The Science of Better Ideas with George Newman (SB1796)

Where do great ideas come from, and why do they always show up in the shower, on a walk, or five minutes after you’ve stopped trying so hard?

Joe Saul-Sehy, OG, and Neighbor Doug welcome this week’s mentor, behavioral scientist George Newman, to unpack how creativity really works and how Stackers can use it to make better decisions with money, careers, and life.

This isn’t about becoming “more creative” in a woo-woo sense. It’s about understanding the conditions that consistently produce better ideas. George explains why your best thinking doesn’t come from grinding harder but from combining curiosity, expertise, and space to think. The crew digs into why incremental improvement (the famous “1% better” mindset) often beats chasing giant breakthroughs, and how that approach applies just as well to financial planning as it does to business, habits, or personal growth.

You’ll also hear why surveying the landscape before acting leads to smarter money moves, how relaxing your brain can unlock solutions you didn’t know you had, and why most people already have access to better ideas but don’t recognize them yet. Whether you’re trying to improve your finances, rethink your career, or simply stop overthinking every decision, this episode gives you a practical framework for generating smarter ideas without burning yourself out.

What You’ll Learn:

• Where great ideas are most likely to come from (hint: not when you’re stressed)
• Why expertise plus curiosity beats raw inspiration every time
• How the 1% better philosophy creates long term breakthroughs
• The role relaxation plays in clearer thinking and decision making
• Why surveying your options first leads to better financial outcomes
• How small experiments like paper trading improve confidence before real world action
• Why coaching, reflection, and time horizons matter more than quick wins

This Episode Is For You If:

• You feel like you’re working harder but not thinking better
• Your best ideas come when you’re NOT trying to force them
• You’re exhausted from grinding and want a smarter approach
• You want to improve your finances but feel stuck in the same patterns
• You’re ready to stop chasing breakthroughs and start making steady progress

Questions to Think About:

When do your best ideas usually show up, and what are you doing when they arrive? What’s one area of your finances that could improve with a “1% better” mindset? Drop your answers in the comments or the Basement Facebook group because George’s framework for generating better ideas might shift how you approach everything.

Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/201

Enjoy!

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Our Headline

• Young Traders Practice With Stock-Market Simulators to Make Risky Bets (Wall Street Journal)

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Doug’s Trivia

• Who did Serena Williams beat to win the Australian Open in 2017, an opponent she’d played more than anyone else?

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• Check out The 201, our email that comes with every Monday and Wednesday episode, PLUS a list of more than 19 of the top money lessons Joe’s learned over his own life about money. From credit to cash reserves, and insurance to investing, we’ll tackle all of these. Head to StackingBenjamins.com/the201 to sign up (it’s free and we will never give away your email to others).

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Join Us Friday!

Tune in on Friday when we wrap up 1% Better Week with a roundtable discussion where we ask the question…what can YOU do to be 1% better every day that’ll bring in the Benjamins?

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Written by: Kevin Bailey

Miss our last show? Listen here: When to Trust Your Gut and When to Trust the Math (SB1795)

