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♪ Got to sort of tell 'em ♪ Two destinations, one loyalty card. Visit yamava.com/palms to discover more. It's Friday here at Radical Personal Finance HQ. Friday means Q&A. (upbeat music) Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host. Thank you so much for being with me.

On Fridays we do a live Q&A call. These calls are open to patrons of the show. At the moment I have one patron on the line. So this patron is either going to get a very long and very valuable call or it's going to be a very short conversation.

Time will tell. We'll see here in just a moment. (upbeat music) Appreciate so much you're listening to the show. If this is your first time, welcome to Radical Personal Finance here. We're dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

Before I go right to the phone line and start today's conversation, two quick announcements. First, these phone calls, again, are open to patrons of the show. If you are not yet a patron of the show, I invite you to become a patron of the show. You can find out more details at RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron.

RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron. Feel free to join as a patron of the show and then you'll get access to the call-in information. You can call in and I show up and you show up and you can ask or talk about anything you want. And sometimes the calls are very full and sometimes they're not.

And so you can get a great opportunity. However, these calls are public, so I've just opened up a brand new option for you. And that brand new option is that I am now doing paid phone consulting. If you would like to speak to me personally and you just simply want to talk to me, you want to ask me questions, you want to find out what I might have to say or might be able to contribute for your situation personally, I would first hope that you've gotten a sense of who I am and the type of advice or thoughts that I can give from these Q&A calls.

But if you'd like to do that personally, off the record, not being distributed as a podcast, you can do that now. Go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/phonecall. RadicalPersonalFinance.com/phonecall for all the details on that. I have a paid system where basically you show up. It's a per-minute rate and you'll be charged for exactly however much you and I wind up speaking.

So if you have a question, topic, conversation, you want my insight on it, it can be anything from the technical to the broad. It can be career-oriented, insurance-oriented, investment-oriented. If you just want to have me on the phone while you go meet with your financial advisor, your attorney, and make sure they're not giving you the runaround, I can do that too.

So go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/phonecall. And with that, we will go into today's phone call. Matt, welcome to the Friday Q&A show. - Thanks, Joshua. I sure appreciate your time. - Kick us off, Matt. You called in. What do you want to talk about today? - All right. Well, I'm a 36-year-old guy.

I have a pretty good general business background in a variety of corporate work, both for small and for large companies. And one of the interests that I've been developing, I guess, since first kind of getting into looking at financial independence and some topics like that, maybe around the age of 30, would be the possibility of transitioning from employment to self-employment.

And one of the ways that I've thought about doing that would be through creating content, both from either or both a blog or a podcast perspective. And I thought that that's something that you talked about in the past. So one of my questions for you would be, how did you decide on the podcast format, for example, versus a blog?

And as you survey sort of the social media content space today, if one is looking at either a blog or a podcast as a way to work through one's own thoughts in a transition like that, how do you see the relative advantages or disadvantages of both of those formats?

Good question, and I think an important one. Let's talk conceptually first, and I'll ask you a couple of questions about kind of the niche or the area. Blogging and podcasting are unique and complementary. They serve in some ways the same audience, but often a very different audience. For example, one of the pieces of feedback that I get often on Radical Personal Finance is, "Joshua, I'd be interested in hearing your thoughts, but I just don't want to listen to the show.

I don't have time. I don't like to listen to podcasts." And people aren't being rude about it. They just don't have time in their schedule. For example, since I stopped driving and commuting, the amount of audio time, and since I now work in a place where the work that I'm doing generally always engages my brain, the amount of time that I have to listen to audio is dramatically different than it was in past years.

So I used to listen to probably, I don't know, I'd say 40 to 50 hours of audio a week, just given the fact that I would be driving or doing activities that didn't involve any mental need for me to be very focused on things. And I would just listen to audio, consumed a lot of audio.

Today, it's much less, I don't know, maybe 15 hours a week, something like that. So, and the amount of time that I spend reading has probably gone up because of the nature of my life. This happens to a lot of people. They say, "Okay, I have time to listen," or, "I don't have time to listen," or, "I have time to read, but I don't have time to read." In many ways, I think the best way to answer the question is to start with saying, "What is the goal of my business, and who am I trying to reach?

What am I trying to do?" As an example, with Radical Personal Finance, I'm pursuing what I think of as the popular approach to spreading a message. I'm not trying to speak to an academic. I'm not trying to speak on an academic level. I'm trying to speak to the general population and give meat and content that's engaged with some entertainment value, some interest.

So I'm trying to fill a little bit of that entertainment value. I'm not trying to persuade people in government policy that they should pursue my ideas. I'm not trying to convince financial advisors of how they should do their business. I'm flattered when financial advisors listen to me. I hope they can gain from some of the stuff that I have to share, but that's not the market that I'm going after.

And so when I chose the format of the show, I knew I was going for a popular market. That should be the first thing, because if you, for example, are trying to establish yourself as an academic, compare, for the sake of analysis, compare Radical Personal Finance to Michael Kitsis and his show.

Michael Kitsis' articles are--he is the-- one of the premier, highly ranked authors speaking to financial advisors, and that's the platform that he's developed. And for him, the written article, the written format, I would say, is much more powerful than trying to pursue something like me. For me, I'm trying to, again, meet that popular need and fill the--basically, I'm trying to provide and fill people's drive time with something that will help them be encouraged, inspired, educated, motivated, so they show up to their office more motivated.

When they go home, my hope is that they show up home to their family more motivated, feeling good. I don't try to do a lot of negative stuff. I try to keep the content positive because that's the approach that I'm taking. You have to first answer the question of what am I trying to accomplish and what am I trying to do.

