Today on Radical Personal Finance is live Q&A. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a 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 Joshua Sheets, today is Friday, January 12, 2024.

And on this Friday, as we do on every Friday in which I can arrange the appropriate recording technology, I should come up with something a little bit catchier than that, we record a live Q&A show. You call in, talk about anything that you want. This is your chance to raise the topics, interact with me, give any feedback that you'd like to give on recent shows, ask any questions about your personal life, ask any questions about life in general, bring up any topic that you want.

I don't screen the calls other than to, well, let's see, I don't screen the subjects of the calls, but I do screen the callers. If you would like to join me on a Friday Q&A show, you can do that by becoming a patron of the show. Go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, sign up to support the show there on Patreon, and that will gain access for you to one of these Friday Q&A shows.

I do that to keep the amount of callers at a reasonable number that works for recording a show. We begin with Martin in the Czech Republic. Martin, welcome. How can I serve you today, sir? Hello, Joshua. I'm calling again from Prague now with something completely different that's been on my mind that I'd like to hear your input on.

Recently I had a chat with a German friend who's got this fantastic multilingual family dynamic going on. So he and his Ukrainian wife live in Sweden, and their daughter is picking up German from the father, Russian and Ukrainian from the mother, Swedish outside of the house, and English in school as a second language.

And at 18 years old, she's basically fluent in all these languages, except maybe her English is a little bit less polished due to limited exposure. But this got me thinking. My wife and I are looking to start a family quite soon, and I've always envied kids with bilingual parents who just seamlessly pick up that second language.

However, me and my wife are both Czech natives, so my idea was to exclusively switch to English when communicating with our future child, basically for their entire childhood. And of course, before doing that, I would definitely need to take a lot of time learning a proper accent in a way you, for example, mentioned to a previous listener a couple of weeks ago, since there I could really do some work.

But I have two concerns with this. First of all, I do worry that this linguistic shift might kind of dampen the spark and humor in our relationship, because so much of our connection with my wife is built on the nuances and bonds and so on in our shared language.

I'm sure you know what I'm talking about, and I fear losing that might harm our relationship. And secondly, I wonder if this approach would be genuinely effective, or if there might be a better way. I would really hate to embark on this long-term journey with the language, risking what I mentioned, only to find out that my child is no better off than others without an English-speaking pattern.

So I would really appreciate your thoughts on this matter. Absolutely. So let me begin with the second concern that you have first. Is it effective? To make that kind of change, absolutely it would be effective. There's no question in my mind that any child who is raised in a genuinely multilingual environment that features people speaking to that child in different languages is going to have a significant advantage over other people who are interacting with languages in artificial ways.

Where I first became inspired years ago with the ability of children to learn languages naturally was when I stumbled across a video on YouTube of a little Russian girl named Bella, and she was appearing on a Russian version of one of these Russia's Got Talent TV shows, something like that.

She was, at the time, I think about five years old. She could have been four, could have been six. You can find the clip on YouTube easily enough. Just search for Bella Russian Polyglot and you'll find it. And she was being quizzed by native speakers in something like six languages.

So she had Russian, she had English, she had Spanish, I think she had French, she had Chinese, and she had Arabic. And she was not only speaking those languages with the native speakers who were quizzing her, but she was also reading in those languages live on the show and basically narrating in a very concise fashion what she was reading as part of proving her ability.

And so this I found really inspiring. Here's this little girl who speaks six very different languages that they're not part of the same language family in any way, shape, or form. And so I started looking into it and I found some interviews and discussions with her mother. I forget all the details now because this was years ago, but her mother was, I think, a teacher of some kind, a college professor perhaps, but highly educated.

And her mother had accomplished this multilingual ability primarily by hiring people into their home who spoke those languages natively. And so Bella had been exposed to these languages from infancy based upon having nannies, au pairs, tutors, et cetera, in the home speaking those languages with her. And she clearly had a significant level of comfort in those languages.

I have found a couple of other polyglot parents who have done the same thing with their children. I forget the guy's name, and I forget the name of his platform, but I found a guy in Canada who had done something similar. He himself was a Chinese speaker. His wife was a Japanese speaker.

He was living in Quebec. And what he did was he hired also a Spanish speaking nanny and his children from infancy were fluent in all five of those languages. He spoke to his children in Chinese. The mother spoke to the children in Japanese as did grandparents. The mother's parents were speaking in Japanese.

I think their household language was English. And then in school they were learning French and English. And so they were covering, and then they had the Spanish speaking nanny who taught them Spanish and they were fluent with her. And so that approach absolutely works. And if you had the highest goals for total fluency with your children, with them having the best experience of being native speakers in these languages, then I think what your German friend and his Ukrainian wife are doing is absolutely the way to go about it.

