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To get your 24/25 Season Pass, go to BigBearMountainResort.com. Big Bear Mountain Resort. Winter Lives Here! Today on Radical Personal Finance, we celebrate Episode 1000. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life in a planned room of financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua Sheets, I am your host, and today on the show, we are going to celebrate a little bit together, because as long time listeners know, Episode 1000 is an important milestone for me in the history of Radical Personal Finance. Why you may ask? Well, because if you go back in the very beginning of this podcast, back to the very first episodes, you will find in Episode 11, I believe it is, that I committed to doing a thousand episodes of this podcast.

And I said in the very beginning that I'll do a thousand episodes of this podcast, whether anyone listens or not. And thankfully, I'm quite grateful that many people have chosen to listen. That's an honor, and I'm grateful for that, because while I'd like to talk tough and say that I would have followed through on that, whether or not anybody listened, that was my intention and that was what I planned to do, but it certainly would not have been as easy to get to Episode 1000 as it was to get here with having listeners and having people knowing that I'm making a difference, knowing, getting so many nice letters from so many of you, etc.

has made it much, much easier to get to Episode 1000. That's not to say it has been easy. It has not been easy. It has required a significant amount of determination from me, and I'm proud of that. What I thought we would do today, there are many things that I was considering, how could we celebrate Episode 1000?

Over the months, I've had various big plans. Originally, my goal was to do a cross-country tour and have meetups all around the United States and perhaps all around the world. I had to put those plans on hold. I couldn't quite bring them to fruition. Maybe we'll be able to do them.

We are having a family camp, which in my mind is a celebration of more in-person events, something I've been wanting to accomplish. Of course, in Episode 500, I played many of your wonderful notes and audios and things like that, but I thought what would be most interesting for me and for you would be just to use Episode 1000 and reflect a little bit on the milestone and share with you a few of the lessons that I have learned from this experience, because in my own life, doing radical personal finance was one of the most significant events in my life, because it was one of the most significant times in which I believed in myself and I charted my own path.

I did it in the face of quite a lot of, not opposition, that wouldn't be fair to say, but just lack of people really understanding. Yet for me, as a man, making a decision, saying this is something I want to do, I'm going to do it even when it's uncertain and here's what I'm going to do.

It's going to be a significant investment of time, resources, et cetera, may or may not work out and has enormous possibilities of failure, has some slight possibilities of success, it's outside of areas that I can predict, it's not predictable, but it's something that I want to do and I'm going to do it.

That is something that for me has been extremely transformative in my life and in my character. When I reflect upon that, I can clearly chart the decision to pursue radical personal finance as a dividing point in my life. I don't want to be hyperbolic. This is not hyperbole. If it is hyperbole, it's only a little bit, but making the decision to pursue radical personal finance was for me a very large decision where I had to believe in myself, and I hadn't done a lot of that previously.

It's not a sob story. I've lived a very privileged and charmed life. I have nothing but blessings in my life, but there comes a time in a man's life, in any man's life, in which he has to make a decision, a decision as to what he's going to do, why he's going to do it, and he has to make that decision on his own.

But when he finally does that, it seems to me that whether it's a success or whether it's a failure, it has good effects, good effects in a man's life. It's something that I'm quite proud of because it has spurred me to make more of those decisions. As I reflect, there were other decisions that I made prior to starting radical personal finance, of course, many other decisions that I made that were also in that similar vein.

But those decisions often seemed relatively small and relatively safe. I can think of some of them. For example, when I graduated from college, I decided I was going to go and travel around the United States. I set off by myself. I didn't have a job. I didn't have any clear plans.

I had a little bit of money saved up. But I went off and I traveled all around the United States in my old cheap car, and that was something that I did all by myself. It was challenging for me, but it was also a great experience that I really enjoyed.

And I started to experience the joy of having to rely on myself, and I saw how that decision impacted me. There were other decisions when I became an entrepreneur after getting laid off from my corporate job that I had after college. Then I had to go and be an entrepreneur, but it was still relatively safe in the sense that I wasn't bearing responsibility.

But radical personal finance was different because I was bearing more responsibility when I decided to do that. So let me lay out the story for so many of you who were not there in the early days because I think you'll find some of the inside history interesting. After I graduated college, I worked for a short time in a large corporate marketing and brand management consulting company.

And it was a company that I had started working for during college, and they had provided me the opportunity to have a flexible work schedule when I was in college so that I could finish my college work. And in exchange, they asked me to consider working for them after college.

So when I graduated, I went and said, "Okay, I graduated. Do you have another job for me?" And basically they said, "No, we don't." And I didn't want to keep working in the relatively low-level job that I was working in. So I quit. But as I was quitting on the way out, then they said, "Hey, listen, we'd hate to lose you as an employee.

Come back to us in a little time." And that was actually when I went traveling. I loaded up my car and traveled all around the United States by myself in an old, old, tiny, cheap car. And then I went back and saw my boss when I got back, and they offered me a job.

And the job came with a nice pay raise. It came to a new set of duties and to a new job that they had set up into the company. And they hired me and then two other ladies into the same position. So I worked for that company for, I think, a year or so.

And I was doing it—I didn't like the job. I didn't enjoy the job at all, but I was doing it because I felt like I was fulfilling a commitment. They had given me some extra scholarship money for college in exchange for my considering working for them, and so I thought I would work for them.

My plan was to work for them for a year and then to quit. And so my planned quitting date was January of 2009 that I had decided I was going to move on to something else. I didn't have a clear idea or goal of what else I wanted to do, but I was going to quit in January of 2009.

In June of 2008, I got called into my boss's office and I got laid off, totally out of the blue, didn't expect it. And I had just gotten a pay raise, I thought everything was going great, I thought here I am doing something I don't want to do to satisfy corporate loyalty, and I got laid off.

And I didn't exactly know what to do. So I was looking around, considering options. And then a few weeks later, I had lunch with one of my supervisors—I think it was the vice president or something—the guy had laid me off. And we were having lunch, and I was sharing with him a little bit of vision that I had of what I wanted to do.

And he suggested to me that I consider going into the world of financial services. And at the time, I was a personal finance aficionado, but I had no interest in the world of professional financial services. Being a personal finance aficionado, I had developed an intense skepticism towards financial advisors, the financial advisor industry, all of the scams, all of the worthless financial products, et cetera.

And I had pretty much become a boglehead, and I was a by-term investor difference, I was a Dave Ramsey guy, I was a boglehead, pretty through and through, and didn't have much interest in financial services. But this guy's son had been a college intern doing the college intern program at Northwestern Mutual, which is a large life insurance company and now large financial services conglomerate.

And they'd had good experiences, and so he referred me in, and I went in for an interview. And I went in pretty skeptical. I did a little research, found out that Northwestern Mutual was basically the whole life insurance king. And so half of my first interview, I spent grilling the Northwestern guy about whole life insurance and what use does this possibly have, et cetera.

And after that, though, I liked him, and I liked how he was able to respond to my questions. He was a thoughtful analytical guy. The guy that I interviewed with was a retired Navy guy, engineer, very analytical guy, really enjoyed the interaction. So I started interviewing, went through the whole round of interviews, interviewed with a couple of other companies, and basically I realized, you know what, I've always wanted to learn to sell, and this would be a good chance for me to learn to sell.

And I don't have much of something that's better, and if I do this and I learn to sell, I'll be really grateful for that, even if I don't do this for the long term. And I had found enough discussions and arguments and information about financial products that I realized that I was overall fairly ignorant of the financial space, and I didn't think that I was going to have an ethical issue working in the financial services industry as long as I was careful, so I joined the company, Northwestern Mutual.

And I'm glad that I did, because the time that I joined the industry was during the stock collapse and basically economic collapse of 2008. I was driving to my insurance licensing course in Miami every day, listening, at the time I was an inveterate NPR listener, so I would listen to NPR all the time, back and forth, and here I am listening to the world collapse as I head into the financial services industry, and that was when I began.

As I began, I did fairly well in the industry, I was never a real star, but I was always a solid producer, and over the years I invested quite heavily into learning more about financial services because I got into the business more with an interest in finance and personal finance rather than being entirely focused on making a fortune for myself, I was focused on education.

And I would still love to listen to talk radio, I never listened to music, I still really don't, and so I listened to talk radio, and then this was the early days of podcasting, I had started listening to podcasts in college, and so I would listen to hours and hours and hours of podcasts.

And as I learned and studied, over time I became a chartered life underwriter and a chartered financial consultant and a certified financial planner, and about four or five other designations, I ultimately started pursuing a master's degree in financial services, and ultimately finished that, and as I grew to learn more and more, I found that I couldn't really enjoy financial media the way that I once did.

And I just, the biggest frustration in my life was when I'd be sitting at a table talking to somebody about finance and they would say, "Well Dave Ramsey says such and such, or Suze Orman says such and such," and I just got annoyed that it seemed like Dave Ramsey could spend more time speaking to my clients than I could, and I thought, "Well Dave Ramsey doesn't know anything about financial planning, he's saying this is this that's wrong, this that's wrong, this that's wrong, and Dave's not looking at it from this perspective and that perspective and the other perspective, and after all, I should be the guy who is doing this." And so as I observed this, and I became aware, I started listening to a couple of podcasts about podcasting, and I thought, you know what, it's probably not that hard, I should start a podcast.

