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We tirelessly negotiate so you don't have to. And we help you get past all the tough stuff and on to the good stuff. Not because it's our job, but because it's your dream. Let's go to work. California Association of REALTORS®. Today on Radical Personal Finance, it's live Q&A. Forgot to turn off the mute button.

Welcome to Radical Personal Finance. Every now and then we do one of these rookie mistakes. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua Sheets, and this is the Friday Q&A show for Friday, June 21, 2024. Live Q&A. Call in. Talk about anything that you like. We'll get the timing back on track here in a moment. If you're new, welcome to Radical Personal Finance. Welcome here at Radical Personal Finance, each and every Friday in which I can arrange a microphone and everything else needed to record a microphone and people to ask questions and make comments.

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It's completely open to you. You get to set the entire agenda. We begin with Marcus in Virginia. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hi. Thank you for having me. It's great to be on your show. I wanted to start off with a personal question. I recently sold all my rental property real estate and was looking for an investment suggestion from you on where I should put-- got a total I should have about $100,000.

The real estate market is not looking good to upgrade in. So I wanted to know personally what other investments that you may have uncovered or suggest I put that $100,000 into. What are you investing for? What are you hoping to accomplish? I'm hoping to invest, increase, and gain monthly cash flow.

I'm looking to invest in cash flow. I was recently considering investing in a barber shop. My current barber, he owns a business and was looking to start open a second location and add an additional schooling element to his barber shop so he can teach future barbers for the area here in Virginia.

So I was looking to talk-- I have a scheduled appointment with him and his wife this Sunday to talk about investing in that with the money and buying equity and income, generate income from that, and a few other ideas. There's a car wash down in Atlanta, Georgia that's looking for some equity investors.

The duration of the investment, about three years. If you give--so they give a baseline. They're going to 1.5x your money. So if you give them $15,000, they're going to turn that into $22,000, $25,000 over the course of three years when they sell a car wash to a known business that buys up car washes in the U.S.

market. So looking at different things. Didn't know if you had anything that you found, but just trying to figure out what to do with that money to produce cash flow for myself. What are you living on? I'm a disabled veteran, and I am also self-employed. So I do medical carrier work.

So I deliver pharmaceutical products, prescriptions, COVID test specimens, lab equipment, lab specimens throughout the--this area in Virginia has a very big presence with medical, big hospitals, home health care facilities, a lot of that. So I do that for myself, and then I'm a disabled veteran, so I receive a monthly stipend from the military until the day I die.

Would you yourself be willing to work in a business that you invest into? Absolutely. Well, I like the direction you're going. If you have $100,000 of capital, and your goal is to invest for monthly cash flow, it's hard to come up with any better possible investment than some form of business that you yourself work in, operate, and grow.

It's not unreasonable to expect that you could turn your $100,000 of capital into a business that could get you $10,000 a month of cash flow or much, much more. That's not in any way unreasonable. Now, the reason it's not unreasonable, though, is we're kind of folding in the idea that you're working in the business because that's where you have the ability to then change the business to its maximum amount.

And so if you just want to create cash flow, and that's your investment objective, then that's going to be the highest potential return is going to come from your investing into a business, especially one that you work in. So I would encourage you to think about the attributes of that kind of business and then go out and look at the opportunities that are in the marketplace.

Now, let me give you just a quick précis on a few of the things that I'm pointing out, though. Notice I said the business that you yourself work in. If you're purely engaging in some form of passive investment where you're going to advance money into a business that someone else is going to work in, you're going to have a much lower potential cash flow.

The barbershop and car wash opportunity both match that description. They just want your money, and they're going to take it and go from there. That may be a very reasonable thing to do. So I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I'm trying to help you categorize it in your own mind so you understand what your options are.

So think about, first of all, am I investing into a business as a passive investment, just a pure money man? And if so, I'm going to be getting a marginal rate of return. I'm going to be getting something like a dividend yield on my money, which for $100,000 is going to be the very, very slow way towards your goal.

If you're investing into something like the car wash business, then your $100,000 makes you just a minor investor, which again, they might indeed deliver on your 1.5x growth on your money, but it's just going to be a relatively small amount. So the question comes down to, are you willing to work in the business?

And if you are, then you can derive your compensation. Of course, some of it would be the equivalent of a salary, but it's going to be where you have the most control, the most impact, probably the most safety, and yet ultimately in the fullness of time, the largest opportunity.

So what I would suggest is that you think about that type of structure, see if it fits with your overall willingness, and then look around within your experience and within your network at the kinds of businesses that other people operate that match that. And so look at your medical delivery business and ask yourself, "Well, is there a way that I could expand this?" And this could be the business, because after all, I know this, and put the money into this effectively.

But on literally every corner, everywhere you go, you'll find businesses that you could invest in. I can't go further to give you a specific suggestion. I would encourage you to go and look at some of the franchise directories, read some of the franchise opportunities, because you're very well positioned to start with a new franchise.

And if you start with a new franchise, your franchisor will probably give you the information that you need of how much is needed for a franchise fee, what the cash flow would be, what the kind of business structure would be of every business that you're thinking about getting into.

On the whole, that's the direction I would go looking for investment opportunities. Thank you, Joshua. I did reach out to a franchise broker. He sent me a list of 10 franchises that have a high propensity to do well in my area. And the two that I selected, that stood out to me, were a home health care franchise and a mental health franchise, both with a startup cost of less than $50K to $150K startup cost.

So those were two other opportunities that I was looking at in addition to the car wash and the barbershop with the school. So yes, I have looked into the franchise opportunity as well. And let's assume that you invested the $150,000 into one of those opportunities that the broker suggested to you.

What would be the expected profit on one of those kinds of opportunities, assuming normal results, within a few years? What would you guess the cash flow would be? I would guess the cash flow would be about $15,000 to $22,000 a month. I've also confirmed that with a young lady who owns her own practice, and she said that's what she makes in her mental health practice.

That's what they're bringing in monthly is about $22,000 a month with their mental health practice, and they're all remote. They use interns, a lot of interns, and their costs are very, very low. So you can see the point that I'm making, that if your investment goal is cash flow, you're in the right direction.

I wouldn't be comfortable making comments beyond what I've said in terms of any particular opportunity, but I think you're looking in the right direction and moving in exactly the right direction. So look around your area. Keep thinking about what might work well. Consider this franchise broker. Maybe consider another 10 from another franchise broker.

Do good due diligence in interviewing other people who are involved in this. Think about where the franchise agreement puts you in three years, five years. But if those things fit your vision, I think you'd be very well served with one of those opportunities. So go for it. We move to Nathan in Florida.

Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hi, Josh. I'm making sure I'm unmuted. Can you hear me? Sounds good. Go ahead. Okay, great. Hey, this is hopefully an easy lifestyle-related question. Exploration is a key part of our family culture, and we live in the Mid-South, so we do a lot of road tripping.

I've heard you talk off and on about overlanding or things like that. So just looking at refining our setup, we typically spend probably 10 to 15 nights a year ground camping. So our typical setup is kind of a suburban. Usually got six bikes and then like a kayak and stand-up paddleboard.

But the interior volume is still really tight, and it may be marketing, but the overland setups look slick, and they add a lot of creature comforts. So looking for how to keep doing that and kind of reduce the friction when we say, "Hey, let's go out and check out this place and spend a week." We don't truly need like hardcore overland off-grid, kind of like Earth Roamer extended time off the grid.

But yeah, just curious. I know you've looked around, and I've heard you talk about fewer vehicles is better. So curious what your thoughts are. When you say interior volume, are you referring to the interior volume of your suburban? Yeah. Okay. And you're traveling as a family of six, two adults, four children?

Correct. Yeah. Kids are, let's see, 12, 10, 6, and 5. So they're gradually getting bigger, and bikes that I can currently put in the trunk are starting to need rack space on the back. Yeah. If I woke up in your shoes, I'd keep the suburban. I'd just add a trailer or a small cargo trailer of a couple different potential varieties.

Have you tried pulling a trailer? See how that works for you? Not for camping in particular. We have pulled trailers before, so I've been curious about whether it's a toy hauler or a purely cargo or a teardrop, things like that. When you say trailer, are you thinking mainly of cargo for the stuff?

