Open AI recently survived a brutal firing/rehiring of their CEO and a complete board resignation. In the past, we’ve heard extensively from Sam Altman, the CEO of Open AI, but we haven’t heard from the board. Today we use the words of a board member who’s speaking openly for the first time to ponder the question, “Should YOU have a board of directors for your personal financial life?” We parse the words “board of directors” to determine what that really means, and we dive into how these relationships truly work. Should we except “hostile” advice from strangers? Should we consider our friends to be on our board casually? We explore all of these options and more on today’s extended Wednesday headline discussion!
Of course, we feature a TikTok minute that you won’t want to miss. Doug also supplies his amazing trivia, and of course, we also answer a call for help from a Stacker who thought, “I’d better call Saul…Sehy and OG.”
Deeper dives with curated links, topics, and discussions are in our newsletter, The 201, available at https://www.stackingbenjamins.com/201
Enjoy!
Our Headlines
Our TikTok Minute
Doug’s Trivia
- Which Gwen Stefani song spells out the word “banana” in it?
Better call Saul…Sehy & OG
- Stacker Michelle called in with a question about how to handle debts while entertaining the dream of becoming an entrepreneur.
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Written by: Kevin Bailey
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Episode transcript
[00:00:00] bit: You’re going to end up eating a steady diet of government cheese, and living in a band down by the river. [00:00:12] Doug: Live from Joe’s mom’s basement. It’s the Stacking Benjamin Show. [00:00:27] Doug: I am Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Duggan on today’s show. Who’s on your board of directors? And if you said, I don’t have one, should you, and if you did have one and they found out what you were up to, would they fire you? Today we look into one company, OpenAI, and the story of their board of directors. We’ll use it as a case. [00:00:48] Doug: Study for you to manage your money better. And in our world, famous TikTok Minute world Famous, we’ll shine a light on the tax code and how it might affect you more than you think. Plus, we’ll answer a question from stacker Michelle, who thought, you know what? I’d better call Saul, see hi an og, and then I’ll share some fruity trivia. [00:01:11] Doug: And now here comes the top bananas of Stacking measurements. It’s Joe o and O, ju Jean. [00:01:25] Joe: Hey everyone. Happy Wednesday. So happy you’re here. You found us. Sit back and relax. This is the Stacky Benjamin Show, and I am Joe Saul-Sehy, and across the cart table from me. The banana split of this podcast, it’s Mr. og. [00:01:42] OG: When was the last time you had a banana split? [00:01:43] Joe: Well, you know what’s funny is I haven’t had one in forever and, uh, we were sitting outside with my kids in beautiful Cape Cod this last weekend, and my son, god sake, [00:01:55] OG: I’m so sorry, Doug. [00:01:58] Joe: The rest of us have a drink, you know, some alcoholic beverage. I’m drinking some foamy beverage. My son comes around the corner with the biggest banana split I’ve seen in forever. Like, what the hell are you doing? We’re about to go to dinner. We got dinner reservation half an hour. So he hails the banana split and then later hails the entire dinner. [00:02:17] Doug: Good for, oh gee, you could have said, good for you, man. You ever have bunions? They’re really painful, and somehow he would’ve turned it into a travel story. [00:02:24] Joe: Might have, have you ever heard about the, my bunion story? There was this time and I was in Southeast Asia, had horrible bunions. They have goldfish, but they tasted delicious. [00:02:34] Joe: I didn’t know what, what is a bunion? I got no idea. It is wow. Wednesday, if you haven’t figured it out yet. Uh, this is the day when we dive into a headline in today as Doug so eloquently said earlier, we’re gonna do that, but before that. This show is free and completely sponsor free after the halfway point, right after our trivia because of the fact that we have awesome sponsors. [00:02:58] Joe: And that also means that if you really wanna help the show, you can help us for just a second and support these companies that support us. [00:03:06] bit: Hello, doling, and now it’s time for your favorite part of the show, our Stacking Benjamins headlines. [00:03:13] Joe: Our headline today comes to us from CNBC. Never heard of it, but it’s okay. [00:03:18] Joe: By the way, while we, before I get into this headline, I’m reading the breaking news. You know how, oh gee, there’s always breaking news. Always. Mm-Hmm. It’s like breaking news. FAA Won’t clear Boeing to increase 7 37 max production for several months. Agency Head says. I don’t get the idea of increased 7 37. [00:03:38] Joe: So if you’re making planes where bolts are falling off, we’re just gonna make ’em three or four at a time. You can’t make them 10 at a time. We don’t want everybody to die on the same day, but we’ll have a few of them [00:03:48] OG: make it up on volume. We [00:03:49] Joe: just, I dunno. Do you remember when Sam Altman was fired as the CEO of OpenAI, the company that makes Chet GPT? [00:04:00] Joe: Yeah. He was [00:04:00] Doug: out of a job for like 20 minutes. [00:04:02] Joe: Yeah. His whole company, all the people work for me. As you remember. They all revolted and they’re like, well, if he’s gone, we all quit and then everybody quit. The entire board resigned as a result of all that. Altman came back and everybody that worked there came back. [00:04:14] Joe: Remember that? Oh yeah. [00:04:16] OG: Go on. Where are we going? I feel like there’s a moral to this. [00:04:20] Joe: No, no. I just brought it up. Anyway, let’s talk about something else. Just [00:04:23] OG: brought it up. Cool. It seemed like [00:04:24] Doug: a rhetorical, remember when that happened? Yes. Okay. [00:04:26] Joe: Let’s talk about something else. [00:04:27] OG: Do you remember when the lions lost to the Cowboys? [00:04:30] OG: Yeah. Oh, well, that’s when like there’s, it’s a, it’s a comma that goes there. Is there? Oh, [00:04:35] Joe: that’s right. Is there a comma? Yeah. Uh oh. I might as well. I might as well continue. Um, so it turns out there is truth to. The saying, as mom says, there’s always two sides to a story. And I remember thinking then that, man, what a crappy board. [00:04:54] Joe: Like if everybody that works there quits, and if the CEO quits, then it must be an absolutely rotten board. Well, here’s the other side of the story. Uh, this is written by Hayden Field Open ai, former board member Helen Toner just came forward. Broke her silence talking about the events inside the company leading up to Altman’s firing. [00:05:16] Joe: One example she gave, when OpenAI released chat GPT in November, 2022, the board, imagine you’re on a board of directors for a company. The board was not informed in advance. They found out about it on Twitter. Toner said Altman didn’t tell the board that he owned the open AI startup fund either. Wow. [00:05:36] Joe: Altman was renamed CEO less than a week after he was fired, but toners comments give insight into the decision for the first time. She said the board is a nonprofit board. If you remember, they’re a nonprofit board set up explicitly for the purpose of making sure that the company’s public good mission was primary, was coming first over profits, investor interest, and other things toner said on the Ted AI Show podcast. [00:06:01] Joe: For years, she said Sam has made it really difficult for the board to actually do that job by withholding information, misrepresenting things that were happening at the company, in some cases outright lying to the board. She said, so Altman doesn’t tell them that he’s releasing Chad, GPT. He just releases it, they find out on Twitter, which by the way, you know, at