Because the children never know anything other than this native level fluency and they're completely competent in the languages from birth. Excuse me, I need to sneeze. So is it effective? My answer is yes, it is effective. Is there a better way? My answer is no, there is no better way.

Now the caveat that I would point out would be that if that were all you did, you only had native language tutors or speakers involved in the children's lives in the way that Bella or the Canadian guy has done, then that would not be enough to reach the highest levels of fluency desired.

One of the things that was interesting for me growing up in the United States, I interacted with a lot of people whose native language was Spanish. Their parents were immigrants to the United States. They exclusively spoke Spanish with their parents. However, they were in an English speaking school system, et cetera.

And what I found so fascinating is that they spoke colloquial Spanish better than I did. They spoke Spanish fluently. They had a native accent. They spoke colloquial Spanish very fluently without any trouble because that was their native home language that they speak with their parents. But they had no academic ability in the language.

They couldn't pick up a Spanish novel and enjoy reading it because there was too much unknown vocabulary. And so I, on the other hand, because I learned my Spanish in something of the academic approach, my reading ability was higher than their reading ability. And yet I didn't speak native sounding Spanish.

My accent was inferior to their accent and I couldn't speak the language as fluently as they could, but I had a higher level in the language. So I'm pointing out that speaking a language colloquially is a perfectly acceptable way to do it. But if you genuinely wanted your children to be educated, you would need to make sure that they were reading, that they were doing work, that they were writing in whatever your target language is, et cetera.

Now, is it effective? Yes, it's effective. Is there a better way? No, there is no better way. But now let's go back to the beginning. Could that linguistic shift dampen the spark or the humor or even the relationship that you have with your children? My answer is it could, and this is why I have chosen to maintain all of my relationships with my children in English.

Even though my wife and I both speak Spanish at a pretty decent level, probably an advanced, a lower advanced level, something like that, certainly your English is probably much better than my Spanish, and you have a chance to use it more frequently than I do. Even so, I have not chosen to try to pursue this path because it's just not entirely comfortable for me, and I don't know how to have that nuance of communication and the intimacy of relationship that I desire to have with my children in another language.

And so I choose to speak English. My wife speaks English to the children, and we don't try to do anything else for the reasons that you stated. It's not because I'm concerned about accent. I think you should wipe that concern off of your list. You have a perfectly acceptable accent in English.

There's no need for you to spend any time in accent training, and you would not damage or harm your child in any way, shape, or form from speaking to your children with the English accent that you have right now. So I don't think that's a concern at all. I think that your level of English is certainly capable of doing this that you've described, but it may simply not result in the intimacy of relationship that you desire with your children.

And to me, that's a perfectly valid reason not to use another language. I don't think it's necessary. So earlier I said, "Yes, is it effective? Is there a better way?" No. I don't think it's necessary for you to achieve excellent outcome with your children. I don't think it's necessary that you transform your relationship with them into English.

What you should do is you should make sure they're surrounded by English from an early age. And so the best path, I would say, is simply make a habit of reading to your children in English, and then expose your children to appropriate English media when you choose to. English is the easiest language in the world to learn because there's the best materials available in English more than any other foreign language.

And so people who become truly skilled in English and acquire a native-like accent, acquire a native-like ability, they do that reliably and consistently because of the abundance of English materials for them to learn with. And so what I would say is get yourself some storybooks and just read English language stories to your children from the beginning.

Expose your children to English media when appropriate, videos, songs, all of those kinds of things. Your children will have some form of their education in English. And if I were in your shoes, I would make sure that a significant portion of their education was in English, either by substituting the English classes and training that they'll be receiving in the local government schools or by homeschooling in some way, shape, or form with English curriculum so that your children's education level is very, very high in English.

And I think you can do that while simultaneously keeping Czech as your primary language, the primary family language, and the primary language of your relationship. So I don't think it's necessary to do this. And I have found that in many ways my children's foreign languages, because of academic practice, are ahead of some other native speakers.

As one simple example, some time back, this was a good time back, I happened to meet a French-speaking family on an airline and I invited them over for lunch. And these people had moved to the United States. I met them on a flight from the United States. And they came over for lunch and we were chatting and we were visiting.

And I found it so fascinating that my child's French ability was ahead of their child's French ability, even though French was their family language. And it has to do with exactly what I said in terms of academic ability. My child was at the time, had read five or six Jules Verne novels in French and was comfortably enjoying them because I placed a high degree on French academic ability.

Their child was a native French speaker, but all of the content that their child was consuming was in English because they were now living in the United States and he wasn't getting any academic training in French. And so I don't see any reason why you can't maintain both of those tracks.

