- Mom? - Yeah? - How much longer? - Ask the car, Ben. - Hey Mercedes, what's our ETA? - 12 minutes. - Mom? - Mm? - Is it gonna rain? - Ask the car. - Hey Mercedes, what's the forecast? - Sunny all day. - Mom, can I get a tattoo?

- Ask the ca-- Nice try. - With MBUX Voice Command, an AI that studies your preferences, Mercedes-Benz SUVs are the embodiment of safety, convenience, and intelligence. Go to mbusa.com to learn more. - MBUX Command simulated. - Welcome to Radical Personal Finance. My name is Joshua Sheets, and today on the show, I'd like to give you just a quick personal report on the recently concluded inaugural Radical Personal Finance Family Camp.

Been about a week and a half now since we wrapped up the inaugural RPF Family Camp in Seymour, Indiana, and I wanted just to share with you publicly a little bit about it. Some of you were able to come, but of course many of you weren't able to come, and I thought I owe you, since I talked to you and told you it was gonna be happening, I wanted to give you a public report and just share with you a little bit about the event and how it went.

Put simply, I was enormously satisfied with the event. Hosting an in-person, what I call a family camp, hosting an in-person event in the way that we did it is something that I have wanted to do for a very long time. It's my basic working hypothesis that going forward in the coming years, the best and most satisfying relationships are going to be those that exploit all of the wonder and goodness and usefulness and convenience and just fantasticness of digital connectivity, as well as all of the wonderful fantasticness of in-person relationships.

The trend that I've observed for quite a while is that it's very difficult to run effectively an all-virtual company. It's possible. You may run a department and be leading a team of a dozen computer coders and engineers spread out all around the world, and you can do that sort of effectively from many different places, but it's really hard to do that effectively if you're not building in-person relationships, real in-person relationships.

On the other hand, it's difficult sometimes for us to be completely surrounded at all times with the kind of people that we'd like to be together with in physical space at all times. We all have different reasons why we live where we live, and it can be hard to find like-minded people in a local area.

And so I believe that the best possible outcome for us going forward in the future is to try to maximize both of these things. And so if you're running a company or a department where you have people spread out around the world, I think your best practice would generally be to at least a couple times a year bring your entire team together for several days, enough time to engage in real activities, real business, real productive meetings, but also lots of time just to hang out in a casual unstructured format.

And that's something that I, that's a principle that I think also applies to what I've wanted to do at Radical Personal Finance. For a long time, I've had a dream and a vision of bringing together like-minded people who want to just spend time together, want to build friendships and relationships.

And I think that having something like this show that allows a good form of connectedness is an ideal way to advance ideas, create thought-provoking content, teach people effectively about certain things, but that we should go the next step forward and bring people together in person. Unfortunately, while it's been my dream for a significant amount of time, my wife and I have been busy with a bunch of little babies in our house.

And due to the demands of taking care of babies, it just wasn't something that I've been able to effectively accomplish. If we were to go all the way back to 2017, I started, actually about 2014, I started meeting up with people at events that I would go to. Then again, we started to have a few babies and I stopped going to so many events.

And then after that, we traveled across the country in 2018. And one of the dreams that I had of that trip was to host meetups everywhere we went. I was gonna go from city to city to city. We were gonna have our RV and we were gonna host meetups.

As it turns out, we did it a few times, but it was simply too difficult to figure out the logistics of it. And it was also difficult when coming together for a meetup of just say a three or four hour event, it was difficult for there to be enough time for me to interact effectively with the listener, with all of you in the way that I really enjoy.

I want to interact with people, but it's difficult to do it in an environment where let's say I'm there for two or three hours and there's 20, 30, 40 people. That leads to just doing the math, a conversation of two or three or four or five minutes each. And I've done that in many cities around the United States and just found that I really love meeting people, but it's hard to have the kind of connection that I would like to have of being able to spend a few days together.

And so one of the goals that I've had as we've been getting out of Babyville and I've been able to get things squared away to where I can travel again and I can do this kind of thing, one of the goals that I've had is to do more in-person events.

And it started with the event that I did in Panama a few months ago with Mikel Thorup. That was fantastic. Really loved getting to know my listeners that came and we were able to hang out together for almost a week on a pretty deep level. And just all the time together was great.

We did all kinds of events and presentations and classes, but more importantly or more fun, we just go for cocktails on the rooftop at Casco Viejo or go and travel on the bus together. And it gave us time to talk about anything and everything and really get to know one another.

