Enter a new era of color and brilliance with Vizio's Quantum Pro 4K QLED Smart TV. With over a billion hues of vibrant color plus wide viewing angle and anti-glare film, it delivers perfect clear picture no matter where you're sitting. It even comes with over 300 free TV channels and thousands of on-demand titles with Vizio Watch Free Plus.

And of course, all your favorite apps are built-in, so you can start blasting your favorite music, radio, and podcasts from iHeart Radio straight out the box. Head to walmart.com to find the Vizio Quantum Pro today. Today on Radical Personal Finance, it's live Q&A. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insights, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now, while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua Sheets. Today is Friday, June 28, 2024. And on this Friday, as we do on every Friday, in which I can arrange the appropriate recording gear and gadgets and setup, we do live Q&A. That means you direct the entire content of the show. I want to welcome many new listeners here to Radical Personal Finance.

As I said, each and every Friday here, it basically works like Open Line Friday. You call up, you get to ask any question that you want, talk about any topic that you want, raise any concerns, disagree with me. I love it when you do that. Raise, sharpen some points, ask any personal questions.

We can talk about your personal planning, personal finances, anything that you would like to talk about current events. It's all fair game here on a Friday Q&A show. If you would like to join one of these shows, you can do that by becoming a patron of the show. You go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, sign up to support the show there on Patreon, and that will gain access for you to one of these Friday Q&A shows.

We begin today with Samuel in Colorado. Samuel, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Thank you so much, Joshua. It's a privilege to be here. This is the first time I've been able to talk to you with that listening to your show since the beginning. Welcome.

Yeah. I love the radical topics. Arrest proofing yourself is one that really interested me. Wonderful. My topic today is career and income planning. For a long time, I've had a goal of retiring at 35 and a little background about me, which makes that really hard. I'm currently 31 and been working in public accounting, financial statement auditing at a big four firm for the last 10 years.

I'm a senior manager there now, making a reasonable salary for that job. The main challenge is I want to live out also your part about living a meaningful life now as well. My two biggest hobbies are rock climbing and skiing, and I'm not willing to give up even one weekend, even one day of one weekend for that, especially in the season, because there could be a powder day.

The problem with the industry I'm in is if a client need comes up, you're just on it. It could be weekend and you might have to give up a 20-inch powder day, which you might only get once a year or less. I've been able to work with the firm to make adjustments in terms of not working weekends, but it's never a perfect solution because you're still often giving up your evenings.

It's not a great balance, but there is some other flexibility that comes with working with public accounting, a lot of working from home and things like that. I'm open to the career side. Some of the things I've thought about are consulting. There's firms that will hire your time out, but I've also heard people say it's better to start your own business with that, which is more challenging.

We're also just going into industry. We're also entrepreneurship, but I know you'd probably have to give up even more of your time for that and with career. I've thought about real estate. I don't really have the right temperament because if things break down, you're on the hook or you're paying someone for it.

Just looking for radical ideas in any direction to free up my time and retire at 35. Tell me more about what your post-retirement lifestyle would look like, why retirement is important to you. Good question. I think like you've mentioned in some shows, I would likely still do some level of work, probably part-time, but I would like the option to not have to.

It really would be both the skiing and rock climbing that I'm doing right now, but certain things in my personal life have fallen to the wayside. I'm a believer going to church, so if you have to work five days a week and evenings, I've gotten in the habit of skiing and rock climbing Saturday and Sunday, building relationships outside of work.

It would be nice to be able to do it all, skiing and rock climbing, take trips further around the US and abroad. That stuff just doesn't make sense when you only have weekends. Really selfish, but also building relationships and spiritual. What's your current income and your current net worth?

$130,000 per year and approximately $350,000. Current level of expenses, how much do you spend normally? A very low level of expenses, probably $1,000 per month. Are you married? Do you have children? I'm single, no children. Do you ever hope to marry or have children? It's a long shot. It would be nice, but I don't meet your qualification on your show about the right character and the right temperament to find an excellent wife.

It's unlikely. The first thing I would say is – actually, one more question before I give you my comments. Why specifically did you choose the age of 35 as your target year of retirement? I think it was because somewhere along – it's fairly arbitrary, but I think it was mainly listening to your show pretty close to the beginning.

10 years or less, it's probably around 25, so I set that goal. One more piece of context. I haven't come up with any feasible way to do it other than I got roped in certain points of time to network marketing with Amway. I never got very far into it with Worldwide Group.

I know you've spoke very briefly on stuff like that. They claim they can offer it, but I think the likelihood of achieving it with that is very low. I thought I did a show. I've spoken about network marketing, and I can put my comments. Yeah, you did very long ago.

All right. I probably need to do a new show because it's important that people understand the benefits of network marketing and the tradeoffs of network marketing. If I encapsulate it into probably about 60 seconds, basically, network marketing is a business just like any other business. It's a business with a very low success rate because most people are not suited to a sales business.

There are legitimate network marketing businesses and illegitimate network marketing businesses that are just scams. You can identify a legitimate network marketing business based upon the percentage of time spent selling product as compared to the time spent recruiting people into your downline. A legitimate business will always guide people towards doing direct sales selling product.

The problem is that generally the products that you sell in a direct sales business are generally low commission products. There's not a lot of money into them, which is what pushes most people over to recruiting a downline. If you're comparing network marketing to other direct sales opportunities, if you find out that I like selling stuff and I'm good at selling stuff, then you would almost always be better off just going and getting a real sales job.

Go and sell airplanes, or go and sell cars, or go and sell insurance, or go and sell something directly that has a much bigger price tag and a much bigger model or much bigger ticket price than selling in direct sales and network marketing. Similarly, if you flip over to recruiting in the downline, that's where the big money in network marketing is.

You build a big downline and you become a trainer. Once again, if you're good at these skills, then these are skills that can be applied in all kinds of traditional businesses. You can build out a great sales business. You can start an insurance agency. You can do all kinds of things and you have a much higher earning potential in those businesses than you have in network marketing.

If I'm actually coaching somebody, then very rarely do I point to network marketing as the best expression of it, where network marketing has usually gotten its legs has just been from people who either can't access the traditional marketplace. Somebody might have a felony or have children and providing childcare or time with mom and dad, or they can't go away to a traditional job, or they can't get hired in a traditional job, or they just simply don't have the ambitions desired for that and they just want to do a little bit here and there and make a few hundred dollars.

That's fine. So as long as you're dealing with something where you're actually selling product and not opportunity, then it's legitimate, but it's just not the best. It's not the best option when someone has those skills and then it is not in any way per passive income. So I try to restrict exclusively the concept of passive income exclusively to expressions of basically living on dividends from public companies rather than earning money that's recurring revenue.

It's fine to have recurring revenue. It's wonderful, but it's not passive income. So that was 120 seconds, but it's important to say that with regard to network marketing. So I would like to point... Go ahead. Oh, I was just going to say thanks for that context. Yeah. And I can expand that into a...

I've meant to do a show on that for a while and expand the points with more evidence, but that's the outline of it. To the age of 35, I would say, first of all, it's important that you recognize that this is an arbitrary number. Arbitrary numbers are extremely useful as mental exercises.

They're not so useful in real life planning. And so it's good to say, "Hey, how could I become financially independent in four years?" And that's why you're calling me and what we're talking about. But in terms of your actual life planning, it sounds to me like if you could be financially independent today at 31, then you'd take that because it would give you more powder time, more rock face time.

On the other hand, if you reach it at 37, okay, big deal. It's not that... There's nothing materially different about your life between 35 and 37. So step one, I would say, if you continue on your current trajectory, what do you project would be your financial independence date? Using a 4% rule, what would be your current projection at your current job, current trajectory?

That's the thing. Unless I make a change, because I just got promoted to senior manager and at best people will get promoted to managing director six to eight years. But I'm a white male, so I don't check any of the DEI boxes for this big four. Just check the boxes.

Just check the boxes. There's no point ever in identifying as a white male. So just check the boxes. It doesn't matter. Anyway, go on. But yeah, I was going to say, and I don't think I even want to be a managing director from what I've seen for those I work with.

The higher you go in my organization, the less freedom you have now. You just have to give up the weekends. You just have to give up everything and you have to give up all the other hobbies. Like you said with selling, selling the business has to matter. It has to be your life.

So it's kind of like a point of stagnation. I think I can probably get five to 10% raises every year, which are pretty good, better than probably average. But that being said, I think a million might be reasonable for me with the 4% rule, just because I can keep my expenses so low.

So maybe I could do it in five to 10 years, probably more like 20, because I still enjoy traveling with gas, driving eight hours on a weekend to ski at Salt Lake City, or based in Denver. So I would say, yeah, maybe 15 years. - Okay. So it's important that you have an idea of what your current baseline is.

And if you're not willing to give up your weekends today, then you're not a good candidate for an aggressive plan. And the first thing to focus on is the fact that, hey, listen, I can just, as I say every show, I can build a life I don't want to retire from.

Working a job is not particularly burdensome. It's really not. And so your first step, what I always coach people in, is first, try to build a job that you don't necessarily want to retire from. Now, maybe public accounting has too much variability in your schedule, and that's not for you.

Well, go and get a job working as a flight attendant, right? You'll take a big pay cut, but now you're going to have a standard schedule, and you can, okay, you can't ski all the good powder days because you're going to be working, but go and just take a job.

Just have some kind of job where you go and work and are done with work when you're done with it. Or go and get a job in a mountain town. Move from wherever you are to a little mountain town, get a job at a ski shop as a front desk manager or something like that, and now you can put a sign on the door that says closed for powder when there's good powder, and you can be off on the weekends every time.

Now, it sounds like I'm being flippant. I'm not being flippant. I'm trying to say that if you abandon the idea of first and foremost trying to build a plan for financial independence in the short term, and you start building your plans around building a life you don't want to retire from first, then you'll be able to accomplish your goals of having your weekends available, having your evenings available, things like that.

I lead every show with building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. It's been a while since I've addressed that tagline. I intentionally chose the term freedom rather than financial independence because I mean freedom, not financial independence. As far as I'm concerned, you're financially free today, and how I would define that to say that you can go and do just about anything that you want to do.

There is no lifestyle change that is today outside of your grasp. There is no career change that is today outside of your grasp. There's no geographic move that is today outside of your grasp. There's no business that today, if you wanted to start it, is outside of your grasp.

You have achieved financial freedom in, let's say, six years. If you started listening to me when you were 25, you've achieved financial freedom in six years. But using the definition that you have all choices available to you, any choices available to you, you can even stop working by my calculations with a $350,000 net worth.

I wish I could get my calculator fixed because I always freeze up when doing math verbally aloud over the radio. Right now, you have a total net worth of 29 years of freedom. If you have $350,000 net worth and you have $12,000 of annual expenses, you have 29 years of freedom.

That's what you've bought yourself right now. You haven't bought yourself a lifetime of freedom, but you've bought yourself 29 years of freedom based upon your savings. I'm ignoring investment growth, anything like that, just simply dividing $350,000 by $12,000. That's a huge, huge amount of financial freedom. If you want to take a year off, take five years off.

All of these things are available to you. The only choice you don't currently have available to you, based upon what you're describing, is the choice to never work again the rest of your life. Now, could you get there in the next four years? You absolutely could, but I don't think you're willing to and I don't think you should.

Could you do it? Yes, if you worked like a maniac and you took the highest paying job possible and you continued to live on $1,000 a month, which would be very unusual and you were completely committed to working all the time and making as much money as possible. You have your day job, you're working extra at your day job, all kinds of overtime, and you pick up something else on the side.

Maybe you attend bar at nights and on weekends or have some other kind of high paying gig job that you do. Then you could increase your income and you could get yourself on track to be financially independent at 35. But you haven't articulated the goal to me that would make that make any sense.

A goal would be like, "Okay, I'm going to buy a sailboat and spend the next 10 years sailing the world." So I would say that instead of 35, why don't you stretch it out in your mind to 45 or 50 and say, "All right, I'm on track for early retirement at 45 or 50." When I do this work in private consulting, you could do your numbers yourself.

But usually the first thing I do is say, "Let's assume that you stopped saving money and take your current expenses and calculate the year at which you would be able to live exclusively from the growth of your portfolio based upon a normal expected growth and calculate the year at which if you stopped contributing today, you would be able to live on your desired lifestyle." I'm not going to do the math right now, but take that number and grow it.

Then usually what I'll say is the next question or next thing is, "How can you design a life that would be appropriate for you between today and that day in the future?" So let's say at 31 years old with a net worth of $350,000, let's say you calculate it and you say, "All right, if I don't save another dime, but I keep my full $350,000 invested for the next 17 years, at that point in time, my portfolio, assuming 7% growth rate, my portfolio would grow to be enough to cover my lifestyle.

Then I'll be fine, right? Because that's the benefit of saving super aggressively is that the numbers are going to get very huge in 15 or 20 years. So now then let's bring it back to a different problem and let's solve a much easier problem, which is, "How can I build a life or lifestyle over the next 17 years that I'm really comfortable with?" What I'll usually challenge somebody with is simply to say, "Here are the rules.

