Join us today for a very special installment of our Best of 2023 Week!!!
Crypto? Huge profits? Taking advantage of people? Has that ever happened before? It turns out that it has, in the wild, wild west, which roped in celebrities like Wild Bill Hickok and many others. Today, we’ll tell their stories and rope the lessons around to today with master storyteller and host of the Legends of the Wild West podcast, Chris Wimmer.
Please disregard any mention of current events, as this episode was originally broadcast on June 12, 2023. See the original show notes here.
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/201
Enjoy!
Have a question for the show?
Want more than just the show notes? How about our newsletter with STACKS of related, deeper links?
- 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).
Join Us Friday!
Tune in tomorrow as we wrap up our Best of 2023 Week with our annual Magic 8-Ball episode!
Written by: Kevin Bailey
Miss our last show? Listen here: Mastering Emotions and Maximizing Energy in Financial Decisions (Best of 2023 SB1455)
Episode transcript
📍
You want me to wear those? I can’t fit. There’s not even a, but there’s no covering on the back, Joe. It’s a special episode. I mean, how often do we get to do an old West episode? We never get to do one and it’s dress rehearsal day, so let’s do it. Nobody even sees that part except when you bend over for the pencil.
But we’ve got Doug, the kid here. We got da OG holiday. I am white Earp. And you know what? We are able to clown around. Talking about history of the Old West today on our very special episode because men and women kept us safe for real, right? We’ve got these fake holsters and they got the real ones, the men and women in our military.
So as we do every Monday, let’s begin this special episode with a salute and Doug. Sit down slowly when you’re in those things so you don’t rip ’em. Towel down. They’re already ripped, aren’t they? Here? Here’s to, here’s the, they look like they’re ripped here. Here’s to the men and women keeping us safe. On behalf of the men and women at Navy Federal Credit Union, men and women making podcasts about money in the old West.
Yeehaw, giddy up. Salute our troops. Alright guys, places everybody, let’s review the open to this special episode. Alright? Yeah. Um, hey, what do you think about this? Ooh, that’s good, man. But maybe not so dramatic. Isn’t drama what we’re going for? Well, I mean, we want our Western episode to seem realistic and I want Chris Wimer to feel at home.
Who’s Chris Wimmer Do? Do you ever read the script? I wanted to. I tend to, but it was karaoke last night at The Sizzle. Okay. I really, dude, I don’t care. Do you just have music for the open? Yeah, I can probably find something here. Let me just check the eight track. Oh, gun smoke.
Nah, we can’t do that. That’s trademark. Bonanza, same thing. Trademarked. Django. Come on. Same. Same. Oh my God. Last train to Yuma. Doug. Yep. Last train. Doug. Doug. All right. Okay, fine. Alright, I got one. I got one right here. Okay, good. Well then guys, get in your places. Let’s do a dry run. Press play Doug when I point to you.
All right. Three, two, hold. Hold on, hold on, hold on. Do I press play? Like when you say one, like right when you’re saying the number one what Or after you say after let’s go. Just seems to me like if I wait, maybe like two beats. That’s gonna give Steve a chance. Doug, Doug. Doug. Okay, fine. I’m doing it. I’m doing it.
Live from Joe’s mom’s basement. It’s the Stacking Benjamin Show. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug, and it was a long, hot summer in Texarkana. The kind of day when you found out who was your friend and. Who’s your enemy? Our friend today is sharing lessons from stories of Stacking Benjamins in the late 18 hundreds.
He’s the host of the Legends of the Old West podcast, Chris Wimmer in our headline, it’s June already. Will the June swoon hit your money like a dust storm fresh outta Kansas? We’ll have a thought or two. Of course we ain’t going nowhere without our TikTok minute and even lifeline of that. You can be sure.
And to top it all off we’ll trail drive today’s trivia right to your doorstep. You are most welcome, cow poke. And now two guys who are the sheriff and deputy of these parts. Man, I know I kind of thought of them more like the town hobos, but you know it’s Joe and that OG Feller.
Hey there, stackers. Nice. Open to the special episode. Dry Run through Doug. I’m Joe. Hi every Joe Money on Twitter and. The sheriff in this town and here alongside me on his horse. Ready to roll? It’s Mr. Doc OG Holiday. How are you buddy? Pretty good. You ready to do lessons from the Old West? We’ve done lessons, lessons West.
We’ve done lessons from early days of credit. We’ve done several times lessons around Ben Franklin and around, of course, the founding of our country. We’ve done somewhere around the Civil War, around, uh, early wealth in black America. We’ve done all kinds of things. We’ve never done the Wild West though.
How come we’ve never done that? Robin Stage Coaches? I’m in. Let’s do it. No, probably not. We want podcast. We got an episode Wednesday too. og. Oh. That we gotta be back for. So, fantastic episode. Chris Wimmer? Yes, sir. Joe, I just got a question for you. Do I get to talk like this? The whole episode? Oh, God, if you do, I think we’ll all strangle ourselves.
It’ll be, it’ll be fun. I sure would appreciate it if I got talk like this. All episode. Fun. How about if you just, how about if you just bring the trivia that way? Can we meet in the middle ground maybe? Okay, sure. You got it? Yeah. Yes. All right. While you practice talking normal again, Doug, I want everybody to listen up for a second ’cause I got a little rant.
Here it is. Hey stackers, there’s a lot of people upset about mint shutting down and I get it. Uh, you spend time linking all your accounts, creating different budgets, but rocket money. Is one I can recommend. They make it easy to get set up. Now, do they recommend custom budgets based on your past spending?
They manage your finances and save you money so you can actually reach your financial goals. Rocket Money’s personal finance app. Not only do they do what Mint did, manage all your spending in one place, create budgets and monitor your credit score. But they also cancel unwanted subscriptions and negotiate bills for you to actually help you save money.
It’s a one-stop shop. You can see all your subscriptions at one place, and if I see something I don’t want Rocket Money can cancel it with a couple taps on the app. It’s super easy. They’ll even try to get you refund for the last couple months. A waste of money and can. Negotiate lower bills for you.
Sometimes by up to 20%. Rocket Money is over 5 million users and has helped saved its members an average of $720 a year with over $500 million in canceled subscriptions. Stop wasting money on things you don’t use. Cancel your unwanted subscriptions. But going to rocket money.com/sb. That’s rocket money.com/sp.
Rocket money.com/sb. Maybe play one more of those. Joe, I almost got my normal voice back. Well, if you know me, you know how excited I am about Aura Frames. You know, they sent me a couple of them, which is kind of funny because we already have a subscription for my mother-in-Law, where whenever Cheryl and I go around, did I tell you I went to Bavaria?
I tell you, I went to Bali. We, we go to these different places. I’ve been very lucky. I’ve gone a lot of places. But you know what? I feel like we can take, uh, my mother-in-Law along with us because we send it right to her. And in fact, the one that I just got, that one, don’t tell anybody. That one’s going to mom, so that she gets to travel with us as well.
What’s cool is you can take your app, you just have an app on your phone, take pictures and you can give that code to everybody in the family. So everybody can either use the app, use the code, just send pictures directly to that so it’s not just us. Grandma’s got all the grandkids and she knows everything that’s going on.
If you visit aura frames.com today, you’re gonna give the best gift ever. This holiday season, you’re gonna get $30 off their bestselling frames. With the code SBS. These frames sell quickly though, so get yours before they’re gone. That’s A URA frames.com with promo code SBS. Visit aura frames.com for terms and conditions.
Is it back? Now? It’s getting there. Alright. You still got a little bit of back here in the back, but it’s, I’m close. We got Chris Wimmer talking about lessons from one summer, the summer of 1876, but before that, a big old hoot, nanny of a headline. So let’s go. Hello darlings. Now it’s time for your favorite part of the show, our Stacking Benjamins headlines.
