All right. Thank you all for coming. This is something new for the Bogleheads, this accumulator track. And I think we really want to grow this part of the conference. So tell all your friends how great the conference is and get them all to come. Because this is really important for us to grow this part of the Bogleheads. You are all the future. I am the past. Anyway, today I am very happy to have Chris Mamula with us. Chris is the lead author of the ChooseFI book, which is a great book. I did a podcast with Chris on the book. There's a lot of great information on the ChooseFI book. He's a financial writer for Can I Retire Yet? And personally, I have to pour experiences with the financial industry in his professional life. Chris educated himself on investing in tax planning and now draws on his life experience to write about wealth building, do-it-yourself investing, financial planning, early retirement, and lifestyle design. And of course, my screen just went out. So ladies and gentlemen, let me introduce Chris Mamula. Thanks, Rick. Thanks for all. Thank you for coming to listen. And I want to just start by thanking Rick and also Christine Benz for having me on their podcast to kind of talk about fire and to bring me here to share the message of fire with the Bogleheads. Because I think it's important to be able to share this message because in general in the personal finance community, as far as prestige and respect, I think fire is somewhere around the GameStop people and this guy who's on making TikTok videos on how to get rich in three easy steps. So don't let the Hyatt hear this, but he tells you still your hotel soap. Step two, it's going to save you $45 a month, which you can then invest in the S&P 500 and you will be a millionaire. There is a lot of bad ideas and always new ideas in finance and in personal finance in particular and many of them can be dismissed and some of them should even be laughed at, but it is important to note that occasionally there is an idea that's based on really sound solid principles and those ideas do tend to stick around. And I was kind of thinking, what would be an idea that may resonate with Bogleheads that I could use as a parallel example to how I look at fire? An idea that maybe was initially laughed off and ridiculed and it stood the test of time. And if you take a look at the headline, if you're not familiar with the history of John Bogle and Vanguard and index funds, this kind of gives you the Cliff's Notes version, but it says, 40 years ago, the thought of buying a stock index fund was ridiculed. Why would anyone be satisfied with an investment that promised nothing more than the return, than the same return as the market? Well, I think the reason that this stuck around, there was a number of reasons, but I think the biggest one is this whole Bogleheads philosophy and the things that John Bogle taught, it was based on sound principles. It was based on just simple math. And something that I kind of learned after reading the, this is the first book I ever read about investing was the Little Book of Common Sense Investing. And something I learned after reading this is I started to find other people in this Bogleheads community. And I found that it was this organic community that grew up just cause the ideas were so sound and it was impacting people's lives. So it wasn't like he had to go hire a marketing team. This community grew around him. And I think there's a lot of parallels between this community and the fire community. And that's what I wanna share today. So I really have two goals. The first is I wanna challenge some misconceptions of fire and really change that perception of what it means to pursue it, how it applies to people who embrace the Bogleheads investment philosophy. And I think it applies to a bigger group than many people think. And then I wanna demonstrate just the common sense principles and the simple math that back up fire and why I think this is an idea that has the potential to still be around in another 40 or 50 years as well. So I'm gonna start with a couple of misconceptions cause I really think it's important to make people understand the why of fire because if you don't start there, the how is really not very hard but nobody's gonna ever try it. So I think we need to address some of these misconceptions. So the first myth that I came up with is it requires an extreme lifestyle. And there's a couple of versions of this. One is sure you can achieve fire but you have to have a massive income or better yet just be born into wealth and have your parents give it to you. The second is you have to deprive yourself and then practice extreme frugality and you see this term thrown around everywhere. And for whatever reason, this one really rubs me the wrong way cause I just don't feel that that represents it at all. And then the third one is you must have some kind of special investing prowess or maybe you just got lucky with investing. And so that's how you would get there. But it's really not for the average everyday person. What's the reality? I can share my reality. My wife and I, we were both first generation college graduates in our family. For my family, I did at least have, my parents gave me a solid foundation. My mom was able to stretch a dollar and she gave me that sense of thrift. For my wife's family, money was really a source of stress and anxiety growing up. And I think having talked to many people in the fire community and knowing a lot of them, I honestly think her experience is even more representative of mine. And I think honestly, if you came from wealth and you are, that's what you knew growing up. It's actually harder and the key of fire is to live below your means, whatever that means for you and to develop a high savings rate. And so if you're used to, you know, growing up in a certain lifestyle and you have to take a step back, that can actually make it harder. So I think that's a big misconception and it's available to many people who are natural savers. The second, as far as income, my wife started working at about $35,000 a year and I started a year after her at $40,000. And at those salaries, we started living off of her salary and banking mind just because again, it gave us a feeling of security. Neither of us ever made $100,000 in a single year. To be clear, we did grow our salaries over time and I think we would have hit that. But when my wife had our daughter, she was 35 years old and she decided she didn't wanna go back to full-time work so she never has. And at 41, I left my career as a physical therapist. So we never really made it to that point where we were entering our peak earning years. So you don't have to have a massive salary.  And just after doing a deep dive, I got into fire blogs and these fire bloggers really helped me and through them I found the Bogleheads and the Bogleheads helped me. And it was just a lot of people who weren't in the industry, who weren't necessarily experts, who were just giving freely of their time. And so I started writing as a way that I thought maybe I could give back and pay that forward. So again, I think all of those myths are just that, they're myths. And so how did we get to this point where we achieve financial independence and we achieve fire?  When I was writing the book, we crowdsourced it from the fire community and I wrote this book in conjunction with two guys that do the ChooseFI podcast and somebody sent this in as a voicemail and I really resonated with me cause it really made it, it really felt like what we were doing even though I'd never heard the term. It really felt exactly what my wife and I were doing. And so throughout our accumulation phase we were actually and in my opinion and contrast the idea of suffering and sacrificing and extreme frugality. I felt that we were living better than most of our peers cause we were spending money really freely on the things that mattered but at the same time the reason we were able to save so much is we were cutting pretty relentlessly on the things that didn't matter. So I've shared my story in a bunch of podcast interviews and print interviews and some things kind of raised people's eyebrows that could be perceived as extreme frugality. Even among the fire community we are extremely anti-debt in our house. So like I said, we started living off my wife's salary whenever she was only making $35,000 a year and she had about 25,000 from putting herself through school and a small car loan. And so we managed to do that in about 18 months. We wanted to be debt free before we were married. And since that time, the only debt that we've ever had in our lives is a small mortgage and we pay that off in eight years and we've never had debt again and we still don't.  Part of the reason we didn't have car payments is cause we kind of drove crappy cars. We just don't care about that. And so that was what we did. Clothing and jewelry, I mean, I'm not a great dresser by any means. I don't even own like a watch or a wedding ring. Presence, this one really raises people's eyebrows but my wife and I, we just decided one year that, you know, shopping and for like birthday and Christmas presents, it was more of a pain in the butt and we didn't enjoy and we had everything we truly wanted. So we just made an agreement to not exchange gifts and networks for us and technology. I don't care about that stuff. So I don't have the newest phone or any of those types of things I never have and probably never will. So that slide might turn you off a little bit and say, well, maybe this does sound like extreme frugality, but there's other areas where we were absolutely, we're not frugal. We always chose to live where we wanted and our first year out of school, we were living in the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania area and we kind of moved to the suburbs and bought the house and do the things like you're supposed to do. And so my wife was commuting into downtown Pittsburgh. It was about a 40 minute commute every day. For me, being a physical therapist, it made sense to get away from the city. It was better work opportunities but it was about a 50 minute one way commute every day and within a year, like, I think like we were living the American dream or like we had the degree and the nice house and everything that you were supposed to want and we just realized like, this is not our dream. So we kind of blew it up and we sold our house after only 18 months, which is not a great financial move, but it was great for us. We focused on that next phase of our life of what do we want it to look like. So we focused on places where we could enjoy our work. We focused on optimizing our commutes. We weren't spending the whole day sitting in the car and kind of building the lifestyle we wanted. And then when we reached this point of where we were kind of reaching financial independence, we thought, what do we want our life to look like? And at this point, it wasn't built around work. It was built around the activities we wanted to do.  