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You can have it all too. Visit cmhserviceindustry.com to learn more. This is a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua.

I am your host and today we're going to talk about why I don't miss investing in the stock market. Now you should have a little bit of context though. The reason why I think this is interesting is that I have for almost all of my adult life been invested in the stock market.

Not only that, I spent a significant amount of my career helping other people to invest in the stock market. I've been a licensed securities broker. I have managed money. I have billed fees and charged fees based upon managing people's money. And yet at the time of this recording of this show, I do not currently own any publicly traded mutual funds.

I don't currently own any publicly traded securities. Although I'll expand and share with you a little bit of some additional texture behind that. But today I want to talk about what I don't miss about investing in the stock market. If we look back and we think about kind of where we are as a people, the stock market is a big, big part of our lives.

You know, right now, stock market up, down, every single way. It just seems like no matter how you go through it, every single day, there's more headlines and the stock market is driving almost everything. And yet I become convinced the longer I've been a financial planner, that I become more and more convinced that the stock market is not for everyone.

And so what I want to do in today's show is I want to share with you some details as to some of the ideas that I used to hold about in stock investing that I don't hold any longer, as well as share with you kind of where I'm at.

And I need to just go ahead and give you the whole story from the beginning, which is fairly simple. Right now, as I record this right now, I'm not sure where I'll wind up being over the long term. I'm not sure whether I'll wind up going back into the stock market or staying out of the stock market.

I've been wrestling with that for quite a while, trying to think about different solutions. What I have learned is this, and this is my basic thesis. The more time that I spend out of the stock market, the less I miss it. And the more excited I am about other opportunities.

When I think about the other investment opportunities that I have and that you have, I become increasingly convinced that the stock market is really good at making investment advisors a lot of money, but it's not so good at making individual investors a lot of money. Now I'm not going to make an extreme case in this show.

I'm not going to try to say, "Oh, you can't make any money in the stock market." Of course you can. I'm not going to say that nobody should invest in the stock market. You should sell it all and go buy timberland. What I'm going to try to do is lay out more of my view, which is kind of a nuanced view, which comes down to the fact that the reason why you associate investing primarily with the stock market has more to do with the easy marketability of stocks than it does with the inherent benefits for you as an individual investor.

So here's what I've learned in my years of working as a financial advisor. I started in 2008, so 12 years now as a financial advisor in some form or another. I don't currently hold any investment advisory licenses. I don't hold any securities licenses anymore. I abandoned all those things.

But I had all that stuff and I still consider myself a financial advisor, although I try to be a little bit thoughtful with how I use that term. Simply due to follow the regulations. I don't make suggestions to people to buy or sell securities. Here's what I've learned. Stocks are really easy to sell.

And they're really easy for me to make a living selling. But when you actually pull back from that and you think about the whole broad scope of investment opportunities, you find that there are a lot more opportunities than most people come in. Usually over the years I've learned that I need to be very careful.

When I ask people about their 401k and what investments they have, they automatically think stock market. They automatically think, and let me even be specific because there are stock markets all around the world. They automatically think US publicly traded securities, US stock market, the New York Stock Exchange, the NASDAQ Stock Exchange.

They kind of automatically conflate this word investment to mean stock market. And I believe that that is more due to, again, the influence of those of us who have worked in the securities business than it is to how individuals should think about it. Sorry for all the disclaimers up front, but I do want to be cautious.

I'm not mad at stockbrokers. I'm not here to do an expose on the industry. I have lots of friends who are stockbrokers. I could probably be a stockbroker again in the future at some point in time. I have some ways that I've thought about that I think I could do that.

But what I want to do is just give you a little perspective on the subject. Because when I say the word investment, I don't believe you should just automatically conflate that word investment with buying stocks. I think those should be different things and you should consider them differently. Again, you can invest in almost anything.

I'll give you an example. You can invest in an education. You can and should invest in an education. In fact, for most people, investing in your education is going to be the single best investment that you can make. But here's another trap. Notice that when I said invest in an education, you automatically thought invest in a college degree.

Why did you think that? Well, you thought that because you've been effectively marketed to over the years by colleges, admissions advisors, your friends, your parents, advisors. You've been marketed to by financial planning magazines that have said if you want to invest in your child, you should buy a college fund for them and you should fund it with stocks.

That's been marketed to you. But all I said was invest in education. You can invest in your education in many ways. For example, I invest in my education by reading books. I invest in my education by taking seminars. I invest in my education by hiring mentors and hiring coaches.

You can invest in your education by starting businesses and getting yourself in a situation where you say, "You know what? Even if it costs me a bunch of money, I'm going to go ahead and focus on starting something and learning from the process." You can invest in a marketing degree by going to college or you can go and start a business and invest in your marketing education by learning how to market your business effectively.

Both of those, in my opinion, are really quality investments that you should, can, and should consider doing. But when I say invest in your education, you think college. Same reason when I say invest money, you think stocks. Now what other ways could you invest though? The reason I started with invest in education is because most of the time, we would usually, for thinking clearly, we would recognize that it's more important for you to invest in your education and building your earning skills than it is for you to buy stocks.

If I were presenting to you a 16-year-old who was making, I don't know, $8 an hour at some dead-end job, and they came to you and said, "I've saved $200. What should I invest in?" You would never tell that 18-year-old, whatever age I said, you would never tell that young person that the secret of what you should do with your $200 is to go and buy a stock.

You would say, "You need to invest it into your earning ability. You need to invest it into yourself because that's a good investment." Now there could be other things that are worthy investments that give you financial returns but also give you lifestyle returns. For example, let's say somebody doesn't have a car.

Well, they earn a little bit of money. They save a little bit of money. They should probably invest in a car or at the very least, probably invest in a bicycle because that vehicle might open up totally new earning possibilities to them. That vehicle might open up a totally better lifestyle for them.

Now what else? We talk about investing in your home, and that's perfectly reasonable. That's perfectly adequate. But that's just scratching the tip of the investments that are available. So here's what came, what bothered me when I was a financial advisor. I started to discover that I didn't have a lot of success stories of my clients becoming wealthy because they invested in my stocks that I sold them.

That bothered me. What I realized is I was good at helping clients who were already wealthy invest their portfolios effectively. We put together a portfolio of mutual funds and I would say, "Listen, you've got a million dollars or you've got three million dollars or whatever you've got. We'll help you invest that effectively." But I wasn't very good at helping them get rich.