And the challenge is that being in a regulated industry, I figured, you know what, I'm not sure if I can do this, and I tried to look into the laws, I tried to, I spoke to a couple of lawyers, and I thought I had found a solution, I thought that, you know what, I could start a podcast if I could do it and not make wrong, forward-looking statements and absurd claims and things like that, and I just did it anonymously, I didn't tell people I was a financial advisor, then I could start a podcast, and then I would have the ability to say to my clients, "Hey, listen to this, I did a podcast on this subject, here's an hour of me teaching about this thing.

One of the things that annoyed me as a financial advisor was that, in essence, you have to have the same conversations very repetitively. And I just grew really frustrated with it, I thought, why do I have to have this conversation again and again, why can't I just send somebody a video that I make or an audio file that I make and explain, hey, listen to this, and then you'll know everything about, there's these 10 questions you're going to ask me, and I'm going to answer all these upfront, but I'm going to do it in a way that's going to be really time-effective.

And of course, I didn't have to start a podcast to do that, I could have just recorded those audio files and done it, but I wasn't smart enough to actually follow through and do that at the time, I didn't test it and see how it would work. So I decided I would start a podcast, and so in 2013, I sat down in my spare bedroom with a cheap little voice recorder that I had gotten with my Dragon Naturally Speaking subscription and recorded episode one of Radical Personal Finance, and I have still kept it in the podcast feed.

So if you're interested in listening to episode one, it is still there. And it's available and you can hear it, it was just me talking, basically giving my frustrations and my vision of what I thought a good financial podcast could be and what I was going to try to do.

Then I worked through all the tech of figuring out how to launch it, and then I started recording more podcast episodes, so I wound up in the first three weeks, I recorded 10 episodes, and I found that I really loved doing it, I felt like it was good. After I had recorded episode one, I went back and listened to it, and I basically just asked myself the question, would I listen to that?

And after all, here I am as a guy who listens to huge amounts of talk radio and podcasts and things like that, and I recognized that, yeah, I would listen to that, it wasn't terrible, it kept my interest. And so I said, "Well, good enough for me, let's keep going." So I recorded 10 episodes of the podcast in the first three weeks, figured out how to get a logo, figured out how to get an RSS feed online, did all the stuff, and was just getting going.

During that time, again, I had spoken with a lawyer at the home office and I thought, "Okay, I need to go ahead and make sure they know about it, I've got the legal standing here." So then I submitted an outside business activity form to my chief compliance officer, letting her know what I was doing.

I get a phone call, and she basically says, "Joshua, are you crazy? What on earth are you doing? How could you possibly think that this is something that you're allowed to do? What is wrong with you? Take that thing off the internet, you can't have this on the internet." And basically, I was given an ultimatum of either take it off the internet or you're done here today.

Well, at the time, my wife was six months pregnant with our first baby, and I had spent six years building a financial planning business that was finally profitable, was finally working, I was finally making money, it wasn't that hard, I was pretty good at it, and I had no idea of what to do with a podcast, it was just kind of an interest of mine.

And so I took it down. And I remember that being an enormous emotional crisis for me. I remember writing Cliff Ravenscraft, the podcast answer man, this emotional email of, "Here's my thing, I don't know what to do," and just kind of dealing with it. And it took me a while to calm down a little bit and just deal with the emotions of it.

And I just decided to try to think, "Well, what's going on here?" And I started to look at the number of people who had downloaded the podcast, I had a few emails by them, and then I started to do a little research and I realized that, hey, a lot of people had actually started listening to the podcast, that the initial download numbers were pretty healthy, and people were interested in what I had to say, which was very, which was pretty cool.

And more importantly, I had found that I really loved the experience of recording it. All during those first three weeks, it was an obsession. I was getting up at four o'clock in the morning, working late at night, recording the podcast, just loving every minute of it, and I realized that was a real obsession of mine to talk about this.

And I imagined all the different things that it would be interesting to dig into, that you can't dig into in the life of a normal everyday financial advisor. But I had no plan. And so it took me about six months to become convinced that this was something that I wanted to pursue.

And then the problem was that I had no plan. And podcasting was just a crapshoot. There was no way to know how to make money on it, because basically I became convinced that if you have an audience, then there's lots of ways to make money. If you don't have an audience, there's no way to make money, and it all comes down to having an audience.

Well, how do you know if you can have an audience? Well, ordinarily, the appropriate path would be to build an audience, little by little, and then only make some kind of change when you have an audience. But since I wasn't allowed to do a podcast, then I didn't see any pathway forward.

What am I supposed to do? So at that time, I decided that I needed another plan. Now, I had money saved, I wasn't broke, but I had, again, a newborn baby and a wife to take care of, and I was the sole income earner for our household and wasn't going to change that.

And so I figured, well, what do I do? How am I going to get myself out of this mess? And I wasn't willing to spend savings down because there was no predictability with it. I didn't know how long. Do you need to do a podcast for five years and then you make a dollar?

Do you need to do it for five months and then make a dollar? I had no ability to project. So finally, I realized that the way to solve the problem was two things. Number one was to leave financial services because if I couldn't do this as a licensed individual, then I would just leave financial services and step two, get a job.

And I just needed a job, any kind of job doing anything else in the world that would allow me to record a podcast on the side. So I looked around. I thought about selling cars. I went and interviewed with-- I was looking for sales jobs. So I went and interviewed with selling cars, thought about a number of different things, tried a handful of different things.

But ultimately, I was able to get a job working as a back office financial planner. And once I secured that, then I closed my business, surrendered all of my licenses, canceled all my licenses, and started. And so again, what I negotiated was I was working as a back office financial planner for a financial planning firm.

So I would create financial plans for other advisors, and then I would train young advisors on how to present them, how to understand the financial planning, et cetera. And that was just enough to make a living. Wasn't making anything more than covering my bills, but it allowed me to podcast work from home, et cetera.

And so in 2014, I shut down my business, surrendered all my licenses, and launched. And that was episode 11 of Radical Personal Finance in July of 2014. And so in those early months, I didn't have a plan other than just to podcast as much as I could-- podcast, podcast, podcast.

And so I was basically doing four to five episodes a week. And I was trying to figure out, well, as the show started to grow and continued to grow, I was trying to figure out, how do I make a living off of this thing? In the early years, my plan was to go ahead and start a new financial planning firm because I had figured out that if I registered my own registered investment advisory firm, RIA, that I could be my own chief compliance officer.

And if I was my own chief compliance officer and I wanted to go and do a podcast, then I could go and do a podcast. And to comment on that for a moment, there's no fundamental reason why a financial advisor or an insurance agent is legally barred from having a podcast.

You would know that because many financial advisors for years have had radio shows where they answer questions and they advertise their services. And podcasting is fundamentally no different. A financial advisor may go and have a morning money minute, can go and be interviewed on a talk show. And YouTube and podcasts are just other expressions of that.

The problem comes down to a large firm controlling its liability. If you have a large company that has a bunch of lots and lots of agents, then they have to create very large policies to protect their liability. And an enormous company like Northwestern Mutual, who I was working for, is not going to let every agent just go out and start a podcast.

So they did have a compliance route for doing things like TV appearances at the time. And I'm a decade removed from the business, so I don't know much about it anymore. But at the time, the process was if you were going to go be on the local TV show, you would write out a script of everything you were going to say.

You would submit the script to the compliance attorneys in advance. They would review the script, give you their approval. You would go do the show, and then you would, of course, have to keep a copy of it in the compliance records in case it was ever needed. And that was how you could go and do public appearances.

But I couldn't figure out any way that I could possibly do that with a podcast. I wanted to do a lot of content, and there was just no way. And they wouldn't let me advertise it, so I just threw up my hands. But if I opened my own REA, then I could be my chief compliance officer, and I could do that.

And basically, the thing you really have to stay away from if you're a licensed financial advisor is just being a bozo and making forward-looking, ridiculous statements. So you would never say, "Hey, the stock market is going to go up by 50% next year. Here's why you should buy this fund." But most normal, educated, ethical financial advisors don't even get anywhere near those kinds of things.

So it really doesn't matter. So that was the original plan. I wrote up the paperwork, wrote my form ADV, I filed it with the state, I was waiting for approval when the show really started to go well, and I started to have a significant number of listeners. And I looked at the amount of time that I was investing into the podcast, and I realized, I don't know that I can do both of these things.

I don't think I can be a good financial advisor and also a good podcaster. I don't think they work well together for the same reason why it's hard to be a good financial planner and a portfolio manager. The jobs are just better served by two people. It's better to have a financial planner and a portfolio manager working side by side just like it'd be better to have a financial planner and a podcaster working side by side so that you have one person who's doing marketing, who's doing the public-facing stuff, and you have another person who's meeting with clients.