And where was a great place to raise our daughter. So we up and moved across the country and we now live in Ogden, Utah. Other things that we really spent freely on is experiences, like we love outdoor adventure activities, sporting events, music, and we never skimped on any of that stuff and travel. And just to kind of give you a look at what our life looked like, this is a much younger me. We were in our 20s and we went to Australia. We climbed Kilimanjaro and we did an African safari. We got into mountaineering. This was us in Ecuador, the highest we've ever been, over 21,000 feet. I want to kind of pause on this one, because to me, this is the antithesis of extreme frugality, but growing up in Pittsburgh, it's a really religious community and the religion is stealer football. And so like every Sunday of my life, that's what we did. We watched the Steelers and like I was born as they were entering this dynasty phase of one of the greatest teams ever. Yeah, I don't remember it because I was too young. So what I remember is them stinking or being average for like a good decade. And so finally, when I was in college, they made the Super Bowl and I was a sophomore at the University of Pittsburgh and I was working at a pizza shop because I needed the money and that was about 60% of my calories and I also traded the extras for beer. So when I needed that job and when you work at a pizza shop in the host city of the Super Bowl on Super Bowl Sunday, everybody went off so they said nobody could have off. So after watching this all my life, I couldn't watch them. And I always said if they made the Super Bowl, it was something I was going to do. And fast forward 10 years, they did make the Super Bowl and they played in Detroit. So my wife and I drove up and scalped tickets in the bathroom of a bar in downtown Detroit for like $5,000 a couple of hours before the game. And we went to the Super Bowl was like a once in a lifetime experience. And if you notice the picture, that's not Detroit. So three years later, we ended up going again in Tampa and saw one of the greatest games in NFL history. So for some people that might sound frivolous, but to me it had meaning. And again, that's what being a valueless means. Fast forwarding again, we have our daughter. We kind of brought her into our active lifestyle. And it's not about dragging her to stuff that we like, but as a little kid, she's been on Disney cruises. Somehow during the pandemic, she's become the world's biggest Dolly Parton fan. So we managed to make it to Dollywood with her. But so what I would kind of just ask you to do is kind of reframe that idea of suffering and sacrifice and extreme frugality. Cause I find that it just does not ring true. And the question I would say is, are you a valueless? And are you lining up, you're spending with your money? Because just from a practical standpoint, most people, I mean, fire, yes, it's quick compared to a standard 40 to 50 year career.  And if you're miserable, you're not going to stick with that. So you have to find a way to make it enjoyable for you. And it can't be sacrifice. And so for me, that's kind of what fire is all about. And that's how you're going to develop a savings rate and be able to stick with it. The second fire myth is that fire people don't really retire. It's kind of a Ponzi scheme. And we're all just selling the dream. So we can't really retire. We kind of aren't really financially independent. So we just sell the idea of the next person who then buys our books and listens to our podcasts and whatever, and then it keeps going down the line. I included a picture of Bertie Madoff. That's who I actually think of with a Ponzi scheme, but he's not in the fire community. My fire reality, I did quit my job on December 1st of 2017 and walked out the door and I'm no longer a physical therapist. I will say since then I've published a book. I've partnered on and taken over one of my favorite blogs. This past year I completed the CFP curriculum and I'm currently preparing to take the CFP exam in about a month. And as you can see I'm here, I'm publicly speaking and I've been on many podcasts to promote my ideas. So there is some truth, AKA I do still work, even though I say I retired. Also my fire reality though. My income's about 80% less than what it used to be. I also left behind paid vacation, sick leave and pretty nice healthcare benefits. These days instead of my schedule being controlled by an employer, I have complete control over my time. I rarely have ever worked more than three or four hours a day. Like I said, we moved to the mountains and I'm generally outside four or five days a week and I'm extremely involved in my daughter's life, volunteering at her school, I coach her soccer team. We typically travel five or six weeks a year as a family. But I think even maybe more important than the big things, the things you see in the pictures is just every day we eat breakfast together, we spend like that first hour of the day we talk to my parents on FaceTime because they're kind of shut in with everything going on in the world and my mom has some health issues. I would get everything I need to get done during the day and I pick her up and again, I'm present. And that's something that I think a lot of people they look back and they regret that they didn't have that time with their kids and that's something I'd never wanted to regret. So again, kind of lining up with my values. So I think I kind of retired. So the second question though, it really doesn't matter. Like when you read these fire stories and that's a common criticism and you know, they didn't really retire. It doesn't really matter if you think I retired or anybody else did. I think the second question that's really important is how do you want to define your retirement? And that was kind of a perfect segue and the last segment to bring us into here because the whole idea of retirement it's kind of a quaint and dated idea and retirement is evolving. So if you look at what happens to people when they do retire, many people do walk away. They view it as never working again and many people struggle with purpose and meaning and they end up with depression and anxiety. The rates increase significantly. Many people, they save money their whole life and they turn around and because they're such they become accustomed to being savers. It's hard for them to spend and if you look at the data many people spend way less than they could and they don't actually enjoy their retirement. Many people save for this time in the future where it's gonna be so great and they don't have their health to do the things they actually desire.  And so just remember, if you want a traditional retirement by all means do it but just because that's how most people picture retirement it doesn't mean what that's what it has to mean for you and so I really kind of write and like to talk a lot about the whole idea of just redefining what retirement means. And our third fire myth, this one you kind of hear a lot like when I talked to more sophisticated people in the financial industry and it says fire relies on the 4% rule which is either naive and or uninformed. And this is actually, I had a great conversation about this with Christine when I was on the Morningstar podcast. So if you're not aware of what the 4% rule is maybe we should start there and that's just a rule that tells you how much you can spend in retirement. And so basically the idea is if you have a portfolio on day one of your retirement you can take 4% of it and then you're gonna spend that same amount every year whether the market's up 50% or down 50% adjusting only for inflation so your lifestyle can stay the same forever and you're not gonna run out of money. This is a common rule we talk a lot about this in the fire community and we also talk about the inverse of that then is that if you can take 4% then you know that you need 25 times your annual spending to know if you're financially independent. What's the reality though? I don't follow the 4% rule. I know almost everybody in the fire community I don't know anybody that follows the 4% rule or traditional retirees for that matter and I don't even really know anybody that would argue that it's a rule. But what we do is we use it we call it the 4% rule of thumb or the 4% guideline and there's a couple reasons I think this is a great thing to learn and to understand. Number one is that it makes you kind of focus on what you're spending and many people don't pay any attention and most people don't budget or track their spending and so it's a requisite to know what 25 times your annual spending is you have to know what your annual spending is. So it gets you to start focusing on that and know where your money is going. And also it just gives you a place where you can create a goal and yesterday if you were at the Bugleheads University at something that Jim Doll talked about is having these smart goals and so if you have a defined goal what we found is people start to take action so people that weren't saving at all they learn this principle and it really turns things around and that's fine this goal is gonna change over time you're gonna discover that you may wanna spend more or less than you initially thought maybe healthcare is more expensive and you're gonna learn these things and adapt but at least you have a place that you're starting from and you have a goal in sight. But I think there might even be a bigger and more important point about the whole idea of the 4% rule and that's it in the fire community I think we're asking kind of hard questions and we're having big conversations that are kind of rare in our society where everything is just more and more and more bigger, bigger, bigger and it's a question I really hope resonates with a room full of Bugleheads especially if you've really kind of dove into all of John Bugle's work not just what he's written about investing and that's a question is enough and I think it's a question we don't ask enough is how much is enough for you and then once you have enough what comes next? So I wanted to really kind of start with the why but now I wanna kinda get into a little bit of the how because I do think fire is based on some pretty solid principles again just based in common sense and some very simple math. I will say and I kind of really appreciated the conversation again in the Bugleheads University yesterday I think Rick brought this up and you might not use the exact terminology but I always talk about tactics and principles and so again I think a lot of people they learn of fire because they read like one story of one blogger or one person that's featured in some article and they say well I could never do that and they missed the bigger picture that all the fire people we kind of are all following same the same basic common principles but the tactics are gonna look wildly different within that and so I wanna focus on the principles and that's what we kinda focused on when we wrote the book and that's what I wanna focus on in the talk. One thing I'll say is the Buglehead investment philosophy that we're gonna learn about here this weekend or this week it's really endorsed and embraced by almost everybody in the fire community. We talk about using that investment philosophy you can achieve fire reliably in 10 to 20 years if you follow these principles. If you look at a typical career it's gonna take you about 40 to 50 years till you reach financial independence and you're able to retire and if we're being honest most people in our society do not ever reach financial independence they're highly reliant on social security by the time they reach retirement age so I think it's worth looking at what does the fire community do so differently than most people and what can we learn from it even if we're not gonna go all out and be trying to say 50% and then retiring early. Well there's only three levers that any of us can pull in the world of personal finance if we wanna achieve financial independence quickly and we can spend less we can earn more and we can invest better and I think number three is kind of the sexy one that's the one we like to talk about is how do we invest better but if you want to achieve financial independence again it's about creating this large spread between what you earn and what you spend and so we really need to focus on numbers one and two spending less and earning more. The reason for that again this isn't my opinion this is just based on again simple math and the rules of arithmetic so there's only really three factors that impact your compounding so if we go back to our friend our soap-stealing TikToker friend at the beginning of the presentation he got a lot wrong in that in his little idea but one thing he did really well is he was obviously playing with a compounding or a time value of money calculator and it's something that I think I wish a lot more adults knew how to do let alone kids his age and we'd be a lot better off as a society but you know there's only three factors that impact compounding and again this is something Christine talked about yesterday but the first is the rate of return. If you are a Boglehead if you are a passive investor you know that you're gonna get the return that the market gives you we can maybe at the edges kind of tweak that a little bit with our asset allocation or whatever but essentially you're gonna get what the market gives you so there's not a whole lot you can do there the time to compound is a big factor so a traditional retirement you have 40 to 50 years for money to work for you by definition if you're pursuing fire you're cutting that down to one to two decades you're cutting that in half or less and so we actually have time working against us so that only leaves us one lever to pull and that's to focus on increasing the amount that we save and we add to our investments. So after the 4% row another favorite topic in