I got to use my word hoot Nanny again. So I’m feeling pretty good. That was an old West Term, wasn’t it? I doubt it everybody. You could get both looking at me like the hell, uh, you know, you know what, og? There are a few names in personal finance writing who I always am excited to write. Jason Zweig, Jonathan Clements, uh, Nick Murray, um, Morgan Hausel.
There’s a few of them. This is another one that I really like. I really like it when Mark Halbert writes stuff, mark writes in MarketWatch last week. Don’t bet on a quote. June swoon. Here’s what the data show. He says, there’s no such thing as a June swoon on Wall Street. Those who are predicting one, and there are many, and he clicks.
If you click to the link, you see just how many people are going. Ooh, the market’s gonna be bad again. Like it always is in June, selling May and go away. I know. He says it reveals more about themselves than the stock market. The belief in fictional phenomena such as the June swoon illustrates once again why investor sentiment plays such a powerful role in the markets.
And why contrarian analysis is effective. You know, we’re gonna do an episode here soon on Mindset og, and I think he nails it here. Your mindset going into the summer and acting on that mindset is everything to success in your long-term investing. Well, can I think about where this might’ve started? And you go back 60, 70, 80 years, a hundred years, where stocks are traded person to person, you know, not on the computer, not over the telephone.
And, uh, you, you get to the summertime, it’s New York City. And what do people in the north wanna do during the summer? Kind of, sort of play a little hooky from time to time, right? And so there’s not as much action, there’s not as much stuff going on. And so it stands to reason that in, you know, the old times when those transactions were face-to-face and certainly not over a computer, and certainly not on your iPhone, um, there wasn’t as much conversation.
There was wasn’t, wasn’t as much stuff going on because the traders physically weren’t present. Now you, uh, take that, which may have been a somewhat of irregular occurrence, uh, you know, a hundred years ago or 80 years ago, and then you fast forward to today, I just looked at my stock portfolio while we were talking.
’cause because I’ve, I’m, I’m thinking about a particular thing. You were talking about mindset. But you can look at it, you can trade it, you can do everything you want no matter where you are in the entire world. So that, that, that impetus for what was the sell and may and go away type of idea, it doesn’t exist anymore.
And since you don’t know what the market’s gonna do anyway, why don’t you just follow your plan? I love where it goes from from this point. He says, what’s not fictional, of course, is that the stock market at some point in June will decline. Like we know it’s gonna decline itself, right? Yes. There will be a day or two, or it is going to happen 30.
It, it could be the whole thing, it could be nothing. But to predict that, oh, this June’s like every other June. He says that’s trivially true. The same could be said of any month, but by using the name June swoon, analysts are implying something more than this trivial truth, that there’s something unique and special about the stock market’s downside risk during June.
This also, uh, resonates for people maybe listening to this later in September, right? We always think, Ooh, September, the market’s gonna be pretty horrible. October October’s usually pretty good, but is it You have just as many of those, right? Always remember the whole Black Friday, early October, black Friday.
Yeah. It’s always great. The, uh, Santa Claus rally, you know? Yeah. January’s when all the pensions get funded, therefore, dot dot, you know, here’s what I wonder about. I mean, what, like, classic economics always assumed that all actors were rational, right? And the behavioral economics sort of showed that it, it’s, we’re not, we’re not rational actors when it comes to our money.
When I think back to when I was in a corporate environment. The minute you were done with Memorial Day productivity through the summer sucked. And the minute that Labor Day you came back to the office after Labor Day, it was nose to the grindstone, we got projects to accomplish. So I can see how that mental vacation, at least in the western world that we all take in the summertime, I can see how that’s gonna affect not only corporate performance, but also our mental thought around, um, our investing.
It sounds like you’re saying that’s who we Yeah, it is. Statistically June is no better or worse than any other month across the board. So why would you, you know, why would you make an investment policy out of this might be the June that’s gonna go down. You know, you could say that about any month. This might be the February that goes down.
This might be the, you think about were day trading. If we were a day trading podcast, we would say, yeah, maybe do pull your money out because. This is me trying to support my theory because yeah, corporate performance might suffer a little bit in the summer when people kind of take a mental break. But because we espouse long-term stick to your plan, you’re saying it’s no different than any other month.
So just stick to your plan. No, I’d say even worse than that, Doug, because companies look at year over year results. If they take the same breaks every summer, it’s gonna be this year versus last year, which means that sure, you know, productivity, standards, output, whatever would’ve been down last year too, which is why Halbert nails it here, that these, these names we give these periods throughout the year are just a bunch of baloney.
And you think about this from a deeper level too. If we’re truly investing in companies, if my goal is to own a company, why the hell am I gonna, why? Why am I gonna jump off the ship, then jump back on the ship, then jump back off the ship? Like if my true goal is to beat inflation, I gotta be there OG when it goes up.
And Halbert points out further down this article that a couple weeks ago, on June 2nd, we saw stocks go up 700 points in one day. He’s like, okay, right now everybody says June’s gonna be neutral. Like all of the pundits say, uh, June neutral. Uh, if it goes up 700 points in one day, all of a sudden everybody turns one piece of news changes everything.
Well, and to your point about buying companies, if you’re trying to own companies, you would actually want it to go down. Like, why wouldn’t you wanna buy it at a less expensive price than yesterday’s? Like, I’ve been buying it every week for the last 52 weeks, and today I got it at a cheaper price. Like, that’s a good deal.
So the swoon isn’t, oh my God, it’s, they’re on sale right now. We should go buy. That’s swooning, isn’t it? It should be. It should be that type of sson. I love that. June Spoon. Oh, Lordy. Oh, oh. You haven’t looked more attractive to me. There it is. I knew, I knew we were gonna get Doug. I knew he was gonna come back.
I in the bow and delivered. We finally found the real June spoon and exactly, uh, exactly how to play it. So go by. Go by ladies and gentlemen. Am I in my, uh, I I can hear the old West already sneaking up on us, and we’re not yet to our special guest, so I think that’s a great place to leave it. Let’s, uh, let’s all swoon over stocks in June, shall we?
Hey, uh, let’s bring on the TikTok minute. This is a part of the show, everyone where we corral up some of the best and worst of the old internet. Trying to do old. No, it just isn’t, isn’t there? You are not. Yes. With either a TikTok, Instagram reel, something foolish on Facebook, whatever it might be. OG today, I think it’s the day.
Oh, come on. Turn over a new leaf, man. It’s a better, it’s a new day. Chris Wimmer is upstairs talking to mom right now. We’re about to have a entirely different show, so what do you think? Come on. All right. OG says this one’s gonna be bad. Well, let’s listen in. You know, what if we talked about June in the stock market in these terms?
Like what if you went to meet your financial advisor and they told you, uh, well how good things were in the stock market? This way? Raw. It’s just like, dude, you get the best barrels ever, dude. Just like you pull in and you just get spit right out of them and you just drop in and just smack the lip pullback, you drop down, snap, ah, and then after that you just drop in, you just ride the barrel and get pitted.
So pitted like that do so made like a bunch of money. Like I bought the game stuff. We got like barrel rolled on the GameStop and it just goes wooow pow. Nice Tachos duster average went up 700 pints Kapal. I think he’s a buddy of that second Benjamins voicemail caller. We had a while back from California.
I think those two guys are buddies. He did the guy from Fan Life right, who put his crystals out front. Right. He had to recharge his crystals by putting him on the dash. Yeah. Thanks a lot to Kevin for, uh, setting that our way. If you’ve got a TikTok minute for us and we’ve had, we’ve got a few good ones coming up, guys that you stackers, you’re on top of it, send those to me, Joe at stacky Benjamins dot com.