Yeah. So there would be two directions that I think would probably solve what you're trying. So if you're going out for maximum a couple weeks, I don't think there's any reason at all to consider going with a large structured trailer that you live in. When I was younger, my dad bought a cheap old pop-up camper that we took back and forth across the United States.

And there wasn't enough room in the pop-up camper for the whole family, so the boys always got stuck in a cheap tent on the ground. And for whatever reason, I guess waking up with a wet sleeping bag due to rain and inundation enough times, I grew to really get annoyed with that.

And I would look across the campground and I would see these big giant vehicles of big huge travel trailers and I would just dream someday I could sleep in comfort in a travel trailer and have air conditioning. And when it rains, I wouldn't get wet and wake up wet.

So I dreamed of that. Well, I fulfilled my dream. And one of the things that I learned was, wait a second, going around the world with a travel trailer is an enormous hassle. And I'm a very good trailer driver. I'm very good at backing a big trailer into a tight space.

Traveling with a big trailer adds, and I like driving big vehicles. I've driven big vehicles, big trucks, big trailers my whole life. It doesn't bother me. But it adds a whole different set of friction to your life where it makes it super annoying to constantly have this huge vehicle.

So having done that, I have learned that I would only do that again if I needed a vehicle to live in. So if you're going across the United States for a year with your four young children and you're gonna be full-time on the road for a year, I would unquestionably recommend a full-sized travel trailer or fifth wheel or some kind of large RV that you're going to live in because you're on the road for so long that you need that comfort.

You need the security. You need the comfort, things like that. If you're traveling a lot, you go with those options for the comfort. The problem is if you yourself go to that, you're not gonna use it. You don't need it. And you lose a whole lot of adventure that's currently available to you.

You would lose a whole lot of flexibility that's available to you by being relatively lightweight. And for what? You don't gain anything from it. You wanna be outside. When you're camping for up to 15 nights a year, then you wanna be outside. You wanna be in the elements. And if you have a rainy night or the weather is really terrible and you're in that situation, then you just bail on the campground, go rent a place at a hotel with an indoor pool and go stay there for a couple nights.

And that's infinitely cheaper than going with a travel trailer. So if I woke up in your shoes from what you're describing, I would keep the Suburban, but I would just add a small trailer. And there'd be two ways to go about it. Way number one, which would be super simple, would just be to add a small cargo trailer.

I'm picturing maybe an eight foot trailer and not full width, but keep it as like a six foot width, eight feet long, something single axle or a very small double axle, just for the confidence of having the double axles, but keep it small and narrow. And that way you have a place where you can put your bikes, you can put everything that's currently inside of the Suburban into the trailer, but you have a trailer that tows really easily, backs really easily, is really simple to put in and out of a campsite and you just keep all of your current stuff set up with it.

And if you're not doing hardcore backwoods travel, then that can work out fine. If you are doing, meaning you can take that on plenty of dirt roads, no issues, put some good 10 ply tires on it and you can go down all the back roads that you want. If you need to genuinely go off road on some kind of trails, then you may be able to flip the axles or put a small lift on it, something like that and have something that could handle a little bit more off-road trails, but that just empties out your driving vehicle, keeps you very nimble, very lightweight, super easy, but you just keep your current ground tent set up.

The second version would be if you're genuinely going onto off-road trails and you really need off-road capacity, then I would consider investing into a purpose-built off-road trailer and one with large tires, a lift, one of those nice three-way tow hitch connections so that you can handle all the bumps and all of the off-road camber pretty easily.

That would work well. Who's your realtor? Seriously, who is your realtor? Lately, there's been a lot in the news about real estate and realtors, so let us help clear the air. California realtors are Californians just like you, your neighbor, your best friend's brother, and your kid's baseball coach, and we all strive every day to be your trusted advisors on the biggest financial decision of your life.

No one cares more about helping Californians live the California dream than California realtors because we know California real estate is not easy. That's an understatement, but if you're a first-timer, we help you confidently get in the game, and if you've been there, done that, we're there to help you get through what's new and different.

We tirelessly negotiate so you don't have to, and we help you get past all the tough stuff and on to the good stuff, not because it's our job, but because it's your dream. Let's go to work. California Association of Realtors. And then if you need comfort, just get one and maybe put one rooftop tent on it for you and your wife, and then keep the kids in a nice ground tent, or get one big enough where you could put two big rooftop tents on it so you have a little bit more of just the convenience of the rooftop tent on the trailer, but yet you're still living outside around the vehicle.

I think those are the two most practical setups that would work for what you're describing and would fit your use style. Okay. And when you describe those, I'm picturing like the open-air cargo trailer, not like-- The second version. Either one could work. When I described the first one, I was picturing an enclosed cargo trailer.

The second one, I'm picturing an open cargo trailer with, again, like a rack built with a couple of rooftop tents on it. Right, right, right. Okay. I think the first option is pretty obvious from like brands and stuff like that. Do you have any of the second variety that you've looked at?

I don't. They're all obscenely overpriced as far as I'm concerned. I know, yeah. They are obscene. Every time I've looked at them-- They're absolutely obscene. Yeah. But I would go on to Expedition Portal. Go in the forums there on expeditionportal.com and see what the discussion would be there from some of those guys who know that market.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah, has your family wound up being an outdoors culture? I know you guys did the wild in the RV. Have you guys continued in that vein? Yes. That's where I've spent so much time thinking about it and what I've decided is the only way-- There is no perfect vehicle that works for every circumstance.

So the only rational way to approach these decisions is to design a specific trip or a specific set of trips and then create the vehicle for that. The vehicle that you want for 15 nights of camping in state parks around your home within a four to five-hour drive of your home is going to be very different than the vehicle that you want for a one-year expedition from Alaska to Argentina.

So just think about the specific trips. But I think that generally for most people, a small cargo trailer, a nice enclosed one so that when it's raining, when it's dusty, your stuff can stay cleaner. You can put the bikes back there. All your camping gear goes in there. You can bring along some slightly bigger pieces of gear that make your car camping trip a little easier.

Slightly bigger stove, bigger tables, bigger, more chairs. All that stuff fits beautifully in the cargo trailer, and yet you're still lightweight, easy to go down the road at a good pace, and pretty inexpensive. - Excellent. All right. Well, hopefully it was an easy one. - Yeah, I was going to say, thanks for the softball.

It doesn't get easier than that and more fun. Joshua in Texas, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? - Hi, Josh. - Can you hear me? - Yes, sounds good. Go ahead. - Hi. Thank you for taking my call. And I'm a first-time caller, and I wanted to say thank you for your great insight and ability to foresee the future during the pandemic.

I think you greatly helped me stay safe and myself as well, and I just wanted to say thank you for that. - My pleasure. - I am trying to buy my first car. I've never bought a car. I've had the same make and model of car since I was in high school, and I'm now 30.

So I am trying to buy a car, but I essentially have no cash. It's close to $100,000, but it's, like, all in crypto. And I don't have -- I know there's options. I've looked at a lot of options, but I'm just stuck on how to get -- I need about $7,000 for the down payment, and I'm just a little stuck on how to get the money and, like, what should I -- or should I still do this?

I don't know. I really want the car, but I don't know. I was just saying if you could help me out. - How much is your income? - Right now, I make about $60,000. With this current job, I'm not working my normal job in HR. I'm a compensation analyst.

Hired back on or get another job. Should be around, like, $90,000. But currently, at this exact -- - So you're 30 years old. You're earning $60,000 a year, and as I understand it, you don't have any money saved that is available for buying a car, but you do have about $100,000 in crypto value.

Is that correct? - That's correct. - Why don't you have any money saved? - I just -- I don't know. Like, I've adapted to this mindset. I was -- when I first got into personal finance, like, serious, like, five years ago, I kind of just was stuck on the -- where I'm going to invest everything and not keep any -- like, only keep $1,000 cash on hand, basically, and, like, it's been really hard for me to break that.

So I'm kind of just really, like, basically addicted to it. Anytime I get money, I just want to invest it over. I had probably about $10,000 not too long ago, and, like, situations came up where I, you know, probably used it for something else, like my normal life, but I ended up just investing it, and I've kind of just ended up in the position now where I just have no cash on hand.