Episode transcript

[00:00:00] opener: Sometimes I feel like everyone I work with is an idiot. And by sometimes I mean all times. All the time, every of the time.
[00:00:18] Doug: Live from Joe’s mom’s basement. It’s the Stacking Benjamin Show.
[00:00:32] Doug: I am Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. And on today’s show, how do the best moments of your life happen? You or a friend have a great idea. Where do those ideas come from? We’ll find out today with our Wednesday mentor, George Newman in our headline segment. How can you get more comfortable with the stock market?
[00:00:50] Doug: The Wall Street Journal is touting one way. We’ll ask OG if that’s his preferred method, and you all know my preferred method to steal the show. That’s right at the halfway point. I’ll regale you with my trivia question. And now two guys who’d be out building Snowman if they weren’t here with you. It’s Joe o and OG.
[00:01:16] Joe: That’s right Stackers. It’s the two days a year that it snows in Texas. Hey everybody. Welcome to Freezing our Butt Off podcast. I’m Joe Saul-Sehy. Sit back, relax. ’cause you are now at the Greatest Money Show on Earth, the second longest running personal finance podcast. Can you believe that? It’s been, uh, feels like yesterday.
[00:01:38] Joe: Guys, we’re ready for another episode. And this is a great one. This week, all week we’re helping you get 1% better, and today we’re talking about having more great ideas. And a great idea for this show was to involve the guy sitting across the card table from me. Mr. Og. How are you man? What’s up?
[00:01:56] OG: Yep. Good.
[00:01:57] Joe: Do you like that, Doug? I try to butter him up so he’s not just 1% more salty, but helping people get 1% better. And did
[00:02:02] Doug: you hear how excited he was?
[00:02:04] Joe: Yeah. What’s up? Yeah, of course. Course I am. Course Joe. Duh. What’s
[00:02:08] Doug: up bro?
[00:02:09] Joe: Where did inspiration hit for your last great idea? Og, like, can you think of an idea where you’re like all of a sudden, bam, there it is.
[00:02:18] Joe: Oh, we should do this. Like, whether it’s for your business or a vacation that you’re gonna take or something that’s gonna make your life better, where’s the last place? You had a great idea.
[00:02:29] OG: I didn’t know I was gonna be called on. I’m unprepared.
[00:02:32] Joe: Well, I’ll tell you one for me. I
[00:02:34] OG: can tell you what your last great idea was.
[00:02:36] Joe: My last great idea, I don’t know. But what I do know is that it generally comes when I am around other creators. And uh, specifically when you and I have done Strategic Coach, I generally have phenomenal ideas leaving Strategic Coach. That should give you a hint as to, because the answer,
[00:02:57] OG: oh, uh, the answer is, strategic coach was my last
[00:03:00] OG: great
[00:03:00] OG: idea.
[00:03:01] OG: No, I think the only time that creative thinking can occur is when you’re not under any sort of duress. You know, there’s a reason why going on a bike ride or going on a walk or taking a long shower or whatever, those things can pop up during that time because it gives your brain the opportunity to, you know, not be focused on a specific task.
[00:03:24] OG: Just relax. It definitely happens in AT Coach for sure, but you know, you just kind of relax and you’re going down a path of whatever it is and you’re like, oh, I wonder if I could do it that way. And you know,
[00:03:35] Doug: I would imagine bathroom time at Strategic Coach you could solve like the world’s problems,
[00:03:44] OG: everything.
[00:03:44] OG: Yeah. Well, I mean, basically if we’re all in the, we just all take long showers. It’s really great.
[00:03:49] Joe: That’s it. Hmm. But we, we should maybe podcast from the shower. That’d be slightly awkward.
[00:03:54] OG: Not for me.
[00:03:55] Joe: Ain’t no shame of my game. Might get a little more done. We’re gonna talk about how great ideas can occur more faster.
[00:04:02] Joe: You can actually produce kind of a factory for great ideas more faster. Like Thomas Edison did George actually studied Thomas Edison and others Fail faster? That is a big piece of it.
[00:04:12] OG: Sorry,
[00:04:12] Joe: didn’t mean to run the punchline, my
[00:04:14] OG: bad.
[00:04:14] Joe: Well, no, that’s fine. I won’t steal his thunder. But there’s a reason why the shower, the bike ride, the Strategic coach, why that all works and where those great ideas are found and they’re found in areas that you already know something about.
[00:04:28] Joe: That’s another key. We’re gonna dive into that today. So strap in. Everybody gonna be a fantastic mentor today. George Newman. Before we get to George though, uh, gotta say a little bit about the Benjamin Vault. If you’re brand new here, we have this phenomenal new tool that takes 15 of your favorite tools, whether it’s getting rid of all those unwanted subscriptions, getting rid of all of those nuisance emails and colors.
[00:04:53] Joe: Here’s, here’s something that happened, by the way, when I was looking at my account on the vault. Not only did it get rid of my name in all of these search areas, but some of the stuff OG that it said, which was like, I’m associated with this person and this person and this person and this person. Those all now have gone bye-bye.
[00:05:15] Joe: So people finding me and finding relatives of mine and friends of mine all just by searching the web and imagine what scammers can do with all that information. It’s pretty scary how they can use all this publicly available stuff. Well, you can erase all that and do much, much more with your credit subscriptions and mores stack Benjamins dot com slash vault gets you there, uh, super product and we’re super excited that we’re able to offer it to our stacker community.
[00:05:45] Joe: All right, let’s talk for a second about George Newman because he’s upstairs talking to mom. I’ve been a fan of this guy’s work for a long time, so I’m super happy that we’re here. He is an associate professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and he is, when I say a leading expert in creativity, the research that George has done with his team around the idea of creativity and around the magic, perceived magic of creativity bust through a lot of barriers, meaning you and I can be a lot more creative.
[00:06:18] Joe: And even if you think you’re not a creative person, whether it’s somebody who’s trying to just be a better mom or dad with fun activities for the kids, you’re looking for great ideas to make your financial plan work. You’re trying to be more creative, have better solutions for your team at work. George is your guy.
[00:06:34] Joe: You’ve seen his research in the New York Times, the Economist, the BBC, scientific, American Wall Street Journal, but now of course he’s coming down to mom’s basement. In just a moment, we’re gonna say hello to George Newman, but before that, we have a couple sponsors who help us keep on, keep an on. We’re gonna hear from them, and then George and I, we’re gonna help you hopefully get 1% better, 1% more creative.
[00:07:07] Joe: I’ve been so excited about this conversation for a long time. George Newman joins us in the basement. How are you, man?
[00:07:13] George: Great, Joe. Thanks so much for having me. This is awesome.
[00:07:16] Joe: Well, I’m super happy that you’re here because just making our stackers lives a little more creative, a little more fun, and the fact that it’s right in front of you, which we’ll talk about a little bit, really gets me excited that you know what, things can be a lot more creative for you.
[00:07:32] Joe: I have to ask you this question, and it’s not something that’s in your new work, but are you an Indiana Jones fan?
[00:07:38] George: Totally. I’m, I’m Raiders, ride or Die. Uh, Raiders of the Lost Arc is my favorite, but I love all of it. You know, in fact, in early versions of the cover, I was like sending my publisher like Indiana Jones posters and like, can we do something like this?
[00:07:54] Joe: I’m disappointed they didn’t.
[00:07:56] George: I disappointed. I thought it would’ve worked for sure.
[00:07:58] Joe: I totally think so. But now everybody, all of our stackers are going, what does Indiana Jones have to do with anything? I never thought before I dove into your work that finding good ideas had more to do with Indiana Jones than these, you know, I have these, these brilliant flash of light and the heavens open up and all of a sudden, you know, is some, some idea speaks to me, but it truly is more like Indiana Jones.
[00:08:23] George: Absolutely. I mean, and I love that contrast because you know, like you think about somebody like Thomas Edison, he’s got thousands of patents, and I think the, the myth at least that we have is that Edison’s off in some workshop just dreaming up these things. And the reality was totally different. You know, he had this idea factory, he had like 200 people working for him at one point, just cranking out ideas, filling, you know, thousands of notebooks.
