If you take the idea of packing your own backpack and packing your own chute, the idea of packing your own chute is that you're planning for a moment of risk with packing your own chute. Packing your own backpack, you're you're planning for a journey and helping you guys think through what is your journey. And mainly, I just wanna talk about what expectations you don't have to throw in here.
Welcome to the Up Your Average podcast, where Keith and Doug give no nonsense advice to level up your life. So buckle up and listen closely to Up Your Average.
Here we are, Doug. Another beautiful Friday in Carmel, Indiana.
I just love summertime. I'm in my happy place. Love, I love air conditioning that allows me to love the outdoors when I walk out. It's just, it's just great.
You know, there's a number of ways that our personalities are different from one another, but you like hot weather though.
I love it. I've got all the windows down. I can't wait to walk outside.
I was talking to our friend Raquel this week, and her body is adapted to that 75 degree air conditioning is just fine for her, and she's gotta put on her parka at 72. Because at 72, I'm like, I'm buying into Connors. Gotta have a fan thing. So definitely, Indianapolis has a certain level of humidity that you don't find in some of the drier heat places. So it's a it's a it's been a real good week this week for that.
Yeah. I I I put mister Stonks out today because we hadn't had him for a while, and it's worthy of putting out there because we were talking about it, and probably the last similar day today was when Facebook went public, and then before that, maybe had to go back a long time to find the zeal on the Wall Street that we have for SpaceX. Oh, there's so much hype on it. And you encouraged me
to print off a I mean, you can't really see this, but I I did. I printed off the SpaceX chart, which there's no chart, but, we'll see what it opens up at. It's 10:00 right now and IPO price of $135 back in the day, if I remember right, Facebook, before it's Meta, Facebook opened up and just you could get a discounted price pretty quickly.
Yeah. You there were literally lawsuits suing the companies that brought it public because they were taking advantage of the investors, so called. But they, yeah, and I remember the lawsuits, but in reality, if they just held on to their overpriced, they did okay. Nobody thinks about shoulda, woulda, coulda when these days happen. Everybody, you know, everyone wants to go to the the fair that comes to town. We're all excited. Yeah. And that's what this is. It's fair for
And investing doesn't have to be exciting. I know this is exciting seeing SpaceX come out. It doesn't have to be exciting. And if you're curious about IPOs and stuff like that, give me a call because I'd love to share a couple opinions that I have about them. I just think it's a different time right now.
There's so much money that's been coming in through private equity and different formats of investing early that the kind of wonder and the wanderlust of an IPO has kinda lost some of its luster.
Yeah. Yeah. Let's do a whole podcast so much.
That'd be fun.
Yeah. So back in 1972, there was a it wouldn't have been a video. It would have been a a small film, an educational, motivational film, Zig Ziglar kind of thing. And oh, you guys probably don't even know who Zig Ziglar is. So Zig Ziglar was a motivational speaker, and Zig Ziglar was a rock star. Go look at some of his YouTubes. He was a lot of fun. He was he's just a cool cat. But the the film was called pack your own shoot. And the idea was personal responsibility.
The idea is you're getting ready to jump out of an airplane, which is a high risk situation. And if you pack your own shoot, then whatever happens after that's on you. It's presenting the idea of personal responsibility.
I don't know where Libby went, but I think Hazel's our most recent one who jumped out of an airplane.
But I bet she didn't pack her
own chute. I'm doubting she packed her
own Yeah. Takes a training to pack her own chute. I met a guy at the Harvest Market. I asked the the coffee barista, what's the scariest thing you've ever done? And she said, I don't like to do scary things.
And the guy behind me, I never met him. And he said, for me, I jumped out on an airplane and my emergency chute came out right away and wrapped around the parachute cord. And he said he got to, like, 500 feet, and he was just spinning it, and he and he just thought, this is the end. And once he started cutting things away, the cord hit a telephone wire and saved his life. He bungeed off the telephone wire, and I was like, holy smokes.
But packing your own chute is the whole point is you should live life and manage your own risk. Right? Like, because because our culture today is, like companies will say, our highest priority is your safety. And that is a lie. It's Their not highest priority is to make a profit.
Yeah. It sounds good. Sounds good. And if your highest priority is your own safety, you're probably not gonna live very well because the safest way takes a lot of adventure out of life. And so pack your own chute kinda jumped into my mind to pack your own backpack. And I just wanted to show you my backpack.
That's a fine backpack. I even like the color in your carabiners.
