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My name is Joshua Sheets. Today is Friday, June 7, 2024. And today on this Friday, as we do on every Friday in which I can arrange the appropriate microphone and technology and all that fun stuff, we record live Q&A. You are in charge of the topics for today. Here at Radical Personal Finance, on Friday you get to pick what we talk about.

You can call in and ask about any question you want to ask. It can be personal. It can be general. It can be philosophical. It can be technical. You can raise any topic, raise any argument, anything that you like. If you would like to join me on one of these Friday Q&A shows, you can do that by becoming a patron of the show.

Go to Patreon.com/RadicalPersonalFinance, Patreon.com/RadicalPersonalFinance. That will gain access for you to one of these Friday Q&A shows, and you will be able to join us. We begin with Mava in Texas. Mava, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hi, Joshua. Thank you for taking my call. As always, thank you for the value you provide and insights shared.

The question I have today is kind of the classic whether to take on a mortgage or kind of put myself in a position towards a house for cash, so a little bit of background. My husband and I have several hundred in tax advantage savings, so your IRA, 401(k), et cetera, and then around 100 in brokerage.

And we're interested in buying a home. Probably something suitable for our needs would be around 400(k). And the idea and thought is whether to think of a mortgage or just put ourselves in a position to purchase cash. Currently, in addition to kind of invested amounts shared, we have about 50(k) that's liquid.

And after, like, income, taxes, and kind of the pre-tax retirement contributions, we would annually take in about 150(k). So presumably with the kind of balances that we have, we'd be in a position to purchase cash in about two years. And so my first question is just what opportunity costs should we consider when we're thinking about, you know, entertaining cash purchase?

So, like, what questions to kind of ask ourselves to weigh out cost/benefit? And then, secondly, if kind of leaning towards cash purchase of a home beyond high-yield savings, CEs, or just kind of, like, classic ways to hold a high liquid balance, what else would you maybe bring up to consider?

Just kind of thinking of holding a highly liquid position for two years or so. How old are you and your husband? Late 20s. Do you have children? One. When you consider paying cash for a house versus a mortgage, the most important considerations lie on the dimension of long-term financial gain through the potential power of leverage versus the stability of lifestyle and the peaceful mind and heart that come from not being in debt.

When we look at a piece of real estate, whether it's a house to live in or a rental house, when we add a mortgage in and we assume a growth in the value, the mortgage will generally mean that the long-term rate of return of the investment is higher because it adds leverage.

You can do the same calculation with your stock account. You can say I've got a brokerage account here. If I go ahead and open a margin account and start purchasing stocks and mutual funds with debt, I will have a higher long-term rate of return because of the expanding effects of the debt.

That's the whole point of debt, is to allow people to purchase more than they otherwise could without debt. Now, when I introduce the concept of a margin account, then very frequently people become more conservative because they say, wait a second, if I invest on margin, I can get wiped out.

They often apply that easily to stocks and mutual funds and not so much to real estate, but the same principle applies. I can enhance the returns by borrowing for the investment, but now I introduce greater risk into my life, and we have to account for that risk in some way.

Ordinarily, the defense of using margin safely for real estate and not using it safely for stocks has to do with the general stability of housing, especially as compared to stock market values, and the stability of income and having a margin of safety. This is why we get all kinds of conventionally safe amounts that it's safe to borrow this amount.

It's all basically an idea of pulling back from the edge and choosing a more moderate and safe position. But when you do that, you're giving up long-term rate of return. I would say that it's very difficult to find a satisfying financial calculation that accounts for these things. Rather, it's important to recognize that you're measuring this on basically two different axes, and they don't really meet.

It's very hard to make them meet. Intuitively, the idea of a young couple with a child in late 20s being able to pay cash for a house, almost anybody intuitively knows that's an incredibly attractive thing, because the house now can be something that provides enormous stability under the family.

The house is something that, because we don't have a mortgage, now we have complete and total freedom of choice. You can work any job, whether it's high-paying or low-paying. If you lose your job, there's very little financial stress associated with that. So that's an enormously valuable thing. If you are within striking distance of a debt-free house, I would urge you to go that way, because it's hard for me to believe that that won't result in a better life.

However, I have to acknowledge as a professional financial planner that it may result in a lower return on your real estate purchase. But I think it would generally result in a much better life because of the peace and confidence and stability that it puts in your situation. There are a number of other lenses that we could use of analysis.

For example, I think that one countervailing fact that could help this to actually turn out to be financially superior would involve the idea of motivation. When a young couple has a clear goal of paying cash for a house and you're within striking distance, that can be very highly motivating for you over the next couple of years to earn as much as you can, keep your expenses as low as you can, because we're paying cash for a house.

That would offset the potential returns of leverage. In addition, you would have a stronger potential to get the very best bargain that you can on your house. Anytime I've ever purchased something using debt, I have found that I didn't ever make as smart of buying decisions as I did when I was paying cash, because it's just debt, so I can pay a little bit extra.

I'll just swipe the card and move along my way. When you actually pay cash, and in this case, of course, we mean that in the money-in-the-bank sense, not in the physical sense when you're buying a house. When you pay cash for something, you have a tendency to bargain harder, think more carefully about what you want, and you don't face the distortions in your purchasing decisions based upon the debt markets.

You may also be able to use the ability that you have with cash to purchase a home that's a bargain because you have cash. If you're going out and purchasing real estate as an investor, you're always conscious of the fact that you can compete on price or you can compete on terms.

If you go out and you're a skilled and experienced investor, you can offer somebody a lower price but better terms, as in, "I'll stroke you a check tomorrow at 5 o'clock, and I'll pay cash for the house if you'll sell it to me today for 20% less than you're asking." You can do that, and the immediacy of the purchase can make a big difference.

In a competitive real estate market, a cash offer can often allow your offer to rise to the top because the seller knows that there is less qualification needed for a mortgage. If somebody goes out and is purchasing with an FHA mortgage and they submit a contract offer with the FHA mortgage, knowing the additional underwriting and everything that's associated with the FHA mortgage, the seller may not choose to sell to that person because it's coming with that kind of financing, and so a cash buyer could make a more competitive offer.

There are other ways that you could sweeten the pot. Sometimes you could purchase a house that's simply unfinanceable. Years ago, I looked at a house that had a messed-up foundation, and the foundation caused the house to be un-mortgageable. But just because it had a messed-up foundation didn't mean that the foundation couldn't be fixed.

And so a guy came in, got the house for an enormous discount because it was un-financeable, fixed the foundation, and everything was good. So those are some other factors to think of, but at its core, it's just going to come down to the clarity of a goal and the long-term--the clarity of the goal for you as a family and the value of being debt-free.

And I think that it would be a move that you would absolutely not regret, just pay cash for the house. Okay, thanks for weighing in. That's kind of the direction we were leaning and just kind of thinking through and taking a moment to pause. In terms of just holding that amount of liquidity, is there anything that you would advise or caution?

High-yield savings is fine. Money market is fine. You can open a T-bills account, and that would be fine as well. Any of those are fine. The standard for large amounts of money when you get to significant money is just to open a direct T-bills account with the U.S. government.

And I don't know if that's worth it here. I don't know the numbers that your high-yield savings and all your existing accounts are offering you. You're not in the danger zone for just standard savings accounts with FDIC insurance. But when you get beyond that standard, the normal is just a T-bills account.

Okay. Okay. Thanks, Joshua. My pleasure, and congratulations. You and your husband must be working so hard to make this happen, and congratulations. I hope that you find the house of your dreams. Andrew in Minnesota, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hey, good afternoon, Joshua. Thanks for doing this.