first I would’ve thought, well, this must be a really crappy board member because how does he get away with that? [00:06:27] Joe: Until I heard about the problem a couple weeks ago with, uh, with who’s the, who’s the actress? Scarlet Johansen. And I don’t know if you guys heard the story around Scarlet Johans, obviously there might be more, but the story that I heard around Scarlet Johansen was, Scarlet Johansen had told Sam Altman on multiple occasions, no, you cannot use my voice. [00:06:48] Joe: I. Sam Altman said, Hey, we’re developing this voice for For chat, GPT. I would love to use the voice of the movie Her Scarlet Johansen as our main voice for this. Scarlet Johansen says, thank you. That’s very nice, but no, you can’t use it. Then the day before he actually puts her voice in it. He asks her again, one more time, goes, Hey, it’d be really fun if we used your voice. [00:07:11] Joe: She’s like, no, I told you earlier, no thank you. The next day they go ahead and they use her voice. Apparently. What he didn’t tell Scarlet Johansen allegedly was that, uh, they’d already, they’d already used her voice. [00:07:22] OG: Yeah. Don’t you remember we, uh, recorded the Saturday at Live Skit for this. We did. That’s right. [00:07:27] OG: Yeah. Last week, two weeks ago. [00:07:30] Joe: So before that, before I heard about that incident, I would’ve thought, really the board didn’t know anything. Scarlett Johansen very surprised, apparently that her voice being used and this board member is shocked when. Chat, GPT comes out, has no idea. And oh, by the way, I own all the underlying stuff. [00:07:50] Joe: This nonprofit deal, who owns OpenAI? OpenAI is a nonprofit concern. According to this piece, for any individual case, the woman says, Sam could always come up with some kind of innocuous sounding explanation of why it wasn’t a big deal or misinterpreted or whatever toner said. But the NF effect was that after years of this kind of thing, all four of us who fired him came to the conclusion. [00:08:13] Joe: We just couldn’t believe things Sam was telling us. That’s just a completely unworkable place to be in a board, especially a board that’s supposed to be providing independent oversight over the company, not just helping the CEO to raise more money. So here’s, here’s the question. This is fascinating to me that there’s all this stuff that we never heard about that came out, but that’s not the reason why I brought this forward. [00:08:34] Joe: I brought this forward because of the fact that the, this board has a job to do. Their job is to oversee this nonprofit. To make sure in her words that they are doing exactly what they are representing, that they’re doing. The reason they fire the CEO is because the CEO’s not doing the same stuff that explicitly the board is told to do. [00:08:59] Joe: Company’s public good mission was primary, was coming first over profits, investor interest, and other things wasn’t happening. So they fired the CEO. Then all hell breaks loose and they end up on the outside. [00:09:11] OG: Right. But they did their part and they said, okay, this isn’t the way this thing should be run, and so we’re gonna fire the CEO. [00:09:19] OG: Then everybody said the heck with that, we’re gonna quit. So who’s the ones that failed here, do you think? I mean, if they did their part, it sounds to me like they basically said, oh, well I guess we don’t have the stones to see it through. It sounds like a really poor decision framework of, you know, hey, I wonder what happens if we, like we, this isn’t going the way we think it should, and so what if we fire this guy to fire, you know, and they just went, screw it. [00:09:46] OG: We’re firing him, and then everybody quits. They go, well, crap, that sucked. You know? It’s like now you made a bad decision. Sounds like everybody’s making bad decisions here around this topic. [00:09:56] Joe: Maybe. I don’t know about the decision making. What I do know though is, is how many times. Have you had people tell you that they’re working toward a goal? [00:10:05] Joe: I’m working toward this goal. This is really what I want for myself. And almost going back to to Monday and our guest on Monday about how people self-sabotage their selves over and over and over along the way. Yeah. Yeah. I really want this thing. And yet their actions are everything different than what the thing actually is that they tell you that they want. [00:10:24] Joe: According to this piece, and obviously to your point, og, this is somewhat, uh, he said, she said, right, but I’ve never heard this other side of the story from a board member. I just heard the Sam Altman side of the story. [00:10:34] Doug: OpenAI initially started as a nonprofit, but like four or five years ago, they actually created a subsidiary called OpenAI Global that is for profit and that allows them to then do profit sharing and they, it’s a capped for profit and I don’t remember how it’s like 50 times or a hundred times the max investment they have from anyone. [00:10:56] Doug: Contributor is what their cap on their profits are, but it allows them to get better talent and, and I just dunno how relevant that is to where you’re going with this discussion, but this whole notion of a nonprofit, their, their parent company, open ai, yes. It’s still nonprofit and the board is, but the company that’s releasing all of the tech, that’s a for-profit company. [00:11:16] Doug: Right. It’s a capped for-profit company. No, [00:11:18] Joe: that’s, and that’s my point, Doug, is that okay, according to this woman. She finds out that the for-profit company that’s been created underneath the nonprofit, she found that out the same day chat, GPT was released. She found it out publicly on Twitter. Toner explained the board had work to improve issues. [00:11:36] Joe: She said that in October, a month before the ousting, and this is on the Ted AI talk, uh, she said that in October a month before the ousting, the board had conversations with two executives who relayed experiences with Altman they weren’t comfortable sharing before, including screenshots and documentation of problematic interactions of mistrust. [00:11:53] Joe: Quote, the two of them suddenly started telling us how they couldn’t trust him about the toxic atmosphere he was creating. Toner said. They used the phrase psychological abuse telling us they didn’t think he was the right person to lead the company to a GI telling us they had no belief that he could or would change artificial general intelligence, by the way, is what they’re talking about. [00:12:13] Joe: And obviously at one point they had a team focused on the long-term risks of ai. We had talked about that in a previous episode, Doug, if you remember that, that there’s this big community around long term, like where does this head. OpenAI disbanded earlier this month as team focused on that. Where I’m headed with this is, it’s fascinating to me that this company has this board of directors in the first place, and that when Altman is confronted with the fact that, that, hey, you’re not doing your job and, and, and gets fired, it makes me think about how valuable these board of directors can be. [00:12:49] Joe: In this case, obviously this particular board of directors lost the fight in the long run. Still having this board of directors. I don’t think this has to be just a corporate thing. I think having a group of people you surround yourself with that are smart people, that you tell ’em exactly what you wanna do, you give them the mission, and then you start going against the mission and these people then confront you with it. [00:13:13] Joe: I think that’s actually pretty awesome to have somebody go, yeah, we’re not, you’re not going the way we think you should be going. [00:13:19] OG: Right, but it does backfire. Like for example, there was just a story in the Wall Street Journal a couple of days ago about the guy who really disagreed with how things were