Because the burden for a financial advisor of serving clients and serving them effectively, it's a significant amount of time, a significant amount of work. And I didn't see how I could do both. So I withdrew my application for the RIA before it was approved and decided I was just going to go all in on podcasting and keep financial planning as a backup option.

I decided that—so one more comment—one of the things that frustrated me for many years was the enormous quantity of real conflicts of interest and perceived conflicts of interest in the financial planning business. I'm someone who cares deeply about ethics, morality, right and wrong. Part of it is my nature.

Part of it is how I was raised. Part of it is just, I don't know, I guess by nature. It's an inward—I want to see the weak and the innocent protected. I despise bullies. I despise predators. So it's important to me to deal with those things. And when you're in financial planning or any aspect of financial services, it's an extreme—it can be—it's certainly an industry that is fraught with risk and potential problems.

And in many cases throughout history, it is and has been an extremely predatory business. Because of the nature of the business, where you're dealing with large amounts of money, where people can get rich quick, it attracts a certain type of person. And there's a high correlation between the kind of people who are attracted to financial services and to predators.

There are also other people who are attracted who want to serve people and want to help people effectively. But because there's big money and it's all other people's money and there are enormous leverage abilities, financial services attracts a lot of predators. And so those predators prey on innocent, helpless, undefenseless—excuse me—defenseless people.

And that creates a very difficult reputation for the industry. And at the time, I was very young. When I started in financial services, I was 23 years old. And so I was very young. And I didn't have the kind of self-confidence that a more mature man would have. And so all the things, even just selling life insurance, for whatever reason, there were—I don't know if there still are, but maybe just my perspective has changed.

But there were all kinds of reputational issues about people being life insurance salesmen. Life insurance salesmen were perceived as being aggressive and pushy and all of that, especially whole life insurance salesmen. And I didn't want to be associated with a lot of that. Today, I now appreciate life insurance salesmen more than I ever did, but that just has come with maturity.

So I was frustrated with the conflicts of interest. And I remember when I finally got out of the industry, and I finally had severed all of my licenses. And I was sitting at the breakfast table with my family, and I realized I feel free. I feel free for the first time in years.

And I realized how heavy the burden of all of that was on me. And it's not only conflicts of interest and perceived conflicts of interest, but when you're a financial advisor, you constantly have to think about making the right decision every single time. You have to think about your duties to the client.

You have to keep careful case notes for when you get sued. It's just a nonstop, never-ending burden. And even those who manage it straightforwardly still wind up with issues. Because in that business, even the most righteous of intentions don't work out, because people are people. I remember, as an example of this, I remember one friend of mine who was a young lady.

I came along, counseled her with finances. I helped her set up an investment plan, helped her open up a Roth IRA, helped her get life insurance. And I sold her a small whole life insurance policy. And it fit. Everything was good. My recommendations were prudent. Everything was good. There was nothing that was wrong with my professional recommendations.

Everything that I had recommended to her was reasonable and appropriate. And then three months later, maybe six months, I don't remember. But some months later, she cancels everything and bails on the whole plan. And when you do that, you lose all your money. You lose all your money in the life insurance policy.

You get back money on investments, less commissions and fees that I had gotten paid. But the worst was she just canceled everything. And of course, I got chargebacks, et cetera. And it took me a while to figure it out, because what I realized was I had a very forceful personality.

I never used aggressive sales tactics. I think to the extent that life insurance agents ever used to use those aggressive sales tactics, that was basically a 1980s thing. And it just wasn't a thing when I'm-- and I don't think it's a thing anymore. But I was good at painting a vision.

I was good at showing people where they could be, helping them see a vision of where they could be in 30 years if they started saving money. And yet when I would disappear, then they would get distracted and do other things. And I just felt terrible. And so it was just an example of how you do your very best, then things don't work out.

And you know then that you've harmed someone. And of course, you've been harmed yourself, because all your commissions are reversed. You now have a reversal on your history, et cetera. It's frustrating. But I had harmed someone, even though I had the best of intentions. So being free of all that felt amazing.

And my mission in the early days of the show was I don't ever want to go back into those conflicts of interest. I want to be perfectly objective. I want to have perfect objectivity. And so this guided my early efforts on the show. So in the beginning of the show, I said, I'm going to build a podcast that doesn't rely on things that would harm my objectivity.

I'm not going to take any sponsors. I'm not going to take any ads. I'm exclusively going to work with people in a purely independent and objective way. That was the vision. That was the goal. So my first plan was to build a listener support model. At the time, I was a great admirer of Jack Spierko and his The Survival Podcast.

And he had built his revenue model on a listener support model, where he had some extra member resources and things like that for those who supported his show financially. And he had some advertisers. And so I thought, this is a good model. I like how this is going to work.

So I started building a membership site. And some of the difficult early stories, I think I was planning on launching the membership site with episode 100 was the plans. I built out this membership site. And it was going to be a voluntary contribution for my audience to support me so I could be independent of conflicts of interest.

And somewhere around, let's call it, episode 95, right before I'm ready to launch my membership site, I was getting everything ready and changing with some of the settings with my RSS feed, which is the technical behind-the-scenes thing that makes podcasts work. And I wound up deleting my RSS feed.

And so I went overnight. Right before my big launch, I deleted my entire RSS feed. Then I deleted all of my subscribers. I can laugh now, but it was not fun at the time. And it was an innocent mistake. I can't remember any of the technical details at the moment.

I was trying to redirect something. And I pushed the red button somehow that I didn't know was a dangerous thing. And so I launched my listener support model with my new membership site. And the whole thing fizzled. And it took a while. It took a couple of months. But all my listeners eventually found their way back and more.

But it was a pretty difficult-- it was a pretty challenging thing. Anyway, some people signed up for the listener support model. And that was good. But then I faced this challenge that every time I would sit down to create-- I was trying to figure out, what is the value proposition?

What do I offer to my members that they're willing to pay for? And my ambition, because of all this conflict of interest stuff, was my ambition was always to provide a 10x return on anything that someone would pay me. So if someone's going to pay me $50, I want them to get $500 worth of value.

It's always what I've shot for. And I tried. But every time I would sit down to create extra content, I would just say, oh, this is too good. I should just put this out on the show. So I would just create more podcasts. I would just podcast, podcast, podcast, podcast.

And I basically didn't have much to offer the listeners. And it was sort of kind of working. Along the way, I upgraded the website. And a friend of mine is a web developer. So he started building me a really beautiful website. So we just scrapped the whole listener thing.

And I replaced it with other things. I don't need to go through the blow by blow. But these were continual themes along the way that, over the last 1,000 episodes of things that I tried to figure out and struggled with, I would do things like ads. I would bring on ads, sponsorships, and then some of them were a good fit.

Some of them weren't a good fit. I always worried, well, I have to personally vet all the sponsors. And I have to do this personal endorsement. And that was something that became very difficult to do because how do I check out a company well enough to know that they are excellent, et cetera?

And again, I don't need to go through all of the twists and turns. But I'm trying to share just a little bit so that you can understand that while the life of a podcaster might seem exotic and, oh, it was just wonderful if you've just got a great podcast and it's all made, no, it's work.

It's a business just like anything else. I enjoy it. I enjoy being able to exercise my ideas for the most part. But the twists and turns of the business model are difficult. What I've ultimately done, which has turned out to be a pretty good fit, was, number one, I started taking on private clients from the work.

So at various times, I have done a number of different things. But the things that have really stuck is, number one, I have a small number of entrepreneurs that I work with on an ongoing coaching basis. And it usually starts with personal finance, I mean, financial planning, et cetera.

People like my objectivity and the fact that I still don't have any connections with-- I've never sold financial products on here. I've never made those kinds of connections. And so I have ongoing clients that I work with on an ongoing basis. And that I really enjoy. I really enjoy working with entrepreneurs because it brings together all the best of everything from personal finance and just kind of standard CFP-type stuff.

It brings in, a lot of times, all the international stuff that I really enjoy. And it brings in all the business stuff and all the marketing and things like that. That's worked out well. The second thing that I do related to individuals is I offer paid consultations. What has worked well is I offer these throughout the year at different times.

But these are just straightforward phone consultations. And what I like about them is that I'm able to focus on the 80% return, which is the ideas or the direction. I've developed a pretty unique skill of usually being able to cut to the heart of an idea due to broad knowledge and exposure and due to just broad interest.

I can usually focus on the heart of the idea. What I cut out of the equation is all of the implementation stuff. So I don't implement financial plans the way that a financial planner would do. I don't go through and make sure everything gets signed and et cetera. And so it's kind of up to a client.

Client shows up. They pay me. And at the end of the phone call, I'm done. I move on. And then if there's implementation or follow-through, then that has to be accomplished by the client. And it's an imperfect model because a huge component of the usefulness of a financial planner is being able to prod people forward and get them to take action when they otherwise wouldn't.

As with most of us, how much better would we be if we had coaches in all the important areas of our lives nagging us and prodding us and reminding us for all the things that are necessary so that we continue to press forward? That's really great, but it's not something that I'm interested in doing.

