♪ California's top casino and entertainment destination is now your California to Vegas connection. Play at Yamaha Resort and Casino at San Manuel to earn points, rewards, and complimentary experiences for the iconic Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas. ♪ Two destinations, one loyalty card. Visit yamaha.com/palms to discover more. - Chris Moody, welcome back to Radical Personal Finance.

- It's so great to be here and live and in person. - Indeed, live and in person this time. Last time you were on the show, you and your wife had been traveling, it was July, so you'd been traveling at that time for a month? - Barely a month.

We had just gotten on the road and now here we sit, we have traveled 21,000 miles, nine or 10 months in 72 square feet, living in a cargo van with my wife and we still love each other so much. - So you're taking the answer to my question up front.

Would you do it again? - Absolutely. We have learned so much in living this time together in a small space, traveling all over the United States and Canada. I'll tell you, we would do it so much that we're gonna do it again in 2019. We've got a whole 'nother leg of the trip around the country and I would tell you where we're going, but I don't know yet, that's the beauty of it.

- So give new listeners who didn't hear your first appearance on the show, the 30 second version of what happened and how you and your wife came to travel like this. - My wife and I lived in New York City and because of a job layoff, we had a new opportunity to do kind of whatever we wanted to and so we decided to sell and give away all of our possessions, got rid of our apartment, bought a used cargo van and together built a 72 square foot off-grid home inside the cargo van and decided that that would be, that and gas would be our only expense and we traveled all over the country, in part embedding with communities that have chosen to, as we would say, opt out of a lot of mainstream ways of living to try to find a new American dream and we met a lot of people along the way and it is not for everyone, but we learned to live for free all across America, so many places you can sleep and stay overnight without paying a dime and our only expenses were food and gas and maybe some fun.

- And the most important thing about that transition is you were living in a penthouse apartment in Manhattan, so you were in the middle of the hoity-toity crowd and now you're a van dweller, so this was quite the transition. - It was a complete transition, although we were kind of transitioning that direction in how we lived our lives in Manhattan.

I worked in media and I was very much sucked into the everyday minutiae of the world, of Washington and of culture and of politics, but we set some very strict rules when we lived in New York City about how we would live when we were together in our apartment, for example, not to be vague, but for example, we would not have any device use beyond the threshold of the door in the apartment and when we were home together, we were present and home together and we would live this kind of quiet log cabin existence in the middle of Manhattan while we were home and that's really the way we were heading and it just so happened that we ended up taking it into an extreme level by living in the woods in a van for nine months.

- So your experience and my own family's experience, we've just returned from almost six months on the road, not quite as many miles, but about 13,000 miles and I guess 25, 30 states, something like that, I need to go back and count them, but we've also had an interesting experience and the bulk of what we're gonna focus on in today's discussion is basically the United States of America, what's happening at this moment and I thought this would be a really fun interview for us to do together because we both have curious personalities.

You come from a professional reporter's background, so you have that natural bent or cultivated bent probably to asking questions and learning people's stories. You've traveled all four corners of the country over the last six months. We've traveled a good portion of the country and one of my main reasons for going out and traveling, in addition to personal reasons, was to get a sense of what's happening in the United States of America.

One of the big challenges for me in building radical personal finances, I no longer have a water cooler or a coffee pot to talk around. It's very easy for me in a normal week to sit in front of my computer and all of my work is solitary. I don't work physically with any coworkers, I just sit in front of my computer and I get together with a few personal friends and some church friends and that's about it as far as my in-person interaction.

And what I have learned is that's very dangerous for me because then it leads me trying to form my understanding of what's happening in the world from Twitter or from YouTube or from NewYorkTimes.com or whatever those kinds of things are. And I've struggled to maintain a grip on reality without having coworkers to talk to at the coffee pot.

And so today we're gonna talk about what's happening in the country and you and I have both been out traveling, getting a sense of what's happening. So my question for you, is what you've observed over the last six months a surprise to you? Is the world about how you thought it was when you were living in Manhattan or is it very different?

