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You can have it all too. Visit cmhserviceindustry.com to learn more. Today on Radical Personal Finance is live Q&A. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insights, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Josh Rashid. This is Friday, November 17, 2023. On this Friday, after a long hiatus, we have a live Friday Q&A show. Welcome. If you're new around here, each and every Friday in which I can arrange the appropriate recording technology, then I record a live Friday Q&A show.

It works just like Call & Talk Radio. Call in, ask about whatever you want. We have a live conversation back and forth. It gives me a chance to connect with you on a deeper level, answer questions, comments, you get to bring up topics that I might not bring up, answer questions in a more interesting way and get a little bit of personalized insight and advice.

And I thank you, the many of you who join me for these Friday Q&A shows. If you would like to join me for a Friday Q&A show, you can do that by becoming a patron of the show. Go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Support the show on Patreon and that will give you access to one of these Friday Q&A shows.

I'll notify you in advance and you can call in and talk about whatever you like. We begin with Andy in Indiana. Andy, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hi, Joshua. Thanks for taking my call. I think the sort of high level picture of what I wanted to ask was what mental models and tools and decision making frameworks do you use for somewhat open ended, hard to define things like which job should I be applying for, which of these jobs that I applied for should I take or buying used cars, I feel like is similar.

So the specifics of my situation, my medium term goal is to move from a onsite technician role company I'm with to a completely remote non technician role going from hourly to salary. I was I started working down that path a few months ago and then they completely closed down a lot of salaried hiring.

So that's not available at the moment to me. However, there is there still doing internal hiring for other hourly roles. And so I do have the option to take or to apply for and or take some slightly higher level hourly roles doing different work. My intermediate term goal is I'd really like to get away from like I'd like to do something different than what I'm doing.

I've been in the same role for several years. I'm not finding it challenging or stimulating the schedules got less appealing, etc, etc. So I'd like to get out from that. I also think I'm not like I'm not going to get any more qualified to move up doing the work I'm doing.

And I could go do six months or a year, whatever of some other role and be more qualified for the eventual job that I would like to get. So then I find that I spend a lot of time and mental energy saying, well, you know, I don't see any perfect jobs.

Do I like a better than B is, you know, schedule freedom more important to me or is challenge more important to me? And I don't think there's necessarily a right answer there. But how would you think through when I'm like, I would be happy to take a high schedule freedom job with lower responsibility and do something else different.

But I'd also be happy to take a more challenging, less schedule freedom job. And I don't know what my I just find I get sort of bogged down trying to decide which ones should I pursue. Should I cast the net really wide? Should I have a really narrow focus?

That sort of thing. Yeah. In some ways, it would be nice if there were just a narrow focus. I've always admired people who always knew exactly what they wanted. They're sure that they they're sure they want to do this thing. It's very clear to them and they're on track and and and, you know, we're going to go and get this done.

No problem. Unfortunately, that's not generally been my experience. And I think that's not an experience for many of us. We have to go and search a little bit. Excuse me, I had to cough. Here are the models that I find to be most useful. The first one, I think just comes down to vision is I have discovered this to be the most powerful is simply that if your vision is clear, if your goals are clear, that makes decision making relatively simple and straightforward.

That doesn't mean it's easy. But the first question I ask myself is, am I having trouble deciding because I'm genuinely having trouble deciding or am I having trouble deciding because I don't know what I want? It's probably just as frustrating for me to say, well, get clear on what you want as it is to say, you know, what job do you want?

But the point is simply that a job or any decision in life is going to, you know, what car you buy, etc. is going to be driven by your vision. And let me give a couple of examples from people that I have known. There have been people that I have known whose primary goal, their primary vision was to make a large amount of money.

And in order to do that, they set themselves off on the career path that was most likely to make them a large amount of money. Sometimes that came with very heavy consequences to their social life. Sometimes that came with very heavy consequences to their family life. Sometimes that came with very heavy consequences to their health, etc.

But eventually they wind up succeeding and making a lot of money. In my circles, I've known a lot of people who have prioritized other things. I've known men who prioritized their family. And so, you know, I knew one man who he, for a decade of his life, he worked, he was a highly qualified engineer, had no problem there, but he worked, actually for more than a decade, he worked a half-time job so that he could homeschool his children.

His wife was there, but he wanted to do the homeschooling of the higher level subjects, etc. So he worked a half-time job. That undoubtedly cost him hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars, both in current wages and in opportunity cost of investment growth, etc. But he had a vision of what he was trying to build that caused him to go in that direction.

I've known men who had a vision of wanting to be able to work with their children. And so, instead of taking a corporate job where they wouldn't be allowed to see their family, they chose a pathway that allowed them to work with their family. I've known people who just loved adventure.

And so they would go off and chase adventure, etc. And so it seems to me pretty obvious that your vision will drive your job choices in some way. I, myself, my vision of freedom and control over my time, control over what I want to say, control over what I want to do, etc., has driven each and every one of my decisions.

And there's been many times when faced with a decision that I've said, "Well, am I going to do this certain pathway? Am I going to go down this path?" And I realized, "Well, Joshua, is your vision still that you want freedom or honesty or liberty, etc.? Or is your freedom that you want to make more money?

You'd probably make more money if you took this path." And generally, I find that if I'm clear on my vision, then things fill in. Let's use a vehicle analogy to make it clearer, right? Your vision of what you want to do with the vehicle drives your choice. The choice of whether you buy a pickup truck or whether you buy a sports car is driven by your vision of how you imagine yourself driving it.

The vision of whether you buy a nice big Jeep that you're going to take off-roading every weekend or overlanding every weekend up in the mountains is different than your vision of buying a little two-seater to get you around in the city. Your vision of a new car versus an old car is driven by – or sorry, your decision of a new car versus an old car is driven by your vision.

And so, one of the things I've noticed in financial counseling over many years now is that when somebody doesn't know what to do, my best work is not generally going to be to tell them what to do but rather to try to help them get clear on what they want by sometimes laying out alternatives, suggesting courses of action.

Sometimes I'll suggest a course of action and just see how they respond or react to it. Sometimes you want them to kind of glom onto an idea and say, "Yes, I really want this. I really want that." Sometimes you want them to just recoil from an idea and that recoiling from a certain thing helps a lot.

And so, I believe that if you're having trouble knowing what to do, then generally speaking the most fruitful area of focus is to say, "What kind of vision do I have?" Now I can anticipate the next thing. "Well, I have multiple visions." Okay. Or, "There's multiple things I could be happy with or I could be contented with multiple pathways." So there I think that one of the things that we want to play with is the vividness of a description.

And so, I have found for me one thing that's been helpful is to just take an idea, and this works well for me. I'm not a very mechanical guy. I'm an idea guy so I can manipulate images and ideas in my head very easily. But I'll take an image and I'll just blow it up and I'll say, "What if I were hyper successful at this job?" I've shared publicly.

This is one of the things that caused me to leave financial planning in the formal sense to go after radical personal finance. I took my current more standard job and I said, "What if I'm hyper successful at this?" And I imagined myself as a managing partner of a big firm with the money and the schedule and everything like that.