Rule number one is you cannot spend any money from your investments. You cannot take any money from what you have saved or invested." Enter a new era of color and brilliance with Vizio's Quantum Pro 4K QLED Smart TV. With over a billion hues of vibrant color, plus wide viewing angle and anti-glare film, it delivers perfect clear picture no matter where you're sitting.

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Rule number two, you can no longer save any money. So if you're content living on $1,000 a month, all you got to earn is $1,000 a month. And you can earn that in any number of jobs that are perfectly compatible with the lifestyle that you envision for yourself. So go and find a job that pays you enough to live on.

And the rule is you can't spend any money from savings, but you can't save any money. So now you can kind of think about building a different lifestyle. Now the biggest X factor in your situation is going to be whether or not you ever marry and whether or not you ever have children.

So I think you're probably self-aware to know that it is exceedingly unusual for someone to live on $1,000 a month. I think that you can do it. You can live comfortably on $1,000 a month if you're devoted to some kind of alternative lifestyle. And being some dirtbag out sleeping in your car by the cliffs is a perfectly reasonable lifestyle as being a ski bum sleeping in your car for fresh powder.

You're in good company with the ability to live inexpensively there. But the big unknown is going to be if you ever changed your family situation and were responsible for supporting other people. So just be aware that you should keep flexibility in your plans. Until or unless you decide, "No, I'm never going to marry no matter what," then you should have a couple of plans.

You should have plan A, which would be your single plan, and plan B, which would be your married plan. And ideally you would have a version of those that you're comfortable with. And by the way, to be clear, you don't need to marry somebody who's high maintenance. There's lots of people out there that you can find that are comfortable living really inexpensively.

One of my favorite Twitter followers these days, I don't know his name, he goes on Twitter by something like Shagman Burke. I think you could find him with that. Super interesting writer. He just got married, but all during his 20s, he was a hitchhiker, just basically a homeless bum, hitchhiking left, right, and center across the United States.

Fascinating guy, enormous interest, very interesting guy. But he found a girl who was totally acceptable with his very non-mainstream lifestyle, and they seemed happy couple ever, hoping to have a baby soon, and they just got married and seemed super happy and super content. So that can just be one of the things is that you want to marry some dirtbag rock climber, and perfect, she's a great fit for you, and that's just part of how you live together.

There's lots of women out there who would accept that, but most people find that the hyper hardcore extreme savings doesn't work for the long term. So coming back to the point, number one, recognize that your number is arbitrary. Number two, you're probably not going to be willing to do what's necessary to hit the arbitrary number.

You said it to me already, you said, "I don't want to work weekends." Okay, fine. Well, you're not going to get rich fast and be truly financially independent in a very short period of time without really going crazy. And I don't see any reason why you really need to go crazy.

So what I would say is calculate the age at which, based upon your current savings, you can consider yourself fully financially independent based on portfolio growth. And then go back and say, "What could be a lifestyle that would allow me to live the kind of lifestyle that I really like living that's just sufficient?" I've known plenty of accountants over the years that just did seasonal work.

They just did tax preparation. They just did seasonal work with a small handful of clients that they had themselves. They weren't making as much as you're earning. They weren't making top figures. They weren't trying to make partner. They just wanted to make enough money to support themselves. And they made $60,000, $70,000, $80,000 a year with part-time remote work, very seasonal, and that gave them the flexibility that they had.

So that would harm your ability to be financially independent at 35, but it would fulfill your goal of having every weekend free between now and then and beyond. So that's where I would spend a lot of time thinking through the options to consider if there's just an alternate vision.

It is a lot easier for you to get a different job with different features that are more attractive to you than it is for you to retire from working at all. And that's the thing that changed me off of the financial independence retire early plan. What I now see is that when I was obsessed with firing at a young age, I was obsessed with it because I didn't like my job.

And I have found that it's a lot easier for me to get a job that I like more than to go and become financially independent, especially with all of the uncertainties of long-term financial projections and things like that. So keep on saving money, but spend some serious time finding and thinking of a job that you would like more that would provide you with the attributes of life that you're looking for before you go crazy just focusing on being financially independent at age 35.

Thank you so much. That's a lot to think of and I'll call back in the future and refine in some other topics. I would love it if you did. That would be wonderful. Tyler in Missouri, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Tyler, that's you. You're already unmuted.

Go ahead, Tyler. Going once. I'll come back to you, Tyler. It looks like you're having some trouble with your mute. I'll come back to you in a minute. Marcus in Pennsylvania, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today, Marcus? Hey, Mr. Sheets. How are you? Very well, sir.

Welcome. Well, thank you. So I'm in a bit of a bind and my career has been kind of offset by a year. I'm wondering if, after what I'm going to tell you, if there's any other recommendations that you would recommend or anything that I'm overlooking. So I'm a recently graduated physician from medical school a month ago and I didn't match into residency this year.

There's a bunch of stuff going on all throughout 2024. And I'm kind of wondering, is there any way to make up for, you know, the lost potential future income and the opportunity cost of not being a physician for a year? And how can I kind of make the most of this year, both financially?

Am I able to do some of the things that I wanted to do later in my career, such as take a year off and travel, get an MBA, et cetera? And how can I best accomplish that without losing out too much? Why do you think you didn't match? I don't need all the details, but broadly speaking.

So emergency medicine was especially competitive this year compared to the past two years. And because of my board scores, I don't think I made it past a few filters. I passed, but I just, I very lowly passed on my step to the boards. And then when I went back over my application, you know, I was going through a breakup at the time and my application was not refined.

It was kind of unfocused. I had just torn my pectoralis major and I had surgery. There was just a lot going on. I'm driving on the Uber on the weekend so that I can make ends meet to cover what student loans won't cover. So it was just, I think, multifactorial.

Okay. And pardon my ignorance. I know a lot about physician finances and very, not very little about how to actually be a physician. Is matching for a residency program, is that something that will only happen once a year, or is there a possibility that something can open up in the middle of the year?

It's very uncommon that something opens up in the middle of the year. And there's the match process through NLMP, the National Residency Match Program. And that takes place, applications, I think, open up in September through this program called ERAS. And then you start the interview trail, like, what is it, like November, December, into like January and February.

And then match day is early in March. So that's kind of where you find out. And then there's the supplemental process called the SOAP, where if you didn't match somewhere on Monday, they send you a list of all the open unfilled slots. So I had 10 interviews in two days.

And then you find on Thursday, if you're getting any offers throughout four different rounds of extending offers, and that didn't happen this year. Is there an opportunity to retake your exams and score more highly? So that's what I've been looking into. If I can take step three of the USMLE without having, step three would be the next step.

If I can do that without having an intern year completed, intern year would be the first year of residency. So I'm not the right person to ask about the specifics of the application process. So what I want to articulate that could be useful is simply a frame of mind.

You still want to be a physician, right? Correct. Okay. Yes. So if you want to be a physician and you know, I want to be an emergency room physician, and you've done all this work to get to this point, then you really shouldn't be worrying or thinking or paying any attention to plan B.

You should be completely focused on plan A. Because the guy who's completely focused on plan A, he knows what he wants and he's going to do what's necessary to get there. That's the guy who a year from now is going to be placed back on track with all of the normal stuff.

Getting knocked off track is no big deal. That's normal. You had a bunch of stuff that happened. Okay, great. What's necessary is that you have to learn from it and you have to be an overcomer. And so in the American culture, especially, we don't look down on people ever who get knocked off track.

We love hero stories, but we only look up to them when they have fixed their problems. So we don't have any cultural sense of failure being permanence. That's why our culture is so built around somebody goes through bankruptcy a couple of times, no big deal. We will still honor that person as the greatest businessman in the world once he's rebuilt things.

But we only accept people who are successful. So if you still are down and you're just continuing to fail out and you're sitting at home and moping about how you're depressed, we don't want to hear about it. So what I would say is you need to be, from an attitudinal perspective, you need to be laser focused on saying, "That sucked.

Last year sucked. I screwed it all up. I didn't score well. I didn't interview well. I didn't write good essays, and this has to change." So then by this time next year, if you can change that stuff and you'll be a victor and it'll come into your essays, and 20 years from now when you're accepting some fancy award for some prestigious breakthrough or service or whatever, then you'll say, "You know, the biggest challenge of my life was when I didn't get matched to residency and how humiliating that was because I screwed it all up and I had a breakup and blah, blah, blah, whatever it was." And then you'll inspire the next league of our culture who will go on and continue what we do of praising the underdog story.

So my point is just recognize where you are in the story. "Well, that sucked. I've got kicked in the teeth. I didn't get what I wanted." But recognize now you have to do the hard work to fix the things that were wrong. And so if you know you want to be a physician and you know, "I want to be an emergency room physician," then you have to pull apart every single reason why you didn't get matched, and then you have to work like a maniac to fix those things.

And the good thing is they're all fixable with specific coaching, with specific practice, with specific dedication and effort. So if you didn't score well on an exam, then you have to go back and you have to say, "Why didn't I score well?" And so you need to learn about learning, take a look at your scores, figure out what didn't work well, what was broken in my test preparation process.

Now, I'm not interested in the details here. It could be that you just were so distraught over your emotional life and you were up late arguing and blah, blah, blah, and you just needed more sleep. All right, we'll fix it. But it could be that you really need to be focused on going through the knowledge and really mastering it.

And the thing about academics is by the third or fourth time you go through the class, it should be pretty easy for you. You've passed all of the intellectual screens necessary to be confident of your basic ability. You're not stupid. You're not incapable of learning. So obviously you're capable of passing this exam.

It just might be that you need to be the guy who goes through the material four times when all your classmates went through it twice and that was no big deal. So again, this can be reworked into part of your story. And you can take every failure and every setback and recast it as a success.

And I failed that exam. That didn't work out well. So I dedicated the next six months to studying like crazy, and I passed the exam. And by the way, even if there's not an official metric for this, and I don't know anything about the step in the USMLE process, but even if there's not an official metric for this, what I would do is I would say, "I didn't do well on the boards," or whatever, "on the exam." So if I can't retake the exam officially, then I'll retake the exam unofficially.

I'll find somebody to proctor an official version of the exam, and I'll get a good score, and I'll have that notarized, and I'll take that to my interviews, and they'll say, "Why did you do so badly on the exam?" And I'll say, "Well, I did really badly on the exam because I was going through this, and I didn't know this, and I didn't know the other thing, but I fixed it.

And by the way, here's my form. Here's my notarized affidavit by so-and-so who proctored my exam and said that I scored brilliantly after really focusing on it." And you may be able to do that with going ahead and doing well on step three. So you need to pull apart all of the academic process, figure out and identify and diagnose, "Why did I not do well?

And now I have to figure out how to do well. So if I don't know how to study, then let me go and get more coaching on studying. Let me go and improve the issues." Similarly, "Why didn't I interview well?" Because if you had interviewed better, then probably there would have been a better spot.

So you may need to do some really focused planning and practice related to your interview skills and figure out, "How do I improve my interview skills? Maybe I need to do more practice interviews, more coaching." And it might be something that some individual can mentor you with. It might be something that you're just talking to chat GPT all the time, and you're having chat throw at you tons and tons of interview questions until you're really, really calm.

And anything else that could have impacted essay questions, you might need coaching on your writing. And so you need to hire a coach and work on it and read some books on how to write better essays and really think about the package that you're presenting because all of these are influential and anything else that you can identify that would improve the process.

So my point is that if you know the direction you want to go, then express the determination to not be denied. And there's a good chance that you were right on the edge. Your scores were just a little bit lower than they should have been. The field had this year a larger number of qualified candidates.

Maybe there weren't quite as many vacancies in the industry as expected, but next year it could be totally different, or two years from now it could be totally different. So that would be my primary focus rather than moving on to anything else would just be to say, "How do I stay put on plan A?" And in the fullness of time, in the fullness of your life, being a year behind getting into your career or three years behind or whatever it is, whatever it winds up being, it's not going to be that big of a deal.

So let me pause there. Do you think that's a decent start psychologically for you to work from? Yeah, absolutely. Especially as far as the academics and the exams and the application process is concerned. Supporting myself financially over the next year is my next thing to solve. I've been applying to jobs left and rights.

My undergrad is in mechanical engineering. I'm struggling to find jobs in engineering. I'm driving Uber right now while applying to jobs as a server at high-end restaurants. And I'm wondering if I'm looking, overlooking anything that will be minimally time intensive to give me that time to study and prepare and do more research over the next year and volunteer and keep my clinical skills sharp while I'm supporting myself and my dog.

Yeah. Well, I was just going to ask, it sounded like there might've been a baby there with you. Are you supporting a family or are you a single man? I'm a single man. Okay. So the good thing is that other... So are your student loans in deferral? They are.

300,000. Okay. And can you keep them in deferral for at least the next year or two? I believe that I can. Worst case scenario, I do income-based loan repayment. Okay. So first goal is keep your loans in deferral if at all possible. Then the second way to handle your money is you need to go as absolutely cheaply as possible with your living expenses.

