What are the most difficult skills you can master to create more Benjamins? Among the top must be “communicating effectively.” The term “rainmaker” exists because people who can bring in more connections, networks, and also business into an organization are generally among the highest paid employees. The most valuable people in any organization are those who can simply and effectively share thoughts that move the needle. But that’s only at work. Communication is also a huge part of making and keeping friends, building a family, or negotiating with neighbors, contractors, or community members. In short, being a supercommunicator pays in every possible way. That’s why Charles Duhigg (bestselling author of The Power of Habit) joins us again to discuss how YOU can communicate more effectively. He’ll talk about the different types of conversations people have, techniques to improve your skill when talking with others, and how to find common ground more often so that you can all handle the tasks of the day.
But before that, we share a headline about the insurance industry. Things are a-changin’, as they say, and it turns out…insurance is pretty boring. But will it always be boring? And what does that have to do with your money anyway? We’ll share details on what’s happening in the insurance industry and why you might want to evaluate your coverages to decide if it’s time to move to better risk management techniques.
Of course, we answer a question from a Stacker who thought, “I’d better call Saul….Sehy and OG!” He wonders about dividend paying stocks, taxes, and more. Plus, we’ll also crown this podcast with Doug’s amazing trivia question, the next round of our 2024 Math Joke Off, and more!
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/201
Enjoy!
Our Headlines
- Silicon Valley Needs to Accept That Insurance Is Boring (Wall Street Journal)
Charles Duhigg
Big thanks to Charles Duhigg for joining us today. To learn more about Charles, visit Charles Duhigg. Grab yourself a copy of the book Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection
Doug’s Trivia
- Which New England state issued the first telephone directory?
Better call Saul…Sehy & OG
- Stacker Adam called in with a question about the taxation of dividends.
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Written by: Kevin Bailey
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Episode transcript
Proud dad. Bring out your dad.
What? I’m not dead. What? Nothing. Here’s your nine foots.
I’m not dead.
Yeah, he says he is not dead. Yes, he is. I’m not. He isn’t. Well, he will be St. Stone. He is very ill. I’m getting better. No, you’re not. You’ll be stone dead in a moment. Oh, I can’t take him like that. It’s against regulations
live from Joe’s mom’s basement. It’s the Stacking Benjamin Show.
I am Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Duggan. Today you’ll learn how to. Unlock the secret language of connection with Pulitzer Prize. Pulitzer Pulitzer Prize winning reporter and bestselling author Charles Duhig in our headlines. While the Dow Jones goes crazy, one segment of the market is decidedly not going up.
What is it? We’ll, not only tell you, but share what it has to do with personal finance. Plus we’ll hear why one stacker decided they better call Salt Sea Hut and og. And of course I’ll share some list worthy trivia. And now a guy who’s here to connect with all of you and also og.
Hey Stackers, welcome to the Connection Making Podcast, where we connect you with better money decisions. In a, uh, relaxed, fun way to sit back because we’re about to bring it. Charles Duhig, New York Times Pulitzer bestselling author, Pulitzer Charles Duhig
Pulitzer. Pulitzer Pun. Puler.
Pul. That’s like saying, wow.
I don’t know. ’cause I think it is pub. Is it puberty or puberty? Yeah. Pew, pew, pew. It’s pew,
pew, pew. So
yeah, I just got here guys. What, what’s going
on?
No idea. Welcome to the show, man. We’re just talking about Charles Duhig is here again, man. Uh, of course you read the Power of Habit, I think.
Oh, good stuff.
Yes. I was cheering.
Yeah, Mr. Duhig waiting in the wings. We got a great, great, great headline before that. But you know, before that, og I was just thinking that you haven’t shared any recipes on the show recently. Oh, well
this is gonna sound a little disgusting, but. Why do you put the butter there? Just helps everything slide around, you know,
keeps, so then you, then you do do what with the thermometer?
Oh
God. I mean, with the thermometer, you have to check the internal temperature of your meat all the time. Oh yeah. But the most important thing is,
wow. That sounds really delicious. Soon as we’re done recording, we’re taking that up to mom immediately. og. We’ve got Charles Duhig here. We’ve got a great headline.
Let’s get started.
Hello
Darlings, and now it’s time for your favorite part of the show, our Stacking Benjamins
headlines. Our headline today comes to us from the Wall Street Journal and is written by. John Cindra. Silicon Valley needs to accept that insurance is boring. I, I didn’t know, okay. That
Silicon Valley thought, are they fighting that?
Here’s, here’s a title where we’re mixing it up. All of a sudden, we’re gonna get all kinds of
insurance Isn’t boring. I love insurance.
It’s so exciting. Nothing better. It’s so exciting. John Wrights Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Oh, there we go. Hate it when the audience gets bored, but they may need to elicit more yawns if they’re to transform insurance.
Enthusiasm for artificial intelligence continues to power the stock market, but it isn’t giving a second wind to companies committed to revolutionizing insurance through technology or InsureTech shares. Enlisted players such as Lemonade, root, and hippo have been trading sideways. Meanwhile. Global InsureTech funding failed a four and a half billion dollars in 2023, a 44% decrease from the previous year.
According to Fresh Data by Reinsurance Broker Gallagher Reinsurer. While the uh sector is coming off the free Money craze of 2021, participation in mega deals was the lowest since 2017 last year. So this number one, there’s, there’s so many things to Par zero G. Number one is when you look at. Getting into sector bets with your investment, right?
I like this sector of the market. I like this sector. I think this is gonna be a big one. A few years ago, InsureTech was kind of all we were talking about, and now Silicon Valley wants nothing to do with giving insurers in FinTech land any money. And because of that, the stock is, uh, is not performing that well.
So what you’re talking about here is the investment in the technology of making insurance more interesting or accessible or lower cost or whatever. And we’ve seen a number of companies that were at the forefront of this kind of fizzle away when it comes to, uh, or be acquired. We saw one big one. Yeah.
Or just kind of, that’s not the business we’re gonna be in anymore. Technology is super important from, from a process standpoint. The way that insurance companies can use AI is very much in process technology, around application, decision making, like that sort of stuff. The fact of the matter still remains is that it’s a tough thing to talk about.
Like, Hey, look at how sexy this thing is. This is if you get hit by a bus and your brains are splattered all over the place, isn’t it cool that your family’s gonna be rich? Like you can’t, you know, how do you make that exciting or disability insurance is not exciting. It’s. Meant to be a really heavy thing.
