T.G.I.F. Friday: Volume 24
Welcome to “Thank God I’m FI” Friday, Volume #24!
Here are some things I really like and that you might too.
Finance Articles
How $50,000 in Student Loans Affects the Path to Wealth (We Want Guac) – “The powers-that-be have dealt you a shit hand that you didn’t deserve. Thankfully, that doesn’t need to keep you down for long on your own path to wealth.”
Money or Wealth (Nat Eliason) – “Could some of your time that you’re spending outside of money generating work be put towards wealth generating work?
Video
Take a quick aerial ride through beautiful Castle Valley Utah with one of those insane-asylum wingsuiter dudes. Better him than me but I love to watch.
Who’s Inspired Me
Lisa Nichols.
In the mid 1990’s Nichols was a single mother on government assistance. One day she went to buy diapers and realized she didn’t have enough money. After using cloth as a substitute she promised her son that she would never be so broke again that she wouldn’t be able to provide for him. She said “I felt rock bottom, and I realized, ‘I have to do something’. I have to be my own rescue. No one’s going to rescue me.”
She eventually found a job and started saving money. After gaining interest in and attending conferences about entrepreneurship, she founded Motivating the Masses, a massive training resource for personal and professional development that went public in 2013. Now she’s a millionaire and an in demand motivational speaker who’s inspired millions through her talks and her seven best-selling books. Truly inspirational.
Here’s her episode of Inside Quest which was Tom Bilyeu’s old show before he started Impact Theory.
What I’m Grateful For
My Yamaha FG-401 acoustic guitar. She’s the first guitar I ever bought and turned 30 this year. I learned the basics on her and still use her all the time.
Lyrically Speaking
Step right up, step right up, step right up,
Everyone’s a winner, bargains galore
That’s right, you too can be the proud owner
From “Step Right Up“, by Tom Waits
Those three lines above are the opening shots to the most hip and swinging ode to advertising and shady deals ever written. Waits, who describes his own voice as “the sand in the sandwich”, goes on to rumble through five minutes of every advertising cliche ever created, along with his usual mix of vaudeville, humor, and assorted sundries from the underbelly of American life.
His vocal phrasings and flow in this song are astounding, and you can’t help but shake your hips as you’re being lied to. When Waits wails “How do we do it? How do we do it? Volume! Volume!”, I can picture executives from Walmart and Amazon shaking their hips in their overpriced suits. It works after all.
Miscellaneous
How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat – “The sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead”
An electronic music pioneer races to capture the vanishing sounds of the wild – “Bernie Krause is recording glaciers’ groans and ravens’ wingbeats before nature’s music changes forever”
The case against American truck bloat – “The main reason for the jump in deaths is the increasing proportion of SUVs and trucks on the roads”
Just wanted to say that I always find something interesting in your TGIF posts. Thanks for doing them.
Thank you for reading – I’m into lots of stuff and I enjoy sharing interesting finds!
here’s to tom waits! small change is my favorite album and you might want to know the cover photo is likely elvira, mistress of the dark. mule variations is also a masterpiece. i even had the beginnings of a post written about jitterbug boy from small change where he describes all the stuff he’s done and now he’s holding up this lamp post.
i enjoyed that link for the money vs. wealth discussion. over the years i’ve spent thousands of hours of my free time on my passion project to be a better investor. it’s really paying off and this year our gains are more than twice what we ever made from our w-2 wages from our combined jobs in a year. it was worth the effort.
Small change is such a classic, I used to listen to that CD after I got home drunk from partying in my 20’s and pretend I was one of the characters. I never got rained on by my own .38
And the money vs wealth thing is a great concept. Congrats to you and the better half, y’all are killing it
Always interesting and informative Dave!
I particularly enjoyed the post on American trucks. I had no idea of the linkage between pedestrian deaths and trucks / SUVs getting bigger.
The SUV and truck “size arms race” got out of hand years ago and continues to get more out of hand. We might as well let everyone buy armored tanks, and just kill all pedestrians.
Impressive guitar life 😉
And that’s an interesting point about the truck/SUV bloat. I wonder if the trend continues and vehicle sizes all grow so that there is less variance between car sizes on the road, if death rates will go down..?
Well a lot of the concern is the fact that trucks and SUV tend to kill pedestrians much more when they strike them than a normal car, so if everyone had them more pedestrians will die. As for vehicle on vehicle crashes, who knows. Logic would say that heavier vehicles with more mass colliding just isn’t good.
I recently went down a food documentary rabbit hole (That Sugar Movie, Sugar Coated, Forks Over Knives, The Magic Pill, etc). So unfortunate how the food industry influences food and nutrition science… but thankful we are catching on. And a great reminder to follow the science, not necessarily the mainstream. Learning about The China Study has been one of my favorite discoveries. Thanks for sharing!
I’ve seen most of those but thanks for a few extra references. It’s so sad how the public has been lied to, yet nutrition science is so complex and there are still so many unknowns it’s really hard to know what to believe.