Hey, Cricket customers, Max with Ads is included with your Cricket $60 unlimited plan at no additional cost. "Sike!" Max is the streaming platform where you can watch Scoob, Meg 2 The Trench, The Nightmare on Elm Street Collection, and so much more. "Remember me." Just log in with your Cricket username and password to experience Max on all your favorite devices.

"We never seen this before." Max, the one to watch for a good scream with Cricket. "Yeah!" Phone plan, streams, and standard definition. Programming subject to change. Fees, terms, and restrictions apply. See cricketwireless.com for details. Today on the show, what's wrong with radical personal finance? Or you could just say, "What's wrong with me, Joshua Sheets?" Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less.

My name is Joshua, and I am your host. Today, I am your co-journeyman and perhaps out at the vanguard trying to lead from the front because I'll share with you about some of my successes and more importantly today, some of my failures. I've often joked here on the show that in many ways, we shouldn't spend so much time listening to successful people because they spend all of their time talking about how successful they are and sometimes it's hard to relate.

And I've often joked that sometimes we should talk to failures. We just walk up to a failure and have some time with them and say, "Please, tell me everything that you do and have done so that I can learn what I don't want to do." Obviously, it's hard to do that.

It's challenging to get interviews with failures and it's even more challenging as an interviewer. I can't imagine ever saying to somebody, "Hi, you're a failure. Please tell us about that." Maybe there's a place for that at some point. So it's mainly just a joke, but I think there is a lesson in that.

And so on today's show, I'm just going to share with you – speak very personally about some of my failures over especially the past months but even the past years. And I don't know if this will solve any of your problems or not. I hope it will help. I think that it is helpful to hear people talk about what they're facing so that you feel like you're not all alone.

But if you're looking for a particular technical financial planning insight or looking for any particular – particularly life-changing financial revelation, probably this isn't the show for you. This will be very personal. And I'm going to share it with those of you who desire to hear some of the personal lessons that I've learned.

And I will do it because I think it fits that need of learning from other people's failures, especially even while they're in the midst of them. I don't like to sound – I don't like to complain. And in today's show, it may actually sound like I'm complaining or being negative or something like that.

I don't like complaining. I don't like hanging out with people who complain. But I believe that it's important to present a balanced view. What happens so often in our modern world is we only present the best sides of ourselves. So we show the made-up, beautifully retouched photo, glamour photo that is impossible to ever achieve again rather than the straightforward snapshot that shows our flaws and our wrinkles and our dimples and our rolls, whatever it is.

And especially in the world of money, finance and business, we have a tendency to do that. When I invite people on the show for interviews, I think if you listen like I listen, you'll hear how quickly they trot over the hard times. And they simply seem often to use the hard times as a way to establish their credentials and quickly jump to their successes.

None of us like to talk about the mistakes that we've made. I don't like to talk about the mistakes that I've made. I have to force myself and have continually forced myself on the show to share my mistakes and to share them accurately and straightforwardly without seeking to pull back from them.

It hurts my pride to do that because a lot of times I want to present myself as the world's greatest, most knowledgeable, most helpful person that's always done everything right. But that's simply not true. And if I do that and share that with you, then chances are when you're facing something that you're failing at, you might look around and say, "What's wrong with me?" Rather than, "Okay, this is a failure.

This is what this feels like. This is what this looks like, and I'm going to keep on going." So for good or for bad, I hope you enjoy some of the story and the experiences that I have to share with you on today's show. And I hope that hearing just some of my challenges and frustrations and failures will help you.

I promised myself when I started Radical Personal Finance that I couldn't be the world's greatest broadcaster. I couldn't get everything right, but I would always tell you the truth and not hold back. I promised myself that when I'm wrong, I'll humble myself and tell you I'm wrong and apologize.

If I don't know something, I'll say I don't know and just simply maybe try to find out the answer or say it's out of my area of expertise, but not to present a fake, contrived version of events. So enough with the preamble because it hasn't all been that bad.

I want to share what's been hard and also share what's exciting because I've learned and I'm figuring out some of the solutions to my problems, and I'm very excited about those problems. I've had a really difficult summer. You've heard it in the shows over the last couple of months.

You've heard it in just my production rate of shows fell through the floor. I went from an average of maybe four per week, three or four per week to one a week. You've heard it – one to two a week. You've heard it in probably my tone of voice.

You've heard it in some of the content that I've done. I've just had a really, really challenging summer and a number of different reasons for that. Who knows? It seemed – a lot of my own personal challenges seemed to coincide with the birth of our new child, which was all things considered as I've shared with you, a really great birth.

My wife and I are doing well. The baby is doing well. It's the easiest baby we've ever had, and we are so thankful. Because our first two children were just awful babies. They were really, really, really difficult. And this third one compared to our first two has just been a breeze.

It's been fantastic. But it's funny because I have kind of had challenges in my life almost at the birth of all of our children. Oftentimes, mothers face postpartum depression or just the baby blues when the baby is born or sometimes when the baby is weaned as well. They say that men get postpartum depression as well.

I have no idea. Maybe I've had postpartum depression. I don't know. I read through the symptoms and it doesn't feel like it. But I have had just kind of a minor crisis, and I've felt really depressed. I've really felt challenged with trying to figure out what on earth am I doing and what is going on.

And my biggest problem is that I lost the vision for radical personal finance. I lost the vision. And I just haven't been able to – for a period of months, I just couldn't see a way forward. And what's a little bit annoying about that is I didn't lose the vision in external failure.

It's not been for a lack of success in the numbers. Radical personal finance right now just hit about 7.5 million downloads of the shows over all time. New shows right now, there's about 20,000 to 30,000 listeners per show, which is in the world of podcasting really successful. And so what you often think when you're pursuing a business or pursuing a goal is, "Well, if I just hit that goal, then I'll be successful." And I'm here to affirm from my own experience and from observation as well that's just not true.

Success isn't measured by metrics sometimes. And things can be going really well from an external perspective, and it just cannot seem to matter. Whether it's going well in terms of sales or downloads of a show or growth of an audience or income or whatever, that doesn't necessarily drive the person who's at the middle of it.

And that's what I've experienced. It's just been really challenging because I lost the vision. I couldn't see the way forward. I couldn't figure out how to accomplish what I was trying to accomplish. The lack of a clear and working business plan as accomplishing my goals that made sense to me was not there.

And for lack of a vision, people perish. Where there is no vision, people perish. And that's certainly been the case for me the last few months. Now, my experience with business growth and entrepreneurship and all the businesses that I've been involved in thus far is that there are cycles, ups and downs, ups and downs, ups and downs.

Nothing that I've ever done has been just a consistent, steady success where everything just steadily goes up. Maybe it exists. I admire people who are just day in, day out, brilliantly consistent. But I've never been able to do that. It doesn't fit with my personality and seems like just the time I get something working, I blow it all up.

And so even the growth of Radical Personal Finance has been a series of phases. I've tried all kinds of things. In the beginning, I didn't ever have a plan. I just said, "Well, if I start the show – if I can attract an audience, I'll figure it out. If I can't attract an audience, then it doesn't matter anyway.

