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What's going on everybody? We're almost at the end of the month of December. I should probably be careful phrasing that, giving all the shit going on in the world, not the end of the world. We're at the end of December, getting ready to be 2025 and man, 2024 has been a cool year. There is some really cool stuff for 2025 that I am going to wait till it's a little bit closer before I talk about it because I hate talking about stuff and then it doesn't end up happening stuff. Not who I want to be. So really cool stuff on the horizon. I've already recorded next Friday's episode. We did an Andy vs. Michael Christmas edition, so that's a gift you can unwrap after Christmas and that takes us through 2024. So this will be the last full auto Friday I do for the year. Wild that we're here. Before I get into that, let's talk about Spartan Forge. If you're a fan of the podcast, you have heard me talking about them for the last two two months. This is such a cool brand. I would point you towards the episode I did with Bill Thompson, their founder. Traditionally this is in the hunting space and for those of you who are on video, I'm kind of. Well, not kind of. I'm on their website right now and you can see that this has the same tools that a lot of traditional hunting apps have, but it has a lot more too. And I'll start you over on the left hand side of the screen here. The LIDAR and UAV mapping the deer movement and prediction. The in app pin sharing essentially a blue force tracker. If you go into the desktop model there is there's an AI that you can talk to and ask it questions for things that you may not know the answer to because maybe you have a limited hunting area, hunting time or limited access to a mentor. It offers the same things of those traditional hunting apps, but a lot more. I have been using this. I use this today actually. I flew down to Montana Knife company and picked up some knives and the screen I'm looking at now shows the difference between topography. This is probably a satellite or maybe even uav. And on the right is the lidar. It gives you the ability to see the terrain underneath the foliage which when you're looking for flat level areas in a helicopter, it's pretty important. Highly recommend you head over to spartanforge AI if you're on your desktop or just go to the app store if you're on your phone and check them out. It is well worth the money. It's an awesome brand and I'm going to be doing some work with them into 2025. So this is not going to be the last time you're going to hear about this on that front. The last time you're going to be hearing about things. The last time you're going to be hearing about me answering Q And a in 2024 is right now. Let's go. Okay, I got the red smoke. Sun run north and south. West of the smoke. West of the smoke. Okay, copy. West of the smoke. I'm looking at danger. Oh wait a minute baby, give it to me. I mean it. Cleared hot campaign cleared hot Question numero uno for the last full auto Friday of the year. Dear Andy, Love the show. I listen regularly. I am a recent college graduate majoring in finance and statistics and I am really struggling. I'm 23 and I live in Florida and I have a job where I make about 30k a year in the accounting department. This job really sucks both with the people, the work and the environment. But I will be laid off in the new year. They have already told me along with 250 plus other people. I took this job so I can stay close to home and help take care of a complex situation. With my grandmother I have been neglecting physical fitness on a regular basis. I am not afraid of the work but I definitely need guidance. I would love to start my own business. I was wondering if you could share some tips on how you focus, like really focus on the task at hand. Okay, this is a short email but there's actually one a lot here. I am going to start with the recent college graduate making $30,000 a year. So what is that per month? That's less than $3,000 per month. Let's call it back of the envelope math. $2,500 a month and you graduated majoring in finance and statistics. I never went to college. I have zero seconds of higher education, so I don't have a specialized degree. Obviously having never gone to a place that gives you a degree if you earn it. So I can't speak from a first person perspective on experience on this, but $30,000 a year, $2,500 a month, fuck that job. Okay, if geographically you need to stay here because of your grandmother in that situation, let's use that as the pin in the ground. You need to do that. I would right now, knowing that you're going to let go, go find another job. I feel like it shouldn't be that hard for you to find another job that at least meets this $30,000 per year threshold, which maybe that's your number for survival where you live. The baristas that we have at the coffee shop are making more than that. Maybe they're working more hours, but with tips, they're 100% making more than that per year. My point in saying that is there are jobs out there where at a minimum, you said it sucks with the people, the work and the environment. You can replace those three things and maybe this won't be your forever job, but it's gonna get you out of the environment that you don't like. Working with the people