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Ralphs. Fresh for everyone. ♪ ♪ You know I'm not one to break promises ♪ Hey everybody, it's Rick Sigman again, and we're talking to Joshua Sheets of RadicalPersonalFinance.com. And a little bit of background on Joshua. Joshua's a personal finance guy. He's got a lot of letters behind his name.

He actually knows what he's talking about. But he's going to give you a much better portion of his story than I am, so I'm just going to do a 10,000-foot view. His website is completely dedicated to teaching people how to rethink finance, and do it on terms that fit today's culture and where people are at today.

And it's kind of different than a lot of personal finance people, and he will explain why on his own. But a big reason I have him on this show is he talks about personal responsibility, and that rings so true for this guy and my audience and everything we talk about.

So real quick, say hello to Joshua, and let's turn it over to you. And just fill in the massive blanks I just left for you, Joshua. Tell us a little bit about yourself, and then we'll charge on our conversation. Sure, happy to do so. I come from this very circuitous route into finance.

I was always interested in--basically when I was a kid, I was always interested in getting rich. That was the goal. So I always, as a young person, studied the fields of personal finance. Through a bunch of circumstances, I wound up becoming a professional financial planner and practiced as a professional financial planner for about six years.

And then I closed my practice about just under six months ago to start the website Radical Personal Finance. And the primary reason was a lot of frustration about the lack of integration between the formal technical field of finance, the formal technical science of financial planning, and then the softer skills of personal finance and how to actually integrate those things.

And what I see happening is everybody has a silo. So on one hand, you might have somebody who is an expert at portfolio management, but that person often doesn't understand financial planning. And then you may have an expert at technical financial planning, but that person doesn't understand how to integrate a comprehensive wealth plan.

And you might have somebody who's excellent at talking about wealth planning, but they're very poor at discussing the details of how to set up the systems that actually make a difference on a daily basis. I didn't see anybody creating the kind of media that I wanted to listen to.

So I said, "Well, I might as well do it. Somebody needs to do it. I think this should exist." So I decided to create it. And so that's what my show is about. So we're pretty hardcore. I do it five days a week, Monday through Friday. And I cover on an average week, you'll hear me talk about anything from living in your car and lessons you can learn from the homeless people to talking about how do you do tax planning on a multibillion dollar state plan or trust plan to how does a business owner figure out all the decisions that they can write off through their business that nobody knows about because they don't have time to sit down with their accountant and cover it to what is the practical way of actually setting up personal financial goals for 2015.

So we cover a lot of ground. And my goal is to try to make it super interesting and build financial literacy because we have an epidemic of financial illiteracy in the United States of America, which is my primary focus on. It's just horrific when you start looking at it.

Oh, man. I love that. I love the word epidemic because that's exactly how I feel about my situation with what we're talking about on Work Strong America. So I listened to you. I gleefully heard you on another podcast, a two-part interview, Family Venture Podcast. If you guys want some fun in your life, go over and listen to them.

They're good people and really want to support them as well. But you were talking about the history of work and finance in the United States. And I believe you're talking about was it your father or grandfather? I'm not sure. I probably talk about both of them. Probably my grandfather.

I'll refresh my memory. Right. And just how he was raised and just the differences. You were going through the history of personal finance in the United States as far as how industrialization really changed the way people work. Think about work, the basic creation of the entire retirement mindset in America, which didn't really used to exist, and also the concept of changing things for today as far as how people are looking at things, as far as they don't want to wait until they're retired to do things in their life.

And that actually radically affects personal finance as well as far as how you earn money, how you save money, how you plan for your future, the whole nine yards. And that's really the direction I'm wanting to take this whole conversation today. Yeah. I was always puzzled working as a financial planner because the number one goal that people talk to a financial planner about is this idea of I want to retire.

That's the number one goal. If you pay any attention to financial media, if you just open your local newspaper or flip on Yahoo Money, Yahoo Finance, or look at anything that comes across your feed, you constantly are seeing topics about retirement and the retirement crisis. And if you start digging into the actual statistics of retirement and the amount of money that people have saved, I mean it's horrific.

If you come at it from the standpoint of you've got to be able to save a bunch of money to be able to retire. And so I've always been puzzled as to why that is because I grew up feeding myself personal finance books that made it very clear, "Listen, Joshua, if you open a Roth IRA and save 10% of your income and you just put that into a mutual fund and leave it alone for 40 or 50 years, you'll have a million bucks and you'll be rich and you'll be able to retire." So I thought, "Well, this is easy.

