Enjoy a masterclass on achieving financial independence (and perhaps early retirement) in the first half, and stick around for a ton of uplifting family content in the second. It's on the haus! Bumper: Million Dollar Man Theme Break: Sixteen Tons by Tennessee Ernie Ford (DJ Conrad) Close: Running for So Long from The Peanut Butter Falcon Go forth and multiply. Support Full Haus here or at givesendgo.com/FullHaus Subscribe to Surreal Politiks. And follow The Final Storm on Telegram and subscribe on Odysee. Censorship-free Telegram commentary: https://t.me/prowhitefam2 Telegram channel with ALL shows available for easy download: https://t.me/fullhausshows Gab.com/Fullhaus Odysee for special occasion livestreams. RSS: https://feeds.libsyn.com/275732/rss All shows since Zencast deplatforming: https://fullhaus.libsyn.com/ And of course, feel free to drop us a line with anything on your mind at fullhausshow@protonmail.com. We love ya fam, and we'll talk to you next week.
But whether you like it or not, money also makes the world go round.
Or to quote from my personal financial advisor, Method Man, cash rules everything around me.
And while our eternal enemy has a near monopoly on its creation and manipulation, the fact remains that being good with money, from knowing your inflows and outflows in detail, to being a disciplined saver and making wise investments is more or less essential to living well, to not suffering under a constant anxiety about bills and debts, to providing for your family and enabling more children,
and to creating a war chest of sorts that could simply be peace of mind, a retirement nest egg, a regular income source, dox insurance, or even bail or lawyer money should your ass get hemmed up in some monkey business.
Too many of our guys look down on money as fake and gay, even if they're not entirely wrong, and assume a fatalistic attitude that they are destined to be a lower income working stiff until the grave, or that everything is rigged and thus we shouldn't play the game at all.
Some, I suspect, are just financially illiterate or simply lazy and disinterested when it comes to personal financial responsibility.
I can understand the sentiment, but it's really no way to live.
This week, as those credit card balances balloon along with your Christmas spirits, we welcome a financially savvy, youngish father who is damn good at playing the game, has set his sights on early retirement, and to let his money do the work for him.
Is he a shekel-grubbing silver spoon trust fund baby or one of us who hack the code for better living?
Find out this week on Full House.
And Mr. Producer, let's go.
Everybody's going to pay.
Cause the million dollar man is way.
Welcome, everyone, to Full House, the world's most financially responsible show for white fathers, aspiring ones, and the whole biofam.
It is episode 174, and I am your mostly practicing what he preaches host, Coach Finstock, back with another two hours of news you can use in a financial system managed by you-know-who.
Before we meet the birth panel, though, big thanks to Mitt Gartner, Kirko, Ted, and Anon for their kind support of the show this week.
If you'd like to be like those sovereigns of shekel sharing, and you should, please check out givesendgo.com slash fullhouse or full-house.com and the support us tab.
And after all of that, let's get on with the show.
First up, yet again, he was furious at the content of this week's episode, exploding in rage.
Why didn't anyone tell me any of this stuff 30 years ago, Coach?
Sam, welcome back.
Yeah, Coach.
Yeah, for sure.
For sure.
Yeah, I'm looking forward to this.
No one more than me can benefit from some good advice.
Yeah, you know, I've had a tough go through life having a large family, especially early in life.
And even though I've always managed to have a good job and do all right, but there's a lot of bills and everything.
And I came up really in the 90s, you might say, when, you know, all the traditional things were being lost.
You know, people were working without benefits.
People were working without any retirement savings going on at all.
And, you know, even into the 2000s and then until things kind of improved a little bit.
And there's things that everyone should take advantage.
Like many companies offer some kind of matching savings type thing.
You put in some of your own money, at least up until a certain dollar, and they'll put in their own.
So anyways, I do hope to learn some more good things like we've had in the past, financial talks and things.
Everyone should pay attention.
And just because you can't do everything, that doesn't mean you can't do something, you know.
But yeah, anyways, we were talking about beer just before coming on here.
And I'm drinking this Pipeworks Magic Zone.
It's coconut chili lime beer.
And then I got lined up here, this founder's backwards bastard.
It's like with the aged in the bourbon barrels.
So I'm looking forward to that.
But one thing that I picked up recently is a bottle of my favorite Mescal is called Illegal.
I-L-E-G-A-L illegal.
So my mother-in-law is over here.
So I'll ask her, hey, you want to do something a little illegal?
And then I'll pour some of that.
So that's some good stuff.
Anyways, it's good to be here, coach.
Absolutely.
When you said Pipeworks Magic Zone, I thought maybe that was your and Wifey's nickname for some.
Right, right.
I got another topic in the second hour we can bring up to the bottom.
There you go.
I want to talk about Mescal too.
I got a funny one on that.
And, you know, for the audience, we have done versions of this show before.
Actually, our third episode ever, The Six Million Dollar Men, was sort of personal finance, but I went back to listen to a little bit of it.
I was tight, I'll say for myself, just because we were getting started and not professionals like we are now almost five years later.
And big thanks to our pal, Charles, who kind of kicked our tires and said, hey, guys, you should really do another investment show or finance show.
They have been great.
And our other foolish pal said, yeah, do another gardening show too.
I said, I'm not doing a gardening show in December.
You're going to have to wait until that's for the spring.
We always do one of those.
Yeah, those have also benefited me.
You know, being an urbanite, I just never have gotten the dirt underneath my nails like I should, you know, but yeah, these shows really helped me too.
Absolutely.
And for the audience, please, you know, I get it.
Sometimes this stuff seems materialistic or Jewish or whatever.
I get it.
I really do.
But I was also just as sincere in what I said in the opener there, that this stuff is essential to living well, growing wealth, et cetera.
All right.
I'll shut up.
We still got two more guests introduced.
All right.
Next up, he's still young enough to benefit from the wisdom about to be shared, but will he?
Rolo, welcome back, buddy.
Thank you.
And I will never take in anything that I should be on this show.
Just listen, take notes, do absolutely nothing afterward.
There's a lot of people who actually.
Hey, I'm guilty of that in some respects financially, too.
I've got a bunch of things I need to sell and buy that I haven't done and it's long overdue.
Anything new in your neck of the woods?
You know, I have something.
I have the coyotes and tumbleweeds.
Yeah, the coyotes and the tumbleweeds are they're you know, they're old, but you know, they're we'll get some new coyotes and tumbleweeds come the spring.
Nope, nope.
I had something that I thought was kind of interesting, but I forgot.
So, how interesting could it have been?
Typical.
Maybe you'll remember it in the second half.
All right.
Welcome back, bud.
And finally, our very patient and special guest.
He is, among other things, a proud father and husband, currently a hardworking wage slave, and also, by all accounts, including my own, one of the kindest and most decent men in our cause, over and above his own investing and personal finance chops.
And he's already one of my favorite guests of all time on Full House, having provided two detailed pages of notes almost a week before our recording date.
Conrad, welcome to Full House, buddy.
Thank you, Coach.
I'm excited to be here with you guys.
Amen.
And, you know, you could have just told me that you were Conrad Hilton III at the start, and we can make this a quick show.
You know, you inherit the money.
How do you get wealthy in this world?
You don't trust some baby.
Story.
End of story.
Oh, what a wonderful problem to have.
Yeah.
You inherit it, you sue somebody to get it, or you invest in Greece, right, Rolo?
Wasn't that one of the that's what I do.
Simpsons, yes.
I know, I know.
No, through savings and personal investment.
No, of course through Greece.
Anyway, lay it on us, please, Conrad.
Retirement, Greece.
Thank you.
Your ethnicity, religion, and fatherhood status, please.
Yeah, so like you mentioned, I'm married.
I have four children, all under the age of 10.
So pretty, pretty busy with those young ones.
I'm mostly German with some double-digit percentages of Scottish and Czech mixed in.
And religion, I was born and raised and confirmed Catholic.
But I'll be honest, as far as those personal convictions, a lot of what you talk about, Coach, about really struggling to get over that kind of personal conviction of belief, I'm kind of there with you.
So I'm very pro-Christianity.
Our kids are being raised in it, but I share a lot of thoughts that you've shared on the topic.
Fair enough.
I appreciate you saying that.
So is Wifey taking more of a management on the church going and Bible reading?
Yeah, our oldest is finally of the age where he's in the religious ed classes and she's volunteered as a teacher.
So she's really involved there.
And I'm supporting as much, you know, as much as I can, not contradicting anything.
I know the story, so I'm reinforcing it.
I want them to partake.
I'm trying to get there myself.
So I'm supporting in my own way.
And she's, of course, a lot more active.
Yep.
You don't want to be a phony, but you don't want to be a stick in the mud on all that stuff.
Exactly.
The struggle is real.
Real quick, before we get to money, which is the focus at least of the first hour, a very brief red pill story from you, because you do come across as kind, sincere, gentle.
You know, how did you become a bigoted, racist, xenophobic, homophobic, savage brute like you are today?
So I have my, well, my father is conservative, so very traditional conservative.
So I was brought up, you know, thinking all the typical kind of mainstream Republican lines.
When I was in college, I was very much in the Ron Paul phase.
So, you know, I have a lot of Ron Paul libertarian priors.
The race realism has kind of always been there.
I was, you know, exposed to it as, you know, growing, going through school.
So I saw that.
So the race part of it was always there.
And it's, you know, it's interesting because you meet people in person and You treat everyone kindly, but you can separate from that, no statistics, no probabilities, and know the reality of things.
And that's just kind of always been my mentality.
The JQ came later post-college.
That actually was kind of during the Trump primary train.
Some of my very close friends had gotten red-pilled on the JQ before me and it kind of started dropping hints.
And if you're willing to look at the data once enough hints or drop it, it comes pretty quick.
So I became JQ aware during the 2016 primary season.
Kind of started with ask my buddy, why are you supporting Trump?
Like, what's this about?
And I just went from there.
And yeah, here I am.
That's probably the most common denominator backstory for our guys, I'd say, you know, roughly libertarian, Trump, all that stuff.
And then getting red-pilled either through a friend or through the internet.
Thank you very much.
Before we kick it off here, so many disclaimers here, but this is a serious one.
And I don't know if we have to do this or not, but I'm going to do it anyway.
That what's about to be said is not personalized investment advice, nor are we financial advisors or professionals.
We're not selling anything on the show.
We're not telling you, you got to go buy this or that.
And of course, remember that almost virtually every investment or purchase you make comes with risk.
So if you really want to do your homework and do your due diligence, talk to a professional financial advisor.
We are dudes kicking around ideas, lessons learned, things that I've learned over 25 years of managing my and my family's finances.
But Conrad is better at it than me, and that's why he's here.
So kick us off, pal, if you would, your overall mindset strategy approach.
What is it that you're trying to do?
Sure.
So, I mean, really, it all boils down to financial independence.
You know, like you hit on in the open, you know, money isn't the ends of itself, but it is the means by which you are independent of needing that salary, that paycheck coming in every week or every other week.
That dependence on that paycheck is what maybe keeps you living in a place you wouldn't otherwise live, maybe keeps you quieter about talking about your beliefs because you don't want to lose your job.
It influences so much of what we do in a non-positive way that having money isn't saying kind of cliche, but isn't the key to happiness, but it unlocks the ability to do those things that make you happy.
You can live where you want to live.
You can be less concerned about being doxed.
You can become independent of the system, so to speak, if you have means to be financially independent.
So that's what it's really all about to me.
I want to be able to live where I want to live, not have a eight to five or even longer hour job where you're so physically and mentally drained that you can't engage with your family in the evening the way you'd like to.
Being able to be free of all that, that's what drives me.
I think it's an absolutely laudable goal.
It's not Jewish at all.
It's trying to break those chains that surround you.
Now, I got to ask, you're younger than me.
We'll just say that.
And you are talking retirement within a time frame that is astounding to me.
And I'm personally jealous.
So you just set your mind that I am going to, is it fair to say, I'm going to make enough and make enough smart investments now early that I want to be out of this rat race by X years or whatnot.
Exactly.
So I'm in my mid-30s now, and I will be retired before I'm 40.
And so when I say retired, I'm not, you know, I'm obviously not an old person.
I'm still going to do things.
I'm going to have hobbies.
I'm going to do part-time things of things that I'm passionate about, but having that full-time job, I will be done with that before the age of 40.
And, you know, contrary to the joke made at the beginning, I'm not a trust fund baby when I was in my early 20s.
I think I had $200 in my bank account when I set off on my own.
I'm the first person in my family to ever go to college.
So, you know, it was really building it from the ground up.
I was lucky when I was in my 20s to stumble on the fire movement.
And so a lot of people might have heard of that.
So I mentioned financial independence.
That's the FI of FHIR.
The RE stands for retire early.
And so you can Google FHIR movement.
There's a whole bunch of stuff out there, but I did tons and tons of reading on that, learned the strategies and set my mind to it.
And as we'll get into it, it doesn't take a lot of flash.
It's actually really just boring how it works, but it takes a lot of discipline to maintain it because it's not flashy.
It doesn't go fast.
You just have to have that discipline and that grind and that exponential growth gets you there.
And so I really started in earnest on it in my mid-20s.
And, you know, there was maybe some fortune aspects.
The, you know, the market through the 2010s was favorable, but, you know, as we'll talk about, that's not necessarily essential.
It speeds it up, but you can get there no matter what.
For sure.
Yeah.
And like we discussed before the show, I suspect that the majority of our audience are younger guys and let's say middle class or middle income at best.
I don't think we have a, obviously we have some superstars in the audience who are already wealthy and good at investing.
I suspect most of our audience is probably living on that paycheck with some dabbling in investments.