that you don't wanna be with, doing the work that it doesn't sound like you necessarily enjoy. So why commit to being in that hole any longer than you need to be proactive and go find a different job? I mean, obviously it said you're gonna get laid off after the new year, so not that much time until that happens. But let's start with meeting your baseline criteria for survival. Find another job and use $30,000 as that template and foundation. Now, what might happen is you might have to work outside of the field that you went to school for. Who cares? If that's what you need to do right now and you are passionate about those things, you could work your way back into that later on. Let's do survival first and then thriving a little bit later on. Meet the baseline criteria. You're neglecting physical fitness on a regular basis. We'll get to that in a minute. And you want to start your own business. Okay, I'm going to come back to those two things because I would never try to talk somebody out of wanting to start their own business or working for themselves. I don't think that you are in a place right now, given what you have already described, where that is a viable option. Survival first and Then use your off time to figure out what business that you would want to start. And start your side hustle while you're working for somebody else. And I don't mean being paid by somebody else to work on your side hustle. Fill the roles and responsibilities of that job and in your off time, develop what it is you have going on. Right? Do not take a job for somebody else where they're paying you to work on your own shit. That is, as somebody who is an employer, incredibly frustrating. It happens at times and I understand why people do it. But don't be that guy. How to focus. The crux of this tips on how to focus, like really focus on the task at hand. Okay, you're gonna sit down with yourself. You're gonna get two things. I have them both right in front of me right here. Get off the charger. We have our anxiety rectangle known as our phone. And we have a notebook with a pen or a pencil. So I guess it would be three things. And if you're a fan of coffee, you would have four. A little latte for you. The first thing you're going to do is turn this thing off. And for those of you that are audio only, I'm holding up my phone. You're going to throw this fucking thing as far away from you as humanly possible. You're going to turn off all of your notifications on all of your devices. You're going to go into a room that doesn't have a television that's on. You're going to isolate yourself for a little bit. Why? Well, one of the main things you need to do when you're going to try to focus is remove distractions. So we're going to get rid of those artificial and voluntary distractions. Nobody forces you to turn your phone on. Nobody forces you to check it. Nobody forces you to keep the alerts on. You can turn all of those off whenever you want to. Pen and paper. What are we going to do with this? Well, we're going to determine exactly what the task at hand is. We are going to make a list and maybe start with not trying to list them in order, but let's list. And these are all, excuse me, hypotheticals, depending on the person. Maybe it could be 1 through 5, maybe it's 1 through 10. What are your goals? Give me a short term goal, so something near term and something call that within 12 months or maybe even within six or one of each. Then a 3, 5 and 10 and layer it in there, you know, and maybe here's Some examples that you could put on here just based off of your email. Stay geographically close to your grandmother. Have a job that provides a minimum income of $30,000. Participate in physical fitness or physical activity. I'm gonna put that one on there for you. Cause you admitted you're neglecting it. Start your own business. Buy a car, relationship, whatever it could be. It could be personal, professional, monetary, economic, housing. Fill in the blank. Once we have those, then let's rack and stack that. Because the first thing that I do for myself that helps when allocating my focus is determining exactly what I need to be focusing on. Because if you don't narrow it down, you're going to be cutting your focus across 80 things and you're going to do, at best, a mediocre or moderate job across all of them. I can't do 10 things well. An argument could be made that I can't do anything well, and I would be the one actually making that argument. But if you give me one thing to focus on, I can at least put the lion's share of my attention directly on that. So we're going to take our list and we're going to look at it. Rack and stack. What is the most important? Why are we going to do that? So we can focus on those things. And what I'll say is this. There's an opportunity here for you to determine whether or not your main focus is actually that. If you determine your number one bullet point that you want to focus on and you remove yourself out of this environment where the distractions, you're not going out, and you just, you put the shades down on your windows and isolate yourself in a place free of distractions where you can actually dedicate the time to work. If you're trying to do that and you're working on your number one item, but you keep thinking back on like the number four item or