That will answer whether or not you should write 600-page books, which are going to become footnotes for other people. That will answer whether you should write articles in literary journals. That will answer whether you should write blogs or whether you should write papers, white papers, whatever it is. Decide what the ideal outcome or goal is first.

Now, with connection to the business, the reason I chose podcasting was because writing takes a great amount of discipline and I can exert that discipline over myself, but I think much more effectively through speaking. Podcasting fits a skill that I have, which many people don't have, which is to speak somewhat extemporaneously and to hopefully do it in a coherent manner.

So I'm playing to my strengths. I was also – when I started Radical Personal Finance, I was also looking at the market and there are dozens and dozens and dozens of fantastic finance, personal finance blogs and books and magazines and articles, et cetera. When I looked at the world of written content, I did not see an ability for me to bring a unique and different voice to that space.

I didn't see how I had something to add that was particularly unique there. When I looked at the verbal space, all I saw is a few large radio shows. There was – when I originally started back in 2013, when I originally recorded the first ten episodes of the show, I was not aware of any excellent personal finance podcast that I – that fit the format that I was trying to listen to.

Basically, it was Dave Ramsey and – who's the guy? Rick Edelman and Clark Howard. Those were basically the big ones. There was Marketplace Money was around and there were a few of them, but kind of the big corporate podcasts. So I looked at it and I said, "Here's a market opportunity." I also looked at how completely transformative mobile technology was becoming on podcasting where there was a market shift where for the first years of podcasting, you had to have your MP3 device, hook it up to your computer.

It was a hassle. So people would listen in their car. They would listen to the radio and you would only listen to the MP3 device if you'd hooked it up to your computer and synced it. Well, once the iPhone adjusted the technology to where you could download a podcast and stream it while out and about and once Bluetooth integration to vehicles became the norm, I saw the opportunity.

I saw that that was going to revolutionize the market in the coming years. That was within my capability. Now, I also considered video. Frankly, I would love to do video, but I did not have and still do not have the capability to actually do video. So I didn't have the practice.

I didn't have the equipment. I didn't have the time that I was willing to invest in it. And I didn't have the skill to be able to articulate an important compelling message in about three or four or five minutes, which is most videos, the length of time should be about three or four minutes.

So looking at those things and considering those three methods, I looked at writing, capable of writing, but the market was flooded. I looked at podcasting, very capable of speaking, and I saw an opportunity. And I looked at video and I saw a big opportunity, but it was outside of my capability.

So that was the analysis that I went through to choose when I chose to start Radical Personal Finance. The market has shifted a little bit. I think that analysis is still valid. I think there's still a huge opportunity in podcasting. But I would emphasize that this path is not the ideal path for everybody.

And there are some substantial downsides to podcasting as compared to blogging and video. So here are a couple off the top of my head. First, podcasts are much harder to find. If you write an excellent blog article, the web search engines will index it and it will be very findable.

Search engine optimization is a well-honed art and it's very doable. And if you just write a useful, relevant article, you can build up based upon the strength of the content and people will find it. Podcasts are harder to find. Podcast audio is not searchable by the search engines presently.

So basically people have to find it because they go looking for it. And there are many fewer people who go looking for a podcast than who go looking for an article on something. Or people have to find it based upon the recommendation of a friend. And that's why the audience recommending my show, you, the listening audience, is so important because that's how most people find it.

So it's much harder to find. It's also much harder to go viral. If you have an article, an article can be consumed quickly and easily and can be a quick share. So for example, if I write an 800-word essay that's powerful and effective and useful, people will share that thing all over the place.

And so the article can pick up traction and go viral in no time. Well, if I produce a 60-minute interview, it's very difficult for something like that to go viral. I've never had an episode, excuse me, I've had one episode of my show go viral to some degree. And that was the interview with Curtis Stone, the original interview with Curtis Stone, where we talked about making $80,000 a year on a third of an acre without owning land as an urban farmer.

That went viral because one of the audience, one of the websites shared it. However, I didn't notice any substantial increase in the size of my audience from it. So even though the actual file was downloaded a whole bunch and was listened to a whole bunch in a number of days, it seems like the audience listened to the first few minutes or maybe the first 10 minutes or 20 minutes and then cut off.

Because if you think about the media consumption habits of most people, they have an attention span of about two or three minutes. So that's one of the major downsides of podcasting is it's very difficult to get those big jumps in your audience size. Radical personal finance has simply grown steadily and slowly and organically, simply due to people finding it and also due to people recommending it.

Now the ideal strategy, quick note, videos can go viral very well. So videos can rack up much bigger views in a short time than most podcasts. The ideal strategy for most people is probably a combination of these three things. And that's probably what, in a moment when I ask you more specifics, that's probably what I recommend to you.

Because for most messages and most content, most businesses, most platforms, et cetera, the best thing is a mixture of all of these different types of media. I have not chosen to pursue that at this point simply because, well, I had a different strategy and I'm still working to appeal to the mass market.

But I think for somebody with a niche business or trying to work in a certain area, it would be best to have articles and to have articles expressed in verbal form in podcasts and also to distill those articles into their essence and create videos to spread. And just like for a writer, the best plan is to have a series of books that lay out the academic framework.

Then those books might be written at the academic level. You would also want to have maybe one or two books that are at the popular level, that are digestible. They're not research books, but they're popular books. You'd also want to have articles and essays that you write and publish in various journals.