So I'll just start it without a plan." And I kind of did that just to – took a leap off a cliff and said, "Well, let's see if it works." I wanted – I was worried about the timing. I was worried about being a late mover. And I was already a year behind when I wanted to be.

And so I said, "Let's just go for it." And then in terms of trying to build the business, I started doing the show. And then I planned to open a financial planning firm. I filed the papers for that. But then I decided, "Well, I can't do that too." So I closed the firm.

And then I opened a membership site and that didn't really work. And then I thought, "Well, I'll sell courses and classes." But then that didn't really work. And then I started bringing on advertising. But then that didn't really work. And then I wanted to move to having a listener support program.

And that worked. But it didn't work as well as I wanted it to work. And I really gave that everything I could but I can never kind of crack that nut as well as I want it. So then I started bringing advertisers back on. And then I moved at the beginning of the year to a daily radio show and that just wore me out and destroyed me.

And so all these things, this kind of constant cycle really contributed to my little mini breakdown over the summer. And I seriously considered – for at least an hour, I seriously considered just closing Radical Personal Finance down, deleting everything from the internet, myself included, and taking all my money and buying a herd of cows.

So I could follow my dream of raising grass-fed beef somewhere. And I'm not kidding. I did consider that. Now, of course, practicality would say that's a silly thing to consider. But that's about how I felt. And again, it wasn't due to lack of success. It's just due to lack of saying, "Is this working?" And some of the biggest challenges were challenges that I never anticipated.

The challenges I thought I was prepared for, I did okay. But challenges I never anticipated. I'll give you an example. One of the major challenges I faced that I never expected was the challenge of being exposed to more and more interaction with you and meaningful interaction. Not people who are trolls and whatever.

It took me a few months, but finally I got over the trolls. I'm talking about meaningful interaction where so many of you write me heartfelt, meaningful messages. And I didn't know how to handle that. I wasn't – and I'm still not prepared to handle that well. I think of it as the disease of the proliferating inboxes.

Now, obviously, we've all had to learn to deal with something new, an email inbox. And for years, I was able to keep up with my email inbox even for the first year – a couple of years of the show. And then kind of the dam broke from my email – my email inbox.

And I went from inbox zero to inbox 4,000. And frankly, the email wasn't even the worst because it wasn't just email. It was so many other inboxes, my LinkedIn messages and comments and my Twitter direct messages and mentions and my Instagram messages and apps and Facebook messages on my personal profile, on my business page and the Facebook group.

And then my Patreon inbox and comments. And it just kind of felt like an avalanche just flooding in at me. And I didn't have the infrastructure to deal with it. I didn't know what to do. And the challenge was that every one of the messages and the notes was – is a meaningful interaction from you, my friend.

So I view you, a friend, and somebody who is taking valuable moments out of their day to write to me and ask me a meaningful question. And I didn't know what to do with it because I can't do it. And that was really, really challenging because I felt like I'm failing people.

And so I didn't know what to do. For the last few months, I just kind of solved some things. But for the last few months, I just had to walk away. Now, frankly, I've wanted out of social media entirely. I went through and deleted every back archive on every single social media platform I've used.

Just deleted 10 years of my life off of Facebook and Twitter and all that stuff. And I deleted some of my accounts completely just to kind of get clear of some of the stuff. I deleted my LinkedIn account, which the marketers – I know it's the wrong move, 2,000 LinkedIn connections and deleted the whole account.

I couldn't turn off the inbox and just constantly fill up and said, "You know what? I don't want this. I don't have any fun here. I don't enjoy it. I don't see the point of it." And I – not that I didn't enjoy this. I wanted to hear from you, but I couldn't handle it.

Deleted my Instagram account. And some of them I solved. You don't have to delete stuff. I deleted LinkedIn and Instagram because I needed to. But you may not need to. I'm not recommending that. But I shut off all my Twitter direct messages. I cleared all that. And I just kind of pulled out.

I stopped showing up in the Facebook group. I'm sorry, guys. I just – I couldn't handle it. And I knew that I needed to disengage for a little bit to try to figure out how to go forward and what to do. And probably just the worst thing was in my business.

I felt like I was just spinning my wheels and cranking out work but not confident in the model of what I was doing and how everything interacted. Just pumping things out that I thought might or might not be helpful. But it's too busy to build a proper business plan that would fit what I'm trying to do.

Too busy to hire people to solve some of my problems and hire people to sell ads or hire people to do financial advice. And I just kind of quit the show. I just couldn't see a way through. So over the last few months, even just through the process of going through and clearing some things out, I tried to analyze for myself what's wrong.

And it's frustrating for me that I often find it very easy to solve other people's problems. But I find it very challenging to solve my own. It doesn't make sense. When other people share problems with me, I find it simple and my brain works well enough. I can see the solutions and I can present.

Here are three or four paths. You pick what you like. But boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, here you go. But when I approach my own problems, it just kind of feels impossible. I can never see my way through, which is why we need other people. That's why there's wisdom in having many counselors and many points of view of input.

But even that is challenging because other people don't understand things. But through the process, I've learned some things and developed a couple of epiphanies that have helped me to where today I feel clear, clear on the work that I'm doing, at least for the coming months. And the fundamental epiphany that I had is this.

I don't want to work on things or be involved in things that are ephemeral. When I went through ephemeral meaning, if you're not familiar with the word ephemeral meaning, just for a moment, things that come and then disappear. When I was going through social media and just deleting – I deleted an archive of – I joined Facebook in I think 2005.

So I had 12 years of stuff on there, 12 years of my life. I was a heavy user when I first got into it. I developed – or I found a script. If you're interested, I used – what's the name of it? I used a Google Chrome script that I used to automatically just to – that ran a script on my Facebook page and deleted all the history, deleted all my comments, deleted everything.

I think the script was called F__BookCleaner. Just do a web search for Facebook cleaner or something like that and you can find that. There are a couple of them. One is a Grease Monkey script that somebody developed. That one didn't work for me, but the F__BookCleaner, they can't use Facebook.

Otherwise, it's a copyright or trademark infringement. But you can find that if you want to do the same thing. Don't do it manually. It's impossible. And Facebook doesn't allow you to do it in any easy way. So you got to use a script to do it. But as I was sitting there watching the script run – this was six months ago.

I was sitting there watching the script run and I was just thinking about all of the time. All of the time that I had put into some of the things that I did on Facebook. The time to compose a clever little statement or the time to interact and argue over some trivial thing.

And I just was disgusted at how much time I had put into something that disappeared into the oblivion of the social media timeline. It just disgusted me because I realized what I could have done with that if I had spent that time instead of working on something that was going to be ephemeral.

And just for a moment, if I had put that time into working on something that would last. I read some of the – I think it was leading through some of the comments. I read some of the essays that I posted in Facebook comments. Some of you know what I'm talking about.

We go back and forth and I write you ten pages and then post it in Facebook comments. And I thought to myself, "That was a waste of an essay." It was there in a comment where a few people saw it and it was thought-provoking. But I should have taken that and instead of wasting it on Facebook, I should have taken it and used it and written and just enhanced it just a little bit.

So it was a standalone essay and then published it on my own site. That way it could be there for somebody to access in the future. And the epiphany was just – I watched all the stuff just delete, delete, delete, just float into non-existence. I realized that I don't want to be involved in things that are ephemeral.