That process brought me to believe that financial advisors and the financial advice industry is better at helping people who are rich stay rich and get a little bit richer without having to work every day and also helping people who, well that's it. That's what they're better at. They're better at helping those people who are rich get a little richer and stay richer without having to work every day than they are at helping people who are not rich get rich.

I came to realize that when I looked at it, the two things that always happened that helped my clients to actually become rich was number one, they had a high income job and/or number two, they had a successful business. Because if my clients could have a high income job, they could save money, put money in their 401K and over a course of decades become millionaires or if they had a highly profitable business, they could have enough money either through income or through eventually selling the business that they were rich.

But without those two things, without a high paying job or without a good business, people didn't really wind up becoming all that rich at least not through stock investing. Now is that because it can't work, that it can't happen? Certainly not. It can work. You could have somebody, if you're a financial advisor, you could have a client that you start working with when the client is 22 years old, just came out of college, you open up a Roth IRA, they put a few thousand dollars in it and maybe if 40 years later you're still working with that client, they might have a million dollars, maybe.

But the realistic answer is you're probably not going to be working with that client 40 years later because as a financial advisor, you're always upgrading your clients, you're always changing out your client base and you're moving up to wealthier clients who give you more opportunities for your business as a financial advisor.

So it's not that it can't work, it's just that it's not the most effective. What you need is a high paying job and/or you need a business. And that's why the number one prospecting pool for the vast majority of financial advisors, for most of us, is high income professionals and business owners because there's opportunity there.

Well if that's the case, I think that we should spend a lot more time helping people to develop a high income and/or helping people to develop a profitable business than we do selling stocks. But unfortunately the whole business is built on selling stocks. So what's my personal experience with the stock market?

Well the first thing is when I was 18 years old, I sat down on my 18th birthday and opened a Roth IRA and I bought a mutual fund. I don't even know what mutual fund it was, I just bought a mutual fund. And I was a nerd, I was really interested in financial advice, I was really interested in how I could become wealthy, I really wanted to become wealthy.

And so I sat down at an early age and I started reading the books. I would read books on mutual fund investing and I started with the mainstream personal finance books. I read, what's the one, Automatic Millionaire, I would read the Automatic Millionaire by David Bach when I was in high school.

Or I would read the Lazy Man's Guide to Investing, it's all about passive index fund investing. I would read Jack Bogle's books and what I could find. But mostly at the basic, what I call the personal finance, the consumer level of personal finance. And as a consumer I would put myself in a situation where I said, "Okay, the way I'm going to build wealth is I would buy mutual funds and I would put them in an IRA and I would make sure I fund that IRA." Well fast forward a number of years, in 2008 I started working as a financial advisor.

I started with getting insurance licenses, became an insurance salesman, selling life insurance, disability income insurance, long term care insurance. Then I went ahead and got my securities licenses, a series six, and I forget all the numbers, 63, and then I later got a 65 and became a registered investment advisor representative or whatever it's called, it's a number of years ago.

I wound up studying financial planning. I had a certified financial planning designation, a chartered financial consultant. I wound up getting a master's degree in financial planning. I never did investment focused specific specialties. I didn't become a chartered financial analyst. I didn't spend time to get any of the specific investment management designations.

That was never my interest. I was always more interested in personal financial planning. But I passed the exams. And generally I should know what I'm talking about. I read a bunch of books on the subject. I should know what I'm talking about. Again, I used to manage portfolios. Although I wasn't choosing what stocks were in them, I was just serving as an interface between clients and kind of the back end investment advisors for our firm.

Then I left the firm that I was with. I surrendered all my securities licenses so that I could do what I'm doing right now, which is be a member of the media. I became frustrated with trying to be locked behind a paywall where everything I had to say, sorry, a legal wall where everything I had to say had to go through a legal department.

I had to be pre-approved. The way that it works, if a financial advisor is going to do what I'm doing right now, the financial advisor has to write a script of everything they're going to say. They send that script off to their legal department, get it approved by their legal department.

The legal department says, "Okay, you can say this. You can't say this. You can adjust this." Then they go and they do the media appearance. They do the interview. They go on TV. They say what they're going to say. Then afterwards, they get a recording. Then that recording all goes onto the company servers and has to be saved forever.

It's all kind of part of the deal because if you're going to be in the financial advice industry and you're going to get the licenses, that's the deal you sign up for. I didn't want that. I walked away from that business, got rid of all my licenses, surrendered everything.

I no longer have any licenses and haven't had any since about 2014. Over the years, I've watched to see how I would change because even though I didn't have any licenses, I still had an intense degree of loyalty to the industry, to my comrades, to my friends who are advisors, to everything.

Over the years, that loyalty has kind of changed a little bit. It's not that I don't have that sense of loyalty or that sense of affinity. It's just that that's kind of a past life. I haven't been involved in that in a very long time. Because it's a past life, then I don't think about it much.

I don't worry about it much. It's not something that I pay much attention to. But in the present life, I have a little bit more perspective. Over the years, as I've thought about it, I grew more and more dissatisfied with stock investing. A number of years ago, around about, I would say, 2015 or '16, I was in a position where I looked around and I just thought, "I'm frustrated with stock investing." Number one is I was working on building a business.

What I realized is that I had far more profit potential from building a new business, a business that was not connected to work for time, a business that had a global opportunity, the business that had a potential revenue potential of unspeakably large, extremely profitable. I realized the single best investment that I can make is to invest into my business, into radical personal finance.

I said, "That business can be so much more profitable than anything else. I'm going to go all in on that. No matter what it takes, I'm going to go all in on that." I moved money to cash, partly for safety because I didn't want to have volatility. I figured if I spend every dollar in my savings on building this new business, and if the business succeeds, it would be worth it.

If I keep all the money as emergency funds and savings, just in case I need it, and that allows me the safety to build a big business, it'll be worth it. That was what I did. But along the way, I'd become frustrated with some of the ethics of stock market investing.

I wasn't focused on the specific volatility or scared about the market goes down or it's all lies and fake. I just was frustrated with the ethics of big companies. The number one thing that has really bothered me over the years is how modern capitalism has become crony capitalism. Just no question has become, in my opinion, unquestionably crony capitalism.