five, whatever number it may be, there's a chance that that might be more important than what it is that you are actually working on. It's really hard to stay focused when you are ignoring things in your life because they will have a way of picking up their little head. And it's like a little ice pick. They pull away your focus and attention. So if that happens, sit with that for a minute and try to figure out why that is happening. And maybe you should solve that issue before you can really dedicate your focus to something else. That is how I do it for myself. I have a podcast studio. The viewer can only see what's directly behind Me, the room is. This is a wild guess. You're 15 by 30. There's the curtains. I like the color blue, but they also have the ability to dampen acoustically both inside and outside. The windows that are the viewer can't see, there's three of them that go out to an alleyway, looking kind of at a police station. But I lower those down. And when I really want to get into some dialed in detailed work, what I'll do is I'll come into the studio. The lights obviously are on, but I close out the window shades. I turn off my phone. And oftentimes something I'll do that will help me is I'll set a timer. And what I'm doing is I'm making an agreement with myself to work exclusively on one thing, absent distractions. And it sucks. Here's a. Oh, man, this is so seductive. If you're working on a laptop, it's so easy to leave your notifications on. It's so easy to just let me just click over onto my email real fast. Just let me check to make sure something came in. You don't need to check your email for an hour, right? If somebody's dying, they're not going to send you an email, probably. Unless they're dying in some really fucked up way. But don't fall into those traps. I turn the notifications off as much as I want to click on the Internet browser. Unless I'm doing something that requires research, I leave it off. As an example, right now I'm finishing up the last chapter of the book that I wrote, getting ready to send it off. So the. What's it called? The forward can be written. And I'm working on my computer. I'm working in Microsoft Word. I tell you what, that Internet browser is one icon over and I catch myself checking it for no goddamn reason other than it's right there and I'm distracting myself. So you have to remove those distractions, or at least I do. And I find that when I do those things, I am able to work much more deeply. I will set the timer for 30, 45 or 60 minutes, and that's it. Because if I go past that, my bell curve of productivity goes over the other side. But what I can do is usually 45 minutes is a sweet spot for me. 45 minutes, close the laptop up. Am I using it? Check my email, check my phone, whatever it is, go get a coffee, walk two blocks down the street, get a coffee. It really, really helps me have precise focus and then take a breath Let the ropes off a little bit, right? Let the reins out and then come back in. I can get so much more done in 45 minutes of directed focus than I can in probably five hours of absentminded just dicking off between my phone and oh, I need to look at this video, which I don't. And, oh, I should probably go on Instagram, which I shouldn't. It's ridiculous how distracted we all are. So recognize them, identify them, and then get yourself away from those things and then take a structured approach to tacking your goals. That is what I would recommend. Also, structure your day. Have a set time that you're going to get up, and if you get up on that set time, have something that you're going to do. Don't neglect yourself, right? You're not going to be able to care for anybody else if you can't care for yourself. So get up early and just go for a walk. Start there, Start physical activity for yourself and work your way back into a physical conditioning routine. I guarantee you the muscles above your neck will benefit far more from it than the ones below. That's all I got for question one. All right, Andy, I've never heard you give an answer that wasn't thoughtful and considerate on Fallout of Friday. And I'm at a crossroads. So here it goes. My wife and I are expecting our fifth child in a few months. You, sir, and your wife are out of your goddamn minds. We ran some tests and they came back positive for the same genetic condition my son has. I am doing my best to keep strong, even though it really hurts. I know it hurts my wife even more. And frankly, I'm not the best at being supportive, mainly because I tend to not know what to say, which isn't my question here. In our discussions on how to deal with this situation, we realize that we probably need to move again in order to provide the best services and support for our son and future child. I recently brought up the topic to my teenage daughter and she basically hates us now. I tried explaining how we would finally get our own house and this would be the last move, hopefully, but she doesn't see it that way. We have now moved twice since she started middle school and would now have to leave her friends and start over in high school. Her our other children are young enough that they don't have as much angst over these kind of moves. We haven't made any decisions yet. I don't want to set my daughter off on a possibly downward spiral. I don't know what