the fire community we talk a lot about savings rate and savings rate is really simple it's just how much you save divided by how much you earn and so there's really only two things you can do if you want to improve your savings rate you can either spend less or you can earn more and either is valid and either is okay but in the fire community we talk about frugality a lot and I think that's maybe where some of the idea of this extreme frugality comes from but I do think it's worth starting with frugality for a couple reasons one, it just tends to be a little bit faster you tend to cut your spending quicker than increasing your earnings although it's fine and you should be working on both but I think there's a second reason and it's far less obvious why you should focus on your spending but if you can learn to be happy living on less then that just equates to needing less to be able to be financially independent and to retire if that's what you choose and so going back to that 4% rule and the inverse the rule of 25 if you want to live off $100,000 a year that's perfectly fine but that's gonna take as a starting point we'll say $2.5 million if you can learn to be happy living on half of that $50,000 a year then you need half of that to retire a million and a quarter so that's a much lower bar to save towards if you want to hit financial independence quickly a lot of these ideas when we talk about savings rate it comes from a really popular blog post from a really popular blog Mr. Money Mustache and the article's called The Shockingly Simple Math Behind Early Retirement and in that he uses some assumptions to kind of tie your savings rate to how long it's gonna take you to be financially independent and the assumption he uses that you're gonna get a 5% real return during your accumulation and you're gonna utilize the 4% rule on early retirement and we can argue around the edges about that but I think it's a really good place to start he came up with this slide that shows like in 5% increments your savings rate and how long it's gonna take you and that's obviously a really busy slide so I'm gonna zoom in so standard financial advice is you save 10 to 20% of your income and standard career is about 40 to 50 years like we talked about and if you look at that that lines up really nicely with that so if you want a standard career follow standard advice and that should get you there the problem I think for a lot of people people say well saving 10% is hard well I think the how am I gonna say 50% and I think a lot of this is a psychological game so I think a lot of the reason saving 10% is hard is because you're gonna see results really slowly and you're not gonna notice any progress for a long time cause it takes a while to get compounding working for you and so a lot of people get frustrated and they end up not saving anything at all whereas again if you have this goal and you have this plan to work towards your goal it's actually not all that hard for many people and so in the fire community we talk about starting thinking about a 50% savings rate and again that can seem drastic if you don't have these other things in line first but if you have a 50% savings rate or in that ballpark there now you see where we're getting down to that one to two decades that we talk about that you can reliably achieve fire following these principles I think before we move on from that I think it's important to zoom in and again we talk about with John Bogle he always talked about the relentless roles of humble arithmetic and I kind of am even more simple when I say just say the math is the math and so a lot of people they'll maybe hear my story and say you know that's kind of cool I wish I would have thought of that when I was 25 or 30 but I'm already 45 or 50 but guess what the math is exactly the same if you're saving aggressively for one decade early in your career or one decade late in your career or 15 years early or 15 years late and so this is a message that could help a lot of people who are late savers in behind the game and why is that important? Well we see that there's a lot of people behind the game so this is a very recent study from Vanguard's How America Saves 2022 I'd say these balances are probably pretty bloated being from the end of 2021 compared to what we have today but if we look at people there's last two lines as what I want you to zoom in on the 55 to 64 and the 65 plus this is a kind of a skewed sample because it's people that have retirement accounts with Vanguard so they're probably better than the average person many people don't have any retirement accounts and some that do have with ridiculous fees they're not maybe getting the same advice but even in this crew at that retirement age we're looking at about a quarter of a million dollars so if we go back to that 4% rule these people can take about $10,000 from their portfolio in retirement less than $1,000 a month so they really need help catching up to if they want to do anything more than just supplement social security and live on a pretty bare bones existence and the average tends to be skewed up because you're gonna have people with two or three million dollars in their account so if we look at the median that's even more representative I think of the average person and again this is already a kind of a privileged sample like above average sample compared to the general society and we're looking at people that have less than $100,000 if you look at the median so again if you're looking at 100,004% you're talking people can take $4,000 for the entire year to supplement their social security and that's what you have to live on so again people need a lot of help now while the math is the same what's really important to understand is if you're a late saver or if you know somebody that's a late saver and you can get them to kind of buy into some of these principles and take them to heart there's actually a lot of advantages that you have if you're saving late versus the typical fire person I would say I'm gonna acknowledge off the top the one big disadvantage if you haven't been saving at all or haven't been saving much for 20 or 30 years it may be challenging to change that habit but if you can accept these principles and you can start down this path there's a lot of advantages if you're early in your career if you just think about where you're at in the life cycle you tend to be early in your career where you're making less money maybe you're forming your family so you're still paying for diapers and daycare and saving for college when you're later in your life you tend to be entering your peak earning years like we talked about my wife and I we left before we ever got there you may have a mature family that's you have all these expenses in the rear view mirror or the kids are starting to go to college and moving out and you can redirect that money to retirement savings and if you have kids moving out there might be a time to downsize and one of the biggest ways you can save when you're spending is to cut your housing costs and this could be a perfect time to do it there's also greater tax advantages one of the best simplest things you can do Mike Piper talked about this yesterday is just utilize your retirement accounts to the max and utilize your HSA and get as much tax advantage from your investments as you can well as you get older you have catch up contributions so those contributions get even bigger and it gives you a little more space to work with there and then you just have less it's just less hard to plan for a traditional retirement still not an easy task still 30 years and a lot of uncertainty but compared to 60 years it's a lot easier to plan for that you also have a floor under you with your social security income so you may not need to save 25 times because you have that social security supplying some of your spending and you also have Medicare which it's not free and it's not perfect by any means but compared to what we have to deal with to bridge that gap from working to traditional retirement like for somebody like myself I have 25 years and there's the laws change every couple of years and it's really hard to plan when you don't know what the rules are so I want to kind of leave some time for questions so I want to kind of go through fairly quickly we talked about spending less earning more and investing better and so I want to kind of close on that and so what are the things you can do to develop a high savings rate so probably our third big topic that we love to talk about in the fire community is the big three so we always start by focusing on housing, transportation and food and this isn't because fire bloggers love to tell you what to do again it comes down to simple math okay so for the average American household 50% of your expenses is going to come from these big three housing, cars and food so I kind of like to picture this as like a big pie chart and if it's a big circle and you just cut it down the middle and on one side you have housing, cars and food and on one side you have everything else and some people will say well I don't want to cut on my housing, cars and food and if you want to have a high savings rate that means you essentially cut everything else and I don't think that's a good idea that to me that's the definition of extreme frugality but if you can optimize on those big three and develop a reasonable savings rate that sets you on your way and that's where you want to focus your energy to start and again for some people this is going to feel like this is going to feel like frugality and sacrifice because I think we've been sold that the American dream is to have the biggest house you can have and the most expensive car you can drive and a lot of people have bought into that dream and so it does require a mindset shift if that's how I got you down I think everything gets a lot easier when you once you have a pretty decent savings rate because now you're just throwing gasoline on the fire I have never met anybody who said my life would be so much better if I could just pay a few more dollars in investment fees if I could pay a little bit more in taxes if I can pay some extra insurance premiums or I love to travel but if I could just spend more on it but all those things once you master your finances you can really cut dramatically a lot of people and again in the Bogleheads this is something we talk about a lot is investment fees but it really doesn't matter if you don't have much invested but as your investments grow if you have a million dollars and you cut that from a 1% fee to a 0.05% fee you're talking about saving almost $10,000 a year I mean that's massive taxes Mike Piper talked about this a little bit yesterday some of the simplest things you can do are also the most effective just max out your retirement accounts and defer those taxes in your high earning years and by definition you have a high savings rate and you have a lower cost of living and if you retire early or even semi-retire or whatever and you can spread that out over 20 or 30 years you can pay much lower taxes early retirement lifestyle and this whole financial independence lifestyle is just generally very tax friendly if you kind of like again I'm not really truly fully retired we still have some income but our income is low enough where now our capital gains are tax free so we don't have any of that tax drag even on our taxable accounts just having a lower consumption lifestyle you cut out all those sales taxes if you don't live in as big and expensive a house you tend to have less property taxes so if you don't like paying taxes this is a great way to cut them all these things again insurance if you don't have any savings every little thing that happens can kind of be an emergency and so you need a lot of insurance in your life but as you have a couple of years of savings paying for a short term disability policy maybe doesn't make sense anymore if you're getting to 20 or 30 years of savings having a long term disability and having a life insurance doesn't make much sense anymore if you have enough money to cover expenses you can start raising your deductibles and lowering your premiums on everything from auto and house and healthcare insurance and so again insurance gets a lot cheaper and then travel expenses I kind of put this at the end this is kind of one that excites people and again this is something in the fire community we like to talk about but using travel credit