Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with 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 Sheetz, I am your host, and today on the show I'm going to tell you why I defend billionaires, why I systematically defend intentionally billionaires.

In a recent series of shows I've been analyzing some of the pro-publica journalism, where the journalists of pro-publica have been analyzing the confidential tax records of some of the wealthiest US Americans.

In the most recent episode I talked about their article on Peter Teal, and I have systematically defended some of the billionaires in these articles including Peter Teal.

And I want to tell you why I do that, because in some ways it's become more culturally acceptable to be opposed to billionaires than it is to defend billionaires.

But I want to tell you why I intentionally choose to defend billionaires even though I'm not one of them yet.

The first principle is something that I live by, or try to live by, and it is this, always defend and affirm the things that you want more of in your life.

If you want something that you don't have yet, you should systematically stand up for it, call it out, and affirm it.

I think of this with my own children. My goal, my ambition, is to spend three or four or five times more of my time systematically affirming my children for the things that they do well, for the things that they're really good at as compared to the time that I spend criticizing them,

or correcting them for things that they're not doing well. If I'm working with a friend, I want to spend more of my time encouraging my friend for the things that he or she does well, versus tearing them down and trying to correct them for the things that they're not doing well.

And I believe that supplies at every level of society. Some of the most bitter people that you'll find are those who spend all of their time criticizing something that they object to.

They're just often unpleasant people. And in my opinion, the reason they're unpleasant is they spend all their time focusing on the things that they don't want in their life as compared to the things that they do want.

And I have found for me that when I spend a lot of time talking about the things that I do want, then I tend to experience more of those.

So if I see somebody behaving in a way that is kind, I want to do my very best to notice it, and at least acknowledge it to myself that I really like how kind that person is behaving.

And if possible, call it out to them. I really appreciate, you know, Mr. or Mrs. so-and-so, I really appreciate how kind you were in this situation.

It encouraged me, or how patient you are. I want to call out those things that I appreciate and that I want more of in my life and in the world.

How does this relate to wealth? Well, very specifically, I want more wealth. I want more wealth in my life.

I want more wealth in your life, and I want more wealth in the world around. I really do.

I genuinely hope ten years from now that I have ten times as much wealth as I have today.

I want that for me. I want that for you, and I want that for every single one of our neighbors.

You and I are living in a world that is infinitely wealthier and infinitely better than the world of our parents 50 years ago, or the world of our grandparents 75 years ago, or our previous generations a century or two ago.

You and I don't have any of the problems that some of our forebears wrestled with in their poverty, and I'm grateful for that.

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