[00:08:48] George: And a lot of them were failures. Things like cement furniture and talking dolls. Even Edison like talked about how ideas aren’t brain borne. There’s something that you have to go out into the world and find. So there’s this real contrast between kind of the myth that we tell about creativity and then where it’s actually coming from and what those really successful people are doing.
[00:09:11] Joe: Yeah. And that is, that is the key. And the reason stackers I bring up Indiana Jones is because of this idea that Indiana Jones is an archeologist. I mean, he’s not. Necessarily trying to be creative. He’s looking at the past to see what’s happening now. And to your point, going back to Edison George, you make a point out that Edison had no problem riffing off of, I guess, to put it kindly, other people’s ideas.
[00:09:32] George: Oh, absolutely. I mean, he borrowed ruthlessly, uh, you know, he, he had no problem riffing off of others and, and very much thought about ideas as being out in the world as something that we have to go find. And I think what’s so cool is that there’s just a lot of research that really gives credence to that idea that we’re seeing from Edison’s time.
[00:09:56] George: But even using much more sophisticated, modern methods now we can say like, oh wow, like maybe there’s a very different way to think about this whole process.
[00:10:03] Joe: Is there any research by the way that the flash of light ever truly happens? Like somebody truly just stumbles over something? Or is it 99% of the time we have a process for development and we create these great ideas from around us.
[00:10:18] George: The way that I like to think about it is kind of like a, an Ichenberg. We see the very tip, which could be, uh, the finished idea. It could be the flash of the idea, because sometimes we, I mean, we’ve all had that feeling like you’re taking a shower or whatever, and it hits you. Then beneath the surface, there are all of these processes going on.
[00:10:38] George: Uh, your unconscious mind, the research that you’ve done ahead of time, the way in which you’ve sought to make that problem systematic, and how you’re paying attention to the environment. So all of these things that are going on, sometimes very much under your control and sometimes not really under your control or awareness.
[00:10:55] George: And so we might have the feeling in the end that, oh, an epiphany hit me. But oftentimes there’s been a, actually a very slow, gradual process of trial and error kinda leading up to that point.
[00:11:07] Joe: Let’s riff on this idea then of archeology, because you introduced this gentleman, I think he’s from Kenya, who has this uncanny ability of knowing where to look for artifacts.
[00:11:19] George: Yeah. Uh, Kamoa. Kmu, he was employed by the leaky. He lived in Kenya and didn’t know anything about paleontology before he started working with them. And then zero. Nothing. Nothing. Zero. Yeah. I think I, I’ve got a quote in there. You know, I thought we were gonna go dig up some graves, you know, that’s what he kind of felt was, was happening and then he became the single greatest fossil hunter of all time, in fact.
[00:11:44] George: So, excellent that many of the paleontologists and archeologists that came to that part of that world would hire. Kao and his team to actually kind of source and find all of their big discoveries. Then the question I ask is, well, what is he doing right? Why is Kao so successful And that it’s not just an accident because he actually wind up training generations of fossil hunters that that worked with them.
[00:12:12] George: So he’s teaching them something and so what is he teaching them? Well, it’s to really understand the landscape. It’s to have a really great idea about where to look and what kinds of cues are going to be promising and where other things have been found in the past. So it’s ultimately about knowledge and about being systematic and about being attentive, uh, much more so than it is about being lucky.
[00:12:35] Joe: Well, then there’s the question then, George, for our average stacker listening to this, who’s hoping to, either for the company they work for or for themself, maybe they’re an entrepreneur, they want to come up with the next great idea. Where do we begin to survey where, what is the magic of where he’s. Was looking that he was able to find more artifacts than anybody else.
[00:12:56] George: Awesome. I mean, this is the first step, uh, in this kind of archeological dig process, which I call surveying and talk about a few principles of surveying. One really big one is something called, or what I call being an originality ostrich, that when we go to search for ideas, I think there’s this tendency to say, I’m gonna do something that nobody’s ever thought of before.
[00:13:20] George: I’m gonna kind of the deep blue ocean kind of mentality. The reality is actually far different than if you look at the most impactful ideas in science and in business and in lots of different domains. They actually are strikingly conventional. Oftentimes what people have done is they’ve started with kind of 95% of the idea grounded in things that are working right?
[00:13:43] George: You know that it, it’s successful and working in that environment, and then they put their own twist or spin on it. Talk about this as like the second mover advantage. So that being a really, really powerful way of unlocking creativity where instead of focusing so much on being original, you’re instead saying, well, what’s proven and what’s valuable?
[00:14:03] George: And then how can I put my own unique spin on things?
[00:14:06] Joe: You even talked about with this concept, if you’re trying to be original, you did some studies to show you were more likely to not be original, to actually create some rotten stuff.
[00:14:19] George: Yeah, we did this great study with entrepreneurs and we just said, okay, there’s a storefront in town.
[00:14:23] George: Give us your best ideas for a business. And we actually gave them bonuses. Then we gave all those ideas to a different group and you know, how likely are people actually gonna go to your business, to your store? And so people knew that going in and generating ideas. And so some people gave us like really novel ideas.
[00:14:40] George: Things like a lazy river store where I guess you would just kind of float around on a, on a hand or tube. And, and then there were other ideas that were like, you know, high-end secondhand goods. And so when we asked our entrepreneurs, okay, so how likely are you to win this competition? You know, how likely are people to go to your store?
[00:14:56] George: People thought the more original the idea. The better it would perform. And when we actually gave those ideas, then to other people, it was the exact opposite. It was these kind of really wildly original ideas that, uh, like people weren’t so interested in because yeah, look, it’s a, it’s interesting, but it doesn’t have a lot of of value.
[00:15:16] George: And fascinating. We found the same thing among Top Chef contestants. So we, we analyzed 10 seasons of the show Top Chef and found that in episodes where a chef had said, you know, I’m gonna try to do something like really original that nobody’s ever done before. They were like over two times as likely to be eliminated and kicked off the show.
[00:15:35] George: So there’s something about, you know, when we set out to come up with. A new idea, a creative idea that we’re really overweighting this novelty aspect and kind of underestimating how difficult it it is to come up with something that is both original, but also that people are gonna actually want
[00:15:53] Joe: you write that we have this idea that creativity is this cabin in the woods, right?
[00:15:57] Joe: That I’m all alone. That my idea stands in the middle of nowhere. It is purely its own basic thing. Yeah. You say we need to burn that idea because it’s not that at all. It’s much more like, to your point that you just made, it’s much more riffing on something that is good but not great and maybe making it great.
[00:16:16] George: Absolutely. Yeah. Chapter one, burn the Cabin Down is all about this idea of we have this impulse. Okay? I, I’ve got a, I’ve got this big deliverable coming up, or whatever it might be. This project I really wanna work on, let me just isolate myself. Maybe it’s not going to a literal cabin, but I’m gonna get the fancy noise canceling headphones, and I’m gonna block out communication, and I’m gonna turn off all my devices and everything.
[00:16:39] George: What the research tells us is the exact opposite, right? That that’s where your inspiration and ideas are gonna come from, is actually by interacting with your environment and drawing. On what’s around you and those collaborations and feedback and a process of trial and error and exploration. So get out of the, the metaphorical cabin and immerse yourself in the world.
[00:17:00] George: ’cause that’s where really where we find our spark of creativity.
[00:17:03] Joe: Well, so then what are the questions that I ask myself then at first to find these great ideas? What spot am I, I dunno if it’s my psyche or my life. Do I begin to survey to go, these are where I’m more likely to find good ideas?
[00:17:19] George: I think you can use a few different guiding principles there.