cards and their credit card companies know that they charge an outrageous fee and most people are not gonna benefit by that and so they're willing to give some pretty outrageous bonuses to sign up for their cards because most people are gonna end up paying 15 or 20% but if you can master your finances you get in a position where even if you have to put things on a card you have the money to easily pay it off and you're not gonna be paying these fees you can collect a lot of rewards and I typically, our family just signing up for four or five cards a year we collect about four to $5,000 of free travel on a course of every year the other side of the equation again we talk a lot about spending less but it is important to earn more and again I think it's just it all comes down to that still it's a value proposition so yes a lot of people say everybody should go to college at any cost and there's no other investment in the world that we say that about we wouldn't say as a house a good investment we would say at what price is a stock a good investment we were talking today about valuations everything is what price but with college we just kind of throw our brain out and just take these big loans on and then this ends up in the position that we're stuck in as a country right now so in the fire community we've talked a lot about different ways to get your education for less and I can tell you in my story again my wife and I between us we have six college degrees and plus a bunch of different certifications we're like education junkies and again we've never had any debt except for my wife's initial bachelors so it is possible and it is doable then you want to kind of just grow your earning power through your career and build a network and all these things just to kind of allow you to make more and then the final step so once you grow your savings rate you do have to do something to grow your investments and how do you invest better I would say on this whole panel of speakers at this conference this weekend I am the least qualified person the other people here speaking are the people whose books I read their blogs I read their podcasts I listen to so what I would say is just enjoy the rest of this conference suck up as much as you can and then take it out and pay it forward to your community and help people out and that's really what this is all about and I wish you your best on I wish you all the best on your journey to financial independence and if anybody has questions I'm happy to stay and talk as long as you need A slide you put on at the end about earning more I see a lot of people in the fire community fire bloggers, authors, et cetera that are just crazy about saving, saving, saving, saving and very rarely do they ever talk about earning more and in my experience people dramatically overestimate the difficulty of doubling their income why doesn't the fire community talk about earning more more than they do? You know that's a good question I can't speak for other people but it is something that I mean in the book we devoted a section to each of those three levers of spending less earning more so in my own personal story I do focus on that and again in my own personal story like it would be hypocritical like I know a lot of people get anti-college or whatever I absolutely benefited from having three degrees and my wife has three degrees but again you have to look at the cost benefit and so even when you are focusing on earning more it's all kind of the same thing you have to look at the value proposition and you still have to look at what you're spending but I absolutely agree with you and I wouldn't argue with you I think maybe the only thing I would argue is I think a lot of people think that if you earn more it'll get easier to save and in theory I agree with that but if you look at the data what most people do is they earn more and they just inflate their income and their spending grows right with their earnings so most people don't save more and you can look at like professional athletes you know very well with doctors you know the statistics so that's just the reality so there is a practical reason too I think but I think it's worth working on both but that's why we focus on spending first at least I do Hello, hello, yes my question is regarding how do you know emotionally transition from accumulation to spending your portfolio my wife and I we were thinking we reach our FI number this year and but we don't know we were now scouting where to retire where to go but inside of us we are a little bit afraid if this doesn't work and what we are going to do we still have about 25, 30 years until we get hit our social security benefit so how was in your experience that transition from working and just to living the FI, the fire life yeah that's a great question in my personal situation it really wasn't a question of like we didn't look at did we hit some target number and were we ready to retire my wife and I we kind of always wanted to move west and just do something different I'm from Pennsylvania but like I said we live in Utah now so we had a daughter and she was turning five and she was starting kindergarten and for us it was really a lifestyle decision of once she starts school and making her friends and getting involved in activities it's going to be a lot harder to shift gears and to change to that so that was kind of our initial decision and we always I mean originally I think just like most people I had that same vision of retire is don't work at all you live off your investments but then as you kind of get closer and you start thinking about it what are you going to do for purpose what are you going to do to just fill your time like my daughter is in school and so what am I going to do all day and also it's just a psychological component like you don't save 50% of your income because you are suffering and sacrificing for 15 years you save because it feels good and so imagine like you're driving down the road at 80 miles an hour and then you're just going to slam it in reverse that's basically what you're doing going from like a 50% savings rate to spending from your portfolio so our plan was always to be very gradual and cutting back so my wife has a remote job she works for a company out of Washington DC part time like I said after having our daughter shortly after that she started with that company and she was the seventh employee it was a startup so they kind of just give her a really sweet deal and so she's able to work part time and I plan to keep my physical therapy license I thought I may work part time or do a travel assignment once or twice a year and our investments did really well I did better than I thought with our book and blog and so I just kind of let my license expire and I am I guess completely retired as a physical therapist now I'm not going back but yeah that was kind of always our plan is to have a gradual a gradual transition and so it'll be five years for us in December and my wife is again looking to cut back working this year to kind of cut back our hours again and but we're kind of still like most months we are just basically right about even so every now and then if we have expenses we'll take from our savings every now and then if I have a good month we'll put a little bit into savings but we're not drawing down much we're not saving anymore and it feels very comfortable it's a nice it's a nice transition point you didn't cover one of the observations I know about the fire committee I see as a downside but at least the more vocal fire proponents really seem to hate their job to the point where they will blog about it and like they just want to get out in 10 or 20 years I'm not sure it's like do you think that's representative or maybe just the loudest voices in that community is basically doing it that way and I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about that I'll be honest with you I don't read a lot of fire bugs anymore because I'm kind of like I'm at that transition stage so I don't know what's out there now I do think sometimes the loudest most extreme voices get the most attention that's just natural I mean my personal opinion if I think if you are you know two to three years away from fire and you you know I think it's a rational decision if you have a high paying job to maybe put your nose down and just get through it and hit your number and then quit but you know if you're starting your career and you know that's not what you want to do to suffer and sacrifice through it I mean I think there's a lot better ways to go through life I mean I wouldn't recommend you know suffering for the next 10 years to reach this number that you know there's no guarantee you're ever going to get there so you got to live your life and enjoy it all the way so one question of interest in this is it seems like there's accumulation accumulation of and it has to be taxable investments at this point if you're going to be living your off of it is there a trade-off here where you're just bypassing 401k matches long-term taxable income or tax-free earning on those things to achieve this other side are you passing up those company matches because you're focused on being away and is that a trade-off that's worth it I don't know if that makes sense or not yeah I mean I would say in general I hate to give one size fits all advice but passing up a company match is one unless maybe like if you have a ton of credit card debt something like maybe but you're getting a tax advantage and you're getting just a 300% return so I personally would never pass that up but beyond that I mean when we were in our accumulation years I mean if you're saving enough again unless you're really doing the extreme frugality version of this I mean for us we maxed out both of our 401ks then we maxed out both of our Roths and in the one year we had the option to we maxed out our HSA and then we still saved a substantial amount in taxable investments so we ended up we have a pretty nice mix and a lot of diversification amongst asset or amongst taxable types of accounts but I think if you aren't in that position you have to make a decision I don't know how I would answer that question for many people I think you have to look at your own situation and you know where you're going to be yeah there is ways to get money out of you know your 401k there's you have to jump through some hoops but like there's you can do it's called a 72t and you could take like kind of almost equivalent to RMDs but you're doing it earlier in your life so once you do it you have to do it for a period of at least five years and there's ways to do it also you could just pay the penalty and sometimes that still might be better than paying depending what your tax rate is if you're in a much lower tax rate in retirement you're paying the 10% penalty that still might work out in your advantage so again it's it's really hard to give specific advice to a general audience you have to kind of look at your own situation yeah hello just a general question one of the big threes that you mentioned was housing do you have any advice for people living in high costs of living cities I'm from New York City work in New York make a good living in New York but I find that the housing costs are extreme right now any general solutions I mean besides living with the roommate because I'm doing that now but any other advice you could give no I mean I think again we kind of talk about principles right the principle is you have to do less but then there's the tactics and how are you actually going to do that I think one thing in a high cost of living area like I guess my question would be why are you living like is that where your family is is that where you want to stay because like I think some people go there because there's higher paying job opportunities but then you can always move to a lower cost if that's where you want to live now if you want to stay in the higher cost of living area I think like a roommate is a great idea I mean you're kind of limited by your creativity once you understand the principle but yeah I mean if it's a super like if you're in the Bay Area in Manhattan yeah I mean it's expensive to live there and it's going to take up more your so it's a decision is is that worth it is it worth it to go somewhere else and that's a personal decision that you have to make yeah I think again again like I think a lot of it is just what do you really want like again like my wife she works for a