And if you will simply have your children consume significant amounts of English-speaking media, which is easy, plenty of English movies, English TV shows, English programs, English YouTube, English Khan Academy, et cetera, and then supplement that with lots and lots of reading, then there's no reason at all why you should need to change your family language from Czech to English.

And I wouldn't for those reasons. Thank you, Joshua. That's really helpful. And I think the example with French, that's really interesting. It's at the end of the day, all language skills need to be acquired based upon practice. And so while the ability to read, the ability to write, the ability to speak, and the ability to listen, while these are clearly all related, they are not the same.

And they need to be trained systematically at each level. When you speak a language natively, you become very highly skilled at listening and you become skilled at speaking, but you don't automatically become skilled at reading and you definitely don't automatically become skilled at writing. So these are separate disciplines that have to be trained separately.

But the good news is they can simply be trained separately. And you can, so for example, in my own children, where their abilities are inferior is with regard to listening ability. And that's because instead of being surrounded by the language in a colloquial fashion, where they learn to pick up on all of the slang, casual, slurred conversation, et cetera, all of their language exposure to foreign languages is basically academic.

It comes from listening to audio books. It comes from reading books. And it comes from, in many cases, dubbed and translated TV shows or movies. And so what they don't have is they don't have the street colloquial listening skill. But as far as I'm concerned, that's one of the easiest and simplest skills to acquire.

So that can be put off until a later time. The harder skills to acquire are the skills of academic level reading and academic level writing. And so it's impossible for me to believe, based upon the research and the experience that I've had, that somebody who is skilled with academic level reading, academic level writing, who is skilled with lots of high-level appropriate speaking abilities can't learn to understand easily enough a colloquial register of speech and can't relatively easily learn to speak in a colloquial lower-level register of conversation.

So I think that's the least important thing, rather than the most important thing. And I think that's something that should happen. But it doesn't need to happen at the beginning. Anything else, Martin? No. Thank you so much. My pleasure. And I do think it's a great strategy, and absolutely, English has to be your primary second language.

My only other comment would be that there should be no reason why you shouldn't add in other languages. As you can see from the experience of your friend, I think multilingualism is really only hard because it's hard for us the way that we learn in an academic fashion. But I have found that if you strip away the idea that multilingualism is hard and you simply find resources, then it's actually pretty easy.

And I've watched this happen with two children. I've got a sample set growing and building. And I just watch the progression go through, where, for example, my eight-year-old daughter, a couple of years ago, she didn't want to learn any languages, and I taught her Spanish. She didn't like Spanish until I found some books that had girls and horses in them.

And then three months later, she said, "Spanish is my favorite." She didn't like French at the time. Well, now she loves Spanish and French, as long as I can find books with girls and horses. She loves it. She's like, "You know, I just like it so much. These are my favorite languages." But she doesn't like German right now.

But I tell her, "Give it three months, six months, and you'll like German, too." And then she's doing Latin, and it's just not hard. And that's the thing that took me a while to come to that belief, is I grew up thinking learning languages was hard. And then, again, I found research where linguists have found that there are certain places, there's a certain part of Africa where I think there's a valley where it's very normal that people in that valley speak five different languages.

And so, for them, multilingualism is totally normal. And your experience as a European is much more like this. It's much more normal in your cultural context than in my cultural context to be multilingual. I was with a friend in Luxembourg a few months ago. And all Luxembourg students, all of them, speak four languages.

They have Luxembourgish, English, French, and German. And they're all equally fluent in all of them. So multilingualism is not hard. It is harder to learn a language like English that has a vastly larger vocabulary than, say, a local tribal language of some kind that may have a vocabulary of some tens of thousands of words rather than hundreds of thousands of words.

But generally speaking, most of that is just specialized knowledge and specialized content that comes in that is just not relevant on a day-to-day basis. All right. Let's see. Kevin dropped off, so we'll go to Tran. Tran, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Tran, you're up.

Hello, Joshua. I'm a student from Germany, and I have a question that relates to Korea. So my goal is to become a financial planner. I'm inspired by a lot of people, including you. Currently, I'm 23, and I have already finished my second semester at a business school, business administration.

I took it just because it was the best available choice at the time. I kind of regret it a little bit, but it is what it is. I'm also working, since I started university, as an auditor's assistant because I thought the best way to learn about finance is just reading about financial reports, and it was a great experience.

But actually, I'm not a good office worker. I am not good at focusing on details and doing a very detailed job. I'm more of a big-picture guy, so I don't think this job really fits me. But then I heard about your podcast, and you said that maybe doing the hard work is better, so maybe it's better for me to try to fix that weakness for myself.

But on the other side, I want to get into the world of financial planning and helping others plan their finance sooner. So I'm having a conflict here, like maybe achieving my goal sooner or trying to keep working here and fix my personal issues. When you say you have a goal of working as a financial planner, that would be a goal to work as a financial planner inside Germany, inside of the German financial system.

