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Life insurance and annuities provided by USAA Life Insurance Company, San Antonio, Texas. All insurance products are subject to state availability, issue limitations, and contractual terms and conditions. It's Friday, and today, 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. I'm your host. Today is Friday, July 5, 2024. And today, on this Friday, as on any Friday, in which I can arrange a microphone, we record a live Q&A. You call in, talk about anything that you want. It's open line Friday. You can direct the call.

You can ask any questions that you want, raise any topics, raise any disagreements, raise anything that you want to just shout out. I mean, I don't necessarily let people advertise their stuff, but that does happen sometimes. When you call me with a good conversation, you get to drive the show.

So if you'd like to be on one of these Friday Q&A shows, you can do that by going to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Sign up to support the show on Patreon, and that will gain access for you to one of these Friday Q&A shows. We begin today with Will in North Carolina.

Will, welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? Hey, Joshua. Thank you for taking my call, and thank you for all the awesome work you do. My pleasure. Yeah. I had a quick question for you. It's kind of a two-part question. So I've had this idea or dream in my heart for several years now to start, at some point, a family foundation, a charitable foundation that hopefully, like, one day, you know, our kids and grandkids could also contribute to and that we could, as a family, direct the charitable giving.

So I had kind of a two-part question. The first part is most of the information I've seen online looking into it seems to be geared toward people with millions of dollars, which we do not have currently. So I guess the first question is, is this even worth pursuing right now with limited money, assuming that we will continue to give to it, you know, yearly and invest the money?

And we're young. We're like, you know, 31, 32. So hopefully, by the time we're 80 or 90, it could be in the million. Right. You said 31, 32. How old are your children, and how much money would you put into the family foundation immediately? We have one daughter that is three months old and hope to have more children.

And right now, I mean, I know it's really small, but probably like five or $10,000 and maybe, you know, $20,000 a year, $30,000 a year for the foreseeable future. Right. So I would say that the reason this is all pitched towards expensive, towards rich people is because the fees to properly set up and then run a family foundation are often quite significant.

And I don't know the exact number. I've heard people talk about, when I've heard people talk about it, I've heard, you know, $250,000 to $500,000 is kind of a number that people talk about. So in my mind, a family foundation is always targeted towards the large, you know, a large giver.

That's why things like donor advised funds and community foundations and everything associated with the local shared management of charitable funds has come into being. And so the normal recommendation for the kind of money that you're describing would be a donor advised fund because the fees are much, much more modest in order to run it properly.

I don't think, however, that that necessarily even should be the key focus. I think the most important thing at this stage would be to really get an idea of some of the organizations or causes that you are trying to, that you want to be involved in. And I have some thoughts on that, but let me begin just by saying, is there anything specific that you've targeted of a particular area that you want to focus on with your giving?

There's organizations that we give to monthly now, and I would look to, you know, I would look to other things in the future as well, and hopefully, you know, decades from now, like, you know, my kids would also get to weigh in on that, and we would kind of look at it as a family.

But typically, we're Christians, so just like ministry-related, yeah, kind of stuff. Right, good. And do you feel like the organizations that you can give directly to right now, are they not doing something that you think needs to be done? Is there a reason other than just the concept, the attractiveness of the idea, "We have a family foundation and we coordinate our giving, we make a big impact on the world," other than that psychology, which I'm not saying is not valuable, but other than that, is there a particular reason now why you need the structure of a family foundation?

I would say probably not, other than I would like to have the money. I know it's not a large amount, but, you know, just the financial, like, nerd part of me would like to have it invested versus just sitting in a savings account that we set aside for future use.

And then, honestly, yeah, probably just that legacy component, the psychology component, I guess. Have you looked into a donor-advised fund? I have, briefly. I don't know that I saw where the, like, the kind of the generational aspect that I would love to be a part of it would be as feasible for that, but I could be wrong, because I've not looked extensively into it.

Okay. Well, I feel ill-equipped to answer the question directly here on a live call, because I have not worked with anybody in detail on any of this stuff. So, my knowledge is very general and not specific. So, I can't answer extemporaneously without further research. I can't answer a lot of specifics.

The basic idea, though, that from my general knowledge that I would say is simply, number one, a family foundation is generally not a tool that would be appropriate for the amount of money that you currently are able to give because of the costs of establishing it, running it, running the administration of it, things like that.

It's an appropriate tool for very large gifts. Donor-advised funds are the general tool that has been developed that is ideal for what you're describing. And so, and if you want to orient your giving around Christian causes, there are a significant, there are a number of Christian foundations and charitable organizations that have established donor-advised funds that are focused on that.

If you want to orient your giving in other directions, again, you look at your local community foundation or look at just some of the donor-advised funds that are administered by large investment companies. That would be the normal recommendation for somebody at the amount of money that you are describing.

I think what you're trying to accomplish in terms of the family vision and the impact is something that can be accomplished without imposing the strictures of the actual gifting vehicle of a foundation on yourself. So I think one of the most important things to establish is, why are we here?

What are we doing in the first place? So this comes down to getting a vision for yourself. So if what we're going to do is fund Christian ministries, then what's going to be the vision for that? So are we going to fund international missionaries? If we're going to fund international missionaries, then you can go ahead and do that directly now.

And I think that the culture building that you're looking to do for your children will be something that you build with how you handle that as a family rather than going first to the technical vehicle. So what do I mean? Well, if what we're going to focus on is international missions, and by the way, I'm using this as an example because I've spent the last couple of weeks digging super deep into the international missions.

The Lausanne organization, what do they call it, Lausanne Movement, is having their fourth congress in South Korea in a few months, and they're just releasing, they're in the process of releasing this enormous report on basically the state of, I think it's called something like the state of the Great Commission.

And so I've been reading some of the data in it and just really thinking about it. And one of the things that is enormously shocking to me, I had no clue how bad it was, is the state, the current state of global Christian giving and supporting of international missions.

When you look at the amount of money that Christians in the world control and spend, and you look at the amount of that, the money of that that goes to church or religious related causes, it's pretty astonishingly low. But what's worse is when you look at the percentage of that that goes to things like foreign missions, there's actually more money that is estimated to go to ecclesiastical crime in the current giving space in Christian work than is going to foreign missions.

More money is going to ecclesiastical crime than is going to foreign missions. And then what's even more shocking is of the amount of money that is going to foreign missions, the vast majority of that is going into regions of the world that have been evangelized, and only a shockingly tiny percentage is going into unreached people groups and unreached regions of the world.

So I know that's probably pretty common knowledge to some people, but I was aware of some of that, but to see the stark numbers was super shocking. So this has been an obsession of mine for the last few weeks. I've been thinking a lot about it. And I've been thinking, "Okay, what role does my family have to do with this?" So I'm just using this as an example.

Your burden may be different. But as I've thought about this, I've considered, "Okay, well, how do you build the culture?" Well, first, some people might go and be full-time missionaries. That would be a different perspective. But let's say you're not going to do that. You're going to continue to work.

Well, the first thing that you would do is you would make foreign mission work and foreign missionaries something that you routinely pray for. And so one of the things that I did when pulling out that data was I pulled out—I don't really use it, but I've been aware of some friends that really love kind of a prayer app that you can use to create your own kind of scheduled prayer.

And I started filling in prayer things because we pray together as a family basically four times a day. And so I want to make certain that I'm holding the vision in front of my children that we at least can pray for people. And so that kind of thing consistently done over time will make a big difference.

And there's lots of organizations—Lausanne has it, Joshua Project, there's other people that have things where, "Here, we'll give you a prayer calendar, and you can pray for these peoples, these unreached peoples, these specific tribes, or these specific missionaries who are working with these tribes, or these specific regions." And so something like that can be enormously impactful to start to set the mission in your family to say, "This is what we're working on." In addition, then, you would do things like go and choose the missionaries that you support.

So you would choose the specific missionaries that you support. You would make certain that if you're getting their monthly email newsletter, that you print it, that you put it on the refrigerator, that this is constantly in front of your family and your children, and in front of your family, you're continually talking about it.

And when those missionaries come on furlough, they absolutely come to your house and tell stories. And then whenever possible, you absolutely go and visit them, and you take your family, and you start to build a connection, and you sponsor some short-term missions groups from your local area to them, and you take your children with them.

And these kinds of things will expand out to where now this is a fundamental part and component of our family. And I think this can be done—I'm using foreign missions as an example—but it can be done in almost any area. If your family really—the mission that you really care about is bringing clean drinking water to the children all around the world that don't have any clean drinking water, and you're just providing a humanitarian aid work, then you would do the same basic thing using the same basic steps.

And those types of things will make a difference in terms of articulating continually and holding the vision in front of yourself, in front of your wife, in front of your daughter, that this is one of the reasons our family is put here on earth is to make a difference in this particular issue.

Then I think you would also start to orient and discuss how you can bring skills to bear to this mission, to this particular thing. And so this will be partly with you, but then with your daughter, you'll be talking about how can you contribute to this cause? What is needed for it?

So let's say, for example, that what is really harming us right now in this particular cause that our family has adapted or chosen to focus on is we don't have—we're being frustrated by the legal system. And so if you want to become a lawyer, then we'll support you in that.