- The short answer is no, I learned a lot. First of all, let me set the scene of how we lived. So part of this experience, I almost completely opted out of any exposure to media. I have not read the news in months, although I found I'm exposed to information.

People just tell me things, so I don't feel less informed, but I used to read the news on a moment to moment basis. - And you were reporting the news. - I was reporting, that used to be the news, right? But I also don't consume online content anymore. My phone went from a content machine to just something that tells me how to get places or where a restaurant is.

And that's just about, and to make phone calls and texts, and that's it. And so it seems like while I was on the road for the past nine months, the whole country was acting like everything was on fire. And yet the world that I was encountering on a human to human basis was nothing like that.

I don't know if people are living multiple lives where on Facebook, they act like everything is crazy and that they feel crazy, but in person and out, I'm gonna say out in the country, but I used to live in Washington, DC and in New York City, and there it's just all right in your face.

And you start to think that those East Coast cities are the only cities, not that matter, but that exist. And everything else is just like, it's a thing out there. And I know that that is a stereotype, but that is, you get to a very narrowly focused viewpoint when you live in those places for a long time and to get out into the country and just listen to people.

So I found that for the most part, people are living really happy, positive lives and they're not focused so much on the news as people think they are. They're focused on their family, their jobs and what they're gonna do this weekend. And that is what they talk about. Let me give you an example, Josh.

So I made it a point when I was in my job, I always had to ask people about politics. That was my job. What do you think of Trump? What do you think of Hillary Clinton? What do you think of what's going on? Well, going out on my own really gave me an opportunity to not ask those questions and see what people say.

In nine months, no one brought up politics once. And I talked to a lot of people. I let them guide the conversation. Not a single person mentioned what was going on in Washington. Now they might've just been polite 'cause I was new, but I spent a good amount of time with people, maybe series of days.

There is so much more to talk about and they have an interest in talking about it, but it didn't have anything to do what was in the newspaper. And I found that phenomenally refreshing, but also fascinating as well. - Right, right. So frankly, Chris, I don't know how to analyze this.

So I also, when we were traveling, I also was very cut off from much of the media world. I've had massive problems disconnecting myself from my phone in order to get anything done. I'll tell you how extreme I've had to be. So for years, I've taken off social media.

I used to be addicted to YouTube. I took off YouTube. Then I took off all the social media apps. It got so bad that for me to get something done, I had to completely eliminate my browser, my web browser from my phone. So for the entirety of our traveling around the country, not once I didn't log on to Facebook.

I haven't logged on in eight months at this point. I didn't log on to almost anything. And I did not have a web browser on my phone. My wife has much more self-control than I do. So if we needed to look something up, we use her phone 'cause I did not have it.

And it completely removed the utility of this thousand dollar device in my pocket. But it made me much more peaceful. But I would drive around and I would look at people and I would imagine the arguments that I used to get into online. And I'd be driving past some house in Colorado or they see a house and I would think, this person is on Facebook.

This person is talking there. But this life that I see around them doesn't seem connected to the arguments and the vitriol and the politics and whatnot there. So is it just that the people are living, and I had the same experience, that people didn't talk in real life like we do all of us online.

So is it just that we maintain two different personalities, one real life person and one an online persona? Or are there just the people in Washington and New York, they're the ones who are arguing and no one else cares? - No, people do care. But I think people in Washington and New York assume that most people are thinking about them far more than they are.

- I agree. - And in the business that I was, I remember thinking that what Congressman so-and-so just said in the hallways of Congress was the most important thing. And I had to get it out immediately and it was gonna change the world. And I realized, oh, people consume a lot slower than they do when you're in the belly of the beast, so to speak.

But no, I think you might find that people are living two separate lives. But you'll find that even though the noise is all about what is happening in the West Wing or in Washington right now, that seems like all that's going on in the country, there is so much more going on in the country.

A lot of the cities around the country that people might not have given a lot of credit to in the past 30 or 40 years are really blossoming and coming into becoming real centers of culture and art. And places beyond just New York City are really exciting places to live with exciting people.

And that might be news to some people back east, but it's so true. - Right, absolutely. Last comment on just the influence. I ran the numbers one time on, I was looking at the viewership for the cable news channels and it seems like the cable news channels seemingly drive all the conversation.