Dmm me on Instagram, uh, wherever you see ’em coming up next. Chris Wimmer not only is the host of a podcast that I’ve spent a good amount of time listening to because I love these old Western stories, they’re so, so good. He has a brand new book out where he looks at the summer of 1876 and saw that there’s so many.
So many world changing things that happen all at the same time. And he intertwines all these stories. We are obviously not gonna be able to talk about all of them, but we’re going to talk about one, one of one of the stories involving, uh, the City of Deadwood and the Lakota tribe and much, much, much more.
But before we introduce Chris with lessons on work and money from the Old West Doug, I think you got some old West trivia for us, man. Bring the voice. Sure do. Joe. Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor Doug, and why don’t you mosey on up to the bar cow poking. I’ll spin you a yarn or two about the Old West.
Much like there’d be some pretty wild stories about me floating around the Sizzler. There’s also plenty of stories about money, the Old West and other notable figures. So I thought, how about we ask you trivia question or two about ’em? What’s that? Now keep it to one. You got it. Bar keep one famous individual.
From the old West, found wealth and an early grave. Let’s see if you can name him. His papapa was a preacher who went west, not to pan for gold, but to preach to miners. Oh, sorry, I I don’t mean little kids there, I meant people panning for gold. Anyw who? Okay, where was I? Uh uh, yeah. Upon arriving in California though, his daddy quickly got sick and died.
And when he was all growed up, this man then fought in the Civil War as a confederate gorilla fighter in a group known as the bush whackers. There’s a couple of jokes right there, stackers. But let, I’ll let her go, as this is a polite establishment. And all later a journalist followed him in his group, referring to them as a sort of Robin hood for poor people, something he definitely was not.
Though this man wrote to many papers explaining his illegal actions in a way to make himself look honorable. He even evaded the greatest sleuths of the day. The Pinkerton detectives, after nearly getting caught by authorities in Minnesota, he was murdered at age 34 by a member of his own group who was after a big money bounty.
Alright, stackers, who was this young man? I’ll be back right after I figure out how the heck to move around in these Spurs, people actually wear these darn things.
Well, stackers national security experts are warning our aging power grid is more vulnerable than ever. January Mark the third time power station, North Carolina was damaged by gunfire. Recently, authorities are saying the attack quote raises a new level of threat. Authorities are now checking our grid for vulnerabilities.
They’ve identified nine key substations If those are attacked, power could be knocked out from coast to coast for up to 18 months. Imagine a blackout. The last, not days, but weeks or months, everything’s frozen in time, just like here in mom’s basement. The moment the power fails, lights all over the country, we go out throwing people into total darkness, and that’s why having your own solar power more important than ever with four patriots, Patriot power generator, you get a solar generator that doesn’t install into your house because it’s portable.
Take it with. You can even use it inside, but it’s powerful enough for your phones, your medical devices, or even your fridge right now. You can go to four patriots.com and use code SB to get 10% off your first purchase on anything in the store, including the Patriot Power Generator from four Patriots.
That’s the number four Patriots. You’ll also get their famous guarantee for an entire year after your order. Plus free shipping on orders over $97, and a portion of every sales donated to charities who support our veterans and their families. Just go to four patriots.com, use Code SSB and you’re gonna get 10% off.
That’s the number four patriots.com. Use code XB to get yours today. Get an inside look at Hollywood with Michael Rosenbaum. Let’s get inside of my father, John Glover. You know, we watch Talk Phil. And most of these episodes I never saw, I didn’t watch the show. You never once saw yourself on Smallville in the beginning.
I used to look at myself all the time and love to, and then as I get older I stopped. Why is that? I don’t know. Maybe ’cause I’m older. I was gonna talk to you about that. ’cause you’re 79. Yeah. How old do you feel? 11. Inside of you with Michael Rosenbaum. Wherever you listen.
Hey there Stackers. I’m Wild West Ficto in Texarkana famous podcast, rodeo Clown Joe’s, mom’s neighbor, Doug. Before the break I shared details of one famous wild Westerner’s life. A guy that some called Robin Hood because he stole from banks and gave to the poor. Well, what he really done was put that their money in his trouser pockets.
Who was he? Well, if you said Frank James, that would’ve been correct, except he was murdered at age 34. That would’ve been his brother, Jesse James, one of the most notorious criminals in history. I. And now here with more stories of the Wild West, coming down to our basement level saloon, say hello to Chris Wimmer and we’re super happy.
We have him visiting Mom’s dark dusty, like a saloon in the old West basement. I guess that’s what we’re playing for today. Chris Wimmer is here. How are you, man? Good. I was, uh, pleasantly surprised to see your mom has batwing doors like an old saloon. That was a surprise. Not many people have those anymore.
We set that up specifically for today. Awesome. ’cause we thought you’d feel more at home. Yes. Perfect. Let’s dive right into it. I wanna ask first you and this project, of course, you have some fantastic podcast already about the Wild West, but 1876 even before we get there, why you and the old West Chris, what’s your fascination with the old West?
Uh, it’s actually pretty simple. It comes from my family. My parents grew up in the fifties and sixties when westerns were everything on TV and in the movie theaters. And so when my sister and I were growing up, our family always had westerns on TV in the household. When we took family trips, almost all of them were to the west to see old west towns and battlefields and anything in the western us.
And so it was very much ingrained in me at an early age. And when I started getting addicted to podcasts and I decided I was gonna leap into this, this field and try one of these things. I looked around the landscape and saw that there, no one was really doing a long form storytelling podcast about true stories from the Old West and some of those true stories.
If you’ve, certainly, if you’ve listened to the podcast, it, it really fits that phrase, that truth can be, sometimes they say truth is stranger than fiction. Sometimes it’s just truth is as exciting as fiction, and that’s really what I discovered that the true stories. Of these old west characters and places, they’re just as interesting as any Hollywood version you’ve ever seen.
And your background is in some storytelling already. You were in Hollywood? Yeah, I worked in Hollywood for 14 years, basically. I almost right outta college. I actually moved to Hollywood while I was still in college between my junior and senior year in college and worked a summer job that just turned into a permanent job and I’d always wanted to be a movie director.
I had that glorious dream of being a movie director as a kid growing up in Des Moines, Iowa. Chris Spielberg, Wimmer. Yeah, because the pipeline from Des Moines, Iowa to Hollywood is already secure and it’s perfect. And yeah, everybody does it. It’s so easy to do. And so I had this almost crazy dream of being a film director, but the irony is that I was also, I discovered, I knew that I was fairly decent at writing.
The two things, not surprisingly, I was always good at growing up were history and writing. So it’s no surprise that I ended up starting a couple history podcasts that rely on lots of research and lots of writing. But I went out to Hollywood and worked in the industry doing various jobs early on, and then eventually, um.
Was able to start focusing on screenwriting as a way to potentially lead me into directing, but that was always the goal. I wanted to be a director and not a writer. But as I got writing more and more screenplays, I decided I really liked that process. So I ended up somewhat shifting what I wanted to try to do to be in the screenwriting world, and then it just never panned out.
You know, I had one of those stories. It’s so difficult to sell a screenplay and then ultimately get one made. I just got so frustrated with it that I ultimately changed careers and decided if I was gonna do anything else in the world other than work in the movie industry. They would be to write about college football.
I’m a huge college football fan, and so the dream changed. I thought, ah, if there’s anything else, if the whole world is open to me, what else would I want to do? It would be to travel to all the biggest college football games of the week. Yeah. And write about that would be glorious too. So, uh, I went to the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism in here in Phoenix, Arizona, where I am right now, the Cronkite Journalism School at Arizona State, and got a master’s degree and started my transition into the world of sports writing.
Wow. And during that whole transition is when I got addicted to podcasts and started seeing that there was a creative outlet in the world of podcasts that could be a somewhat of a hybrid of what I had done in Hollywood and what I had not been able to do in Hollywood. Things I wanted to do, but couldn’t.