And then you write snarky Facebook posts and Twitter messages and things to get your message out there. So the best strategy is all of those things based upon the actual business goals of the content creator. Tell me more about what you're thinking about creating. - So I guess without wanting to be too long-winded, Joshua, I'm pretty fascinated by the idea of how we make maybe career decisions in our, even as soon as our late teens, but certainly in our 20s, that set us on a particular path.

Me, for example, I always assumed that I would be interested in being a manager of someone else's business with growing responsibility and growing income. And then maybe one gets to a certain point, or at least I've seen this, and I've seen it in some of my business school classmates.

You get to a certain point where you realize that you're on a path and you're frankly not sure that you want to continue it. For example, in my corporate job, we moved five times in five years to gain a lot of experience very quickly. And there gets a point where once, you know, the one family where that's, it's certainly not as palatable.

And so, you know, I guess my thought from a content standpoint would be, you know, reaching people who are making commitments early on in their career life. They're going to have decades-long implications for them in terms of the schooling that they select and people that I think about are lawyers, doctors, fancy pants MBAs, and maybe wanting to preserve as much flexibility in that decision-making, not necessarily not to pursue the degree, but to do it as inexpensively as possible and to not needlessly foreclose entrepreneurship or self-employment options.

I'm not aware of exact content along those lines. Certainly there are fewer people who are in that market, so to speak, but I guess I know a lot of them and some of the challenges that I find myself facing, I think are pretty common. You know, even as I reflect on that email that you covered and your question about the doctor who wanted to consider becoming a financial planner, I think is indicative of some of that.

So that's, I guess, if I had an audience in mind, that's half of it. And then there's another half of it that I guess I can talk to you about if our conversation goes that long, depending on who else might join the call. - Sure. - So that's what I'm thinking.

- Yeah, let's start with that. So basically what you're outlining is the idea of an expert business. Does that ring a bell as far as that term? Is that terminology? - Yeah. No, I would say absolutely and do some work in that area now, both counseling with young people who are thinking about pursuing this path and then also just networking and keeping up relationships with folks who have already committed and how they're currently thinking about their careers.

- Right. So in an expert business, it's certainly an attractive business model. That's the business that I'm in. That's the business model that I have pursued. And I think many people share that desire. It seems like a perfect business. You have, it seems like a perfect business. And don't get me wrong, it's a great business.

It's not a perfect business. No business is perfect. Most businesses are tough. And the thing that distinguishes, it's not a matter of having the idea, it's a matter of the execution. It's a matter of the follow through. That's what you'll find when you watch and observe all the people who have established themselves as an expert in an area.

And it's a matter of, they're just very good at following through. It's not the idea, it's the follow through. So in an expert business, you've got to look at the different, and the idea behind an expert business is you're getting paid for your expertise as you express it to people and as you help people.

It's important to look at the actual business model first and understand what's the actual business model. So with Radical Personal Finance, I made the decision that I wanted to pursue not a full featured, full rounded expert business, but I wanted to serve people with the audio content. And so I've made decisions along the way that have oriented me in that direction.

So I'm willing to accept paid speaking engagements, but I haven't run out and said, I want to focus on doing that because I haven't maximized the opportunity of helping the number of people that I can help through the podcast. So I've made certain decisions away from kind of a full featured business.

For most people, I don't think that's the best solution. The first step is to understand who specifically are you going to help and how are they going to pay you for your help? Because there's got to be a business model from the beginning. The biggest danger that I see people making is thinking that if you build it, they will come.

If I get an audience, they'll come. I made that decision, and I'm not saying it can't happen, but I would emphasize that it's unusual, unlikely, and the odds are against you. The best approach is to have a specific business model in mind. So for example, what you're describing is something like career counseling.

So if you're going to establish yourself as a career counselor or as a life coach, then you're going to need to have the business model planned out. So the business model, the simplest, most direct path is to say people are going to pay me for my time. I'm going to allow people to pay me for my time.

I'm going to create packages of consulting fees or consulting packages, and I'm going to market these packages of three sessions with me to figure out what you should do with regard to your career. The best way to start is to have a very narrow, small market established into which you can sell.

So the best solution would be to pick a specific industry, whatever it is, whether it's doctors wanting to become financial planners, whether it's firefighters who are finishing up their 20 years and trying to go to something else, or whatever it is, you want to have it as small as possible so that you can reach those people with your message.

You can't market to everybody. You can only market to a firefighter. If you know that you're going to market to firefighters, now you can know how to reach them. What magazines do firefighters read? What YouTube channels do firefighters watch? What podcasts do firefighters listen to? Who do firefighters respect?

Who are the industry leaders? What schools do they attend? You can use that information to put together a marketing plan of how you're going to reach those firefighters. You can then go and you can deliver a message, a speech, at a local firefighter meeting or a local firefighter training seminar or a retirement party or something like that.

You can go and you can deliver a speech to that and you can be very targeted that your message is going to resonate with your target audience. If you bring a message meant for MBAs to firefighters, it won't resonate. If you need to reach MBAs, you've got to go somewhere else.

The key thing is the smaller the better because it's easier to find a small market and then build from there. Then you build the business. You've got to think of blogging and podcasting and video and those types of things as marketing to new prospective clients and also as marketing to your existing clients or as a way of serving your existing clients.

That is the best way to approach that type of business. If you first define who am I going to help and how am I going to help them, then you figure out what is going to be the best way for me to help these people. The best way might not be a blog.

The best way might not be a podcast. The best way might very well be writing articles that are going to be placed into industry publications. It's probably the least talked about and most effective marketing strategy for many people because in every industry, there are a few publications that everybody reads.