And one of the expressions of the legal work you could do would be to work in this particular problem area that we're focusing on. And you can hold the vision in front of your children as to how their individual skills and giftings may fit into the long-term vision and mission of the family.

So if you focus mostly on that for the next 10 or 15 years, while also giving, but giving through the vehicles that you have right now, and along the way you're building your business, you're building your income, you're accumulating more investment capital, and now you have a large payday where you sell a business or something like that.

Now we've got several million dollars to tuck aside. Then I think at that point in time, establishing the family foundation will be absolutely a perfectly compatible thing. And you've done the really hard work up front of identifying the issues that are most important to your family, building a culture around those issues, supporting those issues in the way that your finances currently do.

And then when you have a liquidity event where you can fund the family foundation, then you turn around and fund the family foundation. Your daughter is hired as the executive manager of the foundation. You're collecting more and more donations for it. And along the way, you've probably built out a vision for the kinds of projects, the large projects that need to be done that your family foundation can actually go ahead and fund.

So that's, in my mind, a way to accomplish what you're trying to do that will ultimately probably be the most impactful, and it brings in the technicalities of a particular type of trust when it's appropriate, but it doesn't jump to that prior to it. Make sense? >> Yeah, that makes honestly so much sense.

I knew that talking to you would help bring some clarity to that, so I thank you for your wisdom. >> My pleasure. What was part two of the question? >> It was about specifics of setting it up, so I don't know that I even need to get to part two.

>> Yeah, I would... >> At the moment, anyway. >> Yeah, I couldn't even answer part two just because I've never done it. So it's something that's been on my research list and I've neglected it. But I really want to see, this is a big interest of mine, and it looks like I've got, at the moment, one other caller on the line, so I may talk more about this on the back half of the show just because I've got some time today.

But I had a really interesting consulting call recently that really just stimulated my mind. I'm going to expand on this, but I really want to see philanthropy and charitable work addressed again, and this is something I think we really need to focus on. So I appreciate you giving me a chance to kind of start the question.

But create the culture, build the vision, and then bring in the technical pieces where they're warranted and where they're wanted. And I think that's the best place to be going at this point in time. All right, move on to great state of New York. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today?

>> Hi, Joshua. My name is Michael. I'm looking to gain your perspective on currently a career versus family balance decision that's my wife to make, but it's currently on the table and we have to make a decision in short order. And we could use a different perspective, maybe to see if we are missing something or if there's a better option for us.

Let's get your thoughts. So I thought the best way to maybe lay it out is kind of highlight our goal, our current state, or what she currently has in the future state. And ask me any questions that you have. But the goal at the high level is that my wife is, we have one child and she's taken a slight step back from work, so she still wants to remain employed through her childbearing years.

And we expect a second child here in November. And so she wants to remain employed, effectively. Her current role, her current job has that three-two split, three days in the office, two at home. She makes 96K over 24 clinical hours, but it's an hour commute away. And it has below average benefits, specifically the maternity benefit, healthcare, you name it.

But it is very prestigious and it offers very stimulating intellectual work, which she values. Her future offer, the one currently on the table, is 151K. So a significant increase in pay. It's a two-minute commute from the house. So basically, literally within walking distance. It has significant benefits that are better for her, but she needs to expand her hours work from three-two to four-one, basically 24 clinical hours to 32.

And it also has the benefit of basically being portable. So she can basically move to other states, potentially international if she wants. So it's gotten us to begin questioning whether our goal that we set out is even the right goal, or because all these other benefits have started to say, like, these are really attractive.

But when we set out, our goal was to have her employed and to stay with the child as many hours as she could. I guess the question is, how do you think about this? It's not really a problem. It's two good options, right? But it's, how do you think about this, right?

How can I frame it in a way that, you know, it's her decision to make, and I'm trying to be neutral. I don't want to lean one way or the other, but I'd love to get a perspective on, you know, is there a third option? How do you approach this, right?

- Well, when you said two-minute commute, I about interrupted you to scream, "Take it, take it, take it," without another word. - Yeah, I know. It's literally a two-minute commute. And this is kind of where I thought you would add, you're a few years older than I am, and we're about to have our second child, and we had no idea, you know, zero to one changed our life completely.

One to two is going to change your life completely. So I'd love to get your, yeah, the commute definitely was unexpected benefit here, but. - Yeah, I'll, just a brief interjection on that. I don't know this is entirely true, but here's the model I've made up, is that zero to one completely changes your wife's life, and it changes your life too.

One to two changes your life significantly, because now you're, there's a lot more that you're doing with the older child, and your wife's usually entirely focused on the first child. Two to three, not much of a change, although you have to change your parenting style, because now you're outnumbered, so you have to go to, you know, one to many instead of one to one.

And so there's a bit of a change in a parenting style, and from then on, they're just, it doesn't, it's not that big of a deal. You know, a couple of my children are away at the moment, and you know, we have three children, and what's always amazing is when you go from two to one, or from, in my case, down five to three, you're like, there was a time when three was, felt hard, but today it's like, where's all the children?

It doesn't, it just kind of feels easy. So the point is, everyone's skills grow along the way, and I don't, I don't know, maybe it's not true, but it does, I think, I think one to two does change dad's life a bit more, because moms are usually pretty clingy to, to the first baby.

Question, how is child care currently being handled right now with, with her current arrangement? Great, yeah, great question. So we had a, we, when we were going to have our first child, we were going to do daycare, and when my wife, we actually visited a daycare that a high school classmate of mine unexpectedly set up, and I'm, and it was a phenomenal daycare, except that before we hit the car in the parking lot on the way out, she was quitting her job.

She was like, writing an email to draft. Basically daycare, she found, she couldn't, she, she, she was mortified about the prospect. Right. So we took a step back and we're like, okay, this is clearly not the option. And we had to quickly pivot and we chose to do a nanny.

And so we're paying a significant amount of money, but worth every penny, right, for us to allow her to continue to work. And that would be the, that would be the, the state that we would currently, we had no parental support in, in, in this. So it's, it's either, you know, I make, I should have said this, I make significantly more money than she does.

So the money is not, does not factor into her decision-making really. It's nice, but it's like, I make over 2X if she, you know, that she may, I make 350. So she's, we don't need the money effectively. Yeah. But that nanny is what, is what we currently use. Well, I think when you think about a career, when you look at what you're trying to get out of your career, and especially what your wife is probably trying to get from what you're describing.

So you said we don't need the money. It's not like you're going to be poor if she weren't working at all. So what is she trying to get from her career then? She's trying to get a sense of purpose, right? A sense of contribution, a sense of contributing to the world.

She cares about her patients and she wants to provide good quality care for her patients. She's looking for things like a sense of engagement with stimulation, stimulating her intellect, growing, learning, advancing as, as a physician, as in her role, in her work. She's, wants to feel part of the community, a needed and valued part of the community.

These are all basically fulfillment goals. And so what it sounded like was that the new potential position, I think if I got, if I'm reading my notes right, I think you said that it would be a substantial increase in engagement. And it would also open up more flexibility in the future because it would expand her horizons.

You did say it would be a lot more engaging, right? It was, it's not more, the current role actually is more stimulating of the two. Oh, I see. Every day. The current one is, is, is a highly prestigious role, but it, you know, but it's, it, the, the work that she does is very intellectually stimulating.

You'll never have two same patients. It's highly complex. You know, it's, it pushes her every day, but it, you know, requires her, you know, this is, I didn't mention this, but, you know, she spent significant time out of office, unpaid prepping, you know, having to learn about these very, you know, one in, one in a 10 million type of event, right.

Which wouldn't be the new role. The new role would be far more, uh, you know, I would say not like a common cold, but, but you'll see far more of it in your common everyday man. All right. So that's, this is important. And I, and I did misread my notes.

I wrote down prestigious and stimulating, but I had it in the wrong grouping. Yeah. With regard to her vision, like let's say you fast forward 10 years, 15 years, does she have a vision of where she sees herself 10 or 15 years from now in her career? Yeah. Good question.

Yes. You know, interestingly enough, not in the patient world, actually in the teaching world, which eventually she would like to do is eventually pivot her career into one of collegiate higher level education where she would be able to, you know, pass on her knowledge to the next generation in, in medical, you know, in nursing school or medical school or some type of, you know, um, you know, but not directly with clinical patients at that point.

Is there an obvious difference between these two opportunities in terms of advancing her more quickly in that direction? So, um, I may be not the right person to ask that. I'm in a different field. Um, my, my opinion on this is no, my opinion is that, um, you moving and expanding your network is never a bad thing.

And I think, uh, uh, you can always, you meeting new people, building bigger connections can always lead to, to different, you know, opportunities in them, you know, in other areas, including teaching. Yeah. Right. Well, at your household income level, it, and it becomes much less important to be focusing on maximizing the small things.

Okay. This one makes a little bit more money. That one makes, you know, a little bit closer. This one gives me a little more job satisfaction. I have to work a little bit more at this thing just becomes not so important to focus on maximizing the small things. And it becomes more impactful to look at the big, big options that are going to make big moves in, in your direction.

So let's, let's bring it to your career for, for example. Did I hear you're shopping for a car? Cause I've been at it for ages. Such a time suck, right? Not really. I bought it on Carvana. Super convenient. Oh, then comes all the financing research. Am I right? Well, you can, but I got pre-qualified for a Carvana auto loan in like two minutes.

