Hello, everybody. It's Sam from the Financial Samurai Podcast. And on this episode, I have Jo Piazza, a bestselling author, podcast creator, and award-winning journalist. Welcome to the show. Hi. Thanks for having me. So I first heard of you when you were on Farnoosh Torabi's You're So Money show. And the topic y'all talked about was about traditional wives or tradwives.

Tradwives, yeah. Yeah, I'd never really heard that term before, tradwives. But could you talk about that a little bit? And could you share with us what does that mean? And how does that compare to a stay-at-home parent, a traditional or modern stay-at-home parent, I guess? Yeah. You know, the term tradwife, it's often hashtag tradwife, has come to prominence on social media.

It started on Instagram, and now it's moved over to TikTok. And it's a very particular sort of partnering and really, really vibe, to be honest, and almost a character that it seems like a lot of these folks are playing on social media, which we all know is just content.

But it is a woman who says that she is in a "traditional marriage," which they define as very traditional gender roles. The man is the one who goes and earns the money. The woman works in the home. She raises the children. She has pretty much no agency over their lives or their finances.

Also, she says she doesn't want it. She's very submissive to her husband. She dresses the way he wants her to dress. She does her hair the way he wants her to dress. They say things like, "Women shouldn't go to college because it interferes with their years of potential breeding." Now, this is very different than a stay-at-home wife or a stay-at-home parent.

I respect the hell out of stay-at-home parents. They are the CEOs of their households. This is a conformity to, you would say, 1950s gender roles, but really, mostly the kind of 1950s gender roles that you saw on television, not that necessarily existed in reality, at least not in this picture-perfect kind of way.

Got it. Yeah, I remember watching one of my favorite shows, Leave It to Beaver. It was black and white. It was a great show. It's a good show. But I guess, yo, why do you think there's been this trad wife movement? I think for a lot of reasons, to be honest.

Frankly, social media is obsessed with it. When the algorithm latches on to something, people see an opportunity to grow their audience. We've seen a lot more people moving into this trad wife category because Instagram and TikTok seem to like it. They can get more views and then perhaps make more money.

I do think that there is some base entrepreneurship there. That said, I also think that people are hungry, especially women, for an identity, for a purpose. The corporate world has not been kind to women and especially not to mothers. By identifying themselves as this thing, by finding a club of "like-minded people," it's a lot easier to find purpose in the kind of work done in the home, which typically does not get very much respect.

Yeah, so it's interesting about the trad wife movement. More power to them if they want to be trad wives or trad parents. But it seems that financial dependence on someone is a little bit dangerous because, as we know, 40% to 50% of marriages end in divorce, people split up.

What happens then after there's a breakup and you're a traditional parent who hasn't been earning money, who hasn't been saving for themselves? What goes on then? Yeah, exactly. That's my biggest concern. It's the financial dependence on another person and not having agency over your own life, your own decisions.

I spoke to one woman who calls herself a former trad wife. She met her husband when she was young. He told her to quit college, said, "What did it matter to pay for her education? Why did she need to be educated if she was just going to be in the home and raising their children?" When she tried to leave him nearly two decades later, she had no education, no work experience, no money of her own.

It was incredibly hard. She did it. She did it. She was brave. She was so smart in the things that she did to get out of that. Her warning was, "This felt like an impossible situation. I felt like I couldn't leave even though it was a bad marriage because I had no agency and I had no money." I do think that we're seeing a phenomenon of young women look at these pretty images of #tradwives on Instagram, on TikTok, and be like, "You know what?

The working world does suck now. Maybe I want to stay home and bake bread and wear pretty dresses and do my hair and raise our kids." Cool. Sure. If that's your jam, great. But find a way to make your own money. The flip side, the irony of all of this is that by putting this content out on social media that you are not dependent on your husband, you may be making money off of that.

Right. Right. One of the reasons why I wanted to reach out was because you always said you were looking for the male version of the #tradwife. I offered myself up to you as the male version of the #tradwife. You did. You did. You offered yourself up as a sacrificial lamb.

You are a stay-at-home parent and I want to hear a little bit about your journey to becoming a stay-at-home parent, a stay-at-home dad, and what that's been like for you. How did you get here? Well, so I didn't know I always wanted to have children. We tried for several years when I started 34 or something and it didn't really work because I was so focused on my career.