Is that correct? Actually, no. My far-sighted goal is moving to the U.S. I really love the U.S. I lived in Vietnam and Germany, and it was always too constrained for me. So I want to move to Texas in the future, and that is also a problem for me. I want to have my certified financial planner certificate, but also want to try to figure out a way to move to the U.S., but that still has a long way to go, I think.

Okay. Well, the Texans will welcome you. They'll give you a cowboy hat, give you a giant pickup truck, and they will welcome you when you're able to get there. So is your question – let me just make sure I answer the question that you're actually asking. It seems to me like you are asking a fairly broad question of essentially how do I think through these different options, being a 23-year-old, studying business administration, wanting to become a financial planner, wanting to move to the United States, how do I integrate all these things?

Is that correct, or are you asking a more specific question? That's the broader issue, yes, but also the more minor problem that I have right now is do I keep trying to improve at this auditor job, or should I try to already get experience in the – maybe at the financial planning firm?

Also, I have a side hustle to help people with their taxes, because you said just try to start your business by finding customers, and I already have 10. So that was like since a month ago. So working as – you are currently working as an auditor. Do you have any certifications related to auditing?

No, I'm only an auditor's assistant. Okay, an assistant. And how long have you been doing that work now? One and a half years. After one and a half years experience, it sounds like you have learned with certainty that this is not a career path that you are interested in.

Is that correct? Yes. So speaking to that issue specifically, when you are young – and I'm assuming you are unmarried and do not have children. Is that correct? Yes. Okay. So when you are young, I believe that your basic bias or your basic instinct should be to gain as much experience in as many different areas as possible, because the costs of switching, the costs of changing, are very low.

Now I think there's probably a cultural distinction here between your native culture and my native culture. Coming from a U.S. American perspective, switching and changing things a lot, it used to be looked down on. Nobody looks down on it anymore. And there's certainly a bad thing if you're switching because you're getting fired every two months.

Okay. That's going to be figured out. But if you've been working at something for a year and a half and you've discovered that this is not for me, then move on. Be done with that, because there's no point in investing more of your time and energy into something that you know is not for you unless it forms some strategic part of your overall plan, which the most obvious thing would be, is this specific skill something that could allow me to gain access to the United States?

So setting that aside for a moment, just speaking broadly, at 23 years old, you should be switching, changing quickly from one thing to the next, and you should be analyzing your experience in each opportunity that you have in order to understand what do I like, what do I not like, where should I go with this, where could I go with this, do I want to go forward with this.

But at the end of the day, if you look at a job such as working as an auditor, and you can imagine yourself being successful at that job, and then you look back and you recognize, but I don't want this, I don't want to be a successful auditor, then get out of there and go try something else.

Go and do something else and get yourself exposure to some other aspect of the business. If you know that generally speaking your goal is to become a financial planner, then you should move as quickly as possible in the direction of financial planning. And so you should move in the direction, whatever is convenient to you.

In the German system, that might be working at a bank, or working in banking, it would be much better for you at this stage of your career to be an assistant to a bank officer, or an assistant to a bank auditor, or assistant to a bank tax advisor, or something like that, then to work as an assistant to an auditor.

So it might be a bank, it might be an insurance office, it could be a life insurance office, it could be a property and casualty insurance office, it could be a stock manager, some form of investment advisor, etc. But get yourself as quickly as possible, as close as you can to your long-term career ambition.

So if you want to be a financial planner, get yourself close to working in financial planning. It's going to bring you down a path that you know you don't want to succeed at. Because time is your most precious thing. Everything except time can be managed artificially. If you needed money, you can get money.

Money is pretty easy to get. If you need experience, you can get experience. If you need knowledge, you can get knowledge. If you need academic qualifications or certifications, etc. All of that stuff can be gotten very quickly. Time is the scarce resource. So at 23, you want to be pushing yourself consistently to get as close as you can to your goals and get basically around the environment that could lead to the accomplishment of your goal.

It's much easier to make progress to be exactly where you want to go when you're around where you think you might want to go than when you're on the other side of the country. And time is very short because at 23 years old, you have a very narrow window of time where you need to build your career and you need to build your skills and build your foundation before you get married, before you have children, etc.

So time should be the thing that is putting urgency on you. So that would be my comment on auditing. Now, if you know you want to go to the United States and that's something that you definitely want to do, then once again, you should chart and create the most direct, fastest path towards accomplishing that goal that you can come up with.

Don't spend 10 years building a life in Germany if you know you want to move to the United States. If you know you want to move to the United States, then go as quickly as you possibly can. Because every year that you spend in the United States will be so valuable for you in terms of the connections made, the skills learned, all of the abilities learned, the year ticking forward on a visa, the year ticking forward towards permanent residency, towards citizenship, etc.