And it was a really, a really wonderful experience for me and a really wonderful experience for all of my listeners who came to that event. And so then I was excited to follow that up with the Radical Personal Finance Family Camp, because one of the challenges simply is that I don't want my business life to be isolated and for me to go away and do my business thing and leave my family behind.

One of the reasons I always had for building the kind of business that I run is to have something like a family integrated business. While I will always do the main work, I want to use my business as a strategic part of my life and lifestyle and family. I want my wife to be involved with it.

I want her to be able to have opportunities to express her skills and talents in the context of business. I want my children to be able to be involved with my business. I want my business to be something that gives us a platform for them to learn important skills that are necessary for their long-term growth and their success.

I, of course, want to use my business to pay all of the relevant people and enjoy some of the tax benefits that can come from hiring family members, employees, and all of that stuff too. But more importantly, it's just the training aspects for me. I don't think that children should be segregated from society and locked away in armed compounds where they're just separated from society.

I think that the natural place for children and young people is to be integrated into society in an age-diffuse way where they're interacting with people of their own age and also people of varying ages, younger, older. I think that's the healthiest environment for human beings to be in. And so for me, my business has always formed an important part of my plan to do that.

It's just that it's hard to do that with babies. You've got to get out of baby stage. So Radical Personal Finance Family Camp was, for me, just an enormously important part of my long-term plan and enormously important part of what I wanted to do. It never would have happened, however, if it weren't for a long-time listener to the show and personal friend of mine who basically took away all my excuses.

I told the story, and I'm not gonna tell the story here publicly 'cause I told it at the camp, and we'll leave some things for it. But a friend of mine basically arranged all the details and said, "Joshua, I think we should do a camp, "and I've made it easy for you." And he made it so easy for me, I couldn't say no.

What we didn't know, however, going into the camp was exactly what to offer. As you might guess and understand, when you're gonna create something, you have to offer something to the market and see what the market says to it. And you can do customer research, you can do surveys, you can talk to people, but at the end of the day, it's hard to understand exactly what the market wants until you offer it and see who buys and see what happens.

And even if you can do great customer research about what people want, in reality, you still have to go through the process of creating something, offering it to the market, and seeing what people actually pay for. Because sometimes what people say they want and then what they really want are different, and you know that based upon people who click buy and send you money.

I think it was Henry Ford who said, "If I'd asked the people what they wanted, "they would have all said a faster horse." Sometimes we don't know exactly what we want. So in creating this camp, what our idea was was to create an event that would focus on bringing people together to build relationships, but then would also provide some justification of excuses for being together in order and structure for the events.

So we came up with the idea of basically a four-day, three-night event, starting on Thursday, going through till Sunday. And we tried to put together a diverse track of activities. So I taught some classes on finance, tried to keep it somewhat general and broad so that I would have the ability to respond to the questions that were in the room.

Rather than making this, I didn't create a hyper-specialized tax seminars or hyper-specialized asset protection seminar. Just tried to keep it broad and inclusive so that I could respond to whatever was in the room and questions that were there. Then we put together what we called a lifestyle track. And what we were imagining is wanting to build something that would be appealing to families.

So I was imagining that if your relationships, your relationship with your wife or husband is anything like mine, I'm interested in finance and my wife, not so much. And so we thought, well, how could we create something that would be appealing to couples where one person is interested in one thing and the other person interested in something else?

And so we created what we called a lifestyle track. And we tried to come up with a list of seminars and classes that would be appealing to different people based upon the kinds of things that are appealing to me and the kinds of things that I talk about and figuring that you guys are probably something like me and interested in similar things.

Then we tried to create something that would be attractive for people of varying ages. So of course, I'm middle-aged and we have some things that were helpful for middle-aged and older people. Then we tried to create some stuff for younger people. We wound up having a wonderful teenage entrepreneur who has created a very successful business.

Come and make presentations and that was of special interest to our teens and young people. And then we created all kinds of camp activities for younger children. Because the way that we hosted this particular event was that I rented an entire basically church camp facility. Little bit in the off season, it was springtime.

So it was kind of a guess of what the weather would turn out to be. But that was when we were able to get the facility. So it worked out really well. And I'm just thankful to you guys. The first entire camp that we had rented, the first entire thing sold out in less than a week.