Yeah. But then all the number crunching and terms, right? Nope. I saw real numbers as I shopped, found my dream car and got it in a couple of days. Wait, like you already have it. Yep. Go to carvana.com to finance your car. The convenient way. If you had a job, a job offer where they said, Hey, listen, come over here for, we'll pay you 375 instead of the 350 you're making right now.

You wouldn't take it. You wouldn't take it because you don't know anything about that. And for all, you know, there could be a whole bunch of worse options that you don't know about. You'd be the low man on the totem pole and seniority. There would be all kinds of, you know, a coworker that you don't like or a smelly bathroom at the new place or whatever it is.

And so it's just not worth it. And so for her, it's kind of a similar thing. Now, clearly there's a big difference between 96,000 and 151,000, but at your tax rate, it's an extra $30,000 and you're listening to a finance show. So you're probably saving money. All you're probably going to do with it is save the money anyway and get a little bit richer, a little bit quicker.

So it's like, okay, well, that's not, that's not really going to make a big difference to your life. So we have to look and say, what is going to make a big difference? Now, I'm not convinced that three days of work versus four days of work is going to make a big difference in the life of your family.

But, you know, that is good. You know, being away three days and having the children with a nanny three days is less than four, and it gives her more time. If she's got four days off per week, and if she could be fully off per week, or at least she can arrange her at-home work around your children's schedule, then certainly that's significant, because it'll provide her a lot of flexibility.

And since I believe that her work with children during those early years before they're in school is really important, that seems significant to me, and it's worth paying attention to. The hour-long commute versus two minutes commute, I would say that's a big deal. However, if it's a big deal where it's only three days a week, then we're talking about six hours of time, and it's only three days a week.

And I enjoy having some commute, because I can put that time to good use. There's so many things I'd like to listen to and I'd like to learn. And so if she can put that time to good use in her career, then maybe that could just be part of the overall plan.

So I'm tempted, based upon what you're saying, to say, "Stay put where she is right now, but look for the third option." So if there's no clear distinction between option A and B in terms of which one is going to lead her in the direction of working as a teacher in collegiate education, and the best we can come up with is a little bit of random encounters with expanding the network—which is true, it's good, it's just kind of random—then I'm inclined to say, "Well, is there a third path?

Is there a job that if we really said what would be the next step that would have her teaching full-time as a full-time professor at a prestigious university 10 years from now, then what would be the job that would model that? Is that available to her? Or if it's not available to her today, then what could she do to get on track for that job?" So I'm inclined to look for the third option for that reason, because if she knows where she'd like to be a decade from now or 15 years from now, it's not a small increase in pay or a small decrease in some job satisfaction that she should be working on.

I would look for what it would be the job or job description that would so obviously be right for her that moves her in the direction of where she wants to be 10 years from now that it's a no-brainer, and then work on that rather than worrying about two things that are relatively similar.

>> Very insightful. Yeah, we'll see what she decides. I definitely think it's interesting because in some ways, at the top, her goal was to spend more time with... You spend three days a week, and there's just these other benefits that we are now questioning if our goals should be different, because they're very attractive.

They're very attractive benefits. >> I would bet if we try to compare a two-minute commute to three versus four days, I'm not sure about this, but I would bet that the three-day-a- week job with the long commute would be a better fit for her family goals than the opposite, because by the time you get all set up and ready to go to work, you've got your mindset in work mode.

The children know you're going to be gone. The nanny knows she's going to be there working. You know you're going to work, so working an extra two hours on those days is probably less cumbersome than having to spend a whole 'nother day at the office just because you have a two-minute commute.

Like I said, I'm not entirely sure about that, but that's my bet. We go to Ontario. Welcome to the show. How can I serve you today? >> Hello, Joshua. >> Yep. Welcome. Go ahead. >> Perfect. Thank you. Yeah, I'm just back from a beautiful three-week trip with my family.

You and I actually spoke during that trip, and I thought I was going to call in and ask about corporate burn rates and a bunch of other now seemingly unimportant things, because my 15-year- old has just a week ago received a type 1 diabetes diagnosis, and so my new part-time job is to understand everything about this, about the pancreas and blood sugars and how to best help her.

Honestly, on the financial side, being in Ontario, Canada, they'll pay for a pump and insulin and most costs, but up to age 25, so I've got 10 years before I have to really worry about the financial side of things. I'm actually more thinking about, I mean, we have now in the family a lifesaving medication that I kind of want to figure out how to appropriately stockpile.

Some people seem to just keep very little on hand, and I think, "Wow, that feels scary to me," so I'm not sure exactly. When I called in, I wasn't even sure what exactly I was going to ask about, but then I remembered this has filled my brain for the last week.

– Absolutely. Well, I've got a solution for you, and stand by one second. All right, so I hit record again, and from the pause, what I'll do is I'm going to answer your question in just a moment on how to prepare for this from a prepping perspective, which is basically what you're asking.

So first, I'm not a doctor. I don't play one on the internet. I really don't know, obviously. I do know— – That will not be considered medical advice. – Yeah, exactly, exactly. So I do know that there is an enormous amount of controversy around diabetes diagnosis, and obviously, there's a difference between type 1 diabetes and type 2 diabetes, and there's a lot of information from people who are out there doing things on this.

So the first thing I would say is you should work with your doctor, and nothing I say is ever going to go against your doctor. You should also find as much alternative advice and information on this as you can. I had a friend of mine recently whose 8-year-old was just diagnosed with type 1 diabetes.

He himself is a doctor. He's a crunchy doctor. So he worked with his doctor, followed the advice, but immediately instituted enormous changes in his family's diet, eliminated all carbohydrates, eliminated all—I had to ask him for the—I could get him online, and I could ask him about all the questions, but he eliminated everything, all of the bad stuff, and they progressively stepped down the insulin amounts that his son was receiving, and at this point in time, they've been able to get the disease entirely managed exclusively based upon diet, 100% managed based upon diet.

Now he's doing constant testing, and they're watching it very closely, but my observation is that very few people are willing to actually take those steps to control the disease completely based upon diet, and he was and is and does that. In fact, he knows—he consulted with another physician who has made a specialty of advising people on how to cure type 1 diabetes with this.

Now I know I used the magic word that you're not supposed to use because type 1 is uncurable. All that stuff is true. So I'm not going to go any further than to say that there are a lot of people still debating this and still trying to figure this out, and so of course you need to be very careful with it, and be very careful with it, but go after it with the idea that let's—as we're making a plan for preparing for insulin, let's also make certain that we're doing what we can to cure the disease to that—to whatever extent possible for this particular person.

Yes, totally yes. When they say, "Oh no, you can just eat ice cream. That's fine, and dose for it," it's like my daughter even at 15 is like, "Wait, like don't lie to me. Like if there's a better option, at least tell me, and then I can choose to do it or not do it." Right.

She was kind of—she saw right through it. It's like the standard American diet is not the best option at this point. Right, right. So what the reason—I paused for a second—was I messaged my friend Stephen Harris, who is I think the world's expert on this particular issue, and I got him to jump on with us.

Oh, well I live an hour and a half from Stephen. Stephen, welcome to the show. I'm glad you're here. Hey, I brought my four-inch fire hose. You really want the information, don't you? I did. So I have talked through this with you, but the question is we've got a listener here whose daughter was newly diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, and so now he says, "Okay, I've got to keep this life-saving medication cold." And so I was saying, "Well, I could give the Stephen Harris speech on how to do this and how to prep for this, but if I can get Stephen Harris to do that, it'd be even better." So that's the question, and the question is, how does a type 1 diabetic plan to save his daughter—or sorry, how does a father who is proactively thinking about saving his daughter's life, how does he prepare as much as possible to make certain that she has appropriate insulin supplies saved?

Okay, continental United States or not continental United States? Canada. I live within one hour of Detroit, Michigan, but on the Canadian side. Oh, okay. Yeah, well, you're about one hour from me, my friend. Anything you need, I'll help you out personally, I guarantee it. I'm aware. Thank you, Stephen.

Okay, so insulin pump or not insulin pump? We're one week into a diagnosis, so we're on pens at this point. Okay, are you going to be looking as the doctor going to be looking at an insulin pump for her? I believe so, that is their plan, yes. Okay, and insulin—now type 1 and type 2 are dramatically different worlds, okay?

Definitely. Type 1 really is a fundamental body problem, and Joshua is so correct in many aspects. There are and have been people who have controlled their type 1 insulin with diet. There are other people out there that that are just completely impossible to do, and now I am supposed to be type 2, okay, because slightly overweight, so I control mine very much with diet and with pill, and believe me, I have over a year's worth of pill.

Now, the point is we're controlling it with diet. It's like I have a freezer full of protein, okay, and, you know, ham and bacon and other such things, and I can keep that cold. So, the question comes about is, is it more difficult to control the food? Is it more difficult to control the food that would keep your type 1 diabetes in check, or is it more difficult to control the type of insulin your daughter is going to get to keep it in check?

Now, with Canadian health plans and the way they work in the United States, life becomes easier for the child when they're on an insulin pump, but it's also a lower dose of insulin, and it's a special dose of insulin. Are they just telling you that the insulin for an insulin pump has to be refrigerated, or are they telling you that you just going off a popular lore about insulin being refrigerated?