And in that regard, I'm going to interject here real quick before we get to Conrad and his expertise, frankly, is that if you're tight on money, because I can hear the audience right now, like, I don't have, there's no possibility or prospect that I'm going to have enough surplus scratch to stock away in the stock market and then build it up big enough to the point where I can get out of the rat race and live off dividend income and cashing out stocks, et cetera.
But we're going to get to that.
But if you're not there yet, or if you think that's a pipe dream, the first thing you have to do is get a handle on your own personal finances.
That includes knowing two columns, category and what's coming in, and then two more columns, category and what's going out.
You can do that.
I know it's a pain in the neck.
A lot of times I'm like, well, my income varies from month to month or my expenses vary from month to month.
Do that, please, to get a picture of where your money is, how it's coming in and where it's going out, because you have to do that first, I think, before going to the investments.
You know, somebody once said, tell me, don't tell me what your priorities are.
Show me what you spend your money on and then I'll tell you what your priorities are because that's what makes it clear.
So do that first, please.
But Conrad, back to you.
I would, if I knew nothing about this stuff, I'd say, oh, I have to go buy a bunch of stocks and cross my fingers that the market continues to perform and big dividend income from that.
But let's say somebody's like, all right, let's get started on this project.
He's in his mid-20s.
Some basics, first steps.
Sure.
So, you know, one quick example I want to give to kind of piggyback on your point is you don't have to be making a ton of money.
You're absolutely right.
You need to have your expenses in order.
I've seen people who make six figures and they're living paycheck to paycheck because they spend their money like crazy.
I've seen people make $40,000 a year and be extremely comfortable because they spend their money wisely.
So you are absolutely right that getting your expenses and your budget order is step one, 100%.
One other thing I wanted to address is that people talk about say like millionaires as if this is like a unattainable thing.
And so a quick math example I want to give just to show the power of what we're talking about.
So let's say you have someone who's 30 years old, has $0 saved.
They're making $60,000 a year and they decide they're going to save 10% of their money.
So $6,000.
They could be making less, but still saving $6,000.
So a 10% saving should be very doable.
They actually recommend 20%.
Let's say you're only saving half that, 10%.
If you start saving 10%, $6,000 a year, and you get a 3% match from your company.
So that's another 2,000.
So now you're saving 8,000 a year and you don't increase that savings at all.
So every year all you're adding in is $6,000.
By the time you're 60, you'll have a million dollars, even though you started with nothing at the age of 30 and you're only saving $6,000 a year.
Getting to millionaire status is not, I don't want to say it's not hard, but it's easily attainable as long as you start relatively early and you just slowly add in.
If you actually saved the 20% that they recommend instead of that 10% example and you get inflation adjusted 2% raise increases each year, by the time you're 60, it starts, again, starting with zero at 30, you have $2.5 million by the time you're 60.
The power of exponential growth is amazing.
And so I want to get that laid out there.
You don't have to be making six figures for this to work.
Anyone has anything, as long as you start saving something, it will build on itself.
That money will start working for you.
And so I want to say that at the beginning so that people aren't discouraged just because they don't make as much as they think they need to make for this to apply.
Yeah, it's a matter of discipline and setting those automatic contributions is a good way.
I know myself, if I don't set automatic contributions, I do it haphazardly.
Oh, I'm a little bit flush.
Now I can sock it away.
Oh, this month I'm a little bit tight, not going to put the savings in.
You know, setting those automatic contributions, whether it's your IRA or your savings account or whatever it is, is a good way to get that.
I don't want to be too much.
You provided a perfect outline.
I could just let you roll with it.
But I think that we're up to, let's get down to brass tax.
And we are, if you, and the other thing too, is that that doesn't include the value of your house, which goes into your net worth.
You know, real estate is usually a major component of somebody's net worth, but we don't want to view a house as just an asset that could be sold, even though that's true and you can take out loans against it.
If you're in a pinch, we're talking about socking away a financial, largely liquid nest egg, not in the case of retirement stuff.
So yeah, stocks and go ahead, take it from there, buddy.
Sorry.
Sure, no, you're good.
So when I talk about investing, so I saw, you know, we've been talking about the stock market kind of generically.
What you need to use for a serious life savings is low fee total market index funds.
You know, you mentioned me being like a financial whiz and really it's it's not that.
Like I'm not day trading.
I'm not buying based on the news.
For the last 15 years, 95% of my net worth has been in one mutual fund, which is a 0.03 to sometimes 0% fee total market index fund.
And so for the people who aren't familiar with what that is, so a total market index fund, all that is is there's a mutual fund.
So it has, you know, it has the letters that designate it.
And this fund consists of essentially all of the stocks down to all from large, large companies all the way down to small companies of all these stocks.
And it's weighted by its market capitalization.
So the idea is that when you buy a share of this mutual fund, it's like you're buying a little piece of the entire stock market.
It's meant to represent the entire market.
So even though I've had nearly my entire net worth in this one mutual fund, my eggs aren't all in one basket because this fund consists of all of the baskets of the market.
Right.
And so that's, that's the idea is that you are, you're following the market that way.
You know, full disclosure, yes, I have some individual stocks I play with, but it's just that it's it's play.
If you make money, great, obviously that's what you hope to do.
But that's, you know, very, very small single digit percentages of what I have.
And it's more hobby than serious.
If for serious savings, you just let it ride on the stock market.
If people could beat the market consistently, there'd be a whole lot more rich people that we'd be hearing about.
But the reality is you don't.
And the other piece of what I talked about there was low fee.
And so these total market index funds, you can buy them and you can get essentially no fees out of them.
And that's because it takes very little overhead for these companies to manage these fees because they just set it up to match the market.
They don't do a lot of buying and selling.
There are what they call active managed funds where there's a hedge fund manager in New York and people who listen to the show can imagine the ethnicity likely of this manager.
And the idea is that they are buying and selling funds and they're going to beat the market.
And the reality is that only about 20% of actively managed funds beat the index funds.
And because of the fees associated with them, once you factor in the money you pay to fees, only about 10% of those 20% will still have you come out on top once the fees are factored in.
So 10% of 20%, you only have a 2% chance of coming out ahead with an actively managed fund than you would with just the basic low-fee index fund.
And the last thing you want to be doing is paying your money to these hedge fund managers in New York.
Question for you.
Sure.
Okay.
Let's say you have one of these mutual funds, as you previously described, but in recent years, you've seen some substantial losses in it.
How long do you watch something lose value before you take action?
Or should you?
Or you just let it ride out, like you say.
That's a great question.
And so as long as it's in the right vehicle, which is, again, a low fee total index fund, which means that you are tied to the whole market.
You know, like the 2020 is a perfect example.
And, you know, with COVID coming in, the market tanked about 25% in the first half.
And so people watch their savings go down 25% or you go back to 2008, 2009.
In order to play this game, you have to have the mental fortitude to let it ride.
Too many people see their savings go down by half or a quarter.
They panic, they sell, and now they just locked in that loss.
And then the market recovers and they didn't get the recovery because they sold.
That happens to too many people.
And so if you're going to do this, you have to go in having the mental fortitude to not sell and just let it ride.
Sell high, buy low is such an obvious cliche, but too many people sell low instead of selling high because they panic.
And the reality is the market always goes up.
I mean, whether you go to the Great Depression, the 80s, the 80, you know, 87, dot-com in 2000, 2008, COVID, all these examples, the market has literally always recovered.
It's always come back stronger.
It's been way more resilient than we think it would be.
I mean, the market's up 20% since Joe Biden became president.
Who would have thought that, right?
And when that stops being true, when the market stops recovering, that means our financial system, as we know it, is over, which that'll probably happen at some point.
But until that happens, that has always held true.
And so, you know, the way I look at it is there's no point playing the middle road.
There's no point, you know, doing more conservative investments because if it's computer money and the financial system collapse, it's gone no matter what.
So I do the two extremes.
I play the market wisdom, which says that the market always comes back.
It always goes high.
The market over the last century makes 10% annually, and that includes the Great Depression, even with the Great Depression factor, and it still makes 10% annually.
And so I play the market knowing that that's true.
And I also prepare with survival skills, homestead, land prep for the so-called apocalypse scenario.
I do the two extremes.
I personally don't see a lot of point in the middle because the middle is either the system keeps going and you would have made more money if you did the market or it collapses and you lose it anyway.
And again, that's kind of my mindset on that.
Yep.
And a couple couple things to interject here real quick.
It's been 15 years since the financial crisis, which was scar tissue for so many of us, you know, freaked out.
And of course, it's been about three years since the COVID puke when everybody, oh my God, we did a show on it.
And then it was like, well, if you're near retirement, maybe this is the time to get out.
Or if not, this is a huge opportunity.
A great witticism or a piece of wisdom I heard recently was that at the time of crisis, it seems like a crisis and your hair is on fire and you're freaking out and you're wondering, should I sell?
Is it all going to hell?
And then when you look at those crises, crises in the rearview mirror, they look like massive opportunities.
So that's when your metal gets tested.
When things are dropping and you're starting to get sweaty palms, you have to have that mental fortitude, of course, to be greedy when others are fearful and two, to be fearful when others are greedy.
That's Warren.
That's the latter one.
Conrad did not want to give the specific fund that he prefers, which I totally understand.
So I'll give you Warren Buffett's advice.
He said for 90% of people, or at least those who don't have the discipline or the knowledge to research various ETFs, funds, stocks, et cetera, sectors, just buy the SP 500.
One of the tickers for that is SPY, SPY, coach advocating the SPY fund, and do that at regular intervals.
So your savings interval goes into the SPY, and that's the one.
If you look at it on a long enough time horizon, it has those big dips, but it basically rips over a long enough period.
Yes, of course, it might all go up in flames one day, but it hasn't happened.
Dollar cost averaging, which sounds confusing, it basically just means purchasing at set timeframes and amounts regardless of where the market is not trying to time it.
So I just wanted to add that and chime in my two cents.
My biggest question, perhaps, or I hope I'm asking it for the audience, Conrad, is, all right, let's say I've done my homework and I see that I can, through diligence and saving and being a little bit of a skin flint, set away $6,000 a year.
Then the question, of course, arises, well, where the hell am I going to put it?
Is it going to get by that fund in my IRA, which is relatively illiquid?
Of course, a Roth, you can cash out your contributions anytime in a pinch.
Traditional IRAs, you cannot without tax hits, a regular savings account that looks pretty attractive right now, CDs, or the treasury bond market, or all these other things.
So that's, you know, let's assume somebody did step one, figured out their budget and committed to that regular discipline, saving and investing.
Which vehicle or vehicles should they prioritize?
Yeah, absolutely.
So yeah, SBY, real quick, so SBY is a, that's a great, a great one.
You know, two other examples I'll throw out is, you know, of these low fee index funds.
FZ ROX is Fidelity's 0% total market fund.
And then, you know, Schwab has one as well, SWTSX.
Basically, any major financial institution is going to have a low fee one.
And, you know, one more point on that I wanted to make, just to really stress at home is, you know, most people's 401ks, which is one of the vehicles I'm going to talk about in answer to your question, most default funds have pretty high fees.
And so you need to go in and look at those expense ratios.
And, you know, it's the reason why I harp on these fees is it can make or break you.
So, you know, like some of these funds might have a 2% expense ratio.
2% doesn't sound so bad.
But if you had two identical performing funds, one with no fee, one with 2%, a third of the value will be gone on the 2% fee fund just from that fee.
A third of the value from a 2% fee over 20 years.
So I can't stress enough the low fee portion of that.
But anyway, so I wanted to go back on that.
But yeah, so as far as the vehicles, so like Sam mentioned at the beginning, the 401k matching, that needs to be your absolute number one high priority.
There you go.
And I would, even I would argue, even more than paying down moderate to high interest debt, that should be your number one priority.
And the reason for that is you're getting matched dollar for dollar.
So if you, if you at least get your match every year, the market could have itself every single year, which has never happened, and you would still break even because you're getting your money doubled by the company.
So if you are not taking advantage of 401k match, you're literally throwing money away.
So that needs to be priority one.
Years ago, I worked for a company.
They would match 12% if you could imagine that.
That's very impressive.
But I do have a very good plan right now.
But yes.
I'm guessing you didn't do the 12% contribution, Sam.
At that time, I couldn't afford to go all the way.
I wish I could.
I mean, because you're leaving money on the table, but you also got to pay your bills.
You do as much as you can.
But then anything you save would go against that.
Exactly.
So that's priority number one.
The 401k in general is also high on the priority list.
Any dollar you put in there is pre-tax.
So it comes off your tax bill.
So every dollar that goes into there, it's essentially like you didn't make it as far as the IRS is concerned.
So that's very powerful.
The 22% tax bracket kicks in around $80 some thousand dollars.
And so even below that, it's 12%.
And so you're saving at least 12% of your money by putting into a 401k.
So that one's very powerful.
The Roth IRA is the other common investment fund.
So this works basically the opposite as the 401k.
So it's money that's already been taxed, but then it goes into the Roth and then it grows tax-free.
And then when you pull it out, you don't pay taxes on the back end.
And so that compound growth we talked about by the 20, 30 years down the road, the vast majority of your saved money is going to be earnings rather than the principal, the base money you started with.
And so having to be able to pull that out tax-free is also very powerful.
And so, you know, unfortunately, the direct contribution limits on those are pretty low.
It's $6,500, I think, maybe going up to $7,000.
Seven for next year.
Yep.
Yep.
So you can't put a lot in, but that's another one to hit.
Let me just chime in on the Roth here real quick and hold that thought because that's one that I struggle with.
The annual amounts keep going up, which is great.