And I said, "Okay, now I know what that looks like." Then I took my – I checked out what does failure at that mean, but I wasn't worried about failure then. Then I took my alternative path and I said, "What if I'm hyper successful at the alternative path?" And I sketched out what that would mean and then I said, "What if I'm a complete failure at the alternative path?" And what I found is that I was more excited about even being a failure at the alternative path than I was about being hyper successful at the known path.

It just wasn't very exciting to me. So amplifying and differentiating them is, I think, sometimes useful. And this leads me to the next one, which is regret. Is that I think a lot of times you should ask yourself, "Which choice am I going to regret more? And which regret am I more likely to have?" So that word regret, I think, touches at a core emotion that for many of us is a very off-putting emotion that we don't want to experience.

But we can understand it a little bit if we engage with it. So here I think of – let's say you're in college and you say, "Well, I could stay up late and I could study for this exam and get an A or a B, or I could go to this concert with my friends.

Well, what am I more likely to regret in the future?" Well, it depends on what happens with it. If this A or the B on this exam is the thing that's going to mean you either flunk out of college or suffer some massive problem versus being very successful in college, then certainly you would want to study.

But generally speaking, you probably have things mostly in hand and the fear of regret is just something to illustrate to you that I should go with my friends. This is a component of what I'm doing. Or not pursuing things that are interesting. I find, at least for me, the fear of regret is – and actually the emotion of regret.

I try to discipline the emotion of regret because it's kind of a worthless emotion when it actually happens. We all make the best choices at the time with the information that we have. We do the thing that seems best to us. If in hindsight later we would make a different decision, we can't blame ourselves for that or engage in this feeling or emotion of regret.

After all, we did the best we could with the information that we had. All we can do is go on and make a different decision in the future. So I don't like the actual feeling of regret, but I like harnessing thinking about the fear of regret as a way of identifying the differences between things.

So vision, regret, consequences is the next one. I would just say – I wish I had a better, beautiful name for this – but there are some consequences – and here I'm mostly thinking about negative, although they can be both positive and negative – there are some consequences that I'm willing to accept.

So for example, losing money, losing some amount of money, I'm willing to accept it. Losing a grade or failing a class or something, I'm willing to accept that. Death, doing something that could result in death, I'm not really willing to accept it. Divorce, not willing to do something that's going to result in that as a consequence.

There are a few others. Bankruptcy is serious. I'm willing to consider bankruptcy as a reasonable consequence if the benefit of success is big enough, but in general, if something's going to wipe me out, you generally don't want to do that. And bankruptcy has a different impact depending on where you are.

If you're 20 years old and you didn't have a fortune or you're 30 years old and you hadn't made a fortune yet and you pursue something and you wind up bankrupt, big deal, not a big deal. On the other hand, if you've got $100 million in the bank and you're 50 years old, the costs of going bankrupt at that time are much more significant.

And so you'll consider the costs on a varying way. I guess the final one is one that I've said publicly many times, but I haven't heard anyone say it except I can cite where I learned it, but it just comes from Stephen Covey's win-win or no deal. But over the years as I thought about decision-making through the lens of practicing that habit of always going for a win-win or no deal outcome, I realized that in decision-making, making decisions where you have one good option and a lot of bad options is easy because you just choose the good option.

The only thing that's hard about decision-making is either when you have multiple good options or you have multiple bad options. So that's what's hard. So how can you change a decision from having multiple good options to having one great option and no good options? Or sorry, one option that's – you need to have clear disparity of your decisions.

You're trying to choose – and so if you have decisions that are kind of similar, then you have to figure out how to make them different from each other so that you can differentiate between them. Because at the time at which you have a good option or a great option as contrasted against non-good options, then your decision will now be easy.

So even if you have multiple good options or multiple bad options, the process is the same. There's two pathways you can go down. Pathway number one is you can look deeper at those decisions until you can understand more clearly what the costs and benefits of a decision are. So you can say, "Well, if I go down option A, yeah, I might only be making – yeah, I might be making 20% less on day one, but that's going to put me in a pathway to make 200% more on day 1,001." And so that's actually more alluring to me.

Or another guy might say, "You know what? If I go down option A, there's a good chance I might lose my job entirely, but option B is a much safer thing and I don't want to be without a job, so I'm going to stick with option B." So we try to amplify the attributes of a decision in some way until in our mind with our own kind of punch card, the decisions are now different.

And this is why I think you'll see people who have some maturity, they'll often just be very confident in their decisions. You meet a guy who's an entrepreneur through and through and he can't imagine going back to the world of an employee because he values opportunity and freedom and flexibility, et cetera, more than he values perceived stability, safety, security.

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Now, what if you can't do that? What if you're looking at three options and they're still kind of all feel the same way? There's three cars and they're still kind of all feel the same way. Well then I think you look for another option and you just sit tight and you drive the car you're driving until something comes along that's markedly better or until the circumstances in your life change and things are markedly better or different in some way.

And so as you go through life, things will change and things will change for you. And so just sitting tight and waiting either until there's a new option that's a lot better or something has changed so that you're now in a different situation and can perceive it differently is perfectly reasonable.

I think that that is all of the models that come to mind right off the bat. They're probably imperfect, but those are the best ones that I've used over the years. Thanks. I think maybe I didn't quite get this out of my question. Specifically with, so as far as a big picture vision, I think I'm in a much better place than I pretty much ever have been of where I want to be three to five years from now.

And I have an idea of like, the ideal thing that I would like to do to get there is make a transition to this remote job, kind of change my career path, right? I'm not sure how to. And if I could just be applying internally, which is easy, and I have time for at the moment.

That's why I like, you know, I can do that while I'm at work. And no one questions me sitting over there job shopping on my company computer, you know, on break. So that's straightforward. And if I could be doing that and finding out, can I just do that immediately?

Like I kind of think I can, then, or am I actually not qualified for these jobs yet? I need to gain more experience. I would do that. But that like, there's no, none of those jobs available right now. So then I'm considering this alternative. And it's the the time bound and lots of uncertainty, sort of a, I'm at the base of the cliff.

My goal is to climb to the top of the cliff, I could go left, or I could go right. How do you weigh, you know, which one is going to be the easier path sort of thing? I could, like specifically this situation, probably in three weeks be working at a job that isn't really an improvement over what I'm doing is not super interesting to me, but has a decent amount of downtime that I could spend on development work, right?

Like there's corporate trainings I could take, there's cross functional projects I could volunteer for, etc, etc, that I could have time to do things that weren't in my core responsibilities. I don't think I'd like that job as well. But that would be a decent way to prepare myself. Or I can hold out and keep trying for the really hard jobs that I'm barely qualified for, you know, I'm a good candidate, but there's somebody else that's just as good and more experienced in that area.

And that might take me months to land one of those jobs, which is that job would move me forward down my path. So we're doing the training. Does that make sense? Sort of the A B, which is a little better, which is a little worse, I got to decide now which one do I spend time on that sort of thing.

So then I think that if you go through all of that stuff that I said, you just flip a coin and you pick one and you go. The key is that you're taking action. And so I would apply for the jobs and I would set a time bound. So meaning I would say, all right, I'm the sounds like the ideal path would be to get the higher, better job that I'm not sure if I'm qualified for.