[00:17:23] George: One is do what you know. A big thing that I argue is if we go back to Kamoa Kao and looking for fossils, right? You know, you ha you have to be able to recognize when something is out of place in the landscaper. Maybe that might be something over there. And if you don’t have sufficient expertise in a domain, you might let a really great idea just kind of blow by you because you don’t, you don’t recognize it.
[00:17:47] George: So having expertise is really, really critical. The other big principle I talk about is just doing something that you’re passionate about. I’m sure we’ve all had this experience of, you know, you’re working on an idea and you start to tell your friends about it. And like before you even finish talking about it, you’re, you’re like, bored, you know, or something, you know?
[00:18:05] George: And, and like just drop those projects. Creativity is such a process, and there is a lot of work in getting there. So if you’re not super fired up and excited and jazzed about this thing and really hunting it down and finding, you know, the best possible version of that idea, you’re just never gonna get there.
[00:18:24] George: And so life is too short, or there’s too many great ideas out there to spend it on these things that you’re not totally passionate about.
[00:18:31] Joe: What you’re saying is, if we start off with expertise and stuff we’re passionate about, then we’re gonna know the topic deep enough that we know where the cracks are, right.
[00:18:41] Joe: Where the potential is. And yet, I feel like for a lot of us, George, we feel like, well, if I get too close to this thing, I’m just going to copy it. Like I’m just gonna be a ripoff of this thing and I don’t wanna do that.
[00:18:54] George: Yeah. And I think that is definitely a worry that comes up. The really cool part is that.
[00:19:00] George: That we’re not great copiers that I think we can’t help but put our own spin on things. And even if you sit down, you know, just, just try it. Like, you know, if you’re a musician, take your favorite musician and, and try to redo their song or visual artist or, or writing or whatever, or even a business proposal in trying to copy it identically.
[00:19:21] George: You will inevitably put your own spin on things. It has to kind of come out in a different way. And so I think there’s an acknowledgement that we’re imperfect in doing that. The other big thing that I argue in the book is that. Copying is largely about learning and that even if you try to do a one for one copy, what you’re really doing is stepping in inside the mind of that person.
[00:19:46] George: Why did they make certain decisions? You know, why did they make these choices? Why did they follow one step with this next step? And it’s not until you really get in the weeds and start trying to make the thing yourself that you realize, oh, okay. Like there’s a lot of stuff that I didn’t necessarily appreciate about this process.
[00:20:03] George: Copying itself can be a really powerful way of learning and and I talk a lot about visual artists where you see a very consistent pattern of starting by imitating other people’s work. And then you see this kind of very slight deviation away from it, and they’re drifting farther and farther, and then they kind of.
[00:20:21] George: Hit something that’s totally different, that that’s their own, that has this kind of 95%, 5% quality, where they’ve put their own spin, but now it’s totally recognizable to them, and then they really start unearthing that for all it’s worth. So there’s a lot of value in starting by copying and just saying, well, what can I learn from these other people?
[00:20:39] Joe: I took, uh, some poetry classes in college and it’s phenomenal, George that, uh, our professor who had us just call her Catherine, she wore black every day. I mean, you kind of think that when you think poetry, don’t you totally, of course call me by my first name and all I do is wear black every day. But she had us very specifically do exactly what you’re talking about and with no fear, copy some of the great poets and make it line by line the same, but using your own words.
[00:21:07] Joe: And as you learned about the cadence and the meter and what they did, and we got closer to these people. Then later on when I started having to write my own poetry, it actually was far easier. To riff off it, which brings up another idea that you bring to the forefront, which was this idea of a hot streak.
[00:21:25] Joe: I feel like it’s once one of these artists or a regular person gets in this, uh, groove, right? They find maybe where gold has been before and they start mining for it, they then find more and more. Can we talk about Jackson Pollock for a minute and how his hot streak led to some of the best artistic works the world has ever seen?
[00:21:46] George: Totally. So Pollock, you know, the guy famous for the, the drip paintings or action paintings,
[00:21:51] Joe: the ones I always look at and I go, oh my God, so much money for just flicking paint.
[00:21:56] George: There’s actually a lot more going on in those paintings. But Pollock actually created, he, he experimented with a lot of different styles and all of those paintings that we recognize as like kind of classic Pollocks came from a very short window of time, about three years.
[00:22:13] George: He was doing different stuff beforehand and wound up doing different things afterwards, before he died. There’s a great team of researchers at Northwestern that didn’t just look at Pollock. They looked at 30,000 different scientists and visual artists and filmmakers. There’s been additional research looking at entrepreneurs finding the same hot streak pattern that if you look at the trajectory of people’s careers, their biggest hits aren’t kind of smoothly spread out, and they don’t increase in likelihood over time.
[00:22:45] George: They’re actually punctuated in a very short window, almost as if, you know, they were searching around, stumbled onto a cache of, of gold or treasure or fossils, and then just mined it. Got everything out of the ground that they, they can, so that pattern, I think is really, really persuasive in telling us, well, there’s something much deeper going on here than just people waiting for that light bulb moment, right?
[00:23:12] George: That, that there seems to be something almost getting it out of the ground or drawing it from the environment that is responsible for creativity. And Pollock, you know that you’re talking about the drip paintings. Physicists have analyzed those paintings and actually they conform to this very rich fractal pattern, which is the same pattern that like describes the branching of trees in nature.
[00:23:34] George: In fact, Pollock’s painting, his drip paintings got closer to this fractal pattern over time. Suggesting that he was kind of intuitively aware. He, I don’t think he was consciously aware of it. ’cause you, you need, you know, these really sophisticated algorithms to detect it, but intuitively aware of the fact that, okay, I, I’m onto something here.
[00:23:54] George: There is this structure and, and he’s actually getting closer to that structure over time. So by the end, his paintings are conforming to that structure by like 90% or something like that.
[00:24:05] Joe: I found that so creepy.
[00:24:06] George: Yeah. I mean, and, and here’s the really, really cool part, a different team of physicists who were looking at Zen Gardens and looking at the placement of objects in Zen gardens and these zen gardens that have been preserved for hundreds of years.
[00:24:18] George: They found that that same fractal pattern was there in describing not where the objects were placed, but that actually the negative spaces in between the objects formed the same kind of branching structure. So now you have very wildly different kinds of. Artists and creativity kind of zeroing in on the same core idea like hundreds of years apart, which is so cool.
[00:24:41] Joe: I love this idea just of mining to find the truth and to find the essence of the thing. Yeah. I love board games. Our, our stackers know, and there’s a bunch of them. By the way, George just rolled their eyes when I brought up board games, like, oh God, Joe’s bringing up board games again. But there’s this great board game designer named Alan Moon, and Alan created this game in the nineties called Airlines, which is a good game.
[00:25:02] Joe: Later on, he creates a game called Union Pacific, and if you play airlines and you play Union Pacific, you realize that he’s iterating off of airlines, but now it’s more streamlined and it’s more, it’s better put together. Union Pacific’s a game I like a lot that morphs again a few years later into a game called Santa Fe Rails.
[00:25:20] Joe: And then it morphs again into one of the best selling games of all time. A games, a lot of people, even if you’re not a board game fan, you probably heard of this game, a game called Ticket to Ride. Oh, sure. It now is worldwide, you know, and so many people played Ticket to Ride, but he didn’t come up with it at first, Alan, he was doing exactly this process that you’re talking about that Pollock and other people are doing.