I worked in banking for 13 years, 60 plus hours a week. In 2012, at the age of 34, I decided I had enough. It was just too stressful. I wanted to do something else. I enjoyed writing and I started Financial Samurai in 2009. It was something that I really, really enjoyed doing and it started making a little bit of money.

So I said, "Oh, okay. Maybe I can – there is life after banking." And so – There's always life after banking. It's just, you know, it's – you probably will make less money. Yeah, yeah. I definitely made 80% less money the first year. It was a little bit shocking, you know, not getting that steady paycheck that I've been receiving for 13 years.

But, you know, we had enough. We were frugal. We had our expenses down pat. And it was interesting. Once I left banking, the stress melted away. The white hairs went away. The weight stopped increasing. The sciatica, the lower back pain, all of that stuff went away. And we were actually able to have a child after I left work and after my wife left work also at the age of 34.

And so something to be said about less stress when you're trying to produce life, there's like a positive correlation there or an inverse correlation there. And so I decided after our son was born in 2017 that I was going to be a stay-at-home father for at least five years or at least until he went to school full time.

And then we had a daughter in December 2019 and I wanted to make the same promise. And the reason why I did it was all the books said the fastest and most important development is in the first five years. So I figured, well, I already gave up the money back in 2012, might as well not give up the time I spend with my children because we all know that they grow up so quickly.

So that's where I am. Did you find it hard to find a community of other stay-at-home dads? And how do people respond to you when you say that you're a stay-at-home parent? Yeah, it's really hard to find a community of stay-at-home dads. I couldn't find one. So what I did was I went to a new mother's outing at Golden Gate Park one day and there were six moms.

And then after about a 45-minute stroll, we all sat down in the garden with blanket and then all the moms started breastfeeding. So I was like, "Oh, this is a little weird." So I decided to give privacy and walk away for about half an hour. And so I looked for dads and there was this dads group once a month, but I could never meet up at the time that they wanted to meet up.

And so what I ended up doing was just figuring it out on my own online. There's really no community that I see of online stay-at-home fathers. And so it's just I had to figure it out on my own. It was like my dads don't seem to share their stories.

They don't seem to share their dad guilt because I think there's a huge amount of dad guilt out there. Talk to me about that because I talked to so many women who say they don't think that their husbands have any guilt whatsoever. What is dad guilt for you? So dad guilt I think is just like mom guilt.

Dad guilt might be even more powerful than mom guilt in a way because if the traditional role is for the dad to make the money, if that is the traditional role, then the dad not making the money and being a stay-at-home dad is feeling – it creates more guilt because the dad is not out there trying to hunt for food and make the big bucks to provide for his family.

And so that is something that I dealt with. I know other men who are stay-at-home parents deal with that as well because also it's really hard to be a stay-at-home dad because in the first one year of life especially, the baby latches on to the mother because the mother is the food source.

And then in the second year of life as the baby becomes a toddler and starts knowing what to do, the toddler will also often rebuff the father for the mother because the toddler has been so connected with the mother for so long. So it's almost like a evolutionary push for dads to get out of the house and go back and hunt for food and make money after the first year.

Right, right. No, I can see that. It's interesting because I push back on that so hard in my own family. Yes, the kids constantly come to me like, "Mommy, mommy," when they fall down or they need help with something. And I did not do this in the very beginning.

In the beginning with the first kid, I just accepted it as gospel. I'm like, "Oh, it's me." It's a mothering instinct. And now I push back and I'm like, "No, go to daddy. I'm busy." And I don't wake up in the middle of the night anymore. This is a third baby thing because I'm a psychopath if I don't get sleep.

My anxiety goes up. All of my body and back pain goes up. I can't make good decisions. I can't write books. I can't do anything really. And I'm a crap parent. So Nick is the one that gets up at night whenever any of the children cry. And I think that that has made them go to him.

Not more, maybe not even equal, but definitely more than before. And it's getting closer to equality. But I do think that that is something that couples have to work on because the baby is definitely attached to the mother for food, physically attached to her for nine months. But yeah, it is an uphill battle.

And I can imagine that uphill battle had to be hard for you with no one to talk to about it. My husband has never talked about what we just talked about with anyone, any other human. Well, yeah. I guess men don't really open up about their struggles of being a stay-at-home father, maybe because there's fewer of us, I'm not sure.