So what can I do? The first thing I would do is go and find somebody who is in that job or who is over that job and take that person for lunch or sit down in the office and just ask for a meeting and say, I want this job.

What do I need to do to be qualified for it and how can I qualify myself? And find out if there's a reasonable pathway to qualification for that. And in most cases, if you just simply go to somebody who's in that job and you say, I want your job, how can I be, or probably slightly better, I want to be your co-worker.

I'm not sure if I'm qualified right now. Can you tell me what I would need to do to become qualified? They can lay it out. If a guy is working as a secretary in an attorney's office and he wants to become a paralegal, then all he's got to do is ask a paralegal how to do it and a few months later he can be a paralegal.

If a guy is working as a paralegal and he wants to be a lawyer, all he's got to do is ask a lawyer how to become a lawyer and in a few years he can be a lawyer. If a guy is a lawyer and he wants to become partner, all he's got to do is go to partner and ask him, what do I need to do to become partner and then do the stuff.

And so qualifications are things that can be achieved fairly quickly generally and the process of being ambitious and going and asking for what those necessary qualifications are is often an important step in bringing yourself to the notice of those who are around. And so whoever is involved in that department or in that job, etc, then I would systematically go and make your interest known.

Everyone knows, I mean employers want people who want to have the job and it's hard to find people with motivation and so I think that shows motivation, etc. Now if you find out that there's a reasonable pathway to that, then just focus on qualifying yourself in whatever plan you can.

And if you can be qualified for that within say, I don't know, three months, six months, whatever your timeline is and then looking forward you look at it and say, alright six months from now I can be qualified for it. Meanwhile I'm going to start going out and doing my how are you's and who are you's around the company so that the people in that department know me and I'm going to apply for every one and I'm going to hand deliver my application and I'm going to send a box of chocolates and say, listen did you get my application, I really want this job.

That showing that you want a job and you want it more than another person is a really good qualifying thing in and of itself. And so maybe that works out. If those qualifications however are beyond your window of time and you look at it and say, it's probably going to take me two or three years to get there and I'm not actually going to be qualified for the job without three years and that's not my timeline, then move to option B.

At the end of the day it really doesn't matter what choice you make because if you make the choice and it turns out to be the so-called wrong choice, now you'll know that it was the wrong choice and you would pivot back quickly. And I think that it's more important to be speedy with making decisions so that you can gain actual data from the marketplace or from the job experience itself rather than to sit and to think and to think and to think and to think.

And so we want to avoid wipe out. Again we want to avoid anything that could be completely destructive to us but as long as we're avoiding wipe out, just make a decision and go on. And as soon as you make the decision, you'll probably know within very short order whether it was the right decision or the wrong decision because now you're not dithering about trying to figure out everything in your head.

You're dealing with actual results. Okay. Thanks. That makes sense. I have gone out and reached out and spoken to hiring managers and I think maybe my issue with this particular decision is I think I'm very on the cusp of I'm looking at jobs that I am qualified for but there are likely many likely to be more qualified applicant than I've had that on a couple of the jobs I've been turned down for already.

We would have been very happy to hire you but this guy was three quarters of a percent better or one manager told me they basically literally said they flipped a coin and I lost. So yeah. Yeah. Thank you. So as far as any details of that, you're on the right track.

I would just add go from there and make sure that you're expressing your desire because if things are that close, I mean you know as well as anyone, if you were hiring someone to work beside you, you would want someone who really wants the job and so express the desire and try to do that in a stronger way in addition to just the straight out qualifications.

Kyle in the state of Washington, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Kyle is gone. We will wait for him to show back up. We go to Las Vegas, Nevada. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hey Josh, I appreciate you hosting the session today.

My pleasure. I've got a question. Overall I think my wife and I have done a pretty good job in regards to accumulating that we're focusing on income and reducing expenses but one area I have to give myself an F in is estate planning. As a father with two younger kids, I've got a six-year-old and a nine-year-old, I want to make sure we have that buttoned up more.

The obstacle I have is that I think from a family and value standpoint we have people within our circle that we would be comfortable raising the children if something happened to both my wife and I. But my challenge is I think as part of that conversation figuring out who to be an executor on our estate, talking finances, I would say that some of the family dynamics that would change a lot of things.

I don't think they realize maybe what we've been able to accomplish and trying to one, clean up our estate but also be sensitive to not creating other problems while I'm alive. I don't know if you have any advice on where to start or maybe how to approach it. Yeah, absolutely.

Do you know, if you were sitting in a lawyer's office, do you know what you want to happen to your assets and your estate, etc.? Do you know how that would come about legally speaking? Philosophically, I don't know how to do it in practice but I think my kids are too young to, I would assume to directly inherit anything but if somebody would have to step in and raise them to maturity in our absence, I'd want them to obviously have the resources funding to be able to do that where I wasn't creating a burden on somebody else.

And then obviously any kind of surplus or excess be left to our children. So I'm going to do something that always makes guys like me nervous which is to be prescriptive or just give suggestions without actually polling you for details of your estate and assets and things like this.

So I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice because a proper advisor would ask you a lot of questions about what you own, what you want to accomplish, etc. But what I sense happens a lot of times on this topic of estate planning is simply that because it is so under discussed, then people don't actually know what their options are.

So I'm going to give you what I think is probably about the right solution for about 80% of young parents in situations perhaps like yours. It's not the right solution in all situations but it's the right solution for about 80% of people. Basically if you have a decent amount of assets and those assets can be created based on investments that you've made, those assets can be created just purely on life insurance that you have.

It's not unusual for a young father to have $3 million of life insurance. Well guess what? That's a lot of money and your kids can't inherit it so you need an estate plan for it, etc. And so if you've got a few million bucks or you're on your way to a few million bucks but you don't have anything that's super sticky, for example you don't own a business that you're a 50% interest in or something like that that requires specific planning about what would happen to the shares of the business or you're not a part of a family trust of some kind or a family business is passing down, etc.

You've just got some money, you've made some good financial decisions, you've accumulated money, it's spread across a variety of normal assets. You have equity in your house, you have vehicles, you have 401k accounts and other retirement accounts, you've got some physical assets, you've got some insurance and you've got some other investment properties and things like that.

Let's assume that there's no special needs involved, etc. What I think makes, and you're young, there's no reason to expect that you're going to die, it's just a matter of covering your bases, having a will, etc. The basic thing that you want to do is have two things accomplished.

Number one, you want to designate the ideal person that you want to be the guardian for your children and hopefully there would be a few. Ideally you would have three. In my will I have three. If my wife and I are dead, I want this person to raise my children, to be the guardian of my children.

If that person is unavailable or unwilling, I want this person. If that person is unavailable or unwilling, I want this person. Just know that guardianship, you cannot force guardianship in your will, but what you can do is make it very clear what your desires and intentions are and that has a lot of weight with the court and a lot of weight with anybody who would be the guardian of your children.

So you're trying to establish who you would want to be the guardian of your children and you're trying to make that clear so that your children can be raised according to your and your wife's vision for them. The second thing that you are trying to do is to make sure that your children are provided for financially, both while minors and also according to your wishes as adults.