going with Disney. [00:13:29] OG: So he bought up a bunch of Disney stock to kind of force a shareholder vote. Oh yeah. And a big war. Tried to get a board seat. And it didn’t work. And so, you know, he sold all his stock. He was just like, oh, well that didn’t work. You know, that’s an example of somebody who is trying to buy their influence through ownership of the, you know, like if I’m a big enough owner, you have to gimme a seat at the table because I think it could be run better. [00:13:53] OG: I think board of directors works great for. Governance for like, uh, making sure that compensation is well thought out and that sort of, you agree or disagree about the volume that some of these people make, but that it’s aligned with goals and so on and so forth. Especially in a non-public company, which OpenAI is, you know, they’re, they have lots of shareholders and lots of owners of various, you know [00:14:21] Joe: Sure. [00:14:21] Joe: Entities and whatever. Microsoft being a big owner. [00:14:23] OG: Microsoft is a huge owner. Yeah. And a bunch of other ones, especially in smaller organizations, I think board of directors have a good spot for those things. But then in big companies, their job, I suspect is to kind of make sure that the ship has pointed in the right direction. [00:14:39] OG: But what the heck does this guy from, you know, whatever hedge fund know about how to price Disney Parks or you know, or whatever, or what shows should be on Disney Plus, or what projects should be funded, like, I mean, you can have an opinion about that. I think there’s a benefit of having that kind of independent third party consultation, but you have to still defer to the people who are the experts in that particular field. [00:15:02] OG: You know what I mean? Like if you wanna be a board of directors or a board member at Disney because you think it’s being running correctly and you’re like, well, listen, you guys aren’t charging enough at the parks. It’s like unless you’ve run a freaking park before, I don’t know how you can have a vote in this. [00:15:16] OG: Yeah, [00:15:16] Joe: I think that’s an interesting, you have opinion. I think that’s a really interesting thing to bring up because if somebody wanted to be on my quote board of directors and it was a hostile takeover, somebody going, no, Joe, you should do this. I’m like, well, I’m gonna look into your background. I’m gonna think about, do I really want to take your point of view? [00:15:29] Joe: Do I want to give you board seat? And if not, the fact that I fight them on that, I’m like, yeah, I don’t think I’m gonna take your point of view. How many times have you had unsolicited advice from somebody and you’re like, yeah, no, thanks, mom. [00:15:41] Doug: Well, but I think that’s where the analogy breaks down for us. I mean, we’ve espoused often on this show that you should have a, who’s your team? [00:15:50] Doug: Who’s your board of directors, and you should have some key people that you really trust in some, whether it’s legal or financial or health or, or spiritual or emotional or otherwise, you should have some key people on your team. The difference is we often don’t give those people a agency in. In our own minds, like we don’t necessarily make them the boss of us, so we don’t, we can choose when we wanna take their advice or not, because in a real board of directors that CEO knows, okay, they’re not involved in my day-to-day tactical execution, but if I keep screwing up. [00:16:23] Doug: Over and over, quarter after quarter, year after year, I’m out. But that doesn’t happen in our personal lives if I keep eating a whole Yeah. You can’t get [00:16:31] OG: fired from yourself. [00:16:32] Doug: Yeah. If I keep eating a whole tombstone pizza for dinner, I definitely didn’t just do that last night. Uh, my [00:16:41] OG: What do you want on your tombstone pepperoni? [00:16:44] Doug: Those are great Commercials. Probably isn’t gonna fire me, so I, there’s no real risk there. But if we really want to. Really adopt that notion of we have our board of directors, we need to somehow convince ourselves that they do have agency and that we need to put a lot more weight into their advice to us. [00:17:02] Doug: Secondly, I think most of us don’t tell the people who are on our air quote board of directors, that they’re on our board. Joe, I know I’m pretty much the chairman of your board, but you’ve never once told me that I’m on your board of directors. Of course, I’m joking about that. But I mean, we don’t say, Hey, you know what? [00:17:20] Doug: You’re one of my seven trusted advisors. We don’t do that to people because we allow them to kind of come and go as it suits us. So if we really wanna take this analogy out to the end, we have to talk about. How committed are you to this idea that you have a personal board of directors? [00:17:37] Joe: I think those are, how are you gonna go? [00:17:38] Joe: I think those are fabulous. I think both of ’em. Number one is while they can’t fire us, right. Well, they don’t, that’s the part You like that they can’t fire us? No, I do like, I totally like that because how many times, I mean there have been times in my life where I look back and I’m like, I should have been fired. [00:17:54] Joe: If I would’ve had the ability to be fired, I should have probably been fired right then. Like that was the worst decision. Your, your whole pizza analogy. You know, like why would I keep my job after doing that? It was funny. We got really busy at the end of last year and Cheryl and I missed our money meetings. [00:18:11] Joe: And then at the beginning of the year we had our book club with all these people. And I, you know, in, in the first chapter and second chapter, we start talking about the money meetings. Cheryl’s in this meeting and totally outs us and goes, we haven’t had a meeting in like four months. And everybody in the book club thought it was hilarious. [00:18:26] Joe: I thought it was pretty funny too ’cause getting called out in public and you know what’s funny? That was fantastic. We have not missed a money meeting since then and it was the public nature. Being called out about, yeah, hey, here’s the mirror, Joe. This is what you’re telling people that you do. We haven’t done it for four months, just ’cause we got busy and then we get right back to it. [00:18:49] Joe: So having that open nature, I think is, I think is great. I. Gee, you and I know a couple advisors who kind of do this, they ask their clients sometimes to pick out a group of people that are the people that influence them and ask them to come in and have this board of directors meeting. And I’ve heard from these advisors that, you know what? [00:19:11] Joe: When you get these trusted people in a room together talking about, well, here’s the state of goal, here’s where I’m kind of going, this is what I’m doing. The people that have actually formalized this and made it a real thing. Are showing, at least anecdotally to me, I’ve never seen the, you know, the numerical results, but anecdotally, like the fact that I got all these people whose opinions I need to dovetail in a room together chatting that I’m getting better results. [00:19:35] OG: I think the difference in that is kinda like what, what Doug was saying though, about how much power do they have. It’s funny because I was thinking about this too, which is a pretty much the only experience that I’ve had with this other than a, you know, a coach, which is a different thing, although maybe there’s some dovetails there. [00:19:53] OG: But we specifically use the phrase board of advisors. Because of exactly what Doug was saying. Board of directors sounds like they can fire you. Board of advisors is like, yeah, some guys and gals that provide advice. Really all this boils down to what, you know, you’re working on something for yourself. I think, whether it’s money or physical or whatever, I, I think it ultimately boils down to what