It's a good thing, but it's like, oh man, like sometimes maxing out that Roth, it's like, well, I'm going to, I could use that money for a project here right now or cover expenses, et cetera, or I could put it into this hole, which it is the thing that helps me is the understanding that if I needed to, I could tap that Roth contribution cash or sell whatever funds I have in there and use it for whatever no questions asked, no tax hit.
Although you shouldn't do that, it's basically like a last resort.
But when you are making less than the max for the Roth income limits, which is like, what, 110 for an individual, two something for a married couple, that is something that you should really take advantage of.
And, you know, wealthy people have used Roths too.
And you can make, you can make IRA Roths for your kids, as I understand it, once they're a certain age, but it's a massive wealth growth vehicle that is like the tax story on it is almost too good to be true.
So if you're listening to this and you don't have a Roth IRA yet, assuming you're not making big bucks on income, you really should and just start socking money away in there.
Coach Oak.
Absolutely.
No, absolutely.
And the part you mentioned there about being able to pull out the principal anytime penalty free, that's actually a core mechanic of the so-called pipeline of money of how you can access your retirement funds when you retire early without penalty.
So that's a good preface that I'll get to in a bit.
The last vehicle, you know, because Roth and 401ks are two that pretty much everyone knows about.
Really, the unsung hero is just the standard regular taxable brokerage account.
And the reason why I say it's the unsung hero is so when you put money into those and it earns money, you know, those are capital gains.
And so once it's been a year, that is what makes it long-term instead of short-term capital gains.
And as long as you, as a married couple, I'm going to use the married tax practice as an example.
As long as you, as a married couple, your income is less than $89,000 a year, long-term capital gains tax is 0%.
You get taxed nothing on long-term gains.
So it's a tax-free account as long as you make less than 89.
And even if you're an earner, you know, for the people who earn more, even if you're currently making more than that now, if you follow the money train that I'm about to describe for the fire movement, you'll be making less than that on paper in retirement.
And so you can be getting that 0% long-term gains.
Capital gains have always been taxed way less than income in this country.
It's always favored the wealthy.
The wealthy invest in the market.
They get the long-term gains.
They get low tax.
And we discuss the merits or otherwise of that, but take advantage of that.
And so the regular taxable account is very underrated.
One other question before we leave this portion of your talk.
What about crypto currency?
Is that part of any good savings plan?
I'm going to lump that.
I mean, I dabble in it a tiny, tiny bit, but honestly, for the context of this, I'm going to lump that in with how I describe the individual stocks, which if you want to play with that on the side and speculate and hope you start to get big, go for it if that's what you want to.
But you should do that with a very small portion of your money.
I mean, it's highly speculative, you know, and it's not certainly something that I would put an appreciable amount of my savings into.
But, you know, I have a little bit on the side so that if it takes off, hey, I got something, but it's very much more what I'll call the hobby category rather than a, you know, a serious investment vehicle.
Well, I think a professional financial advisor probably, or at least I've heard this, says that, yeah, you, or I've seen it in newsletters.
I should clarify that.
I get newsletters forwarded to me all this.
Yeah, I can't read all of them.
But yes, you should own some precious metals, gold, both, you know, tangible in your house, in your safe.
You should own some crypto.
You should own stocks.
You should own bonds.
You should have a CD, all this stuff.
You could see the audience rolling their eyes.
Like there's only so many shekels to go around.
But I think the answer is most professionals would probably say yes.
You want to have crypto in your portfolio.
Well, the only reason that I suggest it is I've talked to quite a few people that I would consider to be like smart people with money and so forth.
And they are not in it at all or very little.
And so what I think is with this crypto stuff, we are more towards the beginning than towards the middle or towards some kind of mature level with it.
So in other words, there are yet many people to get into it.
And because of that, I think there's yet a lot of growth to happen that if you were to decide to put in a couple hundred bucks today, this remains a time where it's the beginning, where you're putting in money and there's yet to be big gains in it.
That's my opinion of it.
I know a guy who dollar costs averages on Bitcoin, just every week or every month, whatever.
It just makes a set purchase 100 bucks of Bitcoin, 100 bucks of Bitcoin.
And as of this recording, of course, Bitcoin just had a really nice run up where 43 or 44K.
And people who are smarter than me are saying, please, 100K is the low end, you know, over the next year or two for that.
Take it for, you know, take it for what it's worth.
You could argue.
There's a lot of growth yet to happen with all this.
And a lot of people are going to get into it over time.
And we are in it at the beginning, really.
Getting in now is it remains like a good time to be in it, I think.
Very well could be.
Yep.
All right.
Conrad, I don't want to, yeah, let's not derail you too much here.
So we went over the sort of preference, not preference cascade, but your order of preference and stuff like that.
Where do you want to go next?
You're also like the Bill Gross of our thing with bonds.
You're the bond king.
And bonds have always struck me as both boring and somewhat inscrutable.
Stocks, you know, it's a company.
You like it.
You don't like it.
You get a dividend.
Treasury bonds and the like have always been somewhat anathema to me, probably foolishly.
Want to talk about bonds a little bit?
Sure.
So up until about basically early this year, maybe tail end of last year, you know, I'd been 99 plus percent, those low fee index funds I was talking about.
And, you know, starting beginning this year, interest rates started coming up.
You know, you start thinking, okay, we're, you know, surely we're due for recession.
You know, the market's up, you know, 10, 20% under Biden.
This can't be sustainable.
And hey, I can get 5.5% on bonds.
And so, you know, and I thought back to the most recent example, COVID, where, you know, the market tanked 20, 30% by April.
And I knew with conviction that that was short term because everyone was freaking out about COVID and I knew it was going to come back.
But because all of my money was already in stock, I had very little available to capitalize on that bet and basically buy low.
And so with that lesson in mind, my thought process was, if I have some money set aside and something else that's still making some money, if we have another recession, now I actually have some cash available to buy with.
And the problem in the past was always there was really very few places you could put money besides the stock market, you know, without it, with it earning much.
You know, CDs and everything, bonds were, you know, you were lucky if you could get a percent, right?
And so now, you know, now you can get, and I've been getting 5.5% on four week, they call them treasury bills when it's less than a year duration.
They call them bills.
It's still the same function as a bond.
So treasurydirect.gov, you set up an account, you set up your checking account.
It's like the ACH deposit like you have for your paycheck where they debit and credit when you buy stuff.
And so I've been buying four week bills, so very short-term bills.
And when they come due, I just have an auto reinvest.
It's really easy to do on their website.
And I've been getting the 5.5% there.
And the idea is that if we have another big pullback in the stock market, now I have this money that's been sitting here that's not going to get cut with the rest of the market that I can use to buy back in.
And in the meantime, it's making 5.5%.
The greatest irony is if I had not done that and just strictly followed the advice I've been talking about, I would have made more money because the market's up like 20% year to date versus the 5.5% that I'm still over 80% in the market, but I'm 15% to 20% either in bonds or even money market accounts.
These are essentially settled cash accounts within your investment accounts where you can buy from those, but even the money markets are making 5%.
So you can just have your money sitting in a money market.
So Fidelity's SPR XX, for example, is making like 5.1% or so.
And so that's almost exactly.
It's just sitting there and you're making over 5%.
So between that, bonds, I'm using this purely as a place to keep cash and still make some money with the intent to buy back into the stock market as a buying opportunity.
The only other possible outcome would be if interest rates really take off and they get to a higher percentage than the historical stock market earning that I'm counting on for my early retirement, then I would lock in a longer term interest.
And as an example of that, if you had a crystal ball back in 1981, you could buy a 30-year U.S. Treasury bond and it was paying 16% interest.
So for 30 years, you could have been making 16% annually from the U.S. government guaranteed from 1981 all the way up till 2011.
So I highly doubt it's going to get that high again, but that's an example of a time when you lock in the long-term rate.
And so I'm doing the short-term four weeks, either waiting for interest rates to go up more where you lock in a longer term or a stock market recession and that becomes ammo to buy low.
Talk on the street of the Fed is done raising rates and that we could possibly see cutting next year, which would suggest, if that conventional wisdom is true, that now it's not exactly a 1981, 16% scenario, but is now some percentage of your portfolio, or I should say, to think about locking in 5% on a longer-term treasury bond.
And again, that website is treasurydirect.gov.
It's kind of a running joke.
It looks like it's from 1998 or something, but it does work.
But yeah, locking in rates now, the expectation that we're near the ceiling on those sorts of things.
You know, if you're older, locking in 5% could have some attractive qualities to it.
You know, for me, you know, someone who's looking to retire before the age of 40 and needs this nest egg to live on for several decades, 5% is less than the historical market gain.
And so I would not lock in 5% long term.
That's kind of where I'm at.
You know, the market has made anywhere between 8% and 10%, depending on the metric and timeframe you use.
And so kind of the benchmark I've set for myself is all of my retirement calculators, you know, say, okay, I need to make at least seven.
And again, it's historically made eight to 10.
So 7% is me being conservative.
So if interest rates were ever to get to 8% or higher, which beats that seven, then I would lock it in.
And yeah, like you just said, it's looking less likely like that would be the case.
But that was the line that I set for myself for what I would lock in a long-term bond versus just buying back into the market at some point.
This is, it's not too personal, but what kind of number are we ballparking here in terms of being able to hire?
I once did back of the envelope math, you know, how much stock, let's say there was the perfect, you know, blue chip stock that was yielding 3% or 4%.
How much would I have to own of that stock, you know, for the dividends to basically cover mortgage and, you know, groceries and stuff like that?
And it was upward of like $800,000, you know, depending on the math.
But what's what's that?
Of course, it varies for the person and how much their expenses are or whatever.
But what are, what are we talking?
Not for you, but in general to the point where you can say, all right, now I can quit, or if they fire me, I can tell them to buzz off.
No, great question.
This kind of leads into the last main part to talk about.
And so there's something called the 4% rule.
And it's very helpful for this question.
And so what the 4% rule says is that if you have a pile of savings, as long as you withdraw no more than 4% each year, it will grow at least as much as what you took out and it becomes self-sustaining at that point.
The earnings match the withdrawals.
It becomes a self-sustaining nest egg.
And that's the whole magic behind.
Once you get a self-sustaining nest egg, it doesn't matter whether you live for 30 years or 100 years.
You have a self-sustaining nest egg.
And so, and 4% is the rough rule of thumb.
It was originally developed with the idea of 30 years of retirement.
And there's different trains of thought of whether it applies for longer than that.
But really, whether it's 4% or 3.5%, the logic still applies is once you have a handle on your expenses and what you need to live on, that tells you how much you need to save.
And so if you follow the 4% rule, if you think, you know, if you can live on, you know, easy math, 40 grand a year, that means you need a million dollars because 4% of a million dollars is 40,000.
So once you save up a million dollars, you can live on 40 grand every single year and that million dollars won't go away.
And the math I said at the beginning, a million dollars isn't as unattainable as it sounds.
It doesn't take that much savings to get there over time.
You know, 1.3 million gives you 52,000, et cetera.
And so you really have to have a handle on your expenses because then with the 4% rule, that tells you what you need to save.
And the reality is you can probably get by with more less than that because you're not going to go in it with blinders, right?
Like if the market's down 20%, you're probably not going to go on a lavish vacation that year.
You're going to tighten the belt.
You're not going to withdraw as much.
And so when you don't pull out as much when it's low, then you're not going to hamper your growth as much.
You can do the bigger vacations when the market's up 10, 20% because we can talk about 8% to 10% growth, but it's not like it goes up 8% this year, 8% next year, 8% the year after that.
It goes up 20 one year, down 20 the next, up 10.
I mean, it's up and down.
And so, you know, and so as long as you're watching that and not pulling too hard from it in bad years, you know, those are the tight in the belt years.
You can get by, you know, you get a part-time job and you work 10, 20 hours.
I mean, even just pulling in, you know, 10, 15K to cut into some of your, a good chunk of your expenses goes a long way to not pulling out of your nest egg when it's down.
It's not just dividends.
It's also just the growth, the overall stock growth because you can sell it and it'll keep growing.
So it's a combination of dividends and and actual growth.
Um, you know, and uh, kind of leading into it from there right, so that I if if uh, if it's okay, I was going to talk about the uh yes please, the money pipeline uh, the idea.
Are you sure you're not doing at least a little bit?
Have you done the dna test though?
I have done the dna test.
It doesn't show up.
I promise, all right, take your word for it.
So uh yeah so so so, the money pipeline so so so, let's fast forward.
So you've you've uh, you've set a budget, you're spending very frugally, you're saving your money, you've hit that nest egg amount where the four percent rule says you can pull the trigger.
So you, so you retire.
So then what?
How do you access the money?
Because you're gonna have some money in a 401k, you're gonna have some money in a Roth.
Those are both retirement accounts, which nominally means you can't pull from them until you're 59 and a half years old, and so if I retire at say, 40 on the dot, i'm almost 20 years away from that and maybe you also have some money in a standard taxable brokerage account.
So you have all these funds.
How do you manage it?
So there's this, what kind of what gets called a money pipeline.
And so at the very front of it is the 401k.
So the 401k is pre-tax money.
It's never been taxed because remember, you contributed to it before tax.
So every single year in retirement you roll over money from that 401k to your ROTH, Ira.
So you're going from pre-tax to post-tax, and so when you do that, the IRS treats that as income.
So even though you're retired and say you're let's, let's just say, for simplicity sake, you're not working a job and you have literally zero other income because you're, you're not working at all.
That money that you're rolling over from your 401k to your roth, that is now income.
So for a married couple, the standard deduction is thirty thousand dollars and then, and then it's, uh, you know, you get a couple k for kids beyond that.
But let's just say, let's just stick with the 30 grand standard deduction.
That means at a minimum, every single year you can take 30 000 from your 401k, move it to your roth and still pay zero taxes because the deduction covers it and so now you're doing that every year.