An article placement in that is going to be your way of connecting with people. Down in the byline on the bottom, it says Joshua Sheets, radical personal finance, blah, blah, blah. Then you want to have some hook or mat, emissary to the firefighters. Here's the website, firefighterfreedom.com. You put your little response.

You've got to study the direct response marketers. For a free report on how you can take your 20-year pension and use it to launch the next greatest entrepreneurship business that you're going to start, go to this link. Then they go to that link and then you need the whole sales system in place there, established there.

Then you choose whatever channel and you start on that channel and you build it. Over time, you're going to have a combination in an expert business. You're going to have a combination of product sales. You're going to develop products. You want to develop cheap products to help people with simple questions.

You want to develop expensive products to help people with big questions. You're going to have public speaking. You're going to have live events that you're doing. You're going to do coaching. You're going to do writing. You're going to create different things that are fitting the needs of the person.

Once you decide the market that you're going to try to serve, and the smaller the better, and then figure out what does that market need, then you can go ahead and you can start to see how do I actually meet the needs of this market. One thing I will mention, and it's actually I'm working on an info product on this.

I don't know when it'll be ready, but I'm working on an info product on this, which is how to establish yourself. The working title is right now, how to establish yourself as an industry expert in two years or less. I've got to give it some spammy, markety title to get people to click on it.

But the idea is what if you could, in the current world, what if you could, instead of doing all of the work behind the scenes to develop the knowledge and figure it out, and then you could try to come to market as an expert, what if you could systematically build your audience along the way and connect with your customers as you're learning what you're doing?

This is the strategy that I think is broadly applicable for most people, is to decide on an area that you want to be an expert in, an area that you want to establish yourself as an expert in. Hopefully it's related to your current job. If not, it might be easier to just go and get a job in that field, or use this as a way to get a job in that field.

So you want to establish yourself as an expert in that industry by simply providing content and serving the industry. So you can read the books in the field and share book summaries and share podcasts, teaching the lessons that you've learned. And as long as you are honest about it, and you don't try to hold yourself up as an expert, that's a way where you can really serve people along the way and equip them with the info that they need as they learn.

So is that helpful, Matt? No, absolutely. I appreciate that. Let's do one more question from you, and then we'll go on to another call. Okay. Terrific. Well, are you familiar with either of John Acuff's books, Start and Quitter? Have you read them? I've not read them. I'm familiar with who he is, but I haven't read them, no.

Fair enough. I guess I wanted to ask, I'm a few years farther along in my career than you were when you left, maybe half a decade or a little bit more than that, with a young family of school-aged children. We have our cost structure pretty low. We've been working on that for a long time.

But I wondered if you wanted to talk at all, and I know you've talked about this elsewhere, but about the transition from paid work to entrepreneurship, how you made that work. My vision for that would probably be to see something on the side come up to meeting our needs at least partway before I would make a jump away from full-time work into doing something like that.

But I guess if you have any comments on that transition, that'd be terrific. Absolutely. I think that's the way to do it. If you want to transition from something like a job to your own entrepreneurial endeavor, I think the absolute best way to do it is to do it on the side.

Michael Masterson, an author of various business books, he refers to this as chicken entrepreneurship, and I like that. You don't have to take the risk. And when you don't have to take the risk, it makes a big, big difference. So in general, my go-to advice, if somebody has a job and they're wanting to start a business, just start it and commit yourself to working on it on the side for a while and see if it's going to work.

You want to see if it's going to-- see if it has legs. You've got to actually-- the feedback in the marketplace is customers, and so you want to get feedback on your idea, on your product as quickly as possible by getting it in front of customers and seeing if customers will buy it.

Now, every business is different, but it'd be good to have a confidence that, "Yes, I've got customers. People will buy this product." Prove the concept. And if you can do that without taking any risks on your finances, that, I think, is always the strongest opportunity. Question comes in, "Well, how long should I do it, and to what point?" I don't think there's an easy answer to that.

Every business would be different. For example, if you're doing a business that is specifically related to-- specifically an hourly-- it's specifically a business that's related to some kind of hourly work. Pretend that you want to become a wedding photographer, and you're taking pictures on the side, and it's related to hourly work, and you are having a steady increase of clients.

You've got more orders than you can handle, and you're sitting there and looking at it. A business like that, when you look at it, you can know--you should know the things that you can do to get more referrals and get more business. So if, for example, your income has increased, and you've been able to raise it to where it's 30% of your monthly living expenses, and you know, "Here are the other things that I can do that are going to make this really take off.

It's just a matter of me doing them-- making the phone calls, making the introductions, whatever the market-generating activities are." Then you could be pretty confident that if you've got a runway of cash, you could be pretty confident of leaving the job knowing that over the next three months, I'm going to do these activities, and that should be able to bring this up from 30% to 100% of my necessary living expenses.

That's one thing. Now, if, on the other hand, you're building a business that's not related to something that you're directly controlling-- say you're selling a product, and you just made up this product, and you haven't yet figured out how to fully market it, and the marketing is coming in fits and starts-- or excuse me, the sales are coming in fits and starts, and then all of a sudden there's a big jump, and now it's at 30%, but you're not sure why that happened.

Well, my question to somebody that I were giving advice to in that circumstance would be, "What activities can you do? What extra things can you do that are going to make this revenue come in?" And if I'm selling a product on Amazon or something, and I don't have the answer to that, then it's probably not best for me to assume that I'm going to be able to get it to 100% of my needs.