So if you can’t crack the code on that, I don’t know that there’s a lot of upside in. Trying to gamify or technify, is that, uh, can I check with the, uh, committee on that one? No. Yeah, you nailed it.
Technology, that’s the one. Good
job. Move on that part of your financial plan. I just, I mean, it’s gonna suck
regardless, but imagine a few years ago, oh gee, you thought, you know what?
Based on all the money pouring into these companies, I remember us reporting on this in 2021. So much money pouring into that section of the market, and we saw all kinds of new companies competing with our sponsor at the time, Haven Life, a subsidiary, a FinTech subsidiary. Of MassMutual. That MassMutual finally this year said, you know what?
We’re done with, uh, InsureTech and they took all of the cool things Haven Life was doing that we love so much, and just folded it up and moved it back into MassMutual. So now they’re a piece of, of the power company. Well,
that’s what you saw. That’s, I mean, you see that in a lot of different things in a lot of the robo trading.
Investment platforms. A technology spins up and then a bigger organization comes in and goes, well, that’s cool. We don’t have to develop our own stuff. We’ll just buy this one for a billion dollars, or whatever. You know, I mean, I’m still waiting for somebody to call me about my technology that they wanna buy for a billion dollars, but, you know, we see that in all sorts of different industries.
So it’s not that it’s lost, you know, the investment in process, the investment in in the technology isn’t gone. It’s just not in the same format as it was. What I don’t wanna see. I don’t wanna see these companies get absorbed that are on the forefront of trying to do better things and then turn around and all of that intellectual capital gets lost in the, in the bureaucracy of the 150 year old organization.
You know, that’s a terrible use of
ip. I think it’s also dangerous to just invest, to pick a part of the market you think is gonna go well. I mean, we don’t know how long InsureTech, uh, stocks will do poorly. Any companies in this sector will, will do well. But I will tell you this, og this is some, this is where I think this helps on a personal finance basis.
I love John’s paragraph here. He writes, insurance needs innovation. Natural catastrophes are pushing up premiums and leaving households unprotected. Personal car insurance has become prohibitive while still losing money for underwriters. Some smaller insurance lines remain an afterthought. Almost a decade since Californian innovators descended upon the industry, however few such issues have been solved, they will pick the lock on this, and when they do.
I think while they’re trying to pick the lock on this, what happens? I mean, we live in a capitalist society. These companies exist to make money. They find ways to make money or they go out of business. I think this is a great reminder that you need to once every year, every couple years, go back to your auto insurance, your homeowner’s coverage, your renter’s insurance, and not just look at pricing them through different companies.
Again, just see what’s out there in the market because this market, I think, is really poised to change.
We’ve seen all the sides of the not so fun part of the change, you know, with the increased costs and the insurance premiums going up exponentially read an article in the Wall Street Journal a couple weeks ago that, that we should be expecting another 20 to 30% increase in car insurance across the board.
Boom. You know, if, if that’s not enough. Oh, also it’s a great idea to have a 16-year-old driver who,
you know, bragger.
Yeah, let me, let me tell you how, lemme tell you how wealthy I am. I have two 16-year-old drivers in my
family. Whoa, whoa, whoa. What a flex. Easy
cowboy show off.
I can still pay my
mortgage. I mean, we’re down to eating ramen every day, but kids can drive to school.
That’s the issue I think around how are we gonna solve the affordability component of this is like there needs to be a faster process for insurance companies to react to market changes. As opposed to wading through the bureaucracy of state and local governments for years and years and years, and then bam, dumping that all on consumers all at one time.
What’s gonna happen in the meantime though, og? Because think about this, even before insurance companies innovate, these insurance brokers who are people that I like, they will take many different insurance companies and you call them. It’s not like going online, a person like you or I or the average stacker out there that knows nothing about what to really look for, to price these policies appropriately.
It’s always amazing how much when I go online, the insurance company wants me to decide how much insurance I need. What. The best thing is like, I think this is an area where it makes sense to have a person in my corner at least telling me what I’m looking at and what I should be valuing this on besides price.
But if I go to an insurance broker who’s got many different lines of insurance to choose from, right? I think the insurance brokers out there can see these cost increases coming. They know what the issues are. They are more likely to share with me as much information as they possibly can to help me somehow cost contain, like, show me what.
What discounts I’m eligible for. You know, your kids OG are good at, uh, school. I know that when my kids were in high school, I was very surprised to find out that there, if, if we sent the report card to the insurance company, we got a discount for good grades for our teenage drivers. That helped off. It didn’t, it didn’t come anywhere near offsetting the cost?
No, but it was a little bit less because of that.
Yeah. Yeah.
Nice flex with your kids having good grades. I see how you snuck that in there.
Well, I was saying that his kids had good grades. Ah, I was trying to be complimentary. I see. I’m trying to be a super communicator. Before I talked to Charles Duhig about super communicating.
Super communicators are givers. They offer stuff up. Okay.
It’s getting deep. og, please say something
intelligent. Speaking of speaking of super communicators, we have one in the wings. How about we just transition to that Doug? Charles Duhig not only writes for the New Yorker, he also is a guy who wrote a bestselling book called The Power of Habit.
Well, he is back in mom’s basement for another go run. I love talking to Charles. He has so many phenomenal stories. To illustrate these important points that we need, and one important point, we need to do a better job of communicating. We need to communicate what we want. We need to communicate with our boss.
We need to communicate with our family, and if we’re gonna stack Benjamins communication, which people call a soft skill, truly is very, very hard. We’re gonna talk to Charles in a moment about how to do that, but before that, Doug, you’re gonna super communicate some trivia for us. Sure am.
Watch and learn, Joe.
I mean, uh, listen and learn. Joe. Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug. On this day in 1878, the first ever telephone directory was issued. Crazy to think that until then people had to go house to house, airdropping contacts to one another. That must have taken ages, especially since cars hadn’t even been invented yet.
Come to think of it, I bet that was a big motivation for the invention of cars. Personally, I could use an excuse to collect fewer phone numbers. I can’t keep track of who half these people are. I got numbers for nine different Megans alone. They’re all spelled differently too. There’s Megan with an H Meg hand.
There’s Megan with a y. Meg Ann. I can’t remember what any of ’em looked like either. How am I supposed to, supposed to untangle this mess? Can’t even untangle my tongue. Ask all of them to send a picture to me. Wait, that’s, wait a second. That’s a great idea. I’ll text a photo of myself to everyone first so they know it’s really me, and then I’ll ask them to send one back.
Oh yeah, man.