I haven't written anything on social media with it really in I guess six, eight months. I kind of quit around the time of the election on Facebook anyway. I quit around the time of the presidential election last November. And just one of the reasons I just looked around and just our ability to talk with one another had fallen apart.

It's just nasty, nasty interaction. And it just seemed like everyone is yelling at each other and I just thought I don't want to be involved in this anymore. And I thought how much have I contributed to this? I'm not into presidential politics and I'm not – don't waste much time.

I don't – excuse me. That was an inflammatory statement. I don't spend much time on such things. Local politics I think is the only thing to me that possibly has some ability to influence. But I just thought what have I contributed? Have I contributed to the anger and the frustration and the emotion that so many people have?

And I'm sure I have. So I just felt like I needed to – I didn't want to do that anymore and I felt like I should pull back. And in pulling back – and I didn't intend to go so deeply into social media. But I found it to be really, really helpful.

I deleted all the apps from my phone. I made it hard to get into so you had to go and actually sign in. It wasn't just always there. And I just really worked on making some of the changes. And in time I just got a little bit of perspective.

And I realized that if I use – I don't know. I probably will. I'll probably keep Facebook and Twitter around. I'm happy to be gone with the rest of it. But I'll keep Facebook and Twitter around. And I just thought to myself, though, I'm not going to waste time building these people's empires.

I'm not going to waste time building Facebook's empire or Twitter's empire. I'm going to spend my time building my empire. And what I mean by that is if I take all my thoughts and I write it in the context of a Facebook post, it just disappears into the river of the timeline.

Why not take it and build it into something that's carefully constructed, a well-built website that's a guide to the things that are beautiful and that are lasting and that are true and that are whatever, that are meaningful. And then just use Facebook to point it there. And even I went through and read through the terms of service and I realized I give everything away.

And they've built a great business on it. But that hasn't helped me. And so this recognition of the fact that I don't want to build anything that just disappears into the nothingness of the past. I want to build something that last was really, really deep. Now, along the way, I read a book.

And I'm going to read to you now the introduction of this book. It's about ten pages. But it's a book I read this summer called Out of the Ashes, Rebuilding American Culture by Anthony Esalen. And this book, the introduction, when I read it, just the introduction, put into words in many ways more accurately than anything else I'd read the way that I feel about kind of our current moment in the world and the work that I want to do.

Now, about ten pages here. It'll take me probably about eight to ten minutes to share this with you. The writing itself that I'm about to read to you is beautiful. So if you enjoy good writing, listen just for the beauty of the writing. If you're uninterested in the topic or this particular author's point of view, just skip forward about eight or ten minutes and I'll be speaking specifically about how this applies to my business.

But listen to the introduction to this book. The introduction is titled The Rubble. In this book, I shall indulge myself in one of civilized man's most cherished privileges. I shall decry the decay of civilization. I stand with Livy, who at the final hardening of Rome's republican arteries wrote that the study of his land's history was the study of the rise and fall of moral strength, with duty and severity giving way to ambition, avarice, and license, till his fellow Romans sank lower and lower and finally began the downward plunge which has brought us to the present time, when we can endure neither our vices nor their cure.

My heart goes out to the exiled Dante, who loved his native city of Florence with its old aristocratic modesty and gentility and hated what it had become, a bustling center of money-making and bloodthirsty politics. Thus he has his great-great-grandfather, Cacciaguita, in paradise, like any old Italian man rocking on his front stoop to this day, say of his now long-forgotten fellows.

With these and others I saw Florence in repose, never a cause to shed a tear. With these I saw them lead a just and glorious life, townsmen who never saw some victor drag their lily backward in the field, nor strife of party turn it red upon the flag. Or I walk with the ancient Saxon poet of the Wanderer, whose principal experience in this world is the loss of what was once full of vigor and glory and gladness.

He who thus wisely considers this wall, the world, and into our dark life casts his mind deep. His heart, old and keen, calls back from long ago that wealth of slaughters, and utters these words, "Where has the horse gone? Where has the hero? Where are the hall joys? Where the giver of gems?

Where the gathering for feasts? Alas, the bright goblet! Alas, the burnished mail! Alas, the prince's power! How that time has passed, now dim under the night-helm as if it never were!" After Rome was sacked in 410 by a frustrated glory-seeker, the German warlord Alaric St. Jerome wrote, "Who would believe that Rome, built up by the conquest of the whole world, had collapsed, that the mother of nations had become also their tomb?" I might say now, "Who would believe that the whole Western world, in whose image, for better or for worse, all nations seemed to hurry to refashion themselves, would collapse, not battered from without, but sagging into lethargy and indifference and stupor from within?" Are the words too harsh?

Let me anticipate an objection that my own citations above must provoke. "People are always complaining about decline and fall," someone will say, "but that does not mean that things are actually as bad as they believe. It is simply one generation's way of complaining about the next. You are an inveterate laudator temporis acti, one who praises the time gone by, forgetting its evils and overlooking the virtues of the present age." There are two answers to the charge.

One is that in any civilization, at any time, there will be some good things in decline, and so we will always need people who pull us up short and say, "Perhaps the amalgamation of family farms into vast tracts of agribusiness is not an entirely good thing." Or, "Perhaps the nearly universal exodus of women from homes and neighborhoods into offices does not bode well for the homes and neighborhoods, and that is something we should consider." In itself, the radio is a wonderful thing, bringing great music and pleasant entertainment into millions of homes.

It also precipitated the decay of music made by people themselves, from printed scores, from folk memories passed down over the centuries, and from sheer quirky inventiveness. In itself, the television is a wonderful thing. Why, you might watch a special on emperor penguins of the Antarctic and see the big fellows waddling about the ice, diving into the cold seas to fish, or settling their large eggs between their feet to keep them warm.

But you may more likely waste countless hours and half attention, and not even know the name of that cheerful little gray bird with a crest pecking at the bark of some tree or other ten feet from your window. More people watch baseball than ever before, in high-tech stadia prickly with electronic pictures and lights and noise that are meant to be like injections of adrenaline over and over.

Fewer people play it. Every small town in the country once boasted its own baseball team. Plenty of factories did too. All that is gone, and nothing in a town's common life has come to replace it. Rather, most of the things that were like it—town bands, playhouses, choirs, block parties, founders' days, and so forth—are gone too.

So there will always be some justification for those who warn about things passing away. But the second answer to the charge of exaggeration or intransigent nostalgia is more powerful. Sometimes, entire civilizations do decay and die, and the people who point that out are correct. Think of the incomparably lively centuries when the city-states of Greece were at their height, when the lyric poet Pindar, profoundly religious, wrote odes in honor of triumphant boys and men at the Games of Olympus or Delphi, celebrating not a mere individual achievement, but the very history of the lads, city, and family in the context of the ever-suggestive stories of the gods; when Athens invented drama itself, and Aeschylus, in the context of the new Athenian democracy, composed the Oresteia, the unsurpassed trilogy of blood guilt and revenge, of dark passions that we must never ignore, of reasoned argument and the chance—never a certainty—that men can see through the murk of rage and selfishness and come to the straight and just decision.