Are you living alone? Are you living with family or friends? What's your living situation right now? I'm living alone, but my last rent payment is August and then I'm going to move back in with my parents 20 minutes away. Perfect. Perfect. So that's exactly what you need to do.

Move in with your parents. The easiest way that your family can support you at this stage is to give you a place to live rent-free and that'll be wonderful. Remember that the only reason that you wouldn't want to do that is simply if you're just basically a loser bum.

That's the only problem. But you're not a loser bum and you're not going to be a loser bum. And so if you can move in with your parents and live there rent-free or with just a very token amount, then that should eliminate the financial pressure from living expenses. And then everything else is pretty simple.

You should easily be able to live on some hundreds of dollars a month, especially if you have low rent, and that you can absolutely cover with any kind of gig that's just enough to cover your expenses. You have to stay focused on the big goal, which is getting placed as a physician.

Because once you get through residency and once you get out of residency, the financial problems will be fixed. So this is just a short-term thing. It doesn't require some huge transition. And the most reasonable way to do this as a single man is to be hardcore about your expenses and be really dedicating yourself to study and to all the stuff that I've said.

Now, is there a job that would enhance your hireability as a physician? For example, something related to an emergency room nurse or something related to EMS or anything like that, would any of that stuff improve your hiring attractiveness? I believe so. You just brought up EMS. I haven't even looked in the process of what getting that EMT certification looks like, but that would definitely keep me clinical and push me closer to matching next year.

That would be what I would love to do. So I think we could solve, based upon just a broad thing. Other than your student loans, do you have a lot of other debt, personal debt, credit card debt, anything like that? I have $3,500 of credit card debt from my surgery that I just kind of put the last month of the semester on credit cards.

Okay. So goal number one is keep your student loans in deferral. Goal number two is cut your living expenses to basically zero. Tell mom and dad the situation. Make sure they understand. Make sure they understand what you're doing. Your parents want to help you and they want to support you.

Their only concern will be, are you actually working on a plan, working towards a goal, or are you living like a bum? If they see that you're working on a plan and you recognize this didn't work out last year the way that it was supposed to, but a year from now I'm going to be employed as a physician or a resident, then your mom and dad will be happy to give you a room to live in.

They'll be happy to feed you. They'll be thrilled to do that. It'll be a great time for you to be at the table and they can feed you. They'll be happy to put you on their cell phone plan. They'll be happy to cover your expenses. Now, you have to make certain that you're bearing your own weight.

So if your mom and dad are paying for all of your expenses as an adult man, then you need to be making certain that you're doing a lot at the house to help. But I wouldn't be scared to accept charity from your parents because they want you to succeed.

And so if what's necessary for you to succeed is for them to cover all your living expenses while you study 14 hours a day and you network and you do everything that you can, they're going to be happy to do that. I would do it for my adult son.

If you're a father someday, you will do it for your child because you see that in the long run, this is the best pathway. So if you have a job and you go and get a job and you're waiting tables or you're driving for Uber and you're making some money, of course that's fine.

But you can only do that with time that's not going to invade your primary plan. You can only do that when you can still study effectively. You can't be out late, you know, tending bar somewhere and then not be able to study the next day. Your focus needs to be getting the academic stuff solved, the essay stuff solved, really hardcore, so that this time next year you are a resident and everything else should be in subjection to that.

I wouldn't try to go for anything more creative than that because if you go off and you start hiking the Appalachian Trail because you think that would be fun, that's just going to destroy your studying, you're going to get rusty, you're going to do terrible on your exams. All of that stuff is going to be an impediment to the advancement of your career and you need to make certain that you recoup the investment of years of your life and $300,000 at this point in time.

If the job in, say, working as an EMT or some kind of orderly in a hospital, if that job is going to get you closer to the goal, then you should do it. Not primarily for money. You don't just need money. Again, sounds like your parents can support you for a year, but you should do it because it'll help you get closer to the job.

It'll keep you current, it'll allow you to exercise your knowledge, it'll help you to build relationships. Those relationships may pay off in a match in the future. They may create better endorsements by people who are going to write letters of recommendation for you. If there's an EMT job or an orderly job or something that you could get hired for around the medical business that would get you closer to the goal, then that's what I would do.

Make certain that you're not neglecting the academics. >> Right on. Thank you so much. >> My pleasure. Anything else? >> No, that's it. Thank you. >> All right. Keep in touch and let us know how things go in the coming year. I'd love to hear back from you. Tyler in Missouri, back to you.

>> Can you hear me now, Josh? >> Sounds good. Go ahead, sir. >> Great. Thanks. I have a question for you, life insurance-based. I'm actually asking on behalf of a relative of mine. He ended up getting a $500,000, 65-plus full life policy, and he's basically looking to get out of it.

I just thought I would ask you what your recommendation was before he pulls that trigger, because I've heard on previous episodes you've advised certain things. I have a little bit of information from him. Let me know what you need. >> When did he get the policy? >> About three years ago.

>> All right. If it's three years ago, then there's no—the reason I ask, let me just explain for anyone else who needs to learn. First of all, anytime you buy a life insurance policy, there are always a variety of options available with it. During the time that you're in underwriting, you can cancel the policy.

Anytime that you buy a life insurance policy, once the policy is delivered in every state in the United States, you have some form of free-look period. It used to be two weeks in some states. Now it's 30 days. Basically, anywhere from a couple weeks to a month, depending on the state, you have a free-look period.

We're not in any of those options, but that's why I ask. With a three-year-old policy, we're going to be focusing on the non-forfeiture benefits. The face amount of the policy is $500,000. What's his premium, and what's the current cash value? >> The premium is $625,000 a month. The surrender value is $4,900.

I'm not sure if that's probably a lower amount than the cash value would be, my guess. >> Yeah. Why does he want to get rid of it? It's just an albatross. He got talked into it. At the time when he opened it, he was making roughly a little under $100,000.

He wants to put it in something that's a higher yield return. I think he got talked into it for retirement purposes. He really has, from my understanding, no need for life insurance. He's a single guy, no kids, not married. >> Instead of putting money in a Roth IRA, instead of putting money in 401(k), he opened a whole life policy.

>> Right. >> Okay. It's a little bit tricky at this stage of the policy life where he needs to think about it. First of all, the big problem with whole life insurance is simply that the short-term cash returns are pretty bad. If he cancels the policy now, he will lose the majority of his money because all of the expenses of a life insurance policy are all front-loaded.

In the first year, you really accumulate almost no cash value in a whole life policy. In the second year, you're a little bit better. Third year, okay, we're back on track now, but it takes a number of years before the policy breaks even. First thing we want to do is understand the numbers.

We want to understand the total amount of money that he's put in in terms of premium cost. We want to understand the current cash surrender value. You've stated those numbers. We can calculate 36 months at whatever it was, the monthly payment, and we can figure out where he is.

The next thing we want to do is we want to look at what would be the alternative use of the dollar and what would be the break-even point in the policy. The alternative use of the dollar is really important. What a lot of people will do is they'll do something like buy a life insurance policy.

They'll have regrets. Say, "I want to cancel it." He'll cancel it, but if he doesn't go on and save any money and he doesn't start putting the money into a better investment, then it's going to wind up being a bad decision for him. We don't compound a previous bad decision with a new bad decision.

I've seen this happen lots of times. A guy will have a life insurance policy. He says, "Well, you know, I should have bought term and invest the difference. My life insurance agent ripped me off because he sold me this whole life policy that was inappropriate for me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." Cancels the policy three years later, has no money because he's not saving anything.

We want to make sure that doesn't happen. We want to get clear on what is the alternative use of the dollar. The second thing we want to look at is, is there a way that he can continue doing it? You said the premium was how much? $560,000 a month?

$625,000. $625,000 a month. If he's got $100,000 income at $625,000... His income has increased since then, but just at the time. He's at about $150,000 range right now. Okay. $7,500 a year of premium, that would be... You said he's at $150,000 now? Yes. That would be about 5% of his income going into this policy, something like that.

Is that right? Correct. Okay. It probably was inappropriate when he bought it. He had a lot of motivation to buy lots and get really rich, but he probably could make that payment if he wanted to. I understand he doesn't want to, but he could make the payment today if he wanted to, right?

Correct. Okay. If he's a single guy and he's good with his finances, he could do all of the above. If he's making $150,000, he could max out his 401(k), he could put money into a backdoor Roth IRA, and he could make this life insurance payment and still be okay.

Agreed? Agreed. Okay. Let's not just dump it willy-nilly. Let's make an accurate assessment. Just because something... That's why I'm calling you. Perfect. Yeah. I'm pointing this out for people because it's like this. Somebody says, "I married the wrong woman." Okay. "I married the wrong woman." We can acknowledge the fact that you married the wrong woman, but does that mean necessarily that you should immediately divorce her?

Well, that's a different question. The fact is you are married. There's a balance between engaging in fallacious thinking with a sunk cost fallacy versus making a fresh decision to say, "Here's where I'm at." There's lots of people who "married the wrong woman" who turn out to have a great life and have a great and rewarding marriage because they recognize, "If I had to do it over again, I would do things differently when I got started, but hey, here I am." When I approach a question like you're asking me, I do the same thing.

Okay. Maybe there was inappropriate buying pressure. Maybe I was susceptible to it, but at the end of the day, let me not just say, "Well, I made a mistake then." Let me do a fresh analysis now and say, "Is this suitable for me now?" And from what you're describing, using purely the technical language of suitability, this policy would not necessarily be unsuitable for him today.

He has the capacity to pay the premium. He has the capacity to fund those other things. The big question is, is there an alternative investment for him that is superior to the money that he's putting into this policy, especially given the fact that now all of the costs of the policy are paid?

Once you get into, say, the third year of a policy, then now we can calculate, "Hey, this year I'm going to make a premium payment of $625 a month, but maybe now my rate of return on cash value is higher because I've already paid all the commissions and the expenses." So he should be doing a fresh analysis now.

Now, if he weren't putting the $625 of premium payments today, what specifically would he do with the money? He'd probably just invest it in the stock market. I know that he's already maxing out his Roth 401(k) at work, and he's just been putting extra money in the stock market.

Not necessarily mutual funds, but something similar. All right. So here's where our argument gets a little bit tricky. I think that in the fullness of time, if I have to put my money on which investment is going to turn out bigger, in the fullness of time, I would bet that if he put $625 a month into something like a stock market index fund, as compared to the life insurance policy, I'm of the conviction that the stock market index fund will probably do better in the long run with the $625 a month.

So I think the stock market will outperform life insurance. The reason I think that is simply that the life insurance portfolio is all invested in fixed income investments and very stable, very safe investments. And in general, higher risk asset classes like stocks should outperform lower volatility asset classes like fixed income.

Otherwise, what's the point of the whole stock market in the beginning? All of us would take an entire fixed income portfolio if it would return us higher than the volatility of the stock market. So we take the cost of volatility in exchange for the potential return of stocks. Now, so if you ask me, "Joshua, do you think that in the fullness of time, I will be better off and have more money in the long run if I just put $625 into the stock market versus $625 in the life insurance policy," I'm going to say stock market, okay?

But that's not the situation that he's in. He's already putting aside, let's call it $30,000 or $35,000 a year in the stock market. So we have to look at it and say, "Is $30,000 or $35,000 a year in the stock market, is that enough money in the stock market where now we want to consider some alternative assets that have different features?" What do you think is the answer to that question?

And that's probably a question for him directly. I'm not really sure. Right. But I've got you to talk to. What do you think about that question? If it was me, I would probably put less into life insurance and more into the stock market, but maybe not get rid of the policy completely.

Right. And that's an option. We're going to go over the non-forfeiture options in just a minute. But my point is that this is where I think life insurance is very suitable and is very appropriate. So if I were a life insurance agent today, and I was selling life insurance, and I had to create a basic standard model, what would I do?

How old was he when he bought the policy? About 31. Okay. So if I approach a 31-year-old guy, a single guy, what I would tell him, I would say, "Listen, enter a new era of color and brilliance with Vizio's Quantum Pro 4K QLED Smart TV. With over a billion hues of vibrant color, plus wide viewing angle and anti-glare film, it delivers perfect clear picture no matter where you're sitting.

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You should buy a whole bunch of term life insurance. If you want to buy some whole life insurance, here's how it works. So I would always do a full presentation of here's what 2 million of term life insurance is like, here's what 2 million dollars of whole life insurance would like.

When you do that, 95% of the time, people are desperate to buy whole life insurance. When they actually understand how the product works, they're like, "Oh, absolutely, I should do it." And I would say, "No, I don't think you should do it at all." I would sell him, you know, 1.9 million dollars of term life insurance and 50 or 100 thousand dollars of whole life insurance.

The reason being that I think everybody will be glad to have a little bit of whole life insurance. Then what I would tell him is, but at 31, and whatever he was making at the time, you must first fund your Roth IRA and you must first max out your 401k.