And so I, I eventually took the leap and left the journalism field very shortly after I ended up starting into it. So that whole master’s degree experience, you could say it was worth it, I guess, but it took an odd twist there a couple years later. Well, and I love this. This is a turn. I didn’t expect that we’d take Chris, but for people out there that are listening and they’re trying to plan their career, I feel like when I was in my early twenties, I was looking for a straight line to this thing, to this, you know, promised land where everything was gonna be great in my career.
And yet I had a very circuitous route. You certainly, you certainly did too. Like, I feel like there is a lesson there that all these things, ’cause you can hear all of your journalism and research. You, you can read it. I mean, you can feel it in this book. All of these talents that you’ve gotten from so many different places, coalesced in sometimes in weird and wonderful ways that we can’t expect.
Yeah. Thank you. And I actually, that was, that was the experience I had when I first started writing the podcast scripts, which of course then led into the book, uh, when I just decided I wanted to start a long form storytelling podcast. I had no, there’s no formal training you can get to write long form podcast series.
There’s no program in college. There’s no technical school. I just made it up as a hybrid of the screenplays that I was writing, the journalism principles that I had learned in the master’s program and non-fiction books that I had read. I smashed all of those things together and just came up with my own little system for how to write these things.
And so I, I very much. Overestimated how easy it would be for someone else to do it, because I had just made this up and drawn little things from all my different experiences. Yeah. I realized it was really like Frankenstein’s monster trying to recreate that, trying to have someone else recreate this thing that was just made up and smashed together from all these different pieces was very, very difficult.
So I, you know, I guess maybe that has led to some sort of style. I guess I, maybe I have some sort of style. It’s very weird to say out loud. Your podcast listeners are maybe cringing as I’m kind of guessing at how I should phrase this. Uh, I don’t think so in real time, but yeah, it’s, it’s a style that’s really, you know, a blend of a bunch of different things and, and I’ve learned that it’s, it it becomes unique over time that it’s difficult to replicate.
Yeah. There’s a great book I’ve referenced here. A bunch of people are new to our show, Austin Cleon Steele, like an artist where you take all these different things Yeah. And it informs who you are. I just, I I love that approach. Well, let’s dive in. ’cause man, we’ve got, we’ve got so much I’m not gonna be able to cover.
Why 1876? Chris, with all of the stuff that you’ve done on the podcast, all the research you’ve done, why the summer of 1876? Why are we focused in the lens specifically there? The summer of 1876 really ended up being this transformative period where so many huge things happened in a very short space of time, and they all featured some of the most well-known people of the American West, which are also some of the most well-known people in American history.
So when I was doing the research for the podcast and I was doing individual stories about all these different people in different episodes in the old West era, it hit me that, my God, some of these things happened in a 90 day space of time. This is incredible. And each book that you read about an individual topic like Wild Bill Hickok or Jesse James, or The Rise of Deadwood or Dodge City Baseball or baseball, or the Little Big Horn, they always focus on that one story, of course, with very good reason, but the consequences that they end up.
Ignoring the context and showing that this one story was also happening simultaneous to all these other huge stories. So when I realized that all these big stories happen in this very short space of time in one summer in American history, like the, the middle ground of what we call the old West era, like the peak of the old West era, which is generally considered 1865 to 1900.
So that summer of 1876 is kinda right in the middle. I thought, man, that’s a really interesting story. I’ve never read a book that weaves all these stories together and shows the context. And you know, if you pretended to be a newspaper reader in that summer, your head must have been spinning with all the different things that were happening.
A lot of the things that happen in the old West, there are things happening where the people that live on the land are largely being forced out. I’m talking about the Native Americans, the Lakotas, the Cheyenne across the nation that’s happening. We’ll get into that later. We also have, uh, as you detail a lot, some just bloody skirmishes, not just between these completely different civilizations, but also between outlaws and the law.
But this is set against a background that out East Chris, this is a time of huge innovation that’s, and really technology that’s way beyond what’s happening in the old West. Can we start off with, there is a centennial exhibition going on. Uh, can you talk about the Centennial exhibition and some of the innovation that’s happening at this time?
Yeah, a little bit. I mean, I can, I certainly, to try to dredge it all up from memory would be a little bit difficult, but I can definitely remember some of the highlights that. There are several things that are happening in and around the big storylines that are featured in the book, one of which is that you’re right, the backdrop for all of the big storylines that I put in the book is that for six months of the year of 1876, the City of Philadelphia is hosting the first World’s Fair on American soil.
So I, it has a very long name. They usually just gets shortened to the, uh, Centennial International Exposition. So this is the old school world fairs that we don’t do anymore, but huge buildings are built on massive fairgrounds in the city of Philadelphia, and they’re, they showcase new inventions or updated, uh, machinery or anything like that from all over the world.
So people in the by the millions flock to Philadelphia over the course of six months to tour all these pavilions and marvel at all these new things. Some of which are like the telephone from Alexander Graham Bell and the updated versions of the, of the, if we’re talking about Old West history, the updated versions of the weapons that became very famous in movies and TV and were traced back to the old West era.
So Samuel Colt’s, new pistols were arranged in a very exotic formation so that everyone could see the updated pistols. The Winchester rifle came out with its new 1876 model, and the 1873 model is the rifle that’s typically said the rifle that won the West. So all of these inventions, there’s a whole host of them.
There’s a lists and lists and list of things that were either debuted for the first time or updated and people flocked to Philadelphia, which ultimately ended up accidentally saving the life of a bank teller from Northfield, Minnesota, who ended up traveling to the World’s Fair at the exact time that Jesse James robbed his bank in Northfield.
So he was, he luckily missed out on that and was not a casualty of the moment. It’s wild. All these names, we’re only gonna get to a few of them, but Jesse James, while Bill Hickok, bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, I mean, so many of these names and I’m gonna want to get to a couple of them, but before we do that, talk about the economy at this time, because it seems to me as I read your work that a lot of this need to spread west or this desire to go west and find money.
Really what we’re trying to do is find a life and find a way to support ourself. Was because the economy not so good. Yeah, I, I, you know, this is, this is far more your wheelhouse than mine, so I don’t want to tread very lightly and make sure I don’t misstep here and miss and say anything. Certainly if I do, please correct me down the road.
But the financial panic of 1873 had happened three years before, so there was already real instability in the markets. Everyone was panicked. The gov, the government, and the United States needed money badly. Unfortunately, Ulysses s Grant’s presidential administration was riddled with corruption, so money was disappearing, left, right, and center.
So there were real financial problems in the country. So as a way to try to solve some of those problems, government officials started looking west. Uh, and as gold and silver and other valuable minerals were discovered in the West, those were easy ways to replenish the coffers of the federal government.
And so specific to a place like Deadwood, once Gold was, was verified to be in the Black hills of what is now South Dakota. Obviously miners flocked into the area illegally. That was, that was at that time Lakota land, that land had been cut apart, had been carved out for the Lakota in a treaty agreement about 10 years earlier.
So they, they owned the land, but of course, ownership is never gonna stop miners from going wherever the gold is. So miners would go in there, the US Army would kick them out, and they went through this back and forth until finally the army just gave up and the federal government said, we have to get this land.
It has the gold that we need to try to help our financial problem. And so that was one, you know, that was one impetus for trying to figure out a way to get the black hills away from the Lakota beyond just simple individual greed, which of course was a part of all of it. You go into the idea of manifest destiny about this is the time of manifest destiny and, and people really jumping into manifest destiny, and that means that it’s.
That, Hey, this is gonna happen. It’s inevitable. But you wrote something that made me laugh and not in a haha it’s funny way, but, but you wrote that Manifest Destiny was fantastic. If you’re white, if if you’re white, it means we probably own it. If you’re the Lakotas, probably bad news for you. Yeah.