- Other than the $100,000 in crypto, do you own any other investments, such as retirement investments, things like that? - About half of that is actually in a retirement account that I moved from a 401(k) to a IRA, a crypto IRA. And outside of that, I mean, I have, like, $3,500 in a Roth IRA and, like, $2,000 in a random brokerage account.

- And so you have $3,500 in a Roth IRA and $2,000 in a brokerage account. And what's wrong with your current car? - There is nothing wrong with it. It actually runs fine. I believe this-- The reason why I want the car is kind of an image deal. I mean, just what I do in my life, like, it does kind of-- I need to have a nicer car.

Like, it's something I've vacated for a long time and, like, or, you know, just haven't really prioritized, and, like, I believe it's time for me to do this. - Okay. And are you single or married? Do you have children? - Single, divorced. - Okay. So I'm totally in favor of your buying another car.

I think that's great. If you observe the fact that I've got this junky old car and this junky old car is no longer appropriate for me and I need to upgrade my car, then absolutely, go ahead and upgrade your car. The first thing to talk about is how much money you should consider spending on your new upgraded car.

If you care about building wealth, if you care about becoming wealthy, then I would recommend that you target spending about 10% to as high as 50% of your income on the purchase of another car. So the more extreme version, the closer to 10% you are, the faster you can build wealth.

But I recognize that there may be good reasons to go as high as 50% of your income. So your budget for your next car should be between $6,000 and as high as $30,000 total. That's the total purchase price of your vehicle. So again, from a purely financial perspective, go as close to the $6,000 as you possibly can.

But if it turns out that there's a vehicle that's appropriate, that would be $11,000, I'm not going to beat you up and say you're stupid. And if you go as high as 50%, I won't call you stupid, but any higher than 50%, I'll call you stupid. So you judge in there.

But your budget should be between $6,000 and $30,000. The second component of your budget should involve exclusively the money that you have that you can give to another person for the car. It is stupid to borrow money on car loans because to do so will always result in your overspending for something that goes down in value like crazy.

So if you can't pay cash for it, you shouldn't buy it when it comes to something like a car or any other depreciating asset. So you do have money, you just don't want to spend it. You first of all have some value of the car that you have that you could sell.

If you sold the car that you have right now, how much would it sell for, do you think? Probably about $2,500. Okay. So the time to sell a $2,500 car is when the $2,500 car is working well and there's nothing wrong with it. So you could sell the car for $2,500.

There's $2,500. You have $2,000 in a brokerage account that you could use, and there'd be another that'd take you to $4,500. And then if you need to take some money out of your Roth IRA, then you could do that as well. What I think you should be very concerned about is why don't I have more money.

So if you're making $60,000 a year and you don't have money saved, you should ask yourself why is it that I don't have it. If all the money is investments because that's what I've been putting money into, great, good for you. But just go ahead and wait three months, stop investing for three months, and in three months with a $60,000 income as a single man, you should be able to save another $5,000 just out of your income.

So what I would suggest is you put the current car on the market, see if you can start to get a little interest in that. Somebody might give you $2,500 for it, and then just start saving money like crazy out of your budget. And within three or four months, you should have $5,000 to $10,000 in savings with just those things right there that you can go and purchase another car.

The idea being that recognize that I need a car, so I need to save for one and go buy one, and that takes a priority over my other investing. But don't put yourself in a mindset where I'm going to go and buy a $40,000 car and I need a $7,000 down payment.

Don't spend money that you don't have. Just save money. Save money for the car. And if you need to upgrade for a better image, great. But there's no reason why that needs to happen in less than three months or six months that it takes you to save the money for your next car.

Okay. All right. That makes sense. I don't really have anything else to add. I mean, my plan was to get the new car, and then I was going to try to start a little rental car company. That is part of the plan for the next five years. You're breaking up just a little bit after you said you were thinking about starting a rental car company, which is fine.

If you have a business-making idea and you think that you could rent out this little $2,500 car and there's some way to do that, then sure, you could probably make more money with it as a rental than what you're going to get selling it out in the open market.

I'm not saying no to any of those things, and I would give you full rights of decide whatever is best for you. I just want you to follow two or three rules. Rule number one is 10% of your income is the total value of the car up to as high as 50%, so your budget should be $6,000 to as high as $30,000.

Rule number two, you only buy what you can afford to pay cash for, and so you have to actually save it, or you have to sell some investment that you've previously made and use that money to purchase the next car. And then number three is think really carefully about what you actually need from the perspective of image, whatever you're trying to express, and make a wise decision into a smart car that will fit this image issue without being stupid.

So for example, image issue might mean I need to drive a car that is a little bit newer. Well, maybe a Tesla Model 3 or something like that doesn't come with the baggage that it gives you a high-performance, high-functioning car that doesn't come with the baggage of a BMW 3 Series.

And so you don't want image to be kind of this aspirational thing because what happens is frequently when people say that, they turn towards the entry model of a luxury brand, and the entry model of a luxury brand winds up making you look stupid because, "Look, I got my BMW 3 Series." Yeah, you just weren't rich enough to actually afford a decent car with that company, and now you wind up with high ownership costs, high maintenance costs, and it just turns into a piece of junk very quickly.

So I think the perfect car for most guys, for most people, is a Toyota Prius. Unless you need something that has a higher level of sex appeal, in which case go and find some kind of crossover SUV or something like that that kind of doesn't fit any kind of image issues, a Toyota Prius is a perfect vehicle.

No one knows whether you're a greenie or just smart with money, and yet it's a great, reliable vehicle that you can have for many years, widely available, good parts availability, it's great. Otherwise, look for something else. Look for some kind of efficient crossover or something that just doesn't fit any kind of standard mold, and that way you're not driving something that's clearly cheap, clearly junky, but you are fixing your image issues, but you're doing it in an intelligent way.

So with those things in mind, go and do that. Just give yourself three to six months and save for it, and use it as a chance to save like a crazy man so that you can pay for the thing that you actually want. Cavanaugh in California, welcome to the show.

How can I serve you today? Cavanaugh, time for you. Go ahead. Sorry. Hi. My name's Kirsten. Sorry, I don't know why I said that. Sorry about that. Oh, no problem. I was calling because I've been listening to you for years. I think we have somewhere around the same number of kids.

I have five kids. Great. I think you have somewhere around there. We also homeschooled, also Charlotte Mason style. I feel like we've got a lot in common, so it's not like our family has grown a lot. I've listened to you over the years. Sure. I have two kid-related questions for you.

The first would be, and I don't know, maybe this is something you'd end up doing a whole show about at some point. I know you've talked about traveling with kids. I would love some tips on the financial side of traveling with kids. I was curious, do you play any of the credit card games to do the points or the companion passes or anything?

I know when you did that big traveling trip, you flew a ton. Given that we're also flying with five kids, I'm just wondering how some people do it because it's crazy. Sure. I'll answer that. What's your second question just so I know how to position my answers? My second question is about my oldest who is about to be 12.

He's going into sixth grade. He is a unique kid. I would say he's very dyslexic. He struggles with that. He loves audiobooks. He actually spends more time listening to audiobooks than anyone I've ever known. Hours and hours a day. He's absolutely insecure because of his dyslexia. He ended up being very athletic and does very well in several sports to the point where we ended up involving him in travel sports, which is always one of those things I said we'd never do.

Amazing how our commitments go out the window when we face a circumstance where all of a sudden I need to do this thing that I said I would never do. I spent years saying we would never do that, but here we are. He's also the kind of kid that has a really good head on his shoulders and is very financially savvy.

He's always starting different businesses and has saved several thousand dollars at only 11 and is already investing in the stock market. He just loves that kind of thing. He's already thinking about what kind of career he wants in the future. When you're talking about all the different trades and everything, that's kind of -- we've had a couple conversations about it, too.

Interestingly, his latest idea is that he wants to be a plumber and start his plumbing empire, as he calls it, because his dad is self-employed and owns his own business, too. He's familiar with the concept. I'm just curious if you were talking to a kid in that situation, you tend to have good outside-the-box ideas.