And I would tell him you must do that because every year that passes that you don't maximize these accounts, you lose because now you can't ever go back and get it back. Plus, that money works really well in the stock market where we have really great stock opportunities. And if we don't have that, and this money is asset protected, it's completely exempt from the claims of creditors depending on state laws on the Roth IRA.

In addition, I would say this is the most flexible asset for the long term. So this is where most of your money should be focused. Now, for someone who's making 100 thousand dollars or 70 thousand dollars, he doesn't have more money available to him than that. So maxing out the Roth IRA and the 401k is what always makes sense.

So if I were coaching this life insurance agent, I would say, you dumbo, why would you sell him this big of a policy when he's not first maxing out his Roth IRA and his 401k? But when you come back and you're making $150,000 a year or $250,000 a year, suddenly putting 30 grand in the 401k is not nearly what you need, and you need a lot more.

So there's lots of other options of things that we can do. We could just open up a brokerage account, buy mutual funds or stocks, and that works fine. We could trade crypto. We could go buy houses, all kinds of things we could do. But here's where life insurance is a super interesting asset, because now we have an asset that grows pretty well if it's with a good company.

It's safe and it's stable. It grows tax deferred. It can come out tax free in various forms. It's not reported on the FAFSA. It's creditor protected in many states. And so having a small percentage of your money going into it doesn't harm other financial goals. So with this guy, if there's not another financial goal that's being harmed, I would love to see him keep the full policy, because he can fully fund the 401k.

He can fully fund a Roth IRA. That's all the money he needs in the stock market. He could probably do other important things like buy a house, things like that, without the policy impeding those important decisions. If he wants to get married, he can get married. I don't want a life insurance payment to disrupt his other decisions, but I think it's a really great fit for him now.

I wouldn't have sold it to him three years ago, but today, from what you're saying, he can probably have it. And if we fast forward, there's a good chance that he will be happier to keep the policy, and his current annoyance with it will probably 10 years from now be general happiness with it, for all of those advantages that I said.

Now, he may disagree. And if he does disagree, here's what I'm going to be listening for. What I'm going to be listening for is some important life decision or financial decision that is being hindered by the life insurance policy. So if he says, "Well, I just can't afford to buy a house," and he proves to me that I can't afford to buy a house because of the life insurance policy, well, I'm probably going to say, "Buy the house.

Let's lower down the life insurance policy." Or if he says, "I really want to start a business, and this is really what I'm focused on, but I got this stupid $625 a month life insurance payment." All right, well, let's defer the payment in some way. Cancel it, defer it.

We'll do a couple of things, but let's eliminate the payment so that you can do these other decisions. But if he can do those other important things and still be forced to save the 625, he'll probably be happier with that course of action 10 or 15 years from now than he will be if he just cancels the policy.

Does that logic make sense? Do you think it holds water? I think it does, and that brings to bear. I do know that he was speaking to me about wanting to buy a house in the future, and he does live in a high-cost living state where houses are pretty expensive.

So I know that was one obstacle he was facing, but I'm willing to hear also how he might... Primarily, what I wanted to ask you was to see what was the best decision he could make given that he's already three years into it and for the reasons you stated, what are the options that he has for A, getting out of it, or B, being convinced to stick with it, as you mentioned?

So we'll go now to the getting out of it. I think I've said my piece. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to acknowledge that I don't know if this was the right decision or the wrong decision. I know that when I sold life insurance, I oversold it sometimes.

I was good at getting people to buy it, and then a year later, they would be like, "Oh, this was too much." And so I learned to stop overselling and start underselling because that was better for longevity, and then I would just have people come back and buy more in the future.

So it's a common thing. I've made that mistake. He's made that mistake. I think what I've described, I believe I could defend this philosophy. I'm doing it in public, but I feel good about defending this to any financial planner. I feel good about selling small whole life insurance policies to anybody who wants one because I think that most people will be happy with them.

I feel good about filling up all of the tax-deferred accounts first and then coming back to life insurance. I feel good about acknowledging that this is a useful asset class in those constraints, and then you can consider what's right from there. But to me, I think this is a reasonable appreciation and a good practical approach.

So let's go to his options now. So the first thing that he could do is—and by the way, he doesn't have to do all or nothing. So the first step he should make is call the life insurance agent. He should ask for an in-force illustration showing him what's happening with the policy now, now that he's three years into it, what's going to happen this year, next year, the next 10 years, given whatever the dividend rates are of the company or given whatever the provisions are.

So the first thing that he can do without actually touching the policy is he may be able to adjust his premium by looking at any riders or add-ons that he has. So sometimes someone will have some kind of aggressive rider system of additional purchase benefits or things like that, and if we drop that off, they might drop off $100 a month on a premium.

And so look at any riders or options that he has, consider the cost of those, and maybe he doesn't want to have them. Maybe he bought the waiver a premium but doesn't need it anymore, and so that might reduce the expense down a little bit. The second thing to acknowledge is that he doesn't have to do all or nothing.

So the life insurance policy can be reduced, and it can be reduced proportionally. So let's say he no longer wants to have a $500,000 policy, but he wants to have a $300,000 policy. He can reduce the face amount of the policy and just adjust it partially. He doesn't just have to surrender it.

When it comes to his non-forfeiture options, here are the basic options. The first thing he could do is surrender the policy and take the cash value. That's step one, and that's the most straightforward thing. It terminates the policy, and he'll receive the accumulated cash value. That's the first thing.

The second thing that he could do is he could take the policy reduced paid up. So he can say, instead of giving me the, I mean, $4,000 or whatever it is of cash value, instead of giving me the $4,000 of cash value, what if I just took the policy reduced paid up?

How much whole life insurance would the $4,000 buy me? And that's an option. It's not going to be an exciting option because he has so little cash value, but when people get to higher amounts, then that's a good option. The third thing that he can do is he can take extended term insurance.

And so he said basically the way that works is you take the cash surrender value, you tell the insurance company, "Hey, I don't need this money back, but how long of a period of term insurance would this buy from me?" So maybe the $4,000 of cash surrender value would purchase for him, say, 11 years of term life insurance at $500,000 for him.

And so now he could be insured for the next 11 years in exchange for the $4,000. The other option is, of course, he can always take a partial loan against the policy. And he can do that even while he's continuing to make the premium payments. So if he needed, at this point, he doesn't have a lot of cash value, but if he needed a small loan, he could take a small loan out, use the money for some other financial goal, and then he could put it back in and keep the policy intact.

Those are the options. He could do any or all of those options, and he can do them on a proportional basis, or he can do it on a total basis, depending on the specific contractual provisions of the contract. But what I would say from listening to what you say, if I'm coaching him, unless he has a clear and compelling use for the $4,000, I'm going to say keep the policy, and keep the policy at least a few more years.

And the reason I say that is, number one, I don't think the policy is unsuitable for him, based upon what you've described. I don't hear any pressing financial goal that's not being met. And I would guess that within say four to six years, the policy will cross the break-even point.

Those kinds of policies, it's often around year 10, year 11, I don't remember, but you could check that with a life insurance agent. And the break-even point, just meaning that he'll get back the full amount in his cash surrender value, he'll get back the full amount of money that he's paid in premium payments.

So then, instead of having a net loss, he would at least be neutral, and he would only have a lost opportunity cost. But I don't hear any lost opportunity cost from what's being described. So I would probably fight to keep this one going, because I don't think it's unsuitable.

He can decide based upon those factors. Okay. And if you throw into that, that he wants a slightly earlier retirement, let's just say 55, does that change any of the calculus at all? Not really. Again, we need to see what his other projections are. So not really. The policy could, so first thing for that, I would love to see the policy quick pay.

And so I would take the policy illustration, I would see when it would quick pay. Definition of quick pay just means the dividends are sufficient to cover the premium payments. By the way, that's another thing he could do. I neglected to say that, but he could just take dividends.

Usually, with policies like this, dividends are, any dividends that are credited are being used to make paid up, to buy paid up additions to the contract. But he can just change what the dividends are, the annual dividends are credited for. And instead of using the dividends to buy paid up additions, he can just turn the dividends to reducing the premium.

And so that'll reduce his premium while still keeping his policy intact. So he should call the insurance agent and go over all these with the insurance agent. He should not be scared of the insurance agent. What often happens is guys like this, we're like, well, this insurance agent sold me a bad policy and I don't believe I should keep it and I don't want to talk to him because I'm scared he's going to push me over again.

That's dumb. Call the insurance agent and say, I think you sold me a bad policy, I'm thinking about cancelling it, but I want you to go over it, go over my options with me again. This is, it's not a big deal. That's, insurance agents know that. So the insurance agent, well, that's disappointing, but hey, let's go over it.

And he, the insurance agent will be able to make all these projections for him, go over each of the options, and then he could take that and have actual numbers instead of me doing it with just words on a podcast. And so at 55, if the policy is quick paying by then, then it can be really valuable.

And I don't, I'm not here to sell insurance, but recognize that when insurance agents talk about insurance policies, they're not lying about the benefits of it. So having the money, for example, I was just, I spent this last weekend, I've been pouring over the FAFSA, the free application for federal student aid thing, really trying to make sure I really understand on a deep level, college financing and things like that.

I've got a 10 year old, so I'm starting to make sure I really brush up on this. And one of the things that's really interesting is that things like the FAFSA, retirement assets are not counted, home equity is not counted for when calculating college need, neither is money that's in a life insurance policy or in an annuity.

And so in a normal financial planning, I understand he doesn't have children, but in a normal financial planning, if you ask me as a father of children, would I rather have three or $400,000 in a life insurance policy, or would I rather have three or $400,000 in a taxable brokerage account?

Well, from the perspective of something like college aid planning and need-based aid, which every college is going to be based on as a father of five children, give me the $400,000 in the life insurance policy. That's much more valuable than having the money in the mutual fund account. And so these are not simple things where, oh, it's just absolutely I'll make more money in the stock market.

It should have a holistic approach and be considered. So if he wants to retire at 55, I wouldn't ordinarily recommend life insurance as a primary funding mechanism for early retirement, but it can be a component of the mix. And so I would have to dig into that more. I don't see that this is an unsuitable policy based upon his increased income now.

I don't see that it's unsuitable. So he can do what he likes, but I would say keep the policy now. You can always, all of these options are available to you next year. So unless you have an important alternative use of the 625 a month where you really need to do it this year, then look at what the cost would be, look at where the breakeven points are of the contract, and then go from there.

I appreciate your answer, Joshua. I'll have him listen to this and then I'll see what he does. Up till this point, I just told him, hey, just hang tight at least till I can get some better advice from a guy I know. So thank you. Hopefully that helps him.

And I would bet you, I would bet you, I'd put a whole $5 on this, believe me. But when I used to sell these policies, I would bang my fist up and down on the table, proverbially speaking. And I would say to you, I would say to you, the buyer, I'd say, listen, the only way you lose in buying this contract is for you to buy it today and then cancel the policy in two years.

That's the only way you lose. So either don't do that, like don't buy the contract, or make certain that what you're buying, you're in it for at least a decade. Because the whole life insurance contract can work out fine and be very valuable in a decade, but all your costs are front-loaded in the first year.

So the only way you lose is buying the contract and then getting out two or three years. And so he needs to, I would bet his insurance agent said something like that, but he doesn't remember, because nobody ever remembers. And everything that he talked about three years ago is fuzzy.

So if he cancels it today, he will have had a very expensive mistake. But I don't think it's a necessary expensive mistake. He should acknowledge, all right, if I had to do this over again, I wouldn't have done it. But now let me make a fresh set of decisions.

So hopefully that helps. Cavanaugh in California, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Cavanaugh. Hi, Joshua. Welcome. I called last week to talk to you about kids traveling, and you had some interesting things to say about that. And you said you were going to call me back and talk about my podcast about women working, right?

I did. Wonderful. The floor is yours. Tell me what your thoughts are. Okay. So I guess I should start out by saying, I do think we probably agree on a lot. I'm a stay at home mom. I homeschool my kids. My husband works. I think it works really well for us.

I agree that women should absolutely engage in leadership in the home, like you mentioned in your podcast. And I meant to go back and listen to it again before I called, but I ran out of time. So I'm doing my best. I wrote down a couple notes of what you said the first time.

So I was like, I think I need to, I'm going to push back on this a little bit. Sure. I agree that strong, capable men will want a strong, capable woman. You talked about that. You talked about like some of the red pill stuff and how some of the guys were just, didn't want a woman who was going to engage in the home.

And that that was, that's kind of what they deserve being like that is that they wouldn't get a capable woman by doing something like that. But I will say that you, I appreciate a lot of the things you said, but I wanted to gently suggest that maybe you missed the reason that so many women were upset by his speech.

I think you saw a lot of people, the people that appreciated it were saying things like, well, he's so pro-family. But when you say pro-family, I wonder if he's kind of saying pro, the type of family he's suggesting really only existed post-industrial revolution. When you talk about women at home with kids and men working like that, just wasn't a reality until basically post-industrial revolution given, and you mentioned that a little bit, talking about like the history of farming families and wondering school houses.