So if your children were adults, it would be no problem, you could just leave your money to them or of course if you could establish certain restrictions in a trust, etc. But the basic problem is that you've got a six-year-old and a nine-year-old and they're legally incompetent to inherit money, especially a lot of money.

And so you need somebody to care for the money and so thus you're going to need some kind of trust and you're going to need a trustee to care for the money. And that trustee can be the same person who is the guardian, but it doesn't have to be the same person who is the guardian.

And so what I think works well for most people in your situation is simply this. You decide who the guardian of your children would be. And if you have multiple people, then you could put them in order of your preference, then you do that. Then you decide who do I trust that would love, that loves those children and absolutely will do the best thing for those children.

And it doesn't have to be the guardian, but who do I trust would fight for those children's interest. And you can designate that person as the trustee of what's going to be your family trust. Now in some cases I think it works nicely to have a co-trustee. So I don't want to go, I don't want to say what exactly I have done, but I'll just say that in many cases if the guardian of your child is a co-trustee with someone else who's not caring for the children, but who's someone else who is competent to be able to just provide supervision and make sure the children are being cared for, then that can be a nice safeguard.

Then what you do is you go to your lawyer and you have your lawyer write a will for you, and inside of your will you're going to create a testamentary trust. This is a trust that only comes into being upon your death, when your last will and testament is opened.

So all the trust documents are there, but it doesn't exist, it's not funded, it's just sitting there in your will. And then in that testamentary trust you simply designate the trustee or the co-trustees for your assets, and you direct that the trustee or the co-trustees are to distribute money from the trust for the support of your children and for their education and maintenance and support.

And I think that if you have a trustee that you are confident in, then you want to give your trustee as much latitude as possible. So in my own trust I have it written with a wide degree of latitude. I trust my trustee, I've chosen someone that I believe will do the best, and so I want to give that person a wide degree of latitude.

And there's plenty of money there in the trust, so they don't have to shortchange it. But the idea is that you want the guardian to know that the guardian can care for the children and there's going to be ample financial resources to compensate the guardian for his work in caring for the children.

So the children are not a financial burden on his finances. And then the children are going to be properly cared for, they're going to have everything they need covered for education, health, maintenance, and support. And then you can decide the trust terms, but what I think makes a lot of sense is give the trustee ample control to distribute for education and for maintenance and support, and then set a time, something like around the age of 30, for full disbursement of all of the trust funds directly to the beneficiary, directly to your children.

Then once you have that trust, then all you do is you simply go through all of your assets and you title as the beneficiary of all of your assets that have beneficiary designations the trust established under the will of your name. And then any other assets will be handled by the will itself, and you'll direct that all of the assets will be put into that.

And then direct, you don't have to direct, but you can just give the trustee the right to sell property. And then, so you would say the trustee of course can sell my real estate, et cetera, the family home, all of this stuff can be sold, all of the money can be put into the trust.

And then separate from that, you just write your own letter of intent, and just write your letter of instructions or letter of understanding to the trustee. And this is not a binding, a legally binding thing, but is basically your way of saying, "Hey, if I died today on November 17, 2023, then I think it would make the most sense for my house to be sold and for our rental house to be sold, but I don't think it would make a lot of sense for this raw land that we have over there to be sold." So I would suggest that you as a trustee that you continue to own the land, but you go ahead and sell these other houses and turn them into cash.

Then five years from now, you just go ahead and print up a new letter and say, "Hey, I think now it's time that that raw land would actually be sold because of such and such." And again, you would probably sell it yourself if you thought it was time to be sold.

But you can write any kind of instructions like that that you want, and you can update those whenever you want. And then your last kind of tool in the tool belt is if you feel you need it, if you're not sure who to designate as trustee or as co-trustee, then just simply hire a professional trustee and/or designate a professional trustee in your kind of third line of succession or something like that.

And so you can just hire a professional trustee who will be the steward of the accounts. And the fees are reasonable, and you'll know that there's a professional who's looking out for the interests of my children. And at the end of the day, if any of the people, the individuals that you have selected are not willing to serve, then that's taken care of.

And then does that make sense to you? That something like something would be helpful for you? Yeah, that was very helpful. I wasn't familiar with that type of trust. When it comes to a professional trustee, would that typically be somebody that a law firm could refer me to, or where do you go looking for someone of that?

It's a professional service. So you have all these big firms you've heard of, or maybe like Northern Trust or Bessemer Trust or whatnot. There's these trust companies that quite literally, this is what they do. They are professional trustees, professional money managers, et cetera. It doesn't have to be one of those big expensive firms, but it will often be somebody who does their job as a professional trustee.

It can be a lawyer. It can be a financial advisor, or it can be somebody who actually does this as a job. You don't have to designate that. But yes, your lawyer will have, when you sit with your lawyer and you say, "Could you recommend someone?" Your lawyer will have a long list of people that he works with that he can confirm and say, "Hey, this would be a great person for you to consider." And actually, it doesn't have to be specified in the documents.

You just indicate that there needs to be a professional trustee, and then the people who are involved with your estate, your executor, et cetera, they'll go through the process of finding a professional trustee to serve if your previous trustees are unwilling to serve. >>Trevor: Okay. So it doesn't need to be on retainer or anything.

It's really just kind of as needed basis. Okay. >>Josh: In my trust, I have this person as primary co-trustees, these two people. I have the guardian of my children and another trusted person as co-trustees at the first level. I trust the people that I'm choosing. So here's always this balance with legal documents.

The legal document is not actually necessary if you're dealing with people who are trustworthy. But if you're dealing with people who are untrustworthy, the legal document is not sufficient to control them. So the legal document in some sense is pointless because trustworthy people will do the right thing and untrustworthy people will probably try to do the wrong thing regardless of what happens with the legal document.

But what the legal document does is it gives formal power to certain people and to the court to make sure that there's sanctions in place if people act wrongly. And so I want to give maximum latitude to the guardian of my children. But I also want there to be a legal sanction there, somebody else who is involved, who is able to supervise things.

And I want the court to be able to hold those persons responsible for acting in the best interest of my people, my children. So that's why we have the court documents in place, is they just provide a legal mechanism that somebody can be prosecuted, control can be done, legal documents can be created, etc.

And those people have the right to do that with the document. And then just one last clarification for the execution on this. In naming the trust a beneficiary, that would be a secondary beneficiary, right? And I would still have my wife be primary? Right. Exactly. Now, for a limited time at Del Amo Motorsports of Orange County, get financing as low as 1.99% for 36 months on Select 2023 Can-Am Maverick X3.

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Offer in soon, see dealer for details. Exactly. And so usually you and your wife will have a mirror will and testament, mirror will and trusts. So all of the provisions of it will be the same except flipped. And then all of the primary beneficiaries on all of your accounts will be your wife.

She will have all of your money if you're dead, and she'll take care of the children. And then it's only the trusts only come into action if both you and your wife die simultaneously or within short order and she hasn't changed the affairs. That makes sense. Awesome, Josh. Very helpful.