Manifest Destiny was the, the basic concept that Americans slash white Europeans are destined to overspread the North American continent and the American nation should be from the East coast to the West coast. This is our destiny. We should have this land. And of course there were already lots and lots of societies who were living on that land and had been for hundreds of years.
And so our manifest destiny as Americans didn’t really factor in the Native Americans. The goal was to, if we could find a way to live together, great, but we as Americans still need to dominate whatever landscape that is. We need to have the resources that we need for our growing society. And so ultimately it became an an idea of.
We are destined to move west as an American nation and we’re just gonna have to simply push out or confine, or some people certainly advocated extermination of the Native Americans who were there because we as Americans need those resources for our expansion. You can see things like this in modern societies too, that I think whenever something gets too, whenever a town or a city becomes too expensive, people naturally progress outward.
And that’s basically what was happening on the East coast. Cities were getting bigger, things were coming more expensive. As people were able to travel, they wanted their own piece of land. Land ownership was critical to establishing yourself, uh, in terms of self-worth and just giving yourself a future.
So where do you get the land to the west? Where can you expand to find cheap land and then has resources in the west? So it was both the manifest destiny, the idea that we should have all this and that it was also the fundamental ground level idea that if I want to establish myself as a person who has worth, I need to find land.
And to get that, I have to go west. Let’s talk about Deadwood and about gold in the Black Hills for a moment. Chris, this you write was really a tinderbox already. Like bad things were completely set up to happen. In fact, you begin the book, uh, about 10 years earlier, the US is trying to set up a trail for a lot of these people who were headed west across the north, across the Lakota territories.
There’s a treaty, it seems like the treaties written for the first time ever. You write in the, uh, Lakota’s favor actually. And, uh, that’s a fascinating story on its own that we’re not gonna be able to get to. But what I wanna go to is the Lakota’s now own this land. But as you write, there’s so many phrases and, and not very specific language that allows officials of the US government to go on the land.
A guy who we all know, uh, a guy from just south of Detroit where I’d lived for a long time, a general Custer. General Custer’s out there and he’s doing some expedition, which ostensibly is what Chris, it’s for surveying, but he just happens to bring along some extra stuff just in case. Can you, can you tell us what he, what he brings along?
Yeah. When I referenced earlier that gold was verified in the Black Hills Custer’s 1874 Expedition, I believe it was, is the expedition that verified for real, that gold was in the Black hills. Miners had been going into that area for I think 20 to 30 years. And there were rumors that there were gold in the Black Hills region of what is now South Dakota.
And in 1874, Custer, who had been working on the southern plains, he had been transferred up to the northern plains because of his success against the Southern Cheyenne, uh, and Southern Arapaho. So he had so much success down in the Oklahoma area that the Army transferred him north to try to handle the Northern Cheyenne and the Lakota.
And he got up to the northern plains in the Bismarck area around 18 72, 18 73, 1 of those two years. And in 1874, the Army authorized him to take an expedition, an army column. Into the Black Hills ostensibly to survey it for potentially building forts. That’s right. Which was absurd because they didn’t own the land.
So I don’t know what they, I dunno why they expected to build the forts, but this was the reasoning. They were gonna go into this land survey, it look around, potentially scout it for building forts. And oh by the way, they were also bringing along a couple geologists since they were in the area. We might as well see if these rumors of gold are true.
And lo and behold, they were true. The geologist found gold. The reporters who were also traveling with the column wrote stories about it. And I think there was some sort of embargo on the stories, like they weren’t allowed to publish the stories immediately, but it didn’t matter once a story was published, or once gold was verified, word spread like wildfire.
And the next year in 1875, a second Army column went into the same area. Reverified that there was gold. And after that point there was really no way to stop the, the flood gates. You couldn’t close the flood gates anymore. People started were, were flocking into the gulches and the canyons of the black hills.
No matter what the army wanted, no matter what the federal government wanted, that was all she wrote. Deadwood then springs up as an illegal, illegal town ’cause nobody’s allowed to be there. And to your point, they don’t even own the land. But you go through not just Deadwood, but some other cities dodge, which of course, you know, gun smoke.
Yeah. I, I still listen to those old, uh, radio shows at gun smoke on, on XM radio. And then, uh, you talk about Sweetwater early in the book. Oh yeah. Talk to me a little bit about these towns that are springing up across the west. ’cause these seem to be a place that not only is it fueling the west, but also this is where a lot of money was made and a lot of money was lost in a lot of these, uh, these boom towns.
Yeah. It’s it, the other interesting part of, of that summer is that you have two towns rising to the forefront that their economies rely on totally different things. Deadwood became the premier. A mineral mining boom town. It was by far the richest boom town in American history. Um, and it relied entirely on gold.
Dodge City to the south on the Kansas Plains relied entirely on the cattle industry. So after the Civil War, cattle drives mainly from Texas, began the, the east, there became a huge appetite for beef. So Texas cattlemen raised a bunch of cattle, drove them north to meet the, the trains that were, the railroads that were running tracks across Kansas so that the beef could be shipped to places like Chicago and the meat could then be sent east.
So you had Deadwood that was exploding as an illegal mining town based on the gold, uh, the gold industry. And Dodge at the same time was becoming the premier cattle hub of the American West. And really in America. All, almost all the beef came from Texas. And as these, as these cattlemen drove the herds north, each new stop on the railroad that ran across Kansas became the next big hub.
And by 1876 it was Dodge City’s turn. So they became the premier cattle town and to, um, secure their town for the fortunes that were gonna be made, they needed to hire an all-star team of lawmen, which is where by Masterson and Wyatt Ear, and others came into the picture, uh, heading back north again for just a moment.
With Deadwood now being inevitable, whether the US government condo condones it or not, we, we definitely are going to have, uh, some trespassing problems. Right Chris? So the US decides, and President Grant ultimately are forced into the, this position that we have to, we have to go on the offensive, uh, general Custer.
I actually was in North Dakota, Chris last summer and went to Fort Lincoln. Oh. And it was fascinating seeing his house and how he entertained people. And really that man’s ego was, uh, was, was quite big. You could verify maybe better than I can. I’ve read about it. I have not seen that stuff. So you could probably verify that the rumors of his ego sound like they were true.
Oh yeah. And the way he liked to entertain. Yeah. And he was definitely impressed. And you write in the book extensively about him being out east and in New York City and he, he’s loving all the attention that he gets. But his last days really then, and of course the battle, little Bighorn, that’s all kind of brought on by Deadwood then.
Yeah, it was the need to secure the gold in Deadwood that really spurred everything. You know, the, the president grant, as you, as you referenced a second ago, spent the better part of a year trying to buy the Black Hills from the Lakota after the treaty had been signed. That gave the Lakota the Black Hills, and then the financial panic began to really settle in on America.
President Grant tried to buy the Black Hills two different times, and the Lakota said no. And so if, if Grant essentially had no choice to do something, but to do something he really didn’t want to do, he ultimately, he really did, I believe, genuinely want whatever peace was available between Americans, uh, civilization migrating west and the native societies that already lived there.
I think he really did want that, but e even he had to bow to greater pressures. The steamroller, yeah. By the end of 1875. He authorized a plan to remove the Lakota from, at the very least, the Black Hills area by force. And they, they set it up to make the Lakota look like they were culpable and, and had their degradations and their attacks on various wagon trains and other wide settlers were the reason why the US Army had to go in and remove the Lakota by force.
But ultimately it was about the gold. Growing up as a product, Chris, of the mid and and early seventies, I saw all kinds of westerns, of course, that portrayed the Native Americans as just these savage people with, with no real civilization or understanding what was going on. Of course, we, we, capital W were able to bring that to them and yet you write that the Lakotas, when they’re going after, not just Custer, but when they’re taking on the American forces, their ability to spy on the Americans, their ability to really.