Yeah. A high end. Actually have to breathe as well. Yeah, you have to take training lessons I did on how to wear this backpack, because there's adjustments on what you have to know where the weight hits your back. I don't know if they knew that. Like there's- No, There's- don't know putting this thing on, and this belt here takes the weight off. It takes the weight off your back and puts it on your core. Man, smart
people designing backpacks, I like it.
Yeah, and so we love Yeah, that's
a pretty pimped out backpack. I mean, I don't know much, but I know that this thing's pretty sweet.
Well, the reason I have that is I was honored to pack my own shoot and to live life back a decade ago, was a decade just about now, hopefully you guys can see this. And my daughter was graduating from college, and she asked me to hike the Inca Trail.
I- Where is that? Tennessee?
Yes, exactly. If you've ever had Andy's Mints, have you had those?
Yeah, those are awesome.
Awesome logo? Yeah. What's on the logo? Oh, I don't know.
I think you're gonna tell me.
It's a bunch of triangles. Mountains on it look like this. That's the Inca Okay. You're hiking. Okay.
I've participated.
Yeah. When you eat an Andy's mitt, think of me next time. And so she said, will you hike the Inca Trail with me? And I didn't do any research. I didn't do anything. I thought, what 22 year old wants their old man to go do something adventurous with them? And I said, yes. And all I did was train. I didn't do a lot of research. So I had to buy I knew I had to have a backpack, and I bought that.
But then this top picture here is me probably getting ready to jump on the airplane the next day. I've got all my stuff spread out in the room, and I had to figure out how to get it in that backpack, because we literally just traveled with the backpack. They weren't in suitcases, so had to get all that stuff in there.
That's What's one thing you didn't need?
Most of it. Let's talk about that. Yeah, most of it I didn't. And it goes back to our key principles of buy wisdom. If I bought a little bit of wisdom, I would have known I could probably use a backpack half that size.
And so Yeah.
Then this bottom picture is the two of us, both of us with our backpacks on. We didn't need our rain gear. And the rain gear, what you needed was rain gear that breathed because mine didn't breathe very well. I had a cheap poncho. I probably lost 10 pounds a day because I sweat unbelievably through that.
Gotta have some pit zips.
Exactly. Yeah. So so when we went to Ireland recently, I didn't make that mistake twice because it rains all the time in Ireland, and I knew you need a breathable raincoat. Werner's about ready
to do five days on a trail somewhere in Colorado, and I don't think his thing's that big. But the one thing I did get him was a really good raincoat. Yeah. That's, it's more important than you know, so it's something that needed to be
in there. That was definitely a necessity. And so with these ideas of pack your own shoot and pack your own backpack, I wanted to give you a word picture to talk about life, like your backpack of life, because your backpack is emptying out a little bit as Warner goes to college. Right?
Yeah. We're trying to fill with other stuff to cure our pain.
Exactly. I understand more than you know. And and so the idea I was thinking is that the mistake I made with this is that I was carrying this thing. And and I was the second. There was a 65 year old couple and I was 55 roughly, and the young people, they weren't having any problems. Those of us like this, the steps were probably on average 12 to 18 inches every, like when you're
going- That's a lot of lunges. Yeah.
And so what I realized if I bought wisdom is I could have given most of this to the porter-
That's right.
For maybe a few dollars a day.
Yeah. And make their day at the same time. Right.
And so this is what they look like. It was traumatizing when I saw them realizing what they were doing, but here's a couple of them. I would say on average, they're probably five foot five. So this picture doesn't show exactly, but like you can see the magnitude of their backpacks, and it's an unfortunate thing they have to do that, but they need the revenue, they need the cash flow for their family. And so I gave them some of my stuff.
I didn't carry my sleeping bag and some other things, but had it to do over, would have carried the sleeping bag. And was a little bit lighter than some of the stuff I had in my backpack. So what my thought was we would talk about a little bit is that each of you have a backpack at this phase in life. It's a backpack of perceptions, expectations, a backpack of your reality, and things that you're taking along. A lot of them might be in your head.
One of the first ones that I did a little research on was the idea, when did it become a thing that parents were expected to pay for their kids' college? I don't know. According to my AI, it happened in the 1980s. Prior to the 1980s, a lot of the expenses for college were covered by the local government, the state government. So the cost of college was much less when I went to college in the early eighties than what would have happened today.