And so you need to focus first on that. That's more important and determinative for you than is being a financial planner. Because once you have the ability to be in the United States and the ability to live in the United States, to work in the United States, etc., then you can go in any number of directions.

You can go from insurance to investment management, you can go from investment management to banking, you can go from banking to taxes, you can go in any number of directions. But you can only do that when you have access to the United States. Now I'm not an expert on immigrating to the United States for obvious reasons.

And quite frankly, I don't have a clue what to say to you about U.S. immigration. It is the most screwed up system I can possibly imagine. Just today as we record this, the state of Texas is barring an area on the American border with Mexico, keeping out U.S. federal border patrol agents because the border patrol agents are not enforcing immigration laws.

I don't know what to tell you about anything involved with immigration. It is an absolute nightmare system. And on behalf of all of my people, I apologize to you dramatically because it's an absurd system. Quite frankly, sometimes I wonder if a guy like you shouldn't just simply fly to Mexico and come across the border with everyone else.

I recently was interacting with a friend of mine who had some extended family who came across the border using the current asylum system. The guy was given a court date in 2027. And so for the next four years, he came across the border, applied for asylum, and he has the ability to stay in the United States for four years until he gets a court date, something like that.

I don't know what to say. It's the craziest system I've ever seen, and I don't know what to say. Other than if I were you and I were a young professional, I would not try to go down that path, but I would try to get to the United States as quickly as possible.

So you need to become an expert first and foremost on how to immigrate to the United States. My French acquaintances that I met on an airplane that I just described, they were kind of in a similar situation. What had happened was they decided they definitely had to get out of France because, quite honestly, the woman got attacked in her apartment by a guy with a machete.

And he got offended at something he said because he's from the religion of peace, and he went into her apartment and he attacked her with a machete. Her entire body was covered with these scars. She barely escaped with her life because her husband came at that moment and fought the guy off physically in the apartment.

They were like, "We're getting out of France. We're not living this anymore." They applied for the lottery, and the first drawing, they got a lottery slot in the United States. And so you should definitely put in an application to the lottery slot because you could win the lottery. It does happen.

On the other hand, there are other pathways. And so probably there's something related to either education or sponsorship, and those will probably go together. And so if you want to move to the United States and you want to pursue financial planning, then you should look for some pathway to study financial planning as a component of your education.

And increasingly, the field of financial planning is an official academic subject with degrees granted, et cetera, for it, and that might be one pathway. Alternatively, you might need to get some form of sponsorship. And if you wanted to work as a day-to-day financial planner, generally speaking, you'll have a very hard time finding a company that will sponsor you for that work.

That's not the kind of industry that sponsors people, generally speaking. But there may be something related to it, and so this may be some form of investment analysis that can work, or you might try to find some multinational corporation to work for. And that's why I talked about banking.

If you worked for JPMorgan Chase or some other corporation and you work in Frankfurt at their office in Frankfurt, and then later you apply for an international transfer, something like that may work out for you. I don't know. I'm just giving you ideas. But if you know that I want to go to the United States, then getting to the United States, getting there with a sponsorship visa so that it allows you to work, and then working your way towards your green card, your permanent residency, that then would allow you to not need sponsorship, that should be your highest priority, and you should basically take any job that gets you in that direction.

Because then if four years from now you knew that I don't need sponsorship anymore, I have a permanent residency, I can work here, et cetera, you can go in any direction. So to me that's a more relevant focus for you than is specifically things like getting a CFP certification, et cetera.

Now should you do that? Sure. But generally speaking, I wouldn't worry about any classes for that at this point in time. I would just simply focus on building knowledge, studying the content, reading the books, but mainly focusing on what job pathway would get me close to the financial planning industry and also get me into the United States, and then just go from there to the next step.

Thank you for setting my priorities right. Anything else? No, that's all. And then of course, just keep working on making connections. So one of the things that you need is you need connections, and so especially coming from abroad, that should be your first goal. So if you want to go to Texas, then what I would do, the first thing I would do is I would find a Texas group of financial planners, I would find a financial planning conference of some kind that's going to be in Texas or close to Texas, and then go to that conference as a German and start getting advice from people who are around there.

Reach out to them obviously online, you don't have to physically go there, but reach out to people online, find out is there a company that will sponsor me, what should I be studying, et cetera, and start to get some subject matter experts who can help you and connect you.

But probably you'll need to qualify yourself for an employment opportunity in a large company that can sponsor you in order to get you there quickly, and then once you have sponsorship, once you eventually can create, get permanent residency, get your green card, then you'll be free of the need to work for any particular company and you can work for anyone else that you want.