Every year 30 000, every year 30 000, and so every year that's going into the ROTH and, like you mentioned earlier, you can pull principal from ROSS tax uh, tax and penalty free before the age of 59 and a half.
So there's what's called the five-year rule.
So not only besides being able to pull principal, the principal has to have been in the account for at least five years, so every rollover that's not available for you to pull out as As principal until five years later, if you're under the age of 59 and a half, this is purely to avoid the early retirement under the age of 59 and a half rule.
So if you're less than 59 and a half years old, as long as it's principal and it's been there for five years, you can pull it out.
So you roll the 401k to the Roth.
Five years later, you pull it out.
It's tax-free.
And so because your only income is that $30,000 that you've been rolling over from the 401k to the Roth, your income on paper is also very low.
And so like I mentioned earlier, the long-term capital gains tax is 0% if you have low income.
So you can also be pulling out of your regular taxable brokerage account, and that's also tax-free.
I mean, if you have a ton of money saved, like you could be living on $100,000 a year in retirement and paying literally $0 in taxes.
And it's above board as per the rules.
This isn't tax evasion because you're just rolling over from the 401k.
You're pulling out from the 401k and you're pulling out from the brokerage account, which is gains, not tax.
And it's just this big balancing act.
And so before you retire, what you need to do is you need to balance your 401k and your Roth appropriately.
Because if all of your money is in your 401k, you're going to be forced to roll over a lot more than what's covered by the deduction.
And then you're going to be paying taxes on that.
But if you put next to nothing in the 401k and you go all post-tax while you're working, you're leaving money on the table because you're getting 12 to 20% shaved off on the front end by paying taxes.
And so you want a balance.
And so nominally, 50-50 is a place to start.
The real optimal number is a math equation based on how much you're making now and what your taxes are now and how much you think you need to live on in retirement.
It's a complicated math formula, but 50-50 is a nominal good place to start for someone who just wants to get started.
Don't get bogged down in the math.
Like, you know, I don't want people to say, I don't know, I don't, I don't know how to figure out something to do nothing.
If you do 50-50, you'll be close.
That's 50-50 between post- and pre-tax.
Exactly.
And so you can live on a lot of money and pay no taxes.
And the other amazing thing with that is because your only income on paper is what you've rolled over from the 401k to the Roth, you're going to show up as a low-income family.
Even though you might have a lot of money saved, you're a low-income family.
So even though my net worth will be in the seven figures when I retire, I will have no qualms about putting my children on low-income, free, subsidized healthcare and all the other low-income stuff that I can get because I will be low income on paper.
And I mean, I put way more into the system than I'll ever get out.
So, you know, maybe 20, 30 years ago, I would have had moral qualms about doing this.
But with where we're at now, I have no such qualms.
So there's a lot of programs you can take advantage of because you'll be low income on paper because they care about income, not net worth.
And so, yeah, that's that's if you Google fire early retirement, you'll you'll see a lot more of this in detail.
I think for the purposes of this podcast, that's probably enough detail, but you can do all that last section was for the pros.
I was like, that'll be a good problem to worry about when I'm rolling over from my 401k into my Roths and all the tax calculations.
But no, yep, no, good for that stuff too.
All right.
So for anybody who might be like, oh boy, this is too much.
I can't handle it.
Get a handle on your income and expenses.
At bare minimum, my proprietary system is knowledge is power.
Praise Adolf Hitler.
The acronym is KIPPA, which I thought was self-explanatory.
But seriously, get a handle on what's coming in and what's going out.
Next step, try to dedicate yourself to that $6,000 a year.
Call it $7,000, even if it's just the Roth.
If you're leaving your employer match for your 401k on the table, that is the cardinal sin.
Take the free money guaranteed, 100% instant return, doubling your money just by being a little bit disciplined.
Keep into you diversification is key.
So you do want to own a little bit of this, a little bit of that.
But the easiest way to do that is with just buying those broad market index funds with virtually no fees.
And remember, I'm old enough to remember that when you would buy and sell stocks at the brokers and everybody were taking six, seven, eight, nine dollars a trade, they're all virtually free right now.
They should be.
If you're on a platform that's charging you per trade, you're on the wrong platform.
And keep socking that money away.
Take the broad index funds, ride it out.
Don't get, don't panic.
Don't panic if the market pukes over a long enough timeframe.
We're both dead and the market goes up.
And yeah, there was some more advanced stuff there too, but you can, you can do it.
You will do it.
And I still had a couple, we got a few more minutes here in the first half.
I had a couple other questions.
And home ownership, you could do a whole episode on home ownership.
In fact, we have, but that is arguably, you know, if who you marry is the most personal, most important personal decision you ever make, the house that you buy is one of the most important financial decisions you'll ever make.
And it's an easy way, quote unquote, easy way to build wealth, but you shouldn't view it as an investment.
It's a liability.
And ideally, you buy something that is more modest than you think you want because one, it's good discipline, two, because that's a most people who freak out probably are freaked out about the mortgage, right?
I think maybe it's the car payment because you absolutely need a car.
And mortgage rates are so high.
I watched the debate last night and the cost of homeownership was one of the questions that the moderators asked of the GOP panel up there.
A little bit about purchasing a home, the currently high interest rates.
If I were in the market for a house right now, I would probably balk at 7%, even though in those early 80s, it was way higher.
Thoughts on homeownership?
Sorry for the extremely long-winded question.
Yeah, it's, I mean, you hit a lot of the considerations there.
You know, when you own a home, you know, and I do, you know, there's a lot of money that I'll say is money to nothing, right?
So that's, that's the interest on the loan, which as you mentioned, is going up.
You have property taxes.
You have home insurance.
You know, this is all money to nothing, essentially.
You know, the principal portion of your mortgage payment, that's at least something that's going to you owning the house.
And so if you were to ever sell it, at least that's yours.
And so you're absolutely right.
You don't want to get saddled with the huge mortgage.
You know, they front load those things with interest.
And with interest going up, you can look at the breakdowns and that money to nothing will just swallow your expenses enormously.
And so it's not even that valuable as a deduction either.
You know, I used to think, oh, well, sure, I'm paying a ton of mortgage interest, but at least it's helping me on my tax bill.
And it's less so now with the higher.
Yeah.
And so, I mean, when interest rates were lower, it was, you know, I'd say I was being a lot more optimistic saying, yeah, buy a house.
You can lock in, you know, 2%.
And the reality is, you know, if you get a 2% or 3% loan, that was so far under what, you know, the market was making that it was almost like you were getting a free loan because now, hey, I'm getting, I'm building this equity in the house and I'm getting it for like next to no interest.
And so it kind of made sense there.
But with interest going up, you know, if I was starting out, if I was in my 20s and still renting and wanting to start a family, Unless I found like the right house and very modest and very small, I don't know that I would saddle myself with that high interest loan because it makes it so hard to save doing all the things I talked about before.
You got to compare that money to nothing.
Rent is money to nothing.
Interest, insurance, and property tax is money to nothing.
Which of the two paths is setting less of your money on fire?
And that's going to tell you financially what's the right decision.
If they're really close, then maybe some other softer decisions like, you know, having, you know, just the sentimental idea of having a house of your own or living where you want to live, maybe some of those other things will come into play.
But I think for most people, when you compare the two money to nothing buckets, you're going to see a lot more money lost with homeownership right now, which is it's sad, but I think that's, that's the reality of it.
Yep, absolutely.
All right.
Some of my, I have some hard, maybe Conrad has made no mistakes and has no hard lessons from his investing experience.
That's what it sounds like.
Some of my hard lessons have been way too, being way too influenced by the news cycle in buying and selling stocks, bonds, et cetera, freaking out over a zero hedge article.
This sector is about to boom.
This sector is about to crater.
Speculate in palladium.
Palladium set to skyrocket.
When if I could go back and tell my 22 something self, just start putting it into SPY and let it ride.
And especially if you did that in 2007, 2008, during a crisis when everybody was like, oh my God, the world's on fire.
I'd be in the retirement situation right now if I had followed that discipline and kept those, you know, basically diamond hands.
I've made the huge mistake of selling world-class.
Basically, to back up Conrad's point, stock picking is often a fool's errand.
You can make it big on some.
You can lose everything on some.
I have bought stinkers that I've held forever and I've sold world-class companies that continued to skyrocket thinking, ooh, yeah, let me lock in some profit now.
I'll feel good.
I should have just held.
Yep.
Yeah, I got one of those.
It was a good pick, but it was also like, I kicked myself, you know, during the 2020 era, you know, all the oil stocks were in the toilet and Exxon was down to $30 a share.
And I bought some, which was a great, which was a great pick.
But then once I got up to 60, I'm like, hey, I doubled my money and I sold.
And that was still lesser than it's ever been in, you know, Exxon's like $100 a share right now.
Right.
And so that's, it's sort of a win.
It could have been a bigger win.
You know, I, in my younger days, I thought I was smarter than I was.
I did some foraying into, you know, penny stocks and other things.
And I didn't lose my short, which you can, but I played with that around for a bit.
You know, I think on the net, I came out even.
But in the time I came out even, the market was up, you know, 10, 15, 20% over that period of time.
So coming out even was actually a lot more negative than if I would have done the boring thing, which when you're in your 20s, I get it.
The boring thing is not fun.
You want to make it go faster.
But nine times out of 10, you're going to end up going slower by trying to go fast.
Yeah.
Don't try to be the wolf of Wall Street and be, you know, I know better than the market.
Just coasts along with the market.
Sam, you got something?
Go for it.
Yeah.
You were saying, you know, what you would tell your 22-year-old self and all that.
It's difficult to look back and say what the right thing is.
Sure, it's it's sounds very obvious to be putting away a certain amount, like you say, 10%, 12%, 20%, and all that.
But at least in those days, 90s and early 2000s, you know, there was no question about saving anything.
It was just not even possible.
And even if I, if I would have done that, I would have been even more in the hole because quite often I had to live on a credit card.
You know, you have to, you got to go to work.
You know, people say, don't live on a credit card.
Well, how are you going to get to work if you don't put gas in the tank of the car?
You know, you got to take that credit card, gas up the car, you know.
So, you know, you guys mentioned at the very beginning about, you know, how much faith do you have, can you have, and all that type of thing.
I don't know how anyone can do any of this without like a ton of faith because there's just so many, so many very heart-rending moments, you know, for a young family.
It's an Achilles heel for sure.
I've been guilty of it.
The thing is going to crash.
It is going to crash, collapse, blow up one day almost certainly, but it's like that death has been much advertised and previewed.
And it's still prematurely reported.
Exactly.
Yep.
One other mistake I made is the temptation of dividends is instead of having them reinvesting.
So just buying more of that company and having the dividends grow your share of a company or a fund, being like, oh, no, well, I'll keep the investment, but I'll dabble.
I'll wet my beak in those dividends now.
In general, Conrad, just set and forget, buy and have those dividends reinvest on whatever people are buying.
That's what I'm doing now.
You know, once I stop working and I need to start withdrawing to live on it, then I'll probably switch that to cash because that's just a natural place to get the money from.
But when you're in the growth mode and you're trying to build the nest egg, absolutely auto reinvesting is the way to go.
Very good.
And Rolo has a question in the chat.
What is money?
Come on.
Hour into hour and five minutes and you're asking what's money?
Rolo, come on.
One question for our nothing to worry about.
Rolo, come on.
Something for Conrad.
Conrad.
Conrad.
Those magic cards are an investment.
Yeah.
My son once bought four black lotuses for a thousand bucks.
What are they worth now?
Each one is probably 10 grand.
Yeah.
And that's assuming they're in bad condition and not good condition.
Well, I was going to ask, do you like the song Money by Pink Floyd?
It's not bad.
I've got several good money tunes for the bumper.
Yeah.
Dust one off, I think.
All right.
Fam, if you have any questions, feel free to email the show.
We're not going to give you personalized financial advice, but I suspect our pal would be happy to help in a certain regard, at least with information.
I'll try to get a lot of things.
Well, Rolo, Rolo can recommend what magic cards to get.
There you go.
Rolo is a professional financial advisor on Magic the Gathering.
Investments, when it comes to stocks and bonds, stick with Conrad.
When it comes to mistakes, stick with Sam and me, and you'll be just fine or missed opportunities, I should say.
All right, Conrad, thank you so much.
And Godspeed and good luck to you with your young family.
Of course, I am slightly envious at the same time as I am excited and happy for you, big guy.
Way to go.
You hacked the system.
You did the work.
You had the diligence and the discipline.
Thank you, Coach.
You got it.
All right.
Take us to the break, my friend.
You got the DJ booth.
What are we going to hear before the break?
I was going to recommend 16 tons by Tennessee Ernie Ford.
So it's, you know, in the topic of getting out of the wage slavery.
It's a great historical song about literal wage slaves, Kentucky miners who didn't get paid any money and just store credit.
So I think it's a nice tune for the topic at hand.
Absolutely.
It's a reminder.
Play the game, play the game better than the system wants you to play.
The system would love you to just rack up credit card debt, make stupid investments, go into all sorts of debt.
I remember this song very well is the opposite of it.
Go ahead, Sam, please.
I remember this song very well from when I was in grade school.
That was at a time when schools, even public schools, were pretty good, looking back on it compared to now.
And we would have a music class or music, whatever you want to call appreciation class every day.
And we had this, I remember it so well.
We had this songbook and we would learn all these classic Americana songs that I don't think people learn anymore, you know, and call it whatever you want, or maybe some of them were kind of cheesy or, you know, they didn't impress in a way, but they did give a certain understanding about the way the country was or is or should be or was at one time.
Like I was saying about the parades, you know, there is no American culture anymore, it seems like.
But at one time there was, and there were songs like this that people commonly knew and said something about the country.
Amen.