And so there wasn't my parents didn't really have an expectation to pay for my college, but the parents from the 1980s and on that maybe have been in middle class America, I'd say the lower income people didn't never have that expectation. The middle income people, that expectation has been thrown on. On top of that, the middle since those same years, the middle income people have been thrown on the idea we need to have two incomes. And we've talked about this in the past, nineteen sixties, when the Department of Agriculture started publishing the cost of having children, and their cost was, I think it's 350,000, I'm ballparking it, you can Google what's wrong in this, but 350,000 per child from one to 17. And so what started happening-
That's important, from one to 17, because like, my good friend was on a podcast the other day, and he's got a whole bunch of kids, more than anybody else I know. And he said, yeah, it was no problem to say, yeah, you should have a bunch of kids when they were all eating peanut butter and jelly and everything was scalable. And then you get into your twenties and it's not scalable anymore.
Well, that's, that's kind of what I wanna talk about is how you make it scalable because some of that goes to
packing Good your own luck. Right.
You're on your own chute because if you take the idea of packing your own backpack and packing your own chute, the idea of packing your own chute is that you're planning for a moment of risk with packing your own chute. Packing your own backpack, you're you're planning for a journey and helping you guys think through what is your journey. And mainly, I just wanna talk about what expectations you don't have to throw in here because I think you'll throw some stuff in here. I haven't really even looked what's in here. So if I grab something out of here, like this is in my backpack right here.
I'm not exactly sure
what that Like a box of Altoids or something in there.
There probably is. Here's the I found this one when I was looking around. There's a headlamp. These have been in there. I didn't ever unpack them. And so, I don't know what this is. Medical gift? I guess you would want that.
Yeah. Just in case you I don't know
if this is gonna do you any good, Keith. Yeah. The original anti chafe. What happens in our life? And and mainly I wanted to talk about the psychology of all this because when you live in expectations and you don't even know how they were thrust upon you, I think, like, when this backpack would get heavy, it would get heavy, and you would get tired.
You'd probably get irritable. And as you go through life, those burdens can really increase. And there's really ways to take the weight off of this. There's you can hire boarders or porters. I'm sorry. It's not can hire boarders too, but porters to take the weight off. And that's where I wanted to go because there is such a battle right here how to make your financial life correlate with your core principles in life.
Well, I mean, you have to start with the core principles, and how many people slow down long enough to ask themselves, What are my core principles? What am I all about? That's a pretty scary question to ask.
I would say that's probably a good place for us to jump into it today, because we can, we have the microphone, we can do more of these on this topic as we go forward. But when you think about core principles, when you and Caroline are thinking, you know, when we celebrate our fiftieth anniversary, what are the things we want to talk about?
Yeah. And one of our core principles, this sounds maybe kind of irresponsible, one of our core principles is fun. Okay. Yeah. And
so let's say you're working at the local grocery store and you two are making it, like paying your rent, everything.
Yeah. Was I was making less than working at the local grocery store when
I started in So this
So I would have been rich
if I'd still been working at the local grocery stores. Yeah. So fun is not a cool principle that requires money. Right? No. Yeah. And No. It's an attitude thing. Our culture has evolved to that, though. I think if particularly if you live on the North Side Of Indianapolis around here anywhere, your fun is maybe a couple hiking vacations that you Like, you've just your parents maybe had some success and you came to expect that.
That's what I should do for my kids. Yeah. That's fair. Yeah. So what would you tell them are some fun things they could do where they don't have to
pay out a penny? Well, on, one of our core areas was fun, and we did spend money on this, but we'd go out to Chili's on Friday night, like Chili's restaurant. Yeah. And that was something we looked forward to, we had a lot of fun doing it, we had fun sharing the chips and salsa, and we got to catch up on our weeks and talk about the future and dream about the future, and that was a lot of fun, it didn't cost a lot of money.
We didn't when we were in that same vein, we didn't we decided to not have cable TV to save money.
Oh, yeah. Old Jeff Shreve, man. He he beat that into me. We didn't he was up there on top of the roof asking me, do I need to tilt it more to the left or to the right? So yeah.
I get that. Yeah. So so if I wanna I like to watch sports then. So what we would do is I think regular, I dunno if it was weekly or not, we would go to grindstone church.
Oh, okay. That's where
we had fun in young So fun, fun really. I don't know why that wouldn't be anybody's core principle in life. Like, why, like even if you're 85 or 90 years old, there's ways you can have fun. I was telling the story about my dad teasing Connie when he was retired, and he just had a blast. I came in and his shoulders were jumping up and down. And so fun is a real it's a real core principle.
It's worked for us.
Yeah. Anything else that you would tell a young couple, like what you should think about?
My father-in-law gave me some of the best advice when I asked him if I could marry his daughter, and he said a core principle is communication, just being able to talk together. And so that's a core principle for us. And then co recreation's a big one. We like to find things that we can do together.
Your family's done a lot of bike riding on that.