company based out of Washington D.C. but she worked for them when we were in Pennsylvania and she works for them when we're in Utah and so some like especially now since the pandemic a lot of jobs if that's an option but again if your family's there is that a sacrifice you're willing to make again we did move away from our family but it was because of other reasons and those are always hard decisions and I can't give you a good easy answer on them Hello my name is Chris from the D.C. Area yes I just want to start off by thanking you for revealing some of the particulars for example you know somebody who's still working their way up the income curve you know I didn't really think it you know it could be possible to achieve fire you know without you know the six-figure and above income so that was really encouraging so thank you for that I'm curious because one of the things that I don't hear too often in the fire community is the discussion of how you think about paying for a child's education I know a lot of vocal heads will think that you should always put your retirement first because you know your child can always bar for college but I'm just curious if those are things you think about and what kind of ideas you have there yeah absolutely so that is something when I was when we were our last five years of saving for financial independence we were cutting those investment and fees and tax fees because we were I was also learning the investment side while I was going down the fire hole the fire hole and so I had a lot more money that we were already saving that was freed up and so and also I took a little a side job it was just because we couldn't get out like we I like rock climbing and I couldn't get out and do stuff because it was a drive from where we used to live so I took a job with a local university so all I did was that little side hustle money I threw all that into account for her and in six years of teaching right before we left for Utah I had kind of maxed out what I wanted to say for her for her school and so we we stopped saving when we stopped working so yeah we front loaded it and just like we front loaded our retirement savings I'm from Nashville shot out to Dolly we like your daughter like in Dolly my question is specifically for healthcare because I'm a nurse and I work in a trauma center and we see terrible things happen all day for people who were retired and now their whole life is going to change what does the fire community say about getting ready for whatever particular catastrophe might come your way you hope it doesn't but what would they do what does the fire community say about that yeah I mean this is one area where I do differ for with some people from the fire community who are way more risk tolerant or maybe naive than if I want to be not as diplomatic about it but to me health insurance is absolutely a must for everybody and it's just such a such a huge risk and so just like any entrepreneur you have to figure out how you're going to get it I did do like a deep dive I know some people like the health share ministries for me I just for personal things with like kind of the activities we do like adventure activities they wouldn't cover some of those things and my wife has a pre-existing condition it wouldn't cover so it wouldn't work for us but that is an option that's cheaper I think for most people they try to optimize and this is what we're going to do when my wife cuts back is try to optimize on our subsidies and just go through the ACA but again it's a big challenge because again they passed the law I guess what are we in 2020 midway through 2021 so it didn't be any good to plan because you're already halfway through the year improving the subsidies and it only went through this year and now they passed it again but that takes us three more years but again for myself I'm 46 so that still leaves me 16 trying to do math on the flyer 16 years till Medicare yes I don't know we're going to we just kind of again I think maybe a reason to oversave a little bit a reason to if you can be open to having some income in a way that's enjoyable ways to pay it food yeah it depends I mean if you if you have a low enough income you can get your insurance subsidized to a high level and you could pay very low premiums and also but then you also have the other side of the question that's not the only uncertainty you also don't know if you're going to be healthy so even if you have insurance you know you can have some substantial out-of-pocket costs in a given year so you have to look at what your potential max out-of-pocket is and you just it's a planning exercise you have to figure all that out and look at what your downside is and again the hard part is on the premium side you just don't know what things are going to be in three or five years and things get a lot better or they could go back to having no system who knows it's such a political football okay thank you yeah my name is Mike I just first of all thank you to you Chris and Rick and Dr. Dolly and everybody that's here I feel like I've kind of found my tribe here right so I guess my question is more of a general one of how do you approach your lifestyle with folks that you interact with day to day as far as kids friends parents and you know approaching the glide path to retirement and how did you approach that professionally with your peers and then maybe more generally how do you pay it forward with the folks that you come into contact with trying to think of these questions one at a time so I'll start with the last because I remember that as far as paying it forward I mean just being here being part of this conference I really respect what the Bogleheads do and I was beyond honored and excited when they asked me to come speak and I was happy to do that writing my blog again I do monetize it now but I wrote for five years and didn't make a penny and it's not like a big moneymaker it's more to offset our costs so just trying to put good information out there and like I said I just out of curiosity I went and decided to go down the CFP route to educate myself just to make sure that you know what don't I know and to better be able to educate and help other people so that's that question and then I think you asked about like just in our life interacting with people if people ask what I do I kind of say I'm like semi-retired I say I might write a blog or most people don't really care to be honest as far as my child I guess I'm a little bit I'm a little bit worried like are we going to spoil her is she going to not have the work ethic we have I mean I think every parent has that though I mean I don't know how you know the right balance and you just do the best you can and then as far as like her friends and stuff I mean I think again with my wife and I like I think more is caught than taught so like when I look at the stuff we did well and I look at the stuff we did poorly most of that came from our parents but not because they told us to do anything or not to do anything mostly just we watched and saw what they were doing and I think that's how kids mostly learn so we try to set a good example with how we are stewards of our money and how we spend and we do have occasional conversations but she's 10 and she doesn't really want to get too involved and getting too deep in the weeds there one of the biggest expenses was housing yes on your list yes and the way you solve that problem was you like to rock climb and you wanted a better you didn't want to you didn't want when the long commutes you wanted a quality of life so you moved from Pennsylvania to Utah did your parents follow you there how did how did the the grandparents in your kid situation resolve itself that is a great question and a tough question because that's my parents that's their only granddaughter and so it was a tough situation again this really isn't a financial like we didn't we moved to where we moved is substantially more expensive than where we came from it was a low cost of living so it wasn't a we weren't moving to save money we were moving for lifestyle and like the area we were at in Pennsylvania I mean if my family wasn't there I would never live there I was there because of my family and also just as a place to raise a kid I mean it was it's a it's a depressed area they're just not a ton of opportunities and and also Pennsylvania like the education costs are extremely high so there was a lot of reasons that kind of factored into her quality of life but that that was definitely a tough thing and and we built that in just to our into our lifestyle both in our budget to travel we typically go back we were back this summer we're going to go back for Thanksgiving my parents we have a house with like a mother-in-law suite so my mom's been pretty sick and unable to travel ever since COVID but prior to that they would come out and spend three four weeks at a time with us to be around my granddaughter my daughter their granddaughter so but yeah I mean those are always tough things and it's really not a financial question and so I think you have to navigate that on your own so I've got three kids and eight grandkids and go where you want to go parents want you to be successful go where you need to go if the parents follow they chase their kids then that's what they do if they don't they don't but don't let that be a factor in what you do thank you Chris it's been wonderful and now right outside we have lunch and then we'll be back in here in a little little less than one hour enjoy your lunch


Captain Marvel's latest movie to come out of the MCU is starring Brie Larson as Captain Marvel and this movie is freaking awesome. Great acting, great action, and they captured the character correctly in my opinion. Just, it's such a fun movie and I highly recommend watching it, especially if you're a fan of the MCU.  I'm also really excited that we get a properly done female superhero movie from Marvel now that as well as from DC at this point. Some of my favorite heroes are females in the comics and I'm so happy that they're being done correctly. There have been a number of bad reviews for this movie and a lot of people have been saying stuff like, oh she's too strong at the end. Thing is, that's her power level normally. Like, she can get stronger. And people who are saying that she's too strong are not ready for Phase 4. They're not ready for the Celestials, for Galactus. Because, you know, she is effectively a baby compared to them.  One thing that I personally really like that the movie did and did very very well was the interactions between her and Fury. Fury is freaking great, her interactions with him are hilarious. There's a certain cat and if you've seen the movie you know exactly who we're talking about.  It is hilarious. The way that they did the scrolls was really really good. If you enjoy them in the comics, I personally really liked what they did with these. It was a kind of different take. The movie as a whole I will say held up as one of the best MCU films. It's one of the best solo movies that has come out by Marvel. You don't need to watch the rest of the MCU to understand this. You should at least understand Fury in the MCU and S.H.I.E.L.D. and all of that because that's something that should be known going into this. So that you know who the character is and you know pretty much general normal stuff. If I were to find one flaw with this movie, I would think that it felt a little rushed. But even then, the story still gets told as a whole. It doesn't feel like here, here, here, here, here. It's not like here we're doing one thing, we're doing another thing, we're doing another thing, another thing, another thing. Like the X-Men movie from 2001, it is given time to allow stuff to naturally occur. But if it were about 10, maybe 15 minutes longer, I think it would have been cool to see just some more pre-Homeworld stuff. Again, not really needed, just would have been kind of fun. Ben Mendelsohn is great in this, he's so freaking funny. The way they did Mar-Vell was also very good in my opinion. Mar-Vell being one of my favorite characters from the comics. You got the way they did Jude Law's character, Youngrod. I think that's his name? I can never actually remember that character's name, even from the comics. Anyway, this movie is awesome. Go watch it. This movie deserves to be seen. I believe anyone who watches it should very much enjoy it. And anyway, that's going to be all for now guys. Peace out.