But that's where you'll only know that by speaking to recruiters at firms and find out what they'll actually do. We go to the great state of Washington, welcome to the show, how can I serve you today? Is this my number? That's you, whoever you are, that's you. Excellent. All right, great.

So going back to, I think it was a great family podcast series you did, you made an offhand comment about the so-called social sciences, knowing how we can get happiness. I would love to hear your take on that and any books you have. Is this kind of like the happiness advantage or ...

Anyway, I'd love to hear your thinking. So my offhand comment was, first of all, that I was a little critical of social sciences because I'm frustrated with the replication crisis right now in "social sciences," and I think basically ... I used to, in my own mind, equate somebody who was a chemist and somebody who was a psychologist with somehow being on the same par scientifically speaking.

And I've come to since believe that most social sciences, we should find some other name to rebrand them to create kind of a hard distinction between real, replicatable, consistent, verifiable science and observations and theories about how the human brain works, et cetera. With regard to kind of what we know, certainly there are books that talk about happiness.

I don't have any record ... I've flipped through a couple here and there, but I have not made a deep search for it. Probably just from kind of an a priori religious conviction that I don't think that happiness is a goal that really can ever be achieved or is a worthwhile goal.

In my own thinking, my own ideology, my own mental ease, I draw a distinction between happiness and joy and contentment, and I define those as distinct things. And I believe that happiness is the least important of those, and happiness is a fickle and elusive thing that probably can't be achieved when focused on, but rather is more of a general outcome from a set of actions.

And so I myself don't have any commentary to make on happiness, because I don't believe that happiness is something particularly worth pursuing. That's not to say that I'm not happy. I am happy. But if I'm not happy, if I wake up one day and I'm happy, and I wake up the next day and I'm not happy, I don't see why I should give any weight to the presence of the emotions of happiness or the lack of presence of emotions of happiness, except in just a general observational form so I can notice how I'm feeling.

But there can be any number of reasons why I may or may not feel happy on a daily basis. And so I've avoided a lot of that literature myself, like in terms of just trying to dig into it, other than just a passing interest. I've taken interest in the research on income levels and the self-reported happiness of people who earn a certain amount of money, which definitely shows that you want to earn a good amount of money to get yourself out of poverty, but there's significant diminishing returns after that point in time.

The social science I'm most aware of has to do with basically stability in life and connectedness with other people. And so I'm primarily interested in that as I have tested my own religious convictions. And what you find, for example, is that people who are married report consistently higher experiences of generalized happiness than people who are unmarried.

And I'm inclined to predispose to want to believe that because I have chosen the path of marriage. People who have children generally find that they're a great source of children. People who are connected in a close social community, a religious community, report much more happiness, etc. So I don't have any more of a detailed answer than that, other than to say that these things are studied and I have not found any research from the scientific space that has ever led me to question the decisions that I have made in life.

Every time that I've questioned a decision, so for example, years ago I had a friend of mine who was a player and he had pursued a very different path than mine. I've been with one woman, he'd been with a bazillion. I'm married, he's not, and we have a good relationship and talked it through, etc.

And those kinds of things I always test. I always test my own decisions, my own things, and just try to get a sense. And as an example, we're going through it, and his answer was, "None of this has paid off for me. I thought that it was something that I wanted.

It seemed like the pathway to happiness, pure hedonistic fulfillment, sexual adventures left, right, and center, etc., and it hasn't turned out. It hasn't turned out." And so things like that are things that I think that we should understand and then teach to our children because we know that they're true.

Other things, like things like pornography. When I was younger, my generation, our parents were caught completely unaware by the rise of internet pornography. And I was addicted to internet pornography for years, and as a component of that, I studied the topic out. And what's so interesting to me is the thing that seems like it's going to bring happiness, meaning immediate sexual gratification, is the thing that ultimately destroys happiness.

And so I am very well equipped in my conversation with my children, I am very well equipped today to have a very careful conversation about pornography because of the clear, not only a religious conviction and a moral and ethical conviction about mistreatment of women, etc., but also just from a clear psychological perspective and a physiological perspective.

And so when I talk to teens about pornography, I just say, "Do you want erectile dysfunction? If so, this is your pathway." And so if you want to be on Viagra when you're 20 years old, then use pornography. And so things like that, to me, are an important component of what we should know and what we should be studying and what we should be equipped for to teach our children the truth about these things.

And so those are the things that mostly interest me. Family, religious community, a sense of purpose in the world, those physical, physiological things that result in our experiencing greater daily levels of happiness, sunshine, exercise, water, good food, good relationships, a sense of purpose, etc. That's as far as I could go.