I realized that the single most important job description for most companies is their corporate lobbyist. That bothers me. It still bothers me intensely. I find it utterly offensive that seemingly the single first thing that a company wants to do is get a lobbyist so they can go in and get the laws adjusted.

There are two aspects to this that I find really offensive. Number one is that companies constantly lobby for rules that add more regulation to their industry. That seems counterintuitive. You think I said what I didn't mean to say, but I meant it. Companies lobby for more regulation for their industry so that they can keep their competitors out.

That's what is, to me, so frustrating. Because as you look at the US economy, you look at a mature economy like the US American economy, and you look around and you consider what's actually there, it's very profitable for most large companies to not have small upstart competitors. This leads to a calcified, locked in, repressed almost economic system.

It's what you see in the United States, where there's almost nowhere in the broader US economy that you look for and you find innovation, except usually in some area of internet work, a digital company of some kind, because there are just fewer regulations. But even there, you're starting to see it.

You see Facebook last year when they're called before Congress saying, "Come out, regulate us." Zuckerberg is sitting there saying, "Regulate us, regulate us, pass laws." Why? Well, I don't want to be too ... I don't want to try to say what Zuckerberg thinks, but it wouldn't hurt Facebook to have some pretty intense regulation right now.

Facebook could deal with any regulation because they're highly profitable. They can afford to pay all the people to dot everything out and take care of everything. It's Facebook's competitors who would be hurt by increased regulation. But you look at the US economy and you say, "There's almost no area of excitement." What are you actually excited about with the broader US economy?

There's no area of growth, of adjustment. You have tiny areas. For example, I pay attention to the electric car marketplace, but it's so unfathomably, impossibly expensive for a new car company to come out that you have just a tiny number of success stories. You have Tesla, and then you have Rivian, who gets invested in it.

Without this big, huge investment, they can't make it. Now, you go back and you compare that to the dynamism of a US economy of a century ago, where you had far less regulation. You had dynamic development in all areas of the economy. I'm convinced that there's nothing that's fundamentally changed about the potential.

It's just simply that the regulatory environment is so intense that it leads to really very modest ability for companies to change, to adapt. Again, the place where you usually see it is in digital markets. That really bothers me because big companies, I'm personally convinced. I can't prove it, but I'm personally persuaded at the moment.

Big companies use regulation as a tool to keep from being competed with by small upstart competitors. I find that really offensive. The other thing that's really offensive is that the companies just directly lobby for changes and changes in laws that are going to help them and help their own business models.

Let me give you an example just from today's Wall Street Journal. You see right here, when you look at the Wall Street Journal and you think about what's actually happening right now. First, you had all these companies that put themselves in a situation where they were broke in no time at all, where they couldn't even handle three weeks of no business before all of a sudden they come crying for handouts.

You have trillions of dollars being given to bail out giant Wall Street corporations. Thankfully, some of that money, some of the money is filtering down to smaller businesses as well who don't usually have the lobbying power that large corporations have, but trillions of dollars going to these companies. What's the first thing that you see now when you look constantly at the news?

You see that number one, one of the basic focuses is that we want more. Wall Street Journal article headline, "Lobbyists Press Congress for Last Chance at Coronavirus Stimulus Funds." This is from May 3, 2020. "Democrats Want to Expand Stimulus Aid. Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell Says New Help Should Be Tied to Liability Protections for Business." Lead, "Lobbyists for business groups, labor unions, and non-profit associations are shifting into high gear as Congress considers what could be a final round of aid to combat the economic fallout of the coronavirus pandemic." So first it talks about, the article talks about non-profits, but then it says this, "Other organizations are seeking relief from measures that were aimed at preventing coronavirus aid to companies that have lots of debt.

Saks Fifth Avenue thinks government rules that prohibit federal assistance to firms with too much debt don't take into account the vast real estate holdings and other collateral options of many department stores. Such a change could help Saks and others qualify for federal help. Saks has hired a former top Senate aide as a lobbyist and hopes to win the support of Mr.

Schumer, a Democrat from New York. Saks Fifth Avenue's flagship department store is in Manhattan." So you see, Saks Fifth Avenue putting themselves in a situation where what they feel like they have to do to succeed in this time is to hire a lobbyist to change the laws so that they can get some government money, get some government bailout money.

But it's not the only one. Men's grooming company Harry's Incorporated has hired a lobbyist close to President Trump to try to change another provision that makes it harder for startup companies to qualify for loans backed by the government. New companies can take years to be profitable, making them ineligible for government help due to a rule that prevents loans to failing businesses.

Harry's doesn't qualify for federal assistance under that rule, even though its business appears to be thriving. Last year, a rival grooming company tried to buy it for $1.4 billion. On April 13, Harry's hired lobbyist Brian Ballard, a top fundraiser for Mr. Trump's presidential campaign. Joshua Kushner, the brother of Mr.

Trump's son-in-law and advisor, is a Harry's director and investor. I do appreciate the Wall Street Journal making it obvious that this is a bipartisan issue, because it certainly is. You got Mr. Schumer, and you got Mr. Trump. Everybody's involved. And so you've got this constant revolving door where it goes from Wall Street to Pennsylvania Avenue, Wall Street to Congress, back and forth and back and forth and back and forth.

And it's disgusting. It's utterly, ethically, morally disgusting. Continuing on, who else is going to get involved? More than 100 retailers, commercial real estate firms, and insurers want to create what they're calling America's Recovery Fund, which would build on the already historic economic rescue efforts. The coalition, which will formally launch on Monday, wants more federal support over a longer time to more companies, said Trevor Hanger, the group's research director.

"Businesses across numerous sectors are not going to make it without additional support," said Mr. Hanger, whose coalition includes blah, blah, blah. The existing PPP program is aimed at getting businesses to retain or rehire employees. The coalition contends the needs of consumer-facing businesses and their landlords are more complex and require grants that can be spent over a much longer period of time, with the flexibility to spend more on expenses like rent, utilities, taxes, and debt.

So what do you see? You see that it seems like almost the first situation, first thing that the companies did in this most recent catastrophe was run crying to Congress and say, "We need money." Didn't even take a few weeks before everyone says, "We need money." Now, is there an ethical argument saying, "Well, the government shut us down and therefore we should get some government money"?

I grant that there's an argument there. I don't buy it, but I grant that that's a legitimate argument. But what's amazing is that this is the first response, seemingly, of everybody. "I need some money." Now, you want to know why. One of the things that I do, most of what I have to say about the stock market is not from an investment perspective.

