This question comes from Raj. Raj asks, how do you think about earnings across your various income streams? And what's your philosophy of personal finance? Well, Raj, I'm all in on crypto. All my money's in crypto. I think that is the key. Next question. No, I do not have money in crypto.

How do I think about personal finance? I am incredibly wary of lifestyle creep. If you live in a big city like I do in DC, you just know a lot of people. Or if you went to a fancy college like I went to, you just know a lot of people that have been snared by lifestyle creep.

Make more money, increase the cost of my lifestyle. Ooh, nice stuff. Make even more money. I'm going to increase a little bit further. Move to this nicer house. Get this nicer car. Get that second house. And it creeps, creeps, creeps. And then you're spending all your money. You're stressed out, and you're stuck in your job.

So I'm worried about that. I also have this mindset of everything can go away. So nothing scares me more than having a huge outlay I would have to meet every month just to keep our lifestyle rolling. And that if that money went away, that would be a problem. We couldn't afford a mortgage on our giant house anymore.

We couldn't make the car payments, et cetera. So I'm a big believer in you fix a lifestyle that you really enjoy, that matches your deep life buckets, where you live, and how you spend your time. You want to come up with a lifestyle that you really like. And then don't inflate it.

So if you end up making more money than you need to support that lifestyle, you save it. That's the general philosophy. Now, of course, upgrades will happen to this image, especially early on. So I do not live today the way I lived when I was a first-year grad student.

I don't live today even the way I lived when my wife and I first-- we first moved to DC. So you can do some-- you do some upgrades to this vision, but you're very careful, very conservative about it. This is just my approach. I'm just telling you how I think about it.

And then the money that comes in excess to that, for the most part, you save. And then I think from a stress perspective, it's fantastic because you don't feel like you're right on this line, that if anything goes wrong, if someone loses their job, if you have to-- like I might-- hey, I'm not going to take summer salary this summer as a professor.

It's not going to be-- that's a huge catastrophic problem. So that's the way I think about it. And then what do I do with that savings? Well, I mean, in my position, I'm a huge believer in investing in yourself. So I put a lot of-- the best investment you can make if you happen to be in an entrepreneurial-type field like I am is usually in yourself.

So I invest-- I am not skittish to invest in let's build out the podcast. I pay for my summer salary now out of my own book earnings so that I can write more. Because writing more actually then returns a lot more income, things like this. Invest in a new-- whatever-- web presence for your business.

So I'm really big in investing in myself because those payments really do-- that really pays off. And beyond that, I am boring. I'm a bogglehead, passive index. You're not going to beat the market. Your guy you know is not going to beat the market. This person that does derivatives for you is not beating the market.

You're not rich enough to have access to the people that have access to the things that's going to let them beat the market. So let's not worry about it. Index funding-- we have a guy that has custodial access of the accounts and just does that for us. It's incredibly boring, incredibly boring dimension funds indexing because I don't want to think about it.

The only other thing I will add is skim a little off of unexpected or extra money to do something fun but that doesn't inflate your lifestyle. I'm also a big believer in that. I started doing that even when I had no money. And then I'd make a little bit of money writing.

I always had a philosophy of take a sliver of whatever is extra and just do whatever. Do whatever. As long as it doesn't inflate your lifestyle. Don't use it as the down payment on a car that you have to pay really heavy payments on. But go on a trip or buy something that's nice.

Or you want to have some reward or fun with it. And that's great. You want to feel good about something went well. I sold a thing. I made some money. Take some of that money and go do something fun with it. I think that's fine. All right. So Raj, that's my philosophy.

Let me summarize this all. Fix a lifestyle that's really good that you really enjoy but that you can easily afford with your current financial status. And then as you make more, that's great. Save that money. Don't inflate your lifestyle. I do boring stuff with my saving. But if you have a chance to invest in yourself, that's always the best investment you can make.

And always take a sliver of things that are unexpected or extra or nice. Take a sliver to do something nice for yourself because life is short. Or if all that fails, it's all Dogecoin. I'm telling you, I have a system. I have a system. You have to-- you go to Dogecoin because you have to wait till a day of the week of the month that's a prime number, cyclically speaking.

But actually, what you really want to do is take the days of the week and translate them onto a finite field that you can have a bijection from to the primes. And then you want to take a prime of the prime number finite field, invest on that day. 37 days later, sell.

This is my system. That's the other thing I would say. So that will also make you a billionaire in about nine days. So you can do that, or you can do what I do, which is try to live reasonably, save what you make extra. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)