I mean, you got into the history of literacy and kind of that, but when prior to the industrial revolution, I think you saw a lot of more of an even split raising children. And I, so in Harrison's speech, he spends a lot of time like praising his wife and saying, oh, she's, she does so much for our family.

It's so important. And I'm really glad that they have the ability to raise their children. She can gather so well and that she does such a wonderful job being at home. But what I think is concerning is that he sets up a dichotomy between the women being full-time at home and raising kids versus women in the workplace.

I've been told plenty of times by people, cause we have five kids and people are always like, oh, it's the hardest job in the world. I could never be a stay-at-home mom. It's the hardest job in the world. And generally the type of people that tell me that are saying it really condescendingly because they have no desire to do something like that.

And it's sort of a, and it's not the hardest job in the world. It's a job. It's a good job. I like it. I'm fond of it. I like raising my kids. I like being involved, but it doesn't mean, and when I say that it's not the hardest job in the world, it doesn't mean it's not important, but it's one of a lot of things to do.

And I find that when people are telling me, oh, it's the hardest job in the world, it's usually people saying, giving the verbiage to, oh, sure, we respect this. But at the same time, like I would never do it myself. I'm just going to say it's the hardest job in the world.

It means that you should do it. So, and it's a lot of mostly guys saying it to me. It usually means like, I would never do it, but you should do it. So I can go do something really important is generally how the conversation, they don't say it flat out, obviously like that, but that's kind of how it ends.

So when he talks about being pro-family, I guess I would push back on saying that if he was really pro-family, it would involve both parents working together to prioritize family life over career and figuring out what that would best look like for their family. I think a lot of times it is going to end up with the wife working at home just because it's like biological realities.

And there's a lot of reasons it might work better that way. But to say that this is his wife's life truly began. I've seen that quote everywhere. His wife's life truly began when she became a wife and mother. I think that's shortchanging his contribution because he talks about that there's a war on masculinity.

And I think that a true masculine man who wants to be like Christ, which is what he talks about in his speech, would also be prioritizing his family over career, not to the lack of a career, but both husband and wife should be prioritizing their family. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. Absolutely. Okay. So, and I realized that's kind of like a, it seems like a small contradiction, but at the same time, I kind of just kept seeing it over and over. Right. There was one more point I was going to just bring up, because you talked about there's a toxic culture towards men.

Oh, let me see here. I'm sitting at home. I'm not as scared of interrupting. You can go ahead and answer that for a second, and then I'll keep going. Yeah, I'll start to respond, and then I'll go ahead and come back in a field feeder and interrupting when your child is taken care of.

What I want to say, I think among fair-minded people, I really didn't want to release that podcast, because I'm very conscious of how hard it is to communicate effectively on these topics. I sat on it for a week and a half. That's fair. When you say fair-minded, I get the feeling that you, like my husband and myself, have a very fair marriage.

My husband, and just based on things you said about your wife's postpartum periods and stuff like that too, that you're involved in child rearing. You're not just throwing it all on her to do by herself as she's raising the kids by herself, and you're off making the money, and you're involved in the family.

That's how my husband is too. He encourages, he's able to take the kids and help take care of everything. You're not just putting all of the effort on her instead of taking care of it yourself. However, I think especially the more you encourage men to go out and work and women to stay at home, and you're not allowing for any more variance in between, it doesn't always work out like that.

I'm again in the reformed Christian circles where you run into a lot of guys who then take that as license to like, "Well, I just get to run everything." I'm not saying that's right or that's what's encouraged by that, but I think it's a natural side effect of saying, "Okay, it's going to be better if women stay home, and it's going to be better if men go out and work." I think you just have to watch out for that as a natural side effect of encouraging that.

Right. That's a very fair concern, I think, is a proper concern. Go ahead. I think you had another point that you wanted to raise. Go ahead if you have more. Otherwise, I can respond. Oh, I was just going to bring up Viet. He talks about the war on masculinity, and then he says to fix it that women need to be back in the home.

I think that he's kind of creating a straw man. Not that there's not a toxic culture towards men, but when you say when that's the only thing you're referring to, and then saying women back in the home will fix it, you're ignoring that there's equally toxic people against women.

Maybe that's not something he's aware of as aware of as a man. Maybe that's not something you're as aware of, but as a woman, I can absolutely say that it exists. I have one more thing to push back on when you're talking about women in the workplace. You mentioned that men are more likely to engage in performative acts for women as opposed to focusing and working on what needs to be done or whatever decisions need to be made.

That I was also going to push back on because, one, I think it's a pretty low view of men that if women are out of the workplace, then they're going to perform better. I think that rather than saying, "Well, women, you should be in the workplace so men can work better," men should be held to a higher standard and say, "Well, then rather than just appeal to their base or instincts, then let's say we'll then work harder so that you are supporting women where they need to be." Second, that's not even statistically true.

I was curious, so I Googled it. I wasn't actually sure. In all of the Fortune 500 companies, the ones that have more women in the leadership actually perform better in everything from sales metrics to – I forget all the metrics that they use. You can look it up. Yeah.

It's a fair – I'm familiar with some of that stuff. I haven't taken the time to look into the data behind those articles and things like that. I'm happy to accept it at face value, although in today's world, I don't think we should ever accept statistics at face value, especially whenever those statistics align neatly with a convenient line of thinking.

There's so many ways to manipulate data, things like that. I think – I don't remember exactly that point, but let's start there. Do you think your husband – do you think he likes working with women or do you think he would rather work exclusively with men? He has worked with women.

He works in a job where he has lots of contractors and definitely some of them are women. He doesn't work at the moment closely with other women. He's pretty neutral on it. I ran all this past him and he laughed at me. He's like, "All right, fine. Go call and go on a podcast," and he just doesn't care to get involved in stuff like this.

He's like, "I'll have fun. That sounds good." The reality is in today's world, there's not really any environment in which most of us have much of a choice. We're pretty much stuck in our current reality. Unless you work alone or do something like that, then we just all deal with the world the way it is.

None of us – we're not going to go back to 1872, whatever that was like. It's hard to know what 1872 was actually like, but none of us are going to go back there, so we all have to deal with it appropriately. The reason I ask that is just that most of my life, I've worked with women.

I've had female bosses all over across the board. It's kind of just the standard thing. I don't know of anybody today, any man today, who would exclusively work with men. If you get into some really physically demanding jobs like, I don't know, maybe being one of those guys you see on the internet who's literally working on… Underwater welding.

Yeah, underwater welding or the guys in the oil fields covered in black goop while they're spinning chains around drill bits. Maybe they are in exclusively a masculine environment, but even all of the traditional male-dominated societies, it's all mixed gender now. I'm not here to complain, and I don't like to be kind of the negative guy about anything.

What I've just discovered from personal experience, though, is that it's hard. It's difficult to interact with women when you're a man. It's difficult to do that knowing that you always have to take your basic normal instincts and then filter it for who is listening to you, instead of focusing just on the core of the message.

If I'm together with a group of men, I don't worry too much about how I say things, because things like taking offense, things like tone of voice, things like that, it's pretty immaterial generally in most male relationships. When I'm interacting with women, I'm always much more careful about how I say something to be sensitive and to be thoughtful about how I express myself.

I don't think that means that you can't have a productive team. Obviously not. That doesn't in any way mean that you can't have toxic men. Maybe a collaborative style of leadership does outperform. Maybe female-led companies do outperform. I've seen lots of that stuff. I'm skeptical of the data because I think a lot of the actual experience of it is tilted.

If you look at a thing like contracting—and I think I said this in the show, and this is not a super important point, but I think it's something that's worth mentioning in a conversation about this—is that what I think bothers men is if women get special treatment. I've noticed that any time a woman can hold her own on the same level that men are judged by, that generally men will happily accept her.

I know some female contractors, and I don't think that they have anything but total respect by men around. I've worked with female business owners, and they have complete respect by men around because they're being judged by the same standard. The challenge is that in our current society, in many areas of society, we don't judge people by the same standard.

We judge men and women differently, but we don't acknowledge that we judge men and women differently. This is one of the things that is really turning a lot of men off to relationships with women, and it's really frustrating. If you look at some of the male conversation around this topic, then the men themselves are very frustrated because they're like, "My entire life, all of the resources, all of the focus, all of the effort goes to women, and they're the ones who get pushed and promoted, and they're the ones who get trumpeted everywhere, and now I'm still expected to be superior, and yet I had never had any of that support." I don't care much for complainy-pants stuff.

Some of my heroes are Booker T. Washington and Dr. Drew and some of these guys, and so I don't ever, ever indulge any of the whiny-pants stuff that men today are doing, but it is important to look at. This is kind of a minor point. Back to families, though.

I think it's hard to know how to articulate any topic, and what annoys me is that I wish we could always shoot straight up the middle, and we could say what we think, and we could mean what we say, and we could just say clearly, "Here's what I'm saying," but it seems as though society doesn't work that way.

It seems as though there's always a pendulum swing, and that people get exceedingly on this direction, and then all of a sudden there's a correction, and it comes in the other direction, and everyone's always going too far instead of stopping the pendulum right in the middle. I think we probably do that similarly in terms of these topics as well.

There's an element where it's absolutely true that men should be helpers. One of the ones that annoys me and annoys a lot of women, and a lot of men too as well, but when you say things like a father babysitting his kids, I don't say that, because I'm not babysitting my kids.

I'm being a father. In terms of roles in the household and things like that, I think most of the stuff about who cleans the toilets and who cooks is silly. I've never seen a successful marriage relationship in which the guy was some kind of alpha male who says, "I never cook.

You make me coffee," and all of that stuff. That's not how my family works. I do plenty of household work, and I don't feel like I'm somehow emasculated when I do that. That's my job, is I'm a father, and so I need to help and serve my family. That's my basic function.

What I observe, however, is that we don't get to look at the extreme cases. We have to look at the normal cases. What I've observed is that, to the extent that we know or have any concept of what "traditional gender roles" are, there's a really simple compatibility that is often stamped out in today's world.

I've stumbled across this video, I think yesterday, of this beautiful young lady who was cooking dinner. It was some TikTok video that was shared. The guy had come home from a 14-hour shift, and here's his beautiful young Latino girlfriend who's making him an amazing taco dinner at 11 o'clock at night when he gets home from a 14-hour shift.

There were thousands of comments, and every single comment was, "Wife her up. Wife her up. Wife her up. Don't lose her. Don't lose her." What I find astonishing is that young women often don't recognize how relatively simple it is to attract a great man who's going to appreciate you.

Literally, just make him tacos at 11 o'clock at night. You don't need to earn $100,000 a year. Just make him tacos at 11 o'clock at night, and he probably will turn out to be an incredibly devoted husband to you. That doesn't make a rule about anything. What gets lost in our current environment is the appreciation that men and women are different, and there are natural compatibilities that really work well, and that these can work well for most people.

I struggle to know, should I communicate about what works well for most people, or should I communicate about what works well for everybody? This is a real challenge of communication. I don't believe that all marriages have to work the same. I think it's perfect. There are many marriages and families that work great with husbands and wives that both have jobs, and husbands that stay at home, and wives have big jobs or big businesses.

I think those can work. I know of a significant number of examples of those relationships where they're working beautifully, and I would never come in and say, "Well, you have to change these things." There are lots of things that can work. The challenge is, is that the norm? Is that the norm?

Today, I would say the data pretty well indicates that, for whatever reason, what we're doing right now is not sustainable. Relationships are not being formed. The relationships that are being formed are not being continued. Families are not growing. Children are not being born at the rates that are necessary for the continuance of our civilization.

So what the answer to that is, I'm not certain, and I think that it's an open question. Just at lunch today, I was talking with my wife about this question. I read this really fascinating Washington Post op-ed that a listener sent me. It was just published two days ago, and it was by Monica Hess.

The title of her essay was, "Don't pin the birthrate problem on the birth givers. A lot of women don't want 2.1 kids. We need an economic model in which that's okay." She wrote this very interesting essay, but the most important thing that she said was where she talked about population decline.

Here's one paragraph from it, where she said, "Plenty of researchers studying population decline have attempted to figure out what is happening to begin with. But unfortunately, it turns out the answer is that we really don't know. What we do know is that almost without exception, when women live in places that allow them access to birth control, access to education, and access to jobs, they overwhelmingly have fewer children.

Even if, as in Taiwan, Russia, Italy, and Greece, the government literally gives women cash money for reproduction. Even if, as in South Korea, the government has been addressing the issue from every possible angle, including building a high-speed rail system designed to shorten commutes and make more time for family life.

The only parts of the world where the birthrate seems to be steady, or increasing right now, are in places in which birth control is hard to come by, and where women's roles are relegated to domestic labor. It's almost as if, when women are given the chance to control their own reproduction, and when they have the education to have the option of working outside of the home, and when their society welcomes their contributions in fields beyond motherhood, and when they're paid for their work, it's almost as if leveling the playing field between women and men has allowed women to truly choose how many children they really want to have.