And so offering those kinds of consultations has been good. I also have found that I really enjoy teaching courses and I create all my courses from scratch. And basically what I've discovered is my personal superpower is I am world class at taking a subject that I'm interested in, absorbing either all of the material or huge quantities of the material that is available on the subject, and then organizing and synthesizing those ideas to where they're practical.

And that's what I'm really good at. And so then the natural expression of that is to take that and reorganize the material from a question or a topic or whatever that we're dealing with, reorganize the material in a way that makes sense so that you understand what's important now and what's important later and you can move through a process of change in a really effective and efficient way.

And for me, creating those courses is, again, a real joy because I'm able to, I think, answer questions that people have about seeming paradoxes in various industries. And I'm able to do that by using things like a lens of scale or understanding what matters now. And this is why so much, and helping people understand where is advice actually in conflict and where are you just perceiving advice to be in conflict.

And most financial issues especially really are fairly straightforward. And if somebody understands both sides of an argument or eight sides of an argument, you can see how it's the individual conditions of the person that ultimately determine which of these eight arguments is the correct argument. And to me, that stuff just falls in place pretty easily and logically, et cetera.

So I've tried to do that with my courses, and I'm pretty satisfied with most of them. Put some of them on the market, pulled some of them off, gone back and forth. But I'm satisfied with the quality of the content. I've never been really satisfied with the quality of the production.

One of the things that's happened in the world of ideas is simply we have created more beautiful production around ideas, and that has made it harder for idea people to match that level of production. There's a real balance here because-- let me just articulate this to teach the concept.

Books are a profoundly valuable way to share ideas. And throughout history, one of the key features of a book is simply that a book requires one person to create it. One man can sit down with a notebook, a legal pad, and a pen and write a book. And that book, if he has skill as a writer, that book can be powerful and persuasive.

And that's all of the great books that we read. That's how they've been created with one guy sitting at his desk writing it out, one lady with a vision for what she wanted to create sitting down and writing out the book. Most other forms of media require a much larger team.

This is the difference between a book and a movie. A movie, to bring a movie to fruition, requires an enormous team of skilled specialists to create something. And in some cases, it's better and more satisfying than the written version. In many cases, it's not. But it requires a lot more specialists.

In the past, the way to get rich on ideas was to write them down and then sell people the ideas for a cost. And that has been a very effective business model. I've spent a lot of money over the years on extremely valuable information products. I still reference many of those information products.

Today, the expectations have changed, and digital courses, because of their ease of administration and delivery, have become much more attractive. But creating successful digital courses starts to create the problem of transfer, of needing a big team, the same way that you have the problem of needing a big team to create a movie as compared to writing a novel.

And so I've always been frustrated with my ability to create the high production value that I've wanted. And so that's one of the reasons I took a lot of my courses down. Not complaining, not saying I should have, just sharing honestly a little bit about the journey. Fast forward, those are the basic-- and then advertising, of course, I have ads on Radical Personal Finance now.

It has been frustrating to me to figure out a solution for that. I had planned to create a solution where there were ads, and then there was a premium version where you could just pay to have the ads off. That hasn't worked, but the ads matter. They pay me enough to keep me wanting to go and wanting to create podcasts.

And so those are the basic things that I have done. Now in the future, there's a lot more room for more things, but I'm not getting into the future today. Just sharing that these are some of the twists and turns of entrepreneurship. Thanks to you, the show has grown.

The show has provided a lot of opportunity for me. Radical Personal Finance, I haven't looked up recent numbers, but it's in the top few percent of all podcasts. Right now, with episode 1,000, my total downloads-- and these numbers change based upon whether you want to use impressive numbers or less impressive numbers, and there's a bunch of metrics for measuring this-- but something like 30 million downloads, just under 30 million downloads for episode 1,000, which is great.

And it's been quite the journey. I've enjoyed it. Speaking personally, my longtime listeners have gone with us on quite a journey. I never really expected all of the twists and turns over the last 10 years, but I'm grateful for them. When I began the show originally-- again, my wife was pregnant with our first baby, and then the second launch in 2014, we had our first baby.

Well, fast forward 10 years later, here we are in 2024, and we've had five babies. We've traveled quite a lot. We've lived in multiple places. We've traveled a good amount. We've traveled all around the United States, lived in an RV with our three children. We've lived abroad. We've traveled around the world.

I don't know how many countries, but quite a lot. And a lot of that stuff has just been me testing things. I enjoy learning ideas, testing them, and sharing with you some of the lessons that I have learned. And radical personal finance, in many ways, has been a perfect outlet for me in that way.

I can take an idea that I'm really interested in, I can talk about that idea, I can learn about that idea, I can share with you the ideas and concepts, and then see those ideas implemented in other people's lives. And that's been really exciting. Some of the things I never anticipated.

So I never anticipated leaving the United States. That was not 10 years ago. It wouldn't have surprised me, I guess, if you had said, this is where you'll be. Just because, OK, I'm open to that. But it was never a plan. It was just one of those things that's a reaction to various events, and saw an opportunity, and went for it, and then learned a little bit more, and then realized, hey, you know what?

I kind of like this stuff. And that was part of the dream. Also, though, the dream has changed, and even just the business plan has changed over the years. When I was 15 years old, that was the point in which we were first starting to use the internet to sell ideas to one another, and sell packages.

And I remember I bought some online business course at 15, and I developed the goal of a laptop lifestyle. And I wanted to be able to make money from my laptop. That way I could live anywhere in the world, do what I want, and live how I want. And it took me 15 years to accomplish it, but eventually I did.

And in the beginning, my goals were rather modest. When I started Radical Personal Finance, I wasn't trying to make a million dollars. I wanted to make 100 grand from a laptop, because I figured with geo arbitrage, and with time arbitrage, and et cetera, if I can make 100 grand from a laptop anywhere in the world, man, I'm doing well.

And so that was good. It took me, I don't know, two, three years to do that. And I was content. That was what I was going for. And then I realized though that because that model of just kind of a rather modest business, I realized that I was never going to be able to have the kind of impact that I was capable of having.

I remember distinctly in the beginning of 2017, I was reading my Bible, and I was reading the book of Matthew. And there's a passage in the book of Matthew that really struck me in a way that I had never thought about. But it basically says, "Your light of the world, a city set on a hill, cannot be hidden, nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the stand, and it gives light to all in the house.

In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven." And I'm sitting here looking at my Bible, and I have a note in it, but it just seemed like in 2017, it just felt like with that verse that God spoke to me and said, "Stop playing small." And I realized that I had this very small vision, and I needed to change that.

Because if I was going to be faithful, then it's not enough just to see to what I need or what I want or have enough money to pay my bills, but I needed to be much more diligent than that. And that started a process of trying to figure out, "How do I stop playing small?

How do I think bigger?" And I think this is an appropriate time for me to pivot to, over the years, many things have changed in my own philosophy relating to money, and long-term listeners have heard those changes. Probably one of the biggest ones, if I went back to 10 years, was that when I started the podcast, I very much saw myself as part of the FIRE movement.

I was extremely interested in financial independence, early retirement. That was a real vision of mine. I read all of-- the big influence that I first found was Early Retirement Extreme by Jacob Lund Fisker, and then this was the time that Mr. Money Mustache became popular, and I read all of his stuff, and I just loved it.

And I started integrating those concepts with my clients even when I was a financial advisor, and I was really committed to hyperfrugality and working hard for early retirement as much as I possibly could. And when I started Radical Personal Finance, I was still interested in that. I had made the decision that-- because if I had stayed in traditional financial planning, I would have made a lot more money faster, and as I saw it, that was a faster path to financial independence.

But I realized if you have a business that provides you with a lifestyle of financial independence, it allows you to live the way you want to live, then you don't have to wait 10 years or 20 years, whatever it takes you to accumulate the money to retire. You can just do that now.

And I realized, OK, I'll just do that. And I felt a little bit hypocritical because I was going to be talking about money, but I figured as long as I'm honest about it, then that'll be fine. I'll just tell people honestly, but this is why I'm doing it. After all, there's nothing morally wrong with it.

Just build a lifestyle business instead of trying to build an enormous fortune. And so I was really, really interested in early retirement. It was important to me. But over time, I had a variety of realizations. The first one was simply that a significant problem for me in those years was not that I needed to retire from work, but just that I was in a job for which I was poorly suited.

And that was the basic thing. And I realized what I teach now, it's easier to find a different job than it is to build a fortune and retire. And that probably should be the first thing that you do. And that was why my first course that I did was the Radical Personal Finance Career and Income Guide.

Because if you can generate your income in a way that is pleasing to you, that provides you with the kind of lifestyle that you want to live, you don't need to build a fortune so you can quit work at 30 years old. And it's better, it's easier for you to spend a couple of years trying different jobs, trying different businesses, going from this to that until hopefully after a few years, you can find something that really fits you.

That's a lot easier than building a fortune so that you can retire early. And that was a big realization that I had. A second big realization was something that occurred more slowly. And it's probably just a natural phase change of life. But I became a lot less selfish in my thinking.

And I started to care more about the world in general, the kingdom of God more specifically, my own children more specifically. And I started to realize that it was kind of dumb to spend all my life thinking about pleasure. And I realized that that was a unifying theme through much of the content that I was absorbing at the time, that I was spending all my time listening to people who would go on and on and on and on about pleasure and happiness and personal pleasure, et cetera, this never ending list.