You need to know what are the activities that make customers come in. It's one thing I'm so grateful for having worked as a financial advisor, because what I learned-- the way I learned to build my business-- was you pick up the phone and you call people. And so now to this day, I have no doubt whatsoever that if I need money, I know how to get it.

I pick up the phone and call people. And whether that's in the context of selling life insurance, or whether it's in the context of selling boats, or whether it's in the context of getting a job, I know how to get money. I pick up the phone and I call people.

And I call everyone I know, and I ask to call everyone they know. And if you give me a phone, I can figure out how to get money to come in, either through, again, the sale of some product, finding customers, or whatnot. So I know the activities. So that gives a confidence.

But some businesses aren't like that. And so you have to look at the business, and you have to assess, "Does this business need more time, or does this business just need something different?" If you're selling a product online, and assume that you've got a good sales page, et cetera, sometimes what you don't need is more time to work on it.

Another 40 hours a week is not going to make the difference. Sometimes what you need is to study copywriting, so you can improve your conversion ratio on your sales page. Well, you don't need to quit your job to do that. You just need to start making tweaks and give time for those things to test.

But in general, the best thing to do is to make the transition slowly and let the income on the side come up, and then make a judgment and say, "If I do this, if I have more time to work on this, how is that going to affect the income?" That's not what I did, and I do not recommend what I did to most people.

People think I'm joking sometimes when I say that, but no, I don't recommend it. The only reason I jumped told cold turkey was because I couldn't talk to the world. I was stuck behind the wall of silence. So in order for me to do it, I had to make the jump, and it was very difficult.

At that time, I just simply had committed myself to doing it, but I didn't make a jump from nothing to nothing. I just changed jobs, and I was working behind the scenes. I was working and committed to working two full-time jobs, and even still to this point, as I continue to build the business, that has still been my intention, is that I didn't just go and somehow create the business out of nothing.

I was working a full-time job. I was able to find an opportunity that dropped it back to 24 hours a week, so that helped me immensely so I could put even more energy into radical personal finance, and I was watching the market. I'd given myself a timeline of a year.

I said, "I'll do it for a year, and a year should be enough time for me to know year full-time." I was intending to do it regardless of how long it took, but a year full-time was going to be my timeline to see is the market – is what I have to say useful and helpful and relevant to people, and then from that point, I would make other decisions.

Along the way, I decided not to do the financial planning work because I could see that it was starting to take off, and I doubled down on the media business, but test, test, test, test so you don't make big mistakes. Is that useful, Matt? Absolutely, Jostra. I sure appreciate your time.

Thanks for taking my call. Hope you have a great afternoon. For sure. All right, next call. I see a Florida number popped up. Hey, Jost, it's Alejandro from Fort Lauderdale. Alejandro, welcome. Just down the road from me. Yep, not too far away. So I have two questions. One is a personal question, and one is more just an interest in your ideas.

I've been listening to your podcast for a while, and I've heard you say in passing in some episodes that you really love our current banking system. So I thought it would be interesting to hear you elaborate as to why you love our banking system so much. I mean, I've read a lot about it, and I myself am shocked that we're in the system that we have now, but it is what it is.

So I was interested in hearing your ideas and giving you a soapbox to stand on. It's very polite of you to throw a softball like that to me. Nothing warms an opinionated person's heart like having somebody lob them a softball. Just for clarity, I assume that that question is asked with your tongue planted firmly in your cheek.

Is that accurate? Correct. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I've always been challenged to try to sort through the financial world and discern fact from fiction. I'm not sure that I always get it right. I always just try to work through and see what's right and what's wrong. And I've generally found problems on both extremes and both extreme views of finance and the way that it's run, especially in the United States.

Now, with regard to banking system, there are a couple of different directions I could take that. I could take that at the macro level, for example, Federal Reserve and the idea of -- I'm thinking macro level. Okay. So we could take it at that level. We could take it down to the individual banks, et cetera.

The biggest challenge for me in knowing how to talk and what to say has been feeling confident in the background of it. So, for example, in studying something like the Federal Reserve, people often jump into the discussion and say it's very easy to get on the anti-Fed bandwagon. It's very easy to say, "We shouldn't have that.

We should get rid of the Fed and end the Fed." And, hey, if I had a choice to end the Fed, I'd vote for it. If I had a choice to audit the Fed, I'd vote for that. I'd love to see that done. When you study the history of the Federal Reserve and you start digging into it, it's not something that seems very pleasant to me.

The question that I always had that I could never answer and the reason why I've been relatively silent on it on the show -- I'll show my cards at times, of course, but I haven't done a standalone show on the Federal Reserve. But I've never been able to make the counterarguments confidently.

So, for me, when I approach a subject that I don't know or that I don't understand, I try to figure out -- I try to look at it. And if I don't have a preconceived opinion, I try to just study it and see what emerges naturally. But if I have an opinion, my goal is to be able to argue my side very clearly and effectively.

But then I also want to be able to make the strongest argument for the other side and really feel confident in the other side. And so I spent so much time -- I spent a lot of time reading and thinking through the anti-positions, the anti-Federal Reserve. But then I realized I couldn't -- I was like, "Why do we have the system?

Why did we scuttle the gold standard? What was it? Was it all conspiracy? Was it all evil manipulation?" It's really hard for me to accept that everything is conspiracy and everything is manipulation. But it's also really hard for me to accept that nothing is conspiracy and nothing is manipulation behind the scenes.

