvador is interesting with some of the Bitcoin stuff that they have going on.

El Salvador has traditionally been frustrating with regard to crime, but if you found a community in El Salvador, because they've embraced the Bitcoin stuff, there are some interesting new communities that would be pretty cool, and we'll see how it works out. Their current president is a pretty cool guy, young guy, super young guy, and he's basically locked up huge swaths of gang leaders, and the El Salvador murder rate has plummeted.

Honduras, other than Roatan and the islands, Honduras doesn't have a lot of attraction for most people. Nicaragua, I personally do not like Nicaragua at all, but your mileage may vary. If you go down to San Juan del Sur or one of the surfing communities, you could find a lot of that vibe that you're looking for, and you can find inexpensive property.

As long as you stay out of politics, it's fine. Nicaragua is my least favorite country in Latin America. Costa Rica is super attractive to a lot of people. The problem is Costa Rica's prices are super high, and residency in Costa Rica is not very attractive. There's no real path to citizenship in any short period of time.

Prices are super high. The benefit of Costa Rica is it's probably cheaper for you to get back and forth to from many places. Panama, if you want a big city, Panama City is there for you. If you want beach towns, etc., you can find them. Panama is very connected.

It's just a matter of, again, I think all of these pale in comparison to Mexico. In South America, your problem is going to be, "Do I want to do the flights to get down there?" Colombia has a neat immigration program where if you purchase $150,000 of property in Colombia, that can lead to a residency, which can lead to citizenship.

I personally am a huge fan of Colombia. I love Colombia. I think Colombia has the second biggest financial opportunities in the coming years of the countries in Latin America due to its proximity to the United States across the Caribbean and the fact that they have a huge population and growing.

I'm a big fan of Colombia. You can go down through and you can go through every country, right? Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil. All of them have pros and cons. To me, I would start my search, if I were you, I would start my search in northern and western Mexico because I think that you could probably find a community like you wanted to be in.

I think you could probably find a condo that would fit your price range. I think there's good reasons to think that overall, broadly speaking, the Mexican economy is strong. I think there's more cultural familiarity between Canadian and Mexican culture. I think the fact that you could drive back and forth in, say, three days would be worth adding on in addition to the flights rather than always having to fly down and make a bunch of connections from Calgary.

Okay, yeah, I really like your thinking there. Yeah, I think that makes sense for being bullish on Mexico. The first thing I've ever ran into is, well, I had two questions. Like, owning near the waterfront involves the trucks, and I'm not sure how, like, I like the idea of really owning my own land, and I'm not sure how much of an issue it would be if it's worth moving further inland.

And then also, yeah, the one place I really liked, because I like being a tourist there, for wind sport, that'd be, like, a very specific location, but on the waterfront. So as an investment, I would kind of lean more towards something that has more feed production, so it'd be further inland, and without that truck, this would offer some benefit.

Yeah, it's not as possible where I want to invest, where I want to live. On the owning property close to the waterfront, that is the Mexican law, you can get around it through the use of the trust. It's fairly standardized. Lots of people do it. I think your biggest challenge, personally, is not whether or not you should use a trust, it's could you find a property in your price range that you would want to own and that you would have good reason to own.

Again, $50,000 is not a huge amount of money when it comes to international property investing. So before you buy anything, I would leverage the $50,000, keep it in my bank account, use it to get my Mexican temporary residence permit, and then once you have the residence permit, then you can go property shopping and see if you're willing to step through the hoops with the trust.

Okay. Okay. I guess the biggest thing I would say that I have learned that's important is no matter how sexy it seems to you at the moment to own property in Latin America, recognize you don't need to own property in order for you to go and spend time in the places that you like to spend time.

I think that in many cases the property is a hassle. And so if I were you, I would go slower and not just try to buy property real quick, keep your money in the bank, get a residence permit, go down for a couple of seasons. And I would go and spend two months in Mexico, go and spend two months in Guatemala, spend two months in Colombia, do that for a few years.

I find this to be the biggest distinction between at least my experience in the United States versus Latin America. In the United States, and I think significantly also in a big market like Calgary, when you buy property, you can go into it knowing what your price is and knowing how to get out of it.

So I can go up to you and I can say, "What's your house worth?" And you can answer that with a high degree of certainty. When you go into Latin America, depending on the space, the place, there is a much lower degree of certainty in answer to that question because the number of buyers is a lot smaller.

When you're going into a condo, if you're buying new construction, you're already upside down when you go in. So new construction condos, buy them, but you're upside down. If you go into another condo, again, the market's just much thinner. There are many fewer buyers. And so there's not as much of an opportunity to make money in the short run because it takes a lot more time for you to be confident of the local marketplace.

And when you go in with minimal Spanish skills, you'll also have a harder time buying a place that you'll have a harder time getting great deals than in the future when you're very culturally connected, you've got all the right people, etc. So I wouldn't hurry to buy property. And when you buy property, I would buy property because it's a place that I want to be and I want to live rather than, "Oh, it's an investment." The fact that the property will hopefully maintain its value and may grow is a great addition, but I think your primary reason to buy property is, "This is a place that I want to go back to every winter and spend my time and I'm hoping that it will grow, but that's not my primary focus." If growing the money is your primary focus, I think it's going to be simpler for you to do that in the Canadian market that you know or in a US-American market that has a lot of buyers and has a lot of action that's available to you.

Okay. Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Okay. Go for it. Yeah. Just go check it out and go slowly and let me know how it goes. I'd love to hear back from you in the future as we go. And with that, we conclude today's Q&A show. Thank you so much for your patience.

I went a little bit long on some of those questions, but thank you so much for your patience. Remember as we go that if you are interested in our new course, HackProof, go to hackproofcourse.com, sign up now. Four days remaining before the price increase. Hackproofcourse.com is where you can find that.

And if you'd like to join me on next week's Q&A show, go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. With Kroger brand products from Ralph's, you can make all your favorite things this holiday season because Kroger brand's proven quality products come at exceptionally low prices. And with a money-back quality guarantee, every dish is sure to be a favorite.

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