Long-time listener and caller, and I appreciate all the work you do. My pleasure. So quick question. I bought a travel trailer, and I would like to road trip the Rocky Mountain West. And I can work from home or work from the camper with Starlink, and I've tested that out locally, and it's effective technically, and it's good with my employer.

I was just curious if you have any general tips or lessons learned from your RVing the country experience. I know this is somewhat of a general question, and I just don't know what I don't know. And so just curious if you have any good, like, oh, I wish I would have known that when I started per se.

Absolutely. Will you be traveling alone or with family members? Generally alone. And is your budget ample or modest? Ample. The way that I think about it is -- the way that I think about traveling and working from the road is as a chance to test out a variety of different lifestyles without fully committing to them and kind of get an idea of what you really enjoy.

Do you need to work during specific hours, or do you have flexibility? Generally 8 to 4 Monday through Friday. Okay. So I have some flexibility, but 80% of the time through traditional hours. Yeah. It'll work fine. The western United States is one of the most spectacular places to travel, and it can have the benefit also of being fairly inexpensive as compared to other places like the east coast, just in terms of RV parks, things like that, all of that.

The western U.S. is much, much cheaper, primarily because there's so much public land. First of all, are you set up for boondocking? Are you set up to be -- yeah, you've got Starlink, but do you have batteries? Do you have a generator? Do you have a plan for parking out in the middle of the field, or will you mostly be connected at RV parks?

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We are Vegas. We are CCSD. Start your adventure at teach.ccsd.net. We are CCSD. Start your adventure at teach.ccsd.net. No, I've got a three-quarter ton pickup. The axle's flipped on the camper, so I can go down pretty gnarly roads. I've got a -- I think it's a 2,000-watt battery pack to power a Starlink laptop for a day.

I've got a generator and solar panels. Perfect. You're set up. So then your biggest constraint is usually going to be water. And in that case, just make sure you have the ability with some jugs to bring yourself water when you need to. But if you're a single guy and you've got a 50-gallon tank -- I stretched with my wife and three children.

We just had our standard, I think, 51-gallon freshwater tank. The longest we did was -- what's the name of that park? There's a beautiful national forest just to the west of Cheyenne, Wyoming. West of Cheyenne, there's an amazing mountain that we went up at. That's a big one. Yeah.

I can't remember the name of the park. I could look it up. But it was our kind of peak experience. We were there early in the season. We'd gone to Cheyenne Frontier Days, and this park, there was still snow melt. And it was a little RV park up at the top of the mountain in just this absolutely spectacular setting.

And it was the kind of thing that our pictures looked like the pictures of a brochure, of a travel trailer brochure. Right out the door is a beautiful alpine lake. There's a little bit of snowpack still melting near the camper, which was fun for the children to throw the slushy, sleety ice back and forth.

And it was a hassle to get up to the place because the road was small. And so it wasn't the kind of place that was just comfortable to go in and out. So we said, "Well, let's stay here as long as we can." So we were able to stretch our 51 gallons to a week with just being very, very cautious.

So you could certainly get a couple weeks in if you practice water conservation. But that's going to usually be your constraining factor because with your generator and your battery pack and whatnot, you're fine for a few days. You don't generally need to run an air conditioning as long as you're at a high altitude and not where it's hot.

And it's just going to be great. So the first thing is consider following the weather. That's one thing that is pretty consistently done. Figure out what weather you like and go north and south based upon the weather. And if it gets hot, go higher in elevation, go a little bit lower.

Try to plan, obviously, around your weekend. And so the point of the RV is to get you in a place where there are events that are close to you. So Cheyenne Frontier Days, for example, one of my favorite things that we've ever done. It is such a great show and just totally, totally different than a lot of other things.

Or think about where you're going to be for 4th of July. For us, we were in 4th of July. We were in a little town. We had some friends in Kansas City. And we went an hour and a half, two hours outside of Kansas City to this little town where our friend's father and family was from.

And just had the absolute quintessential 4th of July experience at this little town in Kansas. And it was just phenomenal. And so you just want to think about where you want to be on the weekends because obviously you're going to be working. And the nice thing about the RV is you're comfortable in a variety of locations.

I have enjoyed very much being off the beaten path. And so being out on the mountain, way in the middle of nowhere, doing hiking, that's great. It's also great to be right downtown in the middle of the city. So I would assume you're familiar with the various apps. I've forgotten all the names of them now.

But there's a bunch of apps that have campsites and locations so that you can plan out your events and just be open to the serendipity of the road. Beyond that, the technology should work. Starlink has been a game changer. When we did it, it was before Starlink. And I had cell phone connections and data spots and MIMO antennas and all that stuff.

And it was just an enormous hassle. And it wasn't very reliable. But Starlink has been a total game changer because it's so reliable. It's still probably not perfect. So you'll need to plan ahead and check out your spots. And so if you know you need to be at work on Monday morning at 8 a.m., usually you'll need to be in your spot by Sunday checking to make sure your data and everything is going to be reliable with your new spot so that you can be relaxed about being able to meet your work obligations.

But without any more specific question, I'd say I love it. If I weren't raising children, there's a good chance that I would be spending most or all of my time living in a camper just traveling around the United States and Canada and Mexico just because I enjoy the lifestyle so much.

Yeah, awesome. Yeah, cool. Well, thank you. And yeah, very much. This has been many years coming. And I'm, yeah, at some point I'm just, I've been saving very frugally for many, for a decade or so and close to call it mustache and fire probably there and plus a little more.

I'm just like trying to, you know, let off the gas a little and live a little. And I've always wanted, grew up camp in the West and always wanted to do this. I was like, yeah, why don't I just go buy a three-quarter ton in a camper and have a good time?

You will. The mistake that all new travelers make is they travel too hard. They move too fast. All of us do it. And so expect that in the beginning you're going to say, I've got to cover everything. And that's fine. Go cover everything. But then plan to slow down after a couple of months and recognize that there's no hurry.

And you'll enjoy it more when you're traveling a little bit less. In terms of the money, you have an abundant budget. But just because you have it doesn't mean you need to spend it. And so what I always did was I just picked either we're going to travel, in which case today's budget is going to fuel, or we're going to do activities, in which case we'll try to minimize the accommodation costs, or we'll just take accommodations.

And so for us, you know, you go in and out of nice RV parks with the amenities of a nice RV park that you pay a higher daily rate for as compared to just boondocking or taking an inexpensive state park with fewer amenities but a different experience. So you can very easily moderate your budget and live very inexpensively but still have plenty available.

So think about that in terms of your accommodations and things like that. There are a few places that are very difficult to get into, and many of the parks are just completely overcrowded. So places like Yellowstone are basically impossible to get into without significant prior planning. I mean, we went into Yellowstone, but we just made a day trip of it.

And I just skip a lot of those places because there's no need for that. Every place is spectacular. Spend some time in Utah. Utah is one of the most spectacular places, really nice as it starts to get to wintertime. Come down out of the north and go into the deserts, and it's spectacular there.

Yeah, awesome. Is it easy to pull into a national park on a Tuesday or Wednesday and get a first-come, first-served campsite and hang out there for a week? I found it to be so, yeah. Generally, if you just are off schedule, and if you can be there early and be off schedule, we never had much trouble.

I don't think I made a single reservation all the way through. And the only place I couldn't get in was Yellowstone, and that was no problem. We just did a day trip into Yellowstone, which was sufficient at the time because everything around there is basically almost as good. So if you're flexible and you're comfortable, and if you don't get in on Tuesday, then you can get in on Wednesday morning.