And so that's always troubled me. So over the last few years, I've dug into it quite a bit. I have -- I've dug into it quite a bit. I've sought to understand academically. I only had the straight standard academic model with economics classes in college and then formal financial planning stuff.

I looked a lot at the alternative viewpoints and then I've really -- and then I've read a bunch of -- several books on monetary history and whatnot over the last few years. But I still -- I guess I just often feel inadequate and I often feel like I can't fully make the arguments enough and I don't like to talk publicly about things I'm not super confident in.

So that's why it's often only a passing reference. Gotcha. So you have a strong opinion you don't feel strongly about basically. Well, I'm also pragmatist. So I look at it and I say, "What good does it do me?" I look -- a lot of times how I look at issues is I say, "OK.

Let's assume this is true. What does that mean in my life?" There are lots of ways to do it. But let's assume this is true. Now, if this were true, then what would I need to do with it? So when I look at systems like that, when I look at questions of banking, the reality is we live in a fractional reserve banking system.

I think that system has major flaws, major problems, has major weak spots. I'm not alone in that. I read the commission inquiry report of the financial crisis inquiry report. It's sitting here on my bookshelf. You go through that and you look at things and say, "OK. So I'm not crazy to think there are major flaws." But on the other hand, the system has -- like it's operated pretty well and recovered.

So you can't -- I don't feel so strongly about just saying, "Well, get out and get all the money out completely." I don't feel that that would be -- I don't feel like I've got the case to make for that. It wouldn't be responsible of me, especially given the responsibility.

I might do things in my own personal life that I can't advise other people to do. And so I don't feel responsible coming and coming to a show like this and just banging the drum for any position. I try to see responsibly. So when I look at it, I think the rational way to look at it is to say we have the system that we have.

It has major flaws. It has major problems. These major problems usually are going to take longer to appear than many people predict and think they are. And so let me adjust. And so that's what I apply. I did a show called Looking at Financial Advice Through the Lens of Scale.

And to me, that's one of the most important things that we can do. If I've got $10,000 in the bank, I don't need to be going and buying gold coins and trying to escape the banking system. I've got $10,000. That $10,000 is necessary for my -- just for the daily things that I've got to deal with.

So, yeah, it would be good to keep $1,000 at home if I can safely do that. It might be good to keep $1,000 in my wallet to buy any deals that I can have. But if I've only got $1,000, I don't need to be buying gold coins on eBay.

Now, you flip that around and you say, all right, I've got a million bucks. I wouldn't feel very confident having all of my million dollars invested in one thing and not diversified. And so I'm going to keep some gold coins in another situation. I'm going to keep some diversified currencies.

I'm going to not have all my money in the U.S. dollar. I'm going to diversify my portfolio. And so it's all a matter of looking and saying what are the actual risks that I face and then how can I reasonably protect against them. That's been my philosophy. Okay. Let me ask you a follow-up question to that.

Do you think that there is an alternative to fractional reserve lending, like a viable one for the very near future? At the moment, no. I do not see any – I don't see any – Look into Bitcoin. Yeah, Bitcoin. So let me come back to Bitcoin in a minute.

I believe that there are plenty of viable banking systems that can be done, and I do not like fractional reserve banking. I'm very close. I'm not quite – I haven't quite felt the confidence to do this. But I'm very close to being persuaded that the entire system is morally evil because of who it hurts and how it hurts them.

I'm not quite there yet, but obviously since I just said that I'm getting there, like I'm going in that direction just because of the way that people are hurt and how it misaligns the incentives. And it's just – anyway, so I'm going in that direction. But I don't see a replacement for it on the horizon that can work.

With regard to Bitcoin, I've watched Bitcoin off and on for a couple of years. I was probably slower to the party than many people, so I won't – I wasn't a newcomer to it. At the moment, my current understanding of Bitcoin – I've been wanting to get some Bitcoin people on the show, and I've just been remiss in not getting it done.

It's no one to blame except me. But with regard to Bitcoin, I think Bitcoin has a tremendous future as an idea. But where I see the real application of it is not that it's not going to replace the US dollar. If you look at just the news of the dollar's early demise are strongly overplayed.

I can't remember the Livingston quote that was so famous, but the news of the dollar's demise and the news of the dollar's weakness is strongly overplayed. The US dollar is the strongest currency in the world today, and it's the strongest reserve currency, and there's nothing on the horizon that is going to replace that at any time soon.

Now, certainly, do other currencies desire to replace that? Certainly. Are countries trying to escape from the US dollar in their trade negotiations? Absolutely. But just look at the scale, and you look at the scale of the total market value of Bitcoin as compared to the total market of US dollars.

It's just not a viable alternative. Now, on the other hand, I love the idea of Bitcoin, and I love the idea of cryptocurrencies. I love the idea of cryptocurrencies being spread, number one, throughout many parts of the developing world. I think that can be a tremendous opportunity there, just like the way that cell phones allowed the developing world to leapfrog the slow development in major Western economies, where they had to put all this infrastructure in place of phone lines and things like that, and cell phones just jumped right over that.

I think the same thing is going to happen with currencies, with other things as well, with the ability to transmit money from mobile phone to mobile phone. But in the United States, I love that it's becoming more prominent. I love any kind of competitive system. I just don't see that Bitcoin is a salvation.

At the moment, my current opinion on banking and currency is this. I would love to see the Austrian solution established, which is this. Anybody can create a currency, and anybody can do anything they want with their currency, and let it compete on its own. That's what I would love to see.

Now, do I think it'll happen? I see no chance of it happening under the current system, and so I don't see much point in worrying about it at a macro level. It's simply the power of being able to print money is far too seductive for the politicians to pass by it.