I appreciate it. Yeah, my pleasure. And so to cover myself and to be professionally appropriate, like this is just a general outline. Your lawyer's job is to engage in more specific fact finding, more specific discussion of appropriate options for you, deal with any specific relationships and things like that that you yourself might be worried about.

But a lot of times you're just confused because you don't know what the options are. And what I've described I think is probably the best option for about 80% of people in the life stage that you are. And I want to say quickly and clearly, this will be different when you're 60 years old.

Things will be very different when you're 60 years old. You have a different set of considerations, et cetera. But for young parents who are just saying, "I know I need to get a will because I want to establish the guardianship of my children, but I don't know how to do it and I ought to know something about it," what I've described will I think work about 80% of the time.

All right, we move on. We'll go back to Kyle. Kyle in Washington, are you there this time? Man, I got so nervous I just hung right up on you. I have that effect. Usually it's... I'll skip the rest of the joke. Welcome. We're glad you're here. So these have been great questions.

I've got some pretty kindergarten-y stuff to ask in comparison today. I just... I periodically go to your Twitter and scroll through a month or two of your posting, and I don't like to interact on the computer. I just have a Twitter account to read you and a handful of other folks.

But I've got a handful of what I hope could be rapid fire questions. I don't know if you'll let me do that. Oh, yeah, sure. I think it'd be fun. One quick comment, though. A handful of Q&A shows ago, a guy called and was worried about AI being the next nuclear bomb and how scary it all was.

And your guy, Jack Spierko, had an episode on... Kind of right after I heard him expresses his fears. And he talked about AI as being a weapon. And if your enemy has a weapon and you don't have that weapon to be able to utilize in the same fashion as your enemy, then you're doing yourself a disservice.

So instead of sticking your head in the sand and ostriching away from it, you should turn to it and utilize it for what it's good for. And I thought that was a good way... You try looking at things positively, and I thought that was a good way to... It's a pessimistic view still, but it's a good way to wrap your head around what the real threats are is by learning what it is and getting involved.

And I thought that was kind of neat. I love what you just described. I think that's a great point that Jack made. Absolutely. Yeah, it's good. One thing you posted about human foot-shaped footwear. There was some guy on there that was putting up all these different shoe brands. I'm a similar height to you, and I think we have the same size foot.

I'm running a size 16. And I'm curious what kind of shoes you're finding that are good for your feet. Right now I'm using an Ultra because it's the only company I can find that makes a shoe that shape that big. Yeah. I do not have any currently. I do not have any barefoot shoes.

I have tried to buy them a couple times, and due to the size of my feet, they're just not available. Except for one that I think you – I assume you probably just mentioned that I've been intending to check out. My embrace of the kind of barefoot shoe thing is simply involved just primarily trying to be barefoot at most times.

And so I try to do all of my walking, do my 10,000 steps barefoot. I try to do my running and my sprints barefoot. I try to just be barefoot more and more, and I don't have currently any barefoot shoes. I have been intending to get more deeply into it, like getting the toe spacers and the toe socks and everything like that.

Since I don't live in the US, I can't get that stuff easily. If I were in the United States, I would have the whole stuff. But because I have to plan ahead and buy it all and pick it up when I go into the US, then it's just one of those things that just hasn't been a big priority.

So mostly I just try to be barefoot as much as I can, and then the rest of the time I just wear normal shoes. But I am conscious of it. I've wanted to get my children into – kind of the same actionable thing with my children is that I just try to encourage them to be barefoot most of the time.

And I don't have a whole suite of barefoot shoes for them. Primarily the cost, like you go out and you think about paying 80 bucks, 60 bucks, 70 bucks times five every time you need shoes, and then three months later they've outgrown them. And so I've just mostly just encouraged my children to be barefoot.

And I hope that's good enough. So I'm not a purist on that topic, though the barefoot stuff makes a lot of sense to me. Right. Yeah, I know my kid uses his shoes for bike breaks. It's pretty hard to justify a hundred-dollar bike break like that. Yeah, I've got to step up my barefoot game.

I haven't been doing that. What about our prepper menu? So you've talked about in the past working out a more healthy prepper menu. And I think about this, you know, we have food if we need it, and it's not the greatest. And you know, we don't feel great when we eat it as a family.

Typically we don't eat beans and rice all the time. And you know, is there any place you would go? I know you say you've been out of that kind of for a while. But you know, aside from buying a great big freeze dryer and making my own, you know, what do you do?

Eat versus donate, I guess, is my question there. You know, if I'm just going to have these beans and rice laying around, do I just donate them every five years and buy new beans and rice and I end up never touching it? Yes. So I would say I think I kind of think of this as a barbell strategy in the world of food prepping.

First I think there's a scale and by scale I mean a continuum. And it seems like a lot of people want to get the best thing for all circumstances and it's not possible. So if you want, for example, the cheapest prepper food, the cheapest prepper food is going to be to buy bulk wheat, bulk corn, bulk beans and bulk rice to get mylar bags, seal them up yourself and set them away in five gallon buckets.

That's going to be your cheapest way to get huge amounts of calories stored for the long term. The problem is that the majority of us don't eat that ever, like really ever. And so one of the challenges, it's always been a challenge with preparedness food, has been teaching people how to even use this stuff.

I did it once as an experiment I guess with like wheat berries and making a wheat berry gruel. But the classic thing with wheat berries is people don't have a grinder, nobody bakes bread, et cetera. And so we just don't eat this stuff. So yeah, it's bulk calories but there's a whole skill set associated with actually acquiring it and using it.

The technological revolution for long term storage food has been the freeze dried food. And freeze dried foods are great. They're tasty. They are relatively nutritious. They at least have calories and they last for 30 years. The problem with the freeze dried food is usually the cost, that they're substantially more expensive than just stocking up on calories.

And so you have to ask yourself, am I the kind of guy who has the money that I can just go and buy freeze dried food and set it away for 30 years and forget about it? Or am I the kind of guy who needs to develop the skills so that I can't solve with money?

I have frequently recommended with private consulting clients, guys who, I'm not saying you're a centimillionaire, but there's a lot of guys who just need to go to Costco and buy a pallet and spend $8,000 or $10,000 and buy a pallet of freeze dried food from Costco or whatever it is and just literally buy the freeze dried food, put it in a dark room in a safe place and forget about it.

And at least you know I'm done with that. Now is that true preparedness in the sense that you've learned how to be self-reliant and self-sufficient for a 30 year great collapse? No, but it's a tremendously valuable insurance policy and the cost of it over the next 30 years will become totally negligible as compared to the peace of mind.

And so I think that if, as long as someone is not completely broke, that freeze dried food, substantial quantities of it, just bought from any of the large number of excellent people selling it is great. And of course you should do a little bit of practice with it, buy some, use some, etc.

But that's your fast way to spend money to solve the problem. The flip side is I think you have the standard thing of a deep pantry. That's not that hard to do of just buying a little bit extra of the stuff that you do and that's not going to get you to years of preparedness, but it will get you to a few months of preparedness of food.