Yeah, usually the first-come, first-served system still works fine. Yeah, okay. Thanks a lot. Thank you, sir. Yeah, my pleasure. Enjoy. You're going to meet some great people and have some great adventures. Eric in California, welcome to the show. How can I serve you? Hey, Joshua. I just want to make a comment about one of your latest podcasts on sudden death.

It was phenomenal. I deal a lot with cybersecurity. I work with your pal Stephen Harris, and it's heartbreaking just being involved in church, and everybody knows, "Hey, Eric's in cybersecurity." And we have so many individuals that will come to us and say, "Hey, so-and-so died. Grandpa died. Dad died.

Somebody died, and all of his technology is completely locked up. We don't know any of his passwords. Nothing's written down," which means family photos for decades are locked up potentially. Cryptocurrency is locked up. It's a phenomenal podcast because I'm fairly young, and it seems to me that if you're nearing retirement age or past that, you have a trust and a will, but I've seen a lot of individuals pass away untimely, and it's heartbreaking to see if they can or cannot get into some of those things.

So yeah, anyways, I just thought it was a phenomenal podcast. I deal with it a lot on a personal basis. And then out of the Jack Spierko gravel truck, what happens if you get hit by a gravel truck? My buddy and I started up our own side business of just like, "Hey, let's prepare for this ahead of time.

We'll give you some documents to fill out." I mean, not a trust, not a will, but just where are things stored, what to look for, all of that stuff, and it has been hugely successful just out of the sense of it takes no time to take 15 minutes and write it all down of what's there and what's available.

And yeah, anyways, I just thought the podcast was absolutely phenomenal. Thank you. What's the name of the business or the website? Gravel Truck. Right now, we don't have a website. We just have an email because we've been doing it locally. But it's Gravel Truck Plan, and the idea is what happens if you get hit?

My wife made fun of me. She's like, "That's such a dumb name." And I was like, "Yeah, but when we say, 'Hey, what do you guys do?' It's like, 'Gravel Truck.' What does a gravel truck do? What happens right now if you get hit by a gravel truck?" I love it.

It's sick. And everybody kind of looks at you blank in the face. I'm like, "What happens? Where are your passwords? Are there backups to your passwords?" If you have crypto, does everybody know your ledger, your seed phrase, all that stuff? How is that secured? So we work with them on varying levels of paranoia of like, "We can hold the files for you.

You can give us the encrypted version of the files." And it's also interesting doing that technical bits with potentially some older generation, which is not necessarily trusting the technology. So like, "Hey, let's print it all out in a binder." Just having that information somewhere is so hugely powerful. Anyways, when I was talking to my buddy, I was like, "You're not going to believe the latest Radical Personal Finance podcast." He all but said our name and what we do.

So anyways, it's just a side thing for right now. But if it just helps one person and one family not go through what I've seen a bunch of other families go through, it'll have been more than worth it. What is the – how do people get in touch with you and what can they buy from you?

Yeah, so I mean this doesn't need to be infomercial or anything. Go ahead. I'm giving you layups here. Sell, sell, sell. All right, all right, all right. I won't take money as Jack Sparrow says, right? So essentially it's one time that we onboard you for $500. We give you the documentation that covers an annual thing.

And basically what we do is you designate two people to be your "cleanup crew." Family members, wife, whoever, who we validate, "Hey, is this person actually dead?" Or they call us if they're actually – if you're actually dead. And then after that, it's $220 a year. And that gets you basically a one-time or an annual phone call saying, "Hey, here's what we have on file.

What do you want to update? Has anything changed?" Kind of walk them through our list of – a list of those different things. Just it's one of those things that life goes on. If somebody were to call you up right now and ask you, "Hey, are these still the same people in your life that you want your designated cleanup crew?

Do you have a new house? Do you have new passwords, new crypto, new passwords?" That's in that annual kind of like subscription model. And if anybody's interested, it's info@graveltruckplan.com. It's the way to get ahold of us. And it's one of those things, the way that I also pitch it.

I'm like, "Look, it's cheaper than a Netflix subscription to know that your loved ones can get into all of your stuff after you pass away." And at any point, somebody could cancel it, keep all the documents for themselves. And just as long as they update them, they can do it.

And I have a lot of people that say – tell me like, "Wow, that's awfully expensive for something I could do by myself." And I go, "Please do. Please do it by yourself. Please sit down and take some time. Do not hurt my feelings at all in any way, shape, or form because I just – my hope is that everybody does it." I've had some clients that have come to me with multiple millions of dollars of cryptocurrency.

And they're just like, "We just can't get into this Excel document." And the person was pretty astute, had good passwords, and we weren't able to break in. But we just know that it's sitting there. And so if we could prevent anything like that, that's kind of our whole model of it.

And then the way that it works as far as your cleanup crew is that if something happens to you, we have your cleanup crew's contact information. And we call them as well in that annual process just to say, "Hey, if anything happens to Joshua, give us a call. We'll call the other person designated.

Make sure that this is all above board." And kind of go from there and basically carry out on your wishes. And one of the last things kind of too that we are kind of looking forward to is implementing something where it's like, "Hey, on the anniversary of say your death, your wedding anniversary after you're gone, you're going to have flowers or something delivered to your significant other." It's kind of like beyond the grave just for that first year.

Anyways, enough of the infomercial. I absolutely love that podcast. Good. Let me comment briefly. But I love it. I think it's a great idea, great business, and a great service. And what you're offering is in some ways I brainstormed some solutions to some of this stuff. Because there's a balance between security and I'm not sure what word to use to contrast, but security and practicality.

The more secure you make things, the better in terms of security. But then we're fallible. One of the most embarrassing things that's ever happened to me is I lost access to a couple of hard drives that I encrypted. And I was being hardcore on security. So I use all these very long format passwords that are randomly generated rather than anything that could be designed.

And I commit them to memory using muscle memory. And so I use them many, many times. And so I set it all up, use these hard drives, and I didn't write down the password. Because, of course, I don't want to have a place that the CIA can come and open my home safe and open it up and find my 15-character random password.

Things like that. So then I started traveling and I left the passwords with some of my private things in a different country. Came back and got them months, I don't know, it was a year or two later. And I had forgotten the password. And to this day I can't gain access to them.

So thankfully there was nothing mission critical. But it's pretty galling to know exactly where you have something and you can't get into it because you encrypted everything too much and you didn't leave yourself a backdoor. So the whole concept of having a backdoor is really valuable. And when you do security consulting, I teach in the course that Gabriel Custodia and I teach on HackProof, HackProofCourse.com.

One of the things that we talk about is the safety of not having paper documents. A standard vector of theft has always been the documents in your mailbox. It's easy for someone to walk out and pull out your social security check from your mailbox and steal it. It's easy for someone to get your info by just stealing stuff from your mailbox.

And so today most prudent people don't receive documents like that in the mailbox because receiving those on the web is much easier. But what that means is we don't have the standard file folders full of stuff. We don't have the standard file folders full of bank records. And they could be created.

Somebody could print them. And that would be a good thing because – well, the other aspect of identity theft, the most common form of identity theft is somebody is in your home, a trusted family member or a trusted friend. Someone is in your home. They rifle through your papers and they pull open your drawer marked "tax returns" and there is your social security number.

And now they've got what they need to go and steal your identity and open accounts in your name, things like that. It's a pretty standard thing. And so you can protect against it by not having that stuff there. But then if you don't have that stuff there, then when you're dead, no one has your stuff.