to say to help her. I feel strongly that moving would be a good thing overall. But my relationship with my daughter is so important to me that I hate the idea of risking it over everything. At the same time, I feel like most of my life has been out of my control. Side note here, most of everybody's life is out of their control. We cannot control what happens to us. We can only control how we react to those things. And now I have the chance to set some direction on it. How would you approach the situation? I am not a tyrant, and I don't just want to tell her this is final, but I also seem to do a terrible job of being supportive and persuasive. This is a tough spot. Here's what I'm going to say, and maybe this will be a tough pill to swallow. And I'm not telling you what to do, but I'm telling you how I view the situation and how I would approach this as a parent. There's a time and place where you have to make decisions based off the best interest of the family as a whole versus the individual elements of that family. And I'm not telling you to ignore how your daughter feels by any stretch. My advice would actually be have an open and honest dialogue with her. Make sure that she feels heard. That doesn't mean you have to take what she says and do something with it. It means that you are showing her and teaching her probably one of the most important lessons that anybody can learn in life. And that is this. We don't always get what we want. There's a reason why we don't let teenagers run the country or companies or vote or buy firearms or drive until they have a certain level of age, experience and education and driving there. And I say this as somebody who was a teenager fucking out of control. And their optic on the world is really shallow and narrow. They have, in comparison, almost no time on the planet at a place where I think that they truly understand what is going on in the world and can interact with it, especially in comparison to their parents. You are going to have experience, time, and probably wisdom in orders of magnitude that your daughter and children will never have. And that's okay, because they will be at that point, at some point in time in their life. If you talk with your daughter and you keep it a conversation and you ensure that she knows that she is heard. The lesson that I would impart on my daughter or son if the situation was reversed, not if it was reversed, it was a son or a daughter, would be that everything she is saying is valid, her feelings are valid, her concerns are valid. But sometimes we have to think outside of ourselves. Sometimes you have to think about those that are in your family, like I said, as a whole, and value their experience and the health and wellness of the family as a whole over one individual. Because here's the reality. I have a teenage daughter. She hates me seven times a day. Maybe. I don't know. I'd have to ask her. I hope she doesn't hate me at all. But I think teenage daughters and teenage sons go through a hate blender. There's probably nothing that you can do. There's no way that you are going to live your life without getting on the wrong side of what one of your children wants to do, period. Full stop. So let's accept it at that. But again, that's the role of being a parent, a father or a wife. Work with your wife, talk with your wife, strategize with your wife, weigh the pros and cons of these things and then make decisions for the health of the entity as a whole. Is your daughter gonna hate you? Probably several times today, maybe tomorrow as well? Yes. She's gonna have good days and bad. She's gonna have days that are less emotional and hateful and days that are the opposite of that. Is that gonna happen? Even if you have her live where you live now when she goes to high school? It is. But you wouldn't be serving your soon to be born child and your son as well. It's gonna be okay. She is going to be okay. It is gonna suck. Is it possible that it would send her into a downward spiral? Of course it is. I don't think that it's necessarily likely, especially if you can figure out a way to at least knock on the door of what it is that you are doing and why, why you are making the decision. Teaching her that yes, the things that you feel are so critically important, but that doesn't mean that the world is always going to bend to your needs or desires. It is such an important lesson and I know you've probably felt it in your life. That doesn't mean she's going to enjoy it. It doesn't mean there might be. There won't be a hard time for a little bit of time after this. But there's also the other side of this coin. Depending on where you guys might end up, she might find the best social circle, supportive friends that she's ever found at a new high school that she knows nothing about. The opposite is of course true. But let's not just focus on the negative. Let's focus on some of the potential positives. It could be so awesome that she will come back probably decades from now. And thank you for making that decision. It's probably not going to happen when she's in high school. I don't think I was capable of thinking in those terms when I was in high school. Although we can agree young women mature faster than young boys. Because young boys and young men and men I'm not sure are capable of growing up. But