I’m pretty clever. Hey, today’s trivia question is which New England State issued the first ever telephone directory? I’ll be back right after I decide which photo of myself to send. I’m thinking either the one of me carrying logs. The one of me washing my El Camino on a hot day.
Hey there, stackers. I’m El Camino model and probably the most popular guy in Texarkana, Joe’s, mom’s neighbor, Doug. I’ve already gotten a lot of responses from my, uh, photo request. Did, uh, did not. Go As I had hoped you, you wouldn’t believe the photos some men have sent me just ’cause I sent a photo of myself washing my car shirtless in, uh, short shorts.
It’s not an invitation to send similar photos, dudes. Today’s trivia question is, which New England State issued the first telephone directory? The answer, the very first phone directory ever printed in 1878 was a single card that listed only 50 names and addresses. Believe it or not, our very own Joe Saul
Cihi was one of ’em.
Wow. He
come on. That was good Doug. Nice job. Doug. Anyway, the New England state that issued the card is connect to cut and now here to teach you how to connect to cut with anyone. See what I did there. I still got it. It’s today’s mentor, Charles Duhig.
I’m super happy he’s back with us at the card table.
Charles Duhig here. How are you?
I’m good. Thank you so much for having
me. Well, this project Charles, was, was personal. I was surprised to read like you just wanted to be a better communicator yourself. That’s
basically it. And there was a number of reasons why, right? Like I was screwing up a communication at work and then at home I would go through this experience that I’m certain is probably familiar to you, many people who are listening where like I would come home from a bad day at work and I would start complaining to my wife about my boss doesn’t understand me and my coworkers don’t appreciate me.
And she would have this very good, practical advice. She would say like, look, why don’t you just take your boss out for lunch and you would, and, and you guys can get to know each other a little bit better. Instead of hearing her advice, I would like be like, you don’t understand.
I just want you to support me.
Why aren’t you more supportive? And I was trying to figure out like, I’m a communicator for professionally, I’m a journalist. Like why am I so bad? Why do I screw
this up so frequently? And so I started talking to all these experts and they were like, look, here’s the big mistake you’re making. You think that conversations are one thing, but actually every discussion is made up of multiple conversations.
And, and in that particular case, you were having an emotional conversation and your wife was having a practical conversation. And if you’re not having the same kind of conversation at the same time. You’re not gonna feel like you connect, but I
bet So your spouse, you’re telling me is very happy you wrote this book?
Yes, yes. Although now I will admit that like just last week at dinner, I was kinda like monologuing
about something and she was like, you know, there’s this book that I’ve read that might be helpful.
Like, come on, Mr. Communicator. Your a Yeah, she’ll hold that over your head. Now, um, you, you begin this project by talking about how great communicators may not, may not look the way we think they look.
Uh, tell us about this gentleman and the FBII think this is a great story to kind of get us going on this
journey. Absolutely. And, and this gets to something really deep, right, which is that we tend to think of super communicators as like Bill Clinton. They’re not, we are all super communicators. We all have the, at times we know how to super communicate and it’s about tapping into those instincts.
So you mentioned Jim Lawler. So Jim Lawler’s, this guy, he’s hired by the CIA, he like was so desperate to become a CIA officer. He’s 31 years old. They train him, they send him to the farm and what he learns during the training for the CIA field operations. Is that basically the CIA is a communications agency.
Their job is not to like steal secrets and be in corners. It’s to go to parties and it’s to make friends with people with the hopes that someday you can have a conversation about a sensitive topic that might clarify what’s actually going on. And so Jim Lawler shows up, he sent to Europe. And he just tries everything he can to recruit people.
There’s this guy who works in the Chinese embassy and Lawler butters him up and takes him out to drinks like 12 times. And then eventually he is like, you know, would you consider telling me about the gossip you guys talk about in the embassy? And the guy was like, you know, it’s interesting you ask that because.
My government assassinates people for stuff like that, right? So no, I’m not gonna do
that. Hard pass. Exactly. And so
lawler’s just like striking out again and again. He’s actually certain he’s gonna get fired and he probably was about to get fired. And then someone inside his, the CIA field office there says.
There’s this young woman, Yasmine, who’s coming into town. She works for the Foreign Ministry in her home government, which is in the Middle East somewhere. Why don’t you get to know her? So, so Lawler figures out where she’s going to lunch. He sits next to her at lunch. He introduces himself as an oil speculator, and they start going to lunch regularly.
They become friendly. Eventually he tells her, I’m a CIA officer. I’m hoping that you would consider working with us. And she freaks out. She’s like, no, I can’t do that. My government kills people for things like that. And she leaves. Now. In the meantime, she had told Lawler that she was really unhappy at home, that her country had been taken over by these religious fundamentalists, that she wanted to do something meaningful with her life and she felt like she was working for, for a government that was opposed to her values.
So Lawler convinces her to have one more dinner with him, like this is his last ditch effort because he’s basically been told if you can’t recruit her, you are out of the agency. He tries during dinner. She’s really down ’cause she’s about to go back to her home country. She’s feeling really bad about it and Lawler’s trying to cheer her up and tell her stories and make her feel better and none of it’s working.
And then he has this moment as he described it to me, that he’s sitting there and he remembers when he used to be a salesman before he joined the ccia A, he worked for his dad selling metal parts in West Texas. He went to go call on this one customer. He was terrible as a salesman, couldn’t sell anything.
He goes to call on this one customer, and it’s this woman whose kid isn’t there. He like, makes your spiel and she’s like, I’m not really interested in your joists. It’s okay. But then she just starts talking about how hard it is to be a mom and a business person. I. How challenging it is. She feels like she’s never doing both of them right.
Lawler’s listening to this and he is, he’s at this point, like 26 years old. He has no idea what to say back. He doesn’t have kids himself, so he just does the same thing. He starts talking about how hard it is to work for his dad and that his brother’s a better salesman than he is, and he feels really jealous of him, and he feels bad about feeling jealous.
Just oversharing. Yeah, just totally oversharing. And at that point he’s like, look, I’ve screwed up the sale. I might as well just let her know what’s going on with me. And he leaves, and then she calls two weeks later and places the biggest
order of his career. Wow. And he is like, why are you ordering
from me?
Like our pricing isn’t even better than some of our competitors. And she says, I just felt really close to you. And he realizes that’s how to be a salesperson. Right. The way to be a salesperson is. To meet people where they are. If they show you a vulnerability, show them a vulnerability back. Listen to what they really wanna talk about.