It was when the great statesman Pericles commissioned the building of the Parthenon, that clean and gleaming colonnade of Greek devotion and celebration, now in ruins thanks to the Turks who used it for an ammunition cache, exactly as if someone were to use the Bayeux tapestry for a throw rug.

But, having reached her peak, Athens was then absorbed into the empires of Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander, and, two centuries later, Rome. She was still the schoolmistress of the Mediterranean world, even after her arts went into decline. The people of the ancient world came before the modern watershed, that which encourages us to believe that what is current must be superior to what is past.

We apply what we see in the progress of technology to all other human endeavors, and fail to ask whether technological innovations themselves are always unmixed blessings, let alone whether, for example, modern art, with its inhuman abstraction or its deliberate ugliness, is really an advancement over what the great tradition had bequeathed to us.

Modernity is all too often a cult of erasure and oblivion. The ancients still had memory. They needed it, too. When the monks of the rule of St. Benedict built their monasteries across Europe, planting them even in the dark pagan forests of northern Germany and Ireland and England, they were outposts of memory.

You might think that Christian monks would scorn the pagan past, trusting in an endless supercession. "What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?" asked Tertullian. "And what has Ingeld to do with Christ?" asked Alcuin of his monks in the time of Charlemagne, when he found them still delighting in the heroic German sagas of old.

But those memories lay like seeds in a fertile land in winter, and would spring forth in a wholly new genre of song and story, the romances of Christian chivalry, of Arthur and Lancelot, of Roland and Oliver, of Tristan and Percival and Galahad. Winter comes and goes in the affairs of men and nations and cultures, and if they are to survive at all, they must plant seeds.

They must remember. What happens if they neglect the planting? Imagine a great manor house. The Weston family lives here. First, let us see the rooms. We enter a spacious drawing room with a great fireplace in the center and portraits of the family patriarchs and matriarchs on the wall. They have grown dark and dull with age.

Soot from the fireplace and smoke from cigarettes have turned a scarlet sash to rusty brown and a bright green bonnet to something the color of lichen on the north side of a rock. Sir Peter Weston bears a whitish streak extending from his left eye to what looks like a medal on his chest.

It could be the remains of oyster stew that one of the Weston boys flung at him in disgust. It could be bird droppings, for there are strange water stains in one corner of the ceiling, and it appears that the plaster there has long been pecked away. On each frame, a silver plaque, tarnished black from sulfur in the air and from neglect, bears the now unreadable name of the portrait's subject.

Not one member of the current Weston household can tell you anything about the people up above, except that Lady Amelia was a feminist before her time because she used to sneak out of the manor to carry on with the plowmen in the village, and that Sir Petticore led a Boy Scout troop with rather more interest than he should have, and that Miss Emmeline made a killing in the Caribbean slave trade, and so on.

A few things tawdry, despicable, petty, gross, vile, stupid, and nasty. Most of it exaggerated and some of it downright falsehood. Then we enter the library with its high ceiling and large windows to the east and south and west that flood the room with light all hours of the day.

A movable ladder on wheels runs along a track set eight feet from the floor to allow access to a gallery that divides the lower half of the room from the upper half. Lord John Henry Weston, two hundred years ago, had the room built in this way. The lower half is stocked with books in several of the modern languages of Europe.

They include novels, collections of poetry, histories, biographies, travelogues, and so forth. If you're a nine-year-old boy and you want to read Humphrey Clinker or Robinson Crusoe, or if you're a little older and you want to read Pope's Translation of the Iliad, you can find them ready to hand. Or you can get lost there on purpose as you might go forth into the woods on a sunny day, not knowing where the path will take you.

Lord John Henry devoted the upper half of the room to the upper half of knowledge and culture. There we find works in the ancient languages, Latin and Greek, and books dealing with philosophy, divinity, political constitutions, law, and natural science. The sermons of Lancelot Andrews are there, near Erasmus's edition of the New Testament in Greek and Hooker's Ecclesiastical Polity.

The legal writings of Coke and Blackstone are there, near Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis and the works of the Roman jurist Ulpian. Montesquieu, Boussau, Pufendorf, and Grotius are there, and not just for decoration. Plutarch is there in the original Greek and in North's 16th century English translation. Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Horace, Hesiod, all the poets are there.

The Hebrew Bible, various works by Augustine, Chrysostom, Gregory of Nysa, Lactantius, Jerome. It was the library of a learned man, interested in everything, human and divine. If you moved that ladder now, you would notice, in the channels of its wheels, a thick coating of grime and mold. There was a bad storm fifty years ago, and rain began to seep through some broken shingles on the roof, dripping down to the plaster ceiling.

One corner of the room is quite grey-green with mildew. No one has done anything about it. If you open that edition of Horace from the Aldine Press, you will be greeted with a dank smell. Spots have begun to appear on the books, wherever paper was exposed to the air.

You let your hand rest on one of the shelves, but then whisk it away at once, when you feel a strange grit lying all about. Mouse dirt. In fact, some of the spines of the books have been gnawed through. The library is not abandoned entirely, though. In one corner, there's a table heaped with glossy, hardcover biographies of celebrities, like Elvis Presley and Jim Morrison.

That's also where the most recent children in the Weston family have stashed their old school books. Lately, the family has taken to using the room for storage. So, we also find, crushed against one another, old hat racks, trunks full of outworn clothing, souvenirs from a trip to Disneyland, a sideboard that was supposed to have been repaired, but never was, and photo albums filled with pictures of people no one can any longer identify.

Then, we go to the conservatory. It's a pleasant, sunny room, where the women of the Weston family spent many a happy hour. Believe it or not, there are still 40 or 50 jars of conserves in a cabinet there, but nobody has touched them in many years. Nobody really knows any longer what is in them, and if you told them, they still wouldn't know.

What is "Shagberry" anyway? There's also a baby grand piano and shelves full of sheet music. The strings of the piano have been left untuned for so long, their tension has slowly warped the frame meant to hold them, so that now the instrument is irreparable. Many years ago, a master, Roland Weston, decided to pound the keys with his fist to see what would happen.

What happened was that he broke some of the carpentry, so that several of the keys simply lie flat, disconnected from their hammers. Master Roland got a pasting for that, but the piano was left as it was. Thousands of pages of music, most of it purchased from music stores and music publishers, one song at a time, lie about collecting dust and dead flies.

The Weston women used to play it all the time. No one can read it now. Should we go to the ballroom? Lady Georgina Weston had it renovated with an art deco coffered ceiling, fashioned by a local Italian carpenter with a knack for floral designs. There is a stage at one end for the musicians.

That is also where the Westons would occasionally put on a puppet show for the children. Nobody had any idea that the dances they all had learned from the time they were just little boys and girls would one day have faded from memory. It is true that a current Miss Jasmine Weston takes lessons in modern jazz dance at a local studio.

Her movements are like those Salome might have performed before her lecherous stepfather Herod, if Salome were a little less chaste and decorous. You can, of course, learn how to dance the old dances if you take a special course offered by a local dancing master with a taste running to the antique.

It's as if a boy could still learn how to play baseball if he went to a special baseball camp, or as if we all could still learn how to converse with our neighbors if we went on a special conversation retreat. Then there's the chapel. I need say no more.