What kind of thing? He's great with his hands. He does all kinds of things. I'm just curious if you had any directions to start looking into for him. Absolutely. First of all, let's start with that one, and then I will answer the travel question directly. I just want to do it, and I'll do it now in this show rather than saving it for another episode, because somehow my list of shows I should do tends to be longer than the shows that I do do.

First, I would say that even though your son has profound dyslexia, he shouldn't automatically avoid some kind of academic or intellectual work. I want to say two stories. First, Andrew Pudowa, who is a well-known speaker in the homeschool – Pudowa, I think he says his name anyway. I'm pretty sure we've listened to his interviews of his son, because he's also dyslexic.

Are you saying the right thing yet? Good. For those who are uninitiated, he's the guy who started something called the Institute for the Excellence in Writing, is well-known in homeschool circles, speaks at all the conferences. As I understand his story, he had his son, who was profoundly dyslexic, couldn't read a book with his eyes until he was 15 years old, something like that, and just couldn't do anything with his eyes until he was in his teenage years.

I don't know what he ultimately broke through with, but what Andrew would say is that this son of his, he did everything with audiobooks, and this son of his never stopped listening to audiobooks. Basically, his entire homeschool education was audiobooks. As it turns out, because I listened to a seminar that he gave on how to teach people to be effective writers, he alleged that this son of his was actually a better writer when they were able to develop strategies to deal with the dyslexia, he was a better writer than any of his other children.

In thinking back about it, he realized that because he had had so much exposure to the verbal language, his son had a much deeper connection with language than any of his children did who read with their eyes. It was based upon that that actually convinced me to not try to get away from audiobooks as a means of learning.

The point that he alleged in the talk that I listened to was that when children are very skilled at reading with their eyes, then they have a tendency to skip over the language and just read for meaning, whereas when someone's always reading with his ears, then he hears the language all the time, and thus the beauty of the language is imprinted on him more to a deeper level.

We live in 2024, in which not only is there massive profusion of professionally recorded audiobooks, but also we have really good AI voice generation where any document can be read aloud to your son, and so he can have amazing access to the text, and I would just make everything reading with his ears while you work with whatever therapists and things like that who are working for solutions for him to be able to function in reading with his eyes.

The second thing I would say is that this in no way diminishes his long-term success. My friend Mikel Thorup has an interesting story. He runs Expat Money, and he dropped out of school when he was 12 or 13 years old, and one of the big issues for him was dyslexia.

He couldn't do well in school, and he just couldn't conquer it. So he dropped out of school, started traveling the world, and thought, "I just can't learn. I'm not fit for learning in any way, shape, or form." Later on, he figured out that he could read using audiobooks, and so today he listens to audiobooks constantly, and he reads over 100 books a year, and he does it all by listening to audiobooks at about 3x speed, and that's how he consumes his reading.

He runs a multimillion-dollar business, is financially independent, travels the world, he and his wife have three beautiful children. He's in no way limited by the learning disability that gave issues for him when he was younger because he figured out how to work with it. And so today, with the world of audiobooks, especially with accelerated audiobook listening, your son can use that to learn just as well as anyone else.

And then if you'll continue to get him therapy until he figures out something that works for him to be able to read with his eyes effectively and knowing that it might take many more years, I don't think he should just automatically walk away from a life of the mind because of this, but rather he should approach it from the perspective of, "I can do this, and I can also do these other great things because there's nothing wrong with blue-collar businesses.

There's nothing wrong with any of these businesses." But he shouldn't just automatically let his dyslexia be seen as something that is a handicap that can't be overcome. It can be overcome, it is being overcome, and it can continue to be overcome, especially in today's world. Who's your realtor? Seriously, who is your realtor?

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We tirelessly negotiate so you don't have to, and we help you get past all the tough stuff and on to the good stuff, not because it's our job, but because it's your dream. Let's go to work. California Association of Realtors. Yeah, I appreciate that. I think a good bit of it, I mean, he, when you were saying has a better command of language, I would absolutely say his vocabulary and command of language are surpasses, like, any other kids I know his age.

And I would say he is exposed to great literature all the time. And we've really prioritized audiobooks. We've done Speechify. We have done a lot of the, like, AI language stuff. And I'm really thankful that, at least if he's dyslexic, he's dyslexic in 2024 where we can, you know, there's so many tools that we can use to help him.

And I do think, like, learning to advocate for himself, to be able to use those tools in other situations is, and it's still something, despite having encouraged him that way, it's something he definitely feels a lot of embarrassment about. And, you know, we're working with him, but it's hard to be a middle school boy, you know, so we have sympathy that way, too.

Of course. But nonetheless, I mean, and so we are, you know, I don't want him to think that any career path is closed for him, too. But at the same time, he's absolutely one of those kids that, like, loves to think about the future and, like, plan for the future.

And he already does like to consider a career. So I guess, yeah, I was just curious if there was anything, while we don't want to close doors for him, just, I don't know, any other off-the-wall ideas? Because I notice you tend to be good at that. Yeah, well. You always have an idea that I've never thought of before.

Hopefully just some inspiration is important. Yeah, definitely. And he needs to just understand that, you know, people are different. And one of the things that I'm, it's very easy to poke fun at the kinder, more inclusive society that we all live in, when that society doesn't fit the values that we ourselves want to espouse.

But I want to appreciate the fact that we do live in a kinder, more inclusive society. And it's less, and we're much less likely to spend our time criticizing people for fundamental characteristics that are innate to who they are, when we, instead of just appreciating them for who they are.

And so one of the things that I've noticed, I've noticed this specifically with autism, that if we went back five or ten years, somebody with autism, you know, a diagnosis of autism felt like a stigma. Today, I joke about autism because I'm convinced that a lot of forms of autism are basically a superpower.

And similar things, ADHD is in some ways a superpower. I don't know if dyslexia is a superpower. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. I don't have an argument that it is. But the point is simply that these things are, these differences are not differences to be shunned or to be made fun of or discriminated against.

They're things that genuinely we can work with. And so any way that we can inspire his confidence is important. I would try to look around and recognize that there are lots and lots of very successful people who are totally dyslexic, and they have been able to figure out ways to deal with it, and in the fullness of time, that there are plenty of benefits to it.

I've been thinking and thinking and thinking. I heard some wacko theory about dyslexia at one point in time, about it being misdiagnosed. I can't remember the wacko theory, but go out and look for some wacko theories about dyslexia and see if there's something that you've not considered or not tried.

But beyond that, I just want to encourage him that you're doing great and keep it up. Listening to audiobooks is just as effective as reading them. Reading them with your ears is just as effective as reading them with your eyes. And I think that the fact that he's in a homeschool environment and he's great at sports, we can work on his strengths.

And you don't need to-- truly, your gifts make a place for you in the world. And he should just always lean into his strengths and try to, from time to time, shore up weaknesses. But a lot of times, people spend so much time focusing on their weaknesses instead of their strengths that become superpowers.

And a really powerful tool of success is to focus doggedly on the things that you're really good at and then just let the other things slide. And so lean into athletics, lean into literature, lean into whatever is appropriate for him. And you can be a world-class speaker. You don't have to be able to write to be a world-class speaker.

So there's plenty of ways to make up for it. Let me pivot back now to traveling with children and give you some suggestions. First and foremost, I would say that reality always means that we need to acknowledge that it's going to be different traveling with five children than it is traveling with no children.

And so let's just acknowledge it. And that's going to mean that our travels are going to look different when we have five children than they are when we have no children. And that's not a bad thing. If I have the choice between having five children and traveling in our minivan on a regional or national basis doing road trips around our house versus having no children and spending my time on an airplane bouncing from country to country to country, I'm going to pick the five children every single time because that ultimately in the long run is going to be much more fulfilling and much more effective and a much better lifestyle for everyone above than the bouncing around the world.

In addition, even for the children, if you grow up as one of five children and your family travel involves traveling around in the family SUV on a regional level, whereas the single only child of your friend is traveling around the world with her parents who can easily buy her plane tickets, I think that there's so much more to be had for the kid that's got four siblings.

There's so much more to be had from that than bouncing around the world that again I would make that choice again. I was just this weekend starting a mini outline of a show that basically traveling is wildly overrated and international travel is wildly overrated because I believe it's important that guys like me who talk about travel and talk about the stuff that we did and I took my children to 16 countries last year so I do have some credentials and bona fides in this area and on the whole while I'm happy about a lot of it, I would say a lot of it is wildly overrated and especially for Americans living in the United States, a lot of international travel is just overrated.