[00:25:41] Joe: He’s mining for gold and he doesn’t hit it right away.
[00:25:45] George: Yeah, I’m, I’m sure you’re familiar with this story of Monopoly and how Monopoly came to be and, and the kind of myth about Monopoly is Charles Darrow and that, you know, he just kind of, uh, stumbled into this game and voila. But it really, you know, has this really cool origin.
[00:26:00] George: This woman named Liz Maggie developed, uh, a board game called the Landlord’s Game that was really supposed to kind of communicate these economic principles about taxation and redistribution at the time. And, and her game was pretty complicated. It had these two different sets of rules, like a distribution rule and then a monopolist rule.
[00:26:21] George: That game didn’t go anywhere, but then Parker Brothers and Dara wound up acquiring it from her, and they kind of dropped. The redistribution part and just had the monopolist part. And then, you know, you have, you have monopoly. So it had that kind of similar story, which uh, I always thought was really cool.
[00:26:37] Joe: I’ll actually, for people who wanna know more about that actually, uh, George, we interviewed Mary Palon who wrote a whole book about that and about how, and it’s funny, the unintended consequence of creating something that says capitalism is bad makes all these fraternity boys go, we love capitalism.
[00:26:53] Joe: We’re just, we’re just gonna gonna tear each other to pieces. You find something promising though, and then you put in the work, I think is the big aha here. I think for a lot of people, it’s not about I get hit over the head with this great idea and all of a sudden Monopoly’s born or Jackson Pollock’s born, there’s a ton of work that happens here and you don’t have to be a genius.
[00:27:16] Joe: I think there’s some big, there’s a big aha there as well that I don’t want to be a genius to create these great ideas.
[00:27:23] George: That’s right. I mean, you know, we’re exploring in the environment, we know where we’re looking, we know what we’re looking for, and then we get a little bit lucky and we find something that’s promising.
[00:27:34] George: But then that’s again where the expertise comes in, in being able to recognize that and say, well, how, what’s the right way to refine this? And what’s the right way to iterate on it? And how do I try out now different permutations to figure out what’s gonna be more successful in the environment and how do I draw on the constraints?
[00:27:55] George: And kind of the opposite of thinking outside the box. How do I think inside the box to use those constraints to my advantage to make this idea better? So yeah, I mean now then there’s a lot of work from there to say, have I found the best version of this idea? And what else are its nearest neighbors? And can I exploit all of that and, and use that to my advantage?
[00:28:16] Joe: Is that the biggest, I guess, misinformation about where good ideas come from? Is the fact that I think I have to be a genius, or do you think there’s something else that we all believe that just simply isn’t true?
[00:28:27] George: I certainly think that’s one of them, that we think about great ideas as only coming from these kind of genius figures, uh, especially like a lone genius, right?
[00:28:36] George: And that’s really a myth that if you, you go back through history, it’s very, very difficult to find. Isolated individuals who are just kind of smacked with an idea out of nowhere, especially if they’re not already deeply immersed in the domain. And, and in fact, the opposite is really what’s true. You, you have a lot of people, it’s building on a lot of ideas that have come before.
[00:29:01] George: You know, there’s a lot there that is due to the, to the environment. In fact, a really fascinating phenomenon is called multiple discovery, that throughout history there have been just hundreds and hundreds of instances of people actually arriving at the same idea at the same time. And everything from the theory of evolution to, you know, the telescope, to the thermometer, to the telephone, and talk about like movies that, you know, 2018, like there’s like two movies released in different countries about middle-aged men that formed synchronized swimming teams.
[00:29:33] George: You know, like how, how does that, how does that happen? Right? You know, there’s something in the air, something that people are responding to that is guiding them towards, hey, like I think that there’s something. Potentially promising here and being able to recognize that in your environment. And then, and then, you know, as we were talking about exploit it, you know, how, how do we take advantage of that recognition and use it?
[00:29:54] Joe: The book is called How Great Ideas Happen, the Hidden Steps Behind Breakthrough Success. We start off where we did today surveying and surveying things that we know and that we love for me to be board games. It could be, it could be finding fossils, could be whatever, whatever you want it to be. I love the fact that this explores a territory that we’re all interested in and can help us become better at whatever we’re trying to do.
[00:30:19] Joe: And yet, George, we’re all looking in the wrong place. We’re all looking exactly the wrong spot.
[00:30:24] George: Totally. I mean, uh, I mean ultimately creativity, we think about it as like, it’s gotta be messy. It’s like art or music or poetry or something. But really what creativity is describing is a, is a process of things improving and getting better.
[00:30:38] George: And we all wanna make improvements in our lives, right? Whether they’re big or small. And so thinking about those improvements as coming from a process of discovery rather than I’ve gotta be a lone genius out in the world.
[00:30:51] Joe: Thanks a ton for coming on and mentoring our stackers on finding our hidden genius that we don’t even need to be a genius, which is fantastic.
[00:30:59] Joe: Thank you so much.
[00:31:00] George: Thanks
[00:31:00] Joe: Joe.
[00:31:02] bumper: Hey, I’m Rob Berger When I’m not rolling in the dough. That’s right, I’m Stacking Benjamins.
[00:31:10] Doug: Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s moms neighbor, Duggan. This week we’re celebrating ideas that will make you 1% better. One woman who was more than 1% better than her opponents, Serena Williams won the Australian Open on today’s date back in 2017. And to do so, she had to beat an opponent. She was very familiar with someone she’d play tennis against more than anyone else who did Serena beat to win the open.
[00:31:35] Doug: I’ll have your answer. And you know, if you think about it, you got this one too. As soon as I ask if Joe’s mom wants to play some pickleball, right after we’re done recording.
[00:31:52] Doug: Hey there, stackers. I’m basement pickleball champ, mostly because Joe’s mom refuses to play Joe’s Mom’s Neighbor, Doug, Serena Williams is undoubtedly the best female tennis star of all time and must be on the short list of best female athletes of all time. But on this particular day, back in 2017, she had an awkward match playing an opponent.
[00:32:12] Doug: She played more tennis against than anyone on Earth. Who did Serena have to beat to win the Australian Open? Of course, it was none other than her older sister, Venus Williams, and now here come my brothers by other mothers, Joe and og.
[00:32:32] Joe: I remember that sadly. When 2017, seems like yesterday when you got the, the William Sisters, did you see the movie OG on the William Sisters? Yeah. Will Smith, I think. Yeah,
[00:32:42] OG: the
[00:32:43] Doug: King Richard. Yeah, I did. It was, it was good. Yeah. And actually she’s back, or Venus is back this year, uh, at 41 or something like that.
[00:32:53] Doug: Why can’t I think of, I think it’s back playing against. I think it’s Serena,
[00:32:56] Joe: I gotta tell you, there’s been this real resurgence, I feel like in tennis, and I don’t know if it’s the Netflix shows on it or it’s not that, just the, the huge number of, of emerging stars, but, uh, I dunno. Tennis seems to be pretty exciting now, the world of tennis.
[00:33:11] Joe: Big thanks to George Newman for joining us, by the way, og. Getting back to the way we started this show, you know those ideas that you’ll have when you’re out on the bike ride or in the shower or whatever it is. I think George nailed it. They’re not ideas that are way out in the universe. It’s, oh my God, if I just riff on this thing I’ve been doing and I tweak it just this little bit, it’s 1% better, which means it’s a ton better than what I was doing before.
[00:33:39] OG: I think like with anything, people try to hit home runs on every pitch. You know, I think about it from an investing standpoint. You see the marketing or you see the social media post of the guy who bought Nvidia at $2 a share and that was a trillion dollars. Or, you know, if I’d have just bought Bitcoin when it was 42 cents, I’d have, you know, whatever.
[00:34:00] OG: And so we all think that that’s possible to repeat as opposed to saying, if I can just systematize this and take advantage of the actual power of compounding, what’s the impact of literally 1%? What’s the impact of literally increasing my 401k by 1%? The interesting thing is, is you don’t actually see the impact on that in real time.