Would you? Or being a father at all, that's the thing. I mean, just being a dad, I don't see, I count myself very lucky that I have so many amazing mother friends and female friends that I talk to all the time. But I don't think we've created a culture where dudes talk about this stuff.

No. So I hope, I mean, regarding the FIRE community, for example. Oh, yeah. So you were part of the FIRE community. Explain to our listeners what that is. Yeah. So in 2009, I helped kickstart the modern-day FIRE movement, which stands for Financial Independence Retire Early. And the idea was to save as much money as possible so you can get out of your corporate gig as soon as possible, so you can have as much passive investment income to cover your desired living expenses.

And if you do that, you're financially independent. And that is what I did in achieving that when I left my day job in 2012. I had about $80,000 in passive income. It wasn't huge for San Francisco, but my wife still worked and I told her she's three years younger than me, so I said, "If you can get to 34 years old like me, retiring at 34, you too can leave your day job and we can go live a crazy wildlife together." And so what's interesting about the FIRE movement is that I still think there's probably 70%, 80% of the participants or enthusiasts are male.

And there are many males actually who say they've retired early. But really, they're just stay-at-home dads because their wives still work, provide healthcare, and bring home the money. And so it's an interesting, curious, psychological case where men aren't willing to save their stay-at-home fathers. They rather say they are retired early, early retirees than the other way around.

And so I think men just need to accept realities and be okay and treat the other partner as equal and accept their situations in life. Yeah. No, I mean, look, from your lips to Goddess's ears, yes, men do need to treat their partners as equal. I say that all the time.

It's amazing to me that it's something we still have to say out loud. But I do have a question because this podcast is about social media. When you look at social media, do you see anything supportive for you? For dads, I mean, for a stay-at-home dad, but also just for dads?

I don't. Maybe I'm not looking hard enough. I'm not on Instagram. I see TikTok, but I don't see any support groups for dads. I'm on Twitter, but Twitter is more – I'm just focused on investing and finances and career and stuff like that. So not really. Not really. And I'm interested in hearing from you, would you like your husband to be a stay-at-home dad, the male version of a trad wife?

And do you think other women would like more of their husbands to be stay-at-home fathers? Because I hear – what I do see is maybe jokingly or not jokingly, complaints that men aren't doing enough around the house. And that's probably true. So that's a really interesting question because my husband and I have gone back and forth between who is the breadwinner, who makes more money, who brings home the health insurance, which is a huge, totally annoying thing in our country.

Yes, I think that I would love it. That said, I do think that there is an enormous pressure of being the sole breadwinner, of being the person who is providing all of the income for the family. So if you're the person providing all of the income for the family and you can have a stay-at-home dad and the roles are very set where he genuinely is taking on all of the things that a stay-at-home parent would be taking on and taking that off of your plate, yeah, that sounds great.

But I do think that that is tricky and I don't know how often that happens. Tell me how your setup works. Well, so I'm glad you announced the other side of it because if you're a stay-at-home parent, you have to rely potentially on the other one for all or most of the income.

And if you're the provider of all the income, it's really stressful. It can be really, really stressful, especially as your family size grows. Going from zero to one child is pretty stressful. It's shocking. You're a new parent, all these expenses. And then going to two is maybe not as stressful, but there's like, "Oh, you got to think about two college educations now." Oh, my God.

Try thinking about three, man. Oh, yeah. If you have three college – that's – Crazy. Absolutely crazy. I can't even think about it. I'm pretending college isn't going to happen at this point. Yeah. It's like $800,000 for four years in 15 years. It's like the worst case scenario of four years of private school, right?

No scholarships, nothing. And so, yeah, you're going to have to have like $2.5 million plus for college education, Joe. And so when you start thinking about that, there's a lot of stress. And so for my setup, my wife doesn't have a traditional day job. She helps do a lot of great stuff for me at Financial Samurai for us.

She does the finances. She edits the podcast. She edits a lot of the writing, a lot of the blocking and tackling that comes with having a website, a business. But the thing is there's no direct money coming in, right? We don't really run Financial Samurai to make money. We run Financial Samurai, one, because it's great to create a community.

I enjoy writing. I enjoy podcasting. And also, we want to create an archive of content, verbal or written for our children as they grow up, as they wonder what was mom and dad up to during the pandemic and so forth. So it's been stressful for me as our children.