Everybody should be able to do it." But then when I actually started practicing, I found out everyone's not doing it. So it's kind of inspired a little bit of a research project for me to try to understand why. Because it's easy to get into the, I guess the mania about we've got a crisis and everyone's going to retire and no one has any money.

It's easy to beat that drum. But then I just said, "What's behind that? Why is that?" The why behind stuff really bothers me personally. So I've made it a research project. I'm still trying to figure it out. But as I look at it, one of the things that I've learned is essentially there's been a dramatic cultural shift in the idea behind work, the meaning of work, the usefulness of work, and the concept of retirement.

And the best I can look at it is if you look at history, throughout much of history, there is no concept of retirement in the way that we think of it today. This idea that, well, you're going to go, you're going to go, you're going to build your career from 25 to 65, and then you're going to be able to go and, as Todd Tressiter calls it, go and participate in the pro-leisure circuit and play golf every day.

I live in Florida. We have a lot of people down here. They drive around in a beautiful, nice car and play golf four times a week. And it's great. It keeps our economy going. But the issue is if you look at that, that's a very new concept. Throughout most of human history, people have never had any concept of wanting to retire.

And that was what puzzled me. When I started looking at it, the best I've been able to figure out is that there's a couple different places that retirement originated from. The idea of living on a pension with this idea of guaranteed income, this idea of living on a pension came in with Chancellor Otto Bismarck in Germany.

This is where it's often attributed. And what happened is he was the ruler of Germany, and he was trying to maintain his political power. And the socialists were fighting him to take over Germany. So as often happens with politicians, it wasn't so much about his personal principles of being anti-socialist.

It was more about maintaining power. So he said, well, if the socialists are going to take over power, I'll maintain power by being more socialist than they are. And so he brought in this idea of a pension system. The government is going to pay you to be – everyone over a certain age to retire.

Well, that idea, it worked for him. It became somewhat popular. He instantly wound up eliminating much of his political opposition. Excuse me. I had to cough there. And so he was able to eliminate much of his political opposition and all in one fell swoop and keep power. Well, through the Great Depression in the United States of America, we had a massive unemployment problem.

And the political leaders at that time felt that the unemployment problem was actually destined to be a structural problem on an ongoing basis. And so one of the things that they needed to do was to lower the unemployment problem. This was attacked in many different ways. One of the ways was creating work projects.

So you had things like the Civilian Conservation Corps and you had all of these so-called public works projects to put people to work. But you also had a change of laws and you had essentially the introduction of retirement systems and you also had the introduction of child labor laws.

And all of – by the way, one caveat I need to make. All of these things are all twisted together. Many times people look for one cause. I've never been able to find any one cause in things. But when you start looking at things, you find multiple benefits, multiple things working together.

So when I say something like child labor laws, child labor laws did have the benefit that we were all taught of actually helping to protect children from pretty tough jobs in factories. But they also had the benefit of keeping people out of the workforce. And so you see today with a 13- or 14-year-old young man or woman wants to go and get a job, it's much more difficult for them to actually go and take part in gainful employment than it was throughout history.

So that's important for people to recognize. There's always pluses and minuses to all of these things. So one of the aspects of that however was the introduction of retirement systems. This coincided with a lot of changes in technology where you had the introduction of a more industrialized system and older workers were often not able to participate and use the machines at their disposal as effectively as younger workers.

So one of the ways of getting rid of the older workers was establishing a mandatory retirement system. And throughout the last 75 years in this country, we've gone through various phases of having mandatory retirement systems at a certain age and having those and then taking them away and having them and taking them away.

There's advantages and disadvantages of having them. Specifically, what really kind of knocked me off of my knowledge was basically the idea that when retirement systems were first invented, they were largely resisted by many workers. Many of the older workers did not want to retire. And you still see this today when you actually work in the retirement market.

I learned this working with some retirees. Most – many retirees do not actually want to retire because they find meaning. They find fulfillment in their work. Well, they were forced to retire. And then what's happened is starting in about the 1950s and a little before, a little after but with the invention of modern advertising, what's happened in the last 50, 60, 70 years is the whole concept of retirement has been transitioned from a curse, which is largely how it was traditionally viewed as a curse of a man couldn't work, to being able to be that ideal that we all long for, the invention of the ability for the average person to retire down to a condo in Florida and live a life of leisure.