And then for health food, I think the secret is chest freezers and lots of frozen meat and frozen other stuff as well, but frozen meat. I think that's where your health food is. And so if you have a couple of extra chest freezers and you have a generator and some way of keeping those freezers going, then that's where I think your deep stock of health food is.

I consider meat to be the primary health food. I could exist completely healthily on nothing except meat and meat has the unique benefit of lasting for quite a long time frozen and we can use it regularly from a frozen state. And so if you just have an extra chest freezer or a couple of extra chest freezers and you have some fuel source to keep them going, so some guys will have one propane chest freezer and one electric chest freezer with a generator to power it or some version like that, then just fill them full of meat.

And if you've got $5,000 worth of meat in your freezer, you've got a couple of months of stuff, of food, of high quality health food. And I think that with those two things put, actually I guess I said three things, but those three things put together, a stock of freeze dried food set aside somewhere that you're probably never going to touch, it's going to sit there and 45 years from now it's going to be thrown away.

And then a deep pantry that's a few months worth and then a good supply of meat in the freezer, you've got great health food that's going to last you for a long time. There's a lot more that can be done. My friend Stephen Harris has this info product that he sells on how to preserve eggs for years at a time.

And so you go and have buckets full of eggs preserved in a, I think it's a lime solution and it works great. Like all the stuff works, but a lot of that, that pepper stuff just becomes a hassle. And so what I've described is the lowest hassle for a medium cost.

And I think that works for a lot of people, the beans and the corn and all that I think is great also. And there's two ways. So if somebody has the energy to go and do that, great, you can order a lot of that stuff pre-prepared if you know how to, if you know how to use it.

The other thing that makes, that I think makes sense is just if you're, if you're uniquely concerned about a crisis, then just go and stock up more of it. And so the classic one that I recommend is just corn. You know, you can, Harris is the one who taught me all the corn stuff, but he does all this stuff with corn, teaches you how to use it and make food with it and whatnot.

And so you can just go to tractor supply. If there's a, if there's some kind of thing that you're worried about, then just have on your mental checklist, first place I'm going to go is tractor supply and I'm going to get 30 bags of feed corn and that 30 bags of feed corn is going to last you through the, you know, for a couple of years with no special preservation, no buckets and mylar bags and things like that.

But it gives you the ability to feed your neighbors and feed your neighborhood. And if, if, if you don't use it, then the cost is so cheap that you're out a few hundred bucks and you feed the deer. I guess not that big of a deal. So I think that, you know, I don't have 50 gallon, five gallon buckets of stuff in my house.

If I lived in a place where I could have it, I would probably want it. But I think that I think of it like a barbell strategy, a stock of freeze dried stuff, a heavy pantry and heavy meat in the refrigerator. That's the health food for virtually all things.

And the real reality is the idea of not being able to buy food for years at a time is, is pretty unlikely. And so for many people, especially in the United States, you know, food shortages, crises, things like that, they're going to be short to medium term things. And you can, and it's not that nothing is available.

It's just that maybe not everything that you previously used was available. So as Spirico used to point out, if you've got three months worth of food storage, realistically that three months could probably be pretty easily turned into six months just with stocking up half time at the grocery store.

And so it's not an all or nothing thing. You're not, we're not, we're not going to live in a, in a world in which today everything stops. We sit in our homes and eat nothing but stored food for three years and then emerge like that. Just not, I can't, I can't come up with an event in which that actually is the case.

Yeah, it happens on TV, right? Not in practice. Yeah. Yeah. And I, we're already kind of doing that, right? I mean, that's a heavy pantry in a freezer full of food is, is just a cost effective way to exist as far as I can tell. And so, yeah, like you say, adding to the barbell is a good, good way to go about it.

I read a lot of Peter Zahan's books at your recommendation probably five, six months ago. For some investment questions that I had and I'm looking, having difficulty finding counter opinions to him that are reputable. And I'm curious if you, who, who have you read that carries a lot of weight in that space and may or may not agree fully with what Mr.

Zahan has proposes probably in our future as a globe. And then I'll stop with the rapid fire stuff. The most interesting one was that I saw Zahan himself say that he had, was doing a debate with Ray Dalio. I haven't seen the, I haven't seen any video or audio of that, but I would look forward to, to that.

Short answer is I have not found. So the problem, here's the problem I have with Zahan. I kind of feel like he is a, an enormous cheerleader of the United States. And I kind of feel like he's on the CIA payroll because as somebody said to me, like, you know, the stuff he says, the stuff he says is basically an American politician's wet dream.

You know, it's like rah, rah, rah, US is so well positioned, everywhere else is terrible and whatnot. So I kind of have this feeling that, especially given his background, you know, being involved in those circles and, and his work in DC and his work in years past, I almost feel like he's got a nice check that clears every month from the CIA or from the, some, you know, political group or something.

So that he just keeps saying nice things about the United States. But the problem is that he backs all this stuff up with data and I can't find a, a compelling data driven, you know, alternative to that. There are a few people who ideologically don't agree with him. Zion basically waves his hand and discounts anything kind of culture related.

He's very dismissive of, of anything culture war related. And I think, you know, fine that to a degree, like certainly geography is probably more important than culture in many cases, but you know, culture wars often turn into actual wars. And so who knows? But I feel like that's a weak point that he just kind of glosses over that and doesn't give a lot of credit to that.

I find it interesting and slightly maddening how he never talks about, he doesn't spend much time in any of his books talking about structures of government. Does government matter, right? Is there actually benefit in the, the, the concept of, of a democratic republic, an experiment in, in, you know, liberty and ordered liberty like the United States is, or was just all geography?

I, I wish he would deal with that a little bit, but, but I don't have, there are not a lot of people who, who just, who, who derive data. Most of the time I look for his haters and most of the time it's just an emotional reaction. And I, so this is a rambling way of saying I can't cite a single name specifically that, that I would say is, is kind of someone who is writing in contra to him.

Now I have not looked in the last few months, maybe something has been developed in the last few months. What I do think is interesting is to spend some time imagining the world on the other side of the nation state. And so I've always thought that the writers of, hold on, let me look, have you ever read The Sovereign Individual with James David, here we go, come on, auto correct doing its job again.

So there's a book, it's 15 years old, called The Sovereign Individual, Mastering the Transition to the Information Age by James Dale Davidson and Lord William Reese Mogg. It's an old book, but I think it's still a timely book. And one of the things that, that as a primary lens of analysis that those authors use is basically the logic of violence.

And the basic point, it's a hefty, hefty book, so it's hard for me to summarize it, but one of their biggest points is they talk about how the logic of violence is basically an inescapable point of analysis. And they describe how in different phases, based upon this transition, based upon the tools of violence, et cetera, you have different phases.

And I have, years ago, flippantly I used to say, oh, the nation state is only a temporary thing, but I didn't have a clear alternative for it. And it's something that we're so accustomed to thinking of the nation state as supreme that it's very hard for us to even visualize something other than the nation state.

The whole concept of the nation state is so built into our mode of thinking, and it's done that way by those who want to see the nation state continue. They're trying to keep it going, so they want it to be. But the point of the nation state is that it's only a solution for certain things at a certain time.