That's a private home. Do we want to go out in public? I will now describe things I have seen with my own eyes. Here is a state park that used to be thronged with people on a sunny weekend. I have seen photographs of the parking lot from 60 years ago.

It features a strange geological phenomenon, the largest such in the world. You don't want to go there now. The nervous man in the lone car in the lot is waiting for an assignation that has to do with either of two things. One of those is drugs, and the other one isn't.

Here is a little grassy park with a nice bench and a flower bed, set aside as a memorial to the high school that used to stand there. It isn't that they built a new school somewhere else. Several towns consolidated their school districts into one and built a massive holding tank far from where anybody lives.

Here is a building that used to be a Catholic parochial school. But the order of nuns who used to teach there were infected by a vicious strain of feminism, and the people of the parish could not afford to pay, or did not want to pay, the salaries of the lay teachers who had to replace them.

The school, built by the very hands of the grandfathers of those parishioners, now serves for borough offices, complete with a jail. Here is a room in a Catholic high school. Its closet is filled with books in French and German. They have not been opened in 40 years, and German is no longer taught there.

Here is a church sold off to people who have turned it into a mattress warehouse. Here is a sandlot where boys used to play ball without adult supervision. You would never know that now. Here is a playground built 20 years too late, so that by the time the land was cleared, the children who would have played there were grown up, and there weren't any children to replace them, because people no longer have any, and the few they do have spend their hours in the company of their principal playmate and instructor, the television, or the computer, or the video game.

Here is what used to be the city's vocational high school for boys who wanted to learn a trade. It's gone. This is the American Legion building, which used to be the terminus for the town's grand Memorial Day parade. There has not been a parade in 50 years. This is a bandstand for what used to be the town band.

There is no town band. This is what used to be a parish hall built by a priest with his own family money. It had a library, a billiard room, a gym, and a place for refreshments. It is gone, and nothing like it is in its place. This is a ball field where the town's baseball team, men, not boys, used to play against teams from other towns.

There is no team. There aren't really any towns either, not if a town implies a community life. Here is a dam where older kids used to swim on summer days. No one swims there now. Here is a privately owned lake that used to sport pavilions for big family outings for aunts and uncles and cousins.

There are no more big family outings. Enough. If tradition is the handing on of cultural and artisanal knowledge, and if we have taught ourselves in our smugness that we can dispense with it, then we will become cultural and artisanal incompetence. Your grandfather might be a repository of many generations of know-how, and I am not speaking principally of technological know-how.

If you will not learn from him, from whom will you learn what he knows? From the pimply teenager next door? Inane actors on television? Teachers whose credentials are mainly in the new and improved methods for teaching, but who do not know the subject they are supposed to teach? Newspapers?

Advertisements on the walls of a bus? Politicians? Bubble gum cards? Sometimes the name of a thing remains long after the essence has been lost. In that case, people will still say that they do this or that without knowing that in large part it is no longer true. People still get married, for example.

Not many, as it turns out. Unmarried men who shack up with women tend to be irresponsible, unproductive, and aggressive. Unmarried women who shack up with men tend to be selfish and prodigal, and to want Big Daddy the government to take the same care of them that fathers and husbands used to take.

But those who do marry no longer seem to know what it is they are doing. Is it for keeps or not? What happens when children start arriving? What's a husband supposed to do? What's a wife supposed to do? We are incompetent in the ordinary things of life. We divorce more readily than we sell houses, yet for some reason we believe that we possess great wisdom as regards men and women that our benighted ancestors did not possess.

We raise sons who were not weaned at age 25, yet for some reason we have contempt for the old institutions that used to turn boys into men. We raise daughters who emulate well-paid whores, but who do not actually make the money that the whores make. And yet we persist in believing that only in our time has a girl had half a chance to live a decent life.

We are in debt over the eyeballs. We cannot make ends meet even on two incomes, and yet we hug ourselves for being liberated, looking with pity on a grandmother who in a single day did 50 skillful things for people she loved, rather than spending eight hours fielding phone calls in an office, or scraping plaque off the teeth of strangers while wearing goggles and a face mask to guard against dreadful infections from their blood and spittle.

Every single pagan philosopher of the ancient world said that if you wanted to be free, you had to learn the hard ways of virtue, and that the worst form of slavery was slavery to your own appetites. That is what the founders of the United States also believed. That is what Christian preachers used to preach.

That is what we have repudiated or forgotten, so that now we look to a massive central government for everything. It tells you what proportion of male and female athletes you have to have in your school. It tells you that you have to buy a certain form of medical insurance.

It tells you that you have to bake a cake to help sodomites celebrate their mock marriage. It now bids fair to tell you what toilet you have to let a transvestite use, or a transvestite inside, a man wearing men's clothing on the outside but a frilly skirt on the inside, and his identity a wraith conjured up by his own imagination.

It tells you what you may say and what you may not say on pain of being prosecuted for hate, not for an act, but for an attitude. If your uncle gives you a magnificent Rolls Royce and a year later he wants to see how you have done with it, and you show him a tangled mess of metal and rubber, caused not by a freak accident, but by your habitual misuse, he will naturally conclude that you are incompetent to own a Rolls Royce.

We were given a republic that guaranteed a wide berth for liberty and for local oversight of local matters, with the central government reserved only for matters that were truly national. We now have what every single one of the founders, federalists and anti-federalists both, would have considered tyrannical. It is a tangled mess.

So we need to clear out the garbage, admit our errors, and rebuild. That requires humility, patience, and determination. But nothing else will do. When your only choices are repentance or oblivion, you repent. It is time to get to work, and that is what this book is about. That's the end of the introduction.

When I read that introduction of that book, I closed the book and I felt like crying. Because the introduction of the book exposed my own incompetence with ideas and with the English language. And I realized that not only can I not write as effectively as this author, Anthony Esalen, writes, I can hardly read it.

I can hardly conform – I can hardly just make the sentences work. I have to slow down and pay attention. I'd look up some of the references and allusions. I didn't know what the Bayeux Tapestry was. And I looked it up and I found out that it's this incredible work of art.

I'll tell you just because I learned it, in case you were wondering as well. It was a tapestry that was woven a thousand years ago in the year 1070 AD that's 230 feet long. It's 20 inches tall, but 230 feet long. And it shows 50 different scenes depicting the events that led to the Norman Conquest.

I'd never heard of it. It just made me want to cry. Again, I'm repeating myself. Forgive me. At how incompetent I am with language. Now here's what will happen when I read an introduction like that. About 10 percent of you will be angry at the content of that introduction and you'll dash off an email to me about how upset you are that I would read such a provocative and charged and judgmental portion of the book.

Feel free. My email address is joshua@radicalpersonalfinance.com. If it helps you feel better, go ahead. About 10 percent of you will go buy the book. Of course, of the 10 percent of you who buy the book, you'll do like me and most of you will put it on your shelf, meaning to get to it while we flip our thumbs on our phone.

Flip, flip, flip. The book will sit there for a few years and finally we'll toss it out in a fit of minimalism. And 80 percent of you will do nothing but hear the book and say, "Sounds like a good book," and kind of just move on. Because all we do is consume and consume and consume and consume.