There were differences. Jacob Lundfisker, for example, is not necessarily that way. He's much more of a guy who wants to be creative. But Mr. Money Mustache and Tim Ferriss and all these other people that I was really looking up to and absorbing all their content and really trying to do everything, as I grew older, I've just come to think of their ideology as very immature and very shortsighted.

And to be clear, I don't want you to think I'm saying more than I am. They've matured. They've changed as well. All of us go through a process of maturing in life. And so I don't fault them. But what I realized is I don't want to be one of these guys who sits around and smokes weed and goes on and on about how all I just do is what I want to do, and I don't make a difference in the world.

Like, I want to make a difference in the world. And I expect it to be a rather modest difference, but I still want to make a difference where I can. And as I sorted through my own theology and realized that work is not a curse, work is a blessing, then it's not something that I want to be without.

And I want to work. And I just want to work in things that are meaningful and things for which I'm well-suited. So that was an enormous change for me as I stopped being interested in the fire stuff because it just seems like in many ways, not all, it doesn't have to be, but it seems like something that attracts people to a rather shallow vision.

And I probably came to that conviction somewhere around, I don't know, 2017, probably 2018. But I've watched other people come through that journey as well. And that's really fascinating for me. I'm glad we come through the journey. And again, I'm not upset at anybody. We all go through our own journeys of learning.

And although we wish we could be smarter and find things without learning them the hard way, a lot of times, of course, we wind up learning things the hard way. My point is simply that what resonated with me then doesn't resonate with me now. What resonates with me now is desire for impact and change.

And this leads me to the next topic, which is that a lot of my ideas have changed as well. There's some foundational stuff. For example, I'm no longer as radical as I once was. I think the radical personal finance brand is good branding. It really works well. It's intriguing.

I'm happy with the brand. But I'm not as radical as I once was. And the best expression of this is that as I've grown older, I've realized how many of my radical ideas were not supported by a clear examination of the systems that be. Rather, it was me looking at something and saying, "Well, here's everything that's wrong with it, and here I'm going to fix it." I've come to love the example of Chesterton's fence post, a well-known writer named G.K.

Chesterton. He wrote something. I'll read the original quote. But here's the original quote. He says, "There exists in such a case a certain institution or law, let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, 'I don't see the use of this.

Let us clear it away.' To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer, 'If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me what you do see the use of it, tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.'" And again, that's G.K.

Chesterton. And what I have realized over the last decade is that when I began radical personal finance, I was reformer number one. I was a modern reformer who goes gaily up to the fence and says, "I don't see the use of this fence. Let's clear it away. I don't see the use of working in offices.

Let's get rid of that. I don't see the use of working on a certain time. Let's get rid of that. I don't see the use of working until you're 65. Let's get rid of that. I don't see the use of this, that, and the other thing." Just kind of this very young, immature, find-nothing-but-fault-with-the-system-and-wanna-be-a-fire, a brand-waving revolutionary.

Today, I probably still have that tendency, but today, I'm much more in camp number two, which I want to understand the structures of society. I want to understand the structures of life, of finances, et cetera. I want to understand them very, very well before I call to abolish them.

It's not to say that the opinion and the direction may not still be true, or the overall thing could be true, but I want to be very cautious about that. I want to be wise and affirmation. For example, I still hold lots of unusual opinions. I'd love to see the welfare state disbanded, but if I were, today, anointed emperor of the world, I would not disband the welfare state today.

I would try to put in place some kind of slow plan that would actually come to fruition to make that happen, but it needs to happen slowly. I'm a bit of a firebrand when it comes to the topic of education. I think most people should pull their children out of government schools, but if I were anointed emperor of the universe today, I wouldn't just whole-handed, right away, shutter the government schools and financial examples as well.

I wouldn't just end everything today. I wouldn't end the US dollar. I try to be thoughtful about these things because we need to grow into new changes. I reflected this years ago with a show that I think it is a show on basically the difference between revolution and reformation.

When I was younger, I saw myself as I aligned or identified with the revolutionaries. Today I don't identify with the revolutionaries. I see the revolutionaries as dangerous. Today I identify with the reformers, and I don't want to be a revolutionary. I want to be a reformer. You can never predict the direction a revolution will go, but you can predict the direction that reformation can go.

I can clearly see that this is something that's due to age, due to experience. I can clearly see the frustration that young people have with older people who want to slow things down. I hope that my generation, or at least I, can effectively harness the zeal and enthusiasm that young people have and then point it in a healthy direction and inform it by wisdom.

I don't think that zeal has to always be ignorant. In fact, it shouldn't be. I was never one myself who… I had a lot of zeal. I still have a lot of zeal, but I've always tried to listen to people. If people could explain to me a better way, I'll happily get rid of one set of ideas and adopt another.

I see myself as independent from my ideas in the sense that I can pull any set of ideas out of my mind, put it on the table, look at it from all the different directions, assess it, see if it's valid. If it's valid, I'll pick it up, stick it back in my mind.

If it's not valid, toss it in the garbage can and pick up a new set. And while certainly ideas are connected, I'm not threatened by thinking about ideas and talking about them. And so I hope that we can do a good job of continuing to nurture youthful zeal and enthusiasm, but it should always be informed by the wisdom of the elders.

And I see that more clearly today than I did a decade ago. I'm generally satisfied though with testing ideas. I can share with you some of the ideas that I've tested at Radical Personal Finance. Tested the concept of entrepreneurship specifically. And what I'll tell you about entrepreneurship is it is a solution to many of the things that frustrate people about work and business.

I prize very highly the general sense of independence that I have, the fact that I can say what I want and do what I want. That is very meaningful to me. When I was just starting the podcast, there was a very popular financial brand who had a very established brand, and this guy entreated me to come and work with him.

He could see that we could make a good partnership, et cetera. And I seriously considered it because I admired the brand. I was a big, big fan. I considered the advice very strong and excellent, et cetera, just all good. I was happy with it. I ultimately said no, and I said no to retain my independence of speech and my independence of action.

I knew that there was a good chance that in the coming years, I wanted freedom after having so many restrictions on my speech for so many years in the formal business, I didn't want to establish some kind of sense of duty or obligation to a business partner, that I had to tone down something that I genuinely believe in order to not harm his brand or do something that I thought was right.

And so I stepped aside from-- so I didn't take that partnership. And I think I would have made lots more money if I had, but I haven't really regretted it because I've been grateful to have the freedom that I've had. And so entrepreneurship can provide a lot of those things.

When I look at why people want to be fi, why they want to be financially independent, it a lot of times just comes down to these silly things of I have to be here at a certain time and a certain day, and I don't have any control over my schedule.

And so I appreciate entrepreneurship as one potential solution to those things. However, entrepreneurship brings with it a whole different set of advantages. I think I'm a pretty good match for entrepreneurship, but there's a lot of things about it that I find really frustrating. And there are many times that I have wished just for a job where I just went to work.

And I think that's common. So if you're in a job, don't think that entrepreneurship is going to solve everything. And likewise, don't think that if you're an entrepreneur, everything's going to be solved if you just go and get a job. I now think that I could go back and forth between these things fairly happily.

Things like working in an office, when I was younger, one of my goals was not to have to work in an office. I didn't like going to an office every day. Today I now appreciate an office. I work in an office. I just work in an office alone. But that's one of the things I don't like about entrepreneurship.

I get lonely. And not on an emotional level, but in a sense of feeling like I'm working alone, not on a daily basis, don't sound so pathetic, I get lonely. What I mean is, on a daily life, I'm around a lot of people. But I miss the sense of camaraderie and purpose that comes from working with others.

So there's really something really strong and valuable about being in an office, feeling like you're a part of a team, working towards the team's outcomes and not just my own outcomes. That's something that is really wonderful that I miss. And I haven't found yet the offer or something that would take me, but I've thought about it.

And I have ideas about the kinds of things that I would take, where I would take a job again or I would take a job or an opportunity because of that desire to have a sense of camaraderie with other people and wanting to work with other people towards a common vision, towards a common goal.

Those things make a difference. I've tested other things. I've tested many retirements along the way. I've tested travel. And what I've discovered is simply that there's a reason we live in houses, just as a very practical example. When I was younger, I thought I was pretty obsessed with the idea of just living in an RV.

I was a Tynan fan years before most people were, and I just thought, "Oh, this is how I want to live." And I still am attracted to that. But there's a big difference between being attracted to it as a single man or as a married couple versus doing it with children.

With children, there's a reason why we have the ideas that we have about people going to the suburbs, that in order for a family to build towards something productive, stable infrastructure is very useful. Now, it's not that traveling is bad. We've done full-time RV travel. I have a plan to do more of it in the future because I think it provides a cool set of adventures and experiences that really are hard to get in any other way.

But it doesn't magically solve anything. It doesn't magically fix your life just because you have these external things. One thing I've given up on is finding some kind of thing that's just going to magically fix anything. Changing your location doesn't just fix anything. Changing the time of day that you work doesn't fix anything.