That answer, for a lot of women, seems to be fewer. She goes on, but I thought that was such an insightful question that she raised, is that we need to be talking about these things broadly and consistently, and in good faith, going back and forth to understand. Maybe it is the case that women have been oppressed throughout history.

Maybe it is the case that when women have education and are empowered and have birth control and whatnot, that they don't want to have babies. Maybe that is the case. Then why? Is there a sustainable alternative? Let me stop because I'm kind of rambling a little bit. I don't disagree with your comments.

I think most of your comments sound to me just like the challenge of communication. Who are you communicating to and doing it one way versus two way? I do hope that we can continue in our own private circles and, when possible, in public to talk about them. I guess back to the point I was trying to drive is, should I talk to everybody or should I talk to the majority?

Maybe at 60 percent or 80 percent of men and women would work really well in a situation in which the husband goes out and has a job and the wife is a stay-at-home wife and mother. Maybe it would be 60 percent where that would work well or 80 percent where that would work well.

Maybe it's 20 to 40 percent where that wouldn't work well. I don't want to cut off that 20 to 40 percent, but what I observe talking to a lot of young people today is that they believe that they have to make everything up in life themselves. If you go and you talk to a 24-year-old fresh, new college graduate and you start asking him about his life, it kind of sounds like he's got to figure everything out.

He doesn't really believe in religion and he's not so sure about religion, so he's got to come up with all of his own original religious ideas about what he thinks is right and what he thinks is wrong in the first place. He doesn't really believe in family, so he's got to think about does he believe in marriage, does he want to get married, and he doesn't really believe about gender roles.

He's got to work it out individually. He doesn't believe about children. He's got to take each child and he can't have some preconceived idea about how to take care of a child, so he has to look to the child and have child-led parenting. He doesn't really know what to do with his work and it's just exhausting.

It's an exhausting scenario. So could we figure out a really healthy way to say this is our culture, this is the wisdom of our cultures over the years that works. This doesn't work for everybody, but this works for most people and you should accept these things because it'll work for most people and help young people to kind of be on the fast track where they're willing to accept the wisdom of their elders and the society that birthed them and grew them rather than them having to make everything up.

So that's what I wonder about is in our current scenario. Can we communicate that? Is that appropriate to communicate or is that wrong? So I'll let you say anything else you want to say. No, that's fair. I appreciate those thoughts. I thought it was funny when you were talking to the woman that wrote the letter and she was responding to whatever you'd said to young men, and I hadn't listened to that episode because I guess I'm not a young man, so I didn't care what you had to say to young men.

But, and then to hear that then you were talking, as you're talking about choosing your audience and saying, well, I'm talking to young men, I'm talking to young women. Do I have to hedge what I say if I'm talking to young women? I guess I would encourage you not to have such a low view of young men that they can't listen to you talking to women because you said something in there about like, oh, well, I have to, if I address my podcast to women, men wouldn't listen.

If I address my podcast to men, women will listen. And so that's a favoring point of women. And you're kind of like having a pretty low view of men thinking that they, whatever you have to say to women, isn't worth their time. So maybe just a point of consideration when you're talking about what's going to work for the majority of people, I think with the setup that you and I both have, works really well when you have a solid marriage.

And I think you are pretty generous in assuming that the world has, that the vast majority of the world has a solid marriage that can stand one person not working. Cause that's a lot of, I mean, that's a lot of financial risk for that person to take, right? And I say that again, in the, I'm in a reformed Christian church.

And for probably the last, I've been married for 15 years for 10 of those, the first 10, I probably felt exactly like you do. And I thought, you know, that there was, this is the best way to live. And that basically, if it works for me, it should work for the majority of people.

It's only a small exception that it worked for. And then I would say over the past five years, I've encountered way too many situations of men who have been emboldened by the message that their job is more important than their wives, because, you know, lots of people can stay at home, but they need to go out and provide.

And then, and I'm thinking of a situation where then as part of providing, he got addicted to uppers to keep him working and then ended up like leaving his entire family. And now she's been staying home for 10 years and has no way of supporting herself and her kids and doesn't have supportive family that can take over there.

So she's stuck. And I, there's another very similar situation. And I've just like watched that happen too many times. And I'm starting to question, assuming that everybody is capable of having a loving marriage where two sides support. And I'm thinking that the unhealthy marriages are actually way more common in the world.

This is a consideration when you're talking, when you're thinking about who you're talking to and hopefully you're not, that's not who your audience is made up of. And again, I, like I said, it's not nothing you've said makes me think that you're secretly a raging misogynist that is like that to your wife.

And I assume you guys have a wonderful unmarried too and it's great and good for you. It's just a consideration about who you're talking to. Yeah. And to be, so I don't consider myself, I don't think of myself as an extremist on any of these things. So I think the reasons what you are exactly saying, I spent a lot of time thinking about should education, for example, should education be different for boys and girls?

And on one element, I would say absolutely, or should be in terms of the way that boys learn, the way that girls learn, I would, I've taken an interest in boys' schools versus girls' schools. So anytime I can ask somebody who's gone to an all girls' school or an all boys' school, I always ask them about their experience.

And it seems to me that it's probably not universal, but many people who are having trouble in school would often be better off if they were put into a boys-only school or a girls-only school. But it doesn't seem like that's a universal rule, but separately. But I've asked myself this question, do I think that education should be different for boys and girls?

And my answer is no, I can't find anything that I think should be different about education for boys and girls, except perhaps for emphasis, not for actual details. And so the point you're saying is really important, right? I have a daughter, I have a wife, I'm responsible to protect these women that are under my care.

And one of the things that's important is if my daughter gets hooked up with some deadbeat and she gets abandoned and she has three children or five children or something like that, I have to make certain that she is well-prepared. And so I simultaneously have to prepare her for a world of career excellence and employment and making money and a career of domesticity.

And I have to prepare her for both of those things. And even with skills that are other things, I don't want my boys to be incompetent and not be able to cook and not be able to clean and not be able to take care of a baby. I look down on men who don't have these basic skills and abilities.

I've been the man to receive all five of my children. So that tells you something about how much I care. I don't like the idea of, "Oh, I'm going to sit out here in the waiting room and let you... This is my family, these are my children." So I think we need to prepare for that.

And there is certainly significant levels of abuse that happen. And in fundamentalist circles where people are hardcore, I think that that can many times lead to abuse. And that in many cases, women bear the brunt of that abuse. The question is this, can we properly protect women while also simultaneously properly protecting men and create a culture that is going to continue and expand?

And anybody who can fix that is fundamentally going to be part of the future. But my fascination with birth rates and these issues from a birth perspective or from just a numerical perspective is simply that many of the cultures today that are the loudest will disappear because they're not able to reproduce.

Whereas cultures that have a healthy balance will do that. So I consider the culture that I'm a part of pretty healthy. I don't personally know much dysfunction. I know some, but I don't know much dysfunction. In my family with my siblings, I don't know much dysfunction. Most people have healthy marriages and things tend to work pretty well.

And so that's not to say that sin can't enter in and there's all kinds of sinful people and I'm never going to count against that. But I think that I'm from a pretty healthy culture, but it seems like to have a healthy culture, you probably need to have a strong emphasis, but not a mandatory rule.

So my fight has always just been to say, let's appreciate mothers, let's appreciate women for what they do because I believe that it's worth it. And my wife's work, what she does, I don't think it's the hardest job in the world. I think that's dumb to say that it's not, but I do think it's important, an important job.

And it's a job that to change the impact of her work would be pretty challenging to just replace it with money because not everything can be replaced with money. And I would simultaneously stand side by side with you and tell any father who's trying to build a career where he's just going to go off and make money.

I hate, for example, I hate immigration for this reason because all around the world, all around the world, I wind up talking to men who left their wife and children in the Philippines and moved to Dubai to go and make money. And it's such a destruction of a father's responsibility and he is in no way fulfilling his responsibility towards his family just because he sends a paycheck home.

So we should be fair-minded with that. But anyway, we could probably go back and forth all day. But at its core, it seems to me, back to just to finish, to respond to your comment about men and women and talking to men and women. I care about men. I care about women, but I care about men.

And men are facing enormous issues right now. And you can see that in a way that we've never seen that before. And so we need people to speak to the issues that women face and help them to make good decisions. But we really need right now men to speak to men's issues and to do it in a not destructive, toxic way.

And I hope that I can say a few words that help people in that. But I will undoubtedly do it imperfectly. So as I'm sure is the case with you and me, we have to listen to one another charitably, push back, clarify, and then try to figure out individual application, because all of us have different circumstances that we have to apply things to.

So thank you for calling. And I welcome feedback at any point in time. And may you know great wisdom in pressing through your challenges. And may I know wisdom in the same. I appreciate that, Joshua. Thank you. Thank you very much. All right, Drew in Missouri, welcome to the show.

How can I serve you today, Drew? Hey, good afternoon, Joshua. How are you doing? Very well, sir. How are you? Doing good. Been listening to your conversation. It's been interesting. So we are looking to the Mexico residency. We have an RV. I was on a consulting call with you about a month ago.

And after listening, after that consulting call, then you had another episode with a close friend of yours that started to hear about that. Thank you for doing that commentary on that episode. That has led me down to the path of, if I go down to Mexico, have you ever looked into like, as a 40 year old man, that has been in the doctor in years, I'm on no medications at all, I feel great.

But after listening to that episode, if there's like a full body scan MRI that I could do, just like maybe once every few years or something. And then I've tried to research this online, it's been a little hectic. It's hard to decipher which is a legitimate services to look into.

We have six figures in our HSA account. So the cost isn't really a constraint. I'm just looking to utilize that as we move into our Mexico residency options, doing this as part of that, like a medical tourism. Understood. So I would say, first of all, I'm not a doctor.

So I can only just give you general suggestions. But I would strongly refer you to those who would actually know what they're talking about, from a medical perspective, that's important. So from my layman's like, friend, friends talking over a cold drink perspective, I would say don't try to look into anything extreme until you do the basic stuff.

And so the basic stuff would be to go and visit just a standard physician and get a basic checkup. And then I would say, ask the physician about what would be the important tests and things that would be good for a man of my age to start thinking about.

Now, I have been asking this question for a good number of years, specifically about, you know, I'd love to have an evidence-based approach for knowing confidently, like what you should do at each age. I've looked for books. I've had a couple recommended to me, but I haven't found kind of an ideal one.

I've looked at a few, but I'm sure they're good. But I would say you could start with just kind of standard, a few standard articles or chat GPT or something like that, and just say, you know, what should a guy of my age be doing? And so, you know, I would think, first of all, you would begin with a standard physician with just a regular checkup.

You would talk to that physician about the status of what you have and what you know about your situation. I would think, certainly, you would consult a cardiologist because heart disease and heart attacks are a leading cause of death for people. That was what killed that client of mine, was a heart attack.

And so, you would start with a cardiologist and just get an overview and do whatever the cardiologist recommends. And then, it's my understanding that the most important thing to be looking at is not just a one-time snapshot, but more importantly, the trends. And so, I've collected some data and suggestions on doing just things like regular blood panels.

And so, I think one of the things that you should do is have a comprehensive blood panel. I don't know how frequently, maybe annually, at least annually, and recognize that if you're going from never having consulted with a physician to today, starting that process, everything you do is going to be an improvement.

But at least an annual blood panel, a comprehensive blood panel, would be a good place to begin. There is a guy named Emigal, E-M-I-G-A-L, Emigal, who I've read his blog. And if you go to Emigal.com, you can find, for example, under his longevity guides section, where he has his comprehensive blood testing panel for longevity.

And so, you can read through what the tests are that he wants you to give. And then, I would say the internet is a great resource for you to learn how to read those blood panels. And so, if I were in your shoes, I would take those blood panels, I would feed them into ChatGPT, then I would start going over them, and then I would start tracking them.

So, the goal is not necessarily to see what they are specifically today, but to see what the trends are. So, start collecting the data, and start being aware of the trends of your own data, so that you can properly monitor the data from there. The other thing, then, we get into scans.

I don't know, I'm not a doctor, I don't know the effectiveness of all the scans, things like that. I have read Emigal's contributions on it, and he is the guy who started the company that I learned about called Ezra. And that's his healthcare AI startup, where he's trying to detect cancer early using a full-body MRI, and then artificial intelligence to go over it.

Is it good? Is it not good? I don't know. After I recorded those comments, a listener sent me an article or sent me some resources basically saying, "Hey, you got to be super careful of over-testing and over-diagnosis." I'm not competent to tell you. So, go your own pathway. But to me, it would seem like doing some kind of scan like that could potentially help you to get better early detection of cancer.

But you should also do all of the stuff that your doctor recommends. So, you should probably do colonoscopies regularly and any other things that are recommended for you. And then you should have the data of just the consistent data for yourself. At its core, most of it is going to be based upon living a healthy lifestyle.