Everyone's always either talking about what just got reported on the cable news channels on whichever side of the political spectrum. I looked at it and I said, with the exception of a few big shows, which might have a million or two million people, you know, a big Fox News show or something like that, the average audience for a cable news channel is under half a million people.

And yet this under half a million people, they're not sitting and watching it currently, it's just on in the background. So Nielsen's scraping the fact that it's on, but they're not necessarily paying total attention to it. In a nation of 300 million people, that's really not that much of an impact.

Most people just don't care about the news. Most people don't care about what, all of that stuff that's self-importance. But when I'm in the middle of it, I think it's all that matters. And you've been far more in the middle of it than I have. And only getting out of it and completely walking away from it have I seen, listen, it's not that important.

The crisis of the day is not the most important thing. So I agree with you. Now, I wanna talk about a number of different areas and try to speak practically about our observations. And I brought you here to balance me out 'cause I have a tendency to be more negative probably than is warranted.

I struggle with this question of optimism or pessimism because I think that optimism is always a logical solution. If we look and analyze, life is getting better in general for most of us on most every metric in general. If you look at the course of the history of world, millions of people are coming out of poverty, things are getting better.

It's just hard for us to recognize it because we don't understand what it was like a decade ago. And we're so caught up in the crisis of the day that we don't see the macro trends. So I think that the logical position is to be optimistic. But I also observe and see that things have changed.

I don't know what your reading has been like while you've been on the road, but the most influential book I read in 2018 was a book called "The Silk Road." And the author, or "The Silk Road," the author was a historian and he traced the history of the world in this about 500 pages.

And it was fascinating because of course he was touching on basic things. But what I saw was that the history of the world is constantly a history of problems. And figuring out how to bring together this macro trend while being realistic with the micro trends, I find it impossible.

And I don't know how to do it, especially as looking at the United States. - I think you just look at the data over the long period of time, that the trajectory, despite a lot of hiccups, in terms of prosperity, health, is up. And I think it's easy to feel pessimistic because we are met with a lot of noise that sounds very scary.

But we also are heading into this new year that is a year where there's more prosperity than there ever has been. And I know that it's not maybe doled out, so to speak, in a way that some people would appreciate it to be. But I think the trend lines are going up.

We have access to more goods and services and there's more trade happening between nations than there ever has been before. And with more trade comes more peace, not ultimate, not eternal peace, but some. And so I can only be optimistic on a grand scale, but still go through the year being pessimistic about maybe the way that the culture is heading or the way that, the priorities the country is focusing on.

But in the long term, I can only feel good. - When you traveled across all the corners of the country, did you observe one America? Did you observe two, multiple? How do you put together the fabric of this nation? - Less divided than we're given credit for. The one thing that I found amazing and could not believe was, this is back when I was reading the news, all the essays saying, we are the most divided we've ever been and we're heading for some kind of fracture, a civil war.

Y'all, everybody, most people are like pretty chill with their neighbors. There was no sense that the people I was meeting or talking to of any kind were gearing up to get their muskets and pitchforks and heading for the hills to fight the civil war. This was not in anyone's mind.

Like I said earlier, they're thinking about what their weekend plans are with their family and the idea of no one has the effort to go forth and fight a civil war. Like this is not a thing in people's minds. I think it's a thing for those who live their life through Twitter.

And as a person who used to do that, it's easy to think that twitter.com is the only universe that exists. It's right in your face. It's there throughout all of your day. The morning you wake up and then when you go to bed at night, but that is not the world.

But it seemed like the people writing those essays were living in that universe. You just gotta take a deep breath and step back and realize that that is not happening. That is not. So that's the biggest, I think, myth that I saw. It's not nearly as divided. On policy, yes, absolutely.

And we're about to go through another presidential election cycle and it's gonna be wild and it's gonna be crazy. And I would recommend any listener to just consume your media wisely. Do it in a controlled fashion. Don't let it control your entire day. Take a half hour a day to read the news and then that's it.

