RPF-0035-Saving_Money_on_Communications_Bills_and_Much_Much

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Download the Ralphs app now to save big on your next purchase. Ralphs, fresh for everyone. Must have a digital account to redeem offers? Restrictions may apply. See site for details. Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance podcast for today, Tuesday, August 5, 2014. I'm very thankful that you are here with me today.

I'm your host, Matt Roberts. I'm your host, Matt Roberts. And I'm your host, Matt Roberts. And I'm your host, Matt Roberts. And I'm your host, Matt Roberts. And I'm your host, Matt Roberts. And I'm your host, Matt Roberts. And I'm your host, Matt Roberts. And I'm your host, Matt Roberts.

And I'm your host, Matt Roberts. And I'm your host, Matt Roberts. And I'm your host, Matt Roberts. And I'm your host, Matt Roberts. And I'm your host, Matt Roberts. And I'm your host, Matt Roberts. And I'm your host, Matt Roberts. And I'm your host, Matt Roberts. And I'm your host, Matt Roberts.

The second largest category is often transportation expenses. Then the third and fourth largest categories are often food and utilities as far as communications and entertainment bills. I see this as a huge area where we can save a lot of money. And Daley has written what I consider to be the comprehensive guide of how to do that.

He goes through and he talks about how-- exactly how he and his wife have high-speed cable internet. They have a cell phone for each of them. They have a home telephone number. They have--and then how they get their TV for a total of $46.50 a month. Now, if you've never considered this, I want to sell you on the idea of saving money in this area.

And I want to sell you with the concept of-- the concept of basically $300. And the idea of $300 is--I don't know what to name it. I should come up with some fancy name. But if you take any recurring monthly expense, and if you're interested in being financially independent and not having to work for money anymore, take any monthly expense that you have and multiply that monthly number by about $300.

And that's the number of amount of money that you'll need in savings to support that monthly expense into perpetuity. And that's based upon some math that is accurate, but it's not super precise, but it's basically based upon if you had a portfolio of investments earning a certain rate of return, and you were going to take about a 4% withdrawal from that portfolio every year, how much could you take that withdrawal basically into perpetuity?

So if you take that number and you say, "Let's say that we could go from $250 a month to $50 a month of household expenses," then that would allow you to not have to save an extra $60,000 for retirement. So I don't care if you're interested in a traditional retirement, and you're coming to me as a financial planner, and you're saying, "Joshua, can you put this together for me at the age of 65?" Or if you're interested in early retirement and you want to retire at 25, or it doesn't really matter.

That's $60,000 that you wouldn't need to save just by cutting your expenses. So this is a powerful, powerful thing, and that's why cutting expenses is so valuable, because think about how long it might take the average person to save $60,000. Think of yourself. How long, A, if you don't have $60,000 saved, how long do you estimate that it would take you to save $60,000?

And if you have $60,000 saved, calculate how long it took you to save the $60,000. And hopefully that will give you some motivation to dive into this subject. And we can do this with any monthly expense, because for every $100 of expenses that we can cut out of our budget, we can eliminate the need to save $30,000.

So this is a big deal, and I hope that helps you as far as to think about how big of a deal that this can be. The best place to start with this, I would encourage you, is with Daley's Frugal Communications Guide. You'll see it listed as the first link in the show notes.

This guide is exhaustive, and he walks through all of the details of everything you need to do to save on communications expenses. Then from there, I would encourage you to start looking around his website. And what you'll see on his website-- and his website is thetechmishugana.com-- what you'll see on his website is an in-depth information on different situations.

So let's say you don't follow his guide, and you have an iPhone, and you want to figure out, "How do I save money with my iPhone?" He's got an article on that. Or if you say, "I heard about Republic Wireless, and I heard about what's good with them, but how can I do that for cheaper?" He's got a 5,000-word article on that with exhaustive links and incredible amounts of information.

Daley is an excellent writer, and he is detailed, and he's got a history that he understands this technical stuff in an amazing way. So check out his website, and spend some time on that website for how to save money. And I would encourage you that this is the best resource to go from.

Listen to episode 4 of the show if you're looking for details in an audio format for how to save money. Some things have changed since then, but not a lot. Now this show, like I said in the introduction here, I intended it to be a short primer. But whether it's my learning as a host-- and I'm a rank amateur as a host and an interviewer, I'm learning interviewing skills-- or whether it's Daley, neither he nor I are known for our shortness of expression of communication, which is fine.

But we wound up just talking about a lot of things. We wound up talking about a lot of philosophy. And I think you'll really enjoy the interview, but I just wanted to make sure that you understand what it is going in. I guess I'm a little insecure-- I don't need to say "I guess." I am a little insecure about what the show should look like, and I think, "Well, I should have these perfectly tightened, perfectly buttoned-up pieces of audio," and I want to create that.

And yet I'm learning, but I like listening to conversations sometimes between people. So I hope that you enjoy this as a conversation. We started off with a focus of talking about-- we started off with a focus of talking about details of saving money, and that was what the initial part is.

But we wound up going into politics, we wound up going into economic theory, and neither he nor I were prepared to go there as far as with a written-out agenda, so it more just was a conversation between friends. And I think you'll find it interesting-- or I hope you do-- but I just wanted to give you kind of the warning.

So that's what you can see as far as the length of the show and how long--you can see how long the show is. So I think that's all I wanted to say here at the beginning. I hope you enjoy it. By the way, both he and I are quite opinionated, and both of us are perfectly willing to be wrong.

I'm totally willing to be wrong about anything, so don't get offended about opinionated. I think I enjoy a good conversation and a good debate. And I hope that you enjoy this conversation. Adele is an awesome guy, and he's an amazing resource. I would encourage you--please go look at his website and just enjoy the numbers.

And this is absolutely the number one place that I would point people as far as how to save money and get really good options that are really inexpensive. So with that, enjoy the in-depth conversation with the tech-macho-guna himself. So, Daley, welcome back to the Radical Personal Finance podcast. I'm glad you made the time to sit and chat with me here this afternoon.

It's great to be back, and by the way, it's great to have you back as well. Thank you. It took a little while to get here, and it took quite a bit of work, but I am glad to be back. So essentially what I thought I'd like to do is I'd like to offer a reprise of our past show.

So episode 4 of the Radical Personal Finance podcast was actually kind of an in-depth conversation and kind of a wide-ranging in-depth conversation on saving money on primarily cell phone bills. And since that time--that was a year ago-- so clearly I'm sure a lot has changed in the cell phone world.

Maybe a lot has, maybe a lot hasn't. But what I wanted to do--what's that? It has, but it hasn't. Yeah, it has, but it hasn't, right? So I'm excited about some of the things I see happening in the marketplace and the prices that are coming down, the competition that's happening.

I think it's wonderful for consumers. But since that time, you have released something that I'm glad that you finally released it called your Communication Super Guide. So share with us what is the Communication Super Guide, where did it originate, and what does it look like now? Well, the original Communication Super Guide was actually born out of an email that I had written for a young Irish friend who was coming over stateside.

And she needed guidance on communications needs while she was going to college here. And from that, it was a compilation of research I'd done on my own to save some money for my parents. And from there, it just kind of grew larger and larger and larger. And after a while, wound up coming across the Mr.

Money Mustache community and decided, you know what? Now's the time to put it together and make it public. And from there, it just kept growing, and I dived down the rabbit hole a little deeper. And from there, I finally just spun it off into its own standalone guide on Technical Meshugganah, where you can basically go through and take a hatchet to pretty much every part of your communications and entertainment bills and reduce costs.

And this is a guide that you're going to keep updated on the site now? As best as I can. And I am eventually going to try and spin the thing into a much larger project as well, an actual guidebook that ties in with the guide on the website itself, where I go into a lot more of the philosophy behind what kind of steers and gives the guide such a unique flavor in a world of boundless information on how to save money on these services in the first place.

And I'm glad you did that, because your guide has-- it's the best that I've come across as far as something to point people to. And I've been in the situation many times where people are saying, "Joshua, I'm trying to save money, so what can I do?" And I want to give them some ideas about how they can do it, how they can save.

But I don't have the time to sit and walk through every line item on their budget. But communications expenses is a major, major budget item for many families and many households. And as I've looked for resources, your guide on the Money Mustache forums was the best, but man, it was like 40 pages or 30 pages.

And I would have to tell them, start at the beginning. And then people say, "How am I supposed to read 30 pages?" So I'm glad that you're doing that, and I hope you are able to spin it into a guidebook that can be an authoritative resource for people. Well, that's the plan.

Lord only knows what will happen. Well, good. So let's talk through--the way I'd like to structure this interview, if you're willing, is at the beginning here, I'd like to talk through a high level of what people should be looking for and aware of in each of the communication categories.

As if we were sitting down having lunch, and we have 20 minutes, and you're going to kind of walk me through some quick hits. And let's use the sections of your guide as an outline. And then we will reference for the details, the specific companies, the specific details. Let's reference your guide, which will be updated.

And that way we can create a piece of content here that hopefully will remain relevant for more than a month. And I doubt the philosophy will change much from year to year, but I'm sure the underlying company may, or the underlying prices may, as the competition heats up. But that way we can provide kind of a guide for people to cut money.

So where do we start when it comes to saving money on communications? Well, the most easy to tackle low-hanging piece of fruit is probably television, honestly. Okay. We're going to keep this short and sweet. You don't need it. I was going to say, do people still watch TV? Yeah, they do.

It's just changed on which screens it winds up being watched on. People are watching it online through their computers, their smartphones, their tablets. But you're still being subjected to advertisements, product placement, and 95% of the stuff that's passing as entertainment these days is direct. It's embarrassing. You don't need to waste your valuable time watching loggers up in Alaska swear while driving trucks in the middle of snow or something.

I wound up running into that during a visit with some relatives a couple weeks back, and they were watching something on the History Channel. It actually left me longing for the days back when the History Channel was referred to as the Hitler Channel. Yeah. Most of the stuff that passes for entertainment anymore isn't entertainment.

So the sooner you kind of wake up and realize that cable is an absolute waste of money, the less money you're already spending right there. I'll give you a secret about my family. With the exception of, I think, two semesters in college, I've never owned a TV, and I've never had any kind of cable or satellite or any of that stuff in my house.

I'll tell you, if I were going to attribute one of my favorite things that my parents did for me was never having a TV in the house. So I would say a hearty amen to that point of conversation. I would say a hearty amen. Kick the idiot box to the curb and get on with your life.

But do you go through options for people who do want to watch TV programs that are better than cable? Where do you start with that? I do have some options on that. There are some online streaming media services like Netflix, Samsung Prime, Hulu Plus, that sort of thing. And, of course, all of the major networks.

There's not really many of them that aren't streaming content online anymore now. So it's not difficult to get your fix if you really, really need to get your fix. But the great thing is you stop paying for cable or satellite, and if you make watching TV or taking part in entertainment-- if you actually take it as something that has a purpose, maybe you can raise that bar and gravitate more towards something that's truly entertaining, where what's being produced is an actual story instead of just mindless drivel, which is what has been passed off as entertainment these past few years.

You don't feel strongly about this, do you? Oh, no, not at all. I couldn't possibly hide the fact that I've been influenced deeply by Four Arguments Against Television and The Plug-In Drug. Those are two fantastic books. And anyone who finds themselves watching too much TV or knows someone who does, you've got to really look at what's going on with advertisement and the medium of television proper.

And that even extends to the internet and the smartphones and the like. What makes all of these services so expensive is the addictive quality of it and the feeling that we have to keep using it. We have to keep using it. We have to keep using it. We have to keep going back to it.

We need distraction. We need to be able to keep our mind off of being quiet or being introspective or interacting with friends and family or the stranger walking down the street next to you. Cell phone costs, television costs, internet costs, these all tie in together to this needed seeming dependence upon the screen that we all kind of plug into.

It's been said for a long time that cybernetics are coming and having computers directly interface with our nervous system. But the thing is, is we've been at that place for decades already. The eyes are raw nerves looking out into the world. You look at a screen, whatever is being displayed on that screen is being put directly into your brain.