incentive structure can you put into place. [00:20:23] OG: To have a forcing mechanism for you to get stuff done. And sometimes that incentive structure is look at like the weight loss thing in the office. Remember when that was a big thing and everybody threw money into the kitty, and then there was the forcing structure. There was an app some years ago. God, I can’t remember the name of it now. [00:20:39] OG: It’s, I’m certain it’s not an existence anymore, but it was focused on weight loss, where you would put in money into the pool. I remember this, and everybody who hit the goal split the pool, right? And so like, what, you know, you’d say like, I’m gonna lose two pounds this week. And you had to weigh in and it was whatever your goal was, you didn’t have to be tied to the outcome of the, but it was like a weekly thing. [00:21:00] OG: You put money in the pot and it was just an accountability function of, you know, you own 3% of the pot. So if you hit your two pound goal, bam, you get 3% of the, of the, and half the people didn’t get it, you know, because they didn’t meet the goal or whatever. I can’t remember the name of that app. But did And [00:21:16] Doug: did the, the people who wrote the app, did they get a little like quarter percent cut the pack had [00:21:21] Joe: to have, [00:21:22] Doug: oh, that’s genius. [00:21:23] Doug: We need to do that. Let’s create an app for people to save money and we’ll just take, it’s like the office space thing. We’ll take 0.022% of yes, what they save. [00:21:33] OG: We’ll just round the pennies. Yeah, so I think that there’s a couple of parts to this. If you’re trying to work on this for yourself and say. [00:21:40] OG: What’s the extent that I feel committed to getting better in this area? There has to be some sort of pain and pleasure associated with doing the thing that you said you’re gonna do or not doing. The thing that you said you weren’t gonna do, you know, whatever, whichever side of the equation you’re on. I mean, something as simple as like literally taking pictures of yourself that no one else will see. [00:22:01] OG: Like, you know, you’re trying to get in shape. Yeah. There’s laws against this. Go stand in front of the mirror and take a picture of yourself like. That is not awesome if you are not like an Olympic class athlete and then have somebody that you have to send that picture to, you know, that’s like next level, right? [00:22:15] OG: It doesn’t cost anything, but that’s like a pain and pleasure thing. That an incentive structure of like, I am forced to take this picture on Monday morning. I cannot eat like three pizzas like Doug on Sunday night. ’cause I will just look like trash in my picture, you know? I mean, there’s lots of ways that you can put your thumb on the scale to kind of, [00:22:34] Joe: that’s why I like, I like working out with other people is because if I tell myself I’m gonna go out by myself, I don’t go. [00:22:41] Joe: But if I know that Troy and Trevor are waiting for me at 6:00 AM on this corner, I am gonna show up or I’m gonna, and it’s funny because the downside, it’s just gonna be this. Abuse that I’m gonna take on on a text and to not have the abuse on the text is just enough. That’s a great example. Oh, Joe had to sleep at, what the hell’s going on, man? [00:23:02] Joe: Like it’s a great way to force myself to get out there and do it, but [00:23:05] Doug: don’t fool yourself into thinking that you can’t get fired by. Your buddies or by your board of advisors, because the way you get fired is they just either don’t offer the advice anymore or they don’t show up anymore. They’re not in your life anymore at like they used to be in the same capacity or not at all. [00:23:22] Doug: But it’s easy for us to just wave that off because you think, oh, we grew apart, our kids weren’t playing soccer together anymore. And so we didn’t talk as often as we did, and. I mean, you might really need to challenge yourself and think, is that why we’re not talking anymore? And that that person isn’t on my board of advisors, or is it because they gave up on me because I just wasn’t, you know, I kept asking them for advice and I kept shooting myself in the foot, not taking any of their advice, and they got tired, and they’re like, I’m not, I’m not in it anymore. [00:23:50] Doug: I think [00:23:50] OG: it just all comes back to what, what it is that you are trying to accomplish. You know, you can have all the opinions in the world given to you, but you, I mean, you just, you still have to do the activity of whatever it is, you know, whether it’s getting better money wise, you know, whatever. It’s like you could have all the information I have. [00:24:08] OG: I don’t even know how many books, how many books here? Probably 500 maybe. Count ’em, Doug. Let me know what you get to [00:24:14] Joe: it’s, it is probably more than seven. [00:24:17] Doug: I mean, I didn’t think those were real. I thought those were just like those facades you can get to make you look smart. Oh yeah. [00:24:22] OG: Dang it. Stop. Stop. It makes me look smart and I’ve read most of ’em. [00:24:26] OG: My point is, is that all of them say ostensibly the same stuff when it comes to money, right? Like how many times do you have to hear, spend less than you earn, invest the difference, buy low cost, passive stuff, all of the things. And yet. I still get advertisements for, yeah, cool things to spend money on. [00:24:46] OG: It’s like, well, how bad do you want it? And that is why, [00:24:49] Joe: I dunno. And actually both to your point there, OG and to Doug’s point, that’s why I think keeping it somewhat formal and if people do drift apart going, Hey, no, no, no, no, no. Hey, what’s going on? Are we, you know what I mean? Having that conversation, if that board of records is important to you, you have that conversation. [00:25:04] Joe: I think that’s a, that’s a great point for people. It is interesting looking at this, how we heard one side of this, this story, I don’t know who’s right, but it’s funny that we finally get a board member. Coming along here and saying, this is a, this might be a little bit different story and there might be some stuff that we’ve never heard before. [00:25:22] Joe: I’ll link to this. This is a much longer piece and they go into some things that, uh, have not been out in the open before in this piece. I’ll link to it in our show notes at stacky Benjamins dot com and we’ll also, of course, dive into your board of advisors. I’ll like that too. OG advisors, not directors, and maybe how we’ve seen people put that together before and how to maybe approach them on our 2 0 1 newsletter, which comes out tomorrow. [00:25:46] Joe: Coming up next, we have our famous TikTok minute, but before that Doug, I think you’ve got the world famous world record holding. I dunno. WW How do we embellish this more, uh, gold plated, super San Fran Alistic [00:26:04] Doug: trivia question of the day. Hey there, stackers. I’m Joe’s mom’s neighbor, Doug on this day in 1876. [00:26:12] Doug: Americans went totally bananas because they were first introduced to the commercial sale of bananas. Duh. Oh. Considered a delicacy at the time. The new exotic fruit made its debut appearance at that year’s World’s Fair in Philadelphia. No truth to the rumor that whoever was carrying the Liberty Bell slipped on a banana peel and dropped it causing that big crack. [00:26:34] Doug: I know. I thought that was how it happened too. Anyway, as our yellow friends, popularity grew, we began shoving bananas into everything from ice cream to bread, and even pajamas. That last one. Turns out it’s a kids’ TV show and not just what a couple of friends did when I was in. High school that that definitely didn’t happen today. [00:26:54] Doug: Bananas make up a $40.8 billion industry spread across dozens of brands. There’s Dole, Chiquita, Del Monte, hammocks, and my personal favorite runts. God, I wonder how they shrink ’em and still