Thanks, Sam.
And yeah, unfortunately, the first time I heard this song was on Mad Men, but it was one of those ones that instantly got me.
I broke out the Shazam and it's been a regular ever since.
All right.
Thank you, Conrad.
We're going to the break.
Enjoy Tennessee Ernie Ford in 16 tons.
Some people say a man is made out of mud.
A poor man's made out of muscle and blood.
Muscle and blood and skin and bones.
A mind that's weak and a back that's strong.
You load 16 tons.
What do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
St. Peter, don't you call me cause I can't go.
I owe my soul to the company store I was born one morning when the sun didn't shine I picked up my shovel and I walked to the mine.
I loaded 16 tons, a number nine coal.
And the stall boss said, well, bless my soul.
You load 16 tons.
What do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
St. Peter, don't you call me cause I can't go.
I owe my soul to the company store I was born one morning It was drizzling rain.
Fighting and trouble are my middle name.
I was raised in the cane, break by an old mama line.
Can't know a hot tone woman, make me walk the line.
You load 16 tons.
What do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
St. Peter, don't you call me cause I can't go.
I owe my soul to the company store.
If you see me coming better, step aside.
A lot of men didn't.
A lot of men died.
One fist of iron, the other of steel.
If the right one don't get you, then the left one will.
You load 16 tons.
What do you get?
Another day older and deeper in debt.
St. Peter, don't you call me cause I can go.
I owe my So to the company store.
And welcome back to Full House episode 174, if I recall correctly.
Another dipping of our toes, maybe just a whole cannonball into the world of finance.
Some of that stuff you've heard on the show before, but I don't think that you've heard it condensed as well with a focus toward wealth accumulation for the purposes of getting out of the rat race.
Certainly not as well in an hour, hour, and 10 minutes as we did just there.
So big thanks to Conrad, who, of course, is back with us in the second half.
Can't get enough.
And he let us know that he listens to the show with his wife or they both listen, which is always kind of touching in a good way as a content creator.
We love our families out there who listen together or separately.
Let's go right to New White Life because we got a bunch this week.
Some very, they're always happy, of course, but I am more happy than usual to congratulate Trocar and Kat on their beautiful new bundle of joy.
Healthy baby boy.
Yeah, been in comms with them.
Trokar has said, oh my God, this is an amazing feeling, something to that effect.
Being a father is the best.
And we were able to shake the trees a little bit for some little gifts, diapers and stuff like that.
Not to pat ourselves on the back, but we're happy to do it in a nice response to that.
So congratulations, guys, on the new one.
Love you both and wish you many more.
And of course, for him to go on to be a globe dominating retire by the age of 30.
We're up in the ante.
Get out of the rat race by 30.
Get him started right out of the womb.
All right.
And to our pal, John, he let us know with pictures that he has a brand new baby boy.
John is, I won't, I will just say that John is very sharp and he lives in a different part of the world.
And he's been through the struggles of being a contributor to the cause and is carrying on with a steel spine as we would expect from someone from that country.
And the only thing I had to bust his chops because I said, John, you forgot to take off your hairnet.
You know, John got doxxed a long time ago, so he works flipping burgers.
So he had a hairnet on in the hospital with the baby boy until he corrected me and said, coach, you know, they make us wear that in the hospital, you know, sanitation and all that.
I said, ah, my bad, big guy.
Hygiene.
Congratulations, John.
And also, we got another pal in a different part of the world who welcomed his third boy, I want to say.
And I don't know if it's his real name in Telegram or not.
So he's just going to be a mystery man, brilliant guy who said that I had surprisingly cold takes recently on geopolitics.
And I said, I think your IQ is doing you a disservice here right now, good sir.
You are making this out to be more complicated than it needs to be.
Regardless, congratulations, Bal.
Very excited for you and your new, I think it was his third boy, something like that.
Doesn't matter.
And also apologies for not giving your name or your sock name because with Telegram, you don't know.
Sometimes it's like somebody's real name.
Sometimes you name them and they don't want to go by that.
It can all be very confusing all the same.
All right.
So that's three from me.
Sam, what do you got?
Well, from our local group, we had a couple of people some years ago went homesteading out in a rural area.
And they went there with their very young family, and they just had a baby girl.
And it's wonderful.
And I want to mention them simply because despite people over the years now, this local group has been together for some maybe a good eight years, nine years.
And when people move away, but they remain part of the group and they come back sometimes at Christmas or some other time of the year.
And it's just nice that we maintain these bonds between us built up over the years.
And, you know, over the years, people do move around and stuff like that.
But it's nice when people stay in touch.
And this beautiful couple just brought their baby girl into the world.
So congratulations to them.
Amen.
Congratulations.
And another one is an old friend.
And he's been quiet for a long time now, but they just had a baby boy and quite a few children in this family.
I just leave the number unsaid, except to say that they're getting right up there to my range.
Do you think he's still a listener, Sam, our old palm retirement from the cause?
Yeah, no, no, he's leading very quiet life to himself right now, I think.
Okay.
Well, no congratulations on him.
Yeah.
A new white life doesn't come out if you're not a listener.
Screw him.
Hey, you know, it happens sometimes.
You know, it's yeah, yeah.
No, that's all right.
As long as they keep doing the good thing, keep having the good families and raising them the right way and everything.
And we do hear, we just heard from him recently.
And again, but congratulations to him.
Do you still see him every once in a while or just in touch?
Very, very rarely.
But once in a while, there's a little touchback.
So well, you know, Sam, our audience has been quite niggardly in their effusive praise of us in the inbox at least recently.
Shame on you all.
I feed off positive reinforcement.
Come on.
But we got two really nice ones in the inbox over the past week.
And I got them here.
And this one just came in while we were recording.
I thought maybe I tipped him off that we were recording and it sort of jogged him, but I don't think he knew anyway, regardless.
It says, greetings, birth panel.
I'm sorry it's been so long since I've donated, although I have still yet to miss an episode.
The summer and fall were as my employer announced looming layoffs and kept us hanging all the way through the fall for the final round.
It completely ruined my summer and fall, but I survived again.
I think this is the fifth time I've made it through job cuts here, talking about the dog eat dog American economy and trying to scrape enough scratch to not be nervous about layoffs like that.
Figured I would share the continuing good fortune with you guys.
Please keep up the good work as the white pills you spread are one of the very few things keeping me from slipping into despondency.
My intuition and logical brain keep telling me the white race has very little hope, but it's not like I've never been wrong before.
Either way, we still need to just keep fighting.
That's right.
Even if we are doomed to failure, which you should not allow to enter your thought, you would still fight.
Anyway, and he also had a suggestion for the show, Grandfatherhood.
I don't remember a show specifically dedicated to that subject.
You are correct, sir.
And we've had a couple grandfathers on the show.
Of course, most recently last week with Stephen McNallon.
Steve McNallon.
Yeah, we've never really dedicated a show to that.
So I will add that to the hopper.
And if you're listening to this and you want to come in, it's kind of an easy one.
Spoil those little run rats.
Well, it's also getting more difficult.
You know, when I got married at age 22 or 23, and then, you know, we started having children right away.
And now people are not having children till their 30s, you know, so, you know, it's hard to become a grandfather.
And I'm not a grandfather yet either because my kids are kind of caught up in the same thing where they're the, I'd say the oldest of, you know, of anybody, maybe there's two of the seven that are in a position where they would even have kids.
Yep.
You know, and some of them are still quite young.
So there's still hope, but, you know, that's just the day we live in.
Yep.
And this kind gentleman says, I myself don't have any grandchildren, but my four kids are in the range where I should be in that zone.
And I'm constantly concerned about what I can do to help them to grow families.
Merry Christmas to everyone and hail victory.
And that was from our past.
Hail victory.
Merry Christmas.
Thank you, sir.
Wish you many guns and a lot of grandsons to our old pal, Jim.
And just a little teaser for the audience, you know, it's already, it's December 7th here.
I didn't even think about Pearl Harbor once today.
I didn't see anything.
I guess that's old news.
It's what, 80, 82 years ago.
But anyways, yeah, we're going to have Andreas from Nordic Frontier on.
We are going to get Jim from the fatherland back.
We'll have Jim on once per year, I guess, but he said, absolutely.
He'd come back on.
Was that AJ?
Thank you, Rillo.
And then we got to squeeze in Tom Sewell before the end of the year, too.
So looking forward to that.
Scrap these worldly.
Go ahead, Sam.
You're mentioning dates and all that, Pearl Harbor Day and all that.
Tomorrow will be tomorrow for us.
We're recording on the 7th here, going into the 8th.
December 8th, of course, is Feast of the Immaculate Conception, a holy day of obligation and a great day to celebrate.
Please do.
And one more in the inbox here before I forget.
And then we got a kind note from Scott.
If I can find it here, I'm usually right on top of these things.
Here it is.
All right.
Here we go.
Full House crew.
I have a few parts of this message, so please be patient.
I'll just read the first part.
First, I must express my thanks and admiration for producing such an entertaining and enlightening production.
Though I heard the fatherland once or twice back in the day, I really didn't throw it into my podcast mix and therefore didn't familiarize myself enough with it to enjoy it.
That's a fair way of putting it.
You really had to sort of sit back and soak in the fatherland.
If you just popped in here or there, might not be your cup of tea.
I first heard Full House for the Cantwell Prison Call episode and have been listening ever since.
And he says the next part you can share on the show, but it is a somber matter.
My lady and I have been trying to get pregnant for about two years now and we're thrilled to have finally made it happen.
I traveled for work and heard the news on the road and was overjoyed.
Unfortunately, it was a tubal pregnancy or ectopic as it's called, meaning that the egg was caught in the fallopian tube.
At that point, the baby had grown two inches long and it's a miracle that she had to rush to the hospital and have it removed along with her fallopian tube.
We were devastated and she was in agony.
We went to the church to light a candle, which is something I hadn't done since going with my grandmother as a young child.
So I'd ask for prayer foremost.
I heard in the last show about the couple that conceived using in vitro and it makes me hopeful.
We're still trying, but maybe if those people are willing to offer advice or refer a service, I sure would love to have some guidance.
You got it, bud.
Thank you for the kind words and sincere condolences for your loss and for almost losing your wife.
And I did copy his message, that part at least, and send it to my contact whose sister had the successful IVF.
So that might be another little thing that we can do on the side or in the background to help bring forth new white life.
We'll see.
You know, it's such a personal thing.
You know, where did you go?
What was the clinic?
What was the procedure, et cetera?
But my buddy said that he was willing to try to make that work.
So I'm just, I don't know if I said his name early on, but I'll leave it off.
Thank you, buddy.
And then he had other, a lot of other good stuff in the email for us to consider.
Sam, anything else on the good news or hot stuff?
I got plenty, but take it from there, either with good news or a topic that you're chomping at the bit to gnaw on.
Yeah, well, I put out a list there.
You know, we could work down the list through the show, time permitting.
I wanted to mention about the Berkey water filter.
I don't know if anybody's doing that, but excuse me, some years ago, I talked about that on the show as being a really life-changing thing for me in many ways.
Going away from tap water, drinking the Berkey water and giving up coffee was absolutely life-changing.
Anyways, if you use the Berkey water filter, then you know every couple of years, you got to change out those black carbon filters.
They say it's good for 3,000 gallons.
So you imagine, you know, how many gallons do you use in a year?
I'd say you'd be lucky to use 500 gallons in a year, but, you know, figure if you change it every couple of two, three years maybe is a good way.
But they do supposedly do 3,000 gallons.
Anyways.
Generales came poking around Berkey Way, I hear.
Yes, yeah.
The EPA sued them.
I don't know if I'm using the right thing, but they, for whatever reason, they put like an injunction against them selling that product anymore.
And for the better part of a year, you have not been able to order these black filters.
And at first, I'd have to go back and look because every year or two, I like to have them on the shelf even, you know, just so that I know I always have them in case the zombie apocalypse happens or something.
The number one thing, you could save all the food you want and have all the ammo you want.
But if you don't have a way of making clean water, you're going to be dead pretty quick.
So the Berkey water filter has been a real game changer and a real blessing in our house.
So come the beginning of the year, I was thinking, I'm going to order some filters.
They run sales.
I go on there.
Yeah, they're selling the part for removing the chlorides or fluorine that might be in the water.
But no black filters.
And it says put your email in here to get, you know, so we'll notify you when they become available again.
Put it in there.
Never many months go by.
Never contacted.
And then finally, I received a notification from them.
Oh, go to this other entity, Boru, B-O-R-O-U-X.
And a third party is now supplying these black filters that are equivalent to what the Berkey was supplying.
So those have become available, but you also have to get on a waiting list for them, which I'm told that the ones I ordered will ship later in December.
So anyways, if you do have the Berkey water filter and you've been wondering, hey, when can I order the black filters?
There are alternative ones available.
You can order from Boru, B-O-R-O-U-X.
But also there are knockoff brands online.
I presume that they are equivalent or similar.
So you really have to look around.
Yeah, do your homework, look around, but that's what's going on with Berkey.
So I looked it up real quick, Sam.
And at first I see that EPA prevented the sales because they were unregistered misbranded pesticides.
So when you read that, you're like, oh, good God, you know, Berkey was, you know, they had pesticides that were getting into your drinking water.
But it's because of how they labeled themselves.
You know, due to claims that Berkey treats living microorganisms like bacteria a pest, then this water filter should be categorized as a pesticide or pesticide device.
So it's at least from their story and what I'm seeing from the EPA, it was simply a bureaucratic labeling thing that caused them to shut them down and they're not going to offer their filters anymore.
They tried to fight it in court.
It got dismissed for subject matter jurisdiction.
So they're dead in the water.
Crazy.
Sorry, big.