It's interesting. I was trying to guide the interview in terms of like here are some hardcore ways to save money. But let's go with the philosophy here for a minute and let's chat. It's my show. I can do what I want. I agree. It's fun. I agree with you.

One of the things that I've observed, two aspects. I've never read either of those books, but I just wrote them down. I'll have to check them out because it sounds like the type of book that I would enjoy reading. But two aspects of television that I'm particularly sensitive to.

One, I guess they're basically the same aspect with two different sides to it. One is dissatisfaction with life. I see this a lot of times in our culture, in the standard U.S. American mainstream culture. If you're exposed to a lot of media content, I'll use TV, that's fine. If you're exposed to a well-produced TV program, then it's easy to feel a sense of dissatisfaction with my own life.

I find it easy to feel a sense of dissatisfaction with my surroundings, whether that comes with how cool my gadget is, how beautiful my house is, how amazing my car is. Part of it is through the content and through the programming. Part of it may also be through the advertisements.

I find if I--a lot of magazines, and I allow a lot of magazines with advertising into my house, then I quickly start to get dissatisfied with what I have by focusing on what I don't have. It is scientifically created to do so. A good advertiser is going to create content that is compelling to the reader, to the watcher, the viewer, so that you need to increase someone's dissatisfaction with their current circumstance in order to have them choose your solution to that dissatisfaction.

By not having a TV--and I've actually cut off a bunch of magazine subscriptions in the past few years for the same reason-- is like, I don't need this dissatisfaction. I want to be content with what I have. The second aspect of the dissatisfaction that I've seen also that really frustrates me is on a global perspective.

TV pipes in around the world. It pipes in an altered reality into many places. Specifically, I remember when I was in college, I was in Nicaragua, and I spent some time out in the countryside of Nicaragua. I spent a week doing a host stay when I was in school with a family.

We were in very, very poor, basic conditions. We were in a very, very poor, basic house where there was no money. There was no indoor plumbing. The toilet didn't even have a roof on it. It was an outhouse next to the house that didn't even have a roof on it.

It just had a wall around it. We were out in the countryside in basically a penniless, very, very poor place. I was there for a week, and it was a really great experience. But the thing that frustrated me so much was that the primary activity of the family was sitting around at night, and they had a TV, they had electricity, they had a TV, and all the telenovelas from Brazil are being piped in.

So here we are in a desperately poor situation, and all that is being subjected to this family from the youngest--I think there were five or six kids-- from the youngest to the oldest, the baby up to the 20-year-old, was this lifestyle that was completely out of reach for them to reach.

But this was being portrayed as normal. In talking with them, I just see so clearly the dissatisfaction that that brings with the situation. It breaks my heart when I travel in the poor areas of the world, and I just see the richest 1%, as the saying would go in our current lexicon, the richest 1% is trying to show how the rest of the world should live, and the rest of the world is just being piped in every single night, every single night.

So it really frustrates me. It's a big issue for me. And it happens beyond just television. It happens on the Internet. It happens with Facebook. All of this, it winds up--you layer in this desire from Madison Avenue to basically foster dependence, foster and exploit this empty place in your life, because that's what they do.

You want to see some of the most advanced psychology of the past century? You look to Madison Avenue. You don't look to academia because they have learned how to manipulate the human psyche greater than anything and anyone else. And that's how they develop revenue, by making you want. And the medium itself winds up actually fostering and reinforcing that on top of it.

Because there are studies that have proven that blue light winds up increasing production of serotonin, I believe, which can be an addictive drug that your own body can produce. And it gets reinforced with things through positive reinforcement, through gamification of things. One of the big things with Facebook, the whole like system, "Oh, someone likes me!" And you get all keyed up, and you get that positive little burst of reinforcement, and you get another little drug cocktail piped into your brain, and it becomes addictive.

And because of that addiction, you wind up seeing a need for so much more communication than you actually need if it were a tool. And that is where you change your philosophy, you change your outlook. If I could start anywhere with the guide itself, I don't actually get into this particular message right off the bat with most people, because it can be a very jarring thing to tell someone, "Do you know why you spend so much money on all these services?

It's because you're addicted." That usually winds up falling on really deaf ears, and it just shuts down the mindset, and they turn off everything that you can possibly say from that point. So, truth be told, this is the underlying message to so much of what's in the guide, trying to get people to realize that you don't actually need as much as you think you do.

And once you get to that place, the ability to save becomes just that much easier. It's very true. It's very true, and I'm glad that you've brought that out. I recorded a show last week and released it. It was talking about what can we learn from homeless people and dumpster divers and vagabonds and hobos.

I am constantly struck when I look at my family and talk with my wife, and we talk about our goals. To me, the most pleasurable thing in the world is to learn and to think, and that's what I enjoy doing more than anything else. I enjoy sitting and learning and thinking, and that's what I enjoy.

But if I allow the external influences in, then it does affect what I see and what I do. It affects how I approach life. It causes me to say, "Well, I need to go and buy that. I need to do this other thing. I need to do the third thing." It really can be.

I practice this in my own life, but I hadn't thought about it as a piece of philosophy. You're right. If there could be no other way to increase satisfaction with life, it would probably be to minimize the amount of artificial external input that comes in through the communication media.

You're correct. We're not even just talking mass-produced media content from studios and the like. Social media, at its core, is ultimately about dissatisfaction with your own life and showing off to others when something goes right. Yeah, totally true. I've definitely read some studies on that. What was the study?

I wasn't prepared to reference him. Oh, no worries. Much higher rates of depression and dissatisfaction. When I'm hurt, when I'm lonely, and when I'm upset, I know some people do put that on Facebook, but I don't. I don't put it on there when I'm hurt and feeling lonely and upset.

I put it on there when I'm on top of the world, when I'm doing something cool, when I'm on a cool trip to a cool place. And it sets unrealistic expectations with other people because all they see is happy-go-lucky, rah-rah things from their friends. And it hinders and it actually negatively impacts more meaningful relationships, and it's one of the reasons why I've never done Facebook myself.

I just, I don't want to go there. I've seen what it does to other people, and I didn't like it. So, because I don't have that Facebook addiction, I don't feel it necessary to carry a smartphone where I can be able to tell people what's going on in my life and be able to find out what's going on in their lives.

So all of a sudden, I'm saving that much more money on my communications needs right there. So it is a philosophy that really is at the core of the guide itself, a sort of communications minimalism, kind of getting back to what you need versus what is manufactured in your life to create want.

Mm-hmm. Step two. Well, we already talked about TV and kicking it to the curb to be a major point in saving money. Second step would be to basically approach your internet as a backbone for most of your communications needs. And with that, you don't really need much. They're in the process, the FCC's in the process of trying to redefine broadband as 10 megabit these days due to so many streaming video services and the like.

And we get back to the whole streaming media thing and HD. If you're truly watching television to be entertained, you don't need to see people's mole hair growing out of their faces to be able to enjoy the story. If you really want to watch streaming video, standard def is fine.

And that means that you can get away comfortably with three to five megabit service because voice over IP, telephone communications doesn't really need that much bandwidth. It can honestly get away with not much more than dial-up speeds. Granted, quality kind of suffers a little bit down at that end.

But you kind of strip out that need for streaming video. That three to five megabit is plenty for your needs, which means you can subscribe to the cheapest package available from whatever ISP is in your area. And as long as there aren't prohibitively negative data caps in place where if you were to introduce in streaming video or something that you'd wind up going over, it's not a big deal.

From there, we've tackled television. We've set up the Internet as your primary backbone for communication. From there, you need to basically look at your cell phone bill. That's the other really low-hanging piece of fruit. If you've got a good Internet connection, if you wind up spending most of your time at home anyway, there's no sense in spending money on mobile communications if you are home.

And mobile communications is so much more expensive than VoIP over an Internet connection. Even looking at Republic Wireless as an example, I'm not a big fan of them, but they even have a $5 a month Wi-Fi-only unlimited talk and text plan. That even is kind of expensive for what they're providing, but it shows you how much cheaper it is to basically provide your own bandwidth and get a VoIP phone number than it is to pay for mobile phone service.

Once you work out how much you're actually using at home versus how much you need out and about, then you start to realize, "Okay, if I'm not participating in things like social media, if I take some of my tools offline instead of relying heavily on data, all that's really left is some texting and some minutes for when I'm actually out and about and I actually need to communicate." That's not going to really take that much in the way of mobile service.

And like in my case, I'm getting away with between $5 to $10 worth of mobile time at 5 cents a minute and 10 cents a megabyte and two sentences of text through P-Tel. And I've been busy. I'm not someone who's just sitting around doing nothing. I do use quite a bit of mobile services in my day-to-day line of work, but I'm still getting away with only needing $5, $10 a month.

And that says something right there. If you prioritize, you can – and you offload most of what you would revert to mobile service out of laziness when you're home because you already have the mobile service. Well, why do I need a second phone? You know why you need a second phone?

To keep costs low. I'll tell you, one of the things that – the last time we spoke, I was using – I think I was using at the time AirVoice Wireless on my iPhone. And when I made the switch from – let's see. I had gone from my path through this – through saving money on communications bills was I started with AT&T.

And I had two iPhones on AT&T with unlimited everything, one for me and one for my wife. And then I moved to Straight Talk because I was doing at the time – I was doing a lot of talk on the phone. And I was in sales and I was on the road a lot.

And so I said, "Okay, I need unlimited talk and text." And that was when I moved to Straight Talk. And I used to use a ton of data. I think I would always get – even though I was paying for the unlimited plan with AT&T, which I was paying the extra money for the unlimited iPhone plan that was grandfathered in, that they didn't offer anymore, I would still – I would go over this data cap and I'd get this stupid text message from them saying, "We're throttling your data because you've gone too fast." And talk about making your customers upset.

Tell them that they have unlimited – tell them they have unlimited data and then go ahead and tell them and find out it's not unlimited. And I've since learned that that's the same with all the providers. Unlimited data is not unlimited data. There is no such thing as unlimited.

I mean if you ran the numbers on what actually constituted unlimited, good luck actually trying to find a provider who would give that to you. Right. No, I've since found that out, which I don't understand how – right, unlimited with an asterisk nest to it. But we won't go down that path right now.

So I switched to Straight Talk and I used Straight Talk for a while and that was great. And then I sat down and I said, "Well, how much am I actually using?" And then I went to Air Voice. And what I found by going to Air Voice with their $10 a month plan, which is similar to what PlatinumTel offers, is that I very rarely – I very rarely was going over $10.

And I would go from $10 to $20, something like that. And I would very rarely – I would very rarely ever go over the $10. And the same thing for my wife. And that was her – that was her primary number. But when you sit down and look at it and you have that little meter on your phone, which Air Voice does, where it tells you how much you – you're actually – every time you finish a phone call, how much it cost you, you realize that whatever the $3 a day it was that I used to be spending, or even the – with Straight Talk back when it was 40 – I think it was paying 45 bucks back then.

I would never even get close to $1.50 a day of usage time. And then I – so for a long time, I wasn't using any data. Then I just started using data again. And even though I was using data on a data-heavy phone, which an iPhone is, and even though I'm using data-intensive stuff, I still was nowhere near the dollar – the dollar a day that it used to be.

And so I wish all phones came with a meter that would meter it out. And I think all of a sudden you would have the majority of people recognizing what you've just said, that we don't actually use that much and we don't actually need that much. Most of the people who swear up and down that they need a lot of data usually wind up falling into one of two camps.

They are the people who need to constantly be entertained. So they're either plugged into Facebook or some sort of data-heavy online game that's constantly advertising at them. Or they are people who don't know how to navigate. And I don't say this to disparage people who use GPS services, but by the same token, the ability to actually navigate without the assistance of an electronic device is becoming a dying art.

It really is. And I've even recently had to get my own mother over onto GPS service because she's finding herself needing to drive more these days. And one of her greatest fears has always been potentially getting lost. And so a GPS can be fantastic for that, but I have set expectations with her.

I've told her, do not use the GPS unless you absolutely need to. Learn how to navigate on your own. And I'm actually incredibly proud of her because I deliberately took her out into the country a few weeks back, got her lost. She didn't know where she was, and I told her, okay, get us back home.