It's not saying, "Well, in the long term, the investment perspective is going to be bad," although I'm going to make a little bit of that argument later. But this is one of the many reasons why the investment opportunities are so bad, because you have this calcified structure where you have these huge corporations that are so accustomed to and reliant on government money, and you never have a clearing of the decks.

Back in 2008, what should have happened? All these companies should have gone bankrupt, and then newer competitors should have come in and bought out their assets, but they didn't do it. They didn't let them go bankrupt. They didn't let them fail. And so what do you see in 2020?

You see the same thing happening. We're not going to let them go bankrupt. We're not going to let them fail. And what's needed is to clear the decks. What's needed is bankruptcy for all of these companies that can't make it. All of their assets will be sold off at auction to somebody else who will come in and start again, and that would be the thing that would actually lead to economic growth.

But instead, we've got this calcified corporate crony, corrupt—I'm lacking more C words, but we've got this system that just leads to tremendous inefficiencies and is leading to a stale, stagnant economy, in my opinion. Time will tell whether that prediction turns out to be true or not. I don't like that business model.

I don't like to be involved in it, and I find it really, really revolting. When you have a society that says, "We're going to steal money from citizens for taxes. Then we're going to use that tax money to put in place laws that are lobbied for." And the laws are in many cases written by large corporations who can hire successful lobbying firms to get their position through.

We're going to reward this utter corruption of this back-and-forth flow of going to Congress and then going to Wall Street, going to Congress, going to Wall Street, back and forth and back and forth. And we're going to pay for access to the legislators. And then when things go bad, we're not even going to let anybody pay for the price of their actions.

We're going to just step in and bail them out and print more money. It's absurd. Anyway, that for me has always been the biggest issue. I believe in the value of a free market system. I want to compete in an area of open competition. I've never asked for a bailout.

I've never asked for something. I believe that there's something fundamentally valuable about an individual taking the risk. That's why I love the Internet, because I can speak on the power of my ideas. I can be in a situation where I'm not sitting here saying I'm going to coerce somebody to do it.

I can just bring my ideas and I can compete. And there's a totally free market. I compete for your ears, for your eyeballs. I compete with everybody in the world. And you can say anything you want in the comments. You can share. You can not share. And I love that because it's almost the purest expression of competition where it's the value of my ideas and the value of my advice that has to stand on its own.

How do I, who believes in those values, how do I then turn around and say, "We're going to reward this antiquated, calcified, corrupt system, and we're going to say that that's the best we can do from an investment perspective?" Especially when the investment returns stink and the volatility is off the charts and the regulation is unheard of.

It's frustrating. Other issues that I have. When I look at the broader market, just the S&P 500, I personally, again, not going to try to tell you what to think, but I personally do not like a lot of the businesses that these companies are in. I find them really, really frustrating, the businesses that these companies are in.

I don't like how many of these companies are involved in war. The United States government and the country of the United States of America has been at war for almost 95% of its history. You look at that and you say, "Why? Why on earth does this exist? How could it possibly be the case that you have a country that's at war for almost, for like 93 or 95% of its history?" There's been basically been about a dozen, 12 to 15 years in the history of the US government that they've not been at war.

Now I'm not in Howard Zinn camp. I'm not going to accuse everything of craziness. I'm firmly in a Smedley Butler camp myself. If you're unfamiliar with him, Smedley Butler was the man who wrote most decorated general in history in the United States. He was a Marine Corps general and had two medals of honor.

He wrote this incredible book years ago after World War II. He wrote this incredible book that was specifically called War is a Racket. In that book, he goes through and he shows in that book, specifically, he shows why war is a racket and why there's this horrifying commitment to war based upon the finances of it.

He goes through in that book and he explains how it's all about money. He does such a great job with it. Him, again, most decorated, I think soldier, but certainly Marine in history. He goes through and he just shows how crazy the whole thing is. He shows how even the big wars that most people would agree, like these wars are morally valuable, wars like World War I, World War II.

You would say these wars were necessary or they were valuable. Well, maybe they were, maybe they weren't. None of us were that. We don't get to choose and it really doesn't matter. We can look at them in history. What we can be sure of is that they were unquestionably profitable and that they made massive amounts of money for the inside people.

You look forward and you say, "Why does the war continue? Why on earth does it continue? Just on and on and on. It never ends." Well, it never ends because it's highly profitable. You go through the large companies in the United States of America, you look at Northrop Grumman and Raytheon and Boeing and whatnot.

You just realize how much of it is based upon war and this promulgation of constant and never ending war. It makes you sick to your stomach, especially when you realize who pays the price. Who pays the price is the people who get killed by it, the millions and millions and millions and millions of people who are killed by it.

Yet here I am profiting as an investor from this. It just bothered me for years. That would be an example of the kinds of things that you can consider. You have to make your own decision. You have to think about it. I think that it's so hard because when you come to any of these issues, we all have family, we all have friends who are involved in these things, and it becomes personally troubling.

For me, it's a big, big deal. I hate the violence. I hate the war. It really bothers me because how can I earn money on this system that promotes just extensive war? One of the big concerns I have right now is I feel like everything smells like and feels like we're headed for even more of it.

What would everybody say? What would happen to the stock market if war took off? Well, there'd be some people who would say, "Well, the stock market is going to be bad," but most people agree that war is good for an economy. It unites a nation and results in let's go and do it.

There's only a tiny number of us who would buy the overall arguments that things are destructive, but what I will say is that although I think war is destructive to an economy, war is very profitable to stock investors. There you have that never-ending disconnect between the economy and the stock market.

It also really bothers me just that the ongoing social activism of some of these huge companies because it seems like I'm always on the wrong side of the social activism. For example, I'm deeply offended by war for the reasons previously stated. I think it's really, really bad, but I believe that there's real value in individuals having firearms, for example.

There's a massive difference between tools of war, tanks and battleships and F-22 fighter jets versus rifles, AR-15s or otherwise. The difference is the scale and who benefits from them. You have a system where the government will spend tens of millions of dollars on an F-22 or on an aircraft carrier and yet wants to say simultaneously, "We're going to ban AR-15s." The Canadian government, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, "We're not going to have AR-15s in this country." Well, Justin Trudeau is still going to be protected by AR-15s or the Canadian equivalent, military equivalent, and his troops are still going to have it.