When a platelette's for a customer, what do I hope they notice? I think food should be pretty. That doesn't mean it needs to be elegant or fancy, per se. But I think food should look a fashion that makes you want to eat it. We are going to be doing a potluck dinner tonight with, like, Crusade. When we set out to do a potluck, we're really just one to invite people that we want to cook with, much like a dinner party. That's based on people we see out in the world doing great food and want to bring that here. When guests look at a dish for the first time, I hope that they see something that they are, that makes them comfortable, that they're familiar with, but then maybe when they taste it, it's not what they expected.  And I think design plays a pretty significant role in that, because you're setting up the guests' expectations. I think Food and Lakers, say, provided it's done right, it should give off the sense of warmth, like, of actual warmth. By being served in those pieces. And there's an element of rusticity to it, mowing to the hard materials and hearty, heavy construction of, like, Crusade, that it feels substantive. Chef Curtis, what do you love most? Sorry. All right. Chef, what do you love most about your job? Being able to use ingredients from a farm and, honestly, hospitality. I love being able to take care of people. And my most favorite part about my job will be the satisfaction you get when everything works for the day, because, like, you don't get that many. It's exciting. It's a highly, highly charged, stressful job. It's so endlessly engaging and never, ever, ever boring. My whole life, I've had an ADD and bounced around and, oh, I want to do this and this and this. Now being a chef, it just really pulls all of those things together. And food is one of the few things in the world that people can find pleasure in in its inexperience, but it's also something that everyone needs. That, for me, is why I love what I do. I think the opportunity to every day be able to get better and make your business better, your food better, your relationship better, whatever that is, I think that's always something that keeps you coming back for more.


For this episode of brutal battle beer break. I'm going to be getting to know a beer by the lost Abby at a San Marcos, California Haven't done one on the podcast or on this show the YouTube version here So this will be a first for lost Abby stuff. Like I said out of San Marcos, California This is an ale that has hops and Britannia mices. So it should have some funky probably sourish Notes to it, and it is 6.8 percent alcohol by buying a lot of the Beers that are put out by lost Abby are cork and caged. This one obviously as you can see no different See if we can get that satisfying pop out of it More than satisfying actually Love that love that noise just a nice clean pop All right, let's get this in the glass Decent amount of head as I pour it Very white pillowy head to it Oh, let's just see. See lost Abby. It's Saints devotion is the name of the beer This one came with my rare beer the month club. Yes, the Michael Jackson curated rare beer the month club So anyway, I should say Michael Jackson created rare beer the month club not the singer Super clear beer very orange-ish a little yellowish tinge to the orange nice big head like I was saying It looks really nice man. This is so filtered. It's just like super clear. Oh Yeah, it smells sour you get a lot of like lemony Little bit of like a peel note in there on the lemon, but so much like acidic lemon juice Smells a little bit of like a spiciness in there, too Probably coming from the hops a little piney earthy To go along with that Smells a tad bit of stringent Which is kind of odd, but that also may be a little bit of confusion with the acidic nature Anybody who doesn't know about Britannia Macy's I'm assuming a lot of people do at this point because it's become pretty popular It's just a yeast that produces a lot of acidic acid Originally was viewed as being a terrible thing because it created very undesirable Notes in beers, but then people figured out how to use them to their benefit and make good beers like gooses ood broons Sour farmhouse ales things like that Hmm Okay, there's a slight bit of sourness to it. It's really not all that sour honestly I'm getting a significant spiciness. I'm getting that funk. You get this kind of interesting funkiness with Britannia Macy's as well Yeah, the sourness is really just kind of a little bit at the end But when it's when the beer is kind of Trailing off and what it's leaving on my palate is more of like a bitter Rind like lemon rind type flavor with just the slightest bit of sourness And like I was saying, you know, it's got that spiciness. It's got that kind of earthiness from the hops E I mean I'm getting the funk from the Britannia Macy's which is kind of nice. I'm getting a slight bit of acid, but Not all that impressed with this beer to be honest Hmm It's okay. It's an easy drinking beer I'll keep drinking it no problem.  It could be a little on the older side. So therefore a lot of like the hop notes Have kind of died out. You know, maybe it was a more robust beer before but as it is I'm gonna be honest. I'm not really gonna recommend this beer to people E So our first experience on the show with lost Abby. Sorry lost Abby not so hot But if you want to send me beer so we can try on the show feel free to contact me at brutal battle podcast at gmail.com Anyone else if you want to send me some, you know information. We'll say I like this. I don't like that Suggestions for beers that you want to see done. Please do so. Anyway, thanks everyone for joining me too bad This one was kind of a stinker, but join me next time might be something awesome. Go ahead and have yourself a beer


They were in the state police command has arrested persons they say are responsible for shootings in parts of the state parading the suspects at the command headquarters in Abakaleke for state capital. The commission of police Falaie Olaleie explained that his men apprehended 15 suspects including a herbalist who prepares charms for the gunman. Some of the gunmen were also said to have invaded parts of Abakaleke shootings sporadically to enforce they sit at home order by pro-Biafran agitators. Hello hope you enjoyed the news please do subscribe to our youtube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates


If you want me to continue with my work, it is crucial to support the channel via Patreon. Moreover, make sure to subscribe to Bobby's Perspective on Rumble. All the links are in the description box below. May Allah bless you all. All right guys, welcome back to the channel. If you're new Manus Bobby guys, it has been a while since I reacted to vegan content. So today we're going to react to a Muslim versus a vegan discussing that God put animals here for us. For people that see me for the very first time, I have experiences with both fields. First and foremost, I was born a Christian. However, I reverted to Islam a few months ago. Moreover, I used to be a vegan myself.  For four years straight, I followed a vegan diet. I talked about animal rights on my YouTube channel.  But nowadays, thank God I'm eating meat again. The reason being, my health failed completely. After four years on a vegan diet, I destroyed my teeth. I destroyed my digestion. I got depressed, et cetera, et cetera. You name it. The list of side effects was endless. I urge everybody to stay away from a vegan diet.  If you haven't subscribed already to the channel, please do so and check out the links in the description box. And now with no further ado, let's have a look. Coming from a vegan background myself, I'm very well aware of this argument. Most vegans are so invested into the ideology, it is a religion after all, that they want to represent veganism in a beautiful way, of course. They want to tell you that you can be healthy, you can be strong if you're abstaining from meat, which is absolutely ridiculous, of course. And therefore, they are lying. They're pretending that they are healthy and they're pretending lying to themselves as well. I've seen it with so many vegans, man. Many vegans drop out after three or four years. The most hardcore vegans, they make it up to 10 or even 12 years. But to which cause? In the end, their health is shattered. Just check it out. Search on YouTube X Vegan testimony and you will see it where thousands of cases of people that were animal rights activists, they were on the front line standing in front of slaughterhouses demonstrating, however, after a decade of abuse to their own body, they cannot take it any longer. So therefore, this is a non argument. If you see a person at a given time and they tell you, look at me, I am healthy, I'm eating only plants. Yeah, wait it out. There is a good reason, of course, why there has been no civilization whatsoever built upon plants. All human beings ate meat up until this very day. And now out of a sudden veganism pops up and tells you that this is wrong, that we are supposed to eat plants only, even though they will admit as well, that we cannot eat only plants, we need to take certain supplements in order to sustain our vegan diet, starting with vitamin B12, going over vitamin D3, DHA, EPA and whatnot. So they're very well aware that you cannot sustain a vegan diet without supplements. And to be totally honest, with supplements, you cannot either because I do not know one long term vegan that is not a chigan. Yeah, but I'm like a living example of how you don't have to. Yeah, previously you did though. Yes, true. Maybe, yeah, yeah, like survival, you mean? But can you really survive? See, that's just common sense. The Muslim still has common sense and says, yeah, but previously you did though. Exactly right. When you were born, you were drinking mother's milk or formula, which is cow's milk. So you were drinking saturated fats, cholesterol, protein, coming from an animal source. That is what it is. And this is what you build your body upon. If you look at Joey previously, he was very obese, he was pretty fat. And then through veganism, he lost a lot of weight. But what is weight loss? People don't really understand what weight loss is.  Where does it go?  If you're eating in a caloric deficit, you're eating less than you need, your body needs to take that energy from somewhere. So your body going to take it from itself.  This is what dieting is. This is what losing weight is. It's not just evaporating. No, you're using that energy. And therefore, even though you're eating only plants, your body is eating itself. It's eating animal fat, if you will.  