But what I would love to see is all currency and banking and things like that completely privatized and brought open to the free market. That way, the people that want to deal with Bitcoin, they can do it with Bitcoin. The people that want to have a non-fractionally banked system of gold or gold-backed currency, they can do that.

Just open it up, and that's what I would love to see. Yeah, I agree with about 99% of what you said. The only thing that I'm a little less confident about is probably the time frame for a transition of the US dollar as a world reserve currency, because there's a lot of incentives for a lot of people to move away from that.

I'll get to my personal question, which is probably a little easier to answer. I've been entrepreneuring for, I would say, about the last year. Your podcast had a lot to do with that. But one of the things that I've realized as I've started doing it, one of my biggest weaknesses is sales.

You've talked about how you used to do sales, and sales is a huge advantage for you, because you can, like you said earlier, get on the phone, call, and one way or the other, you'll get income. It's just a numbers game. So what would you give as far as advice to people who are not the strongest in sales, and they have a harder time engaging in that?

Because I'm a big believer that we learn by doing, and so I'm trying to start doing more sales-type behavior in order to learn those skills. But is there anything that you can think of that you wish you would have known when you first started off so that you can gain a little more confidence in it and learn the skills that you need quickly?

What type of business, just generally speaking, are you engaged in? Well, so right now, I'm working for free. There's a lot of reasons for that, but I won't get into the details. But essentially, I'm going to be working in sales for software. So I'm going to be marketing software, and it's a very niche field, one that I've been working in for a long time.

And I have to basically market the product, but I'm not really sure that I've ever had a good history with selling, meaning whenever I've tried to sell things or engage in that sort of behavior, it hasn't come naturally to me. It hasn't been my strong suit. I'm a pretty good communicator in the sense that I can read and write pretty well, and I can also talk about things pretty fluently.

So the talking part isn't the problem. I don't know what is, to be honest, and so I guess that's why I'm sort of looking for help in that respect. But there's a lot of stuff out there. I've read a lot of books about sales and little techniques like foot in the door and all this other stuff.

But that doesn't come naturally to me, so it's an area of struggle that I have. Are you expecting to need to sell face-to-face, person-to-person, or through another format? Last question, and then I'll answer your question. I'm going to be selling through a lot of different formats, basically in person, over the phone, through a website.

I'm going to be creating content in much the same way you do, but through a different platform, probably through YouTube. That's how I'll generate leads, basically. Right. So that's different than – so selling is fundamental to every business and to every product and to every service. It must be sold.

And selling is a science that can be broken down and optimized in every single way. And so whether or not you are selling face-to-face, which is what many people think of when they think of sales, the insurance salesperson, the store salesperson, et cetera, or whether you're selling through some other format, the process is the same.

There are seven key skills that you have to master with sales. And if you miss any of them, your results will not be as optimal as you would like. And so first is prospecting, establishing rapport, identifying needs accurately, presenting whatever product or service you're selling as the best choice for those needs, answering objections, closing the sale, and then getting resales and referrals.

Those are the seven key skills. Prospecting, establishing rapport, identifying needs accurately, presenting your product or service, whatever you're selling, as the best choice, answering objections, closing the sale, and getting resales or referrals. So those will be applied in whatever format or context you are working in. So let's give a simple example.

With prospecting, let's talk first on a retail salesperson. And the key to selling is if you're in sales, the key is to identify which area to work on and then to steadily improve it. So you go get a job selling suits at a department store. Well, prospecting, your prospecting skills are primarily going to be the traffic through the front door.

Now, interestingly, if you study great salespeople, they don't often rely always on the traffic through the front door. My favorite example of this, if anyone's in selling, check out the story. I think they're still available. Years ago, I bought all the CDs and his books. But check out the story of a guy named Joe Girard, G-I-R-A-R-D.

I tried to get him on the show. He didn't want to come on, but he's just a great guy. JoeGirard.com probably is his website. But Joe Girard holds the Guinness Book of World Records as the world's greatest salesperson back when they still published it. It was kind of a flaky award because he has that designation, but then later they stopped publishing that award and that designation.

But he sold automobiles. He sold cars. So he's a traditional car salesperson and Chevrolets, exactly. Yeah, I think I've heard of him. Okay. So when he started his career, for the audience who may not have heard of him, when he started his career, the first job that he got, he – as a car salesperson, they wouldn't give him a job until he told them that he wouldn't take any walk-in traffic.

And so he started his career selling cars by cold calling through the white pages. Now, it's a fascinating story, but he went on to be the most productive salesperson ever, selling over a thousand cars a year. If my memory is right, he sold about 13,000 cars face-to-face, traditional sales, over about 10 years.

His record, if memory is right, was about 1,600 cars in one year, face-to-face, individual sales, no fleet sales, just him at a Chevrolet dealership selling cars. Well, the reason he was so good was because he had mastered this process. Let me go through it. So prospecting system could be people walking through the door.

Establishing rapport for someone who's selling in a retail environment could be as simple as walking over and saying, "Hey, welcome to the store." And when you do sales training, for example, if you have retail salespeople, one of the things you want to do is you want to train them not to ask that stupid question, "Hi, can I help you?" The answer is always no.

The answer to every question is always no. So you teach your salespeople different questions to open and help them establish rapport so they don't say, "No, you can't help me," so they actually have an opportunity. Identifying needs accurately, that's where you look and you try to understand what are you actually looking for.