We have two children, private school, college, all that. And so I'm trying to figure out how to balance that being a stay-at-home father with also trying to make sure our finances don't blow up, that there's some supplemental income. And I see the light kind of at the end of the tunnel because our daughter will be going to preschool full-time in the fall of 2024.

And so that frees up two more days that I can actually do something to make money, for example, if I need to. And I think I need to. And so it's going to be there where, okay, when they're both in school full-time, it's time to go back to the grind a little bit.

I think that's the responsible thing parents should do. LS: Yeah, no. I also have this view that in a perfect world, and so a lot of these ideas are if I could create a perfect world that we lived in, is that different seasons of life for careers and jobs and parenting, we don't live in a corporate world that accepts those right now because for so long we lived in such a male-dominated, still male-dominated corporate world where it was just dudes going to work at 8.30, coming home at 6.30, and not worrying about what happened in the home.

And they didn't have to worry about taking off because they literally had to push a baby out of their vaginas. But in my ideal world, you have a situation where one parent can be either the fully stay-at-home parent or the flexible parent, which is a different thing too, right?

The parent that doesn't have to be in the office or be on calls all day long and can be there to do pick-up and drop-offs and things like run-to-doctors appointments. And then you can switch. Then you can switch over to, "All right, I did this for these four years.

Now I wanna go back and do this work thing. Now you do this." And that would be the ideal situation for me because I also get twitchy if I'm outside of a real job. Actually, I don't wanna say real job. If I'm outside of an office corporate job for too long, I just started doing some new consulting and I'm using Airtable for the first time in a couple of years.

I'm like, "Oh my God." But it's nice, right? Because I get to remember what it is like to work with other humans and to use the platforms that are being used right now. So if we had that kind of flexibility to come in and out of the workforce, but that would require a much more benevolent government that actually cares for people and a corporate world that actually cares for people.

So that's what's happening. I'm curious. When all kids are in school full-time, what does the trad parent, let's say trad parent, do? I know there's pick-up, drop-off, house cleaning, food prep, scheduling after-school activities, but that probably doesn't take more than three hours a day. So what does the trad parent do for the rest of the day?

I don't know. And everyone has different levels of what they do do in the home. So I have a lot of friends who serve on a lot of boards, who do a lot of volunteer work with schools, who are stay-at-home parents, not trad parents. I don't have a lot of trad parent friends.

My mother-in-law was a fully stay-at-home mother for my husband and his brother's whole lives. And she did a ton of volunteer work. And she was essentially being executive of these nonprofits for free, which is the work that women did for so long. Volunteer work, board work, things like that.

So I think that there is a lot of work, right? It's a lot of labor. It's just it's not being acknowledged or respected. Yeah. Got it. No, thanks for that. No, no, that helps because I'm trying to anticipate the future, 2024 and beyond. And what am I going to do filling my time?

And so I've really zeroed in on consulting. Maybe not full-time work because it's so foreign, but consulting seems like the proper balance, maybe 20 hours a week to fill that time to do something productive, to feel part of a team, to make some money, but also to still have enough time to do other things like, I don't know, play pickleball or tennis or hang out, go for walks.

I think that's the right balance, consulting. Well, I mean, and that's what I do now, right? It's some consulting. But one of us does have to have a full-time income and make no mistake, I have income coming in from these podcasts, not as much as when I was with a major network, but I'm growing it.

So now I consider myself an entrepreneur, which I don't really like, but I think that's the direction a lot of us are going in. And my books, right? So as long as I can keep writing books, that is a major, major source of our income. That's a nice plug for everyone to pre-order The Sicilian Inheritance, the greatest book I've ever written.

I have a couple of fire questions for you. Can I throw those out there? Sure. What kinds of things do you invest in to generate a consistent income? Yeah. So about 50% of my investments are in real estate. So owning physical rental properties. I've been, since 2016, slowly investing more in private real estate syndication deals.

So you can basically crowdfund and invest in other properties around the country. It's for diversification and also for more passive income. Because after owning, I would say, three rental properties for myself, managing it starts becoming a pain, right? And so you just want to focus more on passive. At least I do, the older I get.