- Right, right. So when I look at the country, I agree with you in terms of generally. I think there's a lot less fracturing of what it means to be an American. I think, in general, if you look at wars, the politicians declare wars, but normal people don't go to war.

They don't wanna go to war. If the people who actually go to war were the ones that would vote for it, we wouldn't be in any wars. But it's the politicians that go to war and they send everyone else's kids off to war. And I think, to me, that just seems generally true in most countries, most places in the world and most wars.

But I do think that there's a lot happening economically. I think there's a pretty significant divide happening economically. And it's all across the country. There are different discussions of it. Some people talk about it at the coasts versus the interior. A lot of discussion can be made of the city versus the country.

You can talk about it on the level of academic achievement. But it seems to me that there are a lot of people who are really doing well and a lot of people who are really struggling. And the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. And that seems to be challenging to figure out, how do we fix this?

What were your observations economically? - Well, over the past five years, I'd say we've gotten very used to looking at the stock market and it going up, up, up, up. And that makes it really exciting for us to log on to whatever our bank account is where we have our stock brokerages and look at the trend line going up.

And so we might've gotten into the habit of checking it every day. And in the next year ahead or the next few years, I'm no prognosticator, but maybe it won't be so. Maybe it won't only go up. So while we've gotten used to checking it all day, it might not be nearly as fun.

And that might, talking about short-term pessimism, really get us down. And I think it's important for people to, in this time of uncertainty, look back at your long-term plan and make sure you're comfortable and confident in it, and then rest your hope on that and not on your daily habit of checking the stock market.

But to your question about the divide, I think the data are showing that while there is divides in certain areas, poor people that are in poverty, still the standard of living is increasing. - Absolutely. - And so I would still say that it's still, people are doing better year after year.

- Yeah, I agree. And so the classic argument, which I would affirm, is what matters is not so much the difference between the rich and the poor, in terms of the nominal difference. What matters is what is the standard of living. And so the poorest among us today, even on a global basis, the poorest among us today are richer than we've ever been.

Which brings me to my big concern. And I sometimes question, Chris, if I'm just too much of a pessimist. I certainly do. But when I look at it culturally, one of my biggest concerns culturally is I see us feeding greed and covetousness in the culture and envy. The besetting sins of the US American culture that I would say right now are primarily those three, which are all together, covetousness, greed, and envy.

And we seem to be, in my observation, just indulging this very dangerous idea of saying, well, let's take from other people. And we seem to have become a culture of takers, rather than a culture of people who recognize the opportunities we have and want to engage in those. We've become much more focused on our jealousy of what our neighbor has, and how can we get some of it for us, get me some, rather than how can we produce something that our neighbor might wanna buy from us.

- I think you hit on something very important about covetousness and envy. I think we're reaching an envy epidemic right now. And I think the access to constant use of smartphones is having something to do with this, where people are spending their entire day mixing, looking at what everyone else is doing, and then expressing their best live on Instagram or Facebook, and then feeling envious of it.

Has this ever happened to you? You just spent the most amazing day with your family where you took an adventure climbing a mountain or having a picnic, and it was just so pleasant and beautiful. And then at the end of the Sunday evening, you check Instagram and you see somebody else had a good time, and then you feel bad about them having maybe a better time than you have.

We do that. And you mix that with the constant access of online shopping. I think we are seeing a time when people are living lives of envy, and that is poison. And I hope people are becoming more aware that they need to put up barriers, just like you did on your phone, to protect themselves from these feelings.

'Cause these are very base human feelings. There's a reason why ancient ethical and religious codes mentioned it. - Right, right. (laughs) - Like the big ones, the 10 commandments. Because the people from 3,000 years ago were dealing with the same stuff we are, and this is not going to go away and not change.

- Right, right. But I get concerned about what that's doing in people's lives. I fear it's leading, especially, so here's what I see. And I think there's good sociological data to this. The book that, probably my book of the year in 2017, was I read Charles Murray's book, "Coming Apart." It was called "Coming Apart, the State of White America," from 1960 to 2010.