And now that's completely changed generationally speaking. So now I'm a millennial. Everyone from my generation feels like – all the responsible ones feel like I've got to retire. But the funny thing is – and this is what I may have mentioned on the other show was I learned that there are almost two kinds of people.

All the people that are desperate and want to retire, most of the people in my experience that are desperate to retire will never retire because they don't have the money, because they don't like their work. They're doing something they don't enjoy and they just never accumulate any money. Now, many of the people that have the most money in the world, look at the richest titans of industry that are commonly put on the front cover of Fortune magazine.

Many of them are in their 70s, 80s, 90s and still working as vigorously as they ever did. Well, generationally, we have this problem that people who can afford to retire don't want to and the people that want to often can't afford. So there's a very small section of the mass affluent who actually can and do retire and do want to.

So I don't want to say that this is comprehensive. This has just been my overall experience that there's a large percentage of the population that fits into those two categories. But this is changing. So that's why you see all through – you see this dramatic difference in doing retirement planning for younger people.

Millennials – most of us, we've watched our parents. Their retirement plan hasn't worked because they didn't save enough money. Their assets were lowered in the stock market correction or whatever. And so oftentimes, there's this massive change going on. People say, "Why should I bother with that whole idea of waiting and that whole system?

Rather, let me just design my life in a different way." That was what we talked a lot about of why things like family travel, things like building in work that you love, that's why it's so important. So it's my long-winded way of answering your question. No, and that was perfect.

You brought me to the exact point I wanted to be at. And it's interesting. Everything you just finished up with, there's a Seth Godin quote that I'm going to completely murder. But he basically says, "Most people are looking to take a vacation two weeks out of their year to escape from the life that they're in.

Instead of escaping, why don't we just build a life we don't have to escape from?" Absolutely. And when I heard that, that was just one of those small lightning strike moments. It's like, "By God, that's it. It's true." And you hit it right. A lot of millennials have seen their parents struggle with their supposed retirement, lose their money.

In the last, what, six, seven years, we've seen so many families lose their homes, lose every bit of supposed retirement money that they've ever had. A lot of people got scared and jumped out of the market. Never jumped back in to take advantage of the correction that did happen and watch the market come back up to regain their losses.

And as a result, a lot of your generation, the millennials, are just cynical about things. Because the system, and I'm not beating up on the people in the system because I've been a part of it, and I love our educators. I love the people who are trying to give our young people the next leg up that they need.

But we haven't changed the message. We're telling them the same things that work for your mom and dad are going to work for you. And the millennials and young men and women are basically seeing this as in the eyes of, "Yeah, you're telling me this, and you're in charge.

But I've seen the results of what you're talking about, and I'm just not going to buy into that." And so it has. It's completely changed the paradigm. We're seeing millennials not buy cars in the prolific way that all the previous generations before them used to, or buy houses in the same way, or even get married and have kids.

It's much more of a lifestyle-dependent nature of things. And that's where a lot of millennials, as far as the demographics of that generation and the ones after them, they want to own their own business far more than any generation that's preceded them. Not necessarily completely for financial opportunities and gains, but for lifestyle.

For exactly what we're talking about right now. So why don't you talk about that a little bit? Yeah, if you think of what many people actually want, and I try very hard myself not to generalize, because it often gets you in trouble. But you kind of have to sometimes.

My experience doing personal financial planning is when I ask people about what they really want, it's far less of a focus on how can I, what kind of fancy toys can I buy, consumption items. And it's far more about how can I structure my day in a way that gives me joy and gives me pleasure.

I don't think that most people are fundamentally lazy. I think most people are fundamentally, if we're interested in something that we actually are doing, I think of it when, how do you handle your Saturdays and how do you handle your vacation days? There are some people who the only thing they want to do ever is just do nothing.

But most people, if you get to a Saturday, you get to a vacation, there is a combination of work, there's a combination of play. And it's usually packed very full. Right, right. And so the key is the goal is not inactivity. Rather, one of the important things is control over what I do.

And if you actually look at things, I teach people. So I talk a lot about financial independence, how to build financial independence. But I'm convinced that the way of approach and that's the formula there is save a massive percentage of your income, as high a percentage as possible, invest it wisely and live off of the investment.

And the advantage, if you start young, by the way Rick, is your show focused on younger people or older people? Yes, that answer is yes. It focuses on the people who are coming into the job market and seeking out their personal predilections to what they want to do with their life.