And so, if you're living a healthy lifestyle, you're doing a lot, then it's just a matter of detecting something early. And if you're detecting something early, it would seem to me that blood panels and regular scans are probably the key to most detection. Beyond that, I'm way out of my element in any further comments.

>> Awesome. I appreciate your insight on that. Am I last on your call list today? >> I got two more behind you. So, go. >> Okay. I'll hop off here then. I appreciate it, Joshua. Thanks. >> My pleasure. And I would say the key thing, as a man, just be paying attention.

Men are famously averse to going to the doctor. Men are famously averse to following what the doctor orders. Women are much better about going to the doctor and doing what the doctor says. So, one of the reasons why they live longer than us. So, we need to be following through.

And when you recognize how important it is, do it. And also, to your comments on birth tourism, I think this is a really good reason to do medical tourism. If it's hard to do in the United States, there's such a weird medical system in the United States. But if it's hard to do in the United States, you can certainly do this stuff going abroad.

So, you can get concierge service in Mexico, and you can do all the stuff there. My friend, Mikhail Thorup from Expat Money, he does this in Panama City. He's super into this biohacking stuff. And he goes in, spends a whole day at a fancy clinic, and they take you.

You have a personal concierge who takes you from here to there to the next thing and does it all for you. And so, I think this is where doing medical tourism really does pay off. But you need to have a basic plan to begin with. And the nice thing is, many times outside the United States, you can just order all the stuff for yourself.

You don't need referrals. You don't need any of that stuff. You just do it yourself. So, good for you for paying attention to it. Man, Teresa, I think you must be my fourth caller from Missouri today. So, I've hit the nerve in Missouri. Welcome, Teresa, to the show. >> Hi, Josh.

This is Brandon. >> Okay, Brandon. Well, the screen said Teresa. So, anyway, you're still my fourth caller from Missouri. Go ahead. >> I'm still milking my parents' color ID plant. >> Good for you. How can I serve you today, sir? >> Got a quick question for you about your book recommendation, Deep Nutrition.

The author, Dr. Kate Shanahan, makes the argument in the first third part of the book that it is ideal for a woman to wait preferably three if not four years in between pregnancies for optimal health for offspring. This makes sense just from a practical perspective. I should note that I haven't read the rest of the book.

I'm only a third of the way through, but I intend on reading the rest of it. But, obviously, I would say the vast majority of couples in America who get married in their 20s or 30s at this point, they're looking to have multiple children. They don't have the luxury of that kind of time before the woman reaches a point of infertility.

So, how should we think about the vitality of offspring versus the quantity? >> Interesting question. There are probably two, I'm sure there are many approaches to that, so let me not limit it to two. So, for example, most people would have the approach just to say that husbands and wives have sex, babies come when they come, why worry about it, take it as it comes.

That would be one approach that some people engage in. That's pretty uncommon, at least among my circles and probably your circles as well. One of the features of our modern-day philosophy is that basically we assume that childbearing is up to us. I think that that assumption is only true in some circumstances, that in many cases it's not up to us.

So, it can't be planned as perfectly as we think it can be. Usually, I think this comes more from the perspective of infertility. I'm making a minor cultural comment here that I've talked to all kinds of young couples who just said, "Well, I have to worry about this. Are we going to use birth control or are we not?

How are we going to plan our family out?" They have all these ideas and then they decide to start having babies and five years later they still have no babies. Their attitude is totally changed when you realize, "Wait a second, this is not necessarily up to us." So, that would be one approach.

Another approach, you could take the technologist approach and you could say, "What we should do is we should store our sperm and bank our eggs and have all of our babies with implanted embryos that have all been genetically tested for optimal outcomes." So, you could take the high technologist approach.

You could take the approach of, like you said, of having a perfect plan. Where I first ran into this was with the Domen people and Glenn Domen, who I read a lot of his stuff on Teach Your Baby to Read and early child education. He was big on making sure that you really maximize those years.

So, I used to read all the Domen mom blogs and some of them were like, "Well, I need to make sure I have three to four years between my babies so that my babies can be absolutely perfectly educated in reading and doing advanced calculus by the time they're four years old.

Then, I can go ahead and take another baby. Otherwise, I'll be shorting my children and their long-term outcomes and benefits." Then, you could take, as you alluded to, Dr. Shanahan, who says, "For the optimal health of the baby, the mother's body needs time to come together," and all of this stuff.

So, I'll give you my answer, which is obviously what you're asking, but I'm just pointing out some of the things that happened. First of all, do you have any children today? We have one on our way. Okay. Congratulations. Here's my philosophy. Take them one at a time. What I mean by that is just the only people that matter are you and your wife.

Take them one at a time. When I got married, I didn't set out to have a goal of having 18 children. I just took them one at a time. My wife didn't have a goal of having 18 children. I took them one at a time. So, if you take it one at a time and you recognize that the most important duty that you have, your fundamental duty and obligation, is to your wife.

So, back to the earlier conversation from the lady who called in in response to what I said, as a husband, I believe one of the most fundamental duties that you have is to move together with your wife and to work together with your wife. If you and she are not in agreement about your children or your lack of children or your use of birth control or not use of birth control or the timing of your children or the number of children or things like that, you have to work together.

And that means that you have to be on the same page. And so you interact and you work with her and you understand her position and you share your position and you don't move forward until and unless you are in agreement and you talk about it between the two of you.

And the issues related to children are much bigger than just, you know, waiting three years between pregnancies. It's everything as far as what our family can handle, what our family can't handle. And different couples are going to have different experiences. You and your wife may only be able to handle one child, which makes the entire thing a moot point.

Your best friends across the street, they may be able to handle 11 and be fine. You and your wife may be able to have a baby every 18 months and she's just the picture of health. Your friend across the street, she might only be able to have a baby every five years and barely recover.

Everything is subjected to this. And so everything from natural birth to C-sections, if a woman has multiple C-sections, it becomes very risky for her to have many children. And there's just so many more elements as far as the age of the children, how strong you are as parents versus how overwhelmed you are by your children.

Are your children getting the attention, the care, the time, and everything that you receive? So the only answer I'm going to give is that you talk about it together with your wife and the two of you come to an agreement. And you should be able to have enough experience together in the fullness of time to understand what's necessary.

But if I'm a husband and let's say that I observe that my wife is struggling physically. My wife had a bunch of dental problems after one of the babies and we think it was probably due to not sufficient nutrition and to the baby basically sucking vitamins out of her bones.

And so we needed to improve some things. If I observe that my wife is physically not strong and that she's not physically completely rested and recovered from childbirth, I don't want to have any babies. I don't want her to be overwhelmed. And if she's not confident about it, then I don't want her to be in that situation.

So my answer is simply to say that in the intimacy of your relationship together with your spouse, the two of you talk about these things and you come to an agreement. And it's nice to be informed by what people say, but most of my babies are two years apart, so I'm not following Dr.

Shanahan's advice. But that's not the only thing, right? There's all kinds of things. So the other component I would just say is that for me, having babies has always been a matter of faith. And that faith is not—when I use the word "faith" in this context, I don't mean like kind of just screwing up and believing in something, as some people interpret the word.

I mean coming to a place of confidence and my trust in God and my trust in the outcome that I'm willing to have a baby. My wife and I are not young anymore. And so as we get older, if we have children, there's an increased risk of handicapped children, various disabilities, things like that.

And I have five beautiful, healthy children. And you think, "Man, you know, what's the risk about having a handicapped child?" And I don't really want a handicapped child. And so if I were to have a baby, I would have to come to a place of faith and confidence just to say, "I'm willing to do this." My wife has to come to that as well.

So I would just—I would want to encourage you very strongly, take somebody who gives a philosophy. You know, I try to make an argument, an apologetic for, "Hey, let's have a lot of children. Let's have a lot of grandchildren, great-grandchildren." But I'm assuming and explicitly saying now that you should take whatever's inspiring to you about that, and you should go back to the relationship with your wife and your own confidence and your relationship with God, and you should make whatever decisions there that are appropriate to your family.

Take external input, external encouragement, and then re-filter it within your own personal context. Take them one at a time. I don't see any other solution other than just take them one at a time based upon where we are, what we can handle, what we can't handle, how we're doing, and then go from there.

And don't worry about kind of any of that long-term philosophy stuff. Appreciate it. I think that's what I needed here, Joshua. Also, I loved your podcast episode on employment at work. It was fantastic. Good. Thank you. I'm glad that it was helpful, and thank you very much. Peter in New York, you're going to round us out today.

Welcome. Thank you for being patient. How can I serve you today, sir? Hey, Joshua. How are you? Very well. I have a quick question about consulting, but can I give a 30 seconds on the caller too before who asked about screening? Please do. Yes. I saw your name, and I should have brought you on live to that.

Well, I don't know how helpful it would have been, but so I'm a urologist, so I am a doctor. We do do some screening mainly for prostate cancer, but just, you know, at a high level, when you're talking about what he's talking about is screening for illness that he doesn't have yet as opposed to treating a condition that he has.

And so when you're talking about what we call the primary prevention of disease, preventing it before you get it, it is very complicated, and there are a lot of different things that you can try to primarily prevent. When it comes down to it, there are guidelines that are out there for, you know, the broad physician community and then within sort of specialties as well about what screenings are age appropriate for what people at various ages, and most of them relate to screening for cancers like breast cancer with mammograms, prostate cancer with PSA testing, lung cancer with chest CT scans, colon cancer with colonoscopy, et cetera, et cetera.

But things like immunizations fall in there, smoking cessation, physical activity, good diet, et cetera, et cetera. So, you know, to the executive physical panel of blood tests, full-body CT, full-body MRI, I'm not an expert on this. I've had friends ask me about it, and I've looked at it with the data that's out there.

You know, when it comes to those things, there's pros and cons, and it's difficult to say to the population whether that's appropriate or not. But there are things like cholesterol screening or sexually transmitted infection screening for certain populations, blood pressure screening, diabetes screening, visions, whatever, you name it, that are broadly applicable to the population, and most of that can be found online, actually.

And a good resource is something called the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, and they promulgate guidelines on everything for adults, kids, children, pregnant women, et cetera. And, you know, the documents are dense, but when it comes down to it, I think a lot of people bias the detection of disease over the harms of screening that exist.

And I can really speak only in my field, you know, prostate cancer screening, about 10 or 15 years ago, this task force gave it, they give them letter grades, A, B, C, they gave PSA screening for prostate cancer a D, not because it has been helpful in reducing prostate cancer, that's what it has, but the further workup of abnormalities led to so many problems that the benefits were outweighed by the problems of further workup.

And, you know, that has shifted over time, but one of the big negatives of full-body CT or MRI is the detection of incidental findings that are meaningless that create either stress or other tests that don't lead to an elongation of life or better health outcomes. And so I think patients often think every time you find something you're going to live longer, but we as doctors see the downside of detecting diseases that are meaningless or breed concern, or frankly, lead to complications in their further workup.

So, you know, whether you get a full-body CT or MRI, that's not broadly suggested for the population right now, but things like, you know, that guy getting his cholesterol check probably makes sense. So. - So I pulled it up, it's the U.S. - There's my two cents. - Yeah, U.S.

Preventive Services Task Force, and they have on their website, they have published recommendations, recommendations in progress. - They got it all. - Perfect. So this is a good place to look for info. - And these things change, you know, and they'll say, you know, we did this document last 10 years ago, and these are the updates to the document as our knowledge base changes.

And they'll give a recommendation, A, B, C, D, letter grade as to whether people should do that type of screening. So that's probably in the United States, the single best resource that exists for people to find answers to what they should do at what age. - Thank you. One question related to that.

So it sounds like what you're saying broadly agrees with what I said that, you know, having, tracking your blood pressure, tracking your cholesterol, things like that, I don't see any harm, any potential harm from that stuff. With regard to things like full-body MRIs or CT scans or whatever it winds up being, would the concern about harm mostly result from false diagnosis or mental stress due to an anomaly that doesn't actually turn into something?

Or do you think that there's some reason to be concerned about the actual physical procedure itself causing harm? - So I think, so let's take something that would be easier to extrapolate. So let's go with full-body CAT scan because it exposes people to ionizing radiation. So theoretically, if you applied that, so screening by definition means you're taking people who have no symptoms of disease and you are trying to identify a disease before it would be symptomatic.

And if you diagnose it and have an intervention, it will then lead to some improved health outcome, which usually we think of as living longer. So the classic is if you smoke, and I don't know the amount of time that they do it now, but if you were a smoker of some length of time, they recommend, I don't know the age 'cause I don't do this, let's just say it's 50, but there's a recommendation you get a screening CT scan of your chest at, let's say it's age 50 is the age, if you've smoked 20 pack years.

And that leads to an increased rate of detection of early stage lung cancers, which has dropped the lung cancer fatality rate. So it used to be, there was no effective screening for this chest x-rays weren't sensitive enough. And now if you smoked X amount, your doctor will put you through this, you'll find a lesion and it leads to some improvements, but you also find some lesions that are nothing that then lead to more chest CTs or people are nervous.