make ’em taste so good. Today’s trivia question is, which big hit from Gwen Stefani spells out the word banana in it. [00:27:17] Doug: She’s got lots of bananas and Benjamins from that one. I’ll be back right after I find my Jaquita banana costume. Time to get in on this trend. [00:27:36] Doug: Hey there, stackers. I’m Minister, fruit Lover and part-Time. Detective Joe’s, mom’s neighbor, Chiquita Banana. It’s just fun to say that Americans consume an average of 90 bananas each year. Making them way more popular than any other yellow handle shaped fruit in the country. And by my own estimate, each of us has roughly five black bananas sitting in our freezer at any given time for purely aspirational banana bread. [00:28:01] Doug: Am I right? Today’s trivia question is which Gwen Stefani song spells out the word banana in it. The answer. Stefani Solo career showcased her apparent love of spelling first with her debut album’s. Title, love Angel Music Baby, which spells out lamb. Oh, not sure why she wanna do that. Yeah, I know. See, I, I think that way. [00:28:21] Doug: And then with the great B-A-N-A-N-A-S on the album’s hit single Hollaback Girl. And now let’s get back to JOE and og. See what I did there? [00:28:34] Joe: I think you’re the golden penant on this podcast. Doug, I think you got it down. [00:28:38] Doug: Thank you. [00:28:38] Joe: Hey, time for the TikTok Minute. This is the part of the show where we shine the light on a TikTok creator who is either sharing something brilliant or air quotes brilliant. [00:28:48] Joe: I don’t know, Doug, oh gee, has waffled on this, but the last couple times. So I’ll go to [00:28:52] Doug: you, man. Yeah. So I’m gonna go with my tried and true ’cause it works for me. 85% of the time, 30% of the time. Uh, I’m going with 80% of the time. It works 30% [00:29:04] Joe: of the time. [00:29:05] Doug: Yeah. It’s [00:29:07] Joe: geniusness. This one actually was submitted to us, uh, from a person Doug that you and I know, and this is not a TikTok, this is a YouTube, my parole officer. [00:29:14] Joe: It is a, that’s right. It’s a YouTube short and, uh, well just have a listen to this. [00:29:21] Speaker 5: No, I seriously think about this every single day, and I’m sorry if I sound stupid. If somebody has $500 mm-Hmm. And they’ve already paid taxes on it, and they give it to me. So now just because it goes from them to me, I also have to pay taxes on it, even though they, they just did. [00:29:38] Speaker 5: And then not only that, but anytime I spend one of those. $500. I’m going to also pay another tax fee on whatever item I’m buying. And then whoever I bought the item from will have to pay taxes on the money they just earned from what I bought. So every single dollar [00:29:57] Doug: That’s right. [00:29:58] Speaker 5: Just forget it. [00:30:00] Doug: Good for you. [00:30:01] Joe: That’s, uh, we don’t, we don’t need the guy’s commentary. That’s from Valuetainment. Guess who submitted that one? Doug our very own og. Submitted that. Yeah. To the show. [00:30:13] OG: Yeah, that’s what I was gonna say. I thought you’re gonna do the home improvement one. Don’t you have the home improvement one? I don’t know. [00:30:18] OG: The home improvement one. Uh, let’s see from the TV [00:30:20] Doug: show home improvement, [00:30:22] OG: uh, it’s in your, uh, text message from May 23rd, 10:46 PM. [00:30:28] Doug: Could you be more specific? [00:30:29] OG: What I thought [00:30:30] Joe: you thought I was gonna go with was this one category is phrase, and off we go, [00:30:40] Doug: VARs right in the butt. [00:30:42] Speaker 5: What? [00:30:44] OG: Oh. [00:30:45] Doug: Right in the butt. [00:30:47] OG: That’s not the home improvement one either. [00:30:49] Doug: It didn’t even fit if you looked at the tiles that were on the screen. It didn’t even fit. But the guy was so excited to say it doesn’t [00:30:55] OG: fit when it goes right in the nevermind. It totally did [00:30:57] Doug: served that up for you. [00:30:59] Doug: I served it up for you. [00:31:02] Joe: But I, I love the epiphany she has OG about the dollar being every [00:31:07] OG: dollar’s [00:31:07] Joe: taxed, [00:31:08] OG: taxed in some way, shape or form, [00:31:09] Joe: over and over and over again. The [00:31:10] OG: same [00:31:10] Joe: dollar, infinite number of times, same dollar gets taxed over and over and over. [00:31:15] OG: Yeah. When I first listened to that, it’s like, well, well you give it to me, I pay tax. [00:31:18] OG: I’m like, no, you don’t. And then I was like, oh, she means like earned it basically. Yeah. So like if I, yeah, I go work paycheck, I make 500 bucks and then I take my 500 bucks and I wanna spend it. Then I pay taxes on the fact that I spent it, you know, in sales tax or whatever. If you live in one of those states, and then now if that’s earnings to you, so now you pay taxes on your earnings and then you go and spend it buying stuff for me. [00:31:41] OG: And then you pay sales. Yeah, it’s the infinite loop. It’s infinite money Glitch from Reddit or not from Robinhood. Remember the Infinite Money Glitch? It’s the US. Infinite money glitch. [00:31:52] Joe: I love this idea. The dollar being taxed over and over and over, because especially younger stackers will ask, well, what’s the importance of a tax shelter? [00:31:59] Joe: Like, why do I tax shelter? Number one, the importance of saving a dollar, right? When we look at the sweater I wanna buy today versus saving that money for retirement, let’s say I remember, you know, we had Brian Preston from the Money Guys on the show talking about his analogy of every dollar in your twenties is $88. [00:32:19] Joe: Toward retirement just because of compounding interest, like it’s 88 times. Well then you also look at the tax you pay on that sweater that you’re not paying by saving it for one purchase later, like you’re just kicking that ball down the field. What a powerful place to be, and if people can learn that when they’re young, og, like how great is that? [00:32:38] Joe: Taxes suck. TLDR. Yeah. I remember a guy, Patrick, that used to be a client of mine when I was an advisor who would give his, to learn this very lesson. He would give his kids an allowance and then he would take taxes away right in front of them, like just so they had, they had to see it gives him 10 bucks, takes two back. [00:33:00] Joe: What’s that dad? That’s the tax person. [00:33:02] Doug: You know how I always take four cookies from you? The dad tax? That’s the lesson. Right. This is the real dad tax. [00:33:10] Joe: That’s right. And you could tell us the federal government, ’cause it’s going to a bloated home, [00:33:18] Joe: one that is, uh, well cared for. Thanks to OG for setting that in. If you’ve got a TikTok minute, you would like. Us to dive into email to me, Joe at Stacking Benjamins dot com. Hey, let’s move into a stacker that said, you know what? I better call Saul, see hi and og. And, uh, today we’ve got a great question from stacker Michelle. [00:33:38] Joe: By the way, if you’ve got a question for us here, because this one, if you’re brave and you call in, we, we send you some swag for calling in. So let’s hear from stacker. Michelle. Hey Michelle. [00:33:50] Speaker 6: Hey guys, my name’s Michelle and I’m from Springfield, Missouri. And I just have a question for you about what do you do when you’re somebody who maybe has some debts in the line of student loans and some medical debt, and of course, some credit card debt because. [00:34:06] Speaker 6: You know, awesome. But what do you do when you have dreams of becoming an entrepreneur and you’re just not sure how to tackle the debt so that you can free yourself up to become that entrepreneur? Any tips would be great. Is there a way to do that concurrently, or am I just playing my life on financial hard mode? [00:34:27] Speaker 6: Any advice that would be appreciated, and thank you so. [00:34:31] Joe: Oh, thank you. Thank you for the