So, we were instructed to refrigerate our insulin to get to keep it at 1 to 3 years of shelf life. They say once it's out of the fridge, our our medical team says says it's going to be like 28 days out of the fridge. Well, I mean, it says refrigerate your jelly after opening is loaded with sugar, which is a preservative, and it took me three years of yelling at my wife to get her to stop putting my damn peanut butter and jelly in the refrigerator.

Yeah. Now, okay, the insulin pump is a little bit different. Are you familiar with like, I don't want a lot of people to get confused, so I'm going to qualify my answers. Are you familiar with the very expensive injectables that you give yourself like once a month for type 2 diabetes?

Depends. Yes. Those are shelf stable for a long period of time without refrigeration, but that's a whole different world of type 2 diabetes generation meds. One of the meds you are probably going to be falling back on to see if you if you can control is actually available from Walmart in the United States without a prescription for $25 a bottle, and it's called Novalin 70/30.

Now that has to be refrigerated, and they say, well, you can't freeze it, and I have done tremendous amount of work with the work of keeping insulin cold, and I have done it chemically. I haven't released a video on it yet. I should, but there's quite a few ways of doing that, and no, it has nothing to do with digging a hole and putting it in the ground or in the water.

The ground temperature up here is not good enough for keeping insulin cool. The definition of insulin cool is below 40 degrees Fahrenheit, although below 50 extends that it wants to be 40 degrees or below, but they go, oh, but you can't freeze it. However, no one has looked up the definition of insulin freezing, and I have.

I had to go back all the way into the patent literature, and that happens between 10 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit, because if you do do that, it'll destroy the proteins. First of all, for the sake, and insulin is not water or liquid. It is a bunch of proteins, so for the sake of us in the rest of the world, you want to keep it between 32 and 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and my postulation is that it is going to be easier for you to keep the insulin stored and cool than it is going to be able to keep the right amount and quality of food preserved and cool, although I would recommend a dual-prong approach.

I have a CGM, continuous glucose monitor. Let me tell you, anyone out there with type 2 diabetes, you get a CGM, it is going to change your life, like the Freestyle Libre 3. There's a Freestyle Libre 1, 2, and 3. I just found out Dexcom will send you a free sample that works for 10 days, so I ordered one.

My daughter hit me with it last night, and just because I want to compare and understand more. The Dexcom is the superior device. The Dexcom is much more expensive, but you're in Canada, and the Dexcom will talk to your CGM, I mean to your glucose pump. They will talk back and forth.

The other thing the Dexcom does is let you monitor your daughter's CGM remotely on your phone, and they'll send you warnings and everything else. Now, you put it on yourself, right, not her. I did put one on myself, yeah. That was incredibly intelligent, my friend, because now you get to play around with it.

Even when you're a normal average person with a perfectly working pancreas and everything, you will be amazed to see how your sugar changes with what you eat. It's like you're going to see you're going to eat your ice cream, you're going to see it rise, and then you'll see your pancreas go, "Oh, we need insulin," and it comes right back down to normal.

You will see that, and it is fascinating, especially for people who are into body hacking and life hacking, or if you're pre-diabetes, it helps a great deal. But as far as diet goes, we're talking no carbohydrates, no sugars, and so it is literally nuts, meats, protein, fats, oils, and all the wonderful, delicious stuff out there that takes time to get used to eating.

And once you have a CGM on your daughter, you can experiment with diet. You can actually turn off the insulin pump, keep the CGM on, experiment with diet and what you can do to regulate it. But that is up between you and your medical practitioner to see how you want to do that.

Now, I have, like I said, a dozen different ways of keeping insulin cold, some of which are chemically done that you can't even buy the chemicals in Canada because you live in a socialist country. Over here, we can get them. I'm serious. - I know, I know. Keep going.

I'm just laughing. - They're illegal. So, it's like, there's stuff, I'll talk with you personally and privately if you want to come over if you have more issues and you want to go longer, but the easiest answer for you right now is we are going to get you a magical device called a thermos, a stainless steel thermos.

You know exactly what I'm talking about, right? - Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. - Now, they come in quart, half gallon, and gallon sizes. And they're stainless steel inside and out so they won't break when you drop them and they have a vacuum in between of them. And you can put your bottles of Novolan 70/30 in there.

You can put your, the bottles are much smaller for the insulin pump for type 1. Remember, type 1 is a different world than type 2, okay? - Yeah. - If this was 10 years ago and you asked me, "How am I going to do this?" I would say, "I'm sorry, your daughter's going to die." That's the way it was 10 plus years ago.

It's like, "She's dead. There's nothing you can do." And in fact, until the invention of synthetic insulin, which was done only recently in history, like, I believe, 60s, that was the case. Type 1 people died. In fact, there's a whole story arc in the book, "One Second After" about a type 1 diabetic daughter dying.

- I've read, yes, I've read that. - Yeah, and that will, as a father, I'm sorry, that'll probably scare the piss out of you because you'll do anything in the world to keep your daughter alive. And I will supply you with everything you need to keep your daughter alive as long as possible.

But yeah, you can have a three-year supply of insulin. You might have to be going and buying that personally and everything else. You're going to have to find out with your doctor's consultation if the injectable 70/30 NovoLen with a needle, which you get at Walmart as well, will work and control your daughter type 1 with and without diabetes.

Now, Canada also did some other laws and some other stuff. They made insulin, the other types of insulin, very affordable in the United States. This is the only one at this moment in 2024 that I know that you can get without a prescription over the, it actually called behind the counter, it's not over the counter.

You have to ask the pharmacy for it and they go, "Yeah, sure." But if you walk up there with a CGM and you say, "Hey, I need three bottles of NovoLen 70/30 and I need two boxes of 30-unit needles." It's like, "Yep, okay, here you go. Not a problem, no question, anything.

They know you're not a druggie looking for needles or anything else like that." So Stephen, what I was going to say, not having heard some of your other methods, back to the thermos. I've heard you when talking about this in the past, talk about the efficiency of a thermos and how incredibly well insulated it is.

And so, in fact, years ago when I heard you talk about this for the first time, I went out and got a big giant Stanley thermos. No one's diabetic, but I thought like this could be life-saving for somebody. So I went and got one. And then in addition to that, you have, or I would say based upon, let's say that there's a grid down emergency one second after, then you would store fuels for running a generator.

You would use the generator to create ice, and then you would use the ice to keep the thermos cold. And that would be the most efficient way, running an ice maker, that would be the most efficient way to turn stored fuels, which can be stored for the long-term, into ice, which can be used to keep the insulin cold using very high quality, huge amounts of insulation.

So putting that chain together is how I would have answered that. Is that correct? Yes, you're stealing my thunder sheets. Uh-oh, well, I was just trying to get you to do it. So go ahead and... Yeah, I know, but it's a difficult subject that you have to process because there's so much medical involved, and it has to be...

The idea of, you won't be able to store the little vials of insulin for the insulin pump, because you just can't get basically more than a month or so in advance with the Canadian health care or US health care system. And to go and buy them is extremely expensive.

So the idea of, well, the $25 or whatever, the $30 a vial insulin you can get in Canada, work for you, has to be determined between them and their medical practitioner. And then it's like, yes, we can keep it cool, but what uses are keeping it cool if they can't get it or can't afford to get it?

Right, I see. Yep. And it's like, hey, you want to come over to Michigan, you can't get insulin there for $30 a bottle? Well, come over here, I'll give you all the 70/30 noble in you want. Right, right, right. And you can just take it across the border. You know, my friend, you're an hour away, I'll help you.

So Josh is exactly right. And what you want to do is you want to get an ice maker, like one of the $75 to $125 countertop ice makers that makes only 26 pounds of ice a day. And what you're going to do, what you're going to do is you're going to put the insulin into, a year's worth of insulin can fit inside of a thermos, plus maybe some more.

I've done it, I got the bottles here, I got the thermos. And you can put the ice into it. Now, you have to understand the magic is not in the ice, the magic is in the thermos. It is a vacuum-walled insulation device. And nothing passes between a vacuum except for thermal radiation.

And they've cut that down very low with what's called the emissivity of the walls of the vacuum chamber. This is the same way you would store liquid nitrogen, liquid oxygen, liquid hydrogen, liquid helium, they all go into a door or a thermos. And the thing is, you might have to make your ice, you know, the first day you're going to have to put more ice in it because you got to cool down thermos and you got to cool down the insulin.

Now, once it's cold, you'll be adding less ice a day, like you might be adding a pound or half a pound of ice a day to the insulin. You get a little fish tank from Marlboro, you drop it in there, and you read the temperature and away you go.

But the thing is, if there is ice and water in a thermos, it is at 32 degrees Fahrenheit, period. And that is not freezing for insulin. And I would do a combination of very intelligent stuff. And, you know, for what you're talking about, I would go with a solar power method, which I can help you with.

I'm not one of these damn solar generators. Oh, I know you're amazing with solar. I can, we know, you and I can do solar intelligently. If I let you lose to do solar on your own with YouTube and the idiots on the internet, you're going to do solar wrong.