Manipulate what the armed forces are doing at that time, really worked in their favor for a long time till they were simply outnumbered. Yeah. Ultimately, that’s what it always came down to was numbers. They were the premier, if you wanna use modern terms, the premier Unconventional warriors. The gorilla fighters, they could slither up to a point without anybody noticing, just like a modern sniper would.
There are lots of stories about them doing things like this. They would crawl up to positions totally unknown and be able to spy on people or steal horses in the middle of the night. They almost every Native American society became famous for being able to steal horses, particularly army horses who soldiers thought they were guarding properly in the middle of the night herds would just vanish.
So they were really good at being very sneaky and very clever, and they really did have. By 1876, they were able to utilize some tactics that they hadn’t utilized earlier in their, uh, in their fighting days against the US Army. Traditionally, going back to the, you know, to the Texas Rangers battles with the Comanches in, in Texas, it was, it was a well-known assumption that if you made one big assault against a Native American group or if a, a Native American group made one assault against you and you survived it, you could scatter the warriors pretty easily.
They were not known for sustaining battles. They would be one big charge or one big event, and then the fight was basically done. And if it didn’t, if the Warriors couldn’t get it done in that one big charge, they peeled away and lived to fight another day. But by 1876, they were sustaining longer campaigns and fighting for hours on a single battleground and attacking from multiple angles and using different strengths and tactics to, to root out the warriors or to isolate them to conquer and divide.
They were using all of those principles. That they had never heard of. It was probably straight out of an Army manual from West Point that they had never read before. But it was very similar to those kinds of tactics. You know, European tacticians probably would’ve recognized those tactics in the Lakota and the Cheyenne by 1876 without the Lakota and Cheyenne knowing they were doing them.
Let’s go into Deadwood. Tell me about, uh, wild Bill Hickok, who is this man? Wild Bill Hickok was one of the most famous men in America by 1876, and, and for interesting reasons, he was, he really almost lived the fullest life. You can imagine for a guy of that time who had that reputation. He was, you know, he was a teamster on wagon trains.
He fought against Native Americans. He fought against. Outlaws in different places. He was a, a lawman for two very brief stints. Like I think people, people have this image of him as this incredible old west lawman. But I think his total time spent wearing a badge was less than a year or maybe just a little over a year.
He had two stents as a, as a serious lawman in Kansas, and that was it. But he was so recognizable in the way that he dressed, in the way that he carried himself and the way he conducted his business as a lawman in those towns. And then for some of the gunfights that he got into that his reputation just exploded.
And in that time period when journalists were traveling from the east out to the west to find the most interesting stories. Age specific journalist latched onto his story and mixed a whole lot of fact, or a whole lot of fiction with a few facts, and wrote this incredible story of Wild Bill Hickok that boosted his reputation and his celebrity status in the East.
And that just kept spiraling on itself. So he then became this super famous lawman and this really quick draw Gunfighter, and then, you know, started acting with his friend Buffalo Bill Cody in some productions in the East, which he hated, but it boosted his stature even further. And then by the time he gets to 1876, it’s really the downside of his career.
He has lived that celebrity status. He’s been a lawman, he’s been a gunfighter, he’s been a really bad actor on stages in the east, and now he’s gotta figure out the next evolution of his life. Chris, it just seems like he’s trying to settle down at this point. He’s gotten married and he really is in Deadwood just to hopefully strike it rich and, which is amazing that somebody could be that famous.
And so much money was made off of these books about his life, and yet he’s still trying to strike it rich himself. Yeah, he was incredibly famous and rarely had a penny to his name. He didn’t, he did not save all that much, uh, and certainly didn’t have a bank account full of all, all the proceeds he’d made from the show.
So by 1876, he’s newly married, wants to settle down with his wife, wants to live a peaceful, quiet life, but doesn’t have the money to do so. And so he, like lots of people, decides to try to take advantage of the gold rush in Deadwood. And so rides with a wagon, train up to Deadwood to ostensibly make his fortune mining.
But he doesn’t wanna wait around in freezing cold creeks. He doesn’t wanna swing a pick axe for hours on end. He’s actually going there to play poker at the tables. He’s been making a living off of a ga of as a gambler for the last couple years. And essentially he wants to go try to finish his career and maybe life as a gambler and see if he can strike it rich.
Off taking money from the minors, but he’s been starting to have some of these dark premonitions that this might be the end for him. So I think he’s, he’s kind of viewing this as his last hurrah, even though he’s supposed to be going there to secure money for the future, he’s at the same time having these dark thoughts that he might not make it out of this boom town alive.
And then, uh, that obviously brings on the last minutes of his life. He, he loses his life, uh, gambling. Yeah. He sits down at a poker table, uh, in early August and ends up, it ends up being his final game, and he walks into his favorite saloon, the saloon number 10, and sits down at a poker table with three other gentlemen.
And then a, a man who he has beaten just previously, a guy named Jack McCall. This kind of shady, slimy drifter, ends up walking into the saloon and hanging out at the bar. Right near Wild Bill Hickok. Hickok knows that Jack McCall is in the bar, but Jack McCall does not have the reputation of a guy who would be a threat.
He’s just kind of this low level character who’s hangs around the poker tables, and Hickok has beaten him a couple times. And in the previous game between Hickok and McCall, McCall feels like Hickok insulted him. So now McCall shows back up at the number 10 Saloon. Hickok is playing poker again, and McCall pulls out a gun that he has recently purchased and simply shoots Hickok in the back of the head.
McCall runs outta the back of the saloon and tries to get away, but fails miserably. And the town people of Deadwood ultimately catch him and then put him on trial. And because, you know, this is an illegal mining town, they can’t hold a formal legal trial in Deadwood. That whole town is illegal. So they just recruit a group of minors for what was very literally called a minor’s court.
They recruited people off the streets, who are almost always minors to sit down, hear a quasi-legal trial of Jack McCall for murdering wild Bill Hickok McCall claims he did it for revenge, that Hickok killed his brother in a Kansas town years earlier. And when in reality, McCall doesn’t even have a brother, let alone one who would’ve crossed paths with Hickok.
So McCall lies his way out of the trial and is found not guilty by a minor’s court, an informal court in Deadwood and Flees town until he is ultimately brought to justice, uh, sometime later and, and captured by US Marshals. One of so many stories. The story of Baseball’s here, Jesse James, is a story. You, you know what’s fascinating though to me about Deadwood and about Dodge is about, and people like Wild Bill Hickok is, Hickok is not even there to mine.
Like these, these towns a attract people who are attracted to people that are the miners, right? I mean, they’re attracted by all of the, the glamor and the stuff. And historically, throughout time, Chris, it seems to me the people that always get rich are the ones who are selling pickaxes and shovels to the miners, not the miners.
Yeah. The famous phrase that I actually just wrote a little while ago in a new podcast strip was mining the miners. Right? The smart people did that. Like if you watch, again, I’m a huge fan of the TV show, Deadwood. It’s one my favorite shows of all time. And it focuses a lot on the people who are mining the miners.
If you could create a business, a hardware business, which was a great legal way to make money, or if you created a saloon that had all kinds of nefarious and rigged ways to take money off the miners, that was how you really got rich. It was very rare that a guy went to the mines and discovered enough gold and then was able to leave with his gold to set himself up for the future.
He almost always lost that gold at the poker table or the Pharaoh table or the bar of whatever saloon. Uh, and so it was much easier and, and faster and safer to make money by mining the miners than it was to go out and dig the hole yourself or stand in the creek. It’s wild how today that still you go on TikTok and it’s people who are mining the miners.