It's just that individuals are not. You have companies ... It's frustrating. The banks, right? In 2018, Bank of America said, after the Parkland shooting, Bank of America says, "We're going to stop producing loans and financing loans for companies that are involved in firearms manufacturing." Well, on the one hand, I personally support their right of discrimination.

I believe that you and I have an absolute unconditional right to run our businesses and our lives as we see fit when we're in a voluntary society. So I support their right to discriminate. It just feels like their right to discriminate is everywhere and nobody seems like will give much of ...

It doesn't seem like they afford the same right to other people. What else? Again, back to the banks. Banks and payment providers are actively excluding people from commerce, people that I care about. Right now, there have been many Christian ministry organizations who have been canceled by PayPal, who have been canceled by Stripe, who have been canceled by their merchant providers because they get blacklisted by a social activism organization that disagrees with their position.

Now, do I personally support the right of discrimination by PayPal and Stripe? Yes, I do. But it's frustrating to say that now my investments are going to be from these people who are discriminated against, people who believe things that I think are really important. Sometimes really, really difficult. Or what else?

What about just the involvement of a lot of the organizations and invasions of people's privacy? Again, we're getting into pretty esoteric territory. I'm just giving you some things that are the kinds of things that bother me. I wouldn't just pull out of the stock market based on this. But you look at what the banks and the finance companies do in response to the Patriot Act laws and just the complete destruction of privacy.

It's frustrating. Now, in the United States, is that life and death? No, it's not. But around the world, is it life and death? It absolutely is. I find it really frustrating when some of these big companies submit to human rights violators to make a quick buck. You look at a company like Google, right?

In 2018, Google comes out and I think it was Project Dragonfly is revealed, where Google gone back and forth with the Chinese censors over the years about whether or not they were going to censor web search and censor different things. Google had generally taken a pretty strong anti-censorship track.

They stood up for what Google professed to believe, right? Do no evil and organize and allow access to information. Well, in 2018, the information comes out about Project Dragonfly. Now, Google is going to facilitate and work with the Chinese government to put themselves in a situation where they're going to have a censored version of Google web results.

Now, is that Google's right? Sure, it's Google's right. But the Chinese government is unspeakably evil. They are evil. They have murdered tens of millions of people and today, today are persecuting and executing and imprisoning millions of people in the most immoral and unjust fashion. People that I care about, right?

Millions of Christians in China suffer because of the Chinese Communist Party. Right now, millions of Muslims, the Uyghur Muslims are being completely devastated, locked up, sent to re-education camps. The Chinese government, let alone even coming out with the coronavirus, COVID-19 and the insanity of that. You have one of these just incredibly evil governments and you have Google saying, "Oh, okay.

Well, we'll talk a lot, but when it comes down to actually making a buck and us being excluded from the government, from a huge market, we're going to just roll over on that stuff." Fine. Right? Is that Google's right? It's certainly Google's right. My issue is why should I try to profit from that?

How can I sleep at night when Google is sitting here saying, "We're going to submit to these evil men just so we can make some extra money." And I'm supposed to sleep well at night when my brothers and sisters, my Christian brothers and sisters are locked in prison right now, when they're being disappeared off the street right now, and now I'm going to go to bed at night and say, "Well, at least my 401k is up." Like that's unconscionable.

It's unconscionable. And it just goes on and on and on. For me, now again, I know I'm unusually sensitive to these issues. I know most people, it doesn't seem to bother them, but it just goes on and on. It feels like increasingly, Joshua Sheets in 2020, it feels like almost every move that is popular on the broad level is something that's against something that I care about.

I care deeply about children and the ability for children to grow and to not be, to have just the ability to grow and to succeed. And yet we live in a world where everything is about marketing to my children's eyeballs as early as possible. And I fight day and night to keep their eyeballs free of all that stuff.

And yet now I'm supposed to say, "Well, I know that this is the fundamental operating philosophy of this company, and I'm working to keep my children insulated from the destruction of staring at this screen and being totally marketed to and bombarded left, right, and center. But now I'm going to profit from it for other people's children." How does that fulfill any kind of ethical standard of...

It's just, it feels so dirty. And so that's a lot of things. It just seems like for me, with the moral positions that I hold and the ethical things that I think are pretty clear, whether I'm right or wrong, of course I believe I'm right, otherwise I wouldn't believe what I believe, but it seems like at every turn, the majority, I don't know if all, but the majority of large publicly traded corporations have official positions that are directly offensive to me.

And yet I'm supposed to line up and say, "Here, here's the money." At the end of the day, I just came to a point, I thought, "How do I get to the end of my life and stand before the Lord and say, 'Here's my accounting of what I did with your money, God.

Here's how I invested it. And here's all the money that I made on it.'" And God says, "Well, what return did you get?" You read the parable of the steward, right? The master goes away and Jesus tells the parable and he says, the master goes away on a long trip and he comes back and he gives one talent to, depending on which version we use, he gives a talent, gives a few talents, 10 talents, gives 20 talents, comes back from the trip and says, "Give me an accounting." And the master's expecting a return.

And I see that parable that Jesus taught as directly applicable to my life. When God entrusts money to me and he says, "Here, here's money. You are the steward of this money." He expects a return. So I imagine myself standing before the master, right? The master comes back from a long trip and I'm standing there saying, "Well, what's the return?" "Well, God, I made 8.2%." Meanwhile, millions of people were murdered around the world, right?

Other people were locked up. We destroyed society. We destroyed lives, right? Millions of teens committed suicide and yet we're going to stand by and profit from it. Over time, it just grew and grew and grew to the point where I'm like, "I can't do this." Now could I have ever come to that position as when I was a financial advisor?

I don't know if I could have. I'd like to say I could have, but it would have just meant the complete destruction of my entire business, right? How do you operate in that environment? You can't. So it was almost like I needed a few years to detox from it.

But over the years, for those reasons, I've had all of my investment accounts just sitting in cash. Now does that mean that I'm fundamentally opposed to investing in stocks? No. There's lots of ways I think to work through handling that. There's lots of companies that I admire. There's lots of companies that I'd be proud to own, publicly traded companies that I personally would be very proud to own.