It was six days and I sold the last one, last spot that we had available, which was just amazingly encouraging to me to see your response, to see that you were willing to come and sign up. So I went back to the facility and I was able to negotiate another about 15 rooms and cabins on top of the initial one that I had done.

And then we sold those out in about another week as well. So it turns out the total number of attendees was just north of 160. I forget if it was 161 or 163, something like that. Just a little bit more than 160, which I thought was a great size for this event.

I was able to spend time with just about everybody for at least various conversations, which I really loved. And it turned out really, really well. The thing that the first couple of days we had cold and rainy weather. And so thankfully we had to adapt our schedule a little bit, but that all worked out.

Then it turned warm and sunny and beautiful in the last couple of days, which was wonderful. And the feedback from every attendee was really positive. We issued a survey at the end of the event and about 70%, when we asked people, would you come next time? Yes, maybe, and no.

About 70% of the people said yes. The about remaining 30%, about 28% or whatever it turned out said maybe, depending on where it is in details. And then we had one no, which the no had a wonderful note that said, "I really loved it. "I had a great time.

"It was just too far away." Which was totally, of course, totally wonderful. And people came from all around the country, which was just an amazing, what an honor. And I think everybody had a great time. The thing that I found most interesting was how everyone seemed to click really well, even people of very diverse backgrounds.

I was so pleased to see that probably due to the filtration of you being willing to listen to me, we just had the nicest group of people who were able to come together and engage with one another. And so people had many things in common, but even if we didn't have many things in common, other than just simply being connected through this platform through Radical Personal Finance, we found commonality in our ability to engage in important things and engage in important conversations.

There was just such an attitude of respect and appreciation for other human beings and I found it enormously refreshing. We talked, we had conversations about all different stuff. Obviously some stuff finance, some stuff lifestyle related, plenty of just personal interactions. And my listeners, you all had just wonderful things to say to me, which I really was grateful for.

But what I really enjoyed was seeing how within a very short period of time, within a day or two, as I would dip in and out of different conversations and different campfire circles, I found that we were interacting with one another on serious things and really getting the benefit of real true diversity.

And that's something that I feel is so often lacking in our world today. I have an annoyance with the way that the word diversity has come to be used in our current environment. In its current usage, the term diversity means basically what color is your skin and what is your gender expression.

That's about the limit of diversity as it's understood today. I don't care much myself for that kind of diversity. I don't think the color of your skin or your gender really matters. I think what's much more important is the diversity of your thoughts, your ideas, your background, your experiences, those kinds of things are the kind of diversity that I think is genuinely productive.

And it was just such a great expression of people from diverse backgrounds and diverse experiences, but yet shared with a very common desire to improve things, improve the world and see things better. And I was amazed, I mean, put frankly, it's a good thing that I'm grateful that so many of you listen to this show.

And honestly, I wonder sometimes why you do because so many of my listeners are just incredibly impressive people. And that came out in the actual event, just time over and time over. I made several friends there among my listeners and attendees that I hope are friends for life. And I'm just incredibly impressed by you guys.

You guys are smart, driven people, and it's just an honor to be involved with you. So it was, if the event could have gone better, I don't know how. We had some various wrinkles and things, but that was all first time learnings. I think for the most part, we smoothed, everything worked out.

The worst thing that was about to happen was I had made a mistake. I was the one who'd made all the bedroom assignments and cabin assignments. And it was a little bit of a puzzle to try to figure out how to put people together because I had this two facilities that were separated by a significant walk.

And so I was trying to figure out how do I do it? I'm trying to pack everyone together and trying to put like, and I tried to put, I was hoping that we could use the camp environment to facilitate interaction. So unlike being in some hotel where everyone goes off to their own room, I really liked the idea of a camp environment.

This camp was beautiful. It was great. It was modern up to date, but it was still a camp. It was a little bit, it was rustic. It's a camp, but it's a recently built camp and perfectly adequate facilities. So no one was really suffering. So I worked really hard to try to put people together where it would be easy for them to use communal areas and hopefully make friends with people around them and all of that.

Then at check-in, everything's going really well. Everyone's getting all settled in and I had worked out the rooms to just perfectly. I sold the exact maximum number of tickets that I could. And then I get there and a family arrives that I don't have a cabin for. And I just didn't even have them on my list.

It was a moment of potential disaster, but thankfully I was able to avert it and made one quick change, two quick changes of room assignments and everything worked out. So there were growing pains and there were other issues that came up, but on the whole, it worked out really, really beautifully.