Do they wanna talk about pricing or do they wanna talk about their lives? And as he’s sitting at dinner with Yasmine, he realizes he’s been doing the exact opposite, Yasmine’s upset and depressed in front of him, and he’s trying to cheer her up instead of meeting her, matching her where she’s at. So that’s what he does.
He just starts saying like. I’m really worried I’m about to get fired. Like I actually am terrible at this job and it’s the job I’ve wanted my entire life. And he talks for 15 minutes, and then at the end of it, Yasmin starts crying and lawler’s like, oh my God, I’ve screwed this up so bad. I, I’m just gonna leave.
And he says, please stop crying. I’m really, really sorry. And she goes, no, no, I can do this. This is important. I want to help you. That was it. He
recruited his first agent. She came into the
safe house the next day. She learned all these covert communication. She was one of the best Middle East assets for the next 20 years.
But the reason why is because Lawler learned to become a super communicator. I. The most fundamental thing about being a super communicator is figuring out what kind of conversation the person you’re talking to wants to have. Is it a practical conversation? Is it an emotional conversation? Is it a social conversation and then meeting them there matching them?
This is actually known as the matching principle within psychology because that’s how we connect with people. Have you ever
read, uh, Tony Hillerman novels? The
old, uh, yeah. Oh, I grew up in New Mexico, yeah. Oh,
did you? Yeah. Yeah. I love reading those, Charles, because of all the Navajo culture and learning so much, just, just through all of his fun, sometimes very campy writing.
But I remember Joe Lehor from the Tony Hillerman novels and Joe Lehor of this rule that I’ve used, and it’s funny as I’m reading your work, I’m reading Joe Lipor because Joe Lipor would walk into a bank. To talk to a teller about a transaction that he legally cannot ask anything about. He could not know anything about, but he realizes that if he shares a little bit about him and maybe says a little bit more than the woman really needs to know, she will overshare back.
That’s exactly right. And so Joe Lipor does, and, and by the way, I found that work for me and I’ve always called it the Joe Lipor rule, and now it’s the super
communicator rule. Well, and and like, what’s really interesting is. Our brains have evolved to be really good at communication and to crave connection, right?
So. Half a million years ago, the individuals in a village that succeeded were the ones who could make connections with other people and could communicate better. Communication is human superpower, and so we’re actually really good at communicating. Now in the contemporary world, oftentimes we can get in our own way.
We forget how to communicate because now we’re trying to communicate online, or now we’re sort of distracted by modern life. I think the point of of super communicators is to remind people of some basic principles of how communication works, principles that we now understand much better than before because of advances in neuroimaging and, and advances in brain science.
And once we understand those, I. It helps people just remember, oh, this is what I should do. If I’m vulnerable with someone, they’re gonna be vulnerable back. If I ask them the right kind of question, they’re gonna trust me more. If they’re practical minded and I come in with like some sob story, they’re not gonna care.
They wanna like get the problem solved. And so part of it’s just reminding us what we know about communication. ’cause this is the thing. Anyone can be a super communicator. All of us are at times. It’s just about knowing the skills you need to do it more consistently.
Well, let’s talk about one of those skills then, Charles, because I’m thinking about Lawler with Yasmine, and I’m thinking about you with your spouse.
Does it just begin with more questions upfront? Is that a good place to
begin? Absolutely. Absolutely. So, so two things. One of the things that we know is that people who are consistently super communicators, they tend to ask 10 to 20 times more questions than the average person, but we don’t really notice it because a lot of the questions are things like, oh, that’s interesting, or like, oh, tell me more about that.
Or, oh, what you think, right? They’re like, these questions that, that we don’t even perceive as questions, but they’re actually invitations for us to share who we are with someone, and they’re listening closely to that. But then there’s a certain kind of question that’s more powerful than other questions, and these are known as deep questions and they’re questions that ask about our values or our beliefs or our experiences.
And when we call them a deep question, it sounds like that’s really probing and intimate, but it could be as simple as asking someone like, what do you do for a living? And then asking them, oh, did you always want to be a lawyer? Do you love practicing law? That’s a deep question because it’s asking someone to tell you about their experiences, about their values and their beliefs.
If you ask someone a question like that, or you know, where’d you go to high school? What do you think you learned in high school? Like what was the best part of high school for you? Now suddenly you’re, you’re giving someone an opportunity to talk about their childhood and their coming of age to share these important moments with you.
Asking these deep questions creates a little bit of a sense of vulnerability in the positive sense, and what we know is that within psychology, there’s a principle known as emotional reciprocity, which is when you say something vulnerable or emotional. If I reply with something that’s a little vulnerable or emotional about myself, we will automatically feel closer to each other.
We, we actually can’t even fight it. That’s Joe Lipor right there. That’s exactly
it. Yeah, that’s exactly it. As you’re talking, I’m wondering, I probably begin by asking questions first because you talk about how there’s a negotiation going on at the beginning of every. Conversation and how quickly it is.
And Charles, most of the time we missed most of the clues. And if we just spend a little bit more time seeing some of these clues as they fly by us, we’re gonna do better. I’m assuming, you know, I told you the story about Joe Lipor, where he shares, but it sounds like really to use this correctly. Asking that question, so I know where I’m meeting them is probably a better place than me going, Hey Charles, I feel like crap today.
And you know?
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It’s just throw my burden on your back. Exactly. I would say that in the real world, the Joe Lipor method would be to ask a question first and then share second. mm-Hmm. Here’s a good example of that quiet negotiation. So we’ve talked before, we sort of have a little bit of history, but let me ask you, when someone’s on your show.
What’s the first thing that you usually ask them to help them get comfortable? Wow.
I don’t even know.
It’s probably automatic, right?
Yeah. Well, and it generally is always about them and their work and, and how appreciative I am of them spending time with us. I. I think what you just
said is really, really important that you said like, I show that I’m curious about them.
Right. I’m asking them something about themselves, but then I am reciprocating what they’re giving me by showing them how appreciative I am that they shared with me that they’re spending time with me. That is the super communicator bundle, right? Like that’s why you’re so good at doing podcasts because you intuitively understand, like, I wanna show you that I’m curious about you.
And when you come back with something open and genuine, I want to tell you how much I appreciate that, and then reciprocate it. Like I, that’s one of the things I noticed about your communication method is that like, if I give you energy, you give me the energy back. That’s the matching principle. And as a result, we just feel more trusting.
In fact, it’s hardwired into our brain to feel more trusting of people who do that. Stop.