I digress. It'll happen at some point in time if she finds those things, probably not instantaneously. You're not going to ruin your daughter's life. Being a husband, being a father, being a partner to your wife. It can suck sometimes. But you have the experience, you have the knowledge, you have the wisdom. But make sure that she is heard and try to keep it as much as a conversation as possible, even if she's not getting the way that she wants. Because she's going to learn how to win in life. I have no doubt. She also needs to learn how to lose. And you should do so in exactly the same way I tell my children when they win or are successful at things. That's amazing. When they lose, they need to respond in exactly the same way that they do when they win. Right. You have to win and lose equally, regardless of how it feels. Last question for the year. Here we go. Dear Mr. Stumpf, my name is redacted and I have two questions for you. I'm 20, my brother's 23. We really never got along, and we would always fight over stuff. And outside of that, we really never talked or interacted with each other. As we got older, we've never gotten closer together. And I see other brothers we have known for a long time get closer, but we haven't changed the relationship that we have. I recognize that I could try more to do better or to better our relationship. And our mother and father have even mentioned to me and my brother that we don't do anything together. We have some common interests, but not many. And the ones we do I don't know much about or he has stopped participating in. We still get into arguments, but mainly over political issues. So I don't put too much weight on that as my political views don't align with anyone in my family. Do I just need to try harder in finding something to talk about together? And then you go into your second question. So I'm going to answer this one. Family dynamics can be tough. My Sister and I did not have the closest relationship when we were growing up. Another way for me to say that would be we fucking hated each other and we were at each other's throats. And I'm pretty sure she would slit the tires on my car if she would have been able to get away with it. And I definitely would have done that to her if I could have gotten away with it. And maybe the last five years, maybe even, I don't know, 10, something beyond that. I think we've started to work on it and we're in a much, much better place. That's not always the case. I've said this many times. To me, family is not about. It's not about DNA. Even though, yes, that is the definition of your family and bloodline and all those things. But I can look at an example from my own family and for people who've listened to the podcast, when I've had my father on, when we talk about his father, which was my grandfather, he disowned our entire family. My dad had to cut him off because he was a ferocious piece of shit, a manipulator to the nth degree. And he was like that until he died. And I can't imagine having to cut off my own father. Thankfully, my dad. It's interesting. It seems like things like that can go one of two ways. People can be on the receiving end of that trauma and they're like, fuck it, I'm passing this downhill. Or they step up in front of it and they say, you know what? I am never gonna repeat this behavior, and I'm never gonna let somebody be treated like this by me or be exposed to it. And that's the path that my dad took. And I'm appreciative of that, because when my grandfather cut us off, I think I was like, 11, you know, know, I. I just. One of my last memories is we were at. It was. There was a Christmas tree there, so it was around the holidays, and it just. The lights of a cop car or multiple cop cars as they came in to basically kick us out of my grandfather's house because he called the cops on us. I don't remember exactly why. Like I said, super young. What's the point in all of that? If your family's willing to treat you like that? How important is the actual definition of family? I can't answer that. I mean, it's a question for everybody to answer themselves. What I can say is, for me, family is about how people treat me, not the blood that is coursing through our veins. And as I said, I can understand and appreciate those things as well. But if they're not aligned, if you have somebody who is in your family tree who is destructive, who is an asshole, why hang on to that? For what reason? Because they're family. Yeah, how about fuck right off with that? I'm not saying do your best to recover the situation. I'm saying if it gets to the tipping point and it can't be recovered, I mean, put the shovel down, stop digging and throwing dirt on top of your own head, or the tug of war metaphor, let go of the rope and walk away. Stop having arguments. Here would be my suggestion. Before you do any of those things, call your brother and say to him what you said to me in these emails or in this email. Hey, our relationship seems like it kind of sucks. We've never gotten along and just like be brass, tax honest, say to him what you said in the email, especially if you want to change that. And that's how I would actually. That's how I would phrase and work the conversation. Not from a criticizing perspective, but just, hey man, I want this to change and I'm willing to do what