And so there's a real balancing act that is probably necessary to figure out exactly how and what to do it. But having another partner involved cuts out a lot of the risk. And so that certainly can be a great solution for many. So the website is GravelTruckPlan.com and Info@GravelTruckPlan.com.

And just real quick, kind of speaking to what you said, the way that we approach the – we call it availability versus security. So like you said, you don't want to be completely available. Otherwise, then it's public. But you also don't want to be infinitely secure because then nobody can access it, including yourself.

And so basically we have kind of like the locking key setup. So either you can give whoever your cleanup crew is a password, and then we hold an encrypted file or folder for them. So we can't touch it. They can't touch it because they don't have it. And then in the event that something happens, we combine the two together, right?

So you do something along those lines to where – or you give somebody that encrypted flash drive already, and then we maintain the password. So there's that separation there that makes it so that they can't just open up your crypto wallet. They can't just do any of those things.

Nor could we, right? We couldn't do any of those things because we don't have the password. We don't have the – or the flash drive, right? We would have one of those missing pieces of information. So it works out really, really well. Great. I'm glad you called in. Anything else or just – you want to tell us about – say thank you and tell us about that?

Just thank you for the podcast because if just, I don't know, 1% listened to you about that, it could save their families tons of heartache. I've seen it a bunch. So I just thought it was great. Thank you. Thank you for calling in and for telling us about your business.

You can get more info at GravelTruckPlan.com for anybody who's interested in more details, and I hope that the business continues to be – or I hope that the business is extremely successful. Adam in Washington, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, sir? Hey, Joshua. I had a question for you.

I've seen more and more mainstream news sources start to get concerned about microplastics and different chemicals like forever chemicals, these different categories of chemicals that we're getting exposed to it more and more. I'm curious – and so I've seen these concerns, but never with those have been any sort of action plans on how you could potentially reduce your exposure to these things.

So I'm curious if you share sort of this growing concern around some of these chemicals and if you've kind of thought at all about how to reduce exposure to these sorts of things in a meaningful way. I do. I'm not particularly knowledgeable, so I'll tell you my very cursory knowledge and kind of what I do and then refer you to other people for more detail.

First, the health risks, the long-term health risks of microplastics and other endocrine – potential endocrine disruptors, to me that seems persuasive. I'm not a doctor. I don't know how to properly vet medical stuff, but it seems persuasive. Something is dramatically wrong and we are obviously – as a human species, we are basically falling apart and our functions, our bodies are just not working in many ways.

One of the biggest long-term things is our ability to reproduce. If we continue on our current trajectory, huge swathes of our population will be sterile within a few decades, just completely sterile. I can't cite off the top of my head some of the data I've read, but I've read shocking predictions of where things could be by 2060.

I don't know, as with anything, predictions are predictions. It's hard to make predictions, especially about the future, but the point remains that these are significant concerns. We can trace them in the body's chemicals in addition to other things, and they may have all kinds of factors. One of the things that I find fascinating about anything health-related is that so many people assume that the body is like a machine where there's a clear connection between this thing, causal A, factor B, and result C.

If we just fix cause A or just fix factor B, then result C is guaranteed, but I don't think the body works that way. It's an organism, and it can respond various ways, which is why, in so much research, you can have two people who are given a substance, and the substance can cause no reaction whatsoever in person A and an enormously catastrophic reaction in person B.

You say, "Well, we can fix that with large numbers." Well, maybe. I would say, of course, large studies and things like that are obviously integral to our understanding of how things work, but to think that there's not individual factors that don't play a role is important. I have to protect myself with anything that seems doable, and there's always this balance between doable and effective.

To cut to the point, what do I do? Well, I don't live in the middle of the city. I don't live by a highway. There's all kinds of toxins that are released by highways, things like that, everything coming out of the car's tailpipes, coming off the rubber tires. Highways are enormously polluting, so I don't live near a highway.

I try to live in a place where I get fresh air and have good quality air. That's fundamental. Living in a place where you're breathing in smog and bad air is utterly destructive, and so I live in a place with beautiful, clean, fresh air, which is a wonderful thing to have.

Number two, with regard to food, I try my best to get high-quality sources of food. I purchase most of my food direct from farmers, and I'm a big fan of that from a—what's the word? Not political, not ideological, but just from a practical standpoint. Years ago, when I started reading Joel Salatin's books, he convinced me that one of the most impactful things that we could do to increase the quality of food would just be to buy direct from farmers.

So I try to buy as much food as possible direct from farmers. I try to avoid—this is not directly to microplastics necessarily, but I try to avoid industrial food. I'm not a hardcore about it. I try to be flexible. We eat fast food on occasion. I kind of think of it as like an 80/20.

If you can get it 80% right, that's probably good enough, and the ease of going to 80% clean is pretty easy. The ease of going to 100% clean is massively impossible. So I just try to get to 80% and hope that that is enough to move the needle. And so the good-quality food sources are important.

Try to filter all the water. I think there are many great water filtration systems, and some of them are simple. So filtering water, especially filtering all the tap water, because I don't know what's in the pipes. I don't know what's in there. I think filtering your water is a really impactful thing.

We don't use any plastic and try not to drink from any plastic. My wife caught me the other day drinking from a bottle of water, and she playfully slapped it out of my hands and said, "You can't do that." And the point is just to avoid plastic. So we eat on all of our -- we have children, so we use stainless steel cups, things like that, to try to avoid plastic cups or glass, glass or stainless steel.

Obviously, we avoid plastic plates, plastic bowls. One of the key things with plastic seems to be if they get hot. That seems like a really impactful thing. So we don't use plastic water bottles. We use stainless steel water bottles. I avoid -- we don't even have any plastic storage containers.

I use all glass storage containers. By the way, quick pro tip or something that I have found really useful. We're Raiders. We're neighbors. We're trailblazers. We're at the top of our game. And we're more than the strip. We're beyond your wildest expectations. We're headfirst into the currents of change.

We love a good challenge. A better cost of living and an incredible retirement plan as a teacher in Las Vegas for the Clark County School District. We are Vegas. We are CCSD. Start your adventure at teach.ccsd.net. We are CCSD. Start your adventure at teach.ccsd.net. I grew up in a family and you grow up and you see how your mom does stuff and some things you take and some things you don't take.

My mom always would buy sets of containers. And so you have the sets of containers that you get. There's a couple little small ones and big ones and square ones. It drove me nuts. So what I do is I buy about 20 big square glass containers. Not enormous but like big square.

And I don't have any big ones, any huge ones, and no small ones. And it makes it so easy to do. And sometimes you just put a spoonful of something in your big square container. But it works really well in the refrigerator. It works really phenomenally for storage. And it makes it just everything is better without having all the variety of containers.

And you're always looking for the right size container. I guess the other component of that is that I have a commercial refrigerator that I bought instead of a residential refrigerator. And with a big family, that's also been wonderful because you always have tons of space. You just got a big giant square box to stick your stuff into.

And that helps as well. So I don't use anything plastic to eat or to eat with. I don't have a microwave. But if I did have a microwave, I wouldn't microwave anything in plastic. And what else? We try to avoid all the scents, sorry, the smelly stuff. I don't think this is microplastics.

I just think that the smelly stuff is probably not good for you. So we clean with vinegar and I don't know what else. But clean with water and vinegar and alcohol. And just don't buy any of the cleaners and don't buy anything with scent stuff. We don't buy laundry soap that has scent stuff in it.

My wife makes soap. She makes it because she likes it. It's just something fun that she enjoys doing. But the benefit is you get soap without all the junk in it. And that's about it. I stopped wearing all of the deodorant with junk for a long time I did.