And then there's dividend income. You can just invest in the S&P 500 or any dividend stocks, generates 2% to 5% in dividends. And then now treasury bonds yielding 5% plus risk-free. I mean, it's amazing because it's all relative to inflation, but inflation is now at about 3.5% and it seems like it's heading down towards 2%.

If you can lock in 20 years of a 5% treasury bond, that's a real inflation rate. What else? Those are the main things in terms of income production. I think that's so interesting because when I talk about trad waves, I heard from a lot of stay-at-home moms that, again, they felt badly because I said, "I don't think anyone should be completely financially independent on another person." And I think that- I agree with that.

I don't. And I'd like to say a man is not the plan. And I do think that investing and generating passive income, again, something very hard to do. It's hard to make money in this country, but especially enough to be able to invest. But that is another way that stay-at-home moms can have their financial security if they are choosing to invest on their own, separate from their husbands.

Oh, absolutely. I think depending on someone, no matter how much you love them, is really risky. Because think about, obviously, divorce, 30% to 50% divorce rates. Think about untimely deaths. Everyone needs to figure out what they're going to be able to do. How can they make money just in case the worst happens, right?

Absolutely. Someone close to me was a stay-at-home mother for 12 years, 13 years, and then they divorced. She had alimony, but she wasn't able to get a job for more than minimum wage because she had let her skills atrophy over the past 12 to 13 years. So I hope everybody has their own pot of money, is investing separately as well as together, and keeps up their skills so that they don't find themselves on a deserted island one day trying to survive.

Which is what will happen. Actually, tomorrow I'm talking to a woman, a trad wife, former trad wife, who really regrets that she did depend on her husband for so long because when they got divorced, she found herself really, really struggling. She wants to send the message to young women, again, that a man is not the plan.

Yeah. Well, tell me about your household. You work writing, podcasting. What does your husband do? Okay. So I work writing books, podcasting, and some years it is wildly lucrative. Then I have no idea if I will have any income in the future. The media landscape is that much of a wild west right now.

It was not always like this, but it is right now. So some years I am the breadwinner in our family. My husband has a very steady, very traditional job. He works for a company that sells carbon offsets and does climate sustainability consulting. He is a person who is typically on Zooms in our household from about nine to five, and sometimes outside of those hours too because they're a global company.

So I am the more flexible parent. That said, sometimes I have the "bigger job," the job that makes more money because you never know what a podcast deal is going to look like. They look much worse now than they used to. I can say that. Now I'm looking so much more intensely at investing and creating passive income.

I think that's where a lot of us are at. And I wish there were more places online for women to look to for that kind of advice, much like how there's not enough places for men to look to for parenting advice. I'm only just discovering a lot of the places online for women to look to for advice.

I will say it is hard to navigate this world because much like everything with Instagram and social media, someone is trying to sell you their package of advice and you have no idea how to vet who is actually useful and who is not. Got it. And what if, goodness forbid, there's no more book deal, no podcast supporters, how do you think your husband will feel in terms of the finance?

Not good. Not good. Yeah. What would be this plan though? Let's just say you just couldn't make any money. Let's just think in extremes. If I can't make any money, if I can't even do something else. The thing is, I'm constantly looking for my next job too. I'm like, "Oh, am I too old to become a commercial airline pilot or maybe I'll go back and get a PhD and become a professor," which also seems to be a career that is waning these days.

I'm constantly thinking about what can I do next and what skills can I apply to another job. But say I was completely taken out of the situation and it was just my husband supporting our entire family. We could make it work, but our lifestyle would be drastically changed. And we're also not a big spendy family.

We have one modest car that we do not drive a lot. We live in a city. We chose to live in a smaller city. We live in Philly and we bike everywhere. We would definitely travel less because a lot of my writing involves travel. And so that is part of my job and we love to travel.

And we would tighten our bootstraps and I think we could get through it. We could do it. It would be very difficult. When the kids go to school full-time, let's say all the kids go to school full-time, what do traditional stay-at-home parents do for that eight-plus hours a day?

We know about preparing the meals, shuttling them to practice and all that good stuff. But what else? Because I'm trying to anticipate fall 2024 when I have two more free days because my daughter is currently going to school three days a week. She's going to then go five days a week.

And I'm trying to anticipate what am I going to do with that time. I can't play pickleball or tennis every single day. You could. I could and actually my hips would fray off and I wouldn't be able to walk. Yes, they would not work any longer. And so I'm thinking consulting is the answer.