Most travel in the United States is better than traveling around the world on every objective level. The primary reason many people want to do international travel is as a status symbol because as the world has shrunk and as more and more luxury goods have become more common, more cheaply priced, things like that, one of the last remaining status symbols that we can show to others that's not easily achievable has been international travel and so a lot of travel and travel ambition is related to status symbols and I myself am not immune to this.

One of the reasons I travel is because it allows me to say, "Hey, I've been to all these countries. I've been to all these places around the world." It's not only that, so I don't want to oversell the point, but I do want to make sure that we understand that in many cases we're not talking about something that's real.

Let's say you want to take a vacation to Hawaii or you want to take a vacation to Costa Rica. I'm going to bet that on the whole your vacation to Hawaii is going to wind up being cheaper and nicer and a better, more relaxing experience than your vacation to Costa Rica.

Hawaii is better, everything's simpler, but oh, you didn't get a stamp in your passport. Yeah, but so what? If I was looking for the experience, the experience within the United States is probably going to be better on the whole, cheaper on the whole, all things considered, than the experience abroad.

So if we're going to travel abroad, there needs to be some other reason other than those things and so that's where I embrace the difficulty of it. I embrace the cultural challenges. I embrace the linguistic challenges. I assume that this is going to be worse, it's going to be uglier, it's going to be a more difficult experience, and that's what I'm going for is because I want to see a world that's not perfect, where not all the bushes are beautifully manicured and where not all the people have great customer service.

So I travel to get worse experiences that cost me more money because I appreciate that cultural diversity and the linguistic diversity, things like that. So don't feel pressured that somehow the way that I'm going to be a good parent is to travel around the world with my five children.

It's perfectly fine to get in your car and drive to the national parks and you're probably going to have much better experiences doing that, even if that were all you did, than traveling around the world. If you still have a desire to travel after that, great, I'm with you on that.

Although having done quite a lot of it, I now appreciate what I didn't appreciate before of those travels around the United States. So in order to make this work, you have to pull it apart into its component parts and figure out where does the cost of travel come from.

And what most people focus on, I think, is often the wrong thing. So airplane tickets are, in general, shockingly cheap if you're flexible on time and location. So you alluded to traveling with credit card points, things like that. It is possible to travel with credit card points. I did a whole podcast on the value of credit card points.

I have traveled on credit card points. I've got some travels planned this fall with like an eight-country tour that is all booked on points. So I've done it and I'm not opposed to it. What I would say is it's broadly overrated. And so the people who should use credit card points are generally people who just have high structural expenses, usually in a business, where they book tens of thousands of costs and business expenses, and they can just put that on credit cards.

So if you've got tens of thousands of dollars of business expenses that are spendable as credit cards, do that, collect the points, and travel that way. But the idea of travel hacking for the purposes of collecting points, I think, is probably a poor use of time. Not that it can't work, but I don't think it's the highest and best use of time.

The secret to traveling inexpensively with children is to travel when it's cheap, to travel to the places that it's cheap to travel. And so what you are more interested in is low-cost airfare. It's hard to book seven tickets on points because much of the reward travel doesn't have availability for seven tickets at a time.

And you're probably not going to collect enough points that you can get seven first-class seats like the travel hacker people want. But what you can do is you can get inexpensive tickets to all kinds of places, especially if you're flexible on dates. So each coast of the United States has different places that you can travel inexpensively.

From California, you have all of the Asian low-cost carriers that can get you back and forth to Asia pretty expensively. You've got ZipAir that can get you to Tokyo for a few hundred dollars. There's other low-cost carriers that come in and out. And if you buy your fares when the fares are cheap and you buy them to the places that are cheap, then you can do well.

On the East Coast, there's all kinds of discounts to the Caribbean, to Latin America, on all the low-cost carriers, and then to Europe on low-cost carriers and low-cost fares. So the first secret to inexpensive family travel is don't try to set a date that you're going to travel in a specific place.

Rather, figure out where it's cheap to go and when it's cheap to go there, and then figure out what you're going to do when you get there. So I would spend time... Google Flights has become so much better that really you don't need much more. Spend time on Google Flights Explorers, the Google Flights Explorer tab.

That's fantastic. There are various aggregation services that'll show you cheap fares. I subscribed to years to Scott's Cheap Flights, which is now, I think, going.com, something like that. You'll find other tools. Kayak has an explore function. Kiwi has explore functions. Skyscanner has various functions. All of these tools allow you to figure out where it's cheap to go and when it's cheap to go there.

And this is the primary tool that I used with our travels last year. The way that I put our trip together was I found the first ticket. So if you're from the United States, generally you need a transatlantic or a transpacific ticket. That's going to be your big cost.

So figure out when you can get a transatlantic or transpacific ticket at a low cost. Then once you're there, in most regions, especially outside the United States, you can get low-cost airfares. So we have lots of low-cost carriers in the United States that allow us to get across the country pretty inexpensively.

So consider accessing those in your travels as well. But once you get to Europe, you can jet around Europe for 10 bucks a ticket, 25 bucks a ticket from different destinations if you want to go from place to place. So with some of my tickets around Europe last year, I would pay for seven tickets, I paid $250 total just because I picked where we were going based upon where it was cheap to get to.

And you wind up with some kind of random itineraries, but I appreciate the serendipity of that and the randomness of that. So that's the first thing with regard to flights. Also remember that not everything needs to be on an airplane. And so every travel destination, you look at it and then ask yourself if this is a destination where renting a car is going to be the good payoff.

Because if you can put seven people inside of a car, your cost per person goes down dramatically. One person traveling is going to need to use trains and buses and airplane tickets to keep costs low. Another person who fills up seven people in a car can generally have a much lower cost per person.

Also, get familiar with the places that you're going to go and child policies. So in Europe, for example, in many places, children can travel on the trains, not international trains and not long distance trains, but on regional trains with no fares. So that was something that years ago I didn't understand.

When I bought a car in Europe the first time, I did that because I said it was way cheaper for us to travel around in our own car, so I'll just buy a car and we'll use that to travel around. And then later when I figured out that my children could travel free on the trains with two adult tickets, and I realized that makes a lot more sense for me to do.

And so think about the cost per person per method of conveyance. And there's more than just airplanes. There's airplanes, there's trains, there's private rental cars, buses, all of them have their place. The second thing is ask yourself is the cost of transportation worth the experience? Let's move to accommodation now.

With accommodation, Airbnb is a major savior for large families. I've come to despise Airbnb as an infinitely worse experience as compared to staying in hotels. Years ago we were all excited about Airbnb because of all the cool experiences. It sucks. I've spent so much time in conflicts with owners and just junky experiences.

I will always now prefer a hotel whenever possible unless I'm traveling with my entire family. In which case, a lot of times it just makes a lot more sense to rent one apartment where I can fit seven people instead of three different hotel rooms for me to fit seven people into.

And so for a family, you want to get used to Airbnb. And you want to look at the destination you're at and ask yourself do we need to move around a lot or is it fine to go to one place and stay there? The longer you stay in a place, the lower the nightly costs that you can get and the lower the daily costs for the cost of your travels are.

So the worst way to travel, excuse me, the most expensive way to travel as a family is to go to a lot of places and move very quickly. Because what happens is your transportation costs, excuse me, the most expensive way to travel as a family is to go to a lot of places to move very quickly and to stay for a very short period of time.

Let's say that you travel with your family to across the seas and you wind up with $600 round trip tickets overseas and you're going for a two-week trip. Well, $600 round trip tickets times five, that's $3,000. You're going for a two-week trip. Let's assume now that your daily cost is $3,000 divided by 15 would be, it's too late in the day, too tired to figure that out.

My calculator broke. You do the math. 30-day ticket on $3,000 would be, I can't even do verbal math at the moment. The point is the daily cost of your tickets is very, very high. And the shorter your trip, now the daily cost of your tickets gets higher. But if you can take that same $3,000 of expenses and you can go overseas for two months and you can amortize that $3,000 over 60 days, your daily cost is now much lower than it otherwise would be.