Charles, keep going. Stop. Keep going. Stop. Let’s just talk about how awesome I am. Please if we could just do that for the next 15 minutes. I do wanna talk about how often, you know, you and your wife are having two different conversations.
Yeah. You tell a great story about a doctor and certainly we go see our doctor. I. Doctors were there for a reason. This doctor learned a great communication lesson who’s, who’s helping people with cancer. Can you tell his story? Yeah.
I, I love, thank you for asking ’cause I love that
story. And just to give folks a, a sort of framework for this, I mentioned that there’s different kinds of conversations.
Most conversations fall into one of three buckets. As I mentioned, there’s these practical conversations, right, where we’re trying to solve a problem, trying to like make a plan. Then there’s emotional conversations in an emotional conversation. I don’t want you to solve anything for me. I I just want you to understand how I feel and I wanna hear how you feel.
And then there’s social conversations. And social conversations are about how we relate to other people, how other people see us, how our identities influence how we listen and hear. And so there’s this doctor, doctor, um, the far a die who works at Sloan Kettering in New York City. He’s a surgeon that works on prostate tumors.
And so every day men come in who have just learned that they have prostate cancer and they’re totally freaked out and they come into his clinic and he thinks that he knows what his job is. His job is to give them medical advice, right? He’s a doctor. They’re in his clinic. And so what he would tell all of them and he would say, look.
The most certain way to treat this is to cut out the cancer, right? To do the surgery. But the problem is the prostate is located close to the nerves that control urination and sexual function. So for some percentage of patients, they become incontinent and, and they can’t, they can’t have sex going forward.
And so he’s like, look, the best advice I can give you is instead of having the surgery do this thing called active surveillance, which is basically we’re gonna watch the tumor, we’re gonna take blood every six months, do an MRI every two years. As long as it’s not getting big faster than we expected, we’re not gonna do anything else.
We’re not gonna do any treatment. No chemo, nothing. He, he told me he thought this would be the easiest conversations of his life, right? He is telling patients you do not have to have a risky surgery, but the same thing would happen again and again. The patient listens to him, says, that’s really interesting.
Goes home, thinks about it that night, talks it over with their spouse, comes in the next morning and they’re like. Nope, I want you to cut me open. Like take the, take the tumor out right away and he can’t figure out what’s going on. Like, why are all these people, they came to him ’cause he is an expert and now they’re, they’re basically, he thinks ignoring their advice, but what’s actually happening is they can’t hear his advice.
Right? They’re not hearing what he’s trying to say. So he talks to some communication experts, particularly these guys at Harvard Business School, and they’re like, look, you’re doing this all wrong. You’re assuming you know what kind of conversation they want to have. Next time a patient comes in, instead of just giving them advice, ask ’em this question.
Ask them, what does this cancer mean to you? That’s a deep question. It’s asking about kind of like values and beliefs. A couple weeks later, the 62-year-old patient comes in. Dr. Die begins by saying to him, what does this cancer, or what does this diagnosis mean to you? The guy starts talking about how his own father died when he was 14 years old and how it devastated his mom and he wouldn’t wanna do that to his wife.
And then he starts talking about like his kids and his grandchildren and climate change. And he’s really worried about the future. He talks for 10
minutes. He never mentions the cancer once, right? He never, never asks a question about the cancer. And Dr. Die realizes,
oh. This guy needs to have an emotional conversation.
This is an emotional event for him, and so Dr. Dine meets him on the emotional level. He starts talking about. When his dad had gotten diagnosed with an illness about six years prior, how devastating it was for them, but that it actually brought them together. They like had these conversations that he had never had before with his dad.
And once they have this emotional conversation, once Dr. Die matches him and invites him to match it back, then eventually they can move to the practical conversation. Dr. Dai Daikin say, look, can I tell you about treatment options? He’s inviting the, the patient to match him in return. And the man says, yeah, tell me what, tell me what we should do.
And Dr. Aai suggests active surveillance and the guy’s like, absolutely. That’s what I wanna do. The number of patients opting for active surveillance went up 60%. Wow. Simply by changing the first question that he asked. Because he started basically asking what kind of conversation do you want to have?
And then matching people and inviting them to match back
That story Charles reminded me of, uh, the best doctor that I’ve ever had. What I liked about it was that most doctors, you know, you take your shirt off, you’re sitting, they’re half naked, and they’re telling you about your prognosis, and all I can think of is.
I’m, uh, sitting here naked. Yeah. While you are telling me what’s going on, this guy would have me get dressed. We go to his office, sit at his desk with me fully clothed, where I could, I could think, and I could actually, you know, I’m not thinking about all this other stuff. We’re able to have this conversation back and forth, the two of us, which makes me think that listening, the doctor actually listening plays a big part in this.
Tell me about listening and super communicators and the
truth is that those earlier doctors, they probably were listening. They didn’t try and convince you they were listening. Right. They didn’t prove to you that they were listening. Right. And you’re exactly right. This is a huge part of it, is that even if we’re listening to someone, they don’t know that we’re listening unless we prove it to them.
And there’s, there’s actually like a technique that they teach, like in negotiation programs, it’s really simple for proving you’re listening. They call it looping for understanding, which is you ask someone a question, they answer your question. Then the second step is just repeat back in your own words what they just told you to prove to them that you heard them.
And then the third step, and this is the most important step that we often forget, is say, did I get that right? Like, did I hear you correctly? Mm. If you do this, they this, they teach this in like conflict negotiation. They teach this in management classes. If you do this looping for understanding these three steps.
The other person suddenly believes that you are listening to them, and as a result, they become much more willing to listen to you. Right? This reciprocity comes in where they believe that you’re listening to them, and so they wanna listen to you in return. And this looping for understanding. Once you kind of have it in your head, it’s really easy to do.
It feels very natural.
It is the number of techniques as I was reading through this that are so easy to implement was astounding. Like, we could all be thanks so much better communicators than, than we are. Well, and I’ll tell you one
of my favorites that we mentioned in the book, but I think it’s just an easy thing to remember in our head, which is they teach us in schools all the time now to teachers.
If your spouse comes up, if your kid comes up, if a coworker comes up and they’re, there’s something obviously that they want to get off their chest, they wanna talk about, oftentimes what I’ll do is I’ll say, look. I wanna get into this with you. Do you want to be heard, helped or hugged? If you’re saying that you wanna be heard, then I know what you’re really saying to me is.
This is a social conversation where like you want me to hear what you’re saying because it impacts our situation, but you don’t want me to solve the problem. You just want me to acknowledge that I’ve heard you. If you say you want be helped, then what you’re looking for is you’re looking for a practical conversation.