Solar can be done intelligently. And this, for you, since we're talking health, life and safety, is one of the critical uses of solar because what price do you put on your daughter? So we take a multi-prong approach and I can actually recommend some of the products from EcoFlow, not Jackery.

I have them. There are other options as well. You don't want to use their panels if you're cost conscious, but if you say, screw it, I just want it, just get it. That will power your ice maker. And, or we can put, I'd rather over-panel you because you're in Ontario.

We have this thing up here called, that other people don't understand, like Joshua doesn't understand, called winter, where it's cloudy literally for, I mean, literally in December where he and I live, I live in Detroit, he lives in Ontario. There are three days of sunshine a year. And it's like, no, the solar panels don't work in clouds or rain or moonlight.

They're called solar panels, not cloud panels, not rain panels. But the purpose is for every day, for every moment you get sunshine, that reduces your level of fuel you need. Because since your daughter's life is so critical to you, I am going to tell you that if you're going to do this at like the highest level of sincerity, you cannot have a gasoline generator.

Okay. You cannot have one as your main generator. You're going to have to go with either a diesel generator and, or a diesel vehicle with an inverter on it in order to do this. And I would prefer you to have a direct diesel generator. That will also do your house, your home and everything else because us treating and storing diesel fuel, and basically for diesel fuel, all you got to do is make sure water doesn't get into it.

And most diesel, everything have a water fuel separator on them. And you have to make sure a fungus doesn't want to start growing in the diesel fuel. So diesel fuel is easy to store and treat. In fact, for a diesel generator, we can get you jet A, which is aviation kerosene, which is basically the same as diesel fuel.

And it's like, it'll last utterly forever. And it's only $5 a gallon over here in the United States. And yes, we can go and buy as much of it as we want over here in Detroit. You get to tell the border what you're bringing across. But if you're going to go with the ice making method, one, you're going to have three ice makers.

Okay. You're not going to have two, you're going to have three ice makers. You're going to, oh, thank you, Josh, for giving the thermos. That was really considerate for you of other people, let alone if any of your children develop type one. So we're going to go with three ice makers for you.

We're going to go with a battery system, some type of solar input to run the ice maker. And we're going to get you lined up with a diesel generator and/or some other type of diesel power, diesel storage, because you can do that city, country, whatever, in Ontario. And it's like, yeah, guess what?

It's going to cost money and everything else, but you can't change that. These cards have been dealt to you. Your 15 year old is now a type one. And it's like getting your tax bill or having the assessment on your property change. It's like, if you want to keep on living there, this is what you're going to have to, this is what you're going to have to do in order to do this because you can't change the situation.

And the only way you can do food augmentation of, only way you can do food augmentation is with a CGM to see how it affects your type one diabetes. Standard medical care just wants to go throw an insulin pump on them and let them have normal life. And it's like, you know, your diet has to absolutely change when you get into that regime.

And you're going to have to do that with an awfully intelligent endocrinologist. - Yes. It's funny, Steven, at 15, she already saw through the medical team when they said, oh, just eat what you want and dose for it. She's like, well, there's gotta be a healthier option. Tell me what it is and I can choose to do it or not.

- Yeah, absolutely. - Well, I very much appreciate the answers and I'm sure I'll follow up offline. - Right. Joshua, you can get my email at harris1234.com. Of course I had to throw out my website, but no, you can get my email on harris1234.com and then you can send me an email.

Make sure in the subject you put Ontario type one diabetes, Joshua Sheets, and it will gain my attention. And see, the other thing is CGM monitors don't last forever. I've got an extra CGM monitors and they just died in the box. So even if she is type one and you got insulin pump and a CGM, there's no way you're getting extra insulin pumps and CGM for, it would be an extraordinary amount of work to get them for a year, okay?

Let alone for multiple years. So which means you're gonna have to fall back to, you can buy multiple years of finger prick stuff and strips and do it the old fashioned way. And I have at least a year's worth of finger strips and finger prick stuff and the meters that read the blood glucose strips.

And so you can do like three years of those things. And you're gonna have to go with like one, two or three years of, if again, between you and your doctor, keeping my language carefully, will whatever is off the shelf in Canada that you can buy with cash for quote $30 a vial, like Novoland 7030 at Walmart in the United States.

And Walmart is the only place you can get that because they bought the insulin company. The question is, will kept cold Novoland 7030 work for your daughter in her type one situation or not? It's a mid acting insulin. So it's not like an immediate acting insulin. You would have to take it like two or three hours before you ate.

And of course the easiest thing to store is going to be your regular foods of carbs, beans, oil, flour, that type of stuff for long term food storage. And maybe your long term food storage is definitely going to have to change more and focus with your daughter. Yeah, there are all sorts of difficulties.

I think we addressed it enough for Joshua Sheets audience now, but you're free to reach out to me personally and I'll get, we'll get you tailored for your daughter and where you live and what your budget is and what your concerns are and how much the Canadian healthcare system will supply you and everything else.

It's like, well, how did you first notice your daughter was becoming the type one diabetic? Was she like, you know, being sleepy a lot or peeing a lot? What led you to the type one diagnosis? You know what? We went in for almost routine blood work for something that seemed innocuous and they came back and said, drop what you're doing and get to the hospital.

You know, fairly critical that you do that immediately. So I mean, her A1c was 12 at the time, so it was definitely up enough to know there's something up. What was her blood glucose though? 17. No. Oh, you're using different measurements. Oh, sorry. Canadian system. Oh, that would be like, sir, 300, fairly high.

Wow. Yeah. 300 is an ER trip, my friend. 300 is, for a 15 year old, 300 is an absolutely immediate ER trip. And one, congratulations to you as a father, as a responsible parent for taking your daughter in and your child and having just routine panels run on them.

That will pick up problems in your children. It's like, gosh, all your children should have a panel every six months from your local doctor. You know, it's cheap enough and everything else, you know, that just screens for like more things than you could possibly imagine. But yeah, you know, congratulations on just taking your daughter in and having a blood panel done on her.

And it's like, everything's fine. Everything's fine. It's like, oh, well, you know, we noticed you're a little deficient in this, in like vitamin D or B or something, and you should just take a Flintstones daily, multivitamin daily supplement. And it's like, so many lives would be improved around the world if people just had a standard a penny a day multivitamin supplement.

But yeah, congratulations on one going, this isn't normal or something and taking your daughter in and having a panel done. The other best way of knowing if there's anything wrong with you is, you know, literally a CAT scan. That's how all the early cancers and everything are all detected is with a CAT scan.

- I'm going to cut you off there because we actually spent a good amount of time on last week's episode talking about exactly this. I don't know how it's become this radical personal finance has become radical medical advice hour or something. Thank you both gentlemen. - Well, it's because we're talking about preparedness and long-term storage and wanting to live and to find the problem before it becomes the problem.

So it's very much in your subject and in your wheelhouse, as well as with the, I mean, this is dramatically going to impact his finances. - Absolutely. - This whole type one diabetes thing is going to impact with his daughter, his finances. So it very much falls underneath the auspices of radical personal finance.

- Yeah, absolutely. - Thank you very much. - I'll let you gentlemen connect offline. I'll meet you both out here. And in closing on this topic before I go to the final caller here, I want to just list some of the symptoms. As I have observed people as this caller has just experienced, type one diabetes is usually undiagnosed.

And I've observed various stories and listened to a number of people, including personal friends who have gone through a diagnosis and they never had a clue before, but then something happened and they had the tests. And as you just heard straight to the ER. So here is a list of symptoms to watch out for and just to file away in the back of your mind.

Number one is increased thirst and urination. So if you're interacting with a young person who is experiencing increased thirst and urination, then think about what that might mean. Extreme hunger, number two. Number three, weight loss. Number four, fatigue. Number five, irritability and mood changes. Number six, blurred vision. Number seven, yeast infections.

Young girls may experience yeast infections and infants can develop diaper rash caused by yeast. Number eight, bedwetting in previously toilet trained children. Number nine, fruity scented breath. And number 10, nausea and vomiting. And so one of the things that I've heard of stories is where people experience relatively mild symptoms with a teenager, and then they wind up going to the hospital or they wind up going, just kind of not worrying about it.

And then it winds up in the emergency room. So file away in the back of your head. The type one diabetes is something very serious that we want to pay attention to on an ongoing basis and think about those symptoms. Kyle in Washington, welcome to the show. Welcome to the show.

How can I serve you today, Kyle? Hi, good afternoon. I am curious, did you grenade your Twitter account? Yes, I did. You calling me out on it? I'm surprised I'm the first guy to bring it up. Yes, I did. Whether your car has small tires, big tires, tires that go fast tires with extra grip or tires that just get you from here to there, they can be an unexpected expense.

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Don't wait another day. Take advantage of our good to no credit financing today. Big O tires, the team you trust. Okay. Is that what I have to look forward to? You did a good job curating a lot of things that pertain to my specific interest. It's not a permanent thing.

I love Twitter. Twitter speaks my language through and through. And so it's not a permanent thing necessarily, but I have a hard time getting anything done. And as much as I like to believe that I'm a person who's uninvolved with politics, I can't take it. It's a drug for me and I'm an addict.

And so I have to just be off of it. I can't do it. If I let it in at this point, especially going into an election or in an election season and whatnot, then I'll spend half my day arguing with random strangers on the internet and get nothing done.

