My First Podcast: The MoneyPenny TL;DR

In June I sat down with MoneyPenny, the investing podcast from Hospodářské noviny — the Czech business daily — and talked about my own money for an hour. In Czech. Out loud. On the record.

This post is the TL;DR: what we covered, and the part that doesn't make it into an episode — what it actually felt like.

How it happened (spoiler: I pitched nobody)

I'd love to tell you there was a strategy. A media plan. A carefully worded email.

There wasn't. David Busta found the app first. Not the blog, not a press release — the app. He'd been poking around mojefinancnisvoboda.cz, found the blog behind it, and only then did the message arrive.

That order still means more to me than the appearance itself. I built the thing so I'd stop re-typing my own numbers into a fourth spreadsheet. Somebody found it on their own and thought there was a story in there.

What it was actually like

Nervous. Genuinely, unhelpfully nervous.

You'd think my day job would cover this — I'm a product manager, my whole week is meetings. It covered nothing. A meeting has slides and a mute button. This had two journalists, David Busta and Martin Petříček, an hour of open questions, and no undo.

I over-prepared spectacularly. Notes, bullet points, numbers I was ready to defend. I looked at approximately none of it once we started, which I'm told is what always happens.

The odd part is how quickly it stopped being an interview and started being a conversation. Two people who were actually curious, asking the questions my friends ask — just with microphones.

The five things we actually talked about

1. FIRE is about the choice, not the exit. The one I most wanted to get right. I don't want to stop working at 40 — I like my job. I want to choose how I work. A four-day week. More days at home. A free Wednesday spent with my family instead of the roughly twelve hours a week I currently hand over to my car.

2. How close we really are. About seven years. Six to eight, depending on whether you believe the optimistic or the pessimistic version. My wife and I know what our year costs, so this isn't mystical — it's arithmetic.

3. The teacher thing. This one surprised the hosts. The entire reason I want the money is so I can one day afford a job that doesn't pay well. In secondary school I wanted to teach maths and physics; then I looked at teachers' salaries and went and studied computer science instead. Financial independence is how I get to go back to plan A.

4. Real estate — my most expensive lesson. A few years ago roughly 99% of my net worth sat in property. Two houses. I got lucky on the timing and unlucky on the assumption: property is not passive income. There is always something to solve. So the houses now sit completely outside my FIRE plan — I don't count them at all. HN turned that into the headline: invest in yourself first, and as early as you can; real estate just eats time and money. Reading your own sentence back in a national paper is a strange feeling.

Yes, that's me. In an actual magazine. Photographed on an actual kitchen table, because where else would you photograph it.

5. Why MFFT exists. Pure frustration. One spreadsheet for the budget, another for investments, a broker app, a pension account, a savings account, two houses — and an hour or two every single month spent copying it all into one place. So I built the budgeting part first, then net worth, then the portfolio views, which turned out to be the thing people actually stay for.

I also confessed, on a national podcast, that I once bought Tesla on a whim, briefly felt like a genius, then bought into the crypto hype and discovered I was not one. Small amounts. Large lesson. It's why I now invest into one boring global ETF and get on with my life.

What I took away from it

• The stories land; the spreadsheets don't. Nobody leaned in at my model. Everybody leaned in at "I stopped counting the houses."
• Saying it out loud is a stress test. You find out fast which of your convictions are genuinely yours and which ones you just read somewhere.
• I under-tell my own story. I write about frameworks. The hosts kept dragging me back to what actually happened to me. Noted — hence this post.

This is post number one

Welcome to Build in Public: the corner of this blog where I write about building MFFT rather than about money itself. Progress, real numbers, decisions I got wrong, and whatever is shipping next.

The episode is in Czech and runs about an hour. You'll find it — along with the print interview that followed — on the Featured page.

The print one showed up a week later. I have since mentioned it to approximately everybody I know.

More soon. Hopefully with fewer nerves.