It boggles my mind when salespeople don't actually try to figure out what I want or what I need. And if they'll just help me figure out what I want or what I need, I'm totally easily sold. But oftentimes, they don't think. Presenting your product or service as the best choice, answering objections, closing the sale, getting resales and referrals, those can all happen face-to-face.

Those can also – many of them happen digitally. So you could set up a system where your product is sold statically purely off of a website using one sales page on a website and through an email system. So your prospecting system in that scenario is going to be your search engine optimization.

This is the greatest widget for you. And it's also going to be the first paragraph of your sales letter where you are identifying the type of person that needs to read your sales letter. If you study sales copy and sales copywriting, one of the things that's so important is they write to a specific person so that that prospect stumbles across it.

You need to send traffic to the webpage and then that prospect comes across it and that establishes rapport. And then through the process of the sales letter, you can establish rapport between the writer and the reader. You can identify their needs. You weed people out steadily with your copy.

This type of person doesn't like this product. This type of person doesn't like this type of product. But this product is the perfect fit. And so your right customer continues through that listing where they're identifying who they are and what their needs are. Are you fat? Are you overweight?

Would you like to get fit in five minutes a day? And then whether the answer is yes or no, whatever it is, it leads you right through that. Presenting the product or service as the best choice, that's where the sales letter will then talk about the products. Answering objections, this is where the sales copy will say, "Now, you may have heard that this product does this.

Well, what we actually found was in this study with Dr. So-and-so, we found that it did this and here it is." So you're answering objections. And then the sales close is simply act now, hurry to get this limited time offer to save 50% on your order. Click this link.

And then the getting resales and referrals comes in where you establish it as an auto-renew. Hey, for an extra $10 a month, you can get this product at 70% off if you just submit to a recurring order. And then also as a referral system, hey, by the way, here's our affiliate link.

If you send other people to this, then you can go ahead and get people – you can get commissions on this. And then the company gets more products. So whether it's an in-person traditional sales or whether it's all on a sales page and a shopping cart online or whether it's any combination in between, you have that system.

And so that's the fundamental system that you have to master and that's the fundamental system that you apply to your product, your service, your business, and then you optimize each of those things. And so with a podcast, so for me, prospecting is primarily done through the podcast. Establishing rapport, that happens for me through the aspect where people are listening to me and I'll say something that they'll love and so they'll tune in more or I'll say something that they'll hate and they'll hit stop and they'll go away.

So all those things are establishing rapport. And then through the process, then you can establish other things whether – so in the future when I come out with individual products, I'll come out with individual products that are specific to certain needs. And then I'll present those products or services as the best choice.

I'll cover the objections. I'll close the sales. And then the goal is to get the clients and the customers for life where they go and they buy all the other products and they buy again and again and they send their friends to buy. So you can apply it and you can sometimes use YouTube videos.

Sometimes you can do this. You've got to look at the business and figure out how to put those things in place. But you should play to your strengths. So if you're not an outgoing, gregarious person who wants to pick up the phone and does that, you might be wonderful at sitting in a back room and writing the most powerful sales letter of all time.

And if you do that, you can put that sales letter to work, put a YouTube video to work. If you're very shy, you're not outgoing, hire an actor to make the YouTube video. You can set up the whole system and you'll sit in the back and no one will ever know your name or your face.

But the sales system will work. On the flip side, if you're the kind of person – I met a guy – I mentioned this on a recent show where I met my neighbor down the road and this guy, he's selling headlight restoration kits and he's doing headlight restoration kits.

His system is dirt simple. He goes where people are. He puts up a little white canopy, puts up a table, and he sells the stuff face to face. He's a hawker. He's a Spanish guy. His English is heavily accented so he does it in Spanish and in English. But he's hawking products.

But the man is making boatloads of money with this utterly simple system and it's playing to his strengths. He's totally all over the place. He drives around in his car and finds places with people and sells this thing. So it's playing to his strengths. It's very simple but he's still doing exactly the same system.

So I'd encourage you, identify the product or service, the customer, and then think through what am I trying to build. And then if you're going to do it personally, work on those skills individually. Establishing rapport is something that can be studied. It can be developed. It's a skill that can be developed.

Or put the system in place where it will do that for you in that area of the sales process. >> Yeah, that's a fantastic idea. I didn't think of it in a system sort of framework but that makes all the sense in the world. So I'll definitely do that and appreciate the advice.

>> Absolutely. Thanks for calling in. Awesome. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for listening to today's show. I hope these concepts and ideas are useful to you. I know it's kind of you never know what you're going to get but hopefully that's useful. And some of you, perhaps the sales tips will be useful to you.

I love selling because it's that skill that can be applied in every system and because it's the cornerstone of every business. I hope some of that passion comes through. If you don't have somebody who can sell or if you're not selling, the business is going to die. Thank you so much for listening.

Again, remember, if you would like to get access to one of these conference calls in the future, become a patron of the show, radicalpersonalfinance.com/patron. And then also I'll sell to you. If you would like to get my specific advice on a specific question that you have, go to radicalpersonalfinance.com/phonecall.

Radicalpersonalfinance.com/phonecall. And there at that link, you will be able to get in touch with me and we can set up a personal consulting call with you and me. So there's my sales spiel. I got to figure out what your objections are, help you overcome them. No risk to you.

Why don't we deliver? I don't know. I'm just kidding with you. Thank you all so much for listening. Be back with you soon. Don't just dream about paradise. Live it with Fiji Airways. Escape the ordinary with Fiji Airways Global Beat the Rush Sale. Immerse yourself in white sandy beaches or dive deep into coral reefs.

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