You want me to figure out a solution with you? And if you say you want to be hugged, then what you’re saying is this is actually an emotional conversation. I want us to match each other on the emotional level, and it’s this really easy thing to do to just say, look. Do you want me to solve this problem or do you want me to understand the problem?
Do you want to be heard, helped or hugged? It’s a way of encouraging the other person or inviting the other person to tell you what kind of conversation they want, and as a result, it’s much easier to connect.
I’ve been on the other side of that where someone asked me that and, and by the way, I remember this conversation so vividly, which shows how little we use that easy technique that I remembered it, but I had a guy just tell me, Charles, he just goes, it sounds like.
You’re venting. Do, do you want me to be a friend and just listen and you vent, or do you want me to give you solutions? Like what are you looking for? So it wasn’t all three. How did that
make you feel when you heard that? It
actually made me feel really good, but it also made me feel maybe I shouldn’t be venting.
It’s true.
Right? So I think that one thing is, it does
cause us to kind of examine why we’re having this conversation and sometimes we’re like. I thought I wanted to vent, but actually now that you’ve put it that way, I wanna find solutions. Right. Yeah. That
seems like a, that seems like a better
talk to have, but that’s okay.
That’s okay. Right? Because in a lot of ways, when you think about conversations, and you mentioned the quiet negotiation, the point of the quiet negotiation is to figure out what’s the goal of this conversation? I have a goal in my head. You have a goal in your head. Oftentimes, we don’t voice them.
Sometimes we’re not even totally aware of what our goal is, right? Until someone asks us and we’re like, oh, my goal is to vent. Like, I don’t care about your solutions. I just wanna like vent. Once we get those goals a little bit surfaced, you’re gonna have a better conversation and you’re gonna feel closer to the person.
You’re gonna feel more connected because fulfilling our goals is, feels really good.
We don’t know all the time that there’s a big conversation coming up. You know, Cheryl and I will be out on a walk and all of a sudden I realize we’re about to have a big conversation. Yeah. But to those conversations, Charles, that we do know are coming, how do we prep
for those?
It’s a great question and, and oftentimes I think this happens in workplace settings, right? Like sure, you gotta give an employee some like tough feedback or even with our kids, where you’re like, I gotta sit down and we gotta talk about something. The most important thing that you can do ahead of time is to try and figure out.
What do you actually want to accomplish? If I’m talking to my kid, do I want to understand their perspective and get them to understand my perspective? Or do I want to just give them an instruction and help them understand that instruction? So the number one thing you can do is to sit down and just write literally one sentence that says, this is what I want to accomplish, and then this is the mood that I hope that we achieve.
Mm, I want to come to an agreement on the budget. But I don’t want it to be a tough conversation. I want it to be an easy conversation. I want to ask Maria if she wants to take a vacation with me, but I wanna make it easy for her to say no. There was a study that was done at, at an investment bank where they found, and this is like an investment bank where people like tear each other’s faces off all day long, right?
They’re competing for deals or competing for bonuses. People fought like crazy. So these researchers go in and they say, okay, for the next week, before every single meeting, everyone needs to write down one sentence where they say what they want to accomplish and what mood they hope this conversation will have.
The incidents of arguments went down by 80%. Wow. Now that doesn’t mean that people agreed with each other all the time, right? They, they still had differences of opinion. They were still competitive, but. Because people knew what they wanted to accomplish in that meeting. They went in much more focused on kind of getting their piece across and being able to hear what other people were saying.
’cause the truth is, you were mentioning with your wife a big conversation suddenly rubs outta nowhere. Yeah. Part of what’s hard about that is that you’re not only trying to have the conversation, you’re trying to figure out like what’s going on. Like, like, is this a big conversation? Should we be having this big conversation right now?
Am I about to say something that’s gonna completely infuriate her? I’m not gonna bring up her mother. I don’t like, like, like you’re trying to navigate through it. And the thing is, if you know you’re gonna have that conversation and you’ve just decided ahead of time, here’s what I hope to accomplish and this is kind of the mood I hope to, to inspire.
Then you get to focus on the conversation. It just, it lets you focus on the right thing. The
book is super communicators. How to unlock the secret language of connection. And it’s available everywhere yesterday, Charles. Yeah.
Yeah, and and if anyone wants to reach out to me, I’m charles duhig.com. Every email I get from a reader I respond to, so Wow.
Send me an email. Well be ready
for a flood from us, from our stackers. Thanks for mentoring our stackers today on better communication. That’s so helpful. Thanks a ton. Thank you so
much for having me. Hey, this is Joe Crane, host of Veteran on the Move Podcast. And when I’m not helping veterans transition to entrepreneurship, I’m Stacking Benjamins.
Thanks again to Charles Duhig. Oh gee, I always wondered if Dougs this by,
if you have to ask.
Look at the look on
his face. He does play that, uh, weird music in the background.
He does
What if he’s the CIA spying on us. Wait, what?
I
know just, uh, maybe Stacking Benjamins is spying on him.
Oh
yeah. Doug, maybe we’re spying on him. I plot twist. Yes. Huge thanks to to Charles Duhig. Always phenomenal stories and great lessons. Hey, time for better Call Saul. See hi and og. This is the part of the show where we have a stacker that calls in because they need financial help and we are directly the people to give it.
If you’ve got a question for the better, call SA segment. Uh, head to Stacking Benjamins dot com slash voicemail, and guess what? Today? I know you guys have been waiting for his call. It’s about time Adam has finally called in. It’s about time, Adam.
Hey, Joe
OG and Doug. Really enjoy the show and feel like I’ve learned a lot over the past few years of listening. My question today is in regards to dividend paying stocks. I currently invest into both traditional and Roth IRAs, but with my sandbox money, I continue to buy a single dividend paying stock that at this time is paying roughly 14% annually.
My hope is that it continues to pay that dividend and. That’s probably a lesson for another day. My question is in regards to the tax implications of receiving dividends, is there a difference in how it’s taxed if re being also, I have discussed this, someone make dividends are not taxed. Is there any truth to this?
Also, I am married and I’m hopeful that I can retire early to live off these dividends while my wife continues to work for the health insurance benefits. Will her income affect the taxable implications of these dividends or is there no change in tax implications regardless of income? Any input would be greatly appreciated and I can’t wait to support my
new shirt.