You're still there. You still got to do the work. So, disciplining yourself to sit down and do the work whether you feel like it or not is still kind of a fundamental secret of success. I've changed some perspectives on various financial planning things. Some of those are pretty significant and a lot of them have to do with the sense of being radical.

For example, one that is probably the first one that comes to mind is I used to be against home ownership. In the early days of radical personal finance, I was influenced by Jim Collins' essay on how you're better off renting because you're flexible and you can move here and move there and after all, your money is more productive in the stock market.

I think that's interesting and a useful perspective and I think, again, there's a proper application for that. A 21-year-old guy or girl who's working on building a career, I would say home ownership might turn out to be less of a blessing than flexibility. Stay flexible. On the other hand, I've come to appreciate and also, I felt that a home should be viewed as an expense rather than as an asset, kind of channeling the Robert Kiyosaki, Rich Dad, Poor Dad ideology.

That was my perspective back then. Today I don't see it that way. Today I'm persuaded that investing into a primary home that you live in is a perfectly legitimate form of real estate investing. Not only is it legitimate but it's often quite profitable. John Reed wrote his book, An American Principal Resident is the Most Advantaged Investment in History.

Worst title ever. I don't know why he did that but it's a very good book and it persuaded me of the value of simply investing into your home and that's become something that I've frequently done. Whereas in the past, I would say to a wealthy business owner, a wealthy doctor or something, I would say, "Oh, yeah, you should go ahead and have real estate today." I just say, "Listen, if you want to do real estate, that's fine but just go ahead and buy a more expensive home and upgrade your home systematically throughout your life and that's a perfectly valid form of real estate investing." So I think that's a good example of something changing.

On the whole, there's not a lot in my views on money or investing or financial planning that have changed a lot. The biggest one that I was pretty blind to in the beginning was internationalization. Like most financial planners, I didn't know anything about international planning. When I started doing this, you can be a CFP, certified financial planner and not have a clue about anything that I talk about now international.

I remember when I first—I was doing this show when I first learned about the foreign earned income exclusion. I was like, "What?" And as I've shared, that came in response to me of a moral crisis of basically how on earth can I pay taxes and have a clear conscience?

And I realized, "Oh, I'm not stuck. I can choose who I pay taxes to. I can actually choose whether or not I pay taxes." And that was one of the things that launched the whole international space. So that would be a big thing as I now see international planning as something that really everyone should do to some degree as I teach in my International Skate Planning course, but not something that is—it's something everyone should do to some degree, but it's—and it should be more mainstream.

And it is becoming mainstream, which I'm glad about. So that would be a big change. I have a list of other things, but I won't go deeply into them at the moment. But I've tried to track the things that have changed and the things that haven't changed. On the whole, probably the biggest one was my own opinion of early retirement and of retirement in general.

I thought, "Oh, okay, you can just navigate through it." In terms of early retirement, it was in the beginning of the show where I did shows on kind of the retirement scam. But then I realized and I still realize that work is such a profoundly valuable part of our life, and it's how we contribute to the world around us.

All the great change that we all want to see in the world is going to come from work. That work doesn't have to be paid, doesn't have to come with money, but it does need to come, it does need to happen, and it is a valuable component of our overall life.

I thought it would be fun now to share with you some thoughts about individual episodes of Radical Personal Finance, share with you some of the more popular episodes, share with you a few of my favorites, share with you the most controversial episodes, et cetera. Let's begin with the most popular.

As of this current recording, the most popular episode of Radical Personal Finance ever was episode 666, How to Prepare for the Coming Recession, followed by episode 716, called How to Profit from a Recession. It's interesting, we certainly see that the most bad news, clickbait works, first of all. So if I try to not use too much clickbait, but clickbait works, and I say how to prepare for the coming recession, then there's an element of people who want to just hear, wait a second, how do I prepare for it?

And also, is there a recession coming? So that's clearly a component of it. And then also, our eyes are attracted to bad news far more than good news. We hear a lot about when the stock market is falling apart. We don't hear so much when the stock market is doing well.

And so let's just be aware of that with regard to overall psychological understanding. I'm proud of those episodes. I think they're useful. I've tried to always strike a tone of sensibleness, and yet seriousness. I've tried to treat topics with seriousness, and yet be sensible. So those would be the two most popular.

If you're curious, the next one is how to read a book, and then how to set financial goals. There was really probably a golden time in those download numbers where some of the most popular ones are from episodes in the high 600s and early 700s. Most of the most popular episodes come from that time.

And that was before the coronavirus pandemic. So that was 2019, 2020, and that was when the podcast was getting the highest number of podcast downloads. Then when coronavirus came on, it seemed to change the podcast listening experience. And downloads have been down across the industry since then. And then there's been some technical changes that have happened behind the scenes that have also created changes in the download numbers.

So those are most of the highest shows for me come from the high 600s and the lower 700s. There are, I'll skip kind of the least popular shows because that's not something that's interesting necessarily, but it's been interesting to me to watch how I'm basically incapable of predicting what is the most popular.

And that's been frustrating because I'd like to plan and create popular content. I've done that a little bit. One of the things I said I was going to do in the early days of the show was that I was going to teach my way through the CFP curriculum. That was something that I originally said I would do, but I kind of, I didn't intentionally abandon it, but I just practically abandoned it after several dozen episodes because I just found that people didn't listen to those and yet they required enormous amounts of time to create.

And the things that people listened to were often things that I just sat down and had an idea and boom, went for and then people listened to them. So that was something that I learned from that perspective. Some of my favorite episodes, I've really enjoyed a lot of the series that I have done.

One of my favorites was the asset protection for mere mortals series. I enjoyed that because it dealt with a technical area of financial planning that is wildly under discussed in serious ways. And I was satisfied with, I love the sense of empowerment that I got, that I could empower ordinary people to protect their assets so that they, in a time that they might most need it.

One of my favorite series was also kind of foundational philosophy series, my seven rings of Liberty series, I really loved doing that one because I feel like in that series I encapsulated the ideas that lead to a free lifestyle. And while they're not easy to implement, I think that they are the most effective way of accomplishing some of the things that people are looking for Liberty with.

I have this continual challenge that I try to answer people's questions and what people are looking for, but I don't see a lot of the financial solutions as the fast and straightforward way to achieve the kind of lifestyle you want. And so when I started that podcast series and I talked about ring number one, which is spiritual Liberty, to me, that drives at the heart of what people are trying to do.

They're trying to solve things with money where their spirit is broken. But if you can find spiritual Liberty, you can be free no matter what the money looks like. And I think that's something that's dramatically under-discussed, and we talked about all the different lifestyle design things that for me have really paid off.

So that was one of my favorite series, and I think the third one that I really loved doing recently was the Investing in Your Children series. That series was longer than I intended, but once again, it was me indulging that frustration of years of people saying, "What about my 529 plan?" And my answer is, "Your 529 plan is great, but it's not going to do what you're hoping it does for you because it's only one thing, and what you need is this more comprehensive plan, this more comprehensive approach.

And if you'll do these other things, then the 529 plan is completely unnecessary." And it's often hard for me to judge with things like that, those kinds of ideas. It's hard for me to judge how much people can implement them. I'm something of an extremist by nature. When someone says, "This is really hard," I say, "Ooh, let me pay attention." And I'm aware, though, that hard things are hard to do, but you do hard things and you get great results.

But I don't know, I just record stuff and let things go where they may be. Most controversial episodes of radical personal finance, well, there's one touching on hot button topics. Probably to date still, probably the most controversial one was, I think 181, 181. I talked about why we need more of a discussion of politics, religion, and I don't know, something else in financial discussions.

And obviously, a bit of an inflammatory title here. Why we need more discussion of politics, religion, philosophy, morality, and ethics in finance, not less. That was the title of it. And what I shared in that episode was, I had just read, I had an enormous epiphany. This was 2015 when I did that podcast episode.

And this was right at the time of the passing of the Obergefell decision in the United States, legalizing same-sex marriage in the United States. And as I was following those events, I read a book called After the Ball by Hunter Madsen and Kirk something or other, sorry, I can't remember the other author's name.

But they had written a book called After the Ball, How America Will Lose Its Fear of Gays in the '90s. And when I read the book, I was absolutely blown away that for the first time in my life, I understood and could believe how societal influence and propaganda works.

I had been aware of the concept of societal change prior to that. How could you not? I had been aware of conspiracy theories, et cetera. How could you not be at least aware of some of these things? But I've never been a big believer in most of those things.

And a lot of it is just that I don't understand how most conspiracies could come to fruition. So for example, there are two ideas that I think some people hold. Idea number one is that government is incompetent. And idea number two is that government is engaged in a vast conspiracy.

And I don't see how either those ideas can go together. Either you believe that governments are incompetent and thus most big conspiracies, at least on a governmental level, can't happen. Or you believe that government is highly competent and thus elaborate, carefully held, multigenerational conspiracies can come true. Now, that may be a simplistic expression of the idea, but it's always bothered me.