But you can get the filters and I still recommend the thing.
Definitely get the Berkey water filter system, get your filters.
They're selling them through the site even.
I mean, you go to Berkey Water Filter now, you can order the Borus, the Boro filters through the site.
So don't let that stop you.
I had lots of water and green tea in the first half.
And now I've added a third beverage to my brand new here, a little glass of scotch on the rock.
So I can push in terms of how much I can consume.
But yeah, a little looser here.
You mentioned, it just made me think of the mezcal that you mentioned at the top of the show, Sam.
And my quick story is that probably two years ago, my father-in-law got us like this little sampler case of tequilas from Costco.
Yes.
It wasn't Kirkland's signature, but it came in all these little bottles.
And I have grown to love tequila.
You know, I used to hate it.
It's not garbage, but really delicious on the rocks as a sip and drink.
And one of the bottles was silver.
And I'm pretty sure that that one was Mescal.
And we were actually, we were playing a board game with the kids at the table.
And like when I opened it up and poured it, like it instantly filled the room with the smell of like gasoline or diesel.
Oh my God, what is that?
You know, the Mexicans must have put gasoline in that one.
Well, maybe so, but I trust Kirkland and I trust the Costco brand.
They wouldn't allow some, you know, fly-by-night tequila operation to sneak past their quality control.
So I have a sip of it.
Oh boy, it tasted as much as it smelled.
And they're like, you got to pour that down the drain.
I said, nope, nope.
I have trust.
I have faith in Costco.
That's one of the stocks that I own is Costco.
Go ahead, please.
Mezcal definitely is, you know, as you begin drinking these things.
It's just like drinking wine.
You know, you start with certain things that are kind of easy on the palate and stuff.
And your palate becomes more sophisticated.
And then you begin to appreciate what is a good scotch or a good mezcal or a good tequila.
The difference in tequila and mezcal is definitely one of palate maturity because the blue agave is, it's very smooth.
The way it's made, it becomes kind of, it's easy to drink.
Excuse me.
Uh, but the mescal is like, you want a little little wilder walk.
You know you want to.
You know, and like this, this brand that I have, just over this last year especially, i've fallen in love with this brand.
Illegal I l e g a, l it's, you know, it is something special and something different, for sure, but barely yeah, barely legal, barely legal.
And and it's yeah, the blue agave is what we call tequila.
It's, it'd be like equivalent of scotch, you know it's it's, it's made with the same things as other whiskey, but it's certain certain, certain things.
And uh uh, tequila is blue agave, but this mascal is what they call wild agave, and that's.
You will definitely get the sense that it is wild.
It's a.
It's a little rougher ride, for sure, but it certainly.
Take it for a spin or put it in your fuel tank.
Uh, you can probably take that for a spin too.
You know my wife's horrified.
Now, it's just a little sampler right, so it's not this big bottle right, and i'm like well, you know, you know, in for a dime and for a dozen.
You know i'm gonna finish what I started, take Tom Sewell's advice and, like everybody's horrified, like I, and then I started to pretend like I was going blind, like you know, is that is that you over there junior, let me feel your faith.
And they're like, dad, it's tequila.
I was like no no, it's probably just coincidence.
You know, I was due to go blind eventually.
Well, that's anyway that's.
That's why you don't want to make spirits yourself, because you have to be able to measure the methanol content in it.
Because if the methanol, you know the first distillation produces methanol, and if it's too much in there, you can go blind from it.
And that's why it's always been illegal to make spirits there.
Oh sam, siding with the system there well, they come after your illegal hooch and then they come after your burkey water filters.
You can do it, but you got to have the right equipment to measure the process properly.
You know uh, Conrad had some technical difficulties, but I think he's back.
I didn't want him to think that he was totally on ice.
Go ahead sam if if, if he is back.
Uh, maybe this would be a moment to uh.
You mentioned about a board game there which I I wanted to chime in.
We have a little picture, picture in the chat there of his uh board game display which is uh like 10 times as many board games as I have.
But I was yeah, board game vault exactly and uh, I had the great pleasure to uh spend some time over at his house with his lovely family and we happened to go down there to the vault and he showed me his board games.
I and this is like this is a man after my own heart here, because I am a gaming guy and a board game guy and I was just.
It made me also think, because I mentioned this uh topic in our chat uh last week as something we could talk about on the show is my youngest son's birthday and he wanted the game Risk which um I, I have, uh an edition of it, an old edition of it, but it's at my mother's house and he wanted his own, his own uh, his own Risk board game.
So we got that and then yes and, and then it was actually the day after his birthday I said okay, we're gonna play now.
So we, we got out the board game and we played, and it just reminded me again and I was talking to our friend Conrad about how important board games are, especially in our current day and age where everyone plays video games rollo, probably video gaming right now, as we speak, and uh and And how, but in a board game,
you sit across the table from one or more people and you have to interact with people and you have conversation in between turns and things like that.
It's a good social thing, including like what I would call kind of more basic games like Monopoly even or something like that, where you can kind of socially do something and play the game at the same time.
And we had a little party for him and some of his friends came over, very, very nice young Catholic homeschooling group kids came over and we played the game Pit.
Do you know what the game Pitt is?
Never heard of it.
Yeah, it's a card game.
You play as Brad?
No, no, it's like you are on a commodities exchange.
And this is a game.
It's literally the exact game I had as a young teenager and I would play with my high school friends.
And it works best if you have nine people and each one.
So there's nine suits and you're trying to get a corner on the market of, let's say, wheat or hay or corn or barley, whatever it is.
And so everyone is trading furiously, almost like a pit, like a commodities trading pit.
Everyone is furiously raising two or three cards or four cards or one card in their hand trying to make a trade to get all of one suit, if you will.
And then there's an orange bell in the middle of the room there.
And so whoever gets the corner, who gets able to make all the trades to get all the cards, they ring that bell and then they get the score of that, like wheat is worth 100 or barley is worth 85 or whatever it is.
So it's a very fun game.
It gets everybody yelling and laughing and things like that.
And when I was at Conrad's house looking at his board games, you know, that made me think of all that.
We talked about all that, how wonderful it is to play board games.
And he had the board game that I would recommend.
Not that anyone's asking for my recommendation, but when they talk about board games, the logical end of the conversation is, well, what board game would you recommend?
And he had the game Scythe, S-C-Y-T-H-E Scythe.
And it's a wonderful board game.
And I would encourage people to check it out.
And I'll just give the very, very quick little story how I came into contact with it.
Do any of you remember the magazine Omni magazine from years ago?
It was like a science magazine.
See the covers for sure.
Yeah.
It started in 1977 when I was in junior high.
And it was a magazine that was put out by Bob Guccione, who was the same guy who was the publisher of Penthouse Magazine.
Yeah.
Penthouse Magazine.
Barely legal, too.
Barely.
Yeah.
And I subscribe.
I remember getting the first issue.
It was with the cover was H.R. Gieger, of Aliens fame.
And I had it from the first issue.
And I had a subscription all the way through high school.
And it was a magazine that included not only articles about things coming up in science, new ideas or things, technology coming in science, but also would have short stories by very famous science fiction authors like Harlan Ellison or others, Orson Scott Card or others.
And it also had artwork, very scientific or futuristic thinking type artwork and news.
And so it was really good.
Anyways, many, many years forward, maybe about, I don't know, seven, eight years ago, something like that, I happened to be stuck in a Walmart and I happened to be browsing their magazine stand.
I said, oh, Omni magazine.
It was like just a one-issue annual that had come up.
I haven't seen this magazine in years.
So I start flipping through it.
And here's all this beautiful, fanciful art by this artist, Polish artist named Jacob Rosalski.
And this art was all, it was very fanciful, like alternative history type of a concept.
World War I, as though steam power had taken some type of advancement, and there was advanced technology after World War I based on steam power.
So that was the idea of this artwork.
So you had like these giant mechs, you know, robots, you know, but then you had people in this kind of bucolic rural agricultural scenes, you know, and all this, you know, kind of a melding of folkish kind of art with this steampunk kind of aesthetic to it.
And I thought, wow, this is really cool.
So I bought the magazine.
And then as I was reading that pictorial, because like I said, Omni would feature these pictorials of art or not always painting, but other types of art, electronic things or even whatever, different types of art.
And reading there, I saw, oh, this art is actually featured in the game Scythe, which is based on this concept of alternative history.
I wondered where you were going with this, Sammy.
Yeah.
So I started, so I, oh, this, I got to get this game, you know, so I got the game and then there were a few expansion things in it.
And I got those, you know, and then they put out an additional card pack.
Oh, I got that too.
And so this is a board game that we really love here.
And I recommend anybody to check out, at least Google it and look at the artwork.
It's really gorgeous.
And then here I go to Conrad's house and he's got the game on the shelf.
He's got a couple of, you know, different extra things you can get.
And so we talked all about that.
Anyways, board games, very, very good, very important, I think, for families to play board games together.
Almost as important as the family dinner, Sam.
Or, you know, it's like a subsidiary type of thing.
Yeah.
Same idea, around the table, interacting.
Get off your phones.
You know, let the kids play DJ if they want to for a little background music.
Totally agree.
I wanted to give Rolo credit.
It's even good for like couples.
Let's say you get together and you're going to sit and talk or something.
You have an interesting board game like that going.
Comma Sutra cards.
But I wanted to give Rolo credit for introducing us to code names.
I have a mental block about remembering.
I'm looking under the table.
Yes, it is code names, not code words, as I so often call it eyes rolled here.
But that is fun for adults and kids, both junior and dear daughter are old enough and have enough verbal acuity that they can play that competently, quite competently, actually.
And you find out who in your family has more of a wavelength connection too.
You play better with certain people.
But Rolo was the one to introduce that to us.
That's my endorsement of a board game here.
And real quick before we go to Conrad on Risk, Sam, that is one where I will tragically admit, although I know the glory of playing Risk on the tabletop.
Yes.
Once you've gotten a taste of Risk digitally, this watch it plays.
It's like, oh, like, oh my God, I can't believe I killed five hours.
I play once in a while myself to Risk Online or something.
Oh, yeah.
That's fun.
Solid app and they got all sorts of variations, but I always prefer the classic.
Classic one, yeah.
Yeah.
Conrad.
One time when playing charades, I had to act out winning a game of risk.
How do you do that?
What did you do?
I broke down each word.
Eventually, I was able to get them to understand it was a game and then winning was the target and that it was risk.
So it wasn't easy.
It was the stupidest thing that anyone ever put into our risk hat.
Yeah, that's a rough, rough one there.
What kind of risk?
You know, unprotected sex.
What's the, you know, how do you get across the idea of risk?
When Conrad is not counting his shekels in his various accounts, he's also counting his board games down there.
Impressive collections.
I was going to get you back in here.
Yeah, it's very nicely organized.
I like that it looks, it could be out of the 70s or it could be out of 2023.
What's your favorite game in there, sir, and why?
Oh, man.
There are, you know, I probably have a couple hundred games.
So it's always hard to nail down the scythe one that Sam mentioned is a good one.
If I had to pick a favorite, it would probably be Agricola, which is like this farming theme game where you have to raise animals and they expand your family to do different things.
And it's not.
Do you get to have Negro slaves?
Sadly, I think that's in the card expansion deck, maybe, but not in the game.
That's how they milk you.
Obviously a big fan of the games with all these ones I got.
I got a lot of fond memories as a child playing games with the family, you know, holidays, either cards or games.
And, you know, like you guys have said, it's a time where the screens go away.
Games take a while.
So it helps build that attention span in the kids.
It gets the critical thinking juices flowing.
I mean, some of these games have very minimal luck or chance.
It's all strategy.
And they range from fairly simple to very, very complex.
So we got games we play with the kids.
My wife and I, with everything going on with work and raising the four little ones, we also sometimes set aside at least one day each week where we play the game, just the two of us, because that's just something we like to do as a couple.
We got another couple that we like to play games with.
And so we set times where we get together, the four of us, and play a game as couples.
It's a great pastime.
Me and my wife, we play strip poker.
We don't do that with the couples next door.
No.
I also recommend strip chess is also another game.
And for anyone who's in a long distance relationship, there's a strip chess by mail.
Speaking of chess, Junior obviously is no intellectual slouch.
And I was the one who taught him the ropes, the basics.
I never played as a kid.
I didn't particularly care for it when I started later in life.
Too complicated for these old synapses and neurons, but I showed him the ropes and then he really enjoyed it.
And then he got an account online to play chess.
And then he said, do you think you could get me a chess book, Dad?
I said, you bet your ass I can.
Or I said, but probably.
Hopefully.
And he started playing and getting better.
And, you know, me winning every time turned into draws or, you know, an even score.
And now I can't beat him at chess, which I'm not particular.
I'm not particularly ashamed of.
So it just so happens that over the next two days, it's just Junior and me.
Wifey is on a special mission with the two younger ones.
So I said, look, I'll let you embarrass me at chess if you let me embarrass you at Othello, which is my favorite.
Oh, yeah, that's a good one, too.
I always thought, yeah, Othello is so simple.
It's basic.
Of course, it appeals to me.
And but it's always, it's one of those games that I always just saw like on the shelf at a rental house, right?
Or like dusty, you know, what the hell is Othello?
I don't know, but it doesn't look like anybody's played it in a decade or more.
So forget about it.
And I think my wife got it for Christmas or something recently.
I was like, I love the fun, beautiful simplicity of just trying to corner everybody and hope that it works out at the end.
So hopefully he'll thrash me in chess due to his superior intellect and I'll get lucky at Othello.
But yeah, it's been, it's been, it's, it's, it's not like a good thing when your better half goes away for a while or the other kids go for a while, but it introduces a new element where it's like, oh, you know, you want to sit around and eat chicken wings and watch football.