And she used things like country road names where they're using numbers to identify mile markers on country roads, the direction of the sun, physical features of the landscape to be able to get her way back. And that is something that people have kind of lost the ability to do.

And you combine that with a GPS, an offline GPS at that, you don't really need that much data. But the other class of people who wind up burning so much data are the type of people who wind up using stuff like Google Maps and Waze, which are incredibly dangerous to use in the first place because it's constantly beckoning your attention for input during navigation, especially with Waze.

Which just, that's a bad thing to do when you're driving. And it's up there with trying to text while you're driving or something like that. I don't necessarily personally have a problem with people who talk on the phone while they're driving as long as they're using a hands-free kit.

Because from that aspect, it's not much more distracting than talking to someone sitting right next to you in the car. But when you're actually interacting with your smartphone while you're driving, that's where things start to get dangerous and your attentions get divided and you become a bit of a menace on the road.

So if you have offline GPS that doesn't require your interaction and you don't remain dependent on it to be able to get around anywhere and everywhere, you don't wind up needing that much data. So we've already knocked down the two biggest data requirements for pretty much everyone. If you learn how to actually navigate and drive, you learn how to lessen your dependence on GPS, you learn -- you utilize offline GPS that doesn't require a live data connection.

And you cut that dependence on needing to be constantly entertained with shiny, blinky, moving pictures, then most of your data needs are going to be minuscule on the mobile end. >> So now that you've made yourself -- because I agree with you. But now that you've made yourself sound like a crotchety old guy -- >> Windbag.

>> I was just going to say. >> Get off of my lawn. >> We've lost all the audience that's 30 and younger. I think it's a good point. About the GPS. I think it's a good point for -- and I know you've written about this and I know you've got opinions on it.

About that just because a device can do everything doesn't mean that it should do everything. And I get very -- I love having the ability to use my phone for GPS if I need it. But I get so annoyed trying to use it for GPS. I have a -- in my car I have a Garmin, $100 Garmin that I paid $100 for it in 2008.

Their entry level GPS. It was on a Christmas sale and I paid $100 for it. That has been the best device that I have ever -- electronic device. Six years later it's still cranking away. Exactly as good as it was the day that I got it except for the fact that the battery doesn't last.

The battery is pretty much shot at this point. But it navigates flawlessly. I can put it on the floor of the car and it navigates perfectly and it still finds the GPS signals. It doesn't require any kind of subscription. And it's just far easier and more intuitive to use than a cell phone is.

And I see this with electronic devices that in general having a purpose built machine, they just last longer and doesn't break. It doesn't crash. It doesn't lose the signal. It doesn't -- I mean it just works a lot better. So I would recommend -- I still think having a GPS is so useful.

Just get the $100 hardware one. And the crazy thing is what you spent $100 on back in 2008 because everyone is focusing on convergence with mobile devices and having it do everything all in one device, not to say that that can't be useful under certain circumstances with some people.

And truth be told, and I'm going to sound like a hypocrite saying this, my mother's GPS, I wound up putting her on a Moto E with a Sygic as her GPS service simply because it was going to be easier for her to only have to keep track of and carry around one device.

But the point still stands that a standalone device is significantly cheaper. And the great thing is because everyone is so focused on that convergence wanting their cell phone to do everything, you go down to a local pawn shop, what you spent $100 on new back in 2008, you can pick up for $25, $30 now.

Yeah, yeah. And it doesn't come with a monthly contract. And there's no monthly contract. There's no requirement for data. Some of these even have support for Bluetooth to where you could do traffic updates on these things for a fraction of the amount of data that just Google Maps uses on its own.

Right. Yeah, it's a good just reminder. I think I did a show, I don't remember what number it was, but I did a show talking about just alternative ways of thinking through things. And one of the things that I see more and more is that the way to save money is oftentimes thinking creatively and avoiding ongoing costs.

So if you can just avoid the contract, even if the device is more expensive, to get a device that's really great but cuts the ongoing cost, that is probably going to be cheaper in the long run to follow that. What else as far as saving money? So we hit on entertainment, we hit on Internet speeds.

What else is on your list? We hit on data, cell phone service, bringing VoIP into the fray to reduce costs. And the thing, kind of going back to the VoIP point, if you want the convenience of a single phone number for contact, which I think is one of the big selling points with a lot of Republic people these days, because they like that convergence between the home phone and the mobile phone and being able to take advantage of some of the cost savings of VoIP in that setup, you don't need to rely on Republic to be able to reproduce that.

You could bring VoIP into your setup for a single device or even utilizing a home phone to where when you make calls out, they're only getting what phone number you want them to call you back on to where it's basically invisible to them. They think you only have one phone number.

So let's jump to Republic, lest you become known as the Republic anti-matter. Republic, darn kids, get off my lawn, etc. I'm glad you're able to not take yourself too seriously. You just released an epic post on Reddit. I guess I would characterize it as how to build a DIY Republic wireless setup for $2 a month was your ultimate version.

And full disclosure, I actually just went over to the dark side about a month ago and switched to Republic wireless. I'll never forgive you for that. I know. I'm doomed. But I think it'll be a useful thing for us to talk through and I'll tell you the reasons I did it.

And to me, I think it shows -- let me tell you the reasons I did it and then I think it'll be a good case study for how to think through communications. And here's what I mean. When I read your Republic wireless guide, and I think Republic is probably -- although when I was looking at it, I noticed that Freedom Pop also has a competitive offering.

It came down to if you're looking for a lot of stuff for pretty cheap, then Freedom Pop and Republic wireless may be two things to consider. But each of them has their own unique drawbacks. But when I was looking and sitting and looking at what I was trying to do, my iPhone 4 is at the end of its life.

The home button hasn't worked for a long time. And so I was using the on the screen button and it's just getting slower and slower and slower and slower. And I cleared everything off -- what's that? You know you can fix that, right? Yeah, so tell me how to fix it because I may still switch something around.

But when I was -- yeah, how do you fix it? Tell me. Well, you can actually get replacement parts for the iPhone. And you go over to iFixit, they have teardown instructions. But why is it getting slower? Well, the slower thing, that may be -- when was -- just out of curiosity, when was the last time you kind of did a factory reset on the thing and started fresh?

Yeah, so that was -- I actually have done that a couple times, including just a couple weeks ago. So I have fixed things on it. I can fix the button. That's no problem. I just haven't decided to spend the 50 bucks on fixing the button. I replaced the dock because the dock stopped working.

And I went to the Apple store and they said, "You need a new phone." And I took it down to somewhere else. I didn't have time to get the tools. I took it down to one of the iFixit places and they replaced the dock and it was working. And one of the other buttons had failed on me, the screen on/off button had failed, and they replaced that one.

And I just didn't want to spend another 50 bucks on them fixing the home button. But it just seems like it gets slower and slower and slower. And just sitting at home, for example, running Facebook on my phone at home on Wi-Fi where it should be fast, it is horrifically slower.

And the only thing I can figure out is that somehow with all these updates that Apple is doing with the iOS, with the operating system, it's just completely taxing the hardware of the phone. It's a combination of bit rot and code bloat, ultimately. The thing with Apple is they are big into playing Dobsolescence and they are eventually going to try and tank whatever.

Whenever they abandon one of their phones on OS updates, they're going to ensure they abandon it in as terrible a state as possible to try and encourage you to buy the new shiny. You've seen it with the 3GS, the iPhone 4, the older iPhones. It's not that you necessarily need all of these features they're cramming on there, but they're getting on there anyway.

But one of the things I've also noticed with iPhones especially, I know a couple people who've had iPhones and when they start running into some of the sluggishness, they've found that actually backing up their data, wiping the phone, and reloading everything actually kind of straightens things out a little bit.

Which indicates to me that there may be a little bit of a memory management issue with iOS specifically. One of the other things I've also noticed is that it really likes to run a lot of apps in the background. It does, yeah. If things are starting to slow down, you can hold down that home button and bring up all kinds of other apps that are running in the background.

You can close them out and that can do a lot to speed things up as well and just kind of approach things from a minimalist standpoint. Just because iOS wants to try and run everything all at once doesn't mean you actually have to. I agree. Apple claims that doesn't slow it down, but I've reset the phone, I've wiped it, did a factory reset, I've taken most of the apps off, and then I still have found it agonizingly slow.

And even loading podcasts. Just right now, I've got it sitting here in my hand because I still have it, and I'm sitting here pulling up the podcast app, and I click on a podcast, and just the time it takes just to start a podcast playing, it's horrendous. And so I haven't been able to figure that out.

That may be either a software thing or it could be an actual, there may be something wrong with the storage memory on it. Something's up with it. Yeah, something's up. It's been a disaster. In your case, it may not be as easily fixed as some other people's, but one of the things I have noticed with a lot of people is their smartphone starts to slow down for whatever reason, and they think it's broken.

Sure. Not to go off away from Republic Wireless, let's loop back to that in a moment, but let's also talk about a rather important thing with smartphones. People have been conditioned to think that they need to buy a new one every couple of years, and when a system slows down, and I've seen it with computers too, the computer starts to slow down because of code bloat, because of bit rot within the system, fragmented files, and they think that the computer is somehow broken, or the smartphone is broken and it needs to be replaced.

But in reality, all you need to do is maybe uninstall a few apps that you don't actually need anymore, reset the phone or the computer back to factory, reload the information back onto it, and a lot of times those apps alone can breathe new life into an old device.

And here's where you get to my observation, is that it comes down to skill. Because I'm having the same issue with my computer, and I am not a techie guy. I hate dealing with the techie stuff, and I do what I have to do. But that's exactly what happens.

And my computer is tremendously slow, and I cannot figure out how to get it going faster. And then you get to the point where you get this frustration level, which I feel, is that I don't know how to make it go, but then I have to, so that means that because I don't have the personal skill to make it go faster, I have to go and hire somebody, and it's like, why should I hire somebody?

I want it to work, and maybe I just need to go get a new device. That's part of the problem, too, is electronics have gotten so cheap now, and the labor to do technical support is still so expensive, that people see the price on a new computer versus paying someone to basically wipe and start fresh for you as being the same amount of money, and they feel like they're getting more from the electronic device.

But the fact of the matter is, people don't do this with cars. Your car starts to slow down, you pay someone to tune it up. You don't throw away the car and buy another car. Why should we be doing that with electronic devices? Because that's just filling up landfills, you've got places like Agbogbloshie, it is a place over in Africa that is a graveyard for the West's electronics.

I've read about that, where they're recycling, there's a lot of people that are going through and destroying electronic components to try to pull various parts out and resell them to recyclers. I wouldn't exactly call it recycling. It's more like a toxic graveyard where people try and burn the plastics off of the semi-precious metals and try and resell those for pennies to recyclers from that point.

You look at some of the photos from that area, it's disgusting and it's disturbing. And places like this exist because we have this unrelenting maw of replace, replace, replace, when we don't need to. Computers alone have been as configured, maybe stick in a little extra RAM, but for most people's needs, a computer from a decade ago is still more than capable of doing everything that most people need today.

But they're not willing to either learn how to manage software on their own and do the maintenance on their computers to keep them running, or they're not willing to pay the necessary cost of ownership that these devices have to be able to keep them running. To me, tech support for a computer is kind of like a mechanic.

It's going to be part of the cost because, like it or not, these things aren't actually appliances. They need some level of maintenance and upkeep. So when you buy a computer, expect to spend the money to do maintenance and upkeep or spend the time to do the repair work yourself.

And it's really not that difficult. As long as you get in a good habit of backing up your data on another device, like an external hard drive or something, starting fresh is not that difficult, no matter what operating system you're using, no matter what device you're using. It's a good point.

And I've read, what I read about that article, what did you call it? Agbogbloshie. I think I'm pronouncing that right. Forgive me if I'm not world citizens. No problem. I read an article on a guy who had invented a method for sorting plastics based upon their density for recycling.

And they were talking about how that--exactly what you were talking about, Agbogbloshie or whatever it is. And it was just horrendous to see that. And so I don't like replacing stuff. I like to use stuff. But the situation that I found myself in, and I'll explain kind of how I wound up at Republic Wireless, is my phone isn't working.