is necessary to do. So this is the situation that, as I see it. How do you see it? This is a situation that I want it to be in the future. What do you want it to be in the future? The guy might answer, hey, fuck right off into the sunset. And if he does, consider fucking right off into the sunset. You know, when people tell you who they are and what they want, my advice is to listen to them. Most of the time they're telling you the truth. So that's how I would handle that. Put the effort in. If you think that effort is going to be beneficial, if you recognize it's not, you know, consider cutting your losses. Second question has to do with mine and my parents disagreements over career paths. My parents both work in public education and have master's degrees and they push me into getting some kind of degree. I went to college for two years and I didn't really like it. Luckily I was able to work and with help from my grandparents, I was able to pay out of pocket for my schooling. But I want to help people and specifically I want to be a medic in the military, but my parents were against it. My mother was as and is still against the idea of me joining the military. My father doesn't support it completely, but he doesn't want me to stop. He doesn't want to stop me. I should say after several arguments, I agreed to go into the local firefighter and paramedic programs from a community college. But I still have a desire to serve and I don't know how to talk to it. Talk to my mother about it. I have talked to my grandfather who was in the Navy in between Korea and Vietnam. He encouraged me to serve if I wanted to, and I do. I'm sure I will have some delusions of grandeur about what military service is truly like, and I know I need some work to get that job that I want in the military, and I'm working towards it. Do I just continue down the path I am on, or do I give my balls a tug and go after something I've wanted to do since I was a kid? Sorry for the essay, but thanks for the advice. I've been enjoying the podcast since 2022 after I heard you on the good old JRE oh Rogan. You have some influence, Mr. Rogan. Oh man. What to do when your parents don't agree with what it is that you want to do. Parents this is what I've experienced. Parents who come from academia who have degrees often tell their children that that is the path forward. I don't think they're doing that maliciously, but but I do think unless you have a specialized occupation, that you are pursuing law, medicine. I'm sure there's a variety of other ones. I don't know if that advice serves younger generations anymore, and whether that be through the tools that we have access to, through teaching yourself, homeschooling, it just anything other than taking out massive student debt to go down a traditional pipeline. I actually think that the traditional pipeline needs to take a really hard look at itself and probably restructure a lot of things. Not only what they teach, but how they teach it. Again, this is from somebody who's an absolute idiot with zero seconds of higher education. But when I need to learn something, I go onto Google or I go onto YouTube and I type in how do I fill in the blank? And the number of things that I have been able to do on my own because of that is shocking. Before that resource, what were we left with? Going and finding a professional. Maybe go finding a teacher, going find a mentor. All of those things which you can of course still do, but not from the comfort of your own home with a device that sits in your pocket. So it doesn't surprise me that your parents wanted you to go down that path. My advice is this. Walk your path, not somebody else's. They're not saying that they want you to do that because they don't like you. That's the path that they went down and that they are the most comfortable with. I can understand where it's coming from. I don't necessarily agree with it, but I can understand it comes down to this. Do you want to be the author of your life or do you want to be the victim of it? If you live somebody else's life and choose not to do the things that you want to do because somebody else is putting this standard upon you, you are going to be the victim of your life. If you want to look back on your deathbed, your metaphorical deathbed, what do you want to be filled with? Do you want to be filled with regret? Do you want to be filled with disappointment? Or do you want to be fulfilled and grateful for the choices that you made? I land in the latter category. I do not want to come to the end of the one lap that I get and be disappointed in myself because of the things I didn't do, the opportunities that I didn't take, the behaviors that I allowed myself to get away with when I knew I should have been doing better. I can't imagine a worse ending. And thinking about that when opportunities present themselves to me helps me make decisions. Are your parents still going to be your parents if you go into the military? Yeah. Are they going to be upset at you, your mom specifically, if you do something she doesn't want you to do? Yeah. Is she living your life? No. Be the author of your life, not the victim of it. And that's all I have for 2024. Have a great holidays, everybody. See you well next Friday, but that episode's already recorded. See you guys all again in January.