Now, forgive me. I'm not trying to build my own Jeremy Ad against culture and I'm not trying to solve political problems, etc. But I realized that ephemerality is the disease that affects even what I'm doing. And that's what causes me to lose heart. If I don't believe that my work matters, then how can I stay focused on it and labor at it consistently?

And in my own experience, I hope that you see the lesson for your own work and can see the application. If you're doing work that you feel is irrelevant, ephemeral, not going to last, it's not going to cause you to feel motivated to keep going with it and to push through with hard times.

And thus, we seek to escape it as quickly as possible and to get out of it and to do less of it and to shirk it with everything that we can. And it feels good to search for the cheap and bawdy things. They feel good for a moment, but they have no lasting value.

The tawdry homily presented on the evening late night TV show plays well on YouTube. Shows up on the homepage, generates the thumbs up and the reactions and the shares and the comments. And it does nothing to build something that lasts. It does nothing to expose something that's solid. All it does is appeal to the baser instinct wherein we enjoy seeing somebody torn limb from limb, at least in the political sphere.

So forgive me for veering into politics. That's not my intention. What I learned from that book and from my epiphany about social media and even about the show is something that I desire to apply to my own life. My basic philosophy and attitude is this. I'm not responsible for anyone else's corner of the world, but I am responsible for my own little corner.

The next street over from me may be strewn with broken bottles and garbage, but I can take my broom out with a bucket of soap and water and scrub the stoop in front of my own business and then move over to my neighbor's stoop and help them scrub their stoop.

And that's how I view financial planning, not that it has any impact on a broader cultural thing. I'm not trying to get involved in something at that point. But if I can help solve people's financial problems, then I can contribute a little bit to the cleanup of my area of our world.

I can contribute a little bit to the solutions of the culture because if you face fear in your personal finances, it'll easily cause you to apply that fear in, say, the political space. If you are overwhelmed in your personal finance, it'll lead to the breakup of your marriage, which leads a little bit more to the degeneration and the fracturing of society.

And so when I look at the money thing and I look at kind of what's mainstream and what's popular, friends, what we're doing ain't working. It's working for a few, a few, but not all that many. And unfortunately, it's working for many of the wrong people, not the right people, meaning that those who are doing well are doing better and better.

Those who are not doing well are not doing better. I've read a bunch of books on this just trying to understand the current moment. It's really opened my eyes to things that I didn't understand because I'm part of the cultural elite. I'm part of the people who are doing well.

So I don't ever want to complain about a problem without having a solution to offer. There's no point in that. I really don't stand that. And let me just bring this back now very specifically to what I'm doing. I realize that I keep building the wrong business. And for the last few years I keep building the wrong business or at least the wrong business for me.

And the basic problem that's fundamental to what I'm facing is that I build a show, not a business. And show business is different than business because show business is built on the glitz and the glam and the popularity and all the things that I find repulsive. Not because that they're wrong in and of themselves but because they're ephemeral.

They don't last. Show business in our modern world is Jerry Springer. And I don't want Jerry Springer's career. So that's my challenge. Even though I keep trying to turn a little bit, I keep trying to build the show business. And again, I'm just sharing what I've learned and what I realized.

So in building a show, I face a problem that I either have to sell the show itself or I have to build a business behind the show. And in selling the show, the way to do that is to either appeal directly to the listeners for support. I've done that with the Patreon program or to sell the show to advertisers.

And I've done that as well. That has its own set of challenges. But the problem is that neither of those things, the advertising anyway, doesn't work. And listener support is hugely important. But it also doesn't work for the long term because it's built not upon something that lasts. It's built upon something that continues coming.

It's even my problem with my work on Patreon is that in order for me to keep things growing with Patreon, I have to keep on producing. And it's not that I don't want to keep on producing. It's that I want to produce something quality that lasts, that will stand the test of time.

So that's the problem. Now, I've been aware of the problem for a long time and I've been moving towards building the business behind the show. In any endeavor that you're involved in, make sure you don't make the mistake of thinking that if I build something popular, then that will solve the problems.

It just brings its own set of problems. You got to build something that's valuable and then popularize it. So don't just build a podcast. Build a business and then use a podcast to help the business. Don't build a media platform. Build a business and then use the media platform to serve the business.

That's the most important thing. So I have known for a long time that I needed to build the business behind the show. There's kind of two ways that I can do that, personal services to individuals either by me or by others that I hire and train and develop. I do private coaching.

I have a few coaching clients that I help and I do a little bit of consulting. I do some of that on the phone calls. If you want to book a phone call with me, RadicalPersonalFinance.com/phonecall. If you want private coaching, email me. But those are the bases of personal services.

But of course with personal services, I'm always limited in my interaction one-to-one. If I were going to do that, I would go back into the world of financial planning because I can make way more money doing it there than doing it out here. Or I could build personal services by others.

So that brings in building a financial planning firm. Toyed with it, thought about it, built a great marketing platform for it. I could do it. But that limits the conversation too much, and it's an inefficient way to do it. So that brings me back to group teaching, which is essentially what I do here on the show, which is to teach concepts that are valuable.

And in doing group teaching, I didn't need to do it in person or online. And those are some of the options. There are benefits in both. Now back to the challenges. When I did my demographic survey that I reported on the results on to you back in episode 438 of the show, that demographic survey that I did really hit me hard because I hadn't realized who you were.

My dream in starting Radical Personal Finance was that I would create a resource that would be helpful to people who were broke. Now I was naive and misplaced in that, but I wanted to help people who were broke. My goal was to build a resource that would help somebody who was 15 years old and growing up in the projects.

And they find my show on their phone and they find it and they listen to it and they learn a ton. And I have some listeners who are in that situation who have found the show. I've been very privileged to be able to correspond with them and to meet several of them.

But that's not most people. You as my listeners, 96% of you are college educated. 90% of you earn in excess of $50,000 a year, which is about the median income for the United States of America. Almost 60% of you earn in excess of $100,000 per year. And I ask the question, "Okay, if this is who I've attracted, which makes sense now that I think about it after the fact without my former naivete of what I wanted to do.

Well, I have a master's degree in financial planning. I've said I'm teaching master's degree level information. Whether I am or not, you have to judge. But obviously, that's going to be a little bit challenging for the 15-year-old to grasp. When I go into philosophy and put together constructs and theories and structures and blah, blah, blah, it makes sense to me.

You have to be able to be an abstract thinker in order for that to make sense. And abstract thinking is often a skill of those who do well and have high cognitive ability, do well in college. So I thought, "Okay, how is my podcast serving my audience?" 96% of my audience are college educated, highly – which is an interesting challenge with college education.

High education, very poor earners often, even though the broad market statistics say that it should be good and are as reflected even in the income levels. Often, college students are not nearly as productive as they could – college educated people are not nearly as productive as they could be if they had a little less education sometimes.

And I'm one of you. 90% earning in excess of $50,000 and 60% in excess of $100,000 per year. That means bigger problems and more disposable money to put at bigger problems, not doing shows on how to save $3 on groceries but bigger problems. And in that, somebody who fits this character, vast majority of my audience married.