It's got to the point where the thing was just shutting off. I got one point where I pushed a button and somehow the electronics got overloaded and now the screen won't come on. And when the actual screen won't come on, that's a problem if that's my primary-- especially with me running--I've got a couple of businesses that I run and I need the phone to work.

When that's all of my email communication, I need the mobile communication due to the way that my lifestyle is configured. And so when you have to wait for the phone battery to stop, to die, so that you can reset the whole phone, that's really frustrating. And so then I'm in a situation, and I'm intensely conscious of the need of skill, of the cost of skill.

I take everything in my life and I multiply it times 300, because that's the amount of money that I need to maintain something into perpetuity. So when it comes to the reason to save money on expenses, if you could save $100 a month on--if we're working on financial independence, which I am--if we could save $100 a month on communications, then that's $30,000--on anything--that's $30,000 fewer dollars that we need to save in order to--that's $30,000 fewer dollars that we need to save in order to maintain that lifestyle into perpetuity.

So it's worth a lot of money for me to figure out how to substitute skill for the need to spend any $100 a month. But I get there, and, okay, my device doesn't work, so I sit down to do the research. And I went back to the guide, your guide.

I look through it, and I'm saying, "Okay, what do I need? What do I basically need?" Well, I made the decision that I need mobile data, and I need the social apps. So with me running an online business, I'm using the social apps to connect with the people that are listening to the show.

So it's important to me to be able--when someone contacts me on Twitter, it's important to me to be able to use my device and reach back to them quickly, or Facebook and Instagram and these types of things to reach the people who are listening to the show. But yet, okay, so that means I need to kind of do something different.

But it's so overwhelming to try to figure everything out. And when my service provider--my Internet service provider is flaky sometimes, and I can't figure out what the issue is there, and my voiceover IP isn't very good, and I'm tired of spending money, the Republic Wireless offer, like, "Listen, get a device that's new.

It works. It's going to run all the apps that I want to run it on." And it just simply works with a relatively low monthly cost. It's a siren song. And even though I'm intensely conscious of the fact that there are downsides, it works. And that's the situation that I find myself in.

And I think I'm more of a typical--in many ways, I'm normal in a lot of ways, where a lot of people are facing the same thing. I need something that's just simple. And it goes back to, what's your Iron Engineer's Triangle? Easy, good, or cheap, right? And I come back to this again and again.

Right now I'm trying to offer something for my mom, for her, because her flip phone is dying, and also for my sister. And I just get down to it and I say, "I need something simple. I need it to be simple and to work." And they're not techie people.

It's not worth it to them to take the time to kind of go through. And so you wind up with Republic Wireless being the simple one. So feel free to comment. But I think that's the situation. I feel like there's this gap still between the techies that are able to do things and willing to work through things and figure things out, and then the non-techies.

And we need better options to cross that gap. Well, that's one of the reasons--one of the primary forces behind the guide for myself is to try and dispel the notion that these technical solutions, that technology is some sort of magical wizardry that only the elite can handle and manage.

Because in reality, it's a lot simpler than most people give it credit for. And with this latest post where I'm talking about how to reproduce the Republic Wireless experience on your own for even less, the biggest thrust of that was to demonstrate how non-technical it really is to be able to reproduce it.

Most people think, "Oh, I have to set up all of these things on my own. I don't know how to overcome all this." And the fact of the matter is that you don't actually have to do much to do it. That divide is not as--it's not some insurmountable crevasse that you can't overcome.

And in reality, a lot of this stuff is incredibly easy to do once you actually know how to do it. And that's one of the things I always try and do, is try and teach my readers how to do this on their own so they don't have to depend on other people to make this magic happen for them.

Right. And I see the value of it. I mean, if you just think about the fact how long--and I would just take it back to that. And I tell myself and also just anyone listening, if you figure you have to save $30,000 to provide for this $100 a month worth of skill, how long does it take you to save the $30,000?

It's probably going to be a shorter time for me to teach myself how to substitute skill for the need of buying the solution. And so it's certainly a factor for me. I want to ask for some advice, and I'm actually interested. So here's what I don't like about Republic Wireless.

I think my user report on it from--I think I've had it for almost a month now. Phone works great. I went with the Moto X, which is the more expensive one. Phone works great. Camera works great. Everything, it's a joy to use. It's super great. Everything is nice and easy about it.

I'm on their $25 plan, which winds up being $33 after all the stupid taxes. To which I have to ask, why didn't you just buy the cheaper G in the first place? So that one is because of my frustration with the fact--well, here's why. It goes back to planned obsolescence.

Every single electronic device that I've ever bought, with the exception of a GPS or maybe a camera, I don't know. But it seems like they all just stop working over time. And because of this planned obsolescence model, you get to the point and you say, I'm not like you in the sense of-- Well, in this way, here's what I mean.

There is a generational difference between us. I'm almost 30 years old. I want my phone to do everything. And this is something I'm aware of it. I'm conscious of it. But I want to do everything on my phone. I don't want to get up and go and use the computer.

I want my phone to--I find myself, I prefer watching YouTube videos on my phone. I'm more like, I just do everything with my phone because that's what I am accustomed to. And I prefer the phone experience beyond going in and using the computer. And it doesn't make it right or wrong.

That's my philosophy. So because I get so much use off of the phone, it's tied to me. It's basically what I go to for just about everything as far as the first thing to go to. Because I get so much use off of it, I figure it's worth $150 for me to have just everything be a little bit nicer.

And have everything work a little faster and just be a little bit better. But therein lies the issue at hand. Smartphones have hit the same plateau point with performance that we've had with computers for a good number of years. And I'm going to tell you this right now. Outside of maybe having a nicer camera and the ability to do 4G data on the Sprint network with the Moto X in Republic's case.

The only difference, I mean you can throw synthetic benchmarks at it until you're blue in the face and prove that the Moto X is a superior phone to the Moto G. Or even to the Moto E. The newer Moto E which is only $130. Brand new, GSM unlocked, carrier unlocked.

Take it to any GSM provider you want. This was actually the phone I got for my mother. Because she's got a nasty habit of, if you could describe any one person in the world who has the worst luck with refurbished equipment, it would be her. So I just decided we'll avoid dealing with refurbished, even though I much prefer shopping refurbished myself.

I never have any problems myself with doing it. But for some reason, some people just get all the lemons in the world. So I just wanted to bypass that possible risk and crucify me now, oh tree-hugging people out there, call me a hypocrite for doing so. If you knew my mother the way I knew my mother, you'd probably do the exact same thing.

We don't judge on this program, Daley. We throw the dogma and the judgment away. So be proud of your choice. But the thing is, in reality, the only difference you're going to see in performance between the Moto X and even the Moto E is going to be on high-end things like 3D rendering for gaming.

And for trying to pump HD video out onto a big screen TV through the HDMI port or something like that. Things that if you've already bought into the philosophy of the guide, you're not going to give a toss about anyway. Which comes down to if the Moto E is capable of performing just as well as the Moto X in day-to-day operations, then why spend the money for it?

Especially if these phone manufacturers, and especially in the case of the Moto E, G, and the X, where you've got this built-in battery that only Motorola can technically replace for you, just like the iPhones. I will admit I didn't really like that particular part of the Moto E, but that's kind of beside the point.

I'm a big fan of user-serviceable equipment, especially in regards to batteries, because batteries do die. But if these manufacturers design these things with the idea of planned obsolescence anyway, and the phones for the past couple, three years being manufactured are already more than capable of handling people's needs indefinitely at this point, then the planned obsolescence is going to come around to build quality.

And you're really probably not going to get any more length of time out of, say, a Moto X than you are going to out of a G or an E. Which means two, three years before it starts acting twitchy in a way that you can't fix. Which is probably due to some sort of issue with the silicon in there, with memory or something along those lines, and you wind up having to toss it anyway.

So why spend the extra money up front for the nicer device when everything that you need to be done can be done on the lower-end device, and you're likely to get roughly the same lifespan out of both devices equally? Yeah, it's a good point. And I guess the big thing is that knowing my answer to that, as far as why I did it, is that my answer is not knowing how much I use a phone, and knowing how much it is a part of -- sounds so stupid when you say it out loud -- knowing how much it is a part of my daily life, which is how it is for many of us, then I don't want to be frustrated.

And so because I lack the technical competence to be confident that the Moto G or the Moto E is as good as the Moto X, that I figure, well, I probably am going to get what I pay for, and I'll just go ahead and pay for the fewer problems and the better service.

And in a lot of ways, that is true. You get what you pay for. And I've always been a proponent of the philosophy a poor man can never afford to buy garbage. So in a lot of regards, that is a logical approach. But the problem is that we're getting back into market manipulation and advertising and trying to sell people more than they actually do need.

And the fact of the matter is that there are incredibly well-built, solid choices further down the scale. And that, again, comes back to one of the reasons why I do the guide, why I have Technical Meshugana, is to try and dispel a lot of these myths, and to help people realize and understand that they don't need to spend as much as they think they do to get quality.

Right. So here's my frustration with Republic Wireless, and here's where I think you, I have an impression that you might be able to help me. I'm tired of Google owning my soul, and I have this intense cognitive dissonance. I have a problem. My life is basically run by Google, and it's really convenient, and it feels really good for my life to be run by Google.

But I really don't want Google running my life. But I don't know how to disentangle. My email is with Google. My calendar is with Google. Google owns everything. Facebook owns all my data. LinkedIn owns all my data. And everything is, just everything is tracked, and everything is done. And I don't know how to disentangle myself from it.

And I just figure, well, I'll just clog up the system with as much data as possible. But I'm really more and more concerned with trying to figure out, is there a way, without too much trouble, that I can take back some control over my privacy? And I can't figure, I don't know how to do it.

It's beyond my skill level at the moment. And I figure some people have to be working on solutions. But what would be your, if I were concerned with privacy, and I wanted, here's what I want from a phone. I want a device that is easy to, I want a device that works well, that, I actually don't even care about taking phone calls very much, because I don't like talking on the phone.

But I want a device that gets text messages, and that allows me to run social apps. But I would like to get rid of Google, and get Google out of my life. Where do I go, and how do I do it? Well, the first thing I'm going to say is that you're not going to be able to do that by using Android.

I know, that's my point. I do know that much. So, problem is, is that there's not really any other alternatives per se. There is things like CyanogenMod, where it is a fork of the Android project, where you can optionally opt in to including the Google code base, and the Google services with the phone.

But the problem is, is that with a provider like Republic Wireless, you're locked out of that phone. It is proprietary, and you cannot do anything to it, which means you can't flash it over to another Android build or something like that. You are completely dependent on them to provide you with the services, and you have to take it as it is.

So, there's really going to be absolutely no way whatsoever of being able to untangle from Google going the Republic route. And as much as going like CyanogenMod kind of gives you the opportunity to untangle a certain bit from Google, you then have to devise replacements for all of these services.

And there are plenty -- you look around on the Google Play Store, there are apps, there are options that offer completely non-synchronizing offline versions of these apps. And technically speaking, I think it's even possible to utilize these apps on Android without tying in an account with it. But it's the cost of convenience.

If you want to be able to have your data everywhere, have your contacts and your calendar everywhere, and to automatically synchronize between your desktop and your phone and all of that, that requires having middleman. And that is the problem with cloud services. There's not much in the way of roll your own cloud services.

There are a few things out there, but they are considerably more technical to set up than a lot of the stuff that I talk about. So, these really aren't within the average Joe Sixpack's reach. Right. And basically my impression is -- so, I was thinking about some of the other apps and things that I do use.

So, for example, I deposit all of my checks through the phone using my bank's -- I use USAA, and I use their app on my phone to deposit all of my checks. And I use a lot of things like that. I use a lot of apps like that. And so, basically, if you're going to use those apps, the convenience, you need to be, for the most part, you need to be on iOS or Android.

And so, with iOS, I'm stuck with expensive devices, and I can kind of cobble them -- I can hack them together like I've done with AirVoice, and that works perfectly fine. But it's not quite the same experience as it was to have the brand new, expensive, so fun, super -- it's not quite the same experience.