And if now you're moving into an Airbnb in one city for 30 days, you get a 25% monthly rental discount in one and then another one and another one for 30 days and you get another 25% monthly rental discount and now you have lower cleaning fees, things like that, your daily cost of your accommodation is now lower.

And then the third big cost has to do with food. And so travel is hard for big families because the expenses of tickets are much higher and the expenses of eating out now become much higher. And so if you're taking five children out to eat three times a day, then it wouldn't be difficult for you to be spending $500 to $750 a day in food costs.

And so you want to prioritize a place where you can choose your eating out to strategic, to either a peak experience or something else. And so you want to stay in a place where you can cook and you want to go out to eat once a day or once every other day or once every third day and only go out to eat when it's meaningful rather than just constantly eating out just because we're moving too fast to stop and go to the grocery store, buy groceries and things like that.

The final thing that if you really want to travel and you want to travel on a budget, the best way to do that is to get your own RV for a family. The lowest possible cost of travel for a large family is to have your own RV and to travel in your own RV.

So if you do this, and you can do this all around the world, but if you do it that way, you now aren't paying per person per bed per night. You know the beds you're going to sleep in and you're usually going to pay, depending on the place, you're usually going to pay a fee for the vehicle for a camping spot rather than a fee per person.

You can now have your own food that you travel with and it's easy for you to cook it because you have your own cookware, things like that. And so the actual costs of travel diminish quite a lot. So it's mostly about trying different styles and going for a style that's going to give you the kinds of travel experiences that you're looking for and do it on a lower cost.

And so my number one recommendation is buy an RV or rent an RV, but in many cases, buy an RV, plan for the time when you can travel for longer periods of time, going for two or three month trips rather than two week trips, and then recognize that a lot of the stuff that you want to get from the travel, you don't have to travel overseas to get, that rather you can do a lot of that close to home and you can do a lot of the culture stuff even at home.

One more comment and then I'll stop. One of the biggest surprises to me has to do with things like foreign language acquisition. Many people have a very unrealistic idea of how effective foreign travel is for the purposes of language acquisition. And I myself previously had an unrealistic perspective. This is one of the reasons people want to travel.

It's actually very hard to learn languages while traveling unless you're genuinely going to move to another country and enroll your children in a local school where they can be genuinely fully immersed into the local culture, which by the way is a strategy that you should consider. If your family situation permits it, then a good way to travel Europe is not to try to take an annual trip to Europe for three weeks.

Rather, it's to wait until you've got a 15 year old, a 13 year old, a 11 year old, a nine year old, and a seven year old and then move to Europe for a year. Rent a house in Europe for a year. Rent out your house in California for a year.

Live in Europe. Enroll your children into a local school or homeschool in Europe and then make short trips from your central location. Because once you're there, it's super easy. Let's say you set up a base in the UK. It's easy for Americans to access the UK because you can get a six month visa free entry as a tourist.

So you come in, rent a house in the UK and that becomes the place that you go from. Well, now you have super cheap airfare back and forth from London to every corner of Europe very inexpensively and you can take weekend trips or you can take two week train trips.

And so having a location where you do your travels from a more central location is a much better idea than trying to plan a two week trip and buy seven tickets every year. Back to language acquisition. The problem with language acquisition abroad is that when you are on vacation and when you are traveling you spend so much time focusing on logistics because the daily logistics of what you eat and where you stay and what you do are so time consuming you have no time to spend on language studies.

So you don't actually wind up learning much language while you're gone. The best you can hope for in terms of language studies on a trip abroad is to have just a little bit of activation. Your best format for actual immersion study is at home where everything's under control and we can just do two hours of French every day and we can watch movies in French and we can listen in French and we can read in French and do all that stuff for two hours a day.

And then once you have a very high level of French comprehension then go to France and spend a few weeks in France and enjoy that as like your language activation where we now have lots of chances to speak. But if your children have very rudimentary language ability don't think that somehow it's gonna magically fix itself by traveling abroad.

So that was quite a lot but hopefully that's enough to get you started with a few ideas. - No, I appreciate it. That's some good stuff to chew over. I have some ideas already to think about so I appreciate that. - Good, anything else? - Oh, probably when I have more time, sometime I'd love to call in.

Push back a little on your last thing about women in Harrison, but I don't have enough time to do that right now 'cause I just picked up my kids in the car so I'll have to do that another time. - Absolutely, I hope you will. I'd love to hear your thoughts on it.

So please do that and I wish you well. All right, Lindsey in Colorado, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, Lindsey? - Hi Joshua, it's good to talk with you. I wanted to get your perspective on college. I've been interested of course to hear your thoughts on higher education throughout the years and I especially appreciated your recent episode on scholarships.

Let me give a little background about what I'm hoping to get your perspective on. So my husband and I are both highly educated but not necessarily from elite schools. My husband is foreign educated and then I went to schools in the US and I'm an attorney and we've always really valued education for our kids.

We've been very intentional about education and thank God our kids seem to be, they're young but they seem to be very bright, very academically inclined. And I would have thought that we would be doing everything we can to set them up to go to elite universities in the United States.

If their inclination continues, I also am of two minds. I believe that we can also get pretty much everything that you get at university in books and on YouTube. However, both the, I think that the opportunities that come with getting an elite degree are just second to none. That you get both the signaling that you get to say you're an intelligent person who went to XYZ school and then you get to network and meet people and just make more opportunities for yourself.

So I would have thought that that would be the case. However, over the past, let's say decade, I think I've been watching or we've been watching with growing concern about, with respect to some of the values that are, and the dogmas that are being promoted on campuses. Another piece of this is that we're Orthodox Jews and so I think that in many ways, similar to Christians, we are, we have our own set of values that are very important to us and that's gonna carry through and we want our kids to maintain those values as well.

And I've been, it's been a conversation in our community, of course, with lots of ideas and thoughts going around. And I wanna hear your thoughts though. You know, both, you know, we are concerned perhaps for our kids' physical safety. We've been really just aghast at what, you know, at people taking over quads and, you know, and having these encampments and, you know, and defecating there and siding with terrorists and yelling at students who, you know, are there to learn and study.

And, you know, and we are also concerned though, you know, also for psychological safety and I don't mean that as a, you know, in a very snowflakey way, it's just, you know, if you're paying for the privilege for your kids to be, you know, taunted and then also maybe missing out on opportunities with professors and, you know, and their peers and everything else.

And then we're also concerned about their morality. You know, with being in an environment like that, you know, is something that we would be concerned about, that they themselves might, you know, start to adopt this oppressor, oppressed mentality and, you know, and all of the mishegas that kind of goes with it.

So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that and either, you know, when to, I think about like the lobster test or the frog test, you know, when you have a frog in boiling water and, you know, if you turn the water, you turn the heat up slowly, it, you know, it doesn't jump out.

But if you, you know, just dump them into a pot of boiling water, they'll jump out. I've heard that's not actually true, but you get the idea. - I do. - And in any case, you know, whether it makes sense or at what point it makes sense to be looking at, to be looking at alternatives, whether to, you know, whether we maybe shouldn't be going to colleges or these elite universities when, you know, when we are so counter-cultural and they're not really promoting a lot of the values that we espouse versus, you know, just choosing the right university versus, you know, making sure to prepare our kids properly for the university, you know, with facts, with values, with, you know, speaking and writing ability.

And then, you know, and then of course making connections at the universities themselves to, you know, help our kids, you know, be in the right communities with like-minded people. But I would just love to hear just your perspective on kind of all of that. - 100%. How old is your oldest child currently?

- They're little. We've got seven, five, four, and one. - Great. So the first thing that's, I love the question. It's something that I think obsessively about and I'm gonna give you my answers. But there is going to be a big difference today versus in the future. And that difference is partly going to be driven by what is the actual campus environment today versus what is the actual campus environment 10 years from now.

It's also going to be driven by what are the actual ambitions of your individual student versus what are the actual ambitions, which are unknowable today. So these are the things that make it difficult to assess because the college decision choice and college decision process, whether to go or not to go, where to go, all of these things are very individualized and they can't be defined specifically until we get a sense of who your student actually is and what your student actually wants to study.