And from there, I'll refer you to, I don't know, Andrew Huberman. Call him and ask him. Okay. Sounds good. Anything else? Thank you. Yeah. Pushing, well, on this topic, do you have more callers? How many more do you have? Go ahead. Go ahead. Pushing back a little bit, maybe a year or two ago, you had a very helpful podcast on what you do on down days and how you reset your mind and so on.

It seems like happiness isn't necessarily a good goal, but happiness is definitely impactful when I have a bleak day and I don't see color. Everything is gray and black or gray and white, and it does really impact things. So it's not necessarily a goal, but it seems like it's more than just, "Oh, am I happy?

Am I not happy?" Yeah. No, you're right. You're right. And I have a lot of black days. And so part of my, I have learned over the years that I'm an extremely emotional guy. I've always admired people who were just steady state all the time, et cetera. I'm not that way.

And so like many emotional people, I experienced the euphoric highs and I experienced the black lows. And when I was younger, I thought that there was going to be some kind of like, "If only if I can just achieve this thing, then all the blackness will go away. I won't have any black days." That was what I expected when I was younger.

I don't expect that anymore. And so part of what I said about happiness is just part of my own personal philosophy, where when I question the idea that should the way that I feel make any difference in what I do, I believe that I'm master of my mind and I can make the choice that the way that I feel doesn't need to affect what I do.

And I find that where I'm most capable of this is in how I treat other people. So for example, I'm married, I have children. And so how I feel on a today should not affect how I treat those that I love. They're not responsible for how I feel. And so there's no question that it may affect me if I'm tired, if I'm cranky, if I'm having a black day or a black week or a black month.

I have had some black months this year, last year, sorry, 2023 was for me an extremely difficult year. And you talk about it and you're like, "Why should it be difficult? It shouldn't be difficult." I had a lot of peak experiences, but I had months of blackness, just feeling like imprisoned in the black cell.

And it was hard, right? But at the end of the day, I believe that I still have to control how I act. And so I may not, when I'm experiencing that, I may not as naturally as I would like to express those, like, I mean, it may not be as easy for me to laugh with my children and to treat my wife with gentleness and kindness and be effusive, et cetera.

When I'm feeling black, then it's hard to do that. But the fact that it's hard to do that doesn't mean that I have an option, I still need to treat them. I can't raise my voice, I can't raise my hands, I can't do something that's going to cause that.

All I know from having lived for a while is that the blackness comes and go. We have good days and bad days, and they come and go, and that I can make a choice each and every day in what I do to a significant degree. So definitely all that stuff matters.

The thing that I said in that old podcast of the basic things are things that I try to do. So I'll just reprise them very quickly. Here are some of the things that I try to pay attention to. Number one, am I sleeping? And so sleep is sacrosanct. And sleep is driven by, I have to go to bed.

That is the key decision. So I do not stay up late, I never stay up late, I'm not allowed to stay up late, I have to turn everything off, and I have to go to bed, and I need to be in bed no matter what. Because if I go to bed and I get to bed by 10 o'clock, I shoot for 9 o'clock, then I'll naturally wake up at 5 o'clock, I don't have an alarm clock, I have a few minutes before the day gets started, and that forms the foundation.

Movement is another thing. I have to move. If I don't move, if I don't get my 10,000 steps, if I don't walk, if I don't exercise, then I don't feel good. And movement is a way of changing state. I despise with a passion doing Tony Robbins exercises of changing your physical state by some jumping around, but there's no question in my mind that it works.

So I just don't want to do it, because sometimes I don't want to do it, but there's no question that you can change your physical state, your emotional state by your body. And so knowing that we can control our emotions by our body is really important. Sunshine is a really important thing, vitamin D, et cetera, getting sunshine exposure, and then making sure that we're eating well and that we have good relationships, that we have a sense of purpose.

And then I've tried to do my best to overcome the blackness by having some productive things that I can do when I don't feel like doing anything. And so I look at it as basically a gradation of choices. So maybe choice, here's the optimal choice if I were a man of iron discipline would be to do thing A, but if I can't do thing A, let me have a thing B that's not quite so hard to do, but it's still going to give me positive outcomes.

So instead of sitting around and sitting on the couch and, I don't know, watching Netflix or something, let me go for a walk, because at least walking is pretty easy. And if I go for a walk, even if I just waste the time or listen to something that's educational, if I come back in an hour, I'll probably feel better when I come back in an hour than not.

So maybe I was too strong in saying I don't happiness. I aspire to ignore how I feel, because I don't think that how I feel, looking to that as some kind of ongoing cue is a smart way to live. I shouldn't love my wife because I'd feel loving towards her.

I love my wife because it's an act of the will, not based upon how I feel. And so I aspire to do the same thing with happiness, which is why I gave that macho answer to begin with. What do you think? What's your perspective on it? Nope. That makes sense.