call, Michelle. And if there’s anybody who’s, uh, played their life on financial heart mode. It’s been OG and I so I think we got you there. Yeah. Veteran, you remember of the call, we played [00:34:40] OG: the game on veteran. That [00:34:41] Joe: easy or, uh, [00:34:42] OG: yeah. [00:34:42] Joe: Authentic. [00:34:43] OG: Yes. [00:34:44] Joe: Bad skills with a z uh, og. How does she think about her debt in relation to becoming an entrepreneur? [00:34:50] OG: Well, I suppose it depends on what our entrepreneurship, uh, you know, you say get dreams of being an entrepreneur. There’s no reason you can’t do it right away unless that entrepreneurship requires borrowing money or, you know, some long period of time. [00:35:03] OG: Without income, and you’re like, well, how do I pay my bills if I don’t have any money? You know, I gotta build my client base, or I need to build my brand, or whatever the case may be. And, and in which case, you, you, you just have to do kind of two sides of it at the same time. You need to be in a position where financially you can withstand a little bit of a lower income. [00:35:22] OG: So that’s stuff that you can control in terms of spending, in terms of downsizing, you know, those sorts of expenses. And then you’ve got your fixed expenses, which are, they are what they are, right? You’re. Payments on your student loans, you know, payments on your credit cards, that sort of thing. You know, that’s gonna be the number. [00:35:39] OG: Alternatively, I think you could see if there’s a way to do both things simultaneously. If you’re working in a job that’s in a somewhat related field, you might have a little bit of struggle because your boss may not want you to moonlight as a competitor. But if you’re working in a completely separate industry. [00:35:56] OG: This is the fun part of being an entrepreneur. You know, when I was deciding to work for myself, my grandfather was a business owner and he owned a printing business for 60 years, and he said, you know, the great thing about being an entrepreneur is that you only have to work halftime. I was like, I can get behind this grandpa. [00:36:13] OG: And he’s like, yeah, you just pick which 12 hours every day you wanna work. Right. You know? I knew that was where it was going on. Yeah. You know, it was coming, huh? Yeah. Hold on. Where is it? There we go. So thanks Pops. You know, so you’re working your regular job. This is the time where you. Get to get, to have the stress and anxiety of running two jobs at the same time. [00:36:33] OG: You know, I mean, if you wanna move in that direction, look, I’m somebody who takes lots and lots and lots of risk because I always think like the show Arrested Development, there’s always money in the banana stand. Ah. I tie it all together. Ah, how about Bam, banana stand? Yes. I would be like. yolo, let’s get after it, see what happens. [00:36:52] OG: Nothing will motivate you to sell your business, sell your product and your business faster than having a credit card payment due on Tuesday. You know, if you need that motivation or that stress, but you know, I would see if I could do both at the same time. Alternatively, be very aggressive at lowering your lifestyle and getting that stuff paid off. [00:37:11] OG: And what better way to pay it off than to start a side business That is the direction that you wanna be anyway, in terms of being an entrepreneur and using that little bit of extra runway and that extra income or revenue that comes from starting it up to aggressively pay off your debts. Having a little bit more context of what kind of business you wanna start would help. [00:37:30] OG: But uh, yeah. So [00:37:31] Doug: it sounds like I hear you saying you can still be an entrepreneur, but you have to start with something that requires more. Physical capital than financial capital [00:37:40] OG: to get into? Well, I mean, maybe it just one person’s gigantic student loan payment is another person’s, you know, drop in the bucket too. [00:37:47] OG: So there’s, you know, it’s all relative. But if you’re gonna go, like, try to borrow a bunch of money, you need to be in a good financial position. You know, if you wanna open a McDonald’s franchise, you need to be in a good financial position to pull that off. Whether or not that’s necessary to become an entrepreneur, I don’t know. [00:38:03] OG: I, I don’t see a lot of. Startup hamburger joints these days. [00:38:07] Doug: Exactly. So if your goal is just to be an entrepreneur, work for yourself, so you can work halftime like grandpa, then you’re probably gonna have to find. If you don’t care what the subject matter is, what the product or what service is, you’re, you’ve gotta find something that requires, just wanna, I just wanna be [00:38:23] OG: an entrepreneur. [00:38:24] OG: I don’t care what I’m gonna do. Yeah, yeah. I see what you mean. [00:38:26] Doug: There’s a lot of stuff you can go do that doesn’t require a huge downstroke financially. To buy product or to invest in a franchise fee or something like that. Yeah. And then you can raise the capital that either pays off your, all of your personal debt so that you can then qualify for a loan to go for that bigger entrepreneurial flashier and maybe more lucrative. [00:38:47] Doug: Who knows? But I, that’s why I think I heard you saying you can still be an entrepreneur, but you’re gonna have to find a different line of entrepreneurial work that doesn’t require you to borrow money. [00:38:56] Joe: Yeah, I think there’s three mistakes that I see people make. The first one to your point is they, they go take out some big loans immediately and get themself in over their head. [00:39:06] Joe: So I think you nailed that. I think the second thing is they cut themself off from other income sources when they first start out, and so they cut these other income sources betting on the fact that the entrepreneurial dream is gonna come true. And before they know it, they have no income coming in. [00:39:23] Joe: They may have some debt going out, the giant sucking sound of the debt going out and the business isn’t working the way that they thought. So I love this idea of bootstrapping the business. I think the bootstrap idea makes a ton of sense to me and, and in fact, you look at OG the number of businesses that we’ve seen that people began bootstrapping them. [00:39:42] Joe: I think it’s, it’s a little like, uh, play testing, you know, before you go full time. [00:39:46] OG: Especially if you don’t know exactly what you’re getting yourself into. Kind of to Doug’s point, right? If you’re just like, I don’t care what I’m an entrepreneur in, I just wanna be an entrepreneur, then yeah, you just kind of throw some stuff around and see what happens. [00:39:58] OG: But even so, I suspect as long as you’re not in the same business as what you’re doing full-time, there’s probably a quarter part-time type of solution there. Like you said, that bootstraps it, that you can kind of get moving in that right direction and build that momentum. I heard this phrase the other day that, that I thought was really interesting. [00:40:16] OG: It says, in order to make a big snowball, you don’t need a lot of snow. You just need a big enough hill, basically. Like just get it going and eventually take out the town type thing. So anyway, get after [00:40:28] Joe: it. Yeah, I totally agree. I think third mistake I think people make is that they also don’t do enough. [00:40:33] Joe: Enough enough market research. I mean, but people use that as a reason to procrastinate. There’s a reason not to do stuff. Well, I need more market research, but truly the number of people you’ve seen, the open restaurants and don’t have any clue about how a restaurant operates. I make some good jambalaya. [00:40:48] Joe: Yeah. Everyone would wanna buy it. I remember talking to a guy that supposedly was a board game creator, and I said, oh, well what are your favorite board games? I don’t