But for those who choose to continue to be stay-at-home parents and not do any consulting or take a full-time job after the kids go to school full-time, what is the mindset and what are they doing, you think? We should ask our audience. I think that there's lots of different things.

In one respect, this is the reason that we've seen the rise of influencers, to be honest, because there have been a big chunk of women. Influencers really grew out of the Mormon community where women do typically stay and work in the home. And once all the kids were in school, they had a chunk of time and they thought, "Oh, okay.

You know what? I'm a very educated woman. I can create this content." And so we're seeing more and more influencers because that is something that you can do between the hours of 9 and 2, 2.30, 3 o'clock, when your kids are in school and make income and find a purpose.

And I think finding a purpose is the big thing. My husband's mom, my wonderful mother-in-law, she was a stay-at-home mom. She was on a lot of boards. It was a different time. That was 50 years ago. A lot of volunteer work, a lot of boards. One of my very good girlfriends has been a stay-at-home mom since she adopted her daughter.

And also a lot of volunteer work, a lot of boards. Another female friend of mine, I don't have any stay-at-home dad friends, which is you're my first one. She decided to, and she's calling it early retirement. I think she took a severance package. She decided to retire early at 43 because they couldn't keep up with both of them traveling for work and also the shuttling of the kids to the activities all of the time.

That is a full-time job and it's not even something that's easy to find a babysitter for. And so she's going to do consulting. I think it's so interesting and important for us to keep talking about all of these things because the school day isn't set up for two parents to work.

Most corporate jobs will not allow you to quit working at two o'clock or three o'clock whenever you have to do pickup. And afterschool programs are not always easy to cobble together. So I think we do need to find more and more opportunities to re-enter the workforce in a way that works for parents, but to re-enter the workforce in a meaningful way.

So not just re-enter in a gig economy, but to re-enter in a way that you feel like you have a career that is giving you purpose, right? Yeah, I think purpose is the biggest one. Maraudery, purpose, you're doing something that adds value to society and you feel good about.

I think one of the things that I'm experiencing is so much of my time has been spent trying to take care of my children for the first five years of their lives. Then when it's done, it's like, "Oh, now what?" I mean, I had that experience after publishing my book, Buy This, Not That.

Two, two and a half years writing it, editing it, marketing it, it did well. And then there was a trough of sorrow that I felt where, "Oh, now what? What's that void?" It's like the deeper you dig, the bigger the hole, the bigger the void. And so I think it's probably wise and good for parents who are stay-at-home parents to think about that what next before that what next happens.

Yeah. And I do think that being a stay-at-home parent shouldn't be a default. It should be a very conscious strategy. So, okay, I'm going to be the one who does this. But then when we move into a different phase of life, this is what I'm going to try to do.

I think a lot about, I used to do this podcast called Committed, which was about marriage and how people made marriages work. And I interviewed an astronaut and his wife, Chris, was it Chris Hadfield? I need to look up his name. And I always get his last name wrong.

And so, you know, she spent a lot of time being an astronaut's wife, getting him to freaking space, right? You can't, it's not and they had kids too. So yes, she was a stay-at-home mom and she focused on the home and parenting and getting that done. So he could literally go to outer space.

Okay, it is Chris Hadfield. I looked it up. And then he went to outer space and he's a very famous astronaut. And then what he told me is he was like, it's her turn. And I'm going to do what it takes to build her up and help her start a new kind of career now.

And I love that because I think it's important to think about life and marriage and parenting as seasons. So this is your season for doing this, but you always have to have a plan for the next season. Yeah, I think that's a great strategy. My worry is that the window of opportunity that we have might not be as wide or as open as we think it will be.

And the reason why I say that is, for example, society is not set up to give us other windows of opportunity in the corporate workforce. Maybe one that is ageism, that's definitely one. Two is health. So for example, at 46, for me, I feel like my eyes can't stay open in terms of looking at a screen for longer than a couple hours before they get really dry.

And so as a result, my ability to write for let's say five, six hours has waned. And so I was like, okay, well, maybe I won't write as much. Maybe I'll do some more podcasts. And then maybe one day my voice will go away, or my mental capacity will go away.