- 10. - And in that book, Murray posited the argument that, in essence, there are two brand new social classes in the United States of America. An upper class elite that had never before existed in the United States of America, and that upper class elite was not measured in terms of nominal wealth, because there'd always been rich people in the United States, but rather it was measured in terms of a cultural, a distinctive culture, an elite culture, which may or may not come with wealth.

And then he also posited that there was a new lower class that had been built. Again, not in terms of poverty, but in terms of a distinctive lower class culture. And that this was the change from 1960 to 2010 that was marked in US American society. And what I was, frankly, horrified to discover was that I am part of the upper class elite.

I always thought I was a common man. And then I read his book and I took his test and I was shocked to find out that, wait a second. - You were in the bubble, as it were. - I was in the bubble. And that was sobering to me, because I've always prided myself of not being in the bubble.

I've always tried to be exposed to other things, but I was squarely in the bubble, my wife too. And then I realized how in the bubble that we really were. But I've seen this expressed more and more. And let me give you just an example from my history. When I was in college, I spent some time in Nicaragua, which is the second, or at least was at the time, the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, Haiti, of course, being the poorest.

Nicaragua, basically at the time, had six and a half million inhabitants, six million of which were desperately poor and half a million of which were desperately rich. And just a massive caste system in terms of wealth. And I stayed with this family for a week out in the Campo.

And it was a nice enough house compared to the rest of the village. We had concrete walls, but we had dirt floors. And it was very basic. And many of the houses in the village, dirt floors, rusty tin roofs, walls that you could see through. We had a latrine.

We poured a bucket of water over our heads for a shower. Extremely basic. And I would wake up in the morning with chickens under my bed. They would come in and scratch around on the floor in the living room. And I watched every night. I watched the Nicaraguan family I was staying with.

They had, I think, five or six children. I watched them sit and watch telenovelas for about three or four hours, which were coming from Buenos Aires, from all of the rich cosmopolitan cities. And I'd watch them sit there and watch these telenovelas for hours. And here we are sitting in plastic porch chairs, which is what the world's poor sit in, in a dirt hut, watching telenovelas from the upper class high rise.

And I thought, this is so destructive. This is utterly destructive. Because instead of these people actually doing something or having the time to do it, they're sucked into this entertainment culture that's all about things that are completely unattainable. And yet the same thing I see happening today. And so I stand in line in poor areas of the United States, where you can see that poverty is very, very evident all around.

And there everyone is flipping on Instagram, next, next, next, celebrity this, celebrity that, things that are totally unattainable. And it's really troubling to me because I don't see how, without a cultural transformation, which I think has to start at the base, I don't see how that leads to good things.

I don't know how to fix that. - Well, I think with the divide, you're talking about, as you put it, an elite divide. And I think we saw a lot of evidence of that frustration in the 2016 election. - Absolutely. - Where people did not feel listened to. They did not feel that their views were put, at least cast in the way that they thought that they meant, or at least misinterpreted, you know.

But they felt like they were not being represented properly in the culture centers of the country, in New York, Los Angeles, Washington, right? And I think that there was so much frustration about that, that for some people is why they voted the way that they did and then expressed themselves in the way that they have over the past couple of years.

- Right, right. So what do you see happening, kind of just culturally, or socially, or religiously? Or these, 'cause I struggle to talk about economics, 'cause I think economics is downstream of culture, in a sense. First of all, I don't think you can compare economics to the stock market, because most people don't own stocks.

The average person just simply doesn't own stocks. And so you can't look and say, well, the stock market is doing well, so that automatically is indicative of the economy. They are related, but they're not directly related. I think the stock market has a much bigger influence on the elite, the wealthy elite who own stocks, rather than on the majority of the US American population.

But I do think economically, you can, of course, look at things like employment, you can look at things like wealth, et cetera, and those are important. But that's downstream of, in my opinion, culture, of what's happening in a person's life. 'Cause today, I defend, without reservation, that if you are willing to work hard, you can get a job, you can earn plenty of money, and you can become wealthy.

There is nothing standing in the way of you, in the sense of if you have the character to do those things. I talk to people all the time, employers, business owners, they cannot find good help. They can't find people who will show up to work on time, not be drunk or high when they get there, and will do the job that they're told to do.