And it's also focused on the business owners, the people who need these people. So there's two distinct groups within that. Great. So the reason I ask is one of the things I wish I had known when I was younger is that I could set up a plan where I could be financially independent at a much younger age.

I made the massive mistake of only focusing on retirement. And so what I did was I said, "Well, let me set up a plan to be financially independent at 65." And then I spent all the rest of my money. And what I should have done is I wish somebody had come along and somebody had challenged me at 15 years old and said, "Joshua, you need a plan to be financially independent at 25." Because being financially independent at 25 versus 65, you're going to have a radically different life course.

Now, I don't focus on regret. I'm working on my financial independence plan. But I try to teach people you should have a plan in fewer than 10 years to get you financially independent. But the fastest way to get there is not to say I got to have a million dollars but rather the fastest way is to say, "Well, what would I get if I were financially independent and how can I build control in – over my day and over my activities?" And that's probably going to come through business.

If you look at the lifestyle of a business owner, there's a lot of work involved. There's a lot of – I've never worked with a business owner who hasn't been very busy and had a lot of work. But that work, that person has control over that work. And the ones who are working the hardest are often doing that because they're supporting a higher lifestyle.

You don't have to actually work that hard if you don't need that much. And that can be achieved very straightforward with business. So teaching entrepreneurship and encouraging people to build businesses, that builds ownership. With my business right now, I have to work. But the thing is the work matters to me.

So I find myself working far more now than I ever did in the past and enjoying it far more than I ever did in the past because it matters to me and I enjoy doing that. I don't want to – it's funny. We're coming up on Christmas as we're recording this and I'm thinking, "Man, I don't really want to take any time off." Now, I could take the month of December off but I don't want to because I enjoy and I'm really focused on what I'm doing.

That changes throughout life as we go through different phases and there will be phases at which I don't want to – I want to take a year off. I want to take a couple of years off. Business ownership gives you that opportunity. Plus, it allows you to apply leverage to your financial life.

And people often talk about taxes and tax breaks for the rich and tax breaks for the poor. I've studied a lot of taxes and I'll tell you. There are a lot of tax breaks but they're not for the rich and for the poor. We all have the same tax code except there's a tax code that applies to business owners and there's a tax code that applies to individuals.

And the people who are destroyed by our tax code are people who are employees making wages, earning wages. That is the most highly taxed, most inefficient way to build wealth. The people who the tax code benefits are those who create businesses and derive their income from investing. So I just say, "Why don't you skip this whole – why don't you skip this whole phase of essentially working as a cog in the machine for 20 years and why don't we set out a plan for financial independence that is built upon you building up your own enterprise?" And to some people that means working from a laptop in Thailand.

For some people that means building houses where they live. To some people – I mean it means any number of things. But it's so easy in today's world compared to how it's ever been in the history of mankind to do it. The key is you just got to have a roadmap of how to get started.

Oh my gosh. That's completely beautiful. So you hit on two things that are really important. The first one was kind of in your first bit of speech in this conversation was how difficult it is for a young person to actually break into work and the job market at a young age because of the child labor laws we now have in place.

But also the fact that – and this is my experience too. I have hardly run into any young men and women who are actually lazy. But you Google "millennials" in a Google search and it's just going to be all these articles business after business how millennials are unmotivated and they're lazy and all this other stuff.

It's my opinion and it's my experience that they need a challenge and they need to do exactly what you're talking about with your work. Your work counts to you and therefore as a result of that you are excited to go in and make a difference and work hard and serve the people listening to you every single day to the point that you even don't really want to take a break from doing that because that's where you get your fulfillment and your joy.

And that's a huge part of Work Strong America is trying to convey to these young men and women coming into our workforce. And so going into that it completely – this is my passion is to teach them because I really think we're working with the leaders of the next generation.

If we don't turn this ship around as far as what we're talking about, young people taking on the reins, getting – A, being not afraid to get their hands dirty and learn how to do something because the need is so massive in this country for people to actually learn trades, learn those skills and pass them along.

That's another part of what needs to happen is for them to become the leaders of this next movement of America taking the reins back of being able to actually do and produce things. Two, moving them into entrepreneurship and that's a huge theme and focus of both what you and I are talking about.

So what in your opinion from your encounters with these younger generations – I mean you said you wanted to get somebody thinking about this by 15. I would actually like to one up that and say 12 or 13 at least begin having the conversations with them and encouraging entrepreneurship.