And I'm desperately flipping to try to get my copy of The Sovereign Individual open so I can read to you something from it, because it talks about the stages. And so here is, I'll just read slightly from the introduction, because they do a good job of this. So here we go.

The fourth stage of human society. The theme of this book is the new revelation of power, which is liberating individuals at the expense of the 20th century nation state. By the way, again, this book was written in 2000, released in 2000, so more than 15 years, 23 years old.

Innovations that alter the logic of violence in unprecedented ways are transforming the boundaries within which the future must lie. If our deductions are correct, you stand at the threshold of the most sweeping revolution in history. Faster than all but a few now imagine, microprocessing will subvert and destroy the nation state, creating new forms of social organization in the process.

This will be far from an easy transformation. The challenge it will pose will be all the greater because it will happen with incredible speed compared with anything seen in the past. Through all of human history, from its earliest beginnings until now, there have been only three basic stages of economic life.

One, hunting and gathering societies. Two, agricultural societies. And three, industrial societies. Now looming over the horizon is something entirely new, the fourth stage of social organization, information societies. Each of the previous stages of society has corresponded with distinctly different phases in the evolution and control of violence. As we explain in detail, information societies promise to dramatically reduce the returns to violence in part because they transcend locality.

The virtual reality of cyberspace, what novelist William Gibson characterized as "a consensual hallucination" will be as far beyond the reach of bullies as imagination can take it. In the new millennium, the advantage of controlling violence on a large scale will be far lower than it has been at any time since before the French Revolution.

This will have profound consequences. One of these will be rising crime. When the payoff for organizing violence at a large scale tumbles, the payoff from violence at a smaller scale is likely to jump. Violence will become more random and localized. Organized crime will grow in scope. We explain why.

Another logical implication of falling returns to violence is the eclipse of politics, which is the stage for crime on the largest scale. There is much evidence that adherence to the civic myths of the 20th century nation-state is rapidly eroding. The death of communism is merely the most striking example.

As we explore in detail, the collapse of morality and growing corruption among leaders of Western governments are not random developments. They are evident that the potential of the nation-state is exhausted. And many of its leaders no longer believe the platitudes they mouth, nor are they believed by others. So I would read the whole book to you if I could, but it's a great book and I would commend it to you.

But it's, I think, one of the more interesting comments on this. And I think that if you haven't read it, this is a good time to read it, because the predictions of it are 23 years in the past. And yet they've held up broadly quite well. And what's interesting to me is that when I consider the changes that have happened in society, in my experience of it, it very much reflects some of these macro trends that Reese and whatever his name is, predicted way back in the year 2000.

And it's left me, and I think a lot of people, with a great deal of uncertainty. And so I've been talking recently publicly about why I left the United States. And it's been a very strange emotional process for me, because I identified deeply with what it meant to be an American.

And I watched my country completely change and transform. And I've observed that there are a couple of things that have happened. I'm stereotyping broadly. But there are some people, most people, have just simply changed their politics, their ideas completely. In the 20 years that I've been paying attention to politics, there has been almost a complete flip-flop on so many issues between right-wing and left-wing people.

And not on all. Obviously, there's distinctions between the political parties. But the Republicans of today don't believe what the Republicans of a decade ago said they believed. And the Democrats of today don't believe what the Democrats of a decade ago believed. And my question has always been, why? What happened?

Because I thought I understood politics, and then politics completely transformed underneath me. And to me, it makes more sense that some of these things are happening in terms of these trends. And a lot of them are being driven by the information age and the information revolution. And so to me, the sovereign individual has been always a useful pathway through that.

And yet it deals with things that Zion doesn't talk about. He basically assumes static, continual change. He doesn't, in his analysis, I haven't seen any integration of dynamic events. And he also does everything. He uses politics and geography as his primary. Demographics and geography are his big tools. But I think that there needs to be some conversation about the nation state itself, and are there things to do that.

So if I were having dinner with him, that's what I would ask him about. I'm certain he has thought about it. He just hasn't written about it, nor have I found him talking about it. So if I were interviewing him, or if I were having dinner with him, those are the things that I would probe him on.

Yeah, that's interesting. My wife and I were talking about that very thing. How do you reconcile the leader of the communist world coming to California and everybody going and shaking hands with the guy versus what if we didn't do business with them? What does that look like with our culture the way it is?

Who starts the manufacturing back up if we quit doing business entirely? That type of thing. Those type of questions are really hard to answer. And then you look at Zion, and I don't know. There's these big gaping, maybe not big gaping gaps in his logic or what he decides to analyze, but what else is he missing?

I don't see anybody dropping big chunks of what he's missed in front of me. So I appreciate the recommendation. I think it's good to look and obviously try and if it's something you agree with, turn it upside down. And if you're just trying to learn, then you should do the same thing.

Right, right. Shake it out and see if it holds up. There are other people, just to be clear, there are other people who write on some of these topics. I haven't read all of them. I've read some of them. I think Tim Marshall's book, Prisoners of Geography, I put that into our homeschool curriculum.

My son, my eldest, just read that last semester. I think that's interesting. I've been reading a couple of Jared Diamond's books. I read his book Crisis a couple years ago, and I'm in the process of reading Guns, Germs, and Steel, which I never read. It's an interesting perspective. Neil Ferguson is interesting.

Ian Bremmer has some books that are on my list. I haven't read his stuff yet. I've read all of George Friedman's books. Friedman, Zeyhan used to work for Friedman, and I like Friedman's stuff. It's in many ways very similar to Zeyhan. So those are interesting, you know, it's an interesting space.

It's a very unique space, that idea of predicting the future, because you can pretty much say and do what you want. People see what they want to believe. I respect Zeyhan enormously for his defense, robust defense with good data of his events. But I continue to believe, I believe that number one, people can change, and number two, I believe that God is in control, sovereignly ordering things according to his macro plan.

So that religious dimension is an element that certainly Zeyhan gives no accounting to whatsoever, but that I myself do. So those are my comments. Anything else? We finished the rest of your questions, or do you have anything else? I don't know, I mean, they're kind of geeky. Go ahead.

What do I have on here? These tweets, Fred, sometimes you put up, there was a really good one about this guy who was smoking a lot of pot, and then he chronicled how he'd quit and all the effects that it had on him and his family, and it was fantastic.

And I wanted to share it with everybody I knew that picks the pipe up, and man alive, it got deleted. Is that the nature of Twitter? I don't spend a lot of time. It is the nature of Twitter. It happens. It is, and I've done it myself. It's so unfortunate.

When you start getting attention, it's overwhelming. It's funny because I guess some people like going viral. I've gone viral twice, and both times I've ended up deleting the threads because it was just so uncomfortable to be the subject of a firestorm. It's so different than anything that you are accustomed to.

And so if there's anything good, you always have to save it and screenshot it of the stuff that you want. But that issue – Yeah, I love to learn. I am fascinated with that issue, and I have been rethinking – with the issue of marijuana specifically, just drugs specifically.