And we find these all the time on other tests, people who have no risk of lung cancer really, you find small lung lesions, they freak out, they need a chest CT and they're nervous. So let's go back to full-body CAT scan. So let's say you take a population of healthy people and you expose enough people to a full-body CT scan, you will induce some de novo malignancy that somebody would not have gotten absent the radiation exposure.

Now, I don't know how many people you would have to expose and what malignancies would be and what would happen to them, but that would be an example of a harm that you would induce on a healthy population by the exposure to the test. I think MRI is probably generally perceived as safer and there's probably less of an obvious risk.

Although if you did them on enough people, you'd probably find something. So I think that the risks of screening with that and the reason why it's not widely suggested, I mean, number one, it's impractical. You know, CTs and MRIs, there are only so many machines and they're used for people with problems for the most part right now.

So, I mean, you could fix that, but if you tie up every MRI machine in the country with people getting whole body screening, you know, you don't have machines able to deal with someone who's coming in the ER with a stroke or who's getting a malignancy worked up. So that there is some impracticality, but the issues are in two directions.

So number one, you can have false positives. So you find things that turn out to be nothing. And there's actually a name for imaging on imaging, what are known as incidental omas. Omas is a, you know, the suffix for tumor. So they actually call like incidental masses in the adrenal gland in the medical literature are called adrenal incidental omas and they're present in 1% of adults.

And so there are other lesions that you find incidentally that are of no health consequence, but breed stress may lead to other imaging tests, may lead to biopsies, may lead to surgery and may not change anyone's health outcome. And, you know, you do enough of that on enough people, you get complications of those other things.

And, you know, it doesn't happen to the average person very often, but if you're a doctor, you might see it. And certainly if you look at the population, you see that. So you can get false positives. You can also get false negatives. So you could have, let's say you do a full body MRI, you find nothing, you could be lulled into a false sense of security that you don't have a problem that when you, let's say you get a cough, it doesn't go away a year later, you don't get evaluated.

So it goes by directionally. The other thing is there, there are each test that you subject people to there's false positives and false negatives. And those tests have a range of characteristics that they work within where they can either detect things when people are sick, or they don't detect things when you're healthy.

And those are known as the sensitivity and specificity of an individual test. And so when you're doing screening, what you need are tests that are what are called highly sensitive, which means they never miss abnormalities, but what you end up getting then is a lot of false positives. So the classic example is, is the HIV test.

If you have a low risk population that you just draw blood on a screen for HIV, most positive results are false positives as opposed to people actually having HIV. And there are other ways to prove that's not what they have. But this is one of these things in med school, like first year of med school, they teach you about test, testing dynamics and screening.

And, you know, you go to the doctor, you think every test, well, this is the result. Well, every test has a range, it works within a sensitivity and a specificity. And there's something called the pre-test probability of a test being abnormal. So if you come in to see me, you know, I have my, my odds making in my head that you have a certain diagnosis.

And then when I order a test, I, there's a probability that you have the disease I'm testing for. And all those things come out to, you know, spit out where you come to diagnosis and treatment. And it gets complicated statistically, but there's a thing called Bayes' theorem, which I'm sure you're familiar with, but it comes into play with the patient you're seeing, what's the probability they have an illness.

And then you go run a test. What's the test sensitivity and specificity and how reliable is the test result? So it's sort of a long exposition. No, it's really, really fascinating. So I have one more clarifying question you can deal with shortly. So from what you're saying, the usefulness of comprehensive imaging would be debatable.

Maybe so, maybe not. We don't know. Right. Possibly harmful, possibly helpful. We don't know. As I hear you, the usefulness of call it just standard, you know, checking your blood pressure, listening to your heart with a stethoscope, these basic things incontrovertibly important, no harm coming from them. Obviously this should be done.

You should, you know, check your blood pressure consistently. So then the question regarding blood panels, I don't see any harm of having a history of comprehensive blood panels. I can only see help from that, not harm. Would you agree? Is that, is that fair or is there harm that I'm just not, I don't know about?

So I can't speak authoritatively to everything, but I think that there are certain tests which are of benefit for screening purposes. Again, you're talking, you don't have a problem. Obviously, if you have a problem, running tests is designed to sort it out. You know, you come in with, in your jaundice, you know, running liver tests obviously is crucial.

I can't tell you off the top of my head the utility of getting a screening, complete blood count or a basic metabolic panel, which tests your kidney function and electrolytes or, you know, doing liver tests in the average person. There is information about that out there. I think the reality is the benefits of those are probably pretty marginal to the average person who feels fine.

And, you know, getting blood drawn is not high risk, but you know, you do it enough and you nail some, you know, someone's on our nerve and they get a numb hand and people get bruising and, you know, people get scared of needles and have a nice weekend and, you know, stuff like that happens.

But, you know, I would say firmer ground would be screening for diabetes with either blood or urine testing at a certain age. I don't know off the top of my head the specifics for that, but there's better evidence for that. But, I mean, to be honest, if you draw, let's say you drop 20 blood tests, the chance of a lab error or some anomaly that's medically irrelevant by chance alone is pretty high on that panel of tests.

So, like I said, I can't speak authoritatively to a lot of that, but cholesterol screening is one thing where there is evidence that it's beneficial and they do break it down by your age and your history. So, I mean, that's even something like in your 20s, getting your cholesterol checked, if you're even a low risk of heart disease, there is benefit to that.

And they've got, you know, statements on that. But yeah, I think the reality is, is that I think a lot of patients overestimate the benefit of a lot of these things and their actual benefit is, I mean, even the annual physical, I think can be somewhat debated. You know, if you're talking about specific things like screening for cervical cancer with pap smear and, you know, HPV testing, if you're talking about getting a mammogram, if you're talking about a colonoscopy, you're talking about, you know, these other specifics, that's different.

But just, you know, the benefit of these individual components of the once-over, I think a lot of it is frankly debated. - Yeah, that's good because I would be one who, as a non-educated layperson, I wouldn't think about the potential harms, which is why I appreciate the listener who brought the comments up and you yourself.

So, that's good. Well, I'll continue to follow this and hopefully 10 years from now, we'll have more evidence and can make better recommendations. In the meantime, what we can all do is do what we know to do. We just did that. We'd probably get better outcomes. So, go ahead with your question or comment related to the reason for your call.

- Sure, yeah. So, I think I know the answer. So, I do, in addition to my day job, I do a lot of sort of side consulting stuff through different groups. And when I started doing this, a lot of what I did was through groups that have a variety of different consultants in different industries and then they'll get usually either finance firms or consulting firms will come to them to get an expert in a specific area and then they will engage you in a one-time, one-hour call to talk about stuff and get compensated for it.

As I have gotten older in my career, I am finding that I am getting inundated by all these groups with completely irrelevant stuff and my degree of engagement in those things is diminishing. However, every now and then stuff still sneaks through and I think the problem is the way they screen has gotten loose and they're just, you know, they don't match me up with stuff that's my expertise anymore and I don't think they're capable of tightening it up.

So, the question I have is how harmful would it be to just unsubscribe from all these things and lose any ability to get that revenue stream at this point? - How significant is the current revenue stream? - I mean, from all of those things combined is maybe a couple grand a year.

- That doesn't seem like a big harm to what I'm projecting to be your overall finances. If you weren't inundated, if you weren't getting those kinds of requests, could you make a few, take your time for it up and make just a couple few contacts, let's say, with somebody who would be really good for some expert witness work or some really targeted consulting work?

Is it harming you to deal with these inappropriate questions in some way? - For the most part, no, because I usually just delete most of these things and if I ever get one that's decent, I just, I screen them and go through that, you know, I'll look at the questions and see what they want and, you know, the hit rate's pretty low.

I've got other more lucrative consulting things that I do, so this is a small part of it, but it's, I guess the real question is how important is it to seek out every single opportunity to make a couple extra grand? I guess that's really the question. - I would see it as probably of limited importance if you know that it's not going somewhere.

So the reason that, just kind of the basic philosophical reason you want to clear detritus out of your life is so that you're free to focus on the high priorities and the guy who goes after the high priorities with a laser focus is going to be ultimately the most successful.

At the beginning of the call, I think you were not on yet, but I received a first or second call today, was a question from a young medical school graduate who had, was not matched during the residency process and he's talking about, you know, what do I do? And my answer to him was you need to be laser focused on making certain that when next year rolls around, you get your residency.

And so you need to get rid of everything else except this most impactful thing. You don't want to go off hiking the Appalachian trail right now. You need to be focusing on fixing the problems with your board exam scores. You need to be focused on fixing the problems with your interview skills, with your essay writing, whatever it was, you got to fix that stuff.

And so drawing from that for listeners who heard the earlier call, what I would say is philosophically, we want to be really focused on our top opportunity or our top couple of opportunities. And anything that's not that can be distracting to us and keep us from something that's superior.

So it may be that the actual time involved with deleting emails consistently and just answering one a month, okay, the actual time may not be all that significant, but maybe that's draining like the mental reserves where you're thinking, oh, my backup plan is I could do this expert consulting work and I've got a really great system.

But in reality, if you said no to that couple thousand dollars and you challenged yourself to say, what would be a much better option? Maybe there's another type of approach and it might be in medicine where now I could add $100,000 to my income. Maybe this is the year I can write the book on evidence-based prevention for urology.

Or maybe this is the year that I can do cutting edge research in something and really advance forward or something totally outside of medicine. So the only framework that I would use to answer it would be getting rid of the little stuff so that you have bandwidth for the big stuff is usually the best pathway of success because it keeps you focused on the big opportunities that lead to the big wins.

And those things often don't come when you have a busy cluttered mind. >> Got it. Well, I think I'm going to unsubscribe. I've got much higher value opportunities that I get hits on all the time. Don't clutter the inbox that I deal with. So this will be easy to just get rid of them.

>> So the bigger application for you to take away from this call would be, all right, well, that's pretty easy to just unsubscribe from the emails. Maybe it's easy. Maybe it's not easy to get off their list. But going back to your main priorities, let's say you have category A, which is big money, category B, which is pretty big money, category C, which is pretty big money, and category D, which is a lot more than this, which is category G.

But you might need to get rid of category D as well, where, okay, this is something that makes me $24,000 a year. But that might be distracting you from the thing that could make you $240,000 per year. So I'm not imposing that on you. I'm just saying that the framework is, let me figure out what my best opportunities are.

And I probably can't effectively handle more than a couple of good opportunities. But by being really focused on the handful of really high-value opportunities, that's where my biggest wins can come from. So I need to be pretty ruthless about clearing my schedule of the other stuff so that I have the ability to always focus on my biggest opportunities.

>> Got it. It sounds like I should have tuned in earlier to help that kid who didn't match. It happens. It usually works out. That's what I can say. It usually does work out. >> It sounded like to me that if he could just... It sounded like he was on the edge.

So if he could just improve a few things around the edge, then... And it may have been a fluke. He wanted to be an emergency medicine physician. He said there was a lot this year. So maybe next year there'll be a smaller class and he's in. But we got to work at it.

So thank you very much for the call. And I appreciate the extra advice, even around those subjects. Thank you all for listening to today's Friday Q&A show. That ends today's show. In closing, I just want to encourage you. I really love the feedback and I really appreciate it. I don't keep comments open on the website.

So this is actually a really great way. If you agree with something, disagree with something... Oops. Wrong music. I was going for music and I hit the wrong one. If you agree or disagree with something, I would really appreciate it. Just call in, talk about it. It makes for a really interesting conversation among the community here.

And as always, I don't say this every day because I think it's dumb to say this every day. But here is a basic framework for any kind of advice and any kind of input that you ever hear. Take what's useful, discard what's not. So just take in any idea, any comment that's useful, and then get rid of it.

When you disagree with something, as I frequently do with many people, disagree with something, but use it as a chance to say, "Wait a second. Why do I believe what I believe and can I make a good defense of that?" And then in so doing, in the fullness of time, we can find truth, we can find the reality that gives us the best long-term outcome.

And so disagreement is fine. Healthy individuals should be able to disagree with things. And what I'm very glad, what I hope to continue to encourage, to cultivate is that you and I can be an example to the world where we can talk about important topics, we're going to discuss them imperfectly, we're going to ramble a little bit sometimes, we're going to get a little bit wordy, we're going to say the wrong thing, use the wrong expression.

But in the fullness of time, it's in the relationships that you and I have together and with our other friends where we can approach a clearer understanding. In order for that to work, we have to build a safe space, a safe space to disagree, a safe space to have conversation and to speak with one another in respectful dialogue.

It pains me enormously that our society has minimized many of the fora that we used to have for this kind of respectful dialogue. But we can rebuild it, and we can do it right here at Radical Personal Finance, and you can do it right at your dinner table and whatever other fora that you yourself create.

So thank you for listening. Have a great weekend. I'll be back with you soon. Enter a new era of color and brilliance with Vizio's Quantum Pro 4K QLED Smart TV. With over a billion hues of vibrant color, plus wide viewing angle and anti-glare film, it delivers perfect clear picture no matter where you're sitting.

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