I switched to a crystal deodorant. I don't know if that's better or not, but I figure it can't hurt. When you look at what's in the deodorant, that stuff can't be good for you. Your skin is the most absorbing thing possible. And so just slathering on antiperspirant and all that chemicals, it can't be good for you in the long run.

And so, again, I guess that makes me all sound pretty crunchy, and I guess we kind of are pretty crunchy. But I'm not as weird as a lot of people I know, but those are the things that have seemed like low-hanging fruit that we have done. Awesome. Thank you.

Yeah, it's something I've been thinking about. One more question, if that's okay. It's completely unrelated. I'm curious. My wife and I were actually considering hiring an au pair. We've got three young kids, all under six, and we both work. So we're thinking a little bit about that or considering it, I guess.

Nothing like signed or official or anything. I was curious just if you were to be hiring an au pair, neither of us speak a second language fluently, and it's something that there's a huge draw of hiring an au pair, introducing a second language to yourselves and your family. I'm curious if you have any tips.

So the au pair that we're talking to and considering is out of the Dominican Republic, which I'm not particularly familiar with the Dominican Republic. I know a little bit of Spanish from high school, but it's been a long, long time. I'm curious any tips approaching a situation like that.

We would have a few months to get ready and prepare, how you would think about it and any advice you might have stepping into that sort of arrangement. Absolutely. The reason I'm laughing is because I despise with a passion Dominican Spanish. It is the worst Spanish in the world, in my opinion.

I just anger all of my friends from the DR. It is the worst Spanish in the world. When they talk Spanish, they sound like a toothless 70-year-old man who's autistic, who has a mouthful of food when he talks. It's worse than Cuban Spanish, and that's saying something. But all that said, I wouldn't hesitate if you've got a great Dominican woman from the Dominican Republic who's going to be your au pair, I wouldn't hesitate a bit to hire her on that basis.

I just can't stand myself Dominican Spanish. I told this guy one time – I ran into these videos of this guy on YouTube who was showing off his Spanish accent. He had chosen to acquire a Dominican accent. He sounded authentic 100% of the way through. I sat there saying, "Of all of the accents in the Spanish-speaking world you could have chosen, you chose this one?" Sorry for going on, but it's like the English equivalent would be like a drunk Scotsman who's been in the South and acquired – it's just so nonstandard.

Whatever. It's fine. That's why I'm laughing. I don't think any of that would matter. So, yes, I do. I think you should hire an au pair. It's the best way for you to hire your own private personal caregiver in your home where you can supervise and you can be sure of very close attention.

If you have the resources for it, I think it's one of the best ways to engage in child care so that you and your wife can work and care for your children. I think it's fantastic. I think it's obvious that finding a Spanish-speaking au pair is going to be easier than many other languages.

And so hiring a Spanish-speaking au pair is great and it will be a very easy, simple way for you to add another language to the family, especially if she's there for a period of years and your children are interacting with her for years. It's a simple and straightforward thing.

So, yes, yes, yes, all of the above. And in three years when she leaves, you hire a Mexican or a Panamanian or someone with a more neutral, not quite so extreme accent as the Dominicans use. Thank you. My pleasure. All right, we go to Daniel in Texas. Daniel, welcome to the show.

How can I serve you today, sir? Hey, Joshua. How are you doing? Very well. Can you hear me? Yes, sounds good. Good. So you get to use your conspiratorial side of the brain for this, if you want. Fun. Yes, indeed. And you've talked about this, right? The U.S. is a bit of a disaster.

It is quite a bit of a mess. And you have obviously gone back and forth on, is the U.S. going to fall apart tomorrow? Is the economy going to fall apart? And the answer is probably no. But we are also in obviously just a giant cluster of epic proportions, regardless of whether it's slow, fast, whatever.

Probably slow, right? Probably in a slow decline in the middle of it. And who knows how far it goes, right? So as you and I have recently talked about, you recommending me buy a business of something I don't hate, and just running with it and making it better. I guess my thought is what I'm partially trying to think through is obviously anything you can produce for the people around you who will buy it is at minimum a neutral good.

And you could say it's a positive good, right? I think you'd probably agree with that. It also, when the world is in the state that it's in, without getting too crazy about it, it also seems a little silly to say I'm going to go open a coffee shop, or I'm going to build decorative patio covers for people, or things that are more, I guess, if you want to call them unnecessary.

It seems like we should probably be focusing more on building up good things. And obviously there's a lot of benefit to beauty. God created beauty, God created good things. All of that is important. But it seems like we potentially are in a place where that seems like the wrong place to be putting effort and money.

And certainly if you start a outdoor backyard design build firm, is our economy going to be in the place in five years? I really support that. That's certainly another conversation. But I guess my question is what are your thoughts about if you were going to build a business, buy a business, whatever now, like you just do whatever and say, yeah, this seems fine.

I'm going to buy it if the numbers are right. Or would you say it makes more sense to focus on things that are more important to rebuild society than the fun things, if that makes sense? Yeah. For years, I haven't read it much over the last few years, but for years I would read Survival Blog, survivalblog.com by James Wesley Rawls.

And James has been on the show here at Radical Personal Finance several times, been years since I spoke to him. But I would read his blog and one of the things that he talked about on the blog is he would talk about businesses and being prepared for the end of the world as we know it and what that looks like.

And when I would read his commentary, one of the things that I have always found at the time and still find astonishing is that so much of it was based on this idea of the lights going out. And so he would talk about the importance of the basics. He would talk about the importance of being able to do leather working or having a foot-operated sewing machine and having hand tools and things like that.

And to me, it seems obviously intelligent to have backups in case the electricity goes out because the electricity goes out. But it seems crazy to me to think that the electricity would go out for an extended period of time. And that would be the distinction I would make. Is the electricity going to go out for an extended period of time or is it going to go out for a temporary amount of time?

And preparing for a temporary amount of time seems smart. To me, preparing that the electricity is going to be off for the rest of your life seems crazy. So using that as an analogy, I think that I've become convinced that predicting crisis on the basis of prepper novels is a bad way to predict crisis.

I enjoy prepper novels. I find them fun and interesting. And I like to read Lights Out and I love Rawls' series of novels. I enjoy them. But I realized, especially starting about five years ago when I started to get so involved in Venezuela and especially with COVID, I realized how unlikely a lot of those scenarios are in terms of the suddenness of catastrophe and also the permanence of catastrophe and what people value with it.

I know it sounds like I'm giving you a roundabout answer. I'm driving at something. It'll be obvious in a moment. The first thing is with regard to the suddenness, COVID convinced me that I had a completely flawed view of suddenness. And I expected when I would read the first chapter of Patriots, where all of a sudden there's a collapse and it's obvious as there's a collapse, there's a collapse on and everybody jumps in their car and gets to their bug out location, then I realized that that whole mentality had warped my thinking.

And I watched the collapse related to coronavirus and I realized that real world collapses are so slow oftentimes that you aren't ever sure if it's actually a collapse or not until it's too late. And this affected even how I taught about preparedness, teach about preparedness. And I realized that the only answer is going to be to build a plan where you can – if you have to leave, you need to be able to leave early when it's not obvious.

Otherwise, your normalcy bias is going to be too high. And then the other thing was related to Venezuela about the severity of the collapse and what people value. The best thing you can do is go online and start searching for YouTubers that are based in Venezuela. Venezuela has had, over the last decade, the most extreme collapse of any country in the world, any large modern country.

They've had over 1 million percent hyperinflation in a single year's period of time. And that has continued for all kinds of time. It's the country that went from the absolute heights to the absolute depths. And you can find all of this documented on YouTube, all of it available with all kinds of YouTubers there for you.