A hundred percent. It’s people like, you wanna get rich? I’ll show you how it works. Yeah. You can either be the person who spends years and years and years trying to create the product, or you can be the person who finds a way to sell that product and several others and make a money, make money off a little piece of it.
Like it’s, it’s the same principle that’s happening today. You know, they just applied it to gold Mines. There’s so many lessons here. One of my favorite memes is I wish I had the self-confidence of a 25-year-old life coach. Yeah. Yes. Like I, I feel, I feel like there’s a lot of that going on here. The book is the summer of 1876.
Outlaws, lawmen and Legends in the season that define the American West and it’s available everywhere. Thanks a ton, Chris, for, uh, diving back into this history and congratulations on a job Well done, my friend. Thank you. Hi, I’m Mitchell Walker and when I’m not teaching people how to find hidden money, I’m out Stacking Benjamins.
Mine, the miners og. Maybe that’s the big takeaway. How often do you see TikTok videos of I’m a crypto expert. I’m an NFT expert. I’m an expert in the thing that came out three days ago. We just had, uh, what last week? Those new vision goggles that are come out. I swear to God, in the next week, we’re gonna have somebody who’s an expert on how to use them.
I know everything about ’em. Well, they don’t come out till next year. So then two days later, what do you think? Two days later? Three days after I, I see your point. Why do you gotta be that way? Are you gonna buy ’em? Are you gonna buy ’em? I was gonna buy ’em for you and make you wear ’em 3,500 bucks.
They’re pretty sweet, man. I think I can find $3,500 in my sofa cushions. That’s gonna make you guys both wear ’em. They look heavy. They look super heavy. They look a lot lighter than the Vision, vision Quest. What are the meta questions? The meta ones? Meta Quest, whos, yeah. Fin Turn has a set of Meta Quest twos and it’s a little bulky.
It’s still sweet. The graphics suck, but it’s, I mean, as a teaser to what the AR and VR could be, it’s amazing. So this thing looks like I’m in, I’m, I don’t usually jump on the bandwagon fast, but I am in on those. You guys saw the stat that we were texting about this everybody last night, uh, the three of us about these things and about joking about buying them.
But I believe the stat is only 40% of them get used to those meta goggles after six months after their purchase. Like people buy ’em, they’re like, this is cool. And then they take up space on a shelf. My son uses his for baseball. They have like a little app that you can, oh, did you get that? That sheer bat.
You get batting practice, basically all different types of pitches and stuff. It’s kinda cool. Yeah, I’ve seen ads for that, that that looks pretty sweet. And, uh, yeah, fin Turn uses his, I asked him after I saw that stat. Joe, uh, fin Turn uses his, he thought about once a week, but he said the game changer is, do you have somebody else to play with, like, you know, online like you would with Xbox or PlayStation?
He said he probably wouldn’t use his if it were just as a standalone device. Well, and I think the game changer for these new Apple goggles too is that you can see the people around you, like the Microsoft HoloLens, but basically I saw the video from Apple and I’m like, this is what I wanted to HoloLens to be five years ago.
That never came around. Yeah. How do we get on this topic? How is it related? Because it’s old West. It’s the old West for electronics. Yeah. Does, Hey, why don’t we go ahead and throw out the Haven Lifeline? Everybody’s like, oh, Joe, really? We wanna do that now and we’ll, we’ll tackle some of life’s most important questions.
Our friends at Haven Life Insurance Agency, they put OG what you value first. Winning golf tournaments again. Wanna know, baby? I got four this month. Yeah, I was gonna say it’s been like three weeks in a row that all you want, your, your most valued thing is winning. He’s just psyching himself up, isn’t he?
Straight down the fairway with a little flipper wedge to six feet. That’s what I want most, most of all. Yeah. You know, bomb won 3 25 right down the middle of the fairway. Do you think the winner of all golf tournaments right now is the Saudis? Do you think so? Maybe. Oh dude. Too soon. It, it’s, it’s too, too soon, bro.
And or all the people, all the players who took nine figure deals. Those guys are all high. Five in each other. They laughing so hard. Yes. As soon as that news came out, ba oh my God. I understand stackers. If you’re not, if you don’t follow golf and if you don’t follow sports that you don’t know what the hell we’re talking about.
Even if you don’t follow sports, this is worth going in and looking to see what just happened with golf. Because it is unbelievable. Uh, but anyway, it’s your, your, uh, loved ones and your time og. Back to this thing, which in front, which I get to spend lots of time with my loved ones when I play golf with them.
His loved ones are his Titleist balls. It’s why they made buying quality tur life insurance. Actually simple. You go to stacky Benjamins dot com com. Do you guys number your balls? Uh, mine have numbers on ’em. Just ones and twos. God, it’s, so I put dots on ’em. I put, I put three dots on ’em. Oh, three dots.
Yeah. Three dots in your balls. Yeah. Yeah. You go to Stacking Benjamins dot com slash and our logoed haven life. Now to get a free quote. I love what they’re doing at Haven Life because they help you smack it down the middle, a long drive as, uh, the application is simple, like a flat, uh, green. I feel like this whole thing that we’ve, we’ve developed the shtick leading into Haven life is just an exercise to test Joe’s segue abilities and, and it’s horrible.
It just doesn’t do it. You’ll get an instant coverage decision, which means like on immediately, you guys are at me when we, when we golf, uh, their application. Simple. It’s online. Stack Benjamins dot com slash HavenLife. Get your life insurance done. People, today we’re gonna throw out the Haven Lifeline to.
My new BFF Dylan. What up Joe and og? This is Dylan from California calling, uh, about a year and a half ago. My wife and I were fortunate enough to be able to pay off our mortgage. We’re both 37. Uh, we’d saved, uh, pretty aggressively towards accomplishing that for about seven years prior to knocking the house out.
And we’re struggling a little bit with now, allowing ourselves to spend and enjoy our money a little bit more. Um, we’re kind of having a hard time mentally with the transition from being a couple who had this kind of aggressive savings rate and aggressive savings goal to now we want to kind of, uh, spend and enjoy ourselves a little bit more.
We’re kind of having a hard time. I’m curious if you guys have any advice. So thank you for all you do, appreciate you shout out to Doug Dylan. Yes, he saved it right at the end. Dylan, nice call. Thank you so much for the call and congratulations by the way, being. Under 40 and paying off your mortgage.
Sweet. Yeah, that’s huge. It gives you so much flexibility. But Mr. Daco g holiday, you see this all the time, I’m sure, where, you know, you don’t go from being an Uber saver to being a spender overnight. You just, you lock in the habit. Yeah. I don’t know that I’ve actually ever seen anybody do it successfully.
Go from being really good saver to a really good spender, or a really good spender to a really good saver. Like it’s completely the other rewiring of your brain. Hmm. The way that I would think about this is putting it in the sense of projects. Whether it’s a project of like, hey, there’s something we wanna do to the house that’s, you know, a spending goal, or we wanna take a trip, or whatever the case may be.
Put those down in terms of those, you know, kind of six month, 12 month. Two year type of timeframes and allocate your savings to those things just like you did with your, uh, house payoff goal. By the way, there’s also nothing wrong with continuing to live the lifestyle that you’re completely accustomed to and comfortable with, and taking that mortgage, paying money and dumping it in your investments accounts instead, right?
You don’t like, you’re not forced to consume it, and it’s not a requirement now that your house is paid off to, to all of a sudden just spend a whole bunch of cash just ’cause it’s laying around. ’cause there’s other things. I mean, I would think about the things that you wanna do. Make the list of the most important ones and timeline them out just like you did for your house.
And then start allocating the savings that you were already doing toward the house. Allocate those toward those, toward those goals, keeping ’em nice, safe and secure for those, uh, short term goals. And then get the money invested for the longer term stuff. I think something that we always underestimate is, is time.