Thanks. Uh, we’re sending a new shirt to you, Adam, for being brave and calling in. I hadn’t even mentioned that, by the way, to everyone. Buy an individual stocks OG I, I love this question. We haven’t handled it in a while and it’s getting close to tax day. Some people might be getting a surprise going, wait a minute, I reinvested those dividends.
Dividends. They sound so sexy. I would like the stocks with the highest dividends, please. And you go to the dividend supermarket and you’re like, Hmm, which one of these should I have? Ooh, 14% sounds delightful. But we have to remember, here’s the deal when it comes to dividend payout. That’s just another form of return.
If you’re getting a 14% payout on your dividend, you’re not getting capital appreciation, and if you are, it’s not gonna last for a long time. I mean, the average big company dividend payout is eh, one and a half to two, give or take dividend percentage. And what is a dividend anyway? Dividend is the profits from a company being distributed to shareholders.
So Apple last quarter announced that they made $33 billion, I think. So you go, well, I’m getting all 33 billion of that. No. ’cause they say, we’ll give you a little for being an owner, but the rest we need to use for our company to grow it so that we can add more revenue in the future. If they’re paying out a 14% dividend, that means that they’re paying out a lot of their cash flow to their investors and not.
Finding good reinvestment opportunities within the business, which is not particularly good. I don’t know that I would build my financial plan around a dividend stock that’s paying seven x what Coca-Cola pays, and I certainly wouldn’t do it for an investment in one singular organization, you know, notwithstanding diversification purposes.
And, and, uh, Adam even said, I hope it doesn’t get delisted, which means that it’s not even tradable on the stock market anymore. So it’s obviously a stock that’s lower valued. A couple of other things. You mentioned tax rates. So yeah, qualified dividends are taxed at a, at a more preferential tax rate.
Qualified dividends are dividends that are, uh, issued by, uh, specific corporations and you’ve held ’em for a period of time. Uh, so I don’t know if your stock is a qualified dividend or not. If so, then qualified dividends are taxed at a lower rate. If you’re married and your adjusted gross income is under about 90,000.
The tax rate on dividends is zero. So, uh, your friend was kind of correct. He was just thinking about single income earners. But if you’re married, I’m assuming that you’re filing joint because you know, that’s what people do. And the tax rate’s zero under 90, and then it’s actually preferential above that too.
It’s only 10%. And then it goes to, uh, 15%. So dividends are great, but you have to remember that ultimately it’s paid for from the profits of the organization. And if they’re paying you lots of money, that means they’re not investing in the organization. You know, that makes my spidey sense tingle a little bit.
That’s what happened with me, OG, was I was thinking about this as well when he said 14%. I was like, whoa, whoa. Record, scratch what? Like, hold on. And traditionally, and I could be wrong here, but traditionally the types of stocks that pay that type of dividend are pipelines where the infrastructure’s already in.
So they’re, they’re just throwing off all of the income to everyone, uh, shipping companies where they’ve already purchased the ships. They, again, are throwing off the income to all of the shareholders and a few other companies like that. There’s sometimes some quirky ones, as an example. Uh, tradit. Yeah.
Real estate would be one. Yeah. Cedar Fair, which was, you know, is an amusement company but has also traditionally been a real estate company in a lot of ways. They also. Threw off for a long time, a really big dividend before realizing they were a theme park and well, we generally lose money. So when you, when when we look at these types of companies, though.
They are organized as a limited partnership. Lots of them, and that’s what you’re gonna want to check for is when I see a big dividend. A lot of the time I see limited partnership. What that means is you’re not gonna get a 10 99, a regular 10 99 with your dividend. No, no sir. You’re gonna get something called a K
one.
You get a special thing. Hey Joe, when do
K ones show up? Whenever the hell they want them to show up.
Is that generally after you file your income taxes?
Usually the day after you file your income taxes, do you get a K one? Yes, indeed. K ones are the biggest pain in the butt in investing and uh, whenever possible, I just try to stay away from them.
And I learned that the hard way. By the way, with Cedar Fair, Adam, I was an investor in Cedar Fair. I saw an amusement park that was well run, had good cash flow, was actually growing at the time, and uh, was paying a six point something percent dividend. I was like, wow, this is a steal. And what they did was stole my uh, tax reporting.
’cause I had to file a whole separate form as well, which had all my K one stuff.
Yeah. And the other thing to, to remember too is when you see, oh my gosh, that’s paying a 14% dividend, that percentage is calculated by share price. I mean, the, the reality is, is that you can’t spend percentages. You spend cash.
A lot of times we see high dividends when stock prices go down because they’ll, they’ll keep the dividend pay out the same, you’re getting $2 a share, but the stock has gone from. 20 bucks down to five, that payout, you know, the percentage is higher now because, because of the fact that the share price has gone down.
There’s some other downstream effects, like I said, beyond just, uh, I’m getting this gravy train of 14%. You know, you, you in that, in that example, you lost 75% of your money, but Right. But you’re, but you’re, Hey, I’m getting a 20% dividend. Yes, but the account value is down 75%, so just be careful that you’re counting all things when it comes to return cap gains, dividends, it’s all the same return.
It’s just how it comes to you.
Thanks again for the question. If you’ve got a question for us, I. We will also send as a big thank you for an awesome question, like Adams, we’ll send you some awesome Stacking, benjamin swag, Stacking Benjamins dot com slash voicemail gets you there and uh, we’re happy to answer your question if.
You don’t have just a question about dividend reinvesting. It’s more about why am I in this in the first place and how does this work? As part of my plan, OG and his team are taking clients, so head on over to Stacking Benjamins dot com slash OG and that’s the link to his team’s calendar. And we’ll set up a first meeting, which is the first step to seeing how his team can interface with you to make better decisions in the future.
All right time here for many of our favorite segment of the show, but it’s hard to beat Charles Duhig in that awesome headline. But it’s time for our back porch segment, which is the community part of the show. We talk about all the fun stuff you stackers are talking about, and right now, Doug, I think, uh, everybody’s wondering, well, we’re in the second round of the 2024 math joke off.
We’re in round two. So what do you wanna do first? Do you wanna cover who won last
weeks? Yes. Let’s that before we do
thes next hearing, let’s that Okay.
Absolutely. We have results from last week’s. It was a close one, man. I mean, this was, this is good. And it was a one seed versus a nine seed, and it was a great game.
Took it right down to like the final, like 30 seconds of the game before one joke took the lead. So here they are. Mm. Do you want me to read both of them or do you wanna do, let’s have you do the one seed and I’ll do the
nine seed.