And it's a lot cheaper, so it was always worth it to me, but it's not the same experience. Or I can go with Android, and it just seems to me that the simplest option -- the simplest option to get the full experience is the Republic Wireless, or I guess maybe the Freedom Pop type of approach, where you give up something, but you're getting a cheaper option for the full experience.

But I haven't -- I don't know. >> Well, ultimately, it winds up boiling down to that you sacrifice privacy for convenience with all services of this nature. And I think it is kind of important for us to actually briefly visit on the topic of why I'm specifically so "anti-Republic." I don't want to hate on Bandwidth.com.

I don't want to hate on Republic. I really don't. But the problem is there are two core problems with the Republic service. One is the legal boilerplate that you have to agree to to sign up to the service. And there are things in those terms and conditions that you have to agree to that you wouldn't have to agree to with any other mobile provider.

One of them, the biggest thing, being a minimum $500 service fee plus for violating their usage restrictions on their unlimited terms. Usage restrictions that I might add, they don't actually disclose outside of data. And that penalty for crossing that line starts at $500 plus X amount of money for however many minutes, texts, and megabytes of data used in that violation period.

Do you know if anyone's ever actually been charged with that? Have you seen anything where they've actually followed through with that? I'm not entirely sure. But the thing is, it's like Chekhov's gun. If it's there, it's going to be used. So you can't ignore it. Just because they haven't enforced it yet doesn't mean they won't ever.

It's there for a reason. And if you read through something and you find something objectionable, don't be afraid to walk away from that service. That's one of the things that's guided so many of my choices in the guide. I read through the legal contracts that go with these providers.

And if I find something hideously objectionable, either via privacy or terms of service or what defines unlimited and the financial repercussions therein of it, I'm not going to pick it. And that's one of the reasons why I won't jump on board the Republic bandwagon. And by the way, guys at Bandwidth.com, if one of you actually happen to listen to this podcast, you want to make nice with me?

Start with your terms of service. Seriously. You get rid of the really objectionable stuff and actually outline what unlimited means on your service, I'm not going to give you the hard time that I do. Plain and simple. But beyond that, that leaves the other thing, the proprietary nature of the service.

And I will give them props. They finally allow people to reactivate used handsets. That was something that didn't happen before. And that was one of the things that really drove me up a wall, especially in relationship to electronic waste and the like. So being able to reactivate handsets, I'm going to give them props on this.

Congratulations, guys. Thank you for doing that. You're no longer bastards to the environment like you used to be. So good on you. Thank you. But it still doesn't change the fact that you can't bring your own device and you can't take your device to any other provider. And that means you are locked into them and them alone.

So what happens if Bandwidth decides to shut down Republic because it's no longer making the money? What do you do with the phones? Right. And the market and there's no secondary market in that case. There's no secondary market, just like there wasn't a secondary market for used Republic phones that had already been activated.

I mean, back before they started allowing reactivations, you couldn't give away Republic phones on eBay. Interesting. I didn't know that. Yeah. You'd see people, you know, some people would get the wild idea that they could resell it for near the price that they bought the thing for and they'd just sit on there for weeks until the ad ran out.

But the ones that actually potentially sold, they were selling for like five, ten bucks basically for parts. Wow. So, you know, I definitely, this whole planned obsolescence thing, it's a problem that I wish that, I mean, I just don't know the answer. Because, well, from a financial planner's perspective, it's interesting.

Everyone loves to hate on transportation costs, I tell you, among a lot of younger clients and a lot of younger people. I find many people are very intelligent about transportation costs. But if you start talking about communications costs, it's astounding. It's astounding how many 500, 600, 800 thousand dollar devices people, you know, young people are continually buying.

And you're either paying for it on a monthly basis through a contract and a discounted purchase price. Or you're paying for it straight out and doing some other arrangement with your monthly cost. And it's definitely an area that I think we need to focus on as far as savings.

And I would love to see more competition coming out and more people fixing the obsolescence model and just stronger things. It makes me think, I have wondered, and I'm curious, one of the things I considered, I considered just going with the non-smartphone phone, trying to figure something like that out.

Which was so frustrating. I went and actually looked to try to buy a non-smartphone handset. And I went to the store, I was like, "Okay, I'll go buy one, I'll put my Air Voice SIM card in it or something." I don't even know if that would work, but I guess I should ask you.

But I went and looked to try to buy a handset, I couldn't find, and I'm like, "I should pay 20 bucks or something for a handset." I couldn't find anything to buy that would be a non-smartphone handset. And my thought was, "Well, I'll just use a tablet. I'll use my iPad and use my iPad on Wi-Fi for any apps that I'm going to use." And then I'll just have this little dinky handset for any phones.

Is that an intelligent solution in any circumstance? It could be, potentially. It certainly could go in a hybrid approach with a tablet or whatnot. But one of the problems is no one's selling those cheaper phones anymore in stores outside of locked to prepaid operators. Because it's all about margin with brick-and-mortar stores.

They have to be able to compete and stay competitive with outfits like Amazon. And the problem there is that because of that, they deliberately limit their selection to stuff that's going to give them a higher margin on sale. So they're going to eliminate the cheaper products, which just makes the situation even worse.

Because now the only place you really can find cheap, carrier-unlocked feature phones is going to be through Amazon. So it becomes this kind of vicious cycle. But it is possible. Those things do still exist. Even Samsung is still making these really nice, ruggedized IP67 handsets that are basically feature phones that you can slap a SIM card into, carrier-unlocked, that you can pick up for like $60-70.

And these things, you could dunk them in a... You hear about people who wind up dropping their cell phone in a toilet or a urinal or something. This is one of those phones where you could do that, rinse it off and keep using it, as long as you could get past the squick factor.

Well, it's definitely a... I mean, I find my stomach turns at the thought of paying $60 for a dumb phone, a feature phone. I want something that's like... I don't know if it exists, but I want a $10 or $20 handset that just simply will allow me to send a text message if I want to.

You know, some other time. I don't know. I find the whole subject very frustrating to try to figure out how to get it all but for cheap. Therein lies the problem with the race to the bottom. Everyone's focusing on trying to make smartphones cheaper, because that's where the real money is.

Tracking people's usage habits, advertising to them, trying to get them to spend more money on data. So, of course, the open market is going to pour more money into getting people to spend more money. And feature phones don't make people spend more money. So they haven't gotten the love and the race down to the bottom that smartphones have.

Like I said, you can pick up a brand new Moto E, which is a fantastic smartphone, for the money at $130. I mean, this thing could hold its own against any flagship phone from two or three years ago from any of the major players, as far as performance goes.

But you haven't seen that same progression with feature phones, even in developing nations, where there's not as much money going around for these sorts of things. It's still been, "Let's get smartphones out to everybody." And because everyone wants smartphones, there's no money in developing feature phones. But the fact of the matter is that there is still development happening on the feature phone end.

There are some amazing little devices out there, like... I can't remember the name of it off the top of my head. But there's actually an emergency phone that takes a SIM card. The thing costs like $20, $25, and the thing can run off of a AA battery. It's sold as an emergency phone, basically.

And the battery that it comes with, it's one of those lithium jobs. It's got like a 10-year shelf life or something like that. And it's waterproof and has a built-in flashlight on it and all that. So some of these things do exist. There have been advances on feature phones, but by the same token, one of the other things is that since feature phones are going to do less, you don't have to worry about the issues of failure that you do with a smartphone.

And the last feature phone I used, I got about seven years out of it. So yeah, you may wind up having to spend a little bit more for a feature phone than you'd like to think you should, compared to what you can potentially get with a smartphone. But think about how much longer that thing's going to last.

Sure. Yeah, no, I agree. And as a podcaster, I am glad for the growth in the smartphone market, because that means -- that's what I'm counting on, is that everyone from now on will have a smartphone on their hips. That means they can access my show. So that's what I'm counting on.

Now I know if you never invite me back, why. I have another question, and I'm going to go ahead and just leave the recorder on, because I was going to ask you about it afterwards, but the audience might -- I thought you might know. Two things -- I'll just stick with the one that I'm interested in, and it's totally off the topic of communications.

Do you pay attention -- just from our past conversations, I know you might, and so I just was going to take the opportunity to ask you about it. Do you pay attention to the stuff that's going on with the bandwidth speeds and, like, the net neutrality and kind of those debates?

I do keep up with those, yes. Can you explain that to me, because I don't -- I've tried to read some of the news articles, and I can't seem to figure it out. I can't figure the debate out as far as what's going on and who's doing what. Would you be willing just to share with me and kind of explain what's actually going on with all of that?

Instead of jumping immediately in, let's try and find a jumping-off point instead. Exactly what part of it do you find the most confusing? Why is the government getting involved with -- why is the FCC getting involved with regulation, or is it deregulation or regulation that's going on? And why is the FCC getting involved?

And the other thing is, why is data -- why do we have the slowest Internet speeds in the world, it seems like, and the most expensive ones? Well, how honestly do you want me to answer this? Honestly, because this is the radical personal finance, remember? I just get so frustrated when I read about the Internet connection speeds in the rest of the world, and I look at my own bills, and I look at my own speeds, and I say, "This is nuts.

This is the United States of America. We should be three times better than we are right now." Well, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to answer this without outing myself as a filthy communist. Okay, feel free. I get along better with communists sometimes than I do with Democrats and Republicans, so feel free.

Well, truth be told, I'm not actually a communist, but I certainly sound like one sometimes when I get wound up on points of politics. But the big thing -- to kind of get back to your first question on that, why is the government getting involved with this? The biggest thing is that the free market isn't as free as we actually think it is.

We had deregulation of the telecom industry back in the '90s because the Babybels basically reformed as AT&T again, Ma Bell. They promised signs and wonders with taxpayer money that they'd hook up everyone with broadband connectivity if they just deregulate the service. We don't have to adhere to these regulations within the government to provide service.

We can self-monitor. We can basically take care of this, and the free market's going to be a cheaper solution. We don't need to have oversight on this, and oversight costs us money. But if you give us taxpayer money, we're going to do signs and wonders and miraculous things. And it didn't happen.

The great information superhighway that we were sold back in the '90s didn't happen, and it didn't happen because of deregulation. Because deregulation basically allowed a monopoly situation in most municipalities. And in reality, we actually have something more like a duopoly. And it's only because of the type of cables involved that we even have that.

If not for cable TV and the development of the DOCSIS communications standard for data communications over coaxial service, we wouldn't even have that. So you wind up with this duopoly where you have the local phone company owning the copper lines or the fiber optic, as the case may be in this day and age.

And on the other side, you have the local cable company who owns the cable lines. And those are your only choices. There's no free market competition in what service is being provided. So they can basically set whatever prices they want, and there's not much that the end user -- where are you going to go?

If DSL is your only option, are you going to take it to someone else? Ha ha ha. Good luck. You pay what we charge you, or you do without. And I'm getting off on a little bit of a tangent here, but let me try and rope it back in.

Because of this duopoly structure, because there were no checks and balances in place to prevent this sort of thing from happening after deregulation, they were basically taking advantage of the situation to make as much money as possible off of the situation. And historically, as far as network neutrality goes, back in the day, back in the early days of the Internet, when you had providers like you, there were these peering agreements.

Basically, you had competing providers for bandwidth, and you'd have these crossing points. And what net neutrality was was basically we give you access to our network so long as we have access to your network. And as long as everyone's -- if the usage is level, it's a wash. But if you wind up using more than we do, you pay for your share, but only that share.

And it worked great for years. And what's changed about that is the rise of streaming video and the fact that all of these telecoms didn't promise on building out the infrastructure that they said they would. And so now their backbones are saturated with usage. But the thing is that one of the things that kind of gets ignored in the discussion with network neutrality and peering and the like is you and I, we are running websites.

We have to pay for the bandwidth to get our content out to other people. So we're already paying for our share of the bandwidth in the network, just like you, the users, are paying for your share of the bandwidth to access our content. But what was happening with the great Netflix debate and what was happening a few months ago was outfits like Verizon and AT&T and Comcast, they were degrading service and they were demanding that Netflix pay them more money to improve data throughput on their network.

And the thing is, is Netflix is already paying for content delivery onto the network already. So they were effectively getting double billed. And that's why the FCC started stepping in and where a lot of the stink was coming from. Because in reality, stuff like streaming video, it's all about money at the end of the day.