It's not going to be in Spanish, but it's all there. You can see it. You can tour it. And what is shocking about it is none of it looks like returning to an agrarian society in any way, shape, or form. On the contrary, in the crisis, it's even more important to be up-to-date with technology and the stuff that people want.

So, for example, Venezuela has had a terrible power situation where the power has been off. They've destroyed their energy fields. They completely have no ability to keep the lights on. So they keep the lights on for their constant rolling brownouts. And, again, it depends on the region. But throughout the country for years they've had constant rolling brownouts.

But they're just as technologically dependent as anything else. And so if you're talking with a Venezuelan, you'll get a call at 3 o'clock in the morning because all of a sudden the power just came on, and now all the cell phone towers are up, and we've got to connect with everybody.

And so the cell phone is just as important, even though the power is basically off. Nobody goes back to writing letters. It's just that the dependency on the cell phone is even more. If you go to Caracas and you look around in Caracas, what you find is that the rich are living just as high on the hog as they ever did.

And so the people around are without money, but the rich still have money. And you go into the supermarkets, into the fancy supermarkets in Caracas, and you find that it's just astonishing the stuff that's available. So I guess the lessons that I've drawn from that, and the other thing I was going to push on is what do people want.

Well, certainly people want food, and they need food, but their desire for other things doesn't necessarily change all that much. The luxuries are still just as valuable, and people want the luxuries, and they'll do anything to get the luxuries. So I think the mental model, based upon-- those are my experiences that I've observed and kind of thought about.

I think the mental model that a crisis is going to come on, and we're all going to go back to a single-bottom plow being pulled by Betsy is just a flawed model on basically every level. We're not going back. Back to the technology for a moment. The pathway for Venezuelans out of poverty has usually been at the other end of an Internet connection, and the most connected and the most technologically capable Venezuelans have been able to create a pathway for themselves out of poverty because they could access the global market.

So what I notice is that even in times of crisis, the rich do fine. And so I don't think it's wrong to have a business that's serving a luxury product. On the contrary, it's probably better to have that even in a crisis, in a collapse, than it is to have a basic service need because, yes, people need the basic service need, but the price pressure is going to be intense in the basic services as compared to the luxury services.

And the rich people, they still have money. They're rich. They have money. And a 20% change in a billionaire's net worth doesn't cause him to change any of his decisions on a daily basis, just as a 20% change in a billionaire's net worth. A 20% change in a day laborer's workability destroys everything.

So I don't think that model-- I can't find much evidence at all of the idea of collapse and turning to basic growing food to give to people being-- I can't find an analog for that in the modern world. I'm willing to believe that it could be the case. Immediate global nuclear war and half the world's population is gone.

Do we all go back to the Stone Age? Sure. But I can't find any-- all of the collapses I've studied of the modern day, I can't find that to be the case. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess if-- I'm going to go a slightly different direction with this. I'd probably explain it wrong.

I'm not so much worried about the dramatic collapse, the power grid turns off, the internet goes down, whatever. I guess I'm more thinking-- if everything is per se on the table from a choices perspective, right? Like I can choose any business to go into. What is the one with our society in the place that it is that does the most for its good, if that makes sense?

Like what is the thing that will be most beneficial to help-- I say rebuild society, not from the-- we went back to the Stone Age. Now I need to be a blacksmith so that I can make hand tools, right? Right. But the more of the philosophical perspective of we need-- whether you're post-millennial, pre-millennial, or whatever.

Right. What is the-- what maybe at least is the thought process, or maybe there should be no thought process, of how could I best serve the community to help bring it back to a place that is glorifying to God and makes America a prosperous place again. Does that make sense?

Yeah, that's a totally different question than the one I answered. I'm trying to think through. Yeah, really interesting. Sorry. No, it's fine. So I'll give two answers. The first one, in the first part of what you just said, my instinct when what I thought you were going was to talk about the stability of jobs being protected from artificial intelligence versus those not.

So I think that's probably a much more pressing concern. Artificial intelligence is probably a much more pressing concern than collapse of society type of thing. Because somebody who changes oil, has an oil change business on a car, is probably much better protected, or a plumber or electrician is better protected in today's world than somebody who does knowledge work in terms of the invasion by the computers.

But that's kind of a different perspective than what you're going. So I'm not sure that -- I now understand kind of what you're pressing at, and I'm not sure that I agree with the premise of the practical being more important than the beautiful or the philosophic. I think back to when we go on vacation in Europe, all of us, what do we want to do?

We want to go look at the cathedrals. And if you go back and try to think about the cathedrals, what do they represent? They represent an outward religious expression that came from a very poor society of laborers. And the beautiful was the focus of their society. The town is oriented around the cathedral.

And they worked on the cathedral for 700 years while the people lived in very basic poverty, and they contributed their treasure and their toil, all of their effort and their labor to building this monument to their love of God, that you walk in a Gothic cathedral and instantly you're transported into the heavens.

Your eyes go up and you're moved. You're spiritually moved on a very deep level. And so what is needed if a society is in crisis? I would not say that the way to rescue a society is to provide practical services to the society. I would say the way to rescue a society is to draw its attention back to the good and the beautiful, the virtuous and the noble, and to raise the heart of man out of the mud from thinking that he's a beast in the mud to recognizing that he's a spiritual burden.

And so I think that it's a lack of spiritual inspiration and leadership that often causes a society to decline into animalistic behavior, which is what creates the nightmare that you can see around us in many places where we live. And yet the answer to that is not to engage in basic labor so that man gets rich.

If man gets rich but has an uninspired soul, all he turns into is a hedonistic monster who abuses and enslaves other people. But if you can draw his attention to his higher nature and you can preach about the good and the beautiful and you can create art and you can draw him into that, and then combining that with technology, to me, those are the fundamental foundations.

That's why so much modern scientific research-- Christians are responsible for the scientific revolution in a philosophic way. Now, that scientific revolution has been continued by many people of many religions and non-religions, but the original inspiration of the scientific revolution that transformed our world was a religious thing. So I haven't thought deeply about this question, and I'm going to, and I'd love to hear you answer your own question and tell me what you think, but I don't buy the premise that we should turn to practicality.

I don't buy that. I think that there's an even more important reason for us to raise the mind, the soul, and I'm not denying scientific advancement. I believe that's fundamental. Technological advancement, good engineering, good practical and theoretical research needs to be done, but I am saying that I'd rather we spend more time on the humanities and philosophy and religion rather than just immediately going to something practical.

How would you answer your own question? What do you think? I don't have a clean answer. That's why I wanted to ask. I do think we have, I mean, I agree with you about beauty. I think we have lost a theology of beauty, and you could maybe point to lots of reasons why that's happened, specifically from the Christian side and having our culture largely being a Christian-based culture that's largely affected it.

We are obviously moving more secular, but the reality is still a lot of that or certainly has been fed by the church, right? And I think we maybe say lots of reasons why we don't have to get into them. I think we've lost a theology of beauty and doing things for the sake of Christ.

I've said this if my pastor came to the church at our next members meeting and said, "You know what, guys? We need to raise $100 million, and we're going to take the next 70 years to build a cathedral." Everyone would think he was crazy. And yet that is like that's what the cathedral builders did.

Many of those people who started them did not see them finished. And now we have modern technology and blah, blah, blah. So timelines may be a little different. But I do think there is something inherently good in beauty. God created beauty. That's important. Obviously, right? As men, we value beauty in our wives.