I'm really interested – I've been kind of trying to figure out what do I believe on that subject. I've gone on various sides of it. When I was younger, I was like, "Well, of course drugs should be criminalized." Then I got into the libertarian stuff, and it's like, "Well, who's harmed, et cetera?" And then you look – one of the things that's been interesting is that since in my lifetime, when most of those – we've watched – the whole trend has been towards legalization of marijuana broadly, and more important than legalization, broad-scale acceptance of marijuana, and then also legalization of many other drugs.

I have a hard time saying anything good about anything that's happened in the United States with that. You travel across the country, and I mean, it's a hellscape in many places, and it's not just San Francisco, right? You go to the deep south and some of these towns that have been just destroyed, you look at all the stuff that's happened right now with the fentanyl crisis, et cetera, and it's crazy to me.

And so I certainly don't hold to the libertarian position anymore. I keep my mouth shut generally, but it's fascinating to watch. And just this week, speaking of interesting things, just this week I was watching – there's been some video come out of a recent thing that Peter Hitchens, the UK columnist, did.

You know Peter Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens' brother? Yeah. Okay, so Peter – I love Peter. I love Christopher. Christopher was awesome. He was my favorite fiery atheist debater. Peter is his brother, and Peter is equally fiery, but in a totally different way. He's a Christian, but most of his stuff is political.

So he signed up for this thing where they put him into prison, and it was for a TV show, but they sent him to prison for three days in like a mock environment for him to experience this. And so there was this video of him that was widely seen where he's sitting there debating a bunch of ex-cons who were in this prison experiment with him, and he's saying how he believes that marijuana is the most dangerous drug.

And I find this very fascinating because I have come to hate marijuana because of the destruction that it wreaks on the people of destroying their ambition, etc. But I've kind of swallowed the line that, okay, at the end of the day it's probably less destructive than alcohol. And so just this week I was saying I need to read what Hitchens has written on this and see what he cites because it was just a fascinating argument that we're having right now.

And I guess to me the biggest frustration to me has been the widespread acceptance of marijuana and drugs in our society because I've watched it happen. I have a friend of mine who is kind of a semi-retired 60-something guy, and he was always an ambitious go-getter. He was a professional athlete at one time, go-getting business guy.

He was kind of a conservative, not super-political, but conservative anti-pot kind of guy. He started smoking pot, and now he just smokes pot every day. And it just seems like such a waste to me that we allow that stuff to destroy the potential of our society. But thankfully I don't have to make any public policy on it.

- Yeah, people aren't very honest about what it really does, I don't think. They say, "Oh yeah, what's the difference? If you do that or do some beer, well, I'll tell you there's a big difference." People start out their day and end their evening with that stuff. They don't typically do that with liquor.

You can abuse anything, but man alive. That was a really good tweet thread. I'm going to have to start screenshotting if I want to share stuff like that. Anyhow, all right, good lesson. Appreciate it. - Yeah. Last one. - Yeah. Back books. You heard your back a while. I listened to everything you ever said and then I bring up these little tiny things way after you mentioned it.

So I don't expect you to remember, but you talked about, "Hey, I hurt my back and it laid me up and it really depressed me. And I decided I can't be depressed about this. I need to get up and get after it." But it takes a lot out of your sales.

And I had the same thing. I went from blue collar to white collar to blue collar and I hurt my back and I read a bunch of books about it. And I'm just curious, I read Dr. Stuart McGill's books and wrote her book. He's got some really expensive books and I thought I got what I needed from his main one everybody recommended.

And Robin McKenzie, he's out of New Zealand and he wrote some treat your own back stuff. And there's some other folks, but I'm just curious what you did or what you read or if you did anything or if you just kind of laid around and got better. Being six foot seven and a half inches tall, you and I kind of are in the same boat.

Eventually you're going to tweak your back and you got to be strong. Right. Yeah. I do not have any chronic pain of any kind, including back pain. And so I'm very grateful for that. The tweaking the back story, again, you'd probably go in a long time, but I remember distinctly when I was, I think it was 26 years old and it was the first time I hurt my back.

I was serving, I was setting up a, I can't remember what the holiday was. It was doing breakfast omelets on the beach for all my friends. I hosted this big party on the beach in Florida and I was setting up my omelet station to make omelets and I leaned down to pick up something from the ground, nothing heavy at all and I tweaked my back and I couldn't move.

And I went home and spent the next two days sitting in the recliner and it was, what was shocking about it is I've always enjoyed robust physical health, which is an enormous blessing. And when you enjoy robust physical health without fighting for it, you take it for granted. And when it's taken away from you, you all of a sudden stopped taking it for granted.

And so that experience was what opened my eyes to the incredibly difficult experience that so many people have. One other time I tweaked my back and then I, over the last couple of years, I have this occasional neck pain that happened for some reason. And so I visit the chiropractor about once a month and as long as I do that, I don't have any trouble.

All of my research into back pain indicates to me that the vast majority of it is due to weakness in the back. And so the most important thing to do is to strengthen the back and stretch it. So stretching and strengthening the back. I had a neighbor when I was growing up, redneck neighbor, who was injured.

He was a diesel mechanic and he was injured, bunch of messed up discs and whatnot. They put him on total disability and he endured pain for a long time. And then finally one day he walked out on his back porch and he said, "I'm going to fix this thing." And he reached up and he grabbed one of the rafters on his back porch and he just started hanging every day.

And he hung and he hung and he hung and he hung. And he cured himself of his back pain just by hanging on his back porch every day. And so as best I can understand, the majority of back pain should be treated by strengthening the back, which is probably lifting heavy weights and all of the stabilizing muscles, etc.

But strengthening the back with appropriate exercises is the key to avoiding back pain. And so I've realized that you're a fool if you take your health for granted and I'm doing everything I know to do and everything I'm able to do to be one who's actively building stronger health.

And as Mark Ripito says, "I want to be hard to kill." So stronger people are more useful in general and harder to kill. Love that guy. Yeah, I forget. Oh man, I forget the guy. See, I was writing down the names of the books because whenever I call you, I always blank on that.

But I forget I bought that guy's book too, The Hanging from the, oh, what's his name? John something or other, I think. Anyhow, yeah, there's a guy that he's a proponent of hanging for shoulder to avoid shoulder surgery. But I started doing that and I found it helped me back out quite a bit too.

Absolutely. Yeah, you can't take it for granted, man. You're strong until you're not. And then you get laid up by part of an omelet bar. What do you do? I mean, it's really, yeah, it could take the wind out of your sail. Big time, big time. Yeah, but I just thought I'd ask because you're a big reader.

Appreciate your time, Joshua. Happy Thanksgiving. Love the questions. Makes life easy for me when you call me up and throw me softballs. So thank you very much and happy Thanksgiving to you. And with that, we close down today's Friday Q&A podcast. Thank you so much for being here. It's been a pleasure.

Remember that if you would like to be here for one of these Friday Q&A shows, all you need to do is go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, sign up, support the show on Patreon. That allows me to meter the inflow of calls. So go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Today we only have three calls, plenty of time for everybody.

Sometimes we get more, sometimes less, but I would love to have you on next week's show. As we go, remember that I'm heavily promoting my international events right now. Most importantly, the event in Panama that we're hosting in January. This weekend I'm getting on the phone with my partners of that to wind up all those decisions and everything associated with that.

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