If you just do that, then you have opportunity. And then once you're earning income, it's never been cheaper in some ways, on some measurements, never been cheaper, easier to live cheaper. I mean, here you are living in a van. Anybody could live in a van. You can buy most of the things in life very inexpensively.

You can have access to things that the kings of the world didn't have access to. - You're being so optimistic, Josh. - Right, well, here's my point for pessimism. The problem is, you have to have character. You have to have, I don't know what other word, you have to have some get up and go.

And if you're sitting around, you know, smoking weed in a hovel, thrilled with the fact that now marijuana is legal, so that you can sit back and destroy any kind of energy that you can put towards your life, how do we, I don't see how you get there without a cultural transformation.

And I look at that, and that's where I see the weakness. The social fabric, the cultural fabric, to me seems very thin at the moment. - So one thing that I've seen is people spending a lot of their time focusing on stuff that's happening in Washington, and sometimes not as much that's happening in their living room.

- Right. - And I think this is a very easy thing. You can find out, do you spend more time reading or thinking about something happening thousands of miles away in the federal city, or in your home? And if the answer is in Washington, and you're not working in politics, well, maybe you need to think, have a readjustment of that.

And I would hope that people can focus more on the things over which they do have control. And I'm not talking about local politics, I'm talking about micro things like themselves, and then their family, and then their community, just beyond that. And spending more time working on those than thinking about the upcoming election.

People spend a lot, major forces spend a lot of money getting you to want to think about politics a lot, and about elections. And it takes a lot to kind of resist that. There's a heavy advertising machine, not just for products, but for politics as well. - So I hope the same thing.

- Yeah, but-- - I hope the same thing. - Right, right. - But my question is, are people doing that? - I'm worried, given the power of media these days, in that it's not only in your living room now, but it's also in your pocket, and in your bedroom, and in your bathroom, and wherever else you want to take it.

These are incredibly powerful forces, where people spend, as I said, a lot of money going for your attention. And I don't know, in the near term, that people are going to be able to resist those forces. I know that they are not right now. But, as I've come kind of back into society for the holidays, I have noticed, while listening to the radio, or watching television for the first time, people starting to feel a bit of uneasiness about the power it has over them.

And thinking, at least in the beginning stages, of thinking how they can take back some of their time, and not be controlled by these forces. But I don't see a big cultural shift happening anytime soon, which does worry me. I think we'll be more led by external cultural forces that we bring into our homes, than the power of our home culture transforming the outside.

So there's my short-term pessimism. - Here's a piece of data in favor of what you're saying. You, of course, wouldn't have seen it, because you were living in the woods under a rock. But a few months ago, there was a series of articles in the New York Times, and it was talking about smartphone culture in Silicon Valley.

And basically, the most anti-smartphone place has become Silicon Valley. And it's good reporting, I should find the articles for you, because you would read them, you should read them. But it even went so far to talk about how the Silicon Valley parents have virtually a spy network, where they spy on one another's nannies.

And one of the things that now, mothers and fathers, who are working in Silicon Valley at the big tech companies, they hire nannies to take care of their children, and they have their nannies sign a contract that the nanny is forbidden from looking at her smartphone while she's at work.

And so then, if somebody's at the park, and they see a nanny pushing the kids on the swing, and the nanny's using the phone, they'll take pictures of it, and they have message boards among the mothers and fathers there about, whose nanny is this, I saw them on their phone, et cetera.

And so if you look at, Melinda Gates has been quoted as saying, "I wish we had waited longer "to expose our children to technical devices." Steve Jobs famously didn't permit devices for his children for some period of time. And several other big names in tech, who basically all kind of narrowed down.

And so, and then similar things on classrooms. What you see is in Silicon Valley, as reported in the series of articles by the New York Times, we see Silicon Valley is a press away from computerized classroom teaching. And so you see a much more of a turning away from screens, getting children off of screens, using other forms of education.