But what I came to, as I said, the mass market approach, just buying the mutual fund that includes everything, I didn't feel good about it. I acknowledge the efficiency of that kind of scenario, but I didn't feel good about it. I came to the realization that I was as blinded to investment opportunities as most of my clients because I was trained by this mainstream system that exclusively relied on financial advisors to market their products.

What I started to realize over time is that there was a massive world of potential investments, a massive world of opportunity that I just wasn't tuned into. And so once I walked away from the stock market, I started to realize that there were many other areas of investing, many ways I could build huge wealth, invest very effectively, and not have some of the ethical concerns that didn't help me to sleep well at night.

I'm also convinced that a lot of those things are far more profitable. Now I'm not at a position yet as a mature investor where I can confidently teach you what they are. I can teach you some of the academics of one area or another, but I'm not willing to say, "Look, here's my investment record," because I haven't done it for long enough.

I don't have the results to speak for themselves, and I try to speak to things that I actually know about. So we can talk about it academically, but I can't say, "Look, you should invest like me." What I can say is that as I have dug in deeper and deeper, I've realized that there's this whole world of investment that I never before thought about because I was so focused on stocks, stocks, stocks, stocks.

And when you start opening up your mind to those things, all of a sudden you now turn around and you look back at the stock market and you think, "This is crazy. You're trying to tell me that this is where I should invest my money? You're trying to say that this is the best thing that I can do with my money right now?" When you look at it and you think about—I'm sorry for the phone call.

I'm still learning. I'm live streaming the recording of today's show, and usually nobody calls me, but unfortunately I can't. I'm using all my phones as cameras, and so I'm being interrupted by a phone call here. When you look at the stock market and you're open to other opportunities and other ideas, it's hard to make a really strong argument for the stock market with the exception of a few basic arguments.

Let me make the positive thing about what the stock market, speaking generally, is really good at. As I see it, it's basically two things in the modern era. Number one, investing in the stock market makes investing really, really easy for people to do. It makes it really, really easy in the modern world for people to do.

It's so easy for people to open an account. You can do it in an app on your phone. You can go to any one of these investment markets, and you can just open an account and boom, you can be invested in five minutes in some pretty good investments, speaking purely from a financial perspective, broadly diversified, low cost.

It's pretty incredible. When you go into markets where that level of efficiency does not exist, and you go back to a place like the United States where you have that level of access to the market, it's sobering. It's really sobering because you realize what a stunning achievement it is in market efficiency and building out this powerful world of investments where any individual with a smartphone app can just open it up and boom, invest into it.

In the stock market, because of that, it's very efficient. Costs are low. You look at the incredible revolution that's happened over the last couple of decades, even in just the decline of costs, the decline of costs of investing, the major impact of passive investing, of firms that have cut fees.

There's almost no comparison. When you look at the market, you see how incredibly efficient it is with the tremendous focus, the tremendous constant and never-ending focus by the investment analysts. It's really incredible. The US stock market has succeeded in making investing easy. That I think is well worth acknowledging.

It's worth and important to acknowledge that investing is easier in the United States than almost anywhere else in the world. The other thing that's worth acknowledging is that when you invest in the stock market and you invest in mass market mutual funds, you can make a little bit of return, a decent level of return, and you can do it with zero input.

That's amazing. I don't know of any other investment that truly comes close to being passive. People talk about passive income. They talk about, "Well, I'm going to make passive income because I'm going to start a YouTube channel and get advertising revenue," or, "I'm going to make passive income because I'm going to buy rental houses," or, "I'm going to make passive income because I started a network marketing company and I received overrides on the purchases of my downline." None of those things are passive income.

None of them are passive income. They're income that necessarily is not directly tied to the work of today, but none of them are actually passive income. The only thing that I think actually qualifies as passive income specifically is dividends, living on the dividends from publicly traded companies and/or living on the dividends and profits from a large mutual fund portfolio.

Maybe you say, "I'm going to put all my money with American funds, and I'm going to spend my dividends from the American funds in mutual funds," or, "I'm going to put all my money with Vanguard. I'm going to buy the Vanguard total stock market index fund. I'm going to live on 3% of my portfolio." That's genuinely, truly passive, but almost nothing else is.

You can get a little return from that, broadly speaking. You can get a little return for that, and you can do it totally passively. I think that there's also ways to do that, that you can generate those results and still satisfy maybe any ethical concerns you have. Maybe your concern is, "I don't want to fund the war," but you can put yourself in a situation where you say, "I may not want to fund the war, but I'm happy to spend Coca-Cola dividends.

I'll spend my Coca-Cola dividends. They're not financing the war, but I've got dividends from all over the world." Totally passive, really, really powerful as a solution. But outside of those two things, stock market investing has a whole bunch of downsides. The first thing is, although the stock market is generally higher in terms of the overall return that you can get than something like putting money in a bank, which is its own ethical issue, right?

The war on savers, which I'm convinced contributes over time to, is going to contribute to more and more of a destruction of our lives and our finances. When you have a society that penalizes savers through inflationary policies and yet doesn't open up and forces everyone into stocks, it just makes it really more difficult.

I can't go down that tangent. But in the stock market, you can generate some returns, but you have no competitive advantage. Because the market is efficient, you pretty much know that, "Okay, the market's efficient, and you and I have no competitive advantage." There's nothing that you and I can do as individuals to go in and get involved in a particular market and really make it pay off.

We're stuck in a scenario where we're little fish. Now, can you find some little trading opportunity? Maybe. Is there something that you can do where you say, "I've developed a scheme," or, "I've developed a philosophy," or, "I'm going to buy these companies," or maybe. At the end of the day, there's not really any competitive advantage that you and I have.

Why should we invest in a market where we have no competitive advantage? You have a much bigger competitive advantage in a market that you know, in a market that you can be involved in. You have a much bigger competitive advantage working as a plumber and building a plumbing company because you can go out and say, "Here's what's going to make us really effective at plumbing and here's how we're going to compete with everyone," or, "Here's how we're going to take and build out a chain of automotive repair shops and make that really profitable." When it comes to the stock market, you have no competitive advantage.

You're a small fish. I'm a small fish. Utterly meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Why should we go and invest in these areas where we don't have a competitive advantage if that costs us investing in another place where you do? What I'm convinced, personally, is it costs many investors the willingness to go and invest in a market that they actually do know.