With that being said, how do you see a good way to encourage the concepts of entrepreneurship and lighting that fire in somebody from really early on like that? You said we got six or seven hours for this interview, right? Yeah, why not? Or multiple interviews down the road which is kind of the master plan anyway.

So here is – I'll answer – I'll give you my best shot at it and it's a question I think obsessively about. And I'm going to say a couple things in a moment that are going to sound rash to many listeners and when people say rash statements or things that sound a little bit crazy, I think you should hold them to account and research it.

So I'm not asking anybody to accept what I say as being true. I would just ask you to research it. So the answer to your question, I don't – I know almost no millennials that are lazy. I can't stand it. I am a millennial. I can't stand this generational like, oh, millennials are lazy.

I would say that a millennial is probably on average probably just a little bit smarter to see through the nonsense that many people don't see through. It's like why should I come in and play this game of filling out TPS reports for 40 hours a week? This is utterly meaningless and has no impact on my life.

Number two, there's no reason for it because we've set up a system in our society, a system of welfare benefits where there's little motivation to do something different. And those welfare benefits can be brought in by parents, parents who support and provide as Tom Stanley would say economic outpatient care to support underachievement.

And that's – in my mind, someone who takes advantage of that is not lazy. They're intelligent. They're taking advantage of a system that exists or whether it's through a system of government benefits that are established. In my mind, people take advantage of that. They're not lazy. They're intelligent. Why should I do – exert more effort than possible?

So you've got to look at the system of incentives and ask yourself what is the system of incentives that work. If you understand incentives, then you can understand how people are going to react. And so in my mind, that's one of the – one aspect. But I actually don't know any millennials who are lazy.

If you look at those whose society would call lazy, look at what they actually spend their time doing and what's likely is you're going to find them doing things that are important to them. And so I never could figure this out until I started studying the history of school.

When I started actually studying the history of school, it made everything make sense to me that – it made a lot more of the world make sense to me. I used to think that school was about education and that was what I was always taught, that schooling is about education, that you need to – what are we taught?

You need to go to school. You need to get a good education because without a good education in life, you're not going to succeed. And so this schooling idea has become a – schooling has become in our society, the word school, has become synonymous with education. And so that originally was you need to go to – used to be that people with an eighth-grade education were running massive businesses.

Go and read some historical biographies and you find plenty of people who never went beyond what used to be a sixth or eighth-grade education. Then we added this whole thing called high school and then we said you got to get a high school education because if you don't, you're not going to get a good job.

Then high school became college and today college, an undergraduate degree, is now a graduate degree. If you don't have a graduate degree, you're not going to do this. Yeah, it's all about the master's and possibly even the PhD at this point. It's gotten ridiculous. Right, right. And I want to be clear.

Education is vital. Yes. Without education and without a good teacher, what do we – I mean I can't – I wouldn't be anywhere where I am without quality education and without excellent teachers that poured into my life. But education is not synonymous with school. When I went and studied school and I studied the history of school, it made everything make sense to me because I recognized that school has never been about education.

That's why I said that's a reckless statement if you don't understand the history. So don't believe me. Go research it. Throughout most of society, most traditional societies, people have matriculated from childhood to adulthood in somewhere in their early teens and this has been true traditionally for men and for women.

So you can still see some vestiges of that in our modern culture. For example, the Jewish culture has at the age of 12 a bar mitzvah or bat mitzvah for the girls. If you look at many traditional societies, whether those are a hunter-gatherer tribe, they'll often have a ceremony of manhood or rites of manhood or rites of womanhood in their early teens where you go out and if you're on the plains of Africa, you kill a lion.

Many times traditionally, women were married in their early teens. And so you have this like transition throughout history from childhood to adulthood. What we've done now is we've replaced in our culture that transition from childhood to adulthood. We've added a new concept called adolescence. And so we've added this and when do all the problems – I talk to parents.

I have a one-year-old son at the moment. But I talk to parents and they say, "When do all the problems happen? Problems happen in adolescence." Well, one of the primary reasons why those problems are happening is because you have a man or a woman who is practically physically mature.

And this is the time when they should be making their mark on the world and instead, we're stuck in a classroom strapped to a desk with a boring teacher up front lecturing on a subject that's completely irrelevant to modern life and everybody knows it's irrelevant. I've never – I took calculus.