We overplay the money equation, especially people that save a lot, og, they overplay the money piece and they forget that we don’t have. That much time to do all the things. And when you see how quickly time begins to move, I think that that makes it so that saving toward those goals gets easier. I have a couple of past episodes, past guests, Richie Norton was on talking about dump your time management system.
And the reason he talks about dumping a time management system is because it’s actually about being in the spot and doing the thing that you want to do. So Dylan, we’ll link to that in our show notes. We’ll also put it in our 2 0 1 newsletter. And Ashley Winans, a researcher at uh, Harvard, talks about this very topic about the fact that we don’t think enough about our limited time here on this planet.
And so, uh, uh, keeping that, that saving, moving to create these epic moments, I think, I think could also help. So here’s what I heard on Dylan’s call, and, and you guys touched on it a little bit, but I actually heard in the, in the subtext. I think there’s a, there’s a strong chance that one of the two of them isn’t ready to move on to be a spender.
And the other is, I think that’s very common in a relationship, in a long-term relationship. That’s, you know, as we know, it’s one of the biggest marital stripes there is. And I can tell you that what was a absolute game changer for us in our house was in a similar stage a little bit later than Dylan and, and his partner was at 37.
But we had a plan and once our financial advisor was able to say, you’re on track for your plan, you’re gonna get there and that allows you to do these other things. Once there was a third objective party that was able to tell us that, it absolutely changed the whole temperature of the house. And it’s been fantastic.
So I’m not trying to, I guess I am, I think I’m sort of selling the value of having that third party. Financial advisor to help some of those things. ’cause otherwise it feels sort of, you know, person to person. When you got that third person in there who’s saying, look, buy the data, you’re on track. So go have a little bit of fun.
That was the game changer for us. It’s also the value I think of the non-budget, the anti budgett og, because the whole concept of the anti budget is know where you are on track for your goals and then just spend the rest. So if everything’s okay, then to Doug’s point, that gets rid of all the guilt. Yeah.
Except for the fact that it’s very difficult to do that if you’ve been running a really tight budget to then just go, I could do whatever I want. And um, I like how Doug put it. There’s generally probably one person there who’s, who’s going yolo. And the other person’s like, we should probably save a little bit more, don’t you think?
Yeah. And if it’s just the two of you in your house coming up with a plan, there’s still maybe a little distrust of did we do the plan right. If you’ve got the third person whose job it is, that person Joe, you always talk about having great people on your team. So if you’ve got that person that presumably you trust ’cause you hired them to do that job and that’s all they do all day long is do the math and and do those kinds of plans and they have other data from other clients to compare it to, I think it’s a little easier to trust that third party than it is to say, you know, my partner and I came up with this spreadsheet or you know, whatever tool we’re using.
There’s still an element of doubt there. Yeah, there was in our house. Yeah. No I think that’s a fantastic point. Thank you so much Dylan for that call. We’re sending Dylan a call for his, we’re sending Dylan a call for his T-shirt. I’ll call, we we’re sending Dylan a t-shirt. We’re selling him some swag for that amazing call.
Congratulations. If you have a question for our haven lifeline Stacking Benjamins dot com slash voicemail and we’ll be happy to help you as well. And, and Dylan definitely go listen to these two other interviews ’cause I think that those experts will also help you with this. Time for our community calendar.
Uh, what do we got going on this week? Our very own Crystal Hammond from our sister show, the Stacking Deeds podcast is gonna join me on Thursday of this week on Instagram to talk all things real estate. We’ll have her with us. It’s Thursday at 5:00 PM I got so many books now. I’m giving those away. And by the way, thank you for everybody who’s left us those reviews.
And if you have and you wanna send me your, uh, your review of the show, wherever you left it, I’d be very happy to give you a choice of a few books officially. I have to say that we’ll put your name in a hat because I may run out, but I gotta tell you guys, I’m not gonna run out anytime soon. I noticed you’re hanging on tight to your copy of, are you there?
God, it’s me, Margaret, Joe. That one you’re not sending out to people. Dude, that was such a good movie. It was such, it was such a good movie. I did not expect that to be a great movie. But the dude who created Cheers was also behind that. Oh, wow. And the humor in that. But of course, there’s a Judy Bloom had a ton of humor in, you know, tales of a fourth grade, nothing.
And just, uh, that was a, that was a fan. So yes, I am hanging onto it. Uh, my copy of of, of that book, Wellborn copy, it’s important time in my life. Head to stacky Benjamins dot com slash welcome for all the places where you may find us, our YouTube channel. Uh, we also, uh, this coming week, I think, are gonna be on Fireside with a live interview, which means you can either catch us there and ask your own questions, or you can catch us on YouTube.
So, uh, lot going on. Also, the biggest thing going on though, like Doug said, if you need that third person in your corner, you don’t have one, or you don’t really trust the one that you have. Oh, G and his team are taking clients. So if you wanna make better decisions in the future, make sure you have good people in your corner to find out if OGs that right fit Stacking Benjamins dot com slash og And that’s the calendar for him and his team, uh, to get that conversation started.
Alright, that’s gonna do it for today. Doug og. Fantastic Wild West episode in the books. Yeehaw Doug. What should we have learned from this year podcast? Do I get to use the voice again? Joe? Press play man. First Joe, take some advice from Chris Wimmer. Wanna get rich like they did out west or get mining for Golden Mind the miners.
That’s what the gold truly is. Second from our headlines, June swoon, more like June. More of the same, but you know how you do you. But if you sell stocks this month and don’t need the money, don’t go blaming us when you lose that poker hand. But the big lesson, okay, I thought doing this show in chaps would be fun, but can you say restrictive?
Seriously, can I get these things off please? Thanks to Chris Wimmer for joining us today. You’ll find his book, the Summer of 1876, Outlaws, lawmen, and the Legends of the Season That Defined The American West. Wherever books are sold, we’ll also include links in our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com.
Road is Raw. This show is the property of SB podcasts LLC, copyright 2023, and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy. Our producer is Karen Reine. I. This show was written by Lacey Langford, who’s also the host of the Military Money Show. With help from me, Joe, and Doc G from the Earn and Invest podcast, Kevin Bailey helps us take a deeper dive into all the topics covered on each episode in our newsletter called the 2 0 1.
You’ll find the 4 1 1 on All Things Money at the 2 0 1. Just visit Stacking Benjamins dot com slash 2 0 1. Tina Ichenberg makes the video version of this show. Once we bottle up all this goodness, we ship it to our engineer, the amazing Steve Stewart. Steve helps the rest of our team sound nearly as good as I do right now.
Wanna chat with friends about the show later? Mom’s friend Gertrude and Kate Youngin are our social media coordinators, and Gertrude is the room mother in our Facebook group called The Basement. So say hello. When you see us posting online. To join all the basement fun with other stackers type Stacking Benjamins dot com slash basement.
Not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know. 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.
Welcome to the After Show. You know, something that we do during our credits, but if you’re like me, you may skip over the credits of a podcast. I just wanna acknowledge, especially on a show like today’s, where we were having so much fun with a topic and a way to talk about money that we haven’t ever done before, and doing a little bit of, uh, creative stuff we haven’t done before that I really want to thank the team.
You hear OG and Doug and I, but you don’t see everybody behind the curtain, so you’re gonna hear them all right here. And I want to thank them in order, except Gertrude. She, uh, she had some laryngitis today, but this is everybody who makes this show. Thank you so much to all you guys, and thank you to our wonderful team.
Happy trail to you. Until we meet again, happy betrays to you. Keep smiling. Call in until then, who cares about the clouds when we are together, just sing a song and bring the sunny weather. Two, three, have
I remember how it goes
again. Again. Oh God. Hashtag nailed. It was worse than I imagined it was gonna be.
Leave a Reply