[00:34:24] OG: ’cause it’s impossible for our brains to calculate compounding into the future for a really long time. But if you expand your time horizon and you say, Hey, this isn’t money, this is what I was talking to a friend of mine about, this isn’t money for me. You know, I’m 48, this isn’t I like, I gotta get to 65 money.
[00:34:44] OG: This is for me to think about like, my kids are 19, my grandkids aren’t born yet, and now if I have a 50 year time horizon or a hundred year time horizon, it’s really quite profound. The impact of whether it’s 1% savings or 1% fewer mistakes or 1% better execution, or whatever the case may be. You see the impact in those 50 and a hundred year time horizons, not in the portfolio value on December 31, 26,
[00:35:16] Joe: but even if it is age 65 money, you see people in their forties that say it’s too late.
[00:35:23] Joe: And the people that try to hit home runs in their forties, the people that don’t make it. And yet the way to hit a home run is to do, again, back to these ideas. Incorporate a few of these ideas that are singles, right? More conservative singles. And over time og, it turns into a home run. It turns into a huge home run.
[00:35:43] OG: Yeah, you were talking about Strategic Coach earlier this week. I’m going for the beginning quarter of the quarter for me, and the thing that’s somewhat top of mind for me right now is a concept that they talk about early on called the 25 year Framework. And it’s really just around, you know, most people underestimate what you can get done in a quarter century or 10 years or whatever, you know, long time horizon.
[00:36:08] OG: You get think about and overestimate what they, what can get done in a year, you know? So it’s like, oh, I, in a year from now I can be, you know, whatever. You know, that’s maybe a little too grandiose. It’s maybe too aggressive. And the 25 year framework, one of the pieces of it is you break it down into a hundred quarters, you have a hundred opportunities.
[00:36:29] OG: When you think about it like that, you go like, oh my gosh, that’s like, that’s a lot. I don’t have to, I don’t have to do a bunch. I just need to do just a little bit, just a little right now, and I’ve got all the way till the end of March just to get this one little teeny, tiny thing done, you know? Then I’m gonna do the next thing.
[00:36:45] OG: But it starts with this big, big vision of, you know, like, what’s a crazy thing that I’d like to have done, you know, in a quarter century from now? Or what’s a crazy thing that I’d like to. Like to have accomplished in 10 years and then you work backward from that.
[00:37:01] Joe: Well, and this is what I love about our Wednesday mentors, right?
[00:37:03] Joe: George coaching us on, yeah, don’t go out in the woods and think that you’re gonna come up with some genius thing. Look around you, look where, and and, and George is showing us that by surveying in these areas, he’s pointing to the areas he’s coaching us. This is where you should look for Genius, is what he just did.
[00:37:21] Joe: And that’s what strikes me about Strategic Coach. The ability to have a coach who’s coached a lot of people on, Hey, here’s where you find the differentiators. Here’s where you find the next great idea. Survey this area of what you’re doing and these people that have led all kinds of quote idea archeology expeditions that are taking you through it.
[00:37:43] Joe: I think there’s a power in that OG being around people who know how to find the great ideas, which is why I was so thrilled that George was here. But that’s why I think I got so many great ideas at Strategic Coach. I’m not only with somebody who knows, hey, you’re more likely to find artifacts in this area, but I’m also with a bunch of other diggers who are successfully coming up with stuff that makes me power through the crappy ideas.
[00:38:08] Joe: I’m inver, like George said, I’m invariably gonna come up with a bunch of crappy ideas, but I’m gonna power through those and I’m not gonna get frustrated because I’m in a group of people that are also doing the same thing, and some of them are having success ing and I’m feeding off that.
[00:38:23] OG: Challenging you.
[00:38:23] OG: Yeah, challenging you to think bigger than what you already were. And that’s a little bit of the power of any coach, you know, whether it’s. A workout person or, or a financial planner or a corporate executive coach or whatever the case may be. It’s like last year I was telling a, telling this story earlier to somebody, we had this charitable goal that we had, not really formalized, but we had talked about, listen, I had talked about and, and went to this organization that we give money to and said, Hey, this is our goal.
[00:38:55] OG: And in going into the luncheon, she and I had talked about it. When I got to the luncheon, I doubled it. I said, well, here’s our goal. And she was kinda like, what? What? Huh? And I, it just went like, what came out? And I was like, well, I’ll figure it out. So I was feeling pretty proud of myself and in October I was at this coaching group at Strategic Coach and, and we were talking about that, like, this has a new energy around it.
[00:39:17] OG: For me that was just top of mind and very plainly, the person sitting next to me goes, yeah, I don’t think that’s enough. I think you should do twice as much. You should double your double. Yeah. I was like, no, you don’t understand. Like this is like, look at how important I am with this big goal that I set.
[00:39:34] OG: All he said was, well, if you were to do that, how would you get it done? You know, like what does it have to look like to make this an actual reality in a decade from now as opposed to this other, you know, figure that you had thought about. You know, you just kind of sit with that for a little bit. And I think that’s the power of thinking about big things is when you stop asking like really silly questions.
[00:40:03] OG: You know, like, how do I add 1% to my 401k and start thinking of like, how do I fund all of my future family’s college education or higher education? You know, what would it be like to be completely debt free? Not when I’m 70, but when I’m 45. Your brain is so powerful to be able to start working through these things.
[00:40:27] OG: When you literally give up control of everything, when you say everything’s on the table. And so in this charitable goal that we had, I thought about it and I said, oh, well, the more I thought about it, I was like, well, if I think about the big number, I think it’s obscene. There’s no way, like again, we don’t have those resources.
[00:40:44] OG: There’s no way that we could provide for that. When I broke it down into a 10 year goal and then further broke it down into a quarterly goal, I was like, oh, that’s still a big number, but it’s totally doable. If we do it quarterly. You know, I don’t have the resources to write the check. That’s not where we are in our life.
[00:41:02] OG: But I do have the cash flow to do this on a quarterly basis. And when I presented that to the board of this organization, they were like, this is like manna from heaven. Are you kidding me? Like this is your plan to do this quarterly bang. We love it. This is a perfect solution for us. I didn’t know where they were because we hadn’t talked in those terms yet.
[00:41:24] OG: You know what I mean? Like, they were grateful for the relationship that we had. But then when I said, well, here’s what, this is the new plan, they’re like, well, this actually replaces this other thing that we were worried about losing. And you know, now we can continue this, you know, this program that we had.
[00:41:39] OG: Anyways, all that to say you’ve seeing the effects of it already. Yeah, I mean, all that to say, I think from a thinking standpoint, I always say like, questions are free. Quotes are free. You know, when I think about something at the house, like, oh, I, I think I’d like to take the patio cover off and extend the roof line and build a fireplace, and my wife looks at me and goes, what are you talking like a million dollars?
[00:42:00] OG: I’m like, I don’t know, maybe it is, maybe it’s not meets me. And you get the people out and they get jazzed about it and there’s some energy and they go, that’ll be 72,000. You’re like, okay, that’s not what we’re gonna do then. But at least you know, but it like, it sparks, but now, you know. Yeah. It sparks a curiosity
[00:42:16] Joe: around like.
[00:42:17] Joe: What is possible. Well, and this connects it. This connects this discussion with what we talked about on Monday, because on Monday we were talking about if you just looked at the hard cold data, the X amount of money doubling your double, the data suggests from the past, no, that’s not doable. I’ve never been able to that in the past.
[00:42:35] Joe: So that’s happening in the future, but look at what it did. All of a sudden it connects then with your intuition. Well, if I change this and if I do this, and if I do this now, it’s data plus intuition that creates this decision making process that is so much more powerful. That’s so much bigger. The data suggests I can’t change my roof line.