Why did God create that? Why did God create sunsets? Why did God create flowers? He created all of those things and said they were good. So that's a good thing. And as I've been thinking about this, especially lately, I've also thought about, okay, it doesn't make sense that I just need to go start a plumbing business.

Well, plumbing isn't inherently better than anything else. Plumbing is important. But what does that do for society any more than starting something else? So I don't have a clean answer for it. It feels like there's something in the middle between those things where we are -- and maybe it's partially being intentional and you're saying we're intentionally doing this for the glory of God, to praise his name and to bring people to know Jesus and to do things excellently.

And we want to point people to that. Maybe that's part of it. And we want to change people's lives. I did recently hear a podcast with a guy who he owns an electrical transformer business. And the title of the podcast episode, which I thought was great, was "Don't Waste Your Life Building a Small Business." And his point was that the church -- so often when it does talk about entrepreneurship, it's like, "Go start a landscaping business.

There'll be a plot." Like, these really kind of small cottage things, which are good, and he said they're good. But it's like, "I'm going to spend my time doing this." He's like, "I want to build a company that can employ 1,000 men and pay them wages to take care of their family.

Like, if I'm going to put the effort into this, let me go big." And I thought that was really good. That's been part of my feelings of ways, is how do you navigate all of that? And maybe part of that is it's different things for different people. And some people are called to just go be the super faithful plumber, and some people are called to be -- do the bigger thing.

I'm not sure. -Yeah, I agree. -It's not a satisfactory answer. -No, I'm glad that you can broach the subject, and I'm going to think more about it in days to come, and I look forward to talking about it more. To your comment about if your pastor said, "Hey, this is what we're going to do," I think that this is one of the areas where all of our Catholic and Orthodox friends are shaking their fists saying, "Yes, yes, yes, we told you this." And I think that this is something where the world of Protestantism really, very broadly, doesn't have to be this way, but I think this is something that the world of Protestantism has to deal with.

There are Protestant traditions that build beautiful cathedrals, but I myself have walked past the big giant church building when I was younger and shaken my fist at it and said, "What a giant waste. This building could be sold and the money given to the poor, and wouldn't that be better?" And that's kind of at the core of our fundamental ethos.

And quite literally last week, I was talking with a friend of mine. We'd gone to a church meeting, and I was thinking about the whole structure of kind of a standard Protestant church meeting, how in a large church, how it goes. And I was reflecting on this and saying, "Basically, all this is is a Latin mass, or sorry, a mass, a Catholic mass, but stripped of all of the symbolism, stripped of all of the symbolism, stripped of all of the sacramental religious significance, stripped of all the decorations." And basically what we did was took a standard priestly mass, stuck it into a gray building with a guy on a stage, and that's it.

And why does this ring so hollow? What is missing? And those mystical elements are taken out. Now, generally, I would just assume, turn the chairs in a circle and take the man off the stage and have 10 people stand up and talk during the church meeting, and that's what I would do to try to encourage the New Testament simplicity of gathering.

And I think that, but I realize that's basically what much of Protestantism has done, is it's taken the form of the old, but stripped the beauty out of it. And that's kind of what you're talking about. So you go and you look at, I don't know, the Crystal Cathedral or some big megachurch building in your town, and the appeal is still to create beauty and excellence, and we're going to have a million-dollar music program because we want to honor God with our excellent work.

Well, that's no different than the cathedral builders were doing. They were trying to honor God with their excellent work. And which of these is more likely to be around in 100 years? People are still going to be going to Strasbourg, France, to view the cathedral there in 100 years.

Nobody's going to be coming to the big tin megachurch building to hear the band play in 100 years. And so we need to wrestle with it theologically and think about it, because I myself have been wrongly critical of those things in the past, and we see kind of the cheap veneer as it has fallen, that maybe our forebears had wisdom that we discarded without properly appreciating.

Yeah, I think that's true. And I think part of it, too, as I thought back on giant church buildings and stuff as of late, I think even when they go for beauty, so often it's still poor-quality materials and poor-quality craftsmanship, and that building will not be around in 150 years, much less 1,000 years, like some of these cathedrals have existed for hundreds of years.

They're putting the money into it, but they're not actually putting the craftsmanship to the high level behind it to make that happen. Yeah. One of my favorite things, what inspired me, what I've gotten into, so I've gotten super into urban design. How can we build cities in a way that is conducive to the positive life of the people?

I've come to think that that would be... I've got a podcast outline written, and my title is something like "Five Industries I'd Love to See "Conservatives Dominate." But the problem is it doesn't feel... It feels slightly outside of my guidelines of radical personal finance, which is why I haven't done it.

But one of the things that I've observed is I've gotten super annoyed at how people that would tend to align with me politically don't seem to... We tend to... And I'll go ahead and tell you the story, how I came to this realization. But we tend to discard things without thinking about them.

I had a realization a number of years ago. I made a statement. I've probably made it here on a podcast, but I made a statement to someone that if I were elected president, the first thing I'd do would be to quit. And if I was forced to serve, the first thing I would do would be to start cutting laws and getting this off the books and that off the books.

And when I was younger, that was basically my political ethic, was government's too big. We need less government. And if all we could do is just get less government, then we'd be living in a libertarian utopia. And that was great. So then I thought about getting into politics just as a thought experiment.

And I thought, all right, what if I were mayor? And I realized that there's nothing at all attractive. Imagine you elect a local mayor and the mayor says, "Well, my job is to diminish the size of government." Okay, well, certainly. I'm sure there's some bad laws on the books in every town that need to go away.

But that's just not politically attractive in the way that I thought it would be if I were president and my goal was to cut the size of government. Probably it was built by, one of my favorite scenes in a book was when I was in high school, I read "Executive Orders" by Tom Clancy.

And the hero, Jack Ryan, is whisked into office completely unexpectedly. He was sixth in line and then there's a massive tragedy and he goes from sixth in line for the presidency to being president overnight. And it's like your archetypal hero of a president, someone who never wanted to be president, never ever would have run for election, is kind of a normal, just a normal guy, an intelligent guy, kind of a centrist, not super extreme, very pragmatic.

And all of a sudden, he's given the reins of power. So he says, "Well, I'm here. I got to use it." And so there's all these dramatic scenes in the book that lay out how he starts making government better. So back to becoming mayor, what I realized is that I wouldn't have a clue how to even create a campaign speech to run for mayor.

I don't have a clue for a campaign speech to run for state representative because I don't have any philosophy of state politics or local politics. My entire philosophic, political mind is built upon presidential elections in the United States. I had nothing to offer. So I spent a lot of time thinking about it.

And I realized that there's a lot of truth in the fact that political ideology is different at different levels. And the saying that "Internationally, I'm an anarchist. And on a national level, I'm a libertarian. On a state level, I'm a Republican. And on a city level, I'm a Democrat.

And in my family, I'm a communist." There's truth in that because that's kind of how I feel. I don't like... If you go to Republican towns across the United States where it's just all Republicans, they're just no fun. They're terrible towns. They're terrible cities. You don't enjoy being in them.

They're ugly. And it's a four-lane highway and a bunch of fast food restaurants and you're done. Go to a Democrat, a 90% blue community, and you've got beautiful streets and you've got great buildings and wonderful coffee shops. And it's just a pleasant experience. It's way more fun to live in a community that is...

A city that is dominated by Democrats is, I would argue, objectively better. It's an objectively better experience. It's more beautiful. Everything is taken care of, etc. But then... So as I've been thinking about it, I say, "Wait a second. Why don't Republicans or conservatives... I don't even know what to call myself anymore.

