Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated providing you with the knowledge, skills,

insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan

for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets. I'm your host. Today on the

podcast, I want to share with you some ideas related to the idea of cost. I want to explain to you why cost is a feature and not a bug.

Now, one thing I find interesting about having talked about money for a very long time and having done most of it on the record is I am continually forced to confront my own ideas and ask myself the

question of, is this thing that I believe true or not? Is this thing that I have said still true

or not true? In the early days of radical personal finance, I was a pretty hardcore advocate of frugality and frankly, fairly extreme forms of frugality. Really hardcore on, I remember one of the podcasts that I was just so excited to do was probably like episode three or something.

When I went through dozens, perhaps even hundreds of ways to

save money on everything in your life.

Over the years, I have confronted this idea many, many times.

The truth that frugality seems to be a pathway to wealth.

And yet, as I've gone on, I have seen that frugality sometimes

does not work out. And I have had to abandon many of my own frugal ways in exchange for a

different philosophy, a different mindset related to money. And I'm sure that that's not been invisible to you. I've talked

about this straightforwardly. For example, I do believe that frugality is basically universally true

as long as we apply the lens of scale to the questions of frugality. But over the past

couple of years, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this statement

that cost is a feature and not a bug. And that's coming from someone who generally doesn't

have that many luxury consumption predilections. Like, I'm not prone to to go after a lot of

luxury stuff. I enjoy it. No question. I think we all do. But I don't chase luxury. I'm a fairly simple man. But I've come to believe that cost is actually a feature and not a bug. And let me explain to you the specific example that really opened this up to me. And it has to do with the classic debate

of Apple versus Android. Now, I've never really been an Apple fanboy. And I say that as somebody

who works daily on three or four different Apple devices and has probably a dozen or so of them, maybe more by the

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