[00:42:56] Joe: You know, I can’t do this. And it gives you a number. Yeah, maybe I can’t do it today, but you know what, now I know the number, I bet I can come up with something. And now you, if it was
[00:43:04] OG: really important to me, I could, we could work on how to do it. But when you don’t have any expectation or you don’t have any, when you just give up, I giving up sounds like a.
[00:43:13] OG: A bad way of saying it, but I see so many people that are like, well, it’s just not possible. Like it’s, I mean, it’s possible. There’s plenty of people who have been successful doing this. It’s just gonna take some additional energy around it. Most people don’t fall into a $2 million retirement account, like over their lifetime.
[00:43:32] OG: It takes some intentionality around it. It’s
[00:43:34] Joe: exciting. It is very exciting when you think about how easy it is to come up with a process for having better ideas. It’s coaching, it’s knowing where to dig. It is riffing off of other people not giving up, but it certainly isn’t a stroke of genius that I think people think that it is.
[00:43:52] Joe: Let’s do a headline.
[00:43:54] headlines: Hello Darlings. And now it’s time for your favorite part of the show, our Stacking Benjamins headlines.
[00:44:00] Joe: Our headline today comes to us from the Wall Street Journal. This is written by Delvin Brown, found this interesting og, how young traders use fake money to practice for the real thing, you know, simulating these results.
[00:44:15] Joe: The best trade Robert REITs ever made was in a high school investing competition in 2021. This piece says the goal is to generate the highest one month return in the stock market simulator. So he made one of the riskiest bets he could, putting a hundred thousand fake dollars into. GameStop shares and options.
[00:44:33] Joe: His return of about 2000% won in the competition, but a last no prize money. It kind of encouraged very, very risky investment decisions, said REITs now 20 in a college student in New York City. My intro to investing was basically gambling. And so this piece goes on talking about how you can use some of these platforms, OG, to practice trading and to learn about trading, and then that’s a great way to learn about investing.
[00:45:01] Joe: What do you think about that?
[00:45:02] OG: I, I mean, I disagree completely with it because of the exact reason that the person cited at the very beginning of the article. It’s like, because it’s fake money, there’s no consequences. You can do whatever you want and then hit the reset button and go, ah, that didn’t work.
[00:45:16] OG: I’ll start over again. But you can’t do that in real life. To me, this seems so, such an utter waste of time and energy. To spend any amount of, any amount of resource, capital time, money, anything. When the system to be successful already exists, just buy a lot of stuff, be diversified, do it on repeat for the next 25 years and you will be successful there Is there, there is no magic secret to this.
[00:45:48] OG: If you’re successful in another way, that doesn’t mean you can’t be. ’cause there’s plenty of people that are like, well, I just put a hundred thousand dollars into GameStop options and I made 10 million. It’s like, I, I agree with that. That does happen on occasion. On Monday I put it into chat. GPTI was gonna take a million dollars and put it on roulette.
[00:46:06] OG: It wouldn’t let me, it was very concerned for my wellbeing after long conversation about how I was gonna do that. It doesn’t mean you can’t be successful doing it, it’s just, it’s just not a strategy. It’s completely gambling and. Good for you if you, if you made it work, right? Like I’m, I’m super excited for the person, you know, what was the guy’s name?
[00:46:27] OG: The, the, the guy on Reddit that bought all the GameStop stuff and made like $50 million.
[00:46:31] Joe: Yeah.
[00:46:32] OG: They made a movie about him. Sure. You know Roaring Kitty. Awesome. If that was all legit. Good for you, buddy. I’m glad that you did that and you changed your family tree, hopefully for generations to come.
[00:46:45] Joe: I thought the same thing, og, but listen to this, according to Greenlight, which is an investing platform for children and teens, Greenlight, by the way, espouses index investing and boring investing, when they have done their research, they found that families who try paper trading, they’re about four times as likely than other users to go on and very comfortably become investors ’cause of the fact that they did this paper trading.
[00:47:11] Joe: What I think of as garbage and, and I can go into why I think it’s garbage. They aren’t afraid of it. Later on, they’re like, oh yeah, the interface, I get this and I get this and I know what not to do. Like most of these people are using the paper trading to go, oh God, this is stupid. Even this dude that did 2000% said it was super risky.
[00:47:31] Joe: I got way lucky. I don’t know that I could do that with real money.
[00:47:35] OG: I mean, I guess if there’s a lesson there of this doesn’t work, I’m much more concerned for the person that doesn’t learn that lesson. Yeah. I mean, I have that on the platform that I use at Schwab. It’s like you can flip it over to the paper trading and you go, huh, wonder what would happen if I did like all tomorrow call options on Nvidia.
[00:47:53] OG: Woo hoo. It’s like, yeah, sometimes you win that and sometimes you don’t. But
[00:47:57] Joe: Well, and I’ll tell you what, I think it’s garbage. I think it’s garbage because of this. I’ve done the paper trading stuff to try out these strategies like you’re talking about, and I get done. I’m like, okay, that works. And then I go put real money on.
[00:48:09] Joe: Dude, my decision making, my, my gut feelings, maybe not my decision making, but my gut feeling around the trade, way different, the emotional rollercoaster I’m on is way different when there’s real money. Sure. Versus when I’m making a paper trade. Yeah. There’s no stakes. It changes everything. I mean, playing poker, play poker on one of these apps where you’re doing it with fake money and the moves you make are just crazy.
[00:48:34] Joe: You’re like, oh no man, I’m going all in. Like I’m doing this thing. And then you’re in a real poker game and it was amazing. I did all these apps before going to my buddy’s poker game, and we don’t even play for big money. But I gotta tell you, even when we’re doing these little tiny bets and there’s a real pot of money out there, even if it’s only 12 bucks.
[00:48:55] Joe: Yeah. I’m sitting there and I’m emotionally going, oh dude, do I wanna put more money into this? Might win, might not. I don’t know. I don’t, and I’ll tell you on the app, I was like, oh dude, I’m in, I’m, I’m freaking in. ’cause who cares? But I think you make completely different decisions when there’s real money on the line.
[00:49:12] OG: Yeah. Well, I mean, there’s no stakes. I mean, it’s the difference between playing video games and, and reality. I mean, I’m a hell of a football player on ncaa. Right. You know, EA sports man. Like, you should see the throws I can make. It’s not reality. It’s just not. This is one of those like, is the juice worth the squeeze things, in my opinion, is it worth it to sit down and get a paper account and do you know the Nancy Pelosi trades or what?
[00:49:39] OG: Like, probably not. If it scratches a niche, okay, fine. But you’re not gonna be a better investor because you practiced trading. You’re probably gonna be worse actually, because trading isn’t a thing that is repeatable in terms of. Process, like use the thing that is successful long term. The successful long term thing is buy diversified stuff.
[00:50:03] OG: Don’t touch it for a really long time. Like that’s the repeatable process. And you can’t model that on a paper trade because it just looks like a portfolio of ETFs and it goes,
[00:50:12] OG: oh, went up like 0.2% today. Oh, went down 0.1% today. It like is, there’s
[00:50:18] Joe: nothing to, it is a hundred percent. I think if you’re gonna do this, you gotta go in with the stipulations.
[00:50:23] Joe: What I would say would be better
[00:50:25] OG: would be to take your asset allocation and portfolio visualizer and back test. That to me that would be more useful for understanding the value of compounding and the, and the value of adding a hundred dollars a month to my account for the next 20 years. Not saying it’s gonna be exactly repeating, but it’s gonna get close to that math.
[00:50:45] OG: And I think the impact of like going, well, what happens if I add 10%? Commodities to my portfolio over a 20 year time horizon. Like what did that do to the volatility? What did that do to the total return? You know, a lot of people just say, I should put all my money in the s and p. It’s like, okay, cool. Back test that for the last 50 years.
[00:51:05] OG: Use check GPT for that. Say, Hey, what’s better? You know, a 50 50 allocation of stocks bonds or 80 20, a hundred zero? Like what? Use that for your
[00:51:13] Joe: specifically. How would I have done, what would the change