And bandwidth costs money. And Netflix was using a lot of bandwidth and it was undermining the "value" of IP and cable television that these ISPs were providing on top of their other services. Why spend $40 a month from my cable provider for TV when I can spend $8 a month from Netflix?

So it comes down to not taking the time. Instead of churning their profits back into the business to build out the infrastructure to be able to handle increased loads off of video traffic, they basically just – their executives cashed out. Whoopee! Profits out the wazoo. And started basically packet shaping and throttling services that used a lot of bandwidth on their networks.

And that's why the FCC is now starting to have to step back in and regulate on this point. From there, it starts to get a little murky because you got a lot of players each aiming for their own purposes. And the opponents are twisting words and ideas about how network neutrality isn't actually – it is oversight that destroys the free market.

The fact of the matter is that capitalism in and of itself, when left unchecked, you wind up with the same problem with communism. Where it's basically socialism unchecked and through the might of some sort of controlling factor. What do you mean by that? Because what I would say is that we do not live in an open capital society, and that's the problem.

I'll have to go and research. I've never researched the deregulation. I've heard people mention it, but I've never researched the sides of it. But what I see, just my observation as an amateur – I'm not an economist, I'm not a political scientist – I just observe the fact that people think we live in a capitalist society, but the problem is there's so much interference that it's not a capitalist society.

The example that I use is with car dealerships. I was thoroughly enraged when, what was it, six months ago, something like that, the Car Dealers Association was able to get the state of New Jersey to ban any company that didn't go through car dealers to market their products. And the reason was, what's the electric car company out in California?

Tesla. Tesla was selling direct to the public and having their amazing sales direct to the public, completely bypassing a dealer network. And it's working so well, and so they were able to get some laws passed outlawing that. I smell the same thing happening in the communications business with just watching the Google stuff, watching the Google Fiber.

And again, I haven't researched it in depth enough to talk about it. I just smell the same problem. I smell heavy – just people basically using fascism, but you have the corporations using the government to block competition instead of the government ensuring that there's an equal playing field for all to compete.

Well, that is part of the problem, and we start getting into a much broader debate in politics. And I think approaching things from the political compass standpoint really opens things up. It's not a linear argument. There is left and right to the political spectrum, but there's also a secondary axis to this that ranges between basically anarchy and totalitarianism.

And if you look at things in that regard, you've got the upper left-hand corner representing Stalin communism, the upper right-hand corner which is what our country and most of the world is in right now. This capitalist totalitarian regime, and down in the lower right, you have basically anarcho-capitalism, and there in the lower left-hand corner, you have basically socio-anarchism.

Socialism but with individual freedom. Most of the arguments that are being put forward against regulation within the free market are arguments that ultimately go towards anarcho-capitalism. But the problem is with anarcho-capitalism, and it's one of the reasons why I give libertarians such a hard time, it's as realistically impossible to maintain as communism, that socialist totalitarianism.

It's broken for the same reasons of extremity in one point without a check and balance in the other. It is pure – when you involve either total power and greed or total control, the other end winds up getting out of whack and getting abused. And down in the anarcho-capitalist end, the argument is always less restriction in the marketplace, and the market will just correct itself.

It doesn't. You know what happens with the free market? Money starts to consolidate, and you get monopolies, and then the monopolies start abusing their power. You want to know what free market capitalism ultimately degrades down to? Look back to 19th century America. Pre-unions, what was happening in steel, that's what happens when you don't have any sort of checks and balances in place for capitalism.

It ultimately goes just as evil and gets just as abused as a totalitarian state trying to act in the best interests of everybody. It winds up being this delicate balance between the two. And the problem is that the more you want to rely on greed to be able to operate, the more control you are going to have to have in place with the laws to prevent people from exploiting that greed.

The problem with that is that the greed… If I had my back up against the wall and were forced to define myself, and I would agree with you, you do have that problem with… Here's how I would say the problem. I would probably align myself more with an anarcho-capitalist or a minarchist.

Man, we're getting way deep into political philosophy. This will be fun. I would probably align myself far more with that type of thinking than with just about anything else. And the problem, the difference that I've been able to find as far as in reading about various political philosophies is you would have exactly the difference between an anarchist who would… And not in the anarchist viewpoint that most people talk about of let's make a bomb and blow up the government.

I'm not in that world. I'm not going there. But an anarchist would say we do not need the existence of the state. We don't need the existence of the government. And someone who would be, whether it's a classical liberal, a libertarian, a minarchist, something like that, depending on where you wanted to be on that range, would say that the problem you stated is exactly right.

When people can consolidate power, they will consolidate power. And so if you give any authority to the state, the difference that I've observed between a minarchist and an anarchist, if you give any authority to the state, then the state will use that authority and will use it to create more power to itself.

And so that's what you see happening in our society. Now on the flip side… …a social restraint. Yeah, and I don't know. This is one of those things where if I could build time into my life to spend more time in the political abstract like this, I would love to spend time thinking through and debating through this stuff because I just barely allocate a tiny amount of time here and there to reading some Wikipedia articles and saying, well, that makes sense to me.

Because you're right. You do have significant problems. But it's one of those – it's a circular argument. It's just that the problem is that you have exactly – if you were to flip towards the other side, towards the totalitarian side of things, whether that's – let's just say communism, then you're going to have exactly the same people that would have accreted all of the power through the financial process are those who are going to take power through the political process.

And you have a system in place where either you can accrue power through finance or you can accrue power through politics. And the same people are going to build power in either program. And the same people are evil. And that's where – and they're going to be evil no matter what the situation is.

And that's honestly – the larger the system you create, the more you're going to have both in play. And as we become a global society, that's ultimately where we are going to wind up landing in, is a totalitarian state run by money and power of the state. It's going to be this perfect fusion of totalitarianism and the worst, greediest parts of capitalism, truth be told, at least from my perspective.

One of the things that needs to be remembered is that communism isn't the only form of socialism out there. And socialism isn't a bad word. It really isn't. Without socialism, we wouldn't have had the progress and the advancement in rights for women and for minorities in this country. And we wouldn't have had things like the minimum wage and the like, and we'd still have little small children and orphans being exploited for their labor instead of going to school.

Which isn't to say that putting these structures in place don't have their own – everything is kind of a double-edged sword. I mean on one hand, you can't have one without the other. It ultimately winds up kind of tying in together. I'm going to interrupt because I want to argue with you about a point that you just made.

And I think it will be fun and I know you can handle it. So this show, we're recording it on Monday. I plan to release it probably tomorrow on Tuesday. And I haven't recorded today's show yet, but one of the things I'm going to talk about is the minimum wage.

And I personally find the evidence convincing that the minimum wage is one of the most destructive things for people. The minimum wage laws, I think, are incredibly destructive for people, especially destructive for rights. Have you studied any of Walter Williams' research on the subject of racial discrimination and minimum wage laws?

Or are you familiar with any of that by any chance? I'm not as familiar with it as I'd like to be. So I'll give you just a quick thing, which will be going out if I can fit it into the show for Monday's show. But basically, Walter Williams is an economist and he had done a lot of studies.

He wrote a book on it in South Africa. And he talked about how, and it was very clear in South Africa and he observed it also in the United States, but basically in South Africa, the people who were the largest proponents of minimum wage laws were the white-run unions.

And so the idea was, and what he had studied, what he found, was that the white, and this was back in the era of apartheid, so instituted racial discrimination, segregation, but the white unionized construction workers heavily supported minimum wage laws. Because they were getting paid $5 an hour for their work, and a black worker would come in and say, "I'll be willing to work for $1 an hour." And so what they could do is that provided a massive advantage, that provided a massive reason for the business owner to go ahead and say, "I'm willing to hire the black worker for $1 an hour," because it's a major discount from the $5 an hour.

But by instituting minimum wage laws, the business and the business owner, if they were racist, they may be willing to overcome their feelings of racism in pursuit of their own economic self-interest. But by instituting minimum wage law, the black worker was removed, and now the black worker would work for $5 an hour and the white worker would work for $5 an hour, and now the business owner basically would have no incentive to choose to have the black worker.

So that was a book that was written back in the '80s, and he went through in detail, long economic proving that case. And you'd have to read the book to see if he proved it or not. But fast forward to today. I see this happening, and I can't prove it, this is just an observation, but I see this happening in the rates of employment among the elderly and rates of employment among the young.

And so right now in the United States of America, and I also see it in Europe especially as well, but in the U.S. there was a news article, I don't have it pulled up, but there was a news article that I'll cover on the show about the employment rates among the elderly.

And the unemployment rates among the elderly are much, much lower now than they have been in the past, whereas the unemployment rates among the youth are much higher than they have been in the past. And so the rates of unemployment for young people is very, very high. And I think minimum wage laws may have some impact on this.

And the reason is that if the minimum wage is whatever it is, $7.25 an hour, or whatever, I can't remember what the national wage is, somewhere in the $7 range, that if you have a minimum wage law, that means that no one is willing to work for less. And so then it eliminates the economic competition.

It eliminates -- you have no other variable for people to compete on. And so as a business owner, if the 16-year-old is available, or the 60-year-old is available to you at minimum wage, I would choose to hire the 60-year-old any time, because that person is going to have more life experience, they're probably going to have more skills, they're going to have more ability.

And so you have, I think, millions of young people that are completely frozen out of the market because they don't have the skills to do a minimum wage job because the job is only worth $3 an hour. And you have increasing rates of unemployment, probably largely due to many of the minimum wage laws.

And so when I go back and I study the history, and I'm not qualified to talk about whether it's the factory system or any of this, that all of this legislation has unintended consequences. And whether it's we're talking about the -- >> And I don't disagree with that point.

>> Feel free to respond. Go ahead. >> Everything has unintended consequences. And I do see a possible argument that minimum wage has the potential to do this sort of possible segregation in hiring practices. But you take away the minimum wage, what prevents employers from exploiting employees for basically slave labor?

>> Voluntarism. Because it's entirely optional and entirely voluntary for somebody to work there. So go out of minimum wage -- hang on, I'll prove it. Hang on. Hear me out. So A, in that we do not have institutionalized slavery. And in a free society, you don't have institutionalized slavery.

And that's another interesting thing as far as going through and trying to figure out why is -- was slavery an institution in this country? And we can't go there. We'll be here for hours. But look at the labor markets. Look at the labor markets that are out of the minimum wage world.

Out of the minimum wage world, when you get into middle corporate America, everything is based upon the attractiveness of benefits. So I used to work as a benefits consultant. And one of the things as a benefits consultant, then I've worked with employers. And the whole idea of working -- when you're working with an employer, you are working to design a total group of benefits that's attractive to employees.

So the reason -- so let's use a modern example of -- let's pick on the tech companies. So people -- a young engineer just getting ready to graduate from college with a computer science degree. If they are a high caliber engineer, it's possible that they may consider working at Google.

And they may consider working at Google because of the overall attractiveness of their benefits. And that would include the wages that they're paid. That would include the retirement programs that they may have. That would include the free lunch that's offered as part of their employment compensation package. That would include all of these things.

And so in that world, then Google is trying to attract the employees away from Microsoft and is trying to attract employees from all of its other competitors. So in the tech world, which is largely deregulated, you have very high salaries that are paid and high groups of -- and high overall compensation packages.

So you see that you have people who are qualified because of the work that they have done for the job labor. Now, when you drop it down to minimum wage -- to a minimum wage level job, you're working with people, and people are not qualified to work at a higher paying job at that point in time, or they would go and get it.

But you need to have an entryway into the job market for paying work by having jobs available for people so that they can develop themselves to move on to the next situation. And what happens is that the biggest problem that employers face is -- the biggest problem is finding good help.

And that's one of the things that I've learned. I'm so glad I worked as a financial planner because when you're working with an employer, realizing that their biggest problem is finding good people, then you recognize they've got to attract and recruit high-quality people. So the reason that the employers would not exploit it is that if you didn't have minimum wage laws, you would have open competition among employers for resources, for workers, and then the market would be able to more easily regulate.