Because, and then also what the actual on-campus environment is in seven years, or excuse me, in 10 years for this individual student. And then where your family finances are and what your income is and what your assets are. So the first thing I would say is, I'm gonna talk about it from a framework perspective, but these are all super individual things and there are many, all of them are important.

The academic ability of your child, the ability of your child to even get into an elite university based upon whatever the elite universities are or are not doing at that point in time for admissions. The changing nature of the world, the value of an elite university education today versus the value in the future.

I think that a lot of the elite universities have dramatically diminished their brand value with all of the events over the last couple of weeks. There's no one denying that there still have brand value, but I sure don't look at a Columbia grad the same way today as I looked at a Columbia grad three years ago.

And so that Columbia grad is gonna have to do, if I'm a hiring manager, that Columbia grad is gonna have to demonstrate pretty significant evidence to tell me that they're not an anti-Semite racist protester of some kind who's just crazy and crazy at making decisions. I mean, that university has problems with anti-Semitic philosophy left, right and center and it has for many years.

So it's not a surprise what's boiling over today. So my point is that brand value can increase and brand value can decrease. And so the value of what to actually go for, your children are very young today to know that as our mind. So what we can be doing is be paying attention to it.

And as I would see, the basic focus that we have is to prepare for success in any context. And the nice thing about it is the things that we do to prepare our children for success to go to an elite university are very similar to the things that we do to prepare our children for success, understanding that they're going to drop out of school at 16 years old and become a self-employed entrepreneur who's going to be a total autodidact.

And we don't want to be so laser focused on college being the pathway of success that we don't do the broad-based stuff that will work in all circumstances. So it's good to keep kind of a general perspective on it. Let's start with the first thing that you've alluded to, which is actual risks to physical safety and actual discrimination, things like that.

On the whole, if there's actual risks to actual physical safety, then you will never pursue something that results in actual risks to physical safety without a strong conviction that you're doing so as a form of protest. So that's disqualifying. A college that cannot maintain a physically safe environment where students can actually study does not deserve any appreciation or any respect from outside people.

That's 101, is maintaining a studious environment where actual study is going to happen without risks of violence. That's an absolute no-go. So some things are really simple, and that's an obvious no-go. Because when there's actual violence and actual threats of violence, then there can be no free interchange of ideas.

And it's astonishing to me how so many of these colleges that have harped on and on about intellectual uncertainty and intellectual safety of debating ideas are the first ones to go over and become genuinely physically violent. And so what we can see, I think, is that a college needs to nurture a robust exchange of ideas, actual debate, actual principled debate over difficult things with absolute free speech in order for it to avoid physical confrontation and things like that.

So some of those things are simple, and who knows what the world's going to look like 10 years from now. But that's, to me, going to be a clear line in the sand. The next thing to consider with regard to opportunity is going to be driven based upon the individual student's ambitions.

Sometimes an elite degree really matters. So, for example, let's say that you have a student that is growing up to be a lawyer and wants to go and become a judge for the purpose of transforming society. Well, now, having an elite college pedigree is going to be very valuable for your student to move systematically into a position of power in society where he can develop influence and authority and power.

And so it's much more compelling for him to go and attend an elite university, even if he does face some form of discrimination and difficulty, things like that, because that elite pedigree really matters in something like a legal field, especially if your goal is to be a federal judge or an influential person in government, things like that.

That's very different than if your student just wants to make money and is just going to go and get a general business degree from a school. In that case, going to an elite college is not a particular "so what." You know, okay, it was nice that you got in, but a few years later it's not nearly as impactful as something like law.

So that's why I say it's too young to think about, because you have to get an idea of what direction your child is going to go in. Similarly, with regard to cost and the ability to get in, one of the things that's so fascinating about the elite universities has to do with how accessible they are to students who demonstrate financial need and how everything changes if your schooling is being paid for.

So as I discussed in that scholarship podcast, I remember being an undergraduate business student, pulling up the Harvard business degree page and seeing the tuition and saying, "Well, I don't have that money, so of course I can't go. There's just no way I can do it." What I didn't understand is that all of the elite Ivy League universities, they all have need-based tuition.

They don't offer merit scholarships, but they all offer need-based tuition. And if a student can get in, then the student is going to be able to go. And so sometimes going to an elite university that has a very high price tag that is advertised to the public can turn out to be much less expensive for a student than going to a local public university if the student is able to be accepted.

So all of these variations of cost and benefit and opportunity, they're all very individualized. And so on the whole, what you want to focus on, I think, is helping a student to develop strong academic ability so that academics can come fairly easily, so that verbal ability, mathematical ability, all these things are pretty straightforward.

It's going to require work to perform at a high level, but it should be straightforward to get good grades, to build those skills. And then also, I think, you want to help a student to develop interestingness, personal interestingness, which seems to be one of the things that many elite universities really need.

They have plenty of students who apply with very high SAT scores, perfect GPAs. They can check all the boxes on all their AP exams. But what they're looking for is students who have high levels of interestingness. And I think that we can coach interestingness, which turns out to be something that can help you get into an elite university, while also showing the student how the elite university is not in any way necessary.

You can develop interestingness and build a world-class network by connecting with people online, using our more accessible world that we have today. And you can position yourself as a thought leader at a very young age, which ultimately is the thing that gets you accepted into an Ivy League university.

So all the stuff that you do to be accepted into an Ivy is all the stuff that you do to not be accepted into an Ivy, but to do well regardless, which is what you should do. So you should just pursue it and then make the actual decision down the road.

The final thing I would say with regard to culture is this. Here's how I perceive the mainstream college culture. In general, the intellectual environment on college campuses, the philosophy that is mainstream on college campuses has not been a philosophy that's been able to build populations that reproduce themselves. On the contrary, the only reason we have the urban monoculture that exists today with the ideas and philosophies that it has today is because this culture successfully stole the children from highly fertile and fecund cultures who produced children.

And so this primarily happened to Christians back during the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s. As all of the boom of college enrollees grew, college cultures stole the children of Christians in the United States in order to build their roles. And one of the basic tools that they used was a broad-scale deconversion strategy.

And they were able to successfully deconvert many Christian children away from the religion of their parents to adopt the general kind of squishy, secular humanism espoused in the major universities. Interestingly, though, that did two things. Number one is that those people don't reproduce. They don't have children. Generally speaking, demographically speaking, there's a very low birth rate for those communities.

And number two is all of the highly religious communities that saw what was happening started to figure out and say, "Hey, we've got to do something different. We've got to respond to this in some way." Some of that response was to pull back. And so many communities pulled back and said, "We're just not sending our children to college anymore.

We're going to encourage other things." Many communities built alternate institutions. And so in my own community, the Christian community, this is where there was a huge growth in Christian colleges and universities, which said, "Obviously, we're not just going to keep sending our children off into secular colleges. We're going to create our own institutions." Other points of feedback was to say, "What is it that's actually happening?" And so one of the parenting tools that I observe that has happened is that no longer do informed, thoughtful Christian parents rely primarily on a culture of sheltering as any way of perpetuating their ideas.

That was a tool that many Christian parents of yore used. They thought, "Well, if I can just keep my children separated from the world, then they won't encounter these evil ideologies, and then they're more likely to stay in the faith of their fathers." What they found out was that that didn't really work and that as the children got older, then they encountered these philosophies and, in many cases, wound up deconverting because they felt like their parents had hidden something from them and their parents had not provided an adequate immune system to keep them from being infected by the urban monocultural mind virus.

And so what we have done in the Christian community is we've gotten a lot better at giving our children a stronger immune system by vaccinating them against the urban monocultural mind virus. And that starts at a very young age, and it's not entirely successful. We still lose lots of children away from our religion.

It's a continual thing, but we've gotten a lot better at it. We've gotten a lot better at, again, to use the very serious metaphor, vaccinating our children against it. So I teach my young children systematically all of the philosophies of the left and all of the philosophies of the world.

And when you teach them to people, you realize how absurd the philosophies are or the lack of philosophies. And what's funny is even young children, they're like, "Why would somebody think that?" Like, it's just self-evidently dumb. And so I teach aggressive apologetics. I teach all kinds of intellectual foundations for things.

And my hope is that that means that— and I don't hide anything. That's the other thing, is that many cultures around the world that have traditionally used the ability of a community to maintain an insular position and to be protected from external debate, external attack, external of ideas, is finding that with the Internet, those communities are no longer sustainable.