No, of course we're not going to do that.
I got to drag his ass out to do some road work and fill in some potholes on our road.
But yeah, it's, it's, it's just like two bros hanging in the moment, a cell phone and a laptop in sight.
Unfortunately, it's been nice.
Conrad, favorite childhood memory, putting you on the spot.
You've never heard this question before.
Go.
It would definitely be spending time with my paternal grandfather, my dad's dad.
You know, the small family business that he ran had a lot of downtime.
And I spent a lot of time tagging along with him.
And so he would always have some, you know, game games for us to play or he'd have some like sort of trivia fact he'd try to stump me on.
And we'd always have a bunch of inside jokes.
And I remember plenty of times, you know, at their house and we'd be laughing about some joke.
And my grandma just looked at us from across the room, like, what are you guys doing?
So just that time with my grandfather, I really look back at fondly.
Awesome.
Yeah.
Good, good connection to the idea that we need a grandfather show.
That one doesn't immediately strike me as an easy show to do.
You know, I mean, when I think of a grandfather, you know, the kind bearded old man who takes you out, I remember going out for my Irish maternal grandfather, like taking me out for a slice of pizza at the local pizzeria in North Jersey and thinking, this is like, I still remember that, even though we literally just went out for a slice of pizza.
You know, clearly that struck a memory.
And then my Germanic paternal grandfather died when I was about eight or nine from a brain tumor, but I still vividly remember him and his scratchy beard and his gigantic German man claws that were, you know, calloused and scarred from working decades of construction.
So yeah, the grandfather, the GQ, the grandfather question, if there's somebody in the audience who's a grandfather and wants to talk about the psychology and the strategy, it's not just spoil little kids and make them love you.
I'd invite my dad.
I don't think my father would come on the show.
Oh, man, if I could get my dad on the show, that would be a hoot.
He's retired now.
Maybe he's wild enough to do it.
Yeah.
One other thing I'll say about my grandpa is he's, he had a, he had a name for Brazilian nuts.
I don't know if I can say that on the show or not, but he was, what else are they going to take away from us?
Come on.
He always had a big can of mixed nuts and we'd be, we'd be, we'd be eating them.
And he made a point to point out the nigger toes.
And my grandma would always be like, don't say that to him.
And he would just chuckle the way my grandpa talked about it.
Don't say that.
Call them Negro toes.
Yeah.
Colored, colored toes.
Little twinkle in his eye as he drops the hard R. Absolutely.
It was definitely a hard R nigger toes.
He was not shy about Family Matters, the Steve Urkel show, which was big in the 90s, you know, a show like that would come on and he'd be like, what's with all these blacks on TV?
I wish I had time with my grandpa, you know, post-racial awareness, but I can look back on those memories and retroactively and smile.
That's funny that you mentioned that.
Yeah, because I know that my Irish grandfather was, we'll just say racially aware because he knew vividly what happened to Newark, New Jersey in the 60s in particular, you know, moving to the suburbs after race riots.
And I actually asked my dad at one point, what, you know, did your father have any political leanings or ideological leanings?
And he was a union man.
So he was very union.
So he tended to make that priority number one.
And he said that he was never particularly racially aware or care about that stuff just because he knew too many hardworking black guys on the job sites.
So it was, you know, could not compute, at least in terms of some of the things that I've raised over the past few decades.
But yeah, absolutely special relationship.
One of the things that always struck me is that it's like an instant bond that even little, little kids and a grandparent that they might not see that often.
It's just almost instant comfort and instant familiarity and instant treats and trips and stuff like that.
That, yeah, I'm not going to get misty, but nice picture of Conrad and his grandfather in cowboy hats there.
Priceless.
What age is that, I wonder?
He looks like he's about three or four, maybe.
Yeah, four would be my guess.
Yeah.
Definitely, yeah, you can tell there's an 80s aesthetic to that picture somehow.
I don't know.
It's got the old, the old, the old siding.
You know, it's, that does not look like aluminum or vinyl siding.
Yes, that is a circa late 80s photo there.
Okay, very good.
I wanted to mention something real quick that I kicked this over to the Brain Trust because, you know, I got time with Junior here.
I make dinner the other night, not to be a hard ass or whatever.
I was just like, do you know how to light the grill?
You know how to marinate these pork chops, et cetera.
He was not enthusiastic about the idea, but I walked him through lighting the grill, making sure the propane's going, timing it, et cetera.
He did a fine job.
We had a pork chop feast here.
And then I asked the Brain Trust, I said, should I make Junior watch the GOP presidential debate?
And of course, the predictable stuff.
Why?
Has he been bad?
You know, what did he do?
Why would you punish him with that?
You know, I can't even watch it.
And I said, well, you know, I just feel like it's a good thing for him to be exposed to.
It'll be a good vector for natural conversation, explaining things, etc.
So I did turn on the most recent one.
I guess it's the fourth and last non-Trump GOP primary debate, maybe not the last one.
And I actually found it to be as entertaining as it was educational.
We got to talk about Ramaswamy, DeSantis, the differences, Israel being the second question, the very good question about home ownership and interest rates and inflation and talking about the economic stuff.
So uh, you know, of course I and I did ask sincerely.
I was like is this a stupid idea?
Like is this torture?
And he was not particularly enthusiastic but I said, all right, i'm gonna make him watch half an hour and i'll give a little bit of commentary.
We ended up watching the entire hour and he asked me, all right, dad of those people.
Because he, when Ramaswamy was going on his rampage and, you know, spilling the dirt on Nikki Haley and also more common sense on Israel and Ukraine and any of the other three bought and paid for neocons on the stage, I said, if Ramaswamy were white, he would probably be my guy, but I could not possibly vote for an Indian man when it should be a white American saying those things.
So, you know, fatso and female neocon, shameless, shameless Nikki Haley.
So disgusting.
She shares her stuff.
She is Sikh, right?
A Sikh herself.
Yeah.
Her parents are from Indian, India.
She's a street cracker, too.
Well, as I said, I'm sorry, coach.
I was saying Dick Cheney and Forrent Heels was a pretty spot-on description, I thought.
The guy's got, you know, he's utterly shameless.
Paul, like the most obnoxious man on the stage or in America.
Like he, he, he's like a high verbal IQ, you know, send bobs and vagine guy, just totally shameless.
So I, but long story short, I explained to Junior that if I had to vote for someone on that stage, that I would vote for DeSantis, even though I find his Jewish bootlicking and Israeli new conservative because he's done it, because he's done a good job in Florida, all our issues aside.
He did serve in the military.
He's clearly smart and he's clearly good on many of the issues that are important to us.
But essentially, it was a very good thing.
So would he make mandatory Holocaust education throughout the country then?
How does that work?
No, no, it's, you know, it's just that record scratch when it comes to that particular issue.
These guys are incapable of deviating.
And Ramaswamy is more competent and more independent about it than the rest of them, which is really saying something.
You're just allowed to be because he isn't white.
Right.
Sure.
He's got like he also has a grifting past.
Just look up him.
Oh, I know.
Believe me, I'm not boosting Ramaswamy.
It's just remarkable.
Yeah.
No, he, yeah, he's the one that says good things.
He says good things because he's allowed to.
Yeah.
Like white people are not allowed to say positive things about white people.
That's just how it works in mainstream politics.
And until we're free from Jewish control, it's never going to be the contrary.
Right.
Yep.
And I mean, yeah, he gets away with his deviations from orthodoxy, but he, you know, they still, they savage him because he really is an a-hole.
I wanted to do the endorsement for people who aren't following Telegram.
I loved the Peanut Butter Falcon.
A movie discussion broke out in the chat the other night.
Oddly, Rolo was silent.
He must have been catching up on his Z's, but there was like a flurry of movie endorsements, none of which I had seen, which I all added.
I despite the fact that Shila Bouff was the lead and that a mentally retarded Down Syndrome actor was the arguably the other lead, but I in the eyes almost through the entire movie from the visuals to the story to the soundtrack.
I absolutely loved it.
And if you watch that movie yourself or with your family and don't like it, then you can come and take it.
But go ahead, Rolo.
You are our movie man.
Storm the other day while I was out.
You know, big move for me.
Is there a new one?
Is there a new one out?
Yeah.
Yeah, we go over, we go over the definition and examples of magical Negroes.
That's right.
Right up at the top.
Yeah.
See, because I didn't have that Odyssey RSS in my, all I have is my podcast app.
And if I don't have the RSS link, it's the key.
But did you enjoy Peanut Butter Falcon at least, Rolo?
I fell asleep, but not because I was bored, but because I was late.
But that was a movie that when that came out, that was a time when I was trying to watch as many like focus A24 Fox searchlight pictures as possible.
Yeah.
And that was one of them.
And I was like, that actually looks fun.
Yeah, it was heartwarming.
I'll stop there with the glowing over it.
Watch it for yourself.
It's free on Amazon.
And another one was nobody.
I hadn't heard about this one either.
didn't hear about any of these movies i don't know if i is that is that is that jake gyllenhaal or the code guy Bob Odenkirk.
Oh, never mind.
Yeah.
Okay.
I was thinking, yeah, that's the one where he's like a secret agent, Superman.
I'll stop.
This is not the final storm.
I don't want to open up that can of worms, but I was just floored by how much I enjoyed watching Bob Odenkirk, who we all know is Better Call Saul, among other roles, playing essentially a retired tip of the spear special forces, dirty, wet work guy who made a conscious decision to return to suburbia and work a nine to five out of the hustle wife, two kids, et cetera.
And he's basically slowly dying inside.
Sort of a Kevin, but he's got this background.
His old man is from the same background.
And then eventually he snaps or something happens that, yeah, his family is burglarized.
And that forces him to say, nope, this is enough.
I'm not going to like tuck my sack back for any longer and goes to hunt them.
And it essentially reawakens the wolf in him.
And he does a job and it's glorious, despite the fact he's going after Russian gangsters in the look like Oregon license plates.
And we know that there's a lot of Russians up there.
Spectacular, enjoyable film.
Better than John Wick in my estimation.
One and two.
And I guess the third was horrible.
So those are, that's, what's what I got?
Peanut butter falcon and nobody.
Okay.
Yep.
Conrad, four kids, nine to five or eight to six or whatever the hell it is that you work.
Anything you've, you've listened to Full House for a while at least.
Any insights or tips or sadnesses or things you want to share with the audience, big guy?
You've got more kids than I do.
You know, nothing, probably nothing overly profound.
You know, I'm thinking back to the sad letter you read right after the opening half with the couple having the trouble.
And, you know, we had our own share of troubles.
We had over, it took us over a year to have our first conceived.
We were just starting to go through some of the fertility steps.
And then all of a sudden, my wife finally got pregnant and we had her first.
And so were getting a little bit anxious and thinking maybe you needed some intervention.
And half an hour, exactly like I, I was going in for the, the first, you know the, you know getting the sperm count checks.
And they were.
They were.
We were just starting to go through some of the diagnostics, basically and and, and then finally uh uh, Wifey got got pregnant and uh um, and after that we we, we were uh, basically our first time.
Every time after that we were having a kid.
It was just like boom, it was like once, once your body figured out what it needed to do, the damn broke, the damn broke.
So that I guess that would be one bit of wisdom.
Is, if you're having trouble with the first, I mean it.
Obviously there's certain things that are structural where it might continue on, but I and i've heard a lot of other anecdotal stories similar to our own is, you know, once you get the first out of the way, it's much, much easier to conceive.
Um, you know we've, we've had our share of, of miscarriages, unfortunately.
But um, you know we, we kept going and and i'll say we we, we have a very tight age gap between one, two and three.
We thought we were done with three for a while and we were waffling on the edge and, you know I, i'll say I, I will say that uh, I won't give you guys full credit, but you know, when we were right there on the fence uh, you guys talking about having more white babies, it might have been the uh, the final feather that pushed us on the side.
So our our, our youngest uh, you know, definitely owes some thanks to you guys and your, your pro-life message.
You know the when we were talking about it, you know the?
Um, because we've had our share of complications and miscarriages and and and for a lot of reasons, we thought we were done and.
But then, you know talking, you know, the wife and I were talking about it and at one point we said, five years down the road, you know past, all the difficulties of them being young and the sleepless nights.
Would you, would we rather have three or four?
And the obvious answer is we'd rather have four.
So we decided to go for it um, and had it had challenges getting to the fourth, but uh um, you know, uh it, it finally happened and and yeah, you guys yeah, you guys definitely had a had a part to play in pushing us over the edge on number four so well, let me just say uh i've i've uh, met Conrad's family a couple times and he is an absolutely beautiful family.
Thank you, Sam.
No surprise to me.
Now I have to carve another hash mark on for every listener who gives us partial credit for uh, you know, a new white life.
I just carve a giant line on the steel refrigerator right next to my wife.
What is that?
No, we did have, we did have the full house baby on the fridge.
For a while I was like, are you kidding me?
He gave us credit that that little beautiful baby's.
Here he's staying on the fridge.
Eventually it came down, but I still, I still have it in my uh memory box for sure.
Thank you, great work, god bless, and and you mentioned the hard stuff there and I I think we've been clear enough that it's all not rainbows and unicorns and dancing in cornfields and wheat fields oh yeah, uh.
But yeah, as time goes by, you know women have said, you know, like when they're nursing and changing diapers and sleep deprived, never again, never again.
And then the amnesia kicks in, the natural, healthy amnesia.
Those hard times go away.
And you're like, all right, one, one more time at the roulette wheel.
What are we going to have?
Are we going to have a little jerk?
Are we going to have a genius?
Are we going to have baby Hitler?
You never know.
Well, I think you put it in perspective over time.
You know what I mean?
Like, yeah, sure, those times are hard when you're in them, but with time goes by, you put it in perspective.