play any. No wonder nobody buys your games. No one. Your games are horrible. Really? You know nothing about the market. You don’t know where your game sits, and you’re a board game manufacturer. [00:41:06] Joe: He said, I’m, I’m, I’m too afraid that I will steal somebody else’s idea. And I’m like, well, that’s the Austin Cleon, right? You steal like an artist. You take the good stuff and remix it. Pay homage to it and make it your own. It’s fantastic. I’m excited for it to become an entrepreneur though, og, aren’t you? [00:41:23] OG: I mean, I don’t know if she’s gonna be an entrepreneur in, so probably less excited than you based on me not knowing what kind of entrepreneur she’s gonna be. But I don’t know why anybody wouldn’t want to be one. [00:41:33] Joe: I just think your grandfather’s right. But I also think on the other side, there are people that will work 12 hours for themselves. [00:41:37] Joe: They don’t want to go to work for somebody else. You know? Yeah. I don’t want, I don’t want the security door. I want the opportunity door. Like give me the opportunity door. Yeah. A hundred times out of a hundred. There’s so much opportunity there. [00:41:48] OG: Springfield, Missouri, by the way. Great place to be from. Show me. [00:41:51] OG: I like going there. It’s a nice little pit stop on the way back from Michigan. [00:41:55] Doug: Is she gonna get some swag? Some Doug 2024 swag? [00:41:59] Joe: She can have that. Or any other piece of swag we’ve got at the store. Stacky Benjamins dot com slash voicemail. If you want to get in on that, leave us a voicemail. Here’s how I’m thinking of getting into the [00:42:08] Doug: entrepreneurial thing. [00:42:09] Doug: You know, people pay top dollar for like game used jerseys. Or like, you know, wide receivers, gloves and stuff, they’re all clamoring for those. At the end of a game. What if I sold game used episode, used Doug T-shirts, nice episode used. Like I’m wearing one right now and it’s, you know, I get a little worked up when we’re recording, so there’s a little bit of perspiration in there. [00:42:33] Doug: It’s super authentic. Oh, you get the musk. Yes. I think [00:42:38] Joe: people would take, pay top dollar for that. Get the scent of the man himself. The scent of the candidate, the thrill of the hunt, something there multisensory experience. [00:42:48] Doug: Tell us in the basement people, if you’re interested, we can make this happen [00:42:52] OG: in case you’re keeping score at home. [00:42:53] OG: It started raining again at 1 35 and now it is 2 0 8 and has rained another inch and a quarter. [00:43:00] Doug: How do you know that without going outside? Do you have a rain meter outside that communicates to it? Oh my God. That is the ultimate and laziness. You have a rain meter that so you don’t have to walk 38 steps to go look at it. [00:43:15] Doug: Wow. I mean, [00:43:16] OG: if it fills up every 30 minutes, you, you’d be getting soaking wet. [00:43:19] Doug: It’d be running laps and getting wet. Yeah. [00:43:22] Joe: If you, [00:43:22] Doug: technology broke Question for us. [00:43:24] Joe: Head to stacky Benjamins dot com slash voicemail or stacky Benjamins dot com slash uh, rain meter. I don’t know. Time for our last, uh, segment of the show. [00:43:33] Joe: Back porch. Back porch. Back porch. We call this the back porch. Let’s go. Yeah. Doug, you’ve had some, you’ve had some health issues. [00:43:38] Doug: Uh, I have. But before we get there, I. Do you wanna talk about, because you had a, like a Midwest palooza a few weeks back where you were just traveling in your, your whatever, your van, going city to city, meeting people fanned down by [00:43:53] Joe: the river. [00:43:54] Doug: Yeah. [00:43:55] Joe: Old panel Van Detroit. [00:43:56] Doug: Who wants ice cream kids? Uncle Joe’s here. The naked lady Mud flaps on it. Uh, you went to Kalamazoo and, and Baston [00:44:03] Joe: started in Cleveland. Great group of stackers in Cleveland. There were lots of great stories in all the, all the cities. Thank you so much everybody for coming out. [00:44:11] Joe: But the big one is we were just getting started. We maybe have been chatting for four or five minutes and this couple walks in and sits down. We’re doing introductions around the room. There are about 25 people came out in Cleveland. It was a nice, kinda the perfect group for this discussion style meetup that we are having. [00:44:31] Joe: We get to the gentleman and he, he said that they were on vacation from Birmingham, Alabama. Headed to Niagara Falls where they were listening to the show and heard we were coming to Cleveland. So they pushed back Niagara Falls by a day so they could come hang out at the Stacky Benjamins meetup with all the stackers. [00:44:51] Joe: Is that [00:44:52] Doug: cool or what? Amazing. They risked possibly like the falls could stop at any point. You don’t know it could. You don’t know when that water’s gonna just stop One day idea. And they risk all of that to divert to Cleveland. [00:45:04] Joe: Smart move. I think it’s a smart move. I’ll take, I’ll take that. Yeah. So that was great. [00:45:09] Joe: Uh, Doug, you were able to join us in Detroit at the last minute. That was Detroit was old friends night fashionable Ferndale. It was a nice microbrewery. We were at a little loud, but it was a nice microbrewery. We had to have a weird, we have a weird table setup ’cause it was loud enough that. We wanted everybody on one side of the table to hear the other. [00:45:27] Joe: So we had this weird thing where we put me in the middle of the table and had everybody around. It felt very strange, but we tried them lengthwise before you got there. ’cause you were, we were surprised you got there, frankly, as soon as you were able to get there. ’cause you were having a root canal. [00:45:42] Doug: Yeah, I know. I, yeah, I had a root canal in northern Michigan and then drove 250 miles to get there. And I think I was what, like 30 minutes late, 25 minutes late. Yeah. But you thought you’d be there [00:45:53] Joe: like an hour and a half late. Yeah, like never late. And then when you walked in we’re like, dude, that was so, it was so awesome, but we had this weird. [00:45:59] Joe: Weird configuration ’cause we couldn’t figure out how to get everybody to hear each other so we could have a great conversation. But it was old friends day. We actually, the cool thing I want to talk about, there was a gentleman there, I believe his name is Ryan, who had never gone to a meetup with other stackers or anybody in money groups before. [00:46:16] Joe: And I know talking to some family members, I’ve invited to these things like, eh, it sounds like an Amway meeting. You know, it’s, uh, I don’t know if I really wanna do that. It just, eh, and it seemed like Ryan had a good time. He’s one of the, well, when we left, Ryan was still out there chatting with people. [00:46:31] Doug: Yeah. Well, and there was another guy who, if I’m not mistaken, had never listened to the show. I think he heard about our meetup through the Choose Fi Detroit community, but his name was Zach. [00:46:42] Joe: Oh, no. Zach had listed the show. Ryan had never listened to the show. Oh, was that [00:46:44] Doug: it? That it, but, but yeah. [00:46:45] Joe: Yeah. Zach was a fan of the show, but it also never come to anything. [00:46:48] Joe: Okay. You’re right. Well. Yeah. But uh, you could say there was another guy, Zach, who’d never [00:46:52] Doug: Yeah. And uh, so we had a couple, it was like old friends and a couple of new guys, and we did our best to alienate him. I mean, make him feel welcome. [00:47:02] Joe: It’s what we do. It was great seeing everybody. We actually had Tim from Pittsburgh coming to Detroit to see us. [00:47:08] Joe: He was visiting his sister, our friend Chris was visiting her. But it was great to see the old Detroit friends. [00:47:15] Doug: That was his sister Chris was Tim’s sister? Yes. Was it really his sister? [00:47:19] Joe: Yeah. [00:47:20] Doug: I thought they were married. I swear to God I thought they were married. I’m like, wow. They, that’s a long distance marriage. [00:47:27] Doug: Yeah. No, a nice couple Pittsburgh to Detroit. [00:47:29] Joe: Yeah. Yeah. Living this weird lifestyle where he’s one place she’s in another, they have been members of our book club group, so it was good to see the two of them again. Then on to Kalamazoo and we had a, we had a really nice time in Kalamazoo. But the funny thing I wanna share about Kalamazoo. [00:47:45] Joe: Was there, there was a, a, a gentleman, a stacker named Dick there, and at the end of the conversation we were talking about behind the scenes of the show. And you know how we were talking to the editor in chief of, uh, Westwood one slash Cumulus, John Warnock about. Are, you know, the advertisements for the show and the fact that it’s a necessary evil and that, you know what, we gotta find a way to make the stuff entertaining around the ad. [00:48:08] Joe: So, for a while there, og we were doing the, the little thing where we go, Hey, so I got this rash and, and, and let me tell you about it. And then we cut to the ad and I was in the middle of beginning to talk about. You know, the creativity and how funny that was. Now we were making ourselves laugh, but I just started telling that story. [00:48:27] Joe: Yeah. We went through this period where we were, and Doug yells out from like, he’s, he’s in the back of the room. He is like, I hated that. I was so glad you stopped doing it. And it was, and it was so great. ’cause I’m sure then the look on my face about, well we kinda liked it Dick. We, we kind of thought it was a good time, but I love being able to talk to people about that stuff. [00:48:49] Joe: ’cause, ’cause then he’s like, yeah, I, it drove me crazy. I’m so glad that it’s straightforward now. You know that you guys don’t do that anymore. But I remember some of the stuff that you guys came up with. Oh my god. Funny, funny ads. As [00:49:02] Doug: long as we’re having a good time, that’s what [00:49:04] Joe: matters. Exactly. Well that’s what I told him. [00:49:06] Joe: I’m like, we’re just entertaining us. But I love it. And, and by the way, Dick, next time, feel free to just, just write me, just, just write and go, Hey Joe, I hate the way you do the, you do the ad thing or [00:49:14] Doug: blurted out in public from the back of a room as loud as you can. I hated that. Whichever’s more effective. [00:49:19] Joe: We went to a place, I know Doug, you’ve been to downtown Kalamazoo. Gee, I don’t dunno if you’ve been downtown Kalamazoo. They got a place called the Beer Exchange where Stacker Gym took a few of us after our event. They have a ticker tape with all the different beers and the prices, and if you go buy a beer, the price goes up for the next person who buys that beer. [00:49:37] Joe: And if nobody buys a beer for a while, the price then ticks down until people start buying again. Then a couple times a a night, there’s a market crash quote where all the beers are a dollar for like five minutes. [00:49:50] OG: Nice. [00:49:50] Joe: And it was super fun to walk in and you’ve got all the beer prices and I’m not buying the beer based on the one that I really wanna drink. [00:49:56] Joe: I’m trying to buy low and hope that the price goes up later. Hold it. You’re gonna hold it. Yeah. Right. Sell it. Yeah. To someone else. Unfortunately, I Drake away my profits oji, I, drake, ’em all. I didn’t [00:50:06] Doug: even think about a secondary market. That’s a great idea. I’ll sell you the one I got 30 minutes ago. Wow. [00:50:12] Doug: Yeah, that’s right. But, uh, it’s a great way I, and I’ve actually heard some of those haven’t done as well. It’s a really novel idea, but I’ve heard some of those bars haven’t done as well as you’d think. But it is a great way to ensure that you do not have a lot of carrying costs for your inventory. Mm. [00:50:28] Doug: Because even the crappy beer, you’re gonna move. Because it’s gonna be cheaper and thus incentivizing somebody to buy it who wouldn’t have otherwise bought it. [00:50:36] Joe: Yeah. Just to give it a shot. Right. It was. It was fun. They had beers from [00:50:39] OG: the mountains of bush [00:50:42] Joe: beer, Kalamazoo, and all over. And then in Boston, Paula Pant joined me. [00:50:46] Joe: My son and daughter, Nick and Autumn Autumn’s, uh, boyfriend Arthur joined us and we had a ton of stackers join us. I talked, uh, last show about stacker James, which was, which, uh, it was great seeing him repping the, the Doug 2024 colors. I. Which was great, but I met a lot of fantastic stackers and, and I think guys we gotta do, now that my daughter’s there, we gotta, we, Boston, we’re coming back obviously coming back to Cleveland, Detroit, and Kalamazoo ’cause we have family members there. [00:51:16] Joe: But, um, but Boston is someplace you guys gotta come to next time. This place was a micro brew that was a former bank. It was the, the home of, I believe the first bank robbery in the United States ever. Wow. And it felt like we held him up that night at, [00:51:34] Doug: so the message for our stackers is if they wanna meet up, they need to recruit some of our family members to move to their towns. [00:51:40] Joe: That’s exa That’s exactly right. That’s what they need. I got a [00:51:42] Doug: brother in Florida who’s looking to move, so you can get him to move to Portland or wherever. Perfect. Or maybe you come [00:51:47] Joe: to Florida next. Where’s he? Where’s he at? In Florida? Uh, south of Sarasota in Venice. Well, let’s go, let’s go to Venice. [00:51:54] Joe: Meet up in Venice. Hey Venice, stackers, reach out. Tell us how many of you were there. Yeah, really [00:51:59] Doug: that town is a little above our demographic. Age bracket might slightly be, [00:52:04] Joe: well, [00:52:05] OG: not for you guys. [00:52:06] Joe: That’s right. Our next meetup’s at the villages at two. Doug, we wanna hear about your, your health stuff. But I stop think, uh, looking at the clock, OG has told us, let’s not what his hard stop is, so [00:52:17] Doug: we gotta run. [00:52:18] Doug: Yeah. We’re, we’re running outta time. It’s just a teaser for, uh, I, I think people will be interested to hear how I voluntarily put myself through torture to hear [00:52:26] Joe: about your bunions. Yeah, because tease me about my buns another time. [00:52:29] Doug: Doug. What should we have learned today? He said Exasperatedly. Well, Joe, first take some advice from our TikTok minute taxes. [00:52:37] Doug: Yeah. That money’s been taxed, and it’ll get taxed again. And again, and that’s why sheltering with Roth IRA’s 401k plans and knowing deductions for your business can be so important. Second, speaking of important, who’s on your advisory board? Pause this episode and contact people. Now, let’s find great people who we trust, who can help us make better decisions in the future. [00:53:01] Doug: And who might even be able to fire you. So what’s the biggest to do? I gotta dress up as jaquita banana more often. The ruffles really showcase my calves nicely. Plus, you know, food on your head. This show is the Property of SB podcasts LLC, copyright 2024, and is created by Joe Saul-Sehy. Our producer is Karen, Repine. [00:53:25] Doug: Karen and Joe. Get help from a few of our neighborhood friends. You’ll find out about our awesome team at Stacking Benjamins dot com, along with the show notes and how you can find us on YouTube and all the usual social media spots. Come say hello. Oh yeah. And before I go, not only should you not take advice from these nerds, don’t take advice from people you don’t know. [00:53:47] Doug: This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any financial decisions, speak with a real financial advisor. I’m Joe’s Mom’s Neighbor, Duggan. We’ll see you next time back here at the Stacking Benjamin Show.
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