I've never used trigonometry in my practical daily life. I'm not a mathematician and I've never used my knowledge of marine biology. That doesn't matter to me. But I know that most of the things I do use, I was never taught. So students that see through this process, those are a few that can escape.

But the one of the – many of the ones that are stuck in this process of school where everything is put to you and you don't have the opportunity to express and search out your own interests. Instead, it's just here's this curriculum that you have to do. That curriculum is largely designed.

There's a little bit of educational value to function in a modern society but it's largely designed for a system of indoctrination and training a society to be consistent. Because if we had a society filled with free-thinking people who are entrepreneurs and who are able to go and decide what they want and go after and build the course of action, that would be a society that's very hard to manage.

And in a system of an industrialized system, just – I'll use this as an anecdotal comparison. Go look at a factory and watch how a traditional factory worked before it was all replaced by robots. You had a system of people. They needed to come and they needed to sit in chairs and they needed to work on an assembly line.

So what was school designed for? School is designed that you come and you sit in chairs in rows. You have a foreman that stands in the front of the room. You have a teacher that stands in front of the room and lectures to you and tells you what to do.

You have in a factory, you have a bell that goes off and tells you when you stop for lunch. You have a bell that goes off and tells you when you quit for the day. In school, you move around with a herd and bells. So the whole system was based upon building out productive factory workers that were easily controlled and easily managed.

The two C words, compliance and conformity. Right. That's not how you build entrepreneurs. No, it's the polar opposite of everything an entrepreneur is. Right. And so you wonder why is it that throughout history, if you go and look at the history of our nation, traditionally in our nation, our nation was founded by people who were self-reliant people.

There's a famous speech I've quoted on my show where Abraham Lincoln talks about this. And he was refuting something called mudsill theory. I could provide it to you after the show if you want to link to it. It's too long to go into. But he talks about how this country would never be – historically would never be conquered because all of the people had independent sources of livelihood.

Well, fast forward that to today where very – as a percentage of population, a much smaller percentage of our population has any form of independent livelihood. This affects a culture. And so what happens is that I think most young people that I know, when they go into school, when they go in an early age, when they have children in elementary school, I observe they really love school.

They love to learn. But then there's a transition that happens and the average 18-year-old that I meet is a little bit more sullen and surly and just not that interested in life. And I always look at it and say, "What happened?" And in my observation, there may be many factors but one of those is that any of their independent thought and any of their independent ideas are beat out of them.

Even the ones that we do find that are exceptional in classes, I would submit to you that most of the time, the reason we find them exceptional is because they had an interest. Maybe they were very interested in this aspect of science and they created a science project and then that was encouraged.

They usually had a teacher or a mentor that noticed that and encouraged that. And they kind of go through the motions with other things so that they can work on their core genius. I would say one of the major ways that I see of fixing entrepreneurship is either have as much time within the school system, spend as much time – spend the bare minimum needed to kind of check the box so to speak on school because in our society, school is important.

It's become a societal standard and you kind of got to check the box. I encourage people if they're academically capable, it will be useful to you. If you check the box on your high school education, it will be useful. If you check the box on a cheap, fast, easy undergraduate degree.

But recognize that all you're doing is basically nodding to societal standards. You're not actually getting an education that's going to somehow transform you into this different person. So check the box so that you can function easily in society. Then spend your time and energy focusing on what it is that you're interested in.

In today's world, I mean a decade from now, nobody is going to recognize the education system because it's completely in the process of transformation. And with the flattening of society through technological aspects and technological access, people at a young age have access to the information that traditionally was pulled from them.

I just read an anecdote. I did a review on my show of Tony Robbins' new book and I read – it's called Money, Master the Game. And I read in there an anecdote that I never heard. There was this young man in Colorado, 17 years old, all through his teens.

He was interested in robotics. So he taught himself robotics and robotic control. And he built in his spare bedroom, actually built a working prosthetic arm because he wanted a classmate of his to be able to have access to this arm. So he taught himself it all on the internet and built the thing with a 3D printer in his bedroom.

He went on and it was so good that he was actually offered a job with a division in NASA. He went and he took the job and I think it was a couple of weeks that he worked there and he quit. And he said, "This is stupid. You guys are wasting your time.

I just want to build stuff." He went back and now his primary project – remember, at 17 he had invented a fully functioning robotic arm. And now his primary project is he's trying to build a functioning exoskeleton to help a friend of his who's paralyzed be able to walk across the stage at his high school graduation.