Because they're so used to investing into their IRA or their Roth IRA, people often don't ever amass any meaningful wealth and thus they don't look at the world through the eyes of an entrepreneur and see the opportunities. They look at the world through the eyes of a broke salaryman who has a bunch of money and a 401(k) and they don't see how they could get involved in this other business opportunity over here because after all, my money is locked in the 401(k) and yeah, I know I could do a self-directed 401(k) but that's really hard and my company doesn't allow it.

They go through life as basically a salaryman without ever applying that entrepreneurial mentality to the world and seeing the investment opportunities. They'll see a house. Somebody will see a house across the street for sale. Honestly, for many people, it never enters into their brain, never, that they should buy it.

Never. They don't ever think of it because, "Oh, that's not an investment," or "I don't like real estate." They don't look to the guy next door to them that's a real estate investor himself and realize I could lend that guy money at 15%. I make a whole lot more with very modest risk versus the stock market and have it secured by real property instead of something made up.

I have no inset edge in the stock market. I'm a small fish. I have no competitive advantage and I'm dealing with strangers whose character I cannot assess. That's the thing. When you see a company come out, when you see an Enron, the classic Enron and WorldCom, what keeps those things from being an everyday story?

Part of it is due to the very efficient marketplace that people are involved in. Part of it is due to the constant scrutiny of the analysts and the news media chasing down hot stories. But at the end of the day, you still have no ability to know the people.

Whereas if you invest closer to home, you can know the people and you can take a bet on a person because you know their character. The volatility in the stock market is crazy. It's crazy and it makes no sense to me. It makes sense to me that there is volatility, but the direction of it makes no sense to me.

If there's anyone who should know what's going on with the stock market, it should be me. I'm not claiming to be the world's greatest analyst. I'm not. I'm not claiming to be a charter. I'm not a CFA. I've never been that interested in it. But you would think that somebody with a master's degree in financial planning, who was a certified financial planner, I'm in the process of reinstating, but it's not reinstated yet, so I can't say that I am.

You would think that somebody like me should know what's going on in the stock market, considering I used to make my money telling people to invest in the stock market. I don't understand it. I genuinely do not. I do not understand it. Now, part of it is, okay, I get that the market, and I would teach.

If you were calling my Q&A show and you were saying, "Josh, explain the market," I would say, "Well, the market doesn't really exist. The market is this word that we use to describe the individual decisions of millions and millions of people, millions and millions of businesses, funds, all of whom are buying and selling for their own individual reason.

It could be somebody's buying or selling because they think the market's going to go down. Could be someone's buying and selling because they need money to pay for their kid's college tuition. Could be someone's buying and selling because their dad died, left them stocks, and now they're selling. We have no idea why, so we just talk about the market." But realistically, when you think about the overall themes, it's just hard for me to make sense of.

It's really hard for me to make sense of. So we say this thing, "Don't invest in something that you don't understand." We say this little aphorism, "Don't invest in something you don't understand." We say aphorisms, and I like aphorisms. I'm the king of aphorisms. We say, "You shouldn't invest in something that you can't explain to your five-year-old." And yet when I honestly, genuinely come down to it, and I honestly, genuinely think, "Do I understand the stock market?" The answer is no.

The answer is honestly, genuinely no. I don't understand it. I know something about it, but I don't understand it. And so why am I investing massive levels of money in something that I don't understand? Now I'm basically making some bets, right? I can make the arguments, and I'm not saying sell your stocks.

I can make some of the arguments for the long term and say, "Here's where things can grow over time." I look and I see significant headwinds. Let me give you an example. Over the last few years, you've seen most stock analysts, most people involved in stock analysis have minimized and have put themselves in a situation where they downgraded some of their predictions.

They said, "You know what? We think that there's some major headwinds coming up over the long term, and because of that, we're going to downgrade. We think the winds are going to be more difficult." Vanguard, right? Everyone's darling. Vanguard comes out and says, "We know that there are headwinds." Jack Bogle, before he died, "Things are going to be more difficult." Why?

Well, I look at something and I see a lot of reasons why. An example would be this. I think one major headwind against US growth and also global growth is going to be the plummeting or destruction of population growth, the population decline. There's been such a destruction to birth rates that you have this entire economy that was predicated upon basically constant and never-ending growth fueled by large birth rates, and you see the birth rates are going, "Boof," right off a cliff.

Now, most of the wealthy nations of the world, including the United States of America, are below replacement birth rates, which means you can expect to see population shrinking. Is this any kind of overnight thing where all of a sudden it's going to happen right now? It's going to happen and boom, things are going to fall apart?

No, it's not. But what you do see is this is going to have a long-term impact. Now, here's the question. How do declining birth rates impact the stock market? I don't know, because the stock market is this giant amorphous thing made up of thousands and thousands of companies. How do declining birth rates impact Toys R Us?

Well, they result in the total destruction of Toys R Us. I can understand that because people aren't having children, children aren't buying toys, the toys that they are buying are often more electronic, more digital, and so physical toys is a market that's completely fallen apart and led to the bankruptcy of companies.

So I can understand a company, or maybe I run a company locally, maybe I have a local toy store, now I can understand what the impact is. Or I can look and say I run an education company, now I can understand what the impact is. So I can chart a trend out and I can think how it impacts my company that I know, but I can't bring that over and apply it to the stock market.

I don't understand the stock market. I can only understand companies in the stock market. So it goes on and on and on when you think about the lack of understanding. But I guess one day I woke up and I said, you know what, now that my paycheck doesn't depend upon my pretending that I understand the stock market, I honestly have to acknowledge that I don't understand it.

I can make some arguments for it. I can make some arguments as to why it's good. In the last weeks, I have encouraged family members to keep their mutual funds. I'm not saying sell out of mutual funds, but for me as an investor, why should that be a primary part of my life?

Final train of reasoning where you realize the stock market is just woefully not nearly a superior answer as some other things are. About the only thing I get from investing in the stock market is financial return. But investing in so many other areas gives me additional returns. For example, pretend I live in New York City.

Well, I can invest into mutual funds in my IRA. I can also lend money to a friend. I can also lend money to a friend just to make sure I don't get the prohibited person's rules wrong. But I can also self-direct my IRA and I can lend money to a friend and that friend can purchase a rental house in Florida and then simultaneously my friend can lend me money from his IRA to purchase a rental house in Florida.