And if you were a 14-year-old kid needing a job and you were doing a job that was worth $5 an hour, you would actually have the opportunity to enter into that and work at it for $5 an hour so then you could move on to something else and you would have a competitive market for labor.

Businesses don't exploit workers or they don't keep them. And the only reason that the workers stay and continue to be exploited is because there's not another option for them to go and move on to the next thing. Well, what happens when the benefits package ultimately gets stripped down to getting paid or starving?

I mean it's a good question that's worth asking, but I don't have an answer. Yeah. You need to have – it's a delicate balance, unfortunately. You can't – I see where you're trying to go with this, but the problem is you wind up taking away – you take away that social responsibility to mandate a living wage for your employees.

Then the almighty dollar can ultimately reign supreme in the bottom line, and employers can start dictating lower and lower wages. And as money gets consolidated further within smaller hands, you wind up having more and more people becoming desperate for work, which means they're lowering their own standards and willing to work cheaper.

And it winds up being a race down to the bottom, and you wind up back into the exact same situation pre-union days. And you've got these stores that the employees have to shop at for food that winds up costing more than they actually earn in a living situation, and you wind up reinstituting some form of slavery.

The thing with capitalism is that it can't really function without some sort of underclass, and that inequality – I'm not saying that you can't – let me back up here for a moment. That inequality is just a part of – it's an inherent part of human nature. It really is inescapable ultimately.

But to exploit it to the point of your own self-worth, it winds up being a delicate balance. And I keep saying that. But the thing with a lot of these social laws, they've been put in place because people have demonstrated time and time again, even being left to their own devices, they are ultimately going to only care about themselves.

Right. So upon that basis – and this is where – And that's where pure capitalism without regulation starts to fall apart itself. But hang on. In general – so I can take the point and I can agree with you. But if you build on that, you build different systems.

And this is where we'll go round and round on this stuff, and I enjoy going round and round. But I want to give you an opportunity – I want to wrap up and I want to give you an opportunity to have the last word. But on the situation, specifically to what you said as far as people are – I guess the point of capitalism, the quote about capitalism is probably the most famous, is that capitalism is the worst system ever invented except for all the rest.

Right? So it's the worst system ever invented except for all the rest. Just like democracy or a democratic republic is the worst political system that's ever invented except for all the rest because there is an inherent problem. But on the one hand, you've noticed – you observe the fact that people are inherently interested in their own well-being, and then you build a situation that takes that into account.

Or you say, well, no, we're going to try to somehow find people who aren't that way. And so a capitalist would say, well, yes, we recognize that people are interested in their self-interest. I'll give you an example. I do not have any employees. I do not want to have any employees.

And the reason is because I perceive the cost of the employee at the moment – and I've hired various people to work for me – I perceive the cost of the employee to be higher than the value that I would gain from the employee. And I've learned that I can replace a lot of the things that an employee will provide with an electronic solution more and more.

And then also with looking at the labor markets, if I do need some additional help to run a business, I'm much more likely to say, how can I hire somebody from another country? How can I hire somebody from outside of the environment that I work in so that I do not have to provide the other benefits that I'm currently providing that I would have to provide for a local employee?

So recognizing that that's a competitive factor, the only answer is that the employee has to bring more value than they cost me. So I've never chosen, I've never paid somebody minimum wage when they've worked for me. I've always paid substantially more than minimum wage because I get a lot more value from the employee rather than someone at minimum wage.

And so you have this working, is that the competition for a local employee is an international employee who doesn't have a minimum wage restriction on them. That's their competition. And so you have to provide a system. I can't be forced to provide a job, but I can be incentivized to provide it.

Which brings us back to the original point I was trying to get to when I brought in the political compass thing and how anarcho-capitalism is just as fundamentally broken as communism. The problem is scale. The more people you have to encompass, the more you have to try and make it fair for everybody, the more rules you have to put in place to keep the least of us from being abused and exploited, and it winds up complicating matters.

So in reality, the real line, if there is to be a line, goes from the lower left corner of social anarchy up to totalitarianism and individual property rights. And the thing is that with smaller societies, you look at the early days of socialism, and it's even said communism itself would work on a smaller scale.

If you get a bunch of like-minded people together, it works. But you scale it up, and it falls apart. The thing is that the more freedom you want to preserve for the individual, the more socially conscious and the less you can defend property rights to make that happen. So there's got to be this inborn social altruism to be able to preserve those rights and liberties.

And the more you want to increase individual property rights, the more political control is necessary to balance that out to keep the exploitation from occurring with those property rights. And certain individuals. And the same could be said about political control being counterbalanced by property rights. You wind up having – the more you want to go in any one direction with either of those two, they wind up feeding off of each other, and you wind up not being able to have one without the other because the larger the system gets, the more you need that check and balance to keep – to try and keep the playing field fair.

So really, if we're going towards a one-world government and economy, we have to – we're going to have to have regulation in place to counterbalance and prevent people from being exploited. But that power is going to result in people getting exploited. So you see the conundrum here. Right. And it's an interesting thing.

So my motto for the show is I have no idea what – I'm not a macroeconomist. I'm not a macro political scientist. I don't have any idea what works necessarily on a macro scale. But I can figure out how to exploit the system for my scale, for me. And I can teach people where all the loopholes are to exploit.

And as far as I'm concerned, it's up to someone else that actually wants to exert control over people. Let them try to deal with it, and I'll keep looking for the loopholes. No. They're in, in a way, the rub with the loopholes. Wherever you exploit a system, you have to exploit someone in the process.

Not necessarily, because the thing is you don't necessarily have to exploit somebody to exploit the system. Well, someone or something. Something gets exploited to make that happen. Something doesn't come out of nothing. Well, I mean you'd have to use a specific example to – we would have to say, "Okay, here's the situation," and give a specific example.

But that's the key, is that it comes down to everything from welfare and social benefits and all of these things. There are people – they're necessary, they are valuable, and they are important. And yet you look at it and you say, "Well, they can be exploited." So you have to have systems of safeguards in place.

And I guess this is where we'll go – It winds up making things more complex and more costly. It's a vicious – oh, what's the word I'm looking for? A self-propagating wave. You're right about the scale. And here was the last point that I wanted to make, and then if you have any last words, then we'll wrap up.

But you're right about the scale. My family is perfectly communistic, my own personal family. We all share everything. I don't have any money. We have money. Everything – I'm the one who earns an income in my family, but I do not view it as not my income. It's our income.

So my family is perfectly communist, and so it is perfectly voluntary. And in my larger family, in my more extended family, now it will start to function more like that. But you have to have – and I would assume the social scientists have identified this – you would have to have some type of affiliation or some type of grouping.

And so in my church family, that would be much more of a scenario where I'm much more willing to have all things in common, in the essence of a church family. But when you get out and you try to integrate people who don't have any affiliation or any common points of affiliation and you try to force it, you can't force people to do things against their will.

And that's where all the political systems, in my opinion, break down. I'm not willing to go to work and work more so that you can have a higher amount of my income. So your entire tax system has to take that into balance. And that's why, if you look at historically, the check on the government that I see is that people talk all they want about historic tax rates.

In general, the gross taxation has not exceeded about 20 percent of people's incomes for a very long period of time. And so if in aggregate it's in excess of that, it seems like there's that tipping point where things will be torn down because you cannot tax people in excess of that.

Or they just simply say, "Hey, this is not willing," and they revolt somehow. So I don't have the answer for the mass society. I would love to study it and become a social scientist, but that's not the path I'm on right now. But feel free to give us a last word.

I'm sure that as both of us are believers ourselves, we could probably come up with a cute little answer to the issue of society's ills. But I don't want to get into any sort of religious argument with other people. But it does highlight that we as people are imperfect, and we need to be willing to accept that.

And in doing so, we've got to be able to forgive one another, and without that forgiveness, this is what happens. We wind up having spiraling systems getting out of control, ultimately trying to serve everyone's best interests, but ultimately serving no one's. And as a believer myself, I don't know how many people listening actually know this or picked up on it off of my own website, but I practice Messianic Judaism.

I have approached Christianity from a Jewish standpoint in understanding, and I know I'm going to get flak from both sides for saying this. And you know what? Bring it on. I don't care. I'm willing to answer questions. I'm willing to fight and argue over it. I love the yeshiva style of discussion on a lot of these topics.

But one of the things that I've found about my faith is what we are actually commanded to do, there is that strong social contract while also desiring to preserve a great deal of personal individual liberty. And as such, I used to find myself firmly in the conservative Republican camp, but as I've gotten older, as I've grown more in the faith, and I actually study and read what the Torah teaches and what Yeshua taught, Yeshua being Jesus Christ, most of the rest of you.

I realize that that aspect, that philosophy isn't entirely compatible with what we are to do as believers. And it's one of the reasons why I've – in a lot of ways, I guess I am a Judeo-Christian social anarchist. And you really want to get into it and talk about and research what the faith truly says.

I'm sure you've heard of Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace. The man wrote some fascinating works on the faith and kind of a sociopolitical take on it. And Tolstoy himself was definitely of kind of the Christian anarchist philosophy in that – and going back briefly, that's kind of what I was talking about.

You can have socialism without authoritarianism, without a strong central government and authority, and that's what a lot of people forget in this argument. You can have a form of libertarianism that is strongly socialist, and that's kind of the approach that I try to take things in my day-to-day life.

I want to help people. It's why I give this information out for free. I'm doing it for the common good of my fellow man, and that is something that cannot be legislated. It is not something that can be made into a law. Either you believe in trying to do right by your fellow man or you do not.

And if you do not, then you wind up having to put legislation into place that mandates that, which is where we start losing control on both ends. Well, it's definitely something that I think deserves more debate and more discussion. Because the thing about it – because I agree with you as far as socialism, if it were voluntary.

We keep trying to wrap up, and I just forget about wrapping up. Whatever. It's the internet. People can turn off if they don't want to listen. Hey, if you got three hours out of… Out of Jacob, right? Yeah, exactly. The thing is, in one sense I love that you bring religion into it, but in another sense I hate it.

Because the problem is that I 100% agree with you if it's voluntary. But that's the thing is, when it's not voluntary, when the welfare state is not – if acts of charity and acts of goodwill and acts of support in a social structure, if that's not voluntary, then it turns into violence.

The welfare state as we know it relies on – It's why communism didn't work. Right. And it's like, "Thou shalt not steal except by majority vote." That's my issue with – It's not okay for individuals to steal, but if somehow I get put in charge of government, now it's okay for me to steal because I've got the majority vote.

And you have – the essence of all welfare states is that you rely on a system of compulsory taxation, which is backed up by the threat of violence against the taxpaying residents. And so I would fully support in the very next neighborhood over an entirely socialist communist compound to exist, and everybody there to have all things in common.

Everyone owns all things completely. And I would love the opportunity to live there if I wanted to, but I don't want to be forced to live there. And that's where my issue with all these things comes down to it, is it comes down to a forcing of things. And so just a recognition – and that's where when you look in a system, a recognition of how people work – just because I would wish everyone to be kind-hearted and generous and open and giving and loving, that doesn't – just because I wish them to be that way doesn't mean that I can make them that way.

And I can't legislate their morality. I can't legislate them to have a spiritual regeneration of their self through passing a law. I have to recognize their state and pass a law that will leave them equal. But by the same token, if we want to reap the benefits of any sort of communal growth and societal progress, we then – if we are not going to abandon and do the wrong thing, we wind up having to create systems that compensate for the people who are more than happy to screw over the little guy just for their own.

Which would be the protection of individual rights, right? And that's where your right to screw people ends at the right to inflict physical harm on another person and to harm another person. ANDREW LORENZ: Yeah, and some of that winds up getting into more socialist ideas and trying to prevent – there are ways to harm people beyond just denying them the capacity for owning physical property.

And that's where things like welfare wind up having to be constructed because we now wind up having to encompass enough people where we're having to compensate for enough people not doing the right thing to keep other people from getting burned themselves in the process. But by the same token, you're now getting into the slippery slope of trying to legislate morality, which doesn't work.

So the only way you can further enforce that is through more control and more consolidation of power. And it just winds up – the bigger the system, the uglier it gets. Right. I found one essay that I had read recently, which made me think of the Walter Williams article.