I assume many have children. The podcast format doesn't fit well for great consistent teaching, which is what I've wanted to do. Good teaching needs a careful, clear structure and presentation that's concise and that's focused on the topic at hand. I can do that in a podcast format, and I've gotten better at doing that over time.

But the podcast comes in and it slides out the back door. And it's hard to keep those things put together carefully. Great teaching needs supporting materials and references, external links, action items, follow-up surveys, follow-up thought prompts, journaling activities, follow-up resources of where to go to get stuff done, useful providers for certain services.

Unfortunately, with the constant ephemerality of podcasting where I keep pumping it out, I don't make the time to do that because I can't figure out how to be compensated for the time in the podcast format. Good teaching needs notes for reference. We remember only a very small percentage of what we hear.

So there needs to be easy, quality reference materials, written summaries and transcripts, outlines to remember the major points. I've experimented with it on the show. In the podcast format, I can't figure out any way to make it worth the time and the money to build those things. Good teaching needs to have a good feedback mechanism so that the student can talk to the teacher and get clarity and additional information presented for the parts of the teaching that were inadequate.

So constantly I receive feedback on a podcast episode of something I missed or a mistake that I made or a question that wasn't quite clear, usually my own fault of miscommunication or drawing the wrong emphasis. And I'd like to go back and adjust it, but I can't do a whole new podcast episode on it.

It just doesn't work. So good teaching needs to have that, and there needs to be an iterative process where you present a concept to a group of students. You find out how well the concept resonates, how clear it is, and then based upon that feedback, you go back and you change the things that aren't done well, and you improve the things that are done well.

I said that wrong. It's because it's a podcast and I can't go back and change it. The point is you fix the stuff that didn't work and make it all work as much as possible. Good teaching needs to have different levels and layers of access. It needs to have an introductory overview and then maybe a more in-depth review, but still not the deep dive, and then a deep, deep, deep dive opportunity.

I don't know how to do that in a podcast. It's very hard. And then good teaching needs to be navigable. It needs to not be lost in a vast archive of material just passing through the feed, just the feed, the feed, the feed, the never-ending feed where you flip your thumb and more stuff appears.

And what was important was lost and you can never get it back. That's kind of how a podcast works, especially at this point. So my original vision with the podcast of trying to teach, teach the CFP curriculum or teach valuable things, it doesn't work well. And it's not that it hasn't worked.

And thank you. Many of you have written to me deeply moving emails and notes. And earlier I talked about the flood of input. I want to – I meant to say there I appreciate the flood. I actually – I crave the flood. It's so helpful to hear that feedback.

I can't respond to everybody, but it's helpful to hear that. I just need to figure out a better system for handling it and then have somebody collate it for me so that I can read and understand and have it presented in a way that I can keep up with.

So please don't pull back or think that I can't email Joshua because he's busy. I'd rather you do it and at least I'll see it and read it. But the point is my original vision for the podcast doesn't work well because I'm trying to do teaching without the necessary follow-up materials.

And given my audience demographic, I'm trying to teach people for free who I believe would rather have better content that solves their problems with less time. Highly educated, highly – highly educated, high earners are busy people. And so there's a huge value on time. You have time and money.

At the beginning stages of life, you've got a lot of time. You usually don't have that much money. And so the people who can devote the time to something and need to do it on the cheap are usually in the beginning stages of life. Well, once you get your earnings up, you often run into the opposite problem.

You have more money than time. And in that situation, the most – one of the more intelligent things to spend money on is on saving time. And so you pay for a good solution. That's why if you reach a certain income level, you probably shouldn't do your own financial planning or your own taxes or any of that stuff.

It's a lot cheaper for you to pay someone else to do it and do it well. So in the podcast, I'm fighting against that format that I basically know. Now, all the things that I've just shared with you I've known for months. I've known for years in some of it.

I just never have figured out how to fix it. And a lot of this kind of contributed to some of the break – kind of the mini breakdown that I had of how do I fix this. So I knew those things months ago. And so for the – but there's one challenge in it.

I've decided that the best future for me is to keep the podcast going but not have the podcast as a primary business. To keep the podcast as something that points and serves as an outlet, an advertising arm for the primary business, which is basically what I want to create, a comprehensive curriculum of useful, timeless ideas that can be applied by people specifically to their situation in different areas.

So I've known that for a long time and I've made progress on knowing what to do. And for the last few months, I've been working to try to take an initial action on this, which is to deliver – develop and deliver to you the Radical Personal Finance course on career and income planning.

I want to start with career and income planning because that's the fundamentally most important thing related to financial planning. And I have some ideas that I think are valuable that I've curated and thought through and philosophies that I've developed that I know make a big impact on people's career and income.

I know these ideas work. I've received the emails from some of you with many of them that I've shared in the shows talking about how your incomes have increased by tens of thousands of dollars, in some cases six figures. It's wonderful. So for the last few months, I've been working and building that as kind of my fundamental course.

And I failed, miserably, utterly failed, absolutely failed. Now, it's not that I don't have content. I have 40 pages of careful outlines. The challenge is I don't know which of the ideas are relevant. And I have a hard time judging what's really going to be the most valuable because I have so many esoteric interests.

And figuring out what's going to have the most impact is really, really a challenge. And I want to create something really, really valuable and I want to charge appropriately. I want to create – at least for the career and income course, I want to create something that's worth a significant amount of money.

I want to create a thousand-dollar course as my goal. And I'm convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that I could add a minimum of $10,000 to any person's income who takes the course in the next 12 months with what I have to teach. And that's 10 grand to someone earning basic wages or even minimum wage levels.

I can add six figures of income to someone who's starting in a better place than basic minimum wage. So that's kind of my goal. I want to have a 10x return on anything I do, anything I charge. I need to be convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that it's going to have an excess of a 10x return.

So I've got that for career and income. But I got 40 pages of outline that just can become hours and hours of courses. And I can't get it – I haven't been able to get it out at the right quality, at the right amount because of lack of feedback.

So I heard a metaphor. I learned it from Dan Sullivan recently. That was kind of just a major breakthrough for me. We talked about – he said this essentially. He said that entrepreneurs often feel like they've got to be and function as a self-milking cow. Cows produce milk. But cows are not good at milking themselves.

The hooves don't do a good job on the udder. And they don't even reach it in the first place. So the cow can create milk but it can't milk itself. And that metaphor, once I heard it, just was a total breakthrough and I realized that's the problem. I'm very good at creating useful milk.

I'm very bad at figuring out the right proportions and who the right person is. And so as Dan Sullivan talked about, he talked about the fact that you don't have to have – an entrepreneur thinks they need to get it all out. Well, I failed at that. So I'm ready to give that up.

But you don't have to. What you need is you need to bring people around who can get it out. So I've realized that that's been the problem I faced with figuring out how to create these courses for you. That I need you to help me understand what your problems are.

I need you to help me understand what's the most valuable thing for you. There's a difference between talking about interviewing skills and how to build interviewing skills so that you can interview for a better job versus how to analyze the profit centers within a business and identify the weak ones and figure out where your biggest bang for the buck is going to come from.

I don't know what's important. I have a whole module in my course. I don't know if I'll keep it in or not. I thought about doing a podcast on it. But I have a whole module on how to make it as an illegal alien, undocumented worker if we want to use the current word.

