About me

     

 

     My name is Joshua and I am your host for the Our Foundation podcast. I have been asked a few times about who I am and so since my show focuses on content, not me, I wanted to have a place where you can go to learn a bit about who you are listening to. I have a Bachelors degree in both Entrepreneurship and Marketing. I ran my own business for 5 years before taking an easy, stable job with great benefits. I have done mostly independent learning and research for the topics I cover on this show. 

     For the origin story of this podcast: It all began when I decided to open a brokerage account and basically gamble on oil prices. The IRS thought I was very successful and sent me a letter saying I owe taxes on the $13,000 in profits I made off my original $2,500 investment. They were probably not pleased when I let them know that I also lost money which totaled to around $14,000 and the IRS actually sent me a check. I switched from gambling on leveraged oil etfs to actually investing. I moved my brokerage account into a Roth IRA and also started helping to manage some family member's investments. With the easy job I had recently taken, I had about 5 hours a day to listen to audio content. I started with sci-fi novels which I have always enjoyed. I was at a point where I could really start to appreciate how good sci-fi can mesh together concepts about society, economics, politics, technology, and more in a way that brings up thoughts, questions and analysis of today's world.

     As I began "real" investing, I started incorporating economics books and podcasts on investing, news, politics, and economics. I got sucked down the rabbit hole of Austrian economics which quickly led to political theory as well. At this point, I ditched the sci-fi entertainment and focused on educating myself in these very important areas that I now realized I knew very little about. It also became very apparent that these things have direct ties to the business cycle, investing, and interest rates which all have major impacts on the stock market. I discovered cryptocurrency and blockchain next and was really intrigued by how it incorporates all the things I'd been studying... monetary theory, incentive models, politics, governance, investing, and more. The third rabbit hole I jumped down was related to education. My wife and I had just had out first child and I knew that I wanted to give him the best upbringing and teaching I could but I also knew that I didn't know much about this stuff. I dug into child development, learning techniques, and teaching models. This, along with my wife who was homeschooled, lead me to research homeschooling and the failures of the public school system. The failures of the school system tied in a bit with corruption and conspiracy which had come up many times in other areas as well. Of course, I dove into this rabbit hole too and tried to focus on conspiracy history that had been proven and mostly admitted to and I avoided things like aliens, bigfoot, and lizard people. All through this time, I was also studying theology and looking at the many parallels I was finding between theology and these other subjects. 

     I got to the point where I felt I was well versed in all these areas. I thought about it one day and realized how many hours I had spent listening to podcasts and going through books. For example, I logged over 850 hours of just podcasts as well as a few hundred hours of audiobooks in just one year. This is after the switch from entertainment to educational content so this was all learning. This lead me to think about how blessed I was to be able to educate myself to this level and how unrealistic it would be for most "normal" people to do the same. It's very rare for people to have 5 hours + per day to spend on intellectual pursuits outside of their job. I hadn't really come across any sources that discussed all these aspects and how they relate either. There didn't seem to be a condensed format that was more reasonable for most people to attempt to consume. I decided to make an outline that highlighted all the content I had learned. I wrote out a 2 page outline that went chronologically and covered everything from history to corruption to modern movements. It laid out in a coherent way all the topics I felt were necessary to truly understand how society works, how it got this way, what's wrong, and what is and can be done about it. I liked the idea of doing a series of pamphlets that would each cover a topic then turn them into a book upon completion. I could let people pay a small fee to subscribe and get each pamphlet each month or so and they would get a free copy of the book when it was all done. I then thought it would be a cool perk to do a podcast that would act as a companion to the pamphlets where I talk about and explain the content as well. This morphed into me deciding to just do a podcast and ditch the whole book idea entirely. Season 1 of Our Foundations is the expanded version of the outline I referenced. Season 2 begins the journey into other ways to analyze society and better understand modern times while still keeping an overarching focus on political theory, economics, education, and history. Hopefully you listening to this show will nudge you down a few more rabbit holes yourself. Enjoy!

 

-Joshua