All right. Zach sent us the number one seed Z. I just lost my job at the bank.
Lady asked me to check her balance, so I pushed her over.
It’s great. It’s got physical comedy. It’s also a little bit of a mind teaser, right? All the pieces gotta think it through. It’s a good joke. But here’s the nine seed. I saw my math teacher with a piece of graph paper yesterday. I think he must be plotting something that was from Jen with two Ns.
Yeah. And there we go. Some a classic dad joke material right there. Doug, right? Yeah.
And uh, so we’ve got the results in it was a tight, tight race. The nine seed pulled in 52% of the votes. Wow. So we have a big upset. One seed just like Purdue every year out of the
tournament.
Not that you care. I’m
so terrified for this year’s tournament.
And so going to the final four is, uh, Jen’s joke. Nice job Jen. Jen’s taken home a couple more books from recent guests. And has a chance now, one in four jokes left, but we’ll go down to the way far end Doug of the pairings. And we’ve got a number seven seed versus a 14.
Yeah. So, uh, how about you take the seven seed Oh, give you the higher seeds. We got a
classic one versus a little, uh, play on word. So this is, uh, from Jeff. What’s the difference between taxes and taxidermy? Once cruel, inhumane. The other deals with dead animals.
And, uh, I’ve got a joke from Seth, probably Seth Myers.
I’m thinking prob, I’m sure. Uh, yeah. Big fan of the show. 14 seed. Hear about the constipated mathematician. He worked it out with a pencil.
All time Humdinger right there, Seth. All right, Jeff and Seth, uh, those are the two. You’re gonna see that Karen puts those up for us. And if you vote, you probably wanna vote on, on Wednesday.
You wanna vote today? If you listen to this today, get there and vote as quick as you can because we record a little early. And, um, depending on our recording schedule, sometimes we only have, well for this one, how many, how many do we have? How many votes? Yeah. 55 votes. Yeah, 55 votes. Decided it. You went to your country to vote people.
And then after that, you owe it to vote on the joke
off. If you’re gonna be a citizen of the basement, it’s your responsibility.
You need to vote. Otherwise, the bad joke’s gonna win. It’ll be a joke until next year that that joke had to stand is the best we could come up with as a community. Well,
the best
math joke, can I slide one in there?
Oh yeah. Now that, now that you’re done with everybody else’s time for another OG Flex while we’re doing it. Yeah.
OG just sits like a lion in the tall grass while we go through all of this. And then he pounces right at the end. Go joke boy.
Did you guys know that, uh, plastic surgery used to be such a taboo subject?
Now you can talk about Botox and nobody raises an eyebrow.
When does a joke become a dad joke? I. Dunno, dunno, when the punchline is apparent.
Oh god. And on that note, yeah, we gotta stop him. We gotta segue into one other thing, which is probably the biggest thing. And that is that we finally, finally have a Stacking Benjamins local meetup group. Doug Egan,
Minnesota, two night.
Joe, are you ready? Are you there? Are you hopping on a plane like any second?
Man, I ca it’s, it’s gonna be so fun. We’re giving away books. We are giving away stickers. We are giving away swag. We’re gonna have a great party. Oh,
all I know is that I was, I was in Minnesota a week ago and I was not invited to this.
Meet up because you didn’t come to any of the planning meetings. I need
to just be told
where to go. I’m not to, I don’t. Veronica and Dan and Chris and Mike work their butt off and big, by the way, big thanks to them. Our, uh, twin cities contingent that created this, they’ve done a lot of the hard work. Uh, Stacey and I just are trying to help them.
You’re gonna get to experience Doug’s trivia tonight. Wait, Doug’s going. It’s kind of Douglas
trivia. See what I did there, huh? Ah, real name Douglas. Ah. But it’s LASS instead of LESS. Clever. And I said Douglas trivia because Doug, less Doug ain’t gonna be
there. Yes. Unfortunately I will not be there either.
But we are having, uh, we are going to, uh, you know what, buy you maybe a drink as well while you’re there. Oh. So, um, uh, whether you prefer a foamy or non foamy beverage. Uh, first one’s on us, so, so, and a line come hang out. Absolutely. Gonna be a great time. Uh, where again, where is it? It’s at
Union 32 in Eagan, Minnesota.
I love, Joe, when we, when we were recording these and you announce stuff, we’re buying for our fans, and I love watching OGs face whenever you say that. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. What?
We’re doing what? Huh? And that’s why we don’t invite
OG to meetings. No, we’re to the meetings. Heck. Well,
we decided the accounting team I see.
We decide to spend your money on the good people of the Twin Cities who deserve it. That’s true. All right. Uh, hope you guys can make it. Uh, looking forward to seeing the pictures and hearing about how fun that was. And we’re gonna do it every month there. So be on the lookout for more meetups in the future.
You can find out when and where those are in the 2 0 1 newsletter, and you’ll also get details in our basement Facebook group. Doug. I think that’s it for today, man. That’s it. So much to learn. What could possibly be the top three things on this list. I’m gonna give you three.
First, take some advice from Charles Duhig and begin working on the soft skills of communication today.
It seems easy, but great communication is difficult. Di yeah, second insurance, probably time to get quotes on your home. Renters and auto insurance again. But what’s the biggest to-Do someone ought to invent some sort of directory with people’s photos next to their names so we can remember who everyone is.
Like a, like a book of faces. Do I have to think of everything around here?
Thanks to Charles Duhig for joining us today. You can find his book Super Communicators wherever books are sold. We’ll also include links in our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com. I need to change it up. I always say, I always say Stacking Benjamins dot com, and I gotta, I just gotta think of a new way to say that.
Do com.com, dot com. That’s it. I want to go with that. We’re gonna include links in our show notes at Stacking Benjamins dot com. I like it. It’s energy. The show is the property of SP podcasts, LLC, copyright 2024, and is created by Joe Sulci High. Our producer is Karen Reine. This show is written by Lisa Curry, who’s also the host of the Long Story Long podcast with help from me, Joe Kate Yakin, Karen, Reine and 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. Wonder how beautiful we all are. Of course you do, but you’ll never know if you don’t.
Check out our YouTube version of the show. Engineered by Tina Eichenberg. Then you’ll see once and for all that I’m the best thing going for this podcast. 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.
We wanna chat with friends about the show later. Mom’s friend Gertrude Stacey Doe and Julia Garib 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.
For more interactive fun, join us on Instagram. Every Tuesday and Thursday for our Instagram lives, Kate Yakin and Joe host those weekly. 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.
I.
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