I've done it repeatedly from time to time, but that's the story. So it was nice of you to notice. And I will be back on Twitter in the future undoubtedly. I've had an account since 2008 and I'm sure that I'll be back posting more stuff in the future. But quite literally in my password manager, Twitter has a label on it that says, "Do not open this password until..." And I usually put a goal in there because I know that if I want to get something done, I can't be on Twitter for whatever reason.

Some guys are addicted to video games. I'm addicted to Twitter. So I just got to manage it. So that's it. Hold me accountable. I didn't tell anybody. I don't announce anything. I don't say I'm leaving Twitter. I just delete everything and disappear. And you're the first person to call me out on it.

Yeah. I check every handful of weeks and I'm like, "Nasim Tlaib still. Okay. Well, I guess he's gone. Fine. I'll look for something else to do. Maybe I'm killing time too." What do you mean, "Nasim Tlaib"? Do I have a tweet up about that? Yeah. It was like a year old tweet.

It's the only thing up. That is hilarious. So I deleted every tweet that I can see. And what happens when you delete all your tweets is depending on how you do it, which app you do it. I don't do it manually. I use various apps and whatnot. But you'll delete them all and then there'll be a few left and you go through and you delete them.

So I got rid of all of them. So I can't see a single tweet on my profile. But what's funny, what does the tweet say? Is it when Tlaib blocked me? Yeah. That's what I was wondering. Is it because... I don't know if it's when he blocked you, but I'm wondering if that's why.

I'll tell you the story. That's hilarious though. So there are very few people that... I'm not a heavy blocker and I'm sure I'm blocked by some people, but I've had my share of arguments and things like that. But for the most part, I've learned not to argue with people on the internet.

I just say, "You're right," and move on with my life. But I've long been a fan of Nassim Tlaib. He always had an interesting Twitter feed. So for many years, Twitter was broken. I used to use TweetDeck. I wanted to see all the tweets of the people that I chose.

That was what I wanted to see. Anyway, I've changed the system a lot over the years. But I would always go and check Tlaib's feed and I always appreciated his insight. He's a very deep thinker. I respect his ability. I really do. I respect him a lot. He's also a jerk, a total jerk on Twitter.

But I'm good at dealing with jerks. I have lots of jerks in my life that I learned from and move on. So that doesn't really bother me. So I watched him. I watched Tlaib all through the pandemic. And if you think back about all of the controversy, Tlaib was an early warner of the pandemic.

And he would go left, right, and center about how stupid everyone was for not reacting. And so I watched him all through the pandemic. And he was a strong proponent of COVID vaccination. And I always respected his statistical ability. So I followed him as a trusted source of information.

So after the pandemic, though, we started to see all kinds of aberrations in medical data. And so the question is, what's going on? What's going on with all these heart attacks and this heart disease? What's going on with the myocarditis that was going on? And I'm reading and I'm watching and I'm finding all kinds of information that this is concerning.

And then the excess deaths. I'm watching all the excess death numbers around the world. And the excess deaths in every country that has the data just going up and up and up and up. So one time, I chose my time, because I know that Tlaib's a jerk and he insta-blocks everyone.

And so I came back to him one time. And I said, "I'm looking forward to hearing..." This was my quote, or this was my tweet. "Nassim, I'm looking forward to hearing your analysis of the current rates of excess deaths. I'm looking forward to hearing your statistical analysis of this situation when you have the time." I come back to Twitter blocked.

And that really frustrated me. Because it's like, when your block hand is so heavy, and you actually... Anyway, that drove me nuts. And so whatever tweet I had there, that was the context. And I'm still blocked by Tlaib. And I still find it annoying, because I genuinely would like to hear from somebody like him do an analysis of the excess death problem.

And I'm totally... I'm not a conspiracist. I'm totally willing just to follow the data. But we need to actually look at the data. And so when there's astounding levels of silence of this global, never-ending excess deaths in every country that has the data, then it's pretty astonishing. And it really makes you wonder if your heroes are as honest as you wish they were.

Yeah, come on, man. Hire some economists. We all know you love them. So that's the story. And that's hilarious to me, that that's what would show up. I remember when you got blocked, because I knew he didn't know your personality or anything, because otherwise, he would have thought you were being genuine.

It was to crack me up. How could I have stated it any differently? I didn't... What do you do? I understand that Twitter is a pretty toxic place, and you think everyone is doing it. But how could you possibly more politely just express, "I want to hear your perspective on this issue, because I'm interested in how you view this." And you're so sensitive that Insta-block.

Thank you for being on Twitter. I will be back on Twitter soon. Probably won't be back on Twitter till after the election season, just because I can't take it. I don't have enough self-control. If I have it on my phone, which is of course where you wind up most, then I wind up just wasting all my time.

If I'm signed in it on the computer, I wind up wasting all my time, and I can go into zombie mode on that thing. So I'm not strong enough to resist it. I have thought that maybe at some point I'll do what some people do, have someone else post your tweets for them.

So here, put this on Twitter, put this on Twitter, put this on Twitter. But I haven't done that. Well, and so I don't care for social media too much. I don't really like it, but that's what I mean about you curating that stuff for me is I've gone on since you deleted that and tried to find the kind of thing that interests me.

And boy, you're not wrong. You can end up, like you say, just wasting time in rabbit holes that ultimately lead to nothing. I can see how you just want to call it here and there. Exactly. I'll be back. I'll be back. I'm not sure when. I'll put a question if you feel like it.

Please, that'd be great. We'll round out with your question. Go ahead. So you've spoke about your son's reading level, and I'm curious how you're establishing his reading level and how you're testing it. If you're just giving him hard books to read and you read them, or if you're actually testing it, if you've got some methodology, some type of framework or reading level competency framework that the college uses that you're putting in front of him, I'd just be curious to see how you do that.

If I say something like I've said in the past, so I have a child who, I've said, reads at a graduate degree level, that's an offhand comment, first of all, but it's not one without substantiation. I'm doing that based upon Lexile score. So the simplest score that I have looked at is, there's what's called a Lexile score.

I forget all the data that goes into it, but it's a standardized measurement. So if you're out shopping for books, one of the things that you can find, they may or may not have it on Amazon, but one thing you'll find is, oh, this book has a Lexile score of 473 or 862.

So what I did one time was I took some of the school books that I know that I'm assigning that are being read, and then I know that they're being understood because I require narration after the reading, so I know that it's being understood, and then I just checked the Lexile scores.

And due to the kind of the homeschooling curriculum that we use, we use a lot of advanced books. In the philosophy that I follow mostly, which is the Charlotte Mason philosophy, we don't really shelter language. We don't try to give children dumbed-down books once they're doing. What we do is we make the language accessible by, for example, reading it aloud to the student instead of causing the student to read it himself.

We make it accessible by taking it in short segments. We don't require 60 minutes of reading. It's just six minutes. So sit and listen to this difficult book for six minutes, and then we try to stimulate interest by finding the very best books that are on the subject written by somebody who's a real expert.

So those books are in many cases written for adults, and they're written at a very erudite level. They're very sophisticated in the language, and then the student just gets used to that, and that becomes a core component of the kind of things that he reads. So I have observed that this works fine, is that we don't need to shelter language if we recognize that there's a pace at which you have to work into this.

But that's not to say that I require those kinds of books all the time. That's just for the school books that I do require, but I make them acceptable. I'm always testing to say, "Do we have comprehension? Test comprehension by narration. Is it too hard? If I have pushback on the book, then I recognize it's too hard.

I need to make it easier." And then the children just have access to a broad array of books that they can read from for free, voluntary reading, and they can pick and choose, and I don't really care what they choose. It's fine if it's low. So that's why I've made that statement.

What I think is true is that young people can access young students if they have a good educational platform—and remember, this is thousands of hours of reading aloud and good books and all the stuff that's working up to it. I think young people can handle intellectually the same ideas that older people can handle.

I think an 8- or 10-year-old can handle the same exact ideas that an 18-year-old can handle in terms of the study of biology or the study of physics. What he can't handle is he doesn't have the stamina. So it's my observation that what an 18-year-old builds or a 25-year-old builds is stamina, and so it's hard work for the brain to absorb those concepts.

And so what we're basically building in school once we get past the initial phases is stamina, not necessarily sophistication of language. >>Gottcha. Yeah, and are you asking for narration right after the reading? You're not, I imagine, coming back for long-term retention a day or a week or a month later for that type of assessment?

>>You're supposed to ask for narration right alongside the reading. So one of the things that the experienced educators that I really admire, they will read a segment of the book, and then they'll require narration for the segment of the book. My wife and I aren't that good enough to do that, so what I found that worked—we really struggled with narration for a long time.

Not only did I have terrible narrations for a long time, but we also just struggled to do it because we weren't really used to it. What has worked for us is to put narrations in at mealtime. So since we eat together, and we eat together as a family 23 times a day, what I have done is to make mealtimes productive, since I want to have conversation, but a lot of times with young children, it doesn't flow the same as with teens and adults.

So I do narrations at mealtime. So I come in for lunch, I have the children bring me their checklists, and then I go around the table. Child number one narrates, and I choose something from the morning's readings. Child number one narrates it, then I go to child number two, choose something from that child's checklist that has been read in the morning, and that child narrates it.