But simultaneously, Google and Apple are both constantly trying to get Chromebooks and iPads into every school, and trying to get every single student on their platforms, and the whole idea is, we're gonna go with this virtual education. Everybody thought, what would be the rich people who have computers, and the poor people who don't, but it's turned into the exact opposite.

The poor people's children are being raised by their smartphones, and the rich people's children are being raised by actual teachers. And so there is a piece of data to your thesis, but this is what adds to my concern, because I don't see how, Chris, I've become such a curmudgeon, it's so bad.

But I don't like to be critical of people, but you can't go out to dinner and find children talking to their parents. - Right, yeah. - What kind of world are my children gonna live in when children, when their peers don't know how to talk to their parents? - Mm-hmm.

It's a real concern, and you have to set the boundaries in your home for this to work at all. No one is going to legislate this, and they shouldn't. But, you know, this is what I mean when I say people need to turn more inward to their home culture than turning outward and just bringing the culture in and letting them babysit their children that way.

I have since, you know, if you read the new book called "iGen," you know, it talks about the generation that comes after the millennials. And, you know, the data is still rolling in every day, but it makes me very nervous, you know, about the future. And that is a very, like, old man yelling at cloud thing to say.

- Of course. - Although, if I could say one positive thing, Generation X, I think, is maybe the greatest generation of our time, 'cause they're the only ones, like, not whining or not doing disastrous things and going to work and making the country run. I am not Gen X.

I am a millennial, but I have great respect for the Generation X. - Hold on, my son is crawling on a table. Hold on. (laughs) Child crisis averted. I guess, kind of in summary, Chris, I was hoping when I went on my walkabout, I was hoping to come to some conclusion about the future of the country.

I was hoping to come to some conclusion about, you know, positivity or negativity. And I know that it's naive to think that it would be all one way or the other. Obviously, that's naive. Life is not so simple. Life is a combination of things together. And there's always gonna be advances and declines, and those things are gonna come and go.

Just don't know what to make of it. I still don't. I didn't come to any conclusions. I didn't come to, the only conclusion I came to, I guess I could say this. The conclusion that I came to was, you can create a positive, successful environment in your own microclimate, so to speak, in your own area.

And frankly, my biggest concerns is the cultural, the declining culture. And specifically, I mean, marriage, family formation, which leads to success. Because with the attacks that marriage run, or these things have long-term effects, and they have long-term financial effects as well. We could get into that data, but of course, we don't have it at our fingertips.

But I see it happening all around. And what I observe is, with the increasing angst about politics, perhaps it's just the coastal elites who live and breathe in this world. But basically, what I see many of my peers doing is because we've walked away from the areas where we can actually make a difference, we spend our time arguing about things we can't make a difference, and that just leads to depression.

So, like, I'm the king of my castle. I can make a difference in my castle. I don't have to ask anybody. I don't have to apply for a license. I have my wife, and I have my children, and I can make a difference there. And that difference will ripple throughout the coming centuries in terms of what I do.

So far be it from me, it would be what a disaster for me to waste my time arguing with people online about things that I can't change, and thus ignoring the needs of my own children. And yet, and the same thing in my neighborhood. I can make a difference in my neighborhood.

I can make a difference in my business. I can make a difference in my job. I cannot make a difference on who the next president of the United States is gonna be. And so, I observe that that's the only solution I have found, is to walk away from that nightmare and to focus on loving my wife, loving my children, and loving my neighbor, and building the local community that can endure.

Because that local community is what will build the fabric of the next generation. That local community is what will build the fabric of my neighbors and their success, their stability. And I can't go across the country and say to all those millions of people what I think they should do if I haven't even gone across the fence to my next door neighbor and said, "How can I serve you?

"How can I help you?" That's the only solution I've come to. - Well, I think a lot of people could gain a lot by coming to that solution as well. Look, I don't mean to say that everybody should completely opt out of reading the news. I did it as a personal experiment, and now I can bring it back into my life in a more healthful way.

But I think we can change our relationship with the national political scene, and not let it dominate us so much. And that gives us more time to focus on the things over which we do have control, like you just said. And I think that would be, at least for me personally, one of the biggest takeaways from my trip would have been actually very similar to what you described.