Because now when anybody can just go to Google and ask or go to ChatGPT and ask for an answer, then now you can't survive in a world of insular thinking. You have to engage with the ideas around. So what I think will happen with your community and the same thing that's happening with Christian communities is you will continue to test the ways to inoculate your children against ideologies that are ultimately toxic to your faith.

And some will work. Some will not work. Some will be effective. Some will be ineffective. But you'll increasingly find those things that are effective. And so then there won't ultimately be proof of it, but you should be more confident sending your children out into a world that hates them, into a world that disagrees with them, knowing that ideally you've equipped your children with the tools needed to defend their own personal philosophies in a straightforward way and to think and deal logically with whatever the things that are coming in is.

And sometimes, by the way, not all that's taught in a college classroom is bad. Otherwise you wouldn't go. A lot of times it can provide a valuable correction even to your own community. And so your children may be those who pick and choose from those things that they disagree with and say, "You know what?

"This is an important critique. "This is something "that we can bring in "and change our own family, "change our own ideology, "change our own community." So in conclusion, from a culture perspective, I think that's what your main focus needs to be is let me teach my children what we believe, why we believe it, teach my children what others believe, why they believe it, and seek to install a clear, thoughtful philosophy so that they can interact with ideas that they disagree with and do so in a healthy way.

And you're much less likely to have your children deconvert when that's the common cause rather than if they just are super sheltered and all of a sudden they're sent into the lion's den and they don't know what to do. And I would make one final even just academic note of this.

One of the bits of data that I find very interesting is for Christians, I don't know the data on Jews, although it's probably similar, but for Christians, the more advanced education that somebody has, the more likelier that person is to be religious, specifically Christian. So a higher percentage of PhD holders are Christian than non-college educated.

A higher percentage of bachelor's degree holders are Christian than non-college educated persons. And this doesn't prove anything. It's not a proof of anything. And there are plenty of PhD holders who are not Christians. I'm not arguing that the data says anything different than what it does say. Just simply saying that somebody who is highly educated, having high amounts of education doesn't necessarily mean that a person is going to deconvert from the religion of his youth if that religion was well installed with a robust philosophy and engaged with robust interaction with the ideas that he's ultimately going to interact with.

- I think that's right. Thank you. We're also heartened by the birth rate of some of these groups. When you value life and children, you value life and children. And not all of this group at campus feels that way, of course. And I definitely think it's so important to vaccinate.

I think it's a good metaphor in a lot of ways. And make sure that we're very clear about our values and our beliefs and not to hide anything. I think that's right because they'll find it eventually and then would wonder why we're hiding it. And there's nothing to hide.

We believe that our beliefs and way of life stand up to anything. Hang on one sec. I think that it's just such a shame that when we want our kids to go for an education and to learn and to pursue knowledge and seek truth and do all of these things, and to have to send them away now, it seems a little bit more like we have to prepare them to also be activists, which could be fine.

Not all kids are fighters. And I think that where we were once thinking that this is for education, now it also seems to be for not ceding the space to hateful people and hateful ideologies. But thank you. You answered the question beautifully. Really appreciate it. - My pleasure. And oops, I muted me instead of muting you.

Yeah, and to the point, I would just say it's gonna come down to the vision. One of the things that I wish, so there are many people, I think, who are better served by being encouraged not to go to college at all. With the advent of, with the easy availability of information, many of the most educated people in the world are ultimately gonna be autistic YouTubers who spend all their time reading arcane books that are widely available on Google Books and interacting with things that would never be touched in a college classroom.

I find some of my favorite sub-stacks are people who are outside of academia because basically many, I don't wanna describe all, but many academics are so cowed that they basically have nothing interesting to say. They're not willing to touch on anything that is potentially controversial. And so all of the great college, many of the great college professors find themselves ushered out of academia, but they have amazing podcasts now.

They have amazing sub-stacks. They have amazing things where they're engaging in genuine, good quality thinking, good research, healthy debate, and those are the kinds of communities that are producing what colleges used to produce. And that's why I'm so, and this is obvious, this is why I'm so anti-ethnic diversity and pro-ideological diversity.

What has happened is we substituted, due to seeing all kinds of racial wrongs and trying to fix those, we took the word diversity and we decided that the word diversity exclusively means that people have different skin colors or different sexual attractions and sexual practices, and we ignored the concept of ideological diversities.

Well, in a university system, that's the death of the university, which should be built on ideological diversity. And there's certainly elements of impacts on ideological diversity based upon the experience of different people. But at its core, you want great ideological diversity. So a lot of the universities have lost their clout.

Who trusts them anymore? You don't trust them. You know it's in many cases, in many ways, an ideological monoculture where everyone's going to say the same thing, believe the same thing, do the same thing. And what's the point? When they're actively, we can cite article after article, statement after statement, where we know they are actively censoring important research because it's not politically correct.

So a lot of the important research is happening in other places, is my point. And so there may be people who it's dumb to go to college because colleges don't offer the value proposition of what they once did. On the other hand, there may be many people who still need a certain pedigree for a certain plan.

And we really want to encourage those people to do it. We need really smart, really educated, elite judges and justices and things like that, people who are really good at that. And if you look back over the last 50 years, over the last 100 years, you can see that within a generation or a few generations, you can have an enormous change in ideology.

And so these institutions are not entirely stuck. If you look in your field, just look at how the conservative, the growth of the conservative wing of law has resulted in a major change in the way that the legal system at the federal level and at state level, but how the legal system works.

If you went back 50 years ago, it was not in any way, there was not in any way the power of the conservative movement in the legal field. Today, the conservatives are very powerful. There are, in some cases, a majority and very, very influential. But yet, that was a pretty hard-won experience.

If you go back to all of the Supreme Court justices for the conservatives nominated who turned out not to be conservative. Again and again and again, conservatives got their teeth kicked in. But they didn't stop. They continued pressing forward generation by generation. They got their people into the schools.

They got their people in front of Congress. They got their people nominated. They got the people to believe that it mattered. They got their president who came in and defended the justices. And they got the change that they were looking for. So, is it a durable change? Time will tell.

My point is that things can change. And so we shouldn't look at the colleges and just make overarching, sweeping judgments against them and say they're all lost. We should be thoughtful, precise, and we should look at individual students, individual colleges, individual ideologies, individual goals, and make those decisions. And the things that we can do to prepare our students to succeed in elite universities are the things that we want to do regardless of whether our students attend the elite universities in the first place.

And so if we focus on doing that, then we will in the fullness of time, I think, have all that we need to help our students to succeed regardless of the course of action that an individual student can take. And I expect that, you know, my hope within my children, I expect that I'll have one child who does an online degree and gets an online degree by 16 years old and is an independent entrepreneur who never ever sets foot in a college classroom.

I expect I'll have another child who goes and winds up getting a Ph.D. from an elite university. I'm sure that I'll have other children who do other things. And so that's, I think, what we should expect. And the backlash against colleges is ultimately going to be healthy because fewer of the people who should-- there are many people who shouldn't have been going to college who have been, and those people need to be directed into other directions, into trade schools, into different colleges.

And then the people who should be going to elite colleges, hopefully more and more will be going there. And I think that even the elite universities themselves, they're probably mostly run by well-intentioned people. And so while the crazies may have all the power at the moment, there's got to be some well-intentioned, intelligent people who recognize the harm that's being done to academic progress and who will change and who will recalibrate.

And they're probably not going to communicate that to us because that's not what they say publicly. But internally, there's probably going to be changes and we're going to be in a different world a decade from now. So maybe I'm a Pollyanna. Maybe none of that is true, but I think that it's at least plausible.

Time will tell how crazy we go. You just look at the pushback. All the DEI stuff now is becoming entirely toxic. Nobody wants anything to do with it except highly convinced pro-DEI people. But in the real world, it's now increasingly toxic because it's a philosophy that destroys itself. So we know where philosophies go if we think them out.

Thank you so much for listening to today's show. I really value your being here. Remember, if you'd like to be with me on a future Q&A show, you can go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. I would welcome your presence on the next show where we can talk about interesting topics like we've talked about today.

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