And I was enormously encouraged by that. So I just share that as a report. I'm not publishing videos or audios or anything from the event. I really want to, I have the privilege of being able to speak to you with a microphone whenever I want and I can turn on a camera whenever I want.

And I really think that in many cases, electronic eyes around us mess up real human connection. And so I don't wanna, I'm not trying to create something that this particular event was not designed to be anything that was live streamed. I'm not sharing any of the audio publicly. It was a real interactions with people who were there.

So what does the future hold? Well, I would say this was certainly the inaugural event and I will certainly repeat this event in the future. I'm trying to figure out exactly how to do that in balancing future events. There's basically three things that I'm trying to juggle. The first one is simply what the actual offering is.

So we, this one that I'm referring to here was the Radical Personal Finance Family Camp. I made it very friendly to families and it provided the kind of environment that I was excited about. Not only was it you and your families, but I was able to bring my wife, my children, my parents, various members of my nuclear and extended family.

And so that interaction of my family with your family was something that I thought was just a wonderful aspect of it. Then the previous one in Panama was not friendly to families and that was purely an adult's trip, which was also really great in a totally different way. So there's a balance between a family camp versus an adult's event.

There's a balance between an event that is at a camp facility where it's a little bit rustic, very basic versus something that's higher end. So there's a difference between what I tried to do with this event, which was talk a little bit, but not too much, and teach a little bit, not too much versus something that's very content focused, oriented on a specific transformational event of content of come here and in two days, we're gonna accomplish this specific outcome or teach this body of material that's very applicable to people.

So that's one thing is the exact just offering. The second thing is balancing a location. So this location was in Indiana, which in some cases is centrally located, but it wasn't the easiest thing to get to. It was easy in terms of airports. We had, it was equidistant from Indianapolis, Louisville and Cincinnati, but it wasn't the easiest thing to get to in terms of people.

And so there's a much higher population density in other parts of the United States. So should I do events in other parts of the United States? I still really appreciate the international aspect of life, but I understand that that's not something that resonates with everyone in the show. So kind of balancing that coming where you are versus trying to pull you outside of the United States and do enjoy things outside of the United States, and then balancing just frequency and figuring out what I can do in terms of frequency versus what's too much, what's not enough.

Certainly I will make the, certainly I intend to make the Radical Personal Finance Camp an annual event. Beyond that, I don't wanna make any public commitments. Hosting an event is a pretty big disruption in terms of the work associated with it. It's enormous. I found it to be an enormously profitable event that didn't make any money.

So the profit was all non-financial. And so finding that balance between financial profit as compared to other forms of profit is a balance as well, and figuring those things out. So bear with me as we go through the growing pains. We'll work out some of these things over time.

But at its core, for me, the event was very, very important to build a connection with you in person and then go from there. We've created, in the wake of the in-person event, with those personal relationships, we've created a really great group with lots of digital interaction where those of us who attended the event are continuing our interactions.

And I'm finding that to be really, really productive and helpful as well. Because once you've met someone, once you've spent a couple nights around a campfire with someone, once you've shared a few drinks with someone and a few laughs and a tear or two in private, then it gives you then the ability to go on and feel much more confident, especially in a closed electronic setting, sharing your questions, sharing your concerns in a real way that with your friends, rather than random people on the internet, which is, I think, what we're all looking for.

So I just wanna say thank you. Thank you to those of you who came and who worked with it. Thank you especially to Andy who helped me organize it. Thank you to every one of you who came. It was an honor to interact with you. And I'm thrilled for the friendships that we have begun.

And thank you to every one of you who listens. I hope that I can offer you something in the future that will be appealing to you. And regardless of whether you are able to come to one of my events or not, I would just encourage you to do everything you can to expand your social contacts, build friendships, build community in your local area.

We need it right now. All of us need friends. We need people who will walk with us and encourage us, who can teach us, who can inspire us. And they're right around you. It's just a matter of you reaching out to them and looking for them. I really believe that every person is my superior in some way.

You are my superior in some way. And I'm your superior in some way. And a healthy, productive relationship can be built upon you and my looking for that interaction. And searching it out. And we can walk together in a very productive relationship as long as we take the effort to initiate them.

So thank you very much. That's my report on Radical Personal Finance Family Camp on the inaugural one. And I look forward to seeing you at a future event. - That's not just the sound of that first sip of morning joe. It's the sound of someone shopping for a car on Carvana from the comfort of home.

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