Child number three, and I go through. Then what has happened is this has fixed our narration problems because with my oldest, we didn't have a culture of narration. Now with my younger children, they're way better narrators because they've been narrating since the beginning, and they just think it's fun and it's what we do.

Then what I'm also hoping winds up being the case in the fullness of time, is that this stuff becomes a test of basically what you're saying, long-term memory. Because if child number two or three is narrating a story or narrating a book that is two or four grade levels behind child one or two, then the older child is being reminded of the concept from the book previously.

So that's the K. I'm not doing much in the area of long-term retention. I've thought about it, I just don't have the capacity to do it. I think in a perfect world, we would all read everything in SuperMemo, the app that Piotr wrote years ago. We would just do all our reading in that, and everything we put into a spaced repetition system, and we would put everything in, but I can't do that.

So I don't worry too much about retention because I figure the brain's going to hang on to what the brain wants to hang on to. As we get towards exams, then we'll prepare for exams, and that'll be kind of where we start to put in more of those structured things.

But as I see it, the philosophy that makes sense, I really like Charlotte Mason's ideal vision of spreading a delectable feast before the child. And basically, if I continue to do my job of spreading a delectable feast of ideas in front of my children, then it's my idea that in the fullness of time, they'll choose what they want and they'll discard what they don't, and then we'll just observe what they're more attracted to, what they're less attracted to, as individuality sets in.

But I'm going to keep putting those ideas in place. And my concern with extensive testing goes back to another Charlotte Mason philosophy, that she always said that what matters with a good education is not how much the child knows, but how much does a child care. And that really rings true with me, is that the test is not to see how much knowledge can we pound into a child's head in whatever years we're directing his schooling, because who knows, right?

There's always more knowledge, and knowledge is multiplying enormously. So I want to think more about the character of how we do it, because the goal is how much does the child care. And so I want to create a world in which the resources are there, and the child is there for caring.

I appreciate very much some of the contributions of the self-directed learning community. I think they make some really strong arguments. And so if we listen to the unschoolers or the self-directed learning community, and we take the good things from them, one of those things is just following the interests of children.

And so what I'm trying to do is I'm trying to shoot the middle, to say I'm going to require some feedback, because I believe that testing is an important learning tool, but I'm not going to make it onerous. I'm not going to subject you to this like complicated scheme where I have to make sure that you remember every single page of every book.

I'm going to expose you to the widest possible array of beautiful ideas, and I'm going to let you pick and choose. And what I look for is, do my children pick up their school books outside of the assignments? And I see that happening pretty regularly, which makes me really happy.

Yeah, that's good. And I think about that when I was a kid taking, I guess it would be, your teacher would give you a test about the book you read, right? It's kind of like she writes the book report and you fill in the blanks that she pulls out.

And if you get a B, you read the book, but is it making you love the book more because you're getting a B on this thing? Or is it making you love it less because she's pointing out that you're a bad reader? I don't know. I want to do that.

Yeah. It seems if you listen to people, if you listen to the stories of school children, they're pretty consistent to say, "If I knew I had to make a book report, I'd have hated the book. If I knew I was going to be tested on it, I didn't want to do it." So why should we create that if we don't have to?

Yeah. And it's a lot more engaging to say, "Narrate the story for your dad at lunchtime at the lunch table instead of getting a B and having a label assessed to your ability of enjoying this piece of art." Right. Exactly. Yeah, it seems silly. Grades, I'm trying to figure out how do we integrate these things.

I learned a lot from changing my philosophy on testing, just for those who may not have heard me say it. Years ago, I knew I was going to homeschool my kids since I was 15 years old, and I never understood the point of testing. I always said, "Well, testing is pointless.

Testing is pointless. There's no point in testing. After all, testing is just to tell a teacher how you're doing on it." I've since changed on that. I believe that testing should be seen as a learning tool, because what we're tested on, all the learning scientists show us with their research that when we're tested on something, we retain it more effectively.

So I've changed my philosophy on that. So we go to grades. Is there a point to grades? I don't see much of a point to grades, but I'm open to the fact that we have to change it. But right now, I still see that grades are very much a...

Grades don't make sense to me, because if the goal is to get an A and that's the actual goal, then I'm going to do things that are less difficult so that I can just get an A. This happens all the time. I coasted through all of my academics. I've never done challenging academics.

I didn't care too much about getting A's, but I never tried to do something hard. But if you think about it as an adult, do you want your child to take an easy class that he can coast through and get an easy A, or do you want your child to take a hard class that he has to work at and get a C?

I think you're going to learn a lot more in the class that you wind up getting a C on. So the whole concept of grades just doesn't make sense to me. I understand it's necessary in an industrial environment. We've got to have some system. I'm not calling for destroying the school system by getting rid of grades, but I don't have to worry at all myself about anything related to the industrial school system.

So the concept of grades doesn't make sense in my head. But what does make sense is that we want to make certain that we're at the difficult frontier. I'm not sure what to call it, maybe the efficient frontier of learning, which is probably something like 80% to 90% accomplishment and 10% to 20% hardship.

So if we're getting hundreds on everything and we're getting straight A's, hundreds on every test, then we're not challenging. And so we need to dial up the difficulty of the subject so that the student is actually being challenged. On the other hand, if we're getting 50% on every test, then we've got a problem.

Now this is probably going to be the child's going to be frustrated by the constant and never-ending difficulty and the drudgery. It's too intense. So let's dial back the intensity. And that's what I try to focus on. And so I give a daily math lesson and I say, "Okay, tell me how many you got right out of 17 problems." And what I'm hoping for is we get 14 right.

And my children check their answer. So they do the math problem, then they check their answer, and they tell me how many they got right. So I want to focus on what we got right and I'm going to celebrate it. And if we get 17 out of 17 right, great, let's celebrate that.

But I don't want to see 17 out of 17 right every single day or I know that we're not pushing things. Not sure how that relates to what you said, but just a little back and forth on the topic of education. Yeah, no, it does. And mine aren't as old as yours, but I'm trying that, as I read aloud, to be the narrator and to ask those test questions.

Why is he doing that? Why is he picking that up? Why is he going there, you know? And seeing if my son can remember and tell me what's going on two pages ago, you know? And at least when he turns 10, what you're doing now, yeah. It's absolutely great.

I think it's what we should be doing. It's engaging in activity. But the only point would be that you're not penalizing him if he doesn't know, you're just reminding. And these things are good. The other thing that, just back to Mason, she always talked about narration, was one of the reasons we narrate is to cultivate attention.

And so when she taught about narration, her focus was we never reread. We read something, we read it beautifully, it's an attractive book, carefully chosen. We read it with an appropriate amount of time. We're not trying to make you listen to 60 minutes of something when you're six. But we never reread, or we never go through it again.

And so the idea is you need to train the habit of attention to focus on what you're doing, listen, or pay attention when you go through it one time and then be done. So I still take it as a matter of trust, trusting the experience of those who's gone on before.

I have a narrator who's not very good, and I have narrators who are better, but I think it does help. And it's a good practice. It's simple, it's easy, the children don't resist it. They just think it's kind of fun, but it keeps them focused on things. And it allows you to continually assess what's working and what's not working.

I am doing some new experiments, by the way. So how old are you, oldest? Four. Good. So I'll try to be, you keep on calling and poking me and I'll try to keep sharing what I'm learning. I am doing some experiments with regard to kind of long-term knowledge learning.

So I have this theory, I've never read anybody who has it, I don't know if it's true, it's just a theory. But I have this theory that learning is actually easy, and that learning any subject is actually easy. And the basic reason learning the subject is hard has to do with the compressed nature of learning generally.

If I think about the subjects that I know really well, there was a time in which they were really hard for me, and now they're easy. So what was the difference? Well, usually it just has to do with working with the ideas more consistently for a longer period of time.

And so, you know, if a math teacher is teaching advanced mathematics, and let's say he's teaching calculus, the math teacher is not having a hard time with calculus problems any more than you and I have a hard time with a long division problem. But when we were in fifth grade sweating our way through a long division problem, it felt really hard.

So it's just a matter of doing it more over a longer period of time. So when I look at academic subjects, one of the reasons academic subjects seem to me to be hard is, number one, they're siloed, and they're compressed into a very short period of time. So let's say you're going to take AP biology in high school.

You've got 181 school days, minus all the days for snow days and hurricane days and, you know, homecoming days and whatever. So the teacher might have 150 days or 160 teaching days, where, you know, he's got to bang in all this advanced knowledge. And so it's like drinking from a fire hose.

And so the only reason AP biology is hard is because it's all new, it's all novel, and you have to learn it all at once while you also have four other classes going on. So my theory is, what if we took an AP biology class, and what if we stretched it out over four years?

And what if we introduce things at a much slower pace, giving the brain time to do it, and instead of doing 50-minute class periods, we did five-minute class periods. And we did five-minute class periods. And what if we just drilled it for five or 15 minutes every day, but we stretched it out over four or five years?

Wouldn't it be pretty easy actually to learn AP biology in that context? And so that's one of the things I've been testing. And so quite literally, well, first way I've been doing it is before we get to high school and college-level work, one of the theories I have is we should have been introduced to it several times over, primarily with narrative books.