As far as how I feel is important for how I experience things, but how I feel should not impact how I live going forward. As you said, how I love my wife and my daughter shouldn't be impacted by how I'm feeling. I do those because it's right. So yeah, that makes sense.

Just this morning, I think there's more things that we can learn. So here's one. Here's a book I haven't read, but I took some notes on it from a book summary. But there was a book called The Winner Effect, and this was just this morning I was looking into this.

And one of the things that I think is really interesting that evidently is talked about in that book is how early wins that someone has makes a big difference in their long-term performance. So we know, for example, that professional athletes have a very strong skew towards being born in January, February, March, et cetera, because that means that they were always the biggest and the fastest players on the team just because they were the biggest and fastest players on the team.

That led to them doing things they felt good about, having wins, racking up those wins, has some influence on who they ultimately become. And what's really interesting about that is the guy I was listening to made the comment. And he said this, "Is it ever effective to feel like you lost?" And I've tried for years to embrace the idea of sometimes you win, sometimes you learn.

I have embraced that to a high degree. But one of the things that I have thought about, even just this morning, is that is there any point in negative feelings? I was talking with a friend of mine, friends of mine who are parents, and we're talking about shame. We weren't talking about it with regard to children, although it affects children.

We were talking about it in relationships. And the conversation that we're having is, is it ever appropriate to try to inflict shame on somebody? And I don't know the answer to that. I'm still thinking about that. And so as an outlay of that, just this morning, I was thinking about, is it ever effective to feel like you lost in some way or to feel like a loser?

Does that matter? And I guess if I were to try to answer that question, I would say that, sure, there are some people who thrive on the hatred that they determine from losing. But you yourself, like, don't beat yourself up about things. And so I do wonder, and this is a question that you're inspiring, and I'm rambling a little bit, so I'm going to wrap it up.

But I do wonder, like, how many of the black days are just due to our beating ourselves up over things? And the older I get, the more I realize the worthlessness of negative emotions or of really assigning any kind of weight to certain things. An example, like dieting, right?

I've been fat for years. And so dieters, people who are yo-yo dieters, as I have been, you get this, there's just this strange tendency that someone says, "Well, I cheated on my diet because I went to a party and I wasn't supposed to eat carbohydrates and ate carbohydrates at the party." And then two weeks later, they're chowing down pizza every day.

And what I've realized over the years with lots of failures where I assigned all kinds of negative emotions to that is there's just no point to any of those negative emotions. So I screwed it up. All right, no big deal. If I just brush that off and say, "I'm human, and so what?

It was a party and I felt like eating carbohydrates," and then the next day, I don't have any of the negative emotions associated with it, then I can just go right back on, I'm right back on the wagon, and no one ever dies. No one's diet is ever destroyed by one meal of eating something that wasn't on your diet plan.

And so that is something that I am thinking about. And I do wonder the effect of those negative emotions, the things, the stories we tell ourselves where we tell ourselves we've failed or we've lost or we could have done better or should have done better, all the shoulda, shoulda, shoulda stuff, I do wonder the impact of that on happiness, but I don't have any answers.

So there we should look to social science and try to understand some of those answers from them. Interesting. Thank you. Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you for calling, and I feel like I gave you two answers. The macho one is what I aspire to. The real one is that, you know, we all face it, but I do think that we should try to, there's no reason, if we can do something that's going to improve our mental state, why not?

But at the end of the day, it shouldn't be something that drives us. I think I'm picking up the right- I gotcha. Okay. Well, let's just, I want to make sure I got this right. All right. That caller is on the other line, so we'll just hang on one second and see if she can get finished up.

Okay. Robin, thank you so much for your help. I really appreciate it. I'll go ahead and get this set right over. Have a great day. You're welcome. Thank you. Bye-bye. Are you with us now, ma'am? Did you- Ma'am, are you there from Washington State? That's you. I don't know your name.

We go to Washington State. Are you there, ma'am? All right, well, 360 Area Code, are you there? Our previous caller was from Washington, but it sounds like she's not going to be able to be there. All right. So that concludes our podcast for today. Thank you so much, everyone, for being here.

Thank you for your interesting questions. I guess Josh was becoming, I don't know, some form of life coach and career coach because he didn't give me any hard financial questions. It makes it easy for me, but I got to keep my chops up as a financial planner, et cetera.

So don't forget that if you've got a financial planning question or something, I always do my shows with my calculator right here, so I'm ready to go. You don't have to just give me these softball questions, although, of course, I do enjoy talking about this stuff and I think it does matter.

Thank you so much for listening to today's show. If you'd like to join me next week, remember, go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, and we will look forward to... Actually, hold on. Hold on. No. I'll just skip that question for now. Thank you so much. (upbeat music)