So I've established a source of financing from my IRA. We'll choose some rental houses and then once a year I need to go to Florida to check on my rental house and so now my travel expenses to check on my investments are now going to be deductible to me and my friend might also choose that week for him to go and check on his rental house and we'll go and during the day I'll work on my rental house.

Notice I'm not saying I'm specifically steering clear of a prohibited transaction because I'm not working on my rental house that my IRA owns. I'm working on my rental house that my friend's IRA has a mortgage on that lent me. So I'm there working in the daytime on my rental house and then at nighttime we can go down to the tiki bar and hang out together and have a nice time together.

I can't do that with mutual funds at least not in a tax efficient way and oh by the way the returns on that rental house depending on what I do I can juice those returns by actually applying all the techniques of real estate investing. I can juice those returns by putting myself in a situation where I just dramatically expand my opportunity for profit.

I can do that all over the world. I can go into markets that are far more interesting, far more profitable than Florida. There's plenty of investors in Florida but I can go into markets all around the world and do exactly the same thing. Now I can get a little bit of currency play.

I can get a little bit of political play. I can do some things in ways that should over time dramatically enhance my returns. One of the most fascinating things to me that I've been studying a lot is just banking rates around the world. You wind up stuck like in the United States or in the United Kingdom.

You wind up stuck in these banking situations where you get no return on your money because you're living in a calcified economy with low interest rates because the Fed is desperately trying to boost some growth in the economy. Meanwhile you can't get any return just on your savings. But if you go around the world there are all kinds of markets around the world where they'll actually pay you a return on your savings in the bank.

So how do I wind this down? I hope this wasn't a screed. My goal was not to sit down and record a screed of everything wrong with it. The stock market is good at giving you easy ways to invest money and it's good at giving you something of a return maybe over the long term with zero input from you.

So if you are a high income professional and you say my day job is fine. I don't want to go and be a plumber. I don't want to go and invest in timberland in Nicaragua. I don't want to go and do this stuff. I just want to work my day job, earn my money, put money in my 401k and relax.

Well the stock market is going to be the best solution for that. But there's a percentage of us, I don't know what that percentage is, but there's a percentage of us who are just involved in that automatic system by default. Not because we chose it, but just that's the default option.

And so what I would tell you is that from one guy who went into that automatic default system, I went into it as a default system as a Roth IRA investor when I was a teenager going through college. I went into that default system as a mainstream financial advisor.

And as one guy who's come out of it fairly slowly and set out and kind of charted for myself the radical personal finance approach, when I see the wealth of options that are available beyond that, I have no incentive to go back. And when you see the costs that come with it, right, the crazy volatility for reasons that you can't be sure of, the impenetrability of the markets, you sit back and you watch people's portfolios just decline.

I know, right now, I know how well my investments are doing because I understand them. And this is the first market crash that I didn't have money in the stock market. And as I've tried to make very clear, it wasn't because I timed it. Respect to those who want to do that, that was not my thing.

But I understand my investments now. And even if I don't get as good of a result, which I think is probably unlikely in time, at least I understand them. And I feel good about investments contributing to society instead of being destructive to society. In the future, I want to invest in a lot more private businesses.

I haven't figured out how to do it effectively yet. It's a project of mine. But I want to invest in businesses that actually help their neighbors and serve their neighbors instead of enslave their neighbors and put their neighbors into debt. I want to invest in businesses that lead to peace and prosperity, not to war and destruction.

And I want to invest in businesses that are on a good moral standard instead of corrupting society and corrupting youth. And I sound like such an old man. Apologies. But I guess I'm becoming an old man. Just that at the end of my life, I don't want my investments to be an area that doesn't count.

I want my investments to be an area that I'm proud of. I don't want to sit back at the end of my life and say, "Yeah, yeah, Lord, I made some money. Isn't that great?" I want to sit back and at the end of my life be proud of what I built.

I want to be proud of that. I always think of a guy like, I don't know, Munger and Buffett, right? You think of that. Buffett and Munger are proud of what they've built because they built a giant business that has a legacy and a lasting legacy and they built this culture around it.

Many entrepreneurs get to the end of their life, they're proud of what they built. They're proud of their store. They're proud of their business. They're proud of their impact. At the end of my life, I want to be proud of what I've built. I want something that's going to be handed down throughout the generations of my family.

I want there to be a sense of identity, a sense of, "This is us." I don't see any way to get that with some shares of an index fund. I see a way to get that with a vineyard in Argentina. I see a way to get that with an office building in Miami.

I see a way to get that with a farm in Mexico. I don't see a way to get there with ... I see a way to get there with radical personal finance, right? Maybe we spin off a bunch of businesses in the coming decades. I don't know. I don't know what the future holds.

But I see a way to get there with a sense of pride. Having a sense of pride in my investments, I've realized, is something that I really care about and that I really want more of in my life. It's much more satisfying than the disgust that I used to feel when I opened the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

I guess I should say these. I'd open the screen of the Wall Street Journal and read about the latest shenanigans on Wall Street. That's all I got to say, but that's my answer on why I don't miss investing in the stock market. I don't know what's right for you.

What I would encourage you, though, is think about it. Think about it. More and more, I've become convinced that if you think about your decisions very carefully, at the end of the day, you can often be prouder of those decisions. And whether you make the same choice or not, at least it was an examined decision.

There's the old quote, because Socrates, "An unexamined life is not worth living." Well, I think there's a real sense of truth in that, that an examined life is really nice. And so when you examine the basics of your life, you examine where you live, you examine how you earn an income, and you examine how you invest your money, when you wind up doing it over again, you'll probably feel happier about it.

What I found for me is that although I think I'll buy more stocks in the future, I think I will, I don't think I'll ever go back to that default approach. I don't want those feelings again. Thank you for listening to Radical Personal Finance. If you haven't subscribed to the podcast, please make sure you pull open your podcast player and subscribe.

During the month of May, we're testing out live streaming. I have live streamed the entire show here. Hopefully the internet connection worked out, but I've live streamed the entire show here on Facebook and on YouTube and on Periscope, so feel free to check out those. We're live streaming at the very least Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 2 p.m.

Eastern time, although I may change that a little bit. We'll see, but I've enjoyed that. In future live streams, I'll interact more with the audience, so I would invite you to come and join me on Facebook, facebook.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Like the page there, and you'll find those details. Thank you for listening, and I'll be back with you very soon.

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