Yes, the times were hard, but it was worth it at the same time.
No, my youngest being, you know, three, you know, still a little bit younger, I know, than Coach's youngest, but hearing Coach frequently talk about how his youngest gets older and the last time doing these different kid moments, it definitely that was always in the back of my mind.
It's like, okay, it's going to, there's going to be some times that suck, but it's going to be worth it to hit the reset button one more time.
Yep.
Yeah.
Am I, am I really ready to say goodbye to that game?
And at this, at this point, I am.
I can't say that I'm like crying that I won't have another little one in diapers and whatever.
But, you know, if we had started earlier, we easily would have had four.
We'll call four Conrad tier going forward.
It's not quite Sam tier, but that's you got it, buddy.
Thank you.
Thank you for that.
Rolo, you had something there real quick.
And then Sam has a very disturbing cryptic word that he wants to talk about.
I've resisted the urge to Google it.
Well, you're standing at the roulette wheel thinking about the next baby.
Is this one going to be red or black?
Is this one going to look Aryan like my wife, or is it going to look Mexican like me?
That's our radio.
Thank you, Rolo.
All right, Sam.
You got it.
What the hell?
I have no idea what this is.
Well, that you did not recognize that word, I guess, tells me something.
I suppose it's more of a regional thing.
Maybe Conrad might recognize that word.
I don't know.
But no, okay.
Well, it's more regional then, but it is a regional thing and there are numerous locations, but Sybaris is a wonderful romantic getaway place.
And you can Google that term and look at it.
It's, you know, you get a room.
There's a pool in your room.
There's a sauna in your room.
There's a jacuzzi in your room.
There's sex furniture in your room.
All right, now I'm covering it.
That's the second time sex furniture is coming up, come up on the screen.
Go ahead, buddy.
Gotta get a second round.
I wasn't really sure how to use the sex furniture, honestly.
I almost have to watch some videos or something.
Does anyone know how to use that?
Just like you look at it and you just know.
Pretty sure everyone has to look it up.
Oh, romantic weekend getaways by advertisement.
Pool suites.
Oh, go ahead.
I don't want to steal your thunder.
Yeah.
No, no, that's fine.
There are several, you know, there are some more modest ones, but I always go for the middle one, which is the paradise room.
Now, we were talking to, or I was talking to some dear friends of mine, a couple that last weekend.
And the lady was saying, oh, I don't know if I could ever go to a place like that.
And well, I think what some people have in mind is like the what will other people say or think?
And now the higher end rooms, what makes the higher end rooms different is you pull inside an indoor garage and you get out of your car.
You know, you don't, no one's got to see you come or go, you know?
And so if that's important to you for a little extra scratch, but that I don't care about that.
In fact, I'd love to run into somebody and just, you know, thumbs up, wink, you know, type of a thing.
But I've never run into anybody checking in or pulling my car.
I mean, and it's beautiful.
You, you pull around this place.
It's like it's beautifully landscaped and you pull up to the, to some of these, like the ones that I like to go to, they're the mid-range ones.
And it's, it's kind of like a quad, you know, they're linked together.
But and then there's the bigger ones for a little more money.
You pull in the inside car garage.
But, but yeah, it's, it's absolutely beautiful.
You come in.
It's a beautiful bedroom with the romantic lighting and everything.
There's a big screen TV.
There's Bluetooth.
You can put your music on.
The stereo goes throughout the whole place.
And then there's a there's kind of a glass window there that goes into the pool area.
There's a beautiful pool, heated pool, jacuzzi, a sauna, and there's a big screen TV.
You could watch TV.
So we brought, and this is, this is our third or fourth time going in 20 years.
This is, you know, we don't go all the time because you do have to, it will run you some dough.
You got to save up your shekels and go.
But it is a, it is a blast.
You don't have to like just constantly have sex.
But I was going to say, Sam, I was like, I don't, you know, I don't like feeling compelled.
Like you, you, like, you know, you walk, you walk in there and it's like palm chicken.
Yeah, you got a bone right away.
Well, don't you want to use this public sex furniture?
Doesn't that put you in the mood?
Well, it does, but, but I guess what I'm saying, like our friends, I think that they were.
Yeah, absolutely.
But I think for our friends that I was talking to, the lady was a little bit hesitant.
Listen, don't look at it like you got to go there and perform.
You go there, you swim in the pool, you sit in the jacuzzi.
We went out.
We brought some nice takeout in there.
There's a table and chairs.
You and your wife can sit there and eat.
And, you know, and there's a beautiful, the bathroom is a beautiful big shower and there's a bidet.
I don't know if you have a bidet in your house.
I don't.
But, you know, you can go to the toilet.
Use the.
Yep.
Juice does.
Yeah.
Well, a lot of people do, I guess.
A lot of people do, but I don't.
And, you know, there's a nice bathroom.
It's just the whole experience is very beautiful.
And yeah, the sex definitely comes into it.
But it's, you don't have to go there and think you got to do that.
Go there, you know, swim, have fun, put a movie on you want to watch, put your, jam out your fashion wave or whatever throughout the place.
And it's a beautiful experience.
And let me just say, it was, it was, it was wild.
We, we hadn't gone in some years, but it was wild.
And I'll just say this, my, my wife is a wonderful lover and I'll just leave it at that.
But yeah, check it out.
Check it out.
I'm telling you, if you come to the area, there's, there's at least, if you go on that site, there's at least like seven of them in the area.
So, but Sybaris, man, is a blast.
And it's immaculately clean.
Upper Midwest.
That's, of course, the question I was going to ask, Sam.
I was like, is it CD or is it clean?
But you made it.
No, that's what some people think.
Oh, no, I'm not going to a sex motel.
No, it's immaculately clean, immaculately clean.
And they inspect the rooms twice a day.
If you're going to stay like for two days or something, you have to let them in and they inspect it and make sure everything is working right and everything like that.
So it's like for the upper Midwest or something like that.
Yeah, it's very private.
Like I said, I don't care if somebody sees me getting in or out of my car.
I would just like, hey, you know, you having a good time in there?
Like, we are here.
Heck yeah.
You know, so check it out.
Very cool.
Thank you, Sam.
That was.
That was a good surprise, or you know sure, there's a there's, there's equivalence to that.
Not everybody's going to fly to the middle of the country to go to that's, that's right.
That's why.
That's why I said like, because I know that there's a bunch of them in the area, but I don't know if maybe they're in other parts of the country.
I didn't, I have never looked that far and you guys clearly haven't heard of it and I thought maybe Conruit, the only one outside of Chicago, is in Cincinnati, based on my quick googling.
Okay see, so maybe there is.
They do a great job.
Oh, and the other thing is, as far as like, is it cd or not?
They do it like their advertising says for married couples, and they're very strict, like when you're, when you're, checking in.
So I made the reservation.
So they text me, okay, you ready to check in?
I okay, i'll check in, just like any hotel.
No no, you got to go through all this stuff.
You got to give your a license plate number.
They tell you it's only two people in the room, there's no parties or anything else.
Uh and uh, you have to agree to all these things.
No smoking in the room no this no that, and uh uh, they do it very secure.
It's gated with a guard.
You come in, he lets you can go and come.
You know we, we checked in and then we, we ran out for something and came back.
It's no problem to leave at any time, including in the middle of the night uh, but uh, it's very secure.
Uh they they, no funny business.
And and it's a private club when, when you go there, you have to join quote join unquote right, which is like a I think it's 30, and then like if, let's say, within less than a year, you go again, you don't have to pay again, but the, but the membership fee lets them like, keep queers out and stuff like that, like they can refuse entry to people.
Yeah sure, and so it's they.
They try to, they want it, it's for married couples, it's for right, it's for married couples, so it's, it's done very classy.
Yeah, check it out.
Good stuff, good stuff sam, thank you, that is Syberus s-y-b-a-r.
Uh, Us is.
Yeah, I s yeah not, not Cerberus uh rollo no, it's like the uh, double-headed Dog of hell.
Different kind of different kind of fantasy.
It's an awesome yeah different different yeah, different fantasy stuff.
All right gents, let's land this.
I think we did enough family content in the second half to justify our sordid uh descent into the materialist realm of finance.
But you know guys I, I swear uh, I know we're late in the second half, but please take Conrad's advice to heart, treat money with seriousness diligence discipline respect, because whether you like it or not, unless you're like a magical homesteader or you're from money or you have a very low uh threshold for like material needs you know,
I that's probably obviously if you win the lottery it can cause a lot of problems for your life.
But most people suffer through life worrying about money, yours truly included, whether whether I was flush or whether I was starting to feel anxiety, or or in between.
It'll kill you if you're not careful.
And you can cure that or at least partially cure it by figuring out where you are and just basically following a program as gay as that sounds.
Everybody's different.
Some people need reminders.
Some people need it automated.
Some people can do it on their own, but you got to do it.
And if you're not doing it for yourself, fine, justify it as leaving a nest egg for your kids, for your for your legacy.
And we thank Conrad spectacularly for not just sharing that on the show, but for his lovely family.
And it was my pleasure to meet him earlier this year and get to put the face to the name and realize that, ah, yeah, another one of these guys who is just as he is IRL as he is online.
All right.
Last call.
Conrad, thank you, sir.
Do you want to exhort the audience to any further savings?
No, no, I think you said it better than I could.
I'll just reemphasize, you know, no matter how little you can save, every little bit helps.
It builds.
Even if it's not going to help you retire early, you'll leave something to your kids, just like you said.
So, you know, don't, don't, don't let that analysis paralysis or, you know, worrying about the big picture stop you from at least getting started.
It will build on itself.
And again, if not for you, for your kids.
Amen, brother.
And the, yeah, the full house.
You bet.
The full house fundraising emails will be sent just to your email inbox going forward.
No good deed goes unpunished.
Yeah.
Careful what you advertise.
All right.
Sammy Baby.
Thank you, sir.
Yes.
Thank you.
Great show.
I would like to wish all of our listeners, especially the Catholic listeners, a blessed Advent.
We just lit that first purple candle last Sunday, and you can't help but say, wow, here it is, Advent again.
Christmas closing in and four weeks upon us.
It's a very blessed time of the year.
Advent is a time of kind of like a mini Lent, you know, where we maybe give up a little bit, kind of a little bit of personal reckoning of things, maybe a few extra confessions, extra masses, and getting ready for Christmas to start that joyous holiday season of celebration.
Amen, big guy.
We got all the Christmas lights up on the house more than usual, but no Christmas tree here yet.
But we'll talk about Christmas and Yule in the coming weeks.
And over to you, Rolo.
I think by now, the longest and grandest producer of the show.
No doubt.
23andMe just had a data breach.
So if you ever use that, go ahead and call whatever credit company you're with.
The CRISPR Tech is going to do me for sure.
Yeah.
They got my DNA.
Well, yeah, they notified and stuff like that.
And then there's also, we just became aware today of if you want to possibly be involved in a class action lawsuit against them, you have to manually opt out of their new terms of service that might preclude that.
It's possibly the most Jewish thing I've ever heard of from a company that was at least partially started by, I think, Cheryl Sandberg of Facebook.
Yeah, I do regret ever using 23andMe.
I don't necessarily regret the DNA analysis through spit decision.
But yeah, 23andMe got hacked.
You know, basically all these things are going to get hacked eventually.
So you should prepare to have your opinions and your dissident activities cost you and insulate yourself and your family for that possible eventuality.
Thank you, Rolo, sincerely for helping to make this show happen.
Full house episode 174.
I believe 120, yeah, at least 120 more, like 140 minutes of jam-packed information from Finance the Family was recorded on December 7th.
To start, it's now December 8th.
It is a typically chilly December night.
I hear the dog barking off in the distance, chasing the deer that the local hunters have not yet claimed, myself included.
And follow us on Gab Telegram.
You know, the websites, full-house.com.
Email the show if you get something hot that needs addressing or if you want it read on the air.
And again, huge thanks to our pal for coming on, sharing his knowledge.
Follow up on that if you'd like to.
I was going to go out this week with a real ball buster of a metal song that would have been keeping from the first half, but this half was so comfy and so kind and loving and generous, etc., that I'm going with my favorite little acoustic folksy song from the Peanut Butter Falcon.
And I don't, if you give me guff about liking a movie with Shia LaBoef and a Down syndrome actor, I will.
Dude, I won't do anything.
I'll just take your attention.
Anyway, this is Running for So Long in parentheses: house, a home, and it's charming as hell.
We love you, fam, and we will talk to you next week.
Conrad, it's all yours.
See ya.
That's two for two.
See ya.
We've been worn down in the hardest ways.
The long night's over, and I'm starting to believe I'm not as broken as some made me out to be.
What makes a house a home?
Been running for so long.
When I met you, I couldn't let you.
What makes a house a home?
Time moves fast now, like tires on the road.
But I don't mind it.
I always dreamed ago.
The long night's over, and I'm starting to believe I'm not as broken as some made me out to be.
What makes a house a home?
Been running for so long.
When I met you, I couldn't let you.
What makes a house a home?
What makes a house a house a home?
Been running for so long.
When I met you, I couldn't let you.
What makes a house a home?
Been running for so long.
Been running for so long.
Been running for so long, been running for so long What makes a house your home Been running for so long When I met you, I couldn't let you.
Oh, I'm tired of being alone.
My oh, my Lord, I just can't hardly wait.
We come so far through the darkest days, The long night's over, and I'm starting to believe I'm not as broken as some made me out to be.
What makes a house, your home, Been running for so long?
When I met you, I couldn't let you What makes a house a home What makes a house your home Been running for so long When I met you,
I couldn't let you Oh, I'm tired of being alone Been running for so long Been running for so long I've been running for so long Been running for so long When I met you,