But why don't Republicans or conservatives do this? I don't see any fundamental reason in conservative ideology, whatever that is, why we can't build beautiful towns. I think most people want to live in a beautiful town. So why don't we do that?" And so things like town planning and good urbanism, I've now come to say, this is something that would solve it.

And I believe that that's fundamentally actually a conservative value. Bad urbanism is leading to fractured communities and fractured families. Everything from living in the suburbs and children being isolated in their houses and not knowing your neighbors and having just miles of cars. And it's all a scam anyway. Meaning that the road mafia, the conservatives love to say, "We're not going to build a train because it costs too much." And they don't ever bother to calculate how much the highways cost to maintain.

And so it's all fake. So things like that matter. So to the point I was driving at, some of my favorite people are those who build houses. And I find them on social media. And there's a bunch of guys that live in normal places. And what they do is they build, you know, thousand-year houses made out of brick, all of the traditional methods for rich people to have.

And 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I never would have conceived of the idea of that. I would see the single wide, you know, mobile home as the most beautiful thing because that provides housing for the most people. Today I look at it and I say, "What an amazing thing that that guy is doing." And all he's doing is building beautiful brick houses that are designed to last.

I want more of that. And I want to be involved. Whatever that is, I want more of it. I want to provide housing and be grateful about the beautiful innovations of the mobile home for keeping poor people off the streets. I love that. I don't want to go live in a sawed house.

But I also want to encourage rich people to not-- I want to encourage rich people to spend money on craftsmanship and building big, expensive houses with things that will last. And I want them to build cathedrals and build businesses and endure because those are good uses of money. And I've been trying to get at that a little bit in recent podcasts, even the one-- Yeah.

--most recent one, to say a decade ago, I didn't get it. I didn't understand it. Today, guys like you and I were looking at it and I think and understanding it that we want to build and pass along wealth for the next generation. And when you just have cheap financial wealth, it doesn't last.

One final thing, and then I'll let you respond and wrap us up. But I thought about this a lot in the context of inheritance on two dimensions. And dimension number one is that of family inheritance. Years ago, I read Bill Bonner's book called Family Fortunes. I really love the book.

And one of the points that he made in that book was the worst possible thing to give your children is money. If you just give your children money and you pass them along an inheritance that's money, you're almost assured that your family is going to be broke very soon because the people are going to spend the money because that's what you do with money.

And so his comment was certainly money is going to be part of it, but the goal should be to provide an inheritance that will endure. And that inheritance is probably going to involve lands or business. And lands are famously difficult to sell. They're difficult to divide. They're difficult to sell.

And so if you pass along physical property to your beneficiaries, that physical property is not something that they can sell. They can spend the income from it, but you can make it so they can't sell it. So thus, it's more likely to endure. And then he talked a lot about a business and a business culture and how if there's a family identity that's associated with a business, then this business now is not likely to just be pawned off to the next bidder.

And ever since I read that book, probably a decade ago, I've just thought about the cheapness of money, that we spend all of our time chasing money, which is the cheapest, most ephemeral thing that exists, and we often ignore true wealth and those things that create money. And Aesop wrote the fable of the goose and the golden egg for a reason.

And yet I feel like most of our modern American mentality related to money is all about cutting the goose open to get the egg so we can show it off online rather than cultivating a farm of geese and taking that one goose that was producing kind of yellowish-looking eggs and carefully breeding it and carefully breeding it and carefully breeding it until three generations from now we can have a goose sire that can fill our children's goose houses with progeny forever.

And so how do we get more of that in our thinking? How do we build that long-term thinking? And my entree into this is this is why I think it's important that we think and talk about our family. We're living in a culture that is so ephemeral that all we think about is ourselves.

And so if we're going to go build a business we're just thinking about how we can get rich so we can retire and be done as quickly as possible. But more and more as I get older and I watch my children get older now I'm thinking how can I build a business that my great-grandchildren will be able to triple?

That's a totally different mindset. And I don't know if it's possible. We can look to some of the businesses in Japan and in Europe and the Middle East and whatnot where there's 600-year-old businesses. And the business major in me just says, "Oh, that's ridiculous. Our modern engineering is so better." But is it?

Don't we have some lessons to learn? So I don't have much to teach on it but I am thinking about it and trying to find some solutions to solve these desires that you and I share. Yeah, I think that's... I mean, that's been a lot of what I think has kept me from...

which is not necessarily a good thing but what's kept me from taking action at times is I want to build a business that not only my children can inherit but can do so much more than I was able to do with it. I love the Thousand Year House guy.

Those guys are super awesome and especially with my background in construction, I love that stuff. And I think there's obviously a lot to be said in UC, right? As wealthy people spend money and if they start to value something you start seeing that transition over to lower classes and that can happen.

It's also just hard where it's like, gosh, it's like a million-dollar home and it's not even that big and what about the people who need this to some degree? Some of those people just need to go figure out a way to make more money, right? I couldn't afford an all-brick home right now.

So, you know, and so I think there's... It's like I see a lot of this stuff that I want to move to and I don't see a lot of people doing it. Other than there's a few people doing like that kind of thing but then I even see like I struggle with kind of the economic side of it.

I don't mind. I have no problem selling expensive things to wealthy people. Also, to some degree, it's like how can we scale that down in a reasonable way so that a reasonable family when they're trying to buy a home, they're not wasting their first home payment on some trashy new build that literally falls apart in six months and is built literally falling apart, right?

I like your example of the golden egg where yeah, that's totally what we're doing. You're totally like not only killing the goose but cutting open the egg and it's like all of this stuff. We destroy the actual valuable thing and we have no thought for the future because ooh, I can post this on Instagram.

I don't know. I'm glad to hear you're thinking that. I would love for you to do that episode on the five industries that financial services should take over. I think that's totally within your wheelhouse. - All right. I always question how do I keep my podcast name Radical Personal Finance instead of The Joshua Sheets Show if I go too far off script but I probably should.

- That ship has sailed. It's fine. - There you go. That was the accurate comment. The ship sailed with episode 33, Joshua. Come on. And we're all still here. Great. All right, good stuff, Daniel. Thank you. Let's keep talking and let's keep thinking. I think obviously with most things everything begins with desire so we begin with a desire and there's not a solution.

On the housing thing, I've been following the guys who are 3D printing houses and I don't think it's not-- They're not thousand-year houses. They still use wooden trusses and asphalt shingle roofs and things like that so it's not nearly as great as a brick house with a slate roof or something like that but still there are probably some ways to do it and if I were involved in home building and I could use a-- If I could build 3D printed houses with the construction printers that they have, the concrete printers that they're using now, that stuff's pretty cool and so it's probably not an extremism.

Probably what we need is some builders building modest houses that cost a million dollars because they're all made out of brick and then we need a lot of other people that are still producing homes for the masses because we forget how minuscule the wealthy has always been. The counterargument to everything that we've said so far is just to appreciate that a lot of our ancestors lived in a sod house that they dug out of the ground and piled up grass around and that was where they birthed nine children and so we're doing a lot better than that but that doesn't mean that we've reached the zenith of civilization.

We've got a lot yet to do. Thank you all for listening to today's show. That concludes our Friday Q&A show for today, June 7, 2024. As you can see, that's open mic Friday. You can call anything. You can talk about anything and I can't censor you and you can trigger me any way you like.

So if you'd like to join me on next week's show, I hope you'll do that. Go to Patreon.com/RadicalPersonalFinance and sign up there and you'll be able to join me next week on the Friday Q&A show. Hey, you. Yes, you. Ever wonder if your shoes could talk? What stories they'd tell?

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