But when I finally read the book After the Ball and I realized I could look back on my entire lifetime growing up in the '90s and the '90s and the 2000s, leading up to 2015, that not only was there the single largest measured change in opinion in recorded history where the entire country in about 15 years went from strongly opposing the concept of same-sex marriage to strongly supporting it.

And I could see all the politicians of my lifetime—President Obama was for same-sex marriage, then he was against same-sex marriage to get elected the first time, then he was for same-sex marriage to get elected the second time, and just kind of this flip-flopping. And I never understood it. And when I finally read After the Ball, it just opened my eyes in an astonishing way because I realized, "Wait a second, I was a victim of all these societal things.

I was present for all of these." And as a young man, that was an enormous eye-opener for me because it was one of those things where for the first time in your life, when you're young, the world that you're born into is the world that you conceive of. If I try to describe to my children how when my dad would come back from a business trip, we would go and wait for him at the gate and he would walk off the jetway and we were there hanging out and giving him a hug.

They have no concept of that because their entire concept of airports is this elaborate security theater that we all go through all the time. And so they will have a hard time believing. So when you're young, you have a hard time believing that the world was different than how it is in your childhood.

But then as you start to live for a while, you start to see change and you realize that, "Wow, this is different, that's different, this is different." And for me, reading that book was just an enormous epiphany. And it really impressed me enormously because I could, for the first time, see how societal change happens and to see how societal change is manipulated and how you and I are manipulated by propaganda and those who desire to change us.

And sometimes they have good intentions, sometimes they don't. You judge for yourself. But an awareness of that is really fundamental. As part of my homeschooling curriculum for my children, I plan to have a very deep dive into propaganda so that we can understand it so we have a good defense mechanism.

Anyway, that one is the one that I... That episode though, I published the episode and then non-stop for the next week, non-stop emails, non-stop comments on the show of, "Josh, you hate gay people, blah, blah, blah," just never ending. And that was good. It was hard for me. I don't know.

I think I cried. I don't remember. I just know it was really hard because I'm a people pleaser. I like people to... I want everyone to be happy. I don't like to disagree with people. I don't ever like to tell people they're wrong. I'm a people pleaser. But that experience hardened my skin quite a lot and I was really grateful for it.

What I find fascinating is passing on since then, 2015, I should go back and listen to that show, but here we are almost 10 years later and the trends have only continued and we continue to be subjected to the same social manipulation tactics, but I see people waking up and paying attention to that.

So it'd be interesting. I haven't listened to that show, but interesting for me to go back and listen to what I actually said and consider it. Other controversial ones. The only shows that I've only ever deleted in the history of radical personal finance, one show, one podcast, and that was the interview that I did with Andrew Tate.

This was a few years ago and I interviewed Andrew. I observe a lot of things and so I try to keep my proverbial fingers in the stream of culture and understand what's happening. And I saw Andrew and his content coming to the fore and I followed him closely because Andrew has some, he's an incredibly smart man and incredibly well-spoken.

He has honed his craft very, very diligently and a lot of his ideas are very, very useful and a lot of them are very appealing. So I saw him coming up and I asked him for an interview and he said yes. And I did it because I've learned now long enough, I've recognized that I'm not bad at seeing trends.

Like I can see trends happening and I can predict with some degree of confidence where they're going. I haven't been able to figure out how to apply this to financial markets but I can see this with social trends at least to some degree and so I knew Andrew was getting ready to blow up.

So I was clout chasing a little bit, asked him for an interview and his background, his business, his persona, a lot of his public persona is for shock value. He has embraced the idea that there's no such thing as bad publicity but a lot of his background is very distasteful to me but I also felt like he was good at offering ideas.

Anyway, point is I asked him for an interview and I interviewed him and it was a good interview. I thought I did a pretty good job with it and I published it and then a couple days later I got an email from a listener, this wonderful sweet woman that wrote me a very nice email and talking about persuasion and whatnot, just kind of a textbook case of persuasion and she wrote me this story and she said Joshua, I don't fault you for interviewing Andrew Tate and talking about interviewing and et cetera and I don't fault you for that but she said let me tell you my story and she told the story of how her daughter from her perspective, how her daughter was victimized and was by a predator and was pressured into, was basically sex trafficked and had faced all these difficult situations and she, I don't know, I don't remember all the details of the letter.

What I remember is her tone and she was so kind, she was so respectful, she didn't yell at me, she didn't say take the showdown, she didn't say anything just to share her story and then she asked the question, is this who you want to be associated with? And she had just that sweet motherly, grandmotherly tone that it really shook me and I thought no, I don't want to be associated with this.

I do, I think today especially, I would say Andrew is a predator and if I'm involved in promoting a predator, what moral guilt do I share in that? And on the one hand, and I've never solved this because generally speaking, I'm a free speech guy, I want to hear from people and so I want journalists to do their job, I want journalists to go and interview nasty evil people, I want psychologists to interview people on death row, I read all the terrorist manifestos, like I want to hear what people say and what people think because I don't think that we do right when we hide from information and I don't know, that just to me is, so I don't like to be the guy who engages in censorship, like that's not me, I try not to censor.

But then on the other hand, there is obviously some element of responsibility, so I may go and I go and read terrorist manifestos but I don't publish them and so then as a publisher, you feel like you have some sense of responsibility and I just, I don't know, so I don't know if I made the right decision, I took the show down and I've gone back and forth and back and forth and back and forth on should I publish it, should I not publish it, should I publish it, should I not publish it and it's, I could talk about it with my wife, she's like, why do you, just who cares, move on with your life but like, but babe, freedom of speech, like I don't want to be censoring people, it's like, but come on, it is, anyway, I still don't know if I did the right thing on taking that down.

It was just a split second decision, it was just the, I don't know, I just imagined talking to my mom about it and my mom would say, Joshua, are you really promoting this guy who's made his fortune off of pornography, like that's who you want to be? And I realized that I was clout chasing quite a lot and so who knows, I never figured out whether that was the right decision but since I took it down, then I just figured, well, it's down and I told a friend of mine that I was going to put it back up and then I went through endless months of deliberations on it and I still don't, I don't know how to reconcile that, those decisions.

I think if I were doing it over today, I wouldn't have taken it down but that doesn't mean that I want to republish it and then the problem was that then at the time, Andrew was controversial but not, there wasn't as much evidence of who he really was at that time and to be clear, I'm not ascribing to Andrew legal guilt.

I believe in innocent until proven guilty in a court of law and even then, legal systems can be messed up but I think there's enough evidence that there's abundant court evidence to confirm my own assessment that Andrew is a very smart and well-spoken predator and I don't really like predators.

I don't like bullies. I don't like predators. I don't like people who prey on men and I'm not alleging, for those of you who are big Andrew Tate fans, I'm not alleging anything that even based on court documents of his alleged crimes, I'm just talking about things from his own mouth of the way that he made his money and so as much as I enjoyed the conversation and as much as I thought it was, I had tried to walk that line, I don't know, that was the one episode of Radical Personal Finance that I deleted out of a thousand.

I've deleted probably, I pulled, you know, a few months ago, I pulled a question from a Friday Q&A show because I had answered it poorly. Other than that, I don't remember ever deleting anything else. It's all there. Good, bad, ugly, long-winded, crisp, concise, it's all there for you to see and that was always my hope.

That was always my idea was that, and I said this in the very beginning, I'll leave up the early episode so that other people can see that you don't have to be great to start but you got to start to be great and you can go back and you can see early episodes on some things I've gotten a lot better, on a few things I've come to the conclusion that I've been standing still.

Recently my forays into the world of deliberate practice really showed me that I have not been engaging in deliberate practice with my speaking abilities. I've been engaging in naive practice, just doing more of the same and not getting better and that annoys me so I'm changing that. So I intend to be a lot better 10 years from now than I am today.

And so now the obvious concluding transition is, "Alright Joshua, what's next?" I can hear you saying, "Alright, that's all well and interesting and it's kind of fun to talk about old times but after all the past is dead and gone, what's next? What's your plans?" Well, I'm going to disappoint you by not publicly telling you what's next but rather just say watch and see.

And the reason is simply that I have learned over the years that ideas are a dime a dozen, it's great to talk about plans but it's meaningless, all that matters is execution. Ideas are a dime a dozen, execution is everything, doing is everything. And I've learned that the hard way because being a good talker, I'm also good at talking to myself and I've realized and there's some good data behind this from the scientific psychological community but talking about the things that you're going to do gives you a little bit of a burst, a little bit of a dopamine hit of, "Hey, this feels good." And you kind of feel like you've achieved something because you've talked about it.

But then in reality you've achieved nothing and all you've done is talk about it. And I've found that this is a great problem for me. It's very easy to say all the things that you're going to do but it's harder to actually do those things. And this has been a significant form of frustration for me over the past years, especially over the past five to eight years.

In some ways over the last decade, I felt like I'm swimming in mud instead of swimming in water. And I can identify a few reasons for them, some explainable and understandable, some not so much. So one obvious thing is that I have five children and so those responsibilities require time, attention, distraction, all of those things.