Who knows if he'll make it or not? But he did it all with independent learning. And so one of the things that I try to encourage young people to do is you have to recognize the reality of society and recognize that we live in a system that many people aren't going to understand you if you kind of do certain things.

And maybe you can just say, "I'm going to do my own thing." I find that it's useful to be able to function within society. But don't worry about an SAT score. Figure out and spend those precious few years of your life where you don't have high structural costs into your life, where you're not supporting a family.

Spend those years building and focusing on something of interest. Build a business. And I think with my one-year-old son at the moment, my best idea is I have a personal goal of getting most of the academic stuff that he needs to function done by about the age of 12.

Now we still have mandatory schooling laws. So he'll have to do some schooling beyond that. But in my mind, from 12 till 16, 18, 20, I'm going to be encouraging him to focus primarily on building businesses and trying things, failing, trying things, failing, trying things, failing. And hopefully he can put together through those teen years, instead of being locked in a room where any kind of spark of interest is beaten out of him, he has the ability to feed those sparks and see if any of them happen to catch fire over time.

Oh my goodness. You're singing the song right here. So, okay. Everything you said, in my opinion, was spot on. So, for a wrap up for this show, because I surely hope we're going to have you on in the future. What are, in about a minute or two, some final words that you would say to a mom, a dad, or an educator, a dialed-in teacher who really has a heart for their students, to change their paradigm of what success is and help encourage the young men and women that they're influencing and that are in their lives on this path and to this direction?

We need great teachers and we need great parents. I come from a family of teachers. My mom was a school teacher, my grandmother was a school teacher, my sister is a school teacher, and my brother-in-law is an active school teacher in a government school. So, one of the keys that people often struggle with, we struggle with this comparison between education and school.

I submit they are not synonymous. School is a function of society and education is a need for people to advance themselves. You might be able to get some education in school and depending on what you're studying in school, you might be able to get more education or less education, but it's not necessarily the same thing.

Another important distinction to draw, however, is that school is not necessarily synonymous with teaching. So, I'm a teacher every day, and you're a teacher, Rick, on your podcast. Every day you're teaching. So, I'm teaching every single day on my show. The key that I would encourage people is look at how society is changing.

And what's happening is there's this massive revolution. I used to be on the fringe as far as my opinions and thoughts and ideas, and I'm used to being on the fringe, and that's okay. It's a good place to be. I like being there. You get better results when you're out of the mainstream.

But I used to be on the fringe. But if you just look, look. Look at the articles constantly about the cost of college versus the success of graduate degrees. Look at people talking about school. Look at the alternative methods. Research online the Khan Academy. Research online how businesses are changing.

A decade or two from now, 50% of the occupations that currently exist will not exist. When I graduated from high school, it was almost just over 10 years ago, iPhone didn't exist. Android didn't exist. Podcasting barely existed. Like, none of these technologies existed. So my best encouragement would be that in today's world, the only way for people to be successful is to become an autodidact, a self-taught learner.

That's the primary skill that you can teach. And so if you're a teacher, I believe you need to be teaching people not facts and figures but rather teaching people how do I learn about this topic of interest, whatever it is. And use your skill and knowledge of teaching in the educational process.

Figure out what that interest is and then encourage a student in a way of learning about that interest. Because if you can -- there is no possible way that in 12 or 16 years of schooling that you can prepare somebody that's going to be able to be functional in the year 2030.

You cannot do it. The only way that you can prepare someone to be functional in 2030 is if you can teach them how to learn. And then they can keep their eyes open to what they need to learn and then apply those skills of learning to that topic that's important for them at that point in time.

Beautiful. Beautiful. My goodness, Joshua, thank you so much. Our clock's starting to run out. So I just want to thank you for coming on our podcast. Thank you for talking to the people that listen to this. And people can find you at RadicalPersonalFinance.com and your podcast name is the same?

Absolutely. RadicalPersonalFinance.com. And I thank you for having me on and I encourage you to keep doing what you're doing because we need thousands and thousands of people to do what you and I are doing to help people navigate these transitions. Amen, brother. All right, you guys, I hope you all enjoyed this.

And Joshua, you have a great day. Signing off. Thanks. There ain't nothing I can really say. I can't lie no more. I can't hide no more. That could be true to myself. And it feels like I am just too close to love you. So you'll be on my way.

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