That's what your body is doing. And if you've been pretty obese, then yeah, well, you can live quite some years on a vegan diet. But the reality is, as long as you're burning your own fuel, you're burning your own body, you're not living only on plants. And once all the nutritional deposits are used up, you're going to run into nutritional deficiencies, a.k.a. you're going to become an ex-vegan. It's been nearly a decade for me, bro. Yeah. And all the science is hopefully... All the science. Okay, so... Yeah, he's absolutely right. Again, those guys have common sense, man. First and foremost, it's not all the science pointing to a vegan diet. Of course, not just recently. We had a study that showed that red meat is not a cause of heart attacks, disease at all. But that being said, yet again, the brothers have common sense. What they tell you here is, science changes all the time. And that is, of course, true. If you look at science, it is changing and evolving and developing every few years, every few months, to be precise. So if you go a few decades back, you will see doctors recommending cigarettes to patients for weight loss. This is really what they recommend back in the day. And they didn't see anything wrong with it. Or if you look into the recent past years, what kind of medications have been prescribed, and now people are circling back on that as well. The point is, science is changing always. So why would you use this as a measurement for nutrition? And if we're talking about science, which branch of science are we even talking about, I would say that the only useful science when it comes down to humans and nutrition would be anthropology. Because at least anthropology shows us what humans have been eating for the longest time and how the human digestive tract looks like. Okay, so, but we're all vegan here. All of us. And there's massive vegan movement. And there's really good data on vegan diets as well, like the Adventist Health study to vegan vegetarians had a lower mortality rate. Yeah, absolutely fantastic. Yet again, vegans get outraged when you call them religious people, but then they're listing a Adventist Health study. The Adventist Church is a religious institution. The Adventist Church was very interested in pushing cereal onto their young boys. Why? Look it up, Google it yourself, because they as a church were interested in those boys to abstain from masturbation. That's really what it was. They want those boys to lower the testosterone levels, so they masturbate less. And for that, they were feeding them plans. They were getting rid of the animal fats in the morning, such as bacon and eggs, and they're feeding them cereal instead. This is the Adventist Health science. Yeah, wrong, though. He is religious, of course. His religion is veganism. That's what I was saying to Tristan, actually. I don't know if you watched the whole discussion. But I brought up Islam, actually, because Andrew is a Muslim now. And Tristan was saying he doesn't care about cruelty. And I said, well, in Islam, they have a haram and halal. Yeah, and you have to respect animals. Now, we do, because we believe on the Day of Judgment, if you kill an animal unjustly, God will hold you accountable for that. So basically, now we do, but you've got to kill it humane way. And then there's seven animals you can't eat. And then again, he's going to argue that the humane way of killing an animal, that's what he's going to come up with. Halal way. You cut the throat. If you need to, maybe. If you need to, maybe halal way is the best way.  And halal is not no suffering. You know that, right? Have you seen halal slaughter videos? No, vegan halal doesn't mean no suffering. This is not Ahimsa. This is not Buddhism. Halal means permissible and haram means non permissible. That's pretty much what it is. So therefore, yes, in a halal slaughter way, you're reducing pain, you're reducing suffering, but nobody will tell you that there is no suffering at all. You're slaughtering an animal. It is never pretty, never cute. This is not a Disney movie. Slaughtering always implies some sort of suffering. Possible valet. What is this? Have you seen halal slaughter? It's a much higher point. It's got a point. It's got a point where there is obviously that there is companies that valet the policies and that's everywhere around the world. You live here? Yeah, we do live here. Yeah. Okay. So here in the UK, you get chickens. They come from factory farms. 100%. And then they take them from the factory farm and drive them in a truck to a halal slaughterhouse. They halal slaughter them. And they live the life of suffering. You're going to understand that. What I'm saying about halal, as Muslim, if you go and buy chicken at the short store, they come from a factory farm here in the UK, statistically. Some KFCs, they'll do halal chicken, right? And a Muslim might go and go, okay, they've treated this animal with respect. No, complete disrespect. And then they take him to a halal slaughterhouse and killed them. And who knows what goes on in those slaughterhouses, bro? You don't watch. So the point that the vegan makes here is actually accurate just because the animal has been slaughtered in a halal way doesn't mean that the upbringing was good. Most animals do grow up in a factory farm in the UK and then they're shipped to a halal slaughterhouse. That is absolutely accurate. I personally don't have a big issue with that because after all, we have to feed our population. And factory farms are the only way to go for our society. This is the way that it is. However, if you want to make sure that your meat has been properly raised, nobody's stopping you from that either. You can always go to a halal farm if you want to. I agree with some of what you're saying here. But you know, you're advocating for fully banned. That's not what happens. But you're going to understand why animals are not humans as well. So they're not going to have the same treatment as humans. Of course not.  Exactly.  No, there's not. So then why do we do it? Why do we need to do it? And this is where the childish ideology of veganism truly shows. But it's not nice, is it? So why do we do it then? So is everything that we have to do in life supposed to be nice? How would we live like that? It's so impractical. Life starts with birth. Birth is not nice. The woman is blowing up. Then she has to press this baby out of her pelvis. Then the life of the baby starts with crying. Then the whole process of getting onto its feet is just an endless suffering, starting to crawl, standing up, falling down. So as you can see, suffering is always implicit in life. Even for the Buddhists out there, the Buddha said that life is suffering. And that is true to an extent of course. There's always an implicit suffering in everything we do. During this life of flesh and blood, you will always suffer. And the same applies to the natural world. If you look into the natural world, you will see that everything feeds on each other. Even if you would eat only plants, those plants feed on corpses.  Everything becomes part of the cycle. Even those plants extract the nutrients from dead bodies.  From death comes life. It's a reoccurring cycle over and over again. Once you understand that reality, life becomes beautiful. And life becomes real. It's not a Disney movie. It's a non-argument of course. I know that Islam has very important parts about animals that other religions don't have. Which is why I have good conversations with Muslims. Causing animals suffering. Yeah, but Islam has one aspect that other religions don't have either. Which is the slaughterfest. It's forbidden. Now in the time of the Prophet, there were not factories. There's suffering they cause in the dairy. Now dairy is halal by default. You go on the shot. You don't look for halal milk. It's always halal. Because back then, there was no factories for milk. You just take it from the goat or whatever like this. Now there's factories, bro. They impregnate the mother. They take the calf away. That causes the mother suffering because they're taking her baby. They kill the calf if they're a male. And then the cow will go to a non-halal slaughterhouse to be slaughtered. Turn into minced meat. Yeah, and you'll take the milk. You'll fund the industry. All right. But it should really be haram. Sheikh Joy Carpström gives us a fatwa. Eating animals. I don't think that there's anything wrong with that. But the way they do it. It's not happening like the traditional way that you think. Whether you have these animals they respect you. If it was happening traditional. No. Because it's needless. It doesn't have to happen. Why do you think animals have important... What does needless mean? So here's all over the place. First and foremost, it tells you, well, you cannot eat animals because it's not like back in the day. Then the Muslim says, but what if it is like back in the day? What if I go to a farm and I do it like back in the day? Then he tells you, no, we cannot do that either because it is needless. Define needless. If you look into the essential nutrients. Starting with vitamin B12 as I said already in the beginning. Vitamin B12 is an essential nutrient that's almost exclusively found in animal sourced foods such as fish, meat, dairy products and eggs. Second, creatin. Creatin is a molecule found in animal foods. Most of it is stored in your muscles, but significant amounts are also concentrated in your brain. Number three, carnicin. Carnicin is an antioxidant that's concentrated in the muscles and brain of humans and animals. Number four, vitamin D3 in the form called calciferol. This is again only found in animal foods. You cannot find it in plants. Number five, DHA is previously mentioned. This is an essential omega-3 fatty acid and it is only found in animal foods yet again. Number six, heme iron. Of course, many vegans are anemic and heme iron is only found in red meat. Number seven, torene yet again only found in animal foods. You do not have this in plants. Another nutrient that is worth mentioning would be vitamin A of course and a couple of other amino acids as well. So the reason why I'm listing all of those nutrients is that you do not have those nutrients in plants. So what does that mean now? Those nutrients are essential. We need those nutrients, but they are not found in plants. So what to do?  It is never needless if you need this animal for nutrition. You literally need it. I think that we're put in a world to experience life. What does that mean, man? Sorry, guys. I have to interrupt this video every couple of seconds, but really, what does that mean? That animal has been put into life to experience life. Okay, why does God create animals? Why does God create nature where every animal eats another animal? Could it be that this is actually life for the animals? Could that be? No, we're going to pretend it is not. We're going to pretend they're all living on a beautiful lush greenery and nobody's eating each other, right? They're just cuddling each other all day long. There is no death in this world. What are you talking about? They need to. They need to. We don't. They don't. Okay. Animals eat each other, bro.  Lions eat other lioness cubs. We don't eat each other's babies. So we can't look at nature and say that that's ethical. They do it because they have to and cows never harmed anyone. Chickens never harmed anyone. It is about necessity. It is about perfect human health. If you look into modern day diseases, you will see that those modern day diseases came with modernity after the invention of agriculture. You see that we created all kinds of plants that we consume nowadays and it leads to bad health outcomes. However, if you look back into what humans ate prior before they had rampant heart disease and cancers, you will see that they were eating predominantly animal foods. Okay. It's possible to be vegan. You can be a vegan Muslim. No problems. And you're guaranteed. No problems. It's just allow. Because there's no animals being decapitated, no factory farms or something like that. It's the way to minimise the suffering you cause. That's the best way, bro. To minimise. I eat out of factory farms, brother. Because you've got no other option. Yes, you can be vegan. Now, if you go into a store, right, and you go, you get the vegan option, you can guarantee it's allow. Unless it's got alcohol, you just check if some dessert with alcohol, whatever. I don't know if vegan is fully healthy or not at all. It's healthier in many ways. It's healthier. Like you cannot provide any evidence for your claim other than an appeal to authority fellows. You have you seen that one study there? The point of the story is your diet is lacking at least 15 nutrients, 15 essential nutrients for human health. Now, you tell me how this is healthier. It's like a lot of meat, a lot of red meat, a lot of this and that. This isn't healthy. And I know Muslim, Muslim supposed to be, supposed to be look after your health. Are you advocate for health? I'm an animal rights activist. I want animals to have rights so that they don't get exploited and murdered. That's it. I want them to have rights. The most suffering that happens on this earth is for animals killed for food. The most by numbers. The most suffering and killing blood spilt is because of humans lost for animals. We don't need to, bro. But you wouldn't be sustainable in the world.  