We've done a lot of bike riding, we don't do so much of that anymore. But, yeah, Caroline and I both love to water ski. And, there's been years where we didn't have a boat, and we had one ski that we both shared, but we had a lot of fun doing it. And, I would say that's just so important, and especially in a marriage, to find something that you like to do together. My son Spencer, he's really gotten into golfing, and I don't golf.
But I look forward to just riding in the cart with him So and watching him even if you're not on the same level, you you can cheer someone on on what gets them excited.
That's absolutely right. There's there's these brain locks or traps that you can get into. So so if you say you lived in Carmel, Indiana, and you you had beat the system, you you were able to do it. But there's a good chance that, say, your kids wouldn't be able to do it because of the cost of living here. And so so they they could do it, but it's gonna bring stuff in their backpack that they've never really thought about because they just assumed it.
But there's a brain hack that you could do with your AI. You could say, I wanna live with my core principles and have as much free time as I can have and be able to get to Carmel as frequently as I want, where should I live that I can cut the overall cost? Maybe we could live with one income. Where could I live as a family and make that economically more viable for me?
Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Because I mean, where I dream of moving to someday, it's the exact opposite of Carmel. And I love Carmel. Right. I love living here.
But Right. Well, and I'm only picking on Carmel because that's where we're sitting. But say you're in New York City, You you have you have put stuff in your backpack by living in New York City that gets really heavy. You and I were having social time in New York City with your friends, I'm forgetting his name. With Larry? Larry. And his friend was an actor. Do you remember that conversation? And he had to be pushed at 50, don't you think? He was a little older.
Yeah. Yeah. And he was explaining his dynamics of trying to live in New York City.
Yeah.
And I was just it was late at night anyway, but I was getting exhausted thinking about his his I was thinking I was like, because we do this and you could do the math without really doing it. And just thinking of his expectations and the reality of that. And and so there are dials
Pretty tough.
To turn. But but your number one dial in in the thing that's gonna be in your backpack and you have control over it is the cost of your housing. And the closer you get in proximity to a major city, it's absolutely gonna be more expensive. And so that's that's a variable you have control over. You just have to decide whether I really want to have control or if it's not, if it's not negotiable, if I'm gonna live in Carmel, it's not negotiable.
Yeah. If this where the adventure is, you gotta live there.
That's that you put that the stuff that you have to have, it's going in there. Right? Yeah. So you just have to decide your priorities. I don't I don't really have an opinion of your priorities. Right?
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. And and for us, it it was children, and you can have as many children as you want. It can fit in here as a high priority because I can assure you there I didn't check it out, but I can assure you that the higher your income is, I would bet the fewer children you have in general. Like if you're just looking at the demographic thing in America, so if the number of children go down with the higher income, it tells you something you might want to think about. Yeah.
I'll double check that data, but I'm in my thoughts, it seems like it's probably true. It makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. So children are a high priority for us, and they didn't cost us, I can assure you from one to 17, they did not cost us $300,000 a piece. We did not spend $1,500,000 raising kids.
Yeah. You were heading to Sam's Club, getting that big jumbo peanut butter. Stacking it up.
Yeah. The only person that didn't didn't get hand me downs was Caleb. It would have been I don't know how to express that, but, yeah, there was a lot of hand me downs. And and the the Department of Agriculture's math, the biggest expense in their calculation is housing costs. So your your housing costs, it does not go up.
If I I would bet, and it is again my opinion, that a young married couple today has the house before they have the kids. Yeah. Probably. So the housing cost isn't going up unless they just they're they're my my daughter and son-in-law bought four bedroom house. Maybe they were planning on having kids, but they already have it before they have any children. Right? Yeah.
That's why they make bunk beds. You know? You can just squeeze them all in there.
How many bunk beds did you guys have? Well, two sets. Yeah. Now I I don't know that I was in there. Were they in the same room, or do they have separate rooms for those? Or
Oh, no. We paired the boys up. So there was
one bunk bed in one room and one bunk bed in another? Yeah. We had a season where both bunk beds were in the same room. It was traumatizing to all.
Yeah. That that sounds like camp.
It was it was mixed martial arts in camp. Yeah. Yeah.
That's great.
It was it was fun times. The the packing your own backpack thing, there are burdens that get in there that you didn't know. There's things that could take along. And some of that you can think through your own life, like maybe you haven't prioritized. I think that's more often than not what
I'm Can I share one that I would take out personally? Yeah. Yeah. That, you know, I'm old, but when I was young enough to carry this thing with strength and muscle, one expectation that I'd definitely take out of here that I didn't even know was a struggle was wanting to be liked. And this desire to want to be liked, who doesn't like to be liked?