And when I was competing in league tennis, I was feeling pretty good in my 30s, but now in my 40s, not as good in terms of recovery and all that. So I like the seasons. That's a good analogy. I think folks should maybe just maybe think about shortening the seasons a little bit.

Because if it takes 20 years for your spouse to become an astronaut and go to outer space, that's a long 20 years. That's why I wouldn't marry an astronaut. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it sounds cool, right? Like, oh my God, I'm married to an astronaut. But that is a lot of work as the spouse of an astronaut.

Yeah. Have you seen the show Selling Sunset on Netflix? No, I haven't seen it. Is this something I should be watching? No, it's really trashy TV. Okay. I like trashy. I like trashy. I'm into trashy shit. Well, it's really trashy TV that my wife and I enjoy. But what we noticed was that all the real estate agents are female and there's a lot of fighting.

A lot of fighting. And then the guys, the really rare guys who are on the show, they're not fighting too much. They're just like, "Oh, whatever." And I'm trying to understand because I see this on social media as well. What is your opinion on the fighting between women versus the fighting between men?

And do you think women fight more than men or are meaner than men? No. I think that society really loves to talk about women fighting. I think culture and media love to talk about women fighting. And I can say this as a person who created a lot of media for a long time, who created trashy tabloids, literally created them, who wrote for very reputable newspapers and magazines for a long time.

Our media loves the idea of what they like to call a cat fight. And so, for example, Sex and the City, the women who work on Sex and the City, they love nothing more than headlines about how they're in a cat fight. They hate each other. They're fighting. You would never see a story about the cast of, say, Ocean's 11 getting into a bro fight.

The media does not talk about male ire or male confrontations that way. We love to portray women as bitchy, as hating one another, and that merely perpetuates the stereotypes such that young girls grow up thinking that that is the way to behave to one another. Okay. So maybe I'm being manipulated by the media.

You're definitely being manipulated by the media. We all are. We all are on a very, very regular basis. Okay. Okay. Good to know. Good to know. I'll be more cognizant of that bias going forward. Because when I think about the trad wife, you talked about how it seems like trad wife influencers pit or make other non-trad wife women feel bad.

They do. They absolutely do. But here's the thing that I think a lot of non-trad wife women didn't realize, that then often at times, trad wives and stay-at-home moms feel bad looking at the posts about women who work outside the home and talking about their professional successes. I do believe the Instagram algorithm sends us things to get us riled up.

And so you can't win. You just can't win. You feel bad if you're staying at home. You feel bad if you're working outside of the home. I feel weirdly bad right now that I'm working and my kids are with our babysitter watching TV because they're all homesick. Meanwhile, they're freaking happy.

They don't care that I'm not sitting down with them. They really don't. They're like, "Okay, great. I'll see you later. Thanks for letting me watch Jurassic World Lego version," or whatever. Let's say you have a spouse, you have a wife who's been stay-at-home for 5, 7, 10 years and they're comfortable with their lifestyle.

They're comfortable with the dad going to make the money, doing all that. Transitioning is hard. What would you say to them? Transitions are hard. Transitions are impossible. And we don't live in a society that makes them possible, easy, smooth, any of that. And so I don't have an easy answer.

I really don't. I think that we're going to experience so much more of a shakeup now. And I hate to be so doom and gloom about what AI is going to do to a lot of jobs, but we're going to see a lot of people very shaken up in "white-collar jobs" about what will be available to them.

And so this is a conversation we need to be constantly having. What will you do next? What can you do next? What are you qualified to do next? We're qualified to do very little, to be honest. Could I be a dog walker? Yes, you can. I could. I could.

Absolutely. And it's also, I genuinely believe getting rid of some of the stigma around certain jobs. Hollywood is really terrible at this because Hollywood mocks a lot of jobs. They mock a lot of gig jobs. They mock a lot of hourly wage jobs as not being as good as other kinds of jobs.

And I think that, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you just look at how they treat people like plumbers in movies, right? When a plumber is a really good job, you do very well. Make $150,000. Exactly. Or how in a lot of, if you're watching romantic comedies, or let's actually just talk about Christmas movies, all of the Lifetime and Hallmark.

And now I think they're on everything, all of the Christmas movies. It's always some high-powered lady who works in a shiny office building going home to meet a working class former boyfriend. And working class people are portrayed very badly in most Hollywood productions. They really are. They're looked down on.