But when I was in the fury of it all, in the other world, I didn't give myself the time to think and realize that. And I'm grateful for the experience. And I hope other people can come to that conclusion as well, and start thinking about ways that they can set up systems that'll allow them to focus on what is more important.

I really hope people in the next year begin to start thinking about these things, and practicing them in their daily life. But I do think it's going to be a long, tough road with moments of great reckoning that might be painful. And it might feel like a couple steps forward of more steps back.

But darn it, I'm still gonna be optimistic that we are going to come out of these uncertain and strange times, learn from it, and hopefully build better communities. But I know that sounds kind of hokey. I know it does, but I can't help it. - Here's what I observed.

It does sound hokey. - I'm sorry if you-- - It's funny, if you look at so many people who study the problems from so many perspectives, people arrive at common solutions, and this is one of them. There are people from every background who basically arrive at these common solutions.

I'm gonna ask you a closing question, and just give you a chance to talk about your trip in this way. I think one of the most useful things that we could encourage people to do is from time to time to take a sabbatical. I believe that the concept of retirement, as in work for 40 years, and then retire and play golf for 30 years, is broken because it doesn't, it's broken.

It was a conspiracy foisted upon the poor by those who were trying to reduce the unemployment numbers. But the concept of sabbatical, I think, is so valuable. Work a project for a number of years, be it five, seven, eight, nine, 10 years, whatever, and then take a sabbatical. Take a year off, take two years, take six months, and do something different.

And when you go back to it, you'll go back to something new, something productive. Instead of sitting around playing golf for 30 years, you'll go back to something productive. - But to go with a renewed energy, vigor, focus, et cetera. That's what I've seen that you've done. What is your comment after having been on a sabbatical?

- Well, I would say that doing something like this is not possible for everybody, and I wouldn't be so privileged as to think that, oh, couldn't anybody just take time off? You can, you just have to work very hard to build systems that are beyond the big system, and it's incredibly difficult to do that.

That said, one thing people can do is take the concept of Sabbath on a more micro level more seriously. Anything from an entire day to just having micro Sabbaths during your day. For example, used to be, we would take micro Sabbaths all the time. And what I mean by that is a bike ride with your girlfriend or boyfriend or your wife, or an afternoon picnic with your family.

When you would leave your house in the age before cell phones and everything, you were completely off grid during that time. And that is no longer the case. You are still opening yourself up to interruptions. And I don't know about you, but if I'm interrupted, if my headspace is not where I am, then I'm not there anymore.

I'm gone into the phone or into the news or whatever. And so to your point, I would encourage people that if they can't take a real sabbatical to take micro Sabbaths during their day, when they are truly with the people they love or alone in solitude, and taking back that time for themselves in a way that we did only a couple of years ago.

And I think you will find a profound difference in the way that you perceive the world and you're refreshed enough to be able to tackle the hard things that are demanded of us in the future. - So you've gone around interviewing people who are opting out. What story or what person that you've interacted with so far has really stuck with you and made you think?

- One of the first groups of people we met that are known in the personal finance community, the Frugalwoods family up in Vermont. A lot of people know them, they've heard of them. They saved a large percentage of their income and then semi-retired to a pastoral life in Vermont in the way they wanted to live, where they made the terms of their life.

What they did took an incredible amount of work, but it also took a lot of bravery in stepping out and saying, "We are not going to live as everyone tells us to live. We're going to do what we're going to do. And there may be consequences to that, but we don't care." And the fact that they fashioned the life that they wanted to build, and everyone's dream is different, but they were able to do it because they had the discipline and then went ahead and did it themselves.

And I would say that they're a phenomenal example of what any normal person could do if, first of all, you know your goals, but then work very diligently every single day to reach them both in a micro and a macro level. - I look forward to reading the book when you finish writing it.

Your platform is LifeOptedOut on Instagram, LifeOptedOut, right? - That's right, yes. - So I've been enjoying watching you there, and I look forward to hearing what's next for you and Christy. Thank you for coming on the show. - Thank you for having me on. - Don't just dream about paradise.

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