And so I'm not as effective of a businessman as I was when I was single on that regard just because I have more weight on my shoulders. And it's a good thing. I think it drives me to do more, accomplish more, but it also makes it more difficult to accomplish.

And so that's been one factor. Another factor is just the fracturing of my mind. I've been victimized by the same trends that we all have been victimized of, of fracturing of attention, fracturing of our ability to pay attention. I remember this going back very early and for me, I can clearly remember the world of pre-Firefox tabbed browsing versus post.

I'm not kidding. I was in high school when Firefox came out and I think it was them that invented tabbed browsing. And at the time, my family, we had computers and whatnot before a lot of other people did because my dad was a software engineer. But at the time, the internet was a linear function.

And for someone who's interested in everything, the internet was a great boon to me. I grew up in a fairly quiet way. I read a lot. We never had a TV in the house, so I didn't have my attention distracted by those things. And so I read books and I had an enormously powerful attention span.

And then we had the internet and now I could indulge all of these different interests. And I distinctly remember when we had the concept of tabbed browsing. For me, it was the greatest thing in the history of humanity because now, instead of having to follow a train of thinking forward and backward, I could click on every shiny little thing and I could open up 50 tabs in my browser window or whatever the limit was at that time.

And I loved it because I could absorb everything. But I noticed how that approach started to harm my attention span. I noticed that I would be halfway down a web page and now I was just bored and I would click to the next web page, click to the next tab in the browser.

And I didn't like how that felt. And I started very early at that time to try to pay attention to it and be careful of it. And over the years, I've had times of advancement and times of retrenchment, of more distracted, less distracted. But in some ways, over the last 10 years, it's been a fight and I think it seems like it's a fight for all of us.

It's not just me because not only is it now we have tabbed browsing, but now we have endless opportunities for distraction. And so cultivating the ability to do important, meaningful work without distraction and cultivating the ability to pay attention to hard work, that's a never-ending challenge. And I'm doing my very best, but I am frustrated with my results at times.

And I guess the final reason would simply be one of the great challenges of an entrepreneur is to know what to do. Again, when I think about the swimming in mud, a big portion of it is basically represented by me sitting at my desk having a bazillion things I could do and seeing how every single one of them could be successful and could lead me in the direction that I want to go and not knowing how to choose among them.

And that's very different than a job. In a job, your boss says, "Here, do this." Or if you are a leader in the company, you come together with other people, you talk to the boss and the boss says, "We want to go in this direction," you talk about plans and you commit and say, "This is what we're going to do." But as a solopreneur, you can go in any number of directions and you can change on a dime and you can pivot and you can switch and you can do all kinds of things.

And as a very creative person who's good at coming up with ideas, I am king of sitting down and writing a list of ideas and they all sound super new and enthusiastic and exciting to me. And interestingly, kind of a classic cycle for me goes basically like this. I have the idea to write a tweet.

So I sit down to write a tweet and then I start writing the tweet and I realize, "You know what? This is probably a good podcast episode." So I expand my tweet into a podcast episode. Then as I'm in the middle of writing the outline for the podcast episode, I realize, "Nah, this is not an episode.

This is a series. Because wouldn't this be a great series?" So I start expanding into a series and then I realize I've got such good stuff that I'm like, "This should be a course. Like if I just created a course on this, that'd be so much more helpful." And so then as I'm most of the way into the course, then I'm like, "No, you know what?

Instead of a course, this should be an entirely different brand. Like this would just be amazing business if I built this." So then I go and buy a URL for the brand and stick it into my stable of URLs. And then it's such a big project that I don't know where to begin.

And so I just quit because I've got 30 pages of notes on something that could be its own brand and I don't even have a tweet. And so I hope that you'll laugh at me because it's ridiculous to say it out loud, but I believe in honesty. But that's basically the experience that I've had of so many things.

I've got a dozen courses with dozens and dozens of pages of notes, of outlines, of these elaborate things that I have built of great content. And then I've been frustrated by my ability to get that stuff out and serve anybody with it because, "Oh, it's so good. It should be its own separate thing." So as me trying to deal with that, I have told myself to stop talking about things that I'm going to do and just do stuff and then talk about what I've done and to do the same thing to myself as well.

So I still set goals and ambitions, but I'm trying to avoid the deadly trap of thinking that you made progress just because you wrote your goals down or talking about your goals because that's something that I think really happens. You say, "This is what I'm going to do," and you feel great because you talked about what you're going to do.

But now that you feel great, you move on to something else because you talked about it. And in reality, talking about it doesn't matter. The ideas don't matter. The only thing that matters is execution, execution, doing, doing, doing, doing. And that's been something that I'm doing. So as an expression of that, forgive me if I just simply sidestep the question about what are Joshua's plans?

What is Joshua going to do and watch me and come along for the ride? And with that, I want to close with just a very genuine thank you because I have been extremely fortunate in my life. I've been extremely blessed. And if I reflect on the last 10 years, it's been an adventure.

And it's been an adventure if I had to make the same decision over again, I would make the same decision over again. Even though not everything has worked out like I've liked, there's been a lot of disappointment, a lot of pain, a lot of frustration, a lot of disillusionment, all kinds of negative stuff.

But at the end of the day, I'm proud of what I've done. I'm proud of myself for saying what I was going to do and then doing it. I'm proud of myself for sticking through it when it's been difficult. I'm proud of myself for sticking to my guns and not backing down.

Even if I was wrong, even if I want to change, I'm not going to just do that. And that's been the hardest thing for me. I have not enjoyed being a public figure. And it's not because of anything that you've done, it's just that it's uncomfortable. It's uncomfortable to know that your words and your ideas impact others.

It's uncomfortable to know that if you're wrong on something and you persuaded someone to have something and then you have to say you're wrong, that's really uncomfortable. I haven't enjoyed having all of my ideas on record in terms of what that means because sometimes you'd like to go and erase the past.

And I've certainly thought many times about just doing that. I've thought many times about deleting everything and disappearing into obscurity again. That is an option and it's a very attractive option to me. I don't crave fame in any way, shape, or form. I run from it and I consciously do things that try to avoid it, to avoid it.

However, because of you and the wonderful relationship that I've built with you over the years, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to disappear from the internet. I'm going to keep pressing forward because I believe that I need to put as simply as that. I believe that I need to and I want to.

I want to be useful in this world. I want to be useful to you. I want to serve you and I want to be useful in my corner of the world to see, to do something if at all possible, to see to the flourishing and the betterment of my fellow man.

And I want to see our world continue on an arc towards justice and righteousness and peace and prosperity. I want to see people living satisfied lives, contented lives. I want to see families prosper and thrive. I want to see young people grow up and in safety and security and surrounded by love, free of trauma, able to expand in the world.

I want to see, I want to see a further expression of the kingdom of God in this world. I want to see a furthering of human flourishing. I want to see poverty eradicated. I want to see peace brought on a global basis. Now obviously I think we all do, right?

Those are things that we all do. We all want to see that. And it's one thing to want something and it's another thing to actually do it. But if you want to see something happen, then the most rewarding and fulfilling thing that you can do is to work at making it happen.

Because while we all acknowledge that it's unlikely that the fullness of any of these things will occur within a single lifetime or within because of a single person's efforts, that doesn't diminish the importance of the task. It doesn't diminish the importance of a single person laboring in obscurity because that person may be even unknowingly laying a road, a pathway for someone else to follow who picks up their work and moves on.

And we want to see, and while it may be frustrating how limited we are on a daily basis or a weekly basis or a yearly basis, when you reflect on something like a decade, you can see that some progress can be made in a decade. And that's exciting. And when you recognize that most of us may have five or six decades of, or more hopefully, five to eight decades of productivity within us, then that's enough time to feel like we can make a difference in something.

I am very grateful to have made a difference with my decade of work. I have a smile file of the many notes that I've received telling me about the difference that I've made. And I know that that's real. And I really am grateful for that. And so when I look forward and I think about what could possibly be accomplished in another five decades of work, then I start to get excited.

And that's really what I want to do is I want to feel like my work is useful to other people in accomplishing that global vision that we all have. And I mean global as a-- anyway, I don't have to define all my terms. So I just want to say thank you because the fact that you're here listening to me right now is rewarding, and I will do my best to try to find, uncover, and teach the most useful impactful ideas that I'm able to find.

And I hope that you will take those ideas, build on them, and then turn around and teach me and implement them and teach your neighbor. That's always been my goal. And then along the way, I have been able to live a very rewarding lifestyle because of it. And I'm very grateful for that as well.

I don't take that for granted as well. I live a very rewarding lifestyle, fairly simple, fairly quiet, but I find it very rewarding as well. And it's something where I'm just grateful the opportunities we have. We live in such an amazing time to be alive. If I got picked up and plucked back in 100 years ago or 300 years ago, my life decisions and life choices would be very limited.

I'd probably be hoeing my row of corn somewhere in the world. And I'm sure there are many great things about that, but that doesn't appeal to me, doesn't appeal to me at all. And so the many modern choices that we have of how we live in today's world are overwhelming at times, but they're very rewarding.

So I just want to say thank you. Thank you for being here, and I really appreciate you, and I'll be back with you very soon.