How do you do it? How do you cash a check when you don't have a bank account? How do you get a bank account if you don't – all these kind of interesting things that I've worked through because I just have – interested in weird stuff like that. But that's not useful to my course, but yet it's an interest.

So I need someone to say, "No, Joshua," or, "Yes, Joshua, we're interested in that." I don't think that's going to make it into the final version. That's just an example. So in working this problem through with some of my coaches over the last few months and kind of just figuring my way out of the morass, I've developed a plan that I'm pretty confident in and that's what I'm here sharing with you.

So number one, I am continuing to do radical personal finance, but I'm not going to do radical personal finance with – I'm not trying to do five days a week. I will keep doing Q&A shows. I will keep doing – I plan to do more of this in a Q&A, and I'll take some of the content that I'm creating thematically and I'll release it to you for free in podcasts.

It's important to me that I provide information that's – not only is it good marketing, but it's important to me that I provide lots of valuable, useful information that's available for free. Many of you have written to me and said, "Joshua, we appreciate the information. We're not in a financial position where we can support you at this point in time, but we really, really appreciate it, and we're getting out of debt and we're working on it.

We want to support you in the future." That means the world to me. I don't need your money. I'd rather you keep it and solve your problem first. So I want to – I will continue to create more valuable stuff on the show. I just shut things down over the last few months just because I didn't know what I was doing.

I felt like, "Why am I just doing more, more, more, more?" and thinking that more is going to change anything. I got to fundamentally think through what I'm doing and be clearer on it. So I'm going to continue doing the show, but the show – I'm transitioning from the show being my primary product to building out a comprehensive set of courses that will be available for you to buy.

I'm anticipating – I have planned dozens of topics that are large in scope and that are small in scope. Everything from $1,000 career and income course, we'll see. I've got plans for bigger ones down to I want to create a simple little $20 information product that answers the problems of insurance, life insurance.

You're going to buy life insurance. You're going to meet with a life insurance agent. $20, here's everything you need to know. Here's the 10-minute version. Here's the one-hour version. That's it, that type of thing. Or how to buy a car or how to buy a house and all the little tricks that you can know in advance.

So that's – we'll see. And I want them in various things. I want to do a couple of courses for free. I want to do a course on how to get out of debt for free, and I want to do probably a course on budgeting for free. I struggle with the idea of doing free courses, but I'll probably do the how to get out of debt one for free because I want to help – anyway, who knows?

But the plan that came up with my coaches is I'm going to do these with a beta version. And so before I do what I'm trying to do now, which is to build this whole giant thing with all kinds of great – all the supplementals and the beautifully branded stuff.

It just kind of sank me with the sheer scope. I'm going to open these things with a beta version. So in the coming days – actually, my plan is on Monday, August 7th. So you're getting this on Thursday the 3rd. But on Monday, August 7th, I'm going to – I'll launch a sales page and start taking registrations for a beta version of the career and income course.

That registration will be open for a couple weeks or until it's full. I'm planning to take 100 people total. So it will open for either two weeks or until it's full, and then the course will launch towards the end of August, Monday, August 21st. But as part of that beta version, if you desire to sign up and be part of the beta group, as part of your entry, I'm going to share with you some – get some detailed surveys and some questions from you to find out what the problems are that you're facing.

And then, of course, I've got the whole curriculum that I've got developed, but I'll adjust the curriculum based upon the responses to those surveys. And then we'll take your feedback as part of the beta version. I'll take your feedback and use that to adjust the final version. So, of course, the beta version is going to come with a deep discount for being part of that beta.

So that allows me – because I'm giving you a deep discount, that allows me to feel better about just producing things more quickly, the concepts, rather than focusing on the polish of all the little details that we've all come to expect with something done well. I want to do it well.

And as part of that beta version, you'll get, again, access with input, with surveys, detailed feedback on what works, what doesn't work, what concepts are helpful, what concepts are not helpful, what's unclear, what's clear. And then there will be extensive opportunities for Q&A feedback. And I'll take that and I'll use that – I'll answer all your questions, all of that behind a private forum, and I'll use that as a basis for adjusting the final version of the final course.

And then, of course, if you're a beta member, you'll get access not only to the beta course, which will be a little bit rougher and not so polished, but to the final version, which will be polished. The idea of launching in a beta version first, which is less perfect in terms of production quality, was just a major breakthrough for me to solve the problem.

It allows me to create something that lasts, but also to solve that problem of my being able to get it out. So I hope you all like the idea. I hope that you'll find it valuable and helpful to you. I am confident in the direction. And with having it back to kind of the arc that I talked about, solving this beta issue and clarifying the importance of non-ephemerality to me has been hugely helpful to bringing back my vision.

And this week has been a great week with so many of those challenges that I described to you vastly improved. So that's what I'm doing. That's what I'm facing. Watch out for that launching on Monday. We'll launch with a sales page. I'll open that up where if you're interested in joining the beta group, you'll have access to that.

Love to have you join that. Really, really excited about sharing some of the things that I have to share with you in that context, then hearing your feedback and then answering your specific questions and solving your problems. That's the goal. So together, together, if you're not interested in this particular topic of career and income, I think you should be.

And if you don't have much money, jump on the beta version because that's going to be the deal of the century. Otherwise, wait for the other one. It'll be the full price version will be well worth it. Just stay tuned. I want to do other stuff as well. I've got to figure out a way for my paying customers to vote on the topics that they want to do because the topics that most excite me, I don't know whether they excite other people sometimes.

And so I got to figure out a way for the audience that's paying, not just the general audience, but the audience is paying to vote on those things. Those of you who've been patrons of the show, thank you for that. And there will be benefits, which I'll be talking to you about in Patreon pretty soon.

But you'll get extra special benefits, as I have promised. I view you guys as the most important foundation of my business and what I have done. And I'm excited about even just the context because I can create by focusing on stand-alone courses, like college courses, a type of approach, but that are actually practical.

I can create things that don't need timeliness, just the things that are always the same, things that just stay and don't change. And then I can also adjust the resources when this thing goes out of favor or whatnot, then I can create that. And I can do it in a way where it doesn't get lost in a stream of hundreds and hundreds of podcasts.

A little different show today, just sharing some of my own personal journeys, some of my own personal struggles. I hope that you enjoyed this. I hope that you found some value in it. And remember this, when you are facing problems, everyone else has problems too. And the problems that you face and the problems that I face are usually pretty similar.

A little bit of a different expression with our personalities, but they're pretty similar. So if you're going through a difficult time, take heart. There will be an end to it and you can make it through. Talk to you soon. This show is part of the Radical Life Media network of podcasts and resources.

Find out more at RadicalLifeMedia.com. Hey there, treasure hunters and bargain seekers. Are you on the lookout for a local thrift store that has it all? Look no further. Picks Exchange is your thrifting paradise right here in the heart of Torrance. Picks Exchange offers a wide variety of new and used clothing, shoes, new scrubs, uniforms, new and used furniture, all at low prices.

Don't miss out on the ultimate thrifting experience at our Picks Exchange parking lot anniversary sale at our Torrance location. location. Visit PixExchange.org for more details.