And it's not short, but it's not long. I want to read it to you. And I'll go ahead and just include it because it goes back to the minimum wage laws. And I think you'll find it interesting, and then I'll give you a chance to comment if you wish on it.

And this is written by Gary North, who is an economist. He writes at GaryNorth.com. I'll link to the essay. But this essay is called "How Minimum Wage Laws Promote Racial Discrimination." And he wrote this in July 18, 2014. "It was over 40 years ago that I first heard Walter Williams speak at a conference." Anyway, I think it was over 40 years ago.

It could not have been less. Gary North is in his 70s, so he's been doing this a while. "He and I were on what speakers call the 'rubber chicken circuit' as early as 1974. We spoke to high school teachers in a program sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, the 'Role of Business in Society,' or ROBIS.

As I recall, I'd heard him speak before we were on the summer lecture circuit. I remember very clearly his main point at one of his lectures. He said that minimum wage legislation discriminates against teenage black males." Which my point to insert, if anyone, Walter Williams is black himself. So, if that helps.

"He said that minimum wage legislation discriminates against teenage black males. This has been known by economists since at least the mid-1950s. The statistical evidence on this was overwhelming, but high school teachers had not heard this. What made Williams' speech memorable was the fact that he clarified the reason why the minimum wage legislation was detrimental to teenage black males.

He made the observation, which nobody challenged, that the teenage black males are considered undesirables by the general population. In other words, they are discriminated against. They suffer from the stereotypes attached to their particular group. He asked the obvious question, 'How does someone who is part of a group that is discriminated against find a way to prove to somebody doing the discriminating that his assessment is incorrect?' It was really this question, 'How do undesirables break through the discrimination against them?' He made what was considered to be an obvious point from the point of view of an economist, but which was not obvious to his audience.

He said that the person who is discriminated against needs to have a competitive edge that will enable him to compete effectively with members of groups that are not discriminated against. The free market offers such a tool, he said, wage competition. Specifically in the case of competition among potential workers who want to be employed, the most effective competitive edge available is the offer to work for less money per hour.

This offer is taken seriously by employers. Minimum wage legislation makes it illegal for employers to take advantage of such offers. This removes the most effective single competitive strategy that is available to a person who is considered undesirable because of his membership in a particular group that is widely considered undesirable.

This economic analysis applies to all sorts of groups. Statistically, economists in 1974 knew that unemployment rates for black teenage males began to exceed the unemployment rate for white teenage males when the system of minimum wage legislation was first enacted by the federal government. The statistics on this go back as far as the legislation.

By focusing on individual offers made by members of undesirable groups to potential employers, Williams focused on microeconomics. He focused on decisions at the margin. This is where economic decisions are made, at the margin. By making an offer to work for less than members of desirable groups are willing to work for, members of undesirable groups gain an edge in the marketplace.

As soon as an employer is made aware of such an offer, he now faces a cost for any future discrimination. If he refuses to take the offer, he is going to have to pay a higher wage to a member of a desirable group. This is going to increase his cost of doing business.

In other words, he suffers an economic loss. Cost is defined as that which you have given up in order to gain what you want. The employer wants low-cost workers. He wants to pocket the difference from consumers of their output. It is buy low, sell high. If an employer refuses to hire someone who has made an offer to work for less, this increases his cost of doing business.

From an economic standpoint, this imposes the cost of discrimination on the employer. Williams understood that some employers, meaning employers at the margin, want to gain a competitive edge against other employers. They will therefore be willing to accept offers from certain individuals who are willing to work at wages that are lower than average in the industry.

By making the offer, the member of an undesirable group imposes the cost of discrimination on anybody who will not accept his offer. There is no question about the origin of minimum wage legislation. It came from trade unions. Trade unions did not want to face competition from workers who were not members of a union.

They wanted to make it illegal for businessmen to take advantage of offers to work for less than what the trade union members were able to extract from employers based on their monopolistic position in the industry. The federal government, through the Wagner Act of 1933, had made it illegal for businesses to offer low-wage jobs if half of the employees, plus one, voted to unionize the business.

What was happening, union leaders understood, was that blacks were in a position to break the stranglehold of the unions in some industries because they could go to employers and use their competitive edge, a willingness to work for less money per hour. The way to stop this, the union leaders understood, was to make it illegal for any employer to hire anyone at a wage below the mandated minimum wage.

This would stop competition against trade unions. From a political standpoint, it was incumbent on the trade unions to keep the voters and also keep congressmen from recognizing that minimum wage laws are discriminatory against groups that already suffer from discrimination. It was seen as politically incorrect in the late 1960s to discriminate against blacks, but this was what minimum wage laws did from the beginning.

So it was imperative that this line of reasoning be kept away from students in colleges and universities. This was why Williams' argument was devastating. Students and teachers could not refute it. It made them feel guilty because they were pushing for legislation that imposed additional burdens on members of racial minorities.

But Joshua, I'm going to stop you there because I think you've well exceeded the fair use on copyright with the extract there. You think so? I always wonder where those lines are. I think this officially goes well with the sampling standpoint. You get the point. You get the point.

I see where he's going, and I understand the points trying to be made. But that's assuming that the purpose of the trade unions were the same from the get-go, and that's where, at least to me, things start to fall apart a little bit. The reason why unions arose in the first place and the reason why workers unionized to begin with was to try and prevent exploitation.

I'm not defending what a lot of unions wound up turning into after they started getting that power back and exploiting their own power. I'm not arguing that point, but you can't – the thing is, is the unions came about in the first place because there was no minimum wage.

Because there was no minimum wage, there was a propensity for businesses to exploit and enslave their workers. And the minimum wage was an answer to try and prevent that from – the unions happened, and minimum wage happened to try and prevent that from happening. So what's going to happen if we repeal minimum wage?

I don't disagree that minimum wage has these unintended consequences of the possibility of things like racism and the like. But that – if we're getting into trying to do things for the social good and trying to – I'm not sure repealing the minimum wage is the right answer. Unfortunately, the only other answer that helps level the playing field for these people that isn't lowering the minimum wage means providing more educational benefits for free to the population as a whole, giving them more opportunities that they haven't "earned," which means a larger welfare state.

So it winds up – in a lot of ways, we're in a lose-lose situation here. Right. There's no chance of minimum wage legislation being reversed. It's zero possibility of that ever happening. Yeah. Go ahead. And I understand why some people – in a very idealistic sort of way, it does make sense.

But it's that same sort of naive idealism that makes socialism on a larger scale work. That's a fair point. I'll give you that point. I always tend to argue from the ideal, but you're right. It's a challenge. And I don't – frankly, I don't know how to get from here to there other than to make little moves one step at a time.

It's why religion winds up popping into the argument whether we want to or not. Right. Exactly. Well, Daley, thank you for indulging. I'm going to have to figure out whether we're going to – I assume we'll probably release this, but I know this is a farther-ranging conversation than communication than it was intended to be.

But I guess that's what happens when you get two guys that like to talk, and we get together and start talking with one another, right? In a way, though, it does kind of tie in. You think about it. There is no system that is isolated and independent from any of – so – and having these sort of conversations, right or wrong, listeners, if you want to skewer me for my ideas, go for it.

But all I ask is that you bring a solid argument with you, not rhetoric, not empty hollow threats. Give me a reason why, and I will be happy to argue in facts, and I will admit I stammered a lot in this discussion. I threw a lot on you that you weren't expecting.

Well, yeah, and you as well, truth be told. We went to some very interesting places during this discussion. Neither of us – I certainly wasn't ready to talk about political stuff. I just – but I'm actually glad to do it because it seems to me that – I'm glad to do it because I wish – one of my hopes for our society is I wish we could argue about politics and religion more in the sense that there are a few things that have more of an impact on people's lives than politics and religion.

And yet it seems as though we've lost the ability to disagree with – it seems as though in our society – and I'm generalizing grossly – we have seemed to have lost the ability to disagree with each other, argue with each other, and still remain friends, and to argue emphatically for our ideas.

For example, there's not a chance in the world that I can imagine myself today all of a sudden saying, "I'm going to abandon" – what did you call it? – "anarcho-capitalism" and move all over to the other extreme. But I can certainly listen, and I can understand, and it gives me something to think about.

And I can enjoy the intellectual exercise, and at the end of the day, you'll have to leave a conversation and figure out, "What am I going to do in my life?" And so I hope that – I wish to bring lots of people on this show who disagree with me and have it as an opportunity, because I'd love to regain that in our culture, the ability to disagree with each other emphatically, argue over something, and still remain friends, without skewering our debate opponents' character and somehow engaging in an ad hominem attack that says, "Well, Daley's just an idiot because he believes such and such." Daley's certainly not an idiot.

He may see something different because he's had different life experience. So I hope that this can be a productive example of that. And the thing is, discussing about these things, discussing about topics on moral values and the like, it even ties into personal finance because it influences what you do with your money and how you live your life.

And what I'm trying to tell folks is that money's just stuff. It's a tool. That's all it is. Don't give it any more power in your life than you would a hammer or a saw. It is a tool used to be able to live in our modern society. And when you start getting into worship and devotion of it, centering your life around that money, you wind up – that's where you start to devalue your fellow man.

And the last time we talked a year ago, one of the things that I remember about that conversation specifically was how I commented how smartphones were eroding our society because it was degrading social interaction. In a lot of ways, money does the same thing. Money has the power to separate us from other people.

And we can't let that happen. We all have to share this place together. And that means being there for your neighbor and setting aside differences and trying to act for a common good. I think that's a fitting way to end. Techmachigina.com is your website. Anywhere else that you want people to find you or is that the primary place?

That's the primary place. I will give you an unqualified plug and I will add it into the intro and also just here. I'll give you an unqualified plug. And I thank you for the work that you've done. And I know that I've tried to – I've appreciated it. And I would just encourage the audience to go and to consider donating – A, consume the content on your site as far as the guides that you have written.

And you'll find information there. If you have an iPhone, if you have Republic Wireless, if you want to do better than Republic Wireless, you'll find detailed instruction there. And that will be better in a text form. And then also I just want to encourage them if they appreciate the work to do to donate, to shop using your affiliate links and your Amazon pass-through and some of that information to help support you.

And I thank you for the work that you've done. I appreciate your support and I appreciate everyone's support out there. As I tell everyone, I don't demand money for this information. I put it out there for the common good. But it does take time and I appreciate all forms of thanks that are given back.

And like it or not, as much as I'm not a big fan of money myself, money is what makes the world go around. Money is what keeps the server lights on. It's all good to live in the woods without money. But if you want a server going, you still got to pay for electricity.

Well, if I want to participate in society and actually try to help people, that means I need resources. So if you want to help me have the resources to help other people, you know how that's going to have to happen. Absolutely. Well, Daley, thank you for coming on the show.

I appreciate it. Thank you for having me on, Joshua. And that's the show. I hope you enjoyed that conversation. Like I said in the introduction, it didn't go in the direction that I had planned. I'll have to keep working on my interviewing skills to keep us on target and I'm learning.

I wanted to make sure that I did release this anyway because, as you can see, I'm learning. And I think learn as you learn. Jump into something with both feet forward and just learn. So if I can encourage you to do that. And I wanted to make sure that I was completely open and authentic.

I thought about going through and trying to trim this thing out and edit it and tighten it up. But I wanted you to just to see kind of where I come from because hopefully in 10 years you're still listening and you're enjoying and you can see how challenging it was for me to do really great interviews.

And I don't know, maybe we'll continue these long conversations like this or maybe we'll work to keep things tightened up a little bit. But I hope you enjoyed that. Daley, thanks so much for coming on. I'm just thrilled that you accepted it. Please keep doing the work that you're doing.

And I think it's a tremendous, tremendous resource for people. And if you can support him in any way, I would just encourage you to support him. He is, it's a service that he provides and I think he deserves some financial support. So I would encourage you to support him if you're able to.

That's the show for today. Have a lovely week. Coming back tomorrow with some in-depth financial planning. I've kind of gotten away from the technical financial planning and we're coming back to it and we're going to continue that. So have a lovely evening, everybody. We'll talk to you tomorrow. Thank you.

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