But just understanding that you're probably not for everybody, and that's okay. And if you're standing for something, it could be an opinion or something that a core belief, it doesn't mean that everybody else is going to share it. And I don't have to try and convince somebody to share it. And so when they don't like me for this or that or the other, you can carry that around and it's really heavy, because you'll try and please everybody. And I just encourage you that if you like to be liked, just know that you're enough and you don't have to carry that around much longer.
Boy,
really appreciate you mentioning that because I did carry that burden around. And I never knew how heavy it was until I pretty much let it go. And I had a conversation with a friend this week that gave me some feedback. Yeah. Criticism. And if you want to be liked, criticism creates a lot of unnecessary stress for you because you feel like you gotta justify, rationalize, argue your point of view. Maybe you're wrong.
Yeah. Right? Yeah. You can change. That's another thing, is you can be wrong and change. Throw that thing out.
Yeah, this person that was giving me feedback, it was harsh feedback. They were coming at me aggressively. And they said, You know what I like about us, Keith, is I can just be straight with you and you take it. That's good. And I only that I didn't know that when I was Caleb's age.
If if somebody would have came at me like that when I was Caleb's age, I literally would have lost sleep about it. Mhmm. But when I'm my age and I know how many mistakes and how many times I've been wrong, if somebody that's further down the road than me gives me feedback, and I think about it, oh, that makes sense. I didn't think of it that way. It's gift they've given you to lighten your load. Yeah. Yeah. Wisdom does that for you. Yeah.
I think going back to allowing someone else to maybe carry your load is, you know, think about my parents and their lives and the things they've experienced and I've watched them go through and the decisions they've made. You can learn a lot about life by just watching someone else with some experience and picking up on their wisdom. You might not be buying a counseling session from anybody, but you're learning through experience of someone else's life. And you might say to yourself, you know what? I I think I would do things different, or I think, you know what?
I hope I would emulate that as well and and do it the way that they did it.
Well, I think and this is just a perception. I think a lot of people younger than me have grown up with the Home Depot, do it yourself stuff. And so that that that mindset that I need to fix everything in my house or fix everything or I can YouTube it, it subtly fills your backpack up with things that you probably don't need to be involved with.
Yeah. You're probably not that good at it or you just don't really care.
Yeah. And and part of that, we heard we heard our friend Jim Bowen speak last week, and I and I'm just going from He's
the first trust guy. Right?
CEO. And he said something that I go, oh, I learned of that, but I never really saw the central point of it. But he said it very succinctly. He said, you know you've learned to lead better when a memo comes across your desk for a signature and you read it and it goes and you go, I could have done that better, and you sign it and pass it on because it's not your job. Right.
And the more you can take that into your life, the more you're gonna lighten your load, because you can focus on the things that you can do, but those things may take away from the things that are a high priority for you. Yeah. Us, family has been a high priority. It has consumed some of our wealth, it's consumed a lot of our time, it's consumed a lot of our energy, but we don't look at it as a consumption, we look at it as living. Yeah.
Because we want that in our backpack, right? I put this up here,
this is a fanny pack because fanny packs catch such a This would be Amanda's fanny pack.
Is that right?
I just want to point that out.
Yeah. Yeah.
It's a nice sage green.
And I put that there because a fanny pack, we'll say for Amanda carrying around, we wouldn't ever carry that. Nothing against you if you are, but
For our European audience. Yes.
But a fanny pack is like the picture of minimalism. And really all we're talking about is being prepared and not necessarily minimalism because there's a difference between being a minimalist and I think what we're saying.
Good, good, good call there.
You can you can carry what you want to carry, or you can be a minimalist. Like, you you can live as inexpensively as you want.
Yeah. There's the badge of honor with being a yeah. We're not talking about that. No. No.
Yeah. Yeah. Know. But but as I mature, I am getting rid of things, but I'm still not a minimalist. I'll still have some things. But That's a good point. Really, I'd say your takeaway today from this conversation is prepare the first picture I showed you with all the stuff I was putting in the backpack to get that picture, that came after a lot of thought. I had to decide what I was gonna take. And then by doing that, then I'd say what you can do is after you go take that hike, put all
that back on the floor
and go, which should I left out? And there's a lot of things you get left out. And and I think that as you leave those things out, it frees up cash flow, frees up peace of mind and opportunity to have a lot more fun than spending more time in the office. Yeah. Well, thanks for hanging out, Doug. This was just kind of a random conversation that we talked about yesterday. I really enjoyed it.
Have a killer day, everybody.