So what I've done is I've taken and built a map where I take every high school course, and I break it out, and I try to find two or three books that are related to that course that are going to teach it, but that are going to just teach it in a straightforward way.

So if I use chemistry as an example, like we know, all right, the capstone achievement for chemistry studies is going to be to take the AP chemistry exam and pass it, right? That's the achievement. So this child is what you're required to do. You're required to pass the AP chemistry exam.

All right, so let's back off of that. So when you're 15 years old or 17 years old, then of course you can take an AP chemistry high school class, and you can take an AP chemistry study book, and you can do all that stuff. But what can we do today to make it super easy for you when you are 15?

And so what I do, what I've done is collect a series of books that I hope will make it doable. So with chemistry, we read a biography of Robert Boyle, who was the founder of chemistry. I'm pretty persuaded that what we need in order to have a better science education for students is we need a lot more literature.

And I think that literature is actually probably a better way to teach science than is a textbook. We need the textbook to absorb the knowledge set of the subject, but it's not a very good teaching tool. And so I think biographies of great scientists is probably a better teaching tool, because now you're going through the actual scientific process with the person who discovered it.

And so last year, my eldest, we read a biography of Robert Boyle. And then we went through, right now he's going through the Cartoon Guide to Chemistry. I've found, I forget the name of the illustrator, but there's all these cartoon guides to microeconomics and macroeconomics and statistics and chemistry, and they seem to be really engaging.

And they give kind of the, when you do a cartoon, you give just the very essence of the idea. So he's going through the Cartoon Guide to Chemistry now, and I forget some of the other ones that I have on my list. But the point is, if we've gone through a chemistry course several times over before you get to AP Chemistry, then AP Chemistry should be pretty easy.

And we'll see how it works, but so far I'm optimistic. And then what I actually just started doing is I actually just started taking through one of the AP, I bought a box of AP flashcards, and now I'm starting to go through them at the dinner table of, "Hey, let's just spend two or three minutes on this particular concept and let's talk about it." And I really think that this should make, in the fullness of time, this should make learning a lot easier.

Now, I don't have, there's probably no possible way that this could be integrated in any kind of industrial system, but I don't have to worry about that. So I'm testing that now and I'll, you know, give me a couple years and I'll let you know how it goes. Yeah, it'd be great if they could orchestrate a well-built curriculum like that across the country.

They exist, but for whatever, yeah, go ahead. I didn't mean to interrupt. Yeah. No, that's okay. I'm just saying you're not going to see somebody like, "Okay, this biology term, we're only going to read a biography about biologists and we're not going to do any biology." It would, you know, there'd be letters and school board meetings about it.

I don't know. I scratch my head. I don't like to just always stick my finger out at the industrial school system and say, "I can't do anything for you." So I listen to some of the debates, I read some of the debaters and some of their points, and my heart goes out to people who are working in that system because it just seems so hard to do.

And when you have to design a system that appeals to everyone, it seems really hard to do. And the debates that are happening in that space are really nothing like the debates that are happening in the home education space. And I don't fully understand what some of the mainstream school educators are trying to do, but there are people who are integrating things and there's good evidence.

I've been reading E.D. Hirsch's books recently, and he's kind of known as the guy who is working hard on trying to get people to focus on knowledge, even not just kind of the modern standards. If you read through the common core standards and things like that, they just focus on skills, skills, skills, skills.

And it's like, how do you do skills without knowledge? It just seems impossible to me. So at least if we focus on knowledge, we can test things. But I'm rambling now. So we'll keep it up. But if you keep testing stuff and we'll keep communicating, and let's see if I'm optimistic because I really think that 50 years from now, we've got to do better.

We need to do better than what we've done. So I'm trying to do my best to be well-educated and test anything I can. Yeah, there is opportunity out there. That's to be sure. Can I follow up with you on one thing that you mentioned about rereading? When she says that, is it rereading being assigned as a punishment for not narrating well?

Or right now, I've got a four-year-old, almost five, and he likes, like you complain about, I have to read the same book over and over again because they like to, they're building, you know, he's got whole books memorized that he'll just sit and narrate to himself if we're not reading to him.

And so, is it something where should I be trying to introduce more variety? We've got quite a lot, but what is that rereading avoidance? What's the point of that? Is it just to make sure you're not punishing? Yeah, I would, well, no. The point of it, as I understand it, is to cultivate the habit of attention.

So let's say that you read two paragraphs to your child, and the child, you get to the end, you ask for a narration, and the child says, "Well, I don't know what, you know, I don't remember." Well, then the temptation would be to say, you know, "I'm going to go back.

Okay, well, I'll reread it to you again because you don't remember." And let's say you test it and your child really doesn't remember. So, "Okay, well, no problem. I'll just reread it to you so then you can remember." Well, in that situation, what you're doing is you're cultivating the habit of inattention.

You're cultivating an environment in which, "Oh, I don't have to pay attention because if I'm asked about it, I'll just do it again." And so, I think, if I understand Mason, and again, I'm not an expert on her stuff, but there's plenty of, go find some of the Charlotte Mason moms.

They're amazing. But I think what she would say is she would say, "Let's go back to what you can pay attention to with perfection. So, let's read one sentence, and then let's narrate one sentence. And when you can show me that you can pay perfect attention to one sentence and narrate it back, then we'll move on and we'll make it a paragraph.

And then we go to a paragraph, and then we go to a page, and eventually you go to a chapter in a book, and kind of going from there." And so, we're not trying to penalize the child, but we're trying to cultivate the habit of attention. So, I think what she would do is just say, "Well, you know, Johnny, next time pay attention." And then the next day, she wouldn't do two paragraphs.

She would do two sentences and then require the narration. Okay. So, you're not distinguishing between pleasure reading and reading for the curriculum you've developed. No, and I don't think that there's any reason to forbid any kind of re-reading. So, first, we know from the reading researchers that the secret to having a good reader is free, voluntary reading.

And so, whatever the child wants to read on his own, the child can read. If he wants to read the same book 10 times through, great, read the same book 10 times through. If you want to read 10 books one time through, it doesn't matter. So, there should be abundant amounts of time for voluntary free reading.

I see no reason at all why we should forbid reading of any books. So, all the school books are there, and like I said, sometimes the children pick up the school books and read them. They don't really take that much of a distinction between the assigned books and the non-assigned books.

Although, certainly, they tend to go for pure narrative, pure story, pure fiction more than the subject matter books. So, I don't think re-reading is a problem. It's just that we're not going to re-read before narration. We're going to cultivate the habit of attention. Gotcha. Yeah, and that's one thing I worry a little bit about, is him getting tired of what we're reading to him before.

For example, the Magic Treehouse books made our way into our home, and he's just now learning to read, and he loves them. And we've got probably 30 volumes, and I worry that when he can read, he's going to be sick of hearing them. And maybe that will or won't happen, but if it does, I guess I'll find something else he'll be interested in besides those.

But I don't know if you find that to happen as well, where you've read aloud something that is maybe too old or whatever it is for the child, and then you end up not having material that's appropriate for him. You have to find new stuff. My friend, I have spent on my life...

Or you want to go and read what you already read. I have spent on my home... I drive a cheap, junky car, and I have spent on my home library what most people spend on a beautiful car. So there's no chance of running out. My hobby is collecting book lists.

So I literally have a file with book list after book list after book list after book list. I collect them from every corner I find them. There's no chance of it. I think, "Don't sweat it. Let the child read what he wants to read." If my children, we read something and they kind of get tired of it, then we just quit the series for a time.

I mean, there's 56 books in the Magic Treehouse series. And so if you get 20 or 30 in and you quit for six months, then come back then. I also find that there is just personality differences. So I have one child who gets obsessed with something, and I have 56 books in the Magic Treehouse series, and that child read through 56 books in the Magic Treehouse series without stopping.

And then on the flip side, I have a child who doesn't get obsessed and just kind of does that, although with age, it's changing. So I say not worry about it. At the end of the day, if you've got a good environment and you've got good habits and there's not any negative damaging stuff, then the rest of it will all work out.

It really will. It'll be fine. Yeah, I'm not going to run out of books. We're living in a golden age of books, book lists, and access to them. And especially if you're in the United States, we have libraries and Amazon right there. It's just amazing. There's no limit to it.

I run out of bookshelves, not books. That's my problem. As I find myself, my wife goes, "Again? We're running out of room." I go, "Yeah, I'll make another shelf." We'll start a support group for homeschool dads because it sounds vaguely similar to conversations my wife and I have. "Babe, let's get a bigger house.

We'll get a bigger house so we can fit more bookshelves." And she refuses. Her theory is that walls must be free in order that the mind can rest. So we have a library and she forbids books from the rest of the house. But we'll see. I'm working on her.

I'll wear her down eventually. Yeah, you'll get her in a minute. Thanks for the fun calls, Kyle. I really appreciate it. It's a fun way to... Oh, sorry. I muted you halfway through, but you're good. Thank you. It was fun to chat about. Thank you all for listening. That ends today's Friday Q&A show.

Quite a fun diversity of topics. I hope that you'll join me next week. If you'd like to join me next week, go to patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Sign up to support the show on Patreon, patreon.com/radicalpersonalfinance, and that will gain access for you to next week's Friday Q&A show where we can visit together then.

Thank you.