[00:51:16] OG: have been? Yeah, for your paper trading to stress test ideas. Not like, should I put a hundred thousand dollars in a frigging GameStop?
[00:51:24] OG: I mean, would I take your money and do that? Sure, I would. Why not? It’s Joe’s money.
[00:51:32] Joe: Why not use my money for your crazy stuff? All
[00:51:34] Doug: $75 of it.
[00:51:36] Joe: Yes. We will link to this on our show notes page at Stacking Benjamins dot com. Love to hear what your thoughts are. Stackers either on Spotify or in our basement Facebook group.
[00:51:47] Joe: Before we say goodbye, Doug, we gotta wander out onto the back porch and, uh, find out what’s happening in stacker land. Well,
[00:51:54] Doug: Joe, there’s a review that we got recently that I’d, I’d love to read. Oh, excellent. If that’s okay with you. Yeah. Well, heck yeah. The thing that really caught my eye about this was the title of it.
[00:52:04] Doug: Well, five Star Review. That helps. But the title is Addicted and I got Concerned. Right. I thought, well, this, this is somebody crying out for help. Oh boy. This is by ADA Crossroads. Ah, I see. See what they did there. Yeah. I do not have an addictive personality, however, this is at a crossroads talking, not me.
[00:52:24] Doug: I do not have an addictive personality. However, I have to admit, I have been constantly needing a Stacking Benjamins fix on the regular, and this is all your fault, Doug. Thank you. I think, uh, since, since discovering your podcast, I have opened A-V-T-S-A-X account, started a Roth IRA, and shored up my emergency fund to provide me six months worth of expenses.
[00:52:50] Doug: That’s awesome. Way to go add. It’s actually a pretty long review. I’ll, uh, I’ll skip ahead here a little bit, says, uh, I would love a book recommendation, but maybe able to help me reach my goal of Fi Can’t Do Fire anymore because the re has since left the building, which I loved. I’m guessing that means this person is maybe a little bit older.
[00:53:13] Doug: Thank you so much, Joe, Doug og. He just lists the whole gang, Paula, Jesse, Len, doc G, and all of you for the nuggets of true financial wisdom and the laughs too, especially the laughs. Thanks, Anna.
[00:53:26] Joe: That is fantastic. And by the way, what a great episode. Hopefully you’re hearing this ADA because you know, just this 1% better and riffing off of what works versus, uh, going for the home run.
[00:53:40] Doug: If
[00:53:40] Joe: only there was a book that you could
[00:53:41] Doug: recommend
[00:53:42] Joe: if
[00:53:43] Doug: Crossroads, if only. If only, huh? What’s that big yellow blotch? That’s like a, a brick of bright yellow behind you over there. It’s like
[00:53:52] Joe: right behind me. It’s a little book called Stacked. And in fact, uh, ADA, if you, uh, write to me and give me your address, I’m gonna send it to you.
[00:53:59] Joe: I’ll send it to you four. Oh, free. Yes. I will send it as a thank you for the kind words and to help you along the way. And by the way, I thought you were talking about George’s book because George’s book Not bad either. Love, love what George is talking about, but yes, for good financial planning stacked, uh, CNN called it the number one book to read when it came out.
[00:54:22] Joe: When it comes to personal finance.
[00:54:24] Doug: Joe, uh, later today, maybe, uh, another walkthrough stroll through the vault,
[00:54:29] Joe: two walkthroughs of the vault happening today. Those are this afternoon. If you’re listening the day that it, that this comes out, which is, uh, Wednesday, January 28th, we are going to be live at 4:00 PM Eastern Time.
[00:54:43] Joe: And at 8:00 PM Eastern Time. So that’s what, uh, 5:00 PM Pacific and Pacific, uh, 1:00 PM Pacific. So, uh, do the math if you’re in the middle of the country like I am, but we’d love to have you on our YouTube channel. Walk through the Vault. You can see all the 15 different things that this thing, this thing does so many different things.
[00:55:05] Joe: None of them are revolutionary. Clearly the revolutionary part is putting it all together into one roof and keeping, uh, all of your identity safe from unwanted subscriptions off these unwanted lists. By the way, Cheryl just, uh, texted me because she got something from the vault just now that said, tell me you went to Albertsons today, which means somebody might be trying to steal our identity again, uhoh as we speak, but we’re on it right now because of the vault.
[00:55:32] Joe: So Stacking Benjamins dot com slash. Vault and you can take a look at it.
[00:55:37] Doug: Are you gonna tell her to, like, you better dig into that. ’cause you don’t want her to know that you went there to buy the family sized bag of Cheetos. Yeah. If we could just write that so you’re like, oh
[00:55:45] Joe: yeah,
[00:55:45] Doug: somebody
[00:55:45] Joe: write that off.
[00:55:46] Joe: Somebody stole, somebody, stole her id. That many Lucky Charms wouldn’t have been me. No. Would’ve never been me. Uh, a bunch of stuff from the donut aisle. That’s weird. Wow. God, again, how do we keep getting our identity stolen? Sadly, wasn’t me. So that is scary. Hey, uh, last thing is, uh, big congrats to our group of Mankato who’s, uh, having their inaugural bad meeting this evening as well.
[00:56:14] Joe: Hope it goes well. And if you’re in the Mankato area, if you’re in southern Minnesota, come join our friends and they’re on the campus of, uh, Minnesota State University. The other MSU og.
[00:56:30] Doug: Yeah, they’re, they’re meeting down on Stadium Road. I think it’s two 30 Stadium Road on the Minneapolis. Minneapolis, a Minnesota State campus in Manco, Mankato, I can’t say it. I think it Mankato, it needs to be Mon Mancado or something. But anyway, six 30 tonight, be there at the bad meeting. All the
[00:56:47] Joe: gang there, all the students taking part in this group.
[00:56:50] Joe: Super excited to have this group rolling. So, uh, fantastic. Gives me a warm, fuzzy to know people getting together, talking about. Doing better with their money in Southern Minnesota.
[00:57:02] Doug: Eh, they’re probably getting a bit together to talk about how hilarious I am. Pro. Probably,
[00:57:07] Joe: maybe that too. Really, when you think about it, they’re doing your trivia.
[00:57:10] Joe: I have seen your trivia question for tonight, Doug, and I thought that was a particularly good one. So, all right. Big thanks to you for hanging out. If you know somebody that needs to make better decisions, somebody that needs, uh, better, better money help in their corner, OG and his team are taking clients head to Stacking Benjamins dot com slash og for his and our friend Anna’s calendars.
[00:57:31] Joe: And uh, that’s the first step into making 2026 a fantastic year for your money. And then also if you know somebody who wants just better ideas, I think this is a great podcast to, uh, forward on to your friends that wanna have better ideas. ’cause I thought George. I, I, I love this idea about where Genius comes from, and George, I think nailed it today.
[00:57:52] Joe: So big thanks to him for helping. But Doug, you’ve got the list, man, the official Stacking Benjamins list. What are the things that should be on our to-do list after listening to today’s show?
[00:58:02] Doug: Well, Joe, first take some advice from the world’s biggest Seinfeld fan, George Newman. I mean, seriously, where’d he come up with that name?
[00:58:10] Doug: I mean, there’s no other explanation for where he came up with that. Both, yeah, with that nom de plume, George Newman. Anyway, wanna find better ideas, survey areas you are familiar with, become even more of an expert and start digging. As Thomas Edison showed us, all great ideas are discovered by digging, not by intuition.
[00:58:30] Doug: Second, paper trading. While it might make you more comfortable, realize you’re gonna make much different decisions when real money is on the line and your emotions are involved, invest small amounts of real cash and you’ll see better how you respond. But the big lesson, Joe’s mom wants to challenge me to a jeopardy contest.
[00:58:53] Doug: Trivia. Really, ma, I got this. Wait. I meant to say what’s Doug could easily win this. I think that’s the acceptable format. Yeah, that’s better. Thanks to George Newman for joining us today. You’ll find his new book, how Great Ideas Happen, the Hidden Steps Behind Breakthrough Success, wherever Books are Sold.
[00:59:16] Doug: We’ll also include links in our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com. And coming Friday, we’re joined by the 1% Better Conference founder David Gillis, to chat about getting 1% better with your money habits. We’ll see you back here in Mom’s basement for that one. This show is the Property of SP podcast LLC, copyright 2026, and is created by Joe Saul Sea High.
[00:59:41] Doug: You’ll find out about our awesome team at Stacking Benjamins dot com, along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube and all the usual social media spots. Come say hello and oh yeah, before I go, not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know.
[01:00:00] Doug: This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I’m Joe’s Mom’s neighbor, Doug, and we’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamin Show.