Hollywood is very condescending to working class people. And I think that we have to stop being condescending about a lot of different kinds of jobs because we're going to see a massive shift in how people work and what they work at. Yeah. I'm glad you brought up AI because definitely I am a little bit paranoid about all the jobs that will be taken away or eliminated in the next 10 to 20 years for our children.

Because look, college is getting more expensive, yet the value of college is declining because everything can be learned online for free. And then the jobs are going away as well. So in my opinion, there's several ways to counteract AI. One is to learn physical skills that you can use with your hands like plumbing, electrician, landscaper, so forth.

And the other one is to invest in AI. Because if you invest in AI and it becomes a huge revolutionary technology, then you're going to get rich in 10 to 20 years. And if it becomes a dud over height technology, then you're not going to get rich, but at least your children will still have those jobs that they want.

So that's what I plan to do. How are you investing in AI? Tell me. Well, you can invest one in public companies. This is not investment advice, but you can invest in public companies that invest in AI. So for example, Microsoft, anybody can buy MSFT that has a 10 plus billion dollar stake in the AI company, OpenAI, which is a private company.

You can invest in NVIDIA, which makes the chips that power AI. You can invest in Google, any of these public companies. And then from a private company standpoint, you can invest in private AI companies that are only investable if you know the person, have connections, or you invest in a venture capital fund that invests in AI companies.

So that's something for folks to look into. Personally, I'm going to allocate a good chunk of money to private growth companies and AI companies over the next three years, because I want to hedge. I want to hedge for what is potentially a bleak future, because it's been really clear to me from the OpenAI debacle when they fired the CEO, that they are very profit driven.

They're supposed to be a non-profit company, that's supposed to help humanity, but they're a for-profit company. And when you're a for-profit company, and you have this "cap profit" of 100x, which is total BS, you're going to crush industries for the sake of your own financial gains. And so it's either you're going to get crushed by it, or you're going to try to invest with them.

And so unfortunately, I think you have to join them. We have to join them. Oh, the worst. The worst. But yes, that is good advice. And again, I like talking about this advice on this show, even though we are a show that focuses on influencing and motherhood, again, because I think talking about finance gives women so much more agency over our lives, right?

Yes. Please, please read as much as you can about personal finance, investing, asset allocation, retirement planning, because the more information you know, the more you're going to actually take action to shore up your finances. And the more you're going to think about multivariables that you probably weren't thinking about in the past, and the more you think about it, the more protected you'll be.

Because anything can and will happen. It's like Murphy's law, right? If you don't think it's going to happen, it's going to happen. Exactly. All right, everyone. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Joe Piazza on the trad wife movement. I had no idea such a movement existed. Sounds interesting.

I can see how that movement could grow given the responsibility of work and parenthood is so much. Some people are just like, "Forget it. I just want to focus on family and the way things were back in the 1950s." I see that. I have been a stay-at-home parent since 2017, and it's been so much work.

But the thing is, I've also had to write consistently on Financial Samurai three times a week. Now I'm podcasting once a week. I've got random business development deals. So juggling all this has been exhausting. I wouldn't trade it for going back to work full-time, but I will say it's been a lot of work.

So anybody who says a stay-at-home parent isn't making money for the family or isn't saving money for the family really don't know what they're talking about because it can be a 24/7 job. The job is worth at least the median household income of your city, if not plus another 50 to 100 percent, because one look away could mean disaster for your child.

For example, I've been teaching my kids how to swim, and we go in the pool for 1 to 1 hour and 45 minutes. They just have endless energy. But because they don't swim very well, I need to constantly be on because if I look away for 5 seconds or 10 seconds, they might drown and drowning is a top 5 reason for death for kids under 5 years old.

So please be aware of that. And I would say for those who are stay-at-home parents, more power to you. For tradwives out there, if that's what you want to do, great. I would try to develop your own income stream a little bit on the side, have your own savings on the side just in case you never know what's the downside of protecting yourself financially.

I'll stop here, folks. If you enjoyed this episode, I'd love a positive review on Apple, Spotify, Google Play, wherever you listen to this podcast episode. And if you want to keep in touch, join 60,000 plus others and subscribe to the free Financial Samurai newsletter at financialsamurai.com/news. Take care. (explosion)