Here's a good one. Here's a good one for you, bro. Because if we were meant to eat animals, all of us and God would have accounted for population growth. He knows how many people is going to be on the earth. Think, think.  They have to grow soya, oats, corn. Most of the farmland on earth, 83% has been used for animals. Most of the water, if you think of fresh water, people are starving on earth. Man, this argument has been defunct years ago. So the point of the story is many plant-based foods consume much more water than animal foods. For example, almonds. But putting that aside, vegans don't understand that we are not growing plants for animals. Do you really believe that we are growing plants exclusively for animals? That we such a waste. Most of the products, most of the plant products that the animals then eat are waste products from the human plant production. For example, one major contributor is the beer industry. All the residue that is not used for beer production is actually fed to animals. The same applies for the soy production and the same happens in the bread production as well. What do you think this is? Do you really believe the factory animals are munching on grade A plants? Of course not. They're eating waste products, man. People, if you care about people, he said he doesn't care. I speak to him all the time. He doesn't care. You wouldn't say a human's life is worth more than an animal's life? A human's life is worth more than an animal's life. An animal's life is worth more than our taste buds. And we don't have to cause this suffering. We can eat something else. If you know a farmer in Pakistan living in the mountains and all you've got is access to the modern world and things like that and they don't have access to grow plants and things like that, what are they going to eat? I think they would have access to plants in Pakistan for us in northwest Pakistan. Yeah, so this doesn't take into account the environment that a farmer, for example, in Pakistan lives in. Those guys don't know anything about nature. Vegans are completely removed from nature. This is why they're eating such an unnatural diet to begin with. However, if you look into certain terrain, some areas of the land are fantastic for growing plants and other areas are fantastic for pasture, which means those areas are fantastic for animals to graze upon and then you eat the animals. You cannot eat those plants. They're not for human consumption because we're not herbivores. However, sheep, for example, can eat those plants, those weeds. They're eating them and then we're eating them in turn. So for a family on a mountain, it would be so much easier, so much more sustainable to have a bunch of mountain goats that they can use for milk and for meat, maybe some chickens, rather than planting all kinds of crops that don't even yield on their mountaintop. It doesn't make any sense. And even if they would achieve that, even if they would achieve to grow potatoes or rice or whatnot, they would still need to supplement vitamin B12, at least. Full of mountains and that. Also, there's nothing to grow. So in a survival situation, yeah, but they have to eat animals. But I'm not going to go out and talk to my mother or my brother.  So they would be justified eating it. Yeah. But people do crazy things in survival situations, bro. You know what I'm saying? I mean, justifying the strong words in a bad situation. Yeah. I mean, because people kill each other in bad situations all the time, I don't think killing is justified because in a situation where you can think killing, they do it because they're in a bad situation. So I'm saying to you guys here in the UK right now, you don't need to. The most compassionate choice you can make right now in civilization is a vegan choice. And it would be the most hell-out choice. The least amount of suffering and unjustifiable killing. You don't know what's going on in the other end of the hell-out label. But if you look into it, you might be shocked at what you're saying. The way I look at it, yeah, I understand what you're saying. Yeah. Make some good points. Yeah. I don't want to be with you. Yeah. Okay. But the way I look at it, my God gave us a right to eat animals. And he said he created animals for us as humans. And he said, which animals you can eat. And I trust his judgment more than any human. That's the way I'm going. You're not going to listen to me. Some guy on the side of the road. I understand that. Right. The video is long enough. I'm going to cut it off here. And yet again, for the sake of YouTube, this was not the whole video. If you want to check out the whole original video, go to Joey Carpström's channel and you can see it in its full length. That being said, the last point was extremely important here. The Muslim says I'm going to follow what God has revealed and not what a man says. And that is so important.  Okay. And therefore we should not. Why? Just because it's not nice. What is it based upon? Joey Carpström says that he is not religious. As I said already, he is religious of course, because he's indoctrinated into the vegan ideology. But nevertheless, let's say he doesn't follow an Abrahamic faith. He does not believe in God. All right. The question then becomes what is your standpoint on objective morality, on objective truths, on what is right and what is wrong? He derives his moral compass from veganism. Veganism says it is unnecessary to eat animals, even though this is not scientifically accurate. But nevertheless, they point towards certain scriptures, certain studies.  And therefore this becomes their moral compass. It is all right to eat plants. It is unnecessary to eat animals.  This is your doctrine. This is your ideology. However, yet again, speaking to a Muslim, you cannot make haram. What is halal? As he said already, eating animals is permissible for us as Muslims. We cannot eat certain animals like swine, for example, like rats. But other animals are permissible for us. We have the slaughter fest on top of that. We consume meat. It is permissible for us. Islam is very black and white on that subject. Islam shows you what is permissible and what is not permissible. And this is the moral guidance that we go by. As Muslims, but even Christians agree with this or Jews, we do believe in one God. So that God lays out certain laws. This God is the origin of what is right and wrong. Because there is the most loving God, we believe that love originates from him, is coming from him. He is the creator of his creation. We do believe in creationism. You on the other hand, do not believe in God. You believe in random evolution. So if everything evolved randomly, you are random. Your brain is random and there is no right and wrong. They are just opinions. So now if we look into the natural world, we see everything eats each other. But then you say, this is an appeal to nature, fellas. We cannot look into nature. All right, so if we don't look at nature, what do we look at then? You are not a naturalist, you say. But you do not believe in God either. So you do not believe in the natural world. You do not believe in the metaphysical world either. So you believe in humanity, essentially. So this means you follow utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is whatever is good for society. Whatever that means, who determines what is good for society. It's so hilarious. Human rights, they're good for society. We are okay. So personal freedom, you can do what you want. You can open up an OnlyFans, for example. This is your freedom. This falls under utilitarianism. You can do what you want as long as you don't harm anybody. But don't you harm anybody by showing your naked body off? Isn't that harmful? No, of course not. Pornography has absolutely no harm on human beings, does it? No, just do what you will, show off your butt. And if it's not enough on OnlyFans, you can do it in public as well. There is almost no indecent exposure anymore. Women can wear what they want, leggings, hotpants, cleavage out and whatnot. This is your freedom. And this is what you base your ideology upon. Do whatever feels good, right? This is the vegan ideology. Do not hurt anybody and do what feels good to you. And this is why all of those movements go hand in hand. Be it veganism, be it feminism, be it ABCDE, FGEism or what not. All of those movements are godless. All of those movements are atheistic in nature. And all of those movements allegedly are good for humanity. And even from that standpoint, even if you want to take the utilitarian view, why wouldn't you take the perspective of Tristan that you just debated as you said? He is said, he is for human flourishing.  This at least would be somewhat congruent.  Fantastic. Let everybody eat steaks and sushi and everybody is happy after all. But no, that is not your standpoint. You believe that there is no right and wrong, that there are no universal truths, but you want to tell me that your morel is the right one. Why would I buy into your morel? You tell me there is no god, there is no afterlife, animals suffer though, and therefore we should stop suffering. Why would we, if you're all biological machines trying to survive? This is what evolution teaches, right? Survival of the fittest. And we're gonna die. And there is no afterlife at all. There is no heaven and hell. The lights go off. Why wouldn't I just take that cow out of her suffering? Just shoot the damn thing, end it there. Why would it be a cow in the first place? It's such a heavy existence, right? Just kill that thing. Who cares? There is no afterlife. And there is no judgment for my actions anyways. Why do you care for a halal way of slaughter? You do not care, of course. This is all hypocritical.   There is no afterlife. There is no right and wrong. Why would I adapt your ideology? It is so pointless. And that is really what it boils down to, man. The vegan argument has not changed at all in the past decade or so. It is nothing but an appeal to emotion fallacy. I cry when I see animals suffer. Therefore it is bad. There is no right and wrong. There is no good and evil. There is no god. There is no heaven and hell. But I think it is bad. And most people think it is bad. Therefore it must be wrong. Fantastic, man. Go back into the 1940s in Germany. Most Germans believed that a certain group of people should not exist within Germany. Is that right, therefore? Because the majority of the population thought it's right. This is so crazy. If you go back in history and you see what people thought was right, later on became wrong. The same applies to slavery, for example. And this is an argument that the vegans tell you about all the time. And this is when you learn that it does not matter what humans think. It does not matter that the majority of a group thinks something is right or wrong. As believers, we only go by what is right and wrong by god. All right, guys. This is it for today's video. If you liked it, leave it a thumbs up. If you haven't subscribed already, guys, please do so. And if you want to support this channel via Patreon, for example, all the links